It is true that innovation is not just computers and printers. There is an important component of building impossible designs, and then scaling them back for production. One innovation of the Saturn program was welding. The weld lengths that were required were at least an order of magnitude beyond the state of the art at the time. On the project I was working on, the machinists needed to be very creative to get our work done.
This needs to be communicated to schools where the kids in Calculus are considered better than the kids who can machines, so they school has no machining tools because who wants to delegate kids to a second class status. Or where all the kids are relegated to nothing because they can't be trusted with the tools.
Let me add this. The basic process of engineering can be taught using just about anything. If we want to teach problem solving, then problem solving using a scientific or engineering process in every grade up to at least ninth grade has to be a required part of the curriculum. The curriculum must involve an increasing set of complex tools that will students to leverage their talents. We might decry a CMC, but how much work is done with chisels instead of a lathe.
But really the issue is not equipment, but schools. There are only one thing school understands: tests. So it is difficult for schools to have a class that teaches innovation because teachers and students are going to be judged on regurgitating facts and figures or completing a design that they basically have already done or winning a competition.
We could have more open ended work done where completion of the curriculum or mastering a set or facts is not the purpose. The purpose is to go through a problem solving process for a wide variety of tasks using a wide variety of tools. Every student is going to reach different levels with different qualities and different products. This is a very dangerous situation, where everyone will ask why are paying teachers with no accountability and rewarding students without fixed products. Yet in my highest paying jobs I have little day to day accountability, and often my solutions looked very different from expectation. After all, why pay someone huge amounts of money if the solution is known. The real skill is posing the questions well.
The naivete is that there will not be consequences. Responsible parents and educators tell their kids that when they try to make a name for themselves, when they start playing with big boys in the real world, and not the fake world of high school or college, there will be no protection. That daddy's money and lawyers will no longer keep you out of jail.
You don't think that his father did not have to do some questionable things to win his lawsuit in an attempt to stop Linux from crushing his company?
I keep saying and thinking this is a cautionary tale. I see high school kids breaking laws all the time, sometimes for good, and not realizing that someone might come after them. It will usually be, as in this case, because the kids are costing them a lot of money, which is interpreted as stealing food and shelter from their kids. It is the scooby doo thing, i would have gotten away with it if it weren't for the meddling kids. Except sometimes the needling kids get dead.
In a world of lollipops and sugar cookies everything would be fair. The laws would be a minimal set of rules that kept us safe, and we could share information and knowledge and process and all growth wealthy in terms of our physical, emotional, and psychological health. But in the real world people want stuff and will go to extremes to keep the stuff. Just like this kids dad did in the past.
So if blaming other people for the way the world is helps you sleep at night, then go ahead and be naive. As one grows and matures one realizes that we all have culpability, and sometimes the best way to help is not by blaming other people, not by taking other peoples stuff, but by setting an example of behavior. You know, by being a community organzier rather than a script kiddie.
Exactly. That such a politically motivated question is asked on/. shows the lack of technical expertise of too many, which is surprised for a site such as/.
Any infrastructure requires maintainace. Maybe not daily, but certainly periodic. Anyone who runs a website knows that they can't be left on autopilot for a month. Given that this shutdown is open ended, it simply makes more sense to turn things off that do not have funding rather than come back in later, when people are not being paid, and do a controlled shutdown.
There is also the issue of security. It would be a great idea to leave all the infrastructure open when all these disgruntled employes who were laid off with almost no notice have nothing better to do than play hacker. So many private firms have had so much success allowing access to their computers to laid off employees.
As far as national parks go, there may not be fully staffed, but there is a probably a park ranger to help with issues Most people do expect services. It is better to close the park than to have to recall some laid off employee in an emergency. Which is what is happening now in louisinan/alabama/missisipi/florida. You would think these sates who are so supportive of the shutdown would support themselves.
That said, there would be ways to turn on more services. Congress could pass the bill that guarantees federal employess back pay. It is there and it only requires the House to agree. The congress could also vote to open all public facing agencies with a skeleton staff. This would amount to giving some a paid vacation while others would have to work, but there we go. We could open websites and state parks and the memorials.
It kind of depends what you metrics are. I think there is a valid option for choices in education, but those choices have to balanced with society interests. Charter schools, at least in my are, are constantly being sued for stealing money and inappropriate behavior with kids, and many simply trade cash for a diploma Most of the home school kids I know are never going to college because the skills they are being taught are ludicrously out of date. The smart home school kid, or the good charter school, is likely more an exception than they rule, just like the superior public school. All of these require a bias in the sample set. The same goes for private school. I went to a crap one for a couple years because we could not afford a decent one.
There are no valid research studies that say charter school provide superior results. The commenter must either be an educator or a social scientists because those are the only groups who believe the research that supports charter schools. Probably also believes human induced climate change is a conspiracy.
It is hard to say that most schools are awful considering that millions of students are graduated every year that end up living a integrated and productive life. Schools may not put out the kind of students that wingnuts and conspiracy theorists want, but they do put out productive kids, most of who go out and find jobs and raise families and pay taxes.It is merely an ideological stance that public schools are bad, just like it is an ideological stance that same kind of health care that congress and military enjoy would be bad for the general public.
