A number of people I knew in University dropped out and did rather well. Some found jobs in software. Some started businesses. The thing was that they were able to get into a more or less real university and succeed for some period of time. The mere fact atht they were able to do this mean they have some ability to work and plan and do paperwork and other silly things simply because they need to be done. It also means that they sat for their SAT or ACT and did rather well. You don't get into Harvard of Standford with 1000 on you SAT.
So giving away 2 million dollars to the the top twenty applicants with a good idea is not really going to tell us anything. First, many of the innovations we see today were created using college resources. Bill Gates dropped out of harvard to do software, but it is alleged that he used campus resources to start. 100K is not going to get you campus resoureces. Dell sold computers out of his college dorm.
My thought is that people who want to drop out of college and go out and change the world do it. Some stay to maintain access to university resources. In any case the university will continue to be a basis of training for innovation. I have never had access to the equipment in the real worl that I had in University, and familiarity with that equipment has transferred to many other projects.
What would make me impressed is if there were 2 million dollars for high school students who start a tech firm prior to graduation. That woud accelerate innovation.
From what I can tell ia this has to do with Standard Model which predicts equal quantity of matter and anti-matter in the universe. As far as can be determined, there is an asymmetry that is hard to explain. One way to explain this asymmetry in the quantity of matter is if there was a physical asymmetry between the electron and positron. The asymmetry would not exist in the particles themselve, but in the virtual particles surrounding them.
These virtual particles are tiny compared to atomic matter and exist for short amount of time, such a short amount of time thier very existence is below the uncertainty thresholds. They are a consequence of the fundamental uncertainty in position and momentum. They are created out of the vacuum.
So the question the experiment attempts to answer is does the electron behave like an object that reacts symmetrically in all dimensions, or is there so aberration, that is, is it not a perfect sphere. To a very high accuracy the paper claims that it is a sphere.
However that is not the full story. The paper is based on the idea that the aspherical shape would be larger than the standard model predicts. Adjusted models predicts a larger aspherical aberration. Since this experiment did not detect large aberrations, these other models, extensions of the Standard Model seem to be less than accurate. Form what I read, the standard model predictions are orders of magnitude lower than current sensitivity so it remains unclear if the electron acts like a sphere or something that is almost like a sphere.
What this experiment does is provide a novel and fascinating method to probe subatomic particles, as well as establish an upper limit on how big the abberation could be. Good science.
Right now most of the structure of a web page are customizable by the user. The question is then will the URL be off by default, and will there be options to turn it back on? If the URL is going to go away completely, then this is just the MS vision of an application front end controlled by a subscribed service.
From a usability point of view the URL has been criticized from at least 1999, mostly due to influx of machine generated addresses on dynamic web pages. Since that time, the url has only become more obfuscated, so it would seem that the URL bar has reached a point where it should go away.
OTOH there is a security issue. The URL does provide a means of knowing where one is on the web. Of course with embedded content, the URL can lie, but that is more about bad and intentionally fraudulent behavior, not abou the URL. The URL also allows user a means to get from one place to another without an intervening service or sanctioned links. This freedom can cut into revenue.
Really, if the URL can be turned off and on, then that is about user choice for a simpler interface. If the URL cannot be turned back on, then that is about the browser wanting to control the user experience, probably to maximize tracking data and ad data. For a consumer browser like Firefox and Chrome and IE, it would make sense for the URL to be turned off by default. These are browser used by the masses who don't know what URL stands for, doesn't understand what it means, and doesn't care if Google or whomever tracks their every move. I would just be surprised to see Mozilla do it.
Someone needs to tell Julian and Ricky that they can cover their pot growing operation with servers. Cops bust in see the servers and never look for the pot. Of couse I doubt that anyone would be competent to set up the serves. Maybe J-Roc.
But seriously, this is the kind of thing that has really killed the world. Here we have a weed that is one of the most perfect and useful plants in existence. Because of fundamentalist faith based lawmaking and general greed it is banned for most purposes. Of course some would say that it damages kids, but how about the legal drugs? The Pfizer commercials tells kids they can only be happy with drugs. Someone like Rush Limbaugh can afford to be a prescription drug addict, and maybe old people in the US with medicare part D, but the average person has to go with the unregulated stuff. It would be nice if kids were not told that drug use is good, and I certainly believe that drug use in general is a losing game, but there we have it. Corporate drugs good, plants are bad.
