Oh, dear. Ever had a sledge handle break? Or had the head starting to come off? I'm remembering a memorable weekend years ago, on a Habitat for Humanity project, where the volunteers brought _good_ tools and some contractors involved had brought absolute bottom-of-the-barrel, nasty, dangerous tools. We had a little trouble recovering some of our tools from some of the contractor's lowest ranked employees, who really, really wanted our tools, including a very sweet sledge hammer that I also really wanted.
Yes, it is. Getting access to only 1/4 of the same sales revenues, without the huge ad sales revenues that Ebay relies on, is hurting their bottom line fairly sales, and with all the money going through another company's management and infrastructure and decision makin? Not only does that cut back potential profit, it takes the "non-profit" moneys righout out of Ebay's employee pool and most especially their "executive perks" funding and leaves it over at Craigslist. And it hopefully embarasses the next round of promotions and bonuses out of the idiot who mandated the new website and went for glamour over substance.
Oh, dear. I'm afraid you missed my point on that: my point was that it was a pretty minor upgrade task, and not genuinely effective for anything except irritating people. Frankly, I find Ebay completely useless without a sniping tool.
Excessive use of fragile and unreliable, non-standards-compliant Javascript? Check. Excessive use of meaningless graphics, slowing browsing and usability but reducing the number of successful page changes by clients? Check. Obvious uselessness for those with visual problems? Check. Unnecessary re-arrangement of straightforward design to force a "new paradigm" as part of some advertising exec's "new vision"? Check. No improvement in user experience or actual usable features added? Check. Disable current generation of sniping tools, forcing them to hire engineers for at least 30 minutes work to update their clients? Check.
Driving people to the plain-text, plain-language, you can even rent cheap hookers there traffic of Craigslist? Check.
Ouch. I hadn't been thinking about that: and after all, a professional or semi-professional thief has little interest in keeping inventory around, so I'd be surprised if they still have a majority of the stolen goods when found, so it would still be unlikely that they'd get your goods even if they catch the thief. But I can easily believe that they wouldn't try hard to tie the local lost or stolen reports to the goods, and it would be pilfered (by bad cops) or auctioned with other "unrecovered" goods at the annual auctions.
Most cops I've known work hard at dangerous work, and actually try to stop guilty people. But it only takes a few bad quartermasters, or "policy" decisions to spend time on running the auction instead of digging up the original owners to stolen goods, to keep finding lost goods a profitable sideline.
I'll grant you they'll give you the report form paperwork. If they're actually there. I swear, where I lived after college, one of my roommates actually came home when a thief was in the house stealing the TV. He struggled with the guy, who got away, went down the street to the police station, and there was no one in the entry hall, no one answered the buzzer, no phone to call in, nothing.
He only found them when he went around the corner to the coffee shop to get his nerve back, around people. They took his report, but it was pretty embarassing all around.
I also think your dad was were lucky. I strongly suspect that a real thief will take the money _and_ the credit cards, and throw it in the trash. They've little to risk by doing so, and much to avoid by getting it out of circulation. It's the casual thief, the "Oooohhhh, look, a wallet! With cash!" person who'll leave it to be found. Credit cards are potentially as valuable as cash: professional or semi-professional thieves can do quite a lot of damage with them.
Perimeter security and booby traps, just like "Bouncing Betty" land mines. Frankly, I'd prefer these around military sites that are later abandoned: unexploded land mines are a huge security risk for a lot of innocent people in invaded countries, for decades afer the war is over.
Actually look at the CCTV recordings of the coffee shop where the laptop was lost? Actually tell you how to contact the lost and found offices of _both_ bus lines that pick people at that terminal? Actually help you act against the spammer forging email in your name?
I've had all of these happen to me or to friends in my presence. They just didn't bring enough traffic ticket money or rise to the level of political significance to pull police out of their cars or out of their construction site traffic duty to pursue smaller crimes. (Don't get me started on the overtime duties that could be filled by a much less expensive traffic guard to free police to do real work.)
I do respect most police officers: they do hard, difficult work. But where I live, at least, they lack resources to pursue many smaller issues that don't raise money for the city, such as theft or loss of property.
