This reminds me how quickly technology changes the mean of communication. For instance, the Pony Express only operated for a year or two, ultimately made irrelevant by the telegraph.
I recall these internet appliances that would allow us to cheaply access email and the WWW. Since so many were still using dial up, a land line phone was a common sense addition. Few imagined that cell phone rates would fall so quickly that phone calls would almost be given away, and what you pay for was data. This lead to the internet appliance that was not imagined, the smart phone, and the larger table on which we use Skype, which with we call anywhere for negligible costs, at least by developed world standards.
This is funny because so many said the internet appliance would never be viable. Maybe that was true in a very restricted sense, but not in a broad sense. In the same sense that there was no market for microcomputers.
Which is why I get so annoyed when people dismiss a concept because they do not like a design. Sure the Tandy 100, 200, PC-6 might not have been many peoples idea of a programmable portable device, but they had many of the ideas that people want today. A keyboard, programing on device, removable storage. It is interesting to note that many successful mobile devices do not include such features. But that is who progress works. We start by mimicking existing technology, then move to novel ideas.
Statutorily the only way the US governments ability to pay bills can come to an end is by the Feds deciding not to pay bills. The stuff we are paying for has already been bought. What is happening right now is congress saying that the Fed cannot pay for stuff that congress has already purchased. Boenher is driving his Hummer off the lot, while canceling payment on the check, so to speak.Anyone who says the US can't pay it's bills has never read the constituition, which is ironic since many of these people are tea baggers who claimed to have done so. I guess this proves there is a difference between reading and comprehension.
Furthermore, we have a plan in place to stop deficit spending. While we are calling it a fiscal cliff, it is more like a train approaching from a half mile away. There is time to get out of the way, though not to stop the train. For most people, there are two major issues with the current plan. On is that the income of average people is going to drop by a few hundreds of dollars every month, which means this is money they are no longer have to spend. This is only a problem because due to the Bush era tax cuts and other conservative policy, pay has remained relatively stagnant over the past 10 years. The way to fix this is to encourage pay levels to increase. One way to do this is increase taxes disproportionately on the wealthy and corporations so they have an incentive to pay more to workers, which is not taxed to the employer.
The other complaint with the current plan is that it hurts the military. Again, the goal should be free market based. We should not be so dependent on the military pay, or federal orders. It should be the consumer that drives the economy. It should not be government contracts that makes boenng one of the largest receivers of the dole in the country. We can choose to become a country of small business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations that provide extremely well paid jobs to consumers. Or we can continue paying out entitlement to corporations.
To the matter at hand. As has been said, the feds have a rich set of data from local and other sources that allows it to predict what will happen in terms of atmospheric disturbances. This is not just to predict the odd hurricane. In fact it is used to determine how we as a country can best use our resources to maximize profits. The mistake that many make is that each event is unrelated to anything else. In fact we ideally make decisions based on what will maximize future return. If these storms are going to impact the upper eastern seaboard repeatedly, we need to know. And to know we need data.
Conservatives tend to be very bad at this. For instance the gov of Texas, Rick Perry. puts very little money in planning and conservation, yet expects things to be paid for when this lack of planning results in a major crisis. Two instance come to mind. First, the last big hurricane on the texas gulf coast resulted in huge power outages that cost huge amounts of money. Lack of planning meant it cost much more than it should, and the rate payers had to pay the price for the lack of planning. Second, lack of forestry maintenance resulted in huge wildfires in texas. While the feds paid for part of it, Perry wanted to be fully compensated, by the US taxpayers for his incompetence. Doesn't seem very fair.
Yet if hurricanes become a significant threat to the upper east coast, and we allow the status quo, the US taxpayer is going to be in the hole again and again so that the elite can have their barrier island homes. Or we can get better data from better equipment, determine what the risk is, and make an informed choice.
Pretty much this is the case. There are inspectors in texas, but they seem to only give warnings if the do anything at all. And then the situation is set up so the owners are not responsible. For instance in 2005, 15 workers were killed at BP in Texas City A year later another worker was killed. None of these were BP related, because these were contract workers. There were many safety citation which were never enforced. And BP does not care because they contractors, who have no control over the safety, are the one's responsible for the workers.
So no, it is not reasonable to say that they did not know and should not have known and really had no reason to know. In fact it is reasonable to assume that they did not, in some file somewhere is a warning and many even a promise form the owners to fix it. But without real fines and even criminal penalty, there is no incentive to make changes that are only going to make a plant unprofitable.
So, BP has some of the most dangerous plants in the world, and over the past 5 years because of publicity they seem to be safer. This is the way things change in Texas. To shame the people who are only cared about profits. There is a lot of money in Texas, and most believe that it is uncool to kill people to save a buck. There are people who are paid a lot for semi skilled work, but that is because the work is dangerous, though no one is paid to die.
One would think. Like the right to organize so that employers do not gain the power to arbitrarily reprimand or fire workers. Yet right to work laws are also passed, so these there is no way for these workers to actually complain. Employment laws are meaningless without employer consequences. Believe me, these laws are going to do nothing in a world where the masses are desperate for semi-skilled entry level jobs and labor is powerless to help them.
One has to admit that the functionality if Google docs is extremely basic. Though some will say that the differences is just eye candy and extended functionality that really is not needed in an office application, I have to say not true. Google docs is made for basic work, and is optimized for group setting.
OTOH, most of what people use office for is basic memos and the like, simple spreadsheets, and presentations. I think for a small office buying 10 users for $50 a person instead of 5K for MS office would be a value proposition. I certainly can do without MS Office, and I suspect many other can as well. And web storage is a great benefit.
