When in fact most of us actually DO take our rights seriously - seriously enough to make the government suffer the consequences when they capriciously violate our rights, e.g. by voting them out.
True enough, assuming that people are aware of the issues and where representatives and candidates stand on them. However, there's an entire public relations industry built up to obscure people's knowledge of what politicians actually stand for. They haven't (yet) been able to hide politicians' votes and positions from those who have time and energy to do their own research, but that's why people talk so much about candidate "electability" and "empathy with the common person" contributing to that electability - it's because the actual issues and the nuts and bolts of implementing them have been drowned out by image.
It's also why, in the last election, many Republicans actually thought George Bush held to policies (such as concerning the environment, etc.) that were actually policies held by Kerry and not Bush. Policy discussions among major candidates is pretty much off the table in the United States, replaced by fuzzy images and harmless platitudes, at least in the major media.
Yes, I appreciate your ideas. The problem with the floppies is not for at school, though, but when the students take their work home. I have lots of floppies for free from former days, so it's easy to turn to them. On the other hand, the way things are going, the computers at home may not have floppies for much longer, either. (I'm running into a similar problem when I send VHS tapes home)On the other other hand, many of my families, if they have computers, have rather old ones, anyway.
Your idea of using gmail as an ftp server is interesting. I didn't know you could do that. On the other hand, the kids would all have to be taught how to ftp. They cannot reach the classroom computer at school because it's behind a giant firewall with local IP addresses on the inside.
Probably eventually I'll have to go to flash drives -- as they get cheaper, it should be easier to implement that. I wonder, though, if plugging and unplugging a flash drive in Linux is any easier. Does one have to mount them? I'll give it a try this week to see.
I'm a fifth/sixth grade teacher who still uses floppy drives and floppy disks with my students. It would be great if they could implement floppy behavior to be similar to what windows does. SUSE comes pretty close, actually, but I'm always afraid to try other Linux distros to avoid the hassle of floppy drives, since some seem to want to mount the drives, and mounting the drives (and unmounting them), while not impossible for a fifth grader to do, is next to impossible for 32 fifth graders to do and remember to do.
Anyway, I hope when they think usability, they also consider usability for kids.
I totally agree with your comments. If you had not posted it, I was going to post something similar. You hit the nail on the head that roads, internet, health care, etc., are all of a piece. We pay twice as much per head for health care here as in other developed countries, and for what? So the private insurers can figure out how to screen out the people that will keep them from getting a good profit. And don't forget advertizing.
They'd be the cheapest crappiest roads they could get away with. They'd lobby Congress to exempt them from liability from death and damage caused by baseline maintenance. Look at what happened in Ohio -- that massive electrical blackout was caused by a conglomerate cutting powerline maintenance beneath the bone to pump up profits..... Elected officials at least can go to jail, lose their jobs, be exposed as lying jackasses.
Exactly. Here in California we have literally lost billions of dollars to the crooked oil companies in a manufactured crisis a couple years ago. And now that the Gropinator, a man totally in bed with big oil, is our governor, we'll never sue to recover it. I remember hearing the taped telephone calls between members of those companies heartlessly joking about stealing money from Grandma Millie. Why are those fiends not behind bars? It's not hard to imagine that their heartless schemes shortened the lives of such little old ladies who attempted to conserve heat or even ran out of heat.
Most technologically advanced countries have good public health care, fast internet, and good highways because they still adhere to the concept of the public good overriding the possiblity of someone making an immense profit. It's as simple as that.
Exactly. The idea that government is the source of all evil has been sold to us so thoroughly that most people just assume that government is always inefficient and never up to the tasks that corporate entities can handle with ease. And all that, even though Dilbert is popular because it speaks the truth about corporations! Sure, government needs a watchdog, too, but it's such a lie that it's always less efficient than private companies.
Don't get me started on this topic!!! Okay, you did, but I'm quitting now. I don't think we'll ever see cheap broadband until we confront the whole system that's stealing us blind. It's like all the lobbying that Microsoft does to keep out open source, and all the lobbying cable companies do to actually pass laws to make it illegal for city governments to set up their own broadband services. Sheesh...................
