That sounds really odd, and I have no idea. Are you sure your company isn't misunderstanding the rules? The DoD uses tons of COTS code produced in other countries. Unless the database programming side of it is causing some weird rule interaction, I can't imagine why it would be a problem.
Sounds like a G-6 (or whatever the communications office at your approval authority level is called) issue. DoD is rife with OSS. I'm a senior systems person at a DoD lab that is almost entirely Linux. Most of the Army's new tactical computer (brigade and below) war-fighting systems are Solaris. The version they use may not be entirely open source (though it might be, I don't know), but it's full of OSS components. Firefox has been allowed everywhere I've worked (as a contractor) or served (as a soldier). DoD as a whole is very OSS friendly and has been for ~the last eight to ten years or so.
It's like this. I can go online (as a contractor or a DoD employee, I've been both) and purchase or download COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software that was created anywhere. It's COTS and it's considered market vetted. If we can examine the source code (OSS) even better. Linux is fine and was fine even before Linus became a US citizen. It's considered COTS, the Linux Red Hat sells to the DoD is the same Linux they sell to Google or Ford or Bolivia. Same with say, SAMBA, even though Jeremy Allison is Australian.
On the other hand if I hire you to write custom code for the DoD then the requirements, documents, etc are all considered sensitive and you have to hire US citizens. If the government wanted a piece of software that was able to interface with Windows AD, for instance, (and they couldn't just use Samba for some reason) they couldn't hire Jeremy Allison to head up the effort even though he has a lot of experience from his work with Samba.
Their problem is quickly becoming one of choosing a poison. The elderly vs middle aged vs young adults vs children gap in Japan is approaching critical. Most of the industrialized world is experiencing problems with an aging populace: the problem is less pronounced but existent in the US, noticeable in a lot of Europe, getting serious in other parts of Europe, and nearing critical in Japan. If the Japanese elderly don't want to cared for by robots, and they don't want to be cared for by non-Japanese (or non-Japanese speakers, let's face it Japanese is neither a commonly learned nor easy to learn second language) their remaining choices are getting thin.
It's simple math. If there aren't enough young people to care for the old people you either need to import more young people or find another solution. What that solution is I don't know, but robots were at least a legit attempt.
If you want to give your invention as a gift to the world you should patent it and licence the patent for free. Yes, it sucks, paying for the patent process if you just want to release it for free, but that's the way it is when you have patents, no matter if the priority goes to the first to invent of to the first to file.
Theoretically they don't need to file. Simply publish your invention specifics (online would do I'm sure), and you've established prior art. No one else can patent your idea, because it's already existent in the public domain. If, as the second article in the summary suggests, they also change the law to allow third party submission of prior art, then it wouldn't even be difficult to defend your public domain invention.
Not one is talking about removal of prior art though. In fact later in the summary (not the article, the summary) it talks about Microsoft's support for improving prior art claims by allowing third parties to submit them. Presumably this means that if I know that a company has filed a patent on something I already released into the public domain, I can personally call the patent investigator and submit evidence of prior art before the patent is approved.
For my information, what do you like better about it? I've been generally pleased with MotionX (Like both of us mention the walking route thing is especially nice, it even knew about and took advantage of the paths through Boston Commons), but I'm always interested in seeing if there's something better out there.
I don't see where they talk about monitoring customer comments and the like. They're monitoring *employee* comments to the *corporate* website. WTF is the problem here? I own a company. I setup a company Facebook page. I'd like to make sure that my employees do not post illegal or damaging information on my company Facebook page. I can't stop you form making negative comments on your personal page (I could conceivably fire you if I found them, but that could happen anyway). I can't monitor customer comments (any more than I could already by reading and potentially deleting them). It just provides a way to monitor official company posts to the official company page.
You can also monitor chat when the employee is using the company identity. This is all about ensuring that employees of the company do not do illegal or ill advised things while operating under the identity of the company. The most recent example of the value of this is Kenneth Cole's problems over some ad guy's Twitter post a couple days ago.
