They are kept on life support by government at the behest of the unions. GM wasn't bailed out for our benefit - it was bailed out for the benefit of the UAW.
Agreed-ish. Well, it was bailed out so that the unions would re-elect the politicians.
Teacher's Unions are not the sole problem. I do agree that the majority of teacher unions are little to no help in today's society. If you compare the salaries of a union teacher vs a non-union teacher (private schools) they can vary widely. Particularly among smaller suburban catholic schools. Its been scientifically shown that expectations create who you are (citation needed). If your teacher constantly says your dumb, I wouldn't expect you to get it right, etc, the student will will become that person. If the teacher says 'your going to do great one day, keep up the good work' that student is going to become great. Now yes thats not 100% true, but expectations from your teacher is a huge influence on a student's performance. This thinking can also be applied racially.... but thats for another time.
There will always be victims of circumstance, and teachers that are better than others. I think we need to improve the education for teachers, and perhaps have some sort of personality assessment. FTFA teachers that expect a lot from the students, get a lot from the students. So rather than saying FIRE THE TEACHERS! maybe we can do some retraining. Just some thoughts. Here's a penny.
There are definitely problems in the U.S. educational system. This article was pretty cool, and they do state that their metrics aren't perfect, but lead to some valuable insight. I'd like to see further studies on this.
Private schools often has a similar problem in the U.S. because the school does not want to lose any money (a students tuition). There is no support for teachers to remove trouble makers. Its sad, really. Education standards are plummeting. Just look at my poor grammatical skills and use of smileys:-(.
Honestly though, I attended K-8 in a public system and 9-12 in a private system. I don't come from a wealthy family, but I was raised with many books in the home. Its statistically shown that families where books are home tend to create students with better grades. I was highly encouraged to read throughout my life. I definitely believe that reading and math should be supported in the home. Teacher's should be more positive towards there students, and that troublesome students should be given special attention. They should be held to the SAME standards (not easier side classes). But should be given more support.
As for comp-sci classes, HAH. I remember in 6th grade, we were graded on how fast we could type. My teacher had a paragraph for us to type and we had to do as much of it as possible within 30 seconds. I was the only student in the class to finish the paragraph, in 22 seconds. I reversed an i and e (like their/thier) and she docked me points:-(
I did not complain about devices (the Iphone). Rather, just data plans. Well, all their cellular plans in general. I do not own a single apple device, but that will not stop me from pointing out the obvious fact that there is an oligopoly. Back in 84? the telecom Bell was broken up. Over time many of those have merged basically recreating the monopoly of Bell, under the new name AT&T. The oligopoly controls around 90% of the market.
Dear SmallFurryCreature,
In a capitalist society commodities are to be sold at lower prices due to competition. Although Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile may be 'competitors' they are rather an oligopoly. There is no true competition. In a capitalist society monopolies and oligopolies are usually the things people hate most. So yes, your right, they can charge whatever they want. If they were the only person to offer this service (data) because of a new technology, let them earn their money. But no, cellular data has been around for quite a while, and the oligopoly is just raking in the cash at every opportunity. Text messaging prices have INCREASED despite the fact that text messages cause NO effect on the network. So before you say 'this is the way things work in a socialist/capitalist market' consider the fact that its actually not a capitalist situation because there is no true competition.
Regards,
Rukie
Dear AT&T,
I hate you.
Regards,
Your Customer.
Gradeschool and Highschool for me always required a Librarian to scan the book and then input your name. However, our Librarians knew every student by first and last name. College for me has a photo identification card that needs to be shown (with a magnetic stripe) and the books are linked to whoever is on the photo (you must match the photo).
I dislike the idea of using fingerprints. The government should NOT maintain this information. I can fully understand someones approach to this and why they want to use this, but as this gains popularity, it will become far easier for the governments to say, Hey, lets have a universal id system using fingerprints. Oh, you'll need the fingerprint to check out books, identify yourself for guns, for paying at the gas station, for getting on the city bus, etc. Yes it can create a significant convenience for the consumer, but now the government can track your every move, every purchase. Today's kids are going to be used to handing over every bit of personal information, our government certainly isn't going to protect our rights at this point, we need to protect them ourselves. (How often is the government supposed to be overthrown? Every 200 years?) I realize this article is about a school, but it all starts somewhere, right?
I bought a cheap sirius radio about 3 years ago. After three years the unit burned out, and for no charge Sirius sent me a free radio. The problem Sirius has right now, is that they need a larger market. If it became "standard" that all cars had sirius, it would be great for them. Their monthly fee is 12.95, and I think that's cheaper than WoW.
