Seems like one of those things that's going to motivate some people and not others.
I had a teacher who would call people to the front of the classroom to pick up their papers. "There were 3 C's. Joey, Rachel, Janet. There were 5 B's..." and so forth.
As an A-student and proud of it, it felt really, really good to be the last one called up, especially on an assignment where I'd really had to work for it.
I imagine that the kids who consistently received F's felt very differently about it.
The thing is... while neither of those statements is theoretically true (and Flashback shows it), for the last 10-15 years, they have been *practically* true.
How many mac users do you know (prior to this incident) who had a virus?
We all knew (or should have known) this would eventually change. But a whole decade where it was impossible to get malware specifically because there wasn't any written for your platform (hey, it's impossible to get Halflife, too) is a pretty good run, and a strong selling point, given the number of Windows machines I have had to clean out over the years.
It is sort of an interesting problem of analysis. Because slavery was definitely at the core of everything. Southern states seceded because of concerns that their slavery (and major industry) would be banned. As you point out, they said so themselves. But then, the Union never needed to invade Virginia. They could have let the South go fail at being a country on their own (which they probably would have, given a general lack of industry, low population, and an economy dependent on slave labor cash crops).
The thing is, the Army of the Potomac did not march into Virginia because they wanted to free the slaves. They marched to keep the Southern states under Federal control. And that's what turned this whole mess into a massive war instead of a couple skirmishes followed by a treaty. Yes, the South fired on Fort Sumter first - a Fort sitting right in the bay of one of their major cities, and an attack which produced no casualties.
In that light, it was a state's rights issue - did the states have the right to withdraw as political units from the US Government.
So, it's a mistake to say it wasn't about slavery... but it's also a mistake to tell the story the way I was taught in grade school - that the Union army had to punish the South for the evils of slavery, and make everyone free. Even the Emancipation Proclamation was mostly a political move to keep Britain from throwing military aid to the South.
It's not like we dont' understand them - I think pretty much everybody do. It's just that we can't comprehend why seemingly intelligent people can be so closed minded.
Believe me, conservatives have been saying exactly the same thing about liberals who still push gun control, or who think that Wind farms can make a significant dent in America's energy production.
I drive my Toyota Celica because it is a) sporty and fun to drive b) gets over 30 mpg and c) has a hatch big enough to put stuff in (if not necessarily good seating for people). There is at least something of a market for people who don't want to waste a ton of gas but also don't want to drive a car without any soul.
Oh, I'm completely willing to wait and let them figure it out. I just think that the current aid structure is actively retarding their progress. Not as bad as when all the aid was tired to the communism/democracy proxy wars, but still pretty unhelpful.
Really all depends on exactly which area of policy you're talking about.
Evolution? Sure, creationism is a nutty sociological response to the idea that evolutionary science challenges the moral underpinning of religious philosophy. Although even most creationists are still ok with a most of biology - they just don't like the implications of where those findings lead going backward from today.
Global Warming? I'm sorry, the high and mighty liberal stance on this is bullshit. There is very good scientific evidence for global warming now, and its been strong enough to remove most doubt for a few years now. However, most people's opinions seem to have been made up long before this was the case. One's stance on global warming is more related not to a trust of science, but a trust of Al Gore.
The political groups who began the original push for global warming measures are the same groups who have been jumping on every end of the world catastrophe possibility for forty years. I'm sorry if they've lost some of their credibility.
So, yes, Global Warming is a real problem. Some conservatives are willing to admit that. I wish more were, so that instead of arguing whether the scientists are being paid off by leftist grants or big oil, we could argue about whether government regulation or the free market is better able to deal with the issue.
I will gladly admit that the association of science with an anti-expert bias is throwing the baby out with the bathwater thing. But it's definitely the cause of a fair amount of it.
Look, I'm not even a conservative (atheist libertarian), but I can at least understand where the people are coming from without assuming that they're all idiots.
