Of course, the terrorists wouldn't be smart enough to follow the giant train of large yellow things at 7:30-8am. Nor the hordes of small Americans, all walking the same direction.
A more effective plan would be to build big underground bunkers, and not let the children ever come out.
Pretty much their entire business is built on selling chemicals. A lot of them have been turned into "food simulation" products. You know, shit that seems something like food, but is not food. That or "food which isn't normal food because we fucked with it". Examples include:
Aspartame Saccharin Agent Orange Dioxin and PCBs rBGH RoundUp Genetically modified crops resistant to RoundUp One-use seeds which produce infertile crops And pick pretty much any lawsuit world-wide involving scary-ass GM crops
The biggest hurdle is actually cost. Yes, you heard me right. Linux costs more than MS does. "How can that be", you ask?
In my school, all our computers are heavily subsidized by MS. As a result of a lawsuit against MS, my state (and many others) received huge "settlements", in the absolutely ridiculous form of technology grants. That means, MS pays for most of our shit. From Smartboards to the hundreds of dell PCs we have in the school, most is funded by MS.
And of course, this makes great sense for them. Indoctrinate early, and the payoffs will happen later in life, when some of these people are in purchasing positions at their business.
If Red Hat came to us, and offered to subsidize 100 computers to make them cost us $100 each, loaded with software, we'd probably take them up on it. If Novell, after a lawsuit, gave us a technology grant in the way of computers pre-loaded with Suse, we'd take it.
As it is, the only company throwing computers and money at us is Microsoft. Lunix has to compete with that subsidization, and it's not easy, even when the OS and apps are free. We get far more than that out of MS at the moment. Plus, the environment is now homogenized. Breaking out of that is hard as well, as admin duties and training and software offerings all need to expand. Breaking into education is not an easy task. I hand out the occasional Ubuntu cd, but those go home.
sudo post anonymously requesting a sandwich in return for up-modding, so that you can actually mod rather than ruining it by posting first while logged in.
Where do you live? I just recently gave up on deli-sliced meat when everything topped $8/lb here in the NE US. It's far cheaper for me to buy regular cuts of meat and cook them myself, than to buy deli stuff.
And if you don't want to risk the $20 (well worth it) download the demo. It's the entire first 1/4 of the game.
I've purchased several copies as gifts so far - they give you a customizable download page when you purchase a copy. You can write your own message, and afaict, the full-copy download link is good for quite some time. Downloading my linux copy off the link I was mailed when I purchased my copy back in December.
And they're still small enough that you'll get an email back if you write to them.
I've been saying that for about a decade now. And that's the reason we'll both never be president. You're not going to get much support if it looks like you're going to mess up a system which "just works" for the folks currently in the system. And I highly doubt that either of us will ever be a viable third party candidate, given this country's history with them.
All I have left is to vote for "not a Republican or a Democrat" in every election. That and explain what I'm doing and why to those around me. I doubt it will change much, but at least I'm doing something. John McCain showed pretty clearly that you can't be a "maverick" and change a party from the inside. The only thing you can do is try to reduce their influence. And I doubt that will happen.
My back-up plan is to move to a more sensible country. It was going to be Iceland, but I'm not so sure now. They've not been doing so well lately either.
I just posted a semi-rant to some friends about a woman I work with who was charged by Dell $350 to wipe her virus-ridden machine. She lost all her photos and documents, because $350 isn't enough to save them, apparently. I do wonder how it would have gone if she had instead been instructed to install Ubuntu on the free space of the drive, and been shown how to find her pictures.
My second point was that Apple did the linux world a ton of good with the misleading "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" commercials. That was a nice introduction to the masses regarding the fact that there is more than one platform, and that they are not alike, nor are they interchangeable. I questioned how a similarly misleading "I'm Linux, and I'm like a free version of OSX that will run on your slow/infected/broken PC" set of commercials would help the linux world out.
Mandate a distro, and six different groups will fork it to make it specialize in what they want. The "there can be only one" statement shows a proprietary mindset. You can't force linux to be anything. The best you can do is support the distribution you like the most, and hope that other people support it as well.
