One of the problems with the whole subject of education spending is that it tends to be viewed solely in terms of either total expenditure or "spending per student," which is nothing more than the amount spent by the school/district divided by the number of students in that school/district.
Teachers themselves aren't paid that well, certainly not commensurate with the social importance of their jobs. One could call them "greedy" for wanting to make more money, but if you bottom-dollar public school teaching as a career, fewer people will choose to do it and those who do choose to do it will probably be lower-quality teachers, because the best ones can demand more money as private school teachers, professional tutors, or university professors.
It amazes me that people don't think of this when they hear about teachers demanding better pay, considering that teachers aren't paid terribly well to begin with. I mean, it's fine if you want to pay teachers shit--just don't expect anything better than shit teachers. Capitalism works in that job market just as well as it does in others: you pay more for good employees, cut corners if you don't care about having bad ones.
I fully agree, but while it may be impractical (read: expensive) to stop people at every road intersection to demand their papers, it doesn't take much to stop Internet traffic from reaching its destination. Governments find this attractive because it is, in theory, possible without being terribly expensive. A country can wall itself off from the greater Internet if it so desires, and police its own Internet pretty effectively.
Since you brought up roads, a good example here might be the nature of cars. Can most people build their own car? Generally, no. Building your own road-legal car is a fairly expensive proposition. But today, anyone can build their own website for next to nothing. In the future, this may not be the case due to regulation. In the same way that the road is only to be populated with properly titled, registered, and maintained cars (driven by people with documented, official licenses), the Internet may someday be regulated in a similar manner: only approved equipment allowed to connect; only verified, documented users allowed to do much of anything. This would be a Bad Thing in my opinion (and probably yours), but technically feasible and legally enforceable when you get right down to it.
I'd be fine with that, or only making the individual teacher ratings accessible to the parents of children in that teacher's class. I think that information is more relevant to those parents than it would be to anyone else. And if the students in a particular class are doing worse than the rest of the school, the parents would have the right to demand answers.
But the ratings for individual teachers do matter, taken in the context of how other teachers in that school (and area) are doing. You're right that it's much more complex than just having good teachers/bad teachers. If one or two teachers in a whole school are having poor evaluations, that probably points to lousy teachers. If all the teachers have poor evaluations, you're looking at a broken school. If the pattern is consistent across multiple schools in a particular area, you know it's an even bigger problem than just one bad school.
Individual teacher ratings are just one part of a much larger puzzle, I just wonder who is going to take the time to put the puzzle together and figure out which problems are caused by bad teachers, bad administrators, bad parents, or even bigger socioeconomic issues. Firing all the teachers in a teacher won't do a damn thing if the kids come from homes in poor neighborhoods with inattentive parents. But there would certainly be times when there's an obviously bad teacher whose poor performance is downplayed or covered up by the administration (or the union.)
While I'm in favor of teachers' unions, the job of a union should not be to protect crappy employees, but to look out for the interests of the employees as a whole. You can't tell me the union is served by protecting shitty teachers!
The Internet has simply become too big and too important to remain apolitical forever. Think of how much has changed just in the past few years:
* Groups like Anonymous have done real-world damage to businesses and governments by bringing down servers and stealing private information. * Wikileaks has embarrassed numerous governments by exposing their dirty laundry and even illegal activities. * Twitter has been instrumental in organizing and spreading resistance movements, particularly during the Arab Spring. * Bitcoin has allowed underground economies like Silk Road to flourish. * The proliferation of strong encryption has presented new challenges for law enforcement and government eavesdropping. * Onion protocols like Tor make it easier for people to hide their illegal/rebellious activities. * The ease-of-use of BitTorrent and its clients have made copyright infringement easier than ever.
Taken by themselves, each of these things is a nuisance at best. Taken as part of a larger pattern, governments around the world see the Internet as a platform that's simply out of their control. Under the pretense of stopping criminal activity, they would also gladly lock it down to quash dissent. What originally came to prominence as a new engine for business has evolved as a viable platform for organized dissidence as well as criminal activity. The difficulty is in fighting in the latter without stopping the former. I know around here, the preference would be to maximize freedom even if that means criminal elements remain unthwarted and unpunished. Unfortunately, most people understand too little of these issues and most governments are too singularly focused on serving their own interests to see the Internet as a global public good that should be preserved. Instead, it's considered another vector for terrorism, criminality, and disruption, and therefore it must be sanitized to make it into a more suitable vehicle for commerce and propaganda.
