High schools are governed and accredited by the state, not by an accreditation authority. If a school is failing to meet standards, the school is taken over by the district and the relevant staff and teachers are replaced. If an entire school district is that crappy, the state board of education usually comes in and takes over. In either case, students in such a situation still have to pass state-written tests and meet minimum state standards. Otherwise, they don't get the diploma.
As for colleges not accepting graduates from a given high school? There are far too many commercial colleges (e.g. University of Phoenix) and community colleges who will accept anyone as long as they pass some basic entrance exams and the checks clear, so really, that's bullshit as well. Now if you meant state or highly reputable colleges, then it's more likely that such kids would fall off due to the entrance competition. I suspect that UF is one of those schools, where they have more students applying than they have seats, so naturally the competition would kill them off.
PS: I'm pretty sure that the University of Florida isn't having problems renewing/keeping its accreditation.
That "dictionary attack" should've triggered something on Hotmail's servers after, oh, the 48 millionth failed login attempt in less than five minutes...
Looking at it from a Black Hat perspective, if they're stupid enough to keep requiring that, then once Windows 8 gets released, things will become, well, interesting...
Ah yes... the always-free DAVIT suite! (Darwin AntiVirus Involuntary Testing)!...but wait, they've had that for years now. You'd think GMail would have at least aped the feature once or twice...
Hello, Obama? Anyone home? There's a campaign donation in it for you from a few big tech luminaries, I'm pretty sure.
Sadly, that's not correct... most "big tech luminaries" happily use patents as cudgels to prevent little guys from entering their staked-out territories, or to push out anyone who gets in their way.
I'm not seeing any big tech corporation wanting to remove what is arguably becoming their biggest (and still legal) weapon to fend off or tame the competition.
After all, look at how much money Microsoft has managed to score from 'selling' Android to the manufacturers so far...
"We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued."
(...mind you, this is originally posted in jest, but it points to some pretty scary shit that some folks are willing to suggest, just to whip up the crowds.)
Someone is going to die after telling their family members that they've stopped seeing a regular doctor and went holistic with Crooksey when they should have had their ankle amputated.
Wait, what?
I can understand someone doing something stupid like deciding to forego certain medications (in this case Metformin, Insulin, whatever) in favor of some holistic thing, but skipping surgery based on what some random dude on a blog says? C'mon, you're flirting with argumentum ad absurdum there.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with your main point: if he's charging money giving actual medical advice sans license, he's opened himself up to a shitload of liability, and if something goes wrong, he's liable to become a permanent pauper.
OTOH, as long as he was smart enough to put up the regular disclaimers ("this is not actual medical advice, always see and trust your doctor first, etc...") then nobody has a leg to stand on (I know, I know...) when it comes to prosecuting him, because as long as those disclaimers are prominent enough to be legible on his site or elsewhere, anyone trying to sue him would have a very hard time winning.
Good luck with that... from childhood (watching schoolyard fights), we've been addicted to drama, and it won't stop any time soon. My FB page (as little as I see it) is already swamped with political spam for both sides, each fervently proclaiming that the other guy is the locus of all evils... too bad neither side can go out of their way to list definitive good things about their own chosen side. I just block 'em all until after election season.
But when you think about it, the manufactured kind of drama (brought to you by CNN, Fox News, drudgereport.com, et al) isn't necessarily malicious in and of itself, but only serves to capture eyeballs, thus advertising dollars. The malice is just a side effect (and one that no one seems interested in alleviating).
Look at it this way: It is a mark of maturity to know that the only way to win such a game is to not play it at all.
A tablet is meant as a terminal front end to a cloud based application.. what is it you would like to manage on it in the first place.
Speaking from the Enterprise environment, I can name three things right off...
1) prevent users from parking games on my work tablets. 2) lock down where users go with the web browser on the tablet to just those sites I want them to go. 3) do those first two things without having to go nuts with subnets, or custom proxy settings, or having to go crazy modifying my network - because if I have to do any of that, I may as well just get them iPads.
