The effects of NCLB were an issue that candidates ran on in 2004 school board races in major cities. The gist is that since schools don't have the resources to meet the test score standards, the only way to hit those targets is to force underperforming students out, boosting the average.
And that's reflected in part by these statistics. I'm sure un(der)funded mandates like NCLB aren't the only factor here. But it definitely is one of them.
Since the military doesn't do that. The Department of Energy does reasearch along with the national labs. They're the ones with supercomputers modelling the physics of criticality events.
They could totally design thermonuclear warheads within the terms of a license the merly said "no military organizations can use the software".
And of course, people will use this globally. We don't have normalized diplomatic relations with Iran, but they have the internet. If you sue them for violating your license, you'll be shouting into a void.
The self serve check-in asks you if you have an ID or not and I just say I don't. I get my boarding pass and I have to whip out the drivers license for the nice TSA person to match me against the name on the boarding pass at the checkpoint. I don't have so much of a problem with this because that person's going to forget me 15 seconds later.
Of course, this doesn't mean that I'm flying anonymously. I'm still in the reservation system and that data is probably shared with the gov like no tomorry. But it's one less step I need to take.
Be able to learn how to use a new program based on skills learned to use other programs
install and remove software
install an operating system
perform basic troubleshooting (are the cables plugged in? are the switches turned on)
name the parts of a PC and provide a brief description of what they do.
find the answers to questions online
print a document
Myself, I can barely tread water in Word or Excel but I can assemble my own host from parts, build gentoo from stage 1 and all that fun stuff. I would consider myself above average computer literacy even though I don't bother mastering Office. I think the above 'requirements' would go most of the way towards giving people the context they need to understand what's going on and shave off a huge chunk of learning curve.
I seem to remember the telegraph having been used extensively during the American civil war. Warfighters have used communication technology for thousands of years. Even Sun Tzu talked of using flags and drums for communication.
If by "wired war" we're talking about the use of telecommunications technologies we have to consider the telegraph. The American civil war is the first conflict I can think of where it was used as a strategic communications tool but it had been around for about 20 years by that point, so it's possible that telecommunications had been used in a major conflict prior to that.
We code to w3c standards throughout building templates, usually using firefox and web developer plugin. In our experience this makes the site work great in everything except IE. So basically we use IE propriety conditionals and javascript to fork what will end up rendering in the browsers... w3c for modern browsers is default and IE gets different css and markup where needed. All in one set of source on the server side.
The important thing to remember is that GUI browsers on a personal computer aren't the only clients visiting web pages. If you want good search results... you best have machine-readable markup. That means well formed and to standards. Some phones are going to parse the markup and then decide how to render it... if at all. help systems, email clients... the list goes on.
That being said, the most important thing is to produce markup that a buggy parser with little or no error handling won't choke on. Then you can make it look pretty on a PC. You don't get there with the mentality "the majority is using browser x, we'll just code to that". You have to start with a solid foundation and then deviate as needed. Coding for w3c provides that foundation and has certainly made making pages render correctly much easier.
Yeah, I've been meaning to move my Asterisk box off of Red Hat for a while. Now this is definitely bumped up to the top of the to-do list. If they're crossing over to the dark side of the copyright/DMCA force, they're fired as far as vendors for my business. I encourage people to do the same.
...on both HD-DVD and Blu Ray. Holographic storage hits the market within a year with much greater density and throughput. Online movie distro music store style is likely to hit even before then.
So there's absolutely no point in investing a grand in a technology which will be obsoleted within a year. I'll throw a holo drive in a MythTV, get my movies online legit and tell the consumer electronics manufacturers to suck it.
What I'm worried about is it being so easy to close a meeting that it becomes routine.
Right now we have one safeguard: It's a pain in the ass to wait 15 days so people would mostly rather keep meetings open than close them. Unless absolutely necessary.
And I understand the probable necessity of having a closed meeting on short notice.
Where I have a real issue is the way that DHS has decided to work around this conflict. You can't just up and decide that the law doesn't apply to you. You can't decide to just break the law if it doesn't suit you. If the circumstances under which the law was created have changed, maybe it's time to change the law. Go to Congress, tell them how the law hasn't kept pace with reality and ask for changes. Better yet, suggest some.
