The problem with Ron Paul, like most libertarians, is that he wants less government control over everyone. In reality, although all men are created equal, not all men end up with equal amounts of power. Those with the most power require the most checks on that power to prevent abuse.
Right now, there are two groups with lots of power: corporate leaders and government officials. If you deregulate businesses, you reduce the amount of government power, while increasing the amount of corporate power. This is not a net gain or a net loss; whether the people with the most power are governments or corporations is immaterial because in the long run, the net effect is the same. You'll still have the same disparity between the power held by an average citizen and whoever has the most power, which means that many (most?) of those who have power will abuse it, and there won't be anything meaningful that the average citizen can do about it when they do.
What makes proper government hard is that the people who most desire power are invariably the ones who are least qualified to wield it, and thus the ones from whom government must protect us the most. This is difficult not only because those sorts of people have a tendency to weasel their way into positions of power within governments, but also because it is very hard to write rules that maximally affect people with power and minimally affect people without it.
The best that can be hoped for is a government that gets it right most of the time, which pretty much requires high taxes on people with lots of money to reduce their ability to grow that money without bounds, treating capital gains (at least above a certain dollar figure) as ordinary income, an outright ban on political contributions made by groups of people who are not acting as individuals (whether that group be a corporation, a union, a PAC, or any other organization), and a few dozen other major fixes that are far enough removed from this discussion that I won't bother mentioning them here.
Note that most of these things are precisely the opposite of what Ron Paul wants. He wants to eliminate the income tax and capital gains taxes, which means that all revenue would be through regressive taxes that further increase the disparity between the rich and the poor, and thus the power difference. His voting record shows that he supports PACs and rejects nearly all manner of campaign finance reform (disclosure rules for donations by lobbyists, limits on soft money ads, etc.). And so on.
In short, Ron Paul is really just another side of the same coin as the Democrats and the Republicans. That's not what we need. What we need is to throw away the rusty old coin entirely and bring in people with fresh ideas.
And what if you don't want to license your music to someone
You're apparently operating under the delusion that you have a choice in the matter here in the U.S. For as long as I can remember, we've had compulsory licensing such that anyone can record your song once you publish it by paying a small per-unit licensing fee.
As far as I can tell, the only differences here are that it is a flat fee instead of a per-unit fee, that there isn't a cap on the number of units, and that in China, you have to wait three months.
Not unless every party involved first agrees that everybody else has a right to an equal share.
Pretty much what I was thinking. Put another way, there will always be at least one party that thinks that sharing is stealing, even if it's really just copyright infringement....
Well, on further thought, there are a few actual differences that are meaningful:
What they do to funding for public education while in power (as a rule, the Democrats increase it, while the Republicans tend to decrease it),
Their position on programs that provide assistance to the poor and elderly (the Democrats tend to increase them, while the Republicans tend to decrease them).
Their position on taxes for people making over about 200 grand per year (the Democrats tend to increase them, while the Republicans tend to decrease them).
So there's a difference in the degree of redistribution of wealth that they support. That's really just about the only meaningful difference I can see, though.
And really, even that comes down to a difference in perspective. The Republicans think the poor are freeloaders who are too lazy to work. The Democrats think the poor are people who got screwed by big corporations. The reality is that both parties are correct for a certain subset of the population and wrong for another subset. Thus, the Democrats, in order to not devolve into dysfunctional overspending, need the Republicans to rein them in, and the Republicans, in order to not devolve into plutocracy, need the Democrats to rein them in. As long as they alternate power every few years, that aspect of society tends to take care of itself.
There are lots of differences between the parties—just no significant ones. All of the differences are with respect to issues that neither party can significantly affect without getting smacked down by the courts—abortion, for example—or differences that in theory make a difference but in practice do not—techniques for redistribution of wealth, for example. (Tax and spend versus borrow and spend both have the same net effect, but one causes inflation that reduces your paycheck's buying power, while the other causes your paycheck to look smaller numerically, thus reducing buying power without inflation.)
Two reasons. First, they're a good point of contact who should know the right person to contact about the problem, first. Second, the last time this happened to me, the light was malfunctioning in a dangerous way—failing to give a left turn arrow for several cycles in a row, resulting in left-turn traffic backing up into the straight lane. That's a public safety issue and demands that either the problem be resolved immediately by rebooting the light or an officer going down there to direct traffic.