Much of the business community would be happy to see the Internet become a "push" medium. Allowing users to generate content and express themselves opens site owners/operators up to more and more liability. I don't think it will ever come to outright banning of particular technologies, but policies, legal precedents, and broader governmental involvement in Internet affairs will result in a chilling effect, to the point that it won't be a good idea to speak your mind about most things, and the number of venues you'll have in which to do that will be limited anyway.
I think we have a long way to go before that happens, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it every step of the way.
Really? All the US controls is the.com TLD (and some others), a component of DNS. The rest of the world could happily build their own Internet with their own DNS and completely cut out the US, if they were so inclined. It's not as if we control some key piece of infrastructure that no one else could possibly duplicate.
If you don't like what Google does with your information, do not use their services and therefore avoid providing any information at all.
I agree that Google has every right to block access to people who don't allow Google to collect the information they want. That's the price you pay for their services, after all.
I think that's entirely separate from Google working around IE's security settings, which I agree is pretty fucking shady and not something they have any right to do.
But the person I responded to wasn't even expressing a specific concern about privacy. They were concerned about "selling our demographic information to advertisers." Whether Google sells the information directly or merely sells tools that rely upon it, this is how Google makes their money. Since when did the definition of "privacy" extend to "aggregate data that may or may not represent characteristics of myself within the statistics"?
Selling that demographic information is how they provide all the free services they do. Their ability to target ads effectively is what makes them attractive to advertisers.
I get that Slashdotters are deeply paranoid about anyone knowing anything about them, but at the same time, you aren't entitled to free services like those that Google provides. If you really don't want anything to do with Google, modify your hosts file so all requests to *.google.com (and related domains) are sent nowhere. That's "voting with your wallet," so to speak.
But I can't say I have much patience for people who want to use Google's services and then complain about Google using the information they gather about you as part of their advertising system. There's room to argue about what they should or shouldn't be allowed to do with it, but to presume they shouldn't have any information about you at all is a bit silly.
I feel the same way, myself. I'd rather the browser render whatever it has available at that moment rather than wait for the whole page (unless it has to because the page is compressed or something.)
As noted in other posts, Microsoft wouldn't be able to predict the behavior of the general Internet, and therefore not have repeatable results. The results only need to be repeatable by Microsoft for their own testing. It's not like they are trying to prove a scientific theory here, they're trying to improve a product through aggregate testing and quantitative measurements. Hard to make good quantitative measurements when there are variables you can't easily account for, hence their own private, custom-designed Internet.
That's what I hear, but there's also what I said about people not liking to switch.:)
I'll stick with Chrome until I hear something is much, much better, or Chrome gets much, much worse. Same thing happened when I originally used Netscape (turned to shit around version 4.5), then IE (turned to shit around version 6), then Firefox (I forget when it went to hell, but then I jumped to Chrome.)
Nah, it was in reference to the way the GPL "spreads" through code. What Microsoft likes are licenses such as BSD, where you can take an open codebase, change it, package it, and sell it--all without ever having to share your modified source with anyone. Microsoft didn't like the GPL because it meant to use GPL'd code they would have to share any changes they made to it, and when's the last time you saw Microsoft giving useful code away?
MS doesn't seem to much mind giving away binaries, but source code is seemingly sacred there.
The one part of this argument that makes sense to me is manual drivers having a better feel for how their car is sticking to the road. Your vehicle's speed is more tangible with a stick. However, in this age of modern vehicles with electronic traction control systems and other computer intervention, I'd argue that a manual transmission doesn't add much benefit in that equation. Traction control systems are often better at helping a driver control a vehicle in a dangerous situation, as the car's computer can do a lot more than just change the gear up or down and apply brakes.
I see no reason to take people's manual transmissions away if they want to use them, but I don't think it's accurate to say being skilled with a manual transmission makes you a safer driver than someone riding in, say, a late-model automatic with various types of computer-assisted hazard intervention. Thinking that the manual is better specifically because a human is controlling it is also a supposition based on human ego rather than real data. A computer is actually better at controlling your car than you are--that's why traction control systems work in the first place! Drivers are, by and large, total shit at handling a loss of traction. That's not a slight against humans, we just aren't accustomed to things like having to vary the speeds of four wheels at once, and I'd argue that short of cybernetic enhancements, we'll never be able to do that as effectively as a computer.
