One thing to keep in mind with these ultra-portable devices is that it's bad to pass judgment on them before you've held one in you hands and used it for a while. Remember the initial response to the iPod (no wireless, less space than Nomad, lame.).
People who were expecting something other than an enlarged iPhone miss the point of the device. The point is that an iPhone's functionality can be significantly improved for many applications simply by making it larger. Apple's been watching people do things with the iPhone that no one would have considered possible on a cell-phone a couple years ago (photo editing, on you cell phone! really?!) and now they are asking if it makes sense to make it a bit larger but retain a lot of the functionality of the iPhone. They are betting that there are a lot of uses for such a device.
Now people are complaining that the iPad doesn't do enough. Over the years PC manufacturers have done irreparable harm to the image of tablet computing by trying to cram every feature they can think of into them. Apple's approach is to take things they know will work, and then add other features to the device if there is significant demand for them, and when they are fully ready to be rolled out. Apple's approach has consistently resulted in a better user experience.
I honestly don't believe it's possible to force your ideology onto your children. No matter how much they believe you when they are young, they will probably make up their own minds when they are teenagers.
What I am talking about is the need to teach children what is truly important, which is how to be an adult. Schools don't do that. Schools get in the way of that (for the reasons I've stated above). I don't believe that it makes sense to waste time trying to get your children to listen to someone lecture them all day long and then try to use what little time is left to teach them the important things. And I think a parent needs to be able to make those kinds of decisions in raising their children.
Um, that situation is thousands of times better than the school I attended, where academic performance was practically frowned upon, as simply stating you got a good grade on an exam could be interpreted as an insult to your peers.
It sounds to me like we are complaining about the same situation. I don't care whether it's academics or athletics we are talking about. Trying to make that distinction is missing the larger point I am trying to make.
What exactly are you doing to raise your kids so that they don't come to highly critical and sweeping generalizations when they meet my children in the workplace?
It seems to me that there is no shortage of people like that being produced by the public education system. Children learn a lot through example. The example you set, as their parent, has a lot to do with it. Also the examples set by other adults they interact with and their peers has a lot to do with this. On the other hand, when a teacher talks about cultural sensitivity, then hands a student an F because they have poor reading comprehension, what is the child learning? Please don't tell me that they shouldn't dumb-down schools because that isn't what I'm saying.
Here is the problem. When you teach children that they should grade people the same way we grade meet, you are teaching them to think of other people as objects. You can't just say to someone that they're worthless because they can't read or they're bad at math or sports or some other thing. People are more complicated than that, they are not a food product for our consumption
s my son bound to be a liar and my daughter a whore, because they did not receive a proper christian homeschooling?
We live in a society that teaches young people that it is glamorous and desirable to be liars and whores. If they accept that message, then they will accept the lifestyle. People are individuals and they set their own course. Plenty of lairs and whores come from the "traditional" christian upbringing. Often their parents are lying hypocrites themselves.
Here is the main point I am trying to make: Traditional school is very bad. Homeschooling is only a perfect alternative if you are a perfect parent, but it seems to me that it is often a better one. In that case, I think parents should decide the right course of action to make sure the needs of their children are being met as best they can. Will they be right all the time? No, of course not.
I agree, but I think that in ones early life, you need your parent or a loving adult to hold your hand and guide you through the process. I feel like sending your kids to school is like throwing them in a river and expecting them to swim upstream.
I think that once they are introduced to the world, and know a bit about it, then you can cut them loose (as they become a teenager) so long as they have a good support structure of loving friends who will be there for them when they need help. I feel like that, too, is missing.
I'm not saying that's what you are trying to teach your children, I am saying that's what you are teaching them. I suppose later on when they put you in a nursing home you will understand that they aren't trying to neglect and ignore you, but rather that they are looking out for your own best interests the same way they learned to do it from you.
Statements like these remove any doubt that a significant proportion of home schoolers are indeed whack jobs that do it for ideological and dogmatic rather than pragmatic reasons.