On topic, most kids today are going to be using computers as productivity tools their entire lives. Those kids lucky enough to have a computer are going to be the ones who are the ones that are going to learn to interact and manage their time with a computer, and are going to be the ones that will be more likely to leverage it as a tool and not a toy. One of the biggest reasons that so many people are ideologically against public schools, IMHO, is that they tend to provide a uniform platform in which all kids can learn and gain access to tools no matter what their social or economic status might be. This is why so many are cool with public schools teaching auto mechanics or hair styling or HVAC, but trying to give kids mad skills and everyone is talking about how you are wasting money because all the kids are going to do it go out and sell drugs.
First the disclaimer. I do believe that professionally peer reviewed journals and reporting still has a place. I pay significant sums of money to subscribe to a newspaper, a few top magazines, as well as Science and Nature. They serve a purpose and, to me, are worth the costs.
That said Science is not beyond reproach on accuracy. Both journals has had a very scandalous path over the past few years with their accepting clearly fraudulent papers. In July, evidently, Alirio Melendez had a paper retracted. This researcher fooled many major journals with at least 13 papers. Science also published the paper on bacteria living on arsenic, which is generally seen as having major issues. I recall reading a paper related to dancing and sexual attraction, maybe in Nature, being retracted due to fabricated data.
That said, there is little wrong with a single suspect paper being published. This is how scientists communicate. There is little protection against fraud such as occurred in this case because it is so patently silly. Building a system to protect against such silliness would mean that we would no longer be focused on science. The real problem here is that the popular media does not understand the difference between a single piece of research and the process of research. Places like/. should know better, but they don't. The process of science is to reproduce and extend results. When a bad paper corrupts the process, as has happened when Science and Nature has published suspect paper, that is a problem. These journals, having high impact factors, have a responsibility to proctor what they publish. A backwater online journal does no necessarily have such responsibility, rather relying on the ethics of the researcher and a faith in the process of science to ferret out unethical and silly people like these.
What is truly alarming is the simple bad science present in this research project. This experiment has no control group and does not try to match the target journals to an equivalent paper journals.
If the research was done properly the open access journals would be matched with closed journals on the basis of several relevant criteria, like impact factor, cost to publish, region predominately served, or the like. This is the way research is done. One can't just go out onto the street, ask 10 people who you don't like if they ever thought of killing someone, then claim that everyone in this group are murderers if 7 say yes.
The paper would then be submitted to all the journals, the results generated using well known statistical methods, and then, if there is some degree of confidence, the results published.
My prediction is that if you were paying a closed source low ranking journal to publish a paper asserting that the moon was composed of coagulated casein in a mesh of lipids they would not blink at printing it.
At the end of the day, in this case Science is no better than your average corrupt advertising agent.
n relation to the public perception of science (which itself is important) blog and web commentary never, or only rarely, influences the process of scientific inquiry itself."
popular science articles, especially when directed at the popular rather than technical community, never, or only rarely, influces the processes of scientific inquiry. I want one example of a major grant or new scientific theory that was prompted by Popular Science or Discover or Omni or whatever.
I certainly agree that these magazines promote science, build interest in science, and expose science process to the masses. Which is why comments are so important. In the modern world people are learning to learn through social interaction. I know that in the political structure of the US it seems that no one is willing to change perception or opinions, only try to get other people to their point of view. But that is not true. Some people want to learn.
Twenty years ago the future of MS was in question. The internet was a thing, the WWW was beginning, and we were using Mosaic and many of us would soon move to Netscape. MS, who knew that if the application front end moved form a proprietary application to a generic, open source, open standard web browser, their reign of terror over an unsuspecting population would be over. So they created iE, borked the standard, and engaged in 10 year dark age where the web was not compatible with non MS devices.
Now, after 15 years of in the mobile computer market MS is back to a crisis point because it cannot create a proprietary standard to prevent innovation in the mobile computer market. The best it can do it become a patent troll and extort $10 out of every android handset sold. People wonder why MS is still selling the MS Surface. Because if it did not have a product then it would be a simple and toxic Patent Troll, rather than a slightly better type of patent troll that actually produces a product.
MS is at a point where there is some long term uncertainty. There are many productivity competitors out there, and it is unclear if the next generation is going to as fanatically attached to MS Office. It is certain that the next generation is not going to think the their entire technology stack has to based on MS products. At some point corporate may not see MS as the best value, which is what happened to IBM. And, unlike IBM, MS never actually provided service or a product to the end user, which is why they are scrambling now.
First, it is unclear how taxes effect the economy. We know that Reagan lowered taxes, but it is also arguable that his military deficiet spending, like W, was the real cause of the economic expansion. We know that when Bush 'read my lips' raised taxes, and when that lead to a growing economy that was not dependent on military spending, we got all sorts of great things out of it under Clinton.
Form a business perspective, on e problem is that are many people who government jobs because of healthcare. On a purely labor basis, for example, the military removes a huge potential workforce from the labor pool. How can a start up who needs basic labor compete with above minimum wage, a housing allowance, a subsistence allowance and health care. I talk to kids who are joining the military simply because they cannot figure another way to live, and see the benefits. If healthcare were less complicated, these kids might work for someone, learn some stuff, and get a legitimate job like I did. I was able to because I was in college and had health insurance through that, so I was free to explore and learn from experienced business people who employed me to do various IT tasks.
