I've never seen a machine strip the creativity out of students faster than the Public School Systems of our country. Learning is a chore here, not an enjoyable endeavor for most. I would venture to guess that outside of the social aspect (learning how to interact with different people), public schools hinder our society more than assist it. It's time to scrap the system and start over.
You are spot on in your rant. In fact, I wouldn't consider it a rant. I'd call it valid criticism. It's one of the primary reasons that I'm paupering myself to send my children to private school (paying both high property taxes and private school tuition is VERY draining on the bank account). The question is, what can we do to fix the problem? The reason that public school drives students like you nuts is that it has to find some way of educating people of all backgrounds and intelligence levels. The net result is a curriculum that is geared towards the low side of average. A handful of students can't keep up because the pace is too fast for them. The majority of students are bored because the pace is too slow. Another handful of students turn to deviant activity because the pace is so incredibly slow for them that they have no respect whatsoever for the school system. Private schools get around this problem by having some control over who gets admitted, so they are able to provide education at a pace that's more reasonable. Even so, there are still students (like my son), who are bored. Public schools do not have the same options. I'm pretty certain that if my son were going to a public school, he would be a huge nuisance to the teachers there.
Most people in my situation are hoping for school vouchers so that we can channel at least part of our property taxes into the learning instituation of our choice. But I'm pretty sure that within five years after school vouchers are introduced, we wouldn't have a public school system. Maybe this doesn't seem so bad, but there will always be families who flat out cannot afford to send their children to a private instituation, and those students have as much right to a good education as the families who have the means. So, what's the answer?
I would guess it's cheaper. The 7-inch vinyls are singles. And it just goes to show that nothing has changed. People want to buy songs individually for $1 or $2 rather than paying $15 or $20 for a whole album with only one or two songs they like. Start distributing singles in ultra-cheap but modern media format that works in most players and systems, and I'll bet you'll see people gravitate towards that instead of the vinyls.
I think of deers eating and breeding until they all starve and we don't seem much different right now.
Actually, we're pretty much responsible for the deer starving, too. When we destroy their habitat to build new homes, we leave smaller foraging areas available for the same size population. Also, we eliminate some of their natural predators, so the population grows. Wildlife commissions in most states do a pretty good job of tracking the deer population and determining how that compares against the amount of land available to sustain them. That's why the number of Bucks and Does a hunter can take changes pretty much every year, and also why that variance seems so incomprehensible sometimes.
If they clean house I'd be satisfied. That's what more I want. People on the board should have ethics to go by, and not turn a blind eye towards something they 'don't want to know the details about'.
OK, placed in this context, I completely agree with you.
Sorry, but these aren't just a few employees, these are board members.
And the guilty members are stepping down and also under investigation by law enforcement officials. What more do you want? Perhaps you'd like to completely ruin HP so that they can lay off more employees? Personally, I'd be satisfied to see the guilty spend some time in prison and pay heavy fines that take a sizeable chunk out of their personal assets. And I doubt any sane company would ever put them in a leadership position again. Although if that were to happen, I'd support boycotting _that_ company.
I've finally figured it out! Slashdot is mostly made up of REPUBLICAN supporters! All of these silly arguments that end up further proving of Godwin's Law are actually cleverly designed to make us AFRAID to vote Democrat unless we want to be grouped with the people bringing up the Hitler arguments.;)
Add to this the fact that our society is pretty damn car-centric, and you have something that is really on the minds of everyone.
Too true. For many of us driving is mostly non-discretionary, which means it's very difficult to cut back in order to save money. It's like food. In order to get to work, we have to drive. It's not like clothing, where you can stretch out the current wardrobe a little longer before you have to replace it. Some people (particularly my colleagues in Europe) will argue that we should take public transportation. But in most of the US, public transportation is not really an option. In my case, my job makes my schedule unreliable, so I can't carpool with others. The distance from home to work is 35 miles and takes the better part of an hour to drive. I did some research and found a way to get there via public transportation, but that would take about 2.5 hours with multiple bus changes and a total price higher than what it costs to drive. I just can't imagine paying more to spend 5 hours commuting each day. Some suggest that I move closer to work, but with the housing boom over the last few years I can't afford more than a crackerjack box anywhere near where I work. I don't drive any more than I have to, but it still costs me in the neighborhood of $40/week. My wife has a similar situation but without quite as much driving. We have reduced the fuel budget about as much as is possible. But regardless, our budget is definitely feeling the $150 extra per month we have to pay.
