This in turn is a result of the assembly-line educational style that is favored in American schools. There's this attitude that all kids have to come out of the educational system with an essentially identical skill set.* It's not just that the schools don't encourage kids to actively develop their individual talents, its that the schools actively discourage kids from developing their individual talents. I don't blame this on teachers - I'm sue there are mean-spirited teachers who try to stifle individuality in their students, but that's not the source of the majority of the problem. It's that no room is given for kids to nurture their own talents - their schedules are filled with all of the required classes, their time is entirely devoted to lectures, and their homework is all read-and-regurgitate busywork. Of course kids hate that - I know I did, and I'm the kind of unrepentant nerd who reads Nature for pleasure. I'm not a parent, so I haven't spent a whole lot of time around young children, but I've spent enough to know that they are naturally inquisitive and actively want to learn - something is stifling that urge. I think it's the fact that, upon entering school, they learn very quickly to associate learning with drudgery. Not that there's really any other option, given how cheap Americans are with respect to their future. The current educational system is probably the best you can do with these huge class sizes, this lack of desire to put money into cirriculum development and teacher training, the way we actively discourage the most talented people from being teachers because we won't pay them a reasonable salary, and the fact that we won't pay for a reasonable student-to-teacher ratio. Especially the last one - it's not just the big class sizes, it's the number of classes each teacher has to teach. Assignments that really challenge students' minds are also assignments that take a long time to grade, and I can't blame teachers for wanting to have lives outside of work. Even more so with assignments that allow students to use their individual talents - a stack of open-ended final projects is a lot harder to grade than a stack of electronic-scan multiple-choice final exams. Furthermore, if kids are to get the best instruction, they should be able to meet one-on-one with their teachers during study hall or lunch or somesuch, but that's hard to arrange when most teachers are in lecture 70-80% of the work day.
* I'm not necessarily saying that there isn't a core set of knowledge that we should teach to everyone, but the current cirriculum in most schools was obviously chosen by throwing darts at a board. I have no clue why I was forced to learn all the phyla and classes in the kindom mammalia as a freshman in high school. I also have no idea why I was never taught basic reasoning skills in school - call me crazy, but I think that in a society where all citizens take part in major political decisions, we should try to ensure that everybody who votes is able to recognize basic logical fallacies like tautological reasoning, even if they don't know it by name.
So true. A carpenter doesn't design furniture with a hammer and saw in hand, because without a plan for what he's doing the pieces won't fit together quite right and the finished product will end up looking shoddy.
I hope nobody mods you flamebait, because to a large degree, what you say is true. But I would mod you "naive consumer" if I had the option. You could have avoided a lot of frustration and anger if you had just followed two very simple rules of buying $200 pieces of hardware:
1. Wait for others to buy it and see whether or not it sucks rather than gambling your own money. (This is doubly true for first-gen Apple products. No, make that triply true; their hardware design folks have bought way too heavily into the idea that function follows form since Steve came back.) 2. Figure out what the hell you're buying before you buy it. It isn't too hard to figure out whether or not an iPod Nano supports WMA before you lay down the cash for it.
(disclaimer: I'm a Mac user and a happy 3G iPod owner.)
Life might be better if you're established in the IT field, but I can say that, at two and a half years out of college, all of my CS major friends who got jobs in the industry are working 60-80 hours a week and getting paid for 40 of them. Most of them bitch about their jobs incessantly, even the ones who weren't previously apt to complaining.
Me, I do a fair bit of programming, database administration, and other IT-type stuff at work - maybe about 25% of my time - but it's certainly not my primary responsibility. I just do what needs to be done to streamline workflows when I see that we're doing busywork that is better handled by comptuers. Unlike my IT friends, I am working a nice friendly 40-hour week like all the non-geek people in my department. I don't know how late all of the official IT and software development people at my company stay, but I assume they work quite a bit more than me because their cars are always still in the parking lot when I leave for home, even when I work late.
Yeah, I'll admit that they all make more than I do, but not much more. It'd take a lot more money than they make before I'd be willing to trade my life for any of their lives (or lack thereof). Nor do I think the possibility of a nice cushy job with good pay is a good reason to consider getting back into the industry proper. If I want to get hazed, I'll go join the Masons.
