I love you, data and error analysis. With you, I've taken an uncertainty that, with one measurement would be in the 20+ cm range, and reduced said uncertainty down to ±2cm, all using statistical techniques. Now, if only you could have dinner ready by the time I got home, all would be well in the world.
Who knew that a 2 credit course at the 100 level in a community college would be so useful?
It is also possible that they mean that the article's point of view needs to consider as many sides of an issue or idea as possible, and not just the most important ones. I would argue that a man who sees the entire universe from every point of view at all times is closer to having a neutral point of view than a man who sees from but a few points. Perhaps the term should be recast to "equilibrium point of view," no? There is also a significant distinction between the words "no" and "neutral." In the phrase "neutral point of view" it is implied that our point of view must take into account all sides of an issue. "No point of view" which is what many people think of when they see "neutral point of view" implies that our eyes are closed. I think this is where people make mistakes, because they assume that neutrality steps nowhere, though in fact to be neutral one must take a stand in nautrality. I don't quite see how neutrality is fiction. I do see how human fallibility makes it more of an ideal to be reached for than a concrete milestone.
If you need any other arguments of great philosophical complexity reduced to semantics, I'll be here all week.
And yet nothing is said of Yahoo, who assists the Chinese authorities with hunting down and incarcerating political dissidents who use their email service. Read that again for emphasis. Google is evil for simply filtering search results?
Google isn't the only service which has catered to China to get access to the market. What, were you sitting around waiting for them to make a move counter to their motto so you could shout to all of Slashdot "I TOLD YOU SO!?"
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you farting on gmail? belching on it? Spitting? And is it spitting at Ebay or spitting at Gmail? Please try to make your jibes a little more clear. After all, I'm only an American.
I caught one the other night, buzzing around my face. I spent 15 minutes being very still and waiting for it to come over to me, then I reached out with my hand and caught the little fucker. That'll teach them to fly through the screen on my window.
It's not 500 of one item. For example, if this happened at a neighborhood Best Buy, it would be 500 people buying huge quantities of various items. Maybe 10 people are in to buy a refrigerator and a washer/dryer. Another 100 are going through CDs and DVDs, and might buy a new laptop. Still another 250 are looking thorugh the home theatre section. It's a lot easier to make money when you know you've got guarenteed customers. If you plan it in advance, and the store owner is in on it, he might be able to stock up if all of you wanted one specific item, but the impression I get is that that is not what is happening. It's not like 500 people standing in line for a release of something.
Discount sales only exist for one reason: to drum up business. Retailers attract you by making everything cheaper, you buy more stuff, their margin stays the same, and they've attracted some new customers. That's all the game is. This tactic in China only gives some of the power to the consumer.
And a negotiation group such as you've mentioned would be beneficial to the consumer as well as to the retailer, by ensuring steady business for the latter and volume-level discounts for the former.
Your computer is one tool that developed out of war. ENIAC, the first American all-purpose digital computer, developed out of the need to solve differential equations quickly to compute firing tables. This is just an example of the technologies that have developed out of war-time need.
Parent, I apologize if you mistake this as a response directly to your post. I'm attempting to support your response to the GP.
--
Essentially, using god as an answer to a "How" question is a complete and total cop-out and non-sequitor. Using him as an answer to a "why" question is perfectly acceptable. That is the distinction that scientists make between science and non-science.
If I were to say that the universe was created by God's having willed it so, you would look at me strangely, and rightly so. We cannot duplicate God's will, so any answer to the "how" question produced by that theoretical framework is meaningless.
The entirety of science is explaining how something works so that we can either repeat or predict what will happen. If something is proven non-repeatable even once, then the theory is proven flawed. There is nothing wrong with this, and in fact it keeps scientists intellectually vigilant.
String theory cannot explain how anything should work in any meaningful fashion, and so is not a useful theory. Essentially what it does is say "There is effectively an infinite number of possible ways for the world to work. Ta-da! We've got a theory!" This is meta-physics and does not belong in a serious technical discussion. I believe one of the above posters said it best when he said that string theory is a gigantic academic wank-fest.
I'm really sorry to say this about something that originally got me interested in Physics, but String Theory is complete and utter bunk unless it can make predictions that are proveable, applicable, and are not covered by any other theoretical framework.
Yeah, I'll give you the point that it's kind of half-assed. In my defense as a lazy American, my offense against your defense was also a little half-assed. In fact, I think that every comment I've made thus far has been half-assed. Except for that one time I got modded +5 Insightful. That was all me, baby.
