Slashdot Mirror

This post from a NZ blogger shows a correspondence trail culminates in the Government saying make a complaint about the content if it bothers you.
https://kmccready.wordpress.co...

... he's hoping he can please all the people, all the time? Yeah, there shouldn't be a problem accomplishing that. It's not like people have been famously saying that that's impossible for the last 150 years or anything. Proceed.

Where did these people work before NASA? They need to be investigated.

It's OK. No need to worry. You can ignore this report. At least one of the authors has already been "investigated" and found to be wanting by the skeptic croud. He is one of the "alarmists" predicting that if the trend to 2007 continued then arctic sea ice could disappear in 2012.

He also, according to the skeptics, cherry-picks:

https://stevengoddard.wordpres...

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...

And, indeed, he's (obviously deliberately) done it again here: only using the data to 2008.

On a less facetious note, this could be good, bad, or make no difference to existing thoughts.

Good - some mechanism not considered is allowing substantial transfer of mass from the oceans to the interior of Antarctica. In the shorter term at least this could make sea level rise much less than currently anticipated over the next few centuries.

Bad - there's a much larger than believed loss of ice-mass from somewhere else and the current estimates of expected sea level rise will turn out to be severe underestimates when, e.g. the Greenland icesheet disintegrates and falls into the ocean.
(The only two mechanisms I can think of to account for the observed sealevel rise and the assumption that Antarctica didn't lose mass are much more loss from Greenland or thermal expansion. Excess energy going into heating of the oceans could account for the "pause" too)

Indifferent - there's a short-term mechanism that can temporarily move ice mass into interior Antarctica. This can occur over a decade or two before reestablishing longer term trends. This will add noise to the system and make it harder to estimate long term trends from shorter term data but doesn't significantly alter trends from longer terms.

Greenland ice is not growing. In fact the decline in volume is accelerating: https://andthentheresphysics.f...

I think maybe the article you were looking at was regarding antartica?

Maybe, just maybe if we stopped waging wars at $3 trillion apiece we'd have money for kooky stuff like healthcare.

But there is money! The US government already spends more per-capita on healthcare than most other nations in that list, but just does not get much for it. The US health-care system is far more expensive overall, and produces much worse outcomes (both medical and other) than other industrialised nations. However, sadly, doctors in Europe may not be paid quite as much, so they may be forced to drive around in a 3-year-old Mercedes. https://danieljmitchell.wordpr...

Instead of trying to be terribly modern and applying some kind of 'digital' solution to the problem of keeping track of your books, why not go a little more medieval and try a proven solution that works?

Here
you
go.

Vi

That's all I use, but I was really hoping to see some more interesting answers than what has been provided. This is a very common "problem", and I know my text file solution has numerous deficiencies. The saving grace for a text file + vim is my proficiency with vim and the benefits that result from that. For example, there is no way in hell that a standard html + cgi based solution would ever suffice - way too slow to make updates, change status on things, move stuff around, etc. It's possible that a very rich web 2.0 thing may be able to do it, but it's got some big shoes to fill.

For detailed time tracking, I've used this before: https://projecthamster.wordpre...
It's not really the same as note taking, but there's some cross over there. It was one of the easiest to use though, and that won some points in my book.

"This is yet another example of idiot governments rolling over and giving corporations everything they want, and utterly failing to serve the people who voted for them."

You're under the dangerous idea that they ever worked for you.

First, our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Why you can't have capitalist democracy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mxp_wgFWQo&feature=youtu.be&list=PLKR2GeygdHomOZeVKx3P0fqH58T3VghOj&t=724

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]
"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of tramautized soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/

Some history on US imperialism by us corporations.

https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-history-of-imperialism-and-state-violence-in-colombia/

What happens when government tries to help its people - greece

http://williamblum.org/

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb/

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

"How do you know this?"

You need to get up to speed on what has been going on... Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought.

Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

The (mass surveillance) by the NSA and abuse by law enforcement is just more part and parcel of state suppression of dissent against corporate interests. They're worried that the more people are going to wake up and corporate centers like the US and canada may be among those who also awaken. See this vid with Zbigniew Brzezinski, former United States National Security Advisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY

Brezinski at a press conference

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWTIZBCQ79g

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

From war is a racket:

"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10]

"War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23]

"The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24]

General Butler is especially trenchant when he looks at post-war casualties. He writes with great emotion about the thousands of tramautized soldiers, many of who lose their minds and are penned like animals until they die, and he notes that in his time, returning veterans are three times more likely to die prematurely than those who stayed home.

