The idea that a clone is going to be some sort of non-human entity with no moral standing one way or the other is just plain nuts.
I don't think that's really the concern-- at least it wouldn't be my concern. The bigger problem comes when you start to ask the question, "Why are you cloning things?" Is it specifically because you hope to create a sub-human thing that you can harvest tissue and organs from? That might be a problem.
At it's most benign, people might want to clone themselves because they're so egotistical that they believe "what the world needs is more of me." If it's ok to clone people, with no restrictions, and I own my own genetic material, then why shouldn't I be allowed to clone an army of little nine-times clones? Well, beyond being weird and creepy, it's a potential public health issue in that you might end up with certain people being overly-represented in the gene pool, leading to the same sorts of problems when you do lots of inbreeding.
In my mind, a lot of it is just trying to keep people from doing horribly weird things without thinking of the consequences. Yes, you might be able to put jellyfish DNA into all of your children so they'll glow in the dark because you think it's cool, but if everyone starts doing crap like that, what are the ramifications going to be in 200 years? What's going to happen when your jellyfish kids start mating with someone else's cat-children?
When there are real, sane things that people want to do with this technology, then I think we should consider it. But no, I definitely don't think it should be open to all, or taken lightly.
Someone telling Stephen King, "I'm a huge fan of your work! Please write another book so I can buy it!", but later downloads the book for free, I would certainly label a deceiver.
That's a bit of a stretch, but for the sake of argument, let's say that is "deception" enough to constitute "theft of labor". So that still means that if you download it without first promising to buy it, then it's not theft of labor.
And yes about one year of Mr. King's labor has been without compensation.
I'm under no obligation to compensate Mr. King for his labor, and neither is anyone else here. Even if I read his book, I'm not under any obligation to pay him for his labor. I am perfectly allowed to borrow a friend's book or check it out of the library and read it without paying Mr. King a single red cent. If I copy his book without a license, then I *may* be subject to some kind of civil action, but I'm still not obligated to pay him any given amount until I've agreed to licensing terms.
It's that simple. It simply boggles my mind to see so many people who try to discount that. It's there for a reason....Someone said it, if that work was allowed to be copied by others without compensation, I in effect, would have done their work for them providing them countless hours of free labor. THAT IS WHY THE CONSTITUTION HAS ARTICLE I SECTION 8!!!
It's not quite that simple, because it's part of the US Constitution, and it helps to understand how the Constitution is written. Did you know, for example, that excluding the Ammendments, the Constitution does not specify the rights held by citizens? The Amendments were kept separate on purpose because the writers did not want to talk about the rights of citizens in the Constitution itself. In fact, they specifically didn't want to enumerate citizens' rights at all, but only list some that they were adamant not ever be surrendered to the government (which is why they wrote the 10th ammendment).
Now I'm not just going off on a tangent here, but rather I want to point something out: the part of the Constitution that you cited was not an Amendment. Read it more carefully, and you'll see that the clause does not guarantee citizens "right to their respective writings and discoveries," but rather it grants the Federal government the power to grant that right.
Now notice something else: it grants them the power to grant that right, but doesn't specify that they are responsible for granting that right. Legally, there's a difference. The Congress can opt to grant or not-grant that right on whatever grounds they think is appropriate, so long as their decisions don't otherwise conflict with the Constitution.
Ok, now let's back up on that clause all the way to the beginning. Notice it says, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? That's the context under which they're granted the power to grant such exclusive rights. Therefore, constitutionally, they are not given any power (at least not in that clause) to grant such rights *except* when it will promote science and useful arts.
Don't believe me? Go looking in the constitution for the part where it specifies that Congress has the power to grant citizens the right to own property. The Constitution doesn't really spell things like that out because it's assumed that people have the right to own property. However, they spell out that Congress may give exclusive rights to writings and discoveries particularly because it's *not* any kind of inalienable right of citizens. It's rather a method open to Congress to try to incentivize science and "useful arts".
Sorry commodore, but you need to look up "theft of labor" again. Copyright or patent infringement is not "theft of labor".
Theft of labor is when you get someone do work by force or deception. If I tell you I'm going to pay you for a job when I have no intention of doing so, or if I make you do work for me at gunpoint, then that's theft of labor. If you've done work voluntarily and I've pulled benefit from that work, after the fact, without your permission, it's a different thing.
In most cases, it's completely legal to benefit from someone else's intellectual work without the worker's permission. We've made copyright and patent law to protect two particular cases for particular reasons, but the concerns are different than of "theft of labor". Copyrights and patents are more concerned with protecting *investments*.