Strictly, when you call 911 you are calling the emergency dispatcher, not the police.
Depends on where you live. In many places, E911 is handled by the police department. Admittedly, you're usually not talking to a police officer, but it's a very fine line.
You're way too paranoid. I'm not even slightly concerned about phoning up the local PD to let them know that a traffic light is malfunctioning. I end up reporting malfunctioning lights at least a couple of times a year around here.
I'm also not even slightly concerned about phoning the police to report a car accident, calling 911 to report a fire beside the road, etc.
If the situation involves you in more than a tangential way, regardless of whether you're contacting them or they're contacting you, then and only then does the "don't talk to the police" rule kick in. It does not apply if you are merely a witness who happened to notice something hinky (unless you were somewhere you weren't supposed to be or were otherwise committing a crime at the time).
No, step 2 is to transfer all of your domains to an account with an actual registrar. Buying domains through a hosting provider is a recipe for disaster. It means that:
your email address (assuming it is at that domain),
the contents/management of the site itself,
management of the domain, and
management of SSL certs, if any
are all protected by a single password, managed by a single team of people, capable of making a single mistake and causing you to lose everything. Your best security is ensuring that no single point of failure can fully compromise things other than the registrar (which is bound by fairly strict rules that make such compromise less likely).
Hiding the bomb in his underpants led to the underutilisation of the bomb. He after all had to use a bomb which could be hidden in such and such way as to avoid the increased screening and which therefore had to function in such and such a way (had to be lit). It's likely that that TSA had a major role in the failure of the plot.
Don't make me laugh. How else would he have triggered the explosion? A blasting cap? That would never have made it through pre-9/11 security. It would have set off the metal detector had he carried it on his person, and would have been seen by the X-ray tech had he carried it in a bag. If anything, the TSA's decision to move away from metal detectors to full body scanners has made it easier for blasting caps to be smuggled on board (in a body cavity). So the fact that he did it with a fuse indicates that either A. pre-9/11 security was sufficient, B. the guy wasn't very good at building bombs, or C. both. Any of those three possibilities completely negates the assertion that the TSA had a positive benefit here.
Secondly the security theatre does popularise security. It should make people more vigilant.
Maybe slightly, and maybe for a few weeks, until the heightened level of concern becomes the new normal. Once the threshold of perception increases, the TSA would have to go to greater and greater lengths to make people notice or care. Sure, actual bombings would make people more vigilant (unless it became a regular thing, at which point even that would lose its effectiveness eventually), but for the most part, the TSA's added security mostly just pisses people off.
Furthermore, over the long term, the TSA's added security actually makes us less vigilant. It's not an accident that the English word vigilante descends from the same Latin root. Had the government done nothing, the onus would have been on the passengers to provide for their own safety, and thus they would be more likely to take things into their own hands. By making the passengers feel safe, the TSA undermines that feeling of insecurity that lies at the root of vigilance and vigilantism.
To go back to your car example, to a limited degree, advertisements about additional air bags in some cars can make people pay more attention to safety when they are buying a car. However, those ads don't make consumers aware of the safety of cars as a whole, but rather that there is a difference in safety between one vehicle and the average car. If every vehicle had those extra air bags, it would become the new normal, and advertisements about them would quickly regress to having no effect.
Similarly, the more the TSA spreads to multiple modes of travel, to more airports, etc. and the more body scanners that get installed, the more complacent the public will become about security in general, because they will naturally assume that the TSA is protecting them, so they need not be vigilant.
Since when do people routinely carry weird-looking electronics on board a plane? What, do you consider Kindles, tablets, smartphones, and laptops to be "weird-looking"?
Since when do terrorists routinely use weird-looking electronics without concealing the weird-looking parts so that the devices look harmless? All of the IEDs I've ever seen in photos have been concealed in other things—laser printer cartridges, suitcases, cardboard boxes, etc. The whole point of such devices is that they are designed to look harmless until they blow up. Sure, they contain weird-looking electronics inside, but from the outside, they look like an old tire or a rusted out muffler.
Thus, as a general rule, if you see weird-looking electronics, you can feel perfectly safe in the knowledge that it is not a bomb, because if it were a bomb, you would not see the weird-looking electronics. You would see only what their creator wanted you to see.
Terrorists have always been forced to disguise their bombs. That didn't help the people on Pan Am flight 103. The reason the two terrorists you mention failed was that they tried to light something on fire with other people around. The TSA had no role whatsoever in foiling those plots.
