In addition to the points the other posters made (it's sold with the computer, not the OS, etc), you can easily uninstall these whenever you want. In fact, all you have to do is drag them to the trash.
Around 99 or so, a friend in the dorm room next to me tried that with her IE. Didn't go so well. I've since read that it *is* possible to safely uninstall IE without destroying Windows, but it must be at least a bit more complicated/obscure than with iLife.
Of course, you can't get a real degree from it, but someone with real motivation could certainly use this stuff to study up, possibly test out of a few classes so that they have less credits (and thus $$) in the way of themselves and a degree. There are probably plenty of other ways to use it, as well. And it's all free.
I don't agree that only those who know what they want to study should go to college. In fact, if that were the case probably 75% of college students wouldn't be there.
Personally, I knew what I wanted to study, but I know a lot of people who weren't sure or changed their minds midway through, and profited from the chance to explore domains they'd never considered.
Campusfood.com already offers this kind of service, in a lot more places than just big cities.
Kozmo offered video rentals online, with free delivery - as well as things like snack foods, CDs, convenience items, video games, etc. It was impulse-buying to the max. I was so sad to see Kozmo die. This is nothing like Kozmo, it's like all the other online ordering systems for restaraunts out there.
Interesting note in there about Creative Commons being a perfect fit with educational materials. I agree that it's good to distribute educational materials as widely as possible, but when one of your prime concerns is accuracy, you might not want "remixing," etc.
Of course, a lot of this happens in curriculum development anyhow. When you're stuck for ideas, you look at activities and lesson plans others have written and pull what's relevant to adapt to what you're doing - no reason to reinvent the wheel. As long as you don't copy it all wholesale, there's not much worry since you can't copyright an idea. (When you do pull an entire graphic organizer, activity, graphic, etc from another source, of course you've got to cite it and get permission.) So that sort of "license" is, in a way, taken for granted in the educational community. I'll have to actually go to their site and look at the science section to see what they're all about.
Dude, that's just the title of the article. Neither the submitter nor the editors came up with the show pony line.
In fact, once you get past "Computer Business Review reports that," the whole "summary" is just the first few sentences yanked from the article, with nothing to let you know that it's a direct quote. I hate it when they do that. If you're going to summarize, SUMMARIZE for pete's sake. If you're too lazy to do that, a few quotation marks do wonders.
The paper trail doesn't have to identify the voter any more than current paper ballots identify voters. It just needs to be a record of each vote for each candidate that is independent of the computer used for voting.
No, right now, we can't give a distinct physiological correlate for g. But we're working toward that, and I think that eventually we will have one. There is growing evidence linking IQ with measurable attributes like reaction time.
Of course, IQ tests aren't a perfect measure of g. And whether you define g as all there is to intelligence... I think that will always be up for debate, but it is a pretty significant contributor to just about everything that is considered "intelligent" behavior in the United States, at least. And yes, I do think that the definition of intelligence can change somewhat according to culture - there is a wide range of cognitive abilities, some of which depend on g more than others; if a culture happens to value a non-g-loaded ability very highly, they may consider that to be "intelligent" behavior. "Intelligence" will also always have many colloquial definitions, even if you can settle on an accepted scientific defintion.
Personally, though, I think that for our uses of IQ scores in American school settings, g is a very, very important factor. I hope that eventually we can measure whatever it is that g "really" is more precisely. But whatever it is, I have no doubt whatsoever that it has a genetic component. The brain is just another body part, after all.
In what city? Most actors are in New York or LA (or maybe Chicago) - those are expensive places to live. 3 hours at 231 an hour... That's $519 a month. You'd be hard-pressed to pay rent in any city for that much, let alone utilities and food or rent in NYC.
How much of what you eat is grown in North Dakota vs Florida?
Let's imagine we go to straight majority-rules popular vote.
Farmers are a small minority, but one that is vital to our nation's functioning. Let's say there's a candidate who plans to completely ignore the agriculture industry, because that's not where the majority of the votes are. He gets voted in by all the city folk who don't really listen much to the farmers' complaining. The senate has been abolished, too, since it's not based on population of the state. How long until something is voted through that completely screws over farmers, and we're stuck with a wheat shortage or something?
