Politicians, like all power figures, are innately tied to the influences of power. In this case, a powerful nation to the south, which has powerful incentive to push intellectual poison on the rest of the world to prop itself up. [yes, I am a citizen of that powerful country, but I can see the handwriting on the wall. The US has no real manufacturing infrastructure. Our agribiz infrastructure is no longer first rate in the world market, and our last strongholds for world relevency are intellectual property and military might. Without IP, I believe we would crumble like the former soviet union, due to the shortsighted practices of our corporations who have no sense of national loyalty, only loyalty to money-- and our politicians who are loyal to those corporations, and not the voting public. As such, the US is a sinking ship, with bandaids over huge holes of economic policy, and bilge pumps of government bailouts running 24/7. It is NOT sustainable.]
This whole issue with "Worldwide DMCA" would dissolve rapidly if [when] the USA finally tanks. Without the US to make a fuss over it, the corporations would be unable to leverage such global policy positions on the rest of the world, and the effort would suffer huge spirals of inefficiency as every little government everywhere suddenly had the 300lb gorilla with the billy club removed from the parlament floor, and politicians had golden parachute cords cut.
As suicidal as it seems, what is best for the WORLD right now is for my country to suffer the consequences of its own complacency, and to deminish-- in profound and spectacular fashion.
Props to the people of Canada for telling my government to shove it. I love you guys.
On the contrary. I tried the new UIs in Vista and win7. I found that they treated me like I knew nothing about how the computer works, and that I knew nothing about ACLs, local volume security, user credentials and accounts-- and hid vital functionality from me for the sake of being "Friendly" to people that genuinely do not know about such things.
Since I am not one of those people, there is no reason, and no excuse for hiding that functionality from me, when I want, or even have legitimate need, to enable it.
On vista and windows 7, I have to use CLI tools to brute force creation of user groups and to assign custom access control lists to them. I know. I have had to do it. This is especially true on anything other than "Ultimate" flavors of those OSes, which nearly nobody has legitimately on their home PCs. It makes the tasks of "Can you give junior a limited access account, and can you prevent him from seeing my porn collection?" much more difficult for me, when friends and family ask it.
Other times I would need or want access to such features are when I am trying to remove a multi-part worm that constantly regenerates, and tries to use filesystem and group policy security against me.
My beefs against the new UIs are legitimate. They have burned me many times. I no longer want to play. Leave my tools alone, they are not broken.
Because the ribbon interface hides things from you in more aggressive ways than did the dropdown menu interface? Because the ribbon interface in office broke shortcut keys that required otherwise incompetent finance and HR people to re-build their cheat sheets, and resulted in months of hassle as IT people the world over got called incessantly on "How do you do Mail Merge again?" type problems, when there were more pressing matters to attend with?
Because the whole reason that Microsoft implemented the ribbon UI was because of turtleneck wearing LA majors in silicon valley saying "It looks ugly, I don't like it." while drinking a double latte from starbucks, while posting from a Macbook air?
Seriously, I absolutly HATE the new UIs in windows vista and windows 7. Hated the "Aqua" UI in XP too-- First thing I do on XP machines is enable the "Classic UI". Cant even do that now on win7.
Here's an idea, just because something is new, does not mean it is better. Likewise, if something isn't broken, don't fix it.
These ideals are why you will see real power users and real computer geeks extolling the virtues of the CLI. (An interface that has been around for more than 30 years.)
The beef isn't that "Your computer illiterate fiance cannot figure it out"-- it is that if the UI isnt broken, then there is no reason to fix it. You can give the overall appearance a facelift, but dont change the core functionality with something untested and unproven without a means of reverting it to the more tried and true method.
Guess what I will do on windows8 systems? (If microsoft lets me that is...)
The linked PDF you provided speculates that "object X" might be a self-obscured star, obscured by its own ejecta.
If we assume that this is indeed a dyson swarm, then the purpose might not be exclusively for collecting energy.
A category II or III civilization would be doing asto-architecture, and would need tremendous amounts of raw materials. Heavy atoms are only produced naturally in one kind of environment: in the hearts of stars. If this star is regularly expelling large quantities of cosmic dust, as the linked article postulates, then it would make an excellent "Factory". Energy would be in copious abundance, and the star itself would be churning out millions of tons of heavy atoms every minute. Even with a short (compared to other stars) lifespan, it would make an excellent factory site for other large astro-engineering projects.
It would be far more economical than mechanically processing already aggregated matter clumps (planets, asteroids, etc)-- especially with a dyson sphere/swarm infrastructure. The emitted gas and dust would be strongly ionized, and a simple network of magnetic traps could passively funnel the more desirable metal and halide ions from the lighter non-metals, with very minimal post processing. It would go a long way toward eliminating material scarcity issues that would otherwise plague a category II or III civilization.
Spectrographic analysis of the dust cloud to see if it has an uneven distribution of heavy and light elements would be quite revealing if this is the case-- Heavy ions would be in greater concentrations nearer the solar mass than away from it-- contrary to what you would expect if it was merely a gravitationally bound stellar dust cloud. (the latter would have a fairly uniform distribution of dust and gas)
Sadly, since it is in another galaxy such spectrographic studies are not very easy to do in sufficient resolutions to make such distinctions. It would need to transit some other more luminous celestial object in order for us to get such a reading, so that the invisible gas envelope surrounding the object could be studied, but again, it being in a distant galaxy coupled with the slow rate of orbital rotation of stars around a galactic center mass makes this a wait that could be billions of years long for such an event.
I agree that it is a very interesting object though.
Together, this along with the target distance to the alien planet will give you the optimum broadcast power for an intelligable message to be sent. Bear in mind that the SNR needs to be sufficiently high to still discern the signal from cosmic background radiation. Choice of broadcast frequency would be helpful here, but sadly I cant link you to any helpful data on that one.
For the inverse, (Building a reception antenna), you would need to compute the absolute minimum broadcast power that the alien civilization could still realistically send a message that distance with (Using the first part above), then calculate the gain needed to derive a useful signal from the weak source.
Given the distances, you are probably looking at something the size of aracibo or bigger.
With just a teeny bit more data, it COULD be used to describe your exact position though.
All that is needed is a pingtime from the towers. 3 towers, and you have a triangulated position. (or, rather, could triangulate the position painlessly.)
I can see the benefits of having this information inside the phone-- It would enable much cleaner handoffs between towers, if the phone knew where it was, what direction it was going, and what towers were nearby that could offer service. However, the world being the way that it is, one advertisment firm learns of this monetary goldmine for targeted advertisements, and BOOM-- a system implemented to improve QoS becomes a nightmare of targeted advertisements, and later, gets abused by government officials.
Personally, I dont want to get coupons in the mail for an italian place on the highway I commute each day on my way to work, simply because that information is theoretically available to advertisers.
Note to advertisers:
If I wanted to know about italian restaraunts in my area, *I WOULD DO AN INTERNET SEARCH FOR IT MYSELF. DO NOT PROACTIVELY TELL ME ABOUT THEM. I AM NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR TARGETED ADVERTS. PERIOD.*
I do not like your Spam, Sam I am, I do not want your green eggs and ham.
Leave my email inbox alone. Leave my mailbox alone. Dont send me advertisments, dont send me spam SMS messages, I dont want them. Track my phone for QoS reasons only, if you absolutely must, but that information should naturally expire within a few hours. It should not be kept indefinately; neither internally nor externally./rant
Yes. Shiny new ipads are obviously going to increase test scores. Much more than hiring competent teachers, or funding academic programs that foster learning.
No, They got a government budget surplus, and they blew it on something shiny that makes them look technologically savvy. Kinda like useless people in suits blow money on a shiny sports cars and other status symbols. "Look at our school! We have all this awesome technology! [of course, none of our staff knows how to properly manage it anyway, and we will sue you when your children demonstrate superior control over our shiny status symbols than we do-- But pay no attention to the incompetent people behind the administration desks!]
