You're absolutely right. Tyler Clementi did kill himself, and he ultimately bears sole responsibility for that. So yes, you are 100% correct!
But you seem to have missed the point, which is that whatever Clementi's problems might have been, it doesn't mean that Dharun Ravi was not CRIMINALLY LIABLE for what he was charged with, which included (1) invasion of privacy, (2) tampering with evidence, and (3) bias intimidation. And he IS responsible for his actions, just as much as Clementi was for his decision to kill himself. At no point do I make the claim that Ravi made Clementi commit suicide. But the point of the trial was never about that. It was about whether Ravi intruded on another person's reasonable expectation of privacy (Clementi requested that privacy, asking for the personal use of the room, and Ravi granted it on at least two occasions). It was about whether Ravi did what he did because he intended to humiliate Clementi (and not whether Clementi regarded such acts as intimidation). And it was about whether Ravi then tried to cover up what he had said and done once he realized he was in trouble. For that, he is absolutely guilty. To disagree is to reveal your hypocrisy, because as you can see, I agree that Clementi is the only one who is responsible for his own actions--just like Ravi is for his.
Sure, because as we all know, Tyler Clementi obviously used his gay powers of mind control to subconsciously (a) instruct Ravi to modify his computer to auto-accept remote requests to activate his webcam, (b) point the webcam at Clementi's bed, (c) brag about the experience to his friends over twitter, (d) then try to delete incriminating texts and tweets. Wow those suicidal gays sure are sneaky!!!!
Ravi's life wasn't ruined by Clementi or his suicide. Ravi has himself, and only himself, to blame. You seem to have missed out on a crucial aspect of the chain of causality. Short of spelling it out in crayon for you, the unassailable fact remains that Ravi engaged in a pattern of behavior resulting in the charges he was convicted of.
Wow, how did that comment get modded 5, Informative?
The shortcuts aren't about just moving around and selecting cells. If you think that's what this is about, then you obviously are not much of a user of Excel. It's about the ease, immediacy, and PRECISION of filling in cells with formulas based on references to other cells and automatically selecting ranges of cells based on whether they contain something. If I had to pinch and swipe and drag and double-tap my finger or fingers across a tablet every time I needed to do something like this, it would be horrendously slow and prone to ERROR.
Excel users aren't just concerned about doing things quickly. They need to make sure that the UI facilitates accurate and reliable construction of spreadsheets. The speed issue comes into play only because if you have to take the time to make sure your gesture was correctly interpreted, you've slowed down and lost productivity.
I have to use Excel on a daily basis, and I am also an avid iPad and iPhone user, not to mention I use Photoshop extensively in my photography hobby. As much as I love using all of these tools, I also recognize that the ways in which their interfaces are designed are quite different, and that it is their own individual elegance that makes each of them what they are.
Okay, I can understand wanting some kind of rudimentary spreadsheet viewing/editing application for tablet/mobile devices, but Excel is a particularly good example of a program that really needs a physical, full-size keyboard. There are numerous key combinations and shortcuts that are absolutely essential for efficient usage of Excel. If you're doing any kind of spreadsheet work, you need a keyboard with a numeric keypad, cursors, and Ctrl/Alt/Shift/F-number keys. Tapping an on-screen keyboard just isn't going to cut it, especially when that keyboard takes up valuable screen space that would otherwise be used to display more cells.
In a way, Excel is like Photoshop in that regard. Keyboard shortcuts are huge. These are applications that have evolved their present UI design to suit a desktop computing environment to the point where it would be incredibly cumbersome to adapt it to a tablet device with no mouse, no physical keyboard, and limited screen size. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but if you did actually manage to accomplish the task, users would almost have to completely relearn how to use the application. Nor am I saying that one should even attempt to design a full-featured version of Excel for tablet devices. My view is that tablets really are best suited for content consumption for most kinds of quantitative or visual data. It has nothing to do with whether we're talking about an iPad or some other tablet. The essence of what Excel does, and how the user creates spreadsheets in it, is something I don't think could translate well to such a device. And in light of this, I think the question of whether some incarnation of Office should be developed for iOS seems to be besides the point.
I knew some idiot such as yourself would read what I wrote and point that out. I was waiting for such an argument to be made. Congratulations, you just demonstrated that you're a tool...who also can't spell.
So here's the rebuttal that you evidently need to have spelled out for you. I don't hand out ANY emails "wrecklessly" [sic]. I don't even hand them out recklessly. I use my hotmail address to sign up for various web services, like slashdot, meetup, and twitter; I also use it as my contact address for online shopping. These are perfectly legitimate and reasonable uses, and wherever applicable, I always opt out of having my hotmail address shared, visible, or otherwise made public. If I get spam as a result of signing up or doing business through these sites, then that's not my fault.
My Gmail, on the other hand, is for PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE and IMPORTANT things, and I have incoming messages pushed to my phone.
That's the entire context of the distinction I make between my accounts. You, dumbass that you are, seem to want to exaggeratedly characterize it as me recklessly sharing my hotmail address with every spammer on the planet, when that is not the case. Furthermore, you don't seem to realize that sharing my gmail address with other individuals could perhaps put them at even greater risk of getting spammed, because if you sign up for a service or buy goods, you're sending your contact info to a company, which is generally better at securing the systems that store that data. On the other hand, I have no idea if my friend(s) or personal contacts are using a compromised machine that has been infected with malware that's harvesting their contacts.
The bottom line is that no matter how you share your account, spam is going to be sent to it. Someone is going to find your address and it's going to get hit eventually. Once that happens, the success of the spam filter has nothing to do with who has your address. If I bother to look in my gmail's spam folder--and I have done this--I would find hundreds of tagged messages that were caught by the filter. But I almost NEVER see any spam get through that filter, out of all of that junk. On the other hand, hotmail routinely lets spam into my inbox on a daily basis. I had to create multiple rules to filter it out manually, because their so-called "BEST IN THE INDUSTRY" filter is too stupid to do it.
