Absolutely right. This is an attempt to take billions of dollars and shift it to private industry. Romney referred to us as "Company" and not a "Country" the other day. We're at the point where I'm nostalgic for Bush II calling us "Consumers" instead of "Citizens". The middle class was created when wealth was redistributed down. Those at the top have spent the last 60 years working to reverse that, and they've nearly succeeded. Four years of Romney with a Republican congress will seal the deal.
Yes, it is. First off, you're not just dealing with the students, you're dealing with (sometimes) batshit-crazy parents, in addition to your own supervisory chain. You're dealing with 25 students in a room, 12 of which have IEPs or 504 documentation, and you may or may not have any in-room support for those kids, depending on the subject area and district. And you're having to deal with students who just won't do the work or are disruptive, you're likely to get little support from the school in terms of disciplining the kid, and often less from the kid's parents.
Most programmers - most professionals - don't have to deal with that many individual people - and aren't expected to both cater to them and produce results - to the same degree as teachers. It's exhausting. And when you look at what charter schools are attempting to get teachers to do (and mind you, the charters often do a crap job of actually supporting their teachers), it's little wonder that a high proportion of charter school teachers quit after one or two years. BTW, the least effective teaching years for a teacher? The first two or three years. If your school has a high percentage of teachers with less than four years of experience, it's not going to be as good. I'm sure some of the/. readers will object to that, but there are a significant number of studies that have shown it over the years.
In addition, there's the pressure that if you can't get through to a kid, they're behind next year, and maybe more the year after that. And trust me, that bothers them. You're constantly battling to get kids to recognize that something is in their long-term benefit. Most goddamn adults can't figure that out.
Yeah, but Ryan isn't a baby boomer. He was born in 1970, so that either puts him on the tail end of Gen X if you've extended past the "original" timeframe used for that term, or else early GenY. As a slightly-older GenX, I couldn't stand this kind of jackass 25 years ago, and I can't stand them now. He's clearly in love with himself, and how clever he thinks he is, and he somehow doesn't think he's relied on other people to get there. And let's not forget that he's only managed to get a couple of pieces of meaningless legislation (naming a post office and lowering excise tax on arrow shafts) through Congress in 14 years..
Hell, he even thinks he's brilliant enough to reconcile Catholicism and Objectivism. That's a level of mental contradiction that's only possible if you're shallow or delusional - or you're just a power-hungry, cynical political hack who doesn't have any real principles.
Arguably, Hawaii could as well, The original annexation wasn't legally voted on by congress (the treaty was never ratified), so the statehood vote may or may not count.
No, it can't. The only tablet I'm aware of that can do any sort of enterprise auth out of the box (against Active Directory) is the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet (Android). You can use your AD password to lock/unlock the device. They also preload a Citrix client into the tablets.
Apple is pretty hostile towards GPLv3. They won't distribute any code licensed under it. That's almost certainly why they stuck with an older version of Samba in OS X until they could replace it with their own implementation. Pretty much, once something goes GPLv3, they're going to fork & maintain, or rewrite from scratch.
Does anyone think that a serious candidate who would threaten the surveillance agencies' plans would ever get to the presidency, or even to a major party nomination? Any dirt on candidates or their families would appear from "anonymous sources" well before that happens.
I seriously doubt the the NSA - even if ordered by a court or by whoever the current administration is at the time - would actually stop collecting the data or to delete the data in question
Weirdly - they're shipping really nice cameras. The Alpha A77 and A65, as well as the compact system NEX-7, are really good by any measure, and fantastic for the money. Of course, the A77 and A65 have a Minolta lineage, and some parts of the NEX-7 do as well. But the new OLED electronic viewfinder in those cameras is industry-leading, and the new sensor is terrific. And their top-end lenses are as good as anyone's. Sony's actually putting more thought into their digital imaging products than a lot of other camera makers at this point.
Does anyone think any candidate unacceptable to the intelligence/national security apparatus in this country would even get past the primary, if even the smallest bit of dirt could be found on them and passed to the media? Because I sure have my doubts.
