Not that it's bad for beginners, but I'm not sure I want such a toy OS.
I've heard comments like this a lot and I am curious as to why you consider Xandros a toy operating system. I am a long time Fedora user and have been using Linux seriously for over 12 years and I am quite happy with the distribution that came with my EEE. I don't use the easy mode that the EEE defaults to (though I actually do like that mode), but nothing about the distribution seems "toy" to me.
In IT in particular, you're either learning, growing and adapting or you're headed for obsolescence.
Exactly. The days of learning how to do one thing well and then hanging on to that for 30 years until you retire are long gone. The cutting edge technology of today is the humdrum common knowledge of tomorrow. It used to be that if you could make interactive, data driven websites, you were hot stuff and command top dollar. Now? Who cares. Tons of people know just enough html, php, javascript, and sql to do that, and many of them live in places that have a much lower standard of living. Thanks to the internet, they can compete for those jobs just as easily as the guy next door.
This is great for our economy. It means that we cannot just rest on our laurels and collect royalties on the specialized knowledge we picked up 10 years ago. It gives us a huge incentive to keep being inventive and innovative. It is painful if you are lazy or if you end up having a set of technical skills that the market doesn't want, but it is definitely good for the country.
There's no way the financial institution would actually offer a loan that they know could not be repaid if the institution had to take the hit when the borrower walked away from the deal.
But instead of taking that hit, the lender lets the government bail them out of their stupid lending decisions so at the end, society is responsible for protecting people from themselves.
The problem wasn't so much that the government was bailing out the institutions for making bad loans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are publicly traded institutions (where it is assumed the government will not let them fail) and they irresponsibly bought lots of stupid loans. This is putting them in jeopardy and causing their shareholders to (deservedly) lose a lot of money. The real problem was that lenders were knowingly making bad loans because they knew they could sell that loan to someone else. And that someone else knew they could resell that to some other sucker. It was a giant game of hot potato. There was no incentive in the system to turn down loans and that is the big problem that needs to be fixed.
I think the government should back Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but that backing should come at a heavy cost. They types of loans they buy should be limited to "safe" loans. This would reduce the market for the high risk, high return subprime loans. This will reduce the amount of home buyers out there, but it should keep the market stable.
I do hate seeing the term bailout used a lot, though. Look at the financial numbers coming out of the banks. They are all hurting big time. Many of them are giving up huge amounts of equity to outside investors to stay solvent, some are getting bought at a steep discount and some are going under. The banks are actually suffering. If you were a financial services company that was responsible and stayed out of this mess, you are in great shape and likely looking to buy a piece of these banks at a steep discount. And I like to see that; smart players in the system should be able to profit from the stupidity of others.
So I ask, wouldn't it be to the benefit of society (read - all of us who might someday like to buy a home) to ensure that these checks are in place and properly enforced?
I'm not sure it is in society's benefit to enforce common sense. The housing collapse will be very, very good to some people. I expect that there will be lots of good, cheap houses on the market over the next several years. I've wanted to buy a house for a while, but was turned off by what I felt were crazy prices. It turns out that I was right. Those prices were indeed crazy. Now I have a lot of money saved up and a huge buyer's market. Personally, I'm very happy that lots of people are so bad at math that they cannot figure out whether they can afford a mortgage. For me, there has been no downside. The innocent people that are hurt in this are those who bought a house they could afford and are now in a position that they must sell now. I feel a bit of sympathy for them, but that risk is a known part of buying real estate. It is a very illiquid investment; you have to be prepared for that going in.
Network centric computing utterly depends on security and that means encryption.
This is not necessarily true. Many cloud computing uses are purely within an enterprise. Imagine a company the size of IBM; they have huge computing needs for both R&D and operations. Cloud computing says instead of each business unit buying and running the servers that they need, there will be a centralized pool of computing resources. Business units just reserve an appropriate server and start using it. When they no longer need that application, the resource is released back into the cloud for someone else to use. This is really nice because in many cases computing needs are temporary. I might need a nice fast build server with a specific setup for 6 months and then I may not need that setup for a while, but I might need it in the future to put out a security patch. Cloud computing is great for this because it prevents wasted resources. In this application, everything is kept and controlled by IBM so encryption and security issues are not very important.
