European far right = American center. American far left = European center. European left = American very very far left. European right = American slightly left American left = European slightly right American Right = European very very far right.
What you'd call "out as far as left field" in america would be considered faily right wing in europe. So from our point of view, most of your major news stations are pretty damn right wing and FOX is the abode of crazy people who would be on a street corner shouting about the robots anywhere else in the world.
Last I checked, stealing credit card info was a crime (kind of like stealing a game is...), but protecting one's copyrighted content was not.
So a piece of software installed on my computer without my consent which collects my information without my consent is illegal? Subtle how you stuck in the note about game theft even though it has sweet fuck all to do with DRM. Protecting my land is legal, protecting my land with a field of land mines is not.
good comparison, for the more agressive forms of DRM it's like you've hooked it up to the mains power supply. Fair use being stamped on = putting the fence up over an old public Right of Way. Dial home DRM = renting out living space on your land then locking all your tenants out of their rooms when your phone breaks over the weekend and they can't call you.
The answer to that, of course, is to not agree to a license that explicitly states "this license is not transferable".
I wonder how it would hold up if I placed a "liscence" at the start of a book I was publishing saying that by turning the page they were agreeing to it and that they may never sell the book second hand or give it to anyone else.
Yes, because I'm sure DRM has nothing to do with piracy...
Correct. 100% correct. Once one person cracks a program and it hits the torrent sites the DRM does nothing, nada, zero, ziltch to prevent piracy. It only hurts legitamate users.
And locks on a house don't protect criminals from breaking in. But I bet you a hundred dollars you still have locks on your house.
awful awful awful analogy but I'll bite. It isn't like a lock on your house since every lock is different and takes time to open or they can just kick the door in, meatspace rules don't fit well. no. It would be more accurate to compare it to buying a house, the builders install a lock system which they hold the keys to, whenever you want to get into your house you have to take out your phone, call them and ask their permission to enter your house. Your friends are not allowed inside under any circumstances, if you want to sell your house you can't and once someone works out how to pick the lock on one door in the neighbourhood then all the doors pop open for them.
You mean like Spore?
Nope, I mean like ANYTHING. Show me a system like that which has been out for a resonable length of time which hasn't been cracked wide open. If you have any understanding of the technical aspects then you'll know that any DRM can and will be cracked provided legitamate users can get at what they've paid for. DRM is a joke.
Even if DRM doesn't work for 100% of cases as you keep maliciously claiming,
It works for 0.00% of cases. it it worthless. it it crap, it is snake oil. Any Exec who pays for it is a fool who should be fired by those above him and anyone who sells it should by jailed as a con artist.
And as I said, this is about DRM not piracy. the 2 have very little to do with each other. pirates never encounter DRM and people who have to deal with DRM are, almost by definition, using legit copies.
Tell me. by any chance do you work for a company selling DRM? Last time I heard the words "as you keep maliciously claiming" was from a snake oil(Homeopathy) salesman claiming he was selling the cure for everything who I called out as a fraud.
it's sort of sad to see how the situation with ISP's is going. A few years back there were thousands of them all keen to stab each other in the back and undercut each other. Caps kept dropping and quality was going up fast. Now we're down to a handful of providers who tend to play nice with each other. Caps are dropping, prices are rising, and it's harder than ever for anyone without a few hundred million spare change to get peering.
DRM prevents them from selling the game second hand and so devalues their purchase a great deal. Does this lost value factor in anywhere?
And we weren't talking about piracy. we were talking about DRM. DRM doesn't prevent piracy, it encourages it since people are often unwilling to install crap-ware on their PC's and the copy protection in no way at all affects people with pirated copies. Only users who have paid for a copy ever see the DRM. Games get cracked before they're even released so what good is DRM?
How does DRM encourage creativity? It doesn't. unless you count teenage hackers learning about disassembling programs to be encouragement of creativity.
Company execs who think DRM prevents piracy are fools and hacks who sell DRM software to those companies are con artists who should be prosecuted as such since they're selling the software equivalent of snake oil.
How are map editors any more a part of the game than DRM?
How was the music on sony CD's any more part of the music than the sony rootkit? It's all just bits and bytes. If I install a free game which infects me with a virus which listens for credit card details it's still just bits and bytes.Is the keylogger less a part of the game than anything else?Would the eula save them then?
