Not to defend trolls, but only to say this is not an internet problem, people should be able to make critical judgements of what they here. For instance, television is full of statements that make no sense. Infomercials, opinion shows masquerading as news, daytime talk shows. Dr. Oz makes false claims, has even been called in front of congress, almost every week. I don't see how rational people are going to believe that gold is long term investment strategy for the small investor. At least with commercials most people know they are being lied to.
Trolls may in fact make the discourse of the internet less enjoyable, but it also has a built in bullshit detector called everyone else. And each of us adults has a responsibility to think critically about statements that are made.
For instance, when I first heard this I immediately asked how could a software update effect the charging hardware. How could a software update effect the ability of the hardware to handle hard radiation. And by what mechanism could the battery be charged.
Of course some of these questions come from a hard science background, not something everyone has. But still isn't the problem that so many in the population just believe and repeat whatever they are told by authority figures. Is the problem really trolls, or that a certain subgroup of people just want to believe in the magical solutions promoted by their revered charlatans.
Honestly, Smartboards in modern use case is a scam. It is essentially a big mousepad. The reason that most people buy it is because they do not understand basic computer/physics/electronic stuff. I am serious here, some don't understand that they can project on a normal whiteboard. Now one can use a smartphone as a remote mouse to control whatever you want to better than the board.
About the only reason that the smartboard is useful is because administrators like teachers to stand in front of the class and pretend to teach. Although writing on a slate or ipad and having it show up on the board can be better, the teacher standing in front of the room is still seen as the old fashion as the better solution.
If I am honest, though the smartboard software is bloated, there are some things it does very well, although it is still better to not use the smartboard. There was a time when the board itself was interesting to kids, but now they all have smartphones.
So to answer the question, if there is not something in the software that you absolutely have to use, like the math symbols, then don't use it. Download mobile mouse or something like it to control the computer. There are many drawing apps that will allow you, or any student, to write. I have a slate.
I find it to be a bit slow on my 5. It is very slow on my old iPad. This, I think is normal, and it has gotten faster since I upgraded.
As far as the updates, most applications seem to update when a new iOS comes out. I have not seen an inordinate number of updates. As the Apps have to not only deal with a new OS but also new screen sizes, Apps that are not written to run on many screen sizes will obviously have to be updated.
My problem is that Apple is reintroducing the cloud disk service, a la iDisk, but it is not going to available on mac until the next MacOS, which is not going to be available for at least a month. Those who upgrade when they upgrade their phone will lose access to data on the Mac. There does seem to be some feature bloat at the expense of efficiency.
you would be more expensive because you would not be manufacturing at the same scale. If you are making 10,000 widgets, and it costs $100K to set up and $10 to make, that is $20 a widget just to make. If you are manufacturing a million, that is $10.10, and probably much less due to other discounts.
We see this in other industries. The F150 is now aluminum, which required not only the entire production line to be redone, but also supplied of aluminum to be created. This is only profitable because Ford sells about 10,000 of these trucks a week, and that is a number that has been falling since a high in about 10 years ago, though in recent years the sales have increased.
To upgrade my phone to IOS 8 I had to free some space. This basically involved deleted some Apps that I never use that were taking a great deal of space. I don't buy apple movies because they can be only played on apple devices, so the majority of data is music, most of which is stored on the cloud, and photos. I know people have almost no music on their devices, but stream everything. To be honest, streaming has meant that many people do not have to deal with the hassle of local storage. Though we can get into a philosophical argument, the fact is that I do not store as much on my mobile devices as I once did. Even my laptop now has less stuff on it.
As to why there is still a 16GB model, that is obvious. Apple needs an entry level device and is not willing to enter the cut rate phone market. Amazon has done this with a 99 cent 32GB model and at $99 64GB model. Obviously they are hoping customers buy the 64GB model even though what is essentially $100 for a 32GB upgrade is essentially highway robbery. Some will do it even though the pricing structure provides little value.
Most cell phone companies do this. Apple, being a premium device, is just a little more aggressive.
The story is the owners want to maintain control, even if they do not maintain a controlling interest. They set up a shell company in the cayman islands which is nominally linked to the profits of the actual company, and as far as I can tell are in fact selling shares in that shell company. So the company that is being purchased in not in china, and the business model will probably be international.
As far as why this is allowed, it is a lot of money. The banks and firms who are managing the IPO are US and will make a lot of money. The persons and firms who are allowed to buy or are given the stocks will make a lot of money when they resell the stock, either immediately, or in a few months when principles are allowed to resell stock.
