A differentiator only matters if it can actually sell.
And that's why I said "there was a longshot chance". But until a product is in the market, you don't know what's going to sell or not. Microsoft knew it was going to be hard to break into the market with WP7, especially after the flops of their WinCE crap having poisoned their name in the mobile phone world, but they completely reinvented their phone OS, followed best practices in developing it and have poured a lot of money into creating a quality product, so they think they have a chance against Android. And since Nokia already knew they were fading rapidly, they were willing to take that bet.
But yeah, this will probably be another Betamax / VHS battle, where a lot of people have already proved they are willing to pay less for cheap and buggy. (We can't deny that there aren't a lot more Android bugs and malware out there than on the iOS platform.) But there's already someone dominating the "high-quality / high-price phone OS" space, and that's really who Microsoft is going to have to compete with.
They could go Android, sure, but Android phones are almost commodity phones, where the handset manufacturer isn't adding enough value to make them differentiators. That means as a customer, I could pick up an LG or HTC or Motorola or Samsung and get a pretty similar phone. And that means they all compete on price. That puts the Nokia phones up against the manufacturing might of China, which means that margins would start out razor thin and fade quickly to non-existent.
Symbian appealed to a hundred thousand early-adopter phone geeks, but they were not getting any mass market share from the first-time smartphone buyers, who were heading straight to Android or iPhone (depending primarily on the contents of their wallets.) Maemo would have cannibalized that market, but would not have taken any buyers away from the two big players. The WP7 deal came with the backing of Microsoft, which provided a lot more marketing clout than Nokia is capable of delivering these days.
When you're trying to compete, it's best to have a differentiator that people will actually pay for. Symbian was no longer it, and Maemo would never have been it. They bet that WP7 might have been it. It's not looking great so far, but Microsoft is a lot better backed than anyone else courting Nokia.
It may have been obvious, but it was obvious long before Microsoft had anything to do with it, and this certainly isn't Microsoft's fault. Remember the Burning Memo? Nokia has been faltering ever since the Chinese factories have been able to create their own lines because of the cell phone chipset availability.
Nokia took the Microsoft deal because it became evident to them that Nokia's own OS was no longer a selling point, so it didn't make sense to further invest in it. That saved them a few kroner in the short term, plus there was a longshot chance that Windows Phone 8 could have made a dent in the market. It obviously hasn't yet, nor did the tech community expect much different, but one never knows what the phone market will look like in five years.
Stuxnet wasn't a virus designed to spread until it found Natanz and then attack it. That would have been noticed much earlier. Stuxnet was deployed inside the air-gapped systems of Natanz, and was only detected after it escaped containment and began to spread.
That's the sniper using a ghillie suit and flash suppression, hiding in a marsh. Sounds like the USA's m.o.
TFA has the author's theory that it's a part of the survival / defense mechanism that has us avoid sick or lame humans, who would threaten us with disease, or cause us to have to shoulder the burden of their injury by sharing with them, or by slowing down the tribe in case we needed to run.
A slashdotter made an interesting observation last year regarding the effect. He thought It was the reaction to the detection of a mimic. "Hi, visitor, welcome to our villag-HOLY SH!T, YOU'RE NOT A PERSON, WTF ARE YOU?!?!". But I wonder if that would engender more fear than revulsion.
The difference seems to be that we suddenly don't know what they expect of us. Seeing a baby preps us for providing for their safety and security. Later, perceiving the baby as an artificial construct makes us not understand it any longer. Notice how the uncanny valley effect is somewhat lessened when the image is already a threat, as in a violent video game? It hardly matters if the guy with the sword looks perfect if we're already afraid that he's going to behead us.
Maybe there's some self-loathing because we feel stupid for not recognizing the simulacrum earlier. "I should have known better!" That might explain why motion seems to amplify the effect. The static image says "it's OK", but later motion says, "hey, wait, you're being tricked."
The autotrading event was the trigger, but not the cause of the disaster. By itself, the autotrading crash would have been a minor event. The root cause of the disaster was the thieving bank scams, all of them together, including the housing market, the overextended banks, the deregulated investments made by the insurance companies, the insanely complex derivatives that spat out profits but had ultra high risks built in, all of that together was the real cause.
If you have a barrel full of gunpowder, and you're examining it closely with a lighted candle, it's hardly the candle's fault if it explodes.
I think by "financial crisis" he meant "a minor market crash due to autotrading algorithms", and not the real crisis being caused by thieves running trillion dollar banking, mortgage, and insurance scams.
