What truly puzzles me here is why exactly any secret service such as the FSB would be stupid enough to poison some Kremlin critic with a really hard to acquire substance such as Polonium. It should be assumed that the British WILL find out what killed Litvinenko, and when it is something as obscure as Polonium, it's got to be the Russians. You're practically implicating yourself by being too good at what you do.
The guy is far more valuable to his cause as a confirmed martyr than some loud-mouthed expat living in Britain. If I were Putin, I probably wouldn't bother, and if I wanted to bother, I would want it to look like a traffic accident or a random mugging. The tinfoil hat guy in me actually is willing to believe this was a CIA job that wants to implicate the FSB. Let's face it, if you want to make Russia look bad, this is what you'd do.
Unless, of course, I REALLY wanted to make a point of Russia's reach, but in that case, Putin's guys are simply miscalculating...
Just something that I've always wondered about.. how do you measure the spin of something that is essentially, for an outside observer, a spherical event horizon containing some amount of mass? I would think that in order for something to be meaningfully spinning, it's got to have something you can put your finger on so you can "sense" the spin. Is a black hole's gravity field not uniform, or what exactly does one mean by a BH's spin?
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Let me tell you something, son, as you are obviously confused.
The Internet is like a series of tubes. It's certainly not like a truck that you just dump something on...
The "public" part of the equation has absolutely nothing to do with the general problem you point out. You just want to turn everything into a Libertarian issue, and here I fail to see how the dots connect.
"Teachers grading their own work" would theoretically be a problem, no matter where the funding comes from. In a private school, the problem would be exactly the same, in particular if there were money bonuses for higher marks. Which is in general a pretty silly idea, as this shifts too much focus on marks in general. It's a bit like teaching to the test, which is equally dumb.
However, you're also mistaken in whose work is being graded. The grades are feedback to the student. They are supposed to tell the student where they need to improve. A secondary function is to allow comparison, but at least in primary education, this is less of an issue. Equating grading the teacher's work to measuring the number of high marks produced leads to a misconstructed feedback mechanism, which is actually somewhat market-oriented in very botched way. This would be a bad method of education, public or private, and it is in no way typical of the public side of things, as you theorize.
Teachers need to be compensated for being inspired and inspiring teachers. It's something you do for the passion of doing it, not because of the chance to boost your pay through an increase of some dubious measure. The first thing you need to invest in, therefore, is proper teachers' education. You first maximize teacher quality, then let them loose on the kids, and trust them to do their jobs properly.
I don't understand why the Anglo-Saxon world has such serious trouble getting to grips with this -- this testing and paying for marks sort of mentality seems very alien to me. It's bringing the micromanaged, reductionist competition mentality to everything that is ruining your public school systems, while in the US, there is of course an outright hostility towards even trying to make it work in the first place. All the while the Nordic Countries are, again, doing things apparently the right way despite us having almost nothing but public schools... there's a right way and a wrong way to do most things, and with dedication and funding, there is no reason why public system cannot work.
And I would like to have some kind of a bill of rights when the USA decides I am a foreign enemy combatant and need to be dragged off to Guantanamo, although I may be not guilty under Finnish laws. And no, whatever you'd grant me is probably not enough.
International war crimes judgements can not have legitimacy if it all mere victor's justice. You wouldn't accept it at home, why accept it abroad? The legitimacy of those who pass judgement is a cornerstone of the entire idea of the rule of law, and I find it dubious you would want to make an exception for yourself. I don't believe in the idea of "local" judgements either, such as in Iraq, as the *Iraqi* court could hypothetically as well have said Saddam is not guilty, and the US would have considered this as the "wrong" result, and those courts are weak subject to local and outside pressures in the first place. Something IS horribly wrong in a justice system that says someone is not guilty under the criteria the ICC would find a guilty judgement (which are not, incidentally, laws of some specific foreign government)... perhaps the trial deserves to be brought out of the country it is being held in in such circumstances.
By all means, drag me to the ICC when I commit war crimes, even if the Finnish government would try to protect me. It is as neutral a venue as possible, unless of course the US attempts to sabotage the whole thing out of principle... sometimes the paranoia Americans have about "foreign governments" is just creepy, even when they are trying to build institutions that reduce the power of state actors on the legal process, while their own government apparently can do no wrong...
Seriously, we need the International Criminal Court. I can think of a lot of people who would deserve hanging for causing the deaths of 150 people, if not outright deliberately, at least out of criminal negligence. Let's start with Sharon and Bush.
It's not really about choice either. Nordic schools make you go through a 7-16 years of age routine, plus typically an additional 3 years (because with just the mandatory comprehensive school, you're of course fucked in life). The curriculum is rather "usual", but I feel we mostly stick to objective fundamentals (an aberration being the purely political Swedish-education which aims to shape Finland's demographics to be more acceptable to the 5,5% of Swedish-speakers here), and that is what makes it work. My impression is that for example UK public schools have problems because of too much choice. They spread kids too thin and fill a lot of the schoolday with garbage, and allow the children to make choices which may be "fun" (read: easy) at the moment, but have little relevance in the long run. This is why the Brits are worried that their science education and thus future science is tanking completely.
