The context here is that people keep firearms because, on average, they think it will keep them safer. Anecdotal cases of a person being accidentally murdered by a child or accidentally commuting suicide or accidentally murdering a neighbor while cleaning a gun is not going to change that perception. The gun owners are still going to feel safer, on average, than if they did not have a gun. Otherwise they would not have a gun. Any accidents such as this are going to be considered matters of gun safety, not gun ownership.
And frankly I do not see why we need to interfere with the culture who is ok with babies being murdered or murdering others as long as the victim is a willing participant of that culture. It is like saying that we should ban football for young people or skateboarding. People die in tragic accidents. My only concern is when the gun culture claims victim of innocents outside the culture. When some young white male who mother is so paranoid that she has an arsenal murdered 20 kids, or some other virgin decides he has to kill several people so he can get his face on TV.
Stories like this are supposed make you think because a toddler is unlikely going to kill his grandmother with a knife. It is supposed to make you think that a gun is an easy way for a coward to commit suicide by cop, take a few innocent with him, and get his fact on TV. At least a suicide bomber has the courtesy to make sure that they are the first one's to die.
Real true this. It seems most people want a voyeuristic high, or at best one where most danger has been engineered out of the system. If I may plane the crotchety old person, kids these day.
How can they have any fun building a computer if there is no real danger of getting electrocuted, or being burn by a soldering iron, or even being poked by a IC? I in now way think that anyone should drive dangerously, but in the right machine, well engineered, and able to travel at high speed, there is really nothing else that is needed.I have done drives through the pine trees that have ended too soon. On the other hand I have done drives up the mountains in POS rentals that I could not wait to end.
So San Fransisco is like china, where pedestrians are worth so little it is better to kill them if you run over them.
Honestly, sometimes pedestrians do dart out and there are cases where there is no way to avoid them. But with numbers like this, it is evident of a basic disregard for human life, where one makes no attempt to avoid killing someone.
For the longest time my ad blocker was Flash block and turning off GIF animation. For mobile platforms these were not a problem.
The advent of HTML5 video is really what is driving this revolt. There is an advertising social contract between the content provider and the reader. For example prime time TV we expect about 15 minutes of ads per hour, for non prime it may go to 20. For fashion mags most of it is ads, for Foreign Affairs there are few ads.
When the social contract is broken, there is no one to blame but the content providers, like the US auto firms have no one else to blame for their crash in the 70's. There are a lot of content providers out there that seem unaware they are screwing the pooch with bad decisions. For instance, I am not going to subscribe to Slate because they won't allow zoom on the iPad.
This article is good because it also analyses the other costs to the mobile platform, such as load time. Professional web designers used to look at this. Now it is assumed that latency and bandwidth are so great that it does not matter. In fact it still matters. I occasionally still get a stuck web page waiting for google analytics or waiting for google to record that I am going from a search result to the resultant page. It is a cost of using the web, but a cost that web sites have to manage carefully.
First, it is of course an owners right to limit distribution. If someone wants to sell only to people with three nipples, that is their right.
Second, no one exists in a vacuum. The tools used to write software were probably developed and refined over time by corporate drones, kids in the basement, and, yes, even immigrants who took jobs away from hard working locals who could use the bread to feed their family. Read the rant on the down load page to see how this guy thinks he developed this software independently. It is the standard conservative delusion that we do not depend on others to accomplish what we have.
Third, from the article, "Although the change in the license may be a nuisance for some researchers, the program is far from irreplaceable". People who write software like this really want it to be used. Most software is used because it simply what people are trained to use. For instance, Origin is used because everyone is trained on it, even though it may not be the best, and even though it is extremely expensive. In reality lots of students pirate copies of the software. This software does not appear to cost anything, so one of two things will happen. I suppose that labs will just continue to use it, even without a license, unless it prevented by peer review. If that happens different software will be used.
Again, reading the rant it seems like just another conservative having a temper tantrum because someone else that does not look like the developer is getting free stuff.
Honestly, there was only a 100 year period where synchronous direct speech audio communication was the norm. In 1900 with a population of almost 80 million, only a few million had a telephone. By the year 2000, we already say a generation that was reverting back to the way humans had communicated through much of history, writing and sending asynchronously, such as one does with texting and email.
The paradigm shift, so to speak, that made the smart phone a success, was the realization that for most people synchronous verbal communication was not of primary importance. Sure, a lot of people might want to make a video for later use, but I wonder how many people who can use Facetime or the like really use it. Furthermore, he rise of the answering machine tells us that the phone as a critical mode of communication is not all it was cracked up to be.
