Antibiotics help everyone and have the potential to help everyone. Advanced warnings of hurricanes do not. Apples and oranges, bro. Apples and oranges.
Again, the point is it's not cool or doesn't provide us with information. The point is that it does NOT benefit humanity. The utter amount of stupidity around here is shocking. As if my comprehension on the subject at all affects the utter misuse of a word. It makes me sad to see people dogging someone about their stupidity when they all seem to fail at comprehending English.
How exactly is watching hurricanes, which redistribute energy and bring water to the Americas, going to benefit humanity? With super HD footage for the Discovery channel? Saving a few lives when 100x as many die every year to massive overpopulation? Nah. It won't benefit humanity. It's cool though.
Because even a high quality website where the "hardest" part of the entire process is signing up and adding a credit card can exceed the simplicity, availability, and convenience of torrents.
Most people who download movies do it because torrenting is more convenient and/or easier than accessing that movie in any "legal" means. For instance, streaming a movie is common (torrents are even second to this for new movies) even from cam quality videos because despite the poor quality, the convenience far exceeds that of going to a theater.
Of the pirates I know, and I know very many, a very very small percentage just "download everything and collect." Most of the people I know who pirate do it to consume. Also, the "quality control" argument is bullshit when it comes to movies. You have previews, you have reviews, and you have many a critic site that will quickly gauge for you the quality of a movie to help you decide. And $2 is a lot less to lose than $10, the drive + gas, and the stress of dealing with the fucking moronic teenagers that sell you the tickets and then create distractions in the theater. I sure as hell wouldn't get upset if a few movies I watched that way weren't very good, $2/hr for entertainment is far better than most.
It's also not about DVDs. I am talking more about instant accessibility very soon after the theatrical release, before DVDs and BDs go on sale. Electronic viewing, high def, and micro-transacted. Further, DVDs are a pain in the ass to deal with, who the fuck buys them anymore? They're clumsy and they're not failure tolerant -- a bad scratch and you're fucked.
Your argument that this isn't a market is flawed and case in point are businesses that are thriving. iTunes generates more money than anything you'll ever have your hands on. Netflix is doing very well despite not implementing the idea very well at all, they're even putting Blockbuster out of business. Amazon and other e-book outlets combined with the iPad and other devices are doing phenomenally. I'm quite sure there are other examples, but your claim is outright incorrect. The market is there, and it's huge. The fact that people who barely know shit about computers are willing to go torrent movies is because of the convenience, this is the same reason why most kids went and downloaded songs some 8-10 years ago from the likes of napster, etc. It wasn't just the cost, it was a lot to do with accessibility (middle school and early high school kids don't often have an allowance or a job either, so the high cost does lend itself to accessibility). And iTunes now is still prohibitively expensive at $1/song. A CD back then was way overpriced at $12-$18/cd. Add those songs together and you're back at $12/album; and so all iTunes has given you is the ability to buy just that 1 song you want, which is a huge plus on convenience. Things like youtube, pandora, and other means of streaming media, most especially centered around audio have taken off and become huge, so the ease of access to music suggested to you which is related to what you like is sufficient -- we don't even need to download the file so we can hear it whenever we want. And youtube as everyone knows has almost every song that sees any amount of popularity and you can play it as many times as you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, even if the quality is a little worse. The market is absolutely enormous, it's worldwide, and there's fortunes that amount to billions to be made there. These companies simply want to retain way too much control and so they will not embrace the technology we're showing them we want. It's simply ignorance on their part.
