They can come to your door and ask question. You can refuse to answer.
Homeland Security can ask TechDirt to give them Digger's identity. TechDirt can refuse.
They can investigate all they want. Without a warrant, TechDirt doesn't have to cooperate.
It goes back to the Fourth Amendment:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
I thought the cops needed a reasonable suspicion to search someone. I got that from reading the judge's decision in the stop and frisk case in New York City. If a guy is just sitting on his stoop minding his own business, the cop can't just come by and search him (or even demand that he answer questions) without an articulable reason for suspicion.
What articulable reason does Homeland Security have to investigate Digger? Only that he wrote words similar to words that have been ruled legal expressions of free speech by the Supreme Court.
There's no reasonable, articulable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Therefore there is no justification for a search warrant.
Another way to put it is "probable cause." According to the Fourth Amendment:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
No probable cause, no search warrant. Exercising your First Amendment right to express political hyperbole, of the sort determined by the Supreme Court, is not probable cause.
A judge can decide that even when we assume that the facts as claimed are true and most favorable to the petitioner (the Department of Homeland Security), there would still be no crime and no basis for suspecting a crime.
If there's no reasonable suspicion of a crime, there's nothing to investigate.
You can't investigate a threat if the supposed "threat" is not a threat.
It's reasonable to conclude that Digger's statements are similar to the statements that the Supreme Court ruled were not threats, and similar enough that they are according to established rulings not threats.
At this point I can't make any further decisions on the basis of common sense and my general understanding of the law. I'll leave it to the lawyers.
But my common-sense instinct is that this was a clearly hyperbolic statement and it doesn't represent a bona fide threat, nor is it justified to investigate Digger any further.
As an aside, I used to read the Wall Street Journal comments pages, and there were lots of people posting comments with their full names, saying that there is a ".38 solution" to Obama, or that we should "exercise our Second Amendment rights." One guy said that Congressman Rangel "should be lynched." I thought those were clear statements of threat, but I thought they were hyperbolic and didn't represent an actual threat. I thought of reporting them to the FBI, but I decided that free speech was more important than trash-talking statements that they obviously weren't taking seriously.
What I get is confirmation that some people are simply illiterate fools who wouldn't know quality writing if they were hunted down and beaten to death with a style guide.
I assume you are spending your retirement hunting people down and beating them to death with a style guide.
Illiterates like me are writing the journalism that you read on the Internet.
Well, that would explain why there's been such a precipitous drop in the overall quality of reporting.
If you don't like the way Slashdot covers the news, you can get your money back.
Back in the days of well-funded, advertising-supported newspapers and magazines, they used to hire copy editors (like Theodore Bernstein) to review the stories, with a checklist of all the rules that they should follow. 3 or 4 editors (including me) would check each story. These articles didn't just come unvarnished out of the heads of reporters, they were the result of a labor-intensive process.
Then they fired the copy editors. The result was apparent. But they didn't lose audience. So that's what you get.
If you want to know who Masnick is, you can click on the link. That's what hyperlinks are for.
And you can pay money to subscribe to a professional society magazine, like Science or Spectrum, where they do have money to pay copy editors and hire reporters who know what they're writing about.
The point that TechDirt (and their lawyers) made was that there was no grounds for suspicion that Digger had made an illegal statement, since the Supreme Court has ruled that similar statements were protected speech and not illegal.
Homeland Security can investigate (as long as its investigations don't infringe on other constitutional rights).
However, they have no right to get a subpoena from a judge, or an order to disclose the name, because there are no grounds for suspicion that a law was broken.
The AC asked
I would like to know what sort of level of verbal threat counts as worthy of investigation to the Absolute Freedom Of Speech people.
That was true back in the days when newspapers had copy editors on staff who were paid regular salaries and had steady jobs.
And guess what? It's still true.
The rules of journalism don't change just because you fire people. If anything, they become more important so that illiterates like you aren't left behind.
Illiterates like me are writing the journalism that you read on the Internet. If you want quality, pay for it.
In journalism, anytime a person is mentioned it's standard practice to make reference to who he/she is in relation to the story, but slashdot often dispenses with those conventions.