Thank you for defending someone's hasty generalization. May I enquire as to your country of origin, so that I may call its people lazy? Or perhaps you would like to explain how it's any more of an avoidance of overgeneralization to generalize to a specific country instead of the world? I can see that you are in the same camp as the OP.
It's interesting how much more efficient we could make this particular facet of our lives because, according to at least one book on energy out there we could reduce our annual consumption by about 2/3 if we used all of our technological muscle to be more efficient. Even a 1/3 or 1/4 reduction is huge considering all of the environmental costs and monetary costs associated with it. If we had more efficient game consoles, that energy could be used elsewhere. It's not just about personal savings. The issue is that we could maintain the same lifestyle but do it a lot more efficiently if we wanted to.
Technologically it's possible for us to have more efficient computer systems, but it's not a very high priority because it's cheaper to keep cranking out space heaters.
Oh, wow. So they're going to top Vista off with being MORE ANNOYING than Windows XP? You mean I'm actually going to have to be prompted every time I want to do something? There'd better be a way to turn this off or I'm never going to buy a copy of Vista.
It's bad enough to be prompted every 15 minutes for a restart after I've installed updates, EVEN IF I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING. Yes, Windows will pull me out of full-screen just to tell me that it has finished installing updates. To top it all off, I wont be able to browse the internet or insert CDs without some twat at Microsoft building the program to assume that I dont know what the fuck I'm doing with my computer? Sounds like a brilliant security strategy. Piss people off enough so that they never use your OS.
That kind of treat-you-like-you're-stupid shit is what makes me dread installing updates. I dont give a shit that I need to restart to install updates. Windows has waited for weeks for me to restart, and I dont need the constant nagging while it's waiting. Let me know when Vista has had its obligatory "dont treat me like I'm a mindless twat computer user" update. Then I'll get it.
I think you just shot yourself in the foot by highlighting the exact phrase which would give us precedent in the case of ripping CDs for personal use. Namely, the idea that the activity is conducted entirely within the person's home/personal effects. No sharing of data takes place between people, we are not sending the MP3s across the net or burning them to CDs to sell or give to our friends, and thus the only harm that occours is the invented harm of us not going out and spending an additional $15 on a CD in data form. In fact, we could counter with the argument that the RIAA is attempting to use its power as a cartel to force the consumer to pay a toll simply for the use of something which they have already paid for.
Furthermore, we could argue that we are also creating increased public interest in recorded material by format shifting, and that there is also "no accompanying reduction in the market for the plaintiff's work" in the format shift. In fact, the same argument for damages in the case of file sharing, that the sharing reduces the market for the work by effectively popping someone's song-cherry, can be made for this particular use. The person has already bought a license and listened to the music several times. Why are they then not allowed to transfer it to a new medium since they have already heard it? What damage does this cause? Why, it creates a market for MP3 players and software to rip CDs. If RIAA companies want a piece of the pie, why not get into selling transcoding and ripping software?
In high school, a friend of mine was put under emergency suspension for having the nickname "Terrorist." Now, those of us who know a little about Counterstrike will know that that's the name of one of the sides on there. That is where he got the nickname. Did the school ever listen to reason on that? No. Instead they had the police come out to search his house in what is a clear invasion of privacy. All over a nickname. If I were him I would've sued for libel, invasion of privacy, harassment, and anything else I could get my hands on.
I'll say though that it isn't the faculty that does this shit. It's the administration, being increasingly out of touch with the students who aren't there to raise hell. Our administrators wouldn't help us find an acceptable way for a bunch of us to form a club whose purpose was to enable us to stay after school with our friends. Our security guards would selectively enforce policies depending on who it was that they were confronted with.
Public high schools are really fucked in the head, and it's only going to get worse unless a bunch of us who were abused by the current system move to change it. Remember, it's our children that will be going into these places, and unless we do something to stamp this shit out now there will be no end to it.
Man, must be a SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW news day for C-Net for them to bother posting this random crap. The author goes from a wild speculation, into Apple's supposed "gaming history," then tells us that Apple might be able to raise the capital to cover such a deal. He never bothers to actually analyze any kind of trend in Apple's behavior toward such a grab for the gaming market, nor does he suggest anywhere that Nintendo might be a little opposed to the deal. Oh, wait, Apple tried making a gaming console once right? That means they're just itching to get into the market! Brilliant!
