Giving the government credit for creating the current internet is like giving Abner Doubleday credit for Henry Aaron's home runs.

Now I'm confused. If baseball hadn't been invented, how would Hank Aaron have hit home runs again?

Maybe we need to work on your similes.

Government will fuck this up - it always does.

Right. If private enterprise had been in charge of the space program, we might have sent a man to the moon by now.

I'm not complaining.

That's exactly what you're doing.

I think this is mainly going to be an excuse for hotels to add a daily $7.99 (+ $1.39 tax) "Robot Fee" to your bill.

So any male that cracks a dick joke subconsciously wants to suck cocks all day and either can't or won't admit it to himself

I agree.

That's good stuff. I'm glad I asked and I'm glad you shared those links.

Oh, I get that. But don't you think it's a little bit insulting that the only way they could make it interesting to Slashdot readers is to make references to bad 1970s sci-fi?

My problem is not with the new technology. My problem is that someone thinks we can only be interested via dumb fictional references.

Of course it was. The entire comment was a way to get that joke in. I've been saving it for just such an occasion.

Oh, you poor thing. You're just a victim of oppression, aren't you?

And I bet a big believer in ethics in game journalism, too.

It could be better. In our state it's considered mediocre among comparable towns, but to give you an example of what that means 86% of students score as "proficient" or "advanced" by national math standards. In most states that'd be accounted as a pretty good school.

The top two stories on Slashdot right now are a working Tricorder at SXSW and Boeing patenting "Star Wars Style Force Field Technology".

I get that it's "News for Nerds" but can we please try to appeal to a readership that doesn't think the holocaust is the name of the new VR headset from Samsung?

I'd be very interested to know which city and state you taught in, and whether you were regular faculty. But I think your approach to reasoning about this is misguided. Rather than taking your experiences in dysfunctional school and generalizing from that, you should be looking at how the top performing schools operate.

Special needs isn't just squirming kids. Despite having lackluster marks, our daughter was screened by the school system as gifted, which in my state is considered "special needs". The school brought in a cognitive psychologist to run an elaborate battery of tests, including a comprehensive neurological assessment. What they found was very specific, narrow deficit: slow processing speed. She was capable of solving complex math problems and generating sophisticated answers to open response questions, but even simple questions took her a long time to answer. So the action plan was to put her on a more challenging course load, but to give her longer time if necessary to complete tests. On top of that we paid for training with an educational psychologist who specializes in learning disabilities. Eighteen months later she no longer required any special accommodations and was near the top of her class.

In a nutshell, all that new-fangled bullshit worked. 30 years ago she'd have been tracked into an easy CP courseload based on her marks, but the school actually put the effort into finding out that what she really needed was to be tracked into honors and AP courses. And the school system manages to do this while spending about the national average per student -- $11,505.

You don't have to be an analyst to figure out that the cost of living in New York City is astronomically higher than it is in Utah. A one bedroom apartment in New York City costs an average $2700/month. That same apartment in Salt Lake City would cost $750. A dozen eggs in NYC cost $3.19; in Salt Lake City it's $2.03. If you want to join a gym in Salt Lake, that's about $29/month. In New York it's $86.

So you're drawing the wrong lesson here. Adjusted for its cost of living, Utah spends slightly less than middle-of-the-pack amounts per student and gets slightly better than middle-of-the-pack results. Clearly Utah deserves praise for financial efficiency, but their results could be better.

I know how the story goes. I name people, then you say that is exception, so I name 3 more, you say that means nothing,

I promise not to do that. Please name some names, if you really believe what you say.