The estimates are that the cheaply available fissile material will be gone in about 70 years at the current rates of production.
True, but extremely misleading. Nuclear power is energetically profitable even with very expensive fissile material. Nuclear power plants consume astoundingly small amounts of fuel - a pound of uranium generates as much energy as 400,000 pounds of coal. A 10% increase in the price of coal makes a big difference to a coal plant. A 10% increase (or even 10000% increase) in the price of uranium is negligible to a nuclear plant. The energetic and financial cost of nuclear fuel is miniscule compared to the overhead costs of operating a nuclear plant.
A lot of people (including you) have no real idea just how much nuclear fuel the Earth contains. If we allow breeder reactors (which President Carter banned for political reasons related to nuclear weapons), uranium fuel will last for billions of years at current rates of consumption. Even if you allow for a drastically increased rate of consumption, it's still enough for several hundred million years.
What's most striking about the calculation in the link above is that it is so simple. It's not like oil reserve estimates where governments can fudge the numbers, and even the experts disagree. Anyone can take a sample of seawater and check the concentration of uranium.
These figures are with presently proven technology. No assumptions about future technology are required.
Can we please get past the cheap shots about Microsoft's security, and pay attention to the trend wherein Microsoft, practically founded on opposition to sharing code, has been experimenting with open source licenses and making overtures to the FLOSS community?
Not all CC licenses are free software/open source. In particular, the license that Microsoft used is CC-BY-NC-SA. This is not a free or open source license. The problem is the NC clause -- NC means non-commercial. A non-commercial license does not satisfy the definition of free software or open source.
Ooooh, wow!!!! Microsoft is open sourcing a list of methods that developers should follow to ensure security of their applications!!!! Wow!!!
It's not even an open source license. The license is CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0. NC as in non-commercial. This license does not satisfy any reasonable definition of open source/free software.
Richard Stallman said that one of the reasons he opposes the CC licenses is because it's very easy for people to confuse the free CC licenses with the non-free CC licenses, and mistakenly think that a CC-licensed work is free when it's not free. I'm beginning to think that he's right.
the entirety of the pupil's increased potential be attributed to the kindergarten teacher; none to the pupil him/herself, none to any teachers at other grades, none to the educational system set up (buildings, libraries, school buses, etc).
If you read the study, or even the article, you'll see that the authors attempt to correct for these factors. The $320,000 figure is the effect attributed to the teacher. Perhaps their calculations are not perfect, but they did try to address the point you made.
As it happens, the U.S. already spends ~$9700 per pupil per year on public education. Project that out to a class of 35 and you're at $340k per teacher. So it actually sounds like we're spending about the right amount of money on education, maybe a little too much (you want your education system to realize a greater economic gain than what you've invested).
$340k per class is not $340k per teacher. As I explained above, the $320k really deserves to go to the teacher. But even if we actually spend $340k on teachers, it's still worth it. As explained in the article, the $320k estimate is only the earnings differential, and "doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime." So, in this sense $320k actually underestimates the value of a good teacher. If you include the value of these positive externalities, a good teacher is worth well over $320k.
Market value is generally about supply and demand, and if the OP is correct, supply of high school physics teachers is far less than kindergarten teachers.
The $320,000 figure is for outstanding kindergarten teachers, not average kindergarten teachers. In this context, the supply of kindergarten teachers is largely irrelevant. What matters is the supply of really great kindergarten teachers, and this, I suspect, is far lower than the overall supply of kindergarten teachers.
An appropriate analogy is to sports stars. The supply of basketball players is truly enormous, but the number of elite-level players is very small. That's why top level players command such huge salaries. It has almost nothing to do with how many basketball players there are in the world.
The first problem that you mention is easily solved in this case. If you read the article, or the study, it says that the percentile test score distribution in kindergarten is an accurate predictor of adult life outcomes. So, if you want to determine who is a good teacher and who is a bad teacher, all you have to do is test the kindergarten students before and after the school year. Incidentally, this seems to be exactly what the LA Times is disclosing.
If there were a market in teacher pay, for example, I'm reasonably certain that a high school physics teacher would make a lot more than a kindergarten teacher.
I think you are badly and dangerously wrong. Correct facts are a prerequisite for a robust debate, and your facts are wrong.
According to a recent study, the true economic value of an outstanding kindergarten teacher is somewhere around $320,000 per year. As in, three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars. A high school teacher is not worth anywhere near as much. That's because, by the time students get into high school, they are too old for a teacher to change them very much. In order to make a significant difference in a student's life outcome, you have to get to them while they're young.
If schools actually start paying their best kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year, then yeah, sure, to hell with unions. Until then, however, I view them as a necessary evil.
Also, food allergies seem to be a symptom of lack of breastfeeding and using formula instead. Obviously, virtually everybody breastfeeds in third world countries.
It's not obvious at all that everyone breastfeeds in third world countries. In fact, efforts such as the Nestle boycott came about precisely because of companies successfully pushing the use of infant formula in developing countries.
I have a simpler explanation for the lack of food allergies in developing countries. In places where even normal people have trouble procuring adequate nutrition, children who have fatal allergies tend to die quickly. That's why you never encounter severe allergies in developing countries -- the ones who were born with them are already dead.
If you are really as confused as you say about the summary, then that's what links are for.
I'm glad you brought that up. One of the links in the slashdot summary points to
this
article. Go read that article. No, really, read it, don't just assume you know what it says. Done? Now tell me where in the article
does it state that the UVa study is limited to incoming freshmen. Go
ahead, I'll wait. You can't. Because the entire article doesn't mention the
qualification anywhere at all.
A study like the UVa study, which unavoidably and
inevitably leads to misleading secondary media coverage, is a
flawed study. This is true regardless of how clearly the study authors
state their conclusions. Note that it is the study
itself that is flawed, not the authors' reporting of the
results; that is, the choice of what to measure in the study was wrong.