Here's my suggestion: keep the 15 days notice the way it has been. However, in the case that the meeting has to be held much sooner than that and be closed, you have to do more than just give notice. You may have to have a counterpart in a different branch of government review an "emergency closure request" or somesuch and OK it. Maybe add a sunset provision in there where after a certain amount of time there will be a review (with a comment period) to decide wether or not the meeting stuff should remain closed. If the review isn't held, the stuff is automatically opened.
See, it isn't that complicated. DHS gets what they need to do their job. There is a check against the power from another branch and we have a mechanism to regain transparency after the fact.
But did DHS even ask Congress or entertain the notion? I don't have the answer to that. What I do know is that the President, DHS, the whole danged government and the general populace don't get to decide which laws do and do not apply to them. They can't selectively choose to obey this law and disobey that law. No matter what the percieved necessity may be.
And this has been happenning at an increasing pace in our executive branch as of late. It's criminal, anAmerican and unacceptable.
Sheesh, DHS... all you have to do is ask. We'll listen. But if you give up on the rule of law... you'll lead us down a path to anarchy or totalitarianism. And you know what... that's a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda could ever hope to be. Don't do their work for them.
Demanding dreamweaver/wysiwyg 'access' usually is an end to a means. Basically, instead of hiring somebody to do site maintainance and updates, they want to make it so anybody can update the site. This usually is motivated by costs and process. If people can directly update the site instead of asking the web guy to do it... that's a benefit.
So in this kind of situation, you want to open a dialog with your boss about what "functionality" the site should have. If they say "it has to be able to be edited by dreamweaver" you should ask what the goal of that feature is. Why are those goals important.
Then you come back later with a list of ways in which those goals can be achieved. Keep dreamweaver in there as a comparison. And have an executive summary of the business case pros and cons of each item, with estimated costs.
So maybe you find that it costs less to build the site on top of an off-the-shelf content management system than it costs to buy dreamweaver licenses for everybody every time a new version comes out. And it costs less to maintain code that way than to fight with the code dreamweaver produces. That metric could use real-world data from your hours.
We could do like sendmail and have the version we have for the US fighters and the version we give to our partners.
GPL would actually work really well for the partner version. We already set terms in our contracts about who arms can be re-sold to or a right to first refusal. And GPL says you only have to reveal source to people you distribute to. If we hold partners to only releasing source to those they distribute to, the security through obscurity knobs are placated while the partners have an open codebase they can collectively hack on.
This helps everybody involved. Our partners can imporve upon their investment and more eyes fix bugs faster. And the hawks in the US can settle their nerves because they can choose to participate in the partner codebase yet still have their 'commercial' version to fall back on if they all of a sudden don't trust the open version.
The clincher of course is controlling who the planes and associated software are distribited to. You can't put a genie back in a bottle. But then again, if source being leaked breaks the security of your product... it was never secure to begin with.
Both these weapons (m249 and m240g) get really hot. You have to fire them in 3 second strings and swap out the barrels every 300 rounds or so. While you're letting the barrel cool between strings or changing out the barrel... that's when the enemy attacks you.
So a common technique is "talking machine guns". You have 2 gun crews and they take turns with the firing strings, so there are always rounds going down range and the barrels stay relatively cool. Hopefully you can stagger changing out the barrels too.
So how do the robots handle this? You'd need moving parts that handle the ammo chain. Either it would have to be able to reload from standard chains by itself or troops would have to link many chains together and load them into a drum beforehand. If you've got a long chain you need an armature to twist the chain in case of a runaway gun. And then there's the barrels. You need more moving parts to change those out. And what if it drops one?
So to deal with those cooling issues with these weapons you may need 2 weapons per robot or 2 robots working in tandem.
But even that's not ideal. A minigun is a far better weapon for this kind of thing. The ones on the blackhawks would be perfect. We already can order them in bulk, the barrels stay cool and in the case of a runaway gun, you just cut power to the motor. And the moving parts are far less compicated. Much easier to maintain in the field.
