Cobb County Appeals Laptop Ruling

In a previous post I commented on the Cobb County School Board plan to provide laptops to every high school student and middle school student. The $100+ million laptop program was to be paid for by a Special Purpose Location Option Sales Tax that I had voted for. My concerns were:

1. This was not part of the SPLOST explanation voters were given
2. The choice of Apple did not provide mainstream technology and applications to students
3. The predicted costs kept escalating

A judge eventually agreed with my #1 and told the county to cancel the program because voters were not completely informed on this as part of the SPLOST vote. The school system hired a private investigation firm to review the entire situation and process. While this report did not exactly agree with my #2 the findings were extremely significant and vindicated my #2.
"An investigation into the program said that the school system "deceived the public" in choosing [...] Apple as the company to supply it with laptop computers."

Well, it seems the Cobb County school system has money to burn because they have decided to appeal the judges ruling. This is despite significant public outcry against the program, the resignation of the school superintendent, and a damning review by the investigation firm the school system hired to review the laptop program. The school board canceled the program and yet the school board is still choosing to spend financial resources on an appeal.

The board should give it up and let go. There are many other educational needs that should be concentrated on and the money going to lawyers on this should be spent helping students.

Given the chance I will definitely vote against all incumbents on the school board and I will vote against the next SPLOST. We the citizens of Cobb County need to send a very strong message to our chosen representatives that deceiving us is unacceptable. Politicians thrive on power and money is power. By voting down the next SPLOST we send a very strong and painful message to politicians. In return they will try to scare us with end of the world scenarios if the SPLOST is not approved, hogwash I say to that.

Are terminators the future or are they here today?

Today there are military robots, drones, pilotless aircraft, robot sentries, and even bomb robots in use by the military and civilian police forces. These machines are clearly the first step on the path to what is depicted in the Terminator movies. The Talon military robot has been in use since 2000, and we have all seen Honda's Osimo human shaped walking robot.

http://www.gizmohighway.com/robotics/talon_robot.htm
http://www.gizmohighway.com/robotics/asimo.htm

Now a Japanese scientist has created an extremely early version of a human looking android. Ironic that he chose to make the first one female since females are the more vicious gender of the human species. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4714135.stm

At least in the terminator movies the female came later and not at first :)

And of course the illustrious DARPA has been working seriously, along with many educational institutions, on creating true artificial intelligence.

"DARPA spends $29 million per year on its Perceptive Assistant That Learns program, which develops robots programmed to think. The agency and its contractors will first develop an architecture that considers reasoning, learning, perception, language and action for robots, he said." http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0419/feat-brachman-04-19-04.asp

Many of the most wonderful and the most destructive human capabilities have come about in very similar ways. Little pieces worked on by separate endeavors that when brought together become dangerous to man kind. I doubt Einstein thought much about his calculations and I doubt the people that contributed to the creation of "conventional explosives" saw the potential for them to light off an atomic bomb. But bring together the knowledge of many areas and we create the scariest explosive device known to man.

What will happen when we bring together all of the work to create terminators or have we already and we just don't know it yet?

I am back!

Well, I am finally done with my bachelors degree and now I have the time to get back to blogging, among other things. I will be trying to blog a few times a week and I will try to create some more interesting blogs this time around.

Thanks

I miss blogging......

I have really missed blogging about current events and some of the things I am doing in my life. I have been doubling up courses at school to finish my BA ahead of time by about 4 months. I am in the last two weeks of the last class. If I can hold my grade up in this class I will graduate Summa Cum Laude.

I promise lots more blogging after this class ends. After all I have to start talking about camping, and house selling strategies as well as Christmas. YES it is never too early to talk about Christmas.