What the hell are you talking about? Where did I say we shouldn't try to live good lives?
What I want from Christians is for them to not try to get laws enacted and textbooks rewritten to make *me* a Christian in fact, if not belief. I have no problem with Christians falling short of their moral ideals. It's the hectoring me about how I'm falling short of their ideals that gets tiresome.
Okay, good luck with that. I think you vastly overestimate your ability to remake the Republican party (and vastly underestimate the space you're sharing in your traditional coalition with social conservatives), but we'll see what the next ten years bring. If you actually succeeded as you outline above, it sounds like it would be pretty good--but this isn't a new philosophy, and it has its own history of failing in practice. Everyone thinks every entitlement should go--except their favorite. The enduring image of tea partiers I have is an old lady being interviewed, and saying she wants the government to keep its hand off her Medicare. The cognitive dissonance is breathtaking.
As an aside, if you'd started with something this calm and thoughtful, rather than the snotty, liberal bashing you began with, you might get more reasonable discussions.
To clarify the AC's point below mine, Texas' market for textbooks is large enough that publishers write the textbooks to Texas standards and then sell them nationwide. West Virginia's (or South Carolina's, or Maine's, or Illinois') standards don't get considered.
For all their vaunted Christian morals and breastbeating on the importance of marriage, they have a higher divorce rate than the national average, and even 50% higher than the atheists and agnostics they despise.
After they fail and ask God for forgiveness, they go right back to the hookers with whom they got caught (c.f., Jimmy Swaggart).
They embezzle millions from their mega-churches, which makes me think they're in it for the money more than the God (c.f., Jim Baker).
They extort millions from their followers by claiming God will kill them if the sheep don't pay up (c.f., Oral Roberts).
They spend their Christian lives doing everything they can to make homosexuals suffer, only to get busted offering to pay guys at truck stops to receive blowjobs from them (c.f., Bob Allen), or tapping their foot in an airport restroom (c.f., Larry Craig), or using their ministry's travel budget to fund methamphetamine and gay sex party weekends (c.f., Ted Haggard).
In other words, I dislike them because they're hypocrites who claim they're better than everyone else when in fact, they're usually worse, but they're very happy to try to force their morals on me through laws and textbooks.
You know, I would actually welcome a proper libertarian government. I wouldn't be happy about about the government withdrawing from areas where I think it should go, but at least I could look forward to a robust economy.
But you're deluding yourself if you think that it's not the social conservatives manning the grassroots barricades. They're the ones fighting gay marriage, they're the ones primarying weak, centrist Republicans, and they're the ones rewriting textbooks in Texas so that the next generation of Americans think that Thomas Jefferson didn't exist. Good luck getting an abortion if they succeed.
Unless, of course, you mean actual libertarians, not just the libertarian wing of the Republican party, in which case, you're a fucking joke. How's Ron Paul working out for you? Back on the gold standard yet?
Good luck with that. The Conservative Ascendancy, such as it is, isn't driven by the libertarian wing of the Republicans, it's driven by the Apocalypse-mongering religious conservatives who want Creationism taught in school and anti-communist fanatics like Joe McCarthy rehabilitated. Your kids will be praying in school and will learn about sex in the back seat of a Ford rather than from a textbook that tells them how to avoid pregnancy and STDs. Vibrators will be illegal nationwide, not just in Alabama. The Federal budget will be 100% Defense, and the streets of every city with more than 5,000 people will be full of the homeless panhandling since Welfare, Medicare, and Social Security were privatized. And the U.S. will be occupying the entire Middle East to provide a buffer zone for Israel's sake.
As the AC noted below, it's considered a best practice to omit the ?> to avoid accidentally including non-processed whitespace after the closing tag when you include the file. If someone hits space after ?>, and you include that file and then try to print a header, it causes an error.
As my cite demonstrates, QWERTY was one of several competing keyboard layouts after jamming was no longer a problem. It didn't achieve dominance because it solved the jamming problem.