The point is "if you use similar automated response strategies as a large set of other similar entities, you could all suffer the same fate from a common cause."
Supposedly a market crash was triggered by autotrading algorithms that all tended to do exactly the same thing in the same situations. So when the price of oil shot up (or whatever the trigger was) then all those algorithms said "sell". As all the sell orders came in, the market average dropped, and the next set of algorithms said "sell moar". So there was a cascade because so many systems had identical responses to the same negative stimulus. Think of those automated trades as being akin to a "failover" IT system: if host X is failing, automatically shift my service load this way.
So that's the analogy the author is trying to make with respect to systems that depend on automated recovery machinery like load balancers: if response time is too high at hosting vendor X, my automated strategy is to failover to hosting vendor Y. And perhaps 500 large sites all have a similar strategy. Now let's say that vendor X suffers a DDoS attack because they host some site that pissed off Anonymous. So now all these customer load balancers see the traffic slowing down a X, and they simultaneously reroute all app traffic to vendor Y in response. Vendor Y then gets hammered due to the new load, and the load balancers shift the traffic elsewhere. Now two main hosting providers are down while they try to clean up the messes, and the several smaller providers are seeing much bigger customers than usual using them as tertiary providers, and they start straining under the load as well, causing their other clients to automatically shift.
And if that isn't exactly what plays out next year, might not something similar happen with payment gateways, or edge content delivery systems, or advertising providers?
It's a cascade of failures due to automated responses that's remarkably similar to the electrical grid overloads that caused the northeast coast blackout in 2003. The author's point is "we don't know precisely what bad thing might happen within this particular ecosystem, but there is significant risk because we've seen complex interdependent systems have similar failures before."
Let's see if I've got this straight: "You gave me A, B, and C for free yesterday, and now you're only giving me an improved A and B for free? I deserve an improved C, too! You're a miserable, horrible entity for denying me the new and improved C!"
This reads like astroturf. People are actually complaining because the free new version is less capable than the old free versions to date.
So you've rationalized that all the complaining is somehow legitimate, and even insulted me as an "astroturfer" in the process. What makes you so damn deserving that they should give it away to you at all? It's this arrogant sense of entitlement that is so amazing to me.
Apparently the "Me" generation has begat the "Gimme!" generation.
When you drop a nuclear bomb on an enemy, is there a warhead left to analyze? Exactly. That's how cyberweaponry should be designed...one time use only, and it destroys itself, whether it's successful or not. Not only does that keep the enemy guessing, but it also keeps the minds behind the attacks active and creative.
Cyberweapons come in two main flavors: code that runs internally on the target system (malware such as Stuxnet, Flame, Duku, etc.) and attacks that are run external to the target (Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks from tools such as LOIC, disabling the routers that serve the target, disrupting their DNS, etc.) External weapons remain safely out of the hands of the target. The only thing the target gets is the SYN packets, or the RST packets, or a dead router. An analogy would be that nothing in physics says you get a copy of the gun that's shooting at you - you only get the bullets.
But it's the internal weapons that deliver the real value. They don't just deny the target from using their systems, they are weapons that do the spying, damage centrifuges, take out oil pumping stations and pipelines, shut down electric grids, etc. But to do their work, they must be delivered all the way to the target, where they are they are subject to interception and copying, and are even subject to modifications that would enable them to be used by the target against their enemies. Metaphorically speaking, in a cyber-war, every cyber-hand grenade thrown comes with a blast-proof set of blueprints for making more hand grenades. You don't get to make statements such as "weapon, destroy yourself" because they can always be intercepted and copied.
Or how about asking how many people would consciously and knowingly allow code to run on their PC (unobtrusively in the background, of course) that would disrupt or cause harm to their perceived enemies. Lots and lots, I bet.
LOIC, for the play-at-home version. And "lots and lots" would be a fairly accurate estimate.
They give away an up-to-date free (as in beer) version of one of the most advanced software development tools on the planet, and yet people complain about its limitations.
Virtually all of the home-schooled kids I know are at least as well educated as their public school counterparts. I know one that finished Calc II while still at home, and he plays the French horn beautifully well. (I haven't heard what college degree he graduated with, but I'd be shocked if he didn't ace it.) But this same kid believes that dinosaurs never existed. He can go forth in this world and will no doubt succeed in any field he chooses. He'd make a fine engineer, or lawyer, or mathematician. He'll probably go on to be a deacon in his church some day. But I also can pretty much guarantee you he won't choose a career in paleontology. And I don't think he'll be teaching biology, geology, or astronomy if he thinks god created the universe 6,000 years ago, because those professions simply wouldn't fit with his worldview. I'm good with that.