Internet Radio is NOT the market for sirius (but they do offer it). Sirius also offers business deals and campus deals. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, you can hear Sirius channels playing in the dining areas, in the gym, and in general all around campus. Since attending college I gave my parents the car unit, and picked up a second subscription and a stiletto. It can hold about 18 gig or so of music, has streaming internet access when your indoors (for music only), and streaming sattelite radio when your outdoors. So, it can compete with Slacker quite well.
Many restaurants fail on the first attempt, are bought out, and become successful on the second buyout. I have a feeling the same will hold true for Sattelite radio.
Isn't it something like clearstation or clearmedia that owns all of the Kiss stations across the country? That company owns a ridiculous amount of radio. Sirius tends to have newer music and a wider variety versus the collection of 3-5 songs that Kiss plays on repeat for months at a time.
I for one, like my sirius overlord.
I get a much better sense of accomplishment than they do. They go, "I write about rookie baseball players for a living." or "Here's an advertisement for your company." I go "Here's your new water purification plant for your country."... or.. "Here's a machine that makes tools for you." lol I could end up doing something that will affect people on a deep level, that writing (entertainment) just can't quite give.
Writing has two purposes. Entertainment, or Information. Adverts, calc books, physics books, all under information. Well, some people would put the dictionary under entertainment;)
But me, I'll love what I do.
Actually, its been a warm winter (as the local New Yorker's claim...)
I'm of Wisconsin, so its been pretty nice. Its been warm, a fair amount of snow. Wisconsin is having record snowfalls though. (Since 1885 record I guess, supposedly global warming is causing record snowfalls too. Heck, anything "out of the ordinary" is caused by global warming.)
Right now I'm doing physics, Oh, I did did physics Sunday, and Saturday, and except for a little calculus on Friday, I did physics then too.
God I want a co-op already! lol
I'm in a mechanical engineering degree. In the past 10 years, fewer than 10 people have recieved 4.0 gpas. It is ridiculously difficult. The classes are ridiculously difficult. However, by the time I graduate RIT I'll know this stuff so well..
I spent all weekend on 3 problems. what the heck! lol It takes me two hours to write a decent 10 page paper, it takes me 10 hours to answer 1 math problem. I definitely agree, other fields have inflated gpas, but you know what, I know a hell of a lot more than someone with an inflated grade, and that makes me proud.
There's a difference between air warming and surface warming. Sure there are obnoxious amounts of CO2 being released, along with methane and other "greenhouse gases."
Everything depends on minute details. First, we don't have records that go back much more than 100 years on a world wide scale. We don't know that much about the weather, if we did, the meteorologist would never be wrong.
Air warming (actual air, nitrogen, oxygen, etc) has seen a small increase over the past 100 some years (as records show from studies by NASA/etc)
However, surface warming (the actual planet, ground, iron, granite, etc, solid forms instead of gasses), has not seen a steady increase as would be expected. The surface undergoes cooling periods, warming periods, I believe end of the 70's it went down.
The majority of our own greenhouse contributions happened when, after 1930's? 1940's? I think thats when 70-80% of human greenhouse gases come from.
So if 20&% is before 1940, then the earth's atmosphere must have been warming on its own quite well to keep the trends.
The sun goes through cycles, which could easily affect earth and it's cycles. We know the sun has periods where there are high amounts of sun spots, and low amounts. These could attribute to the earth raising and lowering in atmosphere temperature.
There are THOUSANDS of reasons why temperatures could be changing, and human made greenhouse gases do NOT seem like the most likely reason to me.
Feel free to bash me, i said people were ignorant. Before you accept the media's interpretation of things, check stuff out for yourself. I'm not saying I have any insight not available to anyone else, I just think too many people have jumped on a political bandwagon after lots of misinformation.
I'm sure there's information out there that I do not know about, and it might just change my opinion. But from what I've read and learned I disagree with the majority of people, does that make me a bad person? I guess so. Maybe I'll just sign those referendums to jail people who don't believe in global warming!
No such thing as global warming. Not mistargeted, just ignorant people, AKA idiots.
