Just like you can't rely on the grammar checker in Word to fix all of your child's mistakes all his life. Then when he/she is 18 you shove him/her out the door and they wind up making Slashdot posts with absolutely no punctuation or captial letters. And then everyone assumes they're just some 13-year-old who wants to eat Doritos for lunch pretending to be an adult with an informed opinion. You can't protect your kids from writing skills forever.
But I do feel a twinge of hurt and betrayal when one of my Animal Crossing buddies suddenly decides they're sick of talking to me and instead starts yelling at me or making fun of me.
Then I whack them on the head with the net for a while and I feel better.
ING also offers a fairly good rate on their regular savings account, right now I think it's around 4.5%? Much higher than any brick-and-mortar banks will give you. It takes a couple days to transfer in/out of your checking account, but that's the only drawback. I've been with them for like four years now and love it! ingdirect.com (Don't know anything about HSBC, but if their service is just as good with a better rate, go for it.)
Um, in case you haven't been following this story too closely, the main point is that these will retail for $100. iBooks retail for roughly ten times that amount.
Sure, maybe Apple could figure out how to make a $100 limited iBook, but they're a private company rather than a nonprofit, so how would that help their shareholders? Or someone could donate 10x as much money to get real iBooks out there - but then people would say it's a waste of money if you could get 10x as many of these special computers for the same price.
(Of course, Apple DID offer to donate OS X licenses to the project, but Negroponte refused b/c he wants it totally open source...)
Oh, trust me, there are lots of studies out there, many with conflicting results. Mostly because no educational research is ever 100% controlled - it happens in a real classroom rather than a laboratory, where a million things could be contributing.
One thing that seems pretty clear is that how useful computers are is directly correlated with how much ongoing training the teachers and administrators receive both on using the computers and on integrating them into the curriculum. Getting the administrators on board is one of the most important things, as they tend to set the tone on whether or not the teachers are excited/willing to learn to use the technology. But even in the best-of situation with lots of training for teachers and administrators, what actual results you see from the computers varies and depends a lot on what you're counting as a measure of improvement.
You laugh, but electroconvulsive therapy has gone a long way. It's now considered a reasonably safe and clinically proven treatment for certain disorders.
Oh, and there's the fact that most air-related deaths are on private planes. If you only fly commercial, especially domestic, your odds of dying go WAY down. How long has it been since there was a fatal American commercial airline crash? 3 years or so? I think the last one was a commuter plane that flipped over in Charlotte during takeoff. I think someone in a car was killed last year at Chicago Midway, but no one in the plane was hurt.
Of course, and certain types of people (higher intelligence, more educated, not dealing with drug or alcohol dependencies) are far less likely to die in a car crash than the general population. But unless they fly a whole helluva lot (as in, almost daily), they're still less likely to die in a plane crash than a car crash.
I actually have tried that - the Spanish subtitles + dubbing thing - and noticed the same problem. It's very annoying, because using those together would be a great language-learning tool (one of the hardest things about hearing spoken language is figuring out where the word/sentence breaks are, so seeing it written out at the same time is a huge help).
I'm familiar with Mattel's long history of being overzealous in protecting their copyright, to the point of protecting it from things that are not actually infringements, such as people posting photographs of the Barbies they personally own or creating parodies.
So I would not put it past them to have worked hard to support this bill. Just think - if someone is selling Barbies remade as bondage dolls (which I've seen, pretty cool stuff) or using Barbies in their erotic artwork, now Mattel doesn't just have to sue them! Now Mattel can sick the government on them and have them thrown in jail for misleading children into thinking their website is innocent and child-friendly!
(Of course, most people doing this long ago stopped using the word Barbie anywhere on their site or anything associated with their artwork, because Mattel was sending C&D letters left and right. But this way Mattel has more tools to catch anyone new to the Barbie-defiling field.)
I've read that they're equally safe per hour (or other unit of time) spent travelling. So when you look at a 12-hour car trip vs a 3-hour plane trip, the plane trip is several times safer. (And then, of course, you add in all the time you spend driving that couldn't be done in a plane...)
I don't like Apple mice (I have a logitech with several buttons on my eMac), but really. You don't have to click with your whole hand. Even with an old-school non-Mighty mouse, you just press down with one finger like usual and let the mouse move under your hand. Unless you have such incredibly weak fingers that you can't press the whole weight of the mouse down with it, it shouldn't be a problem.
