Taking into account the percentage of students taking the tests,
I can't access the article, but that looks like a really big caveat right there. What does the percentage of students taking the ACT or SAT do? Could be that unionised teachers turn out more and smarter students, or it might be the case that the only ones willing to bother are the best and brightest in the first place. I'm not spending $15 to find out right now, though.
In any case, I didn't actually say anything about the quality of unionised instruction, did I? I observed that the teachers unions have a pretty strong grip on the public schools. You haven't really disputed that, and your counter-example is that 'quite a few states' have no mandatory unions. (Perhaps you could offer a list? I'd actually like to be enlightened.) Unions, as I understand, are well within their power to force membership on all non-management employees at a workplace once the union is established. Unionisation is democratic, but membership is often not voluntary. In which case, the union may not be officially mandatory, even if every teacher is a union member.
I also observed that, hey, tuition is expensive, and it has to increase to cover increases in teacher salaries, which also has bupkis to do with test scores.
Look, I'll confess that this is way off my subject of expertise (and I use the word expertise with a certain amount of sarcasm), but could you at least address something I was talking about?
Class size really doesn't seem to be a great indicator of quality of education. Good teachers teach well, and bad teachers teach poorly. It is a great thing to do to make parents feel good and increase the number of teachers, though (and more teachers means more union dues, of course).
Kinda difficult. The teacher's unions seem to have a death grip on the public education system, for starters. AFAIK, there are no non-union teachers in most states' public schools.
For private schools, I suspect that the cost needed to allow that sort of teacher salary would either balloon class sizes (undesirable to most parents) or make tuition unaffordable to most parents, lacking significant subsidies. (I know that, when I graduated from a private school in 1997 that the starting teacher's salary there was below poverty level. Granted, it was one of the least expensive, accredited private schools in the area.)
Clickykeyboards.com sells them on a limited basis--I guess they salvage them from defunct Model Ms--at $1 per. Not too bad if you need a few, but I was hoping to find a better price, which I haven't. I'm short a couple arrow keys and an Escape key, IIRC. I'd have to dig the spares out to inventory and check.
I have a couple spares, actually, though I'm not sure if they're all of the removable keycaps variety. I'm not totally satisfied with the result in the article: I think I'd have used a piece of stiff, black plastic instead of felt. Looks pretty nice, though.
If the lawsuit you speak of was in Texas, then it's probably specific to the way engineer as a title is treated in Texas. Texas law requires that all engineers be certified. It was once a relatively lax certification, but ISTR that they've tightened it up a lot, so that it's equivalent to other states' PE cert. (This even applies to software engineers, and could have been the cause of such a lawsuit.)
You might be surprised. I think Alien Hominid debuted at $20 on the Gamecube when it was published a couple years ago. (Granted, it was originally developed as a Flash game, so the overhead of the GCN port was probably pretty low.)
While it's a safe bet that Squeenix won't move FFXIII at this date, the tell will be in their choice of platform for FFXIV, if they bother with one. I don't think HD is a make-or-break feature for FXIII, but I don't think the Wii's capabilities would be up to snuff for it, either.
You see, there's a really big catch here: those PS2 games that 'will all run flawlessly on the PS3' already run flawlessly on the PS2. By itself, the PS2 sales figure is only a potential boon to PS3 sales, somewhere down the line. Right now?
The reason PS2 sales are good for Sony right now isn't the potential upgraders down the road, it's that the PS3 is being sold at a loss, while the PS2 probably sells for a net profit. PS2 sales keep Sony in the game, but it's not going to win the game selling PS2s.
In the meantime, I really haven't heard much about developers flocking to the PS3. Would you care to cite a few? Will they be delivering exclusives? PS3 releases of multi-platform projects? Ports of previously released PC games? Are there more of them adding the system to planned deliveries than are dumping it, or making once exclusive titles into multi-platform releases? Do tell, because I don't know and I'm genuinely curious about this. (Or did you mean that they're releasing on the PS2? Well, sure: PS2 dev should be a relatively solved problem by now. Still, the PS2 is reaching its end-of-life, and, unless you're talking about developers making exclusives for the platform, there's no reason at all to assume that a PS2 port will convince that studio to release for the PS3 primarily or at all.)
Actually, at least some of them (Vladimir Ashkenazy, say) seem to be famous as classical pianists go (it's not a subject I follow, sadly). But, the music comes from a very wide range of performers, and is sometimes monkeyed with just a bit.
Supposing you're a music critic, and you're listening to a CD of a performance of a piece of music you have already heard, perhaps several times by several different performers. Are you really telling me that you would assume that, because it sounds familiar, it wasn't just that you'd heard some other performances of the same piece? (And, if you hadn't heard it before, why should you recognize it at all?) Critics may or may not be full of it, but I really don't think this matter reflects on that at all.
