As I grow older, I find TNG to formulaic and not so watchable. I more likely to watch DS9 or Voyager. They tend to rely less on magic, though voyager did have an almost fatal number of time travel episodes. Don't get me wrong. TNG probably has more very excellent episodes(maybe 10) but that did not compensate for the overwhelming amount of filler, not to mention disastrous cast changes.
I remember watching the first episode of TNG. The studio shooting was as dreadful as TOS, but when the music came up, and the Patrick Stewart voiceover came up, there was a great confort that along with the bad there was going to be a lot of good. Of course, one the quest for rating took hold and the overwhelming militaristic mission took over, it was pretty much over. TNG and the Borg. DSP and the dominion. Enterprise and the confusing and arbitrary Xindi. Peaceful explorations simply does not sell laundry detergent.
I have been utilizing web based utilities like this for a number of years. My favorite in this category has been logic.ly, but I will be looking at this now. These are clearly not professional tools. I have the professional tools and they are expensive and require yearly reinstalls. If you spend your life doing these things, then professional tools are necessary. if not, web based solutions are becoming increasingly adequate. They can run from any computer, they can be used to teach at little or no cost, they can be used to test a hobby circuit. They are not going to be used to test transient behavior of high frequency circuits, but if one need to do that one already has the software.
If people want to keep up with this are aren't, following fakeelsevier on twitter is a humour way to so do.
I for myself am not sure how all this is going to turn out. Publishing is not as expensive as it used to be, and much of the work to publish is essentially funded by grants and unpaid, so there is good arguments to made that publicly funded non profits consortiums can and probably should handle most of the heavy lifting. Libraries receiving a glossy magazine that researchers then have to manually copy is certainly out of date. Free, access my reciprocal agreements, or moderately priced online access certainly make more sense. Like book publishing, the fight against free access is a fight to keep to legacy and inefficient jobs and machinery in place. Economic growth not by freeing resources and talent to build new industry of the future, but by keeping resources locked away in fear that something different is something bad.
Games and game like things may be what literature turns into, but let us not forgot that the tools to create hyperlink literature has only been available for a decade ot so, and while we would expect new forms or art to develop faster in a world where are communication is faster and art creation is potentially faster, there are still generational issues. In particular, a generation of artists must be born learn to use the tools, and in all likely hood, teach those prototype methods to a new generation of artists of refine and produce popular works. So we are still looking at decades
As evidence that time is required, let us look at what we currently consider literature, the novel. The novel was well on it way by the late 17th century, but it was over 100 years later when "The Novel", what we now call literature was in full bloom. Take, for example, Sense and Sensibility, Madam Bovery to suggest classic english works. Sure we had literature prior to that, Shakespeare, The Canterbury Tales, The Iliad, Beowulf, but this is not considered modern literature. It was the literature of the time, and it evolved over time, until we are now at the Novel as Literature, and which certainly will evolve to something else, and maybe has with the like of Vonnegut.
While some may want to kill an idea after only a few years, typical for people who are afraid of losing power due to a paradigm(and yes I heave read the book), such naysayers are never the authority on the future.
This is news because it is Nigerian or because it is a scam. Because scams are nothing new. It all comes down to selling a product that is not real in any meaningful sense. R. Allen Stanford, Madoff, and who knows how many others are on trail for doing exactly the same thing, advertising products that really did not really exists. Stanford is trying to win an acquittal by saying the products did exists sufficiently to satisfy some overly broad level of financial responsibility, i.e. not fraud. Really it seems that the nameless nigerian scammer, Madoff, and Stanford all operate on the same principle. Appealing to peoples greed so due diligence is not performed prior to a financial transaction.
Really the US is full of borderline scams like this. My mother would get beautiful catalogs of beautiful photographed items at very low prices. When she ordered then they invariably turned out to be junk and after shipping charges were not even cheap junk. Nothing illegal about that, just sophisticated enough to not be legal.
So the only difference between the so-called nigerian scammers is the ability to gain capital to run a sophisticated scam like Stanford. The difference, of course, is that stanford did it not survive, but just for kicks.
I read the first part of Applied Cryptography for a job I did several years ago. I was not in security, but did need to know something about it work with the codebase. Later I read beyond fear. It was a technical book, but it was an important book for people making security decisions, which is all of us. Security is not just about making a website using SLL or not responding to strange emails, or locking the door. It is about not getting so afraid that you make silly mistakes or disproportionate sacrifices. This is especially true when security is very costly, and can impact profits and deficits. I wonder how many firms have gone bankrupt because they did not manage security expenditures due to fear.
I have not read Lies and Outliers, expect for the excerpt online, but I have followed the writing on the blog. It seems to me that this is another book that promotes and explains rational security. Really that was all that Applied Cryptography did. Explain what to do with the tools and knowledge we had. Most security systems are merely only façades. Door locks are not that hard to disable. Checks are not all that hard to forge. They exist to put a layer of ritual between others and our secrets, and it is beneficial for most of us to respect those rituals. What is left, then, is what to do with the those that do not respect ritual, or, even more dangerous, appear to respect the ritual but really are just abusing the rituals to maximize personal returns at the expense of the community.
The end, as always, is an efficient security that does not cause more trouble than it is worth. I think of all the alarms that used to go off every time a car was approached. Of course alarms did not really stop car theft. Most people just ignored them. Modern methods that do not destroy the civil tone of society tends to be more productive.
