Can the government mandate what TV shows kids are allowed to or must watch? Can government force kids to read certain books or attend certain functions?
No, and no.
Actually, it's yes, yes and yes.
TV: If someone reports that your kids are watching hard core porn and snuff films on tv every day, and that they've been behaving way to precociously, you may find yourself heading to jail for child abuse.
Books: School attendance is mandatory until a certain age. If your kids continuously refuse "because my parents said I don't have to read any of this this" when they're given assignments, you can be investigated for failure to take proper care of your children.
Functions: See books (above). Attendance at school is one. If you insist on home-schooling and their marks are not up to snuff, then they have to attend a public school.
How many other aspect of life do we expect others to change their behavior because we fear something?
We expect others to not drink and drive because we don't want a drunk to run into us. We expect others not to store poisonous products out in the open where kids or animals can get to them. We expect others to wash their hands while preparing food so we don't get sick. We expect airlines to hire competent pilots and mechanics so the plane doesn't come crashing down on our home.
Breeches of all these things happen in real life. That's why we punish them.
Not vaccinating your child just because you don't feel like it is almost child abuse
How is it only "almost." Causing the death of your child by refusing to get them vaccinated against measles is, at the least, criminal negligence leading to death. Lets take it further - manslaughter.
This is what happens when you get extreme partisanship - the other side's knee-jerk reaction to anything is to oppose it. Kind of like a rabid animal will bite anything.
FTFA: "claims it is able to tell whether a baby it hears is laughing, crying, gurgling or trying to talk".
Any parent who wants to (a) keep their sanity and (b) get some sleep and (c) not be charged with infanticide already knows how to do this... literally in their sleep.
Now, if this thing could change the diaper at 2am they might be on to something. Until then, I think not.
The poster never said that parents (or anyone for that matter) filled in the blanks. What part of "With a couple books, some resources from the library, and no instruction from anyone" is so hard to understand. There is NO need to teach CS before college. Anything you teach before that will be obsolete anyway, and those who want to learn will do so on their own time, on their own dime, and they'll do fine.
Programming is fast becoming a dead end as a career, in large part because of the industry-wide ageism, which has lowered salaries and forced people to look elsewhere. Throw in the H1Bs and you've got a recipe for gutting the field of home-grown talent of either gender.
Or perhaps their women are looking at the effect the working conditions have on people and are steering their daughters to better fields, while we still see guys doing "Ask Slashdot - I want to get my kids interested in programming blah blah blah" because they've fallen for the "I did 48 hours nonstop" pseudo-macho bs in what is now a dead-end job where most are having to start a new career by 40.
The reality is that kids don't make career choices that early in life - otherwise most boys would grow up to be athletes, pilots, scientists, lawyers, and astronauts, and most girls would grow up to be teachers, veterinarians, writers, singers, and doctors.
Young kids don't want to be programmers. And knowing how soul-crushing the work environment is, can't say they're wrong to want to be scientists and doctors and veterinarians, or almost anything else but.
Well, current practice certainly hasn't stopped the market from being flooded with "less passionate" men. Just look at all the "ask slashdots" where the ID-T-10 of the day asks how they can get into programming because their current job died on them and they heard there's "big money" to be made making apps. Or look at the men around you at work. How many of them are really passionate about programming? Most of them lose any passion after a few years of real-life experience and just want to go home and watch pr0n and/or play games.
Ditto with all those "Believe your way to success" self-improvement scams. The big hook is that, if you do this right, you too can make money teaching others how to improve themselves. I've had friends fall for these stupidities, and a few times it's gotten to the point of just letting them do it instead of trying to talk some sense into them, because people get angry when you throw water on their "get-rich the easy way" schemes.
Thanks for completely ignoring my main point. Whether current safety standards are good enough isn't the issue (and I think that, except for the waste disposal problem - which includes the radioactive components of decommissioned reactors, they are). The real problem is that people don't see it that way, so to make nuclear more palatable, we have to go yet another extra mile. Educating the masses simply isn't going to work. Think of it as getting engineering practice for building fusion reactors, because we're going to need them.
The extinguishing came at the hands of the iPad and Android tablets though. Microsoft didn't get any piece of that, and in fact lost ground.
No - the death of netbooks was the rapid decline in price in full-featured notebooks. Same as the decline in desktops has been fueled by the rise of DTRs - cheap (and some not-so-cheap) laptops serving as desktop replacements.
This is the point that all those "Ask Slashdot - I'm about to get laid off at my job and I hear there's big money in making apps. I have no programming experience but I have an idea, so how can I get it done in less than 6 months" fail to get. The app gold rush is well and truly dead, and the way to make money is to milk the suckers.
Two of the disciplinary actions this year were in-school suspensions for referring to a classmate as black and bringing his favorite book to school: "The Big Book of Knowledge."
“He loves that book. They were studying the solar system and he took it to school. He thought his teacher would be impressed,” Steward said.
But the teacher learned the popular children’s encyclopedia had a section on pregnancy, depicting a pregnant woman in an illustration, he explained.
