Don't answer this, but what approximate percentage does that 12K represent? If it is less than 40% you are doing OK. My own personal portfolio lost several times what you lost, though I have perhaps been working for many more years, and it is down 38%. It sucks to lose enough "money" to be able to buy a very nice car, or a downpayment on a second house, but what can you do? But it really is money on paper only. So what can you do? Well if you are under age 50 I don't think it will make a difference except a small dent in the quality of living and how hard you have to work after age 70. We'll all be working for years, there won't be the classic retirement anyway (the baby boomers will have sucked us dry by 2030 anyway), and so the 12K you lost now might make the difference between buying a new car every 5 years or one every 7. (although it can be said that interest on that 12K compounded over the next 30+ years can make a huge difference)
Sorry for the ramble. It seems everyone I know who invested "intelligently" with a mix of investments that matched their risk tolerance got screwed. The only people who did well are those who were "stupid" with their money and invested in fixed return investments. My wife, for example, lost only 1% last year and over the last 10 years has exactly matched my returns... she has been ribbing me mercilessly in return for all my comments over the years about investing more wisely.
But the $10,000 on shoes goes to support any number of other people. Sure, it may not go *directly* to barefoot Africans, but it will go to support any number of people along the way. The same can be said for $80,000 rugs and gold plated commodes - the money doesn't disappear, it just gets redistributed differently.
Personally I am glad of this, as I draw my own livelihood from the productivity of other people. If they don't work and earn money, neither do I. For that matter, that is probably true of everyone unless they are homeless or a self-sufficient farmer living off the grid.
You better watch out, when you get famous enough for a Wikipedia entry, the authors will use that as a citable source and you will *never* get your death-date correct.
My driving instructor, more than 25 years ago at this point, once told our class that we needed to beware of "tunnel vision" or "highway vision" because it was so impairing. At the time I had no idea what she was talking about, and for many years since then could not recall ever being in such a state even when stoned out of my mind.
However now that I am getting less and less sleep, mostly due to spending way too much time on my computer at night and still getting up at 5:15 a.m., I find that it is easy to doze off while behind the wheel, or at the very least go into a state where I know I am driving but not really paying attention to anything other than 60 feet in front of my car. This is impaired driving, and yet there is nothing anyone can do about it unless I wreck my car or otherwise pull a bonehead move observed by an officer. The worst I will get is a ticket in such a situation because any field sobriety test I would pass - I'd be really awake if pulled over.
I'd guess I am really super dangerous when driving tired, as are many of the people driving alongside me to and from work. But what can you do?
http://search.cga.state.ct.us/2009/TOB/S/2009SB-00349-R00-SB.htm is a new bill under consideration in the Connecticut State legislature that will make possession of small amounts of marijuana a ticketable offense, not a misdemeanor. I recently wrote to my State Senator recommending approval of this bill, when it comes out of committee, simply because I have two children. I would rather have them caught and ticketed for marijuana possession, and then directed back to me for resolution. What happens today with a midemeanor is that they are taken in a police car down to the station, booked and then we have to deal with court/judge etc.
The linkage between risk and punishment is perverse in the case of marijuana. The punishment is so severe for mere possession, where (except for driving) there is not a clear linkage between simple usage and future riskier behaviour. That said, impairment while driving is a serious offense that should be punishable equally whether it is marijuana, alcohol, prescription drugs etc. However for kids busted on the street, at a party, a passenger in a car, or anywhere but driving, I say let the parents deal with the problem for the first 2 instances before getting the judicial system involved.
Your are absolutely (and surprisingly, to me, correct). A quick Google search and then dive into Wikipedia says that it is the National Firearms Act that regulates these weapons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_II_weapons are the weapons regulated. Getting a Title II weapons permit is not even required. However it is very expensive, enough so perhaps to explain why every NRA member has not already done so!
And how did that work out for you? I *finally* talked to my family about my agnosticism and my mother-in-law was outraged, virtually to the point of tears. She said to me "You don't know what it is like to be in war... you've never had to experience being in a foxhole praying to God for your life".
Anyway, your comment just reminded me of that experience (just this weekend).
