Because unguided independent study by an uneducated person doesn't work for the overwhelming majority of people.
True, and this is where family members (immediate or extended), friends, clergy, and others can help a child learn the self-direction and discipline to learn on his own. Do you really think the best way to raise a child is by bussing him to some dreary warehouse where he'll be placed under the arbitrary authority of some adult stranger for 8 hours a day? Please.
You should check out this book. The author (an award-winning elementary school teacher who has since renounced compulsory schooling) has put it up online, free as in beer. Underground History of American Education.
Many forms of addiction are entirely psychological such as alcoholism and gambling addictions
Sudden cessation of heavy, regular alcohol consumption can be fatal. It is a shock to the central nervous system to suddenly go without a depressant; seizures and hallucinations are possible. Cannabis withdrawal symptoms (yes they do exist) are very mild. Usually there's a loss of appetite, sometimes nausea, and a worsened mood for a few weeks. But it's nothing as bad as the suicidal I-feel-like-I'm-dying heroin withdrawals you hear about in DARE.
The current TV uses channels 2-51. The FCC plans to "decapitate" it and only leave channels 2 to 25. That's about half the spectrum which means instead of averaging 12 different stations per city, there will only be 6. Goodbye independents or movie channels or RetroTV channels and so on. You can also say goodbye to spanish channels like Univision, since there'd only be enough to hold the top 6 networks.
Cool, thanks for the nice summary. I guess it's just another example of centralized power leading to abuse. Le sigh.
I completed K-12 public education in a middle/upper-middle class school district, graduating from HS in 2008. During that time my family had Macs at home and the school district used only Macs in their computer labs. Being a pretty computer-literate student through all those years, I got a decent idea of how school-administrated Macs differ from regular Macs.
And it's why I'm *really* glad I graduated from HS before my school tried any crap like this. My school's use of computers was appalling.
My school had about 150 Macs for student use in a school with 1600 students. They were all together on the same dog-slow network with roaming profiles over AFP. If a class of 20 tried to all log in at the same time, it would usually be 15 minutes before half the class saw a desktop. This was eventually "fixed" by the IT staff so it only took 5 minutes. Later, I discovered that the student server was just a 2002 PowerMac G4 with some extra hard drives thrown in, sitting in a closet.
The network sucked, but it didn't really matter, because the teachers I had were all born between 1950 and 1980 and thus weren't comfortable with any computer use outside of their e-mail. The teachers would only have us use computers to c/p together 500 words on something when the administrators told them to make us use computers. Otherwise, they just lectured with overhead transparencies (ignoring the proxima projectors on the ceilings) while we took notes with paper and pencil.
My school admins never tried to make computers a core component of classwork, and I think it would have been an expensive disaster if they had tried what this school in MA is trying. My school's network would crumble under the strain and teachers would fall back to the same overhead transparencies they'd been using while students schlepped $999 laptops around all day without opening them. And I won't even go into all the problems with bullies smashing other kids' laptops.
What's sad is that these kids in MA will suffer through excessive/inappropriate use of computers in lesson plans, but that the kids after them *will have it worse*. Why? Because the more technically-inclined administrators of tomorrow won't just tolerate the heavy computer use. They'll embrace it. They'll look at current school institutions like the dumbed-down textbooks, the lack of privacy, the hall passes, the bells, the 3-minute passing periods, and the tardy slips, and say, "This is SOOOOO 20th-century!". They'll look to computers as a way to make it all even worse, furthering the secret goal of every public school administration (creating an environment with no privacy, with total centralized control, and no action on the students' part that has not been pre-approved by the faculty. If you think I'm being sarcastic, read Gatto's Dumbing Us Down, and petition your local sysadmin for a sarcasm font while you're at it.)
What can we expect computers for student use to be like in the future? I think it'll be like 1984, only with iPads (eduPads?):
0. The schools will buy a shitload of eduPads for student use; basically iPads where the school acts like Apple except a million times worse. The schools will consider laptops with windows or linux, but decide on a proprietary hardware/software package so that the students have a harder time hacking them, citing cyber-terrorism concerns in red states; child porn in blue. It will also help that the soccer moms at PTA and school board meetings will be wooed by Apple's sleek iPad-like offering of the time, absent all the intimidating push-buttons of laptops. Le sigh.
