It's not about the recursion, its about the stack depth problem. I use that as an example, because I made that mistake messing around with some Ruby recently. I understood what I did wrong when I got the error, and was able to fix it fairly quickly. However, if someone is learning to program with a language that hides the stack and hides the heap, and they don't know the difference, then what's a stack depth? why are you more likely to hit it in a recursive function than if using an iterative approach? (repeated function calls build up more stack frames, rather than staying in a single space within one function and looping... get too many and your stack is too "deep". Clearly, you're making too many function calls... so either your data is bad, or your base case is off and you're not hitting the floor where you think you should... maybe both)
In hiking, a similar case would be "what does this pattern on the contour map mean?" If you bought a GPS, or are using Google Maps on your phone and think "oh, sweet, I'll go for a hike!", then next thing you know, you're walking towards a cliff with no notion of it because you've never been there before and don't understand a contour map, well, then SOL, I suppose.
Learning to use maps, taking day hikes in areas you're more familiar with, and working up to bigger adventures, longer excursions, etc, is the way to go. And having all that experience behind you is going to make using fancy new tools even easier, you'll be safer, and when you run out of batteries it won't be the end of the world. It's about learning to walk before trying to run.
As a white guy, you're probably more likely to get in trouble for referring to it as "negrospeak" in casual conversation. I'm pretty sure that's not a technical term... outside of Amos and Andy.
When I was in Boy Scouts as a kid, we had to learn to read topographical maps and use a compass. Maybe we had a cell phone, maybe not. hand-held GPS was kind of expensive and not particularly advanced. Besides, GPS needs batteries and adds weight.
Hiking with a map and compass and no "please, come get me!" beacon is like programming in C or Assembler. You're closer to the metal and have to have a deeper understanding of what you're actually doing. Going out with GPS is like jumping right in with a language like Ruby which makes things really easy at first... until the first time you forget to properly define a base case for a recursive function and hit a stack error message.
The tools are great, but are always going to work way better for people who understand the basic principles of what's being automated for them, and have some "old school" experience to fall back on when necessary. Easy tools that take all the hard work out of a lot of necessary tasks lead to a false sense of security.
As with programming, where high-level, dynamic languages make it much easier for people who might otherwise not take the time to learn to program do so, going "here's a GPS... and this rescue beacon!" encourages people who probably don't really want to learn how to tie proper knots go out in the woods, get themselves in way over their head, and then basically hit that stack error. But, never having had to address memory by hand, they don't really know what that means or what to do about it.
I go hiking fairly regularly, and I don't even own any of that stuff. You can get USGS topo quads easily enough, and a good compass. Sturdy boots, balanced pack, and my leatherman. Carry enough water and some spare granola bars in case I get out farther than I had really planned. If I'm in the woods, its 'cause I don't want to be attached to the computer anymore. But maybe thats because I work surrounded by them all day.
But what if the third time there really/was/ an emergency, like a rattler bite or a bear mauling? The Boy Who Cried Wolf is supposed to be a cautionary tale for the morons. Blame lawyers for taking the effect out of it.
You mean like how the government uses the police to coerce people into behaving themselves, or scaring them into not protesting, etc? You basically just defined government in all forms. Even the elected ones, who turn around and employ police to enforce the rules.
like during that whole Cold War thing, after that whole WWII thing? Europe could revoke status of forces agreements and make us pack up our shit and come home, couldn't they? If we're so terrible, why don't they kick us out? Once we don't have to staff all those outposts, maybe we could cut back on defense spending by an equal proportion. Although that'd just dump a lot of unemployed soldiers onto a shitty job market. But the point is, if they don't need us to be there with our tanks and bombers to be a bullwork against the Soviet Union anymore, then telling us to leave strengthens their position when they want to tell us to fuck off on out of their politics, too.
I heard on NPR that the judge declared a mistrial with regards to the remaining 23 accounts and has ordered a retrial. Of course, going into that with wide-spread public knowledge of the other conviction, plus constantly pulling stunts like this, isn't really going to help him. Although, I think the big question is, who would pay $80 to get their picture taken with this greasy douchebag?
