Well, sometimes there are reasons even for geeks to use Hotmail. Where I currently work, the net nanny won't let me access my personal email (it's hosted by fastmail.fm, which the net nanny thinks is a spamming domain), but it will allow Hotmail. Now, I'm geeky enough to circumvent it, but since I'm a lowly security guard (haven't been able to find an appropriate job since being laid off from HP a year and a half ago), I could lose my job if I were caught; while I feel confident about accomplishing the circumvention, I don't feel certain that I can cover my tracks. So, I use Hotmail for certain emails I want to be able to read at work.
One of these days, I'll set up a server at home (under the aegis of doing homework for a certification course I'm taking), and use that as a proxy. But until then, Hotmail is my only decent option.
When they start getting images from the JWST, they'll see a dude in a flowing white robe and beard waving his arms; lip readers will ultimately be able to make out the words "Let there be light!" in Hebrew.
Ok, but the headline did say what this was about. If you're not interested in the case, there's no reason you have to read it. I only read articles I'm interested in, that way, I don't waste time reading or complaining about the ones I'm not.
Public schools provides not only a place for children to learn the basic skills such as math but also a place where they can learn how to socialize with different people in different situations. Most people tend to only socialize where they feel most comfortable. Schools tend to break the students out of that, and make them socialize with everyone.
Oh, really? Gee, I didn't realize that cramming 30-40 kids of the same age into a room was "making them socialize with everyone."
Will homeschooling provide that? Nope.
We were members of 2-3 different homeschooling groups (mostly overlapping), which got together once or twice a week for educational and social activities. My children (who are now adults) got to make friends with people several years older and several years younger than themselves. Unlike school, where most social relationships tend to be with people within a year or two of the same age as themselves. When I was in school, I hardly knew the people two classes ahead of me or behind me, and we were in a rural/small town setting. Bottom line, socialization is a straw man; our children had the opportunity to get to know a much greater variety of other children than most of those in public schools.
I have talked to a few people that have been homeschooled, and all of them had some severe social problems, more so than the average person that went to a public High School.
Your breadth of experience on the subject astounds me!
On another subject on Homeschooling, what about the parents "qualifications" for homeschooling? Do they have a bachelors Degree? A Master perhaps? In what subject do they have them on? Are they qualified (ie can do the exercises on their own, instead of saying "I am learning with my child?") to teach all subjects in schools?
I have yet to meet a set of parents that could answer "yes" to all those questions.
So what? Learning at its best is an internally-driven process. The best teachers aren't those who use their diplomas for wallpaper, they are those who inspire their charges to learn. Teaching is not about spoon-feeding knowledge to the pupils; it's about getting the pupils to want to know more about a subject, and helping point them in the right direction to find out more. We didn't keep our children cooped up in a classroom and drone at them all day; we made learning interesting, and as a result, ended up with two very gifted and creative individual thinkers. Our eldest scored in the 90th percentile on her SATs, and was accepted by 3-4 different colleges, and did well in her coursework. Our youngest chose not to go to college, as her interests are more artistic than academic, though she is now considering going to school after all (she's almost 22 now). Both have numerous friends and are well-liked by virtually everyone they know and work with
Exactly how would you say we failed them?
Homeschooling is actually worse than Public school.
You haven't met enough or the right homeschooled individuals, and don't have a clue what you're talking about. I was immersed in it for my children's entire childhood, and met numerous well-adjusted, articulate, bright and talented young people and their parents who were giving them the best fundamental educations I've ever seen.
Mind, we weren't the fundamentalist Christian type of homeschoolers who were doing it for religious reasons, such as avoiding having them learn about evolution or being exposed to the sinful ways of the world. We were following the educational philosophies of John Holt and others in the field. We actively participated in our childrens' lives and educations, and we were all richer for it.
Except that accounts who are deemed via metamoderation to moderate badly a lot no longer get mod points. In the long run, this really reduces the problem.
Good thing it's so hard for someone to create multiple accounts, then. Oh, wait....
While this is true, the parent's point is still valid. People do misuse mod points as described, and consider "offtopic" or "troll" to be a legitimate means of saying "I disagree with you" (which is why my default is to read at -1, whether or not I happen to have mod points; I have to skip over all of the "fr1st p0st" (which, I've noticed, usually aren't first posts!) and "goatse" crap, but I also get to read good comments that some idiot armed with mod points disagreed with); metamoderation only provides a means for grading the performance of moderators and doesn't really make the problem go away.
