The problem, though is that after the brouhaha, people started deliberately using the "innocent" word in mean-spirited ways. I mean, come on, before all of this mess, no one ever used the word niggardly in normal conversation. One guy does it, misguided racial accusations fly, stalwart defense is mounted, and now, people use it all the time. It's not that the word deserves to be more common; they're doing it specifically for the purpose of its new racial connotations even though there really shouldn't be any.
Read this section about the controversy in Wikipedia for more insight, and a good idea of why using the word "niggardly," even if it's technically correct in the sentence you've made, can still be taken in a racial sense. And, of course, ask yourself if you're using it because it happens to be the best word for the sentence, or because it sounds so much like the other n-word.
If that happens to step on your personal wants, then thats too bad.
What if it steps on what I need to do my job? I'm glad I don't work for you. You seem to be one of those types that thinks that just because something can be done, it needs to be done. Pushing down the default page doesn't protect the corporate computing assets, though I'm sure that's how our desktop goobers pitched it to management. It's just one more way to control things they have no business controlling, and it impacts our productivity.
They also do thinks like push down custom Start Menu structures. Microsoft Word, for example, isn't under All Programs or even Microsoft Office like it is on every other computer. No, it's buried under "Office Applications" (not to be confused with "Business Applications," a separate directory), along with things like Adobe Acrobat and such. They've also moved Windows Explorer (the filesystem explorer, not Internet Explorer) under Accessories. If I change this to something I'm more used to, it gets reverted next time I log in. Obviously, they've also deleted and blocked Solitaire and Minesweeper from running; it wouldn't do for people to take a break from hammering their stones. The company logo is pushed out to be everyone's desktop background.
My favorite, though, is that they've decided that everyone needs a little application called Kontiki. It's a peer-to-peer video distrubtion software system that turns all of our PCs into filesharing peers for corporate videos. You can't disable it and you can't delete the videos that it pushes down. (If you try to deleting a video, the software automatically re-downloads it from--you guessed it--your coworkers computers.) I detest days when corporate videos go out. My bandwidth is sucked dry by something I neither want nor use and have no control over.
Let's see... Need more stories? How about this. They recently pushed out a piece of software called Connected Backup. What happened is that our fileservers where people's home directories were started filling up. Instead of going out and buying more hard drives or implementing quotas, they've rolled out this backup software to everyone's computer that automatically backs up your machine once a day whether you want it to or not. Now, they're telling everyone that official company policy is to NOT store important documents on the fileservers, but to store them on your local PCs. Brilliant! Of course, network traffic has shot up dramatically, and the backup servers had to have a TON of storage added to them (the data still has to go somewhere), and instead of only things that people save on the fileservers being backed up, all of their personal shit is, too.
Every day, my computer runs a Connected backup, a virus scan, a vulnerability scan, a document retention scan, a software installation scan, Notes database replication, and my Run key in the registry has around 50 entries in it that our desktop group has loaded in, and it takes around two minutes for all of the group policies and login scripts to run when I log in. Thanks to our desktop group, literally 30 minutes of my day is wasted waiting for all of that shit to run.
I could go on with the stupidity if you really want me to. You're right about one thing; they've definitely protected the corporate computing assets. People hate using their computers so much now that a lot of people I know have gone back to just leaving it on all the time for doing their timesheets, and conduct their normal business using such old school methods such as the telephone and pencil and paper. As for me, I actually do some of my work at home using my own computing resources, and the only reason I can tolerate using my work computer for anything is because I know how to get around most of the shit they try to push down on us.
Please, by all means, you and Mr. Scott change the world. If it takes an irrational optimist and a guy who makes infomercials and thinks that God literally made him rich to change how big companies have done things for decades, then so be it.
Meanwhile, I'm going to keep trying this "reality" strategy that seems to work pretty well for me. I'm sorry that I have a hard time believing that pitching Total Gyms and Deal-A-Meals and reading the Bible will get my company to start using open source software, but hey, good luck to you with that.
No, they specifically blocked firefox.exe. It wasn't part of a regular expression or policy to keep people from running their own programs. They made a deliberate and conscious choice to not only standardize on Internet Explorer as the Official Company Browser(TM), but to try to prevent anything else from even working.
It's not the only time they've done something lame-ass like that. For example, they've also created an Active Directory policy to push down the corporate intranet page as your home page. So if you're like me and prefer something like Google as your home page, too damn bad, it resets it next time you log in. I had to go in and deny permission to that registry key for Administrators to keep that from happening. (Yes, I know, they can reset the permissions on the key if they figure out what I've done, but they're not that motivated, and the point was to keep the automatic update from happening, which this does successfully.)
Have some patience, we'll run across them... event
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The Fermi Paradox is Back
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· Score: 5, Insightful
In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-boggingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
The problem isn't that there isn't anyone else out there. With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.) The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small.
I always put this thought experiment before people: If you had a spaceship that could instantly take you to anywhere in the universe, where would you go?
Sure, you'd probably drop by a few nebulae and stars and even planets, but after you've seen a few, where to then? You could travel to other planets for lifetimes and still not run across intelligent life on other planets. It's not that truly interesting things aren't out there, it's just that the universe isn't very conducive to producing life-bearing planets. Sure, with so vastly many planets, it will happen (and obviously has), but finding life out there is like finding a needle in a haystack, and we're just now starting to be able to see the haystack.
Further complicating matters is that we don't have spaceships that can instantly take us anywhere in the universe, and according to the laws of physics as we know them, it's likely that other intelligent beings don't either. Maybe they have travelled lifetimes and they just haven't run across us yet.
So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years. After all, it's more than just a trip down the road to the chemist, and something that cool will probably be worth the wait.
Reminds me of games that try to filter out all 'bad' words
I play City of Heroes, and for some weird reason, it blocks the word "count." I think it was a typo when someone was entering words to block into the filter. It was just kind of funny, because I discovered it when I told someone, "Don't worry, you can count on me!" and it came out as "Don't worry, you can <bleep!> on me!" They had no idea what I was talking about, and it took a few entertaining minutes to hash out what was going on.
So you'd advocate fighting FUD with FUD? Brilliant!
In a big company, you don't have a choice. When it comes to FUD versus real information, FUD will always win, no matter what. It's how big companies work. They don't ask, "How much could this make our company better" to make decisions, they ask, "How much could it cost me if it screws up?" Why do you think FUD is such an essential strategy in Microsoft's marketing campaign?
So what I'm saying is that the choice comes down to either fighting fire with fire or being stuck using.NET software. I hate that big companies work that way, but that's what where we are. (Of course, you can try to change your corporate culture, but that will likely end up with you being miserable, or worse, fired.) I'm not being facetious when I say that each person out there will have to make their own choice as to how badly they want something that works and what they can live with themselves for doing.
The genius that is Microsoft...