[blockquote]Combined, the north and south polar ice caps are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometers (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, making it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America's Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. kms (5,439 miles). [/blockquote]
OK, so how many libraries of congress, or Niagra Falls is this? All joking aside, how does this relate to single units of glaciers or land masses, not non-continguous lakes. For example, how many Antarctica's is this? Or how many of our own polar ice caps? Hell, just tell me how many deep Greenland would be covered in ice!
I know we need things to make volumes, sizes, distances and other units seem real but let's choose something that we all can relate to, that makes sense, eh? Great Lakes just seems really a) North American centric, b) non-sensical to most U.S.ians like myself.
Sorry for the complaint. I know you do your best with these things. Perhaps it is the lack of Vitamin D and the seasonal affective disorder amongst some of us Northern Hemispherians that make me cranky.
That is embarrassing, after all I would be the first to complain to anyone about doing a Google search! I cannot say the last time I looked, but certainly the original post reminded me that I didn't know where to volunteer. As you, and others, have helpfully suggested, it looks like there might be some effective starting points.
Off-topic, but in response to others, as for doing work in Impress, to be honest I hate PowerPoint and what it has become in business. Instead of people documenting projects in a text based document, they are cramming slides full of bullet points. One manager said to me that my PPTs needed to be more robust and serve as a "leave behind". I have been trained all along that PPTs are not the message, that they just help enable the message - the old 3 - 5 bullets per page, 3 - 5 words per bullet kind of thing.
I am so sick of everyone talking about President-Elect Obama is doing this, that and everything. It'll be nice now that he finally has the job that we can simply call him President Obama.
How long till someone slips and calls him Mr. Obama, Senator Obama, or PE Obama again?
I am a marketing droid. One of the things that has always been confusing to me is how I sign up. There seems to be lots of places where a developer can sign up, or even just start coding in spare time, submit a few changes etc. Perhaps I haven't looked lately, but I don't see any places that want my help. Sure, I can't offer free advertising or financial resources, but I can help write press releases, ad copy, design business proposals in powerpoint etc.
Actually the last sentence was somewhat in jest, as that seems to be what most techies think of marketing guys like myself. Really we do a lot of market research, helping to set what direction a technical business will take (e.g. the strategy), also a lot of what I do is explain what is possible to the business types, based on what I learn from techies, and in turn explain to the techies why they cannot build yet another friggin datamart for $2M. I have customer service skills godddammnit! Anyway, I'd hope to be able to help. Like I said, where do I sign up? Is it with Canonical, or is there a generic "Linux" marketing effort someplace?
Just like RedHat took off in its own direction, after being the darling Linux distro some years ago, eventually perhaps Canonical will see the same writing on the wall and abandon the focus on the Linux desktop. The money is in servers and support contracts, the Ubuntu consumer desktop serves to give a distribution a foothold, to give it eyeballs, to focus developer attention on it. But if Ubuntu is to truly become a business it needs to be a whole lot more than self-sustaining.
I also second comments that $30 million is nothing in terms of revenue. There are thousands of small businesses that do that kind of revenue every year, and yet we don't ask if MS is worried about XYZ business.
This is really news to me! You mean you can get a fully functional, non-ultralight plan for $15K? That isn't so much a rich mans sport/hobby as it has been suggested. Maybe there is hope for private flight in.thisguys family yet! Thanks for the headsup AC, now on to Google looking for these inexpensive plans you mention... woot!
I'd bet this is something that could be created in GreaseMonkey or otherwise developed as an add-on for Firefox. It would certainly be an effort I would contribute to as this discussion is making me paranoid.
I went to see the film "Australia" with my wife. I almost had to leave the theatre because the digital effects were so nauseating. If this is the future of film, I won't be going to many more movies. A couple of examples. First, in any wide "helicopter" type shots, you could see the motion of the frames, almost like when watching a hidef football or other sports show with lots of movement. Second, in big scenes with a lot of detail, for example the stampede on the cliff scene, you could easily tell the cattle were not real, the cliffs were added in digitally, and everything was superimposed on a digital canvas. Third, any time there was dust, you could see a very poor almost photoshop-beginner attempt to add the clouds of dust. I was reminded of the Disney movie Hercules where the clouds were these over the top swirley things. Finally, in any shots of ships they almost looked like they were pencil/watercolor ships with fantastic flames emerging. I haven't seen the reviews of Pearl Harbor, the director's other epic, but I'd bet the same criticisms apply there also. Suspension of disbelief just couldn't happen.
