Can it be done, probably? A lot of smart people develop lots of things.
It's the vast majority of the population that can't tell the difference between a web browser, their monitor, and "the internet" that would have to use such a system.
While students may "know technology" these days, I'm getting a lot of students at university that don't understand where their files go. I have students who don't know about simple keyboard shortcuts like cut, copy, and paste. I've had to give mini lessons on how to do basic formatting in Microsoft Word, and how to do simple manipulations of a spreadsheet.
Learning how to code is useful, but I feel that should come after learning some very simple basics.
For a custom GUI bringing in data from a database, I've found most GUI tools for this on Linux to be a bit clunky yet. Writing PHP forms and reports was just easier, and I'm not a web developer by any means, but it didn't take much for me to get exactly what I needed, and in just a little mroe time that it would have taken me with Access front end and MS-SQL backend. If I did that work more often, I could probably bang it out quicker in PHP.
...the one where all the celebrities with sexual addiction problems blame it on the alien wizard. It was Facebook that created all those dating site profiles honey, honest. Yeah, the alien wizard.
And I'm not saying any of them are wrong. But I'm also thinking of the potential of what these could do. Infrared camera module, blood-sugar testing module are two things that come to my mind.
I just completed work for a customer who, because of a lot of legacy software, kept needing to purchase IBM hardware and operating systems. They somehow manage to make everything WAY more complicated than it needed to be, and WAY more expensive. I want to believe that their hardware was good, in my experience, IBM hardware does last a long time, and functions well. With that said, I could buy COTS hardware with Linux, and have several sets of backup hardware, for less than the cost of what IBM proposed for a single system, and I could have it up and running in less time than it would take to set up the IBM systems. They're quickly pricing themselves out of the marketplace.
The military is made up of people of all types, from all different backgrounds, from all different education and experience levels. I have anecdotal stories that would support both sides of this question, and I think it just boils down to the person, and not weather they're ex-military or not. In general, the ones I knew while I was in the military who were into IT outside of the military went on to have big careers in IT. I knew a few grunts who got out after the recent conflicts, and decided they wanted an IT career because they played lots of video games, and may have built a gaming PC. Even with tech school training, their skills were usually lacking. Same works for the non-military people I know.
I have gone to conferences and found out things I wasn't aware of, or found new ways of looking at things that then translated into new solutions at work. After attending the conference two years in a row, I was able to contribute, and got to present the third year. I know there were people who didn't know the technology I was presenting, so I'm sure it helped other organizations. As a presenter, I got to attend for free, and just had to cover the travel costs (which were then covered by my employer). My employer was also able to say their employee had presented at tech conferences as well. A win/win.
The public is involved in electing the school board members, and running for school board. Of the school board members I've met, I don't think I'd identify them as politicians. More importantly, the pubic is sitting in front of the teachers deserving an education by a qualified teacher who is allowed the resources to do the best job that they can for their students.
I understand you don't like taxes. But if we're going to complain about how our tax money is spent, I'd much rather not have my taxes used for sending my former students to foreign soil to get their brains blasted out, the same brains I spent several years putting information into at tax payers expense. The money used to kill, maim, or otherwise damage my former students in pointless wars consumes 60% of the federal budget. You don't like taxes, let's take a chunk out of the biggest consumer.
Administrators who suddenly decide to have a 3 hour meeting at the very end of the work day. Administrators who fire qualified teachers and hire their unqualified good buddy for the same position. Administrators who refuse to purchase enough text books for the number of students in a class. Administrators who don't plan man-power properly and have 40-50 kids in a classroom built to hold 30 max. Administrators who give performance reviews based on the attractiveness of a teacher. Administrators who maintain physical environments that are not condusive to learning (too hot, too cold, dirty, depressing, interruptions to class time). Administrators who assign extra duties that interfere with student's education, at no extra pay. Administrators who create a schedule that does not allow for even a lunch break, much less a restroom break for the teachers.
All of these examples are things that actually happend in the district that I worked for, and had clauses in the contract that were added, negotiated by the union and the school district.
