Err, those documentation notes were in a beta test. Not a finished product. If you don't understand what "set (some variable) to (some value)" means, maybe you shouldn't be messing around with unfinished software.
I would say that if it's in a big file called README in the root of the install directory, you're pretty much obligated to read it, yeah. Or at least not complain that you didn't know something that was said in it. Even if you have read others before.
It's pretty clear that it was just mistakenly left out of the demotest documentation. It wasn't concealed, and we all know about it now, so let's just declare "no harm, no foul" and move on.
Re:Touchier than it might seem
on
License to Surf
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· Score: 2
I think I might not have made myself entirely clear: the question I was posing was a bit broader than the scope of the article it was posted under- I was really asking whether anonymity is a good thing or not in the abstract, not necessarily whether the licensing scheme or any other particular implementation was good.
You bring up good points about why licensing isn't the best way to provide security or hold people responsible. However, what I'm really more concerned about is this: what if we could make any action completely anonymous on the Internet? That's what a lot of Slashdotters seem to want, but would it be a good thing? Conversely, would it be a good thing to make everything easily traceable by people who wanted to? What technological promises about anonymity do we want to make, and what will the consequences of those promises be?
Interesting stuff...
Re:Drivers Licenses are GROSSLY Immoral
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
I can see both sides of this issue. On the one hand, as society starts having more and more of its business online, it will be more and more important for people who commit online crimes to be held accountable- in real life, "I just shot him to demonstrate what poor security against bullets he had!" doesn't hold up in many courts. Which is not to say that I think pranks like defacing a web site are as serious as murder, of course, but what about the guy who discovers an exploit for those new digital iToasters that will let him burn people's houses down, and uses it? Or who subtly hacks into an e-commerce site so that when you submit your credit card number, it records it in a plaintext file on the server before passing it along so he can come back and read it at his convenience?
From that standpoint, we want to make it as hard to be truly anonymous as possible, so that we can catch people who are doing things that we ought to punish. On the other hand, anonymity on a more casual level is very important. I am doing a sociology study on homosexuality and the internet, for example, and am finding that it's pretty common for people who are just discovering that they are gay to turn to the anonymity of the Internet to get information because they don't want people to know that they're gay. Destroying their anonymity would be very bad for them, perhaps even physically dangerous. And of course there are the more common reasons: I certainly don't want people knowing about my surfing habit just because it's none of their business, dammit, and I *certainly* don't want to start getting e-mails about sites that I'll just *love* considering the sites that I visit now...
I'm not sure how to reconcile those two competing interests. Does anyone else have any ideas?
That would imply, though, that/. gets ~ 1 hit/minute, which isn't very plausible. I've actually never seen that counter be anything other than 1.
On the other hand- as I've been checking, the "yesterday" figure keeps increasing. Probably the slashbox is just broken so that yesterday is today's stat and today points off into never never land somewhere.
Y'know, it would go a long way if they just kept a database of all the (non-"mailto:") links they posted and searched it when they posted a new story. They seem to have an automatic link-leeching thing going on anyhow, so they could probably do it totally transparently. All they'd need is another table in a database and a little routine that checked to see, when a story was about to be published, if the link was in the database- if so, have a little warning screen. "A link in your story ($linkName) has been previously posted on $oldLinkDate attached to the story $oldStoryName. Are you sure you want to post it again? [Yes] [No]"
Might be worth coding up,/. people. Of course, there is the whole "time to write + performance hit / embarassment avoided" ratio, which might not be low enough to warrant implementation.
I have to disagree back. I have a feeling that most geeky kids had some collection of cool things that they saw computers do that got them excited about learning more about them. For me, it was a combination of the original King's Quest (on the PCjr), the asteroid scene in The Last Starfighter, the afore-mentioned Tron, and the voice generator on my dad's TI that would say, "Hel-o, Jah-kob..."
