If what you were saying was correct we should get rid of concrete mixers and pumps and have slews of people mix the concrete and carry it in buckets to where it needs to be poured.
Suppose you weren't a Slashdot-posting nerd. Imagine facebook is difficult for you, because it has text. You can't quite read "The Cat and the Hat" without help, but you're an adult and you'll make any excuse to hide your embarassing illiteracy. Your math skills include counting to 100 and adding single-digit positive numbers.
You'd like those jobs. Better yet, the crazy-high expense would knock the rich down a few levels, changing demand (and thus supply) of various things to your benefit. You could live mostly as well as pretty much everybody else. You'd feel better about yourself, attract better women, etc. Live would be pretty sweet, at least regarding jealosy and feelings of unfairness.
There are more people like the above than most of us Slashdot people realize. It's uncomfortably close to being the norm.
So by the same logic, we should just stop all the bits of data from Facebook at the border - after all, when they cross into another country, to quote you, "local law should start applying from that moment."
What exactly in the IP packet is in violation of EU law? It doesn't contain child porn. Privacy law issues happen on servers in the USA. Even if they did occur on the client, the client isn't owned by Facebook.
If the sale transaction occurs on a server in the USA, I don't see why EU law would be an issue.
Note that privacy law violation also don't occur in the EU. There is also no reason why posession of IP packets from Facebook would be illegal in the EU.
BTW, there is something intermediate between proprietary and open source: the source license.
Something that satisfies 3 of the open source requirements should be preferred over something that satisfies just 2 of them.
Consider a situation in which the state gets source code under NDA. You get to build it. (to prove this, you DO build it and use only your own build) You get to make emergency fixes. You might get to add features. You don't get to redistribute the source code. This situation is clearly worse than open source, but clearly better than proprietary. Currently it is not distinguished from the proprietary situation.
Okay - in that case, let Canadian pharmacies sell drugs over the Internet to Americans. And weed.
There shouldn't be a problem with that, as long as they hold it in Canada for you. (you can use it during your visits to Canada) If it crosses the border, US law should apply starting from that moment.
How geeks can see Win 7 and OSX lion, with its ease of use and intuitiveness
Excuse me? Have you ever used these products?
In OSX, you click on an icon to start a program. A barely-visible tiny unnoticable little dot appears under the icon to tell you that the program is running. If you try to start another instance of the program in the obvious way, NOTHING HAPPENS. If you do succeed (command line, or a non-default mouse setup that allows right clicking) then you get a second icon. Note: you don't get a second little dot. You get a whole second icon, way off on the right where you might not notice it. Uh, WTF? The problem here is confusion between the concepts of "program" and "process".
OSX also retains part of a UI design that was optimal on a 512x384 screen back in 1984. Application menus can be over 2000 pixels away from the applications, way the fuck over at the top left of the screen. They disappear of you switch apps. Since apps can remain running without windows, the fact that an app is running at all is obscured. All you get is that previously mentioned teeny tiny dot OR secondary icon.
Then there is the oddly-behaved "Finder" app. You can't close it, WTF?
Window management is a botch too. Bring one window up, and ALL windows of that app come up with it.
only if they are allowed to pick what they consider the best tool for the job that fits
There are migration costs, particularly with proprietary data formats and protocols. It's not OK for the IT department to make a choice that causes the state's data to be held hostage by the vendor.
The vendor may later get rid of introductory pricing or even discontinue the product, but lock-in makes the state unable to leave. This is not acceptable.
When you foreigners visit the USA (physically or virtually) you seem to want your own law. No. This is the USA. Facebook is in the USA. Why in Hell is this so hard to accept? Make your own facebook if you don't like the law over here.
I suppose the EU has the right to block Facebook. If they dare, some people will use proxies and some will not. Oh well.
If a European travels to some other country, do they expect EU laws to apply? This is virtual travel. Europeans who dislike US law should stay home or maybe visit China.
