How many BSD machines are you installing per day that you can't just install GNU fileutils and move on? I'm surprised that you didn't mention that the default shell was ksh and not bash. That seems to be the biggest stumble for most Linux converts. Spend more time with your OpenBSD install. There are other (more significant, IMHO) features that make BSD worth it, like wireless drivers. Such a PITA in Linux. The ports tree is pretty nice, too.
Ah, my first computer. Fond memories. I still have my "Programming Great Games for the TI99/4A", which my parents bought me when they got sick of me beating the $50 games the first day I had them. The disk drive never worked very well, though.
This is idiotic. Sure, it's "old news". But it seems, at least to me, relevant. I'd even call it "stuff that matters". Given that I'd never seen this before, I think it has some value in having been reposted to Slashdot.
OK, so what you're saying is that you don't need any factual information in order to make commentary? Sure, I can buy that. But then what does that commentary amount to? Drivel. Why should I listen to you if you have no factual information, no argument, or even a fuzzy outline of where you're going? It's just a disconnected bunch of opinions that fail to follow logically or be supported by observation, but that has the effect of discrediting the article. You do need to give some evidence when you say that there has been vote tampering since the beginning of elections! That's a big claim! But not only that, I think that your claim is probable, even likely. Yet you still fly off the rails, claiming that I shouldn't be allowed to rebut you? Insane.
Clearly the country has not "moved on" since there are a great number of people who are still upset about this. Regardless of which side you're on, you should be concerned about claims of vote tampering. It steals the legitmacy away from our soverignty. With regard to whether I would accept references given by Bill Kristol-- of course I would! Aside from that fact that Bill Kristol is an extremely bright guy who comes to some rather different conclusions than I do, he often backs his claims up with references, and you can check on those references. The exact opposite of your shotgun FUD approach.
Scientific throught puts a big emphasis on validity and reproducability. Why should an article about voter fraud be any different? We have 208 references we can check, many of them statistical in nature. We have statements that use those references to draw a conclusion. So you can say two things about this article-- is it true, or it is false. We can use the scientific method to arrive at a conclusion regarding the premise of the article. My point is that all of your blathering has failed even to attempt at such an analysis, and that as a community of trained thinkers, we should be ashamed at so highly valuing such rubbish.
I believe the traditional coalitions of "left" and "right" that once wanted similar things (and differed only on the details) are drifting further apart as the extremists take control of the respective major parties.
You can hardly consider the Democratic party "extreme" when they bend over backward to make sure their message conforms to what they've determined to be "mainstream" through repeated polling. They're hardly liberal in my mind, and definitely not extreme. As a result, I also think they're a useless bunch of power-seekers.
So you're saying that in your company bean-counters don't make the decisions? I think we lucked out that they picked Cogent over Verizon, but I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that the reasons were technical. We give input, but we don't make the decisions here.
On top of it, they never mention how US military overseas from Florida specifically (that overwhelmingly vote republican) didn't get their absentee ballots
You did notice that the whole point of this article was the 2004 election, right? All of your linked articles are about the one in 2000. Fuck, we're like barely literate here.
You start off by saying that "there has been fraud, corruption, and all manner of crap going on in elections in the US since the beginning of time", which seems to be a plausible statement to me, but then you dismiss the whole idea by saying that "people want to believe, well, what they want to believe".
So what's your point? Did you read the article? And what did you mean when you said "and, might I add, consider the source"? Do you mean Rolling Stone? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr? Good job getting a 5, Insightful on a post that didn't even attempt to refute a single one of the 208 references in the article, yet still managed to cast doubt.
We should be ashamed here. This is news for nerds and we're nerds, right? So we should be smart enough to mod this guy down as a Troll, and then go ahead, read the fucking article, and look up the references ourselves. What hypocrites we are. We deride religious fundamentalists for pushing intelligent design into school curricula ("Ha, ha, what ignorance-- here's a spaghetti monster!") and then we turn around and do the same thing by modding up a post that contains NO FACTUAL INFORMATION in its rebuttal.
I'm going to finish reading the article. Then I'm going to look up some of the more brazen references (not all of them, of course-- I do have a life after all), probably more than the two or three the mainstream media is going to latch on and harp on until this article is "discredited". You should all do the same.
WTF? Hey Slashdot editors-- maybe you should have a quiz on the article before you're allowed to post. 'Cuz we all just got F's.
