One issue with the 20 year old textbooks is that the schools end up buying books from people with connections at the district level, and those books end up costing a lot more than new equipment for the football team.
You can learn a whole hell of a lot without a single textbook these days, but the textbook model is deeply entrenched and is a big moneymaker for a bunch of corporations.
I could teach a class of kids more math in a year with creative classroom exercises and zero homework than they learn in 5 years in a public school with $100 books and nightly homework.
The model of teaching is flawed, and it has nothing to do with a lack of (or wasted) money on sports programs. At least with competitive sports some kids are learning how to improve their skills at -something-. This is completely different than the crappy lecture/book/homework model that gets them good at absolutely nothing, and only a few kids by chance manage to learn on their own despite the rampant idiocy.
Baby steps are always easier. I find it pretty sad that we put people on the moon 40 years ago with slide rules, explosions, and brains and haven't been back.
The Wii doing well reminds me of how the C64 came into the game with vastly inferior hardware that "anyone could use" at a lower price point. I believe they sold more than any other machine at that time (maybe even now).
Have a few fun games, make it easy enough to use, make it cheap enough and people will buy it. Those old school Tiger LED games like "soccer" and whatever else where you can't tell what's going on and random crap lights up would be a huge seller if any of the games were actually playable.
Are you just reporting on something that you read, or are you seriously trying to imply that it's a good thing to make it possible for the government to get a number of wire tap warrants so large that it is currently intractable due to a shortage of wrists and opposable thumbs?
In a sufficiently large company you'll have a good chunk of programmers (though I wouldn't call them that) that ave ever compiled anything without selecting "build" from the menu in Visual Studio. Try getting those guys up to speed on make and emacs.
You'll actually have to teach them something about code.
I like how this article bring out all the negatives, but never the positives.
You have an excellent point here, and I'd like to start listing positives first, and then negatives from now on. Sometimes it's not very clear to me how great things are if looked at in this fairer light.
Positives:
1. You lose a little bit of weight. 2. The voices stop. 3. You don't have to worry about paying off those credit cards anymore. 4. It will definitely "show her"
Negatives:
1. You're dead.
Act in question:
Blowing the back of your head out with a shotgun....
The only negative that needs to be pointed out is that we will completely lose our freedom. But see, people are too dumb to figure out how that happens and give responses like "oh you're overreacting, it'll never come to that!" Then people with a little more foresight start to panic, since they realize that these morons who think the world will be so great with the new kill switches are the majority and will vote this sort of thing in.
That's when we start with the examples, and when it all falls apart. Giving examples is the worst thing you can ever do when the target is too stupid to understand a concept, since then they forget that they're failing to comprehend a concept, and they instead think that you're trying to barrage them with bullshit. That's when you lose time and again, and in enough time society becomes completely unbearable.
Then again, there really are people out there that like the TSA because they feel safer with minimum wage employees bossing them around, confiscating their water, and smugly apprehending their deodorant.
The moral of the story - my argument sucks because it's just a bunch of examples. Feel free to disregard it.
I see no reason why nobody has yet tied basic speech recognition software into an interface to text messaging systems. If you have a sufficiently powerful phone, there should be a "texting mode" or something that allows you to either say something like "respond to text" and then say your message, or hit a single button and then speak the message. You should be able to have it read to you on command as well.
All of these technologies are already there - it's not magic.
You may counter that speech recognition software sucks, but have you ever tried to read a text message? It's a mess of abbreviations that is barely intelligible to begin with. Who cares if the recognition isn't perfect, it'll be just as effective.
I personally walk down the middle of the isle, I would like to see teachings on both sides without the hatred from either.
Middle of the isle?
A red herring to get someone to challenge your grammar skills so you can respond that you're using the island metaphor.
I don't understand what the big deal is when someone questions theories or religions.
You don't understand questioning theories or religions being a big deal? Questioning theory is completely expected. Asserting a creator as a sort of simple solution to the problem is intellectually dishonest at worst, and stupid at best. It takes quite the mind to think that a creator of infinite complexity is truly a simple and elegant solution to anything, and extends a sort of "if it's easy to say in words, it must be easy" theorem to the whole of everything.
Both should be equally taught and both should be equally questioned.
When science is taught, you get the whole thing. When religion is taught, you virtually never get the whole thing. Hell, even if you limit it to one sect, virtually nobody has even read the holy texts that they claim to have complete faith in. Though I would be behind teaching every single faith that is out there. Limiting it to one would be akin to tossing out quantum mechanics as something that you disagree with, and stopping right at general relativity.
