Equip teleworkers' laptops with a Webcam, and require them to use AccuTimeCard with Webcam enablement.

examiners repeatedly lied about the hours they were putting in and many were receiving bonuses for work they did not do

If workers in private industry do that, we call that fraud. Hours of claimed work should be validated and approved by an uninterested third party such as a supervisor.

The supervisor should keep their own private notes and reject the submission of hours, if it is in disagreement with their notes.

All of these recommendations are, naturally, based on your extensive research into optimizing educational outcomes for children, yes?

Actually, they're based on the fact that habits learned early, such as working hard a full working day, get carried along later into life.

And the purpose of schools is not to "maximize education outcomes" by someone's ad-hoc standard, but to provide sufficient inspiration and opportunity to acquire basic knowledge and general skills ability and motivation to pursue lifelong self-learning.

Because, it's simply a fact: schools cannot teach you a significant percentage of exactly what you need to know to get through life. In fact.... there are a lot of pieces of information you will likely need to know in the future, that you do not know today, and frankly, the knowledge or information might not even exist today.

You're not going to memorize future prospective employers' telephone numbers and resume submission instructions in school. It's not part of an "educational outcome"; it's simply something you will have to learn later, millions of things, the same.

Therefore.... schools, quite frankly don't exist for the purpose of optimizing "educational outcomes". They exist for the purpose of maximizing the qualities of students' current childhood, life after school, and future opportunities, in other words their happiness.

For some students, their happiness will be maximized if they are leaving elementary school all ready to pass out of college Calculus III and skip to some advanced physics classes.

For others.... they will be pleased with a more laid back, balanced course of study. So "educational outcome" and satisfaction can ultimately only be assessed by the students' determination themselves!

That's a bad idea. A 10-hour school day would guarantee that at least two of those hours are wasted. The only upside would be that you wouldn't have to care what your kids are doing while you're at work.

Two of those hours are often wasted already. If you didn't notice I also suggested a 4 day school week, in which students will have no schoolwork on Wednesday, for example. Quite the opposite of parents not having to care for what their kids are doing ---- many might be abusing the school system and the traditional schedule as a means to "Not have a parent taking on a caretaker role" and a sort of "day care" to avoid all parental participation in students' lives.

My suggestion would be that while the hours would be extended: teachers would not be allowed to assign "homework", and all projects would all have to be done on school premises during those 10 hours, with the teacher or other students available to assist each other.

If students have 4 classes a day, each for 90 minutes of instruction time, then another 50 minutes of time would be added to each class for the sole purpose of completing reading assignments and tasks to be turned in at the end of the period.

The "off day" would be for the students' own self-study, not lounging around, and there should likely be some mandatory "activities" based on grade level such as visits to the library and participation in a certain minimum number of designated field trips per term requiring parental engagement, active parental participation. This implies that occasionally at least one parent would be required to take some number of entire days off work during the school year and actively participate in the activity to meet a requirement, and prove meeting that requirement by the end of the semester.

Not that failure to conduct the activity would affect the student's grade, but that the parents would be subject to possible truancy charges and jail time if the required standard of participation from the parent was not met, and the student would be subject to having their "vacation time" reassigned as time to make up / do the activities.

There is no evidence to suggest most bugs come from tasks developers find difficulty. Which is implying that "shotgun troubleshooting" is causing bugs ---- this is a real potential phenomena, but I believe it is one primarily suffered by novice programs.

Competent programmers are likely to seek help and be extra careful about it when they find something difficult, which suggests more testing and more careful coding and quicker discovery of bugs with the thing they are finding difficult..

What's more likely happening is the bugs are occuring When programmers are not careful, because the task is difficult or complex, but the developer is overly complacent or fails to recognize the difficulty, or they just make a silly careless mistake, because they perceive the task so easy, they are not being so cautious, and they are kind of rushing through it --- furthemore, when they look back at the code, they may see it perfectly correct and not recognize that there could be an error at all.

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
- Mark Twain

And, of course, you're illustrating the real problem with this idea: it would cost money. Money for buildings and money for teachers

This is already an issue. More money needs to be spent, even if we don't go to year-round schooling.

Also... a 4-day school week, 2-week vacation every 4 months and perhaps a 3-week winter break would also still provide plenty of time for building maintenance; they would just have to prioritize the maintenance differently.

For example: schedule it around the days that students are not there.

Think balancing a chemical equation in chemistry or solving the a Lorentz time dilation problem in physics, or remembering the plot of Snow White

Elementary/High school students don't really need to retain the skills such as balancing a chemical equation. They've studied the material, they've proven they have learned it.

