but in the real world, please name ONE country that acts properly, here. go ahead, I'll wait. go show me one that will not trample on citizens' rights in the name of 'fighting bad guys', whatever bad guys are defined as, locally.
Somalia. Then again, you may not approve of their form of "community policing", either.
You'll forgive me if I don't reply to any replies. I'll be preemptively shooting each of my hard drives to remove any risk of being suspected of having child pornography.
And all my CDs, DVDs, USB drives, and floppies.
Don't forget your bookshelves. That copy of Lolita is just praying for a Fed to find it. Oh, and I see the movie's playing on cable, so you're now proven to be actively infringing. James Mason must be spinning in his grave. What on Earth was he thinking?!?
I see your public library has a copy too, so you're exploiting children every time you pay your taxes, you bastard!
You are correct sir. The US is in fact the most evil nation to ever curse the earth with its existence.
Sweeping generalizations are always wrong.:-)
The problem is it's a big country containing lots of people and you can only barely identify with each other, much less the rest of the world. You expend so much wasted energy fighting amongst yourselves (Dems vs. GOP, whites vs. blacks and chicanos, North vs. South, Liberals vs. Fundies, 1% vs. 99%, straights vs. gays, $blah vs. Jews & Israel, yada, yada, !@#$ing yada, on and on). You deem yourselves to be The World Cop, and are seemingly *always* looking for the next sovereign country to invade and slap into line with your vision of how things "should be", whatever the !@#$ that is at that particular moment.
Then when a disaster hits yell at us some more about how are help is flowing in too slow.
Katrina. You can't even clean up the messes that happen within your own back yard. You can't even spell "our" right.
Meanwhile, you're exporting your visions of messes to the world (War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, patent and trademark IP trollery & *AA fascism, "Won't someone think of the children?!?",...) and have been doing so for decades now, if not centuries. The joke's getting real old.
The USA has *so* much potential going for it, yet these are the things it's known for these days. Why is that? If you'd just look inwards and try to sort out some of your own internal problems for a bit (and maybe even just grow up), the rest of the world would stop bitching and leave you alone, and might even learn to miss you.
Lastly, this, in a small way, [is] Google's fault.
Not fair. Pretty much any system can be gamed. Humans excel at sneaky, underhanded stuff. Google can't change that. It's practically human nature. They can try to minimize its effect, but it's always going to be part of the mix.
Blaming the teachers' unions proves you are a fucking retard who listens to too much Rush Limbaugh.
Get a grip, union boy. I said the bottlenecks were the school board *and* the union. I do not listen to Limbaugh, and anyone who uses epithets like "Retardican" is a nitwit, at best, and that's being charitable on my part.
*Try* to be just a bit less partisan polarized. You ought to read what you write sometime. You'll be ashamed.
You want to have schools that teach well and give all kids an opportunity for a good education? LEARN TO BE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT.
You are paying for it, big time! The trouble is how little you're getting for all that cash. The school board in my town just blew a huge wad for a new building, and they have no idea what to do with the old one. Great planning there. They're only using 1.5 floors of the new building. We have close to three times as many school board members as city councilmen! For what?!? To help the school board blow through money, I guess.
The teachers aren't being supported, politicians treat the budget like their personal fiefdom, and imbeciles spread too thin do their IT. Chyaa, that's going to work.:-P
My sister spends close to a month doing report cards, then re-doing the ones the principal sends back.
I think my dad purchased the first report software himself, since the time he'd save made it worthwhile and the senior teachers were a bit old. The school bought it soon enough, once he'd shown other teachers. This is the first result, but £23 ($35?) is probably a worthwhile investment for your sister. There's even a free trial.
Non-starter. It's Windows only and insists on MS-Word. Over here, Macs pretty much have a lock on the education market.
She once forgot her password so I tried logging in as "Admin" and got in. Sweet Hey-Zeus! I've got mad skills. In addition to grades they had personal information for students (parents' names and SS #s).
Merde. That kind of thing would tempt me to do an "export" of all data, then blow it all away. Then I'd hold it hostage until they agreed to listen to me, agreed to fire the !@#$head that came up with that stupid system, and agreed to take people's personal data seriously.
