As mentioned elsewhere, the total cost would be more like 10 million. However, as mentioned above there are other costs. And seriously, estimates are often an order of magnitude off at the end of the day. So we would be looking at another 100 million. After all, if the project were not already drastically over budget, this would not be an issue. OTOH, when one is looking at nearly half a billion per aircraft, another 100 miliion does not seem so bad, and would have been ok in the end as it would likely not have increased the incremental cost and likely would have reduced the long term costs. Definitely a case of the military industrial complex trying to transfer wealth from the taxpayer to a few high level executives. Jobs for the masses indeed.
I am not opposed to shops printing a code at the bottom of a receipt to get into the Wifi for a number of hours. If the WiFi is close, that is the only thing that makes sense. On the key is known, then anyone can use it and it might as well be open. Even the individual key is not going to stop snooping.
Honestly, if I were going to snoop traffic, I would do it at a public place where the acces was open. People are crazy and wil do all sorts of confidential stuff over an open line. At home you feel safer, but may not be. Even with a 'protected' connection it is not going to stop the dedicated wardriver. Passwords can be cracked. Much better to lower the power of your access point so that no one can get a good connection on the street.
He was arrested because he embarrassed the religion that he associated himself with. Why else would a law be passed to prevent the free right expression of the Westboro Baptist church? They have a right to do what ever they want on public land, yet political people who presumably go to church and believe that church people should have the right to express themselves say this is not a proper expression of the religion. Same things go for christian terrorists assaulting innocent people with words, graphic pornographic images, and threats. Again, christian politicians have created buffer zones that limit such otherwise constitutionally protected activity.
So if this political, it is the politics of the evangelical christian, not the politics of the state. The state has rules that defines and describes civilized activity. If is the uncivilized activity of the religious terrorist that requires us to revisit and reinforce the rules.
It is true that much of the shortage comes about because companies want to hire people who will work hard with few distractions, like family, and have what are 'current' skills, and has a particular degree. There are certainly a lot of people out there that, with a bit of training, could do a good job.
One must also consider that if I hire a immigrant, and sponsor them, or if they are undocumented, I have much more control over that person than if i hire a citizen with freedom to move to a better job, or leave if the work interferes with family
Of course we can give the benefit of the doubt and say why would a company not want to hire from the top 1%, which many can do with a worldwide search, rather than the top 10% which is what is required if the search is limited to a country.
Which is why we much try to better in teaching. Unfortunately doing that is expensive. For instance, i have talked to oil industry people about why they don' work with high school kids, even those in pre engineering programs. They say there is not a good return in investment. Working with colleges makes more financial sense, when the kids are self selected to do the work.
Likewise the first step in STEM education has to be suppling elementary schools with good ancillary teachers. Coaches that teach fine motor control, music teachers that work on creativity and process, math teachers that build up to abstraction, science teachers that work on discovery. This addition of a couple hundred thousands of dollars to each school is not going to result in much, but without it the kids are not going to have the basis, unless they learn it at home, to do rigorous work later on.
Some of this can be paid for by decentralizing curriculum. There is no reason for every state to development science, math and technology basic curriculum. It is not like newtons law are different in new mexico and Delaware. Billions of dollars are wasted in this way. Then there is testing. Billions of dollars more, not to mention the need to add days to school because they are wasted in testing students. Have a curriculum, hire good teachers to customize it for the students, and give national norm referenced tests to measure progress. NCLB, the law to transfer money from the tax payer to rich people, was good in that if focused on best practices and content knowledge for teacher, but was bad in that it took power to deliver content from the local teacher to the state, and the power to spend money from the local district to the federal government. School could no longer spend money on equipment the students needed, rather had to spend it on testing. So we got test books instead of Arduino kits.
I think the US education system has been good at creating motivate, skilled, creative, and aggressive citizens. Public schol is tough. If we were a country of startups this would be good enough. But corporate is king, so we need to build in some other skills.
Apple, by all indications, was significantly funding the development of a competitors platform through licensing payments to Google. The competitor, Google, provided significant technology for Apple, but refused to provide the most advanced technology for Apple. Google was acting rationally by playing hardball on exclusive technology for Android. Apple is acting rationally by saying we are no longer going to fund the development of Android.
Apple has a user base and has time to create a better map software, just like they were given time to make a better phone. OTOH, with Apple Maps in disarray, all the Apple users who are locked into contracts are going to be looking for better maps. There are better navigation maps that cost very little money on IOS. Mapquest, as a has been mentioned, is a good alternative. With increased use and more ad funding, Mapquest can be very good. Mapquest was what we all used before google came along with it's pretty pictures.
The danger here is 100% google. If users do not see a Google App in the next few weeks, many will have gone other places. For travel, the thing Google has is Buses. Mapquest, for instance, has the ability to match that. It has in some cities. For many Apple users, the new maps is good enough. Google took a risk and lost some branding.
Algebra is the way we introduce critical abstract thinking in the US. Thre are other ways, but when I hear people object to algebra I often see it as an objection to the teaching of critical thinking, the ability to objectively assess validity based on fundamentally verifiable assumptions, or as verifiable as possible.
