You may not care. But I have little respect for those who have no tolerance, period. Unfortunately, I find the most intolerant people are usually those who are professing that someone else is being intolerant.

I don't recall the exact wording, but my state had a gay marriage proposition a few years back. Now I have no problem with either gay civil-unions or marriages, per se, as long as they come with the same burdens w.r.t. divorces etc. The problem that I have is the establishment of additional protected classes, which it seems like much of the gay rights community is pushing for. The problem has already been seen with ministers being sued for refusing to perform gay marriages.* This is why I prefer having civil-unions from the state, which anyone can have with whomever they want, separate from the marriage, which is left to the descretion of whatever religious/other organization you perfer. The difference may be largely semantic, but it seems like it could help.

*I don't know if the suit was sucessful or not. I just remember the news article about it being attempted.

multiple marriage (regardless of which sex is the single) = polygamy [ok so far]
"reverse traditional" by which I assume you mean one Female, multiple Male marriage = polyandry [note same root as android, etc. Literally "many men."]
the far more common one Male, multiple Female marriage = polygyny [note same root as gynacologist. Literally "many women."]

I didn't watch TFVideo (work restrictions), so I will admit to be lacking a bit of context, but one could interpret the quoted congress-critter as having said, "The standard textbook definition of the scientific method includes starting with a hypothesis, and then either proving or disproving that hypothesis. Are you sure that you can eliminate any a-priori bias from the resulting work?" Stated that way, the comment is actually a reasonable thing to ask. (or at least isn't unreasonable.)

And I know he stumbled on the word "hypothesis", but beng 44 now myself, that is a sign of getting older. You start to grasp for words that you know you know, and sometimes have to settle for something "close, but not quite right."

I understand the use of math visualization as one of a number of tools to teach math, and I have seen it used very sucessfully, but the small bit of the "common core" implementation of teaching math is not done well at all. I have also seen the "traditional" method done poorly, so at some level I have to blame the education of our teachers. (i.e. we don't know how to teach teachers to teach).

My example of poorly done traditional method actually leads to my example of well done math visualization. My son had been able to perform basic addition since kindergarten (I had done many math-game type activites, so I knew he was capable.) However, in second grade, his teacher required each student to finish a page of 30 addition problems within a minute, before they could then progress to the next page of 30 addition problems. Easy enough right? this gives you one second to parse the problem, and one second to write. About half way through the year we were informed by the teacher that my son was still on the first page of problems, and was now refusing to even attempt to do them, choosing to put zeros in, or nothing, for every answer. What we didn't realize at the time was that my son was slightly disgraphic (hand-eye writing coordination issue). After another quarter of the year, and many conferences later, my wife thought to ask my son to write the numbers 1 to 30 on a page. Guess what, it took him just slightly longer than 60 seconds to do it. The end of this half of the story is that my son was completely put off of learning math by this teacher.

That summer I saw an ad for Mathnasium, a math tutoring franchise which claimed to "make math fun". We thought it worth a try, and indeed they were able to help with the math self-image/attitude that my son had acquired from the second grade teacher. A big part of Mathnasium's approach involves developing math visualization techniques. The thing is that they don't stop there, they continue on to the more traditional computational methods, which scale much better as the math becomes more complex. ( I highly recommend this franchise if it is available near you.)

Fast forward a couple of years.... math is one of my son's best subjects. The school switches to a new text-book/curriculum across the district. We attend presentations by the publisher. The teaching method presented is to be to introduce multiple ways to do the calculations, such that the student can use whichever method works best for them. Sounds good right? The problem is that when the teachers present it, they insist that all the students learn all of the different methods presented, and they specify that each set of problems is to be performed with a particular method. This doesn't work well, of course, because few students become good at all of the methods. I admit that several of the multiplication and long division methods are interesting shortcuts, but they don't seem lead to a good understanding of how the processes work at a more general level. (ie. they don't scale well). My son manages well enough, anyway.

Another few years, and my younger daughter is now going through the schools, except now it is common core. Instead of multiple methods, there is one method which MUST be followed, and that is the visualization "boxes" that others here have described well. It doesn't matter if you get the answer right in the end, if it looks like you were trying to draw the boxes correctly. On the contrary, if you know how to do math, and get the answer correct, but haven't figured out how the textbook wanted the boxes to be partitioned, you get the problem marked wrong. My daughter is also fairly good at math, and finds this very frustrating. My conclusion is that the talent of the teacher is as much or more than the particular method being used. ( assuming that a better teacher would teach around the text in this case.)

As a result, if it weren't for hearing the same situations described by many other "common core(d)" parents, I would blame the specific teachers. However, with so many similar stories, including from different areas of the country, I can only assume that this is how the teachers are being instructed to present (and grade) the topic. Mathnasium shows that it can be done well, but obviously this isn't what is happening in the standard classroom.

p.s. Before anyone accuses me of disliking teachers, both of my parents were teachers. I just have more respect for some, than I do for others.

The "standards" themselves may be fine, but the way that they are implemented, seemingly universally are not. Unfortunatly, the implementation is what the kids get to experience.

While I get your point (and Apple did NOT invent the first of any of the above), Steve Wozniak does lay claim to putting the first integrated keyboard and video display on a desktop computer with the Apple 1. (see his autobiography, "iWOZ")

Also, closer to the point of the current court case, while there were "smart phones" prior to the iPhone (I even had one) they were only about as "smart" as the dumbest of phones today. The iPhone really was a major departure at the time and re-set the bar for how smart a smartphone needed to be.

What I find difficult is why do some people feel the need for the FDA to "control" items which are actually effective, simply because they are effective? Not everything is dangerous, even if it does have some effect. I can think of several things which are effective, yet safe, herbal remedies.

