What about the brightest young men? The ones who never did go into teaching? The ones who are generally suspected of being child molesters if they teach in an elementary school?
Making education a meritocracy is only marginally related to pay. Granted, pay can be linked to merit, but I think the most important first step would be to GET RID OF TENURE! it is this that permits incompetents to remain in the classroom. IMHO, eliminating incompetence is MUCH more important than getting really good teachers in the classroom. One year of incompetent teaching early on can do psychological damage that takes ten years of superb teaching to undo. I've seen it happen.
By your logic, if someone somewhere has been pulled from a car and murdered, then it's Ok for me to pull you out of your car and break your nose.
One of the beautiful things about evil is that it has convinced a lot of people that only ultimate evil is truly evil; the rest of it is nothing to which about.
Oh, and BTW - your grandparents were REALLY repressed only because no one stepped in and stopped the progression from taunts to genocide until after 1945. (Oops, I almost Hitlered this thread) (Oops, now I've done it...)
Agreed:) But I'll take advantage of it for as long as it lasts, then get another job and not get paid for a hobby anymore. A market economy is a wonderful thing.
Teachers aren't THAT horribly underpaid, either. I know; my father is one. I have a secondary math education degree, and taught for one school year. (I left the field because I didn't want to be part of an assembly line.) I was paid $19,000. If your father is a teacher, and you have (or are thinking about) kids, I'd guess he's been teaching for at least 15 years and has his master's degree. I have about 3.5 years experience in the computer field, and three college computer classes (one of which I failed). He's probably earning about what I am (adjusted for local wages), and I'm earning about $10K below the lowest median figure I saw on the last salary survey for IT professionals in the Midwest (where I am).
If I had continued to teach, I probably would have moved from a small-town school to a suburban, or even an inner city school district (these pay progressively more; rural districts pay the least). I would have lived frugally, saved my money, and bought a smaller house. I don't doubt that I could have provided comfortably for my wife, dog, and 2.5 kids. So I agree, teachers are not horribly underpaid. HOWEVER, they're not paid that well, considering the training that is required for them, and considering what is expected of them.
Quite frankly, the people who are "in it for the money" are the LAST ones I want anywhere near my children, when I have them.
What a funny attitude. I imagine you don't want them treated by doctors who are in it for the money, or driven by bus drivers who are in it for the money, or watched by baby-sitters who are in it for the money. My personal observation has been that teachers teach for one of two reasons - they are too incompetent in their field of study to do anything else, or they want to teach. The latter group will always be there. The former group is definitely in it for the money. Furthermore, they can actively hate your children and keep their job, if your state has a tenure law (most do).
Disclaimer: I've thought long and hard about these opinions and am not likely to change them. They are the result of five years studying the public education system, one year fighting it (and losing), and four years recovering from the mental and emotional wounds that experience inflicted.
What is different is perceived to be threatening until proved to be otherwise - though people have varying thresholds for what constitutes different. In my experience, you do not change those thresholds by saying "Look at me! I'm different!" You canot force acceptance on others; this is perceived as an overtly hostile act. I prefer behavior that says "Look at me! I'm just like you!" Differences are superficial and temporary. Looking beyond those differences to find similarity and common experiences is a bit more mature, and IMHO what life is really about. Focusing on differences is stupid.
Tell your friend to learn some empathy for these other teachers. She shouldn't scorn them just because they are different from her (ie not as sensual and frightened by goths). Until she can accept them, I doubt they'll accept her or the "different" students she's identified herself with.
How can it be that education these days is only for those that don't explore? For any topic you are qualified to teach, you will be trying to teach material you mastered 15-20 years ago for an average teacher. How exciting can that be, to present the same basic information for forty years? Would a person who loved to explore be drawn to that?
P.S. I taught high school for 1 year. I got out because I didn't want to work on an assembly line.
I'm not sure what the big fuss is. All ISPs need to do is to install some filtering software. Anytime they get a request for a page that contains the trademarked terms or the copyrighted filenames, they can instead serve up a page saying "Lucasfilm has blocked access to this site for intellectual property theft. Your request for illegal information has been logged." It would last about a DAY before Lucasfilm fired their legal firm and came crawling on their knees begging to be forgiven.
