This is the first thing that crossed my mind. He presents himself as someone who is for limited government and personal freedom. In fact when important voltes like this come up, here is no where to be seen, but when there is pork to be gotten he is happily in line. He isn't first in line, but does manage to show up.
Which is the point. At this point in our technology, flying cars and moon bases are possible, but will they solve any real problems or generate a profit. Certainly we imagined flying cars much more than music players that could would not skip in a car and hold a million songs and play them with no degradation over time. But what do we have?
WRT to extraterrestrial life, if the question is existence, I am sure at some point in the future we will see some evidence of it. However given the size of the universe and the time the universe exists, will we every meet such a creature? Maybe not. Is the search worthwhile? Sure. Exploration, even when we did not know if we would find anything at all has always been profitable. It is like the basic survival instinct of humans.
While I have not done any work in this field, for deeply technical books, not the general reference that places like O'Reilly produces, I find that Addison Wesley is one of the better publishers. When I need such a book I first look at what AW has.
I would also look at what the Association for Computing Machinery has. I had a memebership a while back and it seems they had so resources on this topic. In fact looking back they have a book called VHDL for Programmable Logic, which I have no idea if it what you are looking for, but there you go.
To be pedantic, Ron Paul is not running for president and he likely never will be. He is running for the nomination to be the presidential candidate for the republican party.
The very fact that is running to be a candidate for the Republican Party, and not running to be president, shows his lack of seriousness to actually change anything. He could be an independent candidate. He has the popularity, the resources, the name recognition. He, is, however more interested in profiting off the party system and big government rather than making incremental changes that will result in the more prosperous and libertarian society he claims to want.
How does he leverage big government? His district, for instance, is dependent on the government dole. Most people work directly or indirectly for the government. NASA controls everything at a time when it makes a lot of sense to privatize space travel using libertarian ideals. He has the federal government build bus stops and infrastructure so the locals can pay domestic help less, instead of letting the free market work. He has the government pay the shrimp industry huge sums of money to convince people to eat shrimp rather than, again, allowing the free market to work.
If Paul were serious about changing the world, he could do a lot. Unlike Alaska, Arizona, and the like, Texas does not need the government dole. We are fiscally responsible people. Paul could be more local to end the waste that results in million dollar bus stops with contracts given to buddies, government funding that promotes one industry over another, and government control of what should be free enterprise. His continuous affiliation with the republican party proves his unwillingness to truly fight for what he says he believes.
I think a Ron Paul presidential candidate would be cool, but the farce of a Ron Paul republican nomination just indicates the continuation of national office to generate personal profit.
It seems to me that this would be of equal or higher benefit to the drug maker. From what I can tell, the FDA regulation really provides more of an affermative defense to the drug makers than real protection to the consumer. If the drug maker jumps through certain hoops, conducts certain tests, then they are basically guaranteed that if their product kills someone, even if the data shows that it kills people, they will have limited liability if the FDA said the drug was safe.
Of course the problem right now is that devices that can be hacked are unregulated, so the device manufacturers can say they were following all the FDA rules, which are none, and therefore cannot be held responsible for anything. Of course any regulation will probably be insufficient and will likely only serve to give the manufacturers cover. I would just like to see the companies be criminally and civilly responsible for any device that is hacked. This would give confidence to the patient. If the device is hacked, even if you are not harmed, you will have grounds to go after the doctor, the firm who sold the device, the manufacturer.
These are graders for standardized tests in the middle and high school grades. There is still plenty of time to interact with students. Automated graders, however, provide significant benefit. First the provide the first level of grading to insure that the students is doing what is necessary to pass the end of course or end of semester test. If a computer is going to grade the work, then the student needs to write for the computer. Likewise, the computer grading papers helps insure the teaching is teaching and students are learning the skills mandated by the state. This helps the student as the student is less likely to arrive at a test after being taught skills not tested by a creative teacher. It also provides feedback on progress
Presumably during the year the teacher is reading for content, and not just stucture. If a computer is grading the teacher can spend more time on content, thus helping the student get into the habit of critical thinking that will lead to more factual essays. But how much time needs to be spent of facts for an language essa? My impression is that the essay will either have a short prompt, where the student will state feelings or impressions or opinions of the prompt, or will read a story, and then pull quotes from that story to support and opinion on the story. Neither of these are particularly connected to reality.
Galileo just sat in church watching chandeliers swing. One of my professors when I was in school got a paper out of watching the pool while he was vacationing in Mexico. My high school sent a getaway special a couple years after I graduated. Sometimes Physics is just mathematical models, sometimes it is big expensive experiments. I tWe are in a time of big experiments at the moment because the years 1900-1950 or so were spent rewriting the classical laws of physics into Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity, then after that time continuing to figure out why they do not mesh.
What we are seeing now is a few decades of really big science to test the models and discover which are correct, which are not, and which need to be rewritten. This is not going to be a forever process. At some point our experiments will result in data and we will have another direction to go in. Cyclotrons are not going to get arbitrarily big. Spacecraft will eventually need to be sent out and we are simply going to have to wait. We may see a time when the theoretical physicists have to work for a few decades to understand what we need to build next.
