You can't come up with solutions to problems that cost more money.
I don't think you said what you thought: because I can always come up with solutions that cost more than the problems. One need not look further to our current situation.
Paying *anyone* doesn't solve a personnel problem, and's predominantly what the education system has. Paying more *may* attract better talent, but is not a guarantee. Pay is not the problem. It's evaluation of talent and retainment of talent that is the problem, just like any company. More money does not equal better talent, not at the face, anyway.
I'll challenge you this: allow individual teachers to *not* join the union. Make it an option (I'm not inherently anti-union up to the extent that a union can preclude a non-union employee from being employed; by not joining the union you can take your full paycheck home - no dues). Let them negotiate their own wage, etc. Lets give it 5 years, and then compare salaries, benefits, take-home, etc. Or, hell, why 5 years? If you want to be a teach and don't want to join a union, why should you have to? If you're not getting what you think you're worth, what do you do? (oh, *gasp*, this sounds like private sector), you leave go elsewhere, or use that (threat) to renegotiate.
Our failing schools are failing because of three things: Lack of caring parents (society should fix this), Bad Teachers, enough to sour the whole profession, and funding models that reward failure and punish success. We can fix two out of three, and this will likely impact the third.
...I'd want my money back. If you listen to his "testimony", he testifies that studying astronomy has "nothing" that contradicts a "recent" earth creation (roughly 6000 years). Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't most astronomy contradict "recent" earth creation? Even with an expanding universe, most observations are at over 10 billion years for the existence of the universe (roughly 4.5B for the Earth, itself). So, does "god" have gas, brake & clutch pedals? He floored it for the first 6 days, slammed on the brakes, swerved, while hitting the clutch?
(not having watched the entire video yet) I hope Bill Nye asks (Ham) point blank: Why do you insist on a creator that dictates natural laws, rather than just accepting a supernatural being created the universe. (assuming said supernatural being did, in fact, create the universe, what created the supernatural being? what does he/she/it exist? Turtles all the way down...).
"Evidence confirming an INTELLIGENCE produced life". It would seem to me that blinding accepting without independently observable proof that anyone accepting his (Ham) evidence would be inherently lacking intelligence. Intelligence requires critical thinking that judges the available evidence. And no, superstition is not evidence. It needs to be independently observable.
Zenimax doesn't need Carmack. Zenimax probably doesn't want Carmack. Zenimax is about pumping out products. Look at the poor state Fallout 3/New Vegas were released in, as well as Skyrim. These are some of their premier products and the released them so buggy as to be near unplayable (Fallout 3 was the best of the lot, New Vegas on the 360 would routinely hang after 15 minutes). Carmack is too much of a perfectionist to fit into such a culture. He's fine delaying a product for years if it's not ready (at least technically, let's face it, he's not about the content/design/story).
Both parties, Zenimax and Carmack, are probably inwardly happier for the separation.
I like Zenimax games, the stories, but they've been lacking quality of engineering. I had hoped that with the acquisition of id that the quality of engineering might have rubbed off, and with Carmack's departure, I'm disheartened about it.
To my knowledge, it was just the federal government (not state, local, etc) that had a hand in GM & Chrysler (Ford never went bankrupt, nor did they directly accept federal funds). I'm also pissed at the Fed Gov because they bypassed bankruptcy law and basically invalidated all bond holders (who, at various levels, had fist say to GM & Chrysler assets). I'm rather disappointed in Cerberus Capital (held a lot of Chrysler debt) that they allowed this to happen without due process in the courts.
I also had some really excellent teachers, who can be credited with a large portion of my success in life. Guess who gets driven out first when working conditions are made increasingly shitty? When teachers are underpaid, overworked, disrespected by management, then the ones who are best (combination of academic excellence and natural leadership) will eventually burn out on their altruism and take one of the many much higher paying jobs that they are more than qualified for.
This basically states the talented ones leave. Then, you state:
The ones who are petty authoritarian teach-to-the-test dimwits, with no prospects for better employment, stick around forever.
Which indicates that those that follow the "system" are the ones that survive. Which is it? Then you state:
Unions aren't keeping the bad teachers in --- self-serving slimeballs will cling on no matter what, and will gladly game the system to look good on a shallow management-driven metrics system. Unions are keeping the good teachers in, giving people a rewarding professional career.