I also know many people who hold down uninteresting corporate of government jobs for the health insurance. At the end of the day, they don't bring home that much money. I know many people who have real skills, and would love to go out and sell those skills in the entrepreneurial market, or some who would simply work to make the family business more successful. They cannot go out and innovate, however, because the risk of a health care crisis is too high. I imagine in the next few years we might see a lot of people leave their relatively unproductive jobs and go out and innovate.
Or young people who realize they can get subsidized health insurance while the try to find their place in life which is not a government job.
What I find annoying about all the people who take about how bad government healthcare is, is that so many are on it, and don't see to realize how much money the US is wasting by making a government job the only possible reality for so many people. Over the past few years the number of government jobs has been slashed, and the best outcome of the ACA is that we continue see people support themselves rather than depending on the dole.
Why was the first Die Hard movie incredible, the second passable, the third tolerable, and the rest awful. It was originality, the desire of Bruce Willis, who had been told he could never be a leading man, but proved himself on Moonlighting, to work hard, and the lack of expectations. With each sequel the stars get greedy, the studio get greedy, and the investors get greedy. It no longer becomes about making a movie but about making everyone rich.
Star wars is no better or worse than any other story, except that it had the potential to be told over a number of movies.
Movies are also pressured to maximize the use of technology to tell a story. This can work, but with episodes i,ii,and iii I think the advanced technology worked against the story, and in any future movies will be a fx tour de force, rather than story telling.
Problem with your rant is that the iPhone is not the problem. It is the proliferation of USB cables, A to B, A A, to mini A, mini B, micro A, micro B. I have to have multiple sets of four different cables to run everything. OTOH, with the Apple stuff two or three cables were enough. And the lighting cable, like the magsafe, is an elegant solution that requires much fewer materials, and I have only had one or two break. When the dock connecter was out, it meant I could usb or firewire, which was good because USB was slow.
So yes, there are a few stupid companies that are trying to reinvent the wheel just for a proprietary solution. Nintendo comes to mind. I don't know anyone else that doesn't have a USB charger. It would be nice if they standardized on micro A, but that is not the waste problem. The waste problem is the charger itself. I used to buy so many device that cam with a charger that I would lose or would be useless. That meant I had to buy a new charger, with all that plastic, copper, and electrolyte, which was wasteful. Now a few chargers scatted around, and all it well. A world with a lighting cable only would be much better, as it is not as fragile as micro A.
To start, chick fil a has an excellent market niche and excellent advertising. It sells very cheap junk food, albeit above average quality junk food, at reletively high prices enabling it keep it's niche and advertising. In fact the"chicken" sandwich is from a nutritional point of view much better than at most other junk food restaurants.
This is very different from a pasta manufacturer, as most americans simply see pasta as cheap commodity product. Which chickfila there are few other options in the category. With pasta a consumer has to make a conscious decision to pay more. While chickfila is often see as a healthier choice, one pasts has nothing over another in most Americans value system.
As far as respecting others beliefs, I think there are two issues here. One is that one can respect and still debate. For instance, on the current topic, there is a question of gay marriage. In response to this one might quip that those who voted for Ronald Reagan put the first mistress in the white house, the couple married by a radical church that continues to ignore social convention by facilitating gay marriages. If the public has no issues with mistresses destroying marriage, then why pick on gay people. I think this is respecting beliefs, but still facilitating debate.
Likewise one might wonder why those opposed to the islamic center near the 9/11 ground zero did not also demand that the christian churches around the atlanta Olympic bombing site did not move or at least put up a monument accepting group responsibility for the terrorist attack. In both these cases, one group wants to impose thier will on another, and then claims that their own beliefs are not being respected when the subject is debated.
he second issue is just a more extreme case of the first. When I was a kid, roving gangs would travel my neighborhood telling us we were going to hell it we did not believe as they did. Now, we were a nice lower middle class neighborhood, where kids all went to school, some to very good schools, parents put in long days working, some mothers stayed home, some did not, many has college degrees. The upshot was that no nearly everyone was living what would be considered an ethical life. So why would these gangs want to come to our homes, disrespect our beliefs, insult us, and expect anything else than malice?
Which is what so many people miss. One can't just state any view and expect it to stand. Some views, such that it is ok to define a person by extrinsic behavior, is harmful. This is the same philosophy that some Christians have, in that non christian behavior is harmful. Some discussion on the subject is less harmful.
I can see this, mostly because we are getting some basic 3D printers out there. The cost of the originals was in the precision apparatus. Right now printer can get down to features below half a mm and layer thickness of tens of microns. If those number doubled, the price might come down by as much as half.
Also, given a market for drawings there might actually be something to print. Of course every pop culture firm is going to be suing every one to death for every depiction of mickey mouse or jar jar binks or the enterprise. I suppose that they will have trouble with toy manufacturers if they wanted to license such templates. I am not sure how many people will go and design their own. I practice by designing a chess set, but I got some high end software for free.
Then there is the cost of the resin, which is really why Costco wants to go into the business. I would assume that 3D printers are going to end up like ink jet printers. Many will have then, as they might only cost a few hundred dollars, bug the sticker shock might put them in a corner. Or like label makers. I have one, but I am not really willing to shell out the cost of a cartridge.
