As opposed to the Muslims who conquered Palestine, North Africa, Iberia, Persia, Mesopotamia and southeastern Europe?
The Muslim Empire was successful in part because they were more tolerant than the rulers they replaced. The Jews in Spain had more rights under Muslim rule than under the Visigoths.
Spain was the exception to the rule, and the fabled tolerance there has been exaggerated. Tolerance as a conquered people is a relative thing.. Islamic armies rather ruthlessly killed off competing faiths and languages wherever they went. Do you think the reason North Africa is Arabic-speaking and Muslim today is because the Caliphate said "pretty-please"? North Africa was a center of Christian thought and culture for centuries... St. Thomas Aquinas was North African, and most of North Africa spoke Coptic or Berber... before the followers of Mohammad moved in. With the exception of the Indian Ocean-Western Pacific Muslim civilizations (such as present day Malaysia), virtually everywhere Islam spread it did so by the sword. The South Asian Muslims were the only large groups that actually converted voluntarily, because of cultural contacts via trade routes from Arab merchants. Turkey, southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa were all conquered.
Catholic schools used to be the absolute best places to send your kids, but their quality is declining. The problem is that decreasing number of men and women are taking priesthood vows and joining the ranks of nuns. Priests and nuns have excellent educations and made excellent teachers (and tough, too... you learned while you were there). When there were plenty of nuns, filling the teaching ranks of Catholic schools wasn't a problem. But now they're increasingly using non-clergy teachers, and they're losing that edge (and getting more expensive as a result... nuns and priests were also cheap labor and kept the costs of running Catholic schools down).
There is no correlation between teacher qualification and effectifveness. I truly wish this myth would die.
One of the worst things to befall high schools was the Education degree. By this level, history classes should be taught by history majors, English classes by English majors, etc. Not Education majors. There should be a minor in teacher training for those that want to be high school teachers, but by grade 7 or so, subject classes should be taught by majors in those fields. One of my college professors told me that when she was working on her PhD, she applied to be a high school teacher. She was rejected flat out, not because she was overqualified, but because she didn't have an Education degree. In the minds of the teacher's unions, someone with a Masters in history is less qualified to teach a high school history class than someone with an Education degree. Got that?
As a result my daughter never learned to write in cursive
... and nothing of value was lost? I, nor anyone I know, has had any use for knowing this "skill."
It used to be absolutely necessary. But with the advent of computers, it's fast becoming a boutique skill for private school students with no real need in daily life. As Latin is no longer taught in high schools, cursive will one day soon cease being taught in schools. Not to say that things like Latin and cursive writing don't have education value... they do... but in limited times to teach and limited budgets, you have to prioritize.
Frankly, formal typing skills should replace cursive skills in schools now. Formal typing training is a huge boost to productivity vs. the hunt-and-peck method.
The problem with homeschooling is finding one that isn't rife with ridiculous religious indoctrination.
Uh, that's a study group. Homeschooling is a parent teaching their own children. Unless you're a psychotic with split personalities, why would you be worried about religious indoctrination of your kids by... you?
It isn't about making friends. It's actually the opposite - making enemies and dealing with having to work with them on projects. Unless, of course, homeschooling parents force their kids to do project with kids they don't like. That would be pretty open minded of them.
Also, most likely they will socialize with kids from similar backgrounds and belief systems. They won't have the experience of meeting and accepting people who are different from them.
I keep hearing this silly "socialization" argument, and it's bogus. As if kids don't socialize with other kids in places other than schools. As if they don't meet other kids at church, clubs, and in their neighborhood. "Socialization" is the number one red herring of the anti-homeschool forces. Humans learned socialization just fine for centuries before public schools were ever a dream.
Your real problem is that homeschooled kids aren't forced into a government-approved box to be engineered in ways acceptable to you. Well, too bad.
Homeschooling is a good option if you have parents that are up for the challenge. My wife plans on homeschooling our kids, as she was home schooled herself (along with her 2 sisters). Homeschooling has gotten a bad rap because it is portraid by either the crazy people or ultra religious people. There are plenty of normal families that homeschool their kids and they turn out just fine, don't be distracted by the crazies.
Homeschooling has gotten a bad rap because the public education establishment... read "teacher's unions"... have been trying to kill it ever since the movement started growing. They can't kill off private schools... too many in the political class send their kids there... but they can kill off homeschooling with enough political support from that class. And you know what? Every time you say something demeaning about those that homeschool ("crazies"), you help those trying to kill it by repeating their memes and propaganda. Congrats.