It is interesting you mentioned cash flow. It was what I did as a young adult. Interesting it did not involve great complexities of algebra, but my ability to put the words of my boss into a model and then assess that model for validity proved very profitable for me. The later was what was important. Assessing the model. To often people just put code in a machine, or just use canned models, with no ability to understand if the output is valid. They think they don't have to think because the machine does it for them. The machine is useful because it allows some to do work they could not otherwise do, and other to amplify thier work, but it does not think. A computer can enforce rules, free us up to do more profitable work,, but it cannot validate. So we have a case where a lot of bad stuff is floating around just because it comes out of a machine and few people are wise enough to understand that it is bad.
What we need to remember are the children now are three or four generations away from real food. It is acceptable to provide chips for lunch. It is acceptable to use processed cheese and Velveta. While people are moving to the edges from the center of the stores, they are looking for what appears to less processed food, not fresh fruits and vegetable. If they are going to have a home cooked meal, they are going use Bisquik or cake mix, rather than flour, eggs, and milk. Around here, to get big bags of beans and rice one much go to the hispanic or asian store.
My parents were older and were not exposed to the generation of television programming that told us we should eat processed food, so we do not. I look at my contemporaries and they, their children, all expect fast and processed food for all meals, even when the money is extremely limited. There is simply no expectation for a fresh healthy meal. I do not blame them, this is what they were taught. That milk has to pasteurized and homogenized. That good food is processed for their health. That picking something out of the ground, a carrot, a squash, an apple, is simply unhealthy. I recall walking though a garden, pickup pecans, and breaking them and eating them as a snack. My friends who were eating chips though I was crazy.
I do not blame the parents. This is current policy. Profits of major corporations depend on sales of calories to children. In the past forty years per capita candy consumption has doubled. When a young unwed mother is given counseling on how to care for her child, she is told to use formula. Now, I understand that there might be a drug issue with the mother, but when we are teaching that processed food is better than mothers milk, what hope to we have that they will feed the kids fresh healthy food. None.
This kind of stuff is not so bad as long as it is just entertainment. The software mismatches a attribute and nothing is lost. There is no reason to think that there is any real accuracy in the software, the patent is simply there to make sure if someone else does this they can sue. I would not think that a piece of free software would even have the funding to accurately do what it does. Certainly it is easy enough to lie when entering data.
The problem occurs when some ignorant people start believing that the myths. I saw this happen once on a work thing I was forced to attend. A quack presenter was telling us all these ways we could judge people just by looking at them. if the person played with their change they were cheap, if they looked up they were dishonest, and on and on. Now I will admit that these things may be true in many if not most cases, but to build a profile of a person assuming they are true all the time. That is ludicrous, especially as this information was presented to professionals who would then make judgements on people that would effect their future.
You know, depending on what you teach, there are many other ways to go about it. If you want to teach basic coding, a web host can be had for $100 a year, create a shell account for each student, and you can teach web programming or python, C++, shell scripting, on whatever terminal the student or teacher can scrounge up. An old computer, an iPad, a chrome book, whatever.
If you want to teach programmable logic, universal programmers and GAL or the like are dirt cheap. A breadboard, some cheap components, and the student can learn to driver all sorts of things. Glue motors to the breadboard and you have a robot. One computer is needed to program the chip. I remember how much fun I had when I was a kid using an Apple ][ and a slot in programmer to burn chips.
This device appears to be made to promote a certain form of education. This form is often used by people who prefer OSS, and therefore the lack of OSS is going to be a problem for some people. It would be better if it used more open components. However education is a complex endeavor, and often educators want models that expose the concepts to be taught, while hiding all the distracting details. My concern is if Raspberry Pi hides distracting details, or are the distracting details going to
overwhelm anything that might be taught.
I would have to agree with this. Americans eat way too much processed food, calories that don't fill you up, don't provide nutrition, and don't promote heath. These are chips, soft drinks, energy drink, most fast food, and to be honest, the processed meat too many people eat.
I have seen people lose great amount of weight, and I lose weight, when sugar and sugary snacks are cut out. For people I have seen who follow high protein diets that is really all this is involved. They stop eating candy and junk food and fill up on meat. Such a diet makes sense in a country where only two things are widely available, meat and junk.
OTOH, we need about 8 ounces of protein a day, On average in the US we eat maybe 50% more than that in meat alone, so lets call it 3 to 4 ounces at 300-500 (less for hamburgers, more for bacon), so that is an extra 300 calories a day, or an extra 100,000 calories a year. If this were all converted in mass, that would be a few hundred pounds of potential extra fat.
Which is to say the the simple carbohydrates one eats does contribute to weight gain(complex carbohydrates are a more complicated story), but eating too much meat significantly contributes. Taking the bun off a burger is not going to help nearly as much as replacing the burger with a good vegetable stew.
But is it not legal? I don't know. It sounds like Toy R Us decided the $199 price point was too high and created a product that it sell for 25% less. We don't really know what happened before this. Did Toys R Us do something to keep sales down, or was there simply no demand for a $200 toy? Or was Toys R Us told that it was going to be sold online and they were going to lose the exclusivity. Selling exclusively through Toys R Us, a failing enterprise, does not seem the long term way to grow a company. I can imagine that small firm might be initially happy to get shelf space at such a large retailer, but quickly become anxious at the limitations.
If the products is faster better and provides a better experience, then there is not going to a huge advantage to a slower device that can be only found at Toys R US.
