The Underground History of American Education
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Failing Our Geniuses
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There's a book you can read online entitled "The Underground History of American Education" which was written by a former New York public schoolteacher named John Taylor Gatto. The book touches on this subject, that for a paycheck a teacher will hold back a gifted child to maintain classroom quotas and such. The entire book is a highly recommended read (even more so because you can read the whole thing online) due to its content. The notion that we all need to be schooled the exact same way in the same subjects using the same methods (and so forth) is an illusion conjured by the industrialists that founded the institution of public schooling in the first place.
Frankly, I don't see the scandal in the fact that Africa doesn't have good access to the Internet, and reject this article on the grounds that (a) as usual, the story is focused on lack of infrastructure, which is not the correct focus
Ok, let's take a look here...
not to mention phone line trouble, saturated networks, and so on
Strange, those sure sound like infrastructure problems to me!
The reason I like my desktop (computer) is because of the amount of desktop (display area) real estate I have. I have a 24" wide screen LCD as my center screen, flanked by a pair of 20" widescreens. I will eventually upgrade to all 24" panels. Show me a laptop that even comes close to competing with that (while still being "portable") and I'll consider this "it's the end of the desktop!" notion to be valid. There's only two ways I can think of this happening, moving forward. Option one is that my laptop will have a built-in projector that can display the ginormous desktop I desire. Option two is a HUD that projects said desktop directly onto my retina. I would surely welcome either option, but neither is really technologically nor financially feasible right now nor do I see them being so within the projected 5-7 year timeframe.
Also, as others have mentioned, I can get superior graphics performance from a desktop because it's easier to manage thermal output and you can therefore utilize video processors which have greater thermal emissions. "Graphics performance" isn't limited to games here, either; I enjoy being able to do high-polygon work in SketchUp with 4x anti-aliasing turned on.
The cause I see for the spike in laptop purchases is twofold. One, more people are buying them because they're affordable. Two, they're replaced more frequently than desktop PCs because they are abused (and therefore broken) more frequently than desktop PCs. I don't drop my desktop on the floor regularly, but everyone has been known to drop their laptop bag now and again without thinking. I don't have a tendancy to block the air vents on my desktop, but laptop air vents are often placed in very inconvenient locations. etc, etc. These two aspects are related, really. The drop in the price of laptops is mostly due to them being made more cheaply (not a "more bang for your buck" cheap, but a "lower quality" cheap) and therefore more prone to failure when mistreated/misused. I think that people are replacing laptops on a more frequent cycle than desktops, and that's why we're seeing this surge in laptop purchases.
However, it would be kinda strange for an individual or crew capable of navigating a craft at least twenty four trillion miles to not know how to fly a spacecraft well enough to avoid crashing.
Yeah, it would be kinda strange for a passenger capable of buying a ticket to ride on a craft for at least ten thousand miles to not know how to fly a jet aircraft well enough to avoid crashing.
I'm not clear on your logic. I agree with the parent to your post, but your post is somewhat unclear.
The parent is saying that the poor can't afford that $3000 over Blue Book price, and if the automobile makers start producing more fuel-efficient cars at a high(er) cost, how does this benefit the poor? The only possible way is the "hand me down" effect, which could take 5-7 years (or more) to take place. The poor only have money for 20+ year old cars that get 10-15 miles per gallon.
There's also a hidden problem with fuel-efficient vehicles: they're likely to be driven more than the ones they're replacing. If people can drive more for less cost than they do now, they'll take more day trips, do more driving around town, possibly even drive farther to save a few cents on gasoline because driving that extra distance doesn't cost them as much as it used to. This means more wear and tear per-vehicle and reduces the likelihood that a "hand me down" from the upper to lower class will perform nearly as well as it did when it drove off the lot.
Additionally, if these more-efficient vehicles are in high demand, their resale prices will probably remain high (e.g. $3000 over Blue Book).
