How do you know your upstream DNS isn't poisoned with the IP number of a site that passes Slashdot through a filter that substitutes the IP numbers with other values?
You did say 74.125.19.147 and 74.125.19.104, right?
Is it typical for a senator to introduce so many do-nothing bills?
Which would you rather have, bills designating a "National Safe Place Week" or bills like FISA? I, for one, would much rather have our government wasting its time passing the former than screwing the American public and wiping their backsides with the Constitution by passing the latter. The best possible government, at least judging from what I've seen thus far, is a government so completely embroiled in a state of gridlock that they can do no further harm.
Agreed. That said, going too small can also be a problem, though, depending on the students. I've seen larger groups (a couple dozen) work better than smaller ones (half a dozen) at least with older students, since larger groups provide a bit of pressure to conform that can help keep students from becoming overly disruptive. Obviously if you have only well-behaved kids, the smaller the size, the better. For a mixed bag, I think you sort of need a lower bound on class size as well as an upper bound.
However, I do agree in general that smaller classes tend to be better. I've tried to teach a large class (older students, fortunately). It definitely is a lot harder to keep it interesting than with a smaller group. Education starts to really rapidly degrade if the class size is big enough that you can't remember everyone's name by the end of the first day or two---not just the teachers, but the students knowing everyone's name, as well. Class size of 15-20 seems pretty optimal in my mind, though I've seen classes in the low 20s that were comfortable. By the time you hit 30 kids, unless they are all fairly evenly matched in interest and intellect, it starts to degrade pretty badly, and most of our classes when I was in school were 35-ish, which tells you a lot....:-)
Amazing. A reference to a relatively mindless comedy (Austin Powers) gets modded up, while a reference to a really good geek movie (Real Genius) gets modded down as off topic. *sigh* Kids with mod points, I tell ya.... Bets on whether the person who modded the parent down had been born yet when this movie came out?:-)
Absolutely agreed. Few things irritate me more than seeing people treating high school folks like children. They're not adults, mind you... well, a few of them pretty much are... but they're not kids, either... well... some of them are....
So I guess that comes back to my point again; people also grow up at different rates. I've see high school students who act mature enough that I feel comfortable basically treating them as equals, and I've seen college students (and even occasionally grad students) who acted so childish that I thought they should be back in junior high. I suspect you're right that a large part of that depends on how much responsibility they've had to take while growing up. Some people never learn to be responsible. Those are the ones I saw going to parties in college, getting completely drunk/stoned, and blowing off class the next day, making Cs and Ds, and wondering why they were on academic probation (hint: it's not because any of them were stupid).
The problem is that responsibility is hard to teach to kids whose parents are not themselves responsible. I'm not sure where to begin on that subject, but I need to get back to work and be responsible, so I'll leave you with this thought: trust is a two-way street. If you do not trust me, I have no reason to trust you. Respect is a form of trust, as is responsibility. If you want your students to be trustworthy and responsible, you must first begin by trusting them and giving them the freedom to spread their wings---not completely unchaperoned, mind you, but also not completely protected from themselves. Only by allowing them to make mistakes can they learn how to come back from those mistakes... and that, IMHO, is the most important lesson you can teach.
If your server is configured as it should be, the exposure here should be pretty limited. AFAIK, issues with cache poisoning can be dramatically reduced in risk by limiting requests for recursion to hosts within your own network. In environments where the network is untrusted, of course, that's not sufficient, though it is still a good stop-gap to reduce your exposure.
In that same article, you'll note that the IEEE defines microwaves as being 1 GHz and up. I would argue that this is the more common definition. I've never heard anyone call the UHF TV band (of which 850 MHz is part) part of the microwave band.
Absolutely. IMHO, the biggest problem with schools is that students are assumed to be incapable of making decisions on their own, and thus, the schools treat everyone identically as though they were all of median intelligence, all had identical interests, etc. Among other things, this means that people below the median intelligence can't keep up, fall behind, and are unable to get the extra help they need, while people above the median get bored out of their minds as they have their time wasted with ten times as much homework as the other students (but always more of the same crap) just to keep them busy.
A real approach to education reform starts by recognizing that every child is different, every child has different needs, different motivating forces operating on him/her, different interests in different areas, etc., then tailoring the educational program in such a way that children of similar levels of ability and interests are grouped together. You then take it one step further and have teacher-student conferences with each student at the end of the year to find out what things the student liked and didn't like. By late elementary school, students should be helping plan their own curriculum, with core classes plus a range of optional classes that they can choose from. And so on.
It drove me nuts throughout school that I had to waste time learning the same things over and over again. I took a test and got out of U.S. history in college. It covered pretty much the same thing that we covered in U.S. history in high school, which in turn pretty much covered the same thing as U.S. history in junior high. Mindlessly repeating the same content over and over does not promote learning except for people who have trouble learning. For the rest of us, the high school class was a colossal waste of about 200 hours of my life that could have been spent learning something we hadn't already learned but for the fact that taking it was required to attend the universities.
