Maybe they're not overly fond of the Google Cache.
Re:Government size isnt important to me
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
The Federal budget for education is small because because it's primarily a local matter. After all, it's unclear that it's necessary to have that much Federal oversight or control over it.
That way, the obnoxious Bible-thumpers can pester their own school boards, but it's pretty hard for them to infect any other school district. Ditto for the leftists who'd like to replace "Hamlet" with "Betty the Yeti: An Eco-Fable".
As for budget voting by the masses, you'd probably end up with people supporting money to preserve cute animals or providing free American flags and forgetting about, say, dealing with space junk or holding EM spectrum auctions.
Re:Piracy is Constitutional.
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 1
Sure I can. Acceptance of a product normally also stipulates that one will obey the usual laws, such as giving whatever payment was requested. People should keep their word.
If you want to distribute your own IP under an extremely generous license, absolutely nothing is stopping you. Go ahead.
However, if somebody wishes to distribute his own IP, and as a condition requests that people abide by fairly tame restrictions, it seems indecent to take his IP and reject the restrictions.
And as to whether it's "speech", it's not the infringer's own speech to give. I doubt there are people so inarticulate that they can communicate effectively only by sharing.MP3s of other peoples' songs.
Re:I'm sick of dumbshits saying GWB is great
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 1
Whiner.
1. Economies are cyclical. WJC knew it, Bush (both of 'em) knew it. Economists know it.
2. A fair amount of the boom/was/ a bubble. People got greedy, and they're getting burned for it now. Value hasn't evaporated; it just wasn't there if you look at P/E ratios and so forth. In other words, a lot of the boom was collective stupidity, and WJC did very little to discourage that. Now honesty's coming back into vogue (as Mr. Ebbers is about to find out, I suspect...)
3. No, GWB did not impress me post 9/11 -- I find action more meaningful than lofty phrases. I was mildly surprised to find out that he survived the trip to NYC, actually -- al-Qaeda might have guessed that he would visit and planted a sniper or car bomb.
4. al-Qaeda isn't motivated by money. Is that the only motivation that you understand? If so, that's pretty pathetic.
5. GWB did not "carpet bomb". Hell, the "war" was practically a short manuever affair in the desert consisting of wiping out their air defenses and collecting prisoners. The UN weapons inspectors were kicked out by your friend Saddam, and Saddam has publically stated that they're staying out.
6. If somebody attacks you and lives, it's usually stupid to ignore the possibility that they'll attack you again.
7. Go ask the bureaucrats about the 9/11 funds. Some of the next-of-kin stand to get very, very large payments.
8. Clinton cared more about image than doing things properly. Hence, his willingness to pull out of Somalia after minor losses, his insistance on having a female attorney general for the sole reason of having a female cabinet member (pretty obvious when he nominates three women in a row for the same job, and then makes a selling point of it), his repeated deceptions of a court until his image became incompatible with the evidence, his willingness to have empty gestures like lobbing a couple of ineffectual missiles at bin Laden...
Re:The Constitution doesn't need amending
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Read the Fourteenth Amendment again. It wasn't put their by the Founders, but it's certainly been law for a long time (by US standards).
Bogus. There stated objective is killing off the infidels and leaving the world only for Muslims -- i.e. everybody else has to convert or die. It's rather unlikely they'll "win".
I'd be much, much happier if reporters actually had the guts to ask tough questions of politicians, in person (e.g. at press conferences where the politicos can't just forward the question to a staff member for a typed response days later). Their job consists of finding the truth, not merely relaying what an administration wants people to hear.
Communism and other "patterned" systems -- systems which prefer to maintain a specific distributional pattern, such as equality -- instrinsically require control to either prevent people from breaking the pattern or to correct any violations. Somebody's a talented musician, more so than the Chairman's own daughter, and lots of people would like to disrupt the pattern by paying him more? Oops.
Capitalism requires far less control over the people, since it regards fewer actions or transactions as fundamentally illegitimate.
Re:The word is treason
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
Normalcy. (Was it Harding who said that?)
Prior to 9/11, there were probably a large number of Americans who were completely oblivious to the fact that numerous people, inside and outside the country, have a violent hatred of the citizens and/or the government for a variety of reasons.
At some point, 'tho, speech should probably become probable cause... if somebody is constantly propagandizing "Death to America and the Zionists", for instance, it might be worthwhile to investigate.
Are you sure they're essential part of school? For which subjects would that be so?
