After all, THAT would at least have explained better why Neo was able to sense the damn squidbots and blow them up.
Seems pretty clear to me why Neo could sense & blow up the squidbots: they're part of the machine network, connected to some master system ("the source") that activated when he visited the architect.
The entire public education structure is broken
Not really. And I say this as a former would-be teacher who bailed because of weaknesses in the system, and of course, as a grown-up student who can now see many flaws in my the education I received.
On the other hand, of course, I actually got a pretty great public education, at the end of which I knew basic Calculus, electronic circuits, Pascal & C, how to use UNIX, basic writing and argument skills, an appreciation for poetry and literature, a little bit about the Spanish language, and college credit for a lot of this (never had to take freshman comp, general biology, american history, and I also had two semesters of Computer Science down). I can come up with examples of holes in my education too, but honestly, with a bit of better counseling from somebody or a better internal compass, I could have *easily* gotten a lot more out of the whole thing -- there was simply a lot stuff on the table that I just left there. All from a state (Utah) that tends to lag in per pupil spending.
The school I did my student teaching had at least that much to offer. Problems, yes, not necessarily the apogee, but pretty good.
Yes, of course there are districts and schools and individuals out there in deeper trouble than I'm describing... enough that reform is a worthy problem. But this idea that it's all broken top to bottom seems fishy to me, and I think it's driven more by a subtle antipathy than actual analysis.
A HS teacher should have at least an MS in the field they teach and not in education.
Credentialism isn't going to save us from any of our current problems. In fact, we probably need less of it: slightly lower barriers to getting into the profession, better evaluation of those already involved.
But even if we were talking about more subtle solutions, a subject-and-practice focused undegrad (augmented with some light pedagogical theory) is going to be as helpful as tacking on an extra two years of study, particularly for the better candidates.
On the teaching side HS should be more like college and less like grade school
Oh, certainly. Probably most importantly in having more time for teachers to refine and practice their subject matter and less time on per-se prep and teaching. Of course, that's going to cost us, particularly if we're also increasing the professionalization of teachers (and compensating accordingly).
it IS AN OPEN STANDARD. It's just not free as in beer.
It's not free as in libre either if you can't freely re-implement.
Imagine a world where HTML itself was controlled by a patent association that charged fees to anyone who implemented authoring or rendering software.
You're essentially arguing for that.
Wrong. H.264 was created to create a STANDARD.
Great. If they want a standard, they're welcome to it. And if the members of the patent pool want the pool to protect their intellectual property and mine the value, then that's their privilege.
If they want a *web* standard, though, that's different.
You do not have a open web -- in the free/libre sense -- when its clients can't be freely implemented and re-implemented. Imagine a world where HTML itself was controlled by a patent association that charged fees to anyone who implemented authoring or rendering software and you start to get the idea. Yet some people are apparently OK with playing exactly that game with a key piece of the HTML5 spec.
WebM is a step away from that.
I wish people would just stop drinking the Google Cool-Aid and think about WHY they are making this move. It's not about the money. it's not about openess. It's about trying to make the standard that they bought the standard for video on the web. Next thing, they will limit the licensing to their competitors so that they can't do everything they are doing with video on the web.
Google has granted a perpetual, royalty-free patent license to VP8/WebM.
Who's drinking kool-aid again?
The Journal of Cosmology has published a special issue...which touches all the bases. In a chapter titled Sex on Mars...
Are we sure we got the right "Cosmo" here?
Your "taxophobic minority" is another person's "reasonable concern."
You may not be aware of this, but there are substantial members of the caucus that likes to present themselves as "reasonably concerned" about taxes that are actually signing pledges from people like Grover Norquist and similar ilk stating that they will flat-out oppose any new tax or tax increase. No consideration of policy, no assessment of fiscal impact. No tweaking the code by increases here, decreases there. Pure monotonic ratchet down.
Sound "reasonably concerned"? Or does "taxophobic" maybe start to sound more accurate?
designed to divide and conquer. For example, "shall we raise taxes on beer?" The majority of people, not being beer drinkers, thinks this is just swell. "Shall we increase the cigarette tax?" Different majority, same result.
Alcohol and tobacco as examples of singling out powerless minorities? Dude, you can't be serious. Taxes on those things pre-date income tax by decades, probably are among the earliest taxes in the USA, and the rationale behind them has far more to do with "sin tax" anti-incentives and public costs associated with their trade, use, and abuse than it does with rarity of use amongst population -- particularly alcohol, since depending on who you ask, 40-50% of the population drinks beer, and 60+% drinks something (yes, I suppose that technically makes beer drinkers a slight minority, but a minority that's as big as a plurality in many presidential elections is not the kind that isn't going to have any clout when the issue comes up for review).
I'm even a full supporter of the idea that anyone who votes in favor of a tax has to be subject to that tax even if they don't participate in the actions being taxed.
Sure! And while we're at it, let's extend the operative principle here to *all* areas of the law! Proposing or voting for a new statutory punishment? Well, get ready to pay the fine and do the time yourself, buddy!
The Fairness Doctrine is being leveraged to ensure that there are only two viable political parties.
If you're worried about an entrenched party duoarchy, any content-focused "Fairness Doctrine" should be the least of your concerns. Even if it were still operating (it's not, and it's pretty easy to verify both by pointing at examples of broadcast outlets that violate its principles as well as checking history), any effects it has are an order of magnitude lower than the plurality voting system.
Then when new regulations are passed that give more power to the corporations, you blame the people who told you that was going to happen if you kept pushing for more regulations.
