Not sure how you'd do it in my district. My grandmother helps run polls there, and so I have a fairly good idea how it works. (Well, plus having voted there many times.)
You walk in the door, and (if there's no line) are faced with a table of election workers from all the major parties. Each has a stack of papers, listing around 750 registered voters in the district, in alphabetical chunks. You pick the line that matches up with the first letter(s) of your last name, tell them your name, and they check you off the list. You then are allowed behind that table, where you pick up your paper ballot, and someone ticks a counter, counting the number of people who entered the voting area. You go vote. Fill-in-the-bubble, or connect-the-tail-of-the-arrow-to-the-head. Once you've voted, you head out out of the voting area to the collection area. You run your ballot through the optical scanner, and if there aren't any errors, it drops into the big bin. If there are, it spits it back out, and you can go get another/fix the problem. After your ballot goes into the bin, another poll worker clicks a counter, counting cast votes.
To stuff a box, you'd have to magically do several things:
Get the ballots ahead of time and mark them up. Make the number of voters A) checked off the registry list, B) counted as entering the voting area, and C) counted as successfully voting all match the number of votes you stuffed. Since this involves a half-dozen or more people, it would be hard to do.
Not to mention that there are about a half-dozen people watching the ballot box at any one time, from the start of the voting until the end.
Compare that to being able to switch a half-million electronic bits in a few seconds, not requiring any extra votes, and I hope you can see how much harder it is to rig paper ballots.
In my district, the scanned tally gets reported immediately, but only the hand-counted ballots are certified. Of course, that happens a day or two later. Would it be *possible* to stuff the ballot box? Sure, anything's possible. But it would be HARD AS HELL TO DO. Personally, I have 100% confidence in the voting done there. I'm not sure why it's so hard to do it this way in the rest of the country.
Until recently, I was living 4-5 hrs north of Boston. I paid ~$600/month for a 750 sq foot 2-bedroom apt, including all utilities. (Well, except garbage. Plowing tho, which is huge in the winter.) It was the upper half of an old colonial parsonage, next to the church, across the street from the town hall and library. The road outside had a couple of stripes down the middle, but no white lines or sidewalks. At the bottom of the hill, 5 min away, was a little general store and the only restaurant in town. (And it was actually pretty good, and inexpensive.)
The catch? Like Shakrai said, it was a tiny town - 500 people, with far more livestock than that. There was nothing to do outside of driving 1-2 hrs to civilization, but it was dirt cheep to live well. There was no crime to speak of, never a traffic issue, (ok, except for an hour or so during a parade, when the entire town shut down, since there was really only one road in town.) fantastic air quality, and dead quiet. 7pm-6am.
The weird thing was that you couldn't really bike or hike, despite the rural area. None of the roads had shoulders, meaning you shared the full lane with semis and all the rest of the traffic, doing 50-60mph, around sharp corners and on steep hills. Being farmland, most of it was fenced in, (and no-trespassing, to keep the riffraff from shooting all the deer) which made any sort of hiking hard.
But there were computer jobs within an hour drive to be had. $30-$35k base, which isn't much, but when you can do an apartment and car payment for $1k a month, it's not bad. Of course, there's nothing in the way of entertainment to spend your money on....
Why the FUCK is idle showing up on my main page again? I killed it for good reason the first time.
Secondly, RE: Evolution, they apparently missed the big job of of hyena clitorises - it allows the female to be in complete control of mating. In hyena circles, the males are inferior, and have to be on good terms to pass on their genes. It's a genetic chastity belt.
Hell, even if you had the number, and needed to figure out what it was, WHO SEARCHES WITH NO CONTEXT?
Type that in and the word "chemistry", (the overwhelmingly vague content area you might have encountered that number in), and 58.44 shows up as sodium chloride with no problems.
Is this for the same people who type "cocks" into a search engine while looking for birds, and are shocked at the results? I was under the assumption that most people understood that search engines don't read minds...
For the price of your pay provider, could you replace it with a subscription to a Sports Bar?
Not saying it's in any way feasible, based on how much you may watch per month, but plenty of bars/pubs are happy to sell you a beer while you watch a game.
A bunch of people here have said the same thing, and....
I have to say, it worked for me too. I had an overpriced satellite package, was headed back to school, and moving. To save money, and because I'm going to be slammed for time this fall, I got rid of the TV this spring.