I'm glad you've come out and said it: that public schools aren't for teaching our best and brightest, but instead are for some kind of malthusian social conditioning
Public schools were never about education, at least in the classical Greek idea. Public schools were created specifically for training, and more to the point, training a vast new wave of labor for America's growing manufacturing sector during the Industrial Revolution. To this day, what is the number one complaint about public schools? That they don't prepare our kids for the workforce. Schools in America were very literally conceived as a way to supply a labor force for industry.
If education is what you want for your kids, homeschool them (either keeping them home completely or teaching them part time after school hours), or put them in a private school.
Look, if a woman is a great programmer, then she should be hired, I agree, strictly because she's a great programmer. But "stereotypes" exist for a reason: they have a basis in reality. There are always exceptions to the rule here and there, but men tend to be good at some things and women at others. The idea that "gender is a social construct" is as ludicrous as saying that calling up "up" is unfair, and that down deserves to be "up" too. The differences between men and women are wide and deep and visible at a very early age.
Sexuality, gay strait or bi, is biological and natural
Funny. Even real scientists admit that they can't prove that homosexuality is "biological and natural". Some suspect that it is, but to this day, no one has been able to find proof. No gene, no chemical... nothing. Mind filling us in on this revolutionary proof you seem to have found?
Re:Your right to what?
on
BTJunkie No More?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Communicate. Yes. That's what it was used for.
When what you're doing is illegal, people are often tempted to cloak it in idealistic terms, i.e. "music wants to be free".
Note: yes, I know that torrents in and of themselves are useful and not illegal. But come on. We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.
Perhaps the lesson is rather that Anon isn't ONLY made up of scriptkiddies. I know, goes against the talking points, but at some point they do get a bit tired.
I'm sure there are some highly intelligent and very, very capable people working for anonymous, at least in a technical sense, just as there are probably lots of mediocre hangers-on. But when it comes to sense, these aren't the brightest bulbs in the pack. Sooner or later, FBI is going to go to NSA for help on this... the international aspect of Anon's ops will legally justify that... and these guys are either going to be caught, or spend a very scared and pathetic life on the run, like some old 60's radicals that can never use their name again because of the things they did.
So it's wrong to make sure the government isn't up to no good? You sound like you would have been a loyal Nazi sympathizer back in the 30s.
Didn't waste any time getting to Godwin, did we?
There's a big difference between being an active citizen and doing common sense things to hold your government accountable, and undertaking what is essentially an intelligence op not too different from what a hostile foreign spy agency would have done against your own government. You need to put away the silly V for Vendetta mask and realize that this is way out of bounds. This isn't protesting, this isn't marching, this isn't a hunger strike. This is a direct attack on law enforcement, and that's only going to end in one way.
Japan followed the Keynesian playbook and all they have to show for it is a perpetually stagnant economy with a debt to GDP ratio of over 200%.
Indeed. Japan has had a stagnant economy since the mid 90's, despite huge levels of spending. In the 2000's, business magazines wrote articles about "Japan's Lost Decade". Now it's becoming Japan's lost decades.
I remember when experts were telling us in the 80's that Japan's economic model... high government spending, high subsidies and protectionism for domestic industries, the government picking winners and losers... was the future, and that the US would be left behind if we didn't adopt it.
You know what will fix this and bring jobs back to the USA?
Nothing. Steve Jobs was right. Those jobs aren't coming back, and not just because of wages. Tim Cook sold Jobs on moving the manufacturing to China for a number of reasons, many which make sense (one huge reason is that America has largely abandoned the kind of job training that makes both good electronics assembly workers and the foremen that oversee them). There's a pretty good podcast here laying out most of the justifications. It sucks, but it'll likely never change. The change in education, labor laws, and factory investments would be so huge... in the trillions of dollars, on a truly industry-wide and nation-wide scale... that it'll almost certainly never happen.
Ah, so the human race has progressed materials science as far as it will go? We already know about all possible alloys, composites, and construction techniques? Science has unraveled all the mysteries of the Universe, all the way down through the quantum level? No possible advances in propulsion technology? Think again.
Materials science is the only place left to go. We saw the future, and it was unaffordable. Flying cars? Jetpacks? Supersonic airliners? All do-able. All prohibitively expensive and inefficient and unsuited for mass productions. You should read an article called The End of the Future. It sums up something I've suspected for quite some time: while we've made advances we could never dream about... computers, biotech, etc... the advances we did dream about never came, and never will (at least not in our lifetimes or those of our children or grandchildren). All those dreams of colonizing planets, traveling to other stars, floating cities, etc, ran into the hard shoals of reality, both physical and fiscal. Humanity is now actually slowing down, after a century of constantly going faster. 50 years from now, whatever Boeing is producing at it's plant will look largely like what they've been making since the 707; a fat tube with slightly swept wings and jet engines in pods underneath. It may be made of plastics and have advanced computers, but it'll carry around the same number of people and go about as fast as current airliners. The future... the one we wanted... really did die.
