It depends a lot on your circumstances and the school district you are in as well as the state you reside in. Both my children are homeschooled by my wife with me helping out where applicable. We live in a school district where the high school has a dismal graduation rate of around 40%, the other schools do not much better. Ironically, the high school one district over and just a mile away has a graduation rate of 98%.So in that regards we as parents can't do any worse job than the local public schools. That said, if the public schools were doing well the incentive would be lower.
Homeschooling takes a lot of time. My wife spends anywhere from 4 to 8 hours on actual instruction, but that on only four days a week. I do one activity at night or on the weekend. Also, my wife spends several hours a week on prepping for school and staying informed. That means if you have a full time or even part time job you may find not having enough time.
Homeschooling isn't cheap, but you definitely can be frugal about it. Also, some states provide the text books no matter if a student is in public, private, or home school. You still need to buy books, materials, and supplies. The more work you put in yourself the less you have to pay. There are many curricula ready to go with instructions and tests and so on already done. Those tend not to be cheap.
Homeschooling still has a bad rap, many think you are a religious nutball, a whacky liberal, a sect member, jobless, or the devil in disguise. Also, some school districts have staff that is totally anti-homeschooling. Some districts try to bully homeschoolers with made up rules, so in any case you need to be well versed on the legal framework. In some states like Connecticut you do not have to do anything although a letter of intent to the district is encouraged. In some you have to do a lot of paperwork with quarterly and annual reports, for example in New York. And then there are states like Pennsylvania that make homeschooling total hell with insane restrictions and requirements that are not even applied to public schools. For that reason the stats are hard to come by and often biased depending on who tries to make what argument.
That said, the best thing is that you are in control. You and your child set the pace. If the child needs more time with one subject you have the luxury to spend more time. If you want to do an awesome project that takes a few days you can do that as well. If you had enough and need to take a few days off, you can do that as well. Vacation when everyone else is in school is also an option. You don't like a text book...find a different one and sell the other one on eBay or Amazon. All this is not possible in a public school setting. And that is the main reason why homeschoolers might do better academically, they set their own pace and they repeat the stuff they didn't get the first time as many times as it takes. It is possible to be at 7th grade level in reading and writing, but still at 5th grade level in math. That is not a problem at all as homeschooler as long as you get the content covered eventually. Often times it just clicks and a child gets it quickly although before it was like talking to a wall. Some children learn gradually, others have learning spurts and then level off. Nothing wrong with that, but something a public school with 40 kids in a class cannot accommodate. As homeschooler you can also cut out all that crap like daily pledge of allegiance or citizenship courses or whatever other useless garbage gets dumped on kids in schools. You can also prevent that your child's life gets destroyed by curricula such as "Everyday Math" or the many history books with totally distorted facts.
Now to the dumb argument of homeschoolers lacking social interaction. Do you know how many school districts do not allow kids to speak to each other on the bus or on the school yard? And definitely not in class unless asked. What kind of social interaction is that? My kids attend a drama club, a choir, and arts and computer classes. In the summer they play with other k
VBox is desktop virtualization, similar to VMWare Workstation. I use both regularly to run tests on clean systems (VMWare) or in combination with Genymotion to emulate Android. Would be nice to have Genymotion run on top of VMWare Player or Workstation instead, one less tool ecosystem to worry about.
Not sure if it is a matter of features, but Genymotion runs on top of VirtualBox and is the only affordable Android emulator. A close second is Bluestacks, but they charge even for personal use.
I agree...but I have to mention that Lego Robotics is freakishly expensive! Unless you can find a good sponsor you won't be able to get enough sets for even a small group. I looked into this for my kids and I could just not afford it.
The Raspberry Pi was designed exactly for this purpose. You can program it in Python or Scratch, but also many other languages. In regards to programming, I spent a fair share of time with VB6, ObjectPAL, Pascal, C, Assembler, Delphi, VB.NET and Java. Except for VB6 (which is unfortunately dead) they are all cumbersome and needlessly complicated. I eventually found my home with PHP, you want to do X then the command to use it typically X. PHP is also excellently documented and as demanded by others is a marketable skill. Yes, it has shortcomings and is quirky at times, but despite its simplicity you can do a lot of awesome things...and that even without object oriented programming.
