The greenie-weenies just hope this further bit of evidence of their fecklessness will go away if it's ignored and the adults understand no further comment is necessary.
All that eye wash about education was just a way to attract the necessary talent at below market rates as well as to get foundation funding. Once it became clear that Dr. Negroponte wasn't going to ride the OLPC to fame, if not fortune, he ditched the project having gotten a lot of high-level international press coverage and the red-carpet treatment by a bunch of presidents, prime ministers and the like.
I think we may need a new word because "rights", at least in my humble opinion, don't lay an obligation on anyone else or society in general, to fund. If you desire to express yourself by yodeling on a street corner you come fully equipped to do so and society has no obligation to buy you a megaphone or lessons.
If anything, this issue is more about those asserting the right; about their assumption of a right to impose their views on others or assuage guilt for being relatively wealthier, then about those who are supposed to enjoy the right to free internet access.
"We will need"? Do you have a mouse in your pocket or did I miss the coronation?
The only thing we need is fewer narrow-nosed, moralizing ideologues who can think of no other explanations for a diversity of opinion then stupidity or insanity and no other solution to the problem of a diversity of opinion but authoritarianism.
Oh, and since you seem to be a bit upset with hyperbole perhaps you could direct your ire at this:
If all TVs met state standards, California could avoid the $600-million cost of building a natural-gas-fired power plant, says Ken Rider, a commission staff engineer.
Ooops. That's not just hyperbolic it's hyperbolic and monumentally arrogant. I guess the two together are OK.
Carry on.
But "profound" thinning isn't sensationalism? Is there a scale of hyperbolic adjectives that maps to physical volumes or thicknesses? If there isn't then "profound" is an invitation to make an assumption unsupported by the facts.
As opposed, of course, to their doing a crappy job educating your kid in which case you can't sue them for dick as has been reaffirmed plenty of times.
My guess is that this is an extension of the "zero tolerance" attitude rampant in public education. Since public education employees have zero responsibility for educating kids it's just perfectly natural for them not to be responsible for the kid's safety either. So they promulgate poorly-worded and poorly thought-out regulations that take them off the hook for just about everything.
A kid gets shot? No problemo, they've got a zero tolerance weapons policy so they've done everything that can be expected and....they have no responsibility for the shooting.
Kids drop dead due to arrhythmias? No problemo. They make all the kids wear heart monitors which, while they may be medically useless, prove that the administration is worried enough to encumber every kid with a useless gadget. Responsibility? Not!
Go to a school board meeting with as many parents as you can find who are annoyed with this idiotic and self-serving idea, kick up a fuss and my guess is the school board will kill the idea. After all, they're looking for fewer waves not more.
Oh, I don't think it's fair, or accurate, to call him stupid. After all, he did manage to get himself elected president. It may be satisfying to dismiss Obama as stupid but the evidence suggests otherwise.
Still, any assumptions that don't include "stupid" still have to explain why an otherwise intelligent man would find reason to believe that if we all just wish hard enough the bad people will see the error of their ways and repent.
OK, so the people who'd kill or die to protect those kids, the people who wouldn't be seen as all that unusual giving the kid a kidney, *lots* of them don't really give two shits about their kid's education but the folks who are paid to show up, those folks do give two shits about the kid's education?
Since you're obviously a teacher, or the spouse of a teacher, let me clue you in about public education; education doesn't matter.
Teachers don't get or keep their jobs on the basis of their skill as teachers and superintendants don't get or keep their jobs on the basis of the academic performance of the schools they oversee. That's why the best teacher in the state can be teaching right next door to the lousiest teacher in the state and no one comments on the contrast. That's why teachers can be, and are, treated as interchangeable components.
If teachers are to be treated as if what they do matters then what they do has to be measured and those measurements have to have meaning and consequences. Since what teachers do isn't measured why shouldn't teachers be treated as if what they do doesn't matter?
