True, but I think this is only a first step. Office applications for mobile platforms are getting better, and meanwhile mobile platforms are getting more powerful. I'm now convinced that Apple plans to do what I imagined for the future for quite a long time: make your phone your computer.
I'm imagining that within a few years, it won't really make sense to have a desktop computer, a laptop, an iPad, an iPhone, and whatever else. Instead, you'll essentially have a smartphone that contains enough processing power and RAM to run a full desktop operating system. When it's alone, it operates as a smartphone. When you dock it at a desktop docking station, you'll get a full keyboard, mouse and monitor and it will run a full desktop UI (you may even be able to include additional processing power in the dock).
From there, it just becomes an issue of building different docs for different situations. You can have a tablet dock for when you want it to have a bigger screen. You can have a laptop-like dock for when you want a good platform for working on-the-go. This way, all of your documents and settings go with you wherever you go, and there's no need to setup complicating syncing solutions. It's kind of like having your smartphone running on a LiveUSB distribution that can be run anywhere.
It's not just for eldars. We're also more willing to spend money to lock 20-something marijuana smokers in jail than to send them to college or job training.
It's some system we've got going: pull funding from education, imprison the youth, then offshore labor or import it from other countries because "there aren't enough qualified applications", even while the number of unemployed goes up.
Well I said "can be" as a way of admitting that sometimes amateurs are really really good at stuff. Still, I've met too many people who have the attitude of, "I've run a Linux web server at home, so I know everything my IT guy does."
So my point was, even if you know more about Linux than your IT guy, he might know a bunch of other stuff. He might not know all the configuration options, but he might have a better idea about which configuration options you want to use in a professional setting. He might know more about how Linux works in a complex environment with a bunch of other servers and users running on other platforms. He might know more about general IT best practices. He might know more about the internal rules of the company you're working for, and the internal politics that formed them.
As an IT guy, some of the stupidest and most frustrating conversations you're going to have are with hobbyists and programmers-- i.e. people who generally know about computers, but often don't understand IT work.
Perhaps the reason a desktop display should be 3 feet from your eyes is because the PPI is so low?
No, that's just my estimate based on sitting properly in a chair (not all slouched over) with a keyboard in front of you and a display in front of that. Maybe it's not quite 3 feet, but 2.5 feet, but it's not 1 foot. I think if 2 feet is going to be a little cramped and include bad ergonomic practices.
Now doesn't get me wrong, a high DPI screen would be cool and I'd rather have it. A screen like the Wacom Critiq would benefit from higher DPI because you aren't using it as a normal desktop display. I'm just pointing out that there's less of a need for a 300 dpi monitor when you're not holding it in your hand, a foot away from your face.
I'd like to see high resolution displays as much as the next guy, but it's much less necessary on desktop displays and television sets.
I'm sure someone will freak out about me saying that, but here's the thing: it's not just about DPI, but about the viewing distance. The reason the retina display is called "retina" is that (we can argue about the validity of the claim, but...) it's roughly the maximum resolution discernible by the human eye at the distance you're expected to view a smartphone. That is, approximately a foot away from your eyes.
Your desktop display should be about 3 feet from your eyes. My TV at home sits... I don't know, somewhere around 12 feet from my eyes. Though it might be really cool to get a 300 dpi television, I'm not sure it makes sense to worry about it when you're talking about a television that's 12 feet away.
This isn't a huge issue. There are a lot of IT jobs with no requirement formal training or education. However, in addition to not having any training or education, he also apparently has no experience.
Oh, I get it. He set up a server and has taught himself PHP. There can be a significant divide, though, between "someone who knows how to run a Linux server" and "someone who is qualified to be a Linux sysadmin." It's not all technical knowledge; it's also about understanding how businesses work, how to work with other people, how to manage your workload, and how to cope with problems and mistakes. Experience counts for a lot.
So your friend has no formal training and not a lot of experience. He'll probably need to start at the bottom, which means being a low-level tech.
Here's the thing: this has been going on for laptop and cell phone manufacturers since... forever. These people don't know where the technology is going, they don't have a plan, and they arguably don't know how to make a good product. Given the technical capabilities of computers these days, it's amazing how poor a job manufacturers are doing of actually solving problems or giving people what they want.
However, the cost is prohibitive, and its actually cheaper to get a hosted box and have dynamic ips at home.
Only because we're running out of addresses, which is a problem that IPv6 solves.
I have never had those dynamic dns issues, because I setup and run my own DNS.
Great, so you've just introduced a chicken-and-the-egg problem that in order to circumvent the need for a static IP, you need a DNS server with a static IP. Easily solved, or we could get rid of the problem for everyone by using a system that makes sense, instead of a bunch of hacks.