Just yesterday I came across https://codecombat.com/ (might even have been from a/. article), it is a game that teaches coding skills. I didn't have time yet to evaluate if it is any good.
....are developers who embrace the entire product design cycle, that includes business analysis, testing, and support. That means mainly not having the attitude that requirements are never to be questioned and once something compiles with less than three dozen warnings the code is ready for production. Great developers are also not to snobby to reject taking on a customer support case, pitching in during regression testing before a release, or fixing bugs (that they put into the app). In short, great developers do not come across as a diva that leaves no opportunity out to state how awesome they are.
Municipal networks and the separation of ISPs and infrastructure providers (means ISPs get equal access to the infrastructure) increased competition and competition brings better service and / or lower prices. In the US you are lucky if you can chose between a slowpoke phone company offering DSL or a greedy cable company with craptastic service - or the combination of both with satellite or mobile service. When leaving metro areas you are out of luck anyway, the reason why there are still many who use dialup.
Even if there is a true choice, the cost of access and the service provided is expensive and slow compared to even western Europe. It is a matter of legislation, such as prohibiting municipalities from building their own fibre networks or putting many road blocks into the path of companies like Google. As long as the legal and regulatory framework does not allow anything else than the status quo, well, all you get is the status quo. That is followed by dumb arguments about cost, the same reason why the entire banking sector still operates with the same tech used in the 60s.
Years ago it was shown that electronic noise emitted by keyboards and mice could be easily retrieved with some cheap off the shelf hardware even from across a street. That is the reason why many government agencies are dusting off the mechanical typewriters.
Google Glass - aside from being just creepy and ugly - is a solution to a problem that does not exist. And for that it is ridiculously overpriced and tied to having a phone nearby.
Congress needs to pass legislation that limits any phone, email, and fax interaction solely on an opt-in basis and opt-out requests need to be handled within a day (not this "you will be removed from our mailing list in 6-8 weeks"). This needs to include political campaigns as well. The only exception is reverse 911 for obvious reasons.
Even if RS would emerge from bankruptcy, what would they do after that? Keep having stores open that are only good for taking your broken rechargeable batteries for free recycling? Once in a while I go there to buy something, but then they either do not have something simple like standard transistors, diodes, or 120mm fans, or they charge so much for it that I could buy a dozen of them online with overnight shipping.
They used to have stuff for the electronics and computer hobbyist and they used to have knowledgeable staff. Now they only have an array of dorks that can do nothing unless you tell them the catalog number just to have them fail to operate a cash register.
After reading your comment I reread the original post...now with more coffee in me. I totally missed that, yea, they are asking the dimensions of the box that gets shipped, not what is inside the box.
Also, flat rate is only a deal with you max out the weight. For everything else using your own box is cheaper.
Less than stellar user experience IS a bug. Bugs are not limited to "Object reference not set to an instance of object" errors that mean nothing to anyone.
Agreed...I think it is so engrained in everyone at USPS that ZIP (that is an acronym, so all caps) comes last. That makes sense when writing out an address because it makes it easier to spot the ZIP for humans and machines. Although, in many other countries the postal code is in front of the city name and their postal service can figure it out no problem.
Stauss and Seidel define a bug as "anything that negatively impacts user experience". So #1 is clearly a bug.
As far as #4 goes, you'd think that a postal service offers a means to mail them a letter with a question or concern. All they offer is email or phone! I sent a letter a few months ago to the Postmaster General in DC about this, still waiting for a response. Seems as if USPS is not set up to handle and read mail from its postal customers.
Please use stamps rather than these fugly stickers. With more stamps used more canceled stamps can be collected. Once you collected cancelled stamps send them to
Briefmarkenstelle Bethel
Quellenhofweg 25
33617 Bielefeld
Germany
The stamp office in Bethel employs over 120 handicapped people who earn a living wage processing stamps and packaging them for sale to distributors and collectors. This program also funds partially other work programs and rehab for handicapped people with the aim to give them a purposeful live and work either at Bethel or in other settings.
