Having been through jury selection in both, state and federal court have different procedures. Indeed, from what I'm reading about the trial, it appears that different federal circuits or courts may have different procedures, since what was done here doesn't match what was done when I went through federal jury selection (or they've changed the procedure).
I agree that the GNU info program has a rather annoying interface
(presumably it makes perfect sense to GNU Emacs users). But the Texinfo
source from which info documents are generated will target multiple outputs,
including PDF and HTML. For packages using the GNU build system these are
built with "make pdf" and "make html" respectively. Moreover, GNU packages
typically make the manual available for download in a number of formats on the
package website.
Just use the all-on-one-page HTML version in w3m and you have something
that is essentially identical to a giant man page, except with internal
cross-references and hyperlinks.
Thanks for the hint -- I'll have to give that a try next time I need to use an info page!
Please note that it's in Github, and continuing to be updated. To put it another way: they wrote the first draft in three days.
And actually, being open does make things better and more useful. Why did the IBM PC succeed where so many others failed? Sure, part of it was that it had IBM's backing... but a large part was that it was much less closed and proprietary than alternatives: IBM built it from commonly-available parts, and published the specs. That allowed clone manufacturers to get started. They used a knock-off of a well-known, 'generic' OS (CPM) instead of a custom-made, proprietary one... which made it possible for a lot of software that started on CPM to be easily ported over. They didn't go around forcing people to get licenses to write software for their system either.
Prior to the late 20th century, most of the world operated in an 'open' fashion for almost everything. A musician who heard a good tune would freely copy it and base their song on it -- that's part of how we got such classics as "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Amazing Grace". In the world of literature, openness gave us the tales of King Arthur and Robin Hood, the Greek myths, the Iliad and Odyssey. Nosferatu - widely recognized as one of the greatest horror films ever made - was almost destroyed by a copyright dispute.
Scientists and engineers have freely built on each other's discoveries and inventions for centuries. Indeed, patents were created in order to spread this - so inventors would publish how their devices worked, in order that other inventors could learn from them.
Open systems are universally more useful than closed systems, all else being equal -- because you're allowed to do more things with them.
So, really, "best-selling book in Britain in the last 14 years". And note that that's including e-books, which records haven't been kept for for that whole time.
The actual number of copies sold to get that 'record'? 5.3 million. I can't find worldwide sales figures for it, but the article above mentions that the sequels sold 3.6 and 3.2 million copies in Britain, and the series as a whole has sold "over 40 million copies". Let's take 45 million for the sake of argument, and assume that proportional sales of the sequels are about the same everywhere. If we do this, we get 19.7 million copies sold. Call it 20 million.
Checking Wikipedia's list of best-selling books of all time, that puts it about #65 on their list. That's pretty far from #1. Especially when you realize that the top category is books that have sold over 200 million copies... and that the list doesn't include books for which there are no reliable sales figures. Like, say, the Bible and the Koran. Heck, even Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is listed as not having reliable sales figures.
Then those are badly-written man pages. The good ones give you plentiful examples of common use cases.
And even when they don't give you examples, a halfway-decent man page at least tells you what option switches are available. And I can actually read the damn thing without having to learn someone's idea of a keyboard-based hypertext system. I can tell you I'd much rather have a halfway-decent man page than a wonderful info page.
Code doesn't lie - but it may not be answering the question you needed answered. Or it may be wrong. Particularly when you're developing, comments that tell you what code is supposed to be doing can be very valuable.
You apparently didn't read all the way -- if you'd read to the end of my comment, you would have found me saying that book prices are indeed ridiculous, and that something needs to be done about it -- and giving a couple of ideas about what could be done.
On your other comments, though....
Your wife is only one data point, I'm afraid. I got my idea of how much college textbooks cost by searching for and looking at materials on the average cost of textbooks in the US. $200 actually appears to be on the high end of average, but I used it anyway, because it's a number a lot of people were throwing around, and I was erring on the side of being cautious. You don't mention how many hours the class was, or anything else that could help in determining if that $230 is a normal price for a class there. Still, though, assuming it is -- is the college in question a private one, that gets all its revenues from tuition? Or is it a tax-supported public school? If it's the latter, then there's a good chance that the actual cost of the class is considerably higher than that $230 / student.