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MSN Censors Your IM
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· Score: 5, Informative
From an article that is linked to from this one:
The link filter does not take canonical URLs into account: http://evil.example.com/download.php and http://evil.example.com/down%6Coad.php is the same URL, expressed in two different ways. The first one is blocked, while the second one is not.
Or for that matter, http://tinyurl.com/z35a5.
Kind of reminds me of our software filter where I work. They blocked firefox.exe from running. My solution? I renamed the file to iexplore.exe. Worked like a charm.
It's also probably worth noting that the messages are blocked on the server, not the client. That means that it will block the message whether you're using the MSN client, Pidgin, or any other client to access MSN.
My advice: Get a frickin' Google mail account already and use Google Talk instead.
I don't know how many times I've said this, and people still don't get it. When deciding whether a law is good or bad, you should always assume that the worst scum of the earth are going to be exploiting it for their own evil agendas, and then decide if you can live with its consequences.
Let's see what the Republican who defended the law says about it:
Republicans disputed [Democrat Zoe Lofgren's] description. "It does nothing to tear up the Constitution," said Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif.
If an American's communications are swept up in surveillance of a foreigner, he said, "we go through a process called minimization" and get rid of the records unless there is reason to suspect the American is a threat.
So everything--including eavesdropping on domestic calls--is fair game if there is a reason to suspect that the American is a threat. Who gets to decide if the American is a threat? Why, the President and Attorney General, of course! And who do they have to tell? No one! And they have to be a threat of committing some sort of terrorist act, right? Of course not, they can be deemed a threat for any ol' reason they damned well please! "Wow, that person may get me voted out of office. I deem them a threat to national security." Don't think it could happen? You're not thinking hard enough, and you're still not assuming that the worst scum of the earth are in charge.
If you can't see the potential for abuse of this law, then you're beyond naive, you're an idiot. And if you think that George Bush would never abuse it in this way because he's such a nice man who is looking out for our safety, then imagine it in the hands of Hillary Clinton, because you're also giving it to whoever takes office after Bush, and whoever takes office after that, and whoever takes office after that. Do you trust whoever will be president in 20 years, even though you have no freakin' clue who that will be?
At the risk of going all Godwin in this thread, imagine that 20 years from now, a new Adolph Hitler manages to win the election. Do you trust him not to abuse the law too? Don't ever ask if you think the people in charge now will abuse the law, ask if Adolph Hitler would. Government is supposed to be designed in such a way that if a branch of government does become corrupted by a Hitler-like person, we'd be okay in the end because the other two branches would compensate for it with their checks and balances. Laws like this are specifically designed, though, to take those checks and balances away from other branches and concentrate the power in one branch (in this case, the executive branch). No matter how much you think it will only be used with good intentions, it will be abused at some point.
By passing this bill, Congress has failed us miserably yet again, and the biggest reason why is because of naive little Bush cheerleaders who are too stupid to know how government works.
Don't be fooled by management's official reasons why they don't go with Linux or other open source software. It really just boils down to FUD.
There's still a prevalent image of Linux and other open source software out there as just hobbyist software. The reason I hear most often cited for not considering open source software at my company is, "There's no one to hold accountable if it breaks." Even when I point out companies that offer paid support--people to be held accountable for making sure the software works--they still chant the "hold accountable" mantra. Those companies aren't big enough, they may go out of business any minute now, blah blah blah.
It's really disgusting sometimes. I've seen software come into our environment that I know for a fact and can demonstrate is crap, and offered alternatives for it. I'm told, "That's all fine and good, but when the software we're going to use breaks, we'll have someone to sue over it." Of course, that doesn't really happen, we always just end up suffering for several years until the next version comes out or some other closed-source competitor comes in and convinces management that they're the way to go instead. Having people to "hold accountable" (which they never are) is more important to my company than having something that actually works.
I don't know what to suggest. Another trait of large companies is that they won't do something until everyone else in the world is doing it. Once a company reaches a certain size, there's no longer a culture of trying new things and trying to separate yourself from the competition; it becomes an unrelenting strive for mediocrity. Right now, everyone else is moving to.NET, so that's probably where you'll end up, regardless of what is best for your company. About the only chance you have is to put together a pretty Powerpoint presentation showing that switching to.NET will cost a billion dollars. Make costs up if you have to. The problem is that if you show it will only cost a million, they'll still do it anyway just to be on that magical.NET bandwagon, and you'll need a ridiculously large cost to justify not doing so.
Actually, I am pretty fucking special, but that's beside the point.
They could do all of the surveys they want and the speed limit still won't be changed. Do you know why?
Two reasons. The main one is that speeding tickets generate much-needed revenue to the city. Whenever the city gets into a crunch, they can and do get police officers to man the speed traps more and rake in what they decide they need.
The other reason is because the maximum speed limit isn't set according to what the maximum safe driving speed is. It's set according to Georgia State Code 40-6-181. I could have studies showing that the safest driving speed on the interstate is a hundred miles per hour, and it wouldn't make a damned bit of difference.
And just for good measure, check out what happened when some students got together and decided that they would force people to obey the speed limit on Atlanta's Interstate 285 for a while one day. (Hint: A lot of very angry drivers, and even an accident when some genius decided to pass their line of cars on the right shoulder.)
The law is stupid and dangerous, it's not going to change, and therefore I will choose not to obey it. I'm sorry you have such a problem with that. (But not really.)
First of all, calculating braking distances isn't a "little math and physics." You say that as if any sixth grader should be able to churn out the numbers without any problem. It actually requires calculus and mechanics to figure out, something that even most smart people don't really know or care about. (But since I spent over two years as a physics major in college and took mechanics and second-year calculus my first quarter--and got A's in both--I might know a little about it.)
Second of all, I guess that means that technically, since the stopping distance-to-velocity equation holds even for very small values of velocity, we should really all just stay home. Anything else is just grossly unsafe.
Third of all, traffic fatalities have actually be steadily decreasing per miles traveled. I know, it's an inconvenient little statistic, given all those maniacs out there like me who apparently don't give a rat's ass about safety.
Fourth of all, if you're going to present yourself as some sort of authority on math and physics, at least know what the hell you're talking about. Increasing your speed doesn't give diminishing returns with regards to travel time. If car A's average speed is exactly twice what car B's is, car A will arrive at its destination in exactly half the time as car B, period. Obviously, on surface streets, there's a practical limit as to how fast you can drive, but if you're able to increase your speed over a distance by x times, you will reduce your time to cover that distance by exactly a factor of x, no diminishing returns.
Also, the increase in stopping distance isn't an "expotentional" increase. It's not even an exponential increase. If it were, the stopping distance would vary as some constant to the power of the velocity. It doesn't. It varies as the square of velocity, which is a quadratic increase, not exponential.