I use Autodesk software. I note that it does not use a dongle. I see other software does use a dongle, and see that there are issues with OS updates. I am not sure how widespread the problem is but my preference as a consumer is not to be inconvenienced by the software I pay for.
A model I can live with is one in which a big watermark is placed over all print, and a pop up is presented occasionally to make the user aware that the copy is not licensed and how to get a license.
Years ago, before the internet was used for verification, I used software in which each copy appeared to be personalized. The company details could not be changed by the end user. Therefore the software could be loaded onto any machine, but it was not practical for another firm to use the software because all prints and interactions wold list the original firms information.
Just some ideas that might not cause the user to hate the software while still providing some incentive to pay for a product that presumable generates profit for a firm.
Pretty much, which is why real space battles are not on tv.
One show I think did do a good job was Babylon 5. The battles tended not to be overdramatic. In particular acceleration was used to accelerate.. There was use of kinetic bombardment which seems to be the consensus method to kill a planet.
I think we are seeing the beginning of what space battles will be like. Namely, drones controlled by remote operators. I am sure we will see autonomous. drones playing a key role.
Years ago I attended a lecture given by Ralph Nader. In it he talked about lawsuits. He asked how many in the audience had ever sued someone. Very few raised their hands. He then said that lawsuits were largely used by the powerful to get what they want, and they laws being passed were meant to make sure that only the powerful were able to sue.
We see this with politicians. Sontoram wants to limit the rewards of lawsuits, but when his wife injured her back and blamed a doctor, he was right there to request an inordinate amount of money. We see it with Gingrich now. He is lying as much if not more than anyone else in the presidential campaign, but what does he want to do, Sue. He can't take the attacks and defend himself like a man. He has to hid behind the threat of jurisprudence.
The fact i when consumer or employee is injured by the powerful, they are expected to bend over and take it. But when the powerful and often conservative are even inconvenienced, they feel they have been mortally wounded. I mean everyone knows that such people have been chosen by god to lead a guided life, and who would dare to deny them their special privileges.
Intel made it share of mistakes. Can anyone say the Pentium that could not do floating point division reliably? How about all the resources fighting the RISC/CISC war that would eventually end in a draw based on the engineering reality, not personal preferences. In spite of this much of what we are seing now is simple business cycles. Many of us can remember when Intel was the only game in town, and the others were merely used for niche products.
Here is one thing that happened in 2006 that many may not considered. Apple switched to Intel. That is 20 million more chips sold. More importantly these machines are not $500 models that require cheap low tech processors. No, Macs are high end models that require high end processors and Apple is a company that can help fund research to create those chips. Honestly, how much research and develop can be funded when most of the chips sold are going into bargain basement machines. If one's business depends on PCs, research and development has to be how to cut costs. If chips are going in Macs, the R&D will focus on performance.
I know many will agree, but remember this. A mac is built with matched components that work together to create a usable system. Many PCs are built to be buzzword compliant, putting on cheap components like USB drives and the like to make the machines look advanced while running slow front side busses and even lamer processors.
Again, what is James Randi doing.Taking a few anecdotal examples and condemning the whole religious organizations. That is what many of the comments are doing as well. When we talk about religion, we can be bigoted, but now when we talk about skeptics?
I am not bigoted against skeptics or religious people or whomever. Everyone can believe what they want to believe and I will support them in that right. What I am biased against are people who take selected a priori 'facts', molds it into a narrative that supports their beliefs, and then deny's the possibility that those beliefs could possibly be wrong.
A good example is the vaccination/anti-vaccination debate. Now, vaccination has certainly made the world a more hospitable place for children and have made parents life much easier, no longer having to deal with mumps, or polio, or the like. OTOH there are some concerns, and the pharmco should certainly spend some of that money to address those concerns rather than just depending on the government forcing parent to give their kids drugs that are probably safe but ay not be. In the free market, products that may not be safe are quickly replaced that products that may be safer. Take BPA, high fructose corn syrup, trans fat. Non of these are proven to be harmful, yet we see that due to consumer expectations, they have largely been removed from may products so that consumers have a choice.
Yet such a thing does not happen in the realm of skeptics. They scream that there is no proof that vaccines cause harm. They say that vaccines are important and unless children are dying en masse, there is no problem. They take an affront that anything would be done to placate the masses when something has been scientifically proven to be of no harm. The fundamentalists are screaming that only g-d can tell me what to do. They scream of some secular liberal agenda to remove the spirit from everyone so that everyone will forced to believe in nothing. Everyone else is the middle is being squeezed by the dogma. The expectation, as in the grocery aisle, is that the product that people want will be the product that people will be sold. That there will not be a necessity for government mandate, but a general perception that we are getting the best possible product erring on the side of safety. Most don't care about the skeptics defending the corporate power, or the fundies defending the church's power. We just want good products. I know such a want is delusional. No one cares about the masses.
There is probably nothing in oil extraction, refining, distribution, and use that cannot be done safely. The question is does the economics allow the process to be done safely. As another example, take coal. One gripe people have about coal is that it is transported in open containers and coal dust gets everywhere. One would think the cars would be covered, but they are not, presumable for economics reasons.