I'm well aware of this, but what do I call it when I installed my home directory on a separate partition, and installed stuff to it under three different linux operating systems and a dozen different point versions? Under the current one, they all work. Should I switch, they would probably still work.
What do I use? Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu? Or do I say "I Use Linux", because that provides the common functionality which lets all the above things run.
When talking to a fellow Linux dork, I'll use OS and version, and perhaps kernel number. When I'm talking to windows users, I use the word "Linux". Because if you live in that world, all the rest is mumbo-jumbo. Most computer users use the word Windows or Computer to describe everything, including their hardware and all software. If you want to speak their language, you need to use "Linux" in the same way.
Trying to educate people on the semantics of computer nomenclature is generally a pointless endeavor. I'd rather they have a minimal amount of knowledge about the existence of alternate platforms than tune me out as a boring pedant.
Change it starting where? Ultimately, it needs to be done everywhere at once. (Well, maybe from the top down, but I don't know if that would work.) There are just too many players for that to happen.
At the very top are things like the Medical Boards and the Bar Exam. Below those are all the college classes which prep for those exams. Below those are the SATs and ACTs which are the standardized pre-college tests. Below those are the state standardized exams. (now required by the NCLB act) And now we are discussing on a local level making our personal exams have a similar breakdown of question types to make sure students are familiar with the state testing format.
How do you change all of those testing systems, and make them so that students demonstrate learning rather than memorization? In the old days, you'd apprentice under a master, and when he was satisfied, you'd be on your way to fame and fortune.
I'm convinced now that standardization is the root of all evil. It has made our system of education useless for most students, horrifically uncompetitive, and does not teach many lasting lessons. However, I see no way to fix it. Between the state and federal laws, incomplete, apathetic, and financially driven public opinion, the ignorance of administrators and lawmakers, teaching unions and higher education, I can't see any major changes being made.
How do you start changing a system which the entire voting populace was indoctrinated into?
Because it's not news that a student asked me (a teacher) if I could burn him some Ubuntu isos, because his windows machine kept screwing up the burn. I happily did, and explained to a few other kids who were around for the hand-off about how it's both free to do so, legal, and encouraged.
But that's not exciting, doesn't draw ad revenue, it's not outrageous, won't get linked to, and nobody will remember it a week or a month from now. So it doesn't get a slashdot headline, nor does it make it into the blog-spam-o-sphere.
I wonder how many times the GP's comment needs to be posted and answered before all the idiots here understand that there are non-browser ways to download things?
I had assumed that between bit torrent clients, other peer-to-peer software, instant messages, email, and ftp sites that most people would understand that there is more than one protocol to transfer data over the internet. And that list excludes some protocols more common under *NIX.
Actually, it's not that teachers are - it's that the entire system is. I'm far from a bureaucrat. I'd love to have students demonstrate that they can DO things. However, our entire system is designed around filling heads with facts, and having those heads regurgitate those same facts at a later time.
Our performance is judged based on state-wide standardized tests. We could be great teachers with the most amazing and creative students, but if they can't recall on command all the facts we are supposed to teach, we're considered failures.
Have a lot of teachers succumbed to this system? Of course. There is a selection bias to begin with, and there is a lack of long-term survival if you don't "teach to the test". As I pointed out in an Education class once, "So we're not supposed to teach to the test, but our performance is judged based on the results of the test? Do you not see how illogical that statement is?"
A good example of this is the game World of Go. It's a great little puzzle game, and the first 1/4 of the game is available for free. If you like that much, it's a no-brainer to drop $20 on the rest of it, since you can download and install it in all of 10 minutes on a good connection. They make it easy to try, and easy to buy. No stupid DRM, and multi-platform. (Linux port is still in beta, but progressing fast.)
Nice idea, but if people at large were taught how to think, then the government as it exists today would not last long.
You cynical bastard..... Of course, you're 100% right. As a science teacher, I can clearly state that School isn't about learning to think, and developing logic. School is about learning to engage/disengage when you hear the bell. It's about being able to work the line, downtrodden with the rest of your social peers.
