The arguments against are a little shaky. Any replication of an experiement includes replication of the data analysis. Intermediate and final results must be verified. Without computers this requires an independent scientist going through the math and looking for mistakes. Now a third party must be able to go through the code and verify it makes sense. It is also important for a third pary to run the code. Even though most hardware and software is commodity, there is always a possibility of systematic errors introduced by the compiler or hardware.
As far as commercilization is concerned, in most cases the research institution owns the research and licenses the results to a commercial enterprise for futher development. Though I only have passing knowledge of such deals, the seem to work pretty well. It is really hard, and as you said, very expensive to commercialize basic research. You generally must have the cooperation of the researchers themselves, and any loose license issues might mean that the millions you spent on development might become the property of a competitor. This further motivates industry to play by these rules.
About once a year there is some major issue of fraud in science. This results in a major setback in which we no longer know what we think we did. Science works because it is open, and when it is not red flags tend to go up. Particulalry in papers that depend on data analysis, original data and methodology is critical. If a computer is used for analysis, the same results must be achieved across compilers and hardware.
I read the book when it first came out, so it has been a while, but one thing stayed with me. The fact that ender was only accidentaly special. That it was not a coming of age, not a chosen one. Just a person with some skills who was tricked into doing dreadful thing.
It was clasic science fiction where the fx and space was secondary to the people and situations. This is why I am not sure that film can be made. It is going to be hard to get a young actor that act that innocent and that hurt.
It also sounds like card is giving into hollywood, changing the story from that a world that chooses to fatally damage a child in an effort to save itself, to that of a child that is fatally damaged, and then spends the rest of his life trying to make up for what he did. Which is of course what card did when he changed the book to a series, but at least the book existed to make that specific point.
So, if final say is about ages, and special effects, and the like, then there is little hope. The tragedy will be turned into the standard chosen one redemption crap.
That is a big part of it. When a teacher gives students an assignment, a techer must not only know the measureables that are going to result from that assignment, but also how the assignment is going to help the students meet those measureables. I think sometimes we forget this. We get a book, or worksheet, or computer program, and just sit the kids down and hope they will work, without thinking of how the work is going to help.
OTOH, the computer is one of the tools we now have. Like a pencil. Just having a kid sit and scrawl random characters is not often going to meet an objctive. In the same way, having a kid play a game on a computer or do guided practice may not result in any useful measureables. However, like the other tools teachers have, never using it is not good either. The point is to know how to use the computer, know how it can help, and make it a part of the lesson cycle. Some students it will not help at all, some students it will.
All that said, the article really did not make a convicing case that the study was valid. For instance, did they adjust for the fact that succesful teachers, that is teachers whose students tend to do well, might be less likely to use new techniques in thier classrooms? They do a good job, so why change? Or that teachers with less success might be more likely to use computers, as they are looking for anything to help. These might also be the teachers who are less skilled overall. This is outside of school mandates. Teachers tend to use what they want, no matter what is supplied. I also can't tell if there is a bias in the study. Do the researchers have some reason not to want the state to supply computers? Is it a group that believes doing math in your head or knowing how to spell is superior to knowing how to do process ananlysis or advanced mathematics?
I know 4th graders that are learning to computer presentations. I know high school students who are doing more math because of calculators. The things that are not being becuase of technology taught may be important, but I would rather have my kids know who to do a presentation and use a calculator rather than knowing how to make perfect characters or do exact math in thier heads. It is just a matter of what modern success is.
The issue has existed for a long time. Before Project Gutenberg, they were libraries. Libraries have books, and getting to one was not such a big deal. Every child in the US that went to school probably had a library with books that could be borrowed for free. They were taken to that library as part of school. In addition, most kids, at least in cities, had a library very close to them, and even those of us who were not rich, were taken to the library to check out books.
So, the reason that Gutenberg is not used so much is the same reason the library is not. Books are not expensive, and most who do read can cheaply buy a copy. If not new, then at the many stores of used books. The mild annoyance of reading a book on the computer, like the minor annoyance of have to check out and return a book, keeps book sales active.
A cheap e-book reader will start the movement to e-books, but I think that people wil still buy, or a least subscribe, to well formated books over the free stuff. I actually think that the entire reading thing is going to decline, and most money will be made of books on tape, or books on iPod.
First, as a republican, you understand that producers must be compensated for their efforts by consumers. The price of those goods and services are set by the free market, so, by definition, a cost of a good that is actively pursued by consumers is not too high.
