All it requires is enough supermarket chemicals to make an explosive charge, and incendiary charge, and a small delay fuse. That plus a bag of flour correctly applied turns the entire room into a big diesel engine for a fraction of a second, and then widespread confetti.
The point is, levelling the school and everything for a block around it is easy, and can be done with stuff that's difficult to impossible to ban and no special equipment. Getting a gun is hard. The risk won't go away if you ban guns.
Another point is, the person most likely to know how to level the school is wearing a collared shirt with pocket protector, not a trench-coat printed with a drunk Euro symbol. The risk won't go away if you terrorise minority groups, nor if you protect them.
In order to fix the problem, you must fix the people. You won't fix the people with more indoctrination, regimentation and random harassment. You'll fix the people by not crushing their individuality, creativity, authority and responsibility; by giving them less time in schools, not more; by letting the parents back into their lives instead of shutting them out as much as possible.
``Aeroflot achieves ultimate in efficiency, eliminates passengers and cargo from flights''
``It['s] easy to estimate sheep numbers, simple multiple human population by five.''
Since most of the humanoid population of New Zealand seems to be living in Australia now, perhaps that sheep-count multiplication factor needs a bit of tweaking?
A round of applause for the, uh, piro maniac(?)
on
Sean In The Middle
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· Score: 2
Good post. Possibly even great post. Not earth-shaking, but right on the money.
Almost makes me wish I was moderating, but I seem to attract a lot of bad karma. Something to do with not being politically correct, I think...
Still I deserved it as I am a slut and now my biggest turn on is being treated this way.
Good punchline. Pity that practically none of the people who really need to read it would ever clock on to SlashDot. At least, not until they don't need to read it any more...
OT: Religion is a process, Evolution is a religion
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Sean In The Middle
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Evolution is not a religion, it's a process.
Religion is a process; it's a process of exercising a belief; it's a belief in the process of life, possibly also afterlife and/or beforelife (although not so in the case of Atheism). Humanism, a subset of Atheism, is a belief in your own life process.
OT: moral absolutes reductio ad stupidium
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Sean In The Middle
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· Score: 2
Spot the non-sequitur:
Under a purely atheistic framework, it is indeed true that the concept of moral absolutes goes out the window, but that's about the only thing you got right.
versus
the philosophy and religion of Atheism and Evolution says that murder, theft, rape, etc. are okay
They certainly do not say they are ok.
Really? Then why is it bad/naughty/wicked to murder a six-month-old child, but OK to murder that exact same child kicking and struggling eight months earlier?
You can't have your moral cake AND eat it too, Brad.
That holds just as well for religion, by the way. One major religion has been more or less directly responsible for 60 million definitely documented deaths, possibly an order of magnitude more and almost certainly more than double, PLUS more deaths from starting both world wars (lending a big hand to the Axis in the second), the American Civil War and sundry others.
And if you think that the licence for wholesale butchery on ``moral'' grounds is an exclusive possession of conventional religion, consider the Reign of Terror in France, and nearly a century of Atheistic Communism in the USSR. (It's 2AM in Stalingrad: ``Knock-knock.'' ``Who's there?'' ``You have to ask?'').
Now, consider murdering children post-partum. It happens right now in China to lots of baby girls, a consequence of their one-child policy. And it's being proposed as a legitimate activity in the USA by an Atheist group. Meanwhile, euthanasia is eating into our brains trust at the other end of the age spectrum. How long until it meets in the middle?
Moral relativism at its best. ``Thou shalt not kill,'' a moral absolute, is much safer.
Mentally handicapped teenagers can teach @ home
on
Sean In The Middle
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· Score: 2
I simply don't believe that the majority of people are qualified to be effective home teachers.
Actually, several studies have show that teaching qualifications impair your effectiveness as a home educator.
One example had mentally handicapped teenagers educating their children at home and producing noticeably better results than State schools.
Bullying is a constant of all school systems in the world, it is something you've got to acknowledge. Two kids thrown together will first fight, then maybe develop a friendship.