The whole premise behind SPEWS is flawed. The company that I work for is one of those "caught in the crossfire". Like a good mail administrator, I contacted my ISP (Cogent), and tried to reason with them (the abuse guy at Cogent is an idiot, but that's beside the point). But we don't have any real pressure here-- our monthly bill is a drop in the bucket compared to what spam revenue brings in. So, according to SPEWS, we should switch ISPs. What SPEWS doesn't take into account is that large businesses can't just switch ISPs *like that*. Most of the time, you have a contract, and in our case, we have 4 more years of that contract. Sure, we could find another ISP and eat that cost, but so far, for all of Cogent's flaws, they completely blow the competition (Verizon) out of the water. So we're stuck. SPEWS blows.
There are better ways to fight spam than blacklisted netblocks. Use one of those.
I briefly worked for Apple putting together its educational conferences. I met a number of Apple employees, and all of them told me that, aside from the fact that the job was demanding, Apple was a great place to work, and paid well. They also treated me very well, and when they once made a mistake on my paycheck, in my favor, they sucked it up and let me keep the mistaken earnings. So in my brief experience as an Apple employee, I'd have to say that they were fantastic.
We block somewhere around 200k spam emails a day. And we have a very similar setup sitting in front of our Exchange server. The kinds of things we can do with Postfix simply aren't possible with Exchange, and once we learned the ins and outs of Postfix, we found it to be easier to use than Exchange. For one, Postfix has real documentation. Not to mention that the main developer posts regularly on the mailing list. Ever talk to MS's corporate support people for Exchange? Exchange is so huge and complex no one person knows the entire program. Postfix is a model of simplicity by comparison.
I am not a terrorism "expert"; just someone who likes to keep the "story" consistent with the way I've seen the world work. This "horde of Islamic fundamentalists" stuff is just fearmongering. Think about it.
The goal of Islamic jihadists (at least, the ones we care about-- Al Qaeda, right?) is to remove those people who stand in the way of a Muslim state. The reason why they target not just Westerners (who clearly stand in the way-- we introduct Democracy, corporate influence, and lifestyles unacceptable to orthodox Muslims), but other Muslims, is because of one thing: the "plague" of material goods. This political philosophy was strongly advocated by a person named Sayyid Qutb). The line of reasoning is that anyone "infected" by the obsession of ownership will fail to remain a Muslim because they will do anything in order to fulfill their desires. Community and tradition fall apart. Qutb argued that leaders who pushed for Westernization, mainly in the form of economic reforms, were secretly (or perhaps unknowingly) destroying Islam. Therefore, those leaders could be, in good conscience, put to death. Later followers of Qutb's political theory, like Ayman Zawahiri (mentor to Osama bin Laden) expanded on that theory, saying that anyone who follows the Western model of capitalism can be rightfully put to death. Hence, death to other Muslims, death to the people working in the WTC.
But I doubt there is one, pervasive political philosophy throughout the Middle East. There are many different tensions, the result of many different historical conflicts. Part of the reason why there is so much fighting is that Muslims tend not to forget about those conflicts (tradition is important, remember?)-- another is the continuing destabilizing force the West has been throughout the years, playing those historical tensions against each others, for poltical and economic reasons (read: oil & power). Certainly, though, Qutb/Zawahiri's philosophy is the view held by Al Qaeda. So far, they're the only terrorists who actually seem to want to expand the conflict beyond the Middle East.
My question is this, if Al Qaeda is really composed of as many smart people as our government, media, and terrorism "experts" say they are, why haven't they realized that a few dozen bombs ain't exactly going to halt the massive machinery put in place by the military, industry, and politicians? It seems to me that "world domination" isn't their goal. Fear of "world domination" is just the boogeyman that our media keep throwing out at us to keep us happily supporting the $80 billion/yr money pump to war profiteers.
radmind for Windows is finally out. We'll be looking into using RfW next year, but we already have a respectable radmind installation for our Mac network. This finally helped me determine which users were the ones with real problems and which were the helpless losers ("Oh, you mean I shouldn't delete system fonts?"), because all of our machines are identical as of 4 AM every morning (excluding preferences files, which do occasionally go corrupt (are you listening Quark?)). Anyhow, radmind is more than just a tripwire/software management program. Ever wondered what, exactly, that installer put on your machine? Radmind will tell you exactly what it put there (and if that program is made by Macromedia, it's ugly). Radmind for Windows is supposed to extend its tripwire functionality into the registry.