I have no idea whether I would be a CS geek today if it hadn't been for the "'The last starfighter...' is dead! The last starfighter is dead!" scene. It's impossible to know for sure, but I am very hesitant to say that I'm just wired for CS and my childhood experiences didn't have anything to do with it.
I just have a suspicion that for some small set of kids who see Toy Story, they'll just have to know how it was that they did that. And maybe, for some small set of those, they'll get really jazzed by the answers and decide to learn more. I really disagree with your statement that "the only kids that are going to want to know how Toy Story was rendered are those that are similar to how I was as a child"- young children strike me as exceptionally intellectually curious. It's fun to ask adults what their hobbies were as young children. I was a rock collector, a stamp collector, a comic book collector, a chemist, a physicist, an alchemist, a poet and fiction author, a luthier, a magazine publisher, an animal-rights activist, an athlete, a cartoonist, a sculptor, a violist, and of course a computer programmer all before I was a teenager (sadly, I'm only a few of those things now). I was not exceptional. But I dabbled in all of those fields because there was something in each of them that made me think they were cool (yes, even viola- I never said I was a child genius). I bet that for a few people, Toy Story is that "something cool" that made them want to check out computers.
"... I mean, if something explodes, it does so spherically(sp?) - not like a flat disk. Perhaps I'm missing something here... that just seems to stupid to have come from any sane scientist."
Which sounds to me like, "The Big Bang theory obviously means that we should ignore more direct evidence."
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're saying? I think I must be, considering your response...
Saying "the evidence doesn't support our theory, therefore the evidence is wrong" is what scientists get frustrated by non-scientists doing. We can measure (apparently) the thickness of the universe- if that doesn't jive with the big bang theory, then the big bang theory needs to be adjusted to take into account the evidence, NOT (and NEVER EVER EVER) the other way around.
Remember also that the Big Bang theory is somewhat more speculative than many other theories we work with. It's like doing an eight-term Taylor series for a function around 0, and then evaluating it at -8,000,000,000: better than nothing, but you'd have to be crazy to expect it to be exactly right.
...that Disney has for once made a sequel that didn't just shamelessly extract money from the parents who were unlucky enough to have children obsessed with the originals.
On an unrelated note, I think movies like Toy Story have an interesting significance: getting kids interested in computers. I mean, if you were four and you saw a CG movie as cool as Toy Story, wouldn't you want to figure out how they did all that with computers? (Actually, you can strike the "if you were four" part- I want to know too!) Furthermore, Toy Story (and Bug's Life, Antz, etc) don't strike me as being particularly "boy" movies, which means that they might have a hand in breaking the current gender imbalance that CS departments typically see these days. That would be good.
So perhaps we're misinterpreting the whole thing! Maybe they just threw that stipulation in there so that the young'uns would learn to use programming development tools like make!
Calm down, everyone, I figured it out. Corel is trying to give back to the community by encouraging under-18 Linux hackers!
Sounds like a culture clash. Remember, these are the people who brought us Netscape 4.0. They're probably quite impressed with themselves for being able to go a whole hour without failing...
[Yes, AC posts start at 0, while logged-in posts start at 1 (or 2 for people with high karma).]
I have two responses to your argument: the first is that schools are not a monopoly. How can they be when there are private schools? You are not forced to enroll your kid in a public school if you want her to go to school. Many people do not. In fact, most people who can afford it do not. Ergo, schools are not a monopoly. QED.
Second, I think that what you're hinting at is that schools need to be forcibly privatized so that competition will bring up the bad schools. There are a number of obvious problems with that idea, and they stem from this fact: privatization is a function that optimizes for profit margin. While that works well for children of wealthy parents, and government subsidy can bring the money threshold down, you'll always have the problem that for those who can't pay, or for those who are expensive to teach, you'll get shoddy service or no service at all. People with learning disabilities, for example, suck up quite a bit of money because they cost an awful lot to teach. Public education takes them. Would you, as a private school, take a student whom you knew you would have to pay considerably extra for? What about those who are poor enough that they can't pay whatever it is you charge? (Yes, I realize that there's the idea of vouchers- however, good profit-driven schools will probably charge more than the voucher covers, due to supply and demand laws) Would you accept "problem children" who are more likely to disrupt your classes and bring your standardized test scores down?
