You will see that most states spend less than $10000 per year per student, before the current economic downturn and budget cuts.
That's because it costs less than $10K per year per student. If you don't believe me, run the numbers. Take 30 kids and give the teacher a $50K salary to be kind because I know they make less. (50000/30) = $1666.66 That's less then $2K per year. You put several teachers and hundreds of kids in a single school and suddenly the cost to run that building distributed over those kids becomes minimal.
That's the problem. Nobody wants to pay for it even though their children are the ones using it. They'd rather make everyone else pay for it.
If schools were run like businesses, they'd be competing for your dollar and offering an education you approve of for your children. Parents might actually start paying attention to what their kids are learning as well instead of sending them off to a public funded babysitting service while they go to work. The schools would have to manage money, maintain a high standard of learning and make the most out of what they have instead of constantly asking for more. If you find the school is teaching your kids about something you don't approve of, send them to a competitor. We kind of have that now with private schools (like Catholic Schools) but the people going to these schools are also paying for the public schools as well. Most people don't like having to pay twice so the public schools have an unfair monopolistic advantage. Remove school taxation but create a law that their children must be educated up to at least a standard set of guidelines and you'll see a drastic improvement in education levels.
Of course, people will complain that it's a shock to all the parents who have multiple kids in school. I ran the numbers in another story and it could cost less than $10 a school day and less than $2000 a year. This is less than most people spend to eat daily. The taxes have already been reduced for those with kids... where's this money going? They get a standard deduction of anywhere between $850 to $5150 per dependent not counting your own single deduction of $5K-7.5K. So why then do we not have money? People are living outside their means because they've counted on this yearly return or they spend it on jetskis, TVs and other items that they think they need. Don't tell me your tax return plus MAYBE a little set aside from your paycheck wouldn't cover $2k in child education...
Sure, out of the gate, schools will be meeting the minimum levels set, but they will soon start to edge each other out and over time it will change. You could even upgrade the education levels from time to time based on learning curves.
The biggest problem I see with their method is the target market of their their clients. As with any business, they will target the OS with the most market share. You'll see clients with Windows applications, Windows articles, and Windows support/solutions more often than you'll see Linux or Apple sites. This causes the statistics to be slanted toward a Windows friendly report since more of the clients they have target this share of the market in order to make money.
I don't know if I understood you correct, but I've always thought that the universe could merely be a series of tiny binary particles that could follow one or two simple rules. A positive and negative particle that seek to attract to each other like magnetism but cannot coexist in the same location. If two particles following this rule were to interact with each other the singular rule would appear to complicate itself during this interaction but each particle is still going about it's task oblivious to the other particle. For instance, if you take a billion tiny particles and make them move toward their anti-particle at the same speed never slowing down or speeding up, some will be deflected and some will collide perfectly so that they cannot get any closer. Some will find a particle it's attracted to going off in a certain direction trying to attract to another and follow it. The strange part to this is that one my be coming in at an angle just off another and start following it making it an orbiting particle because it can never catch up to the particle it's attracted to. Others may find themselves making tiny orbits trying to get closer to other neighboring particles, but the other particles nearby are preventing a direct path. Of course, since a particle cannot exist in the same location as another, they can be knocked away from their "partner" by other particles trying to attract themselves. These would be ultra tiny... so tiny that it would be an injustice to say that your skin was made up of these tiny things because your skin would be a combination of destructive and constructive groupings of these particles that happen to reside in that point in space. As you walk through the air, these particles would be left behind and replaced with particles from in front of you. When you enter a space where these particles are less dense, they tend to spread out and the opposite is true for more dense groupings.
I don't know if that makes sense at all. The simple rule of attraction between these little particles could create some interesting groupings and patterns that appear to be more complicated if you are looking at the whole grouping of particles spinning, oscillating back and forth trying to merge, or whatever it might be doing instead of the individual particles themselves.
Of course, I have no proof, solid theories or the like. It's simply a thought.
Why now do we see Microsoft trying harder than before?
Slower sales? Pitching the company instead of a product? Trying to recover from the slump in stock sales? Trying to recover from years of a bad image before it hits them hard?
Why does Microsoft view the brand as declining value?