All true. Although I have a friend who uses Opera, and she was aghast at the way Chrome renders a white screen before it starts rendering the full page. She said under Opera, the full page just shows up all at once with no weird white screen first. I'm not sure but I think Opera's renderer might be a little faster than Chrome's.
Quite true. And a car with dozens of sensors is, by definition, going to have a higher degree of situational awareness than a human driver. We've got two eyes, a few mirrors, and a bunch of windows. A computer in a car can keep track of much more than that, and react more quickly to it, as well. The technical ability is there, we just need the implementation in terms of software and hardware. But with today's computing power and the kinds of sensors commercially available, there really aren't any technical limitations thwarting automated driving.
Though I know automated cars won't be perfect, I'm confident they can be safer than human-driven cars simply because a machine (with more information than a human, and processed more quickly) is going to be better at sizing up and reacting to a situation. It won't decide based on emotion or whether or not it's in a hurry, or get angry or be distracted by a cell phone, or be capable of driving while drunk/high.
So, what's going to make anyone use a Microsoft browser? They've been losing market share for ages because their browsers suck. How do they get people back? Make a good browser. Your argument might mean something if Microsoft sold IE as a standalone product, but they don't. It costs nothing (in terms of cash coming straight out of your pocket) to switch browsers, and users are notoriously not fond of switching. Since you can't count on your competitors' products to be lousy, you can only compete by making yours better. The browser market is about as Darwinistic as a software market could be.
Yeah, that's why I ditched Firefox years ago for Chrome. Got sick of FF freezing/crashing all the time, as well as its performance just getting worse and worse over time.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the problems with the whole subject of education spending is that it tends to be viewed solely in terms of either total expenditure or "spending per student," which is nothing more than the amount spent by the school/district divided by the number of students in that school/district.
Teachers themselves aren't paid that well, certainly not commensurate with the social importance of their jobs. One could call them "greedy" for wanting to make more money, but if you bottom-dollar public school teaching as a career, fewer people will choose to do it and those who do choose to do it will probably be lower-quality teachers, because the best ones can demand more money as private school teachers, professional tutors, or university professors.
It amazes me that people don't think of this when they hear about teachers demanding better pay, considering that teachers aren't paid terribly well to begin with. I mean, it's fine if you want to pay teachers shit--just don't expect anything better than shit teachers. Capitalism works in that job market just as well as it does in others: you pay more for good employees, cut corners if you don't care about having bad ones.
I fully agree, but while it may be impractical (read: expensive) to stop people at every road intersection to demand their papers, it doesn't take much to stop Internet traffic from reaching its destination. Governments find this attractive because it is, in theory, possible without being terribly expensive. A country can wall itself off from the greater Internet if it so desires, and police its own Internet pretty effectively.
Since you brought up roads, a good example here might be the nature of cars. Can most people build their own car? Generally, no. Building your own road-legal car is a fairly expensive proposition. But today, anyone can build their own website for next to nothing. In the future, this may not be the case due to regulation. In the same way that the road is only to be populated with properly titled, registered, and maintained cars (driven by people with documented, official licenses), the Internet may someday be regulated in a similar manner: only approved equipment allowed to connect; only verified, documented users allowed to do much of anything. This would be a Bad Thing in my opinion (and probably yours), but technically feasible and legally enforceable when you get right down to it.
I'd be fine with that, or only making the individual teacher ratings accessible to the parents of children in that teacher's class. I think that information is more relevant to those parents than it would be to anyone else. And if the students in a particular class are doing worse than the rest of the school, the parents would have the right to demand answers.
How do you propose we "hold parents accountable"?
So, your idea is to export shitty, unrepresentative quantitative measures to other fields even though you admit they suck? That's brilliant.
But the ratings for individual teachers do matter, taken in the context of how other teachers in that school (and area) are doing. You're right that it's much more complex than just having good teachers/bad teachers. If one or two teachers in a whole school are having poor evaluations, that probably points to lousy teachers. If all the teachers have poor evaluations, you're looking at a broken school. If the pattern is consistent across multiple schools in a particular area, you know it's an even bigger problem than just one bad school.
