On the US pacific coast they evidently have a system that can reliably provide warning for earthquakes, which is about the best we can hope for. Electrical signals travel faster than seismic waves, so in many cases there will be time to automatically prepare connected infrastructure. We are talking about the 30 seconds it takes to turn off devices that might cause damage, open emergency doors, sound a siren to give a few seconds notice to pull the car over. This is what other countries do, but I guess the US is not that technologically advanced.
In reality I suspect predicted earthquakes will be like predicted hurricanes landings. The false positives will kill it. Everyone will get prepared the first few times, but after a few false positives people will just assume the next one is as well. But we can't risk a false negative, so what is there to do? And people do get killed in hurricanes because they do have the sense to stay off the street.
For most natural disasters the best thing to do is simply to engineer the safety into the products. For hurricane it is buildings that will not flood and will not blow away. For earthquakes it is building that will fail gracefully.
Given that it is florida, and given that the cargo ships and airplanes do go between Florida and Africa on a regular basis, I suspect most of this is due to shipping. This is generally the manner in which invasive species read a new land. Ships creww bring them or they stow away in cargo. While international ait travel can bring human level type contagions, it is cargo and large sea vessels that bring in the disruptive fauna and flora.
For example, though flowers from africa represent a small portion of total cut flowers imported in the US, one can imagine baby snails using them as a vector. Apparently most of the cut flowers go through Miami.
Yes, if one is doing a one off project, or a prototype that will then be given to someone else to redesign, the perhaps this is the a good method. But for production work, that will have to be used by average people in the field, maybe not so much. The saturn V was not production, was only reliable with great effort, and with incredible highly skilled and trained people. It did it's job, but at great expense. Something one does not want to have to deal with when trying to make a profit.
The issue is not necessarily price,but value. For instance the current generation of kids to have different experiences, and what needs to be tested is different, but the test can be changed for that. What can't be accommodated for is that in many surveys, what todays firm wants in an entry level employee is the ability to get to work on time, every day, the ability to do some basic reading, and the ability to be trained. These are skills that can be demonstrated through a high school diploma and not a test.
Really these changes have been going on for a while, particularly since high schools have implemented somewhat rigorous testing as a barrier to graduation. Really, 20 years ago a GED was almost superior to a high school diploma. It demonstrated actual knowledge. Not that high schools are testiing, the high school diploma is preferred in many cases. For the past ten years I have not seen many use it for jobs. In fact even 20 years ago the only time I saw it used was to gain entrance to a community college or to qualify for a promotion at an existing job.
In any case, the trend now seems to be extend high school for those who need it, try to get them into the workforce, and by hook or crook get a high school diploma. For heavily supervised work, that is enough. Anyone hired people for lightly supervised or unsupervised work is going to hire a college grad anyway. Even someone with an online degree can work semi-supervised.
It is also a gimmick because Austin is a small, compact and well wired. Google is picking the low hanging fruit, not really helping anyone. If they would have gone into any other city, it might have done some good.
Here is what I have seen with broadband. Firms, as much as they say they are running the last mile, are really only doing so in high income high density area, mostly the suburbs. In many ares the best is someone like ATT who already has a presence. In other areas the only hope is cable. Not even ATT is going to spend the money to run a few miles of line and only serve a single small neighborhood.
So it would be pretty to think that Google is trying to put official ISPs on notice, but they are not. If they would they would have chosen another city in texas, run fiber to the neighborhoods around the central business district, and completely obliterated cable and ATT, and provided high speed to some people who could really use it. Instead they chose a safe place with a safe population that would return a high profit on relatively little investment. Even if many use the free service, the city is dense enough so that they will have many customers for each mile of fiber run.
This sounds more like a system implemented so Google does not have to deal with old accounts. It sounds good to me. If a user does not log in for a couple years, delete the data. Why should google have to pay to maintain old data that no one probably wants. Even banks get to close accounts after a number of years inactivity. This is the basis for all those commercials that proclaim "Government has billions of dollars of publics money, some of it could be yours!" In this case there is good legal reasons for Google to enact this. If data is lost, no one can sue google. It is in the terms and services that data will regularly be purged.
The issue is, that like with annuities and death benefits, many people do not remember to update the record as beneficiaries move out of their lives. It seems likely that for something as low priority as a gmail account is to some people, data could indeed inadvertently make it to a person who would use for no good.