Oh, and anybody with a fan page should send George a bill for their work in promoting Star Wars.
Fight stupidity with stupidity.
*illegal information - what a stupendously silly phrase.
I believe that bartenders have the responsibility to cut off their clients, but they can't be held liable for their actions. These are contradictory beliefs, and you need to reconsider one of them. If I am responsible for X, then I am liable for failing to do X.
Again, Let's be responsible for our own actions. Yes. And let's be sure bartenders are, too. Remember, for every person who drives drunk, there's someone who made money selling them the alcohol. If you provide me with booze, and you have reason to believe I will drink it and drive, you should be held liable for your actions. A drunk person can't make rational decisions, but a storekeeper can. Right now, he looks at the situation rationally and says "I'm not driving right now, the law doesn't hold me liable, and i stand to make a buck. Screw it."
Absolutely correct. Now, try to keep up with me here...
1. Elected representatives are not perfect. 2. The level of imperfection in the laws they create will be normally distributed. 3. More laws => more REALLY REALLY BAD laws 4. Judges are not perfect. 5. The level of imperfection in the laws they uphold will be normally distributed. 6. More laws => more REALLY REALLY BAD laws.
Or, to put it otherwise, while the ratio of good laws to bad laws is constant, the absolute number of bad laws increases as the total nuymber of laws increase.
So, you're saying you wouildn't object if I gave you a 0.5 mR dose on an hourly basis? How about on a quarter-hourly basis/ how about if I decide the signal strength is too low and decide to double the X-ray intensity? etc. etc.
You don't seem to have much grasp of the "tragedy of the commons" - if one person does it, it's OK, if a few people do it, it's OK, but when everybody and their dog is doing it, we are all screwed.
India's population will hit the 1 billion mark soon. China's already has. In both countries, computer usage is growing tremendoushly, so don't discount ESR's figure entirely.
Ummm....anybody who works for a living is "pimping themselves out to the highest bidder." Different people place different values on different things, but I can't think of any examples of workers who turned down an offer of higher value for an offer of lower value.
And yes, I see the humor in your comment. I'm merely pointing out that this it not a silicon valley thing; it's a capitalist worker thing.
...he didn't spam Intel, because spamming is commercial...
While spamming currently appears to be motivated by commercial interests, but I could imagine endless examples of non-commercial spam. Consider the following potential spams (remember, these are hypothetical):
The Christian Coalition sends a bible verse to everybody on the internet, every day.
Al Gore thinks that internet email would be a cool way to campaign, so he emails his platform to every email address in the country. (Hey, there's no controlling legal authority that says he can't!)
Mothers Against Drunk Driving emails everyone on Friday afternoons, reminding them not to drink and drive that weekend.
31337 h4x0r5 decide that rather than owning web sites, they would prefer to send everyone emails saying "1 0Wn y0uR m411 s3rV3r"
The list could obviously go on. Unsolicited bulk email is spam; I don't care if it's commercial or not. I've said elsewhere in this discussion that this was an act of pure spam, and I've yet to see a decent argument against that. I think this is a good thing. The courts have ruled that a particular spammer cannot send email to a particular server. If it is appealed and upheld, we've gained a pretty good precedent to use against spammers.
IANAL, but I've never heard of laws against sending things to people. I know you can't send someone something unsolicited and then bill them for it, but I would think you could send someone all the free gifts you wanted to. So send those condoms to my mom - she'll just think they're oddly-shaped balloons, anyway:)
This guy sent unsolicited bulk email to a targeted group. He did NOT set up a mailing list that people subscribed to, he did NOT limit his communications to friends and former colleagues, and he did NOT pay for the network resources he used. How he got the addresses, I don't care. What he had to say, I don't care. Whose network it was, I don't care. I don't see that his position is any different than that of the average spammer. Note that most spammers claim that their actions are protected by freedom of speech, just like this guy is.
I don't doubt that he was screwed by Intel, and I don't doubt that he had something worthwhile to communicate to Intel's employees. But either you're against spam or you're not. I don't want my mailbox jammed with spam that's there for my own good any more than I want it jammed with get-rich-quick schemes.