Oh, sure, that makes sense. I'd be all in favor of increasing education opportunities, and I believe that all parents (not without exception, but across socioeconomic boundaries) want their children to succeed. If they sincerely believe that opportunities are open to them, they're more likely to work to make the most of those opportunities.
However, by my making copies and sending them around, for that one time fee of $270, I get multiple backups in very safe locations.
I can sign up for online backups from multiple companies and have multiple backups in different locations, too, but online backups can easily be done in increments like, "every hour". Backing up to a new USB drive every hour and shipping it someplace every hour would not be easy.
Note that I'm not saying a USB drive doesn't have advantages, but depending on what you want and need, the advantages and disadvantages of an online backup might be better than the advantages and disadvantages of a USB drive backup. Plus online backup is just one thing made possible by faster Internet speeds.
Anyway, you're missing the point. I'm not saying, "Gee, everyone really needs a 1Gbps connection to their home right now, because they need to send that 3k email REALLY fast!" It's an issue of building infrastructure. Infrastructure needs to be available, by which I mean that the issue isn't whether any given person is going to take particular advantage of it. I don't have to own a trucking company to make use of the roads, but trucking is an important thing in our country today and the roads need to be there for that. Roads are available to me and available to the trucker, and that allows various business enterprises to thrive. I can go to work, and the trucker can transport things. And in that sense, it's really not sensible for me to say, "Why do we have an interstate highway system? I don't use it everyday!"
So yes, not everyone is even making use of a DSL line, but it's not sensible to say, "Why should my neighbor be able to get a 10Mbps symmetric connection? I don't think I have use for that!" And frankly, it's embarrassing that there are so many populated places in this country where you can't get anything faster than dialup. It's embarrassing that you can live in NYC and still not be able to get a faster uplink than 512kbps.
And no, we don't necessarily need 1Gbps connections everywhere today, but infrastructure also needs to be upgradable. If they're upgrading it, they should go ahead and build it to be faster than it needs to be (within reason), and able to be easily/cheaply upgraded even faster in the future.
My point is more that the uses available to us are somewhat determined by the potential available to us. You might not have a use for 1Gbps now, but there was also a time when 56k was *really* fast, and no one was even imagining Youtube at that moment. No one was expecting B2B internet usage of the sort we have today.
So what will someone come up with in 10-20 years that will saturate a 1Gbps connection? I don't know. Something.
A USB drive doesn't have the advantage of being off-site, meaning it doesn't work as a backup in case my house burns down.
But none of that is really the point. The point is that having fast symmetric Internet connections would open up endless possibilities. In some cases there might be alternate/better solutions, but certainly the fast connections will be useful.
Do you really expect that businesses won't be able to make good use of a 1Gbps connection within the next 10 years? Because along with everything else, when you're building infrastructure like this, you don't want it to be "Good enough for now." You want it to be "Probably good enough for at least a couple of decades, and hopefully upgradable to whatever we'll want in a few decades when it's no longer good enough."
But then, I don't know why I'm arguing with you, commodore64_love. We've talked before, and I know you're just trolling.
But the genetically inferior are more likely to be poor.
That really needs some better support before you get to claim that. Scientifically, we haven't even settled how much of intelligence is nature as opposed to nurture. Even if you can prove that it's all genetic, there's still a further step to say that some genetic forms of intelligence are straight-up "inferior" as opposed to being good at different things (e.g. someone might be better at math while another person is better at reading people). Once you've gotten that far, then you can do a scientific study that to see if the "genetically inferior" are more likely to be poor. It's possible they aren't.
I was talking Apple in general, they always seem to miss out on some things and they aren't to good at listening to their consumers ideas
Still not following. If you pay attention, Apple's development process tends to be that they release a pretty simple but well-designed product to start off, and add features very slowly as they figure out how to integrate those features seamlessly. The opposing model is like Microsoft's where they put in every feature they can and sort it out later. But Apple does make progress, slow and steady.
And no, they don't include every idea that people ask them to include. Who does? Microsoft doesn't. Linux developers certainly don't. I don't think it would be a good idea to include everyone's ideas anyway, since it would lead to an unfocused/messy design, even if you ignore the idea that lots of suggestions might just be bad suggestions.
Clearly the financial commitment is important. Maybe if your child fails a class, you should be required to reimburse the state for expenses (I'm guessing around $500 per class per semester, based on the figures I've heard about spending per student).
I don't think that will work well when you consider that the children you're most worried about often share a fair amount of overlap with parents who don't have the money to pay even if you charge them. And talk about unintended consequences, what kind of pressure do you think will be coming down on teachers to pass kids along when failing them means their parents won't be able to afford food for 3 months?