On top of the insanity of jailing people for growing plants or using plants simply because that plant has not been awarded the special corporate status of tabacco, is just the beginning. So we now have these indoor operation using huge amounts of dirty power that contributes god knows how much to global warming, killing the future even for the kids that aren't addicted to Zoloft. All this waste because growers are forced indoors. Of course in canada part of the problem is the short growing season, but really, it is arguable that the time of the police would be better spent arresting doctors for frivolously doping kids so that they don't annoy their parents.
I agree. I am still on an unlimited data plan, but it is from2007 . Most new *g services have a cap to meet a price point, and because the higher bandwidth of new generation phones are going to kill the network if used by the teen age boy viewing pron 24X7 or the older guy viewing sports clip over the same time frame. So instead of fake unlimited plans we have real limited plans. This is shown in the T-Mobile thing. It has nothing to do with ATT. It has to do with expanded 3G and anticipated 4G coverage. With a 2G phone, if one were continuously downloading content, one could expect to consume on the order of 10 GB of content. A lot buy most people are not going to do this. Most people will consume less than 1GB. With 3g the maximum content is on the order fo 100 GB. With 4G the problem increases. Larger pipes, faster downloads, more bandwidth used per customer, yet customers don't want to pay more. It is like candy. Can't charge more, so use less product.
A long time ago, in a much happier time when there was still hope for web development, there was a markup language named the Hypertext Markup Language. In this language tags were used to give context to bits of text. There was no definition of how it would be displayed, since the makers knew that computers could create output in any number of forms, and not all users meet a predefined metric. Therefore things were defined as headers, emphasized, etc. Structure could be defined using tables where columns took a percentage of the page.
However, as tends to happen, the insane compulsive designers came in and said they could not live in a world where they did not have 100% control of the look and feel of content. So hacks were made and kludges were put into allow these insane people to force their views on the innocent world. By the time a compromise was reached, in terms of cascading style sheets, the display independent ideal was long gone. Web pages were made to displayed on specific size screen with specific content. And we found ourselves in need of a book that differentiated the mobile device from the fixed device. What a joke.
I would say three things have happened to hurt ROI. FIrst, PC gaming became comparable with hurt the console and left two players, Nintendo catering to youth and Sony catering to the older crowd. The MS got in the game with xbox, and through agressive pricing, at this point free with a qualifying computer, set an unattainable maximum price for a high end console. This does not hurt Nintendo, but killed the launch of Sony PS3 which would have set the highest standard for the console. Who is going to invest in making the ultimate console if there is no market for it? Third is the iPad. People who might have spent money on a console for casual gaming are buying an iPad and plying angry birds or simple physics or space station or flight controller.
Another reason has to be included. The game manufacturers themselves. It seems they are actively trying to kill the resale and rental market. Yet this is how kids get the games and get hooked. If the kids can't get the game, and therefore play the free or cheap online games, they will never buy a console.
At some point secondary education became compulsory, not only because of unemployment and political issues, but because industrial employers needed workers who could get to work on time, stay in one place for long times, and learn simple routines. A person with basic training can learn the skills needed for the job. The jobs were low paying becaue a complex management structure was needed to supervise and create the simple structure needed to makle minimally educated people productive.
A person who completes higher education should have basic abilities beyond the secondary education. Specificalluy such a person should be able to look at problems and with minimal supervision and prompting solve the problem. Think The Devil Wears Prada. A college educate person should be able to, when thrown into a pool, learn to swim before they drown. Everyone who can't should not have a college degree as they should have drowned, i.e. dropped out.
What is happening is an oversupply for colleges is driving a desire for more and more students, which is reducing the minimum standards. This results in mores students who are not qualified problem solvers or qualified creative persons to attend. This itself is not bad, but, at least in the US, such students are often recruited with the offering of federally guaranteed student loans which they can use to pay tuition, books, and living expenses. Since the student does not pay for school directly, there is no downward pressure on prices. Since the loans are guaranteed, there is no incentive of the loan companies to insure the school is preparing the student, that the student is a good risk, or to insure the student pay back the loan. OTOH, these loans can never be settle with bankruptcy or any normal debt removal procedure.