It's worse than that - they're actually pushing costs off onto wifi providers. Any crowded place with unmetered wifi - Coffee shops, college networks, hotels, etc. are getting hammered by crap like this, and in some cases aren't budgeted for it. And it's not "just get another access point" - it's the amount of traffic - 802.11 and otherwise - in that spectrum. There's a point where there's just too much traffic, and adding additional equipment won't fix the problem. We can't turn every room into a Faraday Cage. Even crowded apartment buildings are starting to see problems with interference between apartments.
And, yes, I am making a value judgement on the feature. If you've got working fingers, you can type and not bother the rest of us with your voice. This is on par with Nextel users who used to use the "push to talk" feature back in the day, would hold the phone a foot away from their face, and yell into it while the phone blasted the other party out on a speaker. This using this thing around other people is the aural equivalent of someone going out of their way to fart in a crowded room.
Oracle uses anti-competitive licensing for RDBMS to promote their OS and hardware. They allow you to pay for per-vCPU licensing (assuming CPU-based licensing) if you're using their version of Xen under their "Unbreakable" Linux, but if you're using a different platform - RedHat/Xen, RedHat/KVM, VMware, SuSE/Xen, etc, you have to pay for each CPU core in the host, regardless of how many vcpus you've assigned to the VM. And they've made moves to try to force RedHat users to switch to "Unbreakable" - look at the mess around ASMlib support.
And it looks like they're moving to a model where users of IBM and HP's higher-end systems will pay more per CPU for Oracle than those running SOracle hardware (they're discounting 25% on SPARC).
As of last spring, Oracle's hardware shipments were down by a whopping 40% vs. the pre-sale Sun numbers. So they're attempting to use their dominant position - and let's not fool ourselves about how big a player they are - in the RDBMS market to "encourage" customers to use other Oracle products.
We won't invest in teachers' training and pay, because educational material and educational technology companies lobby hard to get contracts. We won't invest in training TSA agents training and pay, because contractors would rather sell the government security technology that doesn't work. Investing in the people - which DOES work, isn't on the table. And privatization? The pre-9/11 privatized security worked SO well. And, hey, doesn't Edison Schools have a great terrific record?
Their cronies and paid politicians will prevent these companies from being held to account. After all, we wouldn't want to interfere with taxpayer-funded free enterprise.
And even the non-content producing cable-operating ISPs (Cablevision, Verizon, etc) have to worry about the networks and studios and what sort of terms are negotiated and fees are paid as contracts come up for renewal. And there's the looking threat of Congress passing additional regulations that could be more expensive to implement.
Yes, that's right, they actually use the phrase 'AL-QAEDA' MASSACRE above the headline NORWAY'S 9/11. Now that it's a right-wing extremist, he'll just be a lunatic instead of it being a plot.
Research-based methods don't lead to big profits for educational reform advocates (paid consulting gigs, speaking engagements), those who run private schools and publishers or scantily-researched educational materials. We've now got the educational equivalent of defense contractors selling weapons to the military that they don't want and that don't work.
Good luck in a lot of places finding a public library that's open when you'd need it to be. Public libraries are closing or cutting hours and services at an alarming rate.
One of the problems with educational reformers is that things that work on a small scale - only put in the best teachers, get parents involved, etc. can't always be replicated on a large scale. And they need to realize that. You can't have 100% excellent teachers. What's the current number - not even a third of the US population gets a 4-year college degree? Exactly how can we pay to have millions of brilliant teachers? Especially when teachers are under attack, there's pressure to drive pay down, etc. And a huge part of public school problems are actually societal problems. We've got drugs, crime, malnutrition, poverty, uninvolved/absent parents, lead poisoning, lousy school facilities and so forth. And the public schools can't cherry pick.