Fracking is similar. It is already a relatively expensive process. It may be safe, but likely cost pressures are going to minimize safety in an effort to provide cheap gas.
Either one agrees that people have the right to worship as they will, or you don't. It is not up to us to decide which organizations are religious, and which are not. In the US the only real concern is the IRS and tax breaks. This involves stuff like getting involve in politics.
Really, there should be no special religious exemption. Churches should be able to apply as a non profit, and get those benefits, but if they are not doing non profit work, they should not be able to have any special dispensation. I don't really see why I should be paying for someone else to have a private spa, or to preach that I am evil simply because i do not agree with them.
Otherwise people should be able to do as they please, believe as they please, and worship as they please. It is not up to me or anyone else to be so childish as to go and embarrass those I disagree with. You want my to come into your house and say you are wrong because you let your kids stay up too late, or pick their nose, or not hold their fork properly, or waste money on lunchables, or pay for cable TV instead of books. Of course not.
There is at least one thing that skeptics have in common with religious fanatics. Neither will rest until everyone believes as they do.It is like their personalities are so shallow that any hint of disagreement will set them off. Civilized conversation and debate are meaningless because they are right and everyone else is wrong.
There is a difference between zealotry and faith and basing results of life on physical experience. For instance, I follow the idea that the scientific method is probably the best way to acquire knowledge, and I will tend to reject any form of argument based on common sense or widely held assumptions. This, however, does not keep me from engaging with other people who believe differently, not does it keep from adjusting my opinion based on valid arguments based on empirical facts. I try not assume that people are wrong simply because I disagree with them. My faith is not diminished just because everyone does not hold the same faith. I do not see why it necessary to to personally attack those who disagree. One thing that skeptics and fundamentalists do the same is use the harm of children as an excuse to descend into personal and non productive attack.
My favorite recent example was a case where a cartoon was reinterpreted and linked to by a conservative website that did not share the values of the publishing website. Of course all creative work have only one interpretation, so anyone who interprets the work differently from the original author is simply wrong and deserves to be chastised and ridiculed. What made the situation really comical, however, and totally discredited the skeptics, was that they used the fact that the conservative site deep linked to comic. Of course the publishing site had text requesting that other sites directly link to the comic, and provided the link to so do. Of course none of this dismayed the skeptics from waging their crusade, rather than, as civilized people would, using the cross pollination as an opportunity to know one another. No, skeptics and fundamentalists know what they know, and have no desire to know anything different. This of course makes them different from scientist who go out discover new things, rather than simply use a existing fact base to prove all they disagree with as wrong.
A good example of talking to one another is the proposed agreement between chicken manufacturers and those who wish to make sure the chickens are treated humanely until actually slaughtered. Of course the former provides a product that many want and a low price, and of course the later might prefer that the product did not exist at all. Niether of those scenarios will happen, but there is a third compromise scenario that could happen if the law is passed in the us. Very little productive was going to happen while sides were insulting each other. No that conversation can occur, something might.
A big difference between a controlled market and a free market is that they free market depends on the availability of huge surpluses. In a controlled market on can say we need five units per person, there are 5 million people, so we need to make 25 million units, plus or minus for damage and the like.
In a free, market, however there cannot be that level of control. There may be several of firms producing similar, fungible, product. Each might be trying for 50% market share. That might mean that the actual production might be 5 times what is needed. With commodities such a surplus might be compensated for by increased consumption through more advertising or lower price, but such a thing is hard to do with drugs.
So really the only rational thing to do it to give the drug companies what they want, then insure that surplus product is destroyed. A free market demands surpluses so that consumers can have a choice, and firms have an opportunity to sell premium product. It makes not sense to compromise those values just because a few worry warts are scared.
I recall when MacWrite, and later MS Office for Windows came out, and all writing seemed to stop. People were playing with fonts, colors, kerning. While they made pretty pages, there was often no intellegible language on the page. The redeeming factor was that the Mac allowed a person with a few thousand dollars to publish quite professional looking product, instead of the tens of thousands previously required.
To write a book you need a text editor. To publish a book you need a page layout program like LaTex. It will print in PDF which most anyone can read or print. You can even sell them. if you want something more than a book, then something more than page layout program is required.
What we are mostly talking about now is how to publish more than a book and how to distribute that more than a book. Amazon already has a method to publish and distribute a book. What Apple is providing is an eBook that, if done correctly, will not translate well to a simple printed book. If we are talking textbooks, for instance, the simple printed book is no longer good enough. We have textbooks, we even have very good free textbooks in many subjects. What we need are more than books so the students can get the words, lectures, and simulations outside of class, and use class time for the modeling of the social interactions that are necessary for learning. Successful students instinctively forms groups, not so successful students thinks that such groups are only for partying or sports.
So I don't see how this is useful. LaTeX is open source and free and a very mature and reliable product. I do not see Booktype opening up any new distribution channels. I am only saying this because the summary started off by citing Apple. What Apple has done is provide a format that will let a writing create an e-book, not simply a book that read on a screen instead of paper, and a method of distribution. As I understand it, the EULA really is not going to effect a writer, since any real writer is going to lay down the text and generate the graphics outside of the publishing application. The EULA only says that the iBook is required to be distributed by Apple. This means that write can create a rich content e-book which must be distributed by Apple, but can also create a traditional book that can be distributed any way. This traditional book could be created by Booktype or Latex or anything else.