A teacher who starts at 8:30am and knocks off at 3:30pm isn't doing the job. There's time spent preparing lessons, quizzes, tests, etc.; then there's the time spent correcting the aforesaid. There are parent-teacher meetings that normally happen outside of school hours, continuing education requirements (many of which require using up some of that "12 weeks annual leave", or night classes or whatever), and supervising extra-curricular activities (athletic coaches usually get paid extra, but it isn't that much, and non-athletic activities usually don't entail extra pay).
Being a teacher entails acting as a mentor, an arbitrator, a cop, a counsellor, a confidante, a social worker, and many other professions. And then they have to put up with bozos who complain that they are overpaid.
I'm not actually a fan of the public school system; I think it's designed primarily to create sheep who will be docile and obedient workers for industry (for further discussion of that, see the works of John Taylor Gatto and John Holt). My wife and I homeschooled our own children, because we could see that public school wasn't serving their needs or helping them achieve their potential. But to assert that teachers have it easy and don't deserve what they make is utterly ridiculous. It is a demanding, high-stress, low-respect job, and anyone who does it (and doesn't just go through the motions) deserves more respect and salary than they probably get.
As for making $10,000 more than you, without knowing what that is or what you do to earn it, that's a meaningless comparison.
I'm the volunteer assistant admin for a PHP board (Bookup/Chess Opening Software support forums), and invariably, whenever I see someone register with an email address ending in.ru, it's a spammer. Either they put up a pr0n/laptop batteries/credit card/v1agr@ website link, or when their account is activated, they start posting spam in the forums. We've changed our policy to require admin approval for activating all new accounts, and have adopted a "delete on sight" policy for *.ru -- I don't even bother to email them to confirm their legitimacy, which I do for most others.
Sorry, but I've never seen a legitimate user register with a.ru address.
Amen. I'm currently working as a $12/hour security guard, less than a third of what I was making at HP when laid off a year and a half ago (thank you, Mark Hurd!). I've lost my house (we're moving to an apartment this weekend), have lousy health insurance (no more co-pays for medical appointments; I have to spend $3000 before they'll cover anything like that) and will be filing for bankruptcy in the very near future. Do they care? No. They've got their Beemers and fancy houses, and figure everything is going just fine. Eventually, though, I think the economy is going to implode, as they cut the legs out from under the people who are supposed to be buying all the crap Corporate America puts out.
I'm reminded of a story about a conversation between the president of an automobile manufacturer and a union leader (I don't remember the exact details, or whether it's just apocryphal). The automaker was bragging about how automation was going to cut costs and personnel and allow him to build hundreds of thousands more cars for the same price. The union leader's reply was something like, "That's great, but with all those people you're laying off, who's going to buy all those cars?"
The lower and middle class workers are the ones who are buying the stuff that makes the profits for the business people. Cut their ability to earn a decent living, and those profits will shrink drastically.
No. It is not my job to show I am innocent. Heck, some guy in this country was let off intensive sharing of child-pornography on the defense that his computer was riddled with virus.. Or some such. I'll just say "I didn't do it. Since I have an open wireless, it could be anyone in the neighbourhood". Then it would be my word against theirs, and the case would drop. Of course, they might bother me, even ransack my harddisks (which are clean). If they actually took my computer, I would be awarded damages if found innocent, and so forth (not much, of course. But still). Since I would be innocent, I don't really worry that I'll be convicted.
I don't know about Denmark, but in the US, there's a big difference between the rules of evidence for a criminal trial and those for a civil trial. For a criminal trial, the prosecution has to prove guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt". However, in a civil trial, the plaintiff needs only a "preponderance of the evidence"; the plaintiff prevails if the judge/jury thinks that its more than 50% likely that the defendant did, in fact, commit the tort and cause harm to the plaintiff.
It appears to me that the suits referred to in the article are civil suits, so unless Denmark has radically different rules about the level of evidence required for a plaintiff to prevail, you might be more exposed than you think. You might actually have to prove that someone else actually did commit the infringement, not merely that someone else could have.
The point being that the DNC is doing something that is likely to offend some of its supporters. Republicans and die-hard conservatives don't have any use for the DNC anyway.
Ok, I can see why he wouldn't want students looking at it during school time, but I think the real reason he went after them was his own ego. Students do waste time at school, and adults waste time at work, but do you really think he would have pulled out all the stops if this page wasn't aimed at him?
Reading through the comments in the bug report, it appears that they claim to be able to get Acrobat Reader (as well as Ghostview) to read the forms, so they're asserting that it's a Foxit problem. That said, I haven't tried it myself; I'll download 2.2 in the next few days and poke around with it to see what I can figure out.