I wouldn't do any of those things if I were running a profit-driven school. But all of the people who I wouldn't teach deserve to be taught. Furthermore, taking them all and putting them in an "overflow" school that guarantees school for those who can't get in to any of the other schools would be extremely bad for them: you learn from your peers. If your peers are by and large those who have learning disabilities and those who don't care about school, along with probably a minority who are simply too poor to afford the schools that they'd rather be in, you'll probably learn not to value school much.
On the other hand, that shortage of qualified people in industry is a good leverage point from the employees' perspective. If I am a good CS guy, and I say "I will work for you on the condition that I be allowed to teach one high school class," I'm a lot more likely to be taken seriously if there isn't a long line of other good CS guys who don't want to take time off waiting for the job, too.
I think you completely missed my point. Go ahead and read what I wrote again. I am saying what you're saying- it is certainly true that one shouldn't try to teach a whole school full of diverse people with differing abilities the same curriculum.
I was saying that schools don't want to do that. Sometimes it seems like that's what they're trying for, but it's just because they don't have the resources to provide every student with a specially-tailored education.
Oh, and funny you should mention it- at the public high school I went to, I did take "Advanced Calculus II," in the form of vector calculus, at Georgia State University. The Atlanta Public School system paid for it- but, I had to get accepted by Georgia State first. The high school never claimed that anyone could get into the program, only that if you could get into the program, they would pay for it. Also at high school, I enjoyed a number of AP classes and whatnot that certainly weren't available to everyone at the school, only those who had proven they could handle them. I have no reason to suspect that my high school is the only high school in the country that has such a policy. (In fact, I know that it is utterly un-unique in that respect.)
Perhaps you should stop beating up straw men? There are more useful things to do with one's time.
"Abolish the educational system. Give poor people a chance to get out of the morass which has held minorities back for the last 50 years."
Wha...? Maybe I missed some crucial point of your argument, but I fail to see how abolishing public education and instead relying on Internet-based tutoring with one-on-one sessions with world experts for education will benefit poor people. Unless by "poor people" you mean people with cutting-edge computers, high-speed dedicated internet connections, time to stay home and make sure the kids do their work, and money to hire all those tutors?
Interesting. But I'm not sure that the evidence supports as broad a claim as "it's not the money," implying that more funding of schools leads to better results. It has been shown many times that more money does not lead to higher results at all when the money is simply poured on a school. However, at the same time, quality of teachers has been shown to have a strong effect on student performance (surprise!). If we hypothesize that raising teacher salaries will attract better teachers, and that better teachers will improve student scores, then we can still say that "it's the money" AND explain why money didn't help in the case you mentioned.
Case in point: the retarded students--excuse me, special education students--might be offended if we teach material that is too advanced for their comprehension; therefore, the liberals reformed our schools, making the curriculum "equal."
You're confusing real life with Harrison Bergeron. Maybe you ought to check out a public school. You'll find that though there are some bad ones, much more frequently they do their very best to offer curricula for students of all intellectual abilities. No one argues that we ought to not teach anything that is too advanced for the least capable member of the class- that's not "equal," and it's not "liberal," it's just "stupid." When you see some students stifled in their intellectual curiosity, it's very frequently because they're the top students in their class and the school can't afford to make a separate class just for them, though it would like to.
The question Keefesis asks shows up all over the place in different forms: "how can we get better teachers?" "How can we make students learn more?" "What can we do about the educational crisis in American public schools?"
Here's the answer:
Pay teachers more money! Pay teachers more money! Pay teachers more money!
