It says it right there in the article summary Some people think it is more important to solve the problem you identify rather than the problem that needs to be solved to create the product.
Now, to be clear sometimes when creating a product, like the iPhone, it is useful to think about the problem from a different perspective. Likewise, pulling the real problem client wants to solve out of them is an artform. But it is important to work the problem, and not jjust redefine it to suit your needs.
For instance about 20 years ago I was working on a roll you own web server. There was some data visitation code that broke for certain cases of data that were outside the arbitrary parameters the original coders set. These people redefined the problem to one they knew how to solve instead of solving the problem that needed to be solved. I have the education and the skills to actually do the research and coding to solve the real problem,
This in fact is why people fail tests. They are taught in school that they can work an easier problem that they know and they never are going to have to go through the effort to create a solution to a novel problem,. We ate training people to work in factories or scripted technical support.
The problem with the straight A student, in fact, is not that they are necessarily better or worse prepared to push papers or sell widgets to widget buyers. The problem is that they, unless they are very organized, focused, and precocious, likely earned their A by taking the easiest classes, by crying to administrators about how mean the teacher was anytime they got a b, and by having their parents threaten to sue. This means that why they do get a challenge in the work place, they are going to be unable to deal with it, or feel like the challenge is unfair.
I am thinking about the devil wears prada where the protagonist has a job, and is unable to do it without constantly whining.
A student with a low to mid b average is probably going to be a better employee.
On trick of clickbait like this, or any report that is meant to imply they consumer is being ripped off, is to set the baseline so that your analysis looks valid. It is a valid trick, but a trick nonetheless.
Let's look at reality. IN 1995 the top of the line MacBook was $3500. Not fully ticked out, just the top base model. That is $6,000 in todays dollars. I can get a 1 terabyte iPad that does so much more for $2000 in todays dollars.
Moving forward a bit, a Palm V, the PDA without a phone, was around $500. In todays dollars that is $700, without a phone. In 2000 or so, a motorola razr was, inflation adjusted, around $900.
In 2000 a good MacBook pro was $2500. Again, that is almost $4000 dollars in todays dollars.
The reality is the Apple has done a better job of controlling prices than most other companies, given that it is much more aggressive about using top of the line tech. They were the first to use LCD displays. Almost all machines now come with SSD.
A base iMac is $1300, and I can't get a decent PC all in one for less than a $1000, and that is without and SSD or I7.
One valid criticism is that we expect prices to fall all the time. The response to this is that Apple never sells last year product as the new model. Sure, it might not update for a few years, but you are getting really tech, not whatever fell off the garbage truck this morning,
You MS or google product is in no way cheaper than an Apple product.
In the 1980's, Reagan used this argument to completely end renewable energy research and development. In the process he handed all the jobs, profits, and other benefits to Asia and Germany.
Yes, right now the electric cars are a luxury item. Back them renewable energy was a luxury few of us could afford. You had to have disposable income to buy your electricity from Green Mountain energy. Unfortunately all those wind turbines are controlled by the Germans and Danes.
Now, I personally find no value in manufacturing in the US. I don't think that our work force, unwilling to be educated beyond the 8th grade, can really manufacture high tech quality products. But if we are going to continue to pursue a manufacturing economy, the Tesla model, god help us, is as good as any path forward. But it is not refined, efficient, or self sustaining.
So we have a choice. Give all the jobs to the Germans, or subsidize the process.
Some schools that are really not that good have built a reputation with gullible high school personnel that these schools are the only ones to go to. The gullible school personnel convince gullible parents to take out large students loans to pay for the school. This is bad.
In many ways the high cost of college simply reflects the need of these schools to keep undesirables out. Almost every school will give kids they want to attend a full free ride. Most qualified students will get at least a partial scholarship.
The question here is what do we do with the 50% of the students who are not qualified to attend a university. Clearly these students, no matter what ignorant high school personnel say, should not be encouraged to take on any debt. There are lower costs options, and we should increase these options.
I assume he will expect the rest of us to pay taxes to cover his infrastructure, just like the people in the suburbs expect everyone to pay for the highways to get them home then complain about the city people mooching off everyone else.
As much as people in the west like to take about personal responsibility and freedom, the only reason that there is water is because the government exercises strict control over water use.
Much of the water storage in the area appears to be running on dry. I assume that this community would have to build more water storage, and presumably have us pay for it, but where would the water come from?
Cryptocurrency is built off cheap subsidized electricity, and with all the sun and space electricity is not going to be hard to come by the residents of the area. And Nevada is desperate for anyone who wants to provide jobs, and does not care the damage it does. But water is harder to get than electricity, and infrastructure that its build for a few thousand people does not scale well for tens of thousands. While the state probably does not care if the cities have enough water, the people in the cities probably do.
It is a truly a matter of what a kid is doing. For instance, there is great evidence that the 24 hour social app cycle is damaging to kids and teens. They do not sleep, they are constantly stressed because they have to perform for their friends, or are constantly getting attacked by their friends, and do not have the coping skills to self soothe. Enforced curfew times, research indicates, are a must as the kids do have the ability to self regulate.