They monitor your posts to the *company* Facebook page 24/7. If you post to the company page on your off-time, they still want to make sure that you're not posting stuff they don't want to see on the company page. At a guess it works like this: No human has write access to the company Facebook page, the password is kept secret. Instead you login to the service's page, and compose your post. When you hit "submit" rather than going to Facebook, it goes into a queue to be reviewed. Probably their are a number of people who can review and approve posts. When one of them (or some percentage of them, or if you're really paranoid, all of them) approve the post the software then posts it to Facebook.
Chats could have a similar setup, but with less of an "approve/disapprove" option and more "I can interrupt or take over your session if needed through the proxy". I'm betting Kenneth Cole wishes they'd had something like this about now...
In my experience the "real" GPS apps on the iPhone can work totally independently of the cell network. They have preloaded maps, and while they *can* use tower assisted GPS for when they're out of satellite LOS, they don't need it. You definitely don't want to rely on the on board Google Maps app. It needs a regular Internet connection to get map data. I pay $25 a year for (Plus a one time $1 fee to get the app in the first place) for the MotionX GPS (drive) app. For that I get regular updates and the phone acts just like a normal car navigation GPS. Considering that most dedicated GPS companies want more than that just for map updates and I have to buy the device, it seems worth it. It'll also provide walking routes, which was really nice when I visited Boston. Better still for an extra $2 I also have their off-road GPS that can be used while hiking and boating.
I would really want to get one of those battery based speed chargers if i was going to use the thing for off road navigation though.
And as is regularly brought up, there's a reason for that. Without government sponsored monopolies most cities would have 50 ISPs jumping over themselves for the lucrative to operate and relatively cheap to install urban markets, while the unprofitable to operate, relatively expensive to install outlying areas would be luck to get Internet at all. The whole idea of local government owned or government managed utilities came about precisely because people outside of the urban centers got tired of not being able to get electricity, water, and phone service. Do you think the Internet would be miraculously different somehow?
As an "also a fan of Apples, and owner of an iDevice" I have to agree. This is a poor decision in a number of ways. If I were B&N or Amazon I'd have to wonder if it didn't make more sense to pull my app. They'd really rather you spent money on their e-readers anyway, iPhone and Android apps are a convenience for their customers more than I profit center I'd think. In the event that the e-readers are either pulled or charge a premium for iDevices, I probably won't buy the iPad I was thinking of this year. I mainly wanted an e-reader that could also do general computation. The premium for the iPad over a Kindle was already giving me pause (Would I use it for enough other stuff to make it worth the extra money?). Take away the e-reader part and it definitely isn't worth the money. I'll get a Kindle instead.
Really? Useless? My iPhone can: send and receive e-mail, browse the web, act as a portable media device, act as a portable GPS device, entertain me with games, keep my notes and calendars, allow me to remote manage my servers, help me figure out what's in this interesting drink, convert binary to hex, and even act as a freaking flashlight. That's just my personal phone with the apps I have installed. It does everything I want or need it to do. Indeed it does everything that an Android phone will do with two exceptions that I'm aware of. It won't tether, and I can't use video teleconferencing outside of wifi hotspots. Since I more or less never need those things, it's not really an issue for me. Also not every Android phone will do those things.
If you need those things, then fine, it's not the device for you; but useless is a tad overstated don't you think?
Actually, you wouldn't have made money betting against Jobs, just against Apple. To my knowledge Jobs has only ever been directly involved in one company that didn't pretty much make money hand over fist the entire time he was with them. That company was NeXT, and while it was never a huge commercial success in it's own right, it paved the way for Jobs' return to Apple and for all intents and purposes designed what would become OSX. So you couldn't exactly call it a failure either. Apple has stumbled a few times under Jobs' direct leadership (the Lisa comes to mind), but it's never had any disastrous failures while he was at the helm.
So, regardless of Jobs, there is realistically no way Apple can ever fail as a company.
I think that's overstating the case. Apple is in no danger in the foreseeable future, for exactly the reasons you present, but "never" is a long time. If they started to really screw up (ala, the Sculley years) they'd have 5, maybe 10 year of padding before it started to show. They could easily be on the verge of bankruptcy again in 10-12 years if the right combination of events occurred. Note that I'm not saying it will happen, or even that it's likely to happen, but Apple is no more immune to screw ups than any other company.
