And whilst I use StartSSL, it's a pain that you can't get free wildcard certs for your domain...
And it fucking pisses me off that the grocery store won't just give me free food, too.
StartSSL is a business, and its business model is to give out free Class 1 certs with the hope of converting you into a paying customer. They charge for every possible thing other than issuing personal use basic certs, even cert revocations. So if you say wanted to revoke your "free" cert for a very good reason like, say, Heartbleed, then be prepared to be converted to a paying customer.
I'm not saying that you should never use StartSSL, though. I'm just saying that you should know what you're getting yourself into, and know why they don't offer (and never will offer) other free services like wildcard certs.
I've considered https, but it's too hard for me as a small web site owner: first I have to manage to get an SSL certificate (costs serious effort and money), then I have to figure out how to install it correctly (tried it before with a self-issued certificate and failed; while I'm fairly computer savvy), finally I have to somehow remember to renew it every few years or so - which is an interval way long enough to completely forget how the installation worked, so I have to start all over again.
Ideally, your web host should hold your hand through this.
I don't want to come across as a shill, so I'm not going to name names, but I just looked at the customer panel for a large shared hosting provider, and the process for adding HTTPS was dead simple. You just click on "Secure Hosting", and it walks you through it. You can use a self-signed cert (which they create for you automatically), buy an SSL cert through them for $15/yr, or you can copy/paste in your own (if you want to save a few bucks and get a PositiveSSL from Namecheap for $9/yr or a "free" cert from StartSSL). It took me about 2 pointy-clickys to add SSL to a test domain.
Imagine if you will, a scenario where you are given an opportunity to learn about a subject you truly love from one of the best experts in the field, but you would have to take the class with 10 of the most far right nut wingers imaginable.
Or even better, imagine going through college as a conservative. As you no doubt remember, only expressions of Leftist doctrine are permitted in the "marketplace of ideas" that we call college. Never mind examining the merits of all ideas; college is a place where everyone from the students through the professors consider it to be their moral duty to ignore what you say and then insult you personally while explaining how sensitive and inclusive and open-minded they are.
At the end of the day, the path to your dreams need not run through any club nor class nor approval of the tactless. It's consistent, persistent action that advances you toward your goals and dreams, and that is the lesson that I hammer into my children's heads. I have very little patience for "oh, but she might get awkwardly hit on!" Apparently that happens 742 times per hour just walking down the street, anyway.
What it comes down to is that the educators will look at a number of predefined criteria that reasonably predict a child's aptitude.
I understand what they do. My point is that they should not do that. They should give motivated kids a chance to be challenged. And let's be honest, do AP classes represent an actual challenge? I took a metric assload of them, and I did not find them to be challenging at all. The reason for this should be obvious: they take a semester-long college course and consume a full academic year teaching it. Of course they're dead easy.
Naturally, the schools can't let all these kids in. The system isn't set up to support that.
I'm not GP, but many schools restrict who can enroll in AP courses. Personally, I think that this is stupid. Even the lower-class-rank students should be able to take an AP class if they think that they can handle it. They may not be taking a full course load of AP, but why not let them try some college level work in a subject that they like?
And then there are those brilliant guys I've worked with which I still can't figure out their code
I would argue that those guys are not brilliant at all.
Any programmer can solve a complex problem with a complex solution. The brilliant programmers are the ones who can take a complex problem, distill it down to well-organized chunks, making the solution appear straightforward and obvious (even when the solution was anything but obvious).
When you get a dev on your staff who writes clear, straightforward code, you keep that dev in high morale and you don't let him or her go.
This is silly. Girls already do way better in school than boys, on average, and US colleges are majority-female. If girls are so uncomfortable with boys in their class, how come they are kicking our asses in school?
If memory serves, if a black person is shot and killed, it is something like 80x more likely that it was by another black person than that the shooter was a white police officer.
The better advice is to avoid high-crime areas, and that is without regard to skin color.
You tell your kids not to go to Chicago because of the crime, I tell mine not to go because of the police.