Go ahead, throw me in jail. Your data's still being held hostage until you agree. It's encrypted. I think San Francisco's former network admin was on the right track. This sort of !@#$ must be stopped.
From OP:"... support making school tax == 0% for those parents..."
I would have parsed that as "making school tax == 0%". This just shows that humans make lousy compilers/interpreters. We're too forgiving, sloppy, and willing to try to make sense of whatever we hear or read, whether that interpretation was intended by the speaker or writer, or not. It all may be valid English, but just because it compiles does not mean it produces anything of any value.
If you're talking about July and August off, you haven't factored in the couple of months teachers expend moving between classrooms or schools with the tonne of stuff they've accumulated over the years, not to mention the inevitable meetings they have to stomach during it all. And once they're moved in, the principal may still insist they move again to another space, at the last minute. The system is rife with favoritism and simply chaotic.
I always got my mom's or dad's signature when I got a bad write-up that required my parents signature. I guess I was raised better then most in terms of respecting my elders.
I'm a bit shocked to see people write that they're stunned to find people who didn't forge their parent's signatures. I was raised seriously white bread. I first heard about ethics and morality when I hit about twenty. Elders? They can row their own damned oars, can't they?
Maybe I just didn't care what school thought about me.
BTW, "then" is about time, not comparisons. "Than" is what you should have used. Too many people do it, and it's annoying.
Teachers should be able to use technology to teach 50-60 students at a time, all with individualized instruction.
My sister's an elementary school teacher. She can use tech. She's not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is the school board and the teachers' union. She's been begging the school board all year to get software she wants to use. It finally showed up last week, in March.
Report Cards *could* be damnably simple; radio buttons on a couple of web pages, with a few text boxes thrown in for detail. Instead, it's all done by hand just as it was done 150 years ago, because everybody else thinks it's alright as it is and it doesn't need to be changed. My sister spends close to a month doing report cards, then re-doing the ones the principal sends back.
Add in all the PC !@#$ that teachers have to look out for these days (they don't even want to mention "Christmas" now that there's rampant multi-cult sensitivities to consider). God help her if she gets a "slow" kid whose parents refuse to believe is slow. "MY PRECIOUS SNOWFLAKE IS NOT SLOW, DAMNIT!"
School IT is close to the bottom of the barrel, right next to lawyers' and doctors' IT. School, though, has the added encumbrance of school board bureacracy and a teachers union in the mix.
It is nice, too, that we were given a second chance (in terms of Marshall vs. Morgenthau plan).
Holy crap, what an abomination! I've never heard of that before. "There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a 'pastoral state'. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it." Aiiee! Cold War East Germany was bad enough. The Morgenthau Plan would have been just what a Hitler would have wanted to justify WWIII.
As I said, pretty much everyone back then was nuts. Germany was just desperately trying to fit into the general insanity of the times. Germans are just too good at everything they try to do, hence Naziism; whole hog, all the way, to the logical extreme.
I'm not enjoying this century much, but I'm glad to see the back of that one.
The interesting bit is, it did happen there, but you got over it (with a little help from your friends:-).
We were full of shit back then, and it is invaluable that someone (a lot of people actually) went through hell to beat it out of us.
I blame their philosophers, and I think just about everyone was full of it back then. It was one cluster!@#$ of a century, and the repercussions of it are still reverberating through the system. Historians of the future are going to have a field day with it.
Case in point: I learned just the other day that "Ultra" was cracked by the Poles and the solution given to the Brits and French *five weeks before WWII broke out.* So, what did Bletchly Park and Alan Turing do, really? What else have they been lying to us about?
It'll all come out eventually, though we may not live long enough to see it. So many helpless victims caught up in the storm that is life.:-|
C) Sure, no problem with fairness and tit-for-tat. Just give me they keys and access to all your personnel files and corporate/company/business/entity email accounts and Facebook account(s), let me check out and do a background check, etc. on you and your personnel, make sure I might actually want to work for you, and then I'll let you access my Facebook account.
I am totally stunned by the fact that it is possible at all for employers do this in the US.