1. Computers will be compulsory for all classes. Classes where this wouldn't make any sense (metals, woods, auto tech) will already be totally gone from the curriculum. For the remaining classes, everything done on paper today will be done through the computers. Students will receive access tickets to e-textbooks instead of bound paper copies. Students will receive lecture notes, complete/submit as
Children are still developing emotionally and morally [...]
EVERYONE is still developing emotionally and morally. Sure, children are developing faster than a middle or senior age adult, but the human mind doesn't just freeze after age 25.
It's a shame more people don't realize this. I wonder how many "football team" straight-ticket Dems/Repubs could be saved if they acknowledged their potential for continued growth.
Even so, much of their planning revolved around how to give voters the tools to grasp the bigger picture: our educational system for one, freedom of the press for another.
[Boldface Emphasis Mine]
What? The Department of Education was a 20th century invention, and our "founding fathers" specifically argued against centralized government education, believing that it would inevitably be used as a tool of social control (as it is today, see the works of John Paul Gatto for further reading).
I won't challenge you on this particular anecdote, but I will say that "crunch time" is poor planning at best and theft of employee time at worst. It is something to be avoided.
A lot of businesses choose to operate in the US BECAUSE we have the best IP protection around.
Best IP protection for businesses, maybe. But that's only because it's the strongest. If the US reduced the term on copyright to something sane, like 10-20 years, and stopped issuing patents on genes and mathematics, it would still have IP protection more than strong enough for businesses to stay and thrive here. And we the people would get our rights back!
Now I'm of the opinion that total freedom of speech isn't necessarily a right I feel everyone needs.
Then please please PLEASE stay home playing Yahtzee on election days from now on. Trust me, it's way more fun than having your voice heard. Everyone's doin it.
Not at all. Blizzard has been supporting Mac since SC1 over 10 years ago.
Heck, it's been longer than that. The earliest title Bliz made for the Mac (that I know of) is Blackthorne (1994). And the earliest one that anyone cares about (Orcs and Humans) was still all the way back in '96.
EVERY job market is already flooded. Might as well do something you enjoy for 4 years. You're going to be fucked after that no matter what field you go into.
Or better yet, don't waste 4 years of your life paying tuition just to be an actor in someone else's script. I know you're probably thinking, "But any HR department will turn down my application if I don't have a 4-year degree!"
Solution: Don't work at places with HR departments. Instead, just do what you want and monetize it as best you can. If you're convinced that the only way for you to make enough money is to work at a faceless megacorp with an HR dep't, take some time to seriously consider if that nice reliable paycheck is REALLY worth all the bullshit that comes with HR. HR departments are co-morbid with lots of other company diseases... "quality fairs", "sensitivity training", lazy management, discriminatory hiring practices (sorry... "affirmative action"), you name it.
Hey, could everyone please stop using words like "denialists" and "deniers" to describe those who believe concerns about anthropogenic global climate change are overstated? Labels like "denier" really don't foster open and thoughtful discussion, and it shows a certain contempt for independent thought. Let's attack and defend ideas, not people.
There are lots of idiot "deniers" (the Fox News viewer) and idiot "believers" (the California soccer mom saving the planet with her Prius). If we're trying to have a productive discussion about A-GCC, these people should be ignored, since they only rile people up and make them forget about the important details
For those "believers" out there looking to challenge their own views, there are some thoughtful "denier" arguments about A-GCC that you should read. The "believers" out there have an intellectual duty to read them, just as "deniers" have an obligation to contemplate arguments from "believers". If you're on a "side" with A-GCC, you're probably doing it wrong, because the scientific method isn't about picking sides.
*Disclaimer: I personally don't know what the hell's going on with A-GCC, and I don't think anyone really does. I have seen thoughtful, analytical, convincing arguments from "believers" and "deniers" alike. I have also smelled a lot of money getting involved on both "sides", which makes me even more hesitant to trust anything I read. The oil industry is on the "denier" side, and Goldman Sachs is on the "believer" side. I don't know which I trust less.
Hey, could everyone please stop using words like "denialists" and "deniers" to describe those who believe concerns about anthropogenic global climate change are overstated? Labels like "denier" really don't foster open and thoughtful discussion, and it shows a certain contempt for independent thought. Let's attack and defend ideas, not people.
There are lots of idiot "deniers" (the Fox News viewer) and idiot "believers" (the California soccer mom saving the planet with her Prius). If we're trying to have a productive discussion about A-GCC, these people should be ignored, since they only rile people up and make them forget about the important details
For those "believers" out there looking to challenge their own views, there are some thoughtful "denier" arguments about A-GCC that you should read. The "believers" out there have an intellectual duty to read them, just as "deniers" have an obligation to contemplate arguments from "believers". If you're on a "side" with A-GCC, you're probably doing it wrong, because the scientific method isn't about picking sides.
