This only makes sense if it is possible to cope with a warmer planet. If a global warming 'tipping point' exists, this may not be the case.
You're also ignoring the possibility that even without said tipping point, the cost of coping with a warmer planet may be higher than the costs required to halt climate change. Add to that the fact that the planet we'd have to cope with could be a very unpleasant place to live -- which itself must be considered as a cost -- and I'd say that whether or not man-made global warming is actually occurring is a pretty important question.
I agree that the Air Marshal program is a very good idea. It's a real security measure that might actually stop some of the kinds of attacks we should be worried about. My only problem with the program is that I don't think it's extensive enough: I think there should be multiple armed guards on every flight.
I don't think it's actually new, though. Wikipedia says it was established in 1968; I have no idea whether or not that's true, but I'm pretty damn sure it was pre-9/11. Then after 9/11 the program was expanded to some degree.
You didn't see the spectacular failure of security in airports that preceded the Sept. 11th attacks by mere hours? Haven't you noticed the fact that the so-called security measures enacted since then are unlikely to prevent an identical attack? Or are you saying that because a successful attack hasn't been carried out recently, we are therefore secure? That's a very dangerous stance. It assumes that because vulnerabilities haven't been exploited, they aren't a problem. That's like saying that because some critical vulnerability in your operating system of choice hasn't been exploited yet, the vendor might as well not issue a fix; we should only fix a problem once half the boxes on the 'net have been infected with the as-yet-unwritten virus that exploits the problem. Soghoian pointed out a problem that has been known for months and yet hasn't been repaired. He did this to draw attention to the security theater that exists surrounding airline travel; he was trying to highlight the fact that our government doesn't take security seriously, but only tries to foster the appearance of safety while failing to address real issues.
For a wealth of information about problems with our airport and airline security, start reading archives of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html
The line between sensible and thoughtless disclosure is a tricky one though. If the secret society of bad guys already know about it then all bets are off, but how do you know?
In this case, the vulnerability had been made clear by others months prior to this disclosure. In fact, this wasn't so much a disclosure as much as it was a public demonstration of just how easy it is to exploit the already known vulnerability....unless you wanted to make a point and shame an organisation, then it would be foolish and malicious, and possibly illegal.
Attempting to shame an organization isn't necessarily foolish and malicious. If that organization is a government body charged with insuring your safety, and it is failing spectacularly to do so, you might desire to shame it publicly in order to improve its behavior. Illegal, I'll grant -- and often the law is unjust.
I know a number of audiophiles who detest MP3s. I've tricked them into saying that the actual CD was an MP3 and the MP3 I ripped from that CD was the real CD. They couldn't actually tell a difference and were taking guesses.
Were you playing the content on a crappy (read: normal, average, home) sound system? In my experience the difference in quality between mp3 and CD audio is extremely clear if you're listening on a hi-fi system. And I'm not an audiophile.
The Lockean principles of Natural Rights and Natural Law may have been formulated within the context of a Christian society, but they didn't issue from the church -- they issued from the pens of the men of an increasingly secular enlightenment. The founders may have attended church, but there's a reason Jesus' name doesn't show up in the Constitution. The so-called 'natural religion' of these men had much more in common with Deism than with Christianity.
However -- whatever the truth of the historical question, that isn't what you claimed was true regardless of what athiests like or don't like. The statement you made that claim about was this:
God, as the ultimate and only sovereign in the Universe has given us humans certain rights and responsibilities to be exercised under His ultimate sovereignty. This is true, whether atheists like it or not.
That isn't simply a historical claim. It's a philosophical and metaphysical claim, and it doesn't go without saying.
Rights are supposed to be things that you are innately entitled to and the law exists to protect the rights that are yours by nature.
They are supposed to be, but I think that's a sort of fiction or myth that we use to justify the fact that these particular laws are placed above all our other laws.
When you bake a loaf of bread, the bread belongs to you. You have a right to your property. Your right to your property would exist even if there were no laws against stealing it.
Really? How is this a natural law? I mean, we say that some kind of right to property exists in nature, but is that really true? It seems that something akin to a desire for property exists in nature, but a right to it? When a large animal takes food from a small animal, do we gasp in outrage because the smaller animal's right to property has been violated?
