Considering Israel thinks that Iran will use nukes on Israel at the first chance they get, Israel will not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons, and it is thought that Israel may bomb Iran to get at their nuclear facilities, which are underground. That would take multiple sorties and would be frowned upon by almost all of the 1 billion Muslims in the world, most of whom live within a few thousand miles of Israel. We could be looking at a true Armageddon if the Islamic nations confront Israel with massive force, and the EU and US decide to provide military support to Israel. While such a war today probably would end with as many dead as in WWII, there could easily be far more resources spent in fighting the war, and more destruction.
Under duress, it's difficult to say that a person should be found guilty. It's not a great choice to say that in a year, you can be dead and honored if it's public knowledge that you sacrificed yourself for others (I'd like to think I'd make that choice, and plenty of people have, but until faced with it, I'd have a hard time proving that I'd make that choice) or you can be alive but reviled when it's revealed that you allowed several others be killed, and who would have probably been killed anyway after you were dead, in order to save yourself.
I work for the Postal Service as a contractor (Probably half of IT work in the USPS is done by contractors).
The USPS employs at least 1 employee in every Post Office in the country, significant amounts of administration and behind the scenes operations to support its primary function. In many rural locales, the Post Office is the only presence the Federal Government has nearby, which is why draft registrations and passports involve the Postal Service.
Now, if we get rid of the business that the Postal Service does handling junk mail, the cost of first class and package shipping will have to go up a significant amount to cover all of the costs to maintain that entire workforce. If bulk mail is half the cost of first class, and makes up 90% of the volume, then the cost of a first class stamp is going to have to go up to a $1.50 or more to make up the lost revenues. And if that happens, what will happen to the volume of first class mail and shipping packages? Would I love receiving less junk mail? Sure, but not at the cost of having to pay even more when I wanted to send something of my own.
And, I do think Open Source would help a lot. Once government computers are on non-proprietary systems, every vendor will support it, which will mean drivers for hardware, and familiarity for regular computer users. Once people are familiar with it, they'll decide to try it at home, and their kids will grow up with it. And once it starts to grow that way, software (games and the stuff you see on the shelf at Best Buy) will be written for the *nix environments. Then people will be able to choose based on the merits of the Open Source systems instead of saying, 'Oh, I can't use Linux, because it doesn't have Photoshop.' Then, Microsoft and Apple will have to do some pretty significant things to compete, and if they can't, they'll eventually become the minor players in the market. Unfortunately, if that ever comes to pass, it will be at least 15 years away.
It's not necessarily bad for Google for Yahoo to end up in Microsoft.
Microsoft loses a bunch of cash, and if the merger goes poorly (Yahoo has a different culture to MSN, employees of both become disillusioned, talented people choose to go elsewhere, Google's market share goes up similar to a combined drop in MSN and Yahoo, etc.), Microsoft is worse off than if they never bought Yahoo. Microsoft stock goes down, and stockholders finally realize what a poor CEO they have and fire him.
Wait, that would be bad for Google. Disregard previous.:)
The article refers to XP, but you refer to Vista. Vista has a new network stack that is significantly better than XP. This was reported back in the day, but I couldn't find the article. There was a fellow in that discussion who did a similar test after he realized his network connection was faster with Vista. He compared Linux, XP and Vista, and Linux and Vista were comparable, but XP was not. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the article.
If we were going to start a new calendar to mark some significant event based on today, would we mark the first day day 1, year 0 to mark the number of days since the event, or day 1, year one? I'd think it would make more since to have a year zero so the year on the calendar would always mark the amount of time since the passage of the event, and other than proclaiming something as part of some best of the (decade, century, millennium) list, it doesn't actually affect anything other than providing pedants an opportunity to be pedantic.
According to Wikipedia, the start of the calendar was set in the 6th century, by Dionysius Exiguus, and he didn't indicate if year 1 or 0 was the beginning of the calendar, which was his best estimate of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Since it's based on what amounts to a guess, and it doesn't actually affect anything, we should go ahead and tie decades, centuries, and millennium to a year that starts with zero, because that seems to be what people prefer.
