Now, look within a school district, and compare students who do well, vs. those who do poorly (excluding those with learning disabilities), the better students, in general will have parents who have more concern with their kids education, and play a more active role.
I have on numerous occasions studied the correlation between free-and-reduced lunch percentage data per school (a good indication of what percent of students are from low-income and improverished families) and school test scores in states that allow open-enrollment (parents can enroll their children in schools located outside their home district). The correlation coefficient has always been strong, and particularly strong within large municipal areas. Impoverished and low-income families are much less likely to instill within their children the skills they need to be successful in school.
What "philanthropists" like Bill Gates don't understand is that the skill set necessary for success that most school "reform" pushers are ignoring is not academic in nature. (It's well documented that intelligence is fairly independent, though not completely mutually exclusive, from environment.) It's rather a social skill called "self-regulation" which is instilled at the home, not at school. Self-regulation is the ability to control and plan emotions, cognitions, and behaviors. Students who can self regulate are the students who can keep their emotions from impeding success (a.k.a. perseverance), who can look at a problem or a set of problems and determine a step-by-step approach to solving them (a.k.a. problem solving & task management), and who can determine an appropriate reaction to a given stimulus depending on the setting they are presently in (a.k.a. good behavior). And studies have documented that self-regulation is taught most successfully in the home, but is not taught as successfully in low-income and impoverished homes.
The academic divides that currently exist within the school setting are more a symptom of a deeper social problem that needs to be addressed. Beating up on schools will not solve the problem when the problem is in the home, not the school.
(A more in-depth article on self-regulation can be read here.)
Government is force. For wise laws and unwise laws alike, they are all enforced by an implementation of "might makes right".... This is carried out by men with guns and other weapons, typically known as either police or agents.
The government is an establishment of the will of the people. Police and agents are people entrusted with enforcing the established will of the people. As Locke talked about in the social contract, we surrender certain rights in the creation of a government in order for the government to protect and preserve the rest.
Do you not like what the government does? Then elect the candidates you favor to change government. Or run for office yourself. Until then, follow the law. As Washington said in his Farewell Address, "The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government."
And another line of yours also does not sit well with me. At least you can refuse to ever allow Amazon to affect your life. You can simply not do business with them. When Amazon refuses to pay taxes on its business operations, it does affect your life. Amazon ships its products to you using couriers. They use federal, state, and local road systems. All that package weight slowly wears away on the roads. When they don't pay taxes, they don't pay to help fix the potholes you drive over every day. And that's just the beginning. When they don't pay taxes, they don't pay for the police force that protects their private property from vandalism & theft. When they don't pay taxes, they don't pay for the fire department to help put out fires on their private property. When they don't pay taxes, they aren't paying for the education and civilization of their work force that they depend on to be educated and civil. And so on, and so on, and so on. And when they don't pay their fair share, guess who has to pay for them? We all do. We are all affected by Amazon not paying the taxes necessary to support the public infrastructure it depends on to do business.
ONLY if Amazon paid sales tax would your statement be true. Because then, only those who did business with Amazon would cover their costs of business, rather than everyone throughout the country.
Is this press release just a response to a rather damning report last week released by Pakistan's The Nation?
Granted, I understand that most people here would view a newspaper in Pakistan as not the most credible source for news, but I believe this newspaper to be a credible one, and they do not appear to be in the business of conspiracy theories. Putting that issue aside, why has this report not received more discussion?
Sure doesn't put the power station in as nearly a glowing light as the NY Times article does.
Option 1: Pay $260 / month for a $1,000 deductible plan, and hope that I don't have to spend the $1,000 before health insurance kicks in the rest.
Option 2: Rob a bank. Get free health care!
Except, I wouldn't ask for $1 like this guy. The teller would probably just laugh and tell me to get lost. I'd demand $50,000. That way, if I manage to evade the police, at least I can afford health care for one year before I would need to rob the bank again!
I guess CmdrTaco had the wisdom to see this coming when he created a website with "News for Nerds." Just imagine what type of trouble/. would be in if it was "Gadgets for Geeks" or something along those lines!
My first reaction was, "What? PBS? FrontLine? Really, guys, now you've gone too far."
But then, when I took a step back, I realized that I was portraying a double-standard. When Anonymous (or its derivatives) goes after Big-Corp, we all stand beside the hackers and shout out chants of "Yea, they're finally getting what's coming to them!" But when they attack an organization I have lots of respect for, it's only then where I feel that they've crossed a line.