Amazing. I had always heard that Internet connectivity was expensive in Australia, but you're getting 10 times the data cap and several times the speed that we get in the U.S. for only slightly more than we're paying for wireless data on our phones (on plans that don't even allow tethering to computers)....
I hadn't heard about the way Australia was doing it, but I have heard about a few U.S. cities who have laid fiber for wired connectivity and leased access to ISPs. With so many companies competing and the overhead so low, their wired connectivity is dirt cheap compared with what the rest of the U.S. pays. So yeah, it has been tried successfully even in the U.S. It's just that the anti-communist, anti-socialist rhetoric from the corporate machine here in the U.S. makes it hard for such ideas to gain traction even in situations where government ownership is actually a good idea.
Actually, it is probably not legal to snoop on those cellular frequencies (even if you are not actually decoding the audio data), per section 302(d) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (or, more formally, title 47 USC, chapter 5, subchapter III, Part I, section 302(d)).
The major telcos like AT&T own towers in major metropolitan areas, but for the other 99% of the land mass, what you described is, for the most part, an accurate description of the way cellular infrastructure is built and maintained today. Well, there's no legal requirement to sign service contracts, but if you didn't sign contracts, you wouldn't make money, so you'd pretty much have to be an idiot not to do so.
Won't work, for precisely the same reason that the current oligopolies don't work today. The cost of building the infrastructure is high, the payoff is spread over a long period of time, and given the cost of the infrastructure, the number of companies that can viably operate in a given market is inherently limited to a fairly small number.
The only potentially viable solution to cellular telephony is precisely the same as it is for DSL service, cable service, and other services with huge infrastructure overhead: publicly owned infrastructure. The government builds the towers to ensure good coverage and adequate levels of service. The telcos compete to provide everything beyond the backhaul. By doing this, the cost of entry becomes low enough that dozens of companies can compete instead of just a couple. Even better, this forces everyone to use the same bands, communication standards, etc., thus ensuring that you don't have to replace your handset every time you switch services.
But try to tell the American public that this is the best solution to the problem, and you'll have a bunch of anarcho-capitalists screaming "socialist" at the top of their lungs until the project gets killed and laws get passed to prevent it. Why? Because there is less profit in any system that isn't rigged.
Learning about programming by learning about turing machines is like learning about how to design skyscrapers by learning about cave dwellings. In theory, they are distant cousins. In practice, learning about something so incredibly primitive doesn't really help you much unless your goal is to spend the rest of your life as a theoretician.
You can't learn programming from the bottom up because the bottom isn't useful by itself. You can't learn programming from the top down because then you get a bunch of people who think Excel macros are a perfectly cromulent programming language.
You need to learn programming from the middle (or at least from both ends simultaneously). Control flow by itself would be boring and hard to learn, so you instead start by learning I/O to a text screen and almost immediately jump down eighteen levels to cover control flow. Once you understand the concept of control flow in the context of actual, working code that does something you can interact with in an interesting way, everything else starts to look like special cases of control flow.
Then, after you've shown them that coding can be fun—that you can change things and get different results—then you back-fill with knowledge of how some of that stuff happens (RAM, ROM, etc.). And after people understand how to write basic code, then you start to introduce flowcharts for more complicated code. If you introduce those things too early, everybody's eyes glaze over, and then you've lost them.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying that the government wants free porn. I'm saying that as soon as the cameras are there, your love life is only a quick hack away from people who do.
Perhaps because of 1984, but perhaps because that TV has become a major part of people's reality and has so far only been one way.
Or because TVs are more likely to be found in bedrooms and other places where people would very much not want to be seen by others. Unlike laptops (which can be closed and/or moved), those TVs are always pointed so that you can see them from the bed. This means that if it has a camera, it can watch you have sex, it can watch you watch porn (which, Slashdot readers notwithstanding, is more likely on a TV than a computer), and (if the angle is wide enough) it can watch you get dressed in the morning.
A TV in a common room with a camera is potentially acceptable, but making it a standard feature of every TV would be a catastrophically bad idea. There are some places that cameras just do not belong. Like my bathroom.
No, Orwell pretty much had it right. Only members of the party had telescreens. The proles couldn't afford them. This means members of the party probably (though it is not explicitly stated, IIRC) wanted them, at least at first. Oppression almost always starts out as something you want—safety, security, video chatting—that later gets abused by those who know how much you want it. First the carrot, then the stick, and all that.