How are they hoarding it? For them to hoard the money economically would be for it to be where it is not active, and those would be in cash holdings at home or in a safe deposit box, or in a non-interest earning account, such as a brokerage account. If they are not doing one of those three things, they aren't hoarding the money.
If it's in the stock market, they're letting someone else use their money while they hope their investment grows. If it's in a CD or savings account, the bank has loaned it out to buy or build a house, run a business, or for other purposes.
Can you explain how the money as it's currently being used (if the funds are in the bank, and thus loaned out to somebody) is going to be inferior to what the government is proposing to do with it? If the money is active, in the way I point out, taking that money from the people who currently has it forces them to liquidate those funds, which forces to the bank to stop lending that money out to the next person who wants a loan, which prevents the economy from growing naturally. Because, all of that money that is loaned, even if used to buy used items, eventually finds it's way to somebody who is selling something to buy something new with it, and there it will create or maintain jobs for the people that make that something. Besides, what you call hoarding is really saving, which is the opposite of credit (for every dollar borrowed, one is loaned), unless you have proof that many people have been taking cash and holding it as such.
In the end, we limit growth by keeping people from getting the funds necessary to do other things. So you can't count the '1 million jobs' as a gain. You can only count the net (gain or loss) between letting things happen without government interference vs with government interference. Really, every thing the government is doing is just looking busy to keep the boss (voters) placated to think they're fixing things when they probably will have no effect.
I was just reading this morning on the how FDR's New Deal didn't fix the Great Depression, it prolonged it (confirmed by quotes of members of FDR's own administration), and we only ever managed to recover because of WWII, and the government had to send many soldiers overseas who would have been unemployed otherwise, and all of the other economic activity that feeds off of a war (caskets, uniforms, weapons, ammunition, ships, tanks, jeeps) including what we were selling to allies. After the war, our economy did well despite the programs instituted by FDR, not because of them.
In the end, government control of more money (there is a necessary amount, something less than now) only really gets us two things, more corruption and more dependence on politicians to fix our problems (ha!)
Except, if there are only 24 active developers, how could development not stagnate.
Start a new project, with the open office code base. Give the project a new name, bring on any frustrated members of the OpenOffice community, and find new people. Surely you can find several hundred, and start working on this new project.
The goals of such a project: Remove Java and replace with native code, if possible.
Make this new project the fastest of the major Office Products, by rewriting code.
Make the user interface flexible, so people that prefer either the 2003 and before paradigm or those who prefer the new MS office can use something similar there as well. Maybe see if there is a way that the one or both of those can be improved upon, and offer that as well. The interface is just a way of invoking the underlying code, so there shouldn't be a problem with having multiple interfaces.
If these disgruntled coders who are mentioned have good code that has been rejected, some of the work has already been done, and you're already there.
I would love to see what a Sun-free OO clone could be like if done well. Too bad lethargy will probably prevent people from taking the plunge, and making it happen.
The thing about the 'expensive Windows tax' is, all of the major OEMs are now shipping non-Windows machines. That mean, every OEM should be paying the higher price, if it still exists. Which will only serve to drive up the cost of Windows for their customers. That either creates a larger price discrepancy between the Windows and non-Windows box, or the OEM will make more money by keeping the cost of the Linux machine similar to the Windows machine, which will encourage the OEM to sell even more non-Windows machines.
Microsoft has three possible responses to this, ignore it and depend on user inertia, compete on price by offering all OEMs the lower price or trying to otherwise offer discounts based on preferences, or offer an improved product that is worth the price.
Late reply I know, but I reinstalled Sid a couple of weeks ago, and found icedtea-gcjwebplugin. It's got the same version in Lenny, and when I installed in on my system, I was able to run the Sam's Club batch upload which is Java. It wasn't pretty, but I haven't seen what it looks like on another system, so it might be the program instead of IcedTea, but at least it worked without having to boot into my 32-bit environment.
