You don't think it's democratic? You seem to use this word "democratic" in an odd manner. You think the process is unfair or unjust, not undemocratic. To claim it's not democratic is to claim that these laws were passed without either the explicit or implicit support of the populace.
A democracy isn't a place where you get to get out of obligations by saying that you do not agree with them. If you do not agree with those obligations, then work to change the laws.
The point of at least one of the articles was that the criteria used in many game reviews of what sucks and what doesn't isn't in touch with the actual consumers of the product. From the article on EA Casual: "20-something guy reviewing a game like THQ's Cars is pretty pointless--can he possibly play the game from the perspective of a seven-year-old who idolizes Lightning McQueen?". It is pointless to whine that the mechanics of Cars or the newest Harry Potter game are not realistic since people like you will not be the main ones buying the game. What is fun to the under 12 crowd may not be the same thing that is fun to the over 21 crowd.
What I would like to be done is have different reviews for the different types of gamers. Start out with broad categories, the hardcore gamers who will want a certain type of game, the more laid-back gamer who buys more games than the average consumer but will not be pissed that the game isn't that different than other games within the genre, the casual gamer who only really cares about some easy, quick fun. This would allow you to self-select which type you are and pick the most relevant review. Just like you may or may not care that some movie uses a certain camera perspective of an obscure Italian director, you may or may not care that Halo is very similar to other (computer) FPS's.
He could be a teenager or just never got really into a game until later in his teenage years. The first game I really got into was Splinter Cell (not including TFC), and I am 22. I played Duke Nukem, Heretic, Hexen, Wolfenstein 3D and the like back in the day, along with the normal assortment of games for the NES, SNES, N64, and PS2, but none of them held my attention nearly as much as Splinter Cell.
Then perhaps the law should require a banner of some sort from APs intended to be for common public use.
I think the easiest heuristic for determining whether an open AP was intended to be open or not is whether the AP name has been changed from its default setting. If it has been changed from its default setting then the person has clearly messed around with SOME options, and therefore providing some reasonable basis for thinking the person at least had a serious chance to secure their AP. Whereas if the open AP's name has not changed from the default settings, it seems reasonable to conclude (without contrary evidence like encryption or broadcast off) that the person is likely to be an idiot who hasn't thought about securing their network. This seems like a simple enough heuristic, maybe a little to simplistic for a legal standard but it definitely seems to work fine for the morality of the issue.
What is interesting about your analogy is that there is solid evidence (if you really desire the actual studies I could find them given some time) that the hunters in a group did not provide the majority of the caloric intake of a group. I vaguely remember the success rate for hunting groups to be below 10%. So to be true to your analogy, the guys ('guys' in a non-gender way, of course) at MIT are not actually providing enough support for the scientific community and necessarily require the other (lesser-known, and lesser-respected) scientists to survive. So to be faithful to your analogy the hunters at MIT are providing a valuable service (like the hunter provides much-needed protein to the diet of hunter-gatherer groups) but should not be overly-praised at the expense of the gatherers.
Makes sense. After all, science plays no prominent role in hip-hop "culture," sports "culture," or Hollywood "culture." When you have a whole generation which idolizes only members of those three groups, what else should one expect?
This of course assumes that people who idolize say a sports star cannot or do not idolize intellectual figures, which is rubbish. Of course science plays no role in musical artists, athletic events, and movie making (at least on the naive level). This is not at all surprising. I do not expect my favorite rapper to be able to do quantum mechanics. I do not expect my favorite sports star to be able to determine just how they can perform their amazing feats. And I certainly do not care if my favorite actor/actress can do anything dealing with science. People are quite able to spend an afternoon reading about particle physics then spending the evening watching the NBA Playoffs. There is no contradiction here. Pushing the blame on the existence or prominence of those entertainment venues is hardly worthy of being considered a worthwhile addition to this debate.
that study is obviously flawed, as anyone who has ever done tech support will tell you, the percentage of intelligent people out there is FAR FAR lower than that.
Alternative hypothesis for your data: Self-selection bias. People who are 'intellectually curious' or 'intelligent' are much more likely to try to find the answer themselves, rather than call support. Whether or not this is the case, the data does not immediately support your conclusion.