Maybe that's because San Andreas featured a lot of black gang members and the knock-offs are simply applying the age-old "me too" aspect to their game design? Of course they're gonna have predominantly black characters because they're copying everything to make it appealing to people who enjoyed San Andreas.
True. But I wasn't trying to insinuate that games that feature black guys with guns are all racist. I was pointing out a good reason not to assume that the author of an article that mentions video games featuring black guys with guns is racist by providing an alternative guess as to what his thought process was.
First of all, let's get our language straight. "There's racism in the industry" does not mean the same thing as "the industry is racist." It's the difference between 'some' and 'all.'
And no, one black guy with a gun is not racist. But if you start looking at cheap knock-off games that are trying to capitalize on the success of GTA and/or "street culture," you'll probably notice that a disproportionate number of the gang-bangers in those games are black.
Now, I understand what they are saying here, but why the inclusion specifically of the black young man holding a shotgun?
I wouldn't take that quote as a sign that the article's writer is racist. Rather, I'd take it as a sign that the author made a nod to the fact that there's racism in the video game industry.
Luckily, the culture of the current text adventure community is strongly biased against games where you can die without warning or get into situations where you can't escape dying.
You still see interactive fiction where this happens, especially among stuff written by new IF authors, but it usually gets more or less ignored by the community at large.
Of course distributing all of Windows would be copyright infringement. So would distributing entire copies of books - or entire copies of LAME for that matter.
Fair use covers taking small snippets of something for various uses. Aruging that you can't duplicate an entire work says nothing about whether a particular use of a small snippet is fair use.
Thay make little textured plastic screen protectors for PDAs. They're much nicer than the clear ones that most stores sell because that texture provides enough friction to make writing much easier - there was an overnight improvement in my Graffiti speed and accuracy.
They're also much nicer than a rubber nib or a textured screen because the bit you're chewing up with all that friction is easily replaceable.
But that's all beside the point - this thing doesn't appear to be a tablet PC so much as an internet appliance. Me still wants, though.
I'd suggest that the chances of us ever building anything approaching a sustainable transportation system based around private automobiles like what we have now, regardless of what kind of fuel they use, are remote at best. Computer models are suggesting that even wind power will muck up the environment if you rely very heavily on it.
I'm sure things would still favor the hybrid by a pretty good margin, in spite of issues like this, but it would be interesting to see a complete comparison. (One that is not from somebody trying to sell us on the idea of owning a hybrid.)
I'm not so sure for a couple of reasons. First, the pollution involved in making and disposing of the batteries for these things is really nasty, and nobody's really done much to try and figure out how to make something even remotely resembling an apples-to-apples comparison of different kinds of pollution. I don't know anything about laws governing disposal of cars, but if they allow for these batteries to be dumped into landfills or disposed of improperly in some other way, you can be pretty much guaranteed that they will. I'm reminded of computers - what is it, 70% of computers that are taken to "recycling" centers end up just being shipped to countries with weaker environmental laws and dumped there. I'm sure the industry will find a similarly bad way of disposing of the nastier parts of HEV's and justify it with economic motives if they are given half a chance.
The second is that HEV's are nothing more than whistling in the dark. There's a quote from McDonough and Braungart's book Cradle to Cradle, "Less bad is no good." The idea is, incrementally reducing pollution isn't a very good solution for two reasons. First, it makes us think that we're in the clear. A Civic Hybrid driver may fall into thinking that because his car pollutes less than most other cars out there, that he isn't causing horrible envrironmental damage every time he drives it. He may use it to ratlionalize living in the suburbs and driving 45 minutes round trip to work, or driving to the corner store that's within easy walking distance in order to pick up a loaf of bread. But that's really quite wrong - the person who pollutes less is really the guy who drives the Chevy Impala but lives in the town where he works and uses his damn feet every once in a while.
Second, reducing pollution incrementally only slows the rate of environmental damage. So now it's not your children that have to pay the price; it's your grandchildren. Big whoop. Granted, this isn't a serious problem on its own, since continued incremental improvement could certainly lead to a sustainable society over time, but the first problem often gets in the way. Environmentalism (at least in the US) has almost died out in a lot of ways; most people I know seem to think it's enough to just recycle when recycling is the tiniest little piece of a half-assed cop out compared to all the things that need to change if we're going to have an environmentally and economically sustainable future.