As usual, Microsoft is full of shit. My hotmail account allows the MOST spam through to my inbox. Gmail's filters are nearly perfect--I think I've only seen one spam message make it through in the past few years, whereas in hotmail, I've had to create a rule that moves anything not specifically addressed to me into the junk folder. Every day, that folder gets filled with spam from the likes of obviously faked domains like SEBUJIHJTPHJ@a.encloserrewall.com, and HUZDSUBYYZMB@a.gamelikeinconside.com. I've contacted hotmail demanding to know why their spam filter sucks so hard that they can't even filter out something as obvious as that. Of course, there's no response because as we can see, they're spending money on spokespeople rather than developers.
Furthermore, it's not just that hotmail fails to filter spam, the problem is that they have such an antiquated and feature-poor interface for users to control how incoming email is sorted. Then the web interface itself is extremely slow. I'm hardly a fan of Google but anyone with half a brain can see that Gmail is superior in EVERY CONCEIVABLE WAY. It's not even close.
Hotmail is for email you don't give a shit about, and when you don't want to give out a real address. Honestly, I don't even know why I still have it. I'd be better off creating a garbage gmail account and use that instead.
You're an idiot if you think I'm talking about students from a junior college.
How many UNIVERSITIES are located in Pasadena, whose mascot is a beaver?
The students who go there are most certainly NOT your average, run-of-the-mill college students. I had classmates that would sit down and write their own operating systems and filesystems over a weekend, just for the fun of it. Our professors were some of the most brilliant and renowned academic minds in the world (which, by the way, tended to make them lousy instructors). My previous comment was mostly in jest, but the truth is that there probably do exist a number of individuals (undergrad, graduate, or faculty) who have the knowledge and access to computational resources to break such encryption if they so desired, or at least devise some manner to circumvent it.
Nestled in quiet suburban Pasadena, a small university without a football team is full of hundreds of students who could probably crack the encryption scheme faster than they can finish their CS/EE midterms. That is, if they could be bothered to....
I did not say Siri uses Wolfram|Alpha to determine the meaning of the transcribed voice input. Perhaps you need to read more carefully.
I said, "This is what Wolfram|Alpha attempts to do." That is a true statement, but I did not say "Siri uses Wolfram|Alpha's algorithms to determine the meaning of the input." I mentioned it as an EXAMPLE of an algorithm that does such a thing. Since so many people seem to think that Siri just does some kind of simple keyword search, and since Wolfram|Alpha is a technology that has been in existence for some time and has more familiarity in the public consciousness, it was entirely appropriate for me to mention it as an instance of how statistical methods can be used to parse natural language input.
What makes the technology used for Siri novel is not the individual components, but the way in which they work together.
Siri is the synergy of three distinct but related challenges in artificial intelligence: (1) How do we get a computer to correctly parse the syntax of natural human speech? (2) How do we get a computer to understand the meaning of a sentence in some specified human language? (3) How do we get a computer to provide a relevant response to a meaningful but potentially vague command? Siri arguably is the first attempt at doing all three of these things in near real-time for a very broad space of possible inputs. However, it should be stressed that by no means is it perfect at any of these tasks--indeed, far from it.
The point to be understood here is that Siri is not merely about voice transcription, nor is it about the transfer of voice input. That is just one part of the process. The next part is using the result of its transcription algorithm as input to a natural language processing engine that likely uses various other statistical methods to pick out certain words, analyze the grammatical structure of the input, and determine the sentence's most likely intent. This is what Wolfram|Alpha attempts to do. The final part is to have the computer search what resources are available to it and provide data or perform an action that (hopefully) is what the user wanted. None of these steps are trivial.
Many of the criticisms of Apple's involvement in Siri's development have been misplaced. I've heard people say how Apple weren't the innovators of the technology, or how Siri isn't anything special or new. And it's true--Apple didn't develop Nuance's speech recognition technology, nor did they invent Wolfram|Alpha's processing algorithms. But the innovation occurred when they decided they wanted to put these things together, put it on a smartphone, and try to make it do things intuitively and seamlessly. Whether it actually works as well as we might want it to is another question.
In so far as its availability on various iPhone models, I think it's rather obvious by now that Apple made a business decision to restrict Siri's availability to the iPhone 4S. It has nothing to do with hardware/software limitations. Apple knows it has a coveted feature and they're not afraid to say, "hey, if you want it, you're going to have to buy the newest iPhone," even though there's no technological reason that Siri can't run on older devices. It's a dick move for sure, but the history of computing--indeed, the history of capitalism--is littered with similarly annoying tactics. I'm sure some iPhone 4 users are hoping that after the iPhone 5 is announced and the shine fades on the iPhone 4S, that Apple will somehow find it in their hearts to put Siri on the iPhone 4. But I wouldn't hold my breath. These phones are Apple's bread and butter--they will do whatever it takes to make sure you want to buy a new one after each and every upgrade cycle. The only pressure they're feeling to make the hardware better is coming from the Android device manufacturers.
I think it's pretty clear by now that I'm neither an Apple fanboy, nor an Apple hater. I find such binary thinking to be simplistic, naive, and largely irrelevant in light of the fact that there are no completely honest actors in the technology sector, and there never will be.
And from my own personal experience as someone who has used an iPhone since the very first model, I have not found that Siri has noticeably increased my data usage. Other types of data access are far more intensive, such as streaming video and music, as well as sharing images/video taken with the iPhone's camera.
