The reverse is true as well...The science people think the arts people are concerned with trivial, easy stuff. The arts people think the science people are all boring social retards.
The truth of it is, they're both valuable, but both sides dish out snobbery at each other so often that they cultivate contempt as a defense mechanism. A lot of it is just the specialization of our times. Gone are the days of generalized education...Hell, they're trying to make you major in high school now, so don't worry about ever being forced to do something outside of your narrow speciality.
If you want to know what a culture thinks about a group, go and look at the stereotypes. Look at the language that is used to describe those groups. Liberals are all pacifist pansies, conservatives are all gun toting rednecks. Liberals are whiny intellectuals, conservatives are ignorant religious nuts.
In this country, there aren't many positive intellectual stereotypes. People may be smart, but that's rarely ever the thing that is used to describe them. Can you even think of a positive intellectual stereotype?
The thing that bothers me is that they do apply a general rule, and woe betide you if one size does not indeed, fit all.
I did have a few good teachers who did their best for me, but it was the exception rather than the rule. Just seems like, with all the goddamn testing we do these days, that the goal should be to try and put people where they belong in terms of ability, and not just to force conformance to a standard mean.
I like how you substituted the pejorative word "hate" for the mild phrase "view intellectualism with suspicion." Then you immediately make the connotation between brains and elitism, because obviously if you're smart, you're an elitist, the kind of person a sensible, wise, god-fearing American hero would be bound to hate. Can't blame them for hating hateable people, right?
This is how deep it runs, where the very idea of intelligence is immediately coupled with negative identifiers. If I described a girl as "smart" the thought would be that she's ugly, because if she's not ugly, then I would have had something better to say about her than smart, right? In the movies a character's physical attractiveness/fitness is often inverse to his/her intelligence. The smartest person is rarely the hero, unless he happens to be an action hero,in which case his intelligence only emerges when there is nothing to shoot at. Villains are often intelligent. Evil Genius. Criminal Mastermind. Mad Scientist.
If that's not enough, then you have the smart-but-dumb stereotypes. He's book smart. Bumbling scientist. Ivory tower intellectual. Impractical. Naive. He's got this big brain, but really he's dumb. He's a social outcast. Smart people can't communicate with normal people. He doesn't understand the real world. He has high intelligence but low wisdom (that one is even enshrined in D&D...Intelligence for the mages and their dark and violent ways, and Wisdom for the healing priests).
Blah blah blah blah blah. I don't know why I bother. Believe what you want to believe.
My post was about as dispassionate as it is possible to be. I honestly don't care about "Who started the anti-intellectual trend in America." I really don't. My personal opinion, based on historical and current knowledge of religion leads me to suggest that that probably had something to do with it.
Then, out of the woodwork, come all these hysterical Christians, horrified that I could say anything at all that might reflect poorly on their faith. Really, it me being completely biased. Apparently I hate puritans, for example, which is news to me.
The fact that most Christians react extremely strongly to statements that they do not agree with, coupled with the general trend of social conservativism in religion, is exactly why I think that religion is responsible for this countries attitudes toward intellectuals. The church has not historically been kind to intellectuals, and while more modern sects may indeed promote literacy, it has not been that long since the church restricted the printing of the bible to a dead language.
Because claiming that the church that beat down and imprisoned Galileo has a bias against intellectualism is obviously an unfounded slander, right? This is not a slander. This is a historical fact.
At any rate, I wasn't talking about the Catholics. They started it, but the Protestant churches picked it up and ran with it to the point where the Catholics now look intellectually progressive by comparison.
Actually I was in a tracked school...I graduated in the early 90's, so that should give you a data point. I moved into the system in 9th grade, and was immediately shunted into the "standard" classes, where an "A" average was a 4.0 (As opposed to the Remedial classes where it was 3.0 and the Accelerated classes where it was 5.0). I stayed there until my junior year, when the first round of standardized tests swept through and I outscored almost the entire school. Got put into the accelerated track my senior year and my GPA literally doubled.
On the one hand, as someone who experienced both sides, I really appreciated being in the advanced classes. It was night and day; better people, better work, better pace. On the other hand, it sucked hard being stuck in the standard track (there was no provision for smart kids there, because if you were smart, you wouldn't be there), and no real effort was ever made to reevaluate students once they ended up in a track.