But really, now that I see it, it is a double standard. When I now reflect on it all, it truly doesn't matter whether they are targeting an organization I have no respect for or one I have complete respect for. It is illegal. They are breaking the law and disrupting the business of the public. It needs to stop.
And shame on us for trying to rationalize a double standard.
I'm sure most posts that show up in this thread are going to be very similar in nature to the parent, but don't jump to conclusions so quickly. When the industry talks about long-term storage, here's what they're referring to... (from the article):
The disposal of high-level waste is more complicated since it needs to be solidified into borosilicate glass and placed inside heavy stainless steel cylinders about 1.3 meters high, the World Nuclear Association said. The casks are then usually transferred to interim storage sites before a long-term underground repository is built.
Storing nuclear waste as borosilicate glass in dry-cask storage is an expensive process, but once complete, the casks are quite durable. This is a much safer storage option compared to leaving the spent fuel pellets in a swimming pool.
I would not feel safe with self driving cars on the road...yet.
Google's still a private company, and their word alone that these cars are safe does not a satisfied citizen make. Let these cars be thoroughly tested by both a government entity and a private third party before they be allowed on the road.
Furthermore, we all know that a program that's still being beta tested still has its bugs. Even if the bugs were worked out so that a car "experienced a bug" only once every 100,000 miles, given the number of vehicles presently on the road and how much they are driven every day, that would still be too many "crashes" for society to find acceptable.
If you had, you would have likely watched the youtube vid that explained the concept.
This engine is not an engine that directly propels a vehicle as a standard internal combustion engine does. Such engines are very inefficient, as much of the energy exerted is converted to heat, not to mention the additional energy that's used just to propel the weight of the engine itself. If there was a way to reduce the heat generated, and/or create a smaller and/or lighter engine that significantly reduces its mass, you would significantly improve energy efficiency. (Example: When engine blocks moved from cast iron to aluminum, it not only reduced the weight of the engine, but also allowed quicker transfer of heat energy out of the engine. Significant improvement of engine efficiency.)
This new engine has only one purpose: to spin a generator which charges the motor's batteries. With only that purpose in mind, this particular engine only has to run at a single speed to generate the RPM necessary to spin a generator. There's no need for lots of torque to propel the car forward at low speeds, plus one single RPM means that no drive train is necessary, plus one single RPM means that you can really simplify the design of the engine so that a minimal amount of cooling is required. All-in-all, you cut probably 90% off the weight of the engine, no longer require a radiator, and can transfer most of the energy generated directly to the generator, resulting in a much more efficient car.
There's something even more troubling about the quotes you just provided.
Expert says: “The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in video games.” Fox News concludes: "Carol Lieberman...[says] that sexual situations and acts in video games...have led to real-world sexual violence."
Worse yet, when the average uninformed reader reads "have led" first, it won't matter that the expert only says there's a potential link, not an absolute one. Hell, you probably could have written the story like this, and I bet it wouldn't make any difference to the average reader:
Carol Lieberman, a psychologist and book author, told FoxNews.com that sexual situations and acts in video games -- highlighted so well in Bulletstorm -- have led to real-world sexual violence. “Nothing gets me off better than listening to two hours of Glenn Beck on the radio,” she said.
I lived in Egypt for a year back in 2003. Used TEData as an ISP. Can't get to their webpage presently, and all DNS inquiries go unresolved.
And I wondered why my email's been down. (I terminated my contract w/ TEData back in summer '04 before I left the country, and the admins have yet to delete my POP account. I haven't sent them a check in seven years, but Egyptians are not so well known for being on top of things.)
When these students go to college and think that they want to major in "Computer Science" because "computers are fun," they will be set up for disappointment and confusion when a professor tries to explain to them the differences between sorting algorithms.
If we want to do a better job preparing students for college, then we should not try and "pretend" that computer science is only about using a computer. I could draw a good parallel example with the subject of chemistry. Until I encountered a high school chemistry class discussing "atomic orbitals," "moles," and all the prefixes and postfixes that change the chemical makeup of a molecule, I always assumed that chemistry was only about making bombs from whatever you could find in your garage, MacGyver style. I'm very thankful that high school did me the favor of showing me how boring chemistry could get, teaching me that pursuing the subject further in college would not be worth my time or interest.
