If the current public education system is a failure and should be replaced, how do you propose we replace it?
Homeschool isn't a viable option. Not everybody has the time, much less the qualification, to teach their children. When both parents work full-time to bring in a decent amount of money, somebody else has to educate the kids.
Private school isn't a choice for everyone. (Vouchers? I don't have a problem with my tax dollars funding public schools that are open to all. I DO have a problem with funding private/religious schools that are selective with my tax money. Paying for public schools, that's for the greater good. Paying for private schools is only paying for the good of those the school chooses to accept.)
Charter schools are in most cases a joke. Here in Ohio, (suprise, suprise) they're all screwed up. There was one in Coloumbus that had no electricity and only a single Port-O-Potty. There was one in Cleveland that built a brand new, multi-million dollar facility...that never got finished becuase they ran out of state money.
So what do we replace the broken public schools with? We don't. We fix the damned things. The first step to fixing them is making the kids want to learn. The problem is that most of them are some of the laziest people you will ever see. Then there are the average kids that are brought down be the lazy ones. "If they don't give a shit, why should I?" Flawed logic? Definately. But it is what's going on inside their heads. Then there are the above-average kids. They are very bright, but get by being lazy because (1) they're good test takers and (2) lowered expectations from their teachers.
How to get them to want to learn and not be lazy is left as an exercise to the reader. You can bet your ass that the good teachers have been trying for years unsuccessfully. A good first step is getting the parents to care. If those kids know that bringing home a report card full of Ds and Fs will result in a very unpleasant experience, they'll be a little bit more motivated. (Which is why private schools don't have the problems public ones do -- the parents care enough to spend the cash to send them to private school, and they're gonna care enough to make sure that their money is "well-spent," meaning the kids bring home good grades.
What we really need to do is stop looking at schools as big business. Public schools do not exist solely to sell routers and T1s to. It's a side note to what they are there for -- providing a quality education. And DAMNIT, stop taking their money away to pay for these novelty solutions that DON'T WORK!
Mitchell [a charter school principal] worries that his school will be judged not by the citizens it nurtures, but by the bottom-line performance standards it meets. "It's not a business at all," he continues. "We deal with human beings, not products."
Funny, because that's what public schools have been saying all along.
Don't bring the Dreamcast into this. It's not relevant.
The reason the Dreamcast failed was mostly due to the fact that its anti-copy scheme was broken. Any average gamer with an Internet connection and a burner could get any game for free. No one wanted to develop games when the ease of piracy is that high.
The Dreamcast was Sega's last-ditch effort to make a comeback in the console market. After the miserable failures of the SEGA CD and the Saturn, they were almost a joke.
Don't get me wrong though, I love my Dreamcast. I still play it. It is technically superior to the PS2. It really is quite unfortunate that it failed.
(This will most likely be lost in the sea of comments, but here I go anyways...)
The problems is, you're taxing people in other areas to pay for your school's facilities. Schools are, and should be, local entities. If the local taxpayers don't want to spend the money to maintain the infrastructure, then why should you and I, who don't even benefit?
Because you've done something for the greater good? And that's the problem, no one wants to do good unless they see a way that they will somehow benefit from it.
And on the note of local funding -- no one wants to fund their local schools anyways, especially in the areas this program is targeted to. You go into a poorer area and say "Hey, we are going to raise taxes to pay for schools!"...duck because there's gonna be a shitstorm.
You say, "If the local taxpayers don't want to spend the money to maintain the infrastructure, then why should you and I, who don't even benefit?"
The local taxpayers say, "If the taxpayers who actually have kids in the schools don't want to spend the money to maintain the infrastructure, then why should you and I, who don't even benefit?"
And then the people with kids in school say, "I just can't afford it, and besides, isn't everyone supposed to help pay for the schools?"
On a side note, here in Ohio, it was recently ruled unconstitutional to support schools exclusively through property taxes. Problem is, that's the only place districts really have to get money. The state funding system is entirely fucked up. Not only has the state bugeted money to districts, then taken half of the money away halfway through the year, but the entire funding system has been ruled unconstitutional no less than FOUR times! (The CNN page says 3, but that is from 2002.)
I wish that if I was doing something unconstitutional, even after being ruled against four times, I could keep doing it without consequence!
He said there is no UI -- it's just a script that picks a song randomly from the collection. (He plans on mounting a Sun Ray 150 to the dashboard for playback control.)
