I was only talking about its most hyped application.
Java is unsuited to adding active functionality to web pages. Happy now?
Incidentally, I've written 10-15K lines of java, all of which were applet or application code (incidentally, it didn't take me all that coding to recognize that it sucked, it's just that I had no other option). I hated it, because it forces you into a half-assed OOP model. If you're going to force people to use OOP, you should at least implement it right. It totally ties your hands. I've also written a few hundred K lines of C and C++, over 100K lines of Perl.
A web applet language should be well integrated with HTML, not segregated into little square windows. Does anyone remember Curl? Not the web grabber, but the lispish thing with curly brackets at MIT. It was a brilliant idea. It replaced HTML, Java, Javascript, Flash, etc. with one quite adequate language. Unfortunately, nobody seems interested in replacing HTML.
A run-anywhere platform should not be tied to specially designed languages. You should be able to compile your C into bytecode that will run on any system. It wouldn't be a big deal to implement, many game emulators do a bigger job. You'd have to provide a low-level window library, but that's really no big deal (the insanity begins when you try to make a high-level window library, and anticipate everything the programmer might want to use).
Let's face it, Java went as far as it did on a huge marketing campaign, not on its technical merits. It didn't deliver on its promises, and those not caught up in the trendiness saw that it never could. Let's not waste any more time with it.
Have you experienced the horrors of the Johnson Keyboard? The idea is that you never have to leave the home row. Unfortunately, due to a really lame implementation using xmodmap, you type the space with your little finger, which rapidly becomes painful. If it ever gets done right (like with an X patch, or something like that) it might be worth taking a look at.
it's a mistake to do exercises to "strengthen" your hand--typing all day long is enough exercise
This is as wrong as the idea that doing lots of jogging will build up strong legs (BTW, if you want strong legs, do squats or leg press). Typing is what got you into this mess, it won't get you out.
If you want to strengthen some part of your body, you need brief, intense, and infrequent exercise. Constant light (like typing or jogging) use tells your body to conserve energy by paring down to bare essentials. That's why many geeks have scrawny wrists and finger problems and most long-time joggers have scrawny legs and knee problems.
To strengthen the fingers I strongly recommend this exercise: lay a sheet of newspaper (just one, as you get stronger you'll want to stack up two or three pages) flat on a table in front of you, grab it with the fingertips of one hand and crumple it into a ball without using your other hand or squashing it against anything (including the table). Repeat with fresh sheets until you try and fail to finish crumpling the last sheet. If you feel pain in your joints, stop and try again tomorrow. Do this every day for a week or two, then every second day or so indefinitely.
Another good exercise is wetting a towel and wringing it dry over and over, or squeezing a soft foam ball. Remember, exhaust as rapidly as possible then rest as long as it takes to recover.
Oddly, strength increases spill over between near muscle groups, so if you work out your arms you'll help strengthen your fingers too (you don't have to get fancy, just grabbing a sack of potatos and curling and pressing it overhead ten or twenty times with each arm will make a huge difference if you aren't getting much exercise). And of course, if you work out your back and legs you'll get stronger all over; deadlifts in particular can transform your entire body, and have a dramatic effect on your grip.
If at all possible, avoid all typing until your fingers are strong and healthy again: remember, it is like jogging after you've had problems with your knees. Switch to the hunt-and-peck method if you must use computers, and do odd things like hitting the keys with your thumbs if your fingers get at all tired or sore. Rest frequently.
The basic principle of strength increase is anabolic stress (which should be intense for maximum positive effect and brief for minimum negative effect) followed by adequate rest. Your body heals, grows, and strengthens only when you rest. If you overload your body when it should be resting, you cause cumulative damage, not strength gain. This is why no sustained strength training program should be done more than once every second day.
They seem to be pushing it as if it will actually go into wide use.
It's a cool toy, but it is a toy, and it's not presented as one. All that stuff about performance is nonsense, because the overhead of even the current piggy in-use software isn't a big deal. What's the point of reducing task-switching overhead from 0.3% to 0.01%? You still gain less than 0.3%
Also, this would be a much, much cooler toy if it came with source. Why do you want a toy OS, except to tinker with its guts?
