Now, it's more like: you are more likely to accept broad generalizations and we are more likely to not realize that it was never changed from that way.
You are absolutely correct. And Finland has a very homogeneous culture with strong traditions (sisu sp?) of self-reliance and an awesome work-ethic. Now, pretend you live in America with vast inner city ghettos, heterogeneous cultures (breeding an us vs. them attitude) and a culture of entitlement. Your system would be the biggest boondoggle ever in this country.
Ok, how about a phrase: short-sighted greed.
Like when a software vendor screws their customers for short-term gains. Like when a salesman lies to his customers for short-term gain.
I agree with GPP, it's all about simple (short-sighted) greed.
Well, the real problem is that one of the charts is a gross distortion. Look at the "Large File USB to HD" chart. All the other charts are absolute, in that the starting y-axis value is zero. In this chart, the numbers are so close that the author fudges by starting them at 16.5. This makes Ubuntu look almost twice as fast as Windows, when the reality is that the biggest delta is about 5%. I don't think it was intentional, but it has no place in a benchmarking report.
Could you trigger a massive rockfall off of, say, Taiwan or Hawaii, aimed (more or less) in the direction of your arch-enemy and wipe them out? Perhaps drill a core every 100 meters, plant explosives down the shaft, explode, profit!
Re:6502 assembly - now there's a blast from the pa
on
1200-Baud Archeology
·
· Score: 1
Didn't the terminator run on 6502 assembly? I seem to recall watching a scene where they scrolled a bunch of assembly as the guvanator was deciding how to answer a question. I was sure I saw a load accumulator instruction in there somewhere! Thanks for the memories.
Now that I have your attention: I highly recommend the original 3 foundation novels, but under no circumstances should you flog your child (or anyone else's) with the tripe that followed.
So sayeth I/he/she/it/we/Gaia...
For fantasy, you would be hard-pressed to do any better than Raymond Feist's Magician series.
There is a rampant misunderstanding of the free market and its ability to use substitutes and alternatives as prices rise. Even here on slashdot, where people should know better.
I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.
I especially like the part where the doctor pledges to do no surgery.:-)
It could be argued that the no child left behind act is largely responsible for our corrupt, money hungry, and materialistic society today.
How could this ever be modded insightful? NCLB was passed into law on Jan, 2002 . Let's see, that leaves a little over 6 years for those elementary school kids to enter the workforce and displace all the ethical adults that preceded them?!
Also, the ethics courses had been removed from my High School before I attended. And that preceeds NCLB by many years.
Now let's look at the theoretical private company under Friedman's model that would step in to fill this sudden demand for private education. It would ostensibly be a for-profit corporation,...
With those *very* different directives, a few moments' thought should be enough to show that any for-profit entity operating in the field of public services is going to provide the least possible service at the highest possible rates.
Perhaps that will be the goal (of the corporation), but competition will exert a constant pressure to improve. The end result of competition is almost always high quality at a low price. Contrast that to the withering effect of socialism, which tends to produce low quality at a high cost.
We've seen that time and again, in country after country, in sector after sector. Medical services in the US? Check. Water utilities in the UK? Check. Power companies in the US? Check. Major ISPs in Australia, Canada, the US? Mobile communications services just about anywhere? Check.
So, all I have to do is provide some counter-examples, right? Like cpu or chip costs (remember, this is slashdot). Or, perhaps we can dig a little deeper and discover what makes some enterprises work and others fail. Health care is a captive market with demand outstripping supply. Oligopolies control many of the other markets you mentioned.
So, is the education market likely to follow those patterns or those of more competitive industries? I'm betting it will be much better when people have a choice, maybe not perfect. But, what we have now is so broken after elementary school, that it almost can't be worse.
The ah-ha moment for me came when I realized that the Houston ISD budget was the same size as the City of Houston government budget. It is just so inefficient that there is a lot of room for a private company to make money by just running more efficiently.
Fobbing such services off onto the private sector produces other problems as well, as corporations are by their very definition protected by legal limits on their liability. Given the intimate roles that teachers play as in loco parentis, it is important on many different levels that parents have a serious say in what happens at schools -- which is where PTAs come in. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that no for-profit company would really allow a PTA to have much authority over what goes on.
