The public schools were great when I went to them. Now, they are rather poor. The same schools I attended - and was, until recently, proud of.
Like my girlfriend and i were, our daughter is very advanced for her age. Unlike when I started, public school would not place her based on her performance; they didn't even test her performance. Instead, placement is based only on age. Despite our efforts - including appealing at each level all the way up to the state's secretary of education - we could not get her performance based placement. Fortunately, her teacher was willing to help us get her into a private school where she could learn at her level. The school even granted her a scholarship. Our daughter has thrived and excelled in that school.
We were lucky to be able to send our daughter to private school. If we hadn't, we would have home-schooled her. (At the time, moving was not an option. We tried. we were not able to find an affordable appartment or house in a district with enlightened schools.)
As for supporting public schools, we still try, but there are too few people who feel that the needs of smart kids are important enough to make changes to the schools. The sad thing is, we're not asking for anything the schools didn't do in the past.
In your great-grandparents' day, very few people got a college education at all. In your grandparents' day, the post-WWII GI bill (i.e. government money) accounted for most of the increase in enrollment. Then the boomers got affordable state-subsidized education, supplemented with plentiful high-paying low-skilled jobs to work their way through, plus loans that could be discharged in bankruptcy if necessary.
My great grandparents - and grandparents - didn't need an university education to get to good jobs that paid enough to raise 3 or 4 kids and send them all to university - in a single earner family. By the time my brother and I went to university, our parents would not have been able to afford the cost if they only had a highschool education. Fortunately, that did not matter because we both were awarded merit scholarships.
Now, my girlfriend and I, even with our university-degree-enabled jobs, will do well to be able to put our 1 kid through university. And that is the cost after the amount of the merit scholarship she was awarded.
Though we have managed to dodge the burden of student loans, the disproportionate rise of education costs vs income has affected us a lot.
PS. I have talked with some of my former professors. They claimed that the increases had little to do with less state subsidy, but rather a huge decrease in research funding - most of which came from non-government sources. This resulted in shifting more and more of faculty and staff salary costs to "other sources, mainly tuition"
Soon they'll be mandatory in Enterprise deployments.
Would be nice, but, at least in my current office, they are being ignored. The space above the ceiling is illuminated by "deck prisms" in the roof, but all the ceiling panels are opaque, so our work space does not get any of that - except when a facilities tech opens a panel to get at something above the ceiling.
It's doctors failing to even know what things cost, much less bothering to treat patients cost effectively
While there are some doctors that are like this, not all. More likely the insurance companies dictating how doctors treat patients.
Example, my girlfriend's doctor knows that treatments "A" and "B" do not work for her, but the insurance company won't cover "C" unless the doctor tried "A" and "B" first. Even though this has happened many times, with the doctor providing all the supporting documentation each time, the (same) insurance company continues to not allow skipping directly to "C". Just the combined costs of "A" and "B" are more than the cost of "C", then add in other costs because my GF is sicker than she was when she saw the doctor. So it is not a case of the doctor choosing "C" over "A" or "B" because some pharma (or other) rep gave him a free lunch, it is the insurance company's pedantic refusal to deviate from their "formulaic care plan". (if the patient is allergic to a treatment, they will allow a deviation, lack of effectiveness is not enough)
Unfortunately, Obama's comments have encouraged this practice of formulaic health care, which is reducing doctors to the role of diagnosticians.
The silver lining of the Supreme Court ruling, is that Obamacare is legally a tax. Mitch McConnell realized that taxes can be altered, or eliminated, in the budget reconciliation process. If the Republicans can get total control, even by slim majorities, Obamacare will die. Hillary Clinton is the best hope of keeping Obamacare alive.
More likely they will get rid of the employer mandate while retaining the individual mandate. The wealthy already have health care they can afford, so the individual mandate has little or no negative impact on them.
C is powerful. As a software developer for electronic control modules, every job I've had used C (and sometimes a few lines of assembly to minimize latency in interrupt service routines).
For PC (or server) based applications, I've used whatever was needed, including C++, Java, Javascript, Lua, Ruby, Haskel, Perl and several others.