It seems that the sale is on shaky ground, given that the Chinese government can likely do any number of things to make the shell company worthless. I think what some may be hoping is that the Alibaba can quickly expand out of china and preserve value as a worldwide conglomerate type thing. At a basic level this is further indication that there is a lot of capital out there, and for some reason the people who have it think it is better to risk it on the occasional potential high return scheme than use it to build long term infrastructure. I guess no matter how much money one have, one always is susceptible to a get rich quick scheme,
My thoughts are there must have been a reason that dealers franchises had to be protected from manufacturers. I suspect there were issues, and that is the reason in the vast number of cases, except for fly by night 'seen on tv' junk we as retail consumers tend to buy retail, not direct from the manufacturer.
I have bought or been involved in buying a fair number of cars in my life. I never felt the dealer was pushing me to buy a car I did not want. I have generally gone in knowing the car that I want, and the back and forth is which car that is available is the car I am willing to plunk done some cash for. I suppose some people go into to buy a car that they have no interest in, and the dealer gets them to buy it, but I don't think that is the general case.
Making money off service and not the car is no issue to me. That is how we keep cars affordable. It is called competition. What Tesla wants to do is charge an arbitrarily high price for a produce, like Mont Blanc. I am not a greedy person and have never been unwilling to pay for good service. Likewise is a car comes with a good warranty I know that there is a good chance the car is good, and a dealer network means I can get warranty repair. I am not saying that Tesla is not a good car, but if the car needed a repair not under warranty, and it cost money, and it was less than three years old, it is not a good car.
There are a lot of cars that have limited production run. The Lotus Evora has production runs of about 2,000 a year, but I can go down the street right now to my car dealer, lay down $100K, and get one. A 2013. So Tesla is not unique there.
I suspect that the franchise laws will change, and that Tesla will be able to sell direct. I also suspect that Tesla has spent too much time with the lawyers, and cheating tax payers out of 1.5 billion, and not enough time innovating, so they may not be able to bring the 25,000 electric car to the people, which is what we need. As it is the Asian car manufacturers are shipping real cars right now that get over 50mpg in the real world. Not all electric, but electric is simply a means to an end, not an end to itself.
Of course Astrophysics, even as the bastard child of real physics, is still very hard. Most people who are in it have had some major training and degrees by the time they are 30.
Also, if you are like me you are probably making some good money after 20 years of work. I could probably go to a research job, learn what I needed to learn, but would probably me making half of what I do. I love research, but like the cash as well, and can do fun stuff occasionally and as a hobby.
That said there seem to many contribution amateur astronomer make to the science. IT is a very general term, and can mean anything from repairing computers to writing web pages to developing analytical algorithms in C, but maybe there is something you could contribute to on that side, or a job with a firm that does work that might be an intersection of the two.
Just to mention, since many have probably never heard of it, the JIR was a great to read in college. My favorite collection was Druken Goldfish. I also particularly remember the study that sought to predict the date when National Geographics would trigger a world cataclysm.
Really it is true. The GOP in the US base most of their policy on religious and military views. For instance, GWBush used an expansion of the military to employ the unskilled and uneducated. He then used Homeland Security.
If you are not actually basing your economy on a educated workforce, and maintaining control through religion, then any kind of secular education is a bad thing.
This is quite a piece of idolotry. Let us start at the end first.
For many jobs no one requires a certified plumber or electrician or anything. There is no requirement to get such a certification. For certain jobs it is a requirement to get a permit, but that is to protect lives. OTOH I am sure you would no problem if your family died because the water heater exploded or the house caught on fire because of the work of a plumber or electrician was faulty, because, after all, she had good recommendations from people who had no expertise in critiquing the actual work. In any case, such requirements as the exists, are demanded not by government but by bankers, insurance companies, and general sane people who do not want to die because the invisible hand, or magic ratings, or whatever, was a substitute for competence.
It is intersting that th.s hair brained scheme was introduced after the previous hair brained scheme, to force some Uber drivers to work at or below cost, failed. You see some of the driver took the capitalistic idea of better service leading to more profits seriously,So they only wanted to serve the high end clientele, and invested resources to do so. But Uber told them they could not limit themselves to high end customers, and said if the drivers did not pick up any customer that Uber sent, they would be out of the network. This was absolutely Uber's right to do, after all the contractors could just leave, but I think it speaks to an issue with capitalistic fantasy. At some point the people who are taking a cut of everything the workers do, will want an increasingly large cut to support their increasingly inefficient operations, and to do that they will begin to compete on price instead of service. The contractors, as individuals, can make that choice on a case by case basis. Corporate, however, seeing only a lack of funding for their cocaine habit, are only able to make drastic decisions to increase funding for said habit.