It is not about the presence of risk, but the ability to mitigate risk. There is no place where risk is not present. In rural areas snow can be quite dangerous. In other area tornadoes. In rural areas, far from medical and emergency services, what is a minor incidence in the city can be a major disaster. For instance, I know people who live in rural lake areas. They were talking to their insurance agent about fire insurance rates. They wondered if they got together and put some fire service infrastructure if they could save on insurance. They were told that companies only insure on the basis that the entire house would be burned down, and the services were only there to save other houses, though it would be likely that other houses would be lost. In the city an ambulance is minutes away. Last time I called an ambulance in a rural area for a relative, it took 45 minutes.
So it is about risk mitigation. We have hurricanes, we have flash floods, but I have been lucky enough to live in places that are 'cool', i.e. relatively high property values, but also safe, i.e. no real flooding, houses that are build well, ground that is stable. Developers push to build in unsafe areas, and those house tend to get regularly flooded and sometimes people die. It is unnecessary. Closer to the coast, responsible people build simple houses that can handle the flooding and winds, but some unreasonable people build expensive houses and then expect the taxpayer to pay for it, either through subsidized insurance or federal disaster release.
So we have some cool places that are, in reality, not reasonable places to live but due to tax payer subsidies are made reasonable. What is happening now, however, is that the gravy train is ended. Places that repeatedly get hammer and destroyed are being bought up by the feds instead of the feds rebuilding and buying the owners new stuff. The insurance companies, knowing that they cannot charge high enough rates to generate a profit, won't touch these. Consumers, in response, are moving to safer cool places. This is what is happening around me.
Everyone says that software like VLC can't succeed, but it can and has. And it has in the tradition of Kermit, that provided a good enough, even better, experience than anything else. Both reliability and resilience. Back in the day work would not have gotten done without Kermit. Now media would be useless, particularly on MS Windows machines, without VLC. Everything else is too worried about DRM to be functional. I have even seen corporate caving into the reality that they are going to have to depend on GNU software(I know some Kermit software is closed, but the protocol is open, and the openness is what allowed us to work efficiently).
Yes and no. On one hand there is no point arguing when an opponent comes with absolute knowledge. When someone is saying that evolution is wrong because the bible says so, or that climate change is wrong because the bible says so, or that intelligent design is a plausible hypothesis, this is not science so there is no argument, just a possibility of agreeing to disagree. To me the issue is no so much that a healthy debate can't occur, but that a healthy debate does not in general exist. For example a lot of people are focusing on the fact that climate change is not occurring as fast as it once was thought, or that we have a cooling cycle going on right now, as an indictment for the general idea that climate change is a problem. These people are trying to fit evidence to a preconceived notion, which is not science and really has no place in a scientific discussion.
OTOH, magazines such as Popular Science are not always reporting accurate science, and often go into editorials that attack others. There has been cases were such attacks have been unjustified and unsupported by objective evidence. In the past such attacks were unhindered by feedback within the magazine. Now people who are more interested in science that personal vendettas are free to point these out. There was a situation like this a few years back where a widely regarded 'skeptic' was attacking another person. The attack was based on false evidence. In the past the attack would have remained a black eye on the face of science. But now comments can be posted to show that not all science people are willing to forgo objectivity when their feeling have been hurt.
This obviously is an editorial problem. Honestly everyone else have been able to deal with comments. Free discussion is the basis of science, even if sometimes it get messy. This can only be taken to be a financial issue.
You don't know the half of it. When I was a kid we had to look at these graphic movies in which kids were shown to degrade and eventually die due to drug use. These were urban school in areas with a significant crime rate and drug use, even to this day. The film was shown in all elementary schools, although we were a selective school.
It was more traumatic than you could possible imagine, close to a snuff film. I don't think it really effected the drug use of anyone, given the arrest rates. Kids who abuse drugs will tend to do so no matter what, or because, the programs. These best way to keep kids off drugs is to stop the culture of drugs, in which they see ads on TV every day showing how drugs are necessary for a good life, but then making those drugs unavailable.
If it were an ultrabook, meaning it was $449 with a keyboard that would be one thing. But at the end of the day you are going to pay $600 with tax, and not even have wireless.
I find it is the type of site. I find I can be quite honest on/.. The comments have been modded up or down pretty reliably.
The exception is, of course, companies that can afford to monitor comments. So anything I write about goggle that doesn't imply they are g-d will be modded down. OTOH, such comments will often be modded up by others. I have seen up to 10 mod points being used to argue over my Google comments. Not to isolate google. MS and Åpple also appear to have a contingent
Which comes to a real issue that mod systems have. Too many points are used to mod down, and not enough people participate in bringing the interesting content to the top, as opposed to what they agree. I am guilty of not using my mod points. I think one solution would be if people who used more than 2 out of 10 mod points to degrade would lose all other. If new users posted at zero for their first several comments, then we would not have to make all the offensive stuff off-topic.
I think MS wants us to believe that Xbox one can be their central switch of the living room, just like the A/V amplifier used to be. It is standard with MS type hardware. We have more ports than anyone else, so we are better.
This would tend to prove the idea that MS thinks control of the living room is the primary goal. Simply being hooked up to the ztv is not enough. All content must flow through the XBox.
Company makes a significant error and jeopardizes it's own investment, not to mention hundred of millions of taxpayer funds. Not that NASA does not make mistakes, but some companies will not survive the initial shake out because they make too many mistakes.
As others have said, this is rocket science, and rocket science has the reputation it does for a reason.