Give it some time. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find mostly digital actors the norm inside of fifty years (that's a hell of a timespan, though: I doubt we'll be watching 2-D movies by then). With motion-capture and far improved modeling, CGI may yet save the radio star.
Movies are a business, after all, and real actors can be terribly expensive. If you can replace a whole stable of screen actors with a handful of voice actors (who are, themselves, expendable for anybody who can do the right voices for a lower salary), why wouldn't you (assuming you're a bean counter)?
Yeah, fun games totally went out with the last millenium. It's all about games that are excruciating to play. I hear the next console from Sony will include electrodes in the controllers, to shock players at random intervals (hardcore gamers love this sort of thing: it keeps them on their toes)!
Seriously, guy. You need a better hobby than this.
I would imagine that people will find productive things to do. There will pretty much always be people unable to help themselves for one reason or another, and (hey!) there's a lot of universe to explore, even without jumping gravity wells. Never mind the pursuit of art, philosophy, theology, entertainment, and so forth. There will be things to do. Even, I imagine, gruntwork. (And, of course, there's more to life than what we usually think of as work.)
Still, limitless wealth will be a problem. I'm doubt we'll reach a point where everyone will be idly wealthy, their every need seen to by a vast, automated workforce. There will always be problems to solve and, I believe, people to solve them. (There will need to be people to maintain the automated workforce, for instance, even if they're only slightly busier than the proverbial Maytag repairman, and there will be those tasked with improving the robots, as well. Just for starters.) I'm really not much for optimism, but I'm not convinced that the human race ends in lethargy and sloth (sloth is likely to be a temporary state, however catastrophic the transition from it is likely to be).
I wasn't. That was a different poster. However, I'm not sure the usage need be applied to a writing style; that's just the example dictionary.com used. Assuming it wasn't a typo in the first place, the earlier poster may have simply been pointing out that Maxo-Texas's claims lacked detail or supporting evidence.
(On reflection, a typo seems more likely. Whatever.)
Things get cheaper over time, though, and there's really no reason to assume that space colonization needs to involve near-or-at-lightspeed velocities. Nor is it likely that we'd jump to Alpha Centauri (or wherever) until the habitable and terra-formable bits of our current star system are inhabited. At that point, though, we'd be looking at an absolute minimum of two worlds' worth (Mars and Earth) of resources and a pretty huge technological boost from our current position. Never mind what we can ferret out of the rest of the solar system without colonizing it. (As to propulsion, something like Project Orion might make more sense than more conventional ideas.)
Resources may not be unlimited, but I'd be surprised if they weren't awfully close to it for our purposes. It's obviously not a short-term prediction. It doesn't really sound infeasible, though. Just very, very hard.
At the moment, though, I don't know if the supply problem is caused by demand vastly outstripping supply, or if they've just run into that much difficulty keeping supply up. (I wasn't planning to purchase one for another couple of months, though.)
You seem to be assuming facts not in evidence. Why would politics block a civilisation from colonizing a planet outside its solar system? Because nobody wants to move that far? (In fact, a civilisation with sufficiently advanced technology would probably have a not-insignificant number of people who wanted to do exactly that, for one reason or another, and, likewise, possessed the capability: this would be analogous to various voluntary exoduses on our own planet, like the Pilgrims' voyage to the new world, or the Mormons' trek to Utah.)
'Big' projects are pretty relative. A trip across the Atlantic was a massive undertaking, a months-long voyage, say, 500 years ago. Now, it's a 14-hour flight that people take every day. I don't mean to suggest that interstellar travel will necessarily get faster as time and technology progress, but there's really no reason to assume that humanity colonizes the Earth, Alpha Centauri and then... stops. A light-speed limit on travel and communication would mean that a Centauri colony would be 4+ years away under the best circumstances. That's a longer communications delay than the Brits suffered managing their colonies, and almost all are independent now. Supposing, then, that the Centauri colony eventually became independent, why wouldn't it attempt to colonize its nearest, or next nearest, star?
Slashdot Mirror
They're called "black-out curtains". Look into them.
Wait, wait, wait.
Taking into account the percentage of students taking the tests,
I can't access the article, but that looks like a really big caveat right there. What does the percentage of students taking the ACT or SAT do? Could be that unionised teachers turn out more and smarter students, or it might be the case that the only ones willing to bother are the best and brightest in the first place. I'm not spending $15 to find out right now, though.
