When you say "life in a briefcase", what are we talking in percentage terms?
The solution would vary depending on if you're just out of the office for a few days every month, or one week out one week back, or one of those fellows who sees his apartment every second weekend for just long enough to do laundry.
Exactly. Standard procedure is to close down the roads and block off the intersections, so it doesn't matter if the lights are green or not since the convoy will be the only ones on that road.
After the mess that makes out of traffic changing the traffic lights for the few minutes needed is only a minor disrupt to traffic, no more than if an ambulance or police vehicle had their lights/siren running and needed to run light.
This seems like the least annoying method compared to ones used in the past.
I think the difference here is that instead of having the blockades and barricades and making an obvious "you're so important we'll shut the city down for you", they tried to do it "under the table" to give the impression that London traffic is so smooth that it won't be an issue during the games.
I think the argument would have to be from the developer side.
As the consumer, I don't give two figs about who gets what cut of most things I buy. I worry about the final cost. All things being equal I'll buy direct from the artist if I can (for items which have one), but I don't think most people worry what cut Walmart gets on that box of Mac and Cheese.
Developers can make a stink, but their option is simply to not develop iOS apps. Since everyone still is, I'm going to suggest that the economics are still in their favor even after taking the 30% hit into account.
And in this specific case, people using the Dropbox API probably don't care what cut Apple takes from Dropbox, since they're not getting any of that money either.
Why bother when you can just recharge VIA lighting strikes!
I suppose when time travel is invented, we'll see DeLoreans driving around, where instead of a map there's a timetable of future lightning strikes labeled "fueling stations"
Maybe they can Eject the Core (Battery) to reduce weight in case of emergency.
While I suspect that won't be a feature (not the least because you're dropping a presumably heavy battery on top of someone), it would be awesome if it did and it worked.
Of course, to make it a proper analogy, you'd have to add the fact that EA had agreed to terms that they *would* share the revenue from the online component, and then tried to cheat out of it.
Let's not forget that Apple is very clear on how things work in the App Store (I've read the terms, all 42 stupid pages of them). You can bitch about the terms (I can't say I'm particularly fond of them myself), but they're remarkably clear on just what you get and give to work in the Apple App Store. Dropbox knew it was ducking the system, and bet that Apple wouldn't call them on it. They lost the bet.
This isn't a case of Apple showing up, Mafia-style - this is them enforcing the terms and agreements that Dropbox agreed to.
Desktop version users shouldn't have to pay an Apple tax.
And they don't - if you buy your upgraded space through the desktop app (or just browse there, even in iOS Safari), Apple gets (and asks) for no cut.
Easy comparison: if you buy your CD through Apple, they take a cut. If you buy it through HMV, HMV takes a cut. If you buy it directly from the artist, no-one gets a cut. But you won't find a lot of HMVs that will let the artist sell from inside their store without getting a cut.
It's not a bad rule. Here, let's move the argument into the real world. (Sadly, not a car analogy.)
I used to work at a gaming shop. One of the popular items was CCG cards (Magic and Pokemon being the big two at the time). One big revenue generator for the store was selling singles. (When you can sell the rare for the price of the pack or better, *and* sell the commons and uncommons, the math was pretty compelling).
We also had gaming space. And the rule was, no selling cards in the store. Why, you ask? Because players would bring binders of cards, take up one of our tables (using our floorspace, our electricity), and then proceed to undercut us - which is pretty easy when you have no overhead.
We tried to be nice, but they simply started making the deals, then "stepping outside" to exchange money. And yes, when we banned them we got nothing but "why are you being so mean"?
Were we saying "you can't sell your cards?" No, of course not - they're your cards. We're saying "you can't use our overhead to sell your cards". And that's what Apple is saying - if you provide a button on your App (which is being used through their app store) to buy something, Apple gets a cut. If they go to you through some other method, Apple doesn't care - you just can't cheat around it.
My problem is that Apple is causing problems with 3rd parties that have nothing to do with this dispute. I never commented on whether Dropbox was right or wrong. Apple could of sent an email message that said "This is a TOS violation, fix it." They cut off API users instead. That's the criticism.
No, Apple cutoff Dropbox for violating TOS. Dropbox's customers (the "3rd parties") can go complain to Dropbox for screwing up the system.
Apple has no motivation to make Dropbox's life easier in this case (and would be weakening future positions if they did cut them slack).