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-Antiwar-Americas-Decorated/dp/0922915865/">War is a racket

US distribution of wealth

https://imgur.com/a/FShfb

http://www2.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

The Centre for Investigative Journalism

http://www.tcij.org/

Some history on US imperialism by us corporations.

https://kurukshetra1.wordpress.com/2015/09/27/a-brief-history-of-imperialism-and-state-violence-in-colombia/

It does seem to bare a striking resemblance to this:
http://images.static-bluray.co...
and this:
http://sayforward.com/sites/de...
and eventually this:
https://cinema1544.files.wordp...
leading to this:
https://unshavedmouse.files.wo...

Hope it works out well! :)

It does seem to bare a striking resemblance to this:
http://images.static-bluray.co...
and this:
http://sayforward.com/sites/de...
and eventually this:
https://cinema1544.files.wordp...
leading to this:
https://unshavedmouse.files.wo...

Hope it works out well! :)

For all of this, in the very best case W7X will only sustain fusion for thirty minutes (according to Wikipedia). That is an extremely long way from being practical.

Even assuming it works very well, we are an extremely long way from solving all of the problems required to build a practical working fusion reactor.

Some of the problems remaining to be solved:

• Neutron flux (part 1). Most of the energy from the deuterium-tritium reaction is in the high-energy neutron produced by the reaction. The best estimate is that the neutron flux from a 1GW fusion reactor would be one or two orders of magnitude higher than from a fission reactor. No known material can withstand that neutron flux. One other way to look at it is that in five years of operation, every atomic nucleus in whatever radiation shield you build will be hit hundreds of times over a five year period.
• Neutron flux (part 2). the deuterium-tritium reaction produces one neutron. That neutron has to (1) heat a working fluid that can be used to run a turbine, and (2) strike a lithium nucleus with enough energy to breed tritium. You need to do that with every damned neutron to have a self-sustaining system. This is made even more challenging by the fact that neutrons will be emitted isotropically from the reactor. Yes, there are materials that can act as neutron amplifiers, but no one has ever done that on a large scale and it probably won't be easy or simple.
• Lithium. You are going to need a lot of it. A 1GW reactor will probably need around 10000 tons of lithium. At $7/kg, that is seventy billion dollars worth of lithium. That is also a significant percentage of the world's annual production of lithium.
• Tritium. Once you've made the tritium from the lithium, you need to get it back into the plasma where it can do some good. I note that both tritium and lithium will easily react with each other and separating them will be tricky.
• Helium removal. Your fusion reaction will produce helium. Too much helium in the plasma will interfere with the reaction and lower the efficiency of the reactor. You need a system to get the helium out of the plasma without cooling it down. This system must operate continuously.
• Scaling. W7X has a plasma volume of around 30 cubic meters. A 1GW fusion plant would need a plasma volume on the order of 1000 cubic meters. W7X will cost around a billion dollars -- straight-up extrapolation implies a cost north of 30 billion dollars. That doesn't include all of the systems described above or a turbine to actually generate electricity. I also point out that scaling up isn't necessarily cheaper either.

I'd also note that solving each of the above problems is not going to be cheap. It is hard to imagine how a fusion plant can be made for less money than an existing fission plant, and those plants are already not competitive. Chances are it would be better and cheaper to build lots of batteries with all that lithium and a lot of wind turbines and solar panels. That would get you the same amount of energy, probably.

Sources: matter2energy, Do The Math

C'mon, even Jaws managed to hook up:

https://thehande.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/jawsandgirl.png

Well, You could literally do that if You put a fly in a box with your phone in it and ground the fly with a thin wire.
This is the GUI used by the connectbot ssh client:
https://techronilces.files.wor...
source:
https://techronilces.wordpress...

Well, You could literally do that if You put a fly in a box with your phone in it and ground the fly with a thin wire.
This is the GUI used by the connectbot ssh client:
https://techronilces.files.wor...
source:
https://techronilces.wordpress...