But don't let that from keeping you from driving 55 miles per hour and feeling good about yourself. Around here, people who do that aren't making the roads safe, they're a nuisance, a road hazard that needs to take the bus instead (which, incidentally, also drives faster than 55) so that normal people can actually get where they're going.
you think the law is silly because you would like to break it, because doing so lets you get free games.
You, sir, are an ass. (And an anonymous one at that, the best kind.) That's what you get for thinking you know me. I don't have any illegal games. Zip, zero, zilch. If any official-type agencies want to come inspect my computers, they could do so to their heart's content and I would be free and clear because there's simply nothing there. Of course, I would do everything in my power to defend the right to not have my equipment searched, even though I have absolutely nothing to hide, and once they were done, they'd be facing a very costly lawsuit for doing so.
I don't think the law is "silly," I think it's extremely destructive. Not because I can't copy games, but because it tells me what I can and cannot do with my own property, a dangerous precedent with a repugnant slippery slope. My personal freedoms trump the profit-making capability of game developers and publishers. If that means that you or someone else can't make money because of my fair use rights and my right to do what I please with my property as long as it doesn't interfere with other people's rights, too damn bad. Find something else to do in which you can make money without destroying other people's freedoms.
As for your comments about speeding, they just go to show how much of an idiot you are. If you think that driving faster than the speed limit is not giving a fuck about people who get killed by speeding motorists, then I guess that 99.99% of all of the people in this country (including every cop I've ever seen on the interstate) doesn't give a fuck about road safety. Or maybe the simpler explanation--you're an idiot--is right instead. Believe what you want; given your assinine response, I don't really care about your opinions.
He isn't exactly an innocent victim and life does tend to suck after you've been caught breaking the law.
Do you ever speed? I mean, really, when everyone else is going 65 to 70 (or higher) miles per hour, are you really going to diligently only go 55?
Do you have any idea what the possible penalties for speeding are? I mean, sure, most people who get caught by the police get a slap-on-the-wrist fine, but do you know what you could face for speeding? Check your state laws; in involves losing your license to drive, facing hefty penalties, and jail time. If you've gotten speeding tickets before, that means that you're a repeat offender and they can really throw the book at you.
Yet still, I'll bet that when you get on the interstate, you go 70 right along with the rest of the cars. By your logic, that means that if a police officer pulls you over and arrests you, throws you in jail for a few months, you lose your license to drive, and have to pay thousands of dollars in fines, even though that may not be the normal punishment that fits the dinkiness of your crime, hey, you're not exactly an innocent victim, and your life sucking from now on is justified, since after all, you were caught breaking the law.
As far as I can tell, this guy was guilty of breaking a law that is just as silly as the one that says I'm supposed to drive 55 miles per hour on a straight road that is 10 lanes wide (I live in Atlanta, we really have interstates 10 lanes wide in 55 mile per hour zones), even if it's a lazy Sunday afternoon with perfect visibility and very low traffic volume.
I don't see anything in the article that says he was selling the modded boxes. I don't see anything that says he was using the modchips to steal games illegally. I don't see anything that says he was using modchips to distribute illegal copies of games. If he's guilty of some or all of those things, then maybe he does deserve a stiff penalty, but that should only happen after he's tried and convicted in court, after that little annoyance called due process runs its course. Right now, all I'm seeing is that he violated the DMCA, which says that regardless of your intent, you do not have the right to modify hardware that you purchased and own to suit your own needs. It says that corporations have the right to tell you what you can do with your own property. It says that if you're suspected of modifying your own property, regardless of intent and without due process, you will lose that property and more, and that's just not right.
Years from now, this law will be looked back upon as one of the most shameful and disgraceful that this country has ever had on the book. (At least, until the DMCA v2.0 is passed and Richard Stallman's dystopian future really does come to pass.) In the meantime, I hope you rethink your ideas that just because something is illegal it is immoral, and that people deserve whatever comes to them for breaking laws that, frankly, need to be broken.
First they came for the filesharers, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a filesharer;
Then they came for the modchippers, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a modchipper; ...
Well, that's true, but I also think that part of the problem is people who create packages that don't understand how to use RPM. I can't tell you how many times I've seen installation instructions that include things like "use --force to bypass the version checking..."
Of course, then we get into how complicated RPM is for normal software developers to use. I mean, just because I write awesome nifty C++ code doesn't mean I'm an expert in RPM. (Nor should it, really.)
What we need is a way for installation configuration to be simplified both for end users and developers. I can't tell you how many times I've churned out some widget to do something and ended up spending more time tweaking installation packages than I did on writing the thing it was installing.
The only people stuck in RPM Hell are those too ignorant to learn how to use rpm or yum.
Because, of course, average computer users who just want to check e-mail, write a few letters now and then, and browse the web should be proficient at using a tool that, although created with the best of intentions, is still pretty onerous even to more experienced users in order to install and update software...
With attitudes like this, it's no wonder Microsoft is still the desktop leader. Say what you want, but except for DRM, at least when they see a usability problem in their software, instead of sitting back and talking about how ignorant the users are, hoping that someday maybe the users will be more motivated to learn something they shouldn't have to, they actually work to make their software work the way people expect it to.
As an extreme example, look at all the choices in Microsoft's lineup. I've said it before on here, but as "the computer guy" that my friends and family turn to for advice, I wanted to kill them when they had out two versions named Windows 2000 and Windows Millennium Edition. Sure, I know the difference, but I'm paid good money to know these things. I had friends who were actually considering "upgrading" from Windows 2000 to Windows ME until I told them what a hideous idea that was.
I'm all for choices for the educated public and competition to keep the desktop Linux market on their toes, but for typical non-gurus, I'm really hoping that one distribution makes it as the clear desktop distribution leader.
(And personally, I hope and think that it will be Ubuntu. It's a lot more intuitive to use than RedHat, IMHO, and I have a lot of respect for Mark Shuttleworth.)
In case anyone misses the reference, the invitation to "drink from the firehose" is referring to UHF, the 1989 movie by "Weird Al" Yankovic, in which Stanley Spadowski (played by a pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards) treats a kid who wins a game on his Captain Kangaroo-type show to drink from the firehose. The kid opens his mouth wide to the hose's nozzle, Stanly pulls the lever back, and the kid is promptly blown several feet off his seat.
Really funny stuff, including lots of television and movie genre parodies. If you like Weird Al's music and haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend you check it out. It's gained a cult following (obviously, with obscure references on Slashdot and all...) after having a disappointing theatrical release.
(But to be fair, that summer was particularly strong, with the release of Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, Back to the Future Part II, Ghostbusters II, The Little Mermaid... Any other year, and it probably would have been a moderate success. As you can tell, I wish Al would make another.)
It would be nice if people didn't post "print" links to articles. Lots of times this cuts out the advertising that the publisher has on the web page.
There's a reason people post "print" link to articles instead of to the ad-laden one, and it's the publishers' faults.