Better question - if they consider sending the email to be sufficient notice, do they have to re-hire all the other staff? (After all, if sending email to Bob is sufficient for him to be fired, the other incorrect emails also have to be sufficient.)
Depending on how much I like my boss, I'd be inquiring about getting my vacation paid out, severence, etc. And then ask for a raise before getting hired back.
Maybe you're misunderstanding? It is often a requirement in the United States (I know it is in New York) to have a master's degree in education. So you spend two years learning God knows what (I know plenty of people with the degree, haven't been wow'ed by their responses as to what they did to earn it). However I'm unqualified to teach in public school because I have a master's in electrical engineering.
You won't get any argument from me on the curriculum of an education degree (and I know quite a few teachers who won't either) - but the crux is this: an education degree is supposed to teach you to teach. It's all well and good for you to be an expert in the field, but if you can't get the concepts across to your students you're no better than the textbook. By contrast, I know a couple people who are excellent instructors, regardless of how much they personally know about the topic (they're also the first to admit when they've hit the edge of their knowledge), but with a week or two crash course, they can get a room of people to learn whatever the topic of the day is.
I don't see why this would be different from current auditing practices. If an external examiner finds that your students have been incorrectly marked, it's either an automatic scaling of grades for everyone, or back to the red pen and regrade everything.
The difference would be that the robo-grader becomes effectively useless. You can either use it's marks (knowing that kids are gaming the system), or you can do everything manually (removing the benefit that the robo-grader provides.
Personally, I don't see a problem with the robo-graders being useless.
So, what you are saying is that the students will figure out how to write with excellent grammar and form, in order to get good grades.
I think that's naive. I think one kid will figure out how to get the computer to kick out excellent grammar and form (a lot easier when you don't actually care about the content), and in short order most of the smart/cunning kids will be using that (the cunning ones because it's a cheap A; the smart ones because they'll want to concentrate on subjects where knowledge matters, as opposed to something that can be outsourced to small shell scripts).
Here's the fun part - it would entirely depend on how the teacher sells this at the beginning of the year. I could see an argument for unfairness if they're picking out kids for "manual grading" - especially when the difference in marks will be vast (the robo's "this meets all my criteria - A+" vs. the teachers "you spewed out random crap for 500 words - F"). How many teachers (and schools) are going to want to walk into that quagmire?
Putting on "angry parent hat", the argument would go roughly - Why does my kid get marked differently than the other kids in class? Oh, you suspected my kid is gaming the system - how many other kids have you checked? None - oh, so you don't have a problem letting your time-saver software hand out A's unchecked to the other kids in class?
(And to forestall the obvious - no, my kid would *not* be in the room for that - I firmly believe students should respect their teachers (at least publicly). And depending on the kid's age, I'm torn between "do it right!" and "good job working the system - now rewrite it properly for your mother and I". But honestly - if schools are teaching to the test, they can't complain when the kids do it better than expected.)
No. This education degree stuff is crap. A teacher should have at least a masters degree in the topic they intend to teach.
Problem 1: Teachers don't get to choose what classes they get - I knew an English teacher who ended up teaching Intro Computing because.. they needed a computing teacher and he was available. Especially for newer teachers - you teach what they tell you to teach.
Problem 2: Are you intending to pay all those teachers in accordance with the extra 2+ years of education you're requiring?
Problem 3: At lower levels, you have A Teacher, not A Math Teacher and An English Teacher. Do you expect your kid's grade 1 teacher to hold multiple degrees? (And see problem #2, expanded to pay for a teacher holding half a dozen post-grad degrees so you feel comfortable letting them teach your kid ABCs.)
How quickly will students learn to game the system to get perfect scores with perfect gibberish?
Considering TFA already notes that people can (or have) designed Android apps that would automatically generate essays designed to pass the robo-maker?
If they're using this system at a school, I would be astounded if there *wasn't* an automated system (or twelve) already.
The magic is gone (it really hasn't helped that they started showing off the "professional" teams. You don't get the same involvement from those guys.
Agreed, but IIRC it was the figure skaters what screwed it up first - they started bending the amateur vs. professional rules to allow skaters to get paid in exhibitions but still compete at the Olympics. And once the door was open...
On the other hand, it's a rare athlete who isn't getting "paid" to do their sport, one way or the other, so "amateur" is a weird moniker anyway.
The staggered Summer/Winter events don't help there either. It's turned into politics - we start hearing about the next Olympics as soon as the previous one starts (not even when it ends). It doesn't feel like there's ever a time when we're *not* ramping up to the next Big Event.
