That's an idealistic bunch of garbage. My wife is currently teaching at *University* and those kids can be absolutely vindictive. If they don't get the A that they think that deserve, then she gets a poor review. It doesn't matter that her office hours are more than most and is available to see students outside of them even without an appointment. None of that matters. Because, her students aren't getting a free ride and god forbid if they can't get away with taking a piss all year like they did in high school. Hell, they even flatly lie about what has happened. It's quite shocking.
In my experience, most of that kind of behavior is from a few reasons
A) Required classes, if you are teaching a required math class for a bunch of people who aren't majoring in a math based field, they really don't care about your class. Why? Because your class means nothing to their life, and most of the time thats correct. For required classes, making them easy is almost what you have to do, you can make them insightful, but ease is key, no one wants to waste time doing logarithms when what they really want to do is be a journalist.
B) Obscure grading guidelines, far too often teachers have things that they grade for the slightest thing that doesn't matter. I remember one teacher who failed kids on tests because their fraction bars were not long enough. Another who failed someone for having a slightly different typeface other than Times New Roman (and it was close to it, not like some weird font). Don't do that, that doesn't add anything to the class
These students today are all about the quick fix. And they'll go to get it and damn morality and ethics. Seriously, we should stop thinking of these kids as angels with halos over there heads. Because, for the most part, they are self serving little bastards.
Sure, but a lot of it is that most people have to get a college degree in order to get a job, even when they really should be getting only on the job training. Its part of the degrading of education in American society.
How? How about we go to where contracts are individually signed. So teacher A negotiates with the school district for a contract valid for a year, a set pay, benefits, etc. Teacher B negotiates for the a contract too, and so on. If teacher A manages to do something to deserve firing, they get fired and teacher B can keep teaching like normal.
In my opinion, unions are a bad thing, made even worse with some jobs that you have to join unions.
I've found that a good teacher can make students like them. Make students respect them. Who treats them as adults and not 5 year olds. A good teacher adapts course material to the class's demographics, if you have a required history class where most of the class isn't going to be historians, don't hammer in obscure dates of obscure events, doing that isn't learning. Focus on improving the student, not forcing them to memorize useless trivia.
But most students in high school at least know what they are doing after high school, and can evaluate the meaning of the class and how it is taught. For example, the teacher in a required math class shouldn't be stressing unimportant things for the majority of the class that is not going on to a higher math class or wants to do a math-based career. The teacher of a required English class should not fail a student because the margins of his/her paper were slightly less or more than what she wanted. The student who signed up for a finance class only to do lots of unrelated work knows that it is pointless.
About the only teachers that I can see who by being total dicks actually help you in the long run is math teachers, and that is only if you are going into a math-based discipline.
...And so abolish tenure. Give all teachers equal chance to get laid off or fired when the next year rolls around. Mr. Grump who everyone hates but can't fire because he has been in the district 40 years, shouldn't be immune to being laid off/fired.
Many schools already have this. The problem is, students are either too lazy to do this, or intentionally give terrible comments about teachers they dont like, regardless of that teacher's teaching ability.
The "lazy" student is used constantly by bad teachers. There are some teachers who can't teach, pure and simple. In order to boost their self esteem, they call students who simply can't learn the way they teach, lazy. Sure, there are some lazy students who won't do anything. And most teachers that can teach, the students like. The teachers who only have to explain things once because they make it crystal clear, the teachers who will spend a week going over a concept until the students grasp it, those are the teachers that students like. The type that can't teach, give pointless assignments, are strict about parts of grades that don't matter (like failing students because they picked a slightly different typeface other then Times New Roman) usually students hate.
Ex. A teacher has to constantly discipline a group of 5-7 students who disrupt class. When it comes time to do evaluations, these students all give the teacher terrible reviews. And, since it is done anonymously, there is no way to tell which students gave the evaluations, so there is no way to determine their bias against the teacher. The teacher is then fired because of those bad reviews, simply because some students didnt like the teacher disciplining them.
But usually teachers have 200 or more kids in a year, so those 5-7 would be quite insignificant.
But math is a strange subject. In order to use it, you have to do a lot of pointless crap. In required math classes, teachers should not try to fail students for not understanding an obscure math concept 75% of them won't ever think about again. There are many, many, many, jobs and disciplines where the use of a calculator, a good spreadsheet program, and basic math is all you will ever need in the way of math. For more advanced math, sure, be picky, but for the majority of us, the obscure math formula you say to memorize only will help us on the final, not ever in real life.