Unfortunately, Paxton is being prosecuted for being a con man who convinced a number of people to invest under false pretenses. I can imagine that by Monday he will put the data up for sale on the 'Dark Web' to fund his defense and imminent life as a fugitive in an undisclosed tropical locations.
I recall using the MS DOS and AppleDOS hooks and pokes to do some pretty fancy things at the time. Frankly, the ease of programming from about 1980 to 2000 increased so quickly that it became difficult for minimally educated people, even if they were talented, to make a living at it. There were simply too many people around willing to code for nothing, and the tools to make sure those less qualified people did a reasonable job became increasingly effective. For that matter, gates became so much cheaper than people, that is did not matter what crappy code was running, there were cycles and memory to spare.
Which is to say we are already in a world where APIs have trumped coding. Being a software developer is more about understanding process, understanding how to take those bits that are the API and putting them together into a coherent package that will perform a customized function. This is a hard skill. This is why people mostly download a file for their 3D printer that is almost what they want instead of designing one themselves. After all, Sketchup Make is free.
So what we are really talking about are the people who can start with a blank sheet of paper, study the available resources, and spec out a process that will transform data in a human usable form for a particular purpose. We tend to call these people engineers and easy APIs will definitely make them more efficient without having to learn how to interpret intelligible error messages.
What I see is the problem are people without process skills using these things and thinking that what they get out is a reflection of reality. One can imagine an unskilled business person push data into some analysis program, making a subtle mistake, and bankrupting the company. We now that bussinesses have little analytical talent, that is why Enron was able to fool the so-called professionals in New York and California for some many year, while the engineers in Texas saw what was going on from day one and stayed away.
When states like Texas are criticized, they have at least been able to say they are better than Alabama and Mississippi. I guess we are not down to Mississippi.
In all these things, the question we should be asking is if the cars are safer. With many modern cars resembling living room instead of cockpits, I would say that autonomous driving is not only going to happen, but it will be necessary for the future of what people want a car to be. As long as we don't see accident rates go up, or if the serious injury or death rate declines, then all will be well.
Much of this is going to be driven by acquisition costs and insurance rates. Acquisition costs will be effected by the possibility of lawsuits by people who expect zero accidents or do not understand how to operate the car.
Altavista used keywords and the assumption that websites would be honest, because, what motivation would they have to not be honest. There was no real monitization on the web, and websites with bad reputations, websites that included keywords that were bogus, would simply fall off the web due to free market forces.
However, about a year after Altavista was founded, 2o7 among other c tracking cookies began to monetize visits to web pages. Altavista, though a huge innovation over Yahoo, was still a simplistic model that really had no method to counteract the market forces that made keyword inflation profitable. Also, Altavista had no real way make money.
Google was a hybrid of Altavista and 2o7 and had several advantages. First, because it used links and not keywords, it could actually use free market forces to evaluate the quality of the page. The assumption was that if a page were linked by a lot of other sites, then the page was useful and it could be ranked based on content. The second was that unlike 2o7, google actually provided a service to end users, so end users were in effect compensated for allowing tracking cookies on their computer. I myself had my browser set to reject all tracking cookies except for Google as I needed those cookies for other services. Third, the Google algorithm was quite sophisticated, so could be tweaked as the pure link based ranking failed due to link farms and the like.
Now, honestly, in many cases the search results returned by google are no better than the search results returned by altavista at the turn of the century. What saves google is that it has funds and motivation to improve the results as the SEO people attempt to manipulate the rankings. I think google is looking at the secondary and tertiary levels of the links to determine ranking, which is helping a lot. Ultimately there is going to have to be some serious math done and graph theory developed to get the ranking back to the quality that allowed Google to pummel everyone else.
Tivo requires a monthly subscription. I think they are trying to be more like Amazon Fire TV, which seems to be not available anymore, but was only $100. It was used to promote Amazon videos, just like the Apple TV sole purpose was to promote Apple videos.
The saving grace of Amazon was that Amazon had a lot free content if you were a Prime Subscriber. It also had a Plex Client. I guess if Apple has Apps now, and one of those is a Plex client, then that would be good.
At the end of the day, though, I don't see any reason to buy any of these because the video format for each service is different, so once you buy a video you are locked into something that may or may not exist in a few months.