I don't watch Olympics because they never show the events I want to see. Yeah, let's watch the runners and swimmers for a few hours. Not. Where's the archery? Fencing? Steeplechase?
The ruling is equivalent to "if you have a logon, you should have root".
Not really - it's saying that if they can log in (using the credentials you provided them), and can access a file that your security gives them read permissions to, they haven't "exceeded their authorized access". If they copy the data and sell it, they might still guilty of other crimes, but hacking isn't one of them.
This is really common sense at the heart of it - a recognition that you can't give someone permission, then revoke it after-the-fact and call it hacking.
Then maybe we should have an interface where you can 'tinker' with voltage curves or PWM tables or something, but you wouldn't need to look at the code that interprets the 'gas' pedal location to do that.
Maybe I'm hand-rolling my own cruise control. (Or for a less-crazy scenario, maybe I just want to log the position for curiosity's sake).
I'm with the parent here - no-one blinks if you take your car full of explosive gasoline and tinker with it, so why should an electric car be off-limits?
I'm about as big a Penn and Teller fan as it's possible to be, but I agree that reverse engineering a trick and selling it is legit. It happens all the time in software. Perhaps the rules are different in magic, but I doubt it.
Especially when you consider that P&T made their bones doing exactly that.
My understanding here is that he's copywritten the specific performance, and this guy is stealing and selling that. The difference between showing someone how to do the cup and balls, and someone doing it *exactly* the way Penn does it (with the potato and everything).
They should be strung up for the simple sin of assuming that they can put a valid answer in and marking it incorrect because "the kids won't know better".
Especially by fifth grade, any given kid could decide to geek out about any particular topic (I personally knew way more about probabilities and gambling than any ten-year-old ought to). That's before you consider that one of the Good Teachers might have gone above the curriculum.
Failing a kid for knowing too much is just plain wrong.
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When you say "life in a briefcase", what are we talking in percentage terms?
The solution would vary depending on if you're just out of the office for a few days every month, or one week out one week back, or one of those fellows who sees his apartment every second weekend for just long enough to do laundry.
Exactly. Standard procedure is to close down the roads and block off the intersections, so it doesn't matter if the lights are green or not since the convoy will be the only ones on that road.
After the mess that makes out of traffic changing the traffic lights for the few minutes needed is only a minor disrupt to traffic, no more than if an ambulance or police vehicle had their lights/siren running and needed to run light.
This seems like the least annoying method compared to ones used in the past.
I think the difference here is that instead of having the blockades and barricades and making an obvious "you're so important we'll shut the city down for you", they tried to do it "under the table" to give the impression that London traffic is so smooth that it won't be an issue during the games.
Have you ever tried to get a document or spreadsheet out of Google Docs and into one of the other on-line office suites?
Just did both (to double-check). Open the file, click "download as", pick Word/Excel as appropriate. Works quite nicely (even kept the formulas!)
Obviously, if you're moving format-heavy docs around you'll have problems, but that's been a truth going back to WordPerfect vs Word.
I think the argument would have to be from the developer side.
As the consumer, I don't give two figs about who gets what cut of most things I buy. I worry about the final cost. All things being equal I'll buy direct from the artist if I can (for items which have one), but I don't think most people worry what cut Walmart gets on that box of Mac and Cheese.
Developers can make a stink, but their option is simply to not develop iOS apps. Since everyone still is, I'm going to suggest that the economics are still in their favor even after taking the 30% hit into account.
And in this specific case, people using the Dropbox API probably don't care what cut Apple takes from Dropbox, since they're not getting any of that money either.
Why bother when you can just recharge VIA lighting strikes!
I suppose when time travel is invented, we'll see DeLoreans driving around, where instead of a map there's a timetable of future lightning strikes labeled "fueling stations"
Maybe they can Eject the Core (Battery) to reduce weight in case of emergency.
While I suspect that won't be a feature (not the least because you're dropping a presumably heavy battery on top of someone), it would be awesome if it did and it worked.
Of course, to make it a proper analogy, you'd have to add the fact that EA had agreed to terms that they *would* share the revenue from the online component, and then tried to cheat out of it.
Let's not forget that Apple is very clear on how things work in the App Store (I've read the terms, all 42 stupid pages of them). You can bitch about the terms (I can't say I'm particularly fond of them myself), but they're remarkably clear on just what you get and give to work in the Apple App Store. Dropbox knew it was ducking the system, and bet that Apple wouldn't call them on it. They lost the bet.
