True. I am not sure how popular the Host file is. I don't talk about it, but I do use it to block web sites. When I do talk about it with Windows admins, most do not know what I am talking about or how it can be used. Also, i seem to recall that spybot S&D did some magic to keep the integrity fo the Hosts file from changes.
The world more than likely was going to starve until the Haber process was developed that allowed us to increase production of food. Saying that the food crisis was hyperbolic or was just randomly solved is sheer ignorance of history and technology. Fritz Harber and Carl Bosch, in Germany in the years prior to WWI likely saved the world from a major disaster. If it would have happened sooner, and Germany was able to have the resources it needed, the history of the early 20th century might have been much different.
In the 1970 the available oil was not keeping up with consumption. Very cheap oil form the middle east was disrupted and we were not yet into deep water drilling, directional drilling was just taking hold. Furthermore car fuel efficiency had reached a historical low with many cars only getting 10 miles to each gallon. Because people knew on which side their bread was buttered, they worked to figure out how to extract more oil and use energy more efficiently. We would have been in trouble if very smart people treated these threats as "hyperbolic". They were real.
As far as pesticides, stating the threat is not real or limiting the threat to cancer is sheer hooliganism. The runoff of chemical pesticides, chemical in general, is a health and food risk. The only question is if that risk is greater than the social damage of doing nothing. For many chemicals, the answer is yes, the risk is greater. The main reason is that often we can achieve about the same results with what are probably safer alternatives. It is like a car. If one can achieve about the same results with a more efficient automobile, why not?
This is major fallacy, IMHO. Often these debates are set up as between hard working firms and hippie environmentalists. This si simply not true. The reality is that in the modern world these debates are between embedded corporate interests and free thinking entrepreneurs. The American car industry wants you to think if failed because of unions, but really it failed because it ignored people who pushing new technology and processes, while the Japan did not. The good news is that even though polemicist is still going to fight to keep the change from happening, corporations are increasingly looking to their balance sheets and realizing that branding is the past and innovative products are the future. They realize that public relations campaigns to convince people that scientist are merely fear mongers are not nearly as effecient as paying the scientists to develop the solutions. Imagine if the germans had just said that the lack of food was fear mongering and not put money into Habers work. We might not only be starving now, but Germany would not have been able to mount a campaign with substantially smaller forces than the rest of Europe.
Because I sense that this article is not so much anti technology but anti-government, let me reiterate. Currently corporations are not ignoring problems, but that is because the government structure is there to encourage development. Let me give one more example, the flat screen TV. The CRT puts out a great deal of radiation and wastes a great deal of energy. Through a series of regulations at various national levels, a standard was put in place to limit the radiation of the CRT. The ultimate solution was the LCD, but that was expensive. However, in a short time, due to interaction between government and corporate interests, almost everyone has moved away from the CRT to a more efficient and safe LCD. Does the CRT really cause damage? Who knows, but because all this was done under the table we are saved from the hooligans of conservatism and libertarians shouting from the rooftops that the LCD is a communist plot and anyone who wants an LCD hates America, or whatever.
About three million people choose to live the greater houston, tx area. In any year, more than 300 people are going to be murdered. Irrational people might think this is a high rate, and might want to move, or spend large sums of money to reduce this rate of murder. But clearly 3 million people think that this is a reasonable compromise and have no problem with it. Now compare this to where the WSJ is, NYC. Even with more than double population, the number of people who are going to get murdered is much less half of houston in any given year. Yet these irrational paranoid people spend huge amounts of money paying officers to randomly accost people on the street. Given the logic this is stupidity. The murder rate is much lower, and could stand to rise a bit. Spending money to keep it this artificially low is simply insanity.
It is interesting to note that only science supported in the 2008 republican platform was medical research. All other sciences is treated with suspicion. The education is not much better, as parents are considered the primary education givers, and not all parents are going to be able to promote an objective science process.
Whether the national ignition facility is good or bad, it represented the basic and applied science that is critical to a countries infrastructure. It high risk, expensive, but it does provide science. While cancer research is important, I am not sure how much actual science is developed with the US government $5 bilion a year.
It sounds like following standard practices are in order. You should have all secure sites you visit bookmarked. Safari and chrome synchs the bookmarks between devices. One should never go to a secure site from an email or text. I can't tell you how may emails I get trying to get me to log into ebay or paypal or a bank using a almost legitimate URL.
The one thing I use SMS for is as a one time pad. A code is sent to me, which I enter as a secondary login credential. Nothing in the text leads me to the site. I have never assumed that SMS is any more secure than email, and I don't think there is any reason to do so.
Of course, if this is a real bug, it needs to be fixed. There are a lot of people out there who depend on a relatively secure SMS system to carry on affairs. It is also worthy to note that an iPhone does not use SMS by default, but messaging if possible.
