It make a lot more sense than a teacher spending 45 minutes reading to the students out of a book (lets be honest, very few teachers are more original than that) and then turning kids loose to figure it out on their own via the take home assignment.
What kind of shitty education did you folks get where things operated this way?
I never had a teacher just read things out of a book. And I never had a teacher turn me loose to learn concepts in homework. When I was a student, concepts were taught in class -- when, unlike with a canned lecture or a book, we could ask the teacher to stop and elaborate on a point during the presentation -- and then re-enforced with homework. (Which is why I often skipped the homework, if I understood the concepts and if it wouldn't affect my grade much.:-) )
If all you expect teachers to do is read out loud from a book, sure, a taped lecture (which is all these "massive open on-line courses" are) can replace that. In fact, if that's the case just skip the lecture and the internet part and give the students the book to read, and stop pretending this is some grand technological breakthrough.
But if that's what you expect from a teacher, you've got some shitty teachers.
Persuasion is voluntary and therefore moral and just, no matter whether you agree or disagree.
Persuasion via honest means is voluntary and therefore morally permissible, but not necessarily morally praiseworthy. Whether it is just depends on the end goal of the persuasion.
If I were to attempt to persuade you that all people of a certain ethnic background should be killed, that would be free speech and legally permissible, and it would be unethical for you to use force to silence me. But to label my speech "moral and just" would be an error. And it would be entirely rational, moral, and just for people to be concerned about my speech, to express their opposition to it, and be vigilant that it did not progress to action.
I don't know if it's still the case, but When I Was Young and playing video games meant going to the arcade with quarters, it was illegal in Baltimore Country for people under 18 to play pinball. Video games were fine, but apparently there was some holdover in the law from when a type of pinball games were used for gambling.
....the gun owners who were mapped and are now making threats...
RTFA, please. One person said something so vague the police declined to label it an explicit threat.
A gun is what makes the difference between a blowhard you can ignore and a real threat of death.
Roughly one-third of murders in the U.S. are carried out without a firearm. If you think lack of a firearm means that someone cannot make a credible threat to kill you, you are a fool; if you think mere ownership of a firearm means someone is a threat, you are also a fool.
Was the paper within its legal rights? Yes, the info is public. Was it a dick move by the paper? You bet. Should the info be public in the first place? No, it should not be.
Same thing as the "Right to bear arms" --- you think with your pissy little semi-automatic assault rifles you can fight the army?
If -- and it's a big if, total hypothetical here, but if -- a dictatorship took power in the U.S. and an armed resistance composed of armed citizens opposed it, the experience of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as the example of resistance groups in Nazi-occupied areas during WWII suggests that a resistance force armed with rifles (even ones not capable of fully automatic fire) could put up significant resistance, yes. Hell, look at how much trouble the Branch Davidians gave the feds, and they were a bunch of frickin' nutcases.
More importantly, though, armed citizens can protect themselves not only against criminals but against corrupt governments on the state and local level. Armed groups played a key role in winning civil rights for African-Americans during the 1960s, both by standing up directly against racist cops and by defending black citizens against violence when the police would not respond.
Are your forum and slashdot posts that long that you need a keyboard to enter them?
Yes. Typing any text at all on a touchscreen is infuriating. Anything without a hardware keyboard is effectively a read-only device; unless one is a silent consumer drone, the web is a read/write medium.
I mean because ice addicts are killing people in their violent rampages
Citation needed.
and other addicts are robbing people to feed their next hit. That's when it becomes the governments problem.
...which is a consequence of prohibition, which drives up prices, and not of the drug itself. How many alcoholics do you see robbing people to feed their next hit? Addicts committing theft is a government-created problem.
And suggesting that the government has the rightful power to forcibly and irreversibly modify the brains of citizens is disgusting and despicable. You should be ashamed of yourself, sir.
What idiot would deliberately burglarise a home because he thought the owner had a gun -- no idea what kind of gun or how valuable.
Any idiot functional enough to watch a house until the occupants leave.
On the black market, pound-for-pound handguns are very valuable, very easy to fence. I've never sold or bought a gun on the black market but I'd guess value there doesn't much correlate with how "valuable" the gun is to collectors or legitimate buyers.
But the rate of gun deaths in the US is so out of lunch with other Western countries that there has to be some explanation beyond insane people alone.
Economic inequality is a good predictor of violence, and the U.S. has a vast problem with that. The U.S. is also, IIRC, the only industrialized democracy nation without universal health care. And it has a unique situation regarding race; given the mammoth differences in white vs. black murder victims, this cannot be ignored.
but to complain about line length (at the time, they were HARSH about keeping lines to 80chars max, which was so braindead)
Making me resize my editor window to deal with your code is braindead^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hannoying. Code wider than 80 columns also doesn't print well by default.
