Of the writings I've read from the years leading up to the war, the south believed that the north wanted to yank the slave workforce right out from under the southern economy. One day they're slaves, the next they're free. That's a HORRIBLE way to deal with the issue for a lot of reasons.
What's really sad about the whole thing is that most people in the south really didn't care for slavery and with industrialization reaching the big farms already, it was a generation or two away from disappearing on its own.
I do wonder what things would be like today if the North had pushed instead for a gradual end to slavery by slowly freeing slaves over a few decades. Maybe the hardheaded leaders of the south still would have rebelled, but maybe not. Maybe we could have avoided a civil war and all the fear that followed it which led to the creation of the KKK, Jim Crow laws, and other such nonsense.
While we in our prosperous slavery-free ivory tower can say that it's abhorrent and should be banned immediately, I have to question whether immediate abolition was a wise course of action. We might have completely avoided the need for a civil rights movement, or perhaps seen it decades earlier.
I grew up on the curriculum set by the Texas Democrats in the 80s.
I was taught that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves from their southern oppressors. In reality, the north controlled the federal government and set a history of economic policies that ignored the well-being of the southern states. Slavery was the last straw; abolition would have crushed the southern economies. Secession happened out of fear and desperation to preserve a way of life.
I've had people become very offended when I present this information; apparently they think I'm trying to say slavery was okay. I believe a lot of what's going on over textbooks in my state today is the same sort of thing: people think that approaching history from another perspective is somehow trying to rewrite it. The mistake a lot of people are making right now is thinking that there is only one way to teach history. There is some merit in what the Texas conservatives are saying right now: some parts of history have been horribly misrepresented in recent history books.
That's not to say I agree with everything they're doing. Like all things in American politics, we are once again sailing right past the middle ground and taking the most extreme approach we can. They're right that a lot of groups are unfairly portrayed or left out entirely. They're right that history needs to be viewed from more than one perspective. But they've managed to take some really good ideas and ruin them.
This is why my children are being homeschooled. Not because we think schools need more God, not because we think they need less, but because we're tired of the politicians on *both* sides of the aisle who shove their personal ideologies into curriculum.
I most certainly agree that formal education is crucial for some fields. Science is an excellent example: there is so much foundation knowledge required to get started that it doesn't make sense to try to learn while doing (except in the sense of structured lab experiments in school).
I'm finding now that I probably should have gone to school for programming. While I've been reasonably successful in the past two years at teaching myself quite a bit, I don't have the benefit of an experienced programmer teaching me the proper way to do things. I often improvise and then reimprovise as my newer projects reach scales I didn't imagine months before.
Here's a Catch 22 for people like me: when we do decide we want a degree, we can't get it. I can't get a computer science degree, as no one offers online study or night classes. I have to quit my day job and become a fulltime student. If I quit my job, I have no use for a degree or the education that comes with it.
I take a small amount of pride in the fact that I am NOT college educated. I went into IT after high school and have learned everything either at home or on the job. Over the years I've picked up some college courses here and there to the tune of about 60 credit hours. I've yet to learn anything useful. The reason we have so many college graduates in America today is the notion that you have to go to college to have a "well-rounded" education. There are jobs for which I will never be considered solely because I lack a degree. Never mind my work history, my level of expertise, or the glowing recommendations I can produce; I don't have a piece of paper issued by a college, therefore I'm not qualified to do the work.
What this country needs is a good reality check on how many qualified workers exist who just don't have the paper requirements listed in the job description. The real irony of it is that when I was 22 and others my age were just getting out of college, i was vastly more knowledgeable than they were. The gap has only grown wider as the years have passed. College grads with IT-related degrees seem more likely to coast on what they learned in college, whereas we the self-educated learned from the start that IT work requires constant education. I've run into a few employers who recognize that degrees aren't worth any more than experience, and will treat a fresh graduate the same as someone with 3-5 years of experience and no degree. We need more people like them to help dispel this myth that college is necessary.
Yes, I'm biased. No, I'm not making this up. I'm speaking from anecdotal experience at best; take it for what it is.
(It takes a great deal of effort to talk about not finishing college without going into a rant about the bullshit college passes off as education, by the way)
"We have evidence that you downloaded X songs (attach a list) for which we own the copyrights. We would like to settle this matter quietly and without legal action. To that end, we would accept a settlement of X * 1.5 dollars in order to resolve this matter. In return, we will arrange for you to have legal digital versions of the songs in question via one of the listed services (iTunes, etc) If you decline this offer, we suggest you retain a lawyer and have them contact our legal department."