I do understand this but could this not also be solved by a scam alert or booting off sellers with high complaint rates. As it is every category has complaints. The issue here is the chosen solution, not the fact that a problem needed to be solved. For instance, computer sales has a high fraud rate. Empty boxes are sold, delivery to far off land result in no payments, payments result in no computer. The solution to this was not to ban sales, but to educate the consumer. It is hard to argue that is is anything but an opportuni to appease the a nnoying vocal subset of alleged Christians.
yes teach kids tomuse internet, but we do not teach kids to ride ambike on the freeway.
Critical information missing. What is the age of the kids, or are these young adults, and what do you want to accomplish by filtering.
If these are kids, say under 13, I think whitelists are absolutely appropriate. They are the only way to block proxy and https workarounds
For older students ad blocking is basic, along with whatever policy states, be it violence, sex, shopping or hookups. Keep in mind that more most students these restrictions are more to cover the schools liability than to actually keep kids off these sites. Most wil have smart phones, and increasingly these smart phones tether. That is why education is so important. You can't keep a 13 year old girl from trying to get a date with an older guy who has a car and cash. You can only educate
For young adults don't even waste the time. Give them a workload that does not allow time to play and provide consequences for those who do not finish.
I must agree that the dock connector might be silly thing. At the time it made sense because the iPod ran off the firewire port, and presumably, Apple had plans to make it run off the USB port when the standard became fast enough. I can say that owning an MP3 player that ran on USB 1.0, filling even 64MB of music was painful(yes MB).
That said the USB standard really sucks. When there were just two types, the big and small, that was manageable. But then I got a Kindle fire and now I have to carry around three cables, four with the dock connector. At the very least I only need one cable for my iOS devices and one adapter for my Macs. WIth Apple in transition, it will be two or three years of annoyance, but with USB there is a new cable every couple years. And USB 3.0 is said to be completely different.
I do, however, appreciate the USB standard for phones.
No it is not any worse. The problem is in the presentation. Online courses are presented as a cheap easy way to deliver an education to the masses. It is presented as a new, innovative method to create the group of critical thinking and highly creative professionals the world needs. Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with education knows this is crap.
Online courses like this are just another way to deliver an education to those easiest to educate. Those that are motivated, can learn well from lectures and books, will take the time in recitation and practice, and will seek out peers and mentors. Before online courses these people learned from libraries, auditing courses, or just forming connections with knowledgable people. They would carry their desks to school, and spend thier teenage years figuring out how to fund college, sometimes traveling to foreign countries to do so.
I am not saying the online courses are useless. They may very well bring an educational opportunity to motivated persons who did not otherwise have the resources. What I am saying is that we might consider applying the adage that if we are successful if we manage to educate one additional person. I know this is not PC in the no child left behind, but it is perfectly consistent with race to the top, where we encourage all students and provide all possible resources to maximums potential. So the dicks who want to go through courses and cheat are as inconsequential as the dicks in college who cheated in high school and spend all day bragging about their high GPA. It does not effect the personal learning of those who want to learn.
At some point it is not the responsibility of the school to babysit the kids. It is the responsibility of the school to provide valid learning opportunities, and the students are responsible to make use of those opportunities. The world will punish those who screw up. I was recently at a presentation at a major engineering firm and it was stated that they hire as many graduates as they can, but the new hires have only months to learn the job and prove they can apply this knowledge. Do you think that your friends are going to help you cheat when six figures are involved and competition is fierce? Even at telemarketing jobs I have seen 300 page binders that are expected to be assimilated in two weeks, and then employees given two more weeks to start producing. For $10 an hour.
So no, online courses should not be singled out for cheating. But they are not going to be the means of overall educational savings. As the students who are easy to educate get filtered out to these other learning opportunities, more money per student is going to be needed to educate those who are more resistant. IMHO, this is the key to the whole debate. Online education is going to be a critical part of training kids, but it is no silver bullet.
Isn't this science? A paper is published and it is treated suspiciously until the work is repeated or applied to another result. An independent lab is not going to guarantee that a result is valid. In most fields, any lab that has the expertise to repeat a study is not going to be independent. All these scientist know each other. There wil always be a risk of collusion. If scientific dishonest is the issue, two dishonest scientist are not going to solve the issue, and if a random lab can't duplicate, the original scientist can just say they didn't have the expertise.
The reality is that any experiment is just a data point, with the conclusion not nearly as interesting as the process. For instance the Millikan oil drop experiment likely had some level of fraud and probably would not be reproducible in the modern sense. However the apparatus and process did give us a path to the electric charge that eventual lead to a something that was more defensible. Likewise Einstein's photoelectric effect experiment did not prove that light was a particle. The apparatus and process were vital to experiments done half a century later that did prove the nature of light.
So the problem is not that results are invalid or scientific dishonest. IMHO the problem comes from three other sources. First, is the idea that results, not process, is the key part of a scientific study. This comes from the bad way that science is taught, and the fraudulent presentation of the scientific method. Second, is the commercial journals and their desire for publicity and 'impact factor' to drive sales. This is where I think open journals might help. Third is the focus on soft sciences, like medicine, to represent all science. In medicine, the results are all that matter, which necessarily leads to the corruption and pervasion of the entire process.