Now, we could have a bigger government that could subsidize certain goods and services so that more consumers could gain access. We in fact do this with farms and ranches and all those republicans in the west that live freely benefit greatly. We do this a great extent with education through such schools as the Republican Minded Texas A&M, which continuously sucks off the public teat while it's graduates complain about taxes. We have not, in general, offered to pay for books. That would certainly be a new mandate, and given the current congress, would remain unfunded.
So, back to your statement. The $120 is the free market price necessary to convince a competent author, and competent publisher, to produce a quality book. And, contrary to popular opinion, new additions are not just permutations of the old edition. They are updated to include new information, and, in the case of calculus, new pedagogical methods. Competence is necessary because we assume you are in school to get an education, and not just a piece of paper, and would be unhappy if you learned that (d/dx)x^2=2+x.
And just to head off those that decry 'the monopoly of the bookstore.' Textbooks are there to make the students life easier. They are not absolutely required. It is usually possible to go to class and take notes and create your own practice problems, especially today with the internet, and have quite reasonable success. It is possible to buy old books and fill in the details with research at the library. It is even possible to learn many subjects without even going to university and paying the huge tuitions.
So, if $120 was in fact too much, the free market would compensate. If google took copyrighted books and published them, then the current administration would rightly be asked to investigate google for violation of copyright, and Bush or his spokespeople would be on TV telling us that google was anti American and not allowing hard working american to put food on their families.
Yes, but now the music company cannot resell tracks to you. The assumption is that you should not put CD tracks on your computer or iPod.
It does little good to argue the philisophical and moral issues. What is true is that the music industry has depended on reselling tracks to consumer for profit. New formats, new collections, etc. Now the consumer can format shift, remix, and backup the collection without the music people getting thier cut.
This is a problem. If you paid for all the music on your iPod, as we did for the CDs that replace vinyl, there would be no problem. But you don't have to.
So how is the music company going to adjust. The apple model does not guarantee long term growth. As a person ages, the interest in new music wanes, and the importance of reselling old music increases. This is why the subscription model is so compelling. It gaurantees that the individual will buy the equivelent of 1 album in perpetuity. it duplicates the glory days when the industry could resell track after track. At some point most people will no longer be interested in the new music, and will pay to just keep what they have. Even better, as the old stuff goes off line, these people will have to pay retail prices to license off line acces to the music.
So, in the minds of the music industry ther probably is no legal concept of copying a CD to an iPod. We are either expected to pay a dollar for every song on our iPod, or buy something that works with a subscription service.
I did not RTFA, but I doubt the writer intended to use or prove the sticker was a placebo. In the former case, the writer would have used the sticker as a control in the experiment. In the later, the writer would have expected the sticker to act as inert object that reinforced the batteries expectation to charge or discharge.
In fact I am sure the purpose was to prove the sticker was ineffective or snake oil. This is very different from a placebo, where there are no indications of effectiveness.
You are probably correct about the flaws. The writer would likely have to have done many more test, with strict controls, and careful statistical analysis. That said, since the physics dictates that the sticker does not work, and I have seen little evidence otherwise, we can assume it is scam.
No, I'm saying that IQ is not all that is there to intelligence.
There is no reason to defend the IQ. It is merely a model that some of the western world feels the need to fit people into. It is somewhat useful if one wishes to know that a person is inside or outside what we assume is to be the middle 68% or so, but is pretty useless otherwise. And why we need to fit people to a model is often in question.
As you mentioned, We can see the folly of the model merely by noting that it is very hard to measure that number, especially when outside the 'average'. For example, a parent can just have a battery of test run to get the need plus or minus 20 points.
But the real problem comes when it is used to as a basis to say certain people can or cannot do certain things. A person or average IQ might not be able to be an engineer, but it is also likely, as is shown by the failure rates at enginnering schools, tath a person of above average intellegence has difficulty as well. As everyone who has worked with children know, motivation plays a huge part.
I know mensa members. Those that are interesting have something beyond intellegence going on. It is not just identifing current fact. It is social, insight , or imagination. It is in fact the ability to create something interesting. It is not just the ability to identify patterns or pompously critic existing objects.
Very seldom is the victim and aggressor well defined Many years ago major companies realized this, realized that they often had much more money and legal expertise than the average person, and started filing frivolous lawsuits against people they did not like, not for the purpose of winning, but just to be annoying.