For all that there is a strong valuing of "skepticism" in much of liberal thought, there is an inherent lack of it when it comes to experts. Many believe that if we just hand over control of any given issue to the experts, being smart and knowledgeable people on that issue, they will make the closest we as society can possibly get to the "right" choices.
Conservatives strongly object to this centralized control, on a gut level (don't tell me what to do), on a utilitarian level (no expert is smarter than the market, because no expert has that level of information), and on a level of basic distrust that the expert will actually have our best interests altruistically in mind.
Aid money is destroying Africa. There's no need to work on a functioning social or government organizations when you can stay in power perfectly well just off of what's getting shipped to you from the West.
Most government budgets in Africa treat aid as a core part of their income - some as much as 50%. They don't use it to cover short term shortfalls, they expand spending to use everything. And these are the governments that are actually using the money and not just pocketing it.
"We" (we being the west) cannot fix Africa short of turning it into east Carolina. They need to come up with their own functional modes of government and funding, whatever those are, on their own. The people have no chance when their local tinpot dictators are being propped up by someone with 100x their power and economy.
Yeah, I always question the reading comprehension of anyone who considers this a serious "invention" of DST. The letter was obviously tongue in cheek humor about the made-up "benefits" of changing the clocks around so the lush could sleep in longer!
I got 12 weeks of it. I enjoyed cooking, and if you were completely ignorant it should have taught you the basics of measurements and following directions.
But all of the recipes still took most of the 50 minute period. It was majority baking, and we didn't cover use of spices at all (as in, which ones you want to keep as standard in the kitchen, or basic ideas of when to use what). Which means that if you came out of that class, you could probably boil a pot of water without setting the house on fire, but you're not going to be any closer to making a 15 minute dish that tastes decent.
I guess I should say - much good food takes time to cook. More importantly, though, there is a strong impression that good food takes a long time to cook, *and* cooking good food quickly is very much a different skillset and set of recipes from just being able to cook at all.
Really, how many cooking shows are showing you stuff that you can throw together in five minutes from frozen/canned food and then leave cooking all day? It's all stuff that looks pretty and takes real time to make.
I think the class division is already there, between those who have the acquired knowledge and prioritization to provide healthy meals on a limited budget, and those who do not.
It is definitely more *complicated*, but it does not require significantly more time or expense.
Today, I can throw together any of several dozen meals that will be cheaper and healthier than frozen or prepared foods, and only take an extra 10 minutes of prep. If I had tried the same thing ten years ago I would have been limited to ramen and mac & cheese.
It used to be that girls studied home economics and cooking, so that someone in the family would know how to handle these things. I'm glad women have other and more options now, but we need to do *something* to fill that knowledge gap.
Many people do not know how to cook interesting food for cheap. Yes, it's something that they should learn, but it is entirely as much of a skill as algebra. It takes time to develop, is not really taught in schools, and if not taught at home is going to require a lot of self-motivation to pick up.
Similarly, much of good cooking takes time. If you have one parent working and another staying at home, you have that time. If you're both working, especially if you work long hours or have a bad commute, you may not have that time.
Does that mean that we should re-examine some of our societal priorities, or make a bigger deal about keeping two parents in households, or make teaching cooking and basic life skills a bigger priority? Yes. Definitely.
We need to realize that cooking, cleaning, shopping, and budgetting aren't things that people just know, even if *we* just know them because our parents taught them to us. There are all sorts of social capital that are so organic to our experience that we don't realize how hard it is to get by without them. That doesn't mean we should think it's cool to not know these things - but it does mean we should say "we should find a way to help people know this is an option, and how they can do it" rather than just saying they're too stupid and lazy to do it.
Study after study has shown the same thing with exercise at school.
I wonder if the problem isn't so much that the average kid is being less active, as much as the current average diet is making those kids who *aren't* inclined to be active/have a high metabolism obese instead of just out of shape.
My experience as both a user and a developer is that hardware dongles suck major donkey butt.
They are excellent at preventing customers and pirates alike from using your software.