Sanitation is important, but there are several levels herre. First is access to plumbing and sewers. These are political. Plumbing and sewers are necessary for cities. If a family were on a few acres, a water pump and septic tank or outhouse would do. However cities require sanitation. This could be done by public toilets, as the ancient greeks did, or by private facilities as the developed world is so fond of. In the US we are very private, and therefore have no public facilities anywhere, i.e. customers only.
But back to the point. It is politics. Either the money is spent to put proper plumbing in a city or it is not. The important thing about plumbing is to keep the human waste from running down the open streets and into the freshwater. Toilets, no matter how fancy, are not going to keep this from happening without some sort of well funded and locally support policity.
Second, people have to use the toilets. This means that whatever facilities that are used has to be placed so that people will make use pf them and there has be regulations and policies in place to enforce them. When conservatives speak of the big bad government, I often complain that the evil government has put in place laws to force me to pay 10% more for my home, all in the name of social engineering to insure otherwise useless industries are propped up and allowed to make huge profits at the private citizens expense. What I mean, of course, if that I have no choice about the facilites I choose to place in my private home. I have to have a bathroom. I do not have the choice to take a dump outside, I have to pay for goverment mandated plumbing. Which is what we are talking about here. Forming social policies that say, presuming that every house in a village does not have a toilet, that someone has to walk half a mile instead of just using the alley.
Which is not to say that these toilets are not useful. Toilets that generate electricity would be useful, as many places do not have electricity, but such toilets would have to bought and maintained. As far as water free toilets, these exist in terms of composting toilets. What I see here is the difference between philanthropy and charity. In philanthropy a person with money decides a solution for a improvised group of people. Sometimes these solutions are good, sometimes they just promote a political or philosophical agenda. Charity is where we give money to locals person, sometimes with control on how they can use it, and allow them to develop local solutions that will work for their constraints. In the developed world do we need toilets t hat use less water? Yes, Is that a primary concern in a place that has no toilets at all? Maybe that is keeping people from having toilets, or maybe it is just a lack of priorities.It is like students who have a new pair of jordans but no pencil. Giving them a pencil will help them learn but not solve the problem.
You know google does not know everything, and if you are looking for anything other than an easy lay or celebrity pictures or link farms it is not all that useful. There are a few people on slashdot who don't spend their days eating their parents foods and playing video games, and these people not only have knowledge that is not readily discernible on google, but also have the basis to repose a question that might be of more use to the person asking. This, of course, is what a professional can do. Repose and redirect a requirement to a more productive route.
I don't think any of the answers here solve the problem. Moodle will work as a grade book, but may be more complex that many want. There are a couple gradebooks here that may or may not be useful. What is true is that even the comments that say just use a spreadsheet are more useful than a comment that says just go to google. As mentioned, that comment is only useful for someone looking for a date, and even in that case craigslist is probably the better suggestion.
On the issue of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are very fragile. They are not very useful production tools to give to people who don't know how to fix and know the limitations of spreadsheet. They will work if you have a very competent person design them, and if they support is there when the luser messes them up.
There is a limit of who we can see with visible light, that is light that our eyes will respond to as color. Basically once you get below the oder of the wavelength, one cannot discern the details. For visibile light this limit is on the order of a micrometer. Therefore in theory we might be able to see something less than a micrometer, but there are other issues involved. The cited figure is order of magnitude less.
We see this in the length of antennas. To receive a signal, the antenna has to be at least a quarter wavelength. If you look at old cars that are made to receive conventional AM signals, they are longer. If you look at newer cars that simply receive XM signals, these are very short. That is because are measured in meters, while satellite radio is measure in centimeters. The wavelength we need to resolve is shorter, so the antenna is shorter.
For black and white images, the rule is going to be different. Our eyes are not going to resolve the image. The image can use particles of smaller wavelength, such as electrons, and shown in false color or black and white.
If these android manufacturers would just pay $5-$15 a device to Apple, Apple would probably drop all the suits.
I am just obnoxious or trying to defend Apple here, but to say in comparison it is what is going to kill innovation. Apple is saying, right or wrong, design something different, follow the FRAND rules, and be innovative. Not everything has to be an iPad or iPhone. The Kindle Fire, for example, is not remotely an iPad, but is an extremely functional machine.
OTOH, MS is saying they own everything, and anyone who does anything owes them money. This is what they did with the naked PC fight. By focusing on Apple, and their effort to innovate, instead of MS and their effort to take a cut of anything that looks like technology, we are losing the war.
I know just like the oil in the gulf of Mexico, the plastic is a natural occurrence. There a little vents that release plastic jugs. These are not a problem because natural processes break down the oil, the plastic, the pumice into small harmless pieces.
