Gas prices probably don't effect the election that much. During Bush II gas prices pretty much increased continuously from the low of around $2 to a high around $3.50. As has been publicized greatly, the prices fell during the election year, but McCain still lost even though he could claim the Republicans gave us lower gas prices. This is of course not true as Clinton gave us the lowest gas prices, maybe ever, yet Gore lost. Now if you take the Bush low and compare it to the Obama high, it looks like Obama significantly increased gas prices. Which is not true. Bush just happened to leave office when prices were falling. In fact Bush doubled gas prices.Right now gas prices a little below the Bush high.
Which makes not difference because the battle is really being fought over who is going to provide low skilled private sector job and semi-skilled high paying government jobs. Through loss regulation and war, bush provided these jobs. Obama, through the reduction of government and enforcement of regulation, is killing these jobs. If you have a government job, or a unskilled job, you are screwed right now. Skilled educated workers, and has been stated by the president, has no trouble finding a job. Which is where Romney comes in. More government jobs through the military machine, he wants to increase the military budget to a statuary percentage of the GDP, as well as push 18th century technology instead of new initiatives. Where would we be if candles were subsidized because people are afraid of the incandescent light bulb. Where are we going to be if incandescents continue to waste our resources because people are afraid of CFL. Romney could win on this along with the fact that he is a white man of mexican descent.
About what the robber barrons of the earl 20th century said about paying workers a livable wage. It was believed that the workers would only waste the money of beer and meat.
Traditional institutions do not traditionally spend money on nothing. They also have donors and funds that help pay for costs and keep costs to students low. What is happening now is the rise of for profit colleges, which reportedly are 1/4 of the defaults and face higher debt and more unemployment. Obviously if one is trying to make a profit, then federal subsidies are the way to go. Just look at military and farmers and the amount of money conservatives love to give to them for nothing.
What I want to see is that a university provides an education. Not job training, but insurance for the future of our democracy.
There is a question of whether on can discover or invent something that does one does not yet know exists. For instance, Oxygen was isolated by Priestly in 1774, yet the idea that elements exists did not come for another 10 or 20 years. So while a couple people separated oxygen from the rest of the air, and did stuff with it, did they discover oxygen? I don't know.
What i do know is my first PDA, though the term did not come into use until the 1990s, was a Tandy 100. It was a portable device that stored all the data I needed for life. It was a little big, but no worse than a Dayrunner or franklin planner, and you saved on all those horribly expensive refills. This machine certainly lead me to a life or electronic organization. I also know that for some of my friends the first PDA was an HP calculator with magnetic strip attachement. This must have 1981-82. Every morning they would enter data for their plan. It was primitive but seemed to be effective for them.
I will say that, for me, the first effective and portable PDA was the Palm V.
Really this is typical of the Paul fiefdom. They want smaller government, the claim to be libertarians, but then, as soon as he gets in office, he is the same borrow and spend politicians that have characterized republicans since Reagan(debt as percent of GDP went over 50% since WWII). Just like everyone else, he knows he needs public tax dollars to pay off his friends who funded his election. Both Pauls have said, and have acted, to make sure their friends get their share fo the federal purse.
So what is wrong with current situation. It is that the TSA is a symptom, not the cause. The cause is Homeland Security, a department, which this year is adding $3billion in deficient spending over what it has been adding all the years since Bush decided that bigger government was the way to go. If we want smaller government, Paul should be giving us legislation to get rid of the DHS, putting the duties into other departments. He should get rid of medicare part D. He should stop the department of education from doing anything but reference curriculum and grants for innovative local teaching ideas. This would be smaller government and real savings. But instead he will continue to attack workers and pretend to care about the people.
You know I would say that if you have a product, you should be paid for it. But this is like MS demanding that naked computers not be sold because most computers are going to run MS Windows, so they should be paid for every computer.
The reality is that not everyone want MS, and not everyone want Monsato. For example, there is a market for organic soybeans, which must be non-GMO. But because of cross contamination, it i hard to so do.
Here what I say is fair. If monsanto can prove that it's seed were stolen, then the farmer should be prosecuted, with royalties or whatever. If a farmer can prove they did not use monsanto, and find monsanto seed on the farm, then monsanto should be held liable.
Right now there are many levels of business pushing up drug prices. In particular, insurance companies need their profits. This became worse when Bush put the federal government in the equation with medicare part D. This allowed drug companies to use hundred of billions of dollars of tax payer money to keep the prices high. Those of us in the middle pay twice, once for out own drugs, once for subsidized drugs.
