Teachers are considered professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Just because you don't believe professions with unions and tenure are professionals, doesn't mean you're correct. Also, um... Both doctors and lawyers are essentially certified by outside boards that lobby for them. Just like a union. And just like a union they can't find work unless they belong to these organizations. Law firms pretty much always have a structure that mirrors tenure. Make partner and you're set for life.
As for the summer bit. Frankly teachers have it right. We're the dumb asses working during the best months of the year.
Trust me. My back pain says there's a serious difference between the bus driver who's been driving 25 years and the one who's been driving 5. You've obviously never ridden the bus, and are disparaging a career you know nothing about. Easy job it is not.
I use Fedora all day at work, and Ubuntu at home on my laptop. I prefer Ubuntu.
* I really like the lack of a root password by default (i.e. you don't know the root password, not that the root password is blank). Everything that needs privilege elevation requests your user password like sudo. It's the way I do things from the command line and I like it a lot better. I don't enter the root password ever in the command line in Fedora, so why should I in XWindows?
* Hardware events. These seem to be much better supported on Ubuntu. If I put in a CD or Camera it asks me what I want to do. And all of the proper programs are registered with these mini-wizards out of the box. In Fedora I either don't see these, or the program I want to use has not been registered with it.
* NetworkManager support in Ubuntu is much further along. And is getting to the point it just works. I love this for a laptop distro. For a desktop I couldn't care less.
* apt vs. yum. Yum still feels slow to me. apt really seems to work
* Just generally the default settings in Ubuntu are better. I seem to run into something new every week or so that has been setup in Ubuntu with a really nice default. Fedora always seems to make me do the leg work myself.
So it's nothing major. All just minor things, but I've made the switch because of them. It's the difference between feeling like I'm on a system for hacking and feeling like I'm using a day-to-day OS.
They've happened, I wish I had data on them. And who says you're going to have a windshield at that point? If there's any twisting of the body, windshields often pop off or break. There's so much stress that apparently seat belts themselves sometimes break (albeit rarely). I suppose I should just believe that darwin has a special place for morons who don't wear seatbelts, but I believe we should protect people from themselves. I don't know why anyone would want to die in a 45mph accident they could have walked away from by simply wearing their seatbelt.
Wrong seatbelts do not just keep people in the care safe. A 150 pound projectile flying out of a windshield has been known to kill people in the other car.
Chances are it would still work this way even with special chips. They're using that light as a floodgate. It decreases congestion on the highways, by letting on streams of 10-20 cars at a time. Otherwise the highway would get so backed up that traffic would stack up through the light and beyond.
People are very bad at figuring out the most efficient way to get through traffic. They think of the most efficient way for themselves which is almost always less efficient. We change lanes to try to speed up which slows us down. We take exits and then merge back in at the next one, which slows us down. Pretty much every move you can make in traffic slows all traffic down. If everyone left two car lengths in front of them in heavy traffic (which is counter-intuitive) I think we'd all be amazed at how fast we moved.
Yeah, I tend to do this too because I drive a standard. It makes a lot of sense to pop it out of gear and coast rather than popping it out of gear at the last possible moment and breaking hard. I rarely break in my car unless I have to come to a full stop. I just let friction do the work for me.
The Republican party has already floated the idea of using the National ID as a voter ID to help with their voter fraud efforts (even though I believe the law currently forbids this. They'd just change the law). I don't know whether that scares you or not.
Having to have a birth certificate as ID is my biggest opposition to it. If I loose my birth certificate I will have to get a new one from a hospital in a city that no longer exists. The hospital or the city. I'd like to think that they pulled all of my records out from under the 6 feet of volcanic ash, but somehow I doubt it. And I don't want to spend 17 hours in the DMV explaining that to someone.
You are correct in that nothing MAY happen, and this MAY just end up being a boring ass driver's license that triples the amount of time I have to spend at the DMV. But that would be ignoring history.