The fear isn't that they might have to contribute, they have to contribute everything that so much as looks, smells, or hears anything related to a single line of GPL code.
My point in using the word "fear" is that sometimes the aversion is not because of what people will actually have to contribute, since people often don't really understand what they have to contribute and when. Or it might be that they don't have a problem with contributing their current code, but there a fear that they don't fully understand the terms, or that they might not want to release their newer code later on down the line.
I'm not saying that people can't have a real and legitimate objection to using GPL'd code. I'm saying even when they don't have a specific problem in opening their code, they still might be hesitant to do so for fear of unanticipated consequences in an unknown future.
I don't think anyone questioned why they were there. The issue is, there are people who will refuse to build off of or contribute to GPL projects because they're somehow afraid of being compelled to contribute something they might not want to. So the question then becomes, are the contributions that are compelled by the license going to be greater than the contributions lost due to fear of being compelled?
I'm not taking a side here. I don't have any idea what the answer is, but I suspect it's different for different projects and different communities.
I don't have backup for this, but I believe it has been well established that if you don't want to mix cases, it's much more readable to keep everything in lower case. The differences between lowercase letters is more dramatic, which is part of the reason we use them in most of our writing.
Since the groups were self selected, ie. they decided to participate, maybe people living in college towns have more time or are more interested in playing.
I'm assuming they took averages, so that explanation doesn't work. You'd have to explain why the sample of "people who had spare time to play" skewed smart.
If that's not clear enough, an average shouldn't be thrown off by the number of people playing, assuming that the sample size is large enough to begin with. If I have 1,000 people scoring an average score of 50 or 1,000,000 people scoring an average score of 50, the average score is the same. So if you wanted to draw out the fact that it was self-selecting, you'd have to say something more like, "The smart people in college towns have more free time than elsewhere. In other places, smart people work longer hours and wouldn't take the time to play the game."
I'm just pointing out why attempts at making neighborhoods that have both rich and poor people generally don't work, and why things end up this way.
Well it *does* work, with varying levels of success. Sure, it doesn't work perfectly-- there will always be rich people who choose to somehow live away from anyone remotely poor or even middle-class. However, there are cities who do a better job of making moderate-to-low income housing available in decent neighborhoods, or protecting poor people from being forced out of their existing homes due to gentrification.
When it straight-up doesn't work is when people throw up their hands, say, "This is impossible and won't work," and then refuse to do anything about the problem. When you take that approach, nothing works.
providing better services to poor neighborhoods with taxpayer funding to try to break the cycle, providing better education in poorer schools, etc.
Of course, you run into the same problems there. Governments tend to be more responsive to rich people, and rich people want their tax dollars to go towards making things better for rich people. Any real solution is going to somehow come down to enough people say, "Yeah, I know it's difficult. I know there are no simple solutions. But you know what? We're going to try. If our first attempts don't succeed, we're going to make a second attempt. If the second attempt doesn't work, we'll make a third. We're not going to give up, because failure is not acceptable."
Clearly I'm aware of dynamic DNS-- I mention it a couple of times in my post. However, it's not always the best solution, and it creates another thing that can fail. For example, I've had occasional problems in the past where a dynamic DNS provider changed their update mechanism, or the client-side updater stopped working, and the DNS stopped being updated. There are also problems, for example, with email getting send from a dynamic IP address, being more likely to get blocked or marked as SPAM.
Dynamic DNS is a big of a kludge to cope with situations where getting a static IP is difficult or expensive. It's not a great all-around solution.
As far as using external hosting, that's a great solution in a lot of cases. In some cases, it's not. Either way, again, it's a bit of a kludge.
Is it really so weird to say, "I don't want to deal with strange hacks, and I don't want to set up work-arounds. I just want to be able to have several computers on my network have static IP addresses without spending hundreds of dollars per month to make that happen."
The funny part is, I live in a middle-class neighborhood that has a free public bus that drives by every 5-10 minutes, there's banks and credit unions within walking distance, good grocery stores within walking distance (and this is in Phoenix, where cars are de rigeur), yet we still have this problem, though admittedly not nearly as bad as the poor neighborhoods.
I'm a little unsure why you think this argues with my point. In fact, it supports my contention that these problems are not the result of "poor people" somehow being inherently worse, but by other social factors. You get some of the "bad behavior" even in extremely wealthy neighborhoods, but it's reduced by greater opportunities, social pressures, increase police presence, etc.
