It would be a good thing if it were true. The massive ammounts of energy used to reduce bauxite are mostly lost as waste heat. If they were actually stored in the material, this might be an efficient system to transport energy.
Actually, this is true. Thermite is a substance that burns at around 5000 degrees, and is capable of welding metal plates and destroying metal machinery. I've always wanted to see someone put a thermite grenade on top of one of those really big soda machines and watch it explode.
Thermite is a mixture of aluminum shavings and rust. The heat is produced by the oxidation of the aluminum as oxygen is transfered from the rust. There's a car in the St. Louis Science Center that is entirely powered from that reaction. It's an experimental thing and I've never heard about why it wasn't practical, but I know it works.
Haraldm is, in fact, correct in that they're just moving the energy production back to a central power plant, and the efficiency of the process is in question. Until they figure out how to turn bauxite into aluminum in solar furnaces, I'd say that this solution is not terribly effectual.
In response to the "where do they get the water?" comment, distilleries figured out how to condense fluids from gasses centuries ago. Properly designed heat exchangers and condenser coils should notably limit the loss in that direction.
All things said and done, either this isn't a complete idea, or they're hiding the rest of it because they think they're clever. It's certainly not a NEW idea, it's just feeding off the hype of "hydrogen fuel!", and propogating because people don't understand the thermodynamics of the process.
It occurs to me that station-keeping engines would be an excellent application for ion engines. They don't have the power to push the thing into orbit, but certainly they could be built with enough thrust to counter the atmospheric drag at those altitudes. While it would take a bit of effort to bring the engines up on the rockets, it would probably be more than compensated by being able to shuttle up a small load of xenon every now and then instead of all of the fuel necessary to boost it back into its original orbit.
Maybe it's just convenient to have it ride lower every now and again, but I can't imagine that the fuel saved by the lower orbit compensates for having to push it back up there again. I haven't done the math, but it's possible that ion engines would allow it to stay at a lower altitude indefinitely, since there's no danger of decay.
And while we're at it, maybe we could design these things with just a tad bit of aerodynamic considerations. Ok, I'm truly talking out my backside right now, but it's fun to think about how to avoid this kind of thing.
It seems that a lot of people in this discussion seem to think that this would be (a) impossible, or at least (b) horribly expensive, so I thought I'd illustrate how it could be accomplished cheaply and effectively.
First, the bank would need to have a readily recognizable web address that fully described the company name. www.wellsfargoofnorthamerica.com, for instance. It's kind of long to type, but we're talking security procedures here.
Second, have ALL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS institute a policy of never sending a link in any email. Announce this policy on TV commercials. Make people sign a notice recognizing this policy when they sign up for an account. Put it in big letters on the initial credit card contracts. Put posters up in the bank lobby, that kind of thing. Awareness is truly the place where we're falling down here.
There will always be idiots who fall for this stuff, but if people in general know that banks won't send these links, then they won't fall for this kind of thing nearly as often.
They must have improved on the technique since I read about it (like seven years ago, I think). I'm curious, was it tetracycline? That was the major one on the original list.
I think that this label is a little misleading. If memory serves, the "short term" course of drugs and antibiotics involves four different antibiotics used in pairs over several months. Heliobacter are some truly resilient critters. You have to use them in pairs partially because the heliobacter become resistant, and partially to avoid completely ruining your intenstinal ecology.
Admittedly, this is short term compared to the years of antibiotics that some people wind up using, and it's better than living with an ulcer for the rest of your life.
You are correct. What they're designing is the ability to create a three dimensional understanding of the world in our minds based on perceptual input. They're also designing an ability to cross-reference the vehicles capabilities with this internal map in order to identify a navigable path from one place to another. These are things that we take for granted, but without which our intelligence wouldn't be able to operate.
Before you can understand something you have to be able to perceive it, or at least model it in your mind. They aren't creating true AI, but they are developing the technologies which are the necessary precursors to AI.
And, no, a soccer mom with a big mac on her knee talking on a cell phone couldn't traverse the course that they'll be on. With gulleys, trees, and other obstacles in the way, it's a little more complicated than that. Try offroading yourself some time.
