I don't think that he is an idiot. Ron Paul's ideas are extreme, but in the end it unfortunately comes down to money. The federal budget needs to be balanced, and that's about it. While RP comes with an ideological baggage that I disagree with, I'd gladly have him for a term rather than say GWB. The ideology is no worse nor better than any other high-ranking politician, but at least we'd get federal finances in order out of it. Seems like an acceptable tradeoff to me, since I don't expect any less ideology from a different republican. I disagree with him about a lot of things, but he's the least evil of all the candidates I think. I wish Obama had the balls to get our spending in order...
You've just eloquently stated that the problem is with high schools. Fix those. Don't apply college as a band-aid. If, over time, undergrad education turns into a joke (as it seems to be so far anyway), will you propose graduate degrees to "fix" that? Sigh. All the money that gets thrown into undergrad degrees as a band aid should be thrown at improving high schools, that's all. I also think that there needs to be a reform of boards of education -- unfortunately, democracy seems not to work there, as it caters to the constituency. That means that impoverished areas will always offer poorer education, but not because of lack money, though, but simply because the boards of education have to cater to wishes of people who often don't give a fuck about quality education at all.
I don't think we need bank clerks or office paper pushers with undergrad degrees. It comes at a big cost to the society, and those jobs do not require that kind of education at all. We don't need renaissance people giving out change, you know. And you don't need to be a renaissance man to be ethical in doing your job either. As far as I can tell, all high-level crooks (anywhere in the world, in any "subject" -- whether politicians, bankers, etc) are educated quite well.
As for the job requirements: this is very true even outside of the U.S. I have a first hand experience in a tax-related govt job in Poland. If you get employed, they expect you to get a master's degree ASAP. Then, they'd like to you get a Ph.D. as well. All that cost for what is essentially a bureaucracy where if you know high-school maths and pick up some law along the way, you'll do fine until retirement. There's plenty of countries in Europe where bank clerks are expected to have BS degrees. The fuck?
The core problem: it's a pipe dream that you can educate people by edict. That's why NCLB is such a stupid idea. Education needs a culture to go with it. Parents who are educated and can guide their kids, society that places value on education and being smart, all that jazz. It's very rarely that you get people who grow up in a family or environment that did not value education at all, and become well educated with a position to show for it. Yet the politicians, and you, seem to think that just giving money to people to "get educated" will somehow fix things. No, it won't. This needs to happen over generations, and the availability of student loans has pretty much missed that point -- just like getting more women won't get a baby delivered any faster, getting more individuals educated won't make a society educated and able to advance towards less menial work.
Shit, no one is saying we should abolish everything. There's a valid discussion to be had about the unintended consequences of stuff. I posit that federal student loans have been exploited by a large number of unscrupulous corporations (for profit colleges), and the ensuing bubble has raised costs of education for everyone. The feds are in a deep stinking budget hole. The option of not cutting out everything that can be possibly cut has been long passed. Given that the student loans are not any sort of a core federal government function, they IMHO rightfully should go. The for-profit college system should collapse, and the "businesspeople" (leeches) who established it should be shamed like they deserve to be.
Heck, there are plenty of colleges where the quality of education is very poor, and where the education does not improve one's employment prospects nor one's usefullness to the society.
The problem is that the federal student loans, while genuinely useful to some, have been exploited pretty much to death by the for-profit colleges. Those do powerful marketing and have pretty much established the idea that everyone should go to college, no matter what. It's the same with diamond jewelry: somehow a semi-rare rock is elevated to cult status, and every woman in the U.S. feels that getting a big one on a golden ring is cool and shit. The colleges merely took a good marketing lesson from DeBeers and applied it to a different market. The outcome is pretty much the same. Couples get into debt for shiny rocks. Students get into debt for college education that can be very well useless to them. Nothing new here, move along.
As much as I think some of RPs ideas are overreaching, I do believe that axing or at least reforming the federal loan program is a must. As an alternative to axing, I'd limit its availability to people who to non-profit schools. I'm sure a more extreme option exists, say limiting it to people who go to non-profit public schools.
OK, WTF is A-level something, and what is the meaning of the 'A' there? Is there B-level something? D-level? Not everyone comes from wherever this term is commonly used, and I didn't find anything very illuminating via google. Plenty of sites would just use other cryptic acronyms to explain it. Communications fail, if you ask me.
Presumably a lot of military hardware uses a couple common satellite buses, so the parts could perhaps be interchangeable. I think that reusing across dissimilar craft is a pipe dream for now.