We should impose efficiencies in drug distributions. Ads are a waste of money. The alleged high price marketing persons are probably a waste of money. Regulate drugs to make sure they are safe, limit payments to professionals to create fake research, and let the market pay what it feels is justified for the drug. Assume that some people are not going to have the drugs because it is simply not a priority. As Nancy said, just say no to drugs.
I guess it was almost 10 years ago that we had data suggesting the location of the beginning of the end of the influence of the Sun. I am not sure of the real significance of the termination shock, other than a marker of where that the end of the solar system is about to be breached.
The heliopause is going to be something else. The data is going to tell us the structure of this interface to intersteller space. Since the data seems to already confirm the slowing of the solar winds to subsonic speeds, we can assume that the winds will continue to slow until the intersteller backlash absorbs it. And though the bow shock does not appear to exists, what does the section of space look like as we leave the solar system. This is the creation of knowledge, the reason we go to space. Because really we just don't know otherwise.
I see it this way. As the processor cycles and memory became cheaper, it became less economical to pay humans to write efficient code. It also frees up cycles that can drive all the eye candy in the modern OS. There is a limit to this as we saw with MS Vista Aero. People are not going to pay just for eye candy. The purpose of faster processor is to reduce the overall cost.
I think the ARM revolution is greater than the license issue. I think it has to do with minimizing cost of the total product that is going be interacted with using high level APIs and not directly using the hardware. The low level routines must be written once, and then distributed globally. I think this is kind of the approach used with the Intel microcode. The fact is on mobile devices cycles are not nearly as cheap as on desktops. There are real costs in term of batteries and opportunity costs in terms of heat.
What is interesting, when I think of the RISC losing the desktop and laptop, I think of the heat problem with the PowerPC. Just using the RISC processor does not mean efficiency. It must be designed in. We see this with phones. Not all pohones use the SOC efficiently. I think this is what we are going to determine the fate fo the MS Windows phone.
Robbery to me is largely an unskilled profession. Skilled persons can scam and get cash in a much less risky manner. When I was younger I took scrap metal that was not absolutely mine, though did not steal it, and sold it. My friends in retail had many strategies. Of course some bankers are the ultimate skilled thieves, billions in the US savings and loans scandal of the 90's, continuing theft by the general financial industry in the US and worldwide. All legal enough that few are prosecuted. If one thinks that college does not pay, ask Madoff. He had to take the fall, but his family is better off than many of the clients.
So the question is bank robbery good for unskilled labor. Lets say that you pull five jobs in a year, get convicted for the last one, and get five years in prison. The robber is in jail, room and board taken care of, but the family might have 80K in unreported funds. If they are somewhat smart, they will get government assistance as well as the 13K a year average. OTOH, if the robber is less responsible they have had a lifestyle for a year that few unskilled people can have. And only worked a few weeks at most.
Sure for those of us with jobs and skills it seems a bit silly, but there a lot of people for whom 20K seems like a fortune. This is why I think that such analysis are not very useful. It does not speak to the basic root fo the crime.
It is true that a certain number of persons so commit premeditated murder with a gun. According to most statistics we have seen, this is a minority of the cases. In most cases it seems the persons are known to each other and the gun is available. In other cases the shooting may be random as the drive by in Montana. In any case most gun crimes does not seem to be well thought out or premeditated. This would seem to be a reasonable crime fighting tool. One that even if a person were framed might lead to the real perpetrator.
The thing is that in principle I don't really believe in gun control, just a well regulated militia, in which responsibility is imposed on those who misuse the guns. If people want to shoot each other, and think that is the way to live, that is the freedom of the US. It will sort itself eventually because honestly family who are totally irresponsible with gun tend to have causalities at the rate fo about 500 a year. I don't even feel the cops should get involved in a fair fight. I think something like this laser engraving, then, is a technology which can limit control overall with the introduction of some sane regulation. It does not surprise me that most pro-gun groups are against this, as most of them are really pro-control so that they can play with their toys, while those of us who are interested in defense and problem solving are controlled by the megalomaniacs that run these so-called pro-gun groups.
There are two things that go wrong with the Macbooks since their introduction. The first, and foremost, has been the DVD drive, which fails in 1-2 years. My latest DVD drive is still working, which I find amazing, though I did not use it very much. The second is the hard disk, which fails after 2 years. The third is they keyboard gets messed up.
All these have been removed from the current Macbook. The hard disk is gone, the dvd player is gone, the keyboard has been redesigned to be reliable, getting rid of the light up feature. If you consider the Applecare as part of the purchase price, which is pretty much what is needed, there is no repairs. The only other thing I have had to replace was the Airport board, which according to the teardown just pops out. All one needs is the special driver.