Just thank your lucky stars he didn't have a puck mouse. Forget clicking, just *pointing* with those things gave you carpal tunnel.
I'm the one who presses the Spanish language button by mistake instead of the English.
To help with learning Spanish, my husband has been purposely using the Spanish version on self checkouts (and ATMs etc) for the past year or so. Apparently this makes him very strange, because at one grocery store in particular every time he chose Spanish an employee would come over to fix it for him. This seemed to be standard practice - picking Spanish made some light go off over at the Customer Service desk so they could come change it to English. Self checkout always took longer at that store, since we had to go through the "No, really, I want it in Spanish" dance with them every time.
That sounds really cool. Out of curiosity, is it easy to void out items if you change your mind? Often, when I get to the end of a shopping trip and I think I've maybe bought a few too many things that weren't on my original list I'll go through my cart and do a "sanity check" and put back one or two treats that I don't really need...
My local Kroger has two self-check-out areas - one that is labelled 15 Items Or Less, and one for cartfuls of groceries. The non-Express one even has rotating bag holders to make sure you can easily bag everything - they hold up to 8 bags of groceries at a time without having to take anything off. These were clearly made for people to use with regular-sized grocery orders, not one or two items.
I use them regularly with about $40-50 worth of groceries. It takes me about the same time as going through the regular checkout, because I'm not incompetent and can work the machine. The only time I ever get slowed down is when I have a vegetable that's not listed and doesn't have a number on it, in which case I tell the cashier what it is, they put it in for me, and the whole ordeal adds ten seconds to my checkout time.
Then having YouTube selling YOUR work to someone else, who now owns your idea, and your finished video.
They can't sell it to someone else - they can only let someone else use it. If you actually read the terms (or TFA for that matter), you'd see that the user retains ownership AND YouTube loses all rights when you take it down. So they could, for example, let a car company use your video in an ad and get paid for it. But:
1) the car company wouldn't own the video, you still would
2) if you take it off of YouTube, their right to let the car company uses it goes away, as does the car company's right to use it
3) 2 makes it very unlikely that a car company would actually spend money on an ad that could get pulled at any moment, with no notice, for no reason
4) 1 makes it very unlikely that a car company would actually spend money on it, because since you still own the video you could sell the rights to the same video to a rival car company at any time, and there's nothing they could do about it.
And of course, if they were to distribute it in physical media, then as soon as you take it off the site you could sue them if they don't destroy the CDs/DVDs it's on.
Overall, the way it's structured it makes it very unlikely that it would be abused in any way that users would really mind. If anything, videos are likely to be used in ads for YT itself and that's about it.
You can wash and reuse Swiffer cloths, actually, if you want to. But, of course, they don't advertise this. You can also wash and reuse things like Ziplock bags and lots of other disposable items. So why don't more people do these things? Probably because the time it takes is more valuable to them than the few cents for a new one.
You're majorly oversimplifying the whole word vs phonics debate. You make it sound like good old phonics has been overtaken by whole-word, and all hell broke loose. In reality, which one is "in style" at a given moment has been switching back and forth every few years for decades now. If you'd lived a few years later or earlier, you might have been one of the kids who was taught to read using a totally phonetic alphabet, only to find that these kids couldn't make the transition to regular English after reading only the phonetic alphabet for two years (surprise, surprise). Or anywhere in between on the spectrum of phonetics vs whole-word. Trust me, it's ALL been tried.
Finally there seems to be a *little* bit of compromise, with most educators admitting that you need a combination of phonics and whole-word for truly effective instruction. But there are still plenty of extremists on both ends.
By the way, you mention that dyslexics read whole-word - the fact is, EVERYONE does, except for unfamiliar words. The whole goal of even phonics-based instruction is to eventually get kids (and adults) reading on the whole-word level - can you imagine if you spent your whole life sounding out every word you read??
If it were a right, and not a privelege, they'd hand out licenses to anyone who turned 16. I don't see any other rights you have to pass a test for.
If you treat it as a right, your attitude needs to be changed. You're probably one of the people whose privelege we all wish would be revoked, because you act like you should be allowed to do whatever you like on the road.