What a brain-dead piece of writing. I feel dumber for having read that.
I didn't vote libertarian in the last presidential election for one reason: The libertarian presidential candidate honestly believed that police should be privatized. More importantly, the concept of an economy or large group of people that is effectively capable of regulating itself is ludicrous. I'd sooner vote communist.
Speaking of paranoia, someone left a disc labeled "THE TRUTH" on my car the other day. I wonder what I did with it? Oh yeah. I tossed it. If some wanker wants to tell me "THE TRUTH" then they can do it the old fashioned way, with pamphlets.
I find it a little odd that mine was the only car in the parking lot with such a CD on it. Maybe I shoul@(*$)*@#%^Y@Ba;skONBIAEOSNA NO CARRIER
Not to be pedantic or anything, but you would actually fare worse in a car wreck in a Titanium car, as it wouldn't give as readily as steel. The more time the impact lasts, the less force the passengers experience. So in a wreck between a titanium Geo Metro and a steel Geo Metro, the passengers of the titanium car could be extracted faster but would be more likely to die. There are more considerations to engineering than just weight and efficiency. If something cant get you from point A to point B as safely as the less-efficient alternative, than the less-efficient alternative bears at least some looking into.
I would like to point out, and I'm a Comcast subscriber, that Comcast technical support sucks balls. The last time I called up the person on the other end insulted my equipment by calling it "the evil modem." What the fuck, Comcast? I'm perfectly happy with my hardware. Maybe it was the ultra-patronizing voice that she said it in.
BTW, the service call I was making was because my service was randomly out for 3 days while a modem that I did not own was connected through the same account. They didn't even act concerned that it wasn't my modem but was somehow connected via my account. How the fuck does that happen? When I told them the problem had resolved itself AFTER THREE DAYS they decided not to send someone or even follow-up on the problem.
Do you have a link to that interview? I would love to read it. If Bin Laden really said that in an interview, then this means that the US Government has been lying to us yet again. *sigh* I wish it wasn't a two-party system so we could vote these fuckers out of office for someone who would actually work on the country's problems.
Yeah. I'd have to say that i'd join the War on Terror(tm) if the terrorists started attacking our infrastructure. Especially as it's the American government that's really been fucking with them, and most of the time we who are its people have not wanted to do what they went ahead and did.
Anything that makes a student think critically about how to solve problems is good for them and directly applicable in the real world. Science and Mathematics may not be directly useful, but the critical thinking and problem solving skills make them an asset. You may not realise this, but after you finish Calculus you will have studied a new method for looking at and breaking down the world. This is completely independant of and yet built on geometry and algebra.
And when you're writing music, you still have to think about how the music sounds as you're writing it on paper. Mathematics and music both involve some heavy mental visualization skills, and there is much scientific evidence to show that studying the latter assists the former.
I think that the biggest mistake students make is thinking that because they'll never apply it directly, they dont need to study it. It's ultimately not about studying something so that you know how to do it. It's about studying something so that you can think in different terms if it becomes neccessary. A lot of thinking outside the box is done by people who have learned to use several different boxes, and just because one box doesn't seem directly applicable at the time, it does not mean you should not study it.
I agree that rote memorization is crap and should be banned from teaching curiculums. Oh, except for science curicula where memorizing physical laws and their names are very important to learning the language. Most students see the technique, and think "Oh, this is what we're supposed to be learning, how boring." They rarely stop to think "why is this useful to me? Is there something more I should be getting out of this?" And when the last question never gets asked after the former, then educators have failed.
Just the other day, in my sociology class, we were talking about the education system. The instructor mentioned a general movement toward going back to teaching communication skills, basic mathematics, and critical thinking. What a lot of teachers never mention is that science courses are there to force you to think critically about something. If your teacher never gets you to do that, then they have failed and need to go back to school.
Get a Samsung SGH-X495. All it does is make calls, send/recieve text messages, give you a calendar, and store phone numbers. It's also got some game/data stuff on it, but overall the interface is uncluttered for people who just make calls. I've also never had it crash on me, and the battery lasts 50+ hours(according to the manual). In actuality, I've left it on at a friend's house for a week without charging, and when I picked it up it still had enough juice to where I could make a call or two. Beat that, Nokia.
