Wikileaks hasn't broken any laws so siting RICO seems quite dubious. In the case of enabling criminal activity, I do see some merit but I'm going to take a guess that you aren't directly quoting the law because that statement would apply to any publisher, no matter the medium they use.
I agree that our pop culture needs some fine tuning but Mitra's work is exploiting a child's natural inquisitiveness and creativity, which largely sidesteps the anti-intelligence culture. The kids want to learn and his program gives them a loosely structured environment so that they can do just that but under their own volition. Most of the world's education systems fail to motivate students to learn and many don't even try. Kids just go to school because they have to, and not because they'll learn something cool or interesting that will help them later.
I suggest watching some of Mitra's presentations as it will become quite evident that he has started to transform education into a game where the goal isn't to learn but rather the path to winning the game is to learn.
I totally agree that their current system is compromised. I just think that someone really needs to step up and design a well thought out digital signature system for images before they become completely irrelevant as legal documents. It looks like cannon tried but fell short of that goal.
If the camera has a clock that is only set at the factory then the timestamp would be wrong as would the gps position if the camera is equipped with a GPS. Saying something is impossible often means one simply hasn't thought of a way to do it yet.
Giving federally subsidized loans to people working towards technical degrees works pretty well and that's how I got through college. It took me a year to find a job after graduating but the government covered the loan interest and didn't require payment on it until I got a job. Since engineering generally pays really well I'm able to pay off those loans in about a year of starting work. If I had dependents I would barely be able to make the 10 year payoff requirement though.
The other problem with this idea is when the benefit of the degree isn't measurable in dollars and can't be paid off easily by the person even after graduation. For instance people more educated in philosophy and history make better voting decisions which lead to a better run government but have very little chance in finding work that will pay enough to make the college degree worthwhile from an economic point of view. Those subjects could be covered in some type of vocational school though so maybe what really needs to happen is that we require several more years of paid for schooling for people who pass some type of test like the ACT/SAT.
The hard sciences aren't the only thing that are important to society, they just happen to have the most direct impact on the economy.
There's a TED talk from a guy who researched giving computer/internet access to kids in India and it greatly increased their learning capabilities. I think the failure of computers in the studies you guys are talking about has more to do with the people not knowing how to integrate computers with the classroom rather than the computer itself being a "hindrance to learning".
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
Thanks for pointing that out. I hate it when people cite blog posts for news because they're almost always wrong about the details. Would it have killed the original poster to have read the article cited in the original blog post?
Your last sentence in the summary is contrary to the main finding of the article in regards to power generation.
"Power Generation
Pursue displacement of inefficient coal generation with natural gas
combined cycle generation.
Develop policy and regulatory measures to facilitate natural gas
generation capacity investments concurrent with the introduction of large
intermittent renewable generation.
" -the MIT research summary
They are not advocating moving away from renewable energy like wind or solar to natural gas but rather advocating the use of both to replace coal since wind and solar do not produce reliable energy.
The only flash powered thing I can find on bing is the video player which is a really bad industry practice that needs to stop. They should have used html5 embedded video or silverlight. I would be really surprised if a silverlight player weren't better than any flash player out there due to flash being awerful at utilizing hardware acceleration. They probably made that decision simply because they didn't have to make the player from scratch and wanted excessive content control.
I do like your point about bing making google better but I don't think bing is going to achieve too big of a marketshare if say....IE asked people to choose a default search provider and listed both google and bing. If MS gets apple on board for choosing bing as default search engine then google could get frozen out of a huge chunk of the market without actually making a superior product but rather making a bearable alternative. I don't think I would have switched if MSN search had been comparable to google.
Two of the last three companies I've worked for as a software developer only gave us power user rights on our windowsXP machines. I was doing embedded software development and testing at both of those companies and it didn't cause any problems not having admin rights on my local machine. I could see where in some cases it would be impossible to function as a dev without admin rights but in most cases it can be gotten around by hiring smart IT support technicians who know how to install complex software and hardware and developers who can communicate their needs to the support staff.