There are two things that are going to be a reality. One is that students are going to receive personalized instruction. Most schools already expect this is some way, but it is cost ineffective. Automation through software will make this personalized instruction possible, and while the technology is improving, it is far from adequate for some subjects. For instance physics is increasingly taught through exploration and modeling. Just letting some students listen to a lecture and other students read and then pass a multiple guess test does not teach physics. Students have to go through certain labs. The personlization might be how a lab is set up, which still requires significant human intervention and discussion with a live professional, though eventually an AI might be able to do it.
Second, despite what the luddites say every student is going to have a computer and every student is going to need to learn to use it. While there are some jobs that require limited computer literacy, those jobs are going to become fewer. I mean everyone says how great education was in the 50's but what did they really need to get a well paying job? Not as much as today. As students get computers, they will be used to personalize when possible. Otherwise they will be used to teach kids the skills they need to get a job.
My oldest and be preserved photos are slides. They are kept in a plastic viewing apparatus. For important videos I have a 3CCD DV camera. The mini DV tape should last at least 20 years. Printed photos, especially color, will degrade quickly unless they are professionally printed and store adequately. This can be done at home using archival ink and paper.
I have a DSLR. I wish I would have just kept the memory cards instead of downloading them to a two hard disks. As luck would have it, the portable hard disk got stolen and the computer with the hard disk crashed shortly after. I have most of the photos, but the memory cards would have been nice. Memory cards are only rated for a few years, though. In any case I don't erase my memory cards. A 64 GB card is cheap, and I just shoot raw until it is full.
But really cell phone cameras are to the point where the photos and video match or exceed what we had in point and shoot cameras. All the photos are uploaded to the cloud, and given the low cost of storage I suspect that this will be a solution that will result in long term storage solution for me. This is because I have tried to keep hard disk backup, even tape backups, and it, over the past decade or so, been less reliable that uploading to off site storage.
The damage done here is usually minimal. The biggest damage they do is if they can mod a negative comment regarding their firm down. Usually we know that someone is a shill because they will mod a comment 'overrated' that has not yet been modded or 'redundant'. This will mean that most people won't see that comment, but it won't effect the modders status. I have seen this often with comments regarding Google.
That time was still steeped in an oral tradition, and much was still not written down. For instance, in the Christian Testament only Mark was written contemporaneously with Jesus. The other books were written well after his death, using sources that have always been suspect.
In the case of the Koran, the dates still indicates that it was written during the lifetime of the prophet, not after.
This should not be an issue of seeing content, it should only be an issue of requesting content. Autoplay on anything, be it GIFs or silverlight is not only an annoyance issue, but a accessibility issue.
In any case, remember that Google is largely responsible for autoplay flash. As the largest ad network, the lack of control by the user grew it's ad revenue. Now that HTML 5 has removes even minimal control from the end user, flash is depreciated. This really only has to do with Googles ability to make money through ads.
Learning, at some point, depends on the motivation of the student. The difference between a teacher and a professor is that the teacher actively encourages motivation in the student, while it is hoped that the professor though deep knowledge in the subject and inherent interest will passively generate the motivation.
Or, to be more realistic, that the college student due to the money being spent will be inherently more motivated. This ignores the fact that some students go to college just for health insurance.
I see the situation with using technology to be more complicated. An underlying assumption that the computer will be more motivational that a 'boring' professor. I have not seen this to be the case. The long term motivation of the student still depends on human intervention. Gamification is not going to work for every student, and while there is nothing wrong with a college that uses it, such a college would not inherently be better than a more traditional college
There is also an assumption that the making the buzzwords more precise will help, i.e. Competency,
Adaptive, Individualized,Differentiated. In fact it comes back to motivation. Most of these are not expecting an equal level of achievement by the end of the course, i.e. not every student is expected have read and analyzed the Odyssey by the end of the course, and maybe that is ok. Some will see it as unfair that they were expected to comprehend Ulysses while others were given an A for reading the Devil Wears Prada, but that is an issue with equity and equality being different things.
No, the problem is that an intelligent student can game the system. I have seen it will well respected adaptive courses. Student purposefully keep their level low so they are able to get credit with minimal effort. If the system still requires equal outcomes, then they are not adaptive or whatever buzzword one wants to use.
I see the problem as it always has been, valuing a degree over learning. There is no technology that is going to educate a student that is simply in school to buy a sheet of paper. For a student that is there to learn, the old technology of a book, a professor who has time to talk, and equally motivated classmates, cannot be beat.