Yes, all I needed to see was that it was on Fox News, and I would assume that he'd be a shill protecting corporate interests. Fox News - the corporate propaganda channel. Always consider the source!
"It has withstood assaults by technologies such as the Windows terminal, the Web and the network PC, but the mighty desktop has been humbled by user demand for the one thing it can't deliver -- mobility."
But desktops can deliver a few things that mobiles can't....like not burning your laptop...and the best bang for the buck performance as well as upgradability...though mini-agp and soon to be mini-pcie (?) will help notebooks with some of that
I agree.
To me, the original statement seems backwards. Users have always wanted mobility, but it's only lately that PDA's and laptops, etc. have finally delivered the capability to do want you want with them, and yet have them be mobile. So it's not humbled by mobility so much as the maturation of mobile technologies.
I am in America now, but I was in Tianjin last month. I found that many Internet sites were unreachable (though slashdot was reachable), and Chinese friends told me they had to be careful what they searched for on Google, else Google would go down. Also the Chinese government finally got around to disabling Google's cache feature, by which in previous years I'd seen the cache of pages that they had blocked.
I would love to see the fall season in China, though.
My guess is that they are just using a heavy hand to pressure skype into two things:
1) handing over some money/bribes.
2) making sure they can listen in on conversations
3) They did something like this to Google a few years back. Even now google experiences outages all the time. I guess this is just the way the chinese gov't is used to doing business.
I totally agree. I can't help but think that if skype gives them the ability to listen and record conversations, it will no longer be such a big deal. How that would work on a peer-to-peer network, I don't know, but I remember being floored when I first got on the skype to China and realized that they couldn't decode the encryptian on the call, or on the attachments that I sent. I knew it wouldn't last.
In general, I agree with your points. I also don't think the migrating is as important, except for easily transferring documents. After all, when you get a new Windows computer, it doesn't automatically transfer settings and preferences for you, either. The Macintosh has started doing this, however.
Other than interoperability with Windows, particularly with Windows printer sharing over networks, and having a clipboard that is common to all applications, there is one big category that I think should be added to the list of four, and that is:
Discoverability.
This is not my idea, I'm not that smart, but something I picked up from an outstanding article online about the inadequacies of the CUPS web-based interface.
Discoverability means that menus and choices are so clear that, with a little fiddling, a naive user can figure out how it all works without a manual. Anyone who has used the CUPS web interface can see that it teaches absolutely nothing. It might be more convenient than editing a configuration file manually, but it is no more helpful for understanding the choices than the configuration file itself would be. Actually, some of those configuration files are well-enough documented that they are probably better than the CUPS web interface.
A lot of Linux is the same way. Sure, people can figure out the start menu, since it's usually set to act just like Windows in the most popular distributions, but what about the control panel? There's no way that it can teach you anything, whereas Windows is almost annoyingly helpful with little messages that ask opinions and outline choices. Some Linux applications suffer from the same lack of discoverability.
Hey, it's no accident that home schooling works for so many people. Parent participation and parental responsibility make all the difference in the world
When I was a kid, forty years ago, and when public education was esteemed, before the "new this" and "programmed that," my mother was president of the PTA. When we had a monthly PTA meeting, it had to be held in the gym, and it was wall-to-wall people. Nowadays, a school is lucky to get five people to come to a PTA meeting. As far as I can tell, it's the same situation in rich neighborhoods as it is in poor ones.
Educating a child is no more the teacher's responsibility than it's the doctor's responsibility to make sure that the patient takes their daily medicine on time.
Parents make the difference, even if they have no idea of the details of pedagogy. Parents make the difference. Parents in the school. Parents volunteering for those endless bake sales and carnivals, parents monitoring their kids' homework, parents just taking an interest in what goes on at school and will sit with their kid from time to time to see what their homework is.
And what a difference between our culture and Asian culture. I had a Japanese tenant once who ended his job six months early so the next Japanese guy to take that position could finish a whole assignment so that the guy's kid could start kindergarten on time with his class back in Japan. Who in America sacrifices their job, not just for their own kid's enducation, but for their colleague's kid's schooling? Japanese parents value education.
I met a young woman at a university in China whose father was only semi-literate, but still, when she was a child, had stayed with her whenever she did her homework, if only for the moral support. Chinese parents value education.
