. . . learning basic "booksmart" skills to make it in life (math, reading, writing, how the government works) . ..
I find it rather disturbing (though by no means unexpected) that you apparently don't consider a decent understanding of economics essential either to one's ability to function in society, or to one's readiness to choose a long-term (and probably permanent) specialization. Literacy and math are indeed essential skills, but without an understanding of economics -- the logical study of human action -- the students can have no rational basis for choosing a particular line of work or course of study in the first place.
Economics and basic psychology together would, IMHO, do far more to prepare students for the "real world" than much of the core curriculum (aside from basic arithmetic and the ability to read). Certainly they would prove more useful than any of the political science courses many schools seem to waste so much time on, and yet these two essential topics are barely given a passing glance.
Parents that care, do whatever they can to send their children to a private school or home school them. . . . Until you can get the majority of public school parents to care about their children's education . . . the system won't change and will continue to go down hill.
By that reasoning, if you do manage to get parents to start caring they'll just pull their students out of the public schools in favor of more responsible/personal educational institutions (private schools and home schooling). Since the first ones to react will probably be those that cared the most to start with, the end effect is that you're now left with a public-school student population whose parents, on average, care even less than before.
It is important to recognize that this is an improvement -- more students are getting a proper education -- even though it makes the public school system look worse than before.
For that matter just read The Lord of the Rings itself. At the council in Rivendell Elrond states: "And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world if will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so." (FotR 2nd ed. pg. 281.)
All true, and I'm aware of the special operation of Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows. (You can configure a similar "system request" key in Linux, for what it's worth -- and it can be any key you want. I think the default is Ctrl-Alt-Pause.)
However, running the task manager won't help if you can't interact with it, and as soon as you start it you're back to your normal graphical windowing environment, where the task manager must compete with all the other windows for input events and screen space. Being always-on-top helps, but there's nothing to prevent other windows from setting the same flag.
In the interest of fairness, however, there are times when internal bugs in an X server inhibit the terminal-switch function, so that isn't entirely reliable either.
You know, that sounds a lot more complex than Alt+Space, Alt+F4, which closed it for me on XP.
That's because the GP's version does more -- on both Linux and XP, handling of the close signal (Alt+F4, titlebar button, or Close item on taskbar context menu) is voluntary; the application doesn't have to respond. On most Linux systems there is a key shortcut that does the same thing as Alt+F4 on XP, and it would most likely have the same effect. The command-line version is more like ending the process through the task manager, with the difference that even the task manager can't close certain system tasks, and the command-line version works even when your graphical interface isn't functional or present.
For those interested, there is an XP program that can perform the same task as kill or killall: taskkill.exe. However, there is no command similar to Ctrl+Alt+F1 that will give you a text terminal should your graphical environment become inaccessible.
Implicit in your answer is the belief that the universe is also of finite age.
That conclusion is also implicit in the laws of physics, particularly the second law of thermodynamics. If you extrapolate a finite amount of time into the past, assuming entropy to be finite and increasing, at some point all the energy in the universe was concentrated at a single point in a state of minimum entropy. There is nothing that can precede that point without assuming that the law of entropy does not hold for all time, and thus either the universe must have a finite age, or our most basic understanding of how it works must be incorrect.
Note that the age of the universe is merely a consequence of our frame of reference -- it might be better to refer to our age, or the age of the matter that makes up our bodies, measured from the beginning of the universe, rather than the age of the universe itself.
Also note that I didn't factor in the effects of gravitational spacetime curvature, which tends to cancel out spacetime expansion locally. One generally only sees net spacial expansion on an intergalactic scale.
It is not discrimination against fat people, it is an encouragement towards a healthy lifestyle.
In other words, the difference is entirely a matter of PR and marketing.
You can't arbitrarily lower the average premium for a given risk class, because that is ultimately determined by the amount the insurance company has to pay out, plus overhead and the minimum (accounting) profit necessary to ensure they stay in that business rather than moving their resources elsewhere. If you introduce discounts for some customers the consequence will inevitably be higher premiums for others.