The only advantage I can see to deploying the m249 or m240g is that the robot and troops could share ammo and the troops know how to service them. But the m134 minigun already uses the same ammo as the m240g and if you're going to service a robot, you probably are going to get special training anyway.
seriously. You'd want to move on pretty quick, but a lot of good stuff is there. Syntax is very c-like. Usual suspects for operators, loops, tests, exceptions, try-catch. Don't need any expensive proprietary software. Lots of documentation. Garbage collection. Loosely typed. Object Oriented.
The kicker is it's very safe. You're likely not going to hose your hard drive or lose a tic-tac-toe match to wopr. You'll have a head start on AJAX and will be able to read c and java well enough to start learning those as well.
Chances are, the Corps is taking commercial off the shelf filtering software, installing it and running with the default packaged filter list. Then modifying it as needed. These lists are huge and the people at the ISV's that compile them tend to lean conservative.
This situation happens a LOT. Sysadmins are instructed to install a filtering package and instead of doing all the work to compile their own list or pour through the list and unblock acceptable sites they just roll with the default config, tell their boss mission accomplished and only modify the list when nagged.
Seriously, if you're in an institution that's running filtering, there's likely a large number of sites that are blocked and the people running the filter don't even know that they are.
So the remedy? Marines should request unblocks through the chain of command or whichever channel has been set up for this. It's likely that the list just isn't being given much scrutiny. And as for fears of retribution because you expose yourself as a non-consrvative... you get more respect standing up for yourself than you do for rolling over. At least that was my experience in the Corps.
Seriously, I think that could take care of the whole situation.
Crazy that is was a year and a half ago. But still pretty topical. And I'm pretty sure those of us old enough to remember the days of many RBOC's can identify with the statement.
You may want to use the search on that site with a few other keywords. This subject comes along every once in a while so there's likely more than one thread about it.
I'm pretty certain that they'll watermark the plaintext, then wrap that up in DRM. They aren't going to sell us non-DRM files just because they've got a watermark.
I agree about doing both from the research perspective. We want to explore and set up operations on the whole moon, not just a corner of it.
However, logistics becomes a problem. What if you're out of a crucial supply at the equator but the station at the pole has many of them. In order to transport the supplies you'd have to do a lot of work. Either build a rail line between the two, have astronauts/mooninites get in their buggies and meet half way, go across that huge expanse Lawrence of Arabia style and back, have a huge supply ship in polar orbit raining supplies down on stations... etc. That's a lot of work.
So it might make sense to have one station, then a few nearby so the people stranded out there can say... run next door when a meteorite wipes out their kitchen.
Once we get the kinks of moon life worked out, then we put up another set of stations in another location. Then we expand the two towards each other. Maybe set up sub-stations 1/3 a tank of oxygen away from the "main" locations by buggy. Each one a li'l oasis.
Abe's only hope is "transdental electromicide".
Dr. Riviera asks for a golf cart motor with a 1000 volt capacimator,
but the two-second hesitation pushes him past schedule. Nick
improvises by ripping the cords from an operating lamp and shocking
the sh-- hell out of Abe. "Keep doing that every five seconds",
the "doctor" instructs. The malpractice charges are dropped, and
Dr. Nick enthuses "Free nose jobs for everyone!" starting with
Jasper, who wants a Van Heflin.
Sure, this was to treat Skin Failure but the ancilliary benefits are just starting to come to light.
I'd prefer that over a conservative hatred of just women. In fact, I can't think of a liberal regime that institutionalized oppression of women. Where there are countless examples on the right, like the Taliban for instance.
TV's days are numbered. If your show doesn't get picked up by the dinosaur networks, give away the first couple episodes for free and sell the rest online.
Or give them all away for free and get donations/grants. Or sell ads.
That's the beauty of not living in a 1950's distribution model. You can be flexible.
I don't have cable. I don't even own a TV anymore. But I do have all the battlestar galacticas. Including this season so far. Legit. I paid for them.
You don't have to go with iTMS specifically, but the market is there so if the major networks don't want to play with you, well you don't need them to succeed.
Um, I wish they'd use some other metal. We can use all the copper we can get here on earth. How about depleted uranium? I could do with less of that in my life and it works well as a projectile.