Educational technology is therefore a critical part of universities who simply exist to funnel student loans to executives of the university. It a symbiosis between institutions who care nothing for education, and students who do not care to be educated.
How much reading and writing is necessary for an average person to succeed. Donal Trump speaks at an elementary school level. I my self have a terrible time with handwriting, and if weren't for computers I would not even have a job.
I also went through school during the 80's, the difference is that I did not learn specific programs because there were no dominant programs. So as a young student I learned to copy basic using a teletype and make it work, then I learned fortant on mainframe and to do shape tables and write papers and spreadsheets on a Apple II, and program an EEPROM copying prewritten assembly. When MS Excel came out my skills allowed me quickly learn it and get a good paying job. I learned whatever text editor or word processor I needed. I learned Pagemaker. Of course by 1990 MS Office had become dominant, so people learned an office suite, not how to use the computer.
I really don't know how anyone thinks that kids can make a living now without have deeply embedded basic computer skills that are taught from a young age. I don't mean how to use a program, but that computers are not magic and when we press a key a number of programmed routines are run to make things happen. So making a turtle move or a princess move or a robot move is teaching the kid or president how computers work, just like having kids play with toy hammers and screws teaches the kid concretely how things are put together,.
OTOH, a big problem is that computer education is not started early so we never get to the abstract stuff. We still test kids to see if they can use MS Office in a very concrete way, such as which function key starts the presentation, and then congratulate them that can do the work of a 10 year old. I know few schools that require a student to know the three or four top office suites, and be able to do real work in all of them.
In fact, this is the same problem we have with reading. So much time is spent on decoding and vocabulary, so little on whole reading. This means that the student gets trained to spend all their metal capacity on the words, and never learns to abstract to sentence, paragraphs, and structure. Reading, and actually knowing how to use a computer, is hard. A decent elementary school should be laying concrete scaffolding. A decent high school should be abstracting that to a useful skill. That way we are not teaching kids for their first minimum wage job, but for their fist middle class job when they are in their mid twenties, or for college that will increase the chance that they will have the skills to be successful when age discrimination sets in at 40.
The kid accused a teacher of what could be a felony. It would cost her a teaching ceritificate, which could be the only ways she makes a middle class income. Yes the kid was too dumb to know what he was doing, just like kid about decade ago was too dumb to know that holding up a liquor store with a gun so he could get some cash to go a date would mean that he would be on death row. Being dumb when on is a teenager is not an excuse for everything.
The fact is, without hyperbole, is when a kid makes an accusation if the accusation is not refuted in the most direct method it can be used to take away a certification. This is a fact and no alternative reality, be it fox news or the self centeredness of a kid can change it. This kid made a mistake. changing schools is is a reasonable consequence that is not going to destroy the kids life but will make sure that other kids are reminded not to do the same thing. 30 years ago these things were taken must less seriously, and it resulted in child care providers spending time in jail.
Back to the hyperbole. For the adults here, if some kid said you were part of satanic cult that murdered babies, do you think that this might negatively effect you work, or do you think that these accusation should be just left online to fester?
I wonder, assuming some of the people writing in response to this actually have a job, or will ever have a job, would be happy if some punk kid caused them to lose that job, lose the ability to feed their family, and lose the ability to every work at that job again.
What this kid alleged was molestation. It was not a harmless joke. If the teacher, the school, the district, and even the cops did not respond to it then such an allegation could fester and result in the loss of a teaching liscense and the potential inability of the teacher to ever earn a living as a teacher again.
Just because some punk kid thought he was being funny.
This is not a case of excessive consequences. This is a case of a kid making serious allegations against a teacher. Even if those allegations were in jest they potentially would have serious consequences. Doing nothing puts ever other teacher in that school in danger as all students would feel they have the right to make similar serious allegations in jest. Removing the student, setting an example, was the best solution to nip the problem in the bud. He can start over at another school without the stigma of being the student who thinks denying the right of teacher to feed her family is funny.
The places I know essentially give employees a rebate who participate. Rates have not gone up significantly in years so I don't think they are hiking rates just to provide rebates. I don't have any problems with this, except that a Fitbit is so expensive I don't see how reduced insurance costs are really going to pay for them
The real overreaction here is the what how would this be useful in killing or maiming someone that do have easier or more effective alternatives.
In reality, attaching one of these does not necessarily require physical access. Insurance companies are promoting drivers to use these in their cars so they can get data to raise rates. It would be easy enough to substitute a more malicious dongle for the less malicious dongle. The driver would voluntarily place the device and not know any better.
