"The problem with children nowadays is the parents."
this is ten thousand percent true. my mom (a public high school teacher) once had a parent actually SAY to her, "if driving a log truck is good enough for me, it should be good enough for my kid."
without parents to back them up, teachers are worse than powerless - they're forced to watch as the good kids, with good parents, are left by the side of the road while they spend all their time dealing with the shitheads.
public school has become a babysitting service with a side of education.
again, the complete disconnect between normal people - like you and me - and the public school system.
i can say without any doubt whatsoever that, while there's a chance that the girl may have had sympathetic parents who would have seen the light of reason, the act of "snatching" would have placed the school in legal jeopardy and the teacher's job in jeopardy of a much more immediate sort.
you can if you like. i'm using this particular case as an example of a larger phenomena.
every day, thousands of cases just as real as this one happen all over the country. if you don't want to address the state of public education at large, that's fine. you don't have to.
on further thought, one thing you wrote i take exception to. it's not our "lawsuit happy culture" that's breaking public education.
granted, the single biggest motivating factor, either direct or indirect, on any given person in the public school system is a lawsuit. and yes, that's because of many lawsuits in the past that have cost school districts (and taxpayers) a great deal of money. and yes, some of those lawsuits were probably spurious.
but many weren't. many were completely justified and laudable. in fact, in many of those lawsuits, i'd say that if the parents hadn't sued the school, they would have been negligent. successful criminal prosecutions of abusive teachers deter would-be abusive teachers - likewise, successful lawsuits of school boards with negligent or corrupt hiring practices serves to teach other school boards a lesson to watch their p's and q's.
sadly, the price of being able to file good lawuits is that others can file bad ones. and the two put together is what is breaking public education. not "our lawsuit-happy culture". that answer is just far too easy and emotionally satisfying to be correct.
jerry, what if you tell the student to leave the class and they refuse? what if you give them a detention and they don't show up? what if you give them a suspension and they DO show up? what if you call the parents and they tell you they don't care? what if the parents get mad - at YOU?
of course there's more civilized ways to deal with problems. and when they work, it's much less hassle for everybody.
but what happens when a kid looks you in the eye, digs in her heels, and says "make me"? what then?
i don't mean this to be insulting, but you appear to be completely and utterly divorced from modern day public education.
you're probably somebody who had a decent high school education. i was too. you would probably be just as appalled as i was if you were to sit through one hour of what both my parents have to put up with every day as public high school teachers.
detention? they don't show up. suspension? they keep showing up. usually just to see their friends and piss off the teachers. at some point, if a kid digs in her heels, gets all dubya, and just keeps saying "make me", given that pretty much any kind of punishment by the school is going to be either unenforceable or circumscribed by administration, you have to do something, or else all the other shithead kids see the rules are hollow while the good kids can't get the time and attention from the teachers that they deserve.
parents? they don't give a shit. their attitude here, and a good handful have voiced this explicitly, is that if driving a log truck is good enough for them it should be good enough for their kids. they get angrier at the teacher for calling them in for a conference then they get at the kids for being shitheads. and that's assuming you don't get one of the "my kid's shits don't stink" parents talking about bringing in their lawyer.
administrators? terrified of the superintendent, who in turn is terrified of lawsuits.
and don't even get me started on the "teachers' union" (tm).
the sad fact is that the single biggest element in the public education equation today is lawsuits. spurious ones as well as those with merit. remember, all you lawyer haters out there, many of those lawsuits that helped break public education were completely justified. there have been many, many cases where teachers abused their powers and/or their students.
sadly, the only solution for that problem appears to be creating a new one. in the past, teachers had some wiggle room with discipline, and students had some wiggle room with unruly behavior. no more. everything, on both sides of the fence, is now by the book. and everybody's worse off for it.
as someone with two parents teaching public high school, i logged in (which i rarely do here anymore) just to tell you that, even though it's only february, this is by far the smartest thing i've read on slashdot all year.
yes, windows has games. also MUCH more extensively developed for and supported if you're doing professional audio work. games and audio are what my computer is FOR.
let me know when i can play simcity 4 on ubuntu and have it just work. no tweaking, no experimenting. i want to put a cd in a drive, have the program install, and crash less than once a month. also, i want to be able to use all the windows SC4 utilities like terraformer.
kudos to whoever is willing to help out with this project, but i'm willing to put up with microsuck if it means i get more out of what little free time i have.
and we won't even get started on how long it would take me to rebuild my collection of VST and VSTi plugins.