Use an indent you want, use any variable names you want, but for fsck's sake, 80 columns unless you've occasionally got a really good reason (code that writes code, for example) to break it. And comment, dammit, comment.
Every other western nation has seriously controlled guns and their level of gun violence is dramatically lower than in the US.
Why is "gun violence" rather than "violence" the issue? Is a person murdered with a knife somehow less dead?
Is Mexico not a Western nation? Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Bermuda, Panama, Greenland? Just a sampling of Western nations with a higher murder rate than the U.S.
The U.S. has a higher murder rate than most democracies with a comparable per-capita GDP, yes, but in saying that we're saying that factors other than the availability of guns are the primary driver of violence. The U.S. is also the only developed democracy without universal health care; it is the most racially and ethnically diverse developed democracy; and has worse income equality. This has much more to do with our rates of violence, then what tools of violence are available.
And if more gun control is the answer to violence, why did the U.S. murder rate fall 50% between 1991 and 2010, while most states liberalized CCW laws over that time?
This is the fundamental problem with guns, they are a significant force multiplier.
Which is why they are an excellent self-defense tool, used at least tens of thousands (millions, according to some controversial estimates) of times each year for self-protection by Americans.
Yes, it is a problem when criminals and maniacs get ahold of them. Which is why we need to keep criminals and maniacs under supervision.
Since firearms accidents are quite rare (you're more than five times more likely to die in a fire than a gun accident, with just 600 out of 128,200 unintentional injury deaths in 2009 being from firearms), and "smart gun" technologies mostly would interfere with the ability to quickly deploy guns for defensive purposes, the call for these technologies ranges from well-intentioned ignorance to a back-door attempt to drive up the price of guns and make self-defense tools unavailable to poor people.
A tazer is not a replacement for shooting someone. A tazer is a replacement for clubbing someone with a nightstick or baton.
No. Using a potential lethal electrical torture device on someone is justified only if the alternative is lethal force.
The purpose of a tazer or baton is to subdue an aggressive individual that will not comply with verbal instructions..
Unless their non-compliance is a threat to someone ("drop the gun!" "No!"), it is not appropriate to use a weapon on someone for mere "non-compliance". You use verbal de-escalation skills to gain compliance.
And unlike the traditional nightstick, they won't generally break your bones or cause skull injuries when they are used on you.
If your cops don't know how to use a baton or nightstick without breaking someone's skull, they need better training. No one ever died from a baton to the peroneal nerve; hundreds of people have died from taser attacks.
If someone was trespassing on your property and refused to leave, you'd be justified in tasering them too.
No. The use of a potentially lethal electrical torture device is justified only when a person presents a credible threat to inflict grievous bodily harm on someone.
How about the USA, where guns are generally legal and murder is much more prevalent than the UK, where guns are generally not legal.
If you take away all murders using a firearm from the U.S. numbers, and count only stabbings, beatings, etcetera, we *still* have a much higher homicide rate than the U.K. The problem isn't our guns, it's our culture.
And, as I noted upthread, within the U.S., states with strong gun control laws tend to have higher murder rates than states that favor the right to keep and bear arms.
having a load of armed civilians around me...certainly would not make me feel safer!
You might not feel safer, but feelings are a piss-poor guide to reality. Within the U.S., you are -- as a matter of crime statistics -- safer in areas where civilians are legally allowed to own and carry firearms then in areas with strong gun control laws.
1) Please, please, please, for the love of the FSM, stop trying to integrate mail and scheduling. They are two different tasks.
2) My mail is on my home Linux box. At home I've got Sylpheed on the desktop; on the road, I have alpine over ssh (from my phone or laptop). Done.
3) Anyone who hands their mail over to a webmail provider to mine for privacy-invasion (i.e., marketing) purposes, or to hand over to governments without any oversight, is either naive or ignorant.
Well, but for the past few decades with the over extention of the federal power due to the bastardization of the interstate trade clause....you could.
No. The United States government is not a federation of states, and has not been since the Constitution was adopted. It's "We the People", not "We the States."
As Madison wrote, "It was generally agreed that the objects of the Union could not be secured by any system founded on the principle of a confederation of Sovereign States....Hence was embraced the alternative of a Government which instead of operating, on the States, should operate without their intervention on the individuals composing them..."
Constitutionally, the majority of the powers in the US IS supposed to reside with the states and not the federal govt.
