I see many posts basically saying that censorship is OK because schools are for learning, not about entertainment.
No, I think you are seeing posts that say that what the schools are doing is ok, and you are applying the term "censorship" trying to erect a straw man.
It is not censorship for a school to say "we will not spend taxpayer dollars funding access to certain websites", any more than it is censorship when a librarian decides not to buy certain books for the library they run. Librarians, however, quite often claim "censorship" when a community makes the decisions of what books to buy instead of letting them make those same decisions, and they are just as wrong when they make that claim.
Nobody is preventing those websites from speaking or publishing. The First Amendment allows the freedom to speak but not the guarantee of an audience. It says that the government can't stop you from speaking; it does not say that taxpayer dollars must be spent allowing everyone to listen to you.
Just to be clear, as if I expected anyone who replies to actually read this far, I didn't say it was GOOD for the schools to do this, or BAD, just that it isn't censorship and arguments based on that claim are moot.
Real learning means unrestricted access to knowledge.
Actually, no, it doesn't always. Even outside the limited technical topic scope you mentioned, basic education doesn't require unrestricted access to knowledge. If it did, then you could never have education, because there has never been and never will be unrestricted access to knowledge. Knowledge is more than information, and as information becomes less restricted finding knowledge becomes more difficult. Not every web page contains knowledge, although every web page may contain information. Even Wikipedia suffers from this conflation.
At some point, it becomes a 24hr/day task to access "knowledge" because it is a 24hr/day process to access the information that goes into creating knowledge, and that is and always will be a restriction.
To get around that, basic education requires directed access to knowledge. That's why they have textbooks in school. Even in college, you have textbooks. Before you have a good grasp on processing information into knowledge, it is dangerous to base education on unrestricted access.
No chemicals to run out, no dependency on an outside power source to keep functioning.
Other than the human power source that has to reset the weights.
I've been wondering. If you power a clock with a battery, the battery runs out and doesn't work anymore. If you power a clock with a weight and gravity, why can you reset the weight? You can't reset the battery. Why doesn't gravity run out? Why doesn't gravity start leaking and ruin the electronics if you store it in a device for a long time?
(Tho these stories have been around as long as steel mills, and I still don't know if any are true.)
The way I heard it, the guy fell into the ladle of molten steel and started shouting "fire fire". I asked him why he shouted that, and he said "would anyone come help me if I shouted 'molten steel, molten steel'?"
Public Broadcasting has a much more relaxed set of rules.
"Public broadcasting" in the US uses the same airwaves and has the same FCC regulations as any other broadcaster. They may push the envelope more because they label it "art" and hope that buys them a lot of slack.
It is trivial for the distributor to edit out the small bits like you mention; they aren't a reason you won't see the show in the US. More likely it's that the distributor has started charging exorbitant rates for the programming. At least that what my local public broadcasting claimed when they stopped carrying Dr. Who. They blamed Lionheart.
Or the shows just don't translate well, even though they are in english. I think US audiences prefer action instead of the long discussions typical of Dr. Who., and a lot of brit slang is just beyond comprehension. "Nick" is when you cut yourself shaving, for example, and "sacking" is what the teenager at the end of the checkout line does for you. Even when you expect it, it's disconcerting. I had to stop and think about what one the companions said on a Dr. Who this morning, it just seemed out of place.
I don't know what "myth" you are talking about. CFLs contain mercury. You admit as much. The only point of disagreement is whether this is a hazard or not.
I dealt with your coal power plant argument once already. One scrubber on a power plant is easier to implement than teaching hundreds or thousands of households to recycle CFLs properly. Scrubbers are already required and will only become better over time. Recycling CFL is a new concept for every first-time CFL buyer, and there is no federal or state oversight keeping them out of the normal refuse stream.
I don't make the buying decisions on fluorescents at my workplace, and I don't have to worry about recycling them, either. There are people who do that. There are people who come to clean up when they break. I DO make the decisions for what I use in my house, and I have to deal with recycling and cleaning up after them when they break. I also have to pay for them when they stop working after a month or two, instead of the marvelous lifetime they are promised to have.
But thanks for bringing standard fluorescent lighting up. It makes the point that we change our minds about what is a hazard and what hazards are appropriate over time. What we once considered ok (standard fluorescent bulbs) are now considered bad. It is not a great leap of faith to think that maybe future humans will look upon CFLs, with the mercury you admit they contain, as an unnecessary hazard and a foolish choice.
You do realize that "elemental mercury" was the source for a lot of the mercury contamination in fish, don't you? People used to think that dumping liquid mercury in the ocean was ok because it was "elemental" and wouldn't enter the food chain. Gosh, they were wrong. Now it's a problem. Just another example of finding out that what we thought was safe was actually deadly.
Throwing them in the trash results in the release of mercury that doesn't have to be released. It doesn't matter how little when it doesn't have to happen, and shouldn't happen, in the first place.
As for those who tell me to "STFU" because I get more mercury from tuna fish, well, practice what you preach. I don't eat tuna fish.
Which is 1/10 the mercury put out by burning hydrocarbons (especially coal) for powering incandescent lamps. Yes, the mercury from CFLs is mercury in your house, and the other kind of mercury from the generators powering incandescent lighting is just in the air you breathe in your house.
Accepting for a moment that your statistic is true, which I don't believe, it is a lot easier to put one scrubber on one smokestack to remove the mercury (and other particulates and pollution) than it is to prevent the escape of the mercury from hundreds or thousands of households using CFLs. It takes zero consumer education to put a scrubber on a smokestack, it takes zero user action. Users can't simply "break" the scrubber like they can drop a CFL. And when a user drops a CFL, the problem is right there in their house, not miles away.
While the amount may be bigger by burning coal, the solution is easier and more likely to be successful. And already required to deal with sulphur and other pollutants. Recycling CFLs is a new concept for every person who starts buying CFLs and impossible to enforce.
As soon as I use up the CFLs I was confused into buying, I'm going back to incandescents.
