I don't know what the certification rules are in your state, but where I grew up, there was a non-traditional method of certification which was geared towards people like you mention in your post.
I only know about California's requirements as that's the only state I've ever had any experience with. When I was in graduate school studying Math, I looked into what was needed to become accredited in Mathematics as this would be a good backup employment option. At that time it required at least a year of *full-time* education classes with little or nothing to do with math.
Forget that I thought. Why spend an extra year in school just to teach high school when I could walk out with a master's degree and teach at a junior college or any private high school. Later I ended up teaching at the university level for several semesters and one semester at a private high school.
Of my friends who took the education classes, most found them a waste of time, and after looking at the material they covered I'd have to agree. Most of it seemed designed to make the simple complex and to justify the continuing existence of an education faculty. Certainly very little of what was taught was relevant to any of my classroom experiences. I think most of the time would have been much better spent having them teach actual students while under the guidance of good teacher.
There is also an 'Emergency' Credential program where you can begin teaching (usually as a substitute) while taking night classes until you have the required number of education credits. This seems to be the route more and more teachers are taking, since nobody wants to spend an extra year in school while making no money.
...the education system (especially in the science and mathematics departments) is a lot better in Russia and China! People have to actually study to get a diploma...
You're absolutely right about this at the secondary level. However, by the end of the undergraduate level, things are much more even.
I suppose you can say that the US system does in 16 years what others do in 12 or 14 years. Of course, one difference between the U.S. and other countries' university systems is that U.S. system is much more open. Virtually anybody who wants a degree, in say Computer Science, can get one and at a fairly low cost by taking advantage of junior colleges and state universities.
It's the same music, how many times do we have to buy the SAME thing?
Good point. In the last thirty years, music has changed its media four times, and now two of these (LPs and 8-track) have been phased out. I think CDs are probably the last stop for a while. They offer the highest fidelity of any of media, and are fairly long lasting. They're also cheaper for the record companies to manufacture than the other media. Best of all, you can make cheap personal backup copies that you leave in the car or at work without worrying about it.
The only way I see consumers ever being weaned off CDs is if the standard album length changed, or there appears a more convenient form factor that's also cheaper.
Who honestly burns CDs filled with Word/Abiword/KOffice documents at home?
Well, my mom just got a digital camera and a digital camcorder, and now she's making CDs full of pictures and video and mailing them to me. It may not be Word documents, but it's just as legitimate. It's so much nicer than video tapes to watch since you can jump through the video more easily, and it's also much easier to copy and backup. When you can store an hour's worth of video on a cd that only costs a dime, why hold back?
Most diesel submarines of the WWII era ran their diesel engines on the surface at night in order to charge up their batteries. Near the end of the war, the Germans invented the schnorkel which allowed them to run their engines (and expel the exhaust) while just under the surface.
I agree that cloning is getting a bad rap in the press. Most people (including pundits and scientists) seem horrified about it, while at the same time jumping on the bandwagon for embryonic cell research, which I think is much more questionable from a ethical and moral standpoint.
A clone of someone would clearly be a legal person and would enjoy all the rights that came with that. They would also be a unique individual as their upbringing and life experiences would never duplicate that of the clonee. The situation is essentially that of separated identical twins, except that one twin would be much older than the other. It's funny that we find identical twins cute and interesting, while clones are bad, bad BAD!
Really, the worst part of cloning (assuming it's ever perfected) would be having to put up with all the celebrities prattling on about their cloned children. Could you imagine Rosie O'Donnell and Rosies I,II, and III? Ugggh....
As I pointed out above, they knew where the photo had been taken, the guy in the photo was wearing his little orange road construction vest, they probably went back to the area where the picture was taken and checked out the construction workers until they found the guy in the picture. No computer needed.
Maybe. But since we're both speculating, who really knows?
It's in between steps 5 and 6 that there's some missing information from the story. It says, "If the image is a match, officers are dispatched to question the person. But in this case it wasn't the system that flagged Milliron, but simply a woman who saw his picture with a news story."
