Having actually worked in a public school district, I can tell you unequivocally that it is just a mantra. Most of the teachers in the district I worked for start at $23K, and teachers at other districts around the state start at between $21K and $25K. Top-end pay for teachers ranges from $45K to $65K, depending on their degree level (bachelor's vs. masters), and that's after 30+ years of teaching in the same district. Most of the money that our district received to buy things like computers, and build new buildings (not to replace aging buildings, but to build new ones because there were too many students in the school, or to replace aging trailers and temporary buildings because there were too many students for the existing buildings) was funded not by increased taxes, but by bond issues, and was later repaid.
Maybe in your community, teachers are better-paid than police officers (starting pay for a cop here is $37K), but here they are not, and in many places they are not. Maybe in your community, schools raise taxes to build new buildings simply because their existing buildings are too old, not too small. But that is not reality in many places.
You make an interesting point about learning/education being a process that students undergo, but I think you are confusing the issue. First, the money spent on the computers probably comes from a capital fund, which in many states cannot be used for teacher pay or textbooks (it's illegal to mix the funds in many states).
Second, the "mantra of we need more money for books and teachers" doesn't seem to have helped because it's a mantra, and the funding doesn't actually get improved. The argument often used is "the money we gave you already hasn't helped, why should we give you more?" (the "good money after bad" theory.) The problem can be made more clear this way: if we funded the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force with $10 Million to share between them, we'd have been run over by the North Koreans already. We have asked our public schools to perform one of the most vital and non-trivial tasks in society, and we have asked them to do it with about 20% of the money they need. Until we fully fund all public schools, we cannot say that we have fairly assessed them, and are in no position to criticize them for failing.
Actually, this might be your chance to patent software! Yes, you too can be your own Jeff Bozo, and patent an obvious software algorithm with tons of prior art!
I have presented my evidence: without reference to soul, spirit, or other similar concepts, the body is all that there is. Until the body ceases to exist, by the complete action of chemistry and/or physics, it is the providence of the owner of the body, and no one else (save a will, or living relatives), what the disposition of the body is, given the action of chemisty and physics. Prove otherwise.
I am not seeking anything. I have merely pointed out that parent posts have assumed things not in evidence; namely, that just because a human being has died means that their bodies are open to whatever they desire to do to/with them. If a person can make decisions about what is permissible to do with their bodies, it certainly seems reasonable to assume that inability to object doesn't change that. We recognize that intoxication, for example, is not implicit consent to sexual intercourse; indeed, we recognize that intoxication prevents consent. Our courts (rightly) recognize necrophilic acts as crimes, this would certainly seem to stem from a similar idea: just because someone cannot respond, negatively or positively, to a query does not mean that the answer is "whatever you want."
Someone (other than you) doesn't have to inhabit it. If you are the only person who exists, and the world as you perceive it is 100% a figment of your imagination, my living breathing body is your living breathing body, or at the least, is your living breathing perception... and, indeed, is sacrosanct in so far as it is all that there is, as far as you perceive.
OTOH, if anyone other than you exists, and you cannot determine whether my body is your own body or that of anyone else, you must either assert that I can decide to do to your body whatever I see fit, or admit that anyone other than you can decide what can be done to their body.
I mean, let's be serious here. If you learned that a corpse were buried under the house you just finished building by hand after countless hours of painstaking labor, would you tear it down to return the land to its "last authority?"
Without hesitation.
Like you, she seems to be confusing the corpse for the person. Get over it -- you're gonna die, and then you'll be dead.
Spoken like someone without respect for the living or the dead.
Here is the basic problem, as I see it: if you do not belive in a soul, spirit, or similar concept, then the body is all that there is. We can assume that you believe that people can decide what happens to their own self; that should I choose to get a tattoo, for example, that is my right. It follows from this that what happens to my body is up to me, in so far as physics and chemistry allow. It seems pretty obvious that dying starts a chemical/physical process that is finished when all of the parts of my body are converted from the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats that make up my body. Until that process is complete, you have no basis to decide that my "self" no longer exists; as long as that is true, it is not up to you to decide what happens to my body, dead or alive.
