Meh, if you already spent it, it's money under the bridge.
I'd still rather recommend spending money that my children will most definitely need and that has a near 100% chance to directly improve their quality of life, than on something that has a very small off chance of being useful if and only if they get a disease sometime before the hospital goes out of business.
I would say that I hope your investment pays off, for your sake, but since that first would require your child having a horrible medical condition, I will wish with all sincerity that this is a complete waste of money for you and your child has a completely healthy and productive life.
Define personal fitness. I'd say it includes running and jumping around. PE teaches team sports because they're a lot more interesting (to most people), and keep a lot more people involved, than running on a treadmill. I guess it's a bit of a philosophy thing - if you're uncoordinated, do you give up or push harder. Some people were never taught (or never had - we could argue that all day) that kind of physical competitiveness.
Team sports may seem like they teach worthless things... but throwing, catching, dodging, all build agility and coordination better than most pure drills you could do, especially when you add that you're trying to do it over the head of someone else.
Unattractiveness is 90-95% body weight and muscle mass. A guy can have one of the ugliest mugs you've ever seen but he will still beat out every over or underweight nerd you know if he has a six pack. Are football players generally naturally attractive? Not their faces, but ask most women and they'd love it if their husband had their bodies. How much depression and disorders are directly linked to poor fitness? How many nerds do you know with major psychological issues due to their inability (or perceived inability ) to attract women (or men, although that is generally less of an issue in our discipline).
And finally... no one is forced to hit their head with a ball. You're encouraged to play, but if you don't go for that header, they aren't going to fail you for the class.
I get tired of this false dichotomy in our society between physical and mental pursuits. There is no reason to ignore any aspect of your personal development. Being smart does not give you and excuse to be weak, nor being athletic an excuse to ignore your math studies. You may not start on the football team or win the nobel price, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't play the game.
I'd only consider it if you've already saved enough money for their college, their first house, and their wedding.
The chances of your child even having something that this could fix are tiny, the chances that the cord will still be in good enough shape, a treatment will have been invented (for the specific disease they got) and it all happens in time, are miniscule. You'd have better odds on your child's welfare by spending $6000 on lottery tickets.
Yes, because there's a much higher earning potential for artists than football players... they're both disciplines where a few people make it big, and the rest scrounge or go into something else while talking about their lost dreams.
In high school, I resented the attention that the jocks and the athletic department got at our school. But then I got to college and went into engineering... and saw dozens of young men who couldn't run a mile, who were obese and unattractive and unable to be self-sufficient when it came to anything physical. Moreover, I saw the inability to work as a team, to work within a command structure or to lead others, to communicate, to deal with stress and confrontation.
Deifying athletics is ridiculous - but so is ridiculing it. Music, art, athletics, hell, even math and science for the vast majority of high schoolers, are not things we teach our children because we want them to spend the rest of their lives painting or playing guitar. They are ways to grow the whole human body and mind into a stronger, faster, smarter, more social, more responsible, and just pure *better* adult.
We should support better safety in sports - but as others have pointed out, concussions are something that are only recently well understood. There was a general idea of a correlation between too many head injuries and brain damage, but no one knew how often, or how bad, or anything it would take to do serious damage. Sports medicine isn't the only area where there have been bad knowledge or just plain lack of knowledge, especially at the high school level.
We should fund art, and music, and science, and everything else in schools better, and many schools do have more priority than they probably should on athletics. But then, how often do you see the whole community energized and supportive in physical presence and monetary donations to watch a science class. Maybe we should be hitting that angle before we complain about schools spending on athletics.
Scrolling on the front wheel is a single continuous motion. On a side scroll wheel you have to stop, come back, and scroll again.
Innovation doesn't meant that no one thought of pieces leading up to something, it means you made some jump in how those pieces were used that makes a significant difference in final quality/usefulness.
My dad's been self-employed as a musician for fifteen years now and gets by. It's enough for him to support himself and help support the family. The trick was his business experience and not being too caught up in his art to not find new markets. He does a fair number of kids programs, but also a bunch of festivals, concerts in small venues, and a few big openers. It's about living within your means, selling your name and music at every opportunity, and not spending $50 on gas for a $40 show.