Even if your staff had the programming chops to fix system related tool for your use, that does not mean they will be able to get their patches accepted upstream. A quick hack that works for me may be unacceptable for others. Unless your staff is embedded in a variety of open source projects (kernel, glibc, etc), you may have very little hope of getting upstream to take your issues seriously and now you have to maintain patches to the software everytime an update needs to happen. One of the benefits of being a RedHat customer is that you get to buy into the open source community and influence the direction it takes without having to staff dedicated hackers. This is huge because otherwise you commit your business to using a technology you have very little control of.
I loved A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It is more of a history of science book. If you want to know something like how it is that we know the age of the earth and all the prior theories and how they were concocted then this is the kind of book for you. It is a very entertaining read as he often takes side tracks into the personalities behind the discoveries.
You see, you have to consider the socio-economic background of the monkeys, their upbringing, and their inherent biases to figure out if they like green, blue or red M&M's best I see that you, like a lot of people, failed to consider the political implications of the monkey's decision. The political climate may have an impact on whether a monkey is a red monkey or a blue monkey. For example, with an unpopular Republican President in office today, I would expect that there are more blue monkeys today. Maybe the political climate when the experiment was run favored the Republicans and so led to more red M&Ms being selected. And then some monkeys would consider a vote for a green M&M as basically a vote against the blue and for the red so that may explain a bias of green over blue. With so much concern for the environment today, perhaps modern monkeys prefer green now.
The more I think about it, the more I think this makes for a better voting system than what Diebold provides. When you go to vote, there are bowls of different colored M&Ms. You get one corresponding to your vote. Whichever color (candidate) has the fewest M&Ms left at the end wins. You can use the M&Ms with nuts to represent guys like Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, and Mike Gravel.
I think we are seriously going in the wrong direction here. Not because I think anyone has a right to spam, but because spam is now not covered by the first amendment and you should ask how this will play out when there is a mailing list or something for a political action commity or group. Will the leaders of that be jailed and fined because their spam isn't covered by the first amendment? No, this law would not apply to them. A political group will generally send its messages with a legitimate email header that identifies the source of the mail. If so, the Virginia law would not apply. The Virginia law addresses mails with fraudulent headers, which is what this spammer did. As long as you are not hiding the source of your mail, you are safe from this law.
3.) This will obviously be appealed to the Supreme Court (that's the only outlet left after traversing the State courts), and, my guess is, it'll be shot down. The defendant's attorney is correct when it states that the VA law doesn't make exceptions for explicitly protected free speech, such as political speech, and the Supreme Court's strict scrutiny standard for this kind of thing won't let it through. VA may re-write the law to prevent commercial SPAM as different from SPAM that's simply expressing an opinion, but that'd be open to a variety of challenges as well. Actually, the major point in the law and his determination of guilt was that the mail was sent with fraudulent headers. The Virginia law specifically disallows this. Had the spammer not forged the source of the mails, he would likely not have been found guilty. The spammer argues that this prevents anonymous speech which is generally protected. But it seems reasonable to me to require that commercial solicitation provides information about the source. Why should commercial advertisements be anonymous? The whole point is to get business.
I think the lack of exception for political and religious speech will not be an issue for SCOTUS because this guy cannot argue that he was engaged in political or religious speech. His mails were clearly soliciting business. SCOTUS rulings are generally pretty narrowly focused on the case at hand. So the real issue would be whether restricting anonymous bulk commercial emails violates free speech protections. If he had sent political messages, they would consider that, but since he didn't, they won't.
4.) Nine years? He was found guilty on 3 counts (each count is a class 6 felony). His trial only focused on three products that he pushed on three separate days. His sentence was 3 years on each count to run consecutively. He certainly generated way more spam than this, though. His assets were listed as $17 million and he had a net worth of $24 million. In each of 2001, 2002, and 2003 his "business" generated over $1 million. I imagine that he could have been prosecuted on much more than 3 counts. In my mind, nine years in jail for making millions in a fraudulent business seems like a reasonable punishment.