I think diesels are also not as popular here because most people remember what diesel cars were like the last time people started worrying about gas prices (and thus diesels jumped in popularity.)
That, and the absolutely HUGE difference in price between regular gasoline and diesel during the winter months when diesel and heating oil are competing for the same resources. Although the efficiency difference overcomes the price difference, it's hard to pay $3.08/gallon of diesel when the 87 octane unleaded is selling for $2.55. It's all psychological. You can see the price difference immediately, but you have to drive 300+ miles before you feel the efficiency difference.
That's a misrepresentation. First of all, Michael Powell is a Republican. He may have been appointed to a position in the FCC by Clinton in '97, however president Bush appointed him chairman of the FCC immediately after his first inauguration in 2001. As a member of the FCC board during the Clinton administration, Powell would not have had the power to set FCC policy. However, as the Chair under Bush - he certainly did. What we're seeing here is most definitely not Clinton FCC policy.
I'll admit that I wasn't detailed enough in my post, but although Michael Powell is a Republican, his policy is more Libertarian in nature. I believe he was pro net-neutrality, and he fined Madison River Communications for blocking VoIP. So, it sounds like his policy is a mixed bag for Slashdotters.
Unless the guy is just plain wrong, in which case a response along the lines of "wrong:" with a citation would be the better approach.
I wasn't plain wrong, but you'll see from a couple other posts that although Clinton appointed Michael to the FCC, it was Bush that elevated him to chairman. So, probably both my comment and the OP should be nailed as flamebait.
...but Michael Powell didn't become FCC chairman until Bush appointed him. He was appointed to the FCC by Clinton.
Yeah, good point. Nevertheless, it appears that both presidents liked the man. There's plenty of bad things to say about the Bush administration, but blaming it/him for things like this just cheapens the argument.
The Bush administration disregards evidence contradicting their world view.
I hope you enjoyed getting your dig in there. Perhaps you didn't realize that the FCC Chairman at that time (Michael Powell) was appointed by President Bill Clinton. Somebody rate the parent comment as flamebait.
1. It's not a real machine you're programming. Your programs end up looking and acting differently from the ones on the computer you're using. If you used a real C64, you would get a much stronger sense of achievement.
Some of the emulators provide a very close experience to the original machine. In terms of learning BASIC, there won't be any discernable difference. In fact, even tricky stuff with poke and peek should work fine. It's when you start trying to do programming that relies on timing and processor cycles that you'll have trouble. Also, if you try to write assembly language programs that twiddle with specific devices (chips) in the machine, you may run into problems, depending on how good the emulator really is. None of those issues are really relevant when it comes to learning the language. I disagree with the "stronger sense of achievement" part about the real C64. I have the opposite experience, but it might just be nostalgia for me because the C64 was so widely used in my last two years of high school -- just prior to the multimedia explosion.
Downloading a C64 emulator doesn't change that; in a sense, it is just like installing a programming language: yes, it works, but it's an extra barrier to entry that wasn't there in the Good Old Times(C)(R)(TM)(WTF).
Agreed, but at least it _is_ possible to provide a similar learning environment. The article talks about searching for a solution. My opinion was that the author didn't search very hard or wasn't very well informed. Either way, I share the sentiment. Actually, there may be a halfway decent market for keyboard addons and BASIC programming language cartridges/disks for some of today's video game consoles. Modern consoles pack significantly more power than the old computers most of us learned on, and they provide a similar visual experience (since they are connected to the TV).
Just for the record, I actually learned to program in BASIC _without_ a computer. I learned in my science class. We had no computers in the school, but the science teacher taught us about programming and had everyody write a simple program. Then, he used dialin to connect to a PDP-8 (if memory serves) at the university and type the programs in to see if they ran. That experience gave me the programming bug, and as soon as affordable home computers (not hobby kits) were available, I drove my parents bonkers until they bought me one.
Erm, you aren't providing them with personally identifying information or an email address than they can spam? Or at least you aren't having to come up with "fake" information and register a one-time-use email address on hotmail or yahoo.