This isn't a case of Apple showing up, Mafia-style - this is them enforcing the terms and agreements that Dropbox agreed to.
Desktop version users shouldn't have to pay an Apple tax.
And they don't - if you buy your upgraded space through the desktop app (or just browse there, even in iOS Safari), Apple gets (and asks) for no cut.
Easy comparison: if you buy your CD through Apple, they take a cut. If you buy it through HMV, HMV takes a cut. If you buy it directly from the artist, no-one gets a cut. But you won't find a lot of HMVs that will let the artist sell from inside their store without getting a cut.
Bad rules should be resisted.
It's not a bad rule. Here, let's move the argument into the real world. (Sadly, not a car analogy.)
I used to work at a gaming shop. One of the popular items was CCG cards (Magic and Pokemon being the big two at the time). One big revenue generator for the store was selling singles. (When you can sell the rare for the price of the pack or better, *and* sell the commons and uncommons, the math was pretty compelling).
We also had gaming space. And the rule was, no selling cards in the store. Why, you ask? Because players would bring binders of cards, take up one of our tables (using our floorspace, our electricity), and then proceed to undercut us - which is pretty easy when you have no overhead.
We tried to be nice, but they simply started making the deals, then "stepping outside" to exchange money. And yes, when we banned them we got nothing but "why are you being so mean"?
Were we saying "you can't sell your cards?" No, of course not - they're your cards. We're saying "you can't use our overhead to sell your cards". And that's what Apple is saying - if you provide a button on your App (which is being used through their app store) to buy something, Apple gets a cut. If they go to you through some other method, Apple doesn't care - you just can't cheat around it.
My problem is that Apple is causing problems with 3rd parties that have nothing to do with this dispute. I never commented on whether Dropbox was right or wrong. Apple could of sent an email message that said "This is a TOS violation, fix it." They cut off API users instead. That's the criticism.
No, Apple cutoff Dropbox for violating TOS. Dropbox's customers (the "3rd parties") can go complain to Dropbox for screwing up the system.
Apple has no motivation to make Dropbox's life easier in this case (and would be weakening future positions if they did cut them slack).
Don't forget "Men in Tights"
Better question - if they consider sending the email to be sufficient notice, do they have to re-hire all the other staff? (After all, if sending email to Bob is sufficient for him to be fired, the other incorrect emails also have to be sufficient.)
Depending on how much I like my boss, I'd be inquiring about getting my vacation paid out, severence, etc. And then ask for a raise before getting hired back.
Maybe you're misunderstanding? It is often a requirement in the United States (I know it is in New York) to have a master's degree in education. So you spend two years learning God knows what (I know plenty of people with the degree, haven't been wow'ed by their responses as to what they did to earn it). However I'm unqualified to teach in public school because I have a master's in electrical engineering.
You won't get any argument from me on the curriculum of an education degree (and I know quite a few teachers who won't either) - but the crux is this: an education degree is supposed to teach you to teach. It's all well and good for you to be an expert in the field, but if you can't get the concepts across to your students you're no better than the textbook. By contrast, I know a couple people who are excellent instructors, regardless of how much they personally know about the topic (they're also the first to admit when they've hit the edge of their knowledge), but with a week or two crash course, they can get a room of people to learn whatever the topic of the day is.
I don't see why this would be different from current auditing practices. If an external examiner finds that your students have been incorrectly marked, it's either an automatic scaling of grades for everyone, or back to the red pen and regrade everything.
The difference would be that the robo-grader becomes effectively useless. You can either use it's marks (knowing that kids are gaming the system), or you can do everything manually (removing the benefit that the robo-grader provides.
Personally, I don't see a problem with the robo-graders being useless.
So, what you are saying is that the students will figure out how to write with excellent grammar and form, in order to get good grades.
I think that's naive. I think one kid will figure out how to get the computer to kick out excellent grammar and form (a lot easier when you don't actually care about the content), and in short order most of the smart/cunning kids will be using that (the cunning ones because it's a cheap A; the smart ones because they'll want to concentrate on subjects where knowledge matters, as opposed to something that can be outsourced to small shell scripts).
Here's the fun part - it would entirely depend on how the teacher sells this at the beginning of the year. I could see an argument for unfairness if they're picking out kids for "manual grading" - especially when the difference in marks will be vast (the robo's "this meets all my criteria - A+" vs. the teachers "you spewed out random crap for 500 words - F"). How many teachers (and schools) are going to want to walk into that quagmire?