As a (former) teacher living in Missouri, this law is horrible. It comes from school administrators around the state going out of their way to not do their jobs. This law came about because of a fear of a teacher going from district to district who molests children, and uses electronic media as one of his tools. If there is a teacher who gets asked to find a job somewhere else because it is suspected that they have molested a student, it is the job of every school district employee to report this person. This reporting is legally mandated, and anyone found having knowledge of molestation who holds a job as a mandatory reporter can and should be held liable. I once worked in a district where the band teacher was suddenly arrested for having sex with students. I was livid. If he had been in the building when I found out, I would have kicked his ass into his office and kept him there till the police came. Any district that doesn't investigate such things should be held liable, and any administrator who suggests a teacher find another district in which to molest students should lose their job and license as well.
I say regressive because most students are well ahead of the school districts in terms of making regular use of technology. This just discourages teachers from using technology further. I can't tell you how many times we've been able to plan accordingly because my kids were able to text their coach or teacher about an upcoming event to make sure we weren't late, or planned to be out of town.
We already have a bunch of negative approaches, I've thought of a slightly different approach. The cheapest foods are also the most unhealthy, so what needs to happen is that we make the healthier choices more appealing. Since "food stamps" are now on a debit card type system, the government can make calculations in the background. I say that any fresh produce purchased on an EBT card will get a 10%-50% rebate, I have no idea on the ramifications of this number, so the exact amount of the rebate would have to be studied. The cost for this rebate can be offset by taking it out of farm subsidies for the less healthy choices like meat. Of course this would have to be monitored for over-users, people who purchase tons of produce, then go to a farmer's market and try to re-sell it for less than grocery prices, but more than their rebate price.
I got this MVIX box off e-bay. My model is the 760 HD, I paid under $50, but most auctions seem to go for under $100. It will look for open SMB shares, wired or wirelessly. If you get one with a hard drive, you can also use it as an external hard drive, but one's not required. They have newer versions also. The interface is basically a file browser, and I've only had a few poorly ripped movies not play with all the codex loaded on this thing. Makes about as much noise as an external hard drive, when you have a hard drive in it, otherwise, everything is in the solid state memory. I guess the downside is that it is JUST a media player, and doesn't surf the internet or anything like that.
Amen to that. When I worked 3rd shift at a hotel while going to college, the pay was crap. I got a "raise" of 10 cents above minimum, then minimum wage went up 15 cents, and they called it another raise. 23 years old, and the only employee on site in charge of a multi-million dollar property and hundreds of lives, getting paid minimum wage. I was never tempted to steal, but I was often tempted to walk out.
At our shop, we started recommend MSE after seeing some independent and objective testing done with it as well as about a dozen other solutions. MSE tested as good as (or better than) most free or subscription services. We have only seen one computer infected with a virus with MSE installed, and after reviewing his history, he deserved a virus for the sites he was visiting.
I also find it to be rather non-invasive and not bloated, like so much other AV software is becoming.
Although my personal preference is still Ubuntu.
This starts from a completely false premise...
on
Power To the Pop-Ups
·
· Score: 1
The author assumes that advertisements are a good thing, and implies they are necessary. Ads may be necessary to his business model, just like prostitutes are necessary to a pimp's business model. I do not see how this shotgun effect of advertisements can continue to be effective. It seems that most sites that sell advertising space try to make up for decreasing revenue from ads by adding more ads. They aren't getting the reality that people don't like advertisements, don't click on advertisements, and those that do are idiots that are likely to fight any charges they may incur by inadvertently clicking on something.
How about a totally different concept: sell a service that people want, and charge a reasonable price for it. If your idea is a good one, people will pay. If it's not a good idea, if your pricing is too high, it will fail. Don't try to subsidize your possibly good venture with advertisements. Thank you for letting me know about a service I won't be using.
If you're determined to use advertisements, I'd try to do it like sites where it's more successful, like Google. I can tell you if Slashdot had pop-ups and ads screaming in my face, I would not be using it either.
I started down this road once, but the district I was with wanted nothing to do with it. The administration wanted very few students to have little technology.
BUT for any financally strapped district who wants to provide for their students, K12LTSP.org is where you can download an LTSP that is educationally geared. I started with a server that had 4 550Mhz pentiums and it powered a lab of 20 machines (p1-266 for the most part).
Secondly, check out Freegeek.org. Take hardware donations, refurbish, recycle, give away computers, and show how they're made. At it's peak, my organization had 20 students daily volunteering after school.
Good luck.
