Why are flying cars stupid? Because energy is not free. All other issues are minor; physics and resources costs come first.
F= ma. So that is ( 100mph horizontal + approximately 100mph vertical fall ) x mass
Packaging is only designed to handle about a 5 ft drop so we are looking at a safety risk.
For safety reasons drones have to SEE that means it will be difficult to prevent alternative uses for the cameras!
Nobody is thinking about the obvious: ROBOT TRUCKS with flying delivery for the last 5-30m from the truck. A flying bees nest of drones begins to make it practical. Robots navigating to doors is incredibly difficult and risky but flying that last 30m makes it a far easier problem. Plus the truck can monitor the whole process (and recharge the drones which will always have limited range since they waste most their energy LIFTING.)
He was recently elected; he isn't getting any points for doing this now - if that were the case he'd wait many years before doing this.
He needs media attention to create pressure and build momentum plus we have the worst congress probably in our history so stuff like this is all that has a chance of passing. It still won't end up with a law during this congress.
All the sensor data and controls should go into the box; that will tell you what was going on far far more than a blurry video. You could store the state of every single control in detail over time for hours in the space it takes to store a few frames of video. Besides that you could use such information to find patterns in how they handle disaster situations which could be used for education and design... and A.I. Pilot suicides like this are extremely rare... but we want to spend a ton of money so we can watch the person tilt the thing down into the ground on CNN in a loop for a few days.
You only know because they caught the man; in the USA the guy would still be free and nobody would be the wiser.
If somebody noticed anything fishy the usual lazy excuse of "It's not my job" would prevent actions from being taken; unless, you can be fired or sued few people here lift a finger.... and if you do take selfless initiative you are equally at risk of being fired or sued.
It will be harder to fool a majority of everybody than a majority of 50% who bother to vote. Just think about it, the people you fool WILL GO VOTE and the people you don't will either abstain or vote for the opposition.
When you notice the impact of impulsive people who don't care and pick major candidates is when you've gamed the public to the point where your election is so close that anything; including the weather, could decide who wins. The MORE people the more difficult it is to game the majority of the populace.
Majority rule does not produce the best results but it is the RESPONSIBILITY of the majority for how happy they are with their results. It is their fault if they are a bunch of sheep; you can't excuse yourself from civic duty as easily when you have to at least participate.
You have to be a moron to fall for the "right to abstain" argument. Everybody can go to vote and not choose any candidate or write in a joke candidate. But to argue Ayn Rand with the usual appeal to absolute freedom is ignoring a fundamental concept of civilization; your duty to society.
If you really want to punish somebody horribly, make them live in 1 cage their whole life. Let them work on stuff; maybe they'll do something worthwhile in their cage.
Being first to market doesn't count then... Trade secrets still continue today and corporate espionage is at an all time high. So they still have plenty to hide which they can not patent. Before patents, or even before they existed as they do today there was plenty going on in the world and secrets were a bigger deal. Things did disappear as a result but things also leaked out.
Innovation is a meaningless word today. Mostly it is applied to things that are not true inventions but applications of inventions by others.
There are reasons to invent which will continue without patents. The significant inventions are largely outside the corporate world anyhow. They will invent ways to bring true innovations to market because a profit can still be had-- just not as much of one for as long. In some cases growth slows. But you can't really prove that current experiment is the best; it's merely a belief, an assertion.
I think most of today's patents have little to do with making the world better for the inventor's children. You also act like it's all made up of people in their garages; when it is not; also the people in low income situations are an insignificantly small proportion. Maybe there is an argument to be had from providing some dream like someday becoming a pro-sportsman but the odds of that are slim to the point of being false advertizing... but it may motivate some people so then it must be ethical right?
Some of us do things for other reasons. more mature reasons. exclusive ownership with the hope (not promise) of piles of money does not motivate everybody to the same degree. Academia is loaded with such people. Also the military has some people who are not there for the money...
The FCC and the executive branch have ZERO power to fix our internet EXCEPT under the administrative powers of the FCC which is fully within it's rights to classify ISPs under title 2.
This is the only thing they can really do; that previous move they made was stupid and bound to lose in the courts like it did.