I'd argue that it has more to do with slashdot's US-centric coverage. They aren't comparing the iPhone to the global market, but to the Storm, the G1, and the windows mobile smartphones on the market in the US. Here the iPhone is pretty much the second smart phone to have a large appeal (after the blackberry, and that was still only really for businessmen) and arguably the best major phone on the market currently. It is definitely the best selling *within the US.*
Yes, the US is aeons behind other countries when it comes to cell phones. Blame the wonderful monopolies we have. You have to be a real phone nut here to buy an unlocked phone, and some of the major providers don't even let you do that.
My house is sitting in the middle of corn fields and cow pastures in Ohio. I admit freely that there's a difference between here (five minutes from a small town, 30 from a medium sized one) and as far out of the way as Texas, but you still definitely can't get cable or high speed out here. Most people would probably call it rural.
I'd imagine it means until it drops low enough that they'll issue you a warranty replacement if it's still under 3 years old - about 50% of the original charge, I think, although don't quote me on that. It's somewhere in that vicinity.
People need to stop freaking out. You can change the battery with five minutes and a screwdriver if your battery dies. The only thing it prevents you from doing is swapping in a second battery on really long trips, which hopefully you won't need if the battery lasts 6+ hours. I can count the people I know who carry a second battery for their 2.5 hour laptops on one finger.
Of course, if you get the thirty year nothing prevents you from still paying it off early, you just a slightly worse rate.
The difference then is that if you get a worse job (or in our case, your wife plans on staying home after you have kids) you revert back to the lower monthly payment as a requirement.
I'm with you on everything except for the 1-2 hours of homework a night.
Any student who actually does care is taking 6-7 courses in a year. If everyone follows your philosophy they're staring down 6-12 hours of homework after completing a 7 hour day that includes another.5 to 1 hour commuting. So your kids are down to 4 hours of sleep assuming that they don't bother eating or showering.
I don't buy any of the crap other people are saying about "letting kids be kids," but you do need to assign something that fits into the actual physical hours they have to study.
Make them do some hard stuff, but give them a day or two to schedule it around the things the other teachers are piling on them.
As for your pencil example... it's a bullshit exercise. You should have spent five minutes doing it in class. As a student, I would have filled that in a quickly as possible so I could get on with actually learning something. Being hard on the kids is half of being a good teacher - and if your test scores are accurate you are at least a decent teacher. But you have to give the kids some reason to take your abuse. I've mentored high school engineering projects where we had to force the kids to go home at midnight on a school night so their parents wouldn't yell at us the next day, because they wanted to be there and wanted to put in that work. You've got to give them some motivation other than just "well, we're theoretically learning something, and I'll get a good grade." Robotics is a little easier to make that much fun than math probably is for most people, but CS should be easy.
Don't start with OO - start with one of bug killer algorithms. Give them something they can see do something cool, something where they can compete. Then after they've had to slog through several pages of their own crappy code, show them how OO will make their lives easier. The only way to make someone care about CS techniques is to a) show them something cool they can do with it or b) show them how they will make their lives easier. If you show them the solution before they've lived the problem they will either accept it tautologically, or not care, and neither of those results in learning.
I'm sounding harsher for this than I mean to - but teachers need to realize that students aren't going to high school because they want to learn. They're going because they're stuck there, and it is the next pre-requisite for for whatever they want to do in life. But that doesn't mean that you can't convince them to enjoy the one hour they're stuck with you ever day and maybe actually learn something in it. Hold them to high standards, but realize that you're only one out of about ten things they've got going on right now and it's your job to make them want to actually make your time a priority.
The best teachers I had motivated and commanded the respect of even the troublemakers in the class. Unfortunately they are few and far between.
Also, a school district with kind of financing is *likely* in an area where they can afford it.
School budgets are funded mostly from local taxes. The "public" schools in ritzy neighborhoods spend money much more wastefully than this. I used to volunteer at one - they had field turf in the stadium, 24" screens in all the labs, and a full robotics program - heck, you even get cisco certified in high school. And they had no debt and churned out more high-quality graduates than any place I'd seen.
There's more to the cost of a computer than the up front cost. It doesn't take much worker overhead to make up the difference in systems. Long term cost comparisons have shown macs to be entirely cost competitive in this sort of environment.
