... which increased tax receipts. WHICH tax receipts? Bush cut capital gains taxes and taxes on the wealthiest 10%. Capital gains tax revenue is has been going down every year of the Bush presidency. Income tax revenue HAS grown slower than expected. You see, income tax revenue is normally expected to increase and the American population grows and more people enter the workforce. If income tax revenue actually DECREASES that means a huge tax cut, or a depression. So while overall revenue is still up, is rate of increase isn't much lower than it was during the Clinton presidency and that has more to do with Bush's crazy spending policies than the end of the dot-com bubble.
Actually, over time is meant throughout the year, and the method is teacher observation, peer review, and management review.
So you don't think that a teacher's job should be tied to how his kids perform in class, AT ALL?
What about the students? When I was in high school all the students knew who was a good teacher and who wasn't. And contrary to the criticism I always hear about this the criteria wasn't who was "easiest". The criteria was based on which teachers were the most interesting and engaging for students because those are the teachers everyone actually learned from. Why shouldn't the students be involved in evaluating the job performance of the teachers since they're in the best position to do so?
You were a late bloomer, I started teaching in 7th grade, science, and computers.
I assisted, but did not teach, science classes in 8th grade. You're only reinforcing my point that the teaching credentials/degrees are nonsense.
No, you are not paying them directly, but you are paying for their daycare, and you are paying for their screw-ups as parents. Do you have a clue as to the number of parents who bitterly complain about assigning homework and expecting it to be turned in on time? Do you wonder why the kids don't care. Their idiot parents don't care.
Considering parents out there smoking crack and raping their kids, not bugging their kids about their homework is the least of my concerns. Or maybe they're just ticked off about all the busy work kids get in school nowadays "Write a 10 page essay on nothing". I remember a lot of busy work from high school.
In Cincinnati, in th school system we were in, parents were held accountable. If the parents were not providing the assistance the kids needed at home to help them learn the materials, the kids were given to a professional tutor and the parents were billed. Yep, some of them complained like mad about how unfair it was.
Because I'm sure the school board threatened to expel their kids if they didn't pay. People who really don't care would never even have considered paying for the tutor and would just let their kids get kicked out.
Passion. Kids pursue their passions, not their needs. Any kid whom I have met or taught who has a passion focuses on that passion
And adults can't be passionate about their profession? I think they can. And I think a working professionals far more likely to be passionate about his work than an academic who isn't doing anything hands on, meaning he's likely to be better at teaching the material. You continue to reinforce my point that teaching is neither particularly difficult, nor does it require a decade of training. Meaning that the union requirements for those credentials are hurting students by limiting their access to good teachers.
The REAL liability is lawsuits from parents who don't get their way, who want this religion taught or that one not, who want their child to be in a class that they can not keep up with or in a grade they are not emotionally ready for (though their book smarts are off the scale).
Don't give me that. Teachers CANNOT be sued for such things and ARE NOT. The lawsuits you describe are directed against the schools, district, etc. and are a completely separate issue. Fear of liability is a big problem for schools and school budgets, but giving teachers jobs for life certainly has little to do with it. If anything it makes the problem worse.
Schools court certain contraversy by their nature. Sex education, evolution, religious studies, drugs, and youth violence are all considered hot-button issues in the USA and because they intersect with K-12 education there is going to be trouble. ALL professions and businesses involve some level of legal wrangling. These have been issues for at least the past 150 years, so you know what you signed up for.
And it seems that you want parents involved only as long as they do EXACTLY what the teach
... you and I hire the public school system teachers. We vote for the school boars, the legislature and either demand answer or not
This is inconsistent with your earlier position. If it's ALL about parents teaching their kids proper "morality" as you claimed, from practical perspective it doesn't matter how they vote because a child that hasn't been properly trained by their parents will fail no matter how "good" the school is. Secondly, you're assuming individual parents have complete voting control over the school boards and legislature. They don't. There are these things called "lobbies". Pretending they don't control the voting process is an ignorant cop-out.
You can no more measure the sum of a child's progress, book smarts, social smarts and street smarts with a battery of *standardized* test than you can measure the Earth's atmosphere by taking temperatures in Kansas.
You CAN measure the content of the entire atmosphere just by sampling the air in Kansas because there isn't a wide variation of gasses across the entirety of the atmosphere (air in Kansas is pretty much the same as air everywhere else).
Prolonged observation of students while in classes at school (not a testing snapshot of one to a few days) gives much better insight into the development of the child.
So you favor third-party classroom auditing? An auditor goes in completely announced, watches the class for several days and interviews and tests the students. What is wrong with THAT metric?
Why don't you hold the parents to the same standard, after all, they are the primary educators of their children.
Because I'm not paying for them. Metrics for parents would serve no purpose. We are not going to start licensing parents or imposing metrics on them, and I would take up arms against the government if we did. Again this is a cop-out. Teachers don't want to take responsibility so they deflect it onto parents.
Most teachers make less money per year and have worse benefits and less retirement than people in the non-academic world.
This is simply not true in California, New York, Florida, or any of the other states that I've looked at. And you're wrong nationwide about retirement, because as far as I'm aware every K-12 teacher in the USA has access to a matching 401K plan equivalent to the Federal plan. It's a good as retirement gets in the USA in 2007, and far better than that offered by 95% of businesses. K-12 teachers have the best medical and dental plans available in California, better than anything offered by ANY business in California.