Radmind uses rsync to transfer images, so you're only transferring the part of the image that changed. If your OS installation + applications is 3-4 GB, you would be taking a huge hit on your network, even with GigE. Even with the kinds of things users can do to F-up their machines, it is unlikely that they'll need more than a few megabytes here and there daily. BTW, radmind uses an HFS+-safe version of rsync, or at least encodes HFS+ information before it is sent, so Mac files are safe, even if your radmind server is not a Mac (ours isn't-- it's OpenBSD).
Maybe if our government didn't constantly lie to us or redact even unimportant information from official documents, we'd have a little faith that they were telling the truth to us this time. Trust has to be earned.
We Merricans have to be pushy every now and then. Shoot, without us, you smelly Europeans wouldn't have ASCII. Now you're trying to force Unicode down our throats like you do with your cheese and pate. Well, we'll just take our characters home with us, and what will you be left with? Only accent characters! Ha ha! Take that, frog!
You're right-- this problem exists in other formats. Like, say, Photoshop.
I have a friend who decided to make a major career change from being a network administrator for a university to... a porn photographer. At the time, I was the resident Photoshop whiz around, so he asked me if I would help him make his business cards. I said I would, but I never got around to it, so he sat down and tried to figure the program out himself. After adding various nude models to his card to come up with a template for a silhouette (want to be tasteful here, right?), he submitted the card to the offset printer.
Unfortunately for him, the printer was not amused. Apparently, due to his unfamiliarity with Photoshop, he left all of those nude photos in there-- in hidden layers. When the printer output the file, out came these prinouts covered in naked women. The printer refused to print the cards, and he eventually had to find another printer. Oops.
Magnetic media is in many cases better than the current alternatives at the moment, and this is where your own analogy can explain. While microwave ovens made cooking more convenient, it certainly hasn't replaced ovens-- nearly every house nowadays has both. Microwave ovens aren't very good at producing the yummy browning that ovens and ranges produce, and so ovens, despite their relative age as a technology, are still around. The same thing goes for CRTs-- LCDs are getting closer at producing the same wide gamut and contrast that CRTs do, but they're not there quite yet; and the ones that are close are very expensive.
The older technologies are still around because they're either still very useful, or because of another important factor: price. Solid state techology is expensive, and still does not meet the demands of heavy usage that hard drives can provide.
So, at worst, assuming 64 endpoints and a GbE line from the multiplexer, I get 16 Mbit downstream and 8 Mbit upstream? And, at best, at home, I get 768 Kbit down and 128 Kbit up? Plus TV, which I don't currently get. For the same price? Sounds pretty damn good to me.
Dude, you're honestly trashing on Netscape, which has only continued to exist via some marketing wormhole, and Mosaic, which was what, a proof of concept browser? While we're at it, lynx's CSS sucks, too!
Yes, Flash, WMP, and Quicktime are a scourge upon the internet. These things need to be solved. The only solution I can suggest is the same thing that has worked in the past. Write a well-documented, easy to implement, open standard for someone to use, and you'll find it in use eventually.
I'm sure that throttling happens here and there, but I'm willing to bet that the following is more common (from the TOS link you mention), and is responsible for much of the slowdown:
At present, our goal is to ship you the DVDs listed highest in your queue. We currently try to ship you DVDs from the distribution center closest to you so that you get movies quickly. Generally, on the same day that we receive a DVD from you, we will ship the next available DVD from your queue. In certain instances, your next available DVD will not ship until at least one business day following our receipt of your returned movie. This can occur, for example, when your top choices are not available to you from your closest distribution center or the number of shipments to be processed by the distribution center on that day has been exceeded. When one or both of these conditions exist, your DVD will likely ship on the next business day and may come from an alternate distribution center.
Teaching for tests is better than not teaching, and, frankly, arts and music aren't very useful.
The "essential" things you learn in school-- grammar, mathematics, foreign languages-- are the skills to require in order to become a productive member of society, and thus feed yourself and your family. But the arts-- music, art, film, literature, spirituality and philosophy-- are the things that make life worth living. You could argue that public schools should only teach us the things that we need to "get by", but I think society as a whole would suffer as a result.