Wealth-transfer systems, including risk-blind "insurance", are not sustainable without the use of force.
Sure they are. Just wait until someone has more then they can watch over all the time, and take it all until they notice.
"Use of force" includes theft. Anyway, even that method doesn't tend to work for long. People learn to keep their things where they can't be easily stolen.
The entire point of insurance is that everyone pays a more-or-less baseline amount and some people don't realize any of that value and some people realize more than they put in.
No, that's precisely the opposite of insurance. The "entire point" of insurance is to mitigate uncertainty. The way to do this is to charge according to estimated risk. (Not the same amount as you later receive back -- that is what makes it insurance and not just savings.) To ignore known differences in risk when determining premiums is counterproductive and inefficient, and is not a part of insurance per se. Any voluntary insurance system which charged the same amount for varying risk levels would soon be out of business, because those who find themselves overpaying would stop subsidizing the riskier customers, possibly by starting a competing co-op insurance organization with fairer rates.
Wealth-transfer systems, including risk-blind "insurance", are not sustainable without the use of force.
Unfortunately, people who are uninformed are people who are least likely to have a preconcieved bias. When you have people who are informed, especially very well informed, then they have opinions, biases, and preferences which may influence their judgments.
Unfortunately it appears that the uninformed people tend to have just as many opinions, biases, and preferences to influence their judgement -- they're just based on things completely disjoint from the facts of the case. Personally I'd rather be condemned by an informed peer on the basis of a relevant opinion than on the basis of my appearance, accent, financial position, employer, etc.
Which always brings up my question: if the universe is not infinite in size, what is it expanding into or sitting in?
I'm not a physicist, but I'll take a stab at this anyway. Basically, the universe isn't expanding into anything. There isn't empty space beyond the universe's boundaries; there isn't anything beyond those boundaries. It doesn't even make sense to say "beyond the boundaries of the universe". There is no frame of reference anywhere in the universe than could possibly observe or interact with anything "beyond" the universe, which means it effectively doesn't exist.
When people talk about the universe expanding, what they mean is that the distances between particles throughout the universe are increasing. From the subatomic to the intergalactic, everything is moving further apart. The "size of the universe" is (simplistically) the largest distance (in 4D spacetime) between any two particles within the universe, which can be simplistically calculated from any given frame of reference as (at most) the age of the universe multiplied by the speed of light. Since the age of the universe is constantly increasing (from our point of view as entities within the universe), the size of the universe increases as well.
Dude, spend an extra $15 a month and get a second NetFlix account.
Better yet, save the $15/mo. and just take advantage of NetFlix's multiple-queue service, where each queue has its own login, password, and profile. It was, after all, created with this exact issue in mind. For under $20/mo. -- for the 4-at-once plan -- they could both get their very own two movies at a time, and separate personalized recommendations (for what that's worth). NetFlix has its issues (QA in particular -- I've gotten a lot of scratched/unplayable discs lately), but queue management isn't one of them.
Give me real filesystem extensions that work in *all* applications, not just KDE apps.
There's a KIO-FUSE module that does exactly that. It allows you to mount the KDE ioslave hierarchy on a local directory, where it becomes accessible to non-KDE applications.
Sorry, you lost me. Sun did something similar, by naming the framework "Java5" while the JVM/JDK was v1.5. Is it the same thing going on here? is KDE4 the "suite" and KDE 4.0 the API?
I don't think it's quite that bad. It looks as though KDE 4.x basically approaches KDE4 for increasing values of x; in other words, KDE4 is the end goal for the entire KDE 4.x release series.
If criminals take advantage of it and borrow both the identity and the money, the credit industry does not care because there is no serious liability to the lender who lent the money.
There ought to be some liability, even under current laws: the amount of the loan. Unless the lender can demonstrate that it actually was you that authorized the loan, and agreed to a contract to repay -- in other words, unless they did real authentication up front -- no court should ever hold the I.D.-fraud victim responsible for the loan. If you never agreed to the loan contract you should have no responsibility whatsoever toward that lender.
If a lender damages my credit rating by lax lending, the lender is liable for a sum like 10% of my annual income.
