Average salaries are sometimes rather misleading. One issue with education is that it's highly seniority based.

Here's the salary schedule for the Seattle Public Schools:

http://www.seattlewea.org/images/static_content/certsalary0910.pdf

The SOONEST a teacher can break 50K is after 7 years of service, if they have a PhD.

In general, it takes 10 years to hit the 50K mark.

Stay in your chair long enough, get enough college credits, and the pay gets all the way up to "OK".

Would any of you guys give up your tech jobs for pay like that?

Obviously lesson plans produced at government funded public schools should be kept free and open so that they can be effectively refined and tailored for specific environments.

I think it depends on the district, the teacher, and the material.

The district my children are in (Seattle) has been notoriously chaotic about dispensing curriculum and lesson plans. In the name of fostering academic freedom, choices about textbooks and curriculum are devolved to the individual schools and frequently the individual teachers (schools not being given a budget for a curriculum developer). Only in the last few years has there been any central curriculum development whatsoever.

In this case, the teachers design these plans outside of regular work hours on their own nickel. I'd say the curriculum no more belongs to the school than the web apps you make on your off-hours belong to your employer.

Another district across the lake (Bellevue) takes exactly the opposite tact. Their curriculum is highly standardized and highly centralized. Teachers are given detailed lesson plans and materials and are expected to execute those faithfully.

In that case, you have a curriculum which is developed by a taxpayer-funded district, by a professional curriculum coordinator, and very clearly falls into the public domain.

In between, I suppose there are a lot of gray areas, but I don't have enough exposure to teaching to comment on that.

(disclaimer: I found your post on TAGMAX. I went to finishing school for a good three days or so, and am not going to argue homeschooling on a list full of homeschoolers. Slashdot, however, is fair game).

First, saying that parents who send their children to "government sponsored day care" are lazy is showing a tremendous quantity of prejudice. Do you KNOW any parents of public schooled kids, or are you so far in the bubble that they don't exist in your life?

I don't have any objections to homeschooling per se (I'm on TAGMAX, so I follow what people are doing and apply as much of this as possible when I can). However, parents approach to schooling and education can be extremely engaged when one's child is in public school as well. You have a choice as to whether you spend your evenings blobbing out over the TV, or reading books together, doing computer programming, teaching them to cook, etc.

You are a former teacher and have the intellectual and academic chops for the job. Good on you. I genuinely believe your children are getting a first-class education from you.

Where my issues arise is that I personally know homeschoolers who pulled their children out of school for fear of them being taught evolution, or "moral relativism" (whatever in Eris's sake that means), etc. These are not particularly bright or worldly people. You talk to their kids and there are some pretty severe gaps in their view of the world, and I have to put the responsibility for this directly on their, uhm, "teachers".

I think where we would agree is that parents have an immense role in the education of their children. If you drop your kids off at "government sponsored daycare", pick them up later, and think no more of it, you won't get good results. If you use the day's school lessons as a jumping off point for more discussion and inquiry, you're getting somewhere.

There's one lingering question I have which has never been satisfactorily answered. Perhaps you can help. Advocates for homeschooling say early and often that homeschooled kids perform above average in academics. In my home state of Washington, children who go through the district's homeschool resource centers get to take our wonderful standardized achievement test (the WASL). While the pass scores ARE above average when you take in the population set as a whole, when they are compared against their socio-economic peers (homeschoolers are generally an economically pretty well-off bunch) the average pass rates are considerably below average.

Perhaps it's not a representative sample, and the only ones who are going to these centers are kids the state thinks are struggling at home. Do you know anything about this?

Numerically impaired?

Nope. I count fine thanks.

The study was interesting, and I should be very precise in what I am saying, which the study does not refute.

Let's split hairs between "high level of ownership" and "easy access". Because everyone gets all weird when we talk about guns, I'll go back to cars.

If I want to drive a car in Italy, I am required by law to take a $3000 course which runs over several months. I'll do a rigorous written and driving test. After this, I will be allowed to drive a car.

If I want to drive a car in Washington State (the province South of BC, aka the bits that you guys didn't want), I will take a 10-minute multiple choice exam and not scare the examiner too badly as I drive a rigorous 1 km course followed by demonstrating my mad parallel parking skillz in an uncrowded lot.

As any vistor to Italy can see, there is a high level of car ownership. However, there is NOT easy access to car ownership.

The study is simply correlating per capita ownership to levels of violence and accidents and demonstrating that ownership alone does not correlate to accidents or violence. I find this very easy to believe. The inference that you are drawing, which the study appears to be completely mute on is what correlation there is between violence/accidents and ease of access to firearms. This is admittedly a much harder value to correlate. There are differing laws (and legal systems) in the jurisdictions mentioned in your study. While levels of ownership and numbers of injuries and deaths are easily quantifiable values, legal restrictions are not.