On the public school side, you'll note that I did indeed find that the books were millions of dollars -- I never claimed otherwise. I also didn't say that more money should be thrown at the problem, so I'm not really sure what you're arguing against. My supposition was that (a) open-source textbooks should be looked into and pursued (there would then just be the costs of printing and binding) and (b) individual schools should be given greater freedom to pick the textbooks they want to use. This would make it harder to get a book in statewide by influencing just a few people, and would hopefully free schools from having to buy new books every few years for classes where the contents don't really change significantly in that time (which is really just about everything at the public school level) just because some state administrator decides it.
Taking your numbers, if that city could adopt an open-source textbook for one class, and contract with a printer to print it, they could potentially save $180k, even if it costs $50 to print and bind each copy!
Something else to consider is forced upgrade cycles. Another way book publishers squeeze tax dollars is by producing new editions, often taking the same material, but rearranging it a bit and changing study questions. They then push school systems to buy the new version. ("Well, we're only going to keep printing copies of the old edition for a few more years, so after that, you won't be able to get replacements... you don't want to have some students in the classes having to have different textbooks from others, do you?") Using open-source books removes this problem entirely -- if a school system wants to keep using the same Algebra textbook for twenty years, they can do that, only having new ones printed to replace the ones that are lost or damaged.
And, of course, open source books + cheap e-readers could revolutionize things in completely different ways. Taking the figures I found before, with book purchases being 0.25% of the budget in a normal school year, and 6% in a year of mandated replacement of everything, that implies that in a normal year, 1 in 24 books has to be replaced due to loss or damage. Just as a wild guess, let's say that e-readers would have to be replaced four times as often. That's still only once every six years. Right now, there are very good e-readers that cost around $120 -- considerably less than that $200 textbook. And a single e-reader could hold all of a student's books.
Oh, and hey -- those school systems that are currently charging high school students a book rental fee? They could require students to buy their own e-reader instead. That creates extra incentive from the parents for the kids to take good care of them, and the school could still buy some to lend to poor kids -- which can be defined the same way as they're currently defining who doesn't have to pay the rental fee.
... except that it doesn't, really. Women moving into the workforce led to a greater need for childcare, which increased the number of available jobs. Women and blacks getting good-paying jobs, when previously they couldn't, bought more goods and services, which increased the number of available jobs. Same with gays.
Employment is not a zero-sum game; there's not a fixed number of possible job positions.
Should say 'applicants', not 'applications'
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From comments here, a lot of people seem to be under the impression that the subjects of the study were looking at a resume or something similar. From the actual paper, they were given an evaluation of the applicant written by a third party, not something that was supposed to have been written by the applicant. The summary is misleading when it says they were asked to evaluate "applications for a lab manager position" -- it should say "applicants for a lab manager position".
Re:Before the reflexive pearl clutching
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Sexism In Science
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With only a paper likely filled with lies and exaggeration to go on [...]
So, I take it you didn't actually read the article? Because what was sent to the scientists wasn't presented as a resume that the candidates themselves had written -- it was presented as evaluations of the candidates written by an impartial third party.
I was able to get to the paper. There were none where gender was left ambiguous: gender was clearly indicated on the information given to the evaluating scientists.
And DaveGod, you're misunderstanding the idea of a control group. The idea of using a control group is to make sure that the variable you're changing is what's causing the effect -- in the case of a drug, you want a control group to make sure that people didn't just get better because of something else in the treatment protocols. Thus, you run a control group that gets either a placebo, or a drug of known efficacy, and is otherwise treated the same. Having done that, you can then legitimately say that the drug being tested was the source of any difference in effectiveness.
In this case, the only difference between what was sent to the two groups was the name and sex given for the student, and they ran controls prior to make sure they were picking two names that were as equivalent in pre-conceived notions about them as they could. They can therefore legitimately say that the difference in sex was the source of the differences in how the candidates were rated.
The equivalent here of a drug test without a control would be for them to, say, send out only the female version of the materials, then try to compare the salary offerings against, say, the average starting salary for lab managers. Then, there'd be no way to be sure whether the difference was due to the sex of the 'applicant', or due to something else about the applicants.
