While I understand that the ‘America’ in ‘Lake America’ means the USA, I can’t help but think of ‘America’ as the America continent. In this sense the whole farce feels less political.
By the way, Carney may consider calling the USA ‘Nocanoram’ (Non-Canadian North America). This at least is more precise than hijacked term ‘America’.
The article doesn’t say why, but at launch the MacBook Neo was the most inexpensive Mac Apple ever made, and it’s a full proper Mac. Despite being inexpensive, it also isn’t junk.
Chromebooks can be had for cheaper, but if a school district was on the fence before about moving to Macs, then Apple made the decision much easier for them.
It is a good idea to give children well designed and nice things, if this can be afforded. An item that is well designed and nice looking tends to receive better care. To a degree this is what you'd want to teach - to really care.
There isn't a guarantee, if you'd give a child a nice looking thing, that a child would care. But given a piece of junk, they'd surely would not, that is guaranteed.
> Apple's latest earnings call revealed a wave of K-12 districts abandoning Chromebooks and Windows machines in favor of the company's new MacBook Neo
It's not just Chromebooks but Windows machines. Schools really should be providing OS-agnostic computer education, and for that they really should support any machine, especially Windows machines which more easily support changing their OS.
This just changes from having them teach "click this Windows-specific icon to do this" to "click this Mac-specific icon to do this".
Schools are still being used as a tool of OS companies to lock-in users for life.
You're not wrong, but I've sat in an elementary school classroom while a teacher was doing the computer class.
It was already difficult with a class attempting to follow instructions in a single OS; if a teacher had to be giving three sets (at least three!) of instructions to a bunch of kids, they realistically wouldn't get anything done in the 50 minutes they have each week.
I could see a proposal to using one trimester for Windows, one trimester for Mac and one for Linux - because it genuinely is kind of hard to switch from one to the other, and it would be useful if kids had a basic familiarity with all three. (Though, how do you choose which distro to use for Linux? Or do you just make them walk uphill each way on the command line?)
You work almost exclusively with the common ground, the common conventions. Teach them file managers, "programs" in a very general sense, windows (being able to resize and position them, the window buttons (to close, maximize, etc.), window menus, etc.), the concept of saving a file from a program, file extensions. You take little pauses to explain how things may differ slightly between OSes.
You take the same approach with programs (web browsers as opposed to simply Chrome, spreadsheets as opposed to simply Excel, etc.).
Once they have the common ground, you can expand on differences, but always OS- and program-neutral, because schools shouldn't be a marketing tool.
The idea is that students should be able to use any computer in a very basic extent. It doesn't take much.
> (Though, how do you choose which distro to use for Linux? Or do you just make them walk uphill each way on the command line?)
You pick the one that has the most common ground with the other OSes.
Again, you're not wrong, but I think you're underestimating just how much hand-holding and very specific instructions a lot of kids need in these classes.
You have to teach them both the general concepts ("data lives in things called files, each file lives in a folder, folders are arranged in a hierarchical tree-like structure") - but you also have to teach them to actually use these things, and you have to wait for each student to have done The Task that is being asked of them. Because if you just talk in vague abstractions, it's not going to sink in as much as Doing The Task will.
If you have any sort of opportunity to observe a elementary or middle school computer class, I strongly urge you to. It's very enlightening.
(Actually, observing any kind of class is very interesting. I used to do it at least once a year for work. I know that every profession is probably super interesting to an outside observer, but - especially as a parent - that was wildly interesting and worthwhile.)
And they all have Firefox and LibreOffice Calc installed, so you can teach them how to use a web browser and a spreadsheet in an OS-agnostic (and DE/distro/WM-agnostic) way.
I don't think the schools are worried so much about not knowing how to teach students to use a word processor, but rather their IT staff not being able to maintain the equipment and set things up properly.
Kids will learn how to use basically any software easily, they are sponges. The poor admin that has to deal with all the lost machine and device enrollment, and password resets and OS upgrades borking stuff, they are the ones who schools are optimizing for.
I wouldn’t get too excited on this topic. The differences between a Mac or Windows PC round to nearly zero in basic GUI operations, and the primary software kids will be using regardless of hardware is likely either G Suite or Microsoft Office depending on what the school district prefers, and most likely accessed through Google Chrome either way.
If they want to game, they’ll eventually get a Windows PC. Even if the school district doesn’t deploy Macs, they’ll likely end up with a Mac by the time of college anyway. And tomorrow won’t be the Year of Desktop Linux either, unless Microsoft really really botches Windows.
> The differences between a Mac or Windows PC round to nearly zero in basic GUI operations
Which should make things easier to educate OS-neutrally.
> and the primary software kids will be using regardless of hardware is likely either G Suite or Microsoft Office depending on what the school district prefers.
> > The differences between a Mac or Windows PC round to nearly zero in basic GUI operations
> Which should make things easier to educate OS-neutrally.
