Maybe if you live in Canada or some other country where healthcare is rationed by the government. I needed an MRI last year and it was scheduled 2 or 3 days later. Who pays for it may be an issue, but there is no shortage of MRI machines in the US. It's that capitalism thing. Hospitals like buying equipment that can generate lucrative cash flows into the forseeable future.
The key to improving education is to get it out of the government school buildings. There is nothing magical about learning that requires government certified teachers and industrial cinder block buildings lacking in windows. Education can, and should happen everywhere.
1. Eliminate all mandatory attendance laws. The kids that don't want to be in school are just getting in the way of those that do. Let them go.
2. Eliminate teacher certification. Anybody with something of value to teach should be allowed to do it without jumping through a myriad of government hoops.
3. Eliminate the government monopoly on education. Let anybody open a school teaching pretty much anything they want.
4. Mandate nothing. Turn tens of millions of young minds free to learn what they want, where they want, when they want, and let them all bloom. The entire community becomes one big educational factory, with kids moving in and out of classes at the local government school, home based education, community based education, private classes, and options that we haven't even thought of yet because they aren't possible under of centralized control and command system.
Education needs to be as decentralized as possible, so that each individual can get the education they want and deserve. That can't happen when the force of law sticks them in a room with 35 other disinterested parties for 6 hours a day.
Don't avoid anything with your kids (within reason). Video games, computers, walking through the woods, baseball, you name it. It's all good. Just make sure you give then the opportunity to do just about everything and they'll naturally find their niche in the world. If it's reading books and hacking Perl, so be it. If it's sports, that's fine too.
Just don't over analyze or stress about it. Parents today (myself included) try too hard to "program" their kids for success. You have no idea what success will be for your kids, and if you think you know, odds are you are wrong. Just go with the flow and enjoy it. They grow up way too fast.
Before you plunk down the cash on Avaya you should take a look at Zultys. Open SIP standard, runs on a Linux appliance, CDR is stored in a mySQL dB. It's not as open as Asterisk, but it's more flexible than an Avaya solution. By using a server that is built around SIP, you maintain flexibility to change pieces and different phones later. If you buy Avaya now, you are buying Avaya for the lifetime of the system. Upfront cost should be comparable either way - but I think the more open solutions will cost less over time.
If you want a commercial class VoIP PBX expect to pay about $800 - $1200 per user for hardware, software licenses, and installation. I do this for a living and invariably the final price is right in that range. If you want open source with more support look at Pingtel, although the feature set is not as robust as Asterisk. If you want open SIP standards built on Linux look at Zultys. For a mid size company with multiple offices, a VoIP system can pay for itself fairly quickly when you start bypassing the phone company and doing all your inter-office calls over your WAN. We have clients looking at reducing their annual phone bill by a million dollars or more. We can even do handset to handset encryption (3DES or AES), not that we have any real reason to. It makes a cool customer demo though!
Barca provides safe and secure email (POP and IMAP) although the IMAP is a little weak, the ability to send calendar invites to Outlook users, task management, free form notes, and some of the other Outlook like features.
I've been using it since Beta - not a bad PIM app. It's still 1.x code and has a ways to go from a features standpoint, but if you need that Outlook stuff and don't mind paying for software, it's a much safer alternative. http://pocosystems.com
(note - I have no connection to the company - just a happy user)
Since we homeschool, the line between playtime and schooltime is a little blurry, but computers have been used extensively for both work and play by the kids since they were old enough to operate a big trackball made for kids. They are soon to be 9 and 11 and both are several years ahead of the peers academically, and they are just fine socially. Computers are simply a part of our daily life - I doubt either of my kids can even imagine a world without computers and a PS2.
That said, I think the fact that we are homeschooling accounts for most of that, not the computers. But the computers definitely haven't hurt.
We have 4 in the house - 2 PC's in the basement schoolroom, and 2 in my home office. Also, my VoIP desk phone runs linux, so that is a 5th computer.
I've played a lot of Stratego with my son - it's one of the few games I can still beat him at! However, at some point between my youth and his, they reversed the ranks in the game. That still screws me up when we play.
I live in Fredericksburg - I pay $79/mo for 128/768 DSL from a company that is basically just reselling Verizon. Verizon refuses to sell it to me direct. And I won't ever give a dime of my money to Adelphia, so I won't consider the cable modem option.