Therefore, an auto-grader is a poor idea because it doesn't provide useful feedback.
For some definitions of useful and feedback, it does. I'm assuming an auto-grader would not just assign a numeric score, but would be similar to all the other grammar checkers out there in that it would provide a list of sentences with possible problems and point out suggested solutions to them.
The student would still have to figure out which of those suggestions are right and which ones are gibberish caused by a misunderstanding of the sentence, but that would tend to be a lot more common at higher levels of writing proficiency, by which point those tools won't be as useful anyway.
But yes, if it is just a numeric score, it's useless, not only because it doesn't help students learn, but also because it will have such a high false error rate that you can't have any degree of trust in the numeric score anyway.
The problem is not that the students don't get enough practice. The problem is that the students don't get feedback until they get their grade.
Having an auto-grader grade your work is a terrible idea because auto-graders can't handle complex English. I thought it might be a good idea to run a grammar checker across my novels before publishing them just to have an extra set of eyes, so to speak. So as an experiment, I fed some fragments of one novel (that I knew contained no grammatical errors) into about a dozen of these so-called grammar checkers, along with a list of deliberately broken sentences to see if they actually caught problems.
I just about died laughing at the ludicrous suggestions that the grammar checkers made, mostly stemming from them incorrectly guessing the parts of speech for words that could have more than one meaning. The best of these algorithms correctly reported about 80% of the correct sentences as correct, though many of those algorithms also failed to flag a lot of the incorrect sentences. The worst algorithms flagged more like 80% of the correct sentences as incorrect (and still failed to flag the actual errors in many of the incorrect sentences).
Based on that, I'd say that having someone's grade depend upon such poor algorithms is a really, really bad idea, I'm guessing it will be at least another 1-2 decades before I would trust a computer-based grader to actually perform grading that counts.
However, making those auto-graders available to students for online pre-screening of their writing before they hand in the final version would be a good thing, provided they can make them a lot better. Such software is great at catching simple errors, and anyone with poor writing skills can probably benefit from such software pointing those mistakes out, allowing them to correct their own mistakes before handing the assignments in. This allows the students to learn from the mistakes. A well-designed checker could even keep track of what mistakes a student makes regularly and point out the pattern so that the student can learn to watch for that type of mistake in the future. Unlike robo-grading, such software can actually teach students to improve their skills usefully.
That's a fair point, and it's going to be a bigger problem for Sony than you might think.
To give you an idea of what games will eventually be worth on their platform, you need only look at iOS games (iPhone, iPad, etc.), which by their nature cannot be resold or transferred (short of transferring an entire iTunes account, that is). According to c|net, the average price of a game on iOS is on a steady decline, and as of a year ago, was only $1.44. Some websites are claiming that the current numbers are as low as $1.02. The most expensive game I've seen was still under $20. Admittedly, it may take longer for a more tightly controlled market like console games to collapse to that point (because the console manufacturer won't let just anybody develop games for their platform), but $5-and-under games are the direction things are trending, and if Sony isn't run by absolute idiots, they'll think twice before they take an action that is guaranteed to hasten that price collapse.
Of course, there's a flip side to that. If the game prices do collapse, more people will buy them. So things might balance out for Sony if the decision doesn't drive people to other platforms... which brings me to the other fatal flaw in their plan. If you have to carry your entire console to somebody else's house to play games because your friends' devices can't play your games, that eliminates the only other advantage that consoles have over an iPad. If they do this, Sony can pretty much kiss their console sales goodbye. Not that there's necessarily any good reason for them to care as far as their game titles are concerned—they probably don't make much money on their consoles anyway—but it takes away control, and Sony's biggest flaw has always been their irrational desire for complete control.
On the one hand, it sucks that Sony is considering this. On the other hand, if I had to pick which console maker I'd rather see go down in flames as an example to other console makers, Sony would be at the top of the list by a sizable margin, so I'm not going to shed a single tear. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of corporate dirtbags.
The only thing a RAID array buys you is convenience of access and the ability to store single files that exceed the size of a hard drive, so if you're just storing individual files long-term, there's no reason to merge the stuff into large RAID arrays.
You can use a hard drive in exactly the same way that you would use a tape. Number each drive with a big, numbered sticker, and when you fill up a drive, make an index of everything on it and keep that on a drive that you back up regularly.
