The "new" thing here is that computers are used, which provides for actual accuracy of the information and vastly expands the scale...
And therein lies the problem. People assume because information comes from a computer it is accurate, and once it is in a database it is hard to correct and keep corrected. The vastly expanded scale also means it is much easier to spread inaccurate information and have it in places besides the original repository, adding to the problem of fixing it.
If you want real protection, you're gonna have to change the way records are made and kept public. FB is an easy target (and Slashdot stories in the past few months show how obsessed people are with FB, but not anyone else), but it's not as big of a deal as large aggregating data companies like LexisNexis. And where do they get the bulk of their data? Public records.
Technology is making it easier to aggregate data even if the person is not a user of your services. For example, as facial recognition improves, coupled with tagging, FB and others will be able to identify a person, and as they get more hits narrow down who they are and where they probably live. By trolling other sites such as linked in they can build a pretty good data set which can be coupled with publicly available information. If they can get DL pictures a person doesn't even have to be online for a company to build a profile of them. The increasing ability to process, analyze and link vast sets of data is changing what is meant by privacy.
The only way to ensure some privacy is to have a big enough political entity pushing it; which is why previously available information on carry permits is now no longer available in some states, and gun purchase records are purged after a short period.
Except teachers don't have an option of working summers teaching and getting the extra pay, which is why the whole summer off argument is specious
Plenty of teachers take other jobs during the summer.
Which is irrelevant to how teachers are paid.
Except teachers, at least where I live, have a contract for a certain number of paid hours per week but are expected to work extra hours none the less
Teachers are not supposed to work extra hours, they are supposed to be skilled and professional enough to get the job done in the hours they have. Elementary and high school teaching should not be so intellectually taxing or unpredictable that you need extensive preparation for your lessons. University professors do need extensive preparation for lectures, which is why their teaching load is usually much lower than that of elementary and high school teachers.
Depends on the subject. I know mostly special ed teachers who spend summers preparing individual lesson plans for their students and preparing beginning of year tests so they can get a baseline to be able to show "progress" on how their kids learned something. Add in the expectations of some parents that the teacher should "cure" their kid and you have a real mess.
You have an awful high opinion of professors, most I've known teach at best one or two classes a year and reuse their notes and tests, most of their time is spent on research.
Since your arguments failed you feel it necessary to resort to ad hominems to try to make your case.
No, you were trying to make it ad hominem, namely by giving the false impression of being a teacher.
Never claimed to be a teacher yet you added in an ad hominem and now claim it was me who did that. False news, much?
I don't teach nor have I been a teacher,
I'm glad to hear it. In contrast, I have been a teacher, and I come from a family of teacher. So, I can tell you from personal experience, in addition to rational arguments, that American teachers are overpaid and underperforming, and that their arguments for why they should receive higher pay are totally unfounded.
I'm sorry if you and your family are the underperforming and overpaid teachers you reference. My experience is many teachers are not.
This whole "teachers get the summer off as a paid vacation" is a fallacy. Most teachers are paid for woking X days;
It's not a fallacy, because when people compare teacher salaries, they tend to compare "annual salaries", which are usually not corrected for the fact that teachers don't work summers.
Anyone could have the same deal if their company offers an unpaid sabbatical leave of 3 months.
Correct. And that's how we should compare teachers salaries to other salaries, namely by adding another 33% on top of the teachers salaries to account for the 3 months they don't work.
Except teachers don't have an option of working summers teaching and getting the extra pay, which is why the whole summer off argument is specious. I'm willing to bet most people would not be willing to take a mandatory 2 - 3 months unpaid leave per year and still be told although we are paying you less you're really making 33% more.
They don't get overtime if the have to stay late for an event or a parent insists on their conference be held after normal working hours
Oh, cry me a f*cking river. Pretty much everybody who doesn't work on an assembly line does that.
Except teachers, at least where I live, have a contract for a certain number of paid hours per week but are expected to work extra hours none the less; of course the county can decide to have mandatory unpaid furlough days to cut costs despite the contractual agreement. Your assembly line comment is closer to true than you realize, as it is easier to push a student along, assembly line fashion, with high grades than it is to give them C's or below. We're getting what e pay for, and I don't blame teachers for taking the easy way out.
Yes, there are bad teachers; and benefits vary greatly by state; but at the rate we are going the only people who will teach are those who can't do anything else or coaches.
That's a meaningless statements.