What if an old Win2k or XP computer goes online to get protection? And it happens to take 12 minutes to get those updates? Is that ironic or deserving?
That is in fact exactly what happened to a friend of mine who tried to install Norton "everything and the kitchen sink" on his wife's laptop. It immediately asked to access the net to complete and update his copy of the software, and in the time it took to do that, the laptop became infected.
When you complain about proper English grammar and/ or spelling and/or usage, and then compare it to programming a computer, you're really mixing apples and oranges.
Firstly, English spelling and grammar are several orders of magnitude more complex than a computer language. Secondly, the mental skills needed to program with correct syntax are different than the skills needed to express oneself with words. (In fact, one person responding to this topic put it pretty well when he expressed his annoyance at people criticizing his written form when his goal was clear expression of ideas. He noted that he could, if required, edit his writing to comform to "standards" but that was not his priority. You might differ in your opinion of his priorities, but it perfectly illustrates how the mental skills are different.)
So it really should be no surprise that, when dealing with a Slashdot crowd, you might see sloppy spelling. I mean spellling.
I mean, computer nerds are, if nothing else, known for their propensity for nonconformance in the face of arbitrary rules. Computer syntax is not arbitrary, but natural language rules often are.
There seems to be a lot of arguing back and forth about the user interface, but quite frankly I think that the user interfaces of gnome and kde and the distros that use them are just fine. I think, as you do, that their interfaces are just as serviceable as Windows or Mac.
There are some things that need to change, though. One thing, which I read about from time to time is the lack of a consistent clipboard in Linux. That's a big one to me.
Another factor, though, which I don't see much mention of, is the lack of good error messages and other systme-level feedback in Linux.
My typical example of this is getting printers to work. I'm no Linux expert, but I do know more about it than Mom and Pop at least. But getting a printer to work that's attached to a Windows machine is always a headache. I pray that it works the first time, and sometimes it does, but more likely than not it doesn't. So where's the problem? Is it CUPS? Is it Samba? Or somewhere else? There are no error messages whatsoever to give me clue.. Instead, the system either reports nothing, or reports that printing was successfully spooled. However, nothing emerges from the printer, so it's always some manner of guess and check. Once it finally works, it works forever, but I'm afraid to even touch the printer configuration for fear of screwing it up again.
Another example is a machine I dual boot into Linux or Windows. In Linux, all of a sudden the network connection was incredibly sporadic. I finally gave up using the computer and went to another, as I didn't have time to tweak this and discover that to figure out the problem.
Later I booted the same machine into Windows, and as Windows started up it informed me that there was an IP address conflict and that it would therefore deactivate the network card. Well, once I knew that, it was easy to fix the problem for both windows and linux.
Anyway, that's what I mean by lack of error messages and system feedback in Linux. And that's the level where I think Linux needs the most improvement.
The idea that business is necessarily more efficient and competent than government is laughable to anybody who's read a Dilbert cartoon.
Not only is it unwise to let private monopolies in broadband develop because of the excess costs to support lobbiests and bribes to elected officials, it's also unwise to institutionalize private monopolies as the gatekeepers to our information. Democracy may be cranky and ineffient, but the alternatives are much worse.
But the rural spread of our population makes market penetration quite difficult, thus resulting in countries with higher population densities pulling ahead.
I've been reading and reading, so forgive me if someone's addressed this already.
How easy is it to swap out the hard drive on the mac mini and replace it with one of the larger ones that I have laying around here? From remarks about memory I would assume it voids the warranty, but it might be worth the risk to have 250 gigs rather than 40.
along those lines, is a CD with OS X included with the mac mini, or is it like those cheap windows pc's that sometimes come with no XP CD, but rather a hidden partition with the installation files and drivers?
I am a teacher in a public school, who is sort of halfway into converting a bunch of windows machines with occasionaly questionable windows licensing to Linux machines that I can feel more legally confident in. (they're mostly donated machines).
There are many usability issues that make me wish I had the money for an Apple, or even winxp. But one that I'd like to highlight now is the relative lack of feedback to commands vs Dos, windows, or apple.
I actually haven't touched the configuration of any of my machines in six months (and the nice thing is, of course, that they all still work perfectly -- not much ongoing maintenance needed), so I can't remember clear examples.