I had some high ideals for what Education was once. That was before getting a Master's degree in Education, and working in a public high school. I could be the best science teacher ever, do original research and instill thought and logic into my students. Except for a system that doesn't let me. By the time I see students in 9th grade, the #1 question they have is "What's the answer?", followed by "Am I right?".
As a science teacher, that kills me. Science is the PROCESS of FINDING that answer, of PROVING that you're right. When the base mechanic that all students operate under is right/wrong, with the answer as the most important thing, Science (and Education) has already lost.
Our state standardized test for Science is a largely multiple-choice, "do you remember what you were taught in Science?" test. Since WHEN is Science about regurgitating facts? It's not. But designing a test where students must figure something out on their own is hard to do, hard to score, and entirely outside much of their skillset, due to a life-time of fact regurgitation. This ties directly into religion as well, for such qualities are REQUIRED to be religious. You must be able to spit out the tenets of your faith. You must noe use use logic and question what's mashed into your head by those above you.
As a Science teacher, what am I to do? If our scores drop too much due to students being unable to barf out facts on command, then the administration takes a look at the department to see if we're doing our "jobs". And as our job is clearly to stuff the heads of mindless automatons with facts, until the bell rings and they move to the next filling station, those not doing that need to be seriously worried about their jobs. And that's as it should be - our society doesn't run on millions of individuals, having individual thoughts and doing individual things. It runs on Industry and Media. It runs on 3 types of beer, 2 types of soda, 3 major sports on TV, 2 types of reality show formats, 5 types of car, etc. It runs from bell to bell, then people drive in their similar cars, on the same roads, to their similar houses, and eat the same sorts of dinner. Anything else, and it all falls apart. And that, of course, must be weeded out and crushed somewhere - luckily school is mandatory, even if religion is not. The most effective schools and states have somehow combined the two.
And potentially any other data stolen anywhere else. Who's to say that these same individuals don't have a copy of the data from other big break-ins lying around.
If they managed to buy one of those databases, suddenly they have a massive amount of data-mining information available to them.
For sure. If a few friends hadn't given me several Opeth albums in mp3 format, I'd have never heard of them. Ditto for DevilDriver and maybe Lamb of God. (Yes, I'm a metal-head.) Between the 3 bands, I now have purchased 8-10 albums.
Now, did my friends give me more mp3s than just those? Of COURSE! Do I still have them? Yes. Should I probably delete them, since I never listen to them? Yes. Are they lost sales? No. I'd never had purchased the CDs in the first place, regardless of whether or not I keep the mp3s I have. But the bands I like, I support.
It's not worth risking a bottle of liquor on some band I don't know about. I'd rather have a bottle of liquor and a tried and true band to listen to than no liquor, and a crappy CD.
Scary, isn't it? I really don't know how it snowballed this far without any public outcry whatsoever. No artists, no lovers of old paintings, no nude society threatened by laws such as this, no parents group who just wants to post pics of their kids being kids. Where's the counter group to the nude=porn group?
For that matter, how sad is it that the group who professed free love, drugs, music, and burned their bras in the 60s make up a solid part of this current social wave? How long before the next counter-establishment movement?
I've been shouting about this for some time. The best answer I have found is that the following chain happened:
We don't like child molesters, someone do something about them! Laws are passed, people are happier. Politicians need a rallying cry, and who can resist "I'm doing this for the Safety of the Children"? Snowball begins...
When you're super-conservative, nudity=thinking forbidden thoughts=sin. Logical solution? Remove sources of nudity to prevent sin. As an added bonus, Think of the Children will garner votes.
It is ridiculously stupid. Ban nudity, and you ban most of the Renaissance painters. Those dirty, sinning pornographers.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, the terrorists wouldn't be smart enough to follow the giant train of large yellow things at 7:30-8am. Nor the hordes of small Americans, all walking the same direction.
A more effective plan would be to build big underground bunkers, and not let the children ever come out.