This blogger "claims" that someone at Google did this by accident, that, "the person who shared this clearly wasn’t supposed to."
This is Google. Google knows what it's doing. They don't have such an extensive interview process just to hire idiots who don't know a mouse from a keyboard.
This was a planned leak designed specifically for marketing purposes.
If we could devote even one tenth the resources that were allocated to finding just this one guy and put it towards finding all the serial rapists and child molesters who are at large, imagine how many real threats to society could be taken off the streets!
I've found that google's search results have gotten progressively more useless over the last 2-3 years.
So, what's better than Google?
I mean, back in the late 90's, I encouraged everyone to go to Google at the time, because it was so much better than the competition: Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista...they all paled in comparison to the accuracy of Google.
But now, is there anything better than Google? Or is it just like the airlines, where there's no "best option" because everything is terrible.
Windows Vista sucked horribly. Windows 7 fixed some suckage with Windows Vista. But just stop this runaway train and fix all the problems, not just a few with each new Windows version. There's a very good reason why 61% of Windows users still use XP. Give them a reason to want something new. Otherwise, you'll just create more division and confusion by creating another version of Windows that PEOPLE JUST DON'T WANT.
I've been a school teacher now for seven years, going on my eighth. Not only am I a math teacher, but I'm also the technology coordinator at our small rural school. And as I'm reading through the posts, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one here who believes that technology is no savior to the classroom.
I was about to respond with my own post, but I'd rather reply to the idea started with the parent comment:
What's the goal? To improve the education process or to make sure that Laura Ingalls cannot recognize it as a school?
This should be the ultimate goal of teachers everywhere, to improve the education process. And if computers do exactly that, then let's put them in the hands of every student. But do computers really do that? If so, where's the proof? I've seen computers in the classroom now for fifteen years, and I was there with them in the classroom for four of them. If they were so fantastic, wouldn't we be seeing positive gains by now?
Sadly, there is little proof. Technology has changed so rapidly, there has been little opportunity to draw a positive or negative conclusion about a particular technology before society labels it old-school. (In fact, few thorough studies have actually been done on educational technology. There is a really good article here that discusses this further.)
So, to anyone who says that classrooms haven't changed in 100 years, I say to them this: has the human brain changed in the last 100 years? What's different about the way the brain learns now as opposed to 100 years ago? As a third grade teacher at my school once said, "It's amazing how much a child can learn when you hand them a popsicle stick dipped in molasses." I say stick to the field trips, the classroom projects, the crayons, and the Elmer's glue. Let a child experience our world, rather than just view it through a monitor.
If your county is too poor to pay for a fire department, you may have a volunteer fire department, or the nearest municipality may charge a fee to cover service. If you don't pay that fee, you don't get fire protection.
But in the interest of public good, a fire that's allowed to burn out-of-control at one home could spread to another home, or to a forest, extending the initial threat from a single private residence to the general welfare of the public. If I were this man's neighbor, and the fire that the fire department let burn suddenly engulfed my house as well, I would be quite the irate citizen.
There is public good in not permitting a fire from growing, regardless of whether or not someone payed their municipal fees. As such, fire protection should be a public service guaranteed to all citizens, funded through taxes, rather than be an optional insurance paid for at the individual level. We realized long ago that individual and/or private firefighting services were not in the best interests of the public.
That's a lot of customers in a very small space. Lots of potential business in a small area means cheaper costs of deployment and greater returns on the investment, leading to easy competition.
...Is that the company I despise the most in this country is the one that came up with the smartest mobile phone plan.
Really, why can't any of the big-name mobile carriers come out with a no-nonsense plan with affordable rates like this one? We've been screaming for years for mobile plans w/o contracts, w/o hidden fees, w/o metered rates, and w/o surprises that come with the end-of-the-month bill. Why did it take Walmart to figure out what the consumer wanted? Hell, if T-Mobile could just sell this exact plan sans Walmart, I'd jump on it in half-a-heartbeat.
First, in regards to the campaign contributions: based on that list you cited, it looks like one should be more concerned about tribal gaming than the NEA. While NEA was #1, the various tribal gaming donors were #2, #3, #4, #8, and #9. Combined, they squash teacher interest.
Now think about this for a moment, because I think this is incredibly important. What do you consider more important to our society, gambling or public education? What should we be fighting to preserve more? A little news for you: Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of our country, fought tooth-and-nail to establish a public educational system in this country, as he understood that it was one of the most important methods of preserving our form of government. "I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810. ME 12:393. And that's just one quote. You can read another whole fist-full here.