In any case, I didn't actually say anything about the quality of unionised instruction, did I? I observed that the teachers unions have a pretty strong grip on the public schools. You haven't really disputed that, and your counter-example is that 'quite a few states' have no mandatory unions. (Perhaps you could offer a list? I'd actually like to be enlightened.) Unions, as I understand, are well within their power to force membership on all non-management employees at a workplace once the union is established. Unionisation is democratic, but membership is often not voluntary. In which case, the union may not be officially mandatory, even if every teacher is a union member.
I also observed that, hey, tuition is expensive, and it has to increase to cover increases in teacher salaries, which also has bupkis to do with test scores.
Look, I'll confess that this is way off my subject of expertise (and I use the word expertise with a certain amount of sarcasm), but could you at least address something I was talking about?
Class size really doesn't seem to be a great indicator of quality of education. Good teachers teach well, and bad teachers teach poorly. It is a great thing to do to make parents feel good and increase the number of teachers, though (and more teachers means more union dues, of course).
Kinda difficult. The teacher's unions seem to have a death grip on the public education system, for starters. AFAIK, there are no non-union teachers in most states' public schools.
For private schools, I suspect that the cost needed to allow that sort of teacher salary would either balloon class sizes (undesirable to most parents) or make tuition unaffordable to most parents, lacking significant subsidies. (I know that, when I graduated from a private school in 1997 that the starting teacher's salary there was below poverty level. Granted, it was one of the least expensive, accredited private schools in the area.)
I have terrifically bad news for you. Most jobs have a lot of tedium.
May as well learn to suck it up now.
Wikipedia says they have 44 stores. They have one in Indiana, though, and a couple in Georgia. (And loads in California.)
Clickykeyboards.com sells them on a limited basis--I guess they salvage them from defunct Model Ms--at $1 per. Not too bad if you need a few, but I was hoping to find a better price, which I haven't. I'm short a couple arrow keys and an Escape key, IIRC. I'd have to dig the spares out to inventory and check.
I have a couple spares, actually, though I'm not sure if they're all of the removable keycaps variety. I'm not totally satisfied with the result in the article: I think I'd have used a piece of stiff, black plastic instead of felt. Looks pretty nice, though.
Northgate Omnikey, I'm guessing. (Just stumbled across it looking for an inexpensive source of Model M keycaps.)
If the lawsuit you speak of was in Texas, then it's probably specific to the way engineer as a title is treated in Texas. Texas law requires that all engineers be certified. It was once a relatively lax certification, but ISTR that they've tightened it up a lot, so that it's equivalent to other states' PE cert. (This even applies to software engineers, and could have been the cause of such a lawsuit.)
You might be surprised. I think Alien Hominid debuted at $20 on the Gamecube when it was published a couple years ago. (Granted, it was originally developed as a Flash game, so the overhead of the GCN port was probably pretty low.)
Provided they aren't Mexican. Or determined. Or sneaky. Or ...
I suspect that you may mean that's been illegal, not impossible.
While it's a safe bet that Squeenix won't move FFXIII at this date, the tell will be in their choice of platform for FFXIV, if they bother with one. I don't think HD is a make-or-break feature for FXIII, but I don't think the Wii's capabilities would be up to snuff for it, either.
You see, there's a really big catch here: those PS2 games that 'will all run flawlessly on the PS3' already run flawlessly on the PS2. By itself, the PS2 sales figure is only a potential boon to PS3 sales, somewhere down the line. Right now?
The reason PS2 sales are good for Sony right now isn't the potential upgraders down the road, it's that the PS3 is being sold at a loss, while the PS2 probably sells for a net profit. PS2 sales keep Sony in the game, but it's not going to win the game selling PS2s.
In the meantime, I really haven't heard much about developers flocking to the PS3. Would you care to cite a few? Will they be delivering exclusives? PS3 releases of multi-platform projects? Ports of previously released PC games? Are there more of them adding the system to planned deliveries than are dumping it, or making once exclusive titles into multi-platform releases? Do tell, because I don't know and I'm genuinely curious about this. (Or did you mean that they're releasing on the PS2? Well, sure: PS2 dev should be a relatively solved problem by now. Still, the PS2 is reaching its end-of-life, and, unless you're talking about developers making exclusives for the platform, there's no reason at all to assume that a PS2 port will convince that studio to release for the PS3 primarily or at all.)
Actually, at least some of them (Vladimir Ashkenazy, say) seem to be famous as classical pianists go (it's not a subject I follow, sadly). But, the music comes from a very wide range of performers, and is sometimes monkeyed with just a bit.
