For the very same reason that cable companies should be required to share: they may have paid for it, but they received massive subsidies in the form of a guaranteed monopoly while they were building that system.
That was a mistake. It was based on a flawed premise, and the fix has been to force them to share lines.
BTW, they don't do all the maintenance. When "telephone poles" come down, it's the power company that usually puts them up. In most cases, it's the power company that put them up in the first place. Maybe SBC should pay my electric bill!
"intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability."
So the popular people you mention had physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability. So if you weren't given athletic ability, screw you, eh?...and I bet you think you left that behavior back in high school.
PS -- you don't know trauma. In every instance where "smart" kids were part of the popular crowd, there were enough of them to form a clique, they were in a school district with wealth (their high school had average incomes above $50k/y, adjust for local cost of living), and it wasn't in a surrounding culture that valued "book learnin'" as a negative characteristic.
Yes, I can imagine in such a setting that not getting your first choice for the prom is indeed a passing trauma, quickly forgotten. But clearly you were never stuffed into a locker or knocked down for being yourself.
You were lucky. Pure and simple, you were lucky. Who you were was compatible with social norms. You went to a rich high school ("oh, not that rich," you'll say, proving you don't know the meaning of poor) and you had a peer group. I bet you were athletic.
Now--imagine not being athletic. You didn't get to play any sports, so you couldn't tell your safety cheerleader (remember, the first one turned you down) which sport you played. "Chess club," you say, and you get laughter from the chicks who get snubbed by the cheerleaders.
You try vainly to wear what everybody else wears. You shower twice a day to make sure there's no oil on your face. Maybe you endure some humiliating medical treatments because the acne just doesn't pass. But "Buck up, little camper! Just smile and have self-confidence and be yourself and you'll be liked for who you are!"
Unless who you are doesn't involve charisma, soccer, or invovles a less than perfectly symmetric face. Then your smiles are greeted with smirks, your self-confidence ruthlessly assailed until you turn away, and then somebody knocks you down from behind.
The coach assigned to watch the kids laughs.
Feeling good about yourself yet? Think it's your fault for not playing soccer well enough? Damn, if only you'd learned to not mention a book you read. Stupid geek, books are for nerds.
And you never went to the prom. It wasn't an option. Maybe you wanted to, maybe you didn't, maybe you pretended you didn't. But you didn't, and you didn't have a choice. And honestly, that's the least traumatic thing about high school.
The reviewer condescends the book for assuming a "Strategist" role is necessary in a successful project, since the customer undoubtedly knows his or her own business.
Not only do customers often not know their own business (or at least haven't thought about it in any systematic way), they generally have no idea of a) what's possible, and b) what's cheap, and c) what's good on the web. They get really caught up in features.
I groan when I'm in a requirements meeting and I hear a client start, "Now, can there be a 'button' that..." Generally they get this image of a button and various form elements in their head, and don't really have the training to think it through, or even better, step back and think about what they're trying to do and what kinds of services can fit them--let the details work themselves out later.
Clients who have this kind of blinder focus on details tend to have more unrealistic expectations and greater disappointment when the magical mind-reading system doesn't appear. They are very frustrated with the process of fixing this system in development.
This isn't their fault. If this were easy, everybody would do...oh wait, everybody would do it well. They don't know that the system requires mind reading--they just assume several steps in between.
Your average developer, head deep in code, doesn't have the business process experience to chain the processes together and see the problem until they get into the code and realize somebody forgot Phase Two:... (I suffer from this occasionally). Then they may not have the best people skills to break this to the client easily, and things get testy. YMMV, but I've found this to be true slightly more often than not.
Those who are really good, and they are rare, at Internet strategy tend to have experience in organizations (not necessarily businesses) and technology. Too little technology and they plunge off the cliff with the client (we have one of those in our company). This is why domain experts with tech experience are as valuable on Web projects as they are on traditional client-server projects.
And such an effective political institution it is.
Oh, wait:
<sarcasm>And such an effective political institution it is.</sarcasm>
When, oh when, is the EFF going to get a DC office? A friend of mine called about volunteering. Neither of us had great sums of money, but we had time. Their response?
"Oh, we only accept local volunteer help."
"That's OK, we're in DC."
"Um, we only have an office in SF."
"???"
Helloooooo--the political capital of the U.S. is in Washington, DC, not Berkeley, CA. You don't even have to rent space in the District to be effective. The NRA has a massive complex in Fairfax, VA. So why, oh why, is the EFF only in SF? Do they think that Ashcroft is going to come to them to ask them what they think? Are they going to get videoconferences with congresscritters? Do they think the'll have any political influence without playing the political game? Not with all the more money they bring to the table.
I like the ideals of the EFF, I just find it to be a fairly lackluster effort. I'd give time and what little money I can spare to an effective organization, but at the moment, my charitable money is better given to the Institute for Justice (politically unpopular with Slashdotters, I know) and the ACLU.
It's not as if there are no successful models to follow, people.