There are new plants coming up, mostly because Obama has pledged over 8 billion dollars in taxpayer money to fund them. The corporate teat suckers are therefore chomping at the bits to take this money and convert it to personal wealth. This has already been done in texas where costs associated with nuclear plants has been added to ratepayers bill. The public instead of investors were stuck with the costs of bad management.
You can say what you like about solar power, but there are few costs for accidents, decommissioning, and it does not pollute the environment with mercury like coal, or contanimate the groundwater like nuclear.
I recall in high school learning basic trig so I could write a video game usinng shape tables. My teacher whose independent stuy course I was Inc was given a significant stipend to write a projectile motion game, also using trig and shape tables.
The difference is between requires and is extremely helpful. For example, one can code with extremely limited abilities to read and write, but both are extremely helpful skills. It increases the number of different fields one can excel in. MIT seems to me if you want to be a programmer you are either a problem solver or code monkey, and math helps you be the former, though there is nothing wrong with the later.
The programmern I know who make the most money, we are talking the top 1% type of money, are math people. This, IMHO is simply because so many people are afraid of math and therefore justify their life around math being not very important. I OTOH attribute my reletively casual lifestyle to the ability to do math. it simply makes a difference.
There has been a few cases in which math has allowed me solve problems that were giving others difficulty. On one project we were working on drawing charts from scratch. The code, several years old, would routines,y break when scaling the axis. It took me a day to debug and a couple to refactor code. Another was retooling a line and needing to create a model for inputs and output costs to determinie which improvements could be justified. This could be done without maths, but was much easier, meaning I had more time for side projects, with it. Then there was all the automation, I.e. robotics, stuff that would have been impossible without it.
I think it is important to remember that the reason we can't just put stuff out there is because when it becomes useful someone is going to put limits on our rights to use it. So we have the creative commons, the GPL, and other copyleft licenses to insure that everyone can use open intellectual property respectfully, but cannot take it away.
What if MS decided to use the OSI Logo for it's program that allows certain customers to view code, it's version of open source. Would OSI be allowed to fight for trademark dilution? I think it would. And in this case it seems pretty clear to me that OSHW wants to implicitly associate itself with OSI, which may be fine and good, but what assurances that OSHW won't become a less open organization? It seems that OSHW would have little difficulty finding an original logo that would set it apart.
My understanding is that they are well taken care of. Of course, the lawyers are sometimes better taken care of. The number of million dollar houses and children sent to ultraexpensive private colleges are amazing, but huge payments are also being made to veterans, even those that served only briefly. One of my colleagues was forced to retire early and one way he is making ends meet is through these payments.
This may sound like very little, but there are stories of major site in which mining and industrial action has rendered entire town uninhabitable. All these people receive are fair market value of their homes and a bit of moving expense. Of course since 2003 cleanup costs of many toxic sites have been borne by the taxpayer.
A person who learned to program a computer should be able to use, after a time, any language that is currently in the top 5, that is C, Objective C, Java, C++, C#. All of these share a common underlying philosophy and basic technique. C is by far the simplest fo these, but also the most basic. Of course most of the time the language is not the thing. Rather the API is where th heavy flitting is done and in fact over the past 10 years of so has become a barrier to entry. One has to know how use.net., or the interfaces for iOS or android. 30 years ago the APIs were not this arbitrarily complex, but also we were not doing threading of complex UI. Specifically when using an API one has to define the solution to the problem in terms of the API, not the language. These language account for perhaps 2/3 of the computer applications.
The second tier stuff if most useful for RAD. That is visual basic, python, perl, PHP, Ruby. These are mostly scripting languages, and require a slightly different approach. The solution is defined in terms of the capability of the language and the available scripts. This is particularly true with Ruby. These are languages that meet specific requirements for specific purposes. For instance PHP and Ruby are what uses to write a website. Python is quite popular for home grown science applications.
Which is to say that anyone trying to promote a language because it is what they know rather than because it is what is used to solve a particular problem is like a person trying to get their boss to buy a lather for the server room because they really need a lathe for home projects. I would not try to script a website with C. I would not try write a data analysis program in assembly. The computers are simply too fast and we have had 40 years of development of tool that means we do not need to spend a quarter and a million dollars rewriting a GUI. This has always been true. In the 80's we used fortran for number crunching because that was the only language supported by IMSL. We used C for everything else because it ran on everything else.
So online learning is only going to teach students how to use useless tools. Yes I would like to teach people how to use Forth, but what is the point? We can teach students how use Shakespeare, and it would teach them techniques they need to know and would be very motivating for certain students, but where would they use it? Once a student is proficient at programming, and understand the basic concept, time needs to be spent on learning how to to efficiently acquire API knowledge
I think that RAM is dirt cheap, and storing local copies in RAM is always the better way to deal with HDD delays. It seems it would be better to put 8GB of RAM in the computer, for $50, than spend money on a SSD to accelerate a HDD.