What is really needed is a sane law to be passed which does actual Net Neutrality. But as anybody who has been paying attention (Faux News doesn't count) knows that our government is foobar. That isn't going to happen and if history is any guide, despotism is all we can realistically expect in the future and if people are lucky, a short lived one before another democracy forms. As is the life cycle of democracies... (see Ben Franklin's full speech which closed out the constitutional convention, it's always relevant.)
Anybody who's watched the EPA fight with some corporation knows it goes way beyond FUD tactics. They will try to setup roadblocks to even being regulated in the 1st place. Then after the information is gathered, they not only try to deny the facts and create uncertainty about them --even clear results-- but their P.R. people attack witnesses, officials, the agency, and they almost always fund attacks against the EPA, government regulation, and fund politicians who do the same (or buy them to do that;) it's not even well hidden because we don't have any good journalists to point out the "other side" is usually just a few corporations (and their hired PR hitmen.)
They also will fund PR campaigns about how smoking is good for you, etc. hire some PhD whores (from brothels called "think tanks,") or advertize how we are not using ingredient X anymore, when they just lowered it's amount or choose something they knew was worse. Even more diabolical are the TV ads they will buy that don't sell anything at all just so the TV news will not report bad things about them. This includes PBS. I knew people who worked in TV news; it happens!
They'll also dodge and ignore things even in court to drag out the product sales as long as possible knowing people are dying and even when the court proves their whole plan they just get a small monetary fine which still made it worth doing (thinking of Merck. ) The process is quite similar because we have an industry of experts who know how to game the whole system who help anybody with enough $ to hire them.
Nuclear power is in the billions to build a plant. We have 2 in the USA that are not coming cheap. It NEVER includes all the free or really cheap government services that nuclear power gets and needs. You complain about wind but nuclear burns money and costs more than solar; graft is always included for both. Thing is, with big massive centralized power generation you have a few powerful players who's political pull is greater than smaller more distributed alternatives (unless the smaller players can unite.)
I've read many times that no nuclear power station in the USA has ever made a profit. ever. not without accounting games shifting the cost onto tax payers. It's a game of stealing as much money as possible; not making legitimate profit. I know in my area they will build stations with lots of bonuses/incentives and low interest loans etc-- then years later get even more taken off if not chucking the remainder of the debt plus expansions of tax-free periods etc. (in the name of jobs, but really these new jobs are being subsidized.) Maybe 30 years later it gets even but the debt and incentives are not repaid. But to be fair, power generation is infrastructure that helps the local economy in ways you can't directly measure... like roads. but it would be better if it were handled like the roads... which have less overhead and work just as well.
Good luck trying to actually prove that not having patents does more harm than having sane patents. You can't really prove it. It was another social experiment like the ones before it. Without patents, people will sit on secrets and use security by obscurity which could prevent or lose inventions that benefit society. Which is the reason patents were created; however, today we better understand this situation. Furthermore, this is the information age where secrets are not well hidden for long.
Employers have to be careful with their secrets... but because of patents they don't have to worry much about secrets leaking out so their employees are disposable... not entirely because there is plenty of stuff they can't OWN so they try to force people into non-compete contracts so they can screw over more employees! The paranoia of competition never really goes away even for the many monopolies (who worry about democracy and the free market so they attack it constantly. the true traitors.)
Sure some inventions wouldn't happen; but a great deal of the big inventions come from publicly funded sources who do most the groundwork if not nearly everything up to the mass production stage. Sure, we now have private funding playing a bigger role at undermining our research institutions but they used to be better funded... Also we used to do research without patents PREVENTING and adding to the cost of doing important research that benefits all of humanity.
Great discoveries are not happening because some prof and his students are unable to use patented techniques or because they only can get grants for better Viagra and not for dull groundwork but fundamental to future discovery.
You have no duty or responsibility for your fellow man, only you matter and the rest of the world can go to hell.
Even further, you are not your brother's keeper even if Jesus said so!
Second hand smoke bother you? well fuck off and die! I'm not giving up my cigarettes you communist!
Humans did ok for most their existence without cars... but now you have one we can't possibly ADAPT to new circumstances... because you don't want to be inconvenienced.