But Google docs does suck when compared to any other mature product, form MS, from Apple, from Apache. The functionality s very limited. The paper sizes are limited. The export is broken. I used Google docs extensively since it came out because it provides two features I need, sharing and automatic online storage. I have used it in a group setting. Since these are my two required features, and it is free, I work around the primitive feature set. What surprises me is that, if they are really competing with MS, they have not expanded the capabilities. Particularly over the past several months there has been no improvement.
Have you not watched the Fox News War on Christmas coverage. They want to punish secular establishments that do not wish exclude persons who do not celebrate christmas.
Or an alarming number of terrorist christians who want to attack a secular government for not promoting their particular superstition.
Have you tried to talk to a christian about the fact the devil is a christian and therefore only christian can be devil worshiper, as most other religions which understands that we cannot judge, much less understand, the nature of the divine.
In the US we are very fortunate in that checks and balances and secular government protects us from the random superstitions that cowardly people use to control other people. We do not have a flag desiccation law. We have a few people go to the supreme and whine about books they don't personally enjoy, but that has a not been a problem recently. This has not, however, prevented the mostly the mostly Christian terrorists from complaining that private publishers are allowed to print books are allowed to print books they do not personally enjoy, or that tax payer money is used to buy such books so that others can enjoy them. I mean if my tax dollars are going to pay for your idolatry, why can't your tax dollars be used to buy Brave New World. At least the later has drugs and sex and so has entertainment value.
First, any auto manufacture that claims they have no idea how ethanol is going to effect their engine is simply incompetent. The question is what will happen with higher temperatures and maybe increased reactions. This has been around for ove 5 years in the US, and longer in other countries, so the testing has been done. In particular US studies has shown that up to 20% is not going to harm the engine. So what we are saying here is we believe hand waving from lazy manufacturers over data. This kind of cognative dissidence is all to common around here.
Second, no manufacturer is going to extend a warranty beyond minimum requirements. Can you imagine going to a dealer, after not changing the oil for a year, saying they would fix an unrelated warranty issue? Of course not. The purpose of a dealer is deny as many warranty repars as possible. So why would they say they would warranty a uncovered fuel that might mean even an additional warranty repair. Much better to blame the fuel even if the repair is unrelated. Of course flex fuel cars are warrentied to run on flexible fuels.
Third, the issue with ethanol is really an issue with corn production in the US as our only crop for such purposes. Corn is about the worst thing one can use for ethanol, but the US has a corn economy. There are many weeds that can be made into ethanol, but little money has been put into developing that technology. Sugarcane can also be used, but the sugarcane economy in the US has been systematically decimated in the US by northern interests who value politics over national security.
So it is clear that this is just another FUD article to promote the fossil fuel economy. Things are going to change, interests that have become fat and lazy on the backs of americans workers are going to become less fat and lazy, and this simply scares them, so they have to scare us.
This seems like a pretty simple situation that will be solved by the insurance companies over time. For instance about 30 years ago even very conservative states started requiring auto insurance and created state insurance to help those that could not get cheap insurance. This was basically set up to make sure the insurance companies had money to cover the increased damages that cars were inflicting. It was not personal injury so much, as indicated by the low cost of personal medical in cars and the fact that helmets are often not required.
In any case this is going to be a liability issue, and worked out with the manufacturers and insurance companies. Even with human drivers, the manufacturers are going to be liable for faulty software, which means they will likely have to take out additional insurance, costs that will be passed onto the consumer. Presumably because so many cars are going drive by electronics anyway, such policies are already in place.
As far as giving a ticket, the ticket is always issued to driver of the car, for the case where the driver is present, of owner of the car, and then devolves to the driver. For instance, a parking ticket on a rental car will eventually be sent to the renter. So if the software does mess up, and violates the law, then we would not want that to effect personal insurance. So the owner would have to show the car was well maintained and not modified, and that would be a liability for the manufacturer.
Which is why this will become a problem. It is like a warranty. It is hard to get the manufacturer to honor a warranty. So if the owner has not gone to the dealer for every single maintenance, not loaded in all updates, not changed tires, etc, then the manufacturer will push liability to the owner, as they do now.
While on non-MS Windows there are many different GUIs to play videos, on MS Windows I have found VLC to be the only reliable method to play videos. Now on MS Windows 7 and 8 MS may have included a workable interface, so VLC may not be a necessity. On other platforms it is optional.
Isn't this a software feature that can be incorporated in all phones? Is this the beginning of Google keeping the best for itself, as MS used to do, and only releasing the second rate product to others?
It is inconceivable that Google can't release software and technical specs to the OEM and have these phones produced. The only thing I can think of is this is going to be another incompatible version of Android, i.e. most phones are not going to upgrade to it, so the best way to handle the PR is to make it sound like a new special version.
Apple really screwed the pooch by making smart phones look like computers, in terms of the ability to upgrade the software. It would have better to simply have the expectation of upgrading the phone every two years to get an upgrade, with simple updates given between those times. It would have made the carriers much more happy, knowing users would have to sign a new two year contract to get the latest software. Even better if updates were every 18 months so customers would just build up contracts. As it is, I my phone is two years old and still run current OS and has many of the current features. I will upgrade soon because it makes no sense not to if you are paying monthly tarrifs.
Getting through high school is not easy, especially when one has free access to things many kids do not. I am talking about acids, arsenic, mercury, power tools, full electronic setups, etc. Some adults are wary, if not outright scared, of kids. Especially at time like this. Especially if one is smart and introverted. Mistakes are made.