This is why dumping money on the public school system wont work. Public schools lack integrity, and as such, cannot be trusted with public funds, really. Unless there is accountability, there will be no integrity, and as long as teachers are treated like martyrs even when they fail their students by continually failing to ensure that they gain basic literacy (AND basic math, AND basic science) at an alarming statistical rate, that accountability will never come.
In terms of school administrators, there is more incentive in looking like they know what they are doing, than in actually investing the time and resources into actually gaining competence. This is especially true when there is flagrant incompetence and other serious shennanigans going on courtesy of the teacher's unions, and liberal arts majors trying to create education policies.
This money would have been much better spent on refurbishing the school's science labs, or on funding extracurricular academic activities. (no, not fucking sports activities. Those get enough money and time already. They dont need more. What needs more time and money are things like physics clubs, engineering workshops, and the like. Things that get kids interested in learning, rather than interested in kicking balls around.)
Netflix has a very limited selection of streamable movies. Nearly everything I really would like to watch as a one-off (EG, something I dont want to buy, but feel like watching once, without going to a rental place) is not available for streaming.
Last night, for example, I wanted to watch a scifi comedy-- So, I did a short list (no particular order)
Spaceballs Dr. Strangelove (Or how I learned to love the bomb) Back to the future (Any) Real Genius and a few others.
NONE are available for streaming.
However, if you are into Stargate, or Doctor Who, or that lot--- You can find whole seasons available for streaming.
They have lots of TV shows, though I have never been big into TV.
My personal suggestion to somebody that wants to use the computer as a playback device for a really big monitor (Like an HDTV with HDMI) is to use a small HTPC, and a NAS, and to go ahead and just digitize their DVD collections. (Or, just resort to plain old piracy and keep good quality rips on the NAS.)
Netflix would be awesome if they could get better agreements with media owners for streaming. As is though, it's deffinately a crapshoot.
I suppose between them and Hulu you could have a reasonable selection--- but they are still no match for the availability of a local collection on a nice NAS box.
What I personally have done, is saddle a big USB2.0 drive enclosure to my XBOX360 for the local movie archive, and use my Wii for Netflix. (*WOULD* use the 360 for it, but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom require you to have a gold membership with a monthly subscription to use netflix on their box, essentially double dipping you for the priviledge. Netflix on Wii is free as far as the wii side of things is concerned-- just the 8$/mo streaming service fee, which is quite affordable. I get that much use out of it monthly, easily.)
That way I just sit on my couch and use a controller to pick what I want to watch, instead of having to fumble for discs. The 360 does high definition playback with AC3 audio for local media, and supports generic Mpeg4 AVI (Unless you really really WANT to use Windows media codecs....) and does so pretty much out of the box these days. (My console is an older one that had to pull an update, but it does it as soon as you try to play a media file that needs it.) That means you can have a high quality BD dump, and play it back fine.
I DO have an actual computer stashed under the entertainment center, but I rarely make use of it, instead doing the streaming from the game consoles because of increased ease of use, and quicker startup times.
Trust me, if you are a disorganized slob like me, (Or you have children that are hell bent on destroying shiny objects like DVDs and BDs) being able to browse your movie archive digitally without leaving your couch is damn convenient, especially since you can change movies painlessly on the go, and not have to put things up. You can put your original discs in a brinks security box, and stash it someplace and be all good.
The problems with Wifi (less so with N, but still impacted) is that the radio frequencies used are quickly attenuated by atmospheric water vapor. THis is why the signal drops through the floor much more quickly over distance than it does for cellular connections.
Whitespaces use TV analog broadcast spectrum, which is not affected this way, which would enable it for use as a mesh network medium.
The issue here is how to make gobs and gobs of APs create and manage peering partnerships with other APs over the medium, so they dont compete and try to drown each other out like WiFi does.
A PKI infrastructure is better able to handle peering, because multiple agents is part of the design of the infrastructure already. We would just need to create an "AP to AP trusted connection" type subprotocol that the APs wishing to enlist peers could negotiate over. This way instead of trying to drown each other out, they could hand off clients based on load, and could communicate with each other if they are able to accept forwarded clients or not.
In the previous example I made about an "open" network, If say, two people in the same neighborhood set up such open networks, they could reach a peering agreement, and configure their APs to accept each other's certificates, and to hand off connecting clients based on load. In the event that one of the offloaded clients is not in the coverage area of the recipient AP, then the AP-AP link would tunnel the connection at a reduced bandwidth to maintain connection. (Connected device would be alerted that this had happened)
In the above situation, the AP the client is forwarded to would serve as a RA (Registration authority) while the AP doing the forwarding would be the CA. The peered AP that recieves the client would ask the forwarding AP to validate the signature of the forwarded client, over the secured AP-AP connection, (Uses their own private key pair, for security reasons) The forwarding AP validates, then passes/fails the request, then issues a temporary certificate re-issue request for the downstream AP to license the client. This would mean that on secured networks (as opposed to open ones) the encryption would change as you walk around the city, because different APs would re-issue public keys as your client gets handed-off through the peering infrastructure.
One idea I came up with last night, would be to create 3 distinct classes of device:
Client Access Point Broker
The first two are self-explanitory, but the third needs some explanation. For it, lets assume a highly dense urban environment, where there could be hundreds of APs in a 1 mile area. (Say, an apartment building in New York.)
Individual 1:1 peering agreements between all the APs would be messy, and labor intensive to set up and maintain. Instead, the landlord can install a "Broker", and enforce peering with the broker as part of the tenant agreement. The broker does not accept client type devices, only other brokers and APs. It serves as something similar to a router, to fascilitate handoffs of clients, and for AP to AP communications. It makes all the APs in the building play nice with each other, and tells specific APs to increase or decrease their broadcast strengths, renegotiate whitespace frequency, etc.
This is where the privacy people ask questions:
1) Does the above situation with the enforced peering forcibly multiplex all the connected landline internet endpoints connected by user APs?
No, not unless you configure your AP to serve in that capacity. If you do not, then your AP simply tunnels connected clients over the AP-AP connection to an endpoint that authorizes access. That way your neighbor cant be surfing for childporn over your pipe, unless you allow it. Instead, if he is visiting a friend on another floor, his connection is simply tunneled through the AP-AP connection to either an open endpoint, or back to is own AP. Peering with the broker does not grant the broker access to your pipe-- It creates a special pipe betwee
What I would like to see is a non-profit org get created for the sole purpose of acquiring licensed spectrum for long-range packet radio, and to create an open-licensed wireless protocol to use it-- Then release it publicly FOSS style.
Because it would be long distance (1 to 2 miles would be the ideal coverage area for access points I would think.. could be wrong though. That's just a guess.) it would need to prevent abuse as part of the protocol itself, and so I personally would like to see encryption be a requirement for devices to connect-- Not some gutless password based encryption either, I mean PKI-style encryption with issued certificates kind.
One of the neat things about public/private key encryption is that you can theoretically have multiple public keys to a single private key, which could then be independently enforced.
The idea is to replace 802.11x (A, B, G, N) straight up, and to make consumer boxes that serve as access points just like wifi routers. For businesses offering complimentary internet, (who wouldnt want to be a free ISP to everyone within 1-2 miles-- and only offer to paying customers) a simple near-feild communication plate built into the counter at the store could supply a time-leased certificate to the device (think really short range bluetooth), giving it permission to access the AP, which would then get revoked after the time elapses. The ability to have multiple public keys per private key would let this work. The business's AP would keep a "pool" of public certs, and would track their use against unique hardware IDs from the connecting devices. (The AP would check that the cert is valid, then check to see who it was issued to-- If the unique ID does not match, no connection.) This would keep people from being repeat customers at a specific place, and eventually having every cert in the pool pushed to their device over time, and then no longer needing to make a purchase to gain access. It would also prevent people from using what is assumed to be a unique public key at the same time somebody else is, and causing problems. (There would be 2 levels of uniqueness-- Unique public key, and unique device MAC. The AP would check both, and decline connection if either is invalid.)