Don't want to pay the postage to Germany? Contact me and you can send the stamps to me. Also, if you know of a US organization that accepts cancelled stamps for an as worthy cause let me know. Some folks are hesitant to donate to organizations outside of the US although it is irrelevant where you help people. Also, this is NOT a call for money donations nor do I sell any stamps (you need to take my word for it, but I will share the thank you letter if you want). This is solely about keeping cancelled stamps out of the trash and putting them to good use.
All university and college education should be paid for by the community. Germany does this and the moderate attempts to introduce tuition payments flopped. As in the US, the majority of the money did not end up in academia. For US universities the expenses in academia (teaching students) were flat throughout the past two decades while the administrative expenses grew by a factor of three. Money collected through tuition is mainly spent on more admin assistants, office furniture, landscaping, or football stadiums. Speaking of which, cutting college athletics out entirely would already lead to a big savings. No a single athletics program at any US school is generating revenue, quite contrary, over all after counting free tuition and benefits for coaches and athletes the programs generate a net loss that is paid by other students.
What Obama should ask for is this:
- spin off college athletics into self-financed (non-profit) organizations that may cooperate with colleges, but are not longer a part of a college, neither financially nor administratively
- slash administration to a reasonable minimum
- drop tuition for all degrees across the board, students still have plenty of money to pay on housing, books, and materials
- in return set limits as to how long a student can attend school before completing a degree, not everyone is cut out for this
Until that happens, your best bet is learning German and study in Germany. Excellent universities and no tuition, not even for foreigners. Just be prepared that even the middle of the pack colleges in Germany are tough. I've studied both in Germany and the US, in the US even at master level. While I did not attend all US universities the ones I attended were academic fluff.
Since top level management read a small blip about Agile they consider constant delivery and no docs as the panacea for everything wrong with software development. This idea makes managers think they can just stuff a story into a backlog, put in first place, and have it all ready for delivery three weeks from now (by cutting testing to half a day at the end of a sprint). Short term sales figures show they are right, consumers and businesses alike shop for features. I've seen multimillion dollar international sales contracts for software and not a single line in there asks about proof of quality or having access to test plans and test results.
As long as customers favor features over quality any complaints about the lack of quality is nothing but bovine excrement. Demand to see the test plans and test results before paying a penny and demand a warranty. As far as software companies go, stop setting arbitrary delivery dates and instead provide decent requirements and expectations, then ship when the work is done. It might take four or five weeks, but it saves you managers from apologizing for crappy products in press releases.
Buying a phone is not the burden, paying excessive amounts of money each month for a data plan is the big hindrance to expanding mobile everywhere. Drop the price for data plans and many more will consider a smartphone.
Tell that to the mother of the two year old who played in mom's purse...oh, you cannot because the loaded and concealed weapon fired and killed the gun owner (mom). Guns in public are an incredibly safety hazard, especially with the legislation in some areas where murderers walk free claiming they "felt threatened". There is no limit on what the threats would be. If a loud car stereo is reason enough so might be an ugly christmas sweater or a baseball cap of the wrong team.
Guns are designed to kill efficiently and with little effort. Why should it be fine to carry something that lethal around? And what does fall under "arms"? Smallpox virus? Enriched uranium? A canister of mustard gas? If anyone has these things in public they get instantly arrested and thrown in jail, but not for being a trigger happy concealed firearms fanatic?
What the hell is wrong with this country???
Please don't lump all muslims into the terrorist bag....I know plenty friends and coworkers who are of muslims, none of them peddles their religion or endorses violent acts. The radicals are a minute minority, but they grab the headlines for destroying an entire religion.
How much more expensive with craptastic service can it get? That was the main reason I ditched TimeWarner Cable...freakishly expensive and it never worked.
....but I am more afraid of all those who vote for idiots like Kirby DeLauter....Kirby? Kirby? Isn't that a vacuum cleaner brand? I guess technically we need to blame his parents for that.