Intellectual property laws like copyright are not innate rights.
I don't disagree; but I think that the whole notion of innate rights is misguided. We don't need that myth to justify the fact that we place these things above all our other laws. All we need to do that is the belief that these particular principles will, if adequately protected, help us maintain the society we want to live in. Do we really need to pretend that every society in the history of mankind that hasn't shared all of our values, and who have placed other things at the top, are an affront to natural law? Maybe you think so, but I think that's absurd.
A right is something enjoyed by all by nature of simply existing.
That's the definition that's being floated here; I'm just saying it's wrong. A right is something that we've decided to call a right and has nothing to do with nature. And the burden of proof is on those who claim that there is such thing as 'natural right'. That isn't a given, it needs to be demonstrated.
The exercise of a right does not by its nature infringe upon the rights of others.
We can add that to the definition of a right if you like. Then we'll have constructed a definition in which freedom of speech is a right and copyright isn't. What does that have to do with nature? We can enumerate definitions and apply them to our laws all day long, and that doesn't change the fact that they're just laws.
Here's where I stopped reading, and I'm not even an athiest. That's pure flamebait. The only possible response is, "Your delusional fiction...er...god doesn't exist, whether theists like it or not." It isn't an argument and it gets no-one anywhere. It's a shame, because your other points might be worth responding to in the absence of such overwhelming hubris.
On a personal note however, I'm really enjoying this thread. It's really not often you get past even a single reply in a philosophical thread like this without it exploding in to a flamewar. Feel free to email me on gmail if you want to continue, username is the same.
I very much agree. I'll continue to respond to some of the other posters in this thread, but I'll have an email off sometime today.
I didn't forget it, in fact by bringing it up you make my point. The GP was claiming that all rights are actually privileges; I defeated that argument.
I see your point, but I disagree. Your definitions of rights and privileges imply that rights are super-legal (or extra-legal?). I'm arguing that copyright is a right in exactly the same way that freedom of speech is a right: by legal protection. The GP seems to be claiming that all 'rights' are actually privileges that are legally protected (and I tend to agree). You're claiming that there's a substantive difference between different legally protected rights -- that some are 'true' rights and others are 'merely' privileges. I think you've failed to demonstrate this.
it remains a privilege; as it is only granted exclusively to the author or inventor. All of the true rights, constitutional or otherwise, apply to everyone.
I'm sure you'd agree that 'something that applies to everyone' isn't an adequate definition of a right. Your earlier post seemed to suggest a criterion derived from nature. I'd argue that many of the rights we deem to be 'natural rights' have no basis in nature. Do all squirrels have the right to practice their religion? Must a bear try a salmon in a jury of its peers before eating said salmon? Does a wolf need a warrant from a judge before sticking its nose down a rabbit hole?
We can invent all the rights we like, but I fail to see how any rights attain a special status of 'true' or 'natural' rights aside from the fact that a whole bunch of people agree on them, write them down, and assign the task of defending them to some people with weapons.
It's important to remember that Locke's arguments rest on the notion of a state of nature that is a well-constructed fiction, but not a description of any state that's ever existed in the real world. For this reason, among others, I don't see how the rights he derives are anything other than a (perhaps useful, but not 'true') social construction. The rights exist because we pretend that they're rights, and because we enforce them as law.
You seem to be forgetting Article I, Section VIII:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries...
You may not accept that this is a right that exists 'regardless of anything the government or anyone else wants to say about it', but it is a constitutional right. Like all other rights -- protected or not -- you may apply the fiction that it exists outside of law if you wish.
Indeed. Where I work, we use velcro ties to solve this problem. They can still be a pain in the ass, but it's a lot easier than cutting and re-tying every time you need to move a cable.
I agree that students ought to watch out for others' cheating, but I've never actually seen it happen. (I'm sure things are different in a military environment for exactly the reasons you cite, though -- I also wouldn't want to trust a cheater with my life.) In some of the cases of cheating I've seen, I don't know whether or not the other students were turning a blind eye, or actually didn't know it was going on. In other cases students have obviously helped their fellows cheat -- like the time three students turned in almost identical programs in an intro programming course, with nothing changed but the names of some variables. Even the comments were identical, which makes me wonder why they bothered going through the trouble of changing variable names. On the other hand, I can honestly say that I've never seen a fellow student cheat in any of the classes I've taken. Maybe that's because I don't look for it enough when I'm a student, because I'm too busy trying to get my own work done; or maybe I've just gotten lucky and had particularly honest classmates.