But so often, it seems like I'd type something and I thought I knew what it was supposed to do, but it apparantly didn't, and there was no error message to let me know that it hadn't found something to let it work, or whatever.
This sort of thing happened in many areas. One that comes to mind, though, is printing, where everything seems to work fine, no error messages, and everything spooled correctly, yet nothing prints. And since there are several steps in the chain of actually printing something, it's a hassle to figure out which step is the problem. If there was some sort of feedback vis a vis success / failure it would be nice.
As a non-technical sort, perhaps I'm asking for something that's not reasonable and I don't realize it. However, I don't recall having so many problems like that with dos, windows, or apple.
Actually, it's even worse than that. If you remember, a few months before the American attack, Saddam did come up with reams of documentation. Two copies - one for America and one for the United Nations.
However, the Americans censored large chunks of it before anyone could see it -- ( I've always assumed the censoring was because there would be evidence of Iraq trading illegally with Halliburton and other American companies.)
Kind of reminds you of the censoring of the 911 reports to remove evidence of Saudi involvement, doesn't it? Makes you wonder what else they might be hiding........
K-12 educators do indeed demand watered down versions of most information, which is part of the problem with basic education today.
Many children are turned off by reading because it is "boring". That's because the books they're forced to read in school have far less complexity and richness than the language children use verbally every day.
I don't disagree with these statements, except that instead of blaming k12 educators, I'd blame the politicians and publishing corporations that force K12 educators to use their books, and it's true that books - almost any nonfiction books, not just "watered down" ones - don't have the complexity and richness of everyday children's language. However, that richness and complexity extends itself in different ways than either adult language or standard English written language.
This is also why I disagree with the post following this one that implies that any competent adult writer can adapt something for chidren by simplifying it. Children's language is not just simplified adult language.
The best children's authors reflect a richness and complexity in their writing that will not bore young readers. But then, it seems that such writers are often passed by when assignments for writing textbooks are "handed out." The same can be said for textbooks for adults, unfortunately.
On June 17 of this year, JMS (Joe Straczynski) the author of Babylon 5, posted the following on the newsgroup rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated:
Amusingly enough, on the Trek front, Bryce Zabel (the creator of Dark Skies)
and I got together and wrote a treatment earlier this year that specified how
to save ST and develop a series that would restore the series in a big way. I
actually think it could be a hell of a show. Whether that ever goes anywhere
with Paramount, who knows?
I, for one, would love to see him take over Trek and make it an interesting show again. He also mentioned that he was offered a job as executive producer on Enterprise, but turned it down, I believe it was because he didn't want to exec. for a show that's really not his, creatively. However, my memory is fuzzy on that point.
Her conclusion is that there will be so many problems with the more than 100,000 paperless voting terminals to be used in the November presidential election that the fiasco will dwarf Florida's hanging chad debacle of 2000."
Recently on a radio interview I heard the investigative reporter Greg Palast make this exact point, with the addition that the fiasco will be by design. Palast also said that, as bad as the electronic voting machines are, this year the real problems will be happening outside the polling place, with policies and programs such as the "Help America Vote" act, which are designed to disenfranchise voters the same way they were disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.
Palast points out that there is a decidedly racist agenda to these voting shenanigans, which he believes are bipartisan, and I believe he is also in favor of using simple paper ballots a la Canada, or using on-site optical readers the way they were used in the non-hanging chad parts of Florida in 2000
The point then is that the chaos likely to occur in November will cover up / give room to maneuver to those who wish the election to go a certain way.
Anyway, I've been looking all over the web to find that program to link to it, but maybe I actually heard it on a real radio this time, because it's nowhere to be found.
Slashdot Mirror
True enough, assuming that people are aware of the issues and where representatives and candidates stand on them. However, there's an entire public relations industry built up to obscure people's knowledge of what politicians actually stand for. They haven't (yet) been able to hide politicians' votes and positions from those who have time and energy to do their own research, but that's why people talk so much about candidate "electability" and "empathy with the common person" contributing to that electability - it's because the actual issues and the nuts and bolts of implementing them have been drowned out by image.