The drivers for every brand we tried was buggy, and often had conflicts - *especially* when installed on the same machine as a different version of the same brand dongle from someone else's software.
It was a support nightmare, because it can easily turn into a problem that *you* can't fix - only the manufacturer of the dongle and the other software you from who knows where can.
You can also very quickly require a separate USB hub just for all of your dongles.
In general, you own the immediate airspace above your land, up to as high as could reasonably interfere with any structures placed there. So a high flying drone would not be trespassing, but a low-flying one (ie, one low enough to hit with birdshot) would be.
Birdshot fired toward a road in this case is no danger at all to anyone - it just doesn't have that range.
The complaint claims that the drone was over public land. We should remember, however, that this is at this point just the claim of the animal rights group, and may or may not be held true in court. If it is, this would of course invalidate the arguments about trespass, and would go into privacy law only. Some states do have strong laws regarding photographing events without permission.
So if it was over private property, and flying low enough to get shot at, it would be guilty of trespass.
However... since remote controlled drones are kind of a new thing, I'm not sure what exact precedent would apply regarding proper steps to be taken by property owners against those drones. I do know that in many states you are allowed to shoot trespassing dogs, cattle, and other animals (although it is normally not encouraged unless they are damaging something). Most states, even those with castle doctrines, do not allow you to shoot trespassing people unless they begin to enter your house, or if you have other reasons to claim self defense.
And all of those attitudes prepare them very well to deal with adults who will be impressed with how precocious they are. They will serve them not at all when they try to deal with their coworkers, potential dates, or potential friends, unless they have also learned the limits that society places on us.
Nearly every home-schooled kid I know perfectly fits their *parents'* definition of a good kid. But that has absolutely nothing to do with how well-adjusted they are to society at large.
Society is full of idiots, of people who are shallow, or petty, or who worship sports stars and ridicule intelligence. And maybe you think it sucks because of that... but you still have to deal with them. You can't just go off and make your own little nerd colony where everyone agrees with you, and doesn't care if you talk over them when they try to speak.
I say all of this in as understanding of a tone as a I can, because up until middle school I was that kid. We grew up in the middle of nowhere - I had no one my age I saw outside of school. It took me years of my friends in high school metaphorically beating the nerd out of me to understand that just because not everyone was a completely sweet, kind, logical 40-year-old woman like my mother, that didn't mean that they were inherently stupid or wrong. Or to learn that I could work with them, make jokes, keep my opinion to myself when appropriate, understand why people like sports... all of the myriad parts of the human experience that are dependent on working within the greater society instead of apart from it.
If I never had that, I never would have grown in my communication and social skills. Oh, sure, I could give an excellent speech on my favorite social issue or debate the relative value of different scientific theories - I had an excellent vocabulary and spoke eloquently. And none of that does a damn bit of good when you're trying to actually talk to your coworkers over lunch, or invite a girl out for coffee.
Now, school isn't the only place to learn that... but if you are planning on home schooling, you have to come up with some replacement for it, that takes your kids away from you for long periods at a time and makes them learn to work with their peers, not just with adults who are happy to pat them on the head for being such ideal little students.
Technically, my parents almost never helped with homework. They did, however, spend most of our time together teaching me about something, even if it was just how to defend a position in an argument with logic.
I think people get caught up in the specifics. The vast majority of the educational attainment differences will be achieved just because you're a parent who cares about these things. The real low end are the children of parents who either aren't parenting hardly at all, or who have no personal respect for intellectual achievement and education.
I really want to believe you, and maybe as homeschooling becomes more of a normal thing, it will happen.. but I've volunteered with homeschool groups and had many classmates who were home schooled for their earlier education... and I've never met one that I'd say was well-adjusted. It could be that given their parents, they would be poorly adjusted nerds anyway - but as much as I am tempted, it makes me really scared to try it with my children (or are likely to be on the nerdy end of the spectrum to begin with).
