Somehow I suspect this is a contributory reason for why USENET is being killed off...
If you really want to make it hard...have the nym server send your messages, encrypted to a USENET group...you can retrieve it from there and no one will be able to really trace what you're doing.
Powers that be, be they governmental or corporate or what-have-you, don't like fully distributed no-one-owns-them systems like USENET. Note too how the intarwebs are becoming increasingly being consolidated as the property of these same powers -- both in terms of the pipes and in terms of the content sites.
Agreeing or not, I was able to mostly follow along with your reasoning until I got to this baffling tidbit:
These people [progressives and socialists] are also responsible for the current Iranian government AND for the ascent of power of people like Saddam Hussein...
Whah? You've *completely* lost me. Iran went nuts the way it did in large part due to corporate money-grubbing. Look up what happened when the *popularly and democratically elected Iranian prime minister*, who happened to be notably pro-US and stolidly secular, decided with popular backing that British Petroleum was abusing its position in Iran and worked to control the nation's own resources. I'll give you a hint -- there was this guy called Shah Pahlavi who was whisked into power with enormous backing from the US (and, incidentally, BP), in a coup d'état staged with covert CIA and MI6 teams. Not very progressive nor socialist, really. Yes, I fully understand that the Shah is no longer in power, but we must recognize that Iran would be a very different place if not for direct covert US and UK intervention, and furthermore, any analysis of the current clerical regime in Iran *must* look at where it came from, and what it was reacting against.
Now for Saddam Hussein. Let's just quote Wikipedia here:
Various U.S. diplomats and intelligence officials have asserted that Saddam was strongly linked with the CIA, and that U.S. intelligence, under President John F. Kennedy, helped Saddam's party seize power for the first time in 1963.
Saddam Hussein in the past was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism in the 1960s and 1970s. His first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with ousting then Iraqi Prime Minister Abdul Karim Qassim.
Hmm, more international skullduggery backed by the CIA. I don't know about all/. readers here, but my general impression is that the CIA is not widely known for its progressive or socialist leanings...
Please correct me if I'm wrong in my reading of your text -- it's entirely possible that by "these people" you didn't actually mean progressives and socialists, although I must say that's what it sounds like after reading your post through again. I agree with a number of your points, but then again some of them seem to come in from outside the ballpark altogether.
Probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, a description of the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized, which in turn forms the basis for issuing a warrant, and the warrant itself is the legal pivot upon which the authorization of the federal government to search, or not search, turns.
In other words, there must be a warrant issued that explicitly specifies all of these various items, before any such search or seizure may take place. Simply searching everything and everyone crossing the border wholesale, on the off chance that you *might* find *something*, but who knows what, is entirely unconstitutional. And as such, any law requiring and / or "authorizing" such dragnet operations is itself null and void, an illegal law.
As numerous others have pointed out in past threads, concert ticket sales benefit the concert promoters and (to a lesser extent) the bands, but really don't do much to bolster RIAA-member company profits, which are much more closely tied to labeled CD and MP3 sales -- precisely what illegal downloads are purported to compete with.
Conclusion -- Save your time, no need to bother with such nitwittage "analysis".
Very interesting, thank you for that link. I'll have to keep an eye on that thread as it develops. I'd run into unresponsive keyboard problems a while back on a Dell Dimension 5150, but wound up just booting into XP in the end due to required Windows-only business software (I had previously run XP in VMWare on top of Ubuntu). Methinks I may now have to open the case and find out the mobo vendor...
Wow, would you like some guacamole for that huge chip on your shoulder?:)
If you're not trolling, might I suggest that you tone down your sensitivity. My post was in no way intended to attack you, but instead to answer your question. Perhaps you misinterpreted the tone of my post?
Your initial question asked by implication why it is that Linux has problems with hibernation and suspend, two functions that rely on ACPI. Leoxx's comment contains a link to an email from Bill Gates, entered into the public court record, describing how Microsoft's upper management echelons were quite seriously working on rendering ACPI unusable for any but Microsoft. I wonder if you went so far as to read that email? It's quite short, I assure you. Given that Microsoft was precisely in a position to carry out such a strategem by influencing how the ACPI standard is defined on the one hand, and how such functionality is implemented by hardware manufacturers on the other by means of their overwhelming market share, we should not find it at all surprising if anyone but Microsoft has trouble working with ACPI.