I don't expect to carry a bible in Saudi Arabia or pro-Nazi stuff in Germany. Local laws apply, even if they are fucked up. Facebook is in the USA, so EU law does not apply.
The poster obviously is looking for something a bit more in her life
That isn't at all clear. She claims to want a bit more money. If her husband gets a raise (possibly via promotion) then this goal is met.
My concern is that there is some sort of pressure to get a second income. It could be feelings of inadequacy ("just a housewife") or some competitive desire to have all the material goods that one's peers may have. Either way is a path to misery. The solution is to not play those games.
You know that it's not possible to use a standardized test to determine understanding, right? You can test process and memorization, but you can't test knowledge, only someone who works with individual students can assess that.
A couple decades ago, I got a perfect score on the AP Chemistry test. I simply can't imagine how one would be able to do that with memorization. Most of the test might best be described as word problems from Hell.
And that's how America is constantly coming up at the tail end of the first world when it comes to the education standard for its students. Some belief that a magical automatically graded test will be able to do a better job than critical analysis by educational professionals.
Those "educational professionals" have shown themselves to be biased, corrupt, and incompetent. Attractive students have enough advantages without also having unfairly better grades.
All schools get the same funding in Finland, regardless of the earning potential of that district.
I had assumed so. They don't get the same quality of incoming students though, and this difference will tend to increase with time as families outbid each other for increasingly expensive houses near the good schools. The effect is less dramatic due to the more homogenous population in Finland. Obviously USA-style funding serves as a magnifier.
Under-performing schools are given more money and access to the most highly trained professionals. Contrasted to the US where an under-performing district loses funding.
Either way is pretty bad. Finnish teachers surely realize that they get paid more if they do a bad job!
You think genetic heritage has more to do with educational success than a system where the entire country is dedicated to its success?
I wouldn't be surprised, but I specifically wrote "culture" because culture is clearly a tremendous source of failure. The failure is both direct (example: a culture with "crab mentality") and indirect (lack of empathy due to differences, with resulting troubles).
Somebody needs to do the homemaking. It's a full-time job. If the wife works for an employer, then she's doing two jobs. That sure isn't fair to her. Do you think spouses should share the homemaking? In that case, she's working 1.5 jobs and so am I. This is obviously more stressfull than working 1 job each. With shared homemaking we can sort of get things down to 1 job each if the outside work is part-time, 0.5 job for each of us, but part-time work seldom pays well.
I suspect that many women seek outside work in part because homemaking is underappreciated. It needs to be respected, valued, and recognized. It is not right to value only that which provides money; this is viewing the world through a masculine lens. It's crazy to judge a woman by male standards.
BTW, my wife also gets to spend time in the bedroom. We have time for each other because she is ONLY a homemaker and I am ONLY working outside the home. We've a two-digit family.:-) She doesn't have to do this; she did way better than me in a calculus-based "Statistics for Engineers" class we both took. She loves being barefoot and pregnant, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Show some appreciation for homemaking, and you too can outgrow a minivan.
The socially conformant kids could be controlled without physical discipline, and so the parents didn't have to use it. These kids, being socially conformant, naturally have little desire to commit crimes.
It's tautological: if you aren't naughty, you aren't naughty.
OK, so I want to reliably identify a good teacher. To do this, I must first find a good teacher. Well then I'd better get a good teacher, but to do that I'll need a good teacher, which I will find by asking a good teacher...
Standardized testing leads to teaching for the test.
Good. The test covers everything, right? If not, fix the test. Note: it doesn't literally need to cover everything, but a random (unknown to teachers) subset is required. In no case should a teacher ever know in advance that desirable subject matter will be untested.
Teachers whose students do well on standardized tests focus superficially on the material that will be tested and gloss over the ancillary knowledge.
If we care about such "ancillary knowledge" then it goes on the test. If not... well WE DON'T CARE. Anything and everything we care about has a chance to be on the test.
no standardized testing with the exception of a single graduation exam
Kind of a huge exception, eh? Most parts of the USA don't even do that.
every wealthy and powerful individual sends their kids into the same system
No, not unless kids are randomly assigned to schools across the entire country. Better neighborhoods will have better schools. This makes those neighborhoods even more desirable and thus even more expensive. As housing costs go up, the useless people become unable to live there and unable to send their ill-behaved kids to the schools.
