NASA operates all over the world, including just about every Air Force base that the US has. considering that each Air Force has it's own budget, yet NASA and other agencies are paid for support, you can't just roll out new systems.
anything "new" has to be bought by the "customer" (i.e. an Air Force base), in which NASA can support the product. the problem is, if a new rollout costs $10 million, and it will increase efficiency and safety while lowering potential support costs, it is still more economical (i say convenient) for each Air Force base to pay $300k (or whatever amount) to just fix the stuff that breaks and live with what they have. yeah, those costs rise ever year, but the problem is that budgets are thin, and if it ain't Dept of Homeland Security, then it won't get funded. and a lot of what NASA does is not "defense" applicable (atmospheric science, oceanic science, engineering, geographical science...). add on the resistance of the existing workforce to incorporate newer technology (and the time and $$$ it takes to train them), and you make it even harder.
no one likes using legacy stuff (especially in software), but you don't have a choice if the customer won't buy the newer products. it's a common problem, and one that I have personally experienced when working with NASA.
i worked for a government agency in partnership with NASA, and unfortunately we were told last year that our budget was stagnant for 3 years in a row and wasn't going up (possibly down).
it is pretty ridiculous to keep budgets stagnant or to lower them and then expect the same output or better. inflation, hardware price increases (we used a lot of legacy systems that were very expensive), annual raises (believe me, not much), and everything else make up the shoestring budget that we were running off of. i don't understand all of the NASA budget cuts. it is an investment into science and our future. and a lot more goes on under NASA than just rockets and spaceships.
there is no such thing as a boycott in this day-and-age. the last successful boycott was with Don Imus, and i can't remember one before that.
in order for a boycott to work, it needs a lot of exposure. lots of TV coverage and radio play. else, how would anyone else know that there is a boycott. a bunch of collective nerds deciding not to buy iTunes music won't do a thing.
and no one cares. i can guarantee that, out of my wife, mother, father, brother, mother-in-law, father-in-law and brother-in-law, i am the only one who could tell you what DRM is, and all of them have bought songs from iTunes. DRM isn't bad. it is put in place because so many people dishonestly rip and share music. i buy iTunes music and don't care about the DRM. i can play it on my iPhone, iPod, and 5 computers.
how does the DRM even affect me? the only time it has been a problem is when i am trying to give music to my friends, which is illegal anyways.
i would only join a union if i could join another union that would police the first union.
my wife is a teacher, and you have to be a member of the teachers' union just to get protection from other teachers who are in the union. if budget cuts hit the school and they need to get rid of teachers, they will keep the union teachers and fire the non-union. it doesn't matter if the non-union teachers' scores are twice as good as the others'.
collective bargaining is completely necessary. but when unions exist for the sake of the existence of the union itself, then things go down the tank. the UAW is a key example of this.
i have been around government workers, and if you even think about checking their performance at all, you'll have a million union grievances filed against you.
i dont think that unions are necessary in today's world.
the teaser for this story is bad. it really has nothing to do with the guy who discovered it, and is more about the industry itself. the story doesn't even say if the guy who discovered it is reasonably successful or not. blah.
i am actually for some regulation. not really of any content, but to force the larger companies to be more open. fact is, the Internet/phone backbone was built using taxpayer money. if that is the case, then the taxpayers have a vested interest in competition and choosing their providers. minimally, all public institutions should be on a government owned/operated network.
large companies like Sprint have paid off enough local FCC chairs that they are now deregulated, and are gladly unplugging all other ISPs that don't belong to the top 6 or 7. fees just to open the plug-in process are over $10,000 a month, and the bigger ISPs aren't even required to do anything. many local companies here have spent $10,000 for several months, having an open account with AT&T, and AT&T is allowed to sit on their hands because they can. you can pay $10,000 to AT&T and request that they hook you up at the local CO, and they will gladly take the money and say "Thanks for making a formal request", and that is it. end of story.
and here in Oklahoma, AT&T is even double billing the local schools and libraries, but the FCC won't do anything about it. AT&T has a contract in Oklahoma to provide schools/libraries with connections for a certain base price, but because the schools/libraries get and pay their own bills, AT&T sends them bills with higher rates, knowing that the local mayoral staff won't have any clue on what they are supposed to pay.
truth is, we should have an easy way to link into a system that was built with taxpayer money. and we need to actually be able to VOTE on what these big ISPs do, and not rely on the incredibly corrupt state FCC.