I, on the other hand, spent hours in front of a computer in high school and college writing papers, designing, and writing code. It was a mainframe world, so I was occupying the phone a lot. I don't know if limiting screen time would have been beneficial to me. I see teens on their iPads constantly drawing. I don't know it limiting screen time for them would be beneficial.
On the other hand, I see kids at restaurants playing video games on their phones, or in cars watching videos. While I certainly watched an inordinate amount of TV, and in fact thank all the TVs that raised me, I was also taught a great deal by my parents in the car and forced to learn to carry on an adult conversation at the dinner table. I was taken to free plays at the outdoor theater and forced to learn to sit as an adult would. It was beneficial, and if we are talking about the hour or two a day that parents are expected to teach their kids being substituted for screen time, then that is an issue.
There are two issues here. One is exposure. For instance, engineering course today are very different from those after WWII as most of the boys, and they were boys, who did engineering were on the farm before the war and so had exposure to how mechanical systems operated, and understood that is things were not just right they would not work. Now we have to give that exposure in school, with Arduinos, robots, and other manipulative.
But there is a more critical issue that the study, and most educators miss. That is abstract thinking. Again, the boys building things after WWII were building things they could see. They were not imagining things like we expect people who build computers and software to do. There is no gear works that one can trace to get from 1.7+1=2, or to fix your potential error because you forgot to cast to floating point.
Children are concrete thinkers until they approach their teenage years. The develop abstract though through their early adult years, when the brain is fully developed, usually to about 25 or 26 years. We see this in the extreme case while playing a game of peek-a-boo with and toddler. We see this in the fact that school age kid can memorize all the dinosaurs, or Pokemon, or Magic the Gathering cards, but can solve a algebraic equation in grade 7. Some kids can, as peoples brain develop different rates.
The point is that the fact that a kid may not be able to abstract a computer is not only to be expected, but irrelevant. For age 2 to about 10 the critical part of education has to be to keep the child stimulated and curios, always learning. The brain is pruning, and is not yet developed to grasp abstract ideas like the indie of the microchip that they cannot see or the quantum wells that let a transistor work. They can, as the student suggested, know names, recite function, and know isolated facts. As I said, this is to be expected and to expect anything else shows a severe ignorance on the part of the researcher.
After age 10, we need to push abstraction gently. This can be done through algebra, through physics, through demanding inferences based on historical accounts. We have to help the child maximize the synapse that are left, and rewire them so they have maximum capability in adulthood.
By the time the teen is reaching adulthood, we can expect most to be able to abstract a computer, write an algorithm, etc. Many adults, for many reasons, never reach full abstraction and do not seem to ever have the ability to design.
On a personal note, I was copying basic on a teletype when I was 10 or 11, but I dd not understand that I was actually programming until I was about 15. For my cohort I was stunted as I was one of the few to not complete algebra before high school or complete many AP course, but I was still atypical in general.
CS as code.org is teaching it is really more like advanced computer literacy. Understanding how compute work, how they interact, the internet, how to use them. It is more functional less design. While learned to write code, design algorithm, the modern classes are more like auto mechanic. You will understand the infrastructure, you will be able to fix things, but no one is going to expect you to learn a new language and put together projects in six months, which is what I and most people who are trained in this profession can do.
This is not good or bad. Frankly the number of jobs for well trained computer science pros are limited. However, every body is going to have to be more computer literate than we have now. I can' tell you how much time I waste in my job because the young people, 20 or 30, cannot hook up a printer, or filter a spreadsheet, or know how to make a simple web page. These are skills we had 20 years ago, and to think that kids are leaving high school believe they are educated without them is like kids leaving high school 30 years ago and not knowing how to type. Sure, you can pay someone, but really why wouldn't you want the skill?
The effectiveness of code.org is understanding that most people who you are going to get to teach are functionally computer illiterate, then, based on this assumption, providing a curriculum that can leverage the limited knowledge to evaluate students that are less illiterate.
However we are living in a country that is still in denial about the how valuable computer literacy is. That is why so many of US jobs are filled by people not from this country. In my job, the tech support jobs are filled by people from south america. It is not surprising as when I am in south amercia I meet domestic help and retail sales person who are more literate than the average US high school graduate.
I see high schools wasting their money on auto mechanics and gardening. Sure, these are popular classes because they are easier, and it is easier to get teachers for these classes, but what skills are we teaching the kids. How to turn a screw, did a hole? I see educated parents sending their kids to auto mechanics training at $10,000 instead of coding boot camp. What is the sense of this?
The hardware to do this obviously is going to include more than an iPhone, but any phone is a receiver of radio signals, and the hardware is there to filter for the desired signal. On can image that the phone can be hacked to filter for singnal based on transmission IMSI instead of destination.
I will agree there is no news here. Every responsible government is monitoring the communications of every other government, in particular the head of government. Because Trump follows none of the safety protocols, and because interception has become so routine, we must assume that every government has a recording of every conversation he has. To do anything less would be irresponsible to the point of negligence.