On the other side of the story, there are incandescents I've not changed in my house since I bought it 15 years ago, and I'm constantly replacing CFLs.
More expensive and shorter life is a real problem. Getting rid of them isn't, they fit into the regular garbage bags just fine.
CFLs are penny-wise and pound foolish. Some day there will be a report of all the damage to the environment being caused by discarded CFLs and people will wonder what the hell we in this century were thinking, replacing low-pollution cheap lights with mercury-containing costly electronics gizmos. By then, they'll be using LED lighting for everything.
Not a straw man, I was referring to a claim appearing in a different article
in this discussion. I didn't feel compelled to respond twice.
The question is, is it the best use for the money,
Be careful when you ask that question, since "government spending" is NEVER the best use for the money. If you want "best use", then allow the PEOPLE to keep their money and decide for themselves what they want to spend it on.
If the people want to spend it on SUVs or electric vehicles, let them decide. Don't prop up an existing production system and make governmental demands that they produce things the people don't want to buy. Throwing money at GM and forcing them to produce non-competitive products doesn't help anyone but the union bosses.
That also means allowing the scientific community to decide if they need to spend more on earthquake monitoring, through the mechanisms of peer reviewed proposals, instead of having politicians trying to buy favors from Alaskan colleagues decide to spend the money. "Buying favors from other politicians" is about the worst "best use" decision there could be. When that kind of spending appears as PORK in an economic stimulus bill, it's wrong.
You decide if he was suggesting that monitoring volcanoes is "wasteful spending"
In an ECONOMIC STIMULUS BILL, it is wasteful. In a budget allocation bill to a scientific agency that has peer-reviewed the proposal and decided the value is worth the cost, it isn't. Yes, there is a difference. The former is just one more example of pork in an allegedly pork-free bill. The latter is scientifically reviewed and scientifically based.
"While some of the projects in the bill make sense,..." "IN THE BILL".
No, not all "spending" is economic stimulus. Not even Democrats truly believe this. Why else would they still be bashing Bush for the money spent on the Iraq war? Hey, it's STIMULUS, unless a Republican does it, then it's a deficit buster!
Yes, they used them in Japan, and many tests in the South Pacific and Nevada.
Unfortunately, those uses were then, and this is now. The hardware we are counting on now hasn't been through real testing, only simulations. Make the right assumptions and a simulated twinkie can destroy a simulated continent.
They can try to reconnect, but they won't be able to. The majority of the signal comes from the NAP, and if it isn't there, the majority of the other signals will fall back to connection attempts -- not a continuous stream of packets anymore. The interference will either go away or greatly reduce, which will be an instant indication of where it was coming from.
Well, exactly. However, the FAA and the airlines have claimed for years that running personal electronic devices in the passenger compartment causes instrument failure in the cockpit.
That is not the claim. Were it so, it would be trivial to disprove for a specific case.
The claim is that it CAN cause interference, and yes, it can. Not every time. Not with every electronic device. I'm a pilot and I've seen it happen. But trying to figure out why there is interference and where it is coming from is enough of a distraction to flying the plane that the chance should be avoided. Is your "right" to call your girlfriend and say "guess where I'm calling you from" more important than the pilot not having to track down where the interference you are creating comes from?
Oh, what about those awful radio towers with kilowatts of power aircraft fly over? The last time I looked those were bolted to the ground and operating 24/7 or some significant proportion of that time. It is easy to know in advance that flying over a certain spot will result in interference in the instruments and that it will go away in a minute or two. (One of the standard instrument departures for Syracuse NY goes right over major FM station. Keep the wings level for one minute and the interference it causes goes away -- and every pilot who flys out of that airport knows it.) It is not so easy to identify interference coming from inside the plane that moves with the aircraft and thus won't naturally go away in a minute or two.
Oh, what about this new Wi-Fi equipment? Guess what the pilot has in the cockpit -- the "OFF" switch. If he suspects interference from that system, he can turn it off instantly to see if the problem goes away. That's a lot less distraction than having to remind all the passengers to turn their phones off. The same goes for any installed radio system in the plane. Not only is it fixed in place (so it won't wander around the cabin and maybe wind up someplace it will interfere), it's tested heavily.
And the final consideration is that the airline is willing to accept the risk for the known radio gear that it has installed itself, but not for every bit of cruft the passengers decide they want to bring along and fire up.
I think we should teach how gravity might not exist. After all, it's still just a "Theory"...
The usefulness and validity of a theory come from its ability to predict events, not because it proves how a past event occurred. The Theory of Gravitation has been tested through what it predicts will happen.
If you see an apple sitting on the ground under an apple tree, you can try to use the Theory of Gravitation to explain how it got there (well, obviously it fell off the tree and landed on the ground!), but it is also possible that it was left there by someone eating lunch who forgot it. The fact that an existing state of something is consistent with a theory doesn't prove either the theory or that the state occurred because of the theory.
However, if you predict that when you pick the apple up and let it go, it will return to the ground with an acceleration X and take Y seconds, then THAT's a test of the theory, and when it does exactly what the theory predicts THAT's support for the theory.
We can PREDICT from the Theory of Evolution (capital-E "how life began") that putting a mix of chemicals in a certain environment will eventually result in multi-cellular intelligent life, but we have yet to run that experiment to a successful conclusion. Even if we ever do get to the point that we can do that experiment, it is still not proof that previous events must have occurred the same way. That there IS multi-cellular life already here isn't proof of the theory, anymore than a static apple sitting under a tree is proof that it fell therefrom.
You're right, but exactly which part of evolution is an opinion?
The part that leaps from observed facts to belief that the processes that have been observed are the only way that unobserved events could have happened.
That's the leap from lower-case 'e' evolution (mutations and crossbreeding leading to changes in species) to upper-case 'E' Evolution (the random combination of chemicals in a primordial ooze being the origin of life.)
We can observe the former; we did not and cannot observe the latter.
Sure, she isn't supposed to, but its not a big issue. Theres a lot of things people do that they aren't supposed to, yet no one really cares because they don't harm anyone.