I have seen far too many courses where there is one professor and 200 people taking the class, and their exams are graded by a handful of TAs, all of whom have never even seen the students...To change things would require more professors and TAs, and that costs money, which is the underlying issue, I guess.
Yeah, no kidding! That's not how education ought to be conducted, at any level, no matter what the subject. And of course the issue is money, but money gets spent depending on the priorities of the institution and the community. I think the priorities in many institutions of higher learning are ass-backwards. Foundational training in academic disciplines shouldn't be done by people who are too busy doing research to talk to students and who don't give a damn about teaching. If those people need to teach classes because we don't have anyone else to do the job, they should have to teach in shifts. Rather than having one or two classes and lots of research, they should have no classes most of the time, and then have to take a break from research and projects for one term while they teach.
It's all about what we value most. As I said to an administrator at my school when they were talking about putting tons of money into new buildings even though they weren't paying professors enough to attract/retain faculty -- I'd rather sit and talk to Professor Jones in a mud hut for two hours a day than have all my classes meet in mansions.
Now, I agree with you that exams do not test original thought, the development of new ideas, and research skills. However, I claim that the majority of papers do not do this much either. Many undergrad papers are basically 'book-report'-type things (albeit with several books and more difficult subject matter than grade school book reports). For this type of paper, an exam is a reasonable substitute (the only thing it might not test is long-term writing skills, i.e. editing and so forth, and not short-term writing skills).
I don't disagree, although I'd argue that the solution to this problem might be more serious paper assignments rather than exams, precisely because exams don't teach writing. The only reliable method for learning how to write well is to do it all the time and to have an extremely critical (and constructively helpful) audience. Students that are required to write a lot become better writers. Of course, I've heard many students complain that focusing on writing skills is a waste of time -- that it won't do them any good in the real world, etc. These students have apparently never seen the kind of horrendous mistakes that can occur when badly-worded emails fly back and forth between companies and their vendors, or even between co-workers. I also believe that learning to write coherently is a good way to learn how to formulate and present well-reasoned arguments generally. Assuming that a student isn't going to spend the rest of his/her life flipping burgers, that skill will come in handy.
First, cheating is less of a problem with such things; they appear mostly in graduate-level courses...
Depending on where and what you're studying, they also appear in 300-400 level undergraduate courses, and I think they should appear more. Doing research and writing is (in many fields) very good preparation for both graduate school and the job market.
However, if cheating were still an issue, there is another option, apart from exams and papers, suitable for classes with few students: a grade based on class interaction and/or a one-on-one interview-type exam.
This is a very good idea. I wish I'd had more of these in my philosophy courses, as a replacement for exams. Being asked to write several comprehensive essays on extremely complex topics in an hour and a half, without knowing ahead of time what you'll be writing about, is real torture. It's not enough to be prepared; you also have to be 'in the zone' for writing. An oral exam can test knowledge just as well, without requiring that the student also worry about the technical aspects of writing a good essay in a very limited time span. (Hey, I'm pro-writing, but that really isn't a realistic skill assessment.)
I would think that discussion of the research and thought process that went into the creation of a paper would do much against the possibility of cheating.
This is what bothers me about the whole discussion of cheating in the classroom: If you're paying attention to your students, cheating isn't all that hard to spot. In the classes I assisted, catching the cheaters was really easy (even aside from the girl who copy/pasted most of her final paper directly from the corporate PR site of a large Washington State software company -- in a computer ethics class, no less). You talk to your students every class session; you get to know something about them, including how clearly they think, and how articulate they are. You talk to them about their paper topics before the papers are due and get an idea of how well they're coming along. If Jimmy, who can't string two sentences together on the days he's NOT hung over, and who knew nothing about his topic the day before the paper was due, hands in the most brilliant writing you've seen in the past year, that raises a flag. But yeah, if you can't manage to catch cheaters just by paying attention, formally talking to each student about their topic after you've read their work is a really good idea.