Re:Great Summary. But where does this go from here
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· Score: 1
The summary paper says that two names were used: John and Jennifer. These were chosen after testing a multitude of names for bias for and against them with a study group; the researchers chose a pair of names that rated as equally as they could find in the tests, to minimize any effects from the names themselves.
Of course they do - men can't take maternity leave; they take paternity leave.;-)
But leaving semantics aside -- if women were paid as much as men, then their leave would have a greater financial impact to the couple, so it would be more likely that (a) the man might take off some time, so the woman doesn't have to take off as much, and (b) the couple might choose to take less total leave time, since their total income is affected proportionally more by it.
Male employees, on the other hand, are more likely to be alcoholic, more likely to have antisocial personality disorder, and more likely to either commit crimes or be victims of crime. All of these things can easily have negative effects on work performance.
As for maternity leave -- all of the people surveyed were in the US, which does not require women to be paid while on maternity leave. The Family Medical Leave Act, which creates that requirement, applies equally to male and female employees -- men are allowed the exact same rights to take off for the birth of their child as women in the US.
Books costing as much as the class themselves? I call BS. Your speaking of "that rare occasion you can buy a used book" sounds like college books, so let's see... grabbing the current tuition rate from my alma mater (FSU), using the in-state rate, that gives $212.09 per semester-hour. Most classes are three or four semester hours. Using the lower of those gives $616.27 per student per class. So, at $200 a book, you're looking at each class calling for three books for the books to cost as much as the classes.
You then talk about districts raising money for books, which sounds like public school. So let's look there. First off, most public schools don't buy new books for every class every year. And I haven't seen any one-use web access codes for books for public schools -- I've seen it for college books, but not ones intended for the public school market. So let's see.... Let's say $200 a book, buying books every other year, buying 40 books for a class. That's $4000 for books per year per class.
Now... what are all the other expenses associated with running that class? Well, a big one up front is the teacher. Let's say the teacher makes $35k a year -- that doesn't seem unreasonable. There are also further benefits included with the job, though, so that teacher probably costs the school district at least $50k a year. $50k / $4000 = 12.5. So, unless that teacher is teaching 13 or more classes a year, just the teacher is already costing more than the books. Most districts these days seem to have a seven-period day, with teachers having one free period during the day, so realistically, we can expect that the teacher is teaching six classes. $50k / 6 = $8,333.33... so the teacher is costing a bit more than twice as much as the books. And that's leaving aside all the other expenses involved for each class -- like the cost of building and maintaining the school, amortized over all those classes. The cost of administrative and support personnel, again amortized over the classes. The costs of lab materials, handouts, and other class materials.
If the school buys new books every year, then the cost of books is roughly the same as the cost of the teacher. But I've never known a school to actually do that.
Now, I agree that the books cost too much -- but they're not costing as much as the class. Not even close. Looking around for figures, it looks like textbooks are about 1% of school budgets. But then, how do we get from that to needing multi-million dollar bond raisings?
Well, one problem is that school systems are used to mandating a whole new lineup of books every five or six years, which means the expense hits heavy in one year, then is small for a few years (during which only books that are lost or badly damaged are replaced). Meanwhile, textbook costs have risen roughly 5% a year over the last decade, leading to "sticker shock" as schools see that new books are going to cost about 34% more than they did last time (six years ago). If they've been setting aside money for the last five years, planning on maybe a 10% increase in price in keeping with the past, then they're getting a sudden, unpleasant surprise.
Looking around a bit, I found a detailed school system budget (the Norwalk, Connecticut public schools). It's the first one I found -- I didn't select it specially. In it, the textbook cost is about 0.1% of the budget. I'm going to assume that's normal for a year in which no new books are being introduced. If we accept the Kentucky figure that textbooks are 1% of the overall budget over time, then that implies that in a year of book replacement, new books are 5.9% of the budget. Call it 6% for ease of figuring. If that's what it was in the last cycle, and prices have risen 34%, but budgets haven't increased, then the new cost is 8% of the budget, for a shortfall of 2% of the budget. Looking back at Norwalk's budget again, overall budget is about $200m... so that would be $4m for them. So, yeah... they'd be looking at a multi-million
I'm the father of a 13-year-old girl, and I have several of her friends' numbers in my phone. Why? Here's a few reasons:
While my daughter has her own phone, she often forgets it or forgets to charge it. Also, she's often on restriction at her Mom's house and not allowed to have a phone there, and when she is, she simply leaves it at my house. (I have her every other week.) Thus, her friends often call me looking for her. I don't have a good memory for phone numbers, so I've saved the numbers of those who call looking for her often, along with their names, so the caller ID on my phone will show me the name instead of the number. That way, I can often answer with a simple, "Hi. She's not here, she's at her mom's" or simply hand the phone over to her to answer.