One of the most famous of these was McDonalds. Though they berate those that would waste the courts time on suing for spilt coffee, they caused one of the longest trails in Britain history. Some protesters were saying the food was non-nutritional. McDonalds sued. McDonals defense. Anything could be a nutritional part of a balanced diet. McDonalds lost. Britain lost. The peoples right to speak freely lost. And, as conservatives are so fond of saying, the lawyers won.
And yet we do nothing to limit the ability of companies to launch these frivolous suites, and allow them to waste everyone times.
Surely the victim in this case is not 100% in the right, and the company is not 100% in the wrong. But this suit is as frivolous as they come.
Linux is stagnant because the GUI suck. Apple put *nix with a good GUI and everyone went hurrah. Windows is hard to beat because, at the end of day, it is not yet the risk to change.
The desktop battle is unknown to most end users. Bringing it up is silly. This is like saying MS Windows will fail becuase each version requires linking to somewhat different libraries and has a slightly different look.
The thing is for a serious user, or a user with specific needs, being able to choose is a good thing. It might just might not be worth the effort.
I was thinking along similiar lines. The law already seems to be refuted by the accepted dogma that increased complexity adds ineffeciencies that does not allow the maximum gain. This is a big component of Brooks' law, a much older and accepted law.
At best one would find an^2 to be valid, where a1, or perhaps some function with an asymptote. What is sure is that double the people with not produce four times as much work. Again, just reference the mythical man month.
Realy netscape in 2000 wasn't so bad. It only had real problems when tring to browser pages generated by MS software. This was made worse by the number of people who knew no better than use MS generated pages. And that would put it around IE 5, which was a real POS.
What I did try to use was Opera, but they took too long to create a usable mac product, and camino came out, so there was no reason to spend the money.
I found and find IE on MS Windows and Mac platforms to be consistantly inferior in most catagories and try not to use it. IE is expandable to be a usable platform, but I often just want to work out of the box. Ie does not.
Some coding might be nice, but find out what they kids have done already. Many elementary schools have significant computer labs and the kids have some notable experience. For instance I have seen first grader students learning the various physical parts of the computer and what they are used for. Fifth grader students are learning the office applicatins. It could be that they have also had some programming.
Atthat age the kiddos have a hard time understanding anything that they cannot touch. I did basic on a teletype in sixth grade, and even though it was fun, it was the applications in high school that realy got me hooked. I was able to get hooked because i knew that is was possible for me to do complex things, even though i did not understand what those complex things were.
Have you priced media? The difference is + and - media is signifcant, like double. It is supply and demand. The one that is supported by more devices costs more. My lacie can handle both, my superdrive cannot.
As others have said, the numbers are very hard to follow, but here are some aspects that stand out as curious.
You state the tax savings as 126,462, with a marginal tax reate of 28%. If we call it 25%, then the deductions over 30 years is around 500,000, so that means you are spending $16,800 every year on tax deductible interest, and we assume local taxes.. Given the fact that you state only 100K is spent on the stuff, the tax savings is only 28,00. which adds 100K to the cost of the house.
Second, your $100 a month rate of maintanance is extremely low. It is the kind of figure floated around to convince people they must own a house. Perhaps ths is the rate for maintaince fees on a small condo, say 700 square feet, but reality is that in a new house it will be on the order of 3-5K a year, and an older house might be double or triple that. A realistic cost of maintaince for a house might be 125,000 over 30 years, or nearly 100K more than you estimate. Again, another 100K disapears.
The real value in a house is stability, some security, and space. It is harder to kick someone out of a house. A person will be generally able to buy a bigger house than they could rent.
OTOH, for 12K a year I can get a place to live with few worries. If something breaks, I do not have to come up with the money to fix it. If undesirable move it, I can move out. I even have someone to pick up my packages, screen my visitors, and talk to me when I am on my way out. With a house I would have $3000 in taxes, $3000 in maintaince, and a whole lot more space to clean. Houses are a good invetment, but often not for money.
This is something I wanted to write the ethicist about. A store provides you a service with well known products at below market prices. You choose, of your own free will, to shop at these stores. Alternatives are available, but you choose to shop on the basis of price. You know that part of the deal is that you will be expected to allow your person to be searched. It is not a surprise. Yet, when the store asks you to complete the deal by being searched, you refuse.
I have decided this is unethical. It would be like complaining that you had to pay for the goods. Or complaining that you did not have a personal shopper. Or complaining that were the wrong size. You know good and well the mores of the store. You know good and well that you are trading your personal dignitiy to save money. To take the deal from the devil, so to speak, and then to back out is not honorable. You may want to rationalize your behavior by saying you are hurting the monster by visiting the store and then harrasing the workers, but th management is laughing all the way to the bank.