In any case, the real insecurity here is a driver keeping and ODB-II device in their car semi-permantly. I have such a dongle for diagnostics, and I certainly do not keep it attached while driving except in certain circumstances. The real insecurity here is firms like insurance companies promoting unsafe products.
You no longer pay for Mac OS, you pay for the computer and upgrades are free, even most Apple Apps. MS office was originally written for the Mac, and is even more ingrained with office 360. Adobe applications were also originally written for the Mac, and creative cloud is best on Mac. There are very small and expensive vertices market applications such as autodesk and Origin and the like that are windows only, but the cost of the computer is less than the software in these cases, and are one reason why upgrades do not happen because these are workhorse production machines that once set up are not changed.
Slashdot Mirror
And frankly I do not see why we need to interfere with the culture who is ok with babies being murdered or murdering others as long as the victim is a willing participant of that culture. It is like saying that we should ban football for young people or skateboarding. People die in tragic accidents. My only concern is when the gun culture claims victim of innocents outside the culture. When some young white male who mother is so paranoid that she has an arsenal murdered 20 kids, or some other virgin decides he has to kill several people so he can get his face on TV.
Stories like this are supposed make you think because a toddler is unlikely going to kill his grandmother with a knife. It is supposed to make you think that a gun is an easy way for a coward to commit suicide by cop, take a few innocent with him, and get his fact on TV. At least a suicide bomber has the courtesy to make sure that they are the first one's to die.
Real true this. It seems most people want a voyeuristic high, or at best one where most danger has been engineered out of the system. If I may plane the crotchety old person, kids these day. How can they have any fun building a computer if there is no real danger of getting electrocuted, or being burn by a soldering iron, or even being poked by a IC? I in now way think that anyone should drive dangerously, but in the right machine, well engineered, and able to travel at high speed, there is really nothing else that is needed.I have done drives through the pine trees that have ended too soon. On the other hand I have done drives up the mountains in POS rentals that I could not wait to end.
So San Fransisco is like china, where pedestrians are worth so little it is better to kill them if you run over them. Honestly, sometimes pedestrians do dart out and there are cases where there is no way to avoid them. But with numbers like this, it is evident of a basic disregard for human life, where one makes no attempt to avoid killing someone.
The advent of HTML5 video is really what is driving this revolt. There is an advertising social contract between the content provider and the reader. For example prime time TV we expect about 15 minutes of ads per hour, for non prime it may go to 20. For fashion mags most of it is ads, for Foreign Affairs there are few ads.
When the social contract is broken, there is no one to blame but the content providers, like the US auto firms have no one else to blame for their crash in the 70's. There are a lot of content providers out there that seem unaware they are screwing the pooch with bad decisions. For instance, I am not going to subscribe to Slate because they won't allow zoom on the iPad.
This article is good because it also analyses the other costs to the mobile platform, such as load time. Professional web designers used to look at this. Now it is assumed that latency and bandwidth are so great that it does not matter. In fact it still matters. I occasionally still get a stuck web page waiting for google analytics or waiting for google to record that I am going from a search result to the resultant page. It is a cost of using the web, but a cost that web sites have to manage carefully.
To defend against the SUV or Volkswagen diesel car driving in front of you.
First, it is of course an owners right to limit distribution. If someone wants to sell only to people with three nipples, that is their right. Second, no one exists in a vacuum. The tools used to write software were probably developed and refined over time by corporate drones, kids in the basement, and, yes, even immigrants who took jobs away from hard working locals who could use the bread to feed their family. Read the rant on the down load page to see how this guy thinks he developed this software independently. It is the standard conservative delusion that we do not depend on others to accomplish what we have. Third, from the article, "Although the change in the license may be a nuisance for some researchers, the program is far from irreplaceable". People who write software like this really want it to be used. Most software is used because it simply what people are trained to use. For instance, Origin is used because everyone is trained on it, even though it may not be the best, and even though it is extremely expensive. In reality lots of students pirate copies of the software. This software does not appear to cost anything, so one of two things will happen. I suppose that labs will just continue to use it, even without a license, unless it prevented by peer review. If that happens different software will be used. Again, reading the rant it seems like just another conservative having a temper tantrum because someone else that does not look like the developer is getting free stuff.
