You really have no qualms about giving up national sovereignty to an unelected, undemocratic world government mainly concerned with environmental issues?
I used to love playing video games precisely because they weren't played "pretend" with other kids. My brother acted like a real bitch and would change the rules or argue for some exception (the little Talmudist!) whenever I began to win, but he could never change the rules of a video game.
Actually, it's the authors of the history textbooks watering history down and molding it into the story they want to tell.
This kind of rampant inaccuracy (you need N+3 sides to every story to know anything resembling the truth) is why I have no memory for any history I didn't live through.
I think it really depends on the student. I'm internally motivated and hard-working (it's what won me my university admissions offers), but only when I get to choose my own path.
My brother, on the other hand, is just as smart as I but has no real idea what he'll do with his life. I can easily see him requiring a far more general program to find something he actually likes. But then again, college may not be for him.
Nobody should have the ability to force anyone else to conform to their views on what constitutes a valid education or a "well-rounded" human being. By this I do not mean that a Computer Science major (like me) should take 100% of their courses in the Math and Comp. Sci. departments, but rather that General-Ed and Humanities requirements should constitute a minority of degree and that I should choose the exact courses for myself.
IMHO, it's much nicer to the student to require "Humanities or Social Science Elective" than to require "Art History - ART 201". I've seen both approaches.
People *should* take courses outside their major. The question is: how many courses? At what levels? In what departments?
The range I've heard for how much of one's classes a major composes goes from 20% to 50%, depending on school and major. That means that in some places, people spend 80% of their time in mandatory classes unrelated to what they actually pay to study and unrelated to what degree they will receive after four years. I happen to think the 50% sounds far more reasonable. Once you count *all* degree requirements (in-department classes for major, general-ed prerequisites to those classes, classes directly applicable to the major from outside the department, etc.), students should spend most of their time earning their degree rather than fulfilling someone's idea of well-rounded-ness.
The rule against splitting infinitives only came from a bunch of academic grammaticians who wanted to make English grammar more like that of Latin. Real English speakers have always split infinitives.
Why I disagree with your general polemic, I would agree that students (who actually do their work well) are overworked. The standard university courseload is 5 classes of 3 credit-hours per week each. 1 credit-hour is agreed-upon as meaning 1 contact hour of class/lab with 2 hours of homework, for a total of 3 hours of work. So that's 5 classes of 3 credit-hours per week each where each credit hour is 3 real hours. That's 5*3*3 = 45.
And that doesn't even take into account engineering schools, packed with smart people working harder than everyone else. Plus, many students work part-time.
I admit people don't consider 5 overtime hours much nowadays, but why do we accept workloads for students as a matter of course that the law (and many workers) recognize as overtime in the real world?
By rewarding the most dedicated students and workers for putting in excessive hours, we only breed pathological attitudes about work.
Nice try, but everyone (and by everyone I mean recent United Nations demographic reports) knows that while developing countries grow exponentially for a while, the First World countries are losing net population. Make people rich enough, and they stop having babies.
Somebody could spoof the Portage hashes and whatnot, but they couldn't use Portage to steal control of Gentoo users' computers from the owners. No version of Portage I've ever heard of runs software updates automatically or without explicit permission from root.
That might actually be true of some Slashbots, but when actual scientists get involved, it's not an issue of "faith in evolution" vs. "faith in the Bible." If anything, it's faith in the ability of critical thinking and the scientific method to sort through what evidence is found, come up with an explanation, and see if the explanation fits. Only if those scientists are biologists. A physicist, geologist, chemist, or climatologist hasn't studied evolution beyond a college- or high-school-level biology course.
You spelled it wrong. The God in Genesis is called Elohim. Please spell it correctly, or people will think you're an anti-Semitic nutjob out to slander the Jewish religion (because such nutjobs' transliterations from Hebrew are often miserably wrong).
Why do people flame the Creationists instead of ignoring them? Because they were taught Evolution (note the capital E) in high-school biology class, and they learned it on faith. So when they feel their faith is under attack, they lash out.
People want to write web-apps, but no real platform exists for writing a user-interface that will run on the client machine while the application logic runs on the server. So everyone tries to do it in the web-browser because it's ubiquitous, even though such an attempt is technically inelegant, prone to error, and often produces bloat (see: AJAX).
But, Can you tell me of one business that was created stictly to benefit the workers and not the owners of that said business? The Mondragon worker cooperatives, in which your two sets of people are identical?
I see that another dumbed-down product of government schools and media has weighed in with the old Bucky Fuller fallacy. "All executive salaries go to is corporate investment"? That's called capital. You must invest capital to design and create products, to design and create factories that produce products, to design and create advertising that informs people about products, to pay people and buy equipment to produce, store, distribute, and sell products to buyers, etc., etc. No capital, no product; no product, no capital. It's not absolute either way, but his point stands. Spending X dollars in anything also involves paying a fixed overhead of Y and a percentage overhead (such as taxes) of Z.
Now the issue of capital is that it "trickles down": it gets distributed in a tree from a root node to leaf nodes. Every time a node passes capital down to a leaf, it pays Y and Z again. So capital that travels through N leaves before it consumes a tangible product or service eventually gets reduced down to X(1 - N/Z)^NZ - NY. Note that "negative compound interest".
But money payed out in wages only travels through two levels: once to the worker and then once to each producer whose product or service the worker consumes. For X dollars of wages going to the worker we get X(1 - Z) - Y. To then distribute that through N consumptions gives (1 - Z)(X(1 - Z) - Y) - NY. Look Ma, no exponents! Now of course, overhead on wages and consumption is different, so we really get (1 - Z2)(x(1 - Z1) - Y2) - NY2 for N consumptions made using a before-overhead wage of X.