So, which is it? You post is meaningless and incoherent.
I can't say I've ever seen an incompetent teacher fired, but I've seen passionate, competent teachers forced out (while I was was a student).
I've also see parents make a difference by complaining and taking a stand. If mine hadn't done so, I would not have had a calculus class until I saw college, and I'd have been easily a year behind. My HS did not offer a calculus class, despite 7/50 students being ready for it. The school board wanted those 7 students to sit on their ass for a year and do nothing. My parents threatened to pull me and send me to the local state college just to take calculus if it wasn't going to be offered locally. It took berating and shaming of the school board (at least one of which had a daughter ready to take calculus) before they decided to provide a part-time teacher for calculus. And, that part-time teacher was one of the best I've had. Of the 7 of us, I know at least 3 passed the AP calc AB exam at 5, at least 2 of us passed the BC exam at 5, despite only having a course geared towards Calc 1. My point is, we had a class filled with passionate students taught by a passionate teacher, and we far exceeded what anyone thought of us. Ironically, if no one from our school had passed the AP exam that year, the school would have lost their AP accreditation for the math program, of which they normally only offered precalc.
Judges at certain levels are granted lifetime posts with the expectation that it would grant them immunity from the pressures of which you speak. Not all Judgeship positions are the same (typically those at county/local levels). Certainly the intent of federal judges to be lifetime appointments was to put them above the position of political reelection.
There is no reason for a teacher to be politically protected, if they're doing their job objectively, and teaching facts and not ideologies.
I also take issue with "we under pay our teachers". We pay what the market demands for their talents. If they could command more money, they'd be employed elsewhere, either at a private company, or perhaps a private educational institution.
Seriously, pretty much everyone has at least one completely crappy teacher and one ancient past-their-prime marking-time-to-retirement teacher over the course of the travels from K-12. We demonize the teacher's union because they enable and tacitly condone such things.
And, why should the students be made to suffer? Because the teacher only has 1 or 2 more years until retirement, they should be allowed to do a half-assed job that sabotages those students future? This argument is disingenuous and harmful to the students, which, is what we're trying to stop.
If the teacher is either unwilling or incapable of doing their job, they should be gone, regardless of their seniority. Tenure at a high school and below level is just a paid excuse to do a piss-poor job of teaching. Tenure is intended for collegiate level positions where research is a greater factor, and tenure granting protection against having an "off-year" because research didn't pan out. It was never intended to be a facility by which to keep piss poor educators of being in a position to continue poisoning the youth for which they're responsible.
The attacks on the public teachers' union might be a viewed as a concerted attack, because they are exhibiting a concerted attack against any and all that would improve the quality of public education at the expense of the public teachers' union. Parents and taxpayers alike are sick of paying for what is obviously a failing (or failed, depending on perspective) system. This is not a condemnation of all or even the majority of teachers. You don't see unions protecting bad employees to the same extent in other industries. Teachers' unions present no incentive to excel and the mentality actively discourages it, because it makes other union members look bad. It's like teaching to the lowest denominator, but now you're tell the teachers to be the lowest denominator.
Not everyone is the top of the cream (both teachers & students). In my opinion, the biggest problem with the public education system is that we predominantly teach to an age. You're 12, so you're going to learn 'A' this year. You're 15, you're going to learn 'B' this year. Never mind some students are capable of learning 'A' & 'B' in the same year, while it may take a year or more for others to learn just 'A'. There are also instances where students exhibiting self learning are actively discouraged, ridiculed or penalized (the source may be either other students or even the teachers).
You can say what you want, but this culture of imposing equality is what is causing the generative decline of our educational system. We actively hold back capable students so the less capable don't have their feels hurt and feel inferior. Doing this actively destroys our society and does harm to less advantaged students with greater abilities. Public education in the US is sadly about making sure everyone makes the lowest common denominator, rather than excelling. Meeting expectations does no one a service. Exceeding expectations does, even more so when those are raised.
And that's wonderful until a site restricts you to the "standard" US keyboard of a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and "!@#$%^&*()" and the likes. So many sites are unaware of unicode, and frankly don't care, that your scheme won't work in a large number of sites. (even those that are unicode aware may artificially restrict, as well). What also irks me is requiring at least one of a class of characters. Supporting, fine, but requiring a minimum of 1 from each of n classes artificially restricts the number of possible passwords given that you support using all n classes.