The potential for harm is a lot greater than you seem to believe. Even with ibuprofen. I have a bottle of OTC on my desk. Here are the warnings:
Allergy alert: ibuprofen may cause a severe allergic reaction which may include:
hives
facial swelling
asthma
shock
Stomach bleeding warning: taking more than recommended dosage may cause stomach bleeding.
DO NOT USE if you have ever had an allergic reaction to any other pain reliever/fever reducer.
If pregnant or breast feeding:...
Keep out of reach of children
Children under 12: ask a doctor
Here's the joys of Excedrin, in short form: Children and teenagers who have or are recovering from chicken pox or flu-like symptoms should not use this product, for the possibility of Reye's Syndrome. Do not use with any other products containing acetominophen. May cause liver damage.
Do you even begin to think that a 13 year old understands or appreciates any of this? That they have the ability to accept the risk for others to whom they may give these pills? I don't.
Your automotive analogy is marvelous, but it ignores the fact that by the time you are a driver you are better able to make choices for your own actions based on the risks. A 13 year old is not going to understand that giving a pill to her 10 year old sister might be bad, and it endangers her sister, not herself. That 13 year old is likely to remember that Mom gave her one "headache pill" (OTC ibuprofen) when she had a mild headache. She's likely to think "two will work better" when giving her ten year old sister (or even herself) the prescription version for a bigger headache. If they don't work right away, maybe two more will be better.
By no harm, I mean substances that are generally recognized as safe. No one would argue that (barring allergic reactions or some massive overdose), ibuprofen is unsafe.
Yes, there certainly are people who argue that ibuprofen is unsafe, and it doesn't take a massive dose to cause problems. By the way, just what is a "massive" dose, and does a 13 year old know where you draw the line between "really large" and the dangerous "massive"? Does anyone? Why did the manufacturer put a warning about SEVERE allergic reactions on the bottle, even when the dose they recommend is ONE pill? What 10 year old who has never had an ibuprofen pill knows she is allergic to ibuprofen and can say "no thanks" when offered pain relief?
The issue is NOT just ibuprofen. It's all drugs. If you want the schools making the decisions on a case by case basis, they need to have a handle on ALL kinds of drugs. That tasty cough syrup that anyone can buy over the counter isn't safe when you drink the whole bottle. Oh, yes, of course, no child would ever do something like that, would they?
As for your points, I believe I didn't make it clear in my posts, but I was referring to policy, not necessarily the rules. Similarly to how going over the speed limit even 5 mph is still illegal, but the policy might not let an officer stop you unless you were going at least 8 mph over the speed limit.
"Policy" and "rules" are just two kinds of the same thing. If you have a rule for zero tolerance and you enforce a policy where you let some kids have drugs and kick others out, you are going to be sued. Furthermore, if you wind up in a situation where one of the "good kids" you allowed to have that bottle of Ibuprofen winds up giving some to another kid who is allergic, you are GOING to be sued, and not just for simple negligence. It's gross negligence because YOU failed to follow the rules.
Wasn't it nice when society didn't sue at the drop of a hat, and people could use their judgment in what "rules" were enforced for which people? (Yes, it was.) Today, you are l
By your logic, if some kid told the principal that so-and-so had a unicorn
So you are claiming that the existence of unicorns is as plentiful as the number of prescription Ibuprofen pills on the planet? That the likelyhood of someone bring a unicorn to school is as high as someone bringing an illicit bottle of ibuprofen she found in her parent's medicine cabinet and handing a few out to her friends? No, a 13 year old child would NEVER do such a thing, would she? Couldn't possibly happen.
No, of course "my logic" doesn't say that someone who claims that another kid brought a unicorn to school should cause ANYTHING to happen, and you know it. Or you don't know it and it is a VERY good thing you are not responsible for any children. I hope you aren't, anyway.
Well, first off, ibuprofen isn't an expensive drug so there is no financial incentive.
She has no business either selling or giving them to another student. Don't get hung up on the financial operation being the issue. It doesn't matter if she can't make a profit if she isn't supposed to GIVE them away, either.
Its easy, no harm, not illegal, not a distraction, should be permitted. At most the parents should be called and asked if it is ok for the girl to be taking ibuprofen.
So you would require elementary school administrators to know what drugs are "no harm", given that this decision is often gotten WRONG by even the experts and also depends on the specific person taking the drug? No, sorry. I can't see the schools making the right decisions about this. I certainly can't see them having the time to call every parent of every child who is carrying an aspirin once you remove the "no tolerance" policy, much less the ability to contact every parent.
Ibuprofen isn't directly harmful, it isn't illegal,
If you take too much of it, it certainly is harmful. And yes, having the prescription strength version without a prescription is illegal. So even you, in the calm perspective of 20-20 hindsight, have gotten two out of three criteria wrong. How do you expect a busy administrator with hundreds of kids to look out for to make the right decision in the middle of the fracas?
This makes it trivial to get out the "bad drugs" while letting people take legitimate drugs.
Cough syrup? Not illegal. OTC. Legitimate drug. Contains alcohol. Is abused. Trivial? I don't think so.
By the time a kid is 13 they should know what they are allergic to and know not to get it.
Yes, they SHOULD. But schools aren't filled with just 13 year olds. I thought that idea was so obvious that I actually deleted a paragraph in my original comment that dealt with that. Schools start at 6 or so. They run through 17 or 18. You really expect that 6 year old with a headache to understand the potential hazards of any "headache pill" he is offered by that 13 year old? Or that 13 year old to know the potential hazards to the 6 year old? I don't.
That still leaves us with SHOULD. If you've never taken a certain drug you won't know that you are allergic. Pharmacists get extensive training on drug interactions, and even they get it wrong or don't know it all. There are massive books (PDR) published listing the contraindications for drugs, even simple ones like aspirin. A 13 year old is going to know all of those? Hardly. I'm a lot older than 13 and even I don't know everything I'm allergic to.