You've apparently never tried to report a stolen wallet or backpack, or even modest laptop. You fill out forms, answer questions,a nd they do _nothing_. It's just not important enough.
The USA also morphed repeatedly. Or did you forget about Hawaii in 1959? And for many European countries, they can trace their citizenry and their capital back far further than the USA: that means they can probably trace their bureaucracy and their people waiting in line for the right paperwork even further.
Or "win" by having an incredible amount of fun. Have you played "Kingdom of Loathing"? (www.kingdomofloathing.com) It's one of the best games I've ever played, and a number of friends of mine prefer it to expensive, computation and bandwidth expensive twitch shooters or highly animated games. As an old "Zork" and "rogue" player when they were first publicized, I empathize with their choice.
Really? What do "bomb electronics" look like? I'm fascinated by your ability to tell at a momentary glance what is a bomb and what is not. Even bomb specialists might have to actually look at what a protoboard is actually wired to, and its payload, to make such a determination.
Yes, I've seen pictures of it. I've even seen animated pictures of the display. Have you ever worked with such devices? Do you have _any idea_ how much fascinating circuitry you can wire into such a protoboard? Clock circuits, relays, even enough voltage doublers and amplification to generate just the sort of ignition spark you'd want for a detonator embedded in plastique? Goodness, I've _wired_ all sorts of fascinating things into such devices. Unless I had a chance to examine it closely, and read the chips and look carefully, _I_ couldn't tell you all of what such a device does. While the display was innocuous, the putty made it suspicious.
You are suggesting that police or security person ask for subtle judgement information from an information drone in an airport? And interpret that to say "oh, no, it probably wasn't a bomb, we'll just send over one rent-a-cop to ask about it".
How is the rent-a-cop, or a single officer, going to move back the crowd and interpose police body armor if it is a bomb? How are they going to get a good look at her device in a crowd, without alerting her to being spotted? Goodness, how does having a "plain clothes" cop walk over and stare a teenager up close in the chest not cause some reaction, even in a crowded airport? (Even I have to be subtle about it, and my interest is far more casual.)
A policeman on the spot has neither the time nor the information to scale back the response. It's much safer for them and for the crowd if they train to, and consistently, react quite firmly to any such incident. Fortunately, this one was farcical.
An "impolite" response could have involved so many other possibilities, it's amazing. Shooting her first tops the list. A firehose or pepper spray is a close second.
This critique makes little sense. She was already _in_ the crowded restaurant. What were they supposed to do but surround her with people in body armor and give her a chance to put it down, in case she is innocent? She was treated as a suspect of a very dangerous crime, but got the benefit of being treated as a suspect.
Would you really prefer that someone ventilate her head with a sniper rifle as a first response, which would have contained the potential damage even more effectively? Instead, the innocent passersby were protected by people in body armor who isolated her and kept her away from them while they assessed the risk. This is what I want in a security scare: react strongly, but politely (as the police on the site did.)
You need to look up this case. There's an image of the artwork, and an article on it, at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2007/09/mit_student_arr.html. When she was asked about it by an employee, she just walked away, and besides the circuit board she had a lump of what looked like putty in her hands. (Upon closer examination, it was flower shaped sculpture.) That raised the concerns of the airport security quite a lot. The object wasn't large, but it's not clear even to me at first glance what it was supposed to be.
Given the historical problems at Logan Airport (where the 9/11 terrorists launched from), and the ongoing IED problems and threats against Americans coming from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the testimony that she didn't stop or answer questions when asked, the security response is completely understandable. And if the bomb were real, what are they going to do? Throw a batarang at her?
There are limits on shotguns, especially for sawing of the handles and on the number of shells they can hold. I once spent a fascinating half-hour with a very sweet old lady selling shotguns, discussing the available firearms for home defense, the legal and illegal modifications, etc. Some of the illegal modifications included simply restoring the firearm's original magazine size, which I thought was fascinating.
Actually, there are numerous books that go into thorough detail, although not with the (questionably copyighted) inner documents fully quoted. "A Piece of Blue Sky" is amusing, and if you can find a copy, "The Scandal of Scientology", and there was an old Time Magazine article that got it basically right in less than 0 pages. You can also find much of the material through websites like www.xenu.net and www.factnet.org, although the documents are fragemented. It's hard to know what is complete or not, but it's enough of the inner material that the cult has been going off their rocker for decades about the general availability of these.