To support the IT guys I'll give a recent example of how I effed up my Vista machine doing something that shouldn't have caused any problems. Vista kept bugging me about enabling automatic updates so I got annoyed and told it to download and install all the latest updates (no service packs). Well, that caused every single proprietary piece of software on my machine to crash on startup. It took the IT tech about 4 hours to figure out what happened and correct the situation and me another 3 hours to put my machine back to where I wanted it.
The moral of the story is that you have no clue what could mess up your computer and IT does. They've dealt with way more computer problems than you could ever in your entire life which is why they should be the ones installing drivers/software on your computer. Plus, you shouldn't be wasting your time developing your computer because you were hired to develop software.
Mine's 2.4% right now. I've got $14k in variable interest rate subsidized loans. I'd say with federal student loans you've got the best loan deal on the planet. You don't have to pay them when you are unemployed or still in school. They have the lowest interest of any loan one can get. They can be forgiven through volunteering in the Peacecorps or Americorps.
Ohhh, the guy in the article doesn't have direct loans. He got them from a bank. Probably not the brightest move in the world but I guess with a high likelihood of a job it seemed like a sane investment. I guess it's very similar to the issue with the housing market where a government program subsidized the initial loan but left it up in the air afterwards causing banks to make riskier loans that were poorly regulated. So in essence, what he wants, is to have never been offered the loan? So confused...
I installed LTSpice with a stock install of wine and it works perfectly. It also supports all the third party spice files manufacturers put out so it's very adaptable like normal spice but easier to use and free.
woah, thanks for the tip! Huh, I'd save $2.46 per trip and spend twice as much time commuting (30 minutes). So I would effectively be earning $4.92/hr sitting on my ass reading the news.
Being a computer engineer I'm required to follow their decisions just like electrical engineers. You'll have to use our drivers and hardware so be prepared for more confusion down the road... These aren't random in the slightest either. Good luck existing in the real world where people have to work together to accomplish things. I'm done.
How about IEEE? Are they official enough? http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/SB/Jan97/bearer_jan97.pdf#page=5 read the article on page 5. I'd find you the standards manual regarding this but that costs money.
Here's some more stuff: http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html (definition of correct system) http://members.optus.net/alexey/prefBin.xhtml (history of the change)
That's mighty impressive. I can only get to 65536 before having to pause. But how long did it take you to get to 1048576? Was it instantaneous? I doubt it.
You're right, most people don't know the extreme ends of the SI system but just about everyone knows what Mega, Kilo and micro means thanks to updated chemistry classes in high school.
Why is it important to make it difficult to do these calculations? What is it achieving? Why must you insist on misusing the SI prefix when you could do what the telecom industry did and invent the kibi,mibi,tibi prefix's for your beloved binary counting system and leave the SI system alone.
Don't assume what has been done in the past is the correct way to do it.
Cross discipline calculations happen all the time. The SI system is there to make such calculations easier. ME's are involved in creating those disk platters in HD's and they do need to know what a KB is. The problem isn't in knowing what a KB is but rather in knowing that dividing 1 megabyte per second into 1 megabyte doesn't give you the time it takes to transfer a megabyte in seconds; you want to know why? Because transmission rates are written using the correct interpretation of the SI prefix. They use kibi's to say what you think a kilo is. Use a different term if you don't want to follow the rules.
Notice how all of those examples you just stated don't use an SI prefix yet most of those disciplines use SI units like crazy. Wouldn't it be confusing to only use SI prefix's correctly in certain instances? What if instead of a bakers dozen they called it a decabagel. That would literally mean ten bagels but because the bakers decided to make it mean twelve bagels everyone would assume they were buying only ten bagels. Do you see a problem with this? Yeah, I know, people should be happy they're getting two extra bagels.
Tell me how many bytes are in a megabyte without using a calculator right now. Now tell me how many bytes are transmitted in a second on a 1 MBps connection. Notice the simplicity of the second example. Even though that's a more complicated question the simplicity in units makes it trivial.
Uhhhhhhhhhh..... Kilo = 1000 times the postfix. Period. Shall I reemphasize that? Kilo will always mean 1000 times whatever your base unit is. Computer science needs to follow this rule just like every other freaking discipline on the planet. Do you honestly think CS is the only place where physical constraints suggest using a non 10 based numbering system. Of course not! The SI system is designed to make engineers lives much much easier. How do you expect a mechanical engineer to know that a kilobyte isn't 1000 bytes when it would mean 1000 in everything they ever do that's not related to memory/storage? I had the SI system memorized freshmen year of college and yet a college diploma later I still have problems doing calculations involving transferring data across serial connections because of the misuse of the SI system in relation to storage space. If you want to keep your powers of two change the name of a kilobyte, megabyte, etc. to a non SI name.