Sirius XM does not have a single commercial free channel. a 10-second promo for Sirius XM itself or the channel that one is listening to is still a commercial. even worse, you can hear commercials for other Sirius XM channels on a given "commercial free" channel. if it ain't music, and it ain't a DJ, it is a commercial. if i am watching "The Office", and NBC shows me stuff for "30 Rock", then i just saw a commercial.
Sirius XM's stock price is a good representative of the company. I would not invest in something that has deteriorated 97%.
and the new subscribers are not paying as much as they should. we got a call to renew our Sirius XM subscription (got it free for 3 months with our car), and the guy started out at $12.99 a month, and worked his way down all the way to $4.99 a month, and we still turned it down. how desparate can one be to make a sale?
and Sirius XM is losing my money for one major reason: iPod connections. i have an iPod with 30 GB of my favorite music on there that i have already paid for and have spent time organizing. and by the way, my "70's playlist" doesn't need to advertise for itself or for my "Rainy Day" playlist. i've spent the time organizing my music for my office and home, why not use it in the car. that makes Sirius XM obsolete.
and Sirius f*cked over my mother when she bought a lifetime subscription 5 or so years ago, and no one told her that it was locked down to the current vehicle that she was using. so she got screwed out of that money. was pretty sneaky to have that in the fine print.
first of all, the iPod/music players/built-in-hard-drives are killing the need for Sirius. we have all spent countless hours working on our music collections, and we now have them (or a portion of them) on our 160GB iPods that we can plug into our cars. some cars have built in hard drives now. why would we pay Sirius money to listen to music that we probably already own(rent), and when we can listen to it truly commercial free? i have an all 80s playlist with all of the music from the 80s that i love. why do i need to pay for it again?
secondly, Sirius is not commercial free. they advertise 100 commercial-free channels, but when i had Sirius (3 month trial membership that came with my car), i could never find one. and a 10 second commercial telling me what channel i am listening to, or telling me that i am listening to Sirius radio (because i must be that stupid) is still a commercial.
lastly, they are doing bad business. if you bought in and got a $300-$500 lifetime subscription, then they won't let you take it to different vehicles. it is only a lifetime subscription for that car. in other words, you helped the company out in the beginning by taking a chance, and you get screwed later on once they become successful (or not...). it's bad business, and after seeing a family member get screwed, why would i support a company who does that to people. just because 90% of the things i buy are made by 10-year-old chinese kids doesn't mean i dont have ethics.
my wife is a teacher. her standardized test scores for the past 2 years were (respectively) 100% and 98% (percentage is for amount of kids who "passed" the standardized test). she is doing this in a low-income school.
needless to say, when students do good, parents take credit. when they do bad, it is the teachers fault. truth is, it is a mix of both.
sadly enough, with NCLB, if my wife gets a 95% pass rate (still high. her school averages around 70-80%), she will be reprimanded. NCLB does not take previous test scores into account, so if a teacher gets a bad crop, they can be hurt.
i hope both candidates try to minimize the union. one teacher missed over 50 days of work at her school last year (and even screwed up on the standardized tests, voiding the scores, and ruining the bonus for the whole school), and she kept her job due to union protection.
parental involvement is key. it is what will change our education. as a parent, if you cannot name all of your kids current teachers, know an approximation of your child's grade, and are not making sure their homework is done every night, then you aren't doing enough. parents need to go to teachers and ask them, "honestly, is my child behind in his/her schoolwork? what can i do to help?", or "honestly, does my child have a behavior problem? what do you want me to do to hold up my end of the deal?" teachers already have a lot of suggestions, and are dying for parents to help. my wife goes through 60 kids in 6 hours, which means she could get 6 minutes a piece with each kid if she wanted to. there is no way that she can give them all individual attention. parents have to discipline.
first, i have to worry about my job getting shipped to India. now it is great to know that the gov't will want me to release the software i write. our small business is gonna make it, i promise!
the average income of a teacher in Oklahoma is about $30,000, which means they get about $22k or so after taxes. The head of the Teacher's Union makes over $100k a year to represent those who make less than a third. yuck.
unions are good if you still have a workforce that can protest and stop buying goods that they don't support.
if people dont like their jobs going to India/China, then they shouldnt buy products from companies who outsource that way. but we as a society/culture have lost the ability to take a stand for something. joining a union is not the way around that.
the problem is, we have lost the ability to take our business and our employment elsewhere, and we have lost the ability to support each other and protest the greedy processes being imposed by those at the top.
this is why wal-mart never has to worry about unions. the people who work there can only afford to shop there and no place else, so there is no way they could officially protest.
