Excellent argument. Stupid and wrong? Now that's flamebait. Further flamebait would be for me to say something like "if you stop looking for aliens in radio signals for a minute, maybe you would have the time to think about the logic of their arguments and how weak they are".
Now that's flamebait. Previously, I posted a rebuttal of sorts to someone regurgitating someone else's "discoveries" about ice cores.
If you read what I was replying to again, I want you to see that the person was basically trying to put the onus of proof on the OP not to discover the truth, but to try and weaken his argument without giving his own evidence.
I don't know why I am a jerk just for calling out union leeches. Maybe he wasn't one, but I enjoy the artistic license of lumping him/her in with them. Now, maybe your state teachers union is a benevolent one. Mine is NYSUT, and they care about extending their political power, and not so much about teachers.
As I comment below in response to a teacher, I have nothing against teachers. I had many great teachers, and wish my kids could have all of them (not possible due to retirement, everyone gets old). Even if they were still there, the system is set up against education. Instead, our local schools focus on qualifying as many children as possible for special needs (money), participating in experimental educational programs (grant money) and social "education" (raising the next generation to think as they do, instead of for themselves). The typical response would perhaps be "they need more money!". Unfortunately, our local district is already spending more than 20K per student per year. A good 1 million or more of that is 1 superintendent, 1 assistant superintendent, 3 principals and vice-principals (1 set for each school), and secretaries for each of those figures. 1200 students. 8 administrators.
I'm not an a**hole, because I don't like the feeling of bulls**t sliding by me.
Umm... have you seen some of the comments put out by NYSUT (NYS United Teachers)? They are extremely aggressive at defending what they consider to be their turf.
In NYS, we have had a very hard time getting good educational freedom legislation passed specifically because of the union. Note I did not say "teachers", but "teachers union". Even our local teachers cringe at the decadence of the union headquarters. They are like a palace, and they have an ungodly budget.
Unless the Wikipedia article is incorrect in regards to NEA, they are "opposed" to homeschooling. I can't vouch for that, as I didn't personally research it, and as we know Wikipedia doesn't approve of original research anyway:).
I think that certainly pay, benefits, and working conditions are concerns of teachers, but the union in NYS seems to be far more interested in being a gatekeeper. I don't know if they are available online, but feel free to try and google their radio spots regarding charter schools. They were quite disturbing in their portrayal of some very dedicated attempts to improve educational quality in the state.
I say all of this as someone who graduated from a public school, and enjoyed most of it, and liked most of my teachers. In fact, I would say I had some of the best teachers available. Some still teach in the local school, but the school itself is garbage, with garbage administrators and garbage goals. You could take 3 of those teachers I had, clone them and put them in charge, and you would have an excellent school.
But you won't see that anytime soon, and there is no reason why parents should have to sit around and wait. Not that you made that argument, so I don't want to attribute that to you. It's more of a general comment.
Well I am glad to hear that, and certainly no solution is perfect. Those homeschoolers who I have talked to often speak of the various difficulties they can encounter. However, most started out with sending their kids to school, and they had more difficulties then.
The other item you mentioned, which is full-time devotion to the teaching, is assuming that homeschoolers follow a public school schedule. They often don't.
3 hours a day or less is usually enough time to do the lessons, assign practice work, grade assignments, and make sure the kids have had exercise. Cooperative children (those who aren't trying to avoid the work) can finish faster.
The reasons for this are simple. There are only a few kids to teach, usually, and individual instruction is faster for most things. "Study Hall", "Lunch", Gym, etc., usually do not require monitoring (again dependent on the kids involved).
Extra curricular activities are much the same in terms of time commitment. Little League, swimming, soccer, etc, are all a pain in the rear still. I don't think there is a solution for that:).
Pro-union bias often arises as a topic in homeschooling because they as a lobby are one of the greatest opponents of home schooling. They frequently push for increased truancy ordinances (targeted at homeschooled children, who have been "picked up" on their way to the library), teacher and school review of curriculum, etc.
The teacher review of curriculum is particularly laughable, since homeschooled children on the whole perform far better in standardized testing than the teacher's own students.
If you have something to add to the article, why don't you just add it, and cite it. Instead of complaining about the cited content, try and get it removed. That was my first visit to that article, but I knew what I would find. Why? Because there have been many published studies on the success of homeschooled children in education vs. their formally-schooled counterparts.
