There's an extremist fringe of Linux loonies who hang out on forums and are disrespectful and threatening because you disagree with them...That can hurt the Linux community.
I can say that whenever I needed help, I went to their forums and someone would anwser my question. Maybe the extremists are out there, but they were not at justlinux. Or they had really good moderators that removed garbage that I never saw it.
Moreover, it is highly likely that executives wouldn't have heard about Eclipse or KDevelop as much as Visual Studio, simply because of marketing reasons.
I will never use that peice of crap, Eclipse. This was a year or 18 months ago, but I had a PIII 600 machine with 384 megs and Eclipse could make the system stop. It is like being on a freeway and having three lanes merge into one. You stop, then drive 5 mph, then stop again.
However, Visual Studio worked just fine.
With "alternative" tools, you often get once shot to impress a person, then they go back to what they know.
I think one of the most fun, and sometimes frustrating things about learning linux is the MAN pages. It can be so fun when you are understanding something, and seeing how much it can do and how much control you have. At the same time, it can be very frustrating when things don't work the way you want them to. I had a laptop and I could not get a windows manager to work. I worked on the problem for 3 days, had other people look at it, and nothing. I must have changed every setting in the config file trying to figure it out, but nada. But when you get it to work, it is pretty fun.
I think the way to get people interested in linux is to let them have fun figuring things out. Give them enough help they don't get so frustrated they want to throw the CD's away and never hear the word linux again.
Sounds like a nice group, I want animals to be happy too. Then one day they came around a KFC in my neighborhood and members yelled at families going in for dinner, calling them murderers and supporting animal concentration camps. They had a bucket of fake blood they threw on someone. Instantly, nobody gave a damn about their group. More importantly, people would support the opposite side just because they hate PETA.
Same think could happen with Linux. What got me interested in Linux was friendly people who really liked it, and wanted to share what they knew about it. What turns me off, I went to a Linux group meeting and had a dual boot machine, Windows 2000 and Debian. Someone gave me shit for having Windows on the laptop. Another dork, and I use the word dork because I think nerd is too nice; anyways, another dork starts laughing and saying how Windows sucks and how easy it is to hack into. I had my machine hooked up to the LAN, and these idiots decided they wanted to try and hack my machine. They even asked me to "ipconfig" and tell them my exact IP address. They thought I was an idiot. After 5 minutes I left. Fuck them.
The same teacher also liked making people color maps. (Crayons! In high school!) He'd mark you down if you didn't color Byzantium pink, because, and I quote, "That's were all the queers were." Eventually one student lost it and in the middle of the class told him he was only obsessed with ancient Roman homosexuals was because he was in denial about his own homosexuality. Got the kid suspended for a week
ROFL!!! That is damn good. I was not as confrontational as that, I just would stick a butterfly knife in the teachers tires. But I bet in todays age, all schools probably have video camera's or something. My other favorite activity was spraying fermaldahyde on their chair. One teacher had this very expensive pen. It was his favoirtie possesion, he even talked about it, it had gold trimmings, the works. A very nice pen indeed. It was one of those that unscrews in the middle, so you can change the ink. The teacher had a habbit of checking a random homework problem at the start of each class, it was how he did attendance. He would walk by every lab station, you had to have your homework out and ready or you got a zero. He checked exactly one problem, and if you got it right he would initial your paper and you would turn it in. If you got it wrong, he would draw a big X over the problem. Anyways, one day he had to leave the room for a few minutes. It was during our disection of a pig. So I take the scalpel and cut the gall bladder out of my piggy, go to his desk, take the pen, unscrew it, pull out the ink cartridge, slide the gall bladder over the end, and screw it all back in. What happened next, I never expected. The teacher came back in, and 10-15 minutes later he took his pen and wanted to write something. He clicked on the pen to make the ink come out, but the gall bladded oozed out. He did not say one word, he just put the pen away and took out another one. A few days later, I forgot about it. But the teacher did not. So we are back to disecting, and he is walking around, inspecting everyones disections. He comes to my table, and says "i don't see the pari-sypho-mialis". I am like WTF, I don't even know what that is. He takes out his pen, and points and says "its right there, under the intestines, can't you see it. i know it is small, that little node. you have to cut it out, because under it is an important vein I want you to see". I am squinting and looking but I see jack shit. He says "get a little closer, move the intestines over, look... look... it is right there... look". So by now my face is 2 inches away from the pigs intestines. The teacher took his hand on the back of my head and pushed my head down into the intestines. He then told me "don't EVER touch my pen again". So for the rest of the day, I was CERTAIN it was not snot comming out of my nose, but cellular tissue from that little piggy.
