This is complete bullshit. Teachers work a ton of extra hours at home and at school. If not grading papers it's in after school activities because there's no budget to hire more employees.
I guess my mother shouldn't have won teacher of the year then, cause she certainly averages fewer hours per week than most professions. Lesson plans take a few hours a week, and you're given more than that much time in prep time during the work day.
Teachers work more hours per week than anyone I know.
Are you saying that you don't know anyone who works 60-70 hours a week, or are you saying that you know a single teacher who does?
I see you skipped math. Those 180 school days account for 36 weeks, or nearly 3/4 of a year, not 1/2 of a year.
I see you skipped reading comprehension. I mentioned that very shortly later in my post.
But you also have to allow that teacher still have to feed their families, and they aren't very likely to be able to find additional work during the time they are off.
My parents are both teachers. I was fed quite well, thank you, and they had no trouble finding work in the summer, which they only had to do for a few years to maintain the upper-middle-class lifestyle that my sister and I had. Don't forget another advantage of teachers is they never (that I've heard of) have to sign non-compete agreements, and are free to get any side jobs they want or need. Also don't forget a great health plan, a great pension plan, and great job security. If your goal in life is to be ultra-rich, teaching isn't for you, but if you just want a nice suburban life without having to ever worry about getting laid off and with greater than cost of living pay increases for the rest of your life, maybe it is. Hell, after the whole dot com fallout I've been looking into going back to school to become a teacher myself. A nice steady salary with the ability to hack code in my spare time without the worries of non-comptete agreements. If there wasn't this stupid certificate program system in place I'd probably be doing it now.
I'm not going to argue about whether giving each teacher another $7500 is the "correct" course of action, but I will note that since the average teacher's salary is about $40,000, that would be more than an 18% raise. That is not an amount I would consider "measly."
Again, I'm not arguing about what's fair or not. My assertion is that the school board should be doing what's best for the kids (as long as they do not violate the law), and that paying teachers $18 more is not going to attract better teachers, and therefore is not what's best for the kids.
Another quote: In Maine the issue of access to computers in schools will no longer focus on improving the computer to student ratio. With this plan in place teachers and students will have one-to-one access making the computer a ubiquitous tool for the educator and the learner.
This is coming from the school's education budget. If the students aren't able to modify the laptop, to install games and other non-educational software, then this is no longer about education, it is about a direct handout. Again, I'm not saying that direct handouts are necessarily bad, but they shouldn't be coming from the school budget.
The second point I can agree with, but the first one I disagree with. Why would being a teacher mean that you don't want to be paid decently.
Of course the teachers want to be paid decently. My point is that paying teachers $7500/year more is not going to attract better teachers. The job of the school system is to benefit the students, not the teachers.
Teachers have to do a lot of work for the measly pay.
Teachers work half the year (180 days or so), and not any longer hours than any other profession (shorter than most, in fact). The pay is hardly "measly" when you consider that fact. Even if you don't consider the rediculous number of holidays teachers get compared to other professions, there is still the fact they get 3 months summer vacation. Multiply their pay by 4/3 right off the bat for that.
They understand that going into it, but it still doesnt help when they have to goto the store and buy materials for his/her class because the school wont.
So spend the $30 million on reinbursements for materials, if that's what the school needs. I'm just saying if you're spending that amount of money on that number of students, raising the teacher's pay is not going to be the most productive way to spend the money. Give each teacher a laptop, free internet access, a $500 materials account, maybe (besides that's all going to be nontaxable to the teacher, so in some respect you get more bang for your buck). Giving them $7500 and hoping they spend it wisely is not the best use of the taxpayer's money.
If you have a desktop you have just wasted an entire desk. With the laptop you don't need a special desk just for the machine, plus you can put it away. And they can be much more easily locked away when not in use.
I wonder how hard it would be to set up a flat screen setup that could fold away into the desk. Basically a flat screen wireless xterminal, networked to the teacher's 1.5 gigahertz running linux (which of course is networked to the rest of the school). A thin client network would probably be better for teaching applications anyway, but the initial setup would probably wind up costing the same $1K each anyway. The advantage would be in the upgrades. In any case, it would probably take far too much technical knowhow for the school system to actually pull off, and hiring that technology would probably be too expensive, so I can see why they're not doing it, but the solution is there... I wish I had contacts on school boards... I guess the rest of the country is glad I don't:)
So this has nothing to do with education, and is really just a resdistribution of wealth based on the property tax. I don't have a problem with that, really, but why disguise it under an education budget?
Or hiring teachers that made better than a C average in college?