Individual teacher ratings are just one part of a much larger puzzle, I just wonder who is going to take the time to put the puzzle together and figure out which problems are caused by bad teachers, bad administrators, bad parents, or even bigger socioeconomic issues. Firing all the teachers in a teacher won't do a damn thing if the kids come from homes in poor neighborhoods with inattentive parents. But there would certainly be times when there's an obviously bad teacher whose poor performance is downplayed or covered up by the administration (or the union.)
While I'm in favor of teachers' unions, the job of a union should not be to protect crappy employees, but to look out for the interests of the employees as a whole. You can't tell me the union is served by protecting shitty teachers!
The Internet has simply become too big and too important to remain apolitical forever. Think of how much has changed just in the past few years:
* Groups like Anonymous have done real-world damage to businesses and governments by bringing down servers and stealing private information.
* Wikileaks has embarrassed numerous governments by exposing their dirty laundry and even illegal activities.
* Twitter has been instrumental in organizing and spreading resistance movements, particularly during the Arab Spring.
* Bitcoin has allowed underground economies like Silk Road to flourish.
* The proliferation of strong encryption has presented new challenges for law enforcement and government eavesdropping.
* Onion protocols like Tor make it easier for people to hide their illegal/rebellious activities.
* The ease-of-use of BitTorrent and its clients have made copyright infringement easier than ever.
Taken by themselves, each of these things is a nuisance at best. Taken as part of a larger pattern, governments around the world see the Internet as a platform that's simply out of their control. Under the pretense of stopping criminal activity, they would also gladly lock it down to quash dissent. What originally came to prominence as a new engine for business has evolved as a viable platform for organized dissidence as well as criminal activity. The difficulty is in fighting in the latter without stopping the former. I know around here, the preference would be to maximize freedom even if that means criminal elements remain unthwarted and unpunished. Unfortunately, most people understand too little of these issues and most governments are too singularly focused on serving their own interests to see the Internet as a global public good that should be preserved. Instead, it's considered another vector for terrorism, criminality, and disruption, and therefore it must be sanitized to make it into a more suitable vehicle for commerce and propaganda.
Much of the business community would be happy to see the Internet become a "push" medium. Allowing users to generate content and express themselves opens site owners/operators up to more and more liability. I don't think it will ever come to outright banning of particular technologies, but policies, legal precedents, and broader governmental involvement in Internet affairs will result in a chilling effect, to the point that it won't be a good idea to speak your mind about most things, and the number of venues you'll have in which to do that will be limited anyway.
I think we have a long way to go before that happens, but it doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it every step of the way.
A new age!
Really? All the US controls is the .com TLD (and some others), a component of DNS. The rest of the world could happily build their own Internet with their own DNS and completely cut out the US, if they were so inclined. It's not as if we control some key piece of infrastructure that no one else could possibly duplicate.
If you don't like what Google does with your information, do not use their services and therefore avoid providing any information at all.
I agree that Google has every right to block access to people who don't allow Google to collect the information they want. That's the price you pay for their services, after all.
I think that's entirely separate from Google working around IE's security settings, which I agree is pretty fucking shady and not something they have any right to do.
But the person I responded to wasn't even expressing a specific concern about privacy. They were concerned about "selling our demographic information to advertisers." Whether Google sells the information directly or merely sells tools that rely upon it, this is how Google makes their money. Since when did the definition of "privacy" extend to "aggregate data that may or may not represent characteristics of myself within the statistics"?
Selling that demographic information is how they provide all the free services they do. Their ability to target ads effectively is what makes them attractive to advertisers.
I get that Slashdotters are deeply paranoid about anyone knowing anything about them, but at the same time, you aren't entitled to free services like those that Google provides. If you really don't want anything to do with Google, modify your hosts file so all requests to *.google.com (and related domains) are sent nowhere. That's "voting with your wallet," so to speak.
But I can't say I have much patience for people who want to use Google's services and then complain about Google using the information they gather about you as part of their advertising system. There's room to argue about what they should or shouldn't be allowed to do with it, but to presume they shouldn't have any information about you at all is a bit silly.