I had a history teacher in high school who refused to give out 100s, on the grounds that "no one is perfect". If you got 100, he'd find a 'missing comma' that would never get you downgraded any time else.
These are the teachers I wanted to kill. I would heckle them, cause all sorts of problems. I had one teacher in particular like that back in high school, and some guys had pictures of ex-girlfriends in their bra and panties. They would hide those pictures in the teachers desk or papers, then anonymously tell the police they "accidentaly noticed it". We would then have a substitute teacher for a few days. The teacher would come back even more pissed off, so we did what Sun Tzu reccomended "if your enemy is angry, irritate him". We would take hot peppers, while wearing gloves, and cut them open and rub them on his desk. Eventually, he would get the hot stuff on his hands, and touch his eyes or mouth. It was war. I eventually was one of the people kicked out of his class, but not before I planted the seeds of a nervous break down in him. Even as they were changing me to a different section, taking me out of his class, I told the dean who was chinese, that I overheard the teacher make
you're not going to mark the paper. DONT SET THE ASSIGNMENT...
I mean what's the point? if the paper doesn't really help to demonstrate your mastery of the subject, and it's not going to be marked properly anyway, why waste everyone's time.
Why not get the students to mark each others papers, for the papers that don't count anyway. And only mark a small sample, and then mark the final paper properly.
That is an interesting idea. I had one unorthodox professor who did something like that. We had a term paper, but we had to work in groups of 4, and the group submitted the paper and everyone got the same grade. It cut down the 30 papers he would have had to under 8. And it forces the students to talk about what they wanted to include in the paper, how valid points of view were. In essance, we were teaching each other.
But I have never been one who liked the idea of having my grade tied into the work of other people. I asked the teacher about that, saying "it is unfair for you to give me a grade for what other people do, I want to be judged based on my work". His responce was "in the real world, the sucess of your business depends on how well your group works as a team, so consider this a heads up".
Also, do not try to argue something stupid. Don't take a contrary opinion to the professor or to popular opinion on the college campus
I really, really, really wish someone told me this. I lost a letter grade in a class because I had a differing point of view from the professor. I wrote a kick ass term paper, I spent countless hours in the library doing research, I had other people proof read my paper. It was one of the best papers I wrote. But it was the exact opposite of what the professor believed.
We expect our teachers will grade us on our work. But every now and then we get a professor who probably spends too much time writing letters to the editorial section of the new york times.
But what is this "union" you speak of? I know of no such union
It is called the faculty senate, at least that is what it was at my university. While I was an undergrad, the teachers threatened to strike over pay and tenure. Students were scared that professors would walk out during the sememster, and credit for classes would not be earned.
And I work way more than 20 hours a week.
Kudos to you. Most professors I had taught 3 or 4 classes a semester. Some had it set up where they only taught MWF or TTH, just like the students who want to have a long, long weekend. Some professors were really good with office hours, others were never there. The light was always on, but the door was locked. I even had one professor who was busy starting up her own company, and teaching was how she paid the bills. I remember hearing "As soon as my dog hair fluffer takes off, I am so outta here".
I used to give short answer/essay questions to my astronomy students the first couple of semesters I taught the big non-major course. It took a tremendous amount of time to grade which was one reason I stopped, but not the primary reason. I'm a novelist, and I know how to write, and there was a consistently high fraction of exams written so badly it was very painful to read. Perhaps I should have kept at it, with the idea that it's good for the students. But a few essays in a science class won't dent the problem that starts in k-12 education.
I will admit, when you have 30 students and they all write a 2 page paper, that is 60 pages of reading for the professor. But in the USA many students don't bloom until college. I dunno why it is that way, but many people who spent highschool trying to get laid and finding beer, had their renaissance years in college. I know that I did not really start reading for fun until my second year of college, when chatting with faculty who said "you know what a really good book is...". I loved those chats I used to have with them.
A good class is coming out knowing more and enjoying the subject more, not a frustrating grade.
I could not agree more. I did the best in classes I liked the most. I even changed majors once because of a professor. I could not wait for the next lecture, they were very interesting. And when we had tests, if we did not do well, the professor would call us in his office to talk about why we did poorly. He never made us feel stupid, but rather was more interested in us learning the material. In some cases, he let students with D's and F's a second chance to retake a test.
Now compare that to the Chemisty Nazi teacher I had. I swear, she must have been paid for every F or D she gave. I think out of 60 students, by the middle of the semester there were 30 left, and if anyone got an "A" in the class, I did not hear about it. She tried to make us feel better, saying those of us who survived to organic chem would get tests with curves. LOL, later I found out an "A" in that class is getting 30% on a test. Fuck that.