Secondly, and relating to number one, sometimes she needs to call her friends, and doesn't have her phone. Having their numbers in my phone allows me to hand it over to her and let her call them, without having to go through the hoops of calling their parents. (Some of whom are divorced, and thus it can be a guessing game as to which parent one needs to call to reach the child.)
(And parenthetically here, that's part of what led me to start saving the kids' numbers in the first place. After having done the game of "Oh, you need to talk to Jenny? Okay, I'll call her mom... hi, Angie, Margie needs to talk to Jenny... oh, she's with Mark? Okay, I don't have Mark's number, can you give it to me? Thanks. Hi, Mark, this is Margie's dad. Margie Andrews. She's a friend of Jenny, and she wants to ask her about... oh, she's over at Alicia's? Do you have the number there? No? Oh, Alicia has a phone? Okay, let me write that down...." two or three times a month for several months, I found it was much easier when she wanted to contact one of the other kids to just have her call that kid directly.)
Third, when she's out with friends and has forgotten her own phone (or it's out of charge), it makes it easy for me to call and get her, since I know who she's with. Even if they've gone out walking, or have walked over to another friend's house in the neighborhood, I can still get her, since I have the numbers of people she's actually physically with.
Now, I don't go around asking for these kids' phone numbers -- I just tag them with their names after they've called me, or save them after I've been given their number and had to call them. (I'd hope by now that in a world of Caller ID, all parents are teaching their children that if you don't want someone to have your number, you shouldn't call them directly.)
I also have the phone numbers of a few older teens who are in my weekly D&D group that meets at a gaming store. I'm the GM, so people have given me their numbers so I can let them know if I'm not going to be able to make it for some reason, or if I'm going to be late, or for similar things. Some of their parents I know; some of them I don't, since these are high school kids who have their own cars and get around on their own. I'd actually prefer to use email for that, since I usually know well in advance, but one of them especially checks her email very rarely, but always gets texts -- and, of course, sometimes I don't know I'm going to be running late until only an hour or so before the game, and many people don't check their email that often. (Usually in that case I actually just text two of the people, and ask them to text everyone else... but one of those is the girl who's the social hub of the teen group.)
All decent UI ideas were already done by Douglas Englebart.
You'll have to pardon me, though, I don't have time to elaborate -- speaking His name reminds me that I have to go dust the shrine and do my ritual obeisance again.
To carry the analogy back, if you have an employee who did a bunch of work, but is also also an asshole, holds the company hostage to get his way, and can't believe he could ever be wrong, and who you're sure any company would be better off without... kick him to the curb.
Sometimes people are so nasty that there's no way to live with them. Sorry that person had to be your mom, man.
Just because your mom carried you for nine months, then spent huge amounts of time and effort raising you doesn't mean you owe her any loyalty; once her usefulness has passed, kick her out the door.
But seriously -- I hope you're being extremely metaphorical with "kick them out the door." If they did that much for the company, they at least deserve some stock or a good severance package, and a glowing recommendation.
My apologies - my training is in physics, and as the terms are used there, both gases and liquids are considered fluids. In common usage, though, only liquids are considered to be fluids.
Well, as recently as a couple of months ago, Amazon didn't have an iPad video app, and since this is the first I've heard of it, it seems they didn't try to advertise much that they do now. Still, happy that they do!
For anyone else who might want to actually *get* the app, its name is "Amazon Instant Video".
Governing is a privilege, not a right. The government needs to abide by the rules of the road as set forth by the Constitution, or find another way to accomplish their ends. It's really that simple. Quit making excuses and just do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Having been through jury selection in both, state and federal court have different procedures. Indeed, from what I'm reading about the trial, it appears that different federal circuits or courts may have different procedures, since what was done here doesn't match what was done when I went through federal jury selection (or they've changed the procedure).