i would love this. at 6'3", 300 lbs, knowing that i wouldn't have police to answer to and hold me accountable would be awesome. no more money. i will just let my fists make the payments.
my wife is a teacher, and she eats, sleeps, and breathes teaching for 9 months out of the year, often times putting in 10 to 12 hour days for very little pay.
when kids fail, it is not her fault, it is the parents' fault.
parents need to discipline their kid, make them shut up and listen, and quit crying ADD, ODD, ADHD..., and discipline their kids.
the problem with America's schools is that there is no punishment for badly behaving students, and therefore, students as a whole suffer. it is extremely hard to suspend a kid these days, even harder to expel one, and nearly impossible if the kid has an IED and has been giving any time of learning disability label, even something as minor as ADD.
after living with a teacher, i will never believe that it is her fault if a student fails (btw, her standardized testing has never fallen below a 98% passing rate, which means she is extremely competent). her most difficult task is getting parents involved and getting students disciplined.
I think scott is just talking out of his anus and is afraid he is going to sell less servers to the telco's to provide all these media services. exactly. what is his core business? selling hardware. what would bring him more revenue? if the big telcos would buy a ton of high dollar expensive hardware from him, and he is going to try to change the market and make statements like this in order to do so.
his job is to bring in money for Sun, and this would do it, which is why he says this. averagejoeblow.com can't afford a Sun data center, but AT&T running averagejoeblow.com can!
it would be infinitely bad for this. this is why Disney doesn't make TVs, or why Boeing doesn't run an airliner service, and its why Cisco doesn't own a telco. overextension is real, true, and can weaken your core business.
i've been searching this thread for someone who i thought had the same idea as me, and you are just about there.
i think it is fair to say that most of us went to college (not all of us graduated, but most of us went), and i think this is where you start, and here is why:
everyone who has done any programming in college, whether you were EE, CS, MIS, or whatever, had to program in a class where there was 1 or 2 guys who just "got it."
i graduated with a computer science degree, and i will be the first to admit that i am not a "star" programmer, much less a "superstar" programmer (that's not to say i don't have my strong points, and that i am worth any less). i look back at the classes we would take, and while there were 48 or 49 of us in the class who were struggling, worrying about the deadlines, and asking each other all sorts of questions, there was always 1 guy (maybe 2) who had the project done the first night it was assigned, he did it in only 2 hours, and it was going to be better than anything the rest of us could put together in our 40 or 50 hours of work.that is the guy you want to hire. that is the superstar
if you want the best of the best, go to colleges and ask the students "who is the best programmer? who is always setting the curve? if you could have the programming abilities and understanding of anyone else in your college class, who would it be?
you would find your superstar, sitting in a class of normal kids, and all you have to do is offer him/her a lot of money, a good place to work, and some freedom to do things the way they want.
i know what these guys are talking about when they say "superstar", and i've really only met one of them, and you are correct. they aren't even necessary.
none of us get to work on things that are "theoretical" or "ground breaking" in the field anyways, so having people who understand things so fluently is not necessary.
if you can find a superstar, hang onto him/her and give them a lot of money and a lot of work. if not, find people who work hard and find ways to keep them working.
the ideal thing to do with a superstar is to give them their own project so that they have free reign to create, and then when they create a completely awesome product, sell the hell out of it.
very true. if i think back, when i was a 16 years old, every female between the ages of 15 to 55 had an open offer from me to engage in anything and everything. i may not have actively solicited every woman in the world, but that was simply because i didn't have enough time...:-)
i wonder if random spam on myspace counts as a "solicit" or not, or if email/spam counts? if so, then i get propositioned about 20 times a week.
also, there are some kids out there who actively seek this stuff, and get many adults talking to them. if a 13 year old girl is actively participating in inappropriate behavior on line, and lets say gets 5 propositions or "solicitations", and 4 other girls just use the internet and never get a solicitation, does that mean that, out of 5 kids, 5 solicitations were made, and therefore it is a 1 to 1 ratio?
first of all, i don't mean to be a jerk. i try to pride myself on being cordial, and if i get testy, it is only because the subject excites me and because i actually have a lot invested in it. i am not a teacher, but my wife is, and i have to suffer because she has to stay late at school to meet parents who wont discipline.