Yes, the specifics may be inaccurate, and we can argue semantics, but the basic security issue is undeniable, and the fix is simple. The reality is that Trump is putting the nation at risk by refusing to follow protocol.
In fact any OEM that is not Samsung could, deepening on how device is defined, roll out different models, for example, to different carriers to keep the sales to below 100K. It seems electric appliance manafucterers do this regularly, making slight modifications and changes in model number, I assume to minimize the effect of low price guarantees and the like.
The cheap cell phone model depends on the ability to use whatever parts fall off the truck. This is similar to the cheap PC model from 25 years ago, except Google apparently is not as skilled as MS to supply an OS that will run on any piece of shit device. The cost of the OEM toupdate appears to be prohibitive. It might not be Googles fault as Android is open source and who knows what the OEM is doing to the. code to drive profits
In any case it is not sustainable. Phones are based in the PC model where garbages software is realeased and then updated after the end users beta test it. If this is not possible it has to be based on the embedded device model where software is as nearly perfect as possible when shipped. However, no one does this anymore as there are very few emdebbed divices. Even the nest thermostat get regular bug fixes
And it is nothing new. In 2000 MS paid like $100 million to workers who sued the in around 1990 for miscatogorization of thier job. MS hired temp workers and contract workers to do what normally would be full benefit work. This is different from amazonn subcontracting to protect itself from liability. We will see if it is the same as Uber drivers.
Contract work has specific requirements and can be useful and lucrative. I have made good money in contract work. However many young managers do not know the law, or think the US provides a third world labor force. This why bill gates always sounded like such an idiot when he threaten to move to Canada. The US does let companies play fast and loose, but Canada is definitely first world Kazan or with first world benefits.
Which is we should just call it the Beatles welfare Check act or 2018. After all we need to make sure a dusty old band members who haven’t done anything in nearly 50 year can still be rich by sucking on the teats of the dole.
Just imagine if the slavers were still in control of the US...
But my real concern is that we don't really know what the side effects of this are. We keep trying to medicate all the 'negative' aspects of our lives, and it keeps biting us in the ass. We want everyone to be happy, and have a 'normal' psychological profile, and what we get it an opioid epidemic that is killing people. We are relative certain the appendix is vestigial, and removing it is of no great significance, but the preponderance of caution that defines medicine says that maybe we should treat appendicitis as it could be a repository for important bacteria.
Who know what the side effects of eliminating these cells are going to be. They may not appear for generations. We thought that aggressive use of antibiotics and routine use of antibacterials would be a good idea, until we bred the superbugs that one day could eliminate us.
Science tells us things that are useful and give us rules that appear to function under the appropriate, if sometime unspecified, assumptions,
So we know that as long as we don't go too fast, among other things, a constant force will produce a predictable acceleration for a given mass.
But science is new in the grade scheme of things. Until Michael Servetus in the 16th century, people believed that blood just swished back and forth in the body. Until Joseph Priestly we did not have any idea that things like atoms might exist. Galileo popularized the empiricism that is the basis of science, but much of what is done is still hunch and extreme extrapolation. Sometimes we get lucky.
Einstein was such an intuitive scientists. The photoelectric effect, for which he won his noble prize, was not 'proven' until the 1950's when lasers allowed us to eliminate other explanations. Likewise, the effects of special and general relativity, like Time Dilation and gravity lenses, have been shown to exist and are consistent with our current theories. Black holes at the center of galaxies seem to be best explanation for celestial data.
On the other hand, it appears that Quantum mechanics and Relativity are incompatible. It is frustrating because every test we make shows that both theories explain what we observe depending of the on the scale. Tunneling and quantum teleportation exists. Mass does warp space. But something is going to have to give. It could be that there is an assumption we made and beyond that assumption the sped of light is not constant. It could be something that no one has thought of. there has to be something.
In this case, the antitrust laws can help prevent Amazon from acquiring firms to reduce competition to the point where no one else has a significant presence in the market. This is what prevents the US from only having a single mobile phone company or having all the major radio stations, such as they are, owned by a single firm.
I don't know if we are there yet with Amazon. Small parts built a very good business over the past 50 years producing very nice hardware, in the classical sense, that they sell for a terrific markup. But they are in no way the only firm that does this. They likely sold to Amazon because the market is not that large for their high quality but very expensive products, and having Amazon as an outlet keeps the company alive.
The reality is that Amazon has some successes and some failures. The bought Woot! and destroyed it.It remains to be seen what remains of Whole Foods after Amazon finishes dismantling it.
Amazon has a tolerance for throwing money at existing business that are past their prime and then trying to revitalize them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
It is because Amazon is seen to risk alienating customers by not only promoting products the are only ancillary interesting to the person looking for a product, but by cross promoting it's own products.
I can tell you it is now not all that easy for me just to browse search results. I have to remember that may results are not going to be what I need, but what advertiser want me to see. For instance, if I am looking for toner, there are going to be results that do not work with my printer, and those results are no longer clearly separated.