PunkBuster, VAC, nProtect, DMW Anticheat, Warden. All intentional, all prevent you from doing things, all installed with the game
Prevent you from doing things *which impact other players of the game*. also they're simply not as obnoxious. Just because I object to software X does not mean I have to object to software Y just becase they're similar when software X, when it comes down to it, is designed to screw me over and hurts my game experience and software Y is designed to stop others screwing me over or hurting my game experience.
well go back a bit and the given was that imaginary things were imaginary and so not subject to any of that kind of crap, of course now with more and more people being paid good money to make imaginary things it makes sense to pretend they're like solid objects. I could equally ask where someone elses inherent right to stop me from saying something to my friend, writing something down and giving it to my friend, playing a song and giving a copy to my friend comes from since IP law makes it illegal to do those things if the thing I'm saying is a copyrighted work, the written item is a copy of a copyrighted book or the song is copyrighted.
Just don't forget that IP law is the less natural of the 2 here. it may be useful to pretend that IP is something solid and real but it isn't an obious truth of the world.
Cases where women are denied drugs, in the example antibiotics, simply because the prescriptions have been issued by a women's clinic which performed abortions.
Funding for treatment, education and condoms gets denied because religious nutcases are in charge and isn't granted unless the education becomes "education" and only mentions abstinance only and the birth control gets removed entirely.
So yes. people do get denied treatment for religous "moral reasons" because they fit the wrong profile or got their prescriptions from the wrong clinic. It most certainly is bullshit. Sheep who let the local priest think for them do tend to hate whores and gays and do everything they can to make life harded for them.
They were rejected by other fundamentalist Christians
You don't think there's more than 1 group of fundamentalist muslims? You truely believe they all agree with each other and that the mainstream doesn't reject the worst examples?
I don't see how they would, they're a part of the game, just a part that not everyone uses with somewhat dull gameplay.
What about the game uninstaller, that's a separate executable that doesn't have game content.
who used the phrase "separate executable that doesn't have game content"? the uninstaller performs a useful fuction for me.
Multiplayer clients? Mod tools? Registry settings? DLLs?
Mostly all part of the game and few of which try to prevent me from doing something. There's a difference between a mistake and an intentional action. A game which screws up some system settings due to an error: mistake. DRM which burns out CD drives which try to copy CDs: intentional.
And what about https traffic? I believe the keys used to encrypt the data are normally thrown away after they are used. Is the gov't going to require all business's to forward the keys to these servers?
You have no idea, this has been proposed in the past. They don't like encryption so
1: you must give up your key when asked. even if you don't have it, it was computer generated or deleted long ago. on pain of sitting in a jail cell for a few years.
2: Ministers have tried to push for a system where all encryption keys you use be sent to a "trusted" 3rd party like the UK government or your ISP. Fortunatly this one was shot down by people with a clue.
But who's going to install it? people of a political bent who oppose your wiretaping. The sort of people who will be first against the wall when the military coup comes.
If this became a big thing and my company maintained a toll road then I'd be looking for ways to create phantom "traffic jams" on alternative routes. This sounds like a trust based system.
Well this is a decent point. It's impossible to create a truely random number generator in software but you can create one in hardware which, for example, measures the decay of radioactive particals or some such.
But in that case it still doesn't mean AI is impossible, something is still artificial even if some of it's capabilities have to be instituted in hardware rather than software.
Who is the better chef? Emeril Lagasse or Jose Andreas? Far more people would pick Emeril despite the fact that he doesn't know crap about half the stuff he does on his show. Chefs recognize Andreas as a standout talent. Do the people really have the more accurate assessment?
If you limited it to people who actually ate the food you'd get the most accurate result.
The idea that "consumers" or "clients" are the best judge of a professional's skill is rooted firmly in ignorance and a self-centered view of the world.
The idea that "consumers" or "clients" are the best judge of the quality of the service that has been provided to them is rooted firmly in reality. A teacher can have all the skill in the world but if they only use it when they're being assessed once a year then it's fuck all use.
Are you seriously suggesting that we judge a director's skill by the number of people who like their movies?