It's because for years now, we the consumers have been so abused with web publishers pushing ads on us that we immediately jump to defend ourselves against them, whether it's justified or not. If Internet publishers had been reasonable all these years and given us an ad or two with our content, it wouldn't be a problem, and I seriously doubt there would be such a backlash against ads nowadays.
But that's not what happened. Once a few publishers found out that they could make some money with ads, they figured they could make even more money with ads. So then we had pop-ups, pop-unders, animated bouncy ads, flash gizmos, interstitials, etc.
And as a direct result of that, now we have AdBlock plus and links to the print version of articles, and publishers are making less money from ads because of their collective greed and abuse. Unfortunately, sites such as the Star Tribune, which actually doesn't have many ads, have to suffer as well because of the sins of their industry. It may not be right, and it may not be fair, but it's just the mode we all necessarily have to operate in today.
For what it's worth, though, here is the ad-laden link to the article if you want give it some eyeballs. One good thing about it: If you follow it instead of the link to the print version, you get to see what this son of a bitch looks like.
Companies come and companies go. It's a fact of life. It doesn't make them going out of business a bubble bursting.
Dvorak talks about a "CD-ROM bubble." Now, I've been around for a while, and I thought I would remember any major deflation of a market such as what happened in the dot-com bubble, but what the hell is he talking about? Ditto pad computing, I must have missed all the hype about that. I do remember word processor "wars," so to speak, but even that is questionable. As far as I recall, WordPerfect led the market for years and years, then Microsoft Word came along and cleaned its clock. Yes, there were some minor players, but seriously, when they went out of business over the years, was it really a bubble bursting? Was there really a PC clone bubble that burst? I remember two-inch thick Computer Shopper magazines with dozens and dozens of company, and over the course of time they all were either bought up or folded, but was it really a bubble bursting?
The thing that made the dot-com bubble unique was that it affected damn near every corner of the industry, even industries that had hardly anything to do with dot-coms, and seemingly all at the same time, around 2000 to 2002. Most of Dvorak's other examples were companies coming and going as they always have and always will.
As for the future, it's hard to say. There will undoubtedly be market normalization for companies that are overpriced right now, but I seriously doubt that so many people are going to be affected all at once like they were in that 2000 to 2002 timeframe.
In other words, companies will come, and companies will go. It's not major crisis, and no reason to panic.
Uhhh, no. The schools don't suck. Really. There's a phrase that comes to mind. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
There are an awful lot of students these days who just plain don't care about school. They don't want to be there. When I was in school, I didn't want to be there, but my mom made me and helped me tremendously to not only succeed, but thrive academically. Unfortunately, there are also an awful lot of parents who don't give a rat's ass about their kids getting an education, so they don't make them go. They don't make them study. They let them barely skate by, or worse, cheat, just to get through it.
I mean, what are teachers supposed to do? Strap the kids down in their chairs, pry their eyes open Clockwork Orange-style, and physically make the kids learn? Even when teachers these days do go above and beyond the call of duty, they're likely to get phone calls from stupid parents complaining about them making their little Johnny late for football practice.
Also, I'm really tired of people posting anecdotes such as "one of the students drew a triangle" and acting as if that's the norm. Sure, cherry-picking such stories makes for entertaining television on Jay Leno's show, but contrary to beliefs that suit a particular agenda (the systematic destruction of a vital part of this country's infrastructure), the vast majority of kids who graduate from high school can competently read, write, and perform arithmetic. They may not be geniuses, which isn't surprising with the lousy job the parents in this country are doing, but I daresay that if you ask 1000 random new high school graduates to draw a rectangle, around 999 would sketch a nice four-sided box. And for every clever little anecdote you have, I can match you with one about a teacher who is great or a student who has excelled despite the odds being stacked against them.
You know what else I'm sick of? People pointing out one or two stupid people and acting like that is the typical student. Hardly any of my friends went to private school, and most of them are extremely intelligent. I admit, I tend to hang with the geeky smart crowd, but the fact is that public schools aren't churning out a bunch of dullards. They can only give students the educational opportunities that they're willing to take.
If you want to improve things for our kids, stop taking these useless digs at the institution that's trying to help them, and start holding accountable the people who are ultimately responsible for their education: the parents.
In other words, "Blah, blah, blah, American schools suck, they don't teach, and they're only about indoctrinating kids into needing government to take care of them." Congratulations, you're on the bandwagon.
What "dose of propaganda" are you referring to? Are you one of those religious nuts that refuses to believe in evolution? Or just a malcontent who things schools are sanctioned by the government in trying to turn all of our children into Socialists? Either way, it's no wonder kids are turning out badly with parents who have such disdain for our educational system.
Here's a thought: Public education was never intended to be the be-all and end-all of a child's education. You are supposed to be (gasp!) a partner in your child's education. If there's something you think your kid needs to learn that the school isn't teaching them, you are supposed to teach them. People who drop their kids off in the morning, pick them up in the afternoon, and expect all of their educational needs to be met with no fuss and no muss are idiots, and there are a depressing number of those people around now.
Are there problems with schools? Sure. Surprisingly enough, just like everything else in our world, I'll be the first to admit that they're not perfect. It's reasonable to expect that a few times in your child's educational career, they'll have a bad teacher. This isn't a failure of the entire educational system, it's called LIFE, and believe it or not, even that teaches children valuable lessons in dealing with people and situations they don't like. Guess what. Once they get out of school and into the work force, they'll probably have a few bad bosses, but oddly enough, I don't see people using that as an excuse to say that capitalism and the free market is a failure.
Or maybe you're one of these nuts who supports publicly-funded school vouchers to private schools. If you want to send your kid to a private school, more power to you. But don't you dare ask for my tax dollars to do so if you don't like the school that my tax dollars has already provided for your kid. I find it extremely stupid and hypocritical that the people yelling because they're having pay for public schools that they don't want to send their kids to are asking for other people to help pay to send their kid to a private school.
Or perhaps you just think we should privatize schools. I've got news for you. Until around 1870, schools were privatized. Why do we have public education now? Because it didn't work, at least not very well. The result was that rich people's kids were educated, poor people's kids were not. Our public education system was one of the key factors in our country becoming a superpower, and almost all modern nations have public education and have greatly benefited from an educated general public. As hard as it may be to believe, even rich people greatly benefit from an educated general populace.
As for the rote memorization and other teaching methods, I hate to burst your bubble, but some things are a pain in the ass to learn, and the best way to do it is to memorize it. If you think that memorization doesn't serve an educational function, please don't ever sing the alphabet song to your kid. That kind of thing is way too rigorous. Don't teach them to spell, either, I guess they'll just pick it up through, I dunno, sleeping with a book under their pillow and absorbing it through osmosis I guess.