Prefer to travel as Mr. Ben Dover as Clarence Johnson of Lockheed's Skunkworks did. He also tended to use passwords along the lines of "123" according to the book, anyways.
How does it go again...the most frequently used passwords are (or some variant of) "password", "god", "sex", "secret"...and I forget the 5th...of course if you know the person you're attacking, you can usually toss in birthdates, family names (first names, surnames, maiden names), streets they've live on, etc.
I had a 10K 320MB/s SCSI drive in my home desktop 15 years ago when 7200 RPM IDE drives were "top of the line". That drive ran so hot, I actually burned my self on it once. I ended up having to solder a 95mm fan to the pinless fan connection points on my motherboard just to keep it from overheating. That being said, I was never disappointed with the performance at the time. System boot and app load times where significantly faster than on other systems that have faster CPUs & more RAM (being said, 15 years ago was really the hey-day of data starved CPUs).
Yeah, this idea is just asinine. This isn't like software where you're not shipping some bits, or even if you ship them and selectively enable or disable. These are physically manufactured components. The parts have to be physically manufactured and installed.
One could argue that by eliminating the variance on the manufacturing line, they could increase efficiency at assembly. If that was the case, just include the features as standard features. Otherwise, they're actually going to increase complexity by introducing some sort of DRM-like system that would probably necessitate some sort of wireless connection to phone home (and who's going to pay for that? hint: not the manufacturer). Not to mention the costs to develop and implement such a system. And will any breakdowns be covered under warranty? And, for how long? If I "subscribe" to heated seats, are they going to assume the replacement/repair cost if they break? Do they transfer to a new owner if I sell my car?
I find this offensive, and that Mini is even considering this has eliminated them permanently from future consideration (not that I'm they're target demographic anyway).
It seems as though that consumers that choose not to subscribe to a particular feature would be subsidizing those that do. (After all, the feature physically exists in my car). It would seem to counteract this, you'd have to up-charge those that do subscribe to offset the manufacturing cost. Either way, it seems to be a lose-lose situation for the consumer.
I've got a "jump to conclusions" mat for you to buy. You can afford it.
I don't need it. I can jump to the conclusion that you're a bitter, downtrodden troll that has probably made a mess of your life and are looking for anyone else to take it out on.
How you got marked insightful is beyond me. First of all, earning $155k does not put you into the top 1% of wage earners in the US. It might get you into the top 5%. Last I looked, you had to make close to $400k a year to be in the 1% of earners. But, I know, it's popular to use the whole 1% vs 99% vitriolic spewage.
What percentage of people do you estimate are able to pull that off, realistically? You live in a bubble world surrounded by the success stories, and thinking that because there are a few hundred thousand of you, that the tens of millions who have not enjoyed that success simply did something wrong.
That I have succeeded at making a good wage, I should somehow feel sorry for those that didn't make the "right" choices, make the right gamble? I made my choices full well knowing it was nothing close to a sure bet, but I made the choices I did because they had the strongest possible outcome, for me, at the time I made them. Do I feel bad about it? No, not in the slightest. I knew I wanted to be an engineer by the time I was 12 and I focused my studies from there on towards that goal. Hard work has never been a guarantee for success. However, it is usually a strong indicator of it. Yes there are people that are lazy or accidentally successful, but the vast majority are hard workers.
Or the "designers" and "marketers" that have more sway over management that the peon engineers that have to make the crap "designs" work. I highly doubt you could get Raymond Chen on record as saying the Win8 start menu was a good idea.
Just because *you* write undefined behavior, doesn't make the code generated by the compiler any less or more valid. The compiler/optimizer are trying their best to generate the fasted code possible from the information given (by you). If you give it invalid or incomplete information, don't be surprised that the behavior isn't what you expected.
Um, the multi-threaded memory model for C++ was just recently defined in C++11. Prior to that standard, there wasn't even an acknowledgement of multithreading/concurrency.
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You can't come up with solutions to problems that cost more money.
I don't think you said what you thought: because I can always come up with solutions that cost more than the problems. One need not look further to our current situation.