No.
Two kids who have either learned to first-hand at school or been pre-conditioned by others (e.g. siblings who have learned as above) will. Elsewhere, this is not a given. In home education, for example, bullying depends on the parents' attitudes and actions.
My number 1 son's interaction with a family of 3 boys (his cousins) is instructive: there is abrasion between he and the school-age oldest, and with the next one down, but not with the youngest - the oldest was de-schooled recently, and the second didn't go to kindergarten like the oldest, so the youngest isn't getting anything like the same amount hand-me-down attitude erosion that the middle child did.
I would suspect the regimented environment of intensifying the aberrant reactions, on top of this.
Yes, it most definitely solves it for Sean
on
Sean In The Middle
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· Score: 2
Does Sean's father really believe that putting him in home school will solve the greater problem.
For Sean, it does. Or at least, it limits the problem to occasions when he meets his tormentors on the street. And of course, his home curriculum could include assorted martial arts...
Examples of ``nonsense'' in curriculum
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Sean In The Middle
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· Score: 2
How To Line Up Neatly
How To Wait Without Causing Too Much Mayhem
How To Vegetate While Looking Busy
How To Avoid Asking the Wrong Kinds of Question
How To Relate To Others Your Own Age Only In A Regimented Situation
Rigid Class Structures And How To Fit Into Them
Politics Of The Fist
Selective Ostracism As A Political Tool
How Brawn Can Substitute For Brains In The Blackboard Jungle
How To BrownNose Without Being Seen To Do So
The System Trumps The Content
The Bell Is More Important Than My Work
Limits To Mental Growth
Limits To Ambition
Limits To Creativity
How To Accumulate Bad Habits From Others
How Many Children Can We Hang Off One Teacher?
Bulk Babysitting - Pay Nothing Now (But Through Your Nose In Taxes Later)
HS kids do better than State schooled - but...
on
Sean In The Middle
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Every home schooled person I've come across (warning! sample size of one!) has had problems interacting with people.
All of the independent tests done so far show HS kids either interacting better, or being indistinguishable from their State schooled peers - unless you count beating up other children as ``interacting'', which I don't.
The one exception that I personally know of was a Mormon boy, and the social difficulties were obviously associated with his parents' interpretation of LDS doctrine (many apparently plain English words mean different (usually odd) things in LDS land) in their everyday life.
All of the other HS kinder I know (maybe 30 or so) are more eager to converse, ask more intelligent questions, and are more likely to constructively use the answers on the spot than ``your average'' child.
You're gravel in their bearings, dude!
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Sean In The Middle
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I was kicked out of Computer Science for what i knew, they said i had the potential to hack and therefore a threat
Yah, but the real reason is: you're a threat to the status quo. School exists to deliver courses. Actually enjoying the course subject and running ahead of the messenger breaks the lock-step rhythm of the class progression, and also upsets the nice information heirarchy of experts->eddept->headmaster->teachers->students.
Welcome to the place where we're all equal, and every else gets booted out (well, maybe some are more equal than others). The school chorussed ``we're all individuals'' and your response was ``I'm not!'' (-: Good upon ya:-)
You can't fix school: sadly, it isn't broken.
on
Sean In The Middle
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· Score: 2
you better haul ass into the school board meetings, PTA, and run for a board position
chances_of_getting_anywhere = hell.snowball;
Jumping up and down in PTA won't help either, not that anyone with a clue would stand a chance of getting on the board.
The big reason is school is doing what it's designed to do - it's working - so trying to fix it is futile. Sean's just plain lucky that he's escaped the system - sorta - and will be miles better off being home educated, as long as his parents don't try to turn their home into a replica of school.
Upload them to Hotmail, so Microsoft's ownership of them becomes official? Translate them to compressed PostScript and offend UDDI's sense of proprietaryness? Post ``improved'' copies that lead people to laugh at UDDI (even harder)? Upload over the top of them? This is an IIS 4 webserver; and if IBM were seriously involved, wouldn't it be WebSphere instead?