Putting on "angry parent hat", the argument would go roughly - Why does my kid get marked differently than the other kids in class? Oh, you suspected my kid is gaming the system - how many other kids have you checked? None - oh, so you don't have a problem letting your time-saver software hand out A's unchecked to the other kids in class?
(And to forestall the obvious - no, my kid would *not* be in the room for that - I firmly believe students should respect their teachers (at least publicly). And depending on the kid's age, I'm torn between "do it right!" and "good job working the system - now rewrite it properly for your mother and I". But honestly - if schools are teaching to the test, they can't complain when the kids do it better than expected.)
No. This education degree stuff is crap. A teacher should have at least a masters degree in the topic they intend to teach.
Problem 1: Teachers don't get to choose what classes they get - I knew an English teacher who ended up teaching Intro Computing because.. they needed a computing teacher and he was available. Especially for newer teachers - you teach what they tell you to teach.
Problem 2: Are you intending to pay all those teachers in accordance with the extra 2+ years of education you're requiring?
Problem 3: At lower levels, you have A Teacher, not A Math Teacher and An English Teacher. Do you expect your kid's grade 1 teacher to hold multiple degrees? (And see problem #2, expanded to pay for a teacher holding half a dozen post-grad degrees so you feel comfortable letting them teach your kid ABCs.)
How quickly will students learn to game the system to get perfect scores with perfect gibberish?
Considering TFA already notes that people can (or have) designed Android apps that would automatically generate essays designed to pass the robo-maker?
If they're using this system at a school, I would be astounded if there *wasn't* an automated system (or twelve) already.
The magic is gone (it really hasn't helped that they started showing off the "professional" teams. You don't get the same involvement from those guys.
Agreed, but IIRC it was the figure skaters what screwed it up first - they started bending the amateur vs. professional rules to allow skaters to get paid in exhibitions but still compete at the Olympics. And once the door was open...
On the other hand, it's a rare athlete who isn't getting "paid" to do their sport, one way or the other, so "amateur" is a weird moniker anyway.
The staggered Summer/Winter events don't help there either. It's turned into politics - we start hearing about the next Olympics as soon as the previous one starts (not even when it ends). It doesn't feel like there's ever a time when we're *not* ramping up to the next Big Event.
I don't watch Olympics because they never show the events I want to see. Yeah, let's watch the runners and swimmers for a few hours. Not. Where's the archery? Fencing? Steeplechase?
Perhaps somewhere there are. But not here.
The ruling is equivalent to "if you have a logon, you should have root".
Not really - it's saying that if they can log in (using the credentials you provided them), and can access a file that your security gives them read permissions to, they haven't "exceeded their authorized access". If they copy the data and sell it, they might still guilty of other crimes, but hacking isn't one of them.
This is really common sense at the heart of it - a recognition that you can't give someone permission, then revoke it after-the-fact and call it hacking.
Then maybe we should have an interface where you can 'tinker' with voltage curves or PWM tables or something, but you wouldn't need to look at the code that interprets the 'gas' pedal location to do that.
Maybe I'm hand-rolling my own cruise control. (Or for a less-crazy scenario, maybe I just want to log the position for curiosity's sake).
I'm with the parent here - no-one blinks if you take your car full of explosive gasoline and tinker with it, so why should an electric car be off-limits?
I'm about as big a Penn and Teller fan as it's possible to be, but I agree that reverse engineering a trick and selling it is legit. It happens all the time in software. Perhaps the rules are different in magic, but I doubt it.
Especially when you consider that P&T made their bones doing exactly that.
My understanding here is that he's copywritten the specific performance, and this guy is stealing and selling that. The difference between showing someone how to do the cup and balls, and someone doing it *exactly* the way Penn does it (with the potato and everything).
Or more properly, they're hinting that if he had done things Their Way, even *more* money would have been made.
Whether CK himself would have made more money is an exercise for the reader's personal politics.
They should be strung up for the simple sin of assuming that they can put a valid answer in and marking it incorrect because "the kids won't know better".
Especially by fifth grade, any given kid could decide to geek out about any particular topic (I personally knew way more about probabilities and gambling than any ten-year-old ought to). That's before you consider that one of the Good Teachers might have gone above the curriculum.
Failing a kid for knowing too much is just plain wrong.