In the project I'm maintaining now, I've discovered such gems as "someVar++// count down" and "if(someDouble == 0 || someDouble == 0.0 || someDouble == 0.00) {... }". Oh, and literally hundreds of global variables whose values are copied in and out of instance and local variables in seemingly random places.
Sounds a lot like the code generator the algorithms group, here, uses - especially all the copying of variables. Unfortunately, us "code crafters" are the ones who have to do that real debugging, so we can't avoid dealing with that hideous code.
...I don't know why, but I had ideas, when younger, of changing that equation, of making jobs more efficient, so more time could be spent elsewhere (leisure, edification, etc.)...and yet, I seem to be spending all my time repairing damaged items or chasing dead-ends, rather than pursuing these agendas.
Unfortunately, improving efficiency is like opening a can of worms. The amount of work management expects you to get done increases as your productivity increases. (and with out a proportional increase in pay)
Because I'd rather work at McDonalds for $8/hr instead of $2/hr as a programmer, but then again I'd probably just go live in solitude in the mountains somewhere, away from technology should she betray me in such a way.
That assumes McDonalds will even hire an out of work tech worker. I know a lot who applied and never contacted for even a telephone interview. A manager I know once told me that neither she nor her follow managers at other stores will consider out of work tech workers.
People seem to be forgetting that javascript can break a lot of accessibility readers. Everything about HTML, CSS, etc., was about separating content from layout. Javascript shits on that entire model, as does Java, ActiveX, and most other plugins.
That's because it was a shit model. Clear, yes, simple yes, all that useful for doing stuff, not so much.
Separating content and layout still makes sense. Not all JS "shits" on that separation.
One place where that makes sense is with screen size. Even in the largest phones, screens are cramped, so you want to devote a higher percentage to content. Tablets can usually all more screen area for navigation and other non-content, and desktop displays even more.
There are many other uses, but I'll just mention the one.
(To head off comments about desktop PCs being in decline, I will point out that the ability to connect a phone or tablet to a larger display is often very helpful. I didn't get a chance to ask about the phone, but one visiting engineer made a presentation in our office directly from his phone by connecting it to the conference room's 60 inch (152 cm) wall mounted display, then used the phone's display like a trackpad.)
No passenger would want to ride in a train with airline type seating.
What trainlines have you ridden on?
In the US, I have ridden on Amtrak. The seats are "airline type". (Though they were the large version you'd expect for business class on an airliner, and the seat spacing was also what you'd expect for airliner business class. Also, there is (or at least was) a 120 VAC power outlet at pair of seats.)
Anyone who doesn't have a sculpture of pivoting 10base2 connectors, and know how to turn them into a replica USS Enterprise, is insufficiently senior to talk to.
I have a small sculpture of those connectors. It's a very lame replica of the Enterprise. If I had more connectors, I certainly could improve it.
There is no way that Verizon can say that baby monitors are against TOS:)
Technically, the baby monitor is a server, so is against the TOS.
Well, maybe. Depends on the monitor. Some of the internet enabled monitors use a service provided by the vendor. This is similar to "print from anywhere" services offered by HP (and others) for their printers.
Practically, ISPs would get a huge amount of flak if they did not allow these monitors - including the ones that do not rely on an external service provider.
How about our law enforcement agencies going back to the good old-fashioned police work they used to do, before all this modern technology enabled their lazy work style? In order to tap a phone in the old days, they had to send a man with alligator clips climbing up the nearest phone pole after they received a lawful order from a judge.
That would require hiring more agents, which would require increasing their budgets.
Without DRM, how do we compensate Jackson? I am not happy with DRM – but I can’t figure out a better idea.
I think that more enough of his fan base are happy enough to continue to pay to see his movies even without DRM (or other copy protection), that he won't have a problem.
There are indy artists out there who manage to make a living off their creations without using DRM or other copy protection. They are good enough to have a large enough fan base. My own fan base is very tiny by comparison, but their are people who pay me for my creations - not because I use DRM or such, but because they like it enough to choose to pay. And I am not talking about the SW my employer pays me to develop. My artistic works are a hobby. That some people actually pay me for copies is just a bonus. I want big media to keep their siphons out of what royalties I do get.