I think tracking is in many ways too rigid, but I don't know of a better way to do it. Lumping all kids together is awful.
Doesn't make it any easier when the system is designed to hold you back. Yea, sure, you're in history class, and the teacher is lecturing out of the book, so you just start reading the book. You think when you finish the book they let you move up a class? Or do you think the teacher will start ragging on you for not paying attention because you've read the damn book two or three times, and you're bored out of your fricking mind?
And do you think when the teacher hears your assertion that you've read the book that that teacher will react with anything but scorn? And do you think that teacher will be surprised and pleased that you actually appear to have mastered the material, after he's stopped class to flip ahead and bombard you with study questions from the later chapters of the book?
Or do you think that he will be so enraged at your showing him up in front of the class that he will go out of his way to pick on you for the rest of the year? You'll end up with a reputation as a "discipline problem," and spend the rest of high school magically ending up in classes with other "discipline problems" which is the nail in the coffin as far as ever giving a damn about school.
And those grades are critical for getting you into the sort of college that you'll really need to be in to get the most out of it. Mediocre grades and phenomenal test scores will only take you so far.
Re:No Child Left Behind doesn't matter
on
Failing Our Geniuses
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It's no surprise. Some cultures love their smart people. The Asian's love their smart people. They glorify them, they treat them with a lot of respect, and view them as a source of national pride.
We, on the other hand, do not. Culturally, Americans view intellectualism with suspicion. We love the captain of the football team; big, handsome, and dumb. You have only to look at the debates on science to understand that. There is societal pressure to not appear too smart, or you'll have a number of unflattering stereotypes applied to you. The last two losing presidential candidates both had their intelligence used against them in an unflattering way; they were know-it-alls, dorks, geeks, namby pamby sissy faggot intellectuals, whereas the guy everyone regards as the dumber candidate is trustworthy and strong.
A lot of it probably has its roots with Christianity. The Devil is smart, remember? When Dante was populating the Inferno, he dumped Odysseus in the 8th circle, 1 up from the bottom. Why? Because he's a smart, tricky bastard, just like the Devil is supposed to be. This country has a lot of radical Christian roots (Puritans, anyone?) so it's not all that surprising that our views on intellectualism are shaped around that.
So, for example, if I buy one copy of a programming book, I can legally make a copy for every employee as long as they don't take it out of the building?
Actually, they do, if you buy into the notion of copyright at all. That's the whole point.
It's very easy for people who create nothing of value to scorn the protections of copyright. I may think copyright runs too long, and is widely abused, but I don't begrudge someone the right to make a living off of their creative labors.
It's very fashionable to blame the RIAA and blame the MPAA, and I think that's fair, because I think they pervert the whole purpose of copyrights. But in this case, you're talking about writers who make very little money and, assuming that someone hasn't screwed them out of their rights already, along comes you and does it because you think no one owes them for using their work.
That has nothing to do with it...It's like saying watching tv or listening to the radio is a violation of copyright! Copyright doesn't have anything to do with your right to listen/watch/read a copyrighted work...It only has to do with COPYing it.
No one gives a damn if a million people read/watch/listen to a copyrighted work, though TV tries to limit the re-display of content (e.g. can't record a football game, and then play the recording in a public venue), and music and text try to control derviative works. It's one copy. You can make a copy for personal use under fair use.
You can NOT make copies for other people. It's a semi-grey area with file sharing because the law was written for physical things, but it is in no way a grey area with making physical copies. Period. If you make and distribute hard copies without paying to do so, it is a crystal clear violation of copyright law with tons of legal precedent behind it.
It's still distribution. Employees are not the same legal entity as a corporation. That would be like saying, "A corporation buys one user-specific (rather than machine specific) software license, so they should be able to install it on every computer they own, and all their employees home computers." Or a corporation buying a copy of a movie, then making fair use copies for all it's employees, or blah blah blah.
Buying one copy gives you the right to that one copy. It in no way gives you the right to make unlimited copies to be given to people who have a legal relationship with you.
This isn't about reading anything. It's unauthorized copying and distribution of a copyrighted work. You can argue fair use if you send someone a copy of an MP3, but you can't argue fair use if you burn a copy of the CD for everyone you know, and that goes a million times more if it's a company doing it as part of their corporate policy. That's just horseshit.
