You know what your description of Croatia's educlational system sounds like? America's. You went down the wrong path.
Tell me about it.
And the new reforms are bound to take it further along the same road.
One would think that the epic fail of the American education system would be taken as a lesson, but I guess it takes an IQ higher than a politician's to see it.
Croatia? The country where way too many kids in primary school have a 5.0 average? (For you non-Croatian readers, that means the highest grade in every single of some 13 subjects.)
The country where secondary education has been made obligatory, which means that even those who do not want to go to school have to?
The country where teachers pass morons just so that they wouldn't have to suffer them for another year?
We don't leave anyone behind. And very, very few actually get ahead.
While this will increase the overall level of education, the people who will truly shine and propel forward are the Einsteins of the world. If we don't give them support, the US will be stuck slowly moving along while the rest of the world leapfrogs over us.
That, alas, only holds true if the rest of the world doesn't follow in your footsteps. And it seems to me that exceptions to the rule are few.
Well, no matter how bright you are, you won't be winning any contests without working hard.
The academic contests I've been in, I won without really working hard.
That was mainly because it doesn't look like hard work when you're enjoying yourself.
Teachers won't become better teachers if they're paid more, they'll just be richer teachers. And smaller classes won't do a lick of good unless the teachers that are hired to staff all these new classrooms are good teachers.
Good teachers are often good at many other things as well. And they get fed up with poor pay and poorer working conditions and leave for better-paid and less stressful jobs.
Yes, you need good teachers. And you need to pay them well enough for them to want to remain teachers.
Paying them better will not improve existing teachers in a significant manner, but it will provide incentive for others to become teachers.
For inastance, here in Croatia, tram drivers are paid twice as much as teachers. And you need almost no qualifications whatsoever to drive a tram.
Teachers are the gutter of the possible jobs; very few people even consider it unless they either really want to teach or they haven't any other choice. There is no shortage of tram drivers, though; people are even willing to bribe someone to become tram drivers, and often they do so.
This is not the environment in which good teachers will have any reason to remain teachers, save for the fact they like the job. And that liking can be pushed aside when you get an opportunity to double your pay and halve your hassle. This is why many really good teachers I know no longer teach, and why many students I think would make good teachers don't even contemplate the possibility.
There are too few people even willing to teach, and therefore there are too few people to pick good teachers from.
It is not about employing a teacher and keeping him for life; it is about finding the best person for the job. And it requires hard work from the management, as well as competitive pay and benefits to maximize the size of the pool of people you choose from.
Teachers used to have respect. Nowadays, they do not.
At least a part of the problem is that the world has changed, and school systems have not.
This is why I want to found a private school... it's just that first I have to work other jobs before I can fund something like that.
Seriously man, I've been watching you and your sock puppets for some time. Am posting AC now, to save my karma (and so I don't get some shill named after me).
Now, now, don't you know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?
I work at Apple to and I must disagree with the parent.
They keep me chained to a radiator making iPods in return for a bowl of rice a day. If I forget to check post anonymously the Apple police will hunt me down and kill me for Thinking Different.
And if I had any business with your company, that would be the end of it.
You would get reported for spamming; if it continued, you would get sued, and my business would go elsewhere.
Then again, I wouldn't do business with the original moron sending all the contacts in the CC: field either.
Ethical or at least semi-ethical behaviour can give you an advantage here.
Someone suggested, for instance, replying to everyone (for good measure, put them in the BCC: field) and making a relatively subtle ad out of it.
I would actually make it a little spam lecture, explaining why this should never be done, and directly letting the competitor know that I have a list of his potential customers which I am not going to spam further. With apologies to everyone reading this as an unsolicited message, but it's an important matter and they will not hear from me again anyway.
Make it all sound not only intelligent, but funny too, and you'll make people laugh, and thus likely to read it through. Some may then decide to click on the link in your signature or simply reply. If they do, it is them contacting you.
I've done it a few times, when an occasional moronic spammer sent me and a hundred other people a shady MLM business offer. I analyzed the hell out of it, cussed at him just because he was a moron, explained every single detail, including who he worked for though he conveniently failed to mention it (a sthey always do), and it got me a few laughs. People who were bothered by the mail were encouraged at the very beginning to delete it immediately, so I'm fairly sure I had not made a pest out of myself.
