Wait a minute they are more word. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
It doesn’t say that the speech needs to anonymous or if paid the donors should be shone.
Yup. Note the operative phrase "no law". Not "some laws if they are really important". The phrase they use for that one is "compelling government interest", which is a BS phrase the courts made up to allow the government to violate the constitution at will.
No law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
What does that mean? That means that the congress cannot place restrictions on your ability to share your ideas with others. At all. No exceptions. Not even for "but politics!!" Actually, particularly for politics... because that was the entire point of enshrining that bit into the bill of rights. Political speech is what they were worried about.
So no, the government cannot say that Jellomizer and I cannot pool our resources and publish a website devoted to ridiculing the Republican candidate for the 5th district. And we can publish as Jellomizer and Cytotoxic, instead of using our real names and posting our real addresses. You know why? Because "Congress shall make no law". Not some laws that only require certain prerequisites for speech.
This one isn't even close people. If you want laws that restrict political speech in the United States, you need a constitutional amendment. The fact that we keep skipping that step and rely on "judicial deference" to allow unconstitutional laws to be enforced is a really big problem.
Funny how people get all interested in civil liberties when it is their liberties being infringed upon. Yet somehow when people they find distasteful are having their liberties run over, they are not really so worried about it. In fact, they often seem to be cheerleading the steamrolling.
Independent election monitors could collect QR code scans on site. So you could have a republican scanner, a democrat scanner, an amnesty international scanner..... all right alongside the official scanner. That, along with a video of people leaving would be all you need to instantly validate the vote.
The only issue with voting receipts is the ability to have people paying for votes. So you'd have to control for that somehow.
And that sets up a fundamental conflict. Because if your QR code doesn't uniquely identify your ballot selections, it is useless. And if it does.. it is corruption incarnate. So the receipt would have to stay on site.
Yeah, the "investment" aspect of bitcoin at this point is the part that is related to a ponzi scheme. Essentially, nobody is in the market. So as more people come to the market for a fixed amount of bitcoin, the price will continue to rise. Until no more people are coming to the market. Then it will stop rising. And then the "investor" class will leave. And the value of bitcoin will fall.
When these points will be reached is another question. One I'd love to know the answer to, because it would be really easy to get really rich knowing something like that.
Well, I think the government is going to get their slice. That's how they roll. If they didn't already have the authority to tax transactions in bitcoin (they do), they would invent it quickly.
Plus, the bock chain makes bitcoin immensely traceable. Everyone knows every transaction that ever happens. So once you figure out who Goldman Sachs is in the bitcoin realm, you can tax all of it.
On the "other currencies" front.... this is where the $6,000 will be risky. Bitcoin is beginning to have real difficulties scaling, with transactions taking a very long time to complete. Other currencies address this issue. So a mass move could be in the offing.
That being said, there are probably fixes available for bitcoin that could save it. With so much money on the line, I guess it would be imprudent to bet against people fixing bitcoin.
We downloaded it right after it first appeared on the net to play with it. Shared computing was just becoming a thing, with folding at home. So we installed in on a couple of machines to see what it was. After playing around with it for a couple of weeks, I had 1 bitcoin and my lead developer had three. I thought it was interesting, but essentially pointless and deleted it. My buddy kept playing around and eventually amassed 7 whole bitcoins.
They were valued at about 50 cents, theoretically, when we started. They spiked to $7 in a really short time, then back down to a buck. When they went back up over two bucks, my buddy sold out. He's no fool. We both knew a bubble scam when we saw it.
You are absolutely correct, so I'll make a stab at an indelible fact....
The guy was crazy.
There, I said it. Crazy dude gonna do crazy dude stuff. The fact that he was a big fan of "Blood Drive" on SyFy might sidetrack some folks, but I'm gonna put my chit down on uncontrolled schizophrenia. Others might dig into his political affiliations. But even if he's been to see Milo and has a Bernie T-shirt with a white power pin, I'm still going with crazy. Everything else is a symptom.
I can tell because the "not crazy" bucket includes "people who don't shoot at large crowds". And the "people who shoot at large crowds" bucket doesn't really include "not crazy".