First, books are only dangerous if we feel we know everything there is to know, and everything we know is fact. For instance, a book about Homo Sapiens dwelling a caves over 200,000 years ago and evolving to Homo Sapiens Sapiens will be unwelcome information to those who believe that the earth has only existed for thousands of years and Humans were placed here fully formed. In the absence of an attachment to assumptions, such reading is merely philosophy. It serves to put our worldview against another, allowing us to look critically at our weltanschauungs and judge them in a fair light.
In terms of the research and intellectual debate, such a thing is more complex than the average person thinks. First, any paper is merely a data point. One paper, or even a trend of papers does not constitute facts. It constitutes data, nothing else. The data must be judged against what has come before and what will come later. In particular data that demands major changes in previous scientific analysis is going to suspect, especially when such research conveniently support what people outside of science want to believe.
Then there are issue directly to the article. First, we do not live in caves. Most of us live relatively sedentary, climate controlled, peaceful lives. Therefore any comparison between us and them is problematic. This problem that we are do not live in caves is countered by stating, at the paper does, that our brains evolved to eat meat. Which of course is nonsense. Our brains evolved because there was excess protein, which at the time of hunting and gathering, was best provided by meat. Our brains need lots of glucose, which at the time could also be provided with meat.
Of course this is silly because we do not live as hunter gathers either. We are a highly industrialized agriculture world community. Protein can come from many sources. For example, so meat-as-critical-to-evolution articles cite Methionine, an important amino acid. To the hunter gathers who lived in areas other than what is now south america the best source of Methionine is beef and fish. Of course this is no longer true. For a vegetarians eggs and cheese provide superior levels of this amino acid. For vegans brazil nuts and corn provide perfectly adequate sources. Which begs the question, if humans had evolved in south america would there be a culture of eating land animals at all? Would humans had evolved on fish and nuts and berries, and would we now be arguing how beef is the antithesis to the intelligent mind.
Speaking to the parent post, the proposition that we are a meat and caveman society can lead to the hierarchical homogeny of the (white) male. I only bring this up as the parent asserts that arguing a feminist point of view is less sane than arguing we all live as cavemen. In the meat and caveman argument we have a situation where strength is important. As long as we believe we are cavemen, we can believe that physical strength is critical. Of course we also know that intelligence is important, so we in fact look for sufficient strength and superior intelligence. We see this in the research that asserts people who recently descended from the African continent are less intelligent than western Europeans. This is important data so that western europeans can feel superior even though they may be less physically strong.
We see the same thing with women, who are characterized as physically and intellectually weak. Of course these are in cavemen tasks and not in the real world we live in, where tools have made physical strength less important and change the nature of what kind of intelligence is important. I am not talking about the emotional crap, but the importance of novel problem solving as opposed to rote. If we let go of the cavemen mentality, then many people who are power are going to suffer. It is just like letting go of the idea that aristocrats were chosen by g-d to be our leader.
We see this in the recent argument over the importance of a homemaker. Sure, one c
We criticise(sic) microsoft for ending support for XP after 13 years, and Apple drops all support after TWO and get a pass? Something like 25% of mac users are using Leopard or older - not least due the removal of PPC support in snow leopard.
First, the 13 years of MS support for MS WIndows XP is not a good metric. MS actually only supported retail XP for less than a year after retail sales ended, and it might have been possible for a consumer to buy a new XP machine with no support.
Since all machines Apple sell come with a current OS, Apple will even provide free upgrades if an upgrade occurs a short time after a purchase, using the MS metric, consumer support should not even extend past the retirement of the old OS.
In reality Leopard became the 'Old OS' in August 2009, with a total life time of less than two years, and old just now has support ended this year. Apple should be criticized because Leopard coverage should go to the end of the year.
Apple says that it will provide support for three years if a user pays, but what is support without software updates for the OS that came with the machine. If the updates were free that would be one thing, but the Snow Leopard was not free, and was not $30. This is particularly critical for Leopard as it is the last version that will run on PPC machines. Although in fairness these machines have not been sold since 2008.
Apple has been on the cloud for 12 years. To effectively manage all your apple devices used to cost $100 a year. This did not include music and videos, but all the other data was included. Mail, addresses, calendar, and password for macs. Also several gigabytes of documents. Docks and preferences were also synced between macs. So the future is the past. For many of us it was a valuable service that allowed us to get work done. There were some fringe benefits involving managing other people machines as well. And it was not even $10 a month for the basic service. Many complained because it was not a free service. They preferred to give personal information to Google to mine and sell.
The new service is not work centered. It is entertainment centered. It replaces useful functionality with the ability to store music and videos. It is free, which is what people want. It may one day be useful, but I am struggling to find services to replace the useful work that mobileme once did.