It's not about imagination, it's about what's practical. There's plenty of movie ideas that are pipe dreams simply because they just plain won't work because of human factors involved. My pet peeve: using your gaze as a pointing device -- utterly stupid, yet sounds cool and futuristic. Why stupid? Because you use gaze for visual exploration, and this comes naturally. Switching from exploration (visual input) to pointing is, at best, locking you out from visual exploration. This utterly breaks down if there's anything even remotely dynamic about the scene you're looking at, as you get involuntary saccades. Of course the device knows what's changing and can classify saccades as involuntary due to changes in the display, but that doesn't make it much better. If you're watching a video of any sort, your pointing ability is gone. You'd need to do something silly like perhaps a double-blink to freeze the screen and switch to pointing mode. Been there, played with it, and it's just so staggeringly cumbersome even if you try hard to get used to it for a couple weeks. Never mind that our fovea is simply too big -- saccades are not very accurate. Even a very dirty mechanical mouse beats eye gaze "accuracy" by an order of magnitude. And it's all assuming you have a theoretically ideal eye movement tracker (with no error) -- I'm talking about physiological pointing error. You'd need UI elements that are silly big -- it'd look like tpuch UI designed for people who wear gloves. On an Antarctic expedition to boot.
As for "3D resizable holographic UI": it's projected "mid-air". If it's "mid-air", you need power for the light source. It'll make the consumption of the worst cellphone out there look silly in comparison. Holography doesn't make your eye magically more sensitive. It has to work in sunlight, yaknow. So that's silly too because basic physics don't bow to engineering, and you're proposing an engineering "workaround" around Nature.
The only low-energy non-conventional display technology, other than using electrodes, requires projecting images directly to your retina. This kind of technology is quite feasible -- we have both sensitive enough remote eye tracking, and projection systems (electro-optics), so that's something that at this point in time only needs money and engineering.
Lastly, the mobile you consider state-of-the-art will be mocked as utterly campy and brick-like by whatever they have in 10 years.
You're wrong here. Our hands don't get all that much smaller over time. The dimensions of a cell phone's user interface surface have to remain where they are. As to the rest: there isn't all that much to be done to an iPhone-sized cellphone. It's ridiculously tiny if you look inside. Even if the motherboard was infinitely small and took no volume at all, you still need the battery, antennas, UI surface. So all you could get is perhaps a slightly thinner iPhone and that's it. I'd say the original iPhone is still a very futuristic device, if you think as to what was available mere 10 years ago. The newer models are pretty much thinner and that's about it as far as form factor goes.
That picture specifically does not show how the pattern looks like between top of the mast and ground at a particular site. It does not necessarily need to resemble the long-distance picture because local effects such as diffraction and reflection on nearby structures will greatly affect what's going on.
Shit, pretend I never posted the original post. I have got confused for reasons I don't yet understand. You're entirely right, thiomersal quickly dissociates to ethylmercury, and the latter is plenty bioavailable. It is toxic in large enough amounts. I should have double-checked that. Apologies.
Nope. It's not only about how many atoms of mercury do you eat, it's also about what substance are those atoms in. Tuna has elemental (atomic) mercury and compounds that are easily bioavailable: the body will get the mercury out of them, and that's what counts in exposure limits. Non-bioavailable mercury, like in thiomersal, is not included in those limits -- there's no mechanism in our body to break down thiomersal to get at the mercury. If the mercury is bound and cannot participate in our biochemistry, it's as good as not being there.
It's like saying there's a limit on how many apples you can eat a week, and then insisting that oranges count under that limit too because both are fruit.
It's more of a case in point that it's a rare thing, so the assumption that the risk is low is allright. Nobody claims the risk is zero, in spite of it being a common misconception (and reason why U.S. airport security theatre is so).
I think that such laws are because people are becoming spineless softies who can't be bothered to think and take responsibility for their decisions. The zero tolerance laws basically promote stupidity: you don't need to think, as an administrator, judge or a juror, because the "books" made decisions for you. This goes for all sorts of zero tolerance rules.
In some school districts, zero tolerance for prescription strength drugs means that a kid with strong ibuprofen gets sacked automatically, with no mental effort on anyone's part. That way the principal can blame the decision on someone else -- it's like saying "I'm a sissy who can't think, but here's why". Having an excuse is no reason that the macho administrator is any less of a sissy...
I don't see anything legally wrong with "barely" legal prostitutes. Either they are legal in given jurisdiction or not. Whether it's an ethical or moral thing to do, is another story, of course.
The ReTWIS has lower resolution than this project, it'd seem, and it's similarly a 1D antenna system only to provide a cross-sectional view.
The Xaver 800 seems to have comparable resolution and 2D antenna to provide 3D imaging, but is using much higher-tech approach. TFA is a system you can easily homebrew if you have RF experience, the Xaver 800 -- not so much.