However, if you assert there is no correlation between ease of access and violence/accident levels, I find that very difficult to believe. I'm very patient, and will be delighted to compare Washington and Ontario law with you to build my case.

What's not a mystery is that, in the US, firearm-related accident rates are plummeting as legal gun ownership steadily increases. Parents are teaching their kids safe handling, and those kids aren't involved in tragedies.

Yes, but firearm-related accident rates are dramatically higher than anyplace else in the Western world due to easy access to firearms.

I'll frame my feelings on this subject this way:

1) The Supreme Court has made it resoundingly clear that the Second Amendment gives a broad personal right to own firearms. Even if I believed in gun control (I don't), it would be unconstitutional, and unless a ban was in place everywhere (see below), piecemeal bans do nothing but punish law-abiding citizens.

2) There are large swaths of the United States where hunting, shooting at animals that eat crops, etc. are regular parts of life. A blanket ban everywhere would be really incredibly dumb, and, oh yeah, unconstitutional (see above).

3) 99.999% of legal firearm owners are not a threat to me or anyone else. It's that last 0.001% that ruins it for everyone.

4) I think the argument that guns protect personal freedoms is pretty much pure poppycock. The State has you outgunned. Deal with it. Concern with being voted out of office weighs in the minds of most politicians 1000x more than fear of civil uprising does.

5) All these things being true, I find it a little unnerving that any space alien off the street can walk into a store and buy a gun. I would really prefer that some sort of licensing be set up. I don't really want to restrict anyone's right to own a gun any more than I want to restrict anyone's right to drive a car. I'd just prefer a speed bump be set up to demonstrate that you're somewhat competent to handle a gun, not bare-wires crazy, and to insure that someone's right to bear a gun goes away when they think that an appropriate use of their Second Amendment rights extends to shooting their rifle in the air during Halloween or the Fourth of July in my crowded urban neighborhood.

I got a license to drive a car over 20 years ago. I rarely even think about it. I follow my end of the deal, don't get liquored up before driving, and don't try find out if my car will really go up to 140 on I-90 at rush hour[1], and everyone's cool.

The ability to do common-sense regulation of firearms seems to get clouded by these slippery slope arguments that today it's just a license, and tomorrow they're going to come and take your guns away.

[1] That's what God made Eastern Washington for! And yes it does!

AT&T has a profit margin of 10%. If you think that is insanely high... I'd rather not be in business with you.

While I don't think AT&T releases profits by divisions of the company, I am writing from inside of one of those sections and don't think I'm giving away any big secrets by telling an illustrating factoid.

Much of the "bulk" of AT&T is the landline business. This is a high-cost, low margin business which is being eaten away at by VOIP, cable companies, attrition to mobile solutions, etc. Another poster asked about how to spend 100 billion dollars. Payroll for 300,000 employees is one way. Rooms full of expensive equipment is another.

There is a much smaller segment of the company involved in mobility solutions (cell phones/HSDPA/etc.) That divison of the company is quite profitable, thank you very much.

My home town (Seattle) is full of stairs that run up and down through greenbelt areas which are too steep to easily build on.

While I think it would be funny to run the GoogleTrikes down the staircases, it might not give the sort of results they're looking for.

er... aren't file systems usually linked lists? Meaning that if you manage to recover the first piece, you can then locate all the others.

Yeah, but... It depends on how that linked list is structured. // DISCLAIMER: I AM A UNIX ADMIN. TAKE ANYTHING I SAY ABOUT WINDOWS WITH A GRAIN OF SALT.

In the old DOS (FAT) world, the linked list was integral to the data on disk. So what you say is exactly correct. Find the header of the file, and you can trace through the file system and find the rest. This gets back to the idea of known text. If I find a chunk of disk with a JPEG header, I can look at the end of the data sector and find the reference to the next sector. I don't know if NTFS works this way. I kind of doubt it.

In the UNIX/Linux world, that linked list is stored in a structure called an inode. When you open a UNIX directory, there's a file name, and a reference to an inode number, from which all of your disk location data can be derived. Now, the downside of this is, once you've lost your inode, you have lost ALL reference to the file behind it. When a UNIX file is unlinked, the inode number in the directory is set to 0.

In theory, you can find a sector on disk that contains data you want to recover, and then track back through unallocated or released inode structures to recover the inode of your now deleted file. It's not trivial to do this. Look at the inode structure in /usr/include/sys on your friendly local Linux box and you'll see what I mean pretty quickly.

Unless you have overwritten the area on the physical disk that contained the data, multiple times, the data can still be recovered.

