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  1. Live off WHAT land. The land will all be owned by someone else. This is already well underway. (Check out real estate prices.)

    Interest rates are below inflation, making it nearly impossible to save. People of moderate means who own land are being slowly squeezed off of it. Sometimes because of job mobility requirements, sometimes because of taxes. Sometimes for other reasons. No one thing is doing it, it's a death of a thousand cuts. If you do maintain ownership of land, it's being hemmed about with increasing restrictions as to what you can do on it, and who is allowed to intrude without warning...sometimes violently.

    Mind you, I'm just describing WHAT is happening, not why. Often the reasons are quite reasonable. If people are living close together, you don't want your neighbors burning soft coal. But individuals are generally not positioned to take advantage of the changes, or at least most of the benefits of any particular change will tend to fall to one particular group...often people who don't live in the area being regulated.

    Then there's robotics. Ever hear the phrase "The power of the press belongs to the man who owns one."? Currently practical robots are EXPENSIVE. They may multiply capabilities, but only for the benefit of those who own them and can situate them advantageously. (A factory robot sitting in a home would be a net detriment.)

    Then there's the DMCA. That may have been sold to the public as being for the benefit of those who produce the works, but they have received next to no benefit, and often have been severely penalized by it. The actual text of the laws makes it clear that they are not intended for the benefit of artists or musicians, and that any benefit such folk get from the laws is purely happenstance. E.g. most musicians don't have a lawyer on retainer, but without such prosecuting a violation is too expensive. (Most DMCA takedown requests are technically invalid, but there's no penalty for making a "good faith" false takedown request, and the meaning of "good faith" has been stretched to not require any human oversight, or any evidence of correctness. So it's clearly mainly intended to stop ALL sharing, whether valid or not.)

    Etc.

    Now we come to weaponry. Ever hear of robot soldiers? The development of them is what the current "war" in the middle east is about. And remember to take derivatives of "The power of the press belongs to the man who owns one.". (Drone regulations have just started. They are clearly necessary, and are currently being done with a light touch. But once in place they can be slowly tightened if necessary.)

  2. Re:It's a design patent - big deal on Microsoft Patents a Slider, Earning EFF's "Stupid Patent of the Month" Award (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Samsung might well disagree with you.

    When something is obvious it should not qualify for a patent of ANY description. Use a trademark or a copyright.

  3. Only until someone gets sued. Then it stops being just stupid and becomes dangerously malicious.

    If they want to keep someone from using their appearance, then have them use a trademark.

  4. Re:Subject matter experts vs teachers on US Dept. of Ed: English, History, and Civics Teachers Good Enough For CS Class · · Score: 1

    Program design is an important part of computer science, though not the only important part. And an important part of program design is to design programs that communicate will with the (expected) user. And this is the place where computer science interfaces with Basic Computer Use.

    There's no reason "how to use a (particular) word processor" shouldn't be taught by an English teacher. As a part of the English class. (But you'd better supply in-class use of whatever word processor is being taught.) Basic use should be easily covered in less than a week....probably spread out over the term in one day, or one topic, sessions. (There's no reason to cover, e.g., macros unless they are required by the class.) But that's not computer science.

  5. I would suspect that in the private school the classes were smaller...but it's certainly true that not being able to effectively discipline the trouble makers is a big part of the problem.

  6. It's easier to imagine a Beowulf clusterfuck of English teachers in the CS classroom.

  7. My wife dropped out of Algebra because the instructor (I won't call him a teacher) was the football coach, and spent most of the class talking about sports. She sat in the back trying to read Helmholtz "Theory of Sound" and ended that class (she couldn't drop it until the end of the semester) not even realizing that Algebra had anything to do with the equations in the book that she couldn't understand.

    So, yes, she didn't want to be in that class. But not because she didn't want to learn math. (To be fair, she would not have been good at math even with a decent teacher, but that's a separate matter.)

  8. Re:Unconvinced... on US Dept. of Ed: English, History, and Civics Teachers Good Enough For CS Class · · Score: 1

    Yes/No. While I agree that that is what it was like then, that's not what it is like now. Now there are all sorts of games that you can have access to without bothering to type them in, so much of the motivation that you describe is missing. And things that people want to secure actually can be secured. And there are excessive punishments for experimentation outside the bounds.

    Probably the best thing would be programming computer controlled robots. I haven't looked into it, but it seems as if there might still be a lot of "low hanging fruit" in that area. (Drones would also work, but the government seems to be staring to stomp on that pretty heavily. And not without reason.)