This is absolutely true in the sense that the system did not select him out of the crowd as a suspect. However, it's unclear how the police were able to identify the man just from a picture. Sure, it's possible they went around the city asking people until they found someone that knew him, but it seems more likely they ran his face through the database to identify him (but not in real time).
Not quite. Most Americans have IQs near normal and manage to function quite well. It's just that people in general are uncurious and don't sweat the details about things unless they have a direct impact on their lives. And for this, I say God bless'em.
The beauty of living in a wealthy, stable, democratic country is that you can pretty much live your life without ever having to be concerned about the political system or the rest of the world. Most people are content just to have a good car, a home, a family, and a decent job and don't worry about much else. I know it's fashionable to mock this, but if you look at it from a historical view this, this is an amazing thing. Just think, the average American doesn't have to worry about a despot coming to power and throwing them into jail on a whim, a neighboring country invading, being forced to labor, being expelled from the country, or prevented from living where they want. Just being able to live your life without these concerns is a luxury that people in say, Zimbabwe, don't have.
You are assuming Microsoft acts rationally. That may be a mistake.
If Microsoft was always rational, they wouldn't have kept up their shenanigans DURING the court case, they'd gone on the straight and narrow for the duration of the trial, or at least been more sneaky, and then started up again with their mess after no one was looking.
On the other hand maybe Microsoft was being rational based on realistic considerations. The knew that any kind of anti-trust litigation would take at least 5 years to actually be resolved. That's 5 years of higher corporate revenue and increased control of the pc market, with a cost of only a higher percentage chance of being hit with a draconian punishment, which they were facing anyway. So far it looks like their gamble is aying off.
It only took me a few hours to realize Mandrake is nowhere near usable.. out of the box it's slow, the apps are still as ghetto as they were 6 months ago
I'm curious as to what kind of apps you were using - were they CPU-intensive and/or disk-intensive? Most Linux systems I've run have felt faster than their Windows counterparts, but of course this is mostly a subjective observation. Has anyone actually run a benchmark between the windows version of an application and the linux version (assuming equal optimization, resources, etc.)?
Across realtime is one of my all-time favorite SF novels. In it he introduces 'bobbles' (stasis fields) and the 'technological singularity'. What's interesting is that rather than just invent some new technology and go Oooh Ahhh over it, he lets the story follow how people quickly adapt the new technology and start playing with it. What's amazing is that he wrote this back in the early 80's, and yet nothing he wrote about computers seems dated - that's foresight!
Pepsi has known the formula for Coke for decades, and vice-versa. It wouldn't take a flavoring specialist and a little qualitative analysis long to be able to reproduce almost all the key components of Coke's flavor. Rather than copy Coke's taste exactly, Pepsi uses relatively more citrus oils and tastes different enough that some people prefer it to Coke.
Re:Tell me what THIS is good for?
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Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 1
I think you missed my point which was that cars don't have to justify their existence by being useful. Car manufacturers could easily make a 1-seat convertible with a measily engine and a 3 gallon gas tank that has ceramic flowers all over it. Is this a useful vehicle? Nope, but they could still make and sell such cars if a market existed.
First, in terms of function, most sports cars (ignoring the Lamborghinis that get 2 MPG) get better mileage than an SUV, and are actually safer, as well
But that not the issue in question. There are legitimate uses for SUV type vehicles. Granted, most owners never come close to using them for what they were intended.
On the other hand sports cars are basically for fun (as well as ego, status symbolism, etc)...and that's okay. They have don't have to be anything but fun. That why I drive mine. Sure, they can be safer than SUVs at least in theory. But the fact that the insurance rates for sports cars almost always run higher than vans or SUVs suggest that this is not the case in reality. The difference is really in the demographics of who drives what, not in the car itself. And that's what's behind a lot of the anti-SUVism - a lot of the people driving SUVs have bad driving habits and are from annoying classes of people in general.
Second, as a status symbol, sports cars are at least up front about being phallus replacements.
Uh, they are? I guess as up front as BMWs or Mercedes or Lexuses or Ford Focuses are.
