Oh I was hoping somebody would engage with a hard question or two. Alas. Challenge accepted, such as it is.
> Lie: "Death panels."
Um, have you actually read any of what your guys say when you don't think we are listening? You might want to start by Googling the "Complete LIVES system". Now consider how much of the health care reform bill is empty except for phrases like "to be determined by the secretary of HHS" and it doesn't take much imagination to see where this will end up when the bills start piling up and the money starts running out. See Europe, it is farther along but if the SCOTUS fails in their duty we will be right behind em.
"Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."
-- Ezekiel Emanuel
or
"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated."
-- Ezekiel Emanuel
Sounds like death panels to me. Especially when we consider the burden of proof under discussion here, where the person saying 'Death Panel" would have to be knowingly bearing false witness and not just wrong.
> Doublethink: "Sanctity of life" vs. death penalty and support of war.
Implied in most people's use of the phrase 'sanctity of life' is the concept of 'innocent' As in killing the unborn for reasons other than self defense is killing the innocent. Not wanting to open that can 'o worms though, but it does make the most obvious example. Executing a murderer is a whole different kettle of fish, at least for me. For me the question comes down to what to do with a murderer; I don't want most of them EVER returning to the streets and see no compelling reason to expend the vast resources required by our courts to keep them in prison for the remainder of their natural lives. Their rights are forfeit by their crime, we can expell them from our society and the protection of the laws they have rejected and there isn't any place to banish them to. On the other hand a non-trivial number do take your position that all life is sacred and reasonable people can argue it.
But not war. I feel nothing but pity for a pacifist. Wretches who live only by the efforts of better men than they. I'm a anti-idiotarian libertarian myself so I'm more non-initiation of force instead of against all violence.
> Actually, the relevant question isn't whether GPP's principles include moral support for truthfulness...
No. The poster I replied to said he 'admired Chomsky's principles' and in the same breath admitted he was almost certainly bearing false witness. Don't know about you but my moral code only has a small number of exceptions to the unacceptability of lying. Things like deception in wartime, etc. Lying to advance an academic argument is simply must be out of bounds if civilization is to remain a viable notion. I can believe somebody is wrong and believe they have principles. I can't believe they are intentionally lying and believe they have principles. Don't care which side they are fighting for. Unfortunately the other team does believe in the rightness of lying in service to a political cause (or at least the ability to doublethink it away) and that speaks volumes about the rest of their moral code. The first lie is always to yourself.
> I admire Chomsky for his principles, but even I admit he has an ego the size of a > planet and will use the thinnest pretext to get his name in the headlines again.
This word you use, I do not think it means what you think it means. If your definition of 'principles' includes the notion that bearing false witness is acceptable then I must question your moral compass as well as Chomsky's.
Perhaps you should log off and spend a quiet month or two in study and reflection on basic principles or morality and decide what you really believe. I suspect you believe many things that you have been told by others are true and haven't bothered to think any of it out for yourself.
Except of course he isn't really known for things he (according to people in his specialty) is actually skilled at. The problem is that he banks on that aclaim from that highly specialized skill to claim a general competence he clearly does not possess. His political writings are of the most dangerous twaddle that only the most vulnerable college student buys into. The sort of thing that leads to revolutions followed closely by mass graves when a critical mass tire of slapping the lies down. So if he is presenting a paper at a conference in his specialty I suppose others in it should probably attend, otherwise it is a good idea to ridicule him.
What exactly was there to 'invent' here? Once you conect two computers to each other sending messages is one of the most obvious uses for the ability; probably occuring within seconds of the notion of transferring documents/files. So the name is the claimed invention? The self evident name will be "electronic mail" or some variation in any English speaking country, which all the early networking research was done in. So what is left, the next obvious step of a easier to say/write contraction to 'email'?
Bah. Just having a hack like Chomsky's name attached speaks volumes. Nothing to see here, move along. Nonstory.
WTF! I didn't believe you so I went to Lenovo's site to get a fast example do rebut you. And they are all gone! All the beautiful X series units with high res panels are all gone. 1366x768 everywhere and no upgrade options. I pray mine doesn't break because I really wouldn't enjoy settling for the rubbish they are selling right now.
Guys, are you still selling Thinkpads or just generic Chinese crap? I won't pay Thinkpad prices for Acer specs.
> A lot of OSX machines are used simply because they are the most > versatile in that they can run Mac, Windows, and Unixy software.
Please don't change the subject. Today's topic is consumer oriented media consumption iProducts like the iPad and iPhone. The Mac does have a niche in the enterprise, hell most art departments probably would change quit en mass if you tried taking their Macs away. We could argue till the universe goes cold whether a Mac really is actually a better platform but it is an undeniable reality that the typical art dept believes it to be so and that is that.
> Just because the device was purchased by a corporation doesn't magically > make it safe to use with sensitive data.
Obviously correct but meaningless and misleading. A corporate owned device is controlled by the owning entity, subject to auditing, enforced security configuration and/or software, encryption mandates, installed software, etc. If the corp can tell you what apps you may, may not or must install on 'your' iPad it ceases to be 'your' iPad. If the corp demands the right to yank an image and inspect it on demand, reimage it if they find anything they don't like or just because they want to, it isn't 'your' iPad anymore. If they demand the right to remote wipe it should you declare it lost OR leave their employement it isn't exactly 'your' property. And if the corp is going to supply your computing hardware there is little reason for them to select an iProduct over competing products that better fit a corporate environment and cost a lot less.
