That is good to hear. I'll just forget the other post, and chalk it up to a late night, and quick typing. I still say you are wrong though, as, everyone is and should be a teacher to the children around us. Anytime teaching is left only to professionals, even if there are good teachers around, kids are seriously missing out.
I don't think that pointing out how bad many teachers are is a strawman argument. The reason is that in my experience, about 15% of the teachers are good, about 20% are actively bad, and the rest are just punching the timecard. Of the 15% that are good, it is not that they have a vast amount of knowledge about kids that a reasonably aware non-teacher does not, but instead are very good because they care, they are willing to put in the effort (which most kids really do recognize), and because they have the patients and skill to pull off the job. This can include simple things like wearing deodorant so that you don't stink when you lean over to explain something to a kid. If we really did have these mythical good teachers that were really revolutionizing teaching, we would see kid getting out of school dramatically better educated than they did in the past. On the whole, we are just not seeing that. I would say that with the latest crop, we are actually seeing kids lose ground to their predecessors.
No doubt that staying politically correct is holding some good teachers back, as they are far out numbered by the one that cannot be defined as good, and thus would have serious problems if they rocked the boat. Of course, this is directly opposed to your advice to let professionals decide how teaching should be done, as it is the mediocre and bad teachers that are in control of modern education. The good teachers are just trying to teach kids while staying under the radar of the crappy ones. It's kind of like the guy that shows up on a Union job, and starts out performing everyone else 2 to 1. The other guys are going to have a chat with him to make sure that he doesn't make their job harder. When it comes to parents, the problem is just as much abdicating teaching to "professionals" as it is from teachers being politically correct. Of course, as I always state when discussing education, I'll say again, the unfortunate fact is that our public education system is broken on every level from the parents to President. Our education system has become a giant welfare system that is no longer (if it ever really was) about education the population, and has become a way to collect and disperse money, as well as a way to push political agendas.
All that being said, I do think the OLPC has some serious problems. To me the computer looks more like business seeding a new market while getting people who think they are giving to charity to foot the bill. The reason I believe this to be the case is that I believe the machine to be vastly over powered for the claimed purpose. This appears to be for the purpose of using AMD processors and running Linux, not because this is the amount of power necessary to run the applications necessary to achieve the claimed goal. Another reason is that they were so intent on making these system WiFi . The wifi is a significant addition to the cost, as well as adding moving parts that become a breaking point. For sharing data close by, sneaker net with SD cards would have been less prone to breaking, and served just as well. For Internet traffic, the whole project is likely to be a flop, as internet requires infrastructure, and that means they will need on going funding. We can't get reliable municipal Wifi here in the States. I see no reason to expect a village in Nigeria to do a lot better. Anyone that remembers the old C64 days knows just how good the sneaker net can be in distributing software and data. One thing that I'm not sure of is how the power is supplied. I know they dropped the hand crank, and they were talking about replacing it with a foot peddle. If there is no foot peddle, then this device is entirely
Hopefully, off-grid power storage will be part of what they invest in. If hydrogen generation could be done efficiently on site, batteries become a non-issue. We already know that hydrogen can be converted back to electricity when you need it. That's what a hydrogen fuel economy would use it for, right? As a storage medium for power generated in ways that actually produce more power than they use.
Re:Please tell me you put your foot in your mouth.
on
Nigerian Company Sues OLPC
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That is not what the parent said, but even if that is what was meant, it would be an incredibly stupid thing to say. Assuming that any professional should go unquestioned is a poor idea. It is particularly bad of an idea to not question teachers. Teaching is not rocket science, and the output of our public schools pretty much speaks for itself. Really, a lot of these public school kids can't read until they are 6 or 7, even after spending a year or two in preschool.
I have actually had a couple of these "profession teachers" try to tell me that you shouldn't even show kids actual letters until they are 3. Instead they are pushing this crap that has become popular amongst "educators" called Zoophonics. They seem to think pqbd are easier for a kid to learn than PQBD. And apparently punching, kicking, and animal fighting are good ideas for education.