Bunch of damn anti-copyright zombies not reading the damn story. This is what copyright is supposed to be about. You write a well researched article that ends up in a trade magazine, and then some PHB at IBM decides he likes it, sends it down to the printshop, and runs off 10,000 copies so he can give one to every employee, and what do you get? Squat.
What do you think someone is going to get out of free distribution in this case? You think Bob, writer of economic trend stories, is going to get more people buying his articles because some joker ripped it off? Maybe he'll sell more seats at his concerts! Come on.
No. Did the company make copies and distribute them to all employees?
The summary is awful. This isn't about "sharing" anything. It is about unauthorized reprinting of someone else's copyrighted work. The analogy isn't "Singing someone a few bars of a new hit tune by the watercooler" it's "Burning a copy of the CD for everyone who works in the building, and distributing them." The first is fair use, the second is systematic copyright infringement.
The internet is a special case. If you send this article to your peers, you're most likely going to send the link...You're not going to print it out, bind it up, and distribute it as part of a new employee orientation packet...That is not authorized reuse.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that had to buy bound xeroxes of newspaper/magazine articles for classes in school...The reason that those are so expensive is because they pay the royalties to get the rights to reprint that work.
Rules need to be memorized. Occasional facts (constants, exceptions to the rule, etc) need to be memorized. Some things in history are good to know, but the dates? But by and large, most facts do not need to be memorized.
Kids are forced to memorize tons of data that has no purpose, and that stuff will clutter your brain for the rest of your life. There needs to be a line drawn between things that are committed to memory because they are going to be needed for your entire life (e.g Vocabulary, Natural Laws, Order of Operations, Bill of Rights, etc) and things that are only useful for passing the test. Far as I'm concerned, make all the kids take open book/open internet tests...That will teach you a real life skill, and you won't have to waste brain space on the names of transcendental poets, and other useless trivia.
Yea, I never used my foreign language either. I just think it's a good idea, teaches you to think a little differently. Same with history; I think you need a vague idea of what happened in the past to understand some of the issues that are happening right now...Hopefully also will give you some raw data to plug into your hopefully-developing reason skills and help you start to understand the world.
I've never formally studied either biology or chemistry outside of high school, but the grounding there has helped me personally work with related stuff in my daily life, so I think the basic course is useful.
As far as computer skills go, I think those actually should be folded in with some of that other stuff, in terms of practical projects and similar stuff. Most people will use computers in the context of doing work that isn't related to computers, so "training" them in that manner is probably useful. Programming, etc, should be an elective, like art. Most people will get as much use out of programming and real CS as most people here would get out of art class.
To be a rounded student out of high school you need the following:
Writing/Composition--3 years Literature (Classic and modern)--2 years History (World and National)--3 years Argumentation/Debate--2 years Scientific Method/Logic--1 year Biology/Chemistry/General Science--3 years. Math up to Pre-Calc (including Trig and Stats)--4 years A foreign language--2 years
That's 5 hours a day for 4 years. Add in some Phys. Ed, and some half-year electives to round it out, and you're good to go.
Every one of those things is something that you'll use for the rest of your life. There is no high school math that you don't see in the world all the time; pre-calc especially is practical math. Everyone needs to know general science, and these days an advanced layman's understanding of Chemistry and Biology isn't really optional.
Writing/Composition/Debate/Scientific method are all basically the "Critical thinking" that people preach about. People need to learn to reason, people need to learn to develop an argument, and people need to be able to gather evidence for themselves and present it intelligently to their peers. Folding this crap in with other classes is pointless...It always becomes rote repitition. Composition can also be used to bulk up history/arts/literature as well through writing projects, but traditional "English" class is almost worthless...Just pure regurgitation with no thought involved.
Until we get away from rote memorization, the educational system here will continue to suck. Memorization is pointless in this era of readily available data.
Still stupid. What were they transferring with, unsecured Samba? Anonymous FTP? Windows File sharing? And why were they transferring files in the first place? Secure files should reside on one machine or cluster, with nightly (or whatever is appropriate) backups. Two locations = two times the security risk.
Sometimes you have to take that risk (a redundant colo or something), but in that case you have a secure medium for file transfers and it should happen pretty damn often if not constantly...Certainly not the kind of special occasion you would need to bring the firewall down for.
Did I say you should never bring down the firewall? I know a guy who (in lieu of network troubleshooting) will plug his PC directly into the cable modem when he has networking issues; gets virused all the time. And why was there only one firewall between this system and unsecured systems?
