It's a Linux kernel, but it's not a Linux platform.
Sure it is - so is a Tivo.
It just isn't a GNU/Linux platform. Linux is just a kernel that launches an init. You can make all kinds of systems on top of it. Most of them don't run X11 at all.
Have you ever tried building Android, though? He's got a point. I couldn't even fetch the repo due to the shitty tools used. You need a massive PC on a massive connection to even participate. It's definitely targeted at corporate users and not at hobbyists. This is not a surprise, but it's still a good reason to play in another sandbox.
Plus, being able to run something in a chroot isn't really saying much - you can do that in any OS that has a POSIX kernel. Debian in a chroot doesn't really get you much outside of the chroot.
The android build tools can be painful to work with. The biggest issue I've had with it is that it is almost impossible to check out the same source twice unless it is tagged. With git every commit gets a unique ID. With repo you have a million commit IDs that constitute a repository and there is no simple way to capture which ones were used in any particular build. It is like going back to subversion where you can never get all your files in a consistent state without explicit tags.
Well now I'm clearly going to have to spend all afternoon looking up how the Inuit diet works, physiologically.
I can't imagine that humans are obligate omnivores. For the most part you need a more complex digestive system to live without meat - living only on meat should be a lot simpler. I'm sure there are meat sources of vitamins, and if not there are always pills.
And that's why I argued that government isn't the appropriate source of accreditation. That is actually how we got to the current situation where independent organizations handle accreditation.
The problem with this is that the government actually IS the source of accreditation today, and those organizations aren't independent.
The government only offers student loans to students attending accredited institutions. The government therefore maintains a list of bodies it considers valid accreditors. Those accrediting bodies effectively have government power behind them, without the accountability that usually requires.
It was the least worst choice between anything goes and government regulation.
I'm not entirely disagreeing with you here. I just think there has to be a better way. I do suspect that regulation is basically inevitable here.
A lot easier to rob too, just grab the one server with the bit coin data on it and walk out the door, far easier than hanging out and breaking into a big heavy safe.
Except, of course, that any institution with any brains would have multiple copies of that data and it would be encrypted. So stealing it would do no good for the thief as they can't use it, and stealing it would do no harm to the company because they have another copy.
Yup. Nothing prevents the local bank from keeping all their cash stacked on a pallet in the lobby behind non-bulletproof glass after-hours. They're just not stupid.
I merely said that running your own bank based on bitcoin is much more practical than doing the same with cash. Given the problem of securing a few files against loss or theft and the problem of securing a stack of cash against loss or theft I'll take the former anytime.
So, you'd be fine with everyone knowing how much you paid for your car? How about how much you're paying your doctor, and for what? These are all contracts, after all.
Yes. It would be the same as everybody else is paying anyway, since nobody is going to pay more for something than what the last person paid.
You can already guess what somebody paid for their car by looking at their car and looking it up online.
Oh, and people not knowing the costs of all the doctors in town is one of the many causes of the healthcare crisis. If that was all published then there would be a lot of downward pressure on prices.
I always look for contracts that have illegal provisions and make sure I sign the document. Then I can get out of the contract without worry.
You enjoy making arguments in court? On the court's schedule?
That's basically true of any contract/etc. Does your car come with a warranty? It is only as good as the manufacturer's word, or your willingness to sue them and waste 5 years in court. Justice in the US is for sale to those with the means to afford it.
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight. Lack of regulation inevitably leads to a boom/bust cycle and poisons economic growth.
Bitcoin is only intended to solve the problem of money production and changing hands. It does not in any way address banking. It is a currency, not an economic system.
It basically solves the same problems as trading in gold solves - there is no inflation because the rate of production is well-understood. I can still rob you and steal your gold, and a bank you give gold to can still steal your money or lose it in a failure.
MtGox certainly illustrates the perils of giving your money to an unregulated bank. It doesn't really illustrate the problems with Bitcoin though, because Bitcoin doesn't address banking at all. Nothing prevents people from storing their Bitcoins in a regulated bank, other than the general unwillingness of governments to regulate it.
One thing Bitcoin does do is make it much more practical to run your own bank. Doing that with cash is fraught with peril, but it is at least reasonably practical to do it for Bitcoin. Certainly one can still do it badly and lose everything, and I'm not calling it the ultimate solution.
Agree. When a party goes to court they're asking for government intervention. The court should only intervene when it serves the PUBLIC interest. Often public and private interest align (since the public is a collection of private individuals), so the concept of civil court is a good one. However, when this isn't the case the pubic shouldn't go shooting itself in the foot by enforcing contract terms that cause it harm.
