Is there a solution to the woeful lack of qualified mathematics teachers that the Teachers' Union will find acceptable?
There are several that teachers unions would likely find acceptable on their own. Among them, providing incentives for current teachers to take the courses that would give them the certifications that would make them "fully qualified" under NCLB as math or science teachers, making loan-repayment assistance available to anyone who finances their own qualification as a math/science teacher (whether new teachers in college or existing teachers), or increasing teacher pay across the board.
And differential pay they'd probably go for, if other, broader improvements in labor conditions for all teachers were linked to it.
The tags for this article (no, yes, maybe) are amusing, but completely unhelpful with regards to tagging. Has slashdot's potentially useful tagging system been sacrificed on the altar of smarm?
While I don't question that a tagging system might be useful, I haven't really seen any reason to think that the system Slashdot had much potential besides smarm. Without any frequency counts, trust system, or any other mechanism to weigh the relevance, significance, or utility of particular taggings, its just a cutesy little toy, and that's, unsurprisingly, what it gets used as.
Besides, ad hominem is actually one of the most effective strategies out there for trial lawyers. Witness says something damaging? Attack the credibility of the witness.
Attacking the credibility of a witness is not the ad hominem fallacy; the ad hominem fallacy exists when attacks on the character of the person making an argument are used to distract from the merits of an argument, but a witnesses statements are not arguments, they are the evidence cited by counsel for one side or the other in support of an argument, and the credibility of the source is not rationally irrelevant to the assessment of that evidence.
Many people don't feel the NEED for education, so never pressure their kids to study.
Perhaps, though I think a far bigger factor is that many people either are only rarely around their kids because if they weren't working multiple jobs, their kids would be living on the streets, or don't see any realistic prospects from the education available to their kids, so don't force them to study.
Of course, lots of parents (even, often, despite those negative factors) try to make their kids study, but are stuck with crumbling schools unable to retain permanent teachers or even provide students with books they can take home, so there isn't a lot they can do to get their kids to study, or a lot of payoff when they do.
These problems are not immune to policy solutions. Nor are the cultural problems, which are the result of perceptions of prospects from different actions. Change the experiences people have and what they see as the prospects and, over time, you'll change the culture.
Where the pr0n goes might influence the results of the war if it was otherwise close (or, if it went in the same direction, help to magnify a blowout), but I don't think its a big deal on its own. The pr0n industry is fairly agile, and will go wherever the eyeballs are, in the end, and while I think plenty of people will buy pr0n for whatever player they have, a lot of people will have trouble justifying (to themselves, and even moreso to any other person that might be involved in the purchasing decision) the expense of an HD player centered mostly around what pr0n is available, particularly if there are other factors weighing in favor of a different HD format.
From that list it looks like both formats got the new release (The Departed), and Blu-Ray got a bunch of old movies that won't be significantly better in quality than the SD DVD version anyway.
The film used for most movies, despite being an analog format, provides a hell of a lot better quality than DVD, so there is no reason that a transfer of an "old" movie to an HD format wouldn't be significantly better than a DVD transfer of the same original material.
Re:Convert it to Wiki - O'Reilly - you listening?.
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And how exactly are they going to make money? Selling access to a wiki page?
Sure. Have registered, paid user accounts, a small staff of professional editors, and give people service credits for significant, useful contributions. Restrict posting edits to main content (but not "Talk" pages) to the paid pros (who each also periodically review the Talk pages in their area) and maybe "trusted" users with good contribution history. Why not?
You could even use a wiki-like editing and viewing system with a format that can be converted on the fly to a book-format PDF for downloading and nice-looking printing.
I'd personally prefer a theory with 3 dimensions + time as an imaginary 4th.
I'd personally prefer to be handed a billion dollars cash.
This has been proven over and over again and is consistent with temporary physics.
Well, no, in fact, it hasn't been proven over and over again. If it had been proven, physicists wouldn't be looking to more dimensions to explain phenomena, because they wouldn't need to.
Assuming by "temporary" you mean "contemporary", well, no, no theory actually proposed with those parameters that explains the observations of contemporary physics clearly better than string theory has been proposed; if it had, it would be heavily favored for parsimony over string theory.
AFAEK [wikipedia.org], the Board hires a CEO to run the company. Members of the board themselves are elected by the general meeting of shareholders.