But teens do have the ability to make the situation easier on everyone. Instead of acting like a child, always having to fight to get your own way, always having to be right, always having to push boundaries, just say yes ma'am, no ma'am, sorry ma'am, I can see how this might seem weird.
Or move to a school where they appreciate intelligence, and trust students because everyone is there to learn, not just to get through. That is what I, fortunately, did.
About 15 years ago what most consider 'The Internet' was on it way to being closed because MS was on it's way to control it, not to mention Flash. Because of Google and Apple and others, 'The Internet' has grown up with open standards. I can share a host for not much money, buy a domain for a fraction of what it costs 15 years ago, and run sophisticated content without paying license fees to anyone. This to me is pretty incredible, open, and allows a great deal of freedom. Yes, a few devices that are hooked to a few pieces of 'The Internet' are restrictive in what they can do, and a few services are charging fees, but just look at what it was like when all we had was dailup and services like Dialog.
Sure, I can pine for the days when my computer ran as a open case and I could solder custom interfaces or fix my floppy disk drive. But I couldn't run up a site that did real work in less than a month.
And this is why it is dumb to build anything for electronics that is based on any connector other than USB. USB has become the standard for charging. There was a time when one bought a charging device and it came with 50 different adaptors. The world is different now. Except for certain situations, a charging device should just have a USB port, and the consumer plugs whatever cord they need, be it a dock connector, a lighting connector, that silly thing nintendo uses, whater. That is a universal charger. Most devices come with a cord. Anything that has cords is not a universal charger, but limited charger that will be obsolete when the device changes. If this device were put out six months ago, it would immediately be obsolete for iPhone.
It is even more dumb. You are asking me to pay for licensing for a cord that I do not even need. If I am am never going to use the dock connector, when am I paying Apple for one?
Here is how it could have been designed. Build a USB port into each of four spindles. Allow the user to supply whatever cables they need, and allow them to install them into the spindles. if a user have four android phones, then they can use those cables. No paying for licenses you don't need.
I suspect that this project was not going to be hugely successful in the first place, and they are simply blaming apple. If they had a working product, they would have simply provided an extra couple USB ports and shipped it.
Also home schooling. Home schooling certainly appears to be a risk factor. We should immediately investigate how many of these paranoid unsociable people who can't even tolerate a private school are on the verge of killing everyone they see.
And bowling. Remember that the Colobine kids were driven to murder by the monotony of only have bowling as entertainment. If the school had some good American LAN parties, everything would have been ok. Remember Lanza made it through high school with the aid of LAN parties. News articles cited concerns that the LAN parties involved violent games. Maybe he was not longer allowed to play such games after high school.
But I would agree that some media might be involved. I can well imagine how something like Batman might drive someone insane. I would have no problem with an investigation into Batman and how it causes murder. I don't suspect many other than the liberal Hollywood industry would object. My problem with Batman, and that genre, is there is not enough sex. I think more sex in movies would solve many of our problems. Not to mention if more people would go out and have deep and meaningful relationship, even it is only at LAN parties. I mean, according to the documentary The Guild, such things can be quite conducive for a sex life.
It has been said that Kodak made a management mistake in not leveraging their patents into digitial procucts. I think this sale, however, shows that the practical value of the patents is to prevent innovation, not create products. If the patents had real value, in terms of products, then Apple or Google or MS may have bought them. As is, the situation appears to be another case of a firm possessing some basic patents and technology, but nothing that can create a product. Truly the product patent is what is valuable. The patent on a camera, not the patent on a button that can be pressed to release a barrier that separates the interior of an light tight box to an aperture.
At some point this patent silliness has to end. Patent troll companies are hoping that it will last long enough to make a quick buck, and this is what is clearly driving the value of some patent portfolios. One thing that used to happen is that someone with an idea would sell it to someone else who could monetize it. This might seem unfair, I mean the inventor of the bar code did not get rich, but neither did he do the work to market it to the point where it was really valuable. In the current situation we have people sitting on ideas waiting for someone else to create a product that uses the idea so the product manufacturer can be sued. I don't know if this is the best way to innovate.
I get it, free learning is great but what about actually verifying any learning was done?
There are many ways to look at college. One is as a time spent becoming educated, cultured, and expanding your contacts beyond you hometown school social group. This is why many sent their kids on the Grand Tour, or from America to the great schools of England. The threat of plague, it is hypothesized, and the arduous journey across the sea, impelled the residents of proto-America to build their own colleges. Over time many private and public universities were built. For the early ones, formal assessment was not as important as learning, and of course they were not for the masses Over time more people entered an institution of higher education, formal methods of assessing learning in more real time were developed to track the progress over the years, and we heard more about so-called grade inflation.
Another way to look at college is as a way to train for a job. In this way general learning is not the key, but rather promotion and validation of a skill set. This skill set will then allow to function as a person who can complete some predetermined set of tasks. As some of these tasks are quite involved and complicated, it requires skilled personel to teach the tasks, and therefore significant money has to be paid. At the high end fo these tasks are doctors and lawyers. At the low end is operating MS Office on a computer. These are valuable skills and deserve a significant payment.
So what are for profit Universities? They may be a place where students who would not succeed in becoming educated and cultured in traditional institution can succeed. In this case all the complaints about cost and default rate are unjustified. The issue we are having right now is if the instruction is rigorous, or are these diploma factories. The cost lends credence to the later, and it would be good if for profit schools focused on that.