What if the parents have told their child they should not take a certain drug, but the child at the next locker has something with a different name? If you don't know what that brand-name drug contains, you won't know that it contains something you are allergic to. You have a headache, you want it to stop, you know someone has something that can make it stop, you want it. Oops, you were allergic to it. Too bad. The sirens of the ambulance coming to rescue you won't be a distraction, nothing to see here, just move along... and those parents certainly aren't going to sue the school for allowing drugs to be distributed on campus, now are they?
Oh yes, because having someone strip searched for possible possession of ibuprofen is totally reasonable!
I didn't say it was. I said, rather clearly, that a "no tolerance" policy was better than a "some ok, some not" policy that can result in selective enforcement or worse.
BTW, you can wave it off as "possession of ibuprofen", but that ignores the distribution and prescription aspects of the specific case. Just to make this clear, I didn't say that those aspects make a strip-search reasonable. I DID say that those aspects are important considerations and ignoring them is dangerous.
In this case if you can't find the alleged ibuprofen, just admit that the source was lying and go on with you
Anyone who isn't capable of applying their own judgement instead of blindly following a rule in a situation like this is far too stupid to have anything to teach a child.
Just how much medical knowledge do you expect school administrators to have, that they could judge which drugs are ok for which students? The second you require them to make this judgement, you require them to accept responsibility for knowingly allowing the use of those drugs. They'd have to know what the parents want in addition to the specific nature and needs of each allegedly sick student and the potential side effects of any drug they allow.
Further, the second that an administrator allows one student to carry a certain drug, he'll have every parent of every student he's previously kicked out for the same drug suing for anything and everything.
The ONLY pass to allow drugs in a school must be a prescription, and only then if the prescription requires consumption of the drug during school hours.
If you allow anything and everything, then some parents will simply hand little Jimmy a bottle of pills and little Jimmy likely has the least understanding of what the bottle contains and who shouldn't take whatever it contains than anyone else involved. He's the worst person to be deciding who he'll give some of them to, and he'd be the only one making the decision.
If you say "some are ok, some are not, decide on a case by case basis", you will have people who have zip for medical qualifications making decisions well beyond their abilities. No, I don't believe that an elementary school principal who isn't a medical doctor is "far to stupid" to have anything to teach to children.
In this case it is quite obvious the girl was not high on painkillers, wasn't selling them, and didn't even have solid evidence she even had them when she was accused.
It is kinda hard to get high on Ibuprofen, either OTC or prescription.
I don't know why you say it is obvious she wasn't selling them. The Fine Article says that someone else was caught with them (apparently without the required prescription) and she was accused of providing them. That removes the "obvious she wasn't selling" part for me. It's not proof she was, just no longer an obvious assumption she wasn't.
A 13 year old should be perfectly allowed to carry ibuprofen, even prescription strength (which is only equal to like 3 regular pills) on their person especially if there was some need for them.
IF she has a prescription, I agree fully. That puts her under a doctor's orders, under the supervision of a physician. The school MUST NOT pretend to know better. Period.
Unfortunately, apparently neither girl had the "get out of jail free" card to justify carrying them. If you allow drugs without that prescription, the school then has to start drawing the line "which drugs are ok", and I, for one, don't think the schools have the understanding or ability to draw that line correctly, or SHOULD have the responsibility of drawing the line.
Without being able to draw a valid "this ok, this not" line, the safest line to draw is "none are ok". That prevents the schools from becoming a place where kids whose parents love pills distribute them to kids whose parents don't approve, or to kids who are allergic or react badly to whatever it is. It seems that even something simple like ibuprofen has bad side effects if even small overdoses are taken. No, a "no drugs" policy is more reasonable than an arbitrary "some ok, some not" that can result in rules-lawyering and elective enforcement, and maybe worse.
Here's two points based on the FA that need to be made. First, one of the lawyers said that the school had no reason to believe that the girl was carrying the pills in her underwear or next to her body. I disagree. Another student accused her of supplying the pills. If they did not find the source in her locker or in her purse, then they had to be somewhere else. The next most logical place is stuck in her bra. While it was not likely, it was far from "no reason to believe".
Second, this girl is 19 now. She was 13 when this happened. What happened to the concept of "statute of limitations"? Why wasn't the case brought up when she was 13?
Software patents are bad, yet they still exist, and you have to live with that reality. Red Hat is not just filing for defensive patents, it is also pouring resources into patent reform.
That's nice. Good for Red Hat. I have no problem with Red Hat getting a software patent on whatever it likes while claiming that software patents are bad. That's not the issue. Not at all.
Let me make this clearer. The problem is that they are claiming the rights associated with those patents, which is the exact Bad Thing that they object to. Software patents without patent rights are meaningless. Software patents are only worth something because of the rights associated with them, and it is use of those rights to keep people from using knowledge that makes them a Bad Thing.
If Microsoft got a patent on CGI/SOAP and said "you can't use this IP", there would be screams about how bad Microsoft is and that software patents are bad. Red Hat has gotten that patent and has told a certain subset of the software world that they cannot use it. Yet people are coming out of the woodwork to defend Red Hat for using their patent to prevent people from using the IP they've claimed. Why is that?
Are software patents and the resulting restrictions that can be imposed on people based on them BAD or GOOD? Why is Red Hat a White Hat for imposing restrictions on people under the guise of a software patent, but MS bad for doing the same thing?
Remember, the "Red Hat Promise" does not allow everyone to use the IP. That, by DEFINITION, means they are putting restrictions on it.
Wrenches can be used to kill people. So can metal broomhandles and tennis rackets. This fact does not make anyone who carries a wrench, a broomhandle, or a tennis racket a bad murderer.
However, when someone buys a wrench (gets the software patent) and then smacks someone over the head with it (denies them the right to use the IP protected by that patent) they are guilty of attempted murder (using software patents to protect their IP.) Only if you buy a wrench (get the patent) and then never hit anyone with it (allow everyone to use the IP) are you not guilty of attempted murder.
assuring all of our freedom to use CGI/SOAP
That is not true. If your project is not open source, you have no freedom to use CGI/SOAP now that Red Hat holds the patent. Is there some odd definition of "all" that you use that doesn't include everyone?
