You're still asking to monopolize a person's primary employment--one can't hold down a second full-time job while teaching 8-9 months out of the year, and a part-time job for the summer is likely to be crappy and pay poorly. You're also asking them, in many cases, to limit their professional options by spending four years on a teaching degree.
If you want a person who's any good in the position, you'll pay them close to as much as they'd get working full time and year-round outside of teaching, even though you're only asking them to work during the school year. If you want poor teachers, you'll bitch that they get so much time off and keep their pay low.
If it still bothers you, then try to get the school year increased. Many other countries have their kids in school for way more hours/year than the US does. (I'm assuming you're in the US)
It's not a matter of pay. It's a matter of job security for incompetents as guaranteed by the teacher's unions, who then can't be fired, and won't leave because they can't find something better for themselves. Sure, there are great teachers who give a lot, but there are plenty who don't.
If everyone starts firing all the shitty teachers you'll quickly have a severe shortage on your hands. So wages will go way, way up.
You still end up raising teacher salaries. The increase in quality just takes longer if you raise salaries directly rather than using pressure from mass firings to do it.
My wife's an elementary school teacher, and she always had hilarious/sad stories about her fellow Elem. Ed. majors.
I'm not sure how some of these people graduated high school, let alone how they got in to college. Many of them were perfectly willing to tell you how much they disliked reading. Some wanted to be a teacher because OMG the children are so cute! It's scary.
Example: she was the only person in a class of 15-20 who knew what a mast was. You know, the thing on a boat that holds the sails up. Seriously. And the others thought it was ridiculous that she found it strange that they didn't know, since the university was in a land-locked state. Sure, it might be silly to expect them to know which side is port or which one is the mizzen mast or whatever (hell, I don't know the latter), but basic terms like "hull", "rudder", "mast", "deck" and the like? Jesus, have they ever read a damn book? I know they watch movies and TV. WTF?
Stuff like that happened all the time. My wife has since discovered that her program, though at a smaller university, was actually pretty good, and gave her a lot of skills that people coming from other programs are lacking, but it was still passing people like this. I mean, what if they didn't pass them? You'd have to throw out 90% or more of the students in the major! Some other school would keep its standards low and take all your "business".
Baring across-the-board, nationwide mandates to greatly increase standards for prospective teachers in universities, the only way I can see to deal with this is to raise wages, which would be an indirect result of increased standards anyway. We look down on teachers because so many of them are stupid or bad at what they do, so we don't want to pay them more, but we won't get better teachers until wages go up.
If what you care about is being "useful in industry," then go to DeVry or ITT or one of those other vocational schools that advertise on TV.
... and get paid less than you would have if you'd gone to through a dumbed-down (or not, either way) 4-year program that got you that nice CS degree. And have fewer options for employment outside of IT since you don't have a 4-year degree.
Wouldn't a study of the average size of the penises of gay men help to isolate the variables here?
If they are significantly smaller than the average in the general population, and smaller penis size is a consequence of exposure to PCB, then the case would be strengthened for male homosexuality being caused in large part by these chemicals. If there's not much of a difference, then it might be the cause in only a minority of cases.
(No, I'm not volunteering to help "test" gay men's penises. Let me know when it's time to start running doing some studies of lesbians, though. Since the masculine ones might also be related to this chemical, we'll need a control of very feminine lesbians. I'll take care of that part.)
That's what my wife and I do with The Sims. She loves the game and wants the new stuff, but I'm not about to shell out $30 for a few textures and some minor features that probably should have been in the original game, especially given how obvious it is that they spend very, very little coding these games (look at the loading time and performance for proof of this--both are horrible, worse than many games with more and larger textures and far better graphical effects)
So, we buy the original game and pirate most of the rest. Sometimes we'll buy the ones that add quite a bit as far as game play, but we never, ever pay for the "Holiday Funiture Pack!" bullshit.
