for a mirror site near you. To make it totally easy to burn CD copies, the mirror site had these as ISO disc images!
Do you know if Redhat intends to make the RMS distro available for free downloading? Of course the FSF would not get that dollar, but I at least would be willing to send a check off direct to the FSF. I'll tell you for sure, the RMS all-free distro is the one I want on my home computer.
> Citing the poor quality of republican websites, Republican > Conference Chairman J.C. Watts has started a project > called 'GOP.gov' to help improve their websites. This is all > well and good, except GOP.gov isn't just their name, it's also > their domain. This is a pretty clear violation, etc.
Since this web site is intended to be used "to improve websites," shouldn't it maybe get the.net suffix?
You'd think that government and the military would be extremely solicitous toward their own.gov and.mil suffixes. Has anyone fired off a letter to GOP.gov? I imagine that they would be kind of peeved at having to give up their chosen domain name but consider. I'd bet you a dollar that if I as a private individual tried to register, say, uncharted.gov or uncharted.mil as my own domain name, InterNIC wouldn't allow it. But if they get to do GOP.gov despite the RFC, then the next thing you know you're only a law suit away from all kinds of weird minor political parties trying to passing themselves off as this_and_that.gov, implicitly the voice of the government itself. I'm sure neither Repubs nor Dems would care for that outcome.
Also, I have a question I'm sure many/. readers can answer: wouldn't GOP.gov be case-sensitive? I just tried an experiment; I typed in
Would anyone reading this from Europe or Japan care to list the specs of these big-screen, wide-format TVs that you see in your stores? The reason I ask is that I recently got a Matrox G400 video card which has two outputs. If you have two regular monitors their Windows NT driver can split an image across two screens, which is kind of neat to look at and possibly useful for CAD operators and the like. Also, though I haven't tried it yet, it seems you can drive a regular TV set from the secondary output jack; the card even comes with an adapter (DB-15 on one end, on the other something that looks like the old-fashioned phono jack for conventional TVs and also an "S-Video" plug, whatever that is).
The resolution of an ordinary U.S. television set is maybe good enough for 640 x 480, and that would be just fine for text-mode, but you wouldn't want to run a GUI at 640 x 480. But if the resolution of these new big TVs is high enough, then even when you are running a GUI at high resolution, you could use a wide-screen TV as a relatively cheap, really big monitor, one you could read across the room! I'd like that a lot, wouldn't you? Relax on the couch with a wireless keyboard and instead of passively slacking in front of a mindless TV feed, you could be hacking instead.
Also, does anyone reading this on Slashdot know if there is a X server for the Matrox G400 that supports either dual monitors or TV out?
>Socialism and Capitalism just take different (drastically different) approaches to achieving the SAME end.
No, the purpose of capitalism is to increase the wealth of the owners of capital. Period. There's a silly, empty myth about the automatic beneficence of the "invisible hand," but capitalism has no inherent interest whatsoever in "a happy functioning society." If the interests of capitalists are served by peace and general prosperity, then they may strive for peace and prosperity; if it maximizes profit to inflict war or starvation on foreigners, or even on their own nation's general public (e.g., the Great Depression), then that's exactly what a capitalist government will do.
Socialism, at least in theory, does intend to create that "happy functioning society." Naturally, the first thing a sensible person says is, "Yeah, sure, it intends to do that, but how well does it work out in practice? Look at Russia, North Korea, etc., etc."
I've been down that road on Usenet before, and I type slowly and poorly enough to make it preferable to cut-n-paste:
> > Communism and socialism have been given their shot, and left a legacy of economic failure and human misery for all to see.
>Where? In Russia? Holy cow, the Russians have fucked up each and every form of government they have ever tried since the days of Genghis Khan. Russian monarchy was an unmitigated disaster for centuries, the shame of Europe. Post-monarchy Russian republicanism dissolved in chaos in a single year. On top of that, the Russian Communist Government were under assault from day one, by the various expeditionary forces which invaded Russia to back up the White Russian counter-revolution, by the embargo of the entire outside world, by a demonic Nazi invasion that killed off a third of the adult male population, and by a nuclear-armed Cold War which was deliberately intended to force them into bankruptcy - at the cost of risking a nuclear holocaust. Not to mention the attack from within - you have to be pretty crazy to describe Stalinism as a logical outcome of Marxist theory. Who murdered Trotsky?
>Since the Russians are your exemplar, why don't you judge capitalism by the way the Russians practice it? In the few short years since the Russians have reverted to capitalism, despite the fact that we have called off the "Cold War" and poured billions of dollars into the new Russian Republic, the life expectancy of the average Russian has gone down by seven years! So much for the blessings of the "free market".
>As far as socialism is concerned, the fact is that each and every one of the "developed countries" is run according to policies which are part of the programs of the Socialist Parties of the early 1900s. I'm talking about things like public schools and old-age pensions. Don't take my word for it, go look up the official platform of the American Socialist Party of 1928. According to Milton Friedman (!) that Socialist Party was "the most influential party in the history of this country", and "every one of its 1928 platform planks" was later enacted. So if you think the U.S.A. has been successful over the last seventy years, then you agree that socialism works.
End quote. You say:
>Eventually, everyone's happy.