In biology or chemistry, I think I'd rather put the resources into a decently equipped lab so the students could get some basic experimental skills -- and the experience would probably pique their interest more than mere lectures.
In mathematics, it's the concepts that are important more than the medium. Mathematics is an inherently abstract field once one gets past the basics of addition and subtraction -- and a blackboard should suffice to illustrate, whenever illustrations are needed. By the time students reach the level of calculus, they should be quite competent at abstract reasoning, and shouldn't have to resort to computational aids to demonstrate understanding.
English, history, and similar courses heavy on comprehension, analysis, criticism and discussion of source material would benefit more from a live in-person chat that goes at the pace of speech rather than typing -- and forcing the students to speak or write may encourage thinking ahead and developing coherent thought by reducing any dependency on the backspace key. Need to teach, say, medieval European history? I'd suggest that Coulton or Tuchman would provide much more in-depth readings than most anything likely to be found online. Hamlet? He's in the library; Brutus, as well, and if you want to do an in-class reading, that's probably easier from paper instead of a monitor.
And with in-class essays, there's an additional benefit to requiring pen and paper only: the students/know/ that they have to organize their thesis and supporting concepts before the write, or risk having to start over with additional paper and the clock still ticking.
Music? Well, computer-generated music is an area of active research, and it might be interesting to see the connections between mathematics and music -- but that's generally not what schools have in mind, is it? Instead, they normally prefer more practical matters such as singing or playing instruments, where again computers aren't terribly important.
And so forth. Even today, if a school district had/no/ computers in its classrooms, I don't think there would be much justification to call the students deprived -- so long as the faculty and staff are competent enough to not need technological crutches.
You should probably be thankful that she didn't fail you in the mistaken belief that you made it up...
Style does matter enormously -- both inside school and outside. A factually correct, but grammatically awful essay will quite possibly do far worse than a honey-smooth line of hooey; a cynic might suggest that this is correct scoring, on the basis of expected real-world rewards.
During middle and high school, I used to compete in a Junior Academy of Science competition. In my state, the format was completely oral: ten minutes exposition, five minutes Q&A from the judge. The main lesson I took away from several years of that was how much presentation mattered compared to content, because I'd seen for myself how well I could do with pretty decent speaking skills (for a student) paired with absolutely unremarkable technical work. The whole experience contributed a lot to my present cynical bitterness, and an aversion to making excessive claims, selectively presenting only the most compliant data, or otherwise deliberately distorting the truth.
I'm in Pittsburgh, and the city school district has, apparently(*), so pissed off a number of foundations that contribute to the point that they're backing off until the district administration and the school board clean up their acts.
(*) Judging from the local paper. I don't have kids, however, and technically I'm a resident of a suburb (and thus not a Pittsburgh voter), so I don't follow it/that/ much.
For instance, the district isn't doing too well financially. Well, that's not too surprising; the economic downturn probably affects how much governments are willing to pay. However, it's not helping that there are/tiny/ neighborhood schools, operating well under capacity, that the board wants to keep open -- because the parents whose kids attend them insist that those schools stay open, even if it's vastly uneconomical, and these parents vote without giving a damn about the cost to everybody else. The superintendant, for his part, hasn't helped things by making one of his first notable actions the requisitioning of new expensive furniture for his office, if memory serves, and perhaps other extravagances.
At least, to my knowledge, there's none of the obnoxious religious wars about Creationism or book banning going on in the district...
The teacher can always try a plausible Google search, or even pick a stylistically distinctive phrase and Google/that/...
Another, probably more brutal, tactic would be to randomly pick students and demand 5-minute extemporaneous oral explanations of their theses, along with Q&A. If they hold up under that and demonstrate understanding, it's much more likely to be their own work.
Hm, the major conference proceedings and journals -- at least, fairly recent ones -- that I look at tend to be online. Likewise, many concepts that interest me, such as numerical methods for singular value decomposition or nonlinear least-squares fitting, have pretty darn good tutorials and such online.
If I want the text of Shakespearean tragedies, or other copyright-long-expired classic literature, it's also quite possibly there, too.
Is this sort of thing not true for less-technical areas?
The UN War Crimes Tribunal doesn't see things your way, either -- just ask Jonathan Randal, who's involuntarily testifying in Milosevic's trial after being forced to via subpoena.
"I speak of the computer that is to come after me, a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate. Yet, I will design it for you..."
Fewer witnesses plus stalls in which to hide the bodies... more seriously, sexual assault of those already at a disadvantage 'coz their pants are down.