If it were an actual death scenario, they should handle it like anyone else. The firm receives a death certificate with the name of the legally certified agent, and whatever assets are sent to that agent. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Here is the thing. I have been at about 30-40 GB of content on devices for over 10 years. First I have 30 GB of songs, all the CDs I owned. Then I paired it down and started adding video. For a while ia hard a half terabyte drive to steam movies locally, but i don't really use that anymore. On my iPad where I have many movies the 64GB limit is a strain, but I still have most of the content I need, while on my phone the 64GB is an overkill. While my next iPad will be 128GB, I don't see paying for phone more than 64GB. It really seems that most things, 30GB is enough for anyone.
As has been said, if I am a small company I might like the free nature of Google for creating memos and the simultaneous editing of other documents. It is better than $400 a pop for each machine running MS Office. If I am a bigger, the uncertainty that my documents are going to available on Google(peoples accounts have been mysteriously shut down) and have the confidential information for other to mine online would not be worth the risk.
That combined with the fact that a tablet is not a great way to develop documents, and this is not a big issue yet. I have written on my tablet, and even with a keyboard is does not seem as fast as on my laptop. There may be value in going to a conference, pulling down the presentation from the cloud, and having some ability to edit, but if i am going to a prevention I am not going to depend on the ability to pull it from the cloud. I want a local copy.
Then is the fact that really, as a office suite, Google Docs is still a toy. I use it, but there are others reasons that I use it and I can work around the toy aspect. What the shortcomings? The presentation software is not flexible with page sizes and what can be done with the presentation. The spreadsheet has no extended features. The word processor has trouble with table. I mean this is really 1990s technology. Which is fine. It works online. But I can see why MS is not willing to take a 10 year step backwards to get it's stuff online.
hat's my next inventory solution. Put on your glasses and look at the QR code on a server, get a readout of what it is and who the point of contact is. Oh wait, your glasses just popped up the status from the SQL database
Not sure if your are serious here. NFC probably provides a better solution for inventory. It might also be good for inventory control. If every item has a unique ID, the ID can be labeled as sold and allowed out, or automatically set off alarm if stolen.
There is not doubt that google glases are innovative. However there is some issues with Google marketing it. They will be the first out, and the first out is often not the first success. Also, Google has never been the first out. They we the second search company. The second ad company. Everyone did mail before them.
Then look at pricing. Google either gives things away in exchange for advertising and data mining, or charges very high prices. The Nexus One was $500 unsubsidized. The could have sold it for $300 if they wanted to sell it. And that $500 included no customer support. And that not even with memory.
So honestly they have no experience with introducing a novel product. They have shown no ability to promote customer confidence that they can support a product. They want an exohbinant price out of the box. And they have not given us the killer app(angry birds anyone?)
There has to be historical context here. Prior ro 2005 there not much demand for NAND flash memory. USB drives were around, but cost $50, though prices were dropping rapidly. All computer still came with CDRW and discs were cheaper. Apple decided to move from the microdrive to flash and introduce the iPod Nano, I am sure for suppliers this was a boon as Apple it significantly increased the market size for the product. Apple also is continuously upgrading product, so it would guarantee a market for larger sizes as they became available. I am sure that any of us would agree that if the there was a decision between almost no market and a huge market, the huge market would be preferable.
This only become a better situation for memory manufacturers with iPhone and iPod with demand for 16 and 32 GB memory sizes. Who else was buying at that size? Even the Zune never got more solid state storage than 16GB. And look a the iPad, now pushing 128 GB, while the WIndows Surface RT was released with 16GB and 32GB. The point is that if the manufacturers wanted to sell memory, Apple was the firm that was mass marketing large quantities to consumers.
What really changed in 2010 was Android, and the smartphone market share approaching 10%. It is interesting to note at that time RIM still had the largest market share, and would grow in revenue for another year. It is also interesting that most phones only has 1GB or none at all. Android phones, OTOH, like iPhone, built a demand of lots of memory. The smartphone was going to grow, and it was going to require lots of nand flash. Apple, for the first time had real competition for memory.
Here is where the manufacturers have to be careful. While tablets are going to drive memory demand, phones may not. I bought the 64(57available)GB iPhone and now realize that there is no way I am going to use all of it. With permanent cloud storage for purchased content and streaming I do not need it. An android phone I bought last year had almost no storage. It does not need it. All content is streamed. So right now we are in a bubble. People still want memory, but how long are they going to pay for memory they do not need? And if other do what MS is doing, which is selling tablet with insufficient memory, how is that going to effect the market?