A professor's job isn't exclusively to teach, you know. To the best researchers in academia who are actually at some university, it's at best a necessary evil research by top profs benefits society a lot more than teaching silly undergrads.
How many of these "top" professors teach intro classes or even second year classes?? And most of these classes have graduate teaching assistants, it is part of their stipend. Come to think of it, most of the TA's I had were all in the sciences, I don't remember any in the humanities. They would split the lecture into multiple lab sections, each lab section had a TA. But I digress...
If the professors are most valuable doing research, then have them work only with graduate students. I am sure it should not be hard to hire someone with a masters degree to teach the 100 and 200 level classes.
And I would make one other point. With state tuition around $10,000 a year, and private schools at over $120,000 for a 4 year degree, I am not at the school for the professors benifit. I am there for my benifit, I am paying them money to teach me. I am not paying the professors money so they can do research.
I can't help but think, if schools hired people with masters degrees in related fields, or even people with Ed.D's in unrelated fields to teach basic intro classes, they might save a little money getting a part time professor at $2000 a class to teach 30 people than a full time tenured professor at $100,000 a year who only teaches 5 or 6 classes a year. I know a couple people with masters degrees who would like to teach part time, and they could be had cheap to teach "introduction to sociology" or "english composition 100".
That reminds me of a startegy some people had when I was an undergrad. Since they knew teachers only skimmed the writings, they used a shotgun approach. They threw everything in the essay including the kitchen sink. They figure somewhere in there, the terms the professor was skimming for would be included. Sadly, these were the "A" students. The "B" students, who tried to write a real paper and make a point, did not get any worthwhile feedback.
kids would rather be out drinking and screwing rather than debating the intricacies of pre vs post agrarian culture in the Southern States
Good Will Hunting?
So more power to him. He is unlikely to be getting anything better or more insightful than a parroting of what he has already delivered in his monologues to his class. Same papers, year in and year out. No big deal to grade these kids with an automated program.
This reminds me of a teacher I had who had over heads with references to pages in the text, 2nd edition. Problem was we were up to the 7th edition, so I can only guess how old the over heads were, and how lazy the professor was to update them.
If a teacher does not have a passion to teach, they should be doing something else.
I wonder how a sociology professor could write a program that follows logic. Can it tell when a slippery slope argument is? I can see it looking for- If a. If b. Then c. But how does it know what a, b or c means?
I can say this much, I have never had any other professor, outside of the Chem or Physics department, grade my papers like a math professor. Most of the humanities professors just skim over. But in my Calculus class, it was possible to turn in homework and get negative points. For example, you have a problem 1.0 + 1.00 = ?. You write 2. First, half a point off for not figuring in significant digits. Another half a point off for sloppy handwriting. And the full point off for not showing your work. Problem worth one point, your score is negative one point. In some cases, it was better to not turn in anything at all.
This reminds me of something that was in the papers a few weeks ago. A professor and graduate students wanted to show that most journals will publish anything if it sounds "academic" enough. So they wrote a paper that was hog-wash, made no point, was just a bunch of academic sounding prose. And guess what? They got published.
If a professor does not care enough to read my papers, then to hell with him. There is more that a professor does than just check grammer, or look for passages that deals with the question and used terms from the book. The best professors I had were the ones who wrote all over the margins, sharing their thoughts about my ideas. Those are the ones who I would meet in their office to chat with. They are the ones who I went to for advice.
I had one teacher in english who graded the first paper, reading them all. She then never read another paper, only skimmed them. She pretty much gave out the same grade on all your papers you got on your first paper. I got an "A" on my paper, and another student got a "D". So I was working with the "D" student, and no matter what was done, the "D" grades went up to "C-" but stuck. So for the last paper, we switched our papers. Guess what? My paper was still an "A" even though it belonged to the other student, and the other paper was a "C". We went to the teacher to explain what we did, and rather than the professor owning up to what was done, we the students got blamed.
This really pisses me off. Professors get paid over $70,000 a year, some over $100,000 a year, they work 20 hours a week, and they have job security and a union. Then they want to slack off. Fucking asshats. Something like this makes me want to vote to remove public funding from schools, to always vote no whenever there is a refferendum to increase property tax. With those kinds of professors, people might as well get their education at the public library.
Quote: California has a law protecting employees from "demotion, suspension, or discharge from employment for lawful conduct occurring during nonworking hours away from the employer's premises
That sounds like Cali, filled with all the fruitcakes and fags. Thank God I live in a red state, where people can still chain someone up against a fence and give em' a good ole fashioned ass whipping for being gay. Or black. Or jewish. I really works for so many vices. And in most counties, the sheriff will back you up.