Paying *anyone* doesn't solve a personnel problem, and's predominantly what the education system has. Paying more *may* attract better talent, but is not a guarantee. Pay is not the problem. It's evaluation of talent and retainment of talent that is the problem, just like any company. More money does not equal better talent, not at the face, anyway.
I'll challenge you this: allow individual teachers to *not* join the union. Make it an option (I'm not inherently anti-union up to the extent that a union can preclude a non-union employee from being employed; by not joining the union you can take your full paycheck home - no dues). Let them negotiate their own wage, etc. Lets give it 5 years, and then compare salaries, benefits, take-home, etc. Or, hell, why 5 years? If you want to be a teach and don't want to join a union, why should you have to? If you're not getting what you think you're worth, what do you do? (oh, *gasp*, this sounds like private sector), you leave go elsewhere, or use that (threat) to renegotiate.
Our failing schools are failing because of three things: Lack of caring parents (society should fix this), Bad Teachers, enough to sour the whole profession, and funding models that reward failure and punish success. We can fix two out of three, and this will likely impact the third.
Fixed a little bit of that for you.
...I'd want my money back. If you listen to his "testimony", he testifies that studying astronomy has "nothing" that contradicts a "recent" earth creation (roughly 6000 years). Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't most astronomy contradict "recent" earth creation? Even with an expanding universe, most observations are at over 10 billion years for the existence of the universe (roughly 4.5B for the Earth, itself). So, does "god" have gas, brake & clutch pedals? He floored it for the first 6 days, slammed on the brakes, swerved, while hitting the clutch?
(not having watched the entire video yet) I hope Bill Nye asks (Ham) point blank: Why do you insist on a creator that dictates natural laws, rather than just accepting a supernatural being created the universe. (assuming said supernatural being did, in fact, create the universe, what created the supernatural being? what does he/she/it exist? Turtles all the way down...).
"Evidence confirming an INTELLIGENCE produced life". It would seem to me that blinding accepting without independently observable proof that anyone accepting his (Ham) evidence would be inherently lacking intelligence. Intelligence requires critical thinking that judges the available evidence. And no, superstition is not evidence. It needs to be independently observable.
Zenimax doesn't need Carmack. Zenimax probably doesn't want Carmack. Zenimax is about pumping out products. Look at the poor state Fallout 3/New Vegas were released in, as well as Skyrim. These are some of their premier products and the released them so buggy as to be near unplayable (Fallout 3 was the best of the lot, New Vegas on the 360 would routinely hang after 15 minutes). Carmack is too much of a perfectionist to fit into such a culture. He's fine delaying a product for years if it's not ready (at least technically, let's face it, he's not about the content/design/story).
Both parties, Zenimax and Carmack, are probably inwardly happier for the separation.
I like Zenimax games, the stories, but they've been lacking quality of engineering. I had hoped that with the acquisition of id that the quality of engineering might have rubbed off, and with Carmack's departure, I'm disheartened about it.
And visa versa. Neither has done the same quality of work "alone" as they have done together.
To my knowledge, it was just the federal government (not state, local, etc) that had a hand in GM & Chrysler (Ford never went bankrupt, nor did they directly accept federal funds). I'm also pissed at the Fed Gov because they bypassed bankruptcy law and basically invalidated all bond holders (who, at various levels, had fist say to GM & Chrysler assets). I'm rather disappointed in Cerberus Capital (held a lot of Chrysler debt) that they allowed this to happen without due process in the courts.
I also had some really excellent teachers, who can be credited with a large portion of my success in life. Guess who gets driven out first when working conditions are made increasingly shitty? When teachers are underpaid, overworked, disrespected by management, then the ones who are best (combination of academic excellence and natural leadership) will eventually burn out on their altruism and take one of the many much higher paying jobs that they are more than qualified for.
This basically states the talented ones leave. Then, you state:
The ones who are petty authoritarian teach-to-the-test dimwits, with no prospects for better employment, stick around forever.
Which indicates that those that follow the "system" are the ones that survive. Which is it? Then you state:
Unions aren't keeping the bad teachers in --- self-serving slimeballs will cling on no matter what, and will gladly game the system to look good on a shallow management-driven metrics system. Unions are keeping the good teachers in, giving people a rewarding professional career.
So, which is it? You post is meaningless and incoherent.
I can't say I've ever seen an incompetent teacher fired, but I've seen passionate, competent teachers forced out (while I was was a student).