I think we have just identified a teacher who really shouldn't be teaching. They let you loose on students?
Since your arguments failed you feel it necessary to resort to ad hominems to try to make your case. I don't teach nor have I been a teacher, I was making an observation based on my experience knowing a number of teachers.
It's just as well I never taught public or private school; the first time a parent said "What are we going to do about my snowflake failing your class?" I'd be saying "Unless you got a mouse in your pocket there is no we in this, bitch. Either your snowflake does the work and passes or doesn't and fails. Your call. Have a nice day."
I don't understand why he didn't use his own branding
You don't? To defraud the people receiving the discs... He literally admits to it in the emails.
I get that; I was wondering because anyone with pulse should realize that is a bad idea. He could have one that an avoided all the trouble and still sell them for 25 cents; that's why I have little sympathy for him.
Yes and no. There's that kind of person, but there's also the jaded geek that spent half his life on the relevant boards, answered every single question that comes again and again until he burned out and it just pissed that people can't be bothered to use the search function.
I get that; and it got worse with eternal September...
"the veterans are marking time until they can retire."
That is always a sign that the retirement benefits are too generous.
Ture, just like waiting for a sales bonus, stock options to vest, etc. As with anyone, once you have a certain amount of skin in the game your viewpoint is often driven by economics.
I get that a newbie can be easily identified; but how do you the if posters are " women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" unless they say so? My guess is that that "most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks" is probably not far off from the mark; because the internet no one cal tell if you are a dog. Recognize the fundamental problem, which is a community that has decided to do things a certain way. I have found, at least in technology oriented forums, there are far more people willing to flame a newbie than answer a question or at least point them to a tread that does. My guess is the flamers are finally feeling superior to someone and need to compensate for their feelings of inadequacy by dumping on others.
Having a large number of lower range salaries will lower the _average_. It need not have any effect whatsoever on the median salary, which is the salary where half of the personnel make more, and half make less income. If there are "classes" among the employees, the clusters of income for those classes can profoundly distort an analysis of the wages.
As you point out, a large cluster of employees will distort the median. Amazon has a lot of low wage warehouse staff, who's numbers dwarf those of higher wage employees. Those, the salary distribution is not a bell curve but has a very fat tail at the lower end, thus driving down the median wage. If you compare Amazon's median wage to a company that doesn't have the same wage distribution, as the WSJ did, you are making an invalid comparison. If you want to compare Amazon to SV companies you need to use similar populations. I'd bet, if you adjust for cost of living, etc., Amazon is pretty close to the companies it competes with for talent.
I'd be curious to see Amazon's median salary minus the warehouse workers. They compared two marketing/advertising giants with a retail enterprise, and we're supposed to feel bad that Amazon's tens of thousands of warehouse workers don't earn a quarter-million dollars/year like top-talent programmers and technology specialists?
Puh-leeze.
Exactly. Having a lot of lower wage employees is going to drag the median way simply do to the numbers. You're comparing two populations that are not the same and drawing a conclusion from it. Unfortunately, I'd wager many of the people reading the WSJ won't recognize the fallacy.
The problem was with importing the disks. Sure, he did this to save money so that they could be sold for only $0.25. Seems like a good idea at the time. The snag though is if there were trademarks being imported from China then it's a crime (thanks to the vast armies of lobbyists). If he had these disks made in the US then it would have been only a civil matter and not a criminal one.
Yes, that was stupid on his part but had he not made them look like genuine Dell recovery disks he wouldn't have had a problem. I don't understand why he didn't use his own branding, the disks would have worked the same and the whole counterfeit trademark issue goes away.
Yes, but they won't be allowed to carry around politicians or administrators. Parent / teacher conferences, however, will be a lot more cordial when the teacher is openly packing a loaded.45 in a shoulder holster.
We should also remove the special perks for teachers: they should work a full working year, with a few weeks off, get the same kind of health insurance as other people in their income bracket, and get 401(k) or 403(b) plans instead of pensions.
This whole "teachers get the summer off as a paid vacation" is a fallacy. Most teachers are paid for woking X days; where I live they can get the check only during the school year or spread over 12 months; even so teh summers are spent prepping for the next year. Anyone could have the same deal if their company offers an unpaid sabbatical leave of 3 months. They don't get overtime if the have to stay late for an event or a parent insists on their conference be held after normal working hours. As for benefits, they are average at best in my district. Yes, they are one of the few jobs that still offers defined benefit pensions, but even then the county messes with them by giving bonuses in lieu of pay raises so they don't get included in pension calculations.