It also makes it unnecessary to teach minute differences. If a student needs to make a switch later for educational, vocational or interest-based reasons, they can figure out the minute differences or seek help.
>> and the primary software kids will be using regardless of hardware is likely either G Suite or Microsoft Office depending on what the school district prefers.
> That's what I object to.
I figured you would, but again: anybody will learn any system they need to because of either work, education or personal reasons. People don’t switch off Excel & don’t want to switch off of Excel because they don’t have to. If you’re only ever going to learn exactly one spreadsheet app in your life, Excel is the one you probably want to learn, unless you don’t strictly need Excel for your vocation, then you can make the choice yourself. Options exist, but it’s fine to treat Excel like the default, because it is.
Both Windows and ChromeOS have Debian subsystems that are easy to enable and use. I prefer the macOS way for my job, but for students it doesn't really matter.
One aspect that is most definitely easier with Chromebooks is that it only takes a powerwash (1-2 minutes) to make the device ready for someone else. With Windows devices it takes our school district hours to get a device re-imaged and fully updated to be ready to issue to the next person. Not sure what the process would be with Macs but I strongly suspect it's much more akin to Windows than Chromebooks in this regard.
Google can't decide what the hell they wanted a Chromebook to do and IT departments everywhere are fed up with it.
Plus I don't think schools are ready to have to deal with managing glorified Android laptops now that Google signaled their wholesale abandonment of the Chromebook platform.
You can assign a mobile device policy on the Mac, and the OS is image based (like a Chromebook). They are much more flexible than Chromebooks, you're not running Adobe Premier or Logic on ChromeOS.
The price is also close enough that its probably worth the migration.
I think Google completely failed to capitalize on its lead, and is probably making things worse by replacing the platform with Android and rebranding things.
At a similar time as the MacBook Neo launch, Apple unified their Device Management programmes as one 'Apple Business'. So perhaps things have improved on that front.
Yes. The next step is to send a very human-like robot to impersonate you on a date, in wedding ceremony, during intimate times in the bedroom, etc., but we are not sure if your date will do the same.
In terms of temperature rather than length of daylight, the peak of summer depends on geography (and latitude in particular). In where I live (Hong Kong), July and August are the hottest months and so it makes sense to me that Summer begins in June.
Men are biologically disposable. If a nation lost 90% or better of its adult male population, it could still bounce back within a generation or two.
Women have no incentive to change that, and the small fraction of men powerful enough to change it can already exempt themselves from the meat grinder. The remaining men's opinions don't matter.
So this definitely works for hunter gatherers and that’s definitely how humans are architected, I agree.
However, if I think through what this process would look like under modern living arrangements, what would happen? Intensified serial polygamy with a massive increase in single motherhood? Full on polygamy?
Our social structures aren’t really set up to handle that. It seems like it would be so bad for society that I wouldn’t really say men are “disposable” under the current arrangement. More like they are the roof and women are the foundation, maybe.
It’s better to lose your roof than your foundation, sure, but losing your roof is still really bad. It does not really compare to, say, throwing out a paper coffee cup.
> If a nation lost 90% or better of its adult male population, it could still bounce back within a generation or two.
Yes in theory, no in practice for Europe.
Europe population and society collapsed 2 generations after WWII. We are literally discussing the consequences of the collapse here and now.
People also forget European societies were already starting to collapse after WWI as the consequence of a large proportion of the men population being killed or wounded.
If a nation lost 90% of their men, they would be completely doomed. As men are the ones that actually build and maintain basically all the infrastructure and have all the jobs that are actually indispensable.
A nation wouldn't lose anything for not having personal to do all those comfy PR, HR, "therapist", etc, etc, jobs created for modern "progressive" societies to pretend women are just as indispensable in the work place as men.
But it would be completely wrecked if there weren't enough men to build and maintain houses, habitation, do the all the heavy jobs, take care of waste, infrastructure maintenance, work on the energy industries, etc, etc, etc.
"Men are biologically disposable. If a nation lost 90% or better of its adult male population, it could still bounce back within a generation or two.", and who told you this? You expect the 10% remaining population who also do the dirty politics and are powerful by dirty means, will bounce back the country? Men's value comes from their ability for leadership, adventurous, innovative, fearless and rebel mindset. Does women have enough testosterone for these?
Women's lives are valuable, men's are not. This has been the case across basically all societies in human history. Losing a ton of men really doesn't matter too much - especially young, family-less men.
Losing a lot of women, though, is really really bad.
Drafts seem like an outdated pre-globalist concept. Die for the borders nobody respects anyway. You need to be nationalistic when it’s useful to your leaders that hate you. Of course just the natives need to die, all the immigrants won’t be doing that.