*Disclaimer: I personally don't know what the hell's going on with A-GCC, and I don't think anyone really does. I have seen thoughtful, analytical, convincing arguments from "believers" and "deniers" alike. I have also smelled a lot of money getting involved on both "sides", which makes me even more hesitant to trust anything I read. The oil industry is on the "denier" side, and Goldman Sachs is on the "believer" side. I don't know which I trust less.
If you can't expect everyone to keep track of their own ID number, you need another way to peg the person to the number later. As much as I don't like the idea of fingerprinting everyone, if it's the only way to efficiently get the government to better provide services for these people, I see it as a necessary 'evil'.
You've got a point here; illiteracy makes recalling and processing written numbers difficult. A biometric system will be great for the illiterate.
However, I see no need for the literate to use this system. They should have the option of just getting a number. After all, the biometric data is likely stored and processed by computers, meaning it is expressed as a number. Maybe I'm exhibiting severe computer stupidity, but it seems like one computer system could keep track of both biometric and plain old "Social Security" numbers.
It's predicted that the human population will reach 9 billion by 2040.
Yeah, and it'll pretty much level off after that. Birth rates are falling around the world, even in 2nd- and 3rd-world countries. There are two main reasons for this:
1. It used to be that having children was like social security; your children would take care of you when you were old and you could use them as work hands in the fields from an early age. Having children used to be profitable. With current child labor laws and the 22+ years spent on 40+ hours per week education for today's children, having children is now very expensive.
2. These days, the use of contraceptives/family planning allows families to have as many or as few children as they want. Because of this, women are waiting longer to have children and are having fewer of them. It also helps that (ever since the women's movement) being a mother isn't #1 on every 20-something woman's to-do list these days the way it used to be.
Long story short, human overpopulation will only become a reality if the fundies get their way and outlaw effective sex education worldwide.
I mean look at it like this. You can probably get a card for $120-$150 now that will probably run every current game well right now. (Well except for Crisis)
Crysis came out in Q3 2007. It's not really a current game anymore. Its use as a benchmark for video card performance is frustrating because it's an incredibly inefficient game engine. Don't get me wrong, it looks beautiful... but so do games that will run at twice the frame rate on the same system.
So my experience is just buy a decent card ($120-$150) and in a few years buy another one and do whatever with the old one. (Sell it, give it to a family member whatever.)
Right on. This is what I used to do until spring of 2007, when I bought an nVidia 8800 GTS 320 MB to play STALKER. That card continues to serve me well with any game I throw at it. I was expecting to need to upgrade it in 2009, but I never did... new games kept running great on it. I've had that card for almost exactly THREE YEARS now and it still amazes me. I've never had any piece of computing hardware that did that.
Changes in graphics card features and speed were really taking place at a white-hot pace between about 2003 and 2007. Those years saw the introduction of cards like the Radeon 9800, the GeForce 6800, and the GF 8800. All of those cards totally smashed their predecessors (from both nVidia AND ATI) in benchmarks. It was even more amazing than the CPU world from 1999 to 2004, when clock rates where shooting through the roof and when AMD embarrassed Intel with the introduction of the 64-bit hammer core (Athlon 64).
Forgot to mention - it is easy and even fun to find truthful information about methamphetamine.
If you'd like to learn about methamphetamine from a well-produced television drama that has won multiple Emmy awards, there's always Breaking Bad. The depiction of methamphetamine's effects on the human body, as well as the nature of the illicit methamphetamine market, is surprisingly accurate.
If you'd prefer a more scholarly source of information about methamphetamine (and just about any other recreational drug out there, including some real weird ones like Bromo-Dragonfly), Erowid is your place.
As an American, I'm worried about the flow of Mexican narcotics such as methamphetamine to America (we have drug control you know?).
MOD PARENT DOWN. As someone who knows a thing or two about recreational drugs, I really have to chime in here. By discrediting your statements, I hope that any lurkers present will ignore your fallacious post.
1. Methamphetamine is NOT a narcotic. It is a stimulant of the amphetamine family. Narcotics (examples: morphine, heroin, hydrocodone) are sedating. I know this can be a confusing distinction because law enforcement handles methamphetamine offenses with officers who work "narcotics". Sadly, this is testimony to how unknowledgeable police agencies are about the true pharmacological properties of the drugs they control.
