The trouble is, Pat Leahy is a terrific Senator, and it is very likely that his opponent will take the same position on this issue. A better approach would be to try to get Leahy to change his position.
Precisely why would a doctor prescribe an anti-bacterial for a viral infection? To cover is ass in case he was wrong about the cause?
This happens more often than you might think. I took my wife to the emergency room because she was 7 months pregnant and had terrible chest pains that were keeping her from sleeping. After 8 hours involving some blood tests and a chest scan, the ER doctor said it was because of bronchitis and sent my wife home with a prescription for an antibiotic.
It turns out she had developed preeclampsia, which is a leading killer of pregnant women. A simple test for protein in the urine would have confirmed that. Instead, we went back to the hospital two days later, but this time we went directly to labor and delivery, where they discovered she had preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome, and they had to deliver our baby two months early to prevent anyone from dying. It's possible this could have been avoided if the proper tests had been done.
Needless to say, we never used the antibiotic as it wouldn't have helped anyway. As it is, pregnant women aren't supposed to take antibiotics unless the absolutely have to. The over-prescribing of antibiotics explains why a lot of them become less effective over time. As a previous poster mentioned, doctors continue to see patients because they don't want to be sued if they refuse them, but they shouldn't over-prescribe antibiotics for unrelated conditions.
Re:Some of the changes (possible spoilers)
on
Star Wars on DVD
·
· Score: 1
. Could they possibly have picked a WORSE animal mascot? Maybe the cockroach...
A single cockroach can produce 300-400 offspring, they resist radiation, and they're presumed to outlive humanity by many, many years. If the BSA picked the cockroach, we'd know they were serious about sticking around for a very long time.
You don't think Apple will stop me the same way they will Real if I come up with a way to play everything (including realmedia) on an ipod and I distribute it?
That depends. Do you plan on distributing it as FOSS, or do you plan on starting a competing music store and earning money off the work Apple has done to develop, popularize and improve their product? Certainly the distinction between the lone hacker and a competing corporation must be clear, and the distinction is intent. If you hack your TiVo for the fun of it, the company couldn't care less - you're just voiding your own warranty. Most companies won't even care if you tell others how to hack it, and Apple seems to have been pretty supportive of the OSS developer community with the advent of OS X. But if you start selling your hacks to others (a la General Computing selling modkits for Missile Command and getting sued by Atari), then you've stepped over a line that invites litigation.
The fact thar Real is a mere shadow of its once-dominant position in online multimedia should be a clue to any customers considering purchasing music through RealNetworks. I wonder if this is an act of desperation, or are they deliberately taking on a fight they can't win in order to boost their stock price?
I warn thee to keep back, or I shall unsheath my IE-only htm file that's ridden with broken JavaScript, popup windows, Flash advertisements, and 500KB-gifs that were composed making excessive use of Kai's Power Tools!
So what you're saying is you're going to host it on Tripod? Or will you use Geocities instead?
I just wish Courtney Love had discovered Magnatune before she re-entered binge-mode, because her Salon rant about doing the music-math made sense. Magnatune's contract (artist keeps half and keeps title to the music, basically) is what she was asking for back when Courtney was still being coherent.
Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.
(many detailed explanations and figures later...)
The band is now 1/4 of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.
In fact, some of Courtney Love's rant and Steve Albini's rant have some similarities:
Albini (1994): "The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month."
Love (2000): "So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven."
Regarding Ian's comment: bullshit. The software is alive and present on the US release. I can't speak for the UK, because I didn't buy a copy there. But it's on mine.
anyway, who is Ian $ez? Tell Ian that part of the whole point i$ that it doe$n't matter how the arti$t feel$ about copy protection. The label$ have been in the court$ and in front of the pre$$, repeatedly talking about the right$ of the arti$t; how well doe$ that rhetoric $tand up when we learn that the arti$t has no right to avoid $uch protection?
It's probably Ian Rogers, the webmaster for the Beastie Boys' web site for a very long time - starting in 1994. I worked with Ian a bit when I was running the original Foo Fighters site, he's actually a really nice guy (Foo Fighters and Beastie Boys used to share the same management, Gold Mountain Entertainment, now GAS or something like that).