An interesting tidbit is that Finnish schoolkids actually spend very little time with schoolwork daily compared to other Western countries, but their results are still better in the subjects that "count". Less is more.
The only "choice" issue apart from the aforementioned I have with our public schooling is probably the fact that not everyone is around the median of the distribution. Those who have serious issues fortunately do not drag everyone down with them, as the support mechanisms kick in individually without requiring that everything be dumbed down. Those who are brighter have a harder time. The lower grades in particular were really boring for me, but at least I could spend the time civilizing myself in ways I wanted that the others used doing homework. This could easily be remedied by adding advanced material and allowing skipping easy parts by just taking tests, though.
Assuming that the US government is intentionally keeping public education dysfunctional by specifically not allowing "choice" seems a bit of a stretch then, as I suppose we offer even less choice. Not making any guesses about whether your govt indeed needs a substantial part of the people to be stupid, though...
Public schools do not educate, according to reformed schoolteachers like John Gatto and John Holt. If they did, the populace wouldn't take the crap that 'we' do - teh masses would know how to recognize tyranny when it happened, and find a way to circumvent it.
Countering myths requires working counter-examples. US public schools may suck, but in PISA studies, the Nordic countries systematically come out on top in everything. Our public schools CERTAINLY seem to educate, and there is no drive to start to privatise anything. It is a myth that things being "public" would neccessarily prevent operation, which can always be organized efficiently regardless of the source of funding. In right-wing thought, simply the source of funds taints the entire operation, and things being private are automatically a panacea. Mind you, I'm pretty sure madrasas in Pakistan are private schools.
This of course requires sectarianism to be kept in check, but in a sufficiently rationalist culture it is pretty easy to agree upon a curriculum. A few languages, sciences, and some humanities such as history should do the trick. If you want to indoctrinate the kid in some other way, feel free to do so outside of school. The school, however, gives the objective fundamentals.
When it comes to healthcare, Finland has a very cost-efficient, universal-coverage healthcare system. Of course the conservatives are trying hard to prove that it should be dismantled, but they are doing a miserable job at it.. not many people are buying the arguments, as the strategy is too clearly the one of "starving the beast" and then criticising it. Certainly it could use more funding at the moment, but even a public system cannot run on air.
As far as being "spiteful" (I would have used "disdainful" myself)
Fine, I'm not a native speaker, bear with me;-)
Certainly MY ideal world is one where sheepdogs are unecessary, as there are no more wolves, and nobody ever WANTS to be a wolf.
This brings us to an even more complex point of general politics... who is a wolf? I tend to, for example, believe in both our welfare state model AND the need to know how to defend one's home when genuinely neccessary (like, when Hitler and Stalin decide to carve up Europe and you end up on one side of the line)... this doesn't including everyone going out on the streets toting guns "just because they can". This would, in some people's eyes, make me a defender of wolves who want to destroy a healthy survival-of-the-fittest society through Socialism by allowing the weak live at the stronger ones' expense and favouring those who believe similarly... I have serious trouble subscribing to the general right-wing model of thought here, as it seems to turn the world into a rather dire battleground. The point here is that liking to play sheepdog does not mean that you need to escalate things just because you feel like it. There is quite a responsibility in drawing the line.
You build up immunity to something by exposing yourself to controllable doses of the pathogen or stressor. If you spend your entire life inside a climate-controlled, sterile bubble, then the first time you get exposed to the tiniest disease, it kills you (or at least has a much greater effect on you) Same deal with any stressor. You don't help kids by isolating them from life, you help kids by mitigating their exposure to extreme stressors and helping them deal with the minor ones.
You're actually not too wrong here. The only problem with the argument is that you don't build even more immunity by sending your kids to be child soldiers in Africa.
BTW, I'm not an American either... I assume you're a Finn? Well with your universal conscription example, you proved my point - you have had some degree of exposure to sheepdoggery yourself, and so are better prepared to deal with life than someone who has not had that opportunity.
Correct. And the reason why I felt the need to respond is that I believe this stuff is being argued way too much through a false dichotomy (which are dangerous political arguments to begin with). Finland has spent the 600 of the past 1000 years in a state of war. We are still around, as an independent country these days no less. You would think we are somehow particularly militaristic. We're not. We have very little gun crime because there are no guns... our violent crime mostly consists of drunken brawls with knives at worst. You can avoid those by not being a drunkard in the first place. The whole idea that a people who doesn't arm themselves to the extreme can't possibly be one that has had a history of self-defense is bull.
