My mod points expired yesterday, but this is DEFINITELY worth bringing up. And not just first hand abuse should be worried about either. Someone posted a link in one of the Dell Ubuntu stories about how by giving Grandma Linux could lead to more sophisticated bot-nets. What about 1 billion Linux machines (that are more or less identical, so rinse and repeat if a zero day is found) in the hands of children? The sudden influx of networked machines would cause the potential for more and larger scale DDOS attacks.
In the end this might be a great thing, but I hope the OLPC crew, and everyone else jumping on that ship has plans on dealing with the potential side effects of all this new networked computing power 'out in the wild' if you will.
Doesn't anyone think that without the context behind the excerpts we don't know if he was trying to be ironic? As in since the essay was so close to the VA shootings, and the parameter of the assignment was to write without boundaries, he was commenting on how people didn't notice the VA shooter to be disturbed through the exact same creative writing exercises?
FYI: Firefox usage nears 25% in Europe is the original article:S, not being a smartass, just sayin':)...
Anyway...
I say that the taxation curves were in a major way a contributing factor to the post-war boom
Well I got tired of clicking links in google about the post war boom and not finding a single reference to the taxes levied at the time. Showing that when I say post war boom, most people do not think about your argument where you didn't specifically mention it, you mentioned an economically prosperous time which I say has more to do with the end of WWII (surplus of workers, increased globalization, increased consumer demand, all DIRECT results of the era) as a factor in itself, not just a time period reference.
That of course depends on the kind of government one has. If it is a truly enlightened representative democracy...
Well our system is far from utopian, but it's the best we got, and it's better to work with the current system then work on something that couldn't be used unless there were significant changes in hows things worked. In a utopian system, most forms of government (including communism, anarchy, etc...) DO work, that's why it's called ideal and not real.
As for your premise though: Real Compensation per hour GDP Historical Tax Brackets
Still doesn't correlate for me when it comes to the numbers, they still go up despite tax cuts in the largest bracket. You'll probably say it was more even distribution to the middle class, I didn't find that particular evidence, and if found I would still attribute it to the strong unions of the period fighting for worker's rights and the GI bill educating the workforce over anything else.
As a matter of fact this very system was in place in the USA during its most prosperous for most of its citizens time, that is in 1950s and 1960s when the middle class expanded rapidly and innovation bloomed like in no time before.
Yet at that very time top bracket tax rates were around 90%.
Coincidence? Me thinks not.
Coincidence with the post-war boom, strong unions, etc... ? I would think so.
Your model still gives the government gobs of money from the private sector. Where is their threshold? Regardless of what it does to the private sector, you now have a government with a large surplus of funds, which is not a good idea methinks.
As another pointed out TFA talking about University Level courses. If you didn't score well in math on entry exams or SATs or whatnot, then you should start in Pre-Calc (as a 0 level pre-requisite course) instead of taking the actual 100 level course (Calc I). For someone who knows 0 programming, yes, start out with some fodder language.
Hello World demonstrates language syntax and is an ABYSMAL way of starting off programming when one has never programmed at all, ever, as far as Java goes. For someone who has written things already in BASIC or Javascript it's a perfectly acceptable way of introducing the language.
What you really want to do is show them something they created and give it properties and actions. Java provides the tools for this. Draw a ball on the screen, have it move across the screen, have the ball bounce, use the class to draw two balls on the screen, etc... Oh look something fun, but I guess this is where we diverge since your version of teaching programming to beginners is parsing strings.
With Java it is even possible to introduce things in abstract like threading AND sockets in a 100 level course and get working proofs of concept. They did it at my college almost a decade ago.
Again, once more, I am talking about 100 level University courses, not vocational school, not high school, not 'what was the language you first programmed in', not what language to teach your girlfriend, etc... You REALLY want to give someone college credit for learning the very basic, spoon fed part of the discipline they will get their degree in?
Like I said I'm using a Pre-Calc/Calc I analogy here, all the Mechanical and Civil Engineers I know didn't get that credit, it was just a pre-req.