Since the learning isn't important the only thing that does matter is getting the credential, the diploma. If a teacher endangers the reciept of the diploma by, unaccountably, demanding the kids learn then that teacher endangers the kids getting their passport stamped. Who has time to deal with a clueless shmuck like that? Just give the kid his "A" so he can shuffle off to the next tedious stop along the route to the diploma or degree.
When education matters, teaching matters. When teaching matters, teachers matter. It really isn't any more complicated then that.
We've made it big and complicated but the evidence is all around that it needn't be.
There used to be little, red schoolhouses all over the place and their modern descendants, charter schools, are also all over the place. Neither one needed/needs a school district with its inevitable central administration bureaucracy and both had/have to concern themselves with teacher competence since parents can don't have to incur the expense of changing their residence if they're not happy with the school.
Gates almost got it right with his small school idea but the problem isn't the size of the school so much as it is the lack of choices open to parents. A lot of small schools for parents to choose among would mean a lot of schools that live and die by parental satisfaction. Since parents are the only group that can legitimately claim to be interested primarily in getting kids a decent education that makes the concerns of the parents the concerns of the schools.
In a school district the concerns of the parents may, or may not be, of any interest to the professionals because they don't have to care.
Only nineteen years after the first installation of a Cyberknife English cancer patients don't have to take a plane to the US to get treatment?
Well all hail the National Health Service!
I wonder how important you'll have to be for the NHS to pop for Cyberknife treatment at a private clinic? Prime minister? PM's mum? Head of the PM's security detail? Cousin of an MP?
But maybe England's one of those places where those with political influence don't use it to save the lives of those closest to them. A place where noble dedication to the public good is the norm and prevents elected officials from taking advantage of the privileges of office for personal benefit at the expense of the public.
Naw, that's just stupid. Of course there's corruption of the system. The only questions are; how extensive it is and whether the news media sees fit to investigate and report.
Not even close. I remember compressed-air storage schemes being touted back in the '70s. The problem then, as now, is the cost which is the problem with all this alternative energy crap.
That's why there's so much emphasis is on how we'll all die soon if we don't embrace stupid energy; on a cost basis they all sucks so proponents have moved the issue to one in which cost is insignificant.
Matter of fact, every alternative energy scheme is a retread. They've all been around forever and they were all thrust aside by the likes of coal, nuclear and hydro.
That's nice in a science fiction story but in the real world hurricane modification research was curtailed because of the fear that unsuspected interactions would result in more damage not less.
It seems to me that we shouldn't tinker with the entire atmosphere if we don't have a good deal of confidence we can control one of the constituent phenomena.
With no new source of packets the era of cheap internet communications is coming to an end.
"We need to build a new Internet based on sustainable technology. We can no longer depend on an unending stream of cheap, easily-obtain packets to fuel the Internet. Plant-based packets, while still expensive and difficult to obtain are the only way to go if we are to move confidently into the twenty-first century", said movie star and technology guru Sean Penn.
Some critics maintain that recently-discussed slowing of the Internet is due to the escalating cost of packets but others maintain that the slowing is due to artificial constraints engineered by OPEC - the Organization of Packet Exporting Countries - in a bid to seize control of the Internet.
"For too long the wealthy nations of the west have treated the Internet as if it belonged to them when in fact, without a steady supply of cheap packets the Internet would not exist." said H.E. Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawian minister of Trade and Private Sector Development. "Malawian packet mines are too valuable a national resource to allow them to be exploited by wealthy, western nations where they are used to download pornography and pirate music."
Dr. Mutharika went on to outline a proposal to trademark high quality, natural, Malawian packets to differentiate them from the cheaply-made and inferior Chinese packets that are flooding the market.
"Consumers should be aware that cheap, artificial packets can clog the Internet's pipes and can easily cause modems to explode violently", Dr. Mutharika warned. "Natural packets are safe to use and protect the pristine beauty of the natural Internet."
If I'm not mistaken, the phones are going for $400 per. It doesn't look all that good compared to the $200 iPhone so why would I want one if I wasn't interested in the "open" aspect of the phone?
