The statistics are poor. We're in a mixed-use environment with mostly Windows for users and mostly Unix variants for servers, including HP-UX, BSD, Solaris, and Linux. The best data I have ever been able to come up with is one tech per 100 units. I've never counted routers, switches, hubs, and wiring in this, though I think you could make a good case to add them in. Some of those are a lot more onerous to configure than a garden variety PC. One thing that helped us was a standard-build PC. Store all data on backed up dual servers so if a PC breaks, you can replace it with an 'identical' PC easily and quickly. We kinda screwed up originally because we were IP rich with eleven Class C networks, so we used IPs to identify PCs and hard coded them, and also used one Class C per building, which was a big waste. It was a bit of a challenge to move to DHCP allocation when our Class Cs began to fill up, but we managed to avoid a lot of subnetting for a couple of decades. You probably couldn't get away with that these days.
A good company knows this about techies and will plan accordingly. Some have 'Senior Tech' positions designed for people who do not care to enter the administrative side. I know of one company that treated their Field Engineers this way. The boss would say, "Are you interested in eventually moving into a management position, or are you committed to to the technology? I have training money to spend on you and I want to spend it the right way." Unfortunately, the FE in question told me, "I told him what he wanted to hear." That's too bad because I knew both guys, and I believe the senior regional manager was absolutely sincere in what he said.
Certainly the Peter Principal can apply (The solution, which is rarely mentioned, is "Creative Incompetence."), but I think it is easy to be short-sighted here. The question is not where you want to be in five years, but where you want to be at age 60 or so. If you can raise your family, pay for your kids' educations, and retire securely doing your tech thing, by all means go for it. But if you need to get better situated in order to do that, you'd better plan ahead.
My advice here (I'm 60 and retired securely) is to not blow off management just because you've got attitude and a PHB. Management can be a very fulfilling role. You're responsible, but you get to call the shots and point the direction. It's not going to happen unless you make it happen. It can get very political, but if you're as smart as you say you are, you ought to be able to make it work.
That is effectively what the Israleites did. Men of this village wanted to marry the Jewish women. The Jewish men, said OK, but to that you must be circumcised. The village men lined up and had it done, retired to their beds to sleep it off, and were killed by the Jewish men. I forget the name of the story, but it's in the Old Testament.
Forget the emails. All they show is a few very prestigious climate scientists "hiding behind" intellectual property rights, refusing to adhere to FOIA rules (both of these normally anathema to/.ers), deleteing data and emails that might be incrimintory, revealing that they have manipulated peer review by keeping skeptical papers out, even to the point of changing the definition of peer review, refusing to release their data, caliming a peer reviewed article = 'settled science', exulting in the death of skeptics, attempting (successfully) to get editors they don't like fired. Just normal boys will beboys stuff. Nothing to see here> Move along.
Right. Same guy. Random number input into his program produced a hockey stick. I downloaded the 61MB zip file and have read most of the emails. Those are damaging in terms of exposing several issues:
1. They manipulated the peer-review process and controlled it to the point of changing what peer-review meant, freezing out contrary authors, reviewing each others' work, getting editors fired, etc. There's a lot of that kind of manipulation revealed.
2. They colluded to avoid the FOIA and deleted emails and threatened to delete data before they would release it under FOIA. This is illegal.
3. They admitted to manipulating data to 'hide the decline' or 'get rid of the Medieval Warming Period.' I don't have a problem with 'trick' being used. No big deal, but 'hide the decline'? Not good.
4. They would manipulate the data by simply not adding it, closing a run on an increase, when the subsequent data showed a decline. They seem dismayed that the last ten years shows an overall redction in temperature, at one point calling it a travesty and suggesting the data must be wrong.
5. Because there were no thermometers 2000 years ago, they use 'proxies' such as tree rings, ice core samples, etc. However, tree ring growth can be caused by wetness and other issues, not just temperature. In ine case they 'proved; warming based on 12 trees in Siberia. When hey went back and measured many more trees, the increase disappeared.
But the more damning evidence is in the programs themselves, including REM statements where 'hide the decline' is found numerous times, data is manually manipulated, and the programs would throw an error and keep on running.
The code, written primarily in FORTAN and IDL, is a mess--not professional. The datasets are often missing or in poor shape. There's one 'Harry Read me' text file where poor Harry is trying to make sense of the code, over several years, and points out many of the flaws.