Yes, because friendly fire generally consists of several runs by torpedo boats and attack aircraft on a registered ship under flag in international waters... Check the chapter on it in 'Body of Secrets' by James Bamford, who is a former Navy intelligence analyst and has written several books about the NSA. Also, check some of the first-hand accounts by the sailors who were on the ship.
The Israeli version is called the IDF. Just because they're state actors doesn't make them any more legitimate. Lest we forget, they repeatedly attacked the USS Liberty, flying under flag in international waters, in an attempt to destroy NSA recordings of sigint mass-executions of Arab civilians by the IDF during the Six-day War in 1967.
They, along with Syria, are (allegedly) a major source of funding and weapons for Hezballah. So Israel cares, which makes the US Government care. But I really don't give a shit. If they're powering their country with nukes, then they can burn less oil, which means more can be available on the market. It's simple Scarface economics -- "don't get high off your own supply."
The reason I didn't say "go forth an develop" is basically this: develop for what?.deb or.rpm? Redhat or Suse? Debian or Ubuntu? What about Slackeware? Arch? (god for bid...)Gentoo?
Plus, I don't really care. I'm a terrible person to ask about desktop linux. I'm not really interested in it. If it were to succeed, that's nice, but that success would largely come in spite of itself and I think we all know it. I like it well enough on servers, although I prefer BSD and currently work in a BSD shop. But we use Macs for workstations there, because frankly, Its Unix enough to be a good sysadmin desktop OS and desktop enough to stay out of the way. I mostly just multiplex terminals anyway. I'd be doing the same thing on a Linux machine, but the client software for remote administration of our black-box product doesn't run on Linux right now, just Mac and Windows, because the majority of our customers who would use the GUI wouldn't be having a Linux around on the desktop anyway.
Teachers are responsible for educating future generations. Attracting bad teachers is the same thing as condemning future generations to mediocrity en mass. That said, it's me who keeps telling her she makes too little money for the amount of time and effort she puts in for her students. She keeps saying its not about the money and if it was about the money, she'd have stayed in investment banking, which she hated but which paid extremely well.
Plus, private schools don't actually pay that well, and their retirement benefits are often shit compared to state benefits. Starting her own school presupposes that people would be able to pay to send their children there, which isn't the case. If we had a voucher system that allowed students to go to better schools, chances are that it would just siphon off the smart kids who could pass the admission tests and the state public schools would be 100% filled with retarded losers instead of just 75% filled with retarded losers.
The problem with arguing about this on Slashdot in particular, is that most people here think that the majority of the population, including teachers, are morons and that they are smart in spite of a failed education system. They learn "in spite of" and not "because of" teachers and so think that teachers aren't worth anything. Well, the best teachers are the ones that inspire you to learn on your own and to have an appreciation for the subject, so the truth is really somewhere in between.
The free market doesn't solve most things, least of all issues of public importance.
Yes, a number of her students learned to speak and read very well. She expects them to learn, which is probably the biggest difference between her and other teachers. She expects people who have made it that far to know enough that if she refuses to speak English and refuses to let them, that they'll either have to sink or swim and it works pretty well. Like I noted in another post -- it's really all about expectations.
Teachers that don't expect much -- typically new teachers who get stuck with the "intro" classes, such as non-honours 9th grade English Lit, don't really expect that much from their students. They get the broad cross section of students, and some of the students care more than others. Those students who care will probably try harder. Of course, when the teacher doesn't expect anything, then the otherwise good students will pick up a "why bother?" attitude. That's the real problem right there.
"Just pass the test and it doesn't matter if you retain knowledge" is what no child left behind encourage. The best teachers I had in high school were my AP and Honors teachers. They knew the material, could make it interesting and relevant, and more importantly the EXPECTED that their students would do well. To point, when I was in 11th Grade, my AP US History class was the only one to have more than 50% of the students pass the US History SOL in the entire school. I missed a single question out of the whole test, and I was done in 15 minutes. I thought it was harder than the AP exam, too (questions like "which of the following was the most significant invention of the 20th century: the microwave, the air plane, the television, the internet" -- seriously, wtf kind of question is that?).