Sounds like these amatuers needed to go out of business.
I have no explanation...It was just crammed in the bottom of the rack. At that time there was no fiber in the building, so it was just on a piece of CAT5...I stuck a toner on the end up in the comm room, and dug through the wires in the server room until I found it, tugged on the wire to see what it was attached to, and that little piece of shit fell out of the rack. I literally could not believe it...If it had been hooked into Lego hardware, or something by Mattel I could not have been more surprised.
I snagged some emergency capital, and put together a fiber/gigabit solution just to the server room...To date its the most bang for my buck I've ever gotten for spending less than 5k. My boss took the credit, and I got reprimanded for being late on an unrelated deliverable. God I love I/T.
Not true for most people; the average schmo will have a computer with a proprietary motherboard (e.g. Dell), and the ubergeeks will scorn all boards that can be bought outside of Akihabara or some other exotic tech mecca. I'm not that rabid, but I still don't go down to Best Buy and buy a crap motherboard...Though I did buy a power supply there once.
As for Knoppix, if you commonly corrupt your bootloader to the point where you can no longer access the machine, I recommend you burn yourself a copy next time you have access to a functional computer. A facility with Knoppix and a bunch of spare knoppix disks kept on hand will save you a world of grief. The Knoppix STD is right up there with the tone wand, the multitool, and the Fluke in my geek emergency kit.
I can't see how this won't be misused. "Where were you on the night of the 1st?" "I think I was at home..." "Well you weren't! Here are the thermal satellite images to prove it!"
No, not really. You've got to expect to lose machines; failure happens. Could have been a motherboard or a power supply. I'd still expect you to be able to boot from CD though. You try knoppix? You should be able to boot to knoppix, then mount the/boot partition and have your way with grub.
The thing is, a network topology is wildly different from a computer. It should be designed for parts of it to drop off, and parts to go berserk...These things happen all the time. It should be designed with a minimum of bottlenecks, and it should be extremely easy to identify and isolate problems.
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The reverse is true as well...The science people think the arts people are concerned with trivial, easy stuff. The arts people think the science people are all boring social retards.
The truth of it is, they're both valuable, but both sides dish out snobbery at each other so often that they cultivate contempt as a defense mechanism. A lot of it is just the specialization of our times. Gone are the days of generalized education...Hell, they're trying to make you major in high school now, so don't worry about ever being forced to do something outside of your narrow speciality.
If you want to know what a culture thinks about a group, go and look at the stereotypes. Look at the language that is used to describe those groups. Liberals are all pacifist pansies, conservatives are all gun toting rednecks. Liberals are whiny intellectuals, conservatives are ignorant religious nuts.
In this country, there aren't many positive intellectual stereotypes. People may be smart, but that's rarely ever the thing that is used to describe them. Can you even think of a positive intellectual stereotype?
The thing that bothers me is that they do apply a general rule, and woe betide you if one size does not indeed, fit all.
I did have a few good teachers who did their best for me, but it was the exception rather than the rule. Just seems like, with all the goddamn testing we do these days, that the goal should be to try and put people where they belong in terms of ability, and not just to force conformance to a standard mean.
I like how you substituted the pejorative word "hate" for the mild phrase "view intellectualism with suspicion." Then you immediately make the connotation between brains and elitism, because obviously if you're smart, you're an elitist, the kind of person a sensible, wise, god-fearing American hero would be bound to hate. Can't blame them for hating hateable people, right?
This is how deep it runs, where the very idea of intelligence is immediately coupled with negative identifiers. If I described a girl as "smart" the thought would be that she's ugly, because if she's not ugly, then I would have had something better to say about her than smart, right? In the movies a character's physical attractiveness/fitness is often inverse to his/her intelligence. The smartest person is rarely the hero, unless he happens to be an action hero,in which case his intelligence only emerges when there is nothing to shoot at. Villains are often intelligent. Evil Genius. Criminal Mastermind. Mad Scientist.
If that's not enough, then you have the smart-but-dumb stereotypes. He's book smart. Bumbling scientist. Ivory tower intellectual. Impractical. Naive. He's got this big brain, but really he's dumb. He's a social outcast. Smart people can't communicate with normal people. He doesn't understand the real world. He has high intelligence but low wisdom (that one is even enshrined in D&D...Intelligence for the mages and their dark and violent ways, and Wisdom for the healing priests).