Beyond this Amazon is making generally usability more difficult in the name of cross marketing. The amazon home page usually has some moving intrusive ad that has to be scrolled past to buy product. On IMDB, an Amazon property, content is often obscured by an ad. As a Amazon customer who uses these other services, it does not fill me a sense of loyalty.
Amazon is opening itself up for competition. I know that everyone is saying who is going to compete, but that is what Toys R US said, and I can tell you that by that 40 years after it was formed it was already going downhill, I knew no one that shopped there, because it was skanky and expensive. Amazon has a decade or so to middle age, and if it is not careful, it will looking at a downhill slide to oblivion. There is very little friction in people going to another web site to buy stuff, and I see a future where retail is as decentralized as Uber.
With consumer electronics, and increasing cars, there is no made in one country. Parts are sourced from all over the world. Tariffs are going to add to costs no matter where it is made because a lot of stuff is going to have to be imported no matter what.
One relevant criticism of the tariffs is the actual cost of work done of assembling the Apple product is a tiny faction of it's value. For a $2000 computer it might be less than $100.So taxing the full value can be considered unfair, as the conservatives always like to say.
What I find interesting is that lots of industries do not face such complications. For instance apparel can be sourced more easily that cars or electronics, and assembled in the USA. However, as simple as it is to make clothes in the USA, Trump and his family still chooses to make the clothes in Mexico and China.
So, as Trump chooses not manufacture in the US, and in fact regularly imports workers from other countries instead of hiring local workers, we can only assume that he knows, as president, something we do not. Like maybe US workers are inferior.
Apple is a mid market luxury brand. As such they do not design to a price point, but rather to a quality specification. While the goal is not always met, the point is that they are not going to sell products primarily based on price.
That said,their price is indeed not always related to production costs. To go further, the price is not always just high due to development and administrative costs. Apple stores can be spacious because the profit margins are high.
We have evidence that apple customers, however, are not just going to accept arbitrary pricing. We see this specifically in the accessory market where they had to reduce the price of dongles from their customer $20 for a piece of plastic.So the question is are they going to risk sales of some items in hopes of maintaining profits, or are they going to cut profits.
The base of the capitalist economy is profits, and while there are some cult items, such as people high prices for cheap SUV, what apple and the customers are doing is simply exchanging goods for services. The opposite of that is a controlled economy like Russia where you all you have to junk to buy, and not other choices, which exist widely in the market Apple occupies.
In some ways, the electronic calculator market was created by TI and it's need to sell the new IC. There were not many applications, and one marketable application was the electronic calculator. In some ways it was like live Apple leveraging the microwave for the iPod.
Like the iPod, the TI calculators were not great, but they were very easy to use. The HP calculators were and are beatiful. But ease of use won out.
Another thing that won out was until about a decade ago all TI calculators were very limited. This made them ideal machines for tests. HP calculators could do unit analsys, and since 1990 they had algebra systems, and could even do calculus. This made them the ideal machine for technical students and professionals, but no high school would waste time teaching it because all they care about is filling out bubbles on an answer sheet.
The interesting contemporary issue that I see is that schools are still teaching calculators when really smart phones can do everything and more, especially with apps like Wolfram Alpha. Unless you are a legacy HP user, asking kids to buy a calculator just to boosts TI profits seems very wasteful to me. This is going to change as more tests move to online format, and online resources such as Desmos take over the physical clacultor, but in the meantime the taxpayer is on the hook for millions of dollars a year per large school district just for legacy technology.
What I have seeing more and more lately, especially on mobile device, are pop up ads that take over the browser and requires closing of windows. These ads requires no interaction from the user.
According to information from sites that have been attacked by these ads, which ultimately appear to be faker support ads, i.e. your browser has been infected, they originate from google.
This happens with google every once in a while. Their greed allows some malicious ad to gert through, they they do a mea cupola and expect to be forgiven,
It is somewhat cultural. As mentioned, Russia and China are state controlled economies so it hardly matter what makes sense to the people or market place. The culture is that the state has to supply power to the people and that responsibility has to be balanced against risk. Also, perhaps the people are not going to protest against utility issues when they are more significantly subjugated.
But there are also issues of a market economy. The US military uses nuclear options not only because it makes sense in their application, but also because they are subject to almost no civilian oversight or normal price pressures. In the real world, nuclear power has had most of 50 years to prove itself, and as far as the marketplace it has failed.
It has failed in the US because we have cheap fuels, like coal and natural gas, lots of land for solar and wind, and lots of waterways. It is not that nuclear is a bad option, just that in the US with the resources we have, it is not the best option. Nuclear did not lose because people are against it, it lost because it makes no sense.
Take Texas, for example, certainly not a bastion of liberal hysteria and certainly not inexperienced in energy. Only a small fraction of the energy is produced by nuclear power, and right now more energy is produced by wind and solar.
Furthermore, many of the wind farms are owned and operated by private firms, and many were instigated by local land owners who receive significant royalties. In fact the one of the largest wind farms in Texas, which is privately held by private investors that funded the building and operation, was organized by local land owners who say the long term profit potential of wind.