This is certainly a ploy to compete with Facebook and the like. Right now Facebook has probably has more tracking cookies set in more machines than google. I know that I don't allow facebook cookies, but I have also been more restrictive on the Google cookies, simply because they are not providing as many services. Facebook will win on the cookies front. Google need a proprietary technology to lock advertisers into Google.
I am sure that Virginia is still quite unhappy that it's slaves were freed. I know is Texas and California, on a while, are are quite unhappy that they have to comply with clean air regulation that in both states dramatically increase the cost of energy. I am quite unhappy that I cannot have a still in my backyard, and I am sure many of my neighbors would to like to cook meth.
I dunno, does one have cable? Now if one watches sports then it is a good value. Every subscriber subsidizes the habit, but if we are just watching the stuff you get on Hulu, then we are being ripped off, totally.
What is keeping Hulu back is the realization that such services are going to kill television, which has become dependent on the cable fees at least as much as the advertising. If things are going as they are, it is going to be very expensive to keep high profit ventures such as sports and fox news, which will be the only thing left, on the air.
The way I look at it si that I pay maybe $60 a month for most of the content I want instead of $150 a month. What annoys me is that Hulu requires a cable account for so much content. The networks know that they have to promote the cable stations.
Which is why I would not mind if Amazon had advertisement for some of it's content. They are doing shows, and are not connecting with the traditional media. If they have to do commercials to air MI-5, i would not mind.
How do you trivialize the fact that people, often adults, play a meaningless game to get fake intangible stuff. Why is buying the stuff with real money any different than playing a game to get stuff. It is being implied that there is some sort ranking system in the game where people with more stuff are somehow inherently better than people with less stuff. Does this extend to the real world where if I have a better car, then I am inherently a better person? Is the submitter upset that the egalitarian nature of the game, where everyone had equal opportunity to get stuff if they invested the hours in the game, even if they were in the real world not as rich? I can tell you that premise is false. Even to begin to play video games one must has reached a lifestyle comfortable enough to afford the game, and have the leisure time to play the game.
Wealth is not necessarily equivalent to cash, and many wealthy families do base their wealth not on cash, but on creation of product. It is unfortunate that so many wealthy people do not actually create anything, and therefore give wealth a bad name. Neither is debt a bad thing, if it is backed up by wealth. A lot of the debt problem is purely fictional. Look at Brazil. Cash is an invention of government, and the promotion of debt as a problem is used to purposely limit certain things for political gain. The US still has a lot of wealth and ability to create.
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This needs to be communicated to schools where the kids in Calculus are considered better than the kids who can machines, so they school has no machining tools because who wants to delegate kids to a second class status. Or where all the kids are relegated to nothing because they can't be trusted with the tools.
Let me add this. The basic process of engineering can be taught using just about anything. If we want to teach problem solving, then problem solving using a scientific or engineering process in every grade up to at least ninth grade has to be a required part of the curriculum. The curriculum must involve an increasing set of complex tools that will students to leverage their talents. We might decry a CMC, but how much work is done with chisels instead of a lathe.
But really the issue is not equipment, but schools. There are only one thing school understands: tests. So it is difficult for schools to have a class that teaches innovation because teachers and students are going to be judged on regurgitating facts and figures or completing a design that they basically have already done or winning a competition.
We could have more open ended work done where completion of the curriculum or mastering a set or facts is not the purpose. The purpose is to go through a problem solving process for a wide variety of tasks using a wide variety of tools. Every student is going to reach different levels with different qualities and different products. This is a very dangerous situation, where everyone will ask why are paying teachers with no accountability and rewarding students without fixed products. Yet in my highest paying jobs I have little day to day accountability, and often my solutions looked very different from expectation. After all, why pay someone huge amounts of money if the solution is known. The real skill is posing the questions well.
You don't think that his father did not have to do some questionable things to win his lawsuit in an attempt to stop Linux from crushing his company?
I keep saying and thinking this is a cautionary tale. I see high school kids breaking laws all the time, sometimes for good, and not realizing that someone might come after them. It will usually be, as in this case, because the kids are costing them a lot of money, which is interpreted as stealing food and shelter from their kids. It is the scooby doo thing, i would have gotten away with it if it weren't for the meddling kids. Except sometimes the needling kids get dead.
In a world of lollipops and sugar cookies everything would be fair. The laws would be a minimal set of rules that kept us safe, and we could share information and knowledge and process and all growth wealthy in terms of our physical, emotional, and psychological health. But in the real world people want stuff and will go to extremes to keep the stuff. Just like this kids dad did in the past.
So if blaming other people for the way the world is helps you sleep at night, then go ahead and be naive. As one grows and matures one realizes that we all have culpability, and sometimes the best way to help is not by blaming other people, not by taking other peoples stuff, but by setting an example of behavior. You know, by being a community organzier rather than a script kiddie.
Any infrastructure requires maintainace. Maybe not daily, but certainly periodic. Anyone who runs a website knows that they can't be left on autopilot for a month. Given that this shutdown is open ended, it simply makes more sense to turn things off that do not have funding rather than come back in later, when people are not being paid, and do a controlled shutdown.
There is also the issue of security. It would be a great idea to leave all the infrastructure open when all these disgruntled employes who were laid off with almost no notice have nothing better to do than play hacker. So many private firms have had so much success allowing access to their computers to laid off employees.