Note that I did not say that Homeschooling always produces good results. But it has a better track record than the alternatives. Instead of trying to fight it, why not try to find out why it is more successful and take lessons from it.
That's funny. Measuring ice core Oxygen isotope proxies is so effective, soon we will be using it to monitor daily temperatures.
Or not. I'm sure you came to your conclusions reading literature written by someone who has spent a lot of time trying to measure temperature by looking at ice cores. I prefer to look at the thermometer.
Tell me, how do you measure an "ice core" from this year. Please be specific as to the steps involved, and how you blindly test this hypothesis (i.e. without knowing the actual measurements, perform the test and see how the results match).
from Wikipedia, in a sourced section of the article:
Test results Figure 2. Home School Students Compared to the National Norm Group in Grade Equivalent Units, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives.
Figure 2. Home School Students Compared to the National Norm Group in Grade Equivalent Units, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives Figure 1. Academic Achievement of Home School, Catholic/Private and the Nation's Students, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives Figure 1. Academic Achievement of Home School, Catholic/Private and the Nation's Students, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives
Numerous studies have found that homeschooled students on average outperform their peers on standardized tests.[52][53] Home Schooling Achievement, a study conducted by National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), supported the academic integrity of homeschooling. Among the homeschooled students who took the tests, the average homeschooled student outperformed his public school peers by 30 to 37 percentile points across all subjects. The study also indicates that public school performance gaps between minorities and genders were virtually non-existent among the homeschooled students who took the tests.[54]
As for social adjustment:
John Taylor later found, using the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale, "while half of the conventionally schooled children scored at or below the 50th percentile (in self-concept), only 10.3% of the home-schooling children did so."[57] He further stated that "the self-concept of home-schooling children is significantly higher (and very much so statistically) than that of children attending the conventional school. This has implications in the areas of academic achievement and socialization, to mention only two. These areas have been found to parallel self-concept. Regarding socialization, Taylor's results would mean that very few home-schooling children are socially deprived. He claims that critics who speak out against home schooling on the basis of social deprivation are actually addressing an area which favors home schoolers.[57]
Opposition to homeschooling comes from varied sources, including some organizations of teachers and school districts. The National Education Association, a United States professional association and union representing teachers, opposes homeschooling.[70][71]
Of course there are those who oppose homeshooling:
Opponents of homeschooling state concerns falling into several categories: standards of academic quality and completeness; (Notice they don't like measurements, only vague suspicions)
(continued...)reduced funding for public schools; (ahh! here we come to the crux of the matter)
lack of socialization with peers of different ethnic and religious backgrounds; (but they fail to cite)
fear of religious or social extremism; (OMG! Are they *religious*? Oops - "Reason for homeshooling: Can give child better education at home - 48.9% with an error of 3.79")
that homeschool curricula often exclude critical subjects; (not cited)
that parents are sheltering their children, or denying them opportunities that are their right such as social development, or providing an unfair advantage over students whose parents lack the time or money to homeschool; existence of parallel societies not fitting into standards of citizenship and national community. [72]
This is actually hilarious, because the article cites thi
Growth rate of coral. Wow, talk about drinking the kool-aid. How does anyone know what else might have affected the growth rate of coral at the time? And "sediments"? I know this is difficult for people who want/need to believe in the latest fad, but you can't tell someone what the temperatures were without a measurement of said temperatures with an accurate temperature measurement device installed and calibrated to our modern specifications being used by people of whatever time period you are wondering about.
It never fails that when someone questions a foolish, oft-wrong authority that a response from the crowd of "Defense! Defense!" is heard. It's like the Zero-population gain folks, with their Malthusian scenarios. It doesn't matter how many times they're wrong, someone will try and take a micro-sample somewhere to use for evidence.
We have no reasonably accurate measurement of temperature before the existence of reasonably accurate measurement devices.
Actually, it's just like a USB A to B cable. You get a FW800 - FW400 cable, and you can get either 4 or six pin. I have all of these. FW 400 6 pin can connect to a 4 pin with a cheap cable, FW 800 to 400 6 pin with a cheap cable, etc...
The extra pins are just unused when talking to slower devices.
Yeah, cause Democrats had nothing to do with outrageous spending in the 80's. Are you referring to Don Regan? Oh, wait, you mean Ronald Reagan. I know it's tough to use that keyboard without skipping keys here and there.