I wouldn't go that far, although I suppose you could consider a claim of nonpayment a mild form of defamation if they didn't bother to see if it was really you first, which would probably entitle you to some compensation. However, it is in the credit-reporting agency's best interest to provide accurate credit reports; unjustly lowering scores would make them just as much less useful to creditors as unjustly raising them. If you can demonstrate that the loan was issued without your knowledge or consent they should update their records accordingly, not because it's legally required but because it's in their own self-interest.
You could burn the logs onto PROMs as well, that's pretty permanent:)
Actually it is possible to overwrite the data stored on a PROM. Once a bit has been altered you can't change it back to the original state, but you can set the remaining bits to the same value, thus eliminating any data previously encoded there.
11111111 - Original state
01000001 - Data stored ("A")
00000000 - Data overwritten
Consequently PROMs are not generally tamper-proof. For that matter I wouldn't stretch their tamper-evidence too far, since it's possible to change e.g. any digit to a zero purely by clearing bits ('0'..'9' -> 0b0110000..0b0111001) -- although you could fix that by adding checksums.
Which is interesting since the US economy and the value of US currency versus most first-world currencies has been nose-diving pretty handily in the past decade.
Well, that's what happens when you proceed to take anti-economical actions (e.g. anything political) "for the good of the economy". Just because economic improvement is their excuse (and maybe their goal) does not mean that political means are suited to achieving such an end.
The use of economic (non-aggressive) means strengthens the economy. Political means (aggression) can only undermine it, however good one's intentions might be.
I'm telling you that after spending 12 years as a college instructor at several institutions in several states that the public schools are in fact turning out "graduates" who can't read a newspaper, can't balance their checkbooks, can't add integers and fractions, don't understand what's in the Constitution, etc. ad nauseum.
As the GP pointed out, that might be the fault of the students and not the schools.
What is the fault of the schools, however, is that after 12 years these so-called students were handed a diploma and certified ready for the real world. If anyone either won't or can't learn they shouldn't get a diploma certifying otherwise. It would be far more productive to simply let such individuals leave school whenever they choose, sans diploma, and see for themselves why an education is important. There's no point in forcing someone to attend school when said person refuses to learn; all that accomplishes is the withdrawal of resources away from those who actually want to be there.
Oh, and schools should have voluntary funding as well as voluntray attendance (i.e. be privatised).
>> I guess I can see that not working well if tabbing is done strangely, or mixed with spaces. I mostly leave that to my editor so it's done fairly well.
Ever try changing your tabstops? That's where leaving formatting up to your editor can get you in trouble. Tabs <em>will</em> make a mess of things unless you either mandate that everyone use the same size of tabstops, or don't care about vertical layout at all.
For example, if you take the following code with five-character tabstops:
which is nothing like the nice column layout you intended.
It gets worse if tabs are placed in the middle of a line rather than just the beginning, or if the code is edited with a mix of different tabstop settings.
The bottom line is that it will all trickle down to collective action of one sort or another: either there is a government that has been chosen by the masses, or what that has been imposed upon them by an individual or group with the means to do so. No government at all is an obvious impossibility.
There's no point in addressing the rest of the post, since the whole thing was just a series of unfounded assertions and this sums them all up nicely.
The difference between the two options you give here -- even assuming that these really are the only two options, as you assert -- is that the former is actually a government, with a cloak of seeming legitimacy, while the latter is merely an obvious case of organized crime. Both are expressions of "might makes right", but the former has the additional power of passing off the responsibility for its actions to those under its rule. The actions of the latter would be universally reviled, and those joining it would be seen as traitors and outlaws, while participation in a "government" toward exactly the same ends carries only the slightest taint.
Given the choice, I'd rather face a criminal organization unmasked than a "government" half its size. At least then the fast majority of my friends and neighbors wouldn't be fighting against me to keep the criminals in power.
No ordinary criminal organization in history has ever been nearly so powerful or intrusive as the average government. To empower a government in hopes of heading off organized crime is to trade a lesser and more nebulous problem for a greater and more certain one.