Yes, there are bad teachers; and benefits vary greatly by state; but at the rate we are going the only people who will teach are those who can't do anything else or coaches.
The problem isn't the amount of money allocated for schools. The problem is where that money goes - namely, to bloated administrative costs. Fire half of the non-teaching staff, set the salaries of the rest so that no one earns more than the teachers, and - magic - suddenly schools will have plenty of money.
Of course, that's only the first problem with public education in the US. There are a whole lot of other problems: the culture of passing students who ought to fail, the inability to fire incompetent teachers, discipline problems, etc...
While that is some of the problems, there are others than need to be addressed. I know a number of teachers and the complaints are the same. Parents who blame them for their child's problems in school; the homework's too hard, too much, the teacher doesn't know how to teach, it's never that their snowflake is lazy and or undisciplined. Overcrowded classes without enough desks or books, the administrations reply is to think outside the box. Having a contract for X days and then being told, "oh, we need to save money so you are getting a bunch of unpaid furlough days." One teacher had a parent expect her to monitor what the child was eating because she was getting fat; of course the parent sent the kid to school with extra lunch money so the kid bought cookies and Cokes. They are going to a merit bonus system and teachers have been told no one can get higher than a 3 out of 4 because the county doesn't want to pay out bonuses. It's no wonder teachers in my district retire on the first day they can, even in the middle of the school year, as a final FU to the system. A recent survey showed over 70% would retire tomorrow if the could, and actively discourage anyone, especially student teachers, from entering the profession. They can't keep match and science teachers, and most new teachers leave after a couple of years; the veterans are marking time until they can retire.
We simply do not value education and are getting what we pay for.
He could have put his own label on them and then sold them as recovery disks. Given he was running a business already he could have asked his attorney how to label them to avoid any problems. A disclaimer they were recovery disks and not provided by MS or Dell? OTOH, 15 months is an over reactions well. He admitted to copyright violation by copying Dell's trademarks, a fine would be more appropriate for importing fake goods than jail. It sounds like there is more to this story than the blog post presents. I wonder how his customers represented the disks to their customers? A repair shop could just a easily download and burn the programs to a DVD and not worry about a label beyond a Sharpie saying what version of the OS it recovers.
On the other hand, if you're like **our** household, buy quite a bit, and quite often, from Amazon, and stream their Included-in-Prime video content, 10 bucks a month is dirt cheap.
So the question is, does Prime meet your needs for the price charged? IF so, get it. IF not, don't. It's THAT simple.
This is/. Please stop trying to bring logic and reason into an argument.
I am in the same situation. I enjoy a number of the Amazon originals plus the some of the back catalogue. Music is OK as well but not as much of some artists I like is available. I find the shipping to be useful as I can buy any Prime item without worrying about shipping costs or getting enough to get free shipping. That makes it useful for smaller items that I can't easily find locally or simply don't want to spend the tase to drive to a store miles away to pick up. The avoided cost of tase probably saves me half or more of the Prime costs; plus I can get heavy items such as go food shipped free as well.
Now back to our regularly schedule Amazon Hate Fest...
Not knowing where to invest to keep it stable and reliable _is_ lack of knowledge. Not doing it when it is needed _is_ lack of knowledge.
I guess will have to agree to disagree. They know where, not doing it is a financial, not knowledge issue; especially since tehy understand the consequences of not doing the required upkeep and improvements. In some cases it's NIMBY as well, people do not want infrastructure near by since they can simply get their power from a wall outlet.
The motivation does actually not matter much. They are doing it and they are gaining a lot of insight and experience doing it. Experience and insight that others lack. Just look at examples like Germany, which apparently cannot build Airports anymore, or the US that has trouble keeping its electrical grid functioning. That is extreme loss of former capabilities right there. In large scale engineering (just like in any engineering really), you need to keep doing it to be able to keep doing it. Much of the West seems to have forgotten that.
Some of it is clearly loss of capacity and knowledge as older workers who have the experience leave the work force or the industrial facilities needed to do major projects close for lack of demand and thus if there is demand later there isn't the plants to satisfy it.
