Colorado State says IE more secure than Firefox and other Mozilla browsers on its website. Their site is built on .NET and trying to submit feedback in the feedback section throws up a bunch of .NET debugging code. Anyway, this article made my day! Read more.
Today’s Award goes to these geniuses.
In latest news, a teacher in Texas saw a student showing off his Linux LiveCD in action. She was so angry that she not only confiscated his CD but wrote an angry letter to the founder of HeliOS, Ken Starks.
Her letter reads as follows:
Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.
Ms. Teacher, first of all, conference is spelt as “conference” and not “confrence”.
Next, how do you assume that no software is free? Are you so uninformed or did just get out of your cave this morning? If you had a problem with Linux during college (which college? I’m dying to know!!) you can’t dump the results of your unsucessful attempts on kids who are eager to learn a new operating system that is far superior to Windows. Kids who want to learn how to use Linux should be allowed to do so and not restricted to the OS shoved down on their throats as the “standard OS”. You are holding the kids back, not poor Ken Starks’ flavour of Linux.
The teacher goes on to say this:
This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…”
Karen xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx Middle School
AISD
Very interesting! I’m sure Microsoft is keeping NEA happy. I’ve heard of other teachers who have tried to get Linux installed in their school computers so the kids can learn something other than Windows, and all these teachers have had stiff opposition. Some were told to keep it down or they’d lose their jobs.
Teachers like Karen should be made to attend a lesson in OS tolerance. If they think Microsoft is king because that’s what they were told or because they couldn’t handle Linux, its their problem. I’ve seen 11-year old kids use Linux with ease. Maybe the teacher wasn’t smart enough, maybe she didn’t have the patience, maybe she just couldn’t handle something as hot as Linux. But she’s very wrong to impose her monopolistic beliefs on her students. Its beyond her scope if she doesn’t understand the benefits of something she hasn’t used properly.
Labelling Linux with the wrong tags and forcing kids to grow up on some proprietary software with no scope of imagination or creative thinking is yet another reason for the dumbing down of the school system in America.
On March 29, many people turned off the lights for an hour from 8pm to 9pm local time to signify that they were “saving” energy (whatever they mean by energy). Very nice, turn off your electrical gadgets for one hour, and then after 9pm, turn on the lights, air conditioners, office lights (maybe all night), flashing decorative lights (oh, these were probably never turned off!), various home gadgets, etc. And then get into the car and drive one block for a crate of coke, circle around the area for 10 whole minutes looking for a parking spot, <<INSERT THE REST HERE>>.
And then, there was Google which jumped on the bandwagon by changing its background to black instead of the usual white.
The funny thing is that black background web pages may use up MORE energy than white background web pages and Google had itself acknowledged the study.
Anyway, Michelle Malkin has more about this and the 1 million phone calls that “eco-friendly” activists intend to make to lawmakers on Earth Day – wonderful way of saving energy indeed!
The latest retard award goes to this award winning Mathematics professor who says that fractions should NOT be taught in schools. He is releasing a book about it. He favours decimals over fractions, wants to eliminate manual long division, calculation of square roots and multiplication of long numbers (yes, without using calculators).
According to this excerpt:
Wonderful! Thats exactly what today’s American kids need, right? Apart from whatever they are already getting on a golden platter at the moment. Kids in America need a calculator for everything. Even adults whip out a calculator all the time, for simple calculations. The kind lady at Kay’s had to pull out a calculator to find what 13 + 13 equalled.
Fractions are the most accurate representation of floating point numbers. I’m glad the other Math professors have actually objected to his statements.
Questioning the wisdom of teaching fractions to young students doesn’t compute with people such as George Andrews, a professor of mathematics at Pennsylvania State University and president-elect of the American Mathematical Society. “All of this is absurd,” Andrews said. “No wonder mathematical achievements in the country are so abysmal.
“Arithmetic is the basic skill. If children do not know arithmetic, they can’t go on to algebra, which leads to calculus. From there you go on to other things,” Andrews said. “It’s fine to talk about it, but this is not a good pedagogy.”
Others see value in both fractions and decimals. To Janine Remillard, associate professor of education at Penn, the decimal system is “incredibly powerful.” And fractions can be a powerful steppingstone to understanding decimals, she says.
“Fractions, if taught well — and that’s a huge caveat — can actually help kids understand the value of the size of the pieces,” Remillard says.
When his book is released later this year, the schools that would probably follow his ideas would be the academically low performing ones! It would be a big blow to the already pathetic state of Mathematics in the US if his book is used on a large scale country-wide.
I hope Dr. Dennis DeTurck is happy with his Retard Award. The prize carries a one-way ticket and permanent citizenship to Retard-Land where he can spend the rest of his life with people with equal IQ levels.
This joke will help you understand how Mathematics has changed over the years!
the science and tech blog 