>Not "right" by the OP's definition, no. Even in 1906 they could not have reasonably predicted the conditions of 2014.

They wanted to widen and straighten the streets. This would have made a pretty significant impact on the road conditions in SF, even today.

Could you imagine what London would be like today if they didn't remodel a bit after 1666?

>Yes - damn the city planners of the 1870's for not anticipating the conditions of 2014.

I know, right? It's not like all of San Francisco ever got hit by a massive earthquake and fire or something.

Actually, they did have their chance to rebuild the city right - they knew their layout was shit and considered it - the trouble was figuring out how property rights would work when you moved all of the lots around was too much of a nightmare for the city, especially given that they'd lost all their records in the fire. So they were basically forced to allow everyone to rebuild right where they were before, using a city layout that would make old European cities cry from dysfunction.

>I don't understand completely how this all has gone so far so fast. Just 15 years ago, this all would have been unthinkable.

The FISA court has been around a lot longer than 15 years. It was founded in 1978, and has been a civil rights issue for those of us paying attention for a long time now.

The American legal system, as you say, is based on being able to confront your accuser in a criminal case (6th Amendment), to examine evidence held against you, and that trials in abstentia are a violation of our natural rights.

So yeah, Pope, I agree with you for once.

>When the simplest functions require you to go to the internet to find out how to do them. My virgin W8 experience wasdoing a websearch on how to shutdown, and there were lots of hits. If we have problems trying to figure how to shut the computer down, there is something drastically wrong.

Yeah, that was my first experience as well. A waitress at a local Denny's had a brand new W8 laptop, and she was passing it around the Fresno Chess Club trying to get someone how to shut it down. Not one could do it. So she brought it over to me. I laughed at them a bit, and then realized I couldn't find the damn shutdown option either.

When you bury a very common operation under an invisible menu (the charms bar) under a nonsensical choice (Power Options) you have a contender for Worst UI of the Decade.

> SCOTUS actually ruled pretty much the opposite: it said -- in so many words -- that the EPA can NOT write its own rules contrary to the laws explicitly laid down by Congress.

Yeah. I listened to the live oral arguments for this case, because I'm a nerd I guess, and the justices were very, very skeptical of the EPA's position on the matter. They fully understood that maybe 250 tons of CO2 isn't as bad as 250 tons of cyanide or whatever, but they really didn't want to go down the road of letting the EPA write their own law and then regulate it.

What SCOTUS really wants done is for congress to come in and adjust the pollution threshold from 250 to 10,000 tons on CO2, and they don't seem opposed to the notion of regulating CO2 entirely as a 'pollutant' (something I take a bit of issue with, as pretty much anything could be called a pollutant in that case if you have enough of it), but given the dysfunction of Congress, it'll probably never happen.

>After all, science is not like philosophy. Science is meant to be used

You use philosophy every day. Everyone does. You just don't realize it because it has faded into the background.

Statements like "People will try to use it and it wont work and they will immediately know that there has been a falsification" reveal what sort of philosophical schools of thought you have bought in to. But they are not God-given, or even necessarily right or best. But you use it anyway because there's a hive mind in science that thinks that Naive Popperism is equivalent to science itself.

>Opting out in Facebook is like playing one of those old Flash games where you mouse around the screen, trying to find the hot spot that will accept a click.

Copying Windows 8's UI, no doubt.

>I note the difference in firing rate. And yet there is little to no evidence that private schools offer a better education or have better outcomes than public schools.

Not the difference, but the fact that public schools in California had effectively a 0% firing rate for tenured teachers. Are you telling me that no tenured teachers are actually bad, and should be fired? Because I can tell you the number is somewhere between 0% and 15%.

>I agree. But honestly, my first reaction to seeing a result like that is that there must be something wrong with the test, not the teacher.

Well, that was a pulling numbers-out-of-my-ass example. But the point is, we test students annually on their English and Math performance, so it's really not that hard to identify teachers that are doing a poor job, because we can see where their kids were at before and after their year of teaching.

I'll tell you another thing - the creative teachers that don't teach to the test, throw away the textbook, and give their kids an interesting and engaging experience? Their students actually do pretty well on the tests. I had Jan Gabay (http://preuss.ucsd.edu/faculty-and-staff/bio/teachers/jan-gabay.html) as a teacher for two years, and she didn't spend a single day in AP English teaching to the test. The class didn't even know what would be on the test, but pretty much everyone passed. I work with similar teachers across the country (Bill Coate being a notable example) and they uniformly do well on their test results (both on my assessments and on standardized state and national assessments).

So if a creative teacher is doing cool creative stuff and the students aren't doing any better on a standardized test after a *year* of their class, then yeah, I'll go ahead and say they're wasting the students' time. Remember, we're not interested in identifying who is creating the highest test scores, but rather which teachers are completely failing to educate their kids.

