This has to be a troll, you make it sound like they have a right to do this.
Maybe it depends on whether or not you think a person has a right to eat.
These "millions" of people need to get out and (for lack of better wording) GET A JOB!
Have you ever been on a city street in the 3rd world? It's not like you can just fill out a job application at KFC or something. My original post is asking what options there are for alternative work. Obviously, getting a different job would be ideal; the difficult question is: What job?
Actually, any illegal immigrant on a payroll is getting taxes withheld, just like you and me. Unless, of course, they are working off the books for cash. But you can't tell me that illegal immmigrants are the only ones guilty of that practice. And the irony is they don't qualify for any of the benefits their payroll taxes are paying for (like Social Security). As things are now, it is a pretty clear-cut case of taxation without representation. Illegals are taxed the same as you and me but they don't have government representation.
If the illegal aliens want to be a part of the US they have to play by the rules of the US
Fair enough. Show them the rules for becomming a U.S. citizen and I'm sure they would comply. The fact is there is no legitimate way for them to become U.S. citizens. With the current system, the chance of them getting accepted to legally work in the U.S. if they apply to the U.S. government is zero. How can you insist that people follow rules when there is no rule that will allow them to work in the U.S. legally?
I'm not sure who modded this "troll". I agree that most of 12th grade has become a waste of time. At that point, at least half the kids are ready for college, and the half that aren't need serious college prep or help transitioning to vocational careers, not wasting their time and tax money taking silly classes that pass for education, or taking AP classes on subjects which are supposed to be taught in college.
Meanwhile, our early childhood education is starving for money. All kids should be getting free pre-school education starting at age 3. Right now, most states won't provide education until age 5, with some states now requiring that kids wait until 6 before they can enter public schools. That is the exact wrong thing to be doing! Let's just can 12th grade and use that money to pay for free preschool for all 3 and 4 year olds!
What's the point of having a high school that teaches college-level classes? Why not just hand these kids their H.S. diploma after 10th or 11th grade and send them onto college, where they obviously belong? Isn't this Thomas Jeferson H.S. nothing more than a college posing as a high school and soaking up K-12 education dollars?
I'd much rather have my K-12 tax dollars being spent making sure all 3 and 4 year olds are getting prepared for school than holding the hands of smart (and lucky) 10th graders who should be off, on their own, in college by now.
If kids are coming out of high school with half of their undergraduate credits already complete, then what is the point of having high school?
This trend is happing everywhere. When I was a kid, AP was a rarity. Now almost half of the high school senior class is getting AP credits. I say 12th grade has outlived its academic usefulness. Most kids today are more than ready for college after 11th grade.
We'd get much more academic performance for our tax dollar if we just did away with 12th grade, send those kids on to college or other "transition" programs, and spend all that 12th grade money to provide free preschool to all children starting at age 3. By providing free early childhood education to all, our overall middle school and high school performance would be much better. And we wouldn't have this silly situation of half of our 12th graders taking college classes when they should just go ahead and be real college students.
Ray Kurzweil as tweaked a digital camera to do just what you describe, for the purpose of providing a portable text reader for blind people. They are for sale now, for about $3500 each.
I guy who lives down the street from me, Ky Michaelson, has already done this. In 2004 he
launched a home-made rocket to 100 km. He was the first amateur to do it, but it's nice to see these kids getting into the act as well.
Most of them were farmers selling their produce locally, until the globalization of the food market made that business unprofitable. Global food distributers refuse to buy their produce for more than it costs them to produce it because it can be imported cheaper from somewhere else. So now they are trying to bootstrap themselves into a new industry, which is exactly what the developed nations tell them tell them they should do when they can't compete in the global food market.
The capacity to quickly duplicate, distribute, and use digital files, whether music, movies, or software, seems to me quite a valuable infrastructure to build in the 21st century. Almost all of the IT infrastructure in the 3rd world -- whether for entertainment or commerce -- is being built with pirated (or free) software -- especially if you are talking about that "last mile" to the consumer's home.