OTOH, it's good to be reminded now and then just how small code can be. I love coding in assembly and seeing just how much I can fit into a KB. Size-limited programming contests rule, especially game programming, especially with exotic platforms (nothing to stretch the old brain like learning to program an Atari 2600).
The real cost of spam is the time you waste sifting it out from among your worthwhile mail. There will never be a precise, objective way to calculate the damage caused by spam.
3) You can force the ISP to SHOW YOU what traffic they are charging you for. They can't just throw numbers at you, saying 'you used xx bytes'. They must be able to back that up somehow. That means records of how much traffic you used, what type, and when. After all, it's only fair.
So you want your ISP to record all of your internet activity? Remember that you'd have to pay for that too; it'll take extra processing time and hard drive space to record confirmable details (not much, though, I suppose). I'd support it if it was just "during this hour you used X bytes", but I don't want a record of IP addresses accessed or anything of that kind.
I can just see the billing disputes: "Let's see, you spent 14 hours downloading pictures of half-dressed semi-humanoid female cartoon characters, you ran a chat server all month for people who secretly fantasize about turnips, and spent an average of 4 hours every day playing a network game of a Sailor Moon Quake mod where you shoot hearts that make the target giggle and remove a piece of clothing. If you want to make a public fuss about what we're charging you, we'd be happy to release our supporting data."
This name seems too blatantly misleading to me. The implication of a logo that says "Windows Powered" is that the thing that the logo is on is running a product named Windows (or contains a "windows chip"). It's a bit like naming an electric car "V8 powered". Believe it or not (given what some companies get away with), there are some rules against this sort of thing.
...in the form of "auto-pay" systems. The toll-paying ones on cars are just the start.
Have you seen the new IBM ad set in a grocery store with this suspicious-looking character stuffing everything in his pockets, walking out the door, and the security guard stopping him because he almost left his receipt (having automatically paid by walking through an arch)?
Funny though, they didn't show the mark of the beast on his hand...
Given that law-enforcement agencies seem to always demand access to all databases which might contain useful information for hunting down criminals, and the way companies love to sell personal information to marketing agencies, I somehow suspect the information won't be kept private.
This will go the way it always does: first it's a novelty, then it's a convenience, then it's the standard and the alternatives are actively discouraged, then everybody thinks you're a paranoid nutcase if you don't go along, finally no alternative is available.
I think the Otherland series covered the future of the internet fairly nicely (though the VR interface was a little overemphasized): a split system of "normal" commercial activity where everything costs, nobody is anonymous, and the authorities can monitor everything fairly easily; and then the Treehouse: good ol' fashion wild west internet, semi-parasitical on the commercial web, basically illegal and you need connections (no pun intended) to get online.
That they are using Linux doesn't mean you'll be able to use it for anything but net surfing. It looks like they have remote configuration capabilities. They haven't even mentioned what main processor will be used. It'll have puny local memory on a flash card and it won't even have a full-sized keyboard.
It looks like they're using a custom web browser that is always on, so I seriously doubt they are even running an X server.
I strongly suspect that it will use proprietary hardware and software that will be useless for anything else.
Perhaps you misunderstood me, I suppose I wasn't very clear. When I said "cushy job" I meant mostly that they don't have to accomplish anything to get their pay or keep their jobs. I suppose even the worst teachers still spend lots of time doing their busy work while boring and/or terrorizing students without teaching them a damn thing.
A wise man once said "teachers are overpaid for what they accomplish and underpaid for what they put up with." The problem is that it's only true for the incompetents. The good teachers are underpaid all around.
I would easily consider over half of current teachers to be incompetent. If it didn't take years of (proven worthless) specialized training to become a teacher it wouldn't be a big deal. You'd try teaching (presumably under fairly close supervision at first), find out you aren't any good at it, and quit/get fired. Oh well, wasted a few months of paid time. The way it is now, firing a teacher for incompetence is practically ruining his life, since he spent so much time getting the job.
Even so, I have no sympathy for teachers who don't teach. If you hired a janitor who didn't get things clean, you'd fire him; if you hired an engineer who worked very hard designing a bridge that would fall down in the first gust of wind, you'd fire him too. You can't make employment decision based on the welfare of the employee or the whole system just breaks down. Remember that there are always lots of other people out there who would like to teach.