And no, there's not a parallel with snail-mail. With physical mail, the sender pays. Yeah, I hate hearing comparisons between spam and junk snail mail. The major reason that they are different is that junk snail mail is not a real problem. The people responsible for delivery (the post office) get paid for each mail, so they don't care. Mail fraud is taken seriously, so the vast majority of snail mails are for legitimate items (even if you aren't interested). And everyone has plenty of storage to deal with the 3-5 small items per day they are receiving. If an 18 wheeler was backing up to my door to drop off a palette of junk mail each day, it would be a totally different story. The burden of dealing with that would certainly change the view of junk mail.
The issue isn't really who pays, it is just the scale of the problem. If I got 3-5 spams a day, it would be a minor nuisance. When I get over 150 per day, I don't really care whether the sender is paying for things or not. I just want it to stop. The vast majority of what I get is simply fraud. If this stuff was investigated the way that mail fraud is investigated, I think this would greatly alleviate the problem.
How would anyone use the Interstate Commerce Clause as an argument that spam is protected speech? No one is using that argument. The spammer is arguing that Virginia's anti-spam law violates both the Interstate Commerce clause and Free Speech. He is arguing that because his spam mails crossed state lines, then only the federal government would have jurisdiction because the federal government regulates interstate commerce. The spammer is also arguing that spam itself is legitimate speech that is protected by the first amendment. He is arguing that the law is invalid because it violates two parts of the constitution. If the judges were to agree on either point, he would be set free.
ETrade is both a brokerage house and a bank. I don't know if other American banks offer RSA SecurID tokens. I'm a happy ETrade customer so I haven't investigated that. A quick google search makes it look like other banks offer this, too.
If they implemented those RSA tokens that spit out a new number every 60 seconds, they could stop almost all the phishing scams. Yet they refuse to do anything to actually even offer the more secure option. I'd pay for the RSA token out of my own pocket if it meant my money would be more secure. Actually, some banks do this. ETrade, for example, provides the RSA tokens. If security were really that important to customers, the banks would respond. But most customers are not security savvy enough to even know what to ask. The mere concept of the RSA token goes completely over the head of most people. What the banks need to do is to take the lead in trying to educate consumers about security issues so that consumers can make more informed choices, but that is a difficult, thankless task that most of them don't want to do. The bottom line is that customers are not leaving banks in droves to go to competitors with better security even though there actually exists competitors with better security. Or to put it another way, providing better security provides only a marginal business advantage, whereas better interest rates provide a huge business advantage.
There is no need to guess at the dollar amounts. They are published on the web. See here for the 2007 numbers. They are providing 5.3 million awards. The average award is $2620. That award does not even come close to paying for extravagant schools. According to this, there are 17 million enrolled students in 4 year colleges. So Pell Grants are helping about 30% of students.
The DOE has only been around a short time and in that time the cost per child in real dollars has nearly doubled with almost no or negative change in student ability. The DOE, in its current form, was established in 1980. According to this study, "Since World War II real (inflation-adjusted) spending per student has increased about 40 percent per decade, or about doubled every 20 years". (They cite their source as "U.S. Department of Education, Educational Testing Service, Digest of Education Statistics, 1995 (Washington: National Center for Education Statistics, 1995), Table 163.") I see no reason to think that the rising education costs have anything to do with the DOE.
That same study has the following quote which I found interesting, "The nonteaching bureaucracy has mushroomed; it grew by 500 percent between 1960 and 1984. Over the same period, the number of teachers and principals grew by a comparatively puny 57 percent and 79 percent, respectively." This has nothing to do with the DOE. The number of school districts in this country has dropped dramatically. Instead of having lots of small, lean school districts, there are fewer, larger districts that are much less efficient. This is a purely local problem.
Clearly our educational system has problems. But those problems were present before the DOE existed. The major reason the DOE exists is to try to address these problems. As much as people want to slam the DOE, I simply cannot find hard evidence that suggests our educational system would be better if it went away.
The Department of Education uses 2% of the federal budget. Their total budget is less than $60 billion dollars. Most of the money goes right back to the taxpayers in the form of Pell Grants ($13 billion) and various grants to the states ($24 billion). Those things do not sound like useless waste to me. Since this money goes into helping people go to college and improving schools in less affluent areas, I feel this is a good investment. A more educated workforce is great for the economy, and therefore good for me. Dollar for dollar, I think we get a better return on Pell Grants than we do on a new aircraft carrier ($13 billion).
