AmiiJewels

There seems to be a lot of scare mongering in that video which doesn't help put the point across.."franken-foods"...really? GM foods are and will continue to be a great leap forward in sustainable, scalable agriculture.

I still have no idea what the "TPP" thing is...when I look at the other sources I just get things like "you will be banned from being able to modify the save file on your game"...huh really? What if I only support indie developers and publishers who don't enforce arbitrary restrictions? Vote with your purse etc.

And then there are a lot of the "it could", "it might", "possibly"...reeks of the same politics where "death panels" and other bullcrap comes from...following the sources and reading the actual proposals it is much less sinister.

http://whytheheckshouldicareaboutthetpp.com/?f=10&q=6 - The words "unauthorized" should be in there...which has a much less powerful point.

Present a reasonable, scientifically backed argument...then maybe I will listen.

I am going to flip this around... we should be teaching children the basics of research, citation, fair use and permission at a young level.

By encouraging children to go off and research and create I hypothesis that they will naturally lean towards simple, creative commons and other "free" or "libre" licenses and start to actively seek these out in favour of more tightly controlled, restrictive, corporate licensing schemes.

Teaching them how to cite, what fair use is and how to ask seek permission from content authors gives them the tools to fight overly restrictive copyright laws - and hopefully, one day, abolish them in favour of sane, time bounded licenses

I applaud the effort but is this really "big data" - the largest data sets they seem to test are ~150GB, that would fit comfortably on my Mac Book Pro a number of times over. Many of these systems being tested are designed to scale efficiently when the data starts peaking > 5TB and therefore I am dubious about the median response time results - things that work well for small datasets (where small is defined as < 1TB) easily fall apart when you scale them up a little bit more.

I do not understand the authors conclusion: 'The more immersed I become in Esmee’s homework, the more reassured I am that the teachers, principals, and school-board members who are coming up with this curriculum are earnest about their work.' when his own Daughter's strategy boils down to :" Memorization, not rationalization" - She isn't learning, she isn't becoming "well rounded", she is memorizing information that will be useless past her next year of schooling.

Some of the things detailed sound horrible, A C because there was no answer column etc. The school sounds broken.