I would think if your child was really attached to drugs and knives, you would try to get him to stop that too...The only difference is that you've chosen your own value system...have rejected the possibility that greed and money could be bad for you.
The difference is that I will sit down with my children and explain to them how their habits might be self-destructing, instead of just telling them, "do it because I'm telling you to, or you will be punished." If God explains the reasons certain actions are bad for me other than that He will punish me for them because he doesn't like it, that's a completely different story. That would be a loving god that is trying to guide you.
I'm sure that my children will make many choices I will not agree with. When I think they're doing something that is a mistake I will not simply prohibit it, but I will explain to them why what they're doing is a mistake. When it's simply a matter of preference (like different politics, or different religions), I might disagree, but I won't punish them for making a different choice.
Your entire post is a classic "I've decided what is valuable, and God should then agree that it is valuable" argument. It's flawed because you're kind of missing the point as to what and who a GOD actually is and means.
I do kind of miss the point of who a God actually is. Is it just someone that's more powerful and more knowledgeable? Satan fits that description, and we're not worshiping him, right? The reason we're not is because the God we do worship is a God we believe is just and looking out for us. I have indeed decided what is valuable and what is not, because if there is indeed a God, he has left it up as a guessing game. He doesn't directly talk to us. He may or may not have talked to some people who wrote some stuff down, but what guarantee do I have that he has, and they weren't just crazy people? We have people today that claim God told them to go kill someone, but we don't believe that. Why should I believe some book about things I've never witnessed. Maybe they did happen, maybe they didn't, I'm not sure either way.
I find this entire discussion fascinating. I completely agree with your interpretation of those passages, and at the same time I can't understand how that makes them acceptable.
No...He said that to one person...
Right. The idea being, "are you willing to give up whatever you find most important in order to be accepted into the kingdom of God?"
Why should anyone have to be willing to give up what's important to them? Just because I'm not willing to give up my riches, or a host of other things I'm supposed to get punished for eternity? That's not a loving god. You wouldn't tell your child, "give up that which you are most attached to or I'll disown you."
Now, if the lesson had included a reason for giving up his riches, such as, "if you had a choice between keeping your wealth or letting an innocent die, you must be willing to give up your wealth to enter the kingdom of God," that would be different. But that wasn't about morality, that's "I'll reward you with eternal life in heaven or punish you with eternity in hell. Which you get depends on whether or not you will obey me, regardless of the cost to you. Fuck...that.
...using "hated" for "love less"
This is the same deal. He wants them to love Him more than their family, more then their own life. Actually, that IS rather cultish. Your family isn't as important as your newfound religion. Again, no. That type of love loyalty is earned, not given. I'm not going to love some god I've never seen, never talked to me, and gives ample room for me to even wonder if he exists or not more than the family that took care of me since I was born. Show up, demonstrate that you are a loving, caring, and good god, and you'll earn my love and trust.
Personally, I'm agnostic, and I believe that if God exists, than most of the stuff in the bible are just horrible interpretations by flawed humans. If there's a loving god out there, all I should do to earn my reward is to lead an honest life and not intentionally hurt anyone in the process. If anything more is being asked, and there's an all-powerful deity out there that really is that selfish, we're all fucked either way, so it won't change how I act.
"Pixar Effect" of using a high quality but unknown actor to avoid distractions
I like Pixar movies, but lets not attribute that kind of virtue to them ok? They get quite a few well known actors to attract viewers for every movie they make
Toy Story: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen
A Bug's Life: Kevin Spacey
Toy Story 2: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Kelsey Grammer
Monsters, Inc: John Goodman, Billy Crystal
Finding Nemo: Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe
The Incredibles: Samuel L. Jackson
Cars: Owen Wilson, Michael Keaton, Paul Newman
Ratatouille: Ian Holm, Peter O'Toole
That list is from memory, so I might actually be missing some big names there.
The toughest enemy in the first game was the camera. Really? I played through the game several times, and then several times again when they released Ninja Gaiden Black, and I never found the camera irritating...hold block and be safe while you adjust the camera, scratch an itch, make a sandwich...
The first release of Ninja Gaiden didn't give you any ability to adjust the camera. At all. If you had an xbox live account, they later patched it so that you could, and Ninja Gaiden Black contained those patches. I quit playing the game because of the camera angle (I didn't have an xbox live account, so I never got the patches), but have since played Ninja Gaiden Sigma and had a lot of fun.
The reason they patched it in the first place was because people were complaining so much about the lack of camera control. I can't understand why they would try to control the camera for the player again, they should have learned their lesson. Unless the lesson they learned was, "we can sell the same game again later, the way people actually want to play it, and call it Ninja Gaiden II Black."
...is it too much to ask that we take away the free speech of people... Yes Is it too much to ask that you respond to an entire quote rather than just taking part of it out of context?
To be fair, he wasn't really responding "out of context." He was implying that it is indeed too much to ask to take away the free speech of anyone, regardless of reason or justification. You're right in saying that there are always limits to free speech in any government, (the whole "don't yell fire in a crowded theater" thing), but it is possible that, in his opinion, even those limits are unacceptable.
Personally, I think we would be doing a great disservice to our soldiers by petitioning to remove the videos from youtube. They're not just giving their lives for our physical safety, they're giving their lives to protect our most highly regarded values and freedoms: they've all sworn an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America, which includes the right to free speech, whether you agree with that speech or not. If you don't, feel free to use your right to ignore it.
In fact, I can think of no greater way of honoring our soldiers than to stand proud and declare that even though those videos insult and hurt us deeply, we will defend the rights of even our current enemies to speak their mind and disseminate information however they please, using our own infrastructure.
People as a whole seem to have forgotten our values of old. Winning against the terrorists won't be accomplished by fighting a war in Iraq. That only feeds the anger of the people in the region which creates more volunteers to their forces. It's much more important to ensure that whatever they have done in the past, and whatever they do in the future, that we continue hanging on to our values. It's important that we resist the temptation to exchange the freedoms we value so highly for safety in the face of the fears that their terrorist actions have awoken in us.
I'm convinced that in the end, the terrorists' own words and actions will weaken their cause. Any reasonable person listening to them will find them to be unjust, unreasonable, and cruel. I say we should give them as much rope as they need to hang themselves.
Specifically, Microsoft is slowly shifting toward a more open standards based approach to its file formats. The ISO standard Office Open XML is an example of the direction we are moving towards. That pretty much says it all, here.
As someone who really prefers open software to proprietary software whenever I can help it, I have to say that I really have no hatred for Open XML. I have no illusion that Open XML is anything other than an attempt by Microsoft to maintain Office market control in the face of increasing government regulations demanding open formats. However, no matter how you spin it, Open XML is better than the older binary blobs. In the whole spectrum of openness, this is a good thing (tm).
Sure, ODF would be better, but Office moving from binary blob to clearly defined standard with a clear "promise not to sue" people who violate the patents in order to implement Open XML is a win for everyone. Not as big of a win as you might want, but it is a win.
And as far as Blender goes, before I read the article I thought that Microsoft were going to try to convince Blender devs to move to.Net on the interface or something that would make it less cross-platform. Instead, they want to help Blender devs implement file formats used in Windows. Microsoft gains something because their file formats will be more utilized elsewhere, Blender gains the ability to import / export to more file formats (which is always a good thing). As long as they don't default to saving to proprietary formats, everyone involved wins again.