Really, once the general public is aware of 'get rich quick scheme' it is going to collapse.
I am not saying Bitcoins is such a scheme, just that some people interpret it as such. Currency speculation is not a good get rich quick scheme. It seems to best with people who have taxes in 30% range, or otherwise need to launder their money.
When it is all automated, then we will have process control that keeps cars at reasonable speeds and distance for the situation. What we are talking about here is the in between time, and suggestion in the article is about as stupid as it can get. It is like when computers were introduced to the office and everyone just thought of them as a fancy typewriter. Some innovative people made it so much more than that.
What we are talking about here has little to do with punishment. It has to with development of a more flexible system of travel. For instance, if cars are networked, and we have a computer that can theoretically know the laws, i.e. business rules, and physics, then these machines can transmit corrections to cars that are outside that realm. It may be that safe travel speed is 70 mph and passing cars might travel briefly for 75 mph. This can be signaled. What also can be signaled is out of compliance behavior. If a driver chooses to remain out of compliance, fine, a ticket is issued. This would be much fairer than the current system where one never really knows what is legal and not.
Such a system can also be used to help us keep the road safe. Make sure cars are inspected. Make sure that cars are insured. Uninsured people are causing thousands of dollars worth of damage all the time, and we the responsible are paying. It may seem like 1984 to the freeloaders, but I would rather have an active system helping me drive better than a cop who has to choose subjectively who to fine for errant behavior.
If they blow the entire budget on fx then all will be lost. Blake's 7 was arguable about Avon and Servilan, the force in which Paul and Jacqueline played those characters. It is kind of like bones and spock. Sure Blake and Kirk were important, but the melodrama kind of made the show, and the fx were of little consequence.
It is going to be interesting to see what SyFy does with it. A lot of their stuff lately is industrial fashion or magics, which does not really lend itself to Blake. Battlestar Galactica is more in line, but they even that included unnecessary magics. The social commentary in Blake is subtle and morality ambiguous, something that is hard to do on and American TV show.
I think at this point no broadcaster is doing anything in the public interest. The best thing we can do it takes all that spectrum and give it to firms who will set up affordable Internet acces. We can stream video from those who will make it with the overhead of the networks. I tell you some of the Netflix stuff is better than anything the networks have. Have you seen booth at the end?
It is sad that some consider such micromanagement necessary for a college student. It is like taking roll. When I was in college prof came in, lectured, gave assignments, never mentioned or in larger classes knew who was there. Responsible adults know who to get where they need to be, and if they are not responsible they should not be in college or get a degree.
So the problem is the good intent here is to help students be responsible. Of course one value of a college degree is that is shows that one can be responsible and get work done without supervision of excessive explanation. Instead of paying a supervisor or expensive training courses, the employer can just pay you large sums of money to get a job done. It is really win win.
Unless, of course, college, with good intentions, begin to supervise students so they never learn how to be self motivated. Then we get the current generation of kids that have helicopter parents, and overbearing colleges, who write whiny books about how they were actually expected to do work, without specific instructions, after college.
So really, give them the resources, give them useful tasks, and if a student does not choose to learn then fail them. If they can afford to take a class a second time, then maybe they will succeed. If they don't have the discipline, maybe college is not for them.
As an aside, such things as this have not developed in a vacuum. Some Universities are under pressure to admit more students. Some Universities are under pressure to admit students who previously would not be admitted. Now, there is no problem with this. I believe that every student should have an opportunity to try University. There is no reason to set a threshold and say at this point one is not going to University. However, some are also thinking there should be graduation standards at Univeristy. For some, like for profit universities that accept on basis on ability to get a student loan, this makes sense. They are selling a product, and there should be some quality assurance. But many universities still sell opportunity to learn, and they should be allowed to vet student based on perceived ability, and then let the student sink or swim. If college is like High School, where we hand hold students through the process, then there really is no point in it.
If I had been proactive and ordered in the first few days of the Kickstarter, I might be on the Pebble bandwagon. As it was I really did not get over to Kickstarter until it was over and at that point my impression, which has been played out, it that there was no date for shipping.