On the other hand, one of the largest nuclear power plants in Texas is 70-80% owned by the state. Like in Russia and China, the people did not want the plant, the government told them they had to build it, the raised taxes and rates to pay for it. In fact, when one of the cities wanted to opt of the plant, and try to sell their stake, no private investor was dumb enough to buy it. You know, in the US, what we call an asset that you can't get a private investor to buy. A scam, a dud, a worth pile of crap. Even Radio Shack was able to find a buyer.
Mind you that this is even though, in real costs, wind probably costs $15-30 more per MWhr to produce than nuclear, if all costs are taken into account, and the pro nuclear people alway promote. Of course, as we have seen, when nuclear melts down it costs at least $1, if not $10 per MWhr ever produced to clean up. And if you put the generators out at sea, then you get some of the cost incurred by wind that the pro nuclear people always assert that has to be included for nuclear, such as transmission lines and backup power resources when the plant is cutoff, such as in the case of hurricane. Again, some coast lines do not have hurricanes, but in the US all but the northern coasts are in danger of such storms.
That is the question. When a big box store, like Wal Mart, is built, the improvement made to the area, such as roads and the like, are paid by the store. However, the store then gets a equal set of tax abatements to offset those upfront costs.The cost were incurred to bring customers to the stores, but ultimately the taxpayer cover the costs. Sure the roads are used for everyone, but we got by with small roads until Wal Mart wanted bigger ones. Just like we all benefit from power plants, so it just depends on how they are going to be paid for.
In reality any profitable business is going to externalize costs Fracking is only profitable because they don't have to deal with proper water disposal. Trucking companies are only profitable because they do not have to cover the full damage they do to the roads. It is everywhere.
It also seems that this happens enough that news sites that would fire someone over plagiarism might put in rudimentary plagiarism detectors. These would be far from perfect, but writers who regularly set them off could be trained not to, or fired before money has to be wasted dealing with their mess.
ok kids, it is up to you to save Forth. I don't see why so many people use assembly on embedded systems when it is easy to develop a customized Forth evvironment.
Slashdot Mirror
XKCD covered why these maps are stupid.
Now, to be clear sometimes when creating a product, like the iPhone, it is useful to think about the problem from a different perspective. Likewise, pulling the real problem client wants to solve out of them is an artform. But it is important to work the problem, and not jjust redefine it to suit your needs.
For instance about 20 years ago I was working on a roll you own web server. There was some data visitation code that broke for certain cases of data that were outside the arbitrary parameters the original coders set. These people redefined the problem to one they knew how to solve instead of solving the problem that needed to be solved. I have the education and the skills to actually do the research and coding to solve the real problem,
This in fact is why people fail tests. They are taught in school that they can work an easier problem that they know and they never are going to have to go through the effort to create a solution to a novel problem,. We ate training people to work in factories or scripted technical support.
The problem with the straight A student, in fact, is not that they are necessarily better or worse prepared to push papers or sell widgets to widget buyers. The problem is that they, unless they are very organized, focused, and precocious, likely earned their A by taking the easiest classes, by crying to administrators about how mean the teacher was anytime they got a b, and by having their parents threaten to sue. This means that why they do get a challenge in the work place, they are going to be unable to deal with it, or feel like the challenge is unfair.
I am thinking about the devil wears prada where the protagonist has a job, and is unable to do it without constantly whining.
A student with a low to mid b average is probably going to be a better employee.
Let's look at reality. IN 1995 the top of the line MacBook was $3500. Not fully ticked out, just the top base model. That is $6,000 in todays dollars. I can get a 1 terabyte iPad that does so much more for $2000 in todays dollars.
Moving forward a bit, a Palm V, the PDA without a phone, was around $500. In todays dollars that is $700, without a phone. In 2000 or so, a motorola razr was, inflation adjusted, around $900.
In 2000 a good MacBook pro was $2500. Again, that is almost $4000 dollars in todays dollars.
The reality is the Apple has done a better job of controlling prices than most other companies, given that it is much more aggressive about using top of the line tech. They were the first to use LCD displays. Almost all machines now come with SSD.
A base iMac is $1300, and I can't get a decent PC all in one for less than a $1000, and that is without and SSD or I7.
One valid criticism is that we expect prices to fall all the time. The response to this is that Apple never sells last year product as the new model. Sure, it might not update for a few years, but you are getting really tech, not whatever fell off the garbage truck this morning,
You MS or google product is in no way cheaper than an Apple product.
In the 1980's, Reagan used this argument to completely end renewable energy research and development. In the process he handed all the jobs, profits, and other benefits to Asia and Germany.
Yes, right now the electric cars are a luxury item. Back them renewable energy was a luxury few of us could afford. You had to have disposable income to buy your electricity from Green Mountain energy. Unfortunately all those wind turbines are controlled by the Germans and Danes.