Dictionary.com lists it as an alternate spelling. Apple is not immune to these things, but it happens so rarely that you'd best check thrice to ensure an untrod-upon crank.
Hmmm...how about the fact that gov't research is being swayed by whomever is in office? This should offend you much more than the fact that your Republican didn't get in (you know, the one for defense, low taxes, and album stickering, or George Bush if you didn't like the Republican).
This lends credence to the complaints during the Clinton administration that conclusions were being altered to support his policies. I don't care if you're conservative, liberal, libertarian, or socialist, doing policy first and science later leads to bad policy and worse science.
You should demand more of your politicians and government scientists. I'd hate to think that you'd be just peachy if they faked data to show that the ice caps would melt tomorrow and we need a crash refrigeration program, just because you prefer environmental issues to, say, poverty reduction.
I'm also a little tired of people bashing the education system without offering any constructive criticism. It's quite easy to scream about how bad the system is and stand silent when asked for potential solutions.
I'm so freaking tired of this rap on education critics I could scream. We do offer solutions. Thousands of them. The problem is, we recognize that the problems aren't marginal; they're structural (structural is a big word meaning the system itself has problems, not one or two bad apples). This threatens those whose income is derived from the current system. In fact, most of them would make MORE money from any changes, but because it means something different, they freak.
So rather than accept that the system might need changing (vouchers are a way to incentivize change in public schools to make them better, c.f. the EU country Sweden, and "incentivize" is a big word that means "makes you want to get off your arse and do something"), apologists for the current system scream that oh, poor them, they're so beat up, and nobody will tell them how to make it right. Then in the same breath they will exclude all serious attempts at reform, exactly as you have done. You, sir or madam, are a part of the problem.
Your solution? More money. Wow. If only that had ever been tried anywhere. Oh, wait, it has. I notice you say nothing about reducing the non-teaching admin staff at schools themselves, only fat at the "federal" and "state" level. Er, great, but when a kid in North Carolina (bigger than many European countries, since that seems to impress you in a complete non-sequitur, non-sequitur being a Latin word meaning "it doesn't follow, and so you haven't proved anything"). I notice you knee-jerk-ly defend the competence levels of teachers, which study after study has found to be seriouslly wanting, and you don't mention any reforms of the teaching colleges themselves, who spend hours per week on "pedagogy" and usually one to two hours per week on substantive matters--at a lesser level than undergraduates in the same subject matter. But noooo, we can't criticize teachers or the system that makes them.
So what you mean to say is that there are no reforms that you will accept coming from those who criticize American education, not that we don't have any. It's just that "reform" to you means "more money and no accountability", and we've tried that shit and it steadfastly refuses to float.
If the EU member Sweden can do something different, what do you have to lose? Oh yeah, you work "with" teachers, so probably there won't be much demand for you in a system that rewards actual educational results, not simply big budgets. And yes, I worked at a teacher's union so I know that's what it's about.
Yeah, gotta love 'em. In fact, you have to love them. Actually, we are under a specific and legally-binding obligation to love them, with severe penalties for alienation of affection.
I can't believe nobody's yet mentioned Hugo Gernsback's famous definition of SF.
Part of the disagreement here may be definitional: some are saying what makes a great work, regardless of genre, some are saying what makes great space opera, and a few are talking about Science Fiction, or as he called it in Amazing Stories #1, "scientifiction":
"By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story -- a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision . . . Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading -- they are always instructive. They supply knowledge . . . in a very palatable form . . . New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow . .."
So basically to be Science Fiction as opposed to space opera (and I'm not knocking good space opera, I love Babylon 5), it needs to be grounded in science with a view toward revealing how humans interact with the consequences of a given technology.
So to be GOOD SF, it must have the elements that make for good literature (plot, characterization, vivid place, etc.), but it also must highlight some aspect of humanity by examining how we react to changed technological circumstances, and do so plausibly and without obviousness. Some of the ones that explore this well for me are Brin's universe of Sundiver/Startide Rising, and Clifford Simak's City.
So SF isn't excused from the requirements for good literature, it imposes extra requirements on it.
Speculative fiction, as noted elsewhere, lifts the technological requirement but does require changed circumstances, the essential "what if." I'd even go so far as to say that Science Fiction is a special case of Speculative fiction. So once you find out what makes good literature and good speculative fiction, you can figure out what additionally is required to make good Science Fiction.
Since the original was in Polish, the a would be "short" (I think that's the right term, never made sense to me as a description) like the a in car. And the i would be like the i in Linux, as prounounced by its creator in his native tongue.;-) Accent, as always, is on the penultimate syllable.
Soh-LAHH-rees.
The movie is in Russian, and Russian spelling rules forbid a normal "a" to come after an l, so it's Solyaris in the movie.
And in the American south it's "Soh-layr...whut??"
I discovered it when it was recommended to me for a nasty GI virus that wouldn't go away by normal starvation. Killed the sucker right off. As a nursing student I will be trying to bring this into any hospital I eventually work for.