When no AP or Honors version of a course was offered and I was in with the general population, the teachers looked the tiredest and had the lowest expectations. A good percentage of it was probably dealing with the kind of kids they had to deal with, but a lot of them you could tell were just bad teachers. The new ones wanted to be "cool" and that really just meant having poor classroom management skills.
But if we really want to get to the real source of the problem, and the biggest sink of funds, how about superintendents and school administrators (principals and VPs) who make six-figure salaries but who have never actually taught a class in their lives? And I mean zip. The new superintendent in the school district where my mom works, and where I attended k-12, makes well over $100k a year and has NOT ONCE EVER taught in a classroom. What makes him qualified to run a school system? What makes him qualified to judge teacher performance? How can be know when its really the teachers fault and when little johnny is just a little shit who doesn't care about school because he's just going to go work on a crab boat as soon as he gets out anyway? Some of these people probably haven't even been in a classroom as students in at least 10 years. They're completely out of touch with reality.
I had some really great teachers, and some really crappy teachers. They exist at both ends of the curve, but truth is there are a lot of teachers in the middle, most of whom are doing the best with what they have to work with and work against. Student apathy, incompetent administrators, hostile parents, low budgets, etc.
The silver bullet isn't going to be found and fixing education is a pretty major task. But lets face it, if we don't fix education were pretty much doomed as a country, and possibly as a biological population, in the future, because they're not going to be able to maintain civilization.
Sure, we all know that Android is based on Linux, but is that really how its marketed to normal people? Seems to be that its marketed as the "google phone" or an "iphone killer" or "look at all these apps". If Android is doing well its not so much that Linux is getting a boost so much as that the Linux community should learn the lesson that normal people don't care about mandatory access control, line-rate packet processing, deduplication backup storage, or whatever else we're on about -- they want "apps".
Why is Windows so successful? Not because people give a crap about Windows, but because there is a lot of software that people want to use, or need to use, and its on Windows. Why is Android popular? Because Google made it, it's not locked to AT&T, and There are lots of cool/useful programs for it. And there are lots of cool/useful programmes for it because normal people are willing to pay $1.99 for a program for their cell phone. Desktop linux is "marketed" (if you can call it that) to normal people often times on cost. It's "free". So they'd feel ripped off if they had to pay $1.99 for a program. Thus, no one charges small amounts for desktop linux programmes, and without the market there isn't that much incentive to write them.
So, good for Google and their phone thing that I don't really want, but not sure Android has much at all to do with Linux-as-we-know-it succeeding in any meaningful way.
I'm pretty sure I did tell you the whole story. She didn't start teaching right away. She worked on Wall Street, then took time out from work when I was born, once my sister and I were old enough, I was in 5th grade and she was in 3rd, then she decided to start looking for teaching gigs. She's been where she is no for about 15 years or so.
It's a non-urban district in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Cost of living is lower than chances are where your sister is, but when you consider she's making face-value what she was in 1983, factor in inflation and all the bonuses and raises you get on Wall Street, then its a wicked shitty deal. For some reason she thinks the "youth of america" are worth wasting time and effort on. Her students do well, so maybe she's right. I've pretty much just resigned myself to the fact that the country has been all down hill since Andrew Jackson left office and I better not get to attached.
Your argument rests on free-market principles, forgetting the fact that public schools are a government monopoly. But, to your point... her students do the best of any foreign language students in the school. Parents are always trying to get their kids into her class. She has one of the highest percentages of students accepted to the Governor's School program in the state, and has had very many of her students go one to Ivy League schools.
