I can't take honor to the store and convert it into food. The power company also doesn't take honor as a form of payment.
Are you unable to afford food? Are you unable to pay your electric bill?
As I said in a different post, it strikes me as odd that people who don't need it are complaining that they're not getting anything from the stimulus. It's like bitching that your child isn't mentally retarded and thus doesn't qualify for the special education programs, or complaining that you aren't disabled so you can't use handicapped spaces.
There are a couple of things wrong with your post:
The stimulus (and, it seems, many of the Obama administration's policies) are designed to reward failure.
That's not remotely true. They're designed to forestall worse economic situations that would sink the entire economy. Now, they may not actually do that, but that's what they're *designed* to do. I don't think anyone who was involved said, "Let's make a plan that rewards people for failing and punishes people who succeed!" To phrase it the way you did implies that they're actively out to hurt the country, and that's just hackery. You may disagree with how they are going about trying to solve a problem, but if you begin with the idea that they are doing so out of bad intentions, then you're not really being all that helpful.
There will be no incentives for people that are on time
How about the incentive of not having to ask for a hand-out? How about the incentive of not having to worry that you're going to lose your home because you make your payments on time? How about the incentive of not having to deal with the whole bureaucratic mess that will inevitably spring up from the need to screen people who are asking for help?
Do you also have a problem in that you don't get anything from unemployment insurance because you're not unemployed? Do you complain that there are handicapped spaces that you're not allowed to take advantage of? Do you wish your children were mentally retarded or otherwise disabled so that they could take advantage of special needs programs? How often do you lament not being given food stamps because you can afford to eat?
I'm a homeowner. I've got a job. I put down 20% when I bought the place, got a mortgage with an excellent fixed rate. I've never missed a payment on my mortage, always paid a little extra in fact so that I'd pay it off sooner and pay less overall. The place I bought has "only" lost 10% of its value during the current crash (and is still worth quite a bit more than I paid for it). So, in other words, I don't expect to get anything directly from the stimulus package, nor do I need it.
But, the indirect benefit I hope to get is that, if more people can keep their homes rather than being foreclosed on, the housing market will hopefully not completely bottom out to where my place will be worth less than I paid for it and to where if I do want to sell it I won't be able to do so without taking a large loss. Further, the economy not going completely into the toilet (read: to the point where the joke about stockpiling food, guns and ammo isn't a joke anymore) and that's a good thing for people like me who don't want to live in some kind of post-apocalyptic world where people kill one another over toilet paper and boxes of Froot Loops.
Also, the ability to return a game that I do not like.
This is why I buy used games for the most part - GameStop lets you return any used game you buy from them for credit if you do so within 15 or 30 days (can't remember; only returned one and that was a year ago). Some of the stores are pretty laid back about this, too - they'll let you return several games on the same credit as long as you don't completely abuse the process.
For games that are new and haven't yet come down in price on the used market, I'll just rent 'em.
I don't think its an issue of fashion so much as one of practicality: online play of a game tends to, over time, decrease (with rare exceptions). If you really like playing online with people, you either have to become an early adopter or you have to only play the games that are the Halos, Starcrafts and Counter Strikes.
I don't think there's a lot of snobbery of "Oh, that game is *6 months old!* I'd never play something like that!" but there surely is a lot of "I'm not going to play that - I can't ever find online opponents!"
After all, people are still playing Halo, Starcraft, Counter Strike and Diablo II - and I'd wager most of their playerbase online is on the younger side rather than a bunch of old farts in their 40's who aren't ashamed to be playing something old.
There is no "sunny" side of the moon - the whole thing gets sun. There's a far-side of the moon, which is the side facing away from us (and that is permanent because we're tidally locked).
So, in order to "cover the sunny side of the moon" with solar arrays, we'd either need to coat the ENTIRE moon with solar arrays or devise some way to have whatever half of the moon happens to be facing the sun at any given moment covered in arrays - some sort of movable dome of arrays.
Either task strikes me as outrageously more difficult than just building a gigantic array of collectors that's outside the plane of the ecliptic (and thus a bit less likely to get pelted with random stuff floating about) that covers a huge area (whatever arbitrary size) and could be made larger over time.
Or we could just build a ginormous reflector in space that will focus light on a smaller array that then beams the power back. A reflector could be made very large, made out of relatively cheap materials, and wouldn't have a very complicated structure. Plus, if we got bored we could move the reflector around to focus the energy on random stuff - heat up Mars, maybe? Fry some space-ants?
Only very, very rarely have I bought a game at release in the last few years. I think I got WoW, City of Heroes and Civ 4 at release. WoW because Blizzard's always done a damn good job with what they put out, City of Heroes because it was the only Super Hero game around (and I liked the costume creator), and Civ 4 because, well, it's Civ!
But otherwise I never buy at release. I'm not unwilling to pay for games (MMO's wind up costing much more than any other single game, price isn't the issue), but I've been burnt enough, and frankly most titles coming out simply aren't compelling enough, that I'm more than happy to wait a year or so for them to be in the bargain bin.
Last weekend I picked up Sins of a Solar Empire for $12.99 - it's pretty nice! - but there's no way I would have paid $49.99 for it when it came out. Same thing with console games - I've got one of each of the current gen (obviously willing to spend money on gaming) but other than Rock Band, I haven't paid full-price for a game, getting them used or once they become "Platinum Hits" or whatever and come down to $19.99 or so. If I like a game a lot, I'll even buy some DLC (Marvel Ultimate Alliance is fun, and running around with an all-villain team is entertaining) - but there is some kind of psychological resistance I have to paying full-price up-front.
Demos are great, but I know that they're just demos and that usually means that their most compelling features are going to be in them, with vague hints that if I get the full game there will be some super-awesome stuff - but unless the demo is just mind-blowing (and a demo never has been for me), there's no way I'll do anything other than make a mental note to check the game out when it's $20 or so.
Now, if I could get games at release for $20, I'd probably be much more willing to try stuff out. Of course, what would likely happen is that developers would release a slightly feature-richer demo rather than a full game and make everything else into DLC so it'd be a losing proposition again. So, I'd rather they stick with the current set-up - let the people who must have a game on release day pay full freight, and then people like me will pick 'em up a year later.
More to the point, it's not possible to save money by giving money to charity. People do get a tax write-off, yes, but the amount saved in taxes can only be a percentage (whatever your marginal rate on the money donated is) of the amount given.
It's not just cynical, it's stupid. It's kind of like the morons who think that the US tax system - by charging a higher marginal rate on monies earned above a certain point - somehow punishes people who make more money. I actually know a few people who truly believe that they're making less money with salaries of around $60,000 a year than people who make $45,000 a year because of the marginal rate increases.
The thing I don't get about terrorist attacks is this:
Why do a 9/11 style thing - hitting a few big, high-profile, symbolic targets, spending the lives of the operatives in the process?
Why not do something that would *really* cripple a target nation? Why not have the operatives rent a bunch of cars or trucks all over the country, fill 'em with bombs, and hit dozens of soft targets, such as day care centers, coffee shops, malls, and other places? To me, it seems like that would make people absolutely terrified of going *anywhere* because *anything* could be a target. Further, there would have been a *total* repeal of civil liberties had things been done that way, rather than "just" the abuses we've had now. If 9/11 had actually been a series of 20 or 30 little attacks all over the country, the end result would have been vastly worse despite the very likely case of a much lower actual body count.
