It's hard to believe this still happens. Teachers are outraged when students look-up info rather than memorize it. For the last 25 years I've been looking up information on the computer, whether compuserve, qlink, aol, irc, ftp, or www. The last 10 years has been trivial to find anything. When teachers prioritize memorization of facts for 8 hours a day when those details could be quickly found in 30 seconds on the student's cell phone, then the student is rightfully insulted. They don't value it, because it truly isn't that valuable to memorize a large quantity of trivial facts. I'm not saying that there's no place for memorization and learning by rote, but that should be a smaller piece of the puzzle, not the biggest. Multiple choice tests are easy to cheat because they are simple. That's not good teaching or good assessing.

Exactly so. RIAA doesn't act to stop piracy. It acts to preserve their distribution model. Regardless of ethics, it campaigns politically and files suit, in order to destroy other distribution models.

I feel ya. I was marked down on my evaluation this year because I was too important. They marked me down on dependability because whenever I had a sick day, the company had no back up plan in place, and they have me in charge of about 5 or 6 critical jobs each day. Honestly, there's only time for about 3 of them, so they are all half-assed. But compared to everyone else they think I'm the messiah when I can switch the blown circuit breaker. I'm clever, but it's honestly about 50% just having experience at the job.

I keep telling myself I'm going to walk out one day and let them hire me back for double. Waiting to have anything else lined up. It's that other side, we're lucky to have jobs, but they are damn lucky to have someone who knows what they are doing. Based on what my colleagues are doing at the other job sites I figure I'm saving them about $10,000/year on the conservative side.

Absolutely. Look at the people who create OSS. Look at the people creating fanfiction for free. Given a society that allows for plenty of food and entertainment for cheap or free, people have free time on their hands. They create content for nothing other than the recognition. Most people love to have their work copied, as long as credit is given.

Now, I won't say that people love to have their work monetized and used for profit without getting something back. But that is a very different scenario than coming up with the perfect desktop theme and posting it to some website where everyone can see that you're #1 with 100,000 downloads. When we have replicators that allow us to copy, with no cost to the designer, we'll be doing to cars what we do to videos. Creating, sharing, downloading, modifying. And that will be a glorious day.

Using Slashdot over the years, this has been a recurring theme whenever technology and healthcare come up. Doctors don't know the side effects, prescribe whatever the free sample is that week, and cause medical problems by mis-prescribing medicine with serious side-effects or bad interactions with other meds.

Numerous anecdotal stories tell of lives saved by patients doing their own research. I doubt doctors like it, but we really need to be doing our own research and not completely trusting our doctors. Example after example on here indicate a smart guy with no medical training can pick out better meds than their doctor.

I'm not the only one who thought, "Awesome! How do I get that for my house?"

Worse than that, what if Facebook had gone to court and said, Your honor, Joe Blow is providing customer information to third parties. And then Joe Blow's laywer asks Facebook witness "What info does Facebook sell to 3rd parties and how many?" in order to prove that Facebook didn't have privacy to protect?

1. Facebook can claim they were protecting customer privacy and then get called on how their users do not actually have privacy.
2. Facebook claims that the problem is that they were being deprived of revenue because someone misused their data and gets called out on how they are profiting from selling user data.

Either way, Facebook would get national news about selling user information and lack of real privacy for user information. There's no way that turns out well for Facebook when there is a new alternative site for social networking every 6 months.

I'm not sure your post was funny. It seems very apropos. Outlook is a life saver for me. I have 4 bosses at my local site and at least 3 sort-of bosses at the central location that have new jobs for me almost every day, many of them conflicting. I then have about 40 people I work with, of which, about 25% bring me a job each day. Without Outlook I would really be lost. No, paper was not enough because I had too many jobs and appointments coming to me out of order... I tried it. With Outlook I have multiple calendars for different types of scheduling information I'll need to look at. And I can put all those calendars together when needed. I get pop-up reminders at a time of my choosing and I can see when I have appointments overlapping. I have my notes associated with my appointments. And I can invite co-workers to the appointments they make with me (they give me paper notes) so that they don't forget either. It's close to perfect.

