It's pretty funny, actually. They take their smartest creationists, put them in a room together, and tell them to think about it for a while. The result? "Yeah, this can't actually be true."
What, exactly, did they think would happen?
I think they were honestly expecting the old "satan planted this false evidence to test our faith in our god", but it turns out they just couldn't intellectually stoop that low.
The subject line of the post is also extremely misleading.
You know you're dealing with uneducated provincials when they use religion and Christianity as a pure 1:1 mapping / synonym.
The article talked about extreme fringe christians, not "religion". Religion would imply they were also comparing known scientific facts and theories to all religious beliefs, such as native animists, buddhists, greco-roman mythology, scientology, hinduism, wiccans, and literally about 10K other mutually incompatible belief systems.
>it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans.
I thought that Lucy/African Eve was the one that we're all descended from. Or was that a single pair of humans... Lucy and multiple males.
Or if we don't all descend from a common source (the rest having died or being killed off), does that give weight to racist arguments that blacks and whites are separate species?
The word you don't know to google for is "speciation"
The really short version of a really long subject using a/. car analogy is that 99.9% of parts for one model in adjacent years are interchangeable, but over an extremely long run, lets say pickup truck model from 1950 vs 2000, there eventually ends up being zero parts interchangeability... they've drifted into "separate species" somewhere between 1950 and 2000, but at no individual model year could you really say this exact spot is THE birth of the new species of truck.
There's plenty of space in evolution for racist arguments based on differences in environmental selection pressure, no need for convoluted miscegenation arguments.
Which part of the Bible contains the facts, and which doesn't? And if you don't know, then what's the point of your faith?
A mythology can still contain useful and popular cultural stories, even if they're all not literally true. Look at the diet of TV animated fiction we feed our kids, Aesops fables, greco-roman mythology, santa claus, some history books, both D and R political party platforms...
I'm no fan of "their" beliefs, but even I can see we as a culture are not getting rid of christmas anytime soon...
recess is needed as well to many fat kids now days
Not a part of NCLB testing, has to be cut. Teach to the test, and only teach to the test, that is all. Seriously, that's what happened. More recess, requires a major cultural change, not a minor scheduling change.
I can think of a number of times I've gotten stuck on a scripting problem, distracted myself on the web for a couple of minutes, then come back and have had the solution become clear to me. I don't really know why this happens but I suspect it's because I'm willing to dump where I'm at and start over from the beginning to look for the problem. Im not sure how much sense that makes so I'll put it another way: I needed a mental reboot.
I/. (and other sites) and also go on walkabouts. Main difference is on/. there is a permanent record on an optical disk (I probably fill a DVD-R all by myself) in some dusty warehouse of every click and every keystroke I ever made, whereas WRT my walkabouts, the carpet is microscopically more worn. Guess which gets documented on the review...
The other issue is that frankly I get a heck of a lot of ideas by surfing the web. There's surfing Ruby sites/blogs, which they may as well catagorize along with manual reading and training time, and then there's FB and G+ which frankly rate right up there with watching paint dry in terms of productivity. Was not using ruby at that time, but am now. Currently Fing off at postgresql sites during downtime, which we don't CURRENTLY use, but...
Two guys goof off on the net between tasks, one learns the joys and pitfalls of master-master mysql replication, the other tries to get a date on facebook. Both look the same to the pointiest of PHBs.
There exists a small tool and die shop in my hometown, really not much bigger than an "extreme home shop". When my dad was my age, there were over two dozen, all bigger than the remaining hanger on.
There exists at least one injection molding shop in the USA. And at least one battery line. How special. There is probably one in Afghanistan, too. Whats relevant is production size, China dwarfs us.
Its like saying Mayberry had a (quantity one) sheriff, and new york city also has cops, therefore there is no difference between them.
- Why would an impartial observer care one jot about that?
Its an end run around feel good environmental and labor relations laws and it's inherently racist. We got rid of all the factory workers jobs and their benefits and "improved" working conditions. Now its time to race the white collar guys to the bottom. Its intellectually dishonest to prattle on about safe and humane working and living conditions being a human right, unless you are not an American, in which case you deserve to sit in the back of the bus with the other undesirables. Someone, please, just have the guts to stand up and say that the labor classes are, should, and always will be oppressed, no matter if they're white, black, red, yellow, whatever country. Repeal all the OSHA and EPA, git rid of all the unions, have the guts and honesty to say we will voluntarily send the whole stinking world back to about 1900. Anyone who won't is just a spineless coward or lying to line their pockets in the process of the destruction of their country.