Free and/or pirated information, whether music, movies, or software, is the very thing that enables the build-out of IT infrastructure into the 3rd world. Efforts like these are only aimed at protecting the monopoly of an established business, not fostering the development of new enterprise.
That was my question. Given the alternatives for survival on the city streets of the 3rd world, reselling music seems more honest and harmless than all of the alternatives that I can think of. The vendor has something that the customer wants, the customer can't afford to buy it in any other way, nobody is harmed of loses anything. Seems like true free enterprise to me, and not much more sleazy than the tactics of these large corporations that are making a big fuss about it.
Maybe it is time for the recording industry to come up with an honest and viable business plan of their own, rather than planning to monopolize and profit from global culture on the backs of anyone who enjoys music and movies. Who owns the global culture anyway?
I'm all for finding alternatives to selling pirated music. That was what I was asking for. I just can't think of any that scale as well and help as many people as this enterprise does.
So what is the plan to provide daily subsistance to the millions of people who rely on selling pirated disks for buck or two on the street? Millions of people have found a sustainable enterprise by re-selling the popular songs and movies that flood the world, and they rely on it for their daily food and shelter. If this enterprise is taken away, what alternatives are there for these people to survive?
You can't sell nuttin' to people what ain't got no money.
People whine and bitch and moan about "the rich getting richer", but without the rich, all checks would bounce.
This does not match my experience. I work with plenty of people on government assistance who never bounce checks and manage to save enough money to buy a used computer and pay for its support. Sure, there are scoundrels out there, but a successful business has to be wary of scoundrels at all income levels, not just the among poor. You can't seriously argue that a rich customer will never try to rip you off!
Yes, serving customers at the low end of the income scale requires a different business model than serving customers at the high end. But just becuase it is a different type of business does not mean there is no business there at all.
It is not modern electronics that are the problem, it is how corporations package and sell electronics as passive consumer products. To learn and thrive, children need less of "do not open, do not copy, no consumer-servicable componentents inside" and more of a "let's take it apart and fix it" mentality.
That "Let's fix it" attitude is certainly possible with modern electronics, just look Make Magazine as an example. We just need to do a better job of teaching "Let's fix it" to our children.
The Americans with Disabilities Act has a pretty large loophole known as "Altnative Accommodation". For example, if putting in a wheelchair ramp is too expensive, all a store has to do is offer to provide service at the curb and they are off the hook. Similarly, all Target has to do is offer to provide assistance in making purchases from its web site over a toll-free phone number and I'm sure they will be off the hook as well. This really won't ammount to much.
The MS Office app that is in dire need of replacement, and the app that seems most obvious to run on the web is PowerPoint. Why not build your presentation on the web and instantly share it will all of your participants, rather than having to jump through PowerPoint's terrible web publishing procedures?
So why doesn't the article mention presentation tools, and why have none of the big players (Google, Yahoo!) put out a web2.0 presentation application yet?
I know there are a many options out there -- Zoho Show, Thumbstack, S5, Empressr, Wimpypoint, PmWiki SlideShow, TiddlyWiki SlideShow, Slidy, OperaShow, TeamSlide, Carbonmade.
I don't have the time to compare them and sort them all out. Where is the big article reviewing and comparing these badly-needed tools? And why aren't the big web guys giving this essential application any attention?
I agree. I'm afraid at $250 a pop, this will only be available to rich kids. Which is fine as far as it goes, I'm just wondering what the other 90% of kids can have to play with. At least you can pick up LEGO mindstorms set pretty cheap at brinklink.
I wonder what other options are out there for good, low-cost robotics toys?
MS market share in colleges and universities is significantly less than 90%. In fact, those are traditional domains of unix and open-source development. This is nothing more than typical MS behavior to gain market share through coercive, monopolistic marketing practices rather than by providing better value.
Anyone who has spent any time with today's teenagers know that kids are "wasting too much time online browsing dangerous sites, instant messaging friends and posting to Myspace" (and creating mindless PowerPoint presentations) whether their school provides them with a laptop or not.