Considering how vital education is to our country, I think a national educators union deserves to spend whatever it needs to preserve the interests of public education, which sadly has been under attack from various businesses, philanthropists, and other institutions over the last few decades. Which leads me to my second point...
You do get what you pay for, and the teacher's union (NEA) are the single largest campaign contributors in the United States.
Then explain to me why No Child Left Behind is so vehemently opposed by teachers at large? It received widespread, bipartisan support when it was passed and renewed in Congress, so why were teachers and the unions so against it? If we were truly getting what we paid for, then I think you would see legislation that was more supportive of unions, rather than trying to undermine them and work against them. (And while NCLB was bad, it doesn't hold a candle to what Duncan and Obama are trying to push through the pipes with the latest "Race to the Top." And remember, the NEA backed Obama during the election, so whysuchopposition?)
Rather, I believe the NEA is spending that much money to do the best that it can to fight such radical undermining of public education.
I'm a teacher. And I will admit, there are problems with public education. Some of those are coming from outside, and some from within. Long has the unions ignored the problems with permitting poor teachers to stay on the payroll and do nothing to help them improve in their teaching skills, it has created a subgroup of individuals with no motivation to improve. But creating a punitive system that stands to bring down an entire school due to poor performance of a student population at large on invalid assessment methods is no way to fix the system. Replacing elected school board officials with unilateral tyrants who are not accountable to the public is no way to fix a the system. Teachers know better than anyone what makes a student learn, and we're so overwhelmed by all these biased and/or misguided individuals, politicians, and businesses who all fighting to take charge of a system that they have no idea how to operate, it's like letting a three-year-old into
Slashdot Mirror
Now, look within a school district, and compare students who do well, vs. those who do poorly (excluding those with learning disabilities), the better students, in general will have parents who have more concern with their kids education, and play a more active role.
I have on numerous occasions studied the correlation between free-and-reduced lunch percentage data per school (a good indication of what percent of students are from low-income and improverished families) and school test scores in states that allow open-enrollment (parents can enroll their children in schools located outside their home district). The correlation coefficient has always been strong, and particularly strong within large municipal areas. Impoverished and low-income families are much less likely to instill within their children the skills they need to be successful in school.
What "philanthropists" like Bill Gates don't understand is that the skill set necessary for success that most school "reform" pushers are ignoring is not academic in nature. (It's well documented that intelligence is fairly independent, though not completely mutually exclusive, from environment.) It's rather a social skill called "self-regulation" which is instilled at the home, not at school. Self-regulation is the ability to control and plan emotions, cognitions, and behaviors. Students who can self regulate are the students who can keep their emotions from impeding success (a.k.a. perseverance), who can look at a problem or a set of problems and determine a step-by-step approach to solving them (a.k.a. problem solving & task management), and who can determine an appropriate reaction to a given stimulus depending on the setting they are presently in (a.k.a. good behavior). And studies have documented that self-regulation is taught most successfully in the home, but is not taught as successfully in low-income and impoverished homes.
The academic divides that currently exist within the school setting are more a symptom of a deeper social problem that needs to be addressed. Beating up on schools will not solve the problem when the problem is in the home, not the school.
(A more in-depth article on self-regulation can be read here.)
Government is force. For wise laws and unwise laws alike, they are all enforced by an implementation of "might makes right". ... This is carried out by men with guns and other weapons, typically known as either police or agents.
The government is an establishment of the will of the people. Police and agents are people entrusted with enforcing the established will of the people. As Locke talked about in the social contract, we surrender certain rights in the creation of a government in order for the government to protect and preserve the rest.
Do you not like what the government does? Then elect the candidates you favor to change government. Or run for office yourself. Until then, follow the law. As Washington said in his Farewell Address, "The very idea of the power and the right of the people to establish government presupposes the duty of every individual to obey the established government."