In other cases, so as the grid, it's not so much a loss of eperience and insight but a lack of investment in upgrading it and the fragmented structure of the grid. The US grid isn't one nicely interconnected where electricity can be easily transmitted from any point A to Point B; rather it is a number of essentially independent grids with internees that limit what can be transmitted between them. We saw that impact when the folks at Enron decided they could make a killing in the CA energy market by doing round trips through the internees, thereby limiting what could be imported and forcing more expensive power onto teh grid and then selling not the market. Our grid is the legacy of early regulation of the power industry, something the industry wanted, BTW, to end the competition occurring in many markets that was hampering profits, that saw the creation of separate local power companies who were restricted in selling across their service area so the grid only needed to be able to help companies get power in the event of an unplanned plant outage resulted in greater demand than could be supplied.
Yup, and taht is the same for many fields: The common usage of a domain specific term often fails to capture the nuances and lumps broad categories together. Unfortunately, once a term becomes commonplace there is no easy way to correct or modify its usage. Hacker used to be a badge of honor amongst a group of tech savvy folks, now it's a generally pejorative term, especially in the mass media.
I've never had a job that offered vacation days. The woes of being a IT contractor, never hired, always used awhile and thrown away
PTO is a myth - employers look at the total cost of an employee, and factor time off into the salary equation. Employers aren't being generous by giving you "PTO" since it is already factored into the equation. If you work for a lose or use employer and don't use your vacation you essentially are giving them a discount on your salary. It's simple economics in the end. A contractor, in many ways, is the most transparent pay situation since you are getting all teh money up front to decide how you want to use it.
With the lack of personnel I'd bet insurance rates go down in case of piracy
...or way up because piracy will become a lot easier if there are no crew.
Who needs to board it if it has a data link that can be compromised and let you redirect the vessel to a new port? The modern pirate will be someone thousands of miles away in their mom's basement hacking ships for phone; bringing the term piracy back to its original meaning.
With that in mind though, i don't think it's impossible to design more redundancy and automate a lot of the maintenance if that's factored into the design. To date, it's just been far easier and cheaper to have an engineer do it.
How you handle a connecting rod replacement in the middle of the ocean without humans would be interesting though. But perhaps the answer is you don't. You design enough redundancy into the ship to continue after even a major engineering fault and then you send out a crew to the ship for repair. But overall I don't think there's that much savings to all this and, frankly, people are better off having the jobs available a lot of the time.
The problem with redundancy is it ads weight, takes up space, and drives up costs in an industry where operating costs are significant. A complete second engine room (or power generator / pod) in case your main propulsion develops a problem at sea is expensive to build and still needs periodic maintenance. You'd essentially double your maintenance costs at the expense of saving on crew costs. In addition, some failures could not be ignored and handled by redundancy; for example if a shaft seal starts leaking allowing water to enter the vessel, or a design flaw the is present in the redundant system if it was an exact copy. In the end, while you will no doubt see more automation you'll still need someone to take the helm if systems fail or grab a wrench and fix a mechanical problem.
These kinds of ships spend almost their entire voyage on "auto pilot" now, and they require a local pilot and tug to navigate into harbor. With the lack of personnel I'd bet insurance rates go down in case of piracy, the need for food and crew space goes away and can be used for more cargo. The ships will still be met and guided into any harbor by the same system we use now.
While I agree on the pilot and tug, the vessel would still require a crew to operate it in the harbor. The pilot directs the vessel's movements but does not operate it; which makes sense as a pilot could not be expected to understand how every vessel responds to propulsion and rudder commands, that requires someone experienced in handling the vessel. Add in the idiots who don't understand the law of gross tonnage and cut across your bow while you are in the channel and while I have no doubt you could build a system that would do 99% of the operation that 1% is still critical to safe operation.
When you have been on a flight with *REAL* turbulence; the type where if you are not seated and wearing a belt you are going to be smashed like a rag doll off the ceiling and couple of seconds later the floor of the plane you wear your seat belt on a plane for every second it is possible to do so.
I've flown a lot and always keep my seatbelt on for just that reason. You never know when you may hit turbulence, especially clear air turbulence, which can seriously injure you if you are not belted in.
Perhaps living in europe where wearing seat belts are compulsory by law in a car we are more used to wearing restraining belts for long periods of time.
Most US stare have some sort of compulsory seat belt laws but enforcement varies and you are not likely to get stopped for not wearing a seatbelt unless you did something to piss the cop off and he needs an excuse to stop you. As for Europe, I would guess compliance varies by country. When I lived in Switzerland the cops would stop you for not wearing a seatbelt, while in Italy you could buy a fake seatbelt strap t shirt so it appeared you are using the seatbelt.