Me, I'm not planning on buying a hybrid any time soon. My bicycle kicks the hybrid's ass up and down the street and takes its parents' names so it can come back for them later. I'm filling my gas tank about 1/3 as often as I used to, too.
The only people who need to carry their entire music collection with them at all times are the homeless.
Nobody needs to carry music anywhere. MP3 players are about fun. I think it's more fun to just slap every CD I have into my hard drive MP3 player and not worry about shuffling playlists back and forth.
Darwin isn't BSD all the way down, it's a Mach kernel with a BSD compatibility layer slapped around it driving a FreeBSD-based user environment.
The Aqua portion takes you a further step away by including IOKit drivers, which aren't even Darwin-compatible, let alone being anything remotely related to *BSD drivers.
After all, you can't buy a Mac and expect to run it on a randomly chosen PC--why do you expect linux to?
Context, people.
I listed all those things in response to the great-grandparent's saying that linux has good hardware support. The point is that while Linux supports lots of hardware, the way in which it supports said hardware is not by any stretch of the imagination something you could call smooth or transparent, as it is on OS X.
This comes in a conversation about much of OS X's polished feel coming from OS X being tightly bound to the hardware, which in turn comes in a conversation about how great it would be if OS X ran on any old computer.
Now, given the back-and-forth of the conversation, as well as the content of the grandparent post, I would assume that the most logical interpretation would be that the post is an argument for keeping OS X bound to Apple hardware, not that Linux should run as smoothly as OS X/ppc despite running on everything from 512-CPU servers down to toasters.
Having to carefully pick your hardware works fine for a geek OS like linux. However, I think it would be very bad for Apple if they released OS X for Intel without just super-awesome support for all reasonably common hardware.
If Apple were to allow OS X installs on any random x86 computer, every random luser wannabe Apple fanboy who drools over OS X but whines about the cost of Apple hardware is going to buy it without checking the system specs, discover that it doesn't work right on their computer because the network card or whatever isn't supported, and then bitch endlessly about how Apple makes a shit product.
Which is the same as one of the main complaints I hear about Linux from luser wannabe Linux fanboys who try installing it without doing their research. The difference is, OS X's main selling point is ease of use, so developing a reputation for being touchy and hard to work would be a serious hit for Apple.
Linux does little to take advantage of hardware acceleration in the GUI or core libraries. OS X does.
Linux's support for many kinds of hardware is a complete hack (wifi anyone?). I used Linux as my primary desktop OS from 1998 until 2003 when I bought a Mac, and I have Debian on said Mac, and I still shudder when friends ask for help getting XXX piece of new hardware to work.
Even today, Linux often makes you worry about crap that most OS X users don't even know exists - like the particular chipset and power management system your motherboard uses.
Linux is _NOT_ a glowing example of good hardware/software integration.
OTOH, for a really good adventure game, the non-engine portion of the development is also the vasto majority of the work. Cost-wise, I'd guess that adventure game makers doing a new story but using the same old engine is about on par with other makers bringing out a new engine but keeping the same old story.
I would think that abolishing mouse click licensing pretty much puts an end to open source. I'm not sure how I would be able to run an open source project if I couldn't enforce a FOSS license on my software and potential contrubtors couldn't accept said license.
Juding from my high-school's experiment with moving over to computer-based education (admittedly a few years ago), here are the problems with electronic documents and educational software:
1. There isn't nearly as much out there. 2. They are more expensive than you think. There's very little free stuff out there. 3. They tend to choose flash over substance. 4. Because they are used with the aid of a computer, using them takes more effort than just opening and reading, especially if you are not particularly computer-savvy. 5. Computers are flaky and break a lot. Books don't inexplicably refuse to open or spontaneously erase themselves.
Overall, pretty much all the students and teachers would agree that we paid more to learn less. The ones who would disagree are mostly students who just liked being able to fuck with computers instead of listening to lectures, and don't want to have their toys taken away.
And I would seriously question why you think a computer is anywhere near being a replacement for a teacher. Have you used educational software and texts? Have you been to school?
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you want to stick an Intel Inside sticker on a piece of music? I don't get it.
I don't think it's CG art this time. It looks like the latest picture is just a PismoBook painted white.
This in turn is a result of the assembly-line educational style that is favored in American schools. There's this attitude that all kids have to come out of the educational system with an essentially identical skill set.* It's not just that the schools don't encourage kids to actively develop their individual talents, its that the schools actively discourage kids from developing their individual talents.