Let's see. We're talking about 38,600 students here. Let's say the average classroom size is 30. So that's 1280 teachers. Now lets say the laptops last 4 years. I think that's reasonable. $38.6M divided by 1280 divided by 4 is $7500/year. A nice bit of money, but do you really think someone is going to go into teaching because of an extra $7500/year? It isn't going to happen. You become a teacher because you love teaching, or because there's nothing better you can do. The difference between making $30,000 a year and $37,500 a year isn't going to sway you one bit.
first off, if communication is possible, don't call them 'it'.
"him/her" didn't seem appropriate in this case. What if it didn't have any sex at all? What if it was both sexes? "It" seemed like the appropriate title, considering all the hypotheticals involved. I actually paused for a second to consider that before deciding on "it".
Yeah, it was meant more as a smart-ass reply... I do think that you could get a deeper understanding of the difference between animals and humans by talking to an animal though. I read the transcript of the gorrilla? that chatted on AOL, and it was quite disappointing. I can write an "AI" program that can communicate better than that animal.
In any case, I hope you don't take my previous comment and label me as ignorant as it sounds, the intention was to be tongue-in-cheek.
Whether this is scientifically feasible is a trivial question compared to the ethics of such an endeavor. If one believes that humans are different from animals in that we contain a spirit and an awareness of God, then should a cross between a human and an animal be considered an animal or a spiritual being?
Sounds like a good way to find out. Create one and ask it.
Re:Stupid domains, incorrect statement about MXs..
on
.museum TLDs are Live
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· Score: 1
There is a general perception that MS products are easy to configure. They aren't, they require no less expertise to operate properly than UNIX, probably more.
Having used Microsoft's DNS server, and having had semi-technical friends use Microsoft's DNS server, I whole-heartedly disagree with you. MS products, in general, are easier to configure.
I'm not saying that Microsoft's DNS server can be used without a basic knowledge of DNS, but once you have that basic knowledge, choosing from "A, CNAME, MX, etc." is much easier (less chance for error) than typing it in. Knowing that MX takes an extra argument because the GUI will not let you not set it (in fact, I believe it defaults to the most common value) is much simpler than having to remember to type it in. I know a hell of a lot about DNS, but I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to enter the MX priority. And Bind will just silently fail, maybe putting something in your syslog, and you'll wonder 2 days later why you haven't been getting any spam.
Sure, there are alternatives to bind and bind configure files, but they generally involve installation of new software, which in and of itself is more difficult than with Windows.
With UNIX and friends, however, you have the OPPOSITE perception. One that it is hard and takes someone who really knows what he's the doing. The truth, of course, is that system administration is a skilled trade like any other - it requires a great deal of expertise to be performed effectively. This is not burger-flipping, this is telecommunications infrastructure maintenance. As a result of the perception, effort is put towards finding a competent sysadmin because they know that an MCSE just isn't going to cut it.
You are certainly right that a Microsoft admin still needs to know what s/he's doing, but I personally have never met a manager that didn't know that. In fact, at my last job the NT admin was probably the smartest and most capable person on the team (in a mixed NT/unix environment). Of course, he wasn't an MCSE, and I'm sure that he is the exception, as opposed to the rule, but I really don't think it's as bad as you're making it out to be.
Re:Stupid domains, incorrect statement about MXs..
on
.museum TLDs are Live
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· Score: 2
The MX is not what's misconfigured, the CNAME is (with the technicality that CNAMEs shouldn't point to CNAMEs, one that is very commonly ignored). As for the MX, I bet mail to that stupid.museum address is supposed to bounce.
Why do you think running NT makes it more likely to misconfigure? I would bet it makes it less likely, since Microsoft makes it much simpler to configure.
Although in practice 106(2) would be very difficult to enforce. I could be mixing up derivative Britney Spears tracks in my basement (god forbid) for years and no one would be the wiser.
Modification for private use almost certainly falls under fair use. But there are exceptions. See Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo (game genie is legal), or Micro Star v. FormGen Inc. (Nuke It is not). This is why I said that I think we mainly agree on the law (modifications for private home use are legal), just not on the specific semantics.
Since the.museum TLD is still in its experimental phase, these domains haven't been delegated to their registrants yet, but resolve as CNAME records in the TLD root, pointing at the other domains each site already has.
Why should a.museum TLD have an A record anyway? I can see a CNAME, pointing to the real machine name, and I can see an MX, also pointing to the real machine name, but the whole concept of.museum is a web thing. What we need is a WWW record, for now CNAME will have to do.
Re:Stupid domains, incorrect statement about MXs..
on
.museum TLDs are Live
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You don't follow a CNAME to a CNAME and then follow the MX. That's not how it works.