So what we've got here is email and program code evidence of manipulation, very poor data, and very poor programming.
The thing is, there are only 4 datasets in the world, two terrestrial and two satellite. There are serious problms with both terrestrial data sets. NOAA's, for example, has manually 'adjusted' data over the years as much as 500%! In other words, the observed degree difference was.1 degree C and the 'adjustment' was +.5 degrees C. You'd think the satellite data asets would be more accurate, however, they were 'calibrated' on the 'adjusted' terrestrial data sets.
Remember Gore's CO2 graph? Probably a 95% correlation between CO2 and temperature, which he presented as proof that CO2 CAUSES global warming. Except that the CO2 increased 800 years AFTER the warming trend. In other words, warming CAUSED CO2 increases, the opposite of what he implied.
this might be just the ticket. It's not just about you. Just look at the difficult someone with cerebral palsy or ALS has with motor skills. There's a brain in there, sometimes a brilliant one (Stephen Hawking, for example). Something like this could be a wonderful enabler for them.
Just shows investors are clueless
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Someone already pointed out below that the stock loss also happened on the day both companies reported quarterly losses and THAT may have had a lot to do with the drop. If some of the loss was due to Google's announcement, it just shows investors are clueless--not that Google is not trying to help them along in their cluelessness. Having used a (rental) cell phone GPS and owning both a portable Garmin and a built-in GPS I can tell you there is a world of difference. Google wants you to take an iPhone and mount it on the dash and pretends it will be just like a Garmin.
Nonsense. Screen size is a very big deal here. GPS systems are distracting and dangerous enough without having to put your head forward to squint at the screen. I think they are about a third of the size of a built-in like on an Acura TSX and less than half of a portable Garmin like the 770 (which both N. American and European maps). Maybe some of you with super X-ray vision can see these tiny things well, but wearing bi-focals I surely cannot and I maintain many people are in the same situation. What people need is a stress-free GPS, not one they have to fight, especially in a strange locale, which is the only time you really need one. You already know how to get home, right?
The problem with the iPhone type devices is that they are a compromise for everything. Do you really enjoy that tiny screen? Do you like browsing the web on your iPhone? Do you enjoy texting with keys that small? Hey, but you can do it anywhere, so you put up with it. It's cool.
And, of course, there is competition and feeping creaturitis. Next up (and this will be a hardware issue): Heads-up displays on the windshield. I would dump my Garmin and buy a new one in half a second if I could get a heads-up display. Let's see you download THAT from Google.
Re:Android WILL take over.
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Maybe some of them were better, but most of them were a lot worse. The quality of a lot of clones was just terrible--especially compared to the fit & finish of a real IBM. It's just that they cost $700 when IBMs were $2,500 and up, comparable to an Apple. I remember making the decision for my company. Hmmm...Three clones or one Apple or one IBM. I need computers on desks fast. It was a no-brainer. Had Apple not been so interested in keeping high gross margins, they could have owned the 'PC' market today. Instead, they got greedy and proprietary, and they lost. Their resurgence is quite a story, but back when they went from circa 90% of the market to about 3% they nearly lost it altogether.
Just a suggestion: Why not hold off on a purchase until you cumulate $25.00 worth, in which case super saver shipping is free with no annual fee? I rarely pay shipping on Amazon. Alas, living in Washington State I do pay the sales tax. It's still cheaper.
Been there. Done that. Retired. There are a lot of unfounded assumptions in these posts. Basics if you choose teaching it will take some time and at first you won't get paid very well, but if you hang in there and get more credits, going to summer school for about ten years, you'll wind up doing okay by your mid thirties. In Seattle, a school teacher with 15 years experience (average age 37-40), with a BA, MA and +135 hours (all those summer quarters for 10 years) makes $75K (2009-2010 salary schedule) and gets summers off--because you've peaked on credits and don't need to do that any more, plus Christmas, Spring break, etc. and all the bennies you could want. Compared to private employment where you're lucky to get three weeks vacation a year that's close to $100K equivalent. But that's the big city, too.
Smaller districts often pay a bit less, but smaller districts are ALSO in more rural areas where the cost of living is less. In many places in WA, teachers are among the highest paid folks in town. All totaled it's a pretty decent middle class lifestyle.