Besides that, I don't know what kind of schools you went to, but by the time I was in ninth grade or so, my classes actually rather free of rote memorization. In English, I had to write essays about symbolism in poetry. In history, I had to write about the impact of some battle to some war. In government/economics, I had to create projects that demonstrated methods of advertising. Even in math, the most rote class there probably could be, I had to use a wide base of knowledge that spanned the previous decade of learning to solve difficult
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The problem, though is that after the brouhaha, people started deliberately using the "innocent" word in mean-spirited ways. I mean, come on, before all of this mess, no one ever used the word niggardly in normal conversation. One guy does it, misguided racial accusations fly, stalwart defense is mounted, and now, people use it all the time. It's not that the word deserves to be more common; they're doing it specifically for the purpose of its new racial connotations even though there really shouldn't be any.
Read this section about the controversy in Wikipedia for more insight, and a good idea of why using the word "niggardly," even if it's technically correct in the sentence you've made, can still be taken in a racial sense. And, of course, ask yourself if you're using it because it happens to be the best word for the sentence, or because it sounds so much like the other n-word.
What if it steps on what I need to do my job? I'm glad I don't work for you. You seem to be one of those types that thinks that just because something can be done, it needs to be done. Pushing down the default page doesn't protect the corporate computing assets, though I'm sure that's how our desktop goobers pitched it to management. It's just one more way to control things they have no business controlling, and it impacts our productivity.
They also do thinks like push down custom Start Menu structures. Microsoft Word, for example, isn't under All Programs or even Microsoft Office like it is on every other computer. No, it's buried under "Office Applications" (not to be confused with "Business Applications," a separate directory), along with things like Adobe Acrobat and such. They've also moved Windows Explorer (the filesystem explorer, not Internet Explorer) under Accessories. If I change this to something I'm more used to, it gets reverted next time I log in. Obviously, they've also deleted and blocked Solitaire and Minesweeper from running; it wouldn't do for people to take a break from hammering their stones. The company logo is pushed out to be everyone's desktop background.
My favorite, though, is that they've decided that everyone needs a little application called Kontiki. It's a peer-to-peer video distrubtion software system that turns all of our PCs into filesharing peers for corporate videos. You can't disable it and you can't delete the videos that it pushes down. (If you try to deleting a video, the software automatically re-downloads it from--you guessed it--your coworkers computers.) I detest days when corporate videos go out. My bandwidth is sucked dry by something I neither want nor use and have no control over.
Let's see... Need more stories? How about this. They recently pushed out a piece of software called Connected Backup. What happened is that our fileservers where people's home directories were started filling up. Instead of going out and buying more hard drives or implementing quotas, they've rolled out this backup software to everyone's computer that automatically backs up your machine once a day whether you want it to or not. Now, they're telling everyone that official company policy is to NOT store important documents on the fileservers, but to store them on your local PCs. Brilliant! Of course, network traffic has shot up dramatically, and the backup servers had to have a TON of storage added to them (the data still has to go somewhere), and instead of only things that people save on the fileservers being backed up, all of their personal shit is, too.
Every day, my computer runs a Connected backup, a virus scan, a vulnerability scan, a document retention scan, a software installation scan, Notes database replication, and my Run key in the registry has around 50 entries in it that our desktop group has loaded in, and it takes around two minutes for all of the group policies and login scripts to run when I log in. Thanks to our desktop group, literally 30 minutes of my day is wasted waiting for all of that shit to run.
I could go on with the stupidity if you really want me to. You're right about one thing; they've definitely protected the corporate computing assets. People hate using their computers so much now that a lot of people I know have gone back to just leaving it on all the time for doing their timesheets, and conduct their normal business using such old school methods such as the telephone and pencil and paper. As for me, I actually do some of my work at home using my own computing resources, and the only reason I can tolerate using my work computer for anything is because I know how to get around most of the shit they try to push down on us.
Please, by all means, you and Mr. Scott change the world. If it takes an irrational optimist and a guy who makes infomercials and thinks that God literally made him rich to change how big companies have done things for decades, then so be it.
Meanwhile, I'm going to keep trying this "reality" strategy that seems to work pretty well for me. I'm sorry that I have a hard time believing that pitching Total Gyms and Deal-A-Meals and reading the Bible will get my company to start using open source software, but hey, good luck to you with that.
For what it's worth, I got the joke. :-)
No, they specifically blocked firefox.exe. It wasn't part of a regular expression or policy to keep people from running their own programs. They made a deliberate and conscious choice to not only standardize on Internet Explorer as the Official Company Browser(TM), but to try to prevent anything else from even working.
It's not the only time they've done something lame-ass like that. For example, they've also created an Active Directory policy to push down the corporate intranet page as your home page. So if you're like me and prefer something like Google as your home page, too damn bad, it resets it next time you log in. I had to go in and deny permission to that registry key for Administrators to keep that from happening. (Yes, I know, they can reset the permissions on the key if they figure out what I've done, but they're not that motivated, and the point was to keep the automatic update from happening, which this does successfully.)
In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, "Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-boggingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."
The problem isn't that there isn't anyone else out there. With so many billions of stars and planets, the odds that there are other intelligent beings out there are astronomically large. (Pun slightly intended.) The problem is that the distances required to travel to reach them and also astronomically large, and the odds that there is life on any given planet are infinitesimally small.
I always put this thought experiment before people: If you had a spaceship that could instantly take you to anywhere in the universe, where would you go?
Sure, you'd probably drop by a few nebulae and stars and even planets, but after you've seen a few, where to then? You could travel to other planets for lifetimes and still not run across intelligent life on other planets. It's not that truly interesting things aren't out there, it's just that the universe isn't very conducive to producing life-bearing planets. Sure, with so vastly many planets, it will happen (and obviously has), but finding life out there is like finding a needle in a haystack, and we're just now starting to be able to see the haystack.
Further complicating matters is that we don't have spaceships that can instantly take us anywhere in the universe, and according to the laws of physics as we know them, it's likely that other intelligent beings don't either. Maybe they have travelled lifetimes and they just haven't run across us yet.
So be patient, my fellow humans, it may take a few million (or even billion) more years. After all, it's more than just a trip down the road to the chemist, and something that cool will probably be worth the wait.
I play City of Heroes, and for some weird reason, it blocks the word "count." I think it was a typo when someone was entering words to block into the filter. It was just kind of funny, because I discovered it when I told someone, "Don't worry, you can count on me!" and it came out as "Don't worry, you can <bleep!> on me!" They had no idea what I was talking about, and it took a few entertaining minutes to hash out what was going on.
In a big company, you don't have a choice. When it comes to FUD versus real information, FUD will always win, no matter what. It's how big companies work. They don't ask, "How much could this make our company better" to make decisions, they ask, "How much could it cost me if it screws up?" Why do you think FUD is such an essential strategy in Microsoft's marketing campaign?