2. Many drugs (particularly cocaine) are smuggled into the United States across the US-Mexico border, but this does not necessarily apply to methamphetamine. Unlike, say, cocaine, which (practically speaking) must be refined from a plant that only grows in high-altitude South American climates, methamphetamine is very easy to synthesize domestically. The chemical processes by which legal chemicals such as pseudoephedrine (an over-the-counter nasal decongestant) can be converted into methamphetamine is very simple (even complete amateur chemists can do it) and can be performed with nothing more than household chemicals and legal laboratory glassware. Domestic methamphetamine production already helps supply the methamphetamine market in midwestern states. If Mexican drug cartels disappeared tomorrow, domestic production of methamphetamine would quickly increase to fill the void. This is not unique to methamphetamine, either. LSD is one of the hardest recreational drugs to synthesize, and clandestine LSD laboratories still exist within US borders.
What I mean is, your government, military, and police are corrupt and controlled by drug cartels. If as a country you decided to take car of your internal problems, then we would all be better off.
3. Mexico's internal problems with drug cartels exist largely because of US drug policy. If controlled substances like methamphetamine were freely available and taxed and regulated in the same way as alcohol and tobacco (as was the case for methamphetamine before the middle of the 20th century in the US), users would buy their methamphetamine from supermarkets, not criminal gangs. Today, law enforcement agencies at all levels of government PROFIT from illicit distribution of methamphetamine and other controlled substances. If you are a meth dealer and the government catches you, they seize your home, boat, car, and anything else they can argue was purchased from proceeds of distribution (this is called asset forfeiture). After seizing your property, police departments then sell these assets at police auctions and pocket the money to buy new equipment and pay their staff. Economically speaking, the biggest single beneficiary of sales of illegal drugs in the United States is the US government. If that's not government corruption, I don't know what is.
Unless your daughter becomes a nun, she will almost certainly have sex at some point in her life. As a parent, this is beyond your control. Not only that, but you can't control *when* she has sex, either.
The only thing you can control is whether she'll have to worry about hiding her sex life (or lack thereof) from you or not. As her parent, this is up to you, but it's been my experience that girls tend to be less worried about using condoms and choosing good partners when their #1 worry is Mommy And Daddy Finding Out.
Please reply if this is an inaccurate summary of your post: You think that people who view child porn might be "pushed over the edge" by it and abuse children where they previously would not, therefore imposing some responsibility on the CP peddler for subsequent acts of child abuse.
This is akin to saying that a woman wearing a sexy outfit is responsible for prompting an act of rape unto herself (yes, some people in modern enlightened countries actually believe this). If she is raped and her rapist goes to trial, it may be demonstrated that she increased her likelihood of rape by her provocative dress, but that doesn't mean that her rapist couldn't choose not to rape her. Making it 100% NOT HER FAULT if she gets raped.
Stop shifting blame. People who abuse children should go to prison. People whose closest tie to child abuse is watching a video of it after the fact should not. It's not that hard.
In response to your starred item about "additional trauma": Just like everyone else, I've had loads of embarrassing moments in my life (my arrest a few months ago being the latest example). If a given incident is recorded on video and distributed online, I shouldn't have some crybaby trump card to suppress the distributors' human right of free speech just so that I can pretend it didn't happen. We shouldn't prohibit free speech because it might hurt someone's feelings, and CP should be no exception. There are less heavy-handed methods of discouraging the creation and distribution of CP. For further reading, see: Star Wars Kid; Barbra Streisand.
US Navy ships don't complete cargo runs, but that's not my point. Because the US Navy controls all of the world's oceans, it can decide who trades with whom and how much. It can dictate the nature of international trade to the benefit of the US (or to the detriment of the US's enemies).
Control of the world's oceans was the key factor that gave the British Empire its status as the dominant world power from the early 1800s to the end of WWII, and the Royal Navy didn't even control all of the oceans in those days.
Slashdot Mirror
Because unguided independent study by an uneducated person doesn't work for the overwhelming majority of people.
True, and this is where family members (immediate or extended), friends, clergy, and others can help a child learn the self-direction and discipline to learn on his own. Do you really think the best way to raise a child is by bussing him to some dreary warehouse where he'll be placed under the arbitrary authority of some adult stranger for 8 hours a day? Please.
