Well compared to POTS which used to be just an analog electrical conversion of a sound wave, and is now a simple digital approximation of the same using a trivial digital encoding (i.e. basically plain text), any encryption is going to be relatively much stronger security, even if it's only 56-bit DES encryption or an encryption algorithm with key escrow. He didn't say it was cryptographically strong security.
While Thimerosal was removed from vaccine production in North America in the last decade (and earlier in much of Western Europe), it was until very recently still commonly used in vaccines sent to most other second and third world nations. Only recently has awareness of the possible risk and the political will to demand change from suppliers surfaced in those nations. So people in those countries may have some justification in looking askance of being supplied a product created through a process which is deprecated and viewed with strong suspicion in the 1st world nations.
Mercury is still present in multi-dose flu vaccines and flu vaccines are increasingly promoted for children and infants. So while the mercury load has been removed the mandatory vaccine schedule, many children could still get thimerosal if they get vaccinated for the flu at clinics that use multi-dose vials.
To be fair, it would be the Senate that would need to have the guts to impeach Obama since impeachment of the President is a Senatorial responsibility.
The production cost differences between a $200 million special effects blockbuster and a $20 million comedy are not reflected in the shelf price of the media. Both types of movies are priced similarly in the theatre and sell in a package for about the same price (perhaps a 20% variation) in a given category (DVD vs. BlueRay). Right or wrong, that reinforces the concept in people's minds that the selling price is not significantly linked to the production cost of the movie and that prices are exorbitant compared to the manufacturing cost of the disk. Now you and I realize that the expected volume of units sold affects how the fixed costs are spread over total sales. But, while you may be correct, the marketing approach (/price setting) used by the big movie distributors reinforces the prevailing perception of price fixing/gouging. In the end, actions speak louder than words.
The good news is that Sony was saying that their TV division is losing money and that they will probably be getting out of the business of producing TVs. That will make it harder for them to force this crap down people's throats. LG and Samsung don't have giant media divisions forcing stupid decisions on the electronics divisions.
Recent neurological research shows that learning is more affected by the amount of focus applied during learning than by the duration. Kids just don't have the sustained attention span. That's why it's better to have fewer distractions in a smaller class than more hours in a bigger class. So on the one hand teachers need the extra time to mark assignments (and, in high school, often wind up using much more than 2 more hours a day to do it), and on the other hand just adding more hours is typically a classic study in diminishing returns.
Sure the Japanese and Koreans add many extra hours of studying in "cram" schools to get into the right university, but there's a pretty big cost in burnout and suicide. They also have a very different culture in terms of focus on higher education. Extra hours at home with a parent or tutor work because you intrinsically have a family environment that places a value on education. You try that generally in the USA with current attitudes and what you'll get is two more hours of free babysitting kids who won't focus because they don't want to be there. You have to change the cultural attitude before adding hours will make a difference, and at that point you won't need to add the hours any more.
how did i not state the problem? i explicitly stated
we have a system where kids only go to school 6 hours a day, 1 of which is physical education and one of which is recess/lunch time. that leaves only 4 hours of actual class time instruction. to top that off, they don't go to school for 2 or 3 weeks during the winter and 3 months during the summer because they need some sort of break.
Kids need some unstructured playtime to foster creativity, and physical exercise helps burn off nervous energy and allows them to focus better in a classroom setting. In addition, since there's good indication that moderate physical exercise such as dancing helps protect brain function in the elderly, it probably is beneficial in the young as well. You're also not including that these days kids often have 1 hour of homework after school, and that they often get a full five hours of classroom time (no PE) in the last 2 years of high school. You've got a point that summer break is probably too long and allows them to forget too much. However if most of those other countries with superior results also have long summer breaks, that probably isn't the root of the problem.
although its not really a school system problem, the american culture likes to tag smart people with derogatory terms like geek and nerd and they actually get teased in school.
No. That was the problem 30 years ago and is why the USA is currently falling behind in developing homegrown scientific expertise and has to import most of their talent. Current right-wing USA culture is that anybody with more than a high school degree is an elitist who is out of touch and can't be trusted. Not just the mathematically and technically adept, anybody who pursues further education. There is a strong toxic anti-education undercurrent that permeates current discourse and which poisons the minds of students in the 8 hours they are awake and not in school. If you've got a class of 30 students and 5 of them are disruptive because they have been indoctrinated against the value of an education, then you're not going to have any chance to keep control of the class and actually teach what you're supposed to. Frankly I don't see that changing until the US has screwed itself up so much that that attitude becomes as discredited as supply-side economics.
i'm not sure if you're just being a troll or just really stubborn... but isn't it obvious what the problem is? the education our children are getting is substandard, especially when compared to numerous other countries. i don't think anyone bothered "identifying" it to you because it was so obvious, we just assumed you'd know what we're talking about here.