And how is that different from the other side wanting to prevent people from believing, to force gay marrige on a community, to help assisted suicide? The only difference is which side you agree with. If it's "your side" then it's good to force your ideas and beliefs on the community, if it's the "other side" then it's a bad thing.
No, I think any rational human being has no qualms being discriminatory in such matters. I do not see you upset that there are laws that make killing another human being illegal. You do realize that there still are religions, and interpretations of more mainstream religions, that disagree that killing ought to be illegal, because they believe it to be justified if you are killing justly for their chosen diety/ies. They are wrong. No, strike that. It isn't that they are necessarily wrong, but as a civilized society we have make a conscious choice to outlaw certain behaviors for the betterment of all. If your religious beliefs put you at odds with this practice, then that reflects poorly on you and your beliefs. Now don't go blowing what I said out of proportion, because I only intend such an attitude on very general matters (e.g. the freedom of every individual and equal protection under the law).
If you want to change this practice, then you have the option of doing so (either through legal reform or through revolution), but whichever option you pick I (and plenty of others) will be fighting you every single step of the way. There is nothing either in the Constitution or the legal intrepretation afterwards that so-much as gives a shred of support we ought to somehow limit our laws in order to not offend certain religious folk (even if they happen to be in the majority). One of the wonderful features of the American political system is that it is not a strict democracy. That would be not only mob-rule, the sort of outcome the founders of the United States worked to prevent, it is pure lunacy. And with that I'll leave you with a cute quote by Michel de Montaigne from On The Lame: "It is wretched to be reduced to the point where the best touchstone of truth has become the multitude of believers."
If you assume mere physical ability is the measure of one's evolutionary ability, then yes, this is the outcome. But it seems at least somewhat likely that with the evolution of cognitive thought that the human species should not be measured in its ability to have healthy teeth (via your citation of dentistry) or be able to walk naturally (via your citation of wheelchairs). If the human intellect can overcome these physical limitations, we have succeeded in being evolutionarily adaptable to not only our environment but the setbacks which are inherent within each of us.
Excuse me if your post was not meant to connote, a very naive concept IMO of, social Darwinism. I'll grant that surely there are idiots who are both physical incapable and mentally incapable of adaptability that survive via human inventions, but do you really think the net outcome has been negative?
Additionally, for those interested, here is an fascinating article about people who naturally walk on all-fours discovered in Turkey. Even if the discovery does not amount to much scientifically speaking, it is fascinating to read about such oddities of the animal kingdom.
I wonder if you'd apply a similar analysis to being successful in academic fields. Say, since Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician who was largely self-taught and could be argued as one of the top 5 pure mathematician geniuses of all time, was able to succeed to such a high degree, would you also agree that most everyone could be able to achieve similar abilities? We can grant that intelligence has at least some genetic component, and we would still have a puzzling picture on why it does not seem plausible (at least to me, and I have detected a similar sense in most if not all the people I interact with) that there are more geniuses in the world. It seems as though we treat intellect as something distinct from ability to motivate yourself and succeed in life. We even need not grant genius level ability; mere advanced intellect does not seem to be plausibly within the reach of most people (at least through self-taught means). I agree with you that there are surely some people who could have done otherwise and self-taught themselves lets say differential calculus and/or topology, but do you really think most people could have done this? If not, why the difference answer than the one you gave to ability to motivate oneself and become successful?
*-I really would like to know, so if you want to just reply as anonymous not to waste karma or whatever, then it's fine by me.
You should notice how they treat digital music differently from physical copies. When you go to a store like BestBuy, you find that the popular and new releases are priced below their unpopular counterparts. This is countrary to how they would like to treat digital music, which does raise some questions about how they think of digital distribution.
There are plenty of examples. Yes, irony has colloquially changed meaning, but this does not negate the prescriptivist mantra that you are incorrectly using the word.
You do know irony is not situational right...? Via Wikipedia "Irony is best known as a figure of speech (more precisely called verbal irony) in which there is a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says, and what is understood." Formally situations cannot be ironic, so Miss Morissette is incorrect. And you too, at least perscriptively (which is the position you seem to take), are wrong. Please fix your English. Thank you.
It doesn't matter whether you're reading your local rag, surfing the net or trying to make heads or tails of someone's inane blog -- the quality bar is set lower than ever, which is saying a lot considering it was never set very high to begin with.