Please don't. I'm serious.
As someone with medical training, you should KNOW that most diseases go away by themselves and there's no substitute for double-blind, placebo controlled studies to ascertain the efficacy of a given treatment. Please don't rip off poor people in their time of need by sending them to GNC to pay lots of money for various things that just don't work, and in some cases kill.
Note that no links to peer-reviewed articles exist on the link you provide. Just assertions who all curiously use the commercial name of the product. Look at the broad range of things it claims to cure...missing only "the vapors" and "consumption" to be pure snake oil.
A quick check of the FDA, however, reveals that these makers haven't bothered to put it to the test of actually trying to show it cures people instead of making outrageous claims:
a href="http://www.fda.gov/cder/warn/cyber/cyber2002.htm"> second letter
And since the stuff you'll be foisting off on suffering, desperate people is unregulated, you won't even know that the brand they buy actually contains the advertised product, nor that it's safe.
Hell, I don't know exactly why switching everyone in the middle east to purple robes wouldn't bring peace, except that nobody's shown even a correlation between purple-robe-wearing and sudden elimination of religious fanaticism (though it'd be fun to try on Pat Robertson in a study). Similarly, since no one has actually shown that the concoction you ingested (if it actually contained what its maker claims it did) had anything to do with your improvement. It's not as if all your white blood cells up and died, leaving it as the only thing between you and death.
Please, go to pharmacy school if not getting a full MD before prescribing drugs, because that's exactly what you'll be doing if you recommend it to anyone.
Vote Democrat this November -- if not for them, for the poor children who are starving in the streets, the racially discriminated, the handicapped, and the gun violence victims.
Yes, I ran over a few on my way to Republican Party headquarters, just for sport. Because they're all over the place you know.
Then I listened to an address by the white Secretary of State and white National Security Adviser.
Then I went up a ramp for the handicapped from that hideos ADA signed into law by that well known Democrat, Bush. Curse him!
Then I drove into Southeast DC and left my vehicle unlocked and jingled my change without fear because guns are outlawed there, so no outlaws have guns.
But fortunately the Senator from Disney is a Republican, so I felt wonderfully secure in my allegience to the RIAA and MPAA.
It must be nice to know that a vague collection of competing interests just happens to be morally pure as the wind driven snow. Wait, you were saying vote Libertarian, right?
The mathematicians are ignoring the psychology of the system, which is as you described. It has benefits in addition to costs.
The benefits are that you really have to think hard about your vote and how angry you are with one of the centralizing candidates. Spoilers perform a useful function in that they force the centralizing parties to go one way or the other in order to appeal to an electable number of voters.
Ralph Nader should have made the Democratic party sit up and take notice that not everybody was happy with Clinton's "Republican Lite" policies. The danger for the Democrats is that they will annoy middle-class, older voters who don't want radical controls on the means of production. So they have to come to some positions that will strop up enough votes from the extremist Left without angering the average voter.
So Ralph's run will do the process good by saying that there's growing extremist disaffection with their pro-business views. Either the Democrats will have to alter their policies, or risk losing elections. All these other systems wouldn't make Gore rethink his positions for the next run, because they would have worked well enough. That's fine if you're completely happy with his positions, but the Nader voter is not as well served by a preference scheme.
I remember reading an article (possibly in Scientific American or Science News) about making a DNA computer and using it to quickly solve the trip planning problem. It seemed a very cool hack but a long way from being practical.
On the other hand the speed of molecular reactions and their ability for massive parallelity (is that a word?) sounds like it would hold promise for certain types of computers.
This of course would leave Steve Jobs to insist that his MISC computers were much better even if they were a terahertz or so behind current Pentiums.
This one was shown me by my dad, a sometimes physics prof in his retirement, when he needed to show the principles of lift as he instructed high school youth on sailplanes (gliders):
All that's required is a solid wooden spool with a single hole, and a circular piece of construction or preferably card stock paper, about 10cm in diameter.
1) Ask the kids what will happen if you blow through the spool with the disk centered on the hole on the other side, flat side toward the spool hole. (they should expect it to be blown away when you take your hand off) 2) Place your index finger onto the paper over the hole in the spool, and put the other end of the spool to your mouth. 3) Blow into the spool very hard. 4) Take your finger off the paper. The paper should stay in place. When you stop, it will fall off.
This demonstrates that swiftly-moving air has lower pressure than stationary air--hence sucking the paper to the spool by blowing.
However, you have to look at other factors to determine the total carbon implications of a fuel. The reason I oppose ethanol-based fuels and organic farming is that they require far greater destruction of carbon-sinks to supply them--i.e., they cut down lots and lots of rain forest and burn it.
Intensive farming can be done without massive fertilizer runoff (hey, Congress, lets use some of those subsidies to promote no-till more instead of merely fallow fields!) and fossil carbon requires less habitat destruction per BTU. We should be pushing for hybrids to tide us over until fuel-cell vehicles can be rolled out on a massive scale.