With how the industry works, I'm sure he had absolutely nothing to do with this, but instead it was label decision as has already been pointed out. It's another perfect example of how disconnected the music industry is from its fans (at least those in non-english speaking countries - the software doesn't exist on the US or UK releases).
I'm not sure if someone's already mentioned this, but Greg Palast already predicted this sort of thing would happen in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. The first chapter is pretty much a detailed covering of the entire Florida election scandal - illegally purging voters from the rolls, allowing a private company to do the purging, illegally requiring felons from other states to petition for voting rights they never lost, etc. The book even throws in photos of a Florida election official (one of Katherine Harris's deputies) running from a BBC camera crew. It also links to the video at the BBC's web site, just in case people dispute it actually happening. And that's just the first chapter!
A lot of the research done by Greg Palast with the BBC video crew was compiled into a documentary called "Unprecedented", which you can download via BitTorrent. (I'm not sure if this counts as video piracy, but it would seem to be trumped by the need to protect the most vital part of democracy: the vote.)
OTOH, looking at the history of 20th century US wars, not one was started by soldiers. Politicians are the ones who lead us into wars. Soldiers are the ones who die fighting them. Learn the difference.
I think what makes this war different is that it was started by politicians who purposefully avoided serving as soldiers when they had the opportunity. From Eisenhower to Bush Sr., every American president had some sort of military service (even Reagan's duties of making training films count) until Clinton came to office in '92, but Clinton didn't purposefully start a war in the Middle East, either.
Maybe we should go back to having a veteran in the White House so the nation is lead by someone who has been in battle and knows what our armed forces are going through. Even Colin Powell once admitted that war is hell and that he would consider himself a dove in a Newsweek article last year before toeing the line with the administration. Having that sort of perspective may have prevented this entire thing in Iraq from happening in the first place, although such conjecture is pointless since our administration currently lacks any useful perspective and we're already over there torturing Iraqis and wasting young American lives.
I never got around to playing Majora's Mask, so I haven't heard of Tatl. Navi was annoying sometimes, but she could be a fun character, as long as she's not turned into a Tinkerbell-type fairy.
The thing that made Ocarina of Time such an interesting story was how you learned your way around this world as a child, and then once you think you've completed the quest, you're suddenly turned into an adult, and everything you had just learned about has been destroyed. I was genuinely saddened by the destruction of the zoras and the rock-eating guys. There wasn't anything like that in Wind Waker, except at the very end, and even then it wasn't quite as heavy. Any good Zelda movie would have to have some sort of loss and eventual redemption for it to be good, but I guess that describes a majority of movies.
If they made a Zelda game, you can bet they'd get someone really annoying to play Link.
Have you ever seen the cartoon series? I made the mistake of downloading the first episode once, and it was absolutely terrible. Link had the ridiculous catchphrase, "Well excuuuuuse me, Princess!" that he said nearly every other line. In order for a Zelda movie to work, they'd have to find someone that would kind of be a cross between Frodo and Pippin from the Lord of the Rings movies, and avoid anyone with annoying cuteness.
Unfortunately, most of the focus of Zelda games is acquiring new stones or trinkets or other items so you can eventually have a showdown with Ganon, so I'm not sure how well this would translate into a movie. Watching the main character work by himself (or with a fairy or a talking boat) to collect various items would definitely not work. Any writer would have to be able to draw on what has made the Zelda series so successful - empathy for Link, the loss of innocence and childhood, the desire to help and be heroic, and the obvious implied attraction between Link and Zelda - and create a fresh new story from that.
I think it would be easier to accomplish that than making a Metroid movie with more than one character (unlike the game), but I'm not a screenwriter.
It costs a lot less to live in Po-Dunk-Town, Alabama than Birmingham, Alabama, and obviously less than New York or Boston. Basically, the IT worker in Po-Dunk-Town commutting to B-ham would probably do well, with the others forced to do a better job with their budget.
I remember going to school. Our school was more-or-less normal. No one cared.
Therefore, since your school experience was unsatisfactory, every student's school experience must also be unsatisfactory. Since your teachers didn't care, no teachers care. Your logic is astounding.
What's the deal with teachers and excuses? Is there an excuse class in teacher training or something? I almost wish I was in high school again so I could use lack of government funding as an excuse for not doing my schoolwork every damn time.
