From the one economics course that I took, I seem to remember that situations such as monopolies and collusion were regarded as market failures. And that it is the government's responsibility to fix such market failures as soon as possible.
The question of how do you "fix" Microsoft is one I wouldn't touch with a 3 metre(approx 10 ft.) pole mind you.
Same thing is happening in Ontario where the government has instituted standardized testing over protests from teachers. My mother, a retired teacher kept on getting messages from her colleagues telling her how lucky she was to have gotten out when she did. The assessment of the schools are now based on how well the students do on these tests, and you can bet that the teachers of classes that perform below the school average will be told that they've got to improve. Mind you, this is the same province that decided that having a gifted program was elitest and is doing it's best to eliminate it (I'm so glad I graduated when I did).
I have to agree with this statement. Currently I'm working for a large financial institution and they are planning to migrate as much of their client PCs to thin clients and then just run all of the applications off of a terminal server. Doing this effectively means that the clients can use almost any OS, or not even have one.
As Sun has demonstrated with their rather cool looking Sun Rays (Saw a demo of one, the smart card logon was really neat!), this is something the industry as a whole seems to be moving to, at least on the enterprise side. So to keep costs down we may see every thin client running a Linux of some sort, but if the servers are all running Win200x then it won't really matter because our computing experience will still be defined by Microsoft.
This isn't a vision very far into the future either, there are already companies that are offering home users the ability to run Microsoft Office on an application server. Microsoft knows that the desktop is not the future, shouldn't we?
I have to agree with this statement. Currently I'm working for a large financial institution and they are planning to migrate as much of their client PCs to thin clients and then just run all of the applications off of a terminal server. Doing this effectively means that the clients can use almost any OS, or not even have one. As Sun has demonstrated with their rather cool looking Sun Rays (Saw a demo of one, the smart card logon was really neat!), this is something the industry as a whole seems to be moving to, at least on the enterprise side. So to keep costs down we may see every thin client running a Linux of some sort, but if the servers are all running Win200x then it won't really matter because our computing experience will still be defined by Microsoft. This isn't a vision very far into the future either, there are already companies that are offering home users the ability to run Microsoft Office on an application server. Microsoft knows that the desktop is not the future, shouldn't we?
First things first, violence does happen in Canadian high schools. As a Canadian, I think that i do need to point this sad fact out. Although I can only think of one case where someone died(a very focussed attack by a group on an individual, outside of the school), it still does happen here. But while we do have violence in our schools, we have not yet experienced a tragedy in the mold of Littleton, one where students almost randomly kill fellow students.
Is this because we(Canada) have more restrictive gun laws? I've seen a lot of comments about this, I guess because it's a very touchy subject in the States. Yes, and no. Yes because not having access to the weapons(a locked metal cabinet is much easier to get at then going out and buying a gun), means that the scale of the violence is limited. Sure people could still make pipe bombs or other such things, but they aren't as reliable or efficient at killing people. No because having access to a gun does not absolve the attacker of anything. It is still the person that wilfully took the gun and killed someone with it.
After reading all of the comments here, I think the main difference is that I don't know anyone who didn't love high school. Sure people formed different cliques, and perhaps the cliques as wholes may not have interacted with each other much, but it was very commonplace for individuals to change between them as easily as a politician before an election. I alternated between Ubernerd, jock, artsie, and for a bit AV guy. In a way it was expected of us to be as multifaceted as possible. Teachers in school would be just as lenient for assignments/tests/etc regardless if you were away playing rugby, going to a trivia tournament or filming a school event, in most cases they encouraged us to do as many things as possible whether or not we were any good at it. There was less of an us verses them mentality in high school because at any time we could be on either side, and so it makes it much harder to dehumanize your fellow students. Something that it appears was very prevalent in more than a few of your high schools.
In fact from what i can see, the American attitude is like that of the Olympic Games: "Citius, Altius Fortius"(Faster, Higher, Stronger), whereas the Canadian attitude is more like that of the Special Olympics: "Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt." In other words, for Americans(gross generalization alert!!!) winning and differentiating yourself from those around you, is more important than the cameraderie gained by experiencing common events.