Sure there are a lot of sci-fi horror stories. But did Columbus bring about the ruination of Europe by going to the Americas? Did Marco Polo do the same thing when he went to China? Did Alexander Grahm Bell when he shouted "Watson come here, I need you!" into the telephone? What about when Thomas Edison first recorded "Mary had a little lamb" on a wax cylinder? You don't know till you try. Of course no one person can speak for our planet. Surely any civilization advanced enough to reach us wouldn't assume as much. Our entire civilization has only advanced when some one said "What the hell, why not", and just jumped out there (not to be confused with the drunken "Hey, y'all watch this!"). Cower in fear if you like. I prefer to boldly go.
I hate Donald Rumsfield now because he is one of the major pushers of the agenda for the millitary-industrial complex, just as he has been since the Nixon years. He does not work for the American people or the American government, nor does he look after the interests of the millitary. He is interested in getting as many of our tax dollars to manufactures of defense products and services as possible.
I remember the Clinton years with some fondness because someone had a plan to improve America and it was working. If it weren't for the facist propaganda telling America that he was corrupt every single day of his 8 years, he could have done so much more. The most investigated president ever in history, millions of dollars spent, and the ONLY thing that anyone could come up with was he lied about cheating on his wife. That was an affair with a consentual adult (+21). I was not fond of how the republican members of congress chose to waste their time or my tax dollars.
Let's see, there was Panama, Grenada, Viet Nam, Korea, multiple central American Countries....where weren't we trying to control their government? And what happened to all those countries in danger of being affected by the domino effect. As for torture, wheather or not the US has been doing it, it has been scientifically proven that torture does not provide good intelligence. This is recent American History as taught in any high school or college, not programming.
I watch Fox news nearly every day, until they tell enough half truths and lies that my blood pressure hits ciritical levels. Then I surf through the remaining news channels. I like to know what kind of propaganda the fascists are putting out there. It's a good thing to try to understand how the enemies of the constitution think.
Rush Limbaugh, Lora Ingrahm, Bill O'Reilly, and all the other lying fascist pigs will eventually suffer the same fate as the traterous Americans that they are.
Let me help define fascism for you. It's not whatever Rush or Lora or Bill say. A compairson was done of 4 or more known fascist governments in the past (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and other smaller countries). They all had these defining charistics, which incidentially, are exactly what the Bush administration is committing right now: 1. Excessive Nationalism - extreme use of national symbols like flags. 2. Distain for Human rights-ie torture, indefinite detention 3. Identification of Scape goats - today Muslims 4. Supremacy of Millitary-spread of millitary activity 5. Rampant sexism and anti-gay rehtoric 6. Controlled Mass Media - Fox news 7. Obsession of National Security - pick any 5 minutes of any Bush speech 8. Religion in Government - done in Bush's first term 9. Protection of Corporate Power - immenent domain giving family property to Wal Mart and other corporations 10. supression of labor unions - you win. I can't think of a quick example for this one. 11. Distain for intellectuals and arts- No child left behind, shrinking government dollars for education 12. Obsession with crime and punishment-more executions in Texas than anywhere else in US while bush was in charge 13. Cronyism and Corruption-Harriet Meiers, Abrahmhoff, and all those who go with it. 14. Fraudulent Elections-diebold, Broward county Florida was actually requiring 3 pieces of photo id's from african americans in the 2000 elections. And yet they still couldn't fix it right. (see source http://www.rense.com/general37/char.htm) Even if you can rebutt 3 or 4 of these, its still fascism.
To answer the original post, I will not leave. I took an oath when I joined the army to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I will stay here and do what I can to make sure that these criminals and trators are held accountable for their actions.
If you dismiss everything I said just out of hand, you are programmed. Just tell yourself black is white, war is peace, and go back to watching Fox news.
I make it through about any game that I play, but, depending on the difficulty, I can do it in around 20 or so hours. That's an hour here, maybe two there. On a good Saturday, maybe I can get in up to 6 hours. Of course you can get much further faster if you can play in large blocks of time, but I have a family, several jobs, and a life. This is without cheats. My kids get a few hours into it, and then they're looking for the cheats. Most FPS go much faster when you have infinite ammo and health.
My personal beef with video games are the ones that attempt to be "hard" by making the screen black. If I wanted that, I'd just turn down the screen brightness or put on a blindfold. Making it difficult to see I think is a lazy way for games to make it more difficult.