I do know of 2 sites, Sam's Club photos uses java for the batch upload option (a few clicks to get all of the photos in a directory, instead of 3 clicks per photo), and the Yahoo live fantasy sports draft rooms, although I saw something on their site recently that indicated that they've changed that tech, so it might be non-java now.
I just crashed my Debian install a few weeks back, and when I reinstalled, I happened to find openjdk-6-jre with the icedtea-gcjwebplugin, and the Sam's Club site worked. It looked ugly, but it got the job done.
My old high school science teacher used to talk about how the volume of the moon was similar to the volume of the Pacific Ocean. I don't know if he was trying to imply that indicated where such an impact would have taken place, but since the impact is speculated to have happened over 4 billion years ago, and Pangaea existed two and a half million years ago, the one cannot have anything to do with the other, at least not directly.
Because, if they don't take your money, they can't give it to other people to buy votes and stay in power. It's a damn shame the Republicans didn't do something about this while they had a chance, now we're going to be in a much deeper hole by the time we get another chance.
Abortion is an act of violence against an innocent being that never caused harm with intent (an important part of if someone is guilty of something). This can never be justified except in the most extreme health of the mother cases (often, it doesn't have to be an either or situation between the life of the mother and the baby).
A weapon doesn't automatically result in murder. It can be used to kill an animal (putting down an injured animal, or protecting life and property from an animal) or for self defense. Self defense is always justified morally, if not legally (I met a man in prison who claimed he got three years for stabbing a man who threatened him and his family with a bat in this man's home). While the ancient Christians would not use violence to defend themselves from an attacker, most Christians do not consider it evil to prevent the death of an innocent (oneself or another) with necessary violence against a perpetrator.
In the U.S., the private schools (often Catholic schools due to discrimination by the Protestants running the public school system in the 19th and early 20th centuries) have significant performance advantage, in part because most private schools cannot fire incompetent teachers because teachers unions prevent it, which has become a spiraling deterioration situation, at least in many poor schools. Bad teachers, who can't, or more likely won't, find a job else where stick around until retirement, and as their students run amok, other teachers get fed up, and leave, either to stop teaching or go elsewhere. Eventually, these schools are paralyzed with the inability to correct the situation. This is a situation no amount of money can fix, because you can't get rid of the bad teacher even if you have more money to hire a good one. This week's TIME magazine cover article is about this exact problem, and the woman trying to fix the worst schools in the country. Read here.
Private schools also benefit from being more expensive, because the parents who are paying that money make darn sure their kids are doing what they are supposed to. Also, they can kick out disruptive kids, public schools have less leeway in the matter, plus they get money from the government for every student enrolled, so they have a financial incentive to take the student.
Meanwhile, many teachers (my sister is one) choose to work at the private schools despite making less money because of the better environment.