Anyhow, all of this would assume that the resale value of a used car is "showing" the car companies anything. I'm still waiting for a major manufacturer to pick up EV manufacturing again, and people have been "showing" support for EVs by writing letters directly to the manufacturer. The result? [Insert sound of crickets here]
Call me when they're competing with MIT's carbon nanotube based ultracapacitors. Conventional ultracapacitors can achieve an energy density of 6Wh/kg, but the CNT ultracapacitors being researched and developed by MIT are claimed to achieve an energy density of 60Wh/kg (or, let's say, ten times more than this "new" capacitory developed by North Carolina State University).
Touch-sensing isn't capacitive as it is with PDAs and Tablet PCs. It uses an Infrared sensing system and a set of cameras to detect objects on or within a few inches of the surface. Funny you should mention it, there IS a sheet of Lexan on top of it, and it works just fine. I should know, I'm sitting right beside one.
A lot of cars out there these days have daytime running lights or even full-on headlights that come on when you start the car. The problem with this is that none of the other lights come on; just the headlights. When I drive at night, I generally see 1-2 drivers with their headlights--and no other lights--on.
That is easily among the worst features invented. I mean, really, how hard is it to make all of the lights come on? I bet it actually costs MORE to wire up just the headlights to come on automatically, than it would cost to make all of them come on automatically.
Before anyone complains about lights robbing power from the powertrain, indicator lamps are usually 3-5 watts, brake lights maybe 10 watts, headlamps 50-100 watts each. So with four side indicators, two front indicators, two rear indicators, two brake lights, and two headlamps, you're looking at a power draw of 160-260 watts, or a little over 1/3 horsepower tops. The alternator is producing more than that much energy as a surplus already...
If somebody were to patent a process that involves converting thing A into thing J, that patent could be circumvented by a process that converts thing A into thing B, which then converts it into thing C, and so on into J. Each step would have to be distinct enough to bear little resemblance to the initial A-to-J conversion, but the end result would be the same. The application won't function "exactly" like it did before, it might be slower (take an extra fraction of a second to connect a call) or take up more memory (require new VOIP connectivity devices), but the result is essentially the same.
I think that circumvention is an interesting challenge, too. Good mental exercise.
If oxygen is the product of fusion, the relative lack of oxygen may indicate that the fusion process is slow or slowing, or maybe that there isn't as much fuel as previously thought, or that the lifespan of a star is less (or maybe more) than previously thought. It's a crisis because suddenly we just don't know exactly what's going on (whereas previously we thought we did) with our primary source of energy.
For the most part, any comparison to the Nazi regime is overkill. You have to form a police state and kill a lot of people for arbitrary reasons before the comparison really becomes valid.
Godwin's Law isn't an admonition against learning anything from the mistakes of the Nazi regime; Godwin's Law is an admonition against exaggerating the seriousness of a situation. In the case of China, however, I think the comparison is more valid than it really would be in any other circumstance I've seen it used, so I (personally) would consider the law to not apply here.
What I'd like to see is a sliding scale for patent protection duration. If a patent is filed by an individual or a small business (defined by some amount of annual revenue), the protection would be maximized in order to allow them the time to develop and market the invention and profit from their idea. A bigger business, though, would be able to more rapidly develop and market an invention to a wider audience, and I think that their protection should be minimized. This would keep big companies from monopolizing the market for too long while still allowing profit to be generated on an idea which is contributed to the collective consciousness.
I also think that software patents, while somewhat evil, could be useful over a very brief period of time, say one year. One year isn't a huge bottleneck in technology development, and it's absolutely nothing compared to the 20 years (I believe it's 20 years) that a patent can currently last for.
Eudora has an MDI interface for working with mailboxes and messages. I can have multiple messages and/or mailboxes opened simultaneously within a single window in Eudora, whereas last I checked, Thunderbird behaved like Outlook with regard to mailboxes and messages; you can only view one at a time, no tiling or cascading of MDI windows.
Is there a plugin or something that makes Thunderbird behave like Eudora in this regard? If there is, I would totally switch mail clients. I'm only hooked on Eudora because I prefer its UI...