However, converting existing fields to growing ethanol is a good idea in the short run. For example, getting rid of organic fields to grow ethanol-producing plants in a responsible intensive manner would be a net plus. I'm just not sure it's a large-scale solution, nor will the market support it given the current first-world mythology surrounding organic foods.
In my opinion, everyone should watch this movie once a year. It really puts things in perspective.
Like...Wow, you don't have to have talent to score a movie? That kind of perspective?
Granted, I think Glass is an idiot generally, mainly because he practices "Emperor's Clothes" minimalism, where "you know, if I make some pretty sounds and repeat them endlessly rather than actually working to craft something and claim it's part of an intellectual tradition instead of Backstreet Boys for yuppies, Profit!!!!" Steve Reich also took an experiment that should have remained a grad school exercize to influence later, real music to ridiculous extremes--but he's far less pretentious and actually has talent. (Good minimalism is practiced by John Adams.)
Case in point: there's a big sweep up a cliff that then breaks out over the water of a lake. Now basic timing of music to movie isn't hard (I've done it by hand, and accuracy within a 3rd of a second is pretty easy), and Glass's mind-numbing 1-5-1 theme keeps repeating as you sweep up this cliff. It's SUPPOSED to burst into a moment of actual chords when you break out over the water. And it does--about two seconds previous. It doesn't sound like much, but I was watching and thinking "uh, ok, what am I supposed to see?" Then two beats later, the water appeared. It wasn't an error of tracking the two together, it was Glass's error.
The images are nicely done in a technical sense, but the "irony" they project is not even close to new, either in technique or style. It was kind of hackneyed five minutes after Metropolis was released.
Someone else mentioned this movie was best enjoyed with chemical alteration of your bloodstream. I couldn't agree more. In another context, though, it's called "beer-goggling."
Ditto, but he'd have to go from Menacing and Cynical to unconcerned and playful. DeNiro is good at what he does, but apart from his appearance in Brazil, which was strange and cynical, he's usually menacing and cynical.
Don't forget the other big reason--ensure only the large players can participate in music distribution by creating DVD CSS-like "licensing fees" for mandatory DRM registration for your content. That means backyard bands won't be able to distribute free MP3s to build up a following or distribute their own CDs without going through RIAA members and signing a contract heavily weighted toward the record company.
It's a bid for an oligopoly of audio content, too.
So, if they run commecials, they're greedy bastards who take advantage of it. If they don't run commercials, they are greedy bastards who take advantage of it.
There's no pleasing you unless they just close up shop and go away. I'm curious...do you give away all money above and beyond what you need to stay alive and go to work? I mean, you don't need a TV, a VCR, a DVD, or a computer. Why not give them up and give the extra money to the poor? Have the courage of your convictions instead of expecting everyone else to do it for you.
There are plenty of reasons why opposing old-style windmills was good environmental policy. They were also known as "Avian Blenders." They really killed a lot of endangered large birds, such as raptors (eagles, falcons, and hawks) and potentially condors.
The new designs claim to be more bird friendly, but I'd rather see some long-term studies that bear that out before releasing them upon the environment willy-nilly. That's what got us into problems with DDT.
Finding something other than oil (and, more importantly, coal) is a good idea, but these "renewables" frequently have environmental problems of their own, especially if scaled up to the level that will take up the slack from oil and coal. Dams will flood habitats, solar panels will pave over and shade habitats, and geothermal can be overused (as New Zealand has found out) pretty easily, literally tapping it out.
That doesn't mean they don't have a place (solar panels on existing infrastructure don't affect the environment *any more* than is already being done), but we also need to accept that all energy sources have a price and be smarter about what tradeoffs we accept in the short term to facilitate a move to ever-cleaner sources in the long term. Just 'cuz nuclear isn't perfect doesn't mean it's worse for the planet than oil and coal (necessarily). Fusion would be great (except for waste heat), but the only energy it generates now is from the decomposition of status reports.
So we should be considering less-than-perfect sources (including nuclear, solar, geothermal, hydro, wind, and possibly wave-action) as a short-term improvement. But that doesn't mean everyone will agree, aside from the NIMBY (not in my backyard) folks that you cite.
Except for the security, comfortable working hours, and in many cases, even worse pay, as well as fewer benefits and less vacation.
Depends very heavily on the contract you're on. In my first contract, I made less than the government employees who had more vacation, got to travel more, got payed better, and had less education and experience in the subject area.
Plus they had fun treating me like a secretary and asking me to do things that were clearly illegal or against contracting regulations.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should they have to share?
For the very same reason that cable companies should be required to share: they may have paid for it, but they received massive subsidies in the form of a guaranteed monopoly while they were building that system.
That was a mistake. It was based on a flawed premise, and the fix has been to force them to share lines.
BTW, they don't do all the maintenance. When "telephone poles" come down, it's the power company that usually puts them up. In most cases, it's the power company that put them up in the first place. Maybe SBC should pay my electric bill!