While having a religious upbringing may sound like it correlates to success, I'd postulate that the primary reason the kids you and I know who are succeeding is because their parents have cared greatly about their children's success for their entire lives. And I consider home schooling to be prima facie evidence of parents who care. Parents who use the schools as babysitters, as surrogate parents, as the disciplinarians, or to provide their moral compasses, those who abdicate their own responsibilities for raising their children, they're far more likely to have the kids that don't reach their potential. And that comprises a depressingly large percentage of kids.
I think religious reasons are a fine reason to homeschool. I'd rather they deal with those personal matters at home, instead of demanding the public schoolteachers waste time acknowledging or debating their particular flavor of pseudo-science. And for the path those kids are likely to end up on, which might be theology or music or church administration, it's a perfectly adequate education.
No, a religious homeschooling is not setting those kids up for careers teaching biology or any of the sciences, but with a belief structure like that at home, those kids probably weren't going to end up contributing to the field anyway.
It seems border crossings have become a point at which the usual rules are thrown out of the window and anyone can be interrogated about anything.
Perhaps it's exactly about this. Maybe the entire idea is to terrorize ordinary people crossing the borders so these people would rather modify their own behavior, and quit exercising all those pesky freedoms.
Although I'd be hard-pressed to consider an hour-long secondary screen to be terrifying. Annoying and maddening, yes, but terrifying, no.
This is an attempt to solve a very real problem. Touch screens are horribly inefficient input devices. Ever study someone using a 10-key pad, and compared their productivity to someone using a touch screen? It's not even a contest.
That said, I don't think this product will help enough.
The "other" interpretation. You make it sound as if there are two and exactly two "sides". The problem is that when you open the discussions up to include the Judeo-Christian creation mythos, you have to welcome every other equally untestable explanation out there: Eurynome, the AEsir, the raven, Pangu, Enki, the Ogdoad, flying spaghetti monsters, pyramid building aliens, the machines from The Matrix, or any of a thousand other explanations that have arisen throughout the centuries. Since none can be proven or disproven, what is there to teach from a scientific perspective?
Religious ideas regarding creation could certainly be discussed in the schools - but in history, literature, or philosophy classes, not science.
You already stretched the imagination when you imagined the rocket blowing up. Do you know how much work it takes to get the fuel in a commercial Estes model rocket engine to blow up? They're designed for maximum safety.
You sort of have the right idea, in that you should teach them in phases. You might start out with a demonstration to capture their interest: the teacher launches a rocket. Then, you teach them some theory - just enough for them to be successful. Then you have a construction phase, where you build models, and perhaps wind tunnel test them. Then you teach them range safety, just before taking them outside again for the launch.
The most important thing to teach them is that range safety is #1, and is not negotiable. Anyone violating it will be escorted away, no second chance to fire their rocket, and enforce that rule like iron, parents' whining be damned. As the adult, you'd be the range safety officer, and you'd always maintain the launch keys in your possession. Do those simple steps and it is not only far safer than gym class, but a fun experience they'll remember.
The most dangerous part? Asking parents to pay for the kits. Teachers don't have a lot of spare money for stuff like this, and bulk educational packets of rockets cost about $50 per 12 rockets. Multiply by 36 students per each overcrowded class, and you have to come up with $150 per class. About half your students will be from households where their parent(s) can't afford a $5 kit, so you need to find a beneficiary or you'll be paying that $75 out of your own pocket. If you go asking for money too often, the parents will likely complain to the principal and you'll find you're risking your job by just trying to be good at it.
First, thanks for two things. I'd never heard of the Flynn effect, and I wasn't aware of how IQ tests are continually re-normalized over time.
So are you saying the Flynn effect proves that intelligence has been increasing over time, because next generations have always scored better than previous generations on the previous generation's test? Or are you saying that due to the testing methodology of setting the baseline of any population's overall IQ at 100, that by definition IQ is always 100 for any population, and that comparisons of IQ over time aren't meaningful due to this practice, therefore the original poster's assertion isn't valid?
Basically IQ tests are flawed. They be be indicative but often stuff that is valued changes over time. By practising IQ tests you get better at them. Yet a higher IQ doesn't unlock magical abilities or make people more effective.