This is why Slashdot should skip the political news. There is always some JV leftist who gets modded "insightful" for spouting off on Reagan, and relating copyright length to the Constitution.
The sick part is, I don't like long copyright terms. But there is nothing in the Constitution which forbids a long copyright term, so I just have to conclude that you have come to this planet to make everyone more stupid.
You are right about O'Neill and Reagan. Now it's all posturing. And Reagan was none too fond of Arlen Specter:
"One of them, Arlen Spector is holding out--his reason, that MX is vulnerable if put in Minute Man silos." page 305, The Reagan Diaries, Hardcover.
"Yesterday we lost in the Judiciary Committee. Brad Reynolds nomination (by me) to be the No. 3 man at Justice was rejected. They even refused to pass it out to the floor with a no pass recommendation because of their fear the whole Senate would do what they were unwilling to do--approve him. & they couldn't have done what they did without the help of 2 Repubs. Sens. Spector & Matthias. Well there are 2 Sens. I won't have to help campaign." page 339, The Reagan Diaries, Hardcover.
"It seems Specter has announced he's against Bork" page 535, The Reagan Diaries, Hardcover.
"Senator Specter has 2 candidates for Fed. Judgeships--after his performance I'll not reward him for his no vote on Bork." page 537, The Reagan Diaries, Hardcover.
Senator Specter is about as far away from Conservative Republicanism as you can get. His record is so bad that he, a long-sitting established Republican, was challenged by Rick Santorum, who actually believes in the plank he runs on.
If he really was a Republican, he wouldn't have spent so much time trying to undermine the most popular Republican president in at least 50 years, probably 100. He is a fraud, and he has been bought.
I love how we have to convert km into proper U.S. measurements even though we are the ones to fund this project through our tax dollars.
I know that Slashdot tends to be a metric love-fest, but this support of our governments ridiculous attempts to conform to the french standard is unwarranted. If we are paying for it, we should be able to know how far it traveled without Google doing a conversion for us.
"More significantly, Rowling was planning to publish her own encyclopedia to the Harry Potter world as one of her charitable publications"
She stated this, between bouts of tears, in the courtroom while trying to win a legal case. She also said this took the energy for the project right out of her. Also known as "making it up on the spot". Besides the fact that she knows that anything she produces, whether or not some unofficial version exists, will be bought in the same numbers regardless, due to the rabid nature of her fanbase.
Even were those plans in existence, her crying in the courtroom was a pure, pitiful attempt at manipulation. So pitiful that not one news agency reporting it had questioned why anyone would feel the need to cry over an allegation of copyright infringement.
I guess as someone who has actually not read the books, I can't fully understand the depths of her suffering. Oh wait, no, she's just playing the victimized woman card. Let's see some honest psychiatric evaluation of those crocodile tears.
It's insightful because it provides insight into the fact that the statements regarding the history of Venus were pulled out of someone's nether regions.
Very little understanding of Venus exists; full understanding wasn't even on the table. Your assertion that we shouldn't deride the "findings" because the findings are just a "theory" show why there are so many people who subscribe to the religion of Scientism without understanding the underlying tenets of science.
The "theory" catchall is always trotted out whenever someone wants to explain something they have no actual knowledge of. The grandparent was a breath of fresh air in a room full of stale "scientific" hit and runs that is Slashdot's "science" section.
What seem to want to ignore is that someone who is middle class, or doing well but not a millionaire, has that same lower tax rate for their investments. It's supposed to encourage people to invest their money, instead of sheltering it. Here's a hint: in the 80's, people took their money out of the shelters and invested it because the cap gains tax had been lowered from its previously confiscatory rate. It's hard enough to put your money at risk in an investment. To punish a successful investment is insane.
Yet that is exactly what those who engage in class warfare wish to do. They prey upon the lotto players, who have the idea that rich people become so by having rich parents, and by cheating the non-rich. Obviously, there are some who would fit this mold. But most "rich" people accomplish "being rich" by 2 methods: starting a company, which may be done with the help of investors, orby investing themselves and reaping the rewards.
In fact, one of the best ways to become rich is to be an investor. Buying lotto tickets? Not so much. Complaining about rich people not paying their fair share (a deception)? Not so much. Saving what you can, learning about investing and diversification, and investing that money? Absolutely.