I'm a senior systems analyst/engineer for a government contractor. We pay entry level engineers 50-60. Dunno where you are, but it must be fairly low cost of living; which probably means the pay for teachers is lower too. The vacation is nice, I won't deny, but at least at my school the "lounge" was a big table with a some plastic chairs surrounding it. The break room at my current place is a good bit nicer. Tenure didn't happen in my school system, though I know it does in others, nor did sabbatical (though the summer could count, not that you were getting paid).
The union protection is certainly worth something. It's harder to get fired as a teacher because of the unions, it's true; but the flip side is that the protection is somewhat necessary. Lots of school districts have funny ideas about what constitutes "performance". Some push a political agenda (mostly neo-conservative here in the south, but I wouldn't be shocked to hear the opposite problem on the coasts). Others will always take the side of parents, because they're the "customer" and the customer is always right. Still others consider student performance on standardized tests to be the only viable measure of success (mostly in under-performing districts that desperately need that performance to prevent funding cuts).
I'm not saying they don't also defend teachers that probably should be fired, it's their mandate to defend all of their members; but in many cases they are defending perfectly competent teachers who are being railroaded by the nature of what they do.
The schools and teachers are there for the students benefit. The union is there for the teacher's benefit. Of course in a perfect "for the students" world teachers would be willing and able to work 24 hours a day, for free, while not using any furniture, and still produce outstanding results. We don't live in that world, and someone has to make sure that teachers are compensated for their time, that their working conditions are acceptable and they are being treated fairly. It's probably not the cash strapped school districts who are going to do that, so the union does.
Now was this particular purchase wasteful? I don't know. I don't what the teachers had previously. I taught school for a year right out of college. In my classroom I had a 25 year old metal desk, an equally old wood frame chair (no swivels or anything, just four legs, a stiff wooden back, and a seat with no padding), and no computer at all. My current company's ergonomics person would probably have a heart attack just looking at my setup. This was in the very late 90s. If our union had insisted on every teacher getting a real chair and a computer (let alone a desk) I would have wept for joy. I did all my work that didn't involve actually standing in front of the class at home where I had a decent computer and a crappy, but infinitely better than work, Office Depot desk and chair. If that was the situation in your schools district, then the union was completely justified.
It doesn't really matter where the money comes from. Terrible working conditions should be fought. The real solution would be for the state to ante up for new chairs and books. That would require more taxes though, and we're Americans, so we hate that. Or we'd have to cut some other underfunded service, and we hate that too. So instead we blame the union for insisting that teachers be given working conditions at least comparable to the average secretary.
In the last two years Alabama has cut education funding by 18.25%, and the Governor just asked the Department of Education send him justification for not not taking another 13% in the next two years. Gosh, I guess those unions are to blame.
Actually Unions aren't preventing you, "no child left behind" type laws that insist on teacher certification over actual subject area competence are the main block. Schools used to happily hire degreed, but uncertified teachers in their chosen fields of study. Now they typically can't because certification is such a huge deal. The Union is interested in protecting it's members jobs, sure. They don't really care whether that person is teaching biology or not, just that they don't lose their job. That's pretty typical in any company though. Most places will hire the most qualified applicant when a job comes open, but they aren't going to fire an existing employee to make room for a more qualified person.
"Sorry Bob, you've given us five good years of service as our IT guy; but you only have a high school diploma and some random guy with a BS-CS sent us a resume so we're ditching you. See ya."
It doesn't happen that way. If Bob is doing an awful job, they may fire him and hire the BS-CS later when searching for a replacement. If they need a new person they may hire the BS-CS and put him over Bob. They aren't just going to fire a reasonably competent current employee to hire someone who looks more qualified on paper.
Also, I suspect that after a year of teaching for 35K a year, you'd be done anyway. Even a fresh engineering grad can expect to make nearly twice as much as a teacher in better working conditions. Certainly with a bit of experience you can do better still.
So you're saying that correct solution is *not* to fund the school adequately, but rather to prevent teacher's unions from insisting on decent working conditions for their members? I mean, really? You're blaming the teacher's unions who insisted on decent desks, chairs, and computers for a failure to recruit scientists to teach science? Don't you think your highly qualified scientists are going to demand all that and more? A person with a masters in biology can get a near six-figure income as a senior lab teach in a bio-science lab and get a nice office with a computer (with Internet!) . A person with a Bachelors in Biology will probably be "stuck" making 40-50K in a lower end lab slot, in a decent cube with a nice computer (with Internet!). Why would they go to teach biology in high school to get heaped abuse, sit in crappy chairs, and have a beat up 486 as their workstation?