The whiners who make up details about their boss, give away corporate secrets, or try to attack someone in an unfair manner are what should stop. There are many people's weblog entries I've read where they sound like spoiled brats.
And you are the one to judge people's words? Let me get this 100% right. If you don't like what I say, then you can deprive me of my livelyhood? It must suck to be a capatalist in North Korea. Or pro-Tiwan in China. Or a socalist in the USA.
But there are many ways to write a negative web log that still tries to be completely fair and see things from the other person's point of view.
Fuck them. I don't want to see it from thier point of view. I want to vent.
One fellow in particular that I enjoy reading writes about his boss, problem clients, assertive sex partners, and demanding family members. He's fun to read because he's figured out that in most cases he is the "problem" rather than all of these people he writes about. He is, after all, the only common link between all of these problematic things. When he writes about a stressful change at work he's not bitching about "the worst decision his boss ever made" but rather "a change his boss made that eluded his understanding".
Your elude my understanding.:p
If you want to leak a secret wrongdoing, send it to a reporter's email address.
Dan Rather, You've got mail!
In all seriousness, we can't regulate free speech, no matter how fucked up it sounds. I strike that, we can, in some instances like when someone wants to blow shit up, or post naked pictures of your wife or sister. But when somoene wants to say how society is unfair, bad, backwards, blah blah blah, that is 100% protected free speech. And depriving someone of work is a millenium old way of killing people, better than jail or beatings. You make them lose their homes, their method of transportation, their ability to socalize. You turn them into a more bitter hermit.
If government really wants to know who made a post, or blog, they can track you down. They have unlimited money and manpower. You would be suprised the tricks they have up their sleve. Who is to say that government does not let a person show their cards before moving in? It is like a busting a drug dealer. The police won't arrest a drug dealer the first time they see him selling drugs. They will wait and video record what he does the next month or more, and then nail him and everyone else.
And with the patriot act, the technology available to the NSA, and the laws regulating ISP's, they know you much better than you think. You can use your proxy, you can try and use a public computer, but they can find you. You are leaving evidence behind. It is like a guy who wears gloves while breaking into a house. But he does not stop to think about picking up a single hair fiber that falls off his head. Or an eyelash. Or the single carpet fiber that is statically clinging to his jeans. There is always something.
We always 'google' our perspective new-hires. People have been not hired because of the content discovered.
You can't lawfully do that. If someone found out, they could sue you and whoever posted the information for defimation. It is the reason why former employers never can say anything bad about a former employees.
Likewise, my personal opinions have nothing to do with my ability to do a job. Googeling to find out what political party a person belongs to, their world views, and the like is a bad practice. I know of a guy who sued a company because they asked for his social security number on an application, then did not offer him work. According to state law, that is illegal. The only reason to ask for a social security number is to pay taxes, and an employer that asks for it is implying they have offered you a job. Same thing goes for asking about marital status, or age.
People should know thier rights and sue when violated. Otherwise corporations will keep crapping on people, paying less money, forcing people to get work as contractors, hiring temps, and the like. It all means the death of good paying jobs with health care and job security.
Unfortunately, to fight this type of thing requires vast reserves of cash, and it is this, as much as anything, that is the reason I am opposed to software patents.
This sucks. Patents should be free to get. They should be free to defend. They should be free to attack. It should not be based on money. I hate to think that corporations could "steal" patents by just throwing a large line of lawyers against a person or an idea.
But the problem is, how would you prove that you came up with the idea independently?
It is human nature to think. I would say it is more probable people would come up with the same ideas or thoughts given simular problems. It does not take a genius to think up an algorithm to compress a file by looking for large patterns of 0's or 1's and changing them to a smaller sequence which represents the original. I am no math guy, but I bet if you gave that problem to 100 graduate math or computer science students, they would all come up with a way of doing it. And I bet the best one would not be that different from the second best.
With the technology we have today, why not just ask the person who is using an idea, when challanged he stole that idea, if he really did steal it. We could hook him up to a lie detector, and find out if it really was his thought, or if he stole it.
Pretty much, yeah. Of course, they wouldn't patent turning chunks of "000000000" into "01"'s, they'd patent "turning sets of numbers into other numbers by a predictable algorithim using intrinsic compression methods"
Yeah, but those algorithims are something that any math major or computer science graduate student would probably come up with if they spent some time thinking about it. Are we talking about something like an unsolvable math problem that for hundreds of years is not solved then someone figures it out?