- For someone who did think it was an undesirable state of affairs, what can be done about it?
Tariffs. Add the difference in costs between doing business in China vs doing business in USA to imports. You'll get a huge amount of astroturf paid by the retailers about how that'll eliminate American jobs, with really deep reasoning, like, because they say so, and because some paid astroturfer 50 years ago said so, so it must be true. Ask yourself, what jobs would be eliminated, they're already GONE! The few that haven't been exported yet? What are you going to do, fire us all 6 months earlier than planned? At least we'd go down fighting rather than the plan of slowly wasting away,
Would it have been better if that slavery would not have been exported?
Yes, because the bleeding hearts couldn't stand seeing it locally, so they got rid of polluters, sweatshops, abusive management. IF we could export those guys to China, they would clean up China, which is pretty much a hellhole. Better than it was 10 years ago, but still a hellhole..
My question is, can the US just print more money until everyone is sick of selling things in the US for monopoly money and they invert their economies and no longer sell to the US?
Welcome to 2011
Because then there will be no outsourcing from the ensuing market crash, since it will no longer be cheaper to outsource anymore, and the process will reverse
No outsourcing will stop because there will be no employed customers left in the US. At least 20% of the population is currently un or under employed... Also when nothing is left in the US of a company except for overpaid managers, then the managers in outsourceland will take over. See GE, others. So no importers or customers left in the US.
I think I'll wait for the 2600 article explaining how to send my own SMS-CBs. That could be big fun, I look forward to it. I know from reading mass media that SAME broadcasts have been repeatedly hacked; I've read reports of flash freeze alerts in the summer in FL, coastal flood warnings being broadcast in Montana, etc.
It is also believed that most phones sold in Japan have some way to warn the user of Earthquakes.
Great, so now when the stupid iphone gets the same feature other phones have had for years it is somehow news?
The news is, the business model is to roll out AFTER the once in a lifetime disaster. I predict California residents will have to wait until a couple months after their "earthquake of the century" to get their warning system.
In a way it makes sense, if you deploy an earthquake sensor network right before the earthquake of the century, you'll only get a couple years use out of it before its destroyed in the earthquake. But if you wait, and deploy after the quake of the century, then you'll get something like a centuries use out of the monitoring system before its destroyed again. Kind of like buying car insurance after the crash, or health insurance after you're dead, sorta.
You've obviously never strapped a wild animal onto your wrist.
Falconry? At least for outdoor work I'm surprised to have never heard of any avian service animals. Its always "seeing eye dogs" never "seeing eye falcons"
Can you friend a teacher in your school that does not have you in any of his/her classes?
Also don't forget advisors, and the concept of groups vs friends in social websites. Where I went to school, "academic clubs" required an academic adviser, and the AA was always a teacher in a related field. The computer club had a math teacher, who also advised the chess club. The science club (mostly we went on cool field trips and listened to interesting speakers) was advised by the chemistry teacher. Take a wild guess which teacher taught the Spanish language immersion club, which was really more of an informal study group. The university ham radio club was advised by one of the EE profs.
Don't we have enough disconnect from the youth of the country as it is?
No, one of the central goals of the public education system is to create/enforce/encourage a strongly classist / caste oriented society. The problem is the collision between their twisted goal and reality.
What if a former student becomes teacher at the same school? Is then the school no longer allowed to have a teachers-only web site for their administration?
Its even weirder, because "work related websites" must be made available for parents.
This would seem to include online performance evaluation websites for the teachers and admins. I guess their annual review must now be made public?
Where I work, we have boring HR training classes, online with video, quizzes, etc. Apparently if a school district offers mandatory online "fundamentals of diversity" class at $100 per viewer or whatever ripoff cost, the district MUST pay for parents if they want to take the class.