Pretty much their entire business is built on selling chemicals. A lot of them have been turned into "food simulation" products. You know, shit that seems something like food, but is not food. That or "food which isn't normal food because we fucked with it". Examples include:
Aspartame
Saccharin
Agent Orange
Dioxin and PCBs
rBGH
RoundUp
Genetically modified crops resistant to RoundUp
One-use seeds which produce infertile crops
And pick pretty much any lawsuit world-wide involving scary-ass GM crops
The biggest hurdle is actually cost. Yes, you heard me right. Linux costs more than MS does. "How can that be", you ask?
In my school, all our computers are heavily subsidized by MS. As a result of a lawsuit against MS, my state (and many others) received huge "settlements", in the absolutely ridiculous form of technology grants. That means, MS pays for most of our shit. From Smartboards to the hundreds of dell PCs we have in the school, most is funded by MS.
And of course, this makes great sense for them. Indoctrinate early, and the payoffs will happen later in life, when some of these people are in purchasing positions at their business.
If Red Hat came to us, and offered to subsidize 100 computers to make them cost us $100 each, loaded with software, we'd probably take them up on it. If Novell, after a lawsuit, gave us a technology grant in the way of computers pre-loaded with Suse, we'd take it.
As it is, the only company throwing computers and money at us is Microsoft. Lunix has to compete with that subsidization, and it's not easy, even when the OS and apps are free. We get far more than that out of MS at the moment. Plus, the environment is now homogenized. Breaking out of that is hard as well, as admin duties and training and software offerings all need to expand. Breaking into education is not an easy task. I hand out the occasional Ubuntu cd, but those go home.
Fail.
sudo post anonymously requesting a sandwich in return for up-modding, so that you can actually mod rather than ruining it by posting first while logged in.
DOH!
Have them build a water-drop electrostatic generator. Very doable on the time-frame and budget.
Where do you live? I just recently gave up on deli-sliced meat when everything topped $8/lb here in the NE US. It's far cheaper for me to buy regular cuts of meat and cook them myself, than to buy deli stuff.
Of course, I agree with the rest of your post.
And if you don't want to risk the $20 (well worth it) download the demo. It's the entire first 1/4 of the game.
I've purchased several copies as gifts so far - they give you a customizable download page when you purchase a copy. You can write your own message, and afaict, the full-copy download link is good for quite some time. Downloading my linux copy off the link I was mailed when I purchased my copy back in December.
And they're still small enough that you'll get an email back if you write to them.
There was some famous one once, about a monkey or something.
And who defines the media?
That is what scares me the most.
I've been saying that for about a decade now. And that's the reason we'll both never be president. You're not going to get much support if it looks like you're going to mess up a system which "just works" for the folks currently in the system. And I highly doubt that either of us will ever be a viable third party candidate, given this country's history with them.
All I have left is to vote for "not a Republican or a Democrat" in every election. That and explain what I'm doing and why to those around me. I doubt it will change much, but at least I'm doing something. John McCain showed pretty clearly that you can't be a "maverick" and change a party from the inside. The only thing you can do is try to reduce their influence. And I doubt that will happen.
My back-up plan is to move to a more sensible country. It was going to be Iceland, but I'm not so sure now. They've not been doing so well lately either.
I just posted a semi-rant to some friends about a woman I work with who was charged by Dell $350 to wipe her virus-ridden machine. She lost all her photos and documents, because $350 isn't enough to save them, apparently. I do wonder how it would have gone if she had instead been instructed to install Ubuntu on the free space of the drive, and been shown how to find her pictures.
My second point was that Apple did the linux world a ton of good with the misleading "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" commercials. That was a nice introduction to the masses regarding the fact that there is more than one platform, and that they are not alike, nor are they interchangeable. I questioned how a similarly misleading "I'm Linux, and I'm like a free version of OSX that will run on your slow/infected/broken PC" set of commercials would help the linux world out.
It's herding cats.
Mandate a distro, and six different groups will fork it to make it specialize in what they want. The "there can be only one" statement shows a proprietary mindset. You can't force linux to be anything. The best you can do is support the distribution you like the most, and hope that other people support it as well.