I do not fault the authors' for not being clear in their reporting of
the results. I fault the actual study itself, and I have clearly
explained why. Indeed, if the media gets it so wrong even despite the study's extraordinary clarity, then that's doubly damning to the study.
Again, it's amazing how much OS fanatics are prepared to twist news that they don't want to hear.
I have a long history of slashdot postings. I am not by any means a fanatic. You, on the other hand, are coming across as exactly such, remaining willfully blind to a study's obvious flaws.
I've done countless comparisons of Macs to comparable Lenovo's, Dells, HPs, etc. For comparably equivalent machines, (sames size LED backlit IPS panel, same HD size and speed, same bus, memory, processor, bluetooth, camera, etc, etc) with comparable software (that generally means Win 7 Home Ultimate) Macs are, generally, 10% to 20% more, and not way overpriced.
The problem is, if you do it that way, you're doing it wrong.
This has been discussed many times before. If you start with a random model of Mac, and try to configure a PC with the same specs, you'll find that the Mac is priced competitively, or maybe a little bit more expensive (10-20%).
But, if you do it the other way, that is start with a random PC, and try to find a Mac with similar specs, you'll run into a huge problem. The number of Mac models is so small that, with overwhelming probability, none of the Mac models will be a good fit to replace that PC. Most of the time, you either have to buy something way overpowered compared to the PC, or way underpowered. In the former case the Mac will be much more expensive, and in the latter case, the Mac will be inadequate.
If we now relate this to the real world, you can see what the problem is. People buying a computer usually have a set of requirements. They may not know themselves what their own requirements are, but in any case they have them. If you try to configure a PC to match their requirements, you'll probably succeed. (The number of configuration options on PCs is enormous.) On the other hand, if you try to configure a Mac to match their requirements, you won't be able to find as good a match, just because there's so few Mac models. Most of the time, Mac owners overpay for their machines, not because the machines are expensive relative to their spec, but because they have to buy a more powerful machine than they really need, since no exact match is available because there are so few models to choose from.
The census is not the slightest bit misleading. What it measures is spelled out clearly in it's title, and in it's description. And the Slashdot summary is clear about what is being measured too. Just because it isn;t measuring what you'd prefer it to measure doesn't make it misleading.
Excuse me? The slashdot summary says, and I quote verbatim without edits:
Laptops now comprise 99% of the computer population. And Linux use has dropped from a high of 2.5% in 2004 to a rounding error this year.
This assertion is misleading, and you are wrong to claim otherwise. The words "computer population" by themselves, without further qualification, strongly imply a reference to the general student body. Similarly, the words "Linux use" by themselves strongly imply that usage across all of campus is being measured. Even if the last two sentences of the summary are always taken in the context of the whole summary (which is not always the case), I don't think one can reliably infer (and why should one even have to resort to inference?) from the summary alone that the last two sentences are also restricted in scope to incoming freshmen -- after all, the study may well have conducted a separate count of the entire student population. You have to click through to the study itself to discover such details.
Clearly, the slashdot summary is misleading. Now, what about the study itself? It is true that the web pages of the study state clearly that its scope is restricted to incoming freshmen. But if this qualification is not clearly stated in secondary coverage, then that means the editors of said secondary coverage (in this case, the slashdot editors) were led to convey a false impression. In this case the mistake is altogether too easy to make. Therefore the study itself is misleading. It measures one thing, but almost everybody (including the slashdot editors, who admittedly are not the world's best writers) writes as if it studies "Linux use" among the "computer population" as opposed to just usage among the incoming freshmen.
Yes, the study spells out clearly what it measures, but that message is being lost in translation. I don't think it's possible to conduct a study that measures what the study is measuring, without being misleading. That's why the study is flawed. It's not because I personally have a negative subjective opinion of the study objective. It's because the objective of the study itself is an intrinsically flawed metric which cannot be communicated in any way without engaging in misdirection.
They have access to the internet. Which is a hell of a lot more information at their fingertips than when I went to college. I managed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of multiple platforms based on nothing more than monthly computer magazines.
First of all, you're already ahead of most students. A great many high school students, believe it or not, do not have unfiltered access to the internet. But more to the point, the fact that you're bragging about your knowledge instead of your actual experience using Linux merely reinforces my point. Using Linux requires owning a computer in an environment where you are allowed to do risky things to that computer, such as installing a new OS. Within the already small minority of high school students like you who know about Linux, even fewer of them are in any position to replace a computer's OS.
In high school, you are in class almost literally from 8am to 3pm, six hours a day (minus lunch), and most of the rest of the time you're also supervised (after-school activities, parents, etc.). That leaves comparatively little time for experimentation. In college, by contrast, a typical student at a four-year university has maybe 3 hours of classes at most, and is unsupervised. That's a very different situation. It simply strains the bounds of (your) credibility to claim that high school students have the same opportunities as college students to try Linux.
It's nothing to do with counting assistance requests. It's a census of ownership using the population "living in first-year residence halls", not the population "sought assistance with their computing."
Was it poor comprehension on your part, or just a demonstration of how far an OS fanatic is prepared to twist any facts that don't match his preconceptions?
The study is still quite flawed, because its conclusion (even if correct) is misleading. It doesn't matter whether the stated data was gathered faithfully.
If you count the Linux users over the entire student body, you'll likely get a different proportion than what you get just from counting incoming freshmen. I don't know whether you have forgotten, or simply never experienced, the stultifying conformity that constitutes the pre-college American educational system, but suffice it to say that it's an extremely rare individual who would gradaute from high school already using Linux. As a high school student, you have basically no legal rights, no resources, and you aren't given the intellectual freedom to experiment with (or indeed even read anything substantive about) non-mainstream computing environments.
