I am quite serious, and I intend to remain civil, because I don't believe you understand the point I'm making.
Police are already allowed to tail people. The argument that proponents of these GPS devices make is that using a GPS is "just like having a cop tail a person, which is what we already allow." I am saying that that reasoning is flawed, that's all. It is not at all like tailing a person.
Now, I don't know where you get the idea that I'm saying it is "valid to do it to one person for no reason." It isn't valid. The difference between theory and practice, however, is wide. In theory, cops need a good reason to tail people. In practice, they may get away with getting the go-ahead for less than good reasons. The scarcity of police resources, in practice, offered a check on what they could get away with, a check that will not be present once the scarcity is radically reduced through the use of GPS devices. With GPS use, we will see many more instances of infringements on our rights.
Advocates of this sort of thing say it is like having a police officer tail a person of interest. I'm sorry but it is not at all like that.
Prior to tracking by GPS, if the police wanted to track someone, they had to assign an officer, or multiple officers, to track him. This is the world we lived with, and this world is the context in which we reasoned about whether or not cops should be allowed to tail someone. I'm sure there was very little debate, if any, but that was because the scarcity of police relative to the population was a limit as to how many people the police could tail. It did not occur to us that the police would start tailing everybody, or even very many people. It was simply unimaginable that they would have the resources to invade the public's privacy
With the advent of GPS, we are now in a completely different economic-political context requiring that we must reconsider the issue and not simply continue right along with the policies put in place in a different world.
Where once police had to carefully consider whether or not it was worth the expenditure of their limited manpower to tail a person, they now no longer have to. Where once privacy protections were taken for granted by the very nature of what tailing people required, they can no longer be. It is reasonable to consider the possibility that GPS tracking could become widespread for all sorts of issues that would be considered minor, today. The police, as the costs of such tracking drop, will ask themselves "Why not?" The cost to society will be an enormous loss of privacy.
Don't let anyone try to tell you that there is no privacy issue because cops already tail people.
Shhhhhh! You're undermining the conceit among educators that says unless something is taught in school, it will never be learned.
I graduated high school in 1985. I never bothered taking the typing class offered. About 10 years later I had the need to learn to type. I bought Mavis Beacon for around $30, and inside of a month, with only a little casual practice, was typing 30 words per minute.
Typing is trivial. It doesn't need to be taught in school.
I agree. From my understanding, California is one of those states where textbooks are chosen by a state board and used throughout the state. In other words, individual districts do not evaluate and choose their own textbooks. Do you have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect an enormous amount of politicking? I think it's fair to say that books are swapped out long before they need to be more for the benefit of the textbook companies and the politicians they're in bed with.
Of course, they obscure this by developing all sorts of "innovative" curriculum changes that require "up-to-date" textbooks that employ "cutting edge" pedagogical methods. Sorry, but I'm not fooled.
Number one: I think you mean "than face the teachers union." A comparison requires "than." What you wrote literally means: first, give them drugs; second, face the teachers union.
Number two: I can't speak for the remaining 50 states, but in New York, a teacher dare not recommend to a parent that a student be put on medication. That's for a doctor to recommend. The best a teacher can do -- even when it's pretty clear to an experienced professional that deals with kids day in and day out that little Johnny could use a shot of Ritalin -- is to make a veiled suggestion to the parents that if they're still wondering what more could be done to help Johnny succeed, perhaps they could have a pediatrician rule out any health problems.
There is plenty of legitimate criticism to be made of education today; but I've got news for you -- the bogeyman teachers union is not behind every problem. It's a million times easier to blame the psychiatrists who spend five minutes "evaluating" a patient before trying their hit-or-miss method of prescribing the first drug that comes to mind. It may just be only less than a million times more accurate to blame them than the teachers union, too.
What people are you talking about? The great unwashed masses of television viewers? Sadly, it takes pleasing them to keep a show on TV. Sometimes the result is palatable to the more discriminating, but more often than not it's crap.
I tuned in every week to watch. Moreover, as pathetic as it is for someone my age, I took part in the e-mail campaign and sent an e-mail to Fox asking them to renew the show. Honestly though, Season 2 was very uneven. Do you disagree? I am very sorry the show was mishandled, because much of the show was very good television, as far as I'm concerned.
As to what the hell do I consider a good show -- as much as I liked SCC, I think Firefly was significantly better. Sorry to say though that my opinion carries very little weight with television executives.
