Except that he can solve his problem for his child within a couple days, whereas the political or public approach will take years.
I think you're underestimating the power of (a) media attention, (b) angry parents and voters, and (c) a real threat of lawsuits to get officials' butts in gear.
Oh great idea! That'll make his daughter very popular with the school. I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong by embarrassing the school district in the local newspapers.
That's straightforward to handle: They go after his daughter, he calls up his media contacts again to tell the followup story of how the school district's response to the story about endangering kids was to punish his daughter rather than solve the problem. Reporters usually don't mind a chance to go after public officials, especially when the story is "school officials punish nice little girl over something our media outlet said". And of course, call an attorney to start drawing up the appropriate legal action.
I have some anecdotal experience with this approach, because my sister ended up in exactly this sort of hot water due to her role as editor-in-chief of a school paper that printed editorials critical of a superintendent. End result: superintendent was fired, my sister went on to Harvard.
My point (which a lot of other posters are making) is that OP's biggest mistake is thinking that the correct thing to do here is come up with a technical solution to figuring out where his daughter is. It's one of those instances where the engineer's "find a technical solution" instincts are not what's really needed: what's really needed is working the levers of politics to make the school district do their friggin' jobs.
However, since it took less than three days for my local school district to misplace my daughter, I have decided that something needs to be done. By the school district's own admission it is a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses. Fortunately, my daughter was located, with no thanks to the local school district.
The problem isn't that you don't have a tracking device for your daughter. The problem is that your local school district isn't doing its job correctly and regularly putting kids on the wrong bus. Instead of posting on Slashdot for a technical solution, a far better solution would be a call to your local news organizations about how the school district is getting kids lost on their bus system and admits to doing that regularly. Raise a stink at school board meetings, PTA meetings, and so forth. Get other parents involved. You're talking about a school district's incompetence endangering not only your own child but all the children in the district.
Pretend, for instance, that you get a perfect tracking device for your daughter. That sorta solves your problem, in that you can go and pick up your daughter from wherever she was left, but doesn't solve your neighbor's problem, and doesn't solve the problem of what happens to your daughter when she's standing around in a strange neighborhood.
I'm going to have to agree with GP on your general affiliation.
The issue with Wikipedia, and the censorship going on by the CoS is to try to prevent information from getting out about them. Just like Eliot Spitzer supporters wanted information about a certain prostitute not get out. Just like anyone else with a religious or political axe to grind. Wikipedia effectively handled cases of lone liars, vandals, and nutjobs fairly well: changes got seen and reverted quickly. What it's having a harder time dealing with are organized liars, vandals, and nutjobs.
Fox News isn't exactly profitable. The purpose of Fox News is not to make profit, but to make the political situation in the countries they operate in more favorable to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, which can save costs elsewhere in the company with tax breaks, reduced regulations, and the like.
One day a student came to Moon and said:
"I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons."
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said: 'I understand how to make a better garbage collector...'
How about this then: In 1965, we had the capability to destroy the planet several times over in a matter of a few hours. In 2005, we had the capability to destroy the planet several times over in a matter of a few hours. What exactly did we gain for our trillions of dollars spent between 1965 and 2005?
Sure, history is nice to know and the basis is almost necessary in order to make political choices, but does that really affect your day to day living unless you are a historian?
I was chatting with a historian just Sunday about this very question, and came up with an excellent answer: Proper study of history is the study of sources. That is, when you have two competing descriptions of the same events, who do you believe? Or what do you do when a document is credible except for a couple of numbers being way off? How do you determine which sources are independent from each other, and which depend on the same primary report? In other words, studying history (the right way, not the boring memorize-dates way) hones your extremely important BS detection skills.
Those kids were not simply running around and not paying attention, they were incapable of doing so. With a non-ADHD kid you could entice them with treats, or threaten them with punishment and they would behave (at least for awhile). But the ADHD children simply could not do it.
I had a fairly sure-fire way of getting ADHD kids to behave: get them focused on something that was interesting to them. And yes, that something may not have been what you originally had planned for them to be doing.
My point was that ADHD often is really an issue of adults expecting kids to behave like adults rather than behave like kids. For instance, kids attention spans are naturally shorter than adults, they naturally tend to move quicker than adults do, and tend to make a lot of noise and be a bit clumsy. All of which are considered important traits in ADHD diagnosis.