Being against energy efficient light bulbs is giving to the rich by ensuring legacy aristocratic policy stays in effect. For instance, more energy means that we do not have the time or funding to move to other energy sources. This means that we must deal with oil, which maintains the status quo.
The new lightbulbs, some which are incandescent, require significant investment which means the idle rich are not going to get richer. We can't just come up with a new lightbulb by laying people off or blaming unions. Actual R&D must be done, actual supply chains must be developed, actual engineers must be sent out to meet with other engineers and researchers to figure out what is possible.
Republicans also apparently tend to be poor, because anytime they are asked to pay for something they say they have no money. My CFB costs no more than $4 a bulb, and last a long time. $4 for a minimum wage Republican probably is a lot of money, more than a case of beer certainly, but I know few people who can't afford it. An LED table lamp is $30. not so much.
So yes, it sometimes seems that conservatives are more concerned with conserving their wealth so they do not have to do any work rather than conserving the traditional values of the country.
Like local and state sales taxes paying for services, state and federal fuel taxes are not going to be able to pay for roads and the deficit in the same way as we move to more efficient vehicles. Now with electric cars there is no fuel tax. The states have loved to live on these hidden taxes, in clothes, in fuel, on the phone bill, but really we are going to have to start more open taxes and explain what they pay for and how they are applied. If every dollar a middle class American makes is going to be taxed three times, one on payroll, once on income, once when it is spent, that makes less sense than just taxing it to begin with. Of course that will result in the wealthy paying taxes. For instance, most of us pay payroll taxes on everything we make, but someone making 200K does not. Now if you can afford a Tesla, you don't pay for the roads you use.
If they school runs MS Windows, they probably do have a site license with many restrictions. Furthermore, running OpenOffice should be simple, but I have seen IT people choke on it. Finding people to teach it and support it may not going to be as cheap as just using MS products. They are a dime a dozen.
I would write the letter asking for a more diverse and rigorous education. It does not hurt to ask. But then I would go out and look for it. I cannot imagine why a CS department is wasting it's time on office application, or why anyone would pay college tuition for such a thing. Evidently people do, and the college is covering cost, so don't expect that to change.
Everything is here, but i will just consolidate and add. MS Security Essentials, as far as I am concerned, has everything one needs. Block the ads and block the flash. It still occasionally happens that some sort of malware gets on a major ad network, and if it happens on a weekend or holiday can be there for a while.
In the browser reject third party cookies and approve all cookies, leaving most of them for session only.
I also use Spybot S&D and adware. Adaware seems to be getting funky, so that recommendation is conditional.
Blocking IPs, which Spybot supports, is also a very good idea.
This only leaves phishing emails, which not software can deflect as it is a purely psychological attack. Don't click though from emails. Bookmark sites and use the bookmarks.
As far the comments to not use MS, the situation is not as dire as it once was. A few years ago, around the time of MS Windows 7, we were using Windows XP, we had to move to a Mac as the attacks on the MS Windows machine were just too effective, and daily updates were not possible. Now I have MS machines up for long periods of time without a problem, and I have not had an infection in a very long time. Fortunately that was on a virtual machine so the damage was minimal.
I don't think this goes back to the middle ages. I think it is the way the modern world works. People want to be protected from things they disagree with. I think that if you walk into most any christian church, they will assert that web block, and in fact limit the information inside the church. They probably don't have a copy of the gnostic gospels, or Jefferson's bible, or even the book of mormon. This is how the world works and why evangelical christian churches are so popular. There is not a lot of information that would invoke cognitive dissidence..
We have to understand that the Islamic Republic of Iran is huge religious community. The state, unlike the US, has been set up to promote a set of religious values. We may disagree with this, but that is they way it is. Even in the US this is so. Tx governor Rick Perry has said the separation between church and state is a secular construction of recent providence. I suppose that is why the religious fanatics want to control what I can and cannot buy in a free market. Again, nothing new or interesting. The religious crazy people always love to control what others do.
And technology is the same. You would think that with all this faith and love and all that is in creation, the fanatics might find something else to do other than watch TV, a creation of the devil. But you know, they can't, and so we all have to pay for V-Chip, just because the fanatics can't control their kids. And because their kids are so ill behaved that they don't have a bed time, we can't have nudity on broadcast TV like we once did. And pictures of naked people on the internet. The natural creation cannot be shown without the materialistic secular creations of men.
And of course christians in the US are just as uptight as any other fanatics. When muslim starting building Mosques in my town, there was no end to christians who wanted to stop it, even though it should be possible for a private citizen to build what they want on a property as long as it meets code. There was one case a few years where Ramadan, or some holiday, fell on 9/11, and a store was closed in memory of the matyrs, and all the christians go in a huff thinking that a private bussiness did not have the right to close a private business to celebrate a holiday that in fact had nothing to do with 9/11.
I wish we could just blame people who are stuck in the past. But I think we have to blame bad thinking.
The simple solution is to feed the corn to humans instead of cows. In the US we produce more corn that we can use. While exports are less, they are still robust. The problem we see in grain prices in general do not effect the US, but where grains and the like form the basis of their diet.
The problem is that we are in a drought and we are using many gallons of water, hundreds?, to make a pound of beef when we could just use lamb, which requires perhaps a third less. Or we could just eat less meat.