Of course, if the evil store has driven out all other stores, and there no equally convinent option, then there might be a case at protesting at the door. I have in fact done this. But if it is a choice between the monster and an equally convinent competitor, then the act of chosing to shopping at the monster indebts you to that monster.
Even if you justify your action by saying you cannot afford all the stuff you want at the competitor, you still indebt yourself to the monster as they are supplying you your essentials, and it is perfectly acceptable to trade dignity for essentials.
People always complain about the writing on/. Sure it has some spelling errors, some agreement problem, and many split infinitives, which, of course, is the fault of Star Trek, but generally the writing is quite adequate and readable.
But the writing on walmartblows just makes my head hurt. These are adults, some say with children, and the writing is at about a 6th grade level. I know for a fact that most teachers don't write this bad. I know for a fact that most teachers try to guide students to better writing. Reading the site i was hard pressed to find a single coherent thought. And these are Americans.
I hate to say it, but thank god for walmart because I do not know where else these people could work. No wonder they make nothing. They probably wasted the free education that America provides and then had delusions that someone would give them a high paying job while allowing them to continue to do nothing.
I generally don't shop at walmart, and generally make myself annoying when I do. I wish it would go away. But reading these writing samples just make me wonder if it the simple inability of Americans to aspire to be something more than workers that makes the domination of walmart inevitable.
I believe years ago it was established that not protected personal information, even if was not personally identifiable, on a web site was actionable. If my recollection is correct, all the applicants have a good case for a class action law suit.
As has already been said, the school did not protect the information. The school likely is changing admission status possibly without just cause.
This is not 1999. We know how to do security. It is just that many companies are to cheap to pay for it.
pretty much the problem is that are too few $10 being spent on research and discovery nd too many spent on death and descruction. And while the later is certainly entertaining, the former is what defines and sustains a great country. Looting can only get you so far. Eventually you have to actually make something, no matter how lazy you are.
Which is why all many existing companies use MS Office. But why do new companies use it. Because for most people, a copy of Office can be gotten for free. Leave you old copy, steal a copy of office, and use it in your competing venture. Eventually you will buy your own copy, but why learn something new when the immidiate cost of Office is nothing.
As much as MS want to fight copyright infringement, it profits are dependent on allowing users the limited abilty to freely copy software. This copying allows current users to continue to use the software, even if they can't afford it, and new users to learn it.
This is the real reason why Linux can't get a foothold. With MS licensing OEMs, and punishing those that don't comply, and letting everyone else have a free copy, Linux ends up costing more.
Which is in reality what happens. The old ATM did one thing, and did it very well. It gave you money. You put in your card, entered your pin, and completed a requested operation.
The big reason for the change, as far as I can see, it to allow advertising and force a primary GUI input. The big thing is the advertising when you drive up, the advertising when you wait for your money, and the advertising when you leave.
The other thing are the touch screens which often get borked. I push my finger and nothing happens. I understand that they may be more reliable than the old soft buttons, but realy.
I am sure the key selling point was the propoganda. It would be a same not to fully utilize the customers time when said customer was a captive audience. it is fully justified because the customer does not have to use the ATM, the customer can just go to a teller!
Ok, here we go. There are a few experiments that have redefined the way we think of waves of matter. These often use simple apparatus but incredible levels of deductions. First, the Michelson-Morley Experiment tested the assumption that waves had to have a medium of travel. We knew that light was a wave, and waves were energy that traveled in matter, like water waves. After the great experiment, we knew that light could and did travel in a vacuum, unlike say sound waves.
Another change came when Einstein discovered that he could use light to knock electrons off of atoms in a way that looked very much like a billiard ball knocking bricks of a wall. It now seemed that the photon was a particle.
What the double slit experiment did was allow us to show that light is both. In the experiment, one shines a pinpoint of light onto two very thin slits. The physics of waves dictate that waves will interfere in a characteristic pattern. This was later used with any matter of particles to show that the wave/particle duality, that is, all suitable small things act like waves or particles depending on the circumstances.
The experiment depends on the fact that we have no idea which slit any particular particle passes through. This uncertainty, in a certain sense, allows particles to go through both slits, which is why a single electron will interfere with itself. If we do know which slit an particle goes through, then then interference disappears. In this way we can show that particles are a wave until, in Schrödinger terms, we collapse it into a wave. So the experiment can show the duality.