Leading up to this, I had been bemoaning how all the good channels consistently turn to crap. (TLC, Animal Planet, History, Discovery...) They stop producing new stuff, and repeat the hell out of stuff. Then drop actual content and start pushing out utter crap. (As someone else already posted, Ghost Hunters? UFO Hunters? A MILLION FUCKING REALITY TV SHOWS ON EVERY CHANNEL?)
The interwebs...where you can find what you want, when you want it, and view it with limited commercial interruption. Now that I've broken the sit-and-veg addition, I'm learning a fair bit more, and wasting a lot less time mindlessly changing channels or sitting through commercials.
Is the internet really all that much better than the TV? Probably not, but it's not costing me $60 a month, and I'm definitely getting more entertainment out of it than TV.
I dunno if it will be what you're looking for, but check out the Tree Style Tabs extension. It puts the tabs to the left, in expandable/collapsible trees, with the trunk forming based on the page the links spawned from. It's great on wide/short monitors, as your vertical space is generally the limiting factor for webpages. Plus, it makes waaaaay more sense to me to organize tabs this way.
I totally had that in Diablo I. I made potion gardens outside. Rows and rows, fields and fields of alternating colors and patterns. "Just in case I needed them deeper in the dungeon..."
I didn't go looking for an ad-blocking piece of software for many years. It was only when the first talking flash ads showed up that I went looking. Even the blinking gifs weren't terrible enough for me consider the fact that they could be blocked out.
In fact, I even remember the first time it happened. It was during the winter of 1999-2000, when I was in a darkened campus computer lab late at night. (I worked there and had a key, so it was opened whenever I wanted it to be open) I was writing a paper and had been listening to a CD, so the volume was up. I refreshed...Yahoo? AltaVista? UsaNet? I forget which, and as my mail was refreshing, I alt-tabbed back to the paper I was writing. Then there was some asshole yelling, which scared the ever-living shit out of me.
Paper editing stopped, and I looked up an ad/flash blocker, once I figured out wtf was going on. Had that never happened, I very well might not have gotten an adblocker.
I agree the development was inevitable, but I don't believe that the popularity was.
Hell, I wasn't even planning on using NoScript for the longest time, even though I had heard about it. After some semi-obvious fishing on the part of a couple of websites, and some other cross-site bullshit, also involving ads, NoScript went on as well.
I know that there are many people like me, who didn't set out to block ads and 90% of the internet. If every time I meet you you're drunk and you puke in my car, you don't get to go in my car any more. If you puke in my browser, you don't get to go in my browser any more.
You and the OP need to read the fine-print of the patent, not the normal, slashdot-fubared summary. The important bit:
and an interface configured to facilitate communication between the electronic device and an external device.
This is an internal system which records all that, then spits it out on command.
Was it one cup of coffee, or constant high humitidy? Was it one major shock, or many, many little ones which damaged the case?
Theoretically, this could register the cup of coffee spilled on it, the drying out, and the working fine afterwards until the device was dropped out of a two-story window and onto concrete. It's an airplane black-box, put in a mobile device.
I came on here to post the same thing. In addition, had they included it at the onset, they could have released on time, and people could have actually played multiplayer while waiting for the next installment of battlecrap.
That was a very rational and calm reply to a very hardcore bit of flamebait on my part. I apologize for the harshness, and you have my thanks for being so reasonable.
Now that I'm no longer posting drunken angry flamebait rants, let me try to put it into more rational terms:
There is nothing a student needs a cell phone for during school. Ever. Talk of emergencies and fires and school shootings and all the other excuses is a load of bullshit. Every classroom has a telephone, which can be used to call for help.
There are something like 100,000 public schools in the US. Since 1992, there have only been 165 or so deaths actually in a school building. Call that 16 years, and we're talking about 10 deaths a year. It makes school far safer than driving a car, for sure.
Realistically, the amount of damage the distraction of cellphones does to education as a whole far overshadows any potential gain they might have in the very, very few emergencies that happen in schools. The chance of an emergency happening is so remote, and the distraction to students is so overwhelmingly pervasive, it's a silly argument to make.