So for that case, the only differences between a hard drive and tapes are A. automated indexing (maybe), B. the cost of the tape drive, C. the difference in cost between a tape and a hard drive, and D. the additional physical space that the hard drive takes up. And even the physical space isn't all that different if you're talking about external laptop drives. So it's mostly cost plus ten lines of code.
For the giant library situation, yes, if you have instant access requirements (a TV broadcast facility comes to mind), it might be marginally cheaper to manage a library of tapes than a library of hard drives, at least for now.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with Ron Paul, like most libertarians, is that he wants less government control over everyone. In reality, although all men are created equal, not all men end up with equal amounts of power. Those with the most power require the most checks on that power to prevent abuse.
Right now, there are two groups with lots of power: corporate leaders and government officials. If you deregulate businesses, you reduce the amount of government power, while increasing the amount of corporate power. This is not a net gain or a net loss; whether the people with the most power are governments or corporations is immaterial because in the long run, the net effect is the same. You'll still have the same disparity between the power held by an average citizen and whoever has the most power, which means that many (most?) of those who have power will abuse it, and there won't be anything meaningful that the average citizen can do about it when they do.
What makes proper government hard is that the people who most desire power are invariably the ones who are least qualified to wield it, and thus the ones from whom government must protect us the most. This is difficult not only because those sorts of people have a tendency to weasel their way into positions of power within governments, but also because it is very hard to write rules that maximally affect people with power and minimally affect people without it.
The best that can be hoped for is a government that gets it right most of the time, which pretty much requires high taxes on people with lots of money to reduce their ability to grow that money without bounds, treating capital gains (at least above a certain dollar figure) as ordinary income, an outright ban on political contributions made by groups of people who are not acting as individuals (whether that group be a corporation, a union, a PAC, or any other organization), and a few dozen other major fixes that are far enough removed from this discussion that I won't bother mentioning them here.
Note that most of these things are precisely the opposite of what Ron Paul wants. He wants to eliminate the income tax and capital gains taxes, which means that all revenue would be through regressive taxes that further increase the disparity between the rich and the poor, and thus the power difference. His voting record shows that he supports PACs and rejects nearly all manner of campaign finance reform (disclosure rules for donations by lobbyists, limits on soft money ads, etc.). And so on.
In short, Ron Paul is really just another side of the same coin as the Democrats and the Republicans. That's not what we need. What we need is to throw away the rusty old coin entirely and bring in people with fresh ideas.
You're apparently operating under the delusion that you have a choice in the matter here in the U.S. For as long as I can remember, we've had compulsory licensing such that anyone can record your song once you publish it by paying a small per-unit licensing fee.
As far as I can tell, the only differences here are that it is a flat fee instead of a per-unit fee, that there isn't a cap on the number of units, and that in China, you have to wait three months.
Pretty much what I was thinking. Put another way, there will always be at least one party that thinks that sharing is stealing, even if it's really just copyright infringement....
Is that from huffing the kittens?
Well, on further thought, there are a few actual differences that are meaningful:
So there's a difference in the degree of redistribution of wealth that they support. That's really just about the only meaningful difference I can see, though.
And really, even that comes down to a difference in perspective. The Republicans think the poor are freeloaders who are too lazy to work. The Democrats think the poor are people who got screwed by big corporations. The reality is that both parties are correct for a certain subset of the population and wrong for another subset. Thus, the Democrats, in order to not devolve into dysfunctional overspending, need the Republicans to rein them in, and the Republicans, in order to not devolve into plutocracy, need the Democrats to rein them in. As long as they alternate power every few years, that aspect of society tends to take care of itself.
There are lots of differences between the parties—just no significant ones. All of the differences are with respect to issues that neither party can significantly affect without getting smacked down by the courts—abortion, for example—or differences that in theory make a difference but in practice do not—techniques for redistribution of wealth, for example. (Tax and spend versus borrow and spend both have the same net effect, but one causes inflation that reduces your paycheck's buying power, while the other causes your paycheck to look smaller numerically, thus reducing buying power without inflation.)
Two reasons. First, they're a good point of contact who should know the right person to contact about the problem, first. Second, the last time this happened to me, the light was malfunctioning in a dangerous way—failing to give a left turn arrow for several cycles in a row, resulting in left-turn traffic backing up into the straight lane. That's a public safety issue and demands that either the problem be resolved immediately by rebooting the light or an officer going down there to direct traffic.