Comments, disagreements, and counterarguments are invited.
Microsoft has signed a consent decree prohibitting these contracts
Read the consent decree. MS can no longer charge OEMS based on the total number of machines they sell - you are right about that. So, that is not what Microsoft does. Instead, Microsoft licenses OEMs to install Windows on specific product lines, and then charges by the number of machines sold in that product line. To sell a competing operating system, OEMs have to go to the time, trouble, and expense of creating an entirely new product line (which is no small undertaking given the bureaucracy of large OEMs).
For desktop systems, the end result is the same. The consent decree was a legal fiction. The reality is fundamentally unchanged for ordinary users. Don't try to argue with me unless you can tell me what OEM you worked for where things were different (I worked for Gateway).
From the article... Arnold Brown, president and CEO of San Francisco-based Audio Explosion, noted that DVDs, available in six regions, include technology that prevents consumers from playing back a disc from one region to another. The technology is "intended to prevent cross-border piracy and price dumping," he commented.
The DVD player software I've worked with (under Win 95) implements this "protection" by letting you pick the region when you install the software. You can change this within the software once or twice, and you can format the HDD to change it again. Pretty lame protection, if you ask me, and it seems indicative of the whole entertainment industry's IQ.
Yeah, Jon, I don't know if you realize it, but you've got a best-seller on your hands. I was STUNNED to see the number of responses to your initial article - the largest ever, if I'm not mistaken. What you wrote got Slashdot slashdotted (well, almost:). While I think your "technical" articles suck, the article you wrote about the two geeks who made good absolutely shone. I appreciate your ability to tell other people's stories, and I think that in this case that ability could serve you quite well.
So take all the emails you received, clean them up, and get them published. Soon. Now is the time that people need to hear the voices behind this tragedy, the voices of the victims on the other side, the voices of perpetrators in the making. Not only could you have a best-seller; you could do some real good. I know there are copyright issues you'll have to deal with, but I urge you to get this message out to a wider audience than the geeks around here. We know the real deal; the rest of the country deserves to know, too.
The codec has NEVER been free. It was owned by the Frauenhofer institute. Apple bought it from them. Why the RIAA didn't buy it first and shut it down is beyond me. My only guess is that Frauenhofer had some ethics.
No sympathy - I can buy that. They murdered and they died. I feel sadness for their parents, but not for them.
However, this article was not a call for sympathy, but for empathy. How can you possibly hope to help someone if you can't climb inside their head and think "Hmm, so THIS is what makes them tick - I can see the inputs, the internally consistent logic, and the outputs"? If only someone could have done this a year ago, rather than saying "Their behavior is unacceptable. I dismiss them entirely. I fart in their general direction." Until you can say "They were WRONG, but I completely understand why they did it", you are part of the problem.
I haven't finished life, either, but I'm not about to say that I don't think it's good.
GEB:EGB was not simply a collection of facts to be absorbed, like a text book. It is a stream of consciousness, to be experienced. reading it enriched my life. I was disappointed when i had finished the book, as a pleasant experience had ended. Reading the book again was not as enjoyable as reading it for the first time; the information was the same, but I'd already experienced it.
You have taken a quote your first quote COMPLETELY out of the context of the article.
"Linux supporters have reacted violently to the Microsoft SA release (Independent research shows NT 4.0 outperforms Linux) published on ITWeb yesterday, saying 'the study was paid for by Microsoft' and that 'a very highly-tuned NT server was pitted against a very poorly tuned Linux server'. In response, Ian Hatton, Windows platform manager at Microsoft SA, says these comments are valid."
A judge (I think it was in Georgia) ruled that the domain names registered to a man were his property and could be taken by his creditors. The story was on/. within the last few weeks.
Sprint, AT&T, MCI, the baby bells, and many others ould be fascinated to hear your theory that you are a part-owner of all their routers and cable.
Slashdot Mirror
Doom has demons and lost souls and you go into Hell. Quake just has big ugly guys dogs and flying slugs and electrical polar bears.
Geeks generally don't persecute mainstream people on a daily basis
Don't we tend to call people less intelligent than ourselves "stupid"?
