Comment Re:So what? (Score 1) 152
Yes, weird. Still, it's better for the people what they are doing now, not what they did before. The Multicanal-Cablevision merger is (was?) obviously a disaster for us consumers.
Yes, weird. Still, it's better for the people what they are doing now, not what they did before. The Multicanal-Cablevision merger is (was?) obviously a disaster for us consumers.
Not neutral. The new law is not “setting things up so that the Government alone chooses who gets a license and who doesn't”, that's propaganda. The new law is just an anti-monopoly law.
Besides, you have your facts wrong. They haven't been operating illegally for several years. Fibertel was "dissolved" on Jan 15th, and the government has been warning the company for some time now. What happened now is not surprise for anyone but the uninformed.
Presidents come and go, but Grupo Clarín has been controlling national politics for decades from the shadow. It will be a good thing to see it go.
So, if I understand you correctly... the Kirchners help corporate friends, and group Clarín is a good and big company that Argentinians should be proud of. Yet, in help of "their corporate friends", the Kirchner are pushing antimonopolic laws.
This is the kind of schizofrenia created by media monopolies on weak minds... =)
Grupo Clarín owns the national major newspaper, and seems to control the 2nd major one. It owns TV channels in every town and city, and in many cities is the only cable operator. It controls the only newspaper paper plant in Argentina and uses prices to undermine other newspapers.
As I explained in another comment, this is really about the government trying to stop a new merger, because Clarin had acquired the 2nd largest cable company in Argentina. The govt rejected the merger, but Clarín went ahead and dissolved the company, creating for itself an illegal situation (because the ISP license belonged to the old comany, which is now dissolved).
We are here in very interesting times regarding the role of journalism, and the fight agains media giants...
This is part of the intention by the government to stop the merger of the two biggest cable providers. The merger has already been done, despite it being rejected ( http://www.buenosairesherald.com/BreakingNews/View/10918 ). The new merged company dissolved one of the parts, without getting the license to operate under the new company. So, now they are operating under a license belonging to a company which no longer exists.
The issue here is government vs media giants. Antimonopoly measures, which are common in developed countries, have a lot more opposition in non-developed countries, where economic interests go over the people's interest (yes, more than in the US =) ).
You are kidding, right?
Maybe the kids are right.
I truly think school is a waste of the child's time because it teaches things the children don't want to learn and in most of the cases it teaches things children won't be needing anyway.
School is mostly a Sisyphean task. Paying kids to transform this into a Sisyphean job is not a good choice. Wouldn't it be better to change what school is into something that kids can make sense of?
Children want to learn, what they don't want is to be answered questions they didn't ask. If you hear a child, you'll notice he's constantly asking questions. I don't think motivation is an issue, the problem is motivating kids to do many pointless things.
Well.. maybe there's a flaw with the school system that requires to be fixed.
My point is almost the same as yours. Although we differ in conclusions. I think school is flawed for the same reasons you mentioned. And we should correct that. You think we should give money to the children so they don't question why they have to go to school in the first place.
In my experience, kids are bottomless pits of curiosity, unless you teach them not to be. Kids really enjoy learning, but you have to answer what they want to know and not just throwing random knowledge to them.
Last week my sister started asking me questions. She wanted to know what was the "optical things on the mouse, cameras, and remote controls". It took me a while to realize she was talking about LEDs. And after that, just by her inquiry, we went from LED to semiconductors to GaAs to the mining and production process. And I didn't have to push any knowledge (or money) on her, it was just her curiosity alone.
It is work, but it is not a job. That's why you don't get payment. There are many things you must work in without getting any payment. In particular, knowledge is a capital you must build. You don't get money to learn, but you learn in order to then apply your knowledge and get money. That's the right lesson.
I wasn't taught school was work (I'm spanish speaker, so I guess it's an idiomatic thing, the Spanish word is 'tarea' which means something like 'task').
