What? Why life of the creator + 20 years? Even if I supported copyright at all, I would think that would be too long.

I believe the only worthwhile and moral safety measure that has been added since 9/11 is that cockpit doors are now reinforced; that's pretty much it. Everything else they've done violates people's fundamental liberties, and since I'm someone who cares far more about freedom than safety, I'd rather go without such security theater (the TSA is garbage and most likely doesn't do anything).

I don't know what you're talking about. You seem to be assuming that I am opposed to all forms of memorizing, but that is not the case. What I'm opposed to is handing out tests that only test for memorization. If you understand the material, I believe there is a very likely chance that you'll have retained facts surrounding it to begin with.

But it's not what education is about.

Will they, now? Is that actually true? Is knowing certain material unrelated to your job without understanding it beneficial? What of the fact that they likely won't be able to do anything innovative with the knowledge, or even know how to use it in complicated situations where not everything is given to them on a piece of paper?

My reasoning?

Is it? They don't seem to be doing a very good job of measuring understanding of the material.

Okay.

If you're just memorizing patterns and "understanding," then chances are, you don't understand anything. These tests do not test for an understanding of the material, and I view that as a problem. I never said that no one should ever memorize anything, just that I believe people should... actually understand the material.

I have no idea what you're talking about, and I have no idea how it relates to my comments.

I believe getting the right answer is important, but getting the right answer is not all that is important. What's puzzling to me is that I actually said something to that effect in the first place, and yet your reply makes it seem as if I didn't.

I firmly believe that having an actual understanding of a subject allows you to be more innovative and precise than a rote memorization drone.

Ignorant? Many of them seem more competent than a grand majority of the products of the public education system. Socially retarded? Locking people up in an obviously artificial environment with others their own age isn't the only way to get kids to socialize, you know. This is a non-problem.

Subjective.

I'd say that's only true if you go to a good college. Unfortunately, there are colleges that are basically glorified high schools...

Not everything is about jobs or getting the right answer.

A grand majority of students produced by the education system will emerge from it and will not have any sort of understanding of any of the material, which is, I think, a problem. As you say, they might be able to get the right answers (but only for a short time, because it's likely that they'll forget all the patterns and facts they memorized), but doing anything innovative will be beyond most of them because they have no grasp on the logic behind any of it.

The ability to memorize facts and recognize patterns is useful (although, in many cases, memorizing facts seems to be useless), but I don't think those skills are even nearly as important as understanding the material. Besides, I've found that if you have a good understanding of the logic behind what you're working with, you'll be able to retain facts about it in memory more easily simply because it becomes more memorable.

Because it doesn't work, for exactly the reasons mentioned. If your goal is to create an educated populace, relying so heavily on such tests probably isn't a very good idea.

All that does is test for memorization and the ability to correctly memorize patterns, not understanding; that's largely why people criticize these tests. Not everyone thinks that getting the right answer is all that is important.

Just because Bush isn't in power anymore doesn't mean we should all forget about what he's done. Further, the guy never claimed that Obama had no hand in any of this.

What happens in that country is their problem, as far as I'm concerned. I don't believe we should try to police the world.

I haven't found it to be true that ignoring bad evidence holds me back.

If there is no actual proof, or anything even resembling it, then that just means copyright and patent law is unproven; it's pretty easy for me to live with that.