I think the OP is referring to those teachers who fear that any breach of their authority is a threat to his control of the classroom. What those kinds of teachers don't understand is that a tirade against some prank is wasted on those not involved and welcomed by the perpetrators. this is a great point. i partially agree with you. (most) teachers do not, can not, and will not try to completely control their classroom. the good ones try to create an atmosphere where their students feel free to speak freely about appropriate material, and who try to promote proper socialization. they want their students to be able to ask questions if they have questions. even more, teachers want to promote the concept that students can teach each other.
but teachers must maintain a professional relationship with their students, and they must be viewed as the "boss" of the class. if not, students will constantly question their authority, and eventually get to the point where they are refusing work and disrupting the work of others. my wife has had kids who will flat out refuse to work. she will tell them to work on the assignment, and the kid will say no. what do you do to that? tell the kid to go to the office? what if they refuse that? the student must respect the teacher, and fear the parent. what if the parent doesnt care? it takes a mile of red tape to get a kid expelled.
pranks dont need to be the worry of a teacher. the prank needs to occupy the time of the parent. so in a way, you are completely right. a good parent will tell their kid that there will be hell to pay if they dont. and these internet pranks can severely affect a teacher. they can get a lot of parents involved, and when it comes to kids causing trouble, parents will inevitably protect their children, even if they are guilty, leaving the teacher out to dry. i am a firm believer that all pranks need to be snubbed and dealt with harshly.
The social networking sites provide tools to deal with this. You just have to know how to use them. i completely agree. the teachers need to educate themselves on what they need to do to maintain privacy, but i think this applies to anyone in the western world nowadays. it does not excuse childrens' behavior though, nor the inability for parents to regulate it. when personal life starts affecting the classroom, a reaction must be created (like if a kid starts showing up with bruises). we have all sorts of rules in place for reacting for when students are abused, but what about when teachers are the brunt of the joke? there is a difference between some petty comments from one kid to another online, but defacing a teachers reputation is another thing entirely, and could affect their status for many years.
children are doing a lot of this on their personal computers at home, and yet the teachers have to deal with it in the classroom.
also, i learned to program in high school, and i am now a successful programmer. i would have been at a disadvantage in my field if i had not started in high school.
Teachers invest way too much in their authority.. they freak out when kids figure out a way to subvert it, so the situation escaletes to litigation.
authority is the only thing that teachers have that can force kids (anyone under the age of about 24 or 25 is still just a kid) to listen and obey. that main sound a bit scary and totalitarian, but guess what, that is the way it is for the rest of your life.
in the work place, you have a boss. he must maintain his authority and invest in it heavily in order to get his workers to work hard, especially in today's competitive world, to keep his business afloat. he must demand the respect of his employees so that work gets done, and people dont spend all day posting comments on slashdot..:-)
if you have a job, go to work tomorrow and subvert your boss. go above him/her and start calling the shots, belittle him/her, and try to minimize the value of his/her existence. i dare you. if you own your own business, go to your customers and try and go above their heads, cutting them out of the loop, or better yet, tell them that they make bad decisions, and that you are going to decide things for them for their own good. you will fail, and do you know why?
your boss, just like your teacher, answers to someone else. they are part of an entire process that is oblivious to you, and you dont even know it. they attend meetings, conferences, teleconferences, customers' offices, and perform more duties than you probably know about. teachers are the same way.
do you know why they need authority? teachers (like my wife) get a 4 year degree from an accredited university, spend a semester student teaching for free, and then must go back for a semester of graduate school (meaning they spend 5 years in college). they are under constant supervision, and if they mistep one bit, then reactionist parents will be there to tell her how inherently wrong she is. teachers answer to their principal, the superintendent, and the school board. that school board answers to the public, and they decide the curriculum based upon what the president and his staff deem as "necessary" for a student of X age to know. hence, you have standardized tests every year or two to gauge how much you know. if a student does bad, and lets say gets a 71% average, which is still a C, then the student can go on to the next grade. but guess what? the teacher receives demerits because a 71% is a horrible score.
But it's hard to ignore how absurd the high school classrom authority situation is
the high school classroom authority situation is only absurd because people like yourself (i am assuming you because you made and defend the point) make it so. in all actuality, if kids would just shut up, pay attention, do their homework, and follow the rules, they would have a lot more free time. a teacher has to cover a certain amount of material, which is decided by the school board. if kids would shut up and do the work, they could blaze through it, and then you could really spend time on things that would expand your mind and truely progress your education; things that could propel you above the rest so that you have an edge in the job market.
it is understandable that you will spend a lot of hours with a teacher and be able to develop a repetoire with him/her, but they have to maintain authority because you wont do a damn thing if they dont. if you are so willing to subvert your teacher, hell, why not subvert the principal. why feed into his authoritarian attitude and situation? you may know more about a subject than a teacher, and you may even be smarter than them on a whole. in 8th grade, i had better ACT and SAT scores than most of my teachers, but knowing what i know now, it doesnt mean a thing. life lessons, work experience, and the ability to adapt and thrive in a given situation means more than any score, and it is something that people in high school, and even college, have yet to experience
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well, it's really not that simple.