Obviously, you're thinking "Come on, we're not that stupid. We know farmers are important, nobody would completely overlook their interests just because they're in a minority." But how often do people REALLY care about issues beyond their own little sphere of existence? And how often do lawmakers REALLY vote in ways that benefit more than their little corner-of-one-state constituency?
The whole system is set up to prevent tyranny of the majority.
Women's visual systems are wired differently enough from men's that I wouldn't doubt it. We're able to detect much more subtle differences in color than men are, for example. ("What do you mean, they both look white to you? This is clearly eggshell and this one is clearly snowflake." - Has a biological explanation!)
I have the same problem. Not just with FPS, but most 3D games make me dizzy. I tried to play some GameCube Sonic game (I forget the exact title), where you go really really fast around loops and stuff, and I couldn't take more than a couple minutes of it.
Maybe that's why I have yet to upgrade from my SNES.
Erm... Don't you think it's that kind of passive, trusting attitude that let America slip so far? It's not like Bush took over and everything just went straight to hell because of him - I'm sure there were decades of lulling us into a false sense of security with our government. These things happen incrementally, it's just that once they build momentum, they tend to accelerate, and that's what we're seeing now.
Even though parts of it are hideously outdated and you could argue that every day it is being corrupted further.
I don't think it's the constitution that's being corrupted - it hasn't been changed at all in years. It's mostly the people who are ignoring it that are the problem.
And if people think some part of the constitution is outdated, they are welcome to start a movement to change it. It came ready-built with an amendment process. Granted, it's rather difficult to get it changed... But do you really want it any easier? So that, say, whatever party controls Congress can push through whatever changes they want? Scary.
We're NOT a democracy, we're a republic. The electoral college is a perfectly sound way to run a republic.
In addition, we were founded to be a union of states. The individual states would never have approved the formation of the union if they had lost all their individual rights. Last year, Colorado had a vote on whether to split their electoral votes according to the popular vote in the state. It was voted down. Why? Because it basically would have made their votes meaningless - instead of 9 votes for one candidate, it would have become only one vote for a candidate. (Well, 5 for one and 4 for the other - so one total.) It would have significantly reduced their state's power in the election.
I'm not saying I'm happy with the way the last election turned out, but I'm not going to say down with the electoral college.
Well, it has to be challenged and make it into the courts before the courts could do anything about it - which, really, is the only check we have on the courts' powers these days, when you think about it.
Hopefully, of course, this will happen the first time someone goes to jail for revealing the existence of a sekkkrit subpoena and the courts will lash out and strike this shit down.
But - was it simply the repetitious work that would have led to an innovation no matter who was doing it, or was it something about her that led her to see the innovation even though the work was otherwise boring her to tears?
No, you don't have to be brilliant (or highly-educated) to be a lab lackey. But actually making something unique out of the data is a different level of work.
Although it's a fascinating story that shows how important it is to keep our minds open to new things scientifically, it in no way implies that her IQ is any lower than most scientists. She may have "felt not smart/capable," but that obviously wasn't true. I'm sure Catherine Zeta-Jones feels ugly sometimes, that doesn't make it true.
Honestly, it sounds a lot like the problems that many very intelligent women have with the (man-created) structure of academia. It's all about tenure, publish, publish more, get more data, etc; many women aren't willing to give up the personal/family time that men have historically given up for this process. This is leading to things like schools extending the tenure track a couple of years for people with young children, etc.
Rather than spend an hour arguing against every single point in your post, I'll just pick and choose a couple...
No research has ever said that all Asians are smarter than all Africans. On average, Asians have a higher IQ than whites, whites higher than blacks. This average difference is about as large as the average difference between siblings in the same family - ie, not really that huge in the grand scheme of things. I'm sure you would not be hard-pressed to find a few black people who are smarter than a few Asian people, so any argument that this should be used for eugenics-type purposes falls apart right there. In addition, different races have different variances in IQ - blacks have less variance than whites, which means there are less blacks at the super-high-end but also less at the super-low-end.
A genetic explanation is unnecessary and contrived.
