Hrm, if everyone passes the test then it's not a good test of ability is it?
The test in question determines whether people graduate from high school. Presumably the point is to test for basic competency at a necessary skill, and most people should pass. If it was an entrance examination for applicants to STEM programs, it would make sense to test for ability as such.
Should school be about teaching practical skills? Don't the set of practical skills depend upon what you do in life? Are you advocating forcing people to pick a career in high school (or earlier) and have them focus on the particular skills needed for the career they select?
I gave a list of what I considered reasonable goals for education: practical skills, background knowledge for citizenship, and general life enrichment. And I was arguing that testing, in its current form, does not advance any of those goals. No, I would not advocate that people should be definitively tracked into careers as early as high school. Quite the contrary: I'm arguing that testing is used to constrain people's life choices, unfairly.
You could use Chromium instead, as it's the open source basis of Chrome, and pretty much the same in functionality, but without the Google branding, and I don't think it sends usage data to Google by default.
The summary takes a cheap shot at the anonymous school board member, and a lot of comments mistakenly assume that the board member took, and failed, the 4th grade math test for which there were sample questions, rather than the 10th grade test. I think the school board member's criticisms are well founded, and many here are missing the point.
There's the often-referenced essay (in PDF format), A Mathematician's Lament, which argues that the method of teaching mathematics in the US is arbitrary, rigid, and fails to teach mathematics -- and that furthermore, not all students actually need or want to learn advanced mathematics, and the rigid math curriculum is a hindrance to those students who do need or want to learn it.
In practice, much of the way our education system works is not about teaching practical skills, providing the background knowledge for full participation in a democracy, or enabling a rich and rewarding life. It's about sorting out who goes in which social class. Tests are designed so that kids will fail -- and increasingly, so that teachers will be fired. If enough teachers and students rise to the challenge, and more students pass the tests, they'll just make the tests harder.
Honestly, how many people have studied calculus? How many people have sweated over integration with hyperbolic functions, and yet never have to cope with mathematics more complex than simple algebra in their daily lives? Certainly, mathematics is important, and certainly, it would be better if people knew more about such an important field of human endeavour -- but there are other things that are important to know as well.
It seems to me that it's often the case that at some point, it's better to build something new then to keep maintaining and adapting something old. It's an opportunity to rethink things from scratch, to apply what you've learned, and to toss out accumulated cruft. I find this when I upgrade a Linux distribution or replace an entire computer, but I also find it when I move to a new home, or take a new job, or otherwise seriously revise my living conditions. I expect it applies in much broader social contexts -- I'm certainly not the only one who thinks the patent system ought to be scrapped and replaced.
Complicating this is that there's a need for the self-discipline to focus on maintaining and adapting something that is still in the prime of its utility. But in general, I do think there is a pattern in which it's good to rebuild once in a while.
Okay, I stand corrected. I was going on a memory of having seen a list of "consumer basket" items, and a description on Wikipedia that didn't include specifics. Apparently my memory was faulty.
Measures of inflation are usually based upon the Consumer Price Index, based upon the costs of a "consumer basket" of commonly purchased commodities -- and thus ignores housing, health care, and education.
There are competing definitions of socialism. The one I prefer is democratic management of the economy. By that definition, Russia has never been socialist, and only briefly had some localized experiments with socialism in a few places in 1905 and 1917.
Except as provided below in paragraph 5, an employee in the computer software field who is paid on an hourly basis shall be exempt under the professional exemption, if all of the following apply:
[...]
4. The employee's hourly rate of pay is not less than $41.00 [the rate in effect on September 19, 2000]. The Division of Labor Statistics and Research shall adjust this pay rate on October 1 of each year to be effective on January 1 of the following year by an amount equal to the percentage increase in the California Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers. Click here for adjusted rate information.
It's much more helpful than any Windows event message I've ever seen.
Windows event logs seem nearly useless to me, but not because they happen to be in XML instead of plain text. The problem is a general one with uninformative error messages from Microsoft products. The most irritating thing is that nearly everything has an associated specific error code, yet there's almost never any way to find out what those codes mean -- as far as I can ever find out, not even Microsoft knows.
I tend to think of this as the most obvious problem with proprietary software: it's exceedingly difficult to find out what the code is actually doing when something goes wrong.
I don't think the shortcomings of Windows events are likely to be shortcomings of a Linux binary journal.
I'd expect that, if readJournalLog is critical to a Red Hat distribution, that Red Hat would put readJournalLog on the recovery CD. If it's a small enough executable, given Red Hat's influence on the entire Linux ecosystem, before long most current LiveCDs would include it.