Not saying it's all roses. Teaching can be a very hard job with lots of expectations from parents, lots of paperwork, and lots of extra time at night preparing for the next day. And frankly, there are lots of places I wouldn't want to be a teacher at all. You know what I mean. Also, it takes awhile to move up on the salary schedule to where you actually make ok money. The first few years can be pretty dismal.
Retirement is pretty good. In WA a teacher with 40 years experience (25-65) would get 80% of pay plus FICA. By the time YOU retire, there might be nothing! But that's the idea. You actually would make more money retired than working: $60K retirement plus $22K FICA.
It's one of those fields where, depending on where you are at and what you teach, it could be a GREAT job, or a piss poor one.
I'm as old as dirt. When I went to college, there weren't any computers available. By the time I got to grad school, colleges were enamored with computers. I actually took a course in BASIC in grad school, something they MAY do in Elementary School today--or not. I learned BASIC via punched cards where ">" was "GT" but, hey! (It was a CDC 6000, same computer as BG used as a teenager.) I thought it was SO COOL!!!! So when the Commodore PET came out I held fire, and when the Trash-80 came out (I loved the wafting plymers of its smell) I just waited, and when the Apple ][ came out, I splurged and by the time I got rid of it, I had spent $7,000 on it with the CP/M card, and all that stuff. And when my boss said, "I think we ought to investigate computers," I humbly suggested an Apple, and she gave me $5,000 to do it. The rest, as they say, is history. I bought one of the first IBM PC's, and by the time I retired, I had purchased several minis and probably on the order of 700 PCs. Also, I might add, I paid my mortgage writing about them for 20 years.
I say this to give background. The point is that when the computer revolution happened, I was there. I lived in it and I loved it, but I was largely self-taught. No one else had a computer at home, and so when our business needed to 'automate,' I was salivating at the head of the line saying "Me! Me! Me!" Who else could they possibly have chosen? Besides, by that time I had learned some Pascal, some dBase, some Fortran and COBOL, not to mention Visicalc. I did the CNE shtick just to try to keep up. And I did. I put in our first Frame Relay Ethernet network, then went to the class to see if I did it right. So that's how I became an IT guy.
But nowadays with the background I had, I could NEVER become an IT person because my industry, when they need an IT person, recruits for one with that amount of knowledge in education. This is simply the maturity of the industry. The same thing happened with electricity, with airplanes, and with any number of fields that simply did not previously exist. They turned from hobbies into professions. Once there was enough background material and a 'recognized body of knowledge' to turn IT into a profession, we folks who learned by doing and pulled ourselves into the field with our bootstraps, and, if I may say, BUILT IT FROM SCRATCH, became outmoded. As someone said, "any profession is a conspiracy against the laity."
I consider myself very lucky to have been able to participate in this field. When I first started there was a computer on one desk: Mine! By the time I retired there were twice as many computers as employees. My work here is done. I am grateful to a lot of people, including BG, for making my career possible. I am now happily retired with no network responsibilities at all, but still addicted to/.
Roundabouts certainly take up less space than cloverleaves, but to suggest they are 'the answer' is problematical. Anyone who has driven in a country with extensive roundabouts, such as Great Britain, knows rush hour traffic can be backed up at a roundabout just as easily as it can with a stoplight. And when you have several roundabouts within a few feet, it gets worse fast. Unless you've been through a triple roundabout with buildings in the middle while dealing with an unfamiliar right-hand drive car in the left lane, I maintain you haven't lived.
Roundbouts are getting more and more popular in America. Any new or revised intersection is a candidate. Where there were none in my county a decade ago, now there are dozens.
I don't really intend this to be politically controversial, though that is probably inevitable. Of course newspapers have been challenged by the Internet, but this is not the first competition they've had. TV has been competing with newspapers for decades and they survived just fine. It isn't that newspapers have lost a competitive edge; they've lost a monopoloistic edge. It used to be they were the only game in town. A rare city had two newspapers. If you wanted to sell your car or post a job, the Classifieds was your only choice. Ever tried to sell a car through the Classifieds lately? Yowzaa! $100 easy just for an ad too tiny to read! But put it on cars.com for $24.95 with a bunch of pictures, and whaddya know, it sells. Happened to me anyway two years ago.