Taking away their school laptop won't solve the problem -- today's kids are surrounded by computers whether their school gives them one or not.
What is needed is real training in time management and critical thinking -- things that must be taught whether or not the school provides a laptop.
At least providing all students with a laptop gives all students equal access to the information tools they need. Taking away the laptops won't take away the need to teach the personal management skills that our children need in the 21st century.
anyone who opposes DRMed music primarily because it allows them to pirate and distribute is a thief
But people have been making copies of music and sharing the copies for as long as recording devices have been available -- even back in the reel-to-reel days. Sure, the qualitiy of the copies is much better now, but I don't think it is realistic for the recording companies to think they are going to change decades of consumer behavior at this point.
In fact, it is the ability to copy, mix, and share music that made popular music the huge industry that it is. To try to pretend copying should never happen is to deny the entire history of the popular music industry.
Instead of pretending that copying doesn't happen, the industry should do what they've done in the past -- find a business model that can profit from copying. For example, they could give away music that builds a "brand" identity for an artist, then make money off of imbedded advertising, merchandising, concerts, and other related products.
But instead of creative thinking, all we are hearing lately is an attempt to criminalize what has been normal consumer behavior for decades.
No matter what the recording companies try to do with DRM, history tells us that copying and sharing music is only going to get easier in the future, not harder. Copying will not go away. The recording companies will not prosper by criminalizing all of their potential customers. They will only prosper if they find a way to profit from copying, just as they have in the past.
If he's a student, yes. Video conferencing and video editing and standard functions in today's e-learning envirnoments -- they're becoming just as essential as word processors were in the 80's.
Try to add the video and graphic capabilities of a $899 Mac to a $450 Dell and you would start to be close in price. The main difference would become the Mac's ease of use and reliability for video and graphic functions.
I actually don't think it would be too hard to put together a FOSS version of this. OCR has been around for a long time now, and there are FOSS OCR packages available. Also, text-to-speech is nothing new and there are FOSS options for that as well. The only reason a device like this was not made before, either is FOSS or comercial versions, was that small, powerful hardware needed for a hand-held solution was not affordable. The software has been around for awhile, but today's small, afordable digital cameras and computers are making it possible to hold the whole package in your hand rather than run it on a desktop they way its been done for the last 10 years.
As of yet, there is not even FOSS desktop version of a text-to-speech book reader available, even though the technology is ten years old. Put together a FOSS desktop book reader and it would be rather trivial to port it to a digital camera / palmtop setup like this device. The pieces are available, someone just has to do the work of gluing them all together.
That's right. Not only will private health insurance pay for these as medical devices, U.S. government health insurance, Medicaid, which most blind people qualify for because of their disability, will also pay for these. In addition, individuals can apply for government assistance through local vocational rehabilitation programs to pay for these. Plus, may public schools systems will be picking up the tab for these for their students.
So the high cost is caused precisely because these are ulimately payed for by government programs and private insurers. What is actually needed is less subsidy on the purchasing side of these devices to drive the price down, not more subsidy.
Only a small number of well-off blind people will be buying these with their own cash. The vast majority of these devices will be paid for with government subsidies.
Even if OS X is only 5% of all PCs in the world, surely there are a good number of hackers out there who would love to release an OS X virus into the wild, just to prove it can be done. Besides, the total number of OS X installs today is certainly greater than the total number of Windows installs that existed at the time the first Windows virus was released.
Most hackers don't need a huge number of installs to stroke their ego. The opportunity to prove that OS X is just as vulnerable as Windows should be more than enough to motivate someone to release an OS X virus into the wild. Yet no one has done it.
There must be more at work here than OS X's small market share. OS X must be inherently more secure than Windows to not have a virus in the wild six years after its release. Certainly there are enough hackers out there who would love to show their prowess by writing an OS X virus, even for the relatively small number of OS X installs that exist; but nobody has been able to do it yet.