I'd agree that statistics based upon surveys are often nothing more than damned lies. Ones based on hard numbers are a little more trustworthy. If I know that 253 kids died from gun violence in schools between 1994 and 1999. I can take the public school attendance rate and come up with a pretty decent statistic. I might need to factor in a few things like absenteeism, but considering the number is so low compared to the number of kids enrolled in public schools, that probably won't nudge that perecentage of a perecent around a whole lot.
I have no problem with Marijuana. I think it should be legal, and I think it's much less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. That said, marijuana usage does diminish judgment and motor skills. I fear people with guns accidentally firing them more than I fear them coming after me with them.
The link has the statistics for the number of kids killed at skill per year by gun violence. It shows that a lot more kids are killed outside of school by guns, then inside schools (which are predominantly gun-free zones). I don't understand why you don't find those statistics pertinent.
My point being that I don't like the idea of people in altered states playing with guns. Really stoned people often find stupid things funny. Like pointing a gun at a wall and pretending to pull the trigger. And then accidentally pulling the trigger because their motor skills are diminished. I believe that potheads are generally more peaceful, but they definitely can be just as stupid as drunks.
>> If there was even a few students there with concealed carry weapons and proficient in using them. None of this would of happened.
If there were even a few students "within range of the killer" with concealed carry weapons and proficient in using them "and lucky enough not to have been shot first." None of this would have happened. Remember, there was armed security on campus. Just not the right part of campus. The devil is in the details.
How do you know that no one was armed? That's the big lie of the pro-gun lobby. There's an assumption that if students were allowed to bear arms that they would have been able to apprehend the suspect before he killed too many people. But what if they themselves were shot first?
Please, please, please remember before you try to bring guns onto our campuses that schools are still statistically one of the safest places on earth to be. They are safe without guns. I don't know how kids with guns could ever be a good idea. Would you be comfortable with a frat house full of concealed handgun owners? Knowing that the crazy pothead next door was packing? If you think college students and guns are a good idea, I think you don't remember college very well.
This site has information on guns and schools. Schools are very safe without guns. Let's consider keeping them that way:
There is no right to bare arms. Although one could say that because the constitution does not explicitly say anything about bare arms that we have the right.
Personally, I wouldn't attend a university with the right to have firearms in the classroom. But I suppose there's a market for it.
Please not the desert. That would have a high environmental impact. I don't think deserts are "barren". But I do like the idea of blanketing things. Put this on building roofs to get bird foot traffic. Put it in streets. We can't ramp this technology fast enough. Could we use this on windmills to increase power generation?
From what I've read Volkswagen has been doing pretty well. They might have burned themselves out a bit by not having a new product, but the last 5 years have been very good for them. I'll agree their quality sucks. My Golf has been fantastic (knocks on wood). My wifes Cabrio was pretty bad. But that brings up the point. People don't buy cars based upon reality. They buy based upon image and a general reputation. VW still has a generally good reputation (that they've been working hard on throwing away). Ford and GM have horrible reputations, but have actually been building a lot better quality cars as of late. Ford and GM are paying for sins their management made over 20 years ago.
Yeah, I agree with most of what you said. Except that I still don't think that labor is the main problem. GM and Ford have been building poor product after poor product. They've just assumed that people would want to buy their trucks forever. That no one would ever get into their neighbors foreign truck and lust after all the fantastic standard features. They spent the entire eighties building products that were substandard and relied on the "buy America" slogan to get people to buy their crap. Here's an idea for them. Turn their lobbying power on Congress to get national health insurance. Then they can get out of their obligations. And then everyone will see that the reason they're losing market share is completely because their management keeps insisting on building crappy cars.
That's great. I never said that GM or Ford build crappy cars (although they've built a pretty good reputation for doing so). They do, however, only put in safety systems as mandated by law. My guess is your 2001 Tahoe does not have standard side-curtain airbags like my Volkswagen does.