I am absolutely sick and tired of people just assuming everyone shares their intuition that things are decaying, quality-wise. I simply do not agree. People have been whining about this exact same thing for hundreds of years. Ask the opinions of the studied few who wrote in Latin when vulgate-writing began to pick up, because they will say the exact same thing. Nietzsche whined in, I think it was, Twilight of the Idols that modern music is a reflection of the decadence of the modern man. The fact that this so-called intelligent man would merely assume everyone agrees that his selective memory of the rubbish that way published in earlier times is disheartening. Is it that there were better stories in the past or am I to just think you do not remember the rubbish (think the rosy retrospection bias from psychology).
Math is a different matter. No student should be allowed to bring a calculator into a math class. Ever.
I'm glad this fellow further embarasses himself by making such an uneducated statement. I wonder if those who study math education, and those who are math-based professionals think that knowing how to add five-digit numbers quickly in your head is an essential trait. I also wonder if this fellow thinks that historians need to memorize all the relevant dates. Of course one's mental power shouldn't be better used to genuinely understand the situation or problem.
But when change does violence to the accepted standards of the king's English and takes the mother tongue into the realm of the unfathomable, as does almost all jargon coming out of the technology and business worlds, it's our job as keepers of the grail to drive it back into the dark little hole from whence it came.
King's English refers to a relatively small group of speakers of English in the British Isles, and it doesn't seem at all obvious why we ought to look to them for our linguistic standards (assuming perscriptivism is what we desire).
Tony Long, copy chief at Wired News, believes that all business majors should be required to study Latin and minor in English lit.
Because the dead language Latin is more important than say a widely spoken foreign language, like Mandarin Chinese or Arabic or German or anything other than Latin (except if you plan to do business with the Vatican, and even then I suspect Italian will do you more good).
I think most people are tired of seeing spam on Wikipedia. You can have websites adding links to their sites in an attempt to boost their Google rantings. You can have companies editting their articles trying to provide the most positive spin of them, and their products.
But you do know that as Franz Fanon once said: "There are too many idiots in this world, and by saying this, I have the burden of proving it." -- Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth. You are now committed to doing something about the problem. You've noticed a problem. Make an account, edit some articles, place some articles on your watchlist and make sure they are not defaced by spammers and trolls, be constructive.
I know if my choices were 'DL from uberfast official site, 10Mbit/sec, perfect quality, 3-5$ for the full contents of a DVD, ready to be burned to disc if I so choose' and 'grab dvdrip with no extras off P2P at crappy speed and no guarantee of quality', I'd pay a few bucks for no hassle.
Fat execs are unable to grasp the effect of internet and plentiful bandwidth. Their 'product' is PURE DATA, so *gasp*, internet will make distribution of said data much more efficient than their stupid 'manufacture shiny discs' business model.
What is impressive is how well bit-torrent adapts to this sort of distribution model. The company initially releases the product on bit-torrent seeded by a 100Mbit/sec line (for popular releases since there will be a huge demand), and not only do you have a streamlined distribution model you get the bonus of some of the customers sharing their bandwidth distributing your product (cutting costs of bandwidth for the main company). It does seem that ISP's will begin to complain about this sort of practice, but it is surprising the huge corporations are not even making an attempt at exploiting such a model. *shrugs*
Popular taste will do a better job of finding talent than payolla in the form of coke and whores.
As much as I'd like to agree with this, I do not see why this would be the case. The unwashed masses are going to continue to buy into whatever is sold to them, and therefore give the appearance of popular support for that sort of music. The reason for this being peoples apparent tendency to think that what is popular is popular because it is quality (e.g. see commercials that claim brand X is the most popular brand). I often scratch my head when I hear such claims. I see no reason to suppose this is the case. Now if you meant popular as avenues that satisfy a fairly selective set of criteria (e.g. my friend, who has eerily similar musical tastes, likes band Y then I probably will like band Y), then fine. But you do need to clear that up in the beginning.
Another problem I saw with such a claim comes to how the unwashed masses are supposed to find this music. Without validated avenues like FM radio and cable music channels, how exactly do you suppose people will find good music? Just witnessing my friends without computer savvy trying to satisfy their desires (e.g. for porn, for music, etc) gives me plenty of evidence that people will not exactly seek out quality product. Often times they will simply rely on search engine returns, and this just pushes back the battle with the music industry. There will still be the battle. Until the masses understand how to find what they want, there will be a conflict between people trying to manipulate the masses and those who actually want to help the public (e.g. legit websites ranked behind websites that google-bomb).