But the main problem I have with SUVs is that the moron manufacturers are screwing with Darwin, keeping the SUV owners from getting what they deserve.
Okay, let's try not to show our hatred here. It's not a pretty sight.
Re:Tell me what THIS is good for?
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 1
On the other hand what good is a Miata for or any sports cars for that matter?
I agree that paying $50K for a cadillac truck is mostly about ego and not utility, but the great thing about this country is that you're free to waste your money in any way you like.
Re:At least people notice terrorism.
on
Eco-Terrorism
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· Score: 1
Ummm, I guess you weren't paying attention when Bush went to Europe a few weeks ago. One of the major issues (if not THE main issue) to be discussed was global warming and the Kyoto treaty. The media was filled with articles on the debate over global warming. Perhaps complete saturation coverage is what you'd like.
Are these cameras really for catching red-light runners? This would require issuing tickets based solely on photographic evidence, which I don't think any city in the bay area is currently doing. I always assumed the cameras were just for traffic monitoring (for now at least).
Its' actually pretty damn scary how every American child has been tought the same 5 sentences about "rights" and "free speach" and patriotism.
Unlike in some other countries I could mention, people in the U.S. take constitutional rights very seriously and feel passionately about them. They are not just some pretty little legal abstractions to be trotted out, admired, and put back on the shelf - people actually expect to use them and woe to anyone who tries to stop them.
The U.S. constitution may be less expansive and more absolute than other countries', but it is usually adherred to fairly closely even at the cost of some inconvenience to society at large. People make a deal of their constitution rights in the U.S. because they can rely on them and they do have power.
So basically, xenophobically claiming that this convention is going to hurt *MY* country doesn't engage with the debate
Why not? Surely I can be upset that French laws may affect which books I can purchase here in the US without being xenophobic. The main problem with this treaty is that people would be subject to laws that were never debated on, never voted on by their representatives, and may in fact violate their constitutional rights. I think the primary objection to the treaty is its undemocratic nature, not that it would sully a country's perfect laws with nasty foreign ones.
4) Of the newsgroups banned, they are all either geared towards copyrighted magazines, or deal with groups that distribute copyrighted media.
alt.binaries.movies is not geared towards a copyrighted magazine or a pirate group. While certainly some copyright material does pass through it, this alone does not make it a 'bad' group. After all, any newsgroup could have copyrighted material posted to it at any time.
Given the growing popularity of amateur produced movies, this (and it's subsets) would be the appropriate place to post them. So it does have legitimate non-copyright infringing purposes.
Can @Home do this? Sure. It's their service and they can set the terms. What I think everyone's complaining about is the broad brush manner that @home has dealt with it. The DMCA is a bad law, and this is just one of its consequences.
If you're physically taking money out of the hands of starving people, stop it! It's called robbery and it's illegal.
If you think you're taking money out of the hands of starving people metaphorically, you must be assuming that economy is a zero-sum situation - i.e to make a dollar, you have to take a dollar away from someone else. Unfortunately this is a very bad assumption and is almost never true, otherwise economic growth would be an impossibility.
Remember people don't get paid what they're worth, or even what's just and decent - they get paid what it would cost to replace them with someone else who can perform the job with equal competence.
Actually DSS streams have been cracked, for several years in fact. Right now, it's an arms race between the satellite services and the hackers. DirectTv seems to have the upper hand (temporarily) over the hackers, and the hackers seem to have DishNetwork beaten (temproarily).
Look here for more info.
Well, actually it probably is true. Recall the McLean, McDonald's lower fat hamburger. It was introduced in the early 90's when there was a lot of concern about the amount of fat in foods. It was indeed lower in fat, but unfortunately it didn't taste quite as good as a regular hamburger. They don't offer it anymore, because in the end there just wasn't that much demand.
The problem is that people say they want healthy foods, but what they actually buy are tasty foods. McDonalds is very much into making food that people will buy.
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I don't know what the certification rules are in your state, but where I grew up, there was a non-traditional method of certification which was geared towards people like you mention in your post.
