School isn't about teaching "social skills" -- and whatever skills it does teach have more to do with subjecting yourself to hierarchy or ganging up on those who don't conform.
Like it or not, learning social skills is an enormous part of child development. That includes learning social heirarchy and the relative merits of conformity vs. identity. The problem is that you'd prefer the peer group not to be future gang members, but future productive members of society.
Despite whatever the teacher unions claim, public schools are an expensive and abysmal failure. The fact that parents line up to send their kids to charter schools whenever they open is testimony to that.
You say that like you'd expect anyone to disagree with you!
Which brings up a point - why is this any worse than home schooling? It seems like exactly the same thing, except here the kid is taught by actual teachers and a syllabus with (assumedly) some idea about giving a balanced education, not whatever lunatic fairy tales the homeschooling parent happens to want to impart.
I think the people who criticize this would also criticize home schooling. This is basically home schooling with some help. It also gives the home schoolers affiliation with an actual school district in exchange for following a real curriculum, to ensure, as you put it, that the home schoolers aren't learning lunatic fairy tales. Seems like a win-win to me, for those parents who have decided to home school already.
I think that you're too worried about the mere possibility of them becoming a bad criminal or getting beat up by them, when if they don't interact with kids of their own age then they're *definitely* going to become pretty fucked up.
Depends on the school. When you think "public school," you're probably thinking of the ones near where you grew up. In that case, dealing with the annual wedgie is no reason to pull the kids out of school. However, I think they may be much worse in Chicago than you might be used to. In many of these schools, violence is pretty much guaranteed. Now I'm definitely against home schooling - those kids turn out like complete losers way too often - but if your school has a statistically defined murder rate, I'll take the loser over the dead kid.
I think a much better solution to your problem is to instead try and clean up the schools and get rid of the little arseholes in there.
I'd have to agree with you, but the bleeding hearts in this country would never let that happen. To them, it's apparently better to subject 1000 kids to daily violence and a shitty education than to "leave behind" a few kids. Since that choice (getting rid of the arseholes) isn't available to parents, you have to get your kid away from the arseholes. Sometimes, some form of home schooling (or charter schooling) is the only real option.
Fortunately, the wife and I are very lucky, as we have good jobs that allow us to live in a very good area that has probably the best public schools (non-magnet) in the country. So, unless we pack up and move to Compton, our kids will never have to face that. But for parents who are not so lucky, it can be a hard decision when your kid gets beaten up everyday. Or when you start hearing about kids bringing guns to school. Or when your kid starts getting pressured to join a gang. Or when your 12 year old daughter starts getting hit on a little too strongly by convicted 17-year-old rapists. At that point, you do what you have to do to get them out.
As the article says, you can't learn social skills sitting in front of a computer. And some of the people here on slashdot prove that. However, this is Chicago, and the public schools there ain't so safe. The article didn't mention it, but for families whose choices are 1) Send their kids to public schools where they'll either become criminals or get beat up by them, or 2) Use this virtual school, well, I'd keep them home. A lot of people in Chicago home school because the private schools are very expensive and the public schools are terrible.
Adding tabs to IE might keep a few users from switching, sure, but there's no way Firefox's market share would go down.
It will as people replace computers. Let's say I got firefox for tabs and security. That's probably a majority of their users. Now I buy a new computer with IE7. It has all the main features as firedox that I use. I probably don't get around to downloading FF right away. I use IE for a while, and it's good enough. The question is, doesn't a browser have to be significantly better than IE to get installed on the new box? I think IE7 closes that gap a lot.
That's not true any more -- OEM manufacturers can build firefox (or any other software they want) into their windows builds without fearing retribution from MSFT. That's what the anti-trust thing was all about.
Uh huh. And if you actually believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. MS learned long ago that it's better for them to pay for a protracted legal war and a meaningless settlement than lose marketshare. If OEMs dont preinstall FF now, they won't when IE7 is out. And if they think about it, MS will find ways to discourage that. Considering how much better FF is now than IE, I'd bet they already are.
