Thanks for the heads up. Despite the slower DLS speeds (I've been *very* happy with TW's performance), having capped cable is like leasing a 200mph sports car with a 50 mile/month limit. It's just pointless.
So, yeah, I meant to look into Frontier, who provides my phone service. I didn't know about their business plan. That's great since I already host a small server at home (TW hasn't rotated my DHCP address in almost a year) and I would like something more legit.
As soon as I get my first warning bill (TW is supposed to send out "this month's traffic would have cost you $_____" notices) I'm calling, bolting, and signing up for DSL.
I'm in the area outside of Rochester, where TW plans to cap. Less than an hour from here is Buffalo where Verizon has laid out FiOS. Guess what? No capping in Buffalo.
So, you're correct: Competition cannot cure this, which is why a NY state legislator has rightly observed it as an abuse of monopoly.
Don't worry about it with President Obama. See, when people don't do as his administration *intended*, he just leverages the federal money they depend on to get them back into the fold.
See what Arne Duncan is threatening with states who don't follow his feelings on the stimulus bills' education funds.
As any parent will tell you, the "terrible twos" are a myth. It's the three-year-olds that have the potent combination of independent ability and lack of responsibility.
I think they should name this study in honor of Bill Cosby's "I dun-no!" sketches.
Will you agree there are some authorities that congress should not delegate away? IMHO, governance of property rights is only of those authorities.
Here in NY, we have a great deal of regulating offices that the state legislature created (as you point out, they were well authorized to do so), but now these offices exist without state oversight, yet they wield power greater than the elected officials who created them.
Child protective services offices in many states operate under this lack of oversight.
In psychology and cognitive science, confirmation bias is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and to avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs.
Publication bias arises from the tendency for researchers, editors, and pharmaceutical companies to handle experimental results that are positive (they found something) differently from results that are negative (found that something did not happen) or inconclusive.
A plane landing safely doesn't make the news while a crash does. This may skew our perception of air travel. The same for patent trolls: A relatively small number of malefactors get more press than all the useful ways patent law works.
True. My first reaction was like the GP: The Constitution grants congress the authority to protect intellectual property ("inventions"). I don't see the Patent Office mentioned anywhere therein. While it makes sense that an office would be creating for the application of congressional rules, granting that office the authority to change the rules is tantamount to dereliction of duty.
But then, like you, I looked back at the last dozen-or-so congresses and realized I don't have much faith in them upholding the Constitution either. Whether it's unlawful search and seizure or bills of attainder, I'm pretty sure most of our elected officials flunked high school government.
There is one difference between having congress set the rules and allowing the USPTO do it: We can vote out the congress.
Over time, you can build up evidence of how students under one teacher perform, but the groups of students in a teacher's classroom are not randomized. So basing merit pay on "above average" performance over time will exasperate the differential teacher quality in under-performing areas.
And the issue of judging teacher quality based on student performance on state tests requires interpretations whose validity is not explored in the current Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, NCME, 1999). James Popham wrote a wonderfully brief article in ASCD last year wherein he called these a "second-step inference", and vowed to address them in the next version of the Standards.
The GP says that it would be easy to game a system wherein teachers are judged by their peers. This is true, but I would rather see that (so long as the process was transparent) than the confounded system in place now.
I mean, here in NY the 3rd grade math test in 2007 had an alpha of.71, and yet it was used to judge the quality of schools? I wouldn't accept that low level of consistency from a graduate student survey. Further, the state's technical reports included a factor analysis (to satisfy the unidimensionality assumption of an IRT analysis) and found the math tests to be "almost" unidimensional. ALMOST?!?! An the dominant factor only explained 24% of the score variance.
"OK, let's pretend that the dominant factor is actually 'math ability.' Then 76% of the variance in students' scores were due to something other than math ability?"
All playing the Quake Live beta did was remind me how far we've come in terms of multiplayer FPS. QIII was great in its day and the achievement of putting Quake online like they have cannot be overstated, but I just don't find the game fun anymore. The training match tells you all you need to know about the game: Spawn, Load-up, frag... Spawn, load-up, frag.