I only know about California's requirements as that's the only state I've ever had any experience with. When I was in graduate school studying Math, I looked into what was needed to become accredited in Mathematics as this would be a good backup employment option. At that time it required at least a year of *full-time* education classes with little or nothing to do with math.
Forget that I thought. Why spend an extra year in school just to teach high school when I could walk out with a master's degree and teach at a junior college or any private high school. Later I ended up teaching at the university level for several semesters and one semester at a private high school.
Of my friends who took the education classes, most found them a waste of time, and after looking at the material they covered I'd have to agree. Most of it seemed designed to make the simple complex and to justify the continuing existence of an education faculty. Certainly very little of what was taught was relevant to any of my classroom experiences. I think most of the time would have been much better spent having them teach actual students while under the guidance of good teacher.
There is also an 'Emergency' Credential program where you can begin teaching (usually as a substitute) while taking night classes until you have the required number of education credits. This seems to be the route more and more teachers are taking, since nobody wants to spend an extra year in school while making no money.
...the education system (especially in the science and mathematics departments) is a lot better in Russia and China! People have to actually study to get a diploma...
You're absolutely right about this at the secondary level. However, by the end of the undergraduate level, things are much more even.
I suppose you can say that the US system does in 16 years what others do in 12 or 14 years. Of course, one difference between the U.S. and other countries' university systems is that U.S. system is much more open. Virtually anybody who wants a degree, in say Computer Science, can get one and at a fairly low cost by taking advantage of junior colleges and state universities.
It's the same music, how many times do we have to buy the SAME thing?
Good point. In the last thirty years, music has changed its media four times, and now two of these (LPs and 8-track) have been phased out. I think CDs are probably the last stop for a while. They offer the highest fidelity of any of media, and are fairly long lasting. They're also cheaper for the record companies to manufacture than the other media. Best of all, you can make cheap personal backup copies that you leave in the car or at work without worrying about it.
The only way I see consumers ever being weaned off CDs is if the standard album length changed, or there appears a more convenient form factor that's also cheaper.
Who honestly burns CDs filled with Word/Abiword/KOffice documents at home?
Well, my mom just got a digital camera and a digital camcorder, and now she's making CDs full of pictures and video and mailing them to me. It may not be Word documents, but it's just as legitimate. It's so much nicer than video tapes to watch since you can jump through the video more easily, and it's also much easier to copy and backup. When you can store an hour's worth of video on a cd that only costs a dime, why hold back?
schnorkel? Make that either Schnorchel or snorkel :-)
Nope, it's schnorkel. At least that's how it's spelled among all the history texts I've ever seen. Even the Navy spells it that way here.
Most diesel submarines of the WWII era ran their diesel engines on the surface at night in order to charge up their batteries. Near the end of the war, the Germans invented the schnorkel which allowed them to run their engines (and expel the exhaust) while just under the surface.
I agree that cloning is getting a bad rap in the press. Most people (including pundits and scientists) seem horrified about it, while at the same time jumping on the bandwagon for embryonic cell research, which I think is much more questionable from a ethical and moral standpoint.
A clone of someone would clearly be a legal person and would enjoy all the rights that came with that. They would also be a unique individual as their upbringing and life experiences would never duplicate that of the clonee. The situation is essentially that of separated identical twins, except that one twin would be much older than the other. It's funny that we find identical twins cute and interesting, while clones are bad, bad BAD!
Really, the worst part of cloning (assuming it's ever perfected) would be having to put up with all the celebrities prattling on about their cloned children. Could you imagine Rosie O'Donnell and Rosies I,II, and III? Ugggh....
Ebooks would be a LOT more popular if there were more titles, and they were easily traded like music via an interface like napster.
Look on gnutella using your gnutellium of choice. It's got tons of ebooks.
As I pointed out above, they knew where the photo had been taken, the guy in the photo was wearing his little orange road construction vest, they probably went back to the area where the picture was taken and checked out the construction workers until they found the guy in the picture. No computer needed.