Likewise, why bother trying to hijack planes when rolling up to an airport security line and doing the suicide bomb thing would be far, far easier and vastly more effective?
None of it makes any sense to me. If you want to completely cripple your opponent, to destroy them or make them destroy themselves, the way people have been going about it doesn't make any sense.
Here's an odd bit of confluence... My uncle was Harold Green (he died recently) - an attorney who worked for the US Government and who was responsible for figuring out how to "get" Oppenheimer when the government went after him. He mentioned feeling conflicted over his part in that - proud for coming up with a legal novelty, but ashamed for helping to ruin a great man.
It was a very odd experience for me reading a biography of Oppenheimer and seeing my uncle in it, reading about what he did.
You want to work in the United States, are not a citizen of the United States, but you are demanding that the government of the United States leave you alone?
Or, am I misunderstanding, and you don't want to work or live in the US? Because generally, unless you're in a country we're invading (sorry about that if you are - hopefully the new guy will be a little less excitable), people in foreign countries are more or less outside US jurisdiction.
Of course, in another post after this, you say you want to secede, which generally isn't a problem for foreigners in the US as they can just go home. Sorry, but you don't get to leave and take part of the country with you.
Except he said *manned* space-flight, not just space-flight. In fact, he specifically said robots and rovers were AOK in his mind. And computers were developed a bit before space-flight, manned or unmanned. So your comment is basically incorrect in both content and purpose.
Personally, I think the bulk of the benefits of manned space-flight have been in the coin of inspiration. When Armstrong took those first steps on the moon, that said something about humanity as a species. Rovers, while cool as hell and certainly less costly, just don't fire up the imagination quite the same way. Even so, we pissed all that away by not continuing to push forward.
What I'd like to see happen is to continue the exploratory bits we do now with robots - map the terrain, as it were - and limit human exploration to orbit in the form of building *real* space-stations, *real* manufacturing capability, maybe bring a few metal asteroids around to use as raw materials. Launching from orbit rather than from the surface of the Earth would certainly cut the cost of a Mars mission dramatically, and developing the orbital manufacture technologies and capabilities would have very tangible benefits.
Seems a much better approach than pissing away billions of dollars to send a 1-shot there and back "look what we can do" mission that won't yield much in the way of actual benefit beyond "wow, people got to Mars" which will, unfortunately, almost certainly yield the same results as "wow, people got to the moon."
There is a bit of a risk/reward situation going on. For an H1B, they're taking the risk of relocating here and being sent back immediately if they lose their job, but the reward is a job and (presumably) a better overall lifestyle compared to what they had back home. If an H1B were taking the giant step of coming here to work for the same or worse lifestyle as back home, they're an idiot. If an H1B were to be genuinely surprised that when they go to a foreign country that foreign country's government takes steps to protect its citizens over foreign nationals who are working there, again, that H1B is an idiot.
On the part of some employers, there's a perception that employees from certain countries are going to be much more easily managed (read: abused) and forced to do lots of extra overtime without complaint because hey, if they don't like it, they can always go back to where they came from. Meanwhile a US citizen, if they don't like it they can just look for another job or quit, but in either case it won't mean being sent half a world away and absolutely disrupting every aspect of their lives. I think its incredibly shitty that this kind of coercion can happen, but hey, it's life.
As to your gay analogy - it's way off base because you're talking about citizens vs. non-citizens. Granted, it does on the one hand seem kind of foolish to play an "us vs. them" kind of game, but that's the way the world is right now. Homosexual US citizens are citizens, period. Just because some (many) people here hate them doesn't change that fact. Conversely, H1Bs are not citizens, period. Just because they're skilled workers and probably have stronger incentives to work harder doesn't change that fact. If H1Bs want the exact same rights, protections and privileges of US citizens, they can try to become citizens. Otherwise they're subject to the rules (arbitrary or not, foolish or not) that any other resident alien is subject to in the US.
The same thing goes in reverse for US citizens working outside the US. I've worked outside the US on a few different occasions and I can say that I was subject to some regulations and requirements by bureaucrats that completely baffled me, but I knew that going into it. Further, because I'm female, in two of the countries I worked in, I was generally subjected to a whole bunch of harassment and had to put up with a lot of bullshit without any protections, but then again, I knew that going into it. Again, shitty for me that I had to put up with it, but hey, that's life, and for me the benefits (primarily the experiences I had and things I learned) were worth putting up with some assholes.
I do agree that many slashdotters seem to have irrational viewpoints and presuppose a lot about people based solely on their H1B vs. citizen status, but again, that's life. People who are worried about keeping their jobs are generally going to be a lot less inclined to welcome more competition in a troubled time, so I just chalk it up to that.
I do, but I'm in academia, so that's not unusual. Actually, it's unusual for me to work more than 35/wk now that I'm done with the student grind. Add to that the ridonkulous vacation and benefits (why, yes, I *do* have over 40 paid days off per year, fully employer funded health-care, matched retirement funds, and I get free travel to some pretty nice locations every month or two [Puerto Rico in December, this month New Orleans, Alabama in February which is nice because I'm in Illinois and it'll be fucking cold then] and so on).... And, of course, there's getting to spend a lot of my time working on things I find really interested in and getting to work with (often) very intelligent people to try to figure out things that nobody else knows.
On the other hand, the pay is about what you'd expect for a job that gives you essentially 2 work-months of vacation a year, I have to deal with some incredibly huge egos, upward mobility requires advanced degrees/ass kissing/massive genius/absolute ruthlessness/incredible luck/a combination of all the above, and the work I make *must* be of very high quality all the time because it's under huge scrutiny and once you get a reputation for being a fuck-up it's not very easy to undo it even if you move to a different university.
For me it works because the plusses are what I want and the minuses are things I seem to be constitutionally suited to dealing with.
For my current job (data manager/protocol design for a research program), the interview had 3 parts. First I met the primary investigator, then I met the team and lastly I was brought into a room, given a stack of personality tests and told simply, "I'll be back in an hour."
The tests were all of the kind people are mentioning here - either ones that were designed as surveys to try and get a snapshot of a larger population (so 1 individual's results were meaningless) or ones with questions that were overly broad ("Have you ever done anything really bad?"), absurd ("You just bought groceries and are 15 miles away from the grocery store when you realize the clerk gave you $1 too much change. Do you: a) go back to the store, b) steal the $1"), pointless ("What kind of animal would you be if you could be anything?"), offered to many response options ("All the time, almost all the time, most of the time, a little more than half the time, not sure but just barely over half the time, half the time, not sure but just barely less than half the time..." etc) and so on.
Rather than take them, I just started critiquing them - "What's this item intended to measure?" "This is too vague, terms need to be defined." "Reduce the number of options to 5, an optimal number to both capture variety and remove option paralysis." and suggesting alternative measures that are more appropriate for what it seems like they were trying to get at.