That said, the DSL service is rock solid - and tech support is great. When I call and say I've pinged and trace routed and the router at IP whatever is timing out, they believe me. They don't ask if I've rebooted my PC yet:)
I don't think Jeopardy is actually filmed daily is it? I think I remember reading somewhere that they film a weeks worth of shows in one day. That is actually more impressive in my opinion. Not only is he kicking ass, he is maintaining that level of concentration through what must be one fairly long day.
From what I've seen homeschooling our kids, an interest or curiosity about history needs to come first if a kid (or anybody) is going to learn. The rote memorization of facts many of us suffered through doesn't work. In our case, my son was hooked on "The Magic Treehouse" books, in which a couple of kids transport through time in a treehouse and end up in the middle of important historical events. That, plus video games got him very interested in history, which made the teaching / learning bit very very easy.
It's no different than contuining education for adults. It's got to be relevant for somebody to be interested. "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is not interesting to kids. Leaning more about westward expansion and what really happened with (Oregon) settlers is interesting to a kid if they have been enjoying the game (or books) already anyway.
I installed Oregon Trail for my daughter last night! She was trying to play SimCity but it is too complicated for her, so I looked thru the CD stack for a game she could play. I didn't even know we owned Oregon Trail until I saw it last night.
One thing they are starting to do is find ways to sells Legos to girls. They have something called Lego Click-its, which are basically build your own jewerly kits made out of specialized tiny Legos. My daughter loves the things. Stuff like that gives me hope for the company.
How gambling software works - how to beat it, etc sure sound like "news for nerds, stuff that matters to me." Write an article, if Taco doesn't want to publish it K5 probably will!
It's been about a year since I was an Earthlink customer, but they had Brightmail implemented and it was blocking 95+% with no false positives. I had gotten so confident in it that I never even bothered to log in to the web site to check the caught spam. Has that system gotten worse? It seems like a challenge response system will put even more of a burden on their network with incoming spam being the same, but now you add all the authentification requests, replies etc.
I ask because my experience directly contradicts the study. I have had the same Yahoo address on my web site since 1998. The Yahoo account was created specifically for use on the web site. The address is a simple mailto link - I'm doing nothing to hide the address. That account gets 4 or 5 spams a day. Another address I used only for Internet.com / ZDnet newsletters is overrun with spam, 50+ daily.
I white list too - with Pocomail. Except that I don't bother with the reply code. All unapproved mail gets left on the server. Once a day or so, I look at the server, grab the one or two good mails that got caught, and CNTRL-A-Delete the rest. Takes about 20 seconds - its not a big deal.
Aren't blogs sort of filling up that "local community" space? Several blogs I read regularly have very narrow topics and a few dozen at best regular posters in comments. It starts to get that old BBS feel when you recognize just about everybody in the comments section, and you expect to see them there daily. The people may be spread out geographically, but the blog does connect the readers in the same way a multi-line BBS did back in the old days. Even better, blogs don't boot you because you've been online for 20 consecutive miutes!
As I sit here some asswipe in the Netherlands is sending spam with my email address as the return address. I'm thinking its an ametuer because he appears to be slow - I'm getting a couple of bounces an hour instead of the usual overload.
This seems to be the originating address dslam197-18-166-62.adsl.zonnet.nl (62.166.18.197)
I've complained to abuse@zonnet.nl. Its a free ISP so I'm not expecting to even get a response
I use Pocomail as a mail client. It's filters allow me to leave all mail on server, except mail from addresses already in my address book, plus whatever other filters I set up for mail lists, etc. it took all of five minutes to set this up, and no spam gets downloaded. I'm running POP, what the client is really doing is marking spam as already read, so it stays on the server. I peek at the server once a day to grab any good mail that got caught, and then delete the rest. Yes, I do have to take that extra step of looking at the mail on the server, but I'm only seeing the headers so its not that big of a deal. It takes all of 30 seconds to scan the headers,and now that I've been doing this for a while, its very clean and I rarely have anything on the server worth keeping.
The Banysean stuff is cool and all, I just don't see that it's enough of an improvement over me current system to justify installing a new app.
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Maybe if you live in Canada or some other country where healthcare is rationed by the government. I needed an MRI last year and it was scheduled 2 or 3 days later. Who pays for it may be an issue, but there is no shortage of MRI machines in the US. It's that capitalism thing. Hospitals like buying equipment that can generate lucrative cash flows into the forseeable future.