Now, I personally find no value in manufacturing in the US. I don't think that our work force, unwilling to be educated beyond the 8th grade, can really manufacture high tech quality products. But if we are going to continue to pursue a manufacturing economy, the Tesla model, god help us, is as good as any path forward. But it is not refined, efficient, or self sustaining.
So we have a choice. Give all the jobs to the Germans, or subsidize the process.
In many ways the high cost of college simply reflects the need of these schools to keep undesirables out. Almost every school will give kids they want to attend a full free ride. Most qualified students will get at least a partial scholarship.
The question here is what do we do with the 50% of the students who are not qualified to attend a university. Clearly these students, no matter what ignorant high school personnel say, should not be encouraged to take on any debt. There are lower costs options, and we should increase these options.
As much as people in the west like to take about personal responsibility and freedom, the only reason that there is water is because the government exercises strict control over water use.
Much of the water storage in the area appears to be running on dry. I assume that this community would have to build more water storage, and presumably have us pay for it, but where would the water come from?
Cryptocurrency is built off cheap subsidized electricity, and with all the sun and space electricity is not going to be hard to come by the residents of the area. And Nevada is desperate for anyone who wants to provide jobs, and does not care the damage it does. But water is harder to get than electricity, and infrastructure that its build for a few thousand people does not scale well for tens of thousands. While the state probably does not care if the cities have enough water, the people in the cities probably do.
I, on the other hand, spent hours in front of a computer in high school and college writing papers, designing, and writing code. It was a mainframe world, so I was occupying the phone a lot. I don't know if limiting screen time would have been beneficial to me. I see teens on their iPads constantly drawing. I don't know it limiting screen time for them would be beneficial.
On the other hand, I see kids at restaurants playing video games on their phones, or in cars watching videos. While I certainly watched an inordinate amount of TV, and in fact thank all the TVs that raised me, I was also taught a great deal by my parents in the car and forced to learn to carry on an adult conversation at the dinner table. I was taken to free plays at the outdoor theater and forced to learn to sit as an adult would. It was beneficial, and if we are talking about the hour or two a day that parents are expected to teach their kids being substituted for screen time, then that is an issue.
But there is a more critical issue that the study, and most educators miss. That is abstract thinking. Again, the boys building things after WWII were building things they could see. They were not imagining things like we expect people who build computers and software to do. There is no gear works that one can trace to get from 1.7+1=2, or to fix your potential error because you forgot to cast to floating point.
Children are concrete thinkers until they approach their teenage years. The develop abstract though through their early adult years, when the brain is fully developed, usually to about 25 or 26 years. We see this in the extreme case while playing a game of peek-a-boo with and toddler. We see this in the fact that school age kid can memorize all the dinosaurs, or Pokemon, or Magic the Gathering cards, but can solve a algebraic equation in grade 7. Some kids can, as peoples brain develop different rates.
The point is that the fact that a kid may not be able to abstract a computer is not only to be expected, but irrelevant. For age 2 to about 10 the critical part of education has to be to keep the child stimulated and curios, always learning. The brain is pruning, and is not yet developed to grasp abstract ideas like the indie of the microchip that they cannot see or the quantum wells that let a transistor work. They can, as the student suggested, know names, recite function, and know isolated facts. As I said, this is to be expected and to expect anything else shows a severe ignorance on the part of the researcher.
After age 10, we need to push abstraction gently. This can be done through algebra, through physics, through demanding inferences based on historical accounts. We have to help the child maximize the synapse that are left, and rewire them so they have maximum capability in adulthood.
By the time the teen is reaching adulthood, we can expect most to be able to abstract a computer, write an algorithm, etc. Many adults, for many reasons, never reach full abstraction and do not seem to ever have the ability to design.
On a personal note, I was copying basic on a teletype when I was 10 or 11, but I dd not understand that I was actually programming until I was about 15. For my cohort I was stunted as I was one of the few to not complete algebra before high school or complete many AP course, but I was still atypical in general.
This is not good or bad. Frankly the number of jobs for well trained computer science pros are limited. However, every body is going to have to be more computer literate than we have now. I can' tell you how much time I waste in my job because the young people, 20 or 30, cannot hook up a printer, or filter a spreadsheet, or know how to make a simple web page. These are skills we had 20 years ago, and to think that kids are leaving high school believe they are educated without them is like kids leaving high school 30 years ago and not knowing how to type. Sure, you can pay someone, but really why wouldn't you want the skill?
The effectiveness of code.org is understanding that most people who you are going to get to teach are functionally computer illiterate, then, based on this assumption, providing a curriculum that can leverage the limited knowledge to evaluate students that are less illiterate.
However we are living in a country that is still in denial about the how valuable computer literacy is. That is why so many of US jobs are filled by people not from this country. In my job, the tech support jobs are filled by people from south america. It is not surprising as when I am in south amercia I meet domestic help and retail sales person who are more literate than the average US high school graduate.
I see high schools wasting their money on auto mechanics and gardening. Sure, these are popular classes because they are easier, and it is easier to get teachers for these classes, but what skills are we teaching the kids. How to turn a screw, did a hole? I see educated parents sending their kids to auto mechanics training at $10,000 instead of coding boot camp. What is the sense of this?