Makes me wonder if WW2 could be won today with so many selfish wimps unwilling to make any sacrifice for the greater good... or even thinking the greater good means anything other than what directly benefits themselves...
Google's next project after that failed glasses thing:
The Google House
Most the stuff is FREE but you must log-in to enter your house. It tracks everything you do and keeps that information forever!
Your phone or grocery store advertizes that you might like to buy some bran muffins. no reason... (except Google House recognized you were constipated today.)
All 3 branches in the US are broken, including most of the 4th estate.
Not only do broken systems allow for corruption but one of the BEST ways to do corruption is by breaking the system!
Congress is so far worse with the worst approval ratings in history; far worse than the executive and they end up re-elected anyway. The industrial military complex has almost completely gamed that democratic body. The reason all three largely move in the same direction while in fighting is because the entire game is rigged... like a Casino, people win/lose but the house always wins (unless Trump owns it.)
Does anybody ever consider the NSA and government system spies on upcoming politicians and most likely officials who hold office as well?
Does anybody notice how people who are strong critics end up in office only paying lip service to positions they legitimately held before they had any power? If not entirely flipping their previous positions?
We've caught the military using PsyOps to win over Senators. You think that is all that has ever happened??
The UK is so in bed with our industrial military spy complex one expects them to parrot each other if not experiment in the UK before trying it out here.
So... Walmart needs worker drones, they are the customer and the education system manufactures worker drones to their specifications?
Cost externalization is another new MBA philosophy being pushed in all aspects possible. Even though all the great progress of the past was not done using these new techniques and new economics we will just hammer every nail with the same new MBA hammer.
Don't train employees... Don't give them any reason to stick around if you do train them. Externalize all your needs by blaming everybody else for not providing that for you-- externalize the cost of employee training (that is, after you externalize all the employees you can to China or India.) Complain colleges don't train your employees enough because naturally your XYZ framework is the only one which matters so the school should teach that instead of useless theory...
The "product" is not up to shifting arbitrary and highly biased expectations. We need more H1B Visas because American workers are now all retarded because of the schools; we can't even find people with 10 years of experience in 5 year old technologies anymore!
Education was always a political issue and always will be one I did not say that it wasn't. The shift in the voting population's PRIORITIES of the issue is what caused it to be elevated to a major issue. At some point it shifted up just 1 position into the top 5 list and became a football.
Administrators are not voted in by the staff; they are hired by politicians. The public likes simple stats - which is why they'll vote for a sheriff with higher arrest numbers even though he got those by skipping real police work for arresting minor offenders that can't be convicted (or more likely plea.)
The union has less power than ever before. The union has it's own political problems and can't ever seem to win against the onslaught of BS coming from all sides.
There is a widespread propaganda war being waged and the public is falling for it. Everybody thinks they are a dentist because they had some teeth pulled. THAT is a big problem here as well.
As far as my family of teachers, we all have a lot of leeway; except in the standardized testing of simplistic metrics... where every year a huge amount of education time is LOST only prepping for gaming the exams. Art teachers not doing art, but teaching to the english test; etc. Perfect is the enemy of good. Some people need to fail and some deserve to fail -- children need to be left behind so the majority and the gifted can continue forward. No, not permanently behind. The only thing good about the technology ideas is how they can customize to an individual level-- and not imposing 1 size fits all. The smart approach would be to profile students and group them by learning styles and emotional problems. COST is a huge factor which is why class sizes are the way they are...
I'm not anti-technology (I built my own stuff) but we can't even measure outcomes competently so how can we seriously evaluate these technology experiments on children.
The real problem in modern education in the USA is that the Republicans entered into the issue. I'm not saying their ideas are all horrible; but that the political fight was so much smaller so the teachers and schools were not in the middle of a political culture war. You see, what really started the mess was that public polling showed voters ranked education higher in priority than in the past and that turned it into a two party political football. The rest is a bunch of policies and ideas which have zero basis in reality and everything to do about sounding good, getting votes, and political BRANDING. SO BOTH PARTIES WORK TO DESTROY IT like everything else they touch these days. That has harmed the system greatly which only reflects the broken political system, just another thing that precedes the collapse of a once great democracy.