Going beyond the book is something that very few seem to want to do. The publishers certainly don't want to make their printing presses and large salary redundant over night. One company that did try this, push pop press, is not part of facebook and is no longer really in the book biz. Apple, as it did with music, sees profit in the disruption of books, and has the funds to not be concerned with the people they are going to piss off.
Quality of life is what medicine should be about, and increasingly is not about. Generally what we should be doing is if a baby can make it past the first few months of life, we should do everything to help it reach adulthood in a healthy and productive form, at which point random events and personal choices will take hold. Medicine can help compensate for some of those random events and personal choices, but really why keep a human alive that has not quality of life. It is often to score political points or prove that one has the power to make others suffer.
Vaccines, antibiotics, increasing advances in surgery, sanitation, safety programs, all allowed us to survive through childhood and become productive adults who then pay society back for the effort of raising and providing for us. Intensive intervention for babies who are going to die after a few years of suffering, while personally rewarding to some, can be argued as something that is not medically appropriate. Likewise keeping a suffering adult alive simply to saw 'we cannot condone suicide' while taking in massive quantities of public funds is arguably not the high moral ground.
Clearly there should be funds to pay for the sickly baby or infirm adult. Clearly if a 80 year old person feels that they need a million dollars to live another year, those funds should be available. Life is priceless. Once a life is gone it cannot be replaced. But to say that we are all required, by the dictate of the medical/political/religious establishment to keep the corporeal form and not meet out maker until they say we can is simply not acceptable. Quality of life has to be paramount, not profits, power, and presumption.
I am in favor of Apple using the APP store. Mac OS X Lion has been the easiest upgrade I have ever done. I forgot to make a disk image, you have to do so before you install, but I assume if my machine breaks I can just install snow leopard and redownload.
What worries me is this 'Mac OS' and 'iOS' convergence. We have already seen one fatality, the Apple Airport utility. The version on the Mac has now been dumbed down to match the version on iOS. Now there is no access to logs, no way to display the MAC address, no easy way to choose which configuration to import or manage profiles. It is really a POS. Just in case anyone else needs a working Airport utility, 5.6 is still available for download so grab while you can.
It may be that mountain lion is so dumbed down that it is no longer useful for people who want to create actual product and do actual work. In that case we will be left with no mainstream OS, and I suppose I will just have to find some other *nix.
The nice thing about computer exams is that it is relatively simple for each student to have what is essentially a different exam, especially in math and science. There is no way to copy because the questions are not the same. This is not trivial, but it s not as complex. Collaboration can help a student select an approach, but the work to a solution has to be a students own work. If the length of a test is proportionately set with the amount of time a student familiar with the test should take, then the grade should be valid. A person is not going to spend too much time helping the neighbor because then they will not finish the test. A person who needs a lot of help will spend all their time getting help and not finish the test.
As far as allowing access to the internet, at my level I allow it but discourage it. In most cases the students just waste their time trying to learn a single problem. If they have done the homework, and know the material, accessing the internet does not help them, and since I do not use standard multiple choice, they cannot communicate answers. I recommend the write a one page summary of what they are to know for efficiency, but really often let the use notes. These don't help much because they don't know where anything is.
At your level, a white list of sites might work. It would be like letting them bring in the CRC or PDR. These resources assume a great familiarity with the content, and simply provide the basic information that one would not be expected to have memorized all the time.
Student to teacher ration, as reported, is meaningless because it do not indicate the median or mode of the number of students a teacher is supposed to teach at one time. Rather it is simply the number of students divided by the number of teachers available in a school, or some such nonsense. It doesn't really effectively take into account that some teachers have 10-20 in a class, while other have 30-40. So while the teacher to student ratio does absolutely matter to education, one can do wonderfully incredible things with 15 students, the way that number is calculated, like so many other metrics, is meaningless.
One can see such silly metric here. For instance (Teacher Salary*%Highly Qualified/Teacher Age). Are we assuming that all teacher start off at 22 out of Teach For America? There are a number of subjects that are not well taught with someone who has no real world experience. One thing about Bush's NCLB is that provided a real path for experience adults to become adults and pass that real world experience to students. In the case of science we are talking about adults have actually does science. In terms of math, adults that have actually applied the math to solve real world problems. You know, the relevance thing.
Then we have (Test Scores/Parent Education). Yes education of parents is a big thing, but so is SES. Any metric that does not include SES is fundamentally flawed. Even test growth needs to ne moderated by SES and other factors, as a child who has a conformable place and resources to do homework is going to grow further. Not all educated parents are automatically a higher SES. Sure 'educated' parents will tend to do better than others at the SES, but these kids are simply not going to have all the perks.
And for the interested, this is in Forbes, a business magazine. It is not written by or for anyone who really is going to understand any kind of formal data analysis, or when it makes sense to generalize the statistics presented to a global case.
In this case the statistics come from a company called Crittercism.It seems to be about 18 months old, and provides free and paid-for crash reporting for IOS and Android. So, for Apps that use the service, and I have no idea if a majority, plurality, minority, or every App uses this service, those on Android seem to be more reliable than those on iOS. I assume on both devices it is possible to turn of error reporting, or in some prevent it, so there is that as well.