The existence of a substitute (school) trumps this any day. When people can pull their children and go someplace else, competition will force the private schools to become answerable to the parents. Look at it this way, if what you are saying is true, then existing private schools would be much worse than existing public schools, but they aren't. I assert this with no proof other than my personal experience in attending a private middle school and then switching back to public school when my family moved. It was a world of difference.
Part of the problem in the Friedman model is the simple issue of motivation. Why would companies suddenly spring up to take over the role of schools? Private schools that exist at present are there in large part because of an organic need in the community, combined with the presence of people with the motivation to be teachers.
Huh? Private schools exist because there is a demand for them, plain and simple. Some of that may be religious, or it may be something else, but it exists. Judging by the growing dissatisfaction with public education, I have no doubt that enabling private schools to be funded via school vouchers will only increase their numbers. If not, then it's no big deal, things don't change.
The Friedman pipe dream instead seems to be based on the profit motive, which is, as noted above, largely incompatible with public services.
I'm as much a believer in evolution as the next, but I've grown a bit tired of every amazing discovery being associated with evolution. In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-11.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was Enlightened.
I have one and it's not the small screen (although as many have mentioned, the newer eeePCs will get a 9" screen). It's the small keyboard. That is the biggest problem. I have small hands and fingers and it's still too small for me. The right shift key is impossibly placed - resulting in either a down or right arrow press. Also the touch pad and space bar cause problems.
Many years ago, I bought an Apple Newton. I still have the keyboard and I stacked it on top of my eeePC to see the difference. The Newton's keyboard is a couple of inches wider and the keys are much larger (and fewer to be fair). But the Newton's keyboard was very easy to use, while the eeePC has a lousy keyboard. Fix that and you will have the eeePC killer.
Good luck defining "equitable" in this context. Now, imagine our wonderful federal govt attempting to implement their version of "equitable".
The devil is in the details, and having the govt attempt to run a business is, well, like having the govt attempt to run a business. Never a good thing. Instead, they decided to auction off the resource for the maximum amount (sounds pretty smart to me), and with, IIRC, 2 of Google's 4 requests in place. Not perfect, but probably a lot better than the alternative.
A little consideration will convince any one that the difficulty of making a
machine beat all games, Is not in the least degree greater, as
regards the principle of the operations necessary, than that of
making it beat a single game.
Other than that little gem, Poe did a pretty good job of deductive reasoning.
I used to work with a guy that had been in the Air Force in Vietnam working in some type of data center. He told me a story about an event that happened one night that forced an emergency shutdown. If I remember correctly, a water pipe burst and the data center was being flooded. As he was on duty that night, he went around shutting down all of the equipment. One machine, in particular, had an "Emergency Shutdown" lever. In training, he was told that he would never need to use it, but it was there. This seemed like an emergency, so he pulled the lever. What he didn't know was that it released a weighted blade that fell down through the backplane severing every wire in its path, essentially destroying the machine.
The aftermath was, a couple of Air Force techs spending weeks soldering the thing back together again, and he got every s#^t job that came up for the remainder of his tour.
Yes, but it took time to make the copies. And, because it was so time-consuming, the amount of copyright infringement was very small relative to the store sales. Today, is a whole new world, with the ability to acquire a huge repository of music in almost no time. This has fundamentally changed the dynamics of the marketplace. The record labels would have responded back in the 70s and 80s the same way if CI were as easy and prevalent.
I agree with you about the labels seeing their window of opportunity shrinking and making a last ditch, desperation attempt, at slapping the genie back into the bottle.
I also agree with a prior poster that the mammalian response will work away at this over time. The question will eventually be resolved by whether the majority of the population embraces mammal or reptile values. When the majority of your population is breaking the law, it's not time to enforce the law, it's time to change it. But, if the prevailing wisdom sides with CI == theft, then the riaa will be around for a long time running their shakedown operations.
Slashdot Mirror
He was: The Most Interesting Man in the World.
Now, it's more like: you are more likely to accept broad generalizations and we are more likely to not realize that it was never changed from that way.