NASA operates all over the world, including just about every Air Force base that the US has. considering that each Air Force has it's own budget, yet NASA and other agencies are paid for support, you can't just roll out new systems.
anything "new" has to be bought by the "customer" (i.e. an Air Force base), in which NASA can support the product. the problem is, if a new rollout costs $10 million, and it will increase efficiency and safety while lowering potential support costs, it is still more economical (i say convenient) for each Air Force base to pay $300k (or whatever amount) to just fix the stuff that breaks and live with what they have. yeah, those costs rise ever year, but the problem is that budgets are thin, and if it ain't Dept of Homeland Security, then it won't get funded. and a lot of what NASA does is not "defense" applicable (atmospheric science, oceanic science, engineering, geographical science...). add on the resistance of the existing workforce to incorporate newer technology (and the time and $$$ it takes to train them), and you make it even harder.
no one likes using legacy stuff (especially in software), but you don't have a choice if the customer won't buy the newer products. it's a common problem, and one that I have personally experienced when working with NASA.
i worked for a government agency in partnership with NASA, and unfortunately we were told last year that our budget was stagnant for 3 years in a row and wasn't going up (possibly down).
it is pretty ridiculous to keep budgets stagnant or to lower them and then expect the same output or better. inflation, hardware price increases (we used a lot of legacy systems that were very expensive), annual raises (believe me, not much), and everything else make up the shoestring budget that we were running off of. i don't understand all of the NASA budget cuts. it is an investment into science and our future. and a lot more goes on under NASA than just rockets and spaceships.
there is no such thing as a boycott in this day-and-age. the last successful boycott was with Don Imus, and i can't remember one before that.
in order for a boycott to work, it needs a lot of exposure. lots of TV coverage and radio play. else, how would anyone else know that there is a boycott. a bunch of collective nerds deciding not to buy iTunes music won't do a thing.
and no one cares. i can guarantee that, out of my wife, mother, father, brother, mother-in-law, father-in-law and brother-in-law, i am the only one who could tell you what DRM is, and all of them have bought songs from iTunes. DRM isn't bad. it is put in place because so many people dishonestly rip and share music. i buy iTunes music and don't care about the DRM. i can play it on my iPhone, iPod, and 5 computers.
how does the DRM even affect me? the only time it has been a problem is when i am trying to give music to my friends, which is illegal anyways.
i would only join a union if i could join another union that would police the first union.
my wife is a teacher, and you have to be a member of the teachers' union just to get protection from other teachers who are in the union. if budget cuts hit the school and they need to get rid of teachers, they will keep the union teachers and fire the non-union. it doesn't matter if the non-union teachers' scores are twice as good as the others'.
collective bargaining is completely necessary. but when unions exist for the sake of the existence of the union itself, then things go down the tank. the UAW is a key example of this.
i have been around government workers, and if you even think about checking their performance at all, you'll have a million union grievances filed against you.
i dont think that unions are necessary in today's world.
the teaser for this story is bad. it really has nothing to do with the guy who discovered it, and is more about the industry itself. the story doesn't even say if the guy who discovered it is reasonably successful or not. blah.
this article was written by a self-aware PC who is tired of the human race's waste of time and energy.
i am actually for some regulation. not really of any content, but to force the larger companies to be more open. fact is, the Internet/phone backbone was built using taxpayer money. if that is the case, then the taxpayers have a vested interest in competition and choosing their providers. minimally, all public institutions should be on a government owned/operated network.
large companies like Sprint have paid off enough local FCC chairs that they are now deregulated, and are gladly unplugging all other ISPs that don't belong to the top 6 or 7. fees just to open the plug-in process are over $10,000 a month, and the bigger ISPs aren't even required to do anything. many local companies here have spent $10,000 for several months, having an open account with AT&T, and AT&T is allowed to sit on their hands because they can. you can pay $10,000 to AT&T and request that they hook you up at the local CO, and they will gladly take the money and say "Thanks for making a formal request", and that is it. end of story.
and here in Oklahoma, AT&T is even double billing the local schools and libraries, but the FCC won't do anything about it. AT&T has a contract in Oklahoma to provide schools/libraries with connections for a certain base price, but because the schools/libraries get and pay their own bills, AT&T sends them bills with higher rates, knowing that the local mayoral staff won't have any clue on what they are supposed to pay.
truth is, we should have an easy way to link into a system that was built with taxpayer money. and we need to actually be able to VOTE on what these big ISPs do, and not rely on the incredibly corrupt state FCC.