That was true back in the days when newspapers had copy editors on staff who were paid regular salaries and had steady jobs. http://www.amazon.com/Headline...
petitioner was convicted of violating a 1917 statute which prohibits any person from "knowingly and willfully . . . [making] any threat to take the life of or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States . . .."[*] The incident 706*706 which led to petitioner's arrest occurred on August 27, 1966, during a public rally on the Washington Monument grounds.
According to an investigator for the Army Counter Intelligence Corps who was present, petitioner responded: "They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J." "They are not going to make me kill my black brothers."
And sometimes the "deciders" need to use some common sense, because the voters vote for things that are obviously inappropriate...
“I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” -- Henry Kissinger
(2) While I find this whole situation funny, I do think the name is a bit inappropriate for a long-term thing in a serious scientific research ship. Maybe they could have named it that for a day or a week or something, just to honor the silliness (and get some media attention), and then renamed it something more "serious" for the rest of its lifespan.
But naming it "Boaty McBoatface" for the long term? Can you imagine a scientist who worked on that ship and putting that on your resume? I don't know what you do for a living, but supposing you're a programmer, imagine that some serious research project that you put years of your life into was given the official designation "Codey McCodeface," and when you tried to get other jobs or talk to people in other fields, you had to use that name to tell them what you had invested your work in. "What was your project?!? What, were you one of the idiots who worked on Clippy??"
You really think there is a problem with a scientist having silly names on his/her resume?
14 of the Funniest Fruit Fly Gene Names By Shruti Iyer - 2nd March, 2015
Fruit flies (Drosophila Melanogaster) are the favourite model organisms of most geneticists, since researchers consider Drosophila melanogaster as “the poster child for genetics” because of the ease at which they can be manipulated and the spped at which effects can be observed. These sticky insect are obviously very different to humans, but studying them is stil beneficial as they carry many genes which are orthologs to the genes in vertebrates.
When I started research in Fruit Fly Genetics research I found it fascinating to learn about the mutant fruit fly names, which range from funny to slightly disturbing. Here is the list of some interesting mutant gene names and their functions.
1. Indy gene (I‘m Not Dead Yet)
The indy gene encodes for an intermediate transporter protein in the Krebs Cycle; flies with mutations in this gene have longer than average lifespan.1,2 There is some controversy surrounding this gene, with reports that mutation does not result in increased longevity.3
2. Boss gene (Bride Of Sevenless)
Boss gene encodes a cell-surface receptor tyrosine kinase and this gene helps in photoreceptor cell (R-cell) development in the Drosophila compound eye. The flies carrying mutation in Boss gene fails to differentiate into a specific photoreceptor cell type called R7 cell.4 Bride of Sevenless gets its name from being the ligand which is binds to Sevenless,5,6 and is thus married to it.
3. Ken and Barbie
This gene encodes a putative transcription factor that functions in treminalia development in the fruit fly. Mutation in this gene leads to malformation in fruit fly’s genitalia development, meaning they lack external genitalia, just like our faithful Ken and Barbie dolls.7
4. Cheap Date
Flies with a mutation in this gene are very susceptible to alcohol.8 Interestingly, this gene is alternatively known as Amnesiac, since mutations in this gene also causes memory impairment.9
5. Lush
Flies with mutant LUSH gene are unusually attracted ethanol, propanol and butanol but have normal chemosensory responses to other odorants.10
6. Halloween Genes
This group of genes includes disembodied, spook, spookier, shadow, shade, shroud and phantom and all encode P450 enzymes which are involved in the synthesis of steroid hormones.11 Flies with mutations in Halloween Genes have altered exoskeleton development, giving the embryos a spooky appearance.
7. 18 Wheeler
This gene encodes a Toll-like receptor (TLR) and mutations in this gene result in defect in salivary gland invagination.12 This gene gets its name due to the segmented expression pattern which is thought to resemble a tarpaulin covering an 18-wheeler truck.
Christal McGee was driving in her father's Mercedes-Benz, which she totaled. That's $50-100,000 right there.
I assumed her dad had deep pockets, and insurance to protect it.