One of the things that I did enjoy about the show, that I thought was done well, was the efforts by the terminators trying to "fit in." For example, in the last episode after the the Mexican girl who was sent by the priest to relay a message to John Connor finished relaying the message, as she was leaving, the terminator character, Cameron, awkwardly calls out "Hasta luega!"
There is a good spoof in the "Touched By A Terminator" concept.
Should someone at Saturday Night LIve or elsewhere pick up on this thread and implement it, I suggest you and I agree now to join forces in the lawsuit;-)
I have a slightly different take. I thought Season 1 was pretty good and showed promise. The best episodes were on Season 2. Of course, the most god-awful episodes were on Season 2, also.
During Season 1, I remember telling a friend of mine that I like the show, but that I worried it would fall into a cliched formula: meet a new character each week who was there for only the one episode, solve that character's problem, and then forget about the whole thing. Sadly, Season 2 had a lot of this "Touched By A Terminator" nonsense.
The last half-dozen episodes, tying up the whole Riley thread and all, were very, very good. But, the show died because it deserved to. It could have been a good show. Unfortunately, it was a very uneven effort.
This is a sore point for me. For a time, I was trying to get a job as a social studies teacher in New York. Most interviews went this way.
At some point during an on-site interview, in addition to filling out a job application and interviewing with one or more people, I would be asked to write a short essay, on the spot, in longhand. It was usually something like, "Tell about a time when a student really affected you," or some other touchy-feely thing.
I soon realized, since people include all sorts of fluff in their cover letter, that this was more or less a literacy test. Believe me, I went to school with other education majors. Some of them have huge holes in what you would consider basic education. Even some of the English majors are lacking (though not as bad as some of the other majors).
In any case, here's what I consider to be the irony. I was educated in New York public schools. I went to a state university in New York, both as an undergraduate (in history) and for graduate studies (in education). I am a product of New York public schooling. All of this is available on my resume. Moreover, I had to pass certain standardized tests in New York, given to teachers as a part of licensing requirements. The schools I was applying to were public schools. So, the joke is that even with a B.A. and an M.A., and my state certification, the schools could not trust my credentials -- and my credentials are the credentials they themselves award! They are credentials awarded by the New York State education system.
I've been saying something similar for a long while, and would love to see the phrase catch on. An adult shouldn't have to live under a giant, child-proof cap.
There is nothing stopping you, right now, from forming your own exclusive club -- or "professional association," if you prefer -- and marketing it as the only place to go to get qualified developers. My guess, however, is that you don't wish to stop there. Rather, you most likely would like to go further than free competition would allow and restrict competition through laws forbidding independent programmers from competing.
Please keep your proposal for what amounts to a medieval guild to your fantasy role-playing game and leave the grown ups free to make up their own minds when it comes to whom to hire.
No. Deregulation is what we need more of. What we need less of -- in fact, none of -- is government favoring some businesses (notably, huge quasi-governmental businesses) over others, and government fiddling with the money supply by promoting so-called "easy money" policies.
We're in this mess because government created two huge entities, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mac, subsidized them with all kinds of tax breaks and anti-competitive advantages, fueled them with tons of inflationary credit, and then encouraged irresponsibility and certain, eventual loss by directing them to make bad loans to people with poor credit, all the while winking to investors all over the world that they never need worry about these banks failing because the US government would write any checks necessary to keep them solvent.
This was the beginning of the speculation in housing, which led to the secondary speculation in mortgage instruments. What hurt was not deregulation, but government favoritism and a policy of socializing losses.
Pro-capitalist is not the same as "pro-business," when pro-business has come to mean Washington gets in bed with big business and writes laws to favor their buddies. That's cronyism. Capitalism means government stays out of the economy completely.
Free-market advocates don't claim that "the economy" will fix itself. What they point out is that each individual, in response to a recession, begins to change his or her economic behavior: this includes investors, business owners, managers, skilled workers, unskilled workers, and individuals spending their money on consumer goods. In this way, people, working individually, redirect their economic activity away from bad investments to good investments. In each case, the actions of each exist within a larger context: namely, the actions of other individuals. This context coordinates economic activity; and as each individual seeks gains rather than losses, the end result will be a reorganization of economic activity that will end the recession.
