... there are plenty of places Philadelphia that could use some innovation in the schools.
Is there green space in inner-city Philly? I haven't been there, so I don't know. It seems to me that $50 million could green up depressed grey and brown areas to give the kids something nice to smell, at least. Sometimes no amount of gee-whiz high-tech pork will have the same impact on a child as simply being able to sit under a shade tree and relax, for once.
The biggest barrier with a school like this is the incredible cost of keeping it state-of-the-art.
I think the marketing materials will end up looking like those movie trailers from the 40s and the 50s, with people having fancy kitchens, super beds, and effort-free clothes washers. Where did the optimism go? It ran away with the money.
If there were more disclosure about personal stock ownership in government contracting, I think the whole business would be seen for what it is. For example, I read that Bill Gates bought a big share of Newport News Shipyards before that "Divide by zero" Navy PR fiasco.
is one where nearly all R&D is already done, and nearly all the components can be purchased off the shelf. I propose a 300 stage multi-booster rocket that uses Estes solid-fuel motors. Sure the specific impulse is low, but the costs savings of just stuffing 3000 cardboard tubes with black powder should not be taken lightly.
Name one thing that they would need to bring up as cargo, that NASA could not replace....?
I read about a billion-dollar satellite with no backup getting blown-up on liftoff. While not impossible to replace a billion-dollar satellite, getting more funding for it might be.
Well, the convenience of this shouldn't be ignored. What are the security implications of this, when intelligence gathering doesn't require an on-site visit?
wherever else there might be congestion, people can adjust their travel behavior accordingly.
Agreed. However, a camera need not have 1600x1200 resolution or whatever for this purpose. A TV-quality camera (at best) would be sufficient to discern that cars are bumper to bumper on the highway.
I though the movie conveyed the harsh irony of war and idealism very well. In fact, the movie was very painful to watch, because some of the scenes gutted much of what people believe in. Perhaps the movie was much better than the viewers percieved, because most viewers expect some typical hack-n-slach-hero-gets-the-bitch flick.
"Babe" (yes the pig) was another movie that comes to mind, where childhood is so accurately depicted that I (an adult, I hope) could barely watch it. Of course, I can't not be reminded of Ender Wiggins at this point...ah crap.
She honestly believes that the school has the right to make any rules they want to and enforce them upon the kids, and that any constitutional rights don't apply to students while they are on school property.
That is awful. If those children are US citizens, then the school cannot take away their rights. The fact that they are not adults is irrelevant outside of the courts and their homes. If any child is punished for what they say in a public school, the punisher needs to be punished even more severely.
...it has to be useful for me, not - like the library - for thousands of people with very different interests and approaches.
Based on the recent articles about how MS Word metadata and undo data lives on in future revisions of the file, your metadata might just be very valuable (and revealing) to future employers, salespeople, etc.
This is why I always give Windows and Word a false identity for their metadata fields.
I suspect the same will happen with these metadata systems; people won't do the work needed to make them truely useful.
Neither will small businesses, and big businesses will go overboard, where employees spend more time managing metadata than real data.
For example, who uses Word file templates whose "author" is some middle manager who quit five years ago? Metadata often becomes stale almost immediately, unfortunately.
Perhaps if we had a single global database of every man, woman, and child with their life history encoded into a digital format, we could link into a single primary key that will never go stale. Oh, the convienience is very much worth the orwellian information dictatorship that ensues stripping every man, woman, and child of their humanity. Yippee!
Technology is bad whenever it becomes the end rather than the means. Do our teachers know the difference? Probably not, as they cannot even give good advice about whether to go to college (look at me, I'm a burned out teacher that went to college and now am telling you to go and suffer, too! HAHAHA! Joke's on you!).
Please upgrade to a newer version of MS Word at home and resubmit your son's work for grading before the next semester.
Or print/type/pen it out and hand it in. Grading based on what a student can afford rather than what the student can write is sick, sad, and evil. Any teacher that engages in this behavior should have their license revoked and condemned to work in a flooded coal mine for the rest of their life using a candle for lighting (kaboom!).
