I saw no mention of declining literacy from the Wiki. What I did see is that of those 1 in 7 people who are considered illiterate 50% of them DID NOT GRADUATE HIGHSCHOOL. So claiming that public schools have failed because of the 1/7 iliteracy rate is scewed. If that 50% had completed highschool, that rate could fall down to 1/14. I did have another link that showed the GAINS in literacy over the last 10 years, but I don't have it available at the moment. And look back 50 years, 1956, school were still segregated and vocational jobs required little to no literacy. I'm not sure of exact numbers but prior to 1965 the literacy rate for minorities had to be insignificant. In 1965 congress passed the Voter Rights bill which banned Literacy Test prerequirements for voting. Literacy Tests where a way to prevent minorities from voting, the a (black) person failed the test, they would not be aloud to vote. rather f'd up if you ask me, but one would think that if there were such tools in place, there must have been a large enough populate of illiterate people to make it work.
In anycase, yes, I am absolutely positive that the literacy rate today is SIGNIFICANTLY higher then it was 50 years ago.
"Wrong! Stealing = Taking the property of someone without permission (Destruction of others' property is taken into account, too)."
If you consider the content "Property" then, yes it is stealing. The only difference between "stealing" digital content VS. physical content is the reproduction costs and ease of access. In both cases you enter an agreement (for sales), for $x I will give you ownership of this copy of this content (whether it's an MP3 download, a DVD, or a car). You don't get reproduction or redistrobution rights. You get fair use (IE: you can drive the car, sell the car, and crash the car, but you can't create a new production plant that builds that car. Just like you can listen to an MPG, you can sell an MPG, but you can make many copies of the MPG and distribute them)
The person DOWNLOADING the music is stealing. The person HOSTING the music, is violating copywrite laws.
Personally, I'd say swat the downloaders with the actual legal download cost per song they get busted with (proven to be illegally downloaded). And sue the people hosting the music for patent infringement with big penalties. Make it clear that you are going after the people distributing the music, not ma and pa who's teenager downloaded a handful of music.
Do you approve of using wire taps to stop terrorist attacks: [ ] Yes [ ] No
Me personally, I would check Yes. Now if the poll was:
Do you approve of wire taps on US citizens inside the US with no oversight outside of the Executive branch of government? [ ] Yes [ ] No
I would check, circle, draw arrows to, highlight and in all possible ways indicate No.
Using the FISA court to issue warrents and have at least SOME level of oversight is important to me. Mind you, this time last year the ACLU was pitching a loaf over the "secret court" and lack of oversight.
It like went like this: Feds: Give us your records Google: No Feds: We'll sue you! Google: We're shaking in our booties Feds: [thwap] subpoena! Google: Hey ACLU, the Feds want your search history! ACLU: F' You feds! Feds: Hey Judge, they said no:( [pouty face] Judge: All right ass hats, get in here.
I am FOR Nuclear power. I was just saying that coal consumption is not a concern. Maybe my phrasing was a bit strong. "...the Energy Information Administration (1995) estimated that the United States has enough coal to last 250 years" as per: http://energy.usgs.gov/factsheets/nca/nca.html
So yes, there is a finite limit to our coal supply, but if we are still primarily powering our country with coal 250 years from now, we will have other issues.
But as great as nuclear is, I think distributed generation is and true Green power is the way to go. For instance, if properly developed, the state of South Dakota could generate enough electricity from wind alone to power the entire western half of the country. Installing integrated photo voltaic roofing shingles (ie: Solar power) in all new residential buildings could reduce demand growth by 75%. Using bacterial scrubbers on coal plants can not only dramaticly cut emissions but they can also be recycled into low emission bio-diesel.
There are many great solutions, and I think Nuclear is one part of the puzzle, but anyone who immediately discredits a form, or puts all of their hopes on one form is either stupid, or has an agenda.
Switching Coal to Nuclear will not have any effect on foreign oil. Switching natural gas to nuclear would help a tad (most replacing golf/central/south american oil). But most of that foreign oil is going into gas tanks, not power generation.
Global warming is having a very minor effect on local environment(what, 1 degree C over 10 years?). Not enough to keep your river from freezing. What is more likely is that the air/water currents are changing and the jet stream is coming south from canada further east, leaving michigan is the duldrums or being heated by southern air.