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/378/
You are absolutely correct. And Finland has a very homogeneous culture with strong traditions (sisu sp?) of self-reliance and an awesome work-ethic. Now, pretend you live in America with vast inner city ghettos, heterogeneous cultures (breeding an us vs. them attitude) and a culture of entitlement. Your system would be the biggest boondoggle ever in this country.
Ok, how about a phrase: short-sighted greed. Like when a software vendor screws their customers for short-term gains. Like when a salesman lies to his customers for short-term gain. I agree with GPP, it's all about simple (short-sighted) greed.
Well, the real problem is that one of the charts is a gross distortion. Look at the "Large File USB to HD" chart. All the other charts are absolute, in that the starting y-axis value is zero. In this chart, the numbers are so close that the author fudges by starting them at 16.5. This makes Ubuntu look almost twice as fast as Windows, when the reality is that the biggest delta is about 5%. I don't think it was intentional, but it has no place in a benchmarking report.
On the other hand, I'm frightened...
On the gripping hand it's also good...
There, fixed it for you. :-)
Could you trigger a massive rockfall off of, say, Taiwan or Hawaii, aimed (more or less) in the direction of your arch-enemy and wipe them out? Perhaps drill a core every 100 meters, plant explosives down the shaft, explode, profit!
Didn't the terminator run on 6502 assembly? I seem to recall watching a scene where they scrolled a bunch of assembly as the guvanator was deciding how to answer a question. I was sure I saw a load accumulator instruction in there somewhere! Thanks for the memories.
Now that I have your attention: I highly recommend the original 3 foundation novels, but under no circumstances should you flog your child (or anyone else's) with the tripe that followed.
So sayeth I/he/she/it/we/Gaia...
For fantasy, you would be hard-pressed to do any better than Raymond Feist's Magician series.
There is a rampant misunderstanding of the free market and its ability to use substitutes and alternatives as prices rise. Even here on slashdot, where people should know better.
I especially like the part where the doctor pledges to do no surgery. :-)
Try Steve Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar magazine and try to dig up any old Byte magazines with his column in it.
How could this ever be modded insightful? NCLB was passed into law on Jan, 2002 . Let's see, that leaves a little over 6 years for those elementary school kids to enter the workforce and displace all the ethical adults that preceded them?!
Also, the ethics courses had been removed from my High School before I attended. And that preceeds NCLB by many years.
Now let's look at the theoretical private company under Friedman's model that would step in to fill this sudden demand for private education. It would ostensibly be a for-profit corporation, ...
With those *very* different directives, a few moments' thought should be enough to show that any for-profit entity operating in the field of public services is going to provide the least possible service at the highest possible rates.
Perhaps that will be the goal (of the corporation), but competition will exert a constant pressure to improve. The end result of competition is almost always high quality at a low price. Contrast that to the withering effect of socialism, which tends to produce low quality at a high cost.
We've seen that time and again, in country after country, in sector after sector. Medical services in the US? Check. Water utilities in the UK? Check. Power companies in the US? Check. Major ISPs in Australia, Canada, the US? Mobile communications services just about anywhere? Check.
So, all I have to do is provide some counter-examples, right? Like cpu or chip costs (remember, this is slashdot). Or, perhaps we can dig a little deeper and discover what makes some enterprises work and others fail. Health care is a captive market with demand outstripping supply. Oligopolies control many of the other markets you mentioned.
So, is the education market likely to follow those patterns or those of more competitive industries? I'm betting it will be much better when people have a choice, maybe not perfect. But, what we have now is so broken after elementary school, that it almost can't be worse.
The ah-ha moment for me came when I realized that the Houston ISD budget was the same size as the City of Houston government budget. It is just so inefficient that there is a lot of room for a private company to make money by just running more efficiently.
Fobbing such services off onto the private sector produces other problems as well, as corporations are by their very definition protected by legal limits on their liability. Given the intimate roles that teachers play as in loco parentis, it is important on many different levels that parents have a serious say in what happens at schools -- which is where PTAs come in. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that no for-profit company would really allow a PTA to have much authority over what goes on.