Furthermore, education is not a business. You can't turn education into an easy statistic like sales and students are NOT customers!! They are not supposed to be happy customers with a "your #1" sticker handed out to everybody and every parent is immune from criticism. The culture is all fucked up; used to be the student was to blame, now the special snowflakes are perfect and the teacher is always the problem.
Yes, technology needs to be PROVEN before it's allowed to be used. SCIENCE should decide everything. That means parents (voters) will be pleased. automated tests have yet to be intelligent. I can interview a student and assess them quicker and more accurately than any static test plus they can't ever fool me. But in the land of lawsuits somebody will be upset they didn't get their "your #1" sticker... while the multiple choice exam allows many times more to sneak bye or undeservedly fail.
SCIENCE: We can't even adjust school hours to fit best with sleeping patterns of the children when that stuff has been known forever.
Science says that middle school kids shouldn't even be educated conventionally. They need emotional development training and stuff so out of the norm many people would revolt. Most education problems are psychologically based and their parents and environment are HUGE factors. If you apply developmental psychology instead of acting like it doesn't exist, you would turn poor performing students, future criminals, and fragile suicide kids into good students and functional adults. Naturally, parents would be upset because they'd have responsibilities, something which they avoid like everything today.
Parents want free daycare. Some need it too. Snow days not only cause parents to call in irate, but it also means some children DO NOT EAT.
There is so much wrong which has so much more impact-- but we only can discuss a FEW issues and wave some shiny new toy in the public's eye... like they were children.
You can't be free without a cost. If lawyers are going to continue to ruin society, we need to curb them... but given how democracy is failing those issues are really sideshow to the real problems. Cutting down on misinformation and ignorance are one of the few things left that can be done to support democracy.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly this.
Why are flying cars stupid? Because energy is not free. All other issues are minor; physics and resources costs come first.
F= ma. So that is ( 100mph horizontal + approximately 100mph vertical fall ) x mass
Packaging is only designed to handle about a 5 ft drop so we are looking at a safety risk.
For safety reasons drones have to SEE that means it will be difficult to prevent alternative uses for the cameras!
Nobody is thinking about the obvious: ROBOT TRUCKS with flying delivery for the last 5-30m from the truck. A flying bees nest of drones begins to make it practical. Robots navigating to doors is incredibly difficult and risky but flying that last 30m makes it a far easier problem. Plus the truck can monitor the whole process (and recharge the drones which will always have limited range since they waste most their energy LIFTING.)
He was recently elected; he isn't getting any points for doing this now - if that were the case he'd wait many years before doing this.
He needs media attention to create pressure and build momentum plus we have the worst congress probably in our history so stuff like this is all that has a chance of passing. It still won't end up with a law during this congress.
All the sensor data and controls should go into the box; that will tell you what was going on far far more than a blurry video. You could store the state of every single control in detail over time for hours in the space it takes to store a few frames of video. Besides that you could use such information to find patterns in how they handle disaster situations which could be used for education and design... and A.I. Pilot suicides like this are extremely rare... but we want to spend a ton of money so we can watch the person tilt the thing down into the ground on CNN in a loop for a few days.
You only know because they caught the man; in the USA the guy would still be free and nobody would be the wiser.
If somebody noticed anything fishy the usual lazy excuse of "It's not my job" would prevent actions from being taken; unless, you can be fired or sued few people here lift a finger.... and if you do take selfless initiative you are equally at risk of being fired or sued.
I'm all for taxes on people who do not understand math. They should help lower taxes for those who do.
It will be harder to fool a majority of everybody than a majority of 50% who bother to vote. Just think about it, the people you fool WILL GO VOTE and the people you don't will either abstain or vote for the opposition.
When you notice the impact of impulsive people who don't care and pick major candidates is when you've gamed the public to the point where your election is so close that anything; including the weather, could decide who wins. The MORE people the more difficult it is to game the majority of the populace.
Majority rule does not produce the best results but it is the RESPONSIBILITY of the majority for how happy they are with their results. It is their fault if they are a bunch of sheep; you can't excuse yourself from civic duty as easily when you have to at least participate.