You have plants removing X per time amount of carbon from the atmosphere. You have cars and stuff emitting carbon at Y per time. If Y > X, then we are spewing more carbon into the atmosphere than is being scrubbed, period.
True, but the point is that Y approaches X as use of stored-carbon fuels diminishes. When/if such fuels run out (or are simply no longer used) Y must be less than or equal to X, because all carbon released by burning the fuel must be in the fuel to start with, and thus must've been pulled out of the atmosphere by the plants.
I was talking about the boom-bust cycles prior to the GD that you still fail to address. You know, the ones that occurred while we were still on the gold standard? 1837, for example?
As I recall the source of the 1837 depression can be traced to foreign inflation -- in Britain, I think. In any event, the contention is not that only inflation can cause depressions, but rather that boom/bust cycles are a consequence of systemic inflation. Standalone depressions have occurred many times as a result of unforeseen phenomenon such as natural disasters, but only in periods of inflation have there been noticable tendencies for boom periods and recessions/depressions to run in predictable cycles.
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I find it rather disturbing (though by no means unexpected) that you apparently don't consider a decent understanding of economics essential either to one's ability to function in society, or to one's readiness to choose a long-term (and probably permanent) specialization. Literacy and math are indeed essential skills, but without an understanding of economics -- the logical study of human action -- the students can have no rational basis for choosing a particular line of work or course of study in the first place.
Economics and basic psychology together would, IMHO, do far more to prepare students for the "real world" than much of the core curriculum (aside from basic arithmetic and the ability to read). Certainly they would prove more useful than any of the political science courses many schools seem to waste so much time on, and yet these two essential topics are barely given a passing glance.
By that reasoning, if you do manage to get parents to start caring they'll just pull their students out of the public schools in favor of more responsible/personal educational institutions (private schools and home schooling). Since the first ones to react will probably be those that cared the most to start with, the end effect is that you're now left with a public-school student population whose parents, on average, care even less than before.
It is important to recognize that this is an improvement -- more students are getting a proper education -- even though it makes the public school system look worse than before.
For that matter just read The Lord of the Rings itself. At the council in Rivendell Elrond states: "And that is another reason why the Ring should be destroyed: as long as it is in the world if will be a danger even to the Wise. For nothing is evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so." (FotR 2nd ed. pg. 281.)
All true, and I'm aware of the special operation of Ctrl-Alt-Del in Windows. (You can configure a similar "system request" key in Linux, for what it's worth -- and it can be any key you want. I think the default is Ctrl-Alt-Pause.)
However, running the task manager won't help if you can't interact with it, and as soon as you start it you're back to your normal graphical windowing environment, where the task manager must compete with all the other windows for input events and screen space. Being always-on-top helps, but there's nothing to prevent other windows from setting the same flag.
In the interest of fairness, however, there are times when internal bugs in an X server inhibit the terminal-switch function, so that isn't entirely reliable either.
That's because the GP's version does more -- on both Linux and XP, handling of the close signal (Alt+F4, titlebar button, or Close item on taskbar context menu) is voluntary; the application doesn't have to respond. On most Linux systems there is a key shortcut that does the same thing as Alt+F4 on XP, and it would most likely have the same effect. The command-line version is more like ending the process through the task manager, with the difference that even the task manager can't close certain system tasks, and the command-line version works even when your graphical interface isn't functional or present.
For those interested, there is an XP program that can perform the same task as kill or killall: taskkill.exe. However, there is no command similar to Ctrl+Alt+F1 that will give you a text terminal should your graphical environment become inaccessible.
That conclusion is also implicit in the laws of physics, particularly the second law of thermodynamics. If you extrapolate a finite amount of time into the past, assuming entropy to be finite and increasing, at some point all the energy in the universe was concentrated at a single point in a state of minimum entropy. There is nothing that can precede that point without assuming that the law of entropy does not hold for all time, and thus either the universe must have a finite age, or our most basic understanding of how it works must be incorrect.
Note that the age of the universe is merely a consequence of our frame of reference -- it might be better to refer to our age, or the age of the matter that makes up our bodies, measured from the beginning of the universe, rather than the age of the universe itself.