I don't blame this on teachers - I'm sue there are mean-spirited teachers who try to stifle individuality in their students, but that's not the source of the majority of the problem. It's that no room is given for kids to nurture their own talents - their schedules are filled with all of the required classes, their time is entirely devoted to lectures, and their homework is all read-and-regurgitate busywork. Of course kids hate that - I know I did, and I'm the kind of unrepentant nerd who reads Nature for pleasure. I'm not a parent, so I haven't spent a whole lot of time around young children, but I've spent enough to know that they are naturally inquisitive and actively want to learn - something is stifling that urge. I think it's the fact that, upon entering school, they learn very quickly to associate learning with drudgery.
Not that there's really any other option, given how cheap Americans are with respect to their future. The current educational system is probably the best you can do with these huge class sizes, this lack of desire to put money into cirriculum development and teacher training, the way we actively discourage the most talented people from being teachers because we won't pay them a reasonable salary, and the fact that we won't pay for a reasonable student-to-teacher ratio. Especially the last one - it's not just the big class sizes, it's the number of classes each teacher has to teach. Assignments that really challenge students' minds are also assignments that take a long time to grade, and I can't blame teachers for wanting to have lives outside of work. Even more so with assignments that allow students to use their individual talents - a stack of open-ended final projects is a lot harder to grade than a stack of electronic-scan multiple-choice final exams. Furthermore, if kids are to get the best instruction, they should be able to meet one-on-one with their teachers during study hall or lunch or somesuch, but that's hard to arrange when most teachers are in lecture 70-80% of the work day.
* I'm not necessarily saying that there isn't a core set of knowledge that we should teach to everyone, but the current cirriculum in most schools was obviously chosen by throwing darts at a board. I have no clue why I was forced to learn all the phyla and classes in the kindom mammalia as a freshman in high school. I also have no idea why I was never taught basic reasoning skills in school - call me crazy, but I think that in a society where all citizens take part in major political decisions, we should try to ensure that everybody who votes is able to recognize basic logical fallacies like tautological reasoning, even if they don't know it by name.
So true. A carpenter doesn't design furniture with a hammer and saw in hand, because without a plan for what he's doing the pieces won't fit together quite right and the finished product will end up looking shoddy.
It's the same story for software development.
You should have read his post more carefully. He is not a stupid consumer. He got it as a gift.
oop. sorry.
I hope nobody mods you flamebait, because to a large degree, what you say is true. But I would mod you "naive consumer" if I had the option. You could have avoided a lot of frustration and anger if you had just followed two very simple rules of buying $200 pieces of hardware:
1. Wait for others to buy it and see whether or not it sucks rather than gambling your own money. (This is doubly true for first-gen Apple products. No, make that triply true; their hardware design folks have bought way too heavily into the idea that function follows form since Steve came back.)
2. Figure out what the hell you're buying before you buy it. It isn't too hard to figure out whether or not an iPod Nano supports WMA before you lay down the cash for it.
(disclaimer: I'm a Mac user and a happy 3G iPod owner.)
Life might be better if you're established in the IT field, but I can say that, at two and a half years out of college, all of my CS major friends who got jobs in the industry are working 60-80 hours a week and getting paid for 40 of them. Most of them bitch about their jobs incessantly, even the ones who weren't previously apt to complaining.
Me, I do a fair bit of programming, database administration, and other IT-type stuff at work - maybe about 25% of my time - but it's certainly not my primary responsibility. I just do what needs to be done to streamline workflows when I see that we're doing busywork that is better handled by comptuers. Unlike my IT friends, I am working a nice friendly 40-hour week like all the non-geek people in my department. I don't know how late all of the official IT and software development people at my company stay, but I assume they work quite a bit more than me because their cars are always still in the parking lot when I leave for home, even when I work late.
Yeah, I'll admit that they all make more than I do, but not much more. It'd take a lot more money than they make before I'd be willing to trade my life for any of their lives (or lack thereof). Nor do I think the possibility of a nice cushy job with good pay is a good reason to consider getting back into the industry proper. If I want to get hazed, I'll go join the Masons.
