Comment Losing Your Computer (Score 4, Funny) 104
Great. There are some days where I forget where I've put my smartphone. So now I can expect to lose my entire computer because it dropped and I might have vacuumed it up with the dust bunnies?
Great. There are some days where I forget where I've put my smartphone. So now I can expect to lose my entire computer because it dropped and I might have vacuumed it up with the dust bunnies?
My wife's grandfather passed away due to complications from Parkinson's. I never got to meet him before the disease started, but it was heartbreaking to see him go from able to walk on his own using a walker to being unable to move a leg without help. He would fall down and being unable to help you life him back up. (FYI, it can really hurt your back trying to lift up a 150 or so pound man who can't help by supporting his own weight at all.) In the end, he couldn't even get out of bed.
I'm not sure which is worse, Parkinson's or Alzheimer's (where you slowly lose chunks of your memory/yourself until there's just an empty shell left). Any progress towards treating these disorders is fantastic.
Documentaries don't use actors to play the people they're about. The people are in them.
So any documentary about the Civil War or WW2 or other historical events only use people who lived through that time? They can never reenact the events to visually show what happened? Or do they bring the people back from the dead. Zombies help make documentaries much more interesting though they sacrifice accuracy a bit when Zombie Lincoln tries to eat the cameraman's brains.
Lions were the first example I thought of also. A male lion taking over a pride will also kill all cubs that aren't his own to ensure that the females only raise his own offspring. Nature isn't a rainbow-sunshine world of peace and harmony. It's a nasty world of kill or be killed and eaten. Anyone who thinks that humans are the only ones who kill really hasn't seen much of nature.
Not that, but my wife once had an undergarment trigger the TSA sensors as an "anomaly" and had to be subjected to the full pat down routine. By a female employee who, I hope, wasn't just doing this because she found my wife attractive. This likely wouldn't let a male TSA agent pat down a female in the line as I believe they have rules in place that only the same-sex individual must do the pat down. Then again, this IS the TSA we're talking about, so I wouldn't be surprised if that was abused as well. They have been caught sending attractive females through the "naked scanner" and ogling the resulting images.
The TSA: Protecting Us Against Imaginary Terrorists*
* But Not Real Ones**
** Also, who protects us against the TSA?
I don't see society losing all knowledge, but I could envision a society where being a scientist is either
A) A secretive, priest-hood type profession - In this case, most people would see science and technology as magic. How does the car run? Nobody knows but the Scientist and he's not telling.
or
B) A reviled profession with people practicing it in secret, if at all - Think of this as the extreme version of the religious extremists' "science is a war on religion" view with religion winning. Study of science is banned and public sentiment is manipulated to make people who study science into outcasts. Technological development freezes and then backslides as those with knowledge can't even repair what we have.
A couple generations of this could easily result in a populace who wouldn't know what to do with a fully charged laptop with a local copy of Wikipedia if you gave it to them - or worse, a populace who would smash the laptop and hang you for heresy.
I mean a teaching degree. Where the person studies education, childhood development, and other subjects that make that person capable to educate growing minds. The "5 week course" is analogous to taking someone whose computer experience is launching Word, giving them a 5 week course on server administration and then making them your sysadmin. Yes, the person might be able to go some of the motions of server administration, but they'll never be as good as someone with years of server administration under their belt.
I'm not sure if this is a general trend across the country, but where I am teachers with actual degrees are being targeted so that they (and the public schools in which they teach) can be replaced with business-run charter schools and "teachers" who took a five week online course. The good teachers are fleeing the profession and I've heard more than one teacher tell people they wouldn't recommend that students choose becoming a teacher as their career.
Montessori schools do that. They let the students decide what they want to learn and at what pace. Personally, I don't buy this educational philosophy. I think kids can often be very short-sighted and might not try to learn an essential subject or might shy away from a subject as "boring/hard" when they would really love it if forced to study it for a bit. K-12 should be about 1) getting a child's educational foundation in place and 2) giving the child exposure to a wide variety of topics so they can decide which ones they like if/when they go to college.
I think it's more along the lines of: Internet Radio came along and the music industry wanted them to pay royalties because "Internet" equals "One Step Away From Piracy." They wouldn't let their music near the "PiracyNet" unless they were compensated first. Fine, so the Internet Radio companies paid them. Now, however, the executives got greedier and noticed that Internet Radio was paying them while Non-Internet Radio wasn't. Greedy executives saw dollar signs and decided that this couldn't stand so they got their buddies in Congress to put forward legislation to force everyone to pay them royalties. (Oops. I mean every Radio company. The "everyone needs to pay $X a month to the music industry no matter what you do" legislation is still being ironed out.)
The more I look into state politics here in NY, especially when it comes to Cuomo, the more I understand that Vermonter's comment isn't tinfoil hattery, but day-to-day politics here.
This is, after all, the state where state senators approved a budget "with a heavy heart" while saying that it was horrible so that our governor could have a fifth on-time budget in a row. And this is the state where said budget tore apart the educational system but gave tax breaks if you want to buy a yacht.
In short: Want to buy a yacht and send your kids to private school? Come to New York. Can't afford a yacht and need to send your kids to public school? Your legislators' hearts are heavy for you but they won't actually do anything to help.
For a second, I thought you were arguing that the moral conflict should be built into the weapon. I envisioned a weapon version of Clippy. "It looks like you are trying to kill someone. Do you want me to help?"
On the plus side, building Clippy into every weapon would ensure that they are never used. (On the minus side, using the weapons as clubs until the weapons were destroyed would increase a thousand fold.)
An autonomous cars' job is "don't hit those people, other cars, or other obstacles in the road." It doesn't need to know Person A is fine to hit but avoid Person B or else. Autonomous weapons need to make this decision and might decide that the wrong person is OK to kill.
I'm saying that the tests are structured such that students are all but guaranteed to fail. Only by coaching their kids constantly on how to take the test, can the teacher possibly hope to have their kids pass. This leads to teachers who only teach how to take tests, not teachers who actually teach.
Being able to take a test and knowing the material are two very different things. Then there's the argument about learning related topics that might not be on the test, but might be interesting and spark a love of learning. The most effective teachers I had when I was in school weren't the ones who taught me how to pass a test, but were the ones who were creative and willing to take detours (staying within the general subject but veering from the path slightly).
This doesn't even get into the politicians setting the bar AFTER the tests to decide just how much progress is deemed acceptable. Because they might decide that a 10 percentage point increase isn't enough and teachers will be deemed ineffective if they don't get a 20 percentage point increase. The whole system is designed to result in failing kids and teachers so the politicians' donors can step in to "save" everyone (and earn a profit).
That transforming robot was clearly a Decepticon in disguise and how is surely gathering all of the energy in Fukushima to convert to Energon for Megatron! Someone call the Autobots.
Where there's a will, there's a relative.