The solution is very simple, and I am amazed that TFA didn't at least mention it. The solution is not to base grades on such handed-in work. Instead, base grades on performance that you can ensure is the student's own. Higher (and lower) education have a name for this: exams. Conduct an exam under carefully-controlled conditions, and no cheating is possible.
As I mentioned in another thread, this doesn't make sense. The problem is that 'handed-in work' and exams don't actually serve the same purpose. Professors don't want students to write papers in order to demonstrate their knowledge; they want students to write papers because that format promotes original thought and the development of new ideas. You can't replace this function with exams.
Note: It may be a challenge to adapt this principle to certain academic fields, in particular those most used to grading papers and not exams. I don't deny this may take effort on the professors' part. Change isn't always easy - but it is necessary.
No, it isn't necessary in these fields. Just the opposite -- maintaining the status quo is necessary. Do you expect students to learn how to do serious research in an exam room? Do you expect them to learn how to conduct themselves in their fields -- that is, fields in which research and writing are the primary modes of academic activity -- by filling in scantrons?
Your point might hold if the purpose of taking a class were to get a grade that fairly represents the work you did. But that's misguided. It's like saying that the purpose of getting on a highway is to go 70 miles per hour; therefore, we must make sure everyone goes 70 miles per hour even if they have to go in the wrong direction! It just doesn't make sense. The purpose of taking a class is to learn as much as possible about the subject being taught, including how the real work of that subject is conducted by professionals in the field. (After all, these classes are about training future experts and professionals, among other things.)
Testing is often among the worst ways to do this. The notion that one learns more about, say, ancient Greek philosophy cramming for an exam than by researching and writing 25 pages on the influences of various presocratics on Platonic thought, is preposterous. The idea that, in a course on the practical use of statistics in the election process, one should test students rather than making them run their own polls, is misguided. Students learn by doing, and in most academic fields, doing means research and writing. Many college courses need fewer tests, not more.
Disclaimer: I'm not a professor. But I have assisted professors in various classes, and have graded many papers, tests, and homework assignments.
But all those things require more work.
That's simply false. Grading all those things is far easier than grading even a few papers, assuming you're paying attention to what your students are writing. Short assignments, quizzez, and most tests (those that don't involve serious essay writiing) are extremely easy to grade. But grading papers requires you to (1) Wade through the often terrible writing of your students, (2) figure out what they're trying to say, and (3) assess their ideas fairly and critically. Even if a paper is well written, you often have to read it multiple times in order to grade it fairly. If you're grading students on their writing as well as on their ideas, which you ought to be, you have to read it several times in order to grade it two ways.
Think hard to make certain that questions actually probe for understanding.
I think that this is misguided. Yes, good questions can probe for understanding; but the job of assignments in a college course is (ideally) about more than testing what students know. Good asignments push students to develop original ideas and go beyond what the lecture and assigned readings provide. Papers are about challenging students to think and learn, not just assessing their knowledge. Good professors (and graders, if they have any leeway) grade for originality, creativity, and quality of thought. Students who write papers that simply regurgitate lecture and assigned reading ought to receive middling grades at best.
I hope this new resource will keep editors and contributors separate. Let the experts contribute as much as they can and let the editors sort out how to present it.
That's not how they're doing things. 'Regular' contributors will be called authors. They can be anyone -- just like a Wikipedia editor today -- but they can't be anonymous. They can edit whatever they want. 'Expert' contributors will be called editors, and they will need to meet certain criteria of expertise. They can edit like normal authors, but they also have the authority to settle content disputes within their areas of expertise.
As OSX becomes more popular for personal use, it will become more popular for business use.
That depends entirely on what you mean by 'business use'. Those of us running high-traffic and/or computationally intensive services in our data centers are unlikely to switch to the Apple brand of Unix any time soon. The fact that many of us are using it on our laptops and desktops doesn't make us any more likely to use it on our servers. It just doesn't perform. And the GUI -- the only real selling point of OS X, IMO, is that it lays a great GUI on top of Unix -- doesn't matter a damn in this part of the market. We aren't managing our servers through GUIs anyway.
I also think that those using Windows in the server space are unlikely to consider OS X seriously in the near future. Those people aren't just locked in to the operating system -- they're locked into the application stack. I know so many people whose companies function on a day by day basis around Exchange, Outlook, AD, etc. The cost of migration for those people would be very, very high, even if there were an alternate solution on another platform that did everything they need.