Am I the only one who sees a philosophical parallel between current popular science and ancient religion? What people wanted in medieval times was inner-peace, an assurance that their suffering was only temporary. As such, they gave power to those who controlled the knowledge of the afterlife, the theories of the universe, etc. In short "truth."
Now we want more toys, health, and prosperity. Science delivers those to us, so we give power to those who claim a connection to science - even without proof of their connection to "truth". Peasants in Europe took their priest's counsel on faith; we think this is somehow different from trusting scientists when we can't verify 99% of their claims.
Publishing raw data on the web calms these fears to a certain extent, but we're still not the ones collecting the data and most of us aren't familiar enough with the analysis methods to sniff out manipulation. Sister Benedict saw the Virgin in the cave in Lourdes. The ice is melting in the Arctic.
This reminds me of a heated discussion I had with the chair of a department at my uni. He called our work "a waste of time" because our instrument was flawed according to his theory. He asked if I had any data to support our interpretations of the data, so I told him the four analysis I had already completed. He claimed that my data was insufficient to support our continued use of the instrument.
At this point I used a classic line I read in a textbook: "What evidence *would* convince you that this isn't a waste of time?"
He threw up his hands and said, "I don't think this conversation is going to change anyone's mind. Let's move on." Translation: I refuse to even look at the data because it threatens my a priori view, and *I* won't change my mind."
I'm a huge fan of science, so I'm put-out by both sides of the climate debate, but I've seen this human nature operate on much smaller political scales.
And corporal punishment? Seriously? I've been trolled, haven't I:-)
Actually it is still legal in several states. One of my grad students found an article on it last semester. IIRC, Texas and Mississippi employ it most regularly (though not frequently).
1. On the multiple-objectives idea, America's Army got that dead right. The most popular map (Pipeline) had three possible end-games: Capture three minor points, one main point, or kill the opposition. Plenty of games (and even maps within AA) don't achieve this balance, but it is possible.
2. On leveling up good/persistent players to the detriment of noobs, AA's honor system is almost perfect: More play and success give you more honor. Honor can be filtered on each server (e.g. newbie servers for people under 30 honor, elite servers with honor over 50) and is only used to determine who gets first pick of the classes.
But most of the studies that have been published include much more rigor than this conveniently-sampled, not-significance-tested phone survey by the poster. The issue is more the media translating the researchers' conclusion (video game playing is *linked* to X, Y and Z) into a causal association.
From the BYU study:
The study didn't allow Jensen and Walker to determine whether video games are drawing college-age adults away from social settings or if they are a way for those already struggling with relationships to spend their time. Walker guesses both are at play.
Yet I saw at least one newspaper with the headline: "Study shows video games *cause* host of problems."
I could launch into my amateur sociological observations backed up with pure anecdotal evidence but thats treading into potentially dangerous grounds lol
Umm, or you would just be a "social scientist." At least, what we call them in Academia. Of course, they (sometimes) get paod, so you;d have to drop the "amateur" moniker.
I traveled to Egypt to gather colloquial Arabic footage for some online courses. It was a good time, but the "security" issues and the corruption of the local officials was on par with Subsaharan Africa countries.
However, there was a great difference in the freedom of speech category. For example, we were filming in a private household and each family member was taking turns telling jokes. (Like "Wahid saiidi fahim wemaat!") Everything went fine until the ten-year-old son started his joke...
"Al ra-ees Mubarak..." [President Mubarak...]
At which point his father flew to his feet, commanded us to turn of the camera, and took his son in the other room for a talk.
Until Americans are afraid to go on camera with a joke about their president, we're nowhere near Egypt.
Reminds me of when I was an undergrad. I went to school through the summers in a town that only existed for its university, so I lived alone for some of the time. Without other people living with me, I turned off the AC, slept on my schedule, got tons of work done (both for class and for the multiple part-time IT jobs I held down), and ate very frugally. I remember the first summer I had one set of dishes, a skillet, and a sauce pan. When I got a car, I paid cash for it. It lasted me six years with minor repairs that I did myself. Good times.
I now keep my house at 71-degrees F, have full hot water, one almost-paid-off newer car, and I'm looking for another one. What's changed? Marriage and a family. If I lived like you do (and like I did in college), child services would cart off my newborn twins, but my wife would take them somewhere else long before that.