Actually, the author anticipated you:
...and I bet you think you left that behavior back in high school.
"intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability."
So the popular people you mention had physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability. So if you weren't given athletic ability, screw you, eh?
PS -- you don't know trauma. In every instance where "smart" kids were part of the popular crowd, there were enough of them to form a clique, they were in a school district with wealth (their high school had average incomes above $50k/y, adjust for local cost of living), and it wasn't in a surrounding culture that valued "book learnin'" as a negative characteristic.
Yes, I can imagine in such a setting that not getting your first choice for the prom is indeed a passing trauma, quickly forgotten. But clearly you were never stuffed into a locker or knocked down for being yourself.
You were lucky. Pure and simple, you were lucky. Who you were was compatible with social norms. You went to a rich high school ("oh, not that rich," you'll say, proving you don't know the meaning of poor) and you had a peer group. I bet you were athletic.
Now--imagine not being athletic. You didn't get to play any sports, so you couldn't tell your safety cheerleader (remember, the first one turned you down) which sport you played. "Chess club," you say, and you get laughter from the chicks who get snubbed by the cheerleaders.
You try vainly to wear what everybody else wears. You shower twice a day to make sure there's no oil on your face. Maybe you endure some humiliating medical treatments because the acne just doesn't pass. But "Buck up, little camper! Just smile and have self-confidence and be yourself and you'll be liked for who you are!"
Unless who you are doesn't involve charisma, soccer, or invovles a less than perfectly symmetric face. Then your smiles are greeted with smirks, your self-confidence ruthlessly assailed until you turn away, and then somebody knocks you down from behind.
The coach assigned to watch the kids laughs.
Feeling good about yourself yet? Think it's your fault for not playing soccer well enough? Damn, if only you'd learned to not mention a book you read. Stupid geek, books are for nerds.
And you never went to the prom. It wasn't an option. Maybe you wanted to, maybe you didn't, maybe you pretended you didn't. But you didn't, and you didn't have a choice. And honestly, that's the least traumatic thing about high school.
You don't know shit about trauma. *I* call BS.
The reviewer condescends the book for assuming a "Strategist" role is necessary in a successful project, since the customer undoubtedly knows his or her own business.
... (I suffer from this occasionally). Then they may not have the best people skills to break this to the client easily, and things get testy. YMMV, but I've found this to be true slightly more often than not.
Not only do customers often not know their own business (or at least haven't thought about it in any systematic way), they generally have no idea of a) what's possible, and b) what's cheap, and c) what's good on the web. They get really caught up in features.
I groan when I'm in a requirements meeting and I hear a client start, "Now, can there be a 'button' that..." Generally they get this image of a button and various form elements in their head, and don't really have the training to think it through, or even better, step back and think about what they're trying to do and what kinds of services can fit them--let the details work themselves out later.
Clients who have this kind of blinder focus on details tend to have more unrealistic expectations and greater disappointment when the magical mind-reading system doesn't appear. They are very frustrated with the process of fixing this system in development.
This isn't their fault. If this were easy, everybody would do...oh wait, everybody would do it well. They don't know that the system requires mind reading--they just assume several steps in between.
Your average developer, head deep in code, doesn't have the business process experience to chain the processes together and see the problem until they get into the code and realize somebody forgot Phase Two:
Those who are really good, and they are rare, at Internet strategy tend to have experience in organizations (not necessarily businesses) and technology. Too little technology and they plunge off the cliff with the client (we have one of those in our company). This is why domain experts with tech experience are as valuable on Web projects as they are on traditional client-server projects.
And such an effective political institution it is.
Oh, wait:
<sarcasm>And such an effective political institution it is.</sarcasm>
When, oh when, is the EFF going to get a DC office? A friend of mine called about volunteering. Neither of us had great sums of money, but we had time. Their response?
"Oh, we only accept local volunteer help."
"That's OK, we're in DC."
"Um, we only have an office in SF."
"???"
Helloooooo--the political capital of the U.S. is in Washington, DC, not Berkeley, CA. You don't even have to rent space in the District to be effective. The NRA has a massive complex in Fairfax, VA. So why, oh why, is the EFF only in SF? Do they think that Ashcroft is going to come to them to ask them what they think? Are they going to get videoconferences with congresscritters? Do they think the'll have any political influence without playing the political game? Not with all the more money they bring to the table.
I like the ideals of the EFF, I just find it to be a fairly lackluster effort. I'd give time and what little money I can spare to an effective organization, but at the moment, my charitable money is better given to the Institute for Justice (politically unpopular with Slashdotters, I know) and the ACLU.
It's not as if there are no successful models to follow, people.
You ain't down with O(D)PP(PR)?
Dictionary.com lists it as an alternate spelling. Apple is not immune to these things, but it happens so rarely that you'd best check thrice to ensure an untrod-upon crank.
cite
What else is there really to comment on?