That statement assumes that those elected officials currently in office and favor such legislation do so out of ignorance. As has been noted, it's not technological ignorance that motivates the push for SOPA: it's money. We're talking LOTS of money, offered by the entertainment industry lobbyists.
Everyone needs to wake up and realize that we don't live in a representative system of government. We live in a plutocracy, in which government policy is shaped solely by those who have the money and power to buy it. The Citizens United SCOTUS decision was not so much evidence of such bribery as it was a reflection of the brazen impunity with which corporations now feel they may act. Same thing with SOPA and Protect-IP. The government knows EXACTLY what it's doing. Don't think for one second that they're just clueless, doddering old fools who barely understand email. They know full well the consequences of their actions--they just don't care, because they're being paid off. Most Americans in their place would do the exact same thing.
The distinction between corporate power and political power in the United States is really quite a bit smaller than most Americans realize. Corporate money is what controls government policy--not just through the obvious route of lobbyists, but in fact through more insidious means, such as the use of propaganda and media bias to shape public perception. This is why partisanship and animosity has increased in proportion to the flow of and ease of access to information, as the intensity of this manufactured conflict drives media consumption (and in turn, fuels advertising revenue). Therefore, it is important to recognize that the notion of "censorship" as it has traditionally applied to a government's silencing of free expression of its people, is too rigid and narrow a framework within which to discuss contemporary social, economic, and political problems caused by the ascension of corporate power in US politics. Instead, to discuss the true extent of how most Americans have lost the ability to shape their futures--in which self-expression plays a critical role--it is necessary to examine how we have not so much lost the liberty to speak out or vote against the policies of our government, but rather, how we have been made dumb, compliant, and fearful by a plutocracy that doesn't need to censor because the public has been brainwashed into supporting policies that are actually contrary to their self-interest.
In this context, then, it is clear that the censorship that occurs in China, for all its relative overtness and lack of subtlety, is really no more insidious, potent, or damaging than the "non-censorship" censorship that occurs in the US. Ultimately, they are really not that dissimilar--at their most basic level, both are merely a means of control, wielded by an elite group with a great deal of money with which they buy influence to further serve their financial and political interests. The only substantive difference is that for the most part, the Chinese know that they exist in a cage, and tend to retain the status quo for cultural reasons, whereas Americans have been fooled into thinking they are somehow "free" because if they realized the truth, they'd revolt. The common reality is that everyone is just a human resource, a commodity for corporations to exploit in the pursuit of ever-increasing amounts of wealth.
I find it amusing that Google fans are quick to point out how they've been harvesting natural language data from your voicemails (never mind the privacy implications for now!), but fail to realize that Siri's voice recognition algorithms are built on technology from Nuance, which is the company that developed Dragon Naturally Speaking. And Dragon has been around for a LOT longer than Google Voice. Apple didn't try to invent Siri's voice recognition from scratch, and that's something that fans of Apple also must realize. Apple purchased Siri, and with the backing of money and resources, grew it into what it is today.
Furthermore, Google may collect a lot of data, but it's the algorithms that drive the accuracy and flexibility of any voice recognition system.
As a final point, Siri is much, much more than just a voice recognition system. All that voice recognition does is transcribe audio input into text. A lot of what Siri does that is novel has to do with the use of natural language processing to achieve semantic understanding of the input, which is what Wolfram|Alpha does. The novelty and the innovation lies in the relatively successful synthesis of these two technologies to achieve something akin to that idealized "Star Trek" interface.
Reading comprehension fail. Note that the grandparent post says "any science/engineering discipline should be well versed in simple math like this." It doesn't say, "answering multiple choice questions." So, to spell out the difference for you, since you seem to not understand it--the format in which the student is tested for proficiency in mathematics is distinct from the knowledge of concepts and skills required for mastery.
And yes, the grandparent post is correct. Any scientist or engineer should be able to demonstrate proficiency with these basic mathematical concepts (arithmetic, estimation, decimal numbers, rates, the Cartesian coordinate system, basic probability). In fact, I would say that ANY adult who has graduated high school should know how to do these things, for what would have been the point of attending high school in the first place if one so easily forgets such things?
Here's the thing. We can debate at length about the utility of such knowledge for the vast majority of people in this world who would presumably not need to know how to do math to succeed or even get by in their day-to-day existence. But why is it that this is the measure by which we determine whether something is worthwhile to know and understand? If that's the way we begin the conversation--i.e., "will I ever need to use this?"--then we've already lost the fight to educate subsequent generations. It's a regressive, know-nothing, anti-intellectual attitude that fails to appreciate the value of knowledge for its own sake. It's why American society is so troubled--large segments of the American public have lost the ability to think critically, having become too accustomed to the notion that someone else will do the analysis for them.
The TSA is a bureaucratic, money-sucking nightmare that entirely fails to live up to the promises of the politicians who created it. It is incompetently managed and its policies are inept, ineffective, capricious, opaque, invasive, disrespectful, and I would argue they are also fundamentally unconstitutional.
All that said, though, the question remains: if the TSA were to vanish overnight, what would take its place? What SHOULD take its place? These are not easy questions to answer--if they were, we'd be on that path by now, but instead the Kabuki dance that is this "security theater" gets more bizarre by the day. The reality is that certain fundamental questions of how best to address and ensure basic passenger safety without infringing on essential personal liberties remain unanswered, let alone the question of how to do it efficiently (both in terms of financial cost and human resources). Of course that is not to say no ideas have been proposed, but the point is that we've let the genie out of the bottle and we cannot go back to the way things were done before. The TSA may or may not have to be dismantled, but something must serve the function of providing basic safety. After all, our corporate overlords who pull the puppet strings of our politicians, can't seem to stop meddling with foreign countries, so it seems unlikely that the rest of the world will soon stop hating us.