By the time you are talking about (late 90s), there was a choice. Homeschooling. My wife read an article about homeschooling in a recent parenting magazine, and she started reading on the internet, and books checked out from the library about homeschooling, and we've agreed that that's the route we're going to go. Studies indicate that home schooled children are significantly better off academically, and I think it boils to the following reasons:
1. Reduced socialization problems found in school, namely, cheating, cliques, peer pressure and bullying. I've realized that the biggest problem causing boys to underachieve is other boys' pulling each other down, creating a culture of non-achievement. My brother-in-law, who is your age, was the top student in his class, but rejected every effort to reward his accomplishments to keep from standing out and being treated differently for it. Don't forget most schools don't really discipline children either, so you can't even depend on students to know how to control themselves properly because they've never had to learn how to, and your children will learn bad habits from them. 2. Time wasted: Think of the time a child loses to school (commuting, wasting time waiting for other students to catch up, or for the one on one time needed to address the child's questions, so they might progress toward learning something: I figure this figure at a couple hours a day) that could be spent progressing towards a true education. 3. Individual attention: Researchers have found that students learn in more than a dozen different ways, yet we stick them all in rooms with each other, and expect a good result. With individual attention, students will be able to learn in a manner that allows them to reach their full potential by being energized and challenged without having to waste time as done significantly in our current system. Instead of the state mandated 20 or 30 to 1 student to teacher ratio, you end up a much better ratio, even in a large family. And older kids can help the younger kids by explaining things differently since they've progressed farther, and have recent experience with the subject being covered. 4. Parents that send kids to school are at the mercy of the school, teachers' union, and what they want to teach you: I recently heard on the radio an account of a European documentary about the US schools where a teacher was discussing the recent election, and made comments that basically would put any children raised in a Republican household in a conflicted situation of having to agree with their parents or their teacher, and which a parent can't control as long as their child is in the school. Now a current Democrat might disagree that this is a bad thing, but you have the alternative where creationists want your child to learn their religious beliefs in their science class. Both cases are avoided in the home where the parents are the final arbiters of what their children learn in these situations and other similar ones. 5. Customized curriculum: When we home school, our kids will be getting home economics, health, naivety training, and personal finance training for 13 years, with real experience. We might add self defense, the option to choose one or two sports, have a nature class so our kids are familiar with nature and be willing to spend more time outdoors than we do ourselves. Our literature, math, science, history and geography curriculum will go far beyond anything we learned in school, and we were both top students in high school and above average in college. We will probably require our students to do things like public speaking or debate, and as we think of additional things that would be beneficial, we will add those as well.
In one thing we've read done on this matter, we've found children are pushed to read too early, and so learn bad habits (reading slowly, one word at a time), where if they waited a few years, they would be much more prepared to read lines or paragraphs, process the information quicker, and learn more quickl
That wouldn't really matter unless they have a diverse selection of genetic material to work with. Otherwise, all of the clones will all be as identical as twins. The real problem might be getting them to procreate which seems to be a problem for animals in captivity.
Remember that the economies of the 40s through the 60s were transitioning from war economies or decimated and non-existent, and having to rebuild buildings and roads, and recreate industries due to damage from the war in Europe, how could Europe have not done well in the 50s and 60s? Those same policies led to stagnation in the 1970 before lower taxes brought prosperity for the last 20 years.
So one parent can't go anywhere with both kids unless the other parent goes also, and what about families with three kids?
As for shopping, if the wife can't take the kids to the store during the day, she has to hire a baby sitter. Instead, taking the children shopping is an excellent teaching opportunity, so they can learn how to behave in public and how to shop within a budget just to name two.
He didn't say worse, just not better which can mean about the same. Instead of being angry about invading Iraq, we might all be upset about Gore not being aggressive enough, Al Qaeda is still running free with a free run of south Asia, and maybe even managed to land a few more attacks on US soil. Then who knows what sort of cowboy war hawk we would have elected in 2004.
Sure, you might lose some of Bush's failures if he hadn't been the sitting president on Sept. 11, 2001, but you also might not have some of his successes.
But you can't blame the RIAA for the judge's mistake. Since they can't bring back the original jury, legally, this is like the original case never happened. I hope RIAA will be on the hook for the defendant's lawyer fees for both trials if they lose this case.
When OpenGL 3.0 came out 5 weeks ago, there was much talk about new features that had been shown and old stuff had been dumped, and then all of that was tossed because of needed backwards compatibility for the CAD software. Is this maybe a chance for the gaming crowd to get the new stuff, developed by a collaboration between AMD, Intel, nVidia (if they're interested) and any game makers and other open source companies that want to participate in a more open API.
If this happens, more companies might start writing their games for the new standard (I assume they'd take on a new name, and OpenGL would be the name for the Professianal Version) so they can easily port to the growing Mac and Linux markets, and between PC and consoles.
Anyway, this is great to see. I can't wait to see what sorts of improvements come out of this.