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It depends a lot on your circumstances and the school district you are in as well as the state you reside in. Both my children are homeschooled by my wife with me helping out where applicable. We live in a school district where the high school has a dismal graduation rate of around 40%, the other schools do not much better. Ironically, the high school one district over and just a mile away has a graduation rate of 98%.So in that regards we as parents can't do any worse job than the local public schools. That said, if the public schools were doing well the incentive would be lower. Homeschooling takes a lot of time. My wife spends anywhere from 4 to 8 hours on actual instruction, but that on only four days a week. I do one activity at night or on the weekend. Also, my wife spends several hours a week on prepping for school and staying informed. That means if you have a full time or even part time job you may find not having enough time. Homeschooling isn't cheap, but you definitely can be frugal about it. Also, some states provide the text books no matter if a student is in public, private, or home school. You still need to buy books, materials, and supplies. The more work you put in yourself the less you have to pay. There are many curricula ready to go with instructions and tests and so on already done. Those tend not to be cheap. Homeschooling still has a bad rap, many think you are a religious nutball, a whacky liberal, a sect member, jobless, or the devil in disguise. Also, some school districts have staff that is totally anti-homeschooling. Some districts try to bully homeschoolers with made up rules, so in any case you need to be well versed on the legal framework. In some states like Connecticut you do not have to do anything although a letter of intent to the district is encouraged. In some you have to do a lot of paperwork with quarterly and annual reports, for example in New York. And then there are states like Pennsylvania that make homeschooling total hell with insane restrictions and requirements that are not even applied to public schools. For that reason the stats are hard to come by and often biased depending on who tries to make what argument. That said, the best thing is that you are in control. You and your child set the pace. If the child needs more time with one subject you have the luxury to spend more time. If you want to do an awesome project that takes a few days you can do that as well. If you had enough and need to take a few days off, you can do that as well. Vacation when everyone else is in school is also an option. You don't like a text book...find a different one and sell the other one on eBay or Amazon. All this is not possible in a public school setting. And that is the main reason why homeschoolers might do better academically, they set their own pace and they repeat the stuff they didn't get the first time as many times as it takes. It is possible to be at 7th grade level in reading and writing, but still at 5th grade level in math. That is not a problem at all as homeschooler as long as you get the content covered eventually. Often times it just clicks and a child gets it quickly although before it was like talking to a wall. Some children learn gradually, others have learning spurts and then level off. Nothing wrong with that, but something a public school with 40 kids in a class cannot accommodate. As homeschooler you can also cut out all that crap like daily pledge of allegiance or citizenship courses or whatever other useless garbage gets dumped on kids in schools. You can also prevent that your child's life gets destroyed by curricula such as "Everyday Math" or the many history books with totally distorted facts. Now to the dumb argument of homeschoolers lacking social interaction. Do you know how many school districts do not allow kids to speak to each other on the bus or on the school yard? And definitely not in class unless asked. What kind of social interaction is that? My kids attend a drama club, a choir, and arts and computer classes. In the summer they play with other k
VBox is desktop virtualization, similar to VMWare Workstation. I use both regularly to run tests on clean systems (VMWare) or in combination with Genymotion to emulate Android. Would be nice to have Genymotion run on top of VMWare Player or Workstation instead, one less tool ecosystem to worry about.
Not sure if it is a matter of features, but Genymotion runs on top of VirtualBox and is the only affordable Android emulator. A close second is Bluestacks, but they charge even for personal use.
Mosquitoes are annoying to humans, but they are dinner for a number of other animals. Killing off almost all mosquitoes will impact other wildlife.
I agree...but I have to mention that Lego Robotics is freakishly expensive! Unless you can find a good sponsor you won't be able to get enough sets for even a small group. I looked into this for my kids and I could just not afford it.
The Raspberry Pi was designed exactly for this purpose. You can program it in Python or Scratch, but also many other languages. In regards to programming, I spent a fair share of time with VB6, ObjectPAL, Pascal, C, Assembler, Delphi, VB.NET and Java. Except for VB6 (which is unfortunately dead) they are all cumbersome and needlessly complicated. I eventually found my home with PHP, you want to do X then the command to use it typically X. PHP is also excellently documented and as demanded by others is a marketable skill. Yes, it has shortcomings and is quirky at times, but despite its simplicity you can do a lot of awesome things...and that even without object oriented programming. Just yesterday I came across https://codecombat.com/ (might even have been from a /. article), it is a game that teaches coding skills. I didn't have time yet to evaluate if it is any good.