It comes down to the fact that our public schools are in shambles, and no matter how bad the other parts are, teachers have to take take a very large part of the responsibility for that. So, question them.
I once saw a game crack that had a EULA that said, no one was ever allowed to run the software. I later got the opportunity to ask an EFF lawyer about that, and she said that the EULA would not protect you against copyright violation, and would likely just make any judge you faced annoyed. So, the EFF at least does not think that Sony would be in the right here. I know that the EFF are not judges, but since I actually asked an IP lawyer about this, I though I would relay what I was told.
Here in the US they don't do conduit at all. The reason they don't is because it is cheaper cheaper to just run the cables, and the only way you will get developers to spend an extra dime is if it mandated by the city/county. While it sounds like NZ has the problem half solved, allowing the company to own the conduit is only slightly better in practice than letting them bury their cables directly.
(By the way, when we are saying conduit, we are not talking about a protective sheathing, but are talking about a large tube that new cable can be pulled through.)
You had me right up until you said "Leave teaching to teaching professionals." That has to be one of the stupidest things I have heard in a very long time. Please, please, please tell me that you typed that without really thinking it through. Really, we all put our foot in our mouths now and then, so please tell me that you just had a momentary lapse of judgment in the fury of a flame war, and you don't really believe that teaching should only be done by teaching professionals.
Unfortunately, fiber would be just as bad of a long term decision. How about conduit. If instead of just allowing builders to lay wire, they should run conduit under the roads, and right up to the house, and that the conduit is owned by the city/county. The city/county could then rent the last mile to anyone that wants to offer data services. We could actually have competition in the telecom and cable tv industry. If this were done in new construction or during times when major reconstruction is already in progress, the cost would be dramatically less than than trying to do this in established neighborhoods. I would bet that once people started seeing the benefits, you would see demand for retrofitting older neighborhoods with conduit. This would also turn the last mile into an on going revenue source for the cities/counties.
The idea that Israel has different definitions of Evil can be debated, but the excuse that it wasn't the CEO, but some middle manager that did the deed is simply not an acceptable excuse. Businesses use that excuse all the time, and it is utter bullshit. If you are a business, you are responsible for the actions that your employees take through the authority that you give them. We know that it is a common practice for businesses to tell "middle managers" that they just need to get something done, knowing exactly how they will do it, but playing the plausible deniabilty card.
That is something that most people don't get. It does not have to be bashing of a culture to discuss the attributes that a culture had 500 years ago, that don't match with the ones we have today.
The funny part is that most of the people that would consider it bashing, don't realize that in another 500 years, morals will likely change again, and things that are just taken for granted today, will be considered horrific at that time. We may find the idea that people were allowed to breed out of control even though we have the technology to prevent it. We may find that the idea of people having to trade their time just to get enough to eat to be horrific. Or, we may find that, much like the Indians trading land for beads, we will find it horrific that people could sell and hoard ideas for money. Of course, we might also find it horrific that ANY ideas could be used without someone getting paid for them.
I have that debate concerning the current crop of UIs on a somewhat regular basis. Someone spouts of about how we have had the desktop metaphor for 30 years, and it is time to replace it. My response is always that when my son was 1 year old, I set up an Ubuntu machine, and spend about 10 minutes showing him the gCompris 'game' that shows a picture when you run the mouse over the blocks, then shows pictures when you click on the blocks. He played with that for a few days, and I spent about another 10 minutes showing him how to turn on the computer, and load gCompris. After that, I just let him go. Within a week or two, he was perfectly competent at using the computer. He would load applications that I never showed him, and he had no problems getting to what he wanted. I figure that if a one year old child can become competent on a computer with less than a half an hours worth of instruction, the interface is pretty damn good!
Or, you are married. I know, queue the jokes about Slashdot readers not having wives.
Really, one of the biggest problems with Netflix ever getting good recommendations is that they are not trying to make recommendations for individuals. They are making recommendations for a group of people who's tastes my not cross over at all. You joke in your post about what movies get a 10 (well, 5 anyways), but would it seem unreasonable that a family of 4 could come up with those very ratings?