Also there are HIPAA violations galore... So my public school teacher sister in law takes an online training class on teaching kids with "fill in the blank mental health issue", that information must be provided to all parents, thus all the parents know at least one kids mental health diagnosis. Or medical diagnosis, ranging from who cares ("bee sting allergies") to the privacy types go freaking bonkers ("pediatric aids")
It must be pretty tough if your teacher is your dad, uncle, or even older sibling.
I'm pretty sure most schools have rules prohibiting students from being taught by their own relatives for most core classes to avoid favortism. When I was in school, kids of teachers were always in someone else's class for the grade their parent taught.
Not where I lived, not beyond grade school. You're The chemistry teacher's daughter, you're in her class, that's just how it is. Same thing happened to The history teacher's daughter. I suppose if we had five chemistry teachers it would have been different than having only one. Everyone acted professionally and it all turned out well, the only noteworthy exception is I did not flirt with either attractive young lady as it would have been super awkward to do that in front of her parent.
Speaking of awkward, I meet the substitute teacher for my economics class and it turns out to be a former girlfriend's mom... thankfully it was her daughter that broke up with me, it wasn't overly dramatic (at least for teenagers), and her mom / the sub teacher actually liked me (in a mother in lawful way, not MILF/naughty teacher way, although that would have certainly made my teenage years much more exciting and fun).
And there's "making up a group to share photos and stuff from our drama/gym/science/photo... club.
My former college ham radio club has a "wait and see" attitude toward having the academic adviser join their FB group, or not. Really weird situation.
Then there's my former employer, where a former coworker was hired to teach some classes I had just taken at night school before I finished off my degree. Luckily he was never my instructor; that would have been awkward enough without being legally required to "unfriend" each other on linkedin.
One of my cousins is a former public school teacher... should she be "permitted" by big brother to friend everyone, or does she have a permanent scarlet letter brand now? She teaches music, piano lessons, I believe, would it be legal or illegal for her to friend her students?
Finally my sister in law is a public school teacher... does that mean her niece and nephew are not legally allowed to friend her upon penalty of jail? That's just bizarre.
Please compare and contrast your assumptions with voice telephone service billing, which has steadily moved away from hyperdetailed billing, toward "all you can eat" for not just decades but multiple generations.
The problem is commodity content. The first provider of commodity content to demand payment, will merely be the first to go out of business when competitors eat their lunch. Competitors are motivated because they'll pick the carcass clean of advertising revenue, however little that may be.
BTW: The computers in new cars are only a barrier if you decide they are a barrier. Modern car systems are mostly well-documented and not terribly difficult to work on. Don't be intimidated.
My ODB-II scanner for my car cost... about $10/year. Or about two pennies per gallon at the gas pump. Each year it continues to work it gets cheaper. Just like my 30 year old deluxe socket set. Really expensive if you use it once then throw it away. Really cheap if you reuse it.
Never underestimate the ability of Americans to be penny wise and pound foolish. But that ethernet cable crimper is the cost of a couple six packs of generic beer, wah waah waaah, repeat endlessly.
Its more likely to be an intelligence filter. Do you replace your own alternator belt? Oh you do, cool, that means you're not innumerate.
Actually, a lot of cloud services are hosted on a central server nowhere. Servers are being virtualized on amorphous collections of geographically distributed, mutually redundant data centres. Just like you can't point to a single water droplet and say "that is the cloud", there's no single box you can point to and say "That is the gmail server."
Welcome to VAX clusters circa late 1983. Most of IT for the last three decades seems to have been focused on poorly reimplementing the VAX.
Some would argue that MVS did it better on mainframes in the late 60s/early 70s, at least for some definitions of better.
I mean, really -- other than Larry and Sergei reading our mail, there really isn't much of a downside.
LOL how about this
Now we don't have that mystery missing-man-day every month when something inevitably goes wrong
No no no. What you mean is now you CAN NOT spend a man-day when something inevitably goes wrong. Just toss your hands up in the air, shrug the shoulders, and go home. Don't confuse lack of ability to control with lack of need to control.