You should check out this book. The author (an award-winning elementary school teacher who has since renounced compulsory schooling) has put it up online, free as in beer. Underground History of American Education.
From the summary, emphasis mine: "In 2005, there were 44 licensed video game arcades in New York"
Somebody please tell me that a gubmint license is not necessary to operate an arcade in New York.
Many forms of addiction are entirely psychological such as alcoholism and gambling addictions
Sudden cessation of heavy, regular alcohol consumption can be fatal. It is a shock to the central nervous system to suddenly go without a depressant; seizures and hallucinations are possible. Cannabis withdrawal symptoms (yes they do exist) are very mild. Usually there's a loss of appetite, sometimes nausea, and a worsened mood for a few weeks. But it's nothing as bad as the suicidal I-feel-like-I'm-dying heroin withdrawals you hear about in DARE.
The current TV uses channels 2-51. The FCC plans to "decapitate" it and only leave channels 2 to 25. That's about half the spectrum which means instead of averaging 12 different stations per city, there will only be 6. Goodbye independents or movie channels or RetroTV channels and so on. You can also say goodbye to spanish channels like Univision, since there'd only be enough to hold the top 6 networks.
Cool, thanks for the nice summary. I guess it's just another example of centralized power leading to abuse. Le sigh.
P.S. And wouldn't have to decapitate Free TV or Free Tadio to do it, as the current FCC plan would do.
Uh, what? I'm not disagreeing with you, although this makes no sense to me without details.
I completed K-12 public education in a middle/upper-middle class school district, graduating from HS in 2008. During that time my family had Macs at home and the school district used only Macs in their computer labs. Being a pretty computer-literate student through all those years, I got a decent idea of how school-administrated Macs differ from regular Macs.
And it's why I'm *really* glad I graduated from HS before my school tried any crap like this. My school's use of computers was appalling.
My school had about 150 Macs for student use in a school with 1600 students. They were all together on the same dog-slow network with roaming profiles over AFP. If a class of 20 tried to all log in at the same time, it would usually be 15 minutes before half the class saw a desktop. This was eventually "fixed" by the IT staff so it only took 5 minutes. Later, I discovered that the student server was just a 2002 PowerMac G4 with some extra hard drives thrown in, sitting in a closet.
The network sucked, but it didn't really matter, because the teachers I had were all born between 1950 and 1980 and thus weren't comfortable with any computer use outside of their e-mail. The teachers would only have us use computers to c/p together 500 words on something when the administrators told them to make us use computers. Otherwise, they just lectured with overhead transparencies (ignoring the proxima projectors on the ceilings) while we took notes with paper and pencil.
My school admins never tried to make computers a core component of classwork, and I think it would have been an expensive disaster if they had tried what this school in MA is trying. My school's network would crumble under the strain and teachers would fall back to the same overhead transparencies they'd been using while students schlepped $999 laptops around all day without opening them. And I won't even go into all the problems with bullies smashing other kids' laptops.
What's sad is that these kids in MA will suffer through excessive/inappropriate use of computers in lesson plans, but that the kids after them *will have it worse*. Why? Because the more technically-inclined administrators of tomorrow won't just tolerate the heavy computer use. They'll embrace it. They'll look at current school institutions like the dumbed-down textbooks, the lack of privacy, the hall passes, the bells, the 3-minute passing periods, and the tardy slips, and say, "This is SOOOOO 20th-century!". They'll look to computers as a way to make it all even worse, furthering the secret goal of every public school administration (creating an environment with no privacy, with total centralized control, and no action on the students' part that has not been pre-approved by the faculty. If you think I'm being sarcastic, read Gatto's Dumbing Us Down, and petition your local sysadmin for a sarcasm font while you're at it.)
What can we expect computers for student use to be like in the future? I think it'll be like 1984, only with iPads (eduPads?):
0. The schools will buy a shitload of eduPads for student use; basically iPads where the school acts like Apple except a million times worse. The schools will consider laptops with windows or linux, but decide on a proprietary hardware/software package so that the students have a harder time hacking them, citing cyber-terrorism concerns in red states; child porn in blue. It will also help that the soccer moms at PTA and school board meetings will be wooed by Apple's sleek iPad-like offering of the time, absent all the intimidating push-buttons of laptops. Le sigh.
1. Computers will be compulsory for all classes. Classes where this wouldn't make any sense (metals, woods, auto tech) will already be totally gone from the curriculum. For the remaining classes, everything done on paper today will be done through the computers. Students will receive access tickets to e-textbooks instead of bound paper copies. Students will receive lecture notes, complete/submit as
Children are still developing emotionally and morally [...]