"For example, the country that brought you the Stealth Bomber also designed the iPod."
uh, you are aware that the first mp3 player was the MPMan, from south korea, right? and that the first, non-mp3 based, prototype digital music player was invented in the UK?
the ipod was just apple doing what it does best - taking somebody else's idea, polishing it to a high gloss, and marketing it very, very well. the mp3 player was not an american invention.
you're right that military R&D doesn't preclude innovation on consumer goods, but it is the primary driver of them. from interstate highways to non-stick cookware to the internet itself, almost every improvement in the american way of life was merely a side-effect of something the military just happened to be doing.
uh, if you've ever tried to read 12-point text on a non-HD glass tube, then yes, you are definitely missing something.
i tried out the new interface last night. it's great. simple and streamlined, yet functional. unfortunately it doesn't solve the crappy framerate and buffering problems.
both van halen and heart have written the mccain campaign, more than once in the case of heart, that they do not wish their songs used to further the political campaign of a person they disagree with.
it's too bad that all these artists don't have some kind of professional organization to represent them. you know, it could collect dues from its members, and then stand up for them in cases like this, where their hard work and creativity is shamelessly co-opted as a marketing gimmick by those in direct and diametrical opposition to the artists themselves on any issue of importance.
like, an association of american industry recordists, or a recording association of american industry... something...
it is the nature of digital to lend itself to being copied. the benefits and liabilities are indivisible.
they opened pandora's box when they invented cd's and dvd's to make everybody re-buy the same content they already owned. the genie will not go back into the lamp. if they had just stayed with analog tape, infinite perfect copies would not be possible.
i like digital stuff. i use it everyday. but i am under no illusions that anything digital is ever truly secure. if a human can lock it, a human can unlock it. it's that simple. the entertainment megacorps are *finally* falling victim to their own greed, laziness, and bad business practices. maybe the system does work after all.
"and what you or I consider "warmness" is actually "muddiness" to them."
it's actually called even harmonic distortion (as opposed to odd harmonic distortion, which tends to sound "harsh")
regardless, it's distortion, which is to say that it is not the most accurate reproduction of the original as possible. and, what us engineers strive for at every stage of the game, is 100% accurate reproduction. high fidelity, to coin a phrase. while some even harmonic distortion can be aesthetically desirable, and is often added during mastering or applied judiciously and sparingly to individual tracks during mixing, we want absolute control of where and when in the recording process it's added. which is why many of us prefer operating in the digital domain, where it can be controlled, as opposed to the analog domain, where it cannot.
not true regarding cd decomposition. i have several cd's that are rotting from the outside in. my rare maxi-single of "jam j" by james vs. the sabres of paradise is unplayable. "plasticity" by cabaret voltaire soon will be.
interestingly, they all seem to be of british manufacture.
"The goal of rational thought is obviously to abandon irrational thought - duh!"
either stop telling me what my goals are, or else convince me that you're right about what my goals are. repeating yourself doesn't count as a valid argument anywhere outside of fox news. i don't tell you what your goals are.
"you don't understand that because you have embraced irrational superstitions as an explanation for experiences you don't understand - the classic "god of the gaps"."
i was unaware that you had proven the inexistence of God. remarkable indeed, that the first person ever to prove a universal negative spends a good deal of time posting on slashdot instead of reveling in their newfound celebrity.
any assertion that God definitively does not exist is just as much a statement of faith as any assertion that God definitively does. i'm not talking about religious faith, i am talking about any belief devoid of proof. now, personally, i have no problem making statements of faith. but you claim to operate strictly from reason. i therefore await your concession that the possibility exists that there is a God.
i do not envy you the ivory prison of your reason. reason has never written a poem or a song. reason has never fallen in love. please note that, once again, i am not denying the importance of reason, or of the many wonderful (and terrible) things reason has given us. i am simply observing that there are things which lie outside it.
i encourage you, in the spirit of both scientific inquiry and personal growth, to keep an open mind and open eyes. i continue to admit my fallibility as a human. i have yet to hear you do the same.