I'll also make a prediction: nobody cares. HuffPo is already on record calling for gun control and talking politics. (that was when the death toll was 20, BTW) Remember the "bath salts" guy who ate the dude's face in Miami? Yeah, nobody remembers that he wasn't on any sort of drugs. He was crazy. Crazy dude gonna do crazy dude stuff. That's how they roll.
So you are right. And nobody cares..... because they have an ax, and they intend to grind it.
The government seized the copyright and used it to prevent the availability of the book.
That is a sideways approach to censorship, but it is straight up dictionary definition censorship - the government is preventing people from having access to a book.
The way around this has already been paved by PLOS ONE. They might not quite have it right, but the open-access part is good.
Each discipline needs to take ownership of their own peer review process and publish entirely in open access web journals. Ideally only one. And some sort of slashdot style moderation and metamoderation system might help bring the more important articles to the top. It is certainly doable. And every discipline could have membership dues to pay the (very small) bills for web development and hosting. Or the NSF could foot the bill and set the thing up.
All it really requires is buy-in from the research industry. Which is probably a lot like herding cats.
Oh, and everyone should publish all of their supporting data too. Much, much easier to critique, reproduce or follow someone's work if you have full access to the data.
So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly?
Same place the funding for the original research itself came from?
This is the wrong place.
There are lots of "pay to publish" journals, and they are practically guaranteed to be crap. Because if I pay you to publish my article, are you really going to say no?
A major part of the value of a journal like PNAS or Science or Nature is that you can trust that most everything they publish is high quality research of high interest. Nobody can keep up with everything that everyone is writing. Researchers rely on journals to filter out some of the crap for them so they have a chance to focus on the more important bits.
From an AC elsewhere on the thread, apparently a company called Clearplay has done this. They sell a Bluray player and a plugin for chrome that works with Amazon streaming service.
They don't seem to have the granular controls that this other service was touting, but they have the tech in place such that they could enhance their service.
So maybe this is like the early fights with Napster et. al. The early movers won't make it, but the concept will eventually be implemented because the demand is there.
Imagine if someone tried selling the movie where the prequels were recut into a single movie. Even if the sale was restricted to people that owned all 3 prequels, it would still obviously be copyright infringement. Well, legally speaking it's the same thing here.
Imagine if someone were to sell an automated bit of editing code that would do the same thing on your own copies of the 3 movies. Pretend it works as a plug-in for the popular PC dvd players. That's clearly legal. It just says "Start playing here, stop here, jump to here.."
This is where these legal constructs start getting silly. They should figure out a way to come to some accommodation with this demand from consumers and be done with it.
They are playing a bit of a semantic game, but the "streaming" aspect should be a legal red herring, in this case.
The "you own the DVD" portion of their service basically renders the service a complicated DVD player with a really long connection to your monitor.
If you accept the model they have constructed - their customers buy the DVD and then the company buys it back - then they have a pretty good argument that they are not violating copyright.
But it is clear that because they are in fact not selling anything, but renting a viewing of the movie and using "we own the DVD" as a license to stream it, this is not going to fly.
It is a shame that the content providers can't reach some sort of agreement with this kind of service, because there are lots of movies that would be great to watch with the family, but have one or two brief moments that are not appropriate for the kids. Many movies have just have an adult joke or a few curse words sprinkled about and are otherwise fine for little kids. But many parents don't want their kids picking up that kind of language. Or maybe they don't want to have to explain some sex-joke to a 6 year old. There clearly is a demand for this sort of service. I hope the copyright holders can get it together and allow it to happen.
The problem with your theory about format shifting is the DMCA also has protections for encryption. So simply ripping an encrypted DVD is prohibited by law. Remember when the DeCSS code was printed on T-shirts as a protest?
You don't have to resort to appeals to the first amendment. Banning Nazi's and the KKK is bad strategy. So is showing up to their rallies with weapons looking to pick a fight. Or just throwing crap at them.
This problem was solved in the 70's and 80's, with full implementation of the solution finally achieved in the early 90's.