And how do we know when the sheepdog turns into a wolf? The most efficient wolf would be one who makes the sheep believe he's there to protect them. There is a very good reason to be wary of your usually self-proclaimed sheepdogs and their assurances... a good litmus test is indeed whether the sheepdog is spiteful of the "ideal world where nobody gets hurt". We may not be there yet, but if you're unwilling even to strive for it, there is something funny about your priorities...
And yeah, I consider myself to be quite a proud sheep. I would be able to kill in immediate self-defense, but I won't enter the slippery slope that finally sees me killing pre-emptively.
I am really proud that in my relatively non-violent, non-US country people are not in general so afraid of each others' potential "intentions" that they would, for example, feel the need to arm themselves. This general nonviolent disposition of the society at a whole DOES make for a better place to live in, no matter how you yanks spin it. The sheepdoggery that is needed is perfectly well handled by the police when neccessary.
And before you start laughing that we're sissies, we're a country with a universal conscription. Yeah, all guys here have actually handled an assault rifle, and yet they do not feel a need to own one. And we beat back Stalin in WW2... don't come educate us about self-defense and machismo:-)
Simple legality not, but law enforcement does:-) Laws are effective -- over here guns are not "illegal" but rather controlled, and gun crime is not an issue, no matter you'd want people to believe...
Not to admire the chap or anything (after all, his sense of style is horrendous), but I wouldn't call him "out of his mind". A dictator maybe, but clearly good at it -- he's got nukes now, and has gone public with them. He's been quite skilled in his maneuvers... much more so than, say, Saddam Hussein. And I do need to point out that not only does he seem to be brighter, he's also all the more dangerous than Saddam, and his regime is genuinely, actively being nasty to its citizens... which you couldn't really say about Saddam's Iraq of 2003.
Quite a lot... I would argue that still even today, most people who enter CS have had prior exposure to programming, and when I was young (C64/Amiga 500 times and such), entry-level programming was much more accessible than it is now, and MANY latter-day computer scientists started with coding marathons in their bedrooms... you can't deny this.
I am fully aware that "CS is more than being a code monkey", as I'm a pencil and paper CS theorist myself mostly these days and at the moment I find programming to be almost on the level of manual labour, but my fascination with the field DID begin with getting the computer to do "cool things" back then. I don't plan on forgetting that. For me the attitude of "liking to hack" (that is, investigating how things work and applying the knowledge learned) is still alive and well; I just don't most of the time bother to actually implement my ideas anymore. Had I been restricted to an hour a day in my formative years, I would never have become a geek, and at least for ME, this would have kept me from wanting to investigate things futher academically.
CS degrees can be as hard as you make them, trust me... the basic Master's isn't that tough, but you can choose to direct yourself towards special applied fields that can be very demanding.
If I had been limited like that when I was a kid, I wouldn't have a degree in CS now. What if the kid is genuinely interested in computers and LIKES to hack, which neccessarily means coding marathons?
Computer science is about algorithms and computability theory and such. You're going to learn about AI and probably cryptology. You're going to learn about theoretical models of computing. Those are all heavily mathematical.
Actually, just coming from a Master's program and having been there, done that, I wouldn't call it "heavily" mathematical in the Physics sense. It takes a mathematical inclination, but at barest minimum, you do manage with basics in logic, set theory, a few series that come up in algorithm analysis... then you just need to know how to write a proof with the stuff you learn in CS itself. I never had need for calculus beyond understanding the basic concepts of gradients; never needed to do an integral myself, as long as I could read them in the more complex papers I came up against in the latter phases of my studies. A lot of the mathematics -- I did do a minor subject on it -- is there to grow character, I'd say.
I don't begrudge UT for wanted to offer an applied mathematics program in their CS department, but I didn't want that, and was basically told that if I wanted to have a life where I did cool stuff with computers, I had to learn Diff. EQ, calculus-based engineering physics, and a whole lot of theory and proofs of CS (emphasis on the _Science_) concepts that perhaps.01% of real-world programmers actually give a shit about.
Hmm. Strictly requiring differential equations and engineering physics is overkill for a pure CS program; although if you're going to code something in engineering or do physics simulations, you'll need that. To the rest of your complaint... no shit! It's almost as if you were in the computer science department of some fucking University! Who would have THOUGHT they teach the Science of computers!!
Come on! Computer Science at University is SUPPOSED to give you the theoretical view of things, at the highest educational level, no less. Can you seriously tell me with a straight face that, even at a theoretical school, there should be no mention of Turing machines, the really FUNDAMENTAL results that follow from them, algorithm analysis, etc? Sure, a lot of rank-and-file programmers don't give a shit about that, but I can assure you that if NOBODY gave a shit about that, the fundamental development of computing would grind to a halt.
That most programmers don't give a shit about the theory just suggests to me that most programmers should be educated at vocational colleges.
You're mostly perfectly on target, but it is important to remember that people are not neccessarily under an obligation to accept people "making fun of" their personal characteristics. One needs to tread carefully here.