The DoD spec is written as it is for a reason. Given a drive with confidential data on it, an unauthorized person attempting to access the drive does not need to get everything back to pristine condition. Even recovering a small part of the total data set can cause incalculable damage if it's the right small part. The value of sites like Avsim are in the whole rather than the sum of the parts.

I've recovered data off of formatted HDD's, off of corrupted file systems, off of compact flash cards and other media (Really useful if you want to keep those photo's that someone thought was deleted, be aware of this people).

There's a large dependency on what you're trying to recover off of. DOS/NTFS are fairly easy to do recovers from. The first character of the filename is zilched out and the rest of the data to find the file is left intact. UNIX/Linux filesystems are a bear. Once you hit "rm", you've lost the ref to your inode. Putting Humpty Dumpty together again at that point becomes nearly impossible because the record which shows where all the pieces are is lost to you. If you have known text from the file, and a good knowledge of how the filesystem works, you should be able to backtrack. Otherwise? God help you.

There's also an issue of how the data is stored. A single-drive system is fairly straightforward. 2 drives are harder. Once you get into a SAN/NAS where data is spread over multiple drives, recovery of even a single file with known text becomes tricky. Multiple files? Unknown data? The only hope I would see at that point is to put a large segment of the Slashdot community on the problem and tell them a large trove of high-res pictures of Natalie Portman completely nekkid are stored within.

In which case those US customs agents should have a search warrant to check those DVDs unless the basic principals that the United States was founded on have been majorly violated.

#include <ianal.h>

It's 4:30 in the morning and I don't feel like digging up case law right now. Unfortunately, the law (and the courts) have said for the last, oh, 150 years or so that the rights enshrined in the Constitution do not apply at the border.

I blame that villainous scofflaw of human rights, Abraham Lincoln.

I wonder if by chance this will finally be the thing that will make them close our border down south?

You mean stop letting my coworkers and neighbors go down to Cancun so they can come back here and infect me and my children with swine flu? Excellent idea!

Oh. You were talking about the guys in front of the labor pickup area. Seen 'em. Don't talk to 'em. Don't drink with 'em. They're not a big health concern to me.

Thx. I learned something new from this thread. And me without an XP machine to test it on.

Anyone who says Macs are virus-proof doesn't have a clue as to what they're talking about.

Macs ARE harder to inject viruses into because the limited privilege escalation system used by Macs (and Linux) reduces the opportunities to run processes as root.

On pre-Vista Windows boxes, most people ran their default account with godlike administrator privileges. It's either that or:

Run a restricted account
Any time you want to install software
DO:
    log out of your restricted account
    log into the admin account
    install the software
    then go back to your restricted account.
REPEAT

After doing this about 5 or six times, you get frustrated and switch the "Administrator" flag on your restricted account and thus leave yourself open to attack any time you download something (or navigate to a malware page if you're running IE).

The vector for infection for this botnet was escalating privileges to install CS 3. It only happens once, and only happens briefly, but once is all you need!

America has just spent the last 5 years torturing people and invading a country against international law with American soldiers massacring its population with impunity. It's a terrible role model for democracy.

There are several comments in this thread that would be good as a jumping-off point for the role of the Net in preventing authoritarian tendencies. Yours seemed good. Congratulations!

Let's look at a few things:

1) The US has, by law if not necessarily by practice, one of the freest flows of information in the world. There is no prior restraint (q.v. UK, Canada), there are no laws restricting hate speech (q.v. Germany), libel cases are notoriously hard to prosecute (lots of places), and judges have historically given a lot of protection to people who bring forth government "secrets" which expose wrongdoing by members of the government.

2) While I won't say there was no vote fraud anywhere, because I don't believe that, the democratic processes here work pretty well on the whole. Let's say that 99% of the voters in the US were able to get to the polls and voted for the candidate of their choice. The US is not Zimbabwe.

3) What was going on vis a vis torture, detentions, illegal declarations of war, etc. was not some big secret that you had to get from samizdat sold in a back alley. Pick up a major newspaper, tune into NPR, or even watch CNN, and what the Bush administration was doing was being lovingly documented, even if there was a lot more deference to state power than the situation deserved. And, of course, any one of a number of bloggers and alternative news sources dug in to their offenses with relish.

So, with all that access to information, Mr. Bush and his enablers won two Presidential elections and three (arguably more if you go back to 1994) congressional elections. While a lot of heat is made of potential vote fraud in Ohio and Florida, the fact is that most states were not very close. (FWIW Bush lost my state by 5% the first time and 7% the second time).

The question this poses is, if so much chicanery can be done in plain sight, with the approval of we the people in a society with some of the best access to information on the planet, what difference can the Internet make in a country without this sort of infrastructure? I would argue that if you control the primary sources of information, what leaks out around it does not make much difference. This is unfortunately a human and not a technical problem.