The only reason Best Buy bought Geek Squad was so BB's computer repair would have a brand name attached to it. They figure if people recognize BB's computer support brand they will choose to buy a computer at Best Buy because they perceive they will get better support than from some other retailer.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe it depends on whether or not you think a person has a right to eat.
These "millions" of people need to get out and (for lack of better wording) GET A JOB!Have you ever been on a city street in the 3rd world? It's not like you can just fill out a job application at KFC or something. My original post is asking what options there are for alternative work. Obviously, getting a different job would be ideal; the difficult question is: What job?
Actually, any illegal immigrant on a payroll is getting taxes withheld, just like you and me. Unless, of course, they are working off the books for cash. But you can't tell me that illegal immmigrants are the only ones guilty of that practice. And the irony is they don't qualify for any of the benefits their payroll taxes are paying for (like Social Security). As things are now, it is a pretty clear-cut case of taxation without representation. Illegals are taxed the same as you and me but they don't have government representation.
If the illegal aliens want to be a part of the US they have to play by the rules of the US
Fair enough. Show them the rules for becomming a U.S. citizen and I'm sure they would comply. The fact is there is no legitimate way for them to become U.S. citizens. With the current system, the chance of them getting accepted to legally work in the U.S. if they apply to the U.S. government is zero. How can you insist that people follow rules when there is no rule that will allow them to work in the U.S. legally?
I'm not sure who modded this "troll". I agree that most of 12th grade has become a waste of time. At that point, at least half the kids are ready for college, and the half that aren't need serious college prep or help transitioning to vocational careers, not wasting their time and tax money taking silly classes that pass for education, or taking AP classes on subjects which are supposed to be taught in college.
Meanwhile, our early childhood education is starving for money. All kids should be getting free pre-school education starting at age 3. Right now, most states won't provide education until age 5, with some states now requiring that kids wait until 6 before they can enter public schools. That is the exact wrong thing to be doing! Let's just can 12th grade and use that money to pay for free preschool for all 3 and 4 year olds!
What's the point of having a high school that teaches college-level classes? Why not just hand these kids their H.S. diploma after 10th or 11th grade and send them onto college, where they obviously belong? Isn't this Thomas Jeferson H.S. nothing more than a college posing as a high school and soaking up K-12 education dollars?
I'd much rather have my K-12 tax dollars being spent making sure all 3 and 4 year olds are getting prepared for school than holding the hands of smart (and lucky) 10th graders who should be off, on their own, in college by now.
If kids are coming out of high school with half of their undergraduate credits already complete, then what is the point of having high school?
This trend is happing everywhere. When I was a kid, AP was a rarity. Now almost half of the high school senior class is getting AP credits. I say 12th grade has outlived its academic usefulness. Most kids today are more than ready for college after 11th grade.
We'd get much more academic performance for our tax dollar if we just did away with 12th grade, send those kids on to college or other "transition" programs, and spend all that 12th grade money to provide free preschool to all children starting at age 3. By providing free early childhood education to all, our overall middle school and high school performance would be much better. And we wouldn't have this silly situation of half of our 12th graders taking college classes when they should just go ahead and be real college students.
Ray Kurzweil as tweaked a digital camera to do just what you describe, for the purpose of providing a portable text reader for blind people. They are for sale now, for about $3500 each.
I guy who lives down the street from me, Ky Michaelson, has already done this. In 2004 he launched a home-made rocket to 100 km. He was the first amateur to do it, but it's nice to see these kids getting into the act as well.
Most of them were farmers selling their produce locally, until the globalization of the food market made that business unprofitable. Global food distributers refuse to buy their produce for more than it costs them to produce it because it can be imported cheaper from somewhere else. So now they are trying to bootstrap themselves into a new industry, which is exactly what the developed nations tell them tell them they should do when they can't compete in the global food market.
The capacity to quickly duplicate, distribute, and use digital files, whether music, movies, or software, seems to me quite a valuable infrastructure to build in the 21st century. Almost all of the IT infrastructure in the 3rd world -- whether for entertainment or commerce -- is being built with pirated (or free) software -- especially if you are talking about that "last mile" to the consumer's home.
