"1.- Selection method: select people that can pay, if we have too many then we select amongst them."
FAIL. People will only pay if you get good academic results. You can only get those by a combination of good teaching and selecting intelligent kids.
"2.- The parents take par in the kids education? How it comes? They don't work or what? Oh, I get it, working class people don't love their kids, that is a privileged trait..."
There are far more working class kids whose parents don't give a crap about their education. Sorry, it's just true. Many are uneducated or felt school was a waste of time. Expecting them to encourage study in their kids is unrealistic. Note - I don't think for a second this applies to everyone, just a sizeable few.
3.- Sure, expel a paying pupil. Don't make me laugh.
Happened a few times at my school. There was some sort of weed related scandal and a few kids were kicked out. A few disruptive kids were also politely moved to other schools.
4.- They are trying to save costs, thus employ so-so teachers.
Right, because they are non-profit organisations with more money than the state institutions...
They can employ teachers who might not have what it takes to control a class of brats in the state sector, but who are academically just fine.
A few private schools are very good and have a reputation to uphold, but most of them are really horrible places and parents are deluded when they think that paying more is necessarily a guarantee of a good education....
Most offer smaller class sizes and teachers that actually care about what they're doing. It's no guarantee, but if you have the money then it's worth investigating.
The parliament also needs reform, greater visibilty and greater accountability. The reason they can ride roughshod over national laws is because member states lead by France gave them that power. It's perfectly legitimate, or at least it would be without the damned comission.
"If you send your kids to public school, you are inflating their grades compared to state educated children"
And what do you mean by "inflating"?
Because the way I see it, if you get a better education then you can get better grades, there's fuck all to do with inflation there.
"This means that good places at universities are granted to your children instead of the their state educated peers who may be better than them."
Define better? They haven't received the training, they haven't been as well educated. There is no "better" here. If you mean that if you took the same kid through both ways they might get a higher grade with a better education, I agree, but the kid has then received a better education and is better prepared for the university work. I know what you're getting it, but it's based on this faulty "inflation" premise.
"I do feel sorry about your bad experience with state education and I do understand that in certain areas it is hard to "make it" in a state school."
When the teachers don't care and other kids disrupt constantly, yup. I was only 7 when my folks took me out and I'm glad. I spent my entire education around other kids whose parents were interested in them achieving and where academic prowess was prized. From what I've heard (and my mother works in state schools) this is rare.
"I would suggest that things have moved on from the time of your experiences,
Again, strongly depends on which school. In Nottingham and the Watford area it seems not.
"and it is my strong belief that the greater the use of state education, the faster the progression of our society."
It may be a strong belief, but it's also a non-sequitur.
"You cannot possibly believe that children, who have not yet had the chance to affect their own position in the world at all should receive better or worse education based on factors they never had any control over."
I don't have to believe that. I believe that it's counterproductive for the country to stop people payong for a better education for their kids. Keeping things "fair" reduces everyone down to the lowest level, and that's not in the interests of the UK as a whole.
Or are you the kind of socialist that believes that parents shouldn't be able to pass on their possessions to kids either? Inheritance is unfair! WAAAAAAH!
"Even the least politically enlightened here should be sickened by the idea."
The EU is a great idfea but the execution is terrible. The council should be destroyed, stricken from the legislature.
That anyone on the council thought that this was even remotely conscionable tells you just how undemocratic the people on it are. The fact that they could then go and do this tells you how undemocratic the council system is.
"Until the community comes together and makes some basic decisions like.tar.gz,.rpm,.deb,.pkg, etc. then how can we possibly expect development houses to even give serious consideration?"
1. Development houses are giving it serious consideration. Big ones. Oracle. IBM. They don't get much bigger.
2. Do you have any idea how dumb that sounds? "Until Microsoft comes together and makes some basic decisions like.zip,.msi,.cab, etc"
Companies are increasingly looking across architectures, not just across distributions for their installer tech, and none of the linux stuff is on the menu.
Besides which, if yo;u target RHEL and SLES/Novell then you get the majority of the commercial market anyway.