Existing case law in a federal court in my home state says otherwise. Off to the SCOTUS we go?
Good point. Since the self-incrimination part of the 5th is considered incorporated against the states, then perhaps this is an avenue to challenge it.
The 5th amendment does not protect you from being required to provide subpoenaed materials. It just means you dont have to testify or speak out about maters which may incriminate you. I can easily see how supplying a password or decryption key would not be covered. But it would be a hard call to make in my opinion.
Correct. The 5th amendment hasn't covered things like keys to a safe or a combination to a safe. I don't know why encryption would be held to a higher standard than that. The 5th has only covered verbal testimony. Physical objects and information related to those objects have never been considered the same thing as verbal testimony. To change that, it would take a Constitutional amendment.
They got two right, with the recent religious freedom case in Hosana-Tabor vs. EEOC. And just like that case, this was a unanimous decision from SCOTUS. That's two Supreme Court ass-kickings in a row for this administration, from both sides of the aisle. I had always thought that the upcoming "Obamacare" case would be a 5-4 ruling either way, depending on what side of the bed Anthony Kennedy woke up on that morning. Now I'm not so sure. I don't think that one will be unanimous too, but now I wouldn't be surprised if it were 6-3 or 7-2 against. SCOTUS seems to be a lot more attuned to the notion that the Constitution is a restraining order against government lately.
Slashdot Mirror
As opposed to the Muslims who conquered Palestine, North Africa, Iberia, Persia, Mesopotamia and southeastern Europe?
The Muslim Empire was successful in part because they were more tolerant than the rulers they replaced. The Jews in Spain had more rights under Muslim rule than under the Visigoths.
Spain was the exception to the rule, and the fabled tolerance there has been exaggerated. Tolerance as a conquered people is a relative thing.. Islamic armies rather ruthlessly killed off competing faiths and languages wherever they went. Do you think the reason North Africa is Arabic-speaking and Muslim today is because the Caliphate said "pretty-please"? North Africa was a center of Christian thought and culture for centuries... St. Thomas Aquinas was North African, and most of North Africa spoke Coptic or Berber... before the followers of Mohammad moved in. With the exception of the Indian Ocean-Western Pacific Muslim civilizations (such as present day Malaysia), virtually everywhere Islam spread it did so by the sword. The South Asian Muslims were the only large groups that actually converted voluntarily, because of cultural contacts via trade routes from Arab merchants. Turkey, southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and North Africa were all conquered.
Superstition kills and maims opposing cultures. It's quite a weapon.
I agree. We should stop forcing small nations to give up carbon fuels in the name of "global warming". It's damaging their economies.
Catholic schools used to be the absolute best places to send your kids, but their quality is declining. The problem is that decreasing number of men and women are taking priesthood vows and joining the ranks of nuns. Priests and nuns have excellent educations and made excellent teachers (and tough, too... you learned while you were there). When there were plenty of nuns, filling the teaching ranks of Catholic schools wasn't a problem. But now they're increasingly using non-clergy teachers, and they're losing that edge (and getting more expensive as a result... nuns and priests were also cheap labor and kept the costs of running Catholic schools down).
There is no correlation between teacher qualification and effectifveness. I truly wish this myth would die.
One of the worst things to befall high schools was the Education degree. By this level, history classes should be taught by history majors, English classes by English majors, etc. Not Education majors. There should be a minor in teacher training for those that want to be high school teachers, but by grade 7 or so, subject classes should be taught by majors in those fields. One of my college professors told me that when she was working on her PhD, she applied to be a high school teacher. She was rejected flat out, not because she was overqualified, but because she didn't have an Education degree. In the minds of the teacher's unions, someone with a Masters in history is less qualified to teach a high school history class than someone with an Education degree. Got that?
As a result my daughter never learned to write in cursive
... and nothing of value was lost? I, nor anyone I know, has had any use for knowing this "skill."
It used to be absolutely necessary. But with the advent of computers, it's fast becoming a boutique skill for private school students with no real need in daily life. As Latin is no longer taught in high schools, cursive will one day soon cease being taught in schools. Not to say that things like Latin and cursive writing don't have education value... they do... but in limited times to teach and limited budgets, you have to prioritize.
Frankly, formal typing skills should replace cursive skills in schools now. Formal typing training is a huge boost to productivity vs. the hunt-and-peck method.