Regardless not wearing a seat belt while seated on a plane is a pointless risk to take in my view.
Without pointless risk takers there'd be no Darwin Awards...
Slashdot Mirror
The "new" thing here is that computers are used, which provides for actual accuracy of the information and vastly expands the scale...
And therein lies the problem. People assume because information comes from a computer it is accurate, and once it is in a database it is hard to correct and keep corrected. The vastly expanded scale also means it is much easier to spread inaccurate information and have it in places besides the original repository, adding to the problem of fixing it.
If you want real protection, you're gonna have to change the way records are made and kept public. FB is an easy target (and Slashdot stories in the past few months show how obsessed people are with FB, but not anyone else), but it's not as big of a deal as large aggregating data companies like LexisNexis. And where do they get the bulk of their data? Public records.
Technology is making it easier to aggregate data even if the person is not a user of your services. For example, as facial recognition improves, coupled with tagging, FB and others will be able to identify a person, and as they get more hits narrow down who they are and where they probably live. By trolling other sites such as linked in they can build a pretty good data set which can be coupled with publicly available information. If they can get DL pictures a person doesn't even have to be online for a company to build a profile of them. The increasing ability to process, analyze and link vast sets of data is changing what is meant by privacy.
The only way to ensure some privacy is to have a big enough political entity pushing it; which is why previously available information on carry permits is now no longer available in some states, and gun purchase records are purged after a short period.
Plenty of teachers take other jobs during the summer.
Which is irrelevant to how teachers are paid.
Teachers are not supposed to work extra hours, they are supposed to be skilled and professional enough to get the job done in the hours they have. Elementary and high school teaching should not be so intellectually taxing or unpredictable that you need extensive preparation for your lessons. University professors do need extensive preparation for lectures, which is why their teaching load is usually much lower than that of elementary and high school teachers.
Depends on the subject. I know mostly special ed teachers who spend summers preparing individual lesson plans for their students and preparing beginning of year tests so they can get a baseline to be able to show "progress" on how their kids learned something. Add in the expectations of some parents that the teacher should "cure" their kid and you have a real mess.
You have an awful high opinion of professors, most I've known teach at best one or two classes a year and reuse their notes and tests, most of their time is spent on research.
No, you were trying to make it ad hominem, namely by giving the false impression of being a teacher.
Never claimed to be a teacher yet you added in an ad hominem and now claim it was me who did that. False news, much?
I'm glad to hear it. In contrast, I have been a teacher, and I come from a family of teacher. So, I can tell you from personal experience, in addition to rational arguments, that American teachers are overpaid and underperforming, and that their arguments for why they should receive higher pay are totally unfounded.
I'm sorry if you and your family are the underperforming and overpaid teachers you reference. My experience is many teachers are not.
It's not a fallacy, because when people compare teacher salaries, they tend to compare "annual salaries", which are usually not corrected for the fact that teachers don't work summers.
Correct. And that's how we should compare teachers salaries to other salaries, namely by adding another 33% on top of the teachers salaries to account for the 3 months they don't work.
Except teachers don't have an option of working summers teaching and getting the extra pay, which is why the whole summer off argument is specious. I'm willing to bet most people would not be willing to take a mandatory 2 - 3 months unpaid leave per year and still be told although we are paying you less you're really making 33% more.
Oh, cry me a f*cking river. Pretty much everybody who doesn't work on an assembly line does that.
Except teachers, at least where I live, have a contract for a certain number of paid hours per week but are expected to work extra hours none the less; of course the county can decide to have mandatory unpaid furlough days to cut costs despite the contractual agreement. Your assembly line comment is closer to true than you realize, as it is easier to push a student along, assembly line fashion, with high grades than it is to give them C's or below. We're getting what e pay for, and I don't blame teachers for taking the easy way out.
That's a meaningless statements.
I think we have just identified a teacher who really shouldn't be teaching. They let you loose on students?
Since your arguments failed you feel it necessary to resort to ad hominems to try to make your case. I don't teach nor have I been a teacher, I was making an observation based on my experience knowing a number of teachers.
It's just as well I never taught public or private school; the first time a parent said "What are we going to do about my snowflake failing your class?" I'd be saying "Unless you got a mouse in your pocket there is no we in this, bitch. Either your snowflake does the work and passes or doesn't and fails. Your call. Have a nice day."