An hour goes by, I'm merrily marking these things up, the primary comes in and sees what I've done and offers me the job, because what I did in the interview is what the job would entail, and the personality qualities they were looking for were more along the lines of "will find a polite way of saying 'what you're doing is stupid, here's a better way to go about doing that.'"
Best job I ever had, too - I've got lots and lots of leeway to change things that I don't feel are being effective, but also working with a really great team who have been able to teach me a lot of stuff about my new field so I'm able to grow quite a bit. The money is shit (that's academia) but money isn't everything, and I do get 3 months vacation:)
There's an easy and obvious way around this - just run 3 simultaneous instances and error-check by consensus. Still able to run the whole thing in under a half hour and still pretty cheap at ~$3000.
Of course I hand-waved through a few hundred thousand generations of slight improvement; this is slashdot, not a formal dissertation and defense. I will cheerfully stipulate that the 5 minutes I spent writing the post you're criticizing is not remotely scientific and serves only to illustrate (in very, very rough form) what some people mean when they talk about evolution. I don't agree that "figuring out" (forgive my anthropomorphizing - I'm a folksy kinda gal when I write off the cuff) how to slowly, over the course of many, many generations, glean some O2 from air instead of water is as absurd as "fish gives birth to monkey," but why quibble? Also, I don't really call myself a "scientist" (except on my income tax - under the occupation heading I like to write "I am a scientist.") - just a person taking part in a discussion. Certainly I never said that my post was absolute scientific truth, and I honestly doubt that any reasonable person reading it could honestly come to the conclusion that I was somehow stating that my post was presented as such.
I did find the quote you chose to post at the end pretty odd. I'm not aware that I claimed to *know* anything with absolute certainty, but also, I wonder, have you been applying that same kind of standard to people arguing against evolution? I'm thinking of people who make bald assertions that the Bible has any kind of divine provenance or "underlying spiritual truth" are generally trying to make the claim that they *know* something with certainty. I'm sure someone with your high standards for requiring evidence and lack of tolerance for hand-waving would agree that all sides of this particular argument should be held to the same standards, no?
"Now I have heard an example of modern evolution that defines a new species like this: suppose you have a fish that is normally green, but occasionally a mutation occurs and a blue fish is born among the green fish. Suppose these fish live near some green coral where the green fish blend in and thus survive more than the blue fish. Then, say that several of the green and blue fish migrate away from that area several miles to where there happens to be a lot of blue coral. Now, the green fish die off and the blue fish survive. Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous."
Personally, I'd liken that to breeds in dogs, rather than species, if the only thing that's changed is the color to suit an environmental issue. But, it's a helpful jumping off point, so let's push it a bit further and perhaps you'll get a visit from the clue fairy.
The two populations of fish have split off - green and blue. Let's fall them family 1 and family 2.
Family 1 stays by that coral - green fish survive, blue ones die. Family 2 moves off to the blue coral where blue fish live, green ones die.
Now, let's say there is some kind of infestation/earthquake/algal bloom or whatever that ruins family 1's coral, kills it off. F1 now splits again - F11 and F12. F11 is comprised of members that try to make a go of it staying at the coral, and let's say that F11 is mostly made of individuals who are big enough to make predators think twice about attacking them. F12 is mostly made of smaller members who move to a new environment, one in which their small size is an asset to avoiding predators, let's say it's a cave system.
F11 members - the biggish ones that resist predators through size - continue to "breed for size" (of course, they don't know this, it's just that the ones that live long enough to breed are the bigger ones). Over time, they become substantially larger than their old F1 ancestors - and food becomes scarce by the coral source. So some members of F11 - the ones who can range over larger distances for food, let's call them F112 - start to spread out over larger and larger distances to find food. The ones maybe some are more efficient at hoovering up plankton or algae (bigger mouths, maybe slightly more efficient stomachs, whatever) - they become F1121. Others are maybe a little more aggressive and instead of going after nutrients from plants, they actually go after smaller fish that eat plants - so they swallow those little fish and their guts rip up the little fish, releasing the plants the little fish ate (let's call these predators F1122). The F1121's keep on getting bigger, more effective at hoovering up plankton and stuff like that, and more able to just roam for VERY long distances to get their daily meal. So we have F1121 - gigantic vegetarians capable of covering huge distances.
The aggressive ones, the F1122's, something interesting happens to them... One batch (F11221) has a bit of a less discerning gut, one that happens to derive nutrition not just from the plants released from their prey, but also maybe a little bit from the blood of that prey that gets released. At first it's not much, but the ones who are able to do that trick well wind up being just a little more efficient than the ones who can't, and soon F11221's have gotten to the point where they're also able to digest the meat from their prey which is MUCH more efficient than digesting the plants. So F11221's have become basically carnivorous.
The F11222's are the F1122's that aren't as maneuverable. They prefer shallower waters like those nearer to land. They still eat plants, but lots of the plants are on the surface of the water, and some of these guys, it turns out, are able to pull some oxygen from air (not a lot, just a little, just enough to let them stay on the surface eating plants a little longer
I'm atheistic/apatheistic/agnostic, whatever you want to call it, but I've never understood why anyone would say that proving evolution (via your device to view it in action) would prove god/gods doesn't/don't exist.Likewise, I don't understand people on the flip-side who think that somehow believing in evolution is contrary to believing in god/gods.
The only thing proof of or belief in evolution would indicate is that the literal interpretation of the Bible is false. That's it. Trying to push it and say that evolution disproves god is illogical - it just disproves a particular tale of how a god or gods might have created things. A particular tale, I might add, that only *recently* has been believed by anyone to be anything but a bunch of metaphor and allegory for various events, concepts etc.
The whole "evolution denies god!" or "evolution disproves god!" argument is just flat-out stupid. It's like saying that the existence of apples demonstrates conclusively that super-string theory is false, or that Newton's laws of motion prove conclusively that unicorns don't exist. The two arguments have nothing to do with each other, except that some people use tortured logic to try and connect them in some kind of meaningful way.
By the way - Georges Lemaitre, the father of the big bang theory (though he didn't call it that)? Catholic priest and, one imagines, quite the believer in god in addition to being a half-decent physicist. I guess he didn't get the memo about the bible being literal truth...
Yes - I blame a lack of coffee for the tarnish/polish swap.
I wasn't responding to PsyStar's efforts, but instead to the poster who claimed that Apple must make a "DAMN" large margin on selling complete systems to stick with that vs. selling just an OS.
Personally, I'd love to see OSX made workable on any hardware easily and without hacks, but I understand why Apple won't do it.
You are missing a lot of factors that go past the margin on the hardware.
One of the reasons Windows gets a bad rap for crashing a lot is because it has to be able to handle any kind of hardware you throw at it. One of the reasons Linux gets such a bad rap for being difficult to install and use is because virtually everyone who's ever installed it has probably run into a problem where some piece of hardware that should be easy to make work just won't. Apple, on the other hand, gets a reputation for "just working" because they control what hardware is used with it - yes, there are problems, but in general they are much less on a user-per-user basis than alternatives.
Another big factor would be reputation as a premium brand. iPods are the bit of Apple that anyone can afford, but they maintain their image as premium by generally doing a good job trying to control the retail experience, charging a premium for the hardware, and all that. Being just another OS would remove that and would take a lot of tarnish off the corporate identity.