So what we have are local colleges like GVSU desperate for students and a seemingly free source of money to fund these students. The school does not care that 10% are going to default and even more are going to have their lives ruined because they did not receive the education needed to succeed to pay for the loans. The univeristy has the money and all risk is placed on the kids to pay or suffer. Weeding out the kids in the first year, before the debt is huge, is a favor to the kid, but costs the university huge sums of money. The alternative is to have a more selective admision proces, which I digree with since all kids should have an opportunity to gain an edcuation.
The Japan situation shows that nuclear power is safe, but not every contingency can be planned for, therefore there is always a small risk. The problem is one of managing risk and expectation. The nuclear industry, like all industries, wish to have minimum external burdens, wish to externalize as much costs as possible to the general public, so they like anyone else will lie to gain support. This will in the long run is always disastrous, but enough profits are made in the short run to make no difference to the private interests.
The big thing with energy is the externalization of costs to the general public, both real and opportunity. It is not really a conservative of liberal thing. When the BP oil well exploded in the Gulf or Mexico, conservatives all along the conservative Gulf Coast raised hell about the externalization of costs. Conservative Florida threw a fit even though conservative support approving drilling in the Gulf with minimal regulations. The coal industry is allowed to destroy public owned resources the could be better monetized by future generation with no recompense to future generations. And the nuclear industry is allowed to irradiate resources and create waste without a management plan. The Swiss reprocesses and stores the larger quantity, but less radioactive waste. Whether this faustian bargain will be acceptable in the long term is yet to be seen. What is true is that unlike out previous energy experiments in the industrial revolution will not be so easy to reverse. The benefit of nuclear energy is that most of the externalization is limited to the nation-state that benefits from the energy, unlike other sources in which the externalization is wolrd wide.
On a total cost basis other energy sources are viable. Switzerland has good solar irradiation potential. It also has mountains. During the day excess solar energy can be used to pump water up the mountain into a reservoir, and then run through a hydroelectric generator when needed. The same is true for wind. All without externalazing costs to future generations.
The SCSI port was standard on Apple machines untile the G4 cube around 2000. All Macs had a SCSI port for high speed communication(around 5mb/s) and RS-242 serial port for lows speed communication(.1 mb/s). Scanners, mass storage and the like used SCSI. The advantage was not only speed, but also plug and play. Many devices that used a traditional parallel port were a bear to set up compared to the automatic and reliable setup of the SCSI port. It also allowed for operations without special drivers. Firewire did replace the SCSI for high speed communication, and it was used in Digital cameras and Camcorders. Real camcorders, that store on film, still use firewire.
Early digital cameras were low resolution so speed did matter. I think they had like 1 MB of memory and worked through a serial cable, at least for the Dyson and Apple Quicktake. By 2000 we had cameras supassing 3 megapixels, with 4 megapixels storage in raw format. This did require speed, so the Nikon D1, For example, did use a firewire port. I recall using the USB 1.0 port for my first MP3 player. It took so long to transfer the music. For $300 I think they could have included firewire. As mentioned, devices that transfered more information, like hard drives and scanners, did move from SCSI to USB. I don't know that there were no still cameras that used SCSI, but probably not consumer ones.
What is interesting about this discussion is that though USB 3.0 is not widely implemented, no one says it is dead. The latest and greatest cameras do not seem to have USB 3.0. The base laptops sold by HP and Dell do not seem to have USB 3.0. This technology has been out for a year and I do not see it widely deployed, even though everyone says it is cheap and easy to do so. I can imagine a time when when medium format digital becomes affordable that there may be many digital backs that user Thunderbolt for tethered operation. Right now such backs seem to include USB 3.0 and firewire.
I have a Linkedin account, and my concern is how is Linkedin going to make money. I am not going to pay linked for professional support when I already pay others for more targeted support. The ads may be more targeted, but all the ads I see are fly by night organizations. Uneducated person may fall prey to them, but these are supposed to be professionals.
The value of facebook, like the value of typicalTV, is that it targets kids and young adults whose future buying patterns can be more easily influenced, or, as you say, soccer moms who are necessarily spending significant money on a daily basis. The most valuable advertising is still used to build brand loyalty, to a product, to a retailers, to a manufacturer. Linked in is not doing that. It may be a way to get gigs, and may be a way to advertise for free, but I wonder if it will a way to make a profit for shareholders.