K-12 has become rather corporate anymore.
Corporate workers are expected to perform and can be fired arbitrarily. How often do schools have rounds of layoffs?
Maybe you might see it as different, but being professional is being professional, only kids have no interest in their job.
The expectation that kids are supposed to be "professional" is fucking batshit crazy. They're KIDS for God's sake. If they're not randomly setting fire to shit you're lucky.
You elect your school board, you have a direct influence on your schools policies in this regard.... I am unaware of an issue here in getting rid of teachers for not being good teachers, as we do let them go.
Did you go to college? Have you not had people who were experts in their field but failed miserably communicating their knowledge? Teaching is not easy.... Have you ever written a lesson plan to carry a classroom through a full year? Bullshit. As a freshman high school student *I* taught the Computer Literacy class at my high school because the assigned teacher was a complete dipshit. I TA'd for him and taught the whole class. I set up the lab, made the curriculum, designed assignments, graded the papers, everything. I trained two other TA's to teach the classes I wasn't in. One of the seni
If the credit card companies are offering such an onerous deal to the merchants then it seems to me there is a gap in the market for a payment system that does share the liabilities around more fairly. One would think. But every such scheme has involved shifting the liability to the consumer (since banks won't touch anything that shifts liability to them), so consumers have swiftly rejected such systems. Remember the photos on CCs? That turned out to to cost the banks money, so they stopped doing it.
What is a card number and pin anyway?... No wonder there is fraud. Credit cards don't require PINs. As I pointed out earlier, CC processors have no incentive whatsoever to improve credit card fraud. It's a revenue stream for them. They have put forth initiatives (smart cards, etc.), but the cost of these initiatives was placed squarely on the shoulders of the merchants. They had to buy ALL the equipment, plus pay higher processing fees, plus it wouldn't work for 90% of the CCs out there. Few retailers thought this was worthwhile.
The only technology that's gotten off the ground is the "disposable" credit card #s for online merchants. And that's only because it's really cheap to implement.
The *BEST* compatibility you can get for your PS2 games, accessories, and mods involves buying a used HD/tray loading PS2 because some games/accessories don't work on the poptop PSTwo (it also scratches your discs). Compatibility is hurt further in the PS3s with hardware emulation, and then drops again in PS3s with software/hardware emulation (the EE can't be emulated, apparently). The only thing you really lose is the wireless PS3 controller, but wireless PS2 controllers can be had for $20.
In theory, a properly-tuned software emulator could outperform (higher frame rates, larger screen size, etc.) a hardware PS2. But since Sony is not apparently putting any effort into developing this, I don't think this is a significant issue in the short or long term. Independent efforts seem to be doing better.
So, for the end user, this is probably a GOOD thing since it saves the end user $100 that he can use towards a tray loading PS2, which is what he really wants for backwards compatibility anyway.
a bot collecting statistics from your email (which you knowingly agreed to if your using gmail) I seriously doubt that anyone "knowingly" agreed to having a bot scrape their GMail account for marketing and tracking information. It is my opinion, and the opinion of MANY, MANY, MANY, legal scholars that the EULA of GMail (and most EULAs) is, literally, gibberish. No two independent contract attorneys can agree on the meaning most of the content of the EULA, and certainly no layman can understand any of it, so it is not valid.
they aren't... keeping tabs on my sex life or political agenda Absolutely, totally, and completely WRONG. Google *IS* profiling you. Once you sign up for a Google account, every single click you make through the Google interface is tracked and recorded. Every single click on a search result, every single click in your GMail, every search in Google Maps, etc. All of this is stored in an online profile that is given away to advertisers. They obfuscate the actual individuals mainly so the advertisers can't go around them, but it won't be long before they sell that information attached to your name to anyone who wants it.
So lets have some examples of how this could be bad: You apply for a new job and as part of that job they do a background check. The PI then purchases your surfing records from Google and checks against them and discovers that you like to surf fetish websites, so you are denied on that basis.
Google operates in China. The Chinese government demands that Google gives them the surfing records of a number of political dissidents. Google is forced to comply (or get tossed out of China). The records reveal that the dissidents are engates in prohibited activity whereupon they're rounded up and assassinated by the PRC.
The first issue is reply quoting. Outlook still insists on its own insane quoting mechanisim, where the full text of the original message, with a large bulky summary of its header, is placed at the bottom of the message, with just a horizontal line on top to indicate "quoting". You can get it to do standard ">" quoting with a large amount of hunting through menus, but you still have to hack that header block down to reasonable size, and I found I can't trust it unless I view all email as plain text. The worst part of this is that almost no Outlook users do this, so you end up with the entire contents of the email thread tacked onto *every* email sent through your system. There are add-ins that claim to fix this, but of course they only work with certain versions of outlook, and I couldn't get any of them to work on mine. Tools>Options>Email Options... allows you to change the quoting config. By default, the only headers included are Date: and From: and Subject: which doesn't seem like a lot to me. What email clients DON'T require you to trim the quoted text? Not trimming the quoted text has nothing to to with Outlook and everything to do with people being lazy in email. Nobody trims quotes in GMail either. I'll admit that Eudora has much better options for managing quoted text, but it's the only graphical client that I can think of with these features (Pegasus is discontinued).