The audio system inegration consists of plugging the soundcard's speaker out into one of those cassette tape adaptors. Yikes on the sound quality...
An e450 is massive stupid overkill though, that is, if that system is actually for real in that minivan. Nothing done there couldn't be done on a single CPU with a single stick of memory on a single hard drive.
He did say that he wants to hook up a few Sun Ray 150s to it to serve up to 3 simultainous video streams stored on its HD. Although a E450 is still probably overkill.
He said that the 3 Rays for watching video were so his kids would have something to do during long trips. Unfortunately, with that behemoth in the trunk, he's not gonna be able to fit any luggage in there to go on long trips.
The system arrived with three power supplies and, though it's clear that this is good for reliability, the space taken by one of them proved convenient to store the power inverter necessary to get from the in-car 12V supply back to the 230V required by the system. It's possible that I might build an alternative plug-in power supply unit that didn't bother with the inverter, but that's a project for another day.
I'd just hate to forget to turn it off when you get out of the car.
This is the age group most inclined to get anything and everything they can off Kazaa. Teens have a very limited cashflow and $25 not spent on a CD/website/whatever is a week's worth of food.
Teens don't have credit cards. If they want to buy something off the web, they have to get a parent's card. This is usually hard or impossible.
So, they have to go for the free hosting. Of course, being greedy bastards, they'll whine and bitch for a week.
Didn't AOL/TW break up... or did I just read that they were thinking about it?
At any rate, they claim interoperabilty through the "open" TOC "protocol."
I say "open" because it is very poorly (officially) documented and I say "protocol" because it is a very stripped-down version of AIM's closed OSCAR protocol that only AIM is supposed to be able to use.
Interestingly, I do have a cell phone but have no problems with it. I have an ancient Nokia, but it is a tank. No cool faceplates, games, or ringtones, but it works in the middle of Yellowstone. (Service is from Verizon.)
The problem is that people say "ooooohhh! Look at the shiny flip phone with the COLOR screen. COLOR!!!!" Too bad that battery won't last you more than half an hour and the antenna can't get a good signal.
I've logged more than 125 hours of talk time (I'm probably getting brain cancer, but it's more likely to come from my CRT anyways) with nary a dropped call.
I guess good for me, but I guess I'm proof that cell phones can work reliably.
Didn't they have the spin-off game "The Streets of Sim-City" or something[...]
Anyone ever play this?
Yes they did. They also had SimCopter in which you could load your maps from SimCity and fly around in a 'copter.
SimCopter came first. I thought it was decent. Gameplay got boring after a while. Then they rolled out Streets, which as far as I could tell, was Copter with a few changes to the code. The gameplay sucked ass. There was zero traffic and poor graphics.
I think most of the discussion can be summed up as "I've never used this," (and therefore don't know how well it works) "but it seems like a really cool idea!"
And they are right, this is a very interesting idea. I would like to see how it works. But since there is no demo or free trial, we don't know that it's a pile of crap.
People say Unix is hard, and then toss me this as the easy alternative?
Ha-- good point. Fact is, the internals are going to be as nasty and ugly on any real operating system, be it a *nix variant or Windows or Mac. But that's fine for me, it means there's always a job market for fixing the damned things.;)
As for the installation, you shouldn't have to drive anywhere. Most new stuff is designed for XP and will work without Admin rights. They can log on as Admin, install it, and go back the the regular non-admin accounts. If it doesn't work, you can just log in via Remote Desktop and fix it up. No 15 mile drives involved.
Bah, hogwash. 99% of the time, the software (or sometimes the lazy author) only thinks it needs Admin priveleges. In reality, it just (like everything else) takes some tweaking.
For example, I have a program and a few games that wouldn't run on the family computer on non-Admin accounts, but after changing the ACLs on their folders to allow writes, the apps ran just fine. Sometimes it also takes allowing writes to a registry key or two. (Right click the registry folder and click Security.)
They are happy because their apps run and I am happy becuase their apps can't write to anything near \Windows. I have yet to come across an app that honestly needs full Admin to run after installation is complete. If it does, it's just really poorly written and you shouldn't be running it anyways.;)
Actually, I just pasted in a block of unspaced text, and after looking at the HTML that came back, I have to wonder what they were smoking when they designed the filter. Its "?<wbr></nobr> " where ? is some letter from your posting.