BTW, accusations of sexual impropriety are as dangerous now as they would be if teachers were commonly fired for incompetence. What's your point?
The information is out there, readily available...
...and yet the teachers don't seek it out.
I've had some great teachers, but only a few. The rest were horrible incompetents, either through ignorance, apathy, or honest-to-God plain stupidity.
Step 1) forget education degrees, these have shown themselves to be worthless: in cases where "trained" teachers are unavailable and they substituted untrained individuals knowledgable in the subjects they teach they have consistently taught equally well or better than "trained" teachers.
Step 2) fire bad teachers. It's not hard to tell who are the bad teachers and who are the good ones. The way things are now, when somebody gets a job teaching in a public school, they are set for life barring gross public misconduct (but not gross incompetence, or acting like a petty dictator). I've known elementary school teachers who couldn't pass their own tests.
Step 3) cut classroom time dramatically. You can't learn for six hours each day; people's minds just don't work that way. Kids do better with 2 hours of traditional notebook and blackboard learning and the rest of the day phys-ed/supervised play (yes, you can cover the same material because kids can pay attention and retain what they are taught). Don't even think about homework! This also gives teachers plenty of time to upgrade their skills and give personal attention to kids who could benefit from extra help. This one applies a little more towards younger kids (presumably "supervised play" isn't a good description of free time for teens to play musical instruments, read things that interest them, do art projects, and all the other constructive things that people do in their free time), but nobody benefits from 6 hours or more of traditional classroom time day after day.
Once you open up the pool of potential teachers and fire the incompetents until you have a group of skilled, motivated teachers, and you give them enough free time to keep their skills up to date, the problem will simply disappear.
You confuse etymology with meaning and argue in the manner of the original sophists who boasted that they could "prove" any point, true or not.
"Eppur si muove," eh? What moves? There is nothing there to move. There is no fixed physical point from which we must measure time. There is no physical reality of any kind to the date system.
When you ask a person's age, you do not get a reply of which year they are in, but how many full years have passed since their birth. When you look at a clock, it tells you how many hours have passed since midnight/noon (with 12 representing zero, and replaced by zero in modern revisions). The only common counterexample is the days of the month. Most people measure year dates by the "obscure" astronomical calendar which counts from zero.
Popular errors of language are not errors. Language is convention, our system of dates is a part of our language. Popular use is correct use in the modern living language. If "experts" use it differently, then that is just their jargon.
In similar vein, if 90% of people spell it "millenium" that makes it the correct spelling (if it's more like 20-80%, it's a competing valid form), just as if people pronounce the word nuclear as "nuke-yu-lar", use "literally" to add emphasis to an analogy (I particularly dislike this one, but it has become so common that stopping it would be like fighting the tide), or say "snuck" instead of "sneaked". Any objection that "that's not how they used it (last year|100 years ago|2000 years ago)" is as invalid as a demand that the word "electron" be used only to refer to pieces of amber, and not these newfangled subatomic particles. These things belong in footnotes of reprints of old books and in dictionaries marked "archaic."
I believe the current popular definition of "millenium" would be "a) a period of one-thousand years or b) the thousands digit in the year date." So people are celebrating the Big Digit Rollover and correctly calling it the change of millenium. Similar definitions apply to century and decade.
I spit upon your kind, you pathetic nitpicker, pedant, and sophist, who sits there as smug and sure as the scientists who daily usurp words in common use and bully the populace into adopting the new meanings (calling them fools all the while), knowingly destroying the meanings of old texts far more quickly than the innocent mistakes of journalists, politicians, and authors.
If everyone says it, that makes it so. This kind of thing has no physical reality, so it is decided by popular opinion. The year number in the date is counted from an arbitrary date. The dates have been fudged several times to make more sense, never mind that whole systems have been changed. We could easily do it again.
When people measure time, they start from zero. Go ahead, ask anyone how many years old a newborn baby is.
Accepted principles, my ass! They aren't accepted by the 99% of the population who will tell you that we're a little over a month from the change of the millenium.