As for choosing our curriculum, that really didn't happen until college. In high school, our choices were basically whether we took French or Spanish, whether we took an AP version of a couple of classes or not, and which science we took. To a large extent, the math curriculum was dictated by whether you took algebra in junior high or not, though there was the option of taking a year off. Not much choice, in any case---the sequence was pretty much planned out in strict order in spite of the fact that none of the higher level math courses really depended on each other beyond requiring an understanding of basic algebra. Everything else was pretty much nailed down ahead of time. You could choose which year you took the classes, but you still had a very fixed list of classes that very nearly added up to a full four years without giving you much choice in what you took. That just plain sucks.
Give students the option to be an active participant in the education process---from choosing the curriculum to leading discussions---and you will find that they are more involved, more attentive, more interested, and more capable of learning efficiently---far more so than the passive participants that today's students are forced to be.
3G isn't tied to any particular frequency. IIRC, AT&T is in the process of moving all of their towers to operate at 850 MHz because the range per mW is better. They've been working on that for some time. That includes 3G coverage.
Uh... that post was not made by me... not that this should be any surprise. And I still remember passwords that I haven't used in a decade. Good thing, too. I have to log in to slashdot annually because it doesn't ever refresh the cookie expiration.
Exactly. My rule is that if power cycling anything "fixes" a problem, that piece of gear either needs a firmware upgrade or should be replaced. Devices should "just work" or they should be replaced with devices that do, period.
What bugs me about tech support is that they always assume the customer is doing something wrong. While they're probably right 99% of the time, for those of us who do know what we're doing, we end up spending hours before we find someone who understands that either the DSLAM card or the concentrator port has stopped passing traffic for some reason and needs to be replaced, repaired, or firmware-flashed. Perfect DSL and ATM "sync" at the modem end, no PPPoE response packets. Power cycling, switching to a different DSL modem, leaving it with no modem connected overnight... nothing helped. That was a recent Covad experience at my house. It started suddenly after 5 years of flawless service.
After the link was back up and running (they did... something... then told me to disconnect for thirty seconds, then power back up, and suddenly everything worked), they had AT&T (the ILEC/wire provider) come out and try to "repair" the line. They found a grounding problem which they claimed they would fix in a couple of days. Two months later, the voice line still hums just as it has ever since the first day I got DSL service. But of course, their tech had no problem getting sync on the line, i.e. the line wasn't the problem... which is what I told the Covad tech support people to begin with, but they obviously either didn't believe me or didn't know enough to understand what I was saying.... It has been up reliably for a couple of months now, but at this point, I feel like I'm on borrowed time before it goes down for multiple days again.
When I deal with tech support, I feel like I'm wasting my breath trying to explain things to them. They simply can't accept that a customer might have a clue. Thus, to the maximum extent possible, I don't deal with them. Unfortunately, occasionally it is unavoidable. In those cases, I bite my lip, deal with them, then hang up the phone and swear under my breath for a week. *sigh*
The ideal tech support staff would have a "clue detector" person answer the phone first, then route to techs with various levels of skills accordingly. It would then flag the customer as having a particular level of clue and would route them to the appropriate tier of tech support. They won't ever do that, though, because pissing off the customer with Tier 1 neophytes who read a script that tells them to power cycle their defective modem is cheaper than hiring more Tier 2 (or higher) support engineers.... [sound of hair being ripped out]
Yeah, IIRC, the level of sociopathic behavior in CEOs is disproportionately high compared to the general population, so that would be an interesting question to ask.
Don't even need to do that. Just use a VCR designed for (semi)professional video production. Since they typically don't use any AGC on the incoming video signal, they also aren't affected by Macrovision. You'll pay a lot more for the VCR, of course, but....
Or you could probably design a circuit that notches out that part of the signal fairly easily. No, I will not design the circuit for you, but I think I could build one for under five bucks with a handful of parts that I have lying around my house already if I wanted to....
As you said, Macrovision is designed to keep casually dishonest people honest and nothing more. It certainly shouldn't be considered real content protection.
Charging $2500 per year for a parking place is outright extortion. That's as much as satellite parking at most major metropolitan airports for a year in commercial parking lots paying by the day. If anybody is really paying that, they need to find a better parking garage and an apartment complex that isn't out to bleed every last cent from residents.
To answer your question, there are cities and then there are cities. I live in the Bay Area, so yes, I've taken public transit. I can't think of any place in the Bay Area where I've seen housing (even apartments) that did not come with at least one parking space per unit, though perhaps there are some in S.F. proper. At least in (most of?) California, anyone who builds new multi-family dwellings is required by law to provide a minimum of 1 parking space per unit plus one guest parking space per two units, so you'd better not be seeing that sort of behavior around here. Places that charge money for a resident to get a single parking space are the exception, not the rule, even in most cities.
It is safe to make the assumption that the intent of electrically-powered vehicles is to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. The latter are utterly unsustainable in the long term, and possibly even in the medium term. My point about recharging was that this does not (as the article summary implies) eliminate the need for fast charging for vehicles. Nothing more.
My point on the store hopping thing was that nothing I saw in the article implied that you could reserve a vehicle for more than a point-to-point trip, and that this was an oversight.