Keynes had it, more accurately: "Eventually everybody's dead."
Finally you say:
>Every motivation for everything we DO is selfish, if you look deep enough.
Maybe so; the main point, then, is that socialism does represent the self-interest of the working class, that is about ninety percent of the American public, whereas capitalism directly serves only a tiny minority of rich capitalists. The feast is intended for the nobility and them alone, even if they do now and then toss us dogs a few table scraps.
"Obsolete" is a word you use to describe an object, a thing that exists for someone else's use. A human being, whether male or female, is the subject, and can not become obsolete.
Sexism arbitrarily treats members of one sex or another as objects. Capitalism, of course, treats us all, excepting only the owners of capital, as exploitable and disposable objects. That is why you owe it to yourself and to humanity to overthrow them both.
Don't you want to stimulate kids with a challenge? Nothing gets young kids so motivated to know how their PCs work as well as that damned censorware. Some kids I know one time asked me how to get around the copy of "Net Nanny" their mother had inflicted on them, for example; while I gave them some general technical advice, I refused to tell them directly - they wouldn't learn anything if I did it all for them - but I was pleased to see later that they finally figured it out themselves. When they did that, they ceased to be mere lowly users and graduated to the first rung of being hackers.
And unlike when you break into someone else's machine, those kids can't get into legal trouble; it's legal to hack your own box!
The down side to installing censorware is that they if the parents go out and buy the censorware themselves, the kids, reasonably, take it as a demeaning insult issuing from a close family member. You know how hypersensitive adolescents are, that's got to have a bad effect on family feelings. But with these new preloaded PCs, it ain't Mom-n-Dad's fault, it comes that way from the factory. So this sounds all good to me.
> With the Clinton Administration giving away our nuclear secrets wholesale, this is a bit of badly needed good news.
Yeah buddy, the Clinton Administration giving away nuclear secrets with the aid of their amazing Tom Swift time machine. You know, the one that allowed Clinton, elected in 1992, to give away the secret of the W-88 ICBM warhead in 1985.
No, if you bother to read the fine print in the newspaper articles, rather than the cartoons on the editorial pages, you'd be aware that the secret was out the door and down the road years before that loser Clinton ever set foot in the White House. It's a well-documented fact that the nuclear-secret leaks took place during the Reagan and Bush Administrations.
While we're mentioning China and the Bush Administration, maybe you recall President Bush's weak, gutless acquiescence to the Tiananmen Square massacre? Democracy be damned, there are big multinational corporations, big campaign contributors, who stood to face a loss if he had cut off their access to all those cheap and industrious one-dollar-a-day Chinese laborers!
Compare Microsoft's resources with those of the Linux hackers: M$ has a thousand times more money, M$ has access to every piece of hardware on the market plus early access to all the new designs still under development, for every Linux hacker there are ten M$ programmers and two dozen support staff. According to traditional capitalist theory, a programmer at M$, with his potential to become a millionaire from stock options, should be vastly more motivated than a Linux hacker working for free.
So why doesn't Linux suck half as bad as those products described in that article? Could it be that capitalism ruins everything? When a Linux hacker, or even a tenth-rate amateur hacker like me, produces a piece of code, we do it because we want a working program. When M$ does whatever you'd call what it does, it couldn't care less about how well the program itself works; the one and only consideration is, "how much money will this thing bring us?"
And it isn't just software. It's the pesticide-laden, hormone-laced food you eat and the polluted air you breathe; it's the way you waste five or ten hours of your lives each week sitting in traffic jams, because "the system" requires everyone to be at their work station at 8:00 AM sharp; and when you drag yourself home from work, it's the idiocy you're offered as "entertainment" on TV. See, food, water and air don't count for anything; the hours of your life are valueless; art is nothing but another commodity - the only fundamentally important thing, the one criterion by which all human effort is planned and judged in this society, is money, money, money.
The lust for money, accurately described in the Gospel as "the root of all evil," dictates every facet of American life, including even immaterial things like religion - nowadays, seemingly, a wholly owned subsidiary of the more pro-business of America's two pro-business political parties. Life in the U.S.A. is primarily controlled by the very rich and by corporations, and every day that goes by sees the corporate stranglehold over your life and mine, even down to the most insanely minute detail (e.g. what files do you have on your hard drive? the NSA has got to know! what did you smoke last weekend? piss in this cup so the boss man can check!) only tighten.
Karl Marx spelled out a potential solution a century and a half ago. But ninety percent of the people reading this post, having had their brains marinated in anti-socialist, pro-capitalist propaganda their whole lives, will be so spooked by the recital of that dread name, that they won't ever bother to even consider the possibilities of a different form of government than the absolute, unlimited reign of capital.
No! instead of that, we all must have faith in the all-beneficent "invisible hand" of capital! Everything will come out for the best in the end! Sure it will.
About six or seven years ago, I thought I had carpal tunnel syndrome and I was considering getting surgery on my hand. My right hand was so weak I couldn't crush an egg in it and it hurt almost all the time. If I tried to do a push-up, I couldn't; it hurt _a lot_, my right wrist would buckle and I'd fall on my face. But it turned out that my problem was in my neck and upper back, not in my hand. I was working a lot of overtime doing CAD drawings and you sit funny, with your arm upraised, tensed and stretched in an unnatural way, when you use a mouse or a tablet all day.