Yes the new cloud is a good thing if ITunes die. Apple is not first place I go buy videos because iTunes just sucks that much. This new clould monstrosity might be a revenue source in that people might buy more music and videos if they do not have to store it locally. It will certainly be a selling point for what ever living room device is going to be sold i the near future. But as far as profit, no. Apple had products like that. If no one is going to pay $100 a year for sync and storage and backup of critical information, then no one is going to pay $100 a year to store music and video they paid for.
Years ago I got a good deal on a high capacity optical drive for my laptop. It was a time of hard disks in the range of 1GB, so the optical drive not only greatly enhanced my storage space buy also provided a very effective back up solutions. CDs and DVD have never been a good backup solution for me, and hard disks are good for incremental frequent backups, but aren't really any better at long term backups. If someone were able to to produce these drives at a reasonable cost, less than $200, and the disk were not hugely expensive, this would be a good solution for backups. However I fear that the drives will cost $500 and therefore it will suffer the fate of all other optical media not used for entertainment. It will simply be too expensive for widespread adoption. Even with drives that play video, the performance of Blueray is interesting.
Homeland Security in general, and the TSA in particular, is a jobs program. Given that some have a fundamentalist belief in the value of work, instead of paying them a few hundred dollars a month in support, and the food and rent asstance, we are paying 2-4X that amount to have then stand around the airport and harass people. Admittedly it might be more expensive to do the job right, pay well trained profilers to observe passengers, but then it would be doing some good. This would be light wall.
There is little that the TSA can do to prevent someone from exploding plane. Hijacking, in the classic sense, is pretty much a proposition without legs. When you have a planeload of people assuming they are dead already, the idea that you are going to make it to Cuba or where is not going to happen.
So create a law. I have seen cars sold for less than the prices on ebay for an iPhone.
I think the real reason that cars have such a system and phones haven't is cultural, with some economic self interest involved. The cultural is that personal transportation, at least in the US, is a big issue. There was a time when horse thieves were simply hanged. If someone comes into you home and steals all you stuff, there is not as much as a furor as a car theft.
Then there is economics. Cars are insured by third parties with no connection to the agent that sold or the agent that provides servie for you car. The insurance company then wants to do stuff to minimize car theft, as they will be out real money for the retail value of a replacement. OTOH, insurance for phones is sold by the carriers, at very high rates, and these firms only need to replace the handset, not pay cash for a retail replacement. Therefore it is in the interest of the carriers to create an environment where customers are highly motivated to acquire this insurance, which they do through contracts and encouraging theft.
The Voyager program, like most of the US space efforts, is creating data that benefits the world. With Voyager in particular, the world has gotten a great value because we not only got data on the outer planets, but also an extended mission that is going to define boundaries that we are able to define in no other way. It is interesting to note that the Voyager program not only was not funded to map the edges of the solar system, but was not even fully funded for it's original mission, to visit most of the planets.
In spite of this limited funding, like so many other NASA project, it met and exceeding objectives. As such it is strange that we are complaining that we have no deep space program when we really never had a deep space program. What we have had are basic program that have been extended as able. We have, for the first time, a defined boundary of the solar system. Now that we know, a formal intersteller mission can be planned. But, as mentioned this is world project, so it should be funded by others in addition to the US.
The problem with the space program is US funding. Increasingly citizens in the US want their entitlements without any strings attached. The progress we have made has been costly, and I thank past generations for shouldering the cost that has made the US a great place to live. It is sad that the current generation is so self absorbed that they cannot think of anything beyond the dollars they have to spend to keep the US great.
It is interesting to note that cable companies pay to rebroadcast the broadcast TV signals. If it is legal to broadcast the signal without license over the internet for compensation, then it will theoretical be legal to rebroadcast those signals over cable as well. Which would irreparable the TV networks.
This technology is not the VCR. This is more like someone setting up a business which will record desired show on tape, and the sell you the tape. That would not be a bad model. Set up hundreds of machines, record a customized set of show for a given night for a given customer, sell the tape for $10. I don't think this, however, would be legal.
OTOH, the problem is caused by random network licensing issues. How much sense does it make to be able to watch Hulu on a laptop, but not a tablet or phone. Most people don't have the data plans to stream Hulu over the cell network, so they are likely going to watch as on a laptop. That someone takes advantage of this arbitrage and tries to monazite it is no surprise.
I feel the same way about gun control. Let everyone have a gun. If two people with guns kill each other, don't waste time prosecuting, call it a fair fight. If a kid dies with a parent gun, call it an act of god. The problem is the people with guns are not the only ones to get hurt. The kid accidentally kills a friend, a guy hyped up on the power a gun gives him goes looking for a fight and kills and unarmed person. This does not change the original statement, everything has risks, but simply to the risks are not limited to an individual.
The same thing with helmets and motorcycles. Sure, on one level the only one hurt is person choosing not to wear a helmet, but in a broader sense if that person is killed in a multi vehicle collision, there is going to be some effect, either real or emotional, on the other person. It could increase car insurance rates which we are all required to have in the US.