The real solution to the middle class *and* upper class paying too much of their income in taxes is to stop wasting massive amounts of money on a useless bureaucracy. Strip the government of all the fat, the drone workers who spend 1.5 hour lunches at the bar (very popular in NY) and the other 6 hours staring out a window. Stop funding federally those things that should be taken care of by an individual state, and stop funding from the state that goes to projects that should be funded by the local governments, if they are even needed. A great example of this would be electronic voting machines.
NYS hasn't yet updated theirs, because the lever machines still work fine and people have been asking legislators not to get rid of them. The people who support the spending of all of this money use the argument (this is not a joke) that it won't cost us much of anything because the federal government is paying for it! Over 200 million dollars to buy something on a whimsical fad that we don't need. That's around $10 / resident (including non-voting age persons) just to vote.
Stop wasting money like it was your own, because you feel entitled. Stop confiscating money that is not your own, because you feel entitled. You are entitled to what you earn/create by the sweat of your own brow. If you purchase an investment, you may be entitled to a portion of what that group of people make. It's call a dividend. If you sell something that you own, you are entitled to that money which you are able to convince the other party to pay. The government doesn't.
The only way that post is interesting is that it has an interesting amount of anecdote and is not an actual benchmark that can be trusted. Having customers who have Windows Mobile 6 smartphones, Few of them will last 5 days while doing anything other than waiting for an occasional ring. I suppose if you never *talk* on your phone, and it spends most of it's time *asleep*, you might get 163 hours out of a charge (he magically fails to mention that it might be plugged in). But if you are actually using any programs on it, that battery is toast with all that junk open (Windows Media Player? Is it actually playing music? Why leave it open?). This is like the file copy troll all over again.
Congratulations. You read some articles. For a second, I thought you had invented a Time Machine and discovered this amazing fact on your own. Instead, you seem to be expelling hot methane rather than being an authority on early Earth history.
How does this stuff get modded up in the first place?
I give up. Your steadfast defense of this nice shiny surety that the galaxy in question is 12.8 billion years old is not penetrable. You obviously will always rely on statements of authority to form the beliefs you cling to. Whoever that authority currently is will be the authority whose position you will take.
"That is, the universe is about 13.7 billion years old,[1] with an uncertainty of 200 million years. However, this age is based on the assumption that the project's underlying model is correct; other methods of estimating the age of the universe could give different ages. Assuming an extra background of relativistic particles, for example, can enlarge the error bars of the WMAP constraint by one order of magnitude"
"Assuming the validity of the models used to determine this age, the residual accuracy yields a margin of error near one percent."
"This is the value currently most quoted by astronomers"
"Calculating the age of the universe is only accurate if the assumptions built into the models being used to estimate it are also accurate"
Then from you: "Trends are towards more accurate estimates. I'm asking you to show why that trend doesn't work in this case"
No, it seems to me that the Trends are towards *different* estimates. Older or younger does not mean more accurate.
"But no amount of scientific advancement is going to change the value of those constants"
Even taking into account the possibility of these "constants" never changing, new data previously "unknown" will change the date.
50 year old estimates were also based on "constants" which are either now not so constant, or don't provide the whole picture. Again, you fail to address the point: How is this date accurate when previous dates were inaccurate? Those previous dates were set using the same arguments you use now.
I don't need to demonstrate an error in calculation, as I am questioning any ability to perform a calculation with so little data. Why don't you show me the data that convinces you that the distant galaxy mentioned is 12.8 billion years old. Show me your raw data that allows you to even apply a mathematical formula.
Is it the perceived size? How was that arrived at? Perceived wobble resulting from certain amounts of gravity? Again, how was that arrived at? Perceived distance? How was that arrived at? Perceived mass? How was that arrived at? Where did each data point come from? You are basing your argument on this huge swaying tower of possibilities, with no foundation in cold hard facts.
Asking me to prove you wrong places the onus on the wrong party. Trends, history, and statistics are on my side, and I will trust those nice solid figures before the wild claims of attention-seekers.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent argument. Stupid and wrong? Now that's flamebait. Further flamebait would be for me to say something like "if you stop looking for aliens in radio signals for a minute, maybe you would have the time to think about the logic of their arguments and how weak they are".
Now that's flamebait. Previously, I posted a rebuttal of sorts to someone regurgitating someone else's "discoveries" about ice cores.