The number of hours you claim teachers spend working is absolute BS. A teacher in their first couple of years might spend a good deal of time working out lessons, because they don't know what they are doing, but if after the first year or two, a teacher is spending hours a day making lesson plans, then they are simply incompetent and should not be allow to teach. Education simply is not changing that fast. After you have a system that works, future years should be little more than tweaks to what you have already been doing. While I will give you that classrooms with compositions do require time for grading, most classes taught simply do not. Most grading is done by 'teachers aids'. These are students who get credit for grading other students papers. Even when they are not, teachers are give a couple of periods a day to do things like grading.
So, two and a half out of the three are for the teacher? I'll cry you a river. Really, considering the massive exaggeration you put into other areas, I have to doubt that they eve spend two weeks in meetings and continuing education. Of course this if further highlight by the fact that you included summer school. That is one of the classic lies. Summer school is a second job. For you to include that is no different than talking about a 9-5 factory worker getting a second job as a security guard, and claiming being a 9-5 factory working is a 16 hour a day job.
So, basically, your exaggerations are big enough to just be lies.
I followed your links, and they tell the same lies that you repeated here. One even starts out with a personal attack on the researchers they disagree with. Another one basis it's comparison on what a Manhattan lawyer makes.
As for your description of how crappy being a teacher is, well, lots of jobs are crappy. Lots of people have to work for management that is clueless. This isn't the first time you have read slashdot is it? If you really think that kids are "pukes", then you would be an idiot for going into that field in the first place.
Look, public schools are broken. We all know that. Paying teachers outrageous salaries is not going to fix that. The problem is that the public school system is broken at every level. It starts with the parents, it includes the teachers, faculty, school boards, and moves through state government, and ultimatly includes the President of the United states, when he refers to the smart kids as "The Nerd Patrol".
Sure, public education was a good idea, and in theory could be fixed, but it won't. The problem is that it has become a big money grab. Very few people are willing to stand up and say. Enough money is being spent on education. The average per student spending on education is $6000 a year. Multiply that by the 30 students you referenced earlier, and you have 180000 per classroom. That's not counting the money that comes in from other areas, such as teachers buying supplies, parents buying supplies, and fund raisers. Where is the money going?
So, I don't think that teachers are the sole problem with schools, but the low wages are simply lies that help add to it.
Your comments are no better than a Godwin argument. You are actually trying to say that if the researchers don't say that Chernobyl is infinitely bad, then they must be saying it was perfectly OK? And, working in the lending industry, my wife has seen W-2 from literally thousands of teachers. They make pretty good money for a part time job.
There is no "Cracked" version of Domino and Notes. The software has no copy protection in it.
I was actually surprised at how cheap it was to license. For years, I always did my contract development using a license supplied by clients. Recently, I decided that it wasn't worth the effort of jumping through the IT hoops to get the most recent versions for testing, so I went ahead and licensed it for myself. $137 per user with up to 4 servers included. I was in shock. I actually called 2 different times to make sure the first person and the website were not misunderstanding. Up until that time, I had never considered recommending it to small businesses.
The problem is that while tasers would be a good replacement for shooting someone, that is not how they are being used. Instead, they are being used when someone doesn't follow directions. The Kerry speech that we all saw the video of was a good example. I doubt that anyone could have argued that the police would have been justified for shooting the guy that was tasered. The very fact that he was tasered in a situation that clearly was not dangerous enough to warrant shooting him, shows that the devices are being used to torture.
"The BBC is giving preferential treatment to those who have bought a particular American company's operating system"
I have often pondered the idea that Americans might do the world some good by being even bigger jack asses than usual. If the rest of the world abandoned MS, they would not survive here in the states either. That being the case, I how long it would take for, say the British government, to abandon Windows if every time they turned around, Americans were calling them their "Bitch". Consistently, making disparaging remarks that pointed out that they are just vassals to the US, as they cannot even run their own government without MS to prop them up. Do you think that other governments could be shamed into dropping MS?