Of course, technically, you're not supposed to have a CNAME to a CNAME in the first place.
See title 17, Section 106(2). In any case, I agree with you as to the law, and it's really just a question of semantics. 106(2) is interpreted to mean that you can't claim copyright on a derivitive work without permission of the author of the original work (and even then your copyright only extends to the modifications). 106(3) covers distribution of the original, and distribution of the derivitive, since the derivitive necessarily contains the original.
The GPL is a copyrighted document that grants you explicit permission to redistribute it in unmodified form.
Regardless of what the FSF wants to tell you, licenses which are GPL derivitives are not protected by copyright. The GPL is a functional document, changing any word or letter in it changes the function of the document. Therefore the protections against derivitives of the document fall under patent law, not copyright law, and the GPL has not been patented.
It seems the only way to challenge a law is to become a criminal.
No, see Roe vs. Wade. In that case, a pregnant woman sued to get a declaratory judgement permitting her to get an abortion. (She later got an abortion in another state, before the ruling, but this has nothing to do with why she had standing). You do not have to break the law to challenge it, but you have to have the intention to break the law.
It seems that in the US legal system, if you think a law is unconstitutional, the only way to get the courts to decide on it is to break the law and get yourself arrested.
No, again, see Roe vs. Wade. Roe did not go to jail.
The best way to get rid of the DMCA and a bunch of other BS that gets passed through congress is to pass one single law. The law would state: "Machine readable encodings are legaly equivalent to human readable text."
Either that or create an AI program that can read Scientific American articles.
The very factors that made Felten a "good" subject for a civil liberties case allowed the judge to rule that there wasn't a case at all. Both the Justice Department and the RIAA prefer to have their test cases with suitably unsavory defendants - Russian pirates and shady hacker magazines are much preferred over all-American Princeton professors.
Did you ever consider that the reason they prefer a test case with Dmitry rather than Felton is because Dmitry broke the law and Felton did not? I said it before the case and I'll say it again. Felton lacks standing and the case was made moot when the RIAA withdrew the threat.
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This is complete bullshit. Teachers work a ton of extra hours at home and at school. If not grading papers it's in after school activities because there's no budget to hire more employees.
I guess my mother shouldn't have won teacher of the year then, cause she certainly averages fewer hours per week than most professions. Lesson plans take a few hours a week, and you're given more than that much time in prep time during the work day.
Teachers work more hours per week than anyone I know.
Are you saying that you don't know anyone who works 60-70 hours a week, or are you saying that you know a single teacher who does?
I see you skipped math. Those 180 school days account for 36 weeks, or nearly 3/4 of a year, not 1/2 of a year.
I see you skipped reading comprehension. I mentioned that very shortly later in my post.
But you also have to allow that teacher still have to feed their families, and they aren't very likely to be able to find additional work during the time they are off.
My parents are both teachers. I was fed quite well, thank you, and they had no trouble finding work in the summer, which they only had to do for a few years to maintain the upper-middle-class lifestyle that my sister and I had. Don't forget another advantage of teachers is they never (that I've heard of) have to sign non-compete agreements, and are free to get any side jobs they want or need. Also don't forget a great health plan, a great pension plan, and great job security. If your goal in life is to be ultra-rich, teaching isn't for you, but if you just want a nice suburban life without having to ever worry about getting laid off and with greater than cost of living pay increases for the rest of your life, maybe it is. Hell, after the whole dot com fallout I've been looking into going back to school to become a teacher myself. A nice steady salary with the ability to hack code in my spare time without the worries of non-comptete agreements. If there wasn't this stupid certificate program system in place I'd probably be doing it now.
I'm not going to argue about whether giving each teacher another $7500 is the "correct" course of action, but I will note that since the average teacher's salary is about $40,000, that would be more than an 18% raise. That is not an amount I would consider "measly."
Again, I'm not arguing about what's fair or not. My assertion is that the school board should be doing what's best for the kids (as long as they do not violate the law), and that paying teachers $18 more is not going to attract better teachers, and therefore is not what's best for the kids.
Another quote: In Maine the issue of access to computers in schools will no longer focus on improving the computer to student ratio. With this plan in place teachers and students will have one-to-one access making the computer a ubiquitous tool for the educator and the learner.
This is coming from the school's education budget. If the students aren't able to modify the laptop, to install games and other non-educational software, then this is no longer about education, it is about a direct handout. Again, I'm not saying that direct handouts are necessarily bad, but they shouldn't be coming from the school budget.
The second point I can agree with, but the first one I disagree with. Why would being a teacher mean that you don't want to be paid decently.