Second, ISPs underestimate what a 'normal' level of Internet use really is. 'When AT&T announced its data caps – 150GB per month for DSL users and 250GB for broadband – it called the data levels generous and said limits would only affect 2 percent of its customers. It turns out Netflix users take up an average of 40GB per month just from streaming media
Normal, at least in the free market, is a compromise between what retailers are willing to sell and users are willing to pay for. People complain about high gas prices, but it is only recently that, again, users are actually responding to the prices. Likewise, it may seem that $2 for a coke is high, but largely retailers sell quite a bit of product in that way.
In this case, bandwidth retailers are largely setting caps based on price points that are attractive to consumers and still provide them a profitable situation. We can argue whether the profits are excessive, but the situation is what it is. Netflix is a new business model, and some costs may be externalized to third parties that do not directly benefit from the service. I think the point of the report is to illustrate this point, and question Netflix as a viable model. OTOH, 'the internet' like 'the roads' s becoming a public resource in which continuously increasing trafic capacity is considered in the public interest, and the telcos clearly benefit from more consumers buying product in part driven by the desire for high bandwidth streaming media.
This is really the question of when is it practical to tell the masses that a huge problem exists, especially when the huge problem is not currently causing any significant economic damage and the fix would be a huge economic problem, Yes the government makes certain decisions that keeps information from the public, but that is everyone. I think that any of us that has worked in any job where physical stuff is created has had to keep secrets from people who were effected, usually minimally, to prevent unnecessary panic.
To date, none of my Mac computers has had a debilitating infection. Back in the day, we could expect a PC to be dead every few months due to infection. So Apple is going to validate a threat that does not exist in quantity so that users can be conned by "your computer is infected" scam and the legitimate anti-virus maker scare tactics.
I am not saying that Apple is not playing security by obscurity, just that it may not yet be time to panic the users. It may be time, I don't know. We will have to wait and see what develops.
MS Windows increasingly did this or allowed the administrator to do this. For example, it was quite vogue for a while to not allow active content over email. In fact many problems on MS Windows occurred simply because opening an email could infect a computer, and MS Outlook was set up by default to open an email when user selected it, or automatically show the most recent email. Back in the very late 90's when I started using PCs again for work I had a machine infected in this way. SInce I had been away from the PC for a while, i did not know they were this venerable.
Over the years Apple has developed these bad habits as well. Apple sends email as HTML with active content, so it sets the Mac to show these dangerous emails by default. From Apple it is probably safe, but there are thousands of other emails that can contain a malware payload in the HTML. Likewise, Apple let Flash and PDF entities run free, which exposed the computer to any number of active contents.
Here are three ways the OS protects the user. First, frequent incremental backups will insure that if the compter is infected it is easy to roll back to a known good state with minimal data loss. Second, anytime the user tries to run content downloaded from an untrusted source, the user will be told that a program is attempting to load as the user has to validate. The novice user can be told to never validate without asking someone knowledgable. This wil not protect kids who would run a program that blew up the house if it meant they could play a game or run a proxy, or older persons who will do the same to see naked people, but those are extreme cases. The third thing, that will combat the fake virus malware, is to simply run all user accounts without admin privileges. These are not necessary for normal work, so do not grant them.
Nerds like us were using BBS to interact and play games. Then the 'Internet' came and as time went by the tools for social interaction became simpler to use and pretty GUIs were added. AIM was what the youngsters in certain areas used, while I noticed many other used Yahoo. What I noticed is that when the kids of 90's got office jobs, they had AIM and the like on for constant connection to keep up with their friends and hook up. Since work does not have the compressed space and social opportunities of school AIM took on the roll of connecting dislocated persons.
Of course at this point not everyone had connections at home, and certainly not while traveling. I would also note that while AIM was actually used for communication, Facebook is more of a vanity website, much more related to the old BBS, rather than AIM.
It is really an issue of reasonable size government and jurisdiction. In the simplest theory, products shipped from a local warehouse in state will be taxed. Shipments are going to have to be verified to insure that firms are complient, which means that we need a new bureaucracy to monitor the taxes. Sure the state may collect more moeny, but at the expense of expanding government for no apparent good purpose. In the theory that a company with any presence in a state should be sales tax on any product shipped to the state, we are talking about huge jurisdictional issues with huge new bureacracy with huge new powers that would have to be blessed by the SCOTUS.