They're not excuses, they're simply some of the difficult factors involved in public education today. If you look at the history of education legislation, including "No Child Left Behind", you'll see that many mandates are enacted that increase school responsibilities without increasing funding. NCLB asks for states to impose high-stakes testing every two years, but doesn't supply any money to put that into place. Now, I don't know if you've ever been involved in large-scale testing, but our high school had to hire an additional person to keep track of the high school students who haven't passed the proficiency tests so we can retest them twice a year until they pass. Believe it or not, but things that seem as simple as giving students a test take time, and as everyone knows, time is money. Since our State Report Card depends primarily on test results and graduation rates, it's important that we help these students pass the tests, otherwise we look bad to our community and we could lose state or even national funding. (An aside: some states, like Utah, are so upset at the additional requirements of NCLB and the additional funding they'll require that they're going to give up the federal money they'd normally get. Why? Implementing the new requirements would cost more than they'd get in federal money.)
Here's the thing: I care about my job. I do the best I can. I'm not going to volunteer to help you do your job. I don't think my employer would buy "lack of government funding" in education as my excuse for anything that goes wrong because I was trying to do someone elses'. (Actually, they probably would, but I don't.)
Your emphasis on the word "my" suggests that I don't care about my job. You see, that's one of the problems with being an educator today. Many, many problems in society are blamed on schools - lack of caring, lack of education, lack of emphasis on the basics, lack of testing, lack of structure, etc. Some of the blame is deserved; nothing is perfect, certainly not schools. All schools can be improved. However, when your boss asks you to work harder, chances are you're probably already working as hard as you can. When your boss asks you to work longer, chances are they'll pay you for overtime. Teachers already put in time during the regular school day, just like anyone else, but how many jobs require employees to do additional work at home? When I grade papers, prepare assignments, do research, etc., all of that time is unpaid for, but it's a requirement of my job. Being a teacher (and having teachers for parents), I knew that going in, and that's absolutely fine, because I had already figured out the great truth of teaching: Being a good teacher is not a job, nor is it a career - it's a lifestyle.
However, that lifestyle is pretty demanding at times (you don't want my job during October or May), and there are only so many hours in the day, so our volunteers are pretty essential. One of our most active volunteers is in her 70's, is the head of our boosters organization, has two daughters that teach in the district, and is also a board member. If she can find time to help out our school, I'm sure you could as well. Which leads me to my last point...
Because I do a good job at my job, I end up paying lots of taxes. I bet you thank the volunteers for their help. I bet you don't thank the taxpayers for theirs.
This is the funniest statement in your troll...er...post! In April 1
What do you do for students who passed it easily? That's how we can tell if you actually care about the students or not. What do you do to help the students who aren't a problem for you? Anything extra? Anything that would indicate they're individuals instead of simply a part of the education process?
For the 9th Grade Proficiency Tests (which students are required to pass in order to graduate in Ohio), our students in higher-level classes take it early in 8th grade so they get it out of the way and can focus on college prep, honors and AP classes. Our high school in particular has a ton of activities and sports, from Honor Society to Wildelife Ambassadors, from a bible club to a step team (which is particularly popular). We even hold LAN parties in the cafeteria once a month. Our school certainly isn't perfect - by definition, no school can meet all the individual needs of every student; you'd need one teacher per student - but we do try to get every student involved in some way past just being another body in a seat. We even started making a list of all of our students and passing it around from teacher to teacher to find out who's involved in what activity, and see if there's any way we can reach kids who aren't involved. You'd be surprised, but this is generally the case at most schools, it's just that some schools are more successful and effective than others.
I agree that teachers aren't sadistic. Some teachers care about the education process. Almost none care about students as individuals.
Again, I have to call bullshit on this one too. Until you go through teacher training and have to put up with the infinite amount of paperwork, the unreasonable (and unfunded) demands of out-of-touch legislators, and experiences with parents that range from wonderful to strange to threatening, and all of these things outside of dealing with students, you simply can't make a statement like that with any degree of accuracy. Believe it or not, the vast majority of teachers I've met get into education because they care about kids. Fifteen, twenty, thirty years down the line, that original reason for getting into education tends to fade, but the really great teachers are able to keep it going and use their experience and expertise to truly master their craft. I can easily list many, many examples of our teachers caring about students as individuals; I'm sure similar things happen at schools all over the country, but we usually only hear about negative incidents on the news like shootings and drug busts and teachers fooling around with students, primarily because those things grab more viewers than "Local Teacher Gives Poor Students Rides Home After School So They Can Participate In After-School Activities." Two teachers bought one of our students a winter jacket because he had to walk about 2.5 miles to school every morning, but stuff like that doesn't (and won't) make the news.