Most Linux users in college started using Linux in college. As incoming freshmen, they would have been Windows/Mac users before they switched to Linux. That's certainly what happened in my case, and my own quick survey of my classmates indicates that probably about ten times as many seniors as freshmen use Linux. So I think the study is counting the wrong thing. Whether out of incompetence or malice, the decision to restrict the study to only incoming freshmen grossly understates the overall Linux usage among the general student population.
So then by implication I can assume you are also wishing to legalize gay marriage so that we can eliminate the federal tax code discrimination against long term gay relationships in order to stamp out google's wage discrimination which is based on countering the federal tax code discrimination against gays?
No. There is another, better solution. Eliminate all consideration of marriage in the tax code. Many countries (e.g. Canada) already do this -- you file your income taxes individually regardless of your marriage status. The same answer, by the way, applies to most of the examples of tax discrimination mentioned by the GP. For example, the ideal response to the mortgage interest tax deduction is not to pay renters a higher salary to compensate. The ideal response is to eliminate the mortgage interest tax deduction.
The question of whether gays should be legally allowed to marry is an independent question. It should not be bundled with tax issues.
That being said, I believe in contracts. If you didn't want the contract, don't sign it.
A big part of the problem is that Verizon is allowed to unilaterally change the terms of the contract, but the consumer is not. In fact, it was such a change to the contract that led to this incident:
"Effective April the 26th, 2010 Early Termination Fees are no longer waived if a consumer moves out of our digital calling area coverage map. This means for customers whom have lost jobs and must relocate, people with immigration status and are liable to leave, or anyone who may otherwise relocate, is now subject to the ETF of $175 or $350, depending on device. " Source
Interestingly, there is an official exception for deployed military personnel, but (apparently) not for soldiers killed in action.
Of course, one could argue "don't sign a contract that allows Verizon to change the terms" but every consumer contract these days contains such a clause, so what do you do?
Is Twitter new and very possibly a passing fad? Sure. Maybe it'll stick around, maybe it won't.
It makes every bit of sense for the New York Times to wait a few years and find out whether or not the term will stick around before they start committing to using the word in their articles. After all, once a New York Times article is written, it is archived for a very long time, and there is no way to go back into the archives and revise the articles to replace one word with another. A conservative approach is the only thing that makes sense.
If the word tweet were absolutely irreplaceable to the point where no other reasonable phrasing could convey the same meaning, then there might be a case for the New York Times to use the word prematurely. But that is certainly not the case here.
The "get off my lawn" patrol is a natural reaction to the absurdly biased comments from the submitter. The New York Times was founded in 1851. Twitter is not even five years old. The New York Times has survived wars, depressions, and technological and economic revolutions that absolutely dwarf anything we see today. It is far more likely that the New York Times will outlast Twitter than the other way around.
Your proposal is only feasible for large custom projects, not for commodity software.
Yes, such a scheme certainly wouldn't work for commodity software. However, my point is that it is feasible for some types of software, such as large custom projects. You were claiming that it isn't feasible under any circumstances due to lack of consideration in the contract exchange, but that's just wrong.
If you ensure that no one obtains any copy of the software from you without first signing this contract, then you can in effect reinvent copyright within contract law.
This is probably impossible. The consequences for unauthorized copying are far more draconian today than what you propose, and yet it's done all the time. It's easy to get free copies of pretty much any software.
It's certainly impossible to recreate large scale copyright to the extent that it is practiced today. However, in a very few narrow situations it would be possible to use contract law as a poor man's copyright. For example, suppose that you literally have only one customer. (This happens more often than you think -- a lot of software is custom made.) In this case, there is no difficulty tracking down who violated your contract.
The extreme difficulty of achieving copyright by contract, by the way, is considered a feature, not a bug, of copyright abolishment, at least according to the FSF.
You can't limit people through a license on something you don't own. That's called fraud. If there was no ownership and no copyright of software, you could not enforce a contract on it.
The point is that, even without copyright, it is still possible to own a physical copy of a piece of software, be it on a CD, hard drive, storage server, or wherever.
You could then make people sign a restrictive contract in exchange for a physical copy of the software. Your ownership of that copy of the software forms a valid basis for entering into a contract exchange. Then, inside the contract, you include a clause that states in exchange for the copy of the software, the recipient is required not to distribute any further copies of the software. If you ensure that no one obtains any copy of the software from you without first signing this contract, then you can in effect reinvent copyright within contract law.
If the recipient ends up distributing the software anyway in violation of the contract, then you sue the recipient for damages. One difference is that you wouldn't be able to successfully sue any third parties other than the recipient, even if the third parties continued to make further copies.
She said (paraphrasing), "Open Source. Those people decided they wanted nothing to do with copyright."
She's a little bit wrong there when you consider that the GNU General Public License uses copyright as the vehicle through which the license is enforced. What she meant to say was that the free software movement requires people be able to copy and modify their software as part of the definition of software freedom. Not quite as good for a sound bite but a truer meaning for those who care.
Your claim is not correct either. Just because the GNU GPL uses copyright as a vehicle to enforce the license does not mean that the FSF wants, endorses, or supports software copyright. In fact, if you search through Richard Stallman's writings and speeches, he makes it pretty clear that using software copyrights in the GPL is merely his way of making the best of a bad situation. Although the GPL uses software copyrights, the FSF does not support software copyright, by any means.
Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright.
That's a clear and unambiguous statement against software copyright. The motivation for the GPL and copyleft is described as follows:
I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.
In summary, it's not entirely correct to say that the FSF wants anything to do with copyright just because the GPL uses copyright. It's more accurate to say that the FSF wants nothing to do with copyright, but that practical considerations forced them to participate in the copyright system against their will.