I'm well aware of this, but what do I call it when I installed my home directory on a separate partition, and installed stuff to it under three different linux operating systems and a dozen different point versions? Under the current one, they all work. Should I switch, they would probably still work.
What do I use? Gentoo, Ubuntu, and Kubuntu? Or do I say "I Use Linux", because that provides the common functionality which lets all the above things run.
When talking to a fellow Linux dork, I'll use OS and version, and perhaps kernel number. When I'm talking to windows users, I use the word "Linux". Because if you live in that world, all the rest is mumbo-jumbo. Most computer users use the word Windows or Computer to describe everything, including their hardware and all software. If you want to speak their language, you need to use "Linux" in the same way.
Trying to educate people on the semantics of computer nomenclature is generally a pointless endeavor. I'd rather they have a minimal amount of knowledge about the existence of alternate platforms than tune me out as a boring pedant.
Change it starting where? Ultimately, it needs to be done everywhere at once. (Well, maybe from the top down, but I don't know if that would work.) There are just too many players for that to happen.
At the very top are things like the Medical Boards and the Bar Exam. Below those are all the college classes which prep for those exams. Below those are the SATs and ACTs which are the standardized pre-college tests. Below those are the state standardized exams. (now required by the NCLB act) And now we are discussing on a local level making our personal exams have a similar breakdown of question types to make sure students are familiar with the state testing format.
How do you change all of those testing systems, and make them so that students demonstrate learning rather than memorization? In the old days, you'd apprentice under a master, and when he was satisfied, you'd be on your way to fame and fortune.
I'm convinced now that standardization is the root of all evil. It has made our system of education useless for most students, horrifically uncompetitive, and does not teach many lasting lessons. However, I see no way to fix it. Between the state and federal laws, incomplete, apathetic, and financially driven public opinion, the ignorance of administrators and lawmakers, teaching unions and higher education, I can't see any major changes being made.
How do you start changing a system which the entire voting populace was indoctrinated into?
Because it's not news that a student asked me (a teacher) if I could burn him some Ubuntu isos, because his windows machine kept screwing up the burn. I happily did, and explained to a few other kids who were around for the hand-off about how it's both free to do so, legal, and encouraged.
But that's not exciting, doesn't draw ad revenue, it's not outrageous, won't get linked to, and nobody will remember it a week or a month from now. So it doesn't get a slashdot headline, nor does it make it into the blog-spam-o-sphere.
Because it's a stupid, ignorant comment. I would assume that anyone familiar with the internet would have used one of the following to transfer data:
bit torrent clients
other peer-to-peer software
instant messages
email
ftp sites
or even scp
It is not like there aren't many common ways to transfer data.
I wonder how many times the GP's comment needs to be posted and answered before all the idiots here understand that there are non-browser ways to download things?
I had assumed that between bit torrent clients, other peer-to-peer software, instant messages, email, and ftp sites that most people would understand that there is more than one protocol to transfer data over the internet. And that list excludes some protocols more common under *NIX.
Actually, it's not that teachers are - it's that the entire system is. I'm far from a bureaucrat. I'd love to have students demonstrate that they can DO things. However, our entire system is designed around filling heads with facts, and having those heads regurgitate those same facts at a later time.
Our performance is judged based on state-wide standardized tests. We could be great teachers with the most amazing and creative students, but if they can't recall on command all the facts we are supposed to teach, we're considered failures.
Have a lot of teachers succumbed to this system? Of course. There is a selection bias to begin with, and there is a lack of long-term survival if you don't "teach to the test". As I pointed out in an Education class once, "So we're not supposed to teach to the test, but our performance is judged based on the results of the test? Do you not see how illogical that statement is?"
A good example of this is the game World of Go. It's a great little puzzle game, and the first 1/4 of the game is available for free. If you like that much, it's a no-brainer to drop $20 on the rest of it, since you can download and install it in all of 10 minutes on a good connection. They make it easy to try, and easy to buy. No stupid DRM, and multi-platform. (Linux port is still in beta, but progressing fast.)