This line of argument is very straightforward, and at least partially backed up by courtroom findings, which leads me to conclude that your mention of raping girls must be an attempt to distract and discredit, rather than actually dealing with the issues at hand.
How many years will pass until Linux gets suspend and hibernate right?
If you are at all actually interested in the answer to this question, look into ACPI. The Wikipedia article notes that MS was one of the companies that helped draft the standard. The Criticism subsection is also informative about some of the problems with the standard. There are also numerousotherexamples of how Microsoft has been quite deliberately poisoning the ACPI well. Slasdot user leoxx posted a comment the other day in the Foxconn mobo thread that you might also find elucidating.
Ever read The Anubis Gates? I did years ago, and reading now about grounding through the heel to protect against these modern magics suddenly gives me shivers of deja vu...
Please note that I didn't write to disparage your post, I was simply adding my own anecdotal evidence to the thread. I also admittedly wanted to point out that your (likely exaggerating?) comment about how fast hybrids can go wasn't necessarily correct.:)
That aside, different needs mean different tools. In my case, passengers are common (most often, my wife), and we sometimes have need for the not-insubstantial cargo space provided when the back seats are folded flat. In your case, I assume these are not factors, and thus a bike makes great sense. Maith thú (Good on you).
I can't speak to acceleration (which mostly only ever struck me as hype anyway), but as far as mileage goes, our 2005 Prius averages around 42mpg at 80mph on US 101 here in central CA. Oh, and it can certainly go faster, too -- at one point I found myself doing over 90 quite easily (and at that, without getting too much faster than most of the traffic...). Just another point on the graph.:)
Asking Linux users to accept DRM is like asking them if it's alright to take a shit in their kitchen.
There is *no* cool way you can word it.
The even more messed up thing about this is that Nokia isn't just asking to shit in our kitchen, Nokia is asking us to help them do it. From TFA:
Jaaksi, Nokia's vice president of software and head of the Finnish handset manufacturer's open-source operations, said: "We want to educate open-source developers. There are certain business rules [developers] need to obey, such as DRM, IPR [intellectual property rights], SIM locks and subsidised business models."
I.e., pay money to buy our crap phone, using software you helped develop, and then help us out even more by developing more crippleware for it. This makes me think something got lost in translation from the Finnish. I actually translate Japanese for a living, but they say Japanese and Finnish are supposed to be related somehow, so lemme see... Yep, sure enough, there was a translation goof. Here's my own proposed translation:
"Hi!! I'm a jackass, and I think you're one too. In fact, I think you're even more of a jackass. Call now for our special offer -- one ginormous hacksaw on sale now for only fifteen easy installments of $1,500.00, which you use to cut off your own foot! Please call now, as this is a limited-time offer. Operators are standing by!! Call 1-800-FSCK-YOU!!!"
The issue is the same: DRMers want to be in control of what people do with their own things.
And perhaps more to the point here, and more why people are getting right royally pissed off about this, is that:
The issue [with Nokia] is different: [these] DRMers want to be in control of what people do with things developed by and belonging to other people [i.e. not the DRMers themselves].
IP strikes me more and more as an extremely bad idea, but once we posit that ideas can be owned, I cannot see how what Nokia is trying to do here ultimately amounts to anything more than extortion and / or attempted theft.
The company's basic strategy is inherently, and rather ridiculously, flawed -- an effort to use FOSS-based DRM to effectively remove the FO from FOSS. As another posted noted, they can go FO [f'off].
Interesting indeed. Schizophrenia is one of the odder mental ailments, and certainly seems to be one of the less-understood. I was about to ask why the fellow was a regular smoker if it only made him paranoid, and then I read your second paragraph and realized that the question isn't the right one to ask.