Depends on where you live. In many places, E911 is handled by the police department. Admittedly, you're usually not talking to a police officer, but it's a very fine line.
You're way too paranoid. I'm not even slightly concerned about phoning up the local PD to let them know that a traffic light is malfunctioning. I end up reporting malfunctioning lights at least a couple of times a year around here.
I'm also not even slightly concerned about phoning the police to report a car accident, calling 911 to report a fire beside the road, etc.
If the situation involves you in more than a tangential way, regardless of whether you're contacting them or they're contacting you, then and only then does the "don't talk to the police" rule kick in. It does not apply if you are merely a witness who happened to notice something hinky (unless you were somewhere you weren't supposed to be or were otherwise committing a crime at the time).
No, step 2 is to transfer all of your domains to an account with an actual registrar. Buying domains through a hosting provider is a recipe for disaster. It means that:
are all protected by a single password, managed by a single team of people, capable of making a single mistake and causing you to lose everything. Your best security is ensuring that no single point of failure can fully compromise things other than the registrar (which is bound by fairly strict rules that make such compromise less likely).
Don't make me laugh. How else would he have triggered the explosion? A blasting cap? That would never have made it through pre-9/11 security. It would have set off the metal detector had he carried it on his person, and would have been seen by the X-ray tech had he carried it in a bag. If anything, the TSA's decision to move away from metal detectors to full body scanners has made it easier for blasting caps to be smuggled on board (in a body cavity). So the fact that he did it with a fuse indicates that either A. pre-9/11 security was sufficient, B. the guy wasn't very good at building bombs, or C. both. Any of those three possibilities completely negates the assertion that the TSA had a positive benefit here.
Maybe slightly, and maybe for a few weeks, until the heightened level of concern becomes the new normal. Once the threshold of perception increases, the TSA would have to go to greater and greater lengths to make people notice or care. Sure, actual bombings would make people more vigilant (unless it became a regular thing, at which point even that would lose its effectiveness eventually), but for the most part, the TSA's added security mostly just pisses people off.
Furthermore, over the long term, the TSA's added security actually makes us less vigilant. It's not an accident that the English word vigilante descends from the same Latin root. Had the government done nothing, the onus would have been on the passengers to provide for their own safety, and thus they would be more likely to take things into their own hands. By making the passengers feel safe, the TSA undermines that feeling of insecurity that lies at the root of vigilance and vigilantism.
To go back to your car example, to a limited degree, advertisements about additional air bags in some cars can make people pay more attention to safety when they are buying a car. However, those ads don't make consumers aware of the safety of cars as a whole, but rather that there is a difference in safety between one vehicle and the average car. If every vehicle had those extra air bags, it would become the new normal, and advertisements about them would quickly regress to having no effect.
Similarly, the more the TSA spreads to multiple modes of travel, to more airports, etc. and the more body scanners that get installed, the more complacent the public will become about security in general, because they will naturally assume that the TSA is protecting them, so they need not be vigilant.
I think Archie Bunker pretty much said it all.
Since when do terrorists routinely use weird-looking electronics without concealing the weird-looking parts so that the devices look harmless? All of the IEDs I've ever seen in photos have been concealed in other things—laser printer cartridges, suitcases, cardboard boxes, etc. The whole point of such devices is that they are designed to look harmless until they blow up. Sure, they contain weird-looking electronics inside, but from the outside, they look like an old tire or a rusted out muffler.
Thus, as a general rule, if you see weird-looking electronics, you can feel perfectly safe in the knowledge that it is not a bomb, because if it were a bomb, you would not see the weird-looking electronics. You would see only what their creator wanted you to see.
Terrorists have always been forced to disguise their bombs. That didn't help the people on Pan Am flight 103. The reason the two terrorists you mention failed was that they tried to light something on fire with other people around. The TSA had no role whatsoever in foiling those plots.
Amazing. I had always heard that Internet connectivity was expensive in Australia, but you're getting 10 times the data cap and several times the speed that we get in the U.S. for only slightly more than we're paying for wireless data on our phones (on plans that don't even allow tethering to computers)....