Of course the teachers want to be paid decently. My point is that paying teachers $7500/year more is not going to attract better teachers. The job of the school system is to benefit the students, not the teachers.
Teachers have to do a lot of work for the measly pay.
Teachers work half the year (180 days or so), and not any longer hours than any other profession (shorter than most, in fact). The pay is hardly "measly" when you consider that fact. Even if you don't consider the rediculous number of holidays teachers get compared to other professions, there is still the fact they get 3 months summer vacation. Multiply their pay by 4/3 right off the bat for that.
They understand that going into it, but it still doesnt help when they have to goto the store and buy materials for his/her class because the school wont.
So spend the $30 million on reinbursements for materials, if that's what the school needs. I'm just saying if you're spending that amount of money on that number of students, raising the teacher's pay is not going to be the most productive way to spend the money. Give each teacher a laptop, free internet access, a $500 materials account, maybe (besides that's all going to be nontaxable to the teacher, so in some respect you get more bang for your buck). Giving them $7500 and hoping they spend it wisely is not the best use of the taxpayer's money.
If you have a desktop you have just wasted an entire desk. With the laptop you don't need a special desk just for the machine, plus you can put it away. And they can be much more easily locked away when not in use.
I wonder how hard it would be to set up a flat screen setup that could fold away into the desk. Basically a flat screen wireless xterminal, networked to the teacher's 1.5 gigahertz running linux (which of course is networked to the rest of the school). A thin client network would probably be better for teaching applications anyway, but the initial setup would probably wind up costing the same $1K each anyway. The advantage would be in the upgrades. In any case, it would probably take far too much technical knowhow for the school system to actually pull off, and hiring that technology would probably be too expensive, so I can see why they're not doing it, but the solution is there... I wish I had contacts on school boards... I guess the rest of the country is glad I don't :)
So this has nothing to do with education, and is really just a resdistribution of wealth based on the property tax. I don't have a problem with that, really, but why disguise it under an education budget?
Or hiring teachers that made better than a C average in college?
Let's see. We're talking about 38,600 students here. Let's say the average classroom size is 30. So that's 1280 teachers. Now lets say the laptops last 4 years. I think that's reasonable. $38.6M divided by 1280 divided by 4 is $7500/year. A nice bit of money, but do you really think someone is going to go into teaching because of an extra $7500/year? It isn't going to happen. You become a teacher because you love teaching, or because there's nothing better you can do. The difference between making $30,000 a year and $37,500 a year isn't going to sway you one bit.
first off, if communication is possible, don't call them 'it'.
"him/her" didn't seem appropriate in this case. What if it didn't have any sex at all? What if it was both sexes? "It" seemed like the appropriate title, considering all the hypotheticals involved. I actually paused for a second to consider that before deciding on "it".
Yeah, it was meant more as a smart-ass reply... I do think that you could get a deeper understanding of the difference between animals and humans by talking to an animal though. I read the transcript of the gorrilla? that chatted on AOL, and it was quite disappointing. I can write an "AI" program that can communicate better than that animal.
In any case, I hope you don't take my previous comment and label me as ignorant as it sounds, the intention was to be tongue-in-cheek.
Easy. We grant them citizenship, explain to them they are victims, then give them money until the day they die.
And let them open casinos and hunt whales, of course.
If the experiments are not able to produce creatures that demonstrate free will, emotions and feelings, and other characteristically human qualities
In my opinion, anybody who thinks animals don't have free will, emotions, and feelings has never owned (read: be owned by) cats. ;-p
Actually, a lot of religions, including some Christian ones, don't believe that humans or cats have free will.
Whether this is scientifically feasible is a trivial question compared to the ethics of such an endeavor. If one believes that humans are different from animals in that we contain a spirit and an awareness of God, then should a cross between a human and an animal be considered an animal or a spiritual being?
Sounds like a good way to find out. Create one and ask it.
There is a general perception that MS products are easy to configure. They aren't, they require no less expertise to operate properly than UNIX, probably more.
Having used Microsoft's DNS server, and having had semi-technical friends use Microsoft's DNS server, I whole-heartedly disagree with you. MS products, in general, are easier to configure.
I'm not saying that Microsoft's DNS server can be used without a basic knowledge of DNS, but once you have that basic knowledge, choosing from "A, CNAME, MX, etc." is much easier (less chance for error) than typing it in. Knowing that MX takes an extra argument because the GUI will not let you not set it (in fact, I believe it defaults to the most common value) is much simpler than having to remember to type it in. I know a hell of a lot about DNS, but I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to enter the MX priority. And Bind will just silently fail, maybe putting something in your syslog, and you'll wonder 2 days later why you haven't been getting any spam.