It seems that everything you eat can give you cancer. Are they now headed down the road of deciding what intellectual content causes stupidity?
Let's face it, when you're talking about negative side effects (lethargy, obeisity, stupidity), watching television, regardless of what you're watching, is worse for you than marijuana.
You are correct though that a space elevator would optimally be tethered near the equator.
Just as a clarification, this is like saying that the hubcaps of a car would optimally be mounted in line with the axle (as opposed to somewhere on the tread, perhaps). Space elevators require geostationary orbit, which only exists over the equator. The only way such a thing is going to be built in US territory is if we decide to conquor a South American (or longitudinally similar) country.
This keyboard is a Key Tronic Ergo Technology black keyboard that they talked Key Tronic into not passing through the last phase of painting, or maybe they painted it black themselves.
These keyboards currently sell for $21.50 even WITH letters painted on. I appreciate the reviewer taking the time to determine that these things really are harder to use than one that has markings, but there are stronger reasons for not buying them.
Um, what?! The oil that covers roads is washed away every time it rains. That's why wet roads are more dangerous after a week of dry weather.
Half true. The roads are more dangerous when it rains after a week of dry weather because the lighter oils float to the top of the water, making an oil slick.
The heavier oils and waxes create a barrier that keep the water out.
Ok, so let's assume that we can all start driving hydrogen based cars now. The burning of hydrogen produces something like nine times its mass in water. This would mean that a crowded road would become hot and humid like the inside of a bathroom when you take a hot shower.
Water vapor isn't like CO2, CO, or other petroleum, it isn't naturally a gas at room temperature. It naturally precipitates out on any cooler surface. So much for road-side newspaper stands, right? Waterproof briefcases and backpacks would become popular. Anyone walking along side the road could wind up drenched.
In case you didn't know it, water is pretty much a universal solvent. Anything near the road would suffer corrosion as if it were under water, although a little slower. Previously safe posters and billboards would have to become plasticized. As petroleum based cars became scarce, the oil that protects our roads from rain would dry up, and the water would quickly destroy most surfaces.
On the good side of this, the road side would suddenly become a very popular place for vegitation to grow. It would be like that spot along the riverside where the grass grows so tall. Imagine wanting to put your garden CLOSER to the street!
Let's talk about days where the temperature is below freezing. All of the storefronts on a popular road would accumulate a thick coating of frost. The heat of the passing cars would keep it liquid until traffic died down, then it would turn to as sheet of ice. Lightly traveled roads would accumulate a perpetual sheen. Traveling on the highways in late evening would become outright dangerous.
Ok, so maybe I'm engaging in a little bit of doomsaying. We're so enthused about getting rid of our old problems, though, that we don't seem to be even thinking about the new problems that this would cause.
On the internet and creativity thing- I will play devil's advocate- What about situations where instead of having to figure out on their own what something is/does/means, a kid can just look it up on the internet? What does that do for creativity?
Creativity is fueled by the complexity of one's environment. Developmental studies on children are pretty clear on that. The more pieces you have to recombine, the more likely you are to recombine them in original and interesting ways. The internet just allows people to avoid the work behind recombining of things in ways that others have already done so, while still providing the benefit of learning the results.
Please, please explain something to me about these hyphenated names. I live in the midwest, so we don't see much of this silliness. But please indulge me
Indulgence granted. When two people with separate names get married and one decides to hyphenate, she generally places the new name at the end of her original surname so as not to disrupt alphabetization. For children, this results in having parents with two distinct and separate last names, and the child generally chooses between them whenever they decide to have a professional life.
Marriage between two people with hyphenated names is generally cause for negotiation. There are no hard rules on whose name gets changed when you get married. Usually the female will drop both of her last names (hyphen included) and take the male's pair. Sometimes she won't bother changing her name at all. I haven't heard of any men taking a woman's hyphenated name, but it does happen for normal names, so it's not impossible. I have heard of couples who just dump the entire mess and invent their own new, legal last name.
So the answer to your question is that it's entirely up to the couple to make it as complicated as they feel appropriate.
"display provides paper-like viewing comfort with a high contrast ratio for reading-intensive applications..."