The second issue is that newspapers once stood for something. They were either avowedly and unabashedly partisan in their outlook, or they proclaimed journalistic objectivity. I think that no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the Internet has allowed you to broaden your horizons, and THAT has lead to a realization that 'journalistic objectivity' is an oxymoron. It's not so much that newspapers lean one direction or another--though my local one never seems to like a Republican candidate, even for innocuous posts, but that you can see "sins of ommission." The real power of a newspaper is in what they choose to publish. They get a tremendous amount of information 'over the wire' and then they choose which stories to print, ignoring the stories they don't wish to print.
When you suddenly have the Net and a tremendous number of news sources to choose from, you can see this. You can see what the newspapers have been leaving out, so the newspaper becomes less relevant to your 'news needs' and you drop it. I dropped my paper because they couldn't seem to get it in the box. After continual complaints of poor service I finally decided I really didn't need it. I don't miss it.
Do you seriously believe that if we had socialized medicine that hundreds of millions of vaccine doses would suddenly appear and 'save' everyone? The conclusion does not follow. Government is not the solution; government is the problem. Get rid of the FDA and take a billion dollars out of the cost of every new medicine produced.
So you want people to die, die, die, so you can get socialized medicine. That's sick.
The student doesn't even have a deflated house as collateral--just a worthless degree. Why should he or she get a better interest rate or one equivalent to a home loan when they only have their own questionable decision to take out massive loans as a testimony to their ability to repay? They are quivalent to the pre-bust 'stated loans' where you don't have to prove your income.
I have to tell you, my daughter is in the business of obtaining grants and scholarships (not loans) for seniors in high school. She averages obtaining $300K per student in stuff they don't have to pay back. Of course, this is usually for multiple schools, only one of which they will attend, but this idea that you 'can't get' scholarships is simply not true, as she has repeatedly proven. If you do your part as a student, there is no reason why you can't get a free ride at the school of your choice if you just plan ahead and do the work necessary to pull down these scholarships and grants. Loans are a last resort for those unable or unwilling to get the grants, and if that's the case, no wonder the percentage is higher. You are a higher risk.
And I would need convincing that this isn't some kind of stunt by Group Health or other elements of the private health industry to wriggle out of paying for flu shots. Gotta love profit-focused private "health" care, and its useful idiot defenders on the Right.
Hmm. Guess I better toss that notice from Group Health encouraging me to come in and get a shot then. I forgot they were part of the vast right wing conspiracy. Gotta love government-controlled and "cost containment" "health" care, and its useful idiot defenders on the Left.
That's demonstrably untrue. At this point in this thread's life there are a couple of funny comments, a couple of 'don't do it' comments, and the rest are thoughtful and full of good information. There are inevitably trolls on every slashdot thread. So what? Thanks for the question!
This is the Memphis case. Godwin, the police chief, lost the case and 'Dirk Diggler' remains anonymous. Also, Diggler was able to force the complaint to be unsealed. Godwin made a procedural error and wound up filing in a different county where the case was not (un-)properly sealed. Diggler shut down his blog, which was getting really ugly with hate speech and internal fights, and now has a forum at URL:http://mpdenforcer20.proboards.com/index.cgi/).
Actually, the Moon does not 'orbit around the Earth.' The 'common center of mass' is within the crust of Earth. Not very far in, but it still fits the definition of a binary system.
Why would anyone bother? At a corporate level, I upgraded the OS by buying new machines capable of running the new OS. The same thing applies privately. It makes little sense to upgrade the OS on an older machine--if it can even handle it, especially with the price of garden variety machines. A Presario, for example, is a perfectly adequate machine for any but those seriously in the need for speed. It costs $500. My home machines run XP, which is very stable. The laptop is getting old enough that the letters on the keys are wearing off. I'll be able to upgrade by skipping the problematical Vista altogether to another stable OS. The last time I tried to get everyone on the same OS was DOS 6.0. It's not worth the hassle.
As a practical matter for most people, this is a non-issue.