Of course, it's certainly true that not all developers agree with the FSF, but if you're going to cite the GPL as an example of the free software community's stance on software copyright, then you are obliged to give greater weight than usual to the FSF's position on software copyright in this context, because the FSF created the GPL.
And yet the iPad will probably sell more units in the first year than all the installed Linux desktop distros in the U.S. It's not just the concept, it's the implementation. Apple takes ideas that have been tried by others, and makes them mainstream and popular. I have nothing against Linux (I use it myself for part of my work), but even at its best you can't begin to compare it with Apple's ease of use.
Let's get some perspective here. Microsoft made 14 billion dollars last year to Apple's 9 billion dollars. Netbooks still outsell iPads 3 to 1. If you're going to give Apple credit merely for marketplace success, then you must acknowledge that Windows and PCs deserve at least equal credit.
Apple is not forcing Android out of the market
Oh really? Then why did Apple sue HTC over Android? What is this lawsuit, if not an attempt to force Android out of the market?
And what I find puzzling is why you (and so many others) are unhappy about it. How does the existence of the iPhone and iPad diminish the utility of Android or Linux in any way, shape, or form?
The existence of the iPhone and iPad contribute to the existence of Apple, which has outright declared (patent) nuclear war on Android. Apple's offensive deployment of software patents (a concept which I oppose to begin with) against Linux makes me very, very unhappy. Before Apple's patent lawsuit, I was happy to let Apple compete in the marketplace on technical merit, but now that Apple has (apparently) decided to resort to legal attacks based on abuse of our broken patent system, it follows that Apple needs to be stopped, by any means necessary.
Incidentally, even before Apple filed their lawsuit, it was obvious to Linux supporters like myself that Apple would stop at nothing to deprive users of the option of running Linux. The lawsuit should make it amply clear even to Apple supporters like yourself that Apple is no better than Microsoft when it comes to tolerating the existence of competition, or allowing their competitors to compete fairly in the marketplace.
Yes, I do not claim that talking to a passenger is safer in absolute terms than driving alone, only that talking to a passenger has certain benefits as well as certain drawbacks compared to driving alone. On the whole the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. However, talking on a cell phone has no benefits whatsoever, and even worse drawbacks. Cell phone driving is much more dangerous than driving while talking to a passenger.
Talking while driving or adjusting the radio isn't "supertasking." Do you want to ban drivers from speaking to their passengers too?
Speaking to a passenger is far far safer than speaking to a cell phone. This meme has to die.
A passenger enjoys the same situational awareness of road conditions as the driver does. In many cases, the passenger is more alert to oncoming threats than the driver, because the passenger is not being distracted by having to operate the vehicle. A passenger participating in a conversation will naturally, subconsciously, and automatically cue the driver to pause the conversation during moments when the driving is dangerous, either implicitly (by delaying a reply) or explicitly ("Hey, watch out for that biker"). The driver can also solicit assistance from the passenger: "Can you watch my other side?" It's also worth noting that the passenger has a significant motivation to contribute to safe driving: a car crash will likely affect him too.
Needless to say, none of these benefits accrues to a driver talking on a cell phone. In addition, even if we ignore the positive benefits of active passenger assistance, technical issues such as poor voice quality and the use of one hand to hold the phone (when not using hands-free systems) also further degrade driver attention compared to the case of conversing with a passenger.
The only scenario where talking to a passenger comes remotely close to the danger presented by a cell phone is in the case of an immature child or a severely disabled passenger who cannot positively contribute to road safety. Even in those cases, the detrimental effect on the driver is less than with a cell phone, because with very few exceptions (e.g. passengers in a full vegetative state), those passengers will still be able to sense dangerous road maneuvers and shut up when the situation warrants, often without the subsequent need for the driver to ask explicitly for any missed previous remarks to be repeated. And besides, I can't think of any situation where you would be talking to a vegetative passenger anyway.
Re:This where I have a problem with reviews...
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I personally, love my iPad, and have convinced 2 other ppl to purchase iPads since I got mine.
If you like it, get it. If you don't like it, don't get it, but don't let someone else to tell you to save your cash. Read their (lack of) usability points, go play with one, and make the decision yourself.
In other words, it's acceptable to talk people into buying an iPad, but it's not acceptable to talk people out of buying an iPad?
No, no, no, a thousand times no. You can't have it both ways. You need to either accept that people are entitled to have and express their opinions, or else do as you say and let your friends make buying decisions for themselves rather than convincing them to buy something they otherwise wouldn't have bought.
There is no explicit Constitutional right to privacy; it's one of the rights that the courts have found to be implied, and that fairly recently.
The courts are correct in concluding that the Constitution implies the right to privacy, and I don't believe an implied right (in general), or this implied right (in particular), should be considered the lessor of an explicit right in any way.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect the Constitution to specify an explicit right to privacy. In 1789, privacy was the default. You could converse in low voices in the middle of a grassy meadow, or sit in your home, and have a high expectation of privacy. Nowadays we have privacy-violating tools like satellite photos, audio bugs, thermal imaging scanners, and large-scale data mining algorithms that are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. These technologies would have been utterly inconceivable to anyone who wrote the Constitution. The authors of the Constitution could not and did not attempt to anticipate and counter every conceivable technological improvement in the text of the Constitution (let alone the inconceivable ones), because that would have made the document too long. Indeed, many people admire the brevity and adaptability of the US Constitution and consider these attributes to be its greatest strength.
In the context in which it was drafted, it is clear that the Constitution relies on an expectation of privacy. The fact that this right was never explicitly stated must be regarded as an understandable reflection of the technology available at the time rather than a meaningful omission.
Slashdot Mirror
The estimates are that the cheaply available fissile material will be gone in about 70 years at the current rates of production.