The second issue is threading. Apparently Outlook refuses to use the email header entry that allows every other mail client in the world uses to properly thread messages. First off, "in-reply-to" isn't properly supported in any client I'm aware of due to bugs in the RFC. If you use "in-reply-to" for threading, your threading will be messed up. Period. Second, Outlook DOES support "in-reply-to". You're talking about a specific bug when you use old versions of Outlook with Exchange 2003 or vice-versa. There are patches for this. It is not Microsoft's fault that your mail admin won't address this bug.
There are basically 4 actors in a credit card transaction: The customer, the merchant, the bank, and the CC processor/company.
The question is: In the event of CC fraud, who takes the hit? It MUST be one of these actors. In the current system, it is the MERCHANT that takes the hit pretty much all the time. Chargebacks, for example. Say you buy something from a store and decide you don't like it, etc. and decide to do a chargeback on your card. The merchant is fined, sometimes as much as $500, for the chargeback plus THE MERCHANT has to prove that the item wasn't defective. In practice this is near-impossible, so the merchant has to soak up the inventory loss too. If someone steals your card and does the same thing, guess who has the liability then?
BTW, If you're paying attention you'll notice that the CC processors actually WANT some level of fraud because it provides them a revenue stream in the form of fines and penalties they impose on the merchant, who soaks up all the loss.
Any change in the laws is likely to shift liability not to the banks or CC processors, but to the customer, which is very bad for the banks and CC processors. The banks an CC companies are VERY powerful in the USA, so this is unlikely to happen.
So my answer to the retailers is: tough shit. If you don't like their rules, you don't have to accept credit cards.
As a company admin, you create the TrueCrypt volume for your employees. Sorry, I was talking about the single-user scenario. With a company admin in the mix, we're dealing with that "trusted third party" I discussed earlier. Conceptually, what you're talking about is no different from giving the company admin a copy of your password.
and too bad that using remote desktop kicks the local user OFF the machine No, it doesn't, but it does seize control of the session. And since we're trying to provide remote support here (have you read the thread?) that's a GOOD thing. It means the local user and remote user can collaborate on the same desktop.
However, I'll generally accept that this is a real problem with Windows XP: you can't have multiple users "active" simultaneously. This is a licensing issue from Microsoft (they consider multiuser a "server" feature), and it sucks. This same limitation exists in Vista, but I think they may be addressing this in a Service Pack.
Also remember that the OP claimed that XP DIDN'T HAVE remote management features, and then someone else claimed they were completely insecure. I'm not arguing that Linux doesn't have good options for remote management, but that Windows DOES have options for remote management, that they work fairly well, and that they are not insecure.
HD-DVDs have the advantage of being backwards-compatible. HD-DVDs are usually "dual-mode" and playable on both regular DVD players and HD-DVD players. If the HD-DVD vendors can get the cost of production (and players) down to the level of regular DVDs, or very close, I we may see wider adoption as consumers slowly transition. I don't think this is going to happen. I think that HD-DVD is just going to die out completely (like UMD movies).
BluRay will remain, but only as a niche format for video enthusiasts. Just like LaserDisc. I seriously doubt the BluRay will ever be much more successful than it is now.
The best way to assign a new password is automatically, I think, in a way that hides the password from IT. Certainly it should not be done by hand, not when there are hundreds or thousands of users. So you think a server should generate a password string and assign it to the user, with some sort of user notification telling them what it is, correct? (I'm still not entirely clear on what you mean.)
Why do you think this is a good idea? The hardest part about passwords, especially complex passwords, is remembering them. So if you serve a strong password to a user, like "sF3$v#P!", how do you expect them to remember it? They won't. What they WILL do is write it down on a post-it and stick it to the edge of their monitor. We let users choose their own passwords because it makes it less likely they'll write them down.
Though some of them are definite proof of some serious failings in their education from their parents - morality. Translation: It it all the fault of the parents, not the schools.
You get rid of the business mentality infesting schools that kids are like widgets. Drop tests, drop standardized curriculum and you drop grade levels. Test scores and grade levels are a joke. They are a means to make believe that all students fit into nice neat little boxes. They don't! They are individual *mashups* of personality traits, learning skills, abilities, beliefs, biologicals (hormones, vision, hearing, sensory ability,...), lifestyles, desires, etc. What do you propose as alternative metrics? Should we just take the teacher's word for it?
You may have noticed I did not say anything about teachers. There is a reason. Most are good and most do it because they love it. Most of them do not do it for the pay. They would make more in store management at WalMart. I know the salaries of each. There are those truly outstanding teachers who can reach across boundaries and perform miracles. We can not afford to hire all the people in the world like that to teach. We can afford to make the classrooms and the students more teachable. Those who are truly bad teachers (not disillusioned nor worn out - these are normally caused by the problems in the schools) can still be removed. But, parental involvement goes a long way to making that more productive - not the parents getting rid of teachers, but the parents supporting teachers to help prevent so much of the burn-out. You didn't say anything about teachers because you have a vested interest in the system since you and your parents teach. Yes, teachers could make more money as a Wal-Mart manager. Some people value health insurance, pension benefits, and job security more than pay. Some people don't like the corporate world and are more comfortable in an academic setting.