Because they can? It's not Java or CORBA.
on
Why UDDI Will Work
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· Score: 2
Why oh why is something being pushed by M$ on a.org?
I think ``using their preferred applications'' (from the front page) is a key phrase, that and ``cross platform programming features are addressed by adopting early versions of the proposed Simple Object Access ProtocoL (SOAP) messaging specifications'' (from the FAQ) heavily pushed by Microsoft. Microsoft would like you to prefer their applications over everyone else's, and in particular anything that's not Java/CORBA.
Let's see... ``The UDDI project is not being "run" by any one company. Nor is it a standards body or a new company. Rather, UDDI is currently being guided by a group of industry leaders'' - that sounds familiar. If the past is any guide, this will be Microsoft spearheading a hyper-SMB protocol and half-pretending that it's an open standard created by ``industry bodies.''
``The UDDI Business Registry is open to all businesses and industry bodies worldwide'' - forever? Or will, say, an MSN/Passport membership number eventually be necessary? First introduced to make things easier, of course...
The companies in their ``communities'' page have a few... issues. There are no links from this page to these members of the supposed community. VirtualWorkz don't appear on search engines. MetalSpectrum have an Ariba rep on their board. If AgentWareSystems are the correct ``agentware'' (I'm having trouble finding an agentware with a matching logo), they list IBM (also part of UDDI) as a partner. And so on. How you say, ``Astroturf Movement?''
``I know who that is... It's the wolf! It's the wolf!!'' -- Lambsie
why should I worry if I've done nothing wrong? They aren't using this information to arrest innocent people.
They (DEA) are using this information to arrest innocent people and confiscate their assets even if they're never charged. The ratio of asset-seizures to criminals is, I gather, about 4:1.
Yes, we may be protected from the odd drug dealer, but who protects us from the DEA?
would Amtrak be doing this if they weren't receiving said cut?
Probably yes, since they're Gummint supported. However, the idea of (1) siezing everything in sight that might be connected with a possible crime; and worse yet (2) rewarding supposed whistle-blowers with a cut of the action is seriously, seriously stupid in the long term.
Consider Amtrak Wars: the radiation was inside the road-trains and facilities which supposedly protected the Federation crews; in this case the ``radiation'' is social poison, and it's inside the system which supposedly protects us.
All police-state approaches like this make several large, stupid assumptions - beginning with the classic pair ``our enforcers are honest and unbiassed'' and ``our methods are effective in bringing about our public aims (we know best).''
But the really big blunder is ``the ends justify the means.'' They don't. The means corrupt the ends.
Sure diamonds may have higher efficiency, but what they should also worry about is Watts/mass, not just efficiency. As long as W/m of GaAs is higher, they should think hard before switching.
Short-term, yes. Lunar/asteroid-mined materials would be a different matter - since lofting them is much easier - and if you were going the powersat/habitat route, they could be arranged to emerge almost as a by-broduct of other refining (the slag/vapour from metals-refining would be relatively high-carbon).
I thought spending on space projects was going down!
A lot depends on how you interpret those last two words.
Our culture is supposedly dominated in areas like science by people who say that they believe in evolution. The next obvious step would be space (although the previous atomic age doesn't seem to have got very far in that direction). Without a program like this, Dr Malthus wins, albeit later than he figured, and everyone else loses (most of us die without any help from a rapacious industry, militant eco-nuts, Chernobyl or the Inquisition). Yet funding for space-oriented development is slowly, steadily drying up.
Expression recognition software, combined with the top window's context, may someday post these for you. Aren't you glad?
Stop me if I missed anything, but Microsoft are proposing to monitor everything down to your very facial expressions, leaving George Orwell not so much awed as flabbergasted by the possibilities, and they're going to use your own hardware to do this, and it's all going through Microsoft's own centralised database, and, gee, people used to be worried about governments monitoring boring stuff like their emails, and the possibility of crackers getting copies...
They're going to know more about how you think and feel than you do yourself. Microsoft?