Taking out the race part for a moment, there is plenty of evidence that intelligence - as well as most personality traits - does have a significant genetic component. It's not contrived, and it's only unnecessary if you don't like to have the whole truth when it gets in the way of your worldview. There is an excellent book chapter by Abraham Tannenbaum on this, but no amount of digging through my crap is allowing me to lay my hands on it right at this moment. Suffice it to say that in order to claim that intelligence has no genetic component, you have to ignore piles of hard data - not to mention common sense. If some people's bodies can metabolize faster than others, why couldn't some people's neurons fire faster than others??
After reading a quick bio of Vera Rubin, I'm not sure what about her would refute this. Seems like a very intelligent woman to me.
But aside from that, IQ has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you are interested in things that other people find interesting. Your comment makes no sense to me.
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Around 99 or so, a friend in the dorm room next to me tried that with her IE. Didn't go so well. I've since read that it *is* possible to safely uninstall IE without destroying Windows, but it must be at least a bit more complicated/obscure than with iLife.
Of course, you can't get a real degree from it, but someone with real motivation could certainly use this stuff to study up, possibly test out of a few classes so that they have less credits (and thus $$) in the way of themselves and a degree. There are probably plenty of other ways to use it, as well. And it's all free.
Personally, I knew what I wanted to study, but I know a lot of people who weren't sure or changed their minds midway through, and profited from the chance to explore domains they'd never considered.
Well, eventually they instituted a $5 or $7 minimum order or something along those lines, in an attempt to not go under... So sad it didn't work.
Kozmo offered video rentals online, with free delivery - as well as things like snack foods, CDs, convenience items, video games, etc. It was impulse-buying to the max. I was so sad to see Kozmo die. This is nothing like Kozmo, it's like all the other online ordering systems for restaraunts out there.
Meh. Call me when Kozmo REALLY comes back.
Of course, a lot of this happens in curriculum development anyhow. When you're stuck for ideas, you look at activities and lesson plans others have written and pull what's relevant to adapt to what you're doing - no reason to reinvent the wheel. As long as you don't copy it all wholesale, there's not much worry since you can't copyright an idea. (When you do pull an entire graphic organizer, activity, graphic, etc from another source, of course you've got to cite it and get permission.) So that sort of "license" is, in a way, taken for granted in the educational community. I'll have to actually go to their site and look at the science section to see what they're all about.
In fact, once you get past "Computer Business Review reports that," the whole "summary" is just the first few sentences yanked from the article, with nothing to let you know that it's a direct quote. I hate it when they do that. If you're going to summarize, SUMMARIZE for pete's sake. If you're too lazy to do that, a few quotation marks do wonders.
The paper trail doesn't have to identify the voter any more than current paper ballots identify voters. It just needs to be a record of each vote for each candidate that is independent of the computer used for voting.
Hey, you're right! You should go tell the RIAA that, I bet they'll let Apple switch as soon as they hear your well-reasoned argument.
Of course, IQ tests aren't a perfect measure of g. And whether you define g as all there is to intelligence... I think that will always be up for debate, but it is a pretty significant contributor to just about everything that is considered "intelligent" behavior in the United States, at least. And yes, I do think that the definition of intelligence can change somewhat according to culture - there is a wide range of cognitive abilities, some of which depend on g more than others; if a culture happens to value a non-g-loaded ability very highly, they may consider that to be "intelligent" behavior. "Intelligence" will also always have many colloquial definitions, even if you can settle on an accepted scientific defintion.
Personally, though, I think that for our uses of IQ scores in American school settings, g is a very, very important factor. I hope that eventually we can measure whatever it is that g "really" is more precisely. But whatever it is, I have no doubt whatsoever that it has a genetic component. The brain is just another body part, after all.
Sorry, that should be 3 hours at $173 an hour. $519 is correct, I just forgot to change the first # after I fixed my math.
In what city? Most actors are in New York or LA (or maybe Chicago) - those are expensive places to live. 3 hours at 231 an hour... That's $519 a month. You'd be hard-pressed to pay rent in any city for that much, let alone utilities and food or rent in NYC.
Let's imagine we go to straight majority-rules popular vote.