I thought I would have a problem with the current MacBook Air. I find the reliability and battery life after a year to be very acceptable. It really is in better condition than the previous Macbook pros. One thing may be the simplicity and lightness of the product, and the solid hinges unlike the previous bad design. Which is not to say there is not annoying issues. The inability to upgrade ram is a problem. This is not as bad as it used to be, as Apple upgrades you from 8 gb to 16 gb at $25 a GB, well within market values.
One can use genetic pieces to make guesses about who a person is descended from. For example, we are pretty sure that most europeans are descended from Neanderthals. We can also say that this person had ancestors that came from this region. But this is not about location. This is about race. So the question is can we relate genetic marker to race. Again, Hungary is in the Neanderthal region, so this guy is Neanderthal. So are Roma, though perhaps not Jewish. So is a Roma everything outside the Neanderthal? I am sure that we can define a set of markers for each race? In this sense #1 is not complex as it depends on a subjective view of what determines a race. One can say it is location, but that is just a statement, and very hard to systematically verify.
As far as ethics, they come from trial and error. We treat each other fairly because that tends to work. We sometimes distrust people who look different because they could be a threat. It has been known that tribes stole women from each other, somehow knowing that the added genetic material is inherently beneficial. Again, we breed with Neanderthals. In recent US history, we have shown that isolated an identifiable group, and persecuting them, is profitable for the short term but not so profitable for the world. So we may talk about ethics, but what we tend to learn is what will create the best world for our children. Sometimes we are forced into choosing our children over others, but that does not really work either.
First, this has nothing to do with competency. As far as I can tell, the machine was not returned in orignal condition. This to ne suggests that person who bought the computer might have been incompetent or extremely cheap, as how hard is it to make a disk image, or use a restore CD. I understand that the restore CD might cost $10-20, so that is why you just back up the hard disk yourself prior to use, or swap the hard disk as has been recommended. No shop can be responsible for taking back product that has been tampered with. That is risk makers take.
Second, it is quite possible to buy a machine that does not come with MS software. There are machines everywhere, at around $1000, that do not have MS tax on it. Of course, few people are going to spend $1000. They are going to buy a cheaper machine, with subsidies from MS and others, and then complain that their cheap machine is not what they want.
At the end of the day we get what we pay for. I prefer to buy less encumbered machines, so I pay more. I can do more with the and do not have to live in fear of the MS police cutting me off.
I hate to add this, but every once in a while I would like to have fax modem. More importantly a fax modem that could hook up to my cell phone. I need this much more that I need an ethernet port.
The thing is optics in a microscope are fragile. The controls are build for adult like dexterity and size and strength. A kid can use it, I was doing microscopy in elementary school, but never really working the controls. If you want the kid to be fully engaged with the instrument, you have to buy an instrument made for the kid.
I would also suggest that unless the primary goal i to teach how to work a microscope, mount slides, that sort of thing, a less traditional style might be in order. The eyeclops, for instance, used to have a hand held unit with a screen and memory stick storage. It let the kid go out, magnify things, and create a collage or whatever. No slicing, no mounting, none of that fun stuff, just analysis.
This is a perfect example of fact based reporting and opinion based reporting, and the sad state fo the world in which random opinion is considered equivalent to fact. For instance, the opinion that Rush Limbaugh is a child molester based on the fact that he had a sex party in a country that at the time trafficked in young boys for sex is considered a fact by the large percentage of Americans who believe opinions not fully supported by facts. Of course there is no real for us to know this is true, so a legitiimate new organization is not going report it, yet opinions as spurious as these are reported as news every day, in a false attempt to be fair and balanced.
I am sure this is done like every other show. People are screened, a number of recordings are made, and the best are broadcast. The show is edited to fit the hour timeline, and of course the calls that don't work are not broadcast. They probably use old calls as fillers. Those who listen to the show also know they have had callers call back to see if the diagnosis is correct, and at this time they include situations where diagnosis was wrong.
This is pretty typical. I watched a taping of Wait Wait, and it is also heavily edited. Not all the answers are given at the time of the question, and it is edited for time. There seems to a general attempt to show that NPR and PRI are not fact based using minor incidents of non disclosure. For instance, there is a great brouhaha over the work of humorist David Sedaris. Now, I understand that are some sad people who believe that every word in the biography of Ronald Reagan is true, but reasonable people among us know that any story, not matter how based on fact, is to some degree apocryphal. Recollections are based on reconstructing memory, which is highly unreliable. We get a realistic point of view by listening the recollection of many people.
What we have here is the proposition that a live unedited show based on personal opinion is more valid that a semi-scripted researched show based on fact.