So it does not work perfectly, I believe your math. What should we do? Stick our heads in the sand and ignore the threat? Rationalize that you are more likely to die in a car accident, so take no action?
That's not 'rationalizing.' That's proper allocation of resources. I could spend a really long time optimizing code that access data in memory and get it to be a few milliseconds faster, but if most of the time spent in the code is writing to disk, then I would be an idiot to not work on optimizing that aspect of the program instead.
I think people that pay cash for a one-way airline ticket need extra scrutiny.
I think people that move money around internationally through sketchy banks need some examination.
I'm not willing to jeopardize the freedoms and the privacy of thousands of innocent people to catch one or two criminals. The cure you're proposing is worse than the disease.
If you can identify who is paying for one-way airline tickets and a way of knowing who is paying cash for their tickets, or knowing where I'm moving my money to, then that's already an unacceptable intrusion into my life. That's before the "extra scrutiny" you think I deserve if I did any of those things. You should have to acquire some reason to suspect me of any wrongdoing and then go to a court and get a warrant in order to find out where I'm traveling to, and where I'm sending my money to.
I think people with terrorist ties need some looking at.
If the government has enough reason to suspect that anyone has terrorist ties, they should have no problem getting warrants and requesting information from banks and airlines as to where these people are going and where they're sending they're money. They can also get a legal wiretap. But they need to have that terrorist connection suspicion first, and then they need to get individual warrants.
And some times during all nighters we get bored so we spice up our comments and code to keep us entertained.
One of the "best" comments I made in my code was, "//WARNING: DO NOT DELETE THIS!" above a section that upon close inspection did absolutely nothing of consequence (although it did set a global variable somewhere. Looking for when it was used, it looked like it was always set to something else before the value was actually used, so setting the value at that point made no sense). Not remembering when or why I put that there, I tried commenting that section out and testing the program to see if anything broke. Everything appeared to run fine without it. However, just in case I was missing some interaction with the rather large codebase, I decided to uncomment the code rather than introducing a bug that I wasn't testing for.
To this day I'm still not sure whether that was a horrendous hack that I did or whether I fell prey to a practical joke I decided to pull to spice things up during one of those boring all-nighters...I am now sure of two things though: global variables suck and comments for horrendous hacks should actually explain what the horrendous hack is doing.
First of all, thanks for replying. I find this subject exceedingly interesting, and I certainly appreciate that you gave some pretty good arguments to support your view this time. From your arguments, I think I've determined we're not going to be able to agree with one another, though. Every logical argument has to begin at one fundamental belief, and this fundamental belief is where we differ. You believe there's something important in life itself, and we must work to preserve that. I believe life just is, and it's not important whether it exists or not. My brain is wired to like certain things and dislike others, so I try to maximize things I like and minimize things I dislike. Thanks to evolution, I kinda like living, so I continue on, not because I think it's my responsibility to continue on, but because that's what I'm wired to like.
Why do dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and other animals exist? They exist to procreate, and evolve into newer better versions of themselves.
What's the end game? Why should I care about what an evolved human being millions of years from now will be capable of? I'll be long dead. Not only that, but why is it important that he be a better version of ourselves? Where is this leading?
You don't think these other animals are busy trying to figure out how to be happy right?
Actually, being happy is pretty much the only thing they're concerned about. Since they lack higher reasoning, they don't know they'll die if they don't eat. They just "feel good" when they eat. They don't care about procreating, but sex "feels good".
All these animals focus on is how to survive from one day to the next, and on how to best survive as a species.
These animals lack the capability of focusing, or even thinking about survival. All they do is what makes them happy, and they've evolved to be happy when doing things that help with their survival. Not because there's a greater meaning in survival, but simply because animals that don't like to eat wouldn't have lasted long enough to procreate, and we wouldn't see them. Either way everyone is doing what makes them happy.
And the reason is, self preservation is a natural law, and the basis of this natural law is the basis for all reason and rational thought.
Self-preservation is a natural law because anything without a self-preservation instinct isn't likely to survive and pass on its lack of self-preservation instinct. It's not something that needs to be any individual's goal. It's something that, as a species, you can't escape. Evolution will always favor species that have a self-preservation instinct over those that don't.
The basis for capitalism is based on each individual being a reasonable actor who acts in his or her best interest. If you believe it's not in your best interest to survive, then you certainly are not reasonable in the way that animals are because it's against the laws of nature to not want to survive.
On the contrary, sir. If I can't find happiness in life, then the laws of nature demand I die. This way, I won't pass my flawed genes forward, and humanity as a whole will be stronger. Only humans with strong self-preservation instincts and those that can find happiness in their environment will procreate. You value improvement of the species, and evolution is just about as much as having a population survive as it is abut having a population die. And about sexual selection, so you generally don't want to be around depressed people who wish to kill themselves, much less procreate with them. That's why we like to be around jovial people. It makes us happy. Being around downers...well, there's a reason we call them 'downers'. That's your instinct telling you to get away from them.
The thing is, no complex thought was required thus far. The complex thought comes in finding the best strategy to avoiding the downers and hooking up
And it's okay that you are irrational, but putting any emotion before survival is irrational.
That's your opinion, and you're entitled to it. However, you failed to offer any arguments to back it up.
In order for my view to be irrational, my arguments need fail a point of logic. However, you're attacking the axiom my argument was based on, without defending your own axiom. Why is survival important? Why do you exist? If you are leading a miserable life, is death not preferable?
I continue on living because I like living. I'm fairly happy. The moment that ceases to be true, suicide is the only logical option. The alternative is to prolong a state you're not satisfied with, only to have it eventually end nevertheless. Therefore, in my view, you are the one being irrational.
I was reading your comments on the topic and couldn't agree with you at all. I couldn't quite figure out what made me believe the exact opposite of what you believe in, until the very moment I read that quote. You have some very good points about responsibility to your family, which should never be ignored, but that one thing you said is simply utterly and completely wrong, regardless of how you look at it.
Survival can't possibly come before happiness. What the hell is the point of living if you're not happy? So you spend your entire life in a job you hate just so you can make sure your children have the greatest possible opportunities in life...and then you expect your children to be miserable their entire lives to give security to their children, and the cycle of complete unhappiness continues. Why? If we're all supposed to be miserable all our lives, why are we so concerned about continuing on with our lives or our children lives? Why not just let humanity end?
The exact opposite is true. We continue on living because things in life makes us happy. Now, I do agree with you, and recommend anyone in a good paying job to be responsible enough to make backup plans while changing careers. Not because sacrifice of happiness for security is something one should aim for (on the contrary, you can sacrifice anything for happiness, but you should never sacrifice happiness itself), but because you're not going to be happy if your new venture fails and you end up in the poorhouse. So plan things wisely if you're making that move.
Vertical space does matter to developers. People even today walk by my desk and laugh at my twisted widescreen HP monitor. They can't possibly see the benefit. Then I drag over a pdf file of a specification document and can read a whole 8.5x11 sheet on that screen while coding on the other screen and they instantly see how well this size matches up.
Well, if you have two screens, that makes perfect sense. I'm not trading my dual monitors for a widescreen (because the price for an equivalently sized widescreen monitor is a bit out of my budget), but there's no way I can ever go back to a no widescreen laptop. I also look at a full 8.5x11 pdf on the 1920x1200 screen 17" screen. And I have a coding window on the same screen to the side.
I guess the problem is that a lot of people have problems reading text when it's too small, but if you have a 17" widescreen laptop, it's plenty enough, at least for me.