Not as sadistically cruel as my experience in college. Six, yes 6, semesters of COBOL/JCL/Mainframe... in a 9 semester Computer Information Systems Degree (which I dropped like a lead weight) I later found out from a friend that they tried to cram C programming in the last semester to cover some requirement.
I keep telling myself that I left because the English literature teacher treated us like kindergartners by turning off the lights when she walked into the room and waited for everyone to be quiet or the Japanese Management class that everyone failed (yet somehow nobody actually did after the grades where published)... but I think It was really the COBOL that made the nightmares worse every night.
They invested in real estate backed by a banker with a virtually unlimited wallet and no moral standing. The bank was handing out credit and money to people that couldn't afford it. When investing in land (especially if you plan on living on it) you better go over the costs yourself instead of believing the bank selling you the mortgage that is "cheaper than renting!" If you make an educated investment in real estate that you know you can afford, it can be a very lucrative ordeal. Your S&P fund is putting money in someone else hands. You have no idea if they will spend YOUR money on carrots or cats. You only have their performance and faith in their systems. When you lose their faith due to mal-investment many others will too, sell off, and the value of that investment drops like a rock.
Real estate can be VERY safe if you do the research and run the figures. In a way, real estate is like the market. If you go into it thinking you will make millions easily and quickly you are looking to be ripped off and disappointed. However, if you go into it right, it's an asset that can't vanish because of loss of faith. It's still there, waiting to be used or sold.
There's no such thing as safe when you're dealing with the market. You may beat the trend by diversifying, but it's far from "safe." If you wanted to be safe, you'd be purchasing real estate and other tangible assets as well. Money can vanish overnight. Most land will still be there tomorrow, in ten years, and even 100 years. If you do it wisely, you could even retire by owning farmland, selling off parcels of land each year, or even renting if you want to go that route. Hire a farmer to plant and harvest it and you'll get a nice check each year. Pay off your taxes and you still have a very good quantity of money left over. My parents have been doing this for years. They take the money they get from the farms and turn it over on more land.
I thought he was more excited to prove his gravitational theory that the "bend in space time" would be proven with the refraction of light around the sun. (Which to me only proves that light particles can be manipulated by the attractive force of [electric|magnetic|both] gravity rather than his idea of compressed universe gravity. But then again, I'm just a lowly programmer and not some world acclaimed physicist.)
PvP is indirect in this game. You have to starve the person to death by giving supplies to someone else. It takes strategy and skill as opposed to some of those other lame PvP games on the market.
That is if it's actually increasing the "education and sophistication of the average idiot" which I have my doubts. I notice you didn't use the words "common sense" or "intelligence". Education implies knowledge, not wisdom, or common sense. While sophistication implies a certain amount of intelligence, it still falls short of promoting a person who promotes socially acceptable actions. You can educate the children all day long (in killing each other from sounds of it) but you'll never teach them how to be socialites simply through education.
You need to make the "adult" in the child's life more responsible for the actions and education o the children. Simply shoving your kids into a tax paid babysitting service does nothing for the country. Give the parents a reason to get involved in their children's education. Put their money on the line. Maybe we need to implement a fee based schooling system where children that are failing will end up paying more for their schooling through taking more classes. That might get the parents involved. Of course, this doesn't work if we are passing children on because we don't want to hurt their feelings.
By the way (some quick math): 40k teacher / (30 kids x 180 school days) ~ $7.40/day/kid or $1334 year + building/admin/book costs distributed to all the kids... it doesn't cost that much to send your kid to school. In fact, I'm sure we probably pay more in taxes than we need.
Two things: 1. If you can't afford kids, don't have them. 2. There's nothing wrong with a $35K/year mother paying a good chunk of their kids' education fees. I have a problem with 100% funding through taxes.
I still think the only way to do truly open WiFi is through solar/wind(?) powered WiFi routers with some sort of node based network and routing protocol. You'd place these throughout the city, utility poles, homes, etc. Of course, places like Boston would have a throw a hernia because of all these blinking boxes all over the place.
Trust me when I say that improving schools starts with parents actually taking an interesting in their child's education.
Why? That's why they pay taxes and have the Department of Education! If they have to start paying attention to what their kids are learning, why do they have to pay for someone else to do it?
This is why parents need to be paying for their kids to go to school and it needs to stop being a free service of the govt paid for by unfair taxation of people without children. If they were kicking out their own money to put their kids through school, parents would be more interested.