Would it be better to have laws which prohibit reverse engineering or intellectual theft?
I always find topics like this interesting under the header of "Your Rights Online." Not too often do you hear about the rights of the patent holders, or the rights of the inventors, or the creators... do they have no rights?
That is a difficult question. Where do your rights end and mine start? If you have an idea first, does that mean you are the only one who can benifit from that idea? At the same time, should I be able to steal your idea? The anwser is to protect companies or people from stealing ideas others developed, yet at the same time not stopping people from using their own spontaneous ideas.
When it comes to media players, I can only ask the question, if a compression is made by microsoft, is it so obvious that in the next decade someone else would have saw the same pattern and made their own compression format? Or is the idea so unlikely to have been concieved without theft that we can assume it was reverse engineered or hacked?
so that means if i come up with an idea, before i can use that idea i must first check to see if anyone else had that idea before me?
why not have a law that says stealing technology or reverse engineering is illegal, but not having a thought which is useful because someone else had it before you.
this is going to get ugly. every useful thing will have a patent and we'll have only one option, buy from the patent holder or live without.
can someone explain patents to me, because i am baffled.
if i see a video stream, and decide to write a program that takes any chuncks of "000000000" and replace it with a "01", and so forth, and that is my way of compressing a file, but someone else programed that before me and filed a patent, does that mean i can't use that kind of code?
it is stupid to me to have patents on things that anyone can think up. what happens if a professor at a university thinks up something, but does not patent it. he teaches it to students, and they are free to use it. 2 years later a start up company in california has an employee who thinks up the same simple idea, and has it patented. what does that mean? that the original professor can no longer use it? that his students who might have used that idea in projects now have to remove it?
what is the purpose of patents. it seems to be very anti-competitive, and creates monopolies.
Slashdot Mirror
I can say that whenever I needed help, I went to their forums and someone would anwser my question. Maybe the extremists are out there, but they were not at justlinux. Or they had really good moderators that removed garbage that I never saw it.
I will never use that peice of crap, Eclipse. This was a year or 18 months ago, but I had a PIII 600 machine with 384 megs and Eclipse could make the system stop. It is like being on a freeway and having three lanes merge into one. You stop, then drive 5 mph, then stop again.
However, Visual Studio worked just fine.
With "alternative" tools, you often get once shot to impress a person, then they go back to what they know.
I think the way to get people interested in linux is to let them have fun figuring things out. Give them enough help they don't get so frustrated they want to throw the CD's away and never hear the word linux again.
Sounds like a nice group, I want animals to be happy too. Then one day they came around a KFC in my neighborhood and members yelled at families going in for dinner, calling them murderers and supporting animal concentration camps. They had a bucket of fake blood they threw on someone. Instantly, nobody gave a damn about their group. More importantly, people would support the opposite side just because they hate PETA.
Same think could happen with Linux. What got me interested in Linux was friendly people who really liked it, and wanted to share what they knew about it. What turns me off, I went to a Linux group meeting and had a dual boot machine, Windows 2000 and Debian. Someone gave me shit for having Windows on the laptop. Another dork, and I use the word dork because I think nerd is too nice; anyways, another dork starts laughing and saying how Windows sucks and how easy it is to hack into. I had my machine hooked up to the LAN, and these idiots decided they wanted to try and hack my machine. They even asked me to "ipconfig" and tell them my exact IP address. They thought I was an idiot. After 5 minutes I left. Fuck them.
ROFL!!! That is damn good. I was not as confrontational as that, I just would stick a butterfly knife in the teachers tires. But I bet in todays age, all schools probably have video camera's or something. My other favorite activity was spraying fermaldahyde on their chair. One teacher had this very expensive pen. It was his favoirtie possesion, he even talked about it, it had gold trimmings, the works. A very nice pen indeed. It was one of those that unscrews in the middle, so you can change the ink. The teacher had a habbit of checking a random homework problem at the start of each class, it was how he did attendance. He would walk by every lab station, you had to have your homework out and ready or you got a zero. He checked exactly one problem, and if you got it right he would initial your paper and you would turn it in. If you got it wrong, he would draw a big X over the problem. Anyways, one day he had to leave the room for a few minutes. It was during our disection of a pig. So I take the scalpel and cut the gall bladder out of my piggy, go to his desk, take the pen, unscrew it, pull out the ink cartridge, slide the gall bladder over the end, and screw it all back in. What happened next, I never expected. The teacher came back in, and 10-15 minutes later he took his pen and wanted to write something. He clicked on the pen to make the ink come out, but the gall bladded oozed out. He did not say one word, he just put the pen away and took out another one. A few days later, I forgot about it. But the teacher did not. So we are back to disecting, and he is walking around, inspecting everyones disections. He comes to my table, and says "i don't see the pari-sypho-mialis". I am like WTF, I don't even know what that is. He takes out his pen, and points and says "its right there, under the intestines, can't you see it. i know it is small, that little node. you have to cut it out, because under it is an important vein I want you to see". I am squinting and looking but I see jack shit. He says "get a little closer, move the intestines over, look... look... it is right there... look". So by now my face is 2 inches away from the pigs intestines. The teacher took his hand on the back of my head and pushed my head down into the intestines. He then told me "don't EVER touch my pen again". So for the rest of the day, I was CERTAIN it was not snot comming out of my nose, but cellular tissue from that little piggy.