So everything has risks, and what we have said as a society is that vaccines on balance lower risk. This does not mean that if there is something in vaccines that may make them riskier the manufacturers can jut ignore it. That is crazy. They are being paid for a product, and market forces should work to move the product to the safest possible, even if that is only a perception. But vaccines keep everyone healthy, so some should not be able to say no just because the feel more important than everyone else, they feel they are going to externalize risk onto someone else's kid.
The externalization of costs is great. How many of these kids do not have insurance and therefore their care is paid for by the taxpayer? If they have insurance, how much are our rates going to increase because these people think they are self sufficient individualist who don't have to follow social rules.
I would be much more supportive of these people if they didn't come crying for handouts when something goes wrong, like the Texas governor complaining that the federal government only pays a majority of the costs of fight wildfire. Why should Texas, whose governor does not even want to part of the US, pay anything to fight fires on it's own land.
The dishonest thing about "astroturfing" is the lack of full disclosure. I see nothing wrong with an employee or developer or managet stating in a review who they think is good about a product. Heck, I would even welcome some inside information about details that make the product really good. However the consumer does have a right to know when a review has a deep interest in the success of a product. I know disclosure is not always permitted, so what I would say is to write nothing that is untrue.
In any case I wonder if these programs really work. If a product is popular, the competition has an equal right to state honestly everything they think is bad about a product. In the end all we have is an arms race where the outcome is determined by advertising resources, not quality of product. And then we back where we started from.
The law tends to support the idea of controversy
Neither the state board of education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.
Ideally what this means is that a teacher can present the fluid dynamics, and when a student asks about the parting of the red sea, show why such a thing is physically impossible if we accept the laws of physics which have quite a bit more objective evidence than the bible. As long as the teacher is objective, and is trying to help the student understand, in this case using the compare and contrast, and never says the student does not have a right to believe whatever he or she wishes, then no school can discipline the teacher.
The folly of this bill will present itself when the teacher union starts using it to grieve school districts who wish to fire teachers based on classroom performance. Any student or teacher complaint about the content of a science teachers performance, as long as the teacher is within the curriculum and does not bring up the subject, is going to be used to limit the power the school to remove teachers.
While I love my gecko based browser, the engine does not hold the critical position it did even a year ago. Webkit is now stable and functional. If MS chooses to make trouble for Gecko, all that will happen is more people will go to Webkit and we will improve that layout engine. I don't think the loss of competition between Gecko and Webkit will hurt, and the primary competitor has been MS IE.
What is interesting is that two of these things are problems that, for better or worse, and maybe for good reason, were designed into the system. 'My Computer' is a stupid name for the stuff on a computer. Even more stupid then 'Trash' to eject a disk, as that can be trained to.
The telephone system sucks for older people or people with some hearing loss. I am sure there was a good reason to make the frequency range so small, but as older people are expected to do everything they same as they always did, it becomes more of a problem. Fortunately there is Skype with is a lifesaver.
As far as everything else, support, like teaching, is about asking questions and assuming nothing. It is hard because the other person thinks they are being talked down to, but then some people cannot be helped.
Just thinking if this is about television prices falling, music missteps, or just general lack of customer confidence. There was a time, back in the tube tv days that Sony was the goto brand. They had the best tubes, and the best TV. Now I would be more likely to go with Samsung than Sony, and have in fact acquired two of these. Sony just seems nothing special.
I don't really know who produces the music I listen to. I am not going to buy a popular recording because of a label. But with all the negative publicity, I would be more likely to buy a non-sony product than a sony produce. There is still at least a perception of a premium, and the premium is certainly not worth it to me.
To be fair, this is a private business which aparently recently raised 8 million USD in funds. Private funding agents do expect to loase some money, but they also expect to get a boat load back occasionally. As such this is not a case of a non profit or educational institution trying to collate content for educational purposes. It is private company that expects to use copyrighted material as a template to create material that may not be copyrighted, but is expected to be sold for a profit at some future time. To me it is like remixing. If I am remixing for myself or for an educational purpose, that should be more or less ok. If I set up a firm and get millions of dollars, then it becomes more ambiguous.
I have seen firms like this. Mixing, adding value, and then, sometimes, selling the product. A lot of times it depends on the amount of original product. If we use another analogy, and go back a while, we can look at the Compaq clean room development of the PC clone, or the MS writing of MS WIndows based on the Apple Macintosh System GUI. Both had sufficient independence that the courts found then not infringing.
It is not clear that this is not infringing. The process starts with a copyrighted textbook. The firm then copies the presentation in the textbook replacing copyrighted content with copyleft content. Is this fair? I don't know. It seems fishy to me.
What really caught my eye though is the FAQ that does not appear to be on the website but does exist in the Google cache. In this FAQ, and I quote
Do Boundless textbooks contain the problem and question sets from the original textbooks?