It appears that the Grail is in Valencia, Spain. I thought I'd previously read that it had been in France until the French Revolution, but that was a wooden cup, and the one in Valencia is agate.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering Israel thinks that Iran will use nukes on Israel at the first chance they get, Israel will not allow Iran to have nuclear weapons, and it is thought that Israel may bomb Iran to get at their nuclear facilities, which are underground. That would take multiple sorties and would be frowned upon by almost all of the 1 billion Muslims in the world, most of whom live within a few thousand miles of Israel. We could be looking at a true Armageddon if the Islamic nations confront Israel with massive force, and the EU and US decide to provide military support to Israel. While such a war today probably would end with as many dead as in WWII, there could easily be far more resources spent in fighting the war, and more destruction.
Under duress, it's difficult to say that a person should be found guilty. It's not a great choice to say that in a year, you can be dead and honored if it's public knowledge that you sacrificed yourself for others (I'd like to think I'd make that choice, and plenty of people have, but until faced with it, I'd have a hard time proving that I'd make that choice) or you can be alive but reviled when it's revealed that you allowed several others be killed, and who would have probably been killed anyway after you were dead, in order to save yourself.
I work for the Postal Service as a contractor (Probably half of IT work in the USPS is done by contractors).
The USPS employs at least 1 employee in every Post Office in the country, significant amounts of administration and behind the scenes operations to support its primary function. In many rural locales, the Post Office is the only presence the Federal Government has nearby, which is why draft registrations and passports involve the Postal Service.
Now, if we get rid of the business that the Postal Service does handling junk mail, the cost of first class and package shipping will have to go up a significant amount to cover all of the costs to maintain that entire workforce. If bulk mail is half the cost of first class, and makes up 90% of the volume, then the cost of a first class stamp is going to have to go up to a $1.50 or more to make up the lost revenues. And if that happens, what will happen to the volume of first class mail and shipping packages? Would I love receiving less junk mail? Sure, but not at the cost of having to pay even more when I wanted to send something of my own.
And, I do think Open Source would help a lot. Once government computers are on non-proprietary systems, every vendor will support it, which will mean drivers for hardware, and familiarity for regular computer users. Once people are familiar with it, they'll decide to try it at home, and their kids will grow up with it. And once it starts to grow that way, software (games and the stuff you see on the shelf at Best Buy) will be written for the *nix environments. Then people will be able to choose based on the merits of the Open Source systems instead of saying, 'Oh, I can't use Linux, because it doesn't have Photoshop.' Then, Microsoft and Apple will have to do some pretty significant things to compete, and if they can't, they'll eventually become the minor players in the market. Unfortunately, if that ever comes to pass, it will be at least 15 years away.
It's not necessarily bad for Google for Yahoo to end up in Microsoft.
Microsoft loses a bunch of cash, and if the merger goes poorly (Yahoo has a different culture to MSN, employees of both become disillusioned, talented people choose to go elsewhere, Google's market share goes up similar to a combined drop in MSN and Yahoo, etc.), Microsoft is worse off than if they never bought Yahoo. Microsoft stock goes down, and stockholders finally realize what a poor CEO they have and fire him.
Wait, that would be bad for Google. Disregard previous. :)
The article refers to XP, but you refer to Vista. Vista has a new network stack that is significantly better than XP. This was reported back in the day, but I couldn't find the article. There was a fellow in that discussion who did a similar test after he realized his network connection was faster with Vista. He compared Linux, XP and Vista, and Linux and Vista were comparable, but XP was not. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the article.
If we were going to start a new calendar to mark some significant event based on today, would we mark the first day day 1, year 0 to mark the number of days since the event, or day 1, year one? I'd think it would make more since to have a year zero so the year on the calendar would always mark the amount of time since the passage of the event, and other than proclaiming something as part of some best of the (decade, century, millennium) list, it doesn't actually affect anything other than providing pedants an opportunity to be pedantic.
According to Wikipedia, the start of the calendar was set in the 6th century, by Dionysius Exiguus, and he didn't indicate if year 1 or 0 was the beginning of the calendar, which was his best estimate of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Since it's based on what amounts to a guess, and it doesn't actually affect anything, we should go ahead and tie decades, centuries, and millennium to a year that starts with zero, because that seems to be what people prefer.