Anyway, like I said, if this is the future of movies, I won't be going back. It was awful from a technical standpoint, not to mention the movie itself was astoundingly poor! I much prefer real film with real actors and no CGI effects, despite my love for the Matrix movies.
The price of these telescopes is simply amazing. For a little less than $400 (I assume you have to add shipping and other stuff) you can get http://www.telescope.com/control/product/~category_id=classicdobs/~pcategory=classicdobs/~product_id=08943 that 8" dobsonian you mentioned. I only went there because of your link and the NOVA/PBS show I watched on home-built astronomy. Basically you can buy a really decent telescope for about the same price as you can build your own, so if just getting started (like I am thinking about) it is easier to buy based on recommendations of active local astronomers.
Thanks for the link. $400 is still a bit out of reach, but we'll see what tax rebate season brings.
I don't know the order of operations for all the items loading on system boot, but I can say the goal would be to have a usable system as quickly as possible. One thing I wouldn't want, which exists today, is a GUI that looks ready to use but has an hourglass or otherwise makes me wait until it is done. On my current Ubuntu installation once I actually get through loading all the stuff, and type in my login, my desktop comes up pretty quickly, but then it takes a few more seconds until I can do anything. Those few seconds are spent waiting in anticipation for the ability to click or type on something.
If I wasn't unsure of the power usage of my laptop during sleep I'd probably never shutdown. Resume from suspend is really super fast.
Not everyone is successful at recovery from bullying. It is very destructive to self-confidence and some people just never get fully over it. I am one of those people. You'd never know it based on my personal and professional life, but I can *still* feel Lenny waiting for me to get off the bus in 3rd grade. Even thinking of the taunts and the constant worry that *today* might be the day he decided to beat me up again sends me back to 36 years ago.
This is why my children's elementary school has programs on bullying for the kids every year. We live in Connecticut, and they take bullying quite seriously. I don't know if it was in response to Columbine, but it seems to have made a difference at least in the younger grades. I do hear that high school is a little rough on kids because of the peer pressure to conform, so the passive-aggressive bullying might start a bit later.
At my former company I hated the Flex schedules because of how people accrued vacation time. If they were on a 9/80 schedule and took a work day off Monday - Friday on Week One, or Monday - Wednesday on Week Two I'd have to record 9 hours of vacation time. If they took the Thursday of Week Two off I'd mark down 8 hours (since (9*5)+(9*3)+8 = 80 and 9*9=81 hours). Furthermore we had a policy, I believe due to IRS rules, where compensation time for salaried employees was not permitted for anyone that had to work on their Friday off. If they had to work it, it was basically unpaid time. We tried to make it as easy as possible, and the folks on that schedule generally liked it very much. But as a supervisor it was a pain in the ass, and during our really busy times it actually contributed to more dissatisfaction at the levels of extra work (time over 40 hours worked) because it interfered with the earned "day off". Eventually we, the management team, decided to eliminate flex time during our busy time... we then eliminated the flex time during our slow time, because what the hell were people doing for 9 hours a day and then getting a day off every other week when we didn't have enough work for them in a standard work week. PHB move, for sure, but flex time from our perspective caused way more problems than it solved.
We eventually went to a telecommuting option that solved our morale problems. The same people that were users of the flex time, were the ones that flocked to telecommuting. Out of sight, out of mind and if, during the slow time, they did laundry, surfing porn or whatever, it didn't matter. And then during the busy time they were the same ones that worked extra long, typically starting earlier than the office workers and staying later - I think they justified the lack of commuting and signed on/off about the same time they would have left/arrived at home.
My very first class at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY was Calculus I. I was sitting alongside hundreds of Freshmen engineering students. The first question from the instructor, who I am told was world renowned for his mathematics prowess, was "how many of you are in Engineering", to which it looked like 95% of the hands went up. The second question was "how many of you have had calculus in high school". I was the only one that did not raise my hand. Uh oh, now what?!?