I thought they were getting more progressive in the recent years? Is this not the case? It seems like it's just getting closer and closer to another dictatorship and extreme socialism.
Extreme socialism? No, that's not correct. Russia is what one would legitimately call a plutocratic oligopoly, where control of the government and economy is tightly confined to those who became extremely wealthy after the disbanding of the Soviet Union opened up economic markets. Once that happened, various well-connected individuals were able to profit immensely from the sale of natural resources (i.e., Russian oil and natural gas) to Europe, and political corruption increased in direct proportion as these individuals leveraged their wealth to gain political influence in a freshly post-Communist country. What happened, basically, was a period of unrestrained capitalism culminating in monopoly power infiltrating a weak political system and the subsequent disenfranchisement of the vast majority of Russian citizens from actual political power. That is not "extreme socialism."
Some might argue that much the same will happen, is happening, or has already happened, in the United States--just with less flagrant violence and impunity, but that is a topic for another thread.
This is why the Communist Party is seeing a revival in Russian politics. Not because the voters actually wish for a return to communism--after all, they know full well what it was like to live under that failed system--but because things have gotten so horrifically bad and obviously corrupt under Putin's effective dictatorship, that a vote for the Communists is basically like giving Putin's party the middle finger.
As usual, the crux of the matter has to do with TRANSPARENCY and CONSUMER CONSENT. The question of whether or not CarrierIQ is actually capturing user behavior through the software is important, but actually secondary to the fact that the carriers themselves do not TELL the consumer that (1) we've installed this logging software on your device; (2) it is not possible through normal means to deactivate it; (3) this software runs without any disclosure or agreement in your contract; (4) this software runs on your device even if you are no longer under contract or even subscribed as our customer; and (5) this software is not an integrated component of the device's operating system.
And why don't they tell you these things? Because they can get away with it. The fact that this software is so hidden from the user, and is NEVER mentioned in any of the legal documentation you are asked to sign, is all the reason why the consumer cannot and should not be expected to simply take either the mobile network operator or CarrierIQ at their word when they say they're not tracking personally identifiable information. Yes, researchers have chimed in with their findings. But such broad, unregulated, and pervasive tools as CarrierIQ have enormous potential for abuse, and it is simply unacceptable to allow these companies to just chalk it up to "sorry we kept this a secret from you, but TRUST US, it's all perfectly innocent." Yeah, bullshit. If it were truly so innocuous, why did you go through such lengths to hide it and make it difficult to disable or remove?
Whatever they might promise to do, you can be assured that they're going to find a sneaky way to turn it into a method to violate your privacy even further.
By now, if you're still using FB, you really don't give two shits about your privacy, so it doesn't matter whether you're going to be given the chance to opt in. They already have you.
He's obviously the one person best suited to figure it out. He knows more about the range of topics that he has studied than his parents or his teachers. Where he might need help is in getting access to the resources that he chooses to take advantage of, given his young age.
As for extracurricular activities, the article already states that he participates in other non-academic pursuits. I'm not concerned about the need for balance in that regard.
The one concern I do have is that for all the academic and extracurricular activities, the one thing he needs to learn to be HAPPY in life is how to relate to others. That's not something you get while doing scientific research, or by doing sports. It's not something you get by overachieving in any sense.
I didn't learn that lesson until relatively late in my teenage years. I was miserable throughout my childhood and adolescence. I still carry the emotional scars. And the problem is that, for all the compliments that others pay me, calling me "talented" and "intelligent," I feel paralyzed, like everyone is always expecting something great to come out of me, and all I ever do is disappoint when I don't meet those expectations. So I stop trying.
Granted, I'm not saying this kid is going to end up the same way. All I'm saying is that he needs to be given the permission to NOT do something grandiose with his life. He doesn't owe anything to anyone but himself. I've come to realize that the most successful and well-adjusted people in life are the ones who are not only talented, but also have the drive, discipline, and perseverance to continue despite past failures. It's not enough to simply have one or the other.
No, you didn't "mean" to imply that the port was functionally the same, but in effect, that's exactly what people have gathered. Now we have folks claiming that Steve Jobs appropriated the design from Polaroid and so any other kind of copying by the likes of Samsung is therefore okay. Whether or not you intended a deception is irrelevant; you basically took a poorly-researched supposition and presented it as fodder for those who already made up their mind to hate Apple products.
If you have any degree of sincerity, you would update your blog post to reflect this information. Otherwise, you are being disingenuous and your credibility is nil.
I wish I could give you mod points for pointing out the yellow journalism in this biased and misleading summary. Alas, it looks like the knee-jerk responses calling for heads to roll have already hit the comments full force, and nobody is going to actually bother trying to see what was actually proposed because it doesn't fit into their delusional partisan worldview.
...I was very interested in Diablo III, but it's been so many years that in the meantime, life happened to me, I grew up, and lost interest in spending my time playing online video games. Diablo I and II were a lot of fun, but it's hard to muster the enthusiasm for stuff like this as I've gotten older.
Let's say this is true, that playing Bejeweled improves cognitive function in older adults.
Come on. It's Be-freakin'-jeweled. It's not exactly up there with calculating an integral or writing a SQL query. If anything, what this tells me is that most people are rock stupid and a simple matching game is enough to exercise and stimulate neural pathways in their brains. You want cognitive stimulation? Teach yourself complex analysis, or learn how to compose a concerto, or even (gasp!) learn Javascript!
Slashdot Mirror
You're absolutely right. Tyler Clementi did kill himself, and he ultimately bears sole responsibility for that. So yes, you are 100% correct!