And another line of yours also does not sit well with me. At least you can refuse to ever allow Amazon to affect your life. You can simply not do business with them. When Amazon refuses to pay taxes on its business operations, it does affect your life. Amazon ships its products to you using couriers. They use federal, state, and local road systems. All that package weight slowly wears away on the roads. When they don't pay taxes, they don't pay to help fix the potholes you drive over every day. And that's just the beginning. When they don't pay taxes, they don't pay for the police force that protects their private property from vandalism & theft. When they don't pay taxes, they don't pay for the fire department to help put out fires on their private property. When they don't pay taxes, they aren't paying for the education and civilization of their work force that they depend on to be educated and civil. And so on, and so on, and so on. And when they don't pay their fair share, guess who has to pay for them? We all do. We are all affected by Amazon not paying the taxes necessary to support the public infrastructure it depends on to do business.
ONLY if Amazon paid sales tax would your statement be true. Because then, only those who did business with Amazon would cover their costs of business, rather than everyone throughout the country.
Is this press release just a response to a rather damning report last week released by Pakistan's The Nation?
Granted, I understand that most people here would view a newspaper in Pakistan as not the most credible source for news, but I believe this newspaper to be a credible one, and they do not appear to be in the business of conspiracy theories. Putting that issue aside, why has this report not received more discussion?
Sure doesn't put the power station in as nearly a glowing light as the NY Times article does.
Option 1: Pay $260 / month for a $1,000 deductible plan, and hope that I don't have to spend the $1,000 before health insurance kicks in the rest.
Option 2: Rob a bank. Get free health care!
Except, I wouldn't ask for $1 like this guy. The teller would probably just laugh and tell me to get lost. I'd demand $50,000. That way, if I manage to evade the police, at least I can afford health care for one year before I would need to rob the bank again!
I guess CmdrTaco had the wisdom to see this coming when he created a website with "News for Nerds." Just imagine what type of trouble /. would be in if it was "Gadgets for Geeks" or something along those lines!
...was my reaction to this story.
My first reaction was, "What? PBS? FrontLine? Really, guys, now you've gone too far."
But then, when I took a step back, I realized that I was portraying a double-standard. When Anonymous (or its derivatives) goes after Big-Corp, we all stand beside the hackers and shout out chants of "Yea, they're finally getting what's coming to them!" But when they attack an organization I have lots of respect for, it's only then where I feel that they've crossed a line.
But really, now that I see it, it is a double standard. When I now reflect on it all, it truly doesn't matter whether they are targeting an organization I have no respect for or one I have complete respect for. It is illegal. They are breaking the law and disrupting the business of the public. It needs to stop.
And shame on us for trying to rationalize a double standard.
I'm sure most posts that show up in this thread are going to be very similar in nature to the parent, but don't jump to conclusions so quickly. When the industry talks about long-term storage, here's what they're referring to... (from the article):
The disposal of high-level waste is more complicated since it needs to be solidified into borosilicate glass and placed inside heavy stainless steel cylinders about 1.3 meters high, the World Nuclear Association said. The casks are then usually transferred to interim storage sites before a long-term underground repository is built.
Storing nuclear waste as borosilicate glass in dry-cask storage is an expensive process, but once complete, the casks are quite durable. This is a much safer storage option compared to leaving the spent fuel pellets in a swimming pool.
I suppose, if Apple is that much of a religion to Apple fans, then does that make these lost plant workers martyrs?
I would not feel safe with self driving cars on the road...yet.
Google's still a private company, and their word alone that these cars are safe does not a satisfied citizen make. Let these cars be thoroughly tested by both a government entity and a private third party before they be allowed on the road.
Furthermore, we all know that a program that's still being beta tested still has its bugs. Even if the bugs were worked out so that a car "experienced a bug" only once every 100,000 miles, given the number of vehicles presently on the road and how much they are driven every day, that would still be too many "crashes" for society to find acceptable.
...when I say, "Why should anybody care?"
It's white. End of story. Move on people.
You didn't read the flippin' article.
If you had, you would have likely watched the youtube vid that explained the concept.
This engine is not an engine that directly propels a vehicle as a standard internal combustion engine does. Such engines are very inefficient, as much of the energy exerted is converted to heat, not to mention the additional energy that's used just to propel the weight of the engine itself. If there was a way to reduce the heat generated, and/or create a smaller and/or lighter engine that significantly reduces its mass, you would significantly improve energy efficiency. (Example: When engine blocks moved from cast iron to aluminum, it not only reduced the weight of the engine, but also allowed quicker transfer of heat energy out of the engine. Significant improvement of engine efficiency.)