The thing with IQ tests is that they're supposed to abstractly measure your ability to think, and are not supposed to be just a trivia test of stuff you've learned. If you understand analogy to a depth greater than the average of your population, your test results should show a higher IQ. The hope is that your higher score is due to your innate ability; but it might be that an understanding of analogy is being taught more effectively in schools and you simply paid more attention than your classmates during those lessons. That's the kind of noise I understand they're trying to steer clear of, but it seems that it would be almost impossible to dodge. If the IQ-testing-community decides that a specific ability confers an advantage, wouldn't they ultimately be self-selecting for teachers that would naturally have that ability and who would be able to teach it as a skill? And is that why you think they're doomed to always be wrong?
If being a genius, or for the sake of argument, having a high IQ, is such big advantage, why haven't we evolved to have higher IQs?
And who's to say that we have or have not evolved higher IQs? 20,000 years ago, Neanderthals weren't exactly sitting down to take baseline tests that would enable a comparison to current-man's intelligence. In 20,000 years, however, future-man will be able to run through today's IQ test and see if the average of his contemporaries is higher than that of current-man. (That is, if the differences between the culture expressed on our IQ test and his aren't so great as to make our tests meaningless to him. They're supposed to be culturally neutral, but that's nothing more than a guess about how people think in today's world, let alone 20,000 years from now.)
One thing we do know is that people choose mates likely to produce successful offspring. Think about all the factors that people consider attractive and therefore lead to mating: beauty, strength, intelligence, charm, wealth, power, courage, etc. Wealth and power are interesting because they're not necessarily inherited traits, but they provide evidence of someone who used whatever traits they had to become successful -- therefore they are likely to be good providers for their offspring.
Evolution isn't just about a single mutation. It's about the acceptance of mixing of that mutation back into the culture. People have to repeatedly demonstrate that they choose mates based on that trait for us to call it a success factor. In other words, you haven't seen it because you aren't old enough. (If you want, you can study history to try to figure out if the ancients were as smart as we are now, but that will probably yield nothing more than a debate.)
If higher IQs yield more successful people, they will eventually produce a population with higher IQs. Just don't look for results overnight. Set a reasonable timeframe.
I fall into the category of "write simple methods that are easily proven with automated unit tests." When it comes to patterns, if I see one, they tell me "because you did it this way, it means X to performance, Y to maintainability, and Z to correctness."
I care a lot more about design principles than about design patterns. Give me simple and clear code first. When it follows a pattern, I'll understand the consequences quicker. If it's close to a pattern, I'll stop and think about the differences. Why did you do this? What does this change solve? Your design doesn't have to follow a published pattern, but it has to have a valid purpose.
Patterns always seemed to be labels for things that were obvious to me anyway.
That's almost the exact definition of what a pattern is supposed to be. It should be an obvious name, so we can all talk about the same basic concept with a common shared language. They aren't magic beans you drop in code. they are concepts.
After you grok the concepts they contain, then they become magic beans that you can drop into your code. See the difference?
Any chance they're just witnessing C&C nodes transmitting spam orders or pagerank gaming links to the remaining 99.2% of Friendster accounts (all of which are hacked and forgotten)?
It's a comp sci paper that is looking for connected nodes in a network, and they're using copies of data sets of social networks as their starting point. They aren't monitoring networks looking for "who is exerting influence over them", they're looking for nodes that are well connected to other nodes, presuming those represent the most valuable people to convince.
Now, could those "friends and families" in the network data actually be there as part of a botnet controller and its zombie minions? Sure, why not? But each one of those would be a single node in the set of nodes as having the right connections. Doesn't mean that marketing to the botherder or the botnet is going to get you much business, but if you were looking for someone who has influence, it would identify the botherder and not the bots themselves.
No, that's all factored into it. That's why we have temporary walls, so we can have temporary positions. Everyone knows that the next HMFIC is going to re-org. It's part of the job. So make sure everything can flex when they get rid of the current old bad leader to make room for the next new bad leader.
But the one thing the board never does is to blame the leader, because that calls into question their ability to wisely pick good leaders.
Honest feedback is fine for those of us down in the trenches. But *don't you dare* raise those ugly truths higher up!
Slashdot Mirror
A differentiator only matters if it can actually sell.