I think it is important to make it clear on a transcript what was actually done, and that means some kind of common vocabulary.
However, the idea of regulation of course content bothers me, especially in the sciences. The government is traditionally extremely slow to embrace change. On the large scale academia is also slow to embrace change, but on the scale of what goes in any particular course many fields are quick to embrace change. This is especially true in the sciences, and that is essential since the state of knowledge is changing rapidly.
With a lot of regulation biology students might still be using the 3-kingdom model of taxonomy; chemists might be mixing elements, controlling phlogiston, and memorizing atomic weights; and physicists would be using Newtonian dynamics to plot orbits.
Oh, and knowing our luck teaching evolution might be illegal, which probably wasn't your goal.:)
Exclusive contracts and confidentiality clauses should be illegal.
Should be why? You're proposing to materially change the fundament (contract law) on which the entire global commercial economy is based, and has been for hundreds of years. Do you have so much as... a reason? The law isn't a 100-line program, you can't just throw it out and rewrite it all because you spotted a small bug. The law is more like a million-line program - you patch it and maybe if you get time you might rearchitect a small corner. You certainly don't get to rearchitect an entire area in complete ignorance of 99% of that area's use cases.
Well, short of building a robot army I don't get to re-architect it at all.:)
However, the reason is simple - confidentiality clauses allow people to do things which cause harm to others, and then only pay for the damages when somebody goes through a lot of trouble to sue them. Doing that is very difficult in the US, so for the most part people just deal with it. If all settlements were published, then it would be much harder for anybody to defend against a lawsuit if they keep repeating their actions.
Exclusive contracts usually get combined with monopoly power to result in all kinds of anti-consumer behavior.
My sense is that whatever benefits either type of contract provides to the public is greatly outweighed by their harm. Therefore, it is not in the public interest to uphold such terms. When two parties dispute a contract in court they're asking the public to step in and help them out, which gives the public the right to dictate what sorts of problems they're willing to help out with.
If somebody wants the government to enforce their contract, the burden on them should be to prove how doing so improves the public welfare. The burden should not be on the government to prove that a contract causes harm.
A BB gun for instance can be a WMD but a rock alone couldn't.
Which just outlines just how stupid the the law is.
The whole point of the term WMD was to draw a line where an attack using anything beyond the line would be considered as being equivalent to a full-scale nuclear attack, with a corresponding retaliation. Back during the cold war the US/Russia/etc were saying that they really didn't care about just how big a nerve gas/biological/nuclear attack you hit them with - they would turn your country into a glass parking lot. It made sense as a policy - once you get to the point of launching mass-casualty attacks that kill people by the tens of thousands a full-scale war was inevitable, and with mounting escalations it would end up being nuclear. When one flies they all fly, or so it goes.
Using the same term to describe common crimes just doesn't make any sense. If some nut shoots a few people with a machine gun you're not going to level entire cities in response. You might just do that if a state actor arms a nut with an atomic bomb and sets them loose on NYC.
Seriously, though, I can't believe we're actually talking about NATO-vs-Warsaw Pact all over again...
Don't need another expensive computer system. Just let the parties have copies and right to distribute.
Sometimes it might be in the interest of both parties to keep the agreement secret, but not in the public interest.
If people want to conspire against the public interest in a manner that isn't outright illegal I don't have a huge problem with that. However, they wouldn't be able to then turn around and ask the public for help with their partner double-crosses them.
If you want the public to step in and settle your disputes with the force of law, then you need to do your part in helping out the public. That means everybody sees what your pricing is, or what your salary is, and so on.
So where on the transcript will it list the part about how sincere prayer is a suitable substitute for adequate reinforcement? Nowhere.
You can graduate with a degree in engineering from the best school in the US and believe that today. All a college test can do is assess knowledge/skill. You can ask people to sign a statement of faith if you want, but the fact that somebody signs a piece of paper has no bearing on what they actually believe, and even if they're sincere beliefs can change.
I know people who have accredited degrees in the biological and physical sciences who don't agree with the Theory of Evolution. Contrary to popular belief, you can pass a test in genetics class without believing that what the class teaches is right. If I sat you down in a theology class I'm sure you could pass a test there, even if you happen to be an athiest.
How about if you hire a geologist to find likely oil fields? Wouldn't you like to know if his 4.0 means he is well versed in geology and able to apply the latest understanding to locating oil?
Absolutely.
What good is it if Unkle Larry's house of lern'in has an accurate transcript?
If the geology courses cover the material and measure the standards required by law, then there is no harm in them listing those courses in the transcript. If the courses do not cover the material required by law, then they can't list those courses on the transcript.