I just cannot agree with the line: When the iMac was first introduced, people went gaga over the fact that the monitor, computer, and speakers were all in one enclosure. When I saw this, I thought, what if the monitor goes, what if the spearkers go? I had a teacher who brought in an iMac whose speakers had blown. Apple's suggestion was to buy a new iMac since the speakers were encased the the plastic of the case. We sold her a $20 pair of speakers and told her to plug them into the headphone jack. I simply don't understand the unabashed and unconditional love of anything Apple on Digg and Slashdot. No hardware or software manufacturer is simply that wonderful.
One could also say those who can't think of anything intelligent to say insult.
I'm not defending all teachers. There are a good handful in our district that I believe should find a different career. I am sorry you are unhappy with your district, but all teachers are not the problem. Our educational system has been set up like an assembly line, and schools are supposed to take product that can vary widely, and turn out a finished product within certain specifications (high test scores). Human beings just don't work that way. They are influenced by many factors such as genetics, environment, family, and friends. I have seen kids who are shooting for the stars only to choose a drug addicted boyfriend over their future. I have seen incredibly bright students taken out of school because their parents don't want their children to get uppity.
I've got my kids for 45 minutes a day, for 180 days a year. All of my student's math scores go up. Some of my freshmen algebra students come to me with 4th grade scores and leave with 6th. Some come in with 10th grade scores and leave with 11th grade scores. They are out of school 16 hours a day, I do my part, and I still get blamed. I usually wonder what's going on during the 2/3 of the day that the test scores aren't going up.
Just like I tell my own children, in life, you can end up with stupid supervisors. The best thing to do is do what they ask and keep your nose clean until you can get past that situation. Take what skills you can from the expirence, and move on. If you just sit and cry about how bad things are, you'll never rise above it.
I'm glad you put this post out there. Irrational and rude parents are the single most detrement to the profession of teaching, even at the community college level. The original poster should be aware of the downsides of teaching. With the current administration's distain of an educated public, and the hateful fascist propaganda on Fox news and talk radio, teaching is a very difficult profession right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Can it be done, probably? A lot of smart people develop lots of things. It's the vast majority of the population that can't tell the difference between a web browser, their monitor, and "the internet" that would have to use such a system.
While students may "know technology" these days, I'm getting a lot of students at university that don't understand where their files go. I have students who don't know about simple keyboard shortcuts like cut, copy, and paste. I've had to give mini lessons on how to do basic formatting in Microsoft Word, and how to do simple manipulations of a spreadsheet. Learning how to code is useful, but I feel that should come after learning some very simple basics.
For a custom GUI bringing in data from a database, I've found most GUI tools for this on Linux to be a bit clunky yet. Writing PHP forms and reports was just easier, and I'm not a web developer by any means, but it didn't take much for me to get exactly what I needed, and in just a little mroe time that it would have taken me with Access front end and MS-SQL backend. If I did that work more often, I could probably bang it out quicker in PHP.
In all seriousness, research the cost differences between traditional coffee makers and coffee vs the Keurig.
...the one where all the celebrities with sexual addiction problems blame it on the alien wizard. It was Facebook that created all those dating site profiles honey, honest. Yeah, the alien wizard.
And I'm not saying any of them are wrong. But I'm also thinking of the potential of what these could do. Infrared camera module, blood-sugar testing module are two things that come to my mind.
I just completed work for a customer who, because of a lot of legacy software, kept needing to purchase IBM hardware and operating systems. They somehow manage to make everything WAY more complicated than it needed to be, and WAY more expensive. I want to believe that their hardware was good, in my experience, IBM hardware does last a long time, and functions well. With that said, I could buy COTS hardware with Linux, and have several sets of backup hardware, for less than the cost of what IBM proposed for a single system, and I could have it up and running in less time than it would take to set up the IBM systems. They're quickly pricing themselves out of the marketplace.
Spidergoat, Spidergoat, does what ever a Spidergoat does...
The military is made up of people of all types, from all different backgrounds, from all different education and experience levels. I have anecdotal stories that would support both sides of this question, and I think it just boils down to the person, and not weather they're ex-military or not. In general, the ones I knew while I was in the military who were into IT outside of the military went on to have big careers in IT. I knew a few grunts who got out after the recent conflicts, and decided they wanted an IT career because they played lots of video games, and may have built a gaming PC. Even with tech school training, their skills were usually lacking. Same works for the non-military people I know.
