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Comment Re:Thanks a lot, Jackass (Score 1) 1090

by theripper (#33445152) Attached to: Armed Man Takes Hostages At Discovery Channel HQ

Reading comprehension is your friend here.

There are left/right-wingers, moderates, and centrists.

left wing + left moderate + centrist + right moderate + right wing = pentachotomy.

And if you really want to take what the GP said to the extreme:

left wing + left moderate + left centrist + centrist + right centrist + right moderate + right wing = heptachotomy.

So while you're correct that there's nothing in what he said between moderate and extreme, there are definitely more than three things to choose from. In reality it's probably more like this:

left wing + moderate left wing + left moderate + left centrist + centrist + right centrist + right moderate + moderate right wing + right wing

Comment Re:No fly list is a dumb idea (Score 1) 300

by theripper (#31964844) Attached to: Man Put On "No-Fly List" While In Air To NYC

As a citizen of the USA I have the right to travel across the country freely. In a car, on foot, on a bus, etc. The government places no restrictions upon that travel when I am a passenger. As a passenger, or on foot, I and kill thousands of people at one time. Still the government places no restrictions on me.

The only time restrictions are placed on me is when I board a plane.

I would argue that the passenger of a plane offers no more threat than a guy walking down a street in manhattan, both can kill thousands at once. If that is so then why placemore restrictions on the passenger of the plane?
Education

Improving Education Through Better Teachers 446

Posted by Soulskill from the best-of-luck-without-raising-pay dept.
theodp writes "The teaching profession gets schooled in cover stories from the big pubs this weekend, as Newsweek makes the case for Why We Must Fire Bad Teachers, and the NY Times offers the more hopeful Building a Better Teacher. For the past half-century, professional educators believed that if they could only find the right pedagogy, the right method of instruction, all would be well. They tried New Math, open classrooms, Whole Language — but nothing seemed to achieve significant or lasting improvements. But what they ignored was the elephant in the room — if the teacher sucks, the students suck. Or, as the Times more eloquently puts it: 'William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years. Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes. And the gaps were huge.' But what makes a good teacher? When Bill Gates announced his foundation was investing $335 million in a project to improve teaching quality, he added a rueful caveat. 'Unfortunately, it seems the field doesn't have a clear view of what characterizes good teaching,' Gates said. 'I'm personally very curious.'"
Government

Secret Service Runs At "Six Sixes" Availability 248

Posted by timothy from the only-need-half-as-many dept.
PCM2 writes "ABC News is reporting that the US Secret Service is in dire need of server upgrades. 'Currently, 42 mission-oriented applications run on a 1980s IBM mainframe with a 68 percent performance reliability rating,' says one leaked memo. That finding was the result of an NSA study commissioned by the Secret Service to evaluate the severity of their computer problems. Curiously, upgrades to the Service's computers are being championed by Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who says he's had 'concern for a while' about the issue."

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