It's also why, in the last election, many Republicans actually thought George Bush held to policies (such as concerning the environment, etc.) that were actually policies held by Kerry and not Bush. Policy discussions among major candidates is pretty much off the table in the United States, replaced by fuzzy images and harmless platitudes, at least in the major media.
Your idea of using gmail as an ftp server is interesting. I didn't know you could do that. On the other hand, the kids would all have to be taught how to ftp. They cannot reach the classroom computer at school because it's behind a giant firewall with local IP addresses on the inside. Probably eventually I'll have to go to flash drives -- as they get cheaper, it should be easier to implement that. I wonder, though, if plugging and unplugging a flash drive in Linux is any easier. Does one have to mount them? I'll give it a try this week to see.
Thanks for your reply!
I'm a fifth/sixth grade teacher who still uses floppy drives and floppy disks with my students. It would be great if they could implement floppy behavior to be similar to what windows does. SUSE comes pretty close, actually, but I'm always afraid to try other Linux distros to avoid the hassle of floppy drives, since some seem to want to mount the drives, and mounting the drives (and unmounting them), while not impossible for a fifth grader to do, is next to impossible for 32 fifth graders to do and remember to do.
Anyway, I hope when they think usability, they also consider usability for kids.
Don't get me started on this topic!!! Okay, you did, but I'm quitting now. I don't think we'll ever see cheap broadband until we confront the whole system that's stealing us blind. It's like all the lobbying that Microsoft does to keep out open source, and all the lobbying cable companies do to actually pass laws to make it illegal for city governments to set up their own broadband services. Sheesh...................
Yes, all I needed to see was that it was on Fox News, and I would assume that he'd be a shill protecting corporate interests. Fox News - the corporate propaganda channel. Always consider the source!
But desktops can deliver a few things that mobiles can't....like not burning your laptop...and the best bang for the buck performance as well as upgradability...though mini-agp and soon to be mini-pcie (?) will help notebooks with some of that
I agree.
To me, the original statement seems backwards. Users have always wanted mobility, but it's only lately that PDA's and laptops, etc. have finally delivered the capability to do want you want with them, and yet have them be mobile. So it's not humbled by mobility so much as the maturation of mobile technologies.
I would love to see the fall season in China, though.
1) handing over some money/bribes.
2) making sure they can listen in on conversations
3) They did something like this to Google a few years back. Even now google experiences outages all the time. I guess this is just the way the chinese gov't is used to doing business.
I totally agree. I can't help but think that if skype gives them the ability to listen and record conversations, it will no longer be such a big deal. How that would work on a peer-to-peer network, I don't know, but I remember being floored when I first got on the skype to China and realized that they couldn't decode the encryptian on the call, or on the attachments that I sent. I knew it wouldn't last.
Other than interoperability with Windows, particularly with Windows printer sharing over networks, and having a clipboard that is common to all applications, there is one big category that I think should be added to the list of four, and that is:
Discoverability.
This is not my idea, I'm not that smart, but something I picked up from an outstanding article online about the inadequacies of the CUPS web-based interface.
Discoverability means that menus and choices are so clear that, with a little fiddling, a naive user can figure out how it all works without a manual. Anyone who has used the CUPS web interface can see that it teaches absolutely nothing. It might be more convenient than editing a configuration file manually, but it is no more helpful for understanding the choices than the configuration file itself would be. Actually, some of those configuration files are well-enough documented that they are probably better than the CUPS web interface.
A lot of Linux is the same way. Sure, people can figure out the start menu, since it's usually set to act just like Windows in the most popular distributions, but what about the control panel? There's no way that it can teach you anything, whereas Windows is almost annoyingly helpful with little messages that ask opinions and outline choices. Some Linux applications suffer from the same lack of discoverability.
Hey, it's no accident that home schooling works for so many people. Parent participation and parental responsibility make all the difference in the world
When I was a kid, forty years ago, and when public education was esteemed, before the "new this" and "programmed that," my mother was president of the PTA. When we had a monthly PTA meeting, it had to be held in the gym, and it was wall-to-wall people. Nowadays, a school is lucky to get five people to come to a PTA meeting. As far as I can tell, it's the same situation in rich neighborhoods as it is in poor ones.