Certificate checking would be strictly enfoced, but 1:1 correlations between certs and devices would not be, based on how the AP is configured. For people wanting to run "Open" connections, (Equivilent of unprotected wifi), a default certificate set of 1 private key (burned into the AP as part of specification compliance), and 1 public key would be ubiquitous to all devices, and would fascilitate that configuration. The over-air data would still be encrypted, just with this defacto key set. (Useless from a security standpoint because everyone has the keys, but useful from a protocol design standpoint because you can always populate the encryption type feild of the datagram header, even in "open" mode.)
The ideal situation would allow deployment of user-generated key sets right out of the box, built on strong encryption bit depths---
It would be the beginning of the open-mesh network everyone seems to want so badly, myself included.
Given that whitespaces have been enabled for public use, maybe I should order an FPGA kit and cobble together a proof of concept some time...
I really would like to see a non-profit org created to administer a project like this though. Could even use whitespace spectrum instead of licensing dedicated.
This is covered by the hour-long presentation cited by the summary.
Also pointed out in that video is the fact that foods that switched formulas from sugar to HFCS actually INCREASED the caloric content from sugar, due to the reduced price point, and increased sweet-taste appeal it provides.
Basically, the reduction in calories from using fructose rich corn syrup are more than offset when you add twice as much corn syrup as you did sugar previously---Just because you can.
Now, go watch the video, THEN comment. K, Thnks, bye.
Just how many people posting replies here have actually, you know-- watched the hour long presentation created by Mr. Lustig all the way through?
In the presentation, Lustig lists the metabolic pathway that fructose (The sugar he rants about) has to go through in order to be processed by the body, and explains why it is toxic in the quantities that people eat it in.
What is drawing fire here, is that lustig rightly mentions that sucrose is just a glucose and a fructose bound together by an ether bond, and metabolically speaking is practically identical to HFCS. (Something the corn refiner's association is also quick to point out.)
The real point of the presentation is to point out that the US population is eating considerably more sugar than it was 50 years ago, with a more than 300% increase in fructose consumption specifically.
He advocates reduction of fructose consumption, based on several cited studies he lists in his viral video presentation.
That said, armchair nerd pundits like us have no place to try to debunk such claims, since as far as I know none of us are licensed dieticians or physicians. As such, throwing useless arguments like "Dihydrogen oxide poisoning" around are non-sequitors at best, and pointless mud slinging at worst.
Having seen the presentation, and seen that he cites dozens of studies that can be independently examined, (and therefor verified), I feel that his presentation is of higher quality than say, a certain celebrity's rants about immunity shots and autism are. As such, it deserves more meaty rebuttles than what I am reading here on slashdot.
The united states would become every bit as despotic as china, and just as rife with abuses, should it no longer be necessary for our government to placate the populace. (Something that is quickly being manifest with eroded liberties and freedoms even as we sit here and argue about it.)
You can find a long littany of such "Secret" abuses if you are willing to suspend your belief that the US is a great place to live. Take for instance, the Tuskegee syphilis study, and the more recent study that abused HIV infected orphans on the east coast-- Not to mention what the US government does to soldiers in terms of medical experimentation. (Seriously, look it up.)
The "Velvet Glove" metaphor I use is meant to point out that the US is "Like China", except it "Takes measures to appear softer and more cuddly, so it can delude you into letting your guard down."
China makes no such concession-- They just shoot you. No argument from me there. In the US though, where we are *supposed* to be beholden to higher ideals and ethics (which as pointed out with the Tuskegee study-- and other horrors like it, of which there are many-- are only window dressing for how things actually happen behind closed doors) the government *HAS* to make such concession, or lose face.
It disturbs me greatly how so many good little americans chime in and say how much better the US is compared to China in terms of hipocricy-- when the smelly corpses of victims can be found easily beneath thin layers of soiled propaganda, which scream otherwise.
Of course, we have it so much better here--- I mean, They have flagrant media manipulation and misinformation systems in place... Wait-- So do we. Well... They do prison labor! Wait... So do we..... Uhm-- Oh yes! We have fast food! And we can protest from Free Speech zones!
Really, the only differences are int he DEGREE of abuse. Something that can change VERY easily.
Assuming that Microsoft doesnt jump the shark and do something totally unlike their past releases, like overtly junking all back-compatibility with x86 legacy applications (I see this windows offering being adapted for use on the emerging tablet market, where existing legacy application support, even if crippled, would be a big selling point), this offering will be technologically inferior to the existing (and based on more portable technologies) offerings like iOS and Android.
The reason is because this new windows flavor will have to JIT emulate the x86 instruction set for those legacy apps, and do all kinds of calisthenics to make shit happen between native binaries and emulated binaries. The ARM cpu uses less power, but is also somewhat more gutless compared to desktop x86 chips. It will suck hard trying to emulate that bloated dinosaur of an instruction set.
If microsoft finally sacrifices the holy vestal virgin of legacy compatibility (Its major strongpoint in corporate environments by a long shot-- Look at the immense power of zombie IE6) for its ARM port, it will suffer the same fate as all the previous alternative architecture builds (PPC, SPARC, Itanium, et al.)-- That is to say, it will die on the vine because users will hate it with purple pasion.
I am curious to see how microsoft pulls this off. If they were smart, they would do something similar to what Apple did when they switched from PPC to x86 commodity chips, and incorporate a special abstraction layer like Roseta. (Note, I am NOT an apple fanboi-- If you call me one, you are an idiot. Just pointing out something I thought apple did that was interesting.)
Sadly, like so many things microsoft does these days, it will probably be filled with so much useless bloat and duct-tape code that it will run like congealed dogpoo even on high end ARM hardware when trying to do such legacy support-- (again, if they even do it at all.)
I will reserve further judgement until I see it in the wild. It might be great-- but I wont get my hopes up.
US politicians have a rather nasty habit. (No, not chasing people around in cloak rooms or playing footsie in bathroom stalls, but they seem into that too)
Namely, they like to straddle the fence, and are very bad at doing so.
Take for instance, the media spectacle of the Egypt and subsequent middle-eastern revolts. The talking heads on capital hill squirmed and looked at each other for DAYS before finally resolving on an official position---AFTER the brave people in Egypt forced their hands. You see, they had been caught with their knickers down. On one side, you had "Heroic efforts to bring real democracy and freedom by the populace"-- which is the anodyne that they spew here in the states (Even though the body politic has rendered most of these so called freedoms that we are supposed to enjoy inert, or highly restricted with red tape and restriction) and on the other, there was Hosni Mubarak-- "Our Man" who "Helped us" with some rather "Nasty Renditions"--and more importantly, the diplomatic bargaining power he brought to the table in middle eastern affairs. (Namely, their dirty underhanded dealings) Having to pick a side and stick with it seems to have ruffled more than just a few feathers up there in washington--- the concept of lasting consequences and of having the onus of that kind of choice on them makes them squirm like worms under the light of a Fresnel lens. Back-troll through the media coverage prior to the deposal of Mubarak, with emphasis on the position from capital hill--- and you will find lots and lots of deflectionary statements.
Same kind of thing with this "Pot calling kettle black" issue with China, and censorship. The US government, like *ALL* Governments, is addicted to power; namely, the power to control its citizens-- (But the US is more aggressive, in that it likes to control OTHER nation's citizens as well. Extra-ordinary rendition, et. al.) As such, it innately LIKES the idea of a serious crackdown on free information exchange. You can go just about anyplace in government where there is "Enforcement" of any sort, be it military to as mundane as city police departments, and you will find a highly prevalent bias toward wanting to control or at least obsessively monitor/record pretty much every kind of correspondence. Constitutionally protected rights to personal papers and effects be damned.