Look up what happened to Susan Meister for writing "The Scandal of Scientology", by the way. Mary Sue Hubbard's minions forged bomb threats to try and discredit Susan, and the related craziness got Mary Sue convicted along with some of the most devoted leadership of the cult, but the cult _still_ managed to wind up with the copyrights on the book to halt further publication.
Don't forget that scientology started out with claims to be a "science of the mind", and applied for "religion" status with the IRS partly for tax reasons, and partly to protect themselves from being sued to pieces for their claimed miracle cures being not only fraudulent but downright dangerous. (The FDA banned them making medical claims for auditing and their fasting programs: they now instead solicit "testimonials" which the FDA does not automatically ban, as not being medical claims.) It was a very sudden switchover, and many younger members probably don't realize why and how it happened.
Selective memory is a common trait of cults and the nastier political movements: it's a human trait, as well, but the extent of it in a cult that does hypnotic sessions with a lie detector and which "reveals your past lives" and teaches you to control the re-incarnated space aliens that are really your thoughts and body (known as "thetans") has a lot of leverage over basically brainwashed people to reprogram with all sorts of strange ideas.
This is the typically ideal solution, when there's other hardware around to take advantage of. C-Kermit is also your able-bodied manservant for getting all the settings right for the client.
Unfortunately, some BIOS's have never worked well for setting the BIOS interface at anything other than 115.2 KBaud, at least without an undocumented BIOS update. And guess what you need to to the BIOS update? You guessed it: Windows and boot-time console access. I ran into this problem with some new Linux servers and a vendor who'd never bothered to test their serial-over-IP setup.
Also, simply saying "use a null-modem cable" isn't enough. Remember that many modern machines don't have a serial port, which the original poster mentioned. I've also seen low-end rack servers that didn't, and proving only USB has gotten more common. Setting up a USB-serial or USB->USB console access takes some time as well, and our poster didn't say he had the money for the more sophisticated modern KVM's that do KVM over IP reliably. I've searched before for a toolkit to do KVM over IP from an identically installed computer, but found nothing for handling the video. It's a shame, really, such a device could be very handy for remote operations staff rather than my having to walk them through grub or BIOS options over the phone.
Oh, my. Sorry for the late reply, I missed the notice that you'd replied.
Pressure is most certainly _not_ force. Even the units are different
Pressure = Force / surface area Force = mass * acceleration Energy = force * distance
Pressure and force are _never_ exactly the same thing, at least if you're using scientific or engineering terms.
Now, it's fun to think mathematically about "what happens if you apply pressure to a point mass". And as you point out, nothing would happen. But _force_ most certainly can be applied: it happens all the time, because it is a mass (gravity applies, as does EM and possibly others, depending on the model). And even pressure has real world effects on what one might normally think of as a "point mass", such as a single quantum, because Schroedinger indeterminacy smears out the spatial location of even that "point mass". The results are fascinating fun, but they turn theoretical arguments based on a pure "point mass" into weird descriptions that lose real-world validity as they descend into the quantum realm trying to describe that "point mass". I hope that makes what I'm saying more clear? I can try again if it would help.
And as for tides: sir or madam, tides even in smaller objects can be "noticeable". Just because it's swamped by the primary gravitational force for a small object on the earth's surface doesn't mean it's not "noticeable". Tides are just such an effect, and they're quite noticeable.
The effect in a small centrifuge is just as you describe. It's many orders of magnitude larger than the gravitational tides, even for something as large as Earth. You're quite correct. But again, that does not mean the gravitational differentials are not "noticeable".
The average parent or master tradesman training apprentices and journeyman throughout history had a more straightforward job. They typically had a more extended family, and far more stable trades. That took practice and discipline. It didn't encourage a lot of "exploration" or "inventiveness". Wealthy families could afford enough books to teach reading, for most families learning to read was a luxury. So kindly don't compare that (admittedly successful for a long time) practice and its results to the needs of educated citizens in today's far larger and more complex communities. The needs have expanded tremendously.