Blah blah blah blah blah. I don't know why I bother. Believe what you want to believe.
My post was about as dispassionate as it is possible to be. I honestly don't care about "Who started the anti-intellectual trend in America." I really don't. My personal opinion, based on historical and current knowledge of religion leads me to suggest that that probably had something to do with it.
Then, out of the woodwork, come all these hysterical Christians, horrified that I could say anything at all that might reflect poorly on their faith. Really, it me being completely biased. Apparently I hate puritans, for example, which is news to me.
The fact that most Christians react extremely strongly to statements that they do not agree with, coupled with the general trend of social conservativism in religion, is exactly why I think that religion is responsible for this countries attitudes toward intellectuals. The church has not historically been kind to intellectuals, and while more modern sects may indeed promote literacy, it has not been that long since the church restricted the printing of the bible to a dead language.
Because claiming that the church that beat down and imprisoned Galileo has a bias against intellectualism is obviously an unfounded slander, right? This is not a slander. This is a historical fact.
At any rate, I wasn't talking about the Catholics. They started it, but the Protestant churches picked it up and ran with it to the point where the Catholics now look intellectually progressive by comparison.
Actually I was in a tracked school...I graduated in the early 90's, so that should give you a data point. I moved into the system in 9th grade, and was immediately shunted into the "standard" classes, where an "A" average was a 4.0 (As opposed to the Remedial classes where it was 3.0 and the Accelerated classes where it was 5.0). I stayed there until my junior year, when the first round of standardized tests swept through and I outscored almost the entire school. Got put into the accelerated track my senior year and my GPA literally doubled.
On the one hand, as someone who experienced both sides, I really appreciated being in the advanced classes. It was night and day; better people, better work, better pace. On the other hand, it sucked hard being stuck in the standard track (there was no provision for smart kids there, because if you were smart, you wouldn't be there), and no real effort was ever made to reevaluate students once they ended up in a track.
I think tracking is in many ways too rigid, but I don't know of a better way to do it. Lumping all kids together is awful.
Doesn't make it any easier when the system is designed to hold you back. Yea, sure, you're in history class, and the teacher is lecturing out of the book, so you just start reading the book. You think when you finish the book they let you move up a class? Or do you think the teacher will start ragging on you for not paying attention because you've read the damn book two or three times, and you're bored out of your fricking mind?
And do you think when the teacher hears your assertion that you've read the book that that teacher will react with anything but scorn? And do you think that teacher will be surprised and pleased that you actually appear to have mastered the material, after he's stopped class to flip ahead and bombard you with study questions from the later chapters of the book?
Or do you think that he will be so enraged at your showing him up in front of the class that he will go out of his way to pick on you for the rest of the year? You'll end up with a reputation as a "discipline problem," and spend the rest of high school magically ending up in classes with other "discipline problems" which is the nail in the coffin as far as ever giving a damn about school.
And those grades are critical for getting you into the sort of college that you'll really need to be in to get the most out of it. Mediocre grades and phenomenal test scores will only take you so far.
"When everyone is special, then no one will be."
It's no surprise. Some cultures love their smart people. The Asian's love their smart people. They glorify them, they treat them with a lot of respect, and view them as a source of national pride.
We, on the other hand, do not. Culturally, Americans view intellectualism with suspicion. We love the captain of the football team; big, handsome, and dumb. You have only to look at the debates on science to understand that. There is societal pressure to not appear too smart, or you'll have a number of unflattering stereotypes applied to you. The last two losing presidential candidates both had their intelligence used against them in an unflattering way; they were know-it-alls, dorks, geeks, namby pamby sissy faggot intellectuals, whereas the guy everyone regards as the dumber candidate is trustworthy and strong.
A lot of it probably has its roots with Christianity. The Devil is smart, remember? When Dante was populating the Inferno, he dumped Odysseus in the 8th circle, 1 up from the bottom. Why? Because he's a smart, tricky bastard, just like the Devil is supposed to be. This country has a lot of radical Christian roots (Puritans, anyone?) so it's not all that surprising that our views on intellectualism are shaped around that.
So, for example, if I buy one copy of a programming book, I can legally make a copy for every employee as long as they don't take it out of the building?