And at a time when standardized tests are being used to evaluate teachers and schools, the kids have no stake in the tests. And there's a ton of pressure (some of it based on the raft of IEPs given to students for all sorts of reasons - some legit, some ridiculous) to grade kids based on effort and not outcome. You want to make adjustments for kids with issues? Provide both absolute and adjusted grades.
And the cost to support students with learning or behavioral problems is high. It's not unheard of now to have a classroom with three or four kids with individual aides, plus there's an assistant teacher to deal with kids who have less-stringent IEPs, plus the lead teacher. Unless, of course, you teach art, music, industrial arts, etc. Then, the aides get that as a break period. So you've got 25 kids in the room - a bunch of whom get aides in other classes and some for behavioral reasons - with no help. And you received no training in how to deal with those students as part of your education.
Try getting a company like Google or Microsoft, when they're trying to sell you hosted services, to say anything other than "we comply with lawful requests for information from governments". Note that they don't just mean your government. They mean the government of any country, and if it's a country they do business in, they have to weigh your business against access to an entire market. Which do you think they'll choose? They may try to dodge by only hosting the information in some geographical locations, but that doesn't help much.
And Target figures out the sales taxes quite easily. And they sell items that are taxable in some states (clothing for example), but not others.
Other web sites - Sears, Wal-Mart, etc.all manage to do this. It's got nothing to do with difficulty, it's Amazon not wanting to lose an advantage. By the way - Amazon could make money via their merchants program by making it more attractive to small internet retailers that don't want to handle computing tax themselves, or providing a paid SaaS service to compute sales tax for other sites.
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Absolutely right. This is an attempt to take billions of dollars and shift it to private industry. Romney referred to us as "Company" and not a "Country" the other day. We're at the point where I'm nostalgic for Bush II calling us "Consumers" instead of "Citizens". The middle class was created when wealth was redistributed down. Those at the top have spent the last 60 years working to reverse that, and they've nearly succeeded. Four years of Romney with a Republican congress will seal the deal.
Yes, it is. First off, you're not just dealing with the students, you're dealing with (sometimes) batshit-crazy parents, in addition to your own supervisory chain. You're dealing with 25 students in a room, 12 of which have IEPs or 504 documentation, and you may or may not have any in-room support for those kids, depending on the subject area and district. And you're having to deal with students who just won't do the work or are disruptive, you're likely to get little support from the school in terms of disciplining the kid, and often less from the kid's parents.
Most programmers - most professionals - don't have to deal with that many individual people - and aren't expected to both cater to them and produce results - to the same degree as teachers. It's exhausting. And when you look at what charter schools are attempting to get teachers to do (and mind you, the charters often do a crap job of actually supporting their teachers), it's little wonder that a high proportion of charter school teachers quit after one or two years. BTW, the least effective teaching years for a teacher? The first two or three years. If your school has a high percentage of teachers with less than four years of experience, it's not going to be as good. I'm sure some of the /. readers will object to that, but there are a significant number of studies that have shown it over the years.
In addition, there's the pressure that if you can't get through to a kid, they're behind next year, and maybe more the year after that. And trust me, that bothers them. You're constantly battling to get kids to recognize that something is in their long-term benefit. Most goddamn adults can't figure that out.
Yeah, but Ryan isn't a baby boomer. He was born in 1970, so that either puts him on the tail end of Gen X if you've extended past the "original" timeframe used for that term, or else early GenY. As a slightly-older GenX, I couldn't stand this kind of jackass 25 years ago, and I can't stand them now. He's clearly in love with himself, and how clever he thinks he is, and he somehow doesn't think he's relied on other people to get there. And let's not forget that he's only managed to get a couple of pieces of meaningless legislation (naming a post office and lowering excise tax on arrow shafts) through Congress in 14 years..
Hell, he even thinks he's brilliant enough to reconcile Catholicism and Objectivism. That's a level of mental contradiction that's only possible if you're shallow or delusional - or you're just a power-hungry, cynical political hack who doesn't have any real principles.