If either flash isn't installed or cookies are disabled, you don't get access - and I, for one, have neither.
I'm not sure what happens without Flash, but you can always use Firefox and set cookies to expire when you close your browser.
Other campaigns use the political exemption to its fullest, and don't honor do-not-call requests at all.
Of course, many people consider this counter-productive
I would have to say that I fall into that group. If a candidate's campaign contacts me after being told not to, I would make the automatic assumption that they were dishonest and that any statements about the candidate's positions on issues were complete bollocks, and regardless of the opponent's positions on key issues, he or she would be a better choice.
The major flaw in this is that the entire premise is based upon the fact that the military wants to win a public relations war rather than the real thing.
Who cares if you are in a *war* and you hurt the enemy?
Give me a break. When you get to the point where you are trying to care about what people think about you in a war you are losing. War is for one thing only--the destruction of your enemy.
I'm sorry to be blunt, but this response and the fact that it was rated as 5, Insightful is only proof that we aren't ready to do away with the Electoral College just yet. In case you haven't noticed, the "wars" we are fighting lately are against terrorists. Since terrorists tend to mix freely with the more or less innocent population, it's virtually impossible to tell the difference between a terrorist and an otherwise uninvolved citizen. So, if you are part of a military force and a group of people start approaching your outpost, are they A) coming to ask directions, B) coming to tell you they hate your country in a peaceful way, or C) coming with a bomb strapped around their waist? When you tell them to stay away, did they A) not understand you, B) stubbornly ignore you or C) not care because they plan to die anyway? In this moment of indecision, do you A) lob a grenade and ask their family questions later, B) put a bullet through their kneecaps and hope they can't crawl close enough to trigger the bomb, or C) fire a directed energy weapon at them that makes them feel like they're being cooked alive and either run away or hit the ground submissively?
Now, let's take a quick trip to Afghanistan. You're part of an elite force of commandos that have been sent to retake control of a town in the province of Ghazni that was recently overrun by Taliban. You know that there are probably 15 to 20 Taliban fighters there and at least hundreds of innocent civilians that are either too scared to kick the Taliban out or don't realize what's going on. Do you A) send your forces into town for close range fighting with the Taliban fighters at a cost of lives of civilians and your own soldiers and the likely escape of a significant number of enemy forces, B) drop a couple daisy cutters or MOABs on the town and call it a day so that you can lean back at the local saloon with whiskey for the men and beer for the horses, or C) use a non-lethal weapon that can render all the inhabitants of the town unconscious or otherwise incapacitated and then go in and haul the Taliban fighters out of the town with little or no long-term impact to either your own forces or the civilians?
Let's face it. Today's "war" is different from the wars of the past. If a country declares war on another country and sends airplanes, boats, subs or troops to invade that country and the people of the invading country don't overthrow their own government, the natural expectation is that the country being threatened is going to retaliate in some way with little regard for citizens of the aggressor. But that's not what has been happening lately. Instead, small factions within a country are the aggressor. As convenient as it may be, we can't punish the whole country for that. Additionally, war has advanced a long way from the troops lining up and firing at one another, each side hoping that the other would turn tail and run first. War has advanced past soldiers digging themselves into trenches and firing at anything that moves in hope that the enemy will be depleted before their own forces are. If you look at the "somebody think of the children rhetoric" spewing out of UN representatives every time one country goes to battle with another, it's obvious that the world doesn't want the all out war of the past. Consider, for example, the recent conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. If Israel gave no care to the innocent people in Lebanon and the court of world opinion, that battle would have been over in less than forty-eight hours. A couple days worth of carpet bombing would have ended th
They may be glossing over an important detail, something like "10 times as much usable energy when you take into account that you're not wasting energy on pressurization or cooling."
Nah, the summary is just bad. The article indicates that it will have 10 times as much usable energy (2200 watt-hours/l) as LITHIUM POLYMER batteries (200 watt-hours/l).
It says right in the article that until the electronic ballots arrived, users could fill out provisional paper ballots.
Read the whole article. They had limited supplies of provisional ballots. Some precincts were not even aware that provisional ballots were available. They were telling people to come back later. They had to extend polling hours to allow those who had been turned away to come back later, and I'm sure some people were just out of luck.