I have gone to conferences and found out things I wasn't aware of, or found new ways of looking at things that then translated into new solutions at work. After attending the conference two years in a row, I was able to contribute, and got to present the third year. I know there were people who didn't know the technology I was presenting, so I'm sure it helped other organizations. As a presenter, I got to attend for free, and just had to cover the travel costs (which were then covered by my employer). My employer was also able to say their employee had presented at tech conferences as well. A win/win.
How will this help if all power, all hotspots, and all cell towers are down? There were dead spots during hurricane Sandy .
The public is involved in electing the school board members, and running for school board. Of the school board members I've met, I don't think I'd identify them as politicians. More importantly, the pubic is sitting in front of the teachers deserving an education by a qualified teacher who is allowed the resources to do the best job that they can for their students. I understand you don't like taxes. But if we're going to complain about how our tax money is spent, I'd much rather not have my taxes used for sending my former students to foreign soil to get their brains blasted out, the same brains I spent several years putting information into at tax payers expense. The money used to kill, maim, or otherwise damage my former students in pointless wars consumes 60% of the federal budget. You don't like taxes, let's take a chunk out of the biggest consumer.
Who is 'oppressing' these teachers?
Administrators who suddenly decide to have a 3 hour meeting at the very end of the work day. Administrators who fire qualified teachers and hire their unqualified good buddy for the same position. Administrators who refuse to purchase enough text books for the number of students in a class. Administrators who don't plan man-power properly and have 40-50 kids in a classroom built to hold 30 max. Administrators who give performance reviews based on the attractiveness of a teacher. Administrators who maintain physical environments that are not condusive to learning (too hot, too cold, dirty, depressing, interruptions to class time). Administrators who assign extra duties that interfere with student's education, at no extra pay. Administrators who create a schedule that does not allow for even a lunch break, much less a restroom break for the teachers.
All of these examples are things that actually happend in the district that I worked for, and had clauses in the contract that were added, negotiated by the union and the school district.
As a (former) teacher living in Missouri, this law is horrible. It comes from school administrators around the state going out of their way to not do their jobs. This law came about because of a fear of a teacher going from district to district who molests children, and uses electronic media as one of his tools. If there is a teacher who gets asked to find a job somewhere else because it is suspected that they have molested a student, it is the job of every school district employee to report this person. This reporting is legally mandated, and anyone found having knowledge of molestation who holds a job as a mandatory reporter can and should be held liable. I once worked in a district where the band teacher was suddenly arrested for having sex with students. I was livid. If he had been in the building when I found out, I would have kicked his ass into his office and kept him there till the police came. Any district that doesn't investigate such things should be held liable, and any administrator who suggests a teacher find another district in which to molest students should lose their job and license as well. I say regressive because most students are well ahead of the school districts in terms of making regular use of technology. This just discourages teachers from using technology further. I can't tell you how many times we've been able to plan accordingly because my kids were able to text their coach or teacher about an upcoming event to make sure we weren't late, or planned to be out of town.
We already have a bunch of negative approaches, I've thought of a slightly different approach. The cheapest foods are also the most unhealthy, so what needs to happen is that we make the healthier choices more appealing. Since "food stamps" are now on a debit card type system, the government can make calculations in the background. I say that any fresh produce purchased on an EBT card will get a 10%-50% rebate, I have no idea on the ramifications of this number, so the exact amount of the rebate would have to be studied. The cost for this rebate can be offset by taking it out of farm subsidies for the less healthy choices like meat. Of course this would have to be monitored for over-users, people who purchase tons of produce, then go to a farmer's market and try to re-sell it for less than grocery prices, but more than their rebate price.
I got this MVIX box off e-bay. My model is the 760 HD, I paid under $50, but most auctions seem to go for under $100. It will look for open SMB shares, wired or wirelessly. If you get one with a hard drive, you can also use it as an external hard drive, but one's not required. They have newer versions also. The interface is basically a file browser, and I've only had a few poorly ripped movies not play with all the codex loaded on this thing. Makes about as much noise as an external hard drive, when you have a hard drive in it, otherwise, everything is in the solid state memory. I guess the downside is that it is JUST a media player, and doesn't surf the internet or anything like that.
