Teachers are a part of the equation of educational outcomes. Parents and economics, I agree, have far more to do with results. But barring extreme circumstances, you can't do anything about a child's parents. You can far more easily do something about their school and their teacher. And I had teachers growing up who ranged from those fostering my love of learning and enriching my young life... to those making every day a litany of scorn and drudgery.

I'm sure your partner is a very good teacher, and deserves great praise for it. But sure she/he would admit that there are good teachers and bad teachers, just like there are people who are good and bad at any job.

Wouldn't she/he want to get paid more for being good at teaching vis-a-vis someone else who didn't put in as much effort or have the same skills? I'm not saying it's a panacea, but I cannot help but believe that paying better teachers more would make the profession more attractive and more rewarding. What's wrong with that and why won't teachers' unions even countenance the idea?

Is it the edition of Shakespeare's works that comes with tests & answers, definitions of archaic words, historical background and age-appropriate commentary and explanations? I always forget if that is the First or Second Quarto.

As an adult, I enjoy reading Shakespeare's works and have copies, both printed and electronic. But to teach Shakespeare you need textbooks, not just the source texts. Textbooks do actually add value in many cases, and it requires someone knowledgeable (e.g. not Wikipedia) to write, edit & proof them and get paid for it.

I went to public school and had some great teachers who were worth their weight in gold. I also had other teachers who weren't worth a nickel and did a great amount of harm to their students.

If teachers' unions ever agree to let teachers be paid based on how good they are - rather than just by seniority - you might actually see more attractive salaries for good teachers. You might also see more bright people interested in taking up the profession if they knew they could make a better living doing so.

With that being said, my only experience in this is with US public schools and their teachers' unions. I'm curious if anyone else knows of examples where teachers are paid purely on merit and the effect (or lack thereof) it has had on educational outcomes.

This is a general problem with devices that are "paired". How do you securely establish the initial connection, when neither side knows anything about the other?

The secure solutions involve some shared secret between the two devices. This requires a secure transmission path between the devices, such as typing in a generated key (like a WPA2 key) or physically carrying a crypto key carrier to each device (this is how serious cryptosystems work).

Semi-secure systems involve things like creating a short period of temporary vulnerability (as with Bluetooth pairing). There's a scheme for sharing between cellphones where you bump the phones together, and they both sense the deceleration at close to the same time.

Apple's reputation management service is reacting faster now. It used to take them an hour to mod criticism down. Now it only takes 15 minutes. Who are they using?

This may be the backdoor known as DROPOUTJEEP, which was described in some Snowden-leaked documents last year.

Looks like Apple sold out, put in a backdoor, and then lied about it.

Nothing I have read about Snowden indicates that he is actually some sort of uber-hacker

Except the stuff about how a 29 year old completely pwnd the NSA, probably the most technically sophisticated part of the US Government there is?

Sheesh. Your standards are high. What would it take, exactly?

Additionally, just because you have read nothing about his programming skills doesn't mean he has none. He once mentioned finding XSS holes in some CIA app so apparently he is good enough to do that.

There are already plenty of CA's in countries that are not under US jurisdiction. However, so far the CA's that issued bad certs were all outside the USA, and appear to have only done so because they got hacked and not because they were e.g. forced to by court order.

Unless you have a magical solution to hacking I don't think your new root CA would solve much.

Additionally, citation needed for "routine man in the middle". SSL MITM has been studied by academics at scale. They did not find evidence of much. Governments don't need to MITM SSL for as long as users browse non-SSLd sites like Slashdot and browser exploits exist.

Work at McDonald's or Walmart (or more likely both) for a living and get back to us.

They buy what gives them the most calories per dollar, while also focusing on foods that require the least preparation time (since their work typically leaves them with little time to spare). End result: saturated fat, refined sugar and sodium, with very little in the way of necessary vitamins and minerals.

For most of the United States, owning a car is a necessity for both working and buying food.

Now. That is funny. :-D

Al Qaida never formally accepted responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. Some things you do as a ragbag organization with grandiloquent revolutionary blather, but then realize, "Oh shit, that actually happened. Yay us and all, but I really don't want to deal with the ensuing sh*tstorm of admitting it was us."

try googletranslating http://lb.ua/news/2014/07/20/2... [lb.ua] - ukrainian army detains 23 terrorists. somehow all 23 turn out to be citizens of the russian federation.

That page is merely reporting a press release from the Ukrainian government in Kiev. Are you suggesting we should treat everything they say as factually true?

let's bisect the other thing you said - "at most Russia is supplying weapons to them".
"at most". as if they were given bows and arrows. they get armoured vehicles. they get... tanks. they get bloody sam systems that can reach targets up to 25km.

Yes. That's what I said. Perhaps this is a language issue.

Whatever is happening in Ukraine it is not a full-blown invasion by Russia in the "classical" style that Iraq or Afghanistan were. That would be far more obvious. It seems to be much more similar to what's been happening in Syria where the west has been supplying weapons, training and expertise to anti-Assad groups there. If you were to say the west has "at most been supplying weapons and training to the Syrian rebels" you would be correct, given that (fortunately) Syria was not invaded by a foreign army.

Not exactly. There is a distinct difference between a soldier and a combatant. A soldier is trained and is a member of a standing military. The separatists can at best be described as "irregulars", or insurgents or rebels if you want to go with slightly more charged terminology.

Yes, really? With that definition it'd be impossible for a new military to ever be created, because anyone who joins and fights with one is not joining a standing army therefore cannot be soldiers. That is obviously nonsense, it must be possible for someone to be a soldier in a newly formed army, which is what it looks like is happening here.

Additionally, you claim that the fighters in Donetsk cannot be soldiers because soldiers are trained, and then immediately claim they're receiving training from Russia. So which is it?

And given the fact that the missiles were launched from inside territory controlled by the rebelsis a very important detail. Why would the Ukrainians have anti-air equipment deployed in an area they do not control, against an enemy with no air power?

You're quite right - it probably was the separatists. This does not change the accuracy of the Wikipedia edit that's being discussed, because unless/until the separatists win, they are still Ukrainians.

Although I'd note that given the amount of bullshit emanating from all sides in this conflict it's hard to really know anything about what's going on. The area of Ukraine that's in revolt is next to the Russian border, which is exactly where you'd expect the Ukrainian military to have had lots of soldiers and equipment stationed. Missiles might have been trucked over the Russian border, or they might simply have been there already. The separatists might be being trained by Russians (this would be unsurprising and not exactly unprecedented - see how the USA supported rebels in Syria), or alternatively they might be operating the equipment without really knowing what they're doing - indeed, having no clue what you're targeting would be rather indicative of not being properly trained, no? Or perhaps they're being trained by people who are ethnically Russian but lived in Ukraine at the time of the rebellion, or one of many other more complex cases that won't neatly fit into the "Putin fired the missiles himself" story the west is busy pushing.

All we can say for sure is that whatever you read about this incident is going to be full-blown propaganda, and should be treated as such.

I don't think Russian state media should be editing Wikipedia entries especially not on matters of current affairs.

But still, interpreted literally the new statement is far more factually correct and unbiased than what it replaced. Whoever shot down the plane, they were "soldiers" or fighters of some variety and almost certainly can be described as Ukrainian, given that everyone seems to agree that the fighters are actually eastern Ukrainians and at most Russia is supplying weapons to them.

The original text, on the other hand, more or less exactly sums up western/west Ukrainian line despite the obvious abuse of the word terrorist to mean "rebel fighter" and the [citation needed] assertion about who did it and the source of the weapons.