In theory, sure. In practice, its not so clean. In fact, this is noted in one of the Wikipedia articles linked to the one that you linked, the one on corporate governance, in its section on the Anglo-American model of governance:
The board of directors is nominally selected by and responsible to the shareholders, but the bylaws of many companies make it difficult for all but the largest shareholders to have any influence over the makeup of the board; normally, individual shareholders are not offered a choice of board nominees among which to choose, but are merely asked to rubberstamp the nominees of the sitting board. Perverse incentives have pervaded many corporate boards in the developed world, with board members beholden to the chief executive whose actions they are intended to oversee.
See, the Founding Fathers of the US thought of this and wrote up the Constitution to say "This is what the Government CAN do" (Articles) and "This is what they CANNOT do" (Amendments). The last amendment states that any other rights are left to the states to decide, and then reserved by the people.
Actually, the last amendment to the Constitution says that Congress can't raise its own pay in the middle of a term.
It is even the last ratified of the 11 that have been ratified of the 12 that were originally proposed as the "Bill of Rights".
But, anyhow, the division between "Can" in the original articles and "Can't" in the Amendments is false. There are limitations in the original articles and positive grants of power in the Amendments. The articles are simply the original text of the Constitution that was adopted, the amendments are changes that were ratified later under the procedure in the original text. That's it.
"Ensure that one hand grasps development while one hand grasps administration," he concluded.
What the hell does that even mean?
Aside from the fact that Hu Jintao needs the Leia-to-Tarkin retort, it means that while over here (waves off to one side) is the Ministry of Network Technology and Applications Research and Development [that's the hand grasping development], over there (waves off to the other) is the Ministry of Internet Monitoring, Censorship, and Dissident Suppression [or the hand grasping "administration"].
It's still why I think Bolshevism* and its sequelae are more insidious than fascism: sure, the fascists will shoot you if you agitate against them; but the Bolshevik state would prevent you from agitating in the first place by limiting the set of stimuli that comprise your world.
Bolsheviks have no problem shooting you and fascists have no qualms about censorship, propaganda, and other information control techniques. While one might find substantive rather than merely rhetorical differences between those two brands of authoritarianism, you certainly won't find it in the place you seem to be looking for it.
The last issue I have with things like yum and apt-get, is "what if you're at the cheapo relative's house who doesn't have a 'net connection" or your's is down?
Well, the apt "infrastructure" handles local file package repositories as well as network ones, and can allow download packages without installing them, so it should, in theory, be fairly straightforward to extend the GUI tools to give you the ability to click a package on, say, a CD or Flash drive to install it. Of course, you'd need to make sure you had all the dependencies bundled with it.
- The free software philosophers believe that sharing is good for society, and to promote it they share some cool technology.
- The open source philosophers believe that cool technology is good for society, and to promote it they share some cool technology.
I don't think that's accurate.
I think its more accurate this way:
- The open source philosophers believe that sharing and cool technology are good for society, and to promote both they share some cool technology, and let people with whom it is shared use it freely.
- The free software philosophers believe that sharing and cool technology are good for society, and to promote both they share some cool technology, and condition that the people they are sharing it with agree to share it and any derivates, if at all, under the same terms.
The fundamental aim of lawsuits is to make spam unprofitable. This is unfortunately not going to work unless EVERY spammer gets sued in a consistent manner, and loses consistently. As long as lawsuits are only sparsely executed against the biggest targets, there's going to be a far too tempting amount of 'under-the-radar' space.
No, while having every spammer be sued and lose would be nice, you avoid having a tempting "under-the-radar" space if spammers of every description get sued (even if not all of them), and lose often enough and pay out awards that substantially outweigh the profit from spamming. You thereby create enough risk to make spamming unattractive, though a spammer might get lucky and either escape a lawsuit or somehow prevail.
Throwing these scumbags in jail for decades at a time for fraud and theft and vandalism is the only real solution
Criminal prosecution faces exactly the same limits as civil prosecution (it equally doesn't work unless its applied broadly and successfully), has greater public expense, and a higher burden of proof, and does less, in and of itself, for the actual victims. It certainly, particularly for the phishing and theft of service cases like this, is appropriate, but it doesn't replace civil prosecution in dealing with the overall spam problem.
An interesting feature of the California law is that the definition of email is circular. Consider:
(f) "Electronic mail" or "e-mail" means an electronic message that is sent to an e-mail address and transmitted between two or more telecommunications devices, computers, or electronic devices capable of receiving electronic messages, whether or not the message is converted to hard copy format after receipt, viewed upon transmission, or stored for later retrieval. "Electronic mail" or "e-mail" includes electronic messages that are transmitted through a local, regional, or global computer network.