EVERYONE is still developing emotionally and morally. Sure, children are developing faster than a middle or senior age adult, but the human mind doesn't just freeze after age 25.
It's a shame more people don't realize this. I wonder how many "football team" straight-ticket Dems/Repubs could be saved if they acknowledged their potential for continued growth.
Even so, much of their planning revolved around how to give voters the tools to grasp the bigger picture: our educational system for one, freedom of the press for another.
[Boldface Emphasis Mine]
What? The Department of Education was a 20th century invention, and our "founding fathers" specifically argued against centralized government education, believing that it would inevitably be used as a tool of social control (as it is today, see the works of John Paul Gatto for further reading).
I won't challenge you on this particular anecdote, but I will say that "crunch time" is poor planning at best and theft of employee time at worst. It is something to be avoided.
Microsoft opened a portion of its fifth TechFair to Silicon Valley residents, demonstrating more than 15 technologies...
Good god, I thought schools taught people to count up to one hundred AT LEAST.
A lot of businesses choose to operate in the US BECAUSE we have the best IP protection around.
Best IP protection for businesses, maybe. But that's only because it's the strongest. If the US reduced the term on copyright to something sane, like 10-20 years, and stopped issuing patents on genes and mathematics, it would still have IP protection more than strong enough for businesses to stay and thrive here. And we the people would get our rights back!
Now I'm of the opinion that total freedom of speech isn't necessarily a right I feel everyone needs.
Then please please PLEASE stay home playing Yahtzee on election days from now on. Trust me, it's way more fun than having your voice heard. Everyone's doin it.
Not at all. Blizzard has been supporting Mac since SC1 over 10 years ago.
Heck, it's been longer than that. The earliest title Bliz made for the Mac (that I know of) is Blackthorne (1994). And the earliest one that anyone cares about (Orcs and Humans) was still all the way back in '96.
EVERY job market is already flooded. Might as well do something you enjoy for 4 years. You're going to be fucked after that no matter what field you go into.
Or better yet, don't waste 4 years of your life paying tuition just to be an actor in someone else's script. I know you're probably thinking, "But any HR department will turn down my application if I don't have a 4-year degree!"
Solution: Don't work at places with HR departments. Instead, just do what you want and monetize it as best you can. If you're convinced that the only way for you to make enough money is to work at a faceless megacorp with an HR dep't, take some time to seriously consider if that nice reliable paycheck is REALLY worth all the bullshit that comes with HR. HR departments are co-morbid with lots of other company diseases... "quality fairs", "sensitivity training", lazy management, discriminatory hiring practices (sorry... "affirmative action"), you name it.
Hey, could everyone please stop using words like "denialists" and "deniers" to describe those who believe concerns about anthropogenic global climate change are overstated? Labels like "denier" really don't foster open and thoughtful discussion, and it shows a certain contempt for independent thought. Let's attack and defend ideas, not people.
There are lots of idiot "deniers" (the Fox News viewer) and idiot "believers" (the California soccer mom saving the planet with her Prius). If we're trying to have a productive discussion about A-GCC, these people should be ignored, since they only rile people up and make them forget about the important details
For those "believers" out there looking to challenge their own views, there are some thoughtful "denier" arguments about A-GCC that you should read. The "believers" out there have an intellectual duty to read them, just as "deniers" have an obligation to contemplate arguments from "believers". If you're on a "side" with A-GCC, you're probably doing it wrong, because the scientific method isn't about picking sides.
Here's an excellent speech from a well-known "denier".
*Disclaimer: I personally don't know what the hell's going on with A-GCC, and I don't think anyone really does. I have seen thoughtful, analytical, convincing arguments from "believers" and "deniers" alike. I have also smelled a lot of money getting involved on both "sides", which makes me even more hesitant to trust anything I read. The oil industry is on the "denier" side, and Goldman Sachs is on the "believer" side. I don't know which I trust less.
Hey, could everyone please stop using words like "denialists" and "deniers" to describe those who believe concerns about anthropogenic global climate change are overstated? Labels like "denier" really don't foster open and thoughtful discussion, and it shows a certain contempt for independent thought. Let's attack and defend ideas, not people.