No. We are working on a long term solution, but in the meantime there are a few easy options if your professor assigns questions directly from the book:
1. Grab the questions from one of your friends, school library, or professor. Many professors will post the questions to your class page.
2. You can find the questions to most large college textbooks online with a simple search. Search your assigned textbook name + chapter+ “questions” on Google.
3. Many sites such as Cramster.com will provide answers to all major college textbooks on their site.
All three of these options in addition to using Boundless are better than wasting hard earned money.
To the reasonable observer it certainly seems that the firm is encouraging students to engage in a practice that might violate copyright for no other reason to promote the profits of the firm. Mind you students have been copying problem sets for years. In many cases, a student solution manual is available at a fraction of the cost of the textbook, and many just buy this. But professors and others are very careful to never encourage such practice. You can't go the university copy shop and have someone copy the sets, you must do it yourself.
So, to be clear I do not have any idea if what Boundless is doing is illegal, but the fact that it is a for profit firm seems to make a lot of the fair use and educational points moot. They do not seem to be adding value to the material. They pull stuff off the net and then sends the kids back to the original textbook. I would think that a textbook replacement at least would have problems sets. I don't take much credence in using the same examples, as there are just so many ways to illustrate a concept, but a book without problem sets is no book at all.
We all go to movies? Is what in the movies real? Is there anything real about the situation? Should be arrest Anthony Hopkins as a serial killer? Of course not.
As we see with dubious edits by James O'Keefe and his co-conspirators of films at NPR and Planned Parenthood, there is little way for the public to know if a film depicts other than a particular viewpoint. Any recording is this way. Take the NBC edits of the 911 call. In the original it appeared that a question was being answered, in the edit it appears that a racial bias was being promoted, in either it is not absolutely clear what the real situation is.
The problem is that many employees, and many employers, are going to create an adversarial relationship at work. Do what I say or you will be fired. You are picking on me because you don't like me. Employers are going to want more work than the employer feels paid for, the employee is going to want to do only the work that is necessary. Obviously there is motive on both sides to create a biased representation. I don't think employees want to be filmed any more than employers. The lack of context in any film is just too potentially incriminating.
I don't know how many people have seen a 2D movie converted to 3D. I saw Lion King 3D and it seemed flat compared to other films original made in 3D. It might be my imagination, but the Christmas Carol seemed much more natural.
My thought, then, is if Titanic 3D is going to turn people of to converted 3D movies. This may the first movie of this type many will see, and there is a huge if misguided following for Titanic. Expectations are high and I don't think the technology is up to the expectations. Of course, many will accept whatever they are given, so it may have no effect.
He said in an interview that he had never seen an Internet provider modifying Web pages that a person visits.
I guess this speaks to inexperience of the web developer. It was not long ago that ISPs were trying to do this. It was not that long ago that web developers put third content within a frame along with ads that generated personal revenue. AFAIR, this idea of pushing personal ads over third party content is as old as the mass advertising on the web. And I know some ISPs specifically did this.
This is a negative practice. It is one of the primary reason used to justify web blockers. While one might trust the website, there are many ways to inject other ads and content into a web page. As such, it is best, from a security perspective, not to load ads.
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This is the first thing that crossed my mind. He presents himself as someone who is for limited government and personal freedom. In fact when important voltes like this come up, here is no where to be seen, but when there is pork to be gotten he is happily in line. He isn't first in line, but does manage to show up.
WRT to extraterrestrial life, if the question is existence, I am sure at some point in the future we will see some evidence of it. However given the size of the universe and the time the universe exists, will we every meet such a creature? Maybe not. Is the search worthwhile? Sure. Exploration, even when we did not know if we would find anything at all has always been profitable. It is like the basic survival instinct of humans.
I would also look at what the Association for Computing Machinery has. I had a memebership a while back and it seems they had so resources on this topic. In fact looking back they have a book called VHDL for Programmable Logic, which I have no idea if it what you are looking for, but there you go.
The very fact that is running to be a candidate for the Republican Party, and not running to be president, shows his lack of seriousness to actually change anything. He could be an independent candidate. He has the popularity, the resources, the name recognition. He, is, however more interested in profiting off the party system and big government rather than making incremental changes that will result in the more prosperous and libertarian society he claims to want.
How does he leverage big government? His district, for instance, is dependent on the government dole. Most people work directly or indirectly for the government. NASA controls everything at a time when it makes a lot of sense to privatize space travel using libertarian ideals. He has the federal government build bus stops and infrastructure so the locals can pay domestic help less, instead of letting the free market work. He has the government pay the shrimp industry huge sums of money to convince people to eat shrimp rather than, again, allowing the free market to work.
If Paul were serious about changing the world, he could do a lot. Unlike Alaska, Arizona, and the like, Texas does not need the government dole. We are fiscally responsible people. Paul could be more local to end the waste that results in million dollar bus stops with contracts given to buddies, government funding that promotes one industry over another, and government control of what should be free enterprise. His continuous affiliation with the republican party proves his unwillingness to truly fight for what he says he believes.