Of course, these treatments are informal and probably not professional economics work, but you get the point. An executive's money pays more investment banker's commissions (and stock-trading and bank fees), while a worker's money ends up in tangible consumptions sooner.
Slashdot Mirror
The Wii has succeeded because it's got an interesting feature and it's cheaper. Nobody likes $400 video-gaming systems.
You really have no qualms about giving up national sovereignty to an unelected, undemocratic world government mainly concerned with environmental issues?
But everyone would still need raw materials and energy.
*Inhales deeply. Drinks Kool-Aid.*
I used to love playing video games precisely because they weren't played "pretend" with other kids. My brother acted like a real bitch and would change the rules or argue for some exception (the little Talmudist!) whenever I began to win, but he could never change the rules of a video game.
Actually, it's the authors of the history textbooks watering history down and molding it into the story they want to tell.
This kind of rampant inaccuracy (you need N+3 sides to every story to know anything resembling the truth) is why I have no memory for any history I didn't live through.
Ah, but do you really think your kids will listen to a hypocrite?
I'm a teenager, you insensitive clod!
And I don't wouldn't read Digg if you put a gun to my head.
Wizards don't know enough about technology to use Slashdot! You must be a Squib.
I think it really depends on the student. I'm internally motivated and hard-working (it's what won me my university admissions offers), but only when I get to choose my own path.
My brother, on the other hand, is just as smart as I but has no real idea what he'll do with his life. I can easily see him requiring a far more general program to find something he actually likes. But then again, college may not be for him.
Nobody should have the ability to force anyone else to conform to their views on what constitutes a valid education or a "well-rounded" human being. By this I do not mean that a Computer Science major (like me) should take 100% of their courses in the Math and Comp. Sci. departments, but rather that General-Ed and Humanities requirements should constitute a minority of degree and that I should choose the exact courses for myself.
IMHO, it's much nicer to the student to require "Humanities or Social Science Elective" than to require "Art History - ART 201". I've seen both approaches.
People *should* take courses outside their major. The question is: how many courses? At what levels? In what departments?
The range I've heard for how much of one's classes a major composes goes from 20% to 50%, depending on school and major. That means that in some places, people spend 80% of their time in mandatory classes unrelated to what they actually pay to study and unrelated to what degree they will receive after four years. I happen to think the 50% sounds far more reasonable. Once you count *all* degree requirements (in-department classes for major, general-ed prerequisites to those classes, classes directly applicable to the major from outside the department, etc.), students should spend most of their time earning their degree rather than fulfilling someone's idea of well-rounded-ness.
The rule against splitting infinitives only came from a bunch of academic grammaticians who wanted to make English grammar more like that of Latin. Real English speakers have always split infinitives.
Why I disagree with your general polemic, I would agree that students (who actually do their work well) are overworked. The standard university courseload is 5 classes of 3 credit-hours per week each. 1 credit-hour is agreed-upon as meaning 1 contact hour of class/lab with 2 hours of homework, for a total of 3 hours of work. So that's 5 classes of 3 credit-hours per week each where each credit hour is 3 real hours. That's 5*3*3 = 45.
And that doesn't even take into account engineering schools, packed with smart people working harder than everyone else. Plus, many students work part-time.
I admit people don't consider 5 overtime hours much nowadays, but why do we accept workloads for students as a matter of course that the law (and many workers) recognize as overtime in the real world?
By rewarding the most dedicated students and workers for putting in excessive hours, we only breed pathological attitudes about work.
Nice try, but everyone (and by everyone I mean recent United Nations demographic reports) knows that while developing countries grow exponentially for a while, the First World countries are losing net population. Make people rich enough, and they stop having babies.
Somebody could spoof the Portage hashes and whatnot, but they couldn't use Portage to steal control of Gentoo users' computers from the owners. No version of Portage I've ever heard of runs software updates automatically or without explicit permission from root.
Really? Mazl tov! Who're you working for?
I'm curious because I'm wondering who still does OS design nowadays outside of M$ and Apple.
You spelled it wrong. The God in Genesis is called Elohim. Please spell it correctly, or people will think you're an anti-Semitic nutjob out to slander the Jewish religion (because such nutjobs' transliterations from Hebrew are often miserably wrong).
So anyone less scientifically educated than you (for instance, liberal arts majors) deserves to be made into food?
Why do people flame the Creationists instead of ignoring them? Because they were taught Evolution (note the capital E) in high-school biology class, and they learned it on faith. So when they feel their faith is under attack, they lash out.
But which set of Power Rangers? The world must know who protects us!
People want to write web-apps, but no real platform exists for writing a user-interface that will run on the client machine while the application logic runs on the server. So everyone tries to do it in the web-browser because it's ubiquitous, even though such an attempt is technically inelegant, prone to error, and often produces bloat (see: AJAX).
Now the issue of capital is that it "trickles down": it gets distributed in a tree from a root node to leaf nodes. Every time a node passes capital down to a leaf, it pays Y and Z again. So capital that travels through N leaves before it consumes a tangible product or service eventually gets reduced down to X(1 - N/Z)^NZ - NY. Note that "negative compound interest".
But money payed out in wages only travels through two levels: once to the worker and then once to each producer whose product or service the worker consumes. For X dollars of wages going to the worker we get X(1 - Z) - Y. To then distribute that through N consumptions gives (1 - Z)(X(1 - Z) - Y) - NY. Look Ma, no exponents! Now of course, overhead on wages and consumption is different, so we really get (1 - Z2)(x(1 - Z1) - Y2) - NY2 for N consumptions made using a before-overhead wage of X.
Of course, these treatments are informal and probably not professional economics work, but you get the point. An executive's money pays more investment banker's commissions (and stock-trading and bank fees), while a worker's money ends up in tangible consumptions sooner.