I would agree, but if someone is interested in chemistry one has to think how that interest is to be focused. Are you going to teach chemistry, which means a hard science. That means that you ask why baking soda and milk is different from baking soda and vinegar. Bake cookies with baking soda only and baking powder only and ask what is the difference between the two that makes them different. Build similar rockets and use different size engines and note how each behaves. Why do they behave differently?
You can also approach chemistry as an inventor or engineer. This is where you blow stuff up, or just bake, or just test things for acids and bases. Plant flowers in different acid/base soils and see what happens. Due to the imposed limitations of the public schooling, this is normally the best one can expect, so doing this at home is no better or worse than the public school one is trying to avoid. I am not making a judgement, just that such thing are not really 21th century science, which you may or may not want to do.
Then there is the reading of books. This is what some people want. Valence electrons, which are talked about in books, are boring because the students has no context for it. For instance, a child can memorize all the elements and masses, but does that teach chemistry. Not without proper context. OTOH, kids that age like to memorize things and this can be done in the way that is educationally relevant. What is interesting is that the facts often leave during the reorganization of the brain during puberty, but the underlying structure and process, if taught, remains.
I would say a graduate degree indicates that one can create valid knowledge. I know that the for-profit business programs, promoted not only by for-profit but also public universities, have significantly degraded the meaning of a graduate degree, but that does not mean that we must accept that education is no longer a possibility.
Certain things may change over time. We may not all go to work and physically collaborate. We may no longer need to pay huge amounts for journals, or need to pay huge amount to store and bind the journals. But to learn to think, to know the difference between opinion and valid statement, requires some greater interaction than listening to a talking head or reading a book.
What I can see is freelance graduate advisors who charge aspiring PhD candidates hourly or fixed rate for graduate thesis. One may say that not everyone needs a graduate degree, to which the reply would be to say that $100 dollars may get you a post graduate education, but not a graduate degree, or at least not a cheap one since I can probably get a sheet of paper saying I have a graduate degree for less than $100.
This is not to say that online education is not valuable. The amount of good content online is soon going to be better than most of what is in print. But a graduate degree is very specific thing, and saying that $100 will get one is like saying that we graduate high school students based on a series of simpleton tests.
I pretty much blame this on college. University should be a place where we go to learn, but universities and industry are treating education as an impediment to employment. You must have an education or you cannot get a job. The universities are increasing tuition, and justifying the increases using university as a vocational training program instead of an education. University is using these online teaching systems as a way to cut costs rather than improving education.
First, content development has to aligned with but separate from testing material. This will increase costs, but it will insure that students have the most complelling learning experience which will not guarantee, but promote the participation of students.
Second, the testing material should be resilient enough to encourage students not to teach. This means that test banks have to large so the majority of questions any students receive are materially different. This means moving away from multiple choice, and to other questions in which students have to calculate or write short answers. With regular expressions, and MathML or LaTex is posible to write questions that can be machine graded. As has been stated, people writing the tests and people writing the content do not need to be the same people. People writing tests do not even need to university faculty.
Third, testing have to be conducted in controlled location. For most classes tests that count can be midterm and final, so this does not have to cost a lot. On other test students are free to cheat as they wish. They fail the midterm, and don't learn to study, then fail the final, they fail the class. It is really this last thing that allow cheaters to prosper. We have sympathy for students who have a bad day. We reward students that do exceptionally well on the daily stuff, and then can't perform under pressure. We want the students money, so pass students who we know deserve not to pass. And none fo this can be fixed by 'fixing' online courses, because these problems existed long before computers.
It is ignoring people like this that are going us to force to leave the planet before we are ready. The Valley is one of the last protected places in Texas, and people flock to the area for beaches and birdwatching.
I assume the main justification for putting it in brownsville is because it is on mainland US and close to the equator. The earth rotates just a bit slower there than Cape Canaveral. If this is the justification, one might propose Douglas Arizona as a better choice. It is near a major interstate, can easily get supplies from California and texas and alabama and is near a major city. Brownsville is near a major city, Monterrey. Is only loses a few percentage points of speed from brownsville. It is also 1000 m higher.
Brownsville has one other advantage that is launch over water, but honestly, there is nothing for miles for 1000 miles east of Douglas. Honestly, what we should do is assemble in the gulf coast and launch from Navassa Island which rotates at 95% of equator velocity.
In the end Texas has a pretty diverse economy. Clear lake is going to suffer with the loss of NASA, but that is not going to be a great loss.
I second this. This is not like google where innocuous searches will lead to objectionable material because of the market driven nature of searches. Firms and google wants porn on search results as it will lead to click throughs and profits. Therefore the filter is necessary for googles survival.