Your personal experiences in Phoenix also might not be great examples of the problems of gentrification and segregating economic classes. I don't know-- some cities are better at handling these things than others, which is part of the point here. Some cities create opportunities for rich, middle class, and poor citizens to interact in positive social ways. In some cities, they get closer to creating ghettos and push poor people to live in them as a depressed underclass that serves everyone else, without any chance of upward social/economic mobility.
Taking a bunch of bad-behaving poor people and sticking them in some master-planned community with great access to banks and public transit isn't going to suddenly make them behave better and stop getting pit bulls and acting like upper-middle-class people. Their kids might start acting more like that, and their grandkids even more
Even by admitting this, you're admitting that (to some extent) shuffling poor people off to crappy neighborhoods without sufficient social services has the effect of dooming them and their descendants to a life of crime and poverty. You're creating a situation where children will be poor for their entire lives because they don't have opportunities because their parents are poor. Is that really an acceptable way for things to work?
Well, you won't need to pay ridiculous fees in order to get a static IP address.
Just to give one example, right now, if I want to be able to SSH directly into the computers on my network from the Internet, it's a pain. I have to pay $100/month extra to upgrade to my ISP's business account to get even 1 static IP address, and getting multiple can be expensive/difficult. I can use a dynamic DNS service instead, which depending on the service might be expensive or unreliable-- just another thing that can go wrong.
But even if I have a single static IP or a dynamic DNS service, I then have to set up port forwarding on my firewall to redirect different ports to different machines, and keep track of which port goes where, or else SSH into one internal server and then SSH from that server to others.
Give everything a unique IP, and I just have to open the ports on my firewall.
Besides, I'm under the impression that IPv6 has more features than just "unique IP addresses for everything" (and preventing us from running out of available IPs). I'm not a super-technical expert, but I thought there were also technical improvements in security and routing.
People won't necessarily switch over to IPv6 for their internal networks right away, since it can be a pain to reconfigure your network. However, there's not really much reason to continue using NAT if there's enough IP addresses to go around.
Well first, I'd like to point out that I don't mind having *this* discussion. That was my point. It's not, "Oh, I want to have rich people live in the city! No wait, I want to have them live in the suburbs! I can't make up my mind!" It's "Is it reasonable to have these kinds of segregated living conditions, and if not, is it possible to solve this problem?"
developers don't want to bother with low-cost units.
Some of this can be controlled to an extent. Cities are capable of engaging in zoning/planning to encourage different mixes of development. Cities have, at different times, experimented with separating commercial/residential areas or forcing them to coexist in the same neighborhoods, with encouraging development in some areas more than others, etc.
But either way, whether developers want to bother with low-cost units isn't really that huge of an issue, considering that they can be incentivized to do it anyway.
pit bulls running loose (I see it in my deteriorating neighborhood all the time now), lots of cars coming and going all the time, horns honking, physical assaults, gang activity, etc.
Have you considered at all that at least *part* of the reason these things are so prevelant in poor neighborhoods is because there's no money, no development, no facilities, and no police? I've lived in a poor neighborhood too, and there were lots of the things that you mention, trash on the street, etc. There were no banks, few grocery stores, bad public transportation, bad schools, etc. If you have to cash your paycheck, you go to the cash-checking place. If you need groceries, you go to little convenience stores that have junk food. When police show up, there's no telling who they're going to hassle or why.
I live in a fairly wealthy neighborhood now, and there are are police everywhere all the time, and they're generally more friendly towards people. There are fantastic grocery stores with fresh produce, banks where you can open an account, and public transportation.
Slashdot is a big fan of the idea that "correlation does not equal causation." Have you considered that you might, to some degree, have the "cause" and "effect" mixed up? Maybe at least part of the reason there's more crime and bad behavior in poorer areas is not because we've wisely herded all the bad people into the bad part of town? Maybe when you herd a bunch of people together with no hope, no future, no opportunities, no economic resources and put them in a shitty area with shitty places to live, they start misbehaving?
houses don't retain their value very well if they're much larger than other houses in the subdivision.
And I care about this why?
Let's take this as an undeniable and unalterable fact of real estate. This means that if you're rich and you want to live in a super-awesome mansion, and it happens to be in an area with some smaller houses around, you get your super-awesome mansion for cheaper. Boo hoo, I guess you save money. It doesn't seem like a problem that anyone should care about.
...want all classes to live together as equals, in the same tiny apartments, but that rich people pay huge rents for the privilege, while poor people pay little or nothing for an identical space next door.
I don't know of anyone arguing in favor of that. But there's a wide range between what you're describing and complete segregation of economic/social classes. Is it really necessary to herd all the poor and lower-middle class people into neighborhoods where all the buildings are roach-infested falling apart, there are crappy grocery stores where you can't get fresh produce, and no access to banks? Or could it be possible for people to live in decent neighborhoods if they don't have a lot of money, but just without all of the frills and amenities of mansions and luxury condos?