They are actually paying to be there and their parents are writing checks directly to the school... so when they fail because they were partying all night, it's a big deal.
If you're going to talk about kids who already have the wealth, education, and background to be in college, then something like that begins to make sense.
There's been ZERO effort to push on parents.
Because you can't really push on parents. You can try to punish them, I guess, but often you're talking about parents who already feel dejected from society in some ways, and might not have very much to lose. Often punishing people like that doesn't have the effect that you want.
As opposed to the sense of entitlement displayed when people demand that public investment occur in non-necessary services so they can be further entertained?
Yes, because the Internet is just for porn and Facebook, right? It couldn't possibly be that it's being used for public services, governmental operation, and businesses both large and small.
And roads are just for joyriding in cars. Trains and planes are just for vacations. Electricity is just for watching TV and playing computer games. Indoor plumbing is for water balloon fights.
Trouble is...it appears Korea (assuming South Korea) doesn't seem to have the inherit need to put extreme amounts of pork and other wasteful spending on their broadband legislation.
What's even sadder is that the whole thing isn't entirely an issue of corruption. Corruption would actually be easier to deal with. The problem is that our culture has become so bitterly divided into two camps that, in order to get any laws passed, you have to put something for each camp into the law.
You want any kind of infrastructure? Well according to roughly half the country, spending money on infrastructure is "communist", so you had better bundle that spending with "tax cuts" to make them happy. Oh, but now you're asking for tax cuts, and tax cuts are always for the rich, so we'd better include some "scholarships for low-income minorities" to keep the first half from getting upset.
Go back and forth a few hundred times until everyone feels like they're getting something out of the deal, and then maybe it will pass.
The luckiest thing that ever happened to Bill Gates happened at the moment of his conception. His innate drive and intelligence practically guaranteed his success
I don't share your focus on genetics. What would happen if Gates's parents were poor? He might still have all the drive and intelligence, but he might not ever have gotten the chance to get an education or the opportunity to experiment with computers. Would he have had the time to start a computer company at all if he was spending his time working for McDonalds to help his parents make ends meet?
And then what about all the people that he met along the way? He didn't make Microsoft a success all by himself. Take away the contributions of the people he worked with, and it's not clear what would happen.
Microsoft was a success because Gates sold MS DOS to IBM. But DOS wasn't IBM's first choice or even second choice for operating systems. Gates happened to be in contact with IBM right about the time IBM was getting really desperate, and so he bought someone else's OS and licensed that to IBM. It could easily have gone another way.
It really isn't a question of whether Gates was going to be a multi-millionaire or multi-billionaire. There's no reason to think that he couldn't have been homeless if his luck had been different. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that poor people are genetically inferior.
It does not care who is smart or who isn't, or who works hard or who is lazy, it tends to allocate resources according to who provides the most value to the system.
That's sort of like saying, "the court system punishes the guilty and releases the innocent." Sure, ideally, theoretically, that's what's supposed to happen. but obviously that's not what always happens. In the same way that a well constructed court system will frequently punish the guilty and release the innocent, a well constructed economic system will tend to reward those who are providing value. But also like the court system, a poorly designed and regulated economic system will quickly fill up with corruption and abuse. Also similar to a court system, even in the best real-world system, mistakes will be made.
It's typical Apple maner to have a good idea, implement it fast and then leave the product and not develop it further.
That doesn't seem right to me at all. In fact, it seems so wrong that I'm trying to figure out whether you're trolling, being sarcastic, or just don't know what you're talking about.
They were working on the iPhone for something like 7 years before release. It's not a hastily put-together product, and they've continued to refine it and add features ever since it was released. Are you sure that you're not just annoyed that they haven't yet chosen to implement features that you want?
It doesn't work quite that easily, since the field of view for the camera would be different than for your eyes, meaning the image on the screen might depict the same stuff that you would see if your phone were transparent, but the image wouldn't line up well enough to give a transparent effect-- at least not without employing some kind of special tricks.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that there's no such thing as "innate superiority", but I think that everyone does a little ego-padding, and a lot of people do too much of it.
One way that it exhibits itself is that people who fail tend to overstate the degree to which their bad luck and circumstances determined their outcome, while people who succeed tend to overstate the degree to which they deserve credit for their own success.
The truth is, it's a mix. As innately superior as you may be, you still wouldn't succeed if you weren't put into a position to succeed. At the same time, some people will just blow great opportunities through bad habits and personal faults. And then sometimes someone blows a great opportunity through no fault of his own, but by bad luck, while someone else succeeds simply by being in the right place at the right time-- it happens.