I have had laptops with up to 750GB HDD. My current laptop has a 256GB SSD, and my next will have at least 500GB. I hate to be buzzword complient, but I don't need all the video and music on my computer all the time. I can leave that in external storage, the cloud, and download it as needed. As it is most of that stuff has been sitting on external terrabyte HDD anyway, HDD that are cheap but terribly unreliable. At 256GB i have to manage the space, but I seldom run out of storage completely. The speed at which my computer boots up and runs makes all the difference in the world.
I do agree that a dollar a GB retail is really expensive, and I would never upgrade to SSD, but the marginal cost added to a new computer is often not significant.
I mean seriously who else are they going to use. There was a time when a *nix desktop might work. Several years ago Lenova agreed to purchase a billion in MS licenses and install them on all their machines because any computer that is sold without a MS license is considered a pirate machie. Then, there are all these OEM who depend or are afraid of MS so they pay protection fees to MS, like HTC and Samsung because any *nix phone infringes on the IP of MS. It is one thing for apple to say the design is too similar to iPhone, it is another for MS to say it owns *nix, which is what Android OEMs are saying every time they give MS $10.
In fact in this market MS should be happy if everyone starts using non-MS OS. Look at the facts. Samsung is paying MS at least a half million dollars a year for the right to use Android. OTOH, MS has to pay Nokia $250 million to use MS phone OS. Which is better for MS?
Back in 200 when Apple showed that *nix could be used as the basis for a Desktop OS, I thought some of the major MS partners might go this route and develop a consortium to create a desktop OS for PC users, using emulation such as we see with WINE. Of course they were happy sucking the teats of MS and making the easy money. It would have been too much work for them to develop and innovative product.
It is unclear how much the chemicals we ingest effect the enviroment. For a while there was concern that the amount of vitamins Americans consume effect the waterways. Much of these chemicals are not metabolized but flow through the body and end up as waste. It is said that many Americans have the most expensive urine in the world. Then there is the high levels of estrogen detectable in the waterways. This could be from humans, but is probably more related to agriculture and industrial waste. Beef and dairy cattle are given estrogen, and they are the likely cause of the vaste majority of the estrogen, as such waste have a much more direct path to the waterways than human waste. My thoughts about coffee is that many coffee houses will promote the coffee grounds as fertilizer. Clearly these grounds still contain some caffeine, and used as fertilizer this caffeine will go directly to waterways.I have no idea how widespread the use of the grounds are, but I were researching this issue that is where I would start.
The youtube app was included and necessary because the iPhone could not play videos and back in the day everyone was under the delusion that youtube videos were kewl. Youtube was tolerated by the aristocracy because there was a limit on what could be done with the videos.
The basic functionality with a smart phone is music, rowsing, maps, video, and mail. I am looking forward to not having the phone redirect to an app when I look at a video. I am looking forward to the voice directions, something which Google has withheld even though Apple pays a huge fortune for the rights to the Google app.
Slashdot Mirror
True. I am not sure how popular the Host file is. I don't talk about it, but I do use it to block web sites. When I do talk about it with Windows admins, most do not know what I am talking about or how it can be used. Also, i seem to recall that spybot S&D did some magic to keep the integrity fo the Hosts file from changes.
In the 1970 the available oil was not keeping up with consumption. Very cheap oil form the middle east was disrupted and we were not yet into deep water drilling, directional drilling was just taking hold. Furthermore car fuel efficiency had reached a historical low with many cars only getting 10 miles to each gallon. Because people knew on which side their bread was buttered, they worked to figure out how to extract more oil and use energy more efficiently. We would have been in trouble if very smart people treated these threats as "hyperbolic". They were real.
As far as pesticides, stating the threat is not real or limiting the threat to cancer is sheer hooliganism. The runoff of chemical pesticides, chemical in general, is a health and food risk. The only question is if that risk is greater than the social damage of doing nothing. For many chemicals, the answer is yes, the risk is greater. The main reason is that often we can achieve about the same results with what are probably safer alternatives. It is like a car. If one can achieve about the same results with a more efficient automobile, why not?
This is major fallacy, IMHO. Often these debates are set up as between hard working firms and hippie environmentalists. This si simply not true. The reality is that in the modern world these debates are between embedded corporate interests and free thinking entrepreneurs. The American car industry wants you to think if failed because of unions, but really it failed because it ignored people who pushing new technology and processes, while the Japan did not. The good news is that even though polemicist is still going to fight to keep the change from happening, corporations are increasingly looking to their balance sheets and realizing that branding is the past and innovative products are the future. They realize that public relations campaigns to convince people that scientist are merely fear mongers are not nearly as effecient as paying the scientists to develop the solutions. Imagine if the germans had just said that the lack of food was fear mongering and not put money into Habers work. We might not only be starving now, but Germany would not have been able to mount a campaign with substantially smaller forces than the rest of Europe.