If you're concerned about students getting more personal interaction, I would encourage you to stop by and volunteer at your local school and help out. Nearly every school needs help, even the ones that are financially well-off. Some of them have non-profit volunteer groups that come in and work one-on-one with kids; we have a group with us called City Conquest that will do anything from running copies for teachers to talking to kids with problems in private or even doing presentations in class. Immediately after the September 11th attacks, their group was called to New York to help out, and when they came back, they did presentations to social studies classes about how they helped.
Either way, it's one thing to claim that no teachers care about students as individuals, but it's another thing to go into a school and try to make a difference.
The problem is, science *TEACHERS* are not kid-friendly. Most of them, no matter how compassionate and pro-children they believe they are, are inherently vicious and sadistic people. They can't recognize this fact, of course, and neither can any of the other adults - but just ask an 8 year old sometime.
Wow, that's a pretty heavy opinion. Of course, you make this statement based on exactly what experience you've had with science teachers? Having a couple bad experiences does not entitle you to denounce science teachers as a whole.
Let me give you a flip-side example. I am a science teacher, and I have been for six years now. My dad was a science teacher (now retiring), and I've worked with some really great science teachers at our high school. These are the kind of people that really make a difference in the lives of students, that stay after school to help students make up labs or work on problems they didn't understand. We have a science computer lab with loads and loads of exploratory and remedial software, and we bring in two extra science teachers twice a year to help tutor our students who haven't passed the science portion of the Ohio 9th Grade Proficiency Test. One of our chemistry teachers who retired last year had a 100% passing rate over nearly 20 years for her students who took the Chemistry AP exam. You can't achieve that sort of thing without dedication and trust, and certainly not if your students feel you are "vicious and sadistic".
While there is no question that there are bad science teachers out there, just as there are bad teachers in every subject, I can't accept a statement that most science teachers are not kid-friendly when I see our science department busting their asses to stay current, relevant, interesting and enthusiastic. Sorry, but I just have to call bullshit on you.
1. Not allowing a person to upgrade a DVD/CD drive to a Superdrive. I bought my PowerMac two months before the superdrive was released. I get to use stupid DVD-RAM disks, but I can't burn DVD's unless I buy a whole new computer.
I know other people in this thread have given you some general replies, saying you can use just about any DVD burner with Toast or other third-party software. While all this is true, I'm going to be a little more specific to help you out. I have a PowerMac G4/Dual 500, and it also came with a DVD-ROM drive. A couple months ago, after doing a little research online, I found some sites that suggested any of the Pioneer DVD-RW drives are compatible with iTunes, iDVD, etc. I also stopped by an Apple store and had the guy at the genius bar write down what model was in their Superdrive-equipped PowerMacs, which ended up being the Pioneer DVR-105 (retails as the A05).
I ended up buying a Pioneer DVR-106 (also sold as the A06) from newegg.com, and it's worked like a champ. Burns in iTunes, iDVD, Toast, the Finder, etc. without a problem, and I haven't made a coaster yet. Newegg sells the Pioneer DVR-107 (8x DVD+/-RW) in black for $112 at the moment, so you might want to pick one up and pop it in your PowerMac. Since the 106 that I own is a step above the standard Superdrive, I wouldn't doubt that Mac OS X will pick up the 107 with no problem at all.
Just thought I'd clear up an issue that had been annoying me as well until I did some research and took a chance. Good luck!
Yeah... it has its moments. For the most part, though, it's pretty stable - we haven't restarted the server (outside of the occasional NT4 patch and the death of a power supply) more than a handful of times in 5 years. It's not the easiest thing to configure sometimes, but overall it's helped our district save a ton of time and paper. Mostly I just get tired of people asking me to reset their password because they couldn't remember it over a summer or winter break. We're on spring break right now, and I know I'll have at least 5 requests when we go back Monday.
I am an advanced Linux user. I have been using Linux since 1992. I work as a sysadmin at a web hosting outfit that uses debian almost exclusively.
I use Mandrake at home because I work on computers all day.