You don't ban them. You let them speak their piece. And you ignore their marches and rallies.
When I lived in Atlanta the KKK and Nazis used to have a march every year. The city would try to block them, denying permits and generally trying to ban them from coming. And the ACLU would take up their cause and the march would go forward. Then the folks from the NAACP and the SPLC and a whole lot of other folks who rightly didn't want a bunch of racist assholes coming to their city would show up and make a big show of it. It would often involve quit a few scuffles and thrown objects. It gave the racists a nice platform to play the victim role, and it gave them a lot more relevance.
Then they finally decided to stop all the nonsense and just issued the permits. No more months-long coverage of ACLU battles on behalf of the Klan.
And the anti-racism groups quit most of the violent counter protest stuff. They put out the word that the proper reaction was to pity the poor, uneducated and usually rather dim-witted racists.
They let the Klan leaders go on TV and have long-form interviews espousing their views. Everyone got to see exactly who they were and what they thought. Without a bunch of violence and government interference to soak up the news cycle, they actually got to talk about their core beliefs. And nobody (for very, very large values of nobody) turned out to be sympathetic.
They very quickly dwindled and died. By the early 90's they couldn't get more than 18 marchers for their annual parade. Shortly after that, they just quit coming altogether.
Strategically, confronting ideas with violence is a bad idea. It just creates tribal loyalties that are hard to break.
Most kids when I was growing up didn't have an extra car for them. I earned money for my car mowing grass. Any idea how long it takes to come up with enough for a decent used car when you are earning $2.50 per yard? (two summers, plus lots of nights babysitting). Most kids drive their mom's car. I became the chauffeur for my siblings when I got my license. I'm sure my mom was ecstatic to have that burden off of her shoulders.
I drove mom's car during my learner's permit year and bought a 1976 Ford Granada for $1,750 shortly after I turned 16 in a couple of years before you did. Yeah, baby! Four doors and bench seats! More boring than your mom's car. But it was all mine. Paid cash when I went down to the used car lot (proudly wearing my grass-stained tennis shoes).
Not likely. All of the kids I know personally can afford a car. They even have extra cars laying around. It seems to be a definite choice, whether born of apathy, lack of need or sound decision making based on the developing teen brain being ill-suited to continuous life and death decision-making.
One of my nieces could have driven her dad's Porsche or her mom's M5. Not interested. Didn't get her license until she left for college (paid for by daddy). She's brilliant and wonderful and well-rounded... and not that interested in having a car.
Her cousin is 17, a rising senior in a rural high school. They are working class - mom and dad have union jobs. They have 2 cars, an SUV and a big pickup truck for towing. For two drivers. The cars are all older and used, but that's how they live in flyover country. Mom and Dad tried to encourage him to get his license. But he's not that interested. He says he'll "probably get it sometime this year". In his state you have to sign up for and take driver's ed classes that are not run by the school. Maybe that has a hand to play in it. Where I grew up, driver's ed was in school.
But in my experience, lack of finances isn't a factor. That doesn't mean that if you live in the projects and can barely afford the basics you wouldn't view a license as a luxury. But that hasn't changed.
No, I can back him up on the driver's license thing. It has definitely changed.... a lot!
When I was a kid, pretty much every single kid got their driver's license on their birthday. Those unlucky few who's 16th birthday fell on the weekend had a great anecdote about how they had to wait aaaaaalllllll weekend!
Kids these days are not nearly as pressed. I have 18 nieces and nephews. Only about half of the ones over 16 got their license within a few months of turning 16. Several waited until 17 or later.
Finding a 16 year old without a license was like finding a unicorn when I was a kid. It also implied that you couldn't pass your test or you had gotten in some sort of legal trouble. It isn't that unusual any more. I don't know why... maybe it is the increased connectivity with the internet. Maybe it is the increased traffic - although some of those nieces and nephews live way out in the country where there isn't much traffic. What I can say is that it is definitely different. I also see a lot of kids that I work with at church who don't bother to get their license. One girl we use for babysitting just moved away for college and still hasn't got a license. I don't understand it, but I do know it exists.