There are problems with teacher's unions, most notably the fact that they are highly resistant to merit based salary systems (though given what some districts consider "merit" I can kind of understand their reluctance), but demanding decent base salaries and working conditions for their members are not one one of them. If anything, those demands moderately increase the potential for recruiting better teachers.
First, most of these people aren't biologists. So they often can't defend (or are worried that they can't defend) the theory the way a biologist could. If you're teaching Evolution, it's all but guaranteed that some student's churches have provided them with a list of "stump the chump" questions. These list are provided by various creationist organizations to give students ways to probe apparent weaknesses in evolutionary biology. In every case these questions have answers, but the lists still present issues. Sometimes the answers don't seem intuitively right, so students come away doubting the teacher simply because the question made more apparent sense than the answer. Sometimes they come up with new questions, so a teacher who's not an expert in the field can't simply learn the answers, s/he has spend a lot of time keeping ahead of these (often large and well funded) groups.
Students are often taught in church how to disrupt classes for hours or even days with these lists. Teachers are forced to either ignore the questions and look ignorant or like they're covering something up, or spend large amounts of class time debating a subject that their students are often well drilled in and which they may or may not be comfortable with. It only takes one or two students who are "true believers" from some fundamentalist church to disrupt a whole class.
Second, teachers are beholden to school boards (or boards of directors or whatever for private schools). Those boards are in turn beholden to one level or another to the parents (either as customers or citizens). Simply telling them to fuck off doesn't work. They complain, and even when the complaints aren't justified enough of them are a pain for a teacher. Add to than unstable people making threats, and a general attitude of hostility in areas where fundamentalist religions are very powerful, and it's no wonder many teachers just decide that 40K a year isn't worth this crap and stop teaching it.
It works like this. You go to college and get a degree in biology. You face several choices:
1) You could go be a biology teacher. You could make 30-35K a year to start (not awful, but not great) or even less depending on how much education funding in your state has been slashed recently. In 20 or 30 years you *might* make twice that. You have to spend you days dealing with kids who don't really want to learn what you're teaching them, and parents who alternately abrogate all educational responsibility to you or tell you that your teaching is wrong or even immoral (sometimes the same parents do both!). You probably also have to spend a couple years going to night school getting certified in order to not get fired.
2) You could go work in a lab for 40-50K a year and eventually more. And not deal with any of this crap.
3) You could go to graduate or medical school and make much more money later on down the line as a professor, senior lab tech, doctor, etc.
Which do you choose? A surprising number don't go with option (1) for some reason. This leaves us with a shortage of teachers in biology which gets back filled by people with degrees in "general education".
You're completely offtopic, but what the hell. The logic is very simple to follow. I'm not a particularly huge controll person, and in fact have owned a fire arm at various times. Never the less I understand the argument, and it's perfectly reasonable. The idea is not that evil murders will have awful moral compunction about having a gun. Indeed professional criminals in countries with strict gun control laws often have them. It removes the availability of firearms for less serious criminals. If guns are illegal, and very few people have them, they can't be bought in stores, and possessing them is a crime, then only professional criminals with the resources to acquire them internationally (or those with authorization such as the police/military) will have them. Common street thugs, random looney kids with delusions of fame from an assassination, guys who are abusive and drunk and after their wives... None of them is likely to have a gun.
The real failure of this argument is not the poor and simplistic point you make, but rather the fact that guns pervade our country right now. Merely making them illegal would not do much to availability. Some would argue that it's worth doing anyway, in the hopes that it reduces availability in the long term. I question the usefulness of criminalizing a large segment of society in the hopes that it solve s problem decades from now. Much like Prohibition, it's bound to fail.
It's reference to the beating D&D took during the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s. It was widely blasted for being "Satanic" by even relatively mild religious organizations, and took the blame for a number of suicides and murders. Kinda like video games today. Nobody with any real intelligence took it seriously, but there was plenty of hype and general insanity surrounding the game.