In fact, anyone who believes in global warming is ignorant. What a bunch of B.S. Any climate change is because of earth cycles, Gore's hot air, or.. Gore's hot air. Please, volcanoes release much more pollution into the air than our own vehicles. (However, I do admit to smog being a problem in many locations, such as Chinese Cities and various other highly populated areas.) However, SMOG \= GLOBAL WARMING
At the end of the movie everyone in the audience was like, that sucked. In fact, several people yelled it out. I thought it was horrible. Nothing was consistent. They tried to make it look like it was a tape that was retrieved, but nothing seemed to flow in the tape. Seconds would disappear, everything was jerky, even when he was standing perfectly still. It also took an extremely long time before anything happened, about 40 minutes into the movie before the statue's head came off. (Movie started at 3, it was 3:40 when aliens attacked)....
I want my money back.
What about gay aliens? I remember my first pc game, Cosmo, for dos. I played that the most along with games like Doom/Doom II, original sim city, and duke nukem.. probably around the age of 4-5. None of those gave me nightmares, but the movie "IT" made me afraid of toilets. lol, crazy little kid I was.
This is ridiculous. I went to universitytookit.com and there's an iso there, but is this a toolkit that is windows only? If universities required this would students not be allowed to use *nix derivatives? If so I think that could be a monopolization situation...
But thats just a small arguement vs the invasion of privacy. Socialism at its best right? Oh wait, this is communism!
I can't seem to find the list of universities either..
actually, it takes people like him to make a difference in the world. Either you get what you want personally, or you get what you want globally. He didn't force the school to use ODF but he did get a different professor. I like his style;)
I personally use.odt for all files that I save, however, as a college student I am sometimes required by a *shudder* 2007 office using teacher who only accepts doc and docx. So, I have a copy of EVERYTHING in.odt, and only required copies of.doc. Its horrible that we don't have an open standard that ALL OFFICE SUITE products willingly and gracefully use *cough* microbitches *cough*
I have a logitech trackball, I don't both installing drivers, it works wonders. Definitely true that other people don't like to use it though, so no one ever wants to use my computer. I can't stand using a regular mouse anymore! I love it for fps as well.
People think that the regular mouse won because it has a larger market share, but I think most people are just afraid of a thumb controlled mouse;)
I've gone through 2 mice in about 12 years with the trackball, both logitech, I know my current one is optical, and it works wonders. The only thing I have to do is occasionally clean the little mouse holders to make the ball roll more easily again (once a year maybe?)
Slashdot Mirror
er, this was me
Agreed-ish. Well, it was bailed out so that the unions would re-elect the politicians.
Teacher's Unions are not the sole problem. I do agree that the majority of teacher unions are little to no help in today's society. If you compare the salaries of a union teacher vs a non-union teacher (private schools) they can vary widely. Particularly among smaller suburban catholic schools. Its been scientifically shown that expectations create who you are (citation needed). If your teacher constantly says your dumb, I wouldn't expect you to get it right, etc, the student will will become that person. If the teacher says 'your going to do great one day, keep up the good work' that student is going to become great. Now yes thats not 100% true, but expectations from your teacher is a huge influence on a student's performance. This thinking can also be applied racially.... but thats for another time. There will always be victims of circumstance, and teachers that are better than others. I think we need to improve the education for teachers, and perhaps have some sort of personality assessment. FTFA teachers that expect a lot from the students, get a lot from the students. So rather than saying FIRE THE TEACHERS! maybe we can do some retraining. Just some thoughts. Here's a penny.
There are definitely problems in the U.S. educational system. This article was pretty cool, and they do state that their metrics aren't perfect, but lead to some valuable insight. I'd like to see further studies on this.
Private schools often has a similar problem in the U.S. because the school does not want to lose any money (a students tuition). There is no support for teachers to remove trouble makers. Its sad, really. Education standards are plummeting. Just look at my poor grammatical skills and use of smileys :-(.
Honestly though, I attended K-8 in a public system and 9-12 in a private system. I don't come from a wealthy family, but I was raised with many books in the home. Its statistically shown that families where books are home tend to create students with better grades. I was highly encouraged to read throughout my life. I definitely believe that reading and math should be supported in the home. Teacher's should be more positive towards there students, and that troublesome students should be given special attention. They should be held to the SAME standards (not easier side classes). But should be given more support.
As for comp-sci classes, HAH. I remember in 6th grade, we were graded on how fast we could type. My teacher had a paragraph for us to type and we had to do as much of it as possible within 30 seconds. I was the only student in the class to finish the paragraph, in 22 seconds. I reversed an i and e (like their/thier) and she docked me points :-(
I did not complain about devices (the Iphone). Rather, just data plans. Well, all their cellular plans in general. I do not own a single apple device, but that will not stop me from pointing out the obvious fact that there is an oligopoly. Back in 84? the telecom Bell was broken up. Over time many of those have merged basically recreating the monopoly of Bell, under the new name AT&T. The oligopoly controls around 90% of the market.