Now, I think the debating the merits of Federalism vs state control and the proper role of the federal government of in education is a worthwhile debate. I enjoy hearing different ideas on the best way to fund and run the education system. But I can never take seriously any politician who just says that we should close down the Department of Education. That just ignores the important role that it plays today.
The other candidates have not been interested in what is a real issue and what is not; they are only interested in public perception. That statement is completely delusional. I see the Republicans seriously debating immigration policy, deficit spending, the military strategy in Iraq, how the threat from terrorism should be addressed. These are not fluff issues. These are real problems, and they are the problems that voters care about. Look at the polls and you will see that among Republican voters, immigration is the number one issue. The Democrats are debating their universal health care plans, the problems with "No Child Left Behind", and how to get out of Iraq. To dismiss this and to suggest that Ron Paul is the only one to talk about important issues just ignores what is actually happening.
The issue of whether our currency should be backed by gold is an interesting question. Well, it is interesting if you are trying to get a PhD in economics. But if a candidate runs for president based on that they will lose. Sure, they will get all the voters who think gold is the way to go, but that is a small number and no one else cares. The gold policy has nothing to do with immigration, Iraq, terrorism, deficit spending, health care, or education. It doesn't address the problems the voters really care about.
if he is NOT the one the people want to be president, then we should be very, very afraid. He isn't and there is nothing wrong with that. There is no reason to be overly dramatic about this. Ron Paul is your guy, and that is fine. I (and most other voters) have a different opinion and that is fine too. That is how the system works. But Ron Paul is not some anointed prophet who will save the USA from certain doom. The country will continue on just fine regardless of who is elected. Different candidates will influence things in different ways, but there is no such thing as "the one true way" to run a country.
Note that I'm not trying to rag on Ron Paul. I'm not trying to convince people to vote otherwise. If you think he best represents your views, by all means vote for him. But he is not the only one with ideas; he is not the only one addressing issues; he is not the only honest person in Washington. To suggest otherwise, only pushes him further to the fringes.
If Paul has no chance, it will be precisely because of all the otherwise well-meaning people who keep saying "Paul has no chance". I don't buy this at all. Simply put, Ron Paul's views are out of the mainstream. Ron Paul has views which most voters simply don't agree with. He also has the additional downside that he sounds like a kook sometimes. I'm not saying that many of his ideas don't have merit; but I think the way he communicates them makes him sound like a rambling, raving loony. In the last debate, he went off on some crazy diatribe lamenting about how we have moved away from the gold standard and that will be our downfall. He did this when the discussion was about Iraq. Consider that there is no serious political discussion about the fundamentals of our monetary policy (the question has not been raised in a single debate). This makes him seem unstable. Ron Paul is going to go down in history as another in a series of unusual independents like Ross Perot and Ralph Nader.
I'm not trying to bash Ron Paul. I like the guy, and was very happy that he picked up enough money to be able to stay in the race. He engages voters that would be turned off by most of the other candidates. He inspires passion, and he often forces people to face uncomfortable questions. I'm glad he is in the race, but I will never ever vote for him because I think he is flat wrong on most issues. I don't trust him because I think he is so idealistic that he will never compromise on anything. I suspect most voters see this in similar terms. He just isn't what they want in a president.
6 months is just the starting point for negotiations. I know they will pay for two weeks; maybe they will pay for longer. I've never seen any employer who would fire me because I told them I planned to leave in 6 months. But if a company is dumb enough to be so paranoid that they will give away money just to keep you from coming in, I'm not dumb enough to turn it down. It is just a matter of finding how far they will go. Maybe it is 3 weeks; maybe it is 4 weeks; maybe it is 6 months.
Keep in mind that I was responding to a suggestion to quit with no notice. In the professional world, that is called "being a dick". But if you are willing to do that, you may as well be a dick that is getting free money.
Then, if this is standard practice at your company, do not provide notice. Just quit, walk out, and never look back. That's dumb. If I was at a company where the standard practice was to walk someone out the door as soon as they gave notice, I would give them 6 months notice. After all, maybe they would walk me out immediately and pay me for the next 6 months. If they didn't walk me out, I would always have the option of changing my mind and giving a shorter notice.