How are they hoarding it? For them to hoard the money economically would be for it to be where it is not active, and those would be in cash holdings at home or in a safe deposit box, or in a non-interest earning account, such as a brokerage account. If they are not doing one of those three things, they aren't hoarding the money.
If it's in the stock market, they're letting someone else use their money while they hope their investment grows. If it's in a CD or savings account, the bank has loaned it out to buy or build a house, run a business, or for other purposes.
Can you explain how the money as it's currently being used (if the funds are in the bank, and thus loaned out to somebody) is going to be inferior to what the government is proposing to do with it? If the money is active, in the way I point out, taking that money from the people who currently has it forces them to liquidate those funds, which forces to the bank to stop lending that money out to the next person who wants a loan, which prevents the economy from growing naturally. Because, all of that money that is loaned, even if used to buy used items, eventually finds it's way to somebody who is selling something to buy something new with it, and there it will create or maintain jobs for the people that make that something. Besides, what you call hoarding is really saving, which is the opposite of credit (for every dollar borrowed, one is loaned), unless you have proof that many people have been taking cash and holding it as such.
In the end, we limit growth by keeping people from getting the funds necessary to do other things. So you can't count the '1 million jobs' as a gain. You can only count the net (gain or loss) between letting things happen without government interference vs with government interference. Really, every thing the government is doing is just looking busy to keep the boss (voters) placated to think they're fixing things when they probably will have no effect.
I was just reading this morning on the how FDR's New Deal didn't fix the Great Depression, it prolonged it (confirmed by quotes of members of FDR's own administration), and we only ever managed to recover because of WWII, and the government had to send many soldiers overseas who would have been unemployed otherwise, and all of the other economic activity that feeds off of a war (caskets, uniforms, weapons, ammunition, ships, tanks, jeeps) including what we were selling to allies. After the war, our economy did well despite the programs instituted by FDR, not because of them.
In the end, government control of more money (there is a necessary amount, something less than now) only really gets us two things, more corruption and more dependence on politicians to fix our problems (ha!)
Except, if there are only 24 active developers, how could development not stagnate.
Start a new project, with the open office code base. Give the project a new name, bring on any frustrated members of the OpenOffice community, and find new people. Surely you can find several hundred, and start working on this new project.
The goals of such a project:
Remove Java and replace with native code, if possible.
Make this new project the fastest of the major Office Products, by rewriting code.
Make the user interface flexible, so people that prefer either the 2003 and before paradigm or those who prefer the new MS office can use something similar there as well. Maybe see if there is a way that the one or both of those can be improved upon, and offer that as well. The interface is just a way of invoking the underlying code, so there shouldn't be a problem with having multiple interfaces.
If these disgruntled coders who are mentioned have good code that has been rejected, some of the work has already been done, and you're already there.
I would love to see what a Sun-free OO clone could be like if done well. Too bad lethargy will probably prevent people from taking the plunge, and making it happen.
The thing about the 'expensive Windows tax' is, all of the major OEMs are now shipping non-Windows machines. That mean, every OEM should be paying the higher price, if it still exists. Which will only serve to drive up the cost of Windows for their customers. That either creates a larger price discrepancy between the Windows and non-Windows box, or the OEM will make more money by keeping the cost of the Linux machine similar to the Windows machine, which will encourage the OEM to sell even more non-Windows machines.
Microsoft has three possible responses to this, ignore it and depend on user inertia, compete on price by offering all OEMs the lower price or trying to otherwise offer discounts based on preferences, or offer an improved product that is worth the price.
Late reply I know, but I reinstalled Sid a couple of weeks ago, and found icedtea-gcjwebplugin. It's got the same version in Lenny, and when I installed in on my system, I was able to run the Sam's Club batch upload which is Java. It wasn't pretty, but I haven't seen what it looks like on another system, so it might be the program instead of IcedTea, but at least it worked without having to boot into my 32-bit environment.