Paper-like viewing comfort = you can look at it just like you look at a piece of paper! high contrast ratio = the dark spots really are darker than the light spots! reading-intensive applications = anything that doesn't require us to change pixel brightness too often.
The real problem with this kind of device will be the same problem that e-paper applications have had all along. Durability, lifespan, and manufacturing costs. Lifespan was a serious problem with TFT monitors when they were a new technology but now they generally last longer than their backlighting. Manufacturing costs always drop for new products.
Anything that flexes winds up with a durability issue, and this follows a distinct pattern. Products like this become more durable over time until the manufacturing costs get low enough that people can start considering them "disposable". At that point durability and lifespan drop precipitously. Reference the history of floppy drives and cd roms, for instance.
There is no doubt that they'll be able to create a marketable product, just as there is no doubt that what they've already created isn't it. It's just a matter of time.
It had to come to this eventually. If you're doing something that affects millions of people, and any concerns they raise are just deflected with "na na na na na - I can't hear you", then sooner or later, somebody somewhere is going to have no option but to force you to just ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION.
Unless, of course, you happen to be President Bush.
There is a larger savings that this analysis doesn't consider - the cost of putting all of those chips together into one package. Assembling the various components onto a board isn't a negligible cost, and this will make that expense almost vanish. Again, it won't effect the casting of the cellphone's case or the cost of the keypad and screen, but it'll make the total cost to build a cell phone drop by more than $5
Wow, that's a dumb question. You might as well ask if weapons are necessary. It's the same answer. Humans are naturally competitive creatures, and many of them, even today, are quite happy to take advantage of military superiority to subjugate and/or slaughter those that they feel superior to.
Until the end of the cold war, America was good at taking the moral high ground and only using our military superiority to defend ourselves and others. Now that we notably have no military equal in the world, we've kind of started on a path to subjugate and/or slaughter anyone who we can definitely identify superiority to.
Sound familiar? So the answer to the question is "necessary for what?" If you answer that, then you'll have a clearer picture of the mentality of the people who want to put weapons in orbit.
It starts with them reclassifing DSL as an information service. The telcos go nutz, cut everyoen else off from the lines and crank up the rates until everyone complains. Then they push to get legislation passed saying that they can regulate information services.
Can you imagine the power of a company that could regulate information services? THAT's the truly scary part of this news.
It's annoyingly common for the U.S. Congress to pass laws which push off responsibility to future generations, and this is just another example. I wonder if anyone has made a compendium of the lawmakers which introduce legislation which defers responsibility like this. Probably not, because every spending bill would then be like that.
Wow, people are opinionated about that woman. Why is it necessary to have an extreme opinion of her? Her vision isn't perfect, she got some things wrong, she got some things right. She doesn't need to be deified or demonized, just taken with everything else that we take in.
On the point presented here, there really is such a thing as an occupationally induced mindset. The classical example of this is with strippers. Most of the men that they meet are the type who readily give money at the sight of bare flesh. They wind up socializing with a lot of that kind of person, and other women who see a lot of that kind of person. It's a self-reinforcing environment that encourages women to believe that men are good for nothing except handing over money, and that there is no real affection except that which is bought and sold.
Politicans have a similar problem. Their job is largely to deal with those segments of the population who aren't responsible enough to save for retirement, aren't smart enough to examine their purchases, and aren't wise enough to avoid addiction to anything that's even vaguely appealing. These three things may not apply to any one person, but years of dealing with these types and socializing with mostly others who have to deal with these types becomes a self-reinforcing environment that convinces them that the world is entirely populated by (a) their friends, and (b) people who display all three of the above listed qualities.
I'm not going to give my speech on altruism because we can't agree on a definition.
I agree. What kid EVER wants to trick or treat when it's LIGHT out? That's nuts! Kids would hate it because their parents wouldn't let them go out for another hour, instead of just after dinner, and they wouldn't get to stay out any later because of school hours not shifting.
The Creative Commons isn't about binding your property rights closer to you, it's about specifically allowing people to use your work for certain purposes. He's somehow thinking that it's supposed to add restrictions to use, but it is actually all about decreasing restrictions.