Nice teachers will simply be bullied untill they give in. High-school kids are highly observant of the level of authority a teacher has and once they see a weakness they can be quite merciless.
They don't need to be nice as in "I'm going to bake the class cookies" but rather nice as in "I'm not going to assign large amounts of meaningless work". I've had several teachers who were quite authoritative so people knew not to screw with them, but on the other hand they weren't total idiots, they admitted when they were wrong, didn't assign large amounts of meaningless work, didn't try to fail students, and were generally pleasant to learn from.
The people who are left are either split between people who have some natural authority and dickheads(the kind you read about in this article). A lot of teachers see students correcting them as an assault on their authority and they are partly right about this. Yes, the student may be right but admitting this may weaken the position the teacher has or aspires to have and thereby he has to carefully maneuvre between admitting his faults and maitaining order in the classroom(and over the students in general).
But by admitting faults you don't lose any authority and gain respect. Some of the things were such obvious mistakes that even with solid evidence they didn't believe. For example, a high school science teacher tried to tell us that blood in veins were blue. When we used evidence to prove that he was wrong, he dismissed it and kept telling us that veins were blue to spite us.
Remember that a high-school student spends around 5 years in a high-school but a teacher needs to maintain his position many times longer and that can cause the teacher to become ridgid. Personally, I see this as in inevitability though through good planning the damage can be minimized.
The one thing they can do, is treat high school students like adults. They aren't meant to be told to do this and this and this, but rather use reasoning and logic and such.
Thats one of the problems, theres no real way of measuring talent. I've had teachers with many years of college who can't teach while I've learned many things from the entry level teacher thats fresh out of college.
The TIFF file format is unusual in comparison to other image formats, in that it is composed of small descriptor blocks containing offsets into the file which point to the actual pixel image data (composed of bands of pixel rows). This means that incorrect offset values can cause programs to attempt to read erroneous portions of the file or attempt to read past the physical end of file. Like most other image file formats, improperly encoded packet or line lengths within the file can cause poorly written rendering programs to overflow their internal buffers. Properly-written image rendering programs generally avoid such pitfalls.
Which basically means, buffer overflows are trivial to do with TIFF. Then there is the fact that libtiff has several exploits (as mentioned by a previous poster) that still exist in the most stable version of it.
How about Students, give students an anonymous evaluation form to put their feelings of teachers on them, then when the time comes to get rid of unnecessary teachers, its easier to get rid of the ones where the students can't learn in. Because, most students can easily identify teachers they don't like and can't learn from, and face it, even if you have a PhD in mathematics, yet your algebra students are totally confused, you aren't doing your job as a teacher and should be let go.
I think most nerds have had bad experiences with teachers in public school. Because either teachers count off for the most ridiculous things, have a personal bias against some things (and will fail you if you think otherwise), have a personal vendetta against students who (rightfully) correct them, or many other things that are wrong with our public school system.
Why even include TIFF support in the PSP if you were trying to lock people out of homebrew? TIFF, by nature, will contain more exploitable code then other image formats (based on how the image is stored and other technical specs of the TIFF format), and is much lesser used compared to JPEG, PNG, GIF, and the dozens of other image formats we use on a daily basis. But the inclusion of TIFF seems puzzling, unless by default various Sony products save things as TIFF, there doesn't seem to be any need for it.
...Except for the fact that the videos are DRM-ed and doesn't really work. If I remember correctly you can't play HD content on "non-authorized" monitors, and forget about putting it on anything other then an iPod/iPhone/Windows or OS X machine/Apple TV. This basically means that it is much better to buy the DVD version of the shows so you can do what you want with your purchased content.
Like another poster said, oil will be still needed ~300 years from now even if we make our cars run on hydrogen/electricity/solar/etc. to make plastics, etc. Then there is the fact that more oil = lower oil prices = cheaper gas, which we can all agree is a good thing until alternative cars become reliable/affordable. Then there is the fact that oddly enough, Russia is friendlier towards the USA than most middle eastern countries so honestly Russian oil is better then oil from the middle east.
But the net can and will exist in anarchy. You assume that if we take down all regulations regarding the internet, it would become a train wreck. It won't because people are naturally orderly.