Actually I've got to agree with the GP. First you've got to identify the problem. Yes bad teachers may be part of the problem, but they may be a miniscule and insignificant part of the problem. Getting the power to fire teachers may cause more problems than it solves, by lowering the expectations of teachers in not treating them like professionals, leading to an environment where those who are professional get offended and find something else to do.
What could be more important than firing bad teachers? You have a substantial portion of the USA population who think that having an education makes you an elitist and an untrustworthy bad person. You have a substantial portion of the population who, due to fundamentalist religious teachings, want to stop the teaching of established scientific thought (evolution, sexual education) because it conflicts with their unsupported biases. Bad teachers may factor in, but they are also an easy scapegoat for a segment of the population that doesn't want to admit that they are a major part of the problem. It's a lot harder to teach effectively when you're dealing with a substantial portion of your student base with a hostile attitude fostered at home.
Maybe strong unions generally coincide with higher scholastic achievement because they both arise from more widespread enlightened attitudes about the value of education and human dignity.
A great example of mixing proprietary software with GPL software is VMware ESXi. The hypervisor rides on Linux
Actually no, it doesn't, although it's an easy misconception. The hypervisor runs on the bare metal. in ESX you have a (redhat-derived) custom VM that is used as the system console for controlling the hypervisor. The console VM isn't viewable or manageable like the guest VMs but its underlying implementation is the same. Because (in ESX 3.0 and earlier) significant configuration procedures could only be performed through the Vmware commands accessed through a bash shell (as opposed to VIClient and/or VCentre), VMware admins generally assumed that the hypervisor ran on Linux, but the reverse is true. Since ESXi4, the system console has been stripped down to a minimal VM with a busybox interface, and configuration is performed via either VI Client or the VMware PowerShell extensions. In VMware 5, the ESX version with the full Linux console VM is no longer even sold and only the ESXi version with the stripped down Busybox console VM is available.
If he bought it used, then their market share hasn't really changed. It's not like the former owner went out and bought a PS/4, is it? It may even have gone down if the former owner bought an XBox 360.
Panda would have been another acceptable animal. They may have thought Penguin was too obvious. For the adjective, I would have preferred Proselitizing.
Many of the mainstream media outlets in the US are part of corporate conglomerates that also own content provider members of the RIAA or MPAA. Even assuming that reporters still have 'clarity and integrity', their program managers and others up the corporate hierarchy may strongly discourage reporting on the subject accurately due to corporate conflicts of interest. As someone else pointed out, SOPA got no coverage by most mainstream news organizations until the blackouts of Wikipedia, Google, and other large websites made knowledge of it so widespread that it became impossible to ignore and still pretend to be a provider of news.
False equivalence. The difference is that there wasn't much in the way of double blind tests establishing the benefits of bloodletting for ill humors. Now, had bloodletting actually been beneficial and so proved by double blind tests, it would have been pretty reasonable to encourage sticking with that treatment until applying moldy bread had been proved superior through similar double-blind testing.
In fact a common treatment for hemachromatosis is a modern version of blood-letting, and applying moldy bread to the body of hemachromatosis patients isn't going to do them much good. And if hemachromatosis doesn't qualify as a form of ill humor, I don't know what does.
Kind of a waste of time, though, isn't it? It'd be cheaper and just as effective to throw high velocity normal matter at the target.
Depends on how you get those warheads. If you manage to establish a tunnel to an anti-matter universe and trade with beings in that universe, then it could come out pretty cheap, with a bonus that you could trade your most toxic garbage afterwards for power generation. You also don't need to worry much about them wanting to invade this universe.
As for "just as effective", do you really think that kinetic weapons are going to pack the same punch as equivalent anti-matter? You have to bring all the projectile mass for those kinetic weapons with you to the battlefield. That's a lot of delta-vee. Those anti-matter missiles could be the size of a pinhead and pack the punch of a tactical nuke.
I want my anti-matter warheads to be made out of anti-matter. Doped anti-sillicon for the control chips, anti-carbon fibre for the structural components, etc. Make the first third of that rocket ablative armor made out of anti-iron. Somebody tries to boil it off with a laser while it's evading and all theyre doing is generating a cloud of antimatter in their path. Transporting the missiles to the battle field is left as an exercise to the reader:-).