How many school admins know how to administrate Linux?
Letting the kids take them home all the time seems to be a huge problem here. Occasionally take them home for a project, sure.. but you can't have something that is out of your control most of the time, needs to be consistently usable to the kids all the time, and is still locked down at all.
Every kid who wants to will have any software you install bypassed in no time.
In my experience, the best way to run a public student lab is to allow the kids to do almost whatever they want to the system (with the knowledge that adults can look over their shoulder at any point) and then wipe and restore to an image every night to clear out whatever junk they put on it.
If they're taking it home... I'd honestly go for a bare minimum technical solution and put most of the enforcement at the human level. Let them know that if stuff gets found on the systems violates code they'll get Saturday school and lose laptop privileges. Don't make them administrators, and make a standard procedure for them to come to a teacher who can install software that they need to get things done. Do a spot check of a random person every day in class to make sure they aren't hiding porn or something. All you can ever do is catch the lazy or stupid ones - the trick is to convince people that they're likely enough to be caught that they don't do anything stupid, and that access is a privilege that can be taken away if they abuse it.
Easier to use? Easier to administer? Overall a better computer for general purpose tasks? The ability to run Word, Photoshop, and iMovie (all of which were significant parts of my high school experience).
There are arguments in favor of the asus as well (cheap, moderately usable, teach the kids about free software, cheap) but don't act like using a mac for education is so ridiculous.
You make it sound as though coordinating 25 people to determine and use the correct set of gear, talents, and abilities to deal with multiple complex challenges in real time is less complex than old adventure games and "appealing to the least common denominator."
Combat, and especially the raid combat in MMO's, is as much of a puzzle as "puzzle" type games, it just uses different rules, and happens in a more stressful environment.
Now, I'd like it too if they added some more complex non-real-time problem solving (as these puzzles can involve different types of depth) to modern games, but please don't be insulting.
Yep, you'd definitely need something like that. But that'd require reworking a lot of desk space for a lot of people, I think. And you start running into the arm strain issue again.
When you're writing, you generally rest your arm and your elbow on the desk. Now think about how you use a touch screen. most screens pick up your elbow the same as your finger, not to mention you're putting a lot more stress on your fancy expensive screen.
Now try spending a day looking *down* at your desk to see your monitor. It's useful in specific situations, but eventually the neck strain will kill you.
I actually ended up having a really good senior year - probably the only particularly good one of my entire school. All of the best teachers teach upper class students in high school if at all possible. So it really does vary by individual situation. My senior year was hardest than my freshman year of college.
My experience is that it will come down to random luck on who else is in their classes.
I skipped in a few subjects ( wouldn't let me skip a whole grade ) and while I got along ok with the people in the grade "above" me, there was no one I would have been as close friends with as in my class.
I would say that it would work better earlier, and before the child had formed too many attachments to their own peer group. Otherwise it should be no more damaging (within reason - it'd be tough having a girlfriend in high school when you're ten years old) than moving schools.
1) It's fairly easy to send pictures anonymously to get past a normal police investigation (ie, pictures the kid grabbed online, not of him/herself) 2) Juvenile punishments are much lighter (and what if the kid is already in and out of juvenile?) 3) I read about that story, and god does it suck. WTF are the prosecutors thinking?
By the way, I highly recommend that you NOT google "Miley Cyrus nude" since just by loading the google results and having them in your temporary cache (or in the remains of your temporary cache where they can be retrieved by forensics) you have done enough to be convicted of a felony.
That's the real problem with any sort of possession charges regarding online media. Hell, I'm surprised there aren't more teenagers sending illegal picture collections to people they don't like then calling the cops on them.
Or you can take the approach that the people stealing copper are too stupid, lazy, ignorant, or amoral to know what better options they have. Given the stories I've heard about the behavior of those guys, I'm going with one of those. You can take your pick.
I don't care how down on his luck someone is, risking death to steal $200 of copper off a live feed is just stupid. Go steal radios out of cars or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, if you already spent it, it's money under the bridge.
I'd still rather recommend spending money that my children will most definitely need and that has a near 100% chance to directly improve their quality of life, than on something that has a very small off chance of being useful if and only if they get a disease sometime before the hospital goes out of business.