In other words, the economy doesn't fix itself; the individuals, each working within their own sphere, fix the economy. This activity will still attempt go on whether the government does anything or not. What free-market advocates argue is that government can only hinder this activity and, in doing so, the recovery.
So, yes, unless government manages to completely destroy the economy, when things start improving, free-market advocates will claim that the recovery would have happened anyway; and it is completely consistent with their understanding of economics to do so. It will not have been government that fixed the economy, but those elements of the free-market that remained unhampered by government.
It's also possible that the "humanity" of the brain emerges only with the context of senses connected to the outside world, and the conditional nature of life: meaning, the brain needs to actively pursue goals to maintain its existence.
Perhaps colleges leave us over-educated, and do so on purpose. Let me explain by analogy.
When I go to a restaurant, they pile my plate high with oversized portions. They do this because of the economics of restaurants: they want to charge a certain amount per plate, and the easiest thing to do to keep customers from feeling overcharged is to pile on the food. Now, regarding college, isn't it maybe true that students only need to learn so much to qualify them to start a career, and that they'll learn most of what they know from the years of working in their career. Of course, that wouldn't require 4 years of college, would it?
Maybe the schools are piling on with the subject matter just so they can justify what they're charging? Maybe they've sold us on the idea that what we're learning will be immediately useful?
Are we sure mentioning capitalism isn't a troll? The original article talks about the rah-rah self-esteem nonsense kids are being fed from Day 1. What does this have to do with capitalism?
Their explanation is basically: "We try to put everything in a really good place, but often forget what we did with a thing when we go to look for it." Try that in court when the FBI is investigating you.
It's small consolation to think your country's government enforces a monopoly on implementation of a surveillance society. But, here's an idea -- go onto Parliament's Web site, sign on to your account, navigate over to your privacy settings, and click the radio button marked "Opt Out."
Physical fitness standards have been lowered, with overweight, out-of-shape correctional officers in the system.
Give the prisoners couches, digital cable, and all the junk food they can eat; give the guards hours and hours per day to lift weights. Problem solved.
Slashdot Mirror
You do understand me correctly, but your characterization of my argument is irrelevant.
I am quite serious, and I intend to remain civil, because I don't believe you understand the point I'm making.
Police are already allowed to tail people. The argument that proponents of these GPS devices make is that using a GPS is "just like having a cop tail a person, which is what we already allow." I am saying that that reasoning is flawed, that's all. It is not at all like tailing a person.
Now, I don't know where you get the idea that I'm saying it is "valid to do it to one person for no reason." It isn't valid. The difference between theory and practice, however, is wide. In theory, cops need a good reason to tail people. In practice, they may get away with getting the go-ahead for less than good reasons. The scarcity of police resources, in practice, offered a check on what they could get away with, a check that will not be present once the scarcity is radically reduced through the use of GPS devices. With GPS use, we will see many more instances of infringements on our rights.
Advocates of this sort of thing say it is like having a police officer tail a person of interest. I'm sorry but it is not at all like that.
Prior to tracking by GPS, if the police wanted to track someone, they had to assign an officer, or multiple officers, to track him. This is the world we lived with, and this world is the context in which we reasoned about whether or not cops should be allowed to tail someone. I'm sure there was very little debate, if any, but that was because the scarcity of police relative to the population was a limit as to how many people the police could tail. It did not occur to us that the police would start tailing everybody, or even very many people. It was simply unimaginable that they would have the resources to invade the public's privacy
With the advent of GPS, we are now in a completely different economic-political context requiring that we must reconsider the issue and not simply continue right along with the policies put in place in a different world.
Where once police had to carefully consider whether or not it was worth the expenditure of their limited manpower to tail a person, they now no longer have to. Where once privacy protections were taken for granted by the very nature of what tailing people required, they can no longer be. It is reasonable to consider the possibility that GPS tracking could become widespread for all sorts of issues that would be considered minor, today. The police, as the costs of such tracking drop, will ask themselves "Why not?" The cost to society will be an enormous loss of privacy.
Don't let anyone try to tell you that there is no privacy issue because cops already tail people.
Shhhhhh! You're undermining the conceit among educators that says unless something is taught in school, it will never be learned.
I graduated high school in 1985. I never bothered taking the typing class offered. About 10 years later I had the need to learn to type. I bought Mavis Beacon for around $30, and inside of a month, with only a little casual practice, was typing 30 words per minute.