I hadn't heard about the way Australia was doing it, but I have heard about a few U.S. cities who have laid fiber for wired connectivity and leased access to ISPs. With so many companies competing and the overhead so low, their wired connectivity is dirt cheap compared with what the rest of the U.S. pays. So yeah, it has been tried successfully even in the U.S. It's just that the anti-communist, anti-socialist rhetoric from the corporate machine here in the U.S. makes it hard for such ideas to gain traction even in situations where government ownership is actually a good idea.
Actually, it is probably not legal to snoop on those cellular frequencies (even if you are not actually decoding the audio data), per section 302(d) of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (or, more formally, title 47 USC, chapter 5, subchapter III, Part I, section 302(d)).
The major telcos like AT&T own towers in major metropolitan areas, but for the other 99% of the land mass, what you described is, for the most part, an accurate description of the way cellular infrastructure is built and maintained today. Well, there's no legal requirement to sign service contracts, but if you didn't sign contracts, you wouldn't make money, so you'd pretty much have to be an idiot not to do so.
Won't work, for precisely the same reason that the current oligopolies don't work today. The cost of building the infrastructure is high, the payoff is spread over a long period of time, and given the cost of the infrastructure, the number of companies that can viably operate in a given market is inherently limited to a fairly small number.
The only potentially viable solution to cellular telephony is precisely the same as it is for DSL service, cable service, and other services with huge infrastructure overhead: publicly owned infrastructure. The government builds the towers to ensure good coverage and adequate levels of service. The telcos compete to provide everything beyond the backhaul. By doing this, the cost of entry becomes low enough that dozens of companies can compete instead of just a couple. Even better, this forces everyone to use the same bands, communication standards, etc., thus ensuring that you don't have to replace your handset every time you switch services.
But try to tell the American public that this is the best solution to the problem, and you'll have a bunch of anarcho-capitalists screaming "socialist" at the top of their lungs until the project gets killed and laws get passed to prevent it. Why? Because there is less profit in any system that isn't rigged.
Learning about programming by learning about turing machines is like learning about how to design skyscrapers by learning about cave dwellings. In theory, they are distant cousins. In practice, learning about something so incredibly primitive doesn't really help you much unless your goal is to spend the rest of your life as a theoretician.
You can't learn programming from the bottom up because the bottom isn't useful by itself. You can't learn programming from the top down because then you get a bunch of people who think Excel macros are a perfectly cromulent programming language.
You need to learn programming from the middle (or at least from both ends simultaneously). Control flow by itself would be boring and hard to learn, so you instead start by learning I/O to a text screen and almost immediately jump down eighteen levels to cover control flow. Once you understand the concept of control flow in the context of actual, working code that does something you can interact with in an interesting way, everything else starts to look like special cases of control flow.
Then, after you've shown them that coding can be fun—that you can change things and get different results—then you back-fill with knowledge of how some of that stuff happens (RAM, ROM, etc.). And after people understand how to write basic code, then you start to introduce flowcharts for more complicated code. If you introduce those things too early, everybody's eyes glaze over, and then you've lost them.
No, but I've seen people with a small TV in the bathroom.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying that the government wants free porn. I'm saying that as soon as the cameras are there, your love life is only a quick hack away from people who do.
Or because TVs are more likely to be found in bedrooms and other places where people would very much not want to be seen by others. Unlike laptops (which can be closed and/or moved), those TVs are always pointed so that you can see them from the bed. This means that if it has a camera, it can watch you have sex, it can watch you watch porn (which, Slashdot readers notwithstanding, is more likely on a TV than a computer), and (if the angle is wide enough) it can watch you get dressed in the morning.
A TV in a common room with a camera is potentially acceptable, but making it a standard feature of every TV would be a catastrophically bad idea. There are some places that cameras just do not belong. Like my bathroom.
No, Orwell pretty much had it right. Only members of the party had telescreens. The proles couldn't afford them. This means members of the party probably (though it is not explicitly stated, IIRC) wanted them, at least at first. Oppression almost always starts out as something you want—safety, security, video chatting—that later gets abused by those who know how much you want it. First the carrot, then the stick, and all that.
For some definitions of useful and feedback, it does. I'm assuming an auto-grader would not just assign a numeric score, but would be similar to all the other grammar checkers out there in that it would provide a list of sentences with possible problems and point out suggested solutions to them.
The student would still have to figure out which of those suggestions are right and which ones are gibberish caused by a misunderstanding of the sentence, but that would tend to be a lot more common at higher levels of writing proficiency, by which point those tools won't be as useful anyway.