I feel we as a people would tend to learn more and hate less if that were the case. Religion is a necessary part of any culture as is science and learning.
Religion being necessary is pure conjecture on your (and others, I'll grant) part. Just because something shows up all the time does not even imply that it is necessary. Correlation is not causation.
Whether you accept it or not religion does play a big part in keeping civilizations civil in most cases.
Please present some evidence of religion keeping people civil. I have yet to some across anything that supports that (save random people claiming that it does, without any evidence to back them up). I'm all ears.
I could cite a few that seem to have the opposite effect but for the most part it's true.
I, too, could cite some that have the opposite effect,and I guess we're back to baseless conjecture for the base claim.
I say let the religious keep their religion and teach its history along side other subjects such as civics, math, science, language and whatever other courses are deemed necessary to promote higher learning.
Teaching the history of a religion is distinct from teaching that the holy texts are a legitimate history.
It shouldn't be a battle, it's only knowledge.
Religion is knowledge in the same way that understanding what Orcs and Hobbits are is knowledge. Knowledge is the stuff that keeps us in control of the planet. Religion is the disease that does its best to hamper knowledge and to frame it as some sort of evil. Religion could only exist with sufficient scientific knowledge. If we had had religion telling us to turn off our brains and instead have faith before we decided to build a door to keep the bears out, we'd be fucking extinct.
I could list the things that I dislike about China, and then you could refute them as to why they make sense in whatever reason. I will fundamentally disagree with both the reasoning and basic intent of every policy that they have, and you'll call me closed minded. I will explain why it's more closed minded to not think like me. We will come to an impasse. I will then propose a contest, but let me warn you that I have spent the last 3 years building up an immunity to Iocaine powder.
Don't worry, I think that every country is severely fucked up. It's not just China. The world will be a better place when we figure out a workable and decent way to govern ourselves. We're still trying to do that.
Your question is kind of like asking how to secure the door into your paper house.
Yeah, jump through hoops to encrypt the data so that the consultant has to wait to decrypt it before they can either willfully or accidentally leak it on their end.
I have a lot of rants about security absurdity, and this is up there in the list.
Cabbage Patch Kids was actually one of the best games for the Colecovision. If you google reviews the only one you'll probably find is a bad one, but I assure you that the reviewer in question never actually played the games. If he had, Donkey Kong would have been given far less than an A.
I'm typically all for getting people out of jobs that they're obviously unqualified for, but these days they'll just be replaced by some other idiot that will do the same sort of thing next year.
At least this guy won't make this specific mistake ever again, and will likely be more careful with other implementations in the future. That can't be said for his likely replacement.
Games provide an environment where the penalty for making a mistake is trivial. You are encouraged to improve to get better results, but you don't die if you muck something up. That is value in itself.
Now, the main thing I'd like to say is that every single fun game out there is educational in some way, just not the educational games. Educational games suck: News at 11. This is as true for educational games as it is true for schools and various other learning avenues. If a game sucks, it will either not be played, or will be played in a daze. I'll assert that more kids are learning math through Guitar Hero (star power path optimizations, when to squeeze, and so on) than ever learned it through Lemonade Stand on the Commodore Pet.
Kids learn more about teamwork through Halo than they do in team sports or group projects in school. They learn the truth that not every team member has a positive value, and also how to cooperate to win. They also learn the oft-forgotten skill of how to actually get better at something. The kids that really destroy games by figuring out the best ways to optimize score, kills, whatever are going to be more capable in life than the kid who got all A's, played zero games (this is unlikely, but whatever), and hung out at the mall all day.
Am I saying to get kids to play Guitar Hero in school? Not exactly. I'm just saying that they're learning more useful skills from Guitar Hero than they are from school. At least they'll really know how to multiply by 50, 100, and 150 extremely well.
Your first paragraph is completely out of line with my experience. I'm currently in the process of trying to replace over 10 thousand books with digital copies for storage considerations. It's difficult to move that many books or dedicate rooms to boxes and boxes of books.
I'm one of the few people (apparently) who dislike physical books. I don't even like trying to hold on to a hardcover to read it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's just because there are so many jews there.
Mercury was only interested in the dust clouds around Uranus.
One issue with the 20 year old textbooks is that the schools end up buying books from people with connections at the district level, and those books end up costing a lot more than new equipment for the football team.
You can learn a whole hell of a lot without a single textbook these days, but the textbook model is deeply entrenched and is a big moneymaker for a bunch of corporations.