The best results I've seen are my neighbor's kids, who interact very well with adults, but who seem like they will get eaten alive when they go off to college and have to deal with people who aren't inherently nice, logical, and having their best interests at heart.
Parents sitting down with their children over their homework has 10x the effect on the overall education and outlook of the children than the quality of the school itself. Even *if* the parents are less knowledgeable than their children - putting a value on education is what is important.
The common thread with every overachieving nerd I've known is that they were taught from an early age to enjoy learning, and that knowledge was important - long before they actually got to elementary school.
I had a job for three years as a developer on a 3d engine (Image Generator) for the military.
In theory, you could make some great graphics for this stuff. Because normally it's running on a dedicated box that you are building from scratch and delivering as part of a solution, that you can stuff the highest end graphics card imaginable into. Moreover, since the simulation needs to be high end, most of the physics, AI, and control are handled by an entirely separate computer, leaving yours free to just render network packets.
However, then it starts to get difficult. One technical issue is that most of these simulations are running on network using different military simulation protocols. Protocols that are not designed to handle quick-twitch gamer reactions, or good animations, but to show symbols on a top down map. Moreover, depending on what your packet source it is, it may be difficult to get positional updates regularly enough to even make a plane "fly" smoothly - let alone handling infantry reactions quickly enough. Not to mention that the engine I worked on could support play boxes a couple hundred miles across... in CoD3 you can only see a few hundred yards at a time. Imagine walking across all of the generated terrain in the MS flight sims...except for it all has to be accurate to aerial footage.
But that isn't the real problem with making the engines look nice. The real problem is that the brass don't care about good lighting or artwork. They mostly care about your support tool setup, how easily it integrates, how cheap it is, and how big of an playbox you can support well. This means that the number of artists on a project is 1/50th of that on a good title.
Most modern games have a small core of engineers, and then hordes and hordes of artists tweaking every aspect of the characters and levels. The shop I worked at had about 3 programmers and a single 3d artist, who also had to do the animation and texturing. Our competitors had two programmers and an artist. I know one major IG shop, one of the big names in flight sims, who were down to one developer.
Even selling your licenses at something like 10-20k per seat, you can't afford to hire many artists. There's steady work providing these solutions, but there isn't the "make it big" potential. The market is too niche, fairly fragmented, and not driven by graphics.
And that was the commercial side of things. The military itself had a couple engines that it always was paying someone to work on, but they tended to look even worse. They'd usually try to get contractors to work on them as part of implementing a larger training setup, but the contractors had no incentive to do more than the bare minimum on that engine than to get that one sim up and running.
I guess what I'm saying is, in the end, the backend engine part of most military sims is a harder and more annoying problem than it is in video games, every deployment requires weird custom code, and there's little to no monetary incentive to spend cash on the armies of artists it takes to make a game look good...
Which is too bad, because everyone writing these engines *really* want to make them look good;-)
Faith isn't required. Eugenecists were working off of the latest scientific research. Marxism was once considered to be valid economic theory (in some circles it still is). It doesn't require faith to do evil... just a convincing enough rationalization to make people think they're in the right.
Exactly. Modern religion is a fairy tale designed to make people think that their lives hold meaning beyond what they do with them. That's there's some kind of cosmic point to it all.
Honestly, if it helps you get through life, more power to you. I've seen religious belief, however misguided I may think it is, help get my family members through too many hard times for me to tell people that *they* shouldn't believe, as long as they don't expect me to.
And if all of that mumbo-jumbo is required to make you act like a better person to your fellow man, that's kind of sad, but it's far better than *not* being a moral person.
Religious faith isn't what causes the bad effects of religion. Misguided belief in failed ideologies does that. Too many people have killed each other for nationalism or communism or racism to claim that religion is the source of most of our problems. In its dangerous, organized form it's just an expression of the same basic human problems as every other -ism.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like one of those things that's going to motivate some people and not others.
I had a teacher who would call people to the front of the classroom to pick up their papers. "There were 3 C's. Joey, Rachel, Janet. There were 5 B's..." and so forth.