FWIW, my friend's diagnosis was not paranoid schizophrenia, but schizoeffective disorder, explained to me as non-paranoid schizophrenia plus other emotional elements, in his specific case, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, mild bipolarity, and a preoccupation with personal appearance. His illness seemed to arise more gradually than with your acquaintances, but around the same time, with the OCD becoming noticeable to others around grade 10 or so, and the schizophrenia arising seriously a couple years later with a failed suicide attempt. He later found that pot really helped him mellow out, as it took the edge off his anxiety and helped damp down his OCD. For the schizophrenia itself, he described it as if your imagination got stuck on a really disturbing set of images and you couldn't change the channel; apparently the pot helped push such not-quite-full-blown hallucinations more into the background. But again, his specific manifestation of schizophrenic symptoms did not include paranoia, so that may well account for a large part of the difference from what you describe.
Unfortunately, though in my view understandably, he ultimately became so unhappy with his massively curtailed options in life, which were at stark odds to his ambitions, that he decided to end it himself many years ago, in his mid 20s. Though I still miss him terribly, I can see why he chose to exit the way he did, and when he did, and I do not blame him.
The main problems with using dope are scizophernia[sic] for those who are already genetically predisposed
Though totally anecdotal, my best friend growing up was afflicted with schizophrenia, and later in life (college-age) discovered that pot actually helped alleviate a number of his symptoms.
Incidentally, there is some evidence that infection by toxoplasma, a psychotropic and behaviour-modifying systemic parasite that sometimes sets up shop in the host's brain, might be the root of schizophrenic symptoms. The causal relationship is still not fully understood (i.e. it could be that people with schizophrenia might be more prone to infection, rather than infection causing schizophrenia), but the circumstantial evidence so far seems to suggest that the parasite might be the cause. In my friend's case, the family had a cat that spent as much time as possible outside, and outdoor cats are a known vector for toxoplasmosis. Certainly not a smoking gun, but suggestive, and at the very least another point on the graph.
Also note that, historically, compulsory education in the US only really came about with industrialization and the rise of the more modern labor economy -- at which point, schools provide a very important social service in terms of daycare while parents at at work.
My favorite idea for "fixing" schools comes from Milton Friedman's book "Capitalism and Freedom". The basic idea is that the government would subsidize education and set some minimum requirements, while the actual schooling would be done by competeing private companies.
Let me start off by owning up to my bias -- actually, twofold. First, my wife is a middle school teacher, and I have volunteered in many different ways at her school as both elective teacher and simple extra pair of hands. Second, I have found very little in Milton Friedman's writings that I can wholeheartedly agree with. The man seemed to think that private enterprise was a panacea for all of mankind's various ills. He somehow seemed to miss the problem that the underlying profit motive is often at cross-purposes with many of the not-really-business areas he advocated for privatization.
To extend this and dig into the meat of your post, let's look at your postulation. Schools are, ostensibly, there to provide a public service. There is some real debate at certain levels in education circles about how much that public service really has to do with teaching, and how much has to do with daycare. No, I'm not just being cynical -- a large part of why schooling in the US plays out the way it does is because, historically, mandatory schooling for certain age groups was instrumental in allowing for the 9-5 working day for both men and women, which became very important during WWII.
So let's say we assume that schools are there to provide the public service of actually teaching kids, with daycare as a nice side-effect. Fine.
Now let's look at the theoretical private company under Friedman's model that would step in to fill this sudden demand for private education. It would ostensibly be a for-profit corporation, given Friedman's leanings, which means a number of things. For starters, the corporation's management is under a legal obligation to ensure that the company makes as much profit as possible -- by deliberately taking in more money than it costs to do business. This is diametrically opposed to how not-for-profit corporations (i.e. most private schools that I'm aware of) operate -- by deliberately spending all funds alloted in the budget for that year in order to ensure that the services provided are the best possible.
With those *very* different directives, a few moments' thought should be enough to show that any for-profit entity operating in the field of public services is going to provide the least possible service at the highest possible rates. We've seen that time and again, in country after country, in sector after sector. Medical services in the US? Check. Water utilities in the UK? Check. Power companies in the US? Check. Major ISPs in Australia, Canada, the US? Mobile communications services just about anywhere? Check.
Fobbing such services off onto the private sector produces other problems as well, as corporations are by their very definition protected by legal limits on their liability. Given the intimate roles that teachers play as in loco parentis, it is important on many different levels that parents have a serious say in what happens at schools -- which is where PTAs come in. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that no for-profit company would really allow a PTA to have much authority over what goes on.