The thing that made that classroom setting useless as a teaching tool, and more useful as a data dump, was the intimidation factor. I couldn't very well ask the teacher to repeat why the first derivative didn't make any sense to me without complete embarassment.
I will say that the instructor was marvelous. He did not defer his office hours to some foreign TA, he did them himself. And in the gentlest way possible, he would ask to see your notes (to prove you were in class) and then would give really great examples of how to do things. Unfortunately he was the only one to make a positive impression and it wasn't until I had flunked out, changed majors to Business and changed schools that I would get to demonstrate the results of his teachings later in an MBA level economics course. Who knew that calculating the area under a curve with calculus could be useful to business majors? Anyway most of my fellow students in business didn't get calculus, but I did!
Absolutely there is way more outside the U.S. than in, believe me I know it (and often miss it). However there is cultural variation, geographic diversity etc. for a lifetime of exploration here. I guess I am offering an alternative view of the typical 'American's are so myopic, so untraveled, so uncultured' - perhaps they don't know any better? Until you have been well outside of the country, and I don't mean to Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean, you have no idea how appealing a visit to another culture really is.
Europeans, and those with close ties to Europe (my family is there), have an advantage in knowing that there is a wide world out there. Here we just see the pretty pictures on TV, what looks like decent food and marketplaces, or interesting mountains, or castles & green grass in Ireland. Obviously you get no sense of culture from that.
Did you consider that the limitations on Internet usage are in place for a reason? It may not be the bandwidth, it may be to force participants in this program to get away from their computers and interact with each other. The limits they place sound pretty reasonable to me.
With that said, I'd say satellite is an option while at sea. Otherwise depending on where you go perhaps a tethered cell phone would do the trick. Expensive either way!
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Don't answer this, but what approximate percentage does that 12K represent? If it is less than 40% you are doing OK. My own personal portfolio lost several times what you lost, though I have perhaps been working for many more years, and it is down 38%. It sucks to lose enough "money" to be able to buy a very nice car, or a downpayment on a second house, but what can you do? But it really is money on paper only. So what can you do? Well if you are under age 50 I don't think it will make a difference except a small dent in the quality of living and how hard you have to work after age 70. We'll all be working for years, there won't be the classic retirement anyway (the baby boomers will have sucked us dry by 2030 anyway), and so the 12K you lost now might make the difference between buying a new car every 5 years or one every 7. (although it can be said that interest on that 12K compounded over the next 30+ years can make a huge difference)
Sorry for the ramble. It seems everyone I know who invested "intelligently" with a mix of investments that matched their risk tolerance got screwed. The only people who did well are those who were "stupid" with their money and invested in fixed return investments. My wife, for example, lost only 1% last year and over the last 10 years has exactly matched my returns... she has been ribbing me mercilessly in return for all my comments over the years about investing more wisely.
But the $10,000 on shoes goes to support any number of other people. Sure, it may not go *directly* to barefoot Africans, but it will go to support any number of people along the way. The same can be said for $80,000 rugs and gold plated commodes - the money doesn't disappear, it just gets redistributed differently.
Personally I am glad of this, as I draw my own livelihood from the productivity of other people. If they don't work and earn money, neither do I. For that matter, that is probably true of everyone unless they are homeless or a self-sufficient farmer living off the grid.
You better watch out, when you get famous enough for a Wikipedia entry, the authors will use that as a citable source and you will *never* get your death-date correct.
The funny thing is both of my home computers have drives smaller than the missing 200GB from this 2TB drive. I really need to upgrade soon...
My driving instructor, more than 25 years ago at this point, once told our class that we needed to beware of "tunnel vision" or "highway vision" because it was so impairing. At the time I had no idea what she was talking about, and for many years since then could not recall ever being in such a state even when stoned out of my mind.
However now that I am getting less and less sleep, mostly due to spending way too much time on my computer at night and still getting up at 5:15 a.m., I find that it is easy to doze off while behind the wheel, or at the very least go into a state where I know I am driving but not really paying attention to anything other than 60 feet in front of my car. This is impaired driving, and yet there is nothing anyone can do about it unless I wreck my car or otherwise pull a bonehead move observed by an officer. The worst I will get is a ticket in such a situation because any field sobriety test I would pass - I'd be really awake if pulled over.