I'm with you on the luxury issues, but don't judge everyone because they're not able to be as extremely misery as you are. Some of us would be if we could, but we have other people depending on us. My extensive collection of Backyardigans DVDs may seem excessive to you, but I prefer it over cable TV. A friend of mine is a consultant and absolutely believes his BMW helps him get jobs.
All I can envision is a digital windmill-with-servos that will cut our workweek in half. Of course, when an earthquake or tornado interferes with the creation of this new infrastructure, we will blame the terrorists and simply work harder to complete it on time. Once done, it the government will lease it to providers who will sell access to those who built it.
And pigs will walk on their hind legs with whips in their trotters.
I was also paranoid, but for slightly different reasons. I'm very open about my ideas and I worked in a lab as a graduate student that caught the attention of another university organization. They asked if we could meet for an informal "idea exchange," to which we agreed because, hey, we're all a part of the same university.
It turns out the organization had just been spun off the university into its own LLC and moved off campus. When we got to their office, the first thing they wanted from us was an NDA. We called bait-and-switch and asked them if they would mind signing an NDA for the ideas *we* would contribute. "That would defeat the purpose of this meeting," they told us.
So we signed, sat through a presentation of their work, gave no feedback and left. It wasn't that we were paranoid of them stealing our work, it was that we refused to get played like that.
Later, I spoke with an expert in my field, who is also an open-content guru, and I asked him how I could avoid things like that. He said, "Post everything you do to Sourceforge. Get it out there under GPL, or CC-non-profit license. If anyone wants to patented it, you'll have the evidence you need." (But that's not legal advice.)
I'm not sure if something like that would work at SUU (Go T-Birds!), since they could easily think *you* stole the code from Sourceforge, but it's an idea.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for the heads up. Despite the slower DLS speeds (I've been *very* happy with TW's performance), having capped cable is like leasing a 200mph sports car with a 50 mile/month limit. It's just pointless.
So, yeah, I meant to look into Frontier, who provides my phone service. I didn't know about their business plan. That's great since I already host a small server at home (TW hasn't rotated my DHCP address in almost a year) and I would like something more legit.
As soon as I get my first warning bill (TW is supposed to send out "this month's traffic would have cost you $_____" notices) I'm calling, bolting, and signing up for DSL.
I'm in the area outside of Rochester, where TW plans to cap. Less than an hour from here is Buffalo where Verizon has laid out FiOS. Guess what? No capping in Buffalo.
So, you're correct: Competition cannot cure this, which is why a NY state legislator has rightly observed it as an abuse of monopoly.
Don't worry about it with President Obama. See, when people don't do as his administration *intended*, he just leverages the federal money they depend on to get them back into the fold.
See what Arne Duncan is threatening with states who don't follow his feelings on the stimulus bills' education funds.
And isn't WE taking "credit" for 1812 kind of like THEY taking credit for the Seven Years/French-Indian/War of the Conquest?
I mean, Canada was no more itself in 1812 than the U.S. was in 1763.
As any parent will tell you, the "terrible twos" are a myth. It's the three-year-olds that have the potent combination of independent ability and lack of responsibility.
I think they should name this study in honor of Bill Cosby's "I dun-no!" sketches.
I can accept that.
Will you agree there are some authorities that congress should not delegate away? IMHO, governance of property rights is only of those authorities.
Here in NY, we have a great deal of regulating offices that the state legislature created (as you point out, they were well authorized to do so), but now these offices exist without state oversight, yet they wield power greater than the elected officials who created them.
Child protective services offices in many states operate under this lack of oversight.
Good point. I mean it. It's too bad you posted AC. Someone with mod points might not see it.
Though both may operate in the GP's comment.
A plane landing safely doesn't make the news while a crash does. This may skew our perception of air travel. The same for patent trolls: A relatively small number of malefactors get more press than all the useful ways patent law works.
True. My first reaction was like the GP: The Constitution grants congress the authority to protect intellectual property ("inventions"). I don't see the Patent Office mentioned anywhere therein. While it makes sense that an office would be creating for the application of congressional rules, granting that office the authority to change the rules is tantamount to dereliction of duty.