I've been involved on the service provider side of what is now called "cloud computing" for about two decades. You, as a customer, are worth exactly what you pay us, adjusted somewhat by cost of new sales. Not a penny more, not a penny less. Lets say, $50/mo for outsourced email. We could and did simply drop "expensive" customers. You lose a $10M contract because email from.hk was getting blocked? Oh I feel so sorry, if I'm in a good mood, here's a credit for one month of service, buh bye, if I'm in a bad mood, here's a credit for one email's worth of service, lets say $1, buh bye. Bug us "too much" and unless there are marketing implications, we drop you like a hot potato. At $50/month and $75K/yr for me, we simply could not afford to provide much 1 on 1 help to customers. Our support budget was about 10% so every month we could afford to help each customer about $5 worth, which at about $40/hr means just enough time to hear your monthly problem explanation and me to tell you that unless its a major systemic failure, that was a nice anecdote, now you're SOL, please go away... What happens after you go away is our profits go up, what happens to you... well frankly we didn't have any reason to care. I would assume some of our more "internet focused" customers who we gave the internet-death-penalty simply went out of business. The folks who didn't depend on the internet services we sold, probably had their profits go up, minus our hefty early termination fees of course. Either way, anyone using our outsourced services more or less universally ended up better off after contract termination. That's why I'm not in that line of work anymore.
I've been in cloud computing for about two decades. The marketing and buzzwords have changed, but not much else.
The fundamental problems with "cloud services" is asymmetry, crime, contracts, and uniforms.
Asymmetry is when you're losing $10K/day in revenue because emails from China are getting blocked, and your $19.95/month provider literally can't afford to fix it. Based on their projected profit, and cost of new sales, they're financially better off disposing of your account, complete with you paying an early termination fee. There is no such thing as "commodity service". You pay a cloud provider $20/month you get $20/month of service and not one penny more. You pay a local admin $7K/month you get $7K/month of service. If you're only getting $20/mo of service for $7000/mo of salary, that is a profound management failure. Outsourcing merely means the PHB will find a new way to cause $7K/mo of damage to the bottom line. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
Crime is a big issue. Inside the USA things are every approaching 1984 soviet lifestyle... but cross international boundaries and its like dealing with pirates hundreds of years ago (in some cases, literally). If you outsource to China, you better be prepared to move everything including management team there, like recently happened to GE medical imaging, which is no longer a US company. If you have non-technical managers signing technical contracts, they literally might not even know they're giving away the store, until its too late. Managers in the USA are coddled because corporate and govt interests have merged in a fascist system here... its not like that when you cross international boundaries, its more like the wild west. Good luck, softie east coast city frat boy, in a border town of saloons, stagecoach robbers, and gunslingers (in some cases, literally).
Another problem is contracts. Non-technical users are too dumb to intelligently sign one, so they'll get ripped off. If you have a weak contract, you'll get identity thefted or have to pay for a lifetime. If you have a strong contract with endless credit checks, competitive bidding, DUN number verification, auditing, etc, you'll have a three month outage while switching to new providers... can your business survive 3 months without a fileserver or email? If so, you shouldn't be wasting the money on it to begin with.
Uniforms is the biggest problem. Back in ye old days, blue collar factories sometimes / often supplied uniforms for their wage slaves. In this enlightened era where the only jobs are selling insurance and homes to each other, we are expected to provide for ourselves, and show up at work appropriately clothed rather than nude and expect the boss to pay to dress us. For a decade we've had endless complaints about having to carry a crappy corporate issued locked down phone plus your "real" personal phone. I think the days of a company issued computer / phone are about as numbered as the days of a company issued pair of uniform pants... it'll never quite go away, but the vast majority of workers will simply provide their boss with their personal email addrs, and their personal cell phone number, and that'll be the end of that. Carry your personal laptop into work, plug into what amounts to a DMZ or extremely fast internet pipe, VNC or equivalent into some apps, firefox into other apps... Contractors already live this life, wage slaves will soon. The idea of my employer of the moment selecting my cell phone is frankly weirder than the idea of my employer of the moment selecting my business casual attire. My boss does not buy my socks, nor my car, and soon, not my cellphone and laptop.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pretty funny, actually. They take their smartest creationists, put them in a room together, and tell them to think about it for a while. The result? "Yeah, this can't actually be true."
What, exactly, did they think would happen?
I think they were honestly expecting the old "satan planted this false evidence to test our faith in our god", but it turns out they just couldn't intellectually stoop that low.