I would add one other concern: that publicly-owned vehicles tend to deteriorate rapidly. You know what I'm talking about if you've ever ridden a subway or train. Such a system would absolutely have to be self-sustaining in terms of bringing in enough revenue to cover its costs and being completely isolated from any contributions from taxes or other government interference, i.e. it would have to be a private company. However, in order to avoid it turning into a horrible mess of oligopolies like the taxi system, it also needs to be non-profit. Unfortunately, government tends not to set up organizations like that very often, so the more likely result of such an experiment would be a complete catastrophic failure after they realized that revenue wasn't covering costs, three bailouts through bond programs, and everybody in the city footing the bill for yet another boondoggle.:-)
The thing about not storing things in cars works a lot better in a city with shopping near your home. Most people drive for two reasons: work and shopping. If you don't have to drive ten minutes to a grocery store, you can easily go home and drop off everything from work, then go back out. If shopping is out of the way, it's a bit harder to deal with that. I wouldn't feel comfortable sending things like my laptop home in a deliverbot. Too much confidential information, personal info, etc. Of course, if somebody could get a viable internet grocery thing going, that would solve that, but given how many times it has been tried unsuccessfully, my gut says that the entrenched supermarket chains are very effective at squeezing out competition from such services and would do everything they could to make sure they didn't succeed.
And then there are folks like me who go from work to a music rehearsal (trombone) or to classes and need to carry lots of heavy stuff with them. The practicality of bringing such things into your workplace is problematic at best, particularly in light of the tendency to move to smaller and smaller workspaces to maximize the number of cattle... I mean... engineers that companies can pack into a building.... Could it be solved? Sure. Does it create a real chicken-and-egg problem for people interested in something like this? Also yes.
Like I said, for this to be feasible, you really need the option of rental from door to final door, which I didn't get from the article (though I might have missed it). I do agree, though, that for most people, point-to-point rental would be sufficient for most trips. Many people would need different levels of service on different days, too; for me, I'd need round trip private vehicle service on Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with occasional random exceptions in either direction, but point-to-point would be sufficient on Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and the occasional random trip out to Fry's on Saturday.
On the rental thing, I would argue that the overhead of renting tools at Home Depot is pretty close to zero beyond the price of the equipment. They have the store, they buy the equipment once and make it available for rental. When it gets worn out, they sell it as used gear at about half the purchase price for people who want a bargain. The amount of time they keep it depends primarily on how often it is rented; something frequently rented must be cycled out more often due to wear and tear. The main reason renting costs so much is basic psychology: people are more likely to take care of things they own. For rental gear, they don't care as long as they don't do so much damage that they have to pay for it. They have no financial interest in the long-term viability of the rented product, so they drop it, kick it, carry it bouncing around in the back of their car for a week, etc. As a result, it must be industrial grade gear to survive the abuse. A delivery service is not likely to change the way people abuse other people's stuff. If anything, it will make it worse because they won't have to face a real person when they bring the power washer in with a giant dent in the tank.
Renting doesn't work nearly as well as borrowing. If you really want to get costs down, get a group of friends together and pool your money to buy things that you don't use frequently. That way, you all have a financial interest in its well-being, and everyone will be likely to take care of it. This is almost always going to be cheaper than any rental system could possibly be unless you have fewer than four friends.:-D
Moving it isn't the hard part. The hard part is that for the car to be drivable, the battery needs to be as low as possible and above the rear axle (give or take)---in other words, mounted where the gas tank is located in a traditional car. Thus, you have to do one of three things:
Design a forklift that can lift out the back seat and the battery pack as a unit through the interior of the car, separate the battery pack, install a new one under the seat, and remount the battery and rear seat. Don't forget that every back seat will be different. Either that or every car has to become a hatchback where you could push the back seat forward and open a panel under the floorboard.
Design a rear axle that can easily drop out of the bottom of the vehicle but without any added risk of it falling out on the road. Don't forget to find a way to disconnect and reconnect the brake lines without risk of them working their way loose. Either that or build the rear axle module with self-contained brake system and an electrical connection to the rest of the car....
Design a battery that is curved in such a way that it can be slid in an arcing fashion from above the rear axle down behind it or in front of it. Then, you must figure out how to do a latching mechanism under the car. Suggest large bolts and metal plates. Don't forget that designing a pack in this shape will significantly reduce the usable size of the battery.
Not nearly as easy as you make it sound. Moving around something that massive inside a vehicle without damaging the interior is very difficult. The alternatives all involve significant design compromises in the vehicle itself. If it were easy, it would have been done already.
Simple. The cold calling folks are doing a job without intentionally breaking the law. Spammers often commit multiple illegal acts (compromising other people's computers, obfuscating sender information, violation of opt-out laws, etc.) to make money. The second you cross the line into believing that laws don't apply to you because you're making boatloads of money and believe you can buy your way out of jail, you've crossed into sociopathic (if not psychopathic) territory.
There's also the remote possibility that the murder-suicide was staged (i.e. he made the wrong people mad by informing on them). Either way, suicide or hit, it's sad that dirtbags always end up causing so much collateral damage.