But you seem to have missed the point, which is that whatever Clementi's problems might have been, it doesn't mean that Dharun Ravi was not CRIMINALLY LIABLE for what he was charged with, which included (1) invasion of privacy, (2) tampering with evidence, and (3) bias intimidation. And he IS responsible for his actions, just as much as Clementi was for his decision to kill himself. At no point do I make the claim that Ravi made Clementi commit suicide. But the point of the trial was never about that. It was about whether Ravi intruded on another person's reasonable expectation of privacy (Clementi requested that privacy, asking for the personal use of the room, and Ravi granted it on at least two occasions). It was about whether Ravi did what he did because he intended to humiliate Clementi (and not whether Clementi regarded such acts as intimidation). And it was about whether Ravi then tried to cover up what he had said and done once he realized he was in trouble. For that, he is absolutely guilty. To disagree is to reveal your hypocrisy, because as you can see, I agree that Clementi is the only one who is responsible for his own actions--just like Ravi is for his.
Sure, because as we all know, Tyler Clementi obviously used his gay powers of mind control to subconsciously (a) instruct Ravi to modify his computer to auto-accept remote requests to activate his webcam, (b) point the webcam at Clementi's bed, (c) brag about the experience to his friends over twitter, (d) then try to delete incriminating texts and tweets. Wow those suicidal gays sure are sneaky!!!!
Ravi's life wasn't ruined by Clementi or his suicide. Ravi has himself, and only himself, to blame. You seem to have missed out on a crucial aspect of the chain of causality. Short of spelling it out in crayon for you, the unassailable fact remains that Ravi engaged in a pattern of behavior resulting in the charges he was convicted of.
Wow, how did that comment get modded 5, Informative?
The shortcuts aren't about just moving around and selecting cells. If you think that's what this is about, then you obviously are not much of a user of Excel. It's about the ease, immediacy, and PRECISION of filling in cells with formulas based on references to other cells and automatically selecting ranges of cells based on whether they contain something. If I had to pinch and swipe and drag and double-tap my finger or fingers across a tablet every time I needed to do something like this, it would be horrendously slow and prone to ERROR.
Excel users aren't just concerned about doing things quickly. They need to make sure that the UI facilitates accurate and reliable construction of spreadsheets. The speed issue comes into play only because if you have to take the time to make sure your gesture was correctly interpreted, you've slowed down and lost productivity.
I have to use Excel on a daily basis, and I am also an avid iPad and iPhone user, not to mention I use Photoshop extensively in my photography hobby. As much as I love using all of these tools, I also recognize that the ways in which their interfaces are designed are quite different, and that it is their own individual elegance that makes each of them what they are.
Okay, I can understand wanting some kind of rudimentary spreadsheet viewing/editing application for tablet/mobile devices, but Excel is a particularly good example of a program that really needs a physical, full-size keyboard. There are numerous key combinations and shortcuts that are absolutely essential for efficient usage of Excel. If you're doing any kind of spreadsheet work, you need a keyboard with a numeric keypad, cursors, and Ctrl/Alt/Shift/F-number keys. Tapping an on-screen keyboard just isn't going to cut it, especially when that keyboard takes up valuable screen space that would otherwise be used to display more cells.
In a way, Excel is like Photoshop in that regard. Keyboard shortcuts are huge. These are applications that have evolved their present UI design to suit a desktop computing environment to the point where it would be incredibly cumbersome to adapt it to a tablet device with no mouse, no physical keyboard, and limited screen size. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but if you did actually manage to accomplish the task, users would almost have to completely relearn how to use the application. Nor am I saying that one should even attempt to design a full-featured version of Excel for tablet devices. My view is that tablets really are best suited for content consumption for most kinds of quantitative or visual data. It has nothing to do with whether we're talking about an iPad or some other tablet. The essence of what Excel does, and how the user creates spreadsheets in it, is something I don't think could translate well to such a device. And in light of this, I think the question of whether some incarnation of Office should be developed for iOS seems to be besides the point.
I knew some idiot such as yourself would read what I wrote and point that out. I was waiting for such an argument to be made. Congratulations, you just demonstrated that you're a tool...who also can't spell.
So here's the rebuttal that you evidently need to have spelled out for you. I don't hand out ANY emails "wrecklessly" [sic]. I don't even hand them out recklessly. I use my hotmail address to sign up for various web services, like slashdot, meetup, and twitter; I also use it as my contact address for online shopping. These are perfectly legitimate and reasonable uses, and wherever applicable, I always opt out of having my hotmail address shared, visible, or otherwise made public. If I get spam as a result of signing up or doing business through these sites, then that's not my fault.
My Gmail, on the other hand, is for PERSONAL CORRESPONDENCE and IMPORTANT things, and I have incoming messages pushed to my phone.
That's the entire context of the distinction I make between my accounts. You, dumbass that you are, seem to want to exaggeratedly characterize it as me recklessly sharing my hotmail address with every spammer on the planet, when that is not the case. Furthermore, you don't seem to realize that sharing my gmail address with other individuals could perhaps put them at even greater risk of getting spammed, because if you sign up for a service or buy goods, you're sending your contact info to a company, which is generally better at securing the systems that store that data. On the other hand, I have no idea if my friend(s) or personal contacts are using a compromised machine that has been infected with malware that's harvesting their contacts.
The bottom line is that no matter how you share your account, spam is going to be sent to it. Someone is going to find your address and it's going to get hit eventually. Once that happens, the success of the spam filter has nothing to do with who has your address. If I bother to look in my gmail's spam folder--and I have done this--I would find hundreds of tagged messages that were caught by the filter. But I almost NEVER see any spam get through that filter, out of all of that junk. On the other hand, hotmail routinely lets spam into my inbox on a daily basis. I had to create multiple rules to filter it out manually, because their so-called "BEST IN THE INDUSTRY" filter is too stupid to do it.