Not quite. The US has coal. we have lots of coal. we have an ubsurdly large amount of coal. we have enough coal to not have to worry about centralized generation supplies, ever.
We even have technology (gasification, scrubbers, etc...) to make coal burning pass Kyoto.
Nuclear on the other hand, has some issue that have been glossed over. First off, spent fuel storage. This program would actually reduce that problem, so I think it's a great idea. Second, corrupt, incompotence, and lack of over sight. Check out the nuclear energy system in France. It's heavily governed, has strict regulation, design requirements, etc... In the US we have reactors that are in use beyond their expected life, storing significantly more spent fuel then designed, cutting corners on down time, bribing inspectors, and of all different designs and natures. Third, existing Nuclear power plants are heavily susidized by the government, which means the power they generate is not as cheap per kW as they claim.
I'm not saying Coal is perfect either, it is still significantly more dirty (even with gasification), it takes huge tracks of land to mine coal, and is getting more expensive as requirements to cut emissions and mercury are being increased.
Me, I like nuclear, but our current system is an accident waiting to happen. We should take after the French [shudder] and design the nuclear infrastructure of our country with safety and security in mind.
If they could merge a PDA, with an improved media player, and a game system, I would be quite happy. Then again, my pocket PC already plays all of my music, has games available, and runs third party programs. So what's so special about those other hand helds?
I'm glad it worked for you. But there is a proven statistical link between highschool drop outs and illiteracy.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#World_litera cy_rates : "In 2003 the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), conducted by the US Department of Education, found that fourteen percent of American adults scored at this "below basic" level in prose literacy. More than half of these persons did not have a high-school diploma or GED."
"Ok, so you're happy with public education in Wisconsin. Don't you see it being a better system if it is funded locally instead of sharing funds between counties or states?"
It is mostly funded locally, property taxes are county based. So my $2500 property tax bill stays in Rock County, WI. Yeah, some portion comes from the state, and some from the feds, but that money is pretty evenly distributed, so I'm not too worried about it. Wisconsin is heavily scewed though. Especially around Madison. Our post high school educatin level is over 50%, and in the city 30%+ of people have bachelors or higher level education. If you ever wind up down town you can't sneeze with out goobing on someones PhD.
"I am not against a group education system, I just see the waste in kowtowing to the teacher unions and the public worker unions."
I'm somewhat with you there. Teacher Unions are good and bad. Good because lets face it, teachers have one hell of a job. 8 hours a day teaching, plus hours after school for tutoring and grading. Having a Union is good to make sure they aren't getting too badly abused. On the other hand, the union also protects the incompotent and out dated. Who hasn't had an english teacher that was 4 years past retirement, totally out of touch, and obviously not a good teacher? Since these teachers have ten-year and are in the union, getting them booted is next to impossible.
As for bifurcation, I can't say. From my own personal experience I can say that from my high school, in the mid-late 90's the education was of such quality, that even years after graduating in the middle of the pack, myself and other students were in the top percentile at our college in Trig, Calc, and Physics. (I was at 49% in highschool, I've been top 5% in college and I felt the first 2 years were nothing but review)
"If we cut back public education to ages 6-11 and strictly teach the basics, we can return thousands back to each family in tax savings. It'll be more than enough to let a parent stay home, teach with other parents helping and they can save money to send their kids to private upper education."
BS. I pay property taxes in one of the highest property tax rate states in the nation. My $125k house costs $2500 a year in property taxes (which pay for education). Even if I get that full amount back, it's no where's close to the money my spose or I can make in our careers.
"I'm against all public education systems. I don't believe they've worked."
I went to a public school (in South Central Wisconsin), and I think my high school education was excellent. I joined the military and worked in the private sector before returning to college. I wound up bumping into a handful of students I graduated high school with. None of us were upper crust material (I think I was in the 49th percentile). But Hobbs and I aced the math and physics classes, after 6 years of being out of high school.
Now, schools in the SC region of Wisconsin are some mighty fine schools. But if you head out to say, down town Milwaukee, the schools get larger and the education seems to decline. But I think this has less to do with the schools being public and more to do with class size and funding.
