It's a horrible, horrible idea and would certainly end up being racist as well, but you really have to wonder if voting shouldn't be a little more... restricted.
Why not require voters to pass the US citizenship test?
Textbook authors deserve to be paid. If you have a society where authors do not get paid, you basically wipe out the entire academic basis of learning in the USA, and with it, our country. People's quests for knowledge about the world will not go away when you get rid of books, and, instead of books, they will have their heads filled with muddy, wrong and incorrect web sites all measured more by how many clicks they get from adsense than any real academic measure of the value of the work.
Lowered book prices as a result of piracy wouldn't eliminate book publishing, it would give students the monetary freedom to buy a *decent* physics or calculus textbook in addition to whatever dreck the instructor's using.
It takes an enormous amount of work to make a good academic text. You can't just learn something like physics by skimming a few blog quotes, or get a real sense of any field, for that matter, by reading books.
I'm an MIT student who had to skip, for the most part, *all* the lectures in 8.012 (honors Newtonian mechanics) due to a class conflict. I taught myself using Kleppner & Kolenkow and aced the class. True, you can't get a sense of the *field* reading books but damn a good textbook makes a difference.
I've worked with students failing physics and calculus who turned to the textbook for help and got even more confused because their textbooks sucked. Referring them to a book like Kleppner made a huge difference. It's about lecturers stopped getting paid for writting crappy textbooks, and the only way to reward the guys who write the good ones is to *introduce competition*. You can't have competition if everybody's stuck buying what the university wants them to.
Christianity isn't based on facts?! No denomination of Christianity, or any religion, can be rationally "proved" more sound than any other?
"Ahem". I am sick of Slashdotters characterizing me, a Christian, as somebody who believes in a nebulous God at the edge of the universe who doesn't do anything and wants us to accept his existence by blind faith. He doesn't. Faith, as defined in the New Testament, is acting in trust of God's promises, and isn't blind.
Rather, I believe in a God who can change lives who made promises that *can* be tested. While parts of the bible (such as Genesis) may be meant to be taken allegorically, God outlines a covenant in the New Testament: a covenant under which Christians can communicate with God one on one through prayer and get actual answers. It is a covenant with promises of deliverance from patterns of addiction and hopelessness, and even such seemingly ridiculous promises as healing from sickness ("By His wounds we are healed."). In short, a Christian who has accepted this covenant can test the will of God by acting on His promises.
A promise from God to men is not meant to be taken "allegorically". Jesus did not allegorically die on a cross. He died. And I believe he rose again. As the apostle Paul said, "If Christ did not rise from the dead, we are men to be pitied indeed." He's right; either God has power, and really can answer prayers and work miracles, or my religion is worthless. And as outlandish as it seems, I believe in the Christian God rather than Allah or Buddha because I believe he *does* answer prayers (my parents and I cried out to Jesus for help just before a head-on collision and the other car was suddenly knocked out of our path to the other lane) and *does* heal people (my mom was healed of asthma at a prayer meeting).
Math and computer science competition useless? Many people who took the IOI (an international high school programming competition) such as Mihai Patrascu, for instance, have done excellent work in theoretical computer science research. And Laslo Lovasz and Timothy Gowers, both International Math Olympiad gold medalists, are among today's best mathematicians, respectively winning the Wolf prize and a Fields medal. While some contestants definitely fare better than others, I can say from personal experience that most are extremely bright people. It's sort of a "it's not how you win or lose, but how you play the game" ideal; the contestants who take time to learn higher math and CS rather than remain mired in learning the "tricks" for solving the problems do extremely well.
And lest I forget to mention, Feynman was a Putnam fellow.;)
Slashdot Mirror
It's a horrible, horrible idea and would certainly end up being racist as well, but you really have to wonder if voting shouldn't be a little more... restricted.
Why not require voters to pass the US citizenship test?
Textbook authors deserve to be paid. If you have a society where authors do not get paid, you basically wipe out the entire academic basis of learning in the USA, and with it, our country. People's quests for knowledge about the world will not go away when you get rid of books, and, instead of books, they will have their heads filled with muddy, wrong and incorrect web sites all measured more by how many clicks they get from adsense than any real academic measure of the value of the work.
Lowered book prices as a result of piracy wouldn't eliminate book publishing, it would give students the monetary freedom to buy a *decent* physics or calculus textbook in addition to whatever dreck the instructor's using.
It takes an enormous amount of work to make a good academic text. You can't just learn something like physics by skimming a few blog quotes, or get a real sense of any field, for that matter, by reading books.
I'm an MIT student who had to skip, for the most part, *all* the lectures in 8.012 (honors Newtonian mechanics) due to a class conflict. I taught myself using Kleppner & Kolenkow and aced the class. True, you can't get a sense of the *field* reading books but damn a good textbook makes a difference. I've worked with students failing physics and calculus who turned to the textbook for help and got even more confused because their textbooks sucked. Referring them to a book like Kleppner made a huge difference. It's about lecturers stopped getting paid for writting crappy textbooks, and the only way to reward the guys who write the good ones is to *introduce competition*. You can't have competition if everybody's stuck buying what the university wants them to.
Christianity isn't based on facts?! No denomination of Christianity, or any religion, can be rationally "proved" more sound than any other? "Ahem". I am sick of Slashdotters characterizing me, a Christian, as somebody who believes in a nebulous God at the edge of the universe who doesn't do anything and wants us to accept his existence by blind faith. He doesn't. Faith, as defined in the New Testament, is acting in trust of God's promises, and isn't blind. Rather, I believe in a God who can change lives who made promises that *can* be tested. While parts of the bible (such as Genesis) may be meant to be taken allegorically, God outlines a covenant in the New Testament: a covenant under which Christians can communicate with God one on one through prayer and get actual answers. It is a covenant with promises of deliverance from patterns of addiction and hopelessness, and even such seemingly ridiculous promises as healing from sickness ("By His wounds we are healed."). In short, a Christian who has accepted this covenant can test the will of God by acting on His promises. A promise from God to men is not meant to be taken "allegorically". Jesus did not allegorically die on a cross. He died. And I believe he rose again. As the apostle Paul said, "If Christ did not rise from the dead, we are men to be pitied indeed." He's right; either God has power, and really can answer prayers and work miracles, or my religion is worthless. And as outlandish as it seems, I believe in the Christian God rather than Allah or Buddha because I believe he *does* answer prayers (my parents and I cried out to Jesus for help just before a head-on collision and the other car was suddenly knocked out of our path to the other lane) and *does* heal people (my mom was healed of asthma at a prayer meeting).
Math and computer science competition useless? Many people who took the IOI (an international high school programming competition) such as Mihai Patrascu, for instance, have done excellent work in theoretical computer science research. And Laslo Lovasz and Timothy Gowers, both International Math Olympiad gold medalists, are among today's best mathematicians, respectively winning the Wolf prize and a Fields medal. While some contestants definitely fare better than others, I can say from personal experience that most are extremely bright people. It's sort of a "it's not how you win or lose, but how you play the game" ideal; the contestants who take time to learn higher math and CS rather than remain mired in learning the "tricks" for solving the problems do extremely well.
;)
And lest I forget to mention, Feynman was a Putnam fellow.