But they are not. They more and more are presenting themselves as work training facilities. Which is fine. But in that case the verification of learning is landing and keeping a job. If one is not going to be an institution of abstract higher learning, then one is a job training, a different but valuable resource. However, the fact that people default on loans because they don't get a job then becomes a verification that learning is not going on.
As far as hiring, most jobs for which I have applied wanted authentic verification, not simply degree and grades. The degree and grades were simply a way for HR to thin out the resumes. If someone were to look at a regional or online degree, which in my experience they were not, at least for the pay grade I was looking at, they would still want to see a completed task. It would not mater where the knowledge came from, just that you could apply it.
And that is where all this is going. Authentic assessment. We need many different learning opportunities because people learn differently. But if the learning results in nothing, who cares?
To some extent I agree. For instance we waste a huge amount of time and money with USDA and the FSIS inspection and certification of meat. We don't really need it. Yes a few people will get sick and die but all this legislation has been hastily passed over the years in reaction to the fact that a few people can't make responsible choices. I mean if someone gets sick over meat, won't that mean that firm will go out of business and the situation will correct itself. otherwise it is just a matte of safety education. Educate users how to inspect and use the meat they need. Allow local producers to build reputations with consumers.
In broader terms, gun regulation may not in fact be the best reaction. And it is true that real security does not focus on eliminating all risks, but rather minimizing the risks and victims. Which is what i think is at issue here. The security failed catastrophically and a large number of children died. So as rational security people we can ask why.
One thing that is clear is that there are things we can't defend against economically. For instance, I can imagine it would be cool to own a mortar launcher or a tank or a missile. Clearly this is not something that is generally allowed because, like a large capacity clip or a high powered rifle, the only practical purpose of this is to kill large number of people. Under the second amendment I should be free to own any of these, but practicality, i.e, we don't want to have to defend an office building against a tank, mean they are not readily available.
What bothers me is that we have people, like this guys mother, who apparently had all these things that are only honestly useful more mass murder, who may have thought she had to defend herself against some unspecific threat, and this is considered normal. I remain safe with minimal armament, I am not seriously ready to defend myself against a zombie attack, and if the worlds end i think I will be busy with other things than killing my neighbors. Hopefully we will be developing a plan to survive. And if the government comes in with tanks and drones, I don't think I have the ability to actually acquire anything to defend myself, at least not off the shelf.
So yes the gun control freaks do hav the upper hand at the moment. That is because so many crazy people seem to believe they need to have the tools of war to survive in a place where the most difficult daily decision is where to park your SUV.
What I would like to see is a die date. An option where tweets can be permanantly and automatically deleted after so many days, months, hours, whatever.
And for those who did not notice, Dell exists only because MS has made it so. Dell cow tows to the shrine of MS, keeps it own margins and quality low so that MS can rake in the cash, while assuming the risk of inventory so that MS does not have to.
Is anyone surprised that Dell is jumping on the MS Surface bandwagon.
I know that everyone says this is just one family, and not representative of Baptists. OTOH I have seen the control that Baptists can exert, even with unaffiliated churches. For instance several years ago a local baptist church wanted to engage more fully with homosexuals. The local baptists made life sufficiently difficult that it became easier to just drop the word baptist from the church mane. I wonder why the same is not done for Wesboro
I also wonder how many baptist churches preach against what this church is doing. I mean if a muslim goes out a does something, and every other muslim leader does not immediately condemn the behavior, then all the christians go and condemn all the muslims. So is turnabout fair play?
I would hope that they find the peace of the almighty and work for peace and acceptance that one's faith is not diminished just because others disagree. We have twenty kids dead because we can't just be peaceful and accepting. Now they want to make it worse.
Do you heat your house year rounds. It is often assume that removing a watt of heat costs 3-4 watts of power. So if you cool your house for 3 months of the year, and heat it for the rest, then that might be break even. There are many places where cooling is not installed, so it is not an option. There the power supply would only be beneficial if you can tolerate the heat. For example a small apartment in new york city with no colling where the daytime temperature might be 85, and the computer might bring that up to 90.
So this is really unfair. It is not like the site is tricking anyone into filling out form, or injecting javascript, or putting other content into frames, or charging you. Back in the day you would have charged over a hundred for this service. Many people were duped into thinking this was valuable.
In this case the site exists to connect people who are looking to go to college with colleges who want the money. This is no different than your average bank who will not only sell your name to a fraudsters, but allow them to put the bank logo on correspondence and then claim they have nothing to do with the offer.
In fact it is not the site who are like the banks, but the schools. They are the ones soliciting for others to attract clients using whatever mean necessary. The school have a choice of who they pay for fulfillment. They could simply say if anyone complains about fraud, they will not pay for fulfillment. Yet the don't. They knowingly engage in supporting whatever fraud may exist.
Which is not surprising. School like Phoenix exists to con young people into applying to student loans, taking that money.and giving much less than what would expect from a minimum education. National average default rate is around 14%, University of Phoenix has twice that. The cost of an associates degree is at least 25K, while most community colleges are half that.
If there is a story here it is that some schools have engaged in fraud, promoted fraud, solicited fraud, and destroyed young peoples lives all to steal a few dollars from the US taxpayers.
But it may backfire. One reason, I believe, that google is successful is that there are useful services given. So unlike other ad brokers, like 2o7, yahoo, etc, they get cookies enables and often login. Safe search is one of these. If you want unfiltered searches, you have to set a cookie.
OTOH, the value of their services are becoming less compelling. There is little reason why I need to allow sustained cookies, or cookies at all. Given that they have stated they will delete accounts not attached to a real person, using their services like Google Drive in any critical manner is foolish. Sure they can track me IP and browsing patterns, but without tracking cookies, it is much less useful.