Engineers must follow a code of ethics and here they take an oath called the "Obligation of the Engineer" at the "Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer" in which the engineer receives his iron ring which is worn on the little finger of the working hand as a symbol of the oath.
Anyway, use of an oath isn't the definition of a profession, a profession is "a self-selected, self-disciplined group of individuals who hold themselves out of the public as possessing a special skilll in the interests of others." All provinces of Canada officially consider engineering a profession, and enforce a monopoly for one engineering association.
BTW, I've just learned that the bastards have stretched the apprenticeship (as in experience under the direct supervision of a professional engineer) period out to four years. So you're looking at a minimum 8 year commitment of time to become a professional engineer.
Engineers must follow a code of ethics and here they take an oath called the "Obligation of the Engineer" at the "Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer" in which the engineer receives his iron ring which is worn on the little finger of the working hand as a symbol of the oath.
Anyway, use of an oath isn't the definition of a profession, a profession is "a self-selected, self-disciplined group of individuals who hold themselves out of the public as possessing a special skilll in the interests of others."
Of course it's a profession, but that's no reason you can't get the required degrees by distance learning.
Here in Canada, you also have to spend two years as an apprentice and pass certain tests to become an engineer. This is a much more effective system for weeding out incompetents than a university.
Anyway, I think the whole "profession" thing is overblown. I've met incompetent, lazy engineers and ones that cut corners. Damn few of them seem to respect their ethical obligations to the end-users, accepting whatever management says is okay (they act more from fear of litigation than from any code of ethics). Same with doctors and lawyers.
In fact 90% of the engineers I met (I worked for 2 years in a co-op engineering program before giving up in disgust) didn't deserve the title as it is represented by the professional organizations. I wouldn't trust them to build me a flashlight, let alone a jet engine. The truth is that the reason important things aren't usually clumsily built is not that professional engineers were involved, but simply that they are important, so the human beings involved in the design and construction take care to do the job right.
Everyone should do their work ethically. Everyone should be competent at their job. A short-order cook is every bit as ethically obligated not to poison his customers or spit in the food as a professional chef.
The difference between a "professional" and a skilled laborer is approval by an old bureaucracy; often one which has gained a government-enforced monopoly. Like any group which is profitable to belong to, they set up complex initiations and other barriers to entry, which they use to ensure that the current members continue to profit and that the new members are thoroughly indoctrinated to become useful tools of the group in return for a share in the profit. These are the true purposes for the degree requirement and the fixed-term apprenticeship.
It seems to me that the most indispensable undergrad degree is an engineering degree, as it is one requirement in many places to legally call yourself an engineer (which has special legal advantages).
Does anyone know how to get an engineering/AppSci degree by distance ed?
Personally, I think the idea of laws of war are silly.
For everything that is forbidden, there are dozens that are far more terrible.
Expanding bullets are forbidden, but shrapnel is okay. It would be horribly wrong for the American soldiers to use bullets that explode (or even mushroom out to double width) when they hit an enemy body, but they are now planning to replace their M-16s with weapons that use sophisticated laser rangefinders and electronic fuses to fire bullets which explode as close as possible to an enemy soldier (in addition to firing conventional steel-jacketed bullets similar to those used in the M-16). However, I'm sure the targets will appreciate the distinction.
The Japanese were not playing fair because of the way they treated prisoners, but it was okay for the US to nuke cities, slaughtering the civilian populations and effectively torturing thousands to death.
The Vietnamese were wrong to treat POW's as they would treat anyone else who ran around "their country" shooting people, but it was fine for the Americans to try to counter guerilla tactics by mass defoliation of the land (with dangerous long-lasting poisons) and air-dumping countless mines that are still killing civilians.
I'm not trying to defend the USA's enemies, just point out the irrationality of the laws of war.
Slashdot Mirror
I was only talking about its most hyped application.
Java is unsuited to adding active functionality to web pages. Happy now?
Incidentally, I've written 10-15K lines of java, all of which were applet or application code (incidentally, it didn't take me all that coding to recognize that it sucked, it's just that I had no other option). I hated it, because it forces you into a half-assed OOP model. If you're going to force people to use OOP, you should at least implement it right. It totally ties your hands. I've also written a few hundred K lines of C and C++, over 100K lines of Perl.