But average score changes are rarely a result of changes to the test.
I don't have any way of knowing this. Even if I did know that this sort of thing was "rare", it still wouldn't tell me whether it was the case with the specific test the article write cited.
Aside from that, it's only addressing one minor point that goes to the larger thrust of my argument: statistics are tricky business, and often don't demonstrate what people think they do. There are many varied ways in which a standardized test might fail to give an accurate account of the student's educational level, or in which an analysis of the compiled results might fail to give an accurate picture of what's going on in the country as a whole.
I wouldn't suggest that we should refuse to use statistics and metrics to evaluate our education system, but only that you should be careful in analyzing them. I don't trust the guy who wrote this article to have provided a decent analysis.
First they complained because of "suburb flight" where affluent persons moved to the suburbs and left-behind a poor base in the city...I wish they'd make up their mind.
You do see that the two things you mentioned are not opposites, right? Both are essentially the same thing: a geographical segregation of the wealthy and the poor. It's not about whether the rich people are in cities or not, it's about the Eloi/Morlock-like separation between classes. Now if you want to argue that this kind of segregation is healthy and appropriate, then go ahead, but don't be so naive as to think this is an argument about whether it's better for rich people to live in cities or suburbs.
Implication that teachers can't stand to be held accountable-- check.
Assumption that the government spends too much on education and wants to spend more-- check.
Hinting that Obama is subverting the system for political motives-- check.
Whether or not the article has a good point-- it may be true that we're not as badly off as we think-- the article is written in a divisive way by someone who clearly leans toward the Republican end of things. Throughout the article, there's the running implication that all the doom and gloom is a scam, perpetrated by Democrats, in order to get more funding for education. However, even if we stipulate that our educational system is good, there's still another explanation: As a rule, people throughout history have believed that "the system" is falling apart and they were witnessing the downfall of civilization.
However, I would offer another interpretation of what's going on. For one thing, I would be very careful about trusting any particular standardized test, and even about trusting standardized tests in general. When you say, "Students scored higher on the ABC test this year than the year before!" you can't necessarily assume that students have been educated better. It may be a reflection of changes made to the test. The increase may not be statistically significant. It may be that the teachers started "teaching to the test" at the expense of other lessons. It may be that the school system pulled some other shenanigans to manipulate the test scores. It may be that the test was simply poorly formed in the first place, and is not actually a good reflection of the educational level of the students.
The article begins with a quote about how education is suffering, and then goes on to note that the quote is from *all the way* back in 1983. This may be a sign that the doom-saying has been going on for a long time and does not reflect a real problem. Or it might mean that the educational system has been suffering since at least as far back as 1983. In fact, I'm sure that there are people who would claim that to be the case.
Nice to know that among the 1 ISP option you have, they have a 0-star rating in keeping information private. I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to do with this information.
OTA TV is free, but people still "pirate" it, so they can get it without the ads.
Well first it's arguably not "free" if you have to watch ads, but anyway I don't think that's why people pirate it. I think they want convenience. They want to watch the show when they want to watch it, where they want to watch it. I might want to watch a show on my laptop 5 days after it airs, and I can't do that from the radio waves. Maybe it's on Hulu and maybe not. Even if it is on Hulu, I have to pay $8 a month to watch Hulu on my TV, and even then I can't watch everything on Hulu.
It's just too complicated and they're making people jump through too many hoops. Put everything on Hulu and allow people to watch Hulu on their TVs without paying a subscription, and I bet you can get a lot of people to sit through the ads.
I haven't investigated all the terms yet, but honestly I'm not that tempted. I'm a little tempted, but I've gone a few years now without cable, and I think I might prefer not having it, even if it's free.
Maybe that's weird, but I already have access to most of the shows I want to watch, and everything is effectively on-demand streaming, which to my mind is better than watching TV on someone else's schedule. Maybe I will, though... it would let me cancel my Hulu and stop buying TV shows on iTunes, so it would actually save me money. I hadn't thought of that yet.
But on the other hand, I hate the cable company. They've always provided terrible service. Their internet is unreliable, the TV breaks up, the prices are generally too expensive, and I feel railroaded into using their service anyway. They're the only option where I live, which is amazing considering I live in NYC and not some backwaters country house in the middle of nowhere.
So I kind of want to say to them, "Screw you and your TV service. Just give me good, fast internet speeds and let me get my content from whatever source I choose. Stop trying to force me to use your TV service and your VOIP."