In a way I am glad I did not go in. Apple, as we can all agree, is not very open on the interfaces to iOS, which is why there are so many cool gadgets for Android and so few for iPhone. From what I can tell from the site, the battery life is not so good when used with iPhone and the only thing that really works with a stock iPhone is the messaging, and I don't even know if that includes imessage.
it will be interesting to watch this evolve over the summer. If the battery life improves. If they interface better with the iPhone. If they can ship quickly.
I recently saw a set of open access textbooks and it was clear they were not set in Latex. The layout made it very hard to read. When I made the comment no one seemed to understand what I was saying, which was that MS Word is not anything you want to use to write a text book.
Too many professors still seem to think MS Word, which is approaching 30 years old, and still too buggy to use, is the go to tool for writing. It is true that anyone who is around 40 or younger probably was trained to do this. What is unfortunate is that it does not seem that the current generation of students are being trained on LaTex. I mean, who cares what font you use in a research document. LaTex has all the templates for all the research journals prefab. Is there some reason we have to mix presentation with writing? If the Mac has brought one pestulance to society, it is the mixing of content and presentation. I don't really blame the mac. That really did not mixed until MS Word became the go to tool for writing memos.
Back to the point. LaTex is superior not only because it is superior at presentation, but also because it produces open plain text documents. When writing a book that is 'open source' even ODF is not good enough. It is like distributed compiled binaries for code and calling it open source. This, is, in a nutshell, why LaTeX rocks.
Is that Dutch looks like german, in which everything seems angry. The web page seemed very very angry about my lack of cookies. I never knew a web page could look so angry.
As far as the article, this is not surprising given that security theater dominates our security policy. Look at school shootings. Evidently from what I have read, professors do not have the ability to lock many university classrooms, so they have to barricade of sacrifice themselves. I read this week that the police are now recommending that we take defensive action when someone tries to shoot us. What were school doing before, opening all the doors and lining the kids in the hallways to be executing? At school the policy is to lock doors, hide, and stay away from windows when a attack is announced. Which is to be done before the administration sacrifices themselves. Good defensive positions saves lives.
Of course the answer is always more guns, which is really going to some good when a truck full of claymores and fertilizer is driven into a school courtyard, or when some explodes their group 1 element on the plane.
This pretty much already happens. The question is are you in school to learn or to get a grade.
One problem with teachers grading papers in today world is that you have no idea if the work is original. Reports for all the common topics are all over the place, and it is easy to adjust and mix and match so the common tools will only catch the laziest students. Solution to textbook problems are all over the place as well. The is why any decent science or math teacher will give computer generated tests. Any student who knows the material will be able to generate a solution. Any student copying off the internet and trying to adjust to the current problem is likely to have less success, especially in a time contraint situation. Since such tests are not multiple choice, common test taking strategies that allow students who know nothing to pass tests do not work.
The system at hand will be an invaluable tool for those who are in school to learn. In principle it will provide more feedback and allow more drafts than would be possible otherwise, The prof or TA and then focus on improving a draft that polished enough to work on the high level skills.
And who cares about those that simply use a program to write a paper that can pass the software to grade the paper. Those people would not have taken the assignment seriously anyway, and would not have learned. It is a myth that through grading, or threats, or whatever, you can make people learn. If it were so there would be many fewer people in the world who can't write an essay or solve an equation. Through good teaching we can get people to memorize a fact or process. That does not in any mean they have learned anything, or, after the passage of time, create anything useful.
I really expect the second decade of the 21th century to be full of the awesome low budget films that characterized the end of the 20th century as film and equipment became less expensive and technology became more accesible. I am talking slackers, clerks, el mariachi. Pretty much made less than $100K, even inflation adjusted. We can even include Mad Max, for a budget of much less than $500K.
The cost of making a movie now is not film or equipment, but talent and time. A good 3 CCD camera is less than $1000. I have edited such things on a portable macbook. It is not uncommon for students to learn the basic skills in high school.
Now I am back to the idea that a creative person will find the funding, and creating a good original story and finding good people is really the impediment to a good film, not the money. It seems sad that the trend now is to incorporate increasingly technical FX, which really just test the ability of software writers, not creative talent, instead of creating better content. As hockey as blair witch was, it is still better than Transformers.