  9. Re:Bullshit Regulations on US Dept. of Ed: English, History, and Civics Teachers Good Enough For CS Class · · Score: 1

    Common Core is reasonable. The testing regimen they use to enforce it deserves all the scorn it gets, and more. So do the inspectors they send around to ensure that teachers are teaching anything beyond the core or varying from the plan. And the regulations that those idiots enforce.

    The system was designed so that most schools could not meet the goals. And I believe that it was with malice afore thought. Perhaps it has since been modified, but at the time I checked each year you had to do better than the previous year, no mater what students you had to deal with...and you couldn't do that indefinitely even with a standardized set of identical students. (Which is clearly impossible.)

  10. Re:The DoE is, and has always been useless. on US Dept. of Ed: English, History, and Civics Teachers Good Enough For CS Class · · Score: 1

    Sorry, but DOE (DoE?) is department of energy. So education needed a different abbreviation.

    Actually, in good context either works well, and who cares what the official abbreviation is. But when the context is "we're talking about government departments" then you do need to distinguish, so the feds need to worry about clashes in TLAs for department names. In this post we're only talking about one of them, so who cares which name is used, they're both obvious in context.

  11. Re:Subject matter experts vs teachers on US Dept. of Ed: English, History, and Civics Teachers Good Enough For CS Class · · Score: 1

    College level CS skills is one thing, but most people have essentially NO IDEA of how computers work. NONE. To them it might as well be magic. And these people should not be teaching CS at any level.

    That said, there's a big question in my mind as to what CS is doing in an elementary curriculum anyway. Basic Computer Use is one thing, but that's so removed from CS that there's almost no connection. (The only connection is at the level in user interface design.)

    If they're actually talking about basic computer use skills, then it makes sense that just about any teacher could handle it, but it doesn't make any sense to pull it into a separate class.

    I suspect that the rules are being written by people who not only never use an actual computer, they don't even use a smart-phone (in default mode, i.e., not as a programming platform).

  12. Well, I don't find it hard to believe that you're in education, but I suspect you're an administrator or some other non-teaching role. And you clearly expect teachers to not be the prime wage earner for their family.

    I *do* agree that there are too many inadequate teachers, but OTOH there aren't enough teachers, and class sizes are too large. And schools don't give proper support, at least in the inner cities. My wife reports one teacher who had to supply her class with toilet paper, because the school rest rooms didn't stock it. So *I* would level criticism at the administrators and the funding authorities before even considering criticizing the teachers.

  13. Re:A frozen string literal pragma on Ruby 2.3.0 Released (ruby-lang.org) · · Score: 1

    I understand. Also, I believe, Rubinius. But that's not the Ruby we're talking about. We're talking about the one that just released a new version.

    Frozen strings are not required for multi-core execution, but they facilitate it.

  14. Re:rookie mistake on Vice: Internet Freedom Is Actively Dissolving In America (vice.com) · · Score: 1

    Sorry, but you are requiring all members of the society, or at least all that hold any power, to hold a standardized belief. That's not exactly a free society. (And it's also pretty unlikely that any such society could ever exist, given the belief you are requiring them to hold.)

    What you need is a society where the design of the system allows unpopular, and unpopular with the powerful, views to be published. One way to accomplish this is anonymity. Are there others? Perhaps, but it hasn't been experimentally demonstrated...unless, of course, you require those who wish to voice unpopular views to be subjected to punitive results which can be arbitrarily harsh.

  15. Re:A frozen string literal pragma on Ruby 2.3.0 Released (ruby-lang.org) · · Score: 2

    Frozen strings are extremely useful when doing multi-threaded code. I take this as a sign that Ruby is getting ready for actual use of multi-core execution. (Ruby has an equivalent to Python's GIL which currently prevents multiple simultaneous execution in the same interpeter/virtual machine.)

  16. While correct, a password usually only has a very little information it is because of the larger embedded context. I.e., if your language is English you find it more common for certain letters to follow other letters, and for letters to follow letters, etc. So the intrinsic information is the number of bits used to express it, but the information in context is the number of bits required to represent it using an optimal compression algorithm using all the contextual information that you know. Both are valid measures of information.

  17. I'm not saying the definition is bas, as it clearly isn't. In either field. I'm saying the two fields apparently use the term quite differently. This doesn't make either wrong. And I think that both would agree on the basics, e.g. that a bit is a unit of information.

    P.S.: I tend to think of this as an oversimplification, but it's one we've built all our digital hardware around. The problem is it seems to make any relatively prime chunk of information require an infinite number of bits to express accurately. Try, e.g., to accurately express 1/3 except as a binary number. But practically the higher primes rarely occur, and usually an approximate value is good enough that we don't worry about the finer details. And when we do, there are ways to refer to it...e.g. ratios between two integers. Of course, that doesn't work for the irrational numbers... So I don't think we have an exact theory of information, but only a good approximation. But it's quite a good approximation.