If you have some sample forms created with 2.2 that aren't readable in AR, you might want to attach them to the bug and see if they will reopen it.
I'm not supporting the RIAA but this seems wrong to me. If the person they are sueing has access and may have used the PC for copyright infringement should the PC not be investigated?
It's like going "you can only have 2 of the 3 knives I may of used for that murder".
It's more like, "You can only have the knives that you have a plausible reason to believe may have been used for that murder." Why should they get the defendant's son's knife, just because he lives 4 miles away from the defendant and vigorously asserts the defendant's innocence? They need a reason to search other people's property; they can't just conjure up a hypothesis out of thin air that the property was used to commit the crime, and use that as justification to examine it.
This is all about intimidation. The RIAA doesn't like the son for defending his mother so vigorously, so they're spitefully trying to fish for evidence on his computer, on the off-chance they might be able to drag him into a lawsuit. They have no probable cause to accuse the son of any wrongdoing, or to assert that the mother is committing infringement using his computer rather than her own, and the judge is perfectly correct in denying their motion.
1. E-mail? Hi, people have these things called phones.
Yeah, those are good. But email is good for conveying or asking for information, and letting the other person respond whenever it's convenient, rather than when you feel like calling them.
2. IM? Hi, if you're not a teenage girl..
3. MySpace? Hi, if you're not a teenage girl..
I don't care for these 2 myself, but other people like them.
4. Paying bills? Hi omgstampsandpostoffices.
Ok, but I find online much more convenient. I can schedule recurring payments, set up bills to get paid while I'm out of town, and I don't have to sit down and write out a bunch of checks.
5. Porn? Okay, I don't have an answer there.
You weren't trying hard enough, then. All kinds of stores and magazine stands and video stores carry porn.:)
Slashdot Mirror
They said that???!?! Hmmm.... I guess I'll have to take them a bit more seriously, then....
-Mike
Well, sometimes there are reasons even for geeks to use Hotmail. Where I currently work, the net nanny won't let me access my personal email (it's hosted by fastmail.fm, which the net nanny thinks is a spamming domain), but it will allow Hotmail. Now, I'm geeky enough to circumvent it, but since I'm a lowly security guard (haven't been able to find an appropriate job since being laid off from HP a year and a half ago), I could lose my job if I were caught; while I feel confident about accomplishing the circumvention, I don't feel certain that I can cover my tracks. So, I use Hotmail for certain emails I want to be able to read at work.
One of these days, I'll set up a server at home (under the aegis of doing homework for a certification course I'm taking), and use that as a proxy. But until then, Hotmail is my only decent option.
-Mike
Isn't that what VCRs and DVRs were invented for?
-Mike
Where's the "-1, Wet Blanket" mod option?!?
-Mike
Er.... Ah.... DAMN! -Mike
When they start getting images from the JWST, they'll see a dude in a flowing white robe and beard waving his arms; lip readers will ultimately be able to make out the words "Let there be light!" in Hebrew.
-Mike
Ok, but the headline did say what this was about. If you're not interested in the case, there's no reason you have to read it. I only read articles I'm interested in, that way, I don't waste time reading or complaining about the ones I'm not.
-Mike
Public schools provides not only a place for children to learn the basic skills such as math but also a place where they can learn how to socialize with different people in different situations. Most people tend to only socialize where they feel most comfortable. Schools tend to break the students out of that, and make them socialize with everyone.
Oh, really? Gee, I didn't realize that cramming 30-40 kids of the same age into a room was "making them socialize with everyone."
Will homeschooling provide that? Nope.
We were members of 2-3 different homeschooling groups (mostly overlapping), which got together once or twice a week for educational and social activities. My children (who are now adults) got to make friends with people several years older and several years younger than themselves. Unlike school, where most social relationships tend to be with people within a year or two of the same age as themselves. When I was in school, I hardly knew the people two classes ahead of me or behind me, and we were in a rural/small town setting. Bottom line, socialization is a straw man; our children had the opportunity to get to know a much greater variety of other children than most of those in public schools.
I have talked to a few people that have been homeschooled, and all of them had some severe social problems, more so than the average person that went to a public High School.
Your breadth of experience on the subject astounds me!
On another subject on Homeschooling, what about the parents "qualifications" for homeschooling? Do they have a bachelors Degree? A Master perhaps? In what subject do they have them on? Are they qualified (ie can do the exercises on their own, instead of saying "I am learning with my child?") to teach all subjects in schools?
I have yet to meet a set of parents that could answer "yes" to all those questions.