The hardware to do this obviously is going to include more than an iPhone, but any phone is a receiver of radio signals, and the hardware is there to filter for the desired signal. On can image that the phone can be hacked to filter for singnal based on transmission IMSI instead of destination.
I will agree there is no news here. Every responsible government is monitoring the communications of every other government, in particular the head of government. Because Trump follows none of the safety protocols, and because interception has become so routine, we must assume that every government has a recording of every conversation he has. To do anything less would be irresponsible to the point of negligence.
Yes, the specifics may be inaccurate, and we can argue semantics, but the basic security issue is undeniable, and the fix is simple. The reality is that Trump is putting the nation at risk by refusing to follow protocol.
The cheap cell phone model depends on the ability to use whatever parts fall off the truck. This is similar to the cheap PC model from 25 years ago, except Google apparently is not as skilled as MS to supply an OS that will run on any piece of shit device. The cost of the OEM toupdate appears to be prohibitive. It might not be Googles fault as Android is open source and who knows what the OEM is doing to the. code to drive profits
In any case it is not sustainable. Phones are based in the PC model where garbages software is realeased and then updated after the end users beta test it. If this is not possible it has to be based on the embedded device model where software is as nearly perfect as possible when shipped. However, no one does this anymore as there are very few emdebbed divices. Even the nest thermostat get regular bug fixes
Contract work has specific requirements and can be useful and lucrative. I have made good money in contract work. However many young managers do not know the law, or think the US provides a third world labor force. This why bill gates always sounded like such an idiot when he threaten to move to Canada. The US does let companies play fast and loose, but Canada is definitely first world Kazan or with first world benefits.
Which is we should just call it the Beatles welfare Check act or 2018. After all we need to make sure a dusty old band members who haven’t done anything in nearly 50 year can still be rich by sucking on the teats of the dole.
But my real concern is that we don't really know what the side effects of this are. We keep trying to medicate all the 'negative' aspects of our lives, and it keeps biting us in the ass. We want everyone to be happy, and have a 'normal' psychological profile, and what we get it an opioid epidemic that is killing people. We are relative certain the appendix is vestigial, and removing it is of no great significance, but the preponderance of caution that defines medicine says that maybe we should treat appendicitis as it could be a repository for important bacteria.
Who know what the side effects of eliminating these cells are going to be. They may not appear for generations. We thought that aggressive use of antibiotics and routine use of antibacterials would be a good idea, until we bred the superbugs that one day could eliminate us.
Science tells us things that are useful and give us rules that appear to function under the appropriate, if sometime unspecified, assumptions,
So we know that as long as we don't go too fast, among other things, a constant force will produce a predictable acceleration for a given mass.
But science is new in the grade scheme of things. Until Michael Servetus in the 16th century, people believed that blood just swished back and forth in the body. Until Joseph Priestly we did not have any idea that things like atoms might exist. Galileo popularized the empiricism that is the basis of science, but much of what is done is still hunch and extreme extrapolation. Sometimes we get lucky.
Einstein was such an intuitive scientists. The photoelectric effect, for which he won his noble prize, was not 'proven' until the 1950's when lasers allowed us to eliminate other explanations. Likewise, the effects of special and general relativity, like Time Dilation and gravity lenses, have been shown to exist and are consistent with our current theories. Black holes at the center of galaxies seem to be best explanation for celestial data.
On the other hand, it appears that Quantum mechanics and Relativity are incompatible. It is frustrating because every test we make shows that both theories explain what we observe depending of the on the scale. Tunneling and quantum teleportation exists. Mass does warp space. But something is going to have to give. It could be that there is an assumption we made and beyond that assumption the sped of light is not constant. It could be something that no one has thought of. there has to be something.
The reality is that Amazon has some successes and some failures. The bought Woot! and destroyed it.It remains to be seen what remains of Whole Foods after Amazon finishes dismantling it.
Amazon has a tolerance for throwing money at existing business that are past their prime and then trying to revitalize them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
I can tell you it is now not all that easy for me just to browse search results. I have to remember that may results are not going to be what I need, but what advertiser want me to see. For instance, if I am looking for toner, there are going to be results that do not work with my printer, and those results are no longer clearly separated.
Beyond this Amazon is making generally usability more difficult in the name of cross marketing. The amazon home page usually has some moving intrusive ad that has to be scrolled past to buy product. On IMDB, an Amazon property, content is often obscured by an ad. As a Amazon customer who uses these other services, it does not fill me a sense of loyalty.
Amazon is opening itself up for competition. I know that everyone is saying who is going to compete, but that is what Toys R US said, and I can tell you that by that 40 years after it was formed it was already going downhill, I knew no one that shopped there, because it was skanky and expensive. Amazon has a decade or so to middle age, and if it is not careful, it will looking at a downhill slide to oblivion. There is very little friction in people going to another web site to buy stuff, and I see a future where retail is as decentralized as Uber.