I think a Ron Paul presidential candidate would be cool, but the farce of a Ron Paul republican nomination just indicates the continuation of national office to generate personal profit.
Of course the problem right now is that devices that can be hacked are unregulated, so the device manufacturers can say they were following all the FDA rules, which are none, and therefore cannot be held responsible for anything. Of course any regulation will probably be insufficient and will likely only serve to give the manufacturers cover. I would just like to see the companies be criminally and civilly responsible for any device that is hacked. This would give confidence to the patient. If the device is hacked, even if you are not harmed, you will have grounds to go after the doctor, the firm who sold the device, the manufacturer.
Presumably during the year the teacher is reading for content, and not just stucture. If a computer is grading the teacher can spend more time on content, thus helping the student get into the habit of critical thinking that will lead to more factual essays. But how much time needs to be spent of facts for an language essa? My impression is that the essay will either have a short prompt, where the student will state feelings or impressions or opinions of the prompt, or will read a story, and then pull quotes from that story to support and opinion on the story. Neither of these are particularly connected to reality.
What we are seeing now is a few decades of really big science to test the models and discover which are correct, which are not, and which need to be rewritten. This is not going to be a forever process. At some point our experiments will result in data and we will have another direction to go in. Cyclotrons are not going to get arbitrarily big. Spacecraft will eventually need to be sent out and we are simply going to have to wait. We may see a time when the theoretical physicists have to work for a few decades to understand what we need to build next.
In terms of the research and intellectual debate, such a thing is more complex than the average person thinks. First, any paper is merely a data point. One paper, or even a trend of papers does not constitute facts. It constitutes data, nothing else. The data must be judged against what has come before and what will come later. In particular data that demands major changes in previous scientific analysis is going to suspect, especially when such research conveniently support what people outside of science want to believe.
Then there are issue directly to the article. First, we do not live in caves. Most of us live relatively sedentary, climate controlled, peaceful lives. Therefore any comparison between us and them is problematic. This problem that we are do not live in caves is countered by stating, at the paper does, that our brains evolved to eat meat. Which of course is nonsense. Our brains evolved because there was excess protein, which at the time of hunting and gathering, was best provided by meat. Our brains need lots of glucose, which at the time could also be provided with meat.
Of course this is silly because we do not live as hunter gathers either. We are a highly industrialized agriculture world community. Protein can come from many sources. For example, so meat-as-critical-to-evolution articles cite Methionine, an important amino acid. To the hunter gathers who lived in areas other than what is now south america the best source of Methionine is beef and fish. Of course this is no longer true. For a vegetarians eggs and cheese provide superior levels of this amino acid. For vegans brazil nuts and corn provide perfectly adequate sources. Which begs the question, if humans had evolved in south america would there be a culture of eating land animals at all? Would humans had evolved on fish and nuts and berries, and would we now be arguing how beef is the antithesis to the intelligent mind.
Speaking to the parent post, the proposition that we are a meat and caveman society can lead to the hierarchical homogeny of the (white) male. I only bring this up as the parent asserts that arguing a feminist point of view is less sane than arguing we all live as cavemen. In the meat and caveman argument we have a situation where strength is important. As long as we believe we are cavemen, we can believe that physical strength is critical. Of course we also know that intelligence is important, so we in fact look for sufficient strength and superior intelligence. We see this in the research that asserts people who recently descended from the African continent are less intelligent than western Europeans. This is important data so that western europeans can feel superior even though they may be less physically strong.
We see the same thing with women, who are characterized as physically and intellectually weak. Of course these are in cavemen tasks and not in the real world we live in, where tools have made physical strength less important and change the nature of what kind of intelligence is important. I am not talking about the emotional crap, but the importance of novel problem solving as opposed to rote. If we let go of the cavemen mentality, then many people who are power are going to suffer. It is just like letting go of the idea that aristocrats were chosen by g-d to be our leader.
We see this in the recent argument over the importance of a homemaker. Sure, one c
First, the 13 years of MS support for MS WIndows XP is not a good metric. MS actually only supported retail XP for less than a year after retail sales ended, and it might have been possible for a consumer to buy a new XP machine with no support.
Since all machines Apple sell come with a current OS, Apple will even provide free upgrades if an upgrade occurs a short time after a purchase, using the MS metric, consumer support should not even extend past the retirement of the old OS.
In reality Leopard became the 'Old OS' in August 2009, with a total life time of less than two years, and old just now has support ended this year. Apple should be criticized because Leopard coverage should go to the end of the year.
Apple says that it will provide support for three years if a user pays, but what is support without software updates for the OS that came with the machine. If the updates were free that would be one thing, but the Snow Leopard was not free, and was not $30. This is particularly critical for Leopard as it is the last version that will run on PPC machines. Although in fairness these machines have not been sold since 2008.
The new service is not work centered. It is entertainment centered. It replaces useful functionality with the ability to store music and videos. It is free, which is what people want. It may one day be useful, but I am struggling to find services to replace the useful work that mobileme once did.