This is the single most important thing to understand about domestic politicy in the US: that in real terms, median wages have been almost perfectly static for forty years. I've seen the numbers cited in a number of places, such as this brilliant chart from Randall Munroe: https://www.xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-1910&y=-3118&z=5
With rising costs for housing, health care, and education, the standard of living for most people in the US has declined even as per capita productivity has more than doubled. We are creating more wealth, and enjoying less of it.
Part of what is remarkable about this is that the historical trend, until the early 1970s, was for wages to rise as productivity rises, and the upward trend for both was unbroken. A graph shows that increasing productivity has continued its upward curve, but real wages sharply leveled off in the early 1970s.
This proposed law is part of the ongoing effort to escalate the transfer of wealth and power from the poor to the rich.
But they're not exempt if their pay rate is below a certain threshold, among other conditions. The standards for exempt status in California are more stringent under California law than under federal law, meaning it's more likely that an IT worker qualifies for overtime pay. In California, currently, the hourly pay rate threshold is $37.74 per hour; any work performed over eight hours in a day or forty in a week is eligible for overtime pay. Salaries are calculated as hourly pay, assuming eight hour days and forty hour weeks.
At my workplace, we work 12 hour shifts; this is important. I found out from a co-worker that we were actually entitled to overtime pay; he'd had to explain this to our employer. I discovered our employer was playing dumb, as they claimed not to know anything about this when I brought up the issue, although they conceded the point and paid me my back pay shortly after I was able to cite California labor law, from the same link that That_Dan_Guy posted.
Fortunately, for workers in California, the more stringent standards for exempt status at the state level override the standards at the federal level.
Hey, who would expect a Linux sysadmin to be familiar with MySQL? You may as well expect them to know Apache and at least one of Perl or PHP or Python.
From the perspective of individuals, scavenging for aluminum cans, it looks like they'll be better off if they're especially industrious, but that puts them in competition with each other. Meanwhile, their scavenging and selling in small batches is less efficient than systematic collection and selling in large batches; and the city has the advantage of scale and stability in negotiating the selling price and in the purchase price of services. So it's a situation in which individual initiative, taken collectively, produces worse results than common management.
Also, the city is more likely to spend money on treatment programs for heroin addiction than on heroin, which even heroin addicts will probably agree is a better idea.
They do. Recyclable materials are a commodity, and cities gain revenue by selling the collected recyclables; those revenues are supposed to benefit urban residents.
In fact, one problem, in San Francisco at least, is that there are people who loot recycling bins for aluminum and cardboard, thus cutting into the city's revenues. There's a bit of a tragedy of the commons in operation, as some of that looting is done by homeless people, and services for homeless people are paid for with the city revenues they're undermining.
The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" meme comes from Schenk v. United States, in which Schenk, a socialist, was agitating against conscription for World War I. I agree with Howard Zinn that this was really a case of someone standing outside a theater that was, in fact, on fire, and shouting a warning.
And to the subject at hand: it's reasonable that some things should be mandatory within a social contract, but that social contract must be understood to be up for renegotiation.
It's simpler than that. The entire point of language, and the basis of human life, is coordination of efforts. That means we discuss and agree upon plans, detailing what we will and will not do. Rejecting the idea that anything should be mandatory is rejecting human social existence, and the basis for human life, entirely.
There's a fairly long list of issues that I follow and am concerned about. In general, I find they're related, and that solving one problem would ease addressing the others -- and that conventional politicians have little or no interest in solving any of them, in no small part because of the greed and graft I just mentioned.
Some issues, though, are by nature more important than others, and I think that preventing an imminent mass extinction event that will destroy civilization really ought to be a fairly high priority.
I rely on mass transit to commute to work; most of my co-workers either live close to work, and travel by bicycle, or live more distantly and drive. The drivers mostly would prefer to live closer to work, but can't find affordable housing; there is no alternative to driving, given where they do live.
If we could actually have some actual intelligent city planning, so that people could either live near where they work, or had decent mass transit, we could reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly, and most people would perceive this as a significant improvement in their living conditions.
In the long run, I'm sure the 5% or so of humanity that survives the destruction of most major cities due to direct flooding, the collapse of the ecosystem, the collapse of agriculture, and famine on a scale never experienced before, and has to live with crippling survivors' guilt and massive psychological trauma, and has to completely reinvent food production and rebuild civilization from the ground up, will be fine.
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Hrm, if everyone passes the test then it's not a good test of ability is it?