If you have someone worth keeping who is dumb enough to want to use an iPad in spite of it being totally unsuitable, and has drank so much of the flavor-aid they would switch jobs to keep the Apple logo. That small subset perhaps is worth some effort for. Assuming you aren't in an industry that would put you in jail for permitting information to leak in such a careless fashion. Also assuming this worker doesn't do anything information based... and thus doesn't require the use of more evolved software than a media consumption device such as an iPad provides. So when applying those constraints you get left with a few super sales weasels and pointed haired bosses in industries with zero privacy laws. Not world shaking.
It isn't just the total unsuitability of iProducts. It is the use of ANY non controlled device that is a no-go in many environments. You can't allow an employee owned Windows/Mac laptop to have access to information subject to privacy laws. And all the demand in the world from the low level troops in a company to isn't likely to get those laws rewritten. Because management isn't going to deploy their lobbying resources to get something they know is dumb, dangerous and expensive legalized.
No, he works. You play at home. My current Thinkpad (X200s bought at the end of '10) only has VGA out. It has DisplayPort on the dock but not on the unit. Because they know what their customers actually have. And you go somewhere and need to plug up to a projector you will get handed a cable with a VGA connector on the end. The projector might have been replaced in the last year or two (it could have failed or something) and now support a digital input but when the conference room was built a VGA cable was run through the wall/ceiling from the projector to a wall jack near where you are going to present from.
In other words VGA is going to stick around until all those locations undergo a major remodel because HDMI isn't enough better to spend money on a crew to come in and add a second cable + HDMI booster + jack.
> This is a model that I've seen as well. Basically all communication-related activities have > moved to the iPad. The PC is there for heavy lifting...
Isn't this ass backwards? Buy a $500 (but probably a lot more, especially if cell data is involved) iPad and add another few hundred dollars for docks, displays, input devices and licenses for a sack of overpriced apps that can allow it to move from unusable to 'lame' for a desktop user. Lacking a wired network port they MUST suck in a cube farm, especially if remote display of terminal server is involved. Which do you want to run remote display over? Switched GigE or hopelessly overcrowded WiFi. Exactly.
Meanwhile the 'heavy users' run a generic PC that you can buy with display, inputs AND a copy of Office for hundreds less.
This is a vortex of stupid driven by three idiotic notions. One, that Apple (or Android) products are suitable for corporate use. Two, that Apple is pushing hard to get their stuff into the workplace but are unwilling to actually DO anything to compromise their 'perfect' vison of chains for everyone to make it happen, believing their RDF will instead force business to adapt their business practives to Apple instead. Finally, the eternal belief that employees can or should use consumer products in the workplace. Yes they use Windows in both but that is more of the reverse, using a cut down version of a corporate product at home. Which is of course one of the problems with Windows.
The PC (mostly the Apple ][) did break into the corporate world in the opposite way but that was because of epic failures on the part of the old priesthood of IT. The Apple was almost totally unsuitable but since the priesthood left such a huge unfilled need it was used in spite of its limitations. And we fought those limitations in adapting the early PC into the workplace for almost two decades and still fight some today. Name the huge unfulfilled need the iPad satisfies that a PC doesn't? Until somebody answers that question I just don't see it being a productivity enhancer worth reversing the long established trend toward lower TCO per unit productivity in corporate IT.
Dude! The support details are something that you should have had in writing before you even started working on detailed requirements.
Both sides agree in writing on the scope of work, acceptance procedure, support, training, documentation, code disposition (work for hire, GPL, third party libraries, possibly even escrow), all of that stuff. Anything else just shows a total lack of professionalism.
If you are now in a position of being asked to support it forever without anything in writing you have to decide which will be worse, cutting your losses now and writing off that client and everyone they will bad mouth (with some justification but they are equally guilty of not insisting on getting anything in writing) you to or digging yourself into a hole providing free support until they eventually toss that codebase. Which one you choose depends on far too many factors you haven't provided.
> People I know are usually promoted/fired based on the opinion of their superiors > on the quality of their work.
And unless you work for a small private company, odds are there are productivity metrics. Try firing someone without em and watch how fast they lawyer up these days.
> Pretty much. My position is that there is a difference between a good and bad teacher, > but that it's not possible (or at least, simple) to reduce that difference to numbers in a > way is both balanced across the different nature of classes, and impossible to game.
But we judge the STUDENTS by the very clearly defined metrics you abhore applying to teachers, because we have to use something other than measuring the warm fuzzies to decide whether to pass them or hold them back. Nobody really disagrees with the notion because nobody can propose a better solution. Many of course object to the specifics various school systems around the world test on, but the notion of testing students itself isn't really debatable. Yet it is somehow wrong to then judge the productivity of the instructors and the schools based on the exact same metrics the schools themselves judge the success or failure of the students on.
It is the job of the schools and teachers to teach, if the students aren't learning who else do we hold accountable? If we aren't to judge them by their work product what do we judge them on? It would be like a factory that carefully tested each product before shipment but union regs forbade them from observing which workers/shifts/etc had the highest defect rate on the grounds that the product testing metrics were useless. Oh? Come again? You reply that my analogy is flawed, and I should assume some of the parts coming in are in defective batches and because some shifts just happen to get those cheap Chinese parts it isn't their fault. To which I'd reply, true unless we ALSO measure inputs. Which I do propose, test in and out. Also if some workers could work around bad parts by noticing them and culling them or otherwise fixing the defects on the fly I'd keep those and lose the stupid ones and not lose much sleep about the fairness or unfairness of it, even if the stupid ones were doing everything 'by the book.'