C grads from JMU turn out C grads from JMU. A grads from Ivy League schools turn out the same. That's the difference, and I think a lot of it has to do with expectations. But its harder to get the better people in to fill the rolls unless they don't/need/ the money. And economics are fluid. My mother wouldn't have been able to afford to be a teacher if my dad wasn't making a boatload of money. She'd have had to stay on Wall Street, we'd be stuck in New York, and I probably would have died in a traffic accident trying to learn how to drive in the clusterfuck that is long island where I was born.
My mother is a public high school Spanish teacher. She has an undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from an Ivy League, a Masters in Spanish from a well-known state school, and is currently working towards her PhD. She's been teaching at the school she's at for almost 15 years, I believe. She used to work for an import/export company, then an investment banker. She speaks 7 languages with a high degree of proficiency, 5 of which she's fluent in.
In addition to the class time, there is prep time, duty (being made to come in early to watch kids on and off the bus, hang out outside bathrooms looking for smokers, etc), all the time at home grading papers, etc. If teachers were paid by the hour, most would likely make less than a fast food worker when averaged out. The argument that they get paid in the summer for not doing anything is also fallacious, as the fact of the matter is teachers have the choice, at least here in VA, to take their pay only during the school year, or to have it averaged out over 12 months so that they get less per cheque but have income during the summer.
I make almost as much as my mother does with 1 undergrad degree and just a couple years of relevant experience. I also don't have to give up nearly all my evening time grading papers, having to go to meetings about other people's kids so as not to have time to pay attention to my own (although i haven't got any yet), etc.
With my dad retired from the airline where he was a pilot for over 20 years and occasionally substitute teaching, my mother has assumed the role of primary income for them, so the fact that with all her degrees and experience she's making less money than the typical sysadmin with that much experience (who are another group of people, who if you average out their salaries over the amount of time they're required to put in are grossly underpaid) by quite a wide margin is really sort of shameful.
Then there are the parents who don't or won't take responsibility for their own children, and the children who won't take responsibility for themselves. My mother only teaches upper-level Spanish (3,4,5 and the AP prep classes). Even in those classes, usually in Spanish 3 where you have kids just hanging on long enough for the advanced diploma requirement, you get jackass kids who aren't really concerned with learning. And if they would rather smoke dope and show up late, parents want to blame the schools and the teachers for the kids poor grades.
I'm sorry, but if 90 percent of the kids in a class have a B or better, it's likely not the teacher's fault that the other 10% aren't keeping up. If we had pay-for-performance bonus rules, then my mom would make out like a bandit because she's a great teacher, the vast majority of her students love her, and they do well. This isn't the case for all the teachers. And yes, there are bad teachers. I've seen and known many in my day.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that yes, teachers are underpaid. And if they were paid more, then better people would be able to afford to go into the profession. Most of the worst teachers are the young ones who go into it because they want their summers off and basically live with a case of Senioritis for the first 10 years of their careers. If you're willing to pay enough to make it feasible for an experienced engineer or scientist to come in and teach math and still be able to make their mortgage payments, then you're on the right track. I hate math teachers who know math but can't explain how it applies to anything real.
The teacher pay argument shouldn't be that all teachers automagically deserve more money, but that you need to be willing to pay talent what talent deserves. Of course unions won't like that, but I don't live in a Union state, and being a teacher isn't like being an autoworker -- it's not a blue-collar job, even though they by and large get blue collar pay.
Jailbreaking is already legal. What use would it be to take a photo of a jailbroken user?
If someone broke out of jail and got their hands on an iphone, I imagine having a picture and location information would be very useful to the police. But that's probably not what you meant.
How come you listed all authors then one character, Don Quixote, instead of Cervantes, who wrote the book? O/T, but just wondering. He wrote some other stuff which is worth reading, too.
Yeah, but NASA can do the mission in just one photo-snapping probe. The Japanese had to launch two so they could take pictures of each other taking pictures.