They might also be looking to catch drug use on the job, but that's not really a safety issue unless it's coupled with industrial equipment or hazardous toys, is it?
Hmmm. Tape drives might be cheaper if the masses wanted them and thus justified mass-production -- but pre-built desktop computers very, very rarely include a tape drive these days, even as the included hard disks get ever larger.
You'd think that in the days of "well, format your hard disk and reinstall your OS, thus wiping out all your data" tech support, that people would be concerned, but I guess it just isn't happening. Perhaps it would still be if it weren't for fancy automated installers and CDs/DVDs reducing the need for the ol' fashioned (unreliable...) floppy shuffle...
Hm. Storing Internet snapshots(*)? Or, perhaps, using a never-overwriting filesystem that keeps all versions of a file around, or at least a full journal...
(*) Or, for that matter, do as the Seagate press release suggests and store one Library_Of_Congress unit in a notebook computer...
'course, that's if the heating, cooling and laser don't add too much overhead in terms of size, weight and cost. It's not specified in either article.
Even something as mundane as switching to high-resolution uncompressed true-color movies might take advantage of more space. Say, 2048x1536, 24-bit color, 24fps = what, 216MBps required, which should be something like 1.48TB for a 2hr movie.;)
('course, there's the obvious question of how do you transport that, and whether the drive can sustain sufficient throughput... That kind of network bandwidth available to consumers would probably make Jack Valenti spontaneously combust, but unless newer, far denser DVDs or a suitable replacement media appeared, uncompressed video ain't too useful to him.)
If APIs and system designs were documented first to the point that people agreed upon them, then perhaps you wouldn't have had to make significant design changes later.
Programmers should not write code, hand it off, and say "it documents itself". Have you read the entire source code for the GNU C Library? Unless you're a developer for it, it's rather unlikely. That's because the writers actually had a clue: they wrote documentation so that you don't have to use the code as a manual. If you're working on projects of any significant size, the same applies.
Slashdot Mirror
Smack 'em. Just because MIT is an educational institution does not mean that everything they do is for educational activities.
/as/ a research matter (and not just in getting money /for/ research)? No, not really.
Was it for scholarly criticism? Was the drawing important
Hmmm. I wonder what the MIT penalty for plagiarism is. Expulsion? I wonder what they'll do to the responsible employees.
Maybe they're not overly fond of the Google Cache.
The Federal budget for education is small because because it's primarily a local matter. After all, it's unclear that it's necessary to have that much Federal oversight or control over it.
That way, the obnoxious Bible-thumpers can pester their own school boards, but it's pretty hard for them to infect any other school district. Ditto for the leftists who'd like to replace "Hamlet" with "Betty the Yeti: An Eco-Fable".
As for budget voting by the masses, you'd probably end up with people supporting money to preserve cute animals or providing free American flags and forgetting about, say, dealing with space junk or holding EM spectrum auctions.
Sure I can. Acceptance of a product normally also stipulates that one will obey the usual laws, such as giving whatever payment was requested. People should keep their word.
.MP3s of other peoples' songs.
If you want to distribute your own IP under an extremely generous license, absolutely nothing is stopping you. Go ahead.
However, if somebody wishes to distribute his own IP, and as a condition requests that people abide by fairly tame restrictions, it seems indecent to take his IP and reject the restrictions.
And as to whether it's "speech", it's not the infringer's own speech to give. I doubt there are people so inarticulate that they can communicate effectively only by sharing
Whiner.
/was/ a bubble. People got greedy, and they're getting burned for it now. Value hasn't evaporated; it just wasn't there if you look at P/E ratios and so forth. In other words, a lot of the boom was collective stupidity, and WJC did very little to discourage that. Now honesty's coming back into vogue (as Mr. Ebbers is about to find out, I suspect...)
1. Economies are cyclical. WJC knew it, Bush (both of 'em) knew it. Economists know it.
2. A fair amount of the boom
3. No, GWB did not impress me post 9/11 -- I find action more meaningful than lofty phrases. I was mildly surprised to find out that he survived the trip to NYC, actually -- al-Qaeda might have guessed that he would visit and planted a sniper or car bomb.
4. al-Qaeda isn't motivated by money. Is that the only motivation that you understand? If so, that's pretty pathetic.
5. GWB did not "carpet bomb". Hell, the "war" was practically a short manuever affair in the desert consisting of wiping out their air defenses and collecting prisoners. The UN weapons inspectors were kicked out by your friend Saddam, and Saddam has publically stated that they're staying out.