I'm not sure you get to call yourself a nerd. I'm thinking that you are just so isolated that in comparison to the few other people you've met, you seem like the one that understands computers. The reason I say this, is that at least half of the people I run into know what Linux is, and most of the other half don't know the difference between Word and Windows, so they wouldn't know what it is, even if it was down right common in the home. That, and the "apart from, occasionally, Mac OS X" line. Really, you have to be pretty far removed from society to not know about Mac.
My experiences have been exactly the opposite of yours. I considered 2007 the year of Linux when my wife was hosting a play date for stay at home Moms and their children, I came out of my office for some coffee, and there are 4 stay at home housewives discussing who is running Linux, who is running Windows, and if it was a good idea for the ones running Windows to switch to Linux. That was the defining moment for me to say that Linux is officially mainstream.
As for headaches trying to get simple hardware working, I can only relate the story that I have told many times before... My son did his first, unassisted install of Ubuntu just prior to his second birthday. The only thing I gave him was the CD, a computer, and made sure the hard drive was formatted before he started. As, always, I will accept that he is a genetic mutant that makes his intellect vastly superior to normal humans, if you insist on it, but even if he was as smart as a 6 year old when he was only 1, that still means that Linux is extremely easy to install and use. Of course if it turns out that I am an overly optimistic dad with a child that is only average, then we need to consider whether we can safely have those that are unable to install Ubuntu, out in public without a handler.
Hey, I think that copyright would be just fine if it was enforced across the board. As long as Disney gets sued into oblivion for "stealing" The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and all of the other "Intellectual Property" that they "Stole". I doubt that our society would survive if copyright were to be evenly enforced, but it would stop copyright supporters from having to construct elaborate explanations as to why it is OK for some entities to use other peoples ideas without compensation, but not for other entities to do the same.
Wrong again. You have not lost authority due to the spelling mistakes. You lost authority because of the content of your post. The spelling mistakes simply prove that your content is incorrect. I have not judged you to be "either a hypocrite or failed idealist simply based on an error in punctuation and capitalization". I made that judgment based on the content of your post, and the assumption that you are in fact a human. Your stance that it is realistic for a human to never making a spelling/grammar/punctuation error is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A quick search, and there was evidence that your content was incorrect. So, no, your point was not made. Your content was wrong.
You are now faced with an opportunity. You can accept that you were wrong in your judgment, and never complain about minor spelling, typo, or grammar mistakes again. This way you will no longer be wrong going forward. Or, you can continue to be unrealistic in your expectations. This choice would be dishonest, as I am sure you would not judge yourself to be uneducated. My suggestion is to accept that humans sometimes make mistakes. Sometimes that mistake is in their capitalization of the word 'English', sometimes it is by adding an extra 'o' to the word 'lose', and sometimes it is in their expectations that humans should never make mistakes in their casual writing.
If I was a voting machine vendor, and I wanted to hide a hack, er... miss an accidental bug, in the original hardware, I would just have a ground point that enabled the alternate code. Then the only modification needed would be to leave off an insulating washer. Far less than the modifications done to this machine.
"Have you considered the possibility that someone has broken into the stock buying site and now would like to get into your banking site? Maybe because, I don't know, they think you might have *more* money in your bank account that the stock buying site doesn't have access to and they'd like that money too?"
Actually no. I would venture a guess that most people who have brokerage accounts, have vastly more money in their stock accounts than what they keep in their checking and savings accounts. Really, if you have taken control of Scottrade, you don't really need to worry about cracking B of A also. You already have billions of dollars at your fingertips.
It is amazing how many people I know that I would generally think are intelligent, who for some reason cannot understand what you just said. Hell, Visa even advertises on TV how easy it is to commit fraud with a "Check Card".
Before anyone tries to trot out the tired old claim of 'Godwin', just realize that the parent here is not comparing an unrelated action to the Nazis. Sometimes Nazis are an apt comparison.
While I doubt that the parent and I would agree where the line is, he is absolutely correct in pointing out that the question is not right or wrong, but where we draw the line.
