A perfect chance to tighten the fences keeping the citizens in check.

I'm not disagreeing with you, but the idea that you have to keep Canadians "in check" is pretty funny. I've lived in Canada and have never met a people who were less "out of check".

I mean, what are there, about four homicides a year in Ottawa? And three of those are probably mercy killings. The other was a guy who wore a Marian Hossa jersey to an Ottawa Senators' game. Even criminals in Canada are polite.

Any one of various people who would want the new measures could have hired the guy.

You sound reasonable.

"It's all about ethics in Slashdot comments!"

Why spend the $10 most carriers charge for a SIM if you don't have to?

It's got to be an "Apple SIM" which probably means it's $599 for a small one that nobody wants and $899 for one that you can actually use.

I own a Surface Pro 2 and a Surface Pro 3, and use them for portable music production, live performance and field recording. They are by far the best system for such use. It's a tablet, with the touch screen (or stylus) except it can run a full version of ProTools with all the plug-ins and VSTi's you could possibly want. Full USB connectivity for audio interfaces, MIDI controllers and peripherals.

If they made a Macbook with a removable touchscreen, it would be close, but Apple seems more intent on having every pixel in the world. I remember when Apple really catered to musicians (except for their slow adoption of audio driver standards). Now, they cater to people watching cat videos. At the moment, there is no device close to the Surface Pro for this purpose. I don't believe this niche is enough to sustain the Surface Pro by itself, but I'm glad to have them right now. And I hope someone else out there is paying attention, which is why I post a comment just like this every time the Surface comes up on Slashdot.

Not that there's anything wrong with cat videos.

Of course he's looking for bad news. Have you read the comments for any Slashdot article that mentions the Surface or Surface Pro? A brigade of people come out who are basically upset that it even exists. It's like the Surface Pro scared their mothers when they were in the womb.

Not picking on you personally, but there sure are a lot of dumb ass conspiracy theories on a thread about critical thinking.

The purpose of the neurological changes that take place in a teenagers brain seems to be in part to inspire rebellion against their parents to the point where they flee the nest, once the rebellion succeeds grandchildren bring relative harmony for a decade or more.

Nope, good grammar does that, he just failed to state he was paraphrasing.

The actual meaning of the quote was NOT lost. ie: it explicitly states they oppose CT because they believe it will lead children to doubt their parents or as they put it "undermining parental authority", the wording also strongly implies they don't want the "authority" of fixed beliefs "undermined". The subtext of the quote is that parents and fixed beliefs are infallible and should not be questioned.

In simpler words the policy as you have quoted it says - We don't want educated children, we want obedient children.

They are.

In order to apply critical thinking skills, however, you have to establish a corpus of information (knowledge) from which to operate as a base when testing new information for validity.

In other words, you can't start from a phenomenological basis from the start, you have to assume language in order to be able to communicate about concepts, and then adequately judge their validity or invalidity.

What this means is that you have to shovel their heads full of as much rote knowledge as you can possibly shovel in, prior to their critical thinking filter slamming into place and interfering with the process o communicating things like "rules of grammar", "mathematical concepts", "tigonometric identities", and so on. Because once those filters slam into place, they are going to be thinking for themselves, and so busy questioning the validity of what an authority is saying, and their motives for saying it, that it's going to be difficult to jam anything in.

As to the validity of the rote knowledge you've already jammed into their heads prior to that event - effectively, where they stop being sponges, and wake up into themselves as human beings - well, hopefully the event that throws up the gates occurs after you have taught them Aristotelian logic, and Platonic/Homeric introspective self examination ("The unexamined life is not worth living"), so that they can selectively filter for any "bullshit" that was inserted, along with their times tables or the idea that sin(x) + cos(x) = 1.

So while their motivations may be impure, I have to agree with them that, at least through High School, you want to just shovel as fast as you possibly can, and then when they get to their Sophomore year in college, you send them to the philosophy department to teach them symbolic logic, and you send them to the physics department to teach them how to think rationally about problem solving (something physics is good at, because it's as unforgiving about facts as gravity in a "Road Runner" cartoon isn't).

And if they never make it to their Sophomore year in college, because they stop after the mandatory public schooling, and don't pursue further education... well, they will likely be happier as people not having had their delusions challenged, particularly since those delusions were probably shoveled into their heads at a young age - say 5 or so - and all you are going to do by having taught them critical thinking skills early is to make them miserable as adults.

Yes, the very nature of large organisations drains initiative, males in particular evolved to work in small groups of 5-6 and live in tribes of ~150 people, anyone not in their tribe was by definition "sub-human" but not necessarily a mortal enemy. A wise organisation acknowledges this and will give small teams a great deal of autonomy to achieve a particular goal, eg: think how the military would tackle the goal of "keep the park tidy and well maintained", you may have to explain to them that anyone can use the park, but you get the idea.

Disclaimer: I spent seven years in the 90's as technical lead on an automated job dispatch system that handled thousand of workers and tens of thousands of jobs each day, it covered the continent of Australia, at that time it was by far the largest mobile dispatch system in the southern hemisphere in volume of work and geographical coverage. The backend used "linear programming" techniques (WW2 logistics), no human could beat the daily work plan it churned out. A bunch of execs would get up at 5am and paw all over the plan, add some "special constraints" and end up with a less efficient solution. Often the "special constraints" were accepted anyway, since - we can't have (say) the telecoms minister waiting 2 days for a new install in his office, it has to be done first thing today, and it has to be done by employee X who drinks at the same pub, who gives a flying fuck if 25 nobodys drop off the original work plan?

Because we never had people trying to wipe us out before Muslims came along...

I'm 55, the phrase has been around for a long time, Carl Sagan was fond of it (unfortunately my HS never mentioned it) so it wasn't until I dropped out and saw Sagan and Randi talking about it on TV that I became personally aware that it was a skill that can be taught. Perhaps it's been hijacked lately in the US to mean something else but I haven't noticed. To me it has always meant 'skepticism', in particular self-skepticism. Sagan also referred to it as his "bullshit detection kit". As for TFA, memorising facts* is essential but insufficient, ie: you can't even start to think about things that you don't remember, which is what Newton was getting at with his "shoulders of giants" comment.

*Facts as in - "two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their combined mass and the distance between them", that the force is ~9.8m/s on Earth's surface is trivia, handy to know but not essential to the concept that's being memorised since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong. Of course there are exceptions where memorising numbers is a useful "short-cut" for the student, multiplication tables being the most obvious

Well, OK, then.

So, take that 58 million budget and break down what it is used for.
How much for buildings,
How much for buses,
How much ( and to whom, and how much ) for personnel
How much for supplies
Etc

How many children move thru the system in a given year?

How can we do better?
Are we throwing money at it?
Are the results poor, really?
Are others using less to do more? Less to do the same? If so, how do they do that, can we use those techniques?

No, just that chip+pin makes more sense for taking card payments on machines than... well, last time I remember using a card in a machine in the US it was swipe and... Hey, fingers crossed, who needs a PIN?

Plus, they do have an awful lot of those bill readers.