Now, I personally think that school is wrong in many senses. I was pondering the other day, comparing my little sister (who is 15 years younger than me and is on high school) with myself and my jobs, and the amount of effort she has to put on and stress she is under is insane. I've never again been as tired and bored as I was on school.
But the solution is not throwing money on the problem, the solution in my opinion is greatly reducing the amount of hours and useless knowledge you give to the kids. And trying to help kids finding what they really like learning and feed that interest. Probably home schooling.
And of course, leaving them time for them to discover the world around them.
It's an entitlement. Because you are not supposed to get payed for eduction: education is a service that is provided to you!
Later in life they'll have to pay to get a college degree, a PhD, and so on.
What you should be teaching your son is that if they don't finish school they won't be able to get a job.
On the other hand, it will be a shock when they find out that the only real way of getting money is doing an effort for other people and not for themselves.
If you want to teach your kid the value of work that's great. But do it with actual work (mawing the lawn, doing the dishes) and not with "make believe work".
Does it really work?
You see, being paid is not the only reason adults do anything hard. There are other things like passion, responsibility, self improvement and so on.
Teaching children that school is work is, in my opinion, the wrong lesson. Because it is a false lesson. School is not work, school (i.e. getting knowledge) is what gets you from no payment into eventually getting payed and into better payscales. And that's a lesson you'll have to learn sooner or later.
Nobody is going to pay your son to get through Law School. And you better teach that to your son early in life or he'll just ditch Law School to get an easy buck as soon as possible.
You want to teach him the value of work? Great! that's a perfect lesson. But require your son doing some actual work (mawing the lawn, doing the dishes).
If you teach them to expect payment for doing something for themselves, you'll make things worse. When they grow up they'll only get payed for doing something for other people.
An example of how bad was Alice 3D in comparison with Avatar 3D are subtitles.
In Avatar 3D, subtitles were placed were the action was happening. So if you were watching somebody talking, you just moved your eyes a little and read the subtitles.
On the other hand, Alice has the subtitles in the regular place, at the bottom of the screen. This would be ok in a 2d movie, but in 3d there is another problem and that's that you have to refocus each time you want to read. So the result is very annoying, focusing back and forth from the scene to the subtitles.
Of course there's also the problem of the movie being too dark. And too boring
If ISP helped authorities on these things, there wouldn't be botnets, nor spam. Many attempts at preventing spam stop at their refusal to help. It would be nice to force them by lay to cooperate with spam fighting efforts. Sadly laws to force them to cooperate fighting "piracy" seem to pass easier..... =/
I disagree, I learned about big O notation and algorithms in college, I'm a Physics graduate. This is basic knowledge you need to have if you are working on numerical simulation.
On the other hand, what you don't need, is the capacity to create a reusable program. Just big number crunching programs that solve a specific problem.
What I see that I'm lacking is the capacity to create a complex system with a clean architecture. I'm not sure about design patterns for example, even if I know the basics.
I use it as a human-powered net of blog posts, web pages and news recommendations.
I use two twitter accounts, in one I get frequent updates on political and economical news of my country, in the other I get updates about game programming. In both I get obscure articles I wouldn't get just by googling, and I get them faster than google indexes them.
It is not a perfect recommendation system, I get some "lol, look at my catz" lines, but it works. You get interesting posts most of the times. But I also found out some new blogs via twitter, which I subscribed in my RSS feed reader. I also have followers that read my blog posts when I tweet them.
I also found it a good way to know people. You tweet about a topic, and start knowing people that's into the same things you are. If you find somebody particularly smart, funny, insightful, you move to IM and mail, but twitter is a great place to know them. I happened to know two guys who work at home as I do and have the same interests and now we chat frequently.
Why not using Facebook instead? Well, I use facebook from time to time, but my contacts there are people I know IRL, which are not very technically inclined and most of the time post photos of their family or keep me updated on their advances on Farmville. Twitter is just an unobtrusive medium, Facebook tries too hard to be a platform where you do things.
Let the machine do the dirty work. -- "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Ritchie