So what I'm saying is that the choice comes down to either fighting fire with fire or being stuck using .NET software. I hate that big companies work that way, but that's what where we are. (Of course, you can try to change your corporate culture, but that will likely end up with you being miserable, or worse, fired.) I'm not being facetious when I say that each person out there will have to make their own choice as to how badly they want something that works and what they can live with themselves for doing.
From an article that is linked to from this one:
Or for that matter, http: //tinyurl.com/z35a5.
Kind of reminds me of our software filter where I work. They blocked firefox.exe from running. My solution? I renamed the file to iexplore.exe. Worked like a charm.
It's also probably worth noting that the messages are blocked on the server, not the client. That means that it will block the message whether you're using the MSN client, Pidgin, or any other client to access MSN.
My advice: Get a frickin' Google mail account already and use Google Talk instead.
You're so naive.
I don't know how many times I've said this, and people still don't get it. When deciding whether a law is good or bad, you should always assume that the worst scum of the earth are going to be exploiting it for their own evil agendas, and then decide if you can live with its consequences.
Let's see what the Republican who defended the law says about it:
So everything--including eavesdropping on domestic calls--is fair game if there is a reason to suspect that the American is a threat. Who gets to decide if the American is a threat? Why, the President and Attorney General, of course! And who do they have to tell? No one! And they have to be a threat of committing some sort of terrorist act, right? Of course not, they can be deemed a threat for any ol' reason they damned well please! "Wow, that person may get me voted out of office. I deem them a threat to national security." Don't think it could happen? You're not thinking hard enough, and you're still not assuming that the worst scum of the earth are in charge.
If you can't see the potential for abuse of this law, then you're beyond naive, you're an idiot. And if you think that George Bush would never abuse it in this way because he's such a nice man who is looking out for our safety, then imagine it in the hands of Hillary Clinton, because you're also giving it to whoever takes office after Bush, and whoever takes office after that, and whoever takes office after that. Do you trust whoever will be president in 20 years, even though you have no freakin' clue who that will be?
At the risk of going all Godwin in this thread, imagine that 20 years from now, a new Adolph Hitler manages to win the election. Do you trust him not to abuse the law too? Don't ever ask if you think the people in charge now will abuse the law, ask if Adolph Hitler would. Government is supposed to be designed in such a way that if a branch of government does become corrupted by a Hitler-like person, we'd be okay in the end because the other two branches would compensate for it with their checks and balances. Laws like this are specifically designed, though, to take those checks and balances away from other branches and concentrate the power in one branch (in this case, the executive branch). No matter how much you think it will only be used with good intentions, it will be abused at some point.
By passing this bill, Congress has failed us miserably yet again, and the biggest reason why is because of naive little Bush cheerleaders who are too stupid to know how government works.
Don't be fooled by management's official reasons why they don't go with Linux or other open source software. It really just boils down to FUD.
There's still a prevalent image of Linux and other open source software out there as just hobbyist software. The reason I hear most often cited for not considering open source software at my company is, "There's no one to hold accountable if it breaks." Even when I point out companies that offer paid support--people to be held accountable for making sure the software works--they still chant the "hold accountable" mantra. Those companies aren't big enough, they may go out of business any minute now, blah blah blah.
It's really disgusting sometimes. I've seen software come into our environment that I know for a fact and can demonstrate is crap, and offered alternatives for it. I'm told, "That's all fine and good, but when the software we're going to use breaks, we'll have someone to sue over it." Of course, that doesn't really happen, we always just end up suffering for several years until the next version comes out or some other closed-source competitor comes in and convinces management that they're the way to go instead. Having people to "hold accountable" (which they never are) is more important to my company than having something that actually works.
I don't know what to suggest. Another trait of large companies is that they won't do something until everyone else in the world is doing it. Once a company reaches a certain size, there's no longer a culture of trying new things and trying to separate yourself from the competition; it becomes an unrelenting strive for mediocrity. Right now, everyone else is moving to .NET, so that's probably where you'll end up, regardless of what is best for your company. About the only chance you have is to put together a pretty Powerpoint presentation showing that switching to .NET will cost a billion dollars. Make costs up if you have to. The problem is that if you show it will only cost a million, they'll still do it anyway just to be on that magical .NET bandwagon, and you'll need a ridiculously large cost to justify not doing so.
Actually, I am pretty fucking special, but that's beside the point.
They could do all of the surveys they want and the speed limit still won't be changed. Do you know why?
Two reasons. The main one is that speeding tickets generate much-needed revenue to the city. Whenever the city gets into a crunch, they can and do get police officers to man the speed traps more and rake in what they decide they need.
The other reason is because the maximum speed limit isn't set according to what the maximum safe driving speed is. It's set according to Georgia State Code 40-6-181. I could have studies showing that the safest driving speed on the interstate is a hundred miles per hour, and it wouldn't make a damned bit of difference.
And just for good measure, check out what happened when some students got together and decided that they would force people to obey the speed limit on Atlanta's Interstate 285 for a while one day. (Hint: A lot of very angry drivers, and even an accident when some genius decided to pass their line of cars on the right shoulder.)
The law is stupid and dangerous, it's not going to change, and therefore I will choose not to obey it. I'm sorry you have such a problem with that. (But not really.)
First of all, calculating braking distances isn't a "little math and physics." You say that as if any sixth grader should be able to churn out the numbers without any problem. It actually requires calculus and mechanics to figure out, something that even most smart people don't really know or care about. (But since I spent over two years as a physics major in college and took mechanics and second-year calculus my first quarter--and got A's in both--I might know a little about it.)
Second of all, I guess that means that technically, since the stopping distance-to-velocity equation holds even for very small values of velocity, we should really all just stay home. Anything else is just grossly unsafe.
Third of all, traffic fatalities have actually be steadily decreasing per miles traveled. I know, it's an inconvenient little statistic, given all those maniacs out there like me who apparently don't give a rat's ass about safety.
Fourth of all, if you're going to present yourself as some sort of authority on math and physics, at least know what the hell you're talking about. Increasing your speed doesn't give diminishing returns with regards to travel time. If car A's average speed is exactly twice what car B's is, car A will arrive at its destination in exactly half the time as car B, period. Obviously, on surface streets, there's a practical limit as to how fast you can drive, but if you're able to increase your speed over a distance by x times, you will reduce your time to cover that distance by exactly a factor of x, no diminishing returns.
Also, the increase in stopping distance isn't an "expotentional" increase. It's not even an exponential increase. If it were, the stopping distance would vary as some constant to the power of the velocity. It doesn't. It varies as the square of velocity, which is a quadratic increase, not exponential.
But don't let that from keeping you from driving 55 miles per hour and feeling good about yourself. Around here, people who do that aren't making the roads safe, they're a nuisance, a road hazard that needs to take the bus instead (which, incidentally, also drives faster than 55) so that normal people can actually get where they're going.