In any case, the Uber drivers still had the ability to strike, so they did, and Uber relented.
When I hear the term glass I think of a fused or amorphous material rather than a crystal form. Sapphire, like many other material, is synthetically created as a single crystal as a substrate for RF and IC applications, which is different from the glass use in optical applications.
It is pretty much free. I have some books that are post WWII, and it seems the paperbacks cost 30-50 cents. 70% discounts are even beyond the bargain bin.
As I recall on aspect of the cheap printing was the pulp book. Publisher would print and ship paper backs to stores en masse knowing that most would not sell. Those that did not would simply be returned, maybe with the cover torn off, and pulped back into paper that could be reused to make the next book. Could these book have been the equivalent of the reject rack, and selling the to army was simply a way to at least cover costs? I don't see that these books were specifically printed for the military. OTOH, if they were printed specifically for the military, it has no impact on today's economics. Many industries will sell large quantities of product at cost simply so they can stay afloat and pay the bills, knowing that profit will come in the future.
I believe what really ignited the post war reading boom was the newly educated population, created through the GI Bill, the brief existence of the housewife, whose appliances gave her much less to do and much more free time, and the willingness of publisher to print just about anything, knowing that they could charge enough so the many failures would be covered by the few successes.
What might be applicable from this story to the modern day is that publishers still have to pay for printing presses. No matter how cheap it may be to print books, if the books are not selling, and the printing press costs are fixed, then fewer books are paying for the overhead. E-Books may not need the printing press, but the printing press is still part of the fixed costs.
Cars are really expensive to maintain. In parts of the US and other developed countries, a large number of people have the funds. There will always be a need for mass transportation, both for those who cannot afford personal transport and for the regions that cannot support all individuals driving around.
In the US we cannot afford to lower taxes on cars. We are already in trouble because of very low gas tax and an increase in fuel efficiency over the past 20 years. In fact we really need to change the way we tax cars so that cars pay a small fee for each mile driven adjusted for the weight of the car, instead of a gas tax. So for instance a person driving 10,000 miles a year in their Tesla would pay $100 extra registration fee, while a Highlander might have to cough up $150 for the same. We have no money to fix our roads, and will have to get it somehow.
A more real compromise here is to accept that this is advertisement and not take it at face value. While electric vehicles may be the winner in the consumer market, especially the second car consumer market, it is probably not the best choice for fleet vehicles. Something like fuel cells or the like will be a better choice. Proffesional fleet staff can handle the refueling that might a challenge for the consumer. The range is more reasonable, in the 200 mile range, and refueling is quicker.
I can't, the summary reads like a bunch of propaganda tripe written by some cult. I am a person who wonders if sending your real time medical information to Google or Apple is really a good idea.
Some people seem to be only concerned with living forever in relatively good condition, or keeping a young person alive even if the quality of life is dismal. They will give up whatever privacy, dignity, or wealth to accomplish this task. We have had some success. The average lifespan is increasing, and more importantly more people are healthy at older age. I am sure that artificial organs will play a huge part of this. I am sure that people will cut whatever deal to make it happen. I am sure that when their heart gets hacked they will sue, just like all those boys who grow breasts, even though it is common sense that selling drugs to kids, or allowing remote access to a heart, is not the wisest thing to do.
Here is what scares me. We do not seem to be doing much to keep the brain healthy into very old age. I have seen active, intellectually stimulated, well read, educated people fall into senility even though they have kept their mind active and engaged. It seems there is a limit to how long a brain can be very healthy. Do we want to be 125 years old and not be able to accomplish basic tasks? Do we want a world where a huge percentage of the adult population cannot care for themselves.
This is what i was thinking any commercial conversion place would do. I also recall those machines used to convert film to video, projecting the film and then recording onto video tape. I wonder if one of those could be used to playback a video on a good sony triniton TV and record onto a good 3ccd video recorder. The real problem with VHS is that it is pretty low quality analog, and one has to add information and fill in holes to make it work with digital. This may be the way to do it. When people complain about quality and blame it on lossy transition, it is probably more than likely the way that information is interpolated to make it work on digital.