I think people assume too much. An LED is more efficient than a CFL but not a regular fluorescent. A quick calculation comparing the 3 gives me this.
Energy Efficiency: LED = 70 Lm/W, CFL = 52 Lm/W, Fluorescent = 83 Lm/W.
Cost Efficiency: LED = 5000 H/$, CFL = 1100 H/$, Fluorescent = 8000 H/$.
Clearly we shouldn't be using CFL's if we can buy LED replacement bulbs like the one I found on SparkFun but it would be much better to build new houses with fluorescent lights.
Actually the smartest CHinese outgrow America's entire population! ugh, that's not a counter argument. I'll translate what both you and the video are saying. "1/4 of the Chinese population is greater than the entire north American population". The the fact that they are the smartest Chinese has no bearing on that statistic. I must admit I almost fell for it though.
So the educated Chinese citizens are smarter than the average American. Is that your argument? That's weak. The US has a much more highly educated populace than China, and I severely doubt a Chinese child would beat any American child. Most? Sure. All of them? Not a chance.
Every human being is entitled for a good chance at life and that requires a few things: food, shelter and education. If this were the 1200's you might be right but in current day society education is a requirement of life.
Did you hear about the Microsoft Word exploit that potentially garnered top secret data from the pentagon a few months back? Also, the networks you're referring to were just recently released from the federal court order that had demanded they stay offline. I doubt it will be more than a year before they are accessible from the net. You'd also be interested to know that Estonia has one of the most advanced civil networking infrastructures on the planet. The US government is not prepared for this kind of attack.
Does it matter when it's the same arch, clock, cache etc.... The only thing that changed is the AMD got faster (2xcore) and both got smaller and more efficient (smaller process). I would consider what you said more insightful if you found us a current article comparing performance.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikileaks hasn't broken any laws so siting RICO seems quite dubious. In the case of enabling criminal activity, I do see some merit but I'm going to take a guess that you aren't directly quoting the law because that statement would apply to any publisher, no matter the medium they use.
I agree that our pop culture needs some fine tuning but Mitra's work is exploiting a child's natural inquisitiveness and creativity, which largely sidesteps the anti-intelligence culture. The kids want to learn and his program gives them a loosely structured environment so that they can do just that but under their own volition. Most of the world's education systems fail to motivate students to learn and many don't even try. Kids just go to school because they have to, and not because they'll learn something cool or interesting that will help them later.
I suggest watching some of Mitra's presentations as it will become quite evident that he has started to transform education into a game where the goal isn't to learn but rather the path to winning the game is to learn.
I totally agree that their current system is compromised. I just think that someone really needs to step up and design a well thought out digital signature system for images before they become completely irrelevant as legal documents. It looks like cannon tried but fell short of that goal.
If the camera has a clock that is only set at the factory then the timestamp would be wrong as would the gps position if the camera is equipped with a GPS. Saying something is impossible often means one simply hasn't thought of a way to do it yet.
http://electronics.costfreehost.com/2010/11/20/web-censorship-bill-appears-dead-for-now-but-will-it-stay-dead/
That sure didn't take them long!
Giving federally subsidized loans to people working towards technical degrees works pretty well and that's how I got through college. It took me a year to find a job after graduating but the government covered the loan interest and didn't require payment on it until I got a job. Since engineering generally pays really well I'm able to pay off those loans in about a year of starting work. If I had dependents I would barely be able to make the 10 year payoff requirement though.
The other problem with this idea is when the benefit of the degree isn't measurable in dollars and can't be paid off easily by the person even after graduation. For instance people more educated in philosophy and history make better voting decisions which lead to a better run government but have very little chance in finding work that will pay enough to make the college degree worthwhile from an economic point of view. Those subjects could be covered in some type of vocational school though so maybe what really needs to happen is that we require several more years of paid for schooling for people who pass some type of test like the ACT/SAT.