I don't understand why he didn't use his own branding
You don't? To defraud the people receiving the discs... He literally admits to it in the emails.
I get that; I was wondering because anyone with pulse should realize that is a bad idea. He could have one that an avoided all the trouble and still sell them for 25 cents; that's why I have little sympathy for him.
Yes and no. There's that kind of person, but there's also the jaded geek that spent half his life on the relevant boards, answered every single question that comes again and again until he burned out and it just pissed that people can't be bothered to use the search function.
I get that; and it got worse with eternal September...
"the veterans are marking time until they can retire."
That is always a sign that the retirement benefits are too generous.
Ture, just like waiting for a sales bonus, stock options to vest, etc. As with anyone, once you have a certain amount of skin in the game your viewpoint is often driven by economics.
I get that a newbie can be easily identified; but how do you the if posters are " women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups" unless they say so? My guess is that that "most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks" is probably not far off from the mark; because the internet no one cal tell if you are a dog. Recognize the fundamental problem, which is a community that has decided to do things a certain way. I have found, at least in technology oriented forums, there are far more people willing to flame a newbie than answer a question or at least point them to a tread that does. My guess is the flamers are finally feeling superior to someone and need to compensate for their feelings of inadequacy by dumping on others.
Having a large number of lower range salaries will lower the _average_. It need not have any effect whatsoever on the median salary, which is the salary where half of the personnel make more, and half make less income. If there are "classes" among the employees, the clusters of income for those classes can profoundly distort an analysis of the wages.
As you point out, a large cluster of employees will distort the median. Amazon has a lot of low wage warehouse staff, who's numbers dwarf those of higher wage employees. Those, the salary distribution is not a bell curve but has a very fat tail at the lower end, thus driving down the median wage. If you compare Amazon's median wage to a company that doesn't have the same wage distribution, as the WSJ did, you are making an invalid comparison. If you want to compare Amazon to SV companies you need to use similar populations. I'd bet, if you adjust for cost of living, etc., Amazon is pretty close to the companies it competes with for talent.
I'd be curious to see Amazon's median salary minus the warehouse workers. They compared two marketing/advertising giants with a retail enterprise, and we're supposed to feel bad that Amazon's tens of thousands of warehouse workers don't earn a quarter-million dollars/year like top-talent programmers and technology specialists?
Puh-leeze.
Exactly. Having a lot of lower wage employees is going to drag the median way simply do to the numbers. You're comparing two populations that are not the same and drawing a conclusion from it. Unfortunately, I'd wager many of the people reading the WSJ won't recognize the fallacy.
The problem was with importing the disks. Sure, he did this to save money so that they could be sold for only $0.25. Seems like a good idea at the time. The snag though is if there were trademarks being imported from China then it's a crime (thanks to the vast armies of lobbyists). If he had these disks made in the US then it would have been only a civil matter and not a criminal one.
Yes, that was stupid on his part but had he not made them look like genuine Dell recovery disks he wouldn't have had a problem. I don't understand why he didn't use his own branding, the disks would have worked the same and the whole counterfeit trademark issue goes away.
Are they still talking about arming teachers?
Yes, but they won't be allowed to carry around politicians or administrators. Parent / teacher conferences, however, will be a lot more cordial when the teacher is openly packing a loaded .45 in a shoulder holster.
We should also remove the special perks for teachers: they should work a full working year, with a few weeks off, get the same kind of health insurance as other people in their income bracket, and get 401(k) or 403(b) plans instead of pensions.
This whole "teachers get the summer off as a paid vacation" is a fallacy. Most teachers are paid for woking X days; where I live they can get the check only during the school year or spread over 12 months; even so teh summers are spent prepping for the next year. Anyone could have the same deal if their company offers an unpaid sabbatical leave of 3 months. They don't get overtime if the have to stay late for an event or a parent insists on their conference be held after normal working hours. As for benefits, they are average at best in my district. Yes, they are one of the few jobs that still offers defined benefit pensions, but even then the county messes with them by giving bonuses in lieu of pay raises so they don't get included in pension calculations.
Yes, there are bad teachers; and benefits vary greatly by state; but at the rate we are going the only people who will teach are those who can't do anything else or coaches.