I'm not opposed to standards for education - I'm just opposed to how things are done today.
So how about if they got a 4.0 but unfortunately that means they believe that the earth is 6000 years old at most? That might have implications if their degree is in geology or biology.
If I'm hiring somebody to build a bridge, I don't care if they believe that steel grows on trees. I do care that they know how to determine where to put the steel and what its strength specifications must be.
College should be about skills/knowledge/etc, not belief. For all we know the standard model could be wrong (indeed, I doubt that would be even debated by most physicists considering the various phenomena in the universe we can't explain). I'd expect a physics student to be knowledgeable in the standard model all the same. I wouldn't expect them to sign a statement that they believe in it.
So, if I hire a biologist, I really don't care how old they think the earth is. I do care that they're able to do the job they were hired to do. If I'm hiring them to assemble phylogenetic trees, then I expect that their coursework would have covered how to do that. Whether they think the job I'm paying them to do is BS or not doesn't really matter as long as they get the job done.
You can't even begin to judge the accuracy of a transcript until you know what was taught in those classes. If I take a course in 'advanced geometry' and the class was exclusively circling the shape that doesn't belong, the claim that I ended up with a 4.0 is entirely accurate. Hey, I even got the 'tough' question with the 3 squares and a parallelogram right. So accurate but meaningless.
I'm not suggesting that accreditation doesn't have a place, but it should be done by the government, and it should be about standardizing the terms on transcripts so that you know what somebody took, and not about regulating what courses people need to take.
I agree completely. Exclusive contracts and confidentiality clauses should be illegal. In fact, I'd go a step further and make any contract unenforceable in court unless it is published. Just provide a government service where anybody can publish a contract and anybody can peruse the contracts which are there. It would cost very little to operate or use in the modern age of computers.
There are other issues as well. Do we really want people with a BS from an institute for young earth creation science?
I think it needs to be about the accuracy of the transcript more than the dogma of the school.
If the transcript says they took a particular Biology course, then it should mean that they learned certain things. Whether they believe in Santa Claus or whatever is irrelevant. If a student who has completed Bio 101 can't explain Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium that concerns me more than whether or not they believe that evolution is responsible for the diversity of life on the earth.
1) Go to college because your parents tell you its the only way to succeed.
They, and all your teachers, peers, etc. Just try being a parent who wants to teach their kids that college is overpriced these days - half the country will wish they could lock you up for child abuse.
Schools advertise the portion of their graduating class that is going on to higher education.
Part of the problem is that teachers/etc are giving out the advice that worked well for them - 20-30 years ago it really did make sense to go to college because prices were VASTLY lower even adjusted for inflation.
The problem is that if I take a car that everybody would agree is a good deal and add a zero or two to the price, then it isn't a good buy any longer. That's where we are with education - it hasn't really improved much in 20 years, but it has gotten WAY more expensive.
Sure, you're probably not going to get a cushy office job without the college degree. However, when I look around at my coworkers worried about layoffs I'm not convinced it is nearly as cushy as the TV shows make it out. You don't see 10% of the cast let go every year on The Office.
Don't get me wrong - I value the concept behind a college education. The problem is that we spend WAY too much money making it happen, the system is steeped in tradition, we pay for armies of administrators, there is no competition from start-ups, and that is just the beginning. The system needs a major overhaul, and that won't happen as long as we're letting kids who don't know better indenture themselves to sustain the status quo.
And that is why we have the obligation to regulate the costs. Doing away with accreditation isn't really an option since it was an anti-fraud measure whose purpose still exists.
If that were the case then the accreditation should be issued by the government, in accordance with policies set by the legislature.
The current system is steeped in tradition. If you want to change the basic curriculum, no accreditation. If you want to change how courses are delivered, no accreditation, and so on.
Really the way it should work is that transcripts should be honest, and that's about it. Employers can look at the transcripts and decide if somebody has what it takes.
Ironically with grade inflation transcripts are anything but honest despite accreditation. Parents paying $20k/semester expect passing grades, and they get them.
I spent 8 years working full time and going to school part time. Not a single cent of debt was incurred.
When?
Tuitions are rising much faster than inflation, and have been for 20 years. I incurred only a little debt but that was back in the early 90s and I qualified for merit-based scholarships. If I were in the same situation today I'd probably be facing a LOT more debt.
Also, it makes no sense to have kids doing unskilled labor for 8 years when they could just focus on their studies and be doing something more productive much sooner. Working full time while taking classes can also be a major distraction. These days it won't get you that far anyway, as it is hard to make more than minimum wage without some kind of degree or certification.