I continue to see Opera fall. It started with the insistance on the MS WIndows ecosystem instead of bringing the incredible functionality of other OS. If it had focused on Mac and *nix it could have had those markets, because at the time there was that could compete with it, and even now it is a top browser. I had thought that the move to Webkit was a gutsy move because Opera could not put all it's resources on making a good browser instead of just reinventing and playing catch up on the rendering engine.. The technology has matured, and Webkit and Gecko are the engine. IE is an application front end rather than a general purpose browser, so Trident is always going to be a lesser engine.
Instead they are hitching their wagon to a convenient big horse instead of just being an innovative company. And i think that it will end badly. There is no reason to believe that Google will not increasing put closed source components into Blink. There is no reason for Google to eventual be civil with Apple, in the way that Apple was eventually civil with KHTML. At some point, unless Opera has some sort of secret agreement with Google, it can only be assumed that they will not have a guaranteed future.
in a perfect world that would be ok. In the real world people complain about everything. The service opens Brown up to any number of complaints. For instance the help screen says contact the restaurant for problems with an order.This means if food does not get delivered correctly, the restaurant has to deal with it.
In addition you note that school food account is used to pay. These are often paid by their parents,so it open the school up to the most dreadful thing, parent phone calls. One imagines that there is a delivery fee, and that the delivery fee is something parents are not prepared for. Likewise, the school has a responsibility to control the use of student information. if the school does not do anything, and student information is breeched, then that is a problem for the school.
As has been mentioned, the school asked the firm to stop using the restaurant and the the business did. End fo story. Part of the problem some may be having is that students pretty much expect to do anything they want, but really they can't. There are limits. My firm to tak over the quad quad and play music all day and night to sell cds. I am clearly providing a service. I am not sure if anyone would say that I should allowed to do this.
Anything you say to a person such as this sounds exactly like if you the ROT13 text of this site. Such people do not have the basis to understand the logic. I am not saying anything bad against such people. A friend of mine believes that going to church makes you rich and happy. It is not up to me to change that. We all have things other people disagree with, some of it is what we might consider factually proven, so it is hard for us to keep out mouths such. It is a trade off. Enjoy the company and the sex, or give it up and find someone who is more on your wavelength.
I really like most on the april fool stuff on/. The OMG Ponies was awesome. But this is just stupid and annoying. I mean if the text rendered when you click through that would be on thing, but to click click click that is just, well, silly.
People get killed all the time. Car accidents, jumping off the roof, drinking too much, etc.It is probably useful to have laws against such behavior, but really if dumb people are going to be dumb, we can't stop. The only problem is who is going to pay fot the rescue and medical bills. For instance, helmets are a personal issue, but a great deal of the medical expense for riders who don't wear helmets are paid by the taxpayer.
tThe other thing is that many people have no experience with a hurricane, at least with hurricanes near the tropics. Sandy was uncommon and not something that the eastern seaboard, especially that far from the tropic, was used to. If people have never seen something, it is hard to know how devastating it is.
Slashdot Mirror
In reality I suspect predicted earthquakes will be like predicted hurricanes landings. The false positives will kill it. Everyone will get prepared the first few times, but after a few false positives people will just assume the next one is as well. But we can't risk a false negative, so what is there to do? And people do get killed in hurricanes because they do have the sense to stay off the street.
For most natural disasters the best thing to do is simply to engineer the safety into the products. For hurricane it is buildings that will not flood and will not blow away. For earthquakes it is building that will fail gracefully.
For example, though flowers from africa represent a small portion of total cut flowers imported in the US, one can imagine baby snails using them as a vector. Apparently most of the cut flowers go through Miami.
Yes, if one is doing a one off project, or a prototype that will then be given to someone else to redesign, the perhaps this is the a good method. But for production work, that will have to be used by average people in the field, maybe not so much. The saturn V was not production, was only reliable with great effort, and with incredible highly skilled and trained people. It did it's job, but at great expense. Something one does not want to have to deal with when trying to make a profit.
Really these changes have been going on for a while, particularly since high schools have implemented somewhat rigorous testing as a barrier to graduation. Really, 20 years ago a GED was almost superior to a high school diploma. It demonstrated actual knowledge. Not that high schools are testiing, the high school diploma is preferred in many cases. For the past ten years I have not seen many use it for jobs. In fact even 20 years ago the only time I saw it used was to gain entrance to a community college or to qualify for a promotion at an existing job.