Slashdot Mirror
I love you, data and error analysis. With you, I've taken an uncertainty that, with one measurement would be in the 20+ cm range, and reduced said uncertainty down to ±2cm, all using statistical techniques. Now, if only you could have dinner ready by the time I got home, all would be well in the world.
Who knew that a 2 credit course at the 100 level in a community college would be so useful?
It is also possible that they mean that the article's point of view needs to consider as many sides of an issue or idea as possible, and not just the most important ones. I would argue that a man who sees the entire universe from every point of view at all times is closer to having a neutral point of view than a man who sees from but a few points. Perhaps the term should be recast to "equilibrium point of view," no? There is also a significant distinction between the words "no" and "neutral." In the phrase "neutral point of view" it is implied that our point of view must take into account all sides of an issue. "No point of view" which is what many people think of when they see "neutral point of view" implies that our eyes are closed. I think this is where people make mistakes, because they assume that neutrality steps nowhere, though in fact to be neutral one must take a stand in nautrality. I don't quite see how neutrality is fiction. I do see how human fallibility makes it more of an ideal to be reached for than a concrete milestone.
If you need any other arguments of great philosophical complexity reduced to semantics, I'll be here all week.
And yet nothing is said of Yahoo, who assists the Chinese authorities with hunting down and incarcerating political dissidents who use their email service. Read that again for emphasis. Google is evil for simply filtering search results?
Google isn't the only service which has catered to China to get access to the market. What, were you sitting around waiting for them to make a move counter to their motto so you could shout to all of Slashdot "I TOLD YOU SO!?"
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Are you farting on gmail? belching on it? Spitting? And is it spitting at Ebay or spitting at Gmail? Please try to make your jibes a little more clear. After all, I'm only an American.
I caught one the other night, buzzing around my face. I spent 15 minutes being very still and waiting for it to come over to me, then I reached out with my hand and caught the little fucker. That'll teach them to fly through the screen on my window.
Name a few countries in which this has happened, and explain why and how this has happened.
Yeah, but do Russian spaceships have heated seats, air conditioning, all-leather interior, a 16-speaker sound system and all-nozzle drive?
It's not 500 of one item. For example, if this happened at a neighborhood Best Buy, it would be 500 people buying huge quantities of various items. Maybe 10 people are in to buy a refrigerator and a washer/dryer. Another 100 are going through CDs and DVDs, and might buy a new laptop. Still another 250 are looking thorugh the home theatre section. It's a lot easier to make money when you know you've got guarenteed customers. If you plan it in advance, and the store owner is in on it, he might be able to stock up if all of you wanted one specific item, but the impression I get is that that is not what is happening. It's not like 500 people standing in line for a release of something.
Discount sales only exist for one reason: to drum up business. Retailers attract you by making everything cheaper, you buy more stuff, their margin stays the same, and they've attracted some new customers. That's all the game is. This tactic in China only gives some of the power to the consumer.
And a negotiation group such as you've mentioned would be beneficial to the consumer as well as to the retailer, by ensuring steady business for the latter and volume-level discounts for the former.
Your computer is one tool that developed out of war. ENIAC, the first American all-purpose digital computer, developed out of the need to solve differential equations quickly to compute firing tables. This is just an example of the technologies that have developed out of war-time need.
Parent, I apologize if you mistake this as a response directly to your post. I'm attempting to support your response to the GP.
--
Essentially, using god as an answer to a "How" question is a complete and total cop-out and non-sequitor. Using him as an answer to a "why" question is perfectly acceptable. That is the distinction that scientists make between science and non-science.
If I were to say that the universe was created by God's having willed it so, you would look at me strangely, and rightly so. We cannot duplicate God's will, so any answer to the "how" question produced by that theoretical framework is meaningless.
The entirety of science is explaining how something works so that we can either repeat or predict what will happen. If something is proven non-repeatable even once, then the theory is proven flawed. There is nothing wrong with this, and in fact it keeps scientists intellectually vigilant.
String theory cannot explain how anything should work in any meaningful fashion, and so is not a useful theory. Essentially what it does is say "There is effectively an infinite number of possible ways for the world to work. Ta-da! We've got a theory!" This is meta-physics and does not belong in a serious technical discussion. I believe one of the above posters said it best when he said that string theory is a gigantic academic wank-fest.
I'm really sorry to say this about something that originally got me interested in Physics, but String Theory is complete and utter bunk unless it can make predictions that are proveable, applicable, and are not covered by any other theoretical framework.