Explain to me how it's a GOOD thing that you can't fire teachers for bad performance. And I don't want this "you can" nonsense. I've seen teachers not show up for half their classes. The reality is that I've only ever seen teachers getting FIRED for beating or sleeping with students. That's it. I've seen a few teachers "forced out" because they were crazy, as in "threatening and scaring the students" crazy, but they weren't actually fired. They retired with their lifetime pension.
Explain to me how it's a GOOD thing that working professionals can't teach classes because they didn't waste 4 years in college to get a teaching credential. So any working scientist, historian, etc. can't teach any classes. They have to be academics who don't really know shit about the material and are insulated from the real world. Many professionals would VOLUNTEER their time to teach classes if they were allowed to.
Explain to me why you need 10 years of college to teach a pottery class, or to run kids around a track, or basic carpentry.
Explain to me why teachers shouldn't have performance metrics. i.e. If a majority of a teacher's class fails to graduate, should he be fired?
The document in question was almost certainly fake. As another poster pointed out, it was probably made with MS Word. Contrary to what another poster said it was NOT an obvious fake. On the right-wing blogs this was pounded to death.
Dan Rather has said publically that he believed it was authentic before going to air. And *HIS* source said he also believed it was authentic.
In reality IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT THE DOCUMENT WAS FAKE, because the substance of the letter has been confirmed as true by multiple sources. This just wasn't the case when the story went to air (as opposed to a week later), so the Karl Rove hit squad savaged CBS and Dan Rather for pursuing a negative story about Bush shortly before the election.
The facts remains: George W. Bush got a special, and quite ILLEGAL, appointment to the "Champange squadron" of the Texas Air National Guard due to his father's influence. George W. Bush then skipped out on his military service to go on vacation in the middle of the Vietnam War.
At the same time, Karl Rove and the White House put together a fraudulent hit squad (aka Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) to make up outrageous lies about John Kerry. While there was media uproar about it, the media didn't attack Fox and other right-wing outlets for defending the story.
It's this kind of completely dishonest partisanship that has driven the American public away from the Republican party.
Store the header, and the file you used as a password in a safe place somewhere else.... There is nothing in the header itself that can be used to identify it as a header backup. And the file you used as the password can be anything. Just use a random html page so it doesn't look suspicious if anyone ever finds it. How is this conceptually different from just writing the password on a note and sticking it in a drawer?
The PROBLEM is one of failing human memory. If you forget the password, are you going to remember the obscure file you need to do data recovery? If the problem is based on failed human memory, your recovery solution should not depend entirely on the same factor.
This is why you need either another factor, or a trusted third party.
I don't understand that argument. Why is it necessary to have two passwords? Because IT shouldn't know what the user password is.
An organization must have a database of user passwords, correct? A user may call and say he lost his password. So IT resets his password after verifying his identity. A database of passwords must exist, but it shouldn't be (easily) viewable to IT. IT should never ask users what their passwords are, and should never need to know them. That's best practice.
when they aren't fully automated, I don't understand what you mean here. What's an "automated password"? Just so you know, I was talking about a system that checked against a central server for authentication.
What happens in an organization when a member of the IT staff leaves? The IT access special password, if there is one, needs to be changed on 1,000 computers. I was unclear in my initial post because I was vague about the distinction between a password and the encryption key. The ideal system has a long-string encryption key secured by a password and (here's the important part) you can change the password without re-encrypting your data. So in my example, each volume would have two keys, one for IT one for the user, with resettable passwords on each. Or, perhaps more simply, one key with multiple passwords. The data-recovery benefits of such an arrangement should be obvious.
So to deal with the above problem you'd just change the password, the key remains unchanged.
The parent poster has an excellent point. Current firmware update procedures involved downloading a firmware file from the manufacturer's web site, creating a burning a ISO CD, and then hoping the player recognizes the update when the disc is inserted. It's a PITA for an expert, I don't think most consumers would even consider it.
Some new BlueRay players come with ethernet ports for the sole reason of connecting the player to the network to download firmware because the manufacturers have started to anticipate this bullshit.
BlueRay is doomed as a consumer video format. It's the next LaserDisc. BlueRay is still really expensive, Sony has gone out of their way to screw the early adopters, and BlueRay has nothing but bad press. This is not to say we won't see lots of BlueRay, but only for PS3 games, data archive systems, etc. BlueRay is settling into being a niche proprietary format, like UMD, MiniDisc, MemoryStick, or .
That's cool, but in using cygwin, ssh & VNC to support the idea that it's easier to securely admin a remote Windows box than to admin a remote Linux box, you just proved that you need extra steps to do the same thing... I hate this kind of FUD.
First, Remote Desktop *IS* encrypted. It's RC4, so it sucks, but it's still encrypted. Win2k3 Server and Vista use FIPS 140, meaning RDC from Vista to Win2k3 server or Vista to Vista is probably more secure than an SSH link. If you're really fucking paranoid, you can SSH tunnel this traffic using any number of Windows apps (you don't need cygwin). Or use IPSec. Windows has native IPSec support from 2000 on and it's faster than SSH.
Second, Which distro has an SSH-tunneled NX server running out of the box? None? If that's the case then Linux isn't "easier" because all XP boxes have Remote Assistance out of the box. VNC is widely available as well, and some versions offer encryption. If you're going commercial, there LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS of secure remote-control apps for Windows with every feature you could ever want.