Free and/or pirated information, whether music, movies, or software, is the very thing that enables the build-out of IT infrastructure into the 3rd world. Efforts like these are only aimed at protecting the monopoly of an established business, not fostering the development of new enterprise.
That was my question. Given the alternatives for survival on the city streets of the 3rd world, reselling music seems more honest and harmless than all of the alternatives that I can think of. The vendor has something that the customer wants, the customer can't afford to buy it in any other way, nobody is harmed of loses anything. Seems like true free enterprise to me, and not much more sleazy than the tactics of these large corporations that are making a big fuss about it.
Maybe it is time for the recording industry to come up with an honest and viable business plan of their own, rather than planning to monopolize and profit from global culture on the backs of anyone who enjoys music and movies. Who owns the global culture anyway?
I'm all for finding alternatives to selling pirated music. That was what I was asking for. I just can't think of any that scale as well and help as many people as this enterprise does.
So what is the plan to provide daily subsistance to the millions of people who rely on selling pirated disks for buck or two on the street? Millions of people have found a sustainable enterprise by re-selling the popular songs and movies that flood the world, and they rely on it for their daily food and shelter. If this enterprise is taken away, what alternatives are there for these people to survive?
You can't sell nuttin' to people what ain't got no money.
People whine and bitch and moan about "the rich getting richer", but without the rich, all checks would bounce.
This does not match my experience. I work with plenty of people on government assistance who never bounce checks and manage to save enough money to buy a used computer and pay for its support. Sure, there are scoundrels out there, but a successful business has to be wary of scoundrels at all income levels, not just the among poor. You can't seriously argue that a rich customer will never try to rip you off!
Yes, serving customers at the low end of the income scale requires a different business model than serving customers at the high end. But just becuase it is a different type of business does not mean there is no business there at all.
It is not modern electronics that are the problem, it is how corporations package and sell electronics as passive consumer products. To learn and thrive, children need less of "do not open, do not copy, no consumer-servicable componentents inside" and more of a "let's take it apart and fix it" mentality.
That "Let's fix it" attitude is certainly possible with modern electronics, just look Make Magazine as an example. We just need to do a better job of teaching "Let's fix it" to our children.
The Americans with Disabilities Act has a pretty large loophole known as "Altnative Accommodation". For example, if putting in a wheelchair ramp is too expensive, all a store has to do is offer to provide service at the curb and they are off the hook. Similarly, all Target has to do is offer to provide assistance in making purchases from its web site over a toll-free phone number and I'm sure they will be off the hook as well. This really won't ammount to much.
The MS Office app that is in dire need of replacement, and the app that seems most obvious to run on the web is PowerPoint. Why not build your presentation on the web and instantly share it will all of your participants, rather than having to jump through PowerPoint's terrible web publishing procedures?
So why doesn't the article mention presentation tools, and why have none of the big players (Google, Yahoo!) put out a web2.0 presentation application yet?
I know there are a many options out there -- Zoho Show, Thumbstack, S5, Empressr, Wimpypoint, PmWiki SlideShow, TiddlyWiki SlideShow, Slidy, OperaShow, TeamSlide, Carbonmade.
I don't have the time to compare them and sort them all out. Where is the big article reviewing and comparing these badly-needed tools? And why aren't the big web guys giving this essential application any attention?
bricklink
I agree. I'm afraid at $250 a pop, this will only be available to rich kids. Which is fine as far as it goes, I'm just wondering what the other 90% of kids can have to play with. At least you can pick up LEGO mindstorms set pretty cheap at brinklink.
I wonder what other options are out there for good, low-cost robotics toys?
MS market share in colleges and universities is significantly less than 90%. In fact, those are traditional domains of unix and open-source development. This is nothing more than typical MS behavior to gain market share through coercive, monopolistic marketing practices rather than by providing better value.