Amen to that. When I worked 3rd shift at a hotel while going to college, the pay was crap. I got a "raise" of 10 cents above minimum, then minimum wage went up 15 cents, and they called it another raise. 23 years old, and the only employee on site in charge of a multi-million dollar property and hundreds of lives, getting paid minimum wage. I was never tempted to steal, but I was often tempted to walk out.
At our shop, we started recommend MSE after seeing some independent and objective testing done with it as well as about a dozen other solutions. MSE tested as good as (or better than) most free or subscription services. We have only seen one computer infected with a virus with MSE installed, and after reviewing his history, he deserved a virus for the sites he was visiting. I also find it to be rather non-invasive and not bloated, like so much other AV software is becoming. Although my personal preference is still Ubuntu.
The author assumes that advertisements are a good thing, and implies they are necessary. Ads may be necessary to his business model, just like prostitutes are necessary to a pimp's business model. I do not see how this shotgun effect of advertisements can continue to be effective. It seems that most sites that sell advertising space try to make up for decreasing revenue from ads by adding more ads. They aren't getting the reality that people don't like advertisements, don't click on advertisements, and those that do are idiots that are likely to fight any charges they may incur by inadvertently clicking on something. How about a totally different concept: sell a service that people want, and charge a reasonable price for it. If your idea is a good one, people will pay. If it's not a good idea, if your pricing is too high, it will fail. Don't try to subsidize your possibly good venture with advertisements. Thank you for letting me know about a service I won't be using. If you're determined to use advertisements, I'd try to do it like sites where it's more successful, like Google. I can tell you if Slashdot had pop-ups and ads screaming in my face, I would not be using it either.
I started down this road once, but the district I was with wanted nothing to do with it. The administration wanted very few students to have little technology. BUT for any financally strapped district who wants to provide for their students, K12LTSP.org is where you can download an LTSP that is educationally geared. I started with a server that had 4 550Mhz pentiums and it powered a lab of 20 machines (p1-266 for the most part). Secondly, check out Freegeek.org. Take hardware donations, refurbish, recycle, give away computers, and show how they're made. At it's peak, my organization had 20 students daily volunteering after school. Good luck.
Sure there are a lot of sci-fi horror stories. But did Columbus bring about the ruination of Europe by going to the Americas? Did Marco Polo do the same thing when he went to China? Did Alexander Grahm Bell when he shouted "Watson come here, I need you!" into the telephone? What about when Thomas Edison first recorded "Mary had a little lamb" on a wax cylinder? You don't know till you try. Of course no one person can speak for our planet. Surely any civilization advanced enough to reach us wouldn't assume as much. Our entire civilization has only advanced when some one said "What the hell, why not", and just jumped out there (not to be confused with the drunken "Hey, y'all watch this!"). Cower in fear if you like. I prefer to boldly go.
Let's take this one by one.
I hate Donald Rumsfield now because he is one of the major pushers of the agenda for the millitary-industrial complex, just as he has been since the Nixon years. He does not work for the American people or the American government, nor does he look after the interests of the millitary. He is interested in getting as many of our tax dollars to manufactures of defense products and services as possible.
I remember the Clinton years with some fondness because someone had a plan to improve America and it was working. If it weren't for the facist propaganda telling America that he was corrupt every single day of his 8 years, he could have done so much more. The most investigated president ever in history, millions of dollars spent, and the ONLY thing that anyone could come up with was he lied about cheating on his wife. That was an affair with a consentual adult (+21). I was not fond of how the republican members of congress chose to waste their time or my tax dollars.
Let's see, there was Panama, Grenada, Viet Nam, Korea, multiple central American Countries....where weren't we trying to control their government? And what happened to all those countries in danger of being affected by the domino effect. As for torture, wheather or not the US has been doing it, it has been scientifically proven that torture does not provide good intelligence. This is recent American History as taught in any high school or college, not programming.
I watch Fox news nearly every day, until they tell enough half truths and lies that my blood pressure hits ciritical levels. Then I surf through the remaining news channels. I like to know what kind of propaganda the fascists are putting out there. It's a good thing to try to understand how the enemies of the constitution think.
Rush Limbaugh, Lora Ingrahm, Bill O'Reilly, and all the other lying fascist pigs will eventually suffer the same fate as the traterous Americans that they are.