Take for instance, the rather nasty provisions in the US patriot act, which has come up for review TWICE now, and somehow (rolls eyes) keeps getting new lease on life-- specifically, the data retention policies it enforces on public internet providers. (like internet cafes and libraries) Handing over lending histories was only ONE of the provisions; Another that was discretely added was the requirement to provide, on demand, complete packet logs of persons of interest, without oversight. If Government Man wants, it, Government Man gets it, basically.
Essentially, the US wants to maintain the *illusion* that there is freedom and privacy in people's day to day correspondences, while secretly spying on, sanitizing, and orchestrating "enforcements" on "undesirable" communications. Wikileaks being just one high profile example. Philosophically, how is this any better than China's approach? If anything, the US approach to censorship is more obscene and insideous, because it promotes false senses of security in the citizens impacted--- China at least doesnt deny that it uses strongarm tactics; the US on the other hand, does gymnastics to validate why it purpetually authorizes warrantless searches, siezures, and interrogations at places like airports.
Basically, the US is JUST like China, just in a velvet glove instead of a cold steel one.
It has been my experience that most word problems in school settings are HIGHLY contrived, and are basically just restating the desired formula in sentence form.
More useful for the engineering student would be to pose a problem, rather than to ask a question. EG:
Create a formula for a 3D lofted surface that produces the maximum lift with the least drag for an object 10 meters long and 5 meters wide. Due to material fragility, max strain cannot exceed 30ka/cm^2, and wind sheer restricts max airspeed to 120kph.
The assigned task is to create the formula that rules the resulting wing surface, to maintain the requirements provided. This question would be open book and would permit the student to look up burnouli's formula, or anything else they feel they need to help calculate lift force, without detracting from the purpose of the excercise and would be more appropriate for what an aspiring engineer would be faced with in the course of his/her career. It would test how well they understand the theory behind the mathematics in the class quite effectively, and would not require some arbitrarily imposed handicap like a crippled graphing calculator.
Sadly, Most teachers are too impatient and or lazy to create such an open ended question-- as it would require the teacher to evaluate a large number of possible submissions for fitness.
The reason why word problems are usually just syntax-exact translations from cookie-cutter formulas, is because it makes for only a single possible solution, that is easily pass/failed by the teacher.
Math is not about cookie cutter answers, it is about FINDING answers, and DESCRIBING problems. I dont know about anyone else here, but I was strongly put off by formal math instruction because of this over-dependence on easy evaluation metrics on the teacher's side of the table. The questions do not require thought, only compliance-- which does not teach the fundemental skill behind mathematics-- Understanding the problem posed to you with sufficient abstraction to create a simple model that describes the problem in its entirety.
I learned more about mathematics when I was cutting teeth on programming than I did in school; It was one thing to find out how many apples steve gave bob-- it was another altogether to find clever solutions to the problem of determining if a number is prime or not in a fast and efficient manner, where the input number is any "n", and that still far removed from identifying when a prime number is either going to make or break something you are working on.
I take this dependence upon requiring broken calculators in math classes, especially advanced math classes, to be highly telling of the kind of education we are trying to give and consider it a sympthom of why our educational system is failing miserably, especially in math and science.
We don't teach people the skills of being a scientist-- we teach them what has already been discovered (sometimes not even that..). We dont teach them how to be a mathematician, we teach them already found formulae, then play trivial pursuit.
In the days before flash roms, there were these things called eeproms. And before that, there was this thing called eprom. Under most normal circumstances these chips behave like ROM. However, under special conditions (raise voltage on some types, raise a special signal line on others, depending) you can change it like it wasnt ROM.
Given that this technology has been surpassed by a far superior one (Flash rom), which can endure thousands of cycles, and is reasonably cheap, I fail to see how this question has relevency.
I believe that I have clearly spelled out my rationale for making the parent post at least 3 times within this thread already. Not once did I mention any kind of race hatred, but you most certainly did-- Far the contrary in fact, I argued a totally different tact concerning further enriching corrupt senators and against payola.
I even argued for the reduction of military spending.
Sadly, you were just too busy and self-conceited in your opinion of me to bother reading them, apparently.
Please, take your racial biggotry someplace else, preferable someplace with fire, so you can put both it and yourself in it, and spare the rest of us your ignorance.
When an agency (Of any sort) spends more capital than it receives, it is spending too much money.
Perhaps you were unaware of the extreme deficit crises (Yes, multiple ones) effect many major state governments?
Spending MORE money will not solve the problem of insolvency. These state governments CANNOT get loans, their credit is so bad. Who is going to pay for basic infrastructure? PRIORITIES man! PRIORITIES!
Not exactly-- What I have a problem with is not people becoming more educated, being able to afford their own homes, or to ensure quality education for their children, as many left wing pundits would claim about me.
What I have a problem with is senators and other government employees creating subsidy programs in both military research expenditure budgets, and in technology and infrastructure budgets that generate conditions that destroy actual market competition, with the goal of enriching themselves through enriching the corporations they offer the subsidies to (Shock, horror, Senators can own stock!).
"You just dont want to pay taxes so little Timmy O'Toole can get new crutches!" is a red herring. What I really dont want to pay taxes for is so Dick Cheney can get richer from killing people in Iraq, or so government regulators can get spiffy pension pension plans, while people are starving and suffering contrived forclosures (remember that leak about bank of america?) and losing everything.
Basically, I dislike being told I hate the poor, while watching senators do land grabs and Cesar spout soliloquies while Rome burns to the ground.
It is a fallacy that government subsidies enrich the economy, at least as far as government income is concerned.
Example-- I, as the government, give a subsidy to an energy company so that they can provide the necessary infrastructure my population requires. The energy company accepts my subsidy with sweaty palms, then promptly invests that money in an overseas venture. "We can't possibly track individual dollars as they move through our enterprise!" they proclaim. By "pure coincidence," a large sum of money approximating the savings that they received from the subsidy ends up in a non-taxible foriegn subsidiary, in say-- Ireland.
Meanwhile, prices at the pump and for the domestic services for which you have implemented the subsidy, remain unchanged, or, rather, increase. "We have to charge to meet demand!" they proclaim.
Similar stories with telecom. Did you know that the US government made a slushfund to replace the copper POTS network with straight up fiber in the 90s? Where did the money get spent instead? Oh dear.... That's what I thought.
1) Excessive military expenditures (Notice, I said moratorium on NEW expenditures.) We have plenty of skunkworks projects already. We really dont need new ones, and can reasonably afford to stop innovating new killing machines while we wait for the economy to recover. Pundits will claim military expenditures in R&D create jobs, but that suffers serious paraxoical problems; Money spent on military research and development mostly just enriches private enterprises, who then use tax sheltering ponzi schemes to evade paying taxes back to the government. The money they pay their workers is necessarily less than what the government paid out initially (They need to turn a profit, yo!), so the ROI is always negative.
2) Revise pensioning plans for government workers to be more in line with commercial offerings. Working for the government does NOT entitle people to that "Sweet ass deal where I can vacation in the Bahamas every winter when my summer home in Martha's Vinyard is too cold." [Note, I don't mean marginalize pensions into oblivion, I mean make them sensible. Living comfortably != living lavishly. Such revisions would INCLUDE senators.]
3) Avoid creating new agencies and new departments to handle old problems. (Like this one, where we would be creating new overhead in regulators, enforcement, manufacturing contractual agreements, etc-- to deal with an old problem-- )
4) Actively find ways to use old departments to handle new problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Politicians, like all power figures, are innately tied to the influences of power. In this case, a powerful nation to the south, which has powerful incentive to push intellectual poison on the rest of the world to prop itself up. [yes, I am a citizen of that powerful country, but I can see the handwriting on the wall. The US has no real manufacturing infrastructure. Our agribiz infrastructure is no longer first rate in the world market, and our last strongholds for world relevency are intellectual property and military might. Without IP, I believe we would crumble like the former soviet union, due to the shortsighted practices of our corporations who have no sense of national loyalty, only loyalty to money-- and our politicians who are loyal to those corporations, and not the voting public. As such, the US is a sinking ship, with bandaids over huge holes of economic policy, and bilge pumps of government bailouts running 24/7. It is NOT sustainable.]