Maybe we have a system were they're given intervention first before they can lose tenure (like how schools get PI before being taken over), maybe we have principals do impromptu observations of their classrooms (which would turn up problems like my AP Physics teacher, who was simply old and burned out - he'd give students free passes anywhere on or off campus when he didn't feel like teaching, and would send them out to bring him donuts), but these systems can be implemented with the data technology we have available today (I know, I've done them for a decade). It's just that the unions don't want anything that will make teachers easier to fire.

>I agree the teacher unions could be a lot more cooperative. But then teacher unions and administrators have had a long history of animosity towards each other. They don't trust each other.

Depends on the district, really. Some get along great, some make each others' life miserable.

But I'm more talking about the state teachers' union, the CTA, which is the #1 donor to political campaigns in California. They have literally stood up in Congress and told our congressmen that "We put you there, we can get you out, too." In such an environment, there is zero chance that anything they don't want to go through, and they have no desire to see a teacher evaluation system put in place. Other states, like New York, are just as bad from what I can tell. Hawaii's education system is hilariously dysfunctional.

Grr, Slashcode at the results.

Here's the results again.

N=44
Teachers failing: 6
Teachers marginal: 13
Teachers passing: 25

I also note several awkward sentences, which I apologize for. It's 2:10AM.

You might also be interested in the firing rate comparison between public and private schools here: http://teachersunionexposed.co...

>Uh, sure, but is that because of tenure? I doubt it. Are experienced teachers blocking good ideas and protecting themselves from younger teachers with tenure? No, not likely. Experienced teachers are protecting themselves from administrators. The younger teachers don't have this protection, unfortunately.

Tenure means you can sit in the back of the classroom and read travel magazines all day, like my AP Physics teacher did, while the class does nothing but take problem sets. That the class then passes around and then grade.

The tenure system certainly doesn't protect the starry eyed new teachers who do all sorts of creative and interesting things (and get good results) but end up quitting because the system grinds them down. And no, giving tenure to them wouldn't really help either, as a lot of them quit, not get fired. Though some do get pink slipped in order to avoid giving them tenure. Some districts I work with pink slip pretty much everyone they can every year and then rehire them back.

>That is what I said above, but what would make this discussion more interesting would be some numbers. Exactly how many bad teachers are there? As a percentage of total teachers? And how many of those bad teachers have been identified as needing to be removed, but are being blocked by tenure? In my experience, "bad teacher" is often "teacher I don't like" which is another reason tenure exists.

Number would help us to fire bad teachers, wouldn't it? That's why teachers unions are so adamantly opposed to it. And yes, I've heard their spokesmen repeat the claim that you made, that they support "reasonable" evaluation of teacher performance, but the actual reality is that they don't. Teachers themselves are - and with good reason - paranoid about whatever evaluation system is implemented, but the CTA opposes everything in practice.

California applying for Race to the Top (RTTT), which will add accountability measures? The CTA offered $18k to every state senator who voted against it. It's nice being the organization with the most political money in the entire state, is it not?

LA implementing a reasonable evaluation measure? Opposed. Doesn't matter if it would actually be used to determine pay or firings or whatever.

I could probably do a fairly comprehensive analysis on what percentage of teachers are bad. I've got data spanning a large chunk of the state. But just pulling up one sample school district's results for a test I administered, elementary school teachers (and their students) were given a standards-based test in a core academic subject (which I won't mention so as to provide a bit of anonymity). Note that this was *the same test* their students took. It was a student test. So it was pretty basic stuff. Here's the results:
Number of Teachers (N) taking test: 44
Those failing (= 60% && "bad teacher" is often "teacher I don't like" which is another reason tenure exists.

Which is, again, why we need a comprehensive and fair evaluation system. If teachers could lose tenure by scoring abysmally on a standardized content knowledge test, but keep it otherwise, then only the incompetent teachers could be fired. And only then if their principals thought they weren't salvageable. Teacher training programs can be effective at fixing these issues.

>All evaluations are subjective. Just because you can put a number on something doesn't mean it is helpful or meaningful.

I don't think you know what subjective means. Subjective means that a principal can do a classroom evaluation and give a teacher he likes a good review, and a teacher he doesn't like a bad review. Objective, by contrast, means observer-independent. It means that the system judges all people equally, It doesn't mean that the test is especially meaningful, as you say, since you could objectively assess things unrelated to a student's knowledge. But I will tell you that if Johnny comes in to your English class knowing 5000 words in the English language, and walks out of your class knowing only 3000, then you're failing at your job as an English teacher. Fair assessments can track this sort of thing.