I am really interested in computer science (from an academic standpoint), and I'm working my way towards a Ph.D. in it. I also love to teach and am quite good at teaching. I really want to be a high school computer science teacher after I get my degree, but it's really hard for me to justify taking the pay cut. The difference is substantial- starting salaries for teachers (depending on region) are in the teens to twenties (might be slighly more for those with a Ph.D.- anyone have better numbers?) Starting salaries at good universities and research groups for Ph.D. computer scientists, depending on the place and the specific field, can start in $40,000 range and go past $100,000 sometimes. What would you do?
It does not take a rocket scientist to see that if the brightest people can get jobs that will allow them to do cutting-edge work in their fields and get paid double or more what they'd be paid to teach, most teachers will be the people who weren't good at it. That intuition is borne out by facts: the majority of teachers come from the bottom 1/4th of their college classes [can't find the source right now, but if it really bothers you post and I'll dig it up].
Pay teachers more money, and maybe you'll attract more competent people to be teachers. This is not a secret. You may tell others.
I vote for a new moderation option: "Complaint that the article is boring." But rather than pinning a -1 karma to it, it should warrant immediate execution.
You make an excellent point. However, to some extent, I worry that your argument is akin to the perennial "back in my day" complaint that always accompanies any cultural shift: certainly it's true that people usually use a writing style that's much closer to commonly spoken English in e-mails (and message-board posts) than it is to the writing style that people once used for written correspondence. Certainly computer-corresponders don't put as much effort as their written-corresponder parents and grandparents did into their writing. But how bad is that, really? (This reminds me of one of the most provocative questions I've ever heard in a class: when talking about computer technology, someone mentioned that they feared if computer technology continued to improve with respect to voice recognition and graphical interfaces, people would become less and less literate. The professor responded, "If you had those things, what would be so great about being able to read?")
When arguing that written communication is getting poorer and poorer, it is customary for people to argue (as you and the poster to which you were responding did) that if you write like you speak but you aren't physically present, your communication is missing a great deal of information. I must say, I have always thought of that as a somewhat overstated problem. I have no trouble decyphering people's "let's meet at noon"'s and their "you okay?"'s via e-mail, and I doubt that's because I'm an enormously talented empath. And let's not forget about that very capable low-bandwidth body-language emulator, the emoticon- last I checked, it worked pretty well. (No, that is not a joke argument. It is no accident that emoticons have been around for as long as electronic communication.)
Aside from that, you also argue that "written English" (which I will call "old written English") can be more expressive than "spoken English" (which I will call "new written English"- it's not, uh, y'know, the same thing as, um, when you're talking). I agree. However, you shouldn't dismiss the benefits of new written English out of hand- as you mention yourself, it is more spontaneous, which can lead interesting places. It's also much quicker- the reason writing is more thoughtful than speaking is that we do it so much more slowly. That's fine when you're not writing a whole lot. It is less fine when you spend hours a day communicating via various written channels, particularly e-mail and message-boards. Furthermore, the more deliberation people put into their writing, the more stilted and awkward they sound, usually. (Of course, the less deliberation they put in, the more stupid and incomprehensible they may sound, so there's certainly a trade-off to be made...)
That is not to say that I disagree with the point you make that people ought to put thought into their written communications. It's just that I think we have different conceptions of who the perfect e-mailers would be: it seems as though you imagine the best e-mailers as those who scour everything they write for errors; I tend to think they would be those who learn how to write lucidly the first time. They would have less art, but could get to the point without overdoing it.
(Speaking of overdoing it, look at the size of this post! I should take my own advice...)
From what I gathered, Id has nothing to do with it- it's Activision (the distributor) who's slowing the works down. They are willing to really push to get the Windows version out ASAP, but they're unwilling to spend the cash to push hard with a Linux version that might sell, err, somewhat more poorly than hotcakes. As far as Id's concerned, they'd just as soon release them all at the same time (or even on the same CD, so vendors don't have to pick how many of what platforms).