As an aside, this has almost nothing to do with electronic voting machines, and everything to do with how poorly organized this operation was. Forgetting to deliver the voter cards needed by the new machines is no different than forgetting to provide ballots in the first place, and not realizing that provisional ballots are an option shows that little (if any) effort went into training the pollworkers. The whole thing makes the Florida situation from 2000 actually look like a non-issue. I totally agree with the criticism that electronic voting machines (in particular Diebold) are taking, but using this situation as a data point against them is just plain stupid. The title should be changed to "Elections Officials Still Absolute Morons", or "Can't Get a Job? Become an Elections Official!"
...that there are not secret prisons around the world...
Careful with this one. I did some quick searching, and although I found denials of secret prisons in certain places, I couldn't find any complete denial of secret prisons. If you have specific and generally reliable sources that say otherwise please cite them.
The biggest filter on prosecutablity is that you have to forge the headers you can send out spam all day every day as long as you are honest about where it's coming from.
Agreed. This is what REALLY makes me wonder how stupid the defense attorney thinks people are. From the article:
"You purchase an e-mail address list, alter the transmission information in the header of your e-mail to avoid retaliation, and on Easter morning send out a three-word e-mail to thousands of people: 'Christ is risen!' You have committed a felony in Virginia," Wolf said.
As a Christian, I find this appalling. It's a blatant attempt to appeal to religious sentiment, but it really backfires. First, if you are altering the information in the header to avoid retaliation, this means that you know up front you are sending your message to people who don't want to receive it. You certainly aren't going to win any converts that way. Second, you are sending the email at what ultimately boils down to shared expense with the recipient, so you are asking me to help pay for messages that I don't want to receive. Frankly, I'm insulted by his statement. Even as a Christian, I don't want to be receiving mass mailings from people I don't know, regardless of whether it is intended to be uplifting.
Wolf goes on to say that this is will be a shadow over free speech. I really don't see how. I'm not free to go to a business and tack up notices and advertisements without permission. And since it was being deposited on the mail servers of an ISP, this is exactly what the defendant was doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people in my situation are hoping for school vouchers so that we can channel at least part of our property taxes into the learning instituation of our choice. But I'm pretty sure that within five years after school vouchers are introduced, we wouldn't have a public school system. Maybe this doesn't seem so bad, but there will always be families who flat out cannot afford to send their children to a private instituation, and those students have as much right to a good education as the families who have the means. So, what's the answer?
Some of the emulators provide a very close experience to the original machine. In terms of learning BASIC, there won't be any discernable difference. In fact, even tricky stuff with poke and peek should work fine. It's when you start trying to do programming that relies on timing and processor cycles that you'll have trouble. Also, if you try to write assembly language programs that twiddle with specific devices (chips) in the machine, you may run into problems, depending on how good the emulator really is. None of those issues are really relevant when it comes to learning the language. I disagree with the "stronger sense of achievement" part about the real C64. I have the opposite experience, but it might just be nostalgia for me because the C64 was so widely used in my last two years of high school -- just prior to the multimedia explosion.
Agreed, but at least it _is_ possible to provide a similar learning environment. The article talks about searching for a solution. My opinion was that the author didn't search very hard or wasn't very well informed. Either way, I share the sentiment. Actually, there may be a halfway decent market for keyboard addons and BASIC programming language cartridges/disks for some of today's video game consoles. Modern consoles pack significantly more power than the old computers most of us learned on, and they provide a similar visual experience (since they are connected to the TV).Just for the record, I actually learned to program in BASIC _without_ a computer. I learned in my science class. We had no computers in the school, but the science teacher taught us about programming and had everyody write a simple program. Then, he used dialin to connect to a PDP-8 (if memory serves) at the university and type the programs in to see if they ran. That experience gave me the programming bug, and as soon as affordable home computers (not hobby kits) were available, I drove my parents bonkers until they bought me one.
I'm not sure what happens without Flash, but you can always use Firefox and set cookies to expire when you close your browser.
There's a very easy solution to this. Install a classic machine emulator on your PC. Something like a C64 emulator would work fine.