BTW, ringtones is apples to oranges. Movies are valued more highly than a 15 second ringtone. Couple that with the fact that anyone with an MP3, any one of a hundred free software packages, and a few minutes of time can create one, why would someone buy it (aside from morons who are technically inept)? If you can easily produce hollywood-level movies with
Like I've brought up many times, if the big media companies would just make the movies available soon after theatrical releases ON THEIR OWN WEBSITES in digital form for a premium, streaming, a license for a direct download, and we know they'd want to put some kind of shitty DRM on it (see: DVD), at a REASONABLE price, who the fuck would pirate a movie? If I could go pay $2 to watch a movie that came out 2 weeks ago in HD streaming with unlimited rewatch time for 24 hours, I wouldn't bother downloading the movie because I'd only watch it once anyway. Instead of embracing technology, the media companies seem to be fighting it. What piracy in movies says is that people don't want to have to go to a theater, especially alone, crowded or not, which is often a cesspool of diseases and obnoxious people, instead we just want to watch a movie in the comfort of our home with ultimate convenience. Is that too much to ask? No, the internet grants us that with ease. Media companies for some reason are incredibly hesitant to join the "digital" age. We still have to go watch a movie at a theater or rent a fucking DVD (yes, a PHYSICAL COPY) which requires delivery, when streaming online is immediate. As soon as they wake up, open their fucking eyes to the possibilities of massive profits by simply embracing what we're telling them we want, they won't have to worry about piracy. Are you seriously telling me if you could spend an entire day watching NEW movies in crystal clear HD from your home and only spend $20 for that it wouldn't be worth it? Renting a movie costs $6 from stores. Netflix is $10/month and their delivery is slow and they have very few good movies available for streaming. Going to a movie theater is going to run you $8-12 FOR ONE MOVIE.
This isn't a difficult concept is it? Surely it isn't.. I should go patent this. It is the future of movie distribution, I'm sure. And when they do it, I'd love to sue for hundreds of millions just as a kick in the nuts for being so fucking opaque.
His stuff is helpful with graduate level Linear Algebra? I don't immediately see mention of bilinear and multilinear forms. I don't see mention of Cramer's rule (and proof) or the Cofactor Expansion Formula (and proof), which is striking considering how common they are. Most of what I see would cover an undergraduate course or series of undergrad courses on linear algebra, sadly it looks more engineering oriented as well. I'm not attacking Khan, his stuff is great for its intended audience, but I don't see it being helpful in an appropriately placed graduate level course on the subject except as a refresher of basics that one might forget as it's not often used.
Quite right. For educational institutions that get a lot of their money from local taxes, you can expect a markup of 50% to 250% on the cost of a textbook. Gotta love those sweetheart deals that still aren't illegal.
This just in. Following points made on/. regarding what other things than gaming you can do on your PS3, Sony quickly released an update that includes these changes:
1. Online access to gamer network requires a subscription plan.
2. All publishers must release updates to their games that removes dedicated servers because the datacenter electricity bill was too high.
3. Developing for the PS3 now requires a developer license. Also, an app store has been announced, where applications can be purchased, while free applications exist, they usually suck. Also, you must develop on an Apple OS. Apple agreed to help with the application approval process, seeing as they have a phenomenal app store system, and in return PS3 development has been restricted to OSX.
4. USB attached hard drives are no longer permitted. Nor are harddrive upgrades. "There's no reason for you to need all that space", says Sony, "you're just playing games."
5. Regular USB keyboards and mice no longer work properly with the PS3. You must register your device and pay a mandatory $5 fee per device registered for it to interact correctly with the PS3. Or you can buy a PS3 keyboard/mouse pre-registered for $80 each. 3 month warranty included -- we know how you gamers treat your keyboards, especially after getting pwnd.
Be careful when pointing out positive aspects of a console. They'll be quick to whisk those away so all you have is a box that takes BD disks and makes shiny gfx on the screen.
This really just should be made illegal. Both for copyrights and patents. Purchasing an intellectual monopoly with intent to cause fiscal harm to another party is profiteering and should be made illegal. The punishment? No less than jailtime for the trolls involved, and it should pierce the corporate veil to nab the CEOs that permit this kind of scheme to happen. Intellectual monopoly have been under scrutiny for a very long time as "not working" and inhibiting intellectual progress, but permitting this kind of action most definitely is a direct inhibition of progress and a blatant abuse of the system. Sure, abolishing both would be best, but for now, hopefully criminalizing profiteering with copyrights and patents should stop at least some of the abuse.
It'd be nice to see what content was allegedly copied. If that material is freely available on the LV RJ website, I don't think there's much of a case here, it's just trolls grasping at straws again. But we don't know, because that's how trolls work: stay hidden, be vague, try to steal as much money as possible via government enforced monopolies.