Given all of the news stories lately I don't blame you for this, but you should look up the statistics don't support the fatherly advice that you've given your children. I don't really feel like googling, but if memory serves, among the number of black people who are shot and killed annually, something like 1% of those is by white police officers, and roughly 80% are shot by young, black men.
So..... yeah. You should probably consider giving your black children the same advice that I give my white children: to avoid high-crime areas, stay with friends, look like they know what they're doing, etc.
And for what it's worth, I have family in Chicago and my kids have been there many times. Chicago is a fine city, but like any other major city, you need to be aware of where you are because there are certain neighborhoods that are not welcoming toward white people.
I don't really get the point of the Google initiative. I think that most schools have an intro to computing/programming concepts course that is geared toward catching up those who don't have prior programming experience. Not sure why booting white males and Asians out of the room is necessary or fair.
I think most schools do the same thing. My college did. The intro to CS was two courses, but you didn't take the first one if you had prior experience.
We didn't even need to take a test or require the assistance of Google's affirmative action task force or anything. We just self-selected ourselves into the appropriate course and that was that. I guess life is more complicated now.
80% of the class spoke some dialect of Chinese at home
That can be a little dangerous. A buddy of mine in high school spoke Russian at home and took Russian for the easy A. Wound up being an easy F because he was illiterate and his grammar was atrocious and he didn't realize until too late that he needed to study.
His had animations and sounds when the exercise was only to add a column of numbers.
I like to think that a decent teacher wouldn't have let one outlier student screw up the grading for an entire class. Especially since animations and sounds were not required and introduced unnecessary complexity into his codebase.
I never did figure how to make a recursive function work.
You probably had a shitty teacher, then. Recursion is a little tricky to get the hang of at first, and it's easy to screw up and create an infinite recursion, but if you follow a few simple rules, you should stay out of trouble.
I didn't know that American classrooms were a zero-sum game... Is that common?
Not really, but it's usually up to the teacher how to assign the grades, so it's entirely possible that the grading was normalized and only a certain number of each grade was awarded. That's not usual, however.
A typical grading curve in the US is to take the top X scores as a baseline for the highest grade and everyone who gets a certain percentage of the top X grades gets an A, then a certain percentage lower is a B, etc. In that sense, GP could have distorted the curve by being an outlier score.
I had that happen in an Econ class once. I had already taken the course in high school and had already finished my degree requirements, but still had to take the intro course to graduate. I earned 100% in the class (I was qualified to teach it at that point) and ruined a lot of freshmen's transcripts. I think the Econ department has since loosened up that requirement a bit.
I think the bell curve is likely the entire problem. There simply should not be one.
How many classes did you take that were graded on a strict bell curve where there were a certain number of each grade to be awarded, and the scores were forced into that grading distribution? I don't think I had even one course graded that way.
I had many courses that were graded on a curve, but the formula was generally based on a percentage of the top X scores achieved in the course. In theory, the entire class could earn As, but it would not be possible to have all students fail.
FYI, they don't all last the rest of your life. There are some that require boosters in adulthood. If you see the doctor regularly you should be covered, but just letting you know.
I'm sorry, but you are the one who is arguing irrationally.
GP didn't say that vaccines were bad. He said that he was uncomfortable with the government forcing medical treatments on its citizens. Yet you responded all huffy-like that vaccines are good. Well, no shit vaccinating is a good idea. But that is beside the point.
If you want to respond to GP's assertion that he is uncomfortable with the idea that governments should be forcing medical procedures on his citizens, then you need to argue why it is a good idea for government thugs to be kicking down doors and stabbing citizens with needles at gunpoint. Because that is the point that is under discussion.
Governments take thousands in school taxes, then tell you that if you don't want to send your kids to their public school that you'll have to send thousands more to a private one.
What are "school taxes"? I'm not aware of any jurisdiction in the US that has such a thing. There are property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, use taxes, excise taxes, estate taxes, service fees, etc., but those are paid by everyone, regardless of whether they send their kids to public or private schools, and indeed regardless of whether or not they have kids at all! My 90-year-old grandma pays all of these taxes, and I can assure you that she does not have any children in school right now.