Tell you what, you start working on dropping farm subsidies and those appropriate technology folks can invent their solar heaters and batter-powered heaters. That'll keep you busy enough not to notice your nausea.
Look, while you're are absolutely right about subsidies, dropping them is going to be a tad tougher then saying (or writing) it. There are lots of people who have ahold of the federal tit and they aren't going to let go of it. They'll have to be pried off, fighting all the time. In the mean time some number of those poor folks have their lives improved by some worthwhile increment by the appropriate technology folks.
In general I despise the moral pretensions of "advocates" for poor people but the appropriate technology folks are putting their time where their mouths are. That gets them some props that the "do as I say because I won't do anything" crowd doesn't get.
No, if you pay teachers more without regard to their teaching skill then you get richer, but not better, teachers.
That's why smaller classrooms are such a scam.
California mandated smaller classrooms and since teaching skill isn't important it hardly mattered who was behind the teacher's desk just as long as a they had a body temperature above room temperature. As a result smaller classrooms resulted in lower test scores.
Pay for your own hobbies. If it's done on the public dime it ought to have substantive public benefits.
The Concorde, and the U.S. lunar program, were done for reasons of national pride. Among piss-poor reasons to spend government funds, that's got to be near the top. Britain and France would've been better off in every way if not for Concorde and the commercialization of space probably would've occurred in the 1970's if not for the the U.S. lunar landing program. I don't think any other political response was possible to the Soviet challenge but the price was high, maybe too high.
"To go where no man has gone before" is a nice, romantic tag-line for a cheesy television program but it's not what drives exploration and discovery. The motivating force for exploration has always been the all-mighty buck and you can see in the stagnation of the exploration of space how pivotal the profit motive is. No profit, no warp drives.
Yeah, Easter Island, a geographically isolated, stone-age culture with a total population that would give it "small town" status today has a lot to teach us about the dangers that face a globe-spanning economy with resources the Easter Islander's would dismiss as fantasies and technologies they'd scarcely understand.
The rest of the post consists of either misrepresentation of the current situation as in your use of England as an example of the dangers of overpopulation or clear repudiation of the beliefs of Malthusian fear-mongers as in China which is economically in vastly better shape then it was when its population was significantly less then it is now.
It becomes clear that the world just can't go on like that forever.
On the basis of the examples you offer, it's quite clear that the world can go on like this forever since your examples are either a) inapplicable or b) unsupportive of your claim.
In fact, history does provide a guide to the way the future's likely to unfold. When incomes rise to a certain level the population increase grinds to a halt.
All the wealthier nations, once you subtract the population additions made by recent immigrants, have either very low population growth or a shrinking population. Japan's robotic technology expenditures are driven by a combination of their aging (shrinking) population and a refusal to allow immigration. Who's going to take care of Japan's rapidly increasing geezer population? The U.S.'s population increase is driven by immigration.
If you look at the trends in global per capita income the conclusion to be drawn is that the global population increase will start slowing down within twenty years and top out about 2050 with global population decline to follow. I know that's the sort of thought to fill the zero-population racists hearts with glee but they'll have about as much to do with it as a rooster's crowing does with the rising of the sun.
Of course the human species will carry on, future historians will probably think of the 20th century as some crazy period full of socialist (in the late 20th/early 21st-century USA usually called "liberal") experiments.
Not just historians and there's no need to wait till the future. You can offer examples to the contrary but I'm unaware of any "socialist experiment" that can be deemed a success. With utter uniformity socialism's been either a failure or a disastrous failure.
Slashdot Mirror
The greenie-weenies just hope this further bit of evidence of their fecklessness will go away if it's ignored and the adults understand no further comment is necessary.
Oh, the OLPC was always about Nicolas Negroponte.