To a true religious whack-job like myself there is no difference between "ideological and dogmatic" reasons and "pragmatic" reasons. You seem to believe that your life philosophy should be separate from the way go about your day to day life. I submit to you that if that is indeed the case there is no reason at all to have a philosophy.
What it comes down to here is whether or not you support my freedom to practice my religion the way I see fit. Saying that I can believe whatever I want but that I must live the way you say is as contradiction.
You ought to simply come out and say that you don't want me to live as christian, and that you feel that the government should pass laws prohibiting certain aspects of the christian lifestyle which concern you. You ought to say that the government should repeal aspects of the first amendment to allow these kind of bans based on religious grounds. Making a "quality of education" argument, given the state of public education, makes no sense and is disingenuous.
It's better to be at the mercy of whack-job parents than to be at the mercy of whack-job politicians. Especially when you consider that everyone will be at the mercy of a whack-job politician, while only the children of whack-job parents will be at their mercy.
Also, education has to be the single most overrated social institution in existence. Given the amount of time we spend being educated, we learn almost nothing of value.
Secular schools teach children a lot of non-Biblical things besides evolution and geology (if those things even are non-Biblical, I've read the Bible more than once and I don't think they are).
First and foremost, by handing you children off to someone you don't even know, you are teaching your children that you don't care about them and that you are not concerned about their well being. This sets the stage for greater struggles later in life. As we move into adulthood, gaining self-sufficiency will mean severing all bonds to our parents (as dependency was the only remaining bond). The Bible, by contrast, teaches us that parents should love their children, and that children should respect their parents. So yeah, school turns this one on it's head.
Moreover, you are putting your child in and environment where they receive minimal adult attention and are expected to perform. They are taught that their value as a person is dependent on their academic performance, and they are held to a standard that most cannot meet. As a result, many children are told that they are worthless, simply because they are not proficient at math or reading or some other thing. This contradicts the Bible, which teaches that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, that each one of us has something unique to contribute, and that God loves every one of us.
Finally, school teaches objectification. It teaches us that our own value is only in what we can provide for others, and that others are valuable only because of what they can do for us. Students learn to form social hierarchies where they use lies and rumors and gossip to gain advantage over each other. Later, boys learn to lie to girls in order to use them to satisfy sexual urges, while girls learn to submit to that treatment in order to feel valuable. In contrast, the Bible teaches that people have intrinsic value, and that we should not do things out of selfishness or vain conceit, but rather that we should build each other up and take each others burdens while carrying our own loads.
These are fundamental christian values, and a christian parent needs to be directly involved in their child's life in order to teach them. If you have the time to home-school, that is ideal. I think it's also possible to teach good values to a child who is in school, as long as you spend a lot of time with them outside school.
If you've ever attended a school, then you should understand that there are a lot of good reasons you may want to keep your children out of it. I think that those reasons are much more important than trying to enforce some kind of universalized information distribution scheme. Children don't learn much about those subjects in school anyway (they mostly learn about the kinds of things I've discussed above).
1) While it's nice that it has a keyboard dock, it appears that the dock may only support the iPad in portrait mode (they placement of the connector on the long side of the iPad made it seem a bit precarious for putting in a docked mode).
You can also use the apple wireless keyboard with it.
2) Nothing said about mouse support. Seriously, if I'm going to be using it for any type of document creation (and they seem to think people will, as they're providing iWorks in the app store), I don't want to have to use the screen for copy and paste. Lack of mouse support would be a killer for me.
I think very few people would find use for a mouse with this thing. Copy/Paste is very usable on the iPhone (I use the feature all the time).
3) Main screen is nothing but icons to get into applications. With more screen real estate there should be support for widgets on the home screen (as I understand it, iPhones and iPod touches don't allow that--one must jailbreak a phone and do it manually).
Can't argue with you there. Hopefully Apple will see the light and change things up a bit. I sold my original iPhone to my coworker and she promptly jail broke it and unlocked it. I do get a bit jealous of all the neat things she can do on it that I can't do on my 3GS
Apple uses glass in all their iPod, iPhone, MacBook and iMac devices. They switched in response to complaints about the iPod nano scratching, and the way those complaints translated into concerns about the iPhone when the originally announced specs included a plastic screen. Since then Apple has switched their entire line-up to glass, and routinely cites the use of glass in their environmental credentials.