So my suspicion is: us Unix people can run our server applications on OS X but won't, and the Windows people can only run their applications on Windows and for the most part will continue to do so.
Some people have kids to feed. Their responsibility to make sure their kids can eat and have a roof over their heads is more important than taking a 'pay-cut' to leave welfare and eventually make more money, especially if they're not skilled workers. How long do you think it takes someone to 'move up' if they don't know how to do anything but flip burgers, and aren't particularly talented or intelligent? Who's going to support their kids in the meantime?
Slashdot Mirror
This only makes sense if it is possible to cope with a warmer planet. If a global warming 'tipping point' exists, this may not be the case.
You're also ignoring the possibility that even without said tipping point, the cost of coping with a warmer planet may be higher than the costs required to halt climate change. Add to that the fact that the planet we'd have to cope with could be a very unpleasant place to live -- which itself must be considered as a cost -- and I'd say that whether or not man-made global warming is actually occurring is a pretty important question.
I agree that the Air Marshal program is a very good idea. It's a real security measure that might actually stop some of the kinds of attacks we should be worried about. My only problem with the program is that I don't think it's extensive enough: I think there should be multiple armed guards on every flight.
I don't think it's actually new, though. Wikipedia says it was established in 1968; I have no idea whether or not that's true, but I'm pretty damn sure it was pre-9/11. Then after 9/11 the program was expanded to some degree.
You didn't see the spectacular failure of security in airports that preceded the Sept. 11th attacks by mere hours? Haven't you noticed the fact that the so-called security measures enacted since then are unlikely to prevent an identical attack? Or are you saying that because a successful attack hasn't been carried out recently, we are therefore secure? That's a very dangerous stance. It assumes that because vulnerabilities haven't been exploited, they aren't a problem. That's like saying that because some critical vulnerability in your operating system of choice hasn't been exploited yet, the vendor might as well not issue a fix; we should only fix a problem once half the boxes on the 'net have been infected with the as-yet-unwritten virus that exploits the problem. Soghoian pointed out a problem that has been known for months and yet hasn't been repaired. He did this to draw attention to the security theater that exists surrounding airline travel; he was trying to highlight the fact that our government doesn't take security seriously, but only tries to foster the appearance of safety while failing to address real issues.
p ring02-papers/caps.htmf
If you want another example, read this: http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/6805/student-papers/s
For a wealth of information about problems with our airport and airline security, start reading archives of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-Gram: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram.html
Sorry for the unreadability of my last post. Insert a line break before the ellipsis and it will become much clearer.
The line between sensible and thoughtless disclosure is a tricky one though. If the secret society of bad guys already know about it then all bets are off, but how do you know?
...unless you wanted to make a point and shame an organisation, then it would be foolish and malicious, and possibly illegal.
In this case, the vulnerability had been made clear by others months prior to this disclosure. In fact, this wasn't so much a disclosure as much as it was a public demonstration of just how easy it is to exploit the already known vulnerability.
Attempting to shame an organization isn't necessarily foolish and malicious. If that organization is a government body charged with insuring your safety, and it is failing spectacularly to do so, you might desire to shame it publicly in order to improve its behavior. Illegal, I'll grant -- and often the law is unjust.
I know a number of audiophiles who detest MP3s. I've tricked them into saying that the actual CD was an MP3 and the MP3 I ripped from that CD was the real CD. They couldn't actually tell a difference and were taking guesses.
Were you playing the content on a crappy (read: normal, average, home) sound system? In my experience the difference in quality between mp3 and CD audio is extremely clear if you're listening on a hi-fi system. And I'm not an audiophile.
Yes, that's correct. Widdling: the practice of taking something big and making it widdle.
The Lockean principles of Natural Rights and Natural Law may have been formulated within the context of a Christian society, but they didn't issue from the church -- they issued from the pens of the men of an increasingly secular enlightenment. The founders may have attended church, but there's a reason Jesus' name doesn't show up in the Constitution. The so-called 'natural religion' of these men had much more in common with Deism than with Christianity.