That's some whacky coolaid you're drinking there.
Actually, they do, if you buy into the notion of copyright at all. That's the whole point.
It's very easy for people who create nothing of value to scorn the protections of copyright. I may think copyright runs too long, and is widely abused, but I don't begrudge someone the right to make a living off of their creative labors.
It's very fashionable to blame the RIAA and blame the MPAA, and I think that's fair, because I think they pervert the whole purpose of copyrights. But in this case, you're talking about writers who make very little money and, assuming that someone hasn't screwed them out of their rights already, along comes you and does it because you think no one owes them for using their work.
That has nothing to do with it...It's like saying watching tv or listening to the radio is a violation of copyright! Copyright doesn't have anything to do with your right to listen/watch/read a copyrighted work...It only has to do with COPYing it.
No one gives a damn if a million people read/watch/listen to a copyrighted work, though TV tries to limit the re-display of content (e.g. can't record a football game, and then play the recording in a public venue), and music and text try to control derviative works. It's one copy. You can make a copy for personal use under fair use.
You can NOT make copies for other people. It's a semi-grey area with file sharing because the law was written for physical things, but it is in no way a grey area with making physical copies. Period. If you make and distribute hard copies without paying to do so, it is a crystal clear violation of copyright law with tons of legal precedent behind it.
It's still distribution. Employees are not the same legal entity as a corporation. That would be like saying, "A corporation buys one user-specific (rather than machine specific) software license, so they should be able to install it on every computer they own, and all their employees home computers." Or a corporation buying a copy of a movie, then making fair use copies for all it's employees, or blah blah blah.
Buying one copy gives you the right to that one copy. It in no way gives you the right to make unlimited copies to be given to people who have a legal relationship with you.
This isn't about reading anything. It's unauthorized copying and distribution of a copyrighted work. You can argue fair use if you send someone a copy of an MP3, but you can't argue fair use if you burn a copy of the CD for everyone you know, and that goes a million times more if it's a company doing it as part of their corporate policy. That's just horseshit.
Bunch of damn anti-copyright zombies not reading the damn story. This is what copyright is supposed to be about. You write a well researched article that ends up in a trade magazine, and then some PHB at IBM decides he likes it, sends it down to the printshop, and runs off 10,000 copies so he can give one to every employee, and what do you get? Squat.
What do you think someone is going to get out of free distribution in this case? You think Bob, writer of economic trend stories, is going to get more people buying his articles because some joker ripped it off? Maybe he'll sell more seats at his concerts! Come on.
No. Did the company make copies and distribute them to all employees?
The summary is awful. This isn't about "sharing" anything. It is about unauthorized reprinting of someone else's copyrighted work. The analogy isn't "Singing someone a few bars of a new hit tune by the watercooler" it's "Burning a copy of the CD for everyone who works in the building, and distributing them." The first is fair use, the second is systematic copyright infringement.
Actually, no.
The internet is a special case. If you send this article to your peers, you're most likely going to send the link...You're not going to print it out, bind it up, and distribute it as part of a new employee orientation packet...That is not authorized reuse.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that had to buy bound xeroxes of newspaper/magazine articles for classes in school...The reason that those are so expensive is because they pay the royalties to get the rights to reprint that work.
Well, yes, I should have been more specific.
Rules need to be memorized. Occasional facts (constants, exceptions to the rule, etc) need to be memorized. Some things in history are good to know, but the dates? But by and large, most facts do not need to be memorized.
Kids are forced to memorize tons of data that has no purpose, and that stuff will clutter your brain for the rest of your life. There needs to be a line drawn between things that are committed to memory because they are going to be needed for your entire life (e.g Vocabulary, Natural Laws, Order of Operations, Bill of Rights, etc) and things that are only useful for passing the test. Far as I'm concerned, make all the kids take open book/open internet tests...That will teach you a real life skill, and you won't have to waste brain space on the names of transcendental poets, and other useless trivia.
Yea, I never used my foreign language either. I just think it's a good idea, teaches you to think a little differently. Same with history; I think you need a vague idea of what happened in the past to understand some of the issues that are happening right now...Hopefully also will give you some raw data to plug into your hopefully-developing reason skills and help you start to understand the world.
I've never formally studied either biology or chemistry outside of high school, but the grounding there has helped me personally work with related stuff in my daily life, so I think the basic course is useful.