I have little doubt that most diets are completely unsuccessful after 5 years, but I also wouldn't really expect a doctor to have so much information on various diets. Your friend would probably have better luck asking a registered dietician for that information.
Anecdotally, most of the weight loss success stories that I've heard involve the person making lifestyle changes that naturally appeal to the person, and also just happen to involve increased physical activity and/or caloric restriction. So it's not a one-size-fits-all type of thing. It's more like sitting down and saying to yourself, "Self, what could I change about my life that would primarily be really fun, but would also promote weight loss?"
For me, I'm an economist by training, so I found enjoyment making a satiety vs. calories maximization problem out of it (i.e. what foods kept the hunger away for the longest time for the least amount of calories consumed?). So, I dutifully logged everything that I ate or drank in myfitnesspal and kept notes on how long everything kept me sated. Now, I have a list of foods that, for me anyway, keep the hunger at bay so I can simply eat less food and not feel tired/hungry/grouchy.
I realize that most people would hate doing this, but since I have a love for The Dismal Science, it appealed to me. Others needs to figure out what would excite them.
There's a certain subset of people for whom that is just never going to happen
I'd say that that subset of people who lack the self discipline to deny themselves in the long run would be "most people".
Anyone can say "no" to themselves once, twice, or even several times. But eventually indulgence will win out over self-discipline, because really, which one feels way the fuck better than the other?
Slashdot Mirror
The conversation was about it being so very cheap to roll out SSL because its trivial to get free SSL certificates.
Ahh, sorry. I missed that part of the conversation.
Maybe the "Let's Encrypt" initiative will help. Cloudflare is also a good option.
Cheers!
And whilst I use StartSSL, it's a pain that you can't get free wildcard certs for your domain...
And it fucking pisses me off that the grocery store won't just give me free food, too.
StartSSL is a business, and its business model is to give out free Class 1 certs with the hope of converting you into a paying customer. They charge for every possible thing other than issuing personal use basic certs, even cert revocations. So if you say wanted to revoke your "free" cert for a very good reason like, say, Heartbleed, then be prepared to be converted to a paying customer.
I'm not saying that you should never use StartSSL, though. I'm just saying that you should know what you're getting yourself into, and know why they don't offer (and never will offer) other free services like wildcard certs.
I've considered https, but it's too hard for me as a small web site owner: first I have to manage to get an SSL certificate (costs serious effort and money), then I have to figure out how to install it correctly (tried it before with a self-issued certificate and failed; while I'm fairly computer savvy), finally I have to somehow remember to renew it every few years or so - which is an interval way long enough to completely forget how the installation worked, so I have to start all over again.
Ideally, your web host should hold your hand through this.
I don't want to come across as a shill, so I'm not going to name names, but I just looked at the customer panel for a large shared hosting provider, and the process for adding HTTPS was dead simple. You just click on "Secure Hosting", and it walks you through it. You can use a self-signed cert (which they create for you automatically), buy an SSL cert through them for $15/yr, or you can copy/paste in your own (if you want to save a few bucks and get a PositiveSSL from Namecheap for $9/yr or a "free" cert from StartSSL). It took me about 2 pointy-clickys to add SSL to a test domain.
Imagine if you will, a scenario where you are given an opportunity to learn about a subject you truly love from one of the best experts in the field, but you would have to take the class with 10 of the most far right nut wingers imaginable.
Or even better, imagine going through college as a conservative. As you no doubt remember, only expressions of Leftist doctrine are permitted in the "marketplace of ideas" that we call college. Never mind examining the merits of all ideas; college is a place where everyone from the students through the professors consider it to be their moral duty to ignore what you say and then insult you personally while explaining how sensitive and inclusive and open-minded they are.
At the end of the day, the path to your dreams need not run through any club nor class nor approval of the tactless. It's consistent, persistent action that advances you toward your goals and dreams, and that is the lesson that I hammer into my children's heads. I have very little patience for "oh, but she might get awkwardly hit on!" Apparently that happens 742 times per hour just walking down the street, anyway.