I've had fun sticking bottles of water in the freezer, then pulling them out at just the right moment. They appear as liquid when I first pick them up, but then the whole thing turns to ice, starting at one end, in 5 seconds or less.
The resulting ice is soft, even fluffy, and is fun to munch on.
Haha, all true, though some of it does make sense. The glorification of a fascist society and the inaccurate insults toward other cultures can be chalked up to the narrator's views, which are steeped in Spartan ignorance and militarism.
The lack of likable characters is actually pretty common in ancient Greek writing, too. Just about every important character in The Iliad was a dick, with the possible exception of Hector. The plays of the great tragedians are full of assholes and morons, too.
As for the costuming... yeah, well, at least the practice scenes weren't done in the nude:)
Just haven't gotten the wifi to work yet (1 week).
Have you tried NDISWrapper?
You can install it through Synaptic, the graphical package installation program.
You'll need a Windows XP driver (some others might work, too, but XP is the best one to try first, in my experience) for your wireless card, and it needs to be in a zip file or similar (that is, not a.exe installer, since you need access to the installation files).
Unzip the drivers to a folder. Make sure there's at least one.inf file in it, and if there's more than one, figure out which one looks like it's for your card (sometimes they put drivers for several different ones in a single archive)
Open a console. You will be typing just two commands:
The first command installs the driver, the second sets it to start at boot.
If it still doesn't work after a reboot, make sure you've got the right driver, and maybe try one for another version of Windows. Some just won't work period, but many (most?) will.
If you need extra info on your wireless card to help you find the Windows driver, try the command "lspci" at the command line, your card should be somewhere on the resulting list of hardware.
I'm not confusing anything. Re-read my post. I'm pretty sure the point of 300 wasn't historical accuracy, but to show a story of a real event being told with the embellishments and other characteristics of ancient Greek storytelling. If that was indeed the goal of the film makers, then they did a damn good job IMO.
The fantastic elements and caricatures of the enemy are a fit for this sort of folk-history storytelling, and my reason for bringing up the Iliad is that the battle scenes in 300 are composed of imagery and incidents very similar to those described (again, and again, and again) in the many, many action sequences of that epic.
In fact, I'd call it one of the truest representations of the ancient Greek epic storytelling style to ever see the big screen. Since I'm guessing that was the whole point, I'm gonna go ahead and call the movie really damn good, not just as an action movie, but as an expression of art.
Disagree? Go look at the fight scenes in the Iliad and watch the movie again with that in mind. The somewhat fantastic animals, the way the heroes were larger-than-life, the fights over a fallen comrade, the caricatured enemy--it is exactly the way you'd expect a somewhat-talented ancient Greek storyteller to handle the tale.
Is it Homer? No. The story itself isn't as good. Is it a story about ancient Greece, told with impressive fidelity to the style of dramatic art popular in that time period? Hell yes. If that was the film makers' goal, then I'd say they nailed it.
I'd love to see The Iliad done in a similar style, gods and all. It'd be glorious. The Odyssey's another matter, but then it always read more like a modern novel to me, anyway.
Haha, yeah, it took me a second to figure out what he was talking about, then I remembered: "Oh, yeah, some people actually play FPS games other than Perfect Dark and Goldeneye on a console. That must suck.":P
Oh, god, analogies in the teaching of OOP are a terrible idea.
The concept is FUCKING SIMPLE. Those ridiculous analogies forced me to go through a half-dozen books and even more online tutorials, wondering the whole time at how truly stupid I must be not to understand it after so much reading, before finally finding something that explained it in language that was aimed at a beginner but still to the damn point.
My reaction: holy crap, that's it? That's the simple, simple thing that these other books have turned in to some sort of monster that must be approached very cautiously and indirectly, lest it see you and pounce?
It's basically a function with the ability to inherit the attributes of another function, and persistence like an array or scalar variable.
Jesus, is that so hard? Throw in some examples demonstrating exactly how an object differs from a simple function or routine, and you've got something that's more helpful than a pile of beginner's C++ and Java books.