Here are the 2015 Scripps National Spelling Bee finalists:

https://lintvkoin.files.wordpr... ...or, as like to call them, "7 reasons why the myth of Asian high achievement isn't a myth, and also 3 white kids."

Here you go:

The Surprising Backstory Behind #IStandWithAhmed’s 2-Time Sudanese Presidential Candidate Father

What’s the Story with Ahmed Mohamed and his Ridiculous Briefcase “Clock”? The Answer Lies with his Father

The sister of the boy who brought a suspected hoax-bomb to his Texas high school said she was suspended from a school in a prior bomb scare.

Wind... stop...? I don't understand the question. This concept of "stopped wind" confuses and infuriates us! ;)

Hehe, just like anywhere else we have variation. It's just like we have a higher base multiplier on wind strength than most of the world. So what would normally be an imperceptible breeze in most places is a light breeze here, what would be a light breeze is a stiff breeze, what would normally be a stiff breeze is a strong wind, what would normally be a strong wind is a gale, what would normally be a gale is like being in a tornado.... etc.

I don't know when you came, but just so you know, summer is the calm season. Late winter / early spring is the peak of the windy season.

"0 â" The number of customer cards that Chip-and-PIN-enabled terminals would have been able to stop the bad guys from stealing had Target put the technology in place prior to the breach (without end-to-end encryption of card data, the card numbers and expiration dates can still be stolen and used in online transactions)."

That "article" is painfully lacking in details. End-to-end encryption (E2EE) was already in use. But it was from the POS to the bank. The Target hack involved attacking the POS terminal and copying the information before it was encrypted. These new chips do nothing to prevent this, because the POS is still handling encyrtion (at best). True end-to-end encryption where the encryption is in the chip would fix this problem, but it doesn't exist yet. reference

http://techne.alaya.net/?p=124...

Read it and also click on and read other related pages listed there such as https://senk9.wordpress.com/ch...

Some angry guy posted some fake stuff about Zoe Quinn, and that launched the entire shitfest. Reporting fake stuff is pretty much the definition of unethical journalism.

No her ex posted some true stuff about Zoe Quinn(FYI, those include actual screenshots and other various proofs), was hit with a gag order that blocked his first amendment rights to discuss it. It's now in the courts in MA, where Eugene Volokh and others are working to set a precedence based on the case.

For what it's worth, the open-source crowd has made it pretty easy to strip DRM from the books you buy. Barnes and Noble has gotten slightly tougher of late (as in, you are out of luck if you have no Nook or Android reader), so I just went through the DRM stripping exercise with all the ePubs I had bought from BN, and switched to Amazon.

https://speely.wordpress.com/2...

You seem to think idle predictions made in the popular press are the same as predictions made by models?

Well, they may not be the same, but, unless they meet the same (or, at least, similar) opposition from the proponents of AGW as "deniers" do, one must conclude, the said proponents endorse them.

"could be ice free" instead of "will be ice free"

Oh, I see. So, you are saying, these pseudo-scientists are using the same technique Geico's newt uses in leading us to believe something, while in fact making completely non-committal (non-falsifiable) statements: "15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance". Nice.

you don't know the arguments being made, that you want to deceive people, or that you are just incredibly sloppy with your arguments.

But you are wrong in your dismissal of all such publications as marketing weaselese. At least some of the numerous statements made about Arctic becoming ice-free in the press were falsifiable: here is a nice collection somebody put together. And, as we know, all ended up falsified.

But that's normal for some of the scientific predictions to fail. What is abnormal is the observable dearth of successful ones. Calling me names will not change that — may as well abuse Freeman Dyson, see if he cares.

Cartoon tech - Wile E. Coyote.

The fact that a lot of dreadful things have been done in the name of religion - and in the name of atheism (thus Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot's suppression of religion) doesn't mean we can regard all religions equally. It is most appropriate to look at the earliest expressions of the religion, and decide whether its roots are flawed, or whether it's merely a minority within it that are a problem. On this basis Christianity gets a pass - though with a 'room for improvement' given the Vatican's record over child abuse, the Russian Orthodox inability to tear itself away from Putin's embrace, and some of the more obnoxious elements in Protestantism, including rank homophobia - condemning people for how they are tempted, not merely how they live - as well as the prosperity preachers.