All that eye wash about education was just a way to attract the necessary talent at below market rates as well as to get foundation funding. Once it became clear that Dr. Negroponte wasn't going to ride the OLPC to fame, if not fortune, he ditched the project having gotten a lot of high-level international press coverage and the red-carpet treatment by a bunch of presidents, prime ministers and the like.
I think we may need a new word because "rights", at least in my humble opinion, don't lay an obligation on anyone else or society in general, to fund. If you desire to express yourself by yodeling on a street corner you come fully equipped to do so and society has no obligation to buy you a megaphone or lessons.
If anything, this issue is more about those asserting the right; about their assumption of a right to impose their views on others or assuage guilt for being relatively wealthier, then about those who are supposed to enjoy the right to free internet access.
No, "they" are ridiculed because of the absence of anything approximating proof of the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming.
If there were proof there wouldn't be any need for ridicule but the absence of proof elevates the value of ridicule from mere fun to pivotal.
Umm, because you got a lazy public defender or even a lazy private attorney who'd rather you take your chances with a plea bargain then do their job?
The only thing we need is fewer narrow-nosed, moralizing ideologues who can think of no other explanations for a diversity of opinion then stupidity or insanity and no other solution to the problem of a diversity of opinion but authoritarianism.
Oh, and since you seem to be a bit upset with hyperbole perhaps you could direct your ire at this:
If all TVs met state standards, California could avoid the $600-million cost of building a natural-gas-fired power plant, says Ken Rider, a commission staff engineer.
Ooops. That's not just hyperbolic it's hyperbolic and monumentally arrogant. I guess the two together are OK. Carry on.
But "profound" thinning isn't sensationalism? Is there a scale of hyperbolic adjectives that maps to physical volumes or thicknesses? If there isn't then "profound" is an invitation to make an assumption unsupported by the facts.
My guess is that this is an extension of the "zero tolerance" attitude rampant in public education. Since public education employees have zero responsibility for educating kids it's just perfectly natural for them not to be responsible for the kid's safety either. So they promulgate poorly-worded and poorly thought-out regulations that take them off the hook for just about everything.
A kid gets shot? No problemo, they've got a zero tolerance weapons policy so they've done everything that can be expected and....they have no responsibility for the shooting.
Kids drop dead due to arrhythmias? No problemo. They make all the kids wear heart monitors which, while they may be medically useless, prove that the administration is worried enough to encumber every kid with a useless gadget. Responsibility? Not!
Go to a school board meeting with as many parents as you can find who are annoyed with this idiotic and self-serving idea, kick up a fuss and my guess is the school board will kill the idea. After all, they're looking for fewer waves not more.
I need storage media with minimum data retention period of a trillion years.
Maybe when they start using adamantium nanotubes....
Oh, I don't think it's fair, or accurate, to call him stupid. After all, he did manage to get himself elected president. It may be satisfying to dismiss Obama as stupid but the evidence suggests otherwise.
Still, any assumptions that don't include "stupid" still have to explain why an otherwise intelligent man would find reason to believe that if we all just wish hard enough the bad people will see the error of their ways and repent.
Do you have any friends who are teachers?
OK, so the people who'd kill or die to protect those kids, the people who wouldn't be seen as all that unusual giving the kid a kidney, *lots* of them don't really give two shits about their kid's education but the folks who are paid to show up, those folks do give two shits about the kid's education?
Since you're obviously a teacher, or the spouse of a teacher, let me clue you in about public education; education doesn't matter.
Teachers don't get or keep their jobs on the basis of their skill as teachers and superintendants don't get or keep their jobs on the basis of the academic performance of the schools they oversee. That's why the best teacher in the state can be teaching right next door to the lousiest teacher in the state and no one comments on the contrast. That's why teachers can be, and are, treated as interchangeable components.
If teachers are to be treated as if what they do matters then what they do has to be measured and those measurements have to have meaning and consequences. Since what teachers do isn't measured why shouldn't teachers be treated as if what they do doesn't matter?