I would say that I hope your investment pays off, for your sake, but since that first would require your child having a horrible medical condition, I will wish with all sincerity that this is a complete waste of money for you and your child has a completely healthy and productive life.
Define personal fitness. I'd say it includes running and jumping around. PE teaches team sports because they're a lot more interesting (to most people), and keep a lot more people involved, than running on a treadmill. I guess it's a bit of a philosophy thing - if you're uncoordinated, do you give up or push harder. Some people were never taught (or never had - we could argue that all day) that kind of physical competitiveness.
Team sports may seem like they teach worthless things... but throwing, catching, dodging, all build agility and coordination better than most pure drills you could do, especially when you add that you're trying to do it over the head of someone else.
Unattractiveness is 90-95% body weight and muscle mass. A guy can have one of the ugliest mugs you've ever seen but he will still beat out every over or underweight nerd you know if he has a six pack. Are football players generally naturally attractive? Not their faces, but ask most women and they'd love it if their husband had their bodies. How much depression and disorders are directly linked to poor fitness? How many nerds do you know with major psychological issues due to their inability (or perceived inability ) to attract women (or men, although that is generally less of an issue in our discipline).
And finally... no one is forced to hit their head with a ball. You're encouraged to play, but if you don't go for that header, they aren't going to fail you for the class.
I get tired of this false dichotomy in our society between physical and mental pursuits. There is no reason to ignore any aspect of your personal development. Being smart does not give you and excuse to be weak, nor being athletic an excuse to ignore your math studies. You may not start on the football team or win the nobel price, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't play the game.
I'd only consider it if you've already saved enough money for their college, their first house, and their wedding.
The chances of your child even having something that this could fix are tiny, the chances that the cord will still be in good enough shape, a treatment will have been invented (for the specific disease they got) and it all happens in time, are miniscule. You'd have better odds on your child's welfare by spending $6000 on lottery tickets.
My bad. My roommate in college had an mp3 player with the mechanism I described, and I assumed that was what you meant.
Yes, because there's a much higher earning potential for artists than football players... they're both disciplines where a few people make it big, and the rest scrounge or go into something else while talking about their lost dreams.
In high school, I resented the attention that the jocks and the athletic department got at our school. But then I got to college and went into engineering... and saw dozens of young men who couldn't run a mile, who were obese and unattractive and unable to be self-sufficient when it came to anything physical. Moreover, I saw the inability to work as a team, to work within a command structure or to lead others, to communicate, to deal with stress and confrontation.
Deifying athletics is ridiculous - but so is ridiculing it. Music, art, athletics, hell, even math and science for the vast majority of high schoolers, are not things we teach our children because we want them to spend the rest of their lives painting or playing guitar. They are ways to grow the whole human body and mind into a stronger, faster, smarter, more social, more responsible, and just pure *better* adult.
We should support better safety in sports - but as others have pointed out, concussions are something that are only recently well understood. There was a general idea of a correlation between too many head injuries and brain damage, but no one knew how often, or how bad, or anything it would take to do serious damage. Sports medicine isn't the only area where there have been bad knowledge or just plain lack of knowledge, especially at the high school level.
We should fund art, and music, and science, and everything else in schools better, and many schools do have more priority than they probably should on athletics. But then, how often do you see the whole community energized and supportive in physical presence and monetary donations to watch a science class. Maybe we should be hitting that angle before we complain about schools spending on athletics.
Obviously it's an evolution, but it's a big one.
Scrolling on the front wheel is a single continuous motion. On a side scroll wheel you have to stop, come back, and scroll again.
Innovation doesn't meant that no one thought of pieces leading up to something, it means you made some jump in how those pieces were used that makes a significant difference in final quality/usefulness.
You can make it, you just might not make it big.
My dad's been self-employed as a musician for fifteen years now and gets by. It's enough for him to support himself and help support the family. The trick was his business experience and not being too caught up in his art to not find new markets. He does a fair number of kids programs, but also a bunch of festivals, concerts in small venues, and a few big openers. It's about living within your means, selling your name and music at every opportunity, and not spending $50 on gas for a $40 show.