Part of the problem in the Friedman model is the simple issue of motivation. Why would companies suddenly spring up to take over the role of schools? Private schools that exist at present are there in large part because of an organic need in the community, combined with the presence of people with the motivation to be teachers. The Friedman pipe dream instead seems to be based on the profit motive, which is, as noted above, largely incompatible with public services. His model is also flawed in ignoring the very real geographical constraints of schools -- even assuming real market-style competition
The caveat is that you frequently have to go to grad school to be qualified to teach, and grad school prices are rising much faster than almost anyone's salaries. Of course housing prices and food prices are also rising faster than salaries. Every career that used to be "just enough to get by" is in danger of falling out of the bottom of the middle class. When you have something like modern public school teaching, where most of the potential creativity and chance to influence young intellects has been replaced with neck deep bureaucracy and a focus on preparing for the next evaluation test, there isn't even a "contribute to the community" sliver lining any more. The economy in America is broken.
There, fixed that a bit for you, and added some emphasis.:)
But seriously, it's not just the schools, it's the whole blooming economic system. We're going though a period of extreme flux right now. The economy is a vast and chaotic system, and anytime you have a big, chaotic system and you put a lot of stress on it in a short period of time, things get fugly before the various patterns sort themselves out. The next decade or two (or three or four?) are going to be very interesting times, and not necessarily in any good sense. I'm reminded of the old Spanish proverb here:
Yeah, some folks have noted the short length as a negative, but then again it is only $10, and is the first in what promises to be a string of episodes. The first run-through took me about 5 hours of leisure playing, but now I'm going back through and looking for things I missed the first time around -- apparently you get a different ending or something if you get everything before finishing. Of the current WiiWare titles, I'd say without pause or doubt that LostWinds is the best of them, across the boards - best control scheme, level design, game progression, art style, broad appeal, etc etc.:)
I don't want a 3D game, I want giant, high-resolution sprite filling the screen! Whoever decided that 2D games aren't good enough for consoles anymore was stupid.
I'm not sure if you're pining for the old-school graphics, or for the 2D platformer gameplay. If it's the latter, seriously, have a look at the WiiWare title LostWinds. It might bore hardcore gamers, but it's a fun little game (apparently to be episodic) with very well done graphics and fun gameplay. It's kept my wife enthralled for days, which is saying something as she's terribly dyslexic and no gamer by a long shot.
Al Qaeda is in fact actively trying to build multiple nuclear weapons. We KNOW they have already acquired the weapons-grade uranium, and are simply working on the devices themselves and logistics.
I can't remember where I heard it... but one of the things that makes a good leader is that they have "strong opinions which are weakly held".
They are clear in what they believe and in what to do, but they will change their mind if they find something that makes them think that they are wrong.
Something like, perhaps, a lobbyist with a busload of cash? Or in McCain's case, the possibility to waltz into office if he can appease the right party factions. Face it, AC, this has nothing to do with McCain thinking his opinions were "wrong" so much as discovering that they might not get him elected. And that's a somewhat slimier state of affairs.
Part of my underlying implied point, and the GP's point too I think, was that in holding out for $31, investors could well wind up getting that extra push over the cliff, and ultimately get much less than even $30.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow I suspect this is a contributory reason for why USENET is being killed off...
Powers that be, be they governmental or corporate or what-have-you, don't like fully distributed no-one-owns-them systems like USENET. Note too how the intarwebs are becoming increasingly being consolidated as the property of these same powers -- both in terms of the pipes and in terms of the content sites.
Toodle-oo, Wild West, it was nice knowin ya.
Cheers,
Agreeing or not, I was able to mostly follow along with your reasoning until I got to this baffling tidbit:
Whah? You've *completely* lost me. Iran went nuts the way it did in large part due to corporate money-grubbing. Look up what happened when the *popularly and democratically elected Iranian prime minister*, who happened to be notably pro-US and stolidly secular, decided with popular backing that British Petroleum was abusing its position in Iran and worked to control the nation's own resources. I'll give you a hint -- there was this guy called Shah Pahlavi who was whisked into power with enormous backing from the US (and, incidentally, BP), in a coup d'état staged with covert CIA and MI6 teams. Not very progressive nor socialist, really. Yes, I fully understand that the Shah is no longer in power, but we must recognize that Iran would be a very different place if not for direct covert US and UK intervention, and furthermore, any analysis of the current clerical regime in Iran *must* look at where it came from, and what it was reacting against.