The FAFSA is a form where you declare your income, the income of the biological parent you're living with, and the income of whoever they're married to. If any of those aren't willing to declare their income and sign the form then you don't get financial aid until you're 25 or something like that (so treat your step-parent nicely!).
If the combined incomes are low enough that you basically fall below the poverty line and nobody owns any assets (rent house, or have it mortgaged to about 120% of its value, or live on street), then you can qualify for government grants.
Otherwise they offer you great deals on loans that are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and which can only be refinanced exactly once (interest rate drops again after that? poor you...).
The system is awful for a bunch of reasons: 1. Kids who would really benefit from college often can't go to top-notch schools because their parents aren't ultra-wealthy, and aren't willing to basically wipe out all their savings to pay for them to go. Often the student loans alone don't get you there. The very best students can get non-need-based scholarships which helps. 2. Poor kids who wouldn't benefit much from college get to go on the taxpayer dime. 3. Almost everybody who goes to college does it on somebody else's dime, and doesn't take it nearly as seriously as they should as a result. 4. All the government loans help to prop up insane levels of university waste.
I'm all for providing access to college to any student likely to benefit from it (they consistently do well in school, have a decent understanding of what they want to do after college, and have actually begun to pursue that career in practical ways before going to college). The problem today is that we throw a lot of money at the problem and really the only ones who make out well are the colleges themselves. They're basically the ones selling pickaxes in a gold rush.
Eh... things like automatic power of attorney and being automatically an inheritor of the other's estate (assuming no children and/or will stating otherwise) are pretty damn important legal considerations that we give to married couples under law. So is the right to stay in the country, for that matter. There are hundreds of others, actually.
Yes, but you didn't mention any of those in your post, and the three things you did mention really had no relevance today. I certainly agree in their historical importance.
Honestly, I don't think there is any right conveyed by marriage that really requires "marriage" in the sense that exists today to function. By all means allow people to register with the government a power of attorney for medical/etc decisions. That should be able to be anybody - a parent, a child, a friend, whatever. It might be a list of 5 people with majority rules.
Instead we have an institution that basically started out as a property interest in a woman and kids in exchange for support/inheritance, which has transformed into a religious institution mainly oriented around who is/isn't allowed to sleep together with civil perks for compliance. Now we're trying to fix some of the biggest glaring problems with that, but we're not questioning why the institution really needs to exist in the first place.
Virtually every problem solved by marriage is already solved by other rules/institutions already. They have to be, because not everybody is married but must about everybody is subject to them. Kids are born out of wedlock every day, 19-year-olds have medical problems for which they can't make legal decisions due to incapacitation, 80-year-old widows have medical decisions, and so on.
My gripe with marriage is that we have standardized solutions that only apply to half of the population, and that pool of people is shrinking. We neglect coming up with solutions that work well for everybody else. And the whole reason that fewer people are getting married is that it comes with so much legal baggage that many feel it is something best avoided entirely. The reason it has so much baggage is because we tie so many benefits/rules/rights/etc to a single legal relationship, and it is constantly under pressure by various interests to make it conform to their model of how everybody should live.
Oh look, a bank-like entity failed and people lost money. Good thing the FDIC is there to--
Oops.
If cryptocurrencies are going to repeat the last 100+ years of economic history, can they hurry up and rediscover monetary policy too?
The whole point of Bitcoin is that you don't need to put your money into a bank. If you don't put your money in a bank, then you're not susceptible to bank failures.
That's basically the same thing. Lots of local-area stations with a backbone is the result of reducing the listening area of each one.
It just doesn't work well for very mobile devices, because if you used WiFi for a phone in a car it would be connecting to a new base station every few seconds. It works great for phones when you're sitting down and eating.
While I agree with you in principle, the FAA has been taking an extremely harsh view towards this issue. If you snap a photo from a drone and put it on a website that has ads on it they'd probably argue it was commercial use, let alone putting it in a newspaper.
If somebody pays a pilot the cost of fuel for flying them someplace the FAA would argue that this requires a commercial license as well. At most pilots can split costs evenly, and they can't even count fixed costs like maintenance/hanger/etc in that. If the passenger paid the expenses of the flight on their own they argue that the pilot was compensated with the "joy of flying" and thus was paid for the flight. If the pilot is happy, then the FAA isn't.:)
Oh, they consider commuting to work by plane a commercial flight as well. Just be glad they don't run the DMV.
All of this aside if you're flying a drone around at 100 feet chances are nobody is going to notice/care. If for whatever reason somebody does care, then the FAA can go after you if a dollar changes hands just about anywhere.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a Linux kernel, but it's not a Linux platform.
Sure it is - so is a Tivo.