Honestly, there was only a 100 year period where synchronous direct speech audio communication was the norm. In 1900 with a population of almost 80 million, only a few million had a telephone. By the year 2000, we already say a generation that was reverting back to the way humans had communicated through much of history, writing and sending asynchronously, such as one does with texting and email. The paradigm shift, so to speak, that made the smart phone a success, was the realization that for most people synchronous verbal communication was not of primary importance. Sure, a lot of people might want to make a video for later use, but I wonder how many people who can use Facetime or the like really use it. Furthermore, he rise of the answering machine tells us that the phone as a critical mode of communication is not all it was cracked up to be.
Unfortunately, Paxton is being prosecuted for being a con man who convinced a number of people to invest under false pretenses. I can imagine that by Monday he will put the data up for sale on the 'Dark Web' to fund his defense and imminent life as a fugitive in an undisclosed tropical locations.
I recall using the MS DOS and AppleDOS hooks and pokes to do some pretty fancy things at the time. Frankly, the ease of programming from about 1980 to 2000 increased so quickly that it became difficult for minimally educated people, even if they were talented, to make a living at it. There were simply too many people around willing to code for nothing, and the tools to make sure those less qualified people did a reasonable job became increasingly effective. For that matter, gates became so much cheaper than people, that is did not matter what crappy code was running, there were cycles and memory to spare. Which is to say we are already in a world where APIs have trumped coding. Being a software developer is more about understanding process, understanding how to take those bits that are the API and putting them together into a coherent package that will perform a customized function. This is a hard skill. This is why people mostly download a file for their 3D printer that is almost what they want instead of designing one themselves. After all, Sketchup Make is free. So what we are really talking about are the people who can start with a blank sheet of paper, study the available resources, and spec out a process that will transform data in a human usable form for a particular purpose. We tend to call these people engineers and easy APIs will definitely make them more efficient without having to learn how to interpret intelligible error messages. What I see is the problem are people without process skills using these things and thinking that what they get out is a reflection of reality. One can imagine an unskilled business person push data into some analysis program, making a subtle mistake, and bankrupting the company. We now that bussinesses have little analytical talent, that is why Enron was able to fool the so-called professionals in New York and California for some many year, while the engineers in Texas saw what was going on from day one and stayed away.
When states like Texas are criticized, they have at least been able to say they are better than Alabama and Mississippi. I guess we are not down to Mississippi.
In all these things, the question we should be asking is if the cars are safer. With many modern cars resembling living room instead of cockpits, I would say that autonomous driving is not only going to happen, but it will be necessary for the future of what people want a car to be. As long as we don't see accident rates go up, or if the serious injury or death rate declines, then all will be well. Much of this is going to be driven by acquisition costs and insurance rates. Acquisition costs will be effected by the possibility of lawsuits by people who expect zero accidents or do not understand how to operate the car.
Altavista used keywords and the assumption that websites would be honest, because, what motivation would they have to not be honest. There was no real monitization on the web, and websites with bad reputations, websites that included keywords that were bogus, would simply fall off the web due to free market forces. However, about a year after Altavista was founded, 2o7 among other c tracking cookies began to monetize visits to web pages. Altavista, though a huge innovation over Yahoo, was still a simplistic model that really had no method to counteract the market forces that made keyword inflation profitable. Also, Altavista had no real way make money. Google was a hybrid of Altavista and 2o7 and had several advantages. First, because it used links and not keywords, it could actually use free market forces to evaluate the quality of the page. The assumption was that if a page were linked by a lot of other sites, then the page was useful and it could be ranked based on content. The second was that unlike 2o7, google actually provided a service to end users, so end users were in effect compensated for allowing tracking cookies on their computer. I myself had my browser set to reject all tracking cookies except for Google as I needed those cookies for other services. Third, the Google algorithm was quite sophisticated, so could be tweaked as the pure link based ranking failed due to link farms and the like. Now, honestly, in many cases the search results returned by google are no better than the search results returned by altavista at the turn of the century. What saves google is that it has funds and motivation to improve the results as the SEO people attempt to manipulate the rankings. I think google is looking at the secondary and tertiary levels of the links to determine ranking, which is helping a lot. Ultimately there is going to have to be some serious math done and graph theory developed to get the ranking back to the quality that allowed Google to pummel everyone else.
The saving grace of Amazon was that Amazon had a lot free content if you were a Prime Subscriber. It also had a Plex Client. I guess if Apple has Apps now, and one of those is a Plex client, then that would be good.
