On the contrary, monopolies which last are almost always the result of government
intervention, not the market. Think about it -- most/. users are old enough to
remember when IBM was the big scary OS monopolist that allegedly needed to be
broken up. Soon enough, Microsoft will go the same way. In contrast, its unlikely
that any of us will live long enough to see the end of the disastrous local telco
monopolies, which were government-created.
I certainly do not want to suggest that one cannot get a good education in many of the
public schools in this nation (there are certainly plenty, especially here in New York,
where it would be next to impossible, but that is not the norm). On the other hand, while
the effort put into homeschooling is effort spent on academics, self-discipline, and other
things which one needs to excel in either setting, many of our public schools require
a great deal of effort to break even against an artificial atmosphere, an educational
environment which, by any objective measure, simply does not stand up to either homeschooling
or private schools, and so forth.
Yes social interaction is important, but a public school provides at best a forced and artificial
social environment, and in many cases something much, much worse, as many slashdotters know. If
you actually wish your children to develop social and emotional maturity, an active social life
outside of school is much more important than school is.
As others in this thread have pointed out, is your child going to spend the rest of their life
surrounded only people of their own age?
Certainly the consistent performance of homeschooled students in the national
spelling and geography bees is not of itself conclusive, but coming as it does
on top of study
after study showing
that homeschooled students consistently outperform public school students at all grade
levels and in all areas of the curriculum, I find it pretty telling.
I'm not really interested in an argument over how bad public schools are or aren't. I
think it's pretty clear to all that they are at least bad enough that grand claims of
`vital social benefits' from being forced into such an environment are rather overblown.
Yes, it's important to make sure that your children interact socially with other children.
But public schools are neither the only nor a particularly good forum for such interactions.
Plenty of other venues exist for meeting other children, including athletic leagues, clubs,
churches or synagogues, and so forth. To pretend that the failed academic environment and
low standards of a public school should be tolerated in the name of having your children
interact socially with other children strikes me as, at best, misguided.
Certainly, but this is a completely separate question from whether or not to homeschool.
Homeschoolers still socialize with other children in a wide range of settings, just not in
the artificial (and disastrously mismanaged) setting of a public school. Conversely, parents
of public school children who are intent on isolating their children will still do so.
Tying isolation of children to homeschooling is particularly misguided in the internet age, where
internet sites make it very easy for homeschooling parents to plan field trips, group activities,
and likesuch with other homeschooling parents in their area.
It's also worth pointing out what TheWanderingHermit himself mentions -- that he was, after all,
a special ed teacher. This sugests that the majority of his students, homeschool or otherwise
did indeed have educational or behavioral problems of one sort or another -- but it also suggests
that the homeschool students he encountered were no more representative of homeschoolers in general
than the public school students he encountered were representative of students in general.
Nor should it be any great surprise if parents of children with severe problems did indeed choose to
homeschool (and not, as TheWanderingHermit suggests, the other way 'round) -- after all, we all know
that the disaster that is the current public school system fails children with special needs (at both
ends of the bell curve) even more than it fails students in general...
Come now, just what part of the public school experience do you think helps kid
grow up `normal'? Is it the bullying? The schoolyard fights? The metal detectors
at the doors? The clicques and vicious gossip?
In contrast, homeschoolers study in an environment which emphasizes maturity, self-sufficiency
and accomplishment over conformity and being in the `in crowd'.
Why do you assume that the former environment produces more emotional maturity? What evidence do
you have to back up this view?
An amusing contrast between your sig and your post, friend.
Of course, the fact that a homeschooler beat out kids five years
older than him to win the national geography bee is just one example
of what study
after study has
shown -- the fact that on average homeschoolers perform several years above grade
average in every area of the curriculum.
Against this, you have what counter-argument to make? That home schoolers are missing out
on enforced conformity, clicques, bullying, and all the other `vital social experiences'
enjoyed by public school children? Thanks, but I (and my children) will pass...
By all means. But they do so despite, not because of the `social experiences' of normal public school life.
Much as Winston Churchill responded to critics who argued that his modernization of the Royal Navy was disrupting centuries
of grand traditions by stating that as far as he could see, the grand traditions of the Royal Navy were `Rum, sodomy, and the lash',
I would argue that the `vital social experience' being missed by home schoolers are cliques, bullying, and schoolyard fights.