The first part of any learning path should be to allow those who are not familiar with it to see what you can do with it. Do we start teaching mathematics with order of operations? No -- we show first how to count (immediate practical applications), then how to add, subtract, and other things with immediate practical applications. Do we start teaching reading with sentence diagramming? No -- we start with simple sentences (immediate practical applications). Etc.
Hence why they teach Java instead of x86 assembly. If you were whining about learning C first I could see that, what with memory management, no default/easy graphics/windows form library (no shiny things), and poor string handling, I'll even give you C++ being too hard. But Java teaches you the principles of OO in a very graspable manner. Maybe something simpler should be taught as a pre-req for people who have done all of 0 programming, like QBASIC or something. But when somebody on/. is complaining about Java being too hard of a first college level programming language, then yeah, things are getting too watered down.
I'm a heavy sleeper and from what I heard on the videos, the alarm isn't loud enough, I'll still end up sleeping right through the battery life. Speaking of battery life, this thing needs a charger to sit on, and a lithium battery instead of a couple of copper tops. My last caveat would be that it's motion is a little too random, it should instead have random higher level functions (which, it might have to some extent, might just be some needed configuration), and maybe some advanced configuration options.
Oh yeah that'll spur innovation, take away the incentive to become successful by giving all your profits to the government. Then we'll only have 1 monopoly.
I share your sentiment, but as long as it's legal for citizens to own body armor (Connecticut and New York:( ) then I see no problem with better armor, just make it available to the populace.
Oh please, using sweeping generalizations like that for censorship in an information age are moot. There is such a difference between satelite photos from 2 years ago and 2 days ago that I shouldn't have to explain it. If there wasn't anything wrong about having those photos available for sale then there shouldn't be anything wrong with making them publicly available.
The enemy has gathered 2 year old intel on you, well guess what, you can change tactics, location, etc... and I'll bet by the time photos of 2 days ago come out, it'll be another 2 years. Why can't they use the current intel they gathered as misinformation.
I sincerely hope this whole story is misinformation for the enemey, otherwise it's just more evidence that the people in charge don't know how to run a war.
So 2 year old satellite images offer more intelligence to the enemy then the billion dollar intelligence we have here, so we're just supposed to shut it down? I don't know, how about rotate the positions of the tents maybe, from where they have ALWAYS been for two years? 20 years ago we were in a cold war with a comperable super power, now we're supposed to get up in arms because a few dust farmers killed one guy using Google Maps? Next.
What makes it so not humble? Are you an oceanographer, climateologist(?), maybe even a highschool physics teacher? Or a computer programmer that simply thinks they have some sort of internet authority and false sense of elitism? Oh wait... slashdot... nevermind.
Yeah I know, think of how catastrophic it would be to not have to deal with natures natural way of cooling down the oceans. You know, hurricanes.
In all fairness, smart people would need to be in charge to get something like that just right and not overdone, and smart people in charge are a rare commodity./Wait for troll to say they're glad I'm not in charge in 3...2...
Hindsight is 20/20 and so is the view from the peanut gallery.
The judgment was too much, this has a chilling effect on private citizens giving them responsibilities without increasing the actual authority they have, it shouldn't have ever gone to the courts, being in the situation she was in she was most likely doomed from the start.
TFA never divulged the comments or any details about them. I will reserve judgment that they were malfeasance/wrongdoing/criminal and give the defendant the benefit of the doubt, since that's what you are supposed to do, in this legal system anyway. And before you say it, I know a jury determined otherwise, but I was not on that jury and appeals have not been heard, so you can just consider it my prerogative.
Then we're just arguing semantics. Webster has a few definitions, we're talking about two different things. Like I said, I agree that Scheff was well within her legal rights, anybody can sue anybody else in a civil court for anything. Still doesn't make it right.