I've also see parents make a difference by complaining and taking a stand. If mine hadn't done so, I would not have had a calculus class until I saw college, and I'd have been easily a year behind. My HS did not offer a calculus class, despite 7/50 students being ready for it. The school board wanted those 7 students to sit on their ass for a year and do nothing. My parents threatened to pull me and send me to the local state college just to take calculus if it wasn't going to be offered locally. It took berating and shaming of the school board (at least one of which had a daughter ready to take calculus) before they decided to provide a part-time teacher for calculus. And, that part-time teacher was one of the best I've had. Of the 7 of us, I know at least 3 passed the AP calc AB exam at 5, at least 2 of us passed the BC exam at 5, despite only having a course geared towards Calc 1. My point is, we had a class filled with passionate students taught by a passionate teacher, and we far exceeded what anyone thought of us. Ironically, if no one from our school had passed the AP exam that year, the school would have lost their AP accreditation for the math program, of which they normally only offered precalc.
Judges are the same.
Judges at certain levels are granted lifetime posts with the expectation that it would grant them immunity from the pressures of which you speak. Not all Judgeship positions are the same (typically those at county/local levels). Certainly the intent of federal judges to be lifetime appointments was to put them above the position of political reelection.
There is no reason for a teacher to be politically protected, if they're doing their job objectively, and teaching facts and not ideologies.
I also take issue with "we under pay our teachers". We pay what the market demands for their talents. If they could command more money, they'd be employed elsewhere, either at a private company, or perhaps a private educational institution.
Seriously, pretty much everyone has at least one completely crappy teacher and one ancient past-their-prime marking-time-to-retirement teacher over the course of the travels from K-12. We demonize the teacher's union because they enable and tacitly condone such things.
And, why should the students be made to suffer? Because the teacher only has 1 or 2 more years until retirement, they should be allowed to do a half-assed job that sabotages those students future? This argument is disingenuous and harmful to the students, which, is what we're trying to stop.
If the teacher is either unwilling or incapable of doing their job, they should be gone, regardless of their seniority. Tenure at a high school and below level is just a paid excuse to do a piss-poor job of teaching. Tenure is intended for collegiate level positions where research is a greater factor, and tenure granting protection against having an "off-year" because research didn't pan out. It was never intended to be a facility by which to keep piss poor educators of being in a position to continue poisoning the youth for which they're responsible.
The attacks on the public teachers' union might be a viewed as a concerted attack, because they are exhibiting a concerted attack against any and all that would improve the quality of public education at the expense of the public teachers' union. Parents and taxpayers alike are sick of paying for what is obviously a failing (or failed, depending on perspective) system. This is not a condemnation of all or even the majority of teachers. You don't see unions protecting bad employees to the same extent in other industries. Teachers' unions present no incentive to excel and the mentality actively discourages it, because it makes other union members look bad. It's like teaching to the lowest denominator, but now you're tell the teachers to be the lowest denominator.
Not everyone is the top of the cream (both teachers & students). In my opinion, the biggest problem with the public education system is that we predominantly teach to an age. You're 12, so you're going to learn 'A' this year. You're 15, you're going to learn 'B' this year. Never mind some students are capable of learning 'A' & 'B' in the same year, while it may take a year or more for others to learn just 'A'. There are also instances where students exhibiting self learning are actively discouraged, ridiculed or penalized (the source may be either other students or even the teachers).
You can say what you want, but this culture of imposing equality is what is causing the generative decline of our educational system. We actively hold back capable students so the less capable don't have their feels hurt and feel inferior. Doing this actively destroys our society and does harm to less advantaged students with greater abilities. Public education in the US is sadly about making sure everyone makes the lowest common denominator, rather than excelling. Meeting expectations does no one a service. Exceeding expectations does, even more so when those are raised.
And that's wonderful until a site restricts you to the "standard" US keyboard of a-z, A-Z, 0-9 and "!@#$%^&*()" and the likes. So many sites are unaware of unicode, and frankly don't care, that your scheme won't work in a large number of sites. (even those that are unicode aware may artificially restrict, as well). What also irks me is requiring at least one of a class of characters. Supporting, fine, but requiring a minimum of 1 from each of n classes artificially restricts the number of possible passwords given that you support using all n classes.