It just isn't a GNU/Linux platform. Linux is just a kernel that launches an init. You can make all kinds of systems on top of it. Most of them don't run X11 at all.
Have you ever tried building Android, though? He's got a point. I couldn't even fetch the repo due to the shitty tools used. You need a massive PC on a massive connection to even participate. It's definitely targeted at corporate users and not at hobbyists. This is not a surprise, but it's still a good reason to play in another sandbox.
Plus, being able to run something in a chroot isn't really saying much - you can do that in any OS that has a POSIX kernel. Debian in a chroot doesn't really get you much outside of the chroot.
The android build tools can be painful to work with. The biggest issue I've had with it is that it is almost impossible to check out the same source twice unless it is tagged. With git every commit gets a unique ID. With repo you have a million commit IDs that constitute a repository and there is no simple way to capture which ones were used in any particular build. It is like going back to subversion where you can never get all your files in a consistent state without explicit tags.
Well now I'm clearly going to have to spend all afternoon looking up how the Inuit diet works, physiologically.
I can't imagine that humans are obligate omnivores. For the most part you need a more complex digestive system to live without meat - living only on meat should be a lot simpler. I'm sure there are meat sources of vitamins, and if not there are always pills.
And that's why I argued that government isn't the appropriate source of accreditation. That is actually how we got to the current situation where independent organizations handle accreditation.
The problem with this is that the government actually IS the source of accreditation today, and those organizations aren't independent.
The government only offers student loans to students attending accredited institutions. The government therefore maintains a list of bodies it considers valid accreditors. Those accrediting bodies effectively have government power behind them, without the accountability that usually requires.
It was the least worst choice between anything goes and government regulation.
I'm not entirely disagreeing with you here. I just think there has to be a better way. I do suspect that regulation is basically inevitable here.
A lot easier to rob too, just grab the one server with the bit coin data on it and walk out the door, far easier than hanging out and breaking into a big heavy safe.
Except, of course, that any institution with any brains would have multiple copies of that data and it would be encrypted. So stealing it would do no good for the thief as they can't use it, and stealing it would do no harm to the company because they have another copy.
Yup. Nothing prevents the local bank from keeping all their cash stacked on a pallet in the lobby behind non-bulletproof glass after-hours. They're just not stupid.
I merely said that running your own bank based on bitcoin is much more practical than doing the same with cash. Given the problem of securing a few files against loss or theft and the problem of securing a stack of cash against loss or theft I'll take the former anytime.
So, you'd be fine with everyone knowing how much you paid for your car? How about how much you're paying your doctor, and for what? These are all contracts, after all.
Yes. It would be the same as everybody else is paying anyway, since nobody is going to pay more for something than what the last person paid.
You can already guess what somebody paid for their car by looking at their car and looking it up online.
Oh, and people not knowing the costs of all the doctors in town is one of the many causes of the healthcare crisis. If that was all published then there would be a lot of downward pressure on prices.
I always look for contracts that have illegal provisions and make sure I sign the document. Then I can get out of the contract without worry.
You enjoy making arguments in court? On the court's schedule?
That's basically true of any contract/etc. Does your car come with a warranty? It is only as good as the manufacturer's word, or your willingness to sue them and waste 5 years in court. Justice in the US is for sale to those with the means to afford it.
Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies are the high tech realization of delusional right wing economic thinking. They are ideologically founded on the idea of avoiding government economic oversight. Lack of regulation inevitably leads to a boom/bust cycle and poisons economic growth.
Bitcoin is only intended to solve the problem of money production and changing hands. It does not in any way address banking. It is a currency, not an economic system.
It basically solves the same problems as trading in gold solves - there is no inflation because the rate of production is well-understood. I can still rob you and steal your gold, and a bank you give gold to can still steal your money or lose it in a failure.
MtGox certainly illustrates the perils of giving your money to an unregulated bank. It doesn't really illustrate the problems with Bitcoin though, because Bitcoin doesn't address banking at all. Nothing prevents people from storing their Bitcoins in a regulated bank, other than the general unwillingness of governments to regulate it.
One thing Bitcoin does do is make it much more practical to run your own bank. Doing that with cash is fraught with peril, but it is at least reasonably practical to do it for Bitcoin. Certainly one can still do it badly and lose everything, and I'm not calling it the ultimate solution.
Agree. When a party goes to court they're asking for government intervention. The court should only intervene when it serves the PUBLIC interest. Often public and private interest align (since the public is a collection of private individuals), so the concept of civil court is a good one. However, when this isn't the case the pubic shouldn't go shooting itself in the foot by enforcing contract terms that cause it harm.