I'd argue that it has more to do with slashdot's US-centric coverage. They aren't comparing the iPhone to the global market, but to the Storm, the G1, and the windows mobile smartphones on the market in the US. Here the iPhone is pretty much the second smart phone to have a large appeal (after the blackberry, and that was still only really for businessmen) and arguably the best major phone on the market currently. It is definitely the best selling *within the US.*
Yes, the US is aeons behind other countries when it comes to cell phones. Blame the wonderful monopolies we have. You have to be a real phone nut here to buy an unlocked phone, and some of the major providers
don't even let you do that.
So you can only be rural if you live out west?
My house is sitting in the middle of corn fields and cow pastures in Ohio. I admit freely that there's a difference between here (five minutes from a small town, 30 from a medium sized one) and as far out of the way as Texas, but you still definitely can't get cable or high speed out here. Most people would probably call it rural.
I'd imagine it means until it drops low enough that they'll issue you a warranty replacement if it's still under 3 years old - about 50% of the original charge, I think, although don't quote me on that. It's somewhere in that vicinity.
People need to stop freaking out. You can change the battery with five minutes and a screwdriver if your battery dies. The only thing it prevents you from doing is swapping in a second battery on really long trips, which hopefully you won't need if the battery lasts 6+ hours. I can count the people I know who carry a second battery for their 2.5 hour laptops on one finger.
Of course, if you get the thirty year nothing prevents you from still paying it off early, you just a slightly worse rate.
The difference then is that if you get a worse job (or in our case, your wife plans on staying home after you have kids) you revert back to the lower monthly payment as a requirement.
I'm with you on everything except for the 1-2 hours of homework a night.
Any student who actually does care is taking 6-7 courses in a year. If everyone follows your philosophy they're staring down 6-12 hours of homework after completing a 7 hour day that includes another .5 to 1 hour commuting. So your kids are down to 4 hours of sleep assuming that they don't bother eating or showering.
I don't buy any of the crap other people are saying about "letting kids be kids," but you do need to assign something that fits into the actual physical hours they have to study.
Make them do some hard stuff, but give them a day or two to schedule it around the things the other teachers are piling on them.
As for your pencil example... it's a bullshit exercise. You should have spent five minutes doing it in class. As a student, I would have filled that in a quickly as possible so I could get on with actually learning something. Being hard on the kids is half of being a good teacher - and if your test scores are accurate you are at least a decent teacher. But you have to give the kids some reason to take your abuse. I've mentored high school engineering projects where we had to force the kids to go home at midnight on a school night so their parents wouldn't yell at us the next day, because they wanted to be there and wanted to put in that work. You've got to give them some motivation other than just "well, we're theoretically learning something, and I'll get a good grade." Robotics is a little easier to make that much fun than math probably is for most people, but CS should be easy.
Don't start with OO - start with one of bug killer algorithms. Give them something they can see do something cool, something where they can compete. Then after they've had to slog through several pages of their own crappy code, show them how OO will make their lives easier. The only way to make someone care about CS techniques is to a) show them something cool they can do with it or b) show them how they will make their lives easier. If you show them the solution before they've lived the problem they will either accept it tautologically, or not care, and neither of those results in learning.
I'm sounding harsher for this than I mean to - but teachers need to realize that students aren't going to high school because they want to learn. They're going because they're stuck there, and it is the next pre-requisite for for whatever they want to do in life. But that doesn't mean that you can't convince them to enjoy the one hour they're stuck with you ever day and maybe actually learn something in it. Hold them to high standards, but realize that you're only one out of about ten things they've got going on right now and it's your job to make them want to actually make your time a priority.
The best teachers I had motivated and commanded the respect of even the troublemakers in the class. Unfortunately they are few and far between.
Also, a school district with kind of financing is *likely* in an area where they can afford it.
School budgets are funded mostly from local taxes. The "public" schools in ritzy neighborhoods spend money much more wastefully than this. I used to volunteer at one - they had field turf in the stadium, 24" screens in all the labs, and a full robotics program - heck, you even get cisco certified in high school. And they had no debt and churned out more high-quality graduates than any place I'd seen.
Not every school is strapped for funding.