I do know of 2 sites, Sam's Club photos uses java for the batch upload option (a few clicks to get all of the photos in a directory, instead of 3 clicks per photo), and the Yahoo live fantasy sports draft rooms, although I saw something on their site recently that indicated that they've changed that tech, so it might be non-java now.
I just crashed my Debian install a few weeks back, and when I reinstalled, I happened to find openjdk-6-jre with the icedtea-gcjwebplugin, and the Sam's Club site worked. It looked ugly, but it got the job done.
My old high school science teacher used to talk about how the volume of the moon was similar to the volume of the Pacific Ocean. I don't know if he was trying to imply that indicated where such an impact would have taken place, but since the impact is speculated to have happened over 4 billion years ago, and Pangaea existed two and a half million years ago, the one cannot have anything to do with the other, at least not directly.
It can't reproduce can it? Or does it produce a Cylon-Human half-breed?
Because, if they don't take your money, they can't give it to other people to buy votes and stay in power. It's a damn shame the Republicans didn't do something about this while they had a chance, now we're going to be in a much deeper hole by the time we get another chance.
Abortion is an act of violence against an innocent being that never caused harm with intent (an important part of if someone is guilty of something). This can never be justified except in the most extreme health of the mother cases (often, it doesn't have to be an either or situation between the life of the mother and the baby).
A weapon doesn't automatically result in murder. It can be used to kill an animal (putting down an injured animal, or protecting life and property from an animal) or for self defense. Self defense is always justified morally, if not legally (I met a man in prison who claimed he got three years for stabbing a man who threatened him and his family with a bat in this man's home). While the ancient Christians would not use violence to defend themselves from an attacker, most Christians do not consider it evil to prevent the death of an innocent (oneself or another) with necessary violence against a perpetrator.
In the U.S., the private schools (often Catholic schools due to discrimination by the Protestants running the public school system in the 19th and early 20th centuries) have significant performance advantage, in part because most private schools cannot fire incompetent teachers because teachers unions prevent it, which has become a spiraling deterioration situation, at least in many poor schools. Bad teachers, who can't, or more likely won't, find a job else where stick around until retirement, and as their students run amok, other teachers get fed up, and leave, either to stop teaching or go elsewhere. Eventually, these schools are paralyzed with the inability to correct the situation. This is a situation no amount of money can fix, because you can't get rid of the bad teacher even if you have more money to hire a good one. This week's TIME magazine cover article is about this exact problem, and the woman trying to fix the worst schools in the country. Read here.
Private schools also benefit from being more expensive, because the parents who are paying that money make darn sure their kids are doing what they are supposed to. Also, they can kick out disruptive kids, public schools have less leeway in the matter, plus they get money from the government for every student enrolled, so they have a financial incentive to take the student.
Meanwhile, many teachers (my sister is one) choose to work at the private schools despite making less money because of the better environment.
By the time you are talking about (late 90s), there was a choice. Homeschooling. My wife read an article about homeschooling in a recent parenting magazine, and she started reading on the internet, and books checked out from the library about homeschooling, and we've agreed that that's the route we're going to go. Studies indicate that home schooled children are significantly better off academically, and I think it boils to the following reasons:
1. Reduced socialization problems found in school, namely, cheating, cliques, peer pressure and bullying. I've realized that the biggest problem causing boys to underachieve is other boys' pulling each other down, creating a culture of non-achievement. My brother-in-law, who is your age, was the top student in his class, but rejected every effort to reward his accomplishments to keep from standing out and being treated differently for it. Don't forget most schools don't really discipline children either, so you can't even depend on students to know how to control themselves properly because they've never had to learn how to, and your children will learn bad habits from them.
2. Time wasted: Think of the time a child loses to school (commuting, wasting time waiting for other students to catch up, or for the one on one time needed to address the child's questions, so they might progress toward learning something: I figure this figure at a couple hours a day) that could be spent progressing towards a true education.