Number of characters for the title is limited. And while I wouldn't necessarily call it draconian because after all somebody has to defend my country; it in deed comes as a shock. And it is also shocking that I just randomly stumbled over this news article when this law is in effect already for 3 months. How is it possible that our news talk about all sorts of nonsense but not about something as fundamentally relevant as this ... this is the real shock.
> And while I wouldn't necessarily call it draconian because after all somebody has to defend my country
The ends don't justify the means. Conscription has no place in the free world. It's slavery, plain and simple. Going into the military should be an appealing career choice. Our soldiers are supposed to be highly skilled professionals, not cannon fodder in large quantities.
So, if some other country with different value system attacks your homeland with intention to effectively colonize it then you'd be okay with just letting it happen?
I believe it is up to the free individual to make that decision. I'm not saving the slave ship when I'm treated like one.
ps: There are 8 billion people on this planet, and I've never had any serious issues with any of them, much less a reason to start a war. Governments are always the cause of everyone's misery. Beware of yours!
The regime spent the past 50 years teaching everyone that their nation is just a source of shame and at best just a meaningless social construct, and that their culture and people's history is trash, that really nothing about it is worth saving.
And now the regime wants them to voluntarily sacrifice their lives for it.
Any country that contains millionaires while using military slaves ("conscripts") is evil. If there is clear existential risk then the state should implement wealth taxes to pay volunteer troops instead of enslaving people. And if literally everybody outside the military has been taxed down to the poverty line, and there are still not enough volunteers, it's time to surrender.
I am also surprised that I haven't read about this in German news before. I am following the news. If Trump would have signed an executive order with a similar content affecting US citizen, German media would probably report about this multiple days long with many articles.
I was looking in Google news for other reports about this, but only found an article from Berliner Zeitung published 5 hours after this article from Frankfurter Rundschau.
I am worried about what other information which could be important to me, the news did not report on.
I agree in general. One reason we haven't heard anything about it might be that the administration already admitted that this legislation needs correction or at least clarification, as mentioned in the article.
No, that is not mentioned in the article. The correction and clarification is regarding how exactly this is being implemented. The law is there ... don't think this is a mistake. And there should be serious discussions in a society before something like that is made a law.
I have longed for this feature. For me, it is useful in many scenarios, such as:
* reading two distantly separated sections of a long article on two split tabs;
* reading a research paper on one tab and typing a question to StackExchange on the other;
* reading a scanned book written in French on one tab and using a dictionary on the other.
The article is well written but its title is a click bait. Although the film portrays mathematicians in a negative way and the allegedly hard problem on the blackboard is actually an easy homework exercise that every decent first-year student is able to solve, I don’t think the film has ever gathered any hatred among mathematicians.
Correct, most mathematicians, at least the ones I know, do not actually spend time thinking about Good Will Hunting, but it's the kind of stuff that science writers eat up.
If you want to know a movie that I actually heard mathematicians discussing, it would be "A Beautiful Mind", and then only because some people were complaining about how the minor characters misrepresented the mathematicians and especially how the Princeton Math department was unfairly caricatured in order to create dramatic tension (you need an antagonist, after all).
In reality Nash was treated with incredible generosity and kindness, and was given extreme affordances. For example, he visited Nirenberg at Courant and gave him a stack of hundreds of pages of dense, hand written notes that were the proof of the embedding theorem, and Nirenberg took enormous time to go through it and try to understand what Nash did, and then championed the proof. With no renumeration or credit, just as a professional courtesy and desire to see if the proof is correct. Nash was not easy to work with, but because so many people were willing to devote time to reviewing and correcting the proof -- which took 5 years -- it was eventually published. Moser, Gromov, Chern, and Kuiper all played a massive role, donating huge amounts of their personal time in order to help Nash.
But, as is usually the case with real life, it doesn't make for a good 2 hour dramatic story. It's a shame, because the real story is a great story.
I saw it as a sort of science-fiction - imagine living in a world where the smartest intellectuals all struggled to solve basic exercises about graph theory. Really imagine living in such a world - would you not feel frustrated when you tried to explain this basic concept to these supposed experts and they just didn't get it? The main character must have felt like he was going crazy!
> The muster roll for the garrison of Calais in 1357 shows not only the names of men-at-arms and archers but also the support roles needed: mason, locksmith, fletcher (a maker of arrows), bowyer (a maker of bows), plumber, blacksmith, wheelwright, cooper (maker of barrels), ditch digger, boatman, carter and carter’s boy. One record belongs to a tiler – Walter Tyler. Was this the future rebel leader of 1381, Wat Tyler?
I didn’t know that the surnames Cooper, Carter and Tyler were originated from different kinds of artisans. I didn’t know that there are names for makers of arrows, bows and wheels either. What is carter’s boy? A bellboy for a cart?
By the way, Carney may consider calling the USA ‘Nocanoram’ (Non-Canadian North America). This at least is more precise than hijacked term ‘America’.