Students may appear to have forgotten it --- but that's just because it's not important, since they don't use it in their daily lives. They don't really need to know this, and remembering it would be a waste of the kids' mental resources.

This means the mental connections are in place, and even they lose the ability to balance chemical equations, they are equipped to easily have the capability if they need to do it in the future with a brief refresher.

That fact is all the only one that primary schools are meant to have. If the student goes on to study chemistry or become a scientist or other professional that needs this mechanical skill, they will regain the ability to balance chemical equations no problem --- and they will definitively recover the knowledge and ability they have "forgotten"

One thing that gets missed in this whole year-round school debate is: when is the school going to have time for major maintenance, repairs, and renovations? Many schools are already packed through to the brim (in terms of classroom capacity) so it's not like they can close down an area of the campus/building to get work down while class is in session

Office buildings don't seem to have this problem.

I think the answer is simple: DONT OVERPACK STUDENTS; overbuild capacity is a must. Or construct additional buildings.

Crane lifting a HVAC unit is a once in 30 or 40 years type event.

I mean, jeez! You only get to be a kid once. Let them enjoy those summer vacations. When I think back to my childhood, my fondest memories are during those summer vacations! Why the heck should we take that away from our future generations?

They don't have to eliminate vacations to have year-round schooling.

What they should do is FIRST give students a 10-hour schoolday, just like office workers have; so instead of getting out at 2pm, students start at 7am and school lets out at 5pm, with a 1hour break/lunch.

Next they should give students a 2 week vacation every 4 months.

And reduce the number of schooldays from 5 to 4, so students have Wednesday off for self-study and go to school Mon, Tue, Thu, and Friday.

It was a joke. I was implying that since the US jurisdiction now applies everywhere; for example, claims a right to enforce its own laws on citizens even related to behavior or activities occuring outside the US, the US federal courts have held that search warrants can be issued to seize data overseas, the government attempts to collect income tax on US-based companies worldwide revenue, and foreigners who never set foot in the US have been extradited due to violations of US law.

That the constitutional rights of the US must apply everywhere too, if the US jurisdiction is universal, then the US courts should strike down international laws and override foreign countries' law enforcement decisions which are contrary to any rights protected under the US constitution :)

It becomes a contract when the offer is accepted. The offer is accepted on the understanding that the buyer is paying for something advertised which he thinks he's going to get, ie unlimited internet.

That would work, except the service is not governed by the buyer's informal understanding, since their signup for the service is commemorated by a formal written legal agreement, which takes precedence over other things the buyer might believe, unless the formal written document commemorating the agreement contains ambiguity in the formal terms of the form of contract which can be interpreted in the buyer's favor.

Which is a social and cultural problem, not a problem of automation itself. If people were using open environments similar to Smalltalk or Oberon half of those problems would go away.

Switching to a new language won't solve the problem. Documentation is the right answer, but not just any documentation will do.

You need to understand how the manual part works before you think of having an automatic part.

Then you need a document for the automated version of the process: hyperlinked to a document about each script and each server and each service and each related process.

Is it dangerous? This was ONE idiot.

One idiot. Is all that is required to create a public outrage against the technology and result in legislators banning it.

One idiot is all that is required for the manufacturer to get sued successfully to the tune of millions.

Idiots are definitely common, however, and it has yet to be demonstrated that most such people use the technology exclusively in manufacturer-approved manner.

If someone climbed out of the drivers seat and was reported as such and the car did not detect the oddity and safely stop as a result ---- then others are likely to attempt to mimic, with potentially catastrophic results.

This doesn't necessarily make the technology itself unsafe for the operator ----- but it does mean that the human+partial automaton combination could be dangerous due to the issues with the human -- the human factors should be studied a bit and factor into the design before releasing tech. like this on the world, then incidents like this one wouldn't have happened ==== as the driver attempted to climb out of his/her seat, the car sensed that something was terribly wrong with the operator and cut power to the throttle while gradually bringing the vehicle to a safe stop and pulling over to the shoulder.

I'd have a bit more sympathy for the gamer who filed this suit if he wasn't trying to use this as his personal lottery ticket. He's apparently seeking damages of 5 million dollars.

There's no way he's collecting that. Sony's liability to him is limited, to, essentially, what the man paid to purchase the product, plus (possibly) some legal costs.

The supreme court is bound to overturn it as a flagrant violation of the 1st amendment.