A practical and affordable flying car? Yes, we seem to have missed the mark on that. But even if we hadn't, there are a lot of collateral obstacles to actually "putting one in every garage". For example, I know far too many people who should not be driving a car, let alone an aircraft.
Moon base? I think the obstacles were much more political than technological. It's been almost 44 years since the first maned Moon landing (and safe return on the first try). Politics shut that program down Realistically, we only did Skylab because we already had almost all the hardware needed - but NASA's engineers and contractors did it. If nothing else, I'm sure they could have successfully and safely landed a Saturn third stage on the Moon.
Implanting computers in/near our brains? We already have implanted devices to grant vision to the blind and we are making a lot of progress with using brain signals to control devices. Don't know about you, but I know some people who are already trying to volunteer for a brain implant. Maybe not all who now claim they want such an implant would actually go through with it, but I'm sure some of them really would. Not that I think this is a good idea, I just see politics as the main obstacle to this.
Who the fuck even owns a camcorder or CD player boombox anymore?
I own and still use a 5 disk CD boombox. I even still have a CD collection. I also use the box's aux input with a cheap MP3 player (or sometimes with my Android tablet)
And a friend of mine owns and uses 2 different camcorders. The older one (with a large, high quality lens) records to digital tape. The newer one records to SD card.
States used to have their own copyright laws. The 1976 copyright act nullified them going forward but they may still apply for older works.
Congress (and big media) assert that it has the power to extend the duration of these state issued copyrights. Is the scope of preemption by the federal copyright law really so limited that the DMCA would not apply to those works?
Worse, selective application of the DMCA to those early works would create an even more difficult situation not only for customers, but also for independent artists. The way things have been going for the last few decades, it will soon be impossible for artists to legally distribute their works without a big media contract. Big media has already gotten the Copyright Royalty Board to rule that blanket licenses are defacto statutory licenses, so requiring royalties under a blanket license to be paid to them. Then indy artists must pay a fee to them for the privilege of applying for some percentage (less then 100%) of the royalties collected. Now indy artists must license each work (or, possibly, each defined collection/album/portfolio) to be able to collect royalties without big media siphoning a portion of it.
I really don't see the need for adding EME to HTML5. What are the actual use cases that don't have simple solutions without it?
I agree. I don't see the need for EME. The existing media tags already support alternate codecs, so encryption could be added as simply as creating a wrapper for an existing codec, include the crypto in the wrapper and call the wrapper a codec. The wrapper would, of course, need to be designed to work properly with streaming, but then so would the EME. No need to further pollute the HTML specification.
It's not as easy as saying "Interstate Commerce lets us" as it's never before been defined as such. Doesn't mean that it won't get upheld on that ground, but it will have to be shown that such legal ground exists within the framework of the current laws.
I suspect it would cost the state more to investigate the problem than it could collect in fines.
Also, the merchants are collecting and remitting the tax in good faith, therefor any court judgement - if it went to court - would be in favor of the merchant - even if the evidence that the merchant where informed of the error was irrefutable.
Besides, except in the case of income tax where tax payers file a form showing what they owe vs what they paid, the government has no motivation to refund overages of collected taxes..
If it were shown that the merchants were keeping overages in collected sales tax rather than remitting all collected tax (minus the amount they are allowed to keep to cover the cost of remitting the taxes), then the government would have motivation. But most likely, any tax and fines reclaimed from the merchant would be kept by the state.
He doesn't say that bicycles produce more CO2 than cars, he says that:
Cycling increases your respiration rate so produces more CO2 than not cycling.
Both of these are true.... the second point is refuting the point that bikes are environmentally friendly. The second point is debatable: it's a question of what the basic comparison is. Cycling is more polluting than staying at home, less polluting than driving a car.
Depends on what you are doing at home, how many lights are on, PC, TV, game console, other devices. If all that is on, even a couch potato could indirectly be producing more CO2 and other greenhouse gasses and pollutents.
(some other congress person: CO2 is used by plants, so is not a pollutent.)
More likely it would be the linker detecting that one or more symbols is unreferenced.
The linker my team is using in our current projects has an option to log warnings about unreferenced symbols. We enable this because it provides an extra line of defense against coding errors - and documentation errors.