We are long past the NT4 days when remote management was significantly easier on Unix.
The problem with TrueCrypt, and I use it, is that the is no key recovery or remote management faculty. IOW, if you forget the passphrase (and/or lose the keyfile) your data is gone forever. This is considered unacceptable in many organizations, which is why they have this key recovery faculty.
It's still a crappy implementation. What they needed is a more sophisticated system that allows multiple keys and access levels. i.e. When a user creates a volume it also tags that volume with a "master key" that the IT team uses. Sure, this means that if that key becomes compromised you can get access to all the encrypted volumes on the network, but it's better than turning it OFF when IT needs access. BTW, this is basically how BitLocker in Vista works.
Without centralized key management, encryption products in the enterprise are a very bad idea. It's a great way to lose data.
I not convinced I can set up an XP machine that can't be infected by them. Removing Administrator rights in XP stops 98% of possible malware infections, since it's difficult to install ANYTHING. You can even have them use IE 7 safely because they won't be able to install ActiveX controls and the JVM is likely to flip out given the rare possibility of a Java exploit.
Of course, they can't install anything. And you might run into the occasional app that requires Administrator rights. I strongly suggest you don't use these apps because it is network-aware apps with lousy coding practices that are often the security issue in Windows, not Windows per se.
And with Policies you can do all sorts of crazy enforcement if you really want, like not letting them login after bedtime.
This reasoning is very strange. The CLAIM we're addressing is NOT that PC gaming is more popular than console gaming. Nobody has made this claim. The claim we're addressing is whether or not PC gaming is "dying".
And all available evidence contradicts that claim. PC game sales have increased every year. More PC games are released every year. Profitability at PC game companies is up. By any measure you want to make, PC gaming is doing better in 2007 than it did in 2006. And 2006 was better than 2005, and so forth.
People have been predicting the death of the PC as a gaming platform since the release of the SNES. It's getting a little old.
Considering porting to PC involves little more than a recompile (really, Halo is a DirectX game using standard interfaces, it's basically a Windows game already) I think it will be faster than that. QA, performance tweaking, packaging and market copy, and most time-consuming of all, copy protection are generally what eat up the porting effort. Expect it in late 2008, later if they want cross-platform online play.
I worked with the Evangelists in Apple Developer Relations, and my direct personal experience tells me that you're full of shit. Just to reiterate, this wasn't my experience either. They couldn't answer the simple questions *I* had like:
Back in 2000: "What it the compatibility of the new MacOSX with my Exchange server and infrastructure?" Answer: Ask Microsoft. That's really what they said.
"Do you have complete documentation on error codes in MacOS 9 (or 10 for that matter)?" Answer: No! And fuck you for paying for developer support!
or more recently:
"Can the Xserve handle a LAMP stack?" Answer: What's LAMP?
My experiences with developer and customer support from Apple have been consistently terrible. YMMV.
Those who care about this can wait for the PC version which I'm sure will allow you to pump the resolution to 1600x1200 (or possibly more by editing the.ini files) and zip along in glorious DirectX 10 goodness with their $500 video cards. Of course, by the time it comes out for the PC it will look dated (like Halo 2) and the people with the high-end rigs will be playing something else.
Neoconservative was first coined in the 80s as a synonym for "Reagan Democrats." It was a derisive term The term "neoconservative" was invented in the late 1970s by former 1960s liberal intellectuals disillusioned with liberal ideals, or "mugged by reality" as Irving Kristol (a key neocon) put it.
The term has changed meaning over time to reflect the "empire building" wing of conservatism, as opposed to the isolationist wing. So a "neocon" today is a conservative who supports broad military intervention and "spreading American values" overseas.
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... which increased tax receipts. WHICH tax receipts? Bush cut capital gains taxes and taxes on the wealthiest 10%. Capital gains tax revenue is has been going down every year of the Bush presidency. Income tax revenue HAS grown slower than expected. You see, income tax revenue is normally expected to increase and the American population grows and more people enter the workforce. If income tax revenue actually DECREASES that means a huge tax cut, or a depression. So while overall revenue is still up, is rate of increase isn't much lower than it was during the Clinton presidency and that has more to do with Bush's crazy spending policies than the end of the dot-com bubble.Actually, over time is meant throughout the year, and the method is teacher observation, peer review, and management review.
So you don't think that a teacher's job should be tied to how his kids perform in class, AT ALL?
What about the students? When I was in high school all the students knew who was a good teacher and who wasn't. And contrary to the criticism I always hear about this the criteria wasn't who was "easiest". The criteria was based on which teachers were the most interesting and engaging for students because those are the teachers everyone actually learned from. Why shouldn't the students be involved in evaluating the job performance of the teachers since they're in the best position to do so?
You were a late bloomer, I started teaching in 7th grade, science, and computers.
I assisted, but did not teach, science classes in 8th grade. You're only reinforcing my point that the teaching credentials/degrees are nonsense.
No, you are not paying them directly, but you are paying for their daycare, and you are paying for their screw-ups as parents. Do you have a clue as to the number of parents who bitterly complain about assigning homework and expecting it to be turned in on time? Do you wonder why the kids don't care. Their idiot parents don't care.