However -- whatever the truth of the historical question, that isn't what you claimed was true regardless of what athiests like or don't like. The statement you made that claim about was this:
God, as the ultimate and only sovereign in the Universe has given us humans certain rights and responsibilities to be exercised under His ultimate sovereignty. This is true, whether atheists like it or not.
That isn't simply a historical claim. It's a philosophical and metaphysical claim, and it doesn't go without saying.
Rights are supposed to be things that you are innately entitled to and the law exists to protect the rights that are yours by nature.
They are supposed to be, but I think that's a sort of fiction or myth that we use to justify the fact that these particular laws are placed above all our other laws.
When you bake a loaf of bread, the bread belongs to you. You have a right to your property. Your right to your property would exist even if there were no laws against stealing it.
Really? How is this a natural law? I mean, we say that some kind of right to property exists in nature, but is that really true? It seems that something akin to a desire for property exists in nature, but a right to it? When a large animal takes food from a small animal, do we gasp in outrage because the smaller animal's right to property has been violated?
Intellectual property laws like copyright are not innate rights.
I don't disagree; but I think that the whole notion of innate rights is misguided. We don't need that myth to justify the fact that we place these things above all our other laws. All we need to do that is the belief that these particular principles will, if adequately protected, help us maintain the society we want to live in. Do we really need to pretend that every society in the history of mankind that hasn't shared all of our values, and who have placed other things at the top, are an affront to natural law? Maybe you think so, but I think that's absurd.
A right is something enjoyed by all by nature of simply existing.
That's the definition that's being floated here; I'm just saying it's wrong. A right is something that we've decided to call a right and has nothing to do with nature. And the burden of proof is on those who claim that there is such thing as 'natural right'. That isn't a given, it needs to be demonstrated.
The exercise of a right does not by its nature infringe upon the rights of others.
We can add that to the definition of a right if you like. Then we'll have constructed a definition in which freedom of speech is a right and copyright isn't. What does that have to do with nature? We can enumerate definitions and apply them to our laws all day long, and that doesn't change the fact that they're just laws.
This is true, whether atheists like it or not.
Here's where I stopped reading, and I'm not even an athiest. That's pure flamebait. The only possible response is, "Your delusional fiction...er...god doesn't exist, whether theists like it or not." It isn't an argument and it gets no-one anywhere. It's a shame, because your other points might be worth responding to in the absence of such overwhelming hubris.
On a personal note however, I'm really enjoying this thread. It's really not often you get past even a single reply in a philosophical thread like this without it exploding in to a flamewar. Feel free to email me on gmail if you want to continue, username is the same.
I very much agree. I'll continue to respond to some of the other posters in this thread, but I'll have an email off sometime today.
I didn't forget it, in fact by bringing it up you make my point. The GP was claiming that all rights are actually privileges; I defeated that argument.
I see your point, but I disagree. Your definitions of rights and privileges imply that rights are super-legal (or extra-legal?). I'm arguing that copyright is a right in exactly the same way that freedom of speech is a right: by legal protection. The GP seems to be claiming that all 'rights' are actually privileges that are legally protected (and I tend to agree). You're claiming that there's a substantive difference between different legally protected rights -- that some are 'true' rights and others are 'merely' privileges. I think you've failed to demonstrate this.
it remains a privilege; as it is only granted exclusively to the author or inventor. All of the true rights, constitutional or otherwise, apply to everyone.
I'm sure you'd agree that 'something that applies to everyone' isn't an adequate definition of a right. Your earlier post seemed to suggest a criterion derived from nature. I'd argue that many of the rights we deem to be 'natural rights' have no basis in nature. Do all squirrels have the right to practice their religion? Must a bear try a salmon in a jury of its peers before eating said salmon? Does a wolf need a warrant from a judge before sticking its nose down a rabbit hole?
We can invent all the rights we like, but I fail to see how any rights attain a special status of 'true' or 'natural' rights aside from the fact that a whole bunch of people agree on them, write them down, and assign the task of defending them to some people with weapons.
It's important to remember that Locke's arguments rest on the notion of a state of nature that is a well-constructed fiction, but not a description of any state that's ever existed in the real world. For this reason, among others, I don't see how the rights he derives are anything other than a (perhaps useful, but not 'true') social construction. The rights exist because we pretend that they're rights, and because we enforce them as law.