It seems like the best way to solve this problem is a middle step. If only verizon can translate an IP to a telephone number, Vonage should translate IPs to VonageNumbers which are then translated to IP numbers. Vonage can easily claim both steps as their own. Since the correlation is indirect, I think it would sidestep that claim of the patent. Another middle step would be converting the phone communications into generic encrypted data packets and adopting encrypted data transfer services as another branch of business. Then they aren't transmitting phone communications over TCP/IP, they're transmitting generic encrypted data packets over TCP/IP. It may be more involved than all this, but it seems like a viable-enough workaround.
I have a similar take on letting people carry guns on airplanes. If somebody got wild and tried to hijack the plane, he'd be guaranteed to be shot by 5 or 6 people instantly. If you used some sort of frangible bullet, you'd have even less risk of a ricochet or puncturing the cabin.
By "Careful to cover their tracks" do you mean "too poor to use their own computer, so they went to the library" ? Or do you mean "sitting at any of the hundreds of unsecured wireless access points owned by individuals and businesses alike" ?
If all you have to go on is an IP address, the investigation can take months and may be called off due to lack of technical knowledge. If a library was used, a signup sheet may be able to tie the perp to a computer, but what if the entire library is behind a NAT device? Then everybody using a computer at that time would have the same IP. There's also nothing to prevent somebody from signing up as "Somebody Jones" on the signup sheet.
The recently-evicted tenant is a likely suspect, but if they've been evicted they likely don't have money for housing and will be difficult to track down due to the possibility of a presently-transient situation.
I had my license plates stolen in Tacoma a few months ago. The lock on my truck was forced too (TBH, a screwdriver would have opened that lock it was so damn old) and some shoes I was waiting to return to the store were stolen. If my girlfriend didn't live in Tacoma I'd never go back there. heh.
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Here's a link to the book's TOC: http://johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
There's a book you can read online entitled "The Underground History of American Education" which was written by a former New York public schoolteacher named John Taylor Gatto. The book touches on this subject, that for a paycheck a teacher will hold back a gifted child to maintain classroom quotas and such. The entire book is a highly recommended read (even more so because you can read the whole thing online) due to its content. The notion that we all need to be schooled the exact same way in the same subjects using the same methods (and so forth) is an illusion conjured by the industrialists that founded the institution of public schooling in the first place.
The reason I like my desktop (computer) is because of the amount of desktop (display area) real estate I have. I have a 24" wide screen LCD as my center screen, flanked by a pair of 20" widescreens. I will eventually upgrade to all 24" panels. Show me a laptop that even comes close to competing with that (while still being "portable") and I'll consider this "it's the end of the desktop!" notion to be valid. There's only two ways I can think of this happening, moving forward. Option one is that my laptop will have a built-in projector that can display the ginormous desktop I desire. Option two is a HUD that projects said desktop directly onto my retina. I would surely welcome either option, but neither is really technologically nor financially feasible right now nor do I see them being so within the projected 5-7 year timeframe.
Also, as others have mentioned, I can get superior graphics performance from a desktop because it's easier to manage thermal output and you can therefore utilize video processors which have greater thermal emissions. "Graphics performance" isn't limited to games here, either; I enjoy being able to do high-polygon work in SketchUp with 4x anti-aliasing turned on.
The cause I see for the spike in laptop purchases is twofold. One, more people are buying them because they're affordable. Two, they're replaced more frequently than desktop PCs because they are abused (and therefore broken) more frequently than desktop PCs. I don't drop my desktop on the floor regularly, but everyone has been known to drop their laptop bag now and again without thinking. I don't have a tendancy to block the air vents on my desktop, but laptop air vents are often placed in very inconvenient locations. etc, etc. These two aspects are related, really. The drop in the price of laptops is mostly due to them being made more cheaply (not a "more bang for your buck" cheap, but a "lower quality" cheap) and therefore more prone to failure when mistreated/misused. I think that people are replacing laptops on a more frequent cycle than desktops, and that's why we're seeing this surge in laptop purchases.