A web applet language should be well integrated with HTML, not segregated into little square windows. Does anyone remember Curl? Not the web grabber, but the lispish thing with curly brackets at MIT. It was a brilliant idea. It replaced HTML, Java, Javascript, Flash, etc. with one quite adequate language. Unfortunately, nobody seems interested in replacing HTML.
A run-anywhere platform should not be tied to specially designed languages. You should be able to compile your C into bytecode that will run on any system. It wouldn't be a big deal to implement, many game emulators do a bigger job. You'd have to provide a low-level window library, but that's really no big deal (the insanity begins when you try to make a high-level window library, and anticipate everything the programmer might want to use).
Let's face it, Java went as far as it did on a huge marketing campaign, not on its technical merits. It didn't deliver on its promises, and those not caught up in the trendiness saw that it never could. Let's not waste any more time with it.
Unfortunately, the mouse grates on your eye, and I think I just blinded myself trying to double click.
Ouch, I have to run to the emergency room...
Have you experienced the horrors of the Johnson Keyboard? The idea is that you never have to leave the home row. Unfortunately, due to a really lame implementation using xmodmap, you type the space with your little finger, which rapidly becomes painful. If it ever gets done right (like with an X patch, or something like that) it might be worth taking a look at.
it's a mistake to do exercises to "strengthen" your hand--typing all day long is enough exercise
This is as wrong as the idea that doing lots of jogging will build up strong legs (BTW, if you want strong legs, do squats or leg press). Typing is what got you into this mess, it won't get you out.
If you want to strengthen some part of your body, you need brief, intense, and infrequent exercise. Constant light (like typing or jogging) use tells your body to conserve energy by paring down to bare essentials. That's why many geeks have scrawny wrists and finger problems and most long-time joggers have scrawny legs and knee problems.
To strengthen the fingers I strongly recommend this exercise: lay a sheet of newspaper (just one, as you get stronger you'll want to stack up two or three pages) flat on a table in front of you, grab it with the fingertips of one hand and crumple it into a ball without using your other hand or squashing it against anything (including the table). Repeat with fresh sheets until you try and fail to finish crumpling the last sheet. If you feel pain in your joints, stop and try again tomorrow. Do this every day for a week or two, then every second day or so indefinitely.
Another good exercise is wetting a towel and wringing it dry over and over, or squeezing a soft foam ball. Remember, exhaust as rapidly as possible then rest as long as it takes to recover.
Oddly, strength increases spill over between near muscle groups, so if you work out your arms you'll help strengthen your fingers too (you don't have to get fancy, just grabbing a sack of potatos and curling and pressing it overhead ten or twenty times with each arm will make a huge difference if you aren't getting much exercise). And of course, if you work out your back and legs you'll get stronger all over; deadlifts in particular can transform your entire body, and have a dramatic effect on your grip.
If at all possible, avoid all typing until your fingers are strong and healthy again: remember, it is like jogging after you've had problems with your knees. Switch to the hunt-and-peck method if you must use computers, and do odd things like hitting the keys with your thumbs if your fingers get at all tired or sore. Rest frequently.
The basic principle of strength increase is anabolic stress (which should be intense for maximum positive effect and brief for minimum negative effect) followed by adequate rest. Your body heals, grows, and strengthens only when you rest. If you overload your body when it should be resting, you cause cumulative damage, not strength gain. This is why no sustained strength training program should be done more than once every second day.
They seem to be pushing it as if it will actually go into wide use.
It's a cool toy, but it is a toy, and it's not presented as one. All that stuff about performance is nonsense, because the overhead of even the current piggy in-use software isn't a big deal. What's the point of reducing task-switching overhead from 0.3% to 0.01%? You still gain less than 0.3%
Also, this would be a much, much cooler toy if it came with source. Why do you want a toy OS, except to tinker with its guts?
OTOH, it's good to be reminded now and then just how small code can be. I love coding in assembly and seeing just how much I can fit into a KB. Size-limited programming contests rule, especially game programming, especially with exotic platforms (nothing to stretch the old brain like learning to program an Atari 2600).
Well, I'd say RAM density is about as directly linked to Moore's law as a thing can be, after all, Moore's law is about surface feature density.