Ginger is good for settling the stomache. Motion sickness, and ginger's effect, was (non-scientifically) covered on a Mythbusters episode. I grew up in Michigan, where we drank Vernor's Ginger Ale when sick-to-vomiting. There were times that it was the only thing I could keep down.

Some of our best medicines are plant derived. Statins are naturally present in a particular strain of rice. There was a grain seller who was sued and forced to stop selling that particular type of rice because it violated the patent on Statins, even though the rice pre-existed the drug. At least I think it was a patent issue, could have been FDA related, either way they were forced to stop selling it. (gee, one would think that there would be prior-art there.)

For other items the FDA makes the manufacturer stop because the FDA determines that the effect isn't strong enough. My wife has mild psoriasis. One item which was effective for her was Tegrin ointment, which was either coal or pine tar based. The FDA did some studies and found that they could not show a statistically provable effect, so they forced all of the coal/pine tar (which ever it was) products off the market. There may be different types of psoriasis for all I know, and maybe it isn't effective for all of them, but it did help my wife. Yes, there are steroidal cremes which are potentially more effective, but they also have side effects on the areas treated with them, whereas the ___tar didn't. Recently, there are even "better" treatments advertised on TV, but if you listen to the small print (fast talker at the end of the commercial), they have potentially even worse side-effects, and are only advertised to fairly severe cases because of it. Regardless, a mild treatment which worked for my wife's mild case was removed from the market.

Depending on how you are counting or weighting the count (ie do the number of times 0 and 1 are used in binary/computers count?), I would say that 1 would win against 0, since zero only showed up with the Arabic numbering system. So, releative to the whole history of man, it is a fairly new invention.

Now, to keep on topic, I suppose that I should put this in the form of a question for ESR, so...

What is your opinion of the relatively recent Arabic introduction of the number Zero to the field of mathematics?

Not to diss the listening effort, but what would really be cool would be if the hams figured out how to speak to it, and do what NASA seemingly can't: fix it's orbit.

Southerners, not South Americans. One is in the south end of the North American continent (not including Mexico), the other is a completely different continent which is south of the equator.

As to horseshoe crabs, they are facinating creatures. When I was growing up, one of my brothers had the remains of one, amazingly well preserved (I guess that might happen with an exoskeleton). For what it is worth, the remains were found already dead on the beach. Once you got over the "fishy" smell, one could look at all the structures of the creature, or at least the external ones. It was years later, as an adult, that I first saw one alive at an aquarium. Other than the fact that it moved, there was no visible difference.

Ok, the above sounds rather stupid, but this is all relating to my memories as a less-than 8-year-old.

My hope is that the fact that there is a living harvest element will promote their protection/conservation (or whatever the right word is for not killing them).

IIRC, there was some cake in there too. Don't forget that.

And there is another problem as well, which you (almost) just brought up. Who pays for the first genereation (X) of students? One of the following occurs:

1> Colleges wait for payment (riiight...) for Generation X until we have graduates of X. This is essentially a loan system again. Or it would be if you put a bank in the mix to handle the payments to the college up front. If the IRS handles it it would be a "tax", but essentially it would just be another form of direct govt loan.

2> We start taxing everyone now on behalf of Generation X. This would work, but is not exactly "fair". Of course, this is what is happening when Mommy and Daddy pay for Junior right now, except that you will be required to pay for my kid(s) too.

3> The government fronts the startup money. This is really just #2 or #1, depending on the details.

What you have to remember about Social Security is that although it was advertized as an investment (you put money in which you later withdraw, like an annuity), it is actually closer to a ponzi/pyramid scheme which you already described fairly well. There is a reason that pyramid schemes are illeagal (except when the gov't runs them), eventually they fall apart, and the latest crop of those at the bottom of the pyramid get left holding the bag.

Amazing is it 3 days later (across the weekend) that I am reading here and there are no on topic posts to be seen. So I will start...

My review of Eton's products:
The one which I purchased had terrible workmanship. Unfortunately, I purchased it as part of a fundraiser, so I couldn't return it.

The model I had was a combination solar, wall-power, hand-generator powered unit, with a radio and an emergency (LED) light for output. My complaints all center on one item; however, as that item was the main power switch, its lack of performance (or poor design) made the whole unit inoperative. The switch was a rotary switch which ( IIRC ) had four settings indicated on the housing. I don't recall exactly how the settings were divided, but they were something along the lines of off/charge, on/solar, on/battery, light-on (less sure of this one). Whatever they were exactly, the actual switch only had three positions. In none of the on positions would anything work. I could however get the radio to work by holding the switch between two of the positions, and that only when plugged into the wall wart. The solar cell would not charge the battery at all (as far as I could tell). I could get the crank-generator to dimly light the LED lantern, but only briefly, and I was never able to get the radio to work off the generator, nor charge the battery that way.

As I could not return the unit, I decided to see if I could fix it. I thought I might remove the defective switch and replace it with one (or several) of my own. Unfortunately, the construction was extremely cheap, meaning that the switch mechanism was actually part of the circuit board. I might still have tried to solder to the traces, but decided that I had invested enough time already, and instead just junked it, after removing the solar cell, the LEDs, and a few other potentially useful bits.

I can only say that as a result of this experience, I have avoided buying any more Eton radios, even if the feature set of the advertised products sounded tempting.

Slashdot.org doesn't nag currently, but if it did, would you pay for it?

And, for those who care... Same question for Beta.Slashdot.org? (Now I'm just trolling, but the first was serious.)

THANK YOU! This makes the motives clear. The attempt is not to kill the ebook industry, just the ebook LENDING that libraries and schools allow.