I've seen several plans to pay parents and students to be involved. It doesn't sound unreasonable to me, but many people think it's against the spirit of education.
Yes, I've read about things like that. I personally wouldn't be too concerned about the spirit of education, but more about possible unintended consequences and possible conflicts of interest. Even so, that can't *make* the parents be involved.
Personally, I feel like teachers are paid enough for the job that they are *supposed* to do
Maybe, but I don't really know how you judge. In many places, teachers don't really make what I would call a "decent wage", and often they need to go into their own pockets to buy classroom materials. It may be enough money by some measures, but there are still teacher shortages and it's hardly enough to attract the best and brightest of our young people. Imagine you're fresh out of college and have a bunch of student loans. You have the option of going straight into the workforce, or you can go further into debt getting trained to be a teacher and then end up making 1/3 the pay. Not many people will choose the latter.
On top of that, the pay scale isn't generally determined by anything like "performance", but more like seniority or arbitrary union rules.
It seems to me that business or political success is *usually* more a result of some type animal cunning with a heapin' helpin' of ruthlessness thrown in for good measure.
Let's not forget luck and circumstances. I'm relatively successful (not "Bill Gates" successful, but well above the average income) and I would suppose than many Slashdotters are. It's very tempting to believe that you're there because of some kind of innate superiority, and so it's easy to underestimate the value of dumb luck. Sometimes the difference between a successful person and a failure is "what they choose to do with the opportunities in front of them," but sometimes it really is just "the opportunities in front of them."
But even ignoring that, I don't see any reason to believe that "business success" is any kind of reflection of "overall excellence". Perhaps "business excellence", but successful use of one ability doesn't mean anything about excellence in other fields. Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist, but I wouldn't want him as my surgeon.
Microsoft itself is great at leveraging success in one part of the computer/electronics market to push other related products, but perhaps not the most fantastic at building the actual products-- and those are just two things within the scope of "business".
Then, on top of that, I would side with you and point out that the skills to acquire success in business and finances are often (a) immense drive and ambition; (b) good connections and/or the ability to acquire good connections (c) animal cunning and political savvy; (d) ruthlessness and extreme moral flexibility. Having those qualities can be immensely useful, but they aren't necessarily the traits that you want exposed an masse in the population at large.
Anyone can claim something will fail and they have a 50/50 chance of being correct.
That's a real abuse of statistics. Are you saying that because there are two possibilities (i.e. "fail" or "succeed"), that there's a 50/50 chance of failure? It's like claiming that you have a 50/50 chance of winning the lottery because there are only two possibilities (i.e. "win" or "not win").
Not that I think Ayers is some terrific guy, but he could be a lunatic and still be right.
why isn't he the one with the multi-million dollar program trying to improve the school system?
Because unlike Bill Gates, Ayers's destructive and immoral activities have not made him the richest man on Earth?
That's all well and good, but what, are you going to *make* parents get involved? How are you going to do that?
Not that I disagree. Parental involvement is extremely important, and "throwing money at a problem" usually doesn't do much to solve that problem. On the other hand, I would contend that at least part of the problem is that schools in the US suck. They do, really.
It's not simply the parents' fault or the teachers' fault, but it's a whole culture-wide thing where we have horrendously inconsistent ideas about what "education" is. Is it for job-training, cultural conditioning, feel-goodery, enlightenment, or what? For many people, it's just another arbitrary thing that you have to do.
Hell, I was extremely interested in math and science and even philosophy when I was a teenager, and I was in a school system that was considered one of the best in the country. Still, I almost dropped out because schools-- at least the schools I went to-- position themselves against learning, against curiosity, and against discussion. It was all about authority and power, and someone who was genuinely interested in the topic rather than interested in the grades was a "problem" to them.
No one is expecting people using XP to suddenly go buy Vista and upgrade.
Yeah, someone is. That's how Microsoft expects to make money. If Microsoft was just going to make money from including Windows on new machines, then why would they bother making new releases like this? Why not just have perpetual service packs that fix things for free?
Now, They aren't necessarily expecting every consumer to rush out and upgrade. They're certainly hoping some will, and also hoping IT departments will either buy upgrades or at least pay for software assurance.
So there's still the question of, why should these people buy an upgrade?
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The idea that a clone is going to be some sort of non-human entity with no moral standing one way or the other is just plain nuts.