As to your complaint that it can be gamed, ok. Welcome to reality, any system can be gamed because any finite system of rules can't describe all possibilities and humans (some) are damned clever. The trick is to design the system to reward gaming in such a way that society wins along the lines I discussed above, where the smartest ones will gravitate to students where they are most needed because the teachers can 'game' the system to maximize revenue. Getting there will require a lot of tuning over years. But if we set metrics, competition, rewarding success and punishing failure as goals it is a market driven theory that will almost certainly yield results whereas the current system is proven not to work.
The current system also has pretty simple rules and is easy to game. Sit through an Edu Degree, get a job and expend some effort for a couple of years until tenure. Then you win. Do pretty much whatever the hell you want until you reach retirement age.
And that is the bottom line. The current system does not work. Defending it only makes you part of the problem. So option #1 is to admit that you are ok with the current notion that the school system is run for the benefit of the adults (if you don't vote, pay union dues or write grants you aren't important to the current system) and then STFU. Or you can admit something need to change and either sign on to my notion of measuring performance or tell us your different ideas to actually fix it.
> When we want to judge the quality of a book, we rely on human opinions (reviewers).
Not outside the art houses. In most of the book trade it is sales, a very quantifiable metric. In the academic book racket it is more often citations in other books and journals than raw sales. Reviews ca
> It's doubtful that anyone with vision would be willing to work for the pay most > county school systems are able and willing to pay.
That isn't the problem. I'm way out in flyover country and even our school system pays enough I'd take it considering it is almost as secure as being a teacher. And remember, it is the benefits and job security that make working for the government attractive, until quite recently it wasn't the actual money and things are in the process of correcting back to that historical norm. But I have dealt with them enough to know better, it isn't the money that makes me conclude I'd rather do handjobs for cash if things were ever that bad. It is the knowledge that I'd be dealing with weapons grade stupid on an hourly basis even if I were running their IT shop.
> Oh yea, I'd love to download that 8mb PDF over THAT connection...
Each student could download an 8MB PDF every hour, even constrained to 25Kbps, which is slow by modem standards. And that assumes the average student could READ an 8MB document in an hour, which few could unless it is a comic book. And assumes each student needs to download a different one and can't retrieve the one copy cached locally before class by the instructor, and therefore directly available over the gigabit ethernet.
What drives the bandwidth needs are video and the rush to shut down the entire backend operation in the local school plus the school board and outsource all traffic except printing and perhaps the most basic of file serving. This scheme only appears to make sense because of the artificial economy created by the SLC funding mechanism that leaves the school system only paying a small portion of the bandwidth bill. In a more typical network a lot of the traffic is local and a smaller Internet feed will suffice. The Cloud is bringing this same idea into the Enterprise setting and the same hillarity is going to ensue as all the supposed savings are likely to be eaten by vastly scaled up Internet conection expenses.
> Most of the infrastructure is all bought and paid for through the 1996 telecommunications act. > Schools, universities, and libraries get internet connectivity at absurdly cheap prices.
And because they don't see the true price of it they buy services they would never consider if they actually paid fair market value for it. But there is no bandwidth fairy, there is a reason there is a whole subculture of ISPs servicing SLC funded sites, it is great money with little risk because they are all government customers and most of the actual money is OPM. But it is being extracted in taxes from each and every one of us who uses a phone or accesses the Internet in the form of a special tax labeled "Universal Service Fund" on your bill. It also pays for the newly discovered 'right' to have a cell phone paid for by someone else and plans are afoot to jack the tax another notch to pay for the about to be discovered 'right' to Internet access even if you choose to live in a spot where it isn't practical.
> In fact, in the state of Illinois, they don't even have to connect to the internet directly, > they only have to get a line to one of the very many connection points to the state funded > network, which has more than enough connectivity to the internet to handle any workload.
On the other hand, this is a very good idea. Too bad we would never consider it around here in Louisiana.
No. An OC is roughly the same as a copper based T-3 which is of course based on the classic T-1. which is itself based on carrying two dozen 64Kbps calls multiplexed together. An OC-24 is therefore about the same as two dozen T-3 lines but would normally be delivered on a single pair of fiber. I know the single pair of fibers on our wall that currently delivers only 30Mbps can deliver anything up to 1000Mbps with nothing more than a phone call and a signature on an updated contract, no truck roll needed.
> Weighing teachers against each other based on their > student's results is inaccurate, because you have no control.
Every time the notion of judging the performance of teachers by their output, exactly like EVERYONE else with a job is judged, promoted and fired.... this red herring is thrown out. It is crap.
You test at the start and again at the end of the year. Any problems in the students aren't lilkely to change during the year, if the parents have been defective, apathetic, etc. in the past they are (as a group) likely to remain so, involved parents probably won't suddenly stop caring. So you certainly can draw conclusions from the difference unless it is your position that it is normal for there to be no measurable difference year over year, that the teacher, school, hell; just the passage of a year is expected to make zero difference in what a child knows. Or is it your position that there is no reliably measurable difference between a 'good' and a 'bad' teacher?
In fact a GOOD teacher would probably want a class of slighly at risk kids since if they can fire the imaginations of even a quarter of em the potential will be there to make a vast swing in the average. Meanwhile a class of upper class kids already operating at or above grade level would be a lot harder to inspire any such large improvement in.
And guess what? As a matter of public policy we probably want the best and brightest teachers choosing to work with that exact group of kids, slightly behind but salvagable. Amazing how often the market driven goal is the right one.
> The problem with my metric is that it's impossible to measure.
Which means it is useless. Mine is chosen almost entirely on the basis of being actually measurable and thus IS useful. Come on over to the reality based community, it is sane and it works every time it is allowed to be triumph over unreasoning emotion.