Only because you think the labor market is different from other markets. One thing you miss is that the there are regulations in all markets. In fact firms want these regulations so the competition is simplified. On radical extremist say the minimum wage is bad, as it allows firms to compete for labor in a less expensive manner. There is disagreement on the value of the minimum wage, but even developing countries have minimum wages. It would be like saying that indoor plumbing or septic tanks should not be part of the building regulations because it prices some people out of the market. Our homeless problem would decrease significantly if people could just pout chamber pots into the streets or poop in the yard. Yet few conservatives are running around decrying how these building codes are destroying society.
This is where I think we get in trouble with forensic science. Certain things, like finger prints and DNA, can exonerate a suspect but we have seen enough analysis around here to know that it is a fallacy to think that these things prove guilt. it only proves guilt if we assume the probability of guilt is 100% initially. When comparing the sample to a database, random error can create a match under certain common circumstances.
So we can say that DNA evidence is part of a chain that can lead to guilt, and if we assume the known suspects represent the total population of possible suspects, then if the DNA exonerates all other suspects, then there is a case to be made for guilt, but that is a lot of caveats. As we have seen in many cases, obvious suspects are ignored because the authorities jump to quick conclusions. As said, DNA is good for exonerating people, not convicts them.
I think a different analogy is appropriate. Say a group of activist threatened to block access to stores in a neighborhood who charged more than $1 a pound for any fruit. The stores have a choice between taking a loss on fruit, not selling fruit, or having their customers harassed. In such a case we can be sure the police would be called and the activist arrested. The stores could probably sue for lost sales as well.
The problem we have in the US is that firms are given a great deal of leeway to insure that they can charge as high as price as the market will bear, but labor is severely restricted in doing the same. For instance firms are free to form collectives that lobby congress and produce promotional campaigns, even to the point of forcing companies to pay for such promotions, but unions have to bill lobbying efforts separate and members can opt out. Likewise firms are allowed to use some pretty significant tools to prevent labor from organizing, though firms are free to do the same with few restrictions.
One problem with education is that is it 'consensual' For instance, no child left behind set standards, but then left the states to meet those standard. While some good was done with the non-consual bits, i.e. well qualified teachers, hundreds of billions of local tax dollars were wasted paying testing companies and writing curriculum that to some extent were significant duplications of effort.
What needs to be left to local authorities, even down to the teacher, is the choice of how to teach material and a limited buffet of what to teach. What needs to be done on a interstate level is developing the methods of how that learning is going to be assessed. If there was a more consistent, maybe crowdsource, assessment then teachers would probably more understand what they are supposed to teach. Outside of history of the local area, there is little reason to have significant differences in content. What we can have is local differences in content that is emphasized.
The biggest hurdle to this, and the biggest damage the NCLB did, was the need to rank teachers and students. Current testing is not objective based mastery, but rather ranking. This requires an extremely expensive test, with passing levels set arbitratily after the test is given, often to maximize the success of preferred groups of students, rather than based on the objective performance of the student to show mastery of a benchmark number of standards. Therefore instead of measuring that a student has learned the material, and that a teacher has facilitated such learning, we merely have a continuum that is independent of learning, only indicating the ability to fill in bubbles effectively.
This is where the current reforms are still failing. Leaving the punitive ranking system behind and rather focusing on learning. Common Core is a step away from this, which is why no one likes it. Parents like to know their kid is better than others. Administrators like to be able to rank teachers on arbitrary statistically invalid scales.
The line terminator in C and C++ are pretty easy to find and fix. The conventions in FORTRAN are much more difficult to fix as the errors are non nonsensical. On of the first things I learned when I learned to code is a page of errors meant you had a mismatched type in a subroutine.
I have an HP in my desk. If I need to do simple math, I type it into google as I normally have a browser open on my desktop. Anything more complicated can be done in Wolfram Alpha.
I don't carry around my HP anymore, remember they days when everyone had a pocket protector and calculator on the belt, because my phone does everything. An RPN calculator, the Alpha App, and of course web connectivity. Even back in that day I preferred my TRS-80 pocket computer to the calculator, though I had both.
If I were a state I would remember that Tesla played one state against another until one desperate state gave them a reported $500 million dollars. If I were a resident of a state, I would ask why a profitable company wants to much more aggressive in emptying the public purse other companies.
I had some sympathy for Tesla and their fights with states even if I though that they should invest in states first to show some good will. Now they just seem like another evil company trying to make money by empty state coffers rather than making and selling a good product.