What about the brightest young men? The ones who never did go into teaching? The ones who are generally suspected of being child molesters if they teach in an elementary school?
Making education a meritocracy is only marginally related to pay. Granted, pay can be linked to merit, but I think the most important first step would be to GET RID OF TENURE! it is this that permits incompetents to remain in the classroom. IMHO, eliminating incompetence is MUCH more important than getting really good teachers in the classroom. One year of incompetent teaching early on can do psychological damage that takes ten years of superb teaching to undo. I've seen it happen.
By your logic, if someone somewhere has been pulled from a car and murdered, then it's Ok for me to pull you out of your car and break your nose.
One of the beautiful things about evil is that it has convinced a lot of people that only ultimate evil is truly evil; the rest of it is nothing to which about.
Oh, and BTW - your grandparents were REALLY repressed only because no one stepped in and stopped the progression from taunts to genocide until after 1945. (Oops, I almost Hitlered this thread) (Oops, now I've done it...)
I hate it when I leave off the /I...
many computer professionals are quite overpaid.
:) But I'll take advantage of it for as long as it lasts, then get another job and not get paid for a hobby anymore. A market economy is a wonderful thing.
Agreed
Teachers aren't THAT horribly underpaid, either. I know; my father is one.
I have a secondary math education degree, and taught for one school year. (I left the field because I didn't want to be part of an assembly line.) I was paid $19,000. If your father is a teacher, and you have (or are thinking about) kids, I'd guess he's been teaching for at least 15 years and has his master's degree. I have about 3.5 years experience in the computer field, and three college computer classes (one of which I failed). He's probably earning about what I am (adjusted for local wages), and I'm earning about $10K below the lowest median figure I saw on the last salary survey for IT professionals in the Midwest (where I am).
If I had continued to teach, I probably would have moved from a small-town school to a suburban, or even an inner city school district (these pay progressively more; rural districts pay the least). I would have lived frugally, saved my money, and bought a smaller house. I don't doubt that I could have provided comfortably for my wife, dog, and 2.5 kids. So I agree, teachers are not horribly underpaid.
HOWEVER, they're not paid that well, considering the training that is required for them, and considering what is expected of them.
Quite frankly, the people who are "in it for the money" are the LAST ones I want anywhere near my children, when I have them.
What a funny attitude. I imagine you don't want them treated by doctors who are in it for the money, or driven by bus drivers who are in it for the money, or watched by baby-sitters who are in it for the money. My personal observation has been that teachers teach for one of two reasons - they are too incompetent in their field of study to do anything else, or they want to teach. The latter group will always be there. The former group is definitely in it for the money. Furthermore, they can actively hate your children and keep their job, if your state has a tenure law (most do).
Disclaimer: I've thought long and hard about these opinions and am not likely to change them. They are the result of five years studying the public education system, one year fighting it (and losing), and four years recovering from the mental and emotional wounds that experience inflicted.
What is different is perceived to be threatening until proved to be otherwise - though people have varying thresholds for what constitutes different. In my experience, you do not change those thresholds by saying "Look at me! I'm different!" You canot force acceptance on others; this is perceived as an overtly hostile act. I prefer behavior that says "Look at me! I'm just like you!" Differences are superficial and temporary. Looking beyond those differences to find similarity and common experiences is a bit more mature, and IMHO what life is really about. Focusing on differences is stupid.
Tell your friend to learn some empathy for these other teachers. She shouldn't scorn them just because they are different from her (ie not as sensual and frightened by goths). Until she can accept them, I doubt they'll accept her or the "different" students she's identified herself with.
How can it be that education these days is only for those that don't explore?
For any topic you are qualified to teach, you will be trying to teach material you mastered 15-20 years ago for an average teacher. How exciting can that be, to present the same basic information for forty years? Would a person who loved to explore be drawn to that?
P.S. I taught high school for 1 year. I got out because I didn't want to work on an assembly line.
I'm not sure what the big fuss is. All ISPs need to do is to install some filtering software. Anytime they get a request for a page that contains the trademarked terms or the copyrighted filenames, they can instead serve up a page saying "Lucasfilm has blocked access to this site for intellectual property theft. Your request for illegal information has been logged." It would last about a DAY before Lucasfilm fired their legal firm and came crawling on their knees begging to be forgiven.