So I can pay for dropbox, and Apache is working on an online version of OO.org, and Google maps is no off the phone. Maybe buy next year my formal relationship with Google will be over.
Certainly the socratic method and socratic circles can be a highly effective method to teaching many subjects. In fact, the classic lecture is exactly this. It models the method, and then encourages the student to go out and have dialogues, with students for example, taking on the roles of Simplicio, Salviati, and Sagredo. While this method is useful for philosophical discussions, it has fallen out favor for evidence based discussion as it inherently introduces personality into the discussion.
And it is not really relevant here as we are specifically talking about engagement and grading. It does not matter if students are paying attention to a teacher or box. The key is that student engagement is the issue. Likewise, it does not matter whether grade are added up, or awarded based on tests, or level completed. What matter is that students are graded based on the content and skills they can demonstrate, not how they can manipulate the system to earn points.
This is where the games come it. They can hold the attention of the student. But a game is something that is an adversarial process, where information is held back, and must be unlocked by completed often unrelated tasks. The experience of the student in that a game is often separated from the knowledge and skill is exactly what causes it be difficult to use. For instance, I once used a game that was developed by people who were very smart and very familiar with teaching, learning, children, and assessment. Points were added and levels gained as the student when through the process. Some motivated students did very well. But many students just played the game to win, that is simply figured out what the game rules were, played by those rules, and then exited without significant learning.
Which is why simply saying that counting up, that rewarding the class for success, that being positive and engaging student self esteeem, is not sufficient and has not been sufficient since these things were in wide use 50 years ago, 100 years ago, I mean maybe even 10000 years ago. And what we are talking about is not educating a elite, but educating everyone. And to do that a wide array of methods must be used, not just the favorite or the one currently in fashion.
There are certain steps in which games are very useful in education. However, most of the time, assessment is the key. That is, how are you going to continually assess students to make sure the class is learning, and not just following patterns or playing a game. Then are they going to be able to transfer the knowledge to a summative assessment, genuine or question and answers, to show that learning that has gone on. Finally, in most cases some standard test is going to have to completed. Perhaps it is a school test, or the SAT, or the GRE, or something else.
I mention this because it is often very effective to teach with games, and the students will be very engaged, but at least in the US we are still very focused on testable outcomes that can be efficiently graded. Therefore we have to build certain skills beyond the content into students. Such as reading and answering the question you are asked. Understanding that not every level, or question, needs to be completed. That there are are rules and processes, but sometimes a question can be asking to you modify those proceses to achieve an efficient product.
Also, there is a big problem in the classroom of looking like tea
ching is going, not only for outside observers but also to the students. The students have to be focused on the learning. We have a bunch of games, computer simulations, online assistants that make learning much easier and fun that it used to be. However, either because the students are not focused on the details or because the teachers does not connect the games to the content, learning does not go on. This is a big, and rational, criticism of this teaching process and it is something that must be a focus if one is going to use this process.
A large part of learning has always occurred outside the classroom and what we call 'advanced students' often are able to learn despite what happens in the classroom. What makes a good teacher is the ability to connect with 66% of the population that makes up the average student. Games will be one way to do this, but is not going to make a bad teacher good, or alone save an average student.
Slashdot Mirror
I recall these internet appliances that would allow us to cheaply access email and the WWW. Since so many were still using dial up, a land line phone was a common sense addition. Few imagined that cell phone rates would fall so quickly that phone calls would almost be given away, and what you pay for was data. This lead to the internet appliance that was not imagined, the smart phone, and the larger table on which we use Skype, which with we call anywhere for negligible costs, at least by developed world standards.
This is funny because so many said the internet appliance would never be viable. Maybe that was true in a very restricted sense, but not in a broad sense. In the same sense that there was no market for microcomputers.
Which is why I get so annoyed when people dismiss a concept because they do not like a design. Sure the Tandy 100, 200, PC-6 might not have been many peoples idea of a programmable portable device, but they had many of the ideas that people want today. A keyboard, programing on device, removable storage. It is interesting to note that many successful mobile devices do not include such features. But that is who progress works. We start by mimicking existing technology, then move to novel ideas.
Furthermore, we have a plan in place to stop deficit spending. While we are calling it a fiscal cliff, it is more like a train approaching from a half mile away. There is time to get out of the way, though not to stop the train. For most people, there are two major issues with the current plan. On is that the income of average people is going to drop by a few hundreds of dollars every month, which means this is money they are no longer have to spend. This is only a problem because due to the Bush era tax cuts and other conservative policy, pay has remained relatively stagnant over the past 10 years. The way to fix this is to encourage pay levels to increase. One way to do this is increase taxes disproportionately on the wealthy and corporations so they have an incentive to pay more to workers, which is not taxed to the employer.
The other complaint with the current plan is that it hurts the military. Again, the goal should be free market based. We should not be so dependent on the military pay, or federal orders. It should be the consumer that drives the economy. It should not be government contracts that makes boenng one of the largest receivers of the dole in the country. We can choose to become a country of small business owners, entrepreneurs, and corporations that provide extremely well paid jobs to consumers. Or we can continue paying out entitlement to corporations.
To the matter at hand. As has been said, the feds have a rich set of data from local and other sources that allows it to predict what will happen in terms of atmospheric disturbances. This is not just to predict the odd hurricane. In fact it is used to determine how we as a country can best use our resources to maximize profits. The mistake that many make is that each event is unrelated to anything else. In fact we ideally make decisions based on what will maximize future return. If these storms are going to impact the upper eastern seaboard repeatedly, we need to know. And to know we need data.