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The statistics are poor. We're in a mixed-use environment with mostly Windows for users and mostly Unix variants for servers, including HP-UX, BSD, Solaris, and Linux. The best data I have ever been able to come up with is one tech per 100 units. I've never counted routers, switches, hubs, and wiring in this, though I think you could make a good case to add them in. Some of those are a lot more onerous to configure than a garden variety PC. One thing that helped us was a standard-build PC. Store all data on backed up dual servers so if a PC breaks, you can replace it with an 'identical' PC easily and quickly. We kinda screwed up originally because we were IP rich with eleven Class C networks, so we used IPs to identify PCs and hard coded them, and also used one Class C per building, which was a big waste. It was a bit of a challenge to move to DHCP allocation when our Class Cs began to fill up, but we managed to avoid a lot of subnetting for a couple of decades. You probably couldn't get away with that these days.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFbUVBYIPlI/
A good company knows this about techies and will plan accordingly. Some have 'Senior Tech' positions designed for people who do not care to enter the administrative side. I know of one company that treated their Field Engineers this way. The boss would say, "Are you interested in eventually moving into a management position, or are you committed to to the technology? I have training money to spend on you and I want to spend it the right way." Unfortunately, the FE in question told me, "I told him what he wanted to hear." That's too bad because I knew both guys, and I believe the senior regional manager was absolutely sincere in what he said.
Certainly the Peter Principal can apply (The solution, which is rarely mentioned, is "Creative Incompetence."), but I think it is easy to be short-sighted here. The question is not where you want to be in five years, but where you want to be at age 60 or so. If you can raise your family, pay for your kids' educations, and retire securely doing your tech thing, by all means go for it. But if you need to get better situated in order to do that, you'd better plan ahead.
My advice here (I'm 60 and retired securely) is to not blow off management just because you've got attitude and a PHB. Management can be a very fulfilling role. You're responsible, but you get to call the shots and point the direction. It's not going to happen unless you make it happen. It can get very political, but if you're as smart as you say you are, you ought to be able to make it work.
That is effectively what the Israleites did. Men of this village wanted to marry the Jewish women. The Jewish men, said OK, but to that you must be circumcised. The village men lined up and had it done, retired to their beds to sleep it off, and were killed by the Jewish men. I forget the name of the story, but it's in the Old Testament.
and found this. The good part is about half way into this: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/8395514.stm
Forget the emails. All they show is a few very prestigious climate scientists "hiding behind" intellectual property rights, refusing to adhere to FOIA rules (both of these normally anathema to /.ers), deleteing data and emails that might be incrimintory, revealing that they have manipulated peer review by keeping skeptical papers out, even to the point of changing the definition of peer review, refusing to release their data, caliming a peer reviewed article = 'settled science', exulting in the death of skeptics, attempting (successfully) to get editors they don't like fired. Just normal boys will beboys stuff. Nothing to see here> Move along.
But this is /. How about looking at the code? Like here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/04/climategate-the-smoking-code/ or how about a little sympathy for a programmer, Harry. See what he has to say: http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/HARRY_READ_ME.txt or look here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/22/cru-emails-may-be-open-to-interpretation-but-commented-code-by-the-programmer-tells-the-real-story/
Or how about daling with teh mathematics of it all: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_mathematics_of_global_warm.html
So forget the emails; look at the code. Then come back here and say, with a straight face, that the data has not been manipulated.
Right. Same guy. Random number input into his program produced a hockey stick. I downloaded the 61MB zip file and have read most of the emails. Those are damaging in terms of exposing several issues:
1. They manipulated the peer-review process and controlled it to the point of changing what peer-review meant, freezing out contrary authors, reviewing each others' work, getting editors fired, etc. There's a lot of that kind of manipulation revealed.
2. They colluded to avoid the FOIA and deleted emails and threatened to delete data before they would release it under FOIA. This is illegal.
3. They admitted to manipulating data to 'hide the decline' or 'get rid of the Medieval Warming Period.' I don't have a problem with 'trick' being used. No big deal, but 'hide the decline'? Not good.
4. They would manipulate the data by simply not adding it, closing a run on an increase, when the subsequent data showed a decline. They seem dismayed that the last ten years shows an overall redction in temperature, at one point calling it a travesty and suggesting the data must be wrong.
5. Because there were no thermometers 2000 years ago, they use 'proxies' such as tree rings, ice core samples, etc. However, tree ring growth can be caused by wetness and other issues, not just temperature. In ine case they 'proved; warming based on 12 trees in Siberia. When hey went back and measured many more trees, the increase disappeared.
But the more damning evidence is in the programs themselves, including REM statements where 'hide the decline' is found numerous times, data is manually manipulated, and the programs would throw an error and keep on running.