OTOH, Wikipedia has no such problem. Articles are not competing Against each other for clicks. Furthermore one thing that is superior to other ebncyclopedia is that controversial content can be hosted without consumer and retailer pushback. I hate to say , but this is one of those parent problems. Monitor your kids, install a filter, join a good sexual health program early so kids do not have to learn about sex on the street.
Which is why it is clear that the writer understands nothing of design. Design is there to solve a set of problems in an elegant manner. Now it is true that a good design will minimize secondary problems, but the reality is that secondary problems are secondary, and cannot overly impact the primary design. For instance, it would be wonderful if a laptop computer had a big keyboard or a big battery, but since the primary function of a laptop is to be small, these factors are significantly sacrificed.
As mentioned, the problem the clamshell solves is to be light to minimize shipping costs, protect the product from damage, from theft, allow the product to be easily seen, and easily displayed. I think that the clamshell does this at least as good as anything else. The only complaint that it is hard to open.
But what part of the lifecycle is the opening. A small fraction. Most of the life cycle is shipping, display, and the secure sale. Opening, in the grand scheme of the design, is not significant. It could be argued that since the end user is the ultimate person who needs to be satisfied, the opening might be more of an issue. But the end user is the customer of the retail sale outlet, not the manufacturer. And if a product does not sell of get stolen the retail outlet will not be happy.
Which is why Amazon is trying to change the packaging. Because it has no display or security issues. So there is no reason to make the sacrifices that the retail chain makes. And for Amazon there is a simple solution, which is to have a perforated back. The problem such a back kills the security of the package in a traditional retail environment. So something else needs to be done. I am not sure what WalMart is doing. For them, they may looking to minimize shipping and display costs.It is probably cheaper to put something on a shelf rather than hang it, so they are probably looking to sacrifice the display aspect to reduce costs.
Insurance is going to drive some of the development, but some of the development and policies will be driven knowing that the federal government will subsidize bad decisions. Take for example the Texas wildfires. Rick Perry encouraged the budget to be cut for firefighters and fire prevention, loose regulations allowed structures to be built where they presumable should not have been built, and a further presumption can be made that some of those structures did not have proper insurance because it was either too expensive or not required. I can say this because I know that, for instance, not everyone in the flood plane on the Gulf Coast of texas has flood insurance. They just expect the feds to pay the rebuilding costs.
Just like Rick Perry expected the feds to pay all the costs of the fire even though just a few months before he was saying that the state should secede. The taxes to the feds are not the problem, Texas gets most of those back, it is the Perry slush fund that allows him to reward donors. Simple fiscal incompetence. That is what tends to characterize those that don't want to invest in rational infrastructure and development, instead pushing projects based on ideology.
Just imagine if Texas had passed a law saying in 1900 saying that only long term historical data could be used to make plans. That the hurricane could not be used and it would be illegal to based future plans on the fact that Galveston had just been destroyed. It was a one time thing. Not going to happen again. That people are just liberal fanatics who want to destroy the island economy and waste billions of dollars to build an unnecessary ship channel. Texas would not be in the good shape it is now. Fortunately people in Texas are not as crazy as most other states in the south.
This kind of shenanigans is why I use apple products. Right now I can install any free OS using free Virtual Box or just native. This has always been the case. If I try to install MS Windows, I must have copy of windows for each VM, and hope that the license allows it to be used in a VM. I must call and beg MS to allow me to make a hardware change.
I also must hope that there are drivers for each and every peripheral, because MS does not have generic drivers that just lets us plug and play on the USB port. Before the USB port, to get anything to run on the PC required a intimate knowledge of interrupts.
This MS tax has always been the case when it comes to buying PCs. Now, one can buy a PC in more configurations, so that it is sometimes cheaper, but the PC is generally going to cost more because time is not free. If you want to run something else, you are paying MS plus your time. I suppose you could build a machine, but better not be in an office where you haven't paid the MS site tax. It is much simpler to just get a mac.
Slashdot Mirror
Which makes not difference because the battle is really being fought over who is going to provide low skilled private sector job and semi-skilled high paying government jobs. Through loss regulation and war, bush provided these jobs. Obama, through the reduction of government and enforcement of regulation, is killing these jobs. If you have a government job, or a unskilled job, you are screwed right now. Skilled educated workers, and has been stated by the president, has no trouble finding a job. Which is where Romney comes in. More government jobs through the military machine, he wants to increase the military budget to a statuary percentage of the GDP, as well as push 18th century technology instead of new initiatives. Where would we be if candles were subsidized because people are afraid of the incandescent light bulb. Where are we going to be if incandescents continue to waste our resources because people are afraid of CFL. Romney could win on this along with the fact that he is a white man of mexican descent.