I went to an osteopath and after a few treatments (sort of a mild form of professional wrestling; I'd lie on a mat and he'd push here, pull there, shove here, twist there, pop crunch pop, he was really skilled) I started to get my right hand back. I continued treatments for a few months and my problem disappeared and hasn't come back since.
The other thing that helped was getting one of those little gel-filled pillows you rest your wrist on when pushing a mouse; you can get them at most computer stores. The one I got comes attached to a mouse pad with a Velcro strip; I detach it and use it on my tablet. It cost about twelve dollars, which is high, but it works great.
Get your upper spine examined before you do anything as radical as letting someone cut you with a scalpel.
Who reads/.? Anti-literate fundamentalist fanatics or intelligent people such as yourself? I believe the original post suggested that you home-school your kids. Would you teach your kids about the theory of evolution?
My opinion is that the very best thing you can do for your young kids is to home-school them until they can read fairly fluently. Up to age nine or ten is about ideal. It's not natural, a form of torture really, to expect a six year old to sit silently for several hours in a row. This may make sense if you're training up a crew of child laborers to work thirteen hours a day in the factory next door; it makes no sense in 1999. It's especially hard on a smart kid to sit there while the rest of the class goes over the same old material again and again very slowly.
Elementary schools are remarkably inefficient in terms of time. Home-school kids cover the same material in two hours that it take a grade school all day to present. Also as a typical example, suppose a grade school teacher does a segment on the cycle of rain and evaporation, and the kid starts wondering about the color of clouds, where does that come from? Well, sorry kid, that's off the topic, and we have to switch to the reading lesson now anyway. The factory-like time schedule of school truncates that digression, whereas a home-school teacher (i.e. you) would naturally go off the pre-programmed subject and spend an hour or two satisfying your kid's curiosity.
This isn't the fault of the elementary school teachers. Their problem, in every school district, is that there are too many kids per teacher. But you can imagine the cost of running the teacher-student ratio up to one to six for the first two or three grades. At least in Florida, where I live, I guarantee that this will never ever happen. In Florida, politicians get elected by promising to dismantle and destroy the public school system.
Those first four or five grades in your ordinary elementary school can just ruin a kid for life as a student. Almost all grade school kids, including many of the smartest ones, have their natural interest in learning academic things completely extinguished. Excepting, maybe, those naturally spaced-out kids who are blessed with the faculty of splitting the boredom scene altogether and drifting off to fantasy land?
But there's a disadvantage to home-schooling too. As compared with attending a regular school, home-schooling limits a kid's social contacts. You want your kid to be happy, right? Also, a kid can get a lot out of school facilities like chem labs and the library and the specialized knowledge of the teachers of specific subjects; for example, I'm sure we both know enough about reading a arithmetic to teach an eight year old. But how many parents are well read in, say, English literature, and world history, and Latin grammar, and trigonometry, plus biology, chemistry and physics, all at the same time? But those strengths of a regular school mainly benefit older students, not young kids in grades 1-5.
So I think you get the best balance between the advantages and disadvantages of a regular school by letting your kids learn at home until age nine or ten. That's what my three kids did and they're all doing really well in school now.
Also, if they've got them in your area, try to get into one of thoose "magnet school" programs. My older daughter is a senior in an unbelievably good "magnet school;" I look at the homework they assign her and it's amazing, just like college level work. You can bet her fellow students at Tampa Bay Tech don't sit around all bored waiting for a class where they'll actually learn something for a change. How I wish I could have gone to a school like that! If there's one reform that would efficiently improve public education it would be a massive nationwide enlargement of "magnet school" programs like that one.
What a joke! I know that's always been the official U.S. propaganda line, that in contrast to the recklessness of foreign totalitarians, the U.S. only has reasonable, peaceful intentions, but still I can scarcely believe that there's anyone who is so credulous as to take that propaganda at face value.
The U.S.A. is the only country in the world to have used a nuclear bomb as a weapon of war. And in 1962 John Kennedy put seven thousand megatons in the air, over the issue of the Russians basing IRBMs in Cuba the same way the U.S.A. based their IRBMs in Turkey. The hemisphere-destroying nuclear catastrophe was only averted at the last moment thanks to Khrushchev's superior intelligence and sanity.
Don't take my word for it. For documentation, please refer to In Retrospect by Robert Strange McNamara (the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis), and Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes.
Here's the problem, as simply as it can be stated. Some American parents - a lot of parents, probably a majority - want to lie to their kids. With as strength of desire that's almost desperate, they want to tell their young children, in effect, "No such thing as sex exists."
(There is a lesser issue with violence, but how serious is American's disapproval of so-called media violence, really? "Media violence" is a very bad phrase, since what it denominates is not violence but depiction of violence, quite a different thing, the difference between a book and a gunshot wound; yet that term begs the question of whether these depictions are in any way connected to the violence they depict. But at any rate, is not the majority of television "entertainment," broadcast freely over the radio waves to one and all, based on the concepts of crime and violence? If you watch broadcast TV for a week, how many killings do you see? and how many naked bodies? If Americans really disapproved of media violence we'd already censor it on the broadcast media as harshly as we censor even the most innocent sexual display - and we don't.)