It's simple, reasonable, and only mildly threatening. It carries a modest 50% penalty over the cost per song.
They should be going after distributors with the big penalties, not the downloaders.
I work in education IT. An application I'm keen to see in a tablet is the ability to control a desktop computer via a wireless tablet such as this device or the iPad. Especially if the software involved allowed the instructor to enter a mode where they can draw/write on the screen that the students see, allowing them to visually communicate information about applications or web sites they are using.
Why not just use the tablet via some wireless video technology directly to the projector? Because it would be hard for the teacher to run Photoshop on a low-power tablet. But controlling it via the same tablet is quite possible.
There's a market for a product like this. In the small school district I work in, we're seeing substantial spending being directed at presentation technologies, and none of them really do what teachers would like. Having an on-screen remote control like a tablet would be perfect for most of our teachers who use projectors...I'd estimate that's 80-100 teachers in this one small district. Multiply that by the thousands of districts in Texas, half of them larger than us, and this state alone could buy enough units to justify the product. And all you'd really need is a 802.11x tablet that could run VNC with a little extra software to provide the draw-on-screen capabilities.
Just how long should we the other insured people be paying for someone to sit at home feeling bad about themselves?
I know about depression. My wife's family has some serious depression issues and she has struggled with it in the past. She has never missed more than a day of work at a time, calling in only when she feels her mood is so bad that it would be a problem at work. She uses 3-4 sick days a year doing that. She doesn't take medication for it, she just deals with it, some times for months at a time. It helps that I can tell when she's getting worse and can do things to make it easier on her...after seven years, I can usually get her through it without it getting particularly bad.
That said, the insurance company shouldn't be able to arbitrarily suspend her benefits without a serious discussion with the medical professional(s) treating her. After 18 months there *should* be some questions asked: what has been done to treat her, why isn't it working, what else can be done, et cetera. That's a long time to be depressed for any reason, and the insurance company shouldn't be expected to pay out indefinitely for such a vague ailment.
I'm not sure I can agree with the abolition of software patents entirely, as copyrights are insufficient in protecting innovation long enough for it to be profitable and there is no other system which ensures a company can recover development costs on truly innovative software.
There needs to be *something* which protects software developers from having their products ripped off and all their innovative functionality duplicated. Exactly how that *something* should work is best left to people far more expert in the field than me...but before we scrap software patents, we need to provide developers with an alternative.
After skimming the patent, this sounds more like it's more like prompting for sudo. If this were Linux, it would be something like:
"You need to use sudo to run this program. Would you like to use sudo? y / n"
This is a very specific patent and most certainly wouldn't cover sudo, but rather the automatic detection of the need for it and a very detailed description of the GUI built on it. It's almost like the people writing about the patent didn't bother to read it...
Right up until someone decides that "misbehaving" includes "submitting content of which we do not approve." The last thing we need is for the internet to give some powermonger the tools to easily silence dissent.
In my experience, we used StarOffice across an entire school district for years and were plagued with compatibility problems with other schools. Also, Star/OOo lacks some very useful interface features compared even to Office 2000. We still have Star installed on our images to support old documents, but Office 2007 has greatly reduced our incoming support requests. It actually works *better*, as much as I hate to admit it.
I'm the resident FOSS advocate at the schools. I'm the one who has pushed Linux acceptance through on a limited basis and kept the schools from paying out thousands for various applications when there were alternatives. Yet I must concede that OOo and Star simply are not "there" when compared with Office.
It has no relevance only because you want it to have none. In truth, it demonstrates that we can't simply "not shoot up their country" to avoid terrorism. The fact is, there aren't a lot of Iraqi and Afghani terrorists outside those countries. It's countries we AREN'T shooting up that are producing terrorists.
Yes. Failing to act like everyone else is justification for detention. Or maybe it's just grounds to pay a little closer attention to you, put a plainclothes officer near you for observation.
If a company wants to become serious about this, they could make unofficial certifications and hand out prizes to the top x posters for the month. Peer respect is great and all, but being well-liked on the internet doesn't get much.