Blaming RH for its patents are like calling somebody who uses a shotgun to get mistletoe out of a tree a murderer.
A less coherent analogy would be hard to find.
Either software patents are bad or they aren't. When Red Hat gets the patent on something, they are claiming the sole rights to determine who gets to use that IP. That's not the issue. The issue is they ARE using that right to prevent people from using the IP. And further, they are saying that someone who objects to Red Hat's patent for ONE piece of IP, by litigating that patent, doesn't get to use ANY of the Red Hat IP.
If you say that software patents should not be issued, that's saying that NOBODY should get to decide who can or can't use some software-based IP. That would be freedom. Red Hat can't say that they exclude some people from using THEIR IP and also be opposing software patents -- the ability to prevent people from using your IP is the REASON for patents, not an argument against them.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I think you are seeing posts that say that what the schools are doing is ok, and you are applying the term "censorship" trying to erect a straw man.
It is not censorship for a school to say "we will not spend taxpayer dollars funding access to certain websites", any more than it is censorship when a librarian decides not to buy certain books for the library they run. Librarians, however, quite often claim "censorship" when a community makes the decisions of what books to buy instead of letting them make those same decisions, and they are just as wrong when they make that claim.
Nobody is preventing those websites from speaking or publishing. The First Amendment allows the freedom to speak but not the guarantee of an audience. It says that the government can't stop you from speaking; it does not say that taxpayer dollars must be spent allowing everyone to listen to you.
Just to be clear, as if I expected anyone who replies to actually read this far, I didn't say it was GOOD for the schools to do this, or BAD, just that it isn't censorship and arguments based on that claim are moot.
Real learning means unrestricted access to knowledge.
Actually, no, it doesn't always. Even outside the limited technical topic scope you mentioned, basic education doesn't require unrestricted access to knowledge. If it did, then you could never have education, because there has never been and never will be unrestricted access to knowledge. Knowledge is more than information, and as information becomes less restricted finding knowledge becomes more difficult. Not every web page contains knowledge, although every web page may contain information. Even Wikipedia suffers from this conflation.
At some point, it becomes a 24hr/day task to access "knowledge" because it is a 24hr/day process to access the information that goes into creating knowledge, and that is and always will be a restriction.
To get around that, basic education requires directed access to knowledge. That's why they have textbooks in school. Even in college, you have textbooks. Before you have a good grasp on processing information into knowledge, it is dangerous to base education on unrestricted access.
Other than the human power source that has to reset the weights.
I've been wondering. If you power a clock with a battery, the battery runs out and doesn't work anymore. If you power a clock with a weight and gravity, why can you reset the weight? You can't reset the battery. Why doesn't gravity run out? Why doesn't gravity start leaking and ruin the electronics if you store it in a device for a long time?
The way I heard it, the guy fell into the ladle of molten steel and started shouting "fire fire". I asked him why he shouted that, and he said "would anyone come help me if I shouted 'molten steel, molten steel'?"
Yeah, a four hour flight with no chairs is pretty bad, even if the guy standing next to you doesn't smell like jet fuel.
"Public broadcasting" in the US uses the same airwaves and has the same FCC regulations as any other broadcaster. They may push the envelope more because they label it "art" and hope that buys them a lot of slack.
It is trivial for the distributor to edit out the small bits like you mention; they aren't a reason you won't see the show in the US. More likely it's that the distributor has started charging exorbitant rates for the programming. At least that what my local public broadcasting claimed when they stopped carrying Dr. Who. They blamed Lionheart.
Or the shows just don't translate well, even though they are in english. I think US audiences prefer action instead of the long discussions typical of Dr. Who., and a lot of brit slang is just beyond comprehension. "Nick" is when you cut yourself shaving, for example, and "sacking" is what the teenager at the end of the checkout line does for you. Even when you expect it, it's disconcerting. I had to stop and think about what one the companions said on a Dr. Who this morning, it just seemed out of place.
Mod parent up. He's spot on point. This is beta-testing, not production.
I dealt with your coal power plant argument once already. One scrubber on a power plant is easier to implement than teaching hundreds or thousands of households to recycle CFLs properly. Scrubbers are already required and will only become better over time. Recycling CFL is a new concept for every first-time CFL buyer, and there is no federal or state oversight keeping them out of the normal refuse stream.
I don't make the buying decisions on fluorescents at my workplace, and I don't have to worry about recycling them, either. There are people who do that. There are people who come to clean up when they break. I DO make the decisions for what I use in my house, and I have to deal with recycling and cleaning up after them when they break. I also have to pay for them when they stop working after a month or two, instead of the marvelous lifetime they are promised to have.
But thanks for bringing standard fluorescent lighting up. It makes the point that we change our minds about what is a hazard and what hazards are appropriate over time. What we once considered ok (standard fluorescent bulbs) are now considered bad. It is not a great leap of faith to think that maybe future humans will look upon CFLs, with the mercury you admit they contain, as an unnecessary hazard and a foolish choice.
You do realize that "elemental mercury" was the source for a lot of the mercury contamination in fish, don't you? People used to think that dumping liquid mercury in the ocean was ok because it was "elemental" and wouldn't enter the food chain. Gosh, they were wrong. Now it's a problem. Just another example of finding out that what we thought was safe was actually deadly.
Throwing them in the trash results in the release of mercury that doesn't have to be released. It doesn't matter how little when it doesn't have to happen, and shouldn't happen, in the first place.
As for those who tell me to "STFU" because I get more mercury from tuna fish, well, practice what you preach. I don't eat tuna fish.