Let me help define fascism for you. It's not whatever Rush or Lora or Bill say. A compairson was done of 4 or more known fascist governments in the past (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and other smaller countries). They all had these defining charistics, which incidentially, are exactly what the Bush administration is committing right now:
1. Excessive Nationalism - extreme use of national symbols like flags.
2. Distain for Human rights-ie torture, indefinite detention
3. Identification of Scape goats - today Muslims
4. Supremacy of Millitary-spread of millitary activity
5. Rampant sexism and anti-gay rehtoric
6. Controlled Mass Media - Fox news
7. Obsession of National Security - pick any 5 minutes of any Bush speech
8. Religion in Government - done in Bush's first term
9. Protection of Corporate Power - immenent domain giving family property to Wal Mart and other corporations
10. supression of labor unions - you win. I can't think of a quick example for this one.
11. Distain for intellectuals and arts- No child left behind, shrinking government dollars for education
12. Obsession with crime and punishment-more executions in Texas than anywhere else in US while bush was in charge
13. Cronyism and Corruption-Harriet Meiers, Abrahmhoff, and all those who go with it.
14. Fraudulent Elections-diebold, Broward county Florida was actually requiring 3 pieces of photo id's from african americans in the 2000 elections. And yet they still couldn't fix it right.
(see source http://www.rense.com/general37/char.htm)
Even if you can rebutt 3 or 4 of these, its still fascism.
To answer the original post, I will not leave. I took an oath when I joined the army to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. I will stay here and do what I can to make sure that these criminals and trators are held accountable for their actions.
If you dismiss everything I said just out of hand, you are programmed. Just tell yourself black is white, war is peace, and go back to watching Fox news.
I make it through about any game that I play, but, depending on the difficulty, I can do it in around 20 or so hours. That's an hour here, maybe two there. On a good Saturday, maybe I can get in up to 6 hours. Of course you can get much further faster if you can play in large blocks of time, but I have a family, several jobs, and a life. This is without cheats. My kids get a few hours into it, and then they're looking for the cheats. Most FPS go much faster when you have infinite ammo and health.
My personal beef with video games are the ones that attempt to be "hard" by making the screen black. If I wanted that, I'd just turn down the screen brightness or put on a blindfold. Making it difficult to see I think is a lazy way for games to make it more difficult.
I just cannot agree with the line: When the iMac was first introduced, people went gaga over the fact that the monitor, computer, and speakers were all in one enclosure. When I saw this, I thought, what if the monitor goes, what if the spearkers go? I had a teacher who brought in an iMac whose speakers had blown. Apple's suggestion was to buy a new iMac since the speakers were encased the the plastic of the case. We sold her a $20 pair of speakers and told her to plug them into the headphone jack. I simply don't understand the unabashed and unconditional love of anything Apple on Digg and Slashdot. No hardware or software manufacturer is simply that wonderful.
One could also say those who can't think of anything intelligent to say insult.
I'm not defending all teachers. There are a good handful in our district that I believe should find a different career. I am sorry you are unhappy with your district, but all teachers are not the problem. Our educational system has been set up like an assembly line, and schools are supposed to take product that can vary widely, and turn out a finished product within certain specifications (high test scores). Human beings just don't work that way. They are influenced by many factors such as genetics, environment, family, and friends. I have seen kids who are shooting for the stars only to choose a drug addicted boyfriend over their future. I have seen incredibly bright students taken out of school because their parents don't want their children to get uppity.
I've got my kids for 45 minutes a day, for 180 days a year. All of my student's math scores go up. Some of my freshmen algebra students come to me with 4th grade scores and leave with 6th. Some come in with 10th grade scores and leave with 11th grade scores. They are out of school 16 hours a day, I do my part, and I still get blamed. I usually wonder what's going on during the 2/3 of the day that the test scores aren't going up.
Just like I tell my own children, in life, you can end up with stupid supervisors. The best thing to do is do what they ask and keep your nose clean until you can get past that situation. Take what skills you can from the expirence, and move on. If you just sit and cry about how bad things are, you'll never rise above it.
I'm glad you put this post out there. Irrational and rude parents are the single most detrement to the profession of teaching, even at the community college level. The original poster should be aware of the downsides of teaching. With the current administration's distain of an educated public, and the hateful fascist propaganda on Fox news and talk radio, teaching is a very difficult profession right now.