Public Schools aren't a failed system, over all it's a very successful system, look at the high school graduation numbers now compared to 50 years ago, look at the average literacy rates. Now, like any system, there are weak points and short comings, but we're not going to cut off your arm for a broken finger. Standards enforcing, proper funding and class sizes, and teacher reviews can all help improve the lesser schools and help educate our youth.
True, current standards are 66MB/s it has advantages over either other option. Like the DDR solution there is no performance hit for non-sychronous transfer, it consumes less power then hard drives, and takes up less space. It's primary advantage over the DDR solution is that it is non-volitile.
Also, acording to this article, IDE and PCMIA Flash drives should hit 133 MB/s this year. http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/news/articles/stor y_5838.html And it was reported not too long ago on/. that 16 Mb chips(2MB each) are going into production and will lead to significantly larger drives. So, it's non-volitile, less power consumption, soon to be almost as fast, and significantly larger.
Like DDR it has the penalty of being insanely expencive compared to hard drives. At over $50 a GB (for flash) compared to $1 per GB (For hard drives), it's a plainly clear choice which way to go.
If you charge $2.5 million for the code license you can greatly reduce the number of buyers. With some deep buried taging you could even identify which buyer's code was leaked, and then sue them in to oblivion.
"With swap being on this you'd still get transfer rate problems, but access rates should be extremely higher. Especially when the "drive" is fragmented. A defrag program would run pretty fast on one of these as well."
There's no need to defrag data stored on these, there is no performance gain for sequential access over non-sequential access.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw no mention of declining literacy from the Wiki. What I did see is that of those 1 in 7 people who are considered illiterate 50% of them DID NOT GRADUATE HIGHSCHOOL. So claiming that public schools have failed because of the 1/7 iliteracy rate is scewed. If that 50% had completed highschool, that rate could fall down to 1/14. I did have another link that showed the GAINS in literacy over the last 10 years, but I don't have it available at the moment. And look back 50 years, 1956, school were still segregated and vocational jobs required little to no literacy. I'm not sure of exact numbers but prior to 1965 the literacy rate for minorities had to be insignificant. In 1965 congress passed the Voter Rights bill which banned Literacy Test prerequirements for voting. Literacy Tests where a way to prevent minorities from voting, the a (black) person failed the test, they would not be aloud to vote. rather f'd up if you ask me, but one would think that if there were such tools in place, there must have been a large enough populate of illiterate people to make it work.
In anycase, yes, I am absolutely positive that the literacy rate today is SIGNIFICANTLY higher then it was 50 years ago.
-Rick
"Wrong! Stealing = Taking the property of someone without permission (Destruction of others' property is taken into account, too)."
If you consider the content "Property" then, yes it is stealing. The only difference between "stealing" digital content VS. physical content is the reproduction costs and ease of access. In both cases you enter an agreement (for sales), for $x I will give you ownership of this copy of this content (whether it's an MP3 download, a DVD, or a car). You don't get reproduction or redistrobution rights. You get fair use (IE: you can drive the car, sell the car, and crash the car, but you can't create a new production plant that builds that car. Just like you can listen to an MPG, you can sell an MPG, but you can make many copies of the MPG and distribute them)
The person DOWNLOADING the music is stealing. The person HOSTING the music, is violating copywrite laws.
Personally, I'd say swat the downloaders with the actual legal download cost per song they get busted with (proven to be illegally downloaded). And sue the people hosting the music for patent infringement with big penalties. Make it clear that you are going after the people distributing the music, not ma and pa who's teenager downloaded a handful of music.
-Rick
Do you approve of using wire taps to stop terrorist attacks:
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
Me personally, I would check Yes. Now if the poll was:
Do you approve of wire taps on US citizens inside the US with no oversight outside of the Executive branch of government?
[ ] Yes
[ ] No
I would check, circle, draw arrows to, highlight and in all possible ways indicate No.
Using the FISA court to issue warrents and have at least SOME level of oversight is important to me. Mind you, this time last year the ACLU was pitching a loaf over the "secret court" and lack of oversight.
-Rick
Google is resisting a subpoena.
:( [pouty face]
It like went like this:
Feds: Give us your records
Google: No
Feds: We'll sue you!
Google: We're shaking in our booties
Feds: [thwap] subpoena!
Google: Hey ACLU, the Feds want your search history!
ACLU: F' You feds!
Feds: Hey Judge, they said no
Judge: All right ass hats, get in here.