If you read what I was replying to again, I want you to see that the person was basically trying to put the onus of proof on the OP not to discover the truth, but to try and weaken his argument without giving his own evidence.
I don't know why I am a jerk just for calling out union leeches. Maybe he wasn't one, but I enjoy the artistic license of lumping him/her in with them. Now, maybe your state teachers union is a benevolent one. Mine is NYSUT, and they care about extending their political power, and not so much about teachers.
As I comment below in response to a teacher, I have nothing against teachers. I had many great teachers, and wish my kids could have all of them (not possible due to retirement, everyone gets old). Even if they were still there, the system is set up against education. Instead, our local schools focus on qualifying as many children as possible for special needs (money), participating in experimental educational programs (grant money) and social "education" (raising the next generation to think as they do, instead of for themselves). The typical response would perhaps be "they need more money!". Unfortunately, our local district is already spending more than 20K per student per year. A good 1 million or more of that is 1 superintendent, 1 assistant superintendent, 3 principals and vice-principals (1 set for each school), and secretaries for each of those figures. 1200 students. 8 administrators.
I'm not an a**hole, because I don't like the feeling of bulls**t sliding by me.
Umm... have you seen some of the comments put out by NYSUT (NYS United Teachers)? They are extremely aggressive at defending what they consider to be their turf.
In NYS, we have had a very hard time getting good educational freedom legislation passed specifically because of the union. Note I did not say "teachers", but "teachers union". Even our local teachers cringe at the decadence of the union headquarters. They are like a palace, and they have an ungodly budget.
Unless the Wikipedia article is incorrect in regards to NEA, they are "opposed" to homeschooling. I can't vouch for that, as I didn't personally research it, and as we know Wikipedia doesn't approve of original research anyway :).
I think that certainly pay, benefits, and working conditions are concerns of teachers, but the union in NYS seems to be far more interested in being a gatekeeper. I don't know if they are available online, but feel free to try and google their radio spots regarding charter schools. They were quite disturbing in their portrayal of some very dedicated attempts to improve educational quality in the state.
I say all of this as someone who graduated from a public school, and enjoyed most of it, and liked most of my teachers. In fact, I would say I had some of the best teachers available. Some still teach in the local school, but the school itself is garbage, with garbage administrators and garbage goals. You could take 3 of those teachers I had, clone them and put them in charge, and you would have an excellent school.
But you won't see that anytime soon, and there is no reason why parents should have to sit around and wait. Not that you made that argument, so I don't want to attribute that to you. It's more of a general comment.
modded the parent flamebait so you wouldn't see it.
And that comment is a troll because you don't agree with it?
Well I am glad to hear that, and certainly no solution is perfect. Those homeschoolers who I have talked to often speak of the various difficulties they can encounter. However, most started out with sending their kids to school, and they had more difficulties then.
The other item you mentioned, which is full-time devotion to the teaching, is assuming that homeschoolers follow a public school schedule. They often don't.
3 hours a day or less is usually enough time to do the lessons, assign practice work, grade assignments, and make sure the kids have had exercise. Cooperative children (those who aren't trying to avoid the work) can finish faster.
The reasons for this are simple. There are only a few kids to teach, usually, and individual instruction is faster for most things. "Study Hall", "Lunch", Gym, etc., usually do not require monitoring (again dependent on the kids involved).
Extra curricular activities are much the same in terms of time commitment. Little League, swimming, soccer, etc, are all a pain in the rear still. I don't think there is a solution for that :).
Pro-union bias often arises as a topic in homeschooling because they as a lobby are one of the greatest opponents of home schooling. They frequently push for increased truancy ordinances (targeted at homeschooled children, who have been "picked up" on their way to the library), teacher and school review of curriculum, etc.
The teacher review of curriculum is particularly laughable, since homeschooled children on the whole perform far better in standardized testing than the teacher's own students.
If you have something to add to the article, why don't you just add it, and cite it. Instead of complaining about the cited content, try and get it removed. That was my first visit to that article, but I knew what I would find. Why? Because there have been many published studies on the success of homeschooled children in education vs. their formally-schooled counterparts.
Note that I did not say that Homeschooling always produces good results. But it has a better track record than the alternatives. Instead of trying to fight it, why not try to find out why it is more successful and take lessons from it.