While art critics would like to believe that only their opinions count that is when it comes down to it the ultimate test of a directors skill. To be able to tell a story well to a lot of people.
The problems come when picking the good ones out of the ones that just try to make students happy and separating the bad ones from the ones that students just didn't like ("I'm getting an A and they didn't treat me special!", "They held me back because of dumb people!" "They made me do too much homework!") That is where students usually fail quite often. Here's a bit of statistical fun: Check student's assessment of teacher quality against the attractiveness of the teacher. No really. Give it a try. Then come back here and tell me that students are an acceptable measure of teacher quality. Bonus points if you can do it with a straight face.
Ok, lets have a glance at my old schools entries. Discounting teachers with less than 5 ratings since a single 5,5,5 rating is meaningless but 50 good or bad says something.
Top rated.: ratings have 3 numbers. Easiness,Helpfulness,Clarity easiness is not counted towards the rating and can be considered a plus or a minus as it can mean they made a hard subject easy or were just easy on their students.
first place: a teacher in her late 40's early 50's who somehow I can't imagine the boys dreaming about. sample comment: 2,5,4 "how she got me to pass higher chemistry i will never know , great teacher - witty too !!:)" 3,5,5 "she is so helpful teaching chemistry.she manages to break things down to such simple terms to help us understand." 5,5,5 "learn learn learn learn learn" With long list of comments similar and a few about her taking a group to Rome and other things she did outside of class. I had her myself and she was a fantastic teacher.
In the top 10 I see 3 lookers and a few who look like rasins left in the sun too long. I see 2 who terrified me when I was in their classes but who damn well hammered it into my head. For an example of the first 3 comments on one of those: 1 3 5 SCARY!!!!! 3 5 5 Best teacher in the school by far !!!!!!!! Should be glad to have her 1 5 3 Great teacher, scary as hell.
Now for the bottom 10: rock bottom: the teacher I mentioned earlier. Comments: 1,1,1 "its sum laf in her class we get ta do anyting we want i don no 1 bit of french do...." 1,1,1 "the school should receive the bill for the cost of the grinds she forces students to take"
In the bottom 10... nope, not all ugly people.
You have an exceptionally low view of students but when you see comment like "Made me hate every moment of every class with her - but got an excellent result so there must be method in her madness!" with a high rating then you really have to question whether perhaps student opinions might be worth something after all.
you seem to want to get your revenge on every teacher for the actions of a tiny mino
Well sooner or later wages have to go up if they want to fill the teaching jobs. Do teachers get sued personally? here schools tend to be registered as companies so any such lawsuit would be against the school with the teacher as an employee, not against the teacher.
So students viewpoints are completely worthless? If you were ever a teacher I can't imagine you were a very good one with that attitude.
And you're kidding yourself if you think students can identify good teacher better than other teachers.
Or that a group of diners can identify a good cheff better than another cheff who never eats the food from that cheff. Or that a group of readers can identify a tallented author better than a critic who reads a single random page from the book.
That's bullshit and you know it. Other teachers are in a position to know who is nice and who can play office politics but in a fairly crappy position to judge teaching ability except when they get a class which has had another teacher for the same subject the year before.They are in a better position than the parents but they most certainly are not in a better position than the sudents. By any chance were you at some point a teacher who got rated as crap on that site?:D
Other teachers know what a teacher is like in the break room and how very nice they are to talk to. Students get to see what they're like teaching. Students are in the best position to judge a teacher. Final year students and graduates in particular as they tend to care more about the results.
False negatives are something which gets less press but can still be funny.
Girl I worked with was being driven home by her boyfriend. They get stopped at a checkpoint. He's cold sober but she's had enough alcohol to knock out a bull elephant. The officer taps on the window, window rolls down "could you blow on this please", "no problem", DING green light. At this point my very drunk workmate leans across her boyfriend "CAN I HAVE A GO!TEHEHEHE! You don't have to change the mouthpiece!". The police officer rolls her eyes but lets the mad drunk passenger blow into it as there were no other cars waiting. You guessed it. *DING green light* Que some odd looks from the officer and a great deal of lost faith in the technology.
1 weird custom computer like this would be much more trouble and much more expensive than simply buying 2 bog standard PC's and hooking each up to a separate network. it's best to KISS
Do you think that most school boards would give teachers raises to keep them competitive with other professions that require bachelor's degrees and continuing college credits throughout their careers?