Complaining about something is not free. Just as complaints don't always hurt. When you complain, you put your reputation on the line as well otherwise, your complaint holds little value. And complaints give you free advertising as well. I've seen complaints give people more business first hand.
In 2003, Scheff sued Bock for defamation. Bock hired a lawyer, but he left the case when she no longer could afford to pay him.
When Katrina hit in August 2005, Bock's house was flooded and she moved temporarily to Texas before returning to Louisiana last June.
...she knew the trial was approaching but did not know the date. She says she doesn't have the money to pay the judgment or hire a lawyer to appeal it.
Maybe it was wouldn't, because she was getting sued into submission by someone with more money. I guess you've never been in any situation where the shit was piled so high, that you just didn't care about proper procedure anymore. That is not justice any way you slice it, proper procedure maybe, Scheff never broke any law, sure. But 11 million default judgment != a single private citizens' complaints strewn across a few pages of internet. Period.
Whatever, I just hope everyone is prepared to walk on eggshells the next time someone on eBay or Amazon screws someone them over.
Someone spouted off because they were dissatisfied with a service provided and had an $11 million dollar default judgement against them and you call that justice? I'm sure Katrina was a week long, month long event, right? Something that people could just get back on their feet from in a year right? Someone's life got ruined twice, and you find it just? Because they used common vulgarities (crook, conartist) to describe how they felt about the service they recieved. That's just ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
My mod points expired yesterday, but this is DEFINITELY worth bringing up. And not just first hand abuse should be worried about either. Someone posted a link in one of the Dell Ubuntu stories about how by giving Grandma Linux could lead to more sophisticated bot-nets. What about 1 billion Linux machines (that are more or less identical, so rinse and repeat if a zero day is found) in the hands of children? The sudden influx of networked machines would cause the potential for more and larger scale DDOS attacks.
In the end this might be a great thing, but I hope the OLPC crew, and everyone else jumping on that ship has plans on dealing with the potential side effects of all this new networked computing power 'out in the wild' if you will.
It is FROM 1898, but to be fair, it was repealed and reinstated a few times, for people who think I didn't RTFL I put up.
The Federal Excise Tax was repealed and we had a one time refund. Also, it's from BEFORE WWI, more like the Spanish-American War in 1898. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_telephone_exc ise_tax
"I'll phone Children's Aid!"
"Is that right? Oh, well let me get you the phone tough guy."
"What are you doing? If I call them you'll get in trouble!"
"Oh I might get into a little bit of trouble, but I know it takes them 23 minutes to get here, and in that time, somebody gonna get a hurt real bad."
Doesn't anyone think that without the context behind the excerpts we don't know if he was trying to be ironic? As in since the essay was so close to the VA shootings, and the parameter of the assignment was to write without boundaries, he was commenting on how people didn't notice the VA shooter to be disturbed through the exact same creative writing exercises?
Thanks for the more informative article btw.
FYI: Firefox usage nears 25% in Europe is the original article :S, not being a smartass, just sayin' :) ...
Anyway...
I say that the taxation curves were in a major way a contributing factor to the post-war boom
Well I got tired of clicking links in google about the post war boom and not finding a single reference to the taxes levied at the time. Showing that when I say post war boom, most people do not think about your argument where you didn't specifically mention it, you mentioned an economically prosperous time which I say has more to do with the end of WWII (surplus of workers, increased globalization, increased consumer demand, all DIRECT results of the era) as a factor in itself, not just a time period reference.
That of course depends on the kind of government one has. If it is a truly enlightened representative democracy...
Well our system is far from utopian, but it's the best we got, and it's better to work with the current system then work on something that couldn't be used unless there were significant changes in hows things worked. In a utopian system, most forms of government (including communism, anarchy, etc...) DO work, that's why it's called ideal and not real.
As for your premise though:
Real Compensation per hour
GDP
Historical Tax Brackets
Still doesn't correlate for me when it comes to the numbers, they still go up despite tax cuts in the largest bracket. You'll probably say it was more even distribution to the middle class, I didn't find that particular evidence, and if found I would still attribute it to the strong unions of the period fighting for worker's rights and the GI bill educating the workforce over anything else.