It's right next to the chat server for people who secretly fantasize about turnips.
(ask a silly question...)
The real cost of spam is the time you waste sifting it out from among your worthwhile mail. There will never be a precise, objective way to calculate the damage caused by spam.
3) You can force the ISP to SHOW YOU what traffic they are charging you for. They can't just throw numbers at you, saying 'you used xx bytes'. They must be able to back that up somehow. That means records of how much traffic you used, what type, and when. After all, it's only fair.
So you want your ISP to record all of your internet activity? Remember that you'd have to pay for that too; it'll take extra processing time and hard drive space to record confirmable details (not much, though, I suppose). I'd support it if it was just "during this hour you used X bytes", but I don't want a record of IP addresses accessed or anything of that kind.
I can just see the billing disputes:
"Let's see, you spent 14 hours downloading pictures of half-dressed semi-humanoid female cartoon characters, you ran a chat server all month for people who secretly fantasize about turnips, and spent an average of 4 hours every day playing a network game of a Sailor Moon Quake mod where you shoot hearts that make the target giggle and remove a piece of clothing. If you want to make a public fuss about what we're charging you, we'd be happy to release our supporting data."
This name seems too blatantly misleading to me. The implication of a logo that says "Windows Powered" is that the thing that the logo is on is running a product named Windows (or contains a "windows chip"). It's a bit like naming an electric car "V8 powered". Believe it or not (given what some companies get away with), there are some rules against this sort of thing.
Linux could be ported to anything, so it doesn't say much about compatibility to say that Linux runs on a new machine.
What they're saying is that this is a PC, not some totally oddball proprietary thing, so you can run PC-standard software on it.
...in the form of "auto-pay" systems. The toll-paying ones on cars are just the start.
Have you seen the new IBM ad set in a grocery store with this suspicious-looking character stuffing everything in his pockets, walking out the door, and the security guard stopping him because he almost left his receipt (having automatically paid by walking through an arch)?
Funny though, they didn't show the mark of the beast on his hand...
Given that law-enforcement agencies seem to always demand access to all databases which might contain useful information for hunting down criminals, and the way companies love to sell personal information to marketing agencies, I somehow suspect the information won't be kept private.
This will go the way it always does: first it's a novelty, then it's a convenience, then it's the standard and the alternatives are actively discouraged, then everybody thinks you're a paranoid nutcase if you don't go along, finally no alternative is available.
I think the Otherland series covered the future of the internet fairly nicely (though the VR interface was a little overemphasized): a split system of "normal" commercial activity where everything costs, nobody is anonymous, and the authorities can monitor everything fairly easily; and then the Treehouse: good ol' fashion wild west internet, semi-parasitical on the commercial web, basically illegal and you need connections (no pun intended) to get online.
That they are using Linux doesn't mean you'll be able to use it for anything but net surfing. It looks like they have remote configuration capabilities. They haven't even mentioned what main processor will be used. It'll have puny local memory on a flash card and it won't even have a full-sized keyboard.
It looks like they're using a custom web browser that is always on, so I seriously doubt they are even running an X server.
I strongly suspect that it will use proprietary hardware and software that will be useless for anything else.
Perhaps you misunderstood me, I suppose I wasn't very clear. When I said "cushy job" I meant mostly that they don't have to accomplish anything to get their pay or keep their jobs. I suppose even the worst teachers still spend lots of time doing their busy work while boring and/or terrorizing students without teaching them a damn thing.
A wise man once said "teachers are overpaid for what they accomplish and underpaid for what they put up with." The problem is that it's only true for the incompetents. The good teachers are underpaid all around.
I would easily consider over half of current teachers to be incompetent. If it didn't take years of (proven worthless) specialized training to become a teacher it wouldn't be a big deal. You'd try teaching (presumably under fairly close supervision at first), find out you aren't any good at it, and quit/get fired. Oh well, wasted a few months of paid time. The way it is now, firing a teacher for incompetence is practically ruining his life, since he spent so much time getting the job.