You have to be a moron to fall for the "right to abstain" argument. Everybody can go to vote and not choose any candidate or write in a joke candidate. But to argue Ayn Rand with the usual appeal to absolute freedom is ignoring a fundamental concept of civilization; your duty to society.
Exactly this.
If you really want to punish somebody horribly, make them live in 1 cage their whole life. Let them work on stuff; maybe they'll do something worthwhile in their cage.
Being first to market doesn't count then... Trade secrets still continue today and corporate espionage is at an all time high. So they still have plenty to hide which they can not patent. Before patents, or even before they existed as they do today there was plenty going on in the world and secrets were a bigger deal. Things did disappear as a result but things also leaked out.
Innovation is a meaningless word today. Mostly it is applied to things that are not true inventions but applications of inventions by others.
There are reasons to invent which will continue without patents. The significant inventions are largely outside the corporate world anyhow. They will invent ways to bring true innovations to market because a profit can still be had-- just not as much of one for as long. In some cases growth slows. But you can't really prove that current experiment is the best; it's merely a belief, an assertion.
I think most of today's patents have little to do with making the world better for the inventor's children. You also act like it's all made up of people in their garages; when it is not; also the people in low income situations are an insignificantly small proportion. Maybe there is an argument to be had from providing some dream like someday becoming a pro-sportsman but the odds of that are slim to the point of being false advertizing... but it may motivate some people so then it must be ethical right?
Some of us do things for other reasons. more mature reasons. exclusive ownership with the hope (not promise) of piles of money does not motivate everybody to the same degree. Academia is loaded with such people. Also the military has some people who are not there for the money...
The FCC and the executive branch have ZERO power to fix our internet EXCEPT under the administrative powers of the FCC which is fully within it's rights to classify ISPs under title 2.
This is the only thing they can really do; that previous move they made was stupid and bound to lose in the courts like it did.
What is really needed is a sane law to be passed which does actual Net Neutrality. But as anybody who has been paying attention (Faux News doesn't count) knows that our government is foobar. That isn't going to happen and if history is any guide, despotism is all we can realistically expect in the future and if people are lucky, a short lived one before another democracy forms. As is the life cycle of democracies... (see Ben Franklin's full speech which closed out the constitutional convention, it's always relevant.)
TOTALLY! all the time. in fact I wish my game music would play 2 or 3 times longer for each song.
Anybody who's watched the EPA fight with some corporation knows it goes way beyond FUD tactics. They will try to setup roadblocks to even being regulated in the 1st place. Then after the information is gathered, they not only try to deny the facts and create uncertainty about them --even clear results-- but their P.R. people attack witnesses, officials, the agency, and they almost always fund attacks against the EPA, government regulation, and fund politicians who do the same (or buy them to do that;) it's not even well hidden because we don't have any good journalists to point out the "other side" is usually just a few corporations (and their hired PR hitmen.)
They also will fund PR campaigns about how smoking is good for you, etc. hire some PhD whores (from brothels called "think tanks,") or advertize how we are not using ingredient X anymore, when they just lowered it's amount or choose something they knew was worse. Even more diabolical are the TV ads they will buy that don't sell anything at all just so the TV news will not report bad things about them. This includes PBS. I knew people who worked in TV news; it happens!
They'll also dodge and ignore things even in court to drag out the product sales as long as possible knowing people are dying and even when the court proves their whole plan they just get a small monetary fine which still made it worth doing (thinking of Merck. ) The process is quite similar because we have an industry of experts who know how to game the whole system who help anybody with enough $ to hire them.
Nuclear power is in the billions to build a plant. We have 2 in the USA that are not coming cheap. It NEVER includes all the free or really cheap government services that nuclear power gets and needs. You complain about wind but nuclear burns money and costs more than solar; graft is always included for both. Thing is, with big massive centralized power generation you have a few powerful players who's political pull is greater than smaller more distributed alternatives (unless the smaller players can unite.)