But that's great that you love your ugly-ass pimped out minivans. A lot of American's love them too. Just less and less each year. And as gas prices go up, people love them less. And GM and Ford have no established products to fall back on. That's my point. GM and Ford have been making bad business decision after bad business decision. You know what? They were right. SUVs provided amazing short term gains in sales. People loved them. Gas prices are going up now. What do they have to fall back on? Toyota has SUVs that get 30+ miles to the gallon. They have hybrid SUVs. They also have tons of economy cars. They have economy cars targeted to teenagers. They have sensible cars for young professionals, and for grandmas. GM and Ford have ugly ass cars that have reputations for being unreliable. I understand they're getting better. But they're only getting better because Toyota has eaten their lunch. Not because they did anything to stay on top. They stagnated. A competitor has come in, and there's little they can do to survive except start putting out revolutionary cars. Not evolutionary ones. Labor has nothing to do with it.
You don't have to agree with me. You can think your GMs are the best, prettiest, coolest things on earth. That's great. But the sales figures agree with me.
Oh yeah, it's the unions fault. Is it still the unions fault? Is the fact that every single car GM builds is a fucking ugly piece of crap, with a gigantic plastic dashboard, no safety features, and no standard features the fault of the unions? I can only bear the "unions raise cost" argument so far. At some point GM and Ford have to build cars that people want to buy. GM may be having problems because of pensions, but remember they made the promises in the first place. They could have invested to make sure they could pay out on those benefits, but instead they followed the modern corporate motto - "If you can no longer compete, buy some random crappy companies and increase your debtload". So they squandered money on investments that in no way made their automobile business more competitive as their market share dwindled. Ditto for Ford. Those are poorly run companies. They ran afoul of the unions and could no longer compete in labor, sure. But that was only one bad business decision among thousands. Having billions of dollars in medical and pension costs is only a problem if you aren't selling cars.
So what's your problem capitalist? Go sell some fucking cars and all your problems will go away.
Slashdot Mirror
Teachers are considered professionals like doctors, lawyers, and engineers. Just because you don't believe professions with unions and tenure are professionals, doesn't mean you're correct. Also, um... Both doctors and lawyers are essentially certified by outside boards that lobby for them. Just like a union. And just like a union they can't find work unless they belong to these organizations. Law firms pretty much always have a structure that mirrors tenure. Make partner and you're set for life.
As for the summer bit. Frankly teachers have it right. We're the dumb asses working during the best months of the year.
Trust me. My back pain says there's a serious difference between the bus driver who's been driving 25 years and the one who's been driving 5. You've obviously never ridden the bus, and are disparaging a career you know nothing about. Easy job it is not.
Well it would be cool, as long as you didn't have the entire population of Central America living in your backyard.
I use Fedora all day at work, and Ubuntu at home on my laptop. I prefer Ubuntu.
* I really like the lack of a root password by default (i.e. you don't know the root password, not that the root password is blank). Everything that needs privilege elevation requests your user password like sudo. It's the way I do things from the command line and I like it a lot better. I don't enter the root password ever in the command line in Fedora, so why should I in XWindows?
* Hardware events. These seem to be much better supported on Ubuntu. If I put in a CD or Camera it asks me what I want to do. And all of the proper programs are registered with these mini-wizards out of the box. In Fedora I either don't see these, or the program I want to use has not been registered with it.
* NetworkManager support in Ubuntu is much further along. And is getting to the point it just works. I love this for a laptop distro. For a desktop I couldn't care less.
* apt vs. yum. Yum still feels slow to me. apt really seems to work
* Just generally the default settings in Ubuntu are better. I seem to run into something new every week or so that has been setup in Ubuntu with a really nice default. Fedora always seems to make me do the leg work myself.
So it's nothing major. All just minor things, but I've made the switch because of them. It's the difference between feeling like I'm on a system for hacking and feeling like I'm using a day-to-day OS.
They've happened, I wish I had data on them. And who says you're going to have a windshield at that point? If there's any twisting of the body, windshields often pop off or break. There's so much stress that apparently seat belts themselves sometimes break (albeit rarely).
I suppose I should just believe that darwin has a special place for morons who don't wear seatbelts, but I believe we should protect people from themselves. I don't know why anyone would want to die in a 45mph accident they could have walked away from by simply wearing their seatbelt.