Traditional institutions do not traditionally spend money on nothing. They also have donors and funds that help pay for costs and keep costs to students low. What is happening now is the rise of for profit colleges, which reportedly are 1/4 of the defaults and face higher debt and more unemployment. Obviously if one is trying to make a profit, then federal subsidies are the way to go. Just look at military and farmers and the amount of money conservatives love to give to them for nothing.
What I want to see is that a university provides an education. Not job training, but insurance for the future of our democracy.
What i do know is my first PDA, though the term did not come into use until the 1990s, was a Tandy 100. It was a portable device that stored all the data I needed for life. It was a little big, but no worse than a Dayrunner or franklin planner, and you saved on all those horribly expensive refills. This machine certainly lead me to a life or electronic organization. I also know that for some of my friends the first PDA was an HP calculator with magnetic strip attachement. This must have 1981-82. Every morning they would enter data for their plan. It was primitive but seemed to be effective for them.
I will say that, for me, the first effective and portable PDA was the Palm V.
So what is wrong with current situation. It is that the TSA is a symptom, not the cause. The cause is Homeland Security, a department, which this year is adding $3billion in deficient spending over what it has been adding all the years since Bush decided that bigger government was the way to go. If we want smaller government, Paul should be giving us legislation to get rid of the DHS, putting the duties into other departments. He should get rid of medicare part D. He should stop the department of education from doing anything but reference curriculum and grants for innovative local teaching ideas. This would be smaller government and real savings. But instead he will continue to attack workers and pretend to care about the people.
The reality is that not everyone want MS, and not everyone want Monsato. For example, there is a market for organic soybeans, which must be non-GMO. But because of cross contamination, it i hard to so do.
Here what I say is fair. If monsanto can prove that it's seed were stolen, then the farmer should be prosecuted, with royalties or whatever. If a farmer can prove they did not use monsanto, and find monsanto seed on the farm, then monsanto should be held liable.
We should impose efficiencies in drug distributions. Ads are a waste of money. The alleged high price marketing persons are probably a waste of money. Regulate drugs to make sure they are safe, limit payments to professionals to create fake research, and let the market pay what it feels is justified for the drug. Assume that some people are not going to have the drugs because it is simply not a priority. As Nancy said, just say no to drugs.
The heliopause is going to be something else. The data is going to tell us the structure of this interface to intersteller space. Since the data seems to already confirm the slowing of the solar winds to subsonic speeds, we can assume that the winds will continue to slow until the intersteller backlash absorbs it. And though the bow shock does not appear to exists, what does the section of space look like as we leave the solar system. This is the creation of knowledge, the reason we go to space. Because really we just don't know otherwise.
I think the ARM revolution is greater than the license issue. I think it has to do with minimizing cost of the total product that is going be interacted with using high level APIs and not directly using the hardware. The low level routines must be written once, and then distributed globally. I think this is kind of the approach used with the Intel microcode. The fact is on mobile devices cycles are not nearly as cheap as on desktops. There are real costs in term of batteries and opportunity costs in terms of heat.
What is interesting, when I think of the RISC losing the desktop and laptop, I think of the heat problem with the PowerPC. Just using the RISC processor does not mean efficiency. It must be designed in. We see this with phones. Not all pohones use the SOC efficiently. I think this is what we are going to determine the fate fo the MS Windows phone.
So the question is bank robbery good for unskilled labor. Lets say that you pull five jobs in a year, get convicted for the last one, and get five years in prison. The robber is in jail, room and board taken care of, but the family might have 80K in unreported funds. If they are somewhat smart, they will get government assistance as well as the 13K a year average. OTOH, if the robber is less responsible they have had a lifestyle for a year that few unskilled people can have. And only worked a few weeks at most.
Sure for those of us with jobs and skills it seems a bit silly, but there a lot of people for whom 20K seems like a fortune. This is why I think that such analysis are not very useful. It does not speak to the basic root fo the crime.
The thing is that in principle I don't really believe in gun control, just a well regulated militia, in which responsibility is imposed on those who misuse the guns. If people want to shoot each other, and think that is the way to live, that is the freedom of the US. It will sort itself eventually because honestly family who are totally irresponsible with gun tend to have causalities at the rate fo about 500 a year. I don't even feel the cops should get involved in a fair fight. I think something like this laser engraving, then, is a technology which can limit control overall with the introduction of some sane regulation. It does not surprise me that most pro-gun groups are against this, as most of them are really pro-control so that they can play with their toys, while those of us who are interested in defense and problem solving are controlled by the megalomaniacs that run these so-called pro-gun groups.