I hate it when people "support"(buy from) a corporation because they get warm fuzzies from that company "supporting"(tossing a measly hundredth or thousandth of a percent of their profits to) a cause.
It is genious marketing. They tap into the population who don't give directly to any charity but still feel that little voice tugging at their back of their mind to do something. So, the saps get their Doritos, some orphan gets a penny, the company gets a dime, and the saps feel ever so slightly better in their miserable existence.
What is funny is that buying generic chips and giving the savings directly to charity is much much more efficient...but it takes just a teeny tiny bit more effort. Oh well.
I think the case you're referring to is a student who was suspended for wearing a Pepsi t-shirt on his high school's "Coke Day"?
What happened to free speech with the intent of parody? What message is this high school sending to its students? Why are public schools engaging in unconstitutional behavior?
If I were a parent in that school discrict, I would have gone ballistic!
Also, myself a product of a prototype school of a different sort, I can say that using students as guinea pigs doesn't always pan out. The people in Philly need to weight the risks involved in building a gee-whiz school without a proven learning method behind it.
Tell that to a Buddhist or a Hindi person. The arrogance of your statement defies reason and is the stuff that global war and suffering are made of. Morality can be derived without religion, and that is what the government needs to focus on. There is little disagreement about murder, for example, among most anyone of any background. Now try to discuss drugs, sex, speech, art, lifestyles, etc. and there is so much disagreement that the only choice the government really has is to keep their mitts out of it. This is why passing no law is often more significant than passing many laws. Unfortunately, legislators have a harder time putting this on their resume.
Wow, that was a near perfect "Whiny Liberal(tm, Clinton, Gore)" response to reality. Typical anti-American drivel from the kind of people who want to destroy our country. I thank the Lord each day for Bush and keeping power out of the hands of dangerous people like you.
Actually, I consider myself much closer to being a whiny Libertarian than a Liberal [sic]. The reality is that people like our President are being given way too much power, such that "god fearing" people like you and him can judge others baselessly and codify it into law! I bet the image and idea of a Christain Texan leading a global crusade infuriates nearly everyone outside the US; this is not the image that the US should be advertising. Your "thanking the Lord for Bush" is most definitely not helping things, and it is unfortunate that fundamentalist Christains are getting a disproportionate voice in our government lately. If Bush is elected in 2004, it is a step backwards for the USA at home and worldwide. If a Democrat is elected, well, at least we might avoid WWIII. I hope neither gets elected, but that doesn't seem likely anytime soon.
The irony is that you could effectively mix the two systems.
A hybrid system could work, but, unless there is some indicator of fraud, no one would bother to look at the paper records. If every precinct assumed fraud, to be safe, and did check the paper ballots, then the only advantage to an electronic system is that journalists can salivate over the instant data and provide their orgasmic and sensational reports of the "race to the presidency."
voting day should be a FEDERAL HOLIDAY
I agree. Why we get off work on some historical persons birthday and not on election day is absurd. At least a half-day is fully justified, so everyone will have a chance to stand in line and take their opportunity to change future history.
Talk to a stock broker or investment advisor. Ask a biotech company, or the aerospace industry. Military contractors. International companies. International trading partners.
The personal and financial wants and needs of these people and companies are clearly secondary to the advancement of democracy in the US. If people took their country seriously, the whole country would hold its breath while their leadership were being decided. They wouldn't care if a day's labor were lost, nor would they mind delaying making their next year's projections by a few days.
"power to the people" includes corporations which have citizen rights.
And too many of those rights. Corporations' influence on government should be through the votes of the people that work for them. The fact that a CEO can get a priviledged visit to the White House and speak on behalf of a corporation (probably with some money under the table, too) is disgusting.
That way we could reduce the power of congress and the president and put government back into the hands of the people.
Integrity in an election provides the People with much empowerment. I'd also like to see the frowns on journalists' faces when they scramble for real news to report rather than spending 12 hours reporting the same thing over and over and over and over...
Besides, it is pretty sad, when people aren't willing to wait a few days on word about how their country will be run for the next four years.