When I get home I want my computers to just freaking *work* and not spend all weekend configuring them.
I watch over NT4, 2000 and Linux servers at the high school where I teach, running a variety of services from apache and mysql to FirstClass and active directory. We're almost an entirely Wintel school, sans a couple counselors and secretaries with Macs and our Linux servers.
When I come home, I use Mac OS X because it beats Mandrake (or any other operating system) in the "just freaking works" category. I can play around with perl scripts or mysql in vi or work on schoolwork in MS Word or tweak photos for our website in Photoshop. I love Linux, I've been using it since '99, but I'm definitely in the "when I go home, I just want it to work" category. I honestly can't remember the last time my Mac crashed, requiring a restart. That's not to say Linux can't do this as well (or Windows, if protected properly), but Mac OS X does it out of the box.
I am looking forward to Mandrake 10.0's official release - we've been using a variety of versions for our servers, and it's as close to "working out of the box" as any version of Linux has come for us.
Nope, I mean exactly what I wrote. It's funny how I started to get modded to Offtopic by those less geeky than me.
I know, I was just being a smartass. One of my friends had the click of death happen to him with an internal Zip drive in a Power Computing tower, and when I found out disks used in his drive could mess up my external SCSI Zip drive, I swore never to use their products again.
I just found the Clik drive amusing, since it was overpriced and about to be outpaced by faster, more spacious flash storage devices. I've never even seen one in real life, but they're available for pretty cheap on eBay. Sorry for any confusion or incorrect moderation - I should have used the <sarcasm> tag.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoof the White House's phone number
and
For the overly, overly religious; (666) 666-6666
aren't you being a bit redundant?
Just tell him to go fuck himself.
Is that 0 or 1?
This happens more often than you might think. I took my wife to the emergency room because she was 7 months pregnant and had terrible chest pains that were keeping her from sleeping. After 8 hours involving some blood tests and a chest scan, the ER doctor said it was because of bronchitis and sent my wife home with a prescription for an antibiotic.
It turns out she had developed preeclampsia, which is a leading killer of pregnant women. A simple test for protein in the urine would have confirmed that. Instead, we went back to the hospital two days later, but this time we went directly to labor and delivery, where they discovered she had preeclampsia and HELLP syndrome, and they had to deliver our baby two months early to prevent anyone from dying. It's possible this could have been avoided if the proper tests had been done.
Needless to say, we never used the antibiotic as it wouldn't have helped anyway. As it is, pregnant women aren't supposed to take antibiotics unless the absolutely have to. The over-prescribing of antibiotics explains why a lot of them become less effective over time. As a previous poster mentioned, doctors continue to see patients because they don't want to be sued if they refuse them, but they shouldn't over-prescribe antibiotics for unrelated conditions.
Not if you live in Canada.
A single cockroach can produce 300-400 offspring, they resist radiation, and they're presumed to outlive humanity by many, many years. If the BSA picked the cockroach, we'd know they were serious about sticking around for a very long time.
That depends. Do you plan on distributing it as FOSS, or do you plan on starting a competing music store and earning money off the work Apple has done to develop, popularize and improve their product? Certainly the distinction between the lone hacker and a competing corporation must be clear, and the distinction is intent. If you hack your TiVo for the fun of it, the company couldn't care less - you're just voiding your own warranty. Most companies won't even care if you tell others how to hack it, and Apple seems to have been pretty supportive of the OSS developer community with the advent of OS X. But if you start selling your hacks to others (a la General Computing selling modkits for Missile Command and getting sued by Atari), then you've stepped over a line that invites litigation.
The fact thar Real is a mere shadow of its once-dominant position in online multimedia should be a clue to any customers considering purchasing music through RealNetworks. I wonder if this is an act of desperation, or are they deliberately taking on a fight they can't win in order to boost their stock price?
That would explain this error.
So what you're saying is you're going to host it on Tripod? Or will you use Geocities instead?
Come to think of it, this is the best idea ever. Now let us never speak of it again.
Courtney's Salon article in 2000 was interesting, but Steve Albini did the math better in his 1994 rant in Maximum Rock'n'Roll #133:
In fact, some of Courtney Love's rant and Steve Albini's rant have some similarities:
Albini (1994): "The band members have each earned about 1/3 as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month."