Because I sense that this article is not so much anti technology but anti-government, let me reiterate. Currently corporations are not ignoring problems, but that is because the government structure is there to encourage development. Let me give one more example, the flat screen TV. The CRT puts out a great deal of radiation and wastes a great deal of energy. Through a series of regulations at various national levels, a standard was put in place to limit the radiation of the CRT. The ultimate solution was the LCD, but that was expensive. However, in a short time, due to interaction between government and corporate interests, almost everyone has moved away from the CRT to a more efficient and safe LCD. Does the CRT really cause damage? Who knows, but because all this was done under the table we are saved from the hooligans of conservatism and libertarians shouting from the rooftops that the LCD is a communist plot and anyone who wants an LCD hates America, or whatever.
About three million people choose to live the greater houston, tx area. In any year, more than 300 people are going to be murdered. Irrational people might think this is a high rate, and might want to move, or spend large sums of money to reduce this rate of murder. But clearly 3 million people think that this is a reasonable compromise and have no problem with it. Now compare this to where the WSJ is, NYC. Even with more than double population, the number of people who are going to get murdered is much less half of houston in any given year. Yet these irrational paranoid people spend huge amounts of money paying officers to randomly accost people on the street. Given the logic this is stupidity. The murder rate is much lower, and could stand to rise a bit. Spending money to keep it this artificially low is simply insanity.
Whether the national ignition facility is good or bad, it represented the basic and applied science that is critical to a countries infrastructure. It high risk, expensive, but it does provide science. While cancer research is important, I am not sure how much actual science is developed with the US government $5 bilion a year.
The one thing I use SMS for is as a one time pad. A code is sent to me, which I enter as a secondary login credential. Nothing in the text leads me to the site. I have never assumed that SMS is any more secure than email, and I don't think there is any reason to do so.
Of course, if this is a real bug, it needs to be fixed. There are a lot of people out there who depend on a relatively secure SMS system to carry on affairs. It is also worthy to note that an iPhone does not use SMS by default, but messaging if possible.
I do understand this but could this not also be solved by a scam alert or booting off sellers with high complaint rates. As it is every category has complaints. The issue here is the chosen solution, not the fact that a problem needed to be solved. For instance, computer sales has a high fraud rate. Empty boxes are sold, delivery to far off land result in no payments, payments result in no computer. The solution to this was not to ban sales, but to educate the consumer. It is hard to argue that is is anything but an opportuni to appease the a nnoying vocal subset of alleged Christians.
Critical information missing. What is the age of the kids, or are these young adults, and what do you want to accomplish by filtering.
If these are kids, say under 13, I think whitelists are absolutely appropriate. They are the only way to block proxy and https workarounds
For older students ad blocking is basic, along with whatever policy states, be it violence, sex, shopping or hookups. Keep in mind that more most students these restrictions are more to cover the schools liability than to actually keep kids off these sites. Most wil have smart phones, and increasingly these smart phones tether. That is why education is so important. You can't keep a 13 year old girl from trying to get a date with an older guy who has a car and cash. You can only educate
For young adults don't even waste the time. Give them a workload that does not allow time to play and provide consequences for those who do not finish.
That said the USB standard really sucks. When there were just two types, the big and small, that was manageable. But then I got a Kindle fire and now I have to carry around three cables, four with the dock connector. At the very least I only need one cable for my iOS devices and one adapter for my Macs. WIth Apple in transition, it will be two or three years of annoyance, but with USB there is a new cable every couple years. And USB 3.0 is said to be completely different.
I do, however, appreciate the USB standard for phones.
Online courses like this are just another way to deliver an education to those easiest to educate. Those that are motivated, can learn well from lectures and books, will take the time in recitation and practice, and will seek out peers and mentors. Before online courses these people learned from libraries, auditing courses, or just forming connections with knowledgable people. They would carry their desks to school, and spend thier teenage years figuring out how to fund college, sometimes traveling to foreign countries to do so.
I am not saying the online courses are useless. They may very well bring an educational opportunity to motivated persons who did not otherwise have the resources. What I am saying is that we might consider applying the adage that if we are successful if we manage to educate one additional person. I know this is not PC in the no child left behind, but it is perfectly consistent with race to the top, where we encourage all students and provide all possible resources to maximums potential. So the dicks who want to go through courses and cheat are as inconsequential as the dicks in college who cheated in high school and spend all day bragging about their high GPA. It does not effect the personal learning of those who want to learn.
At some point it is not the responsibility of the school to babysit the kids. It is the responsibility of the school to provide valid learning opportunities, and the students are responsible to make use of those opportunities. The world will punish those who screw up. I was recently at a presentation at a major engineering firm and it was stated that they hire as many graduates as they can, but the new hires have only months to learn the job and prove they can apply this knowledge. Do you think that your friends are going to help you cheat when six figures are involved and competition is fierce? Even at telemarketing jobs I have seen 300 page binders that are expected to be assimilated in two weeks, and then employees given two more weeks to start producing. For $10 an hour.
