Speaking as someone who actually works at a school district, you either misunderstand what that money represents, or you know some pretty damned lucky teachers.
The district I work at (and I've heard teachers from other places describe it this way as well) gives you two options:
1) Full pay for nine months. It's up to you to either budget responsibly or find a summer job to hold you over for those summer months.
2) Average out your salary over twelve months - you get the same amount of money, but some of it is held during the school months so that you can continue to receive a steady paycheck over the summer.
Either way, the teachers are only contracted for the days they work in the school year - summer isn't considered paid work or paid vacation.
Now, if things are different in your district, that's fine - just remember that different places and people will have different perspectives.
I'm sorry, but as someone who had to look up Columbia University on Wikipedia just to find out it was an Ivy League school, I don't find that remark "insightful" in the slightest. Could someone explain the "insight" provided by this post?
The biggest expense of nuclear power is not the fuel, but the extreme initial capital cost for building the plant. Fuel is actually a pretty small fraction of the cost for nuclear power - the price of fuel could double and the KWh cost would rise very little.
Just to aggravate you even further, I have a 3Mb/768Kb DSL connection with absolutely no data limit whatsoever. I think I've nearly maxed out my upload bandwidth for about a month once, and there have been months when I've downloaded over 60GB.
Haven't received a single telephone call, letter, or e-mail. Haven't experienced the slightest degradation in service.
Sorry, old chum, but the British (and their Commonwealth friends) seem to get pooched when it comes to internet connectivity. It could be worse, though; you could live in Australia. Yikes!
Honestly, I think the biggest thing about old games is that they encouraged you to use your imagination. That's not an arrow flying past another arrow, that's your starship screaming past the enemy dreadnought. It's much harder to be disappointed or dissatisfied with such basic graphics because the graphics are no longer so much creating the image as they are supplying direction for your imagination to create your own image.
I think there are parallels to be found within cinematic special effects. We all know that, despite how fun they are to look at, the special effects found in Star Wars from 1977 are not real, and we don't treat it as such; there are gaps which our imagination can fill in. Today, special effects have gone beyond that point such that the images presented are under the pretense of "this could be real" and our minds are being asked to accept them as such; this, however, creates a host of new challenges as our minds now race to find the flaws and highlight them, rather than gloss over them and fill them in.
People have complained about entertainment being an increasingly passive activity, and I think in part advancing graphics contributes significantly to that; we are increasingly (indirectly) asked to use our imagination less and less with each advance in special effects and graphics technology.
This is just a pet theory of mine, however, which may or may not be accurate at all.
What about ocean water? Granted, this places certain limits on where you can place the plant (and perhaps it may be infeasible to place such a plant within pumping distance of the ocean, for reasons unknown to me) but it would seem to solve the problem of water supply as well as avoid needlessly consuming precious unsalted water.
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I'm not very successful with women. Could it be that I'm just /too/ attractive? Hmm...
I think it's more like someone who puts on way too much makeup or wears way too much cologne.
Speaking as someone who actually works at a school district, you either misunderstand what that money represents, or you know some pretty damned lucky teachers. The district I work at (and I've heard teachers from other places describe it this way as well) gives you two options: 1) Full pay for nine months. It's up to you to either budget responsibly or find a summer job to hold you over for those summer months. 2) Average out your salary over twelve months - you get the same amount of money, but some of it is held during the school months so that you can continue to receive a steady paycheck over the summer. Either way, the teachers are only contracted for the days they work in the school year - summer isn't considered paid work or paid vacation. Now, if things are different in your district, that's fine - just remember that different places and people will have different perspectives.
I'm sorry, but as someone who had to look up Columbia University on Wikipedia just to find out it was an Ivy League school, I don't find that remark "insightful" in the slightest. Could someone explain the "insight" provided by this post?
The biggest expense of nuclear power is not the fuel, but the extreme initial capital cost for building the plant. Fuel is actually a pretty small fraction of the cost for nuclear power - the price of fuel could double and the KWh cost would rise very little.
Just to aggravate you even further, I have a 3Mb/768Kb DSL connection with absolutely no data limit whatsoever. I think I've nearly maxed out my upload bandwidth for about a month once, and there have been months when I've downloaded over 60GB.
Haven't received a single telephone call, letter, or e-mail. Haven't experienced the slightest degradation in service.
Sorry, old chum, but the British (and their Commonwealth friends) seem to get pooched when it comes to internet connectivity. It could be worse, though; you could live in Australia. Yikes!
Honestly, I think the biggest thing about old games is that they encouraged you to use your imagination. That's not an arrow flying past another arrow, that's your starship screaming past the enemy dreadnought. It's much harder to be disappointed or dissatisfied with such basic graphics because the graphics are no longer so much creating the image as they are supplying direction for your imagination to create your own image.
I think there are parallels to be found within cinematic special effects. We all know that, despite how fun they are to look at, the special effects found in Star Wars from 1977 are not real, and we don't treat it as such; there are gaps which our imagination can fill in. Today, special effects have gone beyond that point such that the images presented are under the pretense of "this could be real" and our minds are being asked to accept them as such; this, however, creates a host of new challenges as our minds now race to find the flaws and highlight them, rather than gloss over them and fill them in.
People have complained about entertainment being an increasingly passive activity, and I think in part advancing graphics contributes significantly to that; we are increasingly (indirectly) asked to use our imagination less and less with each advance in special effects and graphics technology.
This is just a pet theory of mine, however, which may or may not be accurate at all.
What about ocean water? Granted, this places certain limits on where you can place the plant (and perhaps it may be infeasible to place such a plant within pumping distance of the ocean, for reasons unknown to me) but it would seem to solve the problem of water supply as well as avoid needlessly consuming precious unsalted water.