And the last time I was at MicroCenter (a large computer chain) in Boston, a local entrepeneur (kid had to be 14) was distributing for free a CD with FireFox, Open Office, SpyBot, Gimp and Trillian (I told him Trillian wasn't open) on it -- as well as html document that had a link in it to his Amazon donation page, where he was asking for $2.50 which seemed pretty reasonable to me. I asked him about his traffic, and he said he passes out about 200 CD's a day on Saturday and Sunday. And that's great, but it would take armies of kids going door to door installing FF and still it wouldn't be as good as MS's built-in distribution channel, You can't them when they can put IE on every machine out there.
Again, if FF can't beat IE6, how can they expect to beat IE7?
...One could also say that MS has gone *six years* without updating their browser, and Firefox is only at 16%. I mean, I'm as happy as anyone. I'm using it now. But I really see that market share getting cut in half within 2 years of IE7 coming out. MS just won't put up with this, and when you can put your product on every PC that's sold, and the competition can't, you don't have to be great to win.
What, they're going to detour your flight to Guantanamo Bay via your lawyer's office to lay the foundation for your civil suit against your ISP for privacy breaches?
Fortunately, I enjoy the priveleges of citizenship.
It's a bad idea to have a bad net presence when you go get a job. However, a good presence will count towards you (e.g. being helpful, and knowledgeable on technical forums such as the LKML and other FOSS mailing lists is all good when your prospective employer does some googling, assuming your prospective employer doesn't have a fundamental problem with ideas like FOSS).
By presence, I mean message boards and things like this. Yes, helping people out on help boards is a good thing. Also, it depends on your field, so a developer would benefit more than others.
Not really - these aren't real people causing hits.
You'll notice the timing of the traffic surge with recent terrorist event and subsequent legislation.
It's mostly just PATRIOT act research by the gummint to check out prospective employees.
I think you need to readjust your frequency there, Kenneth.
Don't think for a second that IP addresses, time and date stamps aren't part of that post. Trace that back to the DHCP and maybe a few router logs associated with the IP address back at the ol' ISP and it's as easy as pie to identify an 'anonymous coward.' How do you think the RIAA does it, and they have to ask for cooperation - the feds just walk in and jack the data like they own the place.
Oh sure. But that's another level removed, meaning they have to get the service (say facebook) and the ISP to *both* cough it up. And if my ISP coughs up info like that without a subpoena I *will* sue the shit out of them.
Someday, a slashdot troll will apply for a government job and they will ask him about those lovely images he continually posts, and is he really into that sort of thing? And what is his connection with the known terrorist organization, GNAA?
If he has a brain he's been posting anonymously. It's a bad idea for many reasons to have a recognizeable net presence when you go to get a job.
HURD shouldn't have to be any more complex than Linux, and Linux is very complete in comparison. The problems with HURD stem from poor project management, not inherent complexity.
Methinks you've been had by a well crafted troll. My hat's off to GP, by the way.
It's really doubtful anything new involving weapons and combat can be invented anymore.
There are quite a few fields that could still create an original game. Quite a few might involve combat as an element, but I doubt any good combat-based game can be made anymore.
In other news, every new invention was created by 1850 and the patent office has been summarily shut down.
Re:How much editorial oversight is enough?
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Personally, I find Slashdot's moderation system works far better than most people realize. If you step back I think you'll find the "prevailing set of opinions" is just that - the more commonly held belief. But implying that somehow lesser-held beliefs and opinions don't get their fair shake? Maybe the Slashdot hordes aren't the ones with the biases, because you must be very good at ignoring a LOT of highly-moderated posts each day.
I think it's more that flamebait gets modded as insightful if it matches the groupthink, not that well-reasoned posts are modded down if it doesn't. For example, if I make a crack about Bush being a retard or Ballmer being a maniac, there's a good chance that gets to +5. If I do it for most other neutral figures, that gets modded to oblivion. So I think there is still a bias to some extent.
That said, the quality on slashdot has gotten immeasurably better since the rise of another popular tech website that will remain nameless *cough*DIGG*cough*. I think the teenage fanboys have been sucked off to the flavor of the month. Thank God.
Depends. I probably wouldn't use virtual machines for benchmarking. If you do, make sure not to compare VM results from those run natively, as there is a slowdown and it isn't fixed. . Also make sure nothing is running on the host machine.
Basically, to compare the results of some code on OSX to Windows using a VM, you'd need to put a Windows VM and an OSX VM on OSX.