Like Usenet, it really isn't anything goes. Stuff that most people don't like is pushed off to alternative locations, there, bug not where anyone has to deal with it. What would kill 4chan, because evidently it runs with no significant budget or profit, would be a single lawsuit. By creating a belated DCMA policy, the site is protecting itself from such an event. Look at it this way. If Arthur Anderson had created a policy stating the conditions and intervals that documents would be destroyed, it might still be in existence today. But it did not, and panicked, and is gone. It is good that 4chan is being more forward thinking.
The only use for a standalone calculator is testing. The reluctance to allow students to use a phone for a calculator in class is threefold. One is that they need to learn to use the standalone calculator for the test. As easy as the TI is use, it still requires a lot of training. The second is that most students, even in college, lack a degree of self discipline. It is hard for them not to go to facebook. This is not an insult, I often wonder how much coding I would have gotten done if I had the internet growing up. The third is cost. Students are going to have to buy the calculator anyway for the test, so asking them to buy an App, and the good calculator Apps cost money, is something that is hard to enforce.
Ti has the market because it has designed a good calculator not for general use, but for test use. The limited function makes it a bad calculator compared to the HP 49g, but I would hate to have to use my HP for a test written assuming a TI.
As tests move from paper based to computer based, I suspect the testing software will include a calculator and students will probably be moved to a similar calculator downloaded to their phone or tablet. I suspect the some College Board tests may still have require an external calculator, so TI is not in danger of losing all sales immediately. The TI is a really good machine,and they are the granddaddy of the pocket calculator, having developed the device to use their new electronics that did not at the time have a market. Interesting bit of trivia. On a College Board test a while back one of the questions put the TI into a thrashing state. You could have two calculators on the test, and if you did you could work on the second while the first finished. If you did not, well, you were screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Trolls may in fact make the discourse of the internet less enjoyable, but it also has a built in bullshit detector called everyone else. And each of us adults has a responsibility to think critically about statements that are made.
For instance, when I first heard this I immediately asked how could a software update effect the charging hardware. How could a software update effect the ability of the hardware to handle hard radiation. And by what mechanism could the battery be charged.
Of course some of these questions come from a hard science background, not something everyone has. But still isn't the problem that so many in the population just believe and repeat whatever they are told by authority figures. Is the problem really trolls, or that a certain subgroup of people just want to believe in the magical solutions promoted by their revered charlatans.
About the only reason that the smartboard is useful is because administrators like teachers to stand in front of the class and pretend to teach. Although writing on a slate or ipad and having it show up on the board can be better, the teacher standing in front of the room is still seen as the old fashion as the better solution.
If I am honest, though the smartboard software is bloated, there are some things it does very well, although it is still better to not use the smartboard. There was a time when the board itself was interesting to kids, but now they all have smartphones.
So to answer the question, if there is not something in the software that you absolutely have to use, like the math symbols, then don't use it. Download mobile mouse or something like it to control the computer. There are many drawing apps that will allow you, or any student, to write. I have a slate.
As far as the updates, most applications seem to update when a new iOS comes out. I have not seen an inordinate number of updates. As the Apps have to not only deal with a new OS but also new screen sizes, Apps that are not written to run on many screen sizes will obviously have to be updated.
My problem is that Apple is reintroducing the cloud disk service, a la iDisk, but it is not going to available on mac until the next MacOS, which is not going to be available for at least a month. Those who upgrade when they upgrade their phone will lose access to data on the Mac. There does seem to be some feature bloat at the expense of efficiency.
We see this in other industries. The F150 is now aluminum, which required not only the entire production line to be redone, but also supplied of aluminum to be created. This is only profitable because Ford sells about 10,000 of these trucks a week, and that is a number that has been falling since a high in about 10 years ago, though in recent years the sales have increased.
To upgrade my phone to IOS 8 I had to free some space. This basically involved deleted some Apps that I never use that were taking a great deal of space. I don't buy apple movies because they can be only played on apple devices, so the majority of data is music, most of which is stored on the cloud, and photos. I know people have almost no music on their devices, but stream everything. To be honest, streaming has meant that many people do not have to deal with the hassle of local storage. Though we can get into a philosophical argument, the fact is that I do not store as much on my mobile devices as I once did. Even my laptop now has less stuff on it. As to why there is still a 16GB model, that is obvious. Apple needs an entry level device and is not willing to enter the cut rate phone market. Amazon has done this with a 99 cent 32GB model and at $99 64GB model. Obviously they are hoping customers buy the 64GB model even though what is essentially $100 for a 32GB upgrade is essentially highway robbery. Some will do it even though the pricing structure provides little value. Most cell phone companies do this. Apple, being a premium device, is just a little more aggressive.