As a matter of fact this very system was in place in the USA during its most prosperous for most of its citizens time, that is in 1950s and 1960s when the middle class expanded rapidly and innovation bloomed like in no time before.
Yet at that very time top bracket tax rates were around 90%.
Coincidence? Me thinks not.
Coincidence with the post-war boom, strong unions, etc... ? I would think so.
Your model still gives the government gobs of money from the private sector. Where is their threshold? Regardless of what it does to the private sector, you now have a government with a large surplus of funds, which is not a good idea methinks.
As another pointed out TFA talking about University Level courses. If you didn't score well in math on entry exams or SATs or whatnot, then you should start in Pre-Calc (as a 0 level pre-requisite course) instead of taking the actual 100 level course (Calc I). For someone who knows 0 programming, yes, start out with some fodder language.
Hello World demonstrates language syntax and is an ABYSMAL way of starting off programming when one has never programmed at all, ever, as far as Java goes. For someone who has written things already in BASIC or Javascript it's a perfectly acceptable way of introducing the language.
What you really want to do is show them something they created and give it properties and actions. Java provides the tools for this. Draw a ball on the screen, have it move across the screen, have the ball bounce, use the class to draw two balls on the screen, etc... Oh look something fun, but I guess this is where we diverge since your version of teaching programming to beginners is parsing strings.
With Java it is even possible to introduce things in abstract like threading AND sockets in a 100 level course and get working proofs of concept. They did it at my college almost a decade ago.
Again, once more, I am talking about 100 level University courses, not vocational school, not high school, not 'what was the language you first programmed in', not what language to teach your girlfriend, etc... You REALLY want to give someone college credit for learning the very basic, spoon fed part of the discipline they will get their degree in?
Like I said I'm using a Pre-Calc/Calc I analogy here, all the Mechanical and Civil Engineers I know didn't get that credit, it was just a pre-req.
The first part of any learning path should be to allow those who are not familiar with it to see what you can do with it. Do we start teaching mathematics with order of operations? No -- we show first how to count (immediate practical applications), then how to add, subtract, and other things with immediate practical applications. Do we start teaching reading with sentence diagramming? No -- we start with simple sentences (immediate practical applications). Etc.
/. is complaining about Java being too hard of a first college level programming language, then yeah, things are getting too watered down.
Hence why they teach Java instead of x86 assembly. If you were whining about learning C first I could see that, what with memory management, no default/easy graphics/windows form library (no shiny things), and poor string handling, I'll even give you C++ being too hard. But Java teaches you the principles of OO in a very graspable manner. Maybe something simpler should be taught as a pre-req for people who have done all of 0 programming, like QBASIC or something. But when somebody on
I'm a heavy sleeper and from what I heard on the videos, the alarm isn't loud enough, I'll still end up sleeping right through the battery life. Speaking of battery life, this thing needs a charger to sit on, and a lithium battery instead of a couple of copper tops. My last caveat would be that it's motion is a little too random, it should instead have random higher level functions (which, it might have to some extent, might just be some needed configuration), and maybe some advanced configuration options.
:P .
You know what, fuck it, I'll make my own
Oh yeah that'll spur innovation, take away the incentive to become successful by giving all your profits to the government. Then we'll only have 1 monopoly.
One could really Karma-whore it up in here translating all the French that a lot of us all slept through in High School.
I share your sentiment, but as long as it's legal for citizens to own body armor (Connecticut and New York :( ) then I see no problem with better armor, just make it available to the populace.
Oh please, using sweeping generalizations like that for censorship in an information age are moot. There is such a difference between satelite photos from 2 years ago and 2 days ago that I shouldn't have to explain it. If there wasn't anything wrong about having those photos available for sale then there shouldn't be anything wrong with making them publicly available.