Yeah, the description of their courses sounds exactly like a traditional lecture+lab course where they just drop the lecture part.
If done well, it could be a great improvement. I've had lecture sections that were not very informative. And I've had great labs.
But I also had lab sections that simply had us following a recipe by rote, and had instructors that barely spoke the language and couldn't help with comprehension.
So I guess it is all in the implementation. And doing that right is hard. Designing a hands-on experience to learn basic physics is much easier than designing a hands-on experience to learn the Krebs cycle. And I have a hard time imagining what a lab section for calculus looks like without the lecture..... "Here, go use this textbook to learn calculus, then come to the lab section and we'll find the area of an irregular cylinder together!" Ok, being honest, I had a hard time imagining learning calculus in the lecture section too.... I just had to learn that stuff by rote. I never met the teacher who could explain it such that I could "speak math" like some of the mathematicians I know.
And it isn't simply political hot-button science issues such as evolution or global warming.... the same is true for "balanced coverage" of things like alternative medicine. There is no way to be "balanced and neutral" when covering things like homeopathy or reiki. You can be neutral (just the facts, ma'm), or you can be balanced, but you can't be both. Because any "balance" will be false.
Unfortunately, this is often the status quo for these topics. The writers don't really understand the topic in-depth, and their editors expect quotes from "both sides", if they even ask for that. So what we normally get is credulous coverage of some pseudo-science of the day, which in practice becomes promotion of fraudulent businesses.
How does this work in the Facebook world? Well, one would hope that it would mean that a post about the latest super-food that is being widely shared would have a "balanced" offering from Science Based Medicine, explaining why the study in question doesn't actually mean what the press is saying it does, and that the study is really low quality and will probably be disproved when a higher quality study comes out.
But I doubt it. What will probably happen is that if the people at Facebook happen to agree with your point of view, you will think they are following this model. If you don't, you'll think they are just spamming viewpoints they disagree with.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a minute they are more word.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
It doesn’t say that the speech needs to anonymous or if paid the donors should be shone.
Yup. Note the operative phrase "no law". Not "some laws if they are really important". The phrase they use for that one is "compelling government interest", which is a BS phrase the courts made up to allow the government to violate the constitution at will.
No law... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...
What does that mean? That means that the congress cannot place restrictions on your ability to share your ideas with others. At all. No exceptions. Not even for "but politics!!" Actually, particularly for politics... because that was the entire point of enshrining that bit into the bill of rights. Political speech is what they were worried about.
So no, the government cannot say that Jellomizer and I cannot pool our resources and publish a website devoted to ridiculing the Republican candidate for the 5th district. And we can publish as Jellomizer and Cytotoxic, instead of using our real names and posting our real addresses. You know why? Because "Congress shall make no law". Not some laws that only require certain prerequisites for speech.
This one isn't even close people. If you want laws that restrict political speech in the United States, you need a constitutional amendment. The fact that we keep skipping that step and rely on "judicial deference" to allow unconstitutional laws to be enforced is a really big problem.
Amen Brother.
Funny how people get all interested in civil liberties when it is their liberties being infringed upon. Yet somehow when people they find distasteful are having their liberties run over, they are not really so worried about it. In fact, they often seem to be cheerleading the steamrolling.
There is the kernel of an idea here.
Independent election monitors could collect QR code scans on site. So you could have a republican scanner, a democrat scanner, an amnesty international scanner..... all right alongside the official scanner. That, along with a video of people leaving would be all you need to instantly validate the vote.
The only issue with voting receipts is the ability to have people paying for votes. So you'd have to control for that somehow.
And that sets up a fundamental conflict. Because if your QR code doesn't uniquely identify your ballot selections, it is useless. And if it does.. it is corruption incarnate. So the receipt would have to stay on site.
Yeah, the "investment" aspect of bitcoin at this point is the part that is related to a ponzi scheme. Essentially, nobody is in the market. So as more people come to the market for a fixed amount of bitcoin, the price will continue to rise. Until no more people are coming to the market. Then it will stop rising. And then the "investor" class will leave. And the value of bitcoin will fall.