Now for Saddam Hussein. Let's just quote Wikipedia here:
Hmm, more international skullduggery backed by the CIA. I don't know about all /. readers here, but my general impression is that the CIA is not widely known for its progressive or socialist leanings...
Please correct me if I'm wrong in my reading of your text -- it's entirely possible that by "these people" you didn't actually mean progressives and socialists, although I must say that's what it sounds like after reading your post through again. I agree with a number of your points, but then again some of them seem to come in from outside the ballpark altogether.
Cheers,
Ojai yo!
(Bad pun that makes more sense if you're in the right time zone.)
Cheers,
In other words, there must be a warrant issued that explicitly specifies all of these various items, before any such search or seizure may take place. Simply searching everything and everyone crossing the border wholesale, on the off chance that you *might* find *something*, but who knows what, is entirely unconstitutional. And as such, any law requiring and / or "authorizing" such dragnet operations is itself null and void, an illegal law.
Cheers,
As numerous others have pointed out in past threads, concert ticket sales benefit the concert promoters and (to a lesser extent) the bands, but really don't do much to bolster RIAA-member company profits, which are much more closely tied to labeled CD and MP3 sales -- precisely what illegal downloads are purported to compete with.
Conclusion -- Save your time, no need to bother with such nitwittage "analysis".
Cheers,
Very interesting, thank you for that link. I'll have to keep an eye on that thread as it develops. I'd run into unresponsive keyboard problems a while back on a Dell Dimension 5150, but wound up just booting into XP in the end due to required Windows-only business software (I had previously run XP in VMWare on top of Ubuntu). Methinks I may now have to open the case and find out the mobo vendor...
Cheers,
Wow, would you like some guacamole for that huge chip on your shoulder? :)
If you're not trolling, might I suggest that you tone down your sensitivity. My post was in no way intended to attack you, but instead to answer your question. Perhaps you misinterpreted the tone of my post?
Your initial question asked by implication why it is that Linux has problems with hibernation and suspend, two functions that rely on ACPI. Leoxx's comment contains a link to an email from Bill Gates, entered into the public court record, describing how Microsoft's upper management echelons were quite seriously working on rendering ACPI unusable for any but Microsoft. I wonder if you went so far as to read that email? It's quite short, I assure you. Given that Microsoft was precisely in a position to carry out such a strategem by influencing how the ACPI standard is defined on the one hand, and how such functionality is implemented by hardware manufacturers on the other by means of their overwhelming market share, we should not find it at all surprising if anyone but Microsoft has trouble working with ACPI.
This line of argument is very straightforward, and at least partially backed up by courtroom findings, which leads me to conclude that your mention of raping girls must be an attempt to distract and discredit, rather than actually dealing with the issues at hand.
Toodles,
If you are at all actually interested in the answer to this question, look into ACPI. The Wikipedia article notes that MS was one of the companies that helped draft the standard. The Criticism subsection is also informative about some of the problems with the standard. There are also numerous other examples of how Microsoft has been quite deliberately poisoning the ACPI well. Slasdot user leoxx posted a comment the other day in the Foxconn mobo thread that you might also find elucidating.
Cheers,
Ever read The Anubis Gates? I did years ago, and reading now about grounding through the heel to protect against these modern magics suddenly gives me shivers of deja vu...
Cheers,
I'm glad at least that there are a few of us! :D
Please note that I didn't write to disparage your post, I was simply adding my own anecdotal evidence to the thread. I also admittedly wanted to point out that your (likely exaggerating?) comment about how fast hybrids can go wasn't necessarily correct. :)
That aside, different needs mean different tools. In my case, passengers are common (most often, my wife), and we sometimes have need for the not-insubstantial cargo space provided when the back seats are folded flat. In your case, I assume these are not factors, and thus a bike makes great sense. Maith thú (Good on you).