One word. Mass. The mass of a battery pack is likely to be hundreds of pounds. (The Tesla roadster's battery weighs 900 lbs, for a point of reference.) Designing a system that allows for rapid removal and installation of something that large and massive is a nontrivial exercise to say the least, not to mention that the risk of puncturing certain types of batteries could be a serious safety risk. You'd also have the issue of having to move and store these monstrosities on site, which are entirely too heavy to safely stack in any significant way, and you'd basically need a forklift to move them....
No, it would be much better to focus effort on increasing the capacity of ultracapacitors to beat battery technology so we can just dump power into them rapidly and charge them in a few seconds.... The battery swapping thing would be a nice idea if we were talking about 12V car batteries. When you're talking about giant 48V packs that even when "drained" could incinerate a six inch steel pipe instantly if you short them and can weigh as much as a small automobile by themselves, you're in an entirely different league. Not to mention the inevitable problem of different cars requiring different configurations to provide different current vs. voltage tradeoffs, more cells, etc. Heck, car manufacturers can't even standardize something as simple as headlight bulbs. How can we possibly expect them to standardize something like EV batteries?:-)
Well, there's one major unaddressed concern. Two, really. No, three. Four? Where to begin....
The first is that a lot of people use a car not just as a means of getting somewhere, but as a place to store stuff when they get there. For example, if I take a day trip somewhere (fairly common), I don't necessarily have any place wherever I'm going to store all the stuff I might need. Heaven help me if I'm going to a musical gig with two or three instruments, a clothing change, binders full of music, etc. Most of that stuff stays in the car unless and until I need it. That simply isn't practical with non-personal vehicles. This was mentioned briefly, but dismissed with the suggestion of a portable "locker". I can't think of any situation I've been in where this would be sufficient other than commuting to work.... It certainly wouldn't work on the beach. Let's say I'm going to the beach, followed by going to someone's house. I might want to have a laptop with me at the house but not at the beach. I sure as heck wouldn't want to store it in a portable locker that someone could walk off with while I took a walk on the beach, nor is carrying it with me particularly practical. These problems happen almost constantly, at least in my life.
If you go shopping for groceries at two different stores, it would be a huge waste of time and energy if you had to go home and drop off the grocery shopping, call a robotic cab to pick you up again, and go to the second store, but the prospect of hauling that merchandise into a second store is equally unacceptable. The "DeliverBot" idea is cute, but highly impractical. For one thing, the stores will immediately do what they do best: charge you a fee for the cost of the delivery and packing on top of the cost of your food. This means everybody pays more for everything. Worse, for smaller purchases, that would end up being a significant percentage of your total bill. Even a $5 delivery charge is huge if all you needed was a $4.00 carton of half-and-half.
Even if you could get around that problem, you still have the issue of it arriving, finding out that it isn't what you ordered, and having to send it back, plus the extra latency of having to go out, shop, then wait for somebody to pack it somewhere and deliver it to you. That might work for large purchases, but it reduces spec buying to absolutely zero, so stores will fight it with every fiber of their being and will en masse refuse to participate in such a program in any useful way, so the result would be that such services would have to be run by third parties who would have to charge money for the service. Because people generally aren't willing to spend even a couple of bucks for delivery, such a service would almost inevitably die just like countless grocery delivery services before it.
The notion that people adapt to not having cars is about like saying that people adapt to not having feet. Yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in having surgery to remove mine unless it would save my life. It would be possible to adapt, but every instance of that adaptation involves having to either build lots of additional facilities and pay extra money to use them (e.g. public lockers at the beach) or go a significant extra distance (driving back to your hotel/home/office) for no good reason. The former is expensive. The latter increases driving, which in part negates the environmental improvement these were designed to solve.
The second is that people tend to want to personalize their automobiles for comfort, particularly on long vacations. Whether it's a vibrating seat or a DVD player for the kids or whatever. Either all of those sorts of comforts have to be built in or you'll have to have a way of specifying that you require those, at which point you've greatly increased the complexity of fleet management.
Third, an eight hour road trip will, in fact, still require stopping to fill up at least once, and if the suggestion is changing automobiles, I suspect the author hasn't eve
It is worth noting that software is the only thing protected by both copyrights and patents, or at least the only thing I can think of. As such, software makers are currently far more protected than the mousetrap maker. Eliminating patents would go a long way towards equalizing that, but with the current duration of copyright, software makers would still be way ahead....
And you're right. Anything much larger than "Hello World" is a patent minefield automatically, and I suspect I could even come up with a Hello World program that violates at least three or four frivolous software patents....
Most countries that do the things you describe don't care about U.S. patents. China runs roughshod over them with impunity on an ongoing basis and we haven't sanctioned them for it yet. Why, then, would software patents improve on that in any useful way. At best, a product might be enjoined from import into the U.S. (though in practice, this almost never occurs). Doing that for something as easily transmittable as software, however, is an exercise in futility.
Most products that can be trivially rewritten do not substantively advance the state of the art. With the exception of file format compatibility and complex mathematical algorithms like image or sound processing, any piece of software can be rewritten fairly easily through black box examination. Look at the features, the inputs, the outputs, determine what it did, and write code to do the same thing. Such software should not be patentable because it should not be possible to patent the functionality of a piece of code, only the specific implementation thereof. Patents on the functionality go way beyond any patents on inventions in the physical world, and are the main reason that so many people think software patents are absurd.
