I don't see how this would extend the protection on the drug itself. If my doctor presents me with the choice of $1500 for a cycle of name brand medicine with chips embedded or $50 for generic that will cure the disease but won't let me monitor how often I take the pill with my cell phone, the choice becomes pretty obvious.
The instruments will all be a single steady tone. The singers will be making a constant stream of changing random notes to hide the fact that they can neither hit a specific note nor carry whatever note they hit.
I don't know why Folk Metal seems odd to people. Tolkien subjects and metal have had a strong association for as long as anyone has called music metal. To get the feel, don't think Amish, think medieval Europe. Don't think electric banjo, think electric mandolin.
I'm not suggesting it will happen, but the way that Steam COULD effect Linux is if they made the terms desirable for distribution, captured enough of the app market share that Linux was unusable without it, and then changed the terms.
BSD is free as in "I am not free if I am not free to own a slave". GPL is free as in "I am not free if I am not free to bang your wife". BSD is about the individual being able to do what he wants with what he has in his possession. The GPL is about everyone getting to do the same stuff with what anyone has.
Really, the problem is that 100% freedom for more than one person at a time is a paradox.
BSD uses the "I am not truly free if I am not free to own a slave" argument of freedom while the GPL folks use the "I am not truly free if I am not free to bang your wife" argument of freedom. They are even right. The problem is that everyone cannot be truly 100% free at the same time. It just can't be done. So, one has to decide what is more important to them, societal freedom (everyone gets equal access) or personal freedom (I get to do what I want). The best version of freedom is no always clear and it is probably best that we don't have to pick one and apply it universally.
I am with you, and did the same. Part of the problem is that the word 'Algebra' gets redefined. Our society has decided that 'algebra is hard'. Since 1 + 1 = X is algebra, and algebra is hard, they came up with ways to make 1 + 1 = X NOT algebra. They will do things like 1 + 1 = _ , 1 + 1 = [] or 1 + 1 = .
It is mind boggling how much people get dumbed down. If your child is doing algebra at 4, you should consider homeschooling. It isn't 1920's rural Wyoming these days. (I apologize if you live in Wyoming) The 'socialization' boogie man is a myth. A room of 30 kids that are years behind her will only drag her down. At 8 years old my son would be going into the 3rd grade in public school. Being home schooled, he is somewhere in between he is ahead of his friends entering the fifth grade of public school and behind his friends entering the 6th grade.
The schools are only getting about 7 years accomplished in those 13 years, so the colleges had to take up the slack. Unfortunately, they are moving in the same direction, and seeing people leave college with a 7th grade education is now common.
Even sexual education isn't used to it's fullest. When my wife was pregnant, we were contently being corrected by people that her pregnancy would be 10 months when we would say 9. The best we could come up with was that enough people had read 40 weeks, and converted that into 10 months. I suppose that is bad math as well...
The professors' bias might not decide what math is good or bad, but it does tend to screw small children. I can't count the number of times I have heard a teacher defend telling kids a fable about a tiny alligator eating big fish to describe greater than instead of just pointing out that it is a picture of what it means. (the small side is small and the large side is large) Another example is that we teach things out of order. Instead of getting variables out of the way right off the bat so that = always means =, we swap around a half dozen different shapes and symbols in a vain attempt to avoid them. Sometimes they are underlines. Sometimes they are empty squares or rectangles. Other times they are just a blank space on the page.
I don't know about the person you are replying to, but I can tell you that I don't need to hire a plumber. Ironically, a plumber is one of the few tradesmen I do hire. The reason I hire him isn't because the one time I needed work done while I was out of town, he did the unusual act of doing a cleaner job than I did. My work was just as functional, but his was faster and cleaner. The work wasn't difficult. It didn't require any intelligence. My plumber would happily say the same. He was completely aware of and confident with the fact that his value was not in some arcane knowledge, or in some high degree of book learning. His value was in the fact that he had a strong work ethic, took pride in his work, and had done it long enough that he could do it with a profit at a time and materials cost that was less than his customers could do themselves.
Reading anything more advanced than a children's book is no more require to bring value than swinging anything heavier than a mouse is.