Slashdot Mirror
True, but I think this is only a first step. Office applications for mobile platforms are getting better, and meanwhile mobile platforms are getting more powerful. I'm now convinced that Apple plans to do what I imagined for the future for quite a long time: make your phone your computer.
I'm imagining that within a few years, it won't really make sense to have a desktop computer, a laptop, an iPad, an iPhone, and whatever else. Instead, you'll essentially have a smartphone that contains enough processing power and RAM to run a full desktop operating system. When it's alone, it operates as a smartphone. When you dock it at a desktop docking station, you'll get a full keyboard, mouse and monitor and it will run a full desktop UI (you may even be able to include additional processing power in the dock).
From there, it just becomes an issue of building different docs for different situations. You can have a tablet dock for when you want it to have a bigger screen. You can have a laptop-like dock for when you want a good platform for working on-the-go. This way, all of your documents and settings go with you wherever you go, and there's no need to setup complicating syncing solutions. It's kind of like having your smartphone running on a LiveUSB distribution that can be run anywhere.
It's not just for eldars. We're also more willing to spend money to lock 20-something marijuana smokers in jail than to send them to college or job training.
It's some system we've got going: pull funding from education, imprison the youth, then offshore labor or import it from other countries because "there aren't enough qualified applications", even while the number of unemployed goes up.
Yay!
Well I said "can be" as a way of admitting that sometimes amateurs are really really good at stuff. Still, I've met too many people who have the attitude of, "I've run a Linux web server at home, so I know everything my IT guy does."
So my point was, even if you know more about Linux than your IT guy, he might know a bunch of other stuff. He might not know all the configuration options, but he might have a better idea about which configuration options you want to use in a professional setting. He might know more about how Linux works in a complex environment with a bunch of other servers and users running on other platforms. He might know more about general IT best practices. He might know more about the internal rules of the company you're working for, and the internal politics that formed them.
As an IT guy, some of the stupidest and most frustrating conversations you're going to have are with hobbyists and programmers-- i.e. people who generally know about computers, but often don't understand IT work.
Perhaps the reason a desktop display should be 3 feet from your eyes is because the PPI is so low?
No, that's just my estimate based on sitting properly in a chair (not all slouched over) with a keyboard in front of you and a display in front of that. Maybe it's not quite 3 feet, but 2.5 feet, but it's not 1 foot. I think if 2 feet is going to be a little cramped and include bad ergonomic practices.
Now doesn't get me wrong, a high DPI screen would be cool and I'd rather have it. A screen like the Wacom Critiq would benefit from higher DPI because you aren't using it as a normal desktop display. I'm just pointing out that there's less of a need for a 300 dpi monitor when you're not holding it in your hand, a foot away from your face.
I'd like to see high resolution displays as much as the next guy, but it's much less necessary on desktop displays and television sets.
I'm sure someone will freak out about me saying that, but here's the thing: it's not just about DPI, but about the viewing distance. The reason the retina display is called "retina" is that (we can argue about the validity of the claim, but...) it's roughly the maximum resolution discernible by the human eye at the distance you're expected to view a smartphone. That is, approximately a foot away from your eyes.
Your desktop display should be about 3 feet from your eyes. My TV at home sits... I don't know, somewhere around 12 feet from my eyes. Though it might be really cool to get a 300 dpi television, I'm not sure it makes sense to worry about it when you're talking about a television that's 12 feet away.
This isn't a huge issue. There are a lot of IT jobs with no requirement formal training or education. However, in addition to not having any training or education, he also apparently has no experience.
Oh, I get it. He set up a server and has taught himself PHP. There can be a significant divide, though, between "someone who knows how to run a Linux server" and "someone who is qualified to be a Linux sysadmin." It's not all technical knowledge; it's also about understanding how businesses work, how to work with other people, how to manage your workload, and how to cope with problems and mistakes. Experience counts for a lot.
So your friend has no formal training and not a lot of experience. He'll probably need to start at the bottom, which means being a low-level tech.
Here's the thing: this has been going on for laptop and cell phone manufacturers since... forever. These people don't know where the technology is going, they don't have a plan, and they arguably don't know how to make a good product. Given the technical capabilities of computers these days, it's amazing how poor a job manufacturers are doing of actually solving problems or giving people what they want.
However, the cost is prohibitive, and its actually cheaper to get a hosted box and have dynamic ips at home.
Only because we're running out of addresses, which is a problem that IPv6 solves.
I have never had those dynamic dns issues, because I setup and run my own DNS.
Great, so you've just introduced a chicken-and-the-egg problem that in order to circumvent the need for a static IP, you need a DNS server with a static IP. Easily solved, or we could get rid of the problem for everyone by using a system that makes sense, instead of a bunch of hacks.