In my last company, the standard practice was to immediately walk you out if you were going to a direct competitor. If you were not doing that, then you served out your final days like normal. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I think it is understandable.
the slave states were not technically abusing their powers at all
That's where you and I differ. Enslaving human beings is an abuse of the law, even if the law specifically gives no one the right to interfere with you. Which law? If there is no law addressing an issue, it can't really be considered illegal. To do something illegal, you have to violate some law. Prior to the civil war, the view was that the federal government could regulate the flow of slaves between states and into the country, but could not mandate what the state did within its borders. You really have to twist the constitution in knots to read the law any other way. That is no accident. The authors of the constitution were well aware of slavery and simply bypassed the issue. They had the opportunity to make it illegal and did not do it.
Enslaving humans is unquestionably immoral. It is unquestionably illegal in the US today. Whether it is illegal in another place and time depends on the laws in existence at that time. Morality and legality are two separate issues. We generally want them to intersect in most places, but sometimes immoral things are legal and moral things are illegal.
If a state would enact a law that withholds all taxes of every kind collected from its citizens, especially income tax, there is nothing the Feds could do short of taking over that state's government by military force or other draconian measures.
Such a law would be massively unconstitutional, as the Constitution (amended) allows the Feds to collect income tax without state interference. Nice idea, but totally unworkable. There is plenty the federal government could do to enforce this if they needed to. If a state interfered with the tax money coming in, the federal government could economically quarantine the state. Prevent trucks, ships, and planes from entering the state. Prevent business in other states from doing business with anyone in that state. This would be pretty easy to do if it is an isolated state trying to challenge the federal government. The state government would cave very quickly under that pressure. To really fight the government in this way, a state would have to get a whole block of other states to go along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that it's bad for beginners, but I'm not sure I want such a toy OS.
I've heard comments like this a lot and I am curious as to why you consider Xandros a toy operating system. I am a long time Fedora user and have been using Linux seriously for over 12 years and I am quite happy with the distribution that came with my EEE. I don't use the easy mode that the EEE defaults to (though I actually do like that mode), but nothing about the distribution seems "toy" to me.
In IT in particular, you're either learning, growing and adapting or you're headed for obsolescence.
Exactly. The days of learning how to do one thing well and then hanging on to that for 30 years until you retire are long gone. The cutting edge technology of today is the humdrum common knowledge of tomorrow. It used to be that if you could make interactive, data driven websites, you were hot stuff and command top dollar. Now? Who cares. Tons of people know just enough html, php, javascript, and sql to do that, and many of them live in places that have a much lower standard of living. Thanks to the internet, they can compete for those jobs just as easily as the guy next door.
This is great for our economy. It means that we cannot just rest on our laurels and collect royalties on the specialized knowledge we picked up 10 years ago. It gives us a huge incentive to keep being inventive and innovative. It is painful if you are lazy or if you end up having a set of technical skills that the market doesn't want, but it is definitely good for the country.
There's no way the financial institution would actually offer a loan that they know could not be repaid if the institution had to take the hit when the borrower walked away from the deal.
But instead of taking that hit, the lender lets the government bail them out of their stupid lending decisions so at the end, society is responsible for protecting people from themselves.
The problem wasn't so much that the government was bailing out the institutions for making bad loans. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are publicly traded institutions (where it is assumed the government will not let them fail) and they irresponsibly bought lots of stupid loans. This is putting them in jeopardy and causing their shareholders to (deservedly) lose a lot of money. The real problem was that lenders were knowingly making bad loans because they knew they could sell that loan to someone else. And that someone else knew they could resell that to some other sucker. It was a giant game of hot potato. There was no incentive in the system to turn down loans and that is the big problem that needs to be fixed.
I think the government should back Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, but that backing should come at a heavy cost. They types of loans they buy should be limited to "safe" loans. This would reduce the market for the high risk, high return subprime loans. This will reduce the amount of home buyers out there, but it should keep the market stable.
I do hate seeing the term bailout used a lot, though. Look at the financial numbers coming out of the banks. They are all hurting big time. Many of them are giving up huge amounts of equity to outside investors to stay solvent, some are getting bought at a steep discount and some are going under. The banks are actually suffering. If you were a financial services company that was responsible and stayed out of this mess, you are in great shape and likely looking to buy a piece of these banks at a steep discount. And I like to see that; smart players in the system should be able to profit from the stupidity of others.