The existence of a substitute (school) trumps this any day. When people can pull their children and go someplace else, competition will force the private schools to become answerable to the parents. Look at it this way, if what you are saying is true, then existing private schools would be much worse than existing public schools, but they aren't. I assert this with no proof other than my personal experience in attending a private middle school and then switching back to public school when my family moved. It was a world of difference.
Part of the problem in the Friedman model is the simple issue of motivation. Why would companies suddenly spring up to take over the role of schools? Private schools that exist at present are there in large part because of an organic need in the community, combined with the presence of people with the motivation to be teachers.
Huh? Private schools exist because there is a demand for them, plain and simple. Some of that may be religious, or it may be something else, but it exists. Judging by the growing dissatisfaction with public education, I have no doubt that enabling private schools to be funded via school vouchers will only increase their numbers. If not, then it's no big deal, things don't change.
The Friedman pipe dream instead seems to be based on the profit motive, which is, as noted above, largely incompatible with public services.
I disagree completely. E
It's actually ~1% of the ADULT population, not the entire population.
"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.
"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.
"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.
"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.
Minsky then shut his eyes.
"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.
"So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was Enlightened.
No need to panic. Many HAM radio operators build their own. Check out the excellent ARRL handbook.
I have one and it's not the small screen (although as many have mentioned, the newer eeePCs will get a 9" screen). It's the small keyboard. That is the biggest problem. I have small hands and fingers and it's still too small for me. The right shift key is impossibly placed - resulting in either a down or right arrow press. Also the touch pad and space bar cause problems.
Many years ago, I bought an Apple Newton. I still have the keyboard and I stacked it on top of my eeePC to see the difference. The Newton's keyboard is a couple of inches wider and the keys are much larger (and fewer to be fair). But the Newton's keyboard was very easy to use, while the eeePC has a lousy keyboard. Fix that and you will have the eeePC killer.
And APL shall inherit the Earth...
Good luck defining "equitable" in this context. Now, imagine our wonderful federal govt attempting to implement their version of "equitable".
The devil is in the details, and having the govt attempt to run a business is, well, like having the govt attempt to run a business. Never a good thing. Instead, they decided to auction off the resource for the maximum amount (sounds pretty smart to me), and with, IIRC, 2 of Google's 4 requests in place. Not perfect, but probably a lot better than the alternative.
A little consideration will convince any one that the difficulty of making a machine beat all games, Is not in the least degree greater, as regards the principle of the operations necessary, than that of making it beat a single game.
Other than that little gem, Poe did a pretty good job of deductive reasoning.
Perhaps you meant to say, "But there have been no more terrorist attacks on the US during that time because we have moved the theater of war to Iraq.
#8 on the list was the Emergency Shutdown.
I used to work with a guy that had been in the Air Force in Vietnam working in some type of data center. He told me a story about an event that happened one night that forced an emergency shutdown. If I remember correctly, a water pipe burst and the data center was being flooded. As he was on duty that night, he went around shutting down all of the equipment. One machine, in particular, had an "Emergency Shutdown" lever. In training, he was told that he would never need to use it, but it was there. This seemed like an emergency, so he pulled the lever. What he didn't know was that it released a weighted blade that fell down through the backplane severing every wire in its path, essentially destroying the machine.
The aftermath was, a couple of Air Force techs spending weeks soldering the thing back together again, and he got every s#^t job that came up for the remainder of his tour.
Yes, but it took time to make the copies. And, because it was so time-consuming, the amount of copyright infringement was very small relative to the store sales. Today, is a whole new world, with the ability to acquire a huge repository of music in almost no time. This has fundamentally changed the dynamics of the marketplace. The record labels would have responded back in the 70s and 80s the same way if CI were as easy and prevalent.
I agree with you about the labels seeing their window of opportunity shrinking and making a last ditch, desperation attempt, at slapping the genie back into the bottle.
I also agree with a prior poster that the mammalian response will work away at this over time. The question will eventually be resolved by whether the majority of the population embraces mammal or reptile values. When the majority of your population is breaking the law, it's not time to enforce the law, it's time to change it. But, if the prevailing wisdom sides with CI == theft, then the riaa will be around for a long time running their shakedown operations.