Also note that I didn't factor in the effects of gravitational spacetime curvature, which tends to cancel out spacetime expansion locally. One generally only sees net spacial expansion on an intergalactic scale.
In other words, the difference is entirely a matter of PR and marketing.
You can't arbitrarily lower the average premium for a given risk class, because that is ultimately determined by the amount the insurance company has to pay out, plus overhead and the minimum (accounting) profit necessary to ensure they stay in that business rather than moving their resources elsewhere. If you introduce discounts for some customers the consequence will inevitably be higher premiums for others.
"Use of force" includes theft. Anyway, even that method doesn't tend to work for long. People learn to keep their things where they can't be easily stolen.
No, that's precisely the opposite of insurance. The "entire point" of insurance is to mitigate uncertainty. The way to do this is to charge according to estimated risk. (Not the same amount as you later receive back -- that is what makes it insurance and not just savings.) To ignore known differences in risk when determining premiums is counterproductive and inefficient, and is not a part of insurance per se. Any voluntary insurance system which charged the same amount for varying risk levels would soon be out of business, because those who find themselves overpaying would stop subsidizing the riskier customers, possibly by starting a competing co-op insurance organization with fairer rates.
Wealth-transfer systems, including risk-blind "insurance", are not sustainable without the use of force.
Unfortunately it appears that the uninformed people tend to have just as many opinions, biases, and preferences to influence their judgement -- they're just based on things completely disjoint from the facts of the case. Personally I'd rather be condemned by an informed peer on the basis of a relevant opinion than on the basis of my appearance, accent, financial position, employer, etc.
I'm not a physicist, but I'll take a stab at this anyway. Basically, the universe isn't expanding into anything. There isn't empty space beyond the universe's boundaries; there isn't anything beyond those boundaries. It doesn't even make sense to say "beyond the boundaries of the universe". There is no frame of reference anywhere in the universe than could possibly observe or interact with anything "beyond" the universe, which means it effectively doesn't exist.
When people talk about the universe expanding, what they mean is that the distances between particles throughout the universe are increasing. From the subatomic to the intergalactic, everything is moving further apart. The "size of the universe" is (simplistically) the largest distance (in 4D spacetime) between any two particles within the universe, which can be simplistically calculated from any given frame of reference as (at most) the age of the universe multiplied by the speed of light. Since the age of the universe is constantly increasing (from our point of view as entities within the universe), the size of the universe increases as well.
Better yet, save the $15/mo. and just take advantage of NetFlix's multiple-queue service, where each queue has its own login, password, and profile. It was, after all, created with this exact issue in mind. For under $20/mo. -- for the 4-at-once plan -- they could both get their very own two movies at a time, and separate personalized recommendations (for what that's worth). NetFlix has its issues (QA in particular -- I've gotten a lot of scratched/unplayable discs lately), but queue management isn't one of them.
There's a KIO-FUSE module that does exactly that. It allows you to mount the KDE ioslave hierarchy on a local directory, where it becomes accessible to non-KDE applications.
I don't think it's quite that bad. It looks as though KDE 4.x basically approaches KDE4 for increasing values of x; in other words, KDE4 is the end goal for the entire KDE 4.x release series.
There ought to be some liability, even under current laws: the amount of the loan. Unless the lender can demonstrate that it actually was you that authorized the loan, and agreed to a contract to repay -- in other words, unless they did real authentication up front -- no court should ever hold the I.D.-fraud victim responsible for the loan. If you never agreed to the loan contract you should have no responsibility whatsoever toward that lender.
I wouldn't go that far, although I suppose you could consider a claim of nonpayment a mild form of defamation if they didn't bother to see if it was really you first, which would probably entitle you to some compensation. However, it is in the credit-reporting agency's best interest to provide accurate credit reports; unjustly lowering scores would make them just as much less useful to creditors as unjustly raising them. If you can demonstrate that the loan was issued without your knowledge or consent they should update their records accordingly, not because it's legally required but because it's in their own self-interest.