Any company that's a Microsoft shop, which includes a really large number of Fortune 500 companies. That's why Oracle and IBM offer those products on Windows.
We should all send flowers or candy or something to Ubisoft Headquarters. They've done more with one game launch to torpedo the use of DRM than a thousand indignant./ stories and editorials.
(1) the research demonstrating the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard is sparse and methodologically suspect;
(2) a sizable body of work suggests that in fact the Dvorak offers little practical advantage over the QWERTY;
(3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and
(4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years.
Don't bother with Dvorak. The studies that showed Dvorak to be superior were methodologically suspect, and the reams of anecdotal evidence that Dvorak is superior is largely due to confirmation bias--the people who consciously switched improved largely because they were switching consciously (and trying to improve), and the people who don't see an improvement rarely brag about that.
Instead, a touch-typing program or other class will probably benefit you. A lot of the myths about qwerty keyboards are bogus, and you should see an improvement in your speed because you're spreading the typing load across more fingers and having to move your hands and forearms less than a fast, blind hunt and peck. A little practice on activating your pinkies will probably dovetail nicely with your existing skills, so the improvement will be quick.
But what if the Has did it nicely? It's easy to have a nicely landscaped yard with wood chips, desert plants, etc. That's the problem with an ordinance that just says "40%+ grass". Your issue isn't with the wood chips, it's with the aesthetic quality of the neighbour's yard and its effect on your property value. If they violate the ordinance without lowering your property value, then the ordinance is an ass.
The cynical response to your valid point is that having, say, the GAO in charge of IT is that it's probably no less vulnerable to the NSA's illegal actions than it would be if the NSA itself were hosting it. If they're as naughty as you say, then it's no protection to have some other branch of the government running things.
The NSA also has as a mission protecting US communications and IT, so it's arguably well within their scope to run a federal cloud.
The less cynical response is that the NSA is part of the U.S. government, so on paper at least there's no conflict of interest to them running IT, and it's arguably going to be a lot more secure than it would be for a Department of IT Services to run things with a bunch of contractors.
The NSA has 1) the mad hax0r skillz, 2) massive reserves of hidden computer power, and 3) the security chops to actually create a secure U.S. government computing cloud. If they can keep their own codebreaking and intelligence records secure (when was the last time you heard about the NSA getting hacked?), they can do it for the government as a whole.
That's the only way to get an apartment in Manhattan: Follow the obituaries and be the first person at the door, preferably before the paramedics wheel the body out.
I'm not saying that no one should complain. I'm saying that media outlets that highlight every single complaint, valid or not, minor or not, create the opposite perception identified in the grandparent: Instead of thinking a corporation is an angel, we think it's the devil himself, because we're fed a diet of anger and corporate evil. Neither is generally accurate.
Surely there's a balance to be struck between flooding the Internet with minor ragefilter mishaps and real misconduct--organizations, especially large ones, are imperfect and make mistakes. A good place to draw a line would be whether or not more than one person is affected, and a bit of editorial judgment on whether it's a single incident or a corporate policy.
No he didn't. He got caught and outed after carrying out a professional deception for years on end, and to his financial benefit. That's not "people make mistakes", that's being a grifter. The fact that his accomplices (the editors at Infoworld) aided and abetted him does nothing to excuse him.
If John Taylor Gatto is a paranoid lunatic, how was he New York State Teacher of the Year, and how did he teach in NYC public schools for about thirty years?
As any teacher will tell you, there's no shortage of crappy or crazy teachers in the school system. No one is more critical of teachers than other teachers. As for Teacher of the Year, good for him. Doesn't change the fact that he's misrepresenting history (the Prussian origins of public schooling? Please) and talking about conspiracies to regulate and create permanent underclasses.