Slashdot Mirror
Err, those documentation notes were in a beta test. Not a finished product. If you don't understand what "set (some variable) to (some value)" means, maybe you shouldn't be messing around with unfinished software.
With great power comes great responsibility...
I would say that if it's in a big file called README in the root of the install directory, you're pretty much obligated to read it, yeah. Or at least not complain that you didn't know something that was said in it. Even if you have read others before.
It's pretty clear that it was just mistakenly left out of the demotest documentation. It wasn't concealed, and we all know about it now, so let's just declare "no harm, no foul" and move on.
I think I might not have made myself entirely clear: the question I was posing was a bit broader than the scope of the article it was posted under- I was really asking whether anonymity is a good thing or not in the abstract, not necessarily whether the licensing scheme or any other particular implementation was good.
You bring up good points about why licensing isn't the best way to provide security or hold people responsible. However, what I'm really more concerned about is this: what if we could make any action completely anonymous on the Internet? That's what a lot of Slashdotters seem to want, but would it be a good thing? Conversely, would it be a good thing to make everything easily traceable by people who wanted to? What technological promises about anonymity do we want to make, and what will the consequences of those promises be?
Interesting stuff...
Umm... is this supposed to be a joke ... ?
Please say yes.
I can see both sides of this issue. On the one hand, as society starts having more and more of its business online, it will be more and more important for people who commit online crimes to be held accountable- in real life, "I just shot him to demonstrate what poor security against bullets he had!" doesn't hold up in many courts. Which is not to say that I think pranks like defacing a web site are as serious as murder, of course, but what about the guy who discovers an exploit for those new digital iToasters that will let him burn people's houses down, and uses it? Or who subtly hacks into an e-commerce site so that when you submit your credit card number, it records it in a plaintext file on the server before passing it along so he can come back and read it at his convenience?
From that standpoint, we want to make it as hard to be truly anonymous as possible, so that we can catch people who are doing things that we ought to punish. On the other hand, anonymity on a more casual level is very important. I am doing a sociology study on homosexuality and the internet, for example, and am finding that it's pretty common for people who are just discovering that they are gay to turn to the anonymity of the Internet to get information because they don't want people to know that they're gay. Destroying their anonymity would be very bad for them, perhaps even physically dangerous. And of course there are the more common reasons: I certainly don't want people knowing about my surfing habit just because it's none of their business, dammit, and I *certainly* don't want to start getting e-mails about sites that I'll just *love* considering the sites that I visit now...
I'm not sure how to reconcile those two competing interests. Does anyone else have any ideas?
That would imply, though, that /. gets ~ 1 hit/minute, which isn't very plausible. I've actually never seen that counter be anything other than 1.
On the other hand- as I've been checking, the "yesterday" figure keeps increasing. Probably the slashbox is just broken so that yesterday is today's stat and today points off into never never land somewhere.
Y'know, it would go a long way if they just kept a database of all the (non-"mailto:") links they posted and searched it when they posted a new story. They seem to have an automatic link-leeching thing going on anyhow, so they could probably do it totally transparently. All they'd need is another table in a database and a little routine that checked to see, when a story was about to be published, if the link was in the database- if so, have a little warning screen. "A link in your story ($linkName) has been previously posted on $oldLinkDate attached to the story $oldStoryName. Are you sure you want to post it again? [Yes] [No]"
/. people. Of course, there is the whole "time to write + performance hit / embarassment avoided" ratio, which might not be low enough to warrant implementation.
Might be worth coding up,
The "today" stat is broken. It always says 1.
I have to disagree back. I have a feeling that most geeky kids had some collection of cool things that they saw computers do that got them excited about learning more about them. For me, it was a combination of the original King's Quest (on the PCjr), the asteroid scene in The Last Starfighter, the afore-mentioned Tron, and the voice generator on my dad's TI that would say, "Hel-o, Jah-kob..."
I have no idea whether I would be a CS geek today if it hadn't been for the "'The last starfighter...' is dead! The last starfighter is dead!" scene. It's impossible to know for sure, but I am very hesitant to say that I'm just wired for CS and my childhood experiences didn't have anything to do with it.