I agree that the GNU info program has a rather annoying interface (presumably it makes perfect sense to GNU Emacs users). But the Texinfo source from which info documents are generated will target multiple outputs, including PDF and HTML. For packages using the GNU build system these are built with "make pdf" and "make html" respectively. Moreover, GNU packages typically make the manual available for download in a number of formats on the package website.
Just use the all-on-one-page HTML version in w3m and you have something that is essentially identical to a giant man page, except with internal cross-references and hyperlinks.
Thanks for the hint -- I'll have to give that a try next time I need to use an info page!
Speed of sound: about 1100 feet per second.
Muzzle velocity of an M16: about 3200 feet per second. So, close enough to Mach 3 to call it that, with rounding.
Please note that it's in Github, and continuing to be updated. To put it another way: they wrote the first draft in three days.
And actually, being open does make things better and more useful. Why did the IBM PC succeed where so many others failed? Sure, part of it was that it had IBM's backing... but a large part was that it was much less closed and proprietary than alternatives: IBM built it from commonly-available parts, and published the specs. That allowed clone manufacturers to get started. They used a knock-off of a well-known, 'generic' OS (CPM) instead of a custom-made, proprietary one... which made it possible for a lot of software that started on CPM to be easily ported over. They didn't go around forcing people to get licenses to write software for their system either.
Prior to the late 20th century, most of the world operated in an 'open' fashion for almost everything. A musician who heard a good tune would freely copy it and base their song on it -- that's part of how we got such classics as "The Star-Spangled Banner" and "Amazing Grace". In the world of literature, openness gave us the tales of King Arthur and Robin Hood, the Greek myths, the Iliad and Odyssey. Nosferatu - widely recognized as one of the greatest horror films ever made - was almost destroyed by a copyright dispute.
Scientists and engineers have freely built on each other's discoveries and inventions for centuries. Indeed, patents were created in order to spread this - so inventors would publish how their devices worked, in order that other inventors could learn from them.
Open systems are universally more useful than closed systems, all else being equal -- because you're allowed to do more things with them.
You're confusing knowing a field with having been educated in it. ;-)
Check out http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booknews/9459779/50-Shades-of-Grey-is-best-selling-book-of-all-time.html for a fuller version of the story. They're you'll find that it's the "best selling book of all time" if you take that as "in Britain, since the organization that proclaimed it such began keeping records... which is in 1998".
So, really, "best-selling book in Britain in the last 14 years". And note that that's including e-books, which records haven't been kept for for that whole time.
The actual number of copies sold to get that 'record'? 5.3 million. I can't find worldwide sales figures for it, but the article above mentions that the sequels sold 3.6 and 3.2 million copies in Britain, and the series as a whole has sold "over 40 million copies". Let's take 45 million for the sake of argument, and assume that proportional sales of the sequels are about the same everywhere. If we do this, we get 19.7 million copies sold. Call it 20 million.
Checking Wikipedia's list of best-selling books of all time, that puts it about #65 on their list. That's pretty far from #1. Especially when you realize that the top category is books that have sold over 200 million copies... and that the list doesn't include books for which there are no reliable sales figures. Like, say, the Bible and the Koran. Heck, even Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone is listed as not having reliable sales figures.
Then those are badly-written man pages. The good ones give you plentiful examples of common use cases.
And even when they don't give you examples, a halfway-decent man page at least tells you what option switches are available. And I can actually read the damn thing without having to learn someone's idea of a keyboard-based hypertext system. I can tell you I'd much rather have a halfway-decent man page than a wonderful info page.
Code doesn't lie - but it may not be answering the question you needed answered. Or it may be wrong. Particularly when you're developing, comments that tell you what code is supposed to be doing can be very valuable.
You apparently didn't read all the way -- if you'd read to the end of my comment, you would have found me saying that book prices are indeed ridiculous, and that something needs to be done about it -- and giving a couple of ideas about what could be done.
On your other comments, though....
Your wife is only one data point, I'm afraid. I got my idea of how much college textbooks cost by searching for and looking at materials on the average cost of textbooks in the US. $200 actually appears to be on the high end of average, but I used it anyway, because it's a number a lot of people were throwing around, and I was erring on the side of being cautious. You don't mention how many hours the class was, or anything else that could help in determining if that $230 is a normal price for a class there. Still, though, assuming it is -- is the college in question a private one, that gets all its revenues from tuition? Or is it a tax-supported public school? If it's the latter, then there's a good chance that the actual cost of the class is considerably higher than that $230 / student.