Modern day "Murricans" can be pretty strange. Cf. Janet Jackson's clothing malfunction, and the ensuing bruhaha. Tempest in a teapot, or Puritanical radicals running amok? You be the judge.
If it happened here in Germany, everyone would be outraged, and the company would be knee-deep in trouble.
The interesting bit is, it did happen there, but you got over it (with a little help from your friends:-).
It would be in the news front pages and on prime-time TV. The employer's reputation would be damaged for a long time. IANAL but I am sure this level of threatening someone's privacy is a criminal offense here.
And that's why I love the new Germany. I wish I was there with you.
Present day US is nuts. Their current modus operandi appears to have been taken lock, stock and barrel from 1930's Germany. Ick.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry about the spelling.
No problem.
Katrina: Federal governments are slow.
Your federal gov't was damned near comatose. Canadian S&R arrived on scene before yours did. WTF are you doing sending money to FEMA?!?
The Katrina problem said a lot about the people of the area.
No, don't blame it on the Cajuns. That was USA fail all the way. "Just a buch of darkies treading water. It'll dry out soon enough."
but in the real world, please name ONE country that acts properly, here. go ahead, I'll wait. go show me one that will not trample on citizens' rights in the name of 'fighting bad guys', whatever bad guys are defined as, locally.
Somalia. Then again, you may not approve of their form of "community policing", either.
You'll forgive me if I don't reply to any replies. I'll be preemptively shooting each of my hard drives to remove any risk of being suspected of having child pornography.
And all my CDs, DVDs, USB drives, and floppies.
Don't forget your bookshelves. That copy of Lolita is just praying for a Fed to find it. Oh, and I see the movie's playing on cable, so you're now proven to be actively infringing. James Mason must be spinning in his grave. What on Earth was he thinking?!?
I see your public library has a copy too, so you're exploiting children every time you pay your taxes, you bastard!
If they actually had full control of the servers then they would have to pay the hosting company for the servers until such time as they release them.
I wonder why they don't just dump it to tape and then blow it away. Bill the Feds for the tapes and costs and move on. "Not our problem."
Probably something to do with lawyers.
You are correct sir. The US is in fact the most evil nation to ever curse the earth with its existence.
Sweeping generalizations are always wrong. :-)
The problem is it's a big country containing lots of people and you can only barely identify with each other, much less the rest of the world. You expend so much wasted energy fighting amongst yourselves (Dems vs. GOP, whites vs. blacks and chicanos, North vs. South, Liberals vs. Fundies, 1% vs. 99%, straights vs. gays, $blah vs. Jews & Israel, yada, yada, !@#$ing yada, on and on). You deem yourselves to be The World Cop, and are seemingly *always* looking for the next sovereign country to invade and slap into line with your vision of how things "should be", whatever the !@#$ that is at that particular moment.
Then when a disaster hits yell at us some more about how are help is flowing in too slow.
Katrina. You can't even clean up the messes that happen within your own back yard. You can't even spell "our" right.
Meanwhile, you're exporting your visions of messes to the world (War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, patent and trademark IP trollery & *AA fascism, "Won't someone think of the children?!?", ...) and have been doing so for decades now, if not centuries. The joke's getting real old.
The USA has *so* much potential going for it, yet these are the things it's known for these days. Why is that? If you'd just look inwards and try to sort out some of your own internal problems for a bit (and maybe even just grow up), the rest of the world would stop bitching and leave you alone, and might even learn to miss you.
Why the "Scare Quotes" in the title?
There were "exposed wires protruding." Holy !@#$, it *must* be a bomb!!!11
I need John Connor's contact details. Anyone? :-P
Freedom of speech does not include freedom to slander.
I figured you'd say that, you sheep-romancer! Like the wool, don't ya.
Er ..., what?!? Is this an inside joke?
The day I learned of 'Google-bombing', I lost any confidence in their search engine.
Then, I learned of the Googlewhack, and understood it's all about user error. Human civilization is powered by user error.
Fine her and close her blogs.
Tubal ligation comes to mind too.
Lastly, this, in a small way, [is] Google's fault.
Not fair. Pretty much any system can be gamed. Humans excel at sneaky, underhanded stuff. Google can't change that. It's practically human nature. They can try to minimize its effect, but it's always going to be part of the mix.