The implications are complex. The basic definition of an object is dead simple to anyone who already understands what a function is.
I agree; this paper has a shockingly low information density for something written by a supposed scientist, (presumably) used to working with terse and precise language.
If you plotted types of informative writing on a line, you'd have:
1. extremely precise writing that's a bit harsh on one end 2. more verbose, accessible, and pleasant writing that's still informative in the middle. 3. writing that's trying too hard and just sucks, failing to be well-crafted prose and failing to inform efficiently.
This is clearly closest to number 3. Even if there are good ideas in there, they're buried in whole pages of fluff, and I say this as a guy who reads lots of things from disciplines that many Computer Scientists probably regard as being wholly composed of fluff:)
Haha, that part about how bad it is that we teach kids very young children math by analogy was great. Dude obviously never worked with small children, but felt like an authority on which kinds of teaching methods for them work and which are harmful.
Good luck trying to teach a 9-year-old slightly more abstract math if he never did the whole "2 apples plus 3 apples thing", because, odds are, he's still stuck on how addition works, and yes, you'll have to resort to those kinds of analogies to have any hope of getting him up to the level where he can understand zero, negative numbers, variables, functions, etc. Yes, you want to get away from concrete examples as quickly as possible, but you have to start with them.
It's a bit distressing that he felt comfortable using something he clearly knew nothing about as a fairly major bullet point in one of his arguments. I must say, speaking as someone who hasn't read first-hand anything by this guy before, this paper is unimpressive on many levels.
Slashdot Mirror
You're still asking to monopolize a person's primary employment--one can't hold down a second full-time job while teaching 8-9 months out of the year, and a part-time job for the summer is likely to be crappy and pay poorly. You're also asking them, in many cases, to limit their professional options by spending four years on a teaching degree.
If you want a person who's any good in the position, you'll pay them close to as much as they'd get working full time and year-round outside of teaching, even though you're only asking them to work during the school year. If you want poor teachers, you'll bitch that they get so much time off and keep their pay low.
If it still bothers you, then try to get the school year increased. Many other countries have their kids in school for way more hours/year than the US does. (I'm assuming you're in the US)
If everyone starts firing all the shitty teachers you'll quickly have a severe shortage on your hands. So wages will go way, way up.
You still end up raising teacher salaries. The increase in quality just takes longer if you raise salaries directly rather than using pressure from mass firings to do it.
My wife's an elementary school teacher, and she always had hilarious/sad stories about her fellow Elem. Ed. majors.
I'm not sure how some of these people graduated high school, let alone how they got in to college. Many of them were perfectly willing to tell you how much they disliked reading. Some wanted to be a teacher because OMG the children are so cute! It's scary.
Example: she was the only person in a class of 15-20 who knew what a mast was. You know, the thing on a boat that holds the sails up. Seriously. And the others thought it was ridiculous that she found it strange that they didn't know, since the university was in a land-locked state. Sure, it might be silly to expect them to know which side is port or which one is the mizzen mast or whatever (hell, I don't know the latter), but basic terms like "hull", "rudder", "mast", "deck" and the like? Jesus, have they ever read a damn book? I know they watch movies and TV. WTF?
Stuff like that happened all the time. My wife has since discovered that her program, though at a smaller university, was actually pretty good, and gave her a lot of skills that people coming from other programs are lacking, but it was still passing people like this. I mean, what if they didn't pass them? You'd have to throw out 90% or more of the students in the major! Some other school would keep its standards low and take all your "business".
Baring across-the-board, nationwide mandates to greatly increase standards for prospective teachers in universities, the only way I can see to deal with this is to raise wages, which would be an indirect result of increased standards anyway. We look down on teachers because so many of them are stupid or bad at what they do, so we don't want to pay them more, but we won't get better teachers until wages go up.