Ultimate the free market will determine where the resources go. If one can afford to eat meat, go for it. But don't whine about prices being high. That is like whining about gas being high. Use less of it and it will go down. Look at the farm bill and ask about wasted tax dollars. Right now tax payers are paying money for useless beef. In ethanol at least the taxpayer gets value. Without it we would be paying to give corn away, which would serve an ethical purpose.Want farm subsidies to go away? Pay a good price for vegetables from local growers.
Right now the problem with electric cars is the range, size, cost, and that the gas tax is used to pay down debt instead of fix roads. This means that people who drive a lot are helping pay down the debt, which encourages the government to put in policies that have people drive more. On the other side, there is not funding to repair roads, so taxpayers who drive less are subsidizing those that fund more. How much are we subsidizing. If we use Reagan as a baseline, the last time the fuel tax was used only to fund roads, he more than doubled the tax to 9 cents. Just accounting for inflation, we would need almost 20 cents now, but we are getting more like 12. So we are subsidizing several cents a gallon. You might say that bigger cars that do more damage get less miles, so they are not so subsidized. But road damage is complicate, and in particular the damage done by a car is not linear to it's mass. A car that is twice as heavy might do 4 times more damage or more.
In any case given the structure of the taxes and subsidies in the US make anything other than petroleum a money losing deal. One can look at the unfairness of the situation in one example. If I wanted to build some houses, I would most like have to pay the sellers price for the lots. In the city this is very expensive, but even in the suburbs this can become quite expensive, as the sellers, many who have bought land long ago as an investment, want the best price for the investment. The land can take a significant toll on the profits. A 100K house in the suburbs might be sitting on land that is worth 5K, a 2 million dollar house in the city might be sitting on land that is worth $250K. This is the free market and people live with it. Some may have to move out to the suburbs and then spend more on gas.
OTOH, we see that if one is building a pipeline one does not have to pay the seller price. One can condem the land and pay 'Fair Market Value'. Now, I am not against eminent domain, just against it's use to force people to sell land at little profit so someone else can make a large profit. If you want my land and it is worth 1 million dollars to you, then maybe I want 10% for my trouble, not the $20K that the government says I deserve.
So given that the US government continues to invest, a takes people stuff away, so we can have oil, how can electric cars work? For one thing we would need a penny a mile tax on the car to cover federal and local fuel taxes. This could be as little as a $100 a year, but it would be another perceived disadvantage for the car.
There are many open source textbooks. There are two problems with open source textbooks. First, these are not sold, so there are no sales people to push them, to show the quality of the content, and no reason to customize the content to meet the prejudices of the administrators and teachers using them. Second, as books are printed in smaller runs, the cost is going to go up. For a thousand page book at 5 cents a page for printing and binding, that is $50. Not expensive but not cheap.We see this in language subjects where many of the books are out of copyright, and the commentary is slight, but the books are still very expensive. Some books obviously cannot be 100% open source because the content is necessarily copyrighted, which means some other way to publish is going to be necessary. In a generation we will have a new e-book that will solve many of these problems.
As far as the current issue, what they are paying for is a report generator. Presumably the difficulty of this report generator is that there are many for profit data systems out there that can be complex to use. A report generator that can produce the proper output can be useful. What I would argue, however, is that this one of the functions of the department of education. At the very least there should be standards for educational data collection and analysis software that requires a common data storage format, so that third party reporting tools can be easily written, and minimal functional standards of required operations. What would be ideal is a reference implementation available to school that do not wish to buy commercial tools. These are not highly complex tasks. Much of the issue is data security of the students. We have much more complex CMS out there that are open source. Of course the commercial vendors can create and sell superior systems, but right now the local tax payer is being fleeced because we are not leveraging our federal resources. The US is mostly, as a country, paying for the same thing several times because of the radical dedication to local control.
One problem I have with MS software is that it is always tied to a machine. If that machine goes down, there is difficulty in getting another machine up and running quickly. With my home machines and most Apple software I have five concurrent licenses. Even with software that once only had one license, there was never a problem loading it on a new machine.I know this is not the model with MS, I mean every machine has a separate individual license and Office has traditional been paid by corporations and then used by employees, or a disabled version sold for $200 to students and homes.
So I can imagine that this might work as it has worked for me..Mac or whatever it was called meant that files and data could be transfered to a new machine. $80 bought me an office suite that could be used on whatever machine I owned. Now with the App store I can load software onto a new machine without media, though data is no longer part of the deal. Of course Apple is no longer charging a yearly fee for basic services.
My feeling is that if MS wants to bring a new generation of users, they should do the same. Give away a basic version of Office for home users. Give away a basic level of online connectivity. The real reason this won't work is that Google does this, and for what most students and home users need, it is more than enough. Most people would be foolish to pay $100 a year for what google gives away for free. It is not like the data students and home user have is critical, and will cost them $100 on the slight chance they lose it.
For the non corporate user, MS is falling far behind the curve as they try to gain revenue. At first MS software was essentially free to the individual or student. Then they tried to charge. Then they made it closer to free. Now they are trying to charge again. This does not work. Young people are going to go into offices know google, not MS, so what are employees going to use if possible?