Yeah, it would be kinda strange for a passenger capable of buying a ticket to ride on a craft for at least ten thousand miles to not know how to fly a jet aircraft well enough to avoid crashing.
Oh, wait...
I'm not clear on your logic. I agree with the parent to your post, but your post is somewhat unclear.
The parent is saying that the poor can't afford that $3000 over Blue Book price, and if the automobile makers start producing more fuel-efficient cars at a high(er) cost, how does this benefit the poor? The only possible way is the "hand me down" effect, which could take 5-7 years (or more) to take place. The poor only have money for 20+ year old cars that get 10-15 miles per gallon.
There's also a hidden problem with fuel-efficient vehicles: they're likely to be driven more than the ones they're replacing. If people can drive more for less cost than they do now, they'll take more day trips, do more driving around town, possibly even drive farther to save a few cents on gasoline because driving that extra distance doesn't cost them as much as it used to. This means more wear and tear per-vehicle and reduces the likelihood that a "hand me down" from the upper to lower class will perform nearly as well as it did when it drove off the lot.
Additionally, if these more-efficient vehicles are in high demand, their resale prices will probably remain high (e.g. $3000 over Blue Book).
Anyhow, all of this would assume that the resale value of a used car is "showing" the car companies anything. I'm still waiting for a major manufacturer to pick up EV manufacturing again, and people have been "showing" support for EVs by writing letters directly to the manufacturer. The result? [Insert sound of crickets here]
Call me when they're competing with MIT's carbon nanotube based ultracapacitors. Conventional ultracapacitors can achieve an energy density of 6Wh/kg, but the CNT ultracapacitors being researched and developed by MIT are claimed to achieve an energy density of 60Wh/kg (or, let's say, ten times more than this "new" capacitory developed by North Carolina State University).
p _project.html li.pdf
Overview: http://lees-web.mit.edu/lees/projects/cnt_ultraca
More-detailed Poster (PDF): http://lees-web.mit.edu/lees/posters/RU13_signore
The problem happens when a Christian Scientist parent denies treatment to their [presumably innocent] child.
Sugar cane, I believe, is most efficient at 8%.
Touch-sensing isn't capacitive as it is with PDAs and Tablet PCs. It uses an Infrared sensing system and a set of cameras to detect objects on or within a few inches of the surface. Funny you should mention it, there IS a sheet of Lexan on top of it, and it works just fine. I should know, I'm sitting right beside one.
This isn't vaporware, I'm sitting right next to one.
Oh, and using it is about 10 times cooler than seeing it in a video.
A lot of cars out there these days have daytime running lights or even full-on headlights that come on when you start the car. The problem with this is that none of the other lights come on; just the headlights. When I drive at night, I generally see 1-2 drivers with their headlights--and no other lights--on.
That is easily among the worst features invented. I mean, really, how hard is it to make all of the lights come on? I bet it actually costs MORE to wire up just the headlights to come on automatically, than it would cost to make all of them come on automatically.
Before anyone complains about lights robbing power from the powertrain, indicator lamps are usually 3-5 watts, brake lights maybe 10 watts, headlamps 50-100 watts each. So with four side indicators, two front indicators, two rear indicators, two brake lights, and two headlamps, you're looking at a power draw of 160-260 watts, or a little over 1/3 horsepower tops. The alternator is producing more than that much energy as a surplus already...
But, what if you think you're writing a great paper, and you actually are writing a great paper?
So there's a bill to make illegal wiretaps ... illegal? Does anyone else see the problem here?
If somebody were to patent a process that involves converting thing A into thing J, that patent could be circumvented by a process that converts thing A into thing B, which then converts it into thing C, and so on into J. Each step would have to be distinct enough to bear little resemblance to the initial A-to-J conversion, but the end result would be the same. The application won't function "exactly" like it did before, it might be slower (take an extra fraction of a second to connect a call) or take up more memory (require new VOIP connectivity devices), but the result is essentially the same.
I think that circumvention is an interesting challenge, too. Good mental exercise.