As far as national parks go, there may not be fully staffed, but there is a probably a park ranger to help with issues Most people do expect services. It is better to close the park than to have to recall some laid off employee in an emergency. Which is what is happening now in louisinan/alabama/missisipi/florida. You would think these sates who are so supportive of the shutdown would support themselves.
That said, there would be ways to turn on more services. Congress could pass the bill that guarantees federal employess back pay. It is there and it only requires the House to agree. The congress could also vote to open all public facing agencies with a skeleton staff. This would amount to giving some a paid vacation while others would have to work, but there we go. We could open websites and state parks and the memorials.
It kind of depends what you metrics are. I think there is a valid option for choices in education, but those choices have to balanced with society interests. Charter schools, at least in my are, are constantly being sued for stealing money and inappropriate behavior with kids, and many simply trade cash for a diploma Most of the home school kids I know are never going to college because the skills they are being taught are ludicrously out of date. The smart home school kid, or the good charter school, is likely more an exception than they rule, just like the superior public school. All of these require a bias in the sample set. The same goes for private school. I went to a crap one for a couple years because we could not afford a decent one. There are no valid research studies that say charter school provide superior results. The commenter must either be an educator or a social scientists because those are the only groups who believe the research that supports charter schools. Probably also believes human induced climate change is a conspiracy. It is hard to say that most schools are awful considering that millions of students are graduated every year that end up living a integrated and productive life. Schools may not put out the kind of students that wingnuts and conspiracy theorists want, but they do put out productive kids, most of who go out and find jobs and raise families and pay taxes.It is merely an ideological stance that public schools are bad, just like it is an ideological stance that same kind of health care that congress and military enjoy would be bad for the general public. On topic, most kids today are going to be using computers as productivity tools their entire lives. Those kids lucky enough to have a computer are going to be the ones who are the ones that are going to learn to interact and manage their time with a computer, and are going to be the ones that will be more likely to leverage it as a tool and not a toy. One of the biggest reasons that so many people are ideologically against public schools, IMHO, is that they tend to provide a uniform platform in which all kids can learn and gain access to tools no matter what their social or economic status might be. This is why so many are cool with public schools teaching auto mechanics or hair styling or HVAC, but trying to give kids mad skills and everyone is talking about how you are wasting money because all the kids are going to do it go out and sell drugs.
That said Science is not beyond reproach on accuracy. Both journals has had a very scandalous path over the past few years with their accepting clearly fraudulent papers. In July, evidently, Alirio Melendez had a paper retracted. This researcher fooled many major journals with at least 13 papers. Science also published the paper on bacteria living on arsenic, which is generally seen as having major issues. I recall reading a paper related to dancing and sexual attraction, maybe in Nature, being retracted due to fabricated data.
That said, there is little wrong with a single suspect paper being published. This is how scientists communicate. There is little protection against fraud such as occurred in this case because it is so patently silly. Building a system to protect against such silliness would mean that we would no longer be focused on science. The real problem here is that the popular media does not understand the difference between a single piece of research and the process of research. Places like /. should know better, but they don't. The process of science is to reproduce and extend results. When a bad paper corrupts the process, as has happened when Science and Nature has published suspect paper, that is a problem. These journals, having high impact factors, have a responsibility to proctor what they publish. A backwater online journal does no necessarily have such responsibility, rather relying on the ethics of the researcher and a faith in the process of science to ferret out unethical and silly people like these.
What is truly alarming is the simple bad science present in this research project. This experiment has no control group and does not try to match the target journals to an equivalent paper journals.
If the research was done properly the open access journals would be matched with closed journals on the basis of several relevant criteria, like impact factor, cost to publish, region predominately served, or the like. This is the way research is done. One can't just go out onto the street, ask 10 people who you don't like if they ever thought of killing someone, then claim that everyone in this group are murderers if 7 say yes.
The paper would then be submitted to all the journals, the results generated using well known statistical methods, and then, if there is some degree of confidence, the results published.
My prediction is that if you were paying a closed source low ranking journal to publish a paper asserting that the moon was composed of coagulated casein in a mesh of lipids they would not blink at printing it.
At the end of the day, in this case Science is no better than your average corrupt advertising agent.
popular science articles, especially when directed at the popular rather than technical community, never, or only rarely, influces the processes of scientific inquiry. I want one example of a major grant or new scientific theory that was prompted by Popular Science or Discover or Omni or whatever.
I certainly agree that these magazines promote science, build interest in science, and expose science process to the masses. Which is why comments are so important. In the modern world people are learning to learn through social interaction. I know that in the political structure of the US it seems that no one is willing to change perception or opinions, only try to get other people to their point of view. But that is not true. Some people want to learn.
Now, after 15 years of in the mobile computer market MS is back to a crisis point because it cannot create a proprietary standard to prevent innovation in the mobile computer market. The best it can do it become a patent troll and extort $10 out of every android handset sold. People wonder why MS is still selling the MS Surface. Because if it did not have a product then it would be a simple and toxic Patent Troll, rather than a slightly better type of patent troll that actually produces a product.
MS is at a point where there is some long term uncertainty. There are many productivity competitors out there, and it is unclear if the next generation is going to as fanatically attached to MS Office. It is certain that the next generation is not going to think the their entire technology stack has to based on MS products. At some point corporate may not see MS as the best value, which is what happened to IBM. And, unlike IBM, MS never actually provided service or a product to the end user, which is why they are scrambling now.