I think I can get it down to 1st grader level:
include rsa;
rsa_encrypt(stuffToEncrypt);
Wouldn't a study of the average size of the penises of gay men help to isolate the variables here?
If they are significantly smaller than the average in the general population, and smaller penis size is a consequence of exposure to PCB, then the case would be strengthened for male homosexuality being caused in large part by these chemicals. If there's not much of a difference, then it might be the cause in only a minority of cases.
(No, I'm not volunteering to help "test" gay men's penises. Let me know when it's time to start running doing some studies of lesbians, though. Since the masculine ones might also be related to this chemical, we'll need a control of very feminine lesbians. I'll take care of that part.)
That's what my wife and I do with The Sims. She loves the game and wants the new stuff, but I'm not about to shell out $30 for a few textures and some minor features that probably should have been in the original game, especially given how obvious it is that they spend very, very little coding these games (look at the loading time and performance for proof of this--both are horrible, worse than many games with more and larger textures and far better graphical effects)
So, we buy the original game and pirate most of the rest. Sometimes we'll buy the ones that add quite a bit as far as game play, but we never, ever pay for the "Holiday Funiture Pack!" bullshit.
I've had fun sticking bottles of water in the freezer, then pulling them out at just the right moment. They appear as liquid when I first pick them up, but then the whole thing turns to ice, starting at one end, in 5 seconds or less.
The resulting ice is soft, even fluffy, and is fun to munch on.
Haha, all true, though some of it does make sense. The glorification of a fascist society and the inaccurate insults toward other cultures can be chalked up to the narrator's views, which are steeped in Spartan ignorance and militarism.
The lack of likable characters is actually pretty common in ancient Greek writing, too. Just about every important character in The Iliad was a dick, with the possible exception of Hector. The plays of the great tragedians are full of assholes and morons, too.
As for the costuming... yeah, well, at least the practice scenes weren't done in the nude :)
Yeah, you'd actually have to cut out some of the fighting to get it down to 300's action/story ratio, which some people already said was too high :)
Have you tried NDISWrapper?
You can install it through Synaptic, the graphical package installation program.
You'll need a Windows XP driver (some others might work, too, but XP is the best one to try first, in my experience) for your wireless card, and it needs to be in a zip file or similar (that is, not a .exe installer, since you need access to the installation files).
Unzip the drivers to a folder. Make sure there's at least one .inf file in it, and if there's more than one, figure out which one looks like it's for your card (sometimes they put drivers for several different ones in a single archive)
Open a console. You will be typing just two commands:
sudo ndiswrapper -i /path/to/the/driver.inf
sudo ndiswrapper -m
The first command installs the driver, the second sets it to start at boot.
If it still doesn't work after a reboot, make sure you've got the right driver, and maybe try one for another version of Windows. Some just won't work period, but many (most?) will.
You can look at the man page for ndiswrapper if you need more info.
If you need extra info on your wireless card to help you find the Windows driver, try the command "lspci" at the command line, your card should be somewhere on the resulting list of hardware.
Oh, shit, you're the one who had that sig? One of my favorites!
I've been meaning to ask you whether your current one is original, and if not, where you found it. I've Googled, but to no avail.
I'm not confusing anything. Re-read my post. I'm pretty sure the point of 300 wasn't historical accuracy, but to show a story of a real event being told with the embellishments and other characteristics of ancient Greek storytelling. If that was indeed the goal of the film makers, then they did a damn good job IMO.
The fantastic elements and caricatures of the enemy are a fit for this sort of folk-history storytelling, and my reason for bringing up the Iliad is that the battle scenes in 300 are composed of imagery and incidents very similar to those described (again, and again, and again) in the many, many action sequences of that epic.
In fact, I'd call it one of the truest representations of the ancient Greek epic storytelling style to ever see the big screen. Since I'm guessing that was the whole point, I'm gonna go ahead and call the movie really damn good, not just as an action movie, but as an expression of art.