That's funny. Measuring ice core Oxygen isotope proxies is so effective, soon we will be using it to monitor daily temperatures.
Or not. I'm sure you came to your conclusions reading literature written by someone who has spent a lot of time trying to measure temperature by looking at ice cores. I prefer to look at the thermometer.
Tell me, how do you measure an "ice core" from this year. Please be specific as to the steps involved, and how you blindly test this hypothesis (i.e. without knowing the actual measurements, perform the test and see how the results match).
Which will not give you anything resembling exact temperatures. Which you would actually need to plot "data" points.
from Wikipedia, in a sourced section of the article:
Test results
Figure 2. Home School Students Compared to the National Norm Group in Grade Equivalent Units, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives.
Figure 2. Home School Students Compared to the National Norm Group in Grade Equivalent Units, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives
Figure 1. Academic Achievement of Home School, Catholic/Private and the Nation's Students, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives
Figure 1. Academic Achievement of Home School, Catholic/Private and the Nation's Students, Scholastic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics of Home School Students in 1998, Lawrence M. Rudner, University of Maryland, College Park. From Education Policy Analysis Archives
Numerous studies have found that homeschooled students on average outperform their peers on standardized tests.[52][53] Home Schooling Achievement, a study conducted by National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), supported the academic integrity of homeschooling. Among the homeschooled students who took the tests, the average homeschooled student outperformed his public school peers by 30 to 37 percentile points across all subjects. The study also indicates that public school performance gaps between minorities and genders were virtually non-existent among the homeschooled students who took the tests.[54]
As for social adjustment:
John Taylor later found, using the Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale, "while half of the conventionally schooled children scored at or below the 50th percentile (in self-concept), only 10.3% of the home-schooling children did so."[57] He further stated that "the self-concept of home-schooling children is significantly higher (and very much so statistically) than that of children attending the conventional school. This has implications in the areas of academic achievement and socialization, to mention only two. These areas have been found to parallel self-concept. Regarding socialization, Taylor's results would mean that very few home-schooling children are socially deprived. He claims that critics who speak out against home schooling on the basis of social deprivation are actually addressing an area which favors home schoolers.[57]
Opposition to homeschooling comes from varied sources, including some organizations of teachers and school districts. The National Education Association, a United States professional association and union representing teachers, opposes homeschooling.[70][71]
Of course there are those who oppose homeshooling:
Opponents of homeschooling state concerns falling into several categories: standards of academic quality and completeness; (Notice they don't like measurements, only vague suspicions)
(continued...)reduced funding for public schools; (ahh! here we come to the crux of the matter)
lack of socialization with peers of different ethnic and religious backgrounds; (but they fail to cite)
fear of religious or social extremism; (OMG! Are they *religious*? Oops - "Reason for homeshooling: Can give child better education at home - 48.9% with an error of 3.79")
that homeschool curricula often exclude critical subjects; (not cited)
that parents are sheltering their children, or denying them opportunities that are their right such as social development, or providing an unfair advantage over students whose parents lack the time or money to homeschool; existence of parallel societies not fitting into standards of citizenship and national community. [72]
This is actually hilarious, because the article cites thi
Growth rate of coral. Wow, talk about drinking the kool-aid. How does anyone know what else might have affected the growth rate of coral at the time? And "sediments"? I know this is difficult for people who want/need to believe in the latest fad, but you can't tell someone what the temperatures were without a measurement of said temperatures with an accurate temperature measurement device installed and calibrated to our modern specifications being used by people of whatever time period you are wondering about.
It never fails that when someone questions a foolish, oft-wrong authority that a response from the crowd of "Defense! Defense!" is heard. It's like the Zero-population gain folks, with their Malthusian scenarios. It doesn't matter how many times they're wrong, someone will try and take a micro-sample somewhere to use for evidence.
We have no reasonably accurate measurement of temperature before the existence of reasonably accurate measurement devices.
Actually, it's just like a USB A to B cable. You get a FW800 - FW400 cable, and you can get either 4 or six pin. I have all of these. FW 400 6 pin can connect to a 4 pin with a cheap cable, FW 800 to 400 6 pin with a cheap cable, etc...
The extra pins are just unused when talking to slower devices.
Yeah, cause Democrats had nothing to do with outrageous spending in the 80's. Are you referring to Don Regan? Oh, wait, you mean Ronald Reagan. I know it's tough to use that keyboard without skipping keys here and there.