"Fortunately, such base and craven desires to bend the knee to bogymen is something that is dying out in the West as science gradually closes those gaps."
firstly, i hope you realize how pitiably immature, insecure and defensive your insults make you appear. as soon as you start throwing pistols it's pretty clear who's out of ammo.
secondly, if you think that science can, will, or should ever explain everything about the universe, humanity, and the soul then perhaps i was wrong... you appear to have a great deal of faith, indeed.
lastly, if you were as certain of the inexistence of God as you claim to be, you wouldn't still be reading this thread. you would simply shrug your shoulders, sigh with despair at the waste of time that is any confrontation with yet another zealot, and go about your day. i don't think you harbor any illusions of destroying my faith. and i think when you lash out at me, you're really lashing out at the part of you that secretly wonders if i'm right.
but then, like i said, i could always be wrong. could you?
religious nut. i haven't even been to any church in months, and i'm not a member of any.
intoxicatingly useful means two things - it means that faith as a tool is so useful that i don't know how i got by without it. and it also means that that's a statement that only applies to me personally. all faith is personal.
many atheists remind me of the straightedge kids in my high school who would beat up other kids, not for trying to push drugs or alcohol on them, but just for being different themselves. i'm not trying to change anybody's mind, i'm just saying what i think. why are you so threatened by that?
Slashdot Mirror
"The problem with children nowadays is the parents."
this is ten thousand percent true. my mom (a public high school teacher) once had a parent actually SAY to her, "if driving a log truck is good enough for me, it should be good enough for my kid."
without parents to back them up, teachers are worse than powerless - they're forced to watch as the good kids, with good parents, are left by the side of the road while they spend all their time dealing with the shitheads.
public school has become a babysitting service with a side of education.
well, far be it from me to question the neutrality of a slashot editor's summary...
again, the complete disconnect between normal people - like you and me - and the public school system.
i can say without any doubt whatsoever that, while there's a chance that the girl may have had sympathetic parents who would have seen the light of reason, the act of "snatching" would have placed the school in legal jeopardy and the teacher's job in jeopardy of a much more immediate sort.
you can if you like. i'm using this particular case as an example of a larger phenomena.
every day, thousands of cases just as real as this one happen all over the country. if you don't want to address the state of public education at large, that's fine. you don't have to.
on further thought, one thing you wrote i take exception to. it's not our "lawsuit happy culture" that's breaking public education.
granted, the single biggest motivating factor, either direct or indirect, on any given person in the public school system is a lawsuit. and yes, that's because of many lawsuits in the past that have cost school districts (and taxpayers) a great deal of money. and yes, some of those lawsuits were probably spurious.
but many weren't. many were completely justified and laudable. in fact, in many of those lawsuits, i'd say that if the parents hadn't sued the school, they would have been negligent. successful criminal prosecutions of abusive teachers deter would-be abusive teachers - likewise, successful lawsuits of school boards with negligent or corrupt hiring practices serves to teach other school boards a lesson to watch their p's and q's.
sadly, the price of being able to file good lawuits is that others can file bad ones. and the two put together is what is breaking public education. not "our lawsuit-happy culture". that answer is just far too easy and emotionally satisfying to be correct.
jerry, what if you tell the student to leave the class and they refuse? what if you give them a detention and they don't show up? what if you give them a suspension and they DO show up? what if you call the parents and they tell you they don't care? what if the parents get mad - at YOU?
of course there's more civilized ways to deal with problems. and when they work, it's much less hassle for everybody.
but what happens when a kid looks you in the eye, digs in her heels, and says "make me"? what then?
i don't mean this to be insulting, but you appear to be completely and utterly divorced from modern day public education.