I had a history teacher in high school who refused to give out 100s, on the grounds that "no one is perfect". If you got 100, he'd find a 'missing comma' that would never get you downgraded any time else.
These are the teachers I wanted to kill. I would heckle them, cause all sorts of problems. I had one teacher in particular like that back in high school, and some guys had pictures of ex-girlfriends in their bra and panties. They would hide those pictures in the teachers desk or papers, then anonymously tell the police they "accidentaly noticed it". We would then have a substitute teacher for a few days. The teacher would come back even more pissed off, so we did what Sun Tzu reccomended "if your enemy is angry, irritate him". We would take hot peppers, while wearing gloves, and cut them open and rub them on his desk. Eventually, he would get the hot stuff on his hands, and touch his eyes or mouth. It was war. I eventually was one of the people kicked out of his class, but not before I planted the seeds of a nervous break down in him. Even as they were changing me to a different section, taking me out of his class, I told the dean who was chinese, that I overheard the teacher make
That is an interesting idea. I had one unorthodox professor who did something like that. We had a term paper, but we had to work in groups of 4, and the group submitted the paper and everyone got the same grade. It cut down the 30 papers he would have had to under 8. And it forces the students to talk about what they wanted to include in the paper, how valid points of view were. In essance, we were teaching each other.
But I have never been one who liked the idea of having my grade tied into the work of other people. I asked the teacher about that, saying "it is unfair for you to give me a grade for what other people do, I want to be judged based on my work". His responce was "in the real world, the sucess of your business depends on how well your group works as a team, so consider this a heads up".
I really, really, really wish someone told me this. I lost a letter grade in a class because I had a differing point of view from the professor. I wrote a kick ass term paper, I spent countless hours in the library doing research, I had other people proof read my paper. It was one of the best papers I wrote. But it was the exact opposite of what the professor believed.
We expect our teachers will grade us on our work. But every now and then we get a professor who probably spends too much time writing letters to the editorial section of the new york times.
It is called the faculty senate, at least that is what it was at my university. While I was an undergrad, the teachers threatened to strike over pay and tenure. Students were scared that professors would walk out during the sememster, and credit for classes would not be earned.
And I work way more than 20 hours a week.
Kudos to you. Most professors I had taught 3 or 4 classes a semester. Some had it set up where they only taught MWF or TTH, just like the students who want to have a long, long weekend. Some professors were really good with office hours, others were never there. The light was always on, but the door was locked. I even had one professor who was busy starting up her own company, and teaching was how she paid the bills. I remember hearing "As soon as my dog hair fluffer takes off, I am so outta here".
I used to give short answer/essay questions to my astronomy students the first couple of semesters I taught the big non-major course. It took a tremendous amount of time to grade which was one reason I stopped, but not the primary reason. I'm a novelist, and I know how to write, and there was a consistently high fraction of exams written so badly it was very painful to read. Perhaps I should have kept at it, with the idea that it's good for the students. But a few essays in a science class won't dent the problem that starts in k-12 education.
I will admit, when you have 30 students and they all write a 2 page paper, that is 60 pages of reading for the professor. But in the USA many students don't bloom until college. I dunno why it is that way, but many people who spent highschool trying to get laid and finding beer, had their renaissance years in college. I know that I did not really start reading for fun until my second year of college, when chatting with faculty who said "you know what a really good book is...". I loved those chats I used to have with them.
I could not agree more. I did the best in classes I liked the most. I even changed majors once because of a professor. I could not wait for the next lecture, they were very interesting. And when we had tests, if we did not do well, the professor would call us in his office to talk about why we did poorly. He never made us feel stupid, but rather was more interested in us learning the material. In some cases, he let students with D's and F's a second chance to retake a test.