Another would be a huge spike in support costs. Right now, many of Apple's customers buy AppleCare and that subsidizes the costs of support to some extent. If they're just selling the OS and people start having problems because Cheap Chinese Piece of Shit Video Card doesn't work with OSX, they have to be able to handle that OR risk ruining their reputation for "just working" and their premium brand image, both of which eventually lead to their margins.
It isn't just the margin on the hardware that Apple's worried about - it's everything else. They'd have to completely change the way they do business and completely overhaul the company. I suspect that the margin on the hardware + all that other stuff is what makes it so much more profitable to sell complete systems instead of just an OS.
Cash won't do it. It isn't a matter of compensation - it's a matter of the intangibles. More money would probably encourage the *worst* kinds of people to become teachers rather than the best.
I work at a university, do some instruction and like it. My pay is laughable compared to what I used to earn in technology, but I feel like what I do actually matters. Not all the time, but sometimes - definitely more often than I ever felt that way in the tech field. I'm pretty good at teaching, if I do say so myself (and my supervising faculty also agree), and one of the big reasons I'm good is because I have desire, motivation, etc., but also because I have the freedom to modify my lesson plan if it becomes desirable.
I've got over a dozen friends and acquaintances who worked (note the past tense) in the public school system out here. None of them quit over the money - they all got into it knowing that the money was shit. Every one of them got into it because they foolishly thought that they'd be allowed to *teach*. Instead, they were really being turned into prison guards or forced to use a rigid curriculum that is dumbed down to meet the abilities of the least motivated teachers.
Money will motivate some people (usually not the best or brightest) to do certain jobs - it's the intangible benefits that get the best. Money often comes to the best, but jeeze, there's much easier ways to make lots of money than teaching.
That's true - but they will come to see school as a system for the arbitrary use of laughably ineffective authority, and that's not a very good situation, either.
Why not use schools as places to inculcate a sense of intellectual curiosity where their interests can be explored safely and with people who genuinely care about their well being and helping them become informed, critically thinking adults?
I notice that nobody who's said there should be filtering has offered anything close to a definition of what should be filtered that isn't so wildly ambiguous as to allow anything under the sun to be blocked or even said what they think the benefit of filtering the kids' access would be...
You're okay with blocking porn, as long as it's actually porn? Do you have a simple, unambiguous definition for it?
What about violence? And what constitutes violence? Are graphic pictures from the Holocaust too much, or is that okay because it's "History?" What about pictures of skate-borders getting badly injured on youtube? What about the Zapruder film? What about pictures from surgical procedures? How about pictures of self-mutilation?
How about chemistry texts? Should we not allow kids to have access because they can figure out things that will go boom, or do we only restrict things like how to make pipe-bombs?
What about hate speech? Should a kid be allowed to visit Stormfront, or should they be blocked? Should a child be allowed to read Mein Kampf or speeches given by other genocidal sorts, or shall we restrict that, too?
You say you're opposed to blocking research, communication and collaboration tools - well, what if a kid wants to write a paper on sex and sexuality? What's considered a research tool and what's considered out of bounds? How old should a kid be before they're allowed to write a paper on sex? Should each kid have to get parental consent? If the kid gets parental consent, how do you keep them from sharing their stuff with other kids?
It's not so simple as "block some of it, we all know what needs to be blocked" because, obviously, by the fact that there's any discussion at all, it shows that people will disagree.
As I said in another post, the only solution that would actually *be* a solution and would actually enhance learning is to have the activity monitored and open for discussion, not filtered and punished. Treating kids like intelligent human beings rather than like criminals would go a LONG way to salvaging our educational system.
I'm absolutely opposed to filtering. It doesn't need to be filtered - it needs to be observed and discussed.
Putting a filter or other bar to access out there will just encourage kids to try to get around the filters and will set up an oppositional relationship where it's Us vs. Them and each side pointlessly tries to get ahead of the other. That does nothing but waste resources and valuable learning opportunities for something that you acknowledge is so easy to circumvent.
Instead, activity should be observed and discussed. Kids browsing for porn in the lab? So that's a good time to have a discussion about puberty, sex education, ask thought provoking questions that might get the kids to think - like, what do you think about the people who act in those movies? What about the people who pay to see them? And so on. Make it a math lesson coupled with research - porn is a business, what are the numbers behind it? Or to talk about social responsibility and the idea of rights - does their having porn on their screen make another student uncomfortable? Is it right that they should disregard someone else's feelings and do what they want? Is it right that they should restrict their own viewing habits out of deference to the wishes of someone else? Or even a meta discussion - some people say we should restrict what kids can see, other people don't, some people who think we should restrict things disagree on what should be restricted, etc.
One of these approaches teaches kids to attempt to thwart an arbitrary and (usually) incompetent authority system that wants to punish them for being curious. The other helps kids learn to think about things from multiple perspectives and to think of their teachers as allies rather than foes. If we're going to really re-make the educational system in this country, changing the whole dynamic between kids and their teachers is an EXCELLENT way to start.
The problem I see is that for the most part, people who are REALLY smart and REALLY want to work with kids go into teaching thinking they can actually make a difference, only to get burnt out when they realize that they're working with people who are, essentially, trying to run a minimum security prison for children. If we want to get smart and motivated teachers, paying them more isn't the only part of the answer - in fact, I suspect it's a very small part of the answer. Instead, we should allow those smart, motivated people to actually *teach* rather than using them as little more than prison guards who hopefully will get kids to (if they're lucky) occasionally do some math.
I think the people you're referring to - "scientists" that claim science disproves God - are the flip side of the coin to the crazy fundamentalists who think the bible is literal truth.
There are idiots who say "Hey, I have this old book, and it says it knows all the answers. Some so-called 'scientist' says he only has a theory about how the world is, and he admits it might be wrong or incomplete, so my book's way better than his guesses!" The idiot in this case doesn't understand what a theory is, how science does and doesn't work, and isn't capable of handling nuance.
Likewise, there are idiots who say "Hey, some people have figured out how a certain process works, and it doesn't seem to involve god even though some people think it does, so WE HAVE JUST PROVEN GOD DOESN'T EXIST!" The idiot in this case doesn't understand that the only thing that discovery (whatever it is) proves is that the process in question works a certain way and has absolutely nothing to do with god.
They're both ideologues and inflexible, and equally worthless.
Personally, I'm an atheist/agnostic/apatheist in that I'm pretty sure there's no god (practially certain), but willing to admit it in the same way I'd admit it's possible (though so massively improbable as to be laughable) that there's alien life out there that looks exactly like us except with green skin, but either way I don't give a shit.
I'll also say that I find any religion that operates on a system of rewards and punishments to be incredibly juvenile, and the subscribers to such religions to be pathetic and childlike. Saying that your god punishes people for something like loving a human being of the same sex just makes your god a petty, spiteful creature and certainly not one deserving of worship. I do respect some people who happen to be religious, though - they're the ones who hold their beliefs out of a love of their god or gods, and behave as they do out of that love, rather than out of fear or desire.
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I can't take honor to the store and convert it into food. The power company also doesn't take honor as a form of payment.
Are you unable to afford food? Are you unable to pay your electric bill?