Given how widespread their use of the material in applications similar to this is, I doubt it is much of a concern.
I average about 250 MB a month on my iPhone. Right now I'm at 125 and my billing cycle is half over. I feel like I'm on it too much as it is, so I don't think there's any reason to believe that 250 is too small to be usable.
In their place, according to White House insiders, agency officials, industry executives and congressional sources familiar with Obama's long-awaited plans for the space agency, NASA will look at developing a new "heavy-lift" rocket that one day will take humans and robots to explore beyond low Earth orbit.
I don't get it, wasn't one of the main goals of the project the development of a new heavy lift rocket? Are they saying they will cancel this program and then start over on the heavy lift rocket from scratch? That doesn't make any sense to me.
One of the big difficulties I have in understanding evolution is the process of gene syntheses. It seems reasonable that over time certain combinations of genes can win out over others, and certainly in bacteria you see this horizontal gene transfer happen all the time. You even see it in plants now thanks to genetic engineering, and before that you saw it in a more limited way thanks to viruses and cross-pollination and things like that. But all these things have to do with the transfer of genetic information between life-forms.
The question in my mind is where did all the genes come from in the first place. Proteins are complex macro-molecules. It's not like one protein that catalyzes one reaction can simply mutate into a different protein that catalyzes a different reaction. It's more of an all or nothing thing. It doesn't seem like you would ever see transitional "evolutionary" forms of proteins for that reason. Worse still, you can't (as far as we know) start with a working a protein and reverse-transcribe from it into a strand of DNA or RNA that could code for it.
I'd like to point out that this is not true if you really look at things objectively. The reason that this perception exists is the "Made in China" branding that they slap on everything. Of course, many cheap things have their final assembly occurring in China. However, if you were to break down the item's manufacture on a value-added basis, you would hardly that it was primarily made in China. More to the point, all of the really expensive things we buy (houses, cars) or the things we buy a lot of (food, other consumables) are produced domestically (no matter what country you are from).
People around the world should not get caught up in alarmist thinking and remember that the people who are getting screwed are the citizens of China, and that they are getting screwed by their own government, who manipulates the value of their currency in order to keep it artificially low. This is the best argument against allowing Chinese imports, not the (minimal) harm it does here, but the massive harm it does over there.
When you consider social security separately (and arguably you should, since it's a self-contained program)
First of all, something being self contained does not mean it can be considered separately, since it still definitely falls under the realm of government spending.
Secondly, it's only self-contained on paper. In practice the government has been borrowing money from it for the general fund since it's inception and they will soon be paying money into it from the general fund to keep it afloat, unless they decide to cut back benefits in light of the massive federal deficit. Either way, it hardly makes sense to claim it is self-contained in any practical sense of the word.
This was my first thought when I read the article, but I thought that maybe the situation had changed in the last five years since I've been out of academics. Based on the responses to you claim, it seems that it hasn't.
This is really terrifying. Not a single person has seen fit to contradict you. I think the scientific community should be really concerned about this. There is already a lot of low quality work filling up the world of published research with meaningless garbage (I would have said that 1 in 10 papers was worthwhile while I was in college). From the sounds of things it is getting worse, not better.
My company has had a lot of trouble convincing our government clients to go with fixed firm pricing. Ultimately, it comes down to control. They like cost plus because it keeps them in charge, they continually approve additional work and ask for things to be redone particular way, and if it costs more it costs more. With fixed firm, they can't really micro-manage us because we will come back and say that it's not what were planning on doing and we can't afford to change it under the fixed firm price.
There's also the perception that companies can make a lot more profit on fixed firm (which is true, but the risk of losing money is greater also).
I think fixed firm is a better way to go for everyone involved, so it will be neat to see if this works out. On the other hand, I am skeptical that it will pass congress for the reasons I've mentioned above.