Supposing you're a music critic, and you're listening to a CD of a performance of a piece of music you have already heard, perhaps several times by several different performers. Are you really telling me that you would assume that, because it sounds familiar, it wasn't just that you'd heard some other performances of the same piece? (And, if you hadn't heard it before, why should you recognize it at all?) Critics may or may not be full of it, but I really don't think this matter reflects on that at all.
Give it some time. I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find mostly digital actors the norm inside of fifty years (that's a hell of a timespan, though: I doubt we'll be watching 2-D movies by then). With motion-capture and far improved modeling, CGI may yet save the radio star.
Movies are a business, after all, and real actors can be terribly expensive. If you can replace a whole stable of screen actors with a handful of voice actors (who are, themselves, expendable for anybody who can do the right voices for a lower salary), why wouldn't you (assuming you're a bean counter)?
Yeah, fun games totally went out with the last millenium. It's all about games that are excruciating to play. I hear the next console from Sony will include electrodes in the controllers, to shock players at random intervals (hardcore gamers love this sort of thing: it keeps them on their toes)!
Seriously, guy. You need a better hobby than this.
Somebody's been hitting the thesaurus pretty hard. (Correction, the thesaurus just fell down the stairs.)
I would imagine that people will find productive things to do. There will pretty much always be people unable to help themselves for one reason or another, and (hey!) there's a lot of universe to explore, even without jumping gravity wells. Never mind the pursuit of art, philosophy, theology, entertainment, and so forth. There will be things to do. Even, I imagine, gruntwork. (And, of course, there's more to life than what we usually think of as work.)
Still, limitless wealth will be a problem. I'm doubt we'll reach a point where everyone will be idly wealthy, their every need seen to by a vast, automated workforce. There will always be problems to solve and, I believe, people to solve them. (There will need to be people to maintain the automated workforce, for instance, even if they're only slightly busier than the proverbial Maytag repairman, and there will be those tasked with improving the robots, as well. Just for starters.) I'm really not much for optimism, but I'm not convinced that the human race ends in lethargy and sloth (sloth is likely to be a temporary state, however catastrophic the transition from it is likely to be).
You have to live in Red China.
This is the same government that likes to filter the Internet for its citizens. I hope the reduced cost of living is worth it, guys!
I wasn't. That was a different poster. However, I'm not sure the usage need be applied to a writing style; that's just the example dictionary.com used. Assuming it wasn't a typo in the first place, the earlier poster may have simply been pointing out that Maxo-Texas's claims lacked detail or supporting evidence.
(On reflection, a typo seems more likely. Whatever.)
Things get cheaper over time, though, and there's really no reason to assume that space colonization needs to involve near-or-at-lightspeed velocities. Nor is it likely that we'd jump to Alpha Centauri (or wherever) until the habitable and terra-formable bits of our current star system are inhabited. At that point, though, we'd be looking at an absolute minimum of two worlds' worth (Mars and Earth) of resources and a pretty huge technological boost from our current position. Never mind what we can ferret out of the rest of the solar system without colonizing it. (As to propulsion, something like Project Orion might make more sense than more conventional ideas.)
Resources may not be unlimited, but I'd be surprised if they weren't awfully close to it for our purposes. It's obviously not a short-term prediction. It doesn't really sound infeasible, though. Just very, very hard.
At the moment, though, I don't know if the supply problem is caused by demand vastly outstripping supply, or if they've just run into that much difficulty keeping supply up. (I wasn't planning to purchase one for another couple of months, though.)
Welcome to the Internet. Here is your dictionary.
(In case the misunderstanding was intentional, I do apologize for the unnecessary pedantry.)
You seem to be assuming facts not in evidence. Why would politics block a civilisation from colonizing a planet outside its solar system? Because nobody wants to move that far? (In fact, a civilisation with sufficiently advanced technology would probably have a not-insignificant number of people who wanted to do exactly that, for one reason or another, and, likewise, possessed the capability: this would be analogous to various voluntary exoduses on our own planet, like the Pilgrims' voyage to the new world, or the Mormons' trek to Utah.)
... stops. A light-speed limit on travel and communication would mean that a Centauri colony would be 4+ years away under the best circumstances. That's a longer communications delay than the Brits suffered managing their colonies, and almost all are independent now. Supposing, then, that the Centauri colony eventually became independent, why wouldn't it attempt to colonize its nearest, or next nearest, star?
'Big' projects are pretty relative. A trip across the Atlantic was a massive undertaking, a months-long voyage, say, 500 years ago. Now, it's a 14-hour flight that people take every day. I don't mean to suggest that interstellar travel will necessarily get faster as time and technology progress, but there's really no reason to assume that humanity colonizes the Earth, Alpha Centauri and then