So what? Learning at its best is an internally-driven process. The best teachers aren't those who use their diplomas for wallpaper, they are those who inspire their charges to learn. Teaching is not about spoon-feeding knowledge to the pupils; it's about getting the pupils to want to know more about a subject, and helping point them in the right direction to find out more. We didn't keep our children cooped up in a classroom and drone at them all day; we made learning interesting, and as a result, ended up with two very gifted and creative individual thinkers. Our eldest scored in the 90th percentile on her SATs, and was accepted by 3-4 different colleges, and did well in her coursework. Our youngest chose not to go to college, as her interests are more artistic than academic, though she is now considering going to school after all (she's almost 22 now). Both have numerous friends and are well-liked by virtually everyone they know and work with
Exactly how would you say we failed them?
Homeschooling is actually worse than Public school.
You haven't met enough or the right homeschooled individuals, and don't have a clue what you're talking about. I was immersed in it for my children's entire childhood, and met numerous well-adjusted, articulate, bright and talented young people and their parents who were giving them the best fundamental educations I've ever seen.
Mind, we weren't the fundamentalist Christian type of homeschoolers who were doing it for religious reasons, such as avoiding having them learn about evolution or being exposed to the sinful ways of the world. We were following the educational philosophies of John Holt and others in the field. We actively participated in our childrens' lives and educations, and we were all richer for it.
-Mike
Except that accounts who are deemed via metamoderation to moderate badly a lot no longer get mod points. In the long run, this really reduces the problem.
Good thing it's so hard for someone to create multiple accounts, then. Oh, wait....
-Mike
While this is true, the parent's point is still valid. People do misuse mod points as described, and consider "offtopic" or "troll" to be a legitimate means of saying "I disagree with you" (which is why my default is to read at -1, whether or not I happen to have mod points; I have to skip over all of the "fr1st p0st" (which, I've noticed, usually aren't first posts!) and "goatse" crap, but I also get to read good comments that some idiot armed with mod points disagreed with); metamoderation only provides a means for grading the performance of moderators and doesn't really make the problem go away.
-Mike
A teacher who starts at 8:30am and knocks off at 3:30pm isn't doing the job. There's time spent preparing lessons, quizzes, tests, etc.; then there's the time spent correcting the aforesaid. There are parent-teacher meetings that normally happen outside of school hours, continuing education requirements (many of which require using up some of that "12 weeks annual leave", or night classes or whatever), and supervising extra-curricular activities (athletic coaches usually get paid extra, but it isn't that much, and non-athletic activities usually don't entail extra pay).
Being a teacher entails acting as a mentor, an arbitrator, a cop, a counsellor, a confidante, a social worker, and many other professions. And then they have to put up with bozos who complain that they are overpaid.
I'm not actually a fan of the public school system; I think it's designed primarily to create sheep who will be docile and obedient workers for industry (for further discussion of that, see the works of John Taylor Gatto and John Holt). My wife and I homeschooled our own children, because we could see that public school wasn't serving their needs or helping them achieve their potential. But to assert that teachers have it easy and don't deserve what they make is utterly ridiculous. It is a demanding, high-stress, low-respect job, and anyone who does it (and doesn't just go through the motions) deserves more respect and salary than they probably get.
As for making $10,000 more than you, without knowing what that is or what you do to earn it, that's a meaningless comparison.
-Mike
I'm the volunteer assistant admin for a PHP board (Bookup/Chess Opening Software support forums), and invariably, whenever I see someone register with an email address ending in .ru, it's a spammer. Either they put up a pr0n/laptop batteries/credit card/v1agr@ website link, or when their account is activated, they start posting spam in the forums. We've changed our policy to require admin approval for activating all new accounts, and have adopted a "delete on sight" policy for *.ru -- I don't even bother to email them to confirm their legitimacy, which I do for most others.
.ru address.
Sorry, but I've never seen a legitimate user register with a
-Mike
B'ut we's like's ap'ostrophe's!
-M'ike'
(Is this creative enuff to get me trolled?)
Nah. You're trying too hard.
-Mike
Amen. I'm currently working as a $12/hour security guard, less than a third of what I was making at HP when laid off a year and a half ago (thank you, Mark Hurd!). I've lost my house (we're moving to an apartment this weekend), have lousy health insurance (no more co-pays for medical appointments; I have to spend $3000 before they'll cover anything like that) and will be filing for bankruptcy in the very near future. Do they care? No. They've got their Beemers and fancy houses, and figure everything is going just fine. Eventually, though, I think the economy is going to implode, as they cut the legs out from under the people who are supposed to be buying all the crap Corporate America puts out.