The fear isn't that they might have to contribute, they have to contribute everything that so much as looks, smells, or hears anything related to a single line of GPL code.
My point in using the word "fear" is that sometimes the aversion is not because of what people will actually have to contribute, since people often don't really understand what they have to contribute and when. Or it might be that they don't have a problem with contributing their current code, but there a fear that they don't fully understand the terms, or that they might not want to release their newer code later on down the line.
I'm not saying that people can't have a real and legitimate objection to using GPL'd code. I'm saying even when they don't have a specific problem in opening their code, they still might be hesitant to do so for fear of unanticipated consequences in an unknown future.
I don't think anyone questioned why they were there. The issue is, there are people who will refuse to build off of or contribute to GPL projects because they're somehow afraid of being compelled to contribute something they might not want to. So the question then becomes, are the contributions that are compelled by the license going to be greater than the contributions lost due to fear of being compelled?
I'm not taking a side here. I don't have any idea what the answer is, but I suspect it's different for different projects and different communities.
I don't have backup for this, but I believe it has been well established that if you don't want to mix cases, it's much more readable to keep everything in lower case. The differences between lowercase letters is more dramatic, which is part of the reason we use them in most of our writing.
Since the groups were self selected, ie. they decided to participate, maybe people living in college towns have more time or are more interested in playing.
I'm assuming they took averages, so that explanation doesn't work. You'd have to explain why the sample of "people who had spare time to play" skewed smart.
If that's not clear enough, an average shouldn't be thrown off by the number of people playing, assuming that the sample size is large enough to begin with. If I have 1,000 people scoring an average score of 50 or 1,000,000 people scoring an average score of 50, the average score is the same. So if you wanted to draw out the fact that it was self-selecting, you'd have to say something more like, "The smart people in college towns have more free time than elsewhere. In other places, smart people work longer hours and wouldn't take the time to play the game."
I'm just pointing out why attempts at making neighborhoods that have both rich and poor people generally don't work, and why things end up this way.
Well it *does* work, with varying levels of success. Sure, it doesn't work perfectly-- there will always be rich people who choose to somehow live away from anyone remotely poor or even middle-class. However, there are cities who do a better job of making moderate-to-low income housing available in decent neighborhoods, or protecting poor people from being forced out of their existing homes due to gentrification.
When it straight-up doesn't work is when people throw up their hands, say, "This is impossible and won't work," and then refuse to do anything about the problem. When you take that approach, nothing works.
providing better services to poor neighborhoods with taxpayer funding to try to break the cycle, providing better education in poorer schools, etc.
Of course, you run into the same problems there. Governments tend to be more responsive to rich people, and rich people want their tax dollars to go towards making things better for rich people. Any real solution is going to somehow come down to enough people say, "Yeah, I know it's difficult. I know there are no simple solutions. But you know what? We're going to try. If our first attempts don't succeed, we're going to make a second attempt. If the second attempt doesn't work, we'll make a third. We're not going to give up, because failure is not acceptable."
Clearly I'm aware of dynamic DNS-- I mention it a couple of times in my post. However, it's not always the best solution, and it creates another thing that can fail. For example, I've had occasional problems in the past where a dynamic DNS provider changed their update mechanism, or the client-side updater stopped working, and the DNS stopped being updated. There are also problems, for example, with email getting send from a dynamic IP address, being more likely to get blocked or marked as SPAM.
Dynamic DNS is a big of a kludge to cope with situations where getting a static IP is difficult or expensive. It's not a great all-around solution.
As far as using external hosting, that's a great solution in a lot of cases. In some cases, it's not. Either way, again, it's a bit of a kludge.
Is it really so weird to say, "I don't want to deal with strange hacks, and I don't want to set up work-arounds. I just want to be able to have several computers on my network have static IP addresses without spending hundreds of dollars per month to make that happen."
The funny part is, I live in a middle-class neighborhood that has a free public bus that drives by every 5-10 minutes, there's banks and credit unions within walking distance, good grocery stores within walking distance (and this is in Phoenix, where cars are de rigeur), yet we still have this problem, though admittedly not nearly as bad as the poor neighborhoods.
I'm a little unsure why you think this argues with my point. In fact, it supports my contention that these problems are not the result of "poor people" somehow being inherently worse, but by other social factors. You get some of the "bad behavior" even in extremely wealthy neighborhoods, but it's reduced by greater opportunities, social pressures, increase police presence, etc.
Your personal experiences in Phoenix also might not be great examples of the problems of gentrification and segregating economic classes. I don't know-- some cities are better at handling these things than others, which is part of the point here. Some cities create opportunities for rich, middle class, and poor citizens to interact in positive social ways. In some cities, they get closer to creating ghettos and push poor people to live in them as a depressed underclass that serves everyone else, without any chance of upward social/economic mobility.