I've heard good things about both TaskJuggler and openproj.
The latter can read MS Project files.
TaskJuggler claims to be comprehensive, but I've got the impression that it's one of those OSS apps that does absolutely everything *if* you can figure out how the hell to get it to do anything at all.
"most of the inventors and pioneers didnt have any mathematical or theoretical tools or methods to ever use or to understand or even imagine physical phenomenon."
prove it. It's a bunch of fucking nonsense.
"not only that, some of them didnt have even any kind of school education."
That's not even slightly relevant.
"from the way you talk its clear that you are probably a youngster who is fresh into college. your talk reeks of stupid scientific/scholastic elitism. dont worry, you will get over it by the time you get to 30s."
I'm in my 30s and have been working for some years now. Your talk reeks of idiocy and too much caffeine, I suggest you calm down and actually look at what you are talking about. This guy builds mechanical automata driven by electric motors. Is it fun? Yes. Is it in any way groundbreaking? No.
You are spouting off with no knowledge of what you speak of. You're an idiot.
In the UK, yes, it's very very difficult to get rid of disruptive kids. To the extent that some schools have a special "unit", often a separate building, where the hopeless cases basically sit in jail for the day. Some poor teacher has to supervise them.
Please explain in simple English where I am denying anybody else a chance by sending my own kids to a public school.
You can't. You have some sort of gut feeling that it's not fair that some people get a better education whereas in fact, not only is it a socialist fallacy, it's out and out wrong. Not only would I be paying for my kids education, but also I'd be paying taxes into an education system I wouldn't even be using!
Other kids are DIRECTLY benefiting from my paying for private education!
Now, I'm not going to make some pseudo-religious argument about those with money being in some way better people or harder workers, but I do think the idea of restricting the quality of education that people can buy their way into out of some working class instinct about fairness is not only silly, but outright damaging.
I for one was failing in the state system, I was bored and nobody cared if I did any work or not, so I didn't. As a result of public school I'm now a well educated top-rate tax payer.
I have the greatest respect for those that did well through the state system, I also think that denying an alternative those that can afford it would damage the country. We don't have enough engineers, scientists and well educated workers in general. banning public schools would make that worse.
No, the fundamental problem is that most people are idiots. Most calls to Dell probably can be solved with "turn it off and on again", or "Check it's plugged in", because most people are morons when it comes to technology.
The fact that you and I find the whole process frustrating and the people at the other end annoying and obstructive is neither here nor there compared to the bottom line, which is that if they hired competent, technologically literate individuals they would have to pay more and 99.9% of the time the monkey would have been fine.
Whilst that may cover unionised teachers in independant schools, I'm betting the ~50% that are not in the unions are doing better.
Certainly the school I went to paid better than the local state thing. It may also be attractive because it's a much easier teaching environment though, I agree with that.
Actually, private schools consistently get better grade averages because:
1. They select their intake 2. The parents take part in the kids education 3. They can permanently expel disruptive children 4. They can afford to employ the best teachers 5. They can afford to buy better facilities
"Public schools and paying for an education is the quintessential example of what is wrong with the world! It is incredibly unfair!"
So we should all get a shit education because we can't all afford the best one?
Fuck you and your race to the bottom. Your "friend" that went to St Pauls sounds like an arsehole, he's not typical of public school education.
"If you compare their salaries to the salaries of state school workers it is ridiculous"
How else are you going to attract and keep the best? And before you say "they'd be teaching state-school kids if they weren't at public institutions", think about it. A lot of them are intelligent people and could make a lot of cash elsewhere. Teaching may not be their primary motivation.
If you're not well schooled in both their theory and their application then you probably won't know when to apply them or spot when other people have used them.
there's usually better(quicker/less complex) ways for a computer to do these things than how a human would go at them.
So you don't aspire to being the guy that writes those computer routines then? You'll just use library code. Which is fine, but a little devoid of ambition.
"I'm sick of this "Kids in the 1950s were smarter than today" rubbish"
Really?