By contrast that nice Ayatollah Khomeni offers us his agenda for Islam:

Islam’s jihad is a struggle against idolatry, sexual deviation, plunder, repression, and cruelty. The war waged by [non-Islamic] conquerors, however, aims at promoting lust and animal pleasures. They care not if whole countries are wiped out and many families left homeless. But those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation. For they shall live under [God’s law].... Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless.'

Barry M. Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, eds. Anti-American terrorism and the Middle East: A documentary reader. (Oxford: OUP, 2004) 29

'Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless.'

Of course it's nice to be nice to Muslims. Being nice to poisonous snakes is also a good strategy... There are peaceful Muslims - and that's good. However opinion polls point to an awful lot who aren't - and those are the ones who admit their dangerous beliefs. https://muslimstatistics.wordp...

We're so awash in electric resources that we ship in aluminum ore, refine it here with local power, then ship out the aluminum ;) And despite being a ridiculously windy country we only recently built our first wind turbines. There's just been no need. Heck, I'd like to see them build more if only to act as windbreaks ;) Last winter my land got hit by 60m/s (134mph) winds in the strongest of the windstorms - windstorms that hit once every 2-3 days for the whole winter.

That said, I do wish they'd stop trying to dam up every river they can get their hands on. I'm all down with geo but I'm not a big hydro fan.

1. Select by LOTTERY
https://equalitybylot.wordpres...
2. Candidate should QUALIFY in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/f...

Most of the time when people needed some content like research paper of article they go to the trustworthy easy writing services online reviews . It not only help them to evaluate the person or services but also reflect a true picture that how legitimate respective person or services are? So it helped users to reduce hands on efforts for analyzing legitimating of any content provider.

Still writing the paper, though I did the definitions section to try and outline the basic concepts. It's going to need a lot of explanation to make sense, but you can read it if you like, such as it is and what there is of it.

I need to organize things between theoretical basis, extensive concepts, observations, and conjectures about policy. Obviously, demonstrating how wealth grows, how productivity increases wealth, and how scarcity comes into existence shows some basic functions of economics; while showing how these allow various forms of welfare and taxation systems, or how income inequality affects an economy, is more observation and conjecture. I also need to just write, instead of spending all my time studying for the CAPM and playing video games; but who cares? Nobody cares. I freaking solved poverty and all I get is people quickly talking over me to cover up any concern for the poor so they can bitch about the rich having too much and talk about how we should tax them to death and take their stuff, because nobody honestly gives a shit about anyone with less--only about people they can blame and attack, which tends to be people with more.

I didn't name any multinationals, but since you ask:
https://fbnewsroomus.files.wor...

You may not call those bribes, but tell me what $10,000 dollars handed to a candidate is for if it isn't to unduly influence them to deliver benefits to the donator?

But we all know you are just making this up

I do apologise for quoting Facebook's own fucking public report.

Now, perhaps you'd care to apologise in return for being such an ignorant cock?

https://equalitybylot.wordpres...

besides my cock is much bigger than that pathetic little vienna sausage you call a penis

Oh yeah? (SFW)

DDT use cut worldwide malaria deaths per year to about 500,000.

When DDT use dropped, deaths rose to back over 1,000,000 per year.

We're killing half a million people a year just to pat ourselves on the back about how much we "care about the environment".

Hoo-fucking-ray.

Do you honestly believe Firefox will bother implementing these new APIs solely for a single addon

They'll implement them for many addons. It's almost as if you didn't read the blog post I linked to, or the FAQs and blog posts it links to.

However, for a machine I'm giving to a friend or family member, what I wind up doing is just a format command, then a pass with cipher /w (assuming Windows.) Since all my volumes are BitLocker protected, a format command overwrites the areas on the hard drive with the volume master key multiple times. Even with the right BitLocker password or recovery key protector, the data is gone, since the master key cannot be retrieved. The cipher /w just does a simple three pass (zeroes, ones, random numbers), which is good enough for almost anything.

Why? What's the point? Self-entitled "nerds" here keep perpetuating the same old myths that you need to wipe and wipe and wipe and wipe a billion times for the data to be completely inaccessible and are just making themselves look just as ignorant as the people they berate themselves.There is plenty of research on this topic and I wish people would just finally learn something and stop spreading some god damn myths.