Really. How many other professions are there where the people in charge will openly assert that it is impossible to measure their output, immoral to even try and oh, by the way we insist on being granted tenure even though the notion is utterly inapplicable to K-12 education. And please continue bankrupting the public coffers thowing ever increasing sums of money at us, recession or not, just don't expect anything to improve.. or to even be able to know if things are getting better since measurement is a null concept in our industry. But if you DON'T give us more money it is a certainly the children will suffer.
That madness has went on for decades now but things are so bad nobody believes the schools are working so things are going to change. Choose whether to be part of the solution.
> but because they didn't improve she's a bad teacher
You say that like it is a bad thing. If the kids didn't improve from when they came in at the start of the year that means the teacher sucks. Or give me a definition of 'good teacher' that includes 'kids don't improve'.
I don't want to hear any blah, blah excuses either. If the kids wasted a year in that classroom there is no reason to inflict that teacher on another batch without major corrective action and/or retraining. Or would YOU put your kids in that class if they posted their last year entry/exit scores on the door?
You obviously know nothing about the way schools work. There is an entire industry devoted to reinventing every wheel for educational use. Some of it makes some sense, schools have a lot of mandates for privacy and so on, but most of it is simply because. YouTube would be right out, a contract with an edu specific video hosting site would be required, and it would of course require a hefty annual contract with each school system. Each school would have to get a customized portal with the school logo, colors and such or it is a no sale. Access controls are a must. You can't put a picture that includes a student on a school's public facing website without moving a lot of paper for clearances.... meanwhile the local paper's website has the same photo from the game up that day and the kids themselves post everything onto their facebook pages in realtime. And it simply must be this way, the idea that it could be different could never occur. If nothing else, schools simply wouldn't be able to handle the concept of a vendor that doesn't charge.
Thank HTML5 for the death of caching as much as the advertising.
It is all apps now. And in schools they KNOW they are all incompetent boobs so they want nothing that requires skilled labor to maintain. So outsourcing is the word. Everything. Gradebooks, attendance, cafeteria manegement, email of course, Courseware, scheduling and calendaring, yearbooks. If it isn't being delivered from the cloud now it is because they are still fighting over which vendor they want to write a check to. (read as the bidding is still fierce over who will kick back more.. ok, I'm a cynic) That pattern means they need LOTS of bandwidth now and will need an ever growing amount going forward into an HD Video for everything future.
And the vendors love it. It will of course drive lots of sales to schools themselves but when the kids can't do their homework without a constant high bandwidth connection it drives the 'Internet is a 'Right'' meme that leads to even more billions and billions of sweet sweet government money that will only be available to the politically connected.
> it makes the implication that the mother should have a choice and anyone else (government, priests, etc) can go bugger off.
Which means you accept the exact premise I mentioned as inherent in the phrase, that it isn't an important choice. I.e. that it is 'living' but isn't 'life'. You are willing to be just tolerant enough to allow some poor deluded Christer to imagine it is a baby and not kill it if that is their choice but you know better. You wouldn't be arguing for the mother's right to off the lil crotch fruit the day after birth, right? That would be MURDER, where the day before it is just a PROCEDURE.
But as for me, I'm more of the opinion that on one side you have people who hear Monty Python's _Every Sperm Is Sacred_ and fail to realize it is a joke at their expense while the other side, pushing for abortion right up to the instant of natural delivery is across the line to infanticide. So stupid or evil, are those my only choices? Seriously, it is a question that logic and reason can't decide in the limited knowledge and philosophy available to us so lets just pick something reasonable in the middle, call it "The Line; For now" and move on. No more killing things that could just about as easily be delivered alive and no more of this life begins at conception either. Admit we can't decide for now and agree to revisit it when science advances.
Obviously. Gamma rays obey the light speed limit just like everything else.
What I'd like to know is how much gamma ray action the Earth sees when those jets are fired up. We now have evidence that gamma rays influence climate so would it be a good or bad thing if it lit up again? Then we need to be asking if we can determine if/when it will start back up.
Try and keep up, K? This thread is about bias and the difficulty of preventing it, even defining it. Personally I stopped giving the NRA money because they aren't pure enough and seemed to spend more than I was giving them on postage begging for more money. Doesn't mean I can't borrow the gun grabber arguments in an example of the framing bias inherent in the selection of terminology.
> I suppose you *could* wonder this, but that'd make you an idiot.
Not really. The benefits you speak of are designed to promote a public policy purpose that homosexuals can't fulfill so the public (i.e. the state) should have no interest in expending finite resources upon them. See how easy it is? No religion or 'idiot' required. Coldly rational. One could even say reality based if one wanted to taunt the politically correct? Or take this argument: A hundred years ago it was pretty much universally accepted in the medical world that homosexuality was a mental defect. Is it really unpossible for someone to believe that the modern rethinking of that position is in error and was based more on politics than science; without insisting that said belief could only be based in stupidity or religion? I know I haven't devoted enough time to researching the scientific lit to say and I'd bet good yellow gold you haven't either. Leaving aside the entire question of which side is right or wrong, I'm only interested here in demonstrating that there ARE other sides possible that aren't limited to stupid, homophobic, bigoted, blah, blah. That sort of dismissal of the possibility of valid opposing viewpoints is the whole point behind controlling the language of an issue.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh I was hoping somebody would engage with a hard question or two. Alas. Challenge accepted, such as it is.
> Lie: "Death panels."