First, it is unclear how taxes effect the economy. We know that Reagan lowered taxes, but it is also arguable that his military deficiet spending, like W, was the real cause of the economic expansion. We know that when Bush 'read my lips' raised taxes, and when that lead to a growing economy that was not dependent on military spending, we got all sorts of great things out of it under Clinton. Form a business perspective, on e problem is that are many people who government jobs because of healthcare. On a purely labor basis, for example, the military removes a huge potential workforce from the labor pool. How can a start up who needs basic labor compete with above minimum wage, a housing allowance, a subsistence allowance and health care. I talk to kids who are joining the military simply because they cannot figure another way to live, and see the benefits. If healthcare were less complicated, these kids might work for someone, learn some stuff, and get a legitimate job like I did. I was able to because I was in college and had health insurance through that, so I was free to explore and learn from experienced business people who employed me to do various IT tasks. I also know many people who hold down uninteresting corporate of government jobs for the health insurance. At the end of the day, they don't bring home that much money. I know many people who have real skills, and would love to go out and sell those skills in the entrepreneurial market, or some who would simply work to make the family business more successful. They cannot go out and innovate, however, because the risk of a health care crisis is too high. I imagine in the next few years we might see a lot of people leave their relatively unproductive jobs and go out and innovate. Or young people who realize they can get subsidized health insurance while the try to find their place in life which is not a government job. What I find annoying about all the people who take about how bad government healthcare is, is that so many are on it, and don't see to realize how much money the US is wasting by making a government job the only possible reality for so many people. Over the past few years the number of government jobs has been slashed, and the best outcome of the ACA is that we continue see people support themselves rather than depending on the dole.
Star wars is no better or worse than any other story, except that it had the potential to be told over a number of movies.
Movies are also pressured to maximize the use of technology to tell a story. This can work, but with episodes i,ii,and iii I think the advanced technology worked against the story, and in any future movies will be a fx tour de force, rather than story telling.
So yes, there are a few stupid companies that are trying to reinvent the wheel just for a proprietary solution. Nintendo comes to mind. I don't know anyone else that doesn't have a USB charger. It would be nice if they standardized on micro A, but that is not the waste problem. The waste problem is the charger itself. I used to buy so many device that cam with a charger that I would lose or would be useless. That meant I had to buy a new charger, with all that plastic, copper, and electrolyte, which was wasteful. Now a few chargers scatted around, and all it well. A world with a lighting cable only would be much better, as it is not as fragile as micro A.
This is very different from a pasta manufacturer, as most americans simply see pasta as cheap commodity product. Which chickfila there are few other options in the category. With pasta a consumer has to make a conscious decision to pay more. While chickfila is often see as a healthier choice, one pasts has nothing over another in most Americans value system.
As far as respecting others beliefs, I think there are two issues here. One is that one can respect and still debate. For instance, on the current topic, there is a question of gay marriage. In response to this one might quip that those who voted for Ronald Reagan put the first mistress in the white house, the couple married by a radical church that continues to ignore social convention by facilitating gay marriages. If the public has no issues with mistresses destroying marriage, then why pick on gay people. I think this is respecting beliefs, but still facilitating debate.
Likewise one might wonder why those opposed to the islamic center near the 9/11 ground zero did not also demand that the christian churches around the atlanta Olympic bombing site did not move or at least put up a monument accepting group responsibility for the terrorist attack. In both these cases, one group wants to impose thier will on another, and then claims that their own beliefs are not being respected when the subject is debated.
he second issue is just a more extreme case of the first. When I was a kid, roving gangs would travel my neighborhood telling us we were going to hell it we did not believe as they did. Now, we were a nice lower middle class neighborhood, where kids all went to school, some to very good schools, parents put in long days working, some mothers stayed home, some did not, many has college degrees. The upshot was that no nearly everyone was living what would be considered an ethical life. So why would these gangs want to come to our homes, disrespect our beliefs, insult us, and expect anything else than malice?
Which is what so many people miss. One can't just state any view and expect it to stand. Some views, such that it is ok to define a person by extrinsic behavior, is harmful. This is the same philosophy that some Christians have, in that non christian behavior is harmful. Some discussion on the subject is less harmful.
Also, given a market for drawings there might actually be something to print. Of course every pop culture firm is going to be suing every one to death for every depiction of mickey mouse or jar jar binks or the enterprise. I suppose that they will have trouble with toy manufacturers if they wanted to license such templates. I am not sure how many people will go and design their own. I practice by designing a chess set, but I got some high end software for free.
Then there is the cost of the resin, which is really why Costco wants to go into the business. I would assume that 3D printers are going to end up like ink jet printers. Many will have then, as they might only cost a few hundred dollars, bug the sticker shock might put them in a corner. Or like label makers. I have one, but I am not really willing to shell out the cost of a cartridge.
So it is about risk mitigation. We have hurricanes, we have flash floods, but I have been lucky enough to live in places that are 'cool', i.e. relatively high property values, but also safe, i.e. no real flooding, houses that are build well, ground that is stable. Developers push to build in unsafe areas, and those house tend to get regularly flooded and sometimes people die. It is unnecessary. Closer to the coast, responsible people build simple houses that can handle the flooding and winds, but some unreasonable people build expensive houses and then expect the taxpayer to pay for it, either through subsidized insurance or federal disaster release.