The enemy has gathered 2 year old intel on you, well guess what, you can change tactics, location, etc... and I'll bet by the time photos of 2 days ago come out, it'll be another 2 years. Why can't they use the current intel they gathered as misinformation.
I sincerely hope this whole story is misinformation for the enemey, otherwise it's just more evidence that the people in charge don't know how to run a war.
So 2 year old satellite images offer more intelligence to the enemy then the billion dollar intelligence we have here, so we're just supposed to shut it down? I don't know, how about rotate the positions of the tents maybe, from where they have ALWAYS been for two years? 20 years ago we were in a cold war with a comperable super power, now we're supposed to get up in arms because a few dust farmers killed one guy using Google Maps? Next.
IMNSHO?
... slashdot ... nevermind.
What makes it so not humble? Are you an oceanographer, climateologist(?), maybe even a highschool physics teacher? Or a computer programmer that simply thinks they have some sort of internet authority and false sense of elitism? Oh wait
Yeah I know, think of how catastrophic it would be to not have to deal with natures natural way of cooling down the oceans. You know, hurricanes.
/Wait for troll to say they're glad I'm not in charge in 3...2...
In all fairness, smart people would need to be in charge to get something like that just right and not overdone, and smart people in charge are a rare commodity.
I try to be as libertarian as I can, but that had me in tears. Can I have that? I want that as my sig (the part in Parentheses).
Hindsight is 20/20 and so is the view from the peanut gallery.
The judgment was too much, this has a chilling effect on private citizens giving them responsibilities without increasing the actual authority they have, it shouldn't have ever gone to the courts, being in the situation she was in she was most likely doomed from the start.
TFA never divulged the comments or any details about them. I will reserve judgment that they were malfeasance/wrongdoing/criminal and give the defendant the benefit of the doubt, since that's what you are supposed to do, in this legal system anyway. And before you say it, I know a jury determined otherwise, but I was not on that jury and appeals have not been heard, so you can just consider it my prerogative.
Notice the trolls are all together on this one.
Are you calling me a troll? Hypocrisy, maybe just a little?
Well, the plaintiff didn't get a chance to defend herself from your libelous posts.
Yeah, I'm sure it was impossible for her to make a rebuttal. Oh wait, she did. With money and lawyers, how quaint.
Then we're just arguing semantics. Webster has a few definitions, we're talking about two different things. Like I said, I agree that Scheff was well within her legal rights, anybody can sue anybody else in a civil court for anything. Still doesn't make it right.
Complaining about something is not free. Just as complaints don't always hurt. When you complain, you put your reputation on the line as well otherwise, your complaint holds little value. And complaints give you free advertising as well. I've seen complaints give people more business first hand.
One thing is for certain, the lawyers won.
In 2003, Scheff sued Bock for defamation. Bock hired a lawyer, but he left the case when she no longer could afford to pay him.
...she knew the trial was approaching but did not know the date. She says she doesn't have the money to pay the judgment or hire a lawyer to appeal it.
When Katrina hit in August 2005, Bock's house was flooded and she moved temporarily to Texas before returning to Louisiana last June.
Maybe it was wouldn't, because she was getting sued into submission by someone with more money. I guess you've never been in any situation where the shit was piled so high, that you just didn't care about proper procedure anymore. That is not justice any way you slice it, proper procedure maybe, Scheff never broke any law, sure. But 11 million default judgment != a single private citizens' complaints strewn across a few pages of internet. Period.
Whatever, I just hope everyone is prepared to walk on eggshells the next time someone on eBay or Amazon screws someone them over.
Someone spouted off because they were dissatisfied with a service provided and had an $11 million dollar default judgement against them and you call that justice? I'm sure Katrina was a week long, month long event, right? Something that people could just get back on their feet from in a year right? Someone's life got ruined twice, and you find it just? Because they used common vulgarities (crook, conartist) to describe how they felt about the service they recieved. That's just ridiculous.
an assertion which the court has confirmed
Because the defendent couldn't show up. Looks to me like money won the day.