Um, have you actually read any of what your guys say when you don't think we are listening? You might want to start by Googling the "Complete LIVES system". Now consider how much of the health care reform bill is empty except for phrases like "to be determined by the secretary of HHS" and it doesn't take much imagination to see where this will end up when the bills start piling up and the money starts running out. See Europe, it is farther along but if the SCOTUS fails in their duty we will be right behind em.
"Conversely, services provided to individuals who are irreversibly prevented from being or becoming participating citizens are not basic and should not be guaranteed. An obvious example is not guaranteeing health services to patients with dementia."
-- Ezekiel Emanuel
or
"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated."
-- Ezekiel Emanuel
Sounds like death panels to me. Especially when we consider the burden of proof under discussion here, where the person saying 'Death Panel" would have to be knowingly bearing false witness and not just wrong.
> Doublethink: "Sanctity of life" vs. death penalty and support of war.
Implied in most people's use of the phrase 'sanctity of life' is the concept of 'innocent' As in killing the unborn for reasons other than self defense is killing the innocent. Not wanting to open that can 'o worms though, but it does make the most obvious example. Executing a murderer is a whole different kettle of fish, at least for me. For me the question comes down to what to do with a murderer; I don't want most of them EVER returning to the streets and see no compelling reason to expend the vast resources required by our courts to keep them in prison for the remainder of their natural lives. Their rights are forfeit by their crime, we can expell them from our society and the protection of the laws they have rejected and there isn't any place to banish them to. On the other hand a non-trivial number do take your position that all life is sacred and reasonable people can argue it.
But not war. I feel nothing but pity for a pacifist. Wretches who live only by the efforts of better men than they. I'm a anti-idiotarian libertarian myself so I'm more non-initiation of force instead of against all violence.
> Actually, the relevant question isn't whether GPP's principles include moral support for truthfulness...
No. The poster I replied to said he 'admired Chomsky's principles' and in the same breath admitted he was almost certainly bearing false witness. Don't know about you but my moral code only has a small number of exceptions to the unacceptability of lying. Things like deception in wartime, etc. Lying to advance an academic argument is simply must be out of bounds if civilization is to remain a viable notion. I can believe somebody is wrong and believe they have principles. I can't believe they are intentionally lying and believe they have principles. Don't care which side they are fighting for. Unfortunately the other team does believe in the rightness of lying in service to a political cause (or at least the ability to doublethink it away) and that speaks volumes about the rest of their moral code. The first lie is always to yourself.
> I admire Chomsky for his principles, but even I admit he has an ego the size of a
> planet and will use the thinnest pretext to get his name in the headlines again.
This word you use, I do not think it means what you think it means. If your definition of 'principles' includes the notion that bearing false witness is acceptable then I must question your moral compass as well as Chomsky's.
Perhaps you should log off and spend a quiet month or two in study and reflection on basic principles or morality and decide what you really believe. I suspect you believe many things that you have been told by others are true and haven't bothered to think any of it out for yourself.
Except of course he isn't really known for things he (according to people in his specialty) is actually skilled at. The problem is that he banks on that aclaim from that highly specialized skill to claim a general competence he clearly does not possess. His political writings are of the most dangerous twaddle that only the most vulnerable college student buys into. The sort of thing that leads to revolutions followed closely by mass graves when a critical mass tire of slapping the lies down. So if he is presenting a paper at a conference in his specialty I suppose others in it should probably attend, otherwise it is a good idea to ridicule him.
What exactly was there to 'invent' here? Once you conect two computers to each other sending messages is one of the most obvious uses for the ability; probably occuring within seconds of the notion of transferring documents/files. So the name is the claimed invention? The self evident name will be "electronic mail" or some variation in any English speaking country, which all the early networking research was done in. So what is left, the next obvious step of a easier to say/write contraction to 'email'?
Bah. Just having a hack like Chomsky's name attached speaks volumes. Nothing to see here, move along. Nonstory.
WTF! I didn't believe you so I went to Lenovo's site to get a fast example do rebut you. And they are all gone! All the beautiful X series units with high res panels are all gone. 1366x768 everywhere and no upgrade options. I pray mine doesn't break because I really wouldn't enjoy settling for the rubbish they are selling right now.
Guys, are you still selling Thinkpads or just generic Chinese crap? I won't pay Thinkpad prices for Acer specs.
> A lot of OSX machines are used simply because they are the most
> versatile in that they can run Mac, Windows, and Unixy software.
Please don't change the subject. Today's topic is consumer oriented media consumption iProducts like the iPad and iPhone. The Mac does have a niche in the enterprise, hell most art departments probably would change quit en mass if you tried taking their Macs away. We could argue till the universe goes cold whether a Mac really is actually a better platform but it is an undeniable reality that the typical art dept believes it to be so and that is that.
> Just because the device was purchased by a corporation doesn't magically
> make it safe to use with sensitive data.
Obviously correct but meaningless and misleading. A corporate owned device is controlled by the owning entity, subject to auditing, enforced security configuration and/or software, encryption mandates, installed software, etc. If the corp can tell you what apps you may, may not or must install on 'your' iPad it ceases to be 'your' iPad. If the corp demands the right to yank an image and inspect it on demand, reimage it if they find anything they don't like or just because they want to, it isn't 'your' iPad anymore. If they demand the right to remote wipe it should you declare it lost OR leave their employement it isn't exactly 'your' property. And if the corp is going to supply your computing hardware there is little reason for them to select an iProduct over competing products that better fit a corporate environment and cost a lot less.