I think perhaps the title is misleading.
The subject line of the post is also extremely misleading.
You know you're dealing with uneducated provincials when they use religion and Christianity as a pure 1:1 mapping / synonym.
The article talked about extreme fringe christians, not "religion". Religion would imply they were also comparing known scientific facts and theories to all religious beliefs, such as native animists, buddhists, greco-roman mythology, scientology, hinduism, wiccans, and literally about 10K other mutually incompatible belief systems.
>it is unlikely that we all descended from a single pair of humans.
I thought that Lucy/African Eve was the one that we're all descended from. Or was that a single pair of humans ... Lucy and multiple males.
Or if we don't all descend from a common source (the rest having died or being killed off), does that give weight to racist arguments that blacks and whites are separate species?
The word you don't know to google for is "speciation"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciation
The really short version of a really long subject using a /. car analogy is that 99.9% of parts for one model in adjacent years are interchangeable, but over an extremely long run, lets say pickup truck model from 1950 vs 2000, there eventually ends up being zero parts interchangeability ... they've drifted into "separate species" somewhere between 1950 and 2000, but at no individual model year could you really say this exact spot is THE birth of the new species of truck.
There's plenty of space in evolution for racist arguments based on differences in environmental selection pressure, no need for convoluted miscegenation arguments.
Which part of the Bible contains the facts, and which doesn't? And if you don't know, then what's the point of your faith?
A mythology can still contain useful and popular cultural stories, even if they're all not literally true. Look at the diet of TV animated fiction we feed our kids, Aesops fables, greco-roman mythology, santa claus, some history books, both D and R political party platforms ...
I'm no fan of "their" beliefs, but even I can see we as a culture are not getting rid of christmas anytime soon...
recess is needed as well to many fat kids now days
Not a part of NCLB testing, has to be cut. Teach to the test, and only teach to the test, that is all. Seriously, that's what happened.
More recess, requires a major cultural change, not a minor scheduling change.
I can think of a number of times I've gotten stuck on a scripting problem, distracted myself on the web for a couple of minutes, then come back and have had the solution become clear to me. I don't really know why this happens but I suspect it's because I'm willing to dump where I'm at and start over from the beginning to look for the problem. Im not sure how much sense that makes so I'll put it another way: I needed a mental reboot.
I /. (and other sites) and also go on walkabouts. Main difference is on /. there is a permanent record on an optical disk (I probably fill a DVD-R all by myself) in some dusty warehouse of every click and every keystroke I ever made, whereas WRT my walkabouts, the carpet is microscopically more worn. Guess which gets documented on the review...
The other issue is that frankly I get a heck of a lot of ideas by surfing the web. There's surfing Ruby sites/blogs, which they may as well catagorize along with manual reading and training time, and then there's FB and G+ which frankly rate right up there with watching paint dry in terms of productivity. Was not using ruby at that time, but am now. Currently Fing off at postgresql sites during downtime, which we don't CURRENTLY use, but...
Two guys goof off on the net between tasks, one learns the joys and pitfalls of master-master mysql replication, the other tries to get a date on facebook. Both look the same to the pointiest of PHBs.
Tariffs. Add the difference in costs between doing business in China vs doing business in USA to imports.
... which leads to tit-for-tat protectionism.
Whats wrong with that? If the alternative is literally economic suicide, I'd suggest trying protectionism. Can't make it any worse.
All anecdotes.
There exists a small tool and die shop in my hometown, really not much bigger than an "extreme home shop". When my dad was my age, there were over two dozen, all bigger than the remaining hanger on.
There exists at least one injection molding shop in the USA. And at least one battery line. How special. There is probably one in Afghanistan, too. Whats relevant is production size, China dwarfs us.
Its like saying Mayberry had a (quantity one) sheriff, and new york city also has cops, therefore there is no difference between them.
- Why would an impartial observer care one jot about that?