You seem to be forgetting Article I, Section VIII:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries...
You may not accept that this is a right that exists 'regardless of anything the government or anyone else wants to say about it', but it is a constitutional right. Like all other rights -- protected or not -- you may apply the fiction that it exists outside of law if you wish.
You'd have to cut 50 different ties...
Indeed. Where I work, we use velcro ties to solve this problem. They can still be a pain in the ass, but it's a lot easier than cutting and re-tying every time you need to move a cable.
I agree that students ought to watch out for others' cheating, but I've never actually seen it happen. (I'm sure things are different in a military environment for exactly the reasons you cite, though -- I also wouldn't want to trust a cheater with my life.) In some of the cases of cheating I've seen, I don't know whether or not the other students were turning a blind eye, or actually didn't know it was going on. In other cases students have obviously helped their fellows cheat -- like the time three students turned in almost identical programs in an intro programming course, with nothing changed but the names of some variables. Even the comments were identical, which makes me wonder why they bothered going through the trouble of changing variable names. On the other hand, I can honestly say that I've never seen a fellow student cheat in any of the classes I've taken. Maybe that's because I don't look for it enough when I'm a student, because I'm too busy trying to get my own work done; or maybe I've just gotten lucky and had particularly honest classmates.
Professors who do this are hurting their students. Obviously, writing to length teaches you how to write filler, not how to write.
Yeah, no kidding! That's not how education ought to be conducted, at any level, no matter what the subject. And of course the issue is money, but money gets spent depending on the priorities of the institution and the community. I think the priorities in many institutions of higher learning are ass-backwards. Foundational training in academic disciplines shouldn't be done by people who are too busy doing research to talk to students and who don't give a damn about teaching. If those people need to teach classes because we don't have anyone else to do the job, they should have to teach in shifts. Rather than having one or two classes and lots of research, they should have no classes most of the time, and then have to take a break from research and projects for one term while they teach.
It's all about what we value most. As I said to an administrator at my school when they were talking about putting tons of money into new buildings even though they weren't paying professors enough to attract/retain faculty -- I'd rather sit and talk to Professor Jones in a mud hut for two hours a day than have all my classes meet in mansions.
I don't disagree, although I'd argue that the solution to this problem might be more serious paper assignments rather than exams, precisely because exams don't teach writing. The only reliable method for learning how to write well is to do it all the time and to have an extremely critical (and constructively helpful) audience. Students that are required to write a lot become better writers. Of course, I've heard many students complain that focusing on writing skills is a waste of time -- that it won't do them any good in the real world, etc. These students have apparently never seen the kind of horrendous mistakes that can occur when badly-worded emails fly back and forth between companies and their vendors, or even between co-workers. I also believe that learning to write coherently is a good way to learn how to formulate and present well-reasoned arguments generally. Assuming that a student isn't going to spend the rest of his/her life flipping burgers, that skill will come in handy.
Depending on where and what you're studying, they also appear in 300-400 level undergraduate courses, and I think they should appear more. Doing research and writing is (in many fields) very good preparation for both graduate school and the job market.
This is a very good idea. I wish I'd had more of these in my philosophy courses, as a replacement for exams. Being asked to write several comprehensive essays on extremely complex topics in an hour and a half, without knowing ahead of time what you'll be writing about, is real torture. It's not enough to be prepared; you also have to be 'in the zone' for writing. An oral exam can test knowledge just as well, without requiring that the student also worry about the technical aspects of writing a good essay in a very limited time span. (Hey, I'm pro-writing, but that really isn't a realistic skill assessment.)
This is what bothers me about the whole discussion of cheating in the classroom: If you're paying attention to your students, cheating isn't all that hard to spot. In the classes I assisted, catching the cheaters was really easy (even aside from the girl who copy/pasted most of her final paper directly from the corporate PR site of a large Washington State software company -- in a computer ethics class, no less). You talk to your students every class session; you get to know something about them, including how clearly they think, and how articulate they are. You talk to them about their paper topics before the papers are due and get an idea of how well they're coming along. If Jimmy, who can't string two sentences together on the days he's NOT hung over, and who knew nothing about his topic the day before the paper was due, hands in the most brilliant writing you've seen in the past year, that raises a flag. But yeah, if you can't manage to catch cheaters just by paying attention, formally talking to each student about their topic after you've read their work is a really good idea.