It all comes down to preference, I guess. The problem is that this isn't something you can fix. The reason they're not selling the non-widescreen laptops isn't to piss you or anybody else off, it's because the non-widescreen laptops aren't selling as well. Being a geek, I'm on the ignored segment of the market for a whole bunch of products, so I know how you feel, but you just need to suck it up and adapt. Or hope more people start to feel the way you do, I guess.
Look at the very topic of this article--iPhone/GPL incompatibility. The GPL is very probably limiting what software an enduser can use.
The GPL is doing no such thing. Apple is limiting developers from licensing any software under the GPL, if said software was created using their SDK. There's nothing on the GPL that prohibits use of GPL-licensed software in any device, whatever the hell the device may be running. All the limitations are on the developers.
Apple is perfectly within their rights to license their SDK however they like, of course. However, Apple is also limiting enduser freedom by locking the iphone so that only software created by their SDK and distributed by itunes can run.
Either way, the solution for the enduser with an iphone is simple. Jailbreak it, and get control of the device you paid for and is therefore rightfully yours.
As with everything else the government does (except when people cheat on the process which is another problem entirely), the lowest bidder.
How much should be paid to do this contract?
Whatever the lowest bid ends up being.
Should everyone get it or only dense populations? How dense do the populations have to be?
Everyone should get it. If you live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, it's likely to take a while more, but it's not like the government didn't do this before when it subsidized power and phone lines to those people.
How do we pay for it, do we inflate the currency through debt or do we increase tax?
The government should borrow money with future taxes as collateral (whenever this is done, very low interest rates can be worked out, because it's very low risk debt). Then a tax should be introduced on people who subscribe to the fiber, so that nobody else has to pay.
Who gets to use the fiber?
Every single company that has a business plan and can prove they have the capital to implement it.
How much do we charge companies to use this fiber?
Nothing. Users of the fibers are getting taxed on the bill already. Those companies will pay their other corporate taxes for running a business.
How do we ensure its being used for the right purposes and companies aren't bidding for contacts and locking in those customers?
Same way anti-trust laws are enforced. If there's reason to investigate, start an investigation.
Who is responsible for faults in the network? How are costs allocated?
Government contractors that bid for the privilege. They get paid from the same taxes.
The market is fine, the solution is to deregulate so companies are forced to compete, as opposed to the more segregated systems that we are used to now a days.
Competition over laying fiber is stupid and doesn't work. The cost of entering the business is way too high, so competition is naturally kept low (which is why the government ended up subsidizing the telcos so they would do it at all, creating the monopolies in the first place. Besides, the fiber is going through public property, and I strongly believe that anything going through public property should be public.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want the government to be my ISP, but there's no way you're going to get competition if every ISP needs to lay down their own fiber (and leasing it from another adds costs preventing them from competing).
I don't recall anyone ever saying "To have a free market, it must be provided by public Government services", a free market can never have any Government regulation or intervention, else it is not a free market.
People get really pissed off when I say this, but a completely free market sucks. A free market is only great when you can ensure plenty of competition. The moment monopolies show up, everyone gets screwed. Government sponsored local monopolies are a bad idea, but they're not the only way monopolies arise, and they can (and WILL) happen in a completely deregulated market, by simply having the companies with more resources squashing the others.
What I want is a free market with large amounts of competition. And I need anti-trust laws and government services over public areas in order to have it.
Spoken like a conspiracy theory nut. Distrust of the government is a very good thing. Blindingly thinking the government is out to get you is as stupid as blindingly believing it's out to help you. In this case, SELinux is completely open and out there for you to see.
It takes teams of people to understand the ins and outs of large sums of source code
Do you think teams of people haven't gone through the SELinux code with a fine-tooth comb? Security researchers were all over that, when the code was first given to the community in 2000. It wasn't placed in the mainline kernel until 2003. There has been plenty of time for people to find echelon-type code in there. Not to mention it would be pretty stupid to put that type of code in the open, as it would destroy people's confidence in the NSA and allow people who looked at the code to use these hooks for their own benefits, thus potentially using it against the US Government itself, since several departments including the DoD and the NSA itself use it.
I have hacked the kernel and made changes but I do not understand the entire thing, not one person could build an OS like Linux and deploy it without community support.
No, but I guarantee you that if you submitted your kernel changes to the mainline tree, several people above you looked at those changes and vetted it as worthwhile for inclusion. And you can bet every one of those people don't understand the entire kernel, but sure as hell understood the part of the kernel you were messing with. And they understood what your code was doing. Anyone can make changes to the linux code, but it's not an open source repository that everyone submits to, there are specific processes to get things accepted to the main tree.
The government is like a sexually transmitted disease, easy to catch and hard as hell to get rid of.
The solution to sexually transmitted diseases is to be vigilant and careful, not to stop having sex. If all humans become so afraid of sexually transmitted diseases that they quit having children humanity would be gone. Similar fate would befall you in total anarchism. Be wary of your government, and require it to be open. Please don't bitch about the good and open things the government has done, we need to encourage more of that.
From actually trying the graph out, I actually don't even see anything that's different with 'bbb' or 'brr'. 'bbb' is an instruction set that will lead you to node 8 and 'brr' will lead you to the yellow node. I also misread what the original poster was saying. I think you do have to follow the whole direction set if you don't know where you're going (and you can figure out that you're there if the next time you follow 3 directions leads you into a loop back where you started), but nothing should stop you from stopping early if you know you're passing through your destination while following the directions. In that case, there might be shorter paths, but the theorem doesn't indicate that it will give you the shortest possible path anyway.
I agree that specific solution works, but what about the general cases of the other 3 length permutations of 'r' and 'b'...Try 'bbb' and 'rrr' from any node, and you'll find 3 terminal nodes for each path.
I don't think that matters. As I understood it (and I could be wrong), the theorem is that for any node you can find a set of directions that will lead you to it from any other arbitrary node. It doesn't state that all possible direction permutations will lead you to a unique node, just that there's one that will. So 'bbb' and 'rrr' are just never going to be used as directions.
What makes wikipedia worthwhile is the amount of information available. Wikipedia credibility isn't in peril because it contains TNG episode descriptions (and it does). It's in peril because it contains inaccurate information. The one time I corrected wikipedia was the removal of some disguised claims to perpetual motion. The information had a few web page citations backing it up. I followed the links, because what they were saying intrigued me, and ended up at some crackpot's website. So I deleted that information. If it had been wrong on star trek related information, it would still be unreliable. If it didn't have any star trek information, it would still be providing wrong information on that topic.
What that tells you is that the current system works. Any encyclopedia works like that. I wasn't allowed to cite hard-copy encyclopedias when I was doing projects in school, they were meant as a starting point to gather information. Same thing I do with wikipedia. When I want quick information, I go there (and I go there quite often). If I need the extra reliability, I may look at the papers cited at wikipedia and decide if they're good reputable starting points, or go elsewhere.
Wikipedia is tremendously useful if you use it as an encyclopedia is meant to be used. A repository of tons of information for quick reference. If editors continue doing a good job requiring citation sources and checking for accuracy of information on topics they understand, it will continue to grow. If editors start removing information because "it's not worthy" I'm going to have to start going elsewhere for that information and they've accomplished nothing to increase their reputation.
In my house, if my kid comes home with a bad grade, the discussion instantly goes to the realm of show me your homework and exams. If the paper was unfairly graded, in my opinion, I will have a discussion with the teacher.