If oxygen is the product of fusion, the relative lack of oxygen may indicate that the fusion process is slow or slowing, or maybe that there isn't as much fuel as previously thought, or that the lifespan of a star is less (or maybe more) than previously thought. It's a crisis because suddenly we just don't know exactly what's going on (whereas previously we thought we did) with our primary source of energy.
IANAA (I am not an astrophysicist) but the amount of oxygen in the sun could indicate its age, or its expected lifespan.
If the sun only has another thousand years instead of another billion, that is a pretty substantial crisis for example.
For the most part, any comparison to the Nazi regime is overkill. You have to form a police state and kill a lot of people for arbitrary reasons before the comparison really becomes valid.
Godwin's Law isn't an admonition against learning anything from the mistakes of the Nazi regime; Godwin's Law is an admonition against exaggerating the seriousness of a situation. In the case of China, however, I think the comparison is more valid than it really would be in any other circumstance I've seen it used, so I (personally) would consider the law to not apply here.
What I'd like to see is a sliding scale for patent protection duration. If a patent is filed by an individual or a small business (defined by some amount of annual revenue), the protection would be maximized in order to allow them the time to develop and market the invention and profit from their idea. A bigger business, though, would be able to more rapidly develop and market an invention to a wider audience, and I think that their protection should be minimized. This would keep big companies from monopolizing the market for too long while still allowing profit to be generated on an idea which is contributed to the collective consciousness.
I also think that software patents, while somewhat evil, could be useful over a very brief period of time, say one year. One year isn't a huge bottleneck in technology development, and it's absolutely nothing compared to the 20 years (I believe it's 20 years) that a patent can currently last for.
Eudora has an MDI interface for working with mailboxes and messages. I can have multiple messages and/or mailboxes opened simultaneously within a single window in Eudora, whereas last I checked, Thunderbird behaved like Outlook with regard to mailboxes and messages; you can only view one at a time, no tiling or cascading of MDI windows.
Is there a plugin or something that makes Thunderbird behave like Eudora in this regard? If there is, I would totally switch mail clients. I'm only hooked on Eudora because I prefer its UI...
Actually, I just looked at the patent and it never even mention the words "encrypt" or "encryption" so it seems workable.
It seems like the best way to solve this problem is a middle step. If only verizon can translate an IP to a telephone number, Vonage should translate IPs to VonageNumbers which are then translated to IP numbers. Vonage can easily claim both steps as their own. Since the correlation is indirect, I think it would sidestep that claim of the patent. Another middle step would be converting the phone communications into generic encrypted data packets and adopting encrypted data transfer services as another branch of business. Then they aren't transmitting phone communications over TCP/IP, they're transmitting generic encrypted data packets over TCP/IP. It may be more involved than all this, but it seems like a viable-enough workaround.
I have a similar take on letting people carry guns on airplanes. If somebody got wild and tried to hijack the plane, he'd be guaranteed to be shot by 5 or 6 people instantly. If you used some sort of frangible bullet, you'd have even less risk of a ricochet or puncturing the cabin.
By "Careful to cover their tracks" do you mean "too poor to use their own computer, so they went to the library" ?
Or do you mean "sitting at any of the hundreds of unsecured wireless access points owned by individuals and businesses alike" ?
If all you have to go on is an IP address, the investigation can take months and may be called off due to lack of technical knowledge. If a library was used, a signup sheet may be able to tie the perp to a computer, but what if the entire library is behind a NAT device? Then everybody using a computer at that time would have the same IP. There's also nothing to prevent somebody from signing up as "Somebody Jones" on the signup sheet.
The recently-evicted tenant is a likely suspect, but if they've been evicted they likely don't have money for housing and will be difficult to track down due to the possibility of a presently-transient situation.
I had my license plates stolen in Tacoma a few months ago. The lock on my truck was forced too (TBH, a screwdriver would have opened that lock it was so damn old) and some shoes I was waiting to return to the store were stolen. If my girlfriend didn't live in Tacoma I'd never go back there. heh.