The problem isn't the amount of money allocated for schools. The problem is where that money goes - namely, to bloated administrative costs. Fire half of the non-teaching staff, set the salaries of the rest so that no one earns more than the teachers, and - magic - suddenly schools will have plenty of money.
Of course, that's only the first problem with public education in the US. There are a whole lot of other problems: the culture of passing students who ought to fail, the inability to fire incompetent teachers, discipline problems, etc...
While that is some of the problems, there are others than need to be addressed. I know a number of teachers and the complaints are the same. Parents who blame them for their child's problems in school; the homework's too hard, too much, the teacher doesn't know how to teach, it's never that their snowflake is lazy and or undisciplined. Overcrowded classes without enough desks or books, the administrations reply is to think outside the box. Having a contract for X days and then being told, "oh, we need to save money so you are getting a bunch of unpaid furlough days." One teacher had a parent expect her to monitor what the child was eating because she was getting fat; of course the parent sent the kid to school with extra lunch money so the kid bought cookies and Cokes. They are going to a merit bonus system and teachers have been told no one can get higher than a 3 out of 4 because the county doesn't want to pay out bonuses. It's no wonder teachers in my district retire on the first day they can, even in the middle of the school year, as a final FU to the system. A recent survey showed over 70% would retire tomorrow if the could, and actively discourage anyone, especially student teachers, from entering the profession. They can't keep match and science teachers, and most new teachers leave after a couple of years; the veterans are marking time until they can retire.
We simply do not value education and are getting what we pay for.
He could have put his own label on them and then sold them as recovery disks. Given he was running a business already he could have asked his attorney how to label them to avoid any problems. A disclaimer they were recovery disks and not provided by MS or Dell? OTOH, 15 months is an over reactions well. He admitted to copyright violation by copying Dell's trademarks, a fine would be more appropriate for importing fake goods than jail. It sounds like there is more to this story than the blog post presents. I wonder how his customers represented the disks to their customers? A repair shop could just a easily download and burn the programs to a DVD and not worry about a label beyond a Sharpie saying what version of the OS it recovers.
. . . probably not worth it.
On the other hand, if you're like **our** household, buy quite a bit, and quite often, from Amazon, and stream their Included-in-Prime video content, 10 bucks a month is dirt cheap.
So the question is, does Prime meet your needs for the price charged? IF so, get it. IF not, don't. It's THAT simple.
This is /. Please stop trying to bring logic and reason into an argument.
I am in the same situation. I enjoy a number of the Amazon originals plus the some of the back catalogue. Music is OK as well but not as much of some artists I like is available. I find the shipping to be useful as I can buy any Prime item without worrying about shipping costs or getting enough to get free shipping. That makes it useful for smaller items that I can't easily find locally or simply don't want to spend the tase to drive to a store miles away to pick up. The avoided cost of tase probably saves me half or more of the Prime costs; plus I can get heavy items such as go food shipped free as well.
Now back to our regularly schedule Amazon Hate Fest...
Not knowing where to invest to keep it stable and reliable _is_ lack of knowledge. Not doing it when it is needed _is_ lack of knowledge.
I guess will have to agree to disagree. They know where, not doing it is a financial, not knowledge issue; especially since tehy understand the consequences of not doing the required upkeep and improvements. In some cases it's NIMBY as well, people do not want infrastructure near by since they can simply get their power from a wall outlet.
The motivation does actually not matter much. They are doing it and they are gaining a lot of insight and experience doing it. Experience and insight that others lack. Just look at examples like Germany, which apparently cannot build Airports anymore, or the US that has trouble keeping its electrical grid functioning. That is extreme loss of former capabilities right there. In large scale engineering (just like in any engineering really), you need to keep doing it to be able to keep doing it. Much of the West seems to have forgotten that.
Some of it is clearly loss of capacity and knowledge as older workers who have the experience leave the work force or the industrial facilities needed to do major projects close for lack of demand and thus if there is demand later there isn't the plants to satisfy it.
In other cases, so as the grid, it's not so much a loss of eperience and insight but a lack of investment in upgrading it and the fragmented structure of the grid. The US grid isn't one nicely interconnected where electricity can be easily transmitted from any point A to Point B; rather it is a number of essentially independent grids with internees that limit what can be transmitted between them. We saw that impact when the folks at Enron decided they could make a killing in the CA energy market by doing round trips through the internees, thereby limiting what could be imported and forcing more expensive power onto teh grid and then selling not the market. Our grid is the legacy of early regulation of the power industry, something the industry wanted, BTW, to end the competition occurring in many markets that was hampering profits, that saw the creation of separate local power companies who were restricted in selling across their service area so the grid only needed to be able to help companies get power in the event of an unplanned plant outage resulted in greater demand than could be supplied.