In reality, how much would this possibly have cost? A print copy (if the articles are in print only) sitting in a doctors' office might get what.. 50.. 100 reads for the single copy? People get paper copies then give them away because they're just trash.. are they going to claim 100x the cost of the print times some "assumed number of page hits" as damages? I don't see that any reasonable estimate would be worth the time nor effort of buying a copyright then suing. They must be going for millions, when actual damages may be under $5000. Mmm.. gotta love them trolls.
I'm also curious why, when the articles were discovered and there was no permission given to copy them, why the owner of the site wasn't asked to take them down? Usually this is the first course, and if they don't, then you sue for damages. Do trolls not even have 1 shred of decency?
Can't wait until we get court rulings against clickwrap agreements that are so overly-verbose that no sane person will read it. Companies are following Washington in "how to sneak in something you want" by simply cleverly hiding it in the middle of a massively huge document and hoping nobody notices and instead just clicks the "Agree" button, even though it should really read "OK OK FINE. I'LL CLICK THIS DAMN BUTTON BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO READ 100 PAGES OF POORLY CRAFTED LEGALESE."
The only courses that fit that description are simple (read: easy or low-level) courses with very little information which can easily be memorized so that a short timed written test is requisite to demonstrate understanding of what the student was intended to learn. So that's the first few semesters of most disciplines. Testing in this manner becomes completely useless at a certain point and shouldn't be done, in pretty much every field. A written timed test doesn't prove a M.D. is ready to start practicing medicine, only experience does. A written timed test will likely not get you hired at Google, Microsoft, or any major software producing studio. A written timed test will not demonstrate that you're fit to drive a car (you actually have to do it). Why is a written timed test required to show you sufficiently understand the material in courses that cover 400+ page texts? If the author can present the material in an understandable fashion in around 400 pages, how is 3 pages of paper with sparse questions on it going to demonstrate even a tiny fraction of that information? It won't.
The moral of the story was to not require exams in courses where they don't make sense -- they're not conducive to learning and they can easily frustrate and discourage the student. Projects make more sense in computer science and week-long take-home exams work well for mathematics. Timed written tests work well for that freshman music course where you only need to show you know the different artists and what musical pieces they made and some musical terms that you are required to know.
I really hate this as well. It sucks especially for us graduate math students. All semester you have lectures and student-involved proofs of rather deep mathematics as well as insight-provoking assignments that can easily take 6+ hours to complete (we usually have 1 a week per course), even if it's only 5 questions. Then at the midterm and for the final you have these 1-2 hour exams where you're tested on memorization of facts where accuracy and recall of minute detail from memory is the key and you're given a lot of shallow simple problems. Worst of all the professor is a Ph.D., probably with much more experience in the field than you have. This is good from a perspective that they can teach you much and effectively answer any questions you might have, but often they will give a problem with a trick which is obvious to them but not at all obvious to you. At least not with a 1.5 hour time limit dancing around in your head effectively killing any creativity. You just want to hit yourself when 30 minutes after the test is over you remember a brilliant fact that would've made that proof a 3-liner, and even more so when your professor later says that is better than how they solved it.
When dealing with real problems, you get time to think, and you can use books as a reference. It gets discouraging during tests like these when the only thing between you and a succinct and correct proof to the problem is that obscure step.. but you remember it.. you distinctly remember it.. you can even recall the exact theorem who's proof you were presented used it.. and perhaps you can even recall the basic idea.. but because you didn't obsess over memorizing that single fact, you can't seem to get it just right. Just "knowing about it" and being able to properly use a 800+ page book on algebra (D&F, yeah, it's huge) as a reference will only get you 1/10 points for the problem (yes, if it's not perfect, it's pretty much a failure, right?). Even worse, when you ask your professor a problem of any real complexity, like the ones they ask you, they often go straight to their text for insight as well, so if everyone does it as the source material is so vast that holding every tiny little detail in your head is difficult and counter-productive (it's not the precise detail that matters, it's the concepts and the understanding), what's the point of testing your ability to do that?