When these points will be reached is another question. One I'd love to know the answer to, because it would be really easy to get really rich knowing something like that.
Well, I think the government is going to get their slice. That's how they roll. If they didn't already have the authority to tax transactions in bitcoin (they do), they would invent it quickly.
Plus, the bock chain makes bitcoin immensely traceable. Everyone knows every transaction that ever happens. So once you figure out who Goldman Sachs is in the bitcoin realm, you can tax all of it.
On the "other currencies" front.... this is where the $6,000 will be risky. Bitcoin is beginning to have real difficulties scaling, with transactions taking a very long time to complete. Other currencies address this issue. So a mass move could be in the offing.
That being said, there are probably fixes available for bitcoin that could save it. With so much money on the line, I guess it would be imprudent to bet against people fixing bitcoin.
Yeah, I was too smart for all of this.
We downloaded it right after it first appeared on the net to play with it. Shared computing was just becoming a thing, with folding at home. So we installed in on a couple of machines to see what it was. After playing around with it for a couple of weeks, I had 1 bitcoin and my lead developer had three. I thought it was interesting, but essentially pointless and deleted it. My buddy kept playing around and eventually amassed 7 whole bitcoins.
They were valued at about 50 cents, theoretically, when we started. They spiked to $7 in a really short time, then back down to a buck. When they went back up over two bucks, my buddy sold out. He's no fool. We both knew a bubble scam when we saw it.
You are absolutely correct, so I'll make a stab at an indelible fact....
The guy was crazy.
There, I said it. Crazy dude gonna do crazy dude stuff. The fact that he was a big fan of "Blood Drive" on SyFy might sidetrack some folks, but I'm gonna put my chit down on uncontrolled schizophrenia. Others might dig into his political affiliations. But even if he's been to see Milo and has a Bernie T-shirt with a white power pin, I'm still going with crazy. Everything else is a symptom.
I can tell because the "not crazy" bucket includes "people who don't shoot at large crowds". And the "people who shoot at large crowds" bucket doesn't really include "not crazy".
I'll also make a prediction: nobody cares. HuffPo is already on record calling for gun control and talking politics. (that was when the death toll was 20, BTW) Remember the "bath salts" guy who ate the dude's face in Miami? Yeah, nobody remembers that he wasn't on any sort of drugs. He was crazy. Crazy dude gonna do crazy dude stuff. That's how they roll.
So you are right. And nobody cares..... because they have an ax, and they intend to grind it.
Reading comprehension fail?
The government seized the copyright and used it to prevent the availability of the book.
That is a sideways approach to censorship, but it is straight up dictionary definition censorship - the government is preventing people from having access to a book.
The way around this has already been paved by PLOS ONE. They might not quite have it right, but the open-access part is good.
Each discipline needs to take ownership of their own peer review process and publish entirely in open access web journals. Ideally only one. And some sort of slashdot style moderation and metamoderation system might help bring the more important articles to the top. It is certainly doable. And every discipline could have membership dues to pay the (very small) bills for web development and hosting. Or the NSF could foot the bill and set the thing up.
All it really requires is buy-in from the research industry. Which is probably a lot like herding cats.
Oh, and everyone should publish all of their supporting data too. Much, much easier to critique, reproduce or follow someone's work if you have full access to the data.
So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly?
Same place the funding for the original research itself came from?
This is the wrong place.
There are lots of "pay to publish" journals, and they are practically guaranteed to be crap. Because if I pay you to publish my article, are you really going to say no?
A major part of the value of a journal like PNAS or Science or Nature is that you can trust that most everything they publish is high quality research of high interest. Nobody can keep up with everything that everyone is writing. Researchers rely on journals to filter out some of the crap for them so they have a chance to focus on the more important bits.
Apparently Clearplay already does this.
From an AC elsewhere on the thread, apparently a company called Clearplay has done this. They sell a Bluray player and a plugin for chrome that works with Amazon streaming service.
They don't seem to have the granular controls that this other service was touting, but they have the tech in place such that they could enhance their service.
So maybe this is like the early fights with Napster et. al. The early movers won't make it, but the concept will eventually be implemented because the demand is there.