Taking a bunch of bad-behaving poor people and sticking them in some master-planned community with great access to banks and public transit isn't going to suddenly make them behave better and stop getting pit bulls and acting like upper-middle-class people. Their kids might start acting more like that, and their grandkids even more
Even by admitting this, you're admitting that (to some extent) shuffling poor people off to crappy neighborhoods without sufficient social services has the effect of dooming them and their descendants to a life of crime and poverty. You're creating a situation where children will be poor for their entire lives because they don't have opportunities because their parents are poor. Is that really an acceptable way for things to work?
Well, you won't need to pay ridiculous fees in order to get a static IP address.
Just to give one example, right now, if I want to be able to SSH directly into the computers on my network from the Internet, it's a pain. I have to pay $100/month extra to upgrade to my ISP's business account to get even 1 static IP address, and getting multiple can be expensive/difficult. I can use a dynamic DNS service instead, which depending on the service might be expensive or unreliable-- just another thing that can go wrong.
But even if I have a single static IP or a dynamic DNS service, I then have to set up port forwarding on my firewall to redirect different ports to different machines, and keep track of which port goes where, or else SSH into one internal server and then SSH from that server to others.
Give everything a unique IP, and I just have to open the ports on my firewall.
Besides, I'm under the impression that IPv6 has more features than just "unique IP addresses for everything" (and preventing us from running out of available IPs). I'm not a super-technical expert, but I thought there were also technical improvements in security and routing.
People won't necessarily switch over to IPv6 for their internal networks right away, since it can be a pain to reconfigure your network. However, there's not really much reason to continue using NAT if there's enough IP addresses to go around.
Well first, I'd like to point out that I don't mind having *this* discussion. That was my point. It's not, "Oh, I want to have rich people live in the city! No wait, I want to have them live in the suburbs! I can't make up my mind!" It's "Is it reasonable to have these kinds of segregated living conditions, and if not, is it possible to solve this problem?"
developers don't want to bother with low-cost units.
Some of this can be controlled to an extent. Cities are capable of engaging in zoning/planning to encourage different mixes of development. Cities have, at different times, experimented with separating commercial/residential areas or forcing them to coexist in the same neighborhoods, with encouraging development in some areas more than others, etc.
But either way, whether developers want to bother with low-cost units isn't really that huge of an issue, considering that they can be incentivized to do it anyway.
pit bulls running loose (I see it in my deteriorating neighborhood all the time now), lots of cars coming and going all the time, horns honking, physical assaults, gang activity, etc.
Have you considered at all that at least *part* of the reason these things are so prevelant in poor neighborhoods is because there's no money, no development, no facilities, and no police? I've lived in a poor neighborhood too, and there were lots of the things that you mention, trash on the street, etc. There were no banks, few grocery stores, bad public transportation, bad schools, etc. If you have to cash your paycheck, you go to the cash-checking place. If you need groceries, you go to little convenience stores that have junk food. When police show up, there's no telling who they're going to hassle or why.
I live in a fairly wealthy neighborhood now, and there are are police everywhere all the time, and they're generally more friendly towards people. There are fantastic grocery stores with fresh produce, banks where you can open an account, and public transportation.
Slashdot is a big fan of the idea that "correlation does not equal causation." Have you considered that you might, to some degree, have the "cause" and "effect" mixed up? Maybe at least part of the reason there's more crime and bad behavior in poorer areas is not because we've wisely herded all the bad people into the bad part of town? Maybe when you herd a bunch of people together with no hope, no future, no opportunities, no economic resources and put them in a shitty area with shitty places to live, they start misbehaving?
houses don't retain their value very well if they're much larger than other houses in the subdivision.
And I care about this why?
Let's take this as an undeniable and unalterable fact of real estate. This means that if you're rich and you want to live in a super-awesome mansion, and it happens to be in an area with some smaller houses around, you get your super-awesome mansion for cheaper. Boo hoo, I guess you save money. It doesn't seem like a problem that anyone should care about.
...want all classes to live together as equals, in the same tiny apartments, but that rich people pay huge rents for the privilege, while poor people pay little or nothing for an identical space next door.
I don't know of anyone arguing in favor of that. But there's a wide range between what you're describing and complete segregation of economic/social classes. Is it really necessary to herd all the poor and lower-middle class people into neighborhoods where all the buildings are roach-infested falling apart, there are crappy grocery stores where you can't get fresh produce, and no access to banks? Or could it be possible for people to live in decent neighborhoods if they don't have a lot of money, but just without all of the frills and amenities of mansions and luxury condos?