I am a disabled person myself, and I tend to think I have a bit of an ego. I have never let my disability make myself believe that it would somehow reduce my value as a person, or that I would have to somehow accept less respectful behaviour from people than what people generally accept from each other. In my youth I saw too many sad cases of people turning into attention-seeking, overtly self-depreciating class clowns because of this kind of thinking, and I decided not to make the same mistake.
However, I do appreciate the black comedy inherent in living a life where I often come across situations that are, from a healthy person's point of view, absolutely absurd or just simply plain cruel. Sometimes you just have to deal with it by just laughing straight at the face of it, it can be very psychologically liberating.
Your observation that humour is a communal experience and what you can laugh at, you need to understand was spot on. Disabled people tend to have VERY dark humour among themselves, because they are "in" and share the same culture and experience in this regard. This kind of humour would be off limits for most people who don't very intimately LIVE the disability. You can even crack jokes of something really hurtful, as you know you are wide open to comebacks of similar nature as well. This way it can even be a way to process things that would, without making light of it, seem way too difficult to discuss.
A very good measure of how good a friend someone is to me is how much comfortable he is joking about my disability and how well I take it. The key is that such humour still needs to be sympathetic to the person: you share in the experience even though it was negative. My friends realize my frustrations regarding some things, and their humour shows a rather deep, intelligent understanding of what I am going through. Without such contact, I would have nobody who would really show they understand me on a more than just a superficial level!
The downside, when you move away from real understanding, is of course that you also tend to mock and laugh at something you do not understand. This time it turns into insulting the person and laughing "at" him. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish the two when you are not familiar with the person attempting the humour. There is also the slippery slope some people like to push this argument down that says that all grievances disabled people might have about society in general and attitudes prevailing in it are just a lack of "good humour" about it and an instance of taking oneself too seriously. I guess I'd still much rather take South Park's Kenny than have disability pushed into the corner of a taboo issue that people have no contact whatsoever with and can't even try to understand, because it might result in "insulting" someone's feelings...
That said, I perfectly agree with you, professor Hawking hasn't been insulted in this thread in the slightest and I am absolutely certain most slashdotters have nothing but the deepest respect for his achievements. Perhaps that's why the bedpans ARE so amusing... it is sometimes nice to humanize your idols, as you want to feel closer to them on a human level. It is comforting for the average geek to know that yes, even prof. Hawking needs to take a shit every now and then and needs assistance doing it, so at least you're better than him in something! Even Roman generals were mocked by his troops during the triumph, you know...
No, we won't see pervs starting to use C-64s as their main machines. KP looks lousy downsampled to those resolutions and bit depths, and access is slow and inconvenient on the multitude of cassettes or floppies that would be required.:-)
I mean no offense for anyone enrolled in such education and might be interested in hearing what exactly it entails, but...
I don't know whether to cry or laugh when I see mentions of these schools offering specific game programming courses and "degrees" that last for a year or two. Who are they kidding? Even colleges that offer 3-4 year programs with some kind of game programming specializations would, in my view, hardly prepare a person to actually develop games. Design, maybe, from the user's point of view, but "develop" in the programming sense? No.
Maybe I am out of the loop and game programming has indeed turned into some drag and drop excercise, but I am of the old skool where we used to optimize inner loops in assembly to get our pixels onto the screen as fast as possible when me and my friends were coding some crappy little games in high school. Nowadays I'm just about to complete my M.Sc. in CS, with studies both in fundamental algorithmics and all sorts of applied fields, AI, graphics, the works you'd find in a game engine. I STILL wouldn't dare actually seek employment in a game development company, as I don't feel like I am strong enough in the pragmatic aspects of coding (I'm mostly a bookworm, not a geek who codes into the night) and I'm sure I would have a lot to learn about the algorithms side of things, too.
There's this stupid idea floating around that just because most people in the world these days are involved with technology and even like it and an increasing number are even gamers, this inflation of geekness actually means that more people also have the capacity to master this technology so profoundly as to be able to actually create more of it. I am absolutely certain this is false, because people haven't all of a sudden got smarter, and because the offerings are becoming increasingly complex. The fact that a lot of the stuff is being moved into libraries and thus not all games are just written from scratch anymore probably doesn't compensate for this.
You can't just take Joe Random off the street and educate him into a game programmer. Likewise, if you want a career in game development, become a developer first. You need to be a really GOOD developer to actually get to develop games, as you will have to master a large set of complex theoretical ideas and apply them.
Here's a good test: grab any entry-level university textbook on linear algebra. If it makes your head spin, move on.
If only all the Libertarians just moved into a virtual world to create their wet dream survival of the fittest dystopias and let us decent people build something better together in reality... one can dream:-)
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What truly puzzles me here is why exactly any secret service such as the FSB would be stupid enough to poison some Kremlin critic with a really hard to acquire substance such as Polonium. It should be assumed that the British WILL find out what killed Litvinenko, and when it is something as obscure as Polonium, it's got to be the Russians. You're practically implicating yourself by being too good at what you do.