you're probably somebody who had a decent high school education. i was too. you would probably be just as appalled as i was if you were to sit through one hour of what both my parents have to put up with every day as public high school teachers.
detention? they don't show up. suspension? they keep showing up. usually just to see their friends and piss off the teachers. at some point, if a kid digs in her heels, gets all dubya, and just keeps saying "make me", given that pretty much any kind of punishment by the school is going to be either unenforceable or circumscribed by administration, you have to do something, or else all the other shithead kids see the rules are hollow while the good kids can't get the time and attention from the teachers that they deserve.
parents? they don't give a shit. their attitude here, and a good handful have voiced this explicitly, is that if driving a log truck is good enough for them it should be good enough for their kids. they get angrier at the teacher for calling them in for a conference then they get at the kids for being shitheads. and that's assuming you don't get one of the "my kid's shits don't stink" parents talking about bringing in their lawyer.
administrators? terrified of the superintendent, who in turn is terrified of lawsuits.
and don't even get me started on the "teachers' union" (tm).
the sad fact is that the single biggest element in the public education equation today is lawsuits. spurious ones as well as those with merit. remember, all you lawyer haters out there, many of those lawsuits that helped break public education were completely justified. there have been many, many cases where teachers abused their powers and/or their students.
sadly, the only solution for that problem appears to be creating a new one. in the past, teachers had some wiggle room with discipline, and students had some wiggle room with unruly behavior. no more. everything, on both sides of the fence, is now by the book. and everybody's worse off for it.
as someone with two parents teaching public high school, i logged in (which i rarely do here anymore) just to tell you that, even though it's only february, this is by far the smartest thing i've read on slashdot all year.
+50 insightful.
i have a DAW that also plays games.
yes, windows has games. also MUCH more extensively developed for and supported if you're doing professional audio work. games and audio are what my computer is FOR.
sorry, should have been more specific.
let me know when i can play simcity 4 on ubuntu and have it just work. no tweaking, no experimenting. i want to put a cd in a drive, have the program install, and crash less than once a month. also, i want to be able to use all the windows SC4 utilities like terraformer.
kudos to whoever is willing to help out with this project, but i'm willing to put up with microsuck if it means i get more out of what little free time i have.
and we won't even get started on how long it would take me to rebuild my collection of VST and VSTi plugins.
sorry kids, linux is just not for everybody.
uh, directx?
ubuntu's awesome. i'm thinking about putting it on my fiancee's old P3 because she only needs basic stuff for school.
but as for my computer, uh, let me know when i can play simcity 4 on it.
"For example, the country that brought you the Stealth Bomber also designed the iPod."
uh, you are aware that the first mp3 player was the MPMan, from south korea, right? and that the first, non-mp3 based, prototype digital music player was invented in the UK?
the ipod was just apple doing what it does best - taking somebody else's idea, polishing it to a high gloss, and marketing it very, very well. the mp3 player was not an american invention.
you're right that military R&D doesn't preclude innovation on consumer goods, but it is the primary driver of them. from interstate highways to non-stick cookware to the internet itself, almost every improvement in the american way of life was merely a side-effect of something the military just happened to be doing.
yes, but now how do you appease the "everything is photoshop" crowd?
uh, if you've ever tried to read 12-point text on a non-HD glass tube, then yes, you are definitely missing something.
i tried out the new interface last night. it's great. simple and streamlined, yet functional. unfortunately it doesn't solve the crappy framerate and buffering problems.
household hacker. and he'll do it with an onion, some gatorade, and a penny.
but the penny has to be REALLY SHINY.
depends on the artist's publishing deal.
both van halen and heart have written the mccain campaign, more than once in the case of heart, that they do not wish their songs used to further the political campaign of a person they disagree with.
it's too bad that all these artists don't have some kind of professional organization to represent them. you know, it could collect dues from its members, and then stand up for them in cases like this, where their hard work and creativity is shamelessly co-opted as a marketing gimmick by those in direct and diametrical opposition to the artists themselves on any issue of importance.
like, an association of american industry recordists, or a recording association of american industry... something...
there's sanctity in anything math-related. DNA, code, music.
it is the nature of digital to lend itself to being copied. the benefits and liabilities are indivisible.
they opened pandora's box when they invented cd's and dvd's to make everybody re-buy the same content they already owned. the genie will not go back into the lamp. if they had just stayed with analog tape, infinite perfect copies would not be possible.
i like digital stuff. i use it everyday. but i am under no illusions that anything digital is ever truly secure. if a human can lock it, a human can unlock it. it's that simple. the entertainment megacorps are *finally* falling victim to their own greed, laziness, and bad business practices. maybe the system does work after all.
mod parent informative.