Actually, I disagree with both this post and the immediate predecessor: someone is buried in those graves. Absent any living relatives, or a will to the contrary, the people who are buried there own that land and are the last authority on it. At the very least, they are buried there, and there is nothing more sacrosanct than the self. If you (where you==The Royal You(tm)) can prove that the person who is buried there isn't there anymore, then you can do whatever you want to the land. If you cannot prove that, then leave it alone.
And I really don't see why people need to drag Apple into everything. Apple didn't invent keyrings and they weren't the first to deliver them commercially either.
In this case, because the Keychain would appear to be a well-known piece of prior art, which would make it unpatentable (at least by IBM). Whether Apple was first or in the middle is irrelevant to the instant case (as long as it was before IBM:).
People like to drag Apple into lots of things because even if they didn't invent something, or weren't the absolute first commercial producer of something, they are often the first computer company to mainstream new technologies. Apple didn't invent SCSI, but it had SCSI standard long before the rest of the mainstream computer world did. Ditto IEEE 1394 (which they helped invent), the 3.5" floppy (definitely not invented by Apple), USB 1.0 (invented by Intel, IIRC), the GUI and WIMP metaphors for user interaction (invented at Xerox PARC, according to everything that I've read). Apple gets cited because even though they didn't invent, or weren't the first to commercially use, a given product, it seems like they did. And perception is 99% of reality.
If you're not J. R. R. Tolkein, you don't have any gripes. You're not the author, and you're not the director of the movie. If you don't like one artist's interpretation of another artist's work, then don't expose yourself to it. Get over yourself.
In the generic case, you're probably right. However, there are candidates who grok the importance of open standards, open source, and the evils of things like the DMCA, permanent copyrights, software patents (at least as they are currently being exploited/granted), and other issues such as these. Those candidates will have input into their web infrastructure, and if I see a candidate purporting to be interested in open source or standards but whose website runs IIS, then I know that I can't trust them to understand. It's a weeding-out process, to me anyway.
My now deceased grandfather picked up the Macintosh, from System 6, at 70-something, and never had problems with it. By the time he died (at 82), he had conqured video-on-home-computer, was making VHS tapes of his travels from HI-8 and computer editing, and used his Macs (by then at 8.5) for 'Net (e-mail, web), Video (editing, audio, and so forth) and Publishing (he published several books from his 6100AV).
I would say, instead of "computers in general are not easy for an old fashioned 75 year old," that "Windows PCs, and most (maybe all) of their IBM-compatible OS competitors, are not appropriate for an old-fashioned 75 year old."
Neither Windows nor Linux is an appropriate choice for a new computer user, regardless of their age. The Mac OS is a much better place to start, and fares far better in getting people to use a computer for the purpose it is best suited: empowering people, by making (sorry, Larry) the easy things easy and the hard things possible. Whereas getting Mac OS 9 and earlier versions to be truly powerful required some serious wizard work, Mac OS X is both truly simple when you need it to be, and unbelievably powerful once you are ready for it. And, with Mac OS X, you can go from gnubie to guru without having to repartition your HDD later and install Linux, like you would if you had a Windows-based PC; the BSD world is already waiting for you.
No, I agree with whatever his name is, the Chief Exasperating Officer of RedHat: Linux is not ready for gunbie users on their home PCs. For all of that, neither is Windows.
"The edible portion of the cereal plant, commonly called the grain or kernel, is technically a complete fruit whose ovary-dereived layer very thin and dry." (On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen , McGee, Harold, Fireside 1984). I did not remember correctly about corn being an achene, but the part of the corn that we eat is, in fact, a fruit. It is a grass plant, as you point out, but that has no bearing on how it reproduces.
So is corn; it's botanically a fruit (in fact, an achene, IIRC), and nutritionally a starch, but nearly always treated as a vegetable. Just because the Supreme Court can't be bothered to do the Right Thing(tm) doesn't mean that we should tolerate it. Take back the tomato! Demand the fruits of justice!
Someone should do an article on how, when Bungie sold out to M$, Alex and Jason were quoted as saying that M$ wouldn't tell them what games to make, or what platforms to make them for.
So, after two years, Halo is the only thing Bungie made, and it was only available for the XBox. That sure is a big choice in platforms, and demonstrates how Bungie could tell M$ what games they were going to make. Sell Out indeed.
Interesting, coming from one of your clearly superior intellect, that you should choose name-calling.