The problem here is that, in the ideal case, homeschooling is far better than public schooling. But that ideal case is a joke in comparison to reality, even ignoring issues like underclass communities who can't afford to homeschool their kids. Damaged parents create damaged kids. My wife has had to pull students aside, hand them a bar of soap, and tell them to come to school early and shower before class every day because they don't shower otherwise. How would homeschooling that kid help him?
considering is New York about US$20,000 is spend every year per student, why not just give the money to the family?
Because large numbers of families would take that money and give their children a crappy education. A big part of the reason that public schooling took off is that it offered parents the opportunity to educate their children far beyond what they were capable of doing themselves, or had the wherewithal to do themselves.
And you want to talk about creating a permanent underclass? Start widespread homeschooling so that parents get to raise their children entirely insulated from other communities of opinion, children of different economic backgrounds, and exposure to professions other than their parents. The socialization offered by school is just as basic as having them interact with large numbers of other children in a setting that doesn't necessarily favor the idiosyncrasies of the parent's outlook.
If there was widespread or total homeschooling in Bible Belt, how many of those kids would go on to become doctors when they all got to university with no exposure to the theory of evolution?
Gatto's a paranoid lunatic. As someone who's dated teachers and is married to one now, I can say pretty categorically:
1) Teachers have pretty wide latitude over what and how they teach their classes. To a degree this is because of the inability of school administration to closely supervise and control what actually goes on in a classroom, but in part it's also be design. The teachers of today were trained in their education degrees to work flexibly with their class to accomplish the most learning.
2) You don't send your kids to school because you accept a promise that the state can do better than you. You send them to school to socialize them with other kids, to learn from people who teach things you don't know like chemistry and calculus, and to get them out of the house so you can go back to your job (especially if you're a single parent).
3) Until you're in university, virtually nothing in your schooling prevents you, explicitly or otherwise, from pursuing any profession. Bad marks in high school might keep you out of Princeton, but that's about it, and Princeton isn't the only place to get a good degree. Now matter how badly you fuck up high school, you can still go on to do whatever you want to do, if you want it badly enough to do what's necessary, like repeating classes to get a good grade.
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you talking about? Where did I say we shouldn't try to live good lives?
What I want from Christians is for them to not try to get laws enacted and textbooks rewritten to make *me* a Christian in fact, if not belief. I have no problem with Christians falling short of their moral ideals. It's the hectoring me about how I'm falling short of their ideals that gets tiresome.
Good thing I'm not one them, then!
Any "Christian" who says they are better than a non-Christian isn't a Christian
Look up the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
Okay, good luck with that. I think you vastly overestimate your ability to remake the Republican party (and vastly underestimate the space you're sharing in your traditional coalition with social conservatives), but we'll see what the next ten years bring. If you actually succeeded as you outline above, it sounds like it would be pretty good--but this isn't a new philosophy, and it has its own history of failing in practice. Everyone thinks every entitlement should go--except their favorite. The enduring image of tea partiers I have is an old lady being interviewed, and saying she wants the government to keep its hand off her Medicare. The cognitive dissonance is breathtaking.
As an aside, if you'd started with something this calm and thoughtful, rather than the snotty, liberal bashing you began with, you might get more reasonable discussions.
To clarify the AC's point below mine, Texas' market for textbooks is large enough that publishers write the textbooks to Texas standards and then sell them nationwide. West Virginia's (or South Carolina's, or Maine's, or Illinois') standards don't get considered.
I dislike them because:
For all their vaunted Christian morals and breastbeating on the importance of marriage, they have a higher divorce rate than the national average, and even 50% higher than the atheists and agnostics they despise.
After they fail and ask God for forgiveness, they go right back to the hookers with whom they got caught (c.f., Jimmy Swaggart).
They embezzle millions from their mega-churches, which makes me think they're in it for the money more than the God (c.f., Jim Baker).
They extort millions from their followers by claiming God will kill them if the sheep don't pay up (c.f., Oral Roberts).