....are developers who embrace the entire product design cycle, that includes business analysis, testing, and support. That means mainly not having the attitude that requirements are never to be questioned and once something compiles with less than three dozen warnings the code is ready for production. Great developers are also not to snobby to reject taking on a customer support case, pitching in during regression testing before a release, or fixing bugs (that they put into the app). In short, great developers do not come across as a diva that leaves no opportunity out to state how awesome they are.
Municipal networks and the separation of ISPs and infrastructure providers (means ISPs get equal access to the infrastructure) increased competition and competition brings better service and / or lower prices. In the US you are lucky if you can chose between a slowpoke phone company offering DSL or a greedy cable company with craptastic service - or the combination of both with satellite or mobile service. When leaving metro areas you are out of luck anyway, the reason why there are still many who use dialup. Even if there is a true choice, the cost of access and the service provided is expensive and slow compared to even western Europe. It is a matter of legislation, such as prohibiting municipalities from building their own fibre networks or putting many road blocks into the path of companies like Google. As long as the legal and regulatory framework does not allow anything else than the status quo, well, all you get is the status quo. That is followed by dumb arguments about cost, the same reason why the entire banking sector still operates with the same tech used in the 60s.
Years ago it was shown that electronic noise emitted by keyboards and mice could be easily retrieved with some cheap off the shelf hardware even from across a street. That is the reason why many government agencies are dusting off the mechanical typewriters.
Google Glass - aside from being just creepy and ugly - is a solution to a problem that does not exist. And for that it is ridiculously overpriced and tied to having a phone nearby.
What is the point in open sourcing IE? Just throw this steaming pile of garbage into the digital trash can and forget that it ever existed.
Congress needs to pass legislation that limits any phone, email, and fax interaction solely on an opt-in basis and opt-out requests need to be handled within a day (not this "you will be removed from our mailing list in 6-8 weeks"). This needs to include political campaigns as well. The only exception is reverse 911 for obvious reasons.
Even if RS would emerge from bankruptcy, what would they do after that? Keep having stores open that are only good for taking your broken rechargeable batteries for free recycling? Once in a while I go there to buy something, but then they either do not have something simple like standard transistors, diodes, or 120mm fans, or they charge so much for it that I could buy a dozen of them online with overnight shipping. They used to have stuff for the electronics and computer hobbyist and they used to have knowledgeable staff. Now they only have an array of dorks that can do nothing unless you tell them the catalog number just to have them fail to operate a cash register.
After reading your comment I reread the original post...now with more coffee in me. I totally missed that, yea, they are asking the dimensions of the box that gets shipped, not what is inside the box. Also, flat rate is only a deal with you max out the weight. For everything else using your own box is cheaper.
Less than stellar user experience IS a bug. Bugs are not limited to "Object reference not set to an instance of object" errors that mean nothing to anyone.
Agreed...I think it is so engrained in everyone at USPS that ZIP (that is an acronym, so all caps) comes last. That makes sense when writing out an address because it makes it easier to spot the ZIP for humans and machines. Although, in many other countries the postal code is in front of the city name and their postal service can figure it out no problem.
Stauss and Seidel define a bug as "anything that negatively impacts user experience". So #1 is clearly a bug. As far as #4 goes, you'd think that a postal service offers a means to mail them a letter with a question or concern. All they offer is email or phone! I sent a letter a few months ago to the Postmaster General in DC about this, still waiting for a response. Seems as if USPS is not set up to handle and read mail from its postal customers.