So no, online courses should not be singled out for cheating. But they are not going to be the means of overall educational savings. As the students who are easy to educate get filtered out to these other learning opportunities, more money per student is going to be needed to educate those who are more resistant. IMHO, this is the key to the whole debate. Online education is going to be a critical part of training kids, but it is no silver bullet.
The reality is that any experiment is just a data point, with the conclusion not nearly as interesting as the process. For instance the Millikan oil drop experiment likely had some level of fraud and probably would not be reproducible in the modern sense. However the apparatus and process did give us a path to the electric charge that eventual lead to a something that was more defensible. Likewise Einstein's photoelectric effect experiment did not prove that light was a particle. The apparatus and process were vital to experiments done half a century later that did prove the nature of light.
So the problem is not that results are invalid or scientific dishonest. IMHO the problem comes from three other sources. First, is the idea that results, not process, is the key part of a scientific study. This comes from the bad way that science is taught, and the fraudulent presentation of the scientific method. Second, is the commercial journals and their desire for publicity and 'impact factor' to drive sales. This is where I think open journals might help. Third is the focus on soft sciences, like medicine, to represent all science. In medicine, the results are all that matter, which necessarily leads to the corruption and pervasion of the entire process.
But back to the point. It is politics. Either the money is spent to put proper plumbing in a city or it is not. The important thing about plumbing is to keep the human waste from running down the open streets and into the freshwater. Toilets, no matter how fancy, are not going to keep this from happening without some sort of well funded and locally support policity.
Second, people have to use the toilets. This means that whatever facilities that are used has to be placed so that people will make use pf them and there has be regulations and policies in place to enforce them. When conservatives speak of the big bad government, I often complain that the evil government has put in place laws to force me to pay 10% more for my home, all in the name of social engineering to insure otherwise useless industries are propped up and allowed to make huge profits at the private citizens expense. What I mean, of course, if that I have no choice about the facilites I choose to place in my private home. I have to have a bathroom. I do not have the choice to take a dump outside, I have to pay for goverment mandated plumbing. Which is what we are talking about here. Forming social policies that say, presuming that every house in a village does not have a toilet, that someone has to walk half a mile instead of just using the alley.
Which is not to say that these toilets are not useful. Toilets that generate electricity would be useful, as many places do not have electricity, but such toilets would have to bought and maintained. As far as water free toilets, these exist in terms of composting toilets. What I see here is the difference between philanthropy and charity. In philanthropy a person with money decides a solution for a improvised group of people. Sometimes these solutions are good, sometimes they just promote a political or philosophical agenda. Charity is where we give money to locals person, sometimes with control on how they can use it, and allow them to develop local solutions that will work for their constraints. In the developed world do we need toilets t hat use less water? Yes, Is that a primary concern in a place that has no toilets at all? Maybe that is keeping people from having toilets, or maybe it is just a lack of priorities.It is like students who have a new pair of jordans but no pencil. Giving them a pencil will help them learn but not solve the problem.
I don't think any of the answers here solve the problem. Moodle will work as a grade book, but may be more complex that many want. There are a couple gradebooks here that may or may not be useful. What is true is that even the comments that say just use a spreadsheet are more useful than a comment that says just go to google. As mentioned, that comment is only useful for someone looking for a date, and even in that case craigslist is probably the better suggestion.
On the issue of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are very fragile. They are not very useful production tools to give to people who don't know how to fix and know the limitations of spreadsheet. They will work if you have a very competent person design them, and if they support is there when the luser messes them up.
We see this in the length of antennas. To receive a signal, the antenna has to be at least a quarter wavelength. If you look at old cars that are made to receive conventional AM signals, they are longer. If you look at newer cars that simply receive XM signals, these are very short. That is because are measured in meters, while satellite radio is measure in centimeters. The wavelength we need to resolve is shorter, so the antenna is shorter.
For black and white images, the rule is going to be different. Our eyes are not going to resolve the image. The image can use particles of smaller wavelength, such as electrons, and shown in false color or black and white.
I am just obnoxious or trying to defend Apple here, but to say in comparison it is what is going to kill innovation. Apple is saying, right or wrong, design something different, follow the FRAND rules, and be innovative. Not everything has to be an iPad or iPhone. The Kindle Fire, for example, is not remotely an iPad, but is an extremely functional machine.
OTOH, MS is saying they own everything, and anyone who does anything owes them money. This is what they did with the naked PC fight. By focusing on Apple, and their effort to innovate, instead of MS and their effort to take a cut of anything that looks like technology, we are losing the war.
I know just like the oil in the gulf of Mexico, the plastic is a natural occurrence. There a little vents that release plastic jugs. These are not a problem because natural processes break down the oil, the plastic, the pumice into small harmless pieces.
You can say what you like about solar power, but there are few costs for accidents, decommissioning, and it does not pollute the environment with mercury like coal, or contanimate the groundwater like nuclear.