Maybe. But since we're both speculating, who really knows?
It's in between steps 5 and 6 that there's some missing information from the story. It says, "If the image is a match, officers are dispatched to question the person. But in this case it wasn't the system that flagged Milliron, but simply a woman who saw his picture with a news story."
This is absolutely true in the sense that the system did not select him out of the crowd as a suspect. However, it's unclear how the police were able to identify the man just from a picture. Sure, it's possible they went around the city asking people until they found someone that knew him, but it seems more likely they ran his face through the database to identify him (but not in real time).
Most Americans are idiots.
Not quite. Most Americans have IQs near normal and manage to function quite well. It's just that people in general are uncurious and don't sweat the details about things unless they have a direct impact on their lives. And for this, I say God bless'em.
The beauty of living in a wealthy, stable, democratic country is that you can pretty much live your life without ever having to be concerned about the political system or the rest of the world. Most people are content just to have a good car, a home, a family, and a decent job and don't worry about much else. I know it's fashionable to mock this, but if you look at it from a historical view this, this is an amazing thing. Just think, the average American doesn't have to worry about a despot coming to power and throwing them into jail on a whim, a neighboring country invading, being forced to labor, being expelled from the country, or prevented from living where they want. Just being able to live your life without these concerns is a luxury that people in say, Zimbabwe, don't have.
You are assuming Microsoft acts rationally. That may be a mistake.
If Microsoft was always rational, they wouldn't have kept up their shenanigans DURING the court case, they'd gone on the straight and narrow for the duration of the trial, or at least been more sneaky, and then started up again with their mess after no one was looking.
On the other hand maybe Microsoft was being rational based on realistic considerations. The knew that any kind of anti-trust litigation would take at least 5 years to actually be resolved. That's 5 years of higher corporate revenue and increased control of the pc market, with a cost of only a higher percentage chance of being hit with a draconian punishment, which they were facing anyway. So far it looks like their gamble is aying off.
It only took me a few hours to realize Mandrake is nowhere near usable.. out of the box it's slow, the apps are still as ghetto as they were 6 months ago
I'm curious as to what kind of apps you were using - were they CPU-intensive and/or disk-intensive? Most Linux systems I've run have felt faster than their Windows counterparts, but of course this is mostly a subjective observation. Has anyone actually run a benchmark between the windows version of an application and the linux version (assuming equal optimization, resources, etc.)?
Across realtime is one of my all-time favorite SF novels. In it he introduces 'bobbles' (stasis fields) and the 'technological singularity'. What's interesting is that rather than just invent some new technology and go Oooh Ahhh over it, he lets the story follow how people quickly adapt the new technology and start playing with it. What's amazing is that he wrote this back in the early 80's, and yet nothing he wrote about computers seems dated - that's foresight!
Pepsi has known the formula for Coke for decades, and vice-versa. It wouldn't take a flavoring specialist and a little qualitative analysis long to be able to reproduce almost all the key components of Coke's flavor. Rather than copy Coke's taste exactly, Pepsi uses relatively more citrus oils and tastes different enough that some people prefer it to Coke.
I think you missed my point which was that cars don't have to justify their existence by being useful. Car manufacturers could easily make a 1-seat convertible with a measily engine and a 3 gallon gas tank that has ceramic flowers all over it. Is this a useful vehicle? Nope, but they could still make and sell such cars if a market existed.
First, in terms of function, most sports cars (ignoring the Lamborghinis that get 2 MPG) get better mileage than an SUV, and are actually safer, as well
But that not the issue in question. There are legitimate uses for SUV type vehicles. Granted, most owners never come close to using them for what they were intended.
On the other hand sports cars are basically for fun (as well as ego, status symbolism, etc)...and that's okay. They have don't have to be anything but fun. That why I drive mine. Sure, they can be safer than SUVs at least in theory. But the fact that the insurance rates for sports cars almost always run higher than vans or SUVs suggest that this is not the case in reality. The difference is really in the demographics of who drives what, not in the car itself. And that's what's behind a lot of the anti-SUVism - a lot of the people driving SUVs have bad driving habits and are from annoying classes of people in general.