Think about this... the multi-billion-dollar company who can't even protect their own website against a script kiddie... the people who brought you Internet ``where did your data go today'' Explorer and the beloved ``I'm feeling lucky - let's run this'' Outlook... and I'm supposed to trust them with pictures of me, an intimate knowledge of my very thought patterns, every key I hit, every word I read?
Think about this... look interested in an image - or a competitor's product, Microsoft knows it; be angered or pleased by something, Microsoft knows it; do or say something technically illegal or embarrassing, Microsoft knows it; recieve unexpected cash income, Microsoft knows it; fart, and the camera/mike will forward your muscle patterns and noise to Microsoft; hop into the hammock with your SO and you'd better have remembered to switch off the pickups - and... will they really be off...?
You'd have to be a nutter. A goldfish in a shopping mall would have more privacy. Millions of JenniCams plus the ability to fastforward to the juicy bits. If you happen to be pretty, expect to have a lot of hopefully secret admirers. If your personal beliefs aren't mainstream, maybe they soon will be. ``And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.'' - Revelation 13:16-18 - I wonder if the Passport ID has 666 coded into it somewhere? )-:
Co$ material, DeCSS, Halloween Letters, anything else dangerous, feel free to send it this hotmail account and it'll be sent to itself just to be sure. (-:
As I read it, you don't lose copyright on material sent though Passport-related sites, but The Borg gets copyright (and other things) on it as well.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's only something that they think they can fix. Schools are doing what they are supposed to do, this is only an inevitable side-effect.
The point is, levelling the school and everything for a block around it is easy, and can be done with stuff that's difficult to impossible to ban and no special equipment. Getting a gun is hard. The risk won't go away if you ban guns.
Another point is, the person most likely to know how to level the school is wearing a collared shirt with pocket protector, not a trench-coat printed with a drunk Euro symbol. The risk won't go away if you terrorise minority groups, nor if you protect them.
In order to fix the problem, you must fix the people. You won't fix the people with more indoctrination, regimentation and random harassment. You'll fix the people by not crushing their individuality, creativity, authority and responsibility; by giving them less time in schools, not more; by letting the parents back into their lives instead of shutting them out as much as possible.
``Aeroflot achieves ultimate in efficiency, eliminates passengers and cargo from flights''
Since most of the humanoid population of New Zealand seems to be living in Australia now, perhaps that sheep-count multiplication factor needs a bit of tweaking?
Almost makes me wish I was moderating, but I seem to attract a lot of bad karma. Something to do with not being politically correct, I think...
Religion is a process; it's a process of exercising a belief; it's a belief in the process of life, possibly also afterlife and/or beforelife (although not so in the case of Atheism). Humanism, a subset of Atheism, is a belief in your own life process.
Faith in evolution requires belief without proof, often in the face of proof, so it's even a religion for those dimwits who insist that religion requires the absence of proof, or belief only in unprovables.
Evolution is a religion. QED.
versus
Really? Then why is it bad/naughty/wicked to murder a six-month-old child, but OK to murder that exact same child kicking and struggling eight months earlier?
You can't have your moral cake AND eat it too, Brad.
That holds just as well for religion, by the way. One major religion has been more or less directly responsible for 60 million definitely documented deaths, possibly an order of magnitude more and almost certainly more than double, PLUS more deaths from starting both world wars (lending a big hand to the Axis in the second), the American Civil War and sundry others.
And if you think that the licence for wholesale butchery on ``moral'' grounds is an exclusive possession of conventional religion, consider the Reign of Terror in France, and nearly a century of Atheistic Communism in the USSR. (It's 2AM in Stalingrad: ``Knock-knock.'' ``Who's there?'' ``You have to ask?'').
Now, consider murdering children post-partum. It happens right now in China to lots of baby girls, a consequence of their one-child policy. And it's being proposed as a legitimate activity in the USA by an Atheist group. Meanwhile, euthanasia is eating into our brains trust at the other end of the age spectrum. How long until it meets in the middle?