But that doesn't make any sense either, because then you could get sued for a situation like this:
A) Create a website that violates some law in one country that is part of the EU, such as distributing Nazi texts which (as far as I know) is illegal in Germany, but legal in some EU nations such as the UK (where they actually have some shell of freedom of speech)
B) The website is hosted in a legal country such as the UK and all maintainers of it live, work, and have all financial ties in the UK
C) Germany brings charges against you
That just doesn't make any sense (not that most governments do), and seems contrary to having independent nation's laws rather then general EU laws.
How can they be tried in Italy? That doesn't make any sense unless the founders A) Lived in Italy B) Had Itallian bank accounts or other finances C) Did (physical) business in Italy with a physical presence.
Well, its for their future version of Office, Office 2010 will be MS's version of EMACS! I hear however that Apple's newest version of iWork will be based on VI though, while Oracle since they have taken over Sun will release Star/Open Office where you edit everything using ED.
because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems
Well, presumably they couldn't break into it because they didn't get a warrant. This is a Good Thing in principle. You don't want the government randomly breaking into e-mail accounts that are "suspect" do you? Then there is always the question of how do you know what e-mail it is? Unless they were subscribing to some terrorist newsletter, how do you distinguish a terrorist from an ordinary person?
And there is nothing that specifies that an author must be compensated (which is good since a lot of what is created is worthless). However, it specifically states that no one besides the original creator may be compensated, unless they give up this right. This is a important part of copyright.
Then copyright infringement on the internet should be legal. No one gets compensated in any way, no one gets anything stolen in any way.
Then, in response to your original comment, how will authors get compensation from publishers if the publisher is free to copy and distribute his work without paying him?
Simple, non disclosure agreements. Whenever an author sends a copy of his work to a prospective publisher, they can add in an agreement that they agree not to publish this information in any form for 10 years unless another contract invalidates it. If the publishers like the work, they can agree for a contract that sets the pricing of the book, how much money goes to the author on the sale of the book, how much up front they want to pay for the book, etc. Thus allowing the author to be compensated for 10 years (which, is a good amount of protection due to the NDA) and no one loses rights and we don't have eternal copyright.
Um, just Google "Android Data" you will find sites wondering where exactly Android Data is, because there seems to be no company website, etc. So no, in this case I don't think Android Data is close in the least to being confused with Android the cell platform.
Every infected is likely to infect an additional 2-3.
If everyone wears the masks, disease transmission ends and the pandemic is over.
Thats assuming everyone will wear their masks, never take them off, 24/7. We know this to be impossible.
If X people wear the masks, disease transmission can be significantly reduced, even if X is a relatively small percentage of the population.
Not unless the X people were infected. The masks do very, very, very, very little to protect you from swine flu. Then, those infected would have to keep them on 24/7 even when sneezing, which is unlikely because the first instinct when you are going to sneeze with those things on is to take them off.
Then why do we have 36,000 people a year dying from it? That's a hundred people a day (on average).
For a lot of reasons. One, the vaccine is not perfect, some years they get the strain wrong and you got a shot for nothing. Two, a lot of people don't get the flu shot, be it shortages of vaccines, cost, or the general pain of getting a shot. Three, a lot of flu deaths occur whenever the elderly are infected with the flu, and any moderately severe sickness can cause the same effects, its just that flu mutates so often and is so common that its the most typical sickness that would cause death. Four, the flu has about the same symptoms as a cold, in the workaholic culture of America where most bosses would rather you go to work half dead and spread the sickness around rather then go home, it can spread rapidly.
Why don't we do something about this? As it is, if you tried to wear a face mask on a plane, you'd probably end up in Guantanamo. But what if airlines actually encouraged people to wear face masks? What if airlines handed out free face masks?
So, face masks tend to be a bit stuffy. Well, you know how some planes had those nozzles of air you could aim at yourself. What if instead the planes had nozzles of virus-free air that you could hook a face mask up to (like the jacks to plug a headphone set into). You could blow enough air through the mask to keep the humidity down and make it nice and comfortable.
The technology exists to virtually eliminate flu transmission on airplanes - but somehow the political/cultural will just isn't there to make it happen.
Read http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8024605.stm which basically states that all the masks are good for is if you are sick they might help contain it. The masks are simply a placebo where the ignorant masses can buy some "protection" against an unseen foe.