Disagree? Go look at the fight scenes in the Iliad and watch the movie again with that in mind. The somewhat fantastic animals, the way the heroes were larger-than-life, the fights over a fallen comrade, the caricatured enemy--it is exactly the way you'd expect a somewhat-talented ancient Greek storyteller to handle the tale.
Is it Homer? No. The story itself isn't as good. Is it a story about ancient Greece, told with impressive fidelity to the style of dramatic art popular in that time period? Hell yes. If that was the film makers' goal, then I'd say they nailed it.
I'd love to see The Iliad done in a similar style, gods and all. It'd be glorious. The Odyssey's another matter, but then it always read more like a modern novel to me, anyway.
Yes, I'm sure government barriers are the reason monopolies form in a market system with limited resources.
*eye roll*
I use Yahoo Yellow Pages sometimes.
It's the only time I ever visit Yahoo, though, and that's maybe once a month or less.
If only the people in BSG had learned the lessons of the Butlerian Jihad...
Yeah, I even thought I saw a trailer for the series as much as a year ago.
As I recall, it was entirely impossible to tell from watching the trailer that it was in any way related to BSG, aside from the title. Looked boring.
Haha, yeah, it took me a second to figure out what he was talking about, then I remembered: "Oh, yeah, some people actually play FPS games other than Perfect Dark and Goldeneye on a console. That must suck." :P
There's some evidence for that in their naming of the application layers:
Model
Template
View
Oh, god, analogies in the teaching of OOP are a terrible idea.
The concept is FUCKING SIMPLE. Those ridiculous analogies forced me to go through a half-dozen books and even more online tutorials, wondering the whole time at how truly stupid I must be not to understand it after so much reading, before finally finding something that explained it in language that was aimed at a beginner but still to the damn point.
My reaction: holy crap, that's it? That's the simple, simple thing that these other books have turned in to some sort of monster that must be approached very cautiously and indirectly, lest it see you and pounce?
It's basically a function with the ability to inherit the attributes of another function, and persistence like an array or scalar variable.
Jesus, is that so hard? Throw in some examples demonstrating exactly how an object differs from a simple function or routine, and you've got something that's more helpful than a pile of beginner's C++ and Java books.
The implications are complex. The basic definition of an object is dead simple to anyone who already understands what a function is.
I agree; this paper has a shockingly low information density for something written by a supposed scientist, (presumably) used to working with terse and precise language.
If you plotted types of informative writing on a line, you'd have:
1. extremely precise writing that's a bit harsh on one end
2. more verbose, accessible, and pleasant writing that's still informative in the middle.
3. writing that's trying too hard and just sucks, failing to be well-crafted prose and failing to inform efficiently.
This is clearly closest to number 3. Even if there are good ideas in there, they're buried in whole pages of fluff, and I say this as a guy who reads lots of things from disciplines that many Computer Scientists probably regard as being wholly composed of fluff :)
Though it looks to me like a good portion of this paper is rubbish, I will admit:
It took me way, way longer to grok OOP than it should have, due in large part to an over-reliance on analogy in the books I was reading.
What if I write my formal description in C++?
Oops, I just wrote the program, too!
(I'm partly kidding. Partly.)
Haha, that part about how bad it is that we teach kids very young children math by analogy was great. Dude obviously never worked with small children, but felt like an authority on which kinds of teaching methods for them work and which are harmful.
Good luck trying to teach a 9-year-old slightly more abstract math if he never did the whole "2 apples plus 3 apples thing", because, odds are, he's still stuck on how addition works, and yes, you'll have to resort to those kinds of analogies to have any hope of getting him up to the level where he can understand zero, negative numbers, variables, functions, etc. Yes, you want to get away from concrete examples as quickly as possible, but you have to start with them.
It's a bit distressing that he felt comfortable using something he clearly knew nothing about as a fairly major bullet point in one of his arguments. I must say, speaking as someone who hasn't read first-hand anything by this guy before, this paper is unimpressive on many levels.