There are lots of idiot "deniers" (the Fox News viewer) and idiot "believers" (the California soccer mom saving the planet with her Prius). If we're trying to have a productive discussion about A-GCC, these people should be ignored, since they only rile people up and make them forget about the important details
For those "believers" out there looking to challenge their own views, there are some thoughtful "denier" arguments about A-GCC that you should read. The "believers" out there have an intellectual duty to read them, just as "deniers" have an obligation to contemplate arguments from "believers". If you're on a "side" with A-GCC, you're probably doing it wrong, because the scientific method isn't about picking sides.
Here's an excellent speech from a well-known "denier".
*Disclaimer: I personally don't know what the hell's going on with A-GCC, and I don't think anyone really does. I have seen thoughtful, analytical, convincing arguments from "believers" and "deniers" alike. I have also smelled a lot of money getting involved on both "sides", which makes me even more hesitant to trust anything I read. The oil industry is on the "denier" side, and Goldman Sachs is on the "believer" side. I don't know which I trust less.
If you can't expect everyone to keep track of their own ID number, you need another way to peg the person to the number later. As much as I don't like the idea of fingerprinting everyone, if it's the only way to efficiently get the government to better provide services for these people, I see it as a necessary 'evil'.
You've got a point here; illiteracy makes recalling and processing written numbers difficult. A biometric system will be great for the illiterate.
However, I see no need for the literate to use this system. They should have the option of just getting a number. After all, the biometric data is likely stored and processed by computers, meaning it is expressed as a number. Maybe I'm exhibiting severe computer stupidity, but it seems like one computer system could keep track of both biometric and plain old "Social Security" numbers.
It's predicted that the human population will reach 9 billion by 2040.
Yeah, and it'll pretty much level off after that. Birth rates are falling around the world, even in 2nd- and 3rd-world countries. There are two main reasons for this:
1. It used to be that having children was like social security; your children would take care of you when you were old and you could use them as work hands in the fields from an early age. Having children used to be profitable. With current child labor laws and the 22+ years spent on 40+ hours per week education for today's children, having children is now very expensive.
2. These days, the use of contraceptives/family planning allows families to have as many or as few children as they want. Because of this, women are waiting longer to have children and are having fewer of them. It also helps that (ever since the women's movement) being a mother isn't #1 on every 20-something woman's to-do list these days the way it used to be.
Long story short, human overpopulation will only become a reality if the fundies get their way and outlaw effective sex education worldwide.
I mean look at it like this. You can probably get a card for $120-$150 now that will probably run every current game well right now. (Well except for Crisis)
Crysis came out in Q3 2007. It's not really a current game anymore. Its use as a benchmark for video card performance is frustrating because it's an incredibly inefficient game engine. Don't get me wrong, it looks beautiful... but so do games that will run at twice the frame rate on the same system.
So my experience is just buy a decent card ($120-$150) and in a few years buy another one and do whatever with the old one. (Sell it, give it to a family member whatever.)
Right on. This is what I used to do until spring of 2007, when I bought an nVidia 8800 GTS 320 MB to play STALKER. That card continues to serve me well with any game I throw at it. I was expecting to need to upgrade it in 2009, but I never did... new games kept running great on it. I've had that card for almost exactly THREE YEARS now and it still amazes me. I've never had any piece of computing hardware that did that.
Changes in graphics card features and speed were really taking place at a white-hot pace between about 2003 and 2007. Those years saw the introduction of cards like the Radeon 9800, the GeForce 6800, and the GF 8800. All of those cards totally smashed their predecessors (from both nVidia AND ATI) in benchmarks. It was even more amazing than the CPU world from 1999 to 2004, when clock rates where shooting through the roof and when AMD embarrassed Intel with the introduction of the 64-bit hammer core (Athlon 64).
Forgot to mention - it is easy and even fun to find truthful information about methamphetamine.
If you'd like to learn about methamphetamine from a well-produced television drama that has won multiple Emmy awards, there's always Breaking Bad. The depiction of methamphetamine's effects on the human body, as well as the nature of the illicit methamphetamine market, is surprisingly accurate.
If you'd prefer a more scholarly source of information about methamphetamine (and just about any other recreational drug out there, including some real weird ones like Bromo-Dragonfly), Erowid is your place.
As an American, I'm worried about the flow of Mexican narcotics such as methamphetamine to America (we have drug control you know?).
MOD PARENT DOWN. As someone who knows a thing or two about recreational drugs, I really have to chime in here. By discrediting your statements, I hope that any lurkers present will ignore your fallacious post.