This whole issue with "Worldwide DMCA" would dissolve rapidly if [when] the USA finally tanks. Without the US to make a fuss over it, the corporations would be unable to leverage such global policy positions on the rest of the world, and the effort would suffer huge spirals of inefficiency as every little government everywhere suddenly had the 300lb gorilla with the billy club removed from the parlament floor, and politicians had golden parachute cords cut.
As suicidal as it seems, what is best for the WORLD right now is for my country to suffer the consequences of its own complacency, and to deminish-- in profound and spectacular fashion.
Props to the people of Canada for telling my government to shove it. I love you guys.
On the contrary. I tried the new UIs in Vista and win7. I found that they treated me like I knew nothing about how the computer works, and that I knew nothing about ACLs, local volume security, user credentials and accounts-- and hid vital functionality from me for the sake of being "Friendly" to people that genuinely do not know about such things.
Since I am not one of those people, there is no reason, and no excuse for hiding that functionality from me, when I want, or even have legitimate need, to enable it.
On vista and windows 7, I have to use CLI tools to brute force creation of user groups and to assign custom access control lists to them. I know. I have had to do it. This is especially true on anything other than "Ultimate" flavors of those OSes, which nearly nobody has legitimately on their home PCs. It makes the tasks of "Can you give junior a limited access account, and can you prevent him from seeing my porn collection?" much more difficult for me, when friends and family ask it.
Other times I would need or want access to such features are when I am trying to remove a multi-part worm that constantly regenerates, and tries to use filesystem and group policy security against me.
My beefs against the new UIs are legitimate. They have burned me many times. I no longer want to play. Leave my tools alone, they are not broken.
Because the ribbon interface hides things from you in more aggressive ways than did the dropdown menu interface? Because the ribbon interface in office broke shortcut keys that required otherwise incompetent finance and HR people to re-build their cheat sheets, and resulted in months of hassle as IT people the world over got called incessantly on "How do you do Mail Merge again?" type problems, when there were more pressing matters to attend with?
Because the whole reason that Microsoft implemented the ribbon UI was because of turtleneck wearing LA majors in silicon valley saying "It looks ugly, I don't like it." while drinking a double latte from starbucks, while posting from a Macbook air?
Seriously, I absolutly HATE the new UIs in windows vista and windows 7. Hated the "Aqua" UI in XP too-- First thing I do on XP machines is enable the "Classic UI". Cant even do that now on win7.
Here's an idea, just because something is new, does not mean it is better. Likewise, if something isn't broken, don't fix it.
These ideals are why you will see real power users and real computer geeks extolling the virtues of the CLI. (An interface that has been around for more than 30 years.)
The beef isn't that "Your computer illiterate fiance cannot figure it out"-- it is that if the UI isnt broken, then there is no reason to fix it. You can give the overall appearance a facelift, but dont change the core functionality with something untested and unproven without a means of reverting it to the more tried and true method.
Guess what I will do on windows8 systems? (If microsoft lets me that is...)
You guessed it. Classic Interface.
The linked PDF you provided speculates that "object X" might be a self-obscured star, obscured by its own ejecta.
If we assume that this is indeed a dyson swarm, then the purpose might not be exclusively for collecting energy.
A category II or III civilization would be doing asto-architecture, and would need tremendous amounts of raw materials. Heavy atoms are only produced naturally in one kind of environment: in the hearts of stars. If this star is regularly expelling large quantities of cosmic dust, as the linked article postulates, then it would make an excellent "Factory". Energy would be in copious abundance, and the star itself would be churning out millions of tons of heavy atoms every minute. Even with a short (compared to other stars) lifespan, it would make an excellent factory site for other large astro-engineering projects.
It would be far more economical than mechanically processing already aggregated matter clumps (planets, asteroids, etc)-- especially with a dyson sphere/swarm infrastructure. The emitted gas and dust would be strongly ionized, and a simple network of magnetic traps could passively funnel the more desirable metal and halide ions from the lighter non-metals, with very minimal post processing. It would go a long way toward eliminating material scarcity issues that would otherwise plague a category II or III civilization.
Spectrographic analysis of the dust cloud to see if it has an uneven distribution of heavy and light elements would be quite revealing if this is the case-- Heavy ions would be in greater concentrations nearer the solar mass than away from it-- contrary to what you would expect if it was merely a gravitationally bound stellar dust cloud. (the latter would have a fairly uniform distribution of dust and gas)
Sadly, since it is in another galaxy such spectrographic studies are not very easy to do in sufficient resolutions to make such distinctions. It would need to transit some other more luminous celestial object in order for us to get such a reading, so that the invisible gas envelope surrounding the object could be studied, but again, it being in a distant galaxy coupled with the slow rate of orbital rotation of stars around a galactic center mass makes this a wait that could be billions of years long for such an event.
I agree that it is a very interesting object though.
To calculate, simply use the inverse square law, then make use of this information kindly provided by Wikipedia concerning information theory and noisy channels.
Together, this along with the target distance to the alien planet will give you the optimum broadcast power for an intelligable message to be sent. Bear in mind that the SNR needs to be sufficiently high to still discern the signal from cosmic background radiation. Choice of broadcast frequency would be helpful here, but sadly I cant link you to any helpful data on that one.
For the inverse, (Building a reception antenna), you would need to compute the absolute minimum broadcast power that the alien civilization could still realistically send a message that distance with (Using the first part above), then calculate the gain needed to derive a useful signal from the weak source.
Given the distances, you are probably looking at something the size of aracibo or bigger.
With just a teeny bit more data, it COULD be used to describe your exact position though.
All that is needed is a pingtime from the towers. 3 towers, and you have a triangulated position. (or, rather, could triangulate the position painlessly.)
I can see the benefits of having this information inside the phone-- It would enable much cleaner handoffs between towers, if the phone knew where it was, what direction it was going, and what towers were nearby that could offer service. However, the world being the way that it is, one advertisment firm learns of this monetary goldmine for targeted advertisements, and BOOM-- a system implemented to improve QoS becomes a nightmare of targeted advertisements, and later, gets abused by government officials.
Personally, I dont want to get coupons in the mail for an italian place on the highway I commute each day on my way to work, simply because that information is theoretically available to advertisers.
Note to advertisers:
If I wanted to know about italian restaraunts in my area, *I WOULD DO AN INTERNET SEARCH FOR IT MYSELF. DO NOT PROACTIVELY TELL ME ABOUT THEM. I AM NOT INTERESTED IN YOUR TARGETED ADVERTS. PERIOD.*
I do not like your Spam, Sam I am, I do not want your green eggs and ham.
Leave my email inbox alone. Leave my mailbox alone. Dont send me advertisments, dont send me spam SMS messages, I dont want them. Track my phone for QoS reasons only, if you absolutely must, but that information should naturally expire within a few hours. It should not be kept indefinately; neither internally nor externally. /rant
Yes. Shiny new ipads are obviously going to increase test scores. Much more than hiring competent teachers, or funding academic programs that foster learning.
No, They got a government budget surplus, and they blew it on something shiny that makes them look technologically savvy. Kinda like useless people in suits blow money on a shiny sports cars and other status symbols. "Look at our school! We have all this awesome technology! [of course, none of our staff knows how to properly manage it anyway, and we will sue you when your children demonstrate superior control over our shiny status symbols than we do-- But pay no attention to the incompetent people behind the administration desks!]
This is why dumping money on the public school system wont work. Public schools lack integrity, and as such, cannot be trusted with public funds, really. Unless there is accountability, there will be no integrity, and as long as teachers are treated like martyrs even when they fail their students by continually failing to ensure that they gain basic literacy (AND basic math, AND basic science) at an alarming statistical rate, that accountability will never come.