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That is good to hear. I'll just forget the other post, and chalk it up to a late night, and quick typing. I still say you are wrong though, as, everyone is and should be a teacher to the children around us. Anytime teaching is left only to professionals, even if there are good teachers around, kids are seriously missing out.
I don't think that pointing out how bad many teachers are is a strawman argument. The reason is that in my experience, about 15% of the teachers are good, about 20% are actively bad, and the rest are just punching the timecard. Of the 15% that are good, it is not that they have a vast amount of knowledge about kids that a reasonably aware non-teacher does not, but instead are very good because they care, they are willing to put in the effort (which most kids really do recognize), and because they have the patients and skill to pull off the job. This can include simple things like wearing deodorant so that you don't stink when you lean over to explain something to a kid. If we really did have these mythical good teachers that were really revolutionizing teaching, we would see kid getting out of school dramatically better educated than they did in the past. On the whole, we are just not seeing that. I would say that with the latest crop, we are actually seeing kids lose ground to their predecessors.
No doubt that staying politically correct is holding some good teachers back, as they are far out numbered by the one that cannot be defined as good, and thus would have serious problems if they rocked the boat. Of course, this is directly opposed to your advice to let professionals decide how teaching should be done, as it is the mediocre and bad teachers that are in control of modern education. The good teachers are just trying to teach kids while staying under the radar of the crappy ones. It's kind of like the guy that shows up on a Union job, and starts out performing everyone else 2 to 1. The other guys are going to have a chat with him to make sure that he doesn't make their job harder. When it comes to parents, the problem is just as much abdicating teaching to "professionals" as it is from teachers being politically correct. Of course, as I always state when discussing education, I'll say again, the unfortunate fact is that our public education system is broken on every level from the parents to President. Our education system has become a giant welfare system that is no longer (if it ever really was) about education the population, and has become a way to collect and disperse money, as well as a way to push political agendas.
All that being said, I do think the OLPC has some serious problems. To me the computer looks more like business seeding a new market while getting people who think they are giving to charity to foot the bill. The reason I believe this to be the case is that I believe the machine to be vastly over powered for the claimed purpose. This appears to be for the purpose of using AMD processors and running Linux, not because this is the amount of power necessary to run the applications necessary to achieve the claimed goal. Another reason is that they were so intent on making these system WiFi . The wifi is a significant addition to the cost, as well as adding moving parts that become a breaking point. For sharing data close by, sneaker net with SD cards would have been less prone to breaking, and served just as well. For Internet traffic, the whole project is likely to be a flop, as internet requires infrastructure, and that means they will need on going funding. We can't get reliable municipal Wifi here in the States. I see no reason to expect a village in Nigeria to do a lot better. Anyone that remembers the old C64 days knows just how good the sneaker net can be in distributing software and data. One thing that I'm not sure of is how the power is supplied. I know they dropped the hand crank, and they were talking about replacing it with a foot peddle. If there is no foot peddle, then this device is entirely
Hopefully, off-grid power storage will be part of what they invest in. If hydrogen generation could be done efficiently on site, batteries become a non-issue. We already know that hydrogen can be converted back to electricity when you need it. That's what a hydrogen fuel economy would use it for, right? As a storage medium for power generated in ways that actually produce more power than they use.
That is not what the parent said, but even if that is what was meant, it would be an incredibly stupid thing to say. Assuming that any professional should go unquestioned is a poor idea. It is particularly bad of an idea to not question teachers. Teaching is not rocket science, and the output of our public schools pretty much speaks for itself. Really, a lot of these public school kids can't read until they are 6 or 7, even after spending a year or two in preschool.
I have actually had a couple of these "profession teachers" try to tell me that you shouldn't even show kids actual letters until they are 3. Instead they are pushing this crap that has become popular amongst "educators" called Zoophonics. They seem to think pqbd are easier for a kid to learn than PQBD. And apparently punching, kicking, and animal fighting are good ideas for education.
It comes down to the fact that our public schools are in shambles, and no matter how bad the other parts are, teachers have to take take a very large part of the responsibility for that. So, question them.