Although I'm not sure I've spent more time playing it than any other game, I do have to give SMB3 the crown for most-hyped, most-anticipated game ever. We all flocked to see The Wizard just to get a glimpse of it. The waiting list at Blockbuster to rent it was months long (I was 9 at the time - my ability to buy new games was entirely dictated by my parents). I remember being the envy of my friends when I found an arcade version in a laundromat the first week it was out and became the first one to actually play it. I've never seen that kind of thing with another game before or since.
I think he wants to have the music sorted by artist name and then within each artist block the songs are also sorted alphabetically by album name.
I don't know how it works on an iPod (never had one), but in iTunes when I sort by artist, it automatically uses the album as the next level of sorting. Below that, though, they appear to be sorted by track on the album rather than alphabetically by title, if that's what you mean. But once you've got them sorted by artist + album, you've narrowed it down enough that it shouldn't be too hard to find the song you want. And unless you have the track list of the album memorized and know exactly where your song sits alphabetically, it's no easier or harder if they're sorted by track vs ABCs.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like you can't rely on the grammar checker in Word to fix all of your child's mistakes all his life. Then when he/she is 18 you shove him/her out the door and they wind up making Slashdot posts with absolutely no punctuation or captial letters. And then everyone assumes they're just some 13-year-old who wants to eat Doritos for lunch pretending to be an adult with an informed opinion. You can't protect your kids from writing skills forever.
Then I whack them on the head with the net for a while and I feel better.
ING also offers a fairly good rate on their regular savings account, right now I think it's around 4.5%? Much higher than any brick-and-mortar banks will give you. It takes a couple days to transfer in/out of your checking account, but that's the only drawback. I've been with them for like four years now and love it! ingdirect.com (Don't know anything about HSBC, but if their service is just as good with a better rate, go for it.)
Sure, maybe Apple could figure out how to make a $100 limited iBook, but they're a private company rather than a nonprofit, so how would that help their shareholders? Or someone could donate 10x as much money to get real iBooks out there - but then people would say it's a waste of money if you could get 10x as many of these special computers for the same price.
(Of course, Apple DID offer to donate OS X licenses to the project, but Negroponte refused b/c he wants it totally open source...)
One thing that seems pretty clear is that how useful computers are is directly correlated with how much ongoing training the teachers and administrators receive both on using the computers and on integrating them into the curriculum. Getting the administrators on board is one of the most important things, as they tend to set the tone on whether or not the teachers are excited/willing to learn to use the technology. But even in the best-of situation with lots of training for teachers and administrators, what actual results you see from the computers varies and depends a lot on what you're counting as a measure of improvement.
You laugh, but electroconvulsive therapy has gone a long way. It's now considered a reasonably safe and clinically proven treatment for certain disorders.
Oh, and there's the fact that most air-related deaths are on private planes. If you only fly commercial, especially domestic, your odds of dying go WAY down. How long has it been since there was a fatal American commercial airline crash? 3 years or so? I think the last one was a commuter plane that flipped over in Charlotte during takeoff. I think someone in a car was killed last year at Chicago Midway, but no one in the plane was hurt.
Of course, and certain types of people (higher intelligence, more educated, not dealing with drug or alcohol dependencies) are far less likely to die in a car crash than the general population. But unless they fly a whole helluva lot (as in, almost daily), they're still less likely to die in a plane crash than a car crash.
I actually have tried that - the Spanish subtitles + dubbing thing - and noticed the same problem. It's very annoying, because using those together would be a great language-learning tool (one of the hardest things about hearing spoken language is figuring out where the word/sentence breaks are, so seeing it written out at the same time is a huge help).
I wonder who modded this interesting. They must lead a very rambling, inane life.
So I would not put it past them to have worked hard to support this bill. Just think - if someone is selling Barbies remade as bondage dolls (which I've seen, pretty cool stuff) or using Barbies in their erotic artwork, now Mattel doesn't just have to sue them! Now Mattel can sick the government on them and have them thrown in jail for misleading children into thinking their website is innocent and child-friendly!
(Of course, most people doing this long ago stopped using the word Barbie anywhere on their site or anything associated with their artwork, because Mattel was sending C&D letters left and right. But this way Mattel has more tools to catch anyone new to the Barbie-defiling field.)
I've read that they're equally safe per hour (or other unit of time) spent travelling. So when you look at a 12-hour car trip vs a 3-hour plane trip, the plane trip is several times safer. (And then, of course, you add in all the time you spend driving that couldn't be done in a plane...)