Now if one is committed, on what are sometimes laughably referred to as "moral" grounds, to telling all the children in the community the lie that sex does not exist in humans, then one is logically forced to institute the strictest form of censorship upon all available information media. All a First Amendment does is establish a constant source of tension. You can't make the censorship problem go away by, say, supporting the ACLU (though that is a good idea) as it will recur and recur until you eliminate from society the notion that kids must be shielded from knowledge about sex. How one might go about transforming a neurotically puritanic society such as ours in that manner I simply can't imagine.
I suspect that this notion (the virtue of complete sexual ignorance among young people) is fairly new in European society. Up until a couple or three centuries ago, practically no one lived far from the countryside, and the majority of people labored at agriculture. Try to imagine a child growing up on or even near a farm ignorant of the mechanics of sex.
Science has nothing to do with it. When the Senator says "The effect of media violence on our children is no longer open to debate," he's not saying anything about whether such an effect actually exists; he's saying, "I'm up here on the Senate floor with all my power and you're out there on the street with none, so you go shut up now." Imagine. What this bill proposes is a federal board of universal censorship - books, magazines, movies, television shows, and computer programs. How can one not shudder at this prospect?
But look at the bright side. The original post complained about a diminution of freedom. Nothing could be farther from the truth! I am a parent; I have three minor children. It's a lot of work to raise one's children, and now these Senators, bless them, propose to free me of a sizable amount of my onerous burden. Rather than me actually looking over my son's shoulder as he plays a video game, or reading a movie review to see if maybe I'd prefer my teenage daughter not to go to see this or that film, now the Federal Universal Censorship Committee will take all this tedious labor off my hands! And in terms of moral guidance for one's offspring, once the FUCC censors each and every book so that innocent teenagers and younger can only ever read mush, Disney and ads, why I won't have to worry about my kids getting bad ideas in their heads; I can be confident that at the age of maturity their minds will be as clean and empty as a brand new refrigerator, fresh out of the cardboard box. Ah, freedom.
Thus does my generation of Americans, the deservedly-well-loathed so-called "boomers," sink in its middle age into fat, lazy, irresponsible senescence.
> Hold the teachers accountable: that is, grade > them also according to their results.
So how does this work out in the real world, where the students actually exist? In my city, right down the road from my house you can look at some nice, brand new, modern schools, where all the students get fresh new textbooks and clean, well-lit new classrooms. Practically all the students who attend these schools come from prosperous middle-class or upper-middle-class homes (the upper class, which includes ninety percent plus of the politicians, all send their kids to expensive, exclusive private schools). This means that a.) those kids don't lack any of the material resources, such as books and newspapers and computers in the house, that contribute to academic success, and b.) they also have role models right in their own family for success in American society. So a teacher in a class full of such students has a pretty easy time of it, since his students are pretty much all adequately prepared and motivated for doing well in school.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, where the lower-income people (you know which people I mean, I hope? the black kids) live, you see fifty-year-old brick school buildings that look like they are right on the verge of collapse, surrounded on their lots by a sea of deteriorating unpainted portable classrooms. And concerning role models for academic success: most of the kids attending these schools don't have a single college graduate among their families and acquaintances; typically they expect, just on the basis of growing up in the neighborhood where they live, that they will have a far greater chance of being dead or in jail at age twenty-one than being in college. A sizable fraction of the students, particularly the very young ones, are actually undernourished. And their schools are also undernourished; the students are ostensibly supposed to do homework, but in those crumbling inner-city schools half of them don't even have textbooks to take home.
Now if you were a teacher, which group of students would be easier to teach? And face it, which school will have the higher scores on the standardized tests? Obviously the inner-city teacher has a far harder job than the teacher in the new school in the high-priced suburbs, right? So what you suggest is that if a teacher should be so idealistic as to take on the far more challenging task of trying to help the inner-city students who start school with so many obvious disadvantages, rather than taking it easy in the burbs, their reward shall be that they get punished for their "failure," that is, for the lower test scores of their ill-prepared and demoralized students.
This is not just a thought experiment; this is what's happening today in Florida. Our Republican Governor, Jeb! Bush, that third-generation Yankee millionaire who never ever set foot in a public school until he was running for office, has managed to ram through our notoriously corrupt legislature (all of whose kids attend private schools) a fantastically hypocritical plan which punishes the schools whose students score the worst on standardized tests. Of course he couldn't care less one way or another about the students; the purposes of his so-called "Opportunity Scholarships" (i.e. vouchers) are two: to crush the teachers's unions, and to resegregate the public schools. This is the South, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
I want to thank both Redhat and RMS for this excellent thing they offer.
Recently I downloaded the entire Redhat 6.1 binaries and source CDs over my cable modem from a local university's mirror site - see
http://www.redhat.com/download/mirror.ht ml
for a mirror site near you. To make it totally easy to burn CD copies, the mirror site had these as ISO disc images!
Do you know if Redhat intends to make the RMS distro available for free downloading? Of course the FSF would not get that dollar, but I at least would be willing to send a check off direct to the FSF. I'll tell you for sure, the RMS all-free distro is the one I want on my home computer.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> Citing the poor quality of republican websites, Republican
> Conference Chairman J.C. Watts has started a project
> called 'GOP.gov' to help improve their websites. This is all
> well and good, except GOP.gov isn't just their name, it's also
> their domain. This is a pretty clear violation, etc.