I once saw a game crack that had a EULA that said, no one was ever allowed to run the software. I later got the opportunity to ask an EFF lawyer about that, and she said that the EULA would not protect you against copyright violation, and would likely just make any judge you faced annoyed. So, the EFF at least does not think that Sony would be in the right here. I know that the EFF are not judges, but since I actually asked an IP lawyer about this, I though I would relay what I was told.
Here in the US they don't do conduit at all. The reason they don't is because it is cheaper cheaper to just run the cables, and the only way you will get developers to spend an extra dime is if it mandated by the city/county. While it sounds like NZ has the problem half solved, allowing the company to own the conduit is only slightly better in practice than letting them bury their cables directly. (By the way, when we are saying conduit, we are not talking about a protective sheathing, but are talking about a large tube that new cable can be pulled through.)
You had me right up until you said "Leave teaching to teaching professionals." That has to be one of the stupidest things I have heard in a very long time. Please, please, please tell me that you typed that without really thinking it through. Really, we all put our foot in our mouths now and then, so please tell me that you just had a momentary lapse of judgment in the fury of a flame war, and you don't really believe that teaching should only be done by teaching professionals.
Unfortunately, fiber would be just as bad of a long term decision. How about conduit. If instead of just allowing builders to lay wire, they should run conduit under the roads, and right up to the house, and that the conduit is owned by the city/county. The city/county could then rent the last mile to anyone that wants to offer data services. We could actually have competition in the telecom and cable tv industry. If this were done in new construction or during times when major reconstruction is already in progress, the cost would be dramatically less than than trying to do this in established neighborhoods. I would bet that once people started seeing the benefits, you would see demand for retrofitting older neighborhoods with conduit. This would also turn the last mile into an on going revenue source for the cities/counties.
The idea that Israel has different definitions of Evil can be debated, but the excuse that it wasn't the CEO, but some middle manager that did the deed is simply not an acceptable excuse. Businesses use that excuse all the time, and it is utter bullshit. If you are a business, you are responsible for the actions that your employees take through the authority that you give them. We know that it is a common practice for businesses to tell "middle managers" that they just need to get something done, knowing exactly how they will do it, but playing the plausible deniabilty card.
You would be what the father of an 11 year old girl will put up with her watching... Yes, even Glitter.
That is something that most people don't get. It does not have to be bashing of a culture to discuss the attributes that a culture had 500 years ago, that don't match with the ones we have today.
The funny part is that most of the people that would consider it bashing, don't realize that in another 500 years, morals will likely change again, and things that are just taken for granted today, will be considered horrific at that time. We may find the idea that people were allowed to breed out of control even though we have the technology to prevent it. We may find that the idea of people having to trade their time just to get enough to eat to be horrific. Or, we may find that, much like the Indians trading land for beads, we will find it horrific that people could sell and hoard ideas for money. Of course, we might also find it horrific that ANY ideas could be used without someone getting paid for them.
I have that debate concerning the current crop of UIs on a somewhat regular basis. Someone spouts of about how we have had the desktop metaphor for 30 years, and it is time to replace it. My response is always that when my son was 1 year old, I set up an Ubuntu machine, and spend about 10 minutes showing him the gCompris 'game' that shows a picture when you run the mouse over the blocks, then shows pictures when you click on the blocks. He played with that for a few days, and I spent about another 10 minutes showing him how to turn on the computer, and load gCompris. After that, I just let him go. Within a week or two, he was perfectly competent at using the computer. He would load applications that I never showed him, and he had no problems getting to what he wanted. I figure that if a one year old child can become competent on a computer with less than a half an hours worth of instruction, the interface is pretty damn good!
Or, you are married. I know, queue the jokes about Slashdot readers not having wives.
Really, one of the biggest problems with Netflix ever getting good recommendations is that they are not trying to make recommendations for individuals. They are making recommendations for a group of people who's tastes my not cross over at all. You joke in your post about what movies get a 10 (well, 5 anyways), but would it seem unreasonable that a family of 4 could come up with those very ratings?