Whoever modded the parent "Insightful" needs to be shot. Come on, it was a cute joke but insightful? In all reality, any scientist who publishes a paper with an abstract claiming or otherwise claiming to "cure cancer" needs to be modded down to troll. Break-throughs like that do not happen because of one study, and only scientists just itching to get their name published in newspapers would make such a claim.;)
Genius is finding a solution for a problem. Regular schooling is memorizing solution patterns worked out by other people.
Yes, and genius is not finding out what would even constitute a solution. You can't expect a child to understand something like mathematics without some filtering of information, e.g. telling the child books of type X are the ones you learn math from (or even picking out a single book for a subject). Sure a genius may happen to pick up a mathematics book and learn it, but you cannot expect that to be replicated and you can be damn sure the child did not know what they were picking up (and if they did, someone has already guided them in the right direction, which is what I was talking about in my previous post).
Exactly. When teachers assume the roles of virtual baby-sitters they do not give the children a chance to live up to their potential. I too remember elementary school where the teacher comments on my report card would applaud my grades and then wonder why I was misbehaving (talking, not staying in my seat, and the like). Even though it isn't a particularly helpful to have these thoughts, but in retrospect, there are very few elementary school teachers that I respect as teachers. Sure they are people, and they do a needed job. But they did not command respect of the children's intellect, and merely stood in as a babysitter with more authority.
Re:The children will ask themselves
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It isn't a matter of the kids being unable to find projects to "entertain themselves", because they will surely do that. It is a matter of using the child's interest in learning/education and guiding them. Before you can learn anything in subjects like physics or math you need to know what to learn, because each step builds off of the previous steps. This is where, I feel, the school systems/teachers need to step in. If the child is catching onto basic math quickly, do not tell the child to sit down and wait for the other kids to finish. You are punishing them for being good at something. You don't need to neglect the others kids, if you make sure the exceptional children are mentally stimulated. I don't expect a child to know what he/she needs to learn. Sure, learning on your own is fine for certain subjects (and god knows plenty of people have done just that, e.g. Srinivasa Ramanujan). That does not mean all can do that. You really shouldn't be fatalistic about education, especially if you want any results at all.
Compare the article to my experiences of being entirely bored with the subject matter, and being told to "Just sit down". Recently I've thought about how horrible that statement is when told to a child who has completed a task. As long as we have teachers and curriculums that are static, we will be wasting away hordes of human potential.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't think it's democratic? You seem to use this word "democratic" in an odd manner. You think the process is unfair or unjust, not undemocratic. To claim it's not democratic is to claim that these laws were passed without either the explicit or implicit support of the populace.
A democracy isn't a place where you get to get out of obligations by saying that you do not agree with them. If you do not agree with those obligations, then work to change the laws.
The point of at least one of the articles was that the criteria used in many game reviews of what sucks and what doesn't isn't in touch with the actual consumers of the product. From the article on EA Casual: "20-something guy reviewing a game like THQ's Cars is pretty pointless--can he possibly play the game from the perspective of a seven-year-old who idolizes Lightning McQueen?". It is pointless to whine that the mechanics of Cars or the newest Harry Potter game are not realistic since people like you will not be the main ones buying the game. What is fun to the under 12 crowd may not be the same thing that is fun to the over 21 crowd.
What I would like to be done is have different reviews for the different types of gamers. Start out with broad categories, the hardcore gamers who will want a certain type of game, the more laid-back gamer who buys more games than the average consumer but will not be pissed that the game isn't that different than other games within the genre, the casual gamer who only really cares about some easy, quick fun. This would allow you to self-select which type you are and pick the most relevant review. Just like you may or may not care that some movie uses a certain camera perspective of an obscure Italian director, you may or may not care that Halo is very similar to other (computer) FPS's.
He could be a teenager or just never got really into a game until later in his teenage years. The first game I really got into was Splinter Cell (not including TFC), and I am 22. I played Duke Nukem, Heretic, Hexen, Wolfenstein 3D and the like back in the day, along with the normal assortment of games for the NES, SNES, N64, and PS2, but none of them held my attention nearly as much as Splinter Cell.