The hard sciences aren't the only thing that are important to society, they just happen to have the most direct impact on the economy.
lol, best sarcastic comment ever.
There's a TED talk from a guy who researched giving computer/internet access to kids in India and it greatly increased their learning capabilities. I think the failure of computers in the studies you guys are talking about has more to do with the people not knowing how to integrate computers with the classroom rather than the computer itself being a "hindrance to learning". http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sugata_mitra_shows_how_kids_teach_themselves.html
Thanks for pointing that out. I hate it when people cite blog posts for news because they're almost always wrong about the details. Would it have killed the original poster to have read the article cited in the original blog post?
Your last sentence in the summary is contrary to the main finding of the article in regards to power generation.
"Power Generation
" -the MIT research summary
They are not advocating moving away from renewable energy like wind or solar to natural gas but rather advocating the use of both to replace coal since wind and solar do not produce reliable energy.
The only flash powered thing I can find on bing is the video player which is a really bad industry practice that needs to stop. They should have used html5 embedded video or silverlight. I would be really surprised if a silverlight player weren't better than any flash player out there due to flash being awerful at utilizing hardware acceleration. They probably made that decision simply because they didn't have to make the player from scratch and wanted excessive content control.
I do like your point about bing making google better but I don't think bing is going to achieve too big of a marketshare if say....IE asked people to choose a default search provider and listed both google and bing. If MS gets apple on board for choosing bing as default search engine then google could get frozen out of a huge chunk of the market without actually making a superior product but rather making a bearable alternative. I don't think I would have switched if MSN search had been comparable to google.
Two of the last three companies I've worked for as a software developer only gave us power user rights on our windowsXP machines. I was doing embedded software development and testing at both of those companies and it didn't cause any problems not having admin rights on my local machine. I could see where in some cases it would be impossible to function as a dev without admin rights but in most cases it can be gotten around by hiring smart IT support technicians who know how to install complex software and hardware and developers who can communicate their needs to the support staff.
To support the IT guys I'll give a recent example of how I effed up my Vista machine doing something that shouldn't have caused any problems. Vista kept bugging me about enabling automatic updates so I got annoyed and told it to download and install all the latest updates (no service packs). Well, that caused every single proprietary piece of software on my machine to crash on startup. It took the IT tech about 4 hours to figure out what happened and correct the situation and me another 3 hours to put my machine back to where I wanted it.
The moral of the story is that you have no clue what could mess up your computer and IT does. They've dealt with way more computer problems than you could ever in your entire life which is why they should be the ones installing drivers/software on your computer. Plus, you shouldn't be wasting your time developing your computer because you were hired to develop software.
Mine's 2.4% right now. I've got $14k in variable interest rate subsidized loans. I'd say with federal student loans you've got the best loan deal on the planet. You don't have to pay them when you are unemployed or still in school. They have the lowest interest of any loan one can get. They can be forgiven through volunteering in the Peacecorps or Americorps. Ohhh, the guy in the article doesn't have direct loans. He got them from a bank. Probably not the brightest move in the world but I guess with a high likelihood of a job it seemed like a sane investment. I guess it's very similar to the issue with the housing market where a government program subsidized the initial loan but left it up in the air afterwards causing banks to make riskier loans that were poorly regulated. So in essence, what he wants, is to have never been offered the loan? So confused...
I installed LTSpice with a stock install of wine and it works perfectly. It also supports all the third party spice files manufacturers put out so it's very adaptable like normal spice but easier to use and free.
woah, thanks for the tip! Huh, I'd save $2.46 per trip and spend twice as much time commuting (30 minutes). So I would effectively be earning $4.92/hr sitting on my ass reading the news.
Being a computer engineer I'm required to follow their decisions just like electrical engineers. You'll have to use our drivers and hardware so be prepared for more confusion down the road... These aren't random in the slightest either. Good luck existing in the real world where people have to work together to accomplish things. I'm done.
How about IEEE? Are they official enough?
http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/SB/Jan97/bearer_jan97.pdf#page=5
read the article on page 5. I'd find you the standards manual regarding this but that costs money.