What the hell!?!? The <nobr> completely invalidates the <wbr>, then after all that work it just puts in a space anyways!
Bah... I submitted a request to the Slash SF project, but who knows if that'll do any good. Oh well, the lazyasses just need to learn to use <a> tags I guess.
I'm not really sure, but I just realized that my laptop has both a "Pause" key and a "Break" key. I'd like someone to explain that. Pause works like a standard keyboard's Pause/Break but the Break key doesn't seem to do anything.
This is why you leave them with only a non-Administrator account. Then (most) nastyware can't install itself.
Leaving them to browse as an Administrator is equivalent to leaving them to browse as root. Just explain to use the Admin account *ONLY* when istalling boxed software from the store. Install a copy of The Proxomitron and it's damn near impossible to screw things up too much.
Yes, it would screw the autofocus, but even with manual focus, you'd still have a nasty grid in your picture.
I could tolerate watching a shitty cam copy of a movie, but having a grid from the infrared over the picture the whole time would not be tolerable, even for the cheapest of people. Just put IR or UV LEDs behind the screen (it's already perforated because of the speakers behind it) and you've got a good deterrant.
Of course, that is until the guy who through some genetic 'defect' *can* see the IR/UV light from the LEDs... I can smell a lawsuit. Plus there's the fact that your camera might not be sensitive to IR or UV. Then it's all gone to hell.
Slashdot Mirror
So what do we replace the broken public schools with? We don't. We fix the damned things. The first step to fixing them is making the kids want to learn. The problem is that most of them are some of the laziest people you will ever see. Then there are the average kids that are brought down be the lazy ones. "If they don't give a shit, why should I?" Flawed logic? Definately. But it is what's going on inside their heads. Then there are the above-average kids. They are very bright, but get by being lazy because (1) they're good test takers and (2) lowered expectations from their teachers.
How to get them to want to learn and not be lazy is left as an exercise to the reader. You can bet your ass that the good teachers have been trying for years unsuccessfully. A good first step is getting the parents to care. If those kids know that bringing home a report card full of Ds and Fs will result in a very unpleasant experience, they'll be a little bit more motivated. (Which is why private schools don't have the problems public ones do -- the parents care enough to spend the cash to send them to private school, and they're gonna care enough to make sure that their money is "well-spent," meaning the kids bring home good grades.
What we really need to do is stop looking at schools as big business. Public schools do not exist solely to sell routers and T1s to. It's a side note to what they are there for -- providing a quality education. And DAMNIT, stop taking their money away to pay for these novelty solutions that DON'T WORK!
Making a profit on the games, definately.
That's how most consoles are done. Sony/Nintendo/MS sells the machine at a loss but makes up for it from licence fees on the games.
Don't get me wrong though, I love my Dreamcast. I still play it. It is technically superior to the PS2. It really is quite unfortunate that it failed.
Because you've done something for the greater good? And that's the problem, no one wants to do good unless they see a way that they will somehow benefit from it.
And on the note of local funding -- no one wants to fund their local schools anyways, especially in the areas this program is targeted to. You go into a poorer area and say "Hey, we are going to raise taxes to pay for schools!" ...duck because there's gonna be a shitstorm.
You say, "If the local taxpayers don't want to spend the money to maintain the infrastructure, then why should you and I, who don't even benefit?"
The local taxpayers say, "If the taxpayers who actually have kids in the schools don't want to spend the money to maintain the infrastructure, then why should you and I, who don't even benefit?"
And then the people with kids in school say, "I just can't afford it, and besides, isn't everyone supposed to help pay for the schools?"
On a side note, here in Ohio, it was recently ruled unconstitutional to support schools exclusively through property taxes. Problem is, that's the only place districts really have to get money. The state funding system is entirely fucked up. Not only has the state bugeted money to districts, then taken half of the money away halfway through the year, but the entire funding system has been ruled unconstitutional no less than FOUR times! (The CNN page says 3, but that is from 2002.)
I wish that if I was doing something unconstitutional, even after being ruled against four times, I could keep doing it without consequence!
Fuckwit politicians.
He did say that he wants to hook up a few Sun Ray 150s to it to serve up to 3 simultainous video streams stored on its HD. Although a E450 is still probably overkill.
He said that the 3 Rays for watching video were so his kids would have something to do during long trips. Unfortunately, with that behemoth in the trunk, he's not gonna be able to fit any luggage in there to go on long trips.
Whoops.