So, to summarize, when the state of any particular particle is left uncertain, and certain other conditions are met, it will interfere as a wave. What they are doing here is introducing the uncertainty through a ultra-short pulse of light. There are two ways that the pulse could interact with the surrounding particles, but the universe does not know exactly which interaction occurred. There, the strange and headache producing phenomenon of the sub atomic world are allowed to manifest. I am not sure how this is time instead of space, but it is neat.
It is funny to bring up the most obvious mistake, which realy is an emblem of the disconnect between MS and the average user.
But seriously OO.org has a chance to compete because MS has not done much useful in MS Office in about 10 years. The only interesting thing they did was gut Foxpro, put a cheesy GUI on the Rushmore engine, and say look ma we can make one of them new fangle databases.
So as soon as OO.org makes it to fully to Office 95, and has a cheesy database GUI, then I will be happy. Hopefully it can maintain compatibility with the latest formate without falling into the pitfall of useless features.
Well, it depends. If I steal a copy of a 50 cents song that is already released, and just play it on my mp3 player or at my house or in my car, I have deprived 50 cents of their fees, but haven't really violated any other laws.
Likewise, if I steal a bunch of data and just have it around for kicks, then I have broken the law, but since I have not profited off it, very likely no one will know I stole it, and there is little chance of prosecution. Now, if I start bragging about the theft, or start selling it, then a crime will be created and more likely prosecuted.
To further push the analogy beyond it's limits, the difference between a database of person identifiable information and a song is the the later is public information, while the later is not. To make the analogy comparable, one would in fact have to sneak into the recording studio and steal songs that have yet to be released. This likely does happen and is, and has always, been prosecuted quite differently from simply personally making a copy of legally acquired album. There is after all a difference between copyright violation and theft.
Which is to say stealing MP3s or databases of personal information is bad if one has to go through illegal means to get it. Which is why the DCMA is so broad and insideous.
I think quite a few people probably have gigabytes of personal information from the banks. It does not seem that hard to do. Most proabably just keep it as trophies, showing it off only to the most trusted freinds. It is only the greedy that get caught.
There are going to hear the clear sign that you grew up in the oppressive annonyminity of the suburban ghetto, and deal with the resulting psychosis by tomenting others.
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As far as commercilization is concerned, in most cases the research institution owns the research and licenses the results to a commercial enterprise for futher development. Though I only have passing knowledge of such deals, the seem to work pretty well. It is really hard, and as you said, very expensive to commercialize basic research. You generally must have the cooperation of the researchers themselves, and any loose license issues might mean that the millions you spent on development might become the property of a competitor. This further motivates industry to play by these rules.
About once a year there is some major issue of fraud in science. This results in a major setback in which we no longer know what we think we did. Science works because it is open, and when it is not red flags tend to go up. Particulalry in papers that depend on data analysis, original data and methodology is critical. If a computer is used for analysis, the same results must be achieved across compilers and hardware.
It was clasic science fiction where the fx and space was secondary to the people and situations. This is why I am not sure that film can be made. It is going to be hard to get a young actor that act that innocent and that hurt.
It also sounds like card is giving into hollywood, changing the story from that a world that chooses to fatally damage a child in an effort to save itself, to that of a child that is fatally damaged, and then spends the rest of his life trying to make up for what he did. Which is of course what card did when he changed the book to a series, but at least the book existed to make that specific point.
So, if final say is about ages, and special effects, and the like, then there is little hope. The tragedy will be turned into the standard chosen one redemption crap.
OTOH, the computer is one of the tools we now have. Like a pencil. Just having a kid sit and scrawl random characters is not often going to meet an objctive. In the same way, having a kid play a game on a computer or do guided practice may not result in any useful measureables. However, like the other tools teachers have, never using it is not good either. The point is to know how to use the computer, know how it can help, and make it a part of the lesson cycle. Some students it will not help at all, some students it will.
All that said, the article really did not make a convicing case that the study was valid. For instance, did they adjust for the fact that succesful teachers, that is teachers whose students tend to do well, might be less likely to use new techniques in thier classrooms? They do a good job, so why change? Or that teachers with less success might be more likely to use computers, as they are looking for anything to help. These might also be the teachers who are less skilled overall. This is outside of school mandates. Teachers tend to use what they want, no matter what is supplied. I also can't tell if there is a bias in the study. Do the researchers have some reason not to want the state to supply computers? Is it a group that believes doing math in your head or knowing how to spell is superior to knowing how to do process ananlysis or advanced mathematics?