Again, no. The Constitution grants wide powers to the federal government, and removes powers needed for sovereignty from the states. This is especially clear in the area of commerce. Again, quoting Madison: "As to the remark that the States ought to be under the controul of the Genl. Govt. at least as much as they formerly were under the King & B. parliament, it amounts as it stands when taken in its presumable meaning, to nothing more than what actually makes a part of the Constitution; the powers of Congs. being much greater, especially on the great points of taxation & trade than the B. Legislature were ever permitted to exercise..."
While there is legitimate debate to be had about the balance of powers in federalism, the "states rights" crowd is mostly ignorant of history and still buying into bullshit promulgated by anti-civil-rights conservatives in the 1960s.
Getting OSHA / union / bubblewrap parents involved means that those who are capable of helping are not allowed to because of the risk that some idiot gets hurt or damages something.
Yes. Because what they were helping was someone's cat's blog stay up, whereas the risk they were taking was someone getting seriously ill from exposure to diesel fuel -- or burning the building down. (Ever dealt with spilled diesel fuel? Nasty, nasty stuff.)
In the spring of '97 guys were working heavy equipment for days straight...to build a dike that saved Winnipeg
Saving a web server from downtime is not comparable to saving a city. Turn the computers off and go home.
'Vaccinating children,' explains the Shoo the Flu initiative's website, 'will not only improve children's health, it will also dramatically reduce the risk of the flu spreading to adults.'
This is *NOT* a statement about vaccines in general, only about the seasonal flu shot. The flu is different because 1) most cases of what people call "the flu" are not actually influenza, but other viruses; 2) in the general population, influenza is not that serious a disease; and 3) the influenza virus mutates every year.
Science starts by giving you a brief summary of the theory and conclusions, then proceeds to get into the details. We call it an Abstract.
That's how a scientific paper is written. Scientific papers are not science, they are part of the output of science.
Science is a process. This article describes the process that went into one scientific discovery. It includes details about that process, such as the story of how the data was preserved, that would not usually go into a scientific paper. What you call "rambling on about the history of the mission" -- that's the tale of science, bub.
...and how is this different from Google reading all your mail discussions and targeting ads to you?
Well, that's why I don't use Gmail. But there is still a difference: your e-mail, by its nature, goes through Google's servers. Your conversations at home do not naturally flow through Verizon's.
Re:Did Zuckerberg ever have to get past HR?
on
Just Say No To College
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm making more money than all of my 4-year degree friends because I decided long ago to educate myself in a field that's likely to GROW...
And this is the problem right here. A college education is not a four year technical school. If the only thing you go to college for is to get trained in a field where you make money, by all means don't bother.
A college education is an investment in becoming an educated human being trained in disciplined critical thinking and broadly knowledgeable about the world. It is not job training. While being an educated human being should help your job prospects, if that is all you focus on you have missed the point.
But it may be that, in turning our economy over to the aristocrats, the "1%", we have created a situation where educated human beings are no longer in demand in the job market.
And it's certainly the case that in reducing government support of education, we have not only fantastically increased student debt and transferred yet more wealth to the capitialist class, but have made education less available -- thus decreasing the proles understanding of how they're being shafted by the aristocrats.
The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". It does not grant Congress the power to secure exclusive rights to the employers of authors and inventors. (Nor to their heirs or assignees, but one misbegotten legal fiction at a time.) The "work for hire" doctrine is, constitutionally, DOA; it doesn't pass even casual reading.
Slashdot Mirror
What kind of shitty education did you folks get where things operated this way?
I never had a teacher just read things out of a book. And I never had a teacher turn me loose to learn concepts in homework. When I was a student, concepts were taught in class -- when, unlike with a canned lecture or a book, we could ask the teacher to stop and elaborate on a point during the presentation -- and then re-enforced with homework. (Which is why I often skipped the homework, if I understood the concepts and if it wouldn't affect my grade much. :-) )
If all you expect teachers to do is read out loud from a book, sure, a taped lecture (which is all these "massive open on-line courses" are) can replace that. In fact, if that's the case just skip the lecture and the internet part and give the students the book to read, and stop pretending this is some grand technological breakthrough. But if that's what you expect from a teacher, you've got some shitty teachers.
Persuasion via honest means is voluntary and therefore morally permissible, but not necessarily morally praiseworthy. Whether it is just depends on the end goal of the persuasion.
If I were to attempt to persuade you that all people of a certain ethnic background should be killed, that would be free speech and legally permissible, and it would be unethical for you to use force to silence me. But to label my speech "moral and just" would be an error. And it would be entirely rational, moral, and just for people to be concerned about my speech, to express their opposition to it, and be vigilant that it did not progress to action.