As I said in a different post, it strikes me as odd that people who don't need it are complaining that they're not getting anything from the stimulus. It's like bitching that your child isn't mentally retarded and thus doesn't qualify for the special education programs, or complaining that you aren't disabled so you can't use handicapped spaces.
There are a couple of things wrong with your post:
The stimulus (and, it seems, many of the Obama administration's policies) are designed to reward failure.
That's not remotely true. They're designed to forestall worse economic situations that would sink the entire economy. Now, they may not actually do that, but that's what they're *designed* to do. I don't think anyone who was involved said, "Let's make a plan that rewards people for failing and punishes people who succeed!" To phrase it the way you did implies that they're actively out to hurt the country, and that's just hackery. You may disagree with how they are going about trying to solve a problem, but if you begin with the idea that they are doing so out of bad intentions, then you're not really being all that helpful.
There will be no incentives for people that are on time
How about the incentive of not having to ask for a hand-out? How about the incentive of not having to worry that you're going to lose your home because you make your payments on time? How about the incentive of not having to deal with the whole bureaucratic mess that will inevitably spring up from the need to screen people who are asking for help?
Do you also have a problem in that you don't get anything from unemployment insurance because you're not unemployed? Do you complain that there are handicapped spaces that you're not allowed to take advantage of? Do you wish your children were mentally retarded or otherwise disabled so that they could take advantage of special needs programs? How often do you lament not being given food stamps because you can afford to eat?
I'm a homeowner. I've got a job. I put down 20% when I bought the place, got a mortgage with an excellent fixed rate. I've never missed a payment on my mortage, always paid a little extra in fact so that I'd pay it off sooner and pay less overall. The place I bought has "only" lost 10% of its value during the current crash (and is still worth quite a bit more than I paid for it). So, in other words, I don't expect to get anything directly from the stimulus package, nor do I need it.
But, the indirect benefit I hope to get is that, if more people can keep their homes rather than being foreclosed on, the housing market will hopefully not completely bottom out to where my place will be worth less than I paid for it and to where if I do want to sell it I won't be able to do so without taking a large loss. Further, the economy not going completely into the toilet (read: to the point where the joke about stockpiling food, guns and ammo isn't a joke anymore) and that's a good thing for people like me who don't want to live in some kind of post-apocalyptic world where people kill one another over toilet paper and boxes of Froot Loops.
Also, the ability to return a game that I do not like.
This is why I buy used games for the most part - GameStop lets you return any used game you buy from them for credit if you do so within 15 or 30 days (can't remember; only returned one and that was a year ago). Some of the stores are pretty laid back about this, too - they'll let you return several games on the same credit as long as you don't completely abuse the process.
For games that are new and haven't yet come down in price on the used market, I'll just rent 'em.
I don't think its an issue of fashion so much as one of practicality: online play of a game tends to, over time, decrease (with rare exceptions). If you really like playing online with people, you either have to become an early adopter or you have to only play the games that are the Halos, Starcrafts and Counter Strikes.
I don't think there's a lot of snobbery of "Oh, that game is *6 months old!* I'd never play something like that!" but there surely is a lot of "I'm not going to play that - I can't ever find online opponents!"
After all, people are still playing Halo, Starcraft, Counter Strike and Diablo II - and I'd wager most of their playerbase online is on the younger side rather than a bunch of old farts in their 40's who aren't ashamed to be playing something old.
There is no "sunny" side of the moon - the whole thing gets sun. There's a far-side of the moon, which is the side facing away from us (and that is permanent because we're tidally locked).
So, in order to "cover the sunny side of the moon" with solar arrays, we'd either need to coat the ENTIRE moon with solar arrays or devise some way to have whatever half of the moon happens to be facing the sun at any given moment covered in arrays - some sort of movable dome of arrays.
Either task strikes me as outrageously more difficult than just building a gigantic array of collectors that's outside the plane of the ecliptic (and thus a bit less likely to get pelted with random stuff floating about) that covers a huge area (whatever arbitrary size) and could be made larger over time.
Or we could just build a ginormous reflector in space that will focus light on a smaller array that then beams the power back. A reflector could be made very large, made out of relatively cheap materials, and wouldn't have a very complicated structure. Plus, if we got bored we could move the reflector around to focus the energy on random stuff - heat up Mars, maybe? Fry some space-ants?
Only very, very rarely have I bought a game at release in the last few years. I think I got WoW, City of Heroes and Civ 4 at release. WoW because Blizzard's always done a damn good job with what they put out, City of Heroes because it was the only Super Hero game around (and I liked the costume creator), and Civ 4 because, well, it's Civ!
But otherwise I never buy at release. I'm not unwilling to pay for games (MMO's wind up costing much more than any other single game, price isn't the issue), but I've been burnt enough, and frankly most titles coming out simply aren't compelling enough, that I'm more than happy to wait a year or so for them to be in the bargain bin.
Last weekend I picked up Sins of a Solar Empire for $12.99 - it's pretty nice! - but there's no way I would have paid $49.99 for it when it came out. Same thing with console games - I've got one of each of the current gen (obviously willing to spend money on gaming) but other than Rock Band, I haven't paid full-price for a game, getting them used or once they become "Platinum Hits" or whatever and come down to $19.99 or so. If I like a game a lot, I'll even buy some DLC (Marvel Ultimate Alliance is fun, and running around with an all-villain team is entertaining) - but there is some kind of psychological resistance I have to paying full-price up-front.
Demos are great, but I know that they're just demos and that usually means that their most compelling features are going to be in them, with vague hints that if I get the full game there will be some super-awesome stuff - but unless the demo is just mind-blowing (and a demo never has been for me), there's no way I'll do anything other than make a mental note to check the game out when it's $20 or so.
Now, if I could get games at release for $20, I'd probably be much more willing to try stuff out. Of course, what would likely happen is that developers would release a slightly feature-richer demo rather than a full game and make everything else into DLC so it'd be a losing proposition again. So, I'd rather they stick with the current set-up - let the people who must have a game on release day pay full freight, and then people like me will pick 'em up a year later.
More to the point, it's not possible to save money by giving money to charity. People do get a tax write-off, yes, but the amount saved in taxes can only be a percentage (whatever your marginal rate on the money donated is) of the amount given.
It's not just cynical, it's stupid. It's kind of like the morons who think that the US tax system - by charging a higher marginal rate on monies earned above a certain point - somehow punishes people who make more money. I actually know a few people who truly believe that they're making less money with salaries of around $60,000 a year than people who make $45,000 a year because of the marginal rate increases.
The thing I don't get about terrorist attacks is this:
Why do a 9/11 style thing - hitting a few big, high-profile, symbolic targets, spending the lives of the operatives in the process?
Why not do something that would *really* cripple a target nation? Why not have the operatives rent a bunch of cars or trucks all over the country, fill 'em with bombs, and hit dozens of soft targets, such as day care centers, coffee shops, malls, and other places? To me, it seems like that would make people absolutely terrified of going *anywhere* because *anything* could be a target. Further, there would have been a *total* repeal of civil liberties had things been done that way, rather than "just" the abuses we've had now. If 9/11 had actually been a series of 20 or 30 little attacks all over the country, the end result would have been vastly worse despite the very likely case of a much lower actual body count.