Actually it is possible to overwrite the data stored on a PROM. Once a bit has been altered you can't change it back to the original state, but you can set the remaining bits to the same value, thus eliminating any data previously encoded there.
11111111 - Original state
01000001 - Data stored ("A")
00000000 - Data overwritten
Consequently PROMs are not generally tamper-proof. For that matter I wouldn't stretch their tamper-evidence too far, since it's possible to change e.g. any digit to a zero purely by clearing bits ('0'..'9' -> 0b0110000..0b0111001) -- although you could fix that by adding checksums.
Well, that's what happens when you proceed to take anti-economical actions (e.g. anything political) "for the good of the economy". Just because economic improvement is their excuse (and maybe their goal) does not mean that political means are suited to achieving such an end.
The use of economic (non-aggressive) means strengthens the economy. Political means (aggression) can only undermine it, however good one's intentions might be.
As the GP pointed out, that might be the fault of the students and not the schools.
What is the fault of the schools, however, is that after 12 years these so-called students were handed a diploma and certified ready for the real world. If anyone either won't or can't learn they shouldn't get a diploma certifying otherwise. It would be far more productive to simply let such individuals leave school whenever they choose, sans diploma, and see for themselves why an education is important. There's no point in forcing someone to attend school when said person refuses to learn; all that accomplishes is the withdrawal of resources away from those who actually want to be there.
Oh, and schools should have voluntary funding as well as voluntray attendance (i.e. be privatised).
I believe the line was "I know my rights."
Just sayin'.
>> I guess I can see that not working well if tabbing is done strangely, or mixed with spaces. I mostly leave that to my editor so it's done fairly well.
Ever try changing your tabstops? That's where leaving formatting up to your editor can get you in trouble. Tabs <em>will</em> make a mess of things unless you either mandate that everyone use the same size of tabstops, or don't care about vertical layout at all.
For example, if you take the following code with five-character tabstops:
[tab]float asdfg = 40.4,
[tab][tab] bnmvc = 3.7,
[tab][tab][tab]c = 15.8;
and display it in an editor using eight-character tabstops, you get this:
[tab ]float asdfg = 40.4,
[tab ][tab ] bnmvc = 3.7,
[tab ][tab ][tab ]c = 15.8;
which is nothing like the nice column layout you intended.
It gets worse if tabs are placed in the middle of a line rather than just the beginning, or if the code is edited with a mix of different tabstop settings.
How about "macro"?
There's no point in addressing the rest of the post, since the whole thing was just a series of unfounded assertions and this sums them all up nicely.
The difference between the two options you give here -- even assuming that these really are the only two options, as you assert -- is that the former is actually a government, with a cloak of seeming legitimacy, while the latter is merely an obvious case of organized crime. Both are expressions of "might makes right", but the former has the additional power of passing off the responsibility for its actions to those under its rule. The actions of the latter would be universally reviled, and those joining it would be seen as traitors and outlaws, while participation in a "government" toward exactly the same ends carries only the slightest taint.
Given the choice, I'd rather face a criminal organization unmasked than a "government" half its size. At least then the fast majority of my friends and neighbors wouldn't be fighting against me to keep the criminals in power.
No ordinary criminal organization in history has ever been nearly so powerful or intrusive as the average government. To empower a government in hopes of heading off organized crime is to trade a lesser and more nebulous problem for a greater and more certain one.
True, but the point is that Y approaches X as use of stored-carbon fuels diminishes. When/if such fuels run out (or are simply no longer used) Y must be less than or equal to X, because all carbon released by burning the fuel must be in the fuel to start with, and thus must've been pulled out of the atmosphere by the plants.
Yes, which leads us directly to the obvious solution: no government at all.
As I recall the source of the 1837 depression can be traced to foreign inflation -- in Britain, I think. In any event, the contention is not that only inflation can cause depressions, but rather that boom/bust cycles are a consequence of systemic inflation. Standalone depressions have occurred many times as a result of unforeseen phenomenon such as natural disasters, but only in periods of inflation have there been noticable tendencies for boom periods and recessions/depressions to run in predictable cycles.