Sure, there are alternatives to bind and bind configure files, but they generally involve installation of new software, which in and of itself is more difficult than with Windows.
With UNIX and friends, however, you have the OPPOSITE perception. One that it is hard and takes someone who really knows what he's the doing. The truth, of course, is that system administration is a skilled trade like any other - it requires a great deal of expertise to be performed effectively. This is not burger-flipping, this is telecommunications infrastructure maintenance. As a result of the perception, effort is put towards finding a competent sysadmin because they know that an MCSE just isn't going to cut it.
You are certainly right that a Microsoft admin still needs to know what s/he's doing, but I personally have never met a manager that didn't know that. In fact, at my last job the NT admin was probably the smartest and most capable person on the team (in a mixed NT/unix environment). Of course, he wasn't an MCSE, and I'm sure that he is the exception, as opposed to the rule, but I really don't think it's as bad as you're making it out to be.
The MX is not what's misconfigured, the CNAME is (with the technicality that CNAMEs shouldn't point to CNAMEs, one that is very commonly ignored). As for the MX, I bet mail to that stupid .museum address is supposed to bounce.
Why do you think running NT makes it more likely to misconfigure? I would bet it makes it less likely, since Microsoft makes it much simpler to configure.
Although in practice 106(2) would be very difficult to enforce. I could be mixing up derivative Britney Spears tracks in my basement (god forbid) for years and no one would be the wiser.
Modification for private use almost certainly falls under fair use. But there are exceptions. See Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo (game genie is legal), or Micro Star v. FormGen Inc. (Nuke It is not). This is why I said that I think we mainly agree on the law (modifications for private home use are legal), just not on the specific semantics.
Since the .museum TLD is still in its experimental phase, these domains haven't been delegated to their registrants yet, but resolve as CNAME records in the TLD root, pointing at the other domains each site already has.
Why should a .museum TLD have an A record anyway? I can see a CNAME, pointing to the real machine name, and I can see an MX, also pointing to the real machine name, but the whole concept of .museum is a web thing. What we need is a WWW record, for now CNAME will have to do.
You don't follow a CNAME to a CNAME and then follow the MX. That's not how it works.
Of course, technically, you're not supposed to have a CNAME to a CNAME in the first place.
See title 17, Section 106(2). In any case, I agree with you as to the law, and it's really just a question of semantics. 106(2) is interpreted to mean that you can't claim copyright on a derivitive work without permission of the author of the original work (and even then your copyright only extends to the modifications). 106(3) covers distribution of the original, and distribution of the derivitive, since the derivitive necessarily contains the original.
The GPL is a copyrighted document that grants you explicit permission to redistribute it in unmodified form.
Regardless of what the FSF wants to tell you, licenses which are GPL derivitives are not protected by copyright. The GPL is a functional document, changing any word or letter in it changes the function of the document. Therefore the protections against derivitives of the document fall under patent law, not copyright law, and the GPL has not been patented.
Copyright does not apply to modification, it applies to the creation of derivitive works, which private non-distributed modifications are not.
It seems the only way to challenge a law is to become a criminal.
No, see Roe vs. Wade. In that case, a pregnant woman sued to get a declaratory judgement permitting her to get an abortion. (She later got an abortion in another state, before the ruling, but this has nothing to do with why she had standing). You do not have to break the law to challenge it, but you have to have the intention to break the law.
It seems that in the US legal system, if you think a law is unconstitutional, the only way to get the courts to decide on it is to break the law and get yourself arrested.
No, again, see Roe vs. Wade. Roe did not go to jail.
The best way to get rid of the DMCA and a bunch of other BS that gets passed through congress is to pass one single law. The law would state: "Machine readable encodings are legaly equivalent to human readable text."
Either that or create an AI program that can read Scientific American articles.
Felton did not sue the RIAA for making legal threats and then withdrawing them. That case he might have actually won.
Right, so you can't sue someone to get a judgement in a case that hasn't been brought against you.
You can sue to get a declaratory judgement in a case that hasn't been brought against you, if you have standing. See Roe vs. Wade.
The very factors that made Felten a "good" subject for a civil liberties case allowed the judge to rule that there wasn't a case at all. Both the Justice Department and the RIAA prefer to have their test cases with suitably unsavory defendants - Russian pirates and shady hacker magazines are much preferred over all-American Princeton professors.
Did you ever consider that the reason they prefer a test case with Dmitry rather than Felton is because Dmitry broke the law and Felton did not? I said it before the case and I'll say it again. Felton lacks standing and the case was made moot when the RIAA withdrew the threat.