Conservatives tend to be very bad at this. For instance the gov of Texas, Rick Perry. puts very little money in planning and conservation, yet expects things to be paid for when this lack of planning results in a major crisis. Two instance come to mind. First, the last big hurricane on the texas gulf coast resulted in huge power outages that cost huge amounts of money. Lack of planning meant it cost much more than it should, and the rate payers had to pay the price for the lack of planning. Second, lack of forestry maintenance resulted in huge wildfires in texas. While the feds paid for part of it, Perry wanted to be fully compensated, by the US taxpayers for his incompetence. Doesn't seem very fair.
Yet if hurricanes become a significant threat to the upper east coast, and we allow the status quo, the US taxpayer is going to be in the hole again and again so that the elite can have their barrier island homes. Or we can get better data from better equipment, determine what the risk is, and make an informed choice.
So no, it is not reasonable to say that they did not know and should not have known and really had no reason to know. In fact it is reasonable to assume that they did not, in some file somewhere is a warning and many even a promise form the owners to fix it. But without real fines and even criminal penalty, there is no incentive to make changes that are only going to make a plant unprofitable.
So, BP has some of the most dangerous plants in the world, and over the past 5 years because of publicity they seem to be safer. This is the way things change in Texas. To shame the people who are only cared about profits. There is a lot of money in Texas, and most believe that it is uncool to kill people to save a buck. There are people who are paid a lot for semi skilled work, but that is because the work is dangerous, though no one is paid to die.
One would think. Like the right to organize so that employers do not gain the power to arbitrarily reprimand or fire workers. Yet right to work laws are also passed, so these there is no way for these workers to actually complain. Employment laws are meaningless without employer consequences. Believe me, these laws are going to do nothing in a world where the masses are desperate for semi-skilled entry level jobs and labor is powerless to help them.
OTOH, most of what people use office for is basic memos and the like, simple spreadsheets, and presentations. I think for a small office buying 10 users for $50 a person instead of 5K for MS office would be a value proposition. I certainly can do without MS Office, and I suspect many other can as well. And web storage is a great benefit.
But Google docs does suck when compared to any other mature product, form MS, from Apple, from Apache. The functionality s very limited. The paper sizes are limited. The export is broken. I used Google docs extensively since it came out because it provides two features I need, sharing and automatic online storage. I have used it in a group setting. Since these are my two required features, and it is free, I work around the primitive feature set. What surprises me is that, if they are really competing with MS, they have not expanded the capabilities. Particularly over the past several months there has been no improvement.
Or an alarming number of terrorist christians who want to attack a secular government for not promoting their particular superstition.
Have you tried to talk to a christian about the fact the devil is a christian and therefore only christian can be devil worshiper, as most other religions which understands that we cannot judge, much less understand, the nature of the divine.
In the US we are very fortunate in that checks and balances and secular government protects us from the random superstitions that cowardly people use to control other people. We do not have a flag desiccation law. We have a few people go to the supreme and whine about books they don't personally enjoy, but that has a not been a problem recently. This has not, however, prevented the mostly the mostly Christian terrorists from complaining that private publishers are allowed to print books are allowed to print books they do not personally enjoy, or that tax payer money is used to buy such books so that others can enjoy them. I mean if my tax dollars are going to pay for your idolatry, why can't your tax dollars be used to buy Brave New World. At least the later has drugs and sex and so has entertainment value.
Second, no manufacturer is going to extend a warranty beyond minimum requirements. Can you imagine going to a dealer, after not changing the oil for a year, saying they would fix an unrelated warranty issue? Of course not. The purpose of a dealer is deny as many warranty repars as possible. So why would they say they would warranty a uncovered fuel that might mean even an additional warranty repair. Much better to blame the fuel even if the repair is unrelated. Of course flex fuel cars are warrentied to run on flexible fuels.
Third, the issue with ethanol is really an issue with corn production in the US as our only crop for such purposes. Corn is about the worst thing one can use for ethanol, but the US has a corn economy. There are many weeds that can be made into ethanol, but little money has been put into developing that technology. Sugarcane can also be used, but the sugarcane economy in the US has been systematically decimated in the US by northern interests who value politics over national security.
So it is clear that this is just another FUD article to promote the fossil fuel economy. Things are going to change, interests that have become fat and lazy on the backs of americans workers are going to become less fat and lazy, and this simply scares them, so they have to scare us.
In any case this is going to be a liability issue, and worked out with the manufacturers and insurance companies. Even with human drivers, the manufacturers are going to be liable for faulty software, which means they will likely have to take out additional insurance, costs that will be passed onto the consumer. Presumably because so many cars are going drive by electronics anyway, such policies are already in place.
As far as giving a ticket, the ticket is always issued to driver of the car, for the case where the driver is present, of owner of the car, and then devolves to the driver. For instance, a parking ticket on a rental car will eventually be sent to the renter. So if the software does mess up, and violates the law, then we would not want that to effect personal insurance. So the owner would have to show the car was well maintained and not modified, and that would be a liability for the manufacturer.
Which is why this will become a problem. It is like a warranty. It is hard to get the manufacturer to honor a warranty. So if the owner has not gone to the dealer for every single maintenance, not loaded in all updates, not changed tires, etc, then the manufacturer will push liability to the owner, as they do now.
While on non-MS Windows there are many different GUIs to play videos, on MS Windows I have found VLC to be the only reliable method to play videos. Now on MS Windows 7 and 8 MS may have included a workable interface, so VLC may not be a necessity. On other platforms it is optional.