My concern is that these big government proposals are being put forth by alleged conservatives when there are alternatives that conservatives should be considered before giving the governement power to interfere with day to day operations of businesses.
FIrst, most states have use taxes, that is the end user is obligated to pay for products. Obviously, most end users do not pay and the state does not enforce this law. The conservatives have been making a lot of noise about enforcing laws, yet do not seem to want to enforce this one. In fact, this law would be simple to enforce and a few high profile prosecutions would encourage people to pay the use fees without significant expansion of the size or power of government
The second option is to get rid of the sales tax. The sales tax provide a hug burden to business, especially the small firms that many credit with creating jobs. It creates regulatory burdens, competitive disadvatages, and simple honest erros can escalate to huge tax burdens that destroy an otherwise thriving business. The sales tax, by any measure, in anti-free market and really no conservative has any justification to be in favor of it. Rather, a small flat tax with a significant deduction, say anyone at the poverty level pays no tax, could generate income equal or greater to the sales tax. A family making $50K might pay 1-2K in taxes. The top earners inwill pay at least 10K, and there would be no deductions. Simple, fair, minimum government intrusion and no bigger government. Sales tax office that harasses small business is instead responsible to insure that private citizens pay their fair share for services received. What is more, it is very clear to everyone how much those services costs, unlike the hidden sales tax, so they can make a more informed decision about the size of government.
I think this will be good to keep legacy customers in line, but really I can't see a new small firm surviving with MS prices, and MS interference through constant audit threats, in this economy.
What people are not realizing is that Google Docs and the upcoming Android tables and Chrome laptop computer is the first real threat to the MS domination. In the past MS has maintained dominance on the theory that any PC had to be licensed with MS software because it was assumed that any naked PC was bought for the intention of pirating MS Windows. This meant that even if one wanted to run *nix, one still had to have the MS license, so where was the cost savings? Even if one built one's own machine, if one has a single MS Windows machine running, one was open to being attacked by the BSA and MS for piracy, even if everything was licensed. An disgruntled employee could easily set something up for the reward money.
With thins MS is defending itself against the upcoming machines that run the office application over the network and cannot run Windows. This is the $20/month machines that are allegedly soon to be offered by Google. Yes, these machines are going to be a disappoint to some. Yes they will not be as great as advertised. I think they will end up costing more. But they will be machines that will potentially never generate any income for MS. And they will be mass market. This is new a potentially scary territory for people would depend on MS, not to mention MS.
It is true that Google docs are to suck. But so were MS office products. It was years before MS had anything as good even as MacWrite, which was free on the Mac. It was years before MS Excel for MS Windows was nearly as good as MS Excel for Macintosh. This was so apparent that MS really did at one point degrade the user experience on Mac, and stopped developing on any number of products to keep people on Windows. But even without such intervention, $1000 for a PC versus $3000 for a Mac kept most people on the MS Windows side, even though the products on MS Windows were vastly inferior
I can use Google Docs for production work. It is not great, but it is not horrible. There are things it cannot do, but per $20 per seat including computer I can work around the issues. Some of the problems, like the spread sheet, are real. Other problems, like the word processor, are due to people thinking that everything should run like word. The presentation software is no worse than MS Powerpoint, and I can't believe that so many think Powerpoint is still legitimate software. Again, it has to do low expectations.
I think that people who license MS software wil continue to do so for some time. I would wonder about the profitability of new company that choose to spend that king of money on legacy products. It would be like basing your business on IBM Selectric in the mid 80's.
I don't know what we could do if we could not call the president a monkey without the opposing view that he is not in fact a simian. I do like the fact that liberal radio can call the current speak Boner without allowing corrections to his name, and talk about how Bonercare will solve everything. Fact based reporting is for the bygone era, and the fairness doctrine is not going to bring it back.
The procedure you describe is effective and cost efficient. Users should have a backup of data. Some hotshot might be able to figure out what actually is causing the problem, but unless the hotshot is charging $10 an hour, such work is not really useful. If this does not fix the computer, there may be another issue with user or the machine. and at that point it may be useful to spend some time on it and find the 'real problem'. In most cases the cost of the machine makes it such that buying a new machine is cost effective unless you are going to do the work yourself. This is even true for upgrades where, as the article mentions, it is difficult to know what you are actually getting. WIth memory it is impossible to know if the device is new, and an old device can have unknown broken capacitors, which will manifest as a machine that is broken in a different way and must be repaired again.
