What you are describing is a conventional, fixed-rate mortgage. It does exactly what you want, and you can even vary the additional principal month-to-month.

They are limiting minors' access to online gaming to one hour on weekends and holidays.

More importantly, if we had a Space Corps we could have had Space Marines. I can't believe we had the opportunity to have Space Marines and missed it!

Equal pay for equal remote work should be the standard. It is reasonable that pay varies by the location of the work. It is unreasonable that pay for the same work location, and I am counting remote as a location, should vary based on where you live.

Paying remote workers less based on where they live is redlining, pure and simple.

GNU is not Unix. Mac OS X is.

https://www.opengroup.org/open...

For not even $2,000, Apple will sell you a Unix laptop with an industry-leading custom CPU and great battery life. It comes in unibody a aluminum shell, has US-based phone support, and a retail store within driving distance that handles repairs. If you strapped 3 lbs of dead weight to it, raised the price to $6,000, and slapped a Solaris sticker on it; Slashdot would think it was the greatest laptop ever and people should just save up for it to get a real computer.

Apple event on 4/20? I smell a new OS version!

(Not really. They'll probably save that for WWDC.)

I wouldn't stay on iPhone because of it. But it is nice:

1. It's rich texting. Typing ellipses, read receipts, reactions, animations, etc. Including easy privacy features such as configuring the rich features on a per-contact basis.
2. The client (Messages) integrates SMS and iMessage really nicely. I have my group chats with friends including Android devices and chats with all-iPhone friends all living in one app. If Androids are in the picture, it seamlessly falls back on SMS/MMS. All-iPhone switches you right over to iMessage.
3. Apple has stayed committed to the client and platform for a decade.

The big problem from the instructor perspective is verifying who is taking the exam. All the best exam design doesn't help if students are paying a professional cheater to take the exam on their behalf. This is called contract cheating and is more common than you might think.

I require Respondus Monitor even though my exams are open book, open note. It isn't perfect, but it's the best I have to verify identity. Ironically, I have caught students who had their contract cheater sitting right next to them telling them what to answer. I guess they thought I would never look at the video.

You’re making my point. To prevent contract cheating, at some point you need a camera in the loop. Whether that is synchronous or asynchronous, one-to-one or one-to-many is a function of how many students you have and how often you want to assess.

If you’re teaching graduate seminars with a comp exam, the choice set is different than if you’re teaching intro freshman courses with five exams and a final.

I use open-book tests. I still use a similar, but in my opinion much more privacy protecting, product called Respondus Monitor.

One of the major ways in which students cheat today is through contract cheating. That means you hire someone to take the test for you. Graduate-level experts can be hired for relatively little money.

No amount of assessment design gets you around that problem. At some point, you need a camera in the loop to verify who is taking an assessment.

Partial union dues. The union has to break down its expenditures for contract administration, bargaining, and grievance; the services they are legally required to provide to you even if you object; and only charge an agency fee for those. Unless you are a public employee (nationwide) or in a "right-to-work" state, in which case you pay nothing yet still get free-rider access to those services.

It's a bit like living in an HOA community, using the services, and then complaining that you want to opt out of HOA dues.

My college tests are open book as well. I still use proctoring software. Why? Contract cheating, which means students having someone else take the tests for them. It's become quite common and there are lots of websites where you can hire yourself a contract cheater.

At a minimum you need some sort of proctoring solution to verify the identity of the test taker. Even with my recording solution (Respondus Lockdown Monitor, no cost to the students), I still have the occasional contract cheating happening. I even have a fun video of a contract cheating outfit (housed out of a local sorority), openly discussing other contract cheating customers and pricing and workload while taking my student's test.

I had one programming course in college that focused on structural complexity. We started the semester with an existing program that the professor had us type into our own accounts. Yes, that was annoying. But it did get us familiar with the code base.

From that time on, every assignment modified and extended that program cumulatively. If you engaged in quick and dirty hacks in the beginning, you would pay for each of them in later projects as your code had become less maintainable. This included "fun" assignments such as: make your code Y2K compatible.

It was the most educational programming course I have ever taken. And it was COBOL of all things.

This deal gives you Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, i.e. the one that includes PC games. It is specifically only a deal if you also PC game. Believe it or not, you are kind of the target market.

I do PC and Xbox and think Xbox Game Pass Ultimate is a super deal by itself. So much so it's making me consider switching from iPad for my portable device to a GPD Win, even though I'm knee deep in Apple's ecosystem. But I also got Game Pass on sale, which a deal like this precludes. This is more for the "I don't have $500 up front" club.

We are living through a 100-year pandemic. It will probably be less than a year before vaccines have it under control. And some employees are complaining that parents have it too easy?

How stupid to turn on each other like that.