This is why Slashdot should skip the political news. There is always some JV leftist who gets modded "insightful" for spouting off on Reagan, and relating copyright length to the Constitution.
The sick part is, I don't like long copyright terms. But there is nothing in the Constitution which forbids a long copyright term, so I just have to conclude that you have come to this planet to make everyone more stupid.
You are right about O'Neill and Reagan. Now it's all posturing. And Reagan was none too fond of Arlen Specter:
"One of them, Arlen Spector is holding out--his reason, that MX is vulnerable if put in Minute Man silos." page 305, The Reagan Diaries, Hardcover.
"Yesterday we lost in the Judiciary Committee. Brad Reynolds nomination (by me) to be the No. 3 man at Justice was rejected. They even refused to pass it out to the floor with a no pass recommendation because of their fear the whole Senate would do what they were unwilling to do--approve him. & they couldn't have done what they did without the help of 2 Repubs. Sens. Spector & Matthias. Well there are 2 Sens. I won't have to help campaign." page 339, The Reagan Diaries, Hardcover.
"It seems Specter has announced he's against Bork" page 535, The Reagan Diaries, Hardcover.
"Senator Specter has 2 candidates for Fed. Judgeships--after his performance I'll not reward him for his no vote on Bork." page 537, The Reagan Diaries, Hardcover.
Senator Specter is about as far away from Conservative Republicanism as you can get. His record is so bad that he, a long-sitting established Republican, was challenged by Rick Santorum, who actually believes in the plank he runs on.
If he really was a Republican, he wouldn't have spent so much time trying to undermine the most popular Republican president in at least 50 years, probably 100. He is a fraud, and he has been bought.
I love how we have to convert km into proper U.S. measurements even though we are the ones to fund this project through our tax dollars.
I know that Slashdot tends to be a metric love-fest, but this support of our governments ridiculous attempts to conform to the french standard is unwarranted. If we are paying for it, we should be able to know how far it traveled without Google doing a conversion for us.
"More significantly, Rowling was planning to publish her own encyclopedia to the Harry Potter world as one of her charitable publications"
She stated this, between bouts of tears, in the courtroom while trying to win a legal case. She also said this took the energy for the project right out of her. Also known as "making it up on the spot". Besides the fact that she knows that anything she produces, whether or not some unofficial version exists, will be bought in the same numbers regardless, due to the rabid nature of her fanbase.
Even were those plans in existence, her crying in the courtroom was a pure, pitiful attempt at manipulation. So pitiful that not one news agency reporting it had questioned why anyone would feel the need to cry over an allegation of copyright infringement.
I guess as someone who has actually not read the books, I can't fully understand the depths of her suffering. Oh wait, no, she's just playing the victimized woman card. Let's see some honest psychiatric evaluation of those crocodile tears.
It's insightful because it provides insight into the fact that the statements regarding the history of Venus were pulled out of someone's nether regions.
Very little understanding of Venus exists; full understanding wasn't even on the table. Your assertion that we shouldn't deride the "findings" because the findings are just a "theory" show why there are so many people who subscribe to the religion of Scientism without understanding the underlying tenets of science.
The "theory" catchall is always trotted out whenever someone wants to explain something they have no actual knowledge of. The grandparent was a breath of fresh air in a room full of stale "scientific" hit and runs that is Slashdot's "science" section.
What seem to want to ignore is that someone who is middle class, or doing well but not a millionaire, has that same lower tax rate for their investments. It's supposed to encourage people to invest their money, instead of sheltering it. Here's a hint: in the 80's, people took their money out of the shelters and invested it because the cap gains tax had been lowered from its previously confiscatory rate. It's hard enough to put your money at risk in an investment. To punish a successful investment is insane.
Yet that is exactly what those who engage in class warfare wish to do. They prey upon the lotto players, who have the idea that rich people become so by having rich parents, and by cheating the non-rich. Obviously, there are some who would fit this mold. But most "rich" people accomplish "being rich" by 2 methods: starting a company, which may be done with the help of investors, orby investing themselves and reaping the rewards.
In fact, one of the best ways to become rich is to be an investor. Buying lotto tickets? Not so much. Complaining about rich people not paying their fair share (a deception)? Not so much. Saving what you can, learning about investing and diversification, and investing that money? Absolutely.