And that's why I said "there was a longshot chance". But until a product is in the market, you don't know what's going to sell or not. Microsoft knew it was going to be hard to break into the market with WP7, especially after the flops of their WinCE crap having poisoned their name in the mobile phone world, but they completely reinvented their phone OS, followed best practices in developing it and have poured a lot of money into creating a quality product, so they think they have a chance against Android. And since Nokia already knew they were fading rapidly, they were willing to take that bet.
But yeah, this will probably be another Betamax / VHS battle, where a lot of people have already proved they are willing to pay less for cheap and buggy. (We can't deny that there aren't a lot more Android bugs and malware out there than on the iOS platform.) But there's already someone dominating the "high-quality / high-price phone OS" space, and that's really who Microsoft is going to have to compete with.
They could go Android, sure, but Android phones are almost commodity phones, where the handset manufacturer isn't adding enough value to make them differentiators. That means as a customer, I could pick up an LG or HTC or Motorola or Samsung and get a pretty similar phone. And that means they all compete on price. That puts the Nokia phones up against the manufacturing might of China, which means that margins would start out razor thin and fade quickly to non-existent.
Symbian appealed to a hundred thousand early-adopter phone geeks, but they were not getting any mass market share from the first-time smartphone buyers, who were heading straight to Android or iPhone (depending primarily on the contents of their wallets.) Maemo would have cannibalized that market, but would not have taken any buyers away from the two big players. The WP7 deal came with the backing of Microsoft, which provided a lot more marketing clout than Nokia is capable of delivering these days.
When you're trying to compete, it's best to have a differentiator that people will actually pay for. Symbian was no longer it, and Maemo would never have been it. They bet that WP7 might have been it. It's not looking great so far, but Microsoft is a lot better backed than anyone else courting Nokia.
plus there was a longshot chance that Windows Phone 8 could have made a dent in the market. It obviously hasn't yet,
Just a hypothetical, but that might be because it hasn't been released yet.
oops, confused my Windows 8 with WP7.
It may have been obvious, but it was obvious long before Microsoft had anything to do with it, and this certainly isn't Microsoft's fault. Remember the Burning Memo? Nokia has been faltering ever since the Chinese factories have been able to create their own lines because of the cell phone chipset availability.
Nokia took the Microsoft deal because it became evident to them that Nokia's own OS was no longer a selling point, so it didn't make sense to further invest in it. That saved them a few kroner in the short term, plus there was a longshot chance that Windows Phone 8 could have made a dent in the market. It obviously hasn't yet, nor did the tech community expect much different, but one never knows what the phone market will look like in five years.
Stuxnet wasn't a virus designed to spread until it found Natanz and then attack it. That would have been noticed much earlier. Stuxnet was deployed inside the air-gapped systems of Natanz, and was only detected after it escaped containment and began to spread.
That's the sniper using a ghillie suit and flash suppression, hiding in a marsh. Sounds like the USA's m.o.
TFA has the author's theory that it's a part of the survival / defense mechanism that has us avoid sick or lame humans, who would threaten us with disease, or cause us to have to shoulder the burden of their injury by sharing with them, or by slowing down the tribe in case we needed to run.
A slashdotter made an interesting observation last year regarding the effect. He thought It was the reaction to the detection of a mimic. "Hi, visitor, welcome to our villag-HOLY SH!T, YOU'RE NOT A PERSON, WTF ARE YOU?!?!". But I wonder if that would engender more fear than revulsion.
The difference seems to be that we suddenly don't know what they expect of us. Seeing a baby preps us for providing for their safety and security. Later, perceiving the baby as an artificial construct makes us not understand it any longer. Notice how the uncanny valley effect is somewhat lessened when the image is already a threat, as in a violent video game? It hardly matters if the guy with the sword looks perfect if we're already afraid that he's going to behead us.
Maybe there's some self-loathing because we feel stupid for not recognizing the simulacrum earlier. "I should have known better!" That might explain why motion seems to amplify the effect. The static image says "it's OK", but later motion says, "hey, wait, you're being tricked."
It's certainly an interesting phenomenon.
The autotrading event was the trigger, but not the cause of the disaster. By itself, the autotrading crash would have been a minor event. The root cause of the disaster was the thieving bank scams, all of them together, including the housing market, the overextended banks, the deregulated investments made by the insurance companies, the insanely complex derivatives that spat out profits but had ultra high risks built in, all of that together was the real cause.
If you have a barrel full of gunpowder, and you're examining it closely with a lighted candle, it's hardly the candle's fault if it explodes.