One of the problems there is that math is not a single point. No one knows all math, and it is unlikely that anyone ever will. So, as mere mortals we must accept that "knowing math" is a point on a very long line. Where we put that point will be is debatable. Once you acknowledge that no one will ever know all math, you are just deciding how much math is enough. Students don't need this or that isn't evil. It is a reality of living in our universe. It is not denying them a part of their humanity. It is understanding that they are human.
The question is and must be, how much math do people need to function, how much math can a particular individual actually learn, and at what point does the payoff exceed the price for each individual?
There is also the unfortunate trend of calling stupid people 'creative'. To be clear, I'm not saying that creative people are stupid. Lumping all of the stupid people into the 'creative' category is really crewing the truly creative. The 6 year old that dreams up a pig that says 'Moo' is creative. The 6 year old that thinks pigs say 'Moo' is dumb. The two are not the same.
To be fair, we often do the same thing with smart vs. trained. A smart child can tell you that 3 * 3 = 9 because they know that 3 * 3 is the same as 3 + 3 + 3 which is the same as 1 +1 +1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 9. A trained child tells you that 3 * 3 = 9 because that is what the times table chart they were told to memorize says.
For the most part, yes, we could eliminate most subjects, and most people would be just as well off as they are today. Most people leave high school and a good many of them leave college with no better than what should be expected of a 7th grader. It is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that most people don't need algebra because most people don't know algebra, and they do just fine. The same applies to history, language, and every other subject taught after the 7th grade. Is it great for those that want to learn more, but it isn't necessary for a good life.
It seems the right answer to the wrong question has been presented though. It is higher education that is the failing. We run kids through 13 years of primary "education", and then push them into 4 or more years of "education", and what we end up with is a person with a 7 year education. Higher "education" is completely worthless if you haven't received a primary education that ends where the higher "education" is supposed to start.
Why? Most patents are at least initially on "fake" stuff. I have never heard any word that a product had to actually be made and working for it to count in the patent process. Plus, we are talking about "Design" patents. Those "Designs" actually did exists. The fact that the designed were not coupled with working phones or PDAs doesn't change the fact that the designs existed.
That is how Apple fanboys describe things. If Apple has it and someone else doesn't, it is the key defining feature that makes it the greatest "innovation" ever, and completely original. If someone else has it and Apple doesn't, it is a minor, inconsequential part that could hardly be called a feature. In this thread, it is suggested that Samsung copied Apple, even though iPhone doesn't do widgets. Then in another post it is suggested that Apple didn't copy Xerox because Xerox didn't have overlapping windows.
Nobody deals with the kids they were in school with. They don't deal with them as specific individuals. They don't deal with them as abstractions. A group of 8 year olds is not the same as a group of adults that range in age form 18 to 60. There is simply no correlation other than the very weak argument that you will sometimes have to deal with people you don't like, and since homeschooled kids learn those same situations that doesn't apply. Of course, homeschooled kids learn about dealing with people that they don't like in a more realistic way than public school kids. As an adult, you decide every day if dealing with the people is worth the benefit of being where you are. You don't HAVE to be at work with those people. If the environment is bad enough, you can leave. If other individuals are abusive enough, they will get fired. Kids in a public school classroom do not learn that. They learn that if they don't stay in a bad environment then cops will come and arrest them. They learn that they have no choice in where they will spend their time.
You seem to be stuck on the idea that babysitters act as teachers. I never said that, and it is not the way things would typically work. I said, that if you are a single parent and want to home school, you use a baby sitter for kids that can't be left alone, for the purpose of babysitting. You do your schooling when you get home from work. And, the abilities of "a professional teacher who has years of experience" is vastly over rated. We SHOULD be able to expect professional teachers to be vastly better than your average Joe. The fact that they are not better, and frequently a lot worse is one of my big problems with our public school system. Our public school system is to education what the Geek Squad is to the computer industry. Having years of "professional experience" is not evidence of skill in the trade. There is no excuse for my child to be blazing through 5th grade curriculum at 8 year of age when 10 year olds are just getting started on it. Even if both my son and I were genetic freaks giving us vastly superior intellectual capabilities compared to normal humans, there is no excuse for "professional teachers with years of experience" to fail at keeping up.