Not sure what exactly it says about us but I thought it was worth mentioning
Oh, and glad to see that there wasn't as much Katz bashing as there has been in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
From the one economics course that I took, I seem to remember that situations such as monopolies and collusion were regarded as market failures. And that it is the government's responsibility to fix such market failures as soon as possible.
The question of how do you "fix" Microsoft is one I wouldn't touch with a 3 metre(approx 10 ft.) pole mind you.
Same thing is happening in Ontario where the government has instituted standardized testing over protests from teachers. My mother, a retired teacher kept on getting messages from her colleagues telling her how lucky she was to have gotten out when she did. The assessment of the schools are now based on how well the students do on these tests, and you can bet that the teachers of classes that perform below the school average will be told that they've got to improve. Mind you, this is the same province that decided that having a gifted program was elitest and is doing it's best to eliminate it (I'm so glad I graduated when I did).
As Sun has demonstrated with their rather cool looking Sun Rays (Saw a demo of one, the smart card logon was really neat!), this is something the industry as a whole seems to be moving to, at least on the enterprise side. So to keep costs down we may see every thin client running a Linux of some sort, but if the servers are all running Win200x then it won't really matter because our computing experience will still be defined by Microsoft.
This isn't a vision very far into the future either, there are already companies that are offering home users the ability to run Microsoft Office on an application server. Microsoft knows that the desktop is not the future, shouldn't we?
I have to agree with this statement. Currently I'm working for a large financial institution and they are planning to migrate as much of their client PCs to thin clients and then just run all of the applications off of a terminal server. Doing this effectively means that the clients can use almost any OS, or not even have one. As Sun has demonstrated with their rather cool looking Sun Rays (Saw a demo of one, the smart card logon was really neat!), this is something the industry as a whole seems to be moving to, at least on the enterprise side. So to keep costs down we may see every thin client running a Linux of some sort, but if the servers are all running Win200x then it won't really matter because our computing experience will still be defined by Microsoft. This isn't a vision very far into the future either, there are already companies that are offering home users the ability to run Microsoft Office on an application server. Microsoft knows that the desktop is not the future, shouldn't we?
Is this because we(Canada) have more restrictive gun laws? I've seen a lot of comments about this, I guess because it's a very touchy subject in the States. Yes, and no. Yes because not having access to the weapons(a locked metal cabinet is much easier to get at then going out and buying a gun), means that the scale of the violence is limited. Sure people could still make pipe bombs or other such things, but they aren't as reliable or efficient at killing people. No because having access to a gun does not absolve the attacker of anything. It is still the person that wilfully took the gun and killed someone with it.
After reading all of the comments here, I think the main difference is that I don't know anyone who didn't love high school. Sure people formed different cliques, and perhaps the cliques as wholes may not have interacted with each other much, but it was very commonplace for individuals to change between them as easily as a politician before an election. I alternated between Ubernerd, jock, artsie, and for a bit AV guy. In a way it was expected of us to be as multifaceted as possible. Teachers in school would be just as lenient for assignments/tests/etc regardless if you were away playing rugby, going to a trivia tournament or filming a school event, in most cases they encouraged us to do as many things as possible whether or not we were any good at it. There was less of an us verses them mentality in high school because at any time we could be on either side, and so it makes it much harder to dehumanize your fellow students. Something that it appears was very prevalent in more than a few of your high schools.
In fact from what i can see, the American attitude is like that of the Olympic Games: "Citius, Altius Fortius"(Faster, Higher, Stronger), whereas the Canadian attitude is more like that of the Special Olympics: "Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt." In other words, for Americans(gross generalization alert!!!) winning and differentiating yourself from those around you, is more important than the cameraderie gained by experiencing common events.
Not sure what exactly it says about us but I thought it was worth mentioning
Oh, and glad to see that there wasn't as much Katz bashing as there has been in the past.
Anyways, that's my $0.02 (or $0.013 American)