There is always a dialectic between the arts and the sciences. Human understanding is not rigid, and I believe that the one informs the other, and vice-versa. It wasn't until I read Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid that I started to develop a passion for logic and mathematics. A work of art turned me on the beauty of a terse and rigorous proof.
Slashdot Mirror
How many BSD machines are you installing per day that you can't just install GNU fileutils and move on? I'm surprised that you didn't mention that the default shell was ksh and not bash. That seems to be the biggest stumble for most Linux converts. Spend more time with your OpenBSD install. There are other (more significant, IMHO) features that make BSD worth it, like wireless drivers. Such a PITA in Linux. The ports tree is pretty nice, too.
I am not an ECE, but I'm guessing that the components on the bus still need a clock to talk to each other.
Ah, my first computer. Fond memories. I still have my "Programming Great Games for the TI99/4A", which my parents bought me when they got sick of me beating the $50 games the first day I had them. The disk drive never worked very well, though.
This is idiotic. Sure, it's "old news". But it seems, at least to me, relevant. I'd even call it "stuff that matters". Given that I'd never seen this before, I think it has some value in having been reposted to Slashdot.
OK, so what you're saying is that you don't need any factual information in order to make commentary? Sure, I can buy that. But then what does that commentary amount to? Drivel. Why should I listen to you if you have no factual information, no argument, or even a fuzzy outline of where you're going? It's just a disconnected bunch of opinions that fail to follow logically or be supported by observation, but that has the effect of discrediting the article. You do need to give some evidence when you say that there has been vote tampering since the beginning of elections! That's a big claim! But not only that, I think that your claim is probable, even likely. Yet you still fly off the rails, claiming that I shouldn't be allowed to rebut you? Insane.
Clearly the country has not "moved on" since there are a great number of people who are still upset about this. Regardless of which side you're on, you should be concerned about claims of vote tampering. It steals the legitmacy away from our soverignty. With regard to whether I would accept references given by Bill Kristol-- of course I would! Aside from that fact that Bill Kristol is an extremely bright guy who comes to some rather different conclusions than I do, he often backs his claims up with references, and you can check on those references. The exact opposite of your shotgun FUD approach.
Scientific throught puts a big emphasis on validity and reproducability. Why should an article about voter fraud be any different? We have 208 references we can check, many of them statistical in nature. We have statements that use those references to draw a conclusion. So you can say two things about this article-- is it true, or it is false. We can use the scientific method to arrive at a conclusion regarding the premise of the article. My point is that all of your blathering has failed even to attempt at such an analysis, and that as a community of trained thinkers, we should be ashamed at so highly valuing such rubbish.
I believe the traditional coalitions of "left" and "right" that once wanted similar things (and differed only on the details) are drifting further apart as the extremists take control of the respective major parties.
You can hardly consider the Democratic party "extreme" when they bend over backward to make sure their message conforms to what they've determined to be "mainstream" through repeated polling. They're hardly liberal in my mind, and definitely not extreme. As a result, I also think they're a useless bunch of power-seekers.
So you're saying that in your company bean-counters don't make the decisions? I think we lucked out that they picked Cogent over Verizon, but I'm not going to fool myself into thinking that the reasons were technical. We give input, but we don't make the decisions here.
On top of it, they never mention how US military overseas from Florida specifically (that overwhelmingly vote republican) didn't get their absentee ballots
You did notice that the whole point of this article was the 2004 election, right? All of your linked articles are about the one in 2000. Fuck, we're like barely literate here.
You start off by saying that "there has been fraud, corruption, and all manner of crap going on in elections in the US since the beginning of time", which seems to be a plausible statement to me, but then you dismiss the whole idea by saying that "people want to believe, well, what they want to believe".
So what's your point? Did you read the article? And what did you mean when you said "and, might I add, consider the source"? Do you mean Rolling Stone? Robert F. Kennedy, Jr? Good job getting a 5, Insightful on a post that didn't even attempt to refute a single one of the 208 references in the article, yet still managed to cast doubt.
We should be ashamed here. This is news for nerds and we're nerds, right? So we should be smart enough to mod this guy down as a Troll, and then go ahead, read the fucking article, and look up the references ourselves. What hypocrites we are. We deride religious fundamentalists for pushing intelligent design into school curricula ("Ha, ha, what ignorance-- here's a spaghetti monster!") and then we turn around and do the same thing by modding up a post that contains NO FACTUAL INFORMATION in its rebuttal.