I know 4th graders that are learning to computer presentations. I know high school students who are doing more math because of calculators. The things that are not being becuase of technology taught may be important, but I would rather have my kids know who to do a presentation and use a calculator rather than knowing how to make perfect characters or do exact math in thier heads. It is just a matter of what modern success is.
So, the reason that Gutenberg is not used so much is the same reason the library is not. Books are not expensive, and most who do read can cheaply buy a copy. If not new, then at the many stores of used books. The mild annoyance of reading a book on the computer, like the minor annoyance of have to check out and return a book, keeps book sales active.
A cheap e-book reader will start the movement to e-books, but I think that people wil still buy, or a least subscribe, to well formated books over the free stuff. I actually think that the entire reading thing is going to decline, and most money will be made of books on tape, or books on iPod.
First, as a republican, you understand that producers must be compensated for their efforts by consumers. The price of those goods and services are set by the free market, so, by definition, a cost of a good that is actively pursued by consumers is not too high.
Now, we could have a bigger government that could subsidize certain goods and services so that more consumers could gain access. We in fact do this with farms and ranches and all those republicans in the west that live freely benefit greatly. We do this a great extent with education through such schools as the Republican Minded Texas A&M, which continuously sucks off the public teat while it's graduates complain about taxes. We have not, in general, offered to pay for books. That would certainly be a new mandate, and given the current congress, would remain unfunded.
So, back to your statement. The $120 is the free market price necessary to convince a competent author, and competent publisher, to produce a quality book. And, contrary to popular opinion, new additions are not just permutations of the old edition. They are updated to include new information, and, in the case of calculus, new pedagogical methods. Competence is necessary because we assume you are in school to get an education, and not just a piece of paper, and would be unhappy if you learned that (d/dx)x^2=2+x.
And just to head off those that decry 'the monopoly of the bookstore.' Textbooks are there to make the students life easier. They are not absolutely required. It is usually possible to go to class and take notes and create your own practice problems, especially today with the internet, and have quite reasonable success. It is possible to buy old books and fill in the details with research at the library. It is even possible to learn many subjects without even going to university and paying the huge tuitions.
So, if $120 was in fact too much, the free market would compensate. If google took copyrighted books and published them, then the current administration would rightly be asked to investigate google for violation of copyright, and Bush or his spokespeople would be on TV telling us that google was anti American and not allowing hard working american to put food on their families.
It does little good to argue the philisophical and moral issues. What is true is that the music industry has depended on reselling tracks to consumer for profit. New formats, new collections, etc. Now the consumer can format shift, remix, and backup the collection without the music people getting thier cut.
This is a problem. If you paid for all the music on your iPod, as we did for the CDs that replace vinyl, there would be no problem. But you don't have to.
So how is the music company going to adjust. The apple model does not guarantee long term growth. As a person ages, the interest in new music wanes, and the importance of reselling old music increases. This is why the subscription model is so compelling. It gaurantees that the individual will buy the equivelent of 1 album in perpetuity. it duplicates the glory days when the industry could resell track after track. At some point most people will no longer be interested in the new music, and will pay to just keep what they have. Even better, as the old stuff goes off line, these people will have to pay retail prices to license off line acces to the music.
So, in the minds of the music industry ther probably is no legal concept of copying a CD to an iPod. We are either expected to pay a dollar for every song on our iPod, or buy something that works with a subscription service.
I did not RTFA, but I doubt the writer intended to use or prove the sticker was a placebo. In the former case, the writer would have used the sticker as a control in the experiment. In the later, the writer would have expected the sticker to act as inert object that reinforced the batteries expectation to charge or discharge.
In fact I am sure the purpose was to prove the sticker was ineffective or snake oil. This is very different from a placebo, where there are no indications of effectiveness.
You are probably correct about the flaws. The writer would likely have to have done many more test, with strict controls, and careful statistical analysis. That said, since the physics dictates that the sticker does not work, and I have seen little evidence otherwise, we can assume it is scam.
No, I'm saying that IQ is not all that is there to intelligence.
There is no reason to defend the IQ. It is merely a model that some of the western world feels the need to fit people into. It is somewhat useful if one wishes to know that a person is inside or outside what we assume is to be the middle 68% or so, but is pretty useless otherwise. And why we need to fit people to a model is often in question.
As you mentioned, We can see the folly of the model merely by noting that it is very hard to measure that number, especially when outside the 'average'. For example, a parent can just have a battery of test run to get the need plus or minus 20 points.