Fair enough, although some teachers keep exams and you have no way of knowing if the bundle of homework papers your child handed over were all of the assignments. I also think, I misunderstood the scenario. I assumed this was a civil discussion of a parent asking the teacher, "Bobby isn't doing well in your class. Why is that, and what can he do to improve?" type thing as opposed to, "why are you failing Bobby? He's a genius!" thing.
This was 15 year old, my wife was the teacher. The teacher didn't get the child to tell the truth: he asked a simple question that the parent should have asked.
See, to me that changes everything. When a 15-year-old gets bad grades, it's his fault. By that point, some material is bound to be challenging, and he's not guaranteed to be able to absorb everything in lectures. He should know to do his assignments, he should know to search for extra tutoring if he can't do his assignments because he doesn't understand them.
Actually, they should. The kid is more likely fib about his performance than the teacher. Teachers, in my experience on both sides of the issue (my wife and half my friends are high school teachers), don't really discriminate.
Depends on what we're talking about here. I don't think there are many teachers who are purposefully discriminatory, but we all have biases. As someone who has taught a semester course in college as a TA, I can tell you that I instantly started to "like" more the students who were doing better or who appeared to be working harder. I did everything I could to make sure that didn't affect anyone positively or negatively (I wouldn't look at the names on the papers when grading to make sure I wouldn't be more lenient on people that I subconsciously assumed tried harder. I'd also take breaks from grading when I started getting frustrated when noticed some people weren't getting concepts they really should already have been intimately familiar with before being in my class. At the end of it all, I'd compare random samples of papers to see if I were taking off points consistently for similar mistakes).
Now, somebody else replied to my post, and I realized from his response that I sound like I'm supporting confronting teachers over grades and/or ignoring what they say in favor of whatever your child is telling you. I didn't mean to convey that impression. I just think parents need to look at both sides of the story. They listen to the teacher, and then they talk to the child. "She said you're not doing your homework. Why is that?" or "she says you're behaving rudely against her, what's your side of this?" Obviously, "she hates me" wouldn't be an acceptable answer, and "she's wrong, I never did anything" doesn't work for repeated offenses, but I think some communication is necessary.
Actually, it's generally from the same parents. And no level of proof would satisfy them. If you brought in the audio tape, something else would be at issue.
Yeah, after arguing about the existence of bad teachers, I'm not about to argue that there are no bad parents. In fact, between the ones that just expect the teacher to raise the child for them, the ones who really aren't interested at all, and those that won't try to listen to the child's side of the story, I think there's a shortage of good parents out there.
Again, agreed. Been there, done that. This said, of the 30 or so high school teachers I had, three of them were bad.
Sounds like about the right percentage for high school, but when I go back further it's a different story. I had some really bad elementary school teachers. Granted, they don't earn enough to put up with the crap they have t
how can a classroom function at all without parental support?
Well, from your comment I think that some of the things I was trying to say were misunderstood. I don't expect parents to get into a confrontation with the teacher because and claim they don't believe her. Nor do I expect parents to ignore teachers, I understand children will lie to their parents. I'm just saying that they can't be assumed to be lying without a pattern of bad behavior. And even if the child is a perfect angel when he's near you, I don't expect parents to attack a teacher in defense of the child either. I expect them to listen, thank the teacher for telling them about it, and then later to have a serious private talk with the child and try to get the details. Talk to the other teachers, see if there's a universal problem or if it's just that one class. If multiple teachers start telling you the same type of stories, odds are that something is going on, and it's time to take further action. That's the sane way of going about things like that.
My particular beef with the parent's post was that I saw nothing wrong with original example. A child is getting bad grades, the parents don't get a straight answer out of the child, they ask the teacher. The teacher answers. What exactly was the unacceptable behavior there? The calling the teacher a bitch thing is a bit more complicated problem, and I probably wouldn't start demanding the teacher produce an audio tape unless she started escalating the problem herself, but I just don't see it as completely unreasonable (in a situation where she's asking for a suspension or other drastic punishment) to ask for proof.
parent comes with child to teacher-parent conference upset at the teacher that child did not get a good grade. Teacher looks at child and says "did you do the assignments?" Child answers "no". Teacher tells parent "that's why he got a bad grade."
I fail to see what the problem is here. Child tells parent that he got a bad grade because teacher doesn't like him / teacher sucks / whatever. Parent confronts teacher about it. Teacher gets child to tell the truth (although there may or may not be more to it. The child could be just lazy, but it's possible the child didn't do the work because the teacher did suck, and the child was frustrated because he couldn't understand the material. For the sake of limiting the variables, I'm going to assume the child is just lazy). What the hell is abnormal about this scenario?
So, the question is, how much bull do you think this kid can get past his parents if one single question from the teacher can shed light on why he got a bad grade ?
I don't know. How old is this child? If we're talking about a 7 year old, why didn't the teacher send a note home to be signed by the parents telling them that the kid wasn't doing his assignments, before it got to the point of bad grades? What exactly did the child tell the parents about the grades? Again, for the sake of simplifying the argument, I'm going to assume notes were sent and forged signed notes returned. Teacher is not to blame, and parents will find out.
If we're talking about a teenager, you have a point. Even if the teacher sucks, by that age a child should be able to learn by reading the textbook, and any parent who blames the teacher for bad grades can be thoroughly and safely ignored. Heck, at that age, I don't know why parents would even bother to talk to teachers unless they were called in about some problem. Back when I was in school, my parents made my allowance conditional on good grades, and you can bet that worked. They held me responsible for how well I was doing, not the teachers.
How much credibility does the teacher have in that household ?
After that conference, where the teacher clearly explained why the child wasn't succeeding in the class, quite a lot. Did you expect a teacher that the parents have never before met to have some sort of credibility? Based on what, the title of "teacher"?
Or the student who called a teacher a bitch in class. When the parent was called for a conference, her response was "do you have audio-tape proof ?"
It sucks that we live in a world where people don't respect one another. However, if a teacher has constant problems being disrespected like that, instead of being offended about the request for proof, she should take that as good advice, and start recording her lectures. Back when I was in first grade, I had a teacher outright lie to my mother about something that I supposedly did. I assume (now) that she didn't have something against me and somehow got me confused with another child or something, but it still put me in a defensive situation with my parents even though I had done nothing wrong. So you'll forgive me if I think requesting proof isn't altogether a ridiculous idea.
I'm certainly not saying all parents are like this. Not even 15%. But if three or four students in a classroom disrupt, the whole class is in trouble. Computers start to crash. Equipment disappears. All sorts of stuff like that.
Look, being a teacher is hard. And even though I've had craptastic teachers in my day, I've also had some awesome ones. The ones who were great were still disrespected by children who really were a problem, so I do see where you're coming from. Sometimes parents really do have a freaking problem with saying no a child and they raise spoiled brats. I see from another post that you're married to a teacher, and she might be one of those great teachers like the ones I re
The universe is a huge place, what makes NASA think that our telescopes are able to see the "earliest stars and galaxies"?
The cosmic microwave background left over from the big bang as measured by WMAP tells us the approximate age of the universe. Red-shift measurements tells us the distances of the stars we observe. The speed of light tells us how long it takes for the light of those stars to get here. Ta-da.
Or is this one of those "We are in the center of the universe" ideologies again?