Farmers are a small minority, but one that is vital to our nation's functioning. Let's say there's a candidate who plans to completely ignore the agriculture industry, because that's not where the majority of the votes are. He gets voted in by all the city folk who don't really listen much to the farmers' complaining. The senate has been abolished, too, since it's not based on population of the state. How long until something is voted through that completely screws over farmers, and we're stuck with a wheat shortage or something?
Obviously, you're thinking "Come on, we're not that stupid. We know farmers are important, nobody would completely overlook their interests just because they're in a minority." But how often do people REALLY care about issues beyond their own little sphere of existence? And how often do lawmakers REALLY vote in ways that benefit more than their little corner-of-one-state constituency?
The whole system is set up to prevent tyranny of the majority.
I have the same problem. Not just with FPS, but most 3D games make me dizzy. I tried to play some GameCube Sonic game (I forget the exact title), where you go really really fast around loops and stuff, and I couldn't take more than a couple minutes of it.
Maybe that's why I have yet to upgrade from my SNES.
So I should get a sex change because I don't have the exact same opinions as all other women???
Erm... Don't you think it's that kind of passive, trusting attitude that let America slip so far? It's not like Bush took over and everything just went straight to hell because of him - I'm sure there were decades of lulling us into a false sense of security with our government. These things happen incrementally, it's just that once they build momentum, they tend to accelerate, and that's what we're seeing now.
What, like the right to wear religious paraphernalia in public? Oh, wait...
The US has problems, possibly more than Europe, but Europe isn't exactly perfect in every way. The 400-page "Constitution" is a testament to that.
I don't think it's the constitution that's being corrupted - it hasn't been changed at all in years. It's mostly the people who are ignoring it that are the problem.
And if people think some part of the constitution is outdated, they are welcome to start a movement to change it. It came ready-built with an amendment process. Granted, it's rather difficult to get it changed... But do you really want it any easier? So that, say, whatever party controls Congress can push through whatever changes they want? Scary.
In addition, we were founded to be a union of states. The individual states would never have approved the formation of the union if they had lost all their individual rights. Last year, Colorado had a vote on whether to split their electoral votes according to the popular vote in the state. It was voted down. Why? Because it basically would have made their votes meaningless - instead of 9 votes for one candidate, it would have become only one vote for a candidate. (Well, 5 for one and 4 for the other - so one total.) It would have significantly reduced their state's power in the election.
I'm not saying I'm happy with the way the last election turned out, but I'm not going to say down with the electoral college.
Hopefully, of course, this will happen the first time someone goes to jail for revealing the existence of a sekkkrit subpoena and the courts will lash out and strike this shit down.
Still, I'd take those wages. Of course, if you're a struggling actor, that might be all you make that month.
No, you don't have to be brilliant (or highly-educated) to be a lab lackey. But actually making something unique out of the data is a different level of work.
Honestly, it sounds a lot like the problems that many very intelligent women have with the (man-created) structure of academia. It's all about tenure, publish, publish more, get more data, etc; many women aren't willing to give up the personal/family time that men have historically given up for this process. This is leading to things like schools extending the tenure track a couple of years for people with young children, etc.
No research has ever said that all Asians are smarter than all Africans. On average, Asians have a higher IQ than whites, whites higher than blacks. This average difference is about as large as the average difference between siblings in the same family - ie, not really that huge in the grand scheme of things. I'm sure you would not be hard-pressed to find a few black people who are smarter than a few Asian people, so any argument that this should be used for eugenics-type purposes falls apart right there. In addition, different races have different variances in IQ - blacks have less variance than whites, which means there are less blacks at the super-high-end but also less at the super-low-end.
A genetic explanation is unnecessary and contrived.
Taking out the race part for a moment, there is plenty of evidence that intelligence - as well as most personality traits - does have a significant genetic component. It's not contrived, and it's only unnecessary if you don't like to have the whole truth when it gets in the way of your worldview. There is an excellent book chapter by Abraham Tannenbaum on this, but no amount of digging through my crap is allowing me to lay my hands on it right at this moment. Suffice it to say that in order to claim that intelligence has no genetic component, you have to ignore piles of hard data - not to mention common sense. If some people's bodies can metabolize faster than others, why couldn't some people's neurons fire faster than others??
But aside from that, IQ has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you are interested in things that other people find interesting. Your comment makes no sense to me.