Cheers,
I can't speak to acceleration (which mostly only ever struck me as hype anyway), but as far as mileage goes, our 2005 Prius averages around 42mpg at 80mph on US 101 here in central CA. Oh, and it can certainly go faster, too -- at one point I found myself doing over 90 quite easily (and at that, without getting too much faster than most of the traffic...). Just another point on the graph. :)
Cheers,
The even more messed up thing about this is that Nokia isn't just asking to shit in our kitchen, Nokia is asking us to help them do it. From TFA:
I.e., pay money to buy our crap phone, using software you helped develop, and then help us out even more by developing more crippleware for it. This makes me think something got lost in translation from the Finnish. I actually translate Japanese for a living, but they say Japanese and Finnish are supposed to be related somehow, so lemme see... Yep, sure enough, there was a translation goof. Here's my own proposed translation:
Cheers,
And perhaps more to the point here, and more why people are getting right royally pissed off about this, is that:
IP strikes me more and more as an extremely bad idea, but once we posit that ideas can be owned, I cannot see how what Nokia is trying to do here ultimately amounts to anything more than extortion and / or attempted theft.
The company's basic strategy is inherently, and rather ridiculously, flawed -- an effort to use FOSS-based DRM to effectively remove the FO from FOSS. As another posted noted, they can go FO [f'off].
Cheers,
Interesting indeed. Schizophrenia is one of the odder mental ailments, and certainly seems to be one of the less-understood. I was about to ask why the fellow was a regular smoker if it only made him paranoid, and then I read your second paragraph and realized that the question isn't the right one to ask.
FWIW, my friend's diagnosis was not paranoid schizophrenia, but schizoeffective disorder, explained to me as non-paranoid schizophrenia plus other emotional elements, in his specific case, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, mild bipolarity, and a preoccupation with personal appearance. His illness seemed to arise more gradually than with your acquaintances, but around the same time, with the OCD becoming noticeable to others around grade 10 or so, and the schizophrenia arising seriously a couple years later with a failed suicide attempt. He later found that pot really helped him mellow out, as it took the edge off his anxiety and helped damp down his OCD. For the schizophrenia itself, he described it as if your imagination got stuck on a really disturbing set of images and you couldn't change the channel; apparently the pot helped push such not-quite-full-blown hallucinations more into the background. But again, his specific manifestation of schizophrenic symptoms did not include paranoia, so that may well account for a large part of the difference from what you describe.
Unfortunately, though in my view understandably, he ultimately became so unhappy with his massively curtailed options in life, which were at stark odds to his ambitions, that he decided to end it himself many years ago, in his mid 20s. Though I still miss him terribly, I can see why he chose to exit the way he did, and when he did, and I do not blame him.
He quite liked Pink Floyd too.
Cheers,
Though totally anecdotal, my best friend growing up was afflicted with schizophrenia, and later in life (college-age) discovered that pot actually helped alleviate a number of his symptoms.
Incidentally, there is some evidence that infection by toxoplasma, a psychotropic and behaviour-modifying systemic parasite that sometimes sets up shop in the host's brain, might be the root of schizophrenic symptoms. The causal relationship is still not fully understood (i.e. it could be that people with schizophrenia might be more prone to infection, rather than infection causing schizophrenia), but the circumstantial evidence so far seems to suggest that the parasite might be the cause. In my friend's case, the family had a cat that spent as much time as possible outside, and outdoor cats are a known vector for toxoplasmosis. Certainly not a smoking gun, but suggestive, and at the very least another point on the graph.
Cheers,
The upper age limit of compulsory education differs by state in the US. Some places, it's 18; in others (California included, IIRC), it's only 16 -- meaning most folks can legally walk after grade 10.
Also note that, historically, compulsory education in the US only really came about with industrialization and the rise of the more modern labor economy -- at which point, schools provide a very important social service in terms of daycare while parents at at work.
Cheers,
Let me start off by owning up to my bias -- actually, twofold. First, my wife is a middle school teacher, and I have volunteered in many different ways at her school as both elective teacher and simple extra pair of hands. Second, I have found very little in Milton Friedman's writings that I can wholeheartedly agree with. The man seemed to think that private enterprise was a panacea for all of mankind's various ills. He somehow seemed to miss the problem that the underlying profit motive is often at cross-purposes with many of the not-really-business areas he advocated for privatization.