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I don't think that he is an idiot. Ron Paul's ideas are extreme, but in the end it unfortunately comes down to money. The federal budget needs to be balanced, and that's about it. While RP comes with an ideological baggage that I disagree with, I'd gladly have him for a term rather than say GWB. The ideology is no worse nor better than any other high-ranking politician, but at least we'd get federal finances in order out of it. Seems like an acceptable tradeoff to me, since I don't expect any less ideology from a different republican. I disagree with him about a lot of things, but he's the least evil of all the candidates I think. I wish Obama had the balls to get our spending in order...
You've just eloquently stated that the problem is with high schools. Fix those. Don't apply college as a band-aid. If, over time, undergrad education turns into a joke (as it seems to be so far anyway), will you propose graduate degrees to "fix" that? Sigh. All the money that gets thrown into undergrad degrees as a band aid should be thrown at improving high schools, that's all. I also think that there needs to be a reform of boards of education -- unfortunately, democracy seems not to work there, as it caters to the constituency. That means that impoverished areas will always offer poorer education, but not because of lack money, though, but simply because the boards of education have to cater to wishes of people who often don't give a fuck about quality education at all.
Employers can, and should, train on the job. It's way cheaper than paying a salary that's enough to pay off student debts!
I don't think we need bank clerks or office paper pushers with undergrad degrees. It comes at a big cost to the society, and those jobs do not require that kind of education at all. We don't need renaissance people giving out change, you know. And you don't need to be a renaissance man to be ethical in doing your job either. As far as I can tell, all high-level crooks (anywhere in the world, in any "subject" -- whether politicians, bankers, etc) are educated quite well.
As for the job requirements: this is very true even outside of the U.S. I have a first hand experience in a tax-related govt job in Poland. If you get employed, they expect you to get a master's degree ASAP. Then, they'd like to you get a Ph.D. as well. All that cost for what is essentially a bureaucracy where if you know high-school maths and pick up some law along the way, you'll do fine until retirement. There's plenty of countries in Europe where bank clerks are expected to have BS degrees. The fuck?
The core problem: it's a pipe dream that you can educate people by edict. That's why NCLB is such a stupid idea. Education needs a culture to go with it. Parents who are educated and can guide their kids, society that places value on education and being smart, all that jazz. It's very rarely that you get people who grow up in a family or environment that did not value education at all, and become well educated with a position to show for it. Yet the politicians, and you, seem to think that just giving money to people to "get educated" will somehow fix things. No, it won't. This needs to happen over generations, and the availability of student loans has pretty much missed that point -- just like getting more women won't get a baby delivered any faster, getting more individuals educated won't make a society educated and able to advance towards less menial work.
Shit, no one is saying we should abolish everything. There's a valid discussion to be had about the unintended consequences of stuff. I posit that federal student loans have been exploited by a large number of unscrupulous corporations (for profit colleges), and the ensuing bubble has raised costs of education for everyone. The feds are in a deep stinking budget hole. The option of not cutting out everything that can be possibly cut has been long passed. Given that the student loans are not any sort of a core federal government function, they IMHO rightfully should go. The for-profit college system should collapse, and the "businesspeople" (leeches) who established it should be shamed like they deserve to be.
Heck, there are plenty of colleges where the quality of education is very poor, and where the education does not improve one's employment prospects nor one's usefullness to the society.
The problem is that the federal student loans, while genuinely useful to some, have been exploited pretty much to death by the for-profit colleges. Those do powerful marketing and have pretty much established the idea that everyone should go to college, no matter what. It's the same with diamond jewelry: somehow a semi-rare rock is elevated to cult status, and every woman in the U.S. feels that getting a big one on a golden ring is cool and shit. The colleges merely took a good marketing lesson from DeBeers and applied it to a different market. The outcome is pretty much the same. Couples get into debt for shiny rocks. Students get into debt for college education that can be very well useless to them. Nothing new here, move along.
As much as I think some of RPs ideas are overreaching, I do believe that axing or at least reforming the federal loan program is a must. As an alternative to axing, I'd limit its availability to people who to non-profit schools. I'm sure a more extreme option exists, say limiting it to people who go to non-profit public schools.
Thank you!
OK, WTF is A-level something, and what is the meaning of the 'A' there? Is there B-level something? D-level? Not everyone comes from wherever this term is commonly used, and I didn't find anything very illuminating via google. Plenty of sites would just use other cryptic acronyms to explain it. Communications fail, if you ask me.
Presumably a lot of military hardware uses a couple common satellite buses, so the parts could perhaps be interchangeable. I think that reusing across dissimilar craft is a pipe dream for now.