Imagine if someone were to sell an automated bit of editing code that would do the same thing on your own copies of the 3 movies. Pretend it works as a plug-in for the popular PC dvd players. That's clearly legal. It just says "Start playing here, stop here, jump to here.."
This is where these legal constructs start getting silly. They should figure out a way to come to some accommodation with this demand from consumers and be done with it.
They are playing a bit of a semantic game, but the "streaming" aspect should be a legal red herring, in this case.
The "you own the DVD" portion of their service basically renders the service a complicated DVD player with a really long connection to your monitor.
If you accept the model they have constructed - their customers buy the DVD and then the company buys it back - then they have a pretty good argument that they are not violating copyright.
But it is clear that because they are in fact not selling anything, but renting a viewing of the movie and using "we own the DVD" as a license to stream it, this is not going to fly.
It is a shame that the content providers can't reach some sort of agreement with this kind of service, because there are lots of movies that would be great to watch with the family, but have one or two brief moments that are not appropriate for the kids. Many movies have just have an adult joke or a few curse words sprinkled about and are otherwise fine for little kids. But many parents don't want their kids picking up that kind of language. Or maybe they don't want to have to explain some sex-joke to a 6 year old. There clearly is a demand for this sort of service. I hope the copyright holders can get it together and allow it to happen.
Which path did you end up chosing?
Kodi?
What were the reasons for your choice?
The problem with your theory about format shifting is the DMCA also has protections for encryption. So simply ripping an encrypted DVD is prohibited by law. Remember when the DeCSS code was printed on T-shirts as a protest?
You don't have to resort to appeals to the first amendment. Banning Nazi's and the KKK is bad strategy. So is showing up to their rallies with weapons looking to pick a fight. Or just throwing crap at them.
This problem was solved in the 70's and 80's, with full implementation of the solution finally achieved in the early 90's.
You don't ban them. You let them speak their piece. And you ignore their marches and rallies.
When I lived in Atlanta the KKK and Nazis used to have a march every year. The city would try to block them, denying permits and generally trying to ban them from coming. And the ACLU would take up their cause and the march would go forward. Then the folks from the NAACP and the SPLC and a whole lot of other folks who rightly didn't want a bunch of racist assholes coming to their city would show up and make a big show of it. It would often involve quit a few scuffles and thrown objects. It gave the racists a nice platform to play the victim role, and it gave them a lot more relevance.
Then they finally decided to stop all the nonsense and just issued the permits. No more months-long coverage of ACLU battles on behalf of the Klan.
And the anti-racism groups quit most of the violent counter protest stuff. They put out the word that the proper reaction was to pity the poor, uneducated and usually rather dim-witted racists.
They let the Klan leaders go on TV and have long-form interviews espousing their views. Everyone got to see exactly who they were and what they thought. Without a bunch of violence and government interference to soak up the news cycle, they actually got to talk about their core beliefs. And nobody (for very, very large values of nobody) turned out to be sympathetic.
They very quickly dwindled and died. By the early 90's they couldn't get more than 18 marchers for their annual parade. Shortly after that, they just quit coming altogether.
Strategically, confronting ideas with violence is a bad idea. It just creates tribal loyalties that are hard to break.
That is one of the best lessons he will ever learn. Nothing feels better than buying your first car with your own money and paying for it in cash.
Thanks for sharing your story...
Most kids when I was growing up didn't have an extra car for them. I earned money for my car mowing grass. Any idea how long it takes to come up with enough for a decent used car when you are earning $2.50 per yard? (two summers, plus lots of nights babysitting). Most kids drive their mom's car. I became the chauffeur for my siblings when I got my license. I'm sure my mom was ecstatic to have that burden off of her shoulders.
I drove mom's car during my learner's permit year and bought a 1976 Ford Granada for $1,750 shortly after I turned 16 in a couple of years before you did. Yeah, baby! Four doors and bench seats! More boring than your mom's car. But it was all mine. Paid cash when I went down to the used car lot (proudly wearing my grass-stained tennis shoes).