I've read many times that no nuclear power station in the USA has ever made a profit. ever. not without accounting games shifting the cost onto tax payers. It's a game of stealing as much money as possible; not making legitimate profit. I know in my area they will build stations with lots of bonuses/incentives and low interest loans etc-- then years later get even more taken off if not chucking the remainder of the debt plus expansions of tax-free periods etc. (in the name of jobs, but really these new jobs are being subsidized.) Maybe 30 years later it gets even but the debt and incentives are not repaid. But to be fair, power generation is infrastructure that helps the local economy in ways you can't directly measure... like roads. but it would be better if it were handled like the roads... which have less overhead and work just as well.
Good luck trying to actually prove that not having patents does more harm than having sane patents. You can't really prove it. It was another social experiment like the ones before it. Without patents, people will sit on secrets and use security by obscurity which could prevent or lose inventions that benefit society. Which is the reason patents were created; however, today we better understand this situation. Furthermore, this is the information age where secrets are not well hidden for long.
Employers have to be careful with their secrets... but because of patents they don't have to worry much about secrets leaking out so their employees are disposable... not entirely because there is plenty of stuff they can't OWN so they try to force people into non-compete contracts so they can screw over more employees! The paranoia of competition never really goes away even for the many monopolies (who worry about democracy and the free market so they attack it constantly. the true traitors.)
Sure some inventions wouldn't happen; but a great deal of the big inventions come from publicly funded sources who do most the groundwork if not nearly everything up to the mass production stage. Sure, we now have private funding playing a bigger role at undermining our research institutions but they used to be better funded... Also we used to do research without patents PREVENTING and adding to the cost of doing important research that benefits all of humanity.
Great discoveries are not happening because some prof and his students are unable to use patented techniques or because they only can get grants for better Viagra and not for dull groundwork but fundamental to future discovery.
It's only slightly better than living in a giant spinning space station... or in a bomb shelter right here.
Anything you can do on mars, robots can do better. already.
You have no duty or responsibility for your fellow man, only you matter and the rest of the world can go to hell.
Even further, you are not your brother's keeper even if Jesus said so!
Second hand smoke bother you? well fuck off and die! I'm not giving up my cigarettes you communist!
Humans did ok for most their existence without cars... but now you have one we can't possibly ADAPT to new circumstances... because you don't want to be inconvenienced.
Makes me wonder if WW2 could be won today with so many selfish wimps unwilling to make any sacrifice for the greater good... or even thinking the greater good means anything other than what directly benefits themselves...
Google's next project after that failed glasses thing:
The Google House
Most the stuff is FREE but you must log-in to enter your house. It tracks everything you do and keeps that information forever!
Your phone or grocery store advertizes that you might like to buy some bran muffins. no reason... (except Google House recognized you were constipated today.)
All 3 branches in the US are broken, including most of the 4th estate.
Not only do broken systems allow for corruption but one of the BEST ways to do corruption is by breaking the system!
Congress is so far worse with the worst approval ratings in history; far worse than the executive and they end up re-elected anyway. The industrial military complex has almost completely gamed that democratic body. The reason all three largely move in the same direction while in fighting is because the entire game is rigged... like a Casino, people win/lose but the house always wins (unless Trump owns it.)
Does anybody ever consider the NSA and government system spies on upcoming politicians and most likely officials who hold office as well?
Does anybody notice how people who are strong critics end up in office only paying lip service to positions they legitimately held before they had any power? If not entirely flipping their previous positions?
We've caught the military using PsyOps to win over Senators. You think that is all that has ever happened??
The UK is so in bed with our industrial military spy complex one expects them to parrot each other if not experiment in the UK before trying it out here.
So... Walmart needs worker drones, they are the customer and the education system manufactures worker drones to their specifications?
Cost externalization is another new MBA philosophy being pushed in all aspects possible. Even though all the great progress of the past was not done using these new techniques and new economics we will just hammer every nail with the same new MBA hammer.
Don't train employees... Don't give them any reason to stick around if you do train them. Externalize all your needs by blaming everybody else for not providing that for you-- externalize the cost of employee training (that is, after you externalize all the employees you can to China or India.) Complain colleges don't train your employees enough because naturally your XYZ framework is the only one which matters so the school should teach that instead of useless theory...