Since this web site is intended to be used "to improve websites," shouldn't it maybe get the .net suffix?
You'd think that government and the military would be extremely solicitous toward their own .gov and .mil suffixes. Has anyone fired off a letter to GOP.gov? I imagine that they would be kind of peeved at having to give up their chosen domain name but consider. I'd bet you a dollar that if I as a private individual tried to register, say, uncharted.gov or uncharted.mil as my own domain name, InterNIC wouldn't allow it. But if they get to do GOP.gov despite the RFC, then the next thing you know you're only a law suit away from all kinds of weird minor political parties trying to passing themselves off as this_and_that.gov, implicitly the voice of the government itself. I'm sure neither Repubs nor Dems would care for that outcome.
Also, I have a question I'm sure many /. readers can answer: wouldn't GOP.gov be case-sensitive? I just tried an experiment; I typed in
http://www.YAHOO.com/
http:/SLASHDOT.ORG/
http:/www.CONCENTRIC.net/
and in all three cases I got to the expected page. But when I changed
http://www.concentric.net/~Wkiernan/
to
http://www.concentric.net/~WkieRnan/
I got a 404 error. Is it only case sensitive in subdirectories?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Would anyone reading this from Europe or Japan care to list the specs of these big-screen, wide-format TVs that you see in your stores? The reason I ask is that I recently got a Matrox G400 video card which has two outputs. If you have two regular monitors their Windows NT driver can split an image across two screens, which is kind of neat to look at and possibly useful for CAD operators and the like. Also, though I haven't tried it yet, it seems you can drive a regular TV set from the secondary output jack; the card even comes with an adapter (DB-15 on one end, on the other something that looks like the old-fashioned phono jack for conventional TVs and also an "S-Video" plug, whatever that is).
The resolution of an ordinary U.S. television set is maybe good enough for 640 x 480, and that would be just fine for text-mode, but you wouldn't want to run a GUI at 640 x 480. But if the resolution of these new big TVs is high enough, then even when you are running a GUI at high resolution, you could use a wide-screen TV as a relatively cheap, really big monitor, one you could read across the room! I'd like that a lot, wouldn't you? Relax on the couch with a wireless keyboard and instead of passively slacking in front of a mindless TV feed, you could be hacking instead.
Also, does anyone reading this on Slashdot know if there is a X server for the Matrox G400 that supports either dual monitors or TV out?
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You say:
>Socialism and Capitalism just take different (drastically different) approaches to achieving the SAME end.
No, the purpose of capitalism is to increase the wealth of the owners of capital. Period. There's a silly, empty myth about the automatic beneficence of the "invisible hand," but capitalism has no inherent interest whatsoever in "a happy functioning society." If the interests of capitalists are served by peace and general prosperity, then they may strive for peace and prosperity; if it maximizes profit to inflict war or starvation on foreigners, or even on their own nation's general public (e.g., the Great Depression), then that's exactly what a capitalist government will do.
Socialism, at least in theory, does intend to create that "happy functioning society." Naturally, the first thing a sensible person says is, "Yeah, sure, it intends to do that, but how well does it work out in practice? Look at Russia, North Korea, etc., etc."
I've been down that road on Usenet before, and I type slowly and poorly enough to make it preferable to cut-n-paste:
> > Communism and socialism have been given their shot, and left a legacy of economic failure and human misery for all to see.
>Where? In Russia? Holy cow, the Russians have fucked up each and every form of government they have ever tried since the days of Genghis Khan. Russian monarchy was an unmitigated disaster for centuries, the shame of Europe. Post-monarchy Russian republicanism dissolved in chaos in a single year. On top of that, the Russian Communist Government were under assault from day one, by the various expeditionary forces which invaded Russia to back up the White Russian counter-revolution, by the embargo of the entire outside world, by a demonic Nazi invasion that killed off a third of the adult male population, and by a nuclear-armed Cold War which was deliberately intended to force them into bankruptcy - at the cost of risking a nuclear holocaust. Not to mention the attack from within - you have to be pretty crazy to describe Stalinism as a logical outcome of Marxist theory. Who murdered Trotsky?
>Since the Russians are your exemplar, why don't you judge capitalism by the way the Russians practice it? In the few short years since the Russians have reverted to capitalism, despite the fact that we have called off the "Cold War" and poured billions of dollars into the new Russian Republic, the life expectancy of the average Russian has gone down by seven years! So much for the blessings of the "free market".
>As far as socialism is concerned, the fact is that each and every one of the "developed countries" is run according to policies which are part of the programs of the Socialist Parties of the early 1900s. I'm talking about things like public schools and old-age pensions. Don't take my word for it, go look up the official platform of the American Socialist Party of 1928. According to Milton Friedman (!) that Socialist Party was "the most influential party in the history of this country", and "every one of its 1928 platform planks" was later enacted. So if you think the U.S.A. has been successful over the last seventy years, then you agree that socialism works.
End quote. You say:
>Eventually, everyone's happy.
Keynes had it, more accurately: "Eventually everybody's dead."