Likewise, why bother trying to hijack planes when rolling up to an airport security line and doing the suicide bomb thing would be far, far easier and vastly more effective?
None of it makes any sense to me. If you want to completely cripple your opponent, to destroy them or make them destroy themselves, the way people have been going about it doesn't make any sense.
Here's an odd bit of confluence... My uncle was Harold Green (he died recently) - an attorney who worked for the US Government and who was responsible for figuring out how to "get" Oppenheimer when the government went after him. He mentioned feeling conflicted over his part in that - proud for coming up with a legal novelty, but ashamed for helping to ruin a great man.
It was a very odd experience for me reading a biography of Oppenheimer and seeing my uncle in it, reading about what he did.
Wait, I'm not sure I understand...
You want to work in the United States, are not a citizen of the United States, but you are demanding that the government of the United States leave you alone?
Or, am I misunderstanding, and you don't want to work or live in the US? Because generally, unless you're in a country we're invading (sorry about that if you are - hopefully the new guy will be a little less excitable), people in foreign countries are more or less outside US jurisdiction.
Of course, in another post after this, you say you want to secede, which generally isn't a problem for foreigners in the US as they can just go home. Sorry, but you don't get to leave and take part of the country with you.
Except he said *manned* space-flight, not just space-flight. In fact, he specifically said robots and rovers were AOK in his mind. And computers were developed a bit before space-flight, manned or unmanned. So your comment is basically incorrect in both content and purpose.
Personally, I think the bulk of the benefits of manned space-flight have been in the coin of inspiration. When Armstrong took those first steps on the moon, that said something about humanity as a species. Rovers, while cool as hell and certainly less costly, just don't fire up the imagination quite the same way. Even so, we pissed all that away by not continuing to push forward.
What I'd like to see happen is to continue the exploratory bits we do now with robots - map the terrain, as it were - and limit human exploration to orbit in the form of building *real* space-stations, *real* manufacturing capability, maybe bring a few metal asteroids around to use as raw materials. Launching from orbit rather than from the surface of the Earth would certainly cut the cost of a Mars mission dramatically, and developing the orbital manufacture technologies and capabilities would have very tangible benefits.
Seems a much better approach than pissing away billions of dollars to send a 1-shot there and back "look what we can do" mission that won't yield much in the way of actual benefit beyond "wow, people got to Mars" which will, unfortunately, almost certainly yield the same results as "wow, people got to the moon."
There is a bit of a risk/reward situation going on. For an H1B, they're taking the risk of relocating here and being sent back immediately if they lose their job, but the reward is a job and (presumably) a better overall lifestyle compared to what they had back home. If an H1B were taking the giant step of coming here to work for the same or worse lifestyle as back home, they're an idiot. If an H1B were to be genuinely surprised that when they go to a foreign country that foreign country's government takes steps to protect its citizens over foreign nationals who are working there, again, that H1B is an idiot.
On the part of some employers, there's a perception that employees from certain countries are going to be much more easily managed (read: abused) and forced to do lots of extra overtime without complaint because hey, if they don't like it, they can always go back to where they came from. Meanwhile a US citizen, if they don't like it they can just look for another job or quit, but in either case it won't mean being sent half a world away and absolutely disrupting every aspect of their lives. I think its incredibly shitty that this kind of coercion can happen, but hey, it's life.
As to your gay analogy - it's way off base because you're talking about citizens vs. non-citizens. Granted, it does on the one hand seem kind of foolish to play an "us vs. them" kind of game, but that's the way the world is right now. Homosexual US citizens are citizens, period. Just because some (many) people here hate them doesn't change that fact. Conversely, H1Bs are not citizens, period. Just because they're skilled workers and probably have stronger incentives to work harder doesn't change that fact. If H1Bs want the exact same rights, protections and privileges of US citizens, they can try to become citizens. Otherwise they're subject to the rules (arbitrary or not, foolish or not) that any other resident alien is subject to in the US.
The same thing goes in reverse for US citizens working outside the US. I've worked outside the US on a few different occasions and I can say that I was subject to some regulations and requirements by bureaucrats that completely baffled me, but I knew that going into it. Further, because I'm female, in two of the countries I worked in, I was generally subjected to a whole bunch of harassment and had to put up with a lot of bullshit without any protections, but then again, I knew that going into it. Again, shitty for me that I had to put up with it, but hey, that's life, and for me the benefits (primarily the experiences I had and things I learned) were worth putting up with some assholes.
I do agree that many slashdotters seem to have irrational viewpoints and presuppose a lot about people based solely on their H1B vs. citizen status, but again, that's life. People who are worried about keeping their jobs are generally going to be a lot less inclined to welcome more competition in a troubled time, so I just chalk it up to that.
I do, but I'm in academia, so that's not unusual. Actually, it's unusual for me to work more than 35/wk now that I'm done with the student grind. Add to that the ridonkulous vacation and benefits (why, yes, I *do* have over 40 paid days off per year, fully employer funded health-care, matched retirement funds, and I get free travel to some pretty nice locations every month or two [Puerto Rico in December, this month New Orleans, Alabama in February which is nice because I'm in Illinois and it'll be fucking cold then] and so on).... And, of course, there's getting to spend a lot of my time working on things I find really interested in and getting to work with (often) very intelligent people to try to figure out things that nobody else knows.
On the other hand, the pay is about what you'd expect for a job that gives you essentially 2 work-months of vacation a year, I have to deal with some incredibly huge egos, upward mobility requires advanced degrees/ass kissing/massive genius/absolute ruthlessness/incredible luck/a combination of all the above, and the work I make *must* be of very high quality all the time because it's under huge scrutiny and once you get a reputation for being a fuck-up it's not very easy to undo it even if you move to a different university.
For me it works because the plusses are what I want and the minuses are things I seem to be constitutionally suited to dealing with.
Sorry, I got carried away :) I just love my job!
... not the answers.
For my current job (data manager/protocol design for a research program), the interview had 3 parts. First I met the primary investigator, then I met the team and lastly I was brought into a room, given a stack of personality tests and told simply, "I'll be back in an hour."
The tests were all of the kind people are mentioning here - either ones that were designed as surveys to try and get a snapshot of a larger population (so 1 individual's results were meaningless) or ones with questions that were overly broad ("Have you ever done anything really bad?"), absurd ("You just bought groceries and are 15 miles away from the grocery store when you realize the clerk gave you $1 too much change. Do you: a) go back to the store, b) steal the $1"), pointless ("What kind of animal would you be if you could be anything?"), offered to many response options ("All the time, almost all the time, most of the time, a little more than half the time, not sure but just barely over half the time, half the time, not sure but just barely less than half the time..." etc) and so on.
Rather than take them, I just started critiquing them - "What's this item intended to measure?" "This is too vague, terms need to be defined." "Reduce the number of options to 5, an optimal number to both capture variety and remove option paralysis." and suggesting alternative measures that are more appropriate for what it seems like they were trying to get at.
An hour goes by, I'm merrily marking these things up, the primary comes in and sees what I've done and offers me the job, because what I did in the interview is what the job would entail, and the personality qualities they were looking for were more along the lines of "will find a polite way of saying 'what you're doing is stupid, here's a better way to go about doing that.'"