But then, like you, I looked back at the last dozen-or-so congresses and realized I don't have much faith in them upholding the Constitution either. Whether it's unlawful search and seizure or bills of attainder, I'm pretty sure most of our elected officials flunked high school government.
There is one difference between having congress set the rules and allowing the USPTO do it: We can vote out the congress.
Yes and no.
Over time, you can build up evidence of how students under one teacher perform, but the groups of students in a teacher's classroom are not randomized. So basing merit pay on "above average" performance over time will exasperate the differential teacher quality in under-performing areas.
And the issue of judging teacher quality based on student performance on state tests requires interpretations whose validity is not explored in the current Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (AERA, APA, NCME, 1999). James Popham wrote a wonderfully brief article in ASCD last year wherein he called these a "second-step inference", and vowed to address them in the next version of the Standards.
The GP says that it would be easy to game a system wherein teachers are judged by their peers. This is true, but I would rather see that (so long as the process was transparent) than the confounded system in place now.
I mean, here in NY the 3rd grade math test in 2007 had an alpha of .71, and yet it was used to judge the quality of schools? I wouldn't accept that low level of consistency from a graduate student survey. Further, the state's technical reports included a factor analysis (to satisfy the unidimensionality assumption of an IRT analysis) and found the math tests to be "almost" unidimensional. ALMOST?!?! An the dominant factor only explained 24% of the score variance.
"OK, let's pretend that the dominant factor is actually 'math ability.' Then 76% of the variance in students' scores were due to something other than math ability?"
{end rant}
How many hogshead is a litre?
How many rods in a furlong?
What's MLXII + XIV?
All playing the Quake Live beta did was remind me how far we've come in terms of multiplayer FPS. QIII was great in its day and the achievement of putting Quake online like they have cannot be overstated, but I just don't find the game fun anymore. The training match tells you all you need to know about the game: Spawn, Load-up, frag... Spawn, load-up, frag.
Am I the only one who sees a philosophical parallel between current popular science and ancient religion? What people wanted in medieval times was inner-peace, an assurance that their suffering was only temporary. As such, they gave power to those who controlled the knowledge of the afterlife, the theories of the universe, etc. In short "truth."
Now we want more toys, health, and prosperity. Science delivers those to us, so we give power to those who claim a connection to science - even without proof of their connection to "truth". Peasants in Europe took their priest's counsel on faith; we think this is somehow different from trusting scientists when we can't verify 99% of their claims.
Publishing raw data on the web calms these fears to a certain extent, but we're still not the ones collecting the data and most of us aren't familiar enough with the analysis methods to sniff out manipulation. Sister Benedict saw the Virgin in the cave in Lourdes. The ice is melting in the Arctic.
This reminds me of a heated discussion I had with the chair of a department at my uni. He called our work "a waste of time" because our instrument was flawed according to his theory. He asked if I had any data to support our interpretations of the data, so I told him the four analysis I had already completed. He claimed that my data was insufficient to support our continued use of the instrument.
At this point I used a classic line I read in a textbook: "What evidence *would* convince you that this isn't a waste of time?"
He threw up his hands and said, "I don't think this conversation is going to change anyone's mind. Let's move on." Translation: I refuse to even look at the data because it threatens my a priori view, and *I* won't change my mind."
I'm a huge fan of science, so I'm put-out by both sides of the climate debate, but I've seen this human nature operate on much smaller political scales.
Actually it is still legal in several states. One of my grad students found an article on it last semester. IIRC, Texas and Mississippi employ it most regularly (though not frequently).
I'm replying to a couple of threads here...
1. On the multiple-objectives idea, America's Army got that dead right. The most popular map (Pipeline) had three possible end-games: Capture three minor points, one main point, or kill the opposition. Plenty of games (and even maps within AA) don't achieve this balance, but it is possible.
2. On leveling up good/persistent players to the detriment of noobs, AA's honor system is almost perfect: More play and success give you more honor. Honor can be filtered on each server (e.g. newbie servers for people under 30 honor, elite servers with honor over 50) and is only used to determine who gets first pick of the classes.