Because if you are it's easy to stop hearing it - you need to stop misinterpreting what people say.
Nobody's saying kids of yesteryear were smarter, they're saying that the exams were tougher and the education more rigorous. Someone with an A grade today, and the education to match, would not have got that grade in an exam paper from the 70s or 80s.
Do the side by side comparison - the papers were far, far tougher.
I did my exams in the early 90s, and I thought the old papers were tough then. Apparently you can hold todays up to what I did and do the same. Standards are slipping. Kids are not getting dumber.
And much as I don't like the idea that I myself got easy qualifications, I must admit that we did exactly the same back then.
We looked at papers from 10-15 years before, praised the lord that we didn't have to do anything that tough, and then did the papers for practice anyway.
"Why is it that for a CS degree I must know how to do complex differentiation by hand? Not like I'm ever going to need it for anything more than passing the exam"
Because you may want to use some of these calculations in the code you write.
Maths is a very important subject, CS is (in some ways) applied mathematics.
I played portal under wine and have had other things running fine. A native client is a better thing, obviously, but it's not like linux users have been totally unable to run these so far,
"So 17 UN resolutions referencing WMDs represents what to you, moron?"
History. The Irqi gov't weren't cooperating, but Blix was not convinced they had any WMD when he was pulled out.
"Put the propaganda UK rags down, get some better medications, and go back to middle school and learn something before further poisoning the internet with your ignorance."
That's so wrong it's funny. The whole world didn't believe shit about WMDs. Your government made shit up and then our government (UK) got involved because they thought it was politically expedient.
And the Syria thing? Please. Bullshit to justify US actions in light of the complete clusterfuck that the Iraq thing became.
Slashdot Mirror
"1.- Selection method: select people that can pay, if we have too many then we select amongst them."
FAIL. People will only pay if you get good academic results. You can only get those by a combination of good teaching and selecting intelligent kids.
"2.- The parents take par in the kids education? How it comes? They don't work or what? Oh, I get it, working class people don't love their kids, that is a privileged trait..."
There are far more working class kids whose parents don't give a crap about their education. Sorry, it's just true. Many are uneducated or felt school was a waste of time. Expecting them to encourage study in their kids is unrealistic. Note - I don't think for a second this applies to everyone, just a sizeable few.
3.- Sure, expel a paying pupil. Don't make me laugh.
Happened a few times at my school. There was some sort of weed related scandal and a few kids were kicked out. A few disruptive kids were also politely moved to other schools.
4.- They are trying to save costs, thus employ so-so teachers.
Right, because they are non-profit organisations with more money than the state institutions...
They can employ teachers who might not have what it takes to control a class of brats in the state sector, but who are academically just fine.
A few private schools are very good and have a reputation to uphold, but most of them are really horrible places and parents are deluded when they think that paying more is necessarily a guarantee of a good education....
Most offer smaller class sizes and teachers that actually care about what they're doing. It's no guarantee, but if you have the money then it's worth investigating.
We elect the european parliament.
Just not the commission. This must change, starting with the scrapping of the commission.
That's the problem, the dictators in Brussels.
The parliament also needs reform, greater visibilty and greater accountability. The reason they can ride roughshod over national laws is because member states lead by France gave them that power. It's perfectly legitimate, or at least it would be without the damned comission.
"If you send your kids to public school, you are inflating their grades compared to state educated children"
And what do you mean by "inflating"?
Because the way I see it, if you get a better education then you can get better grades, there's fuck all to do with inflation there.
"This means that good places at universities are granted to your children instead of the their state educated peers who may be better than them."
Define better? They haven't received the training, they haven't been as well educated. There is no "better" here. If you mean that if you took the same kid through both ways they might get a higher grade with a better education, I agree, but the kid has then received a better education and is better prepared for the university work. I know what you're getting it, but it's based on this faulty "inflation" premise.
"I do feel sorry about your bad experience with state education and I do understand that in certain areas it is hard to "make it" in a state school."