-Rick
I am FOR Nuclear power. I was just saying that coal consumption is not a concern. Maybe my phrasing was a bit strong. "...the Energy Information Administration (1995) estimated that the United States has enough coal to last 250 years" as per: http://energy.usgs.gov/factsheets/nca/nca.html
So yes, there is a finite limit to our coal supply, but if we are still primarily powering our country with coal 250 years from now, we will have other issues.
But as great as nuclear is, I think distributed generation is and true Green power is the way to go. For instance, if properly developed, the state of South Dakota could generate enough electricity from wind alone to power the entire western half of the country. Installing integrated photo voltaic roofing shingles (ie: Solar power) in all new residential buildings could reduce demand growth by 75%. Using bacterial scrubbers on coal plants can not only dramaticly cut emissions but they can also be recycled into low emission bio-diesel.
There are many great solutions, and I think Nuclear is one part of the puzzle, but anyone who immediately discredits a form, or puts all of their hopes on one form is either stupid, or has an agenda.
-Rick
My PDA has an 'X'! It's a Dell Axim :) It's only 400mhz, but it does have 32k color, 7 buttons, a flipper and a direction pad. :)
-Rick
Switching Coal to Nuclear will not have any effect on foreign oil. Switching natural gas to nuclear would help a tad (most replacing golf/central/south american oil). But most of that foreign oil is going into gas tanks, not power generation.
-Rick
I always though /. was suposed to be Cmdr Taco pissed off and standing on his head, cause, he's only got one eye ya know.
-Rick (Just Kidding!)
Global warming is having a very minor effect on local environment(what, 1 degree C over 10 years?). Not enough to keep your river from freezing. What is more likely is that the air/water currents are changing and the jet stream is coming south from canada further east, leaving michigan is the duldrums or being heated by southern air.
-Rick
Not quite. The US has coal. we have lots of coal. we have an ubsurdly large amount of coal. we have enough coal to not have to worry about centralized generation supplies, ever.
We even have technology (gasification, scrubbers, etc...) to make coal burning pass Kyoto.
Nuclear on the other hand, has some issue that have been glossed over. First off, spent fuel storage. This program would actually reduce that problem, so I think it's a great idea. Second, corrupt, incompotence, and lack of over sight. Check out the nuclear energy system in France. It's heavily governed, has strict regulation, design requirements, etc... In the US we have reactors that are in use beyond their expected life, storing significantly more spent fuel then designed, cutting corners on down time, bribing inspectors, and of all different designs and natures. Third, existing Nuclear power plants are heavily susidized by the government, which means the power they generate is not as cheap per kW as they claim.
I'm not saying Coal is perfect either, it is still significantly more dirty (even with gasification), it takes huge tracks of land to mine coal, and is getting more expensive as requirements to cut emissions and mercury are being increased.
Me, I like nuclear, but our current system is an accident waiting to happen. We should take after the French [shudder] and design the nuclear infrastructure of our country with safety and security in mind.
-Rick
If they could merge a PDA, with an improved media player, and a game system, I would be quite happy. Then again, my pocket PC already plays all of my music, has games available, and runs third party programs. So what's so special about those other hand helds?
-Rick
Err no. So far as I know, even with crap like 'No child left behind' it is still just as difficult to read modern english as it ever has been.
s /Demographics/Overall.asp&PageId=16
http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/index.asp?file=KeyFinding
-Rick
I'm glad it worked for you. But there is a proven statistical link between highschool drop outs and illiteracy.
a cy_rates :
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy#World_liter
"In 2003 the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL), conducted by the US Department of Education, found that fourteen percent of American adults scored at this "below basic" level in prose literacy. More than half of these persons did not have a high-school diploma or GED."
-Rick
What is the difference between Barzil and say, upstate New York, and how migh that effect the effictiness of an ethanol burning engine?
;)
-Rick
PS: I'm a Bio-Diesel fan, all the perks, half the penalties of Ethanol.
You would think that while posting about education I would find it wise to run a spell checker before hitting post. Please, excuse my typo's.
-Rick
"Ok, so you're happy with public education in Wisconsin. Don't you see it being a better system if it is funded locally instead of sharing funds between counties or states?"