Yeah, and I also had the "manual" way of doing it as well. We had an old DOS menu system that would run batch files for programs. I created a batch file to extract the program to be run, run it and on exit zip it back up. That was my solution to making the most of that 40MB hard drive.;)
Warhammer Online I would have to say will fall into your COH assessment. I played it up to level 26 and got bored and tired of the RVR content. It was repetitive and always the same. People were/are stupid and never worked together (on both sides.) Every match pretty much was the same, with the same tactics, and the same look. It was worse than sewers and buildings in COH. At least they changed layout in COH.
Now, you take that formula and make end game out of that? No thanks! I was sick and tired of the game when I hit level 20 without playing RVR and had to go to the other areas and complete partial chapters just to level. Then I found out RVR experience was a pretty huge part of the game and I started RVR'ing more. Then the boring repetitive run Morkain's Temple (sp?) over and over and over again until you got sick of it.
Granted, I'm not a fan of PVP/RVR content. I think it inspires all the wrong in people and they become competitive rather than cooperative. The type of people that play PVP games are generally less inclined to help other people. Nowhere better did this show than in Public quests. It wasn't about helping people complete it. It was about who could heal/damage/tag/collect more than everyone else. Then you toss in the random loot roller and you had a situation like I had with my friends. You see that a PQ was near completion, you'd jump in and get a few shots to have the opportunity just to get loot and out roll the players that had been there progressing the quest from the start.
Games like these make me absolutely hate PVP. Not because of all the good things that COULD come from it... but because of all the bad that DOES.
Slashdot Mirror
DO you have any clue how much education costs?
Do you? Not how much we spend... but how much it actually costs. Run the numbers and I think you'll see that we spend too much.
You will see that most states spend less than $10000 per year per student, before the current economic downturn and budget cuts.
That's because it costs less than $10K per year per student. If you don't believe me, run the numbers. Take 30 kids and give the teacher a $50K salary to be kind because I know they make less. (50000/30) = $1666.66 That's less then $2K per year. You put several teachers and hundreds of kids in a single school and suddenly the cost to run that building distributed over those kids becomes minimal.
I love that method actually. I wish I had a teacher gutsy enough to try it.
nobody wants to pay for education
That's the problem. Nobody wants to pay for it even though their children are the ones using it. They'd rather make everyone else pay for it.
If schools were run like businesses, they'd be competing for your dollar and offering an education you approve of for your children. Parents might actually start paying attention to what their kids are learning as well instead of sending them off to a public funded babysitting service while they go to work. The schools would have to manage money, maintain a high standard of learning and make the most out of what they have instead of constantly asking for more. If you find the school is teaching your kids about something you don't approve of, send them to a competitor. We kind of have that now with private schools (like Catholic Schools) but the people going to these schools are also paying for the public schools as well. Most people don't like having to pay twice so the public schools have an unfair monopolistic advantage. Remove school taxation but create a law that their children must be educated up to at least a standard set of guidelines and you'll see a drastic improvement in education levels.
Of course, people will complain that it's a shock to all the parents who have multiple kids in school. I ran the numbers in another story and it could cost less than $10 a school day and less than $2000 a year. This is less than most people spend to eat daily. The taxes have already been reduced for those with kids... where's this money going? They get a standard deduction of anywhere between $850 to $5150 per dependent not counting your own single deduction of $5K-7.5K. So why then do we not have money? People are living outside their means because they've counted on this yearly return or they spend it on jetskis, TVs and other items that they think they need. Don't tell me your tax return plus MAYBE a little set aside from your paycheck wouldn't cover $2k in child education...
Sure, out of the gate, schools will be meeting the minimum levels set, but they will soon start to edge each other out and over time it will change. You could even upgrade the education levels from time to time based on learning curves.
I could say "people don't want to use Linux, but are forced to use it at work".
I could only hope. Oh... you were being negative. Damn you!
I WANT to use Linux... I can't seem to get that through my favorite game publisher's heads.
The biggest problem I see with their method is the target market of their their clients. As with any business, they will target the OS with the most market share. You'll see clients with Windows applications, Windows articles, and Windows support/solutions more often than you'll see Linux or Apple sites. This causes the statistics to be slanted toward a Windows friendly report since more of the clients they have target this share of the market in order to make money.