This new engine has only one purpose: to spin a generator which charges the motor's batteries. With only that purpose in mind, this particular engine only has to run at a single speed to generate the RPM necessary to spin a generator. There's no need for lots of torque to propel the car forward at low speeds, plus one single RPM means that no drive train is necessary, plus one single RPM means that you can really simplify the design of the engine so that a minimal amount of cooling is required. All-in-all, you cut probably 90% off the weight of the engine, no longer require a radiator, and can transfer most of the energy generated directly to the generator, resulting in a much more efficient car.
There's something even more troubling about the quotes you just provided.
Expert says: “The increase in rapes can be attributed in large part to the playing out of [sexual] scenes in video games.” ...[says] that sexual situations and acts in video games...have led to real-world sexual violence."
Fox News concludes: "Carol Lieberman
Worse yet, when the average uninformed reader reads "have led" first, it won't matter that the expert only says there's a potential link, not an absolute one. Hell, you probably could have written the story like this, and I bet it wouldn't make any difference to the average reader:
Carol Lieberman, a psychologist and book author, told FoxNews.com that sexual situations and acts in video games -- highlighted so well in Bulletstorm -- have led to real-world sexual violence. “Nothing gets me off better than listening to two hours of Glenn Beck on the radio,” she said.
That's misinformation at its finest.
...What does it say about what they do to the rest of the day's news?
I lived in Egypt for a year back in 2003. Used TEData as an ISP. Can't get to their webpage presently, and all DNS inquiries go unresolved.
And I wondered why my email's been down. (I terminated my contract w/ TEData back in summer '04 before I left the country, and the admins have yet to delete my POP account. I haven't sent them a check in seven years, but Egyptians are not so well known for being on top of things.)
When these students go to college and think that they want to major in "Computer Science" because "computers are fun," they will be set up for disappointment and confusion when a professor tries to explain to them the differences between sorting algorithms.
If we want to do a better job preparing students for college, then we should not try and "pretend" that computer science is only about using a computer. I could draw a good parallel example with the subject of chemistry. Until I encountered a high school chemistry class discussing "atomic orbitals," "moles," and all the prefixes and postfixes that change the chemical makeup of a molecule, I always assumed that chemistry was only about making bombs from whatever you could find in your garage, MacGyver style. I'm very thankful that high school did me the favor of showing me how boring chemistry could get, teaching me that pursuing the subject further in college would not be worth my time or interest.
This blogger "claims" that someone at Google did this by accident, that, "the person who shared this clearly wasn’t supposed to."
This is Google. Google knows what it's doing. They don't have such an extensive interview process just to hire idiots who don't know a mouse from a keyboard.
This was a planned leak designed specifically for marketing purposes.
If we could devote even one tenth the resources that were allocated to finding just this one guy and put it towards finding all the serial rapists and child molesters who are at large, imagine how many real threats to society could be taken off the streets!
Poor Plinkett. Guess he'll have to figure out another witty way of saying, "What's wrong with your face?"
"What's wrong with your mug?" just doesn't work the same.
I've found that google's search results have gotten progressively more useless over the last 2-3 years.
So, what's better than Google?
I mean, back in the late 90's, I encouraged everyone to go to Google at the time, because it was so much better than the competition: Yahoo, Excite, Lycos, AltaVista...they all paled in comparison to the accuracy of Google.
But now, is there anything better than Google? Or is it just like the airlines, where there's no "best option" because everything is terrible.
I want Windows 7.1, not Windows 8.
Windows Vista sucked horribly. Windows 7 fixed some suckage with Windows Vista. But just stop this runaway train and fix all the problems, not just a few with each new Windows version. There's a very good reason why 61% of Windows users still use XP. Give them a reason to want something new. Otherwise, you'll just create more division and confusion by creating another version of Windows that PEOPLE JUST DON'T WANT.
I've been a school teacher now for seven years, going on my eighth. Not only am I a math teacher, but I'm also the technology coordinator at our small rural school. And as I'm reading through the posts, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one here who believes that technology is no savior to the classroom.
I was about to respond with my own post, but I'd rather reply to the idea started with the parent comment:
What's the goal? To improve the education process or to make sure that Laura Ingalls cannot recognize it as a school?
This should be the ultimate goal of teachers everywhere, to improve the education process. And if computers do exactly that, then let's put them in the hands of every student. But do computers really do that? If so, where's the proof? I've seen computers in the classroom now for fifteen years, and I was there with them in the classroom for four of them. If they were so fantastic, wouldn't we be seeing positive gains by now?