> 1) Protects experienced senior teachers. You might not think this is important, but guess what? Older, experienced teachers are generally more expensive and have more political influence. Hip new administrator comes in, wants to to change things up, slim down the budget. Get rid of the older teachers first beacuse the younger are cheaper and easier to control.

And yet the way the system actually works in practice? Young teachers with interesting new ideas get forced out of the system. The system is very hostile to people trying to do something different or interesting. It grinds you down and makes you quit.

> 2) Protects good teachers. You know the ones that actually teach and care about education, and don't just give A's to everyone for showing up and sitting at their desk. Actual teaching and enforcing academic standards tends to upset certain kinds of parents. Administrators don't like vocal and upset parents.

Well, this is true. But it protects good and bad teachers equally.

> 3) Protects teachers that push against the administration. Not teaching to the test, enriching the curriculum, doing what might be considered risky things by some ( lab experiments, field trips, etc). Administration often doesn't want this, because it creates headaches for them, but teachers want it because it enhances the education of their students.

Hah.

Hahahaahahaha.

Ah.

> 4) In areas with strong influence by outside political groups, protects teachers that teach controversial subjects. Science vs. creationism is one example, but certainly not the only one. History, economics, literature, art...all of these can have controversial topics. Of course, we don't really teach these anymore, but that is a different topic.

Again, doesn't happen in practice.

Source: I've been an evaluator for school districts for over a decade.

>If you want to improve the quality of teachers, we need to be looking at the evaluation systems that are in place, whether they exist, and why they may or may not be working. Most teachers simply are never evaluated ever, or they are evaluated in completely useless ways. Address that, and then maybe we can deal more easily with underperforming teachers, adjusting the tenure rules as necessary but keeping its major benefits.

Now you're talking my language.

There's a lot of fairly easy ways to test the performance of teachers, such as taking the delta of students' standardized test scores from the previous year and from the current year. Classroom observations and the like (which I'm sure you were referring to) are universally subjective and pointless. The reason we don't have a systematic method of evaluating teacher performance boils down entirely to the issue of teachers unions blocking them. Without data, it's hard to say who the bad teachers are, and the process of firing them is so convoluted and lengthy that most districts don't even bother.

>THERE WERE NO GAMES RELEASED FOR THE PSP WORTH BUYING, OR EVEN PLAYING.

Final Fantasy Tactics was released for the PSP well before it was re-released on the PS3, and it had very nice artwork added to it that made the game a lot better, that didn't get put into the PS3 re-release (IIRC).

Tactics Ogre and Dissidia were also good games for the PSP, from what I hear.

>"A better coding for data error correction and redundancy than Reed-Solomon" - this is News for Nerds after all.

Well, yeah. There's lots of things better than Reed-Solomon for doing video encoding in a lossy environment. I worked on such a project at UCSD in 1998 or so with John Rogers and Paul Chu that could eat pretty impressive amounts of noise and still have a usable video signal without retransmissions. It's start getting pretty muddy looking when you really cranked up the losses, but unlike JPEG or something like that, a frame was still renderable even if you took out any particular chunk of the data.

>. Its so frustrating to hear people on the news talk about how a doctor wouldn't treat them because he didn't take "obamacare". There is no single policy that can be catagorised as "obamacare"

You're probably misunderstanding what is said, or the reporters are saying it wrong. The ACA cut $200B from Medicare/Medicaid reimbursements, and some doctors stopped accepting such patients when they did the math and found it would cause them to take a loss, or not be worth their time.

>a global evolution of government monetary policy which allowed for financial mechanisms to enable such high valuations of companies.

It had more to do with how the private sector chose to valuate internet sites. They were developed by people who had no understanding of what an internet was, or did, or how it was expected to make money. The internet had only permeated the public consciousness in 1995, and so these idiots, who probably didn't get online until 1997 or 1998, were somehow experts on how to valuate companies by 1999? Hah.

Their method? Take the number of users of the site, multiply by a thousand. That's the valuation.

It's no wonder that people like Warren Buffett steered clear of investing in tech stocks for exactly that reason - he said he'd invest once someone developed a better way of determining how much a stock was worth.

But a lot of idiot investors instead used this terrible valuation rule, did some math, determined sites that did not and could not ever make money were leaping in "value" hand over foot, and invested billions of dollars in them. And then whoever was left holding the bag when the reality of a zero return on equity finally hit home lost all the money they invested.

The government didn't hold a gun to these people's heads to make them make brain dead investments. I argued very strongly with some of my friends at the time in investing in tech bubble stocks, for exactly the reasons above, but they were firmly convinced that the number of users was a realistic evaluation of a web site's worth, and so ignored me and lost their money anyway.