If you have someone worth keeping who is dumb enough to want to use an iPad in spite of it being totally unsuitable, and has drank so much of the flavor-aid they would switch jobs to keep the Apple logo. That small subset perhaps is worth some effort for. Assuming you aren't in an industry that would put you in jail for permitting information to leak in such a careless fashion. Also assuming this worker doesn't do anything information based... and thus doesn't require the use of more evolved software than a media consumption device such as an iPad provides. So when applying those constraints you get left with a few super sales weasels and pointed haired bosses in industries with zero privacy laws. Not world shaking.
It isn't just the total unsuitability of iProducts. It is the use of ANY non controlled device that is a no-go in many environments. You can't allow an employee owned Windows/Mac laptop to have access to information subject to privacy laws. And all the demand in the world from the low level troops in a company to isn't likely to get those laws rewritten. Because management isn't going to deploy their lobbying resources to get something they know is dumb, dangerous and expensive legalized.
No, he works. You play at home. My current Thinkpad (X200s bought at the end of '10) only has VGA out. It has DisplayPort on the dock but not on the unit. Because they know what their customers actually have. And you go somewhere and need to plug up to a projector you will get handed a cable with a VGA connector on the end. The projector might have been replaced in the last year or two (it could have failed or something) and now support a digital input but when the conference room was built a VGA cable was run through the wall/ceiling from the projector to a wall jack near where you are going to present from.
In other words VGA is going to stick around until all those locations undergo a major remodel because HDMI isn't enough better to spend money on a crew to come in and add a second cable + HDMI booster + jack.
> This is a model that I've seen as well. Basically all communication-related activities have
> moved to the iPad. The PC is there for heavy lifting...
Isn't this ass backwards? Buy a $500 (but probably a lot more, especially if cell data is involved) iPad and add another few hundred dollars for docks, displays, input devices and licenses for a sack of overpriced apps that can allow it to move from unusable to 'lame' for a desktop user. Lacking a wired network port they MUST suck in a cube farm, especially if remote display of terminal server is involved. Which do you want to run remote display over? Switched GigE or hopelessly overcrowded WiFi. Exactly.
Meanwhile the 'heavy users' run a generic PC that you can buy with display, inputs AND a copy of Office for hundreds less.
This is a vortex of stupid driven by three idiotic notions. One, that Apple (or Android) products are suitable for corporate use. Two, that Apple is pushing hard to get their stuff into the workplace but are unwilling to actually DO anything to compromise their 'perfect' vison of chains for everyone to make it happen, believing their RDF will instead force business to adapt their business practives to Apple instead. Finally, the eternal belief that employees can or should use consumer products in the workplace. Yes they use Windows in both but that is more of the reverse, using a cut down version of a corporate product at home. Which is of course one of the problems with Windows.
The PC (mostly the Apple ][) did break into the corporate world in the opposite way but that was because of epic failures on the part of the old priesthood of IT. The Apple was almost totally unsuitable but since the priesthood left such a huge unfilled need it was used in spite of its limitations. And we fought those limitations in adapting the early PC into the workplace for almost two decades and still fight some today. Name the huge unfulfilled need the iPad satisfies that a PC doesn't? Until somebody answers that question I just don't see it being a productivity enhancer worth reversing the long established trend toward lower TCO per unit productivity in corporate IT.
Dude! The support details are something that you should have had in writing before you even started working on detailed requirements.
Both sides agree in writing on the scope of work, acceptance procedure, support, training, documentation, code disposition (work for hire, GPL, third party libraries, possibly even escrow), all of that stuff. Anything else just shows a total lack of professionalism.
If you are now in a position of being asked to support it forever without anything in writing you have to decide which will be worse, cutting your losses now and writing off that client and everyone they will bad mouth (with some justification but they are equally guilty of not insisting on getting anything in writing) you to or digging yourself into a hole providing free support until they eventually toss that codebase. Which one you choose depends on far too many factors you haven't provided.
Everything old comes back it seems. Why does this look exactly like AOL Keywords reborn?
We know nobody will be bothering registering subdomains on these turds. It will just be 'tickets' resold to the highest bidder.
> People I know are usually promoted/fired based on the opinion of their superiors
> on the quality of their work.
And unless you work for a small private company, odds are there are productivity metrics. Try firing someone without em and watch how fast they lawyer up these days.
> Pretty much. My position is that there is a difference between a good and bad teacher,
> but that it's not possible (or at least, simple) to reduce that difference to numbers in a
> way is both balanced across the different nature of classes, and impossible to game.
But we judge the STUDENTS by the very clearly defined metrics you abhore applying to teachers, because we have to use something other than measuring the warm fuzzies to decide whether to pass them or hold them back. Nobody really disagrees with the notion because nobody can propose a better solution. Many of course object to the specifics various school systems around the world test on, but the notion of testing students itself isn't really debatable. Yet it is somehow wrong to then judge the productivity of the instructors and the schools based on the exact same metrics the schools themselves judge the success or failure of the students on.
It is the job of the schools and teachers to teach, if the students aren't learning who else do we hold accountable? If we aren't to judge them by their work product what do we judge them on? It would be like a factory that carefully tested each product before shipment but union regs forbade them from observing which workers/shifts/etc had the highest defect rate on the grounds that the product testing metrics were useless. Oh? Come again? You reply that my analogy is flawed, and I should assume some of the parts coming in are in defective batches and because some shifts just happen to get those cheap Chinese parts it isn't their fault. To which I'd reply, true unless we ALSO measure inputs. Which I do propose, test in and out. Also if some workers could work around bad parts by noticing them and culling them or otherwise fixing the defects on the fly I'd keep those and lose the stupid ones and not lose much sleep about the fairness or unfairness of it, even if the stupid ones were doing everything 'by the book.'