Afghanistan has many problems: the abandonment of food-crops for heroin growing is a massive problem. Education in agriculture, and how to successfully grow food in that tough climate and rocky soil, can help dissuade the heroin trade. But if dad grew heroin, and the family is investing in weapons to protect the heroin produced, where's the source of education for growing different crops? Kids are inquisitive, sure, and that's worth nurturing in any environment. But if the information isn't at home, homeschooling may not be effective in providing such additional knowledge. And there are certainly cases where the homeschooled lessons are _dangerous_. Genital mutilation, the stoning of women for infedility, religious genocide, racial hatred, and slavery all are more easily taught at home than at a school where reform efforts can be more focused.
The US is no saint when it comes to these practices and teachings. The public schools have been turned into a big help with the worst situations, although they've sometimes been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern West.
I went to Europe for a few years recently, on a "married to a student" visa. The places I consulted for all offered to hire me. One of them had not had the recruiter make clear that I was not staying. They got good work, but were frustrated when I wouldn't stay. They'd never seen a real "geek" before: only one of their local programmers actually like to poke around, and he didn't do open source software.
They all extended my contracts: it was enlightening.
Even if he was bad at it, it doesn't mean he didn't try or wasn't forced to occasionally do a diaper or fix a toilet. He wasn't _that_ wealthy. And I suspect, that at my age, I know a little more of what Berlin was like before the war. It had been getting nastier for Jews there for years: Einstein got out when it got frightening, much to his regret in some ways because a lot of the best physics work was done there. (Yes, I've talked with Berlin trained physicists about their training in the 1930's. The one I met was frighteningly skilled, a true master of many subjects.)
Let's try judging, first, your knowledge of what it's like to be married, to be a father with an infant, or to be aware of what racism does to the lives of geniuses. Then we can discuss this concept of "wise citizens" and how to educate them in wisdom. He may have been awful at such tasks, but I can pretty much guaranteed that he had to to them at some point.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, dear. Ever had a sledge handle break? Or had the head starting to come off? I'm remembering a memorable weekend years ago, on a Habitat for Humanity project, where the volunteers brought _good_ tools and some contractors involved had brought absolute bottom-of-the-barrel, nasty, dangerous tools. We had a little trouble recovering some of our tools from some of the contractor's lowest ranked employees, who really, really wanted our tools, including a very sweet sledge hammer that I also really wanted.
Yes, it is. Getting access to only 1/4 of the same sales revenues, without the huge ad sales revenues that Ebay relies on, is hurting their bottom line fairly sales, and with all the money going through another company's management and infrastructure and decision makin? Not only does that cut back potential profit, it takes the "non-profit" moneys righout out of Ebay's employee pool and most especially their "executive perks" funding and leaves it over at Craigslist. And it hopefully embarasses the next round of promotions and bonuses out of the idiot who mandated the new website and went for glamour over substance.
Oh, dear. I'm afraid you missed my point on that: my point was that it was a pretty minor upgrade task, and not genuinely effective for anything except irritating people. Frankly, I find Ebay completely useless without a sniping tool.
Excessive use of fragile and unreliable, non-standards-compliant Javascript? Check.
Excessive use of meaningless graphics, slowing browsing and usability but reducing the number of successful page changes by clients? Check.
Obvious uselessness for those with visual problems? Check.
Unnecessary re-arrangement of straightforward design to force a "new paradigm" as part of some advertising exec's "new vision"? Check.
No improvement in user experience or actual usable features added? Check.
Disable current generation of sniping tools, forcing them to hire engineers for at least 30 minutes work to update their clients? Check.
Driving people to the plain-text, plain-language, you can even rent cheap hookers there traffic of Craigslist? Check.
If getting a job offer from Microsoft didn't kill him, I'm not sure what would. Ninjas?
No, wait, that's been tried. (http://www.yale.edu/ypu/blog.html)
Ouch. I hadn't been thinking about that: and after all, a professional or semi-professional thief has little interest in keeping inventory around, so I'd be surprised if they still have a majority of the stolen goods when found, so it would still be unlikely that they'd get your goods even if they catch the thief. But I can easily believe that they wouldn't try hard to tie the local lost or stolen reports to the goods, and it would be pilfered (by bad cops) or auctioned with other "unrecovered" goods at the annual auctions.