I'd guess I am really super dangerous when driving tired, as are many of the people driving alongside me to and from work. But what can you do?
http://search.cga.state.ct.us/2009/TOB/S/2009SB-00349-R00-SB.htm is a new bill under consideration in the Connecticut State legislature that will make possession of small amounts of marijuana a ticketable offense, not a misdemeanor. I recently wrote to my State Senator recommending approval of this bill, when it comes out of committee, simply because I have two children. I would rather have them caught and ticketed for marijuana possession, and then directed back to me for resolution. What happens today with a midemeanor is that they are taken in a police car down to the station, booked and then we have to deal with court/judge etc.
The linkage between risk and punishment is perverse in the case of marijuana. The punishment is so severe for mere possession, where (except for driving) there is not a clear linkage between simple usage and future riskier behaviour. That said, impairment while driving is a serious offense that should be punishable equally whether it is marijuana, alcohol, prescription drugs etc. However for kids busted on the street, at a party, a passenger in a car, or anywhere but driving, I say let the parents deal with the problem for the first 2 instances before getting the judicial system involved.
Your are absolutely (and surprisingly, to me, correct). A quick Google search and then dive into Wikipedia says that it is the National Firearms Act that regulates these weapons:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Firearms_Act#Categories_of_Weapons_Regulated
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_II_weapons are the weapons regulated. Getting a Title II weapons permit is not even required. However it is very expensive, enough so perhaps to explain why every NRA member has not already done so!
And how did that work out for you? I *finally* talked to my family about my agnosticism and my mother-in-law was outraged, virtually to the point of tears. She said to me "You don't know what it is like to be in war... you've never had to experience being in a foxhole praying to God for your life".
Anyway, your comment just reminded me of that experience (just this weekend).
Royale with cheese. And the Dutch, man, they put mayo on their fries!
Somebody needs to attend 3rd grade math classes and learn about keeping units aligned.
$50 per month x 12 months per year = $600 per year
$600 per year x 3 years = $1800 per 3 years.
Personally I think that is incredibly expensive still, even if it isn't close to your $1800 per month.
[blockquote]Combined, the north and south polar ice caps are believed to hold the equivalent of two to three million cubic kilometers (0.47-0.72 million cu. miles) of ice, making it roughly 100 times more than the total volume of North America's Great Lakes, which is 22,684 cu. kms (5,439 miles). [/blockquote]
OK, so how many libraries of congress, or Niagra Falls is this? All joking aside, how does this relate to single units of glaciers or land masses, not non-continguous lakes. For example, how many Antarctica's is this? Or how many of our own polar ice caps? Hell, just tell me how many deep Greenland would be covered in ice!
I know we need things to make volumes, sizes, distances and other units seem real but let's choose something that we all can relate to, that makes sense, eh? Great Lakes just seems really a) North American centric, b) non-sensical to most U.S.ians like myself.
Sorry for the complaint. I know you do your best with these things. Perhaps it is the lack of Vitamin D and the seasonal affective disorder amongst some of us Northern Hemispherians that make me cranky.
That is embarrassing, after all I would be the first to complain to anyone about doing a Google search! I cannot say the last time I looked, but certainly the original post reminded me that I didn't know where to volunteer. As you, and others, have helpfully suggested, it looks like there might be some effective starting points.
Off-topic, but in response to others, as for doing work in Impress, to be honest I hate PowerPoint and what it has become in business. Instead of people documenting projects in a text based document, they are cramming slides full of bullet points. One manager said to me that my PPTs needed to be more robust and serve as a "leave behind". I have been trained all along that PPTs are not the message, that they just help enable the message - the old 3 - 5 bullets per page, 3 - 5 words per bullet kind of thing.
I am so sick of everyone talking about President-Elect Obama is doing this, that and everything. It'll be nice now that he finally has the job that we can simply call him President Obama.
How long till someone slips and calls him Mr. Obama, Senator Obama, or PE Obama again?