Prefer to travel as Mr. Ben Dover as Clarence Johnson of Lockheed's Skunkworks did. He also tended to use passwords along the lines of "123" according to the book, anyways.
How does it go again...the most frequently used passwords are (or some variant of) "password", "god", "sex", "secret"...and I forget the 5th...of course if you know the person you're attacking, you can usually toss in birthdates, family names (first names, surnames, maiden names), streets they've live on, etc.
Actually, it may have only been 160MB/s...it's been so long I can't remember the exact details.
I had a 10K 320MB/s SCSI drive in my home desktop 15 years ago when 7200 RPM IDE drives were "top of the line". That drive ran so hot, I actually burned my self on it once. I ended up having to solder a 95mm fan to the pinless fan connection points on my motherboard just to keep it from overheating. That being said, I was never disappointed with the performance at the time. System boot and app load times where significantly faster than on other systems that have faster CPUs & more RAM (being said, 15 years ago was really the hey-day of data starved CPUs).
If only the thermodynamic expenditure of implementing such a feature could be redirected into car seats...heated seats for everyone!
Yeah, this idea is just asinine. This isn't like software where you're not shipping some bits, or even if you ship them and selectively enable or disable. These are physically manufactured components. The parts have to be physically manufactured and installed.
One could argue that by eliminating the variance on the manufacturing line, they could increase efficiency at assembly. If that was the case, just include the features as standard features. Otherwise, they're actually going to increase complexity by introducing some sort of DRM-like system that would probably necessitate some sort of wireless connection to phone home (and who's going to pay for that? hint: not the manufacturer). Not to mention the costs to develop and implement such a system. And will any breakdowns be covered under warranty? And, for how long? If I "subscribe" to heated seats, are they going to assume the replacement/repair cost if they break? Do they transfer to a new owner if I sell my car?
I find this offensive, and that Mini is even considering this has eliminated them permanently from future consideration (not that I'm they're target demographic anyway).
It seems as though that consumers that choose not to subscribe to a particular feature would be subsidizing those that do. (After all, the feature physically exists in my car). It would seem to counteract this, you'd have to up-charge those that do subscribe to offset the manufacturing cost. Either way, it seems to be a lose-lose situation for the consumer.
Funny, my Kindle is wifi only, and 99% of the time the wifi is turned off (there's an easy and convenient menu option to do so).
I've got a "jump to conclusions" mat for you to buy. You can afford it.
I don't need it. I can jump to the conclusion that you're a bitter, downtrodden troll that has probably made a mess of your life and are looking for anyone else to take it out on.
How you got marked insightful is beyond me. First of all, earning $155k does not put you into the top 1% of wage earners in the US. It might get you into the top 5%. Last I looked, you had to make close to $400k a year to be in the 1% of earners. But, I know, it's popular to use the whole 1% vs 99% vitriolic spewage.
What percentage of people do you estimate are able to pull that off, realistically? You live in a bubble world surrounded by the success stories, and thinking that because there are a few hundred thousand of you, that the tens of millions who have not enjoyed that success simply did something wrong.
That I have succeeded at making a good wage, I should somehow feel sorry for those that didn't make the "right" choices, make the right gamble? I made my choices full well knowing it was nothing close to a sure bet, but I made the choices I did because they had the strongest possible outcome, for me, at the time I made them. Do I feel bad about it? No, not in the slightest. I knew I wanted to be an engineer by the time I was 12 and I focused my studies from there on towards that goal. Hard work has never been a guarantee for success. However, it is usually a strong indicator of it. Yes there are people that are lazy or accidentally successful, but the vast majority are hard workers.
Or the "designers" and "marketers" that have more sway over management that the peon engineers that have to make the crap "designs" work. I highly doubt you could get Raymond Chen on record as saying the Win8 start menu was a good idea.
Not to mention the inevitable backlash from unions of a non-union student "stealing" a job of a union teacher.
Just because *you* write undefined behavior, doesn't make the code generated by the compiler any less or more valid. The compiler/optimizer are trying their best to generate the fasted code possible from the information given (by you). If you give it invalid or incomplete information, don't be surprised that the behavior isn't what you expected.
Um, the multi-threaded memory model for C++ was just recently defined in C++11. Prior to that standard, there wasn't even an acknowledgement of multithreading/concurrency.