Sirius XM does not have a single commercial free channel. a 10-second promo for Sirius XM itself or the channel that one is listening to is still a commercial. even worse, you can hear commercials for other Sirius XM channels on a given "commercial free" channel. if it ain't music, and it ain't a DJ, it is a commercial. if i am watching "The Office", and NBC shows me stuff for "30 Rock", then i just saw a commercial.
Sirius XM's stock price is a good representative of the company. I would not invest in something that has deteriorated 97%.
and the new subscribers are not paying as much as they should. we got a call to renew our Sirius XM subscription (got it free for 3 months with our car), and the guy started out at $12.99 a month, and worked his way down all the way to $4.99 a month, and we still turned it down. how desparate can one be to make a sale?
and Sirius XM is losing my money for one major reason: iPod connections. i have an iPod with 30 GB of my favorite music on there that i have already paid for and have spent time organizing. and by the way, my "70's playlist" doesn't need to advertise for itself or for my "Rainy Day" playlist. i've spent the time organizing my music for my office and home, why not use it in the car. that makes Sirius XM obsolete.
and Sirius f*cked over my mother when she bought a lifetime subscription 5 or so years ago, and no one told her that it was locked down to the current vehicle that she was using. so she got screwed out of that money. was pretty sneaky to have that in the fine print.
there are a few reasons that Sirius is failing.
first of all, the iPod/music players/built-in-hard-drives are killing the need for Sirius. we have all spent countless hours working on our music collections, and we now have them (or a portion of them) on our 160GB iPods that we can plug into our cars. some cars have built in hard drives now. why would we pay Sirius money to listen to music that we probably already own(rent), and when we can listen to it truly commercial free? i have an all 80s playlist with all of the music from the 80s that i love. why do i need to pay for it again?
secondly, Sirius is not commercial free. they advertise 100 commercial-free channels, but when i had Sirius (3 month trial membership that came with my car), i could never find one. and a 10 second commercial telling me what channel i am listening to, or telling me that i am listening to Sirius radio (because i must be that stupid) is still a commercial.
lastly, they are doing bad business. if you bought in and got a $300-$500 lifetime subscription, then they won't let you take it to different vehicles. it is only a lifetime subscription for that car. in other words, you helped the company out in the beginning by taking a chance, and you get screwed later on once they become successful (or not...). it's bad business, and after seeing a family member get screwed, why would i support a company who does that to people. just because 90% of the things i buy are made by 10-year-old chinese kids doesn't mean i dont have ethics.
just my two cents.
spot on.
my wife is a teacher. her standardized test scores for the past 2 years were (respectively) 100% and 98% (percentage is for amount of kids who "passed" the standardized test). she is doing this in a low-income school.
needless to say, when students do good, parents take credit. when they do bad, it is the teachers fault. truth is, it is a mix of both.
sadly enough, with NCLB, if my wife gets a 95% pass rate (still high. her school averages around 70-80%), she will be reprimanded. NCLB does not take previous test scores into account, so if a teacher gets a bad crop, they can be hurt.
i hope both candidates try to minimize the union. one teacher missed over 50 days of work at her school last year (and even screwed up on the standardized tests, voiding the scores, and ruining the bonus for the whole school), and she kept her job due to union protection.
parental involvement is key. it is what will change our education. as a parent, if you cannot name all of your kids current teachers, know an approximation of your child's grade, and are not making sure their homework is done every night, then you aren't doing enough. parents need to go to teachers and ask them, "honestly, is my child behind in his/her schoolwork? what can i do to help?", or "honestly, does my child have a behavior problem? what do you want me to do to hold up my end of the deal?" teachers already have a lot of suggestions, and are dying for parents to help. my wife goes through 60 kids in 6 hours, which means she could get 6 minutes a piece with each kid if she wanted to. there is no way that she can give them all individual attention. parents have to discipline.
yay! oss for the government! there goes my job.
first, i have to worry about my job getting shipped to India. now it is great to know that the gov't will want me to release the software i write. our small business is gonna make it, i promise!
the average income of a teacher in Oklahoma is about $30,000, which means they get about $22k or so after taxes. The head of the Teacher's Union makes over $100k a year to represent those who make less than a third. yuck.