As far as computer skills go, I think those actually should be folded in with some of that other stuff, in terms of practical projects and similar stuff. Most people will use computers in the context of doing work that isn't related to computers, so "training" them in that manner is probably useful. Programming, etc, should be an elective, like art. Most people will get as much use out of programming and real CS as most people here would get out of art class.
(Disclaimer: I hate math)
To be a rounded student out of high school you need the following:
Writing/Composition--3 years
Literature (Classic and modern)--2 years
History (World and National)--3 years
Argumentation/Debate--2 years
Scientific Method/Logic--1 year
Biology/Chemistry/General Science--3 years.
Math up to Pre-Calc (including Trig and Stats)--4 years
A foreign language--2 years
That's 5 hours a day for 4 years. Add in some Phys. Ed, and some half-year electives to round it out, and you're good to go.
Every one of those things is something that you'll use for the rest of your life. There is no high school math that you don't see in the world all the time; pre-calc especially is practical math. Everyone needs to know general science, and these days an advanced layman's understanding of Chemistry and Biology isn't really optional.
Writing/Composition/Debate/Scientific method are all basically the "Critical thinking" that people preach about. People need to learn to reason, people need to learn to develop an argument, and people need to be able to gather evidence for themselves and present it intelligently to their peers. Folding this crap in with other classes is pointless...It always becomes rote repitition. Composition can also be used to bulk up history/arts/literature as well through writing projects, but traditional "English" class is almost worthless...Just pure regurgitation with no thought involved.
Until we get away from rote memorization, the educational system here will continue to suck. Memorization is pointless in this era of readily available data.
Still stupid. What were they transferring with, unsecured Samba? Anonymous FTP? Windows File sharing? And why were they transferring files in the first place? Secure files should reside on one machine or cluster, with nightly (or whatever is appropriate) backups. Two locations = two times the security risk.
...Certainly not the kind of special occasion you would need to bring the firewall down for.
Sometimes you have to take that risk (a redundant colo or something), but in that case you have a secure medium for file transfers and it should happen pretty damn often if not constantly
Did I say you should never bring down the firewall? I know a guy who (in lieu of network troubleshooting) will plug his PC directly into the cable modem when he has networking issues; gets virused all the time. And why was there only one firewall between this system and unsecured systems?
Sounds like these amatuers needed to go out of business.
I have no explanation...It was just crammed in the bottom of the rack. At that time there was no fiber in the building, so it was just on a piece of CAT5...I stuck a toner on the end up in the comm room, and dug through the wires in the server room until I found it, tugged on the wire to see what it was attached to, and that little piece of shit fell out of the rack. I literally could not believe it...If it had been hooked into Lego hardware, or something by Mattel I could not have been more surprised.
I snagged some emergency capital, and put together a fiber/gigabit solution just to the server room...To date its the most bang for my buck I've ever gotten for spending less than 5k. My boss took the credit, and I got reprimanded for being late on an unrelated deliverable. God I love I/T.
Not true for most people; the average schmo will have a computer with a proprietary motherboard (e.g. Dell), and the ubergeeks will scorn all boards that can be bought outside of Akihabara or some other exotic tech mecca. I'm not that rabid, but I still don't go down to Best Buy and buy a crap motherboard...Though I did buy a power supply there once.
As for Knoppix, if you commonly corrupt your bootloader to the point where you can no longer access the machine, I recommend you burn yourself a copy next time you have access to a functional computer. A facility with Knoppix and a bunch of spare knoppix disks kept on hand will save you a world of grief. The Knoppix STD is right up there with the tone wand, the multitool, and the Fluke in my geek emergency kit.
Heh. Yea, he's "cognizant" of them all right.
I can't see how this won't be misused. "Where were you on the night of the 1st?" "I think I was at home..." "Well you weren't! Here are the thermal satellite images to prove it!"
Seriously. This is a wet dream for the cops.
No, not really. You've got to expect to lose machines; failure happens. Could have been a motherboard or a power supply. I'd still expect you to be able to boot from CD though. You try knoppix? You should be able to boot to knoppix, then mount the /boot partition and have your way with grub.
The thing is, a network topology is wildly different from a computer. It should be designed for parts of it to drop off, and parts to go berserk...These things happen all the time. It should be designed with a minimum of bottlenecks, and it should be extremely easy to identify and isolate problems.