Most cops I've known work hard at dangerous work, and actually try to stop guilty people. But it only takes a few bad quartermasters, or "policy" decisions to spend time on running the auction instead of digging up the original owners to stolen goods, to keep finding lost goods a profitable sideline.
I'll grant you they'll give you the report form paperwork. If they're actually there. I swear, where I lived after college, one of my roommates actually came home when a thief was in the house stealing the TV. He struggled with the guy, who got away, went down the street to the police station, and there was no one in the entry hall, no one answered the buzzer, no phone to call in, nothing.
He only found them when he went around the corner to the coffee shop to get his nerve back, around people. They took his report, but it was pretty embarassing all around.
I also think your dad was were lucky. I strongly suspect that a real thief will take the money _and_ the credit cards, and throw it in the trash. They've little to risk by doing so, and much to avoid by getting it out of circulation. It's the casual thief, the "Oooohhhh, look, a wallet! With cash!" person who'll leave it to be found. Credit cards are potentially as valuable as cash: professional or semi-professional thieves can do quite a lot of damage with them.
Perimeter security and booby traps, just like "Bouncing Betty" land mines. Frankly, I'd prefer these around military sites that are later abandoned: unexploded land mines are a huge security risk for a lot of innocent people in invaded countries, for decades afer the war is over.
He was waxing eloquent.
Actually look at the CCTV recordings of the coffee shop where the laptop was lost? Actually tell you how to contact the lost and found offices of _both_ bus lines that pick people at that terminal? Actually help you act against the spammer forging email in your name?
I've had all of these happen to me or to friends in my presence. They just didn't bring enough traffic ticket money or rise to the level of political significance to pull police out of their cars or out of their construction site traffic duty to pursue smaller crimes. (Don't get me started on the overtime duties that could be filled by a much less expensive traffic guard to free police to do real work.)
I do respect most police officers: they do hard, difficult work. But where I live, at least, they lack resources to pursue many smaller issues that don't raise money for the city, such as theft or loss of property.
You've apparently never tried to report a stolen wallet or backpack, or even modest laptop. You fill out forms, answer questions,a nd they do _nothing_. It's just not important enough.
The USA also morphed repeatedly. Or did you forget about Hawaii in 1959? And for many European countries, they can trace their citizenry and their capital back far further than the USA: that means they can probably trace their bureaucracy and their people waiting in line for the right paperwork even further.
Or "win" by having an incredible amount of fun. Have you played "Kingdom of Loathing"? (www.kingdomofloathing.com) It's one of the best games I've ever played, and a number of friends of mine prefer it to expensive, computation and bandwidth expensive twitch shooters or highly animated games. As an old "Zork" and "rogue" player when they were first publicized, I empathize with their choice.
Really? What do "bomb electronics" look like? I'm fascinated by your ability to tell at a momentary glance what is a bomb and what is not. Even bomb specialists might have to actually look at what a protoboard is actually wired to, and its payload, to make such a determination.
Yes, I've seen pictures of it. I've even seen animated pictures of the display. Have you ever worked with such devices? Do you have _any idea_ how much fascinating circuitry you can wire into such a protoboard? Clock circuits, relays, even enough voltage doublers and amplification to generate just the sort of ignition spark you'd want for a detonator embedded in plastique? Goodness, I've _wired_ all sorts of fascinating things into such devices. Unless I had a chance to examine it closely, and read the chips and look carefully, _I_ couldn't tell you all of what such a device does. While the display was innocuous, the putty made it suspicious.
You are suggesting that police or security person ask for subtle judgement information from an information drone in an airport? And interpret that to say "oh, no, it probably wasn't a bomb, we'll just send over one rent-a-cop to ask about it".
How is the rent-a-cop, or a single officer, going to move back the crowd and interpose police body armor if it is a bomb? How are they going to get a good look at her device in a crowd, without alerting her to being spotted? Goodness, how does having a "plain clothes" cop walk over and stare a teenager up close in the chest not cause some reaction, even in a crowded airport? (Even I have to be subtle about it, and my interest is far more casual.)