Its an end run around feel good environmental and labor relations laws and it's inherently racist. We got rid of all the factory workers jobs and their benefits and "improved" working conditions. Now its time to race the white collar guys to the bottom. Its intellectually dishonest to prattle on about safe and humane working and living conditions being a human right, unless you are not an American, in which case you deserve to sit in the back of the bus with the other undesirables. Someone, please, just have the guts to stand up and say that the labor classes are, should, and always will be oppressed, no matter if they're white, black, red, yellow, whatever country. Repeal all the OSHA and EPA, git rid of all the unions, have the guts and honesty to say we will voluntarily send the whole stinking world back to about 1900. Anyone who won't is just a spineless coward or lying to line their pockets in the process of the destruction of their country.
- For someone who did think it was an undesirable state of affairs, what can be done about it?
Tariffs. Add the difference in costs between doing business in China vs doing business in USA to imports. You'll get a huge amount of astroturf paid by the retailers about how that'll eliminate American jobs, with really deep reasoning, like, because they say so, and because some paid astroturfer 50 years ago said so, so it must be true. Ask yourself, what jobs would be eliminated, they're already GONE! The few that haven't been exported yet? What are you going to do, fire us all 6 months earlier than planned? At least we'd go down fighting rather than the plan of slowly wasting away,
Would it have been better if that slavery would not have been exported?
Yes, because the bleeding hearts couldn't stand seeing it locally, so they got rid of polluters, sweatshops, abusive management. IF we could export those guys to China, they would clean up China, which is pretty much a hellhole. Better than it was 10 years ago, but still a hellhole..
My question is, can the US just print more money until everyone is sick of selling things in the US for monopoly money and they invert their economies and no longer sell to the US?
Welcome to 2011
Because then there will be no outsourcing from the ensuing market crash, since it will no longer be cheaper to outsource anymore, and the process will reverse
No outsourcing will stop because there will be no employed customers left in the US. At least 20% of the population is currently un or under employed... Also when nothing is left in the US of a company except for overpaid managers, then the managers in outsourceland will take over. See GE, others. So no importers or customers left in the US.
Everything you need to know.. It's based on SMS-CB, and is essentially a high-priority all-points SMS broadcast.
You mean:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_Broadcast
I think I'll wait for the 2600 article explaining how to send my own SMS-CBs. That could be big fun, I look forward to it. I know from reading mass media that SAME broadcasts have been repeatedly hacked; I've read reports of flash freeze alerts in the summer in FL, coastal flood warnings being broadcast in Montana, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Specific_Area_Message_Encoding
Great, so now when the stupid iphone gets the same feature other phones have had for years it is somehow news?
The news is, the business model is to roll out AFTER the once in a lifetime disaster. I predict California residents will have to wait until a couple months after their "earthquake of the century" to get their warning system.
In a way it makes sense, if you deploy an earthquake sensor network right before the earthquake of the century, you'll only get a couple years use out of it before its destroyed in the earthquake. But if you wait, and deploy after the quake of the century, then you'll get something like a centuries use out of the monitoring system before its destroyed again. Kind of like buying car insurance after the crash, or health insurance after you're dead, sorta.
You've obviously never strapped a wild animal onto your wrist.
Falconry? At least for outdoor work I'm surprised to have never heard of any avian service animals. Its always "seeing eye dogs" never "seeing eye falcons"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falconry
Can you friend a teacher in your school that does not have you in any of his/her classes?
Also don't forget advisors, and the concept of groups vs friends in social websites. Where I went to school, "academic clubs" required an academic adviser, and the AA was always a teacher in a related field. The computer club had a math teacher, who also advised the chess club. The science club (mostly we went on cool field trips and listened to interesting speakers) was advised by the chemistry teacher. Take a wild guess which teacher taught the Spanish language immersion club, which was really more of an informal study group. The university ham radio club was advised by one of the EE profs.
Don't we have enough disconnect from the youth of the country as it is?
No, one of the central goals of the public education system is to create/enforce/encourage a strongly classist / caste oriented society.
The problem is the collision between their twisted goal and reality.
What if a former student becomes teacher at the same school? Is then the school no longer allowed to have a teachers-only web site for their administration?
Its even weirder, because "work related websites" must be made available for parents.
This would seem to include online performance evaluation websites for the teachers and admins. I guess their annual review must now be made public?
Where I work, we have boring HR training classes, online with video, quizzes, etc. Apparently if a school district offers mandatory online "fundamentals of diversity" class at $100 per viewer or whatever ripoff cost, the district MUST pay for parents if they want to take the class.