BTW, the reason they might charge you $20 for an aspirin (which I think is an exaggeration) when Walmart charges you $2 for a bottle of 100 is that the bottle of aspirin in a hospital might be sitting on the shelf next to another drug with a similar name that could kill you. A lot of people were killed in hospitals by taking the wrong medicine. The $20 goes for the complicated, redundant system that makes sure you get the right prescription. Instead of being dispensed by a teenage Walmart clerk, that bottle of aspirin in a hospital is dispensed by a nurse who studied organic chemistry and knows all about the thousands of drugs she might dispense. When I was in the hospital the nurses would read my wrist band and ask me to confirm my date of birth before they would give me a drug, to make sure they were giving it to the right patient.
I said, necessary but not sufficient. I've worked 70 hour weeks, and I can't imagine a parent giving a child enough attention after a 70 hour week.
I was working 50-60 hours, and I wanted to take my niece to a science fair and do other activities, but because of my schedule, I could't do it.
If you expect low-income parents to meet the standards of middle-income parents, you have to give low-income parents the financial and other resources of middle-income parents.
You can't just say, "Oh, if they wanted to, they could figure out some way to do it." They can't.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opi... Learning to code is overrated: An accomplished programmer would rather his kids learn to read and reason BY Jeff Atwood NEW YORK DAILY NEWS Sunday, September 27, 2015, 5:00 AM
Mayor de Blasio is winning widespread praise for his recent promise that, within 10 years, all of New York Cityâ(TM)s public schoolchildren will take computer science classes. But as a career programmer who founded two successful software startups, I am deeply skeptical about teaching all kids to code.
When I became fascinated with computers as a teenager in the early 1980s, computers booted up to a black screen and a blinking cursor. You had to learn the right commands to get them to do anything at all. In other words, you were forced to become a computer programmer in order to be a computer user.
One of the great achievements of modern computing is that we no longer need to be programmers to create, build and get things done with the amazing supercomputers that everyone carries around in their pockets.
Thatâ(TM)s a victory we should claim for our kids â" rather than purposefully, almost gleefully sending them back to the era before computers became user-friendly tools.
Iâ(TM)m not saying young people should be oblivious to the way the sausage is made, any more than they should be oblivious to where their food comes from. Indeed, in the coming decades, there are thousands if not millions of good jobs waiting for skilled programmers and creative thinkers who understand the logic of programming.
But as someone whoâ(TM)s been immersed in the digital world for most of his life, I can attest: Computer science is less an intellectual discipline than a narrow vocational skill.
If someone tells you âoecoding is the new literacyâ because âoecomputers are everywhere today,â ask them how fuel injection works. By teaching low-level coding, I worry that we are effectively teaching our children the art of automobile repair. A valuable skill â" but if automobile manufacturers and engineers are doing their jobs correctly, one that shouldnâ(TM)t be much concern for average people, who happily use their cars as tools to get things done without ever needing to worry about rebuilding the transmission or even change the oil.
Thereâ(TM)s nothing wrong with basic exposure to computer science. But it should not come at the expense of fundamental skills such as reading, writing and mathematics â" and unfortunately today our schools, with limited time, have tons of pressure on them to convey those basics better.
Iâ(TM)ve known so many programmers who would have been much more successful in their careers if they had only been better writers, better critical thinkers, better back-of-the-envelope estimators, better communicators. And aside from success in careers, we have to ask the broader question: What kinds of people do we want children to grow up to be?
Itâ(TM)s true. Anyone can learn to code. But very few people can explain why they wrote a line of code, what that code does or convince other people to use it and help them build it. These are all essential human skills that have everything to do with the art of communicating with other people, and nothing at all to do with the writing code that a computer can understand.
Learning to talk to the computer is the easiest part. Computers, for better or worse, do exactly what you tell them to do, every time, in exactly the same way. The people â" well . . . youâ(TM)ll spend the rest of your life figuring that out. And from my perspective, the sooner you start, the better.
I want my children to understand how the Internet works. But this depends more on their acquisition of higher-order thinking than it does their understanding if ones and zeroes. It is essential that they that treat everything they read online critically.
She found that the one factor that was most strongly associated with educational achievement was the parent's income. That's the best scientific evidence.
If you want parents to be involved, you have to eliminate poverty and raise their income. It's not sufficient, but it's necessary. A mother can't read to her children or take them to a museum if she's working 60 hours a week at a fast-food restaurant.
If you want parents to do a better job, give them the resources that they need to do the job.