In any case, with the big beautiful graphs and the talk of how hard it to test an App, and how easy to get these reports and then fix the problem, it appears that the article is more a promotion for the company rather than any reliable data to make any conclusions for the reliability of an OS.
And if you are a user of a lot of data, that is exactly what ATT, and frankly most of the users want, especially since ATT will probably also include another data level that is cheaper than the GB level. Probably if one were not loading prono 24X7, we might still have a simple unlimited plan.
And I am not sure which nation provider has a cheaper data plan. I have Verizon and ATT data plans, and the Verizon i quite a bit more expensive. I have had Sprint, but despite their clams it was neither faster fo more reliable in my urban area, even though I have two towers quite near by
Cricket and Boost are ok if you never go anywhere outside a major population are of major highway. This categorizes most kids, but this is hardly an service for people who need reliable links.
They way we are doing broadband in the US is clearly broken, but the expectation that one can, for $50 a month, get 24X7 video service on a phone is an equally invalid assumption.
A degree can be useful to provide basic process skills and techniques in problem solving. While technical training and the like can provide targeted skills for immediate employment, however those skills may not long be in demand. For instance, it is one thing to know how use MS Office, it is another to have general skills in office applications and the ability to write an effective memo or technical report. It is one thing to complete simple assigned tasks with supervision, it is another thing to have advanced time management and organizational skills so one can plan and complete complex projects with minimal supervision.
In any case, the linked article did not limit itself to degrees. The evidence seemed to suggest that have a experience before graduation was important. That was the way it was during my time of graduating when the economy was not in great shape. Most people I know who got jobs had significant related experience prior to graduation, some paid, some volunteer. And I don't think we expected anyone to give us a job, at least not for a lifetime. Many of us created situation in which we were valuable, and if that value lapsed we created new situation in which we were valuable. This level of expectations, in which employers or the government was required to employ us simply because we existed, was not so much emphasized.
I don't want to come off as lecturing, but the current language in the presidential campaign seems particularly counter productive. Everyone is taking about a few select job creators being in control of out lives, which is not really the case. We can all be in control of our futures, at least to some extent. We don't have to wait for some Ayn Rand savior to give us a sense of worth. We can do it for ourselves, through work, through education, through creating of products. And that is products, not just taking a bit off the top in transactions.
Another reason to have a closed network. Not so much a security issue, but avoids snooping authorities. Sure they could wardrive, but at least one has a possible affermative defense.
As it stands, this type of thing is clearly indicates immature people who crave attention, much like people who put huge subwoofers in their car, or loud exhausts on their bikes, or over the top and distracting decorations on their lawns. I support the police giving them the attention they desire.
And you should look in the box before accepting a return. These rules seem to be followed at the apple store, as the salespeople want to open the box so they can setup(minimize returns?) but elsewhere neither is likely to happen.
A game some people I knew when I was younger was to figure new ways to rip Walmart off. They would buy a car radio, install in the car, and attempt to return the box with the old radio in it. Managed to work pretty well. A safer scheme was to use a razor blade to cut the plastic and take a cd out of the case and then return it. I can imagine that if I were being paid minimum wage it would not be worth my time to make sure returns were valid. I know that if one accepts a job, one has a moral responsibility to do the best one can, but hey, managers don't work for minimum wage. The rules of world are accepted.
This to me says buy from reputable firms. There are always cheaper prices, or more convenient locations, but the truth is we still have to pay for service and reputation, which is another thing our parents told us, at least if we are of a certain age. Younger people were probably told they had inherent rights to huge amounts of toys, and the purpose of life to accumulate as many toys by any means necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember watching the first episode of TNG. The studio shooting was as dreadful as TOS, but when the music came up, and the Patrick Stewart voiceover came up, there was a great confort that along with the bad there was going to be a lot of good. Of course, one the quest for rating took hold and the overwhelming militaristic mission took over, it was pretty much over. TNG and the Borg. DSP and the dominion. Enterprise and the confusing and arbitrary Xindi. Peaceful explorations simply does not sell laundry detergent.
The only thing i saw missing was a BCD display.
If people want to keep up with this are aren't, following fakeelsevier on twitter is a humour way to so do. I for myself am not sure how all this is going to turn out. Publishing is not as expensive as it used to be, and much of the work to publish is essentially funded by grants and unpaid, so there is good arguments to made that publicly funded non profits consortiums can and probably should handle most of the heavy lifting. Libraries receiving a glossy magazine that researchers then have to manually copy is certainly out of date. Free, access my reciprocal agreements, or moderately priced online access certainly make more sense. Like book publishing, the fight against free access is a fight to keep to legacy and inefficient jobs and machinery in place. Economic growth not by freeing resources and talent to build new industry of the future, but by keeping resources locked away in fear that something different is something bad.
As evidence that time is required, let us look at what we currently consider literature, the novel. The novel was well on it way by the late 17th century, but it was over 100 years later when "The Novel", what we now call literature was in full bloom. Take, for example, Sense and Sensibility, Madam Bovery to suggest classic english works. Sure we had literature prior to that, Shakespeare, The Canterbury Tales, The Iliad, Beowulf, but this is not considered modern literature. It was the literature of the time, and it evolved over time, until we are now at the Novel as Literature, and which certainly will evolve to something else, and maybe has with the like of Vonnegut.