True, but extremely misleading. Nuclear power is energetically profitable even with very expensive fissile material. Nuclear power plants consume astoundingly small amounts of fuel - a pound of uranium generates as much energy as 400,000 pounds of coal. A 10% increase in the price of coal makes a big difference to a coal plant. A 10% increase (or even 10000% increase) in the price of uranium is negligible to a nuclear plant. The energetic and financial cost of nuclear fuel is miniscule compared to the overhead costs of operating a nuclear plant.
A lot of people (including you) have no real idea just how much nuclear fuel the Earth contains. If we allow breeder reactors (which President Carter banned for political reasons related to nuclear weapons), uranium fuel will last for billions of years at current rates of consumption. Even if you allow for a drastically increased rate of consumption, it's still enough for several hundred million years.
What's most striking about the calculation in the link above is that it is so simple. It's not like oil reserve estimates where governments can fudge the numbers, and even the experts disagree. Anyone can take a sample of seawater and check the concentration of uranium.
These figures are with presently proven technology. No assumptions about future technology are required.
Can we please get past the cheap shots about Microsoft's security, and pay attention to the trend wherein Microsoft, practically founded on opposition to sharing code, has been experimenting with open source licenses and making overtures to the FLOSS community?
Not all CC licenses are free software/open source. In particular, the license that Microsoft used is CC-BY-NC-SA. This is not a free or open source license. The problem is the NC clause -- NC means non-commercial. A non-commercial license does not satisfy the definition of free software or open source.
Ooooh, wow!!!! Microsoft is open sourcing a list of methods that developers should follow to ensure security of their applications!!!! Wow!!!
It's not even an open source license. The license is CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0. NC as in non-commercial. This license does not satisfy any reasonable definition of open source/free software.
Richard Stallman said that one of the reasons he opposes the CC licenses is because it's very easy for people to confuse the free CC licenses with the non-free CC licenses, and mistakenly think that a CC-licensed work is free when it's not free. I'm beginning to think that he's right.
the entirety of the pupil's increased potential be attributed to the kindergarten teacher; none to the pupil him/herself, none to any teachers at other grades, none to the educational system set up (buildings, libraries, school buses, etc).
If you read the study, or even the article, you'll see that the authors attempt to correct for these factors. The $320,000 figure is the effect attributed to the teacher. Perhaps their calculations are not perfect, but they did try to address the point you made.
As it happens, the U.S. already spends ~$9700 per pupil per year on public education. Project that out to a class of 35 and you're at $340k per teacher. So it actually sounds like we're spending about the right amount of money on education, maybe a little too much (you want your education system to realize a greater economic gain than what you've invested).
$340k per class is not $340k per teacher. As I explained above, the $320k really deserves to go to the teacher. But even if we actually spend $340k on teachers, it's still worth it. As explained in the article, the $320k estimate is only the earnings differential, and "doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime." So, in this sense $320k actually underestimates the value of a good teacher. If you include the value of these positive externalities, a good teacher is worth well over $320k.
Market value is generally about supply and demand, and if the OP is correct, supply of high school physics teachers is far less than kindergarten teachers.
The $320,000 figure is for outstanding kindergarten teachers, not average kindergarten teachers. In this context, the supply of kindergarten teachers is largely irrelevant. What matters is the supply of really great kindergarten teachers, and this, I suspect, is far lower than the overall supply of kindergarten teachers.
An appropriate analogy is to sports stars. The supply of basketball players is truly enormous, but the number of elite-level players is very small. That's why top level players command such huge salaries. It has almost nothing to do with how many basketball players there are in the world.
The first problem that you mention is easily solved in this case. If you read the article, or the study, it says that the percentile test score distribution in kindergarten is an accurate predictor of adult life outcomes. So, if you want to determine who is a good teacher and who is a bad teacher, all you have to do is test the kindergarten students before and after the school year. Incidentally, this seems to be exactly what the LA Times is disclosing.
If there were a market in teacher pay, for example, I'm reasonably certain that a high school physics teacher would make a lot more than a kindergarten teacher.
I think you are badly and dangerously wrong. Correct facts are a prerequisite for a robust debate, and your facts are wrong.
According to a recent study, the true economic value of an outstanding kindergarten teacher is somewhere around $320,000 per year. As in, three hundred and twenty thousand US dollars. A high school teacher is not worth anywhere near as much. That's because, by the time students get into high school, they are too old for a teacher to change them very much. In order to make a significant difference in a student's life outcome, you have to get to them while they're young.
If schools actually start paying their best kindergarten teachers $320,000 per year, then yeah, sure, to hell with unions. Until then, however, I view them as a necessary evil.
Also, food allergies seem to be a symptom of lack of breastfeeding and using formula instead. Obviously, virtually everybody breastfeeds in third world countries.
It's not obvious at all that everyone breastfeeds in third world countries. In fact, efforts such as the Nestle boycott came about precisely because of companies successfully pushing the use of infant formula in developing countries.
I have a simpler explanation for the lack of food allergies in developing countries. In places where even normal people have trouble procuring adequate nutrition, children who have fatal allergies tend to die quickly. That's why you never encounter severe allergies in developing countries -- the ones who were born with them are already dead.
If you are really as confused as you say about the summary, then that's what links are for.
I'm glad you brought that up. One of the links in the slashdot summary points to this article. Go read that article. No, really, read it, don't just assume you know what it says. Done? Now tell me where in the article does it state that the UVa study is limited to incoming freshmen. Go ahead, I'll wait. You can't. Because the entire article doesn't mention the qualification anywhere at all.
A study like the UVa study, which unavoidably and inevitably leads to misleading secondary media coverage, is a flawed study. This is true regardless of how clearly the study authors state their conclusions. Note that it is the study itself that is flawed, not the authors' reporting of the results; that is, the choice of what to measure in the study was wrong. I do not fault the authors' for not being clear in their reporting of the results. I fault the actual study itself, and I have clearly explained why. Indeed, if the media gets it so wrong even despite the study's extraordinary clarity, then that's doubly damning to the study.