I don't think that's really the concern-- at least it wouldn't be my concern. The bigger problem comes when you start to ask the question, "Why are you cloning things?" Is it specifically because you hope to create a sub-human thing that you can harvest tissue and organs from? That might be a problem.
At it's most benign, people might want to clone themselves because they're so egotistical that they believe "what the world needs is more of me." If it's ok to clone people, with no restrictions, and I own my own genetic material, then why shouldn't I be allowed to clone an army of little nine-times clones? Well, beyond being weird and creepy, it's a potential public health issue in that you might end up with certain people being overly-represented in the gene pool, leading to the same sorts of problems when you do lots of inbreeding.
In my mind, a lot of it is just trying to keep people from doing horribly weird things without thinking of the consequences. Yes, you might be able to put jellyfish DNA into all of your children so they'll glow in the dark because you think it's cool, but if everyone starts doing crap like that, what are the ramifications going to be in 200 years? What's going to happen when your jellyfish kids start mating with someone else's cat-children?
When there are real, sane things that people want to do with this technology, then I think we should consider it. But no, I definitely don't think it should be open to all, or taken lightly.
Someone telling Stephen King, "I'm a huge fan of your work! Please write another book so I can buy it!", but later downloads the book for free, I would certainly label a deceiver.
That's a bit of a stretch, but for the sake of argument, let's say that is "deception" enough to constitute "theft of labor". So that still means that if you download it without first promising to buy it, then it's not theft of labor.
And yes about one year of Mr. King's labor has been without compensation.
I'm under no obligation to compensate Mr. King for his labor, and neither is anyone else here. Even if I read his book, I'm not under any obligation to pay him for his labor. I am perfectly allowed to borrow a friend's book or check it out of the library and read it without paying Mr. King a single red cent. If I copy his book without a license, then I *may* be subject to some kind of civil action, but I'm still not obligated to pay him any given amount until I've agreed to licensing terms.
It's that simple. It simply boggles my mind to see so many people who try to discount that. It's there for a reason....Someone said it, if that work was allowed to be copied by others without compensation, I in effect, would have done their work for them providing them countless hours of free labor. THAT IS WHY THE CONSTITUTION HAS ARTICLE I SECTION 8!!!
It's not quite that simple, because it's part of the US Constitution, and it helps to understand how the Constitution is written. Did you know, for example, that excluding the Ammendments, the Constitution does not specify the rights held by citizens? The Amendments were kept separate on purpose because the writers did not want to talk about the rights of citizens in the Constitution itself. In fact, they specifically didn't want to enumerate citizens' rights at all, but only list some that they were adamant not ever be surrendered to the government (which is why they wrote the 10th ammendment).
Now I'm not just going off on a tangent here, but rather I want to point something out: the part of the Constitution that you cited was not an Amendment. Read it more carefully, and you'll see that the clause does not guarantee citizens "right to their respective writings and discoveries," but rather it grants the Federal government the power to grant that right.
Now notice something else: it grants them the power to grant that right, but doesn't specify that they are responsible for granting that right. Legally, there's a difference. The Congress can opt to grant or not-grant that right on whatever grounds they think is appropriate, so long as their decisions don't otherwise conflict with the Constitution.
Ok, now let's back up on that clause all the way to the beginning. Notice it says, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"? That's the context under which they're granted the power to grant such exclusive rights. Therefore, constitutionally, they are not given any power (at least not in that clause) to grant such rights *except* when it will promote science and useful arts.
Don't believe me? Go looking in the constitution for the part where it specifies that Congress has the power to grant citizens the right to own property. The Constitution doesn't really spell things like that out because it's assumed that people have the right to own property. However, they spell out that Congress may give exclusive rights to writings and discoveries particularly because it's *not* any kind of inalienable right of citizens. It's rather a method open to Congress to try to incentivize science and "useful arts".
Sorry commodore, but you need to look up "theft of labor" again. Copyright or patent infringement is not "theft of labor".
Theft of labor is when you get someone do work by force or deception. If I tell you I'm going to pay you for a job when I have no intention of doing so, or if I make you do work for me at gunpoint, then that's theft of labor. If you've done work voluntarily and I've pulled benefit from that work, after the fact, without your permission, it's a different thing.
In most cases, it's completely legal to benefit from someone else's intellectual work without the worker's permission. We've made copyright and patent law to protect two particular cases for particular reasons, but the concerns are different than of "theft of labor". Copyrights and patents are more concerned with protecting *investments*.
Oh, sure, that makes sense. I'd be all in favor of increasing education opportunities, and I believe that all parents (not without exception, but across socioeconomic boundaries) want their children to succeed. If they sincerely believe that opportunities are open to them, they're more likely to work to make the most of those opportunities.