1. Methamphetamine is NOT a narcotic. It is a stimulant of the amphetamine family. Narcotics (examples: morphine, heroin, hydrocodone) are sedating. I know this can be a confusing distinction because law enforcement handles methamphetamine offenses with officers who work "narcotics". Sadly, this is testimony to how unknowledgeable police agencies are about the true pharmacological properties of the drugs they control.
2. Many drugs (particularly cocaine) are smuggled into the United States across the US-Mexico border, but this does not necessarily apply to methamphetamine. Unlike, say, cocaine, which (practically speaking) must be refined from a plant that only grows in high-altitude South American climates, methamphetamine is very easy to synthesize domestically. The chemical processes by which legal chemicals such as pseudoephedrine (an over-the-counter nasal decongestant) can be converted into methamphetamine is very simple (even complete amateur chemists can do it) and can be performed with nothing more than household chemicals and legal laboratory glassware. Domestic methamphetamine production already helps supply the methamphetamine market in midwestern states. If Mexican drug cartels disappeared tomorrow, domestic production of methamphetamine would quickly increase to fill the void. This is not unique to methamphetamine, either. LSD is one of the hardest recreational drugs to synthesize, and clandestine LSD laboratories still exist within US borders.
What I mean is, your government, military, and police are corrupt and controlled by drug cartels. If as a country you decided to take car of your internal problems, then we would all be better off.
3. Mexico's internal problems with drug cartels exist largely because of US drug policy. If controlled substances like methamphetamine were freely available and taxed and regulated in the same way as alcohol and tobacco (as was the case for methamphetamine before the middle of the 20th century in the US), users would buy their methamphetamine from supermarkets, not criminal gangs. Today, law enforcement agencies at all levels of government PROFIT from illicit distribution of methamphetamine and other controlled substances. If you are a meth dealer and the government catches you, they seize your home, boat, car, and anything else they can argue was purchased from proceeds of distribution (this is called asset forfeiture). After seizing your property, police departments then sell these assets at police auctions and pocket the money to buy new equipment and pay their staff. Economically speaking, the biggest single beneficiary of sales of illegal drugs in the United States is the US government. If that's not government corruption, I don't know what is.
Unless your daughter becomes a nun, she will almost certainly have sex at some point in her life. As a parent, this is beyond your control. Not only that, but you can't control *when* she has sex, either.
The only thing you can control is whether she'll have to worry about hiding her sex life (or lack thereof) from you or not. As her parent, this is up to you, but it's been my experience that girls tend to be less worried about using condoms and choosing good partners when their #1 worry is Mommy And Daddy Finding Out.
Source(s): My own rebellious teenage years.
Do you want Miley Cyrus to starve, and Lady Gaga to go naked?
So hard to choose. Can I have both?
My blood boils whenever I see this argument.
Please reply if this is an inaccurate summary of your post: You think that people who view child porn might be "pushed over the edge" by it and abuse children where they previously would not, therefore imposing some responsibility on the CP peddler for subsequent acts of child abuse.
This is akin to saying that a woman wearing a sexy outfit is responsible for prompting an act of rape unto herself (yes, some people in modern enlightened countries actually believe this). If she is raped and her rapist goes to trial, it may be demonstrated that she increased her likelihood of rape by her provocative dress, but that doesn't mean that her rapist couldn't choose not to rape her. Making it 100% NOT HER FAULT if she gets raped.
Stop shifting blame. People who abuse children should go to prison. People whose closest tie to child abuse is watching a video of it after the fact should not. It's not that hard.
In response to your starred item about "additional trauma": Just like everyone else, I've had loads of embarrassing moments in my life (my arrest a few months ago being the latest example). If a given incident is recorded on video and distributed online, I shouldn't have some crybaby trump card to suppress the distributors' human right of free speech just so that I can pretend it didn't happen. We shouldn't prohibit free speech because it might hurt someone's feelings, and CP should be no exception. There are less heavy-handed methods of discouraging the creation and distribution of CP. For further reading, see: Star Wars Kid; Barbra Streisand.
US Navy ships don't complete cargo runs, but that's not my point. Because the US Navy controls all of the world's oceans, it can decide who trades with whom and how much. It can dictate the nature of international trade to the benefit of the US (or to the detriment of the US's enemies).
Control of the world's oceans was the key factor that gave the British Empire its status as the dominant world power from the early 1800s to the end of WWII, and the Royal Navy didn't even control all of the oceans in those days.