Maybe I'm tech-splaining now? ;)
Yup, and taht is the same for many fields: The common usage of a domain specific term often fails to capture the nuances and lumps broad categories together. Unfortunately, once a term becomes commonplace there is no easy way to correct or modify its usage. Hacker used to be a badge of honor amongst a group of tech savvy folks, now it's a generally pejorative term, especially in the mass media.
I've never had a job that offered vacation days. The woes of being a IT contractor, never hired, always used awhile and thrown away
PTO is a myth - employers look at the total cost of an employee, and factor time off into the salary equation. Employers aren't being generous by giving you "PTO" since it is already factored into the equation. If you work for a lose or use employer and don't use your vacation you essentially are giving them a discount on your salary. It's simple economics in the end. A contractor, in many ways, is the most transparent pay situation since you are getting all teh money up front to decide how you want to use it.
With the lack of personnel I'd bet insurance rates go down in case of piracy
Who needs to board it if it has a data link that can be compromised and let you redirect the vessel to a new port? The modern pirate will be someone thousands of miles away in their mom's basement hacking ships for phone; bringing the term piracy back to its original meaning.
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With that in mind though, i don't think it's impossible to design more redundancy and automate a lot of the maintenance if that's factored into the design. To date, it's just been far easier and cheaper to have an engineer do it.
How you handle a connecting rod replacement in the middle of the ocean without humans would be interesting though. But perhaps the answer is you don't. You design enough redundancy into the ship to continue after even a major engineering fault and then you send out a crew to the ship for repair. But overall I don't think there's that much savings to all this and, frankly, people are better off having the jobs available a lot of the time.
The problem with redundancy is it ads weight, takes up space, and drives up costs in an industry where operating costs are significant. A complete second engine room (or power generator / pod) in case your main propulsion develops a problem at sea is expensive to build and still needs periodic maintenance. You'd essentially double your maintenance costs at the expense of saving on crew costs. In addition, some failures could not be ignored and handled by redundancy; for example if a shaft seal starts leaking allowing water to enter the vessel, or a design flaw the is present in the redundant system if it was an exact copy. In the end, while you will no doubt see more automation you'll still need someone to take the helm if systems fail or grab a wrench and fix a mechanical problem.
These kinds of ships spend almost their entire voyage on "auto pilot" now, and they require a local pilot and tug to navigate into harbor. With the lack of personnel I'd bet insurance rates go down in case of piracy, the need for food and crew space goes away and can be used for more cargo. The ships will still be met and guided into any harbor by the same system we use now.
While I agree on the pilot and tug, the vessel would still require a crew to operate it in the harbor. The pilot directs the vessel's movements but does not operate it; which makes sense as a pilot could not be expected to understand how every vessel responds to propulsion and rudder commands, that requires someone experienced in handling the vessel. Add in the idiots who don't understand the law of gross tonnage and cut across your bow while you are in the channel and while I have no doubt you could build a system that would do 99% of the operation that 1% is still critical to safe operation.
When you have been on a flight with *REAL* turbulence; the type where if you are not seated and wearing a belt you are going to be smashed like a rag doll off the ceiling and couple of seconds later the floor of the plane you wear your seat belt on a plane for every second it is possible to do so.
I've flown a lot and always keep my seatbelt on for just that reason. You never know when you may hit turbulence, especially clear air turbulence, which can seriously injure you if you are not belted in.
Perhaps living in europe where wearing seat belts are compulsory by law in a car we are more used to wearing restraining belts for long periods of time.
Most US stare have some sort of compulsory seat belt laws but enforcement varies and you are not likely to get stopped for not wearing a seatbelt unless you did something to piss the cop off and he needs an excuse to stop you. As for Europe, I would guess compliance varies by country. When I lived in Switzerland the cops would stop you for not wearing a seatbelt, while in Italy you could buy a fake seatbelt strap t shirt so it appeared you are using the seatbelt.
Regardless not wearing a seat belt while seated on a plane is a pointless risk to take in my view.
Without pointless risk takers there'd be no Darwin Awards...
What does the robot think?
I don't know but I wonder if it dreams of electric sheep..