As with any other profession, supply and demand.
I have a few other stories of other awful teachers but the drunken one was just the worst.And it's a national union here.
I'm not saying that the unions do nothing useful. Just that if you're a union rep then remember that sometimes the teacher really should be fired.
I'm curious, wherever you live did "ratemyteacher.com" ever get much attention? A few years back it seemed nobody used it but then it got noticed by the teachers union who somehow didn't understand the Streisand effect. A few irate union reps went on the radio and TV shouting about how the site should be BANNED or SHUT DOWN because it was so EVIL! Best. Advertisement. Ever. Every school kid in the country started looking at it. I taught my friends little brother who was still in the school how to bypass the censoring that the union insisted the schools should put in place to stop kids from looking at the site from the school computers:D.
I was quite surprised when I went to look at it myself. I was expecting nothing but complaints and griping but to be fair the kids went on to rate the good teachers as well. The shite teachers got rated to roughly match their skill at teaching. And it wasn't as much a popularity contest as the union claimed, teachers who people didn't like but got the info across were rated fairly at least in my old school. I remember a few hardass teachers who while not popular still ended up in the top 10 in the school. Of course the union took every kind of legal action imaginable to try to shut it down. God that was hilarious. Some of the teachers really got to care about that too, the lowest rated teacher briefly shot up with 50 ratings all in the same writing style and all rating her 5,5,5 before being knocked back down again.
Overall it looked remarkably accurate, the kids tend to have a much better view than those assessors who spend 30 minutes at the back of the class every few years.
Various government figures here have been trying to get rid of free college fees . They're gradually eating away at the setup. another 10 years and we'll be back in the old situation...
I'm not picking on the worst union, I'm simply talking about the union where I grew up where the drunk teacher example wasn't even an unusual case. I'm sure there are much worse unions out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Wooosh!
Lets explain this a little better:
European far right = American center.
American far left = European center.
European left = American very very far left.
European right = American slightly left
American left = European slightly right
American Right = European very very far right.
What you'd call "out as far as left field" in america would be considered faily right wing in europe.
So from our point of view, most of your major news stations are pretty damn right wing and FOX is the abode of crazy people who would be on a street corner shouting about the robots anywhere else in the world.
although by the standards of much of europe almost all american news stations are right wing.
Last I checked, stealing credit card info was a crime (kind of like stealing a game is...), but protecting one's copyrighted content was not.
So a piece of software installed on my computer without my consent which collects my information without my consent is illegal?
Subtle how you stuck in the note about game theft even though it has sweet fuck all to do with DRM.
Protecting my land is legal, protecting my land with a field of land mines is not.
good comparison, for the more agressive forms of DRM it's like you've hooked it up to the mains power supply.
Fair use being stamped on = putting the fence up over an old public Right of Way.
Dial home DRM = renting out living space on your land then locking all your tenants out of their rooms when your phone breaks over the weekend and they can't call you.
The answer to that, of course, is to not agree to a license that explicitly states "this license is not transferable".
I wonder how it would hold up if I placed a "liscence" at the start of a book I was publishing saying that by turning the page they were agreeing to it and that they may never sell the book second hand or give it to anyone else.
Yes, because I'm sure DRM has nothing to do with piracy...
Correct.
100% correct.
Once one person cracks a program and it hits the torrent sites the DRM does nothing, nada, zero, ziltch to prevent piracy. It only hurts legitamate users.
And locks on a house don't protect criminals from breaking in. But I bet you a hundred dollars you still have locks on your house.
awful awful awful analogy but I'll bite. It isn't like a lock on your house since every lock is different and takes time to open or they can just kick the door in, meatspace rules don't fit well.
no. It would be more accurate to compare it to buying a house, the builders install a lock system which they hold the keys to, whenever you want to get into your house you have to take out your phone, call them and ask their permission to enter your house. Your friends are not allowed inside under any circumstances, if you want to sell your house you can't and once someone works out how to pick the lock on one door in the neighbourhood then all the doors pop open for them.
You mean like Spore?
Nope, I mean like ANYTHING.