Considering parents out there smoking crack and raping their kids, not bugging their kids about their homework is the least of my concerns. Or maybe they're just ticked off about all the busy work kids get in school nowadays "Write a 10 page essay on nothing". I remember a lot of busy work from high school.
In Cincinnati, in th school system we were in, parents were held accountable. If the parents were not providing the assistance the kids needed at home to help them learn the materials, the kids were given to a professional tutor and the parents were billed. Yep, some of them complained like mad about how unfair it was.
Because I'm sure the school board threatened to expel their kids if they didn't pay. People who really don't care would never even have considered paying for the tutor and would just let their kids get kicked out.
Passion. Kids pursue their passions, not their needs. Any kid whom I have met or taught who has a passion focuses on that passion
And adults can't be passionate about their profession? I think they can. And I think a working professionals far more likely to be passionate about his work than an academic who isn't doing anything hands on, meaning he's likely to be better at teaching the material. You continue to reinforce my point that teaching is neither particularly difficult, nor does it require a decade of training. Meaning that the union requirements for those credentials are hurting students by limiting their access to good teachers.
The REAL liability is lawsuits from parents who don't get their way, who want this religion taught or that one not, who want their child to be in a class that they can not keep up with or in a grade they are not emotionally ready for (though their book smarts are off the scale).
Don't give me that. Teachers CANNOT be sued for such things and ARE NOT. The lawsuits you describe are directed against the schools, district, etc. and are a completely separate issue. Fear of liability is a big problem for schools and school budgets, but giving teachers jobs for life certainly has little to do with it. If anything it makes the problem worse.
Schools court certain contraversy by their nature. Sex education, evolution, religious studies, drugs, and youth violence are all considered hot-button issues in the USA and because they intersect with K-12 education there is going to be trouble. ALL professions and businesses involve some level of legal wrangling. These have been issues for at least the past 150 years, so you know what you signed up for.
And it seems that you want parents involved only as long as they do EXACTLY what the teach
... you and I hire the public school system teachers. We vote for the school boars, the legislature and either demand answer or not
This is inconsistent with your earlier position. If it's ALL about parents teaching their kids proper "morality" as you claimed, from practical perspective it doesn't matter how they vote because a child that hasn't been properly trained by their parents will fail no matter how "good" the school is. Secondly, you're assuming individual parents have complete voting control over the school boards and legislature. They don't. There are these things called "lobbies". Pretending they don't control the voting process is an ignorant cop-out.
You can no more measure the sum of a child's progress, book smarts, social smarts and street smarts with a battery of *standardized* test than you can measure the Earth's atmosphere by taking temperatures in Kansas.
You CAN measure the content of the entire atmosphere just by sampling the air in Kansas because there isn't a wide variation of gasses across the entirety of the atmosphere (air in Kansas is pretty much the same as air everywhere else).
Prolonged observation of students while in classes at school (not a testing snapshot of one to a few days) gives much better insight into the development of the child.
So you favor third-party classroom auditing? An auditor goes in completely announced, watches the class for several days and interviews and tests the students. What is wrong with THAT metric?
Why don't you hold the parents to the same standard, after all, they are the primary educators of their children.
Because I'm not paying for them. Metrics for parents would serve no purpose. We are not going to start licensing parents or imposing metrics on them, and I would take up arms against the government if we did. Again this is a cop-out. Teachers don't want to take responsibility so they deflect it onto parents.
Most teachers make less money per year and have worse benefits and less retirement than people in the non-academic world.
This is simply not true in California, New York, Florida, or any of the other states that I've looked at. And you're wrong nationwide about retirement, because as far as I'm aware every K-12 teacher in the USA has access to a matching 401K plan equivalent to the Federal plan. It's a good as retirement gets in the USA in 2007, and far better than that offered by 95% of businesses. K-12 teachers have the best medical and dental plans available in California, better than anything offered by ANY business in California.
K-12 has become rather corporate anymore.
Corporate workers are expected to perform and can be fired arbitrarily. How often do schools have rounds of layoffs?
Maybe you might see it as different, but being professional is being professional, only kids have no interest in their job.
The expectation that kids are supposed to be "professional" is fucking batshit crazy. They're KIDS for God's sake. If they're not randomly setting fire to shit you're lucky.
You elect your school board, you have a direct influence on your schools policies in this regard. ... I am unaware of an issue here in getting rid of teachers for not being good teachers, as we do let them go.
Did you go to college? Have you not had people who were experts in their field but failed miserably communicating their knowledge? Teaching is not easy. ... Have you ever written a lesson plan to carry a classroom through a full year? Bullshit. As a freshman high school student *I* taught the Computer Literacy class at my high school because the assigned teacher was a complete dipshit. I TA'd for him and taught the whole class. I set up the lab, made the curriculum, designed assignments, graded the papers, everything. I trained two other TA's to teach the classes I wasn't in. One of the seni
The only technology that's gotten off the ground is the "disposable" credit card #s for online merchants. And that's only because it's really cheap to implement.
Part of this is a QA issue.
The *BEST* compatibility you can get for your PS2 games, accessories, and mods involves buying a used HD/tray loading PS2 because some games/accessories don't work on the poptop PSTwo (it also scratches your discs). Compatibility is hurt further in the PS3s with hardware emulation, and then drops again in PS3s with software/hardware emulation (the EE can't be emulated, apparently). The only thing you really lose is the wireless PS3 controller, but wireless PS2 controllers can be had for $20.