Mathematics ceases to be a worthwhile educational choice when the material being covered reaches a complexity so involved that a seated in-class test cannot possibly provide enough time to complete a problem set that can hope to prove that you understand the material and your grade is highly impacted by such a test. It only gets worse when the small selection of material tested includes that one bit of the course you didn't fully understand, but the other 98% you have rock solid, or it's that one little minute trick that the author did without explaining it in much detail (nor did your professor, and at the time doing it in class it seemed obvious, but the huge elephant in the room that is a time limit prevents you from seeing the problem with enough clarity to recall what obviated it), leaving you with a poor grade even though you feel you sufficiently understand the material. Nothing beats walking away from a test like that, it makes you think "why the hell am I even taking these courses?"
"... this is a matter of national security. A cyber attack on America can do as much or more damage today by incapacitating our banks, our communications, our finance, our transportation as a conventional war attack and the president in catastrophic cases, he's not going to do it every day, not going to take it over, so I say to my friends in the internet relax, take a look at the bill, and this is something we need to protect our country. Right now China — the government — can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have the ability to do that, too."
Wh.. w.... wha... what!? Are you fucking kidding me? NO. "Cyber war" is wholly driven by bullshit and FUD in news agencies, these people have NO IDEA what they're talking about when they talk about cyber security. Further, in that CNN interview, check this out:
1. Most of these systems are HIGHLY ISOLATED and secured already by way of private networks, firewalls, DMZs, etc. In this way, an attack as described would be incredibly difficult if not impossible. We have no evidence to show that this is even a slight concern. None.
2. An internet attack can be fixed. It doesn't DESTROY equipment, it doesn't level a building, it doesn't kill people, and IT people CAN SHUT OFF EXTERNAL ACCESS TO A SYSTEM if it's being targeted by an attack. I trust the judgement of these professional IT persons that know their own systems intimately far above that of our technilogically incompetent and ignorant president.
3. I've looked at the bill -- nothing in it is even remotely "good." We're good in the IT world. You might not understand that our IT departments are like little units of a larger army. If we get attacked, we can defend ourselves. We don't need you shutting down essential access to patches, communication, support lines, just because you think something might be happening.
4. In China this capability is reserved to kill the movement of information to restrict communication and the spread of anti-government "propaganda" via the internet. I argue that shutting off our networks for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER is a very blatant violation of constitutional rights. Power like this can only be abused, and as I've pointed out, there is NO well-intentioned or well-informed use case where this wouldn't be much more damaging than an actual cyber attack.
This sounds like the squaking of a moron with no clue on national TV. He speaks of how damaging shutting down these systems would be.. and that a cyber attack could easily do that (it can't, not easily), but then proposes we give the president the ability to shut them down forcefully here? Really? Killing our networks to stop our networks from being attacked. Do you not see how downtime is downtime no matter what causes it? At least with our current setups, we can mitigate an attack, if the ISP is forced to SHUT OFF the network, we can't, we're fucked, we're down and we just have to go home and hope the all powerful almighty president decides in his infinite wisdom that it's OK to turn it back on later.
It's simple. This level of micro-management is best left to the ISPs and the companies. Stay the fuck out.
You seem to have things backwards. It was Obama that spent trillions for "short-term gains" and his and other liberals' form of "long-term gains" is.. just keep spending hundreds of billions every year, it's fine, just write it into the deficit. Do realize spending federal funds like that places ALL of the burden on the young generation. There's a reason republicans are traditionally called conservatives, even if they've grown away from that in the past few decades.
Hard shutdowns = win. Who wants to walk away with the knowledge that some notepad used as a clipboard augmentation prevents the shutdown for 8+ hours because Microsoft's code is retarded. Let them patent a broken shutdown system -- in reality it's not that hard to do. Just make a signal for indicating to a program the OS wants to shutdo... oh wait.. nvm.
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It's not even a strong indicator. There are plenty of things MOST people get completely wrong.
Antibiotics help everyone and have the potential to help everyone. Advanced warnings of hurricanes do not. Apples and oranges, bro. Apples and oranges.
Once again, advanced warnings may be kind. But it does not benefit humanity.
How does it clearly benefit human nature and kindness? Throwing 'clearly' in front of something does not make it clear.