Oh, and anybody with a fan page should send George a bill for their work in promoting Star Wars.
Fight stupidity with stupidity.
*illegal information - what a stupendously silly phrase.
I believe that bartenders have the responsibility to cut off their clients, but they can't be held liable for their actions.
These are contradictory beliefs, and you need to reconsider one of them. If I am responsible for X, then I am liable for failing to do X.
Again, Let's be responsible for our own actions.
Yes. And let's be sure bartenders are, too. Remember, for every person who drives drunk, there's someone who made money selling them the alcohol. If you provide me with booze, and you have reason to believe I will drink it and drive, you should be held liable for your actions. A drunk person can't make rational decisions, but a storekeeper can. Right now, he looks at the situation rationally and says "I'm not driving right now, the law doesn't hold me liable, and i stand to make a buck. Screw it."
Absolutely correct. Now, try to keep up with me here...
1. Elected representatives are not perfect.
2. The level of imperfection in the laws they create will be normally distributed.
3. More laws => more REALLY REALLY BAD laws
4. Judges are not perfect.
5. The level of imperfection in the laws they uphold will be normally distributed.
6. More laws => more REALLY REALLY BAD laws.
Or, to put it otherwise, while the ratio of good laws to bad laws is constant, the absolute number of bad laws increases as the total nuymber of laws increase.
So, you're saying you wouildn't object if I gave you a 0.5 mR dose on an hourly basis? How about on a quarter-hourly basis/ how about if I decide the signal strength is too low and decide to double the X-ray intensity? etc. etc.
You don't seem to have much grasp of the "tragedy of the commons" - if one person does it, it's OK, if a few people do it, it's OK, but when everybody and their dog is doing it, we are all screwed.
70k readers * $1 = $70k , enough for a statue + a scholarship fund.
Get Cmdr Taco to post a story about a web site that takes credit cards I'll donate a dollar.
India's population will hit the 1 billion mark soon. China's already has. In both countries, computer usage is growing tremendoushly, so don't discount ESR's figure entirely.
Ummm....anybody who works for a living is "pimping themselves out to the highest bidder." Different people place different values on different things, but I can't think of any examples of workers who turned down an offer of higher value for an offer of lower value.
And yes, I see the humor in your comment. I'm merely pointing out that this it not a silicon valley thing; it's a capitalist worker thing.
...he didn't spam Intel, because spamming is commercial...
While spamming currently appears to be motivated by commercial interests, but I could imagine endless examples of non-commercial spam. Consider the following potential spams (remember, these are hypothetical):
The Christian Coalition sends a bible verse to everybody on the internet, every day.
Al Gore thinks that internet email would be a cool way to campaign, so he emails his platform to every email address in the country. (Hey, there's no controlling legal authority that says he can't!)
Mothers Against Drunk Driving emails everyone on Friday afternoons, reminding them not to drink and drive that weekend.
31337 h4x0r5 decide that rather than owning web sites, they would prefer to send everyone emails saying "1 0Wn y0uR m411 s3rV3r"
The list could obviously go on. Unsolicited bulk email is spam; I don't care if it's commercial or not. I've said elsewhere in this discussion that this was an act of pure spam, and I've yet to see a decent argument against that. I think this is a good thing. The courts have ruled that a particular spammer cannot send email to a particular server. If it is appealed and upheld, we've gained a pretty good precedent to use against spammers.
IANAL, but I've never heard of laws against sending things to people. I know you can't send someone something unsolicited and then bill them for it, but I would think you could send someone all the free gifts you wanted to. So send those condoms to my mom - she'll just think they're oddly-shaped balloons, anyway :)
This guy sent unsolicited bulk email to a targeted group. He did NOT set up a mailing list that people subscribed to, he did NOT limit his communications to friends and former colleagues, and he did NOT pay for the network resources he used. How he got the addresses, I don't care. What he had to say, I don't care. Whose network it was, I don't care. I don't see that his position is any different than that of the average spammer. Note that most spammers claim that their actions are protected by freedom of speech, just like this guy is.