Certainly the principles of fair use allow you to use excerpts from people's work for media purposes, but it doesn't allow you to recombine pieces into clips, it doesn't allow you to use it as background music for an informational broadcast, it doesn't allow people to re-mix your work in with others to create something new. Creative Commons DOES allow these things.
It also has a very effective proviso that allows you to specify that others can't use your work to make money off of it through this license. If they want that, they have to make special arrangements with you. This fits many people's philosophies much better than current copyright laws do. "Give my stuff as much airplay as you like, but if you earn money off of it, I want my cut".
You can't tell me that nobody will find a market in selling little boxes that convert digital tv signals into an analog feed for your "old" television. It's inevitable.
Re:The least capabile are the ones that care the m
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 1
Your post suggests that you don't understand what a metaskill is. Metaskills are the skills that allow us to aquire and rate other skills.
Also, your experiences are just a few dots that are drowned in a swarm of other evidence. No matter how many conscientious home schoolers you can point out, there are still more home schoolers who seriously overrate their own ability to perform that function.
I'm not suggesting that teachers have better metaskills, but teachers do have a system in place for telling them when they're incompetent. Or at least they should. Parents have no such thing.
The reason that I would exclude home schooling is because, in my experience, those people who perform home schooling are those that are least capable of actually teaching the children useful life skills. This goes back to my "poor metaskills" argument a few posts back. Most people are capable of realizing that they can't provide their kids with as broad an education as any half-dozen barely competent teachers could. Those with rotten metaskills convince themselves that they know as much as anyone else, and are therefore just as qualified to teach their kids as anyone else is.
As mentioned, those with poor metaskills are invariably those who have poor general skills. As a result, allowing home schooling usually results in the least qualified to teach taking that option.
Another problem with home schooling is that there are some things that parent's can't teach, and those things involve socialization. Children need to learn how to deal with other children, with authority figures that aren't their parents, and with those who are younger/smaller/weaker than themselves. They won't get this at home because that's a completely different social dynamic. Even if you can teach your kids math, science, reading, and other skills, you'll still wind up with kids that are socially retarded.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be a good thing if it were true. The massive ammounts of energy used to reduce bauxite are mostly lost as waste heat. If they were actually stored in the material, this might be an efficient system to transport energy.
Actually, this is true. Thermite is a substance that burns at around 5000 degrees, and is capable of welding metal plates and destroying metal machinery. I've always wanted to see someone put a thermite grenade on top of one of those really big soda machines and watch it explode.
Thermite is a mixture of aluminum shavings and rust. The heat is produced by the oxidation of the aluminum as oxygen is transfered from the rust. There's a car in the St. Louis Science Center that is entirely powered from that reaction. It's an experimental thing and I've never heard about why it wasn't practical, but I know it works.
Haraldm is, in fact, correct in that they're just moving the energy production back to a central power plant, and the efficiency of the process is in question. Until they figure out how to turn bauxite into aluminum in solar furnaces, I'd say that this solution is not terribly effectual.
In response to the "where do they get the water?" comment, distilleries figured out how to condense fluids from gasses centuries ago. Properly designed heat exchangers and condenser coils should notably limit the loss in that direction.
All things said and done, either this isn't a complete idea, or they're hiding the rest of it because they think they're clever. It's certainly not a NEW idea, it's just feeding off the hype of "hydrogen fuel!", and propogating because people don't understand the thermodynamics of the process.
It occurs to me that station-keeping engines would be an excellent application for ion engines. They don't have the power to push the thing into orbit, but certainly they could be built with enough thrust to counter the atmospheric drag at those altitudes. While it would take a bit of effort to bring the engines up on the rockets, it would probably be more than compensated by being able to shuttle up a small load of xenon every now and then instead of all of the fuel necessary to boost it back into its original orbit.
Maybe it's just convenient to have it ride lower every now and again, but I can't imagine that the fuel saved by the lower orbit compensates for having to push it back up there again. I haven't done the math, but it's possible that ion engines would allow it to stay at a lower altitude indefinitely, since there's no danger of decay.
And while we're at it, maybe we could design these things with just a tad bit of aerodynamic considerations. Ok, I'm truly talking out my backside right now, but it's fun to think about how to avoid this kind of thing.