What it comes down to is that the educators will look at a number of predefined criteria that reasonably predict a child's aptitude.
I understand what they do. My point is that they should not do that. They should give motivated kids a chance to be challenged. And let's be honest, do AP classes represent an actual challenge? I took a metric assload of them, and I did not find them to be challenging at all. The reason for this should be obvious: they take a semester-long college course and consume a full academic year teaching it. Of course they're dead easy.
Naturally, the schools can't let all these kids in. The system isn't set up to support that.
Well, maybe they should change that.
I'm not GP, but many schools restrict who can enroll in AP courses. Personally, I think that this is stupid. Even the lower-class-rank students should be able to take an AP class if they think that they can handle it. They may not be taking a full course load of AP, but why not let them try some college level work in a subject that they like?
And then there are those brilliant guys I've worked with which I still can't figure out their code
I would argue that those guys are not brilliant at all.
Any programmer can solve a complex problem with a complex solution. The brilliant programmers are the ones who can take a complex problem, distill it down to well-organized chunks, making the solution appear straightforward and obvious (even when the solution was anything but obvious).
When you get a dev on your staff who writes clear, straightforward code, you keep that dev in high morale and you don't let him or her go.
This is silly. Girls already do way better in school than boys, on average, and US colleges are majority-female. If girls are so uncomfortable with boys in their class, how come they are kicking our asses in school?
If memory serves, if a black person is shot and killed, it is something like 80x more likely that it was by another black person than that the shooter was a white police officer.
The better advice is to avoid high-crime areas, and that is without regard to skin color.
You tell your kids not to go to Chicago because of the crime, I tell mine not to go because of the police.
Given all of the news stories lately I don't blame you for this, but you should look up the statistics don't support the fatherly advice that you've given your children. I don't really feel like googling, but if memory serves, among the number of black people who are shot and killed annually, something like 1% of those is by white police officers, and roughly 80% are shot by young, black men.
So..... yeah. You should probably consider giving your black children the same advice that I give my white children: to avoid high-crime areas, stay with friends, look like they know what they're doing, etc.
And for what it's worth, I have family in Chicago and my kids have been there many times. Chicago is a fine city, but like any other major city, you need to be aware of where you are because there are certain neighborhoods that are not welcoming toward white people.
Not like we have a choice. Our state government mandates that all new developments must have an HOA. It's been that way for decades.
That being said, I don't live under an HOA. Just sayin' that many don't have a realistic choice and endure it out of necessity.
Now that only drove up Bennett's click count. I guess commenting only drives up his comment count, too.
Oops.
But I just can't help myself. I have to click so that I can comment, and I have to comment so that I can bitch about what a shitty writer Bennett is.
One day I'll have to write a greasemonkey script to filter Bennett Haselton out.
When did advanced students cease being role models and instead become problems that need to be kicked out of the room?
I don't really get the point of the Google initiative. I think that most schools have an intro to computing/programming concepts course that is geared toward catching up those who don't have prior programming experience. Not sure why booting white males and Asians out of the room is necessary or fair.
I think most schools do the same thing. My college did. The intro to CS was two courses, but you didn't take the first one if you had prior experience.
We didn't even need to take a test or require the assistance of Google's affirmative action task force or anything. We just self-selected ourselves into the appropriate course and that was that. I guess life is more complicated now.
80% of the class spoke some dialect of Chinese at home
That can be a little dangerous. A buddy of mine in high school spoke Russian at home and took Russian for the easy A. Wound up being an easy F because he was illiterate and his grammar was atrocious and he didn't realize until too late that he needed to study.
His had animations and sounds when the exercise was only to add a column of numbers.
I like to think that a decent teacher wouldn't have let one outlier student screw up the grading for an entire class. Especially since animations and sounds were not required and introduced unnecessary complexity into his codebase.
I never did figure how to make a recursive function work.