It is inconceivable that Google can't release software and technical specs to the OEM and have these phones produced. The only thing I can think of is this is going to be another incompatible version of Android, i.e. most phones are not going to upgrade to it, so the best way to handle the PR is to make it sound like a new special version.
Apple really screwed the pooch by making smart phones look like computers, in terms of the ability to upgrade the software. It would have better to simply have the expectation of upgrading the phone every two years to get an upgrade, with simple updates given between those times. It would have made the carriers much more happy, knowing users would have to sign a new two year contract to get the latest software. Even better if updates were every 18 months so customers would just build up contracts. As it is, I my phone is two years old and still run current OS and has many of the current features. I will upgrade soon because it makes no sense not to if you are paying monthly tarrifs.
But teens do have the ability to make the situation easier on everyone. Instead of acting like a child, always having to fight to get your own way, always having to be right, always having to push boundaries, just say yes ma'am, no ma'am, sorry ma'am, I can see how this might seem weird.
Or move to a school where they appreciate intelligence, and trust students because everyone is there to learn, not just to get through. That is what I, fortunately, did.
Sure, I can pine for the days when my computer ran as a open case and I could solder custom interfaces or fix my floppy disk drive. But I couldn't run up a site that did real work in less than a month.
It is even more dumb. You are asking me to pay for licensing for a cord that I do not even need. If I am am never going to use the dock connector, when am I paying Apple for one?
Here is how it could have been designed. Build a USB port into each of four spindles. Allow the user to supply whatever cables they need, and allow them to install them into the spindles. if a user have four android phones, then they can use those cables. No paying for licenses you don't need.
I suspect that this project was not going to be hugely successful in the first place, and they are simply blaming apple. If they had a working product, they would have simply provided an extra couple USB ports and shipped it.
And bowling. Remember that the Colobine kids were driven to murder by the monotony of only have bowling as entertainment. If the school had some good American LAN parties, everything would have been ok. Remember Lanza made it through high school with the aid of LAN parties. News articles cited concerns that the LAN parties involved violent games. Maybe he was not longer allowed to play such games after high school.
But I would agree that some media might be involved. I can well imagine how something like Batman might drive someone insane. I would have no problem with an investigation into Batman and how it causes murder. I don't suspect many other than the liberal Hollywood industry would object. My problem with Batman, and that genre, is there is not enough sex. I think more sex in movies would solve many of our problems. Not to mention if more people would go out and have deep and meaningful relationship, even it is only at LAN parties. I mean, according to the documentary The Guild, such things can be quite conducive for a sex life.
At some point this patent silliness has to end. Patent troll companies are hoping that it will last long enough to make a quick buck, and this is what is clearly driving the value of some patent portfolios. One thing that used to happen is that someone with an idea would sell it to someone else who could monetize it. This might seem unfair, I mean the inventor of the bar code did not get rich, but neither did he do the work to market it to the point where it was really valuable. In the current situation we have people sitting on ideas waiting for someone else to create a product that uses the idea so the product manufacturer can be sued. I don't know if this is the best way to innovate.
There are many ways to look at college. One is as a time spent becoming educated, cultured, and expanding your contacts beyond you hometown school social group. This is why many sent their kids on the Grand Tour, or from America to the great schools of England. The threat of plague, it is hypothesized, and the arduous journey across the sea, impelled the residents of proto-America to build their own colleges. Over time many private and public universities were built. For the early ones, formal assessment was not as important as learning, and of course they were not for the masses Over time more people entered an institution of higher education, formal methods of assessing learning in more real time were developed to track the progress over the years, and we heard more about so-called grade inflation.
Another way to look at college is as a way to train for a job. In this way general learning is not the key, but rather promotion and validation of a skill set. This skill set will then allow to function as a person who can complete some predetermined set of tasks. As some of these tasks are quite involved and complicated, it requires skilled personel to teach the tasks, and therefore significant money has to be paid. At the high end fo these tasks are doctors and lawyers. At the low end is operating MS Office on a computer. These are valuable skills and deserve a significant payment.
So what are for profit Universities? They may be a place where students who would not succeed in becoming educated and cultured in traditional institution can succeed. In this case all the complaints about cost and default rate are unjustified. The issue we are having right now is if the instruction is rigorous, or are these diploma factories. The cost lends credence to the later, and it would be good if for profit schools focused on that.
But they are not. They more and more are presenting themselves as work training facilities. Which is fine. But in that case the verification of learning is landing and keeping a job. If one is not going to be an institution of abstract higher learning, then one is a job training, a different but valuable resource. However, the fact that people default on loans because they don't get a job then becomes a verification that learning is not going on.
As far as hiring, most jobs for which I have applied wanted authentic verification, not simply degree and grades. The degree and grades were simply a way for HR to thin out the resumes. If someone were to look at a regional or online degree, which in my experience they were not, at least for the pay grade I was looking at, they would still want to see a completed task. It would not mater where the knowledge came from, just that you could apply it.
And that is where all this is going. Authentic assessment. We need many different learning opportunities because people learn differently. But if the learning results in nothing, who cares?
In broader terms, gun regulation may not in fact be the best reaction. And it is true that real security does not focus on eliminating all risks, but rather minimizing the risks and victims. Which is what i think is at issue here. The security failed catastrophically and a large number of children died. So as rational security people we can ask why.