Thanks, but I (and my children), have chosen to pass on these...
Yes indeed, and as I've said several times in this thread, I would argue that it is not in the `legitimate interest'
of the citizens to see the government choose a worse tool for the job merely to support an ideological crusade
or to give one competitor `a leg up' in the market.
Section 508, which establishes feature requirements for software is a separate question -- any competitor
who is willing to meet those feature requirements is welcome at the table.
But you believe that the ideological goal of harming commercial software vendors, ala RMS, outweights the
benefits of having the government spend your tax dollars effectively. Very well, let us each vote as we may,
and a good day to you.
Um, yeah, okay, that's why four of the top ten contestants
in the national geography bee
were homeschoolers, with the number one contestant, a homeschooler, being five years younger than
most of the other contestants?
As I said above, if you really want to make sure that your home-schooled
kid gets the same social experiences he would get in a public school, you could
always beat him up each morning and steal his lunch money...
I think the key term here is `former'. Even if we accept the stereotype that
home-schooled students have social problems (and several studies have strongly suggested
otherwise), this is a new era.
These days, internet-based homeschooling resources make it very easy for home-schooling
parents to work together to plan field trips, sports, and other activities with other
home-schooling kids.
Of course, if you really want to give your kid the social experiences he would have in
a real public school, you could always beat him up and take his lunch-money each morning...
In addition to helping with the various legal hurdles some states impose on
home-schoolers, the HSLDA also provides a clearing house for home-schooling
information.
Another group you may find interesting is k12.com,
which is an internet-based classroom for homeschoolers, founded by former US Secretary
of Education Bill Bennett.
You raise two points here. One is that section 508 already requires that the state have access to the source of software it is evaluating. This is done to prevent the state being stranded in the case of a supplier's demise.
But surely, if this is already required, adding a requirement that the software in question be not only source-available but open source adds no technical advantage to the state, now does it?
Indeed, you yourself said in a previous post that this was about a `moral' advantage of open source software. Well, as someone who relies on the state to do their job well, and who has to shoulder the cost of them doing it, I see a much stronger `moral' advantage in the state using the best tool for the job.
But you give the game away later in the post, when you say that the real advantage of this law is that it would help open source to compete with companies. Just as it is not allowed for a private company to use a monopoly in one area to help itself to compete in another, I think the idea of the state picking one of two competitors and `helping them to compete' is a truly rotten idea.
The truth is, open source software already competes quite well with commercial alternatives in many areas. Giving it an artificial leg-up won't make this any more true, and may actually reduce the incentives which made it true in the first place.
On the contrary, there is a key difference between this and Section 508 (and other FIPS requirements).
The difference is that Section 508 provides a definition of a `superior product', in technical terms, for use
in making decisions.
In contrast, this measure overrides such technical criteria in support of a explicitly ideological cause, and is
thus, IMHO, a really rotten idea.
It also, by the way, suggests that some Open Source advocates feel that their products cannot compete on purely technical merits.
Like Tim O'Reilly, I feel that they can.
Nice try, but no scooby snacks for this answer.:-)
Of all the nasty things MS has done, they have never pushed for
laws to make people buy their products, or sued to make the courts
shut down their competitors.
Sure, but they think that's the case because no matter how nasty they get, people keep on buying those CDs.
And as long as people who do stop buying CDs are downloading mp3s, they will continue to believe that
as long as they shut down the sources of mp3s, people will go back to buying CDs.
If enough people stop buying CDs in protest of their actions, they can't maintain this illusion any longer.
It wouldn't help them much to have that claim if they couldn't
afford a lawyer and a lobbyist, now would it?
More immediately, given the choice of drastically reduced revenue
but being able to make that claim, or of changing their ways and
having people start buying music again, which helps them more?
After all, all the new laws and shut down companies in the world
won't actually bring them a cent of revenue, now will they?
It's all very well to talk about whether the particular smartcard
technology being discussed is or isn't secure, but this misses the
larger problem with such a plan: the fact that forged or copied
cards are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the security
of these things. As with most systems, the real things to worry
about are the human factors.
Most proposed plans for a national ID have suggested that state
DMV's should be the ones to hand these out -- but the last few
decades have seen hundreds of cases of corrupt DMV employees
giving out drivers licenses for cash. It's hard to imagine any
other agency you might choose being much different.