As an A-student and proud of it, it felt really, really good to be the last one called up, especially on an assignment where I'd really had to work for it.
I imagine that the kids who consistently received F's felt very differently about it.
The thing is... while neither of those statements is theoretically true (and Flashback shows it), for the last 10-15 years, they have been *practically* true.
How many mac users do you know (prior to this incident) who had a virus?
We all knew (or should have known) this would eventually change. But a whole decade where it was impossible to get malware specifically because there wasn't any written for your platform (hey, it's impossible to get Halflife, too) is a pretty good run, and a strong selling point, given the number of Windows machines I have had to clean out over the years.
It is sort of an interesting problem of analysis. Because slavery was definitely at the core of everything. Southern states seceded because of concerns that their slavery (and major industry) would be banned. As you point out, they said so themselves. But then, the Union never needed to invade Virginia. They could have let the South go fail at being a country on their own (which they probably would have, given a general lack of industry, low population, and an economy dependent on slave labor cash crops).
The thing is, the Army of the Potomac did not march into Virginia because they wanted to free the slaves. They marched to keep the Southern states under Federal control. And that's what turned this whole mess into a massive war instead of a couple skirmishes followed by a treaty. Yes, the South fired on Fort Sumter first - a Fort sitting right in the bay of one of their major cities, and an attack which produced no casualties.
In that light, it was a state's rights issue - did the states have the right to withdraw as political units from the US Government.
So, it's a mistake to say it wasn't about slavery... but it's also a mistake to tell the story the way I was taught in grade school - that the Union army had to punish the South for the evils of slavery, and make everyone free. Even the Emancipation Proclamation was mostly a political move to keep Britain from throwing military aid to the South.
Believe me, conservatives have been saying exactly the same thing about liberals who still push gun control, or who think that Wind farms can make a significant dent in America's energy production.
Everyone has their blind spots, unfortunately.
Re: Hybrid sports cars that only add power.
You talk like this is a bad thing?
I drive my Toyota Celica because it is a) sporty and fun to drive b) gets over 30 mpg and c) has a hatch big enough to put stuff in (if not necessarily good seating for people). There is at least something of a market for people who don't want to waste a ton of gas but also don't want to drive a car without any soul.
Sounds like a pretty excellent project for a compiler/assembly class at university, actually.
Oh, I'm completely willing to wait and let them figure it out. I just think that the current aid structure is actively retarding their progress. Not as bad as when all the aid was tired to the communism/democracy proxy wars, but still pretty unhelpful.
Really all depends on exactly which area of policy you're talking about.
Evolution? Sure, creationism is a nutty sociological response to the idea that evolutionary science challenges the moral underpinning of religious philosophy. Although even most creationists are still ok with a most of biology - they just don't like the implications of where those findings lead going backward from today.
Global Warming? I'm sorry, the high and mighty liberal stance on this is bullshit. There is very good scientific evidence for global warming now, and its been strong enough to remove most doubt for a few years now. However, most people's opinions seem to have been made up long before this was the case. One's stance on global warming is more related not to a trust of science, but a trust of Al Gore.
The political groups who began the original push for global warming measures are the same groups who have been jumping on every end of the world catastrophe possibility for forty years. I'm sorry if they've lost some of their credibility.
So, yes, Global Warming is a real problem. Some conservatives are willing to admit that. I wish more were, so that instead of arguing whether the scientists are being paid off by leftist grants or big oil, we could argue about whether government regulation or the free market is better able to deal with the issue.
I will gladly admit that the association of science with an anti-expert bias is throwing the baby out with the bathwater thing. But it's definitely the cause of a fair amount of it.
Look, I'm not even a conservative (atheist libertarian), but I can at least understand where the people are coming from without assuming that they're all idiots.
Wish I had mod points.