Accepting for a moment that your statistic is true, which I don't believe, it is a lot easier to put one scrubber on one smokestack to remove the mercury (and other particulates and pollution) than it is to prevent the escape of the mercury from hundreds or thousands of households using CFLs. It takes zero consumer education to put a scrubber on a smokestack, it takes zero user action. Users can't simply "break" the scrubber like they can drop a CFL. And when a user drops a CFL, the problem is right there in their house, not miles away.
While the amount may be bigger by burning coal, the solution is easier and more likely to be successful. And already required to deal with sulphur and other pollutants. Recycling CFLs is a new concept for every person who starts buying CFLs and impossible to enforce.
As soon as I use up the CFLs I was confused into buying, I'm going back to incandescents.
More expensive and shorter life is a real problem. Getting rid of them isn't, they fit into the regular garbage bags just fine.
CFLs are penny-wise and pound foolish. Some day there will be a report of all the damage to the environment being caused by discarded CFLs and people will wonder what the hell we in this century were thinking, replacing low-pollution cheap lights with mercury-containing costly electronics gizmos. By then, they'll be using LED lighting for everything.
Not a straw man, I was referring to a claim appearing in a different article in this discussion. I didn't feel compelled to respond twice.
The question is, is it the best use for the money,
Be careful when you ask that question, since "government spending" is NEVER the best use for the money. If you want "best use", then allow the PEOPLE to keep their money and decide for themselves what they want to spend it on.
If the people want to spend it on SUVs or electric vehicles, let them decide. Don't prop up an existing production system and make governmental demands that they produce things the people don't want to buy. Throwing money at GM and forcing them to produce non-competitive products doesn't help anyone but the union bosses.
That also means allowing the scientific community to decide if they need to spend more on earthquake monitoring, through the mechanisms of peer reviewed proposals, instead of having politicians trying to buy favors from Alaskan colleagues decide to spend the money. "Buying favors from other politicians" is about the worst "best use" decision there could be. When that kind of spending appears as PORK in an economic stimulus bill, it's wrong.
In an ECONOMIC STIMULUS BILL, it is wasteful. In a budget allocation bill to a scientific agency that has peer-reviewed the proposal and decided the value is worth the cost, it isn't. Yes, there is a difference. The former is just one more example of pork in an allegedly pork-free bill. The latter is scientifically reviewed and scientifically based.
"While some of the projects in the bill make sense,..." "IN THE BILL".
No, not all "spending" is economic stimulus. Not even Democrats truly believe this. Why else would they still be bashing Bush for the money spent on the Iraq war? Hey, it's STIMULUS, unless a Republican does it, then it's a deficit buster!
Unfortunately, those uses were then, and this is now. The hardware we are counting on now hasn't been through real testing, only simulations. Make the right assumptions and a simulated twinkie can destroy a simulated continent.
That's already been considered. Half will point east, half will point west, the net effect will be zero.
The danger comes of any of the 'mills is turned north or south. That'll cause a wobble that will make your head spin. Literally.
They can try to reconnect, but they won't be able to. The majority of the signal comes from the NAP, and if it isn't there, the majority of the other signals will fall back to connection attempts -- not a continuous stream of packets anymore. The interference will either go away or greatly reduce, which will be an instant indication of where it was coming from.
If the girls had been wearing briefs, I don't think this would be an issue now. Or maybe they needed boxers.
That is not the claim. Were it so, it would be trivial to disprove for a specific case.
The claim is that it CAN cause interference, and yes, it can. Not every time. Not with every electronic device. I'm a pilot and I've seen it happen. But trying to figure out why there is interference and where it is coming from is enough of a distraction to flying the plane that the chance should be avoided. Is your "right" to call your girlfriend and say "guess where I'm calling you from" more important than the pilot not having to track down where the interference you are creating comes from?
Oh, what about those awful radio towers with kilowatts of power aircraft fly over? The last time I looked those were bolted to the ground and operating 24/7 or some significant proportion of that time. It is easy to know in advance that flying over a certain spot will result in interference in the instruments and that it will go away in a minute or two. (One of the standard instrument departures for Syracuse NY goes right over major FM station. Keep the wings level for one minute and the interference it causes goes away -- and every pilot who flys out of that airport knows it.) It is not so easy to identify interference coming from inside the plane that moves with the aircraft and thus won't naturally go away in a minute or two.
Oh, what about this new Wi-Fi equipment? Guess what the pilot has in the cockpit -- the "OFF" switch. If he suspects interference from that system, he can turn it off instantly to see if the problem goes away. That's a lot less distraction than having to remind all the passengers to turn their phones off. The same goes for any installed radio system in the plane. Not only is it fixed in place (so it won't wander around the cabin and maybe wind up someplace it will interfere), it's tested heavily.
And the final consideration is that the airline is willing to accept the risk for the known radio gear that it has installed itself, but not for every bit of cruft the passengers decide they want to bring along and fire up.
The usefulness and validity of a theory come from its ability to predict events, not because it proves how a past event occurred. The Theory of Gravitation has been tested through what it predicts will happen.
If you see an apple sitting on the ground under an apple tree, you can try to use the Theory of Gravitation to explain how it got there (well, obviously it fell off the tree and landed on the ground!), but it is also possible that it was left there by someone eating lunch who forgot it. The fact that an existing state of something is consistent with a theory doesn't prove either the theory or that the state occurred because of the theory.
However, if you predict that when you pick the apple up and let it go, it will return to the ground with an acceleration X and take Y seconds, then THAT's a test of the theory, and when it does exactly what the theory predicts THAT's support for the theory.
We can PREDICT from the Theory of Evolution (capital-E "how life began") that putting a mix of chemicals in a certain environment will eventually result in multi-cellular intelligent life, but we have yet to run that experiment to a successful conclusion. Even if we ever do get to the point that we can do that experiment, it is still not proof that previous events must have occurred the same way. That there IS multi-cellular life already here isn't proof of the theory, anymore than a static apple sitting under a tree is proof that it fell therefrom.
The part that leaps from observed facts to belief that the processes that have been observed are the only way that unobserved events could have happened.