In theory, a properly-tuned software emulator could outperform (higher frame rates, larger screen size, etc.) a hardware PS2. But since Sony is not apparently putting any effort into developing this, I don't think this is a significant issue in the short or long term. Independent efforts seem to be doing better.
So, for the end user, this is probably a GOOD thing since it saves the end user $100 that he can use towards a tray loading PS2, which is what he really wants for backwards compatibility anyway.
So lets have some examples of how this could be bad: You apply for a new job and as part of that job they do a background check. The PI then purchases your surfing records from Google and checks against them and discovers that you like to surf fetish websites, so you are denied on that basis.
Google operates in China. The Chinese government demands that Google gives them the surfing records of a number of political dissidents. Google is forced to comply (or get tossed out of China). The records reveal that the dissidents are engates in prohibited activity whereupon they're rounded up and assassinated by the PRC.
Exactly right, please mod the parent up.
There are basically 4 actors in a credit card transaction: The customer, the merchant, the bank, and the CC processor/company.
The question is: In the event of CC fraud, who takes the hit? It MUST be one of these actors. In the current system, it is the MERCHANT that takes the hit pretty much all the time. Chargebacks, for example. Say you buy something from a store and decide you don't like it, etc. and decide to do a chargeback on your card. The merchant is fined, sometimes as much as $500, for the chargeback plus THE MERCHANT has to prove that the item wasn't defective. In practice this is near-impossible, so the merchant has to soak up the inventory loss too. If someone steals your card and does the same thing, guess who has the liability then?
BTW, If you're paying attention you'll notice that the CC processors actually WANT some level of fraud because it provides them a revenue stream in the form of fines and penalties they impose on the merchant, who soaks up all the loss.
Any change in the laws is likely to shift liability not to the banks or CC processors, but to the customer, which is very bad for the banks and CC processors. The banks an CC companies are VERY powerful in the USA, so this is unlikely to happen.
So my answer to the retailers is: tough shit. If you don't like their rules, you don't have to accept credit cards.
However, I'll generally accept that this is a real problem with Windows XP: you can't have multiple users "active" simultaneously. This is a licensing issue from Microsoft (they consider multiuser a "server" feature), and it sucks. This same limitation exists in Vista, but I think they may be addressing this in a Service Pack.
Also remember that the OP claimed that XP DIDN'T HAVE remote management features, and then someone else claimed they were completely insecure. I'm not arguing that Linux doesn't have good options for remote management, but that Windows DOES have options for remote management, that they work fairly well, and that they are not insecure.
HD-DVDs have the advantage of being backwards-compatible. HD-DVDs are usually "dual-mode" and playable on both regular DVD players and HD-DVD players. If the HD-DVD vendors can get the cost of production (and players) down to the level of regular DVDs, or very close, I we may see wider adoption as consumers slowly transition. I don't think this is going to happen. I think that HD-DVD is just going to die out completely (like UMD movies).
BluRay will remain, but only as a niche format for video enthusiasts. Just like LaserDisc. I seriously doubt the BluRay will ever be much more successful than it is now.
Why do you think this is a good idea? The hardest part about passwords, especially complex passwords, is remembering them. So if you serve a strong password to a user, like "sF3$v#P!", how do you expect them to remember it? They won't. What they WILL do is write it down on a post-it and stick it to the edge of their monitor. We let users choose their own passwords because it makes it less likely they'll write them down.
Explain to me how it's a GOOD thing that you can't fire teachers for bad performance. And I don't want this "you can" nonsense. I've seen teachers not show up for half their classes. The reality is that I've only ever seen teachers getting FIRED for beating or sleeping with students. That's it. I've seen a few teachers "forced out" because they were crazy, as in "threatening and scaring the students" crazy, but they weren't actually fired. They retired with their lifetime pension.
Explain to me how it's a GOOD thing that working professionals can't teach classes because they didn't waste 4 years in college to get a teaching credential. So any working scientist, historian, etc. can't teach any classes. They have to be academics who don't really know shit about the material and are insulated from the real world. Many professionals would VOLUNTEER their time to teach classes if they were allowed to.
Explain to me why you need 10 years of college to teach a pottery class, or to run kids around a track, or basic carpentry.
Explain to me why teachers shouldn't have performance metrics. i.e. If a majority of a teacher's class fails to graduate, should he be fired?
Here's the short version:
The document in question was almost certainly fake. As another poster pointed out, it was probably made with MS Word. Contrary to what another poster said it was NOT an obvious fake. On the right-wing blogs this was pounded to death.
Dan Rather has said publically that he believed it was authentic before going to air. And *HIS* source said he also believed it was authentic.
In reality IT DOES NOT MATTER THAT THE DOCUMENT WAS FAKE, because the substance of the letter has been confirmed as true by multiple sources. This just wasn't the case when the story went to air (as opposed to a week later), so the Karl Rove hit squad savaged CBS and Dan Rather for pursuing a negative story about Bush shortly before the election.
The facts remains: George W. Bush got a special, and quite ILLEGAL, appointment to the "Champange squadron" of the Texas Air National Guard due to his father's influence. George W. Bush then skipped out on his military service to go on vacation in the middle of the Vietnam War.