As I mentioned in another thread, this doesn't make sense. The problem is that 'handed-in work' and exams don't actually serve the same purpose. Professors don't want students to write papers in order to demonstrate their knowledge; they want students to write papers because that format promotes original thought and the development of new ideas. You can't replace this function with exams.
No, it isn't necessary in these fields. Just the opposite -- maintaining the status quo is necessary. Do you expect students to learn how to do serious research in an exam room? Do you expect them to learn how to conduct themselves in their fields -- that is, fields in which research and writing are the primary modes of academic activity -- by filling in scantrons?
Your point might hold if the purpose of taking a class were to get a grade that fairly represents the work you did. But that's misguided. It's like saying that the purpose of getting on a highway is to go 70 miles per hour; therefore, we must make sure everyone goes 70 miles per hour even if they have to go in the wrong direction! It just doesn't make sense. The purpose of taking a class is to learn as much as possible about the subject being taught, including how the real work of that subject is conducted by professionals in the field. (After all, these classes are about training future experts and professionals, among other things.)
Testing is often among the worst ways to do this. The notion that one learns more about, say, ancient Greek philosophy cramming for an exam than by researching and writing 25 pages on the influences of various presocratics on Platonic thought, is preposterous. The idea that, in a course on the practical use of statistics in the election process, one should test students rather than making them run their own polls, is misguided. Students learn by doing, and in most academic fields, doing means research and writing. Many college courses need fewer tests, not more.
That's simply false. Grading all those things is far easier than grading even a few papers, assuming you're paying attention to what your students are writing. Short assignments, quizzez, and most tests (those that don't involve serious essay writiing) are extremely easy to grade. But grading papers requires you to (1) Wade through the often terrible writing of your students, (2) figure out what they're trying to say, and (3) assess their ideas fairly and critically. Even if a paper is well written, you often have to read it multiple times in order to grade it fairly. If you're grading students on their writing as well as on their ideas, which you ought to be, you have to read it several times in order to grade it two ways.
I think that this is misguided. Yes, good questions can probe for understanding; but the job of assignments in a college course is (ideally) about more than testing what students know. Good asignments push students to develop original ideas and go beyond what the lecture and assigned readings provide. Papers are about challenging students to think and learn, not just assessing their knowledge. Good professors (and graders, if they have any leeway) grade for originality, creativity, and quality of thought. Students who write papers that simply regurgitate lecture and assigned reading ought to receive middling grades at best.
That's not how they're doing things. 'Regular' contributors will be called authors. They can be anyone -- just like a Wikipedia editor today -- but they can't be anonymous. They can edit whatever they want. 'Expert' contributors will be called editors, and they will need to meet certain criteria of expertise. They can edit like normal authors, but they also have the authority to settle content disputes within their areas of expertise.
That depends entirely on what you mean by 'business use'. Those of us running high-traffic and/or computationally intensive services in our data centers are unlikely to switch to the Apple brand of Unix any time soon. The fact that many of us are using it on our laptops and desktops doesn't make us any more likely to use it on our servers. It just doesn't perform. And the GUI -- the only real selling point of OS X, IMO, is that it lays a great GUI on top of Unix -- doesn't matter a damn in this part of the market. We aren't managing our servers through GUIs anyway.
I also think that those using Windows in the server space are unlikely to consider OS X seriously in the near future. Those people aren't just locked in to the operating system -- they're locked into the application stack. I know so many people whose companies function on a day by day basis around Exchange, Outlook, AD, etc. The cost of migration for those people would be very, very high, even if there were an alternate solution on another platform that did everything they need.
So my suspicion is: us Unix people can run our server applications on OS X but won't, and the Windows people can only run their applications on Windows and for the most part will continue to do so.
Some people have kids to feed. Their responsibility to make sure their kids can eat and have a roof over their heads is more important than taking a 'pay-cut' to leave welfare and eventually make more money, especially if they're not skilled workers. How long do you think it takes someone to 'move up' if they don't know how to do anything but flip burgers, and aren't particularly talented or intelligent? Who's going to support their kids in the meantime?
Whoops!
Indeed. Thanks for the correction.