While some may want to kill an idea after only a few years, typical for people who are afraid of losing power due to a paradigm(and yes I heave read the book), such naysayers are never the authority on the future.
Really the US is full of borderline scams like this. My mother would get beautiful catalogs of beautiful photographed items at very low prices. When she ordered then they invariably turned out to be junk and after shipping charges were not even cheap junk. Nothing illegal about that, just sophisticated enough to not be legal.
So the only difference between the so-called nigerian scammers is the ability to gain capital to run a sophisticated scam like Stanford. The difference, of course, is that stanford did it not survive, but just for kicks.
I have not read Lies and Outliers, expect for the excerpt online, but I have followed the writing on the blog. It seems to me that this is another book that promotes and explains rational security. Really that was all that Applied Cryptography did. Explain what to do with the tools and knowledge we had. Most security systems are merely only façades. Door locks are not that hard to disable. Checks are not all that hard to forge. They exist to put a layer of ritual between others and our secrets, and it is beneficial for most of us to respect those rituals. What is left, then, is what to do with the those that do not respect ritual, or, even more dangerous, appear to respect the ritual but really are just abusing the rituals to maximize personal returns at the expense of the community.
The end, as always, is an efficient security that does not cause more trouble than it is worth. I think of all the alarms that used to go off every time a car was approached. Of course alarms did not really stop car theft. Most people just ignored them. Modern methods that do not destroy the civil tone of society tends to be more productive.
A model I can live with is one in which a big watermark is placed over all print, and a pop up is presented occasionally to make the user aware that the copy is not licensed and how to get a license.
Years ago, before the internet was used for verification, I used software in which each copy appeared to be personalized. The company details could not be changed by the end user. Therefore the software could be loaded onto any machine, but it was not practical for another firm to use the software because all prints and interactions wold list the original firms information.
Just some ideas that might not cause the user to hate the software while still providing some incentive to pay for a product that presumable generates profit for a firm.
One show I think did do a good job was Babylon 5. The battles tended not to be overdramatic. In particular acceleration was used to accelerate.. There was use of kinetic bombardment which seems to be the consensus method to kill a planet.
I think we are seeing the beginning of what space battles will be like. Namely, drones controlled by remote operators. I am sure we will see autonomous. drones playing a key role.
We see this with politicians. Sontoram wants to limit the rewards of lawsuits, but when his wife injured her back and blamed a doctor, he was right there to request an inordinate amount of money. We see it with Gingrich now. He is lying as much if not more than anyone else in the presidential campaign, but what does he want to do, Sue. He can't take the attacks and defend himself like a man. He has to hid behind the threat of jurisprudence.
The fact i when consumer or employee is injured by the powerful, they are expected to bend over and take it. But when the powerful and often conservative are even inconvenienced, they feel they have been mortally wounded. I mean everyone knows that such people have been chosen by god to lead a guided life, and who would dare to deny them their special privileges.
Here is one thing that happened in 2006 that many may not considered. Apple switched to Intel. That is 20 million more chips sold. More importantly these machines are not $500 models that require cheap low tech processors. No, Macs are high end models that require high end processors and Apple is a company that can help fund research to create those chips. Honestly, how much research and develop can be funded when most of the chips sold are going into bargain basement machines. If one's business depends on PCs, research and development has to be how to cut costs. If chips are going in Macs, the R&D will focus on performance.
I know many will agree, but remember this. A mac is built with matched components that work together to create a usable system. Many PCs are built to be buzzword compliant, putting on cheap components like USB drives and the like to make the machines look advanced while running slow front side busses and even lamer processors.
I am not bigoted against skeptics or religious people or whomever. Everyone can believe what they want to believe and I will support them in that right. What I am biased against are people who take selected a priori 'facts', molds it into a narrative that supports their beliefs, and then deny's the possibility that those beliefs could possibly be wrong.
A good example is the vaccination/anti-vaccination debate. Now, vaccination has certainly made the world a more hospitable place for children and have made parents life much easier, no longer having to deal with mumps, or polio, or the like. OTOH there are some concerns, and the pharmco should certainly spend some of that money to address those concerns rather than just depending on the government forcing parent to give their kids drugs that are probably safe but ay not be. In the free market, products that may not be safe are quickly replaced that products that may be safer. Take BPA, high fructose corn syrup, trans fat. Non of these are proven to be harmful, yet we see that due to consumer expectations, they have largely been removed from may products so that consumers have a choice.
Yet such a thing does not happen in the realm of skeptics. They scream that there is no proof that vaccines cause harm. They say that vaccines are important and unless children are dying en masse, there is no problem. They take an affront that anything would be done to placate the masses when something has been scientifically proven to be of no harm. The fundamentalists are screaming that only g-d can tell me what to do. They scream of some secular liberal agenda to remove the spirit from everyone so that everyone will forced to believe in nothing. Everyone else is the middle is being squeezed by the dogma. The expectation, as in the grocery aisle, is that the product that people want will be the product that people will be sold. That there will not be a necessity for government mandate, but a general perception that we are getting the best possible product erring on the side of safety. Most don't care about the skeptics defending the corporate power, or the fundies defending the church's power. We just want good products. I know such a want is delusional. No one cares about the masses.