unions are good if you still have a workforce that can protest and stop buying goods that they don't support.
if people dont like their jobs going to India/China, then they shouldnt buy products from companies who outsource that way. but we as a society/culture have lost the ability to take a stand for something. joining a union is not the way around that.
the problem is, we have lost the ability to take our business and our employment elsewhere, and we have lost the ability to support each other and protest the greedy processes being imposed by those at the top.
this is why wal-mart never has to worry about unions. the people who work there can only afford to shop there and no place else, so there is no way they could officially protest.
maybe the government paid off Apple, which is why the iPhone still won't take video. sounds like a conspiracy to me...
i would love this. at 6'3", 300 lbs, knowing that i wouldn't have police to answer to and hold me accountable would be awesome. no more money. i will just let my fists make the payments.
busting your average "joe blow" cop won't do anything. another will just take his place.
now if we could use cameras to track union officials and political party advisors and administration officials, we would really have something.
i agree that homework doesnt make the student.
parents make the student.
my wife is a teacher, and she eats, sleeps, and breathes teaching for 9 months out of the year, often times putting in 10 to 12 hour days for very little pay.
when kids fail, it is not her fault, it is the parents' fault.
parents need to discipline their kid, make them shut up and listen, and quit crying ADD, ODD, ADHD..., and discipline their kids.
the problem with America's schools is that there is no punishment for badly behaving students, and therefore, students as a whole suffer. it is extremely hard to suspend a kid these days, even harder to expel one, and nearly impossible if the kid has an IED and has been giving any time of learning disability label, even something as minor as ADD.
after living with a teacher, i will never believe that it is her fault if a student fails (btw, her standardized testing has never fallen below a 98% passing rate, which means she is extremely competent). her most difficult task is getting parents involved and getting students disciplined.
his job is to bring in money for Sun, and this would do it, which is why he says this. averagejoeblow.com can't afford a Sun data center, but AT&T running averagejoeblow.com can!
it would be infinitely bad for this. this is why Disney doesn't make TVs, or why Boeing doesn't run an airliner service, and its why Cisco doesn't own a telco. overextension is real, true, and can weaken your core business.
i've been searching this thread for someone who i thought had the same idea as me, and you are just about there.
i think it is fair to say that most of us went to college (not all of us graduated, but most of us went), and i think this is where you start, and here is why:
everyone who has done any programming in college, whether you were EE, CS, MIS, or whatever, had to program in a class where there was 1 or 2 guys who just "got it."
i graduated with a computer science degree, and i will be the first to admit that i am not a "star" programmer, much less a "superstar" programmer (that's not to say i don't have my strong points, and that i am worth any less). i look back at the classes we would take, and while there were 48 or 49 of us in the class who were struggling, worrying about the deadlines, and asking each other all sorts of questions, there was always 1 guy (maybe 2) who had the project done the first night it was assigned, he did it in only 2 hours, and it was going to be better than anything the rest of us could put together in our 40 or 50 hours of work.that is the guy you want to hire. that is the superstar
if you want the best of the best, go to colleges and ask the students "who is the best programmer? who is always setting the curve? if you could have the programming abilities and understanding of anyone else in your college class, who would it be?
you would find your superstar, sitting in a class of normal kids, and all you have to do is offer him/her a lot of money, a good place to work, and some freedom to do things the way they want.
i think that you are spot on.
i know what these guys are talking about when they say "superstar", and i've really only met one of them, and you are correct. they aren't even necessary.
none of us get to work on things that are "theoretical" or "ground breaking" in the field anyways, so having people who understand things so fluently is not necessary.
if you can find a superstar, hang onto him/her and give them a lot of money and a lot of work. if not, find people who work hard and find ways to keep them working.
the ideal thing to do with a superstar is to give them their own project so that they have free reign to create, and then when they create a completely awesome product, sell the hell out of it.
very true. if i think back, when i was a 16 years old, every female between the ages of 15 to 55 had an open offer from me to engage in anything and everything. i may not have actively solicited every woman in the world, but that was simply because i didn't have enough time... :-)
i wonder if random spam on myspace counts as a "solicit" or not, or if email/spam counts? if so, then i get propositioned about 20 times a week.
also, there are some kids out there who actively seek this stuff, and get many adults talking to them. if a 13 year old girl is actively participating in inappropriate behavior on line, and lets say gets 5 propositions or "solicitations", and 4 other girls just use the internet and never get a solicitation, does that mean that, out of 5 kids, 5 solicitations were made, and therefore it is a 1 to 1 ratio?