Slashdot Mirror
The effects of NCLB were an issue that candidates ran on in 2004 school board races in major cities. The gist is that since schools don't have the resources to meet the test score standards, the only way to hit those targets is to force underperforming students out, boosting the average.
And that's reflected in part by these statistics. I'm sure un(der)funded mandates like NCLB aren't the only factor here. But it definitely is one of them.
You just want your team to have a commander and ours to be leaderless. Just for that I'll be spec ops more often. Heh.
Since the military doesn't do that. The Department of Energy does reasearch along with the national labs. They're the ones with supercomputers modelling the physics of criticality events.
They could totally design thermonuclear warheads within the terms of a license the merly said "no military organizations can use the software".
And of course, people will use this globally. We don't have normalized diplomatic relations with Iran, but they have the internet. If you sue them for violating your license, you'll be shouting into a void.
The self serve check-in asks you if you have an ID or not and I just say I don't. I get my boarding pass and I have to whip out the drivers license for the nice TSA person to match me against the name on the boarding pass at the checkpoint. I don't have so much of a problem with this because that person's going to forget me 15 seconds later.
Of course, this doesn't mean that I'm flying anonymously. I'm still in the reservation system and that data is probably shared with the gov like no tomorry. But it's one less step I need to take.
Myself, I can barely tread water in Word or Excel but I can assemble my own host from parts, build gentoo from stage 1 and all that fun stuff. I would consider myself above average computer literacy even though I don't bother mastering Office. I think the above 'requirements' would go most of the way towards giving people the context they need to understand what's going on and shave off a huge chunk of learning curve.
I seem to remember the telegraph having been used extensively during the American civil war. Warfighters have used communication technology for thousands of years. Even Sun Tzu talked of using flags and drums for communication.
If by "wired war" we're talking about the use of telecommunications technologies we have to consider the telegraph. The American civil war is the first conflict I can think of where it was used as a strategic communications tool but it had been around for about 20 years by that point, so it's possible that telecommunications had been used in a major conflict prior to that.
We code to w3c standards throughout building templates, usually using firefox and web developer plugin. In our experience this makes the site work great in everything except IE. So basically we use IE propriety conditionals and javascript to fork what will end up rendering in the browsers... w3c for modern browsers is default and IE gets different css and markup where needed. All in one set of source on the server side.
The important thing to remember is that GUI browsers on a personal computer aren't the only clients visiting web pages. If you want good search results... you best have machine-readable markup. That means well formed and to standards. Some phones are going to parse the markup and then decide how to render it... if at all. help systems, email clients... the list goes on.
That being said, the most important thing is to produce markup that a buggy parser with little or no error handling won't choke on. Then you can make it look pretty on a PC. You don't get there with the mentality "the majority is using browser x, we'll just code to that". You have to start with a solid foundation and then deviate as needed. Coding for w3c provides that foundation and has certainly made making pages render correctly much easier.
not in my experience. .82 has been pretty solid for me. I'm using it on a Powermac G5 running 10.4.6 and a crapload of ram/vram.
Yeah, I've been meaning to move my Asterisk box off of Red Hat for a while. Now this is definitely bumped up to the top of the to-do list. If they're crossing over to the dark side of the copyright/DMCA force, they're fired as far as vendors for my business. I encourage people to do the same.
Exactlyyyyyyyyyyy.... hehehehe
...on both HD-DVD and Blu Ray. Holographic storage hits the market within a year with much greater density and throughput. Online movie distro music store style is likely to hit even before then.
So there's absolutely no point in investing a grand in a technology which will be obsoleted within a year. I'll throw a holo drive in a MythTV, get my movies online legit and tell the consumer electronics manufacturers to suck it.
What I'm worried about is it being so easy to close a meeting that it becomes routine.
Right now we have one safeguard: It's a pain in the ass to wait 15 days so people would mostly rather keep meetings open than close them. Unless absolutely necessary.
And I understand the probable necessity of having a closed meeting on short notice.
Where I have a real issue is the way that DHS has decided to work around this conflict. You can't just up and decide that the law doesn't apply to you. You can't decide to just break the law if it doesn't suit you. If the circumstances under which the law was created have changed, maybe it's time to change the law. Go to Congress, tell them how the law hasn't kept pace with reality and ask for changes. Better yet, suggest some.