In terms of school administrators, there is more incentive in looking like they know what they are doing, than in actually investing the time and resources into actually gaining competence. This is especially true when there is flagrant incompetence and other serious shennanigans going on courtesy of the teacher's unions, and liberal arts majors trying to create education policies.
This money would have been much better spent on refurbishing the school's science labs, or on funding extracurricular academic activities. (no, not fucking sports activities. Those get enough money and time already. They dont need more. What needs more time and money are things like physics clubs, engineering workshops, and the like. Things that get kids interested in learning, rather than interested in kicking balls around.)
Netflix has a very limited selection of streamable movies. Nearly everything I really would like to watch as a one-off (EG, something I dont want to buy, but feel like watching once, without going to a rental place) is not available for streaming.
Last night, for example, I wanted to watch a scifi comedy-- So, I did a short list (no particular order)
Spaceballs
Dr. Strangelove (Or how I learned to love the bomb)
Back to the future (Any)
Real Genius
and a few others.
NONE are available for streaming.
However, if you are into Stargate, or Doctor Who, or that lot--- You can find whole seasons available for streaming.
They have lots of TV shows, though I have never been big into TV.
My personal suggestion to somebody that wants to use the computer as a playback device for a really big monitor (Like an HDTV with HDMI) is to use a small HTPC, and a NAS, and to go ahead and just digitize their DVD collections. (Or, just resort to plain old piracy and keep good quality rips on the NAS.)
Netflix would be awesome if they could get better agreements with media owners for streaming. As is though, it's deffinately a crapshoot.
I suppose between them and Hulu you could have a reasonable selection--- but they are still no match for the availability of a local collection on a nice NAS box.
What I personally have done, is saddle a big USB2.0 drive enclosure to my XBOX360 for the local movie archive, and use my Wii for Netflix. (*WOULD* use the 360 for it, but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom require you to have a gold membership with a monthly subscription to use netflix on their box, essentially double dipping you for the priviledge. Netflix on Wii is free as far as the wii side of things is concerned-- just the 8$/mo streaming service fee, which is quite affordable. I get that much use out of it monthly, easily.)
That way I just sit on my couch and use a controller to pick what I want to watch, instead of having to fumble for discs. The 360 does high definition playback with AC3 audio for local media, and supports generic Mpeg4 AVI (Unless you really really WANT to use Windows media codecs....) and does so pretty much out of the box these days. (My console is an older one that had to pull an update, but it does it as soon as you try to play a media file that needs it.) That means you can have a high quality BD dump, and play it back fine.
I DO have an actual computer stashed under the entertainment center, but I rarely make use of it, instead doing the streaming from the game consoles because of increased ease of use, and quicker startup times.
Trust me, if you are a disorganized slob like me, (Or you have children that are hell bent on destroying shiny objects like DVDs and BDs) being able to browse your movie archive digitally without leaving your couch is damn convenient, especially since you can change movies painlessly on the go, and not have to put things up. You can put your original discs in a brinks security box, and stash it someplace and be all good.
The problems with Wifi (less so with N, but still impacted) is that the radio frequencies used are quickly attenuated by atmospheric water vapor. THis is why the signal drops through the floor much more quickly over distance than it does for cellular connections.
Whitespaces use TV analog broadcast spectrum, which is not affected this way, which would enable it for use as a mesh network medium.
The issue here is how to make gobs and gobs of APs create and manage peering partnerships with other APs over the medium, so they dont compete and try to drown each other out like WiFi does.
A PKI infrastructure is better able to handle peering, because multiple agents is part of the design of the infrastructure already. We would just need to create an "AP to AP trusted connection" type subprotocol that the APs wishing to enlist peers could negotiate over. This way instead of trying to drown each other out, they could hand off clients based on load, and could communicate with each other if they are able to accept forwarded clients or not.
In the previous example I made about an "open" network, If say, two people in the same neighborhood set up such open networks, they could reach a peering agreement, and configure their APs to accept each other's certificates, and to hand off connecting clients based on load. In the event that one of the offloaded clients is not in the coverage area of the recipient AP, then the AP-AP link would tunnel the connection at a reduced bandwidth to maintain connection. (Connected device would be alerted that this had happened)
In the above situation, the AP the client is forwarded to would serve as a RA (Registration authority) while the AP doing the forwarding would be the CA. The peered AP that recieves the client would ask the forwarding AP to validate the signature of the forwarded client, over the secured AP-AP connection, (Uses their own private key pair, for security reasons) The forwarding AP validates, then passes/fails the request, then issues a temporary certificate re-issue request for the downstream AP to license the client. This would mean that on secured networks (as opposed to open ones) the encryption would change as you walk around the city, because different APs would re-issue public keys as your client gets handed-off through the peering infrastructure.
One idea I came up with last night, would be to create 3 distinct classes of device:
Client
Access Point
Broker
The first two are self-explanitory, but the third needs some explanation. For it, lets assume a highly dense urban environment, where there could be hundreds of APs in a 1 mile area. (Say, an apartment building in New York.)
Individual 1:1 peering agreements between all the APs would be messy, and labor intensive to set up and maintain. Instead, the landlord can install a "Broker", and enforce peering with the broker as part of the tenant agreement. The broker does not accept client type devices, only other brokers and APs. It serves as something similar to a router, to fascilitate handoffs of clients, and for AP to AP communications. It makes all the APs in the building play nice with each other, and tells specific APs to increase or decrease their broadcast strengths, renegotiate whitespace frequency, etc.
This is where the privacy people ask questions:
1) Does the above situation with the enforced peering forcibly multiplex all the connected landline internet endpoints connected by user APs?
No, not unless you configure your AP to serve in that capacity. If you do not, then your AP simply tunnels connected clients over the AP-AP connection to an endpoint that authorizes access. That way your neighbor cant be surfing for childporn over your pipe, unless you allow it. Instead, if he is visiting a friend on another floor, his connection is simply tunneled through the AP-AP connection to either an open endpoint, or back to is own AP. Peering with the broker does not grant the broker access to your pipe-- It creates a special pipe betwee
What I would like to see is a non-profit org get created for the sole purpose of acquiring licensed spectrum for long-range packet radio, and to create an open-licensed wireless protocol to use it-- Then release it publicly FOSS style.
Because it would be long distance (1 to 2 miles would be the ideal coverage area for access points I would think.. could be wrong though. That's just a guess.) it would need to prevent abuse as part of the protocol itself, and so I personally would like to see encryption be a requirement for devices to connect-- Not some gutless password based encryption either, I mean PKI-style encryption with issued certificates kind.
One of the neat things about public/private key encryption is that you can theoretically have multiple public keys to a single private key, which could then be independently enforced.
The idea is to replace 802.11x (A, B, G, N) straight up, and to make consumer boxes that serve as access points just like wifi routers. For businesses offering complimentary internet, (who wouldnt want to be a free ISP to everyone within 1-2 miles-- and only offer to paying customers) a simple near-feild communication plate built into the counter at the store could supply a time-leased certificate to the device (think really short range bluetooth), giving it permission to access the AP, which would then get revoked after the time elapses. The ability to have multiple public keys per private key would let this work. The business's AP would keep a "pool" of public certs, and would track their use against unique hardware IDs from the connecting devices. (The AP would check that the cert is valid, then check to see who it was issued to-- If the unique ID does not match, no connection.) This would keep people from being repeat customers at a specific place, and eventually having every cert in the pool pushed to their device over time, and then no longer needing to make a purchase to gain access. It would also prevent people from using what is assumed to be a unique public key at the same time somebody else is, and causing problems. (There would be 2 levels of uniqueness-- Unique public key, and unique device MAC. The AP would check both, and decline connection if either is invalid.)