Of course, it was private mail, so no business contacts resulted from it. In business mail, kindly do refrain from cussing.
You can exploit your competitions's mistakes and weaknesses. It's part of doing business.
Employing the same strategy that youu found to be their weakness is simply moronic.
Well the problems I have with it are this: 1. I keep a 1.1Ghz Celeron as a "netbox" as I usually have my 3Ghz busy with video. I also like to check my email from any of the donated machines which I'm working on at the time. While Yahoo uses no more resources than loading any other webpage Gmail slams the CPU to 100% and keeps it there from the time I click the link until 40 to 120 seconds have passed,depending on how many new mails are in my inbox.
I sometimes use a 600 MHz Duron machine for GMail. I haven't had such an issue.
It isn't the fastest, but nothing of the sort. And I don't even sort the majority of my mail.
2. Because of the "dump everything in the inbox" nature of Gmail it insists on loading my full inbox when first launched which makes number 1 even worse.
Proper filters can sort the mail to whatever labels you choose and remove them from the Inbox.
Therefore, you're doing something wrong.
3. Because replies are treated as part of a "conversation" instead of replies it is impossible to simply single out a reply because it insists on loading the entire conversation,which in my case can be very long. See number 1 for why this is not good.
While I'm home, and sometimes when I'm not, my door remains unlocked.
Here you can end up in jail if you even injure a burglar (we have some prety moronic laws and some even moronic judges; check why the Wikipedia Handshake page is (or was) locked), so if some moron decides to break in, at least I won't have to clean up broken glass.
Besides, when I look at the mess I currently live in... the burglar will think someone else came first and took everything worth taking.
However, the labels are shown at the left side of the screen, so they're just as accessible as folders. And filters work nicely, sorting incoming mail into folders just fine.
So either I don't understand what exactly you're saying, or we simply have extremely different approaches to webmail.
To you city folks who think this is wrong, how would you like to wake up and find me in your living room?
Depends. Are you a seriously-hot blond nympho with huge tits who happens to have a thing for senior software engineers?
Even worse.
If I woke up and found some weird guy in my living (or any other) room, well, just kick him out. Yeah, I don't lock my door or anything, and there is little or nothing in the fridge, so it's not that big a deal.
However, if a busty blonde nympho suddenly turned up in the middle of the night, the busty brunette/redhead (depends on her mood) sleeping next to me might be inclined to expect an explanation.
Me personally the day MSFT buys Yahoo will be the day I close out my Yahoo accounts. They have simply screwed Hotmail and anything else web related that they have gotten their hands on too badly for me to trust them with my mail. Anybody know of a good webmail that still has folders? Call me old fashioned but Gmail making everything like chat drives me nuts. I need my folders,dang it! But that is my 02c,YMMV
I find labels much more practical than folders.
What exactly bothers you about them?
Have you ever tried Hotmail(or whatever they're calling it now) and MSN search(or whatever they're calling it now)? Man, last time I tried those it was like being stuck in a giant infomercial,but without the hot babe to distract me from what a ripoff it was. What is sad is they buy out these small companies that have halfway decent products and then by the time their "design by focus groups and committees" gets done with it there is nothing left but a mess. How this same company made Win2K Pro is beyond me. Now they remind me WAY too much of Symantec. Every year they bolt on more pieces and it just gets to be more bloated.
Actually, yes, I have.
It's terrible.
Ads galore; I had the misfortune of accessing them without AdBlock, and boy, was I appalled.
I would never ever use any of their services.
In fact, I see the eerie connection between the bloatedness of Facebook, which I really should clean up (were it not for the fact that I barely use it anyway) and Microsoft's desire to buy it.
And IMHO all this talk of MSFT buying the Yahoo search is a red herring meant to stall while they hope that Icahn can take control of Yahoo and the can snatch up the whole thing. Because if you look at the numbers while Google rules the search Yahoo comes out ahead in webmail. And when combined with Hotmail that would give them a BIG share of the webmail market,which means not only more ad revenue but a ton of data to mine from all those emails. My guess is MSFT is going to try to keep the uncertainty going in the hopes Yahoo stocks will be driven further down and Icahn can take control,at which point they will buy it for less than their original offer. But that is my 02c,YMMV
Funnily enough, recently I wondered whether Microsoft was trying to raise Yahoo! stock, since every time they fail to take them over, Yahoo! stock falls -- but not to pre-takeover-attempt depths.