But the real problem comes when it is used to as a basis to say certain people can or cannot do certain things. A person or average IQ might not be able to be an engineer, but it is also likely, as is shown by the failure rates at enginnering schools, tath a person of above average intellegence has difficulty as well. As everyone who has worked with children know, motivation plays a huge part.
I know mensa members. Those that are interesting have something beyond intellegence going on. It is not just identifing current fact. It is social, insight , or imagination. It is in fact the ability to create something interesting. It is not just the ability to identify patterns or pompously critic existing objects.
One of the most famous of these was McDonalds. Though they berate those that would waste the courts time on suing for spilt coffee, they caused one of the longest trails in Britain history. Some protesters were saying the food was non-nutritional. McDonalds sued. McDonals defense. Anything could be a nutritional part of a balanced diet. McDonalds lost. Britain lost. The peoples right to speak freely lost. And, as conservatives are so fond of saying, the lawyers won.
And yet we do nothing to limit the ability of companies to launch these frivolous suites, and allow them to waste everyone times.
Surely the victim in this case is not 100% in the right, and the company is not 100% in the wrong. But this suit is as frivolous as they come.
The desktop battle is unknown to most end users. Bringing it up is silly. This is like saying MS Windows will fail becuase each version requires linking to somewhat different libraries and has a slightly different look.
The thing is for a serious user, or a user with specific needs, being able to choose is a good thing. It might just might not be worth the effort.
At best one would find an^2 to be valid, where a1, or perhaps some function with an asymptote. What is sure is that double the people with not produce four times as much work. Again, just reference the mythical man month.
What I did try to use was Opera, but they took too long to create a usable mac product, and camino came out, so there was no reason to spend the money.
I found and find IE on MS Windows and Mac platforms to be consistantly inferior in most catagories and try not to use it. IE is expandable to be a usable platform, but I often just want to work out of the box. Ie does not.
Atthat age the kiddos have a hard time understanding anything that they cannot touch. I did basic on a teletype in sixth grade, and even though it was fun, it was the applications in high school that realy got me hooked. I was able to get hooked because i knew that is was possible for me to do complex things, even though i did not understand what those complex things were.
Have you priced media? The difference is + and - media is signifcant, like double. It is supply and demand. The one that is supported by more devices costs more. My lacie can handle both, my superdrive cannot.
You state the tax savings as 126,462, with a marginal tax reate of 28%. If we call it 25%, then the deductions over 30 years is around 500,000, so that means you are spending $16,800 every year on tax deductible interest, and we assume local taxes.. Given the fact that you state only 100K is spent on the stuff, the tax savings is only 28,00. which adds 100K to the cost of the house.
Second, your $100 a month rate of maintanance is extremely low. It is the kind of figure floated around to convince people they must own a house. Perhaps ths is the rate for maintaince fees on a small condo, say 700 square feet, but reality is that in a new house it will be on the order of 3-5K a year, and an older house might be double or triple that. A realistic cost of maintaince for a house might be 125,000 over 30 years, or nearly 100K more than you estimate. Again, another 100K disapears.
The real value in a house is stability, some security, and space. It is harder to kick someone out of a house. A person will be generally able to buy a bigger house than they could rent.
OTOH, for 12K a year I can get a place to live with few worries. If something breaks, I do not have to come up with the money to fix it. If undesirable move it, I can move out. I even have someone to pick up my packages, screen my visitors, and talk to me when I am on my way out. With a house I would have $3000 in taxes, $3000 in maintaince, and a whole lot more space to clean. Houses are a good invetment, but often not for money.
I have decided this is unethical. It would be like complaining that you had to pay for the goods. Or complaining that you did not have a personal shopper. Or complaining that were the wrong size. You know good and well the mores of the store. You know good and well that you are trading your personal dignitiy to save money. To take the deal from the devil, so to speak, and then to back out is not honorable. You may want to rationalize your behavior by saying you are hurting the monster by visiting the store and then harrasing the workers, but th management is laughing all the way to the bank.
Of course, if the evil store has driven out all other stores, and there no equally convinent option, then there might be a case at protesting at the door. I have in fact done this. But if it is a choice between the monster and an equally convinent competitor, then the act of chosing to shopping at the monster indebts you to that monster.
Even if you justify your action by saying you cannot afford all the stuff you want at the competitor, you still indebt yourself to the monster as they are supplying you your essentials, and it is perfectly acceptable to trade dignity for essentials.