I don't doubt that he was screwed by Intel, and I don't doubt that he had something worthwhile to communicate to Intel's employees. But either you're against spam or you're not. I don't want my mailbox jammed with spam that's there for my own good any more than I want it jammed with get-rich-quick schemes.
Comments, disagreements, and counterarguments are invited.
Microsoft has signed a consent decree prohibitting these contracts
Read the consent decree. MS can no longer charge OEMS based on the total number of machines they sell - you are right about that. So, that is not what Microsoft does. Instead, Microsoft licenses OEMs to install Windows on specific product lines, and then charges by the number of machines sold in that product line. To sell a competing operating system, OEMs have to go to the time, trouble, and expense of creating an entirely new product line (which is no small undertaking given the bureaucracy of large OEMs).
For desktop systems, the end result is the same. The consent decree was a legal fiction. The reality is fundamentally unchanged for ordinary users. Don't try to argue with me unless you can tell me what OEM you worked for where things were different (I worked for Gateway).
From the article...
Arnold Brown, president and CEO of San
Francisco-based Audio Explosion, noted that
DVDs, available in six regions, include
technology that prevents consumers from playing
back a disc from one region to another. The
technology is "intended to prevent cross-border
piracy and price dumping," he commented.
The DVD player software I've worked with (under Win 95) implements this "protection" by letting you pick the region when you install the software. You can change this within the software once or twice, and you can format the HDD to change it again. Pretty lame protection, if you ask me, and it seems indicative of the whole entertainment industry's IQ.
Yeah, Jon, I don't know if you realize it, but you've got a best-seller on your hands. I was STUNNED to see the number of responses to your initial article - the largest ever, if I'm not mistaken. What you wrote got Slashdot slashdotted (well, almost :). While I think your "technical" articles suck, the article you wrote about the two geeks who made good absolutely shone. I appreciate your ability to tell other people's stories, and I think that in this case that ability could serve you quite well.
So take all the emails you received, clean them up, and get them published. Soon. Now is the time that people need to hear the voices behind this tragedy, the voices of the victims on the other side, the voices of perpetrators in the making. Not only could you have a best-seller; you could do some real good. I know there are copyright issues you'll have to deal with, but I urge you to get this message out to a wider audience than the geeks around here. We know the real deal; the rest of the country deserves to know, too.
The codec has NEVER been free. It was owned by the Frauenhofer institute. Apple bought it from them. Why the RIAA didn't buy it first and shut it down is beyond me. My only guess is that Frauenhofer had some ethics.
No sympathy - I can buy that. They murdered and they died. I feel sadness for their parents, but not for them.
However, this article was not a call for sympathy, but for empathy. How can you possibly hope to help someone if you can't climb inside their head and think "Hmm, so THIS is what makes them tick - I can see the inputs, the internally consistent logic, and the outputs"? If only someone could have done this a year ago, rather than saying "Their behavior is unacceptable. I dismiss them entirely. I fart in their general direction." Until you can say "They were WRONG, but I completely understand why they did it", you are part of the problem.
I haven't finished life, either, but I'm not about to say that I don't think it's good.
GEB:EGB was not simply a collection of facts to be absorbed, like a text book. It is a stream of consciousness, to be experienced. reading it enriched my life. I was disappointed when i had finished the book, as a pleasant experience had ended. Reading the book again was not as enjoyable as reading it for the first time; the information was the same, but I'd already experienced it.
You have taken a quote your first quote COMPLETELY out of the context of the article.
"Linux supporters have reacted violently to the Microsoft SA release (Independent research shows NT 4.0 outperforms Linux) published on ITWeb yesterday, saying 'the study was paid for by Microsoft' and that 'a very highly-tuned NT server was pitted against a very poorly tuned Linux server'. In response, Ian Hatton, Windows platform manager at Microsoft SA, says these comments are valid."
A judge (I think it was in Georgia) ruled that the domain names registered to a man were his property and could be taken by his creditors. The story was on /. within the last few weeks.
Sprint, AT&T, MCI, the baby bells, and many others ould be fascinated to hear your theory that you are a part-owner of all their routers and cable.