"Majority gets it wrong" is not proof that I am wrong. Welcome to logical fallacies as well. I really hope you enjoy failing at everything.
Again, the point is it's not cool or doesn't provide us with information. The point is that it does NOT benefit humanity. The utter amount of stupidity around here is shocking. As if my comprehension on the subject at all affects the utter misuse of a word. It makes me sad to see people dogging someone about their stupidity when they all seem to fail at comprehending English.
Check a dictionary sometime.
The fire department doesn't claim it's benefiting humanity.
Sure, it benefits somebody. Just not humanity.
How does that provide "quite a significant benefit to humanity"? It provides some insight, sure. But it does not do what you claim it does.
How exactly is watching hurricanes, which redistribute energy and bring water to the Americas, going to benefit humanity? With super HD footage for the Discovery channel? Saving a few lives when 100x as many die every year to massive overpopulation? Nah. It won't benefit humanity. It's cool though.
Because even a high quality website where the "hardest" part of the entire process is signing up and adding a credit card can exceed the simplicity, availability, and convenience of torrents.
Most people who download movies do it because torrenting is more convenient and/or easier than accessing that movie in any "legal" means. For instance, streaming a movie is common (torrents are even second to this for new movies) even from cam quality videos because despite the poor quality, the convenience far exceeds that of going to a theater.
Of the pirates I know, and I know very many, a very very small percentage just "download everything and collect." Most of the people I know who pirate do it to consume. Also, the "quality control" argument is bullshit when it comes to movies. You have previews, you have reviews, and you have many a critic site that will quickly gauge for you the quality of a movie to help you decide. And $2 is a lot less to lose than $10, the drive + gas, and the stress of dealing with the fucking moronic teenagers that sell you the tickets and then create distractions in the theater. I sure as hell wouldn't get upset if a few movies I watched that way weren't very good, $2/hr for entertainment is far better than most.
It's also not about DVDs. I am talking more about instant accessibility very soon after the theatrical release, before DVDs and BDs go on sale. Electronic viewing, high def, and micro-transacted. Further, DVDs are a pain in the ass to deal with, who the fuck buys them anymore? They're clumsy and they're not failure tolerant -- a bad scratch and you're fucked.
Your argument that this isn't a market is flawed and case in point are businesses that are thriving. iTunes generates more money than anything you'll ever have your hands on. Netflix is doing very well despite not implementing the idea very well at all, they're even putting Blockbuster out of business. Amazon and other e-book outlets combined with the iPad and other devices are doing phenomenally. I'm quite sure there are other examples, but your claim is outright incorrect. The market is there, and it's huge. The fact that people who barely know shit about computers are willing to go torrent movies is because of the convenience, this is the same reason why most kids went and downloaded songs some 8-10 years ago from the likes of napster, etc. It wasn't just the cost, it was a lot to do with accessibility (middle school and early high school kids don't often have an allowance or a job either, so the high cost does lend itself to accessibility). And iTunes now is still prohibitively expensive at $1/song. A CD back then was way overpriced at $12-$18/cd. Add those songs together and you're back at $12/album; and so all iTunes has given you is the ability to buy just that 1 song you want, which is a huge plus on convenience. Things like youtube, pandora, and other means of streaming media, most especially centered around audio have taken off and become huge, so the ease of access to music suggested to you which is related to what you like is sufficient -- we don't even need to download the file so we can hear it whenever we want. And youtube as everyone knows has almost every song that sees any amount of popularity and you can play it as many times as you want, whenever you want, wherever you want, even if the quality is a little worse. The market is absolutely enormous, it's worldwide, and there's fortunes that amount to billions to be made there. These companies simply want to retain way too much control and so they will not embrace the technology we're showing them we want. It's simply ignorance on their part.