I'm going to finish reading the article. Then I'm going to look up some of the more brazen references (not all of them, of course-- I do have a life after all), probably more than the two or three the mainstream media is going to latch on and harp on until this article is "discredited". You should all do the same.
WTF? Hey Slashdot editors-- maybe you should have a quiz on the article before you're allowed to post. 'Cuz we all just got F's.
The whole premise behind SPEWS is flawed. The company that I work for is one of those "caught in the crossfire". Like a good mail administrator, I contacted my ISP (Cogent), and tried to reason with them (the abuse guy at Cogent is an idiot, but that's beside the point). But we don't have any real pressure here-- our monthly bill is a drop in the bucket compared to what spam revenue brings in. So, according to SPEWS, we should switch ISPs. What SPEWS doesn't take into account is that large businesses can't just switch ISPs *like that*. Most of the time, you have a contract, and in our case, we have 4 more years of that contract. Sure, we could find another ISP and eat that cost, but so far, for all of Cogent's flaws, they completely blow the competition (Verizon) out of the water. So we're stuck. SPEWS blows.
There are better ways to fight spam than blacklisted netblocks. Use one of those.
I briefly worked for Apple putting together its educational conferences. I met a number of Apple employees, and all of them told me that, aside from the fact that the job was demanding, Apple was a great place to work, and paid well. They also treated me very well, and when they once made a mistake on my paycheck, in my favor, they sucked it up and let me keep the mistaken earnings. So in my brief experience as an Apple employee, I'd have to say that they were fantastic.
We block somewhere around 200k spam emails a day. And we have a very similar setup sitting in front of our Exchange server. The kinds of things we can do with Postfix simply aren't possible with Exchange, and once we learned the ins and outs of Postfix, we found it to be easier to use than Exchange. For one, Postfix has real documentation. Not to mention that the main developer posts regularly on the mailing list. Ever talk to MS's corporate support people for Exchange? Exchange is so huge and complex no one person knows the entire program. Postfix is a model of simplicity by comparison.
Score:4, Insightful? Come on.
I am not a terrorism "expert"; just someone who likes to keep the "story" consistent with the way I've seen the world work. This "horde of Islamic fundamentalists" stuff is just fearmongering. Think about it.
The goal of Islamic jihadists (at least, the ones we care about-- Al Qaeda, right?) is to remove those people who stand in the way of a Muslim state. The reason why they target not just Westerners (who clearly stand in the way-- we introduct Democracy, corporate influence, and lifestyles unacceptable to orthodox Muslims), but other Muslims, is because of one thing: the "plague" of material goods. This political philosophy was strongly advocated by a person named Sayyid Qutb). The line of reasoning is that anyone "infected" by the obsession of ownership will fail to remain a Muslim because they will do anything in order to fulfill their desires. Community and tradition fall apart. Qutb argued that leaders who pushed for Westernization, mainly in the form of economic reforms, were secretly (or perhaps unknowingly) destroying Islam. Therefore, those leaders could be, in good conscience, put to death. Later followers of Qutb's political theory, like Ayman Zawahiri (mentor to Osama bin Laden) expanded on that theory, saying that anyone who follows the Western model of capitalism can be rightfully put to death. Hence, death to other Muslims, death to the people working in the WTC.
But I doubt there is one, pervasive political philosophy throughout the Middle East. There are many different tensions, the result of many different historical conflicts. Part of the reason why there is so much fighting is that Muslims tend not to forget about those conflicts (tradition is important, remember?)-- another is the continuing destabilizing force the West has been throughout the years, playing those historical tensions against each others, for poltical and economic reasons (read: oil & power). Certainly, though, Qutb/Zawahiri's philosophy is the view held by Al Qaeda. So far, they're the only terrorists who actually seem to want to expand the conflict beyond the Middle East.
My question is this, if Al Qaeda is really composed of as many smart people as our government, media, and terrorism "experts" say they are, why haven't they realized that a few dozen bombs ain't exactly going to halt the massive machinery put in place by the military, industry, and politicians? It seems to me that "world domination" isn't their goal. Fear of "world domination" is just the boogeyman that our media keep throwing out at us to keep us happily supporting the $80 billion/yr money pump to war profiteers.
radmind for Windows is finally out. We'll be looking into using RfW next year, but we already have a respectable radmind installation for our Mac network. This finally helped me determine which users were the ones with real problems and which were the helpless losers ("Oh, you mean I shouldn't delete system fonts?"), because all of our machines are identical as of 4 AM every morning (excluding preferences files, which do occasionally go corrupt (are you listening Quark?)). Anyhow, radmind is more than just a tripwire/software management program. Ever wondered what, exactly, that installer put on your machine? Radmind will tell you exactly what it put there (and if that program is made by Macromedia, it's ugly). Radmind for Windows is supposed to extend its tripwire functionality into the registry.