For all that there is a strong valuing of "skepticism" in much of liberal thought, there is an inherent lack of it when it comes to experts. Many believe that if we just hand over control of any given issue to the experts, being smart and knowledgeable people on that issue, they will make the closest we as society can possibly get to the "right" choices.
Conservatives strongly object to this centralized control, on a gut level (don't tell me what to do), on a utilitarian level (no expert is smarter than the market, because no expert has that level of information), and on a level of basic distrust that the expert will actually have our best interests altruistically in mind.
Aid money is destroying Africa. There's no need to work on a functioning social or government organizations when you can stay in power perfectly well just off of what's getting shipped to you from the West.
Most government budgets in Africa treat aid as a core part of their income - some as much as 50%. They don't use it to cover short term shortfalls, they expand spending to use everything. And these are the governments that are actually using the money and not just pocketing it.
"We" (we being the west) cannot fix Africa short of turning it into east Carolina. They need to come up with their own functional modes of government and funding, whatever those are, on their own. The people have no chance when their local tinpot dictators are being propped up by someone with 100x their power and economy.
Yeah, I always question the reading comprehension of anyone who considers this a serious "invention" of DST. The letter was obviously tongue in cheek humor about the made-up "benefits" of changing the clocks around so the lush could sleep in longer!
I got 12 weeks of it. I enjoyed cooking, and if you were completely ignorant it should have taught you the basics of measurements and following directions.
But all of the recipes still took most of the 50 minute period. It was majority baking, and we didn't cover use of spices at all (as in, which ones you want to keep as standard in the kitchen, or basic ideas of when to use what). Which means that if you came out of that class, you could probably boil a pot of water without setting the house on fire, but you're not going to be any closer to making a 15 minute dish that tastes decent.
I guess I should say - much good food takes time to cook. More importantly, though, there is a strong impression that good food takes a long time to cook, *and* cooking good food quickly is very much a different skillset and set of recipes from just being able to cook at all.
Really, how many cooking shows are showing you stuff that you can throw together in five minutes from frozen/canned food and then leave cooking all day? It's all stuff that looks pretty and takes real time to make.
I think the class division is already there, between those who have the acquired knowledge and prioritization to provide healthy meals on a limited budget, and those who do not.
It is definitely more *complicated*, but it does not require significantly more time or expense.
Today, I can throw together any of several dozen meals that will be cheaper and healthier than frozen or prepared foods, and only take an extra 10 minutes of prep. If I had tried the same thing ten years ago I would have been limited to ramen and mac & cheese.
It used to be that girls studied home economics and cooking, so that someone in the family would know how to handle these things. I'm glad women have other and more options now, but we need to do *something* to fill that knowledge gap.
I'd say ignorant and busy.
Many people do not know how to cook interesting food for cheap. Yes, it's something that they should learn, but it is entirely as much of a skill as algebra. It takes time to develop, is not really taught in schools, and if not taught at home is going to require a lot of self-motivation to pick up.
Similarly, much of good cooking takes time. If you have one parent working and another staying at home, you have that time. If you're both working, especially if you work long hours or have a bad commute, you may not have that time.
Does that mean that we should re-examine some of our societal priorities, or make a bigger deal about keeping two parents in households, or make teaching cooking and basic life skills a bigger priority? Yes. Definitely.
We need to realize that cooking, cleaning, shopping, and budgetting aren't things that people just know, even if *we* just know them because our parents taught them to us. There are all sorts of social capital that are so organic to our experience that we don't realize how hard it is to get by without them. That doesn't mean we should think it's cool to not know these things - but it does mean we should say "we should find a way to help people know this is an option, and how they can do it" rather than just saying they're too stupid and lazy to do it.
Study after study has shown the same thing with exercise at school.
I wonder if the problem isn't so much that the average kid is being less active, as much as the current average diet is making those kids who *aren't* inclined to be active/have a high metabolism obese instead of just out of shape.
My experience as both a user and a developer is that hardware dongles suck major donkey butt.
They are excellent at preventing customers and pirates alike from using your software.