You probably had a shitty teacher, then. Recursion is a little tricky to get the hang of at first, and it's easy to screw up and create an infinite recursion, but if you follow a few simple rules, you should stay out of trouble.
I didn't know that American classrooms were a zero-sum game... Is that common?
Not really, but it's usually up to the teacher how to assign the grades, so it's entirely possible that the grading was normalized and only a certain number of each grade was awarded. That's not usual, however.
A typical grading curve in the US is to take the top X scores as a baseline for the highest grade and everyone who gets a certain percentage of the top X grades gets an A, then a certain percentage lower is a B, etc. In that sense, GP could have distorted the curve by being an outlier score.
I had that happen in an Econ class once. I had already taken the course in high school and had already finished my degree requirements, but still had to take the intro course to graduate. I earned 100% in the class (I was qualified to teach it at that point) and ruined a lot of freshmen's transcripts. I think the Econ department has since loosened up that requirement a bit.
I think the bell curve is likely the entire problem. There simply should not be one.
How many classes did you take that were graded on a strict bell curve where there were a certain number of each grade to be awarded, and the scores were forced into that grading distribution? I don't think I had even one course graded that way.
I had many courses that were graded on a curve, but the formula was generally based on a percentage of the top X scores achieved in the course. In theory, the entire class could earn As, but it would not be possible to have all students fail.
FYI, they don't all last the rest of your life. There are some that require boosters in adulthood. If you see the doctor regularly you should be covered, but just letting you know.
I'm sorry, but you are the one who is arguing irrationally.
GP didn't say that vaccines were bad. He said that he was uncomfortable with the government forcing medical treatments on its citizens. Yet you responded all huffy-like that vaccines are good. Well, no shit vaccinating is a good idea. But that is beside the point.
If you want to respond to GP's assertion that he is uncomfortable with the idea that governments should be forcing medical procedures on his citizens, then you need to argue why it is a good idea for government thugs to be kicking down doors and stabbing citizens with needles at gunpoint. Because that is the point that is under discussion.
How about that drug war, where they arrest you for putting things IN your body? Or even for just possibly having the idea.
Most people around here aren't too happy about the drug war, either.
Governments take thousands in school taxes, then tell you that if you don't want to send your kids to their public school that you'll have to send thousands more to a private one.
What are "school taxes"? I'm not aware of any jurisdiction in the US that has such a thing. There are property taxes, sales taxes, income taxes, use taxes, excise taxes, estate taxes, service fees, etc., but those are paid by everyone, regardless of whether they send their kids to public or private schools, and indeed regardless of whether or not they have kids at all! My 90-year-old grandma pays all of these taxes, and I can assure you that she does not have any children in school right now.
Often, home schooling is even prohibited.
[citation needed]
I have little doubt that most diets are completely unsuccessful after 5 years, but I also wouldn't really expect a doctor to have so much information on various diets. Your friend would probably have better luck asking a registered dietician for that information.
Anecdotally, most of the weight loss success stories that I've heard involve the person making lifestyle changes that naturally appeal to the person, and also just happen to involve increased physical activity and/or caloric restriction. So it's not a one-size-fits-all type of thing. It's more like sitting down and saying to yourself, "Self, what could I change about my life that would primarily be really fun, but would also promote weight loss?"
For me, I'm an economist by training, so I found enjoyment making a satiety vs. calories maximization problem out of it (i.e. what foods kept the hunger away for the longest time for the least amount of calories consumed?). So, I dutifully logged everything that I ate or drank in myfitnesspal and kept notes on how long everything kept me sated. Now, I have a list of foods that, for me anyway, keep the hunger at bay so I can simply eat less food and not feel tired/hungry/grouchy.
I realize that most people would hate doing this, but since I have a love for The Dismal Science, it appealed to me. Others needs to figure out what would excite them.
There's a certain subset of people for whom that is just never going to happen
I'd say that that subset of people who lack the self discipline to deny themselves in the long run would be "most people".
Anyone can say "no" to themselves once, twice, or even several times. But eventually indulgence will win out over self-discipline, because really, which one feels way the fuck better than the other?