Most products that cannot be trivially rewritten are really patents on algorithms. Algorithms are mathematical truths and are explicitly excluded from patents. The implementation of an algorithm should, therefore, not be patentable, either, as it basically represents a way to trivially game the system into allowing algorithmic patents.
File format reverse engineering and any patents required to encode and decode a file format should not be patentable because such patents cause direct harm to the end user by limiting interoperability of software from multiple vendors (including free/gratis software for which a patent license could never be reasonably obtained) and creating an artificial lock-in monopoly preventing users from migrating to better software by competitors once it becomes available. The purpose of patents was not to create a situation in which someone would forever be locked into using a particular brand of tractor because it created a field whose furrows were in a special, patented pattern that could not legally be plowed by any other tractor....
I think that we could probably go on with additional reasons for a week....
Slashdot Mirror
How do you know your upstream DNS isn't poisoned with the IP number of a site that passes Slashdot through a filter that substitutes the IP numbers with other values?
You did say 74.125.19.147 and 74.125.19.104, right?
Ah, but think about how much worse the walking could have been had she not been preoccupied with the gum.
I'm well aware of Feinstein being complicit in the FISA nightmare. My point was that I'd rather have her doing useless stuff than doing that.
Which would you rather have, bills designating a "National Safe Place Week" or bills like FISA? I, for one, would much rather have our government wasting its time passing the former than screwing the American public and wiping their backsides with the Constitution by passing the latter. The best possible government, at least judging from what I've seen thus far, is a government so completely embroiled in a state of gridlock that they can do no further harm.
No, no, she's in Core Foundation. Running in loops.
Agreed. That said, going too small can also be a problem, though, depending on the students. I've seen larger groups (a couple dozen) work better than smaller ones (half a dozen) at least with older students, since larger groups provide a bit of pressure to conform that can help keep students from becoming overly disruptive. Obviously if you have only well-behaved kids, the smaller the size, the better. For a mixed bag, I think you sort of need a lower bound on class size as well as an upper bound.
However, I do agree in general that smaller classes tend to be better. I've tried to teach a large class (older students, fortunately). It definitely is a lot harder to keep it interesting than with a smaller group. Education starts to really rapidly degrade if the class size is big enough that you can't remember everyone's name by the end of the first day or two---not just the teachers, but the students knowing everyone's name, as well. Class size of 15-20 seems pretty optimal in my mind, though I've seen classes in the low 20s that were comfortable. By the time you hit 30 kids, unless they are all fairly evenly matched in interest and intellect, it starts to degrade pretty badly, and most of our classes when I was in school were 35-ish, which tells you a lot.... :-)
Amazing. A reference to a relatively mindless comedy (Austin Powers) gets modded up, while a reference to a really good geek movie (Real Genius) gets modded down as off topic. *sigh* Kids with mod points, I tell ya.... Bets on whether the person who modded the parent down had been born yet when this movie came out? :-)
Absolutely agreed. Few things irritate me more than seeing people treating high school folks like children. They're not adults, mind you... well, a few of them pretty much are... but they're not kids, either... well... some of them are....
So I guess that comes back to my point again; people also grow up at different rates. I've see high school students who act mature enough that I feel comfortable basically treating them as equals, and I've seen college students (and even occasionally grad students) who acted so childish that I thought they should be back in junior high. I suspect you're right that a large part of that depends on how much responsibility they've had to take while growing up. Some people never learn to be responsible. Those are the ones I saw going to parties in college, getting completely drunk/stoned, and blowing off class the next day, making Cs and Ds, and wondering why they were on academic probation (hint: it's not because any of them were stupid).
The problem is that responsibility is hard to teach to kids whose parents are not themselves responsible. I'm not sure where to begin on that subject, but I need to get back to work and be responsible, so I'll leave you with this thought: trust is a two-way street. If you do not trust me, I have no reason to trust you. Respect is a form of trust, as is responsibility. If you want your students to be trustworthy and responsible, you must first begin by trusting them and giving them the freedom to spread their wings---not completely unchaperoned, mind you, but also not completely protected from themselves. Only by allowing them to make mistakes can they learn how to come back from those mistakes... and that, IMHO, is the most important lesson you can teach.
If your server is configured as it should be, the exposure here should be pretty limited. AFAIK, issues with cache poisoning can be dramatically reduced in risk by limiting requests for recursion to hosts within your own network. In environments where the network is untrusted, of course, that's not sufficient, though it is still a good stop-gap to reduce your exposure.
options {
allow-recursion { a.b.c.d/xx };
};
In that same article, you'll note that the IEEE defines microwaves as being 1 GHz and up. I would argue that this is the more common definition. I've never heard anyone call the UHF TV band (of which 850 MHz is part) part of the microwave band.