Finland does well, just like Korea and Japan, because Finland has a homogeneous non-idiotic culture. The USA has a very non-homogenous culture. The difference between two randomly chosen Finnish kids is tiny compared to the difference between two randomly chosen American kids.
You might effectively earn more income by doing things to make your husband more employable. A good breakfast (hot, with protein and vegetables) would help. You could pack a nutritious lunch for him. You could encourage him to get plenty of sleep: mild excercise a few hours prior, a decent meal, then calmness and avoidance of bluish light as bedtime approaches.
And how do you identify bad teachers? Testing! Without testing, bad teachers hide in a cloud of bullshit.
Testing also serves as a less-biased way to grade the students. Teachers give better grades to attractive students, but the tests are blind to such things. Standard tests solve the grade inflation problem.
Why blame testing when the metrics promote facts without understanding? Teachers make that error too. Test designers don't always make that error. Either way, it's just a matter of quality.
Psychologically abusive parents produce some pretty fucked up children.
Physical punishment is simple. It happens, and you move on. There isn't continuing manipulative nastyness.
Physical punishment methods can be taught to nearly anybody. The critical idea is that the age of the child determines how long of a badness-to-punishment delay is allowable; a baby will fail to associate misbehavior with punishment if a tiny fraction of a second has passed. Also, avoid head impact.
There, now you know the two important rules. You can stop the psychological abuse.
As for the age, maybe your parents are hiding the truth. You could be the result of a secret pregnancy and birth, intended to cover up the fact that your older sibling went missing.
I suppose I might even qualify as "middle-age". (ouch)
My life tends to be better when crummy people get what they deserve. If you lose your job because your employer finds out about you, then maybe I can take that job. Maybe my son will take your job. Alternately, maybe you would rather shape up to avoid losing your job. I like it if you shape up; it's not cool if you run around spreading diseases or driving drunk.
And yes, I really do want you to lose a relationship with my kid if you have some disease or drug issue.
So no, I don't mind this issue at all. I love the idea even more because of it. Fix your life, and you will have nothing to be embarrassed about.
I'm not about to get AIDS because somebody in the supermarket coughed 10 feet (3 meters) away from me. Almost nobody gets it from mosquito bites. It isn't spread by shaking hands. I won't get it from tap water. Uh, why are we wasting money on this?
Meanwhile, tuberculosis is becoming extremely resistant to every antibiotic. There are mosquito-borne diseases right here in the USA that will make your brain swell up and bleed. An amoeba can survive tap water chlorination, get up into your nose, and then from there go after your brain. MRSA kills too many people to even think about. There are viruses that seem to cause leukemia and heart disease. The ever-present mouth bacteria attack heart valves. Then, oh yeah, non-contagious stuff like cancer and strokes and heart attacks and...
It's horrid that an almost totally avoidable disease is sucking up research money that could go toward stopping numerous other diseases. Are we alarmed or even offended when some disease puts a crimp on our lifestyle, but unimpressed when one strikes people down randomly? People fear AIDS like they fear plane crashes, nuclear accidents, pedophiles, and terrorist attacks. People fear every other disease like they fear car crashes, coal pollution, muggers, and ordinary murderers.
Of course there are downsides, but the benefits would be astronomical.
You need to remember that the information is already somewhat available to wealthy assholes. If somebody with money and determination wants your DNA, they will get it from your doorknob. (hands will do; no need for genital contact with your doorknob)
Slashdot Mirror
If what you were saying was correct we should get rid of concrete mixers and pumps and have slews of people mix the concrete and carry it in buckets to where it needs to be poured.
Suppose you weren't a Slashdot-posting nerd. Imagine facebook is difficult for you, because it has text. You can't quite read "The Cat and the Hat" without help, but you're an adult and you'll make any excuse to hide your embarassing illiteracy. Your math skills include counting to 100 and adding single-digit positive numbers.