I don't know if I understood you correct, but I've always thought that the universe could merely be a series of tiny binary particles that could follow one or two simple rules. A positive and negative particle that seek to attract to each other like magnetism but cannot coexist in the same location. If two particles following this rule were to interact with each other the singular rule would appear to complicate itself during this interaction but each particle is still going about it's task oblivious to the other particle. For instance, if you take a billion tiny particles and make them move toward their anti-particle at the same speed never slowing down or speeding up, some will be deflected and some will collide perfectly so that they cannot get any closer. Some will find a particle it's attracted to going off in a certain direction trying to attract to another and follow it. The strange part to this is that one my be coming in at an angle just off another and start following it making it an orbiting particle because it can never catch up to the particle it's attracted to. Others may find themselves making tiny orbits trying to get closer to other neighboring particles, but the other particles nearby are preventing a direct path. Of course, since a particle cannot exist in the same location as another, they can be knocked away from their "partner" by other particles trying to attract themselves. These would be ultra tiny... so tiny that it would be an injustice to say that your skin was made up of these tiny things because your skin would be a combination of destructive and constructive groupings of these particles that happen to reside in that point in space. As you walk through the air, these particles would be left behind and replaced with particles from in front of you. When you enter a space where these particles are less dense, they tend to spread out and the opposite is true for more dense groupings.
I don't know if that makes sense at all. The simple rule of attraction between these little particles could create some interesting groupings and patterns that appear to be more complicated if you are looking at the whole grouping of particles spinning, oscillating back and forth trying to merge, or whatever it might be doing instead of the individual particles themselves.
Of course, I have no proof, solid theories or the like. It's simply a thought.
Microsoft realized it can't make any more money on keyboards until they digitize them.
That's okay, bloat makes sense. I'm still trying to find a definition for "HuYOOGE" though.
Not something wrong, but it makes you wonder...
Why now do we see Microsoft trying harder than before?
Slower sales? Pitching the company instead of a product? Trying to recover from the slump in stock sales? Trying to recover from years of a bad image before it hits them hard?
Why does Microsoft view the brand as declining value?
Not as sadistically cruel as my experience in college. Six, yes 6, semesters of COBOL/JCL/Mainframe... in a 9 semester Computer Information Systems Degree (which I dropped like a lead weight) I later found out from a friend that they tried to cram C programming in the last semester to cover some requirement.
I keep telling myself that I left because the English literature teacher treated us like kindergartners by turning off the lights when she walked into the room and waited for everyone to be quiet or the Japanese Management class that everyone failed (yet somehow nobody actually did after the grades where published)... but I think It was really the COBOL that made the nightmares worse every night.
What do you think this is, wikipedia?[citation needed]
They invested in real estate backed by a banker with a virtually unlimited wallet and no moral standing. The bank was handing out credit and money to people that couldn't afford it. When investing in land (especially if you plan on living on it) you better go over the costs yourself instead of believing the bank selling you the mortgage that is "cheaper than renting!" If you make an educated investment in real estate that you know you can afford, it can be a very lucrative ordeal. Your S&P fund is putting money in someone else hands. You have no idea if they will spend YOUR money on carrots or cats. You only have their performance and faith in their systems. When you lose their faith due to mal-investment many others will too, sell off, and the value of that investment drops like a rock.
Real estate can be VERY safe if you do the research and run the figures. In a way, real estate is like the market. If you go into it thinking you will make millions easily and quickly you are looking to be ripped off and disappointed. However, if you go into it right, it's an asset that can't vanish because of loss of faith. It's still there, waiting to be used or sold.
Or identifying yourself every time you post?
Hello post #25959227 from [IP address] assigned to [ISP] and [MAC Address] at 2:44 PM UTC on the 2nd of December.
I'm sure even ACs are recorded.
I hate to point out the obvious (at least to me):
The stock market ... safe S&P 500 index fund
There's no such thing as safe when you're dealing with the market. You may beat the trend by diversifying, but it's far from "safe." If you wanted to be safe, you'd be purchasing real estate and other tangible assets as well. Money can vanish overnight. Most land will still be there tomorrow, in ten years, and even 100 years. If you do it wisely, you could even retire by owning farmland, selling off parcels of land each year, or even renting if you want to go that route. Hire a farmer to plant and harvest it and you'll get a nice check each year. Pay off your taxes and you still have a very good quantity of money left over. My parents have been doing this for years. They take the money they get from the farms and turn it over on more land.