Dear SmallFurryCreature, In a capitalist society commodities are to be sold at lower prices due to competition. Although Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile may be 'competitors' they are rather an oligopoly. There is no true competition. In a capitalist society monopolies and oligopolies are usually the things people hate most. So yes, your right, they can charge whatever they want. If they were the only person to offer this service (data) because of a new technology, let them earn their money. But no, cellular data has been around for quite a while, and the oligopoly is just raking in the cash at every opportunity. Text messaging prices have INCREASED despite the fact that text messages cause NO effect on the network. So before you say 'this is the way things work in a socialist/capitalist market' consider the fact that its actually not a capitalist situation because there is no true competition. Regards, Rukie Dear AT&T, I hate you. Regards, Your Customer.
Gradeschool and Highschool for me always required a Librarian to scan the book and then input your name. However, our Librarians knew every student by first and last name. College for me has a photo identification card that needs to be shown (with a magnetic stripe) and the books are linked to whoever is on the photo (you must match the photo).
I dislike the idea of using fingerprints. The government should NOT maintain this information. I can fully understand someones approach to this and why they want to use this, but as this gains popularity, it will become far easier for the governments to say, Hey, lets have a universal id system using fingerprints. Oh, you'll need the fingerprint to check out books, identify yourself for guns, for paying at the gas station, for getting on the city bus, etc. Yes it can create a significant convenience for the consumer, but now the government can track your every move, every purchase. Today's kids are going to be used to handing over every bit of personal information, our government certainly isn't going to protect our rights at this point, we need to protect them ourselves. (How often is the government supposed to be overthrown? Every 200 years?) I realize this article is about a school, but it all starts somewhere, right?
I Live in the Henrietta area and I'm pissed off about this. Any suggestions on who to write letters to?
Contracts? What Contracts? I never signed anything with Sirius.
T.V. used to be free too, while cable was add free. Look what happened there.
I bought a cheap sirius radio about 3 years ago. After three years the unit burned out, and for no charge Sirius sent me a free radio. The problem Sirius has right now, is that they need a larger market. If it became "standard" that all cars had sirius, it would be great for them. Their monthly fee is 12.95, and I think that's cheaper than WoW. Internet Radio is NOT the market for sirius (but they do offer it). Sirius also offers business deals and campus deals. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, you can hear Sirius channels playing in the dining areas, in the gym, and in general all around campus. Since attending college I gave my parents the car unit, and picked up a second subscription and a stiletto. It can hold about 18 gig or so of music, has streaming internet access when your indoors (for music only), and streaming sattelite radio when your outdoors. So, it can compete with Slacker quite well. Many restaurants fail on the first attempt, are bought out, and become successful on the second buyout. I have a feeling the same will hold true for Sattelite radio.
Isn't it something like clearstation or clearmedia that owns all of the Kiss stations across the country? That company owns a ridiculous amount of radio. Sirius tends to have newer music and a wider variety versus the collection of 3-5 songs that Kiss plays on repeat for months at a time. I for one, like my sirius overlord.
I get a much better sense of accomplishment than they do. They go, "I write about rookie baseball players for a living." or "Here's an advertisement for your company." I go "Here's your new water purification plant for your country." ... or.. "Here's a machine that makes tools for you." lol I could end up doing something that will affect people on a deep level, that writing (entertainment) just can't quite give.
Writing has two purposes. Entertainment, or Information. Adverts, calc books, physics books, all under information. Well, some people would put the dictionary under entertainment ;)
But me, I'll love what I do.
Actually, its been a warm winter (as the local New Yorker's claim...) I'm of Wisconsin, so its been pretty nice. Its been warm, a fair amount of snow. Wisconsin is having record snowfalls though. (Since 1885 record I guess, supposedly global warming is causing record snowfalls too. Heck, anything "out of the ordinary" is caused by global warming.) Right now I'm doing physics, Oh, I did did physics Sunday, and Saturday, and except for a little calculus on Friday, I did physics then too. God I want a co-op already! lol
I'm in a mechanical engineering degree. In the past 10 years, fewer than 10 people have recieved 4.0 gpas. It is ridiculously difficult. The classes are ridiculously difficult. However, by the time I graduate RIT I'll know this stuff so well.. I spent all weekend on 3 problems. what the heck! lol It takes me two hours to write a decent 10 page paper, it takes me 10 hours to answer 1 math problem. I definitely agree, other fields have inflated gpas, but you know what, I know a hell of a lot more than someone with an inflated grade, and that makes me proud.