Yes the new cloud is a good thing if ITunes die. Apple is not first place I go buy videos because iTunes just sucks that much. This new clould monstrosity might be a revenue source in that people might buy more music and videos if they do not have to store it locally. It will certainly be a selling point for what ever living room device is going to be sold i the near future. But as far as profit, no. Apple had products like that. If no one is going to pay $100 a year for sync and storage and backup of critical information, then no one is going to pay $100 a year to store music and video they paid for.
Years ago I got a good deal on a high capacity optical drive for my laptop. It was a time of hard disks in the range of 1GB, so the optical drive not only greatly enhanced my storage space buy also provided a very effective back up solutions. CDs and DVD have never been a good backup solution for me, and hard disks are good for incremental frequent backups, but aren't really any better at long term backups. If someone were able to to produce these drives at a reasonable cost, less than $200, and the disk were not hugely expensive, this would be a good solution for backups. However I fear that the drives will cost $500 and therefore it will suffer the fate of all other optical media not used for entertainment. It will simply be too expensive for widespread adoption. Even with drives that play video, the performance of Blueray is interesting.
There is little that the TSA can do to prevent someone from exploding plane. Hijacking, in the classic sense, is pretty much a proposition without legs. When you have a planeload of people assuming they are dead already, the idea that you are going to make it to Cuba or where is not going to happen.
I think the real reason that cars have such a system and phones haven't is cultural, with some economic self interest involved. The cultural is that personal transportation, at least in the US, is a big issue. There was a time when horse thieves were simply hanged. If someone comes into you home and steals all you stuff, there is not as much as a furor as a car theft.
Then there is economics. Cars are insured by third parties with no connection to the agent that sold or the agent that provides servie for you car. The insurance company then wants to do stuff to minimize car theft, as they will be out real money for the retail value of a replacement. OTOH, insurance for phones is sold by the carriers, at very high rates, and these firms only need to replace the handset, not pay cash for a retail replacement. Therefore it is in the interest of the carriers to create an environment where customers are highly motivated to acquire this insurance, which they do through contracts and encouraging theft.
In spite of this limited funding, like so many other NASA project, it met and exceeding objectives. As such it is strange that we are complaining that we have no deep space program when we really never had a deep space program. What we have had are basic program that have been extended as able. We have, for the first time, a defined boundary of the solar system. Now that we know, a formal intersteller mission can be planned. But, as mentioned this is world project, so it should be funded by others in addition to the US.
The problem with the space program is US funding. Increasingly citizens in the US want their entitlements without any strings attached. The progress we have made has been costly, and I thank past generations for shouldering the cost that has made the US a great place to live. It is sad that the current generation is so self absorbed that they cannot think of anything beyond the dollars they have to spend to keep the US great.
This technology is not the VCR. This is more like someone setting up a business which will record desired show on tape, and the sell you the tape. That would not be a bad model. Set up hundreds of machines, record a customized set of show for a given night for a given customer, sell the tape for $10. I don't think this, however, would be legal.
OTOH, the problem is caused by random network licensing issues. How much sense does it make to be able to watch Hulu on a laptop, but not a tablet or phone. Most people don't have the data plans to stream Hulu over the cell network, so they are likely going to watch as on a laptop. That someone takes advantage of this arbitrage and tries to monazite it is no surprise.
The same thing with helmets and motorcycles. Sure, on one level the only one hurt is person choosing not to wear a helmet, but in a broader sense if that person is killed in a multi vehicle collision, there is going to be some effect, either real or emotional, on the other person. It could increase car insurance rates which we are all required to have in the US.
So everything has risks, and what we have said as a society is that vaccines on balance lower risk. This does not mean that if there is something in vaccines that may make them riskier the manufacturers can jut ignore it. That is crazy. They are being paid for a product, and market forces should work to move the product to the safest possible, even if that is only a perception. But vaccines keep everyone healthy, so some should not be able to say no just because the feel more important than everyone else, they feel they are going to externalize risk onto someone else's kid.
The externalization of costs is great. How many of these kids do not have insurance and therefore their care is paid for by the taxpayer? If they have insurance, how much are our rates going to increase because these people think they are self sufficient individualist who don't have to follow social rules.
I would be much more supportive of these people if they didn't come crying for handouts when something goes wrong, like the Texas governor complaining that the federal government only pays a majority of the costs of fight wildfire. Why should Texas, whose governor does not even want to part of the US, pay anything to fight fires on it's own land.
In any case I wonder if these programs really work. If a product is popular, the competition has an equal right to state honestly everything they think is bad about a product. In the end all we have is an arms race where the outcome is determined by advertising resources, not quality of product. And then we back where we started from.
Neither the state board of education, nor any public elementary or secondary school governing authority, director of schools, school system administrator, or any public elementary or secondary school principal or administrator shall prohibit any teacher in a public school system of this state from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught.