In any case, the trend now seems to be extend high school for those who need it, try to get them into the workforce, and by hook or crook get a high school diploma. For heavily supervised work, that is enough. Anyone hired people for lightly supervised or unsupervised work is going to hire a college grad anyway. Even someone with an online degree can work semi-supervised.
Here is what I have seen with broadband. Firms, as much as they say they are running the last mile, are really only doing so in high income high density area, mostly the suburbs. In many ares the best is someone like ATT who already has a presence. In other areas the only hope is cable. Not even ATT is going to spend the money to run a few miles of line and only serve a single small neighborhood.
So it would be pretty to think that Google is trying to put official ISPs on notice, but they are not. If they would they would have chosen another city in texas, run fiber to the neighborhoods around the central business district, and completely obliterated cable and ATT, and provided high speed to some people who could really use it. Instead they chose a safe place with a safe population that would return a high profit on relatively little investment. Even if many use the free service, the city is dense enough so that they will have many customers for each mile of fiber run.
The issue is, that like with annuities and death benefits, many people do not remember to update the record as beneficiaries move out of their lives. It seems likely that for something as low priority as a gmail account is to some people, data could indeed inadvertently make it to a person who would use for no good.
If it were an actual death scenario, they should handle it like anyone else. The firm receives a death certificate with the name of the legally certified agent, and whatever assets are sent to that agent. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Here is the thing. I have been at about 30-40 GB of content on devices for over 10 years. First I have 30 GB of songs, all the CDs I owned. Then I paired it down and started adding video. For a while ia hard a half terabyte drive to steam movies locally, but i don't really use that anymore. On my iPad where I have many movies the 64GB limit is a strain, but I still have most of the content I need, while on my phone the 64GB is an overkill. While my next iPad will be 128GB, I don't see paying for phone more than 64GB. It really seems that most things, 30GB is enough for anyone.
That combined with the fact that a tablet is not a great way to develop documents, and this is not a big issue yet. I have written on my tablet, and even with a keyboard is does not seem as fast as on my laptop. There may be value in going to a conference, pulling down the presentation from the cloud, and having some ability to edit, but if i am going to a prevention I am not going to depend on the ability to pull it from the cloud. I want a local copy.
Then is the fact that really, as a office suite, Google Docs is still a toy. I use it, but there are others reasons that I use it and I can work around the toy aspect. What the shortcomings? The presentation software is not flexible with page sizes and what can be done with the presentation. The spreadsheet has no extended features. The word processor has trouble with table. I mean this is really 1990s technology. Which is fine. It works online. But I can see why MS is not willing to take a 10 year step backwards to get it's stuff online.
Not sure if your are serious here. NFC probably provides a better solution for inventory. It might also be good for inventory control. If every item has a unique ID, the ID can be labeled as sold and allowed out, or automatically set off alarm if stolen.
There is not doubt that google glases are innovative. However there is some issues with Google marketing it. They will be the first out, and the first out is often not the first success. Also, Google has never been the first out. They we the second search company. The second ad company. Everyone did mail before them.
Then look at pricing. Google either gives things away in exchange for advertising and data mining, or charges very high prices. The Nexus One was $500 unsubsidized. The could have sold it for $300 if they wanted to sell it. And that $500 included no customer support. And that not even with memory.
So honestly they have no experience with introducing a novel product. They have shown no ability to promote customer confidence that they can support a product. They want an exohbinant price out of the box. And they have not given us the killer app(angry birds anyone?)
This only become a better situation for memory manufacturers with iPhone and iPod with demand for 16 and 32 GB memory sizes. Who else was buying at that size? Even the Zune never got more solid state storage than 16GB. And look a the iPad, now pushing 128 GB, while the WIndows Surface RT was released with 16GB and 32GB. The point is that if the manufacturers wanted to sell memory, Apple was the firm that was mass marketing large quantities to consumers.
What really changed in 2010 was Android, and the smartphone market share approaching 10%. It is interesting to note at that time RIM still had the largest market share, and would grow in revenue for another year. It is also interesting that most phones only has 1GB or none at all. Android phones, OTOH, like iPhone, built a demand of lots of memory. The smartphone was going to grow, and it was going to require lots of nand flash. Apple, for the first time had real competition for memory.