While instant voting would allow a reduction of the "representive" portion of "Representative Democracy", I think this isn't necessarily good. If the USA were run as the founders intended, the Congress and the President would be elected to deal with truly national issues leaving nearly everything else to states, counties, and cities. With most decision making occuring at the local level, the level of democracy, in the pure sense, is actually quite high.
However, in the last century, the level of representation perfomed by the federal government has skyrocketed, making the US a far cry from a true democracy. It is becoming more and more a bi-umvirate dictatorship of Republican and Democratic leadership. The Constitution is becomeing more historical in nature. The story of the Star Wars movies is applicable to today (although I hate to cite a movie, oh well), as history is repeating itself and will repeat itself until people realize that government is highly corruptable and is the place where power pools until it becomes a monster.
Regardless of who is elected in 2004, I fear that the government will only grow and grow and grow. Whether it is nationalized healthcare, the Patriot [sic] Act, or the Department of Homeland Security, the government will continue consolidating power until the people are truly powerless and live in complete fear of the entity they themselves voted into existence (oh the irony!).
I only watch Fox News accidentally while flipping through channels. That second of seeing their garish graphics and Bill O'Rielly's face is enough to send my blood pressure up 20 points. Most television-based news has become trash--no better than the Weekly World News. Thankfully there are a few refuges of decent reporting, such as the News Hour on PBS, but I wouldn't be suprised if that went away, too.
Would you care to provide us with your mathematical proof that your pencil and paper voting scheme is completely accurate and secure?
It doesn't have to be proven, because its highly distributed nature is already resistent to corruption. Electronic voting could be very highly distributed, too, but it seems much more likely to be cracked on a large scale. The main reason is electrons are much faster than people, and it takes literally one command to change thousands of votes. Changing thousands of paper votes at least requires the manual labor and patience to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
... there are plenty of places Philadelphia that could use some innovation in the schools.
Is there green space in inner-city Philly? I haven't been there, so I don't know. It seems to me that $50 million could green up depressed grey and brown areas to give the kids something nice to smell, at least. Sometimes no amount of gee-whiz high-tech pork will have the same impact on a child as simply being able to sit under a shade tree and relax, for once.
The biggest barrier with a school like this is the incredible cost of keeping it state-of-the-art.
I think the marketing materials will end up looking like those movie trailers from the 40s and the 50s, with people having fancy kitchens, super beds, and effort-free clothes washers. Where did the optimism go? It ran away with the money.
Scroll down for Paul Allen reference
If there were more disclosure about personal stock ownership in government contracting, I think the whole business would be seen for what it is. For example, I read that Bill Gates bought a big share of Newport News Shipyards before that "Divide by zero" Navy PR fiasco.
You were saying?
Be wary when offered candy by the devil.
That's all.
is one where nearly all R&D is already done, and nearly all the components can be purchased off the shelf. I propose a 300 stage multi-booster rocket that uses Estes solid-fuel motors. Sure the specific impulse is low, but the costs savings of just stuffing 3000 cardboard tubes with black powder should not be taken lightly.
Name one thing that they would need to bring up as cargo, that NASA could not replace....?
I read about a billion-dollar satellite with no backup getting blown-up on liftoff. While not impossible to replace a billion-dollar satellite, getting more funding for it might be.
a cybercafe or from the hills of Afghanistan!!!
Well, the convenience of this shouldn't be ignored. What are the security implications of this, when intelligence gathering doesn't require an on-site visit?
wherever else there might be congestion, people can adjust their travel behavior accordingly.
Agreed. However, a camera need not have 1600x1200 resolution or whatever for this purpose. A TV-quality camera (at best) would be sufficient to discern that cars are bumper to bumper on the highway.
...that movie was truly horrendous.
I though the movie conveyed the harsh irony of war and idealism very well. In fact, the movie was very painful to watch, because some of the scenes gutted much of what people believe in. Perhaps the movie was much better than the viewers percieved, because most viewers expect some typical hack-n-slach-hero-gets-the-bitch flick.