Teacher's salaries (cost to county, not takehome) run $30-60K per year day. That means a single teacher's salary for could provide (45000/200) 225 nice tablets, or with class sizes of 20ish, roughly 11 classrooms full. Make this "educational model" reasonably rugged, with an average service life of 3 years, and we've got 33 classrooms full of rugged tablets for the price of one teacher.
Let's not even start to get into what it costs to build and operate a single classroom...
Yeah, but after the kids get bored from playing games and watching porn, they're still going to need a teacher to direct them in their education.
Teachers can raise ideas like, "Here's how to start figuring out what the American Civil War was all about," or, "Here's how a basic electrical circuit works," or, "Here's a Shakespeare play you would be interested in," or, "See what happens when you pour this hydrochloric acid onto the mossy zinc."
I remember my junior high school teacher suggesting, "Why don't we grow bacteria in petri dishes?" We did, and that taught me some things I still use today.
Kids can't get an education by doing a Google search and getting overwhelmed by information. That's like going to a thrift shop and buying 50 pounds of cheap books.
There was a school called Summerhill, built on the philosophy that kids didn't need adult supervision, you could just leave them alone and let them educate themselves. I thought it was a great idea at the time. Since then the evidence has come out that it was a terrible failure. Graduates of Summerhill have written about it (those that managed to learn to write).
There is a rational system to learning the world's information, good teachers (and librarians) understand it, and if you don't know what it is, you're rowing your boat without a compass.
My Senator was Hillary Clinton, and as you may have noticed the best way to lobby her is to hold a fund-raising dinner to collect $100,000 or so in campaign contributions. Unfortunately I don't travel in those circles so that avenue is not open to me. During the campaign, a black student confronted Clinton on her "super-predators" speech, and the student got to Clinton by paying $500 to attend a fund-raising dinner. That's what it takes.
(My current Senator, Kristen Gillibrand, is not much better, and as for Chuck Schumer -- don't ask.)
The ACLU, of which I'm a member, does a better job of lobbying than I could ever do, but even they are usually powerless against the electoral appeal to the mob.
The politics of law and order, and the reasons behind it, are beyond the scope of this posting, but I think it has something to do with our evolutionary programming to unite behind a dictator, and scapegoat minorities, in times of fear.
I would like to be living in the world that you believe exists.
In many of the cases in news reports of student disciplinary actions that led to criminal charges, students were not allowed to contact their parents, were not informed of the right to have a lawyer, and in fact didn't have a right to a lawyer.
There was a court ruling in North Carolina which gave high school students limited constitutional rights in disciplinary hearings. http://tharringtonsmith.com/st... The significant points are (1) Up to that case, they didn't have constitutional rights (2) That case only applies in North Carolina (3) The rights are still limited. Students still don't have a right to a lawyer at most parts of the disciplinary process.
If you want to look it up, Emily Yoffe was writing in Slate about sex abuse charges. In one case, a student got a Skype call over the summer about an accusation he knew nothing about. It was basically an ambush hearing. He said that he thought that he should get a lawyer first. The university official running the hearing said that if he didn't participate in the hearing, they would make their decision without his input.
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
The problem is that SnapTrends passes on the posts to school security, and school security passes on the posts to the police.
The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.
Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer, and they may not even have a right to remain silent.
Police are skilled at manipulating adults, to say nothing of children, into false confessions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and the school police have been prosecuting normal childhood behavior as crimes.
I finally made it to Social Security, which is a little better.
The worst part is going from being a creative, contributing member of society to an over-the-hill guy that nobody needs. The most depressing thing is knowing that you have nothing useful to offer. If you're just a burden on your family, why live?
The money is also a problem. It would be a lot easier if we had European social welfare systems like Germany or the Scandanavian countries, where unemployed workers get almost as much as their historical income, and even get retraining for new jobs.
We used to have a social contract in America. The corporations broke it.
Not to say that real ones don't exist, but I've long been skeptical about the super-misogynistic Bernie Bros and (without getting overly conspiratorial) they've just felt false-flag to me.
Don't forget racist. You can't follow a black or Hispanic person or who tweets about politics and supports someone other than Bernie (or even one who supports nobody at all) without being regularly treated to watching them get buried under racist tweets from Sanders "supporters".