All these have been removed from the current Macbook. The hard disk is gone, the dvd player is gone, the keyboard has been redesigned to be reliable, getting rid of the light up feature. If you consider the Applecare as part of the purchase price, which is pretty much what is needed, there is no repairs. The only other thing I have had to replace was the Airport board, which according to the teardown just pops out. All one needs is the special driver.
I thought I would have a problem with the current MacBook Air. I find the reliability and battery life after a year to be very acceptable. It really is in better condition than the previous Macbook pros. One thing may be the simplicity and lightness of the product, and the solid hinges unlike the previous bad design. Which is not to say there is not annoying issues. The inability to upgrade ram is a problem. This is not as bad as it used to be, as Apple upgrades you from 8 gb to 16 gb at $25 a GB, well within market values.
As far as ethics, they come from trial and error. We treat each other fairly because that tends to work. We sometimes distrust people who look different because they could be a threat. It has been known that tribes stole women from each other, somehow knowing that the added genetic material is inherently beneficial. Again, we breed with Neanderthals. In recent US history, we have shown that isolated an identifiable group, and persecuting them, is profitable for the short term but not so profitable for the world. So we may talk about ethics, but what we tend to learn is what will create the best world for our children. Sometimes we are forced into choosing our children over others, but that does not really work either.
Second, it is quite possible to buy a machine that does not come with MS software. There are machines everywhere, at around $1000, that do not have MS tax on it. Of course, few people are going to spend $1000. They are going to buy a cheaper machine, with subsidies from MS and others, and then complain that their cheap machine is not what they want.
At the end of the day we get what we pay for. I prefer to buy less encumbered machines, so I pay more. I can do more with the and do not have to live in fear of the MS police cutting me off.
I hate to add this, but every once in a while I would like to have fax modem. More importantly a fax modem that could hook up to my cell phone. I need this much more that I need an ethernet port.
My first though is without a battery the dock is a non starter. What does everyone want when they leave work. A fully charged phone.
I would also suggest that unless the primary goal i to teach how to work a microscope, mount slides, that sort of thing, a less traditional style might be in order. The eyeclops, for instance, used to have a hand held unit with a screen and memory stick storage. It let the kid go out, magnify things, and create a collage or whatever. No slicing, no mounting, none of that fun stuff, just analysis.
I am sure this is done like every other show. People are screened, a number of recordings are made, and the best are broadcast. The show is edited to fit the hour timeline, and of course the calls that don't work are not broadcast. They probably use old calls as fillers. Those who listen to the show also know they have had callers call back to see if the diagnosis is correct, and at this time they include situations where diagnosis was wrong.
This is pretty typical. I watched a taping of Wait Wait, and it is also heavily edited. Not all the answers are given at the time of the question, and it is edited for time. There seems to a general attempt to show that NPR and PRI are not fact based using minor incidents of non disclosure. For instance, there is a great brouhaha over the work of humorist David Sedaris. Now, I understand that are some sad people who believe that every word in the biography of Ronald Reagan is true, but reasonable people among us know that any story, not matter how based on fact, is to some degree apocryphal. Recollections are based on reconstructing memory, which is highly unreliable. We get a realistic point of view by listening the recollection of many people.
What we have here is the proposition that a live unedited show based on personal opinion is more valid that a semi-scripted researched show based on fact.
You can also approach chemistry as an inventor or engineer. This is where you blow stuff up, or just bake, or just test things for acids and bases. Plant flowers in different acid/base soils and see what happens. Due to the imposed limitations of the public schooling, this is normally the best one can expect, so doing this at home is no better or worse than the public school one is trying to avoid. I am not making a judgement, just that such thing are not really 21th century science, which you may or may not want to do.
Then there is the reading of books. This is what some people want. Valence electrons, which are talked about in books, are boring because the students has no context for it. For instance, a child can memorize all the elements and masses, but does that teach chemistry. Not without proper context. OTOH, kids that age like to memorize things and this can be done in the way that is educationally relevant. What is interesting is that the facts often leave during the reorganization of the brain during puberty, but the underlying structure and process, if taught, remains.
Certain things may change over time. We may not all go to work and physically collaborate. We may no longer need to pay huge amounts for journals, or need to pay huge amount to store and bind the journals. But to learn to think, to know the difference between opinion and valid statement, requires some greater interaction than listening to a talking head or reading a book.
What I can see is freelance graduate advisors who charge aspiring PhD candidates hourly or fixed rate for graduate thesis. One may say that not everyone needs a graduate degree, to which the reply would be to say that $100 dollars may get you a post graduate education, but not a graduate degree, or at least not a cheap one since I can probably get a sheet of paper saying I have a graduate degree for less than $100.
This is not to say that online education is not valuable. The amount of good content online is soon going to be better than most of what is in print. But a graduate degree is very specific thing, and saying that $100 will get one is like saying that we graduate high school students based on a series of simpleton tests.