However, by my making copies and sending them around, for that one time fee of $270, I get multiple backups in very safe locations.
I can sign up for online backups from multiple companies and have multiple backups in different locations, too, but online backups can easily be done in increments like, "every hour". Backing up to a new USB drive every hour and shipping it someplace every hour would not be easy.
Note that I'm not saying a USB drive doesn't have advantages, but depending on what you want and need, the advantages and disadvantages of an online backup might be better than the advantages and disadvantages of a USB drive backup. Plus online backup is just one thing made possible by faster Internet speeds.
Anyway, you're missing the point. I'm not saying, "Gee, everyone really needs a 1Gbps connection to their home right now, because they need to send that 3k email REALLY fast!" It's an issue of building infrastructure. Infrastructure needs to be available, by which I mean that the issue isn't whether any given person is going to take particular advantage of it. I don't have to own a trucking company to make use of the roads, but trucking is an important thing in our country today and the roads need to be there for that. Roads are available to me and available to the trucker, and that allows various business enterprises to thrive. I can go to work, and the trucker can transport things. And in that sense, it's really not sensible for me to say, "Why do we have an interstate highway system? I don't use it everyday!"
So yes, not everyone is even making use of a DSL line, but it's not sensible to say, "Why should my neighbor be able to get a 10Mbps symmetric connection? I don't think I have use for that!" And frankly, it's embarrassing that there are so many populated places in this country where you can't get anything faster than dialup. It's embarrassing that you can live in NYC and still not be able to get a faster uplink than 512kbps.
And no, we don't necessarily need 1Gbps connections everywhere today, but infrastructure also needs to be upgradable. If they're upgrading it, they should go ahead and build it to be faster than it needs to be (within reason), and able to be easily/cheaply upgraded even faster in the future.
My point is more that the uses available to us are somewhat determined by the potential available to us. You might not have a use for 1Gbps now, but there was also a time when 56k was *really* fast, and no one was even imagining Youtube at that moment. No one was expecting B2B internet usage of the sort we have today.
So what will someone come up with in 10-20 years that will saturate a 1Gbps connection? I don't know. Something.
A USB drive doesn't have the advantage of being off-site, meaning it doesn't work as a backup in case my house burns down.
But none of that is really the point. The point is that having fast symmetric Internet connections would open up endless possibilities. In some cases there might be alternate/better solutions, but certainly the fast connections will be useful.
Do you really expect that businesses won't be able to make good use of a 1Gbps connection within the next 10 years? Because along with everything else, when you're building infrastructure like this, you don't want it to be "Good enough for now." You want it to be "Probably good enough for at least a couple of decades, and hopefully upgradable to whatever we'll want in a few decades when it's no longer good enough."
But then, I don't know why I'm arguing with you, commodore64_love. We've talked before, and I know you're just trolling.
What works rather well? Paying tuition for students?
But the genetically inferior are more likely to be poor.
That really needs some better support before you get to claim that. Scientifically, we haven't even settled how much of intelligence is nature as opposed to nurture. Even if you can prove that it's all genetic, there's still a further step to say that some genetic forms of intelligence are straight-up "inferior" as opposed to being good at different things (e.g. someone might be better at math while another person is better at reading people). Once you've gotten that far, then you can do a scientific study that to see if the "genetically inferior" are more likely to be poor. It's possible they aren't.
I was talking Apple in general, they always seem to miss out on some things and they aren't to good at listening to their consumers ideas
Still not following. If you pay attention, Apple's development process tends to be that they release a pretty simple but well-designed product to start off, and add features very slowly as they figure out how to integrate those features seamlessly. The opposing model is like Microsoft's where they put in every feature they can and sort it out later. But Apple does make progress, slow and steady.
And no, they don't include every idea that people ask them to include. Who does? Microsoft doesn't. Linux developers certainly don't. I don't think it would be a good idea to include everyone's ideas anyway, since it would lead to an unfocused/messy design, even if you ignore the idea that lots of suggestions might just be bad suggestions.
Clearly the financial commitment is important. Maybe if your child fails a class, you should be required to reimburse the state for expenses (I'm guessing around $500 per class per semester, based on the figures I've heard about spending per student).
I don't think that will work well when you consider that the children you're most worried about often share a fair amount of overlap with parents who don't have the money to pay even if you charge them. And talk about unintended consequences, what kind of pressure do you think will be coming down on teachers to pass kids along when failing them means their parents won't be able to afford food for 3 months?