The guy is far more valuable to his cause as a confirmed martyr than some loud-mouthed expat living in Britain. If I were Putin, I probably wouldn't bother, and if I wanted to bother, I would want it to look like a traffic accident or a random mugging. The tinfoil hat guy in me actually is willing to believe this was a CIA job that wants to implicate the FSB. Let's face it, if you want to make Russia look bad, this is what you'd do.
Unless, of course, I REALLY wanted to make a point of Russia's reach, but in that case, Putin's guys are simply miscalculating...
Just something that I've always wondered about.. how do you measure the spin of something that is essentially, for an outside observer, a spherical event horizon containing some amount of mass? I would think that in order for something to be meaningfully spinning, it's got to have something you can put your finger on so you can "sense" the spin. Is a black hole's gravity field not uniform, or what exactly does one mean by a BH's spin?
Let me tell you something, son, as you are obviously confused.
The Internet is like a series of tubes. It's certainly not like a truck that you just dump something on...
The "public" part of the equation has absolutely nothing to do with the general problem you point out. You just want to turn everything into a Libertarian issue, and here I fail to see how the dots connect.
"Teachers grading their own work" would theoretically be a problem, no matter where the funding comes from. In a private school, the problem would be exactly the same, in particular if there were money bonuses for higher marks. Which is in general a pretty silly idea, as this shifts too much focus on marks in general. It's a bit like teaching to the test, which is equally dumb.
However, you're also mistaken in whose work is being graded. The grades are feedback to the student. They are supposed to tell the student where they need to improve. A secondary function is to allow comparison, but at least in primary education, this is less of an issue. Equating grading the teacher's work to measuring the number of high marks produced leads to a misconstructed feedback mechanism, which is actually somewhat market-oriented in very botched way. This would be a bad method of education, public or private, and it is in no way typical of the public side of things, as you theorize.
Teachers need to be compensated for being inspired and inspiring teachers. It's something you do for the passion of doing it, not because of the chance to boost your pay through an increase of some dubious measure. The first thing you need to invest in, therefore, is proper teachers' education. You first maximize teacher quality, then let them loose on the kids, and trust them to do their jobs properly.
I don't understand why the Anglo-Saxon world has such serious trouble getting to grips with this -- this testing and paying for marks sort of mentality seems very alien to me. It's bringing the micromanaged, reductionist competition mentality to everything that is ruining your public school systems, while in the US, there is of course an outright hostility towards even trying to make it work in the first place. All the while the Nordic Countries are, again, doing things apparently the right way despite us having almost nothing but public schools... there's a right way and a wrong way to do most things, and with dedication and funding, there is no reason why public system cannot work.
And I would like to have some kind of a bill of rights when the USA decides I am a foreign enemy combatant and need to be dragged off to Guantanamo, although I may be not guilty under Finnish laws. And no, whatever you'd grant me is probably not enough.
International war crimes judgements can not have legitimacy if it all mere victor's justice. You wouldn't accept it at home, why accept it abroad? The legitimacy of those who pass judgement is a cornerstone of the entire idea of the rule of law, and I find it dubious you would want to make an exception for yourself. I don't believe in the idea of "local" judgements either, such as in Iraq, as the *Iraqi* court could hypothetically as well have said Saddam is not guilty, and the US would have considered this as the "wrong" result, and those courts are weak subject to local and outside pressures in the first place. Something IS horribly wrong in a justice system that says someone is not guilty under the criteria the ICC would find a guilty judgement (which are not, incidentally, laws of some specific foreign government)... perhaps the trial deserves to be brought out of the country it is being held in in such circumstances.
By all means, drag me to the ICC when I commit war crimes, even if the Finnish government would try to protect me. It is as neutral a venue as possible, unless of course the US attempts to sabotage the whole thing out of principle... sometimes the paranoia Americans have about "foreign governments" is just creepy, even when they are trying to build institutions that reduce the power of state actors on the legal process, while their own government apparently can do no wrong...
Seriously, we need the International Criminal Court. I can think of a lot of people who would deserve hanging for causing the deaths of 150 people, if not outright deliberately, at least out of criminal negligence. Let's start with Sharon and Bush.
It's not really about choice either. Nordic schools make you go through a 7-16 years of age routine, plus typically an additional 3 years (because with just the mandatory comprehensive school, you're of course fucked in life). The curriculum is rather "usual", but I feel we mostly stick to objective fundamentals (an aberration being the purely political Swedish-education which aims to shape Finland's demographics to be more acceptable to the 5,5% of Swedish-speakers here), and that is what makes it work. My impression is that for example UK public schools have problems because of too much choice. They spread kids too thin and fill a lot of the schoolday with garbage, and allow the children to make choices which may be "fun" (read: easy) at the moment, but have little relevance in the long run. This is why the Brits are worried that their science education and thus future science is tanking completely.