Get one of those big kid friendly trackballs - much easier for the under 5 set to control the cursor with.
The key to improving education is to get it out of the government school buildings. There is nothing magical about learning that requires government certified teachers and industrial cinder block buildings lacking in windows. Education can, and should happen everywhere.
1. Eliminate all mandatory attendance laws. The kids that don't want to be in school are just getting in the way of those that do. Let them go.
2. Eliminate teacher certification. Anybody with something of value to teach should be allowed to do it without jumping through a myriad of government hoops.
3. Eliminate the government monopoly on education. Let anybody open a school teaching pretty much anything they want.
4. Mandate nothing. Turn tens of millions of young minds free to learn what they want, where they want, when they want, and let them all bloom. The entire community becomes one big educational factory, with kids moving in and out of classes at the local government school, home based education, community based education, private classes, and options that we haven't even thought of yet because they aren't possible under of centralized control and command system.
Education needs to be as decentralized as possible, so that each individual can get the education they want and deserve. That can't happen when the force of law sticks them in a room with 35 other disinterested parties for 6 hours a day.
Don't avoid anything with your kids (within reason). Video games, computers, walking through the woods, baseball, you name it. It's all good. Just make sure you give then the opportunity to do just about everything and they'll naturally find their niche in the world. If it's reading books and hacking Perl, so be it. If it's sports, that's fine too.
Just don't over analyze or stress about it. Parents today (myself included) try too hard to "program" their kids for success. You have no idea what success will be for your kids, and if you think you know, odds are you are wrong. Just go with the flow and enjoy it. They grow up way too fast.
Before you plunk down the cash on Avaya you should take a look at Zultys. Open SIP standard, runs on a Linux appliance, CDR is stored in a mySQL dB. It's not as open as Asterisk, but it's more flexible than an Avaya solution. By using a server that is built around SIP, you maintain flexibility to change pieces and different phones later. If you buy Avaya now, you are buying Avaya for the lifetime of the system. Upfront cost should be comparable either way - but I think the more open solutions will cost less over time.
If you want a commercial class VoIP PBX expect to pay about $800 - $1200 per user for hardware, software licenses, and installation. I do this for a living and invariably the final price is right in that range. If you want open source with more support look at Pingtel, although the feature set is not as robust as Asterisk. If you want open SIP standards built on Linux look at Zultys. For a mid size company with multiple offices, a VoIP system can pay for itself fairly quickly when you start bypassing the phone company and doing all your inter-office calls over your WAN. We have clients looking at reducing their annual phone bill by a million dollars or more. We can even do handset to handset encryption (3DES or AES), not that we have any real reason to. It makes a cool customer demo though!
Barca provides safe and secure email (POP and IMAP) although the IMAP is a little weak, the ability to send calendar invites to Outlook users, task management, free form notes, and some of the other Outlook like features.
I've been using it since Beta - not a bad PIM app. It's still 1.x code and has a ways to go from a features standpoint, but if you need that Outlook stuff and don't mind paying for software, it's a much safer alternative. http://pocosystems.com
(note - I have no connection to the company - just a happy user)
Since we homeschool, the line between playtime and schooltime is a little blurry, but computers have been used extensively for both work and play by the kids since they were old enough to operate a big trackball made for kids. They are soon to be 9 and 11 and both are several years ahead of the peers academically, and they are just fine socially. Computers are simply a part of our daily life - I doubt either of my kids can even imagine a world without computers and a PS2.
That said, I think the fact that we are homeschooling accounts for most of that, not the computers. But the computers definitely haven't hurt.
We have 4 in the house - 2 PC's in the basement schoolroom, and 2 in my home office. Also, my VoIP desk phone runs linux, so that is a 5th computer.
I've played a lot of Stratego with my son - it's one of the few games I can still beat him at! However, at some point between my youth and his, they reversed the ranks in the game. That still screws me up when we play.
Score another point for Pocomail. Knowing my wife isn't using Outlook or OE is well worth paying the license fee for Poco.
It's Mid-Atlantic Broadband (midatlanticbb.com).
I live in Fredericksburg - I pay $79/mo for 128/768 DSL from a company that is basically just reselling Verizon. Verizon refuses to sell it to me direct. And I won't ever give a dime of my money to Adelphia, so I won't consider the cable modem option.