Anyone who has spent any time with today's teenagers know that kids are "wasting too much time online browsing dangerous sites, instant messaging friends and posting to Myspace" (and creating mindless PowerPoint presentations) whether their school provides them with a laptop or not.
Taking away their school laptop won't solve the problem -- today's kids are surrounded by computers whether their school gives them one or not.
What is needed is real training in time management and critical thinking -- things that must be taught whether or not the school provides a laptop.
At least providing all students with a laptop gives all students equal access to the information tools they need. Taking away the laptops won't take away the need to teach the personal management skills that our children need in the 21st century.
But people have been making copies of music and sharing the copies for as long as recording devices have been available -- even back in the reel-to-reel days. Sure, the qualitiy of the copies is much better now, but I don't think it is realistic for the recording companies to think they are going to change decades of consumer behavior at this point.
In fact, it is the ability to copy, mix, and share music that made popular music the huge industry that it is. To try to pretend copying should never happen is to deny the entire history of the popular music industry.
Instead of pretending that copying doesn't happen, the industry should do what they've done in the past -- find a business model that can profit from copying. For example, they could give away music that builds a "brand" identity for an artist, then make money off of imbedded advertising, merchandising, concerts, and other related products.
But instead of creative thinking, all we are hearing lately is an attempt to criminalize what has been normal consumer behavior for decades.
No matter what the recording companies try to do with DRM, history tells us that copying and sharing music is only going to get easier in the future, not harder. Copying will not go away. The recording companies will not prosper by criminalizing all of their potential customers. They will only prosper if they find a way to profit from copying, just as they have in the past.
does he want a web-cam? does he video-edit?
If he's a student, yes. Video conferencing and video editing and standard functions in today's e-learning envirnoments -- they're becoming just as essential as word processors were in the 80's.
Try to add the video and graphic capabilities of a $899 Mac to a $450 Dell and you would start to be close in price. The main difference would become the Mac's ease of use and reliability for video and graphic functions.
I actually don't think it would be too hard to put together a FOSS version of this. OCR has been around for a long time now, and there are FOSS OCR packages available. Also, text-to-speech is nothing new and there are FOSS options for that as well. The only reason a device like this was not made before, either is FOSS or comercial versions, was that small, powerful hardware needed for a hand-held solution was not affordable. The software has been around for awhile, but today's small, afordable digital cameras and computers are making it possible to hold the whole package in your hand rather than run it on a desktop they way its been done for the last 10 years.
As of yet, there is not even FOSS desktop version of a text-to-speech book reader available, even though the technology is ten years old. Put together a FOSS desktop book reader and it would be rather trivial to port it to a digital camera / palmtop setup like this device. The pieces are available, someone just has to do the work of gluing them all together.
That's right. Not only will private health insurance pay for these as medical devices, U.S. government health insurance, Medicaid, which most blind people qualify for because of their disability, will also pay for these. In addition, individuals can apply for government assistance through local vocational rehabilitation programs to pay for these. Plus, may public schools systems will be picking up the tab for these for their students.
So the high cost is caused precisely because these are ulimately payed for by government programs and private insurers. What is actually needed is less subsidy on the purchasing side of these devices to drive the price down, not more subsidy.
Only a small number of well-off blind people will be buying these with their own cash. The vast majority of these devices will be paid for with government subsidies.
Most hackers don't need a huge number of installs to stroke their ego. The opportunity to prove that OS X is just as vulnerable as Windows should be more than enough to motivate someone to release an OS X virus into the wild. Yet no one has done it.
There must be more at work here than OS X's small market share. OS X must be inherently more secure than Windows to not have a virus in the wild six years after its release. Certainly there are enough hackers out there who would love to show their prowess by writing an OS X virus, even for the relatively small number of OS X installs that exist; but nobody has been able to do it yet.
The only reason Best Buy bought Geek Squad was so BB's computer repair would have a brand name attached to it. They figure if people recognize BB's computer support brand they will choose to buy a computer at Best Buy because they perceive they will get better support than from some other retailer.