"Babe" (yes the pig) was another movie that comes to mind, where childhood is so accurately depicted that I (an adult, I hope) could barely watch it. Of course, I can't not be reminded of Ender Wiggins at this point...ah crap.
She honestly believes that the school has the right to make any rules they want to and enforce them upon the kids, and that any constitutional rights don't apply to students while they are on school property.
That is awful. If those children are US citizens, then the school cannot take away their rights. The fact that they are not adults is irrelevant outside of the courts and their homes. If any child is punished for what they say in a public school, the punisher needs to be punished even more severely.
...it has to be useful for me, not - like the library - for thousands of people with very different interests and approaches.
Based on the recent articles about how MS Word metadata and undo data lives on in future revisions of the file, your metadata might just be very valuable (and revealing) to future employers, salespeople, etc.
This is why I always give Windows and Word a false identity for their metadata fields.
I suspect the same will happen with these metadata systems; people won't do the work needed to make them truely useful.
Neither will small businesses, and big businesses will go overboard, where employees spend more time managing metadata than real data.
For example, who uses Word file templates whose "author" is some middle manager who quit five years ago? Metadata often becomes stale almost immediately, unfortunately.
Perhaps if we had a single global database of every man, woman, and child with their life history encoded into a digital format, we could link into a single primary key that will never go stale. Oh, the convienience is very much worth the orwellian information dictatorship that ensues stripping every man, woman, and child of their humanity. Yippee!
How is it bad to have access to technology?
Technology is bad whenever it becomes the end rather than the means. Do our teachers know the difference? Probably not, as they cannot even give good advice about whether to go to college (look at me, I'm a burned out teacher that went to college and now am telling you to go and suffer, too! HAHAHA! Joke's on you!).
Please upgrade to a newer version of MS Word at home and resubmit your son's work for grading before the next semester.
Or print/type/pen it out and hand it in. Grading based on what a student can afford rather than what the student can write is sick, sad, and evil. Any teacher that engages in this behavior should have their license revoked and condemned to work in a flooded coal mine for the rest of their life using a candle for lighting (kaboom!).
I hate it when people "support"(buy from) a corporation because they get warm fuzzies from that company "supporting"(tossing a measly hundredth or thousandth of a percent of their profits to) a cause.
It is genious marketing. They tap into the population who don't give directly to any charity but still feel that little voice tugging at their back of their mind to do something. So, the saps get their Doritos, some orphan gets a penny, the company gets a dime, and the saps feel ever so slightly better in their miserable existence.
What is funny is that buying generic chips and giving the savings directly to charity is much much more efficient...but it takes just a teeny tiny bit more effort. Oh well.
I think the case you're referring to is a student who was suspended for wearing a Pepsi t-shirt on his high school's "Coke Day"?
What happened to free speech with the intent of parody? What message is this high school sending to its students? Why are public schools engaging in unconstitutional behavior?
If I were a parent in that school discrict, I would have gone ballistic!
a prototype it could then market.
Also, myself a product of a prototype school of a different sort, I can say that using students as guinea pigs doesn't always pan out. The people in Philly need to weight the risks involved in building a gee-whiz school without a proven learning method behind it.
Christ's (God's) rules are superior to others.
Tell that to a Buddhist or a Hindi person. The arrogance of your statement defies reason and is the stuff that global war and suffering are made of. Morality can be derived without religion, and that is what the government needs to focus on. There is little disagreement about murder, for example, among most anyone of any background. Now try to discuss drugs, sex, speech, art, lifestyles, etc. and there is so much disagreement that the only choice the government really has is to keep their mitts out of it. This is why passing no law is often more significant than passing many laws. Unfortunately, legislators have a harder time putting this on their resume.
Wow, that was a near perfect "Whiny Liberal(tm, Clinton, Gore)" response to reality. Typical anti-American drivel from the kind of people who want to destroy our country. I thank the Lord each day for Bush and keeping power out of the hands of dangerous people like you.