The real solution to the middle class *and* upper class paying too much of their income in taxes is to stop wasting massive amounts of money on a useless bureaucracy. Strip the government of all the fat, the drone workers who spend 1.5 hour lunches at the bar (very popular in NY) and the other 6 hours staring out a window. Stop funding federally those things that should be taken care of by an individual state, and stop funding from the state that goes to projects that should be funded by the local governments, if they are even needed. A great example of this would be electronic voting machines.
NYS hasn't yet updated theirs, because the lever machines still work fine and people have been asking legislators not to get rid of them. The people who support the spending of all of this money use the argument (this is not a joke) that it won't cost us much of anything because the federal government is paying for it! Over 200 million dollars to buy something on a whimsical fad that we don't need. That's around $10 / resident (including non-voting age persons) just to vote.
Stop wasting money like it was your own, because you feel entitled. Stop confiscating money that is not your own, because you feel entitled. You are entitled to what you earn/create by the sweat of your own brow. If you purchase an investment, you may be entitled to a portion of what that group of people make. It's call a dividend. If you sell something that you own, you are entitled to that money which you are able to convince the other party to pay. The government doesn't.
The only way that post is interesting is that it has an interesting amount of anecdote and is not an actual benchmark that can be trusted. Having customers who have Windows Mobile 6 smartphones, Few of them will last 5 days while doing anything other than waiting for an occasional ring. I suppose if you never *talk* on your phone, and it spends most of it's time *asleep*, you might get 163 hours out of a charge (he magically fails to mention that it might be plugged in). But if you are actually using any programs on it, that battery is toast with all that junk open (Windows Media Player? Is it actually playing music? Why leave it open?). This is like the file copy troll all over again.
Congratulations. You read some articles. For a second, I thought you had invented a Time Machine and discovered this amazing fact on your own. Instead, you seem to be expelling hot methane rather than being an authority on early Earth history.
How does this stuff get modded up in the first place?
"Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you...The Five-Assed Monkey!"
One of the best single lines ever. That along with "He has only one ass! He is of no use to me. I must burn the room!
You know, the one that allows you to capture a portion of a page and look at the latest version of that section (a la "subscribe").
Beauty, they didn't even take a year to snag that feature and rename it.
I give up. Your steadfast defense of this nice shiny surety that the galaxy in question is 12.8 billion years old is not penetrable. You obviously will always rely on statements of authority to form the beliefs you cling to. Whoever that authority currently is will be the authority whose position you will take.
What an amazing lack of introspection.
From Wikipedia:
"That is, the universe is about 13.7 billion years old,[1] with an uncertainty of 200 million years. However, this age is based on the assumption that the project's underlying model is correct; other methods of estimating the age of the universe could give different ages. Assuming an extra background of relativistic particles, for example, can enlarge the error bars of the WMAP constraint by one order of magnitude"
"Assuming the validity of the models used to determine this age, the residual accuracy yields a margin of error near one percent."
"This is the value currently most quoted by astronomers"
"Calculating the age of the universe is only accurate if the assumptions built into the models being used to estimate it are also accurate"
Then from you: "Trends are towards more accurate estimates. I'm asking you to show why that trend doesn't work in this case"
No, it seems to me that the Trends are towards *different* estimates. Older or younger does not mean more accurate.
"But no amount of scientific advancement is going to change the value of those constants"
Even taking into account the possibility of these "constants" never changing, new data previously "unknown" will change the date.
50 year old estimates were also based on "constants" which are either now not so constant, or don't provide the whole picture. Again, you fail to address the point: How is this date accurate when previous dates were inaccurate? Those previous dates were set using the same arguments you use now.
I don't need to demonstrate an error in calculation, as I am questioning any ability to perform a calculation with so little data. Why don't you show me the data that convinces you that the distant galaxy mentioned is 12.8 billion years old. Show me your raw data that allows you to even apply a mathematical formula.
Is it the perceived size? How was that arrived at? Perceived wobble resulting from certain amounts of gravity? Again, how was that arrived at? Perceived distance? How was that arrived at? Perceived mass? How was that arrived at? Where did each data point come from? You are basing your argument on this huge swaying tower of possibilities, with no foundation in cold hard facts.
Asking me to prove you wrong places the onus on the wrong party. Trends, history, and statistics are on my side, and I will trust those nice solid figures before the wild claims of attention-seekers.