Also there are HIPAA violations galore... So my public school teacher sister in law takes an online training class on teaching kids with "fill in the blank mental health issue", that information must be provided to all parents, thus all the parents know at least one kids mental health diagnosis. Or medical diagnosis, ranging from who cares ("bee sting allergies") to the privacy types go freaking bonkers ("pediatric aids")
It must be pretty tough if your teacher is your dad, uncle, or even older sibling.
I'm pretty sure most schools have rules prohibiting students from being taught by their own relatives for most core classes to avoid favortism. When I was in school, kids of teachers were always in someone else's class for the grade their parent taught.
Not where I lived, not beyond grade school. You're The chemistry teacher's daughter, you're in her class, that's just how it is. Same thing happened to The history teacher's daughter. I suppose if we had five chemistry teachers it would have been different than having only one. Everyone acted professionally and it all turned out well, the only noteworthy exception is I did not flirt with either attractive young lady as it would have been super awkward to do that in front of her parent.
Speaking of awkward, I meet the substitute teacher for my economics class and it turns out to be a former girlfriend's mom... thankfully it was her daughter that broke up with me, it wasn't overly dramatic (at least for teenagers), and her mom / the sub teacher actually liked me (in a mother in lawful way, not MILF/naughty teacher way, although that would have certainly made my teenage years much more exciting and fun).
And there's "making up a group to share photos and stuff from our drama/gym/science/photo... club.
My former college ham radio club has a "wait and see" attitude toward having the academic adviser join their FB group, or not. Really weird situation.
Then there's my former employer, where a former coworker was hired to teach some classes I had just taken at night school before I finished off my degree. Luckily he was never my instructor; that would have been awkward enough without being legally required to "unfriend" each other on linkedin.
One of my cousins is a former public school teacher... should she be "permitted" by big brother to friend everyone, or does she have a permanent scarlet letter brand now? She teaches music, piano lessons, I believe, would it be legal or illegal for her to friend her students?
Finally my sister in law is a public school teacher... does that mean her niece and nephew are not legally allowed to friend her upon penalty of jail? That's just bizarre.
Online education is ok, but there's no substitute for being able to ask questions in realtime and address issues with an actual teacher.
However, its good practice for post-graduation education, where you're lucky if you've got google and possibly an oreilly book.
Please compare and contrast your assumptions with voice telephone service billing, which has steadily moved away from hyperdetailed billing, toward "all you can eat" for not just decades but multiple generations.
The problem is commodity content. The first provider of commodity content to demand payment, will merely be the first to go out of business when competitors eat their lunch. Competitors are motivated because they'll pick the carcass clean of advertising revenue, however little that may be.
BTW:
The computers in new cars are only a barrier if you decide they are a barrier. Modern car systems are mostly well-documented and not terribly difficult to work on. Don't be intimidated.
My ODB-II scanner for my car cost ... about $10/year. Or about two pennies per gallon at the gas pump. Each year it continues to work it gets cheaper. Just like my 30 year old deluxe socket set. Really expensive if you use it once then throw it away. Really cheap if you reuse it.
Never underestimate the ability of Americans to be penny wise and pound foolish. But that ethernet cable crimper is the cost of a couple six packs of generic beer, wah waah waaah, repeat endlessly.
Its more likely to be an intelligence filter. Do you replace your own alternator belt? Oh you do, cool, that means you're not innumerate.
Actually, a lot of cloud services are hosted on a central server nowhere. Servers are being virtualized on amorphous collections of geographically distributed, mutually redundant data centres. Just like you can't point to a single water droplet and say "that is the cloud", there's no single box you can point to and say "That is the gmail server."
Welcome to VAX clusters circa late 1983. Most of IT for the last three decades seems to have been focused on poorly reimplementing the VAX.
Some would argue that MVS did it better on mainframes in the late 60s/early 70s, at least for some definitions of better.
I mean, really -- other than Larry and Sergei reading our mail, there really isn't much of a downside.
LOL how about this
Now we don't have that mystery missing-man-day every month when something inevitably goes wrong
No no no. What you mean is now you CAN NOT spend a man-day when something inevitably goes wrong. Just toss your hands up in the air, shrug the shoulders, and go home. Don't confuse lack of ability to control with lack of need to control.