A lot of people seem to think that this will lead to corporate profit-taking, or that it will lead to less accountability for government contractors. That is simply not true, since the companies operating under such a contract are required to deliver. Companies failing to perform are still legally required to meet their obligations, so poor decision making would lead to bankruptcy. Likewise, there is a huge incentive to try to lower costs, because any cost savings will be profit at the end of the contract.
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One thing to keep in mind with these ultra-portable devices is that it's bad to pass judgment on them before you've held one in you hands and used it for a while. Remember the initial response to the iPod (no wireless, less space than Nomad, lame.).
People who were expecting something other than an enlarged iPhone miss the point of the device. The point is that an iPhone's functionality can be significantly improved for many applications simply by making it larger. Apple's been watching people do things with the iPhone that no one would have considered possible on a cell-phone a couple years ago (photo editing, on you cell phone! really?!) and now they are asking if it makes sense to make it a bit larger but retain a lot of the functionality of the iPhone. They are betting that there are a lot of uses for such a device.
Now people are complaining that the iPad doesn't do enough. Over the years PC manufacturers have done irreparable harm to the image of tablet computing by trying to cram every feature they can think of into them. Apple's approach is to take things they know will work, and then add other features to the device if there is significant demand for them, and when they are fully ready to be rolled out. Apple's approach has consistently resulted in a better user experience.
I honestly don't believe it's possible to force your ideology onto your children. No matter how much they believe you when they are young, they will probably make up their own minds when they are teenagers.
What I am talking about is the need to teach children what is truly important, which is how to be an adult. Schools don't do that. Schools get in the way of that (for the reasons I've stated above). I don't believe that it makes sense to waste time trying to get your children to listen to someone lecture them all day long and then try to use what little time is left to teach them the important things. And I think a parent needs to be able to make those kinds of decisions in raising their children.
It sounds to me like we are complaining about the same situation. I don't care whether it's academics or athletics we are talking about. Trying to make that distinction is missing the larger point I am trying to make.
It seems to me that there is no shortage of people like that being produced by the public education system. Children learn a lot through example. The example you set, as their parent, has a lot to do with it. Also the examples set by other adults they interact with and their peers has a lot to do with this. On the other hand, when a teacher talks about cultural sensitivity, then hands a student an F because they have poor reading comprehension, what is the child learning? Please don't tell me that they shouldn't dumb-down schools because that isn't what I'm saying.
Here is the problem. When you teach children that they should grade people the same way we grade meet, you are teaching them to think of other people as objects. You can't just say to someone that they're worthless because they can't read or they're bad at math or sports or some other thing. People are more complicated than that, they are not a food product for our consumption
We live in a society that teaches young people that it is glamorous and desirable to be liars and whores. If they accept that message, then they will accept the lifestyle. People are individuals and they set their own course. Plenty of lairs and whores come from the "traditional" christian upbringing. Often their parents are lying hypocrites themselves.
Here is the main point I am trying to make: Traditional school is very bad. Homeschooling is only a perfect alternative if you are a perfect parent, but it seems to me that it is often a better one. In that case, I think parents should decide the right course of action to make sure the needs of their children are being met as best they can. Will they be right all the time? No, of course not.
Could I get a second opinion on that Troll rating? I feel like my post was well written, on topic, and was devoid inflammatory language/intent.
Could someone explain to me how this is a Troll?
I hope I am qualified to teach those things on an elementary level, I went to school myself for 17 years after all!
I agree, but I think that in ones early life, you need your parent or a loving adult to hold your hand and guide you through the process. I feel like sending your kids to school is like throwing them in a river and expecting them to swim upstream.
I think that once they are introduced to the world, and know a bit about it, then you can cut them loose (as they become a teenager) so long as they have a good support structure of loving friends who will be there for them when they need help. I feel like that, too, is missing.
I'm not saying that's what you are trying to teach your children, I am saying that's what you are teaching them. I suppose later on when they put you in a nursing home you will understand that they aren't trying to neglect and ignore you, but rather that they are looking out for your own best interests the same way they learned to do it from you.