An interesting tidbit is that Finnish schoolkids actually spend very little time with schoolwork daily compared to other Western countries, but their results are still better in the subjects that "count". Less is more.
The only "choice" issue apart from the aforementioned I have with our public schooling is probably the fact that not everyone is around the median of the distribution. Those who have serious issues fortunately do not drag everyone down with them, as the support mechanisms kick in individually without requiring that everything be dumbed down. Those who are brighter have a harder time. The lower grades in particular were really boring for me, but at least I could spend the time civilizing myself in ways I wanted that the others used doing homework. This could easily be remedied by adding advanced material and allowing skipping easy parts by just taking tests, though.
Assuming that the US government is intentionally keeping public education dysfunctional by specifically not allowing "choice" seems a bit of a stretch then, as I suppose we offer even less choice. Not making any guesses about whether your govt indeed needs a substantial part of the people to be stupid, though...
Public schools do not educate, according to reformed schoolteachers like John Gatto and John Holt. If they did, the populace wouldn't take the crap that 'we' do - teh masses would know how to recognize tyranny when it happened, and find a way to circumvent it.
Countering myths requires working counter-examples. US public schools may suck, but in PISA studies, the Nordic countries systematically come out on top in everything. Our public schools CERTAINLY seem to educate, and there is no drive to start to privatise anything. It is a myth that things being "public" would neccessarily prevent operation, which can always be organized efficiently regardless of the source of funding. In right-wing thought, simply the source of funds taints the entire operation, and things being private are automatically a panacea. Mind you, I'm pretty sure madrasas in Pakistan are private schools.
This of course requires sectarianism to be kept in check, but in a sufficiently rationalist culture it is pretty easy to agree upon a curriculum. A few languages, sciences, and some humanities such as history should do the trick. If you want to indoctrinate the kid in some other way, feel free to do so outside of school. The school, however, gives the objective fundamentals.
When it comes to healthcare, Finland has a very cost-efficient, universal-coverage healthcare system. Of course the conservatives are trying hard to prove that it should be dismantled, but they are doing a miserable job at it.. not many people are buying the arguments, as the strategy is too clearly the one of "starving the beast" and then criticising it. Certainly it could use more funding at the moment, but even a public system cannot run on air.
Considering the reports of all the oddities going on in US elections recently, they could probably benefit from some Venezuelan oversight...
In North Korea, Soviet Russia jokes tell old people!
So you wouldn't kill someone who had a loaded gun pointed at your head, but hadn't pulled the trigger yet?
Counts as immediate self-defense. The point is you don't push the concept too far, or everything becomes justified.
As far as being "spiteful" (I would have used "disdainful" myself)
Fine, I'm not a native speaker, bear with me ;-)
Certainly MY ideal world is one where sheepdogs are unecessary, as there are no more wolves, and nobody ever WANTS to be a wolf.
This brings us to an even more complex point of general politics... who is a wolf? I tend to, for example, believe in both our welfare state model AND the need to know how to defend one's home when genuinely neccessary (like, when Hitler and Stalin decide to carve up Europe and you end up on one side of the line)... this doesn't including everyone going out on the streets toting guns "just because they can". This would, in some people's eyes, make me a defender of wolves who want to destroy a healthy survival-of-the-fittest society through Socialism by allowing the weak live at the stronger ones' expense and favouring those who believe similarly... I have serious trouble subscribing to the general right-wing model of thought here, as it seems to turn the world into a rather dire battleground. The point here is that liking to play sheepdog does not mean that you need to escalate things just because you feel like it. There is quite a responsibility in drawing the line.
You build up immunity to something by exposing yourself to controllable doses of the pathogen or stressor. If you spend your entire life inside a climate-controlled, sterile bubble, then the first time you get exposed to the tiniest disease, it kills you (or at least has a much greater effect on you) Same deal with any stressor. You don't help kids by isolating them from life, you help kids by mitigating their exposure to extreme stressors and helping them deal with the minor ones.
You're actually not too wrong here. The only problem with the argument is that you don't build even more immunity by sending your kids to be child soldiers in Africa.
BTW, I'm not an American either... I assume you're a Finn? Well with your universal conscription example, you proved my point - you have had some degree of exposure to sheepdoggery yourself, and so are better prepared to deal with life than someone who has not had that opportunity.
Correct. And the reason why I felt the need to respond is that I believe this stuff is being argued way too much through a false dichotomy (which are dangerous political arguments to begin with). Finland has spent the 600 of the past 1000 years in a state of war. We are still around, as an independent country these days no less. You would think we are somehow particularly militaristic. We're not. We have very little gun crime because there are no guns... our violent crime mostly consists of drunken brawls with knives at worst. You can avoid those by not being a drunkard in the first place. The whole idea that a people who doesn't arm themselves to the extreme can't possibly be one that has had a history of self-defense is bull.