They are actually paying to be there and their parents are writing checks directly to the school... so when they fail because they were partying all night, it's a big deal.
If you're going to talk about kids who already have the wealth, education, and background to be in college, then something like that begins to make sense.
There's been ZERO effort to push on parents.
Because you can't really push on parents. You can try to punish them, I guess, but often you're talking about parents who already feel dejected from society in some ways, and might not have very much to lose. Often punishing people like that doesn't have the effect that you want.
As opposed to the sense of entitlement displayed when people demand that public investment occur in non-necessary services so they can be further entertained?
Yes, because the Internet is just for porn and Facebook, right? It couldn't possibly be that it's being used for public services, governmental operation, and businesses both large and small.
And roads are just for joyriding in cars. Trains and planes are just for vacations. Electricity is just for watching TV and playing computer games. Indoor plumbing is for water balloon fights.
Trouble is...it appears Korea (assuming South Korea) doesn't seem to have the inherit need to put extreme amounts of pork and other wasteful spending on their broadband legislation.
What's even sadder is that the whole thing isn't entirely an issue of corruption. Corruption would actually be easier to deal with. The problem is that our culture has become so bitterly divided into two camps that, in order to get any laws passed, you have to put something for each camp into the law.
You want any kind of infrastructure? Well according to roughly half the country, spending money on infrastructure is "communist", so you had better bundle that spending with "tax cuts" to make them happy. Oh, but now you're asking for tax cuts, and tax cuts are always for the rich, so we'd better include some "scholarships for low-income minorities" to keep the first half from getting upset.
Go back and forth a few hundred times until everyone feels like they're getting something out of the deal, and then maybe it will pass.
The luckiest thing that ever happened to Bill Gates happened at the moment of his conception. His innate drive and intelligence practically guaranteed his success
I don't share your focus on genetics. What would happen if Gates's parents were poor? He might still have all the drive and intelligence, but he might not ever have gotten the chance to get an education or the opportunity to experiment with computers. Would he have had the time to start a computer company at all if he was spending his time working for McDonalds to help his parents make ends meet?
And then what about all the people that he met along the way? He didn't make Microsoft a success all by himself. Take away the contributions of the people he worked with, and it's not clear what would happen.
Microsoft was a success because Gates sold MS DOS to IBM. But DOS wasn't IBM's first choice or even second choice for operating systems. Gates happened to be in contact with IBM right about the time IBM was getting really desperate, and so he bought someone else's OS and licensed that to IBM. It could easily have gone another way.
It really isn't a question of whether Gates was going to be a multi-millionaire or multi-billionaire. There's no reason to think that he couldn't have been homeless if his luck had been different. There's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that poor people are genetically inferior.
It does not care who is smart or who isn't, or who works hard or who is lazy, it tends to allocate resources according to who provides the most value to the system.
That's sort of like saying, "the court system punishes the guilty and releases the innocent." Sure, ideally, theoretically, that's what's supposed to happen. but obviously that's not what always happens. In the same way that a well constructed court system will frequently punish the guilty and release the innocent, a well constructed economic system will tend to reward those who are providing value. But also like the court system, a poorly designed and regulated economic system will quickly fill up with corruption and abuse. Also similar to a court system, even in the best real-world system, mistakes will be made.
I wonder what might happen if the US gave its private telecom companies $200 billion to execute such a plan...
The executives of those telecoms would get really huge bonuses.
It's typical Apple maner to have a good idea, implement it fast and then leave the product and not develop it further.
That doesn't seem right to me at all. In fact, it seems so wrong that I'm trying to figure out whether you're trolling, being sarcastic, or just don't know what you're talking about.
They were working on the iPhone for something like 7 years before release. It's not a hastily put-together product, and they've continued to refine it and add features ever since it was released. Are you sure that you're not just annoyed that they haven't yet chosen to implement features that you want?
It doesn't work quite that easily, since the field of view for the camera would be different than for your eyes, meaning the image on the screen might depict the same stuff that you would see if your phone were transparent, but the image wouldn't line up well enough to give a transparent effect-- at least not without employing some kind of special tricks.
I wouldn't go as far as to say that there's no such thing as "innate superiority", but I think that everyone does a little ego-padding, and a lot of people do too much of it.
One way that it exhibits itself is that people who fail tend to overstate the degree to which their bad luck and circumstances determined their outcome, while people who succeed tend to overstate the degree to which they deserve credit for their own success.
The truth is, it's a mix. As innately superior as you may be, you still wouldn't succeed if you weren't put into a position to succeed. At the same time, some people will just blow great opportunities through bad habits and personal faults. And then sometimes someone blows a great opportunity through no fault of his own, but by bad luck, while someone else succeeds simply by being in the right place at the right time-- it happens.