I read recently that the phones as shipped can choose a network, but can't be changed ofter. This is hardly unlocked. It is like the DVD drives that ship to play in any region, but once one is selected it is locked. It was also my understanding that the ATT phone would work with more international locations. I can't find the article right now, so I don't know if i recalling correctly.
But now, like the Apple store, the MS Windows store will have 50,000 fart apps, 50,000 track your drinking app, 50,000 rate-your-hooks-up and 50,000 top-pick-up-lines-for-geeks. Right there MS will match the number of apps in the Apple store.
What I notice about the Apps in the store over the past year is the barrier to entry is much greater, not because there are more apps, but because the quality has increased substantially. This is no longer a numbers game. Apple has never been about numbers. Apple never competing with MS based on number of Applications. It competed on key applications, like the spreadsheet, the desktop publishing, the touchscreen.
Absolutely. I mean if someone finds a way to hack your security system and enter your house without you knowing, they do not have a responsibility to tell anyone. No, they should plant cameras in you bedroom and bathroom so they can proive the concept, then showing how silly you are for note having perfect security by uploading naked pictures of kids and you doing naughty things to the internet.
Further, there is no way that the person who broke into your house is responsible. It is your fault for not having perfect security. So don't even think of calling the police. You have no basis for complaint. And what about the naked pictures of the kids. Also your fault. So you get to register as the sex offender, not the innocent person who was just doing security research and conductet a proof of concept survey.
In all seriousness, if one finds an error, it is responsible to state the error to the appropriate people first. If they ignore you then promoting a proof of concept . But only a extremely foolish person would expect gratitude for such a thing.
So we want to transfer who we let in from families to those who will maximize profits for business. I suppose this is a tough choice for conservatives. Are we here to be family focused, or are we here because corporations are people.
The reality is that in America we must protect the family, and we must realize that the business of America is bidness. This is why I thought the dream act made so much sense. We have kids who have gone through a US education system, and who are ready for college or trade school. In many schools they are receiving very good SEM prep educations, and they are very motivated to study. If they finish college and get a job, why not let them stay. Why does it make more sense to import adults?
Here is my theory on the current status. Talking to am executive at a major multinational, it seems the H!B was primarily used for multinationals to assign workers, often temporarily, to the US, and but winter and summer resorts to gain skilled employees, usually ski instructors and the like. It boomed with IT looking for skilled workers and realizing that H1B visa workers were cheaper and in effect became indentured servants for the length of the time it took them to get a green card. This is the same thing with teach for america. Two years of guaranteed work without complaint, then leaving before one is vested.
Not only that but it allows them to solve simple problems, perhaps better than a coder that does not understand the issues as deeply. I have in my time gone in a fixed code written by someone who understood a problem and how to solve it but not how to code it. It was much easier for me to clean up the code and make it consistent with best practices that it would have been for me to understand the problem and code the solution from scratch. In fact I am best at such things.
The corporate culture is often too risk adverse, which is why it is so often critically inefficient. Coding is simply a tool to solve a problem. If I am working in a small business, and I have a way to solve a problem, be it code, or a saw drill and hammer, or a logic tester, soldering iron, and components, it would be silly of me not to fix the problem instead of paying someone else to do it. Now sometimes it does not make sense economically for me to solve the problem, but that is on a case by case basis, not a blanket ban.
Here is an example which sort of applies. In my current work, and at time in previous work, a lot of MS Word documents are passed around for production use. Now, MS Word is an rather inefficient and expensive tool to do what we do. Sometimes margins have to be set a certain way, or there are a lot of equations or sciency things. In any case, if people would see coding as a tool and not just something that geeks and other mysterious unapproachable people do, more people might us LaTeX. This would make like much easier in editing and exchanging these files. However, this is not going to happen because as soon as you say code, people run away. Madness.
Slashdot Mirror
As mentioned elsewhere, the total cost would be more like 10 million. However, as mentioned above there are other costs. And seriously, estimates are often an order of magnitude off at the end of the day. So we would be looking at another 100 million. After all, if the project were not already drastically over budget, this would not be an issue. OTOH, when one is looking at nearly half a billion per aircraft, another 100 miliion does not seem so bad, and would have been ok in the end as it would likely not have increased the incremental cost and likely would have reduced the long term costs. Definitely a case of the military industrial complex trying to transfer wealth from the taxpayer to a few high level executives. Jobs for the masses indeed.
Honestly, if I were going to snoop traffic, I would do it at a public place where the acces was open. People are crazy and wil do all sorts of confidential stuff over an open line. At home you feel safer, but may not be. Even with a 'protected' connection it is not going to stop the dedicated wardriver. Passwords can be cracked. Much better to lower the power of your access point so that no one can get a good connection on the street.
BTW, are cable modems still party lines?
So if this political, it is the politics of the evangelical christian, not the politics of the state. The state has rules that defines and describes civilized activity. If is the uncivilized activity of the religious terrorist that requires us to revisit and reinforce the rules.
One must also consider that if I hire a immigrant, and sponsor them, or if they are undocumented, I have much more control over that person than if i hire a citizen with freedom to move to a better job, or leave if the work interferes with family
Of course we can give the benefit of the doubt and say why would a company not want to hire from the top 1%, which many can do with a worldwide search, rather than the top 10% which is what is required if the search is limited to a country.