It seems that a lot of people in this discussion seem to think that this would be (a) impossible, or at least (b) horribly expensive, so I thought I'd illustrate how it could be accomplished cheaply and effectively.
First, the bank would need to have a readily recognizable web address that fully described the company name. www.wellsfargoofnorthamerica.com, for instance. It's kind of long to type, but we're talking security procedures here.
Second, have ALL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS institute a policy of never sending a link in any email. Announce this policy on TV commercials. Make people sign a notice recognizing this policy when they sign up for an account. Put it in big letters on the initial credit card contracts. Put posters up in the bank lobby, that kind of thing. Awareness is truly the place where we're falling down here.
There will always be idiots who fall for this stuff, but if people in general know that banks won't send these links, then they won't fall for this kind of thing nearly as often.
They must have improved on the technique since I read about it (like seven years ago, I think). I'm curious, was it tetracycline? That was the major one on the original list.
I think that this label is a little misleading. If memory serves, the "short term" course of drugs and antibiotics involves four different antibiotics used in pairs over several months. Heliobacter are some truly resilient critters. You have to use them in pairs partially because the heliobacter become resistant, and partially to avoid completely ruining your intenstinal ecology.
Admittedly, this is short term compared to the years of antibiotics that some people wind up using, and it's better than living with an ulcer for the rest of your life.
Well, ya, but once a soccer mom has gone through that kind of training, then she isn't your typical soccer mom any more, is she?
You are correct. What they're designing is the ability to create a three dimensional understanding of the world in our minds based on perceptual input. They're also designing an ability to cross-reference the vehicles capabilities with this internal map in order to identify a navigable path from one place to another. These are things that we take for granted, but without which our intelligence wouldn't be able to operate.
Before you can understand something you have to be able to perceive it, or at least model it in your mind. They aren't creating true AI, but they are developing the technologies which are the necessary precursors to AI.
And, no, a soccer mom with a big mac on her knee talking on a cell phone couldn't traverse the course that they'll be on. With gulleys, trees, and other obstacles in the way, it's a little more complicated than that. Try offroading yourself some time.
It seems that everything you eat can give you cancer. Are they now headed down the road of deciding what intellectual content causes stupidity?
Let's face it, when you're talking about negative side effects (lethargy, obeisity, stupidity), watching television, regardless of what you're watching, is worse for you than marijuana.
You are correct though that a space elevator would optimally be tethered near the equator.
Just as a clarification, this is like saying that the hubcaps of a car would optimally be mounted in line with the axle (as opposed to somewhere on the tread, perhaps). Space elevators require geostationary orbit, which only exists over the equator. The only way such a thing is going to be built in US territory is if we decide to conquor a South American (or longitudinally similar) country.
This keyboard is a Key Tronic Ergo Technology black keyboard that they talked Key Tronic into not passing through the last phase of painting, or maybe they painted it black themselves.
These keyboards currently sell for $21.50 even WITH letters painted on. I appreciate the reviewer taking the time to determine that these things really are harder to use than one that has markings, but there are stronger reasons for not buying them.
Um, what?! The oil that covers roads is washed away every time it rains. That's why wet roads are more dangerous after a week of dry weather.
Half true. The roads are more dangerous when it rains after a week of dry weather because the lighter oils float to the top of the water, making an oil slick.
The heavier oils and waxes create a barrier that keep the water out.
Ok, so let's assume that we can all start driving hydrogen based cars now. The burning of hydrogen produces something like nine times its mass in water. This would mean that a crowded road would become hot and humid like the inside of a bathroom when you take a hot shower.
Water vapor isn't like CO2, CO, or other petroleum, it isn't naturally a gas at room temperature. It naturally precipitates out on any cooler surface. So much for road-side newspaper stands, right? Waterproof briefcases and backpacks would become popular. Anyone walking along side the road could wind up drenched.
In case you didn't know it, water is pretty much a universal solvent. Anything near the road would suffer corrosion as if it were under water, although a little slower. Previously safe posters and billboards would have to become plasticized. As petroleum based cars became scarce, the oil that protects our roads from rain would dry up, and the water would quickly destroy most surfaces.