Please use stamps rather than these fugly stickers. With more stamps used more canceled stamps can be collected. Once you collected cancelled stamps send them to Briefmarkenstelle Bethel Quellenhofweg 25 33617 Bielefeld Germany The stamp office in Bethel employs over 120 handicapped people who earn a living wage processing stamps and packaging them for sale to distributors and collectors. This program also funds partially other work programs and rehab for handicapped people with the aim to give them a purposeful live and work either at Bethel or in other settings. Don't want to pay the postage to Germany? Contact me and you can send the stamps to me. Also, if you know of a US organization that accepts cancelled stamps for an as worthy cause let me know. Some folks are hesitant to donate to organizations outside of the US although it is irrelevant where you help people. Also, this is NOT a call for money donations nor do I sell any stamps (you need to take my word for it, but I will share the thank you letter if you want). This is solely about keeping cancelled stamps out of the trash and putting them to good use.
All university and college education should be paid for by the community. Germany does this and the moderate attempts to introduce tuition payments flopped. As in the US, the majority of the money did not end up in academia. For US universities the expenses in academia (teaching students) were flat throughout the past two decades while the administrative expenses grew by a factor of three. Money collected through tuition is mainly spent on more admin assistants, office furniture, landscaping, or football stadiums. Speaking of which, cutting college athletics out entirely would already lead to a big savings. No a single athletics program at any US school is generating revenue, quite contrary, over all after counting free tuition and benefits for coaches and athletes the programs generate a net loss that is paid by other students. What Obama should ask for is this: - spin off college athletics into self-financed (non-profit) organizations that may cooperate with colleges, but are not longer a part of a college, neither financially nor administratively - slash administration to a reasonable minimum - drop tuition for all degrees across the board, students still have plenty of money to pay on housing, books, and materials - in return set limits as to how long a student can attend school before completing a degree, not everyone is cut out for this Until that happens, your best bet is learning German and study in Germany. Excellent universities and no tuition, not even for foreigners. Just be prepared that even the middle of the pack colleges in Germany are tough. I've studied both in Germany and the US, in the US even at master level. While I did not attend all US universities the ones I attended were academic fluff.
Since top level management read a small blip about Agile they consider constant delivery and no docs as the panacea for everything wrong with software development. This idea makes managers think they can just stuff a story into a backlog, put in first place, and have it all ready for delivery three weeks from now (by cutting testing to half a day at the end of a sprint). Short term sales figures show they are right, consumers and businesses alike shop for features. I've seen multimillion dollar international sales contracts for software and not a single line in there asks about proof of quality or having access to test plans and test results. As long as customers favor features over quality any complaints about the lack of quality is nothing but bovine excrement. Demand to see the test plans and test results before paying a penny and demand a warranty. As far as software companies go, stop setting arbitrary delivery dates and instead provide decent requirements and expectations, then ship when the work is done. It might take four or five weeks, but it saves you managers from apologizing for crappy products in press releases.
Buying a phone is not the burden, paying excessive amounts of money each month for a data plan is the big hindrance to expanding mobile everywhere. Drop the price for data plans and many more will consider a smartphone.
Tell that to the mother of the two year old who played in mom's purse...oh, you cannot because the loaded and concealed weapon fired and killed the gun owner (mom). Guns in public are an incredibly safety hazard, especially with the legislation in some areas where murderers walk free claiming they "felt threatened". There is no limit on what the threats would be. If a loud car stereo is reason enough so might be an ugly christmas sweater or a baseball cap of the wrong team. Guns are designed to kill efficiently and with little effort. Why should it be fine to carry something that lethal around? And what does fall under "arms"? Smallpox virus? Enriched uranium? A canister of mustard gas? If anyone has these things in public they get instantly arrested and thrown in jail, but not for being a trigger happy concealed firearms fanatic? What the hell is wrong with this country???
Please don't lump all muslims into the terrorist bag....I know plenty friends and coworkers who are of muslims, none of them peddles their religion or endorses violent acts. The radicals are a minute minority, but they grab the headlines for destroying an entire religion.
How much more expensive with craptastic service can it get? That was the main reason I ditched TimeWarner Cable...freakishly expensive and it never worked.
....but I am more afraid of all those who vote for idiots like Kirby DeLauter....Kirby? Kirby? Isn't that a vacuum cleaner brand? I guess technically we need to blame his parents for that.