On the public school side, you'll note that I did indeed find that the books were millions of dollars -- I never claimed otherwise. I also didn't say that more money should be thrown at the problem, so I'm not really sure what you're arguing against. My supposition was that (a) open-source textbooks should be looked into and pursued (there would then just be the costs of printing and binding) and (b) individual schools should be given greater freedom to pick the textbooks they want to use. This would make it harder to get a book in statewide by influencing just a few people, and would hopefully free schools from having to buy new books every few years for classes where the contents don't really change significantly in that time (which is really just about everything at the public school level) just because some state administrator decides it.
Taking your numbers, if that city could adopt an open-source textbook for one class, and contract with a printer to print it, they could potentially save $180k, even if it costs $50 to print and bind each copy!
Something else to consider is forced upgrade cycles. Another way book publishers squeeze tax dollars is by producing new editions, often taking the same material, but rearranging it a bit and changing study questions. They then push school systems to buy the new version. ("Well, we're only going to keep printing copies of the old edition for a few more years, so after that, you won't be able to get replacements... you don't want to have some students in the classes having to have different textbooks from others, do you?") Using open-source books removes this problem entirely -- if a school system wants to keep using the same Algebra textbook for twenty years, they can do that, only having new ones printed to replace the ones that are lost or damaged.
And, of course, open source books + cheap e-readers could revolutionize things in completely different ways. Taking the figures I found before, with book purchases being 0.25% of the budget in a normal school year, and 6% in a year of mandated replacement of everything, that implies that in a normal year, 1 in 24 books has to be replaced due to loss or damage. Just as a wild guess, let's say that e-readers would have to be replaced four times as often. That's still only once every six years. Right now, there are very good e-readers that cost around $120 -- considerably less than that $200 textbook. And a single e-reader could hold all of a student's books.
Oh, and hey -- those school systems that are currently charging high school students a book rental fee? They could require students to buy their own e-reader instead. That creates extra incentive from the parents for the kids to take good care of them, and the school could still buy some to lend to poor kids -- which can be defined the same way as they're currently defining who doesn't have to pay the rental fee.
... except that it doesn't, really. Women moving into the workforce led to a greater need for childcare, which increased the number of available jobs. Women and blacks getting good-paying jobs, when previously they couldn't, bought more goods and services, which increased the number of available jobs. Same with gays.
Employment is not a zero-sum game; there's not a fixed number of possible job positions.
From comments here, a lot of people seem to be under the impression that the subjects of the study were looking at a resume or something similar. From the actual paper, they were given an evaluation of the applicant written by a third party, not something that was supposed to have been written by the applicant. The summary is misleading when it says they were asked to evaluate "applications for a lab manager position" -- it should say "applicants for a lab manager position".
With only a paper likely filled with lies and exaggeration to go on [...]
So, I take it you didn't actually read the article? Because what was sent to the scientists wasn't presented as a resume that the candidates themselves had written -- it was presented as evaluations of the candidates written by an impartial third party.
I was able to get to the paper. There were none where gender was left ambiguous: gender was clearly indicated on the information given to the evaluating scientists.
And DaveGod, you're misunderstanding the idea of a control group. The idea of using a control group is to make sure that the variable you're changing is what's causing the effect -- in the case of a drug, you want a control group to make sure that people didn't just get better because of something else in the treatment protocols. Thus, you run a control group that gets either a placebo, or a drug of known efficacy, and is otherwise treated the same. Having done that, you can then legitimately say that the drug being tested was the source of any difference in effectiveness.
In this case, the only difference between what was sent to the two groups was the name and sex given for the student, and they ran controls prior to make sure they were picking two names that were as equivalent in pre-conceived notions about them as they could. They can therefore legitimately say that the difference in sex was the source of the differences in how the candidates were rated.
The equivalent here of a drug test without a control would be for them to, say, send out only the female version of the materials, then try to compare the salary offerings against, say, the average starting salary for lab managers. Then, there'd be no way to be sure whether the difference was due to the sex of the 'applicant', or due to something else about the applicants.