Second, as a status symbol, sports cars are at least up front about being phallus replacements.
Uh, they are? I guess as up front as BMWs or Mercedes or Lexuses or Ford Focuses are.
But the main problem I have with SUVs is that the moron manufacturers are screwing with Darwin, keeping the SUV owners from getting what they deserve.
Okay, let's try not to show our hatred here. It's not a pretty sight.
On the other hand what good is a Miata for or any sports cars for that matter?
I agree that paying $50K for a cadillac truck is mostly about ego and not utility, but the great thing about this country is that you're free to waste your money in any way you like.
Ummm, I guess you weren't paying attention when Bush went to Europe a few weeks ago. One of the major issues (if not THE main issue) to be discussed was global warming and the Kyoto treaty. The media was filled with articles on the debate over global warming. Perhaps complete saturation coverage is what you'd like.
Are these cameras really for catching red-light runners? This would require issuing tickets based solely on photographic evidence, which I don't think any city in the bay area is currently doing. I always assumed the cameras were just for traffic monitoring (for now at least).
Its' actually pretty damn scary how every American child has been tought the same 5 sentences about "rights" and "free speach" and patriotism.
Unlike in some other countries I could mention, people in the U.S. take constitutional rights very seriously and feel passionately about them. They are not just some pretty little legal abstractions to be trotted out, admired, and put back on the shelf - people actually expect to use them and woe to anyone who tries to stop them.
The U.S. constitution may be less expansive and more absolute than other countries', but it is usually adherred to fairly closely even at the cost of some inconvenience to society at large. People make a deal of their constitution rights in the U.S. because they can rely on them and they do have power.
So basically, xenophobically claiming that this convention is going to hurt *MY* country doesn't engage with the debate
Why not? Surely I can be upset that French laws may affect which books I can purchase here in the US without being xenophobic. The main problem with this treaty is that people would be subject to laws that were never debated on, never voted on by their representatives, and may in fact violate their constitutional rights. I think the primary objection to the treaty is its undemocratic nature, not that it would sully a country's perfect laws with nasty foreign ones.
Not quite.
4) Of the newsgroups banned, they are all either geared towards copyrighted magazines, or deal with groups that distribute copyrighted media.
alt.binaries.movies is not geared towards a copyrighted magazine or a pirate group. While certainly some copyright material does pass through it, this alone does not make it a 'bad' group. After all, any newsgroup could have copyrighted material posted to it at any time. Given the growing popularity of amateur produced movies, this (and it's subsets) would be the appropriate place to post them. So it does have legitimate non-copyright infringing purposes.
Can @Home do this? Sure. It's their service and they can set the terms. What I think everyone's complaining about is the broad brush manner that @home has dealt with it. The DMCA is a bad law, and this is just one of its consequences.
If you're physically taking money out of the hands of starving people, stop it! It's called robbery and it's illegal.
If you think you're taking money out of the hands of starving people metaphorically, you must be assuming that economy is a zero-sum situation - i.e to make a dollar, you have to take a dollar away from someone else. Unfortunately this is a very bad assumption and is almost never true, otherwise economic growth would be an impossibility.
Remember people don't get paid what they're worth, or even what's just and decent - they get paid what it would cost to replace them with someone else who can perform the job with equal competence.
Actually DSS streams have been cracked, for several years in fact. Right now, it's an arms race between the satellite services and the hackers. DirectTv seems to have the upper hand (temporarily) over the hackers, and the hackers seem to have DishNetwork beaten (temproarily).
Look here for more info.
Well, actually it probably is true. Recall the McLean, McDonald's lower fat hamburger. It was introduced in the early 90's when there was a lot of concern about the amount of fat in foods. It was indeed lower in fat, but unfortunately it didn't taste quite as good as a regular hamburger. They don't offer it anymore, because in the end there just wasn't that much demand.
The problem is that people say they want healthy foods, but what they actually buy are tasty foods. McDonalds is very much into making food that people will buy.