Honestly, I'm torn on the issue in general.
I think it is important to make it clear on a transcript what was actually done, and that means some kind of common vocabulary.
However, the idea of regulation of course content bothers me, especially in the sciences. The government is traditionally extremely slow to embrace change. On the large scale academia is also slow to embrace change, but on the scale of what goes in any particular course many fields are quick to embrace change. This is especially true in the sciences, and that is essential since the state of knowledge is changing rapidly.
With a lot of regulation biology students might still be using the 3-kingdom model of taxonomy; chemists might be mixing elements, controlling phlogiston, and memorizing atomic weights; and physicists would be using Newtonian dynamics to plot orbits.
Oh, and knowing our luck teaching evolution might be illegal, which probably wasn't your goal. :)
Exclusive contracts and confidentiality clauses should be illegal.
Should be why? You're proposing to materially change the fundament (contract law) on which the entire global commercial economy is based, and has been for hundreds of years. Do you have so much as ... a reason? The law isn't a 100-line program, you can't just throw it out and rewrite it all because you spotted a small bug. The law is more like a million-line program - you patch it and maybe if you get time you might rearchitect a small corner. You certainly don't get to rearchitect an entire area in complete ignorance of 99% of that area's use cases.
Well, short of building a robot army I don't get to re-architect it at all. :)
However, the reason is simple - confidentiality clauses allow people to do things which cause harm to others, and then only pay for the damages when somebody goes through a lot of trouble to sue them. Doing that is very difficult in the US, so for the most part people just deal with it. If all settlements were published, then it would be much harder for anybody to defend against a lawsuit if they keep repeating their actions.
Exclusive contracts usually get combined with monopoly power to result in all kinds of anti-consumer behavior.
My sense is that whatever benefits either type of contract provides to the public is greatly outweighed by their harm. Therefore, it is not in the public interest to uphold such terms. When two parties dispute a contract in court they're asking the public to step in and help them out, which gives the public the right to dictate what sorts of problems they're willing to help out with.
If somebody wants the government to enforce their contract, the burden on them should be to prove how doing so improves the public welfare. The burden should not be on the government to prove that a contract causes harm.
A BB gun for instance can be a WMD but a rock alone couldn't.
Which just outlines just how stupid the the law is.
The whole point of the term WMD was to draw a line where an attack using anything beyond the line would be considered as being equivalent to a full-scale nuclear attack, with a corresponding retaliation. Back during the cold war the US/Russia/etc were saying that they really didn't care about just how big a nerve gas/biological/nuclear attack you hit them with - they would turn your country into a glass parking lot. It made sense as a policy - once you get to the point of launching mass-casualty attacks that kill people by the tens of thousands a full-scale war was inevitable, and with mounting escalations it would end up being nuclear. When one flies they all fly, or so it goes.
Using the same term to describe common crimes just doesn't make any sense. If some nut shoots a few people with a machine gun you're not going to level entire cities in response. You might just do that if a state actor arms a nut with an atomic bomb and sets them loose on NYC.
Seriously, though, I can't believe we're actually talking about NATO-vs-Warsaw Pact all over again...
Don't need another expensive computer system. Just let the parties have copies and right to distribute.
Sometimes it might be in the interest of both parties to keep the agreement secret, but not in the public interest.
If people want to conspire against the public interest in a manner that isn't outright illegal I don't have a huge problem with that. However, they wouldn't be able to then turn around and ask the public for help with their partner double-crosses them.
If you want the public to step in and settle your disputes with the force of law, then you need to do your part in helping out the public. That means everybody sees what your pricing is, or what your salary is, and so on.
So where on the transcript will it list the part about how sincere prayer is a suitable substitute for adequate reinforcement? Nowhere.
You can graduate with a degree in engineering from the best school in the US and believe that today. All a college test can do is assess knowledge/skill. You can ask people to sign a statement of faith if you want, but the fact that somebody signs a piece of paper has no bearing on what they actually believe, and even if they're sincere beliefs can change.
I know people who have accredited degrees in the biological and physical sciences who don't agree with the Theory of Evolution. Contrary to popular belief, you can pass a test in genetics class without believing that what the class teaches is right. If I sat you down in a theology class I'm sure you could pass a test there, even if you happen to be an athiest.
How about if you hire a geologist to find likely oil fields? Wouldn't you like to know if his 4.0 means he is well versed in geology and able to apply the latest understanding to locating oil?
Absolutely.
What good is it if Unkle Larry's house of lern'in has an accurate transcript?
If the geology courses cover the material and measure the standards required by law, then there is no harm in them listing those courses in the transcript. If the courses do not cover the material required by law, then they can't list those courses on the transcript.