Citation needed. I don't believe that. I haven't seen any of the so-called "Bernie Bros". There will always be a few independent assholes, but there's no broad support for them.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not "settled science": 1) Sentence Enhancements Reduce Crime 2) Longer prison terms really do cut crime, study shows
They're requesting documents from TechDirt. TechDirt refuses to give them the documents.
What legal basis does Homeland Security have to require TechDirt to give them the documents?
They can come to your door and ask question. You can refuse to answer.
Homeland Security can ask TechDirt to give them Digger's identity. TechDirt can refuse.
They can investigate all they want. Without a warrant, TechDirt doesn't have to cooperate.
It goes back to the Fourth Amendment:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
No probable cause, no search and seizure.
I thought the cops needed a reasonable suspicion to search someone. I got that from reading the judge's decision in the stop and frisk case in New York City. If a guy is just sitting on his stoop minding his own business, the cop can't just come by and search him (or even demand that he answer questions) without an articulable reason for suspicion.
What articulable reason does Homeland Security have to investigate Digger? Only that he wrote words similar to words that have been ruled legal expressions of free speech by the Supreme Court.
There's no reasonable, articulable suspicion that a crime has been committed. Therefore there is no justification for a search warrant.
Another way to put it is "probable cause." According to the Fourth Amendment:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
No probable cause, no search warrant. Exercising your First Amendment right to express political hyperbole, of the sort determined by the Supreme Court, is not probable cause.
IANAL, but this is my understanding:
A judge can decide that even when we assume that the facts as claimed are true and most favorable to the petitioner (the Department of Homeland Security), there would still be no crime and no basis for suspecting a crime.
If there's no reasonable suspicion of a crime, there's nothing to investigate.
You can't investigate a threat if the supposed "threat" is not a threat.
It's reasonable to conclude that Digger's statements are similar to the statements that the Supreme Court ruled were not threats, and similar enough that they are according to established rulings not threats.
At this point I can't make any further decisions on the basis of common sense and my general understanding of the law. I'll leave it to the lawyers.
But my common-sense instinct is that this was a clearly hyperbolic statement and it doesn't represent a bona fide threat, nor is it justified to investigate Digger any further.
As an aside, I used to read the Wall Street Journal comments pages, and there were lots of people posting comments with their full names, saying that there is a ".38 solution" to Obama, or that we should "exercise our Second Amendment rights." One guy said that Congressman Rangel "should be lynched." I thought those were clear statements of threat, but I thought they were hyperbolic and didn't represent an actual threat. I thought of reporting them to the FBI, but I decided that free speech was more important than trash-talking statements that they obviously weren't taking seriously.
What I get is confirmation that some people are simply illiterate fools who wouldn't know quality writing if they were hunted down and beaten to death with a style guide.
I assume you are spending your retirement hunting people down and beating them to death with a style guide.
Illiterates like me are writing the journalism that you read on the Internet.
Well, that would explain why there's been such a precipitous drop in the overall quality of reporting.
If you don't like the way Slashdot covers the news, you can get your money back.
Back in the days of well-funded, advertising-supported newspapers and magazines, they used to hire copy editors (like Theodore Bernstein) to review the stories, with a checklist of all the rules that they should follow. 3 or 4 editors (including me) would check each story. These articles didn't just come unvarnished out of the heads of reporters, they were the result of a labor-intensive process.
Then they fired the copy editors. The result was apparent. But they didn't lose audience. So that's what you get.
If you want to know who Masnick is, you can click on the link. That's what hyperlinks are for.
And you can pay money to subscribe to a professional society magazine, like Science or Spectrum, where they do have money to pay copy editors and hire reporters who know what they're writing about.
The point that TechDirt (and their lawyers) made was that there was no grounds for suspicion that Digger had made an illegal statement, since the Supreme Court has ruled that similar statements were protected speech and not illegal.
Homeland Security can investigate (as long as its investigations don't infringe on other constitutional rights).
However, they have no right to get a subpoena from a judge, or an order to disclose the name, because there are no grounds for suspicion that a law was broken.
The AC asked
I would like to know what sort of level of verbal threat counts as worthy of investigation to the Absolute Freedom Of Speech people.
I gave him a partial answer to that question.