When the teachers don't care and other kids disrupt constantly, yup. I was only 7 when my folks took me out and I'm glad. I spent my entire education around other kids whose parents were interested in them achieving and where academic prowess was prized. From what I've heard (and my mother works in state schools) this is rare.
"I would suggest that things have moved on from the time of your experiences,
Again, strongly depends on which school. In Nottingham and the Watford area it seems not.
"and it is my strong belief that the greater the use of state education, the faster the progression of our society."
It may be a strong belief, but it's also a non-sequitur.
"You cannot possibly believe that children, who have not yet had the chance to affect their own position in the world at all should receive better or worse education based on factors they never had any control over."
I don't have to believe that. I believe that it's counterproductive for the country to stop people payong for a better education for their kids. Keeping things "fair" reduces everyone down to the lowest level, and that's not in the interests of the UK as a whole.
Or are you the kind of socialist that believes that parents shouldn't be able to pass on their possessions to kids either? Inheritance is unfair! WAAAAAAH!
"Even the least politically enlightened here should be sickened by the idea."
What sickens me is your jealousy.
The EU is a great idfea but the execution is terrible. The council should be destroyed, stricken from the legislature.
That anyone on the council thought that this was even remotely conscionable tells you just how undemocratic the people on it are. The fact that they could then go and do this tells you how undemocratic the council system is.
Get rid of it. It's sick.
"Until the community comes together and makes some basic decisions like .tar.gz, .rpm, .deb, .pkg, etc. then how can we possibly expect development houses to even give serious consideration?"
1. Development houses are giving it serious consideration. Big ones. Oracle. IBM. They don't get much bigger.
2. Do you have any idea how dumb that sounds? .zip, .msi, .cab, etc"
"Until Microsoft comes together and makes some basic decisions like
Companies are increasingly looking across architectures, not just across distributions for their installer tech, and none of the linux stuff is on the menu.
Besides which, if yo;u target RHEL and SLES/Novell then you get the majority of the commercial market anyway.
I've heard good things about both TaskJuggler and openproj.
The latter can read MS Project files.
TaskJuggler claims to be comprehensive, but I've got the impression that it's one of those OSS apps that does absolutely everything *if* you can figure out how the hell to get it to do anything at all.
Still, maybe worth a quick look at those two.
"most of the inventors and pioneers didnt have any mathematical or theoretical tools or methods to ever use or to understand or even imagine physical phenomenon."
prove it. It's a bunch of fucking nonsense.
"not only that, some of them didnt have even any kind of school education."
That's not even slightly relevant.
"from the way you talk its clear that you are probably a youngster who is fresh into college. your talk reeks of stupid scientific/scholastic elitism. dont worry, you will get over it by the time you get to 30s."
I'm in my 30s and have been working for some years now. Your talk reeks of idiocy and too much caffeine, I suggest you calm down and actually look at what you are talking about. This guy builds mechanical automata driven by electric motors. Is it fun? Yes. Is it in any way groundbreaking? No.
You are spouting off with no knowledge of what you speak of. You're an idiot.
In the UK, yes, it's very very difficult to get rid of disruptive kids. To the extent that some schools have a special "unit", often a separate building, where the hopeless cases basically sit in jail for the day. Some poor teacher has to supervise them.
Please explain in simple English where I am denying anybody else a chance by sending my own kids to a public school.
You can't. You have some sort of gut feeling that it's not fair that some people get a better education whereas in fact, not only is it a socialist fallacy, it's out and out wrong. Not only would I be paying for my kids education, but also I'd be paying taxes into an education system I wouldn't even be using!
Other kids are DIRECTLY benefiting from my paying for private education!
Now, I'm not going to make some pseudo-religious argument about those with money being in some way better people or harder workers, but I do think the idea of restricting the quality of education that people can buy their way into out of some working class instinct about fairness is not only silly, but outright damaging.
I for one was failing in the state system, I was bored and nobody cared if I did any work or not, so I didn't. As a result of public school I'm now a well educated top-rate tax payer.