So I ask, wouldn't it be to the benefit of society (read - all of us who might someday like to buy a home) to ensure that these checks are in place and properly enforced?
I'm not sure it is in society's benefit to enforce common sense. The housing collapse will be very, very good to some people. I expect that there will be lots of good, cheap houses on the market over the next several years. I've wanted to buy a house for a while, but was turned off by what I felt were crazy prices. It turns out that I was right. Those prices were indeed crazy. Now I have a lot of money saved up and a huge buyer's market. Personally, I'm very happy that lots of people are so bad at math that they cannot figure out whether they can afford a mortgage. For me, there has been no downside. The innocent people that are hurt in this are those who bought a house they could afford and are now in a position that they must sell now. I feel a bit of sympathy for them, but that risk is a known part of buying real estate. It is a very illiquid investment; you have to be prepared for that going in.
Network centric computing utterly depends on security and that means encryption.
This is not necessarily true. Many cloud computing uses are purely within an enterprise. Imagine a company the size of IBM; they have huge computing needs for both R&D and operations. Cloud computing says instead of each business unit buying and running the servers that they need, there will be a centralized pool of computing resources. Business units just reserve an appropriate server and start using it. When they no longer need that application, the resource is released back into the cloud for someone else to use. This is really nice because in many cases computing needs are temporary. I might need a nice fast build server with a specific setup for 6 months and then I may not need that setup for a while, but I might need it in the future to put out a security patch. Cloud computing is great for this because it prevents wasted resources. In this application, everything is kept and controlled by IBM so encryption and security issues are not very important.
Even if your staff had the programming chops to fix system related tool for your use, that does not mean they will be able to get their patches accepted upstream. A quick hack that works for me may be unacceptable for others. Unless your staff is embedded in a variety of open source projects (kernel, glibc, etc), you may have very little hope of getting upstream to take your issues seriously and now you have to maintain patches to the software everytime an update needs to happen. One of the benefits of being a RedHat customer is that you get to buy into the open source community and influence the direction it takes without having to staff dedicated hackers. This is huge because otherwise you commit your business to using a technology you have very little control of.
I loved A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. It is more of a history of science book. If you want to know something like how it is that we know the age of the earth and all the prior theories and how they were concocted then this is the kind of book for you. It is a very entertaining read as he often takes side tracks into the personalities behind the discoveries.
The more I think about it, the more I think this makes for a better voting system than what Diebold provides. When you go to vote, there are bowls of different colored M&Ms. You get one corresponding to your vote. Whichever color (candidate) has the fewest M&Ms left at the end wins. You can use the M&Ms with nuts to represent guys like Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, and Mike Gravel.
I think the lack of exception for political and religious speech will not be an issue for SCOTUS because this guy cannot argue that he was engaged in political or religious speech. His mails were clearly soliciting business. SCOTUS rulings are generally pretty narrowly focused on the case at hand. So the real issue would be whether restricting anonymous bulk commercial emails violates free speech protections. If he had sent political messages, they would consider that, but since he didn't, they won't. 4.) Nine years? He was found guilty on 3 counts (each count is a class 6 felony). His trial only focused on three products that he pushed on three separate days. His sentence was 3 years on each count to run consecutively. He certainly generated way more spam than this, though. His assets were listed as $17 million and he had a net worth of $24 million. In each of 2001, 2002, and 2003 his "business" generated over $1 million. I imagine that he could have been prosecuted on much more than 3 counts. In my mind, nine years in jail for making millions in a fraudulent business seems like a reasonable punishment.
The full text of the Virginia Supreme Court's decision is available here.
The issue isn't really who pays, it is just the scale of the problem. If I got 3-5 spams a day, it would be a minor nuisance. When I get over 150 per day, I don't really care whether the sender is paying for things or not. I just want it to stop. The vast majority of what I get is simply fraud. If this stuff was investigated the way that mail fraud is investigated, I think this would greatly alleviate the problem.
ETrade is both a brokerage house and a bank. I don't know if other American banks offer RSA SecurID tokens. I'm a happy ETrade customer so I haven't investigated that. A quick google search makes it look like other banks offer this, too.
There is no need to guess at the dollar amounts. They are published on the web. See here for the 2007 numbers. They are providing 5.3 million awards. The average award is $2620. That award does not even come close to paying for extravagant schools. According to this, there are 17 million enrolled students in 4 year colleges. So Pell Grants are helping about 30% of students.