Hmmm...how about the fact that gov't research is being swayed by whomever is in office? This should offend you much more than the fact that your Republican didn't get in (you know, the one for defense, low taxes, and album stickering, or George Bush if you didn't like the Republican).
This lends credence to the complaints during the Clinton administration that conclusions were being altered to support his policies. I don't care if you're conservative, liberal, libertarian, or socialist, doing policy first and science later leads to bad policy and worse science.
You should demand more of your politicians and government scientists. I'd hate to think that you'd be just peachy if they faked data to show that the ice caps would melt tomorrow and we need a crash refrigeration program, just because you prefer environmental issues to, say, poverty reduction.
I'm also a little tired of people bashing the education system without offering any constructive criticism. It's quite easy to scream about how bad the system is and stand silent when asked for potential solutions.
I'm so freaking tired of this rap on education critics I could scream. We do offer solutions. Thousands of them. The problem is, we recognize that the problems aren't marginal; they're structural (structural is a big word meaning the system itself has problems, not one or two bad apples). This threatens those whose income is derived from the current system. In fact, most of them would make MORE money from any changes, but because it means something different, they freak.
So rather than accept that the system might need changing (vouchers are a way to incentivize change in public schools to make them better, c.f. the EU country Sweden, and "incentivize" is a big word that means "makes you want to get off your arse and do something"), apologists for the current system scream that oh, poor them, they're so beat up, and nobody will tell them how to make it right. Then in the same breath they will exclude all serious attempts at reform, exactly as you have done. You, sir or madam, are a part of the problem.
Your solution? More money. Wow. If only that had ever been tried anywhere. Oh, wait, it has. I notice you say nothing about reducing the non-teaching admin staff at schools themselves, only fat at the "federal" and "state" level. Er, great, but when a kid in North Carolina (bigger than many European countries, since that seems to impress you in a complete non-sequitur, non-sequitur being a Latin word meaning "it doesn't follow, and so you haven't proved anything"). I notice you knee-jerk-ly defend the competence levels of teachers, which study after study has found to be seriouslly wanting, and you don't mention any reforms of the teaching colleges themselves, who spend hours per week on "pedagogy" and usually one to two hours per week on substantive matters--at a lesser level than undergraduates in the same subject matter. But noooo, we can't criticize teachers or the system that makes them.
So what you mean to say is that there are no reforms that you will accept coming from those who criticize American education, not that we don't have any. It's just that "reform" to you means "more money and no accountability", and we've tried that shit and it steadfastly refuses to float.
If the EU member Sweden can do something different, what do you have to lose? Oh yeah, you work "with" teachers, so probably there won't be much demand for you in a system that rewards actual educational results, not simply big budgets. And yes, I worked at a teacher's union so I know that's what it's about.
You gotta love lawyers.
Yeah, gotta love 'em. In fact, you have to love them. Actually, we are under a specific and legally-binding obligation to love them, with severe penalties for alienation of affection.
I can't believe nobody's yet mentioned Hugo Gernsback's famous definition of SF.
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Part of the disagreement here may be definitional: some are saying what makes a great work, regardless of genre, some are saying what makes great space opera, and a few are talking about Science Fiction, or as he called it in Amazing Stories #1, "scientifiction":
"By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story -- a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision . . . Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading -- they are always instructive. They supply knowledge . . . in a very palatable form . . . New adventures pictured for us in the scientifiction of today are not at all impossible of realization tomorrow . .
So basically to be Science Fiction as opposed to space opera (and I'm not knocking good space opera, I love Babylon 5), it needs to be grounded in science with a view toward revealing how humans interact with the consequences of a given technology.
So to be GOOD SF, it must have the elements that make for good literature (plot, characterization, vivid place, etc.), but it also must highlight some aspect of humanity by examining how we react to changed technological circumstances, and do so plausibly and without obviousness. Some of the ones that explore this well for me are Brin's universe of Sundiver/Startide Rising, and Clifford Simak's City.
So SF isn't excused from the requirements for good literature, it imposes extra requirements on it.
Speculative fiction, as noted elsewhere, lifts the technological requirement but does require changed circumstances, the essential "what if." I'd even go so far as to say that Science Fiction is a special case of Speculative fiction. So once you find out what makes good literature and good speculative fiction, you can figure out what additionally is required to make good Science Fiction.
Since the original was in Polish, the a would be "short" (I think that's the right term, never made sense to me as a description) like the a in car. And the i would be like the i in Linux, as prounounced by its creator in his native tongue. ;-) Accent, as always, is on the penultimate syllable.
Soh-LAHH-rees.
The movie is in Russian, and Russian spelling rules forbid a normal "a" to come after an l, so it's Solyaris in the movie.
And in the American south it's "Soh-layr...whut??"
I discovered it when it was recommended to me for a nasty GI virus that wouldn't go away by normal starvation. Killed the sucker right off. As a nursing student I will be trying to bring this into any hospital I eventually work for.
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Please don't. I'm serious.