As far as why this is allowed, it is a lot of money. The banks and firms who are managing the IPO are US and will make a lot of money. The persons and firms who are allowed to buy or are given the stocks will make a lot of money when they resell the stock, either immediately, or in a few months when principles are allowed to resell stock.
It seems that the sale is on shaky ground, given that the Chinese government can likely do any number of things to make the shell company worthless. I think what some may be hoping is that the Alibaba can quickly expand out of china and preserve value as a worldwide conglomerate type thing. At a basic level this is further indication that there is a lot of capital out there, and for some reason the people who have it think it is better to risk it on the occasional potential high return scheme than use it to build long term infrastructure. I guess no matter how much money one have, one always is susceptible to a get rich quick scheme,
My thoughts are there must have been a reason that dealers franchises had to be protected from manufacturers. I suspect there were issues, and that is the reason in the vast number of cases, except for fly by night 'seen on tv' junk we as retail consumers tend to buy retail, not direct from the manufacturer. I have bought or been involved in buying a fair number of cars in my life. I never felt the dealer was pushing me to buy a car I did not want. I have generally gone in knowing the car that I want, and the back and forth is which car that is available is the car I am willing to plunk done some cash for. I suppose some people go into to buy a car that they have no interest in, and the dealer gets them to buy it, but I don't think that is the general case. Making money off service and not the car is no issue to me. That is how we keep cars affordable. It is called competition. What Tesla wants to do is charge an arbitrarily high price for a produce, like Mont Blanc. I am not a greedy person and have never been unwilling to pay for good service. Likewise is a car comes with a good warranty I know that there is a good chance the car is good, and a dealer network means I can get warranty repair. I am not saying that Tesla is not a good car, but if the car needed a repair not under warranty, and it cost money, and it was less than three years old, it is not a good car. There are a lot of cars that have limited production run. The Lotus Evora has production runs of about 2,000 a year, but I can go down the street right now to my car dealer, lay down $100K, and get one. A 2013. So Tesla is not unique there. I suspect that the franchise laws will change, and that Tesla will be able to sell direct. I also suspect that Tesla has spent too much time with the lawyers, and cheating tax payers out of 1.5 billion, and not enough time innovating, so they may not be able to bring the 25,000 electric car to the people, which is what we need. As it is the Asian car manufacturers are shipping real cars right now that get over 50mpg in the real world. Not all electric, but electric is simply a means to an end, not an end to itself.
Of course Astrophysics, even as the bastard child of real physics, is still very hard. Most people who are in it have had some major training and degrees by the time they are 30. Also, if you are like me you are probably making some good money after 20 years of work. I could probably go to a research job, learn what I needed to learn, but would probably me making half of what I do. I love research, but like the cash as well, and can do fun stuff occasionally and as a hobby. That said there seem to many contribution amateur astronomer make to the science. IT is a very general term, and can mean anything from repairing computers to writing web pages to developing analytical algorithms in C, but maybe there is something you could contribute to on that side, or a job with a firm that does work that might be an intersection of the two.
Just to mention, since many have probably never heard of it, the JIR was a great to read in college. My favorite collection was Druken Goldfish. I also particularly remember the study that sought to predict the date when National Geographics would trigger a world cataclysm.
Really it is true. The GOP in the US base most of their policy on religious and military views. For instance, GWBush used an expansion of the military to employ the unskilled and uneducated. He then used Homeland Security. If you are not actually basing your economy on a educated workforce, and maintaining control through religion, then any kind of secular education is a bad thing.