Slashdot Mirror
The public schools were great when I went to them. Now, they are rather poor. The same schools I attended - and was, until recently, proud of.
Like my girlfriend and i were, our daughter is very advanced for her age. Unlike when I started, public school would not place her based on her performance; they didn't even test her performance. Instead, placement is based only on age. Despite our efforts - including appealing at each level all the way up to the state's secretary of education - we could not get her performance based placement. Fortunately, her teacher was willing to help us get her into a private school where she could learn at her level. The school even granted her a scholarship. Our daughter has thrived and excelled in that school.
We were lucky to be able to send our daughter to private school. If we hadn't, we would have home-schooled her. (At the time, moving was not an option. We tried. we were not able to find an affordable appartment or house in a district with enlightened schools.)
As for supporting public schools, we still try, but there are too few people who feel that the needs of smart kids are important enough to make changes to the schools. The sad thing is, we're not asking for anything the schools didn't do in the past.
In your great-grandparents' day, very few people got a college education at all. In your grandparents' day, the post-WWII GI bill (i.e. government money) accounted for most of the increase in enrollment. Then the boomers got affordable state-subsidized education, supplemented with plentiful high-paying low-skilled jobs to work their way through, plus loans that could be discharged in bankruptcy if necessary.
My great grandparents - and grandparents - didn't need an university education to get to good jobs that paid enough to raise 3 or 4 kids and send them all to university - in a single earner family. By the time my brother and I went to university, our parents would not have been able to afford the cost if they only had a highschool education. Fortunately, that did not matter because we both were awarded merit scholarships.
Now, my girlfriend and I, even with our university-degree-enabled jobs, will do well to be able to put our 1 kid through university. And that is the cost after the amount of the merit scholarship she was awarded.
Though we have managed to dodge the burden of student loans, the disproportionate rise of education costs vs income has affected us a lot.
PS. I have talked with some of my former professors. They claimed that the increases had little to do with less state subsidy, but rather a huge decrease in research funding - most of which came from non-government sources. This resulted in shifting more and more of faculty and staff salary costs to "other sources, mainly tuition"
Soon they'll be mandatory in Enterprise deployments.
Would be nice, but, at least in my current office, they are being ignored. The space above the ceiling is illuminated by "deck prisms" in the roof, but all the ceiling panels are opaque, so our work space does not get any of that - except when a facilities tech opens a panel to get at something above the ceiling.
It's doctors failing to even know what things cost, much less bothering to treat patients cost effectively
While there are some doctors that are like this, not all. More likely the insurance companies dictating how doctors treat patients.
Example, my girlfriend's doctor knows that treatments "A" and "B" do not work for her, but the insurance company won't cover "C" unless the doctor tried "A" and "B" first. Even though this has happened many times, with the doctor providing all the supporting documentation each time, the (same) insurance company continues to not allow skipping directly to "C". Just the combined costs of "A" and "B" are more than the cost of "C", then add in other costs because my GF is sicker than she was when she saw the doctor. So it is not a case of the doctor choosing "C" over "A" or "B" because some pharma (or other) rep gave him a free lunch, it is the insurance company's pedantic refusal to deviate from their "formulaic care plan". (if the patient is allergic to a treatment, they will allow a deviation, lack of effectiveness is not enough)
Unfortunately, Obama's comments have encouraged this practice of formulaic health care, which is reducing doctors to the role of diagnosticians.
The silver lining of the Supreme Court ruling, is that Obamacare is legally a tax. Mitch McConnell realized that taxes can be altered, or eliminated, in the budget reconciliation process. If the Republicans can get total control, even by slim majorities, Obamacare will die. Hillary Clinton is the best hope of keeping Obamacare alive.
More likely they will get rid of the employer mandate while retaining the individual mandate. The wealthy already have health care they can afford, so the individual mandate has little or no negative impact on them.
C is powerful. As a software developer for electronic control modules, every job I've had used C (and sometimes a few lines of assembly to minimize latency in interrupt service routines).
For PC (or server) based applications, I've used whatever was needed, including C++, Java, Javascript, Lua, Ruby, Haskel, Perl and several others.