I used to work extensively with kids, mostly in summer programs. I described the effects of ADHD as follows:
A kid with ADHD will tend to run around like crazy screaming their head off, will have a short attention span, and may not notice when you tell them something. A kid without ADHD, by contrast, will tend to run around like crazy screaming their head off, will have a short attention span, and may not notice when you tell them something.
Very successful artists have long, successful, comfortable careers.
FTFY.
The vast majority of artists don't have comfortable careers. Or careers in the art at all. There simply isn't enough money going to artists to make that possible.
Let's see, some reasons I like using Ubuntu over Windows XP: - Free updates more-or-less forever. Along with that is only one update program that needs to run, rather than 15 little icons sitting in the bottom left corner for every single piece of software that needs to check for updates periodically. - UI effects that are often prettier than what XP in particular can offer. For instance, translucent windows. - Easy setup for multiple users with different preferences. The same machine can look completely different for Mr and Mrs. - Utility programs that you often need to find and download in the Windows world (from sources you may or may not trust) are already installed on most Linux setups.
It's obviously different than Windows, but as those articles describe there are lots of advantages to doing things that way. Modern distributions like Ubuntu have made it possible to easily handle CDs and other removable disks, which can be a bit of a sticking point.
As JMS described this, he had pre-planned means of switching up characters like that just in case actors needed to drop out for something. For instance, the Talia thing wasn't completely the result of a last-minute scramble.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that he can solve his problem for his child within a couple days, whereas the political or public approach will take years.
I think you're underestimating the power of (a) media attention, (b) angry parents and voters, and (c) a real threat of lawsuits to get officials' butts in gear.
This sounds like we're talking about a 6-year-old, not a 13-year-old. A 6-year-old is usually not trying to escape their parents.
Oh great idea! That'll make his daughter very popular with the school. I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong by embarrassing the school district in the local newspapers.
That's straightforward to handle: They go after his daughter, he calls up his media contacts again to tell the followup story of how the school district's response to the story about endangering kids was to punish his daughter rather than solve the problem. Reporters usually don't mind a chance to go after public officials, especially when the story is "school officials punish nice little girl over something our media outlet said". And of course, call an attorney to start drawing up the appropriate legal action.
I have some anecdotal experience with this approach, because my sister ended up in exactly this sort of hot water due to her role as editor-in-chief of a school paper that printed editorials critical of a superintendent. End result: superintendent was fired, my sister went on to Harvard.
My point (which a lot of other posters are making) is that OP's biggest mistake is thinking that the correct thing to do here is come up with a technical solution to figuring out where his daughter is. It's one of those instances where the engineer's "find a technical solution" instincts are not what's really needed: what's really needed is working the levers of politics to make the school district do their friggin' jobs.
However, since it took less than three days for my local school district to misplace my daughter, I have decided that something needs to be done. By the school district's own admission it is a recurring problem of placing children on the wrong buses. Fortunately, my daughter was located, with no thanks to the local school district.
The problem isn't that you don't have a tracking device for your daughter. The problem is that your local school district isn't doing its job correctly and regularly putting kids on the wrong bus. Instead of posting on Slashdot for a technical solution, a far better solution would be a call to your local news organizations about how the school district is getting kids lost on their bus system and admits to doing that regularly. Raise a stink at school board meetings, PTA meetings, and so forth. Get other parents involved. You're talking about a school district's incompetence endangering not only your own child but all the children in the district.
Pretend, for instance, that you get a perfect tracking device for your daughter. That sorta solves your problem, in that you can go and pick up your daughter from wherever she was left, but doesn't solve your neighbor's problem, and doesn't solve the problem of what happens to your daughter when she's standing around in a strange neighborhood.
I also heard somewhere that the new iPhone will come with a free puppy. It will also water my lawn, clean my house, and walk the puppy for me.
Can I join a PR agency now?
I'm going to have to agree with GP on your general affiliation.
The issue with Wikipedia, and the censorship going on by the CoS is to try to prevent information from getting out about them. Just like Eliot Spitzer supporters wanted information about a certain prostitute not get out. Just like anyone else with a religious or political axe to grind. Wikipedia effectively handled cases of lone liars, vandals, and nutjobs fairly well: changes got seen and reverted quickly. What it's having a harder time dealing with are organized liars, vandals, and nutjobs.
He loses the argument. End of story.