I do need to use a special database I made to track smaller jobs that aren't really applicable to a calendar. Tasks just wasn't full featured enough for me. It was great but I needed something closer to a help desk ticket system.

Unfortunately, several times a year my bosses ask me for reports, the same one reports for each boss. If I avoid paper by emailing the reports they all just print them out on desktop printers instead of on the more economical copiers. So now I just print them out all hole punched and throw them in a binder. It's wasting paper but that's not my call. You can't beat the user. Not when he's your boss anyway.

Agreed. My workplace is unpleasant. In order to increase employee retention they focus on "building relationships" rather than improve the basic working conditions. They believe that having a friend at work will keep you there. Of course this is a huge problem for them as well, because while you might stay for your friend, your just as likely to quit when they leave because they are the only thing keeping you there.

Mixing work and personal lives is a disaster. All workplaces want this when they want you to work from home every night and weekend or stay until 8:00 at night. All workplaces blame employees when this results in you bringing your personal life to work. No work place will tolerate this being a two-way street and there is simply no benefit to the employee if only the employer gets the advantage.

That's kind of like sitting in your car at the bottom of a ravine and saying we are close to driving off the edge of the road. The Simpson's are 23 years old. If they are children, it's only because a writer puts it on a script. They might as well be arresting husbands whose wives dress up in a school girl outfit for them. He's being arrested for fiction. That is a thought crime.

All the comments are mentioning the ineptitude, outright stupidity, of school officials. And of course they are absolutely right. But I'm surprised no one is writing about the poor article here.

Authorities: Who are these authorities? I don't know and the reporter should be informing us. For nothing else, at least to have someone to ridicule publicly.

School policy: If the school official gives a quote about school policy AND the author includes it, that reporter should be questioning those details before using the quote or else pointing out how the school official couldn't provide any documentation for his made-up allegations.

I think what the parent is pointing out, and absolutely true, is not that they don't realize they could use Google but that they still can't figure it out. After years of university they still lack the skills to research a problem to find the answer. This is nothing less than pathetic when technology that was common place 10 years ago allows you to type keywords, get a list of thousands of relevant pages, with short summaries of the articles/pages, and is as easy as clicking a button to go to each and read the instructions.

I'm in America and I'm horrified to read that the problem isn't limited to the US. I have had the chance to work with educators and I am still in shock every time someone with 17-18 years of schooling cannot do simple problem solving steps and is generally unwilling to even attempt to do so.

Are geeks good at problem solving because their desire to play with the computer required them to learn? Or are they drawn to computers because of some innate skill at problem solving? I refuse to believe that problem solving is some special mutant power that only 10% of the population has. I despise the fact that students are asked to read a chapter out of a book and answer a few look-up questions for 12 years while no one is teaching them how to compare and contrast or do research on their own.

This is stupid. It increases the danger to passengers. Think of it this way. If you are put in this section you are declaring to everyone that you have a special weakness or vulnerability to exploit. Someone could easily carry out a small scale attack on the plane by falsely reporting an allergy and then rub peanut dust on all of the armrests.

I'm going to differ here. I get the tie in between Outlook and almost everything else, tie-ins between Word and whatever, Excel and Access, everything else and Sharepoint. But what is the tie in needed for PowerPoint. I use Powerpoint and I really don't find a need for integration anywhere. If someone came a long and offered a product that made it much easier to put together a presentation I'd pick it up in a second. And I don't even spend most of my time on it. Think of the mid-level managers spending hours each week.

I know, maybe you can't get it approved for work. What if the new program had a built in feature to save as video?

I'm just saying, there's less reason to hold onto Powerpoint as to hold onto the other MS Office products.

I think that breaking down the work/personal barrier is a mistake. Companies who destroy that barrier with unmanageable hours leaving employees to work at home or pull a 13 hour day reap what they sow as those employees eventually take their personal time back during the work day.

This leads to scandals over office romps and surfing for porn like in the recent NASA story as well as hold ups everywhere in the production chain as Person B waits for Person A who is taking a nap. When he finally tries passing his work up to Person C he finds C is out getting his shopping done.

This can pay off on jobs where production is needed in spurts. But normally it is just a counter-productive waste of time.