The code, written primarily in FORTAN and IDL, is a mess--not professional. The datasets are often missing or in poor shape. There's one 'Harry Read me' text file where poor Harry is trying to make sense of the code, over several years, and points out many of the flaws.
So what we've got here is email and program code evidence of manipulation, very poor data, and very poor programming.
The thing is, there are only 4 datasets in the world, two terrestrial and two satellite. There are serious problms with both terrestrial data sets. NOAA's, for example, has manually 'adjusted' data over the years as much as 500%! In other words, the observed degree difference was .1 degree C and the 'adjustment' was +.5 degrees C. You'd think the satellite data asets would be more accurate, however, they were 'calibrated' on the 'adjusted' terrestrial data sets.
Remember Gore's CO2 graph? Probably a 95% correlation between CO2 and temperature, which he presented as proof that CO2 CAUSES global warming. Except that the CO2 increased 800 years AFTER the warming trend. In other words, warming CAUSED CO2 increases, the opposite of what he implied.
this might be just the ticket. It's not just about you. Just look at the difficult someone with cerebral palsy or ALS has with motor skills. There's a brain in there, sometimes a brilliant one (Stephen Hawking, for example). Something like this could be a wonderful enabler for them.
Someone already pointed out below that the stock loss also happened on the day both companies reported quarterly losses and THAT may have had a lot to do with the drop. If some of the loss was due to Google's announcement, it just shows investors are clueless--not that Google is not trying to help them along in their cluelessness. Having used a (rental) cell phone GPS and owning both a portable Garmin and a built-in GPS I can tell you there is a world of difference. Google wants you to take an iPhone and mount it on the dash and pretends it will be just like a Garmin.
Nonsense. Screen size is a very big deal here. GPS systems are distracting and dangerous enough without having to put your head forward to squint at the screen. I think they are about a third of the size of a built-in like on an Acura TSX and less than half of a portable Garmin like the 770 (which both N. American and European maps). Maybe some of you with super X-ray vision can see these tiny things well, but wearing bi-focals I surely cannot and I maintain many people are in the same situation. What people need is a stress-free GPS, not one they have to fight, especially in a strange locale, which is the only time you really need one. You already know how to get home, right?
The problem with the iPhone type devices is that they are a compromise for everything. Do you really enjoy that tiny screen? Do you like browsing the web on your iPhone? Do you enjoy texting with keys that small? Hey, but you can do it anywhere, so you put up with it. It's cool.
And, of course, there is competition and feeping creaturitis. Next up (and this will be a hardware issue): Heads-up displays on the windshield. I would dump my Garmin and buy a new one in half a second if I could get a heads-up display. Let's see you download THAT from Google.
Maybe some of them were better, but most of them were a lot worse. The quality of a lot of clones was just terrible--especially compared to the fit & finish of a real IBM. It's just that they cost $700 when IBMs were $2,500 and up, comparable to an Apple. I remember making the decision for my company. Hmmm...Three clones or one Apple or one IBM. I need computers on desks fast. It was a no-brainer. Had Apple not been so interested in keeping high gross margins, they could have owned the 'PC' market today. Instead, they got greedy and proprietary, and they lost. Their resurgence is quite a story, but back when they went from circa 90% of the market to about 3% they nearly lost it altogether.
Just a suggestion: Why not hold off on a purchase until you cumulate $25.00 worth, in which case super saver shipping is free with no annual fee? I rarely pay shipping on Amazon. Alas, living in Washington State I do pay the sales tax. It's still cheaper.
Been there. Done that. Retired. There are a lot of unfounded assumptions in these posts. Basics if you choose teaching it will take some time and at first you won't get paid very well, but if you hang in there and get more credits, going to summer school for about ten years, you'll wind up doing okay by your mid thirties. In Seattle, a school teacher with 15 years experience (average age 37-40), with a BA, MA and +135 hours (all those summer quarters for 10 years) makes $75K (2009-2010 salary schedule) and gets summers off--because you've peaked on credits and don't need to do that any more, plus Christmas, Spring break, etc. and all the bennies you could want. Compared to private employment where you're lucky to get three weeks vacation a year that's close to $100K equivalent. But that's the big city, too.