You, sir, are an ass. (And an anonymous one at that, the best kind.) That's what you get for thinking you know me. I don't have any illegal games. Zip, zero, zilch. If any official-type agencies want to come inspect my computers, they could do so to their heart's content and I would be free and clear because there's simply nothing there. Of course, I would do everything in my power to defend the right to not have my equipment searched, even though I have absolutely nothing to hide, and once they were done, they'd be facing a very costly lawsuit for doing so.
I don't think the law is "silly," I think it's extremely destructive. Not because I can't copy games, but because it tells me what I can and cannot do with my own property, a dangerous precedent with a repugnant slippery slope. My personal freedoms trump the profit-making capability of game developers and publishers. If that means that you or someone else can't make money because of my fair use rights and my right to do what I please with my property as long as it doesn't interfere with other people's rights, too damn bad. Find something else to do in which you can make money without destroying other people's freedoms.
As for your comments about speeding, they just go to show how much of an idiot you are. If you think that driving faster than the speed limit is not giving a fuck about people who get killed by speeding motorists, then I guess that 99.99% of all of the people in this country (including every cop I've ever seen on the interstate) doesn't give a fuck about road safety. Or maybe the simpler explanation--you're an idiot--is right instead. Believe what you want; given your assinine response, I don't really care about your opinions.
Do you ever speed? I mean, really, when everyone else is going 65 to 70 (or higher) miles per hour, are you really going to diligently only go 55?
Do you have any idea what the possible penalties for speeding are? I mean, sure, most people who get caught by the police get a slap-on-the-wrist fine, but do you know what you could face for speeding? Check your state laws; in involves losing your license to drive, facing hefty penalties, and jail time. If you've gotten speeding tickets before, that means that you're a repeat offender and they can really throw the book at you.
Yet still, I'll bet that when you get on the interstate, you go 70 right along with the rest of the cars. By your logic, that means that if a police officer pulls you over and arrests you, throws you in jail for a few months, you lose your license to drive, and have to pay thousands of dollars in fines, even though that may not be the normal punishment that fits the dinkiness of your crime, hey, you're not exactly an innocent victim, and your life sucking from now on is justified, since after all, you were caught breaking the law.
As far as I can tell, this guy was guilty of breaking a law that is just as silly as the one that says I'm supposed to drive 55 miles per hour on a straight road that is 10 lanes wide (I live in Atlanta, we really have interstates 10 lanes wide in 55 mile per hour zones), even if it's a lazy Sunday afternoon with perfect visibility and very low traffic volume.
I don't see anything in the article that says he was selling the modded boxes. I don't see anything that says he was using the modchips to steal games illegally. I don't see anything that says he was using modchips to distribute illegal copies of games. If he's guilty of some or all of those things, then maybe he does deserve a stiff penalty, but that should only happen after he's tried and convicted in court, after that little annoyance called due process runs its course. Right now, all I'm seeing is that he violated the DMCA, which says that regardless of your intent, you do not have the right to modify hardware that you purchased and own to suit your own needs. It says that corporations have the right to tell you what you can do with your own property. It says that if you're suspected of modifying your own property, regardless of intent and without due process, you will lose that property and more, and that's just not right.
Years from now, this law will be looked back upon as one of the most shameful and disgraceful that this country has ever had on the book. (At least, until the DMCA v2.0 is passed and Richard Stallman's dystopian future really does come to pass.) In the meantime, I hope you rethink your ideas that just because something is illegal it is immoral, and that people deserve whatever comes to them for breaking laws that, frankly, need to be broken.
First they came for the filesharers, and I did not speak out--
...
because I was not a filesharer;
Then they came for the modchippers, and I did not speak out--
because I was not a modchipper;
(I think you can guess the rest.)
Well, that's true, but I also think that part of the problem is people who create packages that don't understand how to use RPM. I can't tell you how many times I've seen installation instructions that include things like "use --force to bypass the version checking..."
Of course, then we get into how complicated RPM is for normal software developers to use. I mean, just because I write awesome nifty C++ code doesn't mean I'm an expert in RPM. (Nor should it, really.)
What we need is a way for installation configuration to be simplified both for end users and developers. I can't tell you how many times I've churned out some widget to do something and ended up spending more time tweaking installation packages than I did on writing the thing it was installing.
Because, of course, average computer users who just want to check e-mail, write a few letters now and then, and browse the web should be proficient at using a tool that, although created with the best of intentions, is still pretty onerous even to more experienced users in order to install and update software...
With attitudes like this, it's no wonder Microsoft is still the desktop leader. Say what you want, but except for DRM, at least when they see a usability problem in their software, instead of sitting back and talking about how ignorant the users are, hoping that someday maybe the users will be more motivated to learn something they shouldn't have to, they actually work to make their software work the way people expect it to.
This isn't necessarily true.
As an extreme example, look at all the choices in Microsoft's lineup. I've said it before on here, but as "the computer guy" that my friends and family turn to for advice, I wanted to kill them when they had out two versions named Windows 2000 and Windows Millennium Edition. Sure, I know the difference, but I'm paid good money to know these things. I had friends who were actually considering "upgrading" from Windows 2000 to Windows ME until I told them what a hideous idea that was.
I'm all for choices for the educated public and competition to keep the desktop Linux market on their toes, but for typical non-gurus, I'm really hoping that one distribution makes it as the clear desktop distribution leader.
(And personally, I hope and think that it will be Ubuntu. It's a lot more intuitive to use than RedHat, IMHO, and I have a lot of respect for Mark Shuttleworth.)
In case anyone misses the reference, the invitation to "drink from the firehose" is referring to UHF, the 1989 movie by "Weird Al" Yankovic, in which Stanley Spadowski (played by a pre-Seinfeld Michael Richards) treats a kid who wins a game on his Captain Kangaroo-type show to drink from the firehose. The kid opens his mouth wide to the hose's nozzle, Stanly pulls the lever back, and the kid is promptly blown several feet off his seat.
Really funny stuff, including lots of television and movie genre parodies. If you like Weird Al's music and haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend you check it out. It's gained a cult following (obviously, with obscure references on Slashdot and all...) after having a disappointing theatrical release.
(But to be fair, that summer was particularly strong, with the release of Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2, Back to the Future Part II, Ghostbusters II, The Little Mermaid... Any other year, and it probably would have been a moderate success. As you can tell, I wish Al would make another.)
There's a reason people post "print" link to articles instead of to the ad-laden one, and it's the publishers' faults.
It's because for years now, we the consumers have been so abused with web publishers pushing ads on us that we immediately jump to defend ourselves against them, whether it's justified or not. If Internet publishers had been reasonable all these years and given us an ad or two with our content, it wouldn't be a problem, and I seriously doubt there would be such a backlash against ads nowadays.
But that's not what happened. Once a few publishers found out that they could make some money with ads, they figured they could make even more money with ads. So then we had pop-ups, pop-unders, animated bouncy ads, flash gizmos, interstitials, etc.