Most kids who have younger siblings or friends who have younger siblings have seen a pregnant woman, so what is the big deal? Idiots teaching others how to be idiots by example.
Yes we teach the basics. No we don't teach the applications, such as the minutiae of how stoves and ovens and tvs and cars work. Not in a class aimed at grades 5 to 8 (which is the age group we're talking about).
Don't tighten up safety and the reactors just don't get built. That's the reality, and it's not going to change any time soon. So that's the choice - tighten up safety and eventually have more nukes, or don't, and don't get any more. There is no third option. The public cannot be educated.
The average person doesn't respond to appeals to logic. Otherwise we'd be walking, bicycling, and taking public transit instead
right, because I can ride a bike, or walk 15 miles up a mountain on my way to work everyday....
Or you would have more incentive to move closer to work. Or telecommute. Or take a different job. Or demand better public transit.
And people would have a lot less garbage to haul out on garbage day because they'd recycle.
are there really people out there not recylcing more than in the past? Everywhere I have lived i nthe past 15 years has had recycling and garbage pickup on the same day. its not that hard to put plastic in a different bin than trash.
You can put your recyclables in the bin any day of the week, but that doesn't stop people from throwing their recyclables in the garbage instead. We have a no-presort recycling system, so it's not like glass goes in one, paper in another, plastic in yet another. Should be easy enough, but I've talked to a few of my neighbors and they simply don't recycle.
And we'd be admitting that we went over the tipping point in the 70s.
tipping point concerning what? oil??? blame the environmentalists 100% on that one, they were the ones blocking the installation of new nuke plants, which would have us on less oil today if we could have done so
No, the tipping point where we were doing too much damage to the environment to NOT have global warming. We knew this in the '70s, but people would rather kick the can down the road than actually do something about it.
I'm well aware of that, but with the lead time to build nukes, it's far better to just tighten the safety standards to appease the public and get stuff built than to argue against the need to do so and sit twiddling our thumbs while nothing gets done.
When they introduced the idea, and that it would run on a virtual machine called "parrot", I wasn't the only one who made Monty Python "but it's dead" jokes. Almost a decade later, Perl 6 is still dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Can the government mandate what TV shows kids are allowed to or must watch? Can government force kids to read certain books or attend certain functions?
No, and no.
Actually, it's yes, yes and yes.
TV: If someone reports that your kids are watching hard core porn and snuff films on tv every day, and that they've been behaving way to precociously, you may find yourself heading to jail for child abuse.
Books: School attendance is mandatory until a certain age. If your kids continuously refuse "because my parents said I don't have to read any of this this" when they're given assignments, you can be investigated for failure to take proper care of your children.
Functions: See books (above). Attendance at school is one. If you insist on home-schooling and their marks are not up to snuff, then they have to attend a public school.
There are more examples, but you get my drift.
Obviously not going to school worked out well for you ... I'm sure everyone except me will be signing up to your newsletter.
How many other aspect of life do we expect others to change their behavior because we fear something?
We expect others to not drink and drive because we don't want a drunk to run into us. We expect others not to store poisonous products out in the open where kids or animals can get to them. We expect others to wash their hands while preparing food so we don't get sick. We expect airlines to hire competent pilots and mechanics so the plane doesn't come crashing down on our home.
Breeches of all these things happen in real life. That's why we punish them.
Not vaccinating your child just because you don't feel like it is almost child abuse
How is it only "almost." Causing the death of your child by refusing to get them vaccinated against measles is, at the least, criminal negligence leading to death. Lets take it further - manslaughter.
This is what happens when you get extreme partisanship - the other side's knee-jerk reaction to anything is to oppose it. Kind of like a rabid animal will bite anything.
FTFA: "claims it is able to tell whether a baby it hears is laughing, crying, gurgling or trying to talk".
Any parent who wants to (a) keep their sanity and (b) get some sleep and (c) not be charged with infanticide already knows how to do this ... literally in their sleep.
Now, if this thing could change the diaper at 2am they might be on to something. Until then, I think not.
Depending on location, $60k a year can be absolute crap. Even in the flyover states, it's not that good.
The poster never said that parents (or anyone for that matter) filled in the blanks. What part of "With a couple books, some resources from the library, and no instruction from anyone" is so hard to understand. There is NO need to teach CS before college. Anything you teach before that will be obsolete anyway, and those who want to learn will do so on their own time, on their own dime, and they'll do fine.
Programming is fast becoming a dead end as a career, in large part because of the industry-wide ageism, which has lowered salaries and forced people to look elsewhere. Throw in the H1Bs and you've got a recipe for gutting the field of home-grown talent of either gender.
Or perhaps their women are looking at the effect the working conditions have on people and are steering their daughters to better fields, while we still see guys doing "Ask Slashdot - I want to get my kids interested in programming blah blah blah" because they've fallen for the "I did 48 hours nonstop" pseudo-macho bs in what is now a dead-end job where most are having to start a new career by 40.
Hey, be nice!
The reality is that kids don't make career choices that early in life - otherwise most boys would grow up to be athletes, pilots, scientists, lawyers, and astronauts, and most girls would grow up to be teachers, veterinarians, writers, singers, and doctors.