We ARE at the center of the universe. So is everywhere else. The Big Bang wasn't an explosion that filled out existing space from which there's a center. Space itself expands from that point on, so the same infinitesimal point where the big bang started is the place where you're standing in now. The standard analogy is the surface area of a balloon as you fill the balloon up. There's just no preferred center.
IANAL, but what I interpreted from reading those faqs is that in the first answer, they're worried about limitations from the license. For example, the gpl3 has patent clauses which may or may not be compatible with microsoft retaining their patents. The second answer qualifies this as stating that the promise not to sue applies to everyone, regardless of their development model.
Microsoft often does underhanded things, but everything about the open specification promise actually does seem pretty good to me. That first answer was just their lawyers covering their bases against the wording of licenses which may prohibit you from using patented algorithms, in which case, it's not microsoft's fault, but the license that is causing you to retain "concerns about microsoft patents."
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that I will sit down with my children and explain to them how their habits might be self-destructing, instead of just telling them, "do it because I'm telling you to, or you will be punished." If God explains the reasons certain actions are bad for me other than that He will punish me for them because he doesn't like it, that's a completely different story. That would be a loving god that is trying to guide you.
I'm sure that my children will make many choices I will not agree with. When I think they're doing something that is a mistake I will not simply prohibit it, but I will explain to them why what they're doing is a mistake. When it's simply a matter of preference (like different politics, or different religions), I might disagree, but I won't punish them for making a different choice.
Your entire post is a classic "I've decided what is valuable, and God should then agree that it is valuable" argument. It's flawed because you're kind of missing the point as to what and who a GOD actually is and means.I do kind of miss the point of who a God actually is. Is it just someone that's more powerful and more knowledgeable? Satan fits that description, and we're not worshiping him, right? The reason we're not is because the God we do worship is a God we believe is just and looking out for us. I have indeed decided what is valuable and what is not, because if there is indeed a God, he has left it up as a guessing game. He doesn't directly talk to us. He may or may not have talked to some people who wrote some stuff down, but what guarantee do I have that he has, and they weren't just crazy people? We have people today that claim God told them to go kill someone, but we don't believe that. Why should I believe some book about things I've never witnessed. Maybe they did happen, maybe they didn't, I'm not sure either way.
The woman who does the voice of Bart Simpson is indeed a Scientologist.
I find this entire discussion fascinating. I completely agree with your interpretation of those passages, and at the same time I can't understand how that makes them acceptable.
No...He said that to one person...Right. The idea being, "are you willing to give up whatever you find most important in order to be accepted into the kingdom of God?"
Why should anyone have to be willing to give up what's important to them? Just because I'm not willing to give up my riches, or a host of other things I'm supposed to get punished for eternity? That's not a loving god. You wouldn't tell your child, "give up that which you are most attached to or I'll disown you."
Now, if the lesson had included a reason for giving up his riches, such as, "if you had a choice between keeping your wealth or letting an innocent die, you must be willing to give up your wealth to enter the kingdom of God," that would be different. But that wasn't about morality, that's "I'll reward you with eternal life in heaven or punish you with eternity in hell. Which you get depends on whether or not you will obey me, regardless of the cost to you. Fuck...that.
...using "hated" for "love less"This is the same deal. He wants them to love Him more than their family, more then their own life. Actually, that IS rather cultish. Your family isn't as important as your newfound religion. Again, no. That type of love loyalty is earned, not given. I'm not going to love some god I've never seen, never talked to me, and gives ample room for me to even wonder if he exists or not more than the family that took care of me since I was born. Show up, demonstrate that you are a loving, caring, and good god, and you'll earn my love and trust.
Personally, I'm agnostic, and I believe that if God exists, than most of the stuff in the bible are just horrible interpretations by flawed humans. If there's a loving god out there, all I should do to earn my reward is to lead an honest life and not intentionally hurt anyone in the process. If anything more is being asked, and there's an all-powerful deity out there that really is that selfish, we're all fucked either way, so it won't change how I act.
I like Pixar movies, but lets not attribute that kind of virtue to them ok? They get quite a few well known actors to attract viewers for every movie they make
Toy Story: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen
A Bug's Life: Kevin Spacey
Toy Story 2: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Kelsey Grammer
Monsters, Inc: John Goodman, Billy Crystal
Finding Nemo: Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Dafoe
The Incredibles: Samuel L. Jackson
Cars: Owen Wilson, Michael Keaton, Paul Newman
Ratatouille: Ian Holm, Peter O'Toole
That list is from memory, so I might actually be missing some big names there.
The first release of Ninja Gaiden didn't give you any ability to adjust the camera. At all. If you had an xbox live account, they later patched it so that you could, and Ninja Gaiden Black contained those patches. I quit playing the game because of the camera angle (I didn't have an xbox live account, so I never got the patches), but have since played Ninja Gaiden Sigma and had a lot of fun.
The reason they patched it in the first place was because people were complaining so much about the lack of camera control. I can't understand why they would try to control the camera for the player again, they should have learned their lesson. Unless the lesson they learned was, "we can sell the same game again later, the way people actually want to play it, and call it Ninja Gaiden II Black."
...is it too much to ask that we take away the free speech of people... Yes Is it too much to ask that you respond to an entire quote rather than just taking part of it out of context?To be fair, he wasn't really responding "out of context." He was implying that it is indeed too much to ask to take away the free speech of anyone, regardless of reason or justification. You're right in saying that there are always limits to free speech in any government, (the whole "don't yell fire in a crowded theater" thing), but it is possible that, in his opinion, even those limits are unacceptable.
Personally, I think we would be doing a great disservice to our soldiers by petitioning to remove the videos from youtube. They're not just giving their lives for our physical safety, they're giving their lives to protect our most highly regarded values and freedoms: they've all sworn an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America, which includes the right to free speech, whether you agree with that speech or not. If you don't, feel free to use your right to ignore it.
In fact, I can think of no greater way of honoring our soldiers than to stand proud and declare that even though those videos insult and hurt us deeply, we will defend the rights of even our current enemies to speak their mind and disseminate information however they please, using our own infrastructure.
People as a whole seem to have forgotten our values of old. Winning against the terrorists won't be accomplished by fighting a war in Iraq. That only feeds the anger of the people in the region which creates more volunteers to their forces. It's much more important to ensure that whatever they have done in the past, and whatever they do in the future, that we continue hanging on to our values. It's important that we resist the temptation to exchange the freedoms we value so highly for safety in the face of the fears that their terrorist actions have awoken in us.
I'm convinced that in the end, the terrorists' own words and actions will weaken their cause. Any reasonable person listening to them will find them to be unjust, unreasonable, and cruel. I say we should give them as much rope as they need to hang themselves.
As someone who really prefers open software to proprietary software whenever I can help it, I have to say that I really have no hatred for Open XML. I have no illusion that Open XML is anything other than an attempt by Microsoft to maintain Office market control in the face of increasing government regulations demanding open formats. However, no matter how you spin it, Open XML is better than the older binary blobs. In the whole spectrum of openness, this is a good thing (tm).
Sure, ODF would be better, but Office moving from binary blob to clearly defined standard with a clear "promise not to sue" people who violate the patents in order to implement Open XML is a win for everyone. Not as big of a win as you might want, but it is a win.
And as far as Blender goes, before I read the article I thought that Microsoft were going to try to convince Blender devs to move to .Net on the interface or something that would make it less cross-platform. Instead, they want to help Blender devs implement file formats used in Windows. Microsoft gains something because their file formats will be more utilized elsewhere, Blender gains the ability to import / export to more file formats (which is always a good thing). As long as they don't default to saving to proprietary formats, everyone involved wins again.