This is quite a piece of idolotry. Let us start at the end first. For many jobs no one requires a certified plumber or electrician or anything. There is no requirement to get such a certification. For certain jobs it is a requirement to get a permit, but that is to protect lives. OTOH I am sure you would no problem if your family died because the water heater exploded or the house caught on fire because of the work of a plumber or electrician was faulty, because, after all, she had good recommendations from people who had no expertise in critiquing the actual work. In any case, such requirements as the exists, are demanded not by government but by bankers, insurance companies, and general sane people who do not want to die because the invisible hand, or magic ratings, or whatever, was a substitute for competence. It is intersting that th.s hair brained scheme was introduced after the previous hair brained scheme, to force some Uber drivers to work at or below cost, failed. You see some of the driver took the capitalistic idea of better service leading to more profits seriously,So they only wanted to serve the high end clientele, and invested resources to do so. But Uber told them they could not limit themselves to high end customers, and said if the drivers did not pick up any customer that Uber sent, they would be out of the network. This was absolutely Uber's right to do, after all the contractors could just leave, but I think it speaks to an issue with capitalistic fantasy. At some point the people who are taking a cut of everything the workers do, will want an increasingly large cut to support their increasingly inefficient operations, and to do that they will begin to compete on price instead of service. The contractors, as individuals, can make that choice on a case by case basis. Corporate, however, seeing only a lack of funding for their cocaine habit, are only able to make drastic decisions to increase funding for said habit. In any case, the Uber drivers still had the ability to strike, so they did, and Uber relented.
When I hear the term glass I think of a fused or amorphous material rather than a crystal form. Sapphire, like many other material, is synthetically created as a single crystal as a substrate for RF and IC applications, which is different from the glass use in optical applications.
As I recall on aspect of the cheap printing was the pulp book. Publisher would print and ship paper backs to stores en masse knowing that most would not sell. Those that did not would simply be returned, maybe with the cover torn off, and pulped back into paper that could be reused to make the next book. Could these book have been the equivalent of the reject rack, and selling the to army was simply a way to at least cover costs? I don't see that these books were specifically printed for the military. OTOH, if they were printed specifically for the military, it has no impact on today's economics. Many industries will sell large quantities of product at cost simply so they can stay afloat and pay the bills, knowing that profit will come in the future.
I believe what really ignited the post war reading boom was the newly educated population, created through the GI Bill, the brief existence of the housewife, whose appliances gave her much less to do and much more free time, and the willingness of publisher to print just about anything, knowing that they could charge enough so the many failures would be covered by the few successes.
What might be applicable from this story to the modern day is that publishers still have to pay for printing presses. No matter how cheap it may be to print books, if the books are not selling, and the printing press costs are fixed, then fewer books are paying for the overhead. E-Books may not need the printing press, but the printing press is still part of the fixed costs.
In the US we cannot afford to lower taxes on cars. We are already in trouble because of very low gas tax and an increase in fuel efficiency over the past 20 years. In fact we really need to change the way we tax cars so that cars pay a small fee for each mile driven adjusted for the weight of the car, instead of a gas tax. So for instance a person driving 10,000 miles a year in their Tesla would pay $100 extra registration fee, while a Highlander might have to cough up $150 for the same. We have no money to fix our roads, and will have to get it somehow.
A more real compromise here is to accept that this is advertisement and not take it at face value. While electric vehicles may be the winner in the consumer market, especially the second car consumer market, it is probably not the best choice for fleet vehicles. Something like fuel cells or the like will be a better choice. Proffesional fleet staff can handle the refueling that might a challenge for the consumer. The range is more reasonable, in the 200 mile range, and refueling is quicker.
Some people seem to be only concerned with living forever in relatively good condition, or keeping a young person alive even if the quality of life is dismal. They will give up whatever privacy, dignity, or wealth to accomplish this task. We have had some success. The average lifespan is increasing, and more importantly more people are healthy at older age. I am sure that artificial organs will play a huge part of this. I am sure that people will cut whatever deal to make it happen. I am sure that when their heart gets hacked they will sue, just like all those boys who grow breasts, even though it is common sense that selling drugs to kids, or allowing remote access to a heart, is not the wisest thing to do.
Here is what scares me. We do not seem to be doing much to keep the brain healthy into very old age. I have seen active, intellectually stimulated, well read, educated people fall into senility even though they have kept their mind active and engaged. It seems there is a limit to how long a brain can be very healthy. Do we want to be 125 years old and not be able to accomplish basic tasks? Do we want a world where a huge percentage of the adult population cannot care for themselves.
This is what i was thinking any commercial conversion place would do. I also recall those machines used to convert film to video, projecting the film and then recording onto video tape. I wonder if one of those could be used to playback a video on a good sony triniton TV and record onto a good 3ccd video recorder. The real problem with VHS is that it is pretty low quality analog, and one has to add information and fill in holes to make it work with digital. This may be the way to do it. When people complain about quality and blame it on lossy transition, it is probably more than likely the way that information is interpolated to make it work on digital.