I've been involved on the service provider side of what is now called "cloud computing" for about two decades. You, as a customer, are worth exactly what you pay us, adjusted somewhat by cost of new sales. Not a penny more, not a penny less. Lets say, $50/mo for outsourced email. We could and did simply drop "expensive" customers. You lose a $10M contract because email from .hk was getting blocked? Oh I feel so sorry, if I'm in a good mood, here's a credit for one month of service, buh bye, if I'm in a bad mood, here's a credit for one email's worth of service, lets say $1, buh bye. Bug us "too much" and unless there are marketing implications, we drop you like a hot potato. At $50/month and $75K/yr for me, we simply could not afford to provide much 1 on 1 help to customers. Our support budget was about 10% so every month we could afford to help each customer about $5 worth, which at about $40/hr means just enough time to hear your monthly problem explanation and me to tell you that unless its a major systemic failure, that was a nice anecdote, now you're SOL, please go away... What happens after you go away is our profits go up, what happens to you... well frankly we didn't have any reason to care. I would assume some of our more "internet focused" customers who we gave the internet-death-penalty simply went out of business. The folks who didn't depend on the internet services we sold, probably had their profits go up, minus our hefty early termination fees of course. Either way, anyone using our outsourced services more or less universally ended up better off after contract termination. That's why I'm not in that line of work anymore.
I've been in cloud computing for about two decades. The marketing and buzzwords have changed, but not much else.
The fundamental problems with "cloud services" is asymmetry, crime, contracts, and uniforms.
Asymmetry is when you're losing $10K/day in revenue because emails from China are getting blocked, and your $19.95/month provider literally can't afford to fix it. Based on their projected profit, and cost of new sales, they're financially better off disposing of your account, complete with you paying an early termination fee. There is no such thing as "commodity service". You pay a cloud provider $20/month you get $20/month of service and not one penny more. You pay a local admin $7K/month you get $7K/month of service. If you're only getting $20/mo of service for $7000/mo of salary, that is a profound management failure. Outsourcing merely means the PHB will find a new way to cause $7K/mo of damage to the bottom line. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't.
Crime is a big issue. Inside the USA things are every approaching 1984 soviet lifestyle... but cross international boundaries and its like dealing with pirates hundreds of years ago (in some cases, literally). If you outsource to China, you better be prepared to move everything including management team there, like recently happened to GE medical imaging, which is no longer a US company. If you have non-technical managers signing technical contracts, they literally might not even know they're giving away the store, until its too late. Managers in the USA are coddled because corporate and govt interests have merged in a fascist system here... its not like that when you cross international boundaries, its more like the wild west. Good luck, softie east coast city frat boy, in a border town of saloons, stagecoach robbers, and gunslingers (in some cases, literally).
Another problem is contracts. Non-technical users are too dumb to intelligently sign one, so they'll get ripped off. If you have a weak contract, you'll get identity thefted or have to pay for a lifetime. If you have a strong contract with endless credit checks, competitive bidding, DUN number verification, auditing, etc, you'll have a three month outage while switching to new providers... can your business survive 3 months without a fileserver or email? If so, you shouldn't be wasting the money on it to begin with.
Uniforms is the biggest problem. Back in ye old days, blue collar factories sometimes / often supplied uniforms for their wage slaves. In this enlightened era where the only jobs are selling insurance and homes to each other, we are expected to provide for ourselves, and show up at work appropriately clothed rather than nude and expect the boss to pay to dress us. For a decade we've had endless complaints about having to carry a crappy corporate issued locked down phone plus your "real" personal phone. I think the days of a company issued computer / phone are about as numbered as the days of a company issued pair of uniform pants... it'll never quite go away, but the vast majority of workers will simply provide their boss with their personal email addrs, and their personal cell phone number, and that'll be the end of that. Carry your personal laptop into work, plug into what amounts to a DMZ or extremely fast internet pipe, VNC or equivalent into some apps, firefox into other apps... Contractors already live this life, wage slaves will soon. The idea of my employer of the moment selecting my cell phone is frankly weirder than the idea of my employer of the moment selecting my business casual attire. My boss does not buy my socks, nor my car, and soon, not my cellphone and laptop.