I'm not opposed to standards for education - I'm just opposed to how things are done today.
So how about if they got a 4.0 but unfortunately that means they believe that the earth is 6000 years old at most? That might have implications if their degree is in geology or biology.
If I'm hiring somebody to build a bridge, I don't care if they believe that steel grows on trees. I do care that they know how to determine where to put the steel and what its strength specifications must be.
College should be about skills/knowledge/etc, not belief. For all we know the standard model could be wrong (indeed, I doubt that would be even debated by most physicists considering the various phenomena in the universe we can't explain). I'd expect a physics student to be knowledgeable in the standard model all the same. I wouldn't expect them to sign a statement that they believe in it.
So, if I hire a biologist, I really don't care how old they think the earth is. I do care that they're able to do the job they were hired to do. If I'm hiring them to assemble phylogenetic trees, then I expect that their coursework would have covered how to do that. Whether they think the job I'm paying them to do is BS or not doesn't really matter as long as they get the job done.
You can't even begin to judge the accuracy of a transcript until you know what was taught in those classes. If I take a course in 'advanced geometry' and the class was exclusively circling the shape that doesn't belong, the claim that I ended up with a 4.0 is entirely accurate. Hey, I even got the 'tough' question with the 3 squares and a parallelogram right. So accurate but meaningless.
I'm not suggesting that accreditation doesn't have a place, but it should be done by the government, and it should be about standardizing the terms on transcripts so that you know what somebody took, and not about regulating what courses people need to take.
I agree completely. Exclusive contracts and confidentiality clauses should be illegal. In fact, I'd go a step further and make any contract unenforceable in court unless it is published. Just provide a government service where anybody can publish a contract and anybody can peruse the contracts which are there. It would cost very little to operate or use in the modern age of computers.
There are other issues as well. Do we really want people with a BS from an institute for young earth creation science?
I think it needs to be about the accuracy of the transcript more than the dogma of the school.
If the transcript says they took a particular Biology course, then it should mean that they learned certain things. Whether they believe in Santa Claus or whatever is irrelevant. If a student who has completed Bio 101 can't explain Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium that concerns me more than whether or not they believe that evolution is responsible for the diversity of life on the earth.
1) Go to college because your parents tell you its the only way to succeed.
They, and all your teachers, peers, etc. Just try being a parent who wants to teach their kids that college is overpriced these days - half the country will wish they could lock you up for child abuse.
Schools advertise the portion of their graduating class that is going on to higher education.
Part of the problem is that teachers/etc are giving out the advice that worked well for them - 20-30 years ago it really did make sense to go to college because prices were VASTLY lower even adjusted for inflation.
The problem is that if I take a car that everybody would agree is a good deal and add a zero or two to the price, then it isn't a good buy any longer. That's where we are with education - it hasn't really improved much in 20 years, but it has gotten WAY more expensive.
Sure, you're probably not going to get a cushy office job without the college degree. However, when I look around at my coworkers worried about layoffs I'm not convinced it is nearly as cushy as the TV shows make it out. You don't see 10% of the cast let go every year on The Office.
Don't get me wrong - I value the concept behind a college education. The problem is that we spend WAY too much money making it happen, the system is steeped in tradition, we pay for armies of administrators, there is no competition from start-ups, and that is just the beginning. The system needs a major overhaul, and that won't happen as long as we're letting kids who don't know better indenture themselves to sustain the status quo.
And that is why we have the obligation to regulate the costs. Doing away with accreditation isn't really an option since it was an anti-fraud measure whose purpose still exists.
If that were the case then the accreditation should be issued by the government, in accordance with policies set by the legislature.
The current system is steeped in tradition. If you want to change the basic curriculum, no accreditation. If you want to change how courses are delivered, no accreditation, and so on.
Really the way it should work is that transcripts should be honest, and that's about it. Employers can look at the transcripts and decide if somebody has what it takes.
Ironically with grade inflation transcripts are anything but honest despite accreditation. Parents paying $20k/semester expect passing grades, and they get them.
I spent 8 years working full time and going to school part time. Not a single cent of debt was incurred.
When?
Tuitions are rising much faster than inflation, and have been for 20 years. I incurred only a little debt but that was back in the early 90s and I qualified for merit-based scholarships. If I were in the same situation today I'd probably be facing a LOT more debt.
Also, it makes no sense to have kids doing unskilled labor for 8 years when they could just focus on their studies and be doing something more productive much sooner. Working full time while taking classes can also be a major distraction. These days it won't get you that far anyway, as it is hard to make more than minimum wage without some kind of degree or certification.