I could teach a class of kids more math in a year with creative classroom exercises and zero homework than they learn in 5 years in a public school with $100 books and nightly homework.
The model of teaching is flawed, and it has nothing to do with a lack of (or wasted) money on sports programs. At least with competitive sports some kids are learning how to improve their skills at -something-. This is completely different than the crappy lecture/book/homework model that gets them good at absolutely nothing, and only a few kids by chance manage to learn on their own despite the rampant idiocy.
They're working on that already.
Baby steps are always easier. I find it pretty sad that we put people on the moon 40 years ago with slide rules, explosions, and brains and haven't been back.
The Wii doing well reminds me of how the C64 came into the game with vastly inferior hardware that "anyone could use" at a lower price point. I believe they sold more than any other machine at that time (maybe even now).
Have a few fun games, make it easy enough to use, make it cheap enough and people will buy it. Those old school Tiger LED games like "soccer" and whatever else where you can't tell what's going on and random crap lights up would be a huge seller if any of the games were actually playable.
Are you just reporting on something that you read, or are you seriously trying to imply that it's a good thing to make it possible for the government to get a number of wire tap warrants so large that it is currently intractable due to a shortage of wrists and opposable thumbs?
Nah, she didn't, and she only took 374 photos for her last job.
Nice use of reflection near the nightstand, by the way.
In a sufficiently large company you'll have a good chunk of programmers (though I wouldn't call them that) that ave ever compiled anything without selecting "build" from the menu in Visual Studio. Try getting those guys up to speed on make and emacs.
You'll actually have to teach them something about code.
Yeah - it's about 3.
I like how this article bring out all the negatives, but never the positives.
You have an excellent point here, and I'd like to start listing positives first, and then negatives from now on. Sometimes it's not very clear to me how great things are if looked at in this fairer light.
Positives:
1. You lose a little bit of weight.
2. The voices stop.
3. You don't have to worry about paying off those credit cards anymore.
4. It will definitely "show her"
Negatives:
1. You're dead.
Act in question:
Blowing the back of your head out with a shotgun. ...
The only negative that needs to be pointed out is that we will completely lose our freedom. But see, people are too dumb to figure out how that happens and give responses like "oh you're overreacting, it'll never come to that!" Then people with a little more foresight start to panic, since they realize that these morons who think the world will be so great with the new kill switches are the majority and will vote this sort of thing in.
That's when we start with the examples, and when it all falls apart. Giving examples is the worst thing you can ever do when the target is too stupid to understand a concept, since then they forget that they're failing to comprehend a concept, and they instead think that you're trying to barrage them with bullshit. That's when you lose time and again, and in enough time society becomes completely unbearable.
Then again, there really are people out there that like the TSA because they feel safer with minimum wage employees bossing them around, confiscating their water, and smugly apprehending their deodorant.
The moral of the story - my argument sucks because it's just a bunch of examples. Feel free to disregard it.
I see no reason why nobody has yet tied basic speech recognition software into an interface to text messaging systems. If you have a sufficiently powerful phone, there should be a "texting mode" or something that allows you to either say something like "respond to text" and then say your message, or hit a single button and then speak the message. You should be able to have it read to you on command as well.
All of these technologies are already there - it's not magic.
You may counter that speech recognition software sucks, but have you ever tried to read a text message? It's a mess of abbreviations that is barely intelligible to begin with. Who cares if the recognition isn't perfect, it'll be just as effective.
I personally walk down the middle of the isle, I would like to see teachings on both sides without the hatred from either.
Middle of the isle?
A red herring to get someone to challenge your grammar skills so you can respond that you're using the island metaphor.
I don't understand what the big deal is when someone questions theories or religions.
You don't understand questioning theories or religions being a big deal? Questioning theory is completely expected. Asserting a creator as a sort of simple solution to the problem is intellectually dishonest at worst, and stupid at best. It takes quite the mind to think that a creator of infinite complexity is truly a simple and elegant solution to anything, and extends a sort of "if it's easy to say in words, it must be easy" theorem to the whole of everything.
Both should be equally taught and both should be equally questioned.
When science is taught, you get the whole thing. When religion is taught, you virtually never get the whole thing. Hell, even if you limit it to one sect, virtually nobody has even read the holy texts that they claim to have complete faith in. Though I would be behind teaching every single faith that is out there. Limiting it to one would be akin to tossing out quantum mechanics as something that you disagree with, and stopping right at general relativity.
I feel we as a people would tend to learn more and hate less if that were the case. Religion is a necessary part of any culture as is science and learning.