I think by "financial crisis" he meant "a minor market crash due to autotrading algorithms", and not the real crisis being caused by thieves running trillion dollar banking, mortgage, and insurance scams.
The point is "if you use similar automated response strategies as a large set of other similar entities, you could all suffer the same fate from a common cause."
Supposedly a market crash was triggered by autotrading algorithms that all tended to do exactly the same thing in the same situations. So when the price of oil shot up (or whatever the trigger was) then all those algorithms said "sell". As all the sell orders came in, the market average dropped, and the next set of algorithms said "sell moar". So there was a cascade because so many systems had identical responses to the same negative stimulus. Think of those automated trades as being akin to a "failover" IT system: if host X is failing, automatically shift my service load this way.
So that's the analogy the author is trying to make with respect to systems that depend on automated recovery machinery like load balancers: if response time is too high at hosting vendor X, my automated strategy is to failover to hosting vendor Y. And perhaps 500 large sites all have a similar strategy. Now let's say that vendor X suffers a DDoS attack because they host some site that pissed off Anonymous. So now all these customer load balancers see the traffic slowing down a X, and they simultaneously reroute all app traffic to vendor Y in response. Vendor Y then gets hammered due to the new load, and the load balancers shift the traffic elsewhere. Now two main hosting providers are down while they try to clean up the messes, and the several smaller providers are seeing much bigger customers than usual using them as tertiary providers, and they start straining under the load as well, causing their other clients to automatically shift.
And if that isn't exactly what plays out next year, might not something similar happen with payment gateways, or edge content delivery systems, or advertising providers?
It's a cascade of failures due to automated responses that's remarkably similar to the electrical grid overloads that caused the northeast coast blackout in 2003. The author's point is "we don't know precisely what bad thing might happen within this particular ecosystem, but there is significant risk because we've seen complex interdependent systems have similar failures before."
Let's see if I've got this straight: "You gave me A, B, and C for free yesterday, and now you're only giving me an improved A and B for free? I deserve an improved C, too! You're a miserable, horrible entity for denying me the new and improved C!"
This reads like astroturf. People are actually complaining because the free new version is less capable than the old free versions to date.
So you've rationalized that all the complaining is somehow legitimate, and even insulted me as an "astroturfer" in the process. What makes you so damn deserving that they should give it away to you at all? It's this arrogant sense of entitlement that is so amazing to me.
Apparently the "Me" generation has begat the "Gimme!" generation.
Now get off my lawn.
When you drop a nuclear bomb on an enemy, is there a warhead left to analyze? Exactly. That's how cyberweaponry should be designed...one time use only, and it destroys itself, whether it's successful or not. Not only does that keep the enemy guessing, but it also keeps the minds behind the attacks active and creative.
Cyberweapons come in two main flavors: code that runs internally on the target system (malware such as Stuxnet, Flame, Duku, etc.) and attacks that are run external to the target (Distributed Denial of Service DDoS attacks from tools such as LOIC, disabling the routers that serve the target, disrupting their DNS, etc.) External weapons remain safely out of the hands of the target. The only thing the target gets is the SYN packets, or the RST packets, or a dead router. An analogy would be that nothing in physics says you get a copy of the gun that's shooting at you - you only get the bullets.
But it's the internal weapons that deliver the real value. They don't just deny the target from using their systems, they are weapons that do the spying, damage centrifuges, take out oil pumping stations and pipelines, shut down electric grids, etc. But to do their work, they must be delivered all the way to the target, where they are they are subject to interception and copying, and are even subject to modifications that would enable them to be used by the target against their enemies. Metaphorically speaking, in a cyber-war, every cyber-hand grenade thrown comes with a blast-proof set of blueprints for making more hand grenades. You don't get to make statements such as "weapon, destroy yourself" because they can always be intercepted and copied.
Or how about asking how many people would consciously and knowingly allow code to run on their PC (unobtrusively in the background, of course) that would disrupt or cause harm to their perceived enemies. Lots and lots, I bet.
LOIC, for the play-at-home version. And "lots and lots" would be a fairly accurate estimate.
They give away an up-to-date free (as in beer) version of one of the most advanced software development tools on the planet, and yet people complain about its limitations.