As someone with medical training, you should KNOW that most diseases go away by themselves and there's no substitute for double-blind, placebo controlled studies to ascertain the efficacy of a given treatment. Please don't rip off poor people in their time of need by sending them to GNC to pay lots of money for various things that just don't work, and in some cases kill.
Note that no links to peer-reviewed articles exist on the link you provide. Just assertions who all curiously use the commercial name of the product. Look at the broad range of things it claims to cure...missing only "the vapors" and "consumption" to be pure snake oil.
A quick check of the FDA, however, reveals that these makers haven't bothered to put it to the test of actually trying to show it cures people instead of making outrageous claims:
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a href="http://www.fda.gov/cder/warn/cyber/cyber200
And since the stuff you'll be foisting off on suffering, desperate people is unregulated, you won't even know that the brand they buy actually contains the advertised product, nor that it's safe.
Hell, I don't know exactly why switching everyone in the middle east to purple robes wouldn't bring peace, except that nobody's shown even a correlation between purple-robe-wearing and sudden elimination of religious fanaticism (though it'd be fun to try on Pat Robertson in a study). Similarly, since no one has actually shown that the concoction you ingested (if it actually contained what its maker claims it did) had anything to do with your improvement. It's not as if all your white blood cells up and died, leaving it as the only thing between you and death.
Please, go to pharmacy school if not getting a full MD before prescribing drugs, because that's exactly what you'll be doing if you recommend it to anyone.
And that's just plain wrong.
Vote Democrat this November -- if not for them, for the poor children who are starving in the streets, the racially discriminated, the handicapped, and the gun violence victims.
Yes, I ran over a few on my way to Republican Party headquarters, just for sport. Because they're all over the place you know.
Then I listened to an address by the white Secretary of State and white National Security Adviser.
Then I went up a ramp for the handicapped from that hideos ADA signed into law by that well known Democrat, Bush. Curse him!
Then I drove into Southeast DC and left my vehicle unlocked and jingled my change without fear because guns are outlawed there, so no outlaws have guns.
But fortunately the Senator from Disney is a Republican, so I felt wonderfully secure in my allegience to the RIAA and MPAA.
It must be nice to know that a vague collection of competing interests just happens to be morally pure as the wind driven snow. Wait, you were saying vote Libertarian, right?
Sheesh.
OK, so why change?
The mathematicians are ignoring the psychology of the system, which is as you described. It has benefits in addition to costs.
The benefits are that you really have to think hard about your vote and how angry you are with one of the centralizing candidates. Spoilers perform a useful function in that they force the centralizing parties to go one way or the other in order to appeal to an electable number of voters.
Ralph Nader should have made the Democratic party sit up and take notice that not everybody was happy with Clinton's "Republican Lite" policies. The danger for the Democrats is that they will annoy middle-class, older voters who don't want radical controls on the means of production. So they have to come to some positions that will strop up enough votes from the extremist Left without angering the average voter.
So Ralph's run will do the process good by saying that there's growing extremist disaffection with their pro-business views. Either the Democrats will have to alter their policies, or risk losing elections. All these other systems wouldn't make Gore rethink his positions for the next run, because they would have worked well enough. That's fine if you're completely happy with his positions, but the Nader voter is not as well served by a preference scheme.
I remember reading an article (possibly in Scientific American or Science News) about making a DNA computer and using it to quickly solve the trip planning problem. It seemed a very cool hack but a long way from being practical.
On the other hand the speed of molecular reactions and their ability for massive parallelity (is that a word?) sounds like it would hold promise for certain types of computers.
This of course would leave Steve Jobs to insist that his MISC computers were much better even if they were a terahertz or so behind current Pentiums.
And at least Apple doesn't put "Later, I had to uninstall and reinstall Outlook, but all was not lost" in their ads.
I mean, not only is it Outlook, but they admit a novice user has to "uninstall and reinstall," in what is clearly a fictional article!
This one was shown me by my dad, a sometimes physics prof in his retirement, when he needed to show the principles of lift as he instructed high school youth on sailplanes (gliders):
All that's required is a solid wooden spool with a single hole, and a circular piece of construction or preferably card stock paper, about 10cm in diameter.
1) Ask the kids what will happen if you blow through the spool with the disk centered on the hole on the other side, flat side toward the spool hole. (they should expect it to be blown away when you take your hand off)
2) Place your index finger onto the paper over the hole in the spool, and put the other end of the spool to your mouth.
3) Blow into the spool very hard.
4) Take your finger off the paper. The paper should stay in place. When you stop, it will fall off.
This demonstrates that swiftly-moving air has lower pressure than stationary air--hence sucking the paper to the spool by blowing.
However, you have to look at other factors to determine the total carbon implications of a fuel. The reason I oppose ethanol-based fuels and organic farming is that they require far greater destruction of carbon-sinks to supply them--i.e., they cut down lots and lots of rain forest and burn it.