Typing is trivial. It doesn't need to be taught in school.
It seems it would kill them to include on their Web page a "Hello, World!" -- as in, here is how you tell Uzbl to load the Uzbl Web page.
I agree. From my understanding, California is one of those states where textbooks are chosen by a state board and used throughout the state. In other words, individual districts do not evaluate and choose their own textbooks. Do you have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect an enormous amount of politicking? I think it's fair to say that books are swapped out long before they need to be more for the benefit of the textbook companies and the politicians they're in bed with.
Of course, they obscure this by developing all sorts of "innovative" curriculum changes that require "up-to-date" textbooks that employ "cutting edge" pedagogical methods. Sorry, but I'm not fooled.
Isn't navy sonar already killing the whales?
I can't believe this is going to help things.
Number one: I think you mean "than face the teachers union." A comparison requires "than." What you wrote literally means: first, give them drugs; second, face the teachers union.
Number two: I can't speak for the remaining 50 states, but in New York, a teacher dare not recommend to a parent that a student be put on medication. That's for a doctor to recommend. The best a teacher can do -- even when it's pretty clear to an experienced professional that deals with kids day in and day out that little Johnny could use a shot of Ritalin -- is to make a veiled suggestion to the parents that if they're still wondering what more could be done to help Johnny succeed, perhaps they could have a pediatrician rule out any health problems.
There is plenty of legitimate criticism to be made of education today; but I've got news for you -- the bogeyman teachers union is not behind every problem. It's a million times easier to blame the psychiatrists who spend five minutes "evaluating" a patient before trying their hit-or-miss method of prescribing the first drug that comes to mind. It may just be only less than a million times more accurate to blame them than the teachers union, too.
What people are you talking about? The great unwashed masses of television viewers? Sadly, it takes pleasing them to keep a show on TV. Sometimes the result is palatable to the more discriminating, but more often than not it's crap.
I tuned in every week to watch. Moreover, as pathetic as it is for someone my age, I took part in the e-mail campaign and sent an e-mail to Fox asking them to renew the show. Honestly though, Season 2 was very uneven. Do you disagree? I am very sorry the show was mishandled, because much of the show was very good television, as far as I'm concerned.
As to what the hell do I consider a good show -- as much as I liked SCC, I think Firefly was significantly better. Sorry to say though that my opinion carries very little weight with television executives.
One of the things that I did enjoy about the show, that I thought was done well, was the efforts by the terminators trying to "fit in." For example, in the last episode after the the Mexican girl who was sent by the priest to relay a message to John Connor finished relaying the message, as she was leaving, the terminator character, Cameron, awkwardly calls out "Hasta luega!"
There is a good spoof in the "Touched By A Terminator" concept.
Should someone at Saturday Night LIve or elsewhere pick up on this thread and implement it, I suggest you and I agree now to join forces in the lawsuit ;-)
I have a slightly different take. I thought Season 1 was pretty good and showed promise. The best episodes were on Season 2. Of course, the most god-awful episodes were on Season 2, also.
During Season 1, I remember telling a friend of mine that I like the show, but that I worried it would fall into a cliched formula: meet a new character each week who was there for only the one episode, solve that character's problem, and then forget about the whole thing. Sadly, Season 2 had a lot of this "Touched By A Terminator" nonsense.
The last half-dozen episodes, tying up the whole Riley thread and all, were very, very good. But, the show died because it deserved to. It could have been a good show. Unfortunately, it was a very uneven effort.
This is a sore point for me. For a time, I was trying to get a job as a social studies teacher in New York. Most interviews went this way.
At some point during an on-site interview, in addition to filling out a job application and interviewing with one or more people, I would be asked to write a short essay, on the spot, in longhand. It was usually something like, "Tell about a time when a student really affected you," or some other touchy-feely thing.
I soon realized, since people include all sorts of fluff in their cover letter, that this was more or less a literacy test. Believe me, I went to school with other education majors. Some of them have huge holes in what you would consider basic education. Even some of the English majors are lacking (though not as bad as some of the other majors).
In any case, here's what I consider to be the irony. I was educated in New York public schools. I went to a state university in New York, both as an undergraduate (in history) and for graduate studies (in education). I am a product of New York public schooling. All of this is available on my resume. Moreover, I had to pass certain standardized tests in New York, given to teachers as a part of licensing requirements. The schools I was applying to were public schools. So, the joke is that even with a B.A. and an M.A., and my state certification, the schools could not trust my credentials -- and my credentials are the credentials they themselves award! They are credentials awarded by the New York State education system.