Even so, I have no sympathy for teachers who don't teach. If you hired a janitor who didn't get things clean, you'd fire him; if you hired an engineer who worked very hard designing a bridge that would fall down in the first gust of wind, you'd fire him too. You can't make employment decision based on the welfare of the employee or the whole system just breaks down. Remember that there are always lots of other people out there who would like to teach.
BTW, accusations of sexual impropriety are as dangerous now as they would be if teachers were commonly fired for incompetence. What's your point?
The information is out there, readily available...
...and yet the teachers don't seek it out.
I've had some great teachers, but only a few. The rest were horrible incompetents, either through ignorance, apathy, or honest-to-God plain stupidity.
Step 1) forget education degrees, these have shown themselves to be worthless: in cases where "trained" teachers are unavailable and they substituted untrained individuals knowledgable in the subjects they teach they have consistently taught equally well or better than "trained" teachers.
Step 2) fire bad teachers. It's not hard to tell who are the bad teachers and who are the good ones. The way things are now, when somebody gets a job teaching in a public school, they are set for life barring gross public misconduct (but not gross incompetence, or acting like a petty dictator). I've known elementary school teachers who couldn't pass their own tests.
Step 3) cut classroom time dramatically. You can't learn for six hours each day; people's minds just don't work that way. Kids do better with 2 hours of traditional notebook and blackboard learning and the rest of the day phys-ed/supervised play (yes, you can cover the same material because kids can pay attention and retain what they are taught). Don't even think about homework! This also gives teachers plenty of time to upgrade their skills and give personal attention to kids who could benefit from extra help. This one applies a little more towards younger kids (presumably "supervised play" isn't a good description of free time for teens to play musical instruments, read things that interest them, do art projects, and all the other constructive things that people do in their free time), but nobody benefits from 6 hours or more of traditional classroom time day after day.
Once you open up the pool of potential teachers and fire the incompetents until you have a group of skilled, motivated teachers, and you give them enough free time to keep their skills up to date, the problem will simply disappear.
If 90% of the people called the sky "puce," then "puce" would mean blue. For all I know, there is a language where "puce" does mean blue.
Would you also ridicule me for calling the sky "bleu", "aoi", "blar", or "synthva"? It would depend on which language we're speaking, wouldn't it?
Individual proclaimation is not popular use.
You confuse etymology with meaning and argue in the manner of the original sophists who boasted that they could "prove" any point, true or not.
"Eppur si muove," eh? What moves? There is nothing there to move. There is no fixed physical point from which we must measure time. There is no physical reality of any kind to the date system.
When you ask a person's age, you do not get a reply of which year they are in, but how many full years have passed since their birth. When you look at a clock, it tells you how many hours have passed since midnight/noon (with 12 representing zero, and replaced by zero in modern revisions). The only common counterexample is the days of the month. Most people measure year dates by the "obscure" astronomical calendar which counts from zero.
Popular errors of language are not errors. Language is convention, our system of dates is a part of our language. Popular use is correct use in the modern living language. If "experts" use it differently, then that is just their jargon.
In similar vein, if 90% of people spell it "millenium" that makes it the correct spelling (if it's more like 20-80%, it's a competing valid form), just as if people pronounce the word nuclear as "nuke-yu-lar", use "literally" to add emphasis to an analogy (I particularly dislike this one, but it has become so common that stopping it would be like fighting the tide), or say "snuck" instead of "sneaked". Any objection that "that's not how they used it (last year|100 years ago|2000 years ago)" is as invalid as a demand that the word "electron" be used only to refer to pieces of amber, and not these newfangled subatomic particles. These things belong in footnotes of reprints of old books and in dictionaries marked "archaic."
I believe the current popular definition of "millenium" would be "a) a period of one-thousand years or b) the thousands digit in the year date." So people are celebrating the Big Digit Rollover and correctly calling it the change of millenium. Similar definitions apply to century and decade.
I spit upon your kind, you pathetic nitpicker, pedant, and sophist, who sits there as smug and sure as the scientists who daily usurp words in common use and bully the populace into adopting the new meanings (calling them fools all the while), knowingly destroying the meanings of old texts far more quickly than the innocent mistakes of journalists, politicians, and authors.
Geez, most trolls at least try.