Well, to be fair to the original poster, "pads" of paper are less and less common in offices now, and women's sanitary pads get a lot more advertising exposure on TV and other media than the writing kind these days.
On the other hand, Coca Cola cans probably haven't changed significantly in the last 30 years, beyond different paint stencils. Unfortunately, phones and portable computing devices like tablets have become almost as much fashion accessories as utilitarian devices, with model lines being revamped on at longest a yearly basis. That requires more frequent reconfiguration/reprogramming of any robotic production line. That requires expensive technical skills and associated fixed costs that are harder to recuperate over a short product life cycle than would using a big screen to show a few hundred cheap unskilled labourers how to perform a new process.
Some workers at Foxconn were made to clean iPhone screens with a cleaner that is a known neurotoxin but weren't given adequate protective gear. The neurotoxicity led to hand tremors to a point were they were eventually laid off due to an inability to do their job. So yes, I expect that is worse than the local job examples you have given, although when migrant farm workers get sprayed with pesticides it probably comes close.
Oh, we will. At least those who are not living on mineral resource poor island nations expected to disappear underwater will. However consider that for many people currently living in barely habitable areas, AGW turning those lands into inhabitable locations will mean two things: population migration which makes the economic migration of the last 30 years (that already have the Tea Partiers in a lather) look like peanuts, and brutal wars over water and arable land. The last is good if you're into supplying weaponry for the highest bidder. However wars were the stakes are survival, and not just ideology, tend to be the most brutal because possible repercussions over "war crimes" don't matter if your alternative is watching your family/tribe/country drown or starve to death. And once a people have become habituated to that sort of conflict, they will use those tactics to compete for other resources, including ones you might find useful. Finally, for some, no forced adaptation will be possible and AGW-caused change will simply result in death.
I'm reminded of when the hole in the ozone layer was discovered in the 80s and entrenched economic interests fought controls over CFCs and recommended wearing UV-blocking sunglasses and sunblock, omitting how you were supposed to pull that off for the wildlife and livestock. Humans are very good at adapting, but the members of the food chains that we depend on are rarely as gifted in that regard, with dire consequences.
In short, adaptation of this sort usually implies drastic, traumatic change. So saying I'm not willing to change now because I can always adapt later, is sort of like saying I'm not willing to stop drinking heavily now and can deal with treating cirrhosis of the liver when I have to.
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Maybe the batteries aren't rated for the serious continuous shaking you would get in regular off-road driving.
Only count in horseshoes and hand grenades.
Well compared to POTS which used to be just an analog electrical conversion of a sound wave, and is now a simple digital approximation of the same using a trivial digital encoding (i.e. basically plain text), any encryption is going to be relatively much stronger security, even if it's only 56-bit DES encryption or an encryption algorithm with key escrow. He didn't say it was cryptographically strong security.
While Thimerosal was removed from vaccine production in North America in the last decade (and earlier in much of Western Europe), it was until very recently still commonly used in vaccines sent to most other second and third world nations. Only recently has awareness of the possible risk and the political will to demand change from suppliers surfaced in those nations. So people in those countries may have some justification in looking askance of being supplied a product created through a process which is deprecated and viewed with strong suspicion in the 1st world nations.
Mercury is still present in multi-dose flu vaccines and flu vaccines are increasingly promoted for children and infants. So while the mercury load has been removed the mandatory vaccine schedule, many children could still get thimerosal if they get vaccinated for the flu at clinics that use multi-dose vials.
To be fair, it would be the Senate that would need to have the guts to impeach Obama since impeachment of the President is a Senatorial responsibility.
The production cost differences between a $200 million special effects blockbuster and a $20 million comedy are not reflected in the shelf price of the media. Both types of movies are priced similarly in the theatre and sell in a package for about the same price (perhaps a 20% variation) in a given category (DVD vs. BlueRay). Right or wrong, that reinforces the concept in people's minds that the selling price is not significantly linked to the production cost of the movie and that prices are exorbitant compared to the manufacturing cost of the disk. Now you and I realize that the expected volume of units sold affects how the fixed costs are spread over total sales. But, while you may be correct, the marketing approach (/price setting) used by the big movie distributors reinforces the prevailing perception of price fixing/gouging. In the end, actions speak louder than words.