One thing that is clear is that there are things we can't defend against economically. For instance, I can imagine it would be cool to own a mortar launcher or a tank or a missile. Clearly this is not something that is generally allowed because, like a large capacity clip or a high powered rifle, the only practical purpose of this is to kill large number of people. Under the second amendment I should be free to own any of these, but practicality, i.e, we don't want to have to defend an office building against a tank, mean they are not readily available.
What bothers me is that we have people, like this guys mother, who apparently had all these things that are only honestly useful more mass murder, who may have thought she had to defend herself against some unspecific threat, and this is considered normal. I remain safe with minimal armament, I am not seriously ready to defend myself against a zombie attack, and if the worlds end i think I will be busy with other things than killing my neighbors. Hopefully we will be developing a plan to survive. And if the government comes in with tanks and drones, I don't think I have the ability to actually acquire anything to defend myself, at least not off the shelf.
So yes the gun control freaks do hav the upper hand at the moment. That is because so many crazy people seem to believe they need to have the tools of war to survive in a place where the most difficult daily decision is where to park your SUV.
What I would like to see is a die date. An option where tweets can be permanantly and automatically deleted after so many days, months, hours, whatever.
Is anyone surprised that Dell is jumping on the MS Surface bandwagon.
I also wonder how many baptist churches preach against what this church is doing. I mean if a muslim goes out a does something, and every other muslim leader does not immediately condemn the behavior, then all the christians go and condemn all the muslims. So is turnabout fair play?
I would hope that they find the peace of the almighty and work for peace and acceptance that one's faith is not diminished just because others disagree. We have twenty kids dead because we can't just be peaceful and accepting. Now they want to make it worse.
Do you heat your house year rounds. It is often assume that removing a watt of heat costs 3-4 watts of power. So if you cool your house for 3 months of the year, and heat it for the rest, then that might be break even. There are many places where cooling is not installed, so it is not an option. There the power supply would only be beneficial if you can tolerate the heat. For example a small apartment in new york city with no colling where the daytime temperature might be 85, and the computer might bring that up to 90.
In this case the site exists to connect people who are looking to go to college with colleges who want the money. This is no different than your average bank who will not only sell your name to a fraudsters, but allow them to put the bank logo on correspondence and then claim they have nothing to do with the offer.
In fact it is not the site who are like the banks, but the schools. They are the ones soliciting for others to attract clients using whatever mean necessary. The school have a choice of who they pay for fulfillment. They could simply say if anyone complains about fraud, they will not pay for fulfillment. Yet the don't. They knowingly engage in supporting whatever fraud may exist.
Which is not surprising. School like Phoenix exists to con young people into applying to student loans, taking that money.and giving much less than what would expect from a minimum education. National average default rate is around 14%, University of Phoenix has twice that. The cost of an associates degree is at least 25K, while most community colleges are half that.
If there is a story here it is that some schools have engaged in fraud, promoted fraud, solicited fraud, and destroyed young peoples lives all to steal a few dollars from the US taxpayers.
OTOH, the value of their services are becoming less compelling. There is little reason why I need to allow sustained cookies, or cookies at all. Given that they have stated they will delete accounts not attached to a real person, using their services like Google Drive in any critical manner is foolish. Sure they can track me IP and browsing patterns, but without tracking cookies, it is much less useful.
So I can pay for dropbox, and Apache is working on an online version of OO.org, and Google maps is no off the phone. Maybe buy next year my formal relationship with Google will be over.
And it is not really relevant here as we are specifically talking about engagement and grading. It does not matter if students are paying attention to a teacher or box. The key is that student engagement is the issue. Likewise, it does not matter whether grade are added up, or awarded based on tests, or level completed. What matter is that students are graded based on the content and skills they can demonstrate, not how they can manipulate the system to earn points.
This is where the games come it. They can hold the attention of the student. But a game is something that is an adversarial process, where information is held back, and must be unlocked by completed often unrelated tasks. The experience of the student in that a game is often separated from the knowledge and skill is exactly what causes it be difficult to use. For instance, I once used a game that was developed by people who were very smart and very familiar with teaching, learning, children, and assessment. Points were added and levels gained as the student when through the process. Some motivated students did very well. But many students just played the game to win, that is simply figured out what the game rules were, played by those rules, and then exited without significant learning.
Which is why simply saying that counting up, that rewarding the class for success, that being positive and engaging student self esteeem, is not sufficient and has not been sufficient since these things were in wide use 50 years ago, 100 years ago, I mean maybe even 10000 years ago. And what we are talking about is not educating a elite, but educating everyone. And to do that a wide array of methods must be used, not just the favorite or the one currently in fashion.
I mention this because it is often very effective to teach with games, and the students will be very engaged, but at least in the US we are still very focused on testable outcomes that can be efficiently graded. Therefore we have to build certain skills beyond the content into students. Such as reading and answering the question you are asked. Understanding that not every level, or question, needs to be completed. That there are are rules and processes, but sometimes a question can be asking to you modify those proceses to achieve an efficient product.
Also, there is a big problem in the classroom of looking like tea ching is going, not only for outside observers but also to the students. The students have to be focused on the learning. We have a bunch of games, computer simulations, online assistants that make learning much easier and fun that it used to be. However, either because the students are not focused on the details or because the teachers does not connect the games to the content, learning does not go on. This is a big, and rational, criticism of this teaching process and it is something that must be a focus if one is going to use this process.
A large part of learning has always occurred outside the classroom and what we call 'advanced students' often are able to learn despite what happens in the classroom. What makes a good teacher is the ability to connect with 66% of the population that makes up the average student. Games will be one way to do this, but is not going to make a bad teacher good, or alone save an average student.