And how do we know when the sheepdog turns into a wolf? The most efficient wolf would be one who makes the sheep believe he's there to protect them. There is a very good reason to be wary of your usually self-proclaimed sheepdogs and their assurances... a good litmus test is indeed whether the sheepdog is spiteful of the "ideal world where nobody gets hurt". We may not be there yet, but if you're unwilling even to strive for it, there is something funny about your priorities...
:-)
And yeah, I consider myself to be quite a proud sheep. I would be able to kill in immediate self-defense, but I won't enter the slippery slope that finally sees me killing pre-emptively.
I am really proud that in my relatively non-violent, non-US country people are not in general so afraid of each others' potential "intentions" that they would, for example, feel the need to arm themselves. This general nonviolent disposition of the society at a whole DOES make for a better place to live in, no matter how you yanks spin it. The sheepdoggery that is needed is perfectly well handled by the police when neccessary.
And before you start laughing that we're sissies, we're a country with a universal conscription. Yeah, all guys here have actually handled an assault rifle, and yet they do not feel a need to own one. And we beat back Stalin in WW2... don't come educate us about self-defense and machismo
Legality does not stop criminals.
Simple legality not, but law enforcement does :-) Laws are effective -- over here guns are not "illegal" but rather controlled, and gun crime is not an issue, no matter you'd want people to believe...
Not to admire the chap or anything (after all, his sense of style is horrendous), but I wouldn't call him "out of his mind". A dictator maybe, but clearly good at it -- he's got nukes now, and has gone public with them. He's been quite skilled in his maneuvers... much more so than, say, Saddam Hussein. And I do need to point out that not only does he seem to be brighter, he's also all the more dangerous than Saddam, and his regime is genuinely, actively being nasty to its citizens... which you couldn't really say about Saddam's Iraq of 2003.
Quite a lot... I would argue that still even today, most people who enter CS have had prior exposure to programming, and when I was young (C64/Amiga 500 times and such), entry-level programming was much more accessible than it is now, and MANY latter-day computer scientists started with coding marathons in their bedrooms... you can't deny this.
I am fully aware that "CS is more than being a code monkey", as I'm a pencil and paper CS theorist myself mostly these days and at the moment I find programming to be almost on the level of manual labour, but my fascination with the field DID begin with getting the computer to do "cool things" back then. I don't plan on forgetting that. For me the attitude of "liking to hack" (that is, investigating how things work and applying the knowledge learned) is still alive and well; I just don't most of the time bother to actually implement my ideas anymore. Had I been restricted to an hour a day in my formative years, I would never have become a geek, and at least for ME, this would have kept me from wanting to investigate things futher academically.
CS degrees can be as hard as you make them, trust me... the basic Master's isn't that tough, but you can choose to direct yourself towards special applied fields that can be very demanding.
If I had been limited like that when I was a kid, I wouldn't have a degree in CS now. What if the kid is genuinely interested in computers and LIKES to hack, which neccessarily means coding marathons?
That's one great relief for a Neil...
Computer science is about algorithms and computability theory and such. You're going to learn about AI and probably cryptology. You're going to learn about theoretical models of computing. Those are all heavily mathematical.
Actually, just coming from a Master's program and having been there, done that, I wouldn't call it "heavily" mathematical in the Physics sense. It takes a mathematical inclination, but at barest minimum, you do manage with basics in logic, set theory, a few series that come up in algorithm analysis... then you just need to know how to write a proof with the stuff you learn in CS itself. I never had need for calculus beyond understanding the basic concepts of gradients; never needed to do an integral myself, as long as I could read them in the more complex papers I came up against in the latter phases of my studies. A lot of the mathematics -- I did do a minor subject on it -- is there to grow character, I'd say.
I don't begrudge UT for wanted to offer an applied mathematics program in their CS department, but I didn't want that, and was basically told that if I wanted to have a life where I did cool stuff with computers, I had to learn Diff. EQ, calculus-based engineering physics, and a whole lot of theory and proofs of CS (emphasis on the _Science_) concepts that perhaps .01% of real-world programmers actually give a shit about.
Hmm. Strictly requiring differential equations and engineering physics is overkill for a pure CS program; although if you're going to code something in engineering or do physics simulations, you'll need that. To the rest of your complaint... no shit! It's almost as if you were in the computer science department of some fucking University! Who would have THOUGHT they teach the Science of computers!!
Come on! Computer Science at University is SUPPOSED to give you the theoretical view of things, at the highest educational level, no less. Can you seriously tell me with a straight face that, even at a theoretical school, there should be no mention of Turing machines, the really FUNDAMENTAL results that follow from them, algorithm analysis, etc? Sure, a lot of rank-and-file programmers don't give a shit about that, but I can assure you that if NOBODY gave a shit about that, the fundamental development of computing would grind to a halt.
That most programmers don't give a shit about the theory just suggests to me that most programmers should be educated at vocational colleges.
You're mostly perfectly on target, but it is important to remember that people are not neccessarily under an obligation to accept people "making fun of" their personal characteristics. One needs to tread carefully here.