As usual, Microsoft is full of shit. My hotmail account allows the MOST spam through to my inbox. Gmail's filters are nearly perfect--I think I've only seen one spam message make it through in the past few years, whereas in hotmail, I've had to create a rule that moves anything not specifically addressed to me into the junk folder. Every day, that folder gets filled with spam from the likes of obviously faked domains like SEBUJIHJTPHJ@a.encloserrewall.com, and HUZDSUBYYZMB@a.gamelikeinconside.com. I've contacted hotmail demanding to know why their spam filter sucks so hard that they can't even filter out something as obvious as that. Of course, there's no response because as we can see, they're spending money on spokespeople rather than developers.
Furthermore, it's not just that hotmail fails to filter spam, the problem is that they have such an antiquated and feature-poor interface for users to control how incoming email is sorted. Then the web interface itself is extremely slow. I'm hardly a fan of Google but anyone with half a brain can see that Gmail is superior in EVERY CONCEIVABLE WAY. It's not even close.
Hotmail is for email you don't give a shit about, and when you don't want to give out a real address. Honestly, I don't even know why I still have it. I'd be better off creating a garbage gmail account and use that instead.
You're an idiot if you think I'm talking about students from a junior college.
How many UNIVERSITIES are located in Pasadena, whose mascot is a beaver?
The students who go there are most certainly NOT your average, run-of-the-mill college students. I had classmates that would sit down and write their own operating systems and filesystems over a weekend, just for the fun of it. Our professors were some of the most brilliant and renowned academic minds in the world (which, by the way, tended to make them lousy instructors). My previous comment was mostly in jest, but the truth is that there probably do exist a number of individuals (undergrad, graduate, or faculty) who have the knowledge and access to computational resources to break such encryption if they so desired, or at least devise some manner to circumvent it.
Nestled in quiet suburban Pasadena, a small university without a football team is full of hundreds of students who could probably crack the encryption scheme faster than they can finish their CS/EE midterms. That is, if they could be bothered to....
I did not say Siri uses Wolfram|Alpha to determine the meaning of the transcribed voice input. Perhaps you need to read more carefully.
I said, "This is what Wolfram|Alpha attempts to do." That is a true statement, but I did not say "Siri uses Wolfram|Alpha's algorithms to determine the meaning of the input." I mentioned it as an EXAMPLE of an algorithm that does such a thing. Since so many people seem to think that Siri just does some kind of simple keyword search, and since Wolfram|Alpha is a technology that has been in existence for some time and has more familiarity in the public consciousness, it was entirely appropriate for me to mention it as an instance of how statistical methods can be used to parse natural language input.
What makes the technology used for Siri novel is not the individual components, but the way in which they work together.
Siri is the synergy of three distinct but related challenges in artificial intelligence: (1) How do we get a computer to correctly parse the syntax of natural human speech? (2) How do we get a computer to understand the meaning of a sentence in some specified human language? (3) How do we get a computer to provide a relevant response to a meaningful but potentially vague command? Siri arguably is the first attempt at doing all three of these things in near real-time for a very broad space of possible inputs. However, it should be stressed that by no means is it perfect at any of these tasks--indeed, far from it.
The point to be understood here is that Siri is not merely about voice transcription, nor is it about the transfer of voice input. That is just one part of the process. The next part is using the result of its transcription algorithm as input to a natural language processing engine that likely uses various other statistical methods to pick out certain words, analyze the grammatical structure of the input, and determine the sentence's most likely intent. This is what Wolfram|Alpha attempts to do. The final part is to have the computer search what resources are available to it and provide data or perform an action that (hopefully) is what the user wanted. None of these steps are trivial.
Many of the criticisms of Apple's involvement in Siri's development have been misplaced. I've heard people say how Apple weren't the innovators of the technology, or how Siri isn't anything special or new. And it's true--Apple didn't develop Nuance's speech recognition technology, nor did they invent Wolfram|Alpha's processing algorithms. But the innovation occurred when they decided they wanted to put these things together, put it on a smartphone, and try to make it do things intuitively and seamlessly. Whether it actually works as well as we might want it to is another question.
In so far as its availability on various iPhone models, I think it's rather obvious by now that Apple made a business decision to restrict Siri's availability to the iPhone 4S. It has nothing to do with hardware/software limitations. Apple knows it has a coveted feature and they're not afraid to say, "hey, if you want it, you're going to have to buy the newest iPhone," even though there's no technological reason that Siri can't run on older devices. It's a dick move for sure, but the history of computing--indeed, the history of capitalism--is littered with similarly annoying tactics. I'm sure some iPhone 4 users are hoping that after the iPhone 5 is announced and the shine fades on the iPhone 4S, that Apple will somehow find it in their hearts to put Siri on the iPhone 4. But I wouldn't hold my breath. These phones are Apple's bread and butter--they will do whatever it takes to make sure you want to buy a new one after each and every upgrade cycle. The only pressure they're feeling to make the hardware better is coming from the Android device manufacturers.
I think it's pretty clear by now that I'm neither an Apple fanboy, nor an Apple hater. I find such binary thinking to be simplistic, naive, and largely irrelevant in light of the fact that there are no completely honest actors in the technology sector, and there never will be.
The WaPo article is nothing more than sensationalist journalism, designed to foment controversy for the sake of attention and readership.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/27/siri-is-not-a-bandwidth-hog-and-users-are-not-the-problem/
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753694/siri-isnt-ruining-your-cellphone-service
And from my own personal experience as someone who has used an iPhone since the very first model, I have not found that Siri has noticeably increased my data usage. Other types of data access are far more intensive, such as streaming video and music, as well as sharing images/video taken with the iPhone's camera.