Here's my suggestion: keep the 15 days notice the way it has been. However, in the case that the meeting has to be held much sooner than that and be closed, you have to do more than just give notice. You may have to have a counterpart in a different branch of government review an "emergency closure request" or somesuch and OK it. Maybe add a sunset provision in there where after a certain amount of time there will be a review (with a comment period) to decide wether or not the meeting stuff should remain closed. If the review isn't held, the stuff is automatically opened.
See, it isn't that complicated. DHS gets what they need to do their job. There is a check against the power from another branch and we have a mechanism to regain transparency after the fact.
But did DHS even ask Congress or entertain the notion? I don't have the answer to that. What I do know is that the President, DHS, the whole danged government and the general populace don't get to decide which laws do and do not apply to them. They can't selectively choose to obey this law and disobey that law. No matter what the percieved necessity may be.
And this has been happenning at an increasing pace in our executive branch as of late. It's criminal, anAmerican and unacceptable.
Sheesh, DHS... all you have to do is ask. We'll listen. But if you give up on the rule of law... you'll lead us down a path to anarchy or totalitarianism. And you know what... that's a bigger threat to America than Al Qaeda could ever hope to be. Don't do their work for them.
Demanding dreamweaver/wysiwyg 'access' usually is an end to a means. Basically, instead of hiring somebody to do site maintainance and updates, they want to make it so anybody can update the site. This usually is motivated by costs and process. If people can directly update the site instead of asking the web guy to do it... that's a benefit.
So in this kind of situation, you want to open a dialog with your boss about what "functionality" the site should have. If they say "it has to be able to be edited by dreamweaver" you should ask what the goal of that feature is. Why are those goals important.
Then you come back later with a list of ways in which those goals can be achieved. Keep dreamweaver in there as a comparison. And have an executive summary of the business case pros and cons of each item, with estimated costs.
So maybe you find that it costs less to build the site on top of an off-the-shelf content management system than it costs to buy dreamweaver licenses for everybody every time a new version comes out. And it costs less to maintain code that way than to fight with the code dreamweaver produces. That metric could use real-world data from your hours.
We could do like sendmail and have the version we have for the US fighters and the version we give to our partners.
GPL would actually work really well for the partner version. We already set terms in our contracts about who arms can be re-sold to or a right to first refusal. And GPL says you only have to reveal source to people you distribute to. If we hold partners to only releasing source to those they distribute to, the security through obscurity knobs are placated while the partners have an open codebase they can collectively hack on.
This helps everybody involved. Our partners can imporve upon their investment and more eyes fix bugs faster. And the hawks in the US can settle their nerves because they can choose to participate in the partner codebase yet still have their 'commercial' version to fall back on if they all of a sudden don't trust the open version.
The clincher of course is controlling who the planes and associated software are distribited to. You can't put a genie back in a bottle. But then again, if source being leaked breaks the security of your product... it was never secure to begin with.
Both these weapons (m249 and m240g) get really hot. You have to fire them in 3 second strings and swap out the barrels every 300 rounds or so. While you're letting the barrel cool between strings or changing out the barrel... that's when the enemy attacks you.
So a common technique is "talking machine guns". You have 2 gun crews and they take turns with the firing strings, so there are always rounds going down range and the barrels stay relatively cool. Hopefully you can stagger changing out the barrels too.
So how do the robots handle this? You'd need moving parts that handle the ammo chain. Either it would have to be able to reload from standard chains by itself or troops would have to link many chains together and load them into a drum beforehand. If you've got a long chain you need an armature to twist the chain in case of a runaway gun. And then there's the barrels. You need more moving parts to change those out. And what if it drops one?
So to deal with those cooling issues with these weapons you may need 2 weapons per robot or 2 robots working in tandem.
But even that's not ideal. A minigun is a far better weapon for this kind of thing. The ones on the blackhawks would be perfect. We already can order them in bulk, the barrels stay cool and in the case of a runaway gun, you just cut power to the motor. And the moving parts are far less compicated. Much easier to maintain in the field.
The only advantage I can see to deploying the m249 or m240g is that the robot and troops could share ammo and the troops know how to service them. But the m134 minigun already uses the same ammo as the m240g and if you're going to service a robot, you probably are going to get special training anyway.