Yeah.... I did
Not likely. All of the kids I know personally can afford a car. They even have extra cars laying around. It seems to be a definite choice, whether born of apathy, lack of need or sound decision making based on the developing teen brain being ill-suited to continuous life and death decision-making.
One of my nieces could have driven her dad's Porsche or her mom's M5. Not interested. Didn't get her license until she left for college (paid for by daddy). She's brilliant and wonderful and well-rounded ... and not that interested in having a car.
Her cousin is 17, a rising senior in a rural high school. They are working class - mom and dad have union jobs. They have 2 cars, an SUV and a big pickup truck for towing. For two drivers. The cars are all older and used, but that's how they live in flyover country. Mom and Dad tried to encourage him to get his license. But he's not that interested. He says he'll "probably get it sometime this year". In his state you have to sign up for and take driver's ed classes that are not run by the school. Maybe that has a hand to play in it. Where I grew up, driver's ed was in school.
But in my experience, lack of finances isn't a factor. That doesn't mean that if you live in the projects and can barely afford the basics you wouldn't view a license as a luxury. But that hasn't changed.
No, I can back him up on the driver's license thing. It has definitely changed.... a lot!
When I was a kid, pretty much every single kid got their driver's license on their birthday. Those unlucky few who's 16th birthday fell on the weekend had a great anecdote about how they had to wait aaaaaalllllll weekend!
Kids these days are not nearly as pressed. I have 18 nieces and nephews. Only about half of the ones over 16 got their license within a few months of turning 16. Several waited until 17 or later.
Finding a 16 year old without a license was like finding a unicorn when I was a kid. It also implied that you couldn't pass your test or you had gotten in some sort of legal trouble. It isn't that unusual any more. I don't know why... maybe it is the increased connectivity with the internet. Maybe it is the increased traffic - although some of those nieces and nephews live way out in the country where there isn't much traffic. What I can say is that it is definitely different. I also see a lot of kids that I work with at church who don't bother to get their license. One girl we use for babysitting just moved away for college and still hasn't got a license. I don't understand it, but I do know it exists.
Yeah, the description of their courses sounds exactly like a traditional lecture+lab course where they just drop the lecture part.
If done well, it could be a great improvement. I've had lecture sections that were not very informative. And I've had great labs.
But I also had lab sections that simply had us following a recipe by rote, and had instructors that barely spoke the language and couldn't help with comprehension.
So I guess it is all in the implementation. And doing that right is hard. Designing a hands-on experience to learn basic physics is much easier than designing a hands-on experience to learn the Krebs cycle. And I have a hard time imagining what a lab section for calculus looks like without the lecture..... "Here, go use this textbook to learn calculus, then come to the lab section and we'll find the area of an irregular cylinder together!" Ok, being honest, I had a hard time imagining learning calculus in the lecture section too.... I just had to learn that stuff by rote. I never met the teacher who could explain it such that I could "speak math" like some of the mathematicians I know.
This was exactly my reaction to this post.
And it isn't simply political hot-button science issues such as evolution or global warming.... the same is true for "balanced coverage" of things like alternative medicine. There is no way to be "balanced and neutral" when covering things like homeopathy or reiki. You can be neutral (just the facts, ma'm), or you can be balanced, but you can't be both. Because any "balance" will be false.
Unfortunately, this is often the status quo for these topics. The writers don't really understand the topic in-depth, and their editors expect quotes from "both sides", if they even ask for that. So what we normally get is credulous coverage of some pseudo-science of the day, which in practice becomes promotion of fraudulent businesses.
How does this work in the Facebook world? Well, one would hope that it would mean that a post about the latest super-food that is being widely shared would have a "balanced" offering from Science Based Medicine, explaining why the study in question doesn't actually mean what the press is saying it does, and that the study is really low quality and will probably be disproved when a higher quality study comes out.
But I doubt it. What will probably happen is that if the people at Facebook happen to agree with your point of view, you will think they are following this model. If you don't, you'll think they are just spamming viewpoints they disagree with.
The 9th and 10th amendments died long, long ago. Enumerated powers has never really been a thing, not when important work needs to be done!