I feel the same way, myself. I'd rather the browser render whatever it has available at that moment rather than wait for the whole page (unless it has to because the page is compressed or something.)
Indeed. I've used it (briefly) but just didn't care for it over and above Chrome. I do, however, use Opera Mini on my Android phone.
As noted in other posts, Microsoft wouldn't be able to predict the behavior of the general Internet, and therefore not have repeatable results. The results only need to be repeatable by Microsoft for their own testing. It's not like they are trying to prove a scientific theory here, they're trying to improve a product through aggregate testing and quantitative measurements. Hard to make good quantitative measurements when there are variables you can't easily account for, hence their own private, custom-designed Internet.
That's what I hear, but there's also what I said about people not liking to switch. :)
I'll stick with Chrome until I hear something is much, much better, or Chrome gets much, much worse. Same thing happened when I originally used Netscape (turned to shit around version 4.5), then IE (turned to shit around version 6), then Firefox (I forget when it went to hell, but then I jumped to Chrome.)
A cloud made of those would probably run very, very slowly.
Nah, it was in reference to the way the GPL "spreads" through code. What Microsoft likes are licenses such as BSD, where you can take an open codebase, change it, package it, and sell it--all without ever having to share your modified source with anyone. Microsoft didn't like the GPL because it meant to use GPL'd code they would have to share any changes they made to it, and when's the last time you saw Microsoft giving useful code away?
MS doesn't seem to much mind giving away binaries, but source code is seemingly sacred there.
The one part of this argument that makes sense to me is manual drivers having a better feel for how their car is sticking to the road. Your vehicle's speed is more tangible with a stick. However, in this age of modern vehicles with electronic traction control systems and other computer intervention, I'd argue that a manual transmission doesn't add much benefit in that equation. Traction control systems are often better at helping a driver control a vehicle in a dangerous situation, as the car's computer can do a lot more than just change the gear up or down and apply brakes.
I see no reason to take people's manual transmissions away if they want to use them, but I don't think it's accurate to say being skilled with a manual transmission makes you a safer driver than someone riding in, say, a late-model automatic with various types of computer-assisted hazard intervention. Thinking that the manual is better specifically because a human is controlling it is also a supposition based on human ego rather than real data. A computer is actually better at controlling your car than you are--that's why traction control systems work in the first place! Drivers are, by and large, total shit at handling a loss of traction. That's not a slight against humans, we just aren't accustomed to things like having to vary the speeds of four wheels at once, and I'd argue that short of cybernetic enhancements, we'll never be able to do that as effectively as a computer.
All true. Although I have a friend who uses Opera, and she was aghast at the way Chrome renders a white screen before it starts rendering the full page. She said under Opera, the full page just shows up all at once with no weird white screen first. I'm not sure but I think Opera's renderer might be a little faster than Chrome's.
Quite true. And a car with dozens of sensors is, by definition, going to have a higher degree of situational awareness than a human driver. We've got two eyes, a few mirrors, and a bunch of windows. A computer in a car can keep track of much more than that, and react more quickly to it, as well. The technical ability is there, we just need the implementation in terms of software and hardware. But with today's computing power and the kinds of sensors commercially available, there really aren't any technical limitations thwarting automated driving.
Though I know automated cars won't be perfect, I'm confident they can be safer than human-driven cars simply because a machine (with more information than a human, and processed more quickly) is going to be better at sizing up and reacting to a situation. It won't decide based on emotion or whether or not it's in a hurry, or get angry or be distracted by a cell phone, or be capable of driving while drunk/high.
So, what's going to make anyone use a Microsoft browser? They've been losing market share for ages because their browsers suck. How do they get people back? Make a good browser. Your argument might mean something if Microsoft sold IE as a standalone product, but they don't. It costs nothing (in terms of cash coming straight out of your pocket) to switch browsers, and users are notoriously not fond of switching. Since you can't count on your competitors' products to be lousy, you can only compete by making yours better. The browser market is about as Darwinistic as a software market could be.
What we really need is another Bitcoin story!
Oh snap!
Yeah, that's why I ditched Firefox years ago for Chrome. Got sick of FF freezing/crashing all the time, as well as its performance just getting worse and worse over time.
Yes, there must be some conspiracy! Microsoft couldn't possibly want to make a good browser! They must have ulterior motives!