I think the Vista debacle taught them that simply patching later on down the road won't help the product reputation any (seriously - Apple's growth w/ OSX really took off when Vista released). I also suspect that Microsoft can't afford to have too many turns at saying: "yeah it's a major missing feature, but we can always patch that in later".
This isn't 1999 anymore. There's actual competition out there now, and Microsoft can ill afford to have such a blase' attitude towards the consumer, *or* the enterprise.
In Utah at least, the local schools are 'supported' by a massive state bureaucracy (known as the Utah State Office Of Education). It had its own army of curriculum specialists, administrators, PR people, union-management interface managers, test/competency proctors and formulation managers, textbook approval boards, textbook distribution centers (local school districts 'bought' books from state depots), teacher certification specialists (mostly to keep track of all the teachers, approve classes and CE credits, etc), inter-school activity specialists, and its own massive IT department to maintain the state.edu sites, servers, and networks.
If you look back in my own posting history (well, via Google), you'll see when I put up the first public school approved Linux courses, in January 2000. I had to contend with the local city school board, the local county school board, and the USOE (that state office I mentioned:) ). A root canal would have been less painful (and far less tedious), just to get that one course approved as a replacement for the 1980's era UNIX System 7 (no, really!) course that I found when I was first hired. It was approved mainly because enough bureaucrats at the top had heard the word "Linux" to know it would make them look more up-to-date (and don't ask about explaining the GPL. That took 3 months all by itself, and went all the way up to the state Attorney General's office. I never thought I would never hear the phrase "I don't understand..." so many damned times.:( )
If what you claim were true, everyone would hold teachers in high esteem.
...you mean like how every time something goes 'bump' in the school budget, the teachers are the first to be held up as the martyrs? You name the political campaign, budgeting debate, or what-have-you, it's always the same old spiel about how the poor teachers need less students, more money, etc.
Now here's the kicker: In any school, the teachers are the minority. Here's an extreme sample: When I taught, there were 210 employees of the (tech school, then state collegiate) campus, but only 42 faculty. Yep... forty-two actual teachers on a huge campus. The other 168 employees were administrators, student counselors, janitors, student aid, IT staff, Accounts (Payable|Receiving), fundraising/income specialists, marketing specialists, accountants, special-ed workers (not teachers), program managers, facilities (landscaping, electrical, plumbing, etc), curriculum specialists, bookstore staff, certification specialists (that keep track of teachers' certification requirements), legal staff (you betcha), receptionists, school district liaisons, high school (AP course) liaisons, cafeteria staff, union reps/shop stewards, a staff psychologist, nursing/medical staff, public relations staff, and assorted other positions.
In most other schools, the same ratio holds... about 20-30% of a given school's employees are actual teachers. Sometimes that drifts up to 40%, but only in rare cases.
OTOH, whenever a school budget is argued over, who gets thought of first? It ain't all those other positions I listed up there - just the teachers.
The problem ain't the teachers per se (though an amazing number are incompetent beyond belief, yet the NEA would go ballistic and threaten a general strike if you tried to fire the bad ones). The problem is this monster army of administrators and middle-management that swallows any given school budget, leaving damned little for the actual teachers. Now I'm not talking about the janitors and IT folks, but the massive percentage of paper-pushers, make-work positions (usually granted as political favors), curriculum specialists, and all the bloat that a typical school district carries on its ledger.
Trust me - it can stand a LOT of improvement, and having it run by an unaccountable, spend-happy, typically corrupt-as-hell city/state government agency? Umm, yeah.
Oh, so denying there is a real problem is the way to go then? Screw the customer!
At first the percentage of folks experiencing it was too low to statistically bother with. Once enough people experienced it, then it got fixed.
Kudos to Nokia for coming out and admitting there is a problem and promising a fix. Very un-Apple.
Apple actually delivered a fix, instead of merely promising one. Not sure how much praise you can give to a mere promise, but I usually reserve mine for actual delivery.