I'm reminded of a story about a conversation between the president of an automobile manufacturer and a union leader (I don't remember the exact details, or whether it's just apocryphal). The automaker was bragging about how automation was going to cut costs and personnel and allow him to build hundreds of thousands more cars for the same price. The union leader's reply was something like, "That's great, but with all those people you're laying off, who's going to buy all those cars?"
The lower and middle class workers are the ones who are buying the stuff that makes the profits for the business people. Cut their ability to earn a decent living, and those profits will shrink drastically.
-Mike
So 5x the earth's mass equals....like a freakin lot of gravity!
I wish you wouldn't toss around these fancy technical terms like that!
-Mike
Except that Bezos is on crack himself.
Shouldn't that be statscrack?
-Mike
No. It is not my job to show I am innocent. Heck, some guy in this country was let off intensive sharing of child-pornography on the defense that his computer was riddled with virus.. Or some such. I'll just say "I didn't do it. Since I have an open wireless, it could be anyone in the neighbourhood". Then it would be my word against theirs, and the case would drop. Of course, they might bother me, even ransack my harddisks (which are clean). If they actually took my computer, I would be awarded damages if found innocent, and so forth (not much, of course. But still). Since I would be innocent, I don't really worry that I'll be convicted.
I don't know about Denmark, but in the US, there's a big difference between the rules of evidence for a criminal trial and those for a civil trial. For a criminal trial, the prosecution has to prove guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt". However, in a civil trial, the plaintiff needs only a "preponderance of the evidence"; the plaintiff prevails if the judge/jury thinks that its more than 50% likely that the defendant did, in fact, commit the tort and cause harm to the plaintiff.
It appears to me that the suits referred to in the article are civil suits, so unless Denmark has radically different rules about the level of evidence required for a plaintiff to prevail, you might be more exposed than you think. You might actually have to prove that someone else actually did commit the infringement, not merely that someone else could have.
-Mike
The point being that the DNC is doing something that is likely to offend some of its supporters. Republicans and die-hard conservatives don't have any use for the DNC anyway.
-Mike
Ok, I can see why he wouldn't want students looking at it during school time, but I think the real reason he went after them was his own ego. Students do waste time at school, and adults waste time at work, but do you really think he would have pulled out all the stops if this page wasn't aimed at him?
-Mike
Reading through the comments in the bug report, it appears that they claim to be able to get Acrobat Reader (as well as Ghostview) to read the forms, so they're asserting that it's a Foxit problem. That said, I haven't tried it myself; I'll download 2.2 in the next few days and poke around with it to see what I can figure out.
If you have some sample forms created with 2.2 that aren't readable in AR, you might want to attach them to the bug and see if they will reopen it.
-Mike
But if they did that, Ken Blackwell wouldn't be able to deliver elections to the Republicans.
-Mike
I'm not supporting the RIAA but this seems wrong to me. If the person they are sueing has access and may have used the PC for copyright infringement should the PC not be investigated?
It's like going "you can only have 2 of the 3 knives I may of used for that murder".
It's more like, "You can only have the knives that you have a plausible reason to believe may have been used for that murder." Why should they get the defendant's son's knife, just because he lives 4 miles away from the defendant and vigorously asserts the defendant's innocence? They need a reason to search other people's property; they can't just conjure up a hypothesis out of thin air that the property was used to commit the crime, and use that as justification to examine it.
This is all about intimidation. The RIAA doesn't like the son for defending his mother so vigorously, so they're spitefully trying to fish for evidence on his computer, on the off-chance they might be able to drag him into a lawsuit. They have no probable cause to accuse the son of any wrongdoing, or to assert that the mother is committing infringement using his computer rather than her own, and the judge is perfectly correct in denying their motion.
-Mike
I can't figure out whether he's ignorant, a troll, or a Microsoft shill/fanboy. Very impressive, any way you look at it. Thanks for the laugh. :)
-Mike
1. E-mail? Hi, people have these things called phones.
:)
Yeah, those are good. But email is good for conveying or asking for information, and letting the other person respond whenever it's convenient, rather than when you feel like calling them.
2. IM? Hi, if you're not a teenage girl..
3. MySpace? Hi, if you're not a teenage girl..
I don't care for these 2 myself, but other people like them.
4. Paying bills? Hi omgstampsandpostoffices.
Ok, but I find online much more convenient. I can schedule recurring payments, set up bills to get paid while I'm out of town, and I don't have to sit down and write out a bunch of checks.
5. Porn? Okay, I don't have an answer there. You weren't trying hard enough, then. All kinds of stores and magazine stands and video stores carry porn.
-Mike