The test in question determines whether people graduate from high school. Presumably the point is to test for basic competency at a necessary skill, and most people should pass. If it was an entrance examination for applicants to STEM programs, it would make sense to test for ability as such.
Should school be about teaching practical skills? Don't the set of practical skills depend upon what you do in life? Are you advocating forcing people to pick a career in high school (or earlier) and have them focus on the particular skills needed for the career they select?
I gave a list of what I considered reasonable goals for education: practical skills, background knowledge for citizenship, and general life enrichment. And I was arguing that testing, in its current form, does not advance any of those goals. No, I would not advocate that people should be definitively tracked into careers as early as high school. Quite the contrary: I'm arguing that testing is used to constrain people's life choices, unfairly.
You could use Chromium instead, as it's the open source basis of Chrome, and pretty much the same in functionality, but without the Google branding, and I don't think it sends usage data to Google by default.
The board member had trouble with the tenth grade math exam. The article posted sample questions from the fourth grade math exam.
The summary takes a cheap shot at the anonymous school board member, and a lot of comments mistakenly assume that the board member took, and failed, the 4th grade math test for which there were sample questions, rather than the 10th grade test. I think the school board member's criticisms are well founded, and many here are missing the point.
There's the often-referenced essay (in PDF format), A Mathematician's Lament, which argues that the method of teaching mathematics in the US is arbitrary, rigid, and fails to teach mathematics -- and that furthermore, not all students actually need or want to learn advanced mathematics, and the rigid math curriculum is a hindrance to those students who do need or want to learn it.
In practice, much of the way our education system works is not about teaching practical skills, providing the background knowledge for full participation in a democracy, or enabling a rich and rewarding life. It's about sorting out who goes in which social class. Tests are designed so that kids will fail -- and increasingly, so that teachers will be fired. If enough teachers and students rise to the challenge, and more students pass the tests, they'll just make the tests harder.
Honestly, how many people have studied calculus? How many people have sweated over integration with hyperbolic functions, and yet never have to cope with mathematics more complex than simple algebra in their daily lives? Certainly, mathematics is important, and certainly, it would be better if people knew more about such an important field of human endeavour -- but there are other things that are important to know as well.
It seems to me that it's often the case that at some point, it's better to build something new then to keep maintaining and adapting something old. It's an opportunity to rethink things from scratch, to apply what you've learned, and to toss out accumulated cruft. I find this when I upgrade a Linux distribution or replace an entire computer, but I also find it when I move to a new home, or take a new job, or otherwise seriously revise my living conditions. I expect it applies in much broader social contexts -- I'm certainly not the only one who thinks the patent system ought to be scrapped and replaced.
Complicating this is that there's a need for the self-discipline to focus on maintaining and adapting something that is still in the prime of its utility. But in general, I do think there is a pattern in which it's good to rebuild once in a while.
Okay, I stand corrected. I was going on a memory of having seen a list of "consumer basket" items, and a description on Wikipedia that didn't include specifics. Apparently my memory was faulty.
Measures of inflation are usually based upon the Consumer Price Index, based upon the costs of a "consumer basket" of commonly purchased commodities -- and thus ignores housing, health care, and education.
There are competing definitions of socialism. The one I prefer is democratic management of the economy. By that definition, Russia has never been socialist, and only briefly had some localized experiments with socialism in a few places in 1905 and 1917.
It might be interesting to compare the total amount of losses to bank robbery and this sort of hacking to the amount pocketed by execs in the bailout.
And IT workers are not considered professionals unless they are paid at least $41.00 per hour.
http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/Glossary.asp?Button1=E#employee%20in%20the%20computer%20software%20field
'Service LoadsaBollocks crashed and restarted'.
Yep. That's real helpful.
It's much more helpful than any Windows event message I've ever seen.
Windows event logs seem nearly useless to me, but not because they happen to be in XML instead of plain text. The problem is a general one with uninformative error messages from Microsoft products. The most irritating thing is that nearly everything has an associated specific error code, yet there's almost never any way to find out what those codes mean -- as far as I can ever find out, not even Microsoft knows.
I tend to think of this as the most obvious problem with proprietary software: it's exceedingly difficult to find out what the code is actually doing when something goes wrong.
I don't think the shortcomings of Windows events are likely to be shortcomings of a Linux binary journal.
I'd expect that, if readJournalLog is critical to a Red Hat distribution, that Red Hat would put readJournalLog on the recovery CD. If it's a small enough executable, given Red Hat's influence on the entire Linux ecosystem, before long most current LiveCDs would include it.