Love (2000): "So their profit is $6.6 million; the band may as well be working at a 7-Eleven."
Sounds suspiciously familiar.
If that's the case, then I stand corrected.
It's probably Ian Rogers, the webmaster for the Beastie Boys' web site for a very long time - starting in 1994. I worked with Ian a bit when I was running the original Foo Fighters site, he's actually a really nice guy (Foo Fighters and Beastie Boys used to share the same management, Gold Mountain Entertainment, now GAS or something like that).
With how the industry works, I'm sure he had absolutely nothing to do with this, but instead it was label decision as has already been pointed out. It's another perfect example of how disconnected the music industry is from its fans (at least those in non-english speaking countries - the software doesn't exist on the US or UK releases).
A lot of the research done by Greg Palast with the BBC video crew was compiled into a documentary called "Unprecedented", which you can download via BitTorrent. (I'm not sure if this counts as video piracy, but it would seem to be trumped by the need to protect the most vital part of democracy: the vote.)
I think what makes this war different is that it was started by politicians who purposefully avoided serving as soldiers when they had the opportunity. From Eisenhower to Bush Sr., every American president had some sort of military service (even Reagan's duties of making training films count) until Clinton came to office in '92, but Clinton didn't purposefully start a war in the Middle East, either.
Maybe we should go back to having a veteran in the White House so the nation is lead by someone who has been in battle and knows what our armed forces are going through. Even Colin Powell once admitted that war is hell and that he would consider himself a dove in a Newsweek article last year before toeing the line with the administration. Having that sort of perspective may have prevented this entire thing in Iraq from happening in the first place, although such conjecture is pointless since our administration currently lacks any useful perspective and we're already over there torturing Iraqis and wasting young American lives.
The thing that made Ocarina of Time such an interesting story was how you learned your way around this world as a child, and then once you think you've completed the quest, you're suddenly turned into an adult, and everything you had just learned about has been destroyed. I was genuinely saddened by the destruction of the zoras and the rock-eating guys. There wasn't anything like that in Wind Waker, except at the very end, and even then it wasn't quite as heavy. Any good Zelda movie would have to have some sort of loss and eventual redemption for it to be good, but I guess that describes a majority of movies.
Have you ever seen the cartoon series? I made the mistake of downloading the first episode once, and it was absolutely terrible. Link had the ridiculous catchphrase, "Well excuuuuuse me, Princess!" that he said nearly every other line. In order for a Zelda movie to work, they'd have to find someone that would kind of be a cross between Frodo and Pippin from the Lord of the Rings movies, and avoid anyone with annoying cuteness.
Unfortunately, most of the focus of Zelda games is acquiring new stones or trinkets or other items so you can eventually have a showdown with Ganon, so I'm not sure how well this would translate into a movie. Watching the main character work by himself (or with a fairy or a talking boat) to collect various items would definitely not work. Any writer would have to be able to draw on what has made the Zelda series so successful - empathy for Link, the loss of innocence and childhood, the desire to help and be heroic, and the obvious implied attraction between Link and Zelda - and create a fresh new story from that.
I think it would be easier to accomplish that than making a Metroid movie with more than one character (unlike the game), but I'm not a screenwriter.
Not if gas costs over $2/gallon.
Therefore, since your school experience was unsatisfactory, every student's school experience must also be unsatisfactory. Since your teachers didn't care, no teachers care. Your logic is astounding.
What's the deal with teachers and excuses? Is there an excuse class in teacher training or something? I almost wish I was in high school again so I could use lack of government funding as an excuse for not doing my schoolwork every damn time.
They're not excuses, they're simply some of the difficult factors involved in public education today. If you look at the history of education legislation, including "No Child Left Behind", you'll see that many mandates are enacted that increase school responsibilities without increasing funding. NCLB asks for states to impose high-stakes testing every two years, but doesn't supply any money to put that into place. Now, I don't know if you've ever been involved in large-scale testing, but our high school had to hire an additional person to keep track of the high school students who haven't passed the proficiency tests so we can retest them twice a year until they pass. Believe it or not, but things that seem as simple as giving students a test take time, and as everyone knows, time is money. Since our State Report Card depends primarily on test results and graduation rates, it's important that we help these students pass the tests, otherwise we look bad to our community and we could lose state or even national funding. (An aside: some states, like Utah, are so upset at the additional requirements of NCLB and the additional funding they'll require that they're going to give up the federal money they'd normally get. Why? Implementing the new requirements would cost more than they'd get in federal money.)