Again, it's amazing how much OS fanatics are prepared to twist news that they don't want to hear.
I have a long history of slashdot postings. I am not by any means a fanatic. You, on the other hand, are coming across as exactly such, remaining willfully blind to a study's obvious flaws.
I've done countless comparisons of Macs to comparable Lenovo's, Dells, HPs, etc. For comparably equivalent machines, (sames size LED backlit IPS panel, same HD size and speed, same bus, memory, processor, bluetooth, camera, etc, etc) with comparable software (that generally means Win 7 Home Ultimate) Macs are, generally, 10% to 20% more, and not way overpriced.
The problem is, if you do it that way, you're doing it wrong.
This has been discussed many times before. If you start with a random model of Mac, and try to configure a PC with the same specs, you'll find that the Mac is priced competitively, or maybe a little bit more expensive (10-20%).
But, if you do it the other way, that is start with a random PC, and try to find a Mac with similar specs, you'll run into a huge problem. The number of Mac models is so small that, with overwhelming probability, none of the Mac models will be a good fit to replace that PC. Most of the time, you either have to buy something way overpowered compared to the PC, or way underpowered. In the former case the Mac will be much more expensive, and in the latter case, the Mac will be inadequate.
If we now relate this to the real world, you can see what the problem is. People buying a computer usually have a set of requirements. They may not know themselves what their own requirements are, but in any case they have them. If you try to configure a PC to match their requirements, you'll probably succeed. (The number of configuration options on PCs is enormous.) On the other hand, if you try to configure a Mac to match their requirements, you won't be able to find as good a match, just because there's so few Mac models. Most of the time, Mac owners overpay for their machines, not because the machines are expensive relative to their spec, but because they have to buy a more powerful machine than they really need, since no exact match is available because there are so few models to choose from.
The census is not the slightest bit misleading. What it measures is spelled out clearly in it's title, and in it's description. And the Slashdot summary is clear about what is being measured too. Just because it isn;t measuring what you'd prefer it to measure doesn't make it misleading.
Excuse me? The slashdot summary says, and I quote verbatim without edits:
Laptops now comprise 99% of the computer population. And Linux use has dropped from a high of 2.5% in 2004 to a rounding error this year.
This assertion is misleading, and you are wrong to claim otherwise. The words "computer population" by themselves, without further qualification, strongly imply a reference to the general student body. Similarly, the words "Linux use" by themselves strongly imply that usage across all of campus is being measured. Even if the last two sentences of the summary are always taken in the context of the whole summary (which is not always the case), I don't think one can reliably infer (and why should one even have to resort to inference?) from the summary alone that the last two sentences are also restricted in scope to incoming freshmen -- after all, the study may well have conducted a separate count of the entire student population. You have to click through to the study itself to discover such details.
Clearly, the slashdot summary is misleading. Now, what about the study itself? It is true that the web pages of the study state clearly that its scope is restricted to incoming freshmen. But if this qualification is not clearly stated in secondary coverage, then that means the editors of said secondary coverage (in this case, the slashdot editors) were led to convey a false impression. In this case the mistake is altogether too easy to make. Therefore the study itself is misleading. It measures one thing, but almost everybody (including the slashdot editors, who admittedly are not the world's best writers) writes as if it studies "Linux use" among the "computer population" as opposed to just usage among the incoming freshmen.
Yes, the study spells out clearly what it measures, but that message is being lost in translation. I don't think it's possible to conduct a study that measures what the study is measuring, without being misleading. That's why the study is flawed. It's not because I personally have a negative subjective opinion of the study objective. It's because the objective of the study itself is an intrinsically flawed metric which cannot be communicated in any way without engaging in misdirection.
They have access to the internet. Which is a hell of a lot more information at their fingertips than when I went to college. I managed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of multiple platforms based on nothing more than monthly computer magazines.
First of all, you're already ahead of most students. A great many high school students, believe it or not, do not have unfiltered access to the internet. But more to the point, the fact that you're bragging about your knowledge instead of your actual experience using Linux merely reinforces my point. Using Linux requires owning a computer in an environment where you are allowed to do risky things to that computer, such as installing a new OS. Within the already small minority of high school students like you who know about Linux, even fewer of them are in any position to replace a computer's OS.
In high school, you are in class almost literally from 8am to 3pm, six hours a day (minus lunch), and most of the rest of the time you're also supervised (after-school activities, parents, etc.). That leaves comparatively little time for experimentation. In college, by contrast, a typical student at a four-year university has maybe 3 hours of classes at most, and is unsupervised. That's a very different situation. It simply strains the bounds of (your) credibility to claim that high school students have the same opportunities as college students to try Linux.
It's nothing to do with counting assistance requests. It's a census of ownership using the population "living in first-year residence halls", not the population "sought assistance with their computing."
Was it poor comprehension on your part, or just a demonstration of how far an OS fanatic is prepared to twist any facts that don't match his preconceptions?
The study is still quite flawed, because its conclusion (even if correct) is misleading. It doesn't matter whether the stated data was gathered faithfully.
If you count the Linux users over the entire student body, you'll likely get a different proportion than what you get just from counting incoming freshmen. I don't know whether you have forgotten, or simply never experienced, the stultifying conformity that constitutes the pre-college American educational system, but suffice it to say that it's an extremely rare individual who would gradaute from high school already using Linux. As a high school student, you have basically no legal rights, no resources, and you aren't given the intellectual freedom to experiment with (or indeed even read anything substantive about) non-mainstream computing environments.