Educating a child is no more the teacher's responsibility than it's the doctor's responsibility to make sure that the patient takes their daily medicine on time.
Parents make the difference, even if they have no idea of the details of pedagogy. Parents make the difference. Parents in the school. Parents volunteering for those endless bake sales and carnivals, parents monitoring their kids' homework, parents just taking an interest in what goes on at school and will sit with their kid from time to time to see what their homework is.
And what a difference between our culture and Asian culture. I had a Japanese tenant once who ended his job six months early so the next Japanese guy to take that position could finish a whole assignment so that the guy's kid could start kindergarten on time with his class back in Japan. Who in America sacrifices their job, not just for their own kid's enducation, but for their colleague's kid's schooling? Japanese parents value education.
I met a young woman at a university in China whose father was only semi-literate, but still, when she was a child, had stayed with her whenever she did her homework, if only for the moral support. Chinese parents value education.
Parents make the difference
That is in fact exactly what happened to a friend of mine who tried to install Norton "everything and the kitchen sink" on his wife's laptop. It immediately asked to access the net to complete and update his copy of the software, and in the time it took to do that, the laptop became infected.
Firstly, English spelling and grammar are several orders of magnitude more complex than a computer language. Secondly, the mental skills needed to program with correct syntax are different than the skills needed to express oneself with words. (In fact, one person responding to this topic put it pretty well when he expressed his annoyance at people criticizing his written form when his goal was clear expression of ideas. He noted that he could, if required, edit his writing to comform to "standards" but that was not his priority. You might differ in your opinion of his priorities, but it perfectly illustrates how the mental skills are different.)
So it really should be no surprise that, when dealing with a Slashdot crowd, you might see sloppy spelling. I mean spellling.
I mean, computer nerds are, if nothing else, known for their propensity for nonconformance in the face of arbitrary rules. Computer syntax is not arbitrary, but natural language rules often are.
There seems to be a lot of arguing back and forth about the user interface, but quite frankly I think that the user interfaces of gnome and kde and the distros that use them are just fine. I think, as you do, that their interfaces are just as serviceable as Windows or Mac.
There are some things that need to change, though. One thing, which I read about from time to time is the lack of a consistent clipboard in Linux. That's a big one to me.
Another factor, though, which I don't see much mention of, is the lack of good error messages and other systme-level feedback in Linux.
My typical example of this is getting printers to work. I'm no Linux expert, but I do know more about it than Mom and Pop at least. But getting a printer to work that's attached to a Windows machine is always a headache. I pray that it works the first time, and sometimes it does, but more likely than not it doesn't. So where's the problem? Is it CUPS? Is it Samba? Or somewhere else? There are no error messages whatsoever to give me clue.. Instead, the system either reports nothing, or reports that printing was successfully spooled. However, nothing emerges from the printer, so it's always some manner of guess and check. Once it finally works, it works forever, but I'm afraid to even touch the printer configuration for fear of screwing it up again.
Another example is a machine I dual boot into Linux or Windows. In Linux, all of a sudden the network connection was incredibly sporadic. I finally gave up using the computer and went to another, as I didn't have time to tweak this and discover that to figure out the problem.
Later I booted the same machine into Windows, and as Windows started up it informed me that there was an IP address conflict and that it would therefore deactivate the network card. Well, once I knew that, it was easy to fix the problem for both windows and linux.
Anyway, that's what I mean by lack of error messages and system feedback in Linux. And that's the level where I think Linux needs the most improvement.
Not only is it unwise to let private monopolies in broadband develop because of the excess costs to support lobbiests and bribes to elected officials, it's also unwise to institutionalize private monopolies as the gatekeepers to our information. Democracy may be cranky and ineffient, but the alternatives are much worse.
So Canada has a higher population density?
I found out recently that the Chinese name for the red panda (a smaller cousin to the more familiar Giant Panda) translates to Fire Fox.
So, what I thought was a red fox on the Firefox logo is actually a panda?
How easy is it to swap out the hard drive on the mac mini and replace it with one of the larger ones that I have laying around here? From remarks about memory I would assume it voids the warranty, but it might be worth the risk to have 250 gigs rather than 40.
along those lines, is a CD with OS X included with the mac mini, or is it like those cheap windows pc's that sometimes come with no XP CD, but rather a hidden partition with the installation files and drivers?