Arguably, Hawaii could as well, The original annexation wasn't legally voted on by congress (the treaty was never ratified), so the statehood vote may or may not count.
No, it can't. The only tablet I'm aware of that can do any sort of enterprise auth out of the box (against Active Directory) is the Lenovo Thinkpad tablet (Android). You can use your AD password to lock/unlock the device. They also preload a Citrix client into the tablets.
Apple is pretty hostile towards GPLv3. They won't distribute any code licensed under it. That's almost certainly why they stuck with an older version of Samba in OS X until they could replace it with their own implementation. Pretty much, once something goes GPLv3, they're going to fork & maintain, or rewrite from scratch.
Does anyone think that a serious candidate who would threaten the surveillance agencies' plans would ever get to the presidency, or even to a major party nomination? Any dirt on candidates or their families would appear from "anonymous sources" well before that happens.
I seriously doubt the the NSA - even if ordered by a court or by whoever the current administration is at the time - would actually stop collecting the data or to delete the data in question
Weirdly - they're shipping really nice cameras. The Alpha A77 and A65, as well as the compact system NEX-7, are really good by any measure, and fantastic for the money. Of course, the A77 and A65 have a Minolta lineage, and some parts of the NEX-7 do as well. But the new OLED electronic viewfinder in those cameras is industry-leading, and the new sensor is terrific. And their top-end lenses are as good as anyone's. Sony's actually putting more thought into their digital imaging products than a lot of other camera makers at this point.
Does anyone think any candidate unacceptable to the intelligence/national security apparatus in this country would even get past the primary, if even the smallest bit of dirt could be found on them and passed to the media? Because I sure have my doubts.
Older shows were sometimes altered for DVD release - music removed or changed, etc. - due to royalty issues.
And I can think of good movies that you can't really get on DVD today. Like the Stephen Frears film "Sammy and Rosie Get Laid".
It's worse than that - they're actually pushing costs off onto wifi providers. Any crowded place with unmetered wifi - Coffee shops, college networks, hotels, etc. are getting hammered by crap like this, and in some cases aren't budgeted for it. And it's not "just get another access point" - it's the amount of traffic - 802.11 and otherwise - in that spectrum. There's a point where there's just too much traffic, and adding additional equipment won't fix the problem. We can't turn every room into a Faraday Cage. Even crowded apartment buildings are starting to see problems with interference between apartments.
And, yes, I am making a value judgement on the feature. If you've got working fingers, you can type and not bother the rest of us with your voice. This is on par with Nextel users who used to use the "push to talk" feature back in the day, would hold the phone a foot away from their face, and yell into it while the phone blasted the other party out on a speaker. This using this thing around other people is the aural equivalent of someone going out of their way to fart in a crowded room.
It's not just Oracle. Android-based vendors are lining up to pay Microsoft as much as $10 a unit as well.
And, by the way, since Amazon isn't paying Google, it's possible Oracle will go after Amazon as well.
Oracle uses anti-competitive licensing for RDBMS to promote their OS and hardware. They allow you to pay for per-vCPU licensing (assuming CPU-based licensing) if you're using their version of Xen under their "Unbreakable" Linux, but if you're using a different platform - RedHat/Xen, RedHat/KVM, VMware, SuSE/Xen, etc, you have to pay for each CPU core in the host, regardless of how many vcpus you've assigned to the VM. And they've made moves to try to force RedHat users to switch to "Unbreakable" - look at the mess around ASMlib support.
And it looks like they're moving to a model where users of IBM and HP's higher-end systems will pay more per CPU for Oracle than those running SOracle hardware (they're discounting 25% on SPARC).
As of last spring, Oracle's hardware shipments were down by a whopping 40% vs. the pre-sale Sun numbers. So they're attempting to use their dominant position - and let's not fool ourselves about how big a player they are - in the RDBMS market to "encourage" customers to use other Oracle products.
They're going to be owned by the Russians in no time.
Small-government in the US these days means privatizing the profit, but socializing the cost and risk.