I am a marketing droid. One of the things that has always been confusing to me is how I sign up. There seems to be lots of places where a developer can sign up, or even just start coding in spare time, submit a few changes etc. Perhaps I haven't looked lately, but I don't see any places that want my help. Sure, I can't offer free advertising or financial resources, but I can help write press releases, ad copy, design business proposals in powerpoint etc.
Actually the last sentence was somewhat in jest, as that seems to be what most techies think of marketing guys like myself. Really we do a lot of market research, helping to set what direction a technical business will take (e.g. the strategy), also a lot of what I do is explain what is possible to the business types, based on what I learn from techies, and in turn explain to the techies why they cannot build yet another friggin datamart for $2M. I have customer service skills godddammnit! Anyway, I'd hope to be able to help. Like I said, where do I sign up? Is it with Canonical, or is there a generic "Linux" marketing effort someplace?
Just like RedHat took off in its own direction, after being the darling Linux distro some years ago, eventually perhaps Canonical will see the same writing on the wall and abandon the focus on the Linux desktop. The money is in servers and support contracts, the Ubuntu consumer desktop serves to give a distribution a foothold, to give it eyeballs, to focus developer attention on it. But if Ubuntu is to truly become a business it needs to be a whole lot more than self-sustaining.
I also second comments that $30 million is nothing in terms of revenue. There are thousands of small businesses that do that kind of revenue every year, and yet we don't ask if MS is worried about XYZ business.
This is really news to me! You mean you can get a fully functional, non-ultralight plan for $15K? That isn't so much a rich mans sport/hobby as it has been suggested. Maybe there is hope for private flight in .thisguys family yet! Thanks for the headsup AC, now on to Google looking for these inexpensive plans you mention... woot!
I'd bet this is something that could be created in GreaseMonkey or otherwise developed as an add-on for Firefox. It would certainly be an effort I would contribute to as this discussion is making me paranoid.
I went to see the film "Australia" with my wife. I almost had to leave the theatre because the digital effects were so nauseating. If this is the future of film, I won't be going to many more movies. A couple of examples. First, in any wide "helicopter" type shots, you could see the motion of the frames, almost like when watching a hidef football or other sports show with lots of movement. Second, in big scenes with a lot of detail, for example the stampede on the cliff scene, you could easily tell the cattle were not real, the cliffs were added in digitally, and everything was superimposed on a digital canvas. Third, any time there was dust, you could see a very poor almost photoshop-beginner attempt to add the clouds of dust. I was reminded of the Disney movie Hercules where the clouds were these over the top swirley things. Finally, in any shots of ships they almost looked like they were pencil/watercolor ships with fantastic flames emerging. I haven't seen the reviews of Pearl Harbor, the director's other epic, but I'd bet the same criticisms apply there also. Suspension of disbelief just couldn't happen.
Anyway, like I said, if this is the future of movies, I won't be going back. It was awful from a technical standpoint, not to mention the movie itself was astoundingly poor! I much prefer real film with real actors and no CGI effects, despite my love for the Matrix movies.
The price of these telescopes is simply amazing. For a little less than $400 (I assume you have to add shipping and other stuff) you can get http://www.telescope.com/control/product/~category_id=classicdobs/~pcategory=classicdobs/~product_id=08943 that 8" dobsonian you mentioned. I only went there because of your link and the NOVA/PBS show I watched on home-built astronomy. Basically you can buy a really decent telescope for about the same price as you can build your own, so if just getting started (like I am thinking about) it is easier to buy based on recommendations of active local astronomers.
Thanks for the link. $400 is still a bit out of reach, but we'll see what tax rebate season brings.
I don't know the order of operations for all the items loading on system boot, but I can say the goal would be to have a usable system as quickly as possible. One thing I wouldn't want, which exists today, is a GUI that looks ready to use but has an hourglass or otherwise makes me wait until it is done. On my current Ubuntu installation once I actually get through loading all the stuff, and type in my login, my desktop comes up pretty quickly, but then it takes a few more seconds until I can do anything. Those few seconds are spent waiting in anticipation for the ability to click or type on something.
If I wasn't unsure of the power usage of my laptop during sleep I'd probably never shutdown. Resume from suspend is really super fast.