That's how bad it's gotten.
Or "to," when he means "too."
What does Murdoch know about making money, anyway?
I've been saying something similar for a long while, and would love to see the phrase catch on. An adult shouldn't have to live under a giant, child-proof cap.
There is nothing stopping you, right now, from forming your own exclusive club -- or "professional association," if you prefer -- and marketing it as the only place to go to get qualified developers. My guess, however, is that you don't wish to stop there. Rather, you most likely would like to go further than free competition would allow and restrict competition through laws forbidding independent programmers from competing.
Please keep your proposal for what amounts to a medieval guild to your fantasy role-playing game and leave the grown ups free to make up their own minds when it comes to whom to hire.
No. Deregulation is what we need more of. What we need less of -- in fact, none of -- is government favoring some businesses (notably, huge quasi-governmental businesses) over others, and government fiddling with the money supply by promoting so-called "easy money" policies.
We're in this mess because government created two huge entities, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mac, subsidized them with all kinds of tax breaks and anti-competitive advantages, fueled them with tons of inflationary credit, and then encouraged irresponsibility and certain, eventual loss by directing them to make bad loans to people with poor credit, all the while winking to investors all over the world that they never need worry about these banks failing because the US government would write any checks necessary to keep them solvent.
This was the beginning of the speculation in housing, which led to the secondary speculation in mortgage instruments. What hurt was not deregulation, but government favoritism and a policy of socializing losses.
Pro-capitalist is not the same as "pro-business," when pro-business has come to mean Washington gets in bed with big business and writes laws to favor their buddies. That's cronyism. Capitalism means government stays out of the economy completely.
Free-market advocates don't claim that "the economy" will fix itself. What they point out is that each individual, in response to a recession, begins to change his or her economic behavior: this includes investors, business owners, managers, skilled workers, unskilled workers, and individuals spending their money on consumer goods. In this way, people, working individually, redirect their economic activity away from bad investments to good investments. In each case, the actions of each exist within a larger context: namely, the actions of other individuals. This context coordinates economic activity; and as each individual seeks gains rather than losses, the end result will be a reorganization of economic activity that will end the recession.
In other words, the economy doesn't fix itself; the individuals, each working within their own sphere, fix the economy. This activity will still attempt go on whether the government does anything or not. What free-market advocates argue is that government can only hinder this activity and, in doing so, the recovery.
So, yes, unless government manages to completely destroy the economy, when things start improving, free-market advocates will claim that the recovery would have happened anyway; and it is completely consistent with their understanding of economics to do so. It will not have been government that fixed the economy, but those elements of the free-market that remained unhampered by government.
It's also possible that the "humanity" of the brain emerges only with the context of senses connected to the outside world, and the conditional nature of life: meaning, the brain needs to actively pursue goals to maintain its existence.
Perhaps colleges leave us over-educated, and do so on purpose. Let me explain by analogy.
When I go to a restaurant, they pile my plate high with oversized portions. They do this because of the economics of restaurants: they want to charge a certain amount per plate, and the easiest thing to do to keep customers from feeling overcharged is to pile on the food. Now, regarding college, isn't it maybe true that students only need to learn so much to qualify them to start a career, and that they'll learn most of what they know from the years of working in their career. Of course, that wouldn't require 4 years of college, would it?
Maybe the schools are piling on with the subject matter just so they can justify what they're charging? Maybe they've sold us on the idea that what we're learning will be immediately useful?
Are we sure mentioning capitalism isn't a troll? The original article talks about the rah-rah self-esteem nonsense kids are being fed from Day 1. What does this have to do with capitalism?
Their explanation is basically: "We try to put everything in a really good place, but often forget what we did with a thing when we go to look for it." Try that in court when the FBI is investigating you.
It's small consolation to think your country's government enforces a monopoly on implementation of a surveillance society. But, here's an idea -- go onto Parliament's Web site, sign on to your account, navigate over to your privacy settings, and click the radio button marked "Opt Out."
I'm not sure what it means to "lovate" people, but I'm sure it violates the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
Give the prisoners couches, digital cable, and all the junk food they can eat; give the guards hours and hours per day to lift weights. Problem solved.