The arguments you make are the same ones the kids make. I get frustrated with this bitching, because when you look at the numbers, it's clear that A) cell phones are bad, and B) the arguments about the necessity of emergency contact are akin to the ones against wearing seatbelts, because "sometimes it's safer to get ejected from your vehicle". In some very random, fringe cases, yes, it might be better/safer. But 99.9% of the time it is not.
As a teacher my expectation is that adults will have the view that school is for learning. With such a view, they'll support removing things which are barriers to learning. However, if 5 years has taught me anything, it's that the vast majority of adults can't see this, and will support all sorts of things which are direct impediments to learning.
It frustrates me to no end that someone as intelligent as yourself will hang on ridiculous excuses to justify the acceptance of something which has a profoundly negative impact on education. And it's not just you - I've had plenty of parents do the same thing. That frustration was the source of the angry "fuck you"s from my previous rant, hopefully a bit more rationally and well explained this time.
Once again, I apologize for the tone, it was fairly uncalled for. I just get really angry at "think of the children" shit which can be easily proved to be overall, very bad for "the children".
I taught high school science for 5 years. And it was a blessing to not have some cell phones pick up service in my room.
If there's an emergency, STUDENTS SHOULDN'T BE IN THE SCHOOL!!!
If it's on fire, if there's a gunman in it, if there's a bomb threat, GET THE FUCK OUT!!!!
But if you're in my class, your cell phone should be off. If you can't be trusted turn it off, then it should be jammed.
The purpose of school is to learn. If you're texting Sophie in Spanish, you're not learning. If you're texting you SO in the school down the road, you're not learning.
You, sir, don't know shit about kids. "they can't get kids to pay attention in class maybe the problem is that their lesson plan is boring and the teacher couldn't care less if the kids are interested or not." Do you not remember being a kid? I do. I hated authority. I hated being told to learn shit. I tried my best to rebel against the system, regardless of whether it was beneficial to me. Kids are stupid. They rebel against EVERYTHING. The FUCKING DEFINITION of "kid" is "doesn't know what's good for him". That's why adulthood comes with privileges.
Sure, the school has a problem. It has stupid kids to deal with, and PEOPLE LIKE YOU who don't know SHIT about how a school runs, and what it needs. So seriously, shut the fuck up. You are an idiot, and don't understand schools, kids, and how they work together.
Dude, WTF are you talking about? Does your father-in-law lie to you on a regular basis? I'm a 5 year veteran of public high schools. The BS in your post covers:
1) Discipline. I've mocked, humiliated, and tossed out students who were arrogant asssholes. 2) Grades. I've failed 3/4 of a class before, because they deserved to fail. I've also passed 95% of another, similar class, because they deserved to pass. 3) I've confiscated all sorts of shit. The illegal shit hit the vice principal's desk, the legal shit sat in mine until the end of the day, or until a parent came and got it. That was for stuff that distracted the class, including talking pens, rifle scopes, turkey calls, tennis balls, cell phones, other quasi-educational electronic devices, balloons, decks of cards, laser pointers, etc.
On the rest, I agree. NCLB is a joke, with "high standards" and "no failures" mixed together. You can have one or the other, not both. As for salary, it's a toss-up. Teachers get paid equally in time and salary. In my 5th year, I worked about 8 hrs a day, 180 days a year. Compared to the 250 days a normal, salaried, "10 days vacation per year" individual gets, (I know, I did that for 3 years) it sounds sweet. But I made less than $40k per year. The time off was nice, but with 7 years of schooling behind me, I'd have made more in almost any other profession, with half the BS and half the stress.
I'd also agree with your dis-recommendation for people to be teachers. It's thankless, filled with stupidity, and artificially handicapped. A quick anecdote: Mid-way through my master's in education, I was hired to teach science at a local school which was desperate for a science teacher. I hit that position, and did a fair job teaching. The college I was attending wouldn't certify me to teach. Their reason?
I hadn't undergone "Student Teaching". Their rationale was that I needed to practice teaching. with a mentor, so I could learn to teach. I pointed out that I was *actually teaching* with a mentoring group, and professors and other teachers to guide me. The COLLEGE'S answer was "No."
To be certified to teach, I had to QUIT MY JOB, pay THEM $10k, for 3 courses of "Student Teaching", and then go and do WHAT I WAS ALREADY DOING, FOR FREE.
Yes, that was my college's program. Needless to say, I spent $1200 to go through the state certification instead. Keep in mind, this is a state which tossed out a retired IBM engineer who wanted to teach a physics class. You see, he wasn't *certified* to teach......