BTW, ringtones is apples to oranges. Movies are valued more highly than a 15 second ringtone. Couple that with the fact that anyone with an MP3, any one of a hundred free software packages, and a few minutes of time can create one, why would someone buy it (aside from morons who are technically inept)? If you can easily produce hollywood-level movies with
Like I've brought up many times, if the big media companies would just make the movies available soon after theatrical releases ON THEIR OWN WEBSITES in digital form for a premium, streaming, a license for a direct download, and we know they'd want to put some kind of shitty DRM on it (see: DVD), at a REASONABLE price, who the fuck would pirate a movie? If I could go pay $2 to watch a movie that came out 2 weeks ago in HD streaming with unlimited rewatch time for 24 hours, I wouldn't bother downloading the movie because I'd only watch it once anyway. Instead of embracing technology, the media companies seem to be fighting it. What piracy in movies says is that people don't want to have to go to a theater, especially alone, crowded or not, which is often a cesspool of diseases and obnoxious people, instead we just want to watch a movie in the comfort of our home with ultimate convenience. Is that too much to ask? No, the internet grants us that with ease. Media companies for some reason are incredibly hesitant to join the "digital" age. We still have to go watch a movie at a theater or rent a fucking DVD (yes, a PHYSICAL COPY) which requires delivery, when streaming online is immediate. As soon as they wake up, open their fucking eyes to the possibilities of massive profits by simply embracing what we're telling them we want, they won't have to worry about piracy. Are you seriously telling me if you could spend an entire day watching NEW movies in crystal clear HD from your home and only spend $20 for that it wouldn't be worth it? Renting a movie costs $6 from stores. Netflix is $10/month and their delivery is slow and they have very few good movies available for streaming. Going to a movie theater is going to run you $8-12 FOR ONE MOVIE.
This isn't a difficult concept is it? Surely it isn't.. I should go patent this. It is the future of movie distribution, I'm sure. And when they do it, I'd love to sue for hundreds of millions just as a kick in the nuts for being so fucking opaque.
Do not want.
His stuff is helpful with graduate level Linear Algebra? I don't immediately see mention of bilinear and multilinear forms. I don't see mention of Cramer's rule (and proof) or the Cofactor Expansion Formula (and proof), which is striking considering how common they are. Most of what I see would cover an undergraduate course or series of undergrad courses on linear algebra, sadly it looks more engineering oriented as well. I'm not attacking Khan, his stuff is great for its intended audience, but I don't see it being helpful in an appropriately placed graduate level course on the subject except as a refresher of basics that one might forget as it's not often used.
Quite right. For educational institutions that get a lot of their money from local taxes, you can expect a markup of 50% to 250% on the cost of a textbook. Gotta love those sweetheart deals that still aren't illegal.
This just in. Following points made on /. regarding what other things than gaming you can do on your PS3, Sony quickly released an update that includes these changes:
1. Online access to gamer network requires a subscription plan.
2. All publishers must release updates to their games that removes dedicated servers because the datacenter electricity bill was too high.
3. Developing for the PS3 now requires a developer license. Also, an app store has been announced, where applications can be purchased, while free applications exist, they usually suck. Also, you must develop on an Apple OS. Apple agreed to help with the application approval process, seeing as they have a phenomenal app store system, and in return PS3 development has been restricted to OSX.
4. USB attached hard drives are no longer permitted. Nor are harddrive upgrades. "There's no reason for you to need all that space", says Sony, "you're just playing games."
5. Regular USB keyboards and mice no longer work properly with the PS3. You must register your device and pay a mandatory $5 fee per device registered for it to interact correctly with the PS3. Or you can buy a PS3 keyboard/mouse pre-registered for $80 each. 3 month warranty included -- we know how you gamers treat your keyboards, especially after getting pwnd.
Be careful when pointing out positive aspects of a console. They'll be quick to whisk those away so all you have is a box that takes BD disks and makes shiny gfx on the screen.
This really just should be made illegal. Both for copyrights and patents. Purchasing an intellectual monopoly with intent to cause fiscal harm to another party is profiteering and should be made illegal. The punishment? No less than jailtime for the trolls involved, and it should pierce the corporate veil to nab the CEOs that permit this kind of scheme to happen. Intellectual monopoly have been under scrutiny for a very long time as "not working" and inhibiting intellectual progress, but permitting this kind of action most definitely is a direct inhibition of progress and a blatant abuse of the system. Sure, abolishing both would be best, but for now, hopefully criminalizing profiteering with copyrights and patents should stop at least some of the abuse.