Finally you say:
>Every motivation for everything we DO is selfish, if you look deep enough.
Maybe so; the main point, then, is that socialism does represent the self-interest of the working class, that is about ninety percent of the American public, whereas capitalism directly serves only a tiny minority of rich capitalists. The feast is intended for the nobility and them alone, even if they do now and then toss us dogs a few table scraps.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
"Obsolete" is a word you use to describe an object, a thing that exists for someone else's use. A human being, whether male or female, is the subject, and can not become obsolete.
Sexism arbitrarily treats members of one sex or another as objects. Capitalism, of course, treats us all, excepting only the owners of capital, as exploitable and disposable objects. That is why you owe it to yourself and to humanity to overthrow them both.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Don't you want to stimulate kids with a challenge? Nothing gets young kids so motivated to know how their PCs work as well as that damned censorware. Some kids I know one time asked me how to get around the copy of "Net Nanny" their mother had inflicted on them, for example; while I gave them some general technical advice, I refused to tell them directly - they wouldn't learn anything if I did it all for them - but I was pleased to see later that they finally figured it out themselves. When they did that, they ceased to be mere lowly users and graduated to the first rung of being hackers.
And unlike when you break into someone else's machine, those kids can't get into legal trouble; it's legal to hack your own box!
The down side to installing censorware is that they if the parents go out and buy the censorware themselves, the kids, reasonably, take it as a demeaning insult issuing from a close family member. You know how hypersensitive adolescents are, that's got to have a bad effect on family feelings. But with these new preloaded PCs, it ain't Mom-n-Dad's fault, it comes that way from the factory. So this sounds all good to me.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> With the Clinton Administration giving away our nuclear secrets wholesale, this is a bit of badly needed good news.
Yeah buddy, the Clinton Administration giving away nuclear secrets with the aid of their amazing Tom Swift time machine. You know, the one that allowed Clinton, elected in 1992, to give away the secret of the W-88 ICBM warhead in 1985.
No, if you bother to read the fine print in the newspaper articles, rather than the cartoons on the editorial pages, you'd be aware that the secret was out the door and down the road years before that loser Clinton ever set foot in the White House. It's a well-documented fact that the nuclear-secret leaks took place during the Reagan and Bush Administrations.
While we're mentioning China and the Bush Administration, maybe you recall President Bush's weak, gutless acquiescence to the Tiananmen Square massacre? Democracy be damned, there are big multinational corporations, big campaign contributors, who stood to face a loss if he had cut off their access to all those cheap and industrious one-dollar-a-day Chinese laborers!
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Compare Microsoft's resources with those of the Linux hackers: M$ has a thousand times more money, M$ has access to every piece of hardware on the market plus early access to all the new designs still under development, for every Linux hacker there are ten M$ programmers and two dozen support staff. According to traditional capitalist theory, a programmer at M$, with his potential to become a millionaire from stock options, should be vastly more motivated than a Linux hacker working for free.
So why doesn't Linux suck half as bad as those products described in that article? Could it be that capitalism ruins everything? When a Linux hacker, or even a tenth-rate amateur hacker like me, produces a piece of code, we do it because we want a working program. When M$ does whatever you'd call what it does, it couldn't care less about how well the program itself works; the one and only consideration is, "how much money will this thing bring us?"
And it isn't just software. It's the pesticide-laden, hormone-laced food you eat and the polluted air you breathe; it's the way you waste five or ten hours of your lives each week sitting in traffic jams, because "the system" requires everyone to be at their work station at 8:00 AM sharp; and when you drag yourself home from work, it's the idiocy you're offered as "entertainment" on TV. See, food, water and air don't count for anything; the hours of your life are valueless; art is nothing but another commodity - the only fundamentally important thing, the one criterion by which all human effort is planned and judged in this society, is money, money, money.
The lust for money, accurately described in the Gospel as "the root of all evil," dictates every facet of American life, including even immaterial things like religion - nowadays, seemingly, a wholly owned subsidiary of the more pro-business of America's two pro-business political parties. Life in the U.S.A. is primarily controlled by the very rich and by corporations, and every day that goes by sees the corporate stranglehold over your life and mine, even down to the most insanely minute detail (e.g. what files do you have on your hard drive? the NSA has got to know! what did you smoke last weekend? piss in this cup so the boss man can check!) only tighten.
Karl Marx spelled out a potential solution a century and a half ago. But ninety percent of the people reading this post, having had their brains marinated in anti-socialist, pro-capitalist propaganda their whole lives, will be so spooked by the recital of that dread name, that they won't ever bother to even consider the possibilities of a different form of government than the absolute, unlimited reign of capital.
No! instead of that, we all must have faith in the all-beneficent "invisible hand" of capital! Everything will come out for the best in the end! Sure it will.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
See:
http://www.hsrd.ornl.gov/~lfz/rpchklst/5480_11.h tm
1988 U.S. Department of Energy DOE-5480 RADIATION PROTECTION FOR OCCUPATIONAL WORKERS:
Limit for working adults: 5 REM (0.05 sievert) / year
Limit for unborn child: 0.5 REM (0.005 sievert) / year
Limit for minor child: 0.1 REM (0.001 sievert) / year
So any adult a mile from the plant is getting his Maximum Recommended Annual Dose every fifteen hours; children go well over the limit in two hours.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
-I also sent this as eMail to Kyrrin.