The good news is that Sony was saying that their TV division is losing money and that they will probably be getting out of the business of producing TVs. That will make it harder for them to force this crap down people's throats. LG and Samsung don't have giant media divisions forcing stupid decisions on the electronics divisions.
OK. Go tell this guy.
Recent neurological research shows that learning is more affected by the amount of focus applied during learning than by the duration. Kids just don't have the sustained attention span. That's why it's better to have fewer distractions in a smaller class than more hours in a bigger class. So on the one hand teachers need the extra time to mark assignments (and, in high school, often wind up using much more than 2 more hours a day to do it), and on the other hand just adding more hours is typically a classic study in diminishing returns.
Sure the Japanese and Koreans add many extra hours of studying in "cram" schools to get into the right university, but there's a pretty big cost in burnout and suicide. They also have a very different culture in terms of focus on higher education. Extra hours at home with a parent or tutor work because you intrinsically have a family environment that places a value on education. You try that generally in the USA with current attitudes and what you'll get is two more hours of free babysitting kids who won't focus because they don't want to be there. You have to change the cultural attitude before adding hours will make a difference, and at that point you won't need to add the hours any more.
Kids need some unstructured playtime to foster creativity, and physical exercise helps burn off nervous energy and allows them to focus better in a classroom setting. In addition, since there's good indication that moderate physical exercise such as dancing helps protect brain function in the elderly, it probably is beneficial in the young as well. You're also not including that these days kids often have 1 hour of homework after school, and that they often get a full five hours of classroom time (no PE) in the last 2 years of high school. You've got a point that summer break is probably too long and allows them to forget too much. However if most of those other countries with superior results also have long summer breaks, that probably isn't the root of the problem.
No. That was the problem 30 years ago and is why the USA is currently falling behind in developing homegrown scientific expertise and has to import most of their talent. Current right-wing USA culture is that anybody with more than a high school degree is an elitist who is out of touch and can't be trusted. Not just the mathematically and technically adept, anybody who pursues further education. There is a strong toxic anti-education undercurrent that permeates current discourse and which poisons the minds of students in the 8 hours they are awake and not in school. If you've got a class of 30 students and 5 of them are disruptive because they have been indoctrinated against the value of an education, then you're not going to have any chance to keep control of the class and actually teach what you're supposed to. Frankly I don't see that changing until the US has screwed itself up so much that that attitude becomes as discredited as supply-side economics.
Actually I've got to agree with the GP. First you've got to identify the problem. Yes bad teachers may be part of the problem, but they may be a miniscule and insignificant part of the problem. Getting the power to fire teachers may cause more problems than it solves, by lowering the expectations of teachers in not treating them like professionals, leading to an environment where those who are professional get offended and find something else to do.
What could be more important than firing bad teachers? You have a substantial portion of the USA population who think that having an education makes you an elitist and an untrustworthy bad person. You have a substantial portion of the population who, due to fundamentalist religious teachings, want to stop the teaching of established scientific thought (evolution, sexual education) because it conflicts with their unsupported biases. Bad teachers may factor in, but they are also an easy scapegoat for a segment of the population that doesn't want to admit that they are a major part of the problem. It's a lot harder to teach effectively when you're dealing with a substantial portion of your student base with a hostile attitude fostered at home.
Maybe strong unions generally coincide with higher scholastic achievement because they both arise from more widespread enlightened attitudes about the value of education and human dignity.
Maybe you're getting confused with Cryos? I guess that's an anonymous date of sorts :-)
Actually no, it doesn't, although it's an easy misconception. The hypervisor runs on the bare metal. in ESX you have a (redhat-derived) custom VM that is used as the system console for controlling the hypervisor. The console VM isn't viewable or manageable like the guest VMs but its underlying implementation is the same. Because (in ESX 3.0 and earlier) significant configuration procedures could only be performed through the Vmware commands accessed through a bash shell (as opposed to VIClient and/or VCentre), VMware admins generally assumed that the hypervisor ran on Linux, but the reverse is true. Since ESXi4, the system console has been stripped down to a minimal VM with a busybox interface, and configuration is performed via either VI Client or the VMware PowerShell extensions. In VMware 5, the ESX version with the full Linux console VM is no longer even sold and only the ESXi version with the stripped down Busybox console VM is available.
If he bought it used, then their market share hasn't really changed. It's not like the former owner went out and bought a PS/4, is it? It may even have gone down if the former owner bought an XBox 360.