I just have a suspicion that for some small set of kids who see Toy Story, they'll just have to know how it was that they did that. And maybe, for some small set of those, they'll get really jazzed by the answers and decide to learn more. I really disagree with your statement that "the only kids that are going to want to know how Toy Story was rendered are those that are similar to how I was as a child"- young children strike me as exceptionally intellectually curious. It's fun to ask adults what their hobbies were as young children. I was a rock collector, a stamp collector, a comic book collector, a chemist, a physicist, an alchemist, a poet and fiction author, a luthier, a magazine publisher, an animal-rights activist, an athlete, a cartoonist, a sculptor, a violist, and of course a computer programmer all before I was a teenager (sadly, I'm only a few of those things now). I was not exceptional. But I dabbled in all of those fields because there was something in each of them that made me think they were cool (yes, even viola- I never said I was a child genius). I bet that for a few people, Toy Story is that "something cool" that made them want to check out computers.
Sounded that way to me.
"... I mean, if something explodes, it does so spherically(sp?) - not like a flat disk. Perhaps I'm missing something here... that just seems to stupid to have come from any sane scientist."
Which sounds to me like, "The Big Bang theory obviously means that we should ignore more direct evidence."
Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're saying? I think I must be, considering your response...
Saying "the evidence doesn't support our theory, therefore the evidence is wrong" is what scientists get frustrated by non-scientists doing. We can measure (apparently) the thickness of the universe- if that doesn't jive with the big bang theory, then the big bang theory needs to be adjusted to take into account the evidence, NOT (and NEVER EVER EVER) the other way around.
Remember also that the Big Bang theory is somewhat more speculative than many other theories we work with. It's like doing an eight-term Taylor series for a function around 0, and then evaluating it at -8,000,000,000: better than nothing, but you'd have to be crazy to expect it to be exactly right.
...that Disney has for once made a sequel that didn't just shamelessly extract money from the parents who were unlucky enough to have children obsessed with the originals.
On an unrelated note, I think movies like Toy Story have an interesting significance: getting kids interested in computers. I mean, if you were four and you saw a CG movie as cool as Toy Story, wouldn't you want to figure out how they did all that with computers? (Actually, you can strike the "if you were four" part- I want to know too!) Furthermore, Toy Story (and Bug's Life, Antz, etc) don't strike me as being particularly "boy" movies, which means that they might have a hand in breaking the current gender imbalance that CS departments typically see these days. That would be good.
So perhaps we're misinterpreting the whole thing! Maybe they just threw that stipulation in there so that the young'uns would learn to use programming development tools like make!
Calm down, everyone, I figured it out. Corel is trying to give back to the community by encouraging under-18 Linux hackers!
=)
Sounds like a culture clash. Remember, these are the people who brought us Netscape 4.0. They're probably quite impressed with themselves for being able to go a whole hour without failing...
=)
[Yes, AC posts start at 0, while logged-in posts start at 1 (or 2 for people with high karma).]
I have two responses to your argument: the first is that schools are not a monopoly. How can they be when there are private schools? You are not forced to enroll your kid in a public school if you want her to go to school. Many people do not. In fact, most people who can afford it do not. Ergo, schools are not a monopoly. QED.
Second, I think that what you're hinting at is that schools need to be forcibly privatized so that competition will bring up the bad schools. There are a number of obvious problems with that idea, and they stem from this fact: privatization is a function that optimizes for profit margin. While that works well for children of wealthy parents, and government subsidy can bring the money threshold down, you'll always have the problem that for those who can't pay, or for those who are expensive to teach, you'll get shoddy service or no service at all. People with learning disabilities, for example, suck up quite a bit of money because they cost an awful lot to teach. Public education takes them. Would you, as a private school, take a student whom you knew you would have to pay considerably extra for? What about those who are poor enough that they can't pay whatever it is you charge? (Yes, I realize that there's the idea of vouchers- however, good profit-driven schools will probably charge more than the voucher covers, due to supply and demand laws) Would you accept "problem children" who are more likely to disrupt your classes and bring your standardized test scores down?