At the same time, Karl Rove and the White House put together a fraudulent hit squad (aka Swift Boat Veterans for Truth) to make up outrageous lies about John Kerry. While there was media uproar about it, the media didn't attack Fox and other right-wing outlets for defending the story.
It's this kind of completely dishonest partisanship that has driven the American public away from the Republican party.
And the file you used as the password can be anything. Just use a random html page so it doesn't look suspicious if anyone ever finds it. How is this conceptually different from just writing the password on a note and sticking it in a drawer?
The PROBLEM is one of failing human memory. If you forget the password, are you going to remember the obscure file you need to do data recovery? If the problem is based on failed human memory, your recovery solution should not depend entirely on the same factor.
This is why you need either another factor, or a trusted third party.
So to deal with the above problem you'd just change the password, the key remains unchanged.
The parent poster has an excellent point. Current firmware update procedures involved downloading a firmware file from the manufacturer's web site, creating a burning a ISO CD, and then hoping the player recognizes the update when the disc is inserted. It's a PITA for an expert, I don't think most consumers would even consider it.
Some new BlueRay players come with ethernet ports for the sole reason of connecting the player to the network to download firmware because the manufacturers have started to anticipate this bullshit.
BlueRay is doomed as a consumer video format. It's the next LaserDisc. BlueRay is still really expensive, Sony has gone out of their way to screw the early adopters, and BlueRay has nothing but bad press. This is not to say we won't see lots of BlueRay, but only for PS3 games, data archive systems, etc. BlueRay is settling into being a niche proprietary format, like UMD, MiniDisc, MemoryStick, or .
First, Remote Desktop *IS* encrypted. It's RC4, so it sucks, but it's still encrypted. Win2k3 Server and Vista use FIPS 140, meaning RDC from Vista to Win2k3 server or Vista to Vista is probably more secure than an SSH link. If you're really fucking paranoid, you can SSH tunnel this traffic using any number of Windows apps (you don't need cygwin). Or use IPSec. Windows has native IPSec support from 2000 on and it's faster than SSH.
Second, Which distro has an SSH-tunneled NX server running out of the box? None? If that's the case then Linux isn't "easier" because all XP boxes have Remote Assistance out of the box. VNC is widely available as well, and some versions offer encryption. If you're going commercial, there LOTS AND LOTS AND LOTS of secure remote-control apps for Windows with every feature you could ever want.
We are long past the NT4 days when remote management was significantly easier on Unix.
The problem with TrueCrypt, and I use it, is that the is no key recovery or remote management faculty. IOW, if you forget the passphrase (and/or lose the keyfile) your data is gone forever. This is considered unacceptable in many organizations, which is why they have this key recovery faculty.
It's still a crappy implementation. What they needed is a more sophisticated system that allows multiple keys and access levels. i.e. When a user creates a volume it also tags that volume with a "master key" that the IT team uses. Sure, this means that if that key becomes compromised you can get access to all the encrypted volumes on the network, but it's better than turning it OFF when IT needs access. BTW, this is basically how BitLocker in Vista works.
Without centralized key management, encryption products in the enterprise are a very bad idea. It's a great way to lose data.
Of course, they can't install anything. And you might run into the occasional app that requires Administrator rights. I strongly suggest you don't use these apps because it is network-aware apps with lousy coding practices that are often the security issue in Windows, not Windows per se.
And with Policies you can do all sorts of crazy enforcement if you really want, like not letting them login after bedtime.
This reasoning is very strange. The CLAIM we're addressing is NOT that PC gaming is more popular than console gaming. Nobody has made this claim. The claim we're addressing is whether or not PC gaming is "dying".
And all available evidence contradicts that claim. PC game sales have increased every year. More PC games are released every year. Profitability at PC game companies is up. By any measure you want to make, PC gaming is doing better in 2007 than it did in 2006. And 2006 was better than 2005, and so forth.
People have been predicting the death of the PC as a gaming platform since the release of the SNES. It's getting a little old.
Considering porting to PC involves little more than a recompile (really, Halo is a DirectX game using standard interfaces, it's basically a Windows game already) I think it will be faster than that. QA, performance tweaking, packaging and market copy, and most time-consuming of all, copy protection are generally what eat up the porting effort. Expect it in late 2008, later if they want cross-platform online play.
Back in 2000:
"What it the compatibility of the new MacOSX with my Exchange server and infrastructure?"
Answer: Ask Microsoft. That's really what they said.
"Do you have complete documentation on error codes in MacOS 9 (or 10 for that matter)?"
Answer: No! And fuck you for paying for developer support!
or more recently:
"Can the Xserve handle a LAMP stack?"
Answer: What's LAMP?
My experiences with developer and customer support from Apple have been consistently terrible. YMMV.
Those who care about this can wait for the PC version which I'm sure will allow you to pump the resolution to 1600x1200 (or possibly more by editing the .ini files) and zip along in glorious DirectX 10 goodness with their $500 video cards. Of course, by the time it comes out for the PC it will look dated (like Halo 2) and the people with the high-end rigs will be playing something else.
But if you really want it, it's coming.
The term has changed meaning over time to reflect the "empire building" wing of conservatism, as opposed to the isolationist wing. So a "neocon" today is a conservative who supports broad military intervention and "spreading American values" overseas.