Here's the thing: I care about my job. I do the best I can. I'm not going to volunteer to help you do your job. I don't think my employer would buy "lack of government funding" in education as my excuse for anything that goes wrong because I was trying to do someone elses'. (Actually, they probably would, but I don't.)
Your emphasis on the word "my" suggests that I don't care about my job. You see, that's one of the problems with being an educator today. Many, many problems in society are blamed on schools - lack of caring, lack of education, lack of emphasis on the basics, lack of testing, lack of structure, etc. Some of the blame is deserved; nothing is perfect, certainly not schools. All schools can be improved. However, when your boss asks you to work harder, chances are you're probably already working as hard as you can. When your boss asks you to work longer, chances are they'll pay you for overtime. Teachers already put in time during the regular school day, just like anyone else, but how many jobs require employees to do additional work at home? When I grade papers, prepare assignments, do research, etc., all of that time is unpaid for, but it's a requirement of my job. Being a teacher (and having teachers for parents), I knew that going in, and that's absolutely fine, because I had already figured out the great truth of teaching: Being a good teacher is not a job, nor is it a career - it's a lifestyle.
However, that lifestyle is pretty demanding at times (you don't want my job during October or May), and there are only so many hours in the day, so our volunteers are pretty essential. One of our most active volunteers is in her 70's, is the head of our boosters organization, has two daughters that teach in the district, and is also a board member. If she can find time to help out our school, I'm sure you could as well. Which leads me to my last point...
Because I do a good job at my job, I end up paying lots of taxes. I bet you thank the volunteers for their help. I bet you don't thank the taxpayers for theirs.
This is the funniest statement in your troll...er...post! In April 1
For the 9th Grade Proficiency Tests (which students are required to pass in order to graduate in Ohio), our students in higher-level classes take it early in 8th grade so they get it out of the way and can focus on college prep, honors and AP classes. Our high school in particular has a ton of activities and sports, from Honor Society to Wildelife Ambassadors, from a bible club to a step team (which is particularly popular). We even hold LAN parties in the cafeteria once a month. Our school certainly isn't perfect - by definition, no school can meet all the individual needs of every student; you'd need one teacher per student - but we do try to get every student involved in some way past just being another body in a seat. We even started making a list of all of our students and passing it around from teacher to teacher to find out who's involved in what activity, and see if there's any way we can reach kids who aren't involved. You'd be surprised, but this is generally the case at most schools, it's just that some schools are more successful and effective than others.
I agree that teachers aren't sadistic. Some teachers care about the education process. Almost none care about students as individuals.
Again, I have to call bullshit on this one too. Until you go through teacher training and have to put up with the infinite amount of paperwork, the unreasonable (and unfunded) demands of out-of-touch legislators, and experiences with parents that range from wonderful to strange to threatening, and all of these things outside of dealing with students, you simply can't make a statement like that with any degree of accuracy. Believe it or not, the vast majority of teachers I've met get into education because they care about kids. Fifteen, twenty, thirty years down the line, that original reason for getting into education tends to fade, but the really great teachers are able to keep it going and use their experience and expertise to truly master their craft. I can easily list many, many examples of our teachers caring about students as individuals; I'm sure similar things happen at schools all over the country, but we usually only hear about negative incidents on the news like shootings and drug busts and teachers fooling around with students, primarily because those things grab more viewers than "Local Teacher Gives Poor Students Rides Home After School So They Can Participate In After-School Activities." Two teachers bought one of our students a winter jacket because he had to walk about 2.5 miles to school every morning, but stuff like that doesn't (and won't) make the news.
If you're concerned about students getting more personal interaction, I would encourage you to stop by and volunteer at your local school and help out. Nearly every school needs help, even the ones that are financially well-off. Some of them have non-profit volunteer groups that come in and work one-on-one with kids; we have a group with us called City Conquest that will do anything from running copies for teachers to talking to kids with problems in private or even doing presentations in class. Immediately after the September 11th attacks, their group was called to New York to help out, and when they came back, they did presentations to social studies classes about how they helped.
Either way, it's one thing to claim that no teachers care about students as individuals, but it's another thing to go into a school and try to make a difference.