Hello Kyrrin!
About six or seven years ago, I thought I had carpal tunnel syndrome and I was considering getting surgery on my hand. My right hand was so weak I couldn't crush an egg in it and it hurt almost all the time. If I tried to do a push-up, I couldn't; it hurt _a lot_, my right wrist would buckle and I'd fall on my face. But it turned out that my problem was in my neck and upper back, not in my hand. I was working a lot of overtime doing CAD drawings and you sit funny, with your arm upraised, tensed and stretched in an unnatural way, when you use a mouse or a tablet all day.
I went to an osteopath and after a few treatments (sort of a mild form of professional wrestling; I'd lie on a mat and he'd push here, pull there, shove here, twist there, pop crunch pop, he was really skilled) I started to get my right hand back. I continued treatments for a few months and my problem disappeared and hasn't come back since.
The other thing that helped was getting one of those little gel-filled pillows you rest your wrist on when pushing a mouse; you can get them at most computer stores. The one I got comes attached to a mouse pad with a Velcro strip; I detach it and use it on my tablet. It cost about twelve dollars, which is high, but it works great.
Get your upper spine examined before you do anything as radical as letting someone cut you with a scalpel.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Who reads /.? Anti-literate fundamentalist fanatics or intelligent people such as yourself? I believe the original post suggested that you home-school your kids. Would you teach your kids about the theory of evolution?
My opinion is that the very best thing you can do for your young kids is to home-school them until they can read fairly fluently. Up to age nine or ten is about ideal. It's not natural, a form of torture really, to expect a six year old to sit silently for several hours in a row. This may make sense if you're training up a crew of child laborers to work thirteen hours a day in the factory next door; it makes no sense in 1999. It's especially hard on a smart kid to sit there while the rest of the class goes over the same old material again and again very slowly.
Elementary schools are remarkably inefficient in terms of time. Home-school kids cover the same material in two hours that it take a grade school all day to present. Also as a typical example, suppose a grade school teacher does a segment on the cycle of rain and evaporation, and the kid starts wondering about the color of clouds, where does that come from? Well, sorry kid, that's off the topic, and we have to switch to the reading lesson now anyway. The factory-like time schedule of school truncates that digression, whereas a home-school teacher (i.e. you) would naturally go off the pre-programmed subject and spend an hour or two satisfying your kid's curiosity.
This isn't the fault of the elementary school teachers. Their problem, in every school district, is that there are too many kids per teacher. But you can imagine the cost of running the teacher-student ratio up to one to six for the first two or three grades. At least in Florida, where I live, I guarantee that this will never ever happen. In Florida, politicians get elected by promising to dismantle and destroy the public school system.
Those first four or five grades in your ordinary elementary school can just ruin a kid for life as a student. Almost all grade school kids, including many of the smartest ones, have their natural interest in learning academic things completely extinguished. Excepting, maybe, those naturally spaced-out kids who are blessed with the faculty of splitting the boredom scene altogether and drifting off to fantasy land?
But there's a disadvantage to home-schooling too. As compared with attending a regular school, home-schooling limits a kid's social contacts. You want your kid to be happy, right? Also, a kid can get a lot out of school facilities like chem labs and the library and the specialized knowledge of the teachers of specific subjects; for example, I'm sure we both know enough about reading a arithmetic to teach an eight year old. But how many parents are well read in, say, English literature, and world history, and Latin grammar, and trigonometry, plus biology, chemistry and physics, all at the same time? But those strengths of a regular school mainly benefit older students, not young kids in grades 1-5.
So I think you get the best balance between the advantages and disadvantages of a regular school by letting your kids learn at home until age nine or ten. That's what my three kids did and they're all doing really well in school now.
Also, if they've got them in your area, try to get into one of thoose "magnet school" programs. My older daughter is a senior in an unbelievably good "magnet school;" I look at the homework they assign her and it's amazing, just like college level work. You can bet her fellow students at Tampa Bay Tech don't sit around all bored waiting for a class where they'll actually learn something for a change. How I wish I could have gone to a school like that! If there's one reform that would efficiently improve public education it would be a massive nationwide enlargement of "magnet school" programs like that one.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
> The US, or its allies, would never use one.
What a joke! I know that's always been the official U.S. propaganda line, that in contrast to the recklessness of foreign totalitarians, the U.S. only has reasonable, peaceful intentions, but still I can scarcely believe that there's anyone who is so credulous as to take that propaganda at face value.
The U.S.A. is the only country in the world to have used a nuclear bomb as a weapon of war. And in 1962 John Kennedy put seven thousand megatons in the air, over the issue of the Russians basing IRBMs in Cuba the same way the U.S.A. based their IRBMs in Turkey. The hemisphere-destroying nuclear catastrophe was only averted at the last moment thanks to Khrushchev's superior intelligence and sanity.
Don't take my word for it. For documentation, please refer to In Retrospect by Robert Strange McNamara (the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis), and Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Here's the problem, as simply as it can be stated. Some American parents - a lot of parents, probably a majority - want to lie to their kids. With as strength of desire that's almost desperate, they want to tell their young children, in effect, "No such thing as sex exists."