The summary paper says that two names were used: John and Jennifer. These were chosen after testing a multitude of names for bias for and against them with a study group; the researchers chose a pair of names that rated as equally as they could find in the tests, to minimize any effects from the names themselves.
Of course they do - men can't take maternity leave; they take paternity leave. ;-)
But leaving semantics aside -- if women were paid as much as men, then their leave would have a greater financial impact to the couple, so it would be more likely that (a) the man might take off some time, so the woman doesn't have to take off as much, and (b) the couple might choose to take less total leave time, since their total income is affected proportionally more by it.
Male employees, on the other hand, are more likely to be alcoholic, more likely to have antisocial personality disorder, and more likely to either commit crimes or be victims of crime. All of these things can easily have negative effects on work performance.
As for maternity leave -- all of the people surveyed were in the US, which does not require women to be paid while on maternity leave. The Family Medical Leave Act, which creates that requirement, applies equally to male and female employees -- men are allowed the exact same rights to take off for the birth of their child as women in the US.
Books costing as much as the class themselves? I call BS. Your speaking of "that rare occasion you can buy a used book" sounds like college books, so let's see... grabbing the current tuition rate from my alma mater (FSU), using the in-state rate, that gives $212.09 per semester-hour. Most classes are three or four semester hours. Using the lower of those gives $616.27 per student per class. So, at $200 a book, you're looking at each class calling for three books for the books to cost as much as the classes.
You then talk about districts raising money for books, which sounds like public school. So let's look there. First off, most public schools don't buy new books for every class every year. And I haven't seen any one-use web access codes for books for public schools -- I've seen it for college books, but not ones intended for the public school market. So let's see.... Let's say $200 a book, buying books every other year, buying 40 books for a class. That's $4000 for books per year per class.
Now... what are all the other expenses associated with running that class? Well, a big one up front is the teacher. Let's say the teacher makes $35k a year -- that doesn't seem unreasonable. There are also further benefits included with the job, though, so that teacher probably costs the school district at least $50k a year. $50k / $4000 = 12.5. So, unless that teacher is teaching 13 or more classes a year, just the teacher is already costing more than the books. Most districts these days seem to have a seven-period day, with teachers having one free period during the day, so realistically, we can expect that the teacher is teaching six classes. $50k / 6 = $8,333.33... so the teacher is costing a bit more than twice as much as the books. And that's leaving aside all the other expenses involved for each class -- like the cost of building and maintaining the school, amortized over all those classes. The cost of administrative and support personnel, again amortized over the classes. The costs of lab materials, handouts, and other class materials.
If the school buys new books every year, then the cost of books is roughly the same as the cost of the teacher. But I've never known a school to actually do that.
Now, I agree that the books cost too much -- but they're not costing as much as the class. Not even close. Looking around for figures, it looks like textbooks are about 1% of school budgets. But then, how do we get from that to needing multi-million dollar bond raisings?
Well, one problem is that school systems are used to mandating a whole new lineup of books every five or six years, which means the expense hits heavy in one year, then is small for a few years (during which only books that are lost or badly damaged are replaced). Meanwhile, textbook costs have risen roughly 5% a year over the last decade, leading to "sticker shock" as schools see that new books are going to cost about 34% more than they did last time (six years ago). If they've been setting aside money for the last five years, planning on maybe a 10% increase in price in keeping with the past, then they're getting a sudden, unpleasant surprise.
Looking around a bit, I found a detailed school system budget (the Norwalk, Connecticut public schools). It's the first one I found -- I didn't select it specially. In it, the textbook cost is about 0.1% of the budget. I'm going to assume that's normal for a year in which no new books are being introduced. If we accept the Kentucky figure that textbooks are 1% of the overall budget over time, then that implies that in a year of book replacement, new books are 5.9% of the budget. Call it 6% for ease of figuring. If that's what it was in the last cycle, and prices have risen 34%, but budgets haven't increased, then the new cost is 8% of the budget, for a shortfall of 2% of the budget. Looking back at Norwalk's budget again, overall budget is about $200m... so that would be $4m for them. So, yeah... they'd be looking at a multi-million
I'm the father of a 13-year-old girl, and I have several of her friends' numbers in my phone. Why? Here's a few reasons:
While my daughter has her own phone, she often forgets it or forgets to charge it. Also, she's often on restriction at her Mom's house and not allowed to have a phone there, and when she is, she simply leaves it at my house. (I have her every other week.) Thus, her friends often call me looking for her. I don't have a good memory for phone numbers, so I've saved the numbers of those who call looking for her often, along with their names, so the caller ID on my phone will show me the name instead of the number. That way, I can often answer with a simple, "Hi. She's not here, she's at her mom's" or simply hand the phone over to her to answer.