Since the learning isn't important the only thing that does matter is getting the credential, the diploma. If a teacher endangers the reciept of the diploma by, unaccountably, demanding the kids learn then that teacher endangers the kids getting their passport stamped. Who has time to deal with a clueless shmuck like that? Just give the kid his "A" so he can shuffle off to the next tedious stop along the route to the diploma or degree.
When education matters, teaching matters. When teaching matters, teachers matter. It really isn't any more complicated then that.
No, education isn't that big or that complicated.
We've made it big and complicated but the evidence is all around that it needn't be.
There used to be little, red schoolhouses all over the place and their modern descendants, charter schools, are also all over the place. Neither one needed/needs a school district with its inevitable central administration bureaucracy and both had/have to concern themselves with teacher competence since parents can don't have to incur the expense of changing their residence if they're not happy with the school.
Gates almost got it right with his small school idea but the problem isn't the size of the school so much as it is the lack of choices open to parents. A lot of small schools for parents to choose among would mean a lot of schools that live and die by parental satisfaction. Since parents are the only group that can legitimately claim to be interested primarily in getting kids a decent education that makes the concerns of the parents the concerns of the schools.
In a school district the concerns of the parents may, or may not be, of any interest to the professionals because they don't have to care.
Because as we all know the members of a cartel would never screw the other members by selling under the table.
If it's one thing we can be sure of it's that there's honor among thieves.
Only nineteen years after the first installation of a Cyberknife English cancer patients don't have to take a plane to the US to get treatment?
Well all hail the National Health Service!
I wonder how important you'll have to be for the NHS to pop for Cyberknife treatment at a private clinic? Prime minister? PM's mum? Head of the PM's security detail? Cousin of an MP?
But maybe England's one of those places where those with political influence don't use it to save the lives of those closest to them. A place where noble dedication to the public good is the norm and prevents elected officials from taking advantage of the privileges of office for personal benefit at the expense of the public.
Naw, that's just stupid. Of course there's corruption of the system. The only questions are; how extensive it is and whether the news media sees fit to investigate and report.
Not even close. I remember compressed-air storage schemes being touted back in the '70s. The problem then, as now, is the cost which is the problem with all this alternative energy crap.
That's why there's so much emphasis is on how we'll all die soon if we don't embrace stupid energy; on a cost basis they all sucks so proponents have moved the issue to one in which cost is insignificant.
Matter of fact, every alternative energy scheme is a retread. They've all been around forever and they were all thrust aside by the likes of coal, nuclear and hydro.
That's nice in a science fiction story but in the real world hurricane modification research was curtailed because of the fear that unsuspected interactions would result in more damage not less.
It seems to me that we shouldn't tinker with the entire atmosphere if we don't have a good deal of confidence we can control one of the constituent phenomena.
With no new source of packets the era of cheap internet communications is coming to an end.
"We need to build a new Internet based on sustainable technology. We can no longer depend on an unending stream of cheap, easily-obtain packets to fuel the Internet. Plant-based packets, while still expensive and difficult to obtain are the only way to go if we are to move confidently into the twenty-first century", said movie star and technology guru Sean Penn.
Some critics maintain that recently-discussed slowing of the Internet is due to the escalating cost of packets but others maintain that the slowing is due to artificial constraints engineered by OPEC - the Organization of Packet Exporting Countries - in a bid to seize control of the Internet.
"For too long the wealthy nations of the west have treated the Internet as if it belonged to them when in fact, without a steady supply of cheap packets the Internet would not exist." said H.E. Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika, Malawian minister of Trade and Private Sector Development. "Malawian packet mines are too valuable a national resource to allow them to be exploited by wealthy, western nations where they are used to download pornography and pirate music."
Dr. Mutharika went on to outline a proposal to trademark high quality, natural, Malawian packets to differentiate them from the cheaply-made and inferior Chinese packets that are flooding the market.
"Consumers should be aware that cheap, artificial packets can clog the Internet's pipes and can easily cause modems to explode violently", Dr. Mutharika warned. "Natural packets are safe to use and protect the pristine beauty of the natural Internet."