The problem with homeschooling is finding one that isn't rife with ridiculous religious indoctrination.
Uh, that's a study group. Homeschooling is a parent teaching their own children. Unless you're a psychotic with split personalities, why would you be worried about religious indoctrination of your kids by... you?
It's unfortunate that politicians and bible thumpers have added a stigma to the idea of parents helping their children learn.
No, it's unfortunate that guys like you mock religious people that want their kids to get a better education.
It isn't about making friends. It's actually the opposite - making enemies and dealing with having to work with them on projects. Unless, of course, homeschooling parents force their kids to do project with kids they don't like. That would be pretty open minded of them.
Also, most likely they will socialize with kids from similar backgrounds and belief systems. They won't have the experience of meeting and accepting people who are different from them.
I keep hearing this silly "socialization" argument, and it's bogus. As if kids don't socialize with other kids in places other than schools. As if they don't meet other kids at church, clubs, and in their neighborhood. "Socialization" is the number one red herring of the anti-homeschool forces. Humans learned socialization just fine for centuries before public schools were ever a dream.
Your real problem is that homeschooled kids aren't forced into a government-approved box to be engineered in ways acceptable to you. Well, too bad.
Homeschooling is a good option if you have parents that are up for the challenge. My wife plans on homeschooling our kids, as she was home schooled herself (along with her 2 sisters). Homeschooling has gotten a bad rap because it is portraid by either the crazy people or ultra religious people. There are plenty of normal families that homeschool their kids and they turn out just fine, don't be distracted by the crazies.
Homeschooling has gotten a bad rap because the public education establishment... read "teacher's unions"... have been trying to kill it ever since the movement started growing. They can't kill off private schools... too many in the political class send their kids there... but they can kill off homeschooling with enough political support from that class. And you know what? Every time you say something demeaning about those that homeschool ("crazies"), you help those trying to kill it by repeating their memes and propaganda. Congrats.
I'm glad you've come out and said it: that public schools aren't for teaching our best and brightest, but instead are for some kind of malthusian social conditioning
Public schools were never about education, at least in the classical Greek idea. Public schools were created specifically for training, and more to the point, training a vast new wave of labor for America's growing manufacturing sector during the Industrial Revolution. To this day, what is the number one complaint about public schools? That they don't prepare our kids for the workforce. Schools in America were very literally conceived as a way to supply a labor force for industry.
If education is what you want for your kids, homeschool them (either keeping them home completely or teaching them part time after school hours), or put them in a private school.
Gender should not matter.
That's like saying "the sun shouldn't be hot".
Look, if a woman is a great programmer, then she should be hired, I agree, strictly because she's a great programmer. But "stereotypes" exist for a reason: they have a basis in reality. There are always exceptions to the rule here and there, but men tend to be good at some things and women at others. The idea that "gender is a social construct" is as ludicrous as saying that calling up "up" is unfair, and that down deserves to be "up" too. The differences between men and women are wide and deep and visible at a very early age.
Sexuality, gay strait or bi, is biological and natural
Funny. Even real scientists admit that they can't prove that homosexuality is "biological and natural". Some suspect that it is, but to this day, no one has been able to find proof. No gene, no chemical... nothing. Mind filling us in on this revolutionary proof you seem to have found?
Communicate. Yes. That's what it was used for.
When what you're doing is illegal, people are often tempted to cloak it in idealistic terms, i.e. "music wants to be free".
Note: yes, I know that torrents in and of themselves are useful and not illegal. But come on. We know what the vast majority of stuff that places like BT Junkie link to, and it's not Linux ISO's. It's mainly copyright material.
maybe they found the keys to an NSA-required backdoor in some Cisco equipment.
Or maybe this is a giant honeypot op, and Anonymous bit.
Better anarchistic thugs than authoritarian thugs.
No, not really. That's a false choice. How about "Neither"?
Perhaps the lesson is rather that Anon isn't ONLY made up of scriptkiddies. I know, goes against the talking points, but at some point they do get a bit tired.
I'm sure there are some highly intelligent and very, very capable people working for anonymous, at least in a technical sense, just as there are probably lots of mediocre hangers-on. But when it comes to sense, these aren't the brightest bulbs in the pack. Sooner or later, FBI is going to go to NSA for help on this... the international aspect of Anon's ops will legally justify that... and these guys are either going to be caught, or spend a very scared and pathetic life on the run, like some old 60's radicals that can never use their name again because of the things they did.
Is Hooray. What a dump for the Hoover's and Peel's plonkers.
Secret policemen are the enemy of Democracy and Liberty. Freedom cannot be defended by means of surreptious authority.