So we have some cool places that are, in reality, not reasonable places to live but due to tax payer subsidies are made reasonable. What is happening now, however, is that the gravy train is ended. Places that repeatedly get hammer and destroyed are being bought up by the feds instead of the feds rebuilding and buying the owners new stuff. The insurance companies, knowing that they cannot charge high enough rates to generate a profit, won't touch these. Consumers, in response, are moving to safer cool places. This is what is happening around me.
Everyone says that software like VLC can't succeed, but it can and has. And it has in the tradition of Kermit, that provided a good enough, even better, experience than anything else. Both reliability and resilience. Back in the day work would not have gotten done without Kermit. Now media would be useless, particularly on MS Windows machines, without VLC. Everything else is too worried about DRM to be functional. I have even seen corporate caving into the reality that they are going to have to depend on GNU software(I know some Kermit software is closed, but the protocol is open, and the openness is what allowed us to work efficiently).
OTOH, magazines such as Popular Science are not always reporting accurate science, and often go into editorials that attack others. There has been cases were such attacks have been unjustified and unsupported by objective evidence. In the past such attacks were unhindered by feedback within the magazine. Now people who are more interested in science that personal vendettas are free to point these out. There was a situation like this a few years back where a widely regarded 'skeptic' was attacking another person. The attack was based on false evidence. In the past the attack would have remained a black eye on the face of science. But now comments can be posted to show that not all science people are willing to forgo objectivity when their feeling have been hurt.
This obviously is an editorial problem. Honestly everyone else have been able to deal with comments. Free discussion is the basis of science, even if sometimes it get messy. This can only be taken to be a financial issue.
It was more traumatic than you could possible imagine, close to a snuff film. I don't think it really effected the drug use of anyone, given the arrest rates. Kids who abuse drugs will tend to do so no matter what, or because, the programs. These best way to keep kids off drugs is to stop the culture of drugs, in which they see ads on TV every day showing how drugs are necessary for a good life, but then making those drugs unavailable.
If it were an ultrabook, meaning it was $449 with a keyboard that would be one thing. But at the end of the day you are going to pay $600 with tax, and not even have wireless.
The exception is, of course, companies that can afford to monitor comments. So anything I write about goggle that doesn't imply they are g-d will be modded down. OTOH, such comments will often be modded up by others. I have seen up to 10 mod points being used to argue over my Google comments. Not to isolate google. MS and Åpple also appear to have a contingent
Which comes to a real issue that mod systems have. Too many points are used to mod down, and not enough people participate in bringing the interesting content to the top, as opposed to what they agree. I am guilty of not using my mod points. I think one solution would be if people who used more than 2 out of 10 mod points to degrade would lose all other. If new users posted at zero for their first several comments, then we would not have to make all the offensive stuff off-topic.
This would tend to prove the idea that MS thinks control of the living room is the primary goal. Simply being hooked up to the ztv is not enough. All content must flow through the XBox.
As others have said, this is rocket science, and rocket science has the reputation it does for a reason.
This is certainly a ploy to compete with Facebook and the like. Right now Facebook has probably has more tracking cookies set in more machines than google. I know that I don't allow facebook cookies, but I have also been more restrictive on the Google cookies, simply because they are not providing as many services. Facebook will win on the cookies front. Google need a proprietary technology to lock advertisers into Google.
I am sure that Virginia is still quite unhappy that it's slaves were freed. I know is Texas and California, on a while, are are quite unhappy that they have to comply with clean air regulation that in both states dramatically increase the cost of energy. I am quite unhappy that I cannot have a still in my backyard, and I am sure many of my neighbors would to like to cook meth.
What is keeping Hulu back is the realization that such services are going to kill television, which has become dependent on the cable fees at least as much as the advertising. If things are going as they are, it is going to be very expensive to keep high profit ventures such as sports and fox news, which will be the only thing left, on the air.
The way I look at it si that I pay maybe $60 a month for most of the content I want instead of $150 a month. What annoys me is that Hulu requires a cable account for so much content. The networks know that they have to promote the cable stations.
Which is why I would not mind if Amazon had advertisement for some of it's content. They are doing shows, and are not connecting with the traditional media. If they have to do commercials to air MI-5, i would not mind.
How do you trivialize the fact that people, often adults, play a meaningless game to get fake intangible stuff. Why is buying the stuff with real money any different than playing a game to get stuff. It is being implied that there is some sort ranking system in the game where people with more stuff are somehow inherently better than people with less stuff. Does this extend to the real world where if I have a better car, then I am inherently a better person? Is the submitter upset that the egalitarian nature of the game, where everyone had equal opportunity to get stuff if they invested the hours in the game, even if they were in the real world not as rich? I can tell you that premise is false. Even to begin to play video games one must has reached a lifestyle comfortable enough to afford the game, and have the leisure time to play the game.
Wealth is not necessarily equivalent to cash, and many wealthy families do base their wealth not on cash, but on creation of product. It is unfortunate that so many wealthy people do not actually create anything, and therefore give wealth a bad name. Neither is debt a bad thing, if it is backed up by wealth. A lot of the debt problem is purely fictional. Look at Brazil. Cash is an invention of government, and the promotion of debt as a problem is used to purposely limit certain things for political gain. The US still has a lot of wealth and ability to create.