Okay, okay, if you've got an electronic message that is sent to an "e-mail address" its an "e-mail" or "electronic mail". Good, so what's an "e-mail address"?
(g) "Electronic mail address" or "e-mail address" means a destination, commonly expressed as a string of characters, to which electronic mail can be sent or delivered. An "electronic mail address" or "e-mail address" consists of a user name or mailbox and a reference to an Internet domain.
Okay, if "electronic mail" can be sent to it, its an e-mail address. So what's "electronic mail"? Oh, we go to (f) again, and round and round we go.
A good example of the distinction is a special prosecutor when appointed due to a conflict of interest
Special prosecutors are an inelegant workaround to the problem of conflict of interest; you can't have a prosecutor genuinely independent of the executive power of the sovereignty against whom the alleged crime was committed (at least, in the US system); and they are not completely independent or without conflict, they are an instrument for minimizing conflict.
Since there can be Wikipedia commentors genuinely and completely independent of Microsoft, no such inelegant hack is necessary to allow editing of Wikipedia at arms-length from Microsoft. A editor paid by Microsoft is acting in Microsoft's interests: if they aren't, Microsoft management is violating its fiduciary duty to Microsoft's shareholders.
And that is a conflict of interest, which is why Wikipedia has a set of Conflict of Interest guidelines that, in the first place, strongly discourage any editing by people paid by an interested party for edits, and, in the second place, strongly encourages that, if such people still feel the need to make edits, that they instead recommend them on talk pages and leave inclusion of them on main pages to neutral rather than compromised editors.
I'm no fan of Microsoft, but I don't think that just because they pay someone that makes it FUD.
Who said it did? I said it makes it know different than if it was posted by any other paid agent of Microsoft. That doesn't mean its FUD, necessarily.
The is not who pays but who decides what edits to make.
That an interested party is paying for the edits at the vary least raises a conflict of interests. People who get paid for editing are naturally likely to want to give the people paying them what they want, because that will allow them to get paid for editting again.
And in this case, since the edits will be public and reversible if other people find them incorrect, I don't see a problem.
Apparently, Wikipedia itself does, since its conflict of interest guidelines (WP:COI) strongly discourages edits by paid agents of involved parties and strongly encourages such agents, if they feel they still need to make changes, to instead recommend them on talk pages for inclusions by neutral, rather than compromised, editors.
This isn't some random anonymous goofball being paid to insert text Microsoft gives him; he's an (apparently) recognized figure, not especially MS-friendly, being paid to provide corrections in his area of expertise, with his reputation on the line. I'd trust that more than edits made by the PR people.
That's probably why the PR people hired him—its certainly the reason corporations hire those with respect in the community as public faces rather than putting their own PR staff in commercials, too. On Wikipedia, it is also strongly discouraged by Wikipedia conflict of interest policies (which directly covered outside paid agents equally to members of interested organizations), with those feeling they need to make edits in such circumstances strongly encouraged to recommend the edits on discussion pages for inclusion by a neutral editor, rather than making them directly.
Note, this talks about material which, simultaneously: (1) violates Wikipedia's policies by being unsourced, and (2) is also defamatory. It also only applies to removing the offending material, not replacing it with other material.
That seems different from what was at issue here, a paid agent of an involved party rewriting material related to the involved party on that party's behalf and to make it more favorable (even if, supposedly, only by correcting "errors") to that party: that seems to fall squarely into the area strongly discouraged by the COI rules.
Maybe Microsoft SHOULD pay the better respected press memebers [...]
Since being a "better respect press member" usually starts with being seen as unbiased and uncorrupted, being on the payroll of an interested party would probably stop the "better respected press members" from being "better respected".
No, this is public MIS-information that Microsoft doesn't like on a PUBLIC forum. They have every right to correct those errors, but they've gone one step further and hired a third party to examine the validity of the articles and correct any errors he finds.
A paid agent of Microsoft is no more a "third party" in any meaningful sense than a regular Microsoft employee would be. Had Microsoft convinced a genuinely independent party with no connection to Microsoft to review the material for inaccuracies, and correct any errors in any directions that it found, that would be going a step further than submitting its own corrections. But having their own paid agent doing it is, well, the same as doing it themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
There are several that teachers unions would likely find acceptable on their own. Among them, providing incentives for current teachers to take the courses that would give them the certifications that would make them "fully qualified" under NCLB as math or science teachers, making loan-repayment assistance available to anyone who finances their own qualification as a math/science teacher (whether new teachers in college or existing teachers), or increasing teacher pay across the board.