And in a world where this card is believed to be `secure' for so
many more purposes, such cases will do even more damage than they
already do, because people will be even less likely to question
the documents before their eyes.
So even if there were not serious privacy concerns with a
national ID system, it is at best highly unlikely that it would
buy any real security gains in return for the great cost and
bureaucratic overhead it would introduce.
Put differently: you thought standing in line at the DMV sucked
now-- just imagine what it would be like after the people who
brought you the IRS and the INS got done with it.
The citizens do have the power -- if they didn't buy CDs, the RIAA wouldn't
have the money for lawsuits like this. The problem is, this doesn't mean you have
a right to bootleg music just because you don't want to pay for it, and like most
citizens, you don't actually care about this issue enough to go through the inconvenience
of not listening to new music.
Your mouth is saying `screw the RIAA', and your money is saying `thank you, may I have another?'.
The question here is not one of `crime', though these folks are
in fact guilty of crimes under international law.
These folks are not suspects arrested to face trial, they are
prisoners of war (although they are not even that in the sense of
that term provided by the Geneva Convention, see below). When
brave US troops charged up the cliffs on D-Day, they did not arrest
the Germans they found at the top and read them their Miranda
rights, they took them prisoner. The same holds here.
However, even those Germans were fighting in accord with the Geneva
Convention, wearing clearly marked uniforms and being part of an
organized force with a clear command structure. By fighting
disguised as civilians, and not being part of such a force, these
folks are in violation of the law of war and are not entitled to
the protections of the Geneva Convention. That we choose to treat
them humanely, instead of summarily executing them as that Convention
permits is a good sign of how different we are from those we are
fighting against.
By the way, I find your comment about an `uneven war' particularly
amusing. Where do you get the idea that we have some responsiblity
to fight an `even' war? Exactly by using the vast array of technology
at our disposal, we were able to not only minimize civilian deaths,
but even minimize the number of our enemy which we had to kill to
accomplish our aims. What problem do you have with this?
I would argue that this bit about the state not being able to be
`forced' to do something is somewhat of a pedantic game (if I follow
a law I voted for, am I being forced to? I will be arrested if I
do not, after all), but I don't think that it's necessary for the
point at hand, either.
The key point here is that whether we adopt the word `forced' or
not, a policy by the government of rejecting superior products for
some purpose simply because they happen to be commercial software
is, IMHO, as rotten an idea as a policy of the government only
using commercial software.
In either case, the government will be picking a worse, more
expensive solution for some subset of the software tasks which it
performs. As a taxpayer, I do not feel that this is a good use of
my tax dollars.
It may be a lousy idea, but it's not a lousy idea because it is a restriction on the government.
Certainly. It is a lousy idea because its costs outweight its benefits. Its main costs are the expenses in time and manpower of in some cases forcing government to use worse tools for a particular job, or even forcing them to create custom solutions where COTS solutions exist, but no open source solution exists.
It's main alleged benefit according to you is to make government more `open', whatever that means. I would suggest that in fact, this practice makes government no more `open' than the existing FIPS requirements do. Thus, I see the costs of this bill as far outweighing the gains.
More importantly, as Mr. O'Reilly points out, most of the proponents of this bill aren't really concerned with its costs and benefits at all. They are hewing to an ideological position, ala RMS, that use of commercial software is itself less `pure', morally, than use of open source software. And without making the case for this claim, they should not be trying to impose its use on the government (or anyone else).
Put differently: is it still `free' software if you're forced to use it?
Slashdot Mirror
On the contrary, monopolies which last are almost always the result of government intervention, not the market. Think about it -- most /. users are old enough to
remember when IBM was the big scary OS monopolist that allegedly needed to be
broken up. Soon enough, Microsoft will go the same way. In contrast, its unlikely
that any of us will live long enough to see the end of the disastrous local telco
monopolies, which were government-created.
Yes social interaction is important, but a public school provides at best a forced and artificial social environment, and in many cases something much, much worse, as many slashdotters know. If you actually wish your children to develop social and emotional maturity, an active social life outside of school is much more important than school is.
As others in this thread have pointed out, is your child going to spend the rest of their life surrounded only people of their own age?
I'm not really interested in an argument over how bad public schools are or aren't. I think it's pretty clear to all that they are at least bad enough that grand claims of `vital social benefits' from being forced into such an environment are rather overblown.