Just thank your lucky stars he didn't have a puck mouse. Forget clicking, just *pointing* with those things gave you carpal tunnel.
To help with learning Spanish, my husband has been purposely using the Spanish version on self checkouts (and ATMs etc) for the past year or so. Apparently this makes him very strange, because at one grocery store in particular every time he chose Spanish an employee would come over to fix it for him. This seemed to be standard practice - picking Spanish made some light go off over at the Customer Service desk so they could come change it to English. Self checkout always took longer at that store, since we had to go through the "No, really, I want it in Spanish" dance with them every time.
That sounds really cool. Out of curiosity, is it easy to void out items if you change your mind? Often, when I get to the end of a shopping trip and I think I've maybe bought a few too many things that weren't on my original list I'll go through my cart and do a "sanity check" and put back one or two treats that I don't really need...
I use them regularly with about $40-50 worth of groceries. It takes me about the same time as going through the regular checkout, because I'm not incompetent and can work the machine. The only time I ever get slowed down is when I have a vegetable that's not listed and doesn't have a number on it, in which case I tell the cashier what it is, they put it in for me, and the whole ordeal adds ten seconds to my checkout time.
They can't sell it to someone else - they can only let someone else use it. If you actually read the terms (or TFA for that matter), you'd see that the user retains ownership AND YouTube loses all rights when you take it down. So they could, for example, let a car company use your video in an ad and get paid for it. But:
1) the car company wouldn't own the video, you still would
2) if you take it off of YouTube, their right to let the car company uses it goes away, as does the car company's right to use it
3) 2 makes it very unlikely that a car company would actually spend money on an ad that could get pulled at any moment, with no notice, for no reason
4) 1 makes it very unlikely that a car company would actually spend money on it, because since you still own the video you could sell the rights to the same video to a rival car company at any time, and there's nothing they could do about it.
And of course, if they were to distribute it in physical media, then as soon as you take it off the site you could sue them if they don't destroy the CDs/DVDs it's on.
Overall, the way it's structured it makes it very unlikely that it would be abused in any way that users would really mind. If anything, videos are likely to be used in ads for YT itself and that's about it.
You can wash and reuse Swiffer cloths, actually, if you want to. But, of course, they don't advertise this. You can also wash and reuse things like Ziplock bags and lots of other disposable items. So why don't more people do these things? Probably because the time it takes is more valuable to them than the few cents for a new one.
Finally there seems to be a *little* bit of compromise, with most educators admitting that you need a combination of phonics and whole-word for truly effective instruction. But there are still plenty of extremists on both ends.
By the way, you mention that dyslexics read whole-word - the fact is, EVERYONE does, except for unfamiliar words. The whole goal of even phonics-based instruction is to eventually get kids (and adults) reading on the whole-word level - can you imagine if you spent your whole life sounding out every word you read??
Uh. Considering that they tested the people without distractions as well, I think they showed that the answer was no.
And do you have any statistics to back up your assertion that 40 people is "nowhere near" enough for a statistically valid sample size?
If you treat it as a right, your attitude needs to be changed. You're probably one of the people whose privelege we all wish would be revoked, because you act like you should be allowed to do whatever you like on the road.
Although I'm not sure I've spent more time playing it than any other game, I do have to give SMB3 the crown for most-hyped, most-anticipated game ever. We all flocked to see The Wizard just to get a glimpse of it. The waiting list at Blockbuster to rent it was months long (I was 9 at the time - my ability to buy new games was entirely dictated by my parents). I remember being the envy of my friends when I found an arcade version in a laundromat the first week it was out and became the first one to actually play it. I've never seen that kind of thing with another game before or since.
But in Soviet Russia, the GNAA overthrew Malda. Then ???ed and profited.
I don't know how it works on an iPod (never had one), but in iTunes when I sort by artist, it automatically uses the album as the next level of sorting. Below that, though, they appear to be sorted by track on the album rather than alphabetically by title, if that's what you mean. But once you've got them sorted by artist + album, you've narrowed it down enough that it shouldn't be too hard to find the song you want. And unless you have the track list of the album memorized and know exactly where your song sits alphabetically, it's no easier or harder if they're sorted by track vs ABCs.
Try elementary school. I think this woman was student-teaching fourth or fifth grade.
By college level, they are adults. They are there by their own choice, and it's their problem if they don't pass.