...quickly followed by free covers and software fixes. They also had the guts to not give their baby away for "free" in some futile effort to grab marketshare at all costs.
Samsung spews out a half-dozen new models each month, so the number of people with one particular model is likely to be relatively low (and the carrier can always apologize and send along yet another model of equal or greater specs).
Nokia on the other hand have their fiscal 'nads on the chopping block, so they cannot afford to bork-up what they've been bragging on as their latest and greatest flagship model. Microsoft stands to lose almost as much in the deal (at least as far as the mobile market goes).
Not to be a jerk or anything, but what in the hell is a "fictional fact"?
No, really, that's just wrong. Way wrong. Please don't do that again.
==
I do agree with you that once a canon of sorts is established, especially in a long-running fictional/storybook 'universe', the details of it do fill out, and fans expect the author to try and stay within them, especially as the storylines get more complex. On the other hand, it all too often happens that a new and interesting story may well break the fabric of what you the fan may have come to expect, and something is going to have to explain that.
Maybe Groening will come up with such an explanation in the future? After all, it wasn't unheard of for weird crap to occur in Start Trek:TNG (and others) to start popping out of the writers' collective arse to explain a particular story or situation (accidental time travel, getting sucked into alternate universes, the all-too-rambunctious dilithium crystals, etc.)
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Calling bullshit - here's why:
High schools are governed and accredited by the state, not by an accreditation authority. If a school is failing to meet standards, the school is taken over by the district and the relevant staff and teachers are replaced. If an entire school district is that crappy, the state board of education usually comes in and takes over.
In either case, students in such a situation still have to pass state-written tests and meet minimum state standards. Otherwise, they don't get the diploma.
As for colleges not accepting graduates from a given high school? There are far too many commercial colleges (e.g. University of Phoenix) and community colleges who will accept anyone as long as they pass some basic entrance exams and the checks clear, so really, that's bullshit as well. Now if you meant state or highly reputable colleges, then it's more likely that such kids would fall off due to the entrance competition. I suspect that UF is one of those schools, where they have more students applying than they have seats, so naturally the competition would kill them off.
PS: I'm pretty sure that the University of Florida isn't having problems renewing/keeping its accreditation.
The malware angle I could see, sitting, err, on his Windows machine.
No matter which way you slice it, Microsoft's not going to look too awful good from this.
That "dictionary attack" should've triggered something on Hotmail's servers after, oh, the 48 millionth failed login attempt in less than five minutes...
Looking at it from a Black Hat perspective, if they're stupid enough to keep requiring that, then once Windows 8 gets released, things will become, well, interesting...
Ah yes... the always-free DAVIT suite! (Darwin AntiVirus Involuntary Testing)! ...but wait, they've had that for years now. You'd think GMail would have at least aped the feature once or twice...
Hello, Obama? Anyone home? There's a campaign donation in it for you from a few big tech luminaries, I'm pretty sure.
Sadly, that's not correct... most "big tech luminaries" happily use patents as cudgels to prevent little guys from entering their staked-out territories, or to push out anyone who gets in their way.
I'm not seeing any big tech corporation wanting to remove what is arguably becoming their biggest (and still legal) weapon to fend off or tame the competition.
After all, look at how much money Microsoft has managed to score from 'selling' Android to the manufacturers so far...
You mean like moving from sprawling, single family ranch-style homes, which are expensive to cool, into the city?
Seems someone already suggested a means to hurry that part of it up, starting with the skeptics. To wit:
"We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued."
(...mind you, this is originally posted in jest, but it points to some pretty scary shit that some folks are willing to suggest, just to whip up the crowds.)
Someone is going to die after telling their family members that they've stopped seeing a regular doctor and went holistic with Crooksey when they should have had their ankle amputated.
Wait, what?