(There is a lesser issue with violence, but how serious is American's disapproval of so-called media violence, really? "Media violence" is a very bad phrase, since what it denominates is not violence but depiction of violence, quite a different thing, the difference between a book and a gunshot wound; yet that term begs the question of whether these depictions are in any way connected to the violence they depict. But at any rate, is not the majority of television "entertainment," broadcast freely over the radio waves to one and all, based on the concepts of crime and violence? If you watch broadcast TV for a week, how many killings do you see? and how many naked bodies? If Americans really disapproved of media violence we'd already censor it on the broadcast media as harshly as we censor even the most innocent sexual display - and we don't.)
Now if one is committed, on what are sometimes laughably referred to as "moral" grounds, to telling all the children in the community the lie that sex does not exist in humans, then one is logically forced to institute the strictest form of censorship upon all available information media. All a First Amendment does is establish a constant source of tension. You can't make the censorship problem go away by, say, supporting the ACLU (though that is a good idea) as it will recur and recur until you eliminate from society the notion that kids must be shielded from knowledge about sex. How one might go about transforming a neurotically puritanic society such as ours in that manner I simply can't imagine.
I suspect that this notion (the virtue of complete sexual ignorance among young people) is fairly new in European society. Up until a couple or three centuries ago, practically no one lived far from the countryside, and the majority of people labored at agriculture. Try to imagine a child growing up on or even near a farm ignorant of the mechanics of sex.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
Science has nothing to do with it. When the Senator says "The effect of media violence on our children is no longer open to debate," he's not saying anything about whether such an effect actually exists; he's saying, "I'm up here on the Senate floor with all my power and you're out there on the street with none, so you go shut up now." Imagine. What this bill proposes is a federal board of universal censorship - books, magazines, movies, television shows, and computer programs. How can one not shudder at this prospect?
But look at the bright side. The original post complained about a diminution of freedom. Nothing could be farther from the truth! I am a parent; I have three minor children. It's a lot of work to raise one's children, and now these Senators, bless them, propose to free me of a sizable amount of my onerous burden. Rather than me actually looking over my son's shoulder as he plays a video game, or reading a movie review to see if maybe I'd prefer my teenage daughter not to go to see this or that film, now the Federal Universal Censorship Committee will take all this tedious labor off my hands! And in terms of moral guidance for one's offspring, once the FUCC censors each and every book so that innocent teenagers and younger can only ever read mush, Disney and ads, why I won't have to worry about my kids getting bad ideas in their heads; I can be confident that at the age of maturity their minds will be as clean and empty as a brand new refrigerator, fresh out of the cardboard box. Ah, freedom.
Thus does my generation of Americans, the deservedly-well-loathed so-called "boomers," sink in its middle age into fat, lazy, irresponsible senescence.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
You say:
> Hold the teachers accountable: that is, grade
> them also according to their results.
So how does this work out in the real world, where the students actually exist? In my city, right down the road from my house you can look at some nice, brand new, modern schools, where all the students get fresh new textbooks and clean, well-lit new classrooms. Practically all the students who attend these schools come from prosperous middle-class or upper-middle-class homes (the upper class, which includes ninety percent plus of the politicians, all send their kids to expensive, exclusive private schools). This means that a.) those kids don't lack any of the material resources, such as books and newspapers and computers in the house, that contribute to academic success, and b.) they also have role models right in their own family for success in American society. So a teacher in a class full of such students has a pretty easy time of it, since his students are pretty much all adequately prepared and motivated for doing well in school.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, where the lower-income people (you know which people I mean, I hope? the black kids) live, you see fifty-year-old brick school buildings that look like they are right on the verge of collapse, surrounded on their lots by a sea of deteriorating unpainted portable classrooms. And concerning role models for academic success: most of the kids attending these schools don't have a single college graduate among their families and acquaintances; typically they expect, just on the basis of growing up in the neighborhood where they live, that they will have a far greater chance of being dead or in jail at age twenty-one than being in college. A sizable fraction of the students, particularly the very young ones, are actually undernourished. And their schools are also undernourished; the students are ostensibly supposed to do homework, but in those crumbling inner-city schools half of them don't even have textbooks to take home.
Now if you were a teacher, which group of students would be easier to teach? And face it, which school will have the higher scores on the standardized tests? Obviously the inner-city teacher has a far harder job than the teacher in the new school in the high-priced suburbs, right? So what you suggest is that if a teacher should be so idealistic as to take on the far more challenging task of trying to help the inner-city students who start school with so many obvious disadvantages, rather than taking it easy in the burbs, their reward shall be that they get punished for their "failure," that is, for the lower test scores of their ill-prepared and demoralized students.
This is not just a thought experiment; this is what's happening today in Florida. Our Republican Governor, Jeb ! Bush, that third-generation Yankee millionaire who never ever set foot in a public school until he was running for office, has managed to ram through our notoriously corrupt legislature (all of whose kids attend private schools) a fantastically hypocritical plan which punishes the schools whose students score the worst on standardized tests. Of course he couldn't care less one way or another about the students; the purposes of his so-called "Opportunity Scholarships" (i.e. vouchers) are two: to crush the teachers's unions, and to resegregate the public schools. This is the South, after all.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net