That's the leap from lower-case 'e' evolution (mutations and crossbreeding leading to changes in species) to upper-case 'E' Evolution (the random combination of chemicals in a primordial ooze being the origin of life.)
We can observe the former; we did not and cannot observe the latter.
The potential for harm is a lot greater than you seem to believe. Even with ibuprofen. I have a bottle of OTC on my desk. Here are the warnings:
Here's the joys of Excedrin, in short form: Children and teenagers who have or are recovering from chicken pox or flu-like symptoms should not use this product, for the possibility of Reye's Syndrome. Do not use with any other products containing acetominophen. May cause liver damage.
Do you even begin to think that a 13 year old understands or appreciates any of this? That they have the ability to accept the risk for others to whom they may give these pills? I don't.
Your automotive analogy is marvelous, but it ignores the fact that by the time you are a driver you are better able to make choices for your own actions based on the risks. A 13 year old is not going to understand that giving a pill to her 10 year old sister might be bad, and it endangers her sister, not herself. That 13 year old is likely to remember that Mom gave her one "headache pill" (OTC ibuprofen) when she had a mild headache. She's likely to think "two will work better" when giving her ten year old sister (or even herself) the prescription version for a bigger headache. If they don't work right away, maybe two more will be better.
By no harm, I mean substances that are generally recognized as safe. No one would argue that (barring allergic reactions or some massive overdose), ibuprofen is unsafe.
Yes, there certainly are people who argue that ibuprofen is unsafe, and it doesn't take a massive dose to cause problems. By the way, just what is a "massive" dose, and does a 13 year old know where you draw the line between "really large" and the dangerous "massive"? Does anyone? Why did the manufacturer put a warning about SEVERE allergic reactions on the bottle, even when the dose they recommend is ONE pill? What 10 year old who has never had an ibuprofen pill knows she is allergic to ibuprofen and can say "no thanks" when offered pain relief?
The issue is NOT just ibuprofen. It's all drugs. If you want the schools making the decisions on a case by case basis, they need to have a handle on ALL kinds of drugs. That tasty cough syrup that anyone can buy over the counter isn't safe when you drink the whole bottle. Oh, yes, of course, no child would ever do something like that, would they?
As for your points, I believe I didn't make it clear in my posts, but I was referring to policy, not necessarily the rules. Similarly to how going over the speed limit even 5 mph is still illegal, but the policy might not let an officer stop you unless you were going at least 8 mph over the speed limit.
"Policy" and "rules" are just two kinds of the same thing. If you have a rule for zero tolerance and you enforce a policy where you let some kids have drugs and kick others out, you are going to be sued. Furthermore, if you wind up in a situation where one of the "good kids" you allowed to have that bottle of Ibuprofen winds up giving some to another kid who is allergic, you are GOING to be sued, and not just for simple negligence. It's gross negligence because YOU failed to follow the rules.
Wasn't it nice when society didn't sue at the drop of a hat, and people could use their judgment in what "rules" were enforced for which people? (Yes, it was.) Today, you are l
So you are claiming that the existence of unicorns is as plentiful as the number of prescription Ibuprofen pills on the planet? That the likelyhood of someone bring a unicorn to school is as high as someone bringing an illicit bottle of ibuprofen she found in her parent's medicine cabinet and handing a few out to her friends? No, a 13 year old child would NEVER do such a thing, would she? Couldn't possibly happen.
No, of course "my logic" doesn't say that someone who claims that another kid brought a unicorn to school should cause ANYTHING to happen, and you know it. Or you don't know it and it is a VERY good thing you are not responsible for any children. I hope you aren't, anyway.
She has no business either selling or giving them to another student. Don't get hung up on the financial operation being the issue. It doesn't matter if she can't make a profit if she isn't supposed to GIVE them away, either.
Its easy, no harm, not illegal, not a distraction, should be permitted. At most the parents should be called and asked if it is ok for the girl to be taking ibuprofen.
So you would require elementary school administrators to know what drugs are "no harm", given that this decision is often gotten WRONG by even the experts and also depends on the specific person taking the drug? No, sorry. I can't see the schools making the right decisions about this. I certainly can't see them having the time to call every parent of every child who is carrying an aspirin once you remove the "no tolerance" policy, much less the ability to contact every parent.
Ibuprofen isn't directly harmful, it isn't illegal,
If you take too much of it, it certainly is harmful. And yes, having the prescription strength version without a prescription is illegal. So even you, in the calm perspective of 20-20 hindsight, have gotten two out of three criteria wrong. How do you expect a busy administrator with hundreds of kids to look out for to make the right decision in the middle of the fracas?
This makes it trivial to get out the "bad drugs" while letting people take legitimate drugs.
Cough syrup? Not illegal. OTC. Legitimate drug. Contains alcohol. Is abused. Trivial? I don't think so.
By the time a kid is 13 they should know what they are allergic to and know not to get it.
Yes, they SHOULD. But schools aren't filled with just 13 year olds. I thought that idea was so obvious that I actually deleted a paragraph in my original comment that dealt with that. Schools start at 6 or so. They run through 17 or 18. You really expect that 6 year old with a headache to understand the potential hazards of any "headache pill" he is offered by that 13 year old? Or that 13 year old to know the potential hazards to the 6 year old? I don't.
That still leaves us with SHOULD. If you've never taken a certain drug you won't know that you are allergic. Pharmacists get extensive training on drug interactions, and even they get it wrong or don't know it all. There are massive books (PDR) published listing the contraindications for drugs, even simple ones like aspirin. A 13 year old is going to know all of those? Hardly. I'm a lot older than 13 and even I don't know everything I'm allergic to.
What if the parents have told their child they should not take a certain drug, but the child at the next locker has something with a different name? If you don't know what that brand-name drug contains, you won't know that it contains something you are allergic to. You have a headache, you want it to stop, you know someone has something that can make it stop, you want it. Oops, you were allergic to it. Too bad. The sirens of the ambulance coming to rescue you won't be a distraction, nothing to see here, just move along... and those parents certainly aren't going to sue the school for allowing drugs to be distributed on campus, now are they?