A policeman on the spot has neither the time nor the information to scale back the response. It's much safer for them and for the crowd if they train to, and consistently, react quite firmly to any such incident. Fortunately, this one was farcical.
An "impolite" response could have involved so many other possibilities, it's amazing. Shooting her first tops the list. A firehose or pepper spray is a close second.
This critique makes little sense. She was already _in_ the crowded restaurant. What were they supposed to do but surround her with people in body armor and give her a chance to put it down, in case she is innocent? She was treated as a suspect of a very dangerous crime, but got the benefit of being treated as a suspect.
Would you really prefer that someone ventilate her head with a sniper rifle as a first response, which would have contained the potential damage even more effectively? Instead, the innocent passersby were protected by people in body armor who isolated her and kept her away from them while they assessed the risk. This is what I want in a security scare: react strongly, but politely (as the police on the site did.)
You need to look up this case. There's an image of the artwork, and an article on it, at http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/breaking_news/2007/09/mit_student_arr.html. When she was asked about it by an employee, she just walked away, and besides the circuit board she had a lump of what looked like putty in her hands. (Upon closer examination, it was flower shaped sculpture.) That raised the concerns of the airport security quite a lot. The object wasn't large, but it's not clear even to me at first glance what it was supposed to be.
Given the historical problems at Logan Airport (where the 9/11 terrorists launched from), and the ongoing IED problems and threats against Americans coming from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the testimony that she didn't stop or answer questions when asked, the security response is completely understandable. And if the bomb were real, what are they going to do? Throw a batarang at her?
There are limits on shotguns, especially for sawing of the handles and on the number of shells they can hold. I once spent a fascinating half-hour with a very sweet old lady selling shotguns, discussing the available firearms for home defense, the legal and illegal modifications, etc. Some of the illegal modifications included simply restoring the firearm's original magazine size, which I thought was fascinating.
Actually, there are numerous books that go into thorough detail, although not with the (questionably copyighted) inner documents fully quoted. "A Piece of Blue Sky" is amusing, and if you can find a copy, "The Scandal of Scientology", and there was an old Time Magazine article that got it basically right in less than 0 pages. You can also find much of the material through websites like www.xenu.net and www.factnet.org, although the documents are fragemented. It's hard to know what is complete or not, but it's enough of the inner material that the cult has been going off their rocker for decades about the general availability of these.
Look up what happened to Susan Meister for writing "The Scandal of Scientology", by the way. Mary Sue Hubbard's minions forged bomb threats to try and discredit Susan, and the related craziness got Mary Sue convicted along with some of the most devoted leadership of the cult, but the cult _still_ managed to wind up with the copyrights on the book to halt further publication.
Don't forget that scientology started out with claims to be a "science of the mind", and applied for "religion" status with the IRS partly for tax reasons, and partly to protect themselves from being sued to pieces for their claimed miracle cures being not only fraudulent but downright dangerous. (The FDA banned them making medical claims for auditing and their fasting programs: they now instead solicit "testimonials" which the FDA does not automatically ban, as not being medical claims.) It was a very sudden switchover, and many younger members probably don't realize why and how it happened.
Selective memory is a common trait of cults and the nastier political movements: it's a human trait, as well, but the extent of it in a cult that does hypnotic sessions with a lie detector and which "reveals your past lives" and teaches you to control the re-incarnated space aliens that are really your thoughts and body (known as "thetans") has a lot of leverage over basically brainwashed people to reprogram with all sorts of strange ideas.
This is the typically ideal solution, when there's other hardware around to take advantage of. C-Kermit is also your able-bodied manservant for getting all the settings right for the client.
Unfortunately, some BIOS's have never worked well for setting the BIOS interface at anything other than 115.2 KBaud, at least without an undocumented BIOS update. And guess what you need to to the BIOS update? You guessed it: Windows and boot-time console access. I ran into this problem with some new Linux servers and a vendor who'd never bothered to test their serial-over-IP setup.