Sadly, there is little proof. Technology has changed so rapidly, there has been little opportunity to draw a positive or negative conclusion about a particular technology before society labels it old-school. (In fact, few thorough studies have actually been done on educational technology. There is a really good article here that discusses this further.)
So, to anyone who says that classrooms haven't changed in 100 years, I say to them this: has the human brain changed in the last 100 years? What's different about the way the brain learns now as opposed to 100 years ago? As a third grade teacher at my school once said, "It's amazing how much a child can learn when you hand them a popsicle stick dipped in molasses." I say stick to the field trips, the classroom projects, the crayons, and the Elmer's glue. Let a child experience our world, rather than just view it through a monitor.
If your county is too poor to pay for a fire department, you may have a volunteer fire department, or the nearest municipality may charge a fee to cover service. If you don't pay that fee, you don't get fire protection.
But in the interest of public good, a fire that's allowed to burn out-of-control at one home could spread to another home, or to a forest, extending the initial threat from a single private residence to the general welfare of the public. If I were this man's neighbor, and the fire that the fire department let burn suddenly engulfed my house as well, I would be quite the irate citizen.
There is public good in not permitting a fire from growing, regardless of whether or not someone payed their municipal fees. As such, fire protection should be a public service guaranteed to all citizens, funded through taxes, rather than be an optional insurance paid for at the individual level. We realized long ago that individual and/or private firefighting services were not in the best interests of the public.
The UK has 660 people per square mile. We don't.
That's a lot of customers in a very small space. Lots of potential business in a small area means cheaper costs of deployment and greater returns on the investment, leading to easy competition.
...Is that the company I despise the most in this country is the one that came up with the smartest mobile phone plan.
Really, why can't any of the big-name mobile carriers come out with a no-nonsense plan with affordable rates like this one? We've been screaming for years for mobile plans w/o contracts, w/o hidden fees, w/o metered rates, and w/o surprises that come with the end-of-the-month bill. Why did it take Walmart to figure out what the consumer wanted? Hell, if T-Mobile could just sell this exact plan sans Walmart, I'd jump on it in half-a-heartbeat.
First, in regards to the campaign contributions: based on that list you cited, it looks like one should be more concerned about tribal gaming than the NEA. While NEA was #1, the various tribal gaming donors were #2, #3, #4, #8, and #9. Combined, they squash teacher interest.
Now think about this for a moment, because I think this is incredibly important. What do you consider more important to our society, gambling or public education? What should we be fighting to preserve more? A little news for you: Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of our country, fought tooth-and-nail to establish a public educational system in this country, as he understood that it was one of the most important methods of preserving our form of government. "I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810. ME 12:393. And that's just one quote. You can read another whole fist-full here.
Considering how vital education is to our country, I think a national educators union deserves to spend whatever it needs to preserve the interests of public education, which sadly has been under attack from various businesses, philanthropists, and other institutions over the last few decades. Which leads me to my second point...
You do get what you pay for, and the teacher's union (NEA) are the single largest campaign contributors in the United States.
Then explain to me why No Child Left Behind is so vehemently opposed by teachers at large? It received widespread, bipartisan support when it was passed and renewed in Congress, so why were teachers and the unions so against it? If we were truly getting what we paid for, then I think you would see legislation that was more supportive of unions, rather than trying to undermine them and work against them. (And while NCLB was bad, it doesn't hold a candle to what Duncan and Obama are trying to push through the pipes with the latest "Race to the Top." And remember, the NEA backed Obama during the election, so why such opposition?)
Rather, I believe the NEA is spending that much money to do the best that it can to fight such radical undermining of public education.
I'm a teacher. And I will admit, there are problems with public education. Some of those are coming from outside, and some from within. Long has the unions ignored the problems with permitting poor teachers to stay on the payroll and do nothing to help them improve in their teaching skills, it has created a subgroup of individuals with no motivation to improve. But creating a punitive system that stands to bring down an entire school due to poor performance of a student population at large on invalid assessment methods is no way to fix the system. Replacing elected school board officials with unilateral tyrants who are not accountable to the public is no way to fix a the system. Teachers know better than anyone what makes a student learn, and we're so overwhelmed by all these biased and/or misguided individuals, politicians, and businesses who all fighting to take charge of a system that they have no idea how to operate, it's like letting a three-year-old into