Sorry to comment my own post, but one of the reasons for the many steps in printing was that I'm printing over a network using Samba
There are many usability issues that make me wish I had the money for an Apple, or even winxp. But one that I'd like to highlight now is the relative lack of feedback to commands vs Dos, windows, or apple.
I actually haven't touched the configuration of any of my machines in six months (and the nice thing is, of course, that they all still work perfectly -- not much ongoing maintenance needed), so I can't remember clear examples. But so often, it seems like I'd type something and I thought I knew what it was supposed to do, but it apparantly didn't, and there was no error message to let me know that it hadn't found something to let it work, or whatever.
This sort of thing happened in many areas. One that comes to mind, though, is printing, where everything seems to work fine, no error messages, and everything spooled correctly, yet nothing prints. And since there are several steps in the chain of actually printing something, it's a hassle to figure out which step is the problem. If there was some sort of feedback vis a vis success / failure it would be nice.
As a non-technical sort, perhaps I'm asking for something that's not reasonable and I don't realize it. However, I don't recall having so many problems like that with dos, windows, or apple.
However, the Americans censored large chunks of it before anyone could see it -- ( I've always assumed the censoring was because there would be evidence of Iraq trading illegally with Halliburton and other American companies.)
Kind of reminds you of the censoring of the 911 reports to remove evidence of Saudi involvement, doesn't it? Makes you wonder what else they might be hiding........
Many children are turned off by reading because it is "boring". That's because the books they're forced to read in school have far less complexity and richness than the language children use verbally every day.
I don't disagree with these statements, except that instead of blaming k12 educators, I'd blame the politicians and publishing corporations that force K12 educators to use their books, and it's true that books - almost any nonfiction books, not just "watered down" ones - don't have the complexity and richness of everyday children's language. However, that richness and complexity extends itself in different ways than either adult language or standard English written language.
This is also why I disagree with the post following this one that implies that any competent adult writer can adapt something for chidren by simplifying it. Children's language is not just simplified adult language.
The best children's authors reflect a richness and complexity in their writing that will not bore young readers. But then, it seems that such writers are often passed by when assignments for writing textbooks are "handed out." The same can be said for textbooks for adults, unfortunately.
Amusingly enough, on the Trek front, Bryce Zabel (the creator of Dark Skies) and I got together and wrote a treatment earlier this year that specified how to save ST and develop a series that would restore the series in a big way. I actually think it could be a hell of a show. Whether that ever goes anywhere with Paramount, who knows?
I, for one, would love to see him take over Trek and make it an interesting show again. He also mentioned that he was offered a job as executive producer on Enterprise, but turned it down, I believe it was because he didn't want to exec. for a show that's really not his, creatively. However, my memory is fuzzy on that point.
It's by Mark Fiore and available at the San Francisco Chronicle here
Recently on a radio interview I heard the investigative reporter Greg Palast make this exact point, with the addition that the fiasco will be by design. Palast also said that, as bad as the electronic voting machines are, this year the real problems will be happening outside the polling place, with policies and programs such as the "Help America Vote" act, which are designed to disenfranchise voters the same way they were disenfranchised in Florida in 2000.
Palast points out that there is a decidedly racist agenda to these voting shenanigans, which he believes are bipartisan, and I believe he is also in favor of using simple paper ballots a la Canada, or using on-site optical readers the way they were used in the non-hanging chad parts of Florida in 2000
The point then is that the chaos likely to occur in November will cover up / give room to maneuver to those who wish the election to go a certain way.
Anyway, I've been looking all over the web to find that program to link to it, but maybe I actually heard it on a real radio this time, because it's nowhere to be found.
I did find a link to a Palast article from the San Francisco Chronicle that touches on this problem of voting disenfranchisement. It's subtitled "It's not too hard to get your vote lost -- if some politicians want it to be lost" Here's another link to an article in The Nation Magazine entitled Vanishing Votes
For those interested in more of Palast's writings, they can be found at www.gregpalast.com
Oh! I remember now. It was a video on CSPAN on the Washington Weekly program. It's an hour-long interview and call-in show with Palast located here
Thanks!