Is that the name of their new game? Do I get to play a lawyer?
Re:Seems an obvious patent
on
Talking iPods
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· Score: 2, Interesting
From the Editor's short summary, without actual references to the patent text, it look like a very obvious patent again. Text to speech applyed to menu navigation. Nothing new here.
Yeah, I actually posted about that 2 years ago when the shuffle was rumored. Can I dig up my old/. post and call it prior art?;)
Even that raises the question of how many AAPL shareholders are Mac owners, or more accurately, what fraction of AAPL's market cap is help by fans? I'd expect not so much.
Anyway, after a confusing conversation I was told that I was probably best to just go the the nearest Radio Shack and see if I could pick up a static IP address there
I remember this one time I got an IP ban here at Slashdot, so I called up my ISP's helpdesk to get a new IP address issued. The guy on the other end kept asking me all sorts of questions. "Have you checked the cables?" "When you click on My Network, does it show you all your NICs?" ad nauseum.
Maybe he just never encountered some pathetic loser who would actually call up his ISP and spend hours requesting a new IP address just to avoid an IP block due to being an asshat on slashdot. Perhaps he assumed that, if you're calling tech support, that something was actually *wrong* with your service. I'll forgive his ignorance in this case.
Anyway, I got my new IP address after escalating it to his manager. And here I am! Yay!
Slashdot Mirror
Like it or not, learning social skills is an enormous part of child development. That includes learning social heirarchy and the relative merits of conformity vs. identity. The problem is that you'd prefer the peer group not to be future gang members, but future productive members of society.
Despite whatever the teacher unions claim, public schools are an expensive and abysmal failure. The fact that parents line up to send their kids to charter schools whenever they open is testimony to that.
You say that like you'd expect anyone to disagree with you!
I think the people who criticize this would also criticize home schooling. This is basically home schooling with some help. It also gives the home schoolers affiliation with an actual school district in exchange for following a real curriculum, to ensure, as you put it, that the home schoolers aren't learning lunatic fairy tales. Seems like a win-win to me, for those parents who have decided to home school already.
Depends on the school. When you think "public school," you're probably thinking of the ones near where you grew up. In that case, dealing with the annual wedgie is no reason to pull the kids out of school. However, I think they may be much worse in Chicago than you might be used to. In many of these schools, violence is pretty much guaranteed. Now I'm definitely against home schooling - those kids turn out like complete losers way too often - but if your school has a statistically defined murder rate, I'll take the loser over the dead kid.
I think a much better solution to your problem is to instead try and clean up the schools and get rid of the little arseholes in there.
I'd have to agree with you, but the bleeding hearts in this country would never let that happen. To them, it's apparently better to subject 1000 kids to daily violence and a shitty education than to "leave behind" a few kids. Since that choice (getting rid of the arseholes) isn't available to parents, you have to get your kid away from the arseholes. Sometimes, some form of home schooling (or charter schooling) is the only real option.
Fortunately, the wife and I are very lucky, as we have good jobs that allow us to live in a very good area that has probably the best public schools (non-magnet) in the country. So, unless we pack up and move to Compton, our kids will never have to face that. But for parents who are not so lucky, it can be a hard decision when your kid gets beaten up everyday. Or when you start hearing about kids bringing guns to school. Or when your kid starts getting pressured to join a gang. Or when your 12 year old daughter starts getting hit on a little too strongly by convicted 17-year-old rapists. At that point, you do what you have to do to get them out.
As the article says, you can't learn social skills sitting in front of a computer. And some of the people here on slashdot prove that. However, this is Chicago, and the public schools there ain't so safe. The article didn't mention it, but for families whose choices are 1) Send their kids to public schools where they'll either become criminals or get beat up by them, or 2) Use this virtual school, well, I'd keep them home. A lot of people in Chicago home school because the private schools are very expensive and the public schools are terrible.
Next time remember to make it funny and I'll detect it just fine.
Um, since the setup in question is a speaker, I'd say anyone who builds it will probably listen to it.
It will as people replace computers. Let's say I got firefox for tabs and security. That's probably a majority of their users. Now I buy a new computer with IE7. It has all the main features as firedox that I use. I probably don't get around to downloading FF right away. I use IE for a while, and it's good enough. The question is, doesn't a browser have to be significantly better than IE to get installed on the new box? I think IE7 closes that gap a lot.