That's not 'rationalizing.' That's proper allocation of resources. I could spend a really long time optimizing code that access data in memory and get it to be a few milliseconds faster, but if most of the time spent in the code is writing to disk, then I would be an idiot to not work on optimizing that aspect of the program instead.
I think people that pay cash for a one-way airline ticket need extra scrutiny.
I think people that move money around internationally through sketchy banks need some examination.
I'm not willing to jeopardize the freedoms and the privacy of thousands of innocent people to catch one or two criminals. The cure you're proposing is worse than the disease.
If you can identify who is paying for one-way airline tickets and a way of knowing who is paying cash for their tickets, or knowing where I'm moving my money to, then that's already an unacceptable intrusion into my life. That's before the "extra scrutiny" you think I deserve if I did any of those things. You should have to acquire some reason to suspect me of any wrongdoing and then go to a court and get a warrant in order to find out where I'm traveling to, and where I'm sending my money to.
I think people with terrorist ties need some looking at.If the government has enough reason to suspect that anyone has terrorist ties, they should have no problem getting warrants and requesting information from banks and airlines as to where these people are going and where they're sending they're money. They can also get a legal wiretap. But they need to have that terrorist connection suspicion first, and then they need to get individual warrants.
One of the "best" comments I made in my code was, "//WARNING: DO NOT DELETE THIS!" above a section that upon close inspection did absolutely nothing of consequence (although it did set a global variable somewhere. Looking for when it was used, it looked like it was always set to something else before the value was actually used, so setting the value at that point made no sense). Not remembering when or why I put that there, I tried commenting that section out and testing the program to see if anything broke. Everything appeared to run fine without it. However, just in case I was missing some interaction with the rather large codebase, I decided to uncomment the code rather than introducing a bug that I wasn't testing for.
To this day I'm still not sure whether that was a horrendous hack that I did or whether I fell prey to a practical joke I decided to pull to spice things up during one of those boring all-nighters...I am now sure of two things though: global variables suck and comments for horrendous hacks should actually explain what the horrendous hack is doing.
First of all, thanks for replying. I find this subject exceedingly interesting, and I certainly appreciate that you gave some pretty good arguments to support your view this time. From your arguments, I think I've determined we're not going to be able to agree with one another, though. Every logical argument has to begin at one fundamental belief, and this fundamental belief is where we differ. You believe there's something important in life itself, and we must work to preserve that. I believe life just is, and it's not important whether it exists or not. My brain is wired to like certain things and dislike others, so I try to maximize things I like and minimize things I dislike. Thanks to evolution, I kinda like living, so I continue on, not because I think it's my responsibility to continue on, but because that's what I'm wired to like.
Why do dogs, cats, chickens, pigs, and other animals exist? They exist to procreate, and evolve into newer better versions of themselves.
What's the end game? Why should I care about what an evolved human being millions of years from now will be capable of? I'll be long dead. Not only that, but why is it important that he be a better version of ourselves? Where is this leading?
You don't think these other animals are busy trying to figure out how to be happy right?
Actually, being happy is pretty much the only thing they're concerned about. Since they lack higher reasoning, they don't know they'll die if they don't eat. They just "feel good" when they eat. They don't care about procreating, but sex "feels good".
All these animals focus on is how to survive from one day to the next, and on how to best survive as a species.
These animals lack the capability of focusing, or even thinking about survival. All they do is what makes them happy, and they've evolved to be happy when doing things that help with their survival. Not because there's a greater meaning in survival, but simply because animals that don't like to eat wouldn't have lasted long enough to procreate, and we wouldn't see them. Either way everyone is doing what makes them happy.
And the reason is, self preservation is a natural law, and the basis of this natural law is the basis for all reason and rational thought.
Self-preservation is a natural law because anything without a self-preservation instinct isn't likely to survive and pass on its lack of self-preservation instinct. It's not something that needs to be any individual's goal. It's something that, as a species, you can't escape. Evolution will always favor species that have a self-preservation instinct over those that don't.
The basis for capitalism is based on each individual being a reasonable actor who acts in his or her best interest. If you believe it's not in your best interest to survive, then you certainly are not reasonable in the way that animals are because it's against the laws of nature to not want to survive.
On the contrary, sir. If I can't find happiness in life, then the laws of nature demand I die. This way, I won't pass my flawed genes forward, and humanity as a whole will be stronger. Only humans with strong self-preservation instincts and those that can find happiness in their environment will procreate. You value improvement of the species, and evolution is just about as much as having a population survive as it is abut having a population die. And about sexual selection, so you generally don't want to be around depressed people who wish to kill themselves, much less procreate with them. That's why we like to be around jovial people. It makes us happy. Being around downers...well, there's a reason we call them 'downers'. That's your instinct telling you to get away from them.
The thing is, no complex thought was required thus far. The complex thought comes in finding the best strategy to avoiding the downers and hooking up
That's your opinion, and you're entitled to it. However, you failed to offer any arguments to back it up.
In order for my view to be irrational, my arguments need fail a point of logic. However, you're attacking the axiom my argument was based on, without defending your own axiom. Why is survival important? Why do you exist? If you are leading a miserable life, is death not preferable?
I continue on living because I like living. I'm fairly happy. The moment that ceases to be true, suicide is the only logical option. The alternative is to prolong a state you're not satisfied with, only to have it eventually end nevertheless. Therefore, in my view, you are the one being irrational.
I was reading your comments on the topic and couldn't agree with you at all. I couldn't quite figure out what made me believe the exact opposite of what you believe in, until the very moment I read that quote. You have some very good points about responsibility to your family, which should never be ignored, but that one thing you said is simply utterly and completely wrong, regardless of how you look at it.
Survival can't possibly come before happiness. What the hell is the point of living if you're not happy? So you spend your entire life in a job you hate just so you can make sure your children have the greatest possible opportunities in life...and then you expect your children to be miserable their entire lives to give security to their children, and the cycle of complete unhappiness continues. Why? If we're all supposed to be miserable all our lives, why are we so concerned about continuing on with our lives or our children lives? Why not just let humanity end?
The exact opposite is true. We continue on living because things in life makes us happy. Now, I do agree with you, and recommend anyone in a good paying job to be responsible enough to make backup plans while changing careers. Not because sacrifice of happiness for security is something one should aim for (on the contrary, you can sacrifice anything for happiness, but you should never sacrifice happiness itself), but because you're not going to be happy if your new venture fails and you end up in the poorhouse. So plan things wisely if you're making that move.
Well, if you have two screens, that makes perfect sense. I'm not trading my dual monitors for a widescreen (because the price for an equivalently sized widescreen monitor is a bit out of my budget), but there's no way I can ever go back to a no widescreen laptop. I also look at a full 8.5x11 pdf on the 1920x1200 screen 17" screen. And I have a coding window on the same screen to the side.
I guess the problem is that a lot of people have problems reading text when it's too small, but if you have a 17" widescreen laptop, it's plenty enough, at least for me.
It all comes down to preference, I guess. The problem is that this isn't something you can fix. The reason they're not selling the non-widescreen laptops isn't to piss you or anybody else off, it's because the non-widescreen laptops aren't selling as well. Being a geek, I'm on the ignored segment of the market for a whole bunch of products, so I know how you feel, but you just need to suck it up and adapt. Or hope more people start to feel the way you do, I guess.