On the good side of this, the road side would suddenly become a very popular place for vegitation to grow. It would be like that spot along the riverside where the grass grows so tall. Imagine wanting to put your garden CLOSER to the street!
Let's talk about days where the temperature is below freezing. All of the storefronts on a popular road would accumulate a thick coating of frost. The heat of the passing cars would keep it liquid until traffic died down, then it would turn to as sheet of ice. Lightly traveled roads would accumulate a perpetual sheen. Traveling on the highways in late evening would become outright dangerous.
Ok, so maybe I'm engaging in a little bit of doomsaying. We're so enthused about getting rid of our old problems, though, that we don't seem to be even thinking about the new problems that this would cause.
On the internet and creativity thing- I will play devil's advocate- What about situations where instead of having to figure out on their own what something is/does/means, a kid can just look it up on the internet? What does that do for creativity?
Creativity is fueled by the complexity of one's environment. Developmental studies on children are pretty clear on that. The more pieces you have to recombine, the more likely you are to recombine them in original and interesting ways. The internet just allows people to avoid the work behind recombining of things in ways that others have already done so, while still providing the benefit of learning the results.
Please, please explain something to me about these hyphenated names. I live in the midwest, so we don't see much of this silliness. But please indulge me
Indulgence granted. When two people with separate names get married and one decides to hyphenate, she generally places the new name at the end of her original surname so as not to disrupt alphabetization. For children, this results in having parents with two distinct and separate last names, and the child generally chooses between them whenever they decide to have a professional life.
Marriage between two people with hyphenated names is generally cause for negotiation. There are no hard rules on whose name gets changed when you get married. Usually the female will drop both of her last names (hyphen included) and take the male's pair. Sometimes she won't bother changing her name at all. I haven't heard of any men taking a woman's hyphenated name, but it does happen for normal names, so it's not impossible. I have heard of couples who just dump the entire mess and invent their own new, legal last name.
So the answer to your question is that it's entirely up to the couple to make it as complicated as they feel appropriate.
"display provides paper-like viewing comfort with a high contrast ratio for reading-intensive applications..."
Paper-like viewing comfort = you can look at it just like you look at a piece of paper!
high contrast ratio = the dark spots really are darker than the light spots!
reading-intensive applications = anything that doesn't require us to change pixel brightness too often.
The real problem with this kind of device will be the same problem that e-paper applications have had all along. Durability, lifespan, and manufacturing costs. Lifespan was a serious problem with TFT monitors when they were a new technology but now they generally last longer than their backlighting. Manufacturing costs always drop for new products.
Anything that flexes winds up with a durability issue, and this follows a distinct pattern. Products like this become more durable over time until the manufacturing costs get low enough that people can start considering them "disposable". At that point durability and lifespan drop precipitously. Reference the history of floppy drives and cd roms, for instance.
There is no doubt that they'll be able to create a marketable product, just as there is no doubt that what they've already created isn't it. It's just a matter of time.
It had to come to this eventually. If you're doing something that affects millions of people, and any concerns they raise are just deflected with "na na na na na - I can't hear you", then sooner or later, somebody somewhere is going to have no option but to force you to just ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION.
f ord.html
Unless, of course, you happen to be President Bush.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/politics/08craw
Yea, I know it's off topic, but I wanted to point out that this tactic doesn't always work.
There is a larger savings that this analysis doesn't consider - the cost of putting all of those chips together into one package. Assembling the various components onto a board isn't a negligible cost, and this will make that expense almost vanish. Again, it won't effect the casting of the cellphone's case or the cost of the keypad and screen, but it'll make the total cost to build a cell phone drop by more than $5
Wow, that's a dumb question. You might as well ask if weapons are necessary. It's the same answer. Humans are naturally competitive creatures, and many of them, even today, are quite happy to take advantage of military superiority to subjugate and/or slaughter those that they feel superior to.
Until the end of the cold war, America was good at taking the moral high ground and only using our military superiority to defend ourselves and others. Now that we notably have no military equal in the world, we've kind of started on a path to subjugate and/or slaughter anyone who we can definitely identify superiority to.
Sound familiar? So the answer to the question is "necessary for what?" If you answer that, then you'll have a clearer picture of the mentality of the people who want to put weapons in orbit.