Slashdot Mirror
hey, dude... take it up with SlappyBastard
It's not about the recursion, its about the stack depth problem. I use that as an example, because I made that mistake messing around with some Ruby recently. I understood what I did wrong when I got the error, and was able to fix it fairly quickly. However, if someone is learning to program with a language that hides the stack and hides the heap, and they don't know the difference, then what's a stack depth? why are you more likely to hit it in a recursive function than if using an iterative approach? (repeated function calls build up more stack frames, rather than staying in a single space within one function and looping... get too many and your stack is too "deep". Clearly, you're making too many function calls... so either your data is bad, or your base case is off and you're not hitting the floor where you think you should... maybe both)
In hiking, a similar case would be "what does this pattern on the contour map mean?" If you bought a GPS, or are using Google Maps on your phone and think "oh, sweet, I'll go for a hike!", then next thing you know, you're walking towards a cliff with no notion of it because you've never been there before and don't understand a contour map, well, then SOL, I suppose.
Learning to use maps, taking day hikes in areas you're more familiar with, and working up to bigger adventures, longer excursions, etc, is the way to go. And having all that experience behind you is going to make using fancy new tools even easier, you'll be safer, and when you run out of batteries it won't be the end of the world. It's about learning to walk before trying to run.
As a white guy, you're probably more likely to get in trouble for referring to it as "negrospeak" in casual conversation. I'm pretty sure that's not a technical term... outside of Amos and Andy.
You know, if someone subjected me to clowns, I'd probably be crying out loud, too!
When I was in Boy Scouts as a kid, we had to learn to read topographical maps and use a compass. Maybe we had a cell phone, maybe not. hand-held GPS was kind of expensive and not particularly advanced. Besides, GPS needs batteries and adds weight.
Hiking with a map and compass and no "please, come get me!" beacon is like programming in C or Assembler. You're closer to the metal and have to have a deeper understanding of what you're actually doing. Going out with GPS is like jumping right in with a language like Ruby which makes things really easy at first... until the first time you forget to properly define a base case for a recursive function and hit a stack error message.
The tools are great, but are always going to work way better for people who understand the basic principles of what's being automated for them, and have some "old school" experience to fall back on when necessary. Easy tools that take all the hard work out of a lot of necessary tasks lead to a false sense of security.
As with programming, where high-level, dynamic languages make it much easier for people who might otherwise not take the time to learn to program do so, going "here's a GPS... and this rescue beacon!" encourages people who probably don't really want to learn how to tie proper knots go out in the woods, get themselves in way over their head, and then basically hit that stack error. But, never having had to address memory by hand, they don't really know what that means or what to do about it.
I go hiking fairly regularly, and I don't even own any of that stuff. You can get USGS topo quads easily enough, and a good compass. Sturdy boots, balanced pack, and my leatherman. Carry enough water and some spare granola bars in case I get out farther than I had really planned. If I'm in the woods, its 'cause I don't want to be attached to the computer anymore. But maybe thats because I work surrounded by them all day.
But what if the third time there really /was/ an emergency, like a rattler bite or a bear mauling? The Boy Who Cried Wolf is supposed to be a cautionary tale for the morons. Blame lawyers for taking the effect out of it.
You mean like how the government uses the police to coerce people into behaving themselves, or scaring them into not protesting, etc? You basically just defined government in all forms. Even the elected ones, who turn around and employ police to enforce the rules.
like during that whole Cold War thing, after that whole WWII thing? Europe could revoke status of forces agreements and make us pack up our shit and come home, couldn't they? If we're so terrible, why don't they kick us out? Once we don't have to staff all those outposts, maybe we could cut back on defense spending by an equal proportion. Although that'd just dump a lot of unemployed soldiers onto a shitty job market. But the point is, if they don't need us to be there with our tanks and bombers to be a bullwork against the Soviet Union anymore, then telling us to leave strengthens their position when they want to tell us to fuck off on out of their politics, too.
Maybe they can put it on WikiLeaks. That'll show him!