Young kids don't want to be programmers. And knowing how soul-crushing the work environment is, can't say they're wrong to want to be scientists and doctors and veterinarians, or almost anything else but.
Well, current practice certainly hasn't stopped the market from being flooded with "less passionate" men. Just look at all the "ask slashdots" where the ID-T-10 of the day asks how they can get into programming because their current job died on them and they heard there's "big money" to be made making apps. Or look at the men around you at work. How many of them are really passionate about programming? Most of them lose any passion after a few years of real-life experience and just want to go home and watch pr0n and/or play games.
Ditto with all those "Believe your way to success" self-improvement scams. The big hook is that, if you do this right, you too can make money teaching others how to improve themselves. I've had friends fall for these stupidities, and a few times it's gotten to the point of just letting them do it instead of trying to talk some sense into them, because people get angry when you throw water on their "get-rich the easy way" schemes.
Thanks for completely ignoring my main point. Whether current safety standards are good enough isn't the issue (and I think that, except for the waste disposal problem - which includes the radioactive components of decommissioned reactors, they are). The real problem is that people don't see it that way, so to make nuclear more palatable, we have to go yet another extra mile. Educating the masses simply isn't going to work. Think of it as getting engineering practice for building fusion reactors, because we're going to need them.
The answer is simple - by artificially flooding the market with more coders, you lower the price business pays coders. It's just supply-demand 101.
Just look at the backers. It's not like there's any shortage of coders - just coders that won't work for 3rd-world wages.
The extinguishing came at the hands of the iPad and Android tablets though. Microsoft didn't get any piece of that, and in fact lost ground.
No - the death of netbooks was the rapid decline in price in full-featured notebooks. Same as the decline in desktops has been fueled by the rise of DTRs - cheap (and some not-so-cheap) laptops serving as desktop replacements.
This is the point that all those "Ask Slashdot - I'm about to get laid off at my job and I hear there's big money in making apps. I have no programming experience but I have an idea, so how can I get it done in less than 6 months" fail to get. The app gold rush is well and truly dead, and the way to make money is to milk the suckers.
school is for learning and teaching.
Not this school
Two of the disciplinary actions this year were in-school suspensions for referring to a classmate as black and bringing his favorite book to school: "The Big Book of Knowledge."
“He loves that book. They were studying the solar system and he took it to school. He thought his teacher would be impressed,” Steward said.
But the teacher learned the popular children’s encyclopedia had a section on pregnancy, depicting a pregnant woman in an illustration, he explained.
Most kids who have younger siblings or friends who have younger siblings have seen a pregnant woman, so what is the big deal? Idiots teaching others how to be idiots by example.
Yes we teach the basics. No we don't teach the applications, such as the minutiae of how stoves and ovens and tvs and cars work. Not in a class aimed at grades 5 to 8 (which is the age group we're talking about).
Don't tighten up safety and the reactors just don't get built. That's the reality, and it's not going to change any time soon. So that's the choice - tighten up safety and eventually have more nukes, or don't, and don't get any more. There is no third option. The public cannot be educated.
So what? Doesn't change my point - perl 6 is still MIA and DOA. Just like the bird in the Monty Python skit.
The average person doesn't respond to appeals to logic. Otherwise we'd be walking, bicycling, and taking public transit instead
right, because I can ride a bike, or walk 15 miles up a mountain on my way to work everyday....
Or you would have more incentive to move closer to work. Or telecommute. Or take a different job. Or demand better public transit.
And people would have a lot less garbage to haul out on garbage day because they'd recycle.
are there really people out there not recylcing more than in the past? Everywhere I have lived i nthe past 15 years has had recycling and garbage pickup on the same day. its not that hard to put plastic in a different bin than trash.
You can put your recyclables in the bin any day of the week, but that doesn't stop people from throwing their recyclables in the garbage instead. We have a no-presort recycling system, so it's not like glass goes in one, paper in another, plastic in yet another. Should be easy enough, but I've talked to a few of my neighbors and they simply don't recycle.
And we'd be admitting that we went over the tipping point in the 70s.
tipping point concerning what? oil??? blame the environmentalists 100% on that one, they were the ones blocking the installation of new nuke plants, which would have us on less oil today if we could have done so
No, the tipping point where we were doing too much damage to the environment to NOT have global warming. We knew this in the '70s, but people would rather kick the can down the road than actually do something about it.
I'm well aware of that, but with the lead time to build nukes, it's far better to just tighten the safety standards to appease the public and get stuff built than to argue against the need to do so and sit twiddling our thumbs while nothing gets done.
Although, in hindsight - you've already authenticated the server, so you are going to treat it as a trusted party anyway...
There's trust, and then there's TRUST. Doing something like this automatically is like doing automatic updates ... not a good idea.
No no - they're going to pull a Microsoft and call it Perl X (perl 10). For the number of years everyone's been waiting.
When they introduced the idea, and that it would run on a virtual machine called "parrot", I wasn't the only one who made Monty Python "but it's dead" jokes. Almost a decade later, Perl 6 is still dead.