But most of the studies that have been published include much more rigor than this conveniently-sampled, not-significance-tested phone survey by the poster. The issue is more the media translating the researchers' conclusion (video game playing is *linked* to X, Y and Z) into a causal association.
From the BYU study:
Yet I saw at least one newspaper with the headline: "Study shows video games *cause* host of problems."
Or "rebooting" existing franchises....
Let's see, Bond? Check. Batman? Check. Star Trek? Check(1)? Friday 13th? Check. Am I forgetting anything?
(1) Yeah, more of a prequel than a reboot, but watch: The cannon will be altered by this installment.
Umm, or you would just be a "social scientist." At least, what we call them in Academia. Of course, they (sometimes) get paod, so you;d have to drop the "amateur" moniker.
Talk about a sudden outbreak of common sense. I mean, gee, maybe a functioning system of justice is more important than turning a profit?
I traveled to Egypt to gather colloquial Arabic footage for some online courses. It was a good time, but the "security" issues and the corruption of the local officials was on par with Subsaharan Africa countries.
However, there was a great difference in the freedom of speech category. For example, we were filming in a private household and each family member was taking turns telling jokes. (Like "Wahid saiidi fahim wemaat!") Everything went fine until the ten-year-old son started his joke...
"Al ra-ees Mubarak..." [President Mubarak...]
At which point his father flew to his feet, commanded us to turn of the camera, and took his son in the other room for a talk.
Until Americans are afraid to go on camera with a joke about their president, we're nowhere near Egypt.
Reminds me of when I was an undergrad. I went to school through the summers in a town that only existed for its university, so I lived alone for some of the time. Without other people living with me, I turned off the AC, slept on my schedule, got tons of work done (both for class and for the multiple part-time IT jobs I held down), and ate very frugally. I remember the first summer I had one set of dishes, a skillet, and a sauce pan. When I got a car, I paid cash for it. It lasted me six years with minor repairs that I did myself. Good times.
I now keep my house at 71-degrees F, have full hot water, one almost-paid-off newer car, and I'm looking for another one. What's changed? Marriage and a family. If I lived like you do (and like I did in college), child services would cart off my newborn twins, but my wife would take them somewhere else long before that.
I'm with you on the luxury issues, but don't judge everyone because they're not able to be as extremely misery as you are. Some of us would be if we could, but we have other people depending on us. My extensive collection of Backyardigans DVDs may seem excessive to you, but I prefer it over cable TV. A friend of mine is a consultant and absolutely believes his BMW helps him get jobs.
All I can envision is a digital windmill-with-servos that will cut our workweek in half. Of course, when an earthquake or tornado interferes with the creation of this new infrastructure, we will blame the terrorists and simply work harder to complete it on time. Once done, it the government will lease it to providers who will sell access to those who built it.
And pigs will walk on their hind legs with whips in their trotters.
I've got to read something more upbeat.
Where the Romans became lax in their greatness, the US gov. is more becoming that which they overthrew.
The pigs are walking upright... Four legs good, Two legs better.
I was also paranoid, but for slightly different reasons. I'm very open about my ideas and I worked in a lab as a graduate student that caught the attention of another university organization. They asked if we could meet for an informal "idea exchange," to which we agreed because, hey, we're all a part of the same university.
It turns out the organization had just been spun off the university into its own LLC and moved off campus. When we got to their office, the first thing they wanted from us was an NDA. We called bait-and-switch and asked them if they would mind signing an NDA for the ideas *we* would contribute. "That would defeat the purpose of this meeting," they told us.
So we signed, sat through a presentation of their work, gave no feedback and left. It wasn't that we were paranoid of them stealing our work, it was that we refused to get played like that.
Later, I spoke with an expert in my field, who is also an open-content guru, and I asked him how I could avoid things like that. He said, "Post everything you do to Sourceforge. Get it out there under GPL, or CC-non-profit license. If anyone wants to patented it, you'll have the evidence you need." (But that's not legal advice.)
I'm not sure if something like that would work at SUU (Go T-Birds!), since they could easily think *you* stole the code from Sourceforge, but it's an idea.