I can understand someone doing something stupid like deciding to forego certain medications (in this case Metformin, Insulin, whatever) in favor of some holistic thing, but skipping surgery based on what some random dude on a blog says? C'mon, you're flirting with argumentum ad absurdum there.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with your main point: if he's charging money giving actual medical advice sans license, he's opened himself up to a shitload of liability, and if something goes wrong, he's liable to become a permanent pauper.
OTOH, as long as he was smart enough to put up the regular disclaimers ("this is not actual medical advice, always see and trust your doctor first, etc...") then nobody has a leg to stand on (I know, I know...) when it comes to prosecuting him, because as long as those disclaimers are prominent enough to be legible on his site or elsewhere, anyone trying to sue him would have a very hard time winning.
Look into the history of the years between 1861-1865 if you want a solid example of why that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Good luck with that... from childhood (watching schoolyard fights), we've been addicted to drama, and it won't stop any time soon. My FB page (as little as I see it) is already swamped with political spam for both sides, each fervently proclaiming that the other guy is the locus of all evils... too bad neither side can go out of their way to list definitive good things about their own chosen side. I just block 'em all until after election season.
But when you think about it, the manufactured kind of drama (brought to you by CNN, Fox News, drudgereport.com, et al) isn't necessarily malicious in and of itself, but only serves to capture eyeballs, thus advertising dollars. The malice is just a side effect (and one that no one seems interested in alleviating).
Look at it this way: It is a mark of maturity to know that the only way to win such a game is to not play it at all.
x86 tablets are more expensive per unit. In the end, it's all about that cost (especially at the budgets most folks have to deal with these days).
A tablet is meant as a terminal front end to a cloud based application .. what is it you would like to manage on it in the first place.
Speaking from the Enterprise environment, I can name three things right off...
1) prevent users from parking games on my work tablets.
2) lock down where users go with the web browser on the tablet to just those sites I want them to go.
3) do those first two things without having to go nuts with subnets, or custom proxy settings, or having to go crazy modifying my network - because if I have to do any of that, I may as well just get them iPads.
I think the Vista debacle taught them that simply patching later on down the road won't help the product reputation any (seriously - Apple's growth w/ OSX really took off when Vista released). I also suspect that Microsoft can't afford to have too many turns at saying: "yeah it's a major missing feature, but we can always patch that in later".
This isn't 1999 anymore. There's actual competition out there now, and Microsoft can ill afford to have such a blase' attitude towards the consumer, *or* the enterprise.
True indeed... but sometimes, the biggest things come from the least likely people.
After all, look at what some random student in Finland managed to do with a bit of code back in 1991...
I donno, I can think of numerous films that have otherwise. Especially films starring Bruce Campbell...
...or directed by George Romero.
I wish it were that easy.
In Utah at least, the local schools are 'supported' by a massive state bureaucracy (known as the Utah State Office Of Education). It had its own army of curriculum specialists, administrators, PR people, union-management interface managers, test/competency proctors and formulation managers, textbook approval boards, textbook distribution centers (local school districts 'bought' books from state depots), teacher certification specialists (mostly to keep track of all the teachers, approve classes and CE credits, etc), inter-school activity specialists, and its own massive IT department to maintain the state .edu sites, servers, and networks.
If you look back in my own posting history (well, via Google), you'll see when I put up the first public school approved Linux courses, in January 2000. I had to contend with the local city school board, the local county school board, and the USOE (that state office I mentioned :) ). A root canal would have been less painful (and far less tedious), just to get that one course approved as a replacement for the 1980's era UNIX System 7 (no, really!) course that I found when I was first hired. It was approved mainly because enough bureaucrats at the top had heard the word "Linux" to know it would make them look more up-to-date (and don't ask about explaining the GPL. That took 3 months all by itself, and went all the way up to the state Attorney General's office. I never thought I would never hear the phrase "I don't understand..." so many damned times. :( )
If what you claim were true, everyone would hold teachers in high esteem.