Absolutely. IMHO, the biggest problem with schools is that students are assumed to be incapable of making decisions on their own, and thus, the schools treat everyone identically as though they were all of median intelligence, all had identical interests, etc. Among other things, this means that people below the median intelligence can't keep up, fall behind, and are unable to get the extra help they need, while people above the median get bored out of their minds as they have their time wasted with ten times as much homework as the other students (but always more of the same crap) just to keep them busy.
A real approach to education reform starts by recognizing that every child is different, every child has different needs, different motivating forces operating on him/her, different interests in different areas, etc., then tailoring the educational program in such a way that children of similar levels of ability and interests are grouped together. You then take it one step further and have teacher-student conferences with each student at the end of the year to find out what things the student liked and didn't like. By late elementary school, students should be helping plan their own curriculum, with core classes plus a range of optional classes that they can choose from. And so on.
It drove me nuts throughout school that I had to waste time learning the same things over and over again. I took a test and got out of U.S. history in college. It covered pretty much the same thing that we covered in U.S. history in high school, which in turn pretty much covered the same thing as U.S. history in junior high. Mindlessly repeating the same content over and over does not promote learning except for people who have trouble learning. For the rest of us, the high school class was a colossal waste of about 200 hours of my life that could have been spent learning something we hadn't already learned but for the fact that taking it was required to attend the universities.
As for choosing our curriculum, that really didn't happen until college. In high school, our choices were basically whether we took French or Spanish, whether we took an AP version of a couple of classes or not, and which science we took. To a large extent, the math curriculum was dictated by whether you took algebra in junior high or not, though there was the option of taking a year off. Not much choice, in any case---the sequence was pretty much planned out in strict order in spite of the fact that none of the higher level math courses really depended on each other beyond requiring an understanding of basic algebra. Everything else was pretty much nailed down ahead of time. You could choose which year you took the classes, but you still had a very fixed list of classes that very nearly added up to a full four years without giving you much choice in what you took. That just plain sucks.
Give students the option to be an active participant in the education process---from choosing the curriculum to leading discussions---and you will find that they are more involved, more attentive, more interested, and more capable of learning efficiently---far more so than the passive participants that today's students are forced to be.
3G isn't tied to any particular frequency. IIRC, AT&T is in the process of moving all of their towers to operate at 850 MHz because the range per mW is better. They've been working on that for some time. That includes 3G coverage.
Uh... that post was not made by me... not that this should be any surprise. And I still remember passwords that I haven't used in a decade. Good thing, too. I have to log in to slashdot annually because it doesn't ever refresh the cookie expiration.
Exactly. My rule is that if power cycling anything "fixes" a problem, that piece of gear either needs a firmware upgrade or should be replaced. Devices should "just work" or they should be replaced with devices that do, period.
What bugs me about tech support is that they always assume the customer is doing something wrong. While they're probably right 99% of the time, for those of us who do know what we're doing, we end up spending hours before we find someone who understands that either the DSLAM card or the concentrator port has stopped passing traffic for some reason and needs to be replaced, repaired, or firmware-flashed. Perfect DSL and ATM "sync" at the modem end, no PPPoE response packets. Power cycling, switching to a different DSL modem, leaving it with no modem connected overnight... nothing helped. That was a recent Covad experience at my house. It started suddenly after 5 years of flawless service.
After the link was back up and running (they did... something... then told me to disconnect for thirty seconds, then power back up, and suddenly everything worked), they had AT&T (the ILEC/wire provider) come out and try to "repair" the line. They found a grounding problem which they claimed they would fix in a couple of days. Two months later, the voice line still hums just as it has ever since the first day I got DSL service. But of course, their tech had no problem getting sync on the line, i.e. the line wasn't the problem... which is what I told the Covad tech support people to begin with, but they obviously either didn't believe me or didn't know enough to understand what I was saying.... It has been up reliably for a couple of months now, but at this point, I feel like I'm on borrowed time before it goes down for multiple days again.
When I deal with tech support, I feel like I'm wasting my breath trying to explain things to them. They simply can't accept that a customer might have a clue. Thus, to the maximum extent possible, I don't deal with them. Unfortunately, occasionally it is unavoidable. In those cases, I bite my lip, deal with them, then hang up the phone and swear under my breath for a week. *sigh*
The ideal tech support staff would have a "clue detector" person answer the phone first, then route to techs with various levels of skills accordingly. It would then flag the customer as having a particular level of clue and would route them to the appropriate tier of tech support. They won't ever do that, though, because pissing off the customer with Tier 1 neophytes who read a script that tells them to power cycle their defective modem is cheaper than hiring more Tier 2 (or higher) support engineers.... [sound of hair being ripped out]
Yeah, IIRC, the level of sociopathic behavior in CEOs is disproportionately high compared to the general population, so that would be an interesting question to ask.
Don't even need to do that. Just use a VCR designed for (semi)professional video production. Since they typically don't use any AGC on the incoming video signal, they also aren't affected by Macrovision. You'll pay a lot more for the VCR, of course, but....
Or you could probably design a circuit that notches out that part of the signal fairly easily. No, I will not design the circuit for you, but I think I could build one for under five bucks with a handful of parts that I have lying around my house already if I wanted to....
As you said, Macrovision is designed to keep casually dishonest people honest and nothing more. It certainly shouldn't be considered real content protection.