"Secret Policemen"? The FBI and Scotland Yard are the moral, legal, and operational equivalents of the KGB and the Gestapo? Are you serious?
When Anonymous does it: good. When News Corp does it: bad.
Selective outrage certainly is a useful propaganda tool, isn't it?
News Corp isn't a government agency. News Corp isn't a law enforcement group. Strawmen are certainly useful, no?
So it's wrong to make sure the government isn't up to no good? You sound like you would have been a loyal Nazi sympathizer back in the 30s.
Didn't waste any time getting to Godwin, did we?
There's a big difference between being an active citizen and doing common sense things to hold your government accountable, and undertaking what is essentially an intelligence op not too different from what a hostile foreign spy agency would have done against your own government. You need to put away the silly V for Vendetta mask and realize that this is way out of bounds. This isn't protesting, this isn't marching, this isn't a hunger strike. This is a direct attack on law enforcement, and that's only going to end in one way.
Japan followed the Keynesian playbook and all they have to show for it is a perpetually stagnant economy with a debt to GDP ratio of over 200%.
Indeed. Japan has had a stagnant economy since the mid 90's, despite huge levels of spending. In the 2000's, business magazines wrote articles about "Japan's Lost Decade". Now it's becoming Japan's lost decades.
I remember when experts were telling us in the 80's that Japan's economic model... high government spending, high subsidies and protectionism for domestic industries, the government picking winners and losers... was the future, and that the US would be left behind if we didn't adopt it.
You know what will fix this and bring jobs back to the USA?
Nothing. Steve Jobs was right. Those jobs aren't coming back, and not just because of wages. Tim Cook sold Jobs on moving the manufacturing to China for a number of reasons, many which make sense (one huge reason is that America has largely abandoned the kind of job training that makes both good electronics assembly workers and the foremen that oversee them). There's a pretty good podcast here laying out most of the justifications. It sucks, but it'll likely never change. The change in education, labor laws, and factory investments would be so huge... in the trillions of dollars, on a truly industry-wide and nation-wide scale... that it'll almost certainly never happen.
Ah, so the human race has progressed materials science as far as it will go? We already know about all possible alloys, composites, and construction techniques? Science has unraveled all the mysteries of the Universe, all the way down through the quantum level? No possible advances in propulsion technology? Think again.
Materials science is the only place left to go. We saw the future, and it was unaffordable. Flying cars? Jetpacks? Supersonic airliners? All do-able. All prohibitively expensive and inefficient and unsuited for mass productions. You should read an article called The End of the Future. It sums up something I've suspected for quite some time: while we've made advances we could never dream about... computers, biotech, etc... the advances we did dream about never came, and never will (at least not in our lifetimes or those of our children or grandchildren). All those dreams of colonizing planets, traveling to other stars, floating cities, etc, ran into the hard shoals of reality, both physical and fiscal. Humanity is now actually slowing down, after a century of constantly going faster. 50 years from now, whatever Boeing is producing at it's plant will look largely like what they've been making since the 707; a fat tube with slightly swept wings and jet engines in pods underneath. It may be made of plastics and have advanced computers, but it'll carry around the same number of people and go about as fast as current airliners. The future... the one we wanted... really did die.
Existing case law in a federal court in my home state says otherwise. Off to the SCOTUS we go?
Good point. Since the self-incrimination part of the 5th is considered incorporated against the states, then perhaps this is an avenue to challenge it.
The 5th amendment does not protect you from being required to provide subpoenaed materials. It just means you dont have to testify or speak out about maters which may incriminate you. I can easily see how supplying a password or decryption key would not be covered. But it would be a hard call to make in my opinion.
Correct. The 5th amendment hasn't covered things like keys to a safe or a combination to a safe. I don't know why encryption would be held to a higher standard than that. The 5th has only covered verbal testimony. Physical objects and information related to those objects have never been considered the same thing as verbal testimony. To change that, it would take a Constitutional amendment.
They got one right?!?!
They got two right, with the recent religious freedom case in Hosana-Tabor vs. EEOC. And just like that case, this was a unanimous decision from SCOTUS. That's two Supreme Court ass-kickings in a row for this administration, from both sides of the aisle. I had always thought that the upcoming "Obamacare" case would be a 5-4 ruling either way, depending on what side of the bed Anthony Kennedy woke up on that morning. Now I'm not so sure. I don't think that one will be unanimous too, but now I wouldn't be surprised if it were 6-3 or 7-2 against. SCOTUS seems to be a lot more attuned to the notion that the Constitution is a restraining order against government lately.