Then perhaps the law should require a banner of some sort from APs intended to be for common public use.
I think the easiest heuristic for determining whether an open AP was intended to be open or not is whether the AP name has been changed from its default setting. If it has been changed from its default setting then the person has clearly messed around with SOME options, and therefore providing some reasonable basis for thinking the person at least had a serious chance to secure their AP. Whereas if the open AP's name has not changed from the default settings, it seems reasonable to conclude (without contrary evidence like encryption or broadcast off) that the person is likely to be an idiot who hasn't thought about securing their network. This seems like a simple enough heuristic, maybe a little to simplistic for a legal standard but it definitely seems to work fine for the morality of the issue.
What is interesting about your analogy is that there is solid evidence (if you really desire the actual studies I could find them given some time) that the hunters in a group did not provide the majority of the caloric intake of a group. I vaguely remember the success rate for hunting groups to be below 10%. So to be true to your analogy, the guys ('guys' in a non-gender way, of course) at MIT are not actually providing enough support for the scientific community and necessarily require the other (lesser-known, and lesser-respected) scientists to survive. So to be faithful to your analogy the hunters at MIT are providing a valuable service (like the hunter provides much-needed protein to the diet of hunter-gatherer groups) but should not be overly-praised at the expense of the gatherers.
This individual does not know what eleven looks like.
Being able to know what an abstract entity like a number looks like would make the top mathematicians blush with envy.
Asside from the end-time-ish issues
Pardon me for asking, but are you Christian? And is this what you mean by "end-time-ish"? Because otherwise I really do not follow.
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.google.co
There is some correlation, but not as tight as you make it out to be.
If you want to change this practice, then you have the option of doing so (either through legal reform or through revolution), but whichever option you pick I (and plenty of others) will be fighting you every single step of the way. There is nothing either in the Constitution or the legal intrepretation afterwards that so-much as gives a shred of support we ought to somehow limit our laws in order to not offend certain religious folk (even if they happen to be in the majority). One of the wonderful features of the American political system is that it is not a strict democracy. That would be not only mob-rule, the sort of outcome the founders of the United States worked to prevent, it is pure lunacy. And with that I'll leave you with a cute quote by Michel de Montaigne from On The Lame: "It is wretched to be reduced to the point where the best touchstone of truth has become the multitude of believers."
If you assume mere physical ability is the measure of one's evolutionary ability, then yes, this is the outcome. But it seems at least somewhat likely that with the evolution of cognitive thought that the human species should not be measured in its ability to have healthy teeth (via your citation of dentistry) or be able to walk naturally (via your citation of wheelchairs). If the human intellect can overcome these physical limitations, we have succeeded in being evolutionarily adaptable to not only our environment but the setbacks which are inherent within each of us.
Excuse me if your post was not meant to connote, a very naive concept IMO of, social Darwinism. I'll grant that surely there are idiots who are both physical incapable and mentally incapable of adaptability that survive via human inventions, but do you really think the net outcome has been negative?
Additionally, for those interested, here is an fascinating article about people who naturally walk on all-fours discovered in Turkey. Even if the discovery does not amount to much scientifically speaking, it is fascinating to read about such oddities of the animal kingdom.
I wonder if you'd apply a similar analysis to being successful in academic fields. Say, since Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician who was largely self-taught and could be argued as one of the top 5 pure mathematician geniuses of all time, was able to succeed to such a high degree, would you also agree that most everyone could be able to achieve similar abilities? We can grant that intelligence has at least some genetic component, and we would still have a puzzling picture on why it does not seem plausible (at least to me, and I have detected a similar sense in most if not all the people I interact with) that there are more geniuses in the world. It seems as though we treat intellect as something distinct from ability to motivate yourself and succeed in life. We even need not grant genius level ability; mere advanced intellect does not seem to be plausibly within the reach of most people (at least through self-taught means). I agree with you that there are surely some people who could have done otherwise and self-taught themselves lets say differential calculus and/or topology, but do you really think most people could have done this? If not, why the difference answer than the one you gave to ability to motivate oneself and become successful?
*-I really would like to know, so if you want to just reply as anonymous not to waste karma or whatever, then it's fine by me.