That statement assumes that those elected officials currently in office and favor such legislation do so out of ignorance. As has been noted, it's not technological ignorance that motivates the push for SOPA: it's money. We're talking LOTS of money, offered by the entertainment industry lobbyists.
Everyone needs to wake up and realize that we don't live in a representative system of government. We live in a plutocracy, in which government policy is shaped solely by those who have the money and power to buy it. The Citizens United SCOTUS decision was not so much evidence of such bribery as it was a reflection of the brazen impunity with which corporations now feel they may act. Same thing with SOPA and Protect-IP. The government knows EXACTLY what it's doing. Don't think for one second that they're just clueless, doddering old fools who barely understand email. They know full well the consequences of their actions--they just don't care, because they're being paid off. Most Americans in their place would do the exact same thing.
The distinction between corporate power and political power in the United States is really quite a bit smaller than most Americans realize. Corporate money is what controls government policy--not just through the obvious route of lobbyists, but in fact through more insidious means, such as the use of propaganda and media bias to shape public perception. This is why partisanship and animosity has increased in proportion to the flow of and ease of access to information, as the intensity of this manufactured conflict drives media consumption (and in turn, fuels advertising revenue). Therefore, it is important to recognize that the notion of "censorship" as it has traditionally applied to a government's silencing of free expression of its people, is too rigid and narrow a framework within which to discuss contemporary social, economic, and political problems caused by the ascension of corporate power in US politics. Instead, to discuss the true extent of how most Americans have lost the ability to shape their futures--in which self-expression plays a critical role--it is necessary to examine how we have not so much lost the liberty to speak out or vote against the policies of our government, but rather, how we have been made dumb, compliant, and fearful by a plutocracy that doesn't need to censor because the public has been brainwashed into supporting policies that are actually contrary to their self-interest.
In this context, then, it is clear that the censorship that occurs in China, for all its relative overtness and lack of subtlety, is really no more insidious, potent, or damaging than the "non-censorship" censorship that occurs in the US. Ultimately, they are really not that dissimilar--at their most basic level, both are merely a means of control, wielded by an elite group with a great deal of money with which they buy influence to further serve their financial and political interests. The only substantive difference is that for the most part, the Chinese know that they exist in a cage, and tend to retain the status quo for cultural reasons, whereas Americans have been fooled into thinking they are somehow "free" because if they realized the truth, they'd revolt. The common reality is that everyone is just a human resource, a commodity for corporations to exploit in the pursuit of ever-increasing amounts of wealth.
I find it amusing that Google fans are quick to point out how they've been harvesting natural language data from your voicemails (never mind the privacy implications for now!), but fail to realize that Siri's voice recognition algorithms are built on technology from Nuance, which is the company that developed Dragon Naturally Speaking. And Dragon has been around for a LOT longer than Google Voice. Apple didn't try to invent Siri's voice recognition from scratch, and that's something that fans of Apple also must realize. Apple purchased Siri, and with the backing of money and resources, grew it into what it is today.
Furthermore, Google may collect a lot of data, but it's the algorithms that drive the accuracy and flexibility of any voice recognition system.
As a final point, Siri is much, much more than just a voice recognition system. All that voice recognition does is transcribe audio input into text. A lot of what Siri does that is novel has to do with the use of natural language processing to achieve semantic understanding of the input, which is what Wolfram|Alpha does. The novelty and the innovation lies in the relatively successful synthesis of these two technologies to achieve something akin to that idealized "Star Trek" interface.
Reading comprehension fail. Note that the grandparent post says "any science/engineering discipline should be well versed in simple math like this." It doesn't say, "answering multiple choice questions." So, to spell out the difference for you, since you seem to not understand it--the format in which the student is tested for proficiency in mathematics is distinct from the knowledge of concepts and skills required for mastery.
And yes, the grandparent post is correct. Any scientist or engineer should be able to demonstrate proficiency with these basic mathematical concepts (arithmetic, estimation, decimal numbers, rates, the Cartesian coordinate system, basic probability). In fact, I would say that ANY adult who has graduated high school should know how to do these things, for what would have been the point of attending high school in the first place if one so easily forgets such things?
Here's the thing. We can debate at length about the utility of such knowledge for the vast majority of people in this world who would presumably not need to know how to do math to succeed or even get by in their day-to-day existence. But why is it that this is the measure by which we determine whether something is worthwhile to know and understand? If that's the way we begin the conversation--i.e., "will I ever need to use this?"--then we've already lost the fight to educate subsequent generations. It's a regressive, know-nothing, anti-intellectual attitude that fails to appreciate the value of knowledge for its own sake. It's why American society is so troubled--large segments of the American public have lost the ability to think critically, having become too accustomed to the notion that someone else will do the analysis for them.
The TSA is a bureaucratic, money-sucking nightmare that entirely fails to live up to the promises of the politicians who created it. It is incompetently managed and its policies are inept, ineffective, capricious, opaque, invasive, disrespectful, and I would argue they are also fundamentally unconstitutional.
All that said, though, the question remains: if the TSA were to vanish overnight, what would take its place? What SHOULD take its place? These are not easy questions to answer--if they were, we'd be on that path by now, but instead the Kabuki dance that is this "security theater" gets more bizarre by the day. The reality is that certain fundamental questions of how best to address and ensure basic passenger safety without infringing on essential personal liberties remain unanswered, let alone the question of how to do it efficiently (both in terms of financial cost and human resources). Of course that is not to say no ideas have been proposed, but the point is that we've let the genie out of the bottle and we cannot go back to the way things were done before. The TSA may or may not have to be dismantled, but something must serve the function of providing basic safety. After all, our corporate overlords who pull the puppet strings of our politicians, can't seem to stop meddling with foreign countries, so it seems unlikely that the rest of the world will soon stop hating us.