Also, simply saying "use a null-modem cable" isn't enough. Remember that many modern machines don't have a serial port, which the original poster mentioned. I've also seen low-end rack servers that didn't, and proving only USB has gotten more common. Setting up a USB-serial or USB->USB console access takes some time as well, and our poster didn't say he had the money for the more sophisticated modern KVM's that do KVM over IP reliably. I've searched before for a toolkit to do KVM over IP from an identically installed computer, but found nothing for handling the video. It's a shame, really, such a device could be very handy for remote operations staff rather than my having to walk them through grub or BIOS options over the phone.
Oh, my. Sorry for the late reply, I missed the notice that you'd replied.
Pressure is most certainly _not_ force. Even the units are different
Pressure = Force / surface area
Force = mass * acceleration
Energy = force * distance
Pressure and force are _never_ exactly the same thing, at least if you're using scientific or engineering terms.
Now, it's fun to think mathematically about "what happens if you apply pressure to a point mass". And as you point out, nothing would happen. But _force_ most certainly can be applied: it happens all the time, because it is a mass (gravity applies, as does EM and possibly others, depending on the model). And even pressure has real world effects on what one might normally think of as a "point mass", such as a single quantum, because Schroedinger indeterminacy smears out the spatial location of even that "point mass". The results are fascinating fun, but they turn theoretical arguments based on a pure "point mass" into weird descriptions that lose real-world validity as they descend into the quantum realm trying to describe that "point mass". I hope that makes what I'm saying more clear? I can try again if it would help.
And as for tides: sir or madam, tides even in smaller objects can be "noticeable". Just because it's swamped by the primary gravitational force for a small object on the earth's surface doesn't mean it's not "noticeable". Tides are just such an effect, and they're quite noticeable.
The effect in a small centrifuge is just as you describe. It's many orders of magnitude larger than the gravitational tides, even for something as large as Earth. You're quite correct. But again, that does not mean the gravitational differentials are not "noticeable".
The average parent or master tradesman training apprentices and journeyman throughout history had a more straightforward job. They typically had a more extended family, and far more stable trades. That took practice and discipline. It didn't encourage a lot of "exploration" or "inventiveness". Wealthy families could afford enough books to teach reading, for most families learning to read was a luxury. So kindly don't compare that (admittedly successful for a long time) practice and its results to the needs of educated citizens in today's far larger and more complex communities. The needs have expanded tremendously.
Afghanistan has many problems: the abandonment of food-crops for heroin growing is a massive problem. Education in agriculture, and how to successfully grow food in that tough climate and rocky soil, can help dissuade the heroin trade. But if dad grew heroin, and the family is investing in weapons to protect the heroin produced, where's the source of education for growing different crops? Kids are inquisitive, sure, and that's worth nurturing in any environment. But if the information isn't at home, homeschooling may not be effective in providing such additional knowledge. And there are certainly cases where the homeschooled lessons are _dangerous_. Genital mutilation, the stoning of women for infedility, religious genocide, racial hatred, and slavery all are more easily taught at home than at a school where reform efforts can be more focused.
The US is no saint when it comes to these practices and teachings. The public schools have been turned into a big help with the worst situations, although they've sometimes been dragged kicking and screaming into the modern West.
I went to Europe for a few years recently, on a "married to a student" visa. The places I consulted for all offered to hire me. One of them had not had the recruiter make clear that I was not staying. They got good work, but were frustrated when I wouldn't stay. They'd never seen a real "geek" before: only one of their local programmers actually like to poke around, and he didn't do open source software.
They all extended my contracts: it was enlightening.
Even if he was bad at it, it doesn't mean he didn't try or wasn't forced to occasionally do a diaper or fix a toilet. He wasn't _that_ wealthy. And I suspect, that at my age, I know a little more of what Berlin was like before the war. It had been getting nastier for Jews there for years: Einstein got out when it got frightening, much to his regret in some ways because a lot of the best physics work was done there. (Yes, I've talked with Berlin trained physicists about their training in the 1930's. The one I met was frighteningly skilled, a true master of many subjects.)
Let's try judging, first, your knowledge of what it's like to be married, to be a father with an infant, or to be aware of what racism does to the lives of geniuses. Then we can discuss this concept of "wise citizens" and how to educate them in wisdom. He may have been awful at such tasks, but I can pretty much guaranteed that he had to to them at some point.