I'm sorry to be blunt, but this response and the fact that it was rated as 5, Insightful is only proof that we aren't ready to do away with the Electoral College just yet. In case you haven't noticed, the "wars" we are fighting lately are against terrorists. Since terrorists tend to mix freely with the more or less innocent population, it's virtually impossible to tell the difference between a terrorist and an otherwise uninvolved citizen. So, if you are part of a military force and a group of people start approaching your outpost, are they A) coming to ask directions, B) coming to tell you they hate your country in a peaceful way, or C) coming with a bomb strapped around their waist? When you tell them to stay away, did they A) not understand you, B) stubbornly ignore you or C) not care because they plan to die anyway? In this moment of indecision, do you A) lob a grenade and ask their family questions later, B) put a bullet through their kneecaps and hope they can't crawl close enough to trigger the bomb, or C) fire a directed energy weapon at them that makes them feel like they're being cooked alive and either run away or hit the ground submissively?
Now, let's take a quick trip to Afghanistan. You're part of an elite force of commandos that have been sent to retake control of a town in the province of Ghazni that was recently overrun by Taliban. You know that there are probably 15 to 20 Taliban fighters there and at least hundreds of innocent civilians that are either too scared to kick the Taliban out or don't realize what's going on. Do you A) send your forces into town for close range fighting with the Taliban fighters at a cost of lives of civilians and your own soldiers and the likely escape of a significant number of enemy forces, B) drop a couple daisy cutters or MOABs on the town and call it a day so that you can lean back at the local saloon with whiskey for the men and beer for the horses, or C) use a non-lethal weapon that can render all the inhabitants of the town unconscious or otherwise incapacitated and then go in and haul the Taliban fighters out of the town with little or no long-term impact to either your own forces or the civilians?
Let's face it. Today's "war" is different from the wars of the past. If a country declares war on another country and sends airplanes, boats, subs or troops to invade that country and the people of the invading country don't overthrow their own government, the natural expectation is that the country being threatened is going to retaliate in some way with little regard for citizens of the aggressor. But that's not what has been happening lately. Instead, small factions within a country are the aggressor. As convenient as it may be, we can't punish the whole country for that. Additionally, war has advanced a long way from the troops lining up and firing at one another, each side hoping that the other would turn tail and run first. War has advanced past soldiers digging themselves into trenches and firing at anything that moves in hope that the enemy will be depleted before their own forces are. If you look at the "somebody think of the children rhetoric" spewing out of UN representatives every time one country goes to battle with another, it's obvious that the world doesn't want the all out war of the past. Consider, for example, the recent conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. If Israel gave no care to the innocent people in Lebanon and the court of world opinion, that battle would have been over in less than forty-eight hours. A couple days worth of carpet bombing would have ended th
Uh, I'm not so sure that this is entirely new. Maybe the antifreeze additive is new....
As an aside, this has almost nothing to do with electronic voting machines, and everything to do with how poorly organized this operation was. Forgetting to deliver the voter cards needed by the new machines is no different than forgetting to provide ballots in the first place, and not realizing that provisional ballots are an option shows that little (if any) effort went into training the pollworkers. The whole thing makes the Florida situation from 2000 actually look like a non-issue. I totally agree with the criticism that electronic voting machines (in particular Diebold) are taking, but using this situation as a data point against them is just plain stupid. The title should be changed to "Elections Officials Still Absolute Morons", or "Can't Get a Job? Become an Elections Official!"
As a Christian, I find this appalling. It's a blatant attempt to appeal to religious sentiment, but it really backfires. First, if you are altering the information in the header to avoid retaliation, this means that you know up front you are sending your message to people who don't want to receive it. You certainly aren't going to win any converts that way. Second, you are sending the email at what ultimately boils down to shared expense with the recipient, so you are asking me to help pay for messages that I don't want to receive. Frankly, I'm insulted by his statement. Even as a Christian, I don't want to be receiving mass mailings from people I don't know, regardless of whether it is intended to be uplifting.Agreed. This is what REALLY makes me wonder how stupid the defense attorney thinks people are. From the article:
Wolf goes on to say that this is will be a shadow over free speech. I really don't see how. I'm not free to go to a business and tack up notices and advertisements without permission. And since it was being deposited on the mail servers of an ISP, this is exactly what the defendant was doing.