Smaller districts often pay a bit less, but smaller districts are ALSO in more rural areas where the cost of living is less. In many places in WA, teachers are among the highest paid folks in town. All totaled it's a pretty decent middle class lifestyle.
Not saying it's all roses. Teaching can be a very hard job with lots of expectations from parents, lots of paperwork, and lots of extra time at night preparing for the next day. And frankly, there are lots of places I wouldn't want to be a teacher at all. You know what I mean. Also, it takes awhile to move up on the salary schedule to where you actually make ok money. The first few years can be pretty dismal.
Retirement is pretty good. In WA a teacher with 40 years experience (25-65) would get 80% of pay plus FICA. By the time YOU retire, there might be nothing! But that's the idea. You actually would make more money retired than working: $60K retirement plus $22K FICA.
It's one of those fields where, depending on where you are at and what you teach, it could be a GREAT job, or a piss poor one.
I'm as old as dirt. When I went to college, there weren't any computers available. By the time I got to grad school, colleges were enamored with computers. I actually took a course in BASIC in grad school, something they MAY do in Elementary School today--or not. I learned BASIC via punched cards where ">" was "GT" but, hey! (It was a CDC 6000, same computer as BG used as a teenager.) I thought it was SO COOL!!!! So when the Commodore PET came out I held fire, and when the Trash-80 came out (I loved the wafting plymers of its smell) I just waited, and when the Apple ][ came out, I splurged and by the time I got rid of it, I had spent $7,000 on it with the CP/M card, and all that stuff. And when my boss said, "I think we ought to investigate computers," I humbly suggested an Apple, and she gave me $5,000 to do it. The rest, as they say, is history. I bought one of the first IBM PC's, and by the time I retired, I had purchased several minis and probably on the order of 700 PCs. Also, I might add, I paid my mortgage writing about them for 20 years.
I say this to give background. The point is that when the computer revolution happened, I was there. I lived in it and I loved it, but I was largely self-taught. No one else had a computer at home, and so when our business needed to 'automate,' I was salivating at the head of the line saying "Me! Me! Me!" Who else could they possibly have chosen? Besides, by that time I had learned some Pascal, some dBase, some Fortran and COBOL, not to mention Visicalc. I did the CNE shtick just to try to keep up. And I did. I put in our first Frame Relay Ethernet network, then went to the class to see if I did it right. So that's how I became an IT guy.
But nowadays with the background I had, I could NEVER become an IT person because my industry, when they need an IT person, recruits for one with that amount of knowledge in education. This is simply the maturity of the industry. The same thing happened with electricity, with airplanes, and with any number of fields that simply did not previously exist. They turned from hobbies into professions. Once there was enough background material and a 'recognized body of knowledge' to turn IT into a profession, we folks who learned by doing and pulled ourselves into the field with our bootstraps, and, if I may say, BUILT IT FROM SCRATCH, became outmoded. As someone said, "any profession is a conspiracy against the laity."
I consider myself very lucky to have been able to participate in this field. When I first started there was a computer on one desk: Mine! By the time I retired there were twice as many computers as employees. My work here is done. I am grateful to a lot of people, including BG, for making my career possible. I am now happily retired with no network responsibilities at all, but still addicted to /.
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
Roundabouts certainly take up less space than cloverleaves, but to suggest they are 'the answer' is problematical. Anyone who has driven in a country with extensive roundabouts, such as Great Britain, knows rush hour traffic can be backed up at a roundabout just as easily as it can with a stoplight. And when you have several roundabouts within a few feet, it gets worse fast. Unless you've been through a triple roundabout with buildings in the middle while dealing with an unfamiliar right-hand drive car in the left lane, I maintain you haven't lived.
Roundbouts are getting more and more popular in America. Any new or revised intersection is a candidate. Where there were none in my county a decade ago, now there are dozens.
Linux soars past Windows 3.11 in market share!
I don't really intend this to be politically controversial, though that is probably inevitable. Of course newspapers have been challenged by the Internet, but this is not the first competition they've had. TV has been competing with newspapers for decades and they survived just fine. It isn't that newspapers have lost a competitive edge; they've lost a monopoloistic edge. It used to be they were the only game in town. A rare city had two newspapers. If you wanted to sell your car or post a job, the Classifieds was your only choice. Ever tried to sell a car through the Classifieds lately? Yowzaa! $100 easy just for an ad too tiny to read! But put it on cars.com for $24.95 with a bunch of pictures, and whaddya know, it sells. Happened to me anyway two years ago.