Nice idea, but if people at large were taught how to think, then the government as it exists today would not last long.
You cynical bastard..... Of course, you're 100% right. As a science teacher, I can clearly state that School isn't about learning to think, and developing logic. School is about learning to engage/disengage when you hear the bell. It's about being able to work the line, downtrodden with the rest of your social peers.
I had some high ideals for what Education was once. That was before getting a Master's degree in Education, and working in a public high school. I could be the best science teacher ever, do original research and instill thought and logic into my students. Except for a system that doesn't let me. By the time I see students in 9th grade, the #1 question they have is "What's the answer?", followed by "Am I right?".
As a science teacher, that kills me. Science is the PROCESS of FINDING that answer, of PROVING that you're right. When the base mechanic that all students operate under is right/wrong, with the answer as the most important thing, Science (and Education) has already lost.
Our state standardized test for Science is a largely multiple-choice, "do you remember what you were taught in Science?" test. Since WHEN is Science about regurgitating facts? It's not. But designing a test where students must figure something out on their own is hard to do, hard to score, and entirely outside much of their skillset, due to a life-time of fact regurgitation. This ties directly into religion as well, for such qualities are REQUIRED to be religious. You must be able to spit out the tenets of your faith. You must noe use use logic and question what's mashed into your head by those above you.
As a Science teacher, what am I to do? If our scores drop too much due to students being unable to barf out facts on command, then the administration takes a look at the department to see if we're doing our "jobs". And as our job is clearly to stuff the heads of mindless automatons with facts, until the bell rings and they move to the next filling station, those not doing that need to be seriously worried about their jobs. And that's as it should be - our society doesn't run on millions of individuals, having individual thoughts and doing individual things. It runs on Industry and Media. It runs on 3 types of beer, 2 types of soda, 3 major sports on TV, 2 types of reality show formats, 5 types of car, etc. It runs from bell to bell, then people drive in their similar cars, on the same roads, to their similar houses, and eat the same sorts of dinner. Anything else, and it all falls apart. And that, of course, must be weeded out and crushed somewhere - luckily school is mandatory, even if religion is not. The most effective schools and states have somehow combined the two.
And potentially any other data stolen anywhere else. Who's to say that these same individuals don't have a copy of the data from other big break-ins lying around.
If they managed to buy one of those databases, suddenly they have a massive amount of data-mining information available to them.
For sure. If a few friends hadn't given me several Opeth albums in mp3 format, I'd have never heard of them. Ditto for DevilDriver and maybe Lamb of God. (Yes, I'm a metal-head.) Between the 3 bands, I now have purchased 8-10 albums.
Now, did my friends give me more mp3s than just those? Of COURSE! Do I still have them? Yes. Should I probably delete them, since I never listen to them? Yes. Are they lost sales? No. I'd never had purchased the CDs in the first place, regardless of whether or not I keep the mp3s I have. But the bands I like, I support.
It's not worth risking a bottle of liquor on some band I don't know about. I'd rather have a bottle of liquor and a tried and true band to listen to than no liquor, and a crappy CD.
Unlike the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court....
Scary, isn't it? I really don't know how it snowballed this far without any public outcry whatsoever. No artists, no lovers of old paintings, no nude society threatened by laws such as this, no parents group who just wants to post pics of their kids being kids. Where's the counter group to the nude=porn group?
For that matter, how sad is it that the group who professed free love, drugs, music, and burned their bras in the 60s make up a solid part of this current social wave? How long before the next counter-establishment movement?
I've been shouting about this for some time. The best answer I have found is that the following chain happened:
We don't like child molesters, someone do something about them!
Laws are passed, people are happier.
Politicians need a rallying cry, and who can resist "I'm doing this for the Safety of the Children"?
Snowball begins...
When you're super-conservative, nudity=thinking forbidden thoughts=sin. Logical solution? Remove sources of nudity to prevent sin. As an added bonus, Think of the Children will garner votes.
It is ridiculously stupid. Ban nudity, and you ban most of the Renaissance painters. Those dirty, sinning pornographers.