I don't know if it's still the case, but When I Was Young and playing video games meant going to the arcade with quarters, it was illegal in Baltimore Country for people under 18 to play pinball. Video games were fine, but apparently there was some holdover in the law from when a type of pinball games were used for gambling.
RTFA, please. One person said something so vague the police declined to label it an explicit threat.
Roughly one-third of murders in the U.S. are carried out without a firearm. If you think lack of a firearm means that someone cannot make a credible threat to kill you, you are a fool; if you think mere ownership of a firearm means someone is a threat, you are also a fool.
Was the paper within its legal rights? Yes, the info is public. Was it a dick move by the paper? You bet. Should the info be public in the first place? No, it should not be.
If -- and it's a big if, total hypothetical here, but if -- a dictatorship took power in the U.S. and an armed resistance composed of armed citizens opposed it, the experience of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, as well as the example of resistance groups in Nazi-occupied areas during WWII suggests that a resistance force armed with rifles (even ones not capable of fully automatic fire) could put up significant resistance, yes. Hell, look at how much trouble the Branch Davidians gave the feds, and they were a bunch of frickin' nutcases.
More importantly, though, armed citizens can protect themselves not only against criminals but against corrupt governments on the state and local level. Armed groups played a key role in winning civil rights for African-Americans during the 1960s, both by standing up directly against racist cops and by defending black citizens against violence when the police would not respond.
Yes. Typing any text at all on a touchscreen is infuriating. Anything without a hardware keyboard is effectively a read-only device; unless one is a silent consumer drone, the web is a read/write medium.
Citation needed.
...which is a consequence of prohibition, which drives up prices, and not of the drug itself. How many alcoholics do you see robbing people to feed their next hit? Addicts committing theft is a government-created problem.
And suggesting that the government has the rightful power to forcibly and irreversibly modify the brains of citizens is disgusting and despicable. You should be ashamed of yourself, sir.
Any idiot functional enough to watch a house until the occupants leave.
On the black market, pound-for-pound handguns are very valuable, very easy to fence. I've never sold or bought a gun on the black market but I'd guess value there doesn't much correlate with how "valuable" the gun is to collectors or legitimate buyers.
Economic inequality is a good predictor of violence, and the U.S. has a vast problem with that. The U.S. is also, IIRC, the only industrialized democracy nation without universal health care. And it has a unique situation regarding race; given the mammoth differences in white vs. black murder victims, this cannot be ignored.
Making me resize my editor window to deal with your code is braindead^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hannoying. Code wider than 80 columns also doesn't print well by default.
Use an indent you want, use any variable names you want, but for fsck's sake, 80 columns unless you've occasionally got a really good reason (code that writes code, for example) to break it. And comment, dammit, comment.
Why is "gun violence" rather than "violence" the issue? Is a person murdered with a knife somehow less dead?
Is Mexico not a Western nation? Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Bermuda, Panama, Greenland? Just a sampling of Western nations with a higher murder rate than the U.S.
The U.S. has a higher murder rate than most democracies with a comparable per-capita GDP, yes, but in saying that we're saying that factors other than the availability of guns are the primary driver of violence. The U.S. is also the only developed democracy without universal health care; it is the most racially and ethnically diverse developed democracy; and has worse income equality. This has much more to do with our rates of violence, then what tools of violence are available.
And if more gun control is the answer to violence, why did the U.S. murder rate fall 50% between 1991 and 2010, while most states liberalized CCW laws over that time?
Which is why they are an excellent self-defense tool, used at least tens of thousands (millions, according to some controversial estimates) of times each year for self-protection by Americans.
Yes, it is a problem when criminals and maniacs get ahold of them. Which is why we need to keep criminals and maniacs under supervision.
Since firearms accidents are quite rare (you're more than five times more likely to die in a fire than a gun accident, with just 600 out of 128,200 unintentional injury deaths in 2009 being from firearms), and "smart gun" technologies mostly would interfere with the ability to quickly deploy guns for defensive purposes, the call for these technologies ranges from well-intentioned ignorance to a back-door attempt to drive up the price of guns and make self-defense tools unavailable to poor people.
No. Using a potential lethal electrical torture device on someone is justified only if the alternative is lethal force.
Unless their non-compliance is a threat to someone ("drop the gun!" "No!"), it is not appropriate to use a weapon on someone for mere "non-compliance". You use verbal de-escalation skills to gain compliance.
If your cops don't know how to use a baton or nightstick without breaking someone's skull, they need better training. No one ever died from a baton to the peroneal nerve; hundreds of people have died from taser attacks.
Hundreds of people have been killed by taser attacks.