Which is why we much try to better in teaching. Unfortunately doing that is expensive. For instance, i have talked to oil industry people about why they don' work with high school kids, even those in pre engineering programs. They say there is not a good return in investment. Working with colleges makes more financial sense, when the kids are self selected to do the work.
Likewise the first step in STEM education has to be suppling elementary schools with good ancillary teachers. Coaches that teach fine motor control, music teachers that work on creativity and process, math teachers that build up to abstraction, science teachers that work on discovery. This addition of a couple hundred thousands of dollars to each school is not going to result in much, but without it the kids are not going to have the basis, unless they learn it at home, to do rigorous work later on.
Some of this can be paid for by decentralizing curriculum. There is no reason for every state to development science, math and technology basic curriculum. It is not like newtons law are different in new mexico and Delaware. Billions of dollars are wasted in this way. Then there is testing. Billions of dollars more, not to mention the need to add days to school because they are wasted in testing students. Have a curriculum, hire good teachers to customize it for the students, and give national norm referenced tests to measure progress. NCLB, the law to transfer money from the tax payer to rich people, was good in that if focused on best practices and content knowledge for teacher, but was bad in that it took power to deliver content from the local teacher to the state, and the power to spend money from the local district to the federal government. School could no longer spend money on equipment the students needed, rather had to spend it on testing. So we got test books instead of Arduino kits.
I think the US education system has been good at creating motivate, skilled, creative, and aggressive citizens. Public schol is tough. If we were a country of startups this would be good enough. But corporate is king, so we need to build in some other skills.
Apple has a user base and has time to create a better map software, just like they were given time to make a better phone. OTOH, with Apple Maps in disarray, all the Apple users who are locked into contracts are going to be looking for better maps. There are better navigation maps that cost very little money on IOS. Mapquest, as a has been mentioned, is a good alternative. With increased use and more ad funding, Mapquest can be very good. Mapquest was what we all used before google came along with it's pretty pictures.
The danger here is 100% google. If users do not see a Google App in the next few weeks, many will have gone other places. For travel, the thing Google has is Buses. Mapquest, for instance, has the ability to match that. It has in some cities. For many Apple users, the new maps is good enough. Google took a risk and lost some branding.
It is interesting you mentioned cash flow. It was what I did as a young adult. Interesting it did not involve great complexities of algebra, but my ability to put the words of my boss into a model and then assess that model for validity proved very profitable for me. The later was what was important. Assessing the model. To often people just put code in a machine, or just use canned models, with no ability to understand if the output is valid. They think they don't have to think because the machine does it for them. The machine is useful because it allows some to do work they could not otherwise do, and other to amplify thier work, but it does not think. A computer can enforce rules, free us up to do more profitable work,, but it cannot validate. So we have a case where a lot of bad stuff is floating around just because it comes out of a machine and few people are wise enough to understand that it is bad.
My parents were older and were not exposed to the generation of television programming that told us we should eat processed food, so we do not. I look at my contemporaries and they, their children, all expect fast and processed food for all meals, even when the money is extremely limited. There is simply no expectation for a fresh healthy meal. I do not blame them, this is what they were taught. That milk has to pasteurized and homogenized. That good food is processed for their health. That picking something out of the ground, a carrot, a squash, an apple, is simply unhealthy. I recall walking though a garden, pickup pecans, and breaking them and eating them as a snack. My friends who were eating chips though I was crazy.
I do not blame the parents. This is current policy. Profits of major corporations depend on sales of calories to children. In the past forty years per capita candy consumption has doubled. When a young unwed mother is given counseling on how to care for her child, she is told to use formula. Now, I understand that there might be a drug issue with the mother, but when we are teaching that processed food is better than mothers milk, what hope to we have that they will feed the kids fresh healthy food. None.
The problem occurs when some ignorant people start believing that the myths. I saw this happen once on a work thing I was forced to attend. A quack presenter was telling us all these ways we could judge people just by looking at them. if the person played with their change they were cheap, if they looked up they were dishonest, and on and on. Now I will admit that these things may be true in many if not most cases, but to build a profile of a person assuming they are true all the time. That is ludicrous, especially as this information was presented to professionals who would then make judgements on people that would effect their future.
If you want to teach programmable logic, universal programmers and GAL or the like are dirt cheap. A breadboard, some cheap components, and the student can learn to driver all sorts of things. Glue motors to the breadboard and you have a robot. One computer is needed to program the chip. I remember how much fun I had when I was a kid using an Apple ][ and a slot in programmer to burn chips.
This device appears to be made to promote a certain form of education. This form is often used by people who prefer OSS, and therefore the lack of OSS is going to be a problem for some people. It would be better if it used more open components. However education is a complex endeavor, and often educators want models that expose the concepts to be taught, while hiding all the distracting details. My concern is if Raspberry Pi hides distracting details, or are the distracting details going to overwhelm anything that might be taught.
I have seen people lose great amount of weight, and I lose weight, when sugar and sugary snacks are cut out. For people I have seen who follow high protein diets that is really all this is involved. They stop eating candy and junk food and fill up on meat. Such a diet makes sense in a country where only two things are widely available, meat and junk.
OTOH, we need about 8 ounces of protein a day, On average in the US we eat maybe 50% more than that in meat alone, so lets call it 3 to 4 ounces at 300-500 (less for hamburgers, more for bacon), so that is an extra 300 calories a day, or an extra 100,000 calories a year. If this were all converted in mass, that would be a few hundred pounds of potential extra fat.