Intensive farming can be done without massive fertilizer runoff (hey, Congress, lets use some of those subsidies to promote no-till more instead of merely fallow fields!) and fossil carbon requires less habitat destruction per BTU. We should be pushing for hybrids to tide us over until fuel-cell vehicles can be rolled out on a massive scale.
However, converting existing fields to growing ethanol is a good idea in the short run. For example, getting rid of organic fields to grow ethanol-producing plants in a responsible intensive manner would be a net plus. I'm just not sure it's a large-scale solution, nor will the market support it given the current first-world mythology surrounding organic foods.
In my opinion, everyone should watch this movie once a year. It really puts things in perspective.
Like...Wow, you don't have to have talent to score a movie? That kind of perspective?
Granted, I think Glass is an idiot generally, mainly because he practices "Emperor's Clothes" minimalism, where "you know, if I make some pretty sounds and repeat them endlessly rather than actually working to craft something and claim it's part of an intellectual tradition instead of Backstreet Boys for yuppies, Profit!!!!" Steve Reich also took an experiment that should have remained a grad school exercize to influence later, real music to ridiculous extremes--but he's far less pretentious and actually has talent. (Good minimalism is practiced by John Adams.)
Case in point: there's a big sweep up a cliff that then breaks out over the water of a lake. Now basic timing of music to movie isn't hard (I've done it by hand, and accuracy within a 3rd of a second is pretty easy), and Glass's mind-numbing 1-5-1 theme keeps repeating as you sweep up this cliff. It's SUPPOSED to burst into a moment of actual chords when you break out over the water. And it does--about two seconds previous. It doesn't sound like much, but I was watching and thinking "uh, ok, what am I supposed to see?" Then two beats later, the water appeared. It wasn't an error of tracking the two together, it was Glass's error.
The images are nicely done in a technical sense, but the "irony" they project is not even close to new, either in technique or style. It was kind of hackneyed five minutes after Metropolis was released.
Someone else mentioned this movie was best enjoyed with chemical alteration of your bloodstream. I couldn't agree more. In another context, though, it's called "beer-goggling."
Not Xanth, DareDevil.
And yet another try at Solaris with...George Clooney???
Of course, it's been done, though you have to have a love of montages, a good eye for Soviet counterculture, and a seriously strong bladder to get it.
Ditto, but he'd have to go from Menacing and Cynical to unconcerned and playful. DeNiro is good at what he does, but apart from his appearance in Brazil, which was strange and cynical, he's usually menacing and cynical.
I agree, though, he has the look and accent.
Don't forget the other big reason--ensure only the large players can participate in music distribution by creating DVD CSS-like "licensing fees" for mandatory DRM registration for your content. That means backyard bands won't be able to distribute free MP3s to build up a following or distribute their own CDs without going through RIAA members and signing a contract heavily weighted toward the record company.
It's a bid for an oligopoly of audio content, too.
It's an image ploy.
So, if they run commecials, they're greedy bastards who take advantage of it. If they don't run commercials, they are greedy bastards who take advantage of it.
There's no pleasing you unless they just close up shop and go away. I'm curious...do you give away all money above and beyond what you need to stay alive and go to work? I mean, you don't need a TV, a VCR, a DVD, or a computer. Why not give them up and give the extra money to the poor? Have the courage of your convictions instead of expecting everyone else to do it for you.
There are plenty of reasons why opposing old-style windmills was good environmental policy. They were also known as "Avian Blenders." They really killed a lot of endangered large birds, such as raptors (eagles, falcons, and hawks) and potentially condors.
The new designs claim to be more bird friendly, but I'd rather see some long-term studies that bear that out before releasing them upon the environment willy-nilly. That's what got us into problems with DDT.
Finding something other than oil (and, more importantly, coal) is a good idea, but these "renewables" frequently have environmental problems of their own, especially if scaled up to the level that will take up the slack from oil and coal. Dams will flood habitats, solar panels will pave over and shade habitats, and geothermal can be overused (as New Zealand has found out) pretty easily, literally tapping it out.
That doesn't mean they don't have a place (solar panels on existing infrastructure don't affect the environment *any more* than is already being done), but we also need to accept that all energy sources have a price and be smarter about what tradeoffs we accept in the short term to facilitate a move to ever-cleaner sources in the long term. Just 'cuz nuclear isn't perfect doesn't mean it's worse for the planet than oil and coal (necessarily). Fusion would be great (except for waste heat), but the only energy it generates now is from the decomposition of status reports.
So we should be considering less-than-perfect sources (including nuclear, solar, geothermal, hydro, wind, and possibly wave-action) as a short-term improvement. But that doesn't mean everyone will agree, aside from the NIMBY (not in my backyard) folks that you cite.
Except for the security, comfortable working hours, and in many cases, even worse pay, as well as fewer benefits and less vacation.
Depends very heavily on the contract you're on. In my first contract, I made less than the government employees who had more vacation, got to travel more, got payed better, and had less education and experience in the subject area.
Plus they had fun treating me like a secretary and asking me to do things that were clearly illegal or against contracting regulations.
Yaaaay, government contracting!