Thank you Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
If I'm not mistaken, the phones are going for $400 per. It doesn't look all that good compared to the $200 iPhone so why would I want one if I wasn't interested in the "open" aspect of the phone?
Secure Connection Failed
www.liberateip.com uses an invalid security certificate.
The certificate is only valid for www.propagateltd.com
(Error code: ssl_error_bad_cert_domain)
Tell you what, you start working on dropping farm subsidies and those appropriate technology folks can invent their solar heaters and batter-powered heaters. That'll keep you busy enough not to notice your nausea.
Look, while you're are absolutely right about subsidies, dropping them is going to be a tad tougher then saying (or writing) it. There are lots of people who have ahold of the federal tit and they aren't going to let go of it. They'll have to be pried off, fighting all the time. In the mean time some number of those poor folks have their lives improved by some worthwhile increment by the appropriate technology folks.
In general I despise the moral pretensions of "advocates" for poor people but the appropriate technology folks are putting their time where their mouths are. That gets them some props that the "do as I say because I won't do anything" crowd doesn't get.
No, if you pay teachers more without regard to their teaching skill then you get richer, but not better, teachers.
That's why smaller classrooms are such a scam.
California mandated smaller classrooms and since teaching skill isn't important it hardly mattered who was behind the teacher's desk just as long as a they had a body temperature above room temperature. As a result smaller classrooms resulted in lower test scores.
Umm, there's nothing there.
Pay for your own hobbies. If it's done on the public dime it ought to have substantive public benefits.
The Concorde, and the U.S. lunar program, were done for reasons of national pride. Among piss-poor reasons to spend government funds, that's got to be near the top. Britain and France would've been better off in every way if not for Concorde and the commercialization of space probably would've occurred in the 1970's if not for the the U.S. lunar landing program. I don't think any other political response was possible to the Soviet challenge but the price was high, maybe too high.
"To go where no man has gone before" is a nice, romantic tag-line for a cheesy television program but it's not what drives exploration and discovery. The motivating force for exploration has always been the all-mighty buck and you can see in the stagnation of the exploration of space how pivotal the profit motive is. No profit, no warp drives.
Yeah, Easter Island, a geographically isolated, stone-age culture with a total population that would give it "small town" status today has a lot to teach us about the dangers that face a globe-spanning economy with resources the Easter Islander's would dismiss as fantasies and technologies they'd scarcely understand.
The rest of the post consists of either misrepresentation of the current situation as in your use of England as an example of the dangers of overpopulation or clear repudiation of the beliefs of Malthusian fear-mongers as in China which is economically in vastly better shape then it was when its population was significantly less then it is now.
It becomes clear that the world just can't go on like that forever.
On the basis of the examples you offer, it's quite clear that the world can go on like this forever since your examples are either a) inapplicable or b) unsupportive of your claim.
In fact, history does provide a guide to the way the future's likely to unfold. When incomes rise to a certain level the population increase grinds to a halt.
All the wealthier nations, once you subtract the population additions made by recent immigrants, have either very low population growth or a shrinking population. Japan's robotic technology expenditures are driven by a combination of their aging (shrinking) population and a refusal to allow immigration. Who's going to take care of Japan's rapidly increasing geezer population? The U.S.'s population increase is driven by immigration.
If you look at the trends in global per capita income the conclusion to be drawn is that the global population increase will start slowing down within twenty years and top out about 2050 with global population decline to follow. I know that's the sort of thought to fill the zero-population racists hearts with glee but they'll have about as much to do with it as a rooster's crowing does with the rising of the sun.
Of course the human species will carry on, future historians will probably think of the 20th century as some crazy period full of socialist (in the late 20th/early 21st-century USA usually called "liberal") experiments.
Not just historians and there's no need to wait till the future. You can offer examples to the contrary but I'm unaware of any "socialist experiment" that can be deemed a success. With utter uniformity socialism's been either a failure or a disastrous failure.