I've seen several plans to pay parents and students to be involved. It doesn't sound unreasonable to me, but many people think it's against the spirit of education.
Yes, I've read about things like that. I personally wouldn't be too concerned about the spirit of education, but more about possible unintended consequences and possible conflicts of interest. Even so, that can't *make* the parents be involved.
Personally, I feel like teachers are paid enough for the job that they are *supposed* to do
Maybe, but I don't really know how you judge. In many places, teachers don't really make what I would call a "decent wage", and often they need to go into their own pockets to buy classroom materials. It may be enough money by some measures, but there are still teacher shortages and it's hardly enough to attract the best and brightest of our young people. Imagine you're fresh out of college and have a bunch of student loans. You have the option of going straight into the workforce, or you can go further into debt getting trained to be a teacher and then end up making 1/3 the pay. Not many people will choose the latter.
On top of that, the pay scale isn't generally determined by anything like "performance", but more like seniority or arbitrary union rules.
It seems to me that business or political success is *usually* more a result of some type animal cunning with a heapin' helpin' of ruthlessness thrown in for good measure.
Let's not forget luck and circumstances. I'm relatively successful (not "Bill Gates" successful, but well above the average income) and I would suppose than many Slashdotters are. It's very tempting to believe that you're there because of some kind of innate superiority, and so it's easy to underestimate the value of dumb luck. Sometimes the difference between a successful person and a failure is "what they choose to do with the opportunities in front of them," but sometimes it really is just "the opportunities in front of them."
But even ignoring that, I don't see any reason to believe that "business success" is any kind of reflection of "overall excellence". Perhaps "business excellence", but successful use of one ability doesn't mean anything about excellence in other fields. Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist, but I wouldn't want him as my surgeon.
Microsoft itself is great at leveraging success in one part of the computer/electronics market to push other related products, but perhaps not the most fantastic at building the actual products-- and those are just two things within the scope of "business".
Then, on top of that, I would side with you and point out that the skills to acquire success in business and finances are often (a) immense drive and ambition; (b) good connections and/or the ability to acquire good connections (c) animal cunning and political savvy; (d) ruthlessness and extreme moral flexibility. Having those qualities can be immensely useful, but they aren't necessarily the traits that you want exposed an masse in the population at large.
Anyone can claim something will fail and they have a 50/50 chance of being correct.
That's a real abuse of statistics. Are you saying that because there are two possibilities (i.e. "fail" or "succeed"), that there's a 50/50 chance of failure? It's like claiming that you have a 50/50 chance of winning the lottery because there are only two possibilities (i.e. "win" or "not win").
Not that I think Ayers is some terrific guy, but he could be a lunatic and still be right.
why isn't he the one with the multi-million dollar program trying to improve the school system?
Because unlike Bill Gates, Ayers's destructive and immoral activities have not made him the richest man on Earth?
That's all well and good, but what, are you going to *make* parents get involved? How are you going to do that?
Not that I disagree. Parental involvement is extremely important, and "throwing money at a problem" usually doesn't do much to solve that problem. On the other hand, I would contend that at least part of the problem is that schools in the US suck. They do, really.
It's not simply the parents' fault or the teachers' fault, but it's a whole culture-wide thing where we have horrendously inconsistent ideas about what "education" is. Is it for job-training, cultural conditioning, feel-goodery, enlightenment, or what? For many people, it's just another arbitrary thing that you have to do.
Hell, I was extremely interested in math and science and even philosophy when I was a teenager, and I was in a school system that was considered one of the best in the country. Still, I almost dropped out because schools-- at least the schools I went to-- position themselves against learning, against curiosity, and against discussion. It was all about authority and power, and someone who was genuinely interested in the topic rather than interested in the grades was a "problem" to them.
If they wanted to do that, they wouldn't be so stupid as to make it an extension that's clearly visible in the Firefox preferences.
After some recent events, I'm starting to suspect that Microsoft may indeed be stupid.
No one is expecting people using XP to suddenly go buy Vista and upgrade.
Yeah, someone is. That's how Microsoft expects to make money. If Microsoft was just going to make money from including Windows on new machines, then why would they bother making new releases like this? Why not just have perpetual service packs that fix things for free?
Now, They aren't necessarily expecting every consumer to rush out and upgrade. They're certainly hoping some will, and also hoping IT departments will either buy upgrades or at least pay for software assurance.
So there's still the question of, why should these people buy an upgrade?