At the end of the day, though, I don't see any reason to buy any of these because the video format for each service is different, so once you buy a video you are locked into something that may or may not exist in a few months.
There are two things that are going to be a reality. One is that students are going to receive personalized instruction. Most schools already expect this is some way, but it is cost ineffective. Automation through software will make this personalized instruction possible, and while the technology is improving, it is far from adequate for some subjects. For instance physics is increasingly taught through exploration and modeling. Just letting some students listen to a lecture and other students read and then pass a multiple guess test does not teach physics. Students have to go through certain labs. The personlization might be how a lab is set up, which still requires significant human intervention and discussion with a live professional, though eventually an AI might be able to do it. Second, despite what the luddites say every student is going to have a computer and every student is going to need to learn to use it. While there are some jobs that require limited computer literacy, those jobs are going to become fewer. I mean everyone says how great education was in the 50's but what did they really need to get a well paying job? Not as much as today. As students get computers, they will be used to personalize when possible. Otherwise they will be used to teach kids the skills they need to get a job.
My oldest and be preserved photos are slides. They are kept in a plastic viewing apparatus. For important videos I have a 3CCD DV camera. The mini DV tape should last at least 20 years. Printed photos, especially color, will degrade quickly unless they are professionally printed and store adequately. This can be done at home using archival ink and paper. I have a DSLR. I wish I would have just kept the memory cards instead of downloading them to a two hard disks. As luck would have it, the portable hard disk got stolen and the computer with the hard disk crashed shortly after. I have most of the photos, but the memory cards would have been nice. Memory cards are only rated for a few years, though. In any case I don't erase my memory cards. A 64 GB card is cheap, and I just shoot raw until it is full. But really cell phone cameras are to the point where the photos and video match or exceed what we had in point and shoot cameras. All the photos are uploaded to the cloud, and given the low cost of storage I suspect that this will be a solution that will result in long term storage solution for me. This is because I have tried to keep hard disk backup, even tape backups, and it, over the past decade or so, been less reliable that uploading to off site storage.
The damage done here is usually minimal. The biggest damage they do is if they can mod a negative comment regarding their firm down. Usually we know that someone is a shill because they will mod a comment 'overrated' that has not yet been modded or 'redundant'. This will mean that most people won't see that comment, but it won't effect the modders status. I have seen this often with comments regarding Google.
That time was still steeped in an oral tradition, and much was still not written down. For instance, in the Christian Testament only Mark was written contemporaneously with Jesus. The other books were written well after his death, using sources that have always been suspect. In the case of the Koran, the dates still indicates that it was written during the lifetime of the prophet, not after.
This should not be an issue of seeing content, it should only be an issue of requesting content. Autoplay on anything, be it GIFs or silverlight is not only an annoyance issue, but a accessibility issue. In any case, remember that Google is largely responsible for autoplay flash. As the largest ad network, the lack of control by the user grew it's ad revenue. Now that HTML 5 has removes even minimal control from the end user, flash is depreciated. This really only has to do with Googles ability to make money through ads.
Or, to be more realistic, that the college student due to the money being spent will be inherently more motivated. This ignores the fact that some students go to college just for health insurance.
I see the situation with using technology to be more complicated. An underlying assumption that the computer will be more motivational that a 'boring' professor. I have not seen this to be the case. The long term motivation of the student still depends on human intervention. Gamification is not going to work for every student, and while there is nothing wrong with a college that uses it, such a college would not inherently be better than a more traditional college
There is also an assumption that the making the buzzwords more precise will help, i.e. Competency, Adaptive, Individualized,Differentiated. In fact it comes back to motivation. Most of these are not expecting an equal level of achievement by the end of the course, i.e. not every student is expected have read and analyzed the Odyssey by the end of the course, and maybe that is ok. Some will see it as unfair that they were expected to comprehend Ulysses while others were given an A for reading the Devil Wears Prada, but that is an issue with equity and equality being different things.
No, the problem is that an intelligent student can game the system. I have seen it will well respected adaptive courses. Student purposefully keep their level low so they are able to get credit with minimal effort. If the system still requires equal outcomes, then they are not adaptive or whatever buzzword one wants to use.
I see the problem as it always has been, valuing a degree over learning. There is no technology that is going to educate a student that is simply in school to buy a sheet of paper. For a student that is there to learn, the old technology of a book, a professor who has time to talk, and equally motivated classmates, cannot be beat.