Now compare that to the Chemisty Nazi teacher I had. I swear, she must have been paid for every F or D she gave. I think out of 60 students, by the middle of the semester there were 30 left, and if anyone got an "A" in the class, I did not hear about it. She tried to make us feel better, saying those of us who survived to organic chem would get tests with curves. LOL, later I found out an "A" in that class is getting 30% on a test. Fuck that.
How many of these "top" professors teach intro classes or even second year classes?? And most of these classes have graduate teaching assistants, it is part of their stipend. Come to think of it, most of the TA's I had were all in the sciences, I don't remember any in the humanities. They would split the lecture into multiple lab sections, each lab section had a TA. But I digress...
If the professors are most valuable doing research, then have them work only with graduate students. I am sure it should not be hard to hire someone with a masters degree to teach the 100 and 200 level classes.
And I would make one other point. With state tuition around $10,000 a year, and private schools at over $120,000 for a 4 year degree, I am not at the school for the professors benifit. I am there for my benifit, I am paying them money to teach me. I am not paying the professors money so they can do research.
I can't help but think, if schools hired people with masters degrees in related fields, or even people with Ed.D's in unrelated fields to teach basic intro classes, they might save a little money getting a part time professor at $2000 a class to teach 30 people than a full time tenured professor at $100,000 a year who only teaches 5 or 6 classes a year. I know a couple people with masters degrees who would like to teach part time, and they could be had cheap to teach "introduction to sociology" or "english composition 100".
That reminds me of a startegy some people had when I was an undergrad. Since they knew teachers only skimmed the writings, they used a shotgun approach. They threw everything in the essay including the kitchen sink. They figure somewhere in there, the terms the professor was skimming for would be included. Sadly, these were the "A" students. The "B" students, who tried to write a real paper and make a point, did not get any worthwhile feedback.
Good Will Hunting?
So more power to him. He is unlikely to be getting anything better or more insightful than a parroting of what he has already delivered in his monologues to his class. Same papers, year in and year out. No big deal to grade these kids with an automated program.
This reminds me of a teacher I had who had over heads with references to pages in the text, 2nd edition. Problem was we were up to the 7th edition, so I can only guess how old the over heads were, and how lazy the professor was to update them.
If a teacher does not have a passion to teach, they should be doing something else.
I wonder how a sociology professor could write a program that follows logic. Can it tell when a slippery slope argument is? I can see it looking for- If a. If b. Then c. But how does it know what a, b or c means?
I can say this much, I have never had any other professor, outside of the Chem or Physics department, grade my papers like a math professor. Most of the humanities professors just skim over. But in my Calculus class, it was possible to turn in homework and get negative points. For example, you have a problem 1.0 + 1.00 = ?. You write 2. First, half a point off for not figuring in significant digits. Another half a point off for sloppy handwriting. And the full point off for not showing your work. Problem worth one point, your score is negative one point. In some cases, it was better to not turn in anything at all.
If a professor does not care enough to read my papers, then to hell with him. There is more that a professor does than just check grammer, or look for passages that deals with the question and used terms from the book. The best professors I had were the ones who wrote all over the margins, sharing their thoughts about my ideas. Those are the ones who I would meet in their office to chat with. They are the ones who I went to for advice.
I had one teacher in english who graded the first paper, reading them all. She then never read another paper, only skimmed them. She pretty much gave out the same grade on all your papers you got on your first paper. I got an "A" on my paper, and another student got a "D". So I was working with the "D" student, and no matter what was done, the "D" grades went up to "C-" but stuck. So for the last paper, we switched our papers. Guess what? My paper was still an "A" even though it belonged to the other student, and the other paper was a "C". We went to the teacher to explain what we did, and rather than the professor owning up to what was done, we the students got blamed.
This really pisses me off. Professors get paid over $70,000 a year, some over $100,000 a year, they work 20 hours a week, and they have job security and a union. Then they want to slack off. Fucking asshats. Something like this makes me want to vote to remove public funding from schools, to always vote no whenever there is a refferendum to increase property tax. With those kinds of professors, people might as well get their education at the public library.
That sounds like Cali, filled with all the fruitcakes and fags. Thank God I live in a red state, where people can still chain someone up against a fence and give em' a good ole fashioned ass whipping for being gay. Or black. Or jewish. I really works for so many vices. And in most counties, the sheriff will back you up.
And you are the one to judge people's words? Let me get this 100% right. If you don't like what I say, then you can deprive me of my livelyhood? It must suck to be a capatalist in North Korea. Or pro-Tiwan in China. Or a socalist in the USA.
But there are many ways to write a negative web log that still tries to be completely fair and see things from the other person's point of view.
