... and *you're* the reason they have to ban smartphones during trivia night at the local bar...

I had suggested a longer school year as another alternative. Longer days would be more for high school level - I can see that being a disaster at earlier grades, unless nap time was included. High schoolers often work a part time job after school anyway; this would open up the possibility of them taking a weekday shift in place of random 2 hour blocks throughout the week. Same amount of school and work happening, just shuffled more efficiently.

They aren't giving up a "weekend" day: there would be the same number of teacher shifts as student shifts, so they will also have 4 day weeks. Basically the point is to get 1/3 more usage out of the same building, facilities, etc. You still need to have 1/3 more staff to handle the 1/3 more students.

As for who would do it? I know / knew many teachers who have / had an hour commute each way. They certainly would benefit from a shorter week. And again, this is why I said to only implement it in a *handful* of schools - for those that it would work for, they will have the option, and if the popularity of 4 day work weeks outside the education sector is any indication, you would have to beat them away with a stick.

I don't think you'll have any trouble staffing a school with such an arrangement, or getting students willing to try it. The hardest part would be parent buy-in (those who don't trust their teenager home alone all day in the middle of the week). This arrangement does not lend itself to helecopter parenting.

One solution would be time separation. Some overcrowded NYC high schools would have an AM / PM shift. Another novel idea would be 4 day school weeks, accomplished either via longer days or a longer school year. One group M-TH, a second W-SAT, and an unlucky third shift (M,TU,F,SAT). In this manner, you have 2/3 the students and teachers in the school at any given moment. Only a handful of schools need to do it in order to reduce the pressure on the entire system, and I'd imagine with the draw of 3 days off a week there'd be no shortage of both student and staff applicants for those schools (thus no one would be forced into it).

We almost have that in the form of heavily subsidized colleges: state and community. At least here in NY they're fairly affordable (provided you do not dorm there). The idiots who are 80k in debt working at Burger King are the ones who went to NYU, Cornell, etc and chose a major that does not deliver clear "marketable skills" while also failing to "network" with more successful people which is the main benefit of going to a pricy school. It takes a combination of bad decisions and bad luck (expensive school, liberal arts major, not finding the right crowd) to end up in that position.

At my high school, our academic advisor had addressed the senior class with: "for most of you, you will get the same education at Queens College as you would at Princeton."

It's at least more obvious than changing a gmail password nowadays... at least ebay has your name, indicating that clicking there may be vaguely related to your account. Gmail I had to click on a silouette, then something account sounding, then finally a "security" tab. Forget buried, you need an archaeologist to find that one...

Such an experiment is directly at odds with terraforming. Figuring out which simple (yet useful) life foms can survive both the trip and the environment is one step that can be taken. Since colonization of Mars is the best chance we have at putting some of our eggs in another basket, figuring out what we can put there to start the process of changing the atmospheric composition to be more human-friendly would seem to be a worthy experiment as well.

Except the Bahamas has a pretty big ally, unlike those other areas. The U.S. attacking the Bahamas could start WWIII, since the British would have to intervene. It would be as politically viable as attacking Canada.

Replying to give this more visibility; I had no idea this existed (not that I've ever looked for it) but at first glance it actually looks pretty good. I'd say it is far better for teaching the basics of DBA work than MS Access, and free (as in beer) also makes it more affordable for students if such a product were used in a classroom setting. Disclaimer: I did not read the license to see if such a use was allowed, but it would be foolish of Oracle to block the opportunity to indoctrinate generations of DBAs on their product...

The U.S. isn't represented by $is_overpopulated_city = ($numPeople > $numCows) ? true : false;

There's plenty of areas where you can get both 3 and 4g wireless *and* drive stress free at 5PM... ride Amtrak sometime and look at what phones gets at each town the train stops in. Large towns have low buildings (thus the cell towers can reach farther) and with lower population density, there's less demand placed on those cell towers.

I agree with most of your post, but disagree with this one. Japan allows immigration of skilled labor. The difference between them and elsewhere is they *only* allow the skilled laborer, and not the rest of the family (unless, of course, the rest of the family is able to meet the immigration criteria individually). This filters out anyone who could possibly be a burden on their social systems. A side effect of this is that the few who do immigrate tend to assimilate into Japanese culture, but that is also necessary: their society does not have rules or laws spelled out for every little thing. There are things the legal system allows that no Japanese person would ever do, except in special circumstances. Trying to allow for legitimate exceptions in laws is hard, but when things are enforced by cultural norms, it's easier to have no law.

For New York State, I787 and 495 (Long Island Expressway) still have a minimum speed limit of 40. source (it's buried in there, search for "minimum" to find the right paragraph...).

Couldn't they just have disabled unicode for ACs? Presumably the moderation system would handle the rest.

Also similar to VNC, you can allow other users read only access to your screen session. Useful for a classroom instruction scenario, or collaboration among remote employees.

A more niche but still useful feature is the ability to connect to the same screen session from multiple locations simultaneously. Generally I prefer to work from a Linux box, but whenever I need to copy/paste with outlook, having the same session open on a Windows box is quite helpful...

For an EMP I'd be more worried about cars than trains. A complete loss of all electrical systems should cause an emergency brake application (railway brakes are completely mechanical in all but the most modern trains; fortunately the US doesn't have many of those). On the other hand, the sudden loss of power steering and assisted braking on every road vehicle would mean chaos.

So, English Majors are good for documentation and middle management?