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That sounds really odd, and I have no idea. Are you sure your company isn't misunderstanding the rules? The DoD uses tons of COTS code produced in other countries. Unless the database programming side of it is causing some weird rule interaction, I can't imagine why it would be a problem.
Bah, you're right. My bad.
Sounds like a G-6 (or whatever the communications office at your approval authority level is called) issue. DoD is rife with OSS. I'm a senior systems person at a DoD lab that is almost entirely Linux. Most of the Army's new tactical computer (brigade and below) war-fighting systems are Solaris. The version they use may not be entirely open source (though it might be, I don't know), but it's full of OSS components. Firefox has been allowed everywhere I've worked (as a contractor) or served (as a soldier). DoD as a whole is very OSS friendly and has been for ~the last eight to ten years or so.
It's like this. I can go online (as a contractor or a DoD employee, I've been both) and purchase or download COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) software that was created anywhere. It's COTS and it's considered market vetted. If we can examine the source code (OSS) even better. Linux is fine and was fine even before Linus became a US citizen. It's considered COTS, the Linux Red Hat sells to the DoD is the same Linux they sell to Google or Ford or Bolivia. Same with say, SAMBA, even though Jeremy Allison is Australian.
On the other hand if I hire you to write custom code for the DoD then the requirements, documents, etc are all considered sensitive and you have to hire US citizens. If the government wanted a piece of software that was able to interface with Windows AD, for instance, (and they couldn't just use Samba for some reason) they couldn't hire Jeremy Allison to head up the effort even though he has a lot of experience from his work with Samba.
Their problem is quickly becoming one of choosing a poison. The elderly vs middle aged vs young adults vs children gap in Japan is approaching critical. Most of the industrialized world is experiencing problems with an aging populace: the problem is less pronounced but existent in the US, noticeable in a lot of Europe, getting serious in other parts of Europe, and nearing critical in Japan. If the Japanese elderly don't want to cared for by robots, and they don't want to be cared for by non-Japanese (or non-Japanese speakers, let's face it Japanese is neither a commonly learned nor easy to learn second language) their remaining choices are getting thin.
It's simple math. If there aren't enough young people to care for the old people you either need to import more young people or find another solution. What that solution is I don't know, but robots were at least a legit attempt.
If you want to give your invention as a gift to the world you should patent it and licence the patent for free. Yes, it sucks, paying for the patent process if you just want to release it for free, but that's the way it is when you have patents, no matter if the priority goes to the first to invent of to the first to file.
Theoretically they don't need to file. Simply publish your invention specifics (online would do I'm sure), and you've established prior art. No one else can patent your idea, because it's already existent in the public domain. If, as the second article in the summary suggests, they also change the law to allow third party submission of prior art, then it wouldn't even be difficult to defend your public domain invention.
Not one is talking about removal of prior art though. In fact later in the summary (not the article, the summary) it talks about Microsoft's support for improving prior art claims by allowing third parties to submit them. Presumably this means that if I know that a company has filed a patent on something I already released into the public domain, I can personally call the patent investigator and submit evidence of prior art before the patent is approved.
For my information, what do you like better about it? I've been generally pleased with MotionX (Like both of us mention the walking route thing is especially nice, it even knew about and took advantage of the paths through Boston Commons), but I'm always interested in seeing if there's something better out there.
I don't see where they talk about monitoring customer comments and the like. They're monitoring *employee* comments to the *corporate* website. WTF is the problem here? I own a company. I setup a company Facebook page. I'd like to make sure that my employees do not post illegal or damaging information on my company Facebook page. I can't stop you form making negative comments on your personal page (I could conceivably fire you if I found them, but that could happen anyway). I can't monitor customer comments (any more than I could already by reading and potentially deleting them). It just provides a way to monitor official company posts to the official company page.
You can also monitor chat when the employee is using the company identity. This is all about ensuring that employees of the company do not do illegal or ill advised things while operating under the identity of the company. The most recent example of the value of this is Kenneth Cole's problems over some ad guy's Twitter post a couple days ago.