Uh huh. And if you actually believe that, I have a bridge I'd like to sell you. MS learned long ago that it's better for them to pay for a protracted legal war and a meaningless settlement than lose marketshare. If OEMs dont preinstall FF now, they won't when IE7 is out. And if they think about it, MS will find ways to discourage that. Considering how much better FF is now than IE, I'd bet they already are.
And the last time I was at MicroCenter (a large computer chain) in Boston, a local entrepeneur (kid had to be 14) was distributing for free a CD with FireFox, Open Office, SpyBot, Gimp and Trillian (I told him Trillian wasn't open) on it -- as well as html document that had a link in it to his Amazon donation page, where he was asking for $2.50 which seemed pretty reasonable to me. I asked him about his traffic, and he said he passes out about 200 CD's a day on Saturday and Sunday. And that's great, but it would take armies of kids going door to door installing FF and still it wouldn't be as good as MS's built-in distribution channel, You can't them when they can put IE on every machine out there.
Again, if FF can't beat IE6, how can they expect to beat IE7?
...One could also say that MS has gone *six years* without updating their browser, and Firefox is only at 16%. I mean, I'm as happy as anyone. I'm using it now. But I really see that market share getting cut in half within 2 years of IE7 coming out. MS just won't put up with this, and when you can put your product on every PC that's sold, and the competition can't, you don't have to be great to win.
Fortunately, I enjoy the priveleges of citizenship.
By presence, I mean message boards and things like this. Yes, helping people out on help boards is a good thing. Also, it depends on your field, so a developer would benefit more than others.
I think you need to readjust your frequency there, Kenneth.
Oh sure. But that's another level removed, meaning they have to get the service (say facebook) and the ISP to *both* cough it up. And if my ISP coughs up info like that without a subpoena I *will* sue the shit out of them.
If he has a brain he's been posting anonymously. It's a bad idea for many reasons to have a recognizeable net presence when you go to get a job.
Methinks you've been had by a well crafted troll. My hat's off to GP, by the way.
In other news, every new invention was created by 1850 and the patent office has been summarily shut down.
Personally, I find Slashdot's moderation system works far better than most people realize. If you step back I think you'll find the "prevailing set of opinions" is just that - the more commonly held belief. But implying that somehow lesser-held beliefs and opinions don't get their fair shake? Maybe the Slashdot hordes aren't the ones with the biases, because you must be very good at ignoring a LOT of highly-moderated posts each day.
I think it's more that flamebait gets modded as insightful if it matches the groupthink, not that well-reasoned posts are modded down if it doesn't. For example, if I make a crack about Bush being a retard or Ballmer being a maniac, there's a good chance that gets to +5. If I do it for most other neutral figures, that gets modded to oblivion. So I think there is still a bias to some extent.
That said, the quality on slashdot has gotten immeasurably better since the rise of another popular tech website that will remain nameless *cough*DIGG*cough*. I think the teenage fanboys have been sucked off to the flavor of the month. Thank God.
Basically, to compare the results of some code on OSX to Windows using a VM, you'd need to put a Windows VM and an OSX VM on OSX.
Is that the name of their new game? Do I get to play a lawyer?
Yeah, I actually posted about that 2 years ago when the shuffle was rumored. Can I dig up my old /. post and call it prior art? ;)
Of course, people thought I was nuts then...
Why would they stop now?
Even that raises the question of how many AAPL shareholders are Mac owners, or more accurately, what fraction of AAPL's market cap is help by fans? I'd expect not so much.
There are a few options: 1) Beg parents 2) Get job, or...
3) That's why God gave you blood plasma and spoo. Sell it.
4) Failing that, find some lubriderm, a rubber glove, and a busy intersection.
Did they have any in stock?
Maybe he just never encountered some pathetic loser who would actually call up his ISP and spend hours requesting a new IP address just to avoid an IP block due to being an asshat on slashdot. Perhaps he assumed that, if you're calling tech support, that something was actually *wrong* with your service. I'll forgive his ignorance in this case.
Anyway, I got my new IP address after escalating it to his manager. And here I am! Yay!
Yeah, we're all better for it.