Best job I ever had, too - I've got lots and lots of leeway to change things that I don't feel are being effective, but also working with a really great team who have been able to teach me a lot of stuff about my new field so I'm able to grow quite a bit. The money is shit (that's academia) but money isn't everything, and I do get 3 months vacation :)
There's an easy and obvious way around this - just run 3 simultaneous instances and error-check by consensus. Still able to run the whole thing in under a half hour and still pretty cheap at ~$3000.
Of course I hand-waved through a few hundred thousand generations of slight improvement; this is slashdot, not a formal dissertation and defense. I will cheerfully stipulate that the 5 minutes I spent writing the post you're criticizing is not remotely scientific and serves only to illustrate (in very, very rough form) what some people mean when they talk about evolution. I don't agree that "figuring out" (forgive my anthropomorphizing - I'm a folksy kinda gal when I write off the cuff) how to slowly, over the course of many, many generations, glean some O2 from air instead of water is as absurd as "fish gives birth to monkey," but why quibble? Also, I don't really call myself a "scientist" (except on my income tax - under the occupation heading I like to write "I am a scientist.") - just a person taking part in a discussion. Certainly I never said that my post was absolute scientific truth, and I honestly doubt that any reasonable person reading it could honestly come to the conclusion that I was somehow stating that my post was presented as such.
I did find the quote you chose to post at the end pretty odd. I'm not aware that I claimed to *know* anything with absolute certainty, but also, I wonder, have you been applying that same kind of standard to people arguing against evolution? I'm thinking of people who make bald assertions that the Bible has any kind of divine provenance or "underlying spiritual truth" are generally trying to make the claim that they *know* something with certainty. I'm sure someone with your high standards for requiring evidence and lack of tolerance for hand-waving would agree that all sides of this particular argument should be held to the same standards, no?
"Now I have heard an example of modern evolution that defines a new species like this: suppose you have a fish that is normally green, but occasionally a mutation occurs and a blue fish is born among the green fish. Suppose these fish live near some green coral where the green fish blend in and thus survive more than the blue fish. Then, say that several of the green and blue fish migrate away from that area several miles to where there happens to be a lot of blue coral. Now, the green fish die off and the blue fish survive. Over time these two populations no longer breed amongst each other. By my understanding, evolution defines them as two separate species and state that MACRO-evolution has occurred. I call that a convenient definition to suit evolutionist agenda. Utterly ridiculous."
Personally, I'd liken that to breeds in dogs, rather than species, if the only thing that's changed is the color to suit an environmental issue. But, it's a helpful jumping off point, so let's push it a bit further and perhaps you'll get a visit from the clue fairy.
The two populations of fish have split off - green and blue. Let's fall them family 1 and family 2.
Family 1 stays by that coral - green fish survive, blue ones die. Family 2 moves off to the blue coral where blue fish live, green ones die.
Now, let's say there is some kind of infestation/earthquake/algal bloom or whatever that ruins family 1's coral, kills it off. F1 now splits again - F11 and F12. F11 is comprised of members that try to make a go of it staying at the coral, and let's say that F11 is mostly made of individuals who are big enough to make predators think twice about attacking them. F12 is mostly made of smaller members who move to a new environment, one in which their small size is an asset to avoiding predators, let's say it's a cave system.
F11 members - the biggish ones that resist predators through size - continue to "breed for size" (of course, they don't know this, it's just that the ones that live long enough to breed are the bigger ones). Over time, they become substantially larger than their old F1 ancestors - and food becomes scarce by the coral source. So some members of F11 - the ones who can range over larger distances for food, let's call them F112 - start to spread out over larger and larger distances to find food. The ones maybe some are more efficient at hoovering up plankton or algae (bigger mouths, maybe slightly more efficient stomachs, whatever) - they become F1121. Others are maybe a little more aggressive and instead of going after nutrients from plants, they actually go after smaller fish that eat plants - so they swallow those little fish and their guts rip up the little fish, releasing the plants the little fish ate (let's call these predators F1122). The F1121's keep on getting bigger, more effective at hoovering up plankton and stuff like that, and more able to just roam for VERY long distances to get their daily meal. So we have F1121 - gigantic vegetarians capable of covering huge distances.
The aggressive ones, the F1122's, something interesting happens to them... One batch (F11221) has a bit of a less discerning gut, one that happens to derive nutrition not just from the plants released from their prey, but also maybe a little bit from the blood of that prey that gets released. At first it's not much, but the ones who are able to do that trick well wind up being just a little more efficient than the ones who can't, and soon F11221's have gotten to the point where they're also able to digest the meat from their prey which is MUCH more efficient than digesting the plants. So F11221's have become basically carnivorous.
The F11222's are the F1122's that aren't as maneuverable. They prefer shallower waters like those nearer to land. They still eat plants, but lots of the plants are on the surface of the water, and some of these guys, it turns out, are able to pull some oxygen from air (not a lot, just a little, just enough to let them stay on the surface eating plants a little longer
I'm atheistic/apatheistic/agnostic, whatever you want to call it, but I've never understood why anyone would say that proving evolution (via your device to view it in action) would prove god/gods doesn't/don't exist.Likewise, I don't understand people on the flip-side who think that somehow believing in evolution is contrary to believing in god/gods.
The only thing proof of or belief in evolution would indicate is that the literal interpretation of the Bible is false. That's it. Trying to push it and say that evolution disproves god is illogical - it just disproves a particular tale of how a god or gods might have created things. A particular tale, I might add, that only *recently* has been believed by anyone to be anything but a bunch of metaphor and allegory for various events, concepts etc.
The whole "evolution denies god!" or "evolution disproves god!" argument is just flat-out stupid. It's like saying that the existence of apples demonstrates conclusively that super-string theory is false, or that Newton's laws of motion prove conclusively that unicorns don't exist. The two arguments have nothing to do with each other, except that some people use tortured logic to try and connect them in some kind of meaningful way.
By the way - Georges Lemaitre, the father of the big bang theory (though he didn't call it that)? Catholic priest and, one imagines, quite the believer in god in addition to being a half-decent physicist. I guess he didn't get the memo about the bible being literal truth...
Yes - I blame a lack of coffee for the tarnish/polish swap.
I wasn't responding to PsyStar's efforts, but instead to the poster who claimed that Apple must make a "DAMN" large margin on selling complete systems to stick with that vs. selling just an OS.
Personally, I'd love to see OSX made workable on any hardware easily and without hacks, but I understand why Apple won't do it.
You are missing a lot of factors that go past the margin on the hardware.
One of the reasons Windows gets a bad rap for crashing a lot is because it has to be able to handle any kind of hardware you throw at it. One of the reasons Linux gets such a bad rap for being difficult to install and use is because virtually everyone who's ever installed it has probably run into a problem where some piece of hardware that should be easy to make work just won't. Apple, on the other hand, gets a reputation for "just working" because they control what hardware is used with it - yes, there are problems, but in general they are much less on a user-per-user basis than alternatives.