They monitor your posts to the *company* Facebook page 24/7. If you post to the company page on your off-time, they still want to make sure that you're not posting stuff they don't want to see on the company page. At a guess it works like this: No human has write access to the company Facebook page, the password is kept secret. Instead you login to the service's page, and compose your post. When you hit "submit" rather than going to Facebook, it goes into a queue to be reviewed. Probably their are a number of people who can review and approve posts. When one of them (or some percentage of them, or if you're really paranoid, all of them) approve the post the software then posts it to Facebook.
Chats could have a similar setup, but with less of an "approve/disapprove" option and more "I can interrupt or take over your session if needed through the proxy". I'm betting Kenneth Cole wishes they'd had something like this about now...
In my experience the "real" GPS apps on the iPhone can work totally independently of the cell network. They have preloaded maps, and while they *can* use tower assisted GPS for when they're out of satellite LOS, they don't need it. You definitely don't want to rely on the on board Google Maps app. It needs a regular Internet connection to get map data. I pay $25 a year for (Plus a one time $1 fee to get the app in the first place) for the MotionX GPS (drive) app. For that I get regular updates and the phone acts just like a normal car navigation GPS. Considering that most dedicated GPS companies want more than that just for map updates and I have to buy the device, it seems worth it. It'll also provide walking routes, which was really nice when I visited Boston. Better still for an extra $2 I also have their off-road GPS that can be used while hiking and boating.
I would really want to get one of those battery based speed chargers if i was going to use the thing for off road navigation though.
And as is regularly brought up, there's a reason for that. Without government sponsored monopolies most cities would have 50 ISPs jumping over themselves for the lucrative to operate and relatively cheap to install urban markets, while the unprofitable to operate, relatively expensive to install outlying areas would be luck to get Internet at all. The whole idea of local government owned or government managed utilities came about precisely because people outside of the urban centers got tired of not being able to get electricity, water, and phone service. Do you think the Internet would be miraculously different somehow?
As an "also a fan of Apples, and owner of an iDevice" I have to agree. This is a poor decision in a number of ways. If I were B&N or Amazon I'd have to wonder if it didn't make more sense to pull my app. They'd really rather you spent money on their e-readers anyway, iPhone and Android apps are a convenience for their customers more than I profit center I'd think. In the event that the e-readers are either pulled or charge a premium for iDevices, I probably won't buy the iPad I was thinking of this year. I mainly wanted an e-reader that could also do general computation. The premium for the iPad over a Kindle was already giving me pause (Would I use it for enough other stuff to make it worth the extra money?). Take away the e-reader part and it definitely isn't worth the money. I'll get a Kindle instead.
There's an app for that.
Really? Useless? My iPhone can: send and receive e-mail, browse the web, act as a portable media device, act as a portable GPS device, entertain me with games, keep my notes and calendars, allow me to remote manage my servers, help me figure out what's in this interesting drink, convert binary to hex, and even act as a freaking flashlight. That's just my personal phone with the apps I have installed. It does everything I want or need it to do. Indeed it does everything that an Android phone will do with two exceptions that I'm aware of. It won't tether, and I can't use video teleconferencing outside of wifi hotspots. Since I more or less never need those things, it's not really an issue for me. Also not every Android phone will do those things.
If you need those things, then fine, it's not the device for you; but useless is a tad overstated don't you think?
Actually, you wouldn't have made money betting against Jobs, just against Apple. To my knowledge Jobs has only ever been directly involved in one company that didn't pretty much make money hand over fist the entire time he was with them. That company was NeXT, and while it was never a huge commercial success in it's own right, it paved the way for Jobs' return to Apple and for all intents and purposes designed what would become OSX. So you couldn't exactly call it a failure either. Apple has stumbled a few times under Jobs' direct leadership (the Lisa comes to mind), but it's never had any disastrous failures while he was at the helm.
So, regardless of Jobs, there is realistically no way Apple can ever fail as a company.
I think that's overstating the case. Apple is in no danger in the foreseeable future, for exactly the reasons you present, but "never" is a long time. If they started to really screw up (ala, the Sculley years) they'd have 5, maybe 10 year of padding before it started to show. They could easily be on the verge of bankruptcy again in 10-12 years if the right combination of events occurred. Note that I'm not saying it will happen, or even that it's likely to happen, but Apple is no more immune to screw ups than any other company.