They spend their Christian lives doing everything they can to make homosexuals suffer, only to get busted offering to pay guys at truck stops to receive blowjobs from them (c.f., Bob Allen), or tapping their foot in an airport restroom (c.f., Larry Craig), or using their ministry's travel budget to fund methamphetamine and gay sex party weekends (c.f., Ted Haggard).
In other words, I dislike them because they're hypocrites who claim they're better than everyone else when in fact, they're usually worse, but they're very happy to try to force their morals on me through laws and textbooks.
You know, I would actually welcome a proper libertarian government. I wouldn't be happy about about the government withdrawing from areas where I think it should go, but at least I could look forward to a robust economy.
But you're deluding yourself if you think that it's not the social conservatives manning the grassroots barricades. They're the ones fighting gay marriage, they're the ones primarying weak, centrist Republicans, and they're the ones rewriting textbooks in Texas so that the next generation of Americans think that Thomas Jefferson didn't exist. Good luck getting an abortion if they succeed.
Unless, of course, you mean actual libertarians, not just the libertarian wing of the Republican party, in which case, you're a fucking joke. How's Ron Paul working out for you? Back on the gold standard yet?
Bwahahahah!
Good luck with that. The Conservative Ascendancy, such as it is, isn't driven by the libertarian wing of the Republicans, it's driven by the Apocalypse-mongering religious conservatives who want Creationism taught in school and anti-communist fanatics like Joe McCarthy rehabilitated. Your kids will be praying in school and will learn about sex in the back seat of a Ford rather than from a textbook that tells them how to avoid pregnancy and STDs. Vibrators will be illegal nationwide, not just in Alabama. The Federal budget will be 100% Defense, and the streets of every city with more than 5,000 people will be full of the homeless panhandling since Welfare, Medicare, and Social Security were privatized. And the U.S. will be occupying the entire Middle East to provide a buffer zone for Israel's sake.
As the AC noted below, it's considered a best practice to omit the ?> to avoid accidentally including non-processed whitespace after the closing tag when you include the file. If someone hits space after ?>, and you include that file and then try to print a header, it causes an error.
As my cite demonstrates, QWERTY was one of several competing keyboard layouts after jamming was no longer a problem. It didn't achieve dominance because it solved the jamming problem.
Any company that's a Microsoft shop, which includes a really large number of Fortune 500 companies. That's why Oracle and IBM offer those products on Windows.
We should all send flowers or candy or something to Ubisoft Headquarters. They've done more with one game launch to torpedo the use of DRM than a thousand indignant ./ stories and editorials.
Here's the original reference mentioned in my link above. The high points of it are these:
Don't bother with Dvorak. The studies that showed Dvorak to be superior were methodologically suspect, and the reams of anecdotal evidence that Dvorak is superior is largely due to confirmation bias--the people who consciously switched improved largely because they were switching consciously (and trying to improve), and the people who don't see an improvement rarely brag about that.
Instead, a touch-typing program or other class will probably benefit you. A lot of the myths about qwerty keyboards are bogus, and you should see an improvement in your speed because you're spreading the typing load across more fingers and having to move your hands and forearms less than a fast, blind hunt and peck. A little practice on activating your pinkies will probably dovetail nicely with your existing skills, so the improvement will be quick.
But what if the Has did it nicely? It's easy to have a nicely landscaped yard with wood chips, desert plants, etc. That's the problem with an ordinance that just says "40%+ grass". Your issue isn't with the wood chips, it's with the aesthetic quality of the neighbour's yard and its effect on your property value. If they violate the ordinance without lowering your property value, then the ordinance is an ass.
The cynical response to your valid point is that having, say, the GAO in charge of IT is that it's probably no less vulnerable to the NSA's illegal actions than it would be if the NSA itself were hosting it. If they're as naughty as you say, then it's no protection to have some other branch of the government running things.
The NSA also has as a mission protecting US communications and IT, so it's arguably well within their scope to run a federal cloud.