Oh, and in peacetime can they clean my carpets?
seriously. You'd want to move on pretty quick, but a lot of good stuff is there. Syntax is very c-like. Usual suspects for operators, loops, tests, exceptions, try-catch. Don't need any expensive proprietary software. Lots of documentation. Garbage collection. Loosely typed. Object Oriented.
The kicker is it's very safe. You're likely not going to hose your hard drive or lose a tic-tac-toe match to wopr. You'll have a head start on AJAX and will be able to read c and java well enough to start learning those as well.
Chances are, the Corps is taking commercial off the shelf filtering software, installing it and running with the default packaged filter list. Then modifying it as needed. These lists are huge and the people at the ISV's that compile them tend to lean conservative.
This situation happens a LOT. Sysadmins are instructed to install a filtering package and instead of doing all the work to compile their own list or pour through the list and unblock acceptable sites they just roll with the default config, tell their boss mission accomplished and only modify the list when nagged.
Seriously, if you're in an institution that's running filtering, there's likely a large number of sites that are blocked and the people running the filter don't even know that they are.
So the remedy? Marines should request unblocks through the chain of command or whichever channel has been set up for this. It's likely that the list just isn't being given much scrutiny. And as for fears of retribution because you expose yourself as a non-consrvative... you get more respect standing up for yourself than you do for rolling over. At least that was my experience in the Corps.
Seriously, I think that could take care of the whole situation.
Crazy that is was a year and a half ago. But still pretty topical. And I'm pretty sure those of us old enough to remember the days of many RBOC's can identify with the statement.
http://macslash.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/25/113421 1&mode=thread
You may want to use the search on that site with a few other keywords. This subject comes along every once in a while so there's likely more than one thread about it.
I'm pretty certain that they'll watermark the plaintext, then wrap that up in DRM. They aren't going to sell us non-DRM files just because they've got a watermark.
I agree about doing both from the research perspective. We want to explore and set up operations on the whole moon, not just a corner of it.
However, logistics becomes a problem. What if you're out of a crucial supply at the equator but the station at the pole has many of them. In order to transport the supplies you'd have to do a lot of work. Either build a rail line between the two, have astronauts/mooninites get in their buggies and meet half way, go across that huge expanse Lawrence of Arabia style and back, have a huge supply ship in polar orbit raining supplies down on stations... etc. That's a lot of work.
So it might make sense to have one station, then a few nearby so the people stranded out there can say... run next door when a meteorite wipes out their kitchen.
Once we get the kinks of moon life worked out, then we put up another set of stations in another location. Then we expand the two towards each other. Maybe set up sub-stations 1/3 a tank of oxygen away from the "main" locations by buggy. Each one a li'l oasis.
Abe's only hope is "transdental electromicide". Dr. Riviera asks for a golf cart motor with a 1000 volt capacimator, but the two-second hesitation pushes him past schedule. Nick improvises by ripping the cords from an operating lamp and shocking the sh-- hell out of Abe. "Keep doing that every five seconds", the "doctor" instructs. The malpractice charges are dropped, and Dr. Nick enthuses "Free nose jobs for everyone!" starting with Jasper, who wants a Van Heflin.
Sure, this was to treat Skin Failure but the ancilliary benefits are just starting to come to light.
I'd prefer that over a conservative hatred of just women. In fact, I can't think of a liberal regime that institutionalized oppression of women. Where there are countless examples on the right, like the Taliban for instance.
TV's days are numbered. If your show doesn't get picked up by the dinosaur networks, give away the first couple episodes for free and sell the rest online.
Or give them all away for free and get donations/grants. Or sell ads.
That's the beauty of not living in a 1950's distribution model. You can be flexible.
I don't have cable. I don't even own a TV anymore. But I do have all the battlestar galacticas. Including this season so far. Legit. I paid for them.
You don't have to go with iTMS specifically, but the market is there so if the major networks don't want to play with you, well you don't need them to succeed.
Um, I wish they'd use some other metal. We can use all the copper we can get here on earth. How about depleted uranium? I could do with less of that in my life and it works well as a projectile.