Show me a system like that which has been out for a resonable length of time which hasn't been cracked wide open.
If you have any understanding of the technical aspects then you'll know that any DRM can and will be cracked provided legitamate users can get at what they've paid for.
DRM is a joke.
Even if DRM doesn't work for 100% of cases as you keep maliciously claiming,
It works for 0.00% of cases. it it worthless. it it crap, it is snake oil.
Any Exec who pays for it is a fool who should be fired by those above him and anyone who sells it should by jailed as a con artist.
And as I said, this is about DRM not piracy. the 2 have very little to do with each other. pirates never encounter DRM and people who have to deal with DRM are, almost by definition, using legit copies.
Tell me. by any chance do you work for a company selling DRM? Last time I heard the words "as you keep maliciously claiming" was from a snake oil(Homeopathy) salesman claiming he was selling the cure for everything who I called out as a fraud.
it's sort of sad to see how the situation with ISP's is going.
A few years back there were thousands of them all keen to stab each other in the back and undercut each other.
Caps kept dropping and quality was going up fast.
Now we're down to a handful of providers who tend to play nice with each other. Caps are dropping, prices are rising, and it's harder than ever for anyone without a few hundred million spare change to get peering.
DRM prevents them from selling the game second hand and so devalues their purchase a great deal. Does this lost value factor in anywhere?
And we weren't talking about piracy. we were talking about DRM.
DRM doesn't prevent piracy, it encourages it since people are often unwilling to install crap-ware on their PC's and the copy protection in no way at all affects people with pirated copies. Only users who have paid for a copy ever see the DRM.
Games get cracked before they're even released so what good is DRM?
How does DRM encourage creativity? It doesn't. unless you count teenage hackers learning about disassembling programs to be encouragement of creativity.
Company execs who think DRM prevents piracy are fools and hacks who sell DRM software to those companies are con artists who should be prosecuted as such since they're selling the software equivalent of snake oil.
How are map editors any more a part of the game than DRM?
How was the music on sony CD's any more part of the music than the sony rootkit?
It's all just bits and bytes. If I install a free game which infects me with a virus which listens for credit card details it's still just bits and bytes.Is the keylogger less a part of the game than anything else?Would the eula save them then?
PunkBuster, VAC, nProtect, DMW Anticheat, Warden. All intentional, all prevent you from doing things, all installed with the game
Prevent you from doing things *which impact other players of the game*.
also they're simply not as obnoxious. Just because I object to software X does not mean I have to object to software Y just becase they're similar when software X, when it comes down to it, is designed to screw me over and hurts my game experience and software Y is designed to stop others screwing me over or hurting my game experience.
*harder not harded
well go back a bit and the given was that imaginary things were imaginary and so not subject to any of that kind of crap, of course now with more and more people being paid good money to make imaginary things it makes sense to pretend they're like solid objects.
I could equally ask where someone elses inherent right to stop me from saying something to my friend, writing something down and giving it to my friend, playing a song and giving a copy to my friend comes from since IP law makes it illegal to do those things if the thing I'm saying is a copyrighted work, the written item is a copy of a copyrighted book or the song is copyrighted.
Just don't forget that IP law is the less natural of the 2 here. it may be useful to pretend that IP is something solid and real but it isn't an obious truth of the world.
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2006/5/8/113314/2024
Cases where women are denied drugs, in the example antibiotics, simply because the prescriptions have been issued by a women's clinic which performed abortions.
Funding for treatment, education and condoms gets denied because religious nutcases are in charge and isn't granted unless the education becomes "education" and only mentions abstinance only and the birth control gets removed entirely.
So yes. people do get denied treatment for religous "moral reasons" because they fit the wrong profile or got their prescriptions from the wrong clinic. It most certainly is bullshit.
Sheep who let the local priest think for them do tend to hate whores and gays and do everything they can to make life harded for them.
which is different in no way at all.
They were rejected by other fundamentalist Christians
You don't think there's more than 1 group of fundamentalist muslims?
You truely believe they all agree with each other and that the mainstream doesn't reject the worst examples?
Do map editors count?
I don't see how they would, they're a part of the game, just a part that not everyone uses with somewhat dull gameplay.