As to your complaint that it can be gamed, ok. Welcome to reality, any system can be gamed because any finite system of rules can't describe all possibilities and humans (some) are damned clever. The trick is to design the system to reward gaming in such a way that society wins along the lines I discussed above, where the smartest ones will gravitate to students where they are most needed because the teachers can 'game' the system to maximize revenue. Getting there will require a lot of tuning over years. But if we set metrics, competition, rewarding success and punishing failure as goals it is a market driven theory that will almost certainly yield results whereas the current system is proven not to work.
The current system also has pretty simple rules and is easy to game. Sit through an Edu Degree, get a job and expend some effort for a couple of years until tenure. Then you win. Do pretty much whatever the hell you want until you reach retirement age.
And that is the bottom line. The current system does not work. Defending it only makes you part of the problem. So option #1 is to admit that you are ok with the current notion that the school system is run for the benefit of the adults (if you don't vote, pay union dues or write grants you aren't important to the current system) and then STFU. Or you can admit something need to change and either sign on to my notion of measuring performance or tell us your different ideas to actually fix it.
> When we want to judge the quality of a book, we rely on human opinions (reviewers).
Not outside the art houses. In most of the book trade it is sales, a very quantifiable metric. In the academic book racket it is more often citations in other books and journals than raw sales. Reviews ca
> It's doubtful that anyone with vision would be willing to work for the pay most
> county school systems are able and willing to pay.
That isn't the problem. I'm way out in flyover country and even our school system pays enough I'd take it considering it is almost as secure as being a teacher. And remember, it is the benefits and job security that make working for the government attractive, until quite recently it wasn't the actual money and things are in the process of correcting back to that historical norm. But I have dealt with them enough to know better, it isn't the money that makes me conclude I'd rather do handjobs for cash if things were ever that bad. It is the knowledge that I'd be dealing with weapons grade stupid on an hourly basis even if I were running their IT shop.
> Oh yea, I'd love to download that 8mb PDF over THAT connection...
Each student could download an 8MB PDF every hour, even constrained to 25Kbps, which is slow by modem standards. And that assumes the average student could READ an 8MB document in an hour, which few could unless it is a comic book. And assumes each student needs to download a different one and can't retrieve the one copy cached locally before class by the instructor, and therefore directly available over the gigabit ethernet.
What drives the bandwidth needs are video and the rush to shut down the entire backend operation in the local school plus the school board and outsource all traffic except printing and perhaps the most basic of file serving. This scheme only appears to make sense because of the artificial economy created by the SLC funding mechanism that leaves the school system only paying a small portion of the bandwidth bill. In a more typical network a lot of the traffic is local and a smaller Internet feed will suffice. The Cloud is bringing this same idea into the Enterprise setting and the same hillarity is going to ensue as all the supposed savings are likely to be eaten by vastly scaled up Internet conection expenses.
> Connections to schools aren't that expensive.
Yes they are.
> Most of the infrastructure is all bought and paid for through the 1996 telecommunications act.
> Schools, universities, and libraries get internet connectivity at absurdly cheap prices.
And because they don't see the true price of it they buy services they would never consider if they actually paid fair market value for it. But there is no bandwidth fairy, there is a reason there is a whole subculture of ISPs servicing SLC funded sites, it is great money with little risk because they are all government customers and most of the actual money is OPM. But it is being extracted in taxes from each and every one of us who uses a phone or accesses the Internet in the form of a special tax labeled "Universal Service Fund" on your bill. It also pays for the newly discovered 'right' to have a cell phone paid for by someone else and plans are afoot to jack the tax another notch to pay for the about to be discovered 'right' to Internet access even if you choose to live in a spot where it isn't practical.
> In fact, in the state of Illinois, they don't even have to connect to the internet directly,
> they only have to get a line to one of the very many connection points to the state funded
> network, which has more than enough connectivity to the internet to handle any workload.
On the other hand, this is a very good idea. Too bad we would never consider it around here in Louisiana.
> An OC-24 is a bundle of 24 optical cables.
No. An OC is roughly the same as a copper based T-3 which is of course based on the classic T-1. which is itself based on carrying two dozen 64Kbps calls multiplexed together. An OC-24 is therefore about the same as two dozen T-3 lines but would normally be delivered on a single pair of fiber. I know the single pair of fibers on our wall that currently delivers only 30Mbps can deliver anything up to 1000Mbps with nothing more than a phone call and a signature on an updated contract, no truck roll needed.
> Weighing teachers against each other based on their
> student's results is inaccurate, because you have no control.
Every time the notion of judging the performance of teachers by their output, exactly like EVERYONE else with a job is judged, promoted and fired.... this red herring is thrown out. It is crap.
You test at the start and again at the end of the year. Any problems in the students aren't lilkely to change during the year, if the parents have been defective, apathetic, etc. in the past they are (as a group) likely to remain so, involved parents probably won't suddenly stop caring. So you certainly can draw conclusions from the difference unless it is your position that it is normal for there to be no measurable difference year over year, that the teacher, school, hell; just the passage of a year is expected to make zero difference in what a child knows. Or is it your position that there is no reliably measurable difference between a 'good' and a 'bad' teacher?
In fact a GOOD teacher would probably want a class of slighly at risk kids since if they can fire the imaginations of even a quarter of em the potential will be there to make a vast swing in the average. Meanwhile a class of upper class kids already operating at or above grade level would be a lot harder to inspire any such large improvement in.
And guess what? As a matter of public policy we probably want the best and brightest teachers choosing to work with that exact group of kids, slightly behind but salvagable. Amazing how often the market driven goal is the right one.