You also seem to be confused about exposure to other ideas. Why would you think homeschooled kids do not join clubs and are not exposed to other ideas? Perhaps you just made it up? Perhaps you saw a tv show that used it as a plot device? I can tell you that it isn't the homeschooled kids that are sheltered from other ideas. It is the public schooled kids. The public schools are homogenous places. The kids are all pulled from the same communities, so the belief that they are a diverse set of people is a fiction. Then when they get the kids in the public school, there is a massive and open push to turn each school into a tribe. To give up individuality and be a cog in the machine. Even within the school, there are sub-tribes that kids are heavily discouraged from crossing between.
I don't know if you have school aged kids of your own, if you do, consider how geographically wide their friend pool is. For most public school kids, it tends to be in the range of a couple of miles. For home schooled kids having friends all over the state is common. Even all over the country. Our nation is a very diverse place, and limiting their friends to a couple of miles around their home is not exposing them to other ideas.
The idea of public school isn't really the problem. The implementation is.
Yes. I think it is safe to assume that neither of us are going to convince the other here on slashdot.
While it might be possible for America to reverse it's trend towards urbanization, you would be looking a incident that dwarfs the Great Irish Potato Famine, and that would be just for New York. Not counting the rest of the country.
I also have no problem with public schooling (In theory). It is the way that it is practiced that I have some problems with, and I wouldn't call for it to be shut down even in it's current incarnation. I think the public schools themselves are just as much of a money/power grab as charter schools.
If you want to see some more money grab. Look at the homeschool "Umbrella" programs. This is where the public schools pay homeschoolers a couple of hundred dollars so that they can put the kids names on their enrollment forms and collect money for having the kid "enrolled" at their school. Look also at what some schools are doing now where they are calling kids that miss too many days "homeschooled" under the "umbrella" program and collecting money for them being in the classroom.
Trivia that most people don't know about homeschooling: In most states (all?) every child needs to be enrolled in a public or private school. Thus, "homeschooling" isn't "not enrolled in school" as most people believe. Here in CA, and I believe it is the same nation wide, to "homeschool" you must either be enrolled in a tradition public/private school and given permission to hold classes in your home (e.g. the umbrella programs). Or you open a private school of your own that just happens to be in your home. That is what I did. My son attends an extremely exclusive private school in California. It is so exclusive that it has a student population of 1, and a teacher to student ration of 2:1.
I would suspect you are in denial. I have watched people get bitten. Bitten for real, and a month later deny that it ever happened. I have a friend who's daughter was bitten about 6 months ago. He acknowledges screaming at his neighbor for the dog biting her, but denies she was bitten. Maybe you are extremely lucky to have never been bitten, and not know anyone who has, but it is also possible that you are in denial.
My brother was a burglar. (and rightly did time for it) He never had trouble quietly getting into a house, although he tried to stick to day time burglary because houses tend to be empty at during the day. Your advice of getting signs and an alarms system... Absolutely work. Burglars don't want to get arrested. Going to the neighbors house that doesn't have an alarm makes an arrest less likely. They also don't stick around when alarms are going off because that means police are likely on the way.
The dog... I personal see dogs as more dangerous than a gun. You can't lock a dog up in a safe. Well, you can, but around here they will throw you in jail if you get caught. You can't even put a dog on a high shelf. Dogs also have a rightly earned reputation for "going off" on their own and you can't keep the ammo away from the weapon with a dog. The worst part is that few people understand that the modern dog is designed for most of the same purposes as modern guns. Thus they don't treat keep dogs safely the way they do guns.
And yet dogs are not held to the standard of guns as weapons. While your dogs have may not have injured the guy, and have never gone off on the wrong person, I have personally been bitten 4 different times. My wife has been bitten twice. Most people I know have been bitten. If you get winged by a bullet, it gets reported. When people get bit by a dog, half the time they just play it off like it didn't happen. I have lived in some pretty rough neighborhoods. Ones where plenty of people were armed, and not all of them for protection. I worry much more about dogs than guns.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how this would extend the protection on the drug itself. If my doctor presents me with the choice of $1500 for a cycle of name brand medicine with chips embedded or $50 for generic that will cure the disease but won't let me monitor how often I take the pill with my cell phone, the choice becomes pretty obvious.