I heard on NPR that the judge declared a mistrial with regards to the remaining 23 accounts and has ordered a retrial. Of course, going into that with wide-spread public knowledge of the other conviction, plus constantly pulling stunts like this, isn't really going to help him. Although, I think the big question is, who would pay $80 to get their picture taken with this greasy douchebag?
Yes, because friendly fire generally consists of several runs by torpedo boats and attack aircraft on a registered ship under flag in international waters... Check the chapter on it in 'Body of Secrets' by James Bamford, who is a former Navy intelligence analyst and has written several books about the NSA. Also, check some of the first-hand accounts by the sailors who were on the ship.
The Israeli version is called the IDF. Just because they're state actors doesn't make them any more legitimate. Lest we forget, they repeatedly attacked the USS Liberty, flying under flag in international waters, in an attempt to destroy NSA recordings of sigint mass-executions of Arab civilians by the IDF during the Six-day War in 1967.
They, along with Syria, are (allegedly) a major source of funding and weapons for Hezballah. So Israel cares, which makes the US Government care. But I really don't give a shit. If they're powering their country with nukes, then they can burn less oil, which means more can be available on the market. It's simple Scarface economics -- "don't get high off your own supply."
The reason I didn't say "go forth an develop" is basically this: develop for what? .deb or .rpm? Redhat or Suse? Debian or Ubuntu? What about Slackeware? Arch? (god for bid...)Gentoo?
Plus, I don't really care. I'm a terrible person to ask about desktop linux. I'm not really interested in it. If it were to succeed, that's nice, but that success would largely come in spite of itself and I think we all know it. I like it well enough on servers, although I prefer BSD and currently work in a BSD shop. But we use Macs for workstations there, because frankly, Its Unix enough to be a good sysadmin desktop OS and desktop enough to stay out of the way. I mostly just multiplex terminals anyway. I'd be doing the same thing on a Linux machine, but the client software for remote administration of our black-box product doesn't run on Linux right now, just Mac and Windows, because the majority of our customers who would use the GUI wouldn't be having a Linux around on the desktop anyway.
Teachers are responsible for educating future generations. Attracting bad teachers is the same thing as condemning future generations to mediocrity en mass. That said, it's me who keeps telling her she makes too little money for the amount of time and effort she puts in for her students. She keeps saying its not about the money and if it was about the money, she'd have stayed in investment banking, which she hated but which paid extremely well.
Plus, private schools don't actually pay that well, and their retirement benefits are often shit compared to state benefits. Starting her own school presupposes that people would be able to pay to send their children there, which isn't the case. If we had a voucher system that allowed students to go to better schools, chances are that it would just siphon off the smart kids who could pass the admission tests and the state public schools would be 100% filled with retarded losers instead of just 75% filled with retarded losers.
The problem with arguing about this on Slashdot in particular, is that most people here think that the majority of the population, including teachers, are morons and that they are smart in spite of a failed education system. They learn "in spite of" and not "because of" teachers and so think that teachers aren't worth anything. Well, the best teachers are the ones that inspire you to learn on your own and to have an appreciation for the subject, so the truth is really somewhere in between.
The free market doesn't solve most things, least of all issues of public importance.
Yes, a number of her students learned to speak and read very well. She expects them to learn, which is probably the biggest difference between her and other teachers. She expects people who have made it that far to know enough that if she refuses to speak English and refuses to let them, that they'll either have to sink or swim and it works pretty well. Like I noted in another post -- it's really all about expectations.
Teachers that don't expect much -- typically new teachers who get stuck with the "intro" classes, such as non-honours 9th grade English Lit, don't really expect that much from their students. They get the broad cross section of students, and some of the students care more than others. Those students who care will probably try harder. Of course, when the teacher doesn't expect anything, then the otherwise good students will pick up a "why bother?" attitude. That's the real problem right there.