I have the greatest respect for those that did well through the state system, I also think that denying an alternative those that can afford it would damage the country. We don't have enough engineers, scientists and well educated workers in general. banning public schools would make that worse.
No, the fundamental problem is that most people are idiots. Most calls to Dell probably can be solved with "turn it off and on again", or "Check it's plugged in", because most people are morons when it comes to technology.
The fact that you and I find the whole process frustrating and the people at the other end annoying and obstructive is neither here nor there compared to the bottom line, which is that if they hired competent, technologically literate individuals they would have to pay more and 99.9% of the time the monkey would have been fine.
I was pretty sure that it was the other way around in the UK, but you may have something on the working conditions there.
Whilst that may cover unionised teachers in independant schools, I'm betting the ~50% that are not in the unions are doing better.
Certainly the school I went to paid better than the local state thing. It may also be attractive because it's a much easier teaching environment though, I agree with that.
Actually, private schools consistently get better grade averages because:
1. They select their intake
2. The parents take part in the kids education
3. They can permanently expel disruptive children
4. They can afford to employ the best teachers
5. They can afford to buy better facilities
"Public schools and paying for an education is the quintessential example of what is wrong with the world! It is incredibly unfair!"
So we should all get a shit education because we can't all afford the best one?
Fuck you and your race to the bottom. Your "friend" that went to St Pauls sounds like an arsehole, he's not typical of public school education.
"If you compare their salaries to the salaries of state school workers it is ridiculous"
How else are you going to attract and keep the best?
And before you say "they'd be teaching state-school kids if they weren't at public institutions", think about it. A lot of them are intelligent people and could make a lot of cash elsewhere. Teaching may not be their primary motivation.
Look at some papaers side by side.
The 50s is going back too far, but look from the 80s onward. It's just a big slide towards mediocrity.
If you're not well schooled in both their theory and their application then you probably won't know when to apply them or spot when other people have used them.
there's usually better(quicker/less complex) ways for a computer to do these things than how a human would go at them.
So you don't aspire to being the guy that writes those computer routines then? You'll just use library code. Which is fine, but a little devoid of ambition.
"I'm sick of this "Kids in the 1950s were smarter than today" rubbish"
Really?
Because if you are it's easy to stop hearing it - you need to stop misinterpreting what people say.
Nobody's saying kids of yesteryear were smarter, they're saying that the exams were tougher and the education more rigorous. Someone with an A grade today, and the education to match, would not have got that grade in an exam paper from the 70s or 80s.
Do the side by side comparison - the papers were far, far tougher.
I did my exams in the early 90s, and I thought the old papers were tough then. Apparently you can hold todays up to what I did and do the same. Standards are slipping. Kids are not getting dumber.
THe education system is failing to educate.
And much as I don't like the idea that I myself got easy qualifications, I must admit that we did exactly the same back then.
We looked at papers from 10-15 years before, praised the lord that we didn't have to do anything that tough, and then did the papers for practice anyway.
"Why is it that for a CS degree I must know how to do complex differentiation by hand? Not like I'm ever going to need it for anything more than passing the exam"
Because you may want to use some of these calculations in the code you write.
Maths is a very important subject, CS is (in some ways) applied mathematics.
Likewise, came here to say that.
I played portal under wine and have had other things running fine. A native client is a better thing, obviously, but it's not like linux users have been totally unable to run these so far,
"So 17 UN resolutions referencing WMDs represents what to you, moron?"
History. The Irqi gov't weren't cooperating, but Blix was not convinced they had any WMD when he was pulled out.
"Put the propaganda UK rags down, get some better medications, and go back to middle school and learn something before further poisoning the internet with your ignorance."
Lol. Republitard.
No.
Sorry. No.
That's so wrong it's funny. The whole world didn't believe shit about WMDs. Your government made shit up and then our government (UK) got involved because they thought it was politically expedient.
And the Syria thing? Please. Bullshit to justify US actions in light of the complete clusterfuck that the Iraq thing became.
Did you mean "isn't".
Because right now your "Oh, wait..." is redundant.