Fuck them. I don't want to see it from thier point of view. I want to vent.
One fellow in particular that I enjoy reading writes about his boss, problem clients, assertive sex partners, and demanding family members. He's fun to read because he's figured out that in most cases he is the "problem" rather than all of these people he writes about. He is, after all, the only common link between all of these problematic things. When he writes about a stressful change at work he's not bitching about "the worst decision his boss ever made" but rather "a change his boss made that eluded his understanding".
Your elude my understanding. :p
If you want to leak a secret wrongdoing, send it to a reporter's email address.
Dan Rather, You've got mail!
In all seriousness, we can't regulate free speech, no matter how fucked up it sounds. I strike that, we can, in some instances like when someone wants to blow shit up, or post naked pictures of your wife or sister. But when somoene wants to say how society is unfair, bad, backwards, blah blah blah, that is 100% protected free speech. And depriving someone of work is a millenium old way of killing people, better than jail or beatings. You make them lose their homes, their method of transportation, their ability to socalize. You turn them into a more bitter hermit.
And with the patriot act, the technology available to the NSA, and the laws regulating ISP's, they know you much better than you think. You can use your proxy, you can try and use a public computer, but they can find you. You are leaving evidence behind. It is like a guy who wears gloves while breaking into a house. But he does not stop to think about picking up a single hair fiber that falls off his head. Or an eyelash. Or the single carpet fiber that is statically clinging to his jeans. There is always something.
You can't lawfully do that. If someone found out, they could sue you and whoever posted the information for defimation. It is the reason why former employers never can say anything bad about a former employees.
Likewise, my personal opinions have nothing to do with my ability to do a job. Googeling to find out what political party a person belongs to, their world views, and the like is a bad practice. I know of a guy who sued a company because they asked for his social security number on an application, then did not offer him work. According to state law, that is illegal. The only reason to ask for a social security number is to pay taxes, and an employer that asks for it is implying they have offered you a job. Same thing goes for asking about marital status, or age.
People should know thier rights and sue when violated. Otherwise corporations will keep crapping on people, paying less money, forcing people to get work as contractors, hiring temps, and the like. It all means the death of good paying jobs with health care and job security.
This sucks. Patents should be free to get. They should be free to defend. They should be free to attack. It should not be based on money. I hate to think that corporations could "steal" patents by just throwing a large line of lawyers against a person or an idea.
It is human nature to think. I would say it is more probable people would come up with the same ideas or thoughts given simular problems. It does not take a genius to think up an algorithm to compress a file by looking for large patterns of 0's or 1's and changing them to a smaller sequence which represents the original. I am no math guy, but I bet if you gave that problem to 100 graduate math or computer science students, they would all come up with a way of doing it. And I bet the best one would not be that different from the second best.
With the technology we have today, why not just ask the person who is using an idea, when challanged he stole that idea, if he really did steal it. We could hook him up to a lie detector, and find out if it really was his thought, or if he stole it.
Yeah, but those algorithims are something that any math major or computer science graduate student would probably come up with if they spent some time thinking about it. Are we talking about something like an unsolvable math problem that for hundreds of years is not solved then someone figures it out?
Would it be better to have laws which prohibit reverse engineering or intellectual theft?
That is a difficult question. Where do your rights end and mine start? If you have an idea first, does that mean you are the only one who can benifit from that idea? At the same time, should I be able to steal your idea? The anwser is to protect companies or people from stealing ideas others developed, yet at the same time not stopping people from using their own spontaneous ideas.
When it comes to media players, I can only ask the question, if a compression is made by microsoft, is it so obvious that in the next decade someone else would have saw the same pattern and made their own compression format? Or is the idea so unlikely to have been concieved without theft that we can assume it was reverse engineered or hacked?
why not have a law that says stealing technology or reverse engineering is illegal, but not having a thought which is useful because someone else had it before you.
this is going to get ugly. every useful thing will have a patent and we'll have only one option, buy from the patent holder or live without.
if i see a video stream, and decide to write a program that takes any chuncks of "000000000" and replace it with a "01", and so forth, and that is my way of compressing a file, but someone else programed that before me and filed a patent, does that mean i can't use that kind of code?
it is stupid to me to have patents on things that anyone can think up. what happens if a professor at a university thinks up something, but does not patent it. he teaches it to students, and they are free to use it. 2 years later a start up company in california has an employee who thinks up the same simple idea, and has it patented. what does that mean? that the original professor can no longer use it? that his students who might have used that idea in projects now have to remove it?
what is the purpose of patents. it seems to be very anti-competitive, and creates monopolies.