If your cops have a high risk of doing serious injury to people while restraining them, then you need to train your cops better.
No. The use of a potentially lethal electrical torture device is justified only when a person presents a credible threat to inflict grievous bodily harm on someone.
Guns are also common in Switzerland. Guns don't make a nation go to war.
If you take away all murders using a firearm from the U.S. numbers, and count only stabbings, beatings, etcetera, we *still* have a much higher homicide rate than the U.K. The problem isn't our guns, it's our culture.
And, as I noted upthread, within the U.S., states with strong gun control laws tend to have higher murder rates than states that favor the right to keep and bear arms.
You might not feel safer, but feelings are a piss-poor guide to reality. Within the U.S., you are -- as a matter of crime statistics -- safer in areas where civilians are legally allowed to own and carry firearms then in areas with strong gun control laws.
1) Please, please, please, for the love of the FSM, stop trying to integrate mail and scheduling. They are two different tasks.
2) My mail is on my home Linux box. At home I've got Sylpheed on the desktop; on the road, I have alpine over ssh (from my phone or laptop). Done.
3) Anyone who hands their mail over to a webmail provider to mine for privacy-invasion (i.e., marketing) purposes, or to hand over to governments without any oversight, is either naive or ignorant.
No. The United States government is not a federation of states, and has not been since the Constitution was adopted. It's "We the People", not "We the States."
As Madison wrote, "It was generally agreed that the objects of the Union could not be secured by any system founded on the principle of a confederation of Sovereign States....Hence was embraced the alternative of a Government which instead of operating, on the States, should operate without their intervention on the individuals composing them..."
Again, no. The Constitution grants wide powers to the federal government, and removes powers needed for sovereignty from the states. This is especially clear in the area of commerce. Again, quoting Madison: "As to the remark that the States ought to be under the controul of the Genl. Govt. at least as much as they formerly were under the King & B. parliament, it amounts as it stands when taken in its presumable meaning, to nothing more than what actually makes a part of the Constitution; the powers of Congs. being much greater, especially on the great points of taxation & trade than the B. Legislature were ever permitted to exercise..."
While there is legitimate debate to be had about the balance of powers in federalism, the "states rights" crowd is mostly ignorant of history and still buying into bullshit promulgated by anti-civil-rights conservatives in the 1960s.
Yes. Because what they were helping was someone's cat's blog stay up, whereas the risk they were taking was someone getting seriously ill from exposure to diesel fuel -- or burning the building down. (Ever dealt with spilled diesel fuel? Nasty, nasty stuff.)
Saving a web server from downtime is not comparable to saving a city. Turn the computers off and go home.
I am NOT an anti-vaxxer. But the flu shot does not "dramatically reduce" anything. You need to vaccinate 26 kids (healthy kids over age six) to prevent one case of the flu. In kids under two, the inactivated virus vaccines isn't significantly better than a placebo.
For most people the flu shot is a waste of time and money, and a risk of nasty side effects, for little or no benefit.
This is *NOT* a statement about vaccines in general, only about the seasonal flu shot. The flu is different because 1) most cases of what people call "the flu" are not actually influenza, but other viruses; 2) in the general population, influenza is not that serious a disease; and 3) the influenza virus mutates every year.
That's how a scientific paper is written. Scientific papers are not science, they are part of the output of science.
Science is a process. This article describes the process that went into one scientific discovery. It includes details about that process, such as the story of how the data was preserved, that would not usually go into a scientific paper. What you call "rambling on about the history of the mission" -- that's the tale of science, bub.
Well, that's why I don't use Gmail. But there is still a difference: your e-mail, by its nature, goes through Google's servers. Your conversations at home do not naturally flow through Verizon's.
And this is the problem right here. A college education is not a four year technical school. If the only thing you go to college for is to get trained in a field where you make money, by all means don't bother.
A college education is an investment in becoming an educated human being trained in disciplined critical thinking and broadly knowledgeable about the world. It is not job training. While being an educated human being should help your job prospects, if that is all you focus on you have missed the point.
But it may be that, in turning our economy over to the aristocrats, the "1%", we have created a situation where educated human beings are no longer in demand in the job market.
And it's certainly the case that in reducing government support of education, we have not only fantastically increased student debt and transferred yet more wealth to the capitialist class, but have made education less available -- thus decreasing the proles understanding of how they're being shafted by the aristocrats.
The U.S. Constitution grants Congress the power to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". It does not grant Congress the power to secure exclusive rights to the employers of authors and inventors. (Nor to their heirs or assignees, but one misbegotten legal fiction at a time.) The "work for hire" doctrine is, constitutionally, DOA; it doesn't pass even casual reading.