Blaming the teachers' unions proves you are a fucking retard who listens to too much Rush Limbaugh.
Get a grip, union boy. I said the bottlenecks were the school board *and* the union. I do not listen to Limbaugh, and anyone who uses epithets like "Retardican" is a nitwit, at best, and that's being charitable on my part.
*Try* to be just a bit less partisan polarized. You ought to read what you write sometime. You'll be ashamed.
You want to have schools that teach well and give all kids an opportunity for a good education? LEARN TO BE WILLING TO PAY FOR IT.
You are paying for it, big time! The trouble is how little you're getting for all that cash. The school board in my town just blew a huge wad for a new building, and they have no idea what to do with the old one. Great planning there. They're only using 1.5 floors of the new building. We have close to three times as many school board members as city councilmen! For what?!? To help the school board blow through money, I guess.
The teachers aren't being supported, politicians treat the budget like their personal fiefdom, and imbeciles spread too thin do their IT. Chyaa, that's going to work. :-P
My sister spends close to a month doing report cards, then re-doing the ones the principal sends back.
I think my dad purchased the first report software himself, since the time he'd save made it worthwhile and the senior teachers were a bit old. The school bought it soon enough, once he'd shown other teachers. This is the first result, but £23 ($35?) is probably a worthwhile investment for your sister. There's even a free trial.
Non-starter. It's Windows only and insists on MS-Word. Over here, Macs pretty much have a lock on the education market.
She once forgot her password so I tried logging in as "Admin" and got in. Sweet Hey-Zeus! I've got mad skills. In addition to grades they had personal information for students (parents' names and SS #s).
Merde. That kind of thing would tempt me to do an "export" of all data, then blow it all away. Then I'd hold it hostage until they agreed to listen to me, agreed to fire the !@#$head that came up with that stupid system, and agreed to take people's personal data seriously.
Go ahead, throw me in jail. Your data's still being held hostage until you agree. It's encrypted. I think San Francisco's former network admin was on the right track. This sort of !@#$ must be stopped.
From OP:"... support making school tax == 0% for those parents..."
I would have parsed that as "making school tax == 0%". This just shows that humans make lousy compilers/interpreters. We're too forgiving, sloppy, and willing to try to make sense of whatever we hear or read, whether that interpretation was intended by the speaker or writer, or not. It all may be valid English, but just because it compiles does not mean it produces anything of any value.
Mea culpa. :-P
... and a short work year.
If you're talking about July and August off, you haven't factored in the couple of months teachers expend moving between classrooms or schools with the tonne of stuff they've accumulated over the years, not to mention the inevitable meetings they have to stomach during it all. And once they're moved in, the principal may still insist they move again to another space, at the last minute. The system is rife with favoritism and simply chaotic.
Aaaaah! It burns! It burns! The brackets/parentheses opened and I waited for them to close ...
Make believe you're a compiler or interpreter. The sooner you bail, the sooner you'll feel better.
I always got my mom's or dad's signature when I got a bad write-up that required my parents signature. I guess I was raised better then most in terms of respecting my elders.
I'm a bit shocked to see people write that they're stunned to find people who didn't forge their parent's signatures. I was raised seriously white bread. I first heard about ethics and morality when I hit about twenty. Elders? They can row their own damned oars, can't they?
Maybe I just didn't care what school thought about me.
BTW, "then" is about time, not comparisons. "Than" is what you should have used. Too many people do it, and it's annoying.
Sigh.
That's one of the reasons I support making school tax == 0% for those parents with children who "opt out" of government school (for that year).
Also, your use of the double-equals sign is incorrect. In most programming languages, a single equals would be what you intend.
Wrongo. He was speaking equivalence, not assignment. In C/C++, single equals assigns a value. Double equals is used for tests of equivalence.
Perl's smarter. Single equals does everything. Colon equals is Pascal? I don't go there.
You shouldn't try to talk about that which you don't know, and certainly should not pontificate to others in that state. HTH.
Teachers should be able to use technology to teach 50-60 students at a time, all with individualized instruction.