"Just pass the test and it doesn't matter if you retain knowledge" is what no child left behind encourage. The best teachers I had in high school were my AP and Honors teachers. They knew the material, could make it interesting and relevant, and more importantly the EXPECTED that their students would do well. To point, when I was in 11th Grade, my AP US History class was the only one to have more than 50% of the students pass the US History SOL in the entire school. I missed a single question out of the whole test, and I was done in 15 minutes. I thought it was harder than the AP exam, too (questions like "which of the following was the most significant invention of the 20th century: the microwave, the air plane, the television, the internet" -- seriously, wtf kind of question is that?).
When no AP or Honors version of a course was offered and I was in with the general population, the teachers looked the tiredest and had the lowest expectations. A good percentage of it was probably dealing with the kind of kids they had to deal with, but a lot of them you could tell were just bad teachers. The new ones wanted to be "cool" and that really just meant having poor classroom management skills.
But if we really want to get to the real source of the problem, and the biggest sink of funds, how about superintendents and school administrators (principals and VPs) who make six-figure salaries but who have never actually taught a class in their lives? And I mean zip. The new superintendent in the school district where my mom works, and where I attended k-12, makes well over $100k a year and has NOT ONCE EVER taught in a classroom. What makes him qualified to run a school system? What makes him qualified to judge teacher performance? How can be know when its really the teachers fault and when little johnny is just a little shit who doesn't care about school because he's just going to go work on a crab boat as soon as he gets out anyway? Some of these people probably haven't even been in a classroom as students in at least 10 years. They're completely out of touch with reality.
I had some really great teachers, and some really crappy teachers. They exist at both ends of the curve, but truth is there are a lot of teachers in the middle, most of whom are doing the best with what they have to work with and work against. Student apathy, incompetent administrators, hostile parents, low budgets, etc.
The silver bullet isn't going to be found and fixing education is a pretty major task. But lets face it, if we don't fix education were pretty much doomed as a country, and possibly as a biological population, in the future, because they're not going to be able to maintain civilization.
Sure, we all know that Android is based on Linux, but is that really how its marketed to normal people? Seems to be that its marketed as the "google phone" or an "iphone killer" or "look at all these apps". If Android is doing well its not so much that Linux is getting a boost so much as that the Linux community should learn the lesson that normal people don't care about mandatory access control, line-rate packet processing, deduplication backup storage, or whatever else we're on about -- they want "apps".
Why is Windows so successful? Not because people give a crap about Windows, but because there is a lot of software that people want to use, or need to use, and its on Windows. Why is Android popular? Because Google made it, it's not locked to AT&T, and There are lots of cool/useful programs for it. And there are lots of cool/useful programmes for it because normal people are willing to pay $1.99 for a program for their cell phone. Desktop linux is "marketed" (if you can call it that) to normal people often times on cost. It's "free". So they'd feel ripped off if they had to pay $1.99 for a program. Thus, no one charges small amounts for desktop linux programmes, and without the market there isn't that much incentive to write them.
So, good for Google and their phone thing that I don't really want, but not sure Android has much at all to do with Linux-as-we-know-it succeeding in any meaningful way.
I'm pretty sure I did tell you the whole story. She didn't start teaching right away. She worked on Wall Street, then took time out from work when I was born, once my sister and I were old enough, I was in 5th grade and she was in 3rd, then she decided to start looking for teaching gigs. She's been where she is no for about 15 years or so.
It's a non-urban district in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Cost of living is lower than chances are where your sister is, but when you consider she's making face-value what she was in 1983, factor in inflation and all the bonuses and raises you get on Wall Street, then its a wicked shitty deal. For some reason she thinks the "youth of america" are worth wasting time and effort on. Her students do well, so maybe she's right. I've pretty much just resigned myself to the fact that the country has been all down hill since Andrew Jackson left office and I better not get to attached.
Your argument rests on free-market principles, forgetting the fact that public schools are a government monopoly. But, to your point... her students do the best of any foreign language students in the school. Parents are always trying to get their kids into her class. She has one of the highest percentages of students accepted to the Governor's School program in the state, and has had very many of her students go one to Ivy League schools.