I wouldn't do any of those things if I were running a profit-driven school. But all of the people who I wouldn't teach deserve to be taught. Furthermore, taking them all and putting them in an "overflow" school that guarantees school for those who can't get in to any of the other schools would be extremely bad for them: you learn from your peers. If your peers are by and large those who have learning disabilities and those who don't care about school, along with probably a minority who are simply too poor to afford the schools that they'd rather be in, you'll probably learn not to value school much.
On the other hand, that shortage of qualified people in industry is a good leverage point from the employees' perspective. If I am a good CS guy, and I say "I will work for you on the condition that I be allowed to teach one high school class," I'm a lot more likely to be taken seriously if there isn't a long line of other good CS guys who don't want to take time off waiting for the job, too.
So it sorta cuts both ways.
I think you completely missed my point. Go ahead and read what I wrote again. I am saying what you're saying- it is certainly true that one shouldn't try to teach a whole school full of diverse people with differing abilities the same curriculum.
I was saying that schools don't want to do that. Sometimes it seems like that's what they're trying for, but it's just because they don't have the resources to provide every student with a specially-tailored education.
Oh, and funny you should mention it- at the public high school I went to, I did take "Advanced Calculus II," in the form of vector calculus, at Georgia State University. The Atlanta Public School system paid for it- but, I had to get accepted by Georgia State first. The high school never claimed that anyone could get into the program, only that if you could get into the program, they would pay for it. Also at high school, I enjoyed a number of AP classes and whatnot that certainly weren't available to everyone at the school, only those who had proven they could handle them. I have no reason to suspect that my high school is the only high school in the country that has such a policy. (In fact, I know that it is utterly un-unique in that respect.)
Perhaps you should stop beating up straw men? There are more useful things to do with one's time.
"Abolish the educational system. Give poor people a chance to get out of the morass which has held minorities back for the last 50 years."
...? Maybe I missed some crucial point of your argument, but I fail to see how abolishing public education and instead relying on Internet-based tutoring with one-on-one sessions with world experts for education will benefit poor people. Unless by "poor people" you mean people with cutting-edge computers, high-speed dedicated internet connections, time to stay home and make sure the kids do their work, and money to hire all those tutors?
Wha
Interesting. But I'm not sure that the evidence supports as broad a claim as "it's not the money," implying that more funding of schools leads to better results. It has been shown many times that more money does not lead to higher results at all when the money is simply poured on a school. However, at the same time, quality of teachers has been shown to have a strong effect on student performance (surprise!). If we hypothesize that raising teacher salaries will attract better teachers, and that better teachers will improve student scores, then we can still say that "it's the money" AND explain why money didn't help in the case you mentioned.
You're confusing real life with Harrison Bergeron. Maybe you ought to check out a public school. You'll find that though there are some bad ones, much more frequently they do their very best to offer curricula for students of all intellectual abilities. No one argues that we ought to not teach anything that is too advanced for the least capable member of the class- that's not "equal," and it's not "liberal," it's just "stupid." When you see some students stifled in their intellectual curiosity, it's very frequently because they're the top students in their class and the school can't afford to make a separate class just for them, though it would like to.
Wow. You're a social genius.
Who's going to educate the children of poor people?
As if education in the United States wasn't class-stratified enough...
"Sorry Joe, I know you're only 6, but your mom is poor, and that means you're just not profitable. We only cater to paying customers around here."
The question Keefesis asks shows up all over the place in different forms: "how can we get better teachers?" "How can we make students learn more?" "What can we do about the educational crisis in American public schools?"
Here's the answer:
Pay teachers more money! Pay teachers more money! Pay teachers more money!