Moral relativism at its best. ``Thou shalt not kill,'' a moral absolute, is much safer.
Actually, several studies have show that teaching qualifications impair your effectiveness as a home educator.
One example had mentally handicapped teenagers educating their children at home and producing noticeably better results than State schools.
Lay your fears to rest, Brian.
No.
Two kids who have either learned to first-hand at school or been pre-conditioned by others (e.g. siblings who have learned as above) will. Elsewhere, this is not a given. In home education, for example, bullying depends on the parents' attitudes and actions.
My number 1 son's interaction with a family of 3 boys (his cousins) is instructive: there is abrasion between he and the school-age oldest, and with the next one down, but not with the youngest - the oldest was de-schooled recently, and the second didn't go to kindergarten like the oldest, so the youngest isn't getting anything like the same amount hand-me-down attitude erosion that the middle child did.
I would suspect the regimented environment of intensifying the aberrant reactions, on top of this.
For Sean, it does. Or at least, it limits the problem to occasions when he meets his tormentors on the street. And of course, his home curriculum could include assorted martial arts...
All of the independent tests done so far show HS kids either interacting better, or being indistinguishable from their State schooled peers - unless you count beating up other children as ``interacting'', which I don't.
The one exception that I personally know of was a Mormon boy, and the social difficulties were obviously associated with his parents' interpretation of LDS doctrine (many apparently plain English words mean different (usually odd) things in LDS land) in their everyday life.
All of the other HS kinder I know (maybe 30 or so) are more eager to converse, ask more intelligent questions, and are more likely to constructively use the answers on the spot than ``your average'' child.
Yah, but the real reason is: you're a threat to the status quo. School exists to deliver courses. Actually enjoying the course subject and running ahead of the messenger breaks the lock-step rhythm of the class progression, and also upsets the nice information heirarchy of experts->eddept->headmaster->teachers->students.
Welcome to the place where we're all equal, and every else gets booted out (well, maybe some are more equal than others). The school chorussed ``we're all individuals'' and your response was ``I'm not!'' (-: Good upon ya :-)
chances_of_getting_anywhere = hell.snowball;
Jumping up and down in PTA won't help either, not that anyone with a clue would stand a chance of getting on the board.
The big reason is school is doing what it's designed to do - it's working - so trying to fix it is futile. Sean's just plain lucky that he's escaped the system - sorta - and will be miles better off being home educated, as long as his parents don't try to turn their home into a replica of school.
Upload them to Hotmail, so Microsoft's ownership of them becomes official? Translate them to compressed PostScript and offend UDDI's sense of proprietaryness? Post ``improved'' copies that lead people to laugh at UDDI (even harder)? Upload over the top of them? This is an IIS 4 webserver; and if IBM were seriously involved, wouldn't it be WebSphere instead?
I think ``using their preferred applications'' (from the front page) is a key phrase, that and ``cross platform programming features are addressed by adopting early versions of the proposed Simple Object Access ProtocoL (SOAP) messaging specifications'' (from the FAQ) heavily pushed by Microsoft. Microsoft would like you to prefer their applications over everyone else's, and in particular anything that's not Java/CORBA.
Let's see... ``The UDDI project is not being "run" by any one company. Nor is it a standards body or a new company. Rather, UDDI is currently being guided by a group of industry leaders'' - that sounds familiar. If the past is any guide, this will be Microsoft spearheading a hyper-SMB protocol and half-pretending that it's an open standard created by ``industry bodies.''
``The UDDI Business Registry is open to all businesses and industry bodies worldwide'' - forever? Or will, say, an MSN/Passport membership number eventually be necessary? First introduced to make things easier, of course...
The companies in their ``communities'' page have a few... issues. There are no links from this page to these members of the supposed community. VirtualWorkz don't appear on search engines. MetalSpectrum have an Ariba rep on their board. If AgentWareSystems are the correct ``agentware'' (I'm having trouble finding an agentware with a matching logo), they list IBM (also part of UDDI) as a partner. And so on. How you say, ``Astroturf Movement?''