It'd be nice to see what content was allegedly copied. If that material is freely available on the LV RJ website, I don't think there's much of a case here, it's just trolls grasping at straws again. But we don't know, because that's how trolls work: stay hidden, be vague, try to steal as much money as possible via government enforced monopolies.
In reality, how much would this possibly have cost? A print copy (if the articles are in print only) sitting in a doctors' office might get what.. 50.. 100 reads for the single copy? People get paper copies then give them away because they're just trash.. are they going to claim 100x the cost of the print times some "assumed number of page hits" as damages? I don't see that any reasonable estimate would be worth the time nor effort of buying a copyright then suing. They must be going for millions, when actual damages may be under $5000. Mmm.. gotta love them trolls.
I'm also curious why, when the articles were discovered and there was no permission given to copy them, why the owner of the site wasn't asked to take them down? Usually this is the first course, and if they don't, then you sue for damages. Do trolls not even have 1 shred of decency?
Can't wait until we get court rulings against clickwrap agreements that are so overly-verbose that no sane person will read it. Companies are following Washington in "how to sneak in something you want" by simply cleverly hiding it in the middle of a massively huge document and hoping nobody notices and instead just clicks the "Agree" button, even though it should really read "OK OK FINE. I'LL CLICK THIS DAMN BUTTON BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO READ 100 PAGES OF POORLY CRAFTED LEGALESE."
The only courses that fit that description are simple (read: easy or low-level) courses with very little information which can easily be memorized so that a short timed written test is requisite to demonstrate understanding of what the student was intended to learn. So that's the first few semesters of most disciplines. Testing in this manner becomes completely useless at a certain point and shouldn't be done, in pretty much every field. A written timed test doesn't prove a M.D. is ready to start practicing medicine, only experience does. A written timed test will likely not get you hired at Google, Microsoft, or any major software producing studio. A written timed test will not demonstrate that you're fit to drive a car (you actually have to do it). Why is a written timed test required to show you sufficiently understand the material in courses that cover 400+ page texts? If the author can present the material in an understandable fashion in around 400 pages, how is 3 pages of paper with sparse questions on it going to demonstrate even a tiny fraction of that information? It won't.
The moral of the story was to not require exams in courses where they don't make sense -- they're not conducive to learning and they can easily frustrate and discourage the student. Projects make more sense in computer science and week-long take-home exams work well for mathematics. Timed written tests work well for that freshman music course where you only need to show you know the different artists and what musical pieces they made and some musical terms that you are required to know.
I really hate this as well. It sucks especially for us graduate math students. All semester you have lectures and student-involved proofs of rather deep mathematics as well as insight-provoking assignments that can easily take 6+ hours to complete (we usually have 1 a week per course), even if it's only 5 questions. Then at the midterm and for the final you have these 1-2 hour exams where you're tested on memorization of facts where accuracy and recall of minute detail from memory is the key and you're given a lot of shallow simple problems. Worst of all the professor is a Ph.D., probably with much more experience in the field than you have. This is good from a perspective that they can teach you much and effectively answer any questions you might have, but often they will give a problem with a trick which is obvious to them but not at all obvious to you. At least not with a 1.5 hour time limit dancing around in your head effectively killing any creativity. You just want to hit yourself when 30 minutes after the test is over you remember a brilliant fact that would've made that proof a 3-liner, and even more so when your professor later says that is better than how they solved it.
When dealing with real problems, you get time to think, and you can use books as a reference. It gets discouraging during tests like these when the only thing between you and a succinct and correct proof to the problem is that obscure step.. but you remember it.. you distinctly remember it.. you can even recall the exact theorem who's proof you were presented used it.. and perhaps you can even recall the basic idea.. but because you didn't obsess over memorizing that single fact, you can't seem to get it just right. Just "knowing about it" and being able to properly use a 800+ page book on algebra (D&F, yeah, it's huge) as a reference will only get you 1/10 points for the problem (yes, if it's not perfect, it's pretty much a failure, right?). Even worse, when you ask your professor a problem of any real complexity, like the ones they ask you, they often go straight to their text for insight as well, so if everyone does it as the source material is so vast that holding every tiny little detail in your head is difficult and counter-productive (it's not the precise detail that matters, it's the concepts and the understanding), what's the point of testing your ability to do that?