Offer some evidence. I at least gave some information about where my idea came from. You... what, distrust the media? Sure. We all do. Do you have more than that? Or are you just name-calling because being Anonymous is Cowardly and offers some modicum of protection?
From Merriam-Webster: "3 a : a system of signals or symbols for communication"
A code is a way to transmit information. Just because HTML is a code which describes meta-data about how the information in a document should be displayed does not render its language any less a code. Calling someone who writes HTML a coder is perfectly apropos; they use a code (HTML) to tell someone (web browsing client software) what something means (Wherever you see "<B> or <b>", make the text 'bold', whatever that means for your client).
I have yet to see "the masses" making web apps. If you are talking about non-corporate website developers creating interactive sites, Perl has filled that niche for years, and PHP is making headway in that area. "The masses" don't do much beyond HTML email (which is done automagically by their email client, anyway), iCards and Blue Mountain, and possibly ImageReady and Flash. The most interactive that "the masses" get is passing virus-infected Flash games around.
The truth is that most people don't make websites or create interactive content. All FrontPage did was introduce security problems where no security problem had gone before.
Actually, the Constitution is a document which (unsurprisingly) defines how the government of the United States is to be constituted. It is primarily a document which defines how the government of the United States is permitted to operate, both in the negative sense ("Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion [...]"; "No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed") as well as in the positive sense ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States [...]"; "The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes [...]"). To claim that the Constitution only restricts how the government of the United States can operate implies that the Constitution 1) is half the document it actually is, and 2) enumerates all restrictions on the government, which would seem to grant the government the power to exectute anything not covered in the Constitution. Now, just because the Congress and the President have tried throughout history to do exactly that doesn't mean that it's designed that way.
Very good points, thanks for the reply. It was also brought up in another article's replies that the GPL is a distribution license, not a use license, and that drives a great big wedge between an EULA and GPL.
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Paid back by the district, with interest.
Initially, perhaps. But the taxes are 1) temporary, and 2) paid back by the district. So, I fail to see where this is relevant.
Having actually worked in a public school district, I can tell you unequivocally that it is just a mantra. Most of the teachers in the district I worked for start at $23K, and teachers at other districts around the state start at between $21K and $25K. Top-end pay for teachers ranges from $45K to $65K, depending on their degree level (bachelor's vs. masters), and that's after 30+ years of teaching in the same district. Most of the money that our district received to buy things like computers, and build new buildings (not to replace aging buildings, but to build new ones because there were too many students in the school, or to replace aging trailers and temporary buildings because there were too many students for the existing buildings) was funded not by increased taxes, but by bond issues, and was later repaid.
Maybe in your community, teachers are better-paid than police officers (starting pay for a cop here is $37K), but here they are not, and in many places they are not. Maybe in your community, schools raise taxes to build new buildings simply because their existing buildings are too old, not too small. But that is not reality in many places.
You make an interesting point about learning/education being a process that students undergo, but I think you are confusing the issue. First, the money spent on the computers probably comes from a capital fund, which in many states cannot be used for teacher pay or textbooks (it's illegal to mix the funds in many states).
Second, the "mantra of we need more money for books and teachers" doesn't seem to have helped because it's a mantra, and the funding doesn't actually get improved. The argument often used is "the money we gave you already hasn't helped, why should we give you more?" (the "good money after bad" theory.) The problem can be made more clear this way: if we funded the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force with $10 Million to share between them, we'd have been run over by the North Koreans already. We have asked our public schools to perform one of the most vital and non-trivial tasks in society, and we have asked them to do it with about 20% of the money they need. Until we fully fund all public schools, we cannot say that we have fairly assessed them, and are in no position to criticize them for failing.
Actually, this might be your chance to patent software! Yes, you too can be your own Jeff Bozo, and patent an obvious software algorithm with tons of prior art!
I have presented my evidence: without reference to soul, spirit, or other similar concepts, the body is all that there is. Until the body ceases to exist, by the complete action of chemistry and/or physics, it is the providence of the owner of the body, and no one else (save a will, or living relatives), what the disposition of the body is, given the action of chemisty and physics. Prove otherwise.