The drivers for every brand we tried was buggy, and often had conflicts - *especially* when installed on the same machine as a different version of the same brand dongle from someone else's software.
It was a support nightmare, because it can easily turn into a problem that *you* can't fix - only the manufacturer of the dongle and the other software you from who knows where can.
You can also very quickly require a separate USB hub just for all of your dongles.
Some of the guys are volokh conspiracy go into better legal detail:
http://volokh.com/2012/02/19/private-drones-and-private-property-rights/
In general, you own the immediate airspace above your land, up to as high as could reasonably interfere with any structures placed there. So a high flying drone would not be trespassing, but a low-flying one (ie, one low enough to hit with birdshot) would be.
Birdshot fired toward a road in this case is no danger at all to anyone - it just doesn't have that range.
The complaint claims that the drone was over public land. We should remember, however, that this is at this point just the claim of the animal rights group, and may or may not be held true in court. If it is, this would of course invalidate the arguments about trespass, and would go into privacy law only. Some states do have strong laws regarding photographing events without permission.
So if it was over private property, and flying low enough to get shot at, it would be guilty of trespass.
However... since remote controlled drones are kind of a new thing, I'm not sure what exact precedent would apply regarding proper steps to be taken by property owners against those drones. I do know that in many states you are allowed to shoot trespassing dogs, cattle, and other animals (although it is normally not encouraged unless they are damaging something). Most states, even those with castle doctrines, do not allow you to shoot trespassing people unless they begin to enter your house, or if you have other reasons to claim self defense.
IANAL, but I do read a lot of law blogs.
And all of those attitudes prepare them very well to deal with adults who will be impressed with how precocious they are. They will serve them not at all when they try to deal with their coworkers, potential dates, or potential friends, unless they have also learned the limits that society places on us.
Nearly every home-schooled kid I know perfectly fits their *parents'* definition of a good kid. But that has absolutely nothing to do with how well-adjusted they are to society at large.
Society is full of idiots, of people who are shallow, or petty, or who worship sports stars and ridicule intelligence. And maybe you think it sucks because of that... but you still have to deal with them. You can't just go off and make your own little nerd colony where everyone agrees with you, and doesn't care if you talk over them when they try to speak.
I say all of this in as understanding of a tone as a I can, because up until middle school I was that kid. We grew up in the middle of nowhere - I had no one my age I saw outside of school. It took me years of my friends in high school metaphorically beating the nerd out of me to understand that just because not everyone was a completely sweet, kind, logical 40-year-old woman like my mother, that didn't mean that they were inherently stupid or wrong. Or to learn that I could work with them, make jokes, keep my opinion to myself when appropriate, understand why people like sports... all of the myriad parts of the human experience that are dependent on working within the greater society instead of apart from it.
If I never had that, I never would have grown in my communication and social skills. Oh, sure, I could give an excellent speech on my favorite social issue or debate the relative value of different scientific theories - I had an excellent vocabulary and spoke eloquently. And none of that does a damn bit of good when you're trying to actually talk to your coworkers over lunch, or invite a girl out for coffee.
Now, school isn't the only place to learn that... but if you are planning on home schooling, you have to come up with some replacement for it, that takes your kids away from you for long periods at a time and makes them learn to work with their peers, not just with adults who are happy to pat them on the head for being such ideal little students.
Technically, my parents almost never helped with homework. They did, however, spend most of our time together teaching me about something, even if it was just how to defend a position in an argument with logic.
I think people get caught up in the specifics. The vast majority of the educational attainment differences will be achieved just because you're a parent who cares about these things. The real low end are the children of parents who either aren't parenting hardly at all, or who have no personal respect for intellectual achievement and education.
I really want to believe you, and maybe as homeschooling becomes more of a normal thing, it will happen.. but I've volunteered with homeschool groups and had many classmates who were home schooled for their earlier education... and I've never met one that I'd say was well-adjusted. It could be that given their parents, they would be poorly adjusted nerds anyway - but as much as I am tempted, it makes me really scared to try it with my children (or are likely to be on the nerdy end of the spectrum to begin with).