You'd like those jobs. Better yet, the crazy-high expense would knock the rich down a few levels, changing demand (and thus supply) of various things to your benefit. You could live mostly as well as pretty much everybody else. You'd feel better about yourself, attract better women, etc. Live would be pretty sweet, at least regarding jealosy and feelings of unfairness.
There are more people like the above than most of us Slashdot people realize. It's uncomfortably close to being the norm.
I don't see that they are doing business in the EU. People in the EU decide to do business in the USA by going to facebook.
Now tell me, what privacy law violation is happening INSIDE THE EU for facebook? You can't, because there is none.
So by the same logic, we should just stop all the bits of data from Facebook at the border - after all, when they cross into another country, to quote you, "local law should start applying from that moment."
What exactly in the IP packet is in violation of EU law? It doesn't contain child porn. Privacy law issues happen on servers in the USA. Even if they did occur on the client, the client isn't owned by Facebook.
If the sale transaction occurs on a server in the USA, I don't see why EU law would be an issue.
Note that privacy law violation also don't occur in the EU. There is also no reason why posession of IP packets from Facebook would be illegal in the EU.
BTW, there is something intermediate between proprietary and open source: the source license.
Something that satisfies 3 of the open source requirements should be preferred over something that satisfies just 2 of them.
Consider a situation in which the state gets source code under NDA. You get to build it. (to prove this, you DO build it and use only your own build) You get to make emergency fixes. You might get to add features. You don't get to redistribute the source code. This situation is clearly worse than open source, but clearly better than proprietary. Currently it is not distinguished from the proprietary situation.
Okay - in that case, let Canadian pharmacies sell drugs over the Internet to Americans. And weed.
There shouldn't be a problem with that, as long as they hold it in Canada for you. (you can use it during your visits to Canada) If it crosses the border, US law should apply starting from that moment.
How geeks can see Win 7 and OSX lion, with its ease of use and intuitiveness
Excuse me? Have you ever used these products?
In OSX, you click on an icon to start a program. A barely-visible tiny unnoticable little dot appears under the icon to tell you that the program is running. If you try to start another instance of the program in the obvious way, NOTHING HAPPENS. If you do succeed (command line, or a non-default mouse setup that allows right clicking) then you get a second icon. Note: you don't get a second little dot. You get a whole second icon, way off on the right where you might not notice it. Uh, WTF? The problem here is confusion between the concepts of "program" and "process".
OSX also retains part of a UI design that was optimal on a 512x384 screen back in 1984. Application menus can be over 2000 pixels away from the applications, way the fuck over at the top left of the screen. They disappear of you switch apps. Since apps can remain running without windows, the fact that an app is running at all is obscured. All you get is that previously mentioned teeny tiny dot OR secondary icon.
Then there is the oddly-behaved "Finder" app. You can't close it, WTF?
Window management is a botch too. Bring one window up, and ALL windows of that app come up with it.
only if they are allowed to pick what they consider the best tool for the job that fits
There are migration costs, particularly with proprietary data formats and protocols. It's not OK for the IT department to make a choice that causes the state's data to be held hostage by the vendor.
The vendor may later get rid of introductory pricing or even discontinue the product, but lock-in makes the state unable to leave. This is not acceptable.
local is USA
When you foreigners visit the USA (physically or virtually) you seem to want your own law. No. This is the USA. Facebook is in the USA. Why in Hell is this so hard to accept? Make your own facebook if you don't like the law over here.
I suppose the EU has the right to block Facebook. If they dare, some people will use proxies and some will not. Oh well.
If a European travels to some other country, do they expect EU laws to apply? This is virtual travel. Europeans who dislike US law should stay home or maybe visit China.
I don't expect to carry a bible in Saudi Arabia or pro-Nazi stuff in Germany. Local laws apply, even if they are fucked up. Facebook is in the USA, so EU law does not apply.