What about the game uninstaller, that's a separate executable that doesn't have game content.
who used the phrase "separate executable that doesn't have game content"? the uninstaller performs a useful fuction for me.
Multiplayer clients? Mod tools? Registry settings? DLLs?
Mostly all part of the game and few of which try to prevent me from doing something.
There's a difference between a mistake and an intentional action.
A game which screws up some system settings due to an error: mistake.
DRM which burns out CD drives which try to copy CDs: intentional.
And what about https traffic? I believe the keys used to encrypt the data are normally thrown away after they are used. Is the gov't going to require all business's to forward the keys to these servers?
You have no idea, this has been proposed in the past. They don't like encryption so
1: you must give up your key when asked. even if you don't have it, it was computer generated or deleted long ago. on pain of sitting in a jail cell for a few years.
2: Ministers have tried to push for a system where all encryption keys you use be sent to a "trusted" 3rd party like the UK government or your ISP. Fortunatly this one was shot down by people with a clue.
But who's going to install it? people of a political bent who oppose your wiretaping. The sort of people who will be first against the wall when the military coup comes.
If this became a big thing and my company maintained a toll road then I'd be looking for ways to create phantom "traffic jams" on alternative routes. This sounds like a trust based system.
Well this is a decent point. It's impossible to create a truely random number generator in software but you can create one in hardware which, for example, measures the decay of radioactive particals or some such.
But in that case it still doesn't mean AI is impossible, something is still artificial even if some of it's capabilities have to be instituted in hardware rather than software.
Who is the better chef? Emeril Lagasse or Jose Andreas? Far more people would pick Emeril despite the fact that he doesn't know crap about half the stuff he does on his show. Chefs recognize Andreas as a standout talent. Do the people really have the more accurate assessment?
If you limited it to people who actually ate the food you'd get the most accurate result.
The idea that "consumers" or "clients" are the best judge of a professional's skill is rooted firmly in ignorance and a self-centered view of the world.
The idea that "consumers" or "clients" are the best judge of the quality of the service that has been provided to them is rooted firmly in reality. A teacher can have all the skill in the world but if they only use it when they're being assessed once a year then it's fuck all use.
Are you seriously suggesting that we judge a director's skill by the number of people who like their movies?
While art critics would like to believe that only their opinions count that is when it comes down to it the ultimate test of a directors skill. To be able to tell a story well to a lot of people.
The problems come when picking the good ones out of the ones that just try to make students happy and separating the bad ones from the ones that students just didn't like ("I'm getting an A and they didn't treat me special!", "They held me back because of dumb people!" "They made me do too much homework!") That is where students usually fail quite often. Here's a bit of statistical fun: Check student's assessment of teacher quality against the attractiveness of the teacher. No really. Give it a try. Then come back here and tell me that students are an acceptable measure of teacher quality. Bonus points if you can do it with a straight face.
Ok, lets have a glance at my old schools entries.
Discounting teachers with less than 5 ratings since a single 5,5,5 rating is meaningless but 50 good or bad says something.
Top rated.: ratings have 3 numbers. Easiness,Helpfulness,Clarity easiness is not counted towards the rating and can be considered a plus or a minus as it can mean they made a hard subject easy or were just easy on their students.
first place: a teacher in her late 40's early 50's who somehow I can't imagine the boys dreaming about. :)"
sample comment:
2,5,4 "how she got me to pass higher chemistry i will never know , great teacher - witty too !!
3,5,5 "she is so helpful teaching chemistry.she manages to break things down to such simple terms to help us understand."
5,5,5 "learn learn learn learn learn"
With long list of comments similar and a few about her taking a group to Rome and other things she did outside of class.
I had her myself and she was a fantastic teacher.
In the top 10 I see 3 lookers and a few who look like rasins left in the sun too long. I see 2 who terrified me when I was in their classes but who damn well hammered it into my head.
For an example of the first 3 comments on one of those:
1 3 5 SCARY!!!!!
3 5 5 Best teacher in the school by far !!!!!!!! Should be glad to have her
1 5 3 Great teacher, scary as hell.
Now for the bottom 10:
rock bottom: the teacher I mentioned earlier.
Comments:
1,1,1 "its sum laf in her class we get ta do anyting we want i don no 1 bit of french do...."