Actually, I consider myself much closer to being a whiny Libertarian than a Liberal [sic]. The reality is that people like our President are being given way too much power, such that "god fearing" people like you and him can judge others baselessly and codify it into law! I bet the image and idea of a Christain Texan leading a global crusade infuriates nearly everyone outside the US; this is not the image that the US should be advertising. Your "thanking the Lord for Bush" is most definitely not helping things, and it is unfortunate that fundamentalist Christains are getting a disproportionate voice in our government lately. If Bush is elected in 2004, it is a step backwards for the USA at home and worldwide. If a Democrat is elected, well, at least we might avoid WWIII. I hope neither gets elected, but that doesn't seem likely anytime soon.
The irony is that you could effectively mix the two systems.
A hybrid system could work, but, unless there is some indicator of fraud, no one would bother to look at the paper records. If every precinct assumed fraud, to be safe, and did check the paper ballots, then the only advantage to an electronic system is that journalists can salivate over the instant data and provide their orgasmic and sensational reports of the "race to the presidency."
voting day should be a FEDERAL HOLIDAY
I agree. Why we get off work on some historical persons birthday and not on election day is absurd. At least a half-day is fully justified, so everyone will have a chance to stand in line and take their opportunity to change future history.
Talk to a stock broker or investment advisor. Ask a biotech company, or the aerospace industry. Military contractors. International companies. International trading partners.
The personal and financial wants and needs of these people and companies are clearly secondary to the advancement of democracy in the US. If people took their country seriously, the whole country would hold its breath while their leadership were being decided. They wouldn't care if a day's labor were lost, nor would they mind delaying making their next year's projections by a few days.
"power to the people" includes corporations which have citizen rights.
And too many of those rights. Corporations' influence on government should be through the votes of the people that work for them. The fact that a CEO can get a priviledged visit to the White House and speak on behalf of a corporation (probably with some money under the table, too) is disgusting.
That way we could reduce the power of congress and the president and put government back into the hands of the people.
Integrity in an election provides the People with much empowerment. I'd also like to see the frowns on journalists' faces when they scramble for real news to report rather than spending 12 hours reporting the same thing over and over and over and over...
Besides, it is pretty sad, when people aren't willing to wait a few days on word about how their country will be run for the next four years.
While instant voting would allow a reduction of the "representive" portion of "Representative Democracy", I think this isn't necessarily good. If the USA were run as the founders intended, the Congress and the President would be elected to deal with truly national issues leaving nearly everything else to states, counties, and cities. With most decision making occuring at the local level, the level of democracy, in the pure sense, is actually quite high.
However, in the last century, the level of representation perfomed by the federal government has skyrocketed, making the US a far cry from a true democracy. It is becoming more and more a bi-umvirate dictatorship of Republican and Democratic leadership. The Constitution is becomeing more historical in nature. The story of the Star Wars movies is applicable to today (although I hate to cite a movie, oh well), as history is repeating itself and will repeat itself until people realize that government is highly corruptable and is the place where power pools until it becomes a monster.
Regardless of who is elected in 2004, I fear that the government will only grow and grow and grow. Whether it is nationalized healthcare, the Patriot [sic] Act, or the Department of Homeland Security, the government will continue consolidating power until the people are truly powerless and live in complete fear of the entity they themselves voted into existence (oh the irony!).
I only watch Fox News when I want to laugh...
I only watch Fox News accidentally while flipping through channels. That second of seeing their garish graphics and Bill O'Rielly's face is enough to send my blood pressure up 20 points. Most television-based news has become trash--no better than the Weekly World News. Thankfully there are a few refuges of decent reporting, such as the News Hour on PBS, but I wouldn't be suprised if that went away, too.
Would you care to provide us with your mathematical proof that your pencil and paper voting scheme is completely accurate and secure?
It doesn't have to be proven, because its highly distributed nature is already resistent to corruption. Electronic voting could be very highly distributed, too, but it seems much more likely to be cracked on a large scale. The main reason is electrons are much faster than people, and it takes literally one command to change thousands of votes. Changing thousands of paper votes at least requires the manual labor and patience to do it.