I am really interested in computer science (from an academic standpoint), and I'm working my way towards a Ph.D. in it. I also love to teach and am quite good at teaching. I really want to be a high school computer science teacher after I get my degree, but it's really hard for me to justify taking the pay cut. The difference is substantial- starting salaries for teachers (depending on region) are in the teens to twenties (might be slighly more for those with a Ph.D.- anyone have better numbers?) Starting salaries at good universities and research groups for Ph.D. computer scientists, depending on the place and the specific field, can start in $40,000 range and go past $100,000 sometimes. What would you do?
It does not take a rocket scientist to see that if the brightest people can get jobs that will allow them to do cutting-edge work in their fields and get paid double or more what they'd be paid to teach, most teachers will be the people who weren't good at it. That intuition is borne out by facts: the majority of teachers come from the bottom 1/4th of their college classes [can't find the source right now, but if it really bothers you post and I'll dig it up].
Pay teachers more money, and maybe you'll attract more competent people to be teachers. This is not a secret. You may tell others.
I vote for a new moderation option: "Complaint that the article is boring." But rather than pinning a -1 karma to it, it should warrant immediate execution.
You make an excellent point. However, to some extent, I worry that your argument is akin to the perennial "back in my day" complaint that always accompanies any cultural shift: certainly it's true that people usually use a writing style that's much closer to commonly spoken English in e-mails (and message-board posts) than it is to the writing style that people once used for written correspondence. Certainly computer-corresponders don't put as much effort as their written-corresponder parents and grandparents did into their writing. But how bad is that, really? (This reminds me of one of the most provocative questions I've ever heard in a class: when talking about computer technology, someone mentioned that they feared if computer technology continued to improve with respect to voice recognition and graphical interfaces, people would become less and less literate. The professor responded, "If you had those things, what would be so great about being able to read?")
When arguing that written communication is getting poorer and poorer, it is customary for people to argue (as you and the poster to which you were responding did) that if you write like you speak but you aren't physically present, your communication is missing a great deal of information. I must say, I have always thought of that as a somewhat overstated problem. I have no trouble decyphering people's "let's meet at noon"'s and their "you okay?"'s via e-mail, and I doubt that's because I'm an enormously talented empath. And let's not forget about that very capable low-bandwidth body-language emulator, the emoticon- last I checked, it worked pretty well. (No, that is not a joke argument. It is no accident that emoticons have been around for as long as electronic communication.)
Aside from that, you also argue that "written English" (which I will call "old written English") can be more expressive than "spoken English" (which I will call "new written English"- it's not, uh, y'know, the same thing as, um, when you're talking). I agree. However, you shouldn't dismiss the benefits of new written English out of hand- as you mention yourself, it is more spontaneous, which can lead interesting places. It's also much quicker- the reason writing is more thoughtful than speaking is that we do it so much more slowly. That's fine when you're not writing a whole lot. It is less fine when you spend hours a day communicating via various written channels, particularly e-mail and message-boards. Furthermore, the more deliberation people put into their writing, the more stilted and awkward they sound, usually. (Of course, the less deliberation they put in, the more stupid and incomprehensible they may sound, so there's certainly a trade-off to be made...)
That is not to say that I disagree with the point you make that people ought to put thought into their written communications. It's just that I think we have different conceptions of who the perfect e-mailers would be: it seems as though you imagine the best e-mailers as those who scour everything they write for errors; I tend to think they would be those who learn how to write lucidly the first time. They would have less art, but could get to the point without overdoing it.
(Speaking of overdoing it, look at the size of this post! I should take my own advice...)
From what I gathered, Id has nothing to do with it- it's Activision (the distributor) who's slowing the works down. They are willing to really push to get the Windows version out ASAP, but they're unwilling to spend the cash to push hard with a Linux version that might sell, err, somewhat more poorly than hotcakes. As far as Id's concerned, they'd just as soon release them all at the same time (or even on the same CD, so vendors don't have to pick how many of what platforms).