In fact i have any number of issues with bad memory and tend to use one supplier until it starts shipping bad memory. If I were looking at a machine and saw dodgy memory, I would suggest to the user to replace the memory. How many would think I were ripping them off? Likewise the real problem might be a failing hard disk, and how many people would think I were ripping them off it I suggested replacing a 2 year old hard disk? The thing is that a technical firm cannot survive by billing $40/hour. So cheap firms must come up with creative ways to extort money while still appearing to be cheap.
I have come to believe what the internet has provided in these situations is publicity, not any more complex decision making. In the past when a boy harassed a girl or ridiculed a group of girls, often because they would not date him, it could be kept in the school, apologize made, and everyone could believe a lesson was learned. The internet changed that local control of the situation.
For instance, when nooses were left in the schoolyard and nothing was done until the kids who left the nooses were beat to a pulp, the natural reaction was to say the white kids were just funnin' and did not deserve to beat up. OTOH for many who understand the rules of high school, and understand that some things between boys require a level of physical interaction, the outcomes were unfortunate but predicatable. The school chose not to stop the bullying, so the kids took the issue into their own hands. A kangaroo court was prevented due to publicity.
Likewise when an a 11 year old girl was repeatedly gang raped over some time, The community was willing to brand her a slut. Many saida1 she wanted to be raped, and the alleged rapist, one a star athlete, should not be held responsible. After all, what would it do to the scholarship opportunities? Again, easy publicity fo the internet and a video means that the community will have a hard time blaming the victim.
We see this publicity everywhere. Conservative radio wants to call women sluts and black men stupid and liars. How much father would Trump's birther thing have gotten, and his accusation a black man could never have been the best a Harvard without cheating gotten without the easy access provided by the internet for contradictory facts. The powerful have always had the bully pulpit. In school these are the agressive boys, sometimes girls, and star athletes. But the internet is the real world, and the real world does not operate by adolescent rules. Humiliating another person has never been the right thing to do. It is just that it used to be easier to get away with so we ignored it. Now a bully has the world as his or her judge.
Interesting read. One thing I noticed is that a key issue was the relationship between the viewer and hotel, which made it a transmission to the public, which requires an explicit license. I wonder if something that was set up like a co-op, with a buying, a stake, and a monthly fee would change this relation so transmission would be allowed. That would be like a neighborhood buying DVDs and them sharing them amongst themselves.
At the basis is an attempt to minimize third party profit on movie products. The studios though blockbuster was bad, and now they have netflix, and probably have no idea where it will end. As most of this is caused by physical DVD sales, they would be good to stop making DVDs and just stream everything.
All I want is a button that will set flash content to load only with approval. This is already done third party, but if Adobe did it one might think Flash was more than just a method to push near pornographic advertising onto innocent users. As it is, the infrastructure to approve cookies is horribly unreliable.
Years ago Flash was actively budled with Safari on Apple. It was so bundled that when one updated Safari, Flash would be restored. It was impossible to remove Flash from an Apple computer because once Flash was on the computer, it infected all browsers. The issue, for those who love flash, was that the number of flash components on a web page often overwhelmed my computer. Of couse when Camino had flash blocking Apple autoloads of flash were not an issue.
The Google response reminds me of when MS was in the habit of using PR to quash security reports instead of writing code good. Someone would come up with an exploit and MS would say it was not a well configured updated system so the fixing the code that fell to the exploit was not the responsibility of MS. The security people would then run the exploit again with an fresh out of the box installation with all updates, and the machine would again be compromised. MS would then respond by saying that user could easily configure the machine to not fall to the exploit, so it was a user issue and not a MS issue. The thing is that is the out of the box configuration is not secure, then the machine is not secure. If an Android phone comes with flash out of the box, and Flash is not secure, then the machine is not secure. It does not matter how fancy and pretty and secure the rest of the code may be.
Many schools have good network connectivity, so the value of this will be for kids to do homework. I can see value in many classes, even math and science where there is increasing a large virtual component.
The problem will be managing the computers. The 3G network will be totally unfiltered, so many kids are going to choose to play games rather than read or write or run assigned simulations. While the assignments can be more interesting, the fact is that school can compete against games and music and fight videos about as well as labels can compete against free. It is a conflict. There are valid reasons to have a filtered network at school but increasingly kids do need connectivity at home. Though many kids have cable, 3g will be the best option for some. In the end, though, 3g will keep these computers out of many schools.