One relevant criticism of the tariffs is the actual cost of work done of assembling the Apple product is a tiny faction of it's value. For a $2000 computer it might be less than $100.So taxing the full value can be considered unfair, as the conservatives always like to say.
What I find interesting is that lots of industries do not face such complications. For instance apparel can be sourced more easily that cars or electronics, and assembled in the USA. However, as simple as it is to make clothes in the USA, Trump and his family still chooses to make the clothes in Mexico and China.
So, as Trump chooses not manufacture in the US, and in fact regularly imports workers from other countries instead of hiring local workers, we can only assume that he knows, as president, something we do not. Like maybe US workers are inferior.
That said,their price is indeed not always related to production costs. To go further, the price is not always just high due to development and administrative costs. Apple stores can be spacious because the profit margins are high.
We have evidence that apple customers, however, are not just going to accept arbitrary pricing. We see this specifically in the accessory market where they had to reduce the price of dongles from their customer $20 for a piece of plastic.So the question is are they going to risk sales of some items in hopes of maintaining profits, or are they going to cut profits.
The base of the capitalist economy is profits, and while there are some cult items, such as people high prices for cheap SUV, what apple and the customers are doing is simply exchanging goods for services. The opposite of that is a controlled economy like Russia where you all you have to junk to buy, and not other choices, which exist widely in the market Apple occupies.
Like the iPod, the TI calculators were not great, but they were very easy to use. The HP calculators were and are beatiful. But ease of use won out.
Another thing that won out was until about a decade ago all TI calculators were very limited. This made them ideal machines for tests. HP calculators could do unit analsys, and since 1990 they had algebra systems, and could even do calculus. This made them the ideal machine for technical students and professionals, but no high school would waste time teaching it because all they care about is filling out bubbles on an answer sheet.
The interesting contemporary issue that I see is that schools are still teaching calculators when really smart phones can do everything and more, especially with apps like Wolfram Alpha. Unless you are a legacy HP user, asking kids to buy a calculator just to boosts TI profits seems very wasteful to me. This is going to change as more tests move to online format, and online resources such as Desmos take over the physical clacultor, but in the meantime the taxpayer is on the hook for millions of dollars a year per large school district just for legacy technology.
According to information from sites that have been attacked by these ads, which ultimately appear to be faker support ads, i.e. your browser has been infected, they originate from google.
This happens with google every once in a while. Their greed allows some malicious ad to gert through, they they do a mea cupola and expect to be forgiven,
But there are also issues of a market economy. The US military uses nuclear options not only because it makes sense in their application, but also because they are subject to almost no civilian oversight or normal price pressures. In the real world, nuclear power has had most of 50 years to prove itself, and as far as the marketplace it has failed.
It has failed in the US because we have cheap fuels, like coal and natural gas, lots of land for solar and wind, and lots of waterways. It is not that nuclear is a bad option, just that in the US with the resources we have, it is not the best option. Nuclear did not lose because people are against it, it lost because it makes no sense.
Take Texas, for example, certainly not a bastion of liberal hysteria and certainly not inexperienced in energy. Only a small fraction of the energy is produced by nuclear power, and right now more energy is produced by wind and solar.
Furthermore, many of the wind farms are owned and operated by private firms, and many were instigated by local land owners who receive significant royalties. In fact the one of the largest wind farms in Texas, which is privately held by private investors that funded the building and operation, was organized by local land owners who say the long term profit potential of wind.
On the other hand, one of the largest nuclear power plants in Texas is 70-80% owned by the state. Like in Russia and China, the people did not want the plant, the government told them they had to build it, the raised taxes and rates to pay for it. In fact, when one of the cities wanted to opt of the plant, and try to sell their stake, no private investor was dumb enough to buy it. You know, in the US, what we call an asset that you can't get a private investor to buy. A scam, a dud, a worth pile of crap. Even Radio Shack was able to find a buyer.
Mind you that this is even though, in real costs, wind probably costs $15-30 more per MWhr to produce than nuclear, if all costs are taken into account, and the pro nuclear people alway promote. Of course, as we have seen, when nuclear melts down it costs at least $1, if not $10 per MWhr ever produced to clean up. And if you put the generators out at sea, then you get some of the cost incurred by wind that the pro nuclear people always assert that has to be included for nuclear, such as transmission lines and backup power resources when the plant is cutoff, such as in the case of hurricane. Again, some coast lines do not have hurricanes, but in the US all but the northern coasts are in danger of such storms.
In reality any profitable business is going to externalize costs Fracking is only profitable because they don't have to deal with proper water disposal. Trucking companies are only profitable because they do not have to cover the full damage they do to the roads. It is everywhere.
It also seems that this happens enough that news sites that would fire someone over plagiarism might put in rudimentary plagiarism detectors. These would be far from perfect, but writers who regularly set them off could be trained not to, or fired before money has to be wasted dealing with their mess.
ok kids, it is up to you to save Forth. I don't see why so many people use assembly on embedded systems when it is easy to develop a customized Forth evvironment.