We won't invest in teachers' training and pay, because educational material and educational technology companies lobby hard to get contracts. We won't invest in training TSA agents training and pay, because contractors would rather sell the government security technology that doesn't work. Investing in the people - which DOES work, isn't on the table. And privatization? The pre-9/11 privatized security worked SO well. And, hey, doesn't Edison Schools have a great terrific record?
Their cronies and paid politicians will prevent these companies from being held to account. After all, we wouldn't want to interfere with taxpayer-funded free enterprise.
And even the non-content producing cable-operating ISPs (Cablevision, Verizon, etc) have to worry about the networks and studios and what sort of terms are negotiated and fees are paid as contracts come up for renewal. And there's the looking threat of Congress passing additional regulations that could be more expensive to implement.
In case anyone can't see why, check out the headline from News International's British tabloid, The Sun, on Saturday.
http://fleetstreetblues.blogspot.com/2011/07/sun-blames-al-qaeda-for-norway.html
Yes, that's right, they actually use the phrase 'AL-QAEDA' MASSACRE above the headline NORWAY'S 9/11. Now that it's a right-wing extremist, he'll just be a lunatic instead of it being a plot.
Research-based methods don't lead to big profits for educational reform advocates (paid consulting gigs, speaking engagements), those who run private schools and publishers or scantily-researched educational materials. We've now got the educational equivalent of defense contractors selling weapons to the military that they don't want and that don't work.
Good luck in a lot of places finding a public library that's open when you'd need it to be. Public libraries are closing or cutting hours and services at an alarming rate.
One of the problems with educational reformers is that things that work on a small scale - only put in the best teachers, get parents involved, etc. can't always be replicated on a large scale. And they need to realize that. You can't have 100% excellent teachers. What's the current number - not even a third of the US population gets a 4-year college degree? Exactly how can we pay to have millions of brilliant teachers? Especially when teachers are under attack, there's pressure to drive pay down, etc. And a huge part of public school problems are actually societal problems. We've got drugs, crime, malnutrition, poverty, uninvolved/absent parents, lead poisoning, lousy school facilities and so forth. And the public schools can't cherry pick.
And at a time when standardized tests are being used to evaluate teachers and schools, the kids have no stake in the tests. And there's a ton of pressure (some of it based on the raft of IEPs given to students for all sorts of reasons - some legit, some ridiculous) to grade kids based on effort and not outcome. You want to make adjustments for kids with issues? Provide both absolute and adjusted grades.
And the cost to support students with learning or behavioral problems is high. It's not unheard of now to have a classroom with three or four kids with individual aides, plus there's an assistant teacher to deal with kids who have less-stringent IEPs, plus the lead teacher. Unless, of course, you teach art, music, industrial arts, etc. Then, the aides get that as a break period. So you've got 25 kids in the room - a bunch of whom get aides in other classes and some for behavioral reasons - with no help. And you received no training in how to deal with those students as part of your education.
Try getting a company like Google or Microsoft, when they're trying to sell you hosted services, to say anything other than "we comply with lawful requests for information from governments". Note that they don't just mean your government. They mean the government of any country, and if it's a country they do business in, they have to weigh your business against access to an entire market. Which do you think they'll choose? They may try to dodge by only hosting the information in some geographical locations, but that doesn't help much.
Roads don't pay their own way, even with fuel taxes. All you're doing is deciding one is a necessity, and one isn't.
And Target figures out the sales taxes quite easily. And they sell items that are taxable in some states (clothing for example), but not others.
Other web sites - Sears, Wal-Mart, etc.all manage to do this. It's got nothing to do with difficulty, it's Amazon not wanting to lose an advantage. By the way - Amazon could make money via their merchants program by making it more attractive to small internet retailers that don't want to handle computing tax themselves, or providing a paid SaaS service to compute sales tax for other sites.
Weren't a fair number of them WDEF-based viruses on floppies?
Larger protests - may be picking up steam?
http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/13/a-bad-day-for-sultan.html