I'm a senior systems analyst/engineer for a government contractor. We pay entry level engineers 50-60. Dunno where you are, but it must be fairly low cost of living; which probably means the pay for teachers is lower too. The vacation is nice, I won't deny, but at least at my school the "lounge" was a big table with a some plastic chairs surrounding it. The break room at my current place is a good bit nicer. Tenure didn't happen in my school system, though I know it does in others, nor did sabbatical (though the summer could count, not that you were getting paid).
The union protection is certainly worth something. It's harder to get fired as a teacher because of the unions, it's true; but the flip side is that the protection is somewhat necessary. Lots of school districts have funny ideas about what constitutes "performance". Some push a political agenda (mostly neo-conservative here in the south, but I wouldn't be shocked to hear the opposite problem on the coasts). Others will always take the side of parents, because they're the "customer" and the customer is always right. Still others consider student performance on standardized tests to be the only viable measure of success (mostly in under-performing districts that desperately need that performance to prevent funding cuts).
I'm not saying they don't also defend teachers that probably should be fired, it's their mandate to defend all of their members; but in many cases they are defending perfectly competent teachers who are being railroaded by the nature of what they do.
The schools and teachers are there for the students benefit. The union is there for the teacher's benefit. Of course in a perfect "for the students" world teachers would be willing and able to work 24 hours a day, for free, while not using any furniture, and still produce outstanding results. We don't live in that world, and someone has to make sure that teachers are compensated for their time, that their working conditions are acceptable and they are being treated fairly. It's probably not the cash strapped school districts who are going to do that, so the union does.
Now was this particular purchase wasteful? I don't know. I don't what the teachers had previously. I taught school for a year right out of college. In my classroom I had a 25 year old metal desk, an equally old wood frame chair (no swivels or anything, just four legs, a stiff wooden back, and a seat with no padding), and no computer at all. My current company's ergonomics person would probably have a heart attack just looking at my setup. This was in the very late 90s. If our union had insisted on every teacher getting a real chair and a computer (let alone a desk) I would have wept for joy. I did all my work that didn't involve actually standing in front of the class at home where I had a decent computer and a crappy, but infinitely better than work, Office Depot desk and chair. If that was the situation in your schools district, then the union was completely justified.
It doesn't really matter where the money comes from. Terrible working conditions should be fought. The real solution would be for the state to ante up for new chairs and books. That would require more taxes though, and we're Americans, so we hate that. Or we'd have to cut some other underfunded service, and we hate that too. So instead we blame the union for insisting that teachers be given working conditions at least comparable to the average secretary.
In the last two years Alabama has cut education funding by 18.25%, and the Governor just asked the Department of Education send him justification for not not taking another 13% in the next two years. Gosh, I guess those unions are to blame.
Actually Unions aren't preventing you, "no child left behind" type laws that insist on teacher certification over actual subject area competence are the main block. Schools used to happily hire degreed, but uncertified teachers in their chosen fields of study. Now they typically can't because certification is such a huge deal. The Union is interested in protecting it's members jobs, sure. They don't really care whether that person is teaching biology or not, just that they don't lose their job. That's pretty typical in any company though. Most places will hire the most qualified applicant when a job comes open, but they aren't going to fire an existing employee to make room for a more qualified person.
"Sorry Bob, you've given us five good years of service as our IT guy; but you only have a high school diploma and some random guy with a BS-CS sent us a resume so we're ditching you. See ya."
It doesn't happen that way. If Bob is doing an awful job, they may fire him and hire the BS-CS later when searching for a replacement. If they need a new person they may hire the BS-CS and put him over Bob. They aren't just going to fire a reasonably competent current employee to hire someone who looks more qualified on paper.
Also, I suspect that after a year of teaching for 35K a year, you'd be done anyway. Even a fresh engineering grad can expect to make nearly twice as much as a teacher in better working conditions. Certainly with a bit of experience you can do better still.
So you're saying that correct solution is *not* to fund the school adequately, but rather to prevent teacher's unions from insisting on decent working conditions for their members? I mean, really? You're blaming the teacher's unions who insisted on decent desks, chairs, and computers for a failure to recruit scientists to teach science? Don't you think your highly qualified scientists are going to demand all that and more? A person with a masters in biology can get a near six-figure income as a senior lab teach in a bio-science lab and get a nice office with a computer (with Internet!) . A person with a Bachelors in Biology will probably be "stuck" making 40-50K in a lower end lab slot, in a decent cube with a nice computer (with Internet!). Why would they go to teach biology in high school to get heaped abuse, sit in crappy chairs, and have a beat up 486 as their workstation?