We did, until the internet showed up. Now EVERYONE can beg for attention. Triple points if you work in a profession which requires some web-savviness, since you can leverage that into a bigger cry for attention.
Look, I've been tech support and a SA, I've relied on tech support and the SA. I do my job, you do your job. I thank you for doing your job well, you thank me for doing my job well.
If this isn't your work climate, LEAVE! Get yourself a job where people appreciate your work, and you appreciate theirs. It's not some magical fantasy-land. Stop wallowing in shit, and then demanding thanks for it.
If you need a "day" for your position, then you're being treated like shit. Get a new job.
From the article, cash inflow was "likely in the 4 digits EUR range per month". Since Lance hasn't been heard from since "sometime in 2008", that's looking like a minimum of 12k EU, potentially several times that, in limbo. Since he's the only one with access, nobody knows if the money is still in the account or if it's gone.
I think you have a very good observation here. I'll add an anecdote to your observation:
I recently moved across the country, and had to drive past Chicago. Through the miracle of the iPhone and Google Maps with traffic report, our little caravan picked the bypass with the best traffic flow. It also happened to be the one with the most construction. For several miles, the road was split into 1-lane segments, separated from each other by cement barriers and road work.
Even with the three or so normal lanes constrained to one, single-file lane each, traffic flowed quickly though the construction. We were averaging 45-50 mph for the 10 or so miles of roadwork.
What made this amazing was that before the roadwork, where there were 3-4 lanes of traffic, it was stop-and-go. After the roadwork, where the lanes merged back into one and people could pass again, it was 30mph or less.
With little else to do on a long drive, this got me thinking about how to fix the problems you mention. First, traffic jams have been clearly shown to be compression waves, where the tap of lights ahead gets you to tap your lights, which rolls down the line of cars. Then when the tappers at the front accelerate, a gap opens, so the second row of cars accelerates to catch up, inevitability some accelerate too fast, tap their brakes, and the process repeats. In parts of Germany, they have automated no-tailgating systems, composed of a grid on the pavement and a camera mounted over it. If two cars are in the grid at the same time, the driver in back gets a ticket. This would go a long way to solving many traffic jams.
The herding issue you describe is far harder to solve. about all I could come up with was mandatory cruise control. "Keep right except to pass" doesn't work, due to the idiots you mentioned speeding up to keep up with someone passing them. You can't ticket people for not allowing someone to pass, due to the blind-spot riders you mentioned. It's definitely not my fault for putting cruise on, while someone comes up behind me, pulls out, and then rides beside me.
A law mandating constant speed on the highway? There are so many reasons this is a bad idea, I can't see it flying.
How DO we solve the problematic herd mentality on the roads?
I'm not as drastic as you, but I still go with a more centralized movement setup: SDFC. Since I rarely run backwards in a FPS, and find it more comfortable to have my main movement keys on the home row, SDF makes the most sense. This setup makes it a bit hard to run backwards and turn, but really, how often do you need to do that?
Back on topic, "a bit of a stretch to all but the pianists" is stupid, and means you aren't letting your users map their own keys. The most successful and comfortable games I've played let me map my keys to whatever I wanted. The games I ended up giving up on forced me to use their (often uncomfortable or asinine) control setups.
The power of the keyboard is its flexibility. Let your users make it be whatever they want it to be, and they will be happy.
I mean really, so what? Let them do it. Lately, I've stopped paying big bucks for crippled games. I've been burned enough by shitty and crippled and broken games that my price-point is $20. If it's $20 or less, I can justify the gamble that it's good. If it's more than $20, then it's off my list.
This does mean that I'm not playing the "OMG JUST RELEASED MUST GET IT!@!!!!!" games. But damn...how many games were released in the last 5 years? What percentage did I play?
In the last year I've played more games than in the years previous. However, I've paid the same or less money to do so.
Frankly, I don't gamble on $40-$60 games anymore. And I'm happy to let the industry who pushed me this way die a horrible death.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure how you'd do it in my district. My grandmother helps run polls there, and so I have a fairly good idea how it works. (Well, plus having voted there many times.)