That same study has the following quote which I found interesting, "The nonteaching bureaucracy has mushroomed; it grew by 500 percent between 1960 and 1984. Over the same period, the number of teachers and principals grew by a comparatively puny 57 percent and 79 percent, respectively." This has nothing to do with the DOE. The number of school districts in this country has dropped dramatically. Instead of having lots of small, lean school districts, there are fewer, larger districts that are much less efficient. This is a purely local problem.
Clearly our educational system has problems. But those problems were present before the DOE existed. The major reason the DOE exists is to try to address these problems. As much as people want to slam the DOE, I simply cannot find hard evidence that suggests our educational system would be better if it went away.
The Department of Education uses 2% of the federal budget. Their total budget is less than $60 billion dollars. Most of the money goes right back to the taxpayers in the form of Pell Grants ($13 billion) and various grants to the states ($24 billion). Those things do not sound like useless waste to me. Since this money goes into helping people go to college and improving schools in less affluent areas, I feel this is a good investment. A more educated workforce is great for the economy, and therefore good for me. Dollar for dollar, I think we get a better return on Pell Grants than we do on a new aircraft carrier ($13 billion).
Now, I think the debating the merits of Federalism vs state control and the proper role of the federal government of in education is a worthwhile debate. I enjoy hearing different ideas on the best way to fund and run the education system. But I can never take seriously any politician who just says that we should close down the Department of Education. That just ignores the important role that it plays today.
The issue of whether our currency should be backed by gold is an interesting question. Well, it is interesting if you are trying to get a PhD in economics. But if a candidate runs for president based on that they will lose. Sure, they will get all the voters who think gold is the way to go, but that is a small number and no one else cares. The gold policy has nothing to do with immigration, Iraq, terrorism, deficit spending, health care, or education. It doesn't address the problems the voters really care about. if he is NOT the one the people want to be president, then we should be very, very afraid. He isn't and there is nothing wrong with that. There is no reason to be overly dramatic about this. Ron Paul is your guy, and that is fine. I (and most other voters) have a different opinion and that is fine too. That is how the system works. But Ron Paul is not some anointed prophet who will save the USA from certain doom. The country will continue on just fine regardless of who is elected. Different candidates will influence things in different ways, but there is no such thing as "the one true way" to run a country.
Note that I'm not trying to rag on Ron Paul. I'm not trying to convince people to vote otherwise. If you think he best represents your views, by all means vote for him. But he is not the only one with ideas; he is not the only one addressing issues; he is not the only honest person in Washington. To suggest otherwise, only pushes him further to the fringes.
I'm not trying to bash Ron Paul. I like the guy, and was very happy that he picked up enough money to be able to stay in the race. He engages voters that would be turned off by most of the other candidates. He inspires passion, and he often forces people to face uncomfortable questions. I'm glad he is in the race, but I will never ever vote for him because I think he is flat wrong on most issues. I don't trust him because I think he is so idealistic that he will never compromise on anything. I suspect most voters see this in similar terms. He just isn't what they want in a president.
Is it too late to order one in time for Christmas? I just looked on Newegg, but I didn't see this item. This would make a great stocking stuffer.
6 months is just the starting point for negotiations. I know they will pay for two weeks; maybe they will pay for longer. I've never seen any employer who would fire me because I told them I planned to leave in 6 months. But if a company is dumb enough to be so paranoid that they will give away money just to keep you from coming in, I'm not dumb enough to turn it down. It is just a matter of finding how far they will go. Maybe it is 3 weeks; maybe it is 4 weeks; maybe it is 6 months.
Keep in mind that I was responding to a suggestion to quit with no notice. In the professional world, that is called "being a dick". But if you are willing to do that, you may as well be a dick that is getting free money.
In my last company, the standard practice was to immediately walk you out if you were going to a direct competitor. If you were not doing that, then you served out your final days like normal. I don't necessarily agree with that, but I think it is understandable.
Enslaving humans is unquestionably immoral. It is unquestionably illegal in the US today. Whether it is illegal in another place and time depends on the laws in existence at that time. Morality and legality are two separate issues. We generally want them to intersect in most places, but sometimes immoral things are legal and moral things are illegal.