Charging $2500 per year for a parking place is outright extortion. That's as much as satellite parking at most major metropolitan airports for a year in commercial parking lots paying by the day. If anybody is really paying that, they need to find a better parking garage and an apartment complex that isn't out to bleed every last cent from residents.
To answer your question, there are cities and then there are cities. I live in the Bay Area, so yes, I've taken public transit. I can't think of any place in the Bay Area where I've seen housing (even apartments) that did not come with at least one parking space per unit, though perhaps there are some in S.F. proper. At least in (most of?) California, anyone who builds new multi-family dwellings is required by law to provide a minimum of 1 parking space per unit plus one guest parking space per two units, so you'd better not be seeing that sort of behavior around here. Places that charge money for a resident to get a single parking space are the exception, not the rule, even in most cities.
It is safe to make the assumption that the intent of electrically-powered vehicles is to replace gasoline-powered vehicles. The latter are utterly unsustainable in the long term, and possibly even in the medium term. My point about recharging was that this does not (as the article summary implies) eliminate the need for fast charging for vehicles. Nothing more.
My point on the store hopping thing was that nothing I saw in the article implied that you could reserve a vehicle for more than a point-to-point trip, and that this was an oversight.
I would add one other concern: that publicly-owned vehicles tend to deteriorate rapidly. You know what I'm talking about if you've ever ridden a subway or train. Such a system would absolutely have to be self-sustaining in terms of bringing in enough revenue to cover its costs and being completely isolated from any contributions from taxes or other government interference, i.e. it would have to be a private company. However, in order to avoid it turning into a horrible mess of oligopolies like the taxi system, it also needs to be non-profit. Unfortunately, government tends not to set up organizations like that very often, so the more likely result of such an experiment would be a complete catastrophic failure after they realized that revenue wasn't covering costs, three bailouts through bond programs, and everybody in the city footing the bill for yet another boondoggle. :-)
The thing about not storing things in cars works a lot better in a city with shopping near your home. Most people drive for two reasons: work and shopping. If you don't have to drive ten minutes to a grocery store, you can easily go home and drop off everything from work, then go back out. If shopping is out of the way, it's a bit harder to deal with that. I wouldn't feel comfortable sending things like my laptop home in a deliverbot. Too much confidential information, personal info, etc. Of course, if somebody could get a viable internet grocery thing going, that would solve that, but given how many times it has been tried unsuccessfully, my gut says that the entrenched supermarket chains are very effective at squeezing out competition from such services and would do everything they could to make sure they didn't succeed.
And then there are folks like me who go from work to a music rehearsal (trombone) or to classes and need to carry lots of heavy stuff with them. The practicality of bringing such things into your workplace is problematic at best, particularly in light of the tendency to move to smaller and smaller workspaces to maximize the number of cattle... I mean... engineers that companies can pack into a building.... Could it be solved? Sure. Does it create a real chicken-and-egg problem for people interested in something like this? Also yes.
Like I said, for this to be feasible, you really need the option of rental from door to final door, which I didn't get from the article (though I might have missed it). I do agree, though, that for most people, point-to-point rental would be sufficient for most trips. Many people would need different levels of service on different days, too; for me, I'd need round trip private vehicle service on Sunday, Wednesday, and Thursday, with occasional random exceptions in either direction, but point-to-point would be sufficient on Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and the occasional random trip out to Fry's on Saturday.
On the rental thing, I would argue that the overhead of renting tools at Home Depot is pretty close to zero beyond the price of the equipment. They have the store, they buy the equipment once and make it available for rental. When it gets worn out, they sell it as used gear at about half the purchase price for people who want a bargain. The amount of time they keep it depends primarily on how often it is rented; something frequently rented must be cycled out more often due to wear and tear. The main reason renting costs so much is basic psychology: people are more likely to take care of things they own. For rental gear, they don't care as long as they don't do so much damage that they have to pay for it. They have no financial interest in the long-term viability of the rented product, so they drop it, kick it, carry it bouncing around in the back of their car for a week, etc. As a result, it must be industrial grade gear to survive the abuse. A delivery service is not likely to change the way people abuse other people's stuff. If anything, it will make it worse because they won't have to face a real person when they bring the power washer in with a giant dent in the tank.
Renting doesn't work nearly as well as borrowing. If you really want to get costs down, get a group of friends together and pool your money to buy things that you don't use frequently. That way, you all have a financial interest in its well-being, and everyone will be likely to take care of it. This is almost always going to be cheaper than any rental system could possibly be unless you have fewer than four friends. :-D
Just my $0.02.
Moving it isn't the hard part. The hard part is that for the car to be drivable, the battery needs to be as low as possible and above the rear axle (give or take)---in other words, mounted where the gas tank is located in a traditional car. Thus, you have to do one of three things:
Not nearly as easy as you make it sound. Moving around something that massive inside a vehicle without damaging the interior is very difficult. The alternatives all involve significant design compromises in the vehicle itself. If it were easy, it would have been done already.