Has anyone ever been taken to court over TV shows? Wouldn't it qualify as fair use, as NBC is essentially giving the show away (funded by advertisers)?
No, I wouldn't. Because someone went to college to learn how to design that car. Someone else paid them to engineer it. They also fronted a lot of money for testing the vehicle. There is a significant investment in the development of the car before it's ever assembled, and I recognize that someone else did that with the intent of being rewarded for it. The same goes for music: most musicians want to be paid for all the work and money they put into their music. Just because you can make a copy of it doesn't mean you should.
Musicians can't produce the quality of music you want if they have to spend 40-60 hours on day jobs and just record music for the fun of it on instruments they can afford out of their own budgets. In a world where all music is free, most of it will be from crappy garage bands. Professional musicians depend on income from record sales and concert attendance.
You want to know what big record companies contribute? Cash. They front artists money so they can pay their bills while producing albums. They provide good instruments and equipment to get the best sound. They need to get their heads out of their asses and figure out a new business model, but cutting them out of the picture isn't really an option if you want to keep hearing good music.
No argument there. I was addressing the people who try to justify their actions.
I approach the "because I can" crowd with snobbery and disdain. I am a musician; at one time I was recording on a regular basis, drumming for a half-dozen local artists, two of whom have gone on to be big names in their genres. I know how much goes into the production of quality music, from money to time to creativity to stress. Anyone who thinks it's okay to simply take something because it's there and they can is an idiot and not worth my time.
It doesn't matter that it's free to reproduce. It's not free to originate or distribute. You're still wanting something for nothing, and it's reasonable for artists to desire compensation when people obtain copies of their work.
I knew you were coming, by the way. Even though I never directly compared stealing music with stealing cars, you grabbed that strawman and tore right into him.
All I said was I don't buy cars I think are too expensive.
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Of the writings I've read from the years leading up to the war, the south believed that the north wanted to yank the slave workforce right out from under the southern economy. One day they're slaves, the next they're free. That's a HORRIBLE way to deal with the issue for a lot of reasons.
What's really sad about the whole thing is that most people in the south really didn't care for slavery and with industrialization reaching the big farms already, it was a generation or two away from disappearing on its own.
I do wonder what things would be like today if the North had pushed instead for a gradual end to slavery by slowly freeing slaves over a few decades. Maybe the hardheaded leaders of the south still would have rebelled, but maybe not. Maybe we could have avoided a civil war and all the fear that followed it which led to the creation of the KKK, Jim Crow laws, and other such nonsense.
While we in our prosperous slavery-free ivory tower can say that it's abhorrent and should be banned immediately, I have to question whether immediate abolition was a wise course of action. We might have completely avoided the need for a civil rights movement, or perhaps seen it decades earlier.
I grew up on the curriculum set by the Texas Democrats in the 80s.
I was taught that the Civil War was fought to free the slaves from their southern oppressors. In reality, the north controlled the federal government and set a history of economic policies that ignored the well-being of the southern states. Slavery was the last straw; abolition would have crushed the southern economies. Secession happened out of fear and desperation to preserve a way of life.
I've had people become very offended when I present this information; apparently they think I'm trying to say slavery was okay. I believe a lot of what's going on over textbooks in my state today is the same sort of thing: people think that approaching history from another perspective is somehow trying to rewrite it. The mistake a lot of people are making right now is thinking that there is only one way to teach history. There is some merit in what the Texas conservatives are saying right now: some parts of history have been horribly misrepresented in recent history books.
That's not to say I agree with everything they're doing. Like all things in American politics, we are once again sailing right past the middle ground and taking the most extreme approach we can. They're right that a lot of groups are unfairly portrayed or left out entirely. They're right that history needs to be viewed from more than one perspective. But they've managed to take some really good ideas and ruin them.
This is why my children are being homeschooled. Not because we think schools need more God, not because we think they need less, but because we're tired of the politicians on *both* sides of the aisle who shove their personal ideologies into curriculum.
I most certainly agree that formal education is crucial for some fields. Science is an excellent example: there is so much foundation knowledge required to get started that it doesn't make sense to try to learn while doing (except in the sense of structured lab experiments in school).
I'm finding now that I probably should have gone to school for programming. While I've been reasonably successful in the past two years at teaching myself quite a bit, I don't have the benefit of an experienced programmer teaching me the proper way to do things. I often improvise and then reimprovise as my newer projects reach scales I didn't imagine months before.