Here is where the manufacturers have to be careful. While tablets are going to drive memory demand, phones may not. I bought the 64(57available)GB iPhone and now realize that there is no way I am going to use all of it. With permanent cloud storage for purchased content and streaming I do not need it. An android phone I bought last year had almost no storage. It does not need it. All content is streamed. So right now we are in a bubble. People still want memory, but how long are they going to pay for memory they do not need? And if other do what MS is doing, which is selling tablet with insufficient memory, how is that going to effect the market?
Really, once the general public is aware of 'get rich quick scheme' it is going to collapse.
I am not saying Bitcoins is such a scheme, just that some people interpret it as such. Currency speculation is not a good get rich quick scheme. It seems to best with people who have taxes in 30% range, or otherwise need to launder their money.
What we are talking about here has little to do with punishment. It has to with development of a more flexible system of travel. For instance, if cars are networked, and we have a computer that can theoretically know the laws, i.e. business rules, and physics, then these machines can transmit corrections to cars that are outside that realm. It may be that safe travel speed is 70 mph and passing cars might travel briefly for 75 mph. This can be signaled. What also can be signaled is out of compliance behavior. If a driver chooses to remain out of compliance, fine, a ticket is issued. This would be much fairer than the current system where one never really knows what is legal and not.
Such a system can also be used to help us keep the road safe. Make sure cars are inspected. Make sure that cars are insured. Uninsured people are causing thousands of dollars worth of damage all the time, and we the responsible are paying. It may seem like 1984 to the freeloaders, but I would rather have an active system helping me drive better than a cop who has to choose subjectively who to fine for errant behavior.
It is going to be interesting to see what SyFy does with it. A lot of their stuff lately is industrial fashion or magics, which does not really lend itself to Blake. Battlestar Galactica is more in line, but they even that included unnecessary magics. The social commentary in Blake is subtle and morality ambiguous, something that is hard to do on and American TV show.
I think at this point no broadcaster is doing anything in the public interest. The best thing we can do it takes all that spectrum and give it to firms who will set up affordable Internet acces. We can stream video from those who will make it with the overhead of the networks. I tell you some of the Netflix stuff is better than anything the networks have. Have you seen booth at the end?
So the problem is the good intent here is to help students be responsible. Of course one value of a college degree is that is shows that one can be responsible and get work done without supervision of excessive explanation. Instead of paying a supervisor or expensive training courses, the employer can just pay you large sums of money to get a job done. It is really win win.
Unless, of course, college, with good intentions, begin to supervise students so they never learn how to be self motivated. Then we get the current generation of kids that have helicopter parents, and overbearing colleges, who write whiny books about how they were actually expected to do work, without specific instructions, after college.
So really, give them the resources, give them useful tasks, and if a student does not choose to learn then fail them. If they can afford to take a class a second time, then maybe they will succeed. If they don't have the discipline, maybe college is not for them.
As an aside, such things as this have not developed in a vacuum. Some Universities are under pressure to admit more students. Some Universities are under pressure to admit students who previously would not be admitted. Now, there is no problem with this. I believe that every student should have an opportunity to try University. There is no reason to set a threshold and say at this point one is not going to University. However, some are also thinking there should be graduation standards at Univeristy. For some, like for profit universities that accept on basis on ability to get a student loan, this makes sense. They are selling a product, and there should be some quality assurance. But many universities still sell opportunity to learn, and they should be allowed to vet student based on perceived ability, and then let the student sink or swim. If college is like High School, where we hand hold students through the process, then there really is no point in it.
In a way I am glad I did not go in. Apple, as we can all agree, is not very open on the interfaces to iOS, which is why there are so many cool gadgets for Android and so few for iPhone. From what I can tell from the site, the battery life is not so good when used with iPhone and the only thing that really works with a stock iPhone is the messaging, and I don't even know if that includes imessage.
it will be interesting to watch this evolve over the summer. If the battery life improves. If they interface better with the iPhone. If they can ship quickly.
Too many professors still seem to think MS Word, which is approaching 30 years old, and still too buggy to use, is the go to tool for writing. It is true that anyone who is around 40 or younger probably was trained to do this. What is unfortunate is that it does not seem that the current generation of students are being trained on LaTex. I mean, who cares what font you use in a research document. LaTex has all the templates for all the research journals prefab. Is there some reason we have to mix presentation with writing? If the Mac has brought one pestulance to society, it is the mixing of content and presentation. I don't really blame the mac. That really did not mixed until MS Word became the go to tool for writing memos.