If everyone says it, that makes it so. This kind of thing has no physical reality, so it is decided by popular opinion. The year number in the date is counted from an arbitrary date. The dates have been fudged several times to make more sense, never mind that whole systems have been changed. We could easily do it again.
When people measure time, they start from zero. Go ahead, ask anyone how many years old a newborn baby is.
Accepted principles, my ass! They aren't accepted by the 99% of the population who will tell you that we're a little over a month from the change of the millenium.
...at least here in Canada.
Engineers must follow a code of ethics and here they take an oath called the "Obligation of the Engineer" at the "Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer" in which the engineer receives his iron ring which is worn on the little finger of the working hand as a symbol of the oath.
Anyway, use of an oath isn't the definition of a profession, a profession is "a self-selected, self-disciplined group of individuals who hold themselves out of the public as possessing a special skilll in the interests of others." All provinces of Canada officially consider engineering a profession, and enforce a monopoly for one engineering association.
BTW, I've just learned that the bastards have stretched the apprenticeship (as in experience under the direct supervision of a professional engineer) period out to four years. So you're looking at a minimum 8 year commitment of time to become a professional engineer.
...at least here in Canada.
Engineers must follow a code of ethics and here they take an oath called the "Obligation of the Engineer" at the "Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer" in which the engineer receives his iron ring which is worn on the little finger of the working hand as a symbol of the oath.
Anyway, use of an oath isn't the definition of a profession, a profession is "a self-selected, self-disciplined group of individuals who hold themselves out of the public as possessing a special skilll in the interests of others."
Of course it's a profession, but that's no reason you can't get the required degrees by distance learning.
Here in Canada, you also have to spend two years as an apprentice and pass certain tests to become an engineer. This is a much more effective system for weeding out incompetents than a university.
Anyway, I think the whole "profession" thing is overblown. I've met incompetent, lazy engineers and ones that cut corners. Damn few of them seem to respect their ethical obligations to the end-users, accepting whatever management says is okay (they act more from fear of litigation than from any code of ethics). Same with doctors and lawyers.
In fact 90% of the engineers I met (I worked for 2 years in a co-op engineering program before giving up in disgust) didn't deserve the title as it is represented by the professional organizations. I wouldn't trust them to build me a flashlight, let alone a jet engine. The truth is that the reason important things aren't usually clumsily built is not that professional engineers were involved, but simply that they are important, so the human beings involved in the design and construction take care to do the job right.
Everyone should do their work ethically. Everyone should be competent at their job. A short-order cook is every bit as ethically obligated not to poison his customers or spit in the food as a professional chef.
The difference between a "professional" and a skilled laborer is approval by an old bureaucracy; often one which has gained a government-enforced monopoly. Like any group which is profitable to belong to, they set up complex initiations and other barriers to entry, which they use to ensure that the current members continue to profit and that the new members are thoroughly indoctrinated to become useful tools of the group in return for a share in the profit. These are the true purposes for the degree requirement and the fixed-term apprenticeship.
It seems to me that the most indispensable undergrad degree is an engineering degree, as it is one requirement in many places to legally call yourself an engineer (which has special legal advantages).
Does anyone know how to get an engineering/AppSci degree by distance ed?
Personally, I think the idea of laws of war are silly.
For everything that is forbidden, there are dozens that are far more terrible.
Expanding bullets are forbidden, but shrapnel is okay. It would be horribly wrong for the American soldiers to use bullets that explode (or even mushroom out to double width) when they hit an enemy body, but they are now planning to replace their M-16s with weapons that use sophisticated laser rangefinders and electronic fuses to fire bullets which explode as close as possible to an enemy soldier (in addition to firing conventional steel-jacketed bullets similar to those used in the M-16). However, I'm sure the targets will appreciate the distinction.
The Japanese were not playing fair because of the way they treated prisoners, but it was okay for the US to nuke cities, slaughtering the civilian populations and effectively torturing thousands to death.
The Vietnamese were wrong to treat POW's as they would treat anyone else who ran around "their country" shooting people, but it was fine for the Americans to try to counter guerilla tactics by mass defoliation of the land (with dangerous long-lasting poisons) and air-dumping countless mines that are still killing civilians.
I'm not trying to defend the USA's enemies, just point out the irrationality of the laws of war.