6. If somebody attacks you and lives, it's usually stupid to ignore the possibility that they'll attack you again.
7. Go ask the bureaucrats about the 9/11 funds. Some of the next-of-kin stand to get very, very large payments.
8. Clinton cared more about image than doing things properly. Hence, his willingness to pull out of Somalia after minor losses, his insistance on having a female attorney general for the sole reason of having a female cabinet member (pretty obvious when he nominates three women in a row for the same job, and then makes a selling point of it), his repeated deceptions of a court until his image became incompatible with the evidence, his willingness to have empty gestures like lobbing a couple of ineffectual missiles at bin Laden...
Read the Fourteenth Amendment again. It wasn't put their by the Founders, but it's certainly been law for a long time (by US standards).
Bogus. There stated objective is killing off the infidels and leaving the world only for Muslims -- i.e. everybody else has to convert or die. It's rather unlikely they'll "win".
There's no harm in asking.
I'd be much, much happier if reporters actually had the guts to ask tough questions of politicians, in person (e.g. at press conferences where the politicos can't just forward the question to a staff member for a typed response days later). Their job consists of finding the truth, not merely relaying what an administration wants people to hear.
Communism and other "patterned" systems -- systems which prefer to maintain a specific distributional pattern, such as equality -- instrinsically require control to either prevent people from breaking the pattern or to correct any violations. Somebody's a talented musician, more so than the Chairman's own daughter, and lots of people would like to disrupt the pattern by paying him more? Oops.
Capitalism requires far less control over the people, since it regards fewer actions or transactions as fundamentally illegitimate.
Normalcy. (Was it Harding who said that?)
Prior to 9/11, there were probably a large number of Americans who were completely oblivious to the fact that numerous people, inside and outside the country, have a violent hatred of the citizens and/or the government for a variety of reasons.
Now they're living in the real world.
At some point, 'tho, speech should probably become probable cause... if somebody is constantly propagandizing "Death to America and the Zionists", for instance, it might be worthwhile to investigate.
Are you sure they're essential part of school? For which subjects would that be so?
/know/ that they have to organize their thesis and supporting concepts before the write, or risk having to start over with additional paper and the clock still ticking.
/no/ computers in its classrooms, I don't think there would be much justification to call the students deprived -- so long as the faculty and staff are competent enough to not need technological crutches.
In biology or chemistry, I think I'd rather put the resources into a decently equipped lab so the students could get some basic experimental skills -- and the experience would probably pique their interest more than mere lectures.
In mathematics, it's the concepts that are important more than the medium. Mathematics is an inherently abstract field once one gets past the basics of addition and subtraction -- and a blackboard should suffice to illustrate, whenever illustrations are needed. By the time students reach the level of calculus, they should be quite competent at abstract reasoning, and shouldn't have to resort to computational aids to demonstrate understanding.
English, history, and similar courses heavy on comprehension, analysis, criticism and discussion of source material would benefit more from a live in-person chat that goes at the pace of speech rather than typing -- and forcing the students to speak or write may encourage thinking ahead and developing coherent thought by reducing any dependency on the backspace key. Need to teach, say, medieval European history? I'd suggest that Coulton or Tuchman would provide much more in-depth readings than most anything likely to be found online. Hamlet? He's in the library; Brutus, as well, and if you want to do an in-class reading, that's probably easier from paper instead of a monitor.
And with in-class essays, there's an additional benefit to requiring pen and paper only: the students
Music? Well, computer-generated music is an area of active research, and it might be interesting to see the connections between mathematics and music -- but that's generally not what schools have in mind, is it? Instead, they normally prefer more practical matters such as singing or playing instruments, where again computers aren't terribly important.
And so forth. Even today, if a school district had
You should probably be thankful that she didn't fail you in the mistaken belief that you made it up...
Style does matter enormously -- both inside school and outside. A factually correct, but grammatically awful essay will quite possibly do far worse than a honey-smooth line of hooey; a cynic might suggest that this is correct scoring, on the basis of expected real-world rewards.
During middle and high school, I used to compete in a Junior Academy of Science competition. In my state, the format was completely oral: ten minutes exposition, five minutes Q&A from the judge. The main lesson I took away from several years of that was how much presentation mattered compared to content, because I'd seen for myself how well I could do with pretty decent speaking skills (for a student) paired with absolutely unremarkable technical work. The whole experience contributed a lot to my present cynical bitterness, and an aversion to making excessive claims, selectively presenting only the most compliant data, or otherwise deliberately distorting the truth.