And as a direct result of that, now we have AdBlock plus and links to the print version of articles, and publishers are making less money from ads because of their collective greed and abuse. Unfortunately, sites such as the Star Tribune, which actually doesn't have many ads, have to suffer as well because of the sins of their industry. It may not be right, and it may not be fair, but it's just the mode we all necessarily have to operate in today.
For what it's worth, though, here is the ad-laden link to the article if you want give it some eyeballs. One good thing about it: If you follow it instead of the link to the print version, you get to see what this son of a bitch looks like.
Companies come and companies go. It's a fact of life. It doesn't make them going out of business a bubble bursting.
Dvorak talks about a "CD-ROM bubble." Now, I've been around for a while, and I thought I would remember any major deflation of a market such as what happened in the dot-com bubble, but what the hell is he talking about? Ditto pad computing, I must have missed all the hype about that. I do remember word processor "wars," so to speak, but even that is questionable. As far as I recall, WordPerfect led the market for years and years, then Microsoft Word came along and cleaned its clock. Yes, there were some minor players, but seriously, when they went out of business over the years, was it really a bubble bursting? Was there really a PC clone bubble that burst? I remember two-inch thick Computer Shopper magazines with dozens and dozens of company, and over the course of time they all were either bought up or folded, but was it really a bubble bursting?
The thing that made the dot-com bubble unique was that it affected damn near every corner of the industry, even industries that had hardly anything to do with dot-coms, and seemingly all at the same time, around 2000 to 2002. Most of Dvorak's other examples were companies coming and going as they always have and always will.
As for the future, it's hard to say. There will undoubtedly be market normalization for companies that are overpriced right now, but I seriously doubt that so many people are going to be affected all at once like they were in that 2000 to 2002 timeframe.
In other words, companies will come, and companies will go. It's not major crisis, and no reason to panic.
Why make it so hard? Just hook the dynamo up to the turnstiles instead.
Because of the features of iTunes that aren't in those players.
Specifically, the ability to purchase music and shows from ITMS, and its seamless integration with the Apple TV
Uhhh, no. The schools don't suck. Really. There's a phrase that comes to mind. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
There are an awful lot of students these days who just plain don't care about school. They don't want to be there. When I was in school, I didn't want to be there, but my mom made me and helped me tremendously to not only succeed, but thrive academically. Unfortunately, there are also an awful lot of parents who don't give a rat's ass about their kids getting an education, so they don't make them go. They don't make them study. They let them barely skate by, or worse, cheat, just to get through it.
I mean, what are teachers supposed to do? Strap the kids down in their chairs, pry their eyes open Clockwork Orange-style, and physically make the kids learn? Even when teachers these days do go above and beyond the call of duty, they're likely to get phone calls from stupid parents complaining about them making their little Johnny late for football practice.
Also, I'm really tired of people posting anecdotes such as "one of the students drew a triangle" and acting as if that's the norm. Sure, cherry-picking such stories makes for entertaining television on Jay Leno's show, but contrary to beliefs that suit a particular agenda (the systematic destruction of a vital part of this country's infrastructure), the vast majority of kids who graduate from high school can competently read, write, and perform arithmetic. They may not be geniuses, which isn't surprising with the lousy job the parents in this country are doing, but I daresay that if you ask 1000 random new high school graduates to draw a rectangle, around 999 would sketch a nice four-sided box. And for every clever little anecdote you have, I can match you with one about a teacher who is great or a student who has excelled despite the odds being stacked against them.
You know what else I'm sick of? People pointing out one or two stupid people and acting like that is the typical student. Hardly any of my friends went to private school, and most of them are extremely intelligent. I admit, I tend to hang with the geeky smart crowd, but the fact is that public schools aren't churning out a bunch of dullards. They can only give students the educational opportunities that they're willing to take.
If you want to improve things for our kids, stop taking these useless digs at the institution that's trying to help them, and start holding accountable the people who are ultimately responsible for their education: the parents.
In other words, "Blah, blah, blah, American schools suck, they don't teach, and they're only about indoctrinating kids into needing government to take care of them." Congratulations, you're on the bandwagon.
What "dose of propaganda" are you referring to? Are you one of those religious nuts that refuses to believe in evolution? Or just a malcontent who things schools are sanctioned by the government in trying to turn all of our children into Socialists? Either way, it's no wonder kids are turning out badly with parents who have such disdain for our educational system.
Here's a thought: Public education was never intended to be the be-all and end-all of a child's education. You are supposed to be (gasp!) a partner in your child's education. If there's something you think your kid needs to learn that the school isn't teaching them, you are supposed to teach them. People who drop their kids off in the morning, pick them up in the afternoon, and expect all of their educational needs to be met with no fuss and no muss are idiots, and there are a depressing number of those people around now.
Are there problems with schools? Sure. Surprisingly enough, just like everything else in our world, I'll be the first to admit that they're not perfect. It's reasonable to expect that a few times in your child's educational career, they'll have a bad teacher. This isn't a failure of the entire educational system, it's called LIFE, and believe it or not, even that teaches children valuable lessons in dealing with people and situations they don't like. Guess what. Once they get out of school and into the work force, they'll probably have a few bad bosses, but oddly enough, I don't see people using that as an excuse to say that capitalism and the free market is a failure.
Or maybe you're one of these nuts who supports publicly-funded school vouchers to private schools. If you want to send your kid to a private school, more power to you. But don't you dare ask for my tax dollars to do so if you don't like the school that my tax dollars has already provided for your kid. I find it extremely stupid and hypocritical that the people yelling because they're having pay for public schools that they don't want to send their kids to are asking for other people to help pay to send their kid to a private school.
Or perhaps you just think we should privatize schools. I've got news for you. Until around 1870, schools were privatized. Why do we have public education now? Because it didn't work, at least not very well. The result was that rich people's kids were educated, poor people's kids were not. Our public education system was one of the key factors in our country becoming a superpower, and almost all modern nations have public education and have greatly benefited from an educated general public. As hard as it may be to believe, even rich people greatly benefit from an educated general populace.
As for the rote memorization and other teaching methods, I hate to burst your bubble, but some things are a pain in the ass to learn, and the best way to do it is to memorize it. If you think that memorization doesn't serve an educational function, please don't ever sing the alphabet song to your kid. That kind of thing is way too rigorous. Don't teach them to spell, either, I guess they'll just pick it up through, I dunno, sleeping with a book under their pillow and absorbing it through osmosis I guess.
Besides that, I don't know what kind of schools you went to, but by the time I was in ninth grade or so, my classes actually rather free of rote memorization. In English, I had to write essays about symbolism in poetry. In history, I had to write about the impact of some battle to some war. In government/economics, I had to create projects that demonstrated methods of advertising. Even in math, the most rote class there probably could be, I had to use a wide base of knowledge that spanned the previous decade of learning to solve difficult