Radmind uses rsync to transfer images, so you're only transferring the part of the image that changed. If your OS installation + applications is 3-4 GB, you would be taking a huge hit on your network, even with GigE. Even with the kinds of things users can do to F-up their machines, it is unlikely that they'll need more than a few megabytes here and there daily. BTW, radmind uses an HFS+-safe version of rsync, or at least encodes HFS+ information before it is sent, so Mac files are safe, even if your radmind server is not a Mac (ours isn't-- it's OpenBSD).
You forgot The Pedant. By the way, you spelled drool wrong.
Maybe if our government didn't constantly lie to us or redact even unimportant information from official documents, we'd have a little faith that they were telling the truth to us this time. Trust has to be earned.
I think you're thinking of SCROTUS.
We Merricans have to be pushy every now and then. Shoot, without us, you smelly Europeans wouldn't have ASCII. Now you're trying to force Unicode down our throats like you do with your cheese and pate. Well, we'll just take our characters home with us, and what will you be left with? Only accent characters! Ha ha! Take that, frog!
You're right-- this problem exists in other formats. Like, say, Photoshop.
I have a friend who decided to make a major career change from being a network administrator for a university to... a porn photographer. At the time, I was the resident Photoshop whiz around, so he asked me if I would help him make his business cards. I said I would, but I never got around to it, so he sat down and tried to figure the program out himself. After adding various nude models to his card to come up with a template for a silhouette (want to be tasteful here, right?), he submitted the card to the offset printer.
Unfortunately for him, the printer was not amused. Apparently, due to his unfamiliarity with Photoshop, he left all of those nude photos in there-- in hidden layers. When the printer output the file, out came these prinouts covered in naked women. The printer refused to print the cards, and he eventually had to find another printer. Oops.
Magnetic media is in many cases better than the current alternatives at the moment, and this is where your own analogy can explain. While microwave ovens made cooking more convenient, it certainly hasn't replaced ovens-- nearly every house nowadays has both. Microwave ovens aren't very good at producing the yummy browning that ovens and ranges produce, and so ovens, despite their relative age as a technology, are still around. The same thing goes for CRTs-- LCDs are getting closer at producing the same wide gamut and contrast that CRTs do, but they're not there quite yet; and the ones that are close are very expensive.
The older technologies are still around because they're either still very useful, or because of another important factor: price. Solid state techology is expensive, and still does not meet the demands of heavy usage that hard drives can provide.
Wow, goes to show how ambiguous written language can be. No wonder people get so hot and bothered about the Bible.
So, at worst, assuming 64 endpoints and a GbE line from the multiplexer, I get 16 Mbit downstream and 8 Mbit upstream? And, at best, at home, I get 768 Kbit down and 128 Kbit up? Plus TV, which I don't currently get. For the same price? Sounds pretty damn good to me.
Dude, you're honestly trashing on Netscape, which has only continued to exist via some marketing wormhole, and Mosaic, which was what, a proof of concept browser? While we're at it, lynx's CSS sucks, too!
Yes, Flash, WMP, and Quicktime are a scourge upon the internet. These things need to be solved. The only solution I can suggest is the same thing that has worked in the past. Write a well-documented, easy to implement, open standard for someone to use, and you'll find it in use eventually.
Simple. Dependency diminishes power.
The "essential" things you learn in school-- grammar, mathematics, foreign languages-- are the skills to require in order to become a productive member of society, and thus feed yourself and your family. But the arts-- music, art, film, literature, spirituality and philosophy-- are the things that make life worth living. You could argue that public schools should only teach us the things that we need to "get by", but I think society as a whole would suffer as a result.
There is always a dialectic between the arts and the sciences. Human understanding is not rigid, and I believe that the one informs the other, and vice-versa. It wasn't until I read Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid that I started to develop a passion for logic and mathematics. A work of art turned me on the beauty of a terse and rigorous proof.