In the project I'm maintaining now, I've discovered such gems as "someVar++ // count down" and "if(someDouble == 0 || someDouble == 0.0 || someDouble == 0.00) { ... }". Oh, and literally hundreds of global variables whose values are copied in and out of instance and local variables in seemingly random places.
Sounds a lot like the code generator the algorithms group, here, uses - especially all the copying of variables. Unfortunately, us "code crafters" are the ones who have to do that real debugging, so we can't avoid dealing with that hideous code.
Unfortunately, improving efficiency is like opening a can of worms. The amount of work management expects you to get done increases as your productivity increases. (and with out a proportional increase in pay)
Because I'd rather work at McDonalds for $8/hr instead of $2/hr as a programmer, but then again I'd probably just go live in solitude in the mountains somewhere, away from technology should she betray me in such a way.
That assumes McDonalds will even hire an out of work tech worker. I know a lot who applied and never contacted for even a telephone interview. A manager I know once told me that neither she nor her follow managers at other stores will consider out of work tech workers.
People seem to be forgetting that javascript can break a lot of accessibility readers. Everything about HTML, CSS, etc., was about separating content from layout. Javascript shits on that entire model, as does Java, ActiveX, and most other plugins.
That's because it was a shit model. Clear, yes, simple yes, all that useful for doing stuff, not so much.
Separating content and layout still makes sense. Not all JS "shits" on that separation.
One place where that makes sense is with screen size. Even in the largest phones, screens are cramped, so you want to devote a higher percentage to content. Tablets can usually all more screen area for navigation and other non-content, and desktop displays even more.
There are many other uses, but I'll just mention the one.
(To head off comments about desktop PCs being in decline, I will point out that the ability to connect a phone or tablet to a larger display is often very helpful. I didn't get a chance to ask about the phone, but one visiting engineer made a presentation in our office directly from his phone by connecting it to the conference room's 60 inch (152 cm) wall mounted display, then used the phone's display like a trackpad.)
No passenger would want to ride in a train with airline type seating.
What trainlines have you ridden on?
In the US, I have ridden on Amtrak. The seats are "airline type". (Though they were the large version you'd expect for business class on an airliner, and the seat spacing was also what you'd expect for airliner business class. Also, there is (or at least was) a 120 VAC power outlet at pair of seats.)
Anyone who doesn't have a sculpture of pivoting 10base2 connectors, and know how to turn them into a replica USS Enterprise, is insufficiently senior to talk to.
I have a small sculpture of those connectors. It's a very lame replica of the Enterprise. If I had more connectors, I certainly could improve it.
There is no way that Verizon can say that baby monitors are against TOS :)
Technically, the baby monitor is a server, so is against the TOS.
Well, maybe. Depends on the monitor. Some of the internet enabled monitors use a service provided by the vendor. This is similar to "print from anywhere" services offered by HP (and others) for their printers.
Practically, ISPs would get a huge amount of flak if they did not allow these monitors - including the ones that do not rely on an external service provider.
Fortunately mother nature prevents stupid people from having children. Oh, wait...
Unfortunately, it seems to be the opposite
How about our law enforcement agencies going back to the good old-fashioned police work they used to do, before all this modern technology enabled their lazy work style? In order to tap a phone in the old days, they had to send a man with alligator clips climbing up the nearest phone pole after they received a lawful order from a judge.
That would require hiring more agents, which would require increasing their budgets.
Without DRM, how do we compensate Jackson? I am not happy with DRM – but I can’t figure out a better idea.
I think that more enough of his fan base are happy enough to continue to pay to see his movies even without DRM (or other copy protection), that he won't have a problem.
There are indy artists out there who manage to make a living off their creations without using DRM or other copy protection. They are good enough to have a large enough fan base. My own fan base is very tiny by comparison, but their are people who pay me for my creations - not because I use DRM or such, but because they like it enough to choose to pay. And I am not talking about the SW my employer pays me to develop. My artistic works are a hobby. That some people actually pay me for copies is just a bonus. I want big media to keep their siphons out of what royalties I do get.
A practical and affordable flying car? Yes, we seem to have missed the mark on that. But even if we hadn't, there are a lot of collateral obstacles to actually "putting one in every garage". For example, I know far too many people who should not be driving a car, let alone an aircraft.