You walk in the door, and (if there's no line) are faced with a table of election workers from all the major parties. Each has a stack of papers, listing around 750 registered voters in the district, in alphabetical chunks. You pick the line that matches up with the first letter(s) of your last name, tell them your name, and they check you off the list.
You then are allowed behind that table, where you pick up your paper ballot, and someone ticks a counter, counting the number of people who entered the voting area.
You go vote. Fill-in-the-bubble, or connect-the-tail-of-the-arrow-to-the-head.
Once you've voted, you head out out of the voting area to the collection area. You run your ballot through the optical scanner, and if there aren't any errors, it drops into the big bin. If there are, it spits it back out, and you can go get another/fix the problem.
After your ballot goes into the bin, another poll worker clicks a counter, counting cast votes.
To stuff a box, you'd have to magically do several things:
Get the ballots ahead of time and mark them up.
Make the number of voters A) checked off the registry list, B) counted as entering the voting area, and C) counted as successfully voting all match the number of votes you stuffed. Since this involves a half-dozen or more people, it would be hard to do.
Not to mention that there are about a half-dozen people watching the ballot box at any one time, from the start of the voting until the end.
Compare that to being able to switch a half-million electronic bits in a few seconds, not requiring any extra votes, and I hope you can see how much harder it is to rig paper ballots.
In my district, the scanned tally gets reported immediately, but only the hand-counted ballots are certified. Of course, that happens a day or two later. Would it be *possible* to stuff the ballot box? Sure, anything's possible. But it would be HARD AS HELL TO DO. Personally, I have 100% confidence in the voting done there. I'm not sure why it's so hard to do it this way in the rest of the country.
Until recently, I was living 4-5 hrs north of Boston. I paid ~$600/month for a 750 sq foot 2-bedroom apt, including all utilities. (Well, except garbage. Plowing tho, which is huge in the winter.) It was the upper half of an old colonial parsonage, next to the church, across the street from the town hall and library. The road outside had a couple of stripes down the middle, but no white lines or sidewalks. At the bottom of the hill, 5 min away, was a little general store and the only restaurant in town. (And it was actually pretty good, and inexpensive.)
The catch? Like Shakrai said, it was a tiny town - 500 people, with far more livestock than that. There was nothing to do outside of driving 1-2 hrs to civilization, but it was dirt cheep to live well. There was no crime to speak of, never a traffic issue, (ok, except for an hour or so during a parade, when the entire town shut down, since there was really only one road in town.) fantastic air quality, and dead quiet. 7pm-6am.
The weird thing was that you couldn't really bike or hike, despite the rural area. None of the roads had shoulders, meaning you shared the full lane with semis and all the rest of the traffic, doing 50-60mph, around sharp corners and on steep hills. Being farmland, most of it was fenced in, (and no-trespassing, to keep the riffraff from shooting all the deer) which made any sort of hiking hard.
But there were computer jobs within an hour drive to be had. $30-$35k base, which isn't much, but when you can do an apartment and car payment for $1k a month, it's not bad. Of course, there's nothing in the way of entertainment to spend your money on....
Two comments:
Why the FUCK is idle showing up on my main page again? I killed it for good reason the first time.
Secondly, RE: Evolution, they apparently missed the big job of of hyena clitorises - it allows the female to be in complete control of mating. In hyena circles, the males are inferior, and have to be on good terms to pass on their genes. It's a genetic chastity belt.
Hell, even if you had the number, and needed to figure out what it was, WHO SEARCHES WITH NO CONTEXT?
Type that in and the word "chemistry", (the overwhelmingly vague content area you might have encountered that number in), and 58.44 shows up as sodium chloride with no problems.
Is this for the same people who type "cocks" into a search engine while looking for birds, and are shocked at the results? I was under the assumption that most people understood that search engines don't read minds...
For the price of your pay provider, could you replace it with a subscription to a Sports Bar?
Not saying it's in any way feasible, based on how much you may watch per month, but plenty of bars/pubs are happy to sell you a beer while you watch a game.
A bunch of people here have said the same thing, and....
I have to say, it worked for me too. I had an overpriced satellite package, was headed back to school, and moving. To save money, and because I'm going to be slammed for time this fall, I got rid of the TV this spring.