For a real argument, editing Wikipedia is not akin to, say, being able to buy food. IPs can and do get banned for all sorts of reasons.
Fox News isn't exactly profitable. The purpose of Fox News is not to make profit, but to make the political situation in the countries they operate in more favorable to Rupert Murdoch and News Corp, which can save costs elsewhere in the company with tax breaks, reduced regulations, and the like.
Or in the brilliant words recorded by ESR:
One day a student came to Moon and said:
"I understand how to make a better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons."
Moon patiently told the student the following story:
"One day a student came to Moon and said: 'I understand how to make a better garbage collector...'
How about this then: In 1965, we had the capability to destroy the planet several times over in a matter of a few hours. In 2005, we had the capability to destroy the planet several times over in a matter of a few hours. What exactly did we gain for our trillions of dollars spent between 1965 and 2005?
as usual, military contracting companies provided over-hyped shoddy work to the military, who either didn't know better or didn't care.
Of course, I thought it was going to be as simple as knowing that the password was "Joshua".
The Hindus and Wiccans are both polytheists, so he's actually managed to piss off SEVERAL HUNDRED gods.
Sure, history is nice to know and the basis is almost necessary in order to make political choices, but does that really affect your day to day living unless you are a historian?
I was chatting with a historian just Sunday about this very question, and came up with an excellent answer: Proper study of history is the study of sources. That is, when you have two competing descriptions of the same events, who do you believe? Or what do you do when a document is credible except for a couple of numbers being way off? How do you determine which sources are independent from each other, and which depend on the same primary report? In other words, studying history (the right way, not the boring memorize-dates way) hones your extremely important BS detection skills.
Those kids were not simply running around and not paying attention, they were incapable of doing so. With a non-ADHD kid you could entice them with treats, or threaten them with punishment and they would behave (at least for awhile). But the ADHD children simply could not do it.
I had a fairly sure-fire way of getting ADHD kids to behave: get them focused on something that was interesting to them. And yes, that something may not have been what you originally had planned for them to be doing.
My point was that ADHD often is really an issue of adults expecting kids to behave like adults rather than behave like kids. For instance, kids attention spans are naturally shorter than adults, they naturally tend to move quicker than adults do, and tend to make a lot of noise and be a bit clumsy. All of which are considered important traits in ADHD diagnosis.
I used to work extensively with kids, mostly in summer programs. I described the effects of ADHD as follows:
A kid with ADHD will tend to run around like crazy screaming their head off, will have a short attention span, and may not notice when you tell them something. A kid without ADHD, by contrast, will tend to run around like crazy screaming their head off, will have a short attention span, and may not notice when you tell them something.
Well, for the greedy monarchs the peasants have already eaten all the cake, so all they're left with is "or Death".
I feel that the view spewed forth by the Article author is one that believes that some form of "culture" or "art" is better than other forms
Absolutely. The better form is the form that makes the author money. Anything else is complete BS made up to support that basic premise.
Very successful artists have long, successful, comfortable careers.
FTFY.
The vast majority of artists don't have comfortable careers. Or careers in the art at all. There simply isn't enough money going to artists to make that possible.
I'd recommend reading Joel Spolsky's bit on the effect of keeping up with the current trends on the .NET framework:
http://joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000339.html
Let's see, some reasons I like using Ubuntu over Windows XP:
- Free updates more-or-less forever. Along with that is only one update program that needs to run, rather than 15 little icons sitting in the bottom left corner for every single piece of software that needs to check for updates periodically.
- UI effects that are often prettier than what XP in particular can offer. For instance, translucent windows.
- Easy setup for multiple users with different preferences. The same machine can look completely different for Mr and Mrs.
- Utility programs that you often need to find and download in the Windows world (from sources you may or may not trust) are already installed on most Linux setups.
This seems to offer a pretty good explanation of how the filesystem works:
http://www.freeos.com/articles/3102/
Another guide is here:
http://tldp.org/LDP/intro-linux/html/sect_03_01.html
It's obviously different than Windows, but as those articles describe there are lots of advantages to doing things that way. Modern distributions like Ubuntu have made it possible to easily handle CDs and other removable disks, which can be a bit of a sticking point.
As JMS described this, he had pre-planned means of switching up characters like that just in case actors needed to drop out for something. For instance, the Talia thing wasn't completely the result of a last-minute scramble.
The president is protected from civil suits while in office period.
Completely wrong.