1,1,1 "the school should receive the bill for the cost of the grinds she forces students to take"
In the bottom 10... nope, not all ugly people.
You have an exceptionally low view of students but when you see comment like "Made me hate every moment of every class with her - but got an excellent result so there must be method in her madness!" with a high rating then you really have to question whether perhaps student opinions might be worth something after all.
you seem to want to get your revenge on every teacher for the actions of a tiny mino
Well sooner or later wages have to go up if they want to fill the teaching jobs. Do teachers get sued personally? here schools tend to be registered as companies so any such lawsuit would be against the school with the teacher as an employee, not against the teacher.
So students viewpoints are completely worthless? If you were ever a teacher I can't imagine you were a very good one with that attitude.
And you're kidding yourself if you think students can identify good teacher better than other teachers.
Or that a group of diners can identify a good cheff better than another cheff who never eats the food from that cheff.
Or that a group of readers can identify a tallented author better than a critic who reads a single random page from the book.
That's bullshit and you know it. Other teachers are in a position to know who is nice and who can play office politics but in a fairly crappy position to judge teaching ability except when they get a class which has had another teacher for the same subject the year before.They are in a better position than the parents but they most certainly are not in a better position than the sudents. By any chance were you at some point a teacher who got rated as crap on that site? :D
Other teachers know what a teacher is like in the break room and how very nice they are to talk to. Students get to see what they're like teaching. Students are in the best position to judge a teacher. Final year students and graduates in particular as they tend to care more about the results.
False negatives are something which gets less press but can still be funny.
Girl I worked with was being driven home by her boyfriend. They get stopped at a checkpoint. He's cold sober but she's had enough alcohol to knock out a bull elephant.
The officer taps on the window, window rolls down "could you blow on this please", "no problem", DING green light.
At this point my very drunk workmate leans across her boyfriend "CAN I HAVE A GO!TEHEHEHE! You don't have to change the mouthpiece!". The police officer rolls her eyes but lets the mad drunk passenger blow into it as there were no other cars waiting.
You guessed it.
*DING green light*
Que some odd looks from the officer and a great deal of lost faith in the technology.
Yet still- Why?
1 weird custom computer like this would be much more trouble and much more expensive than simply buying 2 bog standard PC's and hooking each up to a separate network. it's best to KISS
Do you think that most school boards would give teachers raises to keep them competitive with other professions that require bachelor's degrees and continuing college credits throughout their careers?
As with any other profession, supply and demand.
I have a few other stories of other awful teachers but the drunken one was just the worst.And it's a national union here.
I'm not saying that the unions do nothing useful. Just that if you're a union rep then remember that sometimes the teacher really should be fired.
I'm curious, wherever you live did "ratemyteacher.com" ever get much attention? :D.
A few years back it seemed nobody used it but then it got noticed by the teachers union who somehow didn't understand the Streisand effect.
A few irate union reps went on the radio and TV shouting about how the site should be BANNED or SHUT DOWN because it was so EVIL!
Best. Advertisement. Ever.
Every school kid in the country started looking at it.
I taught my friends little brother who was still in the school how to bypass the censoring that the union insisted the schools should put in place to stop kids from looking at the site from the school computers
I was quite surprised when I went to look at it myself. I was expecting nothing but complaints and griping but to be fair the kids went on to rate the good teachers as well. The shite teachers got rated to roughly match their skill at teaching. And it wasn't as much a popularity contest as the union claimed, teachers who people didn't like but got the info across were rated fairly at least in my old school. I remember a few hardass teachers who while not popular still ended up in the top 10 in the school.
Of course the union took every kind of legal action imaginable to try to shut it down.
God that was hilarious. Some of the teachers really got to care about that too, the lowest rated teacher briefly shot up with 50 ratings all in the same writing style and all rating her 5,5,5 before being knocked back down again.
Overall it looked remarkably accurate, the kids tend to have a much better view than those assessors who spend 30 minutes at the back of the class every few years.
Various government figures here have been trying to get rid of free college fees . They're gradually eating away at the setup. another 10 years and we'll be back in the old situation...
I'm not picking on the worst union, I'm simply talking about the union where I grew up where the drunk teacher example wasn't even an unusual case.
I'm sure there are much worse unions out there.