The second issue is that newspapers once stood for something. They were either avowedly and unabashedly partisan in their outlook, or they proclaimed journalistic objectivity. I think that no matter where you stand on the political spectrum, the Internet has allowed you to broaden your horizons, and THAT has lead to a realization that 'journalistic objectivity' is an oxymoron. It's not so much that newspapers lean one direction or another--though my local one never seems to like a Republican candidate, even for innocuous posts, but that you can see "sins of ommission." The real power of a newspaper is in what they choose to publish. They get a tremendous amount of information 'over the wire' and then they choose which stories to print, ignoring the stories they don't wish to print.
When you suddenly have the Net and a tremendous number of news sources to choose from, you can see this. You can see what the newspapers have been leaving out, so the newspaper becomes less relevant to your 'news needs' and you drop it. I dropped my paper because they couldn't seem to get it in the box. After continual complaints of poor service I finally decided I really didn't need it. I don't miss it.
Do you seriously believe that if we had socialized medicine that hundreds of millions of vaccine doses would suddenly appear and 'save' everyone? The conclusion does not follow. Government is not the solution; government is the problem. Get rid of the FDA and take a billion dollars out of the cost of every new medicine produced.
So you want people to die, die, die, so you can get socialized medicine. That's sick.
The student doesn't even have a deflated house as collateral--just a worthless degree. Why should he or she get a better interest rate or one equivalent to a home loan when they only have their own questionable decision to take out massive loans as a testimony to their ability to repay? They are quivalent to the pre-bust 'stated loans' where you don't have to prove your income.
I have to tell you, my daughter is in the business of obtaining grants and scholarships (not loans) for seniors in high school. She averages obtaining $300K per student in stuff they don't have to pay back. Of course, this is usually for multiple schools, only one of which they will attend, but this idea that you 'can't get' scholarships is simply not true, as she has repeatedly proven. If you do your part as a student, there is no reason why you can't get a free ride at the school of your choice if you just plan ahead and do the work necessary to pull down these scholarships and grants. Loans are a last resort for those unable or unwilling to get the grants, and if that's the case, no wonder the percentage is higher. You are a higher risk.
And I would need convincing that this isn't some kind of stunt by Group Health or other elements of the private health industry to wriggle out of paying for flu shots. Gotta love profit-focused private "health" care, and its useful idiot defenders on the Right.
Hmm. Guess I better toss that notice from Group Health encouraging me to come in and get a shot then. I forgot they were part of the vast right wing conspiracy. Gotta love government-controlled and "cost containment" "health" care, and its useful idiot defenders on the Left.
Nice. I remember reading that story. As I remember it, there were three girls and four boys, and that spelled trouble in the future.
That's demonstrably untrue. At this point in this thread's life there are a couple of funny comments, a couple of 'don't do it' comments, and the rest are thoughtful and full of good information. There are inevitably trolls on every slashdot thread. So what? Thanks for the question!
This is the Memphis case. Godwin, the police chief, lost the case and 'Dirk Diggler' remains anonymous. Also, Diggler was able to force the complaint to be unsealed. Godwin made a procedural error and wound up filing in a different county where the case was not (un-)properly sealed. Diggler shut down his blog, which was getting really ugly with hate speech and internal fights, and now has a forum at URL:http://mpdenforcer20.proboards.com/index.cgi/).
I don't think he'll be doing any more writing since he's dead. So he won't bother you any more.
Actually, the Moon does not 'orbit around the Earth.' The 'common center of mass' is within the crust of Earth. Not very far in, but it still fits the definition of a binary system.
Why would anyone bother? At a corporate level, I upgraded the OS by buying new machines capable of running the new OS. The same thing applies privately. It makes little sense to upgrade the OS on an older machine--if it can even handle it, especially with the price of garden variety machines. A Presario, for example, is a perfectly adequate machine for any but those seriously in the need for speed. It costs $500. My home machines run XP, which is very stable. The laptop is getting old enough that the letters on the keys are wearing off. I'll be able to upgrade by skipping the problematical Vista altogether to another stable OS. The last time I tried to get everyone on the same OS was DOS 6.0. It's not worth the hassle.
As a practical matter for most people, this is a non-issue.