Yeah, I'll give you the point that it's kind of half-assed. In my defense as a lazy American, my offense against your defense was also a little half-assed. In fact, I think that every comment I've made thus far has been half-assed. Except for that one time I got modded +5 Insightful. That was all me, baby.
Good day.
Thank you for defending someone's hasty generalization. May I enquire as to your country of origin, so that I may call its people lazy? Or perhaps you would like to explain how it's any more of an avoidance of overgeneralization to generalize to a specific country instead of the world? I can see that you are in the same camp as the OP.
Good day.
It's interesting how much more efficient we could make this particular facet of our lives because, according to at least one book on energy out there we could reduce our annual consumption by about 2/3 if we used all of our technological muscle to be more efficient. Even a 1/3 or 1/4 reduction is huge considering all of the environmental costs and monetary costs associated with it. If we had more efficient game consoles, that energy could be used elsewhere. It's not just about personal savings. The issue is that we could maintain the same lifestyle but do it a lot more efficiently if we wanted to.
Technologically it's possible for us to have more efficient computer systems, but it's not a very high priority because it's cheaper to keep cranking out space heaters.
Oh, wow. So they're going to top Vista off with being MORE ANNOYING than Windows XP? You mean I'm actually going to have to be prompted every time I want to do something? There'd better be a way to turn this off or I'm never going to buy a copy of Vista.
It's bad enough to be prompted every 15 minutes for a restart after I've installed updates, EVEN IF I AM IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING. Yes, Windows will pull me out of full-screen just to tell me that it has finished installing updates. To top it all off, I wont be able to browse the internet or insert CDs without some twat at Microsoft building the program to assume that I dont know what the fuck I'm doing with my computer? Sounds like a brilliant security strategy. Piss people off enough so that they never use your OS.
That kind of treat-you-like-you're-stupid shit is what makes me dread installing updates. I dont give a shit that I need to restart to install updates. Windows has waited for weeks for me to restart, and I dont need the constant nagging while it's waiting. Let me know when Vista has had its obligatory "dont treat me like I'm a mindless twat computer user" update. Then I'll get it.
I think you just shot yourself in the foot by highlighting the exact phrase which would give us precedent in the case of ripping CDs for personal use. Namely, the idea that the activity is conducted entirely within the person's home/personal effects. No sharing of data takes place between people, we are not sending the MP3s across the net or burning them to CDs to sell or give to our friends, and thus the only harm that occours is the invented harm of us not going out and spending an additional $15 on a CD in data form. In fact, we could counter with the argument that the RIAA is attempting to use its power as a cartel to force the consumer to pay a toll simply for the use of something which they have already paid for.
Furthermore, we could argue that we are also creating increased public interest in recorded material by format shifting, and that there is also "no accompanying reduction in the market for the plaintiff's work" in the format shift. In fact, the same argument for damages in the case of file sharing, that the sharing reduces the market for the work by effectively popping someone's song-cherry, can be made for this particular use. The person has already bought a license and listened to the music several times. Why are they then not allowed to transfer it to a new medium since they have already heard it? What damage does this cause? Why, it creates a market for MP3 players and software to rip CDs. If RIAA companies want a piece of the pie, why not get into selling transcoding and ripping software?
In high school, a friend of mine was put under emergency suspension for having the nickname "Terrorist." Now, those of us who know a little about Counterstrike will know that that's the name of one of the sides on there. That is where he got the nickname. Did the school ever listen to reason on that? No. Instead they had the police come out to search his house in what is a clear invasion of privacy. All over a nickname. If I were him I would've sued for libel, invasion of privacy, harassment, and anything else I could get my hands on.
I'll say though that it isn't the faculty that does this shit. It's the administration, being increasingly out of touch with the students who aren't there to raise hell. Our administrators wouldn't help us find an acceptable way for a bunch of us to form a club whose purpose was to enable us to stay after school with our friends. Our security guards would selectively enforce policies depending on who it was that they were confronted with.
Public high schools are really fucked in the head, and it's only going to get worse unless a bunch of us who were abused by the current system move to change it. Remember, it's our children that will be going into these places, and unless we do something to stamp this shit out now there will be no end to it.
Man, must be a SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW news day for C-Net for them to bother posting this random crap. The author goes from a wild speculation, into Apple's supposed "gaming history," then tells us that Apple might be able to raise the capital to cover such a deal. He never bothers to actually analyze any kind of trend in Apple's behavior toward such a grab for the gaming market, nor does he suggest anywhere that Nintendo might be a little opposed to the deal. Oh, wait, Apple tried making a gaming console once right? That means they're just itching to get into the market! Brilliant!