This is the single most important thing to understand about domestic politicy in the US: that in real terms, median wages have been almost perfectly static for forty years. I've seen the numbers cited in a number of places, such as this brilliant chart from Randall Munroe:
https://www.xkcd.com/980/huge/#x=-1910&y=-3118&z=5
With rising costs for housing, health care, and education, the standard of living for most people in the US has declined even as per capita productivity has more than doubled. We are creating more wealth, and enjoying less of it.
Part of what is remarkable about this is that the historical trend, until the early 1970s, was for wages to rise as productivity rises, and the upward trend for both was unbroken. A graph shows that increasing productivity has continued its upward curve, but real wages sharply leveled off in the early 1970s.
This proposed law is part of the ongoing effort to escalate the transfer of wealth and power from the poor to the rich.
But they're not exempt if their pay rate is below a certain threshold, among other conditions. The standards for exempt status in California are more stringent under California law than under federal law, meaning it's more likely that an IT worker qualifies for overtime pay. In California, currently, the hourly pay rate threshold is $37.74 per hour; any work performed over eight hours in a day or forty in a week is eligible for overtime pay. Salaries are calculated as hourly pay, assuming eight hour days and forty hour weeks.
At my workplace, we work 12 hour shifts; this is important. I found out from a co-worker that we were actually entitled to overtime pay; he'd had to explain this to our employer. I discovered our employer was playing dumb, as they claimed not to know anything about this when I brought up the issue, although they conceded the point and paid me my back pay shortly after I was able to cite California labor law, from the same link that That_Dan_Guy posted.
Fortunately, for workers in California, the more stringent standards for exempt status at the state level override the standards at the federal level.
It's already been done, and "chain gangs" were reintroduced a few years ago.
As 9%, and 11%, are well below the crazification factor, I think we have to treat them as statistical noise.
Hey, who would expect a Linux sysadmin to be familiar with MySQL? You may as well expect them to know Apache and at least one of Perl or PHP or Python.
From the perspective of individuals, scavenging for aluminum cans, it looks like they'll be better off if they're especially industrious, but that puts them in competition with each other. Meanwhile, their scavenging and selling in small batches is less efficient than systematic collection and selling in large batches; and the city has the advantage of scale and stability in negotiating the selling price and in the purchase price of services. So it's a situation in which individual initiative, taken collectively, produces worse results than common management.
Also, the city is more likely to spend money on treatment programs for heroin addiction than on heroin, which even heroin addicts will probably agree is a better idea.
Do you have a citation for that? I need to feed Twitter.
They do. Recyclable materials are a commodity, and cities gain revenue by selling the collected recyclables; those revenues are supposed to benefit urban residents.
In fact, one problem, in San Francisco at least, is that there are people who loot recycling bins for aluminum and cardboard, thus cutting into the city's revenues. There's a bit of a tragedy of the commons in operation, as some of that looting is done by homeless people, and services for homeless people are paid for with the city revenues they're undermining.
The "shouting fire in a crowded theater" meme comes from Schenk v. United States, in which Schenk, a socialist, was agitating against conscription for World War I. I agree with Howard Zinn that this was really a case of someone standing outside a theater that was, in fact, on fire, and shouting a warning.
And to the subject at hand: it's reasonable that some things should be mandatory within a social contract, but that social contract must be understood to be up for renegotiation.
It's simpler than that. The entire point of language, and the basis of human life, is coordination of efforts. That means we discuss and agree upon plans, detailing what we will and will not do. Rejecting the idea that anything should be mandatory is rejecting human social existence, and the basis for human life, entirely.
There's a fairly long list of issues that I follow and am concerned about. In general, I find they're related, and that solving one problem would ease addressing the others -- and that conventional politicians have little or no interest in solving any of them, in no small part because of the greed and graft I just mentioned.
Some issues, though, are by nature more important than others, and I think that preventing an imminent mass extinction event that will destroy civilization really ought to be a fairly high priority.
I rely on mass transit to commute to work; most of my co-workers either live close to work, and travel by bicycle, or live more distantly and drive. The drivers mostly would prefer to live closer to work, but can't find affordable housing; there is no alternative to driving, given where they do live.
If we could actually have some actual intelligent city planning, so that people could either live near where they work, or had decent mass transit, we could reduce carbon dioxide emissions significantly, and most people would perceive this as a significant improvement in their living conditions.
In the long run, I'm sure the 5% or so of humanity that survives the destruction of most major cities due to direct flooding, the collapse of the ecosystem, the collapse of agriculture, and famine on a scale never experienced before, and has to live with crippling survivors' guilt and massive psychological trauma, and has to completely reinvent food production and rebuild civilization from the ground up, will be fine.