But average score changes are rarely a result of changes to the test.
I don't have any way of knowing this. Even if I did know that this sort of thing was "rare", it still wouldn't tell me whether it was the case with the specific test the article write cited.
Aside from that, it's only addressing one minor point that goes to the larger thrust of my argument: statistics are tricky business, and often don't demonstrate what people think they do. There are many varied ways in which a standardized test might fail to give an accurate account of the student's educational level, or in which an analysis of the compiled results might fail to give an accurate picture of what's going on in the country as a whole.
I wouldn't suggest that we should refuse to use statistics and metrics to evaluate our education system, but only that you should be careful in analyzing them. I don't trust the guy who wrote this article to have provided a decent analysis.
First they complained because of "suburb flight" where affluent persons moved to the suburbs and left-behind a poor base in the city...I wish they'd make up their mind.
You do see that the two things you mentioned are not opposites, right? Both are essentially the same thing: a geographical segregation of the wealthy and the poor. It's not about whether the rich people are in cities or not, it's about the Eloi/Morlock-like separation between classes. Now if you want to argue that this kind of segregation is healthy and appropriate, then go ahead, but don't be so naive as to think this is an argument about whether it's better for rich people to live in cities or suburbs.
Claiming that the US is #1 in the world-- check.
Vague accusations of anti-Bush bias-- check.
Implication that teachers can't stand to be held accountable-- check.
Assumption that the government spends too much on education and wants to spend more-- check.
Hinting that Obama is subverting the system for political motives-- check.
Whether or not the article has a good point-- it may be true that we're not as badly off as we think-- the article is written in a divisive way by someone who clearly leans toward the Republican end of things. Throughout the article, there's the running implication that all the doom and gloom is a scam, perpetrated by Democrats, in order to get more funding for education. However, even if we stipulate that our educational system is good, there's still another explanation: As a rule, people throughout history have believed that "the system" is falling apart and they were witnessing the downfall of civilization.
However, I would offer another interpretation of what's going on. For one thing, I would be very careful about trusting any particular standardized test, and even about trusting standardized tests in general. When you say, "Students scored higher on the ABC test this year than the year before!" you can't necessarily assume that students have been educated better. It may be a reflection of changes made to the test. The increase may not be statistically significant. It may be that the teachers started "teaching to the test" at the expense of other lessons. It may be that the school system pulled some other shenanigans to manipulate the test scores. It may be that the test was simply poorly formed in the first place, and is not actually a good reflection of the educational level of the students.
The article begins with a quote about how education is suffering, and then goes on to note that the quote is from *all the way* back in 1983. This may be a sign that the doom-saying has been going on for a long time and does not reflect a real problem. Or it might mean that the educational system has been suffering since at least as far back as 1983. In fact, I'm sure that there are people who would claim that to be the case.
Nice to know that among the 1 ISP option you have, they have a 0-star rating in keeping information private. I'm not sure what anyone is supposed to do with this information.
OTA TV is free, but people still "pirate" it, so they can get it without the ads.
Well first it's arguably not "free" if you have to watch ads, but anyway I don't think that's why people pirate it. I think they want convenience. They want to watch the show when they want to watch it, where they want to watch it. I might want to watch a show on my laptop 5 days after it airs, and I can't do that from the radio waves. Maybe it's on Hulu and maybe not. Even if it is on Hulu, I have to pay $8 a month to watch Hulu on my TV, and even then I can't watch everything on Hulu.
It's just too complicated and they're making people jump through too many hoops. Put everything on Hulu and allow people to watch Hulu on their TVs without paying a subscription, and I bet you can get a lot of people to sit through the ads.
I haven't investigated all the terms yet, but honestly I'm not that tempted. I'm a little tempted, but I've gone a few years now without cable, and I think I might prefer not having it, even if it's free.
Maybe that's weird, but I already have access to most of the shows I want to watch, and everything is effectively on-demand streaming, which to my mind is better than watching TV on someone else's schedule. Maybe I will, though... it would let me cancel my Hulu and stop buying TV shows on iTunes, so it would actually save me money. I hadn't thought of that yet.
But on the other hand, I hate the cable company. They've always provided terrible service. Their internet is unreliable, the TV breaks up, the prices are generally too expensive, and I feel railroaded into using their service anyway. They're the only option where I live, which is amazing considering I live in NYC and not some backwaters country house in the middle of nowhere.
So I kind of want to say to them, "Screw you and your TV service. Just give me good, fast internet speeds and let me get my content from whatever source I choose. Stop trying to force me to use your TV service and your VOIP."