Leading up to this, I had been bemoaning how all the good channels consistently turn to crap. (TLC, Animal Planet, History, Discovery...) They stop producing new stuff, and repeat the hell out of stuff. Then drop actual content and start pushing out utter crap. (As someone else already posted, Ghost Hunters? UFO Hunters? A MILLION FUCKING REALITY TV SHOWS ON EVERY CHANNEL?)
The interwebs...where you can find what you want, when you want it, and view it with limited commercial interruption. Now that I've broken the sit-and-veg addition, I'm learning a fair bit more, and wasting a lot less time mindlessly changing channels or sitting through commercials.
Is the internet really all that much better than the TV? Probably not, but it's not costing me $60 a month, and I'm definitely getting more entertainment out of it than TV.
I dunno if it will be what you're looking for, but check out the Tree Style Tabs extension. It puts the tabs to the left, in expandable/collapsible trees, with the trunk forming based on the page the links spawned from. It's great on wide/short monitors, as your vertical space is generally the limiting factor for webpages. Plus, it makes waaaaay more sense to me to organize tabs this way.
Well, stop using bobby tables as part of your password, and all will be well.
I totally had that in Diablo I. I made potion gardens outside. Rows and rows, fields and fields of alternating colors and patterns. "Just in case I needed them deeper in the dungeon..."
But its growth wasn't inevitable.
...Yahoo? AltaVista? UsaNet? I forget which, and as my mail was refreshing, I alt-tabbed back to the paper I was writing. Then there was some asshole yelling, which scared the ever-living shit out of me.
I didn't go looking for an ad-blocking piece of software for many years. It was only when the first talking flash ads showed up that I went looking. Even the blinking gifs weren't terrible enough for me consider the fact that they could be blocked out.
In fact, I even remember the first time it happened. It was during the winter of 1999-2000, when I was in a darkened campus computer lab late at night. (I worked there and had a key, so it was opened whenever I wanted it to be open) I was writing a paper and had been listening to a CD, so the volume was up. I refreshed
Paper editing stopped, and I looked up an ad/flash blocker, once I figured out wtf was going on. Had that never happened, I very well might not have gotten an adblocker.
I agree the development was inevitable, but I don't believe that the popularity was.
Hell, I wasn't even planning on using NoScript for the longest time, even though I had heard about it. After some semi-obvious fishing on the part of a couple of websites, and some other cross-site bullshit, also involving ads, NoScript went on as well.
I know that there are many people like me, who didn't set out to block ads and 90% of the internet. If every time I meet you you're drunk and you puke in my car, you don't get to go in my car any more. If you puke in my browser, you don't get to go in my browser any more.
You and the OP need to read the fine-print of the patent, not the normal, slashdot-fubared summary. The important bit:
and an interface configured to facilitate communication between the electronic device and an external device.
This is an internal system which records all that, then spits it out on command.
Was it one cup of coffee, or constant high humitidy?
Was it one major shock, or many, many little ones which damaged the case?
Theoretically, this could register the cup of coffee spilled on it, the drying out, and the working fine afterwards until the device was dropped out of a two-story window and onto concrete. It's an airplane black-box, put in a mobile device.
Any chance that the DDoS attack comes from 4.78.10.14?
I came on here to post the same thing. In addition, had they included it at the onset, they could have released on time, and people could have actually played multiplayer while waiting for the next installment of battlecrap.
That was a very rational and calm reply to a very hardcore bit of flamebait on my part. I apologize for the harshness, and you have my thanks for being so reasonable.
Now that I'm no longer posting drunken angry flamebait rants, let me try to put it into more rational terms:
There is nothing a student needs a cell phone for during school. Ever. Talk of emergencies and fires and school shootings and all the other excuses is a load of bullshit. Every classroom has a telephone, which can be used to call for help.
There are something like 100,000 public schools in the US. Since 1992, there have only been 165 or so deaths actually in a school building. Call that 16 years, and we're talking about 10 deaths a year. It makes school far safer than driving a car, for sure.
Realistically, the amount of damage the distraction of cellphones does to education as a whole far overshadows any potential gain they might have in the very, very few emergencies that happen in schools. The chance of an emergency happening is so remote, and the distraction to students is so overwhelmingly pervasive, it's a silly argument to make.
The arguments you make are the same ones the kids make. I get frustrated with this bitching, because when you look at the numbers, it's clear that A) cell phones are bad, and B) the arguments about the necessity of emergency contact are akin to the ones against wearing seatbelts, because "sometimes it's safer to get ejected from your vehicle". In some very random, fringe cases, yes, it might be better/safer. But 99.9% of the time it is not.