Don't forget political infighting.
/that/ much.
/tiny/ neighborhood schools, operating well under capacity, that the board wants to keep open -- because the parents whose kids attend them insist that those schools stay open, even if it's vastly uneconomical, and these parents vote without giving a damn about the cost to everybody else. The superintendant, for his part, hasn't helped things by making one of his first notable actions the requisitioning of new expensive furniture for his office, if memory serves, and perhaps other extravagances.
I'm in Pittsburgh, and the city school district has, apparently(*), so pissed off a number of foundations that contribute to the point that they're backing off until the district administration and the school board clean up their acts.
(*) Judging from the local paper. I don't have kids, however, and technically I'm a resident of a suburb (and thus not a Pittsburgh voter), so I don't follow it
For instance, the district isn't doing too well financially. Well, that's not too surprising; the economic downturn probably affects how much governments are willing to pay. However, it's not helping that there are
At least, to my knowledge, there's none of the obnoxious religious wars about Creationism or book banning going on in the district...
The teacher can always try a plausible Google search, or even pick a stylistically distinctive phrase and Google /that/...
Another, probably more brutal, tactic would be to randomly pick students and demand 5-minute extemporaneous oral explanations of their theses, along with Q&A. If they hold up under that and demonstrate understanding, it's much more likely to be their own work.
Hm, the major conference proceedings and journals -- at least, fairly recent ones -- that I look at tend to be online. Likewise, many concepts that interest me, such as numerical methods for singular value decomposition or nonlinear least-squares fitting, have pretty darn good tutorials and such online.
If I want the text of Shakespearean tragedies, or other copyright-long-expired classic literature, it's also quite possibly there, too.
Is this sort of thing not true for less-technical areas?
The UN War Crimes Tribunal doesn't see things your way, either -- just ask Jonathan Randal, who's involuntarily testifying in Milosevic's trial after being forced to via subpoena.
;)
"I speak of the computer that is to come after me, a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate. Yet, I will design it for you..."
Deep Thought, thinking of the Earth, in HHGTTG.
Fewer witnesses plus stalls in which to hide the bodies... more seriously, sexual assault of those already at a disadvantage 'coz their pants are down.
They might also be looking to catch drug use on the job, but that's not really a safety issue unless it's coupled with industrial equipment or hazardous toys, is it?
You have the right to modify it for interoperability. However, you don't have the right to distribute the method...
Nah, not Mars. _Starship Troopers_ was right, it's just that they overestimated the size of the bugs a little...
Blame?
Hmmm. Tape drives might be cheaper if the masses wanted them and thus justified mass-production -- but pre-built desktop computers very, very rarely include a tape drive these days, even as the included hard disks get ever larger.
You'd think that in the days of "well, format your hard disk and reinstall your OS, thus wiping out all your data" tech support, that people would be concerned, but I guess it just isn't happening. Perhaps it would still be if it weren't for fancy automated installers and CDs/DVDs reducing the need for the ol' fashioned (unreliable...) floppy shuffle...
Hm. Storing Internet snapshots(*)? Or, perhaps, using a never-overwriting filesystem that keeps all versions of a file around, or at least a full journal...
;)
(*) Or, for that matter, do as the Seagate press release suggests and store one Library_Of_Congress unit in a notebook computer...
'course, that's if the heating, cooling and laser don't add too much overhead in terms of size, weight and cost. It's not specified in either article.
Even something as mundane as switching to high-resolution uncompressed true-color movies might take advantage of more space. Say, 2048x1536, 24-bit color, 24fps = what, 216MBps required, which should be something like 1.48TB for a 2hr movie.
('course, there's the obvious question of how do you transport that, and whether the drive can sustain sufficient throughput... That kind of network bandwidth available to consumers would probably make Jack Valenti spontaneously combust, but unless newer, far denser DVDs or a suitable replacement media appeared, uncompressed video ain't too useful to him.)
So your spouse can be sure that you're really, really just working late at the office?
If APIs and system designs were documented first to the point that people agreed upon them, then perhaps you wouldn't have had to make significant design changes later.
Programmers should not write code, hand it off, and say "it documents itself". Have you read the entire source code for the GNU C Library? Unless you're a developer for it, it's rather unlikely. That's because the writers actually had a clue: they wrote documentation so that you don't have to use the code as a manual. If you're working on projects of any significant size, the same applies.