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That's an idealistic bunch of garbage. My wife is currently teaching at *University* and those kids can be absolutely vindictive. If they don't get the A that they think that deserve, then she gets a poor review. It doesn't matter that her office hours are more than most and is available to see students outside of them even without an appointment. None of that matters. Because, her students aren't getting a free ride and god forbid if they can't get away with taking a piss all year like they did in high school. Hell, they even flatly lie about what has happened. It's quite shocking.
In my experience, most of that kind of behavior is from a few reasons
A) Required classes, if you are teaching a required math class for a bunch of people who aren't majoring in a math based field, they really don't care about your class. Why? Because your class means nothing to their life, and most of the time thats correct. For required classes, making them easy is almost what you have to do, you can make them insightful, but ease is key, no one wants to waste time doing logarithms when what they really want to do is be a journalist.
B) Obscure grading guidelines, far too often teachers have things that they grade for the slightest thing that doesn't matter. I remember one teacher who failed kids on tests because their fraction bars were not long enough. Another who failed someone for having a slightly different typeface other than Times New Roman (and it was close to it, not like some weird font). Don't do that, that doesn't add anything to the class
These students today are all about the quick fix. And they'll go to get it and damn morality and ethics. Seriously, we should stop thinking of these kids as angels with halos over there heads. Because, for the most part, they are self serving little bastards.
Sure, but a lot of it is that most people have to get a college degree in order to get a job, even when they really should be getting only on the job training. Its part of the degrading of education in American society.
How? How about we go to where contracts are individually signed. So teacher A negotiates with the school district for a contract valid for a year, a set pay, benefits, etc. Teacher B negotiates for the a contract too, and so on. If teacher A manages to do something to deserve firing, they get fired and teacher B can keep teaching like normal.
In my opinion, unions are a bad thing, made even worse with some jobs that you have to join unions.
I've found that a good teacher can make students like them. Make students respect them. Who treats them as adults and not 5 year olds. A good teacher adapts course material to the class's demographics, if you have a required history class where most of the class isn't going to be historians, don't hammer in obscure dates of obscure events, doing that isn't learning. Focus on improving the student, not forcing them to memorize useless trivia.
But most students in high school at least know what they are doing after high school, and can evaluate the meaning of the class and how it is taught. For example, the teacher in a required math class shouldn't be stressing unimportant things for the majority of the class that is not going on to a higher math class or wants to do a math-based career. The teacher of a required English class should not fail a student because the margins of his/her paper were slightly less or more than what she wanted. The student who signed up for a finance class only to do lots of unrelated work knows that it is pointless.
About the only teachers that I can see who by being total dicks actually help you in the long run is math teachers, and that is only if you are going into a math-based discipline.
...And so abolish tenure. Give all teachers equal chance to get laid off or fired when the next year rolls around. Mr. Grump who everyone hates but can't fire because he has been in the district 40 years, shouldn't be immune to being laid off/fired.
Many schools already have this. The problem is, students are either too lazy to do this, or intentionally give terrible comments about teachers they dont like, regardless of that teacher's teaching ability.
The "lazy" student is used constantly by bad teachers. There are some teachers who can't teach, pure and simple. In order to boost their self esteem, they call students who simply can't learn the way they teach, lazy. Sure, there are some lazy students who won't do anything. And most teachers that can teach, the students like. The teachers who only have to explain things once because they make it crystal clear, the teachers who will spend a week going over a concept until the students grasp it, those are the teachers that students like. The type that can't teach, give pointless assignments, are strict about parts of grades that don't matter (like failing students because they picked a slightly different typeface other then Times New Roman) usually students hate.
Ex. A teacher has to constantly discipline a group of 5-7 students who disrupt class. When it comes time to do evaluations, these students all give the teacher terrible reviews. And, since it is done anonymously, there is no way to tell which students gave the evaluations, so there is no way to determine their bias against the teacher. The teacher is then fired because of those bad reviews, simply because some students didnt like the teacher disciplining them.
But usually teachers have 200 or more kids in a year, so those 5-7 would be quite insignificant.
But math is a strange subject. In order to use it, you have to do a lot of pointless crap. In required math classes, teachers should not try to fail students for not understanding an obscure math concept 75% of them won't ever think about again. There are many, many, many, jobs and disciplines where the use of a calculator, a good spreadsheet program, and basic math is all you will ever need in the way of math. For more advanced math, sure, be picky, but for the majority of us, the obscure math formula you say to memorize only will help us on the final, not ever in real life.