The GPL is doing no such thing. Apple is limiting developers from licensing any software under the GPL, if said software was created using their SDK. There's nothing on the GPL that prohibits use of GPL-licensed software in any device, whatever the hell the device may be running. All the limitations are on the developers.
Apple is perfectly within their rights to license their SDK however they like, of course. However, Apple is also limiting enduser freedom by locking the iphone so that only software created by their SDK and distributed by itunes can run.
Either way, the solution for the enduser with an iphone is simple. Jailbreak it, and get control of the device you paid for and is therefore rightfully yours.
As with everything else the government does (except when people cheat on the process which is another problem entirely), the lowest bidder.
How much should be paid to do this contract?Whatever the lowest bid ends up being.
Should everyone get it or only dense populations? How dense do the populations have to be?Everyone should get it. If you live on a farm in the middle of nowhere, it's likely to take a while more, but it's not like the government didn't do this before when it subsidized power and phone lines to those people.
How do we pay for it, do we inflate the currency through debt or do we increase tax?The government should borrow money with future taxes as collateral (whenever this is done, very low interest rates can be worked out, because it's very low risk debt). Then a tax should be introduced on people who subscribe to the fiber, so that nobody else has to pay.
Who gets to use the fiber?Every single company that has a business plan and can prove they have the capital to implement it.
How much do we charge companies to use this fiber?Nothing. Users of the fibers are getting taxed on the bill already. Those companies will pay their other corporate taxes for running a business.
How do we ensure its being used for the right purposes and companies aren't bidding for contacts and locking in those customers?Same way anti-trust laws are enforced. If there's reason to investigate, start an investigation.
Who is responsible for faults in the network? How are costs allocated?Government contractors that bid for the privilege. They get paid from the same taxes.
The market is fine, the solution is to deregulate so companies are forced to compete, as opposed to the more segregated systems that we are used to now a days.Competition over laying fiber is stupid and doesn't work. The cost of entering the business is way too high, so competition is naturally kept low (which is why the government ended up subsidizing the telcos so they would do it at all, creating the monopolies in the first place. Besides, the fiber is going through public property, and I strongly believe that anything going through public property should be public.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want the government to be my ISP, but there's no way you're going to get competition if every ISP needs to lay down their own fiber (and leasing it from another adds costs preventing them from competing).
I don't recall anyone ever saying "To have a free market, it must be provided by public Government services", a free market can never have any Government regulation or intervention, else it is not a free market.People get really pissed off when I say this, but a completely free market sucks. A free market is only great when you can ensure plenty of competition. The moment monopolies show up, everyone gets screwed. Government sponsored local monopolies are a bad idea, but they're not the only way monopolies arise, and they can (and WILL) happen in a completely deregulated market, by simply having the companies with more resources squashing the others.
What I want is a free market with large amounts of competition. And I need anti-trust laws and government services over public areas in order to have it.
Spoken like a conspiracy theory nut. Distrust of the government is a very good thing. Blindingly thinking the government is out to get you is as stupid as blindingly believing it's out to help you. In this case, SELinux is completely open and out there for you to see.
It takes teams of people to understand the ins and outs of large sums of source codeDo you think teams of people haven't gone through the SELinux code with a fine-tooth comb? Security researchers were all over that, when the code was first given to the community in 2000. It wasn't placed in the mainline kernel until 2003. There has been plenty of time for people to find echelon-type code in there. Not to mention it would be pretty stupid to put that type of code in the open, as it would destroy people's confidence in the NSA and allow people who looked at the code to use these hooks for their own benefits, thus potentially using it against the US Government itself, since several departments including the DoD and the NSA itself use it.
I have hacked the kernel and made changes but I do not understand the entire thing, not one person could build an OS like Linux and deploy it without community support.No, but I guarantee you that if you submitted your kernel changes to the mainline tree, several people above you looked at those changes and vetted it as worthwhile for inclusion. And you can bet every one of those people don't understand the entire kernel, but sure as hell understood the part of the kernel you were messing with. And they understood what your code was doing. Anyone can make changes to the linux code, but it's not an open source repository that everyone submits to, there are specific processes to get things accepted to the main tree.
The government is like a sexually transmitted disease, easy to catch and hard as hell to get rid of.The solution to sexually transmitted diseases is to be vigilant and careful, not to stop having sex. If all humans become so afraid of sexually transmitted diseases that they quit having children humanity would be gone. Similar fate would befall you in total anarchism. Be wary of your government, and require it to be open. Please don't bitch about the good and open things the government has done, we need to encourage more of that.
From actually trying the graph out, I actually don't even see anything that's different with 'bbb' or 'brr'. 'bbb' is an instruction set that will lead you to node 8 and 'brr' will lead you to the yellow node. I also misread what the original poster was saying. I think you do have to follow the whole direction set if you don't know where you're going (and you can figure out that you're there if the next time you follow 3 directions leads you into a loop back where you started), but nothing should stop you from stopping early if you know you're passing through your destination while following the directions. In that case, there might be shorter paths, but the theorem doesn't indicate that it will give you the shortest possible path anyway.
I don't think that matters. As I understood it (and I could be wrong), the theorem is that for any node you can find a set of directions that will lead you to it from any other arbitrary node. It doesn't state that all possible direction permutations will lead you to a unique node, just that there's one that will. So 'bbb' and 'rrr' are just never going to be used as directions.
What makes wikipedia worthwhile is the amount of information available. Wikipedia credibility isn't in peril because it contains TNG episode descriptions (and it does). It's in peril because it contains inaccurate information. The one time I corrected wikipedia was the removal of some disguised claims to perpetual motion. The information had a few web page citations backing it up. I followed the links, because what they were saying intrigued me, and ended up at some crackpot's website. So I deleted that information. If it had been wrong on star trek related information, it would still be unreliable. If it didn't have any star trek information, it would still be providing wrong information on that topic.
What that tells you is that the current system works. Any encyclopedia works like that. I wasn't allowed to cite hard-copy encyclopedias when I was doing projects in school, they were meant as a starting point to gather information. Same thing I do with wikipedia. When I want quick information, I go there (and I go there quite often). If I need the extra reliability, I may look at the papers cited at wikipedia and decide if they're good reputable starting points, or go elsewhere.
Wikipedia is tremendously useful if you use it as an encyclopedia is meant to be used. A repository of tons of information for quick reference. If editors continue doing a good job requiring citation sources and checking for accuracy of information on topics they understand, it will continue to grow. If editors start removing information because "it's not worthy" I'm going to have to start going elsewhere for that information and they've accomplished nothing to increase their reputation.
In my house, if my kid comes home with a bad grade, the discussion instantly goes to the realm of show me your homework and exams. If the paper was unfairly graded, in my opinion, I will have a discussion with the teacher.
Fair enough, although some teachers keep exams and you have no way of knowing if the bundle of homework papers your child handed over were all of the assignments. I also think, I misunderstood the scenario. I assumed this was a civil discussion of a parent asking the teacher, "Bobby isn't doing well in your class. Why is that, and what can he do to improve?" type thing as opposed to, "why are you failing Bobby? He's a genius!" thing.
This was 15 year old, my wife was the teacher. The teacher didn't get the child to tell the truth: he asked a simple question that the parent should have asked.