The FAFSA is a form where you declare your income, the income of the biological parent you're living with, and the income of whoever they're married to. If any of those aren't willing to declare their income and sign the form then you don't get financial aid until you're 25 or something like that (so treat your step-parent nicely!).
If the combined incomes are low enough that you basically fall below the poverty line and nobody owns any assets (rent house, or have it mortgaged to about 120% of its value, or live on street), then you can qualify for government grants.
Otherwise they offer you great deals on loans that are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and which can only be refinanced exactly once (interest rate drops again after that? poor you...).
The system is awful for a bunch of reasons:
1. Kids who would really benefit from college often can't go to top-notch schools because their parents aren't ultra-wealthy, and aren't willing to basically wipe out all their savings to pay for them to go. Often the student loans alone don't get you there. The very best students can get non-need-based scholarships which helps.
2. Poor kids who wouldn't benefit much from college get to go on the taxpayer dime.
3. Almost everybody who goes to college does it on somebody else's dime, and doesn't take it nearly as seriously as they should as a result.
4. All the government loans help to prop up insane levels of university waste.
I'm all for providing access to college to any student likely to benefit from it (they consistently do well in school, have a decent understanding of what they want to do after college, and have actually begun to pursue that career in practical ways before going to college). The problem today is that we throw a lot of money at the problem and really the only ones who make out well are the colleges themselves. They're basically the ones selling pickaxes in a gold rush.
Eh... things like automatic power of attorney and being automatically an inheritor of the other's estate (assuming no children and/or will stating otherwise) are pretty damn important legal considerations that we give to married couples under law. So is the right to stay in the country, for that matter. There are hundreds of others, actually.
Yes, but you didn't mention any of those in your post, and the three things you did mention really had no relevance today. I certainly agree in their historical importance.
Honestly, I don't think there is any right conveyed by marriage that really requires "marriage" in the sense that exists today to function. By all means allow people to register with the government a power of attorney for medical/etc decisions. That should be able to be anybody - a parent, a child, a friend, whatever. It might be a list of 5 people with majority rules.
Instead we have an institution that basically started out as a property interest in a woman and kids in exchange for support/inheritance, which has transformed into a religious institution mainly oriented around who is/isn't allowed to sleep together with civil perks for compliance. Now we're trying to fix some of the biggest glaring problems with that, but we're not questioning why the institution really needs to exist in the first place.
Virtually every problem solved by marriage is already solved by other rules/institutions already. They have to be, because not everybody is married but must about everybody is subject to them. Kids are born out of wedlock every day, 19-year-olds have medical problems for which they can't make legal decisions due to incapacitation, 80-year-old widows have medical decisions, and so on.
My gripe with marriage is that we have standardized solutions that only apply to half of the population, and that pool of people is shrinking. We neglect coming up with solutions that work well for everybody else. And the whole reason that fewer people are getting married is that it comes with so much legal baggage that many feel it is something best avoided entirely. The reason it has so much baggage is because we tie so many benefits/rules/rights/etc to a single legal relationship, and it is constantly under pressure by various interests to make it conform to their model of how everybody should live.
Oh look, a bank-like entity failed and people lost money. Good thing the FDIC is there to--
Oops.
If cryptocurrencies are going to repeat the last 100+ years of economic history, can they hurry up and rediscover monetary policy too?
The whole point of Bitcoin is that you don't need to put your money into a bank. If you don't put your money in a bank, then you're not susceptible to bank failures.
That's basically the same thing. Lots of local-area stations with a backbone is the result of reducing the listening area of each one.
It just doesn't work well for very mobile devices, because if you used WiFi for a phone in a car it would be connecting to a new base station every few seconds. It works great for phones when you're sitting down and eating.
While I agree with you in principle, the FAA has been taking an extremely harsh view towards this issue. If you snap a photo from a drone and put it on a website that has ads on it they'd probably argue it was commercial use, let alone putting it in a newspaper.
If somebody pays a pilot the cost of fuel for flying them someplace the FAA would argue that this requires a commercial license as well. At most pilots can split costs evenly, and they can't even count fixed costs like maintenance/hanger/etc in that. If the passenger paid the expenses of the flight on their own they argue that the pilot was compensated with the "joy of flying" and thus was paid for the flight. If the pilot is happy, then the FAA isn't. :)
Oh, they consider commuting to work by plane a commercial flight as well. Just be glad they don't run the DMV.
All of this aside if you're flying a drone around at 100 feet chances are nobody is going to notice/care. If for whatever reason somebody does care, then the FAA can go after you if a dollar changes hands just about anywhere.