Virtually all of the home-schooled kids I know are at least as well educated as their public school counterparts. I know one that finished Calc II while still at home, and he plays the French horn beautifully well. (I haven't heard what college degree he graduated with, but I'd be shocked if he didn't ace it.) But this same kid believes that dinosaurs never existed. He can go forth in this world and will no doubt succeed in any field he chooses. He'd make a fine engineer, or lawyer, or mathematician. He'll probably go on to be a deacon in his church some day. But I also can pretty much guarantee you he won't choose a career in paleontology. And I don't think he'll be teaching biology, geology, or astronomy if he thinks god created the universe 6,000 years ago, because those professions simply wouldn't fit with his worldview. I'm good with that.
While having a religious upbringing may sound like it correlates to success, I'd postulate that the primary reason the kids you and I know who are succeeding is because their parents have cared greatly about their children's success for their entire lives. And I consider home schooling to be prima facie evidence of parents who care. Parents who use the schools as babysitters, as surrogate parents, as the disciplinarians, or to provide their moral compasses, those who abdicate their own responsibilities for raising their children, they're far more likely to have the kids that don't reach their potential. And that comprises a depressingly large percentage of kids.
I think religious reasons are a fine reason to homeschool. I'd rather they deal with those personal matters at home, instead of demanding the public schoolteachers waste time acknowledging or debating their particular flavor of pseudo-science. And for the path those kids are likely to end up on, which might be theology or music or church administration, it's a perfectly adequate education.
No, a religious homeschooling is not setting those kids up for careers teaching biology or any of the sciences, but with a belief structure like that at home, those kids probably weren't going to end up contributing to the field anyway.
It seems border crossings have become a point at which the usual rules are thrown out of the window and anyone can be interrogated about anything.
Perhaps it's exactly about this. Maybe the entire idea is to terrorize ordinary people crossing the borders so these people would rather modify their own behavior, and quit exercising all those pesky freedoms.
Although I'd be hard-pressed to consider an hour-long secondary screen to be terrifying. Annoying and maddening, yes, but terrifying, no.
This is an attempt to solve a very real problem. Touch screens are horribly inefficient input devices. Ever study someone using a 10-key pad, and compared their productivity to someone using a touch screen? It's not even a contest.
That said, I don't think this product will help enough.
The "other" interpretation. You make it sound as if there are two and exactly two "sides". The problem is that when you open the discussions up to include the Judeo-Christian creation mythos, you have to welcome every other equally untestable explanation out there: Eurynome, the AEsir, the raven, Pangu, Enki, the Ogdoad, flying spaghetti monsters, pyramid building aliens, the machines from The Matrix, or any of a thousand other explanations that have arisen throughout the centuries. Since none can be proven or disproven, what is there to teach from a scientific perspective?
Religious ideas regarding creation could certainly be discussed in the schools - but in history, literature, or philosophy classes, not science.
You already stretched the imagination when you imagined the rocket blowing up. Do you know how much work it takes to get the fuel in a commercial Estes model rocket engine to blow up? They're designed for maximum safety.
You sort of have the right idea, in that you should teach them in phases. You might start out with a demonstration to capture their interest: the teacher launches a rocket. Then, you teach them some theory - just enough for them to be successful. Then you have a construction phase, where you build models, and perhaps wind tunnel test them. Then you teach them range safety, just before taking them outside again for the launch.
The most important thing to teach them is that range safety is #1, and is not negotiable. Anyone violating it will be escorted away, no second chance to fire their rocket, and enforce that rule like iron, parents' whining be damned. As the adult, you'd be the range safety officer, and you'd always maintain the launch keys in your possession. Do those simple steps and it is not only far safer than gym class, but a fun experience they'll remember.
The most dangerous part? Asking parents to pay for the kits. Teachers don't have a lot of spare money for stuff like this, and bulk educational packets of rockets cost about $50 per 12 rockets. Multiply by 36 students per each overcrowded class, and you have to come up with $150 per class. About half your students will be from households where their parent(s) can't afford a $5 kit, so you need to find a beneficiary or you'll be paying that $75 out of your own pocket. If you go asking for money too often, the parents will likely complain to the principal and you'll find you're risking your job by just trying to be good at it.
You never know if you still have any left until you open your wallet to check.
I've got matrimonial money. I don't have to open my wallet to know my wife has it all.
First, thanks for two things. I'd never heard of the Flynn effect, and I wasn't aware of how IQ tests are continually re-normalized over time.
So are you saying the Flynn effect proves that intelligence has been increasing over time, because next generations have always scored better than previous generations on the previous generation's test? Or are you saying that due to the testing methodology of setting the baseline of any population's overall IQ at 100, that by definition IQ is always 100 for any population, and that comparisons of IQ over time aren't meaningful due to this practice, therefore the original poster's assertion isn't valid?