Here's a Catch 22 for people like me: when we do decide we want a degree, we can't get it. I can't get a computer science degree, as no one offers online study or night classes. I have to quit my day job and become a fulltime student. If I quit my job, I have no use for a degree or the education that comes with it.
I take a small amount of pride in the fact that I am NOT college educated. I went into IT after high school and have learned everything either at home or on the job. Over the years I've picked up some college courses here and there to the tune of about 60 credit hours. I've yet to learn anything useful. The reason we have so many college graduates in America today is the notion that you have to go to college to have a "well-rounded" education. There are jobs for which I will never be considered solely because I lack a degree. Never mind my work history, my level of expertise, or the glowing recommendations I can produce; I don't have a piece of paper issued by a college, therefore I'm not qualified to do the work.
What this country needs is a good reality check on how many qualified workers exist who just don't have the paper requirements listed in the job description. The real irony of it is that when I was 22 and others my age were just getting out of college, i was vastly more knowledgeable than they were. The gap has only grown wider as the years have passed. College grads with IT-related degrees seem more likely to coast on what they learned in college, whereas we the self-educated learned from the start that IT work requires constant education. I've run into a few employers who recognize that degrees aren't worth any more than experience, and will treat a fresh graduate the same as someone with 3-5 years of experience and no degree. We need more people like them to help dispel this myth that college is necessary.
Yes, I'm biased. No, I'm not making this up. I'm speaking from anecdotal experience at best; take it for what it is.
(It takes a great deal of effort to talk about not finishing college without going into a rant about the bullshit college passes off as education, by the way)
What are we Texans supposed to do? Most of our judges basically tenured appointees. We're as stuck with them as you are.
Seriously, the labels needs to start with this:
"We have evidence that you downloaded X songs (attach a list) for which we own the copyrights. We would like to settle this matter quietly and without legal action. To that end, we would accept a settlement of X * 1.5 dollars in order to resolve this matter. In return, we will arrange for you to have legal digital versions of the songs in question via one of the listed services (iTunes, etc) If you decline this offer, we suggest you retain a lawyer and have them contact our legal department."
It's simple, reasonable, and only mildly threatening. It carries a modest 50% penalty over the cost per song.
They should be going after distributors with the big penalties, not the downloaders.
I work in education IT. An application I'm keen to see in a tablet is the ability to control a desktop computer via a wireless tablet such as this device or the iPad. Especially if the software involved allowed the instructor to enter a mode where they can draw/write on the screen that the students see, allowing them to visually communicate information about applications or web sites they are using.
Why not just use the tablet via some wireless video technology directly to the projector? Because it would be hard for the teacher to run Photoshop on a low-power tablet. But controlling it via the same tablet is quite possible.
There's a market for a product like this. In the small school district I work in, we're seeing substantial spending being directed at presentation technologies, and none of them really do what teachers would like. Having an on-screen remote control like a tablet would be perfect for most of our teachers who use projectors...I'd estimate that's 80-100 teachers in this one small district. Multiply that by the thousands of districts in Texas, half of them larger than us, and this state alone could buy enough units to justify the product. And all you'd really need is a 802.11x tablet that could run VNC with a little extra software to provide the draw-on-screen capabilities.
Just how long should we the other insured people be paying for someone to sit at home feeling bad about themselves?
I know about depression. My wife's family has some serious depression issues and she has struggled with it in the past. She has never missed more than a day of work at a time, calling in only when she feels her mood is so bad that it would be a problem at work. She uses 3-4 sick days a year doing that. She doesn't take medication for it, she just deals with it, some times for months at a time. It helps that I can tell when she's getting worse and can do things to make it easier on her...after seven years, I can usually get her through it without it getting particularly bad.
That said, the insurance company shouldn't be able to arbitrarily suspend her benefits without a serious discussion with the medical professional(s) treating her. After 18 months there *should* be some questions asked: what has been done to treat her, why isn't it working, what else can be done, et cetera. That's a long time to be depressed for any reason, and the insurance company shouldn't be expected to pay out indefinitely for such a vague ailment.
I'm not sure I can agree with the abolition of software patents entirely, as copyrights are insufficient in protecting innovation long enough for it to be profitable and there is no other system which ensures a company can recover development costs on truly innovative software.