To extend this and dig into the meat of your post, let's look at your postulation. Schools are, ostensibly, there to provide a public service. There is some real debate at certain levels in education circles about how much that public service really has to do with teaching, and how much has to do with daycare. No, I'm not just being cynical -- a large part of why schooling in the US plays out the way it does is because, historically, mandatory schooling for certain age groups was instrumental in allowing for the 9-5 working day for both men and women, which became very important during WWII.
So let's say we assume that schools are there to provide the public service of actually teaching kids, with daycare as a nice side-effect. Fine.
Now let's look at the theoretical private company under Friedman's model that would step in to fill this sudden demand for private education. It would ostensibly be a for-profit corporation, given Friedman's leanings, which means a number of things. For starters, the corporation's management is under a legal obligation to ensure that the company makes as much profit as possible -- by deliberately taking in more money than it costs to do business. This is diametrically opposed to how not-for-profit corporations (i.e. most private schools that I'm aware of) operate -- by deliberately spending all funds alloted in the budget for that year in order to ensure that the services provided are the best possible.
With those *very* different directives, a few moments' thought should be enough to show that any for-profit entity operating in the field of public services is going to provide the least possible service at the highest possible rates. We've seen that time and again, in country after country, in sector after sector. Medical services in the US? Check. Water utilities in the UK? Check. Power companies in the US? Check. Major ISPs in Australia, Canada, the US? Mobile communications services just about anywhere? Check.
Fobbing such services off onto the private sector produces other problems as well, as corporations are by their very definition protected by legal limits on their liability. Given the intimate roles that teachers play as in loco parentis, it is important on many different levels that parents have a serious say in what happens at schools -- which is where PTAs come in. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that no for-profit company would really allow a PTA to have much authority over what goes on.
Part of the problem in the Friedman model is the simple issue of motivation. Why would companies suddenly spring up to take over the role of schools? Private schools that exist at present are there in large part because of an organic need in the community, combined with the presence of people with the motivation to be teachers. The Friedman pipe dream instead seems to be based on the profit motive, which is, as noted above, largely incompatible with public services. His model is also flawed in ignoring the very real geographical constraints of schools -- even assuming real market-style competition
There, fixed that a bit for you, and added some emphasis. :)
But seriously, it's not just the schools, it's the whole blooming economic system. We're going though a period of extreme flux right now. The economy is a vast and chaotic system, and anytime you have a big, chaotic system and you put a lot of stress on it in a short period of time, things get fugly before the various patterns sort themselves out. The next decade or two (or three or four?) are going to be very interesting times, and not necessarily in any good sense. I'm reminded of the old Spanish proverb here:
May nothing new happen.
Cheers,
... assuming, of course, that that is what the people in power actually want -- and there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that suggests otherwise.
[ dons tinfoil hat ]
Cheers,
Yeah, some folks have noted the short length as a negative, but then again it is only $10, and is the first in what promises to be a string of episodes. The first run-through took me about 5 hours of leisure playing, but now I'm going back through and looking for things I missed the first time around -- apparently you get a different ending or something if you get everything before finishing. Of the current WiiWare titles, I'd say without pause or doubt that LostWinds is the best of them, across the boards - best control scheme, level design, game progression, art style, broad appeal, etc etc. :)
Cheers,
I'm not sure if you're pining for the old-school graphics, or for the 2D platformer gameplay. If it's the latter, seriously, have a look at the WiiWare title LostWinds. It might bore hardcore gamers, but it's a fun little game (apparently to be episodic) with very well done graphics and fun gameplay. It's kept my wife enthralled for days, which is saying something as she's terribly dyslexic and no gamer by a long shot.
Cheers,
Citations, please?
Cheers,
Something like, perhaps, a lobbyist with a busload of cash? Or in McCain's case, the possibility to waltz into office if he can appease the right party factions. Face it, AC, this has nothing to do with McCain thinking his opinions were "wrong" so much as discovering that they might not get him elected. And that's a somewhat slimier state of affairs.
Cheers,
Part of my underlying implied point, and the GP's point too I think, was that in holding out for $31, investors could well wind up getting that extra push over the cliff, and ultimately get much less than even $30. :)
Cheers,