:)
That said, the DSL service is rock solid - and tech support is great. When I call and say I've pinged and trace routed and the router at IP whatever is timing out, they believe me. They don't ask if I've rebooted my PC yet
I don't think Jeopardy is actually filmed daily is it? I think I remember reading somewhere that they film a weeks worth of shows in one day. That is actually more impressive in my opinion. Not only is he kicking ass, he is maintaining that level of concentration through what must be one fairly long day.
From what I've seen homeschooling our kids, an interest or curiosity about history needs to come first if a kid (or anybody) is going to learn. The rote memorization of facts many of us suffered through doesn't work. In our case, my son was hooked on "The Magic Treehouse" books, in which a couple of kids transport through time in a treehouse and end up in the middle of important historical events. That, plus video games got him very interested in history, which made the teaching / learning bit very very easy.
It's no different than contuining education for adults. It's got to be relevant for somebody to be interested. "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it" is not interesting to kids. Leaning more about westward expansion and what really happened with (Oregon) settlers is interesting to a kid if they have been enjoying the game (or books) already anyway.
I installed Oregon Trail for my daughter last night! She was trying to play SimCity but it is too complicated for her, so I looked thru the CD stack for a game she could play. I didn't even know we owned Oregon Trail until I saw it last night.
One thing they are starting to do is find ways to sells Legos to girls. They have something called Lego Click-its, which are basically build your own jewerly kits made out of specialized tiny Legos. My daughter loves the things. Stuff like that gives me hope for the company.
How gambling software works - how to beat it, etc sure sound like "news for nerds, stuff that matters to me." Write an article, if Taco doesn't want to publish it K5 probably will!
It's been about a year since I was an Earthlink customer, but they had Brightmail implemented and it was blocking 95+% with no false positives. I had gotten so confident in it that I never even bothered to log in to the web site to check the caught spam. Has that system gotten worse? It seems like a challenge response system will put even more of a burden on their network with incoming spam being the same, but now you add all the authentification requests, replies etc.
I ask because my experience directly contradicts the study. I have had the same Yahoo address on my web site since 1998. The Yahoo account was created specifically for use on the web site. The address is a simple mailto link - I'm doing nothing to hide the address. That account gets 4 or 5 spams a day. Another address I used only for Internet.com / ZDnet newsletters is overrun with spam, 50+ daily.
DOH! yes I mean blink. Been working with a client on a flash project, must have the word ingrained in my brain.
And then about two years later some bozo invented the flash tag and irrevocably ruined the internet for all of eternity.
I white list too - with Pocomail. Except that I don't bother with the reply code. All unapproved mail gets left on the server. Once a day or so, I look at the server, grab the one or two good mails that got caught, and CNTRL-A-Delete the rest. Takes about 20 seconds - its not a big deal.
Aren't blogs sort of filling up that "local community" space? Several blogs I read regularly have very narrow topics and a few dozen at best regular posters in comments. It starts to get that old BBS feel when you recognize just about everybody in the comments section, and you expect to see them there daily. The people may be spread out geographically, but the blog does connect the readers in the same way a multi-line BBS did back in the old days. Even better, blogs don't boot you because you've been online for 20 consecutive miutes!
As I sit here some asswipe in the Netherlands is sending spam with my email address as the return address. I'm thinking its an ametuer because he appears to be slow - I'm getting a couple of bounces an hour instead of the usual overload.
This seems to be the originating address
dslam197-18-166-62.adsl.zonnet.nl (62.166.18.197)
I've complained to abuse@zonnet.nl. Its a free ISP so I'm not expecting to even get a response
I use Pocomail as a mail client. It's filters allow me to leave all mail on server, except mail from addresses already in my address book, plus whatever other filters I set up for mail lists, etc. it took all of five minutes to set this up, and no spam gets downloaded. I'm running POP, what the client is really doing is marking spam as already read, so it stays on the server. I peek at the server once a day to grab any good mail that got caught, and then delete the rest. Yes, I do have to take that extra step of looking at the mail on the server, but I'm only seeing the headers so its not that big of a deal. It takes all of 30 seconds to scan the headers,and now that I've been doing this for a while, its very clean and I rarely have anything on the server worth keeping. The Banysean stuff is cool and all, I just don't see that it's enough of an improvement over me current system to justify installing a new app.