Nice teachers will simply be bullied untill they give in. High-school kids are highly observant of the level of authority a teacher has and once they see a weakness they can be quite merciless.
They don't need to be nice as in "I'm going to bake the class cookies" but rather nice as in "I'm not going to assign large amounts of meaningless work". I've had several teachers who were quite authoritative so people knew not to screw with them, but on the other hand they weren't total idiots, they admitted when they were wrong, didn't assign large amounts of meaningless work, didn't try to fail students, and were generally pleasant to learn from.
The people who are left are either split between people who have some natural authority and dickheads(the kind you read about in this article). A lot of teachers see students correcting them as an assault on their authority and they are partly right about this. Yes, the student may be right but admitting this may weaken the position the teacher has or aspires to have and thereby he has to carefully maneuvre between admitting his faults and maitaining order in the classroom(and over the students in general).
But by admitting faults you don't lose any authority and gain respect. Some of the things were such obvious mistakes that even with solid evidence they didn't believe. For example, a high school science teacher tried to tell us that blood in veins were blue. When we used evidence to prove that he was wrong, he dismissed it and kept telling us that veins were blue to spite us.
Remember that a high-school student spends around 5 years in a high-school but a teacher needs to maintain his position many times longer and that can cause the teacher to become ridgid. Personally, I see this as in inevitability though through good planning the damage can be minimized.
The one thing they can do, is treat high school students like adults. They aren't meant to be told to do this and this and this, but rather use reasoning and logic and such.
Thats one of the problems, theres no real way of measuring talent. I've had teachers with many years of college who can't teach while I've learned many things from the entry level teacher thats fresh out of college.
The TIFF file format is unusual in comparison to other image formats, in that it is composed of small descriptor blocks containing offsets into the file which point to the actual pixel image data (composed of bands of pixel rows). This means that incorrect offset values can cause programs to attempt to read erroneous portions of the file or attempt to read past the physical end of file. Like most other image file formats, improperly encoded packet or line lengths within the file can cause poorly written rendering programs to overflow their internal buffers. Properly-written image rendering programs generally avoid such pitfalls.
Which basically means, buffer overflows are trivial to do with TIFF. Then there is the fact that libtiff has several exploits (as mentioned by a previous poster) that still exist in the most stable version of it.
How about Students, give students an anonymous evaluation form to put their feelings of teachers on them, then when the time comes to get rid of unnecessary teachers, its easier to get rid of the ones where the students can't learn in. Because, most students can easily identify teachers they don't like and can't learn from, and face it, even if you have a PhD in mathematics, yet your algebra students are totally confused, you aren't doing your job as a teacher and should be let go.
I think most nerds have had bad experiences with teachers in public school. Because either teachers count off for the most ridiculous things, have a personal bias against some things (and will fail you if you think otherwise), have a personal vendetta against students who (rightfully) correct them, or many other things that are wrong with our public school system.
Why even include TIFF support in the PSP if you were trying to lock people out of homebrew? TIFF, by nature, will contain more exploitable code then other image formats (based on how the image is stored and other technical specs of the TIFF format), and is much lesser used compared to JPEG, PNG, GIF, and the dozens of other image formats we use on a daily basis. But the inclusion of TIFF seems puzzling, unless by default various Sony products save things as TIFF, there doesn't seem to be any need for it.
...Except for the fact that the videos are DRM-ed and doesn't really work. If I remember correctly you can't play HD content on "non-authorized" monitors, and forget about putting it on anything other then an iPod/iPhone/Windows or OS X machine/Apple TV. This basically means that it is much better to buy the DVD version of the shows so you can do what you want with your purchased content.
Like another poster said, oil will be still needed ~300 years from now even if we make our cars run on hydrogen/electricity/solar/etc. to make plastics, etc. Then there is the fact that more oil = lower oil prices = cheaper gas, which we can all agree is a good thing until alternative cars become reliable/affordable. Then there is the fact that oddly enough, Russia is friendlier towards the USA than most middle eastern countries so honestly Russian oil is better then oil from the middle east.
But the net can and will exist in anarchy. You assume that if we take down all regulations regarding the internet, it would become a train wreck. It won't because people are naturally orderly.
Well, Egypt had basically a national slaughtering of pigs in order to "combat" the flu....