Which is to say the the simple carbohydrates one eats does contribute to weight gain(complex carbohydrates are a more complicated story), but eating too much meat significantly contributes. Taking the bun off a burger is not going to help nearly as much as replacing the burger with a good vegetable stew.
If the products is faster better and provides a better experience, then there is not going to a huge advantage to a slower device that can be only found at Toys R US.
The new lightbulbs, some which are incandescent, require significant investment which means the idle rich are not going to get richer. We can't just come up with a new lightbulb by laying people off or blaming unions. Actual R&D must be done, actual supply chains must be developed, actual engineers must be sent out to meet with other engineers and researchers to figure out what is possible.
Republicans also apparently tend to be poor, because anytime they are asked to pay for something they say they have no money. My CFB costs no more than $4 a bulb, and last a long time. $4 for a minimum wage Republican probably is a lot of money, more than a case of beer certainly, but I know few people who can't afford it. An LED table lamp is $30. not so much.
So yes, it sometimes seems that conservatives are more concerned with conserving their wealth so they do not have to do any work rather than conserving the traditional values of the country.
Like local and state sales taxes paying for services, state and federal fuel taxes are not going to be able to pay for roads and the deficit in the same way as we move to more efficient vehicles. Now with electric cars there is no fuel tax. The states have loved to live on these hidden taxes, in clothes, in fuel, on the phone bill, but really we are going to have to start more open taxes and explain what they pay for and how they are applied. If every dollar a middle class American makes is going to be taxed three times, one on payroll, once on income, once when it is spent, that makes less sense than just taxing it to begin with. Of course that will result in the wealthy paying taxes. For instance, most of us pay payroll taxes on everything we make, but someone making 200K does not. Now if you can afford a Tesla, you don't pay for the roads you use.
I would write the letter asking for a more diverse and rigorous education. It does not hurt to ask. But then I would go out and look for it. I cannot imagine why a CS department is wasting it's time on office application, or why anyone would pay college tuition for such a thing. Evidently people do, and the college is covering cost, so don't expect that to change.
In the browser reject third party cookies and approve all cookies, leaving most of them for session only.
I also use Spybot S&D and adware. Adaware seems to be getting funky, so that recommendation is conditional.
Blocking IPs, which Spybot supports, is also a very good idea.
This only leaves phishing emails, which not software can deflect as it is a purely psychological attack. Don't click though from emails. Bookmark sites and use the bookmarks.
As far the comments to not use MS, the situation is not as dire as it once was. A few years ago, around the time of MS Windows 7, we were using Windows XP, we had to move to a Mac as the attacks on the MS Windows machine were just too effective, and daily updates were not possible. Now I have MS machines up for long periods of time without a problem, and I have not had an infection in a very long time. Fortunately that was on a virtual machine so the damage was minimal.
We have to understand that the Islamic Republic of Iran is huge religious community. The state, unlike the US, has been set up to promote a set of religious values. We may disagree with this, but that is they way it is. Even in the US this is so. Tx governor Rick Perry has said the separation between church and state is a secular construction of recent providence. I suppose that is why the religious fanatics want to control what I can and cannot buy in a free market. Again, nothing new or interesting. The religious crazy people always love to control what others do.
And technology is the same. You would think that with all this faith and love and all that is in creation, the fanatics might find something else to do other than watch TV, a creation of the devil. But you know, they can't, and so we all have to pay for V-Chip, just because the fanatics can't control their kids. And because their kids are so ill behaved that they don't have a bed time, we can't have nudity on broadcast TV like we once did. And pictures of naked people on the internet. The natural creation cannot be shown without the materialistic secular creations of men.
And of course christians in the US are just as uptight as any other fanatics. When muslim starting building Mosques in my town, there was no end to christians who wanted to stop it, even though it should be possible for a private citizen to build what they want on a property as long as it meets code. There was one case a few years where Ramadan, or some holiday, fell on 9/11, and a store was closed in memory of the matyrs, and all the christians go in a huff thinking that a private bussiness did not have the right to close a private business to celebrate a holiday that in fact had nothing to do with 9/11.
I wish we could just blame people who are stuck in the past. But I think we have to blame bad thinking.
The problem is that we are in a drought and we are using many gallons of water, hundreds?, to make a pound of beef when we could just use lamb, which requires perhaps a third less. Or we could just eat less meat.
Ultimate the free market will determine where the resources go. If one can afford to eat meat, go for it. But don't whine about prices being high. That is like whining about gas being high. Use less of it and it will go down. Look at the farm bill and ask about wasted tax dollars. Right now tax payers are paying money for useless beef. In ethanol at least the taxpayer gets value. Without it we would be paying to give corn away, which would serve an ethical purpose.Want farm subsidies to go away? Pay a good price for vegetables from local growers.
In any case given the structure of the taxes and subsidies in the US make anything other than petroleum a money losing deal. One can look at the unfairness of the situation in one example. If I wanted to build some houses, I would most like have to pay the sellers price for the lots. In the city this is very expensive, but even in the suburbs this can become quite expensive, as the sellers, many who have bought land long ago as an investment, want the best price for the investment. The land can take a significant toll on the profits. A 100K house in the suburbs might be sitting on land that is worth 5K, a 2 million dollar house in the city might be sitting on land that is worth $250K. This is the free market and people live with it. Some may have to move out to the suburbs and then spend more on gas.