There are problems with teacher's unions, most notably the fact that they are highly resistant to merit based salary systems (though given what some districts consider "merit" I can kind of understand their reluctance), but demanding decent base salaries and working conditions for their members are not one one of them. If anything, those demands moderately increase the potential for recruiting better teachers.
First, most of these people aren't biologists. So they often can't defend (or are worried that they can't defend) the theory the way a biologist could. If you're teaching Evolution, it's all but guaranteed that some student's churches have provided them with a list of "stump the chump" questions. These list are provided by various creationist organizations to give students ways to probe apparent weaknesses in evolutionary biology. In every case these questions have answers, but the lists still present issues. Sometimes the answers don't seem intuitively right, so students come away doubting the teacher simply because the question made more apparent sense than the answer. Sometimes they come up with new questions, so a teacher who's not an expert in the field can't simply learn the answers, s/he has spend a lot of time keeping ahead of these (often large and well funded) groups.
Students are often taught in church how to disrupt classes for hours or even days with these lists. Teachers are forced to either ignore the questions and look ignorant or like they're covering something up, or spend large amounts of class time debating a subject that their students are often well drilled in and which they may or may not be comfortable with. It only takes one or two students who are "true believers" from some fundamentalist church to disrupt a whole class.
Second, teachers are beholden to school boards (or boards of directors or whatever for private schools). Those boards are in turn beholden to one level or another to the parents (either as customers or citizens). Simply telling them to fuck off doesn't work. They complain, and even when the complaints aren't justified enough of them are a pain for a teacher. Add to than unstable people making threats, and a general attitude of hostility in areas where fundamentalist religions are very powerful, and it's no wonder many teachers just decide that 40K a year isn't worth this crap and stop teaching it.
It works like this. You go to college and get a degree in biology. You face several choices:
1) You could go be a biology teacher. You could make 30-35K a year to start (not awful, but not great) or even less depending on how much education funding in your state has been slashed recently. In 20 or 30 years you *might* make twice that. You have to spend you days dealing with kids who don't really want to learn what you're teaching them, and parents who alternately abrogate all educational responsibility to you or tell you that your teaching is wrong or even immoral (sometimes the same parents do both!). You probably also have to spend a couple years going to night school getting certified in order to not get fired.
2) You could go work in a lab for 40-50K a year and eventually more. And not deal with any of this crap.
3) You could go to graduate or medical school and make much more money later on down the line as a professor, senior lab tech, doctor, etc.
Which do you choose? A surprising number don't go with option (1) for some reason. This leaves us with a shortage of teachers in biology which gets back filled by people with degrees in "general education".
You're completely offtopic, but what the hell. The logic is very simple to follow. I'm not a particularly huge controll person, and in fact have owned a fire arm at various times. Never the less I understand the argument, and it's perfectly reasonable. The idea is not that evil murders will have awful moral compunction about having a gun. Indeed professional criminals in countries with strict gun control laws often have them. It removes the availability of firearms for less serious criminals. If guns are illegal, and very few people have them, they can't be bought in stores, and possessing them is a crime, then only professional criminals with the resources to acquire them internationally (or those with authorization such as the police/military) will have them. Common street thugs, random looney kids with delusions of fame from an assassination, guys who are abusive and drunk and after their wives... None of them is likely to have a gun.
The real failure of this argument is not the poor and simplistic point you make, but rather the fact that guns pervade our country right now. Merely making them illegal would not do much to availability. Some would argue that it's worth doing anyway, in the hopes that it reduces availability in the long term. I question the usefulness of criminalizing a large segment of society in the hopes that it solve s problem decades from now. Much like Prohibition, it's bound to fail.
It's reference to the beating D&D took during the "Satanic Panic" of the 80s. It was widely blasted for being "Satanic" by even relatively mild religious organizations, and took the blame for a number of suicides and murders. Kinda like video games today. Nobody with any real intelligence took it seriously, but there was plenty of hype and general insanity surrounding the game.