Fracking is similar. It is already a relatively expensive process. It may be safe, but likely cost pressures are going to minimize safety in an effort to provide cheap gas.
Really, there should be no special religious exemption. Churches should be able to apply as a non profit, and get those benefits, but if they are not doing non profit work, they should not be able to have any special dispensation. I don't really see why I should be paying for someone else to have a private spa, or to preach that I am evil simply because i do not agree with them.
Otherwise people should be able to do as they please, believe as they please, and worship as they please. It is not up to me or anyone else to be so childish as to go and embarrass those I disagree with. You want my to come into your house and say you are wrong because you let your kids stay up too late, or pick their nose, or not hold their fork properly, or waste money on lunchables, or pay for cable TV instead of books. Of course not.
There is a difference between zealotry and faith and basing results of life on physical experience. For instance, I follow the idea that the scientific method is probably the best way to acquire knowledge, and I will tend to reject any form of argument based on common sense or widely held assumptions. This, however, does not keep me from engaging with other people who believe differently, not does it keep from adjusting my opinion based on valid arguments based on empirical facts. I try not assume that people are wrong simply because I disagree with them. My faith is not diminished just because everyone does not hold the same faith. I do not see why it necessary to to personally attack those who disagree. One thing that skeptics and fundamentalists do the same is use the harm of children as an excuse to descend into personal and non productive attack.
My favorite recent example was a case where a cartoon was reinterpreted and linked to by a conservative website that did not share the values of the publishing website. Of course all creative work have only one interpretation, so anyone who interprets the work differently from the original author is simply wrong and deserves to be chastised and ridiculed. What made the situation really comical, however, and totally discredited the skeptics, was that they used the fact that the conservative site deep linked to comic. Of course the publishing site had text requesting that other sites directly link to the comic, and provided the link to so do. Of course none of this dismayed the skeptics from waging their crusade, rather than, as civilized people would, using the cross pollination as an opportunity to know one another. No, skeptics and fundamentalists know what they know, and have no desire to know anything different. This of course makes them different from scientist who go out discover new things, rather than simply use a existing fact base to prove all they disagree with as wrong.
A good example of talking to one another is the proposed agreement between chicken manufacturers and those who wish to make sure the chickens are treated humanely until actually slaughtered. Of course the former provides a product that many want and a low price, and of course the later might prefer that the product did not exist at all. Niether of those scenarios will happen, but there is a third compromise scenario that could happen if the law is passed in the us. Very little productive was going to happen while sides were insulting each other. No that conversation can occur, something might.
In a free, market, however there cannot be that level of control. There may be several of firms producing similar, fungible, product. Each might be trying for 50% market share. That might mean that the actual production might be 5 times what is needed. With commodities such a surplus might be compensated for by increased consumption through more advertising or lower price, but such a thing is hard to do with drugs.
So really the only rational thing to do it to give the drug companies what they want, then insure that surplus product is destroyed. A free market demands surpluses so that consumers can have a choice, and firms have an opportunity to sell premium product. It makes not sense to compromise those values just because a few worry warts are scared.
To write a book you need a text editor. To publish a book you need a page layout program like LaTex. It will print in PDF which most anyone can read or print. You can even sell them. if you want something more than a book, then something more than page layout program is required.
What we are mostly talking about now is how to publish more than a book and how to distribute that more than a book. Amazon already has a method to publish and distribute a book. What Apple is providing is an eBook that, if done correctly, will not translate well to a simple printed book. If we are talking textbooks, for instance, the simple printed book is no longer good enough. We have textbooks, we even have very good free textbooks in many subjects. What we need are more than books so the students can get the words, lectures, and simulations outside of class, and use class time for the modeling of the social interactions that are necessary for learning. Successful students instinctively forms groups, not so successful students thinks that such groups are only for partying or sports.
So I don't see how this is useful. LaTeX is open source and free and a very mature and reliable product. I do not see Booktype opening up any new distribution channels. I am only saying this because the summary started off by citing Apple. What Apple has done is provide a format that will let a writing create an e-book, not simply a book that read on a screen instead of paper, and a method of distribution. As I understand it, the EULA really is not going to effect a writer, since any real writer is going to lay down the text and generate the graphics outside of the publishing application. The EULA only says that the iBook is required to be distributed by Apple. This means that write can create a rich content e-book which must be distributed by Apple, but can also create a traditional book that can be distributed any way. This traditional book could be created by Booktype or Latex or anything else.
Going beyond the book is something that very few seem to want to do. The publishers certainly don't want to make their printing presses and large salary redundant over night. One company that did try this, push pop press, is not part of facebook and is no longer really in the book biz. Apple, as it did with music, sees profit in the disruption of books, and has the funds to not be concerned with the people they are going to piss off.
Vaccines, antibiotics, increasing advances in surgery, sanitation, safety programs, all allowed us to survive through childhood and become productive adults who then pay society back for the effort of raising and providing for us. Intensive intervention for babies who are going to die after a few years of suffering, while personally rewarding to some, can be argued as something that is not medically appropriate. Likewise keeping a suffering adult alive simply to saw 'we cannot condone suicide' while taking in massive quantities of public funds is arguably not the high moral ground.