OTOH, we see that if one is building a pipeline one does not have to pay the seller price. One can condem the land and pay 'Fair Market Value'. Now, I am not against eminent domain, just against it's use to force people to sell land at little profit so someone else can make a large profit. If you want my land and it is worth 1 million dollars to you, then maybe I want 10% for my trouble, not the $20K that the government says I deserve.
So given that the US government continues to invest, a takes people stuff away, so we can have oil, how can electric cars work? For one thing we would need a penny a mile tax on the car to cover federal and local fuel taxes. This could be as little as a $100 a year, but it would be another perceived disadvantage for the car.
As far as the current issue, what they are paying for is a report generator. Presumably the difficulty of this report generator is that there are many for profit data systems out there that can be complex to use. A report generator that can produce the proper output can be useful. What I would argue, however, is that this one of the functions of the department of education. At the very least there should be standards for educational data collection and analysis software that requires a common data storage format, so that third party reporting tools can be easily written, and minimal functional standards of required operations. What would be ideal is a reference implementation available to school that do not wish to buy commercial tools. These are not highly complex tasks. Much of the issue is data security of the students. We have much more complex CMS out there that are open source. Of course the commercial vendors can create and sell superior systems, but right now the local tax payer is being fleeced because we are not leveraging our federal resources. The US is mostly, as a country, paying for the same thing several times because of the radical dedication to local control.
So I can imagine that this might work as it has worked for me. .Mac or whatever it was called meant that files and data could be transfered to a new machine. $80 bought me an office suite that could be used on whatever machine I owned. Now with the App store I can load software onto a new machine without media, though data is no longer part of the deal. Of course Apple is no longer charging a yearly fee for basic services.
My feeling is that if MS wants to bring a new generation of users, they should do the same. Give away a basic version of Office for home users. Give away a basic level of online connectivity. The real reason this won't work is that Google does this, and for what most students and home users need, it is more than enough. Most people would be foolish to pay $100 a year for what google gives away for free. It is not like the data students and home user have is critical, and will cost them $100 on the slight chance they lose it.
For the non corporate user, MS is falling far behind the curve as they try to gain revenue. At first MS software was essentially free to the individual or student. Then they tried to charge. Then they made it closer to free. Now they are trying to charge again. This does not work. Young people are going to go into offices know google, not MS, so what are employees going to use if possible?
I read recently that the phones as shipped can choose a network, but can't be changed ofter. This is hardly unlocked. It is like the DVD drives that ship to play in any region, but once one is selected it is locked. It was also my understanding that the ATT phone would work with more international locations. I can't find the article right now, so I don't know if i recalling correctly.
What I notice about the Apps in the store over the past year is the barrier to entry is much greater, not because there are more apps, but because the quality has increased substantially. This is no longer a numbers game. Apple has never been about numbers. Apple never competing with MS based on number of Applications. It competed on key applications, like the spreadsheet, the desktop publishing, the touchscreen.
Further, there is no way that the person who broke into your house is responsible. It is your fault for not having perfect security. So don't even think of calling the police. You have no basis for complaint. And what about the naked pictures of the kids. Also your fault. So you get to register as the sex offender, not the innocent person who was just doing security research and conductet a proof of concept survey.
In all seriousness, if one finds an error, it is responsible to state the error to the appropriate people first. If they ignore you then promoting a proof of concept . But only a extremely foolish person would expect gratitude for such a thing.
The reality is that in America we must protect the family, and we must realize that the business of America is bidness. This is why I thought the dream act made so much sense. We have kids who have gone through a US education system, and who are ready for college or trade school. In many schools they are receiving very good SEM prep educations, and they are very motivated to study. If they finish college and get a job, why not let them stay. Why does it make more sense to import adults?
Here is my theory on the current status. Talking to am executive at a major multinational, it seems the H!B was primarily used for multinationals to assign workers, often temporarily, to the US, and but winter and summer resorts to gain skilled employees, usually ski instructors and the like. It boomed with IT looking for skilled workers and realizing that H1B visa workers were cheaper and in effect became indentured servants for the length of the time it took them to get a green card. This is the same thing with teach for america. Two years of guaranteed work without complaint, then leaving before one is vested.
The corporate culture is often too risk adverse, which is why it is so often critically inefficient. Coding is simply a tool to solve a problem. If I am working in a small business, and I have a way to solve a problem, be it code, or a saw drill and hammer, or a logic tester, soldering iron, and components, it would be silly of me not to fix the problem instead of paying someone else to do it. Now sometimes it does not make sense economically for me to solve the problem, but that is on a case by case basis, not a blanket ban.
Here is an example which sort of applies. In my current work, and at time in previous work, a lot of MS Word documents are passed around for production use. Now, MS Word is an rather inefficient and expensive tool to do what we do. Sometimes margins have to be set a certain way, or there are a lot of equations or sciency things. In any case, if people would see coding as a tool and not just something that geeks and other mysterious unapproachable people do, more people might us LaTeX. This would make like much easier in editing and exchanging these files. However, this is not going to happen because as soon as you say code, people run away. Madness.