In my experience, students in general are the worst judges of teachers.

We have to ask ourselves what the purpose of education is before we can judge teachers. If we step back and decide that the purpose of education is to maximize success, then I would conclude that the best judges of teachers are, quite simply, successful people!

If you polled all of the most successful people about which teachers led the most to their success, I suspect that the vast majority of them would point to the teachers that truly challenged them - the teachers that made them work relentlessly to solve problems on their own, or those who would not reward anything less than perfection. These teachers are likely to score the lowest in the student rankings, because when you demand top results, many students are not going to be able to deliver.

Of course, very few of us actually end up being truly successful, so the system reflects reality. So, how about we allow the teachers to teach toward the top of the class - or heaven forbid, the median - and be happy knowing that teachers are challenging our students to the best of their ability. Then we can judge them years later by how many of their students go on to be successful.

What's that you say? What about the other kids? The ones at the bottom who couldn't cut it? Well, that's no different than things are now. Only right now if kids don't cut it, the school gets shut down and replaced by a charter school that can selectively reject all those 'underperforming' kids from attending...

OK, I'm a little tired of this argument. So let's clarify what teachers are actually saying:

1) Teachers do want to solve the problem, despite your obvious disbelief
2) Teachers know that personal attention is one of the best motivators of student performance
3) Teachers want smaller class sizes in order to provide more personal attention
4) Smaller class sizes require more teachers
5) More teachers cost $$$
6) Since they don't get the $$$ to hire new teachers, existing teachers ask parents of poor-performing students to help support the education of their own children
7) Parents who don't support public education, or who don't care about the success of their children, laugh and complain that the teacher isn't doing their job

You may be surprised to learn that there's a significant minority of parents that believe that teachers are just babysitters, and that school is just something that the government unnecessarily requires their children to do. I can promise you that the number of parents in any poorly performing school district that don't support their kids' education is far, far, far greater than the number of teachers in that district that are inept. Although I agree that those teachers should be replaced, the conclusion that replacing all of the crappy teachers will lead to significant improvement in education is completely baseless.

In the end, if the student doesn't want to learn, then they won't. There's plenty of blame to go around for that, but bad teachers is probably the least statistically significant.

I'm pretty sure your PS3 is incapable of doing just about anything without PS3-specific software...

This was my only complaint as well. Directors, whether for artistic purposes or not, have used focus for decades as a means of directing your eyes to the point on the screen that they want you to watch. In a true 3D world, the lenses in your eyes expect to be able to focus on an object at any depth. In Avatar 3D, this means that no matter how hard you stare at a close up object, if it was rendered out of focus you're just going to hurt your eyes - and possibly get a headache.

After about 15 minutes, I gave up on trying to immerse myself in the world and just let my eyes follow what the directors wanted me to follow, and I was much happier.

I suppose they could have rendered everything in focus at every depth, and allowed our eyes to focus on everything in frame. For all I know, they tried this and it actually caused more eyestrain due to people trying to 'see' every tiny object in every scene. Also, I believe that the entire movie was 'entirely CG scenes', so they obviously simulated camera focus using their rendering platform.

Cheap educational loans are provided by democratic governments, and opposed by republicans.

No Child Left Behind was imposed by republicans, and is almost universally opposed by democrats.

Let's be careful to sprinkle some perspective on our examples, as the moment I read this in your post, I completely stopped caring about what else you were saying, some of which may have been very insightful, but now I will never know.

Except the cable modem is NOT owned by the cable company... This isn't like the telephone companies of 30+ years ago. Obviously people were buying their own cable modems from the guy, therefore they are the legal owners of the devices. The cable company only owns the modems in their substations, and the cable itself (up to the demarcation point outside your home).

A better analogy is if the water company installed low-flow faucets and showerheads to try and prevent you from using water, and you went ahead and removed them so that you could actually enjoy a hot shower once in a while. The only difference is that the cable company doesn't bill you by the gallon (or MB, as the case may be).

The water company example is actually quite good, in that it parallels the 'tubes' of the internet. The water company can only supply a certain amount of capacity (pressure) to a given area. The difference is that the water company is highly regulated, as they have to be able to provide adequate pressure not just for home/irrigation use, but also for emergency services (fire company). Most water companies bill based on actual usage in a tiered pricing plan.

Cable companies on the other hand are allowed to oversell their bandwidth capacity by an enormous amount, are not required to maintain a minimum level of throughput for emergency services (although some now have to maintain 911 services for digital telephones), and do not bill based on actual usage!!!

As far as I'm concerned, if the cable companies billed based on usage instead of bandwidth, people would be a lot more careful about what they download and what services they expose to the outside world, and that solves most bandwidth problems in one step.

Trust may be the most important factor in promoting peace.

Yes.

Yes.

Y... Whoah, wait... What??? Oh, I'm sorry. For a second, I thought you were trying to make a rational argument. Now I see you're just prone to pointless hyperbole. My apologies...

Well, not exactly... But I do believe that as a whole, we need to stop spending such a ridiculous amount of resources protecting our ideas, and devote more resources to coming up with something that's actually worth stealing...

At some point, we need to decide where the balance is between personal gain and global benefit. Despite what you hear on the financial news networks, real market economists still believe that the optimal choices are those that benefit yourself as well as your surrounding community.

It doesn't cost more. For some time in my state, it actually cost less to buy a new Hummer than it did to buy a new Prius, due to our state government offering tax incentives for buying SUVs, etc.

Now we're finally turning that around and offering tax incentives for vehicles that offer more fuel efficiency and less pollution.

And you're right, I absolutely agree that grandma *probably* shouldn't have been able to afford that Hummer in the first place. In fact, I'm willing to bet that she couldn't without financing and tax incentives. I'm not, however, saying that we should increase costs until no one can buy them. I'm saying that we should increase the costs so that the auto manufacturers will adjust their manufacturing output toward vehicles that are targeted at the general public, rather than focusing only on those people that can afford to fill up a 20gal tank twice a week.

In other words, the profitability of a company should not come before the safety and cleanliness of our environment.

Although your response tells volumes about your position on this issue, I'll explain myself to the others that might be curious.

Socialism would imply that the government dictates which vehicles you can buy, period. Some might even go further and say that it implies that the government design and manufacture the vehicles, and no private corporation is allowed to compete. Clearly, I in no way implied either of these situations.

Frankly, I'm a bit tired of people using the word 'socialism' as a scapegoat to try and justify their own selfishness. Like it or not, it is the role of government in this country to make our decisions for us. Sure, they listen to their constituents on some matters, but the reality is that they vote how they feel for their entire term. If you don't like that, you have to run for office yourself - and win.

Our representative government has to stop worrying about being re-elected, and actually become the *leaders* we need them to be to encourage rational behavior in our consumerism. Right now, the only feedback Americans as a whole seem to respond to is in their wallets, so that's where government should focus their efforts.

Soccer moms don't drive farm vehicles.

Free markets only create an environment for companies to maximize profits. Any benefit to the consumer is purely coincidental.

Tell that to the guy in the accident with another steel car... The energy HAS to go somewhere. In the GP example, it almost ALL went in to the car with the crumple zones. If neither car had them, they may both be dead.