Most Linux users in college started using Linux in college. As incoming freshmen, they would have been Windows/Mac users before they switched to Linux. That's certainly what happened in my case, and my own quick survey of my classmates indicates that probably about ten times as many seniors as freshmen use Linux. So I think the study is counting the wrong thing. Whether out of incompetence or malice, the decision to restrict the study to only incoming freshmen grossly understates the overall Linux usage among the general student population.
So then by implication I can assume you are also wishing to legalize gay marriage so that we can eliminate the federal tax code discrimination against long term gay relationships in order to stamp out google's wage discrimination which is based on countering the federal tax code discrimination against gays?
No. There is another, better solution. Eliminate all consideration of marriage in the tax code. Many countries (e.g. Canada) already do this -- you file your income taxes individually regardless of your marriage status. The same answer, by the way, applies to most of the examples of tax discrimination mentioned by the GP. For example, the ideal response to the mortgage interest tax deduction is not to pay renters a higher salary to compensate. The ideal response is to eliminate the mortgage interest tax deduction.
The question of whether gays should be legally allowed to marry is an independent question. It should not be bundled with tax issues.
That being said, I believe in contracts. If you didn't want the contract, don't sign it.
A big part of the problem is that Verizon is allowed to unilaterally change the terms of the contract, but the consumer is not. In fact, it was such a change to the contract that led to this incident:
"Effective April the 26th, 2010 Early Termination Fees are no longer waived if a consumer moves out of our digital calling area coverage map. This means for customers whom have lost jobs and must relocate, people with immigration status and are liable to leave, or anyone who may otherwise relocate, is now subject to the ETF of $175 or $350, depending on device. " Source
Interestingly, there is an official exception for deployed military personnel, but (apparently) not for soldiers killed in action.
Of course, one could argue "don't sign a contract that allows Verizon to change the terms" but every consumer contract these days contains such a clause, so what do you do?
Is Twitter new and very possibly a passing fad? Sure. Maybe it'll stick around, maybe it won't.
It makes every bit of sense for the New York Times to wait a few years and find out whether or not the term will stick around before they start committing to using the word in their articles. After all, once a New York Times article is written, it is archived for a very long time, and there is no way to go back into the archives and revise the articles to replace one word with another. A conservative approach is the only thing that makes sense.
If the word tweet were absolutely irreplaceable to the point where no other reasonable phrasing could convey the same meaning, then there might be a case for the New York Times to use the word prematurely. But that is certainly not the case here.
The "get off my lawn" patrol is a natural reaction to the absurdly biased comments from the submitter. The New York Times was founded in 1851. Twitter is not even five years old. The New York Times has survived wars, depressions, and technological and economic revolutions that absolutely dwarf anything we see today. It is far more likely that the New York Times will outlast Twitter than the other way around.
Your proposal is only feasible for large custom projects, not for commodity software.
Yes, such a scheme certainly wouldn't work for commodity software. However, my point is that it is feasible for some types of software, such as large custom projects. You were claiming that it isn't feasible under any circumstances due to lack of consideration in the contract exchange, but that's just wrong.
If you ensure that no one obtains any copy of the software from you without first signing this contract, then you can in effect reinvent copyright within contract law.
This is probably impossible. The consequences for unauthorized copying are far more draconian today than what you propose, and yet it's done all the time. It's easy to get free copies of pretty much any software.
It's certainly impossible to recreate large scale copyright to the extent that it is practiced today. However, in a very few narrow situations it would be possible to use contract law as a poor man's copyright. For example, suppose that you literally have only one customer. (This happens more often than you think -- a lot of software is custom made.) In this case, there is no difficulty tracking down who violated your contract.
The extreme difficulty of achieving copyright by contract, by the way, is considered a feature, not a bug, of copyright abolishment, at least according to the FSF.
You misunderstand my argument. I'm not saying it would be any better. I never claimed it would be better. All I'm claiming is that it's possible.
You can't limit people through a license on something you don't own. That's called fraud. If there was no ownership and no copyright of software, you could not enforce a contract on it.
The point is that, even without copyright, it is still possible to own a physical copy of a piece of software, be it on a CD, hard drive, storage server, or wherever.
You could then make people sign a restrictive contract in exchange for a physical copy of the software. Your ownership of that copy of the software forms a valid basis for entering into a contract exchange. Then, inside the contract, you include a clause that states in exchange for the copy of the software, the recipient is required not to distribute any further copies of the software. If you ensure that no one obtains any copy of the software from you without first signing this contract, then you can in effect reinvent copyright within contract law.
If the recipient ends up distributing the software anyway in violation of the contract, then you sue the recipient for damages. One difference is that you wouldn't be able to successfully sue any third parties other than the recipient, even if the third parties continued to make further copies.
She said (paraphrasing), "Open Source. Those people decided they wanted nothing to do with copyright." She's a little bit wrong there when you consider that the GNU General Public License uses copyright as the vehicle through which the license is enforced. What she meant to say was that the free software movement requires people be able to copy and modify their software as part of the definition of software freedom. Not quite as good for a sound bite but a truer meaning for those who care.
Your claim is not correct either. Just because the GNU GPL uses copyright as a vehicle to enforce the license does not mean that the FSF wants, endorses, or supports software copyright. In fact, if you search through Richard Stallman's writings and speeches, he makes it pretty clear that using software copyrights in the GPL is merely his way of making the best of a bad situation. Although the GPL uses software copyrights, the FSF does not support software copyright, by any means.
For example, in "Why Software Should Not Have Owners", Richard Stallman writes:
Digital technology is more flexible than the printing press: when information has digital form, you can easily copy it to share it with others. This very flexibility makes a bad fit with a system like copyright.
That's a clear and unambiguous statement against software copyright. The motivation for the GPL and copyleft is described as follows:
I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.