See, to me that changes everything. When a 15-year-old gets bad grades, it's his fault. By that point, some material is bound to be challenging, and he's not guaranteed to be able to absorb everything in lectures. He should know to do his assignments, he should know to search for extra tutoring if he can't do his assignments because he doesn't understand them.
Actually, they should. The kid is more likely fib about his performance than the teacher. Teachers, in my experience on both sides of the issue (my wife and half my friends are high school teachers), don't really discriminate.
Depends on what we're talking about here. I don't think there are many teachers who are purposefully discriminatory, but we all have biases. As someone who has taught a semester course in college as a TA, I can tell you that I instantly started to "like" more the students who were doing better or who appeared to be working harder. I did everything I could to make sure that didn't affect anyone positively or negatively (I wouldn't look at the names on the papers when grading to make sure I wouldn't be more lenient on people that I subconsciously assumed tried harder. I'd also take breaks from grading when I started getting frustrated when noticed some people weren't getting concepts they really should already have been intimately familiar with before being in my class. At the end of it all, I'd compare random samples of papers to see if I were taking off points consistently for similar mistakes).
Now, somebody else replied to my post, and I realized from his response that I sound like I'm supporting confronting teachers over grades and/or ignoring what they say in favor of whatever your child is telling you. I didn't mean to convey that impression. I just think parents need to look at both sides of the story. They listen to the teacher, and then they talk to the child. "She said you're not doing your homework. Why is that?" or "she says you're behaving rudely against her, what's your side of this?" Obviously, "she hates me" wouldn't be an acceptable answer, and "she's wrong, I never did anything" doesn't work for repeated offenses, but I think some communication is necessary.
Actually, it's generally from the same parents. And no level of proof would satisfy them. If you brought in the audio tape, something else would be at issue.
Yeah, after arguing about the existence of bad teachers, I'm not about to argue that there are no bad parents. In fact, between the ones that just expect the teacher to raise the child for them, the ones who really aren't interested at all, and those that won't try to listen to the child's side of the story, I think there's a shortage of good parents out there.
Again, agreed. Been there, done that. This said, of the 30 or so high school teachers I had, three of them were bad.
Sounds like about the right percentage for high school, but when I go back further it's a different story. I had some really bad elementary school teachers. Granted, they don't earn enough to put up with the crap they have t
Well, from your comment I think that some of the things I was trying to say were misunderstood. I don't expect parents to get into a confrontation with the teacher because and claim they don't believe her. Nor do I expect parents to ignore teachers, I understand children will lie to their parents. I'm just saying that they can't be assumed to be lying without a pattern of bad behavior. And even if the child is a perfect angel when he's near you, I don't expect parents to attack a teacher in defense of the child either. I expect them to listen, thank the teacher for telling them about it, and then later to have a serious private talk with the child and try to get the details. Talk to the other teachers, see if there's a universal problem or if it's just that one class. If multiple teachers start telling you the same type of stories, odds are that something is going on, and it's time to take further action. That's the sane way of going about things like that.
My particular beef with the parent's post was that I saw nothing wrong with original example. A child is getting bad grades, the parents don't get a straight answer out of the child, they ask the teacher. The teacher answers. What exactly was the unacceptable behavior there? The calling the teacher a bitch thing is a bit more complicated problem, and I probably wouldn't start demanding the teacher produce an audio tape unless she started escalating the problem herself, but I just don't see it as completely unreasonable (in a situation where she's asking for a suspension or other drastic punishment) to ask for proof.
parent comes with child to teacher-parent conference upset at the teacher that child did not get a good grade. Teacher looks at child and says "did you do the assignments?" Child answers "no". Teacher tells parent "that's why he got a bad grade."
I fail to see what the problem is here. Child tells parent that he got a bad grade because teacher doesn't like him / teacher sucks / whatever. Parent confronts teacher about it. Teacher gets child to tell the truth (although there may or may not be more to it. The child could be just lazy, but it's possible the child didn't do the work because the teacher did suck, and the child was frustrated because he couldn't understand the material. For the sake of limiting the variables, I'm going to assume the child is just lazy). What the hell is abnormal about this scenario?
So, the question is, how much bull do you think this kid can get past his parents if one single question from the teacher can shed light on why he got a bad grade ?
I don't know. How old is this child? If we're talking about a 7 year old, why didn't the teacher send a note home to be signed by the parents telling them that the kid wasn't doing his assignments, before it got to the point of bad grades? What exactly did the child tell the parents about the grades? Again, for the sake of simplifying the argument, I'm going to assume notes were sent and forged signed notes returned. Teacher is not to blame, and parents will find out.
If we're talking about a teenager, you have a point. Even if the teacher sucks, by that age a child should be able to learn by reading the textbook, and any parent who blames the teacher for bad grades can be thoroughly and safely ignored. Heck, at that age, I don't know why parents would even bother to talk to teachers unless they were called in about some problem. Back when I was in school, my parents made my allowance conditional on good grades, and you can bet that worked. They held me responsible for how well I was doing, not the teachers.
How much credibility does the teacher have in that household ?
After that conference, where the teacher clearly explained why the child wasn't succeeding in the class, quite a lot. Did you expect a teacher that the parents have never before met to have some sort of credibility? Based on what, the title of "teacher"?
Or the student who called a teacher a bitch in class. When the parent was called for a conference, her response was "do you have audio-tape proof ?"
It sucks that we live in a world where people don't respect one another. However, if a teacher has constant problems being disrespected like that, instead of being offended about the request for proof, she should take that as good advice, and start recording her lectures. Back when I was in first grade, I had a teacher outright lie to my mother about something that I supposedly did. I assume (now) that she didn't have something against me and somehow got me confused with another child or something, but it still put me in a defensive situation with my parents even though I had done nothing wrong. So you'll forgive me if I think requesting proof isn't altogether a ridiculous idea.
I'm certainly not saying all parents are like this. Not even 15%. But if three or four students in a classroom disrupt, the whole class is in trouble. Computers start to crash. Equipment disappears. All sorts of stuff like that.
Look, being a teacher is hard. And even though I've had craptastic teachers in my day, I've also had some awesome ones. The ones who were great were still disrespected by children who really were a problem, so I do see where you're coming from. Sometimes parents really do have a freaking problem with saying no a child and they raise spoiled brats. I see from another post that you're married to a teacher, and she might be one of those great teachers like the ones I re
The cosmic microwave background left over from the big bang as measured by WMAP tells us the approximate age of the universe. Red-shift measurements tells us the distances of the stars we observe. The speed of light tells us how long it takes for the light of those stars to get here. Ta-da.
Or is this one of those "We are in the center of the universe" ideologies again?We ARE at the center of the universe. So is everywhere else. The Big Bang wasn't an explosion that filled out existing space from which there's a center. Space itself expands from that point on, so the same infinitesimal point where the big bang started is the place where you're standing in now. The standard analogy is the surface area of a balloon as you fill the balloon up. There's just no preferred center.
I hereby smite you.
IANAL, but what I interpreted from reading those faqs is that in the first answer, they're worried about limitations from the license. For example, the gpl3 has patent clauses which may or may not be compatible with microsoft retaining their patents. The second answer qualifies this as stating that the promise not to sue applies to everyone, regardless of their development model.
Microsoft often does underhanded things, but everything about the open specification promise actually does seem pretty good to me. That first answer was just their lawyers covering their bases against the wording of licenses which may prohibit you from using patented algorithms, in which case, it's not microsoft's fault, but the license that is causing you to retain "concerns about microsoft patents."