I am not seeking anything. I have merely pointed out that parent posts have assumed things not in evidence; namely, that just because a human being has died means that their bodies are open to whatever they desire to do to/with them. If a person can make decisions about what is permissible to do with their bodies, it certainly seems reasonable to assume that inability to object doesn't change that. We recognize that intoxication, for example, is not implicit consent to sexual intercourse; indeed, we recognize that intoxication prevents consent. Our courts (rightly) recognize necrophilic acts as crimes, this would certainly seem to stem from a similar idea: just because someone cannot respond, negatively or positively, to a query does not mean that the answer is "whatever you want."
Someone (other than you) doesn't have to inhabit it. If you are the only person who exists, and the world as you perceive it is 100% a figment of your imagination, my living breathing body is your living breathing body, or at the least, is your living breathing perception ... and, indeed, is sacrosanct in so far as it is all that there is, as far as you perceive.
OTOH, if anyone other than you exists, and you cannot determine whether my body is your own body or that of anyone else, you must either assert that I can decide to do to your body whatever I see fit, or admit that anyone other than you can decide what can be done to their body.
I mean, let's be serious here. If you learned that a corpse were buried under the house you just finished building by hand after countless hours of painstaking labor, would you tear it down to return the land to its "last authority?"
Without hesitation.
Like you, she seems to be confusing the corpse for the person. Get over it -- you're gonna die, and then you'll be dead.
Spoken like someone without respect for the living or the dead.
Here is the basic problem, as I see it: if you do not belive in a soul, spirit, or similar concept, then the body is all that there is. We can assume that you believe that people can decide what happens to their own self; that should I choose to get a tattoo, for example, that is my right. It follows from this that what happens to my body is up to me, in so far as physics and chemistry allow. It seems pretty obvious that dying starts a chemical/physical process that is finished when all of the parts of my body are converted from the proteins, carbohydrates, and fats that make up my body. Until that process is complete, you have no basis to decide that my "self" no longer exists; as long as that is true, it is not up to you to decide what happens to my body, dead or alive.
Actually, I disagree with both this post and the immediate predecessor: someone is buried in those graves. Absent any living relatives, or a will to the contrary, the people who are buried there own that land and are the last authority on it. At the very least, they are buried there, and there is nothing more sacrosanct than the self. If you (where you==The Royal You(tm)) can prove that the person who is buried there isn't there anymore, then you can do whatever you want to the land. If you cannot prove that, then leave it alone.
Prove it.
And I really don't see why people need to drag Apple into everything. Apple didn't invent keyrings and they weren't the first to deliver them commercially either.
:).
In this case, because the Keychain would appear to be a well-known piece of prior art, which would make it unpatentable (at least by IBM). Whether Apple was first or in the middle is irrelevant to the instant case (as long as it was before IBM
People like to drag Apple into lots of things because even if they didn't invent something, or weren't the absolute first commercial producer of something, they are often the first computer company to mainstream new technologies. Apple didn't invent SCSI, but it had SCSI standard long before the rest of the mainstream computer world did. Ditto IEEE 1394 (which they helped invent), the 3.5" floppy (definitely not invented by Apple), USB 1.0 (invented by Intel, IIRC), the GUI and WIMP metaphors for user interaction (invented at Xerox PARC, according to everything that I've read). Apple gets cited because even though they didn't invent, or weren't the first to commercially use, a given product, it seems like they did. And perception is 99% of reality.
If you're not J. R. R. Tolkein, you don't have any gripes. You're not the author, and you're not the director of the movie. If you don't like one artist's interpretation of another artist's work, then don't expose yourself to it. Get over yourself.
In the generic case, you're probably right. However, there are candidates who grok the importance of open standards, open source, and the evils of things like the DMCA, permanent copyrights, software patents (at least as they are currently being exploited/granted), and other issues such as these. Those candidates will have input into their web infrastructure, and if I see a candidate purporting to be interested in open source or standards but whose website runs IIS, then I know that I can't trust them to understand. It's a weeding-out process, to me anyway.
My now deceased grandfather picked up the Macintosh, from System 6, at 70-something, and never had problems with it. By the time he died (at 82), he had conqured video-on-home-computer, was making VHS tapes of his travels from HI-8 and computer editing, and used his Macs (by then at 8.5) for 'Net (e-mail, web), Video (editing, audio, and so forth) and Publishing (he published several books from his 6100AV).