Religion being necessary is pure conjecture on your (and others, I'll grant) part. Just because something shows up all the time does not even imply that it is necessary. Correlation is not causation.
Whether you accept it or not religion does play a big part in keeping civilizations civil in most cases.
Please present some evidence of religion keeping people civil. I have yet to some across anything that supports that (save random people claiming that it does, without any evidence to back them up). I'm all ears.
I could cite a few that seem to have the opposite effect but for the most part it's true.
I, too, could cite some that have the opposite effect,and I guess we're back to baseless conjecture for the base claim.
I say let the religious keep their religion and teach its history along side other subjects such as civics, math, science, language and whatever other courses are deemed necessary to promote higher learning.
Teaching the history of a religion is distinct from teaching that the holy texts are a legitimate history.
It shouldn't be a battle, it's only knowledge.
Religion is knowledge in the same way that understanding what Orcs and Hobbits are is knowledge. Knowledge is the stuff that keeps us in control of the planet. Religion is the disease that does its best to hamper knowledge and to frame it as some sort of evil. Religion could only exist with sufficient scientific knowledge. If we had had religion telling us to turn off our brains and instead have faith before we decided to build a door to keep the bears out, we'd be fucking extinct.
So you're saying that it's better to be a policymaker if you're personally affected and emotionally involved in a situation.
This is actually evidence against design... get back with me when you figure out why.
I could list the things that I dislike about China, and then you could refute them as to why they make sense in whatever reason. I will fundamentally disagree with both the reasoning and basic intent of every policy that they have, and you'll call me closed minded. I will explain why it's more closed minded to not think like me. We will come to an impasse. I will then propose a contest, but let me warn you that I have spent the last 3 years building up an immunity to Iocaine powder.
Don't worry, I think that every country is severely fucked up. It's not just China. The world will be a better place when we figure out a workable and decent way to govern ourselves. We're still trying to do that.
So you're incompetent when it comes to making money but terrific at wisely spending it.
Where can I invest in your fund?
Your question is kind of like asking how to secure the door into your paper house.
Yeah, jump through hoops to encrypt the data so that the consultant has to wait to decrypt it before they can either willfully or accidentally leak it on their end.
I have a lot of rants about security absurdity, and this is up there in the list.
Way to keep our kids safe!
It's sickening that both the mother thought it was right to spy on that, and you thought it was right to do it.
Cabbage Patch Kids was actually one of the best games for the Colecovision. If you google reviews the only one you'll probably find is a bad one, but I assure you that the reviewer in question never actually played the games. If he had, Donkey Kong would have been given far less than an A.
How much does the TSA pay its shills these days?
It makes creation of new repositories comparatively simple.
I'm typically all for getting people out of jobs that they're obviously unqualified for, but these days they'll just be replaced by some other idiot that will do the same sort of thing next year.
At least this guy won't make this specific mistake ever again, and will likely be more careful with other implementations in the future. That can't be said for his likely replacement.
Games provide an environment where the penalty for making a mistake is trivial. You are encouraged to improve to get better results, but you don't die if you muck something up. That is value in itself.
Now, the main thing I'd like to say is that every single fun game out there is educational in some way, just not the educational games. Educational games suck: News at 11. This is as true for educational games as it is true for schools and various other learning avenues. If a game sucks, it will either not be played, or will be played in a daze. I'll assert that more kids are learning math through Guitar Hero (star power path optimizations, when to squeeze, and so on) than ever learned it through Lemonade Stand on the Commodore Pet.
Kids learn more about teamwork through Halo than they do in team sports or group projects in school. They learn the truth that not every team member has a positive value, and also how to cooperate to win. They also learn the oft-forgotten skill of how to actually get better at something. The kids that really destroy games by figuring out the best ways to optimize score, kills, whatever are going to be more capable in life than the kid who got all A's, played zero games (this is unlikely, but whatever), and hung out at the mall all day.
Am I saying to get kids to play Guitar Hero in school? Not exactly. I'm just saying that they're learning more useful skills from Guitar Hero than they are from school. At least they'll really know how to multiply by 50, 100, and 150 extremely well.
That's a hell of an elk!
Your first paragraph is completely out of line with my experience. I'm currently in the process of trying to replace over 10 thousand books with digital copies for storage considerations. It's difficult to move that many books or dedicate rooms to boxes and boxes of books.
I'm one of the few people (apparently) who dislike physical books. I don't even like trying to hold on to a hardcover to read it.