The less cynical response is that the NSA is part of the U.S. government, so on paper at least there's no conflict of interest to them running IT, and it's arguably going to be a lot more secure than it would be for a Department of IT Services to run things with a bunch of contractors.
The NSA has 1) the mad hax0r skillz, 2) massive reserves of hidden computer power, and 3) the security chops to actually create a secure U.S. government computing cloud. If they can keep their own codebreaking and intelligence records secure (when was the last time you heard about the NSA getting hacked?), they can do it for the government as a whole.
That's the only way to get an apartment in Manhattan: Follow the obituaries and be the first person at the door, preferably before the paramedics wheel the body out.
Your comment is funny since your homepage link goes to Microsoft's homepage.
I'm not saying that no one should complain. I'm saying that media outlets that highlight every single complaint, valid or not, minor or not, create the opposite perception identified in the grandparent: Instead of thinking a corporation is an angel, we think it's the devil himself, because we're fed a diet of anger and corporate evil. Neither is generally accurate.
Surely there's a balance to be struck between flooding the Internet with minor ragefilter mishaps and real misconduct--organizations, especially large ones, are imperfect and make mistakes. A good place to draw a line would be whether or not more than one person is affected, and a bit of editorial judgment on whether it's a single incident or a corporate policy.
The guy came right out and admitted what he did
No he didn't. He got caught and outed after carrying out a professional deception for years on end, and to his financial benefit. That's not "people make mistakes", that's being a grifter. The fact that his accomplices (the editors at Infoworld) aided and abetted him does nothing to excuse him.
As any teacher will tell you, there's no shortage of crappy or crazy teachers in the school system. No one is more critical of teachers than other teachers. As for Teacher of the Year, good for him. Doesn't change the fact that he's misrepresenting history (the Prussian origins of public schooling? Please) and talking about conspiracies to regulate and create permanent underclasses.
The problem here is that, in the ideal case, homeschooling is far better than public schooling. But that ideal case is a joke in comparison to reality, even ignoring issues like underclass communities who can't afford to homeschool their kids. Damaged parents create damaged kids. My wife has had to pull students aside, hand them a bar of soap, and tell them to come to school early and shower before class every day because they don't shower otherwise. How would homeschooling that kid help him?
Because large numbers of families would take that money and give their children a crappy education. A big part of the reason that public schooling took off is that it offered parents the opportunity to educate their children far beyond what they were capable of doing themselves, or had the wherewithal to do themselves.
And you want to talk about creating a permanent underclass? Start widespread homeschooling so that parents get to raise their children entirely insulated from other communities of opinion, children of different economic backgrounds, and exposure to professions other than their parents. The socialization offered by school is just as basic as having them interact with large numbers of other children in a setting that doesn't necessarily favor the idiosyncrasies of the parent's outlook.
If there was widespread or total homeschooling in Bible Belt, how many of those kids would go on to become doctors when they all got to university with no exposure to the theory of evolution?
This. As a practical matter, knowing SQL and database design is about the strongest additional skill you can add.
Gatto's a paranoid lunatic. As someone who's dated teachers and is married to one now, I can say pretty categorically:
1) Teachers have pretty wide latitude over what and how they teach their classes. To a degree this is because of the inability of school administration to closely supervise and control what actually goes on in a classroom, but in part it's also be design. The teachers of today were trained in their education degrees to work flexibly with their class to accomplish the most learning.
2) You don't send your kids to school because you accept a promise that the state can do better than you. You send them to school to socialize them with other kids, to learn from people who teach things you don't know like chemistry and calculus, and to get them out of the house so you can go back to your job (especially if you're a single parent).
3) Until you're in university, virtually nothing in your schooling prevents you, explicitly or otherwise, from pursuing any profession. Bad marks in high school might keep you out of Princeton, but that's about it, and Princeton isn't the only place to get a good degree. Now matter how badly you fuck up high school, you can still go on to do whatever you want to do, if you want it badly enough to do what's necessary, like repeating classes to get a good grade.