I thought they were getting more progressive in the recent years? Is this not the case? It seems like it's just getting closer and closer to another dictatorship and extreme socialism.
Extreme socialism? No, that's not correct. Russia is what one would legitimately call a plutocratic oligopoly, where control of the government and economy is tightly confined to those who became extremely wealthy after the disbanding of the Soviet Union opened up economic markets. Once that happened, various well-connected individuals were able to profit immensely from the sale of natural resources (i.e., Russian oil and natural gas) to Europe, and political corruption increased in direct proportion as these individuals leveraged their wealth to gain political influence in a freshly post-Communist country. What happened, basically, was a period of unrestrained capitalism culminating in monopoly power infiltrating a weak political system and the subsequent disenfranchisement of the vast majority of Russian citizens from actual political power. That is not "extreme socialism."
Some might argue that much the same will happen, is happening, or has already happened, in the United States--just with less flagrant violence and impunity, but that is a topic for another thread.
This is why the Communist Party is seeing a revival in Russian politics. Not because the voters actually wish for a return to communism--after all, they know full well what it was like to live under that failed system--but because things have gotten so horrifically bad and obviously corrupt under Putin's effective dictatorship, that a vote for the Communists is basically like giving Putin's party the middle finger.
As usual, the crux of the matter has to do with TRANSPARENCY and CONSUMER CONSENT. The question of whether or not CarrierIQ is actually capturing user behavior through the software is important, but actually secondary to the fact that the carriers themselves do not TELL the consumer that (1) we've installed this logging software on your device; (2) it is not possible through normal means to deactivate it; (3) this software runs without any disclosure or agreement in your contract; (4) this software runs on your device even if you are no longer under contract or even subscribed as our customer; and (5) this software is not an integrated component of the device's operating system.
And why don't they tell you these things? Because they can get away with it. The fact that this software is so hidden from the user, and is NEVER mentioned in any of the legal documentation you are asked to sign, is all the reason why the consumer cannot and should not be expected to simply take either the mobile network operator or CarrierIQ at their word when they say they're not tracking personally identifiable information. Yes, researchers have chimed in with their findings. But such broad, unregulated, and pervasive tools as CarrierIQ have enormous potential for abuse, and it is simply unacceptable to allow these companies to just chalk it up to "sorry we kept this a secret from you, but TRUST US, it's all perfectly innocent." Yeah, bullshit. If it were truly so innocuous, why did you go through such lengths to hide it and make it difficult to disable or remove?
Whatever they might promise to do, you can be assured that they're going to find a sneaky way to turn it into a method to violate your privacy even further.
By now, if you're still using FB, you really don't give two shits about your privacy, so it doesn't matter whether you're going to be given the chance to opt in. They already have you.
He's obviously the one person best suited to figure it out. He knows more about the range of topics that he has studied than his parents or his teachers. Where he might need help is in getting access to the resources that he chooses to take advantage of, given his young age.
As for extracurricular activities, the article already states that he participates in other non-academic pursuits. I'm not concerned about the need for balance in that regard.
The one concern I do have is that for all the academic and extracurricular activities, the one thing he needs to learn to be HAPPY in life is how to relate to others. That's not something you get while doing scientific research, or by doing sports. It's not something you get by overachieving in any sense.
I didn't learn that lesson until relatively late in my teenage years. I was miserable throughout my childhood and adolescence. I still carry the emotional scars. And the problem is that, for all the compliments that others pay me, calling me "talented" and "intelligent," I feel paralyzed, like everyone is always expecting something great to come out of me, and all I ever do is disappoint when I don't meet those expectations. So I stop trying.
Granted, I'm not saying this kid is going to end up the same way. All I'm saying is that he needs to be given the permission to NOT do something grandiose with his life. He doesn't owe anything to anyone but himself. I've come to realize that the most successful and well-adjusted people in life are the ones who are not only talented, but also have the drive, discipline, and perseverance to continue despite past failures. It's not enough to simply have one or the other.
No, you didn't "mean" to imply that the port was functionally the same, but in effect, that's exactly what people have gathered. Now we have folks claiming that Steve Jobs appropriated the design from Polaroid and so any other kind of copying by the likes of Samsung is therefore okay. Whether or not you intended a deception is irrelevant; you basically took a poorly-researched supposition and presented it as fodder for those who already made up their mind to hate Apple products.
If you have any degree of sincerity, you would update your blog post to reflect this information. Otherwise, you are being disingenuous and your credibility is nil.
I wish I could give you mod points for pointing out the yellow journalism in this biased and misleading summary. Alas, it looks like the knee-jerk responses calling for heads to roll have already hit the comments full force, and nobody is going to actually bother trying to see what was actually proposed because it doesn't fit into their delusional partisan worldview.
...I was very interested in Diablo III, but it's been so many years that in the meantime, life happened to me, I grew up, and lost interest in spending my time playing online video games. Diablo I and II were a lot of fun, but it's hard to muster the enthusiasm for stuff like this as I've gotten older.
Wow. Just stop and listen to yourself. You are a hypocritical asshole.
Let's say this is true, that playing Bejeweled improves cognitive function in older adults.
Come on. It's Be-freakin'-jeweled. It's not exactly up there with calculating an integral or writing a SQL query. If anything, what this tells me is that most people are rock stupid and a simple matching game is enough to exercise and stimulate neural pathways in their brains. You want cognitive stimulation? Teach yourself complex analysis, or learn how to compose a concerto, or even (gasp!) learn Javascript!