Oh yes, because having someone strip searched for possible possession of ibuprofen is totally reasonable!
I didn't say it was. I said, rather clearly, that a "no tolerance" policy was better than a "some ok, some not" policy that can result in selective enforcement or worse.
BTW, you can wave it off as "possession of ibuprofen", but that ignores the distribution and prescription aspects of the specific case. Just to make this clear, I didn't say that those aspects make a strip-search reasonable. I DID say that those aspects are important considerations and ignoring them is dangerous.
In this case if you can't find the alleged ibuprofen, just admit that the source was lying and go on with you
Just how much medical knowledge do you expect school administrators to have, that they could judge which drugs are ok for which students? The second you require them to make this judgement, you require them to accept responsibility for knowingly allowing the use of those drugs. They'd have to know what the parents want in addition to the specific nature and needs of each allegedly sick student and the potential side effects of any drug they allow.
Further, the second that an administrator allows one student to carry a certain drug, he'll have every parent of every student he's previously kicked out for the same drug suing for anything and everything.
The ONLY pass to allow drugs in a school must be a prescription, and only then if the prescription requires consumption of the drug during school hours.
If you allow anything and everything, then some parents will simply hand little Jimmy a bottle of pills and little Jimmy likely has the least understanding of what the bottle contains and who shouldn't take whatever it contains than anyone else involved. He's the worst person to be deciding who he'll give some of them to, and he'd be the only one making the decision.
If you say "some are ok, some are not, decide on a case by case basis", you will have people who have zip for medical qualifications making decisions well beyond their abilities. No, I don't believe that an elementary school principal who isn't a medical doctor is "far to stupid" to have anything to teach to children.
It is kinda hard to get high on Ibuprofen, either OTC or prescription.
I don't know why you say it is obvious she wasn't selling them. The Fine Article says that someone else was caught with them (apparently without the required prescription) and she was accused of providing them. That removes the "obvious she wasn't selling" part for me. It's not proof she was, just no longer an obvious assumption she wasn't.
A 13 year old should be perfectly allowed to carry ibuprofen, even prescription strength (which is only equal to like 3 regular pills) on their person especially if there was some need for them.
IF she has a prescription, I agree fully. That puts her under a doctor's orders, under the supervision of a physician. The school MUST NOT pretend to know better. Period.
Unfortunately, apparently neither girl had the "get out of jail free" card to justify carrying them. If you allow drugs without that prescription, the school then has to start drawing the line "which drugs are ok", and I, for one, don't think the schools have the understanding or ability to draw that line correctly, or SHOULD have the responsibility of drawing the line.
Without being able to draw a valid "this ok, this not" line, the safest line to draw is "none are ok". That prevents the schools from becoming a place where kids whose parents love pills distribute them to kids whose parents don't approve, or to kids who are allergic or react badly to whatever it is. It seems that even something simple like ibuprofen has bad side effects if even small overdoses are taken. No, a "no drugs" policy is more reasonable than an arbitrary "some ok, some not" that can result in rules-lawyering and elective enforcement, and maybe worse.
Here's two points based on the FA that need to be made. First, one of the lawyers said that the school had no reason to believe that the girl was carrying the pills in her underwear or next to her body. I disagree. Another student accused her of supplying the pills. If they did not find the source in her locker or in her purse, then they had to be somewhere else. The next most logical place is stuck in her bra. While it was not likely, it was far from "no reason to believe".
Second, this girl is 19 now. She was 13 when this happened. What happened to the concept of "statute of limitations"? Why wasn't the case brought up when she was 13?
That's nice. Good for Red Hat. I have no problem with Red Hat getting a software patent on whatever it likes while claiming that software patents are bad. That's not the issue. Not at all.
Let me make this clearer. The problem is that they are claiming the rights associated with those patents, which is the exact Bad Thing that they object to. Software patents without patent rights are meaningless. Software patents are only worth something because of the rights associated with them, and it is use of those rights to keep people from using knowledge that makes them a Bad Thing.
If Microsoft got a patent on CGI/SOAP and said "you can't use this IP", there would be screams about how bad Microsoft is and that software patents are bad. Red Hat has gotten that patent and has told a certain subset of the software world that they cannot use it. Yet people are coming out of the woodwork to defend Red Hat for using their patent to prevent people from using the IP they've claimed. Why is that?
Are software patents and the resulting restrictions that can be imposed on people based on them BAD or GOOD? Why is Red Hat a White Hat for imposing restrictions on people under the guise of a software patent, but MS bad for doing the same thing?
Remember, the "Red Hat Promise" does not allow everyone to use the IP. That, by DEFINITION, means they are putting restrictions on it.
However, when someone buys a wrench (gets the software patent) and then smacks someone over the head with it (denies them the right to use the IP protected by that patent) they are guilty of attempted murder (using software patents to protect their IP.) Only if you buy a wrench (get the patent) and then never hit anyone with it (allow everyone to use the IP) are you not guilty of attempted murder.
assuring all of our freedom to use CGI/SOAP
That is not true. If your project is not open source, you have no freedom to use CGI/SOAP now that Red Hat holds the patent. Is there some odd definition of "all" that you use that doesn't include everyone?
Blaming RH for its patents are like calling somebody who uses a shotgun to get mistletoe out of a tree a murderer.
A less coherent analogy would be hard to find.
Either software patents are bad or they aren't. When Red Hat gets the patent on something, they are claiming the sole rights to determine who gets to use that IP. That's not the issue. The issue is they ARE using that right to prevent people from using the IP. And further, they are saying that someone who objects to Red Hat's patent for ONE piece of IP, by litigating that patent, doesn't get to use ANY of the Red Hat IP.
If you say that software patents should not be issued, that's saying that NOBODY should get to decide who can or can't use some software-based IP. That would be freedom. Red Hat can't say that they exclude some people from using THEIR IP and also be opposing software patents -- the ability to prevent people from using your IP is the REASON for patents, not an argument against them.