Yes, it's important to make sure that your children interact socially with other children. But public schools are neither the only nor a particularly good forum for such interactions. Plenty of other venues exist for meeting other children, including athletic leagues, clubs, churches or synagogues, and so forth. To pretend that the failed academic environment and low standards of a public school should be tolerated in the name of having your children interact socially with other children strikes me as, at best, misguided.
Homeschoolers still socialize with other children in a wide range of settings, just not in the artificial (and disastrously mismanaged) setting of a public school. Conversely, parents of public school children who are intent on isolating their children will still do so.
Tying isolation of children to homeschooling is particularly misguided in the internet age, where internet sites make it very easy for homeschooling parents to plan field trips, group activities, and likesuch with other homeschooling parents in their area.
It's also worth pointing out what TheWanderingHermit himself mentions -- that he was, after all, a special ed teacher. This sugests that the majority of his students, homeschool or otherwise did indeed have educational or behavioral problems of one sort or another -- but it also suggests that the homeschool students he encountered were no more representative of homeschoolers in general than the public school students he encountered were representative of students in general.
Nor should it be any great surprise if parents of children with severe problems did indeed choose to homeschool (and not, as TheWanderingHermit suggests, the other way 'round) -- after all, we all know that the disaster that is the current public school system fails children with special needs (at both ends of the bell curve) even more than it fails students in general...
Thanks, I'll pass...
In contrast, homeschoolers study in an environment which emphasizes maturity, self-sufficiency and accomplishment over conformity and being in the `in crowd'.
Why do you assume that the former environment produces more emotional maturity? What evidence do you have to back up this view?
Of course, the fact that a homeschooler beat out kids five years older than him to win the national geography bee is just one example of what study after study has shown -- the fact that on average homeschoolers perform several years above grade average in every area of the curriculum.
Against this, you have what counter-argument to make? That home schoolers are missing out on enforced conformity, clicques, bullying, and all the other `vital social experiences' enjoyed by public school children? Thanks, but I (and my children) will pass...
Much as Winston Churchill responded to critics who argued that his modernization of the Royal Navy was disrupting centuries of grand traditions by stating that as far as he could see, the grand traditions of the Royal Navy were `Rum, sodomy, and the lash', I would argue that the `vital social experience' being missed by home schoolers are cliques, bullying, and schoolyard fights.
Thanks, but I (and my children), have chosen to pass on these...
Section 508, which establishes feature requirements for software is a separate question -- any competitor who is willing to meet those feature requirements is welcome at the table.
But you believe that the ideological goal of harming commercial software vendors, ala RMS, outweights the benefits of having the government spend your tax dollars effectively. Very well, let us each vote as we may, and a good day to you.
That's why the winner of the national spelling bee was also a homeschooler?
I guess your ignorant stereotype doesn't hold up after all, now does it?
As I said above, if you really want to make sure that your home-schooled kid gets the same social experiences he would get in a public school, you could always beat him up each morning and steal his lunch money...
These days, internet-based homeschooling resources make it very easy for home-schooling parents to work together to plan field trips, sports, and other activities with other home-schooling kids.
Of course, if you really want to give your kid the social experiences he would have in a real public school, you could always beat him up and take his lunch-money each morning...
In addition to helping with the various legal hurdles some states impose on home-schoolers, the HSLDA also provides a clearing house for home-schooling information.
Another group you may find interesting is k12.com, which is an internet-based classroom for homeschoolers, founded by former US Secretary of Education Bill Bennett.
But surely, if this is already required, adding a requirement that the software in question be not only source-available but open source adds no technical advantage to the state, now does it?
Indeed, you yourself said in a previous post that this was about a `moral' advantage of open source software. Well, as someone who relies on the state to do their job well, and who has to shoulder the cost of them doing it, I see a much stronger `moral' advantage in the state using the best tool for the job.
But you give the game away later in the post, when you say that the real advantage of this law is that it would help open source to compete with companies. Just as it is not allowed for a private company to use a monopoly in one area to help itself to compete in another, I think the idea of the state picking one of two competitors and `helping them to compete' is a truly rotten idea.
The truth is, open source software already competes quite well with commercial alternatives in many areas. Giving it an artificial leg-up won't make this any more true, and may actually reduce the incentives which made it true in the first place.
The difference is that Section 508 provides a definition of a `superior product', in technical terms, for use in making decisions.