And differential pay they'd probably go for, if other, broader improvements in labor conditions for all teachers were linked to it.
While I don't question that a tagging system might be useful, I haven't really seen any reason to think that the system Slashdot had much potential besides smarm. Without any frequency counts, trust system, or any other mechanism to weigh the relevance, significance, or utility of particular taggings, its just a cutesy little toy, and that's, unsurprisingly, what it gets used as.
Attacking the credibility of a witness is not the ad hominem fallacy; the ad hominem fallacy exists when attacks on the character of the person making an argument are used to distract from the merits of an argument, but a witnesses statements are not arguments, they are the evidence cited by counsel for one side or the other in support of an argument, and the credibility of the source is not rationally irrelevant to the assessment of that evidence.
Perhaps, though I think a far bigger factor is that many people either are only rarely around their kids because if they weren't working multiple jobs, their kids would be living on the streets, or don't see any realistic prospects from the education available to their kids, so don't force them to study.
Of course, lots of parents (even, often, despite those negative factors) try to make their kids study, but are stuck with crumbling schools unable to retain permanent teachers or even provide students with books they can take home, so there isn't a lot they can do to get their kids to study, or a lot of payoff when they do.
These problems are not immune to policy solutions. Nor are the cultural problems, which are the result of perceptions of prospects from different actions. Change the experiences people have and what they see as the prospects and, over time, you'll change the culture.
Where the pr0n goes might influence the results of the war if it was otherwise close (or, if it went in the same direction, help to magnify a blowout), but I don't think its a big deal on its own. The pr0n industry is fairly agile, and will go wherever the eyeballs are, in the end, and while I think plenty of people will buy pr0n for whatever player they have, a lot of people will have trouble justifying (to themselves, and even moreso to any other person that might be involved in the purchasing decision) the expense of an HD player centered mostly around what pr0n is available, particularly if there are other factors weighing in favor of a different HD format.
The film used for most movies, despite being an analog format, provides a hell of a lot better quality than DVD, so there is no reason that a transfer of an "old" movie to an HD format wouldn't be significantly better than a DVD transfer of the same original material.
Sure. Have registered, paid user accounts, a small staff of professional editors, and give people service credits for significant, useful contributions. Restrict posting edits to main content (but not "Talk" pages) to the paid pros (who each also periodically review the Talk pages in their area) and maybe "trusted" users with good contribution history. Why not?
You could even use a wiki-like editing and viewing system with a format that can be converted on the fly to a book-format PDF for downloading and nice-looking printing.
I'd personally prefer to be handed a billion dollars cash.
Well, no, in fact, it hasn't been proven over and over again. If it had been proven, physicists wouldn't be looking to more dimensions to explain phenomena, because they wouldn't need to.
Assuming by "temporary" you mean "contemporary", well, no, no theory actually proposed with those parameters that explains the observations of contemporary physics clearly better than string theory has been proposed; if it had, it would be heavily favored for parsimony over string theory.
No, assuming that's meant to represent a point, you skipped a reduction; a point is zero dimensional.
In theory, sure. In practice, its not so clean. In fact, this is noted in one of the Wikipedia articles linked to the one that you linked, the one on corporate governance, in its section on the Anglo-American model of governance:
I thought all businesses were avoiding Vista...
Perhaps they are. While businesses are computer users, not all users are businesses.
Actually, the last amendment to the Constitution says that Congress can't raise its own pay in the middle of a term.
It is even the last ratified of the 11 that have been ratified of the 12 that were originally proposed as the "Bill of Rights".
But, anyhow, the division between "Can" in the original articles and "Can't" in the Amendments is false. There are limitations in the original articles and positive grants of power in the Amendments. The articles are simply the original text of the Constitution that was adopted, the amendments are changes that were ratified later under the procedure in the original text. That's it.
Aside from the fact that Hu Jintao needs the Leia-to-Tarkin retort, it means that while over here (waves off to one side) is the Ministry of Network Technology and Applications Research and Development [that's the hand grasping development], over there (waves off to the other) is the Ministry of Internet Monitoring, Censorship, and Dissident Suppression [or the hand grasping "administration"].
(Actual names of ministries may vary.)
Bolsheviks have no problem shooting you and fascists have no qualms about censorship, propaganda, and other information control techniques. While one might find substantive rather than merely rhetorical differences between those two brands of authoritarianism, you certainly won't find it in the place you seem to be looking for it.