There needs to be *something* which protects software developers from having their products ripped off and all their innovative functionality duplicated. Exactly how that *something* should work is best left to people far more expert in the field than me...but before we scrap software patents, we need to provide developers with an alternative.
They didn't patent sudo. Read the patent.
After skimming the patent, this sounds more like it's more like prompting for sudo. If this were Linux, it would be something like:
"You need to use sudo to run this program. Would you like to use sudo? y / n"
This is a very specific patent and most certainly wouldn't cover sudo, but rather the automatic detection of the need for it and a very detailed description of the GUI built on it. It's almost like the people writing about the patent didn't bother to read it...
Right up until someone decides that "misbehaving" includes "submitting content of which we do not approve." The last thing we need is for the internet to give some powermonger the tools to easily silence dissent.
In my experience, we used StarOffice across an entire school district for years and were plagued with compatibility problems with other schools. Also, Star/OOo lacks some very useful interface features compared even to Office 2000. We still have Star installed on our images to support old documents, but Office 2007 has greatly reduced our incoming support requests. It actually works *better*, as much as I hate to admit it.
I'm the resident FOSS advocate at the schools. I'm the one who has pushed Linux acceptance through on a limited basis and kept the schools from paying out thousands for various applications when there were alternatives. Yet I must concede that OOo and Star simply are not "there" when compared with Office.
Thus permanently killing the movement to reduce our output of carbon.
I saw a rather spectacular meteor probably five hours later over east Texas. It was low (appeared to be below the clouds) and very bright.
The only more impressive one I've seen was during the Perseids shower in 1998, one left a visible trail of dust/smoke/whatever.
It has no relevance only because you want it to have none. In truth, it demonstrates that we can't simply "not shoot up their country" to avoid terrorism. The fact is, there aren't a lot of Iraqi and Afghani terrorists outside those countries. It's countries we AREN'T shooting up that are producing terrorists.
Yes. Failing to act like everyone else is justification for detention. Or maybe it's just grounds to pay a little closer attention to you, put a plainclothes officer near you for observation.
Because that's how the FIRST round of terrorists got started. We shot up their homelands...
When exactly did we do that to Bin Laden?
If a company wants to become serious about this, they could make unofficial certifications and hand out prizes to the top x posters for the month. Peer respect is great and all, but being well-liked on the internet doesn't get much.
Too late, we've done it. Atom PC + solar panel on a large mylar balloon.
I don't even remember why we did it now. Some inside joke gone horribly awry.
Has anyone ever been taken to court over TV shows? Wouldn't it qualify as fair use, as NBC is essentially giving the show away (funded by advertisers)?
No, I wouldn't. Because someone went to college to learn how to design that car. Someone else paid them to engineer it. They also fronted a lot of money for testing the vehicle. There is a significant investment in the development of the car before it's ever assembled, and I recognize that someone else did that with the intent of being rewarded for it. The same goes for music: most musicians want to be paid for all the work and money they put into their music. Just because you can make a copy of it doesn't mean you should.
Nothing is lost?
Musicians can't produce the quality of music you want if they have to spend 40-60 hours on day jobs and just record music for the fun of it on instruments they can afford out of their own budgets. In a world where all music is free, most of it will be from crappy garage bands. Professional musicians depend on income from record sales and concert attendance.
You want to know what big record companies contribute? Cash. They front artists money so they can pay their bills while producing albums. They provide good instruments and equipment to get the best sound. They need to get their heads out of their asses and figure out a new business model, but cutting them out of the picture isn't really an option if you want to keep hearing good music.
No argument there. I was addressing the people who try to justify their actions.
I approach the "because I can" crowd with snobbery and disdain. I am a musician; at one time I was recording on a regular basis, drumming for a half-dozen local artists, two of whom have gone on to be big names in their genres. I know how much goes into the production of quality music, from money to time to creativity to stress. Anyone who thinks it's okay to simply take something because it's there and they can is an idiot and not worth my time.
It doesn't matter that it's free to reproduce. It's not free to originate or distribute. You're still wanting something for nothing, and it's reasonable for artists to desire compensation when people obtain copies of their work.
I knew you were coming, by the way. Even though I never directly compared stealing music with stealing cars, you grabbed that strawman and tore right into him.
All I said was I don't buy cars I think are too expensive.