It's not about imagination, it's about what's practical. There's plenty of movie ideas that are pipe dreams simply because they just plain won't work because of human factors involved. My pet peeve: using your gaze as a pointing device -- utterly stupid, yet sounds cool and futuristic. Why stupid? Because you use gaze for visual exploration, and this comes naturally. Switching from exploration (visual input) to pointing is, at best, locking you out from visual exploration. This utterly breaks down if there's anything even remotely dynamic about the scene you're looking at, as you get involuntary saccades. Of course the device knows what's changing and can classify saccades as involuntary due to changes in the display, but that doesn't make it much better. If you're watching a video of any sort, your pointing ability is gone. You'd need to do something silly like perhaps a double-blink to freeze the screen and switch to pointing mode. Been there, played with it, and it's just so staggeringly cumbersome even if you try hard to get used to it for a couple weeks. Never mind that our fovea is simply too big -- saccades are not very accurate. Even a very dirty mechanical mouse beats eye gaze "accuracy" by an order of magnitude. And it's all assuming you have a theoretically ideal eye movement tracker (with no error) -- I'm talking about physiological pointing error. You'd need UI elements that are silly big -- it'd look like tpuch UI designed for people who wear gloves. On an Antarctic expedition to boot.
As for "3D resizable holographic UI": it's projected "mid-air". If it's "mid-air", you need power for the light source. It'll make the consumption of the worst cellphone out there look silly in comparison. Holography doesn't make your eye magically more sensitive. It has to work in sunlight, yaknow. So that's silly too because basic physics don't bow to engineering, and you're proposing an engineering "workaround" around Nature.
The only low-energy non-conventional display technology, other than using electrodes, requires projecting images directly to your retina. This kind of technology is quite feasible -- we have both sensitive enough remote eye tracking, and projection systems (electro-optics), so that's something that at this point in time only needs money and engineering.
Lastly, the mobile you consider state-of-the-art will be mocked as utterly campy and brick-like by whatever they have in 10 years.
You're wrong here. Our hands don't get all that much smaller over time. The dimensions of a cell phone's user interface surface have to remain where they are. As to the rest: there isn't all that much to be done to an iPhone-sized cellphone. It's ridiculously tiny if you look inside. Even if the motherboard was infinitely small and took no volume at all, you still need the battery, antennas, UI surface. So all you could get is perhaps a slightly thinner iPhone and that's it. I'd say the original iPhone is still a very futuristic device, if you think as to what was available mere 10 years ago. The newer models are pretty much thinner and that's about it as far as form factor goes.
That picture specifically does not show how the pattern looks like between top of the mast and ground at a particular site. It does not necessarily need to resemble the long-distance picture because local effects such as diffraction and reflection on nearby structures will greatly affect what's going on.
Shit, pretend I never posted the original post. I have got confused for reasons I don't yet understand. You're entirely right, thiomersal quickly dissociates to ethylmercury, and the latter is plenty bioavailable. It is toxic in large enough amounts. I should have double-checked that. Apologies.
Nope. It's not only about how many atoms of mercury do you eat, it's also about what substance are those atoms in. Tuna has elemental (atomic) mercury and compounds that are easily bioavailable: the body will get the mercury out of them, and that's what counts in exposure limits. Non-bioavailable mercury, like in thiomersal, is not included in those limits -- there's no mechanism in our body to break down thiomersal to get at the mercury. If the mercury is bound and cannot participate in our biochemistry, it's as good as not being there.
It's like saying there's a limit on how many apples you can eat a week, and then insisting that oranges count under that limit too because both are fruit.
Is it you, Dr Bob?
It's more of a case in point that it's a rare thing, so the assumption that the risk is low is allright. Nobody claims the risk is zero, in spite of it being a common misconception (and reason why U.S. airport security theatre is so).
They do all sorts of profiling all right -- where it makes sense. There aren't all that many suicide bombers with, say, nordic features.
I think that such laws are because people are becoming spineless softies who can't be bothered to think and take responsibility for their decisions. The zero tolerance laws basically promote stupidity: you don't need to think, as an administrator, judge or a juror, because the "books" made decisions for you. This goes for all sorts of zero tolerance rules.
In some school districts, zero tolerance for prescription strength drugs means that a kid with strong ibuprofen gets sacked automatically, with no mental effort on anyone's part. That way the principal can blame the decision on someone else -- it's like saying "I'm a sissy who can't think, but here's why". Having an excuse is no reason that the macho administrator is any less of a sissy...
I think I'd like a showgirl to be a parliamentarian over Motti :)
I don't see anything legally wrong with "barely" legal prostitutes. Either they are legal in given jurisdiction or not. Whether it's an ethical or moral thing to do, is another story, of course.
Posting to undo the mod. I meant it to be funny, not informative.
The ReTWIS has lower resolution than this project, it'd seem, and it's similarly a 1D antenna system only to provide a cross-sectional view.
The Xaver 800 seems to have comparable resolution and 2D antenna to provide 3D imaging, but is using much higher-tech approach. TFA is a system you can easily homebrew if you have RF experience, the Xaver 800 -- not so much.