Panda would have been another acceptable animal. They may have thought Penguin was too obvious. For the adjective, I would have preferred Proselitizing.
Many of the mainstream media outlets in the US are part of corporate conglomerates that also own content provider members of the RIAA or MPAA. Even assuming that reporters still have 'clarity and integrity', their program managers and others up the corporate hierarchy may strongly discourage reporting on the subject accurately due to corporate conflicts of interest. As someone else pointed out, SOPA got no coverage by most mainstream news organizations until the blackouts of Wikipedia, Google, and other large websites made knowledge of it so widespread that it became impossible to ignore and still pretend to be a provider of news.
False equivalence. The difference is that there wasn't much in the way of double blind tests establishing the benefits of bloodletting for ill humors. Now, had bloodletting actually been beneficial and so proved by double blind tests, it would have been pretty reasonable to encourage sticking with that treatment until applying moldy bread had been proved superior through similar double-blind testing.
In fact a common treatment for hemachromatosis is a modern version of blood-letting, and applying moldy bread to the body of hemachromatosis patients isn't going to do them much good. And if hemachromatosis doesn't qualify as a form of ill humor, I don't know what does.
Depends on how you get those warheads. If you manage to establish a tunnel to an anti-matter universe and trade with beings in that universe, then it could come out pretty cheap, with a bonus that you could trade your most toxic garbage afterwards for power generation. You also don't need to worry much about them wanting to invade this universe.
As for "just as effective", do you really think that kinetic weapons are going to pack the same punch as equivalent anti-matter? You have to bring all the projectile mass for those kinetic weapons with you to the battlefield. That's a lot of delta-vee. Those anti-matter missiles could be the size of a pinhead and pack the punch of a tactical nuke.
I want my anti-matter warheads to be made out of anti-matter. Doped anti-sillicon for the control chips, anti-carbon fibre for the structural components, etc. Make the first third of that rocket ablative armor made out of anti-iron. Somebody tries to boil it off with a laser while it's evading and all theyre doing is generating a cloud of antimatter in their path. Transporting the missiles to the battle field is left as an exercise to the reader :-).
Well, to be fair to the original poster, "pads" of paper are less and less common in offices now, and women's sanitary pads get a lot more advertising exposure on TV and other media than the writing kind these days.
On the other hand, Coca Cola cans probably haven't changed significantly in the last 30 years, beyond different paint stencils. Unfortunately, phones and portable computing devices like tablets have become almost as much fashion accessories as utilitarian devices, with model lines being revamped on at longest a yearly basis. That requires more frequent reconfiguration/reprogramming of any robotic production line. That requires expensive technical skills and associated fixed costs that are harder to recuperate over a short product life cycle than would using a big screen to show a few hundred cheap unskilled labourers how to perform a new process.
Some workers at Foxconn were made to clean iPhone screens with a cleaner that is a known neurotoxin but weren't given adequate protective gear. The neurotoxicity led to hand tremors to a point were they were eventually laid off due to an inability to do their job. So yes, I expect that is worse than the local job examples you have given, although when migrant farm workers get sprayed with pesticides it probably comes close.
"Hydrogen" is a form of energy storage and transport, not an energy source.
Oh, we will. At least those who are not living on mineral resource poor island nations expected to disappear underwater will. However consider that for many people currently living in barely habitable areas, AGW turning those lands into inhabitable locations will mean two things: population migration which makes the economic migration of the last 30 years (that already have the Tea Partiers in a lather) look like peanuts, and brutal wars over water and arable land. The last is good if you're into supplying weaponry for the highest bidder. However wars were the stakes are survival, and not just ideology, tend to be the most brutal because possible repercussions over "war crimes" don't matter if your alternative is watching your family/tribe/country drown or starve to death. And once a people have become habituated to that sort of conflict, they will use those tactics to compete for other resources, including ones you might find useful. Finally, for some, no forced adaptation will be possible and AGW-caused change will simply result in death.
I'm reminded of when the hole in the ozone layer was discovered in the 80s and entrenched economic interests fought controls over CFCs and recommended wearing UV-blocking sunglasses and sunblock, omitting how you were supposed to pull that off for the wildlife and livestock. Humans are very good at adapting, but the members of the food chains that we depend on are rarely as gifted in that regard, with dire consequences.
In short, adaptation of this sort usually implies drastic, traumatic change. So saying I'm not willing to change now because I can always adapt later, is sort of like saying I'm not willing to stop drinking heavily now and can deal with treating cirrhosis of the liver when I have to.