Simple. The cold calling folks are doing a job without intentionally breaking the law. Spammers often commit multiple illegal acts (compromising other people's computers, obfuscating sender information, violation of opt-out laws, etc.) to make money. The second you cross the line into believing that laws don't apply to you because you're making boatloads of money and believe you can buy your way out of jail, you've crossed into sociopathic (if not psychopathic) territory.
There's also the remote possibility that the murder-suicide was staged (i.e. he made the wrong people mad by informing on them). Either way, suicide or hit, it's sad that dirtbags always end up causing so much collateral damage.
One word. Mass. The mass of a battery pack is likely to be hundreds of pounds. (The Tesla roadster's battery weighs 900 lbs, for a point of reference.) Designing a system that allows for rapid removal and installation of something that large and massive is a nontrivial exercise to say the least, not to mention that the risk of puncturing certain types of batteries could be a serious safety risk. You'd also have the issue of having to move and store these monstrosities on site, which are entirely too heavy to safely stack in any significant way, and you'd basically need a forklift to move them....
No, it would be much better to focus effort on increasing the capacity of ultracapacitors to beat battery technology so we can just dump power into them rapidly and charge them in a few seconds.... The battery swapping thing would be a nice idea if we were talking about 12V car batteries. When you're talking about giant 48V packs that even when "drained" could incinerate a six inch steel pipe instantly if you short them and can weigh as much as a small automobile by themselves, you're in an entirely different league. Not to mention the inevitable problem of different cars requiring different configurations to provide different current vs. voltage tradeoffs, more cells, etc. Heck, car manufacturers can't even standardize something as simple as headlight bulbs. How can we possibly expect them to standardize something like EV batteries? :-)
Well, there's one major unaddressed concern. Two, really. No, three. Four? Where to begin....
The first is that a lot of people use a car not just as a means of getting somewhere, but as a place to store stuff when they get there. For example, if I take a day trip somewhere (fairly common), I don't necessarily have any place wherever I'm going to store all the stuff I might need. Heaven help me if I'm going to a musical gig with two or three instruments, a clothing change, binders full of music, etc. Most of that stuff stays in the car unless and until I need it. That simply isn't practical with non-personal vehicles. This was mentioned briefly, but dismissed with the suggestion of a portable "locker". I can't think of any situation I've been in where this would be sufficient other than commuting to work.... It certainly wouldn't work on the beach. Let's say I'm going to the beach, followed by going to someone's house. I might want to have a laptop with me at the house but not at the beach. I sure as heck wouldn't want to store it in a portable locker that someone could walk off with while I took a walk on the beach, nor is carrying it with me particularly practical. These problems happen almost constantly, at least in my life.
If you go shopping for groceries at two different stores, it would be a huge waste of time and energy if you had to go home and drop off the grocery shopping, call a robotic cab to pick you up again, and go to the second store, but the prospect of hauling that merchandise into a second store is equally unacceptable. The "DeliverBot" idea is cute, but highly impractical. For one thing, the stores will immediately do what they do best: charge you a fee for the cost of the delivery and packing on top of the cost of your food. This means everybody pays more for everything. Worse, for smaller purchases, that would end up being a significant percentage of your total bill. Even a $5 delivery charge is huge if all you needed was a $4.00 carton of half-and-half.
Even if you could get around that problem, you still have the issue of it arriving, finding out that it isn't what you ordered, and having to send it back, plus the extra latency of having to go out, shop, then wait for somebody to pack it somewhere and deliver it to you. That might work for large purchases, but it reduces spec buying to absolutely zero, so stores will fight it with every fiber of their being and will en masse refuse to participate in such a program in any useful way, so the result would be that such services would have to be run by third parties who would have to charge money for the service. Because people generally aren't willing to spend even a couple of bucks for delivery, such a service would almost inevitably die just like countless grocery delivery services before it.
The notion that people adapt to not having cars is about like saying that people adapt to not having feet. Yeah, sure, but that doesn't mean I'm interested in having surgery to remove mine unless it would save my life. It would be possible to adapt, but every instance of that adaptation involves having to either build lots of additional facilities and pay extra money to use them (e.g. public lockers at the beach) or go a significant extra distance (driving back to your hotel/home/office) for no good reason. The former is expensive. The latter increases driving, which in part negates the environmental improvement these were designed to solve.
The second is that people tend to want to personalize their automobiles for comfort, particularly on long vacations. Whether it's a vibrating seat or a DVD player for the kids or whatever. Either all of those sorts of comforts have to be built in or you'll have to have a way of specifying that you require those, at which point you've greatly increased the complexity of fleet management.
Third, an eight hour road trip will, in fact, still require stopping to fill up at least once, and if the suggestion is changing automobiles, I suspect the author hasn't eve
It is worth noting that software is the only thing protected by both copyrights and patents, or at least the only thing I can think of. As such, software makers are currently far more protected than the mousetrap maker. Eliminating patents would go a long way towards equalizing that, but with the current duration of copyright, software makers would still be way ahead....
And you're right. Anything much larger than "Hello World" is a patent minefield automatically, and I suspect I could even come up with a Hello World program that violates at least three or four frivolous software patents....
That's intended as a strawman argument, right?
I think that we could probably go on with additional reasons for a week....