That was true back in the days when newspapers had copy editors on staff who were paid regular salaries and had steady jobs.
And guess what? It's still true.
The rules of journalism don't change just because you fire people. If anything, they become more important so that illiterates like you aren't left behind.
Illiterates like me are writing the journalism that you read on the Internet. If you want quality, pay for it.
In journalism, anytime a person is mentioned it's standard practice to make reference to who he/she is in relation to the story, but slashdot often dispenses with those conventions.
That was true back in the days when newspapers had copy editors on staff who were paid regular salaries and had steady jobs. http://www.amazon.com/Headline...
And we printed them with lead plates.
I would like to know what sort of level of verbal threat counts as worthy of investigation to the Absolute Freedom Of Speech people.
TechDirt cited 2 cases to justify their belief that Digger's statement was rhetorical hyperbole and not a true threat.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
https://scholar.google.com/sch...
Rankin v. McPherson, 483 US 378 - Supreme Court 1987
After hearing of the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan, a black employee of the Constable of Harris County, was fired for saying,
"yeah, he's cutting back medicaid and food stamps. And I said, yeah, welfare and CETA. I said, shoot, if they go for him again, I hope they get him."
The Supreme Court decided that the Constable's office could not fire her for making that statement.
https://scholar.google.com/sch...
Watts v. United States, 394 US 705 - Supreme Court 1969
petitioner was convicted of violating a 1917 statute which prohibits any person from "knowingly and willfully . . . [making] any threat to take the life of or to inflict bodily harm upon the President of the United States . . . ."[*] The incident 706*706 which led to petitioner's arrest occurred on August 27, 1966, during a public rally on the Washington Monument grounds.
According to an investigator for the Army Counter Intelligence Corps who was present, petitioner responded: "They always holler at us to get an education. And now I have already received my draft classification as 1-A and I have got to report for my physical this Monday coming. I am not going. If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L. B. J." "They are not going to make me kill my black brothers."
And sometimes the "deciders" need to use some common sense, because the voters vote for things that are obviously inappropriate...
“I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” -- Henry Kissinger
(2) While I find this whole situation funny, I do think the name is a bit inappropriate for a long-term thing in a serious scientific research ship. Maybe they could have named it that for a day or a week or something, just to honor the silliness (and get some media attention), and then renamed it something more "serious" for the rest of its lifespan.
But naming it "Boaty McBoatface" for the long term? Can you imagine a scientist who worked on that ship and putting that on your resume? I don't know what you do for a living, but supposing you're a programmer, imagine that some serious research project that you put years of your life into was given the official designation "Codey McCodeface," and when you tried to get other jobs or talk to people in other fields, you had to use that name to tell them what you had invested your work in. "What was your project?!? What, were you one of the idiots who worked on Clippy??"
You really think there is a problem with a scientist having silly names on his/her resume?
Christal McGee was driving in her father's Mercedes-Benz, which she totaled. That's $50-100,000 right there.
I assumed her dad had deep pockets, and insurance to protect it.
BTW, the reason they might charge you $20 for an aspirin (which I think is an exaggeration) when Walmart charges you $2 for a bottle of 100 is that the bottle of aspirin in a hospital might be sitting on the shelf next to another drug with a similar name that could kill you. A lot of people were killed in hospitals by taking the wrong medicine. The $20 goes for the complicated, redundant system that makes sure you get the right prescription. Instead of being dispensed by a teenage Walmart clerk, that bottle of aspirin in a hospital is dispensed by a nurse who studied organic chemistry and knows all about the thousands of drugs she might dispense. When I was in the hospital the nurses would read my wrist band and ask me to confirm my date of birth before they would give me a drug, to make sure they were giving it to the right patient.
I said, necessary but not sufficient. I've worked 70 hour weeks, and I can't imagine a parent giving a child enough attention after a 70 hour week.
I was working 50-60 hours, and I wanted to take my niece to a science fair and do other activities, but because of my schedule, I could't do it.
If you expect low-income parents to meet the standards of middle-income parents, you have to give low-income parents the financial and other resources of middle-income parents.
You can't just say, "Oh, if they wanted to, they could figure out some way to do it." They can't.
http://www.nydailynews.com/opi...