Clearly there should be funds to pay for the sickly baby or infirm adult. Clearly if a 80 year old person feels that they need a million dollars to live another year, those funds should be available. Life is priceless. Once a life is gone it cannot be replaced. But to say that we are all required, by the dictate of the medical/political/religious establishment to keep the corporeal form and not meet out maker until they say we can is simply not acceptable. Quality of life has to be paramount, not profits, power, and presumption.
What worries me is this 'Mac OS' and 'iOS' convergence. We have already seen one fatality, the Apple Airport utility. The version on the Mac has now been dumbed down to match the version on iOS. Now there is no access to logs, no way to display the MAC address, no easy way to choose which configuration to import or manage profiles. It is really a POS. Just in case anyone else needs a working Airport utility, 5.6 is still available for download so grab while you can.
It may be that mountain lion is so dumbed down that it is no longer useful for people who want to create actual product and do actual work. In that case we will be left with no mainstream OS, and I suppose I will just have to find some other *nix.
As far as allowing access to the internet, at my level I allow it but discourage it. In most cases the students just waste their time trying to learn a single problem. If they have done the homework, and know the material, accessing the internet does not help them, and since I do not use standard multiple choice, they cannot communicate answers. I recommend the write a one page summary of what they are to know for efficiency, but really often let the use notes. These don't help much because they don't know where anything is.
At your level, a white list of sites might work. It would be like letting them bring in the CRC or PDR. These resources assume a great familiarity with the content, and simply provide the basic information that one would not be expected to have memorized all the time.
One can see such silly metric here. For instance (Teacher Salary*%Highly Qualified/Teacher Age). Are we assuming that all teacher start off at 22 out of Teach For America? There are a number of subjects that are not well taught with someone who has no real world experience. One thing about Bush's NCLB is that provided a real path for experience adults to become adults and pass that real world experience to students. In the case of science we are talking about adults have actually does science. In terms of math, adults that have actually applied the math to solve real world problems. You know, the relevance thing.
Then we have (Test Scores/Parent Education). Yes education of parents is a big thing, but so is SES. Any metric that does not include SES is fundamentally flawed. Even test growth needs to ne moderated by SES and other factors, as a child who has a conformable place and resources to do homework is going to grow further. Not all educated parents are automatically a higher SES. Sure 'educated' parents will tend to do better than others at the SES, but these kids are simply not going to have all the perks.
In this case the statistics come from a company called Crittercism.It seems to be about 18 months old, and provides free and paid-for crash reporting for IOS and Android. So, for Apps that use the service, and I have no idea if a majority, plurality, minority, or every App uses this service, those on Android seem to be more reliable than those on iOS. I assume on both devices it is possible to turn of error reporting, or in some prevent it, so there is that as well.
In any case, with the big beautiful graphs and the talk of how hard it to test an App, and how easy to get these reports and then fix the problem, it appears that the article is more a promotion for the company rather than any reliable data to make any conclusions for the reliability of an OS.
And I am not sure which nation provider has a cheaper data plan. I have Verizon and ATT data plans, and the Verizon i quite a bit more expensive. I have had Sprint, but despite their clams it was neither faster fo more reliable in my urban area, even though I have two towers quite near by
Cricket and Boost are ok if you never go anywhere outside a major population are of major highway. This categorizes most kids, but this is hardly an service for people who need reliable links.
They way we are doing broadband in the US is clearly broken, but the expectation that one can, for $50 a month, get 24X7 video service on a phone is an equally invalid assumption.
In any case, the linked article did not limit itself to degrees. The evidence seemed to suggest that have a experience before graduation was important. That was the way it was during my time of graduating when the economy was not in great shape. Most people I know who got jobs had significant related experience prior to graduation, some paid, some volunteer. And I don't think we expected anyone to give us a job, at least not for a lifetime. Many of us created situation in which we were valuable, and if that value lapsed we created new situation in which we were valuable. This level of expectations, in which employers or the government was required to employ us simply because we existed, was not so much emphasized.
I don't want to come off as lecturing, but the current language in the presidential campaign seems particularly counter productive. Everyone is taking about a few select job creators being in control of out lives, which is not really the case. We can all be in control of our futures, at least to some extent. We don't have to wait for some Ayn Rand savior to give us a sense of worth. We can do it for ourselves, through work, through education, through creating of products. And that is products, not just taking a bit off the top in transactions.
As it stands, this type of thing is clearly indicates immature people who crave attention, much like people who put huge subwoofers in their car, or loud exhausts on their bikes, or over the top and distracting decorations on their lawns. I support the police giving them the attention they desire.
A game some people I knew when I was younger was to figure new ways to rip Walmart off. They would buy a car radio, install in the car, and attempt to return the box with the old radio in it. Managed to work pretty well. A safer scheme was to use a razor blade to cut the plastic and take a cd out of the case and then return it. I can imagine that if I were being paid minimum wage it would not be worth my time to make sure returns were valid. I know that if one accepts a job, one has a moral responsibility to do the best one can, but hey, managers don't work for minimum wage. The rules of world are accepted.
This to me says buy from reputable firms. There are always cheaper prices, or more convenient locations, but the truth is we still have to pay for service and reputation, which is another thing our parents told us, at least if we are of a certain age. Younger people were probably told they had inherent rights to huge amounts of toys, and the purpose of life to accumulate as many toys by any means necessary.