C grads from JMU turn out C grads from JMU. A grads from Ivy League schools turn out the same. That's the difference, and I think a lot of it has to do with expectations. But its harder to get the better people in to fill the rolls unless they don't /need/ the money. And economics are fluid. My mother wouldn't have been able to afford to be a teacher if my dad wasn't making a boatload of money. She'd have had to stay on Wall Street, we'd be stuck in New York, and I probably would have died in a traffic accident trying to learn how to drive in the clusterfuck that is long island where I was born.
My mother is a public high school Spanish teacher. She has an undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from an Ivy League, a Masters in Spanish from a well-known state school, and is currently working towards her PhD. She's been teaching at the school she's at for almost 15 years, I believe. She used to work for an import/export company, then an investment banker. She speaks 7 languages with a high degree of proficiency, 5 of which she's fluent in.
In addition to the class time, there is prep time, duty (being made to come in early to watch kids on and off the bus, hang out outside bathrooms looking for smokers, etc), all the time at home grading papers, etc. If teachers were paid by the hour, most would likely make less than a fast food worker when averaged out. The argument that they get paid in the summer for not doing anything is also fallacious, as the fact of the matter is teachers have the choice, at least here in VA, to take their pay only during the school year, or to have it averaged out over 12 months so that they get less per cheque but have income during the summer.
I make almost as much as my mother does with 1 undergrad degree and just a couple years of relevant experience. I also don't have to give up nearly all my evening time grading papers, having to go to meetings about other people's kids so as not to have time to pay attention to my own (although i haven't got any yet), etc.
With my dad retired from the airline where he was a pilot for over 20 years and occasionally substitute teaching, my mother has assumed the role of primary income for them, so the fact that with all her degrees and experience she's making less money than the typical sysadmin with that much experience (who are another group of people, who if you average out their salaries over the amount of time they're required to put in are grossly underpaid) by quite a wide margin is really sort of shameful.
Then there are the parents who don't or won't take responsibility for their own children, and the children who won't take responsibility for themselves. My mother only teaches upper-level Spanish (3,4,5 and the AP prep classes). Even in those classes, usually in Spanish 3 where you have kids just hanging on long enough for the advanced diploma requirement, you get jackass kids who aren't really concerned with learning. And if they would rather smoke dope and show up late, parents want to blame the schools and the teachers for the kids poor grades.
I'm sorry, but if 90 percent of the kids in a class have a B or better, it's likely not the teacher's fault that the other 10% aren't keeping up. If we had pay-for-performance bonus rules, then my mom would make out like a bandit because she's a great teacher, the vast majority of her students love her, and they do well. This isn't the case for all the teachers. And yes, there are bad teachers. I've seen and known many in my day.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that yes, teachers are underpaid. And if they were paid more, then better people would be able to afford to go into the profession. Most of the worst teachers are the young ones who go into it because they want their summers off and basically live with a case of Senioritis for the first 10 years of their careers. If you're willing to pay enough to make it feasible for an experienced engineer or scientist to come in and teach math and still be able to make their mortgage payments, then you're on the right track. I hate math teachers who know math but can't explain how it applies to anything real.
The teacher pay argument shouldn't be that all teachers automagically deserve more money, but that you need to be willing to pay talent what talent deserves. Of course unions won't like that, but I don't live in a Union state, and being a teacher isn't like being an autoworker -- it's not a blue-collar job, even though they by and large get blue collar pay.
The media won't write about the details of rape laws and politics in Sweden
Hey! That sounds like a job for WikiLeaks ;-)
no one likes cops.
Jailbreaking is already legal. What use would it be to take a photo of a jailbroken user?
If someone broke out of jail and got their hands on an iphone, I imagine having a picture and location information would be very useful to the police. But that's probably not what you meant.
How come you listed all authors then one character, Don Quixote, instead of Cervantes, who wrote the book? O/T, but just wondering. He wrote some other stuff which is worth reading, too.
Yeah, but NASA can do the mission in just one photo-snapping probe. The Japanese had to launch two so they could take pictures of each other taking pictures.