...you mean like how every time something goes 'bump' in the school budget, the teachers are the first to be held up as the martyrs? You name the political campaign, budgeting debate, or what-have-you, it's always the same old spiel about how the poor teachers need less students, more money, etc.
Now here's the kicker: In any school, the teachers are the minority. Here's an extreme sample: When I taught, there were 210 employees of the (tech school, then state collegiate) campus, but only 42 faculty. Yep... forty-two actual teachers on a huge campus. The other 168 employees were administrators, student counselors, janitors, student aid, IT staff, Accounts (Payable|Receiving), fundraising/income specialists, marketing specialists, accountants, special-ed workers (not teachers), program managers, facilities (landscaping, electrical, plumbing, etc), curriculum specialists, bookstore staff, certification specialists (that keep track of teachers' certification requirements), legal staff (you betcha), receptionists, school district liaisons, high school (AP course) liaisons, cafeteria staff, union reps/shop stewards, a staff psychologist, nursing/medical staff, public relations staff, and assorted other positions.
In most other schools, the same ratio holds... about 20-30% of a given school's employees are actual teachers. Sometimes that drifts up to 40%, but only in rare cases.
OTOH, whenever a school budget is argued over, who gets thought of first? It ain't all those other positions I listed up there - just the teachers.
The problem ain't the teachers per se (though an amazing number are incompetent beyond belief, yet the NEA would go ballistic and threaten a general strike if you tried to fire the bad ones). The problem is this monster army of administrators and middle-management that swallows any given school budget, leaving damned little for the actual teachers. Now I'm not talking about the janitors and IT folks, but the massive percentage of paper-pushers, make-work positions (usually granted as political favors), curriculum specialists, and all the bloat that a typical school district carries on its ledger.
Trust me - it can stand a LOT of improvement, and having it run by an unaccountable, spend-happy, typically corrupt-as-hell city/state government agency? Umm, yeah.
Oh, so denying there is a real problem is the way to go then? Screw the customer!
At first the percentage of folks experiencing it was too low to statistically bother with. Once enough people experienced it, then it got fixed.
Kudos to Nokia for coming out and admitting there is a problem and promising a fix. Very un-Apple.
Apple actually delivered a fix, instead of merely promising one. Not sure how much praise you can give to a mere promise, but I usually reserve mine for actual delivery.
It doesn't rain nearly enough on the show, and there's not enough bars (just Moe's).
OTOH, I can see the characters based on the townfolk in general...
(Disclosure: I live near PDX.)
...quickly followed by free covers and software fixes. They also had the guts to not give their baby away for "free" in some futile effort to grab marketshare at all costs.
Therein lies the diff, no?
There is a small difference...
Samsung spews out a half-dozen new models each month, so the number of people with one particular model is likely to be relatively low (and the carrier can always apologize and send along yet another model of equal or greater specs).
Nokia on the other hand have their fiscal 'nads on the chopping block, so they cannot afford to bork-up what they've been bragging on as their latest and greatest flagship model. Microsoft stands to lose almost as much in the deal (at least as far as the mobile market goes).
Not to be a jerk or anything, but what in the hell is a "fictional fact"?
No, really, that's just wrong. Way wrong. Please don't do that again.
==
I do agree with you that once a canon of sorts is established, especially in a long-running fictional/storybook 'universe', the details of it do fill out, and fans expect the author to try and stay within them, especially as the storylines get more complex. On the other hand, it all too often happens that a new and interesting story may well break the fabric of what you the fan may have come to expect, and something is going to have to explain that.
Maybe Groening will come up with such an explanation in the future? After all, it wasn't unheard of for weird crap to occur in Start Trek:TNG (and others) to start popping out of the writers' collective arse to explain a particular story or situation (accidental time travel, getting sucked into alternate universes, the all-too-rambunctious dilithium crystals, etc.)
A definitive step forward for Nokia.
Well, if you ignore the random data connection drops and the general unsalable nature of the things, sure!
The AT&T ones are so slow that you won't require 'em.
You're holding it wrong.
Wait, what?