As I understand it, they already end up with brown and blackouts all the time scattered over local regions.
The instruments will all be a single steady tone. The singers will be making a constant stream of changing random notes to hide the fact that they can neither hit a specific note nor carry whatever note they hit.
Sure, but the internet only has 2 and look at what can be done with that.
I don't know why Folk Metal seems odd to people. Tolkien subjects and metal have had a strong association for as long as anyone has called music metal. To get the feel, don't think Amish, think medieval Europe. Don't think electric banjo, think electric mandolin.
I'm not suggesting it will happen, but the way that Steam COULD effect Linux is if they made the terms desirable for distribution, captured enough of the app market share that Linux was unusable without it, and then changed the terms.
BSD is free as in "I am not free if I am not free to own a slave". GPL is free as in "I am not free if I am not free to bang your wife". BSD is about the individual being able to do what he wants with what he has in his possession. The GPL is about everyone getting to do the same stuff with what anyone has.
Really, the problem is that 100% freedom for more than one person at a time is a paradox.
BSD uses the "I am not truly free if I am not free to own a slave" argument of freedom while the GPL folks use the "I am not truly free if I am not free to bang your wife" argument of freedom. They are even right. The problem is that everyone cannot be truly 100% free at the same time. It just can't be done. So, one has to decide what is more important to them, societal freedom (everyone gets equal access) or personal freedom (I get to do what I want). The best version of freedom is no always clear and it is probably best that we don't have to pick one and apply it universally.
I am with you, and did the same. Part of the problem is that the word 'Algebra' gets redefined. Our society has decided that 'algebra is hard'. Since 1 + 1 = X is algebra, and algebra is hard, they came up with ways to make 1 + 1 = X NOT algebra. They will do things like 1 + 1 = _ , 1 + 1 = [] or 1 + 1 = .
It is mind boggling how much people get dumbed down. If your child is doing algebra at 4, you should consider homeschooling. It isn't 1920's rural Wyoming these days. (I apologize if you live in Wyoming) The 'socialization' boogie man is a myth. A room of 30 kids that are years behind her will only drag her down. At 8 years old my son would be going into the 3rd grade in public school. Being home schooled, he is somewhere in between he is ahead of his friends entering the fifth grade of public school and behind his friends entering the 6th grade.
No, the US has moved to 'social promotion'. It has given up on educating the children and moved to 'socializing' them.
The schools are only getting about 7 years accomplished in those 13 years, so the colleges had to take up the slack. Unfortunately, they are moving in the same direction, and seeing people leave college with a 7th grade education is now common.
Even sexual education isn't used to it's fullest. When my wife was pregnant, we were contently being corrected by people that her pregnancy would be 10 months when we would say 9. The best we could come up with was that enough people had read 40 weeks, and converted that into 10 months. I suppose that is bad math as well...
The professors' bias might not decide what math is good or bad, but it does tend to screw small children. I can't count the number of times I have heard a teacher defend telling kids a fable about a tiny alligator eating big fish to describe greater than instead of just pointing out that it is a picture of what it means. (the small side is small and the large side is large) Another example is that we teach things out of order. Instead of getting variables out of the way right off the bat so that = always means =, we swap around a half dozen different shapes and symbols in a vain attempt to avoid them. Sometimes they are underlines. Sometimes they are empty squares or rectangles. Other times they are just a blank space on the page.
I don't know about the person you are replying to, but I can tell you that I don't need to hire a plumber. Ironically, a plumber is one of the few tradesmen I do hire. The reason I hire him isn't because the one time I needed work done while I was out of town, he did the unusual act of doing a cleaner job than I did. My work was just as functional, but his was faster and cleaner. The work wasn't difficult. It didn't require any intelligence. My plumber would happily say the same. He was completely aware of and confident with the fact that his value was not in some arcane knowledge, or in some high degree of book learning. His value was in the fact that he had a strong work ethic, took pride in his work, and had done it long enough that he could do it with a profit at a time and materials cost that was less than his customers could do themselves.
Reading anything more advanced than a children's book is no more require to bring value than swinging anything heavier than a mouse is.