It is mostly funded locally, property taxes are county based. So my $2500 property tax bill stays in Rock County, WI. Yeah, some portion comes from the state, and some from the feds, but that money is pretty evenly distributed, so I'm not too worried about it. Wisconsin is heavily scewed though. Especially around Madison. Our post high school educatin level is over 50%, and in the city 30%+ of people have bachelors or higher level education. If you ever wind up down town you can't sneeze with out goobing on someones PhD.
"I am not against a group education system, I just see the waste in kowtowing to the teacher unions and the public worker unions."
I'm somewhat with you there. Teacher Unions are good and bad. Good because lets face it, teachers have one hell of a job. 8 hours a day teaching, plus hours after school for tutoring and grading. Having a Union is good to make sure they aren't getting too badly abused. On the other hand, the union also protects the incompotent and out dated. Who hasn't had an english teacher that was 4 years past retirement, totally out of touch, and obviously not a good teacher? Since these teachers have ten-year and are in the union, getting them booted is next to impossible.
As for bifurcation, I can't say. From my own personal experience I can say that from my high school, in the mid-late 90's the education was of such quality, that even years after graduating in the middle of the pack, myself and other students were in the top percentile at our college in Trig, Calc, and Physics. (I was at 49% in highschool, I've been top 5% in college and I felt the first 2 years were nothing but review)
-Rick
"If we cut back public education to ages 6-11 and strictly teach the basics, we can return thousands back to each family in tax savings. It'll be more than enough to let a parent stay home, teach with other parents helping and they can save money to send their kids to private upper education."
BS. I pay property taxes in one of the highest property tax rate states in the nation. My $125k house costs $2500 a year in property taxes (which pay for education). Even if I get that full amount back, it's no where's close to the money my spose or I can make in our careers.
-Rick
"I'm against all public education systems. I don't believe they've worked."
I went to a public school (in South Central Wisconsin), and I think my high school education was excellent. I joined the military and worked in the private sector before returning to college. I wound up bumping into a handful of students I graduated high school with. None of us were upper crust material (I think I was in the 49th percentile). But Hobbs and I aced the math and physics classes, after 6 years of being out of high school.
Now, schools in the SC region of Wisconsin are some mighty fine schools. But if you head out to say, down town Milwaukee, the schools get larger and the education seems to decline. But I think this has less to do with the schools being public and more to do with class size and funding.
Public Schools aren't a failed system, over all it's a very successful system, look at the high school graduation numbers now compared to 50 years ago, look at the average literacy rates. Now, like any system, there are weak points and short comings, but we're not going to cut off your arm for a broken finger. Standards enforcing, proper funding and class sizes, and teacher reviews can all help improve the lesser schools and help educate our youth.
-Rick
True, current standards are 66MB/s it has advantages over either other option. Like the DDR solution there is no performance hit for non-sychronous transfer, it consumes less power then hard drives, and takes up less space. It's primary advantage over the DDR solution is that it is non-volitile.
r y_5838.html And it was reported not too long ago on /. that 16 Mb chips(2MB each) are going into production and will lead to significantly larger drives. So, it's non-volitile, less power consumption, soon to be almost as fast, and significantly larger.
Also, acording to this article, IDE and PCMIA Flash drives should hit 133 MB/s this year. http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/news/articles/sto
Like DDR it has the penalty of being insanely expencive compared to hard drives. At over $50 a GB (for flash) compared to $1 per GB (For hard drives), it's a plainly clear choice which way to go.
-Rick
If you charge $2.5 million for the code license you can greatly reduce the number of buyers. With some deep buried taging you could even identify which buyer's code was leaked, and then sue them in to oblivion.
-Rick
Okay, if it's the first post asking for a mirror, it is not redundant. Any posts following asking for a mirror are redundant.
Make point 'A' Insightfull
Repeat point 'A' Redundant
-Rick
"With swap being on this you'd still get transfer rate problems, but access rates should be extremely higher. Especially when the "drive" is fragmented. A defrag program would run pretty fast on one of these as well."
There's no need to defrag data stored on these, there is no performance gain for sequential access over non-sequential access.
-Rick
How does this setup compare to a 2gig flash drive on USB4 or one of the integrated IDE/SATA flash readers?
-Rick
"Brian Peppers tried to rape me."
That's just disturbing.
-Rick
4 posts and the link is dead.
-Rick