Educational technology is therefore a critical part of universities who simply exist to funnel student loans to executives of the university. It a symbiosis between institutions who care nothing for education, and students who do not care to be educated.
I also went through school during the 80's, the difference is that I did not learn specific programs because there were no dominant programs. So as a young student I learned to copy basic using a teletype and make it work, then I learned fortant on mainframe and to do shape tables and write papers and spreadsheets on a Apple II, and program an EEPROM copying prewritten assembly. When MS Excel came out my skills allowed me quickly learn it and get a good paying job. I learned whatever text editor or word processor I needed. I learned Pagemaker. Of course by 1990 MS Office had become dominant, so people learned an office suite, not how to use the computer.
I really don't know how anyone thinks that kids can make a living now without have deeply embedded basic computer skills that are taught from a young age. I don't mean how to use a program, but that computers are not magic and when we press a key a number of programmed routines are run to make things happen. So making a turtle move or a princess move or a robot move is teaching the kid or president how computers work, just like having kids play with toy hammers and screws teaches the kid concretely how things are put together,.
OTOH, a big problem is that computer education is not started early so we never get to the abstract stuff. We still test kids to see if they can use MS Office in a very concrete way, such as which function key starts the presentation, and then congratulate them that can do the work of a 10 year old. I know few schools that require a student to know the three or four top office suites, and be able to do real work in all of them.
In fact, this is the same problem we have with reading. So much time is spent on decoding and vocabulary, so little on whole reading. This means that the student gets trained to spend all their metal capacity on the words, and never learns to abstract to sentence, paragraphs, and structure. Reading, and actually knowing how to use a computer, is hard. A decent elementary school should be laying concrete scaffolding. A decent high school should be abstracting that to a useful skill. That way we are not teaching kids for their first minimum wage job, but for their fist middle class job when they are in their mid twenties, or for college that will increase the chance that they will have the skills to be successful when age discrimination sets in at 40.
The fact is, without hyperbole, is when a kid makes an accusation if the accusation is not refuted in the most direct method it can be used to take away a certification. This is a fact and no alternative reality, be it fox news or the self centeredness of a kid can change it. This kid made a mistake. changing schools is is a reasonable consequence that is not going to destroy the kids life but will make sure that other kids are reminded not to do the same thing. 30 years ago these things were taken must less seriously, and it resulted in child care providers spending time in jail.
Back to the hyperbole. For the adults here, if some kid said you were part of satanic cult that murdered babies, do you think that this might negatively effect you work, or do you think that these accusation should be just left online to fester?
What this kid alleged was molestation. It was not a harmless joke. If the teacher, the school, the district, and even the cops did not respond to it then such an allegation could fester and result in the loss of a teaching liscense and the potential inability of the teacher to ever earn a living as a teacher again.
Just because some punk kid thought he was being funny.
This is not a case of excessive consequences. This is a case of a kid making serious allegations against a teacher. Even if those allegations were in jest they potentially would have serious consequences. Doing nothing puts ever other teacher in that school in danger as all students would feel they have the right to make similar serious allegations in jest. Removing the student, setting an example, was the best solution to nip the problem in the bud. He can start over at another school without the stigma of being the student who thinks denying the right of teacher to feed her family is funny.
The places I know essentially give employees a rebate who participate. Rates have not gone up significantly in years so I don't think they are hiking rates just to provide rebates. I don't have any problems with this, except that a Fitbit is so expensive I don't see how reduced insurance costs are really going to pay for them
The real overreaction here is the what how would this be useful in killing or maiming someone that do have easier or more effective alternatives. In reality, attaching one of these does not necessarily require physical access. Insurance companies are promoting drivers to use these in their cars so they can get data to raise rates. It would be easy enough to substitute a more malicious dongle for the less malicious dongle. The driver would voluntarily place the device and not know any better. In any case, the real insecurity here is a driver keeping and ODB-II device in their car semi-permantly. I have such a dongle for diagnostics, and I certainly do not keep it attached while driving except in certain circumstances. The real insecurity here is firms like insurance companies promoting unsafe products.
You no longer pay for Mac OS, you pay for the computer and upgrades are free, even most Apple Apps. MS office was originally written for the Mac, and is even more ingrained with office 360. Adobe applications were also originally written for the Mac, and creative cloud is best on Mac. There are very small and expensive vertices market applications such as autodesk and Origin and the like that are windows only, but the cost of the computer is less than the software in these cases, and are one reason why upgrades do not happen because these are workhorse production machines that once set up are not changed.