The poster obviously is looking for something a bit more in her life
That isn't at all clear. She claims to want a bit more money. If her husband gets a raise (possibly via promotion) then this goal is met.
My concern is that there is some sort of pressure to get a second income. It could be feelings of inadequacy ("just a housewife") or some competitive desire to have all the material goods that one's peers may have. Either way is a path to misery. The solution is to not play those games.
You know that it's not possible to use a standardized test to determine understanding, right? You can test process and memorization, but you can't test knowledge, only someone who works with individual students can assess that.
A couple decades ago, I got a perfect score on the AP Chemistry test. I simply can't imagine how one would be able to do that with memorization. Most of the test might best be described as word problems from Hell.
And that's how America is constantly coming up at the tail end of the first world when it comes to the education standard for its students. Some belief that a magical automatically graded test will be able to do a better job than critical analysis by educational professionals.
Those "educational professionals" have shown themselves to be biased, corrupt, and incompetent. Attractive students have enough advantages without also having unfairly better grades.
All schools get the same funding in Finland, regardless of the earning potential of that district.
I had assumed so. They don't get the same quality of incoming students though, and this difference will tend to increase with time as families outbid each other for increasingly expensive houses near the good schools. The effect is less dramatic due to the more homogenous population in Finland. Obviously USA-style funding serves as a magnifier.
Under-performing schools are given more money and access to the most highly trained professionals. Contrasted to the US where an under-performing district loses funding.
Either way is pretty bad. Finnish teachers surely realize that they get paid more if they do a bad job!
You think genetic heritage has more to do with educational success than a system where the entire country is dedicated to its success?
I wouldn't be surprised, but I specifically wrote "culture" because culture is clearly a tremendous source of failure. The failure is both direct (example: a culture with "crab mentality") and indirect (lack of empathy due to differences, with resulting troubles).
Somebody needs to do the homemaking. It's a full-time job. If the wife works for an employer, then she's doing two jobs. That sure isn't fair to her. Do you think spouses should share the homemaking? In that case, she's working 1.5 jobs and so am I. This is obviously more stressfull than working 1 job each. With shared homemaking we can sort of get things down to 1 job each if the outside work is part-time, 0.5 job for each of us, but part-time work seldom pays well.
I suspect that many women seek outside work in part because homemaking is underappreciated. It needs to be respected, valued, and recognized. It is not right to value only that which provides money; this is viewing the world through a masculine lens. It's crazy to judge a woman by male standards.
BTW, my wife also gets to spend time in the bedroom. We have time for each other because she is ONLY a homemaker and I am ONLY working outside the home. We've a two-digit family. :-) She doesn't have to do this; she did way better than me in a calculus-based "Statistics for Engineers" class we both took. She loves being barefoot and pregnant, and there is nothing wrong with that.
Show some appreciation for homemaking, and you too can outgrow a minivan.
The socially conformant kids could be controlled without physical discipline, and so the parents didn't have to use it. These kids, being socially conformant, naturally have little desire to commit crimes.
It's tautological: if you aren't naughty, you aren't naughty.
Bad kids turn into bad adults. News at 11.
You have a recursion problem.
OK, so I want to reliably identify a good teacher. To do this, I must first find a good teacher. Well then I'd better get a good teacher, but to do that I'll need a good teacher, which I will find by asking a good teacher...
Standardized testing leads to teaching for the test.
Good. The test covers everything, right? If not, fix the test. Note: it doesn't literally need to cover everything, but a random (unknown to teachers) subset is required. In no case should a teacher ever know in advance that desirable subject matter will be untested.
Teachers whose students do well on standardized tests focus superficially on the material that will be tested and gloss over the ancillary knowledge.
If we care about such "ancillary knowledge" then it goes on the test. If not... well WE DON'T CARE. Anything and everything we care about has a chance to be on the test.
no standardized testing with the exception of a single graduation exam
Kind of a huge exception, eh? Most parts of the USA don't even do that.
every wealthy and powerful individual sends their kids into the same system
No, not unless kids are randomly assigned to schools across the entire country. Better neighborhoods will have better schools. This makes those neighborhoods even more desirable and thus even more expensive. As housing costs go up, the useless people become unable to live there and unable to send their ill-behaved kids to the schools.