It starts with them reclassifing DSL as an information service. The telcos go nutz, cut everyoen else off from the lines and crank up the rates until everyone complains. Then they push to get legislation passed saying that they can regulate information services.
Can you imagine the power of a company that could regulate information services? THAT's the truly scary part of this news.
It's annoyingly common for the U.S. Congress to pass laws which push off responsibility to future generations, and this is just another example. I wonder if anyone has made a compendium of the lawmakers which introduce legislation which defers responsibility like this. Probably not, because every spending bill would then be like that.
Wow, people are opinionated about that woman. Why is it necessary to have an extreme opinion of her? Her vision isn't perfect, she got some things wrong, she got some things right. She doesn't need to be deified or demonized, just taken with everything else that we take in.
On the point presented here, there really is such a thing as an occupationally induced mindset. The classical example of this is with strippers. Most of the men that they meet are the type who readily give money at the sight of bare flesh. They wind up socializing with a lot of that kind of person, and other women who see a lot of that kind of person. It's a self-reinforcing environment that encourages women to believe that men are good for nothing except handing over money, and that there is no real affection except that which is bought and sold.
Politicans have a similar problem. Their job is largely to deal with those segments of the population who aren't responsible enough to save for retirement, aren't smart enough to examine their purchases, and aren't wise enough to avoid addiction to anything that's even vaguely appealing. These three things may not apply to any one person, but years of dealing with these types and socializing with mostly others who have to deal with these types becomes a self-reinforcing environment that convinces them that the world is entirely populated by (a) their friends, and (b) people who display all three of the above listed qualities.
I'm not going to give my speech on altruism because we can't agree on a definition.
I agree. What kid EVER wants to trick or treat when it's LIGHT out? That's nuts! Kids would hate it because their parents wouldn't let them go out for another hour, instead of just after dinner, and they wouldn't get to stay out any later because of school hours not shifting.
More bureaucratic hot air, I say.
The Creative Commons isn't about binding your property rights closer to you, it's about specifically allowing people to use your work for certain purposes. He's somehow thinking that it's supposed to add restrictions to use, but it is actually all about decreasing restrictions.
Certainly the principles of fair use allow you to use excerpts from people's work for media purposes, but it doesn't allow you to recombine pieces into clips, it doesn't allow you to use it as background music for an informational broadcast, it doesn't allow people to re-mix your work in with others to create something new. Creative Commons DOES allow these things.
It also has a very effective proviso that allows you to specify that others can't use your work to make money off of it through this license. If they want that, they have to make special arrangements with you. This fits many people's philosophies much better than current copyright laws do. "Give my stuff as much airplay as you like, but if you earn money off of it, I want my cut".
You can't tell me that nobody will find a market in selling little boxes that convert digital tv signals into an analog feed for your "old" television. It's inevitable.
Your post suggests that you don't understand what a metaskill is. Metaskills are the skills that allow us to aquire and rate other skills.
Also, your experiences are just a few dots that are drowned in a swarm of other evidence. No matter how many conscientious home schoolers you can point out, there are still more home schoolers who seriously overrate their own ability to perform that function.
I'm not suggesting that teachers have better metaskills, but teachers do have a system in place for telling them when they're incompetent. Or at least they should. Parents have no such thing.
The reason that I would exclude home schooling is because, in my experience, those people who perform home schooling are those that are least capable of actually teaching the children useful life skills. This goes back to my "poor metaskills" argument a few posts back. Most people are capable of realizing that they can't provide their kids with as broad an education as any half-dozen barely competent teachers could. Those with rotten metaskills convince themselves that they know as much as anyone else, and are therefore just as qualified to teach their kids as anyone else is.
As mentioned, those with poor metaskills are invariably those who have poor general skills. As a result, allowing home schooling usually results in the least qualified to teach taking that option.
Another problem with home schooling is that there are some things that parent's can't teach, and those things involve socialization. Children need to learn how to deal with other children, with authority figures that aren't their parents, and with those who are younger/smaller/weaker than themselves. They won't get this at home because that's a completely different social dynamic. Even if you can teach your kids math, science, reading, and other skills, you'll still wind up with kids that are socially retarded.