Moon base? I think the obstacles were much more political than technological. It's been almost 44 years since the first maned Moon landing (and safe return on the first try). Politics shut that program down Realistically, we only did Skylab because we already had almost all the hardware needed - but NASA's engineers and contractors did it. If nothing else, I'm sure they could have successfully and safely landed a Saturn third stage on the Moon.
Implanting computers in/near our brains? We already have implanted devices to grant vision to the blind and we are making a lot of progress with using brain signals to control devices. Don't know about you, but I know some people who are already trying to volunteer for a brain implant. Maybe not all who now claim they want such an implant would actually go through with it, but I'm sure some of them really would. Not that I think this is a good idea, I just see politics as the main obstacle to this.
.
The DREN network... Was I the only one that thought of Farscape when I read the name?
I thought of it, too.
But it's not the DoD's fault that privatization of the Internet messed it up.
Who the fuck even owns a camcorder or CD player boombox anymore?
I own and still use a 5 disk CD boombox. I even still have a CD collection. I also use the box's aux input with a cheap MP3 player (or sometimes with my Android tablet)
And a friend of mine owns and uses 2 different camcorders. The older one (with a large, high quality lens) records to digital tape. The newer one records to SD card.
States used to have their own copyright laws. The 1976 copyright act nullified them going forward but they may still apply for older works.
Congress (and big media) assert that it has the power to extend the duration of these state issued copyrights. Is the scope of preemption by the federal copyright law really so limited that the DMCA would not apply to those works?
Worse, selective application of the DMCA to those early works would create an even more difficult situation not only for customers, but also for independent artists. The way things have been going for the last few decades, it will soon be impossible for artists to legally distribute their works without a big media contract. Big media has already gotten the Copyright Royalty Board to rule that blanket licenses are defacto statutory licenses, so requiring royalties under a blanket license to be paid to them. Then indy artists must pay a fee to them for the privilege of applying for some percentage (less then 100%) of the royalties collected. Now indy artists must license each work (or, possibly, each defined collection/album/portfolio) to be able to collect royalties without big media siphoning a portion of it.
I really don't see the need for adding EME to HTML5. What are the actual use cases that don't have simple solutions without it?
I agree. I don't see the need for EME. The existing media tags already support alternate codecs, so encryption could be added as simply as creating a wrapper for an existing codec, include the crypto in the wrapper and call the wrapper a codec. The wrapper would, of course, need to be designed to work properly with streaming, but then so would the EME. No need to further pollute the HTML specification.
It's not as easy as saying "Interstate Commerce lets us" as it's never before been defined as such. Doesn't mean that it won't get upheld on that ground, but it will have to be shown that such legal ground exists within the framework of the current laws.
Which is what the new purports to provide.
I suspect it would cost the state more to investigate the problem than it could collect in fines.
Also, the merchants are collecting and remitting the tax in good faith, therefor any court judgement - if it went to court - would be in favor of the merchant - even if the evidence that the merchant where informed of the error was irrefutable.
Besides, except in the case of income tax where tax payers file a form showing what they owe vs what they paid, the government has no motivation to refund overages of collected taxes..
If it were shown that the merchants were keeping overages in collected sales tax rather than remitting all collected tax (minus the amount they are allowed to keep to cover the cost of remitting the taxes), then the government would have motivation. But most likely, any tax and fines reclaimed from the merchant would be kept by the state.
He doesn't say that bicycles produce more CO2 than cars, he says that:
Both of these are true. ... the second point is refuting the point that bikes are environmentally friendly. The second point is debatable: it's a question of what the basic comparison is. Cycling is more polluting than staying at home, less polluting than driving a car.
Depends on what you are doing at home, how many lights are on, PC, TV, game console, other devices. If all that is on, even a couch potato could indirectly be producing more CO2 and other greenhouse gasses and pollutents.
(some other congress person: CO2 is used by plants, so is not a pollutent.)
(rephrasing: Excess CO2 is a pollutent.)
More likely it would be the linker detecting that one or more symbols is unreferenced.
The linker my team is using in our current projects has an option to log warnings about unreferenced symbols. We enable this because it provides an extra line of defense against coding errors - and documentation errors.