Finland does well, just like Korea and Japan, because Finland has a homogeneous non-idiotic culture. The USA has a very non-homogenous culture. The difference between two randomly chosen Finnish kids is tiny compared to the difference between two randomly chosen American kids.
You might effectively earn more income by doing things to make your husband more employable. A good breakfast (hot, with protein and vegetables) would help. You could pack a nutritious lunch for him. You could encourage him to get plenty of sleep: mild excercise a few hours prior, a decent meal, then calmness and avoidance of bluish light as bedtime approaches.
No, there ever really was one production aircraft that regularly (11,000+ hours at Mach 3+ according to official records) could do Mach 3+; the SR-71.
You forgot the space shuttle.
And how do you identify bad teachers? Testing! Without testing, bad teachers hide in a cloud of bullshit.
Testing also serves as a less-biased way to grade the students. Teachers give better grades to attractive students, but the tests are blind to such things. Standard tests solve the grade inflation problem.
Why blame testing when the metrics promote facts without understanding? Teachers make that error too. Test designers don't always make that error. Either way, it's just a matter of quality.
Psychologically abusive parents produce some pretty fucked up children.
Physical punishment is simple. It happens, and you move on. There isn't continuing manipulative nastyness.
Physical punishment methods can be taught to nearly anybody. The critical idea is that the age of the child determines how long of a badness-to-punishment delay is allowable; a baby will fail to associate misbehavior with punishment if a tiny fraction of a second has passed. Also, avoid head impact.
There, now you know the two important rules. You can stop the psychological abuse.
Sure about that? Google might know something you don't. Google knows everything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_androgen_insensitivity_syndrome
As for the age, maybe your parents are hiding the truth. You could be the result of a secret pregnancy and birth, intended to cover up the fact that your older sibling went missing.
How do you recognize an extroverted engineer? He looks at **your** shoes.
I suppose I might even qualify as "middle-age". (ouch)
My life tends to be better when crummy people get what they deserve. If you lose your job because your employer finds out about you, then maybe I can take that job. Maybe my son will take your job. Alternately, maybe you would rather shape up to avoid losing your job. I like it if you shape up; it's not cool if you run around spreading diseases or driving drunk.
And yes, I really do want you to lose a relationship with my kid if you have some disease or drug issue.
So no, I don't mind this issue at all. I love the idea even more because of it. Fix your life, and you will have nothing to be embarrassed about.
I'm not about to get AIDS because somebody in the supermarket coughed 10 feet (3 meters) away from me. Almost nobody gets it from mosquito bites. It isn't spread by shaking hands. I won't get it from tap water. Uh, why are we wasting money on this?
Meanwhile, tuberculosis is becoming extremely resistant to every antibiotic. There are mosquito-borne diseases right here in the USA that will make your brain swell up and bleed. An amoeba can survive tap water chlorination, get up into your nose, and then from there go after your brain. MRSA kills too many people to even think about. There are viruses that seem to cause leukemia and heart disease. The ever-present mouth bacteria attack heart valves. Then, oh yeah, non-contagious stuff like cancer and strokes and heart attacks and...
It's horrid that an almost totally avoidable disease is sucking up research money that could go toward stopping numerous other diseases. Are we alarmed or even offended when some disease puts a crimp on our lifestyle, but unimpressed when one strikes people down randomly? People fear AIDS like they fear plane crashes, nuclear accidents, pedophiles, and terrorist attacks. People fear every other disease like they fear car crashes, coal pollution, muggers, and ordinary murderers.
Of course there are downsides, but the benefits would be astronomical.
You need to remember that the information is already somewhat available to wealthy assholes. If somebody with money and determination wants your DNA, they will get it from your doorknob. (hands will do; no need for genital contact with your doorknob)