Wow, that's a pretty heavy opinion. Of course, you make this statement based on exactly what experience you've had with science teachers? Having a couple bad experiences does not entitle you to denounce science teachers as a whole.
Let me give you a flip-side example. I am a science teacher, and I have been for six years now. My dad was a science teacher (now retiring), and I've worked with some really great science teachers at our high school. These are the kind of people that really make a difference in the lives of students, that stay after school to help students make up labs or work on problems they didn't understand. We have a science computer lab with loads and loads of exploratory and remedial software, and we bring in two extra science teachers twice a year to help tutor our students who haven't passed the science portion of the Ohio 9th Grade Proficiency Test. One of our chemistry teachers who retired last year had a 100% passing rate over nearly 20 years for her students who took the Chemistry AP exam. You can't achieve that sort of thing without dedication and trust, and certainly not if your students feel you are "vicious and sadistic".
While there is no question that there are bad science teachers out there, just as there are bad teachers in every subject, I can't accept a statement that most science teachers are not kid-friendly when I see our science department busting their asses to stay current, relevant, interesting and enthusiastic. Sorry, but I just have to call bullshit on you.
I know other people in this thread have given you some general replies, saying you can use just about any DVD burner with Toast or other third-party software. While all this is true, I'm going to be a little more specific to help you out. I have a PowerMac G4/Dual 500, and it also came with a DVD-ROM drive. A couple months ago, after doing a little research online, I found some sites that suggested any of the Pioneer DVD-RW drives are compatible with iTunes, iDVD, etc. I also stopped by an Apple store and had the guy at the genius bar write down what model was in their Superdrive-equipped PowerMacs, which ended up being the Pioneer DVR-105 (retails as the A05).
I ended up buying a Pioneer DVR-106 (also sold as the A06) from newegg.com, and it's worked like a champ. Burns in iTunes, iDVD, Toast, the Finder, etc. without a problem, and I haven't made a coaster yet. Newegg sells the Pioneer DVR-107 (8x DVD+/-RW) in black for $112 at the moment, so you might want to pick one up and pop it in your PowerMac. Since the 106 that I own is a step above the standard Superdrive, I wouldn't doubt that Mac OS X will pick up the 107 with no problem at all.
Just thought I'd clear up an issue that had been annoying me as well until I did some research and took a chance. Good luck!
You have my deepest sympathies.
Yeah... it has its moments. For the most part, though, it's pretty stable - we haven't restarted the server (outside of the occasional NT4 patch and the death of a power supply) more than a handful of times in 5 years. It's not the easiest thing to configure sometimes, but overall it's helped our district save a ton of time and paper. Mostly I just get tired of people asking me to reset their password because they couldn't remember it over a summer or winter break. We're on spring break right now, and I know I'll have at least 5 requests when we go back Monday.
I use Mandrake at home because I work on computers all day.
When I get home I want my computers to just freaking *work* and not spend all weekend configuring them.
I watch over NT4, 2000 and Linux servers at the high school where I teach, running a variety of services from apache and mysql to FirstClass and active directory. We're almost an entirely Wintel school, sans a couple counselors and secretaries with Macs and our Linux servers.
When I come home, I use Mac OS X because it beats Mandrake (or any other operating system) in the "just freaking works" category. I can play around with perl scripts or mysql in vi or work on schoolwork in MS Word or tweak photos for our website in Photoshop. I love Linux, I've been using it since '99, but I'm definitely in the "when I go home, I just want it to work" category. I honestly can't remember the last time my Mac crashed, requiring a restart. That's not to say Linux can't do this as well (or Windows, if protected properly), but Mac OS X does it out of the box.
I am looking forward to Mandrake 10.0's official release - we've been using a variety of versions for our servers, and it's as close to "working out of the box" as any version of Linux has come for us.
I know, I was just being a smartass. One of my friends had the click of death happen to him with an internal Zip drive in a Power Computing tower, and when I found out disks used in his drive could mess up my external SCSI Zip drive, I swore never to use their products again.
I just found the Clik drive amusing, since it was overpriced and about to be outpaced by faster, more spacious flash storage devices. I've never even seen one in real life, but they're available for pretty cheap on eBay. Sorry for any confusion or incorrect moderation - I should have used the <sarcasm> tag.