Secondly, and relating to number one, sometimes she needs to call her friends, and doesn't have her phone. Having their numbers in my phone allows me to hand it over to her and let her call them, without having to go through the hoops of calling their parents. (Some of whom are divorced, and thus it can be a guessing game as to which parent one needs to call to reach the child.)
(And parenthetically here, that's part of what led me to start saving the kids' numbers in the first place. After having done the game of "Oh, you need to talk to Jenny? Okay, I'll call her mom... hi, Angie, Margie needs to talk to Jenny... oh, she's with Mark? Okay, I don't have Mark's number, can you give it to me? Thanks. Hi, Mark, this is Margie's dad. Margie Andrews. She's a friend of Jenny, and she wants to ask her about... oh, she's over at Alicia's? Do you have the number there? No? Oh, Alicia has a phone? Okay, let me write that down...." two or three times a month for several months, I found it was much easier when she wanted to contact one of the other kids to just have her call that kid directly.)
Third, when she's out with friends and has forgotten her own phone (or it's out of charge), it makes it easy for me to call and get her, since I know who she's with. Even if they've gone out walking, or have walked over to another friend's house in the neighborhood, I can still get her, since I have the numbers of people she's actually physically with.
Now, I don't go around asking for these kids' phone numbers -- I just tag them with their names after they've called me, or save them after I've been given their number and had to call them. (I'd hope by now that in a world of Caller ID, all parents are teaching their children that if you don't want someone to have your number, you shouldn't call them directly.)
I also have the phone numbers of a few older teens who are in my weekly D&D group that meets at a gaming store. I'm the GM, so people have given me their numbers so I can let them know if I'm not going to be able to make it for some reason, or if I'm going to be late, or for similar things. Some of their parents I know; some of them I don't, since these are high school kids who have their own cars and get around on their own. I'd actually prefer to use email for that, since I usually know well in advance, but one of them especially checks her email very rarely, but always gets texts -- and, of course, sometimes I don't know I'm going to be running late until only an hour or so before the game, and many people don't check their email that often. (Usually in that case I actually just text two of the people, and ask them to text everyone else... but one of those is the girl who's the social hub of the teen group.)
All decent UI ideas were already done by Douglas Englebart.
You'll have to pardon me, though, I don't have time to elaborate -- speaking His name reminds me that I have to go dust the shrine and do my ritual obeisance again.
(To meet Poe's law requirements: :-) )
To carry the analogy back, if you have an employee who did a bunch of work, but is also also an asshole, holds the company hostage to get his way, and can't believe he could ever be wrong, and who you're sure any company would be better off without... kick him to the curb.
Sometimes people are so nasty that there's no way to live with them. Sorry that person had to be your mom, man.
Just because your mom carried you for nine months, then spent huge amounts of time and effort raising you doesn't mean you owe her any loyalty; once her usefulness has passed, kick her out the door.
But seriously -- I hope you're being extremely metaphorical with "kick them out the door." If they did that much for the company, they at least deserve some stock or a good severance package, and a glowing recommendation.
My apologies - my training is in physics, and as the terms are used there, both gases and liquids are considered fluids. In common usage, though, only liquids are considered to be fluids.
I'm waiting for one which can handle the Swahili system of grammatical gender.
Well, as recently as a couple of months ago, Amazon didn't have an iPad video app, and since this is the first I've heard of it, it seems they didn't try to advertise much that they do now. Still, happy that they do!
For anyone else who might want to actually *get* the app, its name is "Amazon Instant Video".
Governing is a privilege, not a right. The government needs to abide by the rules of the road as set forth by the Constitution, or find another way to accomplish their ends. It's really that simple. Quit making excuses and just do it.