I recall in high school learning basic trig so I could write a video game usinng shape tables. My teacher whose independent stuy course I was Inc was given a significant stipend to write a projectile motion game, also using trig and shape tables.
The programmern I know who make the most money, we are talking the top 1% type of money, are math people. This, IMHO is simply because so many people are afraid of math and therefore justify their life around math being not very important. I OTOH attribute my reletively casual lifestyle to the ability to do math. it simply makes a difference.
There has been a few cases in which math has allowed me solve problems that were giving others difficulty. On one project we were working on drawing charts from scratch. The code, several years old, would routines,y break when scaling the axis. It took me a day to debug and a couple to refactor code. Another was retooling a line and needing to create a model for inputs and output costs to determinie which improvements could be justified. This could be done without maths, but was much easier, meaning I had more time for side projects, with it. Then there was all the automation, I.e. robotics, stuff that would have been impossible without it.
What if MS decided to use the OSI Logo for it's program that allows certain customers to view code, it's version of open source. Would OSI be allowed to fight for trademark dilution? I think it would. And in this case it seems pretty clear to me that OSHW wants to implicitly associate itself with OSI, which may be fine and good, but what assurances that OSHW won't become a less open organization? It seems that OSHW would have little difficulty finding an original logo that would set it apart.
This may sound like very little, but there are stories of major site in which mining and industrial action has rendered entire town uninhabitable. All these people receive are fair market value of their homes and a bit of moving expense. Of course since 2003 cleanup costs of many toxic sites have been borne by the taxpayer.
The second tier stuff if most useful for RAD. That is visual basic, python, perl, PHP, Ruby. These are mostly scripting languages, and require a slightly different approach. The solution is defined in terms of the capability of the language and the available scripts. This is particularly true with Ruby. These are languages that meet specific requirements for specific purposes. For instance PHP and Ruby are what uses to write a website. Python is quite popular for home grown science applications.
Which is to say that anyone trying to promote a language because it is what they know rather than because it is what is used to solve a particular problem is like a person trying to get their boss to buy a lather for the server room because they really need a lathe for home projects. I would not try to script a website with C. I would not try write a data analysis program in assembly. The computers are simply too fast and we have had 40 years of development of tool that means we do not need to spend a quarter and a million dollars rewriting a GUI. This has always been true. In the 80's we used fortran for number crunching because that was the only language supported by IMSL. We used C for everything else because it ran on everything else.
So online learning is only going to teach students how to use useless tools. Yes I would like to teach people how to use Forth, but what is the point? We can teach students how use Shakespeare, and it would teach them techniques they need to know and would be very motivating for certain students, but where would they use it? Once a student is proficient at programming, and understand the basic concept, time needs to be spent on learning how to to efficiently acquire API knowledge
I have had laptops with up to 750GB HDD. My current laptop has a 256GB SSD, and my next will have at least 500GB. I hate to be buzzword complient, but I don't need all the video and music on my computer all the time. I can leave that in external storage, the cloud, and download it as needed. As it is most of that stuff has been sitting on external terrabyte HDD anyway, HDD that are cheap but terribly unreliable. At 256GB i have to manage the space, but I seldom run out of storage completely. The speed at which my computer boots up and runs makes all the difference in the world.
I do agree that a dollar a GB retail is really expensive, and I would never upgrade to SSD, but the marginal cost added to a new computer is often not significant.
In fact in this market MS should be happy if everyone starts using non-MS OS. Look at the facts. Samsung is paying MS at least a half million dollars a year for the right to use Android. OTOH, MS has to pay Nokia $250 million to use MS phone OS. Which is better for MS?
Back in 200 when Apple showed that *nix could be used as the basis for a Desktop OS, I thought some of the major MS partners might go this route and develop a consortium to create a desktop OS for PC users, using emulation such as we see with WINE. Of course they were happy sucking the teats of MS and making the easy money. It would have been too much work for them to develop and innovative product.
It is unclear how much the chemicals we ingest effect the enviroment. For a while there was concern that the amount of vitamins Americans consume effect the waterways. Much of these chemicals are not metabolized but flow through the body and end up as waste. It is said that many Americans have the most expensive urine in the world. Then there is the high levels of estrogen detectable in the waterways. This could be from humans, but is probably more related to agriculture and industrial waste. Beef and dairy cattle are given estrogen, and they are the likely cause of the vaste majority of the estrogen, as such waste have a much more direct path to the waterways than human waste. My thoughts about coffee is that many coffee houses will promote the coffee grounds as fertilizer. Clearly these grounds still contain some caffeine, and used as fertilizer this caffeine will go directly to waterways.I have no idea how widespread the use of the grounds are, but I were researching this issue that is where I would start.
The basic functionality with a smart phone is music, rowsing, maps, video, and mail. I am looking forward to not having the phone redirect to an app when I look at a video. I am looking forward to the voice directions, something which Google has withheld even though Apple pays a huge fortune for the rights to the Google app.