One of the problems there is that math is not a single point. No one knows all math, and it is unlikely that anyone ever will. So, as mere mortals we must accept that "knowing math" is a point on a very long line. Where we put that point will be is debatable. Once you acknowledge that no one will ever know all math, you are just deciding how much math is enough. Students don't need this or that isn't evil. It is a reality of living in our universe. It is not denying them a part of their humanity. It is understanding that they are human.
The question is and must be, how much math do people need to function, how much math can a particular individual actually learn, and at what point does the payoff exceed the price for each individual?
There is also the unfortunate trend of calling stupid people 'creative'. To be clear, I'm not saying that creative people are stupid. Lumping all of the stupid people into the 'creative' category is really crewing the truly creative. The 6 year old that dreams up a pig that says 'Moo' is creative. The 6 year old that thinks pigs say 'Moo' is dumb. The two are not the same.
To be fair, we often do the same thing with smart vs. trained. A smart child can tell you that 3 * 3 = 9 because they know that 3 * 3 is the same as 3 + 3 + 3 which is the same as 1 +1 +1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 9. A trained child tells you that 3 * 3 = 9 because that is what the times table chart they were told to memorize says.
For the most part, yes, we could eliminate most subjects, and most people would be just as well off as they are today. Most people leave high school and a good many of them leave college with no better than what should be expected of a 7th grader. It is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that most people don't need algebra because most people don't know algebra, and they do just fine. The same applies to history, language, and every other subject taught after the 7th grade. Is it great for those that want to learn more, but it isn't necessary for a good life.
It seems the right answer to the wrong question has been presented though. It is higher education that is the failing. We run kids through 13 years of primary "education", and then push them into 4 or more years of "education", and what we end up with is a person with a 7 year education. Higher "education" is completely worthless if you haven't received a primary education that ends where the higher "education" is supposed to start.
Why? Most patents are at least initially on "fake" stuff. I have never heard any word that a product had to actually be made and working for it to count in the patent process. Plus, we are talking about "Design" patents. Those "Designs" actually did exists. The fact that the designed were not coupled with working phones or PDAs doesn't change the fact that the designs existed.
That is how Apple fanboys describe things. If Apple has it and someone else doesn't, it is the key defining feature that makes it the greatest "innovation" ever, and completely original. If someone else has it and Apple doesn't, it is a minor, inconsequential part that could hardly be called a feature. In this thread, it is suggested that Samsung copied Apple, even though iPhone doesn't do widgets. Then in another post it is suggested that Apple didn't copy Xerox because Xerox didn't have overlapping windows.
And THAT is the first, biggest problem with "IP".
Nobody deals with the kids they were in school with. They don't deal with them as specific individuals. They don't deal with them as abstractions. A group of 8 year olds is not the same as a group of adults that range in age form 18 to 60. There is simply no correlation other than the very weak argument that you will sometimes have to deal with people you don't like, and since homeschooled kids learn those same situations that doesn't apply. Of course, homeschooled kids learn about dealing with people that they don't like in a more realistic way than public school kids. As an adult, you decide every day if dealing with the people is worth the benefit of being where you are. You don't HAVE to be at work with those people. If the environment is bad enough, you can leave. If other individuals are abusive enough, they will get fired. Kids in a public school classroom do not learn that. They learn that if they don't stay in a bad environment then cops will come and arrest them. They learn that they have no choice in where they will spend their time.
You seem to be stuck on the idea that babysitters act as teachers. I never said that, and it is not the way things would typically work. I said, that if you are a single parent and want to home school, you use a baby sitter for kids that can't be left alone, for the purpose of babysitting. You do your schooling when you get home from work. And, the abilities of "a professional teacher who has years of experience" is vastly over rated. We SHOULD be able to expect professional teachers to be vastly better than your average Joe. The fact that they are not better, and frequently a lot worse is one of my big problems with our public school system. Our public school system is to education what the Geek Squad is to the computer industry. Having years of "professional experience" is not evidence of skill in the trade. There is no excuse for my child to be blazing through 5th grade curriculum at 8 year of age when 10 year olds are just getting started on it. Even if both my son and I were genetic freaks giving us vastly superior intellectual capabilities compared to normal humans, there is no excuse for "professional teachers with years of experience" to fail at keeping up.