Another big factor would be reputation as a premium brand. iPods are the bit of Apple that anyone can afford, but they maintain their image as premium by generally doing a good job trying to control the retail experience, charging a premium for the hardware, and all that. Being just another OS would remove that and would take a lot of tarnish off the corporate identity.
Another would be a huge spike in support costs. Right now, many of Apple's customers buy AppleCare and that subsidizes the costs of support to some extent. If they're just selling the OS and people start having problems because Cheap Chinese Piece of Shit Video Card doesn't work with OSX, they have to be able to handle that OR risk ruining their reputation for "just working" and their premium brand image, both of which eventually lead to their margins.
It isn't just the margin on the hardware that Apple's worried about - it's everything else. They'd have to completely change the way they do business and completely overhaul the company. I suspect that the margin on the hardware + all that other stuff is what makes it so much more profitable to sell complete systems instead of just an OS.
Cash won't do it. It isn't a matter of compensation - it's a matter of the intangibles. More money would probably encourage the *worst* kinds of people to become teachers rather than the best.
I work at a university, do some instruction and like it. My pay is laughable compared to what I used to earn in technology, but I feel like what I do actually matters. Not all the time, but sometimes - definitely more often than I ever felt that way in the tech field. I'm pretty good at teaching, if I do say so myself (and my supervising faculty also agree), and one of the big reasons I'm good is because I have desire, motivation, etc., but also because I have the freedom to modify my lesson plan if it becomes desirable.
I've got over a dozen friends and acquaintances who worked (note the past tense) in the public school system out here. None of them quit over the money - they all got into it knowing that the money was shit. Every one of them got into it because they foolishly thought that they'd be allowed to *teach*. Instead, they were really being turned into prison guards or forced to use a rigid curriculum that is dumbed down to meet the abilities of the least motivated teachers.
Money will motivate some people (usually not the best or brightest) to do certain jobs - it's the intangible benefits that get the best. Money often comes to the best, but jeeze, there's much easier ways to make lots of money than teaching.
That's true - but they will come to see school as a system for the arbitrary use of laughably ineffective authority, and that's not a very good situation, either.
Why not use schools as places to inculcate a sense of intellectual curiosity where their interests can be explored safely and with people who genuinely care about their well being and helping them become informed, critically thinking adults?
I notice that nobody who's said there should be filtering has offered anything close to a definition of what should be filtered that isn't so wildly ambiguous as to allow anything under the sun to be blocked or even said what they think the benefit of filtering the kids' access would be...
You're okay with blocking porn, as long as it's actually porn? Do you have a simple, unambiguous definition for it?
What about violence? And what constitutes violence? Are graphic pictures from the Holocaust too much, or is that okay because it's "History?" What about pictures of skate-borders getting badly injured on youtube? What about the Zapruder film? What about pictures from surgical procedures? How about pictures of self-mutilation?
How about chemistry texts? Should we not allow kids to have access because they can figure out things that will go boom, or do we only restrict things like how to make pipe-bombs?
What about hate speech? Should a kid be allowed to visit Stormfront, or should they be blocked? Should a child be allowed to read Mein Kampf or speeches given by other genocidal sorts, or shall we restrict that, too?
You say you're opposed to blocking research, communication and collaboration tools - well, what if a kid wants to write a paper on sex and sexuality? What's considered a research tool and what's considered out of bounds? How old should a kid be before they're allowed to write a paper on sex? Should each kid have to get parental consent? If the kid gets parental consent, how do you keep them from sharing their stuff with other kids?
It's not so simple as "block some of it, we all know what needs to be blocked" because, obviously, by the fact that there's any discussion at all, it shows that people will disagree.
As I said in another post, the only solution that would actually *be* a solution and would actually enhance learning is to have the activity monitored and open for discussion, not filtered and punished. Treating kids like intelligent human beings rather than like criminals would go a LONG way to salvaging our educational system.
I'm absolutely opposed to filtering. It doesn't need to be filtered - it needs to be observed and discussed.
Putting a filter or other bar to access out there will just encourage kids to try to get around the filters and will set up an oppositional relationship where it's Us vs. Them and each side pointlessly tries to get ahead of the other. That does nothing but waste resources and valuable learning opportunities for something that you acknowledge is so easy to circumvent.
Instead, activity should be observed and discussed. Kids browsing for porn in the lab? So that's a good time to have a discussion about puberty, sex education, ask thought provoking questions that might get the kids to think - like, what do you think about the people who act in those movies? What about the people who pay to see them? And so on. Make it a math lesson coupled with research - porn is a business, what are the numbers behind it? Or to talk about social responsibility and the idea of rights - does their having porn on their screen make another student uncomfortable? Is it right that they should disregard someone else's feelings and do what they want? Is it right that they should restrict their own viewing habits out of deference to the wishes of someone else? Or even a meta discussion - some people say we should restrict what kids can see, other people don't, some people who think we should restrict things disagree on what should be restricted, etc.
One of these approaches teaches kids to attempt to thwart an arbitrary and (usually) incompetent authority system that wants to punish them for being curious. The other helps kids learn to think about things from multiple perspectives and to think of their teachers as allies rather than foes. If we're going to really re-make the educational system in this country, changing the whole dynamic between kids and their teachers is an EXCELLENT way to start.
The problem I see is that for the most part, people who are REALLY smart and REALLY want to work with kids go into teaching thinking they can actually make a difference, only to get burnt out when they realize that they're working with people who are, essentially, trying to run a minimum security prison for children. If we want to get smart and motivated teachers, paying them more isn't the only part of the answer - in fact, I suspect it's a very small part of the answer. Instead, we should allow those smart, motivated people to actually *teach* rather than using them as little more than prison guards who hopefully will get kids to (if they're lucky) occasionally do some math.
I think the people you're referring to - "scientists" that claim science disproves God - are the flip side of the coin to the crazy fundamentalists who think the bible is literal truth.
There are idiots who say "Hey, I have this old book, and it says it knows all the answers. Some so-called 'scientist' says he only has a theory about how the world is, and he admits it might be wrong or incomplete, so my book's way better than his guesses!" The idiot in this case doesn't understand what a theory is, how science does and doesn't work, and isn't capable of handling nuance.
Likewise, there are idiots who say "Hey, some people have figured out how a certain process works, and it doesn't seem to involve god even though some people think it does, so WE HAVE JUST PROVEN GOD DOESN'T EXIST!" The idiot in this case doesn't understand that the only thing that discovery (whatever it is) proves is that the process in question works a certain way and has absolutely nothing to do with god.
They're both ideologues and inflexible, and equally worthless.
Personally, I'm an atheist/agnostic/apatheist in that I'm pretty sure there's no god (practially certain), but willing to admit it in the same way I'd admit it's possible (though so massively improbable as to be laughable) that there's alien life out there that looks exactly like us except with green skin, but either way I don't give a shit.
I'll also say that I find any religion that operates on a system of rewards and punishments to be incredibly juvenile, and the subscribers to such religions to be pathetic and childlike. Saying that your god punishes people for something like loving a human being of the same sex just makes your god a petty, spiteful creature and certainly not one deserving of worship. I do respect some people who happen to be religious, though - they're the ones who hold their beliefs out of a love of their god or gods, and behave as they do out of that love, rather than out of fear or desire.