I am a disabled person myself, and I tend to think I have a bit of an ego. I have never let my disability make myself believe that it would somehow reduce my value as a person, or that I would have to somehow accept less respectful behaviour from people than what people generally accept from each other. In my youth I saw too many sad cases of people turning into attention-seeking, overtly self-depreciating class clowns because of this kind of thinking, and I decided not to make the same mistake.
However, I do appreciate the black comedy inherent in living a life where I often come across situations that are, from a healthy person's point of view, absolutely absurd or just simply plain cruel. Sometimes you just have to deal with it by just laughing straight at the face of it, it can be very psychologically liberating.
Your observation that humour is a communal experience and what you can laugh at, you need to understand was spot on. Disabled people tend to have VERY dark humour among themselves, because they are "in" and share the same culture and experience in this regard. This kind of humour would be off limits for most people who don't very intimately LIVE the disability. You can even crack jokes of something really hurtful, as you know you are wide open to comebacks of similar nature as well. This way it can even be a way to process things that would, without making light of it, seem way too difficult to discuss.
A very good measure of how good a friend someone is to me is how much comfortable he is joking about my disability and how well I take it. The key is that such humour still needs to be sympathetic to the person: you share in the experience even though it was negative. My friends realize my frustrations regarding some things, and their humour shows a rather deep, intelligent understanding of what I am going through. Without such contact, I would have nobody who would really show they understand me on a more than just a superficial level!
The downside, when you move away from real understanding, is of course that you also tend to mock and laugh at something you do not understand. This time it turns into insulting the person and laughing "at" him. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish the two when you are not familiar with the person attempting the humour. There is also the slippery slope some people like to push this argument down that says that all grievances disabled people might have about society in general and attitudes prevailing in it are just a lack of "good humour" about it and an instance of taking oneself too seriously. I guess I'd still much rather take South Park's Kenny than have disability pushed into the corner of a taboo issue that people have no contact whatsoever with and can't even try to understand, because it might result in "insulting" someone's feelings...
That said, I perfectly agree with you, professor Hawking hasn't been insulted in this thread in the slightest and I am absolutely certain most slashdotters have nothing but the deepest respect for his achievements. Perhaps that's why the bedpans ARE so amusing... it is sometimes nice to humanize your idols, as you want to feel closer to them on a human level. It is comforting for the average geek to know that yes, even prof. Hawking needs to take a shit every now and then and needs assistance doing it, so at least you're better than him in something! Even Roman generals were mocked by his troops during the triumph, you know...
No, we won't see pervs starting to use C-64s as their main machines. KP looks lousy downsampled to those resolutions and bit depths, and access is slow and inconvenient on the multitude of cassettes or floppies that would be required. :-)
Use Linux, create a tar archive and use split to divide it into suitable-sized chunks. It's a one-liner.
:-)
Of course, you're on Windows, so you're SOL
I mean no offense for anyone enrolled in such education and might be interested in hearing what exactly it entails, but...
I don't know whether to cry or laugh when I see mentions of these schools offering specific game programming courses and "degrees" that last for a year or two. Who are they kidding? Even colleges that offer 3-4 year programs with some kind of game programming specializations would, in my view, hardly prepare a person to actually develop games. Design, maybe, from the user's point of view, but "develop" in the programming sense? No.
Maybe I am out of the loop and game programming has indeed turned into some drag and drop excercise, but I am of the old skool where we used to optimize inner loops in assembly to get our pixels onto the screen as fast as possible when me and my friends were coding some crappy little games in high school. Nowadays I'm just about to complete my M.Sc. in CS, with studies both in fundamental algorithmics and all sorts of applied fields, AI, graphics, the works you'd find in a game engine. I STILL wouldn't dare actually seek employment in a game development company, as I don't feel like I am strong enough in the pragmatic aspects of coding (I'm mostly a bookworm, not a geek who codes into the night) and I'm sure I would have a lot to learn about the algorithms side of things, too.
There's this stupid idea floating around that just because most people in the world these days are involved with technology and even like it and an increasing number are even gamers, this inflation of geekness actually means that more people also have the capacity to master this technology so profoundly as to be able to actually create more of it. I am absolutely certain this is false, because people haven't all of a sudden got smarter, and because the offerings are becoming increasingly complex. The fact that a lot of the stuff is being moved into libraries and thus not all games are just written from scratch anymore probably doesn't compensate for this.
You can't just take Joe Random off the street and educate him into a game programmer. Likewise, if you want a career in game development, become a developer first. You need to be a really GOOD developer to actually get to develop games, as you will have to master a large set of complex theoretical ideas and apply them.
Here's a good test: grab any entry-level university textbook on linear algebra. If it makes your head spin, move on.
If only all the Libertarians just moved into a virtual world to create their wet dream survival of the fittest dystopias and let us decent people build something better together in reality... one can dream :-)