Certificate checking would be strictly enfoced, but 1:1 correlations between certs and devices would not be, based on how the AP is configured. For people wanting to run "Open" connections, (Equivilent of unprotected wifi), a default certificate set of 1 private key (burned into the AP as part of specification compliance), and 1 public key would be ubiquitous to all devices, and would fascilitate that configuration. The over-air data would still be encrypted, just with this defacto key set. (Useless from a security standpoint because everyone has the keys, but useful from a protocol design standpoint because you can always populate the encryption type feild of the datagram header, even in "open" mode.)
The ideal situation would allow deployment of user-generated key sets right out of the box, built on strong encryption bit depths---
It would be the beginning of the open-mesh network everyone seems to want so badly, myself included.
Given that whitespaces have been enabled for public use, maybe I should order an FPGA kit and cobble together a proof of concept some time...
I really would like to see a non-profit org created to administer a project like this though. Could even use whitespace spectrum instead of licensing dedicated.
This is covered by the hour-long presentation cited by the summary.
Also pointed out in that video is the fact that foods that switched formulas from sugar to HFCS actually INCREASED the caloric content from sugar, due to the reduced price point, and increased sweet-taste appeal it provides.
Basically, the reduction in calories from using fructose rich corn syrup are more than offset when you add twice as much corn syrup as you did sugar previously---Just because you can.
Now, go watch the video, THEN comment. K, Thnks, bye.
Just how many people posting replies here have actually, you know-- watched the hour long presentation created by Mr. Lustig all the way through?
In the presentation, Lustig lists the metabolic pathway that fructose (The sugar he rants about) has to go through in order to be processed by the body, and explains why it is toxic in the quantities that people eat it in.
What is drawing fire here, is that lustig rightly mentions that sucrose is just a glucose and a fructose bound together by an ether bond, and metabolically speaking is practically identical to HFCS. (Something the corn refiner's association is also quick to point out.)
The real point of the presentation is to point out that the US population is eating considerably more sugar than it was 50 years ago, with a more than 300% increase in fructose consumption specifically.
He advocates reduction of fructose consumption, based on several cited studies he lists in his viral video presentation.
That said, armchair nerd pundits like us have no place to try to debunk such claims, since as far as I know none of us are licensed dieticians or physicians. As such, throwing useless arguments like "Dihydrogen oxide poisoning" around are non-sequitors at best, and pointless mud slinging at worst.
Having seen the presentation, and seen that he cites dozens of studies that can be independently examined, (and therefor verified), I feel that his presentation is of higher quality than say, a certain celebrity's rants about immunity shots and autism are. As such, it deserves more meaty rebuttles than what I am reading here on slashdot.
That would be the optional head mounted laser system.
Autonomous
Cognitive
Hexapod
Intgrated
Laser
Light
Emission
Subsystem
When I say this, I say it with this intent:
The united states would become every bit as despotic as china, and just as rife with abuses, should it no longer be necessary for our government to placate the populace. (Something that is quickly being manifest with eroded liberties and freedoms even as we sit here and argue about it.)
You can find a long littany of such "Secret" abuses if you are willing to suspend your belief that the US is a great place to live. Take for instance, the Tuskegee syphilis study, and the more recent study that abused HIV infected orphans on the east coast-- Not to mention what the US government does to soldiers in terms of medical experimentation. (Seriously, look it up.)
The "Velvet Glove" metaphor I use is meant to point out that the US is "Like China", except it "Takes measures to appear softer and more cuddly, so it can delude you into letting your guard down."
China makes no such concession-- They just shoot you. No argument from me there. In the US though, where we are *supposed* to be beholden to higher ideals and ethics (which as pointed out with the Tuskegee study-- and other horrors like it, of which there are many-- are only window dressing for how things actually happen behind closed doors) the government *HAS* to make such concession, or lose face.
It disturbs me greatly how so many good little americans chime in and say how much better the US is compared to China in terms of hipocricy-- when the smelly corpses of victims can be found easily beneath thin layers of soiled propaganda, which scream otherwise.
Of course, we have it so much better here--- I mean, They have flagrant media manipulation and misinformation systems in place... Wait-- So do we. Well... They do prison labor! Wait... So do we... .. Uhm-- Oh yes! We have fast food! And we can protest from Free Speech zones!
Really, the only differences are int he DEGREE of abuse. Something that can change VERY easily.
Assuming that Microsoft doesnt jump the shark and do something totally unlike their past releases, like overtly junking all back-compatibility with x86 legacy applications (I see this windows offering being adapted for use on the emerging tablet market, where existing legacy application support, even if crippled, would be a big selling point), this offering will be technologically inferior to the existing (and based on more portable technologies) offerings like iOS and Android.
The reason is because this new windows flavor will have to JIT emulate the x86 instruction set for those legacy apps, and do all kinds of calisthenics to make shit happen between native binaries and emulated binaries. The ARM cpu uses less power, but is also somewhat more gutless compared to desktop x86 chips. It will suck hard trying to emulate that bloated dinosaur of an instruction set.
If microsoft finally sacrifices the holy vestal virgin of legacy compatibility (Its major strongpoint in corporate environments by a long shot-- Look at the immense power of zombie IE6) for its ARM port, it will suffer the same fate as all the previous alternative architecture builds (PPC, SPARC, Itanium, et al.)-- That is to say, it will die on the vine because users will hate it with purple pasion.
I am curious to see how microsoft pulls this off. If they were smart, they would do something similar to what Apple did when they switched from PPC to x86 commodity chips, and incorporate a special abstraction layer like Roseta. (Note, I am NOT an apple fanboi-- If you call me one, you are an idiot. Just pointing out something I thought apple did that was interesting.)
Sadly, like so many things microsoft does these days, it will probably be filled with so much useless bloat and duct-tape code that it will run like congealed dogpoo even on high end ARM hardware when trying to do such legacy support-- (again, if they even do it at all.)
I will reserve further judgement until I see it in the wild. It might be great-- but I wont get my hopes up.
By no means am I advocating China's behavior here, but the US has a rather lengthly track record of similar nasty abuses.
Take for instance, the Tuskegee syphilis study.
Or, if that isnt your cup of tea, and you want 1:1 correlations-- How about the US's forced sterilization procedures it enacted for awhile?
Then you have the whole government neglect in the Monsanto chemical contamination horror-fest...
The real difference between the US and China, is that in the US there is government interest in keeping up appearances. Not so in China.
US politicians have a rather nasty habit. (No, not chasing people around in cloak rooms or playing footsie in bathroom stalls, but they seem into that too)
Namely, they like to straddle the fence, and are very bad at doing so.
Take for instance, the media spectacle of the Egypt and subsequent middle-eastern revolts. The talking heads on capital hill squirmed and looked at each other for DAYS before finally resolving on an official position---AFTER the brave people in Egypt forced their hands. You see, they had been caught with their knickers down. On one side, you had "Heroic efforts to bring real democracy and freedom by the populace"-- which is the anodyne that they spew here in the states (Even though the body politic has rendered most of these so called freedoms that we are supposed to enjoy inert, or highly restricted with red tape and restriction) and on the other, there was Hosni Mubarak-- "Our Man" who "Helped us" with some rather "Nasty Renditions"--and more importantly, the diplomatic bargaining power he brought to the table in middle eastern affairs. (Namely, their dirty underhanded dealings) Having to pick a side and stick with it seems to have ruffled more than just a few feathers up there in washington--- the concept of lasting consequences and of having the onus of that kind of choice on them makes them squirm like worms under the light of a Fresnel lens. Back-troll through the media coverage prior to the deposal of Mubarak, with emphasis on the position from capital hill--- and you will find lots and lots of deflectionary statements.
Same kind of thing with this "Pot calling kettle black" issue with China, and censorship. The US government, like *ALL* Governments, is addicted to power; namely, the power to control its citizens-- (But the US is more aggressive, in that it likes to control OTHER nation's citizens as well. Extra-ordinary rendition, et. al.) As such, it innately LIKES the idea of a serious crackdown on free information exchange. You can go just about anyplace in government where there is "Enforcement" of any sort, be it military to as mundane as city police departments, and you will find a highly prevalent bias toward wanting to control or at least obsessively monitor/record pretty much every kind of correspondence. Constitutionally protected rights to personal papers and effects be damned.