There's more to the cost of a computer than the up front cost. It doesn't take much worker overhead to make up the difference in systems. Long term cost comparisons have shown macs to be entirely cost competitive in this sort of environment.
How many school admins know how to administrate Linux?
Letting the kids take them home all the time seems to be a huge problem here. Occasionally take them home for a project, sure.. but you can't have something that is out of your control most of the time, needs to be consistently usable to the kids all the time, and is still locked down at all.
Every kid who wants to will have any software you install bypassed in no time.
In my experience, the best way to run a public student lab is to allow the kids to do almost whatever they want to the system (with the knowledge that adults can look over their shoulder at any point) and then wipe and restore to an image every night to clear out whatever junk they put on it.
If they're taking it home... I'd honestly go for a bare minimum technical solution and put most of the enforcement at the human level. Let them know that if stuff gets found on the systems violates code they'll get Saturday school and lose laptop privileges. Don't make them administrators, and make a standard procedure for them to come to a teacher who can install software that they need to get things done. Do a spot check of a random person every day in class to make sure they aren't hiding porn or something. All you can ever do is catch the lazy or stupid ones - the trick is to convince people that they're likely enough to be caught that they don't do anything stupid, and that access is a privilege that can be taken away if they abuse it.
Easier to use? Easier to administer? Overall a better computer for general purpose tasks? The ability to run Word, Photoshop, and iMovie (all of which were significant parts of my high school experience).
There are arguments in favor of the asus as well (cheap, moderately usable, teach the kids about free software, cheap) but don't act like using a mac for education is so ridiculous.
You make it sound as though coordinating 25 people to determine and use the correct set of gear, talents, and abilities to deal with multiple complex challenges in real time is less complex than old adventure games and "appealing to the least common denominator."
Combat, and especially the raid combat in MMO's, is as much of a puzzle as "puzzle" type games, it just uses different rules, and happens in a more stressful environment.
Now, I'd like it too if they added some more complex non-real-time problem solving (as these puzzles can involve different types of depth) to modern games, but please don't be insulting.
Yep, you'd definitely need something like that. But that'd require reworking a lot of desk space for a lot of people, I think. And you start running into the arm strain issue again.
When you're writing, you generally rest your arm and your elbow on the desk. Now think about how you use a touch screen. most screens pick up your elbow the same as your finger, not to mention you're putting a lot more stress on your fancy expensive screen.
Now try spending a day looking *down* at your desk to see your monitor. It's useful in specific situations, but eventually the neck strain will kill you.
I actually ended up having a really good senior year - probably the only particularly good one of my entire school. All of the best teachers teach upper class students in high school if at all possible. So it really does vary by individual situation. My senior year was hardest than my freshman year of college.
My experience is that it will come down to random luck on who else is in their classes.
I skipped in a few subjects ( wouldn't let me skip a whole grade ) and while I got along ok with the people in the grade "above" me, there was no one I would have been as close friends with as in my class.
I would say that it would work better earlier, and before the child had formed too many attachments to their own peer group. Otherwise it should be no more damaging (within reason - it'd be tough having a girlfriend in high school when you're ten years old) than moving schools.
1) It's fairly easy to send pictures anonymously to get past a normal police investigation (ie, pictures the kid grabbed online, not of him/herself)
2) Juvenile punishments are much lighter (and what if the kid is already in and out of juvenile?)
3) I read about that story, and god does it suck. WTF are the prosecutors thinking?
By the way, I highly recommend that you NOT google "Miley Cyrus nude" since just by loading the google results and having them in your temporary cache (or in the remains of your temporary cache where they can be retrieved by forensics) you have done enough to be convicted of a felony.
That's the real problem with any sort of possession charges regarding online media. Hell, I'm surprised there aren't more teenagers sending illegal picture collections to people they don't like then calling the cops on them.
The one success of the DARE programs - ensuring the drug war continues.
Or you can take the approach that the people stealing copper are too stupid, lazy, ignorant, or amoral to know what better options they have. Given the stories I've heard about the behavior of those guys, I'm going with one of those. You can take your pick.
I don't care how down on his luck someone is, risking death to steal $200 of copper off a live feed is just stupid. Go steal radios out of cars or something.