> The problem with my metric is that it's impossible to measure.
Which means it is useless. Mine is chosen almost entirely on the basis of being actually measurable and thus IS useful. Come on over to the reality based community, it is sane and it works every time it is allowed to be triumph over unreasoning emotion.
Really. How many other professions are there where the people in charge will openly assert that it is impossible to measure their output, immoral to even try and oh, by the way we insist on being granted tenure even though the notion is utterly inapplicable to K-12 education. And please continue bankrupting the public coffers thowing ever increasing sums of money at us, recession or not, just don't expect anything to improve.. or to even be able to know if things are getting better since measurement is a null concept in our industry. But if you DON'T give us more money it is a certainly the children will suffer.
That madness has went on for decades now but things are so bad nobody believes the schools are working so things are going to change. Choose whether to be part of the solution.
> but because they didn't improve she's a bad teacher
You say that like it is a bad thing. If the kids didn't improve from when they came in at the start of the year that means the teacher sucks. Or give me a definition of 'good teacher' that includes 'kids don't improve'.
I don't want to hear any blah, blah excuses either. If the kids wasted a year in that classroom there is no reason to inflict that teacher on another batch without major corrective action and/or retraining. Or would YOU put your kids in that class if they posted their last year entry/exit scores on the door?
> why would the school not upload to you tube?
You obviously know nothing about the way schools work. There is an entire industry devoted to reinventing every wheel for educational use. Some of it makes some sense, schools have a lot of mandates for privacy and so on, but most of it is simply because. YouTube would be right out, a contract with an edu specific video hosting site would be required, and it would of course require a hefty annual contract with each school system. Each school would have to get a customized portal with the school logo, colors and such or it is a no sale. Access controls are a must. You can't put a picture that includes a student on a school's public facing website without moving a lot of paper for clearances.... meanwhile the local paper's website has the same photo from the game up that day and the kids themselves post everything onto their facebook pages in realtime. And it simply must be this way, the idea that it could be different could never occur. If nothing else, schools simply wouldn't be able to handle the concept of a vendor that doesn't charge.
Thank HTML5 for the death of caching as much as the advertising.
It is all apps now. And in schools they KNOW they are all incompetent boobs so they want nothing that requires skilled labor to maintain. So outsourcing is the word. Everything. Gradebooks, attendance, cafeteria manegement, email of course, Courseware, scheduling and calendaring, yearbooks. If it isn't being delivered from the cloud now it is because they are still fighting over which vendor they want to write a check to. (read as the bidding is still fierce over who will kick back more.. ok, I'm a cynic) That pattern means they need LOTS of bandwidth now and will need an ever growing amount going forward into an HD Video for everything future.
And the vendors love it. It will of course drive lots of sales to schools themselves but when the kids can't do their homework without a constant high bandwidth connection it drives the 'Internet is a 'Right'' meme that leads to even more billions and billions of sweet sweet government money that will only be available to the politically connected.
> it makes the implication that the mother should have a choice and anyone else (government, priests, etc) can go bugger off.
Which means you accept the exact premise I mentioned as inherent in the phrase, that it isn't an important choice. I.e. that it is 'living' but isn't 'life'. You are willing to be just tolerant enough to allow some poor deluded Christer to imagine it is a baby and not kill it if that is their choice but you know better. You wouldn't be arguing for the mother's right to off the lil crotch fruit the day after birth, right? That would be MURDER, where the day before it is just a PROCEDURE.
But as for me, I'm more of the opinion that on one side you have people who hear Monty Python's _Every Sperm Is Sacred_ and fail to realize it is a joke at their expense while the other side, pushing for abortion right up to the instant of natural delivery is across the line to infanticide. So stupid or evil, are those my only choices? Seriously, it is a question that logic and reason can't decide in the limited knowledge and philosophy available to us so lets just pick something reasonable in the middle, call it "The Line; For now" and move on. No more killing things that could just about as easily be delivered alive and no more of this life begins at conception either. Admit we can't decide for now and agree to revisit it when science advances.
Obviously. Gamma rays obey the light speed limit just like everything else.
What I'd like to know is how much gamma ray action the Earth sees when those jets are fired up. We now have evidence that gamma rays influence climate so would it be a good or bad thing if it lit up again? Then we need to be asking if we can determine if/when it will start back up.
Whoosh!
Try and keep up, K? This thread is about bias and the difficulty of preventing it, even defining it. Personally I stopped giving the NRA money because they aren't pure enough and seemed to spend more than I was giving them on postage begging for more money. Doesn't mean I can't borrow the gun grabber arguments in an example of the framing bias inherent in the selection of terminology.
> I suppose you *could* wonder this, but that'd make you an idiot.
Not really. The benefits you speak of are designed to promote a public policy purpose that homosexuals can't fulfill so the public (i.e. the state) should have no interest in expending finite resources upon them. See how easy it is? No religion or 'idiot' required. Coldly rational. One could even say reality based if one wanted to taunt the politically correct? Or take this argument: A hundred years ago it was pretty much universally accepted in the medical world that homosexuality was a mental defect. Is it really unpossible for someone to believe that the modern rethinking of that position is in error and was based more on politics than science; without insisting that said belief could only be based in stupidity or religion? I know I haven't devoted enough time to researching the scientific lit to say and I'd bet good yellow gold you haven't either. Leaving aside the entire question of which side is right or wrong, I'm only interested here in demonstrating that there ARE other sides possible that aren't limited to stupid, homophobic, bigoted, blah, blah. That sort of dismissal of the possibility of valid opposing viewpoints is the whole point behind controlling the language of an issue.