Here's some more stuff:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/binary.html (definition of correct system)
http://members.optus.net/alexey/prefBin.xhtml (history of the change)
NIST is also a very respectable source.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kbit/s#kilobit_per_second
I'm sorry but you're wrong. There is a huge disconnect here in CS and one of my CS profs spent a half hour of class time making sure everyone realized it.
That's mighty impressive. I can only get to 65536 before having to pause. But how long did it take you to get to 1048576? Was it instantaneous? I doubt it.
You're right, most people don't know the extreme ends of the SI system but just about everyone knows what Mega, Kilo and micro means thanks to updated chemistry classes in high school.
Why is it important to make it difficult to do these calculations? What is it achieving? Why must you insist on misusing the SI prefix when you could do what the telecom industry did and invent the kibi,mibi,tibi prefix's for your beloved binary counting system and leave the SI system alone.
Don't assume what has been done in the past is the correct way to do it.
Cross discipline calculations happen all the time. The SI system is there to make such calculations easier. ME's are involved in creating those disk platters in HD's and they do need to know what a KB is. The problem isn't in knowing what a KB is but rather in knowing that dividing 1 megabyte per second into 1 megabyte doesn't give you the time it takes to transfer a megabyte in seconds; you want to know why? Because transmission rates are written using the correct interpretation of the SI prefix. They use kibi's to say what you think a kilo is. Use a different term if you don't want to follow the rules.
Notice how all of those examples you just stated don't use an SI prefix yet most of those disciplines use SI units like crazy. Wouldn't it be confusing to only use SI prefix's correctly in certain instances? What if instead of a bakers dozen they called it a decabagel. That would literally mean ten bagels but because the bakers decided to make it mean twelve bagels everyone would assume they were buying only ten bagels. Do you see a problem with this? Yeah, I know, people should be happy they're getting two extra bagels.
Tell me how many bytes are in a megabyte without using a calculator right now. Now tell me how many bytes are transmitted in a second on a 1 MBps connection. Notice the simplicity of the second example. Even though that's a more complicated question the simplicity in units makes it trivial.
Uhhhhhhhhhh..... Kilo = 1000 times the postfix. Period. Shall I reemphasize that? Kilo will always mean 1000 times whatever your base unit is. Computer science needs to follow this rule just like every other freaking discipline on the planet. Do you honestly think CS is the only place where physical constraints suggest using a non 10 based numbering system. Of course not! The SI system is designed to make engineers lives much much easier. How do you expect a mechanical engineer to know that a kilobyte isn't 1000 bytes when it would mean 1000 in everything they ever do that's not related to memory/storage? I had the SI system memorized freshmen year of college and yet a college diploma later I still have problems doing calculations involving transferring data across serial connections because of the misuse of the SI system in relation to storage space. If you want to keep your powers of two change the name of a kilobyte, megabyte, etc. to a non SI name.
I think people assume too much. An LED is more efficient than a CFL but not a regular fluorescent. A quick calculation comparing the 3 gives me this. Energy Efficiency: LED = 70 Lm/W, CFL = 52 Lm/W, Fluorescent = 83 Lm/W. Cost Efficiency: LED = 5000 H/$, CFL = 1100 H/$, Fluorescent = 8000 H/$. Clearly we shouldn't be using CFL's if we can buy LED replacement bulbs like the one I found on SparkFun but it would be much better to build new houses with fluorescent lights.
So the educated Chinese citizens are smarter than the average American. Is that your argument? That's weak. The US has a much more highly educated populace than China, and I severely doubt a Chinese child would beat any American child. Most? Sure. All of them? Not a chance. Every human being is entitled for a good chance at life and that requires a few things: food, shelter and education. If this were the 1200's you might be right but in current day society education is a requirement of life.
Did you hear about the Microsoft Word exploit that potentially garnered top secret data from the pentagon a few months back? Also, the networks you're referring to were just recently released from the federal court order that had demanded they stay offline. I doubt it will be more than a year before they are accessible from the net. You'd also be interested to know that Estonia has one of the most advanced civil networking infrastructures on the planet. The US government is not prepared for this kind of attack.
Does it matter when it's the same arch, clock, cache etc.... The only thing that changed is the AMD got faster (2xcore) and both got smaller and more efficient (smaller process). I would consider what you said more insightful if you found us a current article comparing performance.