Learning to code is overrated: An accomplished programmer would rather his kids learn to read and reason
BY Jeff Atwood
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Sunday, September 27, 2015, 5:00 AM
Mayor de Blasio is winning widespread praise for his recent promise that, within 10 years, all of New York Cityâ(TM)s public schoolchildren will take computer science classes. But as a career programmer who founded two successful software startups, I am deeply skeptical about teaching all kids to code.
When I became fascinated with computers as a teenager in the early 1980s, computers booted up to a black screen and a blinking cursor. You had to learn the right commands to get them to do anything at all. In other words, you were forced to become a computer programmer in order to be a computer user.
One of the great achievements of modern computing is that we no longer need to be programmers to create, build and get things done with the amazing supercomputers that everyone carries around in their pockets.
Thatâ(TM)s a victory we should claim for our kids â" rather than purposefully, almost gleefully sending them back to the era before computers became user-friendly tools.
Iâ(TM)m not saying young people should be oblivious to the way the sausage is made, any more than they should be oblivious to where their food comes from. Indeed, in the coming decades, there are thousands if not millions of good jobs waiting for skilled programmers and creative thinkers who understand the logic of programming.
But as someone whoâ(TM)s been immersed in the digital world for most of his life, I can attest: Computer science is less an intellectual discipline than a narrow vocational skill.
If someone tells you âoecoding is the new literacyâ because âoecomputers are everywhere today,â ask them how fuel injection works. By teaching low-level coding, I worry that we are effectively teaching our children the art of automobile repair. A valuable skill â" but if automobile manufacturers and engineers are doing their jobs correctly, one that shouldnâ(TM)t be much concern for average people, who happily use their cars as tools to get things done without ever needing to worry about rebuilding the transmission or even change the oil.
Thereâ(TM)s nothing wrong with basic exposure to computer science. But it should not come at the expense of fundamental skills such as reading, writing and mathematics â" and unfortunately today our schools, with limited time, have tons of pressure on them to convey those basics better.
Iâ(TM)ve known so many programmers who would have been much more successful in their careers if they had only been better writers, better critical thinkers, better back-of-the-envelope estimators, better communicators. And aside from success in careers, we have to ask the broader question: What kinds of people do we want children to grow up to be?
Itâ(TM)s true. Anyone can learn to code. But very few people can explain why they wrote a line of code, what that code does or convince other people to use it and help them build it. These are all essential human skills that have everything to do with the art of communicating with other people, and nothing at all to do with the writing code that a computer can understand.
Learning to talk to the computer is the easiest part. Computers, for better or worse, do exactly what you tell them to do, every time, in exactly the same way. The people â" well . . . youâ(TM)ll spend the rest of your life figuring that out. And from my perspective, the sooner you start, the better.
I want my children to understand how the Internet works. But this depends more on their acquisition of higher-order thinking than it does their understanding if ones and zeroes. It is essential that they that treat everything they read online critically.
Without involved parents there is only so much even a great teacher can do with limited time to individually attend to a kid.
Diane Ravitch, who was assistant secretary of education under both GHW Bush and Bill Clinton, reviewed all the data (and had a PhD to understand it). https://dianeravitch.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
She found that the one factor that was most strongly associated with educational achievement was the parent's income. That's the best scientific evidence.
If you want parents to be involved, you have to eliminate poverty and raise their income. It's not sufficient, but it's necessary. A mother can't read to her children or take them to a museum if she's working 60 hours a week at a fast-food restaurant.
If you want parents to do a better job, give them the resources that they need to do the job.
Teacher's salaries (cost to county, not takehome) run $30-60K per year day. That means a single teacher's salary for could provide (45000/200) 225 nice tablets, or with class sizes of 20ish, roughly 11 classrooms full. Make this "educational model" reasonably rugged, with an average service life of 3 years, and we've got 33 classrooms full of rugged tablets for the price of one teacher.
Let's not even start to get into what it costs to build and operate a single classroom...
Yeah, but after the kids get bored from playing games and watching porn, they're still going to need a teacher to direct them in their education.
Teachers can raise ideas like, "Here's how to start figuring out what the American Civil War was all about," or, "Here's how a basic electrical circuit works," or, "Here's a Shakespeare play you would be interested in," or, "See what happens when you pour this hydrochloric acid onto the mossy zinc."