I wonder if they can actually pull off something like what you suggest; the current trends speak against it, but what do I know, Captain, I'm a linguist, not a financial analyst!
Slashdot Mirror
Let me know when a system not on the list passes the petaflop mark.
That will be newsworthy.
I'm more concerned about A, C, G and T.
Sure it will.
As long as you don't run any programs.
Apparently, not necessarily. It's just some Fortran routines.
So much for that joke.
Tell me about it.
And the new reforms are bound to take it further along the same road.
One would think that the epic fail of the American education system would be taken as a lesson, but I guess it takes an IQ higher than a politician's to see it.
Replying to myself simply because I'd forgot to include a link, and couldn't well find another place it would fit.
Watch, listen, think: What Teachers Make
Excuse me?
Croatia? The country where way too many kids in primary school have a 5.0 average? (For you non-Croatian readers, that means the highest grade in every single of some 13 subjects.)
The country where secondary education has been made obligatory, which means that even those who do not want to go to school have to?
The country where teachers pass morons just so that they wouldn't have to suffer them for another year?
We don't leave anyone behind. And very, very few actually get ahead.
That, alas, only holds true if the rest of the world doesn't follow in your footsteps. And it seems to me that exceptions to the rule are few.
The academic contests I've been in, I won without really working hard.
That was mainly because it doesn't look like hard work when you're enjoying yourself.
Working smart is better than working hard.
Good teachers are often good at many other things as well. And they get fed up with poor pay and poorer working conditions and leave for better-paid and less stressful jobs.
Yes, you need good teachers. And you need to pay them well enough for them to want to remain teachers.
Paying them better will not improve existing teachers in a significant manner, but it will provide incentive for others to become teachers.
For inastance, here in Croatia, tram drivers are paid twice as much as teachers. And you need almost no qualifications whatsoever to drive a tram.
Teachers are the gutter of the possible jobs; very few people even consider it unless they either really want to teach or they haven't any other choice. There is no shortage of tram drivers, though; people are even willing to bribe someone to become tram drivers, and often they do so.
This is not the environment in which good teachers will have any reason to remain teachers, save for the fact they like the job. And that liking can be pushed aside when you get an opportunity to double your pay and halve your hassle. This is why many really good teachers I know no longer teach, and why many students I think would make good teachers don't even contemplate the possibility.
There are too few people even willing to teach, and therefore there are too few people to pick good teachers from.
It is not about employing a teacher and keeping him for life; it is about finding the best person for the job. And it requires hard work from the management, as well as competitive pay and benefits to maximize the size of the pool of people you choose from.
Teachers used to have respect. Nowadays, they do not.
At least a part of the problem is that the world has changed, and school systems have not.
This is why I want to found a private school... it's just that first I have to work other jobs before I can fund something like that.
The cake is a lie.
Seriously man, I've been watching you and your sock puppets for some time. Am posting AC now, to save my karma (and so I don't get some shill named after me).
Now, now, don't you know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?
Ooops.
Well, I won't tell them if you don't.
Mod Child Down.
...
Just wondering... If we had a -1 Down mod, wouldn't it be a bit retarded?
But even then, send one and only one targeted e-mail to each potential customer.
If they do not reply, they are not interested, and will not appreciate your next e-mail.
This is a very good piece of advice.
If the PHB is unaware of the BCC: field, "forget" to mention that possibility, and take this track.
If he is more tech-savvy, point him to this discussion and have him post his e-mail address here, so we could show him how annoying spam can be.
If you're really mean, post his e-mail on 4chan, saying "spam my boss with the sickest stuff you can find". If that doesn't teach him, nothing will.
And if I had any business with your company, that would be the end of it.
You would get reported for spamming; if it continued, you would get sued, and my business would go elsewhere.
Then again, I wouldn't do business with the original moron sending all the contacts in the CC: field either.
Ethical or at least semi-ethical behaviour can give you an advantage here.
Someone suggested, for instance, replying to everyone (for good measure, put them in the BCC: field) and making a relatively subtle ad out of it.
I would actually make it a little spam lecture, explaining why this should never be done, and directly letting the competitor know that I have a list of his potential customers which I am not going to spam further. With apologies to everyone reading this as an unsolicited message, but it's an important matter and they will not hear from me again anyway.