Maybe that's because San Andreas featured a lot of black gang members and the knock-offs are simply applying the age-old "me too" aspect to their game design? Of course they're gonna have predominantly black characters because they're copying everything to make it appealing to people who enjoyed San Andreas.
True. But I wasn't trying to insinuate that games that feature black guys with guns are all racist. I was pointing out a good reason not to assume that the author of an article that mentions video games featuring black guys with guns is racist by providing an alternative guess as to what his thought process was.
First of all, let's get our language straight. "There's racism in the industry" does not mean the same thing as "the industry is racist." It's the difference between 'some' and 'all.'
And no, one black guy with a gun is not racist. But if you start looking at cheap knock-off games that are trying to capitalize on the success of GTA and/or "street culture," you'll probably notice that a disproportionate number of the gang-bangers in those games are black.
Speaking as someone who's had a pet rat:
It's pretty obvious that rats can be afraid of things. Being small and incapable of speech doesn't mean that they're mindless automata.
Now, I understand what they are saying here, but why the inclusion specifically of the black young man holding a shotgun?
I wouldn't take that quote as a sign that the article's writer is racist. Rather, I'd take it as a sign that the author made a nod to the fact that there's racism in the video game industry.
Luckily, the culture of the current text adventure community is strongly biased against games where you can die without warning or get into situations where you can't escape dying.
You still see interactive fiction where this happens, especially among stuff written by new IF authors, but it usually gets more or less ignored by the community at large.
Of course distributing all of Windows would be copyright infringement. So would distributing entire copies of books - or entire copies of LAME for that matter.
Fair use covers taking small snippets of something for various uses. Aruging that you can't duplicate an entire work says nothing about whether a particular use of a small snippet is fair use.
Thay make little textured plastic screen protectors for PDAs. They're much nicer than the clear ones that most stores sell because that texture provides enough friction to make writing much easier - there was an overnight improvement in my Graffiti speed and accuracy.
They're also much nicer than a rubber nib or a textured screen because the bit you're chewing up with all that friction is easily replaceable.
But that's all beside the point - this thing doesn't appear to be a tablet PC so much as an internet appliance. Me still wants, though.
I'd suggest that the chances of us ever building anything approaching a sustainable transportation system based around private automobiles like what we have now, regardless of what kind of fuel they use, are remote at best. Computer models are suggesting that even wind power will muck up the environment if you rely very heavily on it.
I'm sure things would still favor the hybrid by a pretty good margin, in spite of issues like this, but it would be interesting to see a complete comparison. (One that is not from somebody trying to sell us on the idea of owning a hybrid.)
I'm not so sure for a couple of reasons. First, the pollution involved in making and disposing of the batteries for these things is really nasty, and nobody's really done much to try and figure out how to make something even remotely resembling an apples-to-apples comparison of different kinds of pollution. I don't know anything about laws governing disposal of cars, but if they allow for these batteries to be dumped into landfills or disposed of improperly in some other way, you can be pretty much guaranteed that they will. I'm reminded of computers - what is it, 70% of computers that are taken to "recycling" centers end up just being shipped to countries with weaker environmental laws and dumped there. I'm sure the industry will find a similarly bad way of disposing of the nastier parts of HEV's and justify it with economic motives if they are given half a chance.
The second is that HEV's are nothing more than whistling in the dark. There's a quote from McDonough and Braungart's book Cradle to Cradle, "Less bad is no good." The idea is, incrementally reducing pollution isn't a very good solution for two reasons. First, it makes us think that we're in the clear. A Civic Hybrid driver may fall into thinking that because his car pollutes less than most other cars out there, that he isn't causing horrible envrironmental damage every time he drives it. He may use it to ratlionalize living in the suburbs and driving 45 minutes round trip to work, or driving to the corner store that's within easy walking distance in order to pick up a loaf of bread. But that's really quite wrong - the person who pollutes less is really the guy who drives the Chevy Impala but lives in the town where he works and uses his damn feet every once in a while.
Second, reducing pollution incrementally only slows the rate of environmental damage. So now it's not your children that have to pay the price; it's your grandchildren. Big whoop. Granted, this isn't a serious problem on its own, since continued incremental improvement could certainly lead to a sustainable society over time, but the first problem often gets in the way. Environmentalism (at least in the US) has almost died out in a lot of ways; most people I know seem to think it's enough to just recycle when recycling is the tiniest little piece of a half-assed cop out compared to all the things that need to change if we're going to have an environmentally and economically sustainable future.