The purpose of this paper was a categorical settlement to the controversy surrounding the misconceptions involving the belief that data can be recovered following a wipe procedure. This study has demonstrated that correctly wiped data cannot reasonably retrieved even if it of a small size or found only over small parts of the hard drive. Not even with the use of a MFM or other known methods. The belief that a tool can be developed to retrieve gigabytes or terabytes of data of information from a wiped drive is in error.

        Although there is a good chance of recovery for any individual bit from a drive, the chance of recovery of any amount of data from a drive using an electron microscope are negligible. Even speculating on the possible recovery of an old drive, there is no likelihood that any data would be recoverable from the drive. The forensic recovery of data using electron microscopy is infeasible. This was true both on old drives and has become more difficult over tine. Further, there is a need for the data to have been written and then wiped on a raw unused drive for there to be any hopy of any level of recovery even at the bit level, which does not reflect real situations. It is unlikely that a recovered drive will have not been used for a period of time and the interaction of defragmentation, file copies and general use that overwrites data areas negates any chance of data recovery. The fallacy that data can be forensically recovered using an electron microscope or related means needs to be put to rest. -- https://www.google.com/search?...

Studies have shown that most of today’s media can be effectively cleared by one overwrite.

        Purging information is a media sanitization process that protects the confidentiality of information against a laboratory attack. For some media, clearing media would not suffice for purging. However, for ATA disk drives manufactured after 2001 (over 15 GB) the terms clearing and purging have converged. -- http://csrc.nist.gov/publicati...

For the purposes of clarity, this will be repeated: If every single sector of a modern hard drive is overwritten, then NO DATA can be recovered, and especially not by the police. In fact companies such as Ontrack, who spend millions of dollars on research into data recovery are not able to do this. This wiping does not need to be done 33, 12, or even 3 times. Just once. -- https://whereismydata.wordpres...

These things go on forever if one just bothers to Google a bit, I could keep linking and quoting stuff for several books' worth.

Anyone remember how this clown reacted?
https://johnosullivan.wordpres...

How? Because when everything becomes sexist you stop caring. When your movement declares "manspreading" a problem (but ignores women taking up 3 fucking seats with bags), the shirt a scientist wears a problem (yet don't you dare every criticize what a woman wears), keeps perpetuating myths like rape culture in the west and the wage gap, everything you say becomes suspect. When things like climate change, fatherhood, and science are declared sexist, why the flying fuck should we believe anyone when they declare yet another thing as sexist?

--You can definitely add more disks if you are using mirrored drives in your pool, instead of RAIDZ. I created a Linux ZFS RAID0 (no redundancy) pool with 2 brand-new drives initially, then bought 2 more drives of the same brand and capacity a month later, and upgraded the pool in-place with no downtime to a zRAID10.

--If I want to expand the size of the pool, I can just add 2 more disks in a mirrored configuration.

# zpool add mirpool mirror ata-ST9500420AS_5VJDN5KL ata-ST9500420AS_5VJDN5KJ

--Note that this syntax is using Linux /dev/disk/by-id devices.

--There are some caveats and best-practices that one should read up on, for instance using ashift=12 with 4K sector drives; and using GPT partition tables on ZFS disks; but ZFS has by far been the most reliable and useful filesystem I've ever used.

REF:
https://blogs.oracle.com/partn...
http://zfsonlinux.org/faq.html
http://jrs-s.net/2015/02/06/zf...
https://jsosic.wordpress.com/2...

Do you want Terminators? Because this is how you get Terminators.

I agree: http://5050by2150.wordpress.co...

Of course it's more expensive. Unlike the US and Europe, we do not directly subsidize our dairy producers.

The cost of dairy products in Canada has very little to do with subsidies and everything to do with tariffs, which indirectly subsidise domestic dairy producers through reduced competition. The fact that the assistance is indirect makes no difference to the economic incidence of the costs (consumers) and the benefits (producers).

If Canada would bring its agricultural protection down to Australian, NZ or even US levels, the government could save billions of dollars a year.

Monsantos GMO-crops has already cross-pollinated ordinary crops years ago, the result was a farmer being sued and had to battle Monsanto in court for years.

You can read more here: https://thegranddisillusion.wo...