Well, the apt "infrastructure" handles local file package repositories as well as network ones, and can allow download packages without installing them, so it should, in theory, be fairly straightforward to extend the GUI tools to give you the ability to click a package on, say, a CD or Flash drive to install it. Of course, you'd need to make sure you had all the dependencies bundled with it.
I don't think that's accurate.
I think its more accurate this way:
- The open source philosophers believe that sharing and cool technology are good for society, and to promote both they share some cool technology, and let people with whom it is shared use it freely.
- The free software philosophers believe that sharing and cool technology are good for society, and to promote both they share some cool technology, and condition that the people they are sharing it with agree to share it and any derivates, if at all, under the same terms.
No, while having every spammer be sued and lose would be nice, you avoid having a tempting "under-the-radar" space if spammers of every description get sued (even if not all of them), and lose often enough and pay out awards that substantially outweigh the profit from spamming. You thereby create enough risk to make spamming unattractive, though a spammer might get lucky and either escape a lawsuit or somehow prevail.
Criminal prosecution faces exactly the same limits as civil prosecution (it equally doesn't work unless its applied broadly and successfully), has greater public expense, and a higher burden of proof, and does less, in and of itself, for the actual victims. It certainly, particularly for the phishing and theft of service cases like this, is appropriate, but it doesn't replace civil prosecution in dealing with the overall spam problem.
Okay, okay, if you've got an electronic message that is sent to an "e-mail address" its an "e-mail" or "electronic mail". Good, so what's an "e-mail address"?
Okay, if "electronic mail" can be sent to it, its an e-mail address. So what's "electronic mail"? Oh, we go to (f) again, and round and round we go.
Special prosecutors are an inelegant workaround to the problem of conflict of interest; you can't have a prosecutor genuinely independent of the executive power of the sovereignty against whom the alleged crime was committed (at least, in the US system); and they are not completely independent or without conflict, they are an instrument for minimizing conflict.
Since there can be Wikipedia commentors genuinely and completely independent of Microsoft, no such inelegant hack is necessary to allow editing of Wikipedia at arms-length from Microsoft. A editor paid by Microsoft is acting in Microsoft's interests: if they aren't, Microsoft management is violating its fiduciary duty to Microsoft's shareholders.
And that is a conflict of interest, which is why Wikipedia has a set of Conflict of Interest guidelines that, in the first place, strongly discourage any editing by people paid by an interested party for edits, and, in the second place, strongly encourages that, if such people still feel the need to make edits, that they instead recommend them on talk pages and leave inclusion of them on main pages to neutral rather than compromised editors.
How about following Wikipedia's Conflict of Interest guidelines? Is that too much to ask?
Who said it did? I said it makes it know different than if it was posted by any other paid agent of Microsoft. That doesn't mean its FUD, necessarily.
That an interested party is paying for the edits at the vary least raises a conflict of interests. People who get paid for editing are naturally likely to want to give the people paying them what they want, because that will allow them to get paid for editting again.
Apparently, Wikipedia itself does, since its conflict of interest guidelines (WP:COI) strongly discourages edits by paid agents of involved parties and strongly encourages such agents, if they feel they still need to make changes, to instead recommend them on talk pages for inclusions by neutral, rather than compromised, editors.
That's probably why the PR people hired him—its certainly the reason corporations hire those with respect in the community as public faces rather than putting their own PR staff in commercials, too. On Wikipedia, it is also strongly discouraged by Wikipedia conflict of interest policies (which directly covered outside paid agents equally to members of interested organizations), with those feeling they need to make edits in such circumstances strongly encouraged to recommend the edits on discussion pages for inclusion by a neutral editor, rather than making them directly.
Note, this talks about material which, simultaneously: (1) violates Wikipedia's policies by being unsourced, and (2) is also defamatory. It also only applies to removing the offending material, not replacing it with other material.
That seems different from what was at issue here, a paid agent of an involved party rewriting material related to the involved party on that party's behalf and to make it more favorable (even if, supposedly, only by correcting "errors") to that party: that seems to fall squarely into the area strongly discouraged by the COI rules.
Since being a "better respect press member" usually starts with being seen as unbiased and uncorrupted, being on the payroll of an interested party would probably stop the "better respected press members" from being "better respected".
A paid agent of Microsoft is no more a "third party" in any meaningful sense than a regular Microsoft employee would be. Had Microsoft convinced a genuinely independent party with no connection to Microsoft to review the material for inaccuracies, and correct any errors in any directions that it found, that would be going a step further than submitting its own corrections. But having their own paid agent doing it is, well, the same as doing it themselves.