In summary, it's not entirely correct to say that the FSF wants anything to do with copyright just because the GPL uses copyright. It's more accurate to say that the FSF wants nothing to do with copyright, but that practical considerations forced them to participate in the copyright system against their will.
Of course, it's certainly true that not all developers agree with the FSF, but if you're going to cite the GPL as an example of the free software community's stance on software copyright, then you are obliged to give greater weight than usual to the FSF's position on software copyright in this context, because the FSF created the GPL.
And yet the iPad will probably sell more units in the first year than all the installed Linux desktop distros in the U.S. It's not just the concept, it's the implementation. Apple takes ideas that have been tried by others, and makes them mainstream and popular. I have nothing against Linux (I use it myself for part of my work), but even at its best you can't begin to compare it with Apple's ease of use.
Let's get some perspective here. Microsoft made 14 billion dollars last year to Apple's 9 billion dollars. Netbooks still outsell iPads 3 to 1. If you're going to give Apple credit merely for marketplace success, then you must acknowledge that Windows and PCs deserve at least equal credit.
Apple is not forcing Android out of the market
Oh really? Then why did Apple sue HTC over Android? What is this lawsuit, if not an attempt to force Android out of the market?
And what I find puzzling is why you (and so many others) are unhappy about it. How does the existence of the iPhone and iPad diminish the utility of Android or Linux in any way, shape, or form?
The existence of the iPhone and iPad contribute to the existence of Apple, which has outright declared (patent) nuclear war on Android. Apple's offensive deployment of software patents (a concept which I oppose to begin with) against Linux makes me very, very unhappy. Before Apple's patent lawsuit, I was happy to let Apple compete in the marketplace on technical merit, but now that Apple has (apparently) decided to resort to legal attacks based on abuse of our broken patent system, it follows that Apple needs to be stopped, by any means necessary.
Incidentally, even before Apple filed their lawsuit, it was obvious to Linux supporters like myself that Apple would stop at nothing to deprive users of the option of running Linux. The lawsuit should make it amply clear even to Apple supporters like yourself that Apple is no better than Microsoft when it comes to tolerating the existence of competition, or allowing their competitors to compete fairly in the marketplace.
Yes, I do not claim that talking to a passenger is safer in absolute terms than driving alone, only that talking to a passenger has certain benefits as well as certain drawbacks compared to driving alone. On the whole the drawbacks outweigh the benefits. However, talking on a cell phone has no benefits whatsoever, and even worse drawbacks. Cell phone driving is much more dangerous than driving while talking to a passenger.
Talking while driving or adjusting the radio isn't "supertasking." Do you want to ban drivers from speaking to their passengers too?
Speaking to a passenger is far far safer than speaking to a cell phone. This meme has to die.
A passenger enjoys the same situational awareness of road conditions as the driver does. In many cases, the passenger is more alert to oncoming threats than the driver, because the passenger is not being distracted by having to operate the vehicle. A passenger participating in a conversation will naturally, subconsciously, and automatically cue the driver to pause the conversation during moments when the driving is dangerous, either implicitly (by delaying a reply) or explicitly ("Hey, watch out for that biker"). The driver can also solicit assistance from the passenger: "Can you watch my other side?" It's also worth noting that the passenger has a significant motivation to contribute to safe driving: a car crash will likely affect him too.
Needless to say, none of these benefits accrues to a driver talking on a cell phone. In addition, even if we ignore the positive benefits of active passenger assistance, technical issues such as poor voice quality and the use of one hand to hold the phone (when not using hands-free systems) also further degrade driver attention compared to the case of conversing with a passenger.
The only scenario where talking to a passenger comes remotely close to the danger presented by a cell phone is in the case of an immature child or a severely disabled passenger who cannot positively contribute to road safety. Even in those cases, the detrimental effect on the driver is less than with a cell phone, because with very few exceptions (e.g. passengers in a full vegetative state), those passengers will still be able to sense dangerous road maneuvers and shut up when the situation warrants, often without the subsequent need for the driver to ask explicitly for any missed previous remarks to be repeated. And besides, I can't think of any situation where you would be talking to a vegetative passenger anyway.
I personally, love my iPad, and have convinced 2 other ppl to purchase iPads since I got mine.
If you like it, get it. If you don't like it, don't get it, but don't let someone else to tell you to save your cash. Read their (lack of) usability points, go play with one, and make the decision yourself.
In other words, it's acceptable to talk people into buying an iPad, but it's not acceptable to talk people out of buying an iPad?
No, no, no, a thousand times no. You can't have it both ways. You need to either accept that people are entitled to have and express their opinions, or else do as you say and let your friends make buying decisions for themselves rather than convincing them to buy something they otherwise wouldn't have bought.
There is no explicit Constitutional right to privacy; it's one of the rights that the courts have found to be implied, and that fairly recently.
The courts are correct in concluding that the Constitution implies the right to privacy, and I don't believe an implied right (in general), or this implied right (in particular), should be considered the lessor of an explicit right in any way.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect the Constitution to specify an explicit right to privacy. In 1789, privacy was the default. You could converse in low voices in the middle of a grassy meadow, or sit in your home, and have a high expectation of privacy. Nowadays we have privacy-violating tools like satellite photos, audio bugs, thermal imaging scanners, and large-scale data mining algorithms that are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. These technologies would have been utterly inconceivable to anyone who wrote the Constitution. The authors of the Constitution could not and did not attempt to anticipate and counter every conceivable technological improvement in the text of the Constitution (let alone the inconceivable ones), because that would have made the document too long. Indeed, many people admire the brevity and adaptability of the US Constitution and consider these attributes to be its greatest strength.
In the context in which it was drafted, it is clear that the Constitution relies on an expectation of privacy. The fact that this right was never explicitly stated must be regarded as an understandable reflection of the technology available at the time rather than a meaningful omission.