The number of hours you claim teachers spend working is absolute BS. A teacher in their first couple of years might spend a good deal of time working out lessons, because they don't know what they are doing, but if after the first year or two, a teacher is spending hours a day making lesson plans, then they are simply incompetent and should not be allow to teach. Education simply is not changing that fast. After you have a system that works, future years should be little more than tweaks to what you have already been doing. While I will give you that classrooms with compositions do require time for grading, most classes taught simply do not. Most grading is done by 'teachers aids'. These are students who get credit for grading other students papers. Even when they are not, teachers are give a couple of periods a day to do things like grading.
So, two and a half out of the three are for the teacher? I'll cry you a river. Really, considering the massive exaggeration you put into other areas, I have to doubt that they eve spend two weeks in meetings and continuing education. Of course this if further highlight by the fact that you included summer school. That is one of the classic lies. Summer school is a second job. For you to include that is no different than talking about a 9-5 factory worker getting a second job as a security guard, and claiming being a 9-5 factory working is a 16 hour a day job.
So, basically, your exaggerations are big enough to just be lies.
I followed your links, and they tell the same lies that you repeated here. One even starts out with a personal attack on the researchers they disagree with. Another one basis it's comparison on what a Manhattan lawyer makes.
As for your description of how crappy being a teacher is, well, lots of jobs are crappy. Lots of people have to work for management that is clueless. This isn't the first time you have read slashdot is it? If you really think that kids are "pukes", then you would be an idiot for going into that field in the first place.
Look, public schools are broken. We all know that. Paying teachers outrageous salaries is not going to fix that. The problem is that the public school system is broken at every level. It starts with the parents, it includes the teachers, faculty, school boards, and moves through state government, and ultimatly includes the President of the United states, when he refers to the smart kids as "The Nerd Patrol".
Sure, public education was a good idea, and in theory could be fixed, but it won't. The problem is that it has become a big money grab. Very few people are willing to stand up and say. Enough money is being spent on education. The average per student spending on education is $6000 a year. Multiply that by the 30 students you referenced earlier, and you have 180000 per classroom. That's not counting the money that comes in from other areas, such as teachers buying supplies, parents buying supplies, and fund raisers. Where is the money going?
So, I don't think that teachers are the sole problem with schools, but the low wages are simply lies that help add to it.
Your comments are no better than a Godwin argument. You are actually trying to say that if the researchers don't say that Chernobyl is infinitely bad, then they must be saying it was perfectly OK? And, working in the lending industry, my wife has seen W-2 from literally thousands of teachers. They make pretty good money for a part time job.
There is no "Cracked" version of Domino and Notes. The software has no copy protection in it.
I was actually surprised at how cheap it was to license. For years, I always did my contract development using a license supplied by clients. Recently, I decided that it wasn't worth the effort of jumping through the IT hoops to get the most recent versions for testing, so I went ahead and licensed it for myself. $137 per user with up to 4 servers included. I was in shock. I actually called 2 different times to make sure the first person and the website were not misunderstanding. Up until that time, I had never considered recommending it to small businesses.
The problem is that while tasers would be a good replacement for shooting someone, that is not how they are being used. Instead, they are being used when someone doesn't follow directions. The Kerry speech that we all saw the video of was a good example. I doubt that anyone could have argued that the police would have been justified for shooting the guy that was tasered. The very fact that he was tasered in a situation that clearly was not dangerous enough to warrant shooting him, shows that the devices are being used to torture.
"The BBC is giving preferential treatment to those who have bought a particular American company's operating system"
I have often pondered the idea that Americans might do the world some good by being even bigger jack asses than usual. If the rest of the world abandoned MS, they would not survive here in the states either. That being the case, I how long it would take for, say the British government, to abandon Windows if every time they turned around, Americans were calling them their "Bitch". Consistently, making disparaging remarks that pointed out that they are just vassals to the US, as they cannot even run their own government without MS to prop them up. Do you think that other governments could be shamed into dropping MS?