Make it all sound not only intelligent, but funny too, and you'll make people laugh, and thus likely to read it through. Some may then decide to click on the link in your signature or simply reply. If they do, it is them contacting you.
I've done it a few times, when an occasional moronic spammer sent me and a hundred other people a shady MLM business offer. I analyzed the hell out of it, cussed at him just because he was a moron, explained every single detail, including who he worked for though he conveniently failed to mention it (a sthey always do), and it got me a few laughs. People who were bothered by the mail were encouraged at the very beginning to delete it immediately, so I'm fairly sure I had not made a pest out of myself.
Of course, it was private mail, so no business contacts resulted from it. In business mail, kindly do refrain from cussing.
You can exploit your competitions's mistakes and weaknesses. It's part of doing business.
Employing the same strategy that youu found to be their weakness is simply moronic.
I sometimes use a 600 MHz Duron machine for GMail. I haven't had such an issue.
It isn't the fastest, but nothing of the sort. And I don't even sort the majority of my mail.
2. Because of the "dump everything in the inbox" nature of Gmail it insists on loading my full inbox when first launched which makes number 1 even worse.Proper filters can sort the mail to whatever labels you choose and remove them from the Inbox.
Therefore, you're doing something wrong.
3. Because replies are treated as part of a "conversation" instead of replies it is impossible to simply single out a reply because it insists on loading the entire conversation,which in my case can be very long. See number 1 for why this is not good.You have a point here.
I do not live in America.
While I'm home, and sometimes when I'm not, my door remains unlocked.
Here you can end up in jail if you even injure a burglar (we have some prety moronic laws and some even moronic judges; check why the Wikipedia Handshake page is (or was) locked), so if some moron decides to break in, at least I won't have to clean up broken glass.
Besides, when I look at the mess I currently live in... the burglar will think someone else came first and took everything worth taking.
To each his own, I guess.
However, the labels are shown at the left side of the screen, so they're just as accessible as folders. And filters work nicely, sorting incoming mail into folders just fine.
So either I don't understand what exactly you're saying, or we simply have extremely different approaches to webmail.
Either way, good hunting.
Depends. Are you a seriously-hot blond nympho with huge tits who happens to have a thing for senior software engineers?
Even worse.
If I woke up and found some weird guy in my living (or any other) room, well, just kick him out. Yeah, I don't lock my door or anything, and there is little or nothing in the fridge, so it's not that big a deal.
However, if a busty blonde nympho suddenly turned up in the middle of the night, the busty brunette/redhead (depends on her mood) sleeping next to me might be inclined to expect an explanation.
And I would have none.
Me personally the day MSFT buys Yahoo will be the day I close out my Yahoo accounts. They have simply screwed Hotmail and anything else web related that they have gotten their hands on too badly for me to trust them with my mail. Anybody know of a good webmail that still has folders? Call me old fashioned but Gmail making everything like chat drives me nuts. I need my folders,dang it! But that is my 02c,YMMV
I find labels much more practical than folders.
What exactly bothers you about them?
Actually, yes, I have.
It's terrible.
Ads galore; I had the misfortune of accessing them without AdBlock, and boy, was I appalled.
I would never ever use any of their services.
In fact, I see the eerie connection between the bloatedness of Facebook, which I really should clean up (were it not for the fact that I barely use it anyway) and Microsoft's desire to buy it.
And IMHO all this talk of MSFT buying the Yahoo search is a red herring meant to stall while they hope that Icahn can take control of Yahoo and the can snatch up the whole thing. Because if you look at the numbers while Google rules the search Yahoo comes out ahead in webmail. And when combined with Hotmail that would give them a BIG share of the webmail market,which means not only more ad revenue but a ton of data to mine from all those emails. My guess is MSFT is going to try to keep the uncertainty going in the hopes Yahoo stocks will be driven further down and Icahn can take control,at which point they will buy it for less than their original offer. But that is my 02c,YMMV
Funnily enough, recently I wondered whether Microsoft was trying to raise Yahoo! stock, since every time they fail to take them over, Yahoo! stock falls -- but not to pre-takeover-attempt depths.
I wonder if they can actually pull off something like what you suggest; the current trends speak against it, but what do I know, Captain, I'm a linguist, not a financial analyst!
This stuff is dangerous. I could get a stroke laughing so hard.
Well, it is said that it is morally unacceptable not to part the fool with his money.