Take for instance, the rather nasty provisions in the US patriot act, which has come up for review TWICE now, and somehow (rolls eyes) keeps getting new lease on life-- specifically, the data retention policies it enforces on public internet providers. (like internet cafes and libraries) Handing over lending histories was only ONE of the provisions; Another that was discretely added was the requirement to provide, on demand, complete packet logs of persons of interest, without oversight. If Government Man wants, it, Government Man gets it, basically.
No wonder then, that libraries and such were up in arms over it.
Essentially, the US wants to maintain the *illusion* that there is freedom and privacy in people's day to day correspondences, while secretly spying on, sanitizing, and orchestrating "enforcements" on "undesirable" communications. Wikileaks being just one high profile example. Philosophically, how is this any better than China's approach? If anything, the US approach to censorship is more obscene and insideous, because it promotes false senses of security in the citizens impacted--- China at least doesnt deny that it uses strongarm tactics; the US on the other hand, does gymnastics to validate why it purpetually authorizes warrantless searches, siezures, and interrogations at places like airports.
Basically, the US is JUST like China, just in a velvet glove instead of a cold steel one.
It's hard to beat liquid nitrogen frozen icecream; It produces extremely fine grained ice crystals in the icecream, resulting in superior creaminess.
Can be made in any number of delicious flavors.
It has been my experience that most word problems in school settings are HIGHLY contrived, and are basically just restating the desired formula in sentence form.
More useful for the engineering student would be to pose a problem, rather than to ask a question. EG:
Create a formula for a 3D lofted surface that produces the maximum lift with the least drag for an object 10 meters long and 5 meters wide. Due to material fragility, max strain cannot exceed 30ka/cm^2, and wind sheer restricts max airspeed to 120kph.
The assigned task is to create the formula that rules the resulting wing surface, to maintain the requirements provided. This question would be open book and would permit the student to look up burnouli's formula, or anything else they feel they need to help calculate lift force, without detracting from the purpose of the excercise and would be more appropriate for what an aspiring engineer would be faced with in the course of his/her career. It would test how well they understand the theory behind the mathematics in the class quite effectively, and would not require some arbitrarily imposed handicap like a crippled graphing calculator.
Sadly, Most teachers are too impatient and or lazy to create such an open ended question-- as it would require the teacher to evaluate a large number of possible submissions for fitness.
The reason why word problems are usually just syntax-exact translations from cookie-cutter formulas, is because it makes for only a single possible solution, that is easily pass/failed by the teacher.
Math is not about cookie cutter answers, it is about FINDING answers, and DESCRIBING problems. I dont know about anyone else here, but I was strongly put off by formal math instruction because of this over-dependence on easy evaluation metrics on the teacher's side of the table. The questions do not require thought, only compliance-- which does not teach the fundemental skill behind mathematics-- Understanding the problem posed to you with sufficient abstraction to create a simple model that describes the problem in its entirety.
I learned more about mathematics when I was cutting teeth on programming than I did in school; It was one thing to find out how many apples steve gave bob-- it was another altogether to find clever solutions to the problem of determining if a number is prime or not in a fast and efficient manner, where the input number is any "n", and that still far removed from identifying when a prime number is either going to make or break something you are working on.
I take this dependence upon requiring broken calculators in math classes, especially advanced math classes, to be highly telling of the kind of education we are trying to give and consider it a sympthom of why our educational system is failing miserably, especially in math and science.
We don't teach people the skills of being a scientist-- we teach them what has already been discovered (sometimes not even that..). We dont teach them how to be a mathematician, we teach them already found formulae, then play trivial pursuit.
In the days before flash roms, there were these things called eeproms. And before that, there was this thing called eprom. Under most normal circumstances these chips behave like ROM. However, under special conditions (raise voltage on some types, raise a special signal line on others, depending) you can change it like it wasnt ROM.
Given that this technology has been surpassed by a far superior one (Flash rom), which can endure thousands of cycles, and is reasonably cheap, I fail to see how this question has relevency.
I believe that I have clearly spelled out my rationale for making the parent post at least 3 times within this thread already.
Not once did I mention any kind of race hatred, but you most certainly did-- Far the contrary in fact, I argued a totally different tact concerning further enriching corrupt senators and against payola.
I even argued for the reduction of military spending.
Sadly, you were just too busy and self-conceited in your opinion of me to bother reading them, apparently.
Please, take your racial biggotry someplace else, preferable someplace with fire, so you can put both it and yourself in it, and spare the rest of us your ignorance.
When an agency (Of any sort) spends more capital than it receives, it is spending too much money.
Perhaps you were unaware of the extreme deficit crises (Yes, multiple ones) effect many major state governments?
Spending MORE money will not solve the problem of insolvency. These state governments CANNOT get loans, their credit is so bad. Who is going to pay for basic infrastructure? PRIORITIES man! PRIORITIES!
Not exactly-- What I have a problem with is not people becoming more educated, being able to afford their own homes, or to ensure quality education for their children, as many left wing pundits would claim about me.
What I have a problem with is senators and other government employees creating subsidy programs in both military research expenditure budgets, and in technology and infrastructure budgets that generate conditions that destroy actual market competition, with the goal of enriching themselves through enriching the corporations they offer the subsidies to (Shock, horror, Senators can own stock!).
"You just dont want to pay taxes so little Timmy O'Toole can get new crutches!" is a red herring. What I really dont want to pay taxes for is so Dick Cheney can get richer from killing people in Iraq, or so government regulators can get spiffy pension pension plans, while people are starving and suffering contrived forclosures (remember that leak about bank of america?) and losing everything.
Basically, I dislike being told I hate the poor, while watching senators do land grabs and Cesar spout soliloquies while Rome burns to the ground.
Clear enough for you?
It is a fallacy that government subsidies enrich the economy, at least as far as government income is concerned.
Example-- I, as the government, give a subsidy to an energy company so that they can provide the necessary infrastructure my population requires. The energy company accepts my subsidy with sweaty palms, then promptly invests that money in an overseas venture. "We can't possibly track individual dollars as they move through our enterprise!" they proclaim. By "pure coincidence," a large sum of money approximating the savings that they received from the subsidy ends up in a non-taxible foriegn subsidiary, in say-- Ireland.
Meanwhile, prices at the pump and for the domestic services for which you have implemented the subsidy, remain unchanged, or, rather, increase. "We have to charge to meet demand!" they proclaim.
Similar stories with telecom. Did you know that the US government made a slushfund to replace the copper POTS network with straight up fiber in the 90s? Where did the money get spent instead? Oh dear.... That's what I thought.
1) Excessive military expenditures (Notice, I said moratorium on NEW expenditures.) We have plenty of skunkworks projects already. We really dont need new ones, and can reasonably afford to stop innovating new killing machines while we wait for the economy to recover. Pundits will claim military expenditures in R&D create jobs, but that suffers serious paraxoical problems; Money spent on military research and development mostly just enriches private enterprises, who then use tax sheltering ponzi schemes to evade paying taxes back to the government. The money they pay their workers is necessarily less than what the government paid out initially (They need to turn a profit, yo!), so the ROI is always negative.
2) Revise pensioning plans for government workers to be more in line with commercial offerings. Working for the government does NOT entitle people to that "Sweet ass deal where I can vacation in the Bahamas every winter when my summer home in Martha's Vinyard is too cold." [Note, I don't mean marginalize pensions into oblivion, I mean make them sensible. Living comfortably != living lavishly. Such revisions would INCLUDE senators.]
3) Avoid creating new agencies and new departments to handle old problems. (Like this one, where we would be creating new overhead in regulators, enforcement, manufacturing contractual agreements, etc-- to deal with an old problem-- )
4) Actively find ways to use old departments to handle new problems.