In contrast, this measure overrides such technical criteria in support of a explicitly ideological cause, and is thus, IMHO, a really rotten idea.
It also, by the way, suggests that some Open Source advocates feel that their products cannot compete on purely technical merits. Like Tim O'Reilly, I feel that they can.
Of all the nasty things MS has done, they have never pushed for laws to make people buy their products, or sued to make the courts shut down their competitors.
And as long as people who do stop buying CDs are downloading mp3s, they will continue to believe that as long as they shut down the sources of mp3s, people will go back to buying CDs.
If enough people stop buying CDs in protest of their actions, they can't maintain this illusion any longer.
It wouldn't help them much to have that claim if they couldn't afford a lawyer and a lobbyist, now would it?
More immediately, given the choice of drastically reduced revenue but being able to make that claim, or of changing their ways and having people start buying music again, which helps them more?
After all, all the new laws and shut down companies in the world won't actually bring them a cent of revenue, now will they?
Most proposed plans for a national ID have suggested that state DMV's should be the ones to hand these out -- but the last few decades have seen hundreds of cases of corrupt DMV employees giving out drivers licenses for cash. It's hard to imagine any other agency you might choose being much different.
And in a world where this card is believed to be `secure' for so many more purposes, such cases will do even more damage than they already do, because people will be even less likely to question the documents before their eyes.
So even if there were not serious privacy concerns with a national ID system, it is at best highly unlikely that it would buy any real security gains in return for the great cost and bureaucratic overhead it would introduce.
Put differently: you thought standing in line at the DMV sucked now-- just imagine what it would be like after the people who brought you the IRS and the INS got done with it.
Umm, you do realize that the MPAA and the RIAA gave more money to Gore, don't you?
He said, and forked out $17.99 for another CD.
The citizens do have the power -- if they didn't buy CDs, the RIAA wouldn't have the money for lawsuits like this. The problem is, this doesn't mean you have a right to bootleg music just because you don't want to pay for it, and like most citizens, you don't actually care about this issue enough to go through the inconvenience of not listening to new music.
Your mouth is saying `screw the RIAA', and your money is saying `thank you, may I have another?'.
These folks are not suspects arrested to face trial, they are prisoners of war (although they are not even that in the sense of that term provided by the Geneva Convention, see below). When brave US troops charged up the cliffs on D-Day, they did not arrest the Germans they found at the top and read them their Miranda rights, they took them prisoner. The same holds here.
However, even those Germans were fighting in accord with the Geneva Convention, wearing clearly marked uniforms and being part of an organized force with a clear command structure. By fighting disguised as civilians, and not being part of such a force, these folks are in violation of the law of war and are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. That we choose to treat them humanely, instead of summarily executing them as that Convention permits is a good sign of how different we are from those we are fighting against.
By the way, I find your comment about an `uneven war' particularly amusing. Where do you get the idea that we have some responsiblity to fight an `even' war? Exactly by using the vast array of technology at our disposal, we were able to not only minimize civilian deaths, but even minimize the number of our enemy which we had to kill to accomplish our aims. What problem do you have with this?
The key point here is that whether we adopt the word `forced' or not, a policy by the government of rejecting superior products for some purpose simply because they happen to be commercial software is, IMHO, as rotten an idea as a policy of the government only using commercial software.
In either case, the government will be picking a worse, more expensive solution for some subset of the software tasks which it performs. As a taxpayer, I do not feel that this is a good use of my tax dollars.
It may be a lousy idea, but it's not a lousy idea because it is a restriction on the government.
Certainly. It is a lousy idea because its costs outweight its benefits. Its main costs are the expenses in time and manpower of in some cases forcing government to use worse tools for a particular job, or even forcing them to create custom solutions where COTS solutions exist, but no open source solution exists.
It's main alleged benefit according to you is to make government more `open', whatever that means. I would suggest that in fact, this practice makes government no more `open' than the existing FIPS requirements do. Thus, I see the costs of this bill as far outweighing the gains.
More importantly, as Mr. O'Reilly points out, most of the proponents of this bill aren't really concerned with its costs and benefits at all. They are hewing to an ideological position, ala RMS, that use of commercial software is itself less `pure', morally, than use of open source software. And without making the case for this claim, they should not be trying to impose its use on the government (or anyone else).
Put differently: is it still `free' software if you're forced to use it?