But the writing on walmartblows just makes my head hurt. These are adults, some say with children, and the writing is at about a 6th grade level. I know for a fact that most teachers don't write this bad. I know for a fact that most teachers try to guide students to better writing. Reading the site i was hard pressed to find a single coherent thought. And these are Americans.
I hate to say it, but thank god for walmart because I do not know where else these people could work. No wonder they make nothing. They probably wasted the free education that America provides and then had delusions that someone would give them a high paying job while allowing them to continue to do nothing.
I generally don't shop at walmart, and generally make myself annoying when I do. I wish it would go away. But reading these writing samples just make me wonder if it the simple inability of Americans to aspire to be something more than workers that makes the domination of walmart inevitable.
As has already been said, the school did not protect the information. The school likely is changing admission status possibly without just cause.
This is not 1999. We know how to do security. It is just that many companies are to cheap to pay for it.
pretty much the problem is that are too few $10 being spent on research and discovery nd too many spent on death and descruction. And while the later is certainly entertaining, the former is what defines and sustains a great country. Looting can only get you so far. Eventually you have to actually make something, no matter how lazy you are.
As much as MS want to fight copyright infringement, it profits are dependent on allowing users the limited abilty to freely copy software. This copying allows current users to continue to use the software, even if they can't afford it, and new users to learn it.
This is the real reason why Linux can't get a foothold. With MS licensing OEMs, and punishing those that don't comply, and letting everyone else have a free copy, Linux ends up costing more.
The big reason for the change, as far as I can see, it to allow advertising and force a primary GUI input. The big thing is the advertising when you drive up, the advertising when you wait for your money, and the advertising when you leave.
The other thing are the touch screens which often get borked. I push my finger and nothing happens. I understand that they may be more reliable than the old soft buttons, but realy.
I am sure the key selling point was the propoganda. It would be a same not to fully utilize the customers time when said customer was a captive audience. it is fully justified because the customer does not have to use the ATM, the customer can just go to a teller!
What the double slit experiment did was allow us to show that light is both. In the experiment, one shines a pinpoint of light onto two very thin slits. The physics of waves dictate that waves will interfere in a characteristic pattern. This was later used with any matter of particles to show that the wave/particle duality, that is, all suitable small things act like waves or particles depending on the circumstances.
The experiment depends on the fact that we have no idea which slit any particular particle passes through. This uncertainty, in a certain sense, allows particles to go through both slits, which is why a single electron will interfere with itself. If we do know which slit an particle goes through, then then interference disappears. In this way we can show that particles are a wave until, in Schrödinger terms, we collapse it into a wave. So the experiment can show the duality.
So, to summarize, when the state of any particular particle is left uncertain, and certain other conditions are met, it will interfere as a wave. What they are doing here is introducing the uncertainty through a ultra-short pulse of light. There are two ways that the pulse could interact with the surrounding particles, but the universe does not know exactly which interaction occurred. There, the strange and headache producing phenomenon of the sub atomic world are allowed to manifest. I am not sure how this is time instead of space, but it is neat.
But seriously OO.org has a chance to compete because MS has not done much useful in MS Office in about 10 years. The only interesting thing they did was gut Foxpro, put a cheesy GUI on the Rushmore engine, and say look ma we can make one of them new fangle databases.
So as soon as OO.org makes it to fully to Office 95, and has a cheesy database GUI, then I will be happy. Hopefully it can maintain compatibility with the latest formate without falling into the pitfall of useless features.
Likewise, if I steal a bunch of data and just have it around for kicks, then I have broken the law, but since I have not profited off it, very likely no one will know I stole it, and there is little chance of prosecution. Now, if I start bragging about the theft, or start selling it, then a crime will be created and more likely prosecuted.
To further push the analogy beyond it's limits, the difference between a database of person identifiable information and a song is the the later is public information, while the later is not. To make the analogy comparable, one would in fact have to sneak into the recording studio and steal songs that have yet to be released. This likely does happen and is, and has always, been prosecuted quite differently from simply personally making a copy of legally acquired album. There is after all a difference between copyright violation and theft.
Which is to say stealing MP3s or databases of personal information is bad if one has to go through illegal means to get it. Which is why the DCMA is so broad and insideous.
I think quite a few people probably have gigabytes of personal information from the banks. It does not seem that hard to do. Most proabably just keep it as trophies, showing it off only to the most trusted freinds. It is only the greedy that get caught.
There are going to hear the clear sign that you grew up in the oppressive annonyminity of the suburban ghetto, and deal with the resulting psychosis by tomenting others.