My sister's an elementary school teacher. She can use tech. She's not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is the school board and the teachers' union. She's been begging the school board all year to get software she wants to use. It finally showed up last week, in March.
Report Cards *could* be damnably simple; radio buttons on a couple of web pages, with a few text boxes thrown in for detail. Instead, it's all done by hand just as it was done 150 years ago, because everybody else thinks it's alright as it is and it doesn't need to be changed. My sister spends close to a month doing report cards, then re-doing the ones the principal sends back.
Add in all the PC !@#$ that teachers have to look out for these days (they don't even want to mention "Christmas" now that there's rampant multi-cult sensitivities to consider). God help her if she gets a "slow" kid whose parents refuse to believe is slow. "MY PRECIOUS SNOWFLAKE IS NOT SLOW, DAMNIT!"
School IT is close to the bottom of the barrel, right next to lawyers' and doctors' IT. School, though, has the added encumbrance of school board bureacracy and a teachers union in the mix.
Hell at the temperature of the Sun's corona.
It is nice, too, that we were given a second chance (in terms of Marshall vs. Morgenthau plan).
Holy crap, what an abomination! I've never heard of that before. "There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a 'pastoral state'. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it." Aiiee! Cold War East Germany was bad enough. The Morgenthau Plan would have been just what a Hitler would have wanted to justify WWIII.
As I said, pretty much everyone back then was nuts. Germany was just desperately trying to fit into the general insanity of the times. Germans are just too good at everything they try to do, hence Naziism; whole hog, all the way, to the logical extreme.
I'm not enjoying this century much, but I'm glad to see the back of that one.
The interesting bit is, it did happen there, but you got over it (with a little help from your friends :-).
We were full of shit back then, and it is invaluable that someone (a lot of people actually) went through hell to beat it out of us.
I blame their philosophers, and I think just about everyone was full of it back then. It was one cluster!@#$ of a century, and the repercussions of it are still reverberating through the system. Historians of the future are going to have a field day with it.
Case in point: I learned just the other day that "Ultra" was cracked by the Poles and the solution given to the Brits and French *five weeks before WWII broke out.* So, what did Bletchly Park and Alan Turing do, really? What else have they been lying to us about?
It'll all come out eventually, though we may not live long enough to see it. So many helpless victims caught up in the storm that is life. :-|
#include std_disclaimer_ianal.h
That's funny by itself. Must be a C++ thing? :-)
Wasn't there a fairly recent ruling that made violating the TOS of an online service a criminal act?
That was the bullying case, methinks, and that was overturned (violating a ToS is not a criminal act).
Under Federal law, even an at-will employee can't be legally fired for refusing to commit an illegal act.
Wow. Sanity prevails still.
C) Sure, no problem with fairness and tit-for-tat. Just give me they keys and access to all your personnel files and corporate/company/business/entity email accounts and Facebook account(s), let me check out and do a background check, etc. on you and your personnel, make sure I might actually want to work for you, and then I'll let you access my Facebook account.
Obviously, not a "team player."
I am totally stunned by the fact that it is possible at all for employers do this in the US.
Modern day "Murricans" can be pretty strange. Cf. Janet Jackson's clothing malfunction, and the ensuing bruhaha. Tempest in a teapot, or Puritanical radicals running amok? You be the judge.
If it happened here in Germany, everyone would be outraged, and the company would be knee-deep in trouble.
The interesting bit is, it did happen there, but you got over it (with a little help from your friends :-).
It would be in the news front pages and on prime-time TV. The employer's reputation would be damaged for a long time. IANAL but I am sure this level of threatening someone's privacy is a criminal offense here.
And that's why I love the new Germany. I wish I was there with you.
Present day US is nuts. Their current modus operandi appears to have been taken lock, stock and barrel from 1930's Germany. Ick.
It sounds like nothing but trouble!
Ok, why does anybody "need" the Internet? I sounds like nothing but trouble!
I can control my interfacing with the Internet. You've no control over FB. You're their product.
When you hold a position of trust, especially over children, what you do in the rest of your life matters. And that's completely reasonable.
Idiot. When they start molesting the kids under their charge, call me. Until then, idiot!