As a teacher my expectation is that adults will have the view that school is for learning. With such a view, they'll support removing things which are barriers to learning. However, if 5 years has taught me anything, it's that the vast majority of adults can't see this, and will support all sorts of things which are direct impediments to learning.
It frustrates me to no end that someone as intelligent as yourself will hang on ridiculous excuses to justify the acceptance of something which has a profoundly negative impact on education. And it's not just you - I've had plenty of parents do the same thing. That frustration was the source of the angry "fuck you"s from my previous rant, hopefully a bit more rationally and well explained this time.
Once again, I apologize for the tone, it was fairly uncalled for. I just get really angry at "think of the children" shit which can be easily proved to be overall, very bad for "the children".
Fuck you. Go suck a big one.
I taught high school science for 5 years. And it was a blessing to not have some cell phones pick up service in my room.
If there's an emergency, STUDENTS SHOULDN'T BE IN THE SCHOOL!!!
If it's on fire, if there's a gunman in it, if there's a bomb threat, GET THE FUCK OUT!!!!
But if you're in my class, your cell phone should be off. If you can't be trusted turn it off, then it should be jammed.
The purpose of school is to learn. If you're texting Sophie in Spanish, you're not learning. If you're texting you SO in the school down the road, you're not learning.
You, sir, don't know shit about kids. "they can't get kids to pay attention in class maybe the problem is that their lesson plan is boring and the teacher couldn't care less if the kids are interested or not." Do you not remember being a kid? I do. I hated authority. I hated being told to learn shit. I tried my best to rebel against the system, regardless of whether it was beneficial to me. Kids are stupid. They rebel against EVERYTHING. The FUCKING DEFINITION of "kid" is "doesn't know what's good for him". That's why adulthood comes with privileges.
Sure, the school has a problem. It has stupid kids to deal with, and PEOPLE LIKE YOU who don't know SHIT about how a school runs, and what it needs. So seriously, shut the fuck up. You are an idiot, and don't understand schools, kids, and how they work together.
My school did this with cement and re-bar. Go figure *my room* was the one which faced the nearest cell tower. and had the most amount of windows...
Dude, WTF are you talking about? Does your father-in-law lie to you on a regular basis? I'm a 5 year veteran of public high schools. The BS in your post covers:
1) Discipline. I've mocked, humiliated, and tossed out students who were arrogant asssholes.
2) Grades. I've failed 3/4 of a class before, because they deserved to fail. I've also passed 95% of another, similar class, because they deserved to pass.
3) I've confiscated all sorts of shit. The illegal shit hit the vice principal's desk, the legal shit sat in mine until the end of the day, or until a parent came and got it. That was for stuff that distracted the class, including talking pens, rifle scopes, turkey calls, tennis balls, cell phones, other quasi-educational electronic devices, balloons, decks of cards, laser pointers, etc.
On the rest, I agree. NCLB is a joke, with "high standards" and "no failures" mixed together. You can have one or the other, not both. As for salary, it's a toss-up. Teachers get paid equally in time and salary. In my 5th year, I worked about 8 hrs a day, 180 days a year. Compared to the 250 days a normal, salaried, "10 days vacation per year" individual gets, (I know, I did that for 3 years) it sounds sweet. But I made less than $40k per year. The time off was nice, but with 7 years of schooling behind me, I'd have made more in almost any other profession, with half the BS and half the stress.
I'd also agree with your dis-recommendation for people to be teachers. It's thankless, filled with stupidity, and artificially handicapped. A quick anecdote: Mid-way through my master's in education, I was hired to teach science at a local school which was desperate for a science teacher. I hit that position, and did a fair job teaching. The college I was attending wouldn't certify me to teach. Their reason?
I hadn't undergone "Student Teaching". Their rationale was that I needed to practice teaching. with a mentor, so I could learn to teach. I pointed out that I was *actually teaching* with a mentoring group, and professors and other teachers to guide me. The COLLEGE'S answer was "No."
To be certified to teach, I had to QUIT MY JOB, pay THEM $10k, for 3 courses of "Student Teaching", and then go and do WHAT I WAS ALREADY DOING, FOR FREE.