Mathematics ceases to be a worthwhile educational choice when the material being covered reaches a complexity so involved that a seated in-class test cannot possibly provide enough time to complete a problem set that can hope to prove that you understand the material and your grade is highly impacted by such a test. It only gets worse when the small selection of material tested includes that one bit of the course you didn't fully understand, but the other 98% you have rock solid, or it's that one little minute trick that the author did without explaining it in much detail (nor did your professor, and at the time doing it in class it seemed obvious, but the huge elephant in the room that is a time limit prevents you from seeing the problem with enough clarity to recall what obviated it), leaving you with a poor grade even though you feel you sufficiently understand the material. Nothing beats walking away from a test like that, it makes you think "why the hell am I even taking these courses?"
"... this is a matter of national security. A cyber attack on America can do as much or more damage today by incapacitating our banks, our communications, our finance, our transportation as a conventional war attack and the president in catastrophic cases, he's not going to do it every day, not going to take it over, so I say to my friends in the internet relax, take a look at the bill, and this is something we need to protect our country. Right now China — the government — can disconnect parts of its Internet in a case of war. We need to have the ability to do that, too."
Wh.. w.... wha... what!? Are you fucking kidding me? NO. "Cyber war" is wholly driven by bullshit and FUD in news agencies, these people have NO IDEA what they're talking about when they talk about cyber security. Further, in that CNN interview, check this out:
1. Most of these systems are HIGHLY ISOLATED and secured already by way of private networks, firewalls, DMZs, etc. In this way, an attack as described would be incredibly difficult if not impossible. We have no evidence to show that this is even a slight concern. None.
2. An internet attack can be fixed. It doesn't DESTROY equipment, it doesn't level a building, it doesn't kill people, and IT people CAN SHUT OFF EXTERNAL ACCESS TO A SYSTEM if it's being targeted by an attack. I trust the judgement of these professional IT persons that know their own systems intimately far above that of our technilogically incompetent and ignorant president.
3. I've looked at the bill -- nothing in it is even remotely "good." We're good in the IT world. You might not understand that our IT departments are like little units of a larger army. If we get attacked, we can defend ourselves. We don't need you shutting down essential access to patches, communication, support lines, just because you think something might be happening.
4. In China this capability is reserved to kill the movement of information to restrict communication and the spread of anti-government "propaganda" via the internet. I argue that shutting off our networks for ANY REASON WHATSOEVER is a very blatant violation of constitutional rights. Power like this can only be abused, and as I've pointed out, there is NO well-intentioned or well-informed use case where this wouldn't be much more damaging than an actual cyber attack.
This sounds like the squaking of a moron with no clue on national TV. He speaks of how damaging shutting down these systems would be.. and that a cyber attack could easily do that (it can't, not easily), but then proposes we give the president the ability to shut them down forcefully here? Really? Killing our networks to stop our networks from being attacked. Do you not see how downtime is downtime no matter what causes it? At least with our current setups, we can mitigate an attack, if the ISP is forced to SHUT OFF the network, we can't, we're fucked, we're down and we just have to go home and hope the all powerful almighty president decides in his infinite wisdom that it's OK to turn it back on later.
It's simple. This level of micro-management is best left to the ISPs and the companies. Stay the fuck out.
You seem to have things backwards. It was Obama that spent trillions for "short-term gains" and his and other liberals' form of "long-term gains" is .. just keep spending hundreds of billions every year, it's fine, just write it into the deficit. Do realize spending federal funds like that places ALL of the burden on the young generation. There's a reason republicans are traditionally called conservatives, even if they've grown away from that in the past few decades.
Hard shutdowns = win. Who wants to walk away with the knowledge that some notepad used as a clipboard augmentation prevents the shutdown for 8+ hours because Microsoft's code is retarded. Let them patent a broken shutdown system -- in reality it's not that hard to do. Just make a signal for indicating to a program the OS wants to shutdo... oh wait.. nvm.