Not everyone is successful at recovery from bullying. It is very destructive to self-confidence and some people just never get fully over it. I am one of those people. You'd never know it based on my personal and professional life, but I can *still* feel Lenny waiting for me to get off the bus in 3rd grade. Even thinking of the taunts and the constant worry that *today* might be the day he decided to beat me up again sends me back to 36 years ago.
This is why my children's elementary school has programs on bullying for the kids every year. We live in Connecticut, and they take bullying quite seriously. I don't know if it was in response to Columbine, but it seems to have made a difference at least in the younger grades. I do hear that high school is a little rough on kids because of the peer pressure to conform, so the passive-aggressive bullying might start a bit later.
At my former company I hated the Flex schedules because of how people accrued vacation time. If they were on a 9/80 schedule and took a work day off Monday - Friday on Week One, or Monday - Wednesday on Week Two I'd have to record 9 hours of vacation time. If they took the Thursday of Week Two off I'd mark down 8 hours (since (9*5)+(9*3)+8 = 80 and 9*9=81 hours). Furthermore we had a policy, I believe due to IRS rules, where compensation time for salaried employees was not permitted for anyone that had to work on their Friday off. If they had to work it, it was basically unpaid time. We tried to make it as easy as possible, and the folks on that schedule generally liked it very much. But as a supervisor it was a pain in the ass, and during our really busy times it actually contributed to more dissatisfaction at the levels of extra work (time over 40 hours worked) because it interfered with the earned "day off". Eventually we, the management team, decided to eliminate flex time during our busy time... we then eliminated the flex time during our slow time, because what the hell were people doing for 9 hours a day and then getting a day off every other week when we didn't have enough work for them in a standard work week. PHB move, for sure, but flex time from our perspective caused way more problems than it solved.
We eventually went to a telecommuting option that solved our morale problems. The same people that were users of the flex time, were the ones that flocked to telecommuting. Out of sight, out of mind and if, during the slow time, they did laundry, surfing porn or whatever, it didn't matter. And then during the busy time they were the same ones that worked extra long, typically starting earlier than the office workers and staying later - I think they justified the lack of commuting and signed on/off about the same time they would have left/arrived at home.
My very first class at Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY was Calculus I. I was sitting alongside hundreds of Freshmen engineering students. The first question from the instructor, who I am told was world renowned for his mathematics prowess, was "how many of you are in Engineering", to which it looked like 95% of the hands went up. The second question was "how many of you have had calculus in high school". I was the only one that did not raise my hand. Uh oh, now what?!?
The thing that made that classroom setting useless as a teaching tool, and more useful as a data dump, was the intimidation factor. I couldn't very well ask the teacher to repeat why the first derivative didn't make any sense to me without complete embarassment.
I will say that the instructor was marvelous. He did not defer his office hours to some foreign TA, he did them himself. And in the gentlest way possible, he would ask to see your notes (to prove you were in class) and then would give really great examples of how to do things. Unfortunately he was the only one to make a positive impression and it wasn't until I had flunked out, changed majors to Business and changed schools that I would get to demonstrate the results of his teachings later in an MBA level economics course. Who knew that calculating the area under a curve with calculus could be useful to business majors? Anyway most of my fellow students in business didn't get calculus, but I did!
Absolutely there is way more outside the U.S. than in, believe me I know it (and often miss it). However there is cultural variation, geographic diversity etc. for a lifetime of exploration here. I guess I am offering an alternative view of the typical 'American's are so myopic, so untraveled, so uncultured' - perhaps they don't know any better? Until you have been well outside of the country, and I don't mean to Canada, Mexico or the Caribbean, you have no idea how appealing a visit to another culture really is.
Europeans, and those with close ties to Europe (my family is there), have an advantage in knowing that there is a wide world out there. Here we just see the pretty pictures on TV, what looks like decent food and marketplaces, or interesting mountains, or castles & green grass in Ireland. Obviously you get no sense of culture from that.
Did you consider that the limitations on Internet usage are in place for a reason? It may not be the bandwidth, it may be to force participants in this program to get away from their computers and interact with each other. The limits they place sound pretty reasonable to me.
With that said, I'd say satellite is an option while at sea. Otherwise depending on where you go perhaps a tethered cell phone would do the trick. Expensive either way!