    P.P.S.: Perhaps a good theory of information would easily solve the three body problem. Currently we rely on infinite approximations, that we necessarily cut off at some point. Now chaos theory implies that even knowing the exact solution wouldn't help us, because we couldn't specify the initial conditions exactly enough, so that might not be a real benefit, but it would be a good theoretical benefit. There are a few other cases where the two body case is easy (well, relatively easy) and the three body (or five body, or...) can only be approximated. I have a suspicion that in many of these cases it's because somewhere in the fundamental assumptions there is something where a rule is used that works well for pairs of items, but not for relatively prime groupings. (Of course, here *I'm* assuming that a case with 4 elements can be handled as a pair of pairs, and this isn't always true.)

  18. Re:He caused his own inconvenience on Forrest Mimms On Modern Air Travel With a Bag Full of Electronics · · Score: 1

    To be fair, if it's battery powered it can easily become a bomb. But they don't confiscate all the cell phones.

  19. It doesn't seem to match the definition of information that programmers use routinely in their work. I'm fairly certain that they is a mathematical identity between the two uses of the word, as they both tie back to Shannon, but the use seems to have developed extremely differently.

    To a programmer every feature that is used to describe an object represents a certain number of bits of information. Clearly it is being asserted that physicists use a very different meaning. It sounds is if it's something like "the log of the number of bits required to fully describe what is knowable about the state". This may actually be closer to Shannon's original meaning, as he was concerned about the amount of information that could be transmitted through a channel of a given bandwidth in a given amount of time, but that's a bit removed from the standard meaning used in computer science, programming, etc.

  20. In my sister's case the airline made space available for both my wife and my sister on a later flight. This was to the credit of the airline, and it cost them two passenger tickets. In the case this story is about the fares were not refunded, and no later flight was allowed.

    I hope that the airline billed the TSA for the lost passenger fares, but I doubt that they're allowed to.

  21. Re:There are US DHS at London Gatwick?? on US Stops British Muslim Family From Boarding Flight To Visit Disneyland (theguardian.com) · · Score: 1

    The government was the one that stole the money. Sorry, but the airline was coerced by the government into canceling their boarding permit. So it was the government that stole the money.

  22. Re:Hyberbole much? on TSA Body Scanner Opt-out No Longer Guaranteed (slashgear.com) · · Score: 1

    IIRC, it has been officially declared that anyone within 200 miles of an international air port or a border is living in an area where the border police (I forget the term used) can harass them as they see fit without warrant or explained cause. (I think they're supposed to actually have a cause, but they don't need to let you know what it is.)

    And, IIRC, this was accepted by the Supreme Court.

    I, personally, believe this to be one, among many other, decisions that the Supreme Court made in defiance of the clear wording of the constitution. OTOH, I also believe that if the constitution were strictly enforced as written, that the country would be ungovernable. Unfortunately, instead of patching the constitution in the manner provided, the government has preferred to ignore it while pretending not to.

  23. Re:Actually, they are checked for dose on TSA Body Scanner Opt-out No Longer Guaranteed (slashgear.com) · · Score: 1

    I believe they are subject to regulation. I also believe that they are operated by incompetents, and that the inspections are slipshod. And that the operators have little to no concern with either how much radiation they are exposing those they scan to or with how much radiation they expose themselves to.

  24. Re: Hyberbole much? on TSA Body Scanner Opt-out No Longer Guaranteed (slashgear.com) · · Score: 1

    What evidence would you expect to find if that happened? All I can think of is an apparently random group of people showing up with cancer over the next couple of decades...and good luck in either tying that back to the malfunctioning machines or in getting recompense.

    If they claim their machines aren't working, I suspect that either they're lying or the malfunction inconveniences them. If they claim they're working fine, I don't think they mean the machines aren't injuring those being scanned. (FWIW, I really suspect they're too incompetent to have a valid opinion about that.)

  25. FWIW, my sister had trouble travelling from Las Vegas to San Jose, CA. Stupid idiotic "security" caused her to miss her flight. After that I'll believe any story about how stupid, inept, unkind, disrespectful, and uncouth the TSA are. After all, I have to presume that she didn't receive the worst possible treatment. Mind you, this doesn't contradict "Most people don't have any trouble." as there was no reason or explanation given either before or afterwards. And no apology. And on the same flight my wife, who was travelling with her, didn't have any trouble (except getting off the plane when my sister was held captive without warrant. I'm not sure whether that should count as kidnapping or false arrest, but they can get away with it because nobody has the right to challenge them. Not even a US Senator.