Let's hear it!

[Ender]

They could easily tape it off.  Also, grass seeds grow quickly and is extremely inexpensive, and grass turf is pretty cheap too.

Schools have far more important things to spend money on grass turf because of juvenile pranks.

Agreed. And to take it a step further, high schools should just replace 98% of their teachers with books. Much cheaper that way.

[d&q]

Ha, I'll pretend you did not just say something completely ridiculous!

[trust]

They could easily tape it off.  Also, grass seeds grow quickly and is extremely inexpensive, and grass turf is pretty cheap too.

Schools have far more important things to spend money on grass turf because of juvenile pranks.

Nah our money is probably better spent on grass seed compared to some of the other things we have.

[Towelie]

They could easily tape it off.  Also, grass seeds grow quickly and is extremely inexpensive, and grass turf is pretty cheap too.

Schools have far more important things to spend money on grass turf because of juvenile pranks.

Agreed. And to take it a step further, high schools should just replace 98% of their teachers with books. Much cheaper that way.

Or... I think we should replace them with strippers. I know I would be able to pay attention in class-- just not to the school material :).

[Hitmen]

Our school doesn't even have enough money to buy all the books they need for next year.... they already have to cut understaffed janitorial and librarian positions, among other things, just to fall within the budget. And we come from a rather large town (60,000+ people) with only one high school... I just don't get why people don't think education is worth putting any money into these days.

[CrAz3D]

Like 'cool' huge mosaics, condoms, and golf carts for the lazy ass 'security guards' that do nothing?

...grass seed is what, $30 for 5 lbs (one price I saw) and I'd bet 5lbs is enough to cover a large area

My god, what the hell kind of rich school did you go to???

Hell!  I wish I went to a rich school!
...those are the pointless things that our school system DOES spend $$$ on.

In addition to that we have 120yr old+ teachers that have such little control over classes that kids literally get up and leave during class, other young-stupid teachers that don't speak english (my french teacher [who only spoke spanish, some french, and a TINY bit on english] once found a 'raped book' under a desk and confronted us about it...only to get uber pissed when we lauged). 
OLD ass text books.  One teacher actually wrote his own book and we bought it from him (he had some copies if you didnt want to buy/couldnt afford it).
Horribly equipped rooms, bad chairs, no auditorium.
School spend money on the most stupid of crap.

...but by God we'll have condoms and a golf cart for the pointless security guards to have (they manage to put stickers on cars when they are parked wrong but didnt stop 4 car break-ins that happened in 1 week).

[Newby]

Agreed. And to take it a step further, high schools should just replace 98% of their teachers with books. Much cheaper that way.

Or... I think we should replace them with strippers. I know I would be able to pay attention in class-- just not to the school material :).

That made me laugh out loud. Haha.

I had a hot biology teacher freshmen year. I paid attention. Just wasn't to anything she taught. I got more out of that class when I actually had discussions completely unrelated to biology than when I tried to pay attention!

[trust]

haha our police officer rides around in one of the golf carts.

My school has a lot of money because it won a bunch of "school within a school" (academy system) and urban education awards. They can afford grass seed I'm sure.

[Ender]

Ha, I'll pretend you did not just say something completely ridiculous!

Mmm, if I had the choice between a brand-new textbook of my own versus a high school class and teacher... then there would only be three classes/teachers (one whose value is purely humor) in my high school that I would choose over the textbook. IMO, public schools are incompetent and a waste of time. And I went to pretty high-ranked public schools. But I also believe that if you're stuck in a public school, and you can't get out of it in a reasonable way that doesn't harm your future, then the best thing to do is to do your work and get good grades.

[Towelie]

Ha, I'll pretend you did not just say something completely ridiculous!

Mmm, if I had the choice between a brand-new textbook of my own versus a high school class and teacher... then there would only be three classes/teachers (one whose value is purely humor) in my high school that I would choose over the textbook. IMO, public schools are incompetent and a waste of time. And I went to pretty high-ranked public schools. But I also believe that if you're stuck in a public school, and you can't get out of it in a reasonable way that doesn't harm your future, then the best thing to do is to do your work and get good grades.

My history class doesn't require a teacher... his lectures are pointless and all we do for homework is read the textbook on our own before the test anyways

[while1]

Maybe in a no-Iraq war world we could have spent the billions we already have and will on subsidizing the public schools.

[CrAz3D]

Billions we have?..... :o
Sure the budget has been getting better the last few years, however, it was still in the red.

[trust]

Maybe in a no-Iraq war world we could have spent the billions we already have and will on subsidizing the public schools.

Maybe with a no War on Terror Bin Laden et all would see us as inferior and deliver more homefront attacks, drastically weakening our economy.

But we'll never know, which is the way of the walk when it comes to maybes.

[CrAz3D]

Maybe in a no-Iraq war world we could have spent the billions we already have and will on subsidizing the public schools.

oooooh, here's a good one!

Maybe with no welfare type programs we'd be able to fund...uhm, well, just about any damned thing we could think up!

We spend more per year on Medi...caid?, one of the two, than we have on Iraq over 5 years.

I think if we cut welfare, well, then we'd be A LOT better off and taxes could be WAY less.

[while1]

Thinking in parallel is really really really.... different.

Currently I'm working on the Standard Template Adaptive Parallel Library (STAPL) project at Texas A&M this summer for a Comp Sci undergraduate research program.  STAPL an adaptive parallel library for parallel computing systems that's a superset of the sequential ANSI C++ STL.  Basically its goal is to provide a generic C++ library with all the same functionality as the C++ STL and in some cases more (i.e. STAPL's pContainers, pAlgorithms, pRanges are the parallel equivalents of STL containers, algorithms, and iterators, respectively).  STAPL looks to provide users/ programmers with the ability to write programs that take advantage of the power parallel computing systems offer while not necessarily requiring them to be aware of the additional complexity that's added through parallelism.  Conversely, it offers the power to those who do with the option of using the framework at a lower level if they desire.  Due to the wide variety of different types of parallel architectures and systems, STAPL relies on both optimization done at runtime, compile time, and at install time (i.e. user specific options and database updating).  The particular parallel model STAPL supports at the moment is the Single Program Multi-Data (SPMD) model, which may change to include other models in the future.

This is just a simple description of the STAPL project.  The actual CS@TAMU STAPL project page provides information that is out of date to a certain extent, but should suffice for a general idea.  With that said, the project has undergone a lot of design changes on both a conceptual and implementation level in recent months which require the re-implementation of the majority of the code, as well as the addition of new code.  To be brief, the most important conceptual and implementational changes involve how the data spread among multiple processors is viewed and locality, as well as how work is done and its relation to data locality.

But anyways, the specific topic concerning the STAPL project I'm working on at the moment is the reimplemention of part of p_sort(), which is STAPL's version of the generic STL sort() algorithm.  What's different about p_sort() is that sorting is a much different ballpark in parallel than in sequential... as well as still actively being researched.  The actual p_sort() algorithm consists of multiple types of parallel sorting algorithms, including but not limited to Column-Sort, Sample-Sort, Radix-Sort, and Bitonic-Sort.  Depending on certain criteria, the "best" parallel sorting algorithm is chosen (i.e. architecture, type of data being worked with, etc.)  I've actually been assigned the Column-Sort algorithm... which I've already implemented sequentially but is a different arena in parallel, and considering I haven't taken a parallel computing course and I'm doing graduate level work... it's tough, but very educational and interesting.