But that doesn't make any sense either, because then you could get sued for a situation like this:
A) Create a website that violates some law in one country that is part of the EU, such as distributing Nazi texts which (as far as I know) is illegal in Germany, but legal in some EU nations such as the UK (where they actually have some shell of freedom of speech)
B) The website is hosted in a legal country such as the UK and all maintainers of it live, work, and have all financial ties in the UK
C) Germany brings charges against you
That just doesn't make any sense (not that most governments do), and seems contrary to having independent nation's laws rather then general EU laws.
How can they be tried in Italy? That doesn't make any sense unless the founders A) Lived in Italy B) Had Itallian bank accounts or other finances C) Did (physical) business in Italy with a physical presence.
Really, this doesn't make any sense.
Well, its for their future version of Office, Office 2010 will be MS's version of EMACS! I hear however that Apple's newest version of iWork will be based on VI though, while Oracle since they have taken over Sun will release Star/Open Office where you edit everything using ED.
because they can't break into a Hotmail account, you know they've got problems
Well, presumably they couldn't break into it because they didn't get a warrant. This is a Good Thing in principle. You don't want the government randomly breaking into e-mail accounts that are "suspect" do you? Then there is always the question of how do you know what e-mail it is? Unless they were subscribing to some terrorist newsletter, how do you distinguish a terrorist from an ordinary person?
And there is nothing that specifies that an author must be compensated (which is good since a lot of what is created is worthless). However, it specifically states that no one besides the original creator may be compensated, unless they give up this right. This is a important part of copyright.
Then copyright infringement on the internet should be legal. No one gets compensated in any way, no one gets anything stolen in any way.
Then, in response to your original comment, how will authors get compensation from publishers if the publisher is free to copy and distribute his work without paying him?
Simple, non disclosure agreements. Whenever an author sends a copy of his work to a prospective publisher, they can add in an agreement that they agree not to publish this information in any form for 10 years unless another contract invalidates it. If the publishers like the work, they can agree for a contract that sets the pricing of the book, how much money goes to the author on the sale of the book, how much up front they want to pay for the book, etc. Thus allowing the author to be compensated for 10 years (which, is a good amount of protection due to the NDA) and no one loses rights and we don't have eternal copyright.
Um, just Google "Android Data" you will find sites wondering where exactly Android Data is, because there seems to be no company website, etc. So no, in this case I don't think Android Data is close in the least to being confused with Android the cell platform.
Every infected is likely to infect an additional 2-3. If everyone wears the masks, disease transmission ends and the pandemic is over.
Thats assuming everyone will wear their masks, never take them off, 24/7. We know this to be impossible.
If X people wear the masks, disease transmission can be significantly reduced, even if X is a relatively small percentage of the population.
Not unless the X people were infected. The masks do very, very, very, very little to protect you from swine flu. Then, those infected would have to keep them on 24/7 even when sneezing, which is unlikely because the first instinct when you are going to sneeze with those things on is to take them off.
Then why do we have 36,000 people a year dying from it? That's a hundred people a day (on average).
For a lot of reasons. One, the vaccine is not perfect, some years they get the strain wrong and you got a shot for nothing. Two, a lot of people don't get the flu shot, be it shortages of vaccines, cost, or the general pain of getting a shot. Three, a lot of flu deaths occur whenever the elderly are infected with the flu, and any moderately severe sickness can cause the same effects, its just that flu mutates so often and is so common that its the most typical sickness that would cause death. Four, the flu has about the same symptoms as a cold, in the workaholic culture of America where most bosses would rather you go to work half dead and spread the sickness around rather then go home, it can spread rapidly.
Why don't we do something about this? As it is, if you tried to wear a face mask on a plane, you'd probably end up in Guantanamo. But what if airlines actually encouraged people to wear face masks? What if airlines handed out free face masks? So, face masks tend to be a bit stuffy. Well, you know how some planes had those nozzles of air you could aim at yourself. What if instead the planes had nozzles of virus-free air that you could hook a face mask up to (like the jacks to plug a headphone set into). You could blow enough air through the mask to keep the humidity down and make it nice and comfortable. The technology exists to virtually eliminate flu transmission on airplanes - but somehow the political/cultural will just isn't there to make it happen.
Read http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8024605.stm which basically states that all the masks are good for is if you are sick they might help contain it. The masks are simply a placebo where the ignorant masses can buy some "protection" against an unseen foe.