Wrong seatbelts do not just keep people in the care safe. A 150 pound projectile flying out of a windshield has been known to kill people in the other car.
Do you have a subscription? Because they feel free to throttle you otherwise (it's in their FAQ). I never had a problem when I was a subscriber.
Chances are it would still work this way even with special chips. They're using that light as a floodgate. It decreases congestion on the highways, by letting on streams of 10-20 cars at a time. Otherwise the highway would get so backed up that traffic would stack up through the light and beyond.
People are very bad at figuring out the most efficient way to get through traffic. They think of the most efficient way for themselves which is almost always less efficient. We change lanes to try to speed up which slows us down. We take exits and then merge back in at the next one, which slows us down. Pretty much every move you can make in traffic slows all traffic down. If everyone left two car lengths in front of them in heavy traffic (which is counter-intuitive) I think we'd all be amazed at how fast we moved.
Yeah, I tend to do this too because I drive a standard. It makes a lot of sense to pop it out of gear and coast rather than popping it out of gear at the last possible moment and breaking hard. I rarely break in my car unless I have to come to a full stop. I just let friction do the work for me.
The Republican party has already floated the idea of using the National ID as a voter ID to help with their voter fraud efforts (even though I believe the law currently forbids this. They'd just change the law). I don't know whether that scares you or not.
Having to have a birth certificate as ID is my biggest opposition to it. If I loose my birth certificate I will have to get a new one from a hospital in a city that no longer exists. The hospital or the city. I'd like to think that they pulled all of my records out from under the 6 feet of volcanic ash, but somehow I doubt it. And I don't want to spend 17 hours in the DMV explaining that to someone.
You are correct in that nothing MAY happen, and this MAY just end up being a boring ass driver's license that triples the amount of time I have to spend at the DMV. But that would be ignoring history.
Ketchup and thousand island dressing.
Judges are elected offices in many states. So um...
I'd agree that statistics based upon surveys are often nothing more than damned lies. Ones based on hard numbers are a little more trustworthy. If I know that 253 kids died from gun violence in schools between 1994 and 1999. I can take the public school attendance rate and come up with a pretty decent statistic. I might need to factor in a few things like absenteeism, but considering the number is so low compared to the number of kids enrolled in public schools, that probably won't nudge that perecentage of a perecent around a whole lot.
I have no problem with Marijuana. I think it should be legal, and I think it's much less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. That said, marijuana usage does diminish judgment and motor skills. I fear people with guns accidentally firing them more than I fear them coming after me with them.
The link has the statistics for the number of kids killed at skill per year by gun violence. It shows that a lot more kids are killed outside of school by guns, then inside schools (which are predominantly gun-free zones). I don't understand why you don't find those statistics pertinent.
My point being that I don't like the idea of people in altered states playing with guns. Really stoned people often find stupid things funny. Like pointing a gun at a wall and pretending to pull the trigger. And then accidentally pulling the trigger because their motor skills are diminished. I believe that potheads are generally more peaceful, but they definitely can be just as stupid as drunks.
>> If there was even a few students there with concealed carry weapons and proficient in using them. None of this would of happened.
If there were even a few students "within range of the killer" with concealed carry weapons and proficient in using them "and lucky enough not to have been shot first." None of this would have happened. Remember, there was armed security on campus. Just not the right part of campus. The devil is in the details.
How do you know that no one was armed? That's the big lie of the pro-gun lobby. There's an assumption that if students were allowed to bear arms that they would have been able to apprehend the suspect before he killed too many people. But what if they themselves were shot first?
f ety/statistics.htm#school
Please, please, please remember before you try to bring guns onto our campuses that schools are still statistically one of the safest places on earth to be. They are safe without guns. I don't know how kids with guns could ever be a good idea. Would you be comfortable with a frat house full of concealed handgun owners? Knowing that the crazy pothead next door was packing? If you think college students and guns are a good idea, I think you don't remember college very well.