I would say, instead of "computers in general are not easy for an old fashioned 75 year old," that "Windows PCs, and most (maybe all) of their IBM-compatible OS competitors, are not appropriate for an old-fashioned 75 year old."
Neither Windows nor Linux is an appropriate choice for a new computer user, regardless of their age. The Mac OS is a much better place to start, and fares far better in getting people to use a computer for the purpose it is best suited: empowering people, by making (sorry, Larry) the easy things easy and the hard things possible. Whereas getting Mac OS 9 and earlier versions to be truly powerful required some serious wizard work, Mac OS X is both truly simple when you need it to be, and unbelievably powerful once you are ready for it. And, with Mac OS X, you can go from gnubie to guru without having to repartition your HDD later and install Linux, like you would if you had a Windows-based PC; the BSD world is already waiting for you.
No, I agree with whatever his name is, the Chief Exasperating Officer of RedHat: Linux is not ready for gunbie users on their home PCs. For all of that, neither is Windows.
No, it doesn't. I have it installed on a SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 box right now, and it works just fine.
"The edible portion of the cereal plant, commonly called the grain or kernel, is technically a complete fruit whose ovary-dereived layer very thin and dry." (On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen , McGee, Harold, Fireside 1984). I did not remember correctly about corn being an achene, but the part of the corn that we eat is, in fact, a fruit. It is a grass plant, as you point out, but that has no bearing on how it reproduces.
So is corn; it's botanically a fruit (in fact, an achene, IIRC), and nutritionally a starch, but nearly always treated as a vegetable. Just because the Supreme Court can't be bothered to do the Right Thing(tm) doesn't mean that we should tolerate it. Take back the tomato! Demand the fruits of justice!
Someone should do an article on how, when Bungie sold out to M$, Alex and Jason were quoted as saying that M$ wouldn't tell them what games to make, or what platforms to make them for.
So, after two years, Halo is the only thing Bungie made, and it was only available for the XBox. That sure is a big choice in platforms, and demonstrates how Bungie could tell M$ what games they were going to make. Sell Out indeed.
Interesting, coming from one of your clearly superior intellect, that you should choose name-calling.
... what, distrust the media? Sure. We all do. Do you have more than that? Or are you just name-calling because being Anonymous is Cowardly and offers some modicum of protection?
Offer some evidence. I at least gave some information about where my idea came from. You
but I recall there being an article (on PBS-TV, maybe?) about how few Iraqis, outside of the Baath party members, had TVs.
If you don't have a TV, how can you play a console? Or, perhaps, this only addresses former (current?) Baath party members?
From Merriam-Webster: "3 a : a system of signals or symbols for communication"
A code is a way to transmit information. Just because HTML is a code which describes meta-data about how the information in a document should be displayed does not render its language any less a code. Calling someone who writes HTML a coder is perfectly apropos; they use a code (HTML) to tell someone (web browsing client software) what something means (Wherever you see "<B> or <b>", make the text 'bold', whatever that means for your client).
I have yet to see "the masses" making web apps. If you are talking about non-corporate website developers creating interactive sites, Perl has filled that niche for years, and PHP is making headway in that area. "The masses" don't do much beyond HTML email (which is done automagically by their email client, anyway), iCards and Blue Mountain, and possibly ImageReady and Flash. The most interactive that "the masses" get is passing virus-infected Flash games around.
The truth is that most people don't make websites or create interactive content. All FrontPage did was introduce security problems where no security problem had gone before.
Actually, the Constitution is a document which (unsurprisingly) defines how the government of the United States is to be constituted. It is primarily a document which defines how the government of the United States is permitted to operate, both in the negative sense ("Congress shall pass no law respecting an establishment of religion [...]"; "No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed") as well as in the positive sense ("The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States [...]"; "The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes [...]"). To claim that the Constitution only restricts how the government of the United States can operate implies that the Constitution 1) is half the document it actually is, and 2) enumerates all restrictions on the government, which would seem to grant the government the power to exectute anything not covered in the Constitution. Now, just because the Congress and the President have tried throughout history to do exactly that doesn't mean that it's designed that way.
Very good points, thanks for the reply. It was also brought up in another article's replies that the GPL is a distribution license, not a use license, and that drives a great big wedge between an EULA and GPL.