"and what you or I consider "warmness" is actually "muddiness" to them."
it's actually called even harmonic distortion (as opposed to odd harmonic distortion, which tends to sound "harsh")
regardless, it's distortion, which is to say that it is not the most accurate reproduction of the original as possible. and, what us engineers strive for at every stage of the game, is 100% accurate reproduction. high fidelity, to coin a phrase. while some even harmonic distortion can be aesthetically desirable, and is often added during mastering or applied judiciously and sparingly to individual tracks during mixing, we want absolute control of where and when in the recording process it's added. which is why many of us prefer operating in the digital domain, where it can be controlled, as opposed to the analog domain, where it cannot.
not true regarding cd decomposition. i have several cd's that are rotting from the outside in. my rare maxi-single of "jam j" by james vs. the sabres of paradise is unplayable. "plasticity" by cabaret voltaire soon will be.
interestingly, they all seem to be of british manufacture.
"The goal of rational thought is obviously to abandon irrational thought - duh!"
either stop telling me what my goals are, or else convince me that you're right about what my goals are. repeating yourself doesn't count as a valid argument anywhere outside of fox news. i don't tell you what your goals are.
"you don't understand that because you have embraced irrational superstitions as an explanation for experiences you don't understand - the classic "god of the gaps"."
i was unaware that you had proven the inexistence of God. remarkable indeed, that the first person ever to prove a universal negative spends a good deal of time posting on slashdot instead of reveling in their newfound celebrity.
any assertion that God definitively does not exist is just as much a statement of faith as any assertion that God definitively does. i'm not talking about religious faith, i am talking about any belief devoid of proof. now, personally, i have no problem making statements of faith. but you claim to operate strictly from reason. i therefore await your concession that the possibility exists that there is a God.
i do not envy you the ivory prison of your reason. reason has never written a poem or a song. reason has never fallen in love. please note that, once again, i am not denying the importance of reason, or of the many wonderful (and terrible) things reason has given us. i am simply observing that there are things which lie outside it.
i encourage you, in the spirit of both scientific inquiry and personal growth, to keep an open mind and open eyes. i continue to admit my fallibility as a human. i have yet to hear you do the same.
"Fortunately, such base and craven desires to bend the knee to bogymen is something that is dying out in the West as science gradually closes those gaps."
firstly, i hope you realize how pitiably immature, insecure and defensive your insults make you appear. as soon as you start throwing pistols it's pretty clear who's out of ammo.
secondly, if you think that science can, will, or should ever explain everything about the universe, humanity, and the soul then perhaps i was wrong... you appear to have a great deal of faith, indeed.
lastly, if you were as certain of the inexistence of God as you claim to be, you wouldn't still be reading this thread. you would simply shrug your shoulders, sigh with despair at the waste of time that is any confrontation with yet another zealot, and go about your day. i don't think you harbor any illusions of destroying my faith. and i think when you lash out at me, you're really lashing out at the part of you that secretly wonders if i'm right.
but then, like i said, i could always be wrong. could you?
religious nut. i haven't even been to any church in months, and i'm not a member of any.
intoxicatingly useful means two things - it means that faith as a tool is so useful that i don't know how i got by without it. and it also means that that's a statement that only applies to me personally. all faith is personal.
many atheists remind me of the straightedge kids in my high school who would beat up other kids, not for trying to push drugs or alcohol on them, but just for being different themselves. i'm not trying to change anybody's mind, i'm just saying what i think. why are you so threatened by that?
good luck with your anger.