Naw, I blame the people who talk about about "regulation" vaguely and as if it's some monolithic thing, of course. Always easier rhetorically, particularly when you're preaching to a choir of fellow conservatives who've repeated the "regulation bad" mantra for so long it's become their own personal lobotomy and they are no longer even *capable* of actually thinking about policy specifics.
So here's the question: can you describe the mechanics of how a regulation that, say, prohibited tolls or discrimination based on packet source/destination would create barriers that favor existing big companies?
The ONLY way to stop corporate control of something by a small group of companies with lobbying power is not to regulate it. End of story.
Either that, or write regulations that are a matter of condition rather than favor.
It's really not that hard to stipulate something to the effect that carriers aren't allowed to bill by source or destination of a packet.
Packets are speech, after all. Is a DDOS really so different from too many people trying to use a telephone system at the same time?
</diabolicaladvocacy>
Phineas and Ferb.
I can't stand the rest of Disney's lineup, but that show is one of my favorite pieces of television ever. A light and pleasantly self-aware show where the protagonists build fantastic things to enjoy and play with? All the fun of Family Guy without the grossness and empty cynicism? Yes, more please.
Man, none of you guys have a clue. Have you read Rand or are you just regurgitating what you read on Wikipedia?
I've read The Fountainhead, Anthem, and a number of Rand's essays, as well as Wikipedia and other biographic articles. I also, of course, know who John Galt is. I think some of her work has some depth it's not given credit for (unfortunately, as much by her apparent followers as her critics).
But I don't think her critics here have no clue. They might be ignoring how noble the protagonists in her fiction are, but they're not incorrect that her philosophy as policy would lead to as many (if not more) James Taggarts and Ellsworth Tooheys as Reardens and Roarks (not to mention the problems with Roark, however romantic a character he is -- sure, he had a contract with Keating that enabled him to blow up the building, but did Keating have a contract with the land owners/developers/ect that gave him property rights that he could transfer to Roark?). And as has been pointed out, when it's come to practical recognition of real-world individuals, Rand has endorsed some individuals and behavior that resembles psychopathy.
On the other hand, the Karl Marx philosophy is about theft. Those who need take precedent over those who produce.
So, speaking of "Have you even read _____" criticisms.... how much Marx have you read? Because while needs are part of the philosophy (and the fact that this is a target of criticism says something about the critics, I'd say), there's a hell of a lot more to Marx than that -- it is, in fact highly concerned with "a fair reward for [the] inspiration and sweat" of laborers and craftsmen. I'd recommend, for starters, this slashdot comment about the implications of a competitive market for labor-as-commodity.
This isn't about PCs disappearing. This is about the bulk of personal "computing" moving onto devices other than PCs*. And even if it's overstated in the article, it's essentially sound as a trend. For people who aren't authoring (and even some who are), PCs are more or less overkill.
None of this means PCs won't be produced or used. They'll just likely become a minority in a larger sea of devices. Or, as his Steveness says, PCs will be like trucks. That's the end of the PC-centric Era, and it's not a particularly controversial idea.
* Where PC means the desktop/workstation form factor that terms has come to signify. Yes, I know, technically it means "personal computer" and you could grandfather anything with a CPU into that; doesn't change the fact the term PC has come to mean something more specific and it's this usage the article is running with.
The author went to prison, but you asked him (as he's been asked in interviews) he'd tell you he's not the only person who's ever, ahem, skirted the law.
I know people who take the same approach to natural language. After all, Spanish and Italian are very very similar, aren't they? The reality with natural languages is that "all languages are the same" thinking enables you to abuse several cultures without actually understanding any of them.
Having seen a fluent southern brazilian portuguese speaker effectively navigate the baja peninsula, I know you're overstating your case. Sure, if you only know one romance language, you'll have vast gaps in your knowledge of another. If you're fluent in one, though, and particularly if you understand its mechanics well on a descriptive/meta level, you can pick up another one much more quickly than if you're learning one for the first time. And in some cases, fluent speakers of one can understand and be understood by speakers of another.
Even if this weren't the case, your objection would have a big problem: programming languages are orders of magnitude more compact and less complex than natural languages. There is, quite simply, a lot less to learn.
And I think that to a large extent the same thing goes for programming languages. For example, if one of your "paradigms" is "object-oriented", does learning Smalltalk really prepare you for making best use of OO in Java or C++? Or vice versa? The inventor of Smalltalk and OO certainly doesn't think so.
SmallTalk would absolutely prepare you to work in Java or C++ in some ways. Maybe not as well as it'd prepare you to work in Ruby or Objective C. Perhaps not as well as C# might prepare you. Definitely better than Pascal would. Paradigms might be a bit more fine grained than "object-oriented", but that doesn't mean that working in one language and (more importantly) understanding the descripting mechanics of it won't dramatically help you with another.
I spent some time a while back trying to explain Scala to a Java programmer. His response was "It's just like Java." Well, Scala *is* just like Java, as long as you ignore the huge and central features that are not like Java. When I started to show him those features, generally in a "replace a page of code with one line" sense, his response was "I don't like it", and that was the end of the conversation. That, in practice, is what "learn 7 languages in 7 weeks" looks like.
No, it's what dislike of the unfamiliar and intellectual incuriosity looks like. The GP posited someone who knew a few paradigms, not someone who didn't like learning new things.
If you want to understand what "learn 7 languages in 7 weeks" looks like, consider part of Daniel Friedman's The Role of the Study of Programming Languagesin the Education of a Programmer ([original postscript] [Google HTML]):
"When I was just starting out in computer science in the Spring of 1964,one of my goals as an undergraduate was to learn at least one new language per semester.
The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.