You should notice how they treat digital music differently from physical copies. When you go to a store like BestBuy, you find that the popular and new releases are priced below their unpopular counterparts. This is countrary to how they would like to treat digital music, which does raise some questions about how they think of digital distribution.
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisti cTerms/WhatIsIrony.htm
http://www.geocities.com/eirig/
There are plenty of examples. Yes, irony has colloquially changed meaning, but this does not negate the prescriptivist mantra that you are incorrectly using the word.
You do know irony is not situational right...? Via Wikipedia "Irony is best known as a figure of speech (more precisely called verbal irony) in which there is a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says, and what is understood." Formally situations cannot be ironic, so Miss Morissette is incorrect. And you too, at least perscriptively (which is the position you seem to take), are wrong. Please fix your English. Thank you.
I think most people are tired of seeing spam on Wikipedia. You can have websites adding links to their sites in an attempt to boost their Google rantings. You can have companies editting their articles trying to provide the most positive spin of them, and their products.
But you do know that as Franz Fanon once said: "There are too many idiots in this world, and by saying this, I have the burden of proving it." -- Frantz Fanon The Wretched of the Earth. You are now committed to doing something about the problem. You've noticed a problem. Make an account, edit some articles, place some articles on your watchlist and make sure they are not defaced by spammers and trolls, be constructive.
Another problem I saw with such a claim comes to how the unwashed masses are supposed to find this music. Without validated avenues like FM radio and cable music channels, how exactly do you suppose people will find good music? Just witnessing my friends without computer savvy trying to satisfy their desires (e.g. for porn, for music, etc) gives me plenty of evidence that people will not exactly seek out quality product. Often times they will simply rely on search engine returns, and this just pushes back the battle with the music industry. There will still be the battle. Until the masses understand how to find what they want, there will be a conflict between people trying to manipulate the masses and those who actually want to help the public (e.g. legit websites ranked behind websites that google-bomb).
Whoever modded the parent "Insightful" needs to be shot. Come on, it was a cute joke but insightful? In all reality, any scientist who publishes a paper with an abstract claiming or otherwise claiming to "cure cancer" needs to be modded down to troll. Break-throughs like that do not happen because of one study, and only scientists just itching to get their name published in newspapers would make such a claim. ;)
Genius is finding a solution for a problem. Regular schooling is memorizing solution patterns worked out by other people.
Yes, and genius is not finding out what would even constitute a solution. You can't expect a child to understand something like mathematics without some filtering of information, e.g. telling the child books of type X are the ones you learn math from (or even picking out a single book for a subject). Sure a genius may happen to pick up a mathematics book and learn it, but you cannot expect that to be replicated and you can be damn sure the child did not know what they were picking up (and if they did, someone has already guided them in the right direction, which is what I was talking about in my previous post).
Exactly. When teachers assume the roles of virtual baby-sitters they do not give the children a chance to live up to their potential. I too remember elementary school where the teacher comments on my report card would applaud my grades and then wonder why I was misbehaving (talking, not staying in my seat, and the like). Even though it isn't a particularly helpful to have these thoughts, but in retrospect, there are very few elementary school teachers that I respect as teachers. Sure they are people, and they do a needed job. But they did not command respect of the children's intellect, and merely stood in as a babysitter with more authority.
It isn't a matter of the kids being unable to find projects to "entertain themselves", because they will surely do that. It is a matter of using the child's interest in learning/education and guiding them. Before you can learn anything in subjects like physics or math you need to know what to learn, because each step builds off of the previous steps. This is where, I feel, the school systems/teachers need to step in. If the child is catching onto basic math quickly, do not tell the child to sit down and wait for the other kids to finish. You are punishing them for being good at something. You don't need to neglect the others kids, if you make sure the exceptional children are mentally stimulated. I don't expect a child to know what he/she needs to learn. Sure, learning on your own is fine for certain subjects (and god knows plenty of people have done just that, e.g. Srinivasa Ramanujan). That does not mean all can do that. You really shouldn't be fatalistic about education, especially if you want any results at all.
Compare the article to my experiences of being entirely bored with the subject matter, and being told to "Just sit down". Recently I've thought about how horrible that statement is when told to a child who has completed a task. As long as we have teachers and curriculums that are static, we will be wasting away hordes of human potential.