I think the OP is referring to those teachers who fear that any breach of their authority is a threat to his control of the classroom. What those kinds of teachers don't understand is that a tirade against some prank is wasted on those not involved and welcomed by the perpetrators. this is a great point. i partially agree with you. (most) teachers do not, can not, and will not try to completely control their classroom. the good ones try to create an atmosphere where their students feel free to speak freely about appropriate material, and who try to promote proper socialization. they want their students to be able to ask questions if they have questions. even more, teachers want to promote the concept that students can teach each other.
but teachers must maintain a professional relationship with their students, and they must be viewed as the "boss" of the class. if not, students will constantly question their authority, and eventually get to the point where they are refusing work and disrupting the work of others. my wife has had kids who will flat out refuse to work. she will tell them to work on the assignment, and the kid will say no. what do you do to that? tell the kid to go to the office? what if they refuse that? the student must respect the teacher, and fear the parent. what if the parent doesnt care? it takes a mile of red tape to get a kid expelled.
pranks dont need to be the worry of a teacher. the prank needs to occupy the time of the parent. so in a way, you are completely right. a good parent will tell their kid that there will be hell to pay if they dont. and these internet pranks can severely affect a teacher. they can get a lot of parents involved, and when it comes to kids causing trouble, parents will inevitably protect their children, even if they are guilty, leaving the teacher out to dry. i am a firm believer that all pranks need to be snubbed and dealt with harshly.
perfect!
children are doing a lot of this on their personal computers at home, and yet the teachers have to deal with it in the classroom.
also, i learned to program in high school, and i am now a successful programmer. i would have been at a disadvantage in my field if i had not started in high school.
Teachers invest way too much in their authority.. they freak out when kids figure out a way to subvert it, so the situation escaletes to litigation.
authority is the only thing that teachers have that can force kids (anyone under the age of about 24 or 25 is still just a kid) to listen and obey. that main sound a bit scary and totalitarian, but guess what, that is the way it is for the rest of your life.
in the work place, you have a boss. he must maintain his authority and invest in it heavily in order to get his workers to work hard, especially in today's competitive world, to keep his business afloat. he must demand the respect of his employees so that work gets done, and people dont spend all day posting comments on slashdot..:-)
if you have a job, go to work tomorrow and subvert your boss. go above him/her and start calling the shots, belittle him/her, and try to minimize the value of his/her existence. i dare you. if you own your own business, go to your customers and try and go above their heads, cutting them out of the loop, or better yet, tell them that they make bad decisions, and that you are going to decide things for them for their own good. you will fail, and do you know why?
your boss, just like your teacher, answers to someone else. they are part of an entire process that is oblivious to you, and you dont even know it. they attend meetings, conferences, teleconferences, customers' offices, and perform more duties than you probably know about. teachers are the same way.
do you know why they need authority? teachers (like my wife) get a 4 year degree from an accredited university, spend a semester student teaching for free, and then must go back for a semester of graduate school (meaning they spend 5 years in college). they are under constant supervision, and if they mistep one bit, then reactionist parents will be there to tell her how inherently wrong she is. teachers answer to their principal, the superintendent, and the school board. that school board answers to the public, and they decide the curriculum based upon what the president and his staff deem as "necessary" for a student of X age to know. hence, you have standardized tests every year or two to gauge how much you know. if a student does bad, and lets say gets a 71% average, which is still a C, then the student can go on to the next grade. but guess what? the teacher receives demerits because a 71% is a horrible score.
But it's hard to ignore how absurd the high school classrom authority situation is
the high school classroom authority situation is only absurd because people like yourself (i am assuming you because you made and defend the point) make it so. in all actuality, if kids would just shut up, pay attention, do their homework, and follow the rules, they would have a lot more free time. a teacher has to cover a certain amount of material, which is decided by the school board. if kids would shut up and do the work, they could blaze through it, and then you could really spend time on things that would expand your mind and truely progress your education; things that could propel you above the rest so that you have an edge in the job market.
it is understandable that you will spend a lot of hours with a teacher and be able to develop a repetoire with him/her, but they have to maintain authority because you wont do a damn thing if they dont. if you are so willing to subvert your teacher, hell, why not subvert the principal. why feed into his authoritarian attitude and situation? you may know more about a subject than a teacher, and you may even be smarter than them on a whole. in 8th grade, i had better ACT and SAT scores than most of my teachers, but knowing what i know now, it doesnt mean a thing. life lessons, work experience, and the ability to adapt and thrive in a given situation means more than any score, and it is something that people in high school, and even college, have yet to experience