Me, I'm not planning on buying a hybrid any time soon. My bicycle kicks the hybrid's ass up and down the street and takes its parents' names so it can come back for them later. I'm filling my gas tank about 1/3 as often as I used to, too.
The only people who need to carry their entire music collection with them at all times are the homeless.
Nobody needs to carry music anywhere. MP3 players are about fun. I think it's more fun to just slap every CD I have into my hard drive MP3 player and not worry about shuffling playlists back and forth.
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away.
duh.
OS X doesn't use the same drivers as any BSD.
Darwin isn't BSD all the way down, it's a Mach kernel with a BSD compatibility layer slapped around it driving a FreeBSD-based user environment.
The Aqua portion takes you a further step away by including IOKit drivers, which aren't even Darwin-compatible, let alone being anything remotely related to *BSD drivers.
After all, you can't buy a Mac and expect to run it on a randomly chosen PC--why do you expect linux to?
Context, people.
I listed all those things in response to the great-grandparent's saying that linux has good hardware support. The point is that while Linux supports lots of hardware, the way in which it supports said hardware is not by any stretch of the imagination something you could call smooth or transparent, as it is on OS X.
This comes in a conversation about much of OS X's polished feel coming from OS X being tightly bound to the hardware, which in turn comes in a conversation about how great it would be if OS X ran on any old computer.
Now, given the back-and-forth of the conversation, as well as the content of the grandparent post, I would assume that the most logical interpretation would be that the post is an argument for keeping OS X bound to Apple hardware, not that Linux should run as smoothly as OS X/ppc despite running on everything from 512-CPU servers down to toasters.
Having to carefully pick your hardware works fine for a geek OS like linux. However, I think it would be very bad for Apple if they released OS X for Intel without just super-awesome support for all reasonably common hardware.
If Apple were to allow OS X installs on any random x86 computer, every random luser wannabe Apple fanboy who drools over OS X but whines about the cost of Apple hardware is going to buy it without checking the system specs, discover that it doesn't work right on their computer because the network card or whatever isn't supported, and then bitch endlessly about how Apple makes a shit product.
Which is the same as one of the main complaints I hear about Linux from luser wannabe Linux fanboys who try installing it without doing their research. The difference is, OS X's main selling point is ease of use, so developing a reputation for being touchy and hard to work would be a serious hit for Apple.
Linux does little to take advantage of hardware acceleration in the GUI or core libraries. OS X does.
Linux's support for many kinds of hardware is a complete hack (wifi anyone?). I used Linux as my primary desktop OS from 1998 until 2003 when I bought a Mac, and I have Debian on said Mac, and I still shudder when friends ask for help getting XXX piece of new hardware to work.
Even today, Linux often makes you worry about crap that most OS X users don't even know exists - like the particular chipset and power management system your motherboard uses.
Linux is _NOT_ a glowing example of good hardware/software integration.
That's natural explanations for phenomena, not explanations for natural phenomena. Is different, it is.
OTOH, for a really good adventure game, the non-engine portion of the development is also the vasto majority of the work. Cost-wise, I'd guess that adventure game makers doing a new story but using the same old engine is about on par with other makers bringing out a new engine but keeping the same old story.
I would think that abolishing mouse click licensing pretty much puts an end to open source. I'm not sure how I would be able to run an open source project if I couldn't enforce a FOSS license on my software and potential contrubtors couldn't accept said license.
Juding from my high-school's experiment with moving over to computer-based education (admittedly a few years ago), here are the problems with electronic documents and educational software:
1. There isn't nearly as much out there.
2. They are more expensive than you think. There's very little free stuff out there.
3. They tend to choose flash over substance.
4. Because they are used with the aid of a computer, using them takes more effort than just opening and reading, especially if you are not particularly computer-savvy.
5. Computers are flaky and break a lot. Books don't inexplicably refuse to open or spontaneously erase themselves.
Overall, pretty much all the students and teachers would agree that we paid more to learn less. The ones who would disagree are mostly students who just liked being able to fuck with computers instead of listening to lectures, and don't want to have their toys taken away.
And I would seriously question why you think a computer is anywhere near being a replacement for a teacher. Have you used educational software and texts? Have you been to school?