The "product" is not up to shifting arbitrary and highly biased expectations. We need more H1B Visas because American workers are now all retarded because of the schools; we can't even find people with 10 years of experience in 5 year old technologies anymore!
Education was always a political issue and always will be one I did not say that it wasn't. The shift in the voting population's PRIORITIES of the issue is what caused it to be elevated to a major issue. At some point it shifted up just 1 position into the top 5 list and became a football.
Administrators are not voted in by the staff; they are hired by politicians. The public likes simple stats - which is why they'll vote for a sheriff with higher arrest numbers even though he got those by skipping real police work for arresting minor offenders that can't be convicted (or more likely plea.)
The union has less power than ever before. The union has it's own political problems and can't ever seem to win against the onslaught of BS coming from all sides.
There is a widespread propaganda war being waged and the public is falling for it. Everybody thinks they are a dentist because they had some teeth pulled. THAT is a big problem here as well.
As far as my family of teachers, we all have a lot of leeway; except in the standardized testing of simplistic metrics... where every year a huge amount of education time is LOST only prepping for gaming the exams. Art teachers not doing art, but teaching to the english test; etc. Perfect is the enemy of good. Some people need to fail and some deserve to fail -- children need to be left behind so the majority and the gifted can continue forward. No, not permanently behind. The only thing good about the technology ideas is how they can customize to an individual level-- and not imposing 1 size fits all. The smart approach would be to profile students and group them by learning styles and emotional problems. COST is a huge factor which is why class sizes are the way they are...
I'm not anti-technology (I built my own stuff) but we can't even measure outcomes competently so how can we seriously evaluate these technology experiments on children.
I know about education; I'm in the field too.
The real problem in modern education in the USA is that the Republicans entered into the issue. I'm not saying their ideas are all horrible; but that the political fight was so much smaller so the teachers and schools were not in the middle of a political culture war. You see, what really started the mess was that public polling showed voters ranked education higher in priority than in the past and that turned it into a two party political football. The rest is a bunch of policies and ideas which have zero basis in reality and everything to do about sounding good, getting votes, and political BRANDING. SO BOTH PARTIES WORK TO DESTROY IT like everything else they touch these days. That has harmed the system greatly which only reflects the broken political system, just another thing that precedes the collapse of a once great democracy.
Furthermore, education is not a business. You can't turn education into an easy statistic like sales and students are NOT customers!! They are not supposed to be happy customers with a "your #1" sticker handed out to everybody and every parent is immune from criticism. The culture is all fucked up; used to be the student was to blame, now the special snowflakes are perfect and the teacher is always the problem.
Yes, technology needs to be PROVEN before it's allowed to be used. SCIENCE should decide everything. That means parents (voters) will be pleased. automated tests have yet to be intelligent. I can interview a student and assess them quicker and more accurately than any static test plus they can't ever fool me. But in the land of lawsuits somebody will be upset they didn't get their "your #1" sticker... while the multiple choice exam allows many times more to sneak bye or undeservedly fail.
SCIENCE:
We can't even adjust school hours to fit best with sleeping patterns of the children when that stuff has been known forever.
Science says that middle school kids shouldn't even be educated conventionally. They need emotional development training and stuff so out of the norm many people would revolt. Most education problems are psychologically based and their parents and environment are HUGE factors. If you apply developmental psychology instead of acting like it doesn't exist, you would turn poor performing students, future criminals, and fragile suicide kids into good students and functional adults. Naturally, parents would be upset because they'd have responsibilities, something which they avoid like everything today.
Parents want free daycare. Some need it too. Snow days not only cause parents to call in irate, but it also means some children DO NOT EAT.
There is so much wrong which has so much more impact-- but we only can discuss a FEW issues and wave some shiny new toy in the public's eye... like they were children.
They act far more like Cardassians, they should use the planet that fits their role best.
Vulcan's only pull that crap in that lousy Enterprise series.
Whatever that USSR joke line is. but reversed.
You can't be free without a cost. If lawyers are going to continue to ruin society, we need to curb them... but given how democracy is failing those issues are really sideshow to the real problems. Cutting down on misinformation and ignorance are one of the few things left that can be done to support democracy.