You also seem to be confused about exposure to other ideas. Why would you think homeschooled kids do not join clubs and are not exposed to other ideas? Perhaps you just made it up? Perhaps you saw a tv show that used it as a plot device? I can tell you that it isn't the homeschooled kids that are sheltered from other ideas. It is the public schooled kids. The public schools are homogenous places. The kids are all pulled from the same communities, so the belief that they are a diverse set of people is a fiction. Then when they get the kids in the public school, there is a massive and open push to turn each school into a tribe. To give up individuality and be a cog in the machine. Even within the school, there are sub-tribes that kids are heavily discouraged from crossing between.
I don't know if you have school aged kids of your own, if you do, consider how geographically wide their friend pool is. For most public school kids, it tends to be in the range of a couple of miles. For home schooled kids having friends all over the state is common. Even all over the country. Our nation is a very diverse place, and limiting their friends to a couple of miles around their home is not exposing them to other ideas.
The idea of public school isn't really the problem. The implementation is.
Yes. I think it is safe to assume that neither of us are going to convince the other here on slashdot.
While it might be possible for America to reverse it's trend towards urbanization, you would be looking a incident that dwarfs the Great Irish Potato Famine, and that would be just for New York. Not counting the rest of the country.
I also have no problem with public schooling (In theory). It is the way that it is practiced that I have some problems with, and I wouldn't call for it to be shut down even in it's current incarnation. I think the public schools themselves are just as much of a money/power grab as charter schools.
If you want to see some more money grab. Look at the homeschool "Umbrella" programs. This is where the public schools pay homeschoolers a couple of hundred dollars so that they can put the kids names on their enrollment forms and collect money for having the kid "enrolled" at their school. Look also at what some schools are doing now where they are calling kids that miss too many days "homeschooled" under the "umbrella" program and collecting money for them being in the classroom.
Trivia that most people don't know about homeschooling: In most states (all?) every child needs to be enrolled in a public or private school. Thus, "homeschooling" isn't "not enrolled in school" as most people believe. Here in CA, and I believe it is the same nation wide, to "homeschool" you must either be enrolled in a tradition public/private school and given permission to hold classes in your home (e.g. the umbrella programs). Or you open a private school of your own that just happens to be in your home. That is what I did. My son attends an extremely exclusive private school in California. It is so exclusive that it has a student population of 1, and a teacher to student ration of 2:1.
I would suspect you are in denial. I have watched people get bitten. Bitten for real, and a month later deny that it ever happened. I have a friend who's daughter was bitten about 6 months ago. He acknowledges screaming at his neighbor for the dog biting her, but denies she was bitten. Maybe you are extremely lucky to have never been bitten, and not know anyone who has, but it is also possible that you are in denial.
My brother was a burglar. (and rightly did time for it) He never had trouble quietly getting into a house, although he tried to stick to day time burglary because houses tend to be empty at during the day. Your advice of getting signs and an alarms system... Absolutely work. Burglars don't want to get arrested. Going to the neighbors house that doesn't have an alarm makes an arrest less likely. They also don't stick around when alarms are going off because that means police are likely on the way.
The dog... I personal see dogs as more dangerous than a gun. You can't lock a dog up in a safe. Well, you can, but around here they will throw you in jail if you get caught. You can't even put a dog on a high shelf. Dogs also have a rightly earned reputation for "going off" on their own and you can't keep the ammo away from the weapon with a dog. The worst part is that few people understand that the modern dog is designed for most of the same purposes as modern guns. Thus they don't treat keep dogs safely the way they do guns.
And yet dogs are not held to the standard of guns as weapons. While your dogs have may not have injured the guy, and have never gone off on the wrong person, I have personally been bitten 4 different times. My wife has been bitten twice. Most people I know have been bitten. If you get winged by a bullet, it gets reported. When people get bit by a dog, half the time they just play it off like it didn't happen. I have lived in some pretty rough neighborhoods. Ones where plenty of people were armed, and not all of them for protection. I worry much more about dogs than guns.
Anyone that is going to be able to take a baseball bat away from me and beat me with it doesn't need a baseball bat to beat me to death.