I'm not sure you get to call yourself a nerd. I'm thinking that you are just so isolated that in comparison to the few other people you've met, you seem like the one that understands computers. The reason I say this, is that at least half of the people I run into know what Linux is, and most of the other half don't know the difference between Word and Windows, so they wouldn't know what it is, even if it was down right common in the home. That, and the "apart from, occasionally, Mac OS X" line. Really, you have to be pretty far removed from society to not know about Mac.
My experiences have been exactly the opposite of yours. I considered 2007 the year of Linux when my wife was hosting a play date for stay at home Moms and their children, I came out of my office for some coffee, and there are 4 stay at home housewives discussing who is running Linux, who is running Windows, and if it was a good idea for the ones running Windows to switch to Linux. That was the defining moment for me to say that Linux is officially mainstream.
As for headaches trying to get simple hardware working, I can only relate the story that I have told many times before... My son did his first, unassisted install of Ubuntu just prior to his second birthday. The only thing I gave him was the CD, a computer, and made sure the hard drive was formatted before he started. As, always, I will accept that he is a genetic mutant that makes his intellect vastly superior to normal humans, if you insist on it, but even if he was as smart as a 6 year old when he was only 1, that still means that Linux is extremely easy to install and use. Of course if it turns out that I am an overly optimistic dad with a child that is only average, then we need to consider whether we can safely have those that are unable to install Ubuntu, out in public without a handler.
I'm thinking "OS".
Hey, I think that copyright would be just fine if it was enforced across the board. As long as Disney gets sued into oblivion for "stealing" The Little Mermaid, Cinderella, and all of the other "Intellectual Property" that they "Stole". I doubt that our society would survive if copyright were to be evenly enforced, but it would stop copyright supporters from having to construct elaborate explanations as to why it is OK for some entities to use other peoples ideas without compensation, but not for other entities to do the same.
Wrong again. You have not lost authority due to the spelling mistakes. You lost authority because of the content of your post. The spelling mistakes simply prove that your content is incorrect. I have not judged you to be "either a hypocrite or failed idealist simply based on an error in punctuation and capitalization". I made that judgment based on the content of your post, and the assumption that you are in fact a human. Your stance that it is realistic for a human to never making a spelling/grammar/punctuation error is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A quick search, and there was evidence that your content was incorrect. So, no, your point was not made. Your content was wrong.
You are now faced with an opportunity. You can accept that you were wrong in your judgment, and never complain about minor spelling, typo, or grammar mistakes again. This way you will no longer be wrong going forward. Or, you can continue to be unrealistic in your expectations. This choice would be dishonest, as I am sure you would not judge yourself to be uneducated. My suggestion is to accept that humans sometimes make mistakes. Sometimes that mistake is in their capitalization of the word 'English', sometimes it is by adding an extra 'o' to the word 'lose', and sometimes it is in their expectations that humans should never make mistakes in their casual writing.
If I was a voting machine vendor, and I wanted to hide a hack, er... miss an accidental bug, in the original hardware, I would just have a ground point that enabled the alternate code. Then the only modification needed would be to leave off an insulating washer. Far less than the modifications done to this machine.
"Have you considered the possibility that someone has broken into the stock buying site and now would like to get into your banking site? Maybe because, I don't know, they think you might have *more* money in your bank account that the stock buying site doesn't have access to and they'd like that money too?"
Actually no. I would venture a guess that most people who have brokerage accounts, have vastly more money in their stock accounts than what they keep in their checking and savings accounts. Really, if you have taken control of Scottrade, you don't really need to worry about cracking B of A also. You already have billions of dollars at your fingertips.
It is amazing how many people I know that I would generally think are intelligent, who for some reason cannot understand what you just said. Hell, Visa even advertises on TV how easy it is to commit fraud with a "Check Card".
Before anyone tries to trot out the tired old claim of 'Godwin', just realize that the parent here is not comparing an unrelated action to the Nazis. Sometimes Nazis are an apt comparison.
While I doubt that the parent and I would agree where the line is, he is absolutely correct in pointing out that the question is not right or wrong, but where we draw the line.