Back to the point. LaTex is superior not only because it is superior at presentation, but also because it produces open plain text documents. When writing a book that is 'open source' even ODF is not good enough. It is like distributed compiled binaries for code and calling it open source. This, is, in a nutshell, why LaTeX rocks.
As far as the article, this is not surprising given that security theater dominates our security policy. Look at school shootings. Evidently from what I have read, professors do not have the ability to lock many university classrooms, so they have to barricade of sacrifice themselves. I read this week that the police are now recommending that we take defensive action when someone tries to shoot us. What were school doing before, opening all the doors and lining the kids in the hallways to be executing? At school the policy is to lock doors, hide, and stay away from windows when a attack is announced. Which is to be done before the administration sacrifices themselves. Good defensive positions saves lives.
Of course the answer is always more guns, which is really going to some good when a truck full of claymores and fertilizer is driven into a school courtyard, or when some explodes their group 1 element on the plane.
One problem with teachers grading papers in today world is that you have no idea if the work is original. Reports for all the common topics are all over the place, and it is easy to adjust and mix and match so the common tools will only catch the laziest students. Solution to textbook problems are all over the place as well. The is why any decent science or math teacher will give computer generated tests. Any student who knows the material will be able to generate a solution. Any student copying off the internet and trying to adjust to the current problem is likely to have less success, especially in a time contraint situation. Since such tests are not multiple choice, common test taking strategies that allow students who know nothing to pass tests do not work.
The system at hand will be an invaluable tool for those who are in school to learn. In principle it will provide more feedback and allow more drafts than would be possible otherwise, The prof or TA and then focus on improving a draft that polished enough to work on the high level skills.
And who cares about those that simply use a program to write a paper that can pass the software to grade the paper. Those people would not have taken the assignment seriously anyway, and would not have learned. It is a myth that through grading, or threats, or whatever, you can make people learn. If it were so there would be many fewer people in the world who can't write an essay or solve an equation. Through good teaching we can get people to memorize a fact or process. That does not in any mean they have learned anything, or, after the passage of time, create anything useful.
The cost of making a movie now is not film or equipment, but talent and time. A good 3 CCD camera is less than $1000. I have edited such things on a portable macbook. It is not uncommon for students to learn the basic skills in high school.
Now I am back to the idea that a creative person will find the funding, and creating a good original story and finding good people is really the impediment to a good film, not the money. It seems sad that the trend now is to incorporate increasingly technical FX, which really just test the ability of software writers, not creative talent, instead of creating better content. As hockey as blair witch was, it is still better than Transformers.
Instead they are hitching their wagon to a convenient big horse instead of just being an innovative company. And i think that it will end badly. There is no reason to believe that Google will not increasing put closed source components into Blink. There is no reason for Google to eventual be civil with Apple, in the way that Apple was eventually civil with KHTML. At some point, unless Opera has some sort of secret agreement with Google, it can only be assumed that they will not have a guaranteed future.
In addition you note that school food account is used to pay. These are often paid by their parents,so it open the school up to the most dreadful thing, parent phone calls. One imagines that there is a delivery fee, and that the delivery fee is something parents are not prepared for. Likewise, the school has a responsibility to control the use of student information. if the school does not do anything, and student information is breeched, then that is a problem for the school.
As has been mentioned, the school asked the firm to stop using the restaurant and the the business did. End fo story. Part of the problem some may be having is that students pretty much expect to do anything they want, but really they can't. There are limits. My firm to tak over the quad quad and play music all day and night to sell cds. I am clearly providing a service. I am not sure if anyone would say that I should allowed to do this.
Anything you say to a person such as this sounds exactly like if you the ROT13 text of this site. Such people do not have the basis to understand the logic. I am not saying anything bad against such people. A friend of mine believes that going to church makes you rich and happy. It is not up to me to change that. We all have things other people disagree with, some of it is what we might consider factually proven, so it is hard for us to keep out mouths such. It is a trade off. Enjoy the company and the sex, or give it up and find someone who is more on your wavelength.
I really like most on the april fool stuff on /. The OMG Ponies was awesome. But this is just stupid and annoying. I mean if the text rendered when you click through that would be on thing, but to click click click that is just, well, silly.
tThe other thing is that many people have no experience with a hurricane, at least with hurricanes near the tropics. Sandy was uncommon and not something that the eastern seaboard, especially that far from the tropic, was used to. If people have never seen something, it is hard to know how devastating it is.