What a brain-dead piece of writing. I feel dumber for having read that.
I didn't vote libertarian in the last presidential election for one reason: The libertarian presidential candidate honestly believed that police should be privatized. More importantly, the concept of an economy or large group of people that is effectively capable of regulating itself is ludicrous. I'd sooner vote communist.
Speaking of paranoia, someone left a disc labeled "THE TRUTH" on my car the other day. I wonder what I did with it? Oh yeah. I tossed it. If some wanker wants to tell me "THE TRUTH" then they can do it the old fashioned way, with pamphlets.
I find it a little odd that mine was the only car in the parking lot with such a CD on it. Maybe I shoul@(*$)*@#%^Y@Ba;skONBIAEOSNA NO CARRIER
Not to be pedantic or anything, but you would actually fare worse in a car wreck in a Titanium car, as it wouldn't give as readily as steel. The more time the impact lasts, the less force the passengers experience. So in a wreck between a titanium Geo Metro and a steel Geo Metro, the passengers of the titanium car could be extracted faster but would be more likely to die. There are more considerations to engineering than just weight and efficiency. If something cant get you from point A to point B as safely as the less-efficient alternative, than the less-efficient alternative bears at least some looking into.
I would like to point out, and I'm a Comcast subscriber, that Comcast technical support sucks balls. The last time I called up the person on the other end insulted my equipment by calling it "the evil modem." What the fuck, Comcast? I'm perfectly happy with my hardware. Maybe it was the ultra-patronizing voice that she said it in.
BTW, the service call I was making was because my service was randomly out for 3 days while a modem that I did not own was connected through the same account. They didn't even act concerned that it wasn't my modem but was somehow connected via my account. How the fuck does that happen? When I told them the problem had resolved itself AFTER THREE DAYS they decided not to send someone or even follow-up on the problem.
Do you have a link to that interview? I would love to read it. If Bin Laden really said that in an interview, then this means that the US Government has been lying to us yet again. *sigh* I wish it wasn't a two-party system so we could vote these fuckers out of office for someone who would actually work on the country's problems.
Yeah. I'd have to say that i'd join the War on Terror(tm) if the terrorists started attacking our infrastructure. Especially as it's the American government that's really been fucking with them, and most of the time we who are its people have not wanted to do what they went ahead and did.
Anything that makes a student think critically about how to solve problems is good for them and directly applicable in the real world. Science and Mathematics may not be directly useful, but the critical thinking and problem solving skills make them an asset. You may not realise this, but after you finish Calculus you will have studied a new method for looking at and breaking down the world. This is completely independant of and yet built on geometry and algebra.
And when you're writing music, you still have to think about how the music sounds as you're writing it on paper. Mathematics and music both involve some heavy mental visualization skills, and there is much scientific evidence to show that studying the latter assists the former.
I think that the biggest mistake students make is thinking that because they'll never apply it directly, they dont need to study it. It's ultimately not about studying something so that you know how to do it. It's about studying something so that you can think in different terms if it becomes neccessary. A lot of thinking outside the box is done by people who have learned to use several different boxes, and just because one box doesn't seem directly applicable at the time, it does not mean you should not study it.
I agree that rote memorization is crap and should be banned from teaching curiculums. Oh, except for science curicula where memorizing physical laws and their names are very important to learning the language. Most students see the technique, and think "Oh, this is what we're supposed to be learning, how boring." They rarely stop to think "why is this useful to me? Is there something more I should be getting out of this?" And when the last question never gets asked after the former, then educators have failed.
Just the other day, in my sociology class, we were talking about the education system. The instructor mentioned a general movement toward going back to teaching communication skills, basic mathematics, and critical thinking. What a lot of teachers never mention is that science courses are there to force you to think critically about something. If your teacher never gets you to do that, then they have failed and need to go back to school.
Get a Samsung SGH-X495. All it does is make calls, send/recieve text messages, give you a calendar, and store phone numbers. It's also got some game/data stuff on it, but overall the interface is uncluttered for people who just make calls. I've also never had it crash on me, and the battery lasts 50+ hours(according to the manual). In actuality, I've left it on at a friend's house for a week without charging, and when I picked it up it still had enough juice to where I could make a call or two. Beat that, Nokia.