But yes, if it is just a numeric score, it's useless, not only because it doesn't help students learn, but also because it will have such a high false error rate that you can't have any degree of trust in the numeric score anyway.
The problem is not that the students don't get enough practice. The problem is that the students don't get feedback until they get their grade.
Having an auto-grader grade your work is a terrible idea because auto-graders can't handle complex English. I thought it might be a good idea to run a grammar checker across my novels before publishing them just to have an extra set of eyes, so to speak. So as an experiment, I fed some fragments of one novel (that I knew contained no grammatical errors) into about a dozen of these so-called grammar checkers, along with a list of deliberately broken sentences to see if they actually caught problems.
I just about died laughing at the ludicrous suggestions that the grammar checkers made, mostly stemming from them incorrectly guessing the parts of speech for words that could have more than one meaning. The best of these algorithms correctly reported about 80% of the correct sentences as correct, though many of those algorithms also failed to flag a lot of the incorrect sentences. The worst algorithms flagged more like 80% of the correct sentences as incorrect (and still failed to flag the actual errors in many of the incorrect sentences).
Based on that, I'd say that having someone's grade depend upon such poor algorithms is a really, really bad idea, I'm guessing it will be at least another 1-2 decades before I would trust a computer-based grader to actually perform grading that counts.
However, making those auto-graders available to students for online pre-screening of their writing before they hand in the final version would be a good thing, provided they can make them a lot better. Such software is great at catching simple errors, and anyone with poor writing skills can probably benefit from such software pointing those mistakes out, allowing them to correct their own mistakes before handing the assignments in. This allows the students to learn from the mistakes. A well-designed checker could even keep track of what mistakes a student makes regularly and point out the pattern so that the student can learn to watch for that type of mistake in the future. Unlike robo-grading, such software can actually teach students to improve their skills usefully.
That's a fair point, and it's going to be a bigger problem for Sony than you might think.
To give you an idea of what games will eventually be worth on their platform, you need only look at iOS games (iPhone, iPad, etc.), which by their nature cannot be resold or transferred (short of transferring an entire iTunes account, that is). According to c|net, the average price of a game on iOS is on a steady decline, and as of a year ago, was only $1.44. Some websites are claiming that the current numbers are as low as $1.02. The most expensive game I've seen was still under $20. Admittedly, it may take longer for a more tightly controlled market like console games to collapse to that point (because the console manufacturer won't let just anybody develop games for their platform), but $5-and-under games are the direction things are trending, and if Sony isn't run by absolute idiots, they'll think twice before they take an action that is guaranteed to hasten that price collapse.
Of course, there's a flip side to that. If the game prices do collapse, more people will buy them. So things might balance out for Sony if the decision doesn't drive people to other platforms... which brings me to the other fatal flaw in their plan. If you have to carry your entire console to somebody else's house to play games because your friends' devices can't play your games, that eliminates the only other advantage that consoles have over an iPad. If they do this, Sony can pretty much kiss their console sales goodbye. Not that there's necessarily any good reason for them to care as far as their game titles are concerned—they probably don't make much money on their consoles anyway—but it takes away control, and Sony's biggest flaw has always been their irrational desire for complete control.
On the one hand, it sucks that Sony is considering this. On the other hand, if I had to pick which console maker I'd rather see go down in flames as an example to other console makers, Sony would be at the top of the list by a sizable margin, so I'm not going to shed a single tear. It couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of corporate dirtbags.
The only thing a RAID array buys you is convenience of access and the ability to store single files that exceed the size of a hard drive, so if you're just storing individual files long-term, there's no reason to merge the stuff into large RAID arrays.
You can use a hard drive in exactly the same way that you would use a tape. Number each drive with a big, numbered sticker, and when you fill up a drive, make an index of everything on it and keep that on a drive that you back up regularly.
So for that case, the only differences between a hard drive and tapes are A. automated indexing (maybe), B. the cost of the tape drive, C. the difference in cost between a tape and a hard drive, and D. the additional physical space that the hard drive takes up. And even the physical space isn't all that different if you're talking about external laptop drives. So it's mostly cost plus ten lines of code.
For the giant library situation, yes, if you have instant access requirements (a TV broadcast facility comes to mind), it might be marginally cheaper to manage a library of tapes than a library of hard drives, at least for now.