Yes, that was my college's program. Needless to say, I spent $1200 to go through the state certification instead. Keep in mind, this is a state which tossed out a retired IBM engineer who wanted to teach a physics class. You see, he wasn't *certified* to teach......
We did, until the internet showed up. Now EVERYONE can beg for attention. Triple points if you work in a profession which requires some web-savviness, since you can leverage that into a bigger cry for attention.
Look, I've been tech support and a SA, I've relied on tech support and the SA. I do my job, you do your job. I thank you for doing your job well, you thank me for doing my job well.
If this isn't your work climate, LEAVE! Get yourself a job where people appreciate your work, and you appreciate theirs. It's not some magical fantasy-land. Stop wallowing in shit, and then demanding thanks for it.
If you need a "day" for your position, then you're being treated like shit. Get a new job.
From the article, cash inflow was "likely in the 4 digits EUR range per month". Since Lance hasn't been heard from since "sometime in 2008", that's looking like a minimum of 12k EU, potentially several times that, in limbo. Since he's the only one with access, nobody knows if the money is still in the account or if it's gone.
So, is it Meth, or Cocaine?
I think you have a very good observation here. I'll add an anecdote to your observation:
I recently moved across the country, and had to drive past Chicago. Through the miracle of the iPhone and Google Maps with traffic report, our little caravan picked the bypass with the best traffic flow. It also happened to be the one with the most construction. For several miles, the road was split into 1-lane segments, separated from each other by cement barriers and road work.
Even with the three or so normal lanes constrained to one, single-file lane each, traffic flowed quickly though the construction. We were averaging 45-50 mph for the 10 or so miles of roadwork.
What made this amazing was that before the roadwork, where there were 3-4 lanes of traffic, it was stop-and-go. After the roadwork, where the lanes merged back into one and people could pass again, it was 30mph or less.
With little else to do on a long drive, this got me thinking about how to fix the problems you mention. First, traffic jams have been clearly shown to be compression waves, where the tap of lights ahead gets you to tap your lights, which rolls down the line of cars. Then when the tappers at the front accelerate, a gap opens, so the second row of cars accelerates to catch up, inevitability some accelerate too fast, tap their brakes, and the process repeats. In parts of Germany, they have automated no-tailgating systems, composed of a grid on the pavement and a camera mounted over it. If two cars are in the grid at the same time, the driver in back gets a ticket. This would go a long way to solving many traffic jams.
The herding issue you describe is far harder to solve. about all I could come up with was mandatory cruise control. "Keep right except to pass" doesn't work, due to the idiots you mentioned speeding up to keep up with someone passing them. You can't ticket people for not allowing someone to pass, due to the blind-spot riders you mentioned. It's definitely not my fault for putting cruise on, while someone comes up behind me, pulls out, and then rides beside me.
A law mandating constant speed on the highway? There are so many reasons this is a bad idea, I can't see it flying.
How DO we solve the problematic herd mentality on the roads?
No, he's not joking.
Ideas are beautiful, fragile things.
Attack people, not ideas.
I'm not as drastic as you, but I still go with a more centralized movement setup: SDFC. Since I rarely run backwards in a FPS, and find it more comfortable to have my main movement keys on the home row, SDF makes the most sense. This setup makes it a bit hard to run backwards and turn, but really, how often do you need to do that?
Back on topic, "a bit of a stretch to all but the pianists" is stupid, and means you aren't letting your users map their own keys. The most successful and comfortable games I've played let me map my keys to whatever I wanted. The games I ended up giving up on forced me to use their (often uncomfortable or asinine) control setups.
The power of the keyboard is its flexibility. Let your users make it be whatever they want it to be, and they will be happy.
And?
I mean really, so what? Let them do it. Lately, I've stopped paying big bucks for crippled games. I've been burned enough by shitty and crippled and broken games that my price-point is $20. If it's $20 or less, I can justify the gamble that it's good. If it's more than $20, then it's off my list.
This does mean that I'm not playing the "OMG JUST RELEASED MUST GET IT!@!!!!!" games. But damn...how many games were released in the last 5 years? What percentage did I play?
In the last year I've played more games than in the years previous. However, I've paid the same or less money to do so.
Frankly, I don't gamble on $40-$60 games anymore. And I'm happy to let the industry who pushed me this way die a horrible death.
That's illegal......