Only because you think the labor market is different from other markets. One thing you miss is that the there are regulations in all markets. In fact firms want these regulations so the competition is simplified. On radical extremist say the minimum wage is bad, as it allows firms to compete for labor in a less expensive manner. There is disagreement on the value of the minimum wage, but even developing countries have minimum wages. It would be like saying that indoor plumbing or septic tanks should not be part of the building regulations because it prices some people out of the market. Our homeless problem would decrease significantly if people could just pout chamber pots into the streets or poop in the yard. Yet few conservatives are running around decrying how these building codes are destroying society.
So we can say that DNA evidence is part of a chain that can lead to guilt, and if we assume the known suspects represent the total population of possible suspects, then if the DNA exonerates all other suspects, then there is a case to be made for guilt, but that is a lot of caveats. As we have seen in many cases, obvious suspects are ignored because the authorities jump to quick conclusions. As said, DNA is good for exonerating people, not convicts them.
The problem we have in the US is that firms are given a great deal of leeway to insure that they can charge as high as price as the market will bear, but labor is severely restricted in doing the same. For instance firms are free to form collectives that lobby congress and produce promotional campaigns, even to the point of forcing companies to pay for such promotions, but unions have to bill lobbying efforts separate and members can opt out. Likewise firms are allowed to use some pretty significant tools to prevent labor from organizing, though firms are free to do the same with few restrictions.
What needs to be left to local authorities, even down to the teacher, is the choice of how to teach material and a limited buffet of what to teach. What needs to be done on a interstate level is developing the methods of how that learning is going to be assessed. If there was a more consistent, maybe crowdsource, assessment then teachers would probably more understand what they are supposed to teach. Outside of history of the local area, there is little reason to have significant differences in content. What we can have is local differences in content that is emphasized.
The biggest hurdle to this, and the biggest damage the NCLB did, was the need to rank teachers and students. Current testing is not objective based mastery, but rather ranking. This requires an extremely expensive test, with passing levels set arbitratily after the test is given, often to maximize the success of preferred groups of students, rather than based on the objective performance of the student to show mastery of a benchmark number of standards. Therefore instead of measuring that a student has learned the material, and that a teacher has facilitated such learning, we merely have a continuum that is independent of learning, only indicating the ability to fill in bubbles effectively.
This is where the current reforms are still failing. Leaving the punitive ranking system behind and rather focusing on learning. Common Core is a step away from this, which is why no one likes it. Parents like to know their kid is better than others. Administrators like to be able to rank teachers on arbitrary statistically invalid scales.
The line terminator in C and C++ are pretty easy to find and fix. The conventions in FORTRAN are much more difficult to fix as the errors are non nonsensical. On of the first things I learned when I learned to code is a page of errors meant you had a mismatched type in a subroutine.
I have an HP in my desk. If I need to do simple math, I type it into google as I normally have a browser open on my desktop. Anything more complicated can be done in Wolfram Alpha. I don't carry around my HP anymore, remember they days when everyone had a pocket protector and calculator on the belt, because my phone does everything. An RPN calculator, the Alpha App, and of course web connectivity. Even back in that day I preferred my TRS-80 pocket computer to the calculator, though I had both.
I had some sympathy for Tesla and their fights with states even if I though that they should invest in states first to show some good will. Now they just seem like another evil company trying to make money by empty state coffers rather than making and selling a good product.
Like Usenet, it really isn't anything goes. Stuff that most people don't like is pushed off to alternative locations, there, bug not where anyone has to deal with it. What would kill 4chan, because evidently it runs with no significant budget or profit, would be a single lawsuit. By creating a belated DCMA policy, the site is protecting itself from such an event. Look at it this way. If Arthur Anderson had created a policy stating the conditions and intervals that documents would be destroyed, it might still be in existence today. But it did not, and panicked, and is gone. It is good that 4chan is being more forward thinking.
Ti has the market because it has designed a good calculator not for general use, but for test use. The limited function makes it a bad calculator compared to the HP 49g, but I would hate to have to use my HP for a test written assuming a TI.
As tests move from paper based to computer based, I suspect the testing software will include a calculator and students will probably be moved to a similar calculator downloaded to their phone or tablet. I suspect the some College Board tests may still have require an external calculator, so TI is not in danger of losing all sales immediately. The TI is a really good machine,and they are the granddaddy of the pocket calculator, having developed the device to use their new electronics that did not at the time have a market. Interesting bit of trivia. On a College Board test a while back one of the questions put the TI into a thrashing state. You could have two calculators on the test, and if you did you could work on the second while the first finished. If you did not, well, you were screwed.