To a true religious whack-job like myself there is no difference between "ideological and dogmatic" reasons and "pragmatic" reasons. You seem to believe that your life philosophy should be separate from the way go about your day to day life. I submit to you that if that is indeed the case there is no reason at all to have a philosophy.
What it comes down to here is whether or not you support my freedom to practice my religion the way I see fit. Saying that I can believe whatever I want but that I must live the way you say is as contradiction.
You ought to simply come out and say that you don't want me to live as christian, and that you feel that the government should pass laws prohibiting certain aspects of the christian lifestyle which concern you. You ought to say that the government should repeal aspects of the first amendment to allow these kind of bans based on religious grounds. Making a "quality of education" argument, given the state of public education, makes no sense and is disingenuous.
Is it even possible to teach to a lower standard than public schools?
It's better to be at the mercy of whack-job parents than to be at the mercy of whack-job politicians. Especially when you consider that everyone will be at the mercy of a whack-job politician, while only the children of whack-job parents will be at their mercy.
Also, education has to be the single most overrated social institution in existence. Given the amount of time we spend being educated, we learn almost nothing of value.
Secular schools teach children a lot of non-Biblical things besides evolution and geology (if those things even are non-Biblical, I've read the Bible more than once and I don't think they are).
First and foremost, by handing you children off to someone you don't even know, you are teaching your children that you don't care about them and that you are not concerned about their well being. This sets the stage for greater struggles later in life. As we move into adulthood, gaining self-sufficiency will mean severing all bonds to our parents (as dependency was the only remaining bond). The Bible, by contrast, teaches us that parents should love their children, and that children should respect their parents. So yeah, school turns this one on it's head.
Moreover, you are putting your child in and environment where they receive minimal adult attention and are expected to perform. They are taught that their value as a person is dependent on their academic performance, and they are held to a standard that most cannot meet. As a result, many children are told that they are worthless, simply because they are not proficient at math or reading or some other thing. This contradicts the Bible, which teaches that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, that each one of us has something unique to contribute, and that God loves every one of us.
Finally, school teaches objectification. It teaches us that our own value is only in what we can provide for others, and that others are valuable only because of what they can do for us. Students learn to form social hierarchies where they use lies and rumors and gossip to gain advantage over each other. Later, boys learn to lie to girls in order to use them to satisfy sexual urges, while girls learn to submit to that treatment in order to feel valuable. In contrast, the Bible teaches that people have intrinsic value, and that we should not do things out of selfishness or vain conceit, but rather that we should build each other up and take each others burdens while carrying our own loads.
These are fundamental christian values, and a christian parent needs to be directly involved in their child's life in order to teach them. If you have the time to home-school, that is ideal. I think it's also possible to teach good values to a child who is in school, as long as you spend a lot of time with them outside school.
If you've ever attended a school, then you should understand that there are a lot of good reasons you may want to keep your children out of it. I think that those reasons are much more important than trying to enforce some kind of universalized information distribution scheme. Children don't learn much about those subjects in school anyway (they mostly learn about the kinds of things I've discussed above).
I don't think it's meant to be used at a desk.
You can also use the apple wireless keyboard with it.
I think very few people would find use for a mouse with this thing. Copy/Paste is very usable on the iPhone (I use the feature all the time).
Can't argue with you there. Hopefully Apple will see the light and change things up a bit. I sold my original iPhone to my coworker and she promptly jail broke it and unlocked it. I do get a bit jealous of all the neat things she can do on it that I can't do on my 3GS
Apple uses glass in all their iPod, iPhone, MacBook and iMac devices. They switched in response to complaints about the iPod nano scratching, and the way those complaints translated into concerns about the iPhone when the originally announced specs included a plastic screen. Since then Apple has switched their entire line-up to glass, and routinely cites the use of glass in their environmental credentials. Given how widespread their use of the material in applications similar to this is, I doubt it is much of a concern.
I doubt you will have to wait long before someone makes a stylus and a note-taking app for it.