I remember my junior high school teacher suggesting, "Why don't we grow bacteria in petri dishes?" We did, and that taught me some things I still use today.
Kids can't get an education by doing a Google search and getting overwhelmed by information. That's like going to a thrift shop and buying 50 pounds of cheap books.
There was a school called Summerhill, built on the philosophy that kids didn't need adult supervision, you could just leave them alone and let them educate themselves. I thought it was a great idea at the time. Since then the evidence has come out that it was a terrible failure. Graduates of Summerhill have written about it (those that managed to learn to write).
There is a rational system to learning the world's information, good teachers (and librarians) understand it, and if you don't know what it is, you're rowing your boat without a compass.
My Senator was Hillary Clinton, and as you may have noticed the best way to lobby her is to hold a fund-raising dinner to collect $100,000 or so in campaign contributions. Unfortunately I don't travel in those circles so that avenue is not open to me. During the campaign, a black student confronted Clinton on her "super-predators" speech, and the student got to Clinton by paying $500 to attend a fund-raising dinner. That's what it takes.
(My current Senator, Kristen Gillibrand, is not much better, and as for Chuck Schumer -- don't ask.)
The ACLU, of which I'm a member, does a better job of lobbying than I could ever do, but even they are usually powerless against the electoral appeal to the mob.
The politics of law and order, and the reasons behind it, are beyond the scope of this posting, but I think it has something to do with our evolutionary programming to unite behind a dictator, and scapegoat minorities, in times of fear.
Thank you for your useful advice. I will fix my laws immediately.
I would like to be living in the world that you believe exists.
In many of the cases in news reports of student disciplinary actions that led to criminal charges, students were not allowed to contact their parents, were not informed of the right to have a lawyer, and in fact didn't have a right to a lawyer.
That's true even for college students. https://www.thefire.org/fire-g...
There was a court ruling in North Carolina which gave high school students limited constitutional rights in disciplinary hearings. http://tharringtonsmith.com/st... The significant points are (1) Up to that case, they didn't have constitutional rights (2) That case only applies in North Carolina (3) The rights are still limited. Students still don't have a right to a lawyer at most parts of the disciplinary process.
If you want to look it up, Emily Yoffe was writing in Slate about sex abuse charges. In one case, a student got a Skype call over the summer about an accusation he knew nothing about. It was basically an ambush hearing. He said that he thought that he should get a lawyer first. The university official running the hearing said that if he didn't participate in the hearing, they would make their decision without his input.
I have to say, if it is public posts, what's the problem?
The problem is that SnapTrends passes on the posts to school security, and school security passes on the posts to the police.
The problem is that school security, and the police, can interrogate students under coercion.
Students in a situation like that don't have a right to a lawyer, and they may not even have a right to remain silent.
Police are skilled at manipulating adults, to say nothing of children, into false confessions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and the school police have been prosecuting normal childhood behavior as crimes.
As Slashdot readers could guess, they prosecute minority children disproportionately http://njdc.info/wp-content/up...
http://www.geekwire.com/2016/b...
For one thing, the findings haven't yet been submitted for peer-reviewed publication.
I finally made it to Social Security, which is a little better.
The worst part is going from being a creative, contributing member of society to an over-the-hill guy that nobody needs. The most depressing thing is knowing that you have nothing useful to offer. If you're just a burden on your family, why live?
The money is also a problem. It would be a lot easier if we had European social welfare systems like Germany or the Scandanavian countries, where unemployed workers get almost as much as their historical income, and even get retraining for new jobs.
We used to have a social contract in America. The corporations broke it.
Not to say that real ones don't exist, but I've long been skeptical about the super-misogynistic Bernie Bros and (without getting overly conspiratorial) they've just felt false-flag to me.
Don't forget racist. You can't follow a black or Hispanic person or who tweets about politics and supports someone other than Bernie (or even one who supports nobody at all) without being regularly treated to watching them get buried under racist tweets from Sanders "supporters".
Citation needed. I don't believe that. I haven't seen any of the so-called "Bernie Bros". There will always be a few independent assholes, but there's no broad support for them.
Here's a black person who supports Hillary. Where's the racist Sanders supporters? http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04...