Absolutely. To your point:
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/programmers-dont-need-a-union-we-need-a-profession/

That was the stupidest blog post I've read all week. It read like a teenager's "If I were king of the world..." writings, except written with adult words, and is justly getting crapped on in the blog comments.

Absolutely. To your point:
https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/11/18/programmers-dont-need-a-union-we-need-a-profession/

I've got some feedback to point you toward, NotDrWho.

It's a good thing you appear to like feedback. Hope you like receiving it as well...

The style of classroom you describe is used extensively by the University of Oklahoma School of Computer Science after a bunch of research. Several years worth of studies essentially found that the lower performing students in those groups would later take individual exams and score roughly half a letter grade higher than those who didn't work in those group projects... follow up studies attributed this gain mostly to being forced to be in proximity to the already-successful students. The already-successful students ALSO BENEFIT from the system, showing a notable jump in their own individual exam scores, but, more importantly, showing a significant jump in their individual *retention* of information a year later, attributed to not only having to learn the material but attempting to teach the material. The situation is pretty much loathed by the already-successful students, but the data has been repeated year after year that it is better for nearly all the students in the environment, both the top performers and the bottom performers. Moreover, over several years of exposure, a peer pressure effect builds up, and you get more and more students actively participating in the later years.

Right.... if it's so good why don't they do the same for the school sports teams? I propose that schools put this to the test: make sure that any given sports team is not made up of the best. Mix in the lowest and middling performers with the best athlete. Only one top athlete per team.

If you want to learn more, the term you should Google is "Readiness Assurance Tests"... these are tests that students take twice, once as a group and once as individuals, and your score is the average of the group and the individual. You can also take a look at these links: https://ccistudentcenterblog.w... http://slideplayer.com/slide/4... https://www.ou.edu/idp/teamlea...

Careful perusal of those studies display that the control used was not... well... stupidly "controlled". They measured the performance of students who were in mixed-ability groups, and students in solo assignments, but they did not measure the performance of top students who were *not* in mixed-ability groups; i.e. putting all the top students in one group. And that's just *one* problem with the studies you linked to.

Like every other social science study, it is obvious from reading just a few paragraphs of each study to see that they tailored the study to confirm the PC acceptable methods they want to use.

Can we say confirmation bias? I *knew* we could ;-)

My first computer was a ZX80 -- fond memories!

I liked it enough that my hobby Calculator app for Windows is now programmable in BASIC. It turns out that making a BASIC interpreter is pretty simple these days; there's a bunch of parser-generators to make it simple to program up the language, and modern computers are super-fast even when dealing with non-optimized code. In fact, the hard part is that people expect more GUI bits in the code, and getting those to all work took longer than the actual programming.

The downside is that it doesn't emulate any particular computer, and it's missing some nice features like "graphics" and "multiple statements on a line".

Link to app: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/best-calculator/9wzdncrdfd6x/

Link to manual: https://bestcalculator.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/bestcalculatorbasicreference.pdf/

I've got some feedback to point you toward, NotDrWho.
The style of classroom you describe is used extensively by the University of Oklahoma School of Computer Science after a bunch of research. Several years worth of studies essentially found that the lower performing students in those groups would later take individual exams and score roughly half a letter grade higher than those who didn't work in those group projects... follow up studies attributed this gain mostly to being forced to be in proximity to the already-successful students. The already-successful students ALSO BENEFIT from the system, showing a notable jump in their own individual exam scores, but, more importantly, showing a significant jump in their individual *retention* of information a year later, attributed to not only having to learn the material but attempting to teach the material. The situation is pretty much loathed by the already-successful students, but the data has been repeated year after year that it is better for nearly all the students in the environment, both the top performers and the bottom performers. Moreover, over several years of exposure, a peer pressure effect builds up, and you get more and more students actively participating in the later years.

If you want to learn more, the term you should Google is "Readiness Assurance Tests"... these are tests that students take twice, once as a group and once as individuals, and your score is the average of the group and the individual. You can also take a look at these links:
https://ccistudentcenterblog.w...
http://slideplayer.com/slide/4...
https://www.ou.edu/idp/teamlea...

But suddenly it seems to have become a social obligation to friend everybody. Which is ridiculous.

Don't be so harsh. Just try it!