This site has information on guns and schools. Schools are very safe without guns. Let's consider keeping them that way:
http://www.neahin.org/programs/schoolsafety/gunsa
There is no right to bare arms. Although one could say that because the constitution does not explicitly say anything about bare arms that we have the right.
Personally, I wouldn't attend a university with the right to have firearms in the classroom. But I suppose there's a market for it.
If only there was a way for emergency vehicles to indicate when they would stop obeying the laws of traffic...
Please not the desert. That would have a high environmental impact. I don't think deserts are "barren".
But I do like the idea of blanketing things. Put this on building roofs to get bird foot traffic. Put it in streets. We can't ramp this technology fast enough. Could we use this on windmills to increase power generation?
I prefer it. That way I can use a thick client and webmail. It's amazing. Why choose?
From what I've read Volkswagen has been doing pretty well. They might have burned themselves out a bit by not having a new product, but the last 5 years have been very good for them. I'll agree their quality sucks. My Golf has been fantastic (knocks on wood). My wifes Cabrio was pretty bad. But that brings up the point. People don't buy cars based upon reality. They buy based upon image and a general reputation. VW still has a generally good reputation (that they've been working hard on throwing away). Ford and GM have horrible reputations, but have actually been building a lot better quality cars as of late. Ford and GM are paying for sins their management made over 20 years ago.
Yeah, I agree with most of what you said. Except that I still don't think that labor is the main problem. GM and Ford have been building poor product after poor product. They've just assumed that people would want to buy their trucks forever. That no one would ever get into their neighbors foreign truck and lust after all the fantastic standard features. They spent the entire eighties building products that were substandard and relied on the "buy America" slogan to get people to buy their crap.
Here's an idea for them. Turn their lobbying power on Congress to get national health insurance. Then they can get out of their obligations. And then everyone will see that the reason they're losing market share is completely because their management keeps insisting on building crappy cars.
That's great. I never said that GM or Ford build crappy cars (although they've built a pretty good reputation for doing so). They do, however, only put in safety systems as mandated by law. My guess is your 2001 Tahoe does not have standard side-curtain airbags like my Volkswagen does.
But that's great that you love your ugly-ass pimped out minivans. A lot of American's love them too. Just less and less each year. And as gas prices go up, people love them less. And GM and Ford have no established products to fall back on. That's my point. GM and Ford have been making bad business decision after bad business decision. You know what? They were right. SUVs provided amazing short term gains in sales. People loved them. Gas prices are going up now. What do they have to fall back on? Toyota has SUVs that get 30+ miles to the gallon. They have hybrid SUVs. They also have tons of economy cars. They have economy cars targeted to teenagers. They have sensible cars for young professionals, and for grandmas. GM and Ford have ugly ass cars that have reputations for being unreliable. I understand they're getting better. But they're only getting better because Toyota has eaten their lunch. Not because they did anything to stay on top. They stagnated. A competitor has come in, and there's little they can do to survive except start putting out revolutionary cars. Not evolutionary ones. Labor has nothing to do with it.
You don't have to agree with me. You can think your GMs are the best, prettiest, coolest things on earth. That's great. But the sales figures agree with me.
Oh yeah, it's the unions fault. Is it still the unions fault? Is the fact that every single car GM builds is a fucking ugly piece of crap, with a gigantic plastic dashboard, no safety features, and no standard features the fault of the unions? I can only bear the "unions raise cost" argument so far. At some point GM and Ford have to build cars that people want to buy.
GM may be having problems because of pensions, but remember they made the promises in the first place. They could have invested to make sure they could pay out on those benefits, but instead they followed the modern corporate motto - "If you can no longer compete, buy some random crappy companies and increase your debtload". So they squandered money on investments that in no way made their automobile business more competitive as their market share dwindled. Ditto for Ford. Those are poorly run companies. They ran afoul of the unions and could no longer compete in labor, sure. But that was only one bad business decision among thousands. Having billions of dollars in medical and pension costs is only a problem if you aren't selling cars.
So what's your problem capitalist? Go sell some fucking cars and all your problems will go away.