I'd just hate to forget to turn it off when you get out of the car.
Cue the jokes about the server getting slashdotted already... FreeCache
Try 720x480 (of 535 lines total).
Of all the different combos of resolution in the world (see table in above link), none of them have 486 lines.
Even more info.
Nah, it falls under "family."
- This is the age group most inclined to get anything and everything they can off Kazaa. Teens have a very limited cashflow and $25 not spent on a CD/website/whatever is a week's worth of food.
- Teens don't have credit cards. If they want to buy something off the web, they have to get a parent's card. This is usually hard or impossible.
So, they have to go for the free hosting. Of course, being greedy bastards, they'll whine and bitch for a week.At any rate, they claim interoperabilty through the "open" TOC "protocol."
I say "open" because it is very poorly (officially) documented and I say "protocol" because it is a very stripped-down version of AIM's closed OSCAR protocol that only AIM is supposed to be able to use.
The problem is that people say "ooooohhh! Look at the shiny flip phone with the COLOR screen. COLOR!!!!" Too bad that battery won't last you more than half an hour and the antenna can't get a good signal.
I've logged more than 125 hours of talk time (I'm probably getting brain cancer, but it's more likely to come from my CRT anyways) with nary a dropped call.
I guess good for me, but I guess I'm proof that cell phones can work reliably.
I think that many people wouldn't even notice it.
You glance at amount due, it's under what you'd notice as suspicious, so you pay and never think about it.
Yes they did. They also had SimCopter in which you could load your maps from SimCity and fly around in a 'copter.
SimCopter came first. I thought it was decent. Gameplay got boring after a while. Then they rolled out Streets, which as far as I could tell, was Copter with a few changes to the code. The gameplay sucked ass. There was zero traffic and poor graphics.
It was actually rather disappointing.
And they are right, this is a very interesting idea. I would like to see how it works. But since there is no demo or free trial, we don't know that it's a pile of crap.
Ha-- good point. Fact is, the internals are going to be as nasty and ugly on any real operating system, be it a *nix variant or Windows or Mac. But that's fine for me, it means there's always a job market for fixing the damned things. ;)
As for the installation, you shouldn't have to drive anywhere. Most new stuff is designed for XP and will work without Admin rights. They can log on as Admin, install it, and go back the the regular non-admin accounts. If it doesn't work, you can just log in via Remote Desktop and fix it up. No 15 mile drives involved.
(I was going to post a link to an article/long thread where a bunch of people bitched about blue LEDs, but I can't find it at the moment... Damn.)
For example, I have a program and a few games that wouldn't run on the family computer on non-Admin accounts, but after changing the ACLs on their folders to allow writes, the apps ran just fine. Sometimes it also takes allowing writes to a registry key or two. (Right click the registry folder and click Security.)
They are happy because their apps run and I am happy becuase their apps can't write to anything near \Windows. I have yet to come across an app that honestly needs full Admin to run after installation is complete. If it does, it's just really poorly written and you shouldn't be running it anyways. ;)
What the hell!?!? The <nobr> completely invalidates the <wbr>, then after all that work it just puts in a space anyways!
Bah... I submitted a request to the Slash SF project, but who knows if that'll do any good. Oh well, the lazyasses just need to learn to use <a> tags I guess.
Odd.
Leaving them to browse as an Administrator is equivalent to leaving them to browse as root. Just explain to use the Admin account *ONLY* when istalling boxed software from the store. Install a copy of The Proxomitron and it's damn near impossible to screw things up too much.
Instead of " " why don't they put in a "<wbr>"???
This way, it would still wrap long text but wouldn't put those ugly spaces in when it doesn't need to wrap!
(Grabs patent application...)
I could tolerate watching a shitty cam copy of a movie, but having a grid from the infrared over the picture the whole time would not be tolerable, even for the cheapest of people. Just put IR or UV LEDs behind the screen (it's already perforated because of the speakers behind it) and you've got a good deterrant.
Of course, that is until the guy who through some genetic 'defect' *can* see the IR/UV light from the LEDs... I can smell a lawsuit. Plus there's the fact that your camera might not be sensitive to IR or UV. Then it's all gone to hell.
It is assumed that if she's going to bed and you're gonna play a computer game, you weren't gettin any anyways.
It is "guy code," fuck the Battle.net record if you've got a decent chance at getting laid. It's in there with the Area Code Rule and the Drunk Rule.