``I know who that is... It's the wolf! It's the wolf!!'' -- Lambsie
They (DEA) are using this information to arrest innocent people and confiscate their assets even if they're never charged. The ratio of asset-seizures to criminals is, I gather, about 4:1.
Yes, we may be protected from the odd drug dealer, but who protects us from the DEA?
And does it work?
This is the kind of police state that the USA (and indeed many Western and European states) seem to be aiming for.
Yah, that's what many people are complaining about: no laws or methods to protect you from the DEA.
Now take your rage AND YOUR CAPITALS and turn yourself in.
Probably yes, since they're Gummint supported. However, the idea of (1) siezing everything in sight that might be connected with a possible crime; and worse yet (2) rewarding supposed whistle-blowers with a cut of the action is seriously, seriously stupid in the long term.
Consider Amtrak Wars: the radiation was inside the road-trains and facilities which supposedly protected the Federation crews; in this case the ``radiation'' is social poison, and it's inside the system which supposedly protects us.
All police-state approaches like this make several large, stupid assumptions - beginning with the classic pair ``our enforcers are honest and unbiassed'' and ``our methods are effective in bringing about our public aims (we know best).''
But the really big blunder is ``the ends justify the means.'' They don't. The means corrupt the ends.
Very much the opposite, at least every one I've investigated.
That's just Intel propaganda, as one would expect after P4 benchmarks started being published.
Posted from an AMD processor in an Intel-free Windows-free household
(Score: 0 - Obvious)
Short-term, yes. Lunar/asteroid-mined materials would be a different matter - since lofting them is much easier - and if you were going the powersat/habitat route, they could be arranged to emerge almost as a by-broduct of other refining (the slag/vapour from metals-refining would be relatively high-carbon).
A lot depends on how you interpret those last two words.
Our culture is supposedly dominated in areas like science by people who say that they believe in evolution. The next obvious step would be space (although the previous atomic age doesn't seem to have got very far in that direction). Without a program like this, Dr Malthus wins, albeit later than he figured, and everyone else loses (most of us die without any help from a rapacious industry, militant eco-nuts, Chernobyl or the Inquisition). Yet funding for space-oriented development is slowly, steadily drying up.
Why?
Expression recognition software, combined with the top window's context, may someday post these for you. Aren't you glad?
Stop me if I missed anything, but Microsoft are proposing to monitor everything down to your very facial expressions, leaving George Orwell not so much awed as flabbergasted by the possibilities, and they're going to use your own hardware to do this, and it's all going through Microsoft's own centralised database, and, gee, people used to be worried about governments monitoring boring stuff like their emails, and the possibility of crackers getting copies...
They're going to know more about how you think and feel than you do yourself. Microsoft?
Think about this... the multi-billion-dollar company who can't even protect their own website against a script kiddie... the people who brought you Internet ``where did your data go today'' Explorer and the beloved ``I'm feeling lucky - let's run this'' Outlook... and I'm supposed to trust them with pictures of me, an intimate knowledge of my very thought patterns, every key I hit, every word I read?
Think about this... look interested in an image - or a competitor's product, Microsoft knows it; be angered or pleased by something, Microsoft knows it; do or say something technically illegal or embarrassing, Microsoft knows it; recieve unexpected cash income, Microsoft knows it; fart, and the camera/mike will forward your muscle patterns and noise to Microsoft; hop into the hammock with your SO and you'd better have remembered to switch off the pickups - and... will they really be off...?
You'd have to be a nutter. A goldfish in a shopping mall would have more privacy. Millions of JenniCams plus the ability to fastforward to the juicy bits. If you happen to be pretty, expect to have a lot of hopefully secret admirers. If your personal beliefs aren't mainstream, maybe they soon will be. ``And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name. Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.'' - Revelation 13:16-18 - I wonder if the Passport ID has 666 coded into it somewhere? )-:
As I read it, you don't lose copyright on material sent though Passport-related sites, but The Borg gets copyright (and other things) on it as well.