There's a difference between air warming and surface warming. Sure there are obnoxious amounts of CO2 being released, along with methane and other "greenhouse gases." Everything depends on minute details. First, we don't have records that go back much more than 100 years on a world wide scale. We don't know that much about the weather, if we did, the meteorologist would never be wrong. Air warming (actual air, nitrogen, oxygen, etc) has seen a small increase over the past 100 some years (as records show from studies by NASA/etc) However, surface warming (the actual planet, ground, iron, granite, etc, solid forms instead of gasses), has not seen a steady increase as would be expected. The surface undergoes cooling periods, warming periods, I believe end of the 70's it went down. The majority of our own greenhouse contributions happened when, after 1930's? 1940's? I think thats when 70-80% of human greenhouse gases come from. So if 20&% is before 1940, then the earth's atmosphere must have been warming on its own quite well to keep the trends. The sun goes through cycles, which could easily affect earth and it's cycles. We know the sun has periods where there are high amounts of sun spots, and low amounts. These could attribute to the earth raising and lowering in atmosphere temperature. There are THOUSANDS of reasons why temperatures could be changing, and human made greenhouse gases do NOT seem like the most likely reason to me. Feel free to bash me, i said people were ignorant. Before you accept the media's interpretation of things, check stuff out for yourself. I'm not saying I have any insight not available to anyone else, I just think too many people have jumped on a political bandwagon after lots of misinformation. I'm sure there's information out there that I do not know about, and it might just change my opinion. But from what I've read and learned I disagree with the majority of people, does that make me a bad person? I guess so. Maybe I'll just sign those referendums to jail people who don't believe in global warming!
No such thing as global warming. Not mistargeted, just ignorant people, AKA idiots. In fact, anyone who believes in global warming is ignorant. What a bunch of B.S. Any climate change is because of earth cycles, Gore's hot air, or.. Gore's hot air. Please, volcanoes release much more pollution into the air than our own vehicles. (However, I do admit to smog being a problem in many locations, such as Chinese Cities and various other highly populated areas.) However, SMOG \= GLOBAL WARMING
At the end of the movie everyone in the audience was like, that sucked. In fact, several people yelled it out. I thought it was horrible. Nothing was consistent. They tried to make it look like it was a tape that was retrieved, but nothing seemed to flow in the tape. Seconds would disappear, everything was jerky, even when he was standing perfectly still. It also took an extremely long time before anything happened, about 40 minutes into the movie before the statue's head came off. (Movie started at 3, it was 3:40 when aliens attacked).... I want my money back.
What about gay aliens? I remember my first pc game, Cosmo, for dos. I played that the most along with games like Doom/Doom II, original sim city, and duke nukem.. probably around the age of 4-5. None of those gave me nightmares, but the movie "IT" made me afraid of toilets. lol, crazy little kid I was.
Didn't we just have an article up here from NASA about global warming not being real?
This is ridiculous. I went to universitytookit.com and there's an iso there, but is this a toolkit that is windows only? If universities required this would students not be allowed to use *nix derivatives? If so I think that could be a monopolization situation... But thats just a small arguement vs the invasion of privacy. Socialism at its best right? Oh wait, this is communism! I can't seem to find the list of universities either..
actually, it takes people like him to make a difference in the world. Either you get what you want personally, or you get what you want globally. He didn't force the school to use ODF but he did get a different professor. I like his style ;)
I personally use .odt for all files that I save, however, as a college student I am sometimes required by a *shudder* 2007 office using teacher who only accepts doc and docx. So, I have a copy of EVERYTHING in .odt, and only required copies of .doc. Its horrible that we don't have an open standard that ALL OFFICE SUITE products willingly and gracefully use *cough* microbitches *cough*
I have a logitech trackball, I don't both installing drivers, it works wonders.
;)
Definitely true that other people don't like to use it though, so no one ever wants to use my computer. I can't stand using a regular mouse anymore! I love it for fps as well.
People think that the regular mouse won because it has a larger market share, but I think most people are just afraid of a thumb controlled mouse
I've gone through 2 mice in about 12 years with the trackball, both logitech, I know my current one is optical, and it works wonders. The only thing I have to do is occasionally clean the little mouse holders to make the ball roll more easily again (once a year maybe?)