I'll be patiently waiting right here... ;)
I thought he was more excited to prove his gravitational theory that the "bend in space time" would be proven with the refraction of light around the sun. (Which to me only proves that light particles can be manipulated by the attractive force of [electric|magnetic|both] gravity rather than his idea of compressed universe gravity. But then again, I'm just a lowly programmer and not some world acclaimed physicist.)
PvP is indirect in this game. You have to starve the person to death by giving supplies to someone else. It takes strategy and skill as opposed to some of those other lame PvP games on the market.
That is if it's actually increasing the "education and sophistication of the average idiot" which I have my doubts. I notice you didn't use the words "common sense" or "intelligence". Education implies knowledge, not wisdom, or common sense. While sophistication implies a certain amount of intelligence, it still falls short of promoting a person who promotes socially acceptable actions. You can educate the children all day long (in killing each other from sounds of it) but you'll never teach them how to be socialites simply through education.
You need to make the "adult" in the child's life more responsible for the actions and education o the children. Simply shoving your kids into a tax paid babysitting service does nothing for the country. Give the parents a reason to get involved in their children's education. Put their money on the line. Maybe we need to implement a fee based schooling system where children that are failing will end up paying more for their schooling through taking more classes. That might get the parents involved. Of course, this doesn't work if we are passing children on because we don't want to hurt their feelings.
By the way (some quick math): 40k teacher / (30 kids x 180 school days) ~ $7.40 /day/kid or $1334 year + building/admin/book costs distributed to all the kids ... it doesn't cost that much to send your kid to school. In fact, I'm sure we probably pay more in taxes than we need.
Two things:
1. If you can't afford kids, don't have them.
2. There's nothing wrong with a $35K/year mother paying a good chunk of their kids' education fees. I have a problem with 100% funding through taxes.
Someone who can legally be responsible for their own actions... at least in theory.
I still think the only way to do truly open WiFi is through solar/wind(?) powered WiFi routers with some sort of node based network and routing protocol. You'd place these throughout the city, utility poles, homes, etc. Of course, places like Boston would have a throw a hernia because of all these blinking boxes all over the place.
Trust me when I say that improving schools starts with parents actually taking an interesting in their child's education.
Why? That's why they pay taxes and have the Department of Education! If they have to start paying attention to what their kids are learning, why do they have to pay for someone else to do it?
This is why parents need to be paying for their kids to go to school and it needs to stop being a free service of the govt paid for by unfair taxation of people without children. If they were kicking out their own money to put their kids through school, parents would be more interested.
Yeah, and I also had the "manual" way of doing it as well. We had an old DOS menu system that would run batch files for programs. I created a batch file to extract the program to be run, run it and on exit zip it back up. That was my solution to making the most of that 40MB hard drive. ;)
Warhammer Online I would have to say will fall into your COH assessment. I played it up to level 26 and got bored and tired of the RVR content. It was repetitive and always the same. People were/are stupid and never worked together (on both sides.) Every match pretty much was the same, with the same tactics, and the same look. It was worse than sewers and buildings in COH. At least they changed layout in COH.
Now, you take that formula and make end game out of that? No thanks! I was sick and tired of the game when I hit level 20 without playing RVR and had to go to the other areas and complete partial chapters just to level. Then I found out RVR experience was a pretty huge part of the game and I started RVR'ing more. Then the boring repetitive run Morkain's Temple (sp?) over and over and over again until you got sick of it.
Granted, I'm not a fan of PVP/RVR content. I think it inspires all the wrong in people and they become competitive rather than cooperative. The type of people that play PVP games are generally less inclined to help other people. Nowhere better did this show than in Public quests. It wasn't about helping people complete it. It was about who could heal/damage/tag/collect more than everyone else. Then you toss in the random loot roller and you had a situation like I had with my friends. You see that a PQ was near completion, you'd jump in and get a few shots to have the opportunity just to get loot and out roll the players that had been there progressing the quest from the start.
Games like these make me absolutely hate PVP. Not because of all the good things that COULD come from it... but because of all the bad that DOES.