Ideally what this means is that a teacher can present the fluid dynamics, and when a student asks about the parting of the red sea, show why such a thing is physically impossible if we accept the laws of physics which have quite a bit more objective evidence than the bible. As long as the teacher is objective, and is trying to help the student understand, in this case using the compare and contrast, and never says the student does not have a right to believe whatever he or she wishes, then no school can discipline the teacher.
The folly of this bill will present itself when the teacher union starts using it to grieve school districts who wish to fire teachers based on classroom performance. Any student or teacher complaint about the content of a science teachers performance, as long as the teacher is within the curriculum and does not bring up the subject, is going to be used to limit the power the school to remove teachers.
While I love my gecko based browser, the engine does not hold the critical position it did even a year ago. Webkit is now stable and functional. If MS chooses to make trouble for Gecko, all that will happen is more people will go to Webkit and we will improve that layout engine. I don't think the loss of competition between Gecko and Webkit will hurt, and the primary competitor has been MS IE.
The telephone system sucks for older people or people with some hearing loss. I am sure there was a good reason to make the frequency range so small, but as older people are expected to do everything they same as they always did, it becomes more of a problem. Fortunately there is Skype with is a lifesaver.
As far as everything else, support, like teaching, is about asking questions and assuming nothing. It is hard because the other person thinks they are being talked down to, but then some people cannot be helped.
I don't really know who produces the music I listen to. I am not going to buy a popular recording because of a label. But with all the negative publicity, I would be more likely to buy a non-sony product than a sony produce. There is still at least a perception of a premium, and the premium is certainly not worth it to me.
I have seen firms like this. Mixing, adding value, and then, sometimes, selling the product. A lot of times it depends on the amount of original product. If we use another analogy, and go back a while, we can look at the Compaq clean room development of the PC clone, or the MS writing of MS WIndows based on the Apple Macintosh System GUI. Both had sufficient independence that the courts found then not infringing.
It is not clear that this is not infringing. The process starts with a copyrighted textbook. The firm then copies the presentation in the textbook replacing copyrighted content with copyleft content. Is this fair? I don't know. It seems fishy to me.
What really caught my eye though is the FAQ that does not appear to be on the website but does exist in the Google cache. In this FAQ, and I quote
Do Boundless textbooks contain the problem and question sets from the original textbooks? No. We are working on a long term solution, but in the meantime there are a few easy options if your professor assigns questions directly from the book: 1. Grab the questions from one of your friends, school library, or professor. Many professors will post the questions to your class page. 2. You can find the questions to most large college textbooks online with a simple search. Search your assigned textbook name + chapter+ “questions” on Google. 3. Many sites such as Cramster.com will provide answers to all major college textbooks on their site. All three of these options in addition to using Boundless are better than wasting hard earned money.
To the reasonable observer it certainly seems that the firm is encouraging students to engage in a practice that might violate copyright for no other reason to promote the profits of the firm. Mind you students have been copying problem sets for years. In many cases, a student solution manual is available at a fraction of the cost of the textbook, and many just buy this. But professors and others are very careful to never encourage such practice. You can't go the university copy shop and have someone copy the sets, you must do it yourself.
So, to be clear I do not have any idea if what Boundless is doing is illegal, but the fact that it is a for profit firm seems to make a lot of the fair use and educational points moot. They do not seem to be adding value to the material. They pull stuff off the net and then sends the kids back to the original textbook. I would think that a textbook replacement at least would have problems sets. I don't take much credence in using the same examples, as there are just so many ways to illustrate a concept, but a book without problem sets is no book at all.
As we see with dubious edits by James O'Keefe and his co-conspirators of films at NPR and Planned Parenthood, there is little way for the public to know if a film depicts other than a particular viewpoint. Any recording is this way. Take the NBC edits of the 911 call. In the original it appeared that a question was being answered, in the edit it appears that a racial bias was being promoted, in either it is not absolutely clear what the real situation is.
The problem is that many employees, and many employers, are going to create an adversarial relationship at work. Do what I say or you will be fired. You are picking on me because you don't like me. Employers are going to want more work than the employer feels paid for, the employee is going to want to do only the work that is necessary. Obviously there is motive on both sides to create a biased representation. I don't think employees want to be filmed any more than employers. The lack of context in any film is just too potentially incriminating.
My thought, then, is if Titanic 3D is going to turn people of to converted 3D movies. This may the first movie of this type many will see, and there is a huge if misguided following for Titanic. Expectations are high and I don't think the technology is up to the expectations. Of course, many will accept whatever they are given, so it may have no effect.
I guess this speaks to inexperience of the web developer. It was not long ago that ISPs were trying to do this. It was not that long ago that web developers put third content within a frame along with ads that generated personal revenue. AFAIR, this idea of pushing personal ads over third party content is as old as the mass advertising on the web. And I know some ISPs specifically did this.
This is a negative practice. It is one of the primary reason used to justify web blockers. While one might trust the website, there are many ways to inject other ads and content into a web page. As such, it is best, from a security perspective, not to load ads.