jwvgoethe

Repeatedly I see articles of this theme and the comments insisting that "education is broken." Well I would like to advance the argument that education in the United States at the present is better than any place else in the world and better than it has ever been. But with one caveat, and that is that children, like people, differ in their abilities and not everyone will or can become a great mathematician or engineer or writer. However, for the ones who are have talent, our educational system, at the secondary and post-secondary level is unique in its ability to nurture budding genius.

American education still has a emphasis on liberal education which practically only exists in the anglo world and most strongly in the US. For all the antagonism towards the general curriculum requirements here on HN, which IMHO is a strain of philistinism, our mental life, and the strength of our democracy depends on citizens well aware of the world around them and capable of critical argument. While some are innately born with this ability, a liberal education is the way to ensure it in those who are not.

Beyond this, for our most promising scientific minds are very well served by our educational system. Generally attending a strong public or good private secondary school, they will be recognized early in their ability and encouraged to supplement their mathematical and scientific coursework at a local institution of higher learning. During summers, they will work in the lab of a prominent university professor and get early exposure to research. This will continue in university as they become further familiar with the state of the art as an undergraduate and are better prepared for graduate school than someone without these benefits so early, say in India or China where the state of research is not so strong.

Do some talented individuals fall by the wayside? Yes, but not as many as imagined. The only real criticism of american education is that it leaves those who may not want or be capable of a high status creative profession underserved. But this is a uniquely american calculation in the interests of equity and idealism. We accept some measure of inefficiency here in our educational system to maintain coherence with our national mythos that all men are created equal, an ambiguous but politically useful statement. Otherwise we could follow a german model and single out the talented children from the rest around the age of 10 and send them to different schools. But I can't really imagine this working in the United States.

Mr. President, we must not allow a mine-shaft gap!!

If google can offer for sale a significant fraction of the books they currently serve, I will be happy. However, The current state of the ebook market is unexciting. There are too many proprietary formats, often tied to some specific piece of software. Furthermore, ebooks often do not carry a significant enough discount over the print edition to make up for the restrictions in my opinion. I've come to this conclusion myself after I purchased an ebook, found a passage revelatory and wanted to show it to a friend, but realized that I did not have printing rights. So I was forced to go out and buy a hard copy.

I think ebooks will go the same way as digital music. Once the market becomes mature enough, consumers will demand the wares without draconion DRM restrictions which currently make the e reading experience unpleasant.

What I took from it as the conclusion was that long stretches of time without distraction are perhaps a necessary condition for deep intellectual exploration. From my experiences i've formed the same conclusions and this is the reason I live alone, don't own a TV, and am currently trying to limit my use of the internet as much as possible (ironic I know considering i'm wasting my time here, but i'm getting better I swear!).

I'm starting to believe that any important intellectual truths have to be discovered for oneself, and that the only way to do this is to be alone with only your thoughts.

I passionately disagree that the intellectual must remain dispassionate. But what you are saying is in fact considered a rarely challenged truism in humanities departments. It is considered very distasteful for an academic to speak publicly about current events, politics, or really anything controversial. But I think, and I know there is a very strong anti-academic current here on HN, that the intellectual plays a similar role to the free press in a democratic society. He is morally obliged to speak out when he sees the society being duped, coerced by the powerful, or being robbed of its freedoms. The academic intellectuals repeatedly fail us in this in the United States, and I admire Chomsky because he is one of the very few with the integrity to perform his moral duty.

Well, my hat is off to the talented individual who, despite having lucrative opportunities elsewhere, recognizes the importance of what free software means to the world.

First of all, what is with the recent deluge of poorly written trite?

secondly, this guy is failing to see that being a "leader" in the field is different from being at the top. Being at the top connotates that one is the best; their abilities are superior to others. A leader can simply be him who recognizes a vacuum in power and seizes it. Being a leader in no way implies that one is at the top of their field.

The best programmers/hackers I've met were quite content to hone their skills without the public attention that only the "leadership types" seem to require.

respectfully, I posit that the right to information outweighs the potential negatives for which it may be used. If we were to allow what you suggest(cultural sensitivities) to be a legitimate basis for the suppression of knowledge, then clearly we should begin stoking the fires for our book burnings.

simply displaying a historical document is not prejudice; what this is instead is just another indication that the japanese are incapable of coming to terms with their past and that their supposedly modern society continues to harbor a primitive mentality that would be considered distasteful and shocking in a westerner.

"as a developer" this seems to be the problem with microsofts new user interfaces. The tech elite may like them, but they are impossible for the ordinary user. I posit that the vast majority of non technical end users utterly hate hate hate the ribbon. I imagine the same thing will happen with windows 7. In fact we've already been seeing it; the tech elite trying out the beta are liking it, which means that it will be unusable from the end user's perspective.

"More research and testing yielded a solution - the ribbon, which displayed different commands depending on what the PC user was doing. Then Larson-Green pushed Microsoft to get even more radical: to release Office 2007 without the hedge of a "classic mode" that would emulate the old look and feel for people who didn't like the changes."

The ribbon almost gives me a stroke every time I have to use office. I've always said that whoever developed it should be drug out into the street and shot. well apparently now we know who it was. The odd thing is that microsoft considered the ribbon a success?! even more stunningly they put ribbon lady in charge of their next OS. I swear it seems that microsofts enemies are making their top level corporate decisions.

This spells doom for windows 7.