First, content development has to aligned with but separate from testing material. This will increase costs, but it will insure that students have the most complelling learning experience which will not guarantee, but promote the participation of students.
Second, the testing material should be resilient enough to encourage students not to teach. This means that test banks have to large so the majority of questions any students receive are materially different. This means moving away from multiple choice, and to other questions in which students have to calculate or write short answers. With regular expressions, and MathML or LaTex is posible to write questions that can be machine graded. As has been stated, people writing the tests and people writing the content do not need to be the same people. People writing tests do not even need to university faculty.
Third, testing have to be conducted in controlled location. For most classes tests that count can be midterm and final, so this does not have to cost a lot. On other test students are free to cheat as they wish. They fail the midterm, and don't learn to study, then fail the final, they fail the class. It is really this last thing that allow cheaters to prosper. We have sympathy for students who have a bad day. We reward students that do exceptionally well on the daily stuff, and then can't perform under pressure. We want the students money, so pass students who we know deserve not to pass. And none fo this can be fixed by 'fixing' online courses, because these problems existed long before computers.
I assume the main justification for putting it in brownsville is because it is on mainland US and close to the equator. The earth rotates just a bit slower there than Cape Canaveral. If this is the justification, one might propose Douglas Arizona as a better choice. It is near a major interstate, can easily get supplies from California and texas and alabama and is near a major city. Brownsville is near a major city, Monterrey. Is only loses a few percentage points of speed from brownsville. It is also 1000 m higher.
Brownsville has one other advantage that is launch over water, but honestly, there is nothing for miles for 1000 miles east of Douglas. Honestly, what we should do is assemble in the gulf coast and launch from Navassa Island which rotates at 95% of equator velocity.
In the end Texas has a pretty diverse economy. Clear lake is going to suffer with the loss of NASA, but that is not going to be a great loss.
OTOH, Wikipedia has no such problem. Articles are not competing Against each other for clicks. Furthermore one thing that is superior to other ebncyclopedia is that controversial content can be hosted without consumer and retailer pushback. I hate to say , but this is one of those parent problems. Monitor your kids, install a filter, join a good sexual health program early so kids do not have to learn about sex on the street.
As mentioned, the problem the clamshell solves is to be light to minimize shipping costs, protect the product from damage, from theft, allow the product to be easily seen, and easily displayed. I think that the clamshell does this at least as good as anything else. The only complaint that it is hard to open.
But what part of the lifecycle is the opening. A small fraction. Most of the life cycle is shipping, display, and the secure sale. Opening, in the grand scheme of the design, is not significant. It could be argued that since the end user is the ultimate person who needs to be satisfied, the opening might be more of an issue. But the end user is the customer of the retail sale outlet, not the manufacturer. And if a product does not sell of get stolen the retail outlet will not be happy.
Which is why Amazon is trying to change the packaging. Because it has no display or security issues. So there is no reason to make the sacrifices that the retail chain makes. And for Amazon there is a simple solution, which is to have a perforated back. The problem such a back kills the security of the package in a traditional retail environment. So something else needs to be done. I am not sure what WalMart is doing. For them, they may looking to minimize shipping and display costs.It is probably cheaper to put something on a shelf rather than hang it, so they are probably looking to sacrifice the display aspect to reduce costs.
Just like Rick Perry expected the feds to pay all the costs of the fire even though just a few months before he was saying that the state should secede. The taxes to the feds are not the problem, Texas gets most of those back, it is the Perry slush fund that allows him to reward donors. Simple fiscal incompetence. That is what tends to characterize those that don't want to invest in rational infrastructure and development, instead pushing projects based on ideology.
Just imagine if Texas had passed a law saying in 1900 saying that only long term historical data could be used to make plans. That the hurricane could not be used and it would be illegal to based future plans on the fact that Galveston had just been destroyed. It was a one time thing. Not going to happen again. That people are just liberal fanatics who want to destroy the island economy and waste billions of dollars to build an unnecessary ship channel. Texas would not be in the good shape it is now. Fortunately people in Texas are not as crazy as most other states in the south.
I also must hope that there are drivers for each and every peripheral, because MS does not have generic drivers that just lets us plug and play on the USB port. Before the USB port, to get anything to run on the PC required a intimate knowledge of interrupts.
This MS tax has always been the case when it comes to buying PCs. Now, one can buy a PC in more configurations, so that it is sometimes cheaper, but the PC is generally going to cost more because time is not free. If you want to run something else, you are paying MS plus your time. I suppose you could build a machine, but better not be in an office where you haven't paid the MS site tax. It is much simpler to just get a mac.