I average about 250 MB a month on my iPhone. Right now I'm at 125 and my billing cycle is half over. I feel like I'm on it too much as it is, so I don't think there's any reason to believe that 250 is too small to be usable.
It sounds like it may be less cost effective too.
I don't get it, wasn't one of the main goals of the project the development of a new heavy lift rocket? Are they saying they will cancel this program and then start over on the heavy lift rocket from scratch? That doesn't make any sense to me.
Maybe they should just end NASA entirely.
One of the big difficulties I have in understanding evolution is the process of gene syntheses. It seems reasonable that over time certain combinations of genes can win out over others, and certainly in bacteria you see this horizontal gene transfer happen all the time. You even see it in plants now thanks to genetic engineering, and before that you saw it in a more limited way thanks to viruses and cross-pollination and things like that. But all these things have to do with the transfer of genetic information between life-forms.
The question in my mind is where did all the genes come from in the first place. Proteins are complex macro-molecules. It's not like one protein that catalyzes one reaction can simply mutate into a different protein that catalyzes a different reaction. It's more of an all or nothing thing. It doesn't seem like you would ever see transitional "evolutionary" forms of proteins for that reason. Worse still, you can't (as far as we know) start with a working a protein and reverse-transcribe from it into a strand of DNA or RNA that could code for it.
What do you think?
I'd like to point out that this is not true if you really look at things objectively. The reason that this perception exists is the "Made in China" branding that they slap on everything. Of course, many cheap things have their final assembly occurring in China. However, if you were to break down the item's manufacture on a value-added basis, you would hardly that it was primarily made in China. More to the point, all of the really expensive things we buy (houses, cars) or the things we buy a lot of (food, other consumables) are produced domestically (no matter what country you are from).
People around the world should not get caught up in alarmist thinking and remember that the people who are getting screwed are the citizens of China, and that they are getting screwed by their own government, who manipulates the value of their currency in order to keep it artificially low. This is the best argument against allowing Chinese imports, not the (minimal) harm it does here, but the massive harm it does over there.
What's wrong with an Apollo capsule? It seems to have been an extremely successful design. . .
First of all, something being self contained does not mean it can be considered separately, since it still definitely falls under the realm of government spending.
Secondly, it's only self-contained on paper. In practice the government has been borrowing money from it for the general fund since it's inception and they will soon be paying money into it from the general fund to keep it afloat, unless they decide to cut back benefits in light of the massive federal deficit. Either way, it hardly makes sense to claim it is self-contained in any practical sense of the word.
This was my first thought when I read the article, but I thought that maybe the situation had changed in the last five years since I've been out of academics. Based on the responses to you claim, it seems that it hasn't.
This is really terrifying. Not a single person has seen fit to contradict you. I think the scientific community should be really concerned about this. There is already a lot of low quality work filling up the world of published research with meaningless garbage (I would have said that 1 in 10 papers was worthwhile while I was in college). From the sounds of things it is getting worse, not better.
I'm pretty sure Boeing makes most of their money selling commercial air liners. Just sayin.
My company has had a lot of trouble convincing our government clients to go with fixed firm pricing. Ultimately, it comes down to control. They like cost plus because it keeps them in charge, they continually approve additional work and ask for things to be redone particular way, and if it costs more it costs more. With fixed firm, they can't really micro-manage us because we will come back and say that it's not what were planning on doing and we can't afford to change it under the fixed firm price.
There's also the perception that companies can make a lot more profit on fixed firm (which is true, but the risk of losing money is greater also).
I think fixed firm is a better way to go for everyone involved, so it will be neat to see if this works out. On the other hand, I am skeptical that it will pass congress for the reasons I've mentioned above.
A lot of people seem to think that this will lead to corporate profit-taking, or that it will lead to less accountability for government contractors. That is simply not true, since the companies operating under such a contract are required to deliver. Companies failing to perform are still legally required to meet their obligations, so poor decision making would lead to bankruptcy. Likewise, there is a huge incentive to try to lower costs, because any cost savings will be profit at the end of the contract.