The best results I've seen are my neighbor's kids, who interact very well with adults, but who seem like they will get eaten alive when they go off to college and have to deal with people who aren't inherently nice, logical, and having their best interests at heart.
Parents sitting down with their children over their homework has 10x the effect on the overall education and outlook of the children than the quality of the school itself. Even *if* the parents are less knowledgeable than their children - putting a value on education is what is important.
The common thread with every overachieving nerd I've known is that they were taught from an early age to enjoy learning, and that knowledge was important - long before they actually got to elementary school.
I had a job for three years as a developer on a 3d engine (Image Generator) for the military.
In theory, you could make some great graphics for this stuff. Because normally it's running on a dedicated box that you are building from scratch and delivering as part of a solution, that you can stuff the highest end graphics card imaginable into. Moreover, since the simulation needs to be high end, most of the physics, AI, and control are handled by an entirely separate computer, leaving yours free to just render network packets.
However, then it starts to get difficult. One technical issue is that most of these simulations are running on network using different military simulation protocols. Protocols that are not designed to handle quick-twitch gamer reactions, or good animations, but to show symbols on a top down map. Moreover, depending on what your packet source it is, it may be difficult to get positional updates regularly enough to even make a plane "fly" smoothly - let alone handling infantry reactions quickly enough. Not to mention that the engine I worked on could support play boxes a couple hundred miles across... in CoD3 you can only see a few hundred yards at a time. Imagine walking across all of the generated terrain in the MS flight sims...except for it all has to be accurate to aerial footage.
But that isn't the real problem with making the engines look nice. The real problem is that the brass don't care about good lighting or artwork. They mostly care about your support tool setup, how easily it integrates, how cheap it is, and how big of an playbox you can support well. This means that the number of artists on a project is 1/50th of that on a good title.
Most modern games have a small core of engineers, and then hordes and hordes of artists tweaking every aspect of the characters and levels. The shop I worked at had about 3 programmers and a single 3d artist, who also had to do the animation and texturing. Our competitors had two programmers and an artist. I know one major IG shop, one of the big names in flight sims, who were down to one developer.
Even selling your licenses at something like 10-20k per seat, you can't afford to hire many artists. There's steady work providing these solutions, but there isn't the "make it big" potential. The market is too niche, fairly fragmented, and not driven by graphics.
And that was the commercial side of things. The military itself had a couple engines that it always was paying someone to work on, but they tended to look even worse. They'd usually try to get contractors to work on them as part of implementing a larger training setup, but the contractors had no incentive to do more than the bare minimum on that engine than to get that one sim up and running.
I guess what I'm saying is, in the end, the backend engine part of most military sims is a harder and more annoying problem than it is in video games, every deployment requires weird custom code, and there's little to no monetary incentive to spend cash on the armies of artists it takes to make a game look good...
Which is too bad, because everyone writing these engines *really* want to make them look good ;-)
Faith isn't required. Eugenecists were working off of the latest scientific research. Marxism was once considered to be valid economic theory (in some circles it still is). It doesn't require faith to do evil... just a convincing enough rationalization to make people think they're in the right.
Exactly. Modern religion is a fairy tale designed to make people think that their lives hold meaning beyond what they do with them. That's there's some kind of cosmic point to it all.
Honestly, if it helps you get through life, more power to you. I've seen religious belief, however misguided I may think it is, help get my family members through too many hard times for me to tell people that *they* shouldn't believe, as long as they don't expect me to.
And if all of that mumbo-jumbo is required to make you act like a better person to your fellow man, that's kind of sad, but it's far better than *not* being a moral person.
Religious faith isn't what causes the bad effects of religion. Misguided belief in failed ideologies does that. Too many people have killed each other for nationalism or communism or racism to claim that religion is the source of most of our problems. In its dangerous, organized form it's just an expression of the same basic human problems as every other -ism.