3. Individual attention: Researchers have found that students learn in more than a dozen different ways, yet we stick them all in rooms with each other, and expect a good result. With individual attention, students will be able to learn in a manner that allows them to reach their full potential by being energized and challenged without having to waste time as done significantly in our current system. Instead of the state mandated 20 or 30 to 1 student to teacher ratio, you end up a much better ratio, even in a large family. And older kids can help the younger kids by explaining things differently since they've progressed farther, and have recent experience with the subject being covered.
4. Parents that send kids to school are at the mercy of the school, teachers' union, and what they want to teach you: I recently heard on the radio an account of a European documentary about the US schools where a teacher was discussing the recent election, and made comments that basically would put any children raised in a Republican household in a conflicted situation of having to agree with their parents or their teacher, and which a parent can't control as long as their child is in the school. Now a current Democrat might disagree that this is a bad thing, but you have the alternative where creationists want your child to learn their religious beliefs in their science class. Both cases are avoided in the home where the parents are the final arbiters of what their children learn in these situations and other similar ones.
5. Customized curriculum: When we home school, our kids will be getting home economics, health, naivety training, and personal finance training for 13 years, with real experience. We might add self defense, the option to choose one or two sports, have a nature class so our kids are familiar with nature and be willing to spend more time outdoors than we do ourselves. Our literature, math, science, history and geography curriculum will go far beyond anything we learned in school, and we were both top students in high school and above average in college. We will probably require our students to do things like public speaking or debate, and as we think of additional things that would be beneficial, we will add those as well.
In one thing we've read done on this matter, we've found children are pushed to read too early, and so learn bad habits (reading slowly, one word at a time), where if they waited a few years, they would be much more prepared to read lines or paragraphs, process the information quicker, and learn more quickl
That wouldn't really matter unless they have a diverse selection of genetic material to work with. Otherwise, all of the clones will all be as identical as twins. The real problem might be getting them to procreate which seems to be a problem for animals in captivity.
Remember that the economies of the 40s through the 60s were transitioning from war economies or decimated and non-existent, and having to rebuild buildings and roads, and recreate industries due to damage from the war in Europe, how could Europe have not done well in the 50s and 60s? Those same policies led to stagnation in the 1970 before lower taxes brought prosperity for the last 20 years.
So one parent can't go anywhere with both kids unless the other parent goes also, and what about families with three kids?
As for shopping, if the wife can't take the kids to the store during the day, she has to hire a baby sitter. Instead, taking the children shopping is an excellent teaching opportunity, so they can learn how to behave in public and how to shop within a budget just to name two.
He didn't say worse, just not better which can mean about the same. Instead of being angry about invading Iraq, we might all be upset about Gore not being aggressive enough, Al Qaeda is still running free with a free run of south Asia, and maybe even managed to land a few more attacks on US soil. Then who knows what sort of cowboy war hawk we would have elected in 2004.
Sure, you might lose some of Bush's failures if he hadn't been the sitting president on Sept. 11, 2001, but you also might not have some of his successes.
But you can't blame the RIAA for the judge's mistake. Since they can't bring back the original jury, legally, this is like the original case never happened. I hope RIAA will be on the hook for the defendant's lawyer fees for both trials if they lose this case.
So, will the CAD and Gaming markets diverge?
When OpenGL 3.0 came out 5 weeks ago, there was much talk about new features that had been shown and old stuff had been dumped, and then all of that was tossed because of needed backwards compatibility for the CAD software. Is this maybe a chance for the gaming crowd to get the new stuff, developed by a collaboration between AMD, Intel, nVidia (if they're interested) and any game makers and other open source companies that want to participate in a more open API.
If this happens, more companies might start writing their games for the new standard (I assume they'd take on a new name, and OpenGL would be the name for the Professianal Version) so they can easily port to the growing Mac and Linux markets, and between PC and consoles.
Anyway, this is great to see. I can't wait to see what sorts of improvements come out of this.
It appears that the Grail is in Valencia, Spain. I thought I'd previously read that it had been in France until the French Revolution, but that was a wooden cup, and the one in Valencia is agate.
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