Basically IQ tests are flawed. They be be indicative but often stuff that is valued changes over time. By practising IQ tests you get better at them. Yet a higher IQ doesn't unlock magical abilities or make people more effective.
The thing with IQ tests is that they're supposed to abstractly measure your ability to think, and are not supposed to be just a trivia test of stuff you've learned. If you understand analogy to a depth greater than the average of your population, your test results should show a higher IQ. The hope is that your higher score is due to your innate ability; but it might be that an understanding of analogy is being taught more effectively in schools and you simply paid more attention than your classmates during those lessons. That's the kind of noise I understand they're trying to steer clear of, but it seems that it would be almost impossible to dodge. If the IQ-testing-community decides that a specific ability confers an advantage, wouldn't they ultimately be self-selecting for teachers that would naturally have that ability and who would be able to teach it as a skill? And is that why you think they're doomed to always be wrong?
If being a genius, or for the sake of argument, having a high IQ, is such big advantage, why haven't we evolved to have higher IQs?
And who's to say that we have or have not evolved higher IQs? 20,000 years ago, Neanderthals weren't exactly sitting down to take baseline tests that would enable a comparison to current-man's intelligence. In 20,000 years, however, future-man will be able to run through today's IQ test and see if the average of his contemporaries is higher than that of current-man. (That is, if the differences between the culture expressed on our IQ test and his aren't so great as to make our tests meaningless to him. They're supposed to be culturally neutral, but that's nothing more than a guess about how people think in today's world, let alone 20,000 years from now.)
One thing we do know is that people choose mates likely to produce successful offspring. Think about all the factors that people consider attractive and therefore lead to mating: beauty, strength, intelligence, charm, wealth, power, courage, etc. Wealth and power are interesting because they're not necessarily inherited traits, but they provide evidence of someone who used whatever traits they had to become successful -- therefore they are likely to be good providers for their offspring.
Evolution isn't just about a single mutation. It's about the acceptance of mixing of that mutation back into the culture. People have to repeatedly demonstrate that they choose mates based on that trait for us to call it a success factor. In other words, you haven't seen it because you aren't old enough. (If you want, you can study history to try to figure out if the ancients were as smart as we are now, but that will probably yield nothing more than a debate.)
If higher IQs yield more successful people, they will eventually produce a population with higher IQs. Just don't look for results overnight. Set a reasonable timeframe.
I fall into the category of "write simple methods that are easily proven with automated unit tests." When it comes to patterns, if I see one, they tell me "because you did it this way, it means X to performance, Y to maintainability, and Z to correctness."
I care a lot more about design principles than about design patterns. Give me simple and clear code first. When it follows a pattern, I'll understand the consequences quicker. If it's close to a pattern, I'll stop and think about the differences. Why did you do this? What does this change solve? Your design doesn't have to follow a published pattern, but it has to have a valid purpose.
Patterns always seemed to be labels for things that were obvious to me anyway.
That's almost the exact definition of what a pattern is supposed to be. It should be an obvious name, so we can all talk about the same basic concept with a common shared language. They aren't magic beans you drop in code. they are concepts.
After you grok the concepts they contain, then they become magic beans that you can drop into your code. See the difference?
Any chance they're just witnessing C&C nodes transmitting spam orders or pagerank gaming links to the remaining 99.2% of Friendster accounts (all of which are hacked and forgotten)?
It's a comp sci paper that is looking for connected nodes in a network, and they're using copies of data sets of social networks as their starting point. They aren't monitoring networks looking for "who is exerting influence over them", they're looking for nodes that are well connected to other nodes, presuming those represent the most valuable people to convince.
Now, could those "friends and families" in the network data actually be there as part of a botnet controller and its zombie minions? Sure, why not? But each one of those would be a single node in the set of nodes as having the right connections. Doesn't mean that marketing to the botherder or the botnet is going to get you much business, but if you were looking for someone who has influence, it would identify the botherder and not the bots themselves.
No, that's all factored into it. That's why we have temporary walls, so we can have temporary positions. Everyone knows that the next HMFIC is going to re-org. It's part of the job. So make sure everything can flex when they get rid of the current old bad leader to make room for the next new bad leader.
But the one thing the board never does is to blame the leader, because that calls into question their ability to wisely pick good leaders.
Honest feedback is fine for those of us down in the trenches. But *don't you dare* raise those ugly truths higher up!