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So giving away 2 million dollars to the the top twenty applicants with a good idea is not really going to tell us anything. First, many of the innovations we see today were created using college resources. Bill Gates dropped out of harvard to do software, but it is alleged that he used campus resources to start. 100K is not going to get you campus resoureces. Dell sold computers out of his college dorm.
My thought is that people who want to drop out of college and go out and change the world do it. Some stay to maintain access to university resources. In any case the university will continue to be a basis of training for innovation. I have never had access to the equipment in the real worl that I had in University, and familiarity with that equipment has transferred to many other projects.
What would make me impressed is if there were 2 million dollars for high school students who start a tech firm prior to graduation. That woud accelerate innovation.
These virtual particles are tiny compared to atomic matter and exist for short amount of time, such a short amount of time thier very existence is below the uncertainty thresholds. They are a consequence of the fundamental uncertainty in position and momentum. They are created out of the vacuum.
So the question the experiment attempts to answer is does the electron behave like an object that reacts symmetrically in all dimensions, or is there so aberration, that is, is it not a perfect sphere. To a very high accuracy the paper claims that it is a sphere.
However that is not the full story. The paper is based on the idea that the aspherical shape would be larger than the standard model predicts. Adjusted models predicts a larger aspherical aberration. Since this experiment did not detect large aberrations, these other models, extensions of the Standard Model seem to be less than accurate. Form what I read, the standard model predictions are orders of magnitude lower than current sensitivity so it remains unclear if the electron acts like a sphere or something that is almost like a sphere.
What this experiment does is provide a novel and fascinating method to probe subatomic particles, as well as establish an upper limit on how big the abberation could be. Good science.
From a usability point of view the URL has been criticized from at least 1999, mostly due to influx of machine generated addresses on dynamic web pages. Since that time, the url has only become more obfuscated, so it would seem that the URL bar has reached a point where it should go away.
OTOH there is a security issue. The URL does provide a means of knowing where one is on the web. Of course with embedded content, the URL can lie, but that is more about bad and intentionally fraudulent behavior, not abou the URL. The URL also allows user a means to get from one place to another without an intervening service or sanctioned links. This freedom can cut into revenue.
Really, if the URL can be turned off and on, then that is about user choice for a simpler interface. If the URL cannot be turned back on, then that is about the browser wanting to control the user experience, probably to maximize tracking data and ad data. For a consumer browser like Firefox and Chrome and IE, it would make sense for the URL to be turned off by default. These are browser used by the masses who don't know what URL stands for, doesn't understand what it means, and doesn't care if Google or whomever tracks their every move. I would just be surprised to see Mozilla do it.
But seriously, this is the kind of thing that has really killed the world. Here we have a weed that is one of the most perfect and useful plants in existence. Because of fundamentalist faith based lawmaking and general greed it is banned for most purposes. Of course some would say that it damages kids, but how about the legal drugs? The Pfizer commercials tells kids they can only be happy with drugs. Someone like Rush Limbaugh can afford to be a prescription drug addict, and maybe old people in the US with medicare part D, but the average person has to go with the unregulated stuff. It would be nice if kids were not told that drug use is good, and I certainly believe that drug use in general is a losing game, but there we have it. Corporate drugs good, plants are bad.
On top of the insanity of jailing people for growing plants or using plants simply because that plant has not been awarded the special corporate status of tabacco, is just the beginning. So we now have these indoor operation using huge amounts of dirty power that contributes god knows how much to global warming, killing the future even for the kids that aren't addicted to Zoloft. All this waste because growers are forced indoors. Of course in canada part of the problem is the short growing season, but really, it is arguable that the time of the police would be better spent arresting doctors for frivolously doping kids so that they don't annoy their parents.
I agree. I am still on an unlimited data plan, but it is from2007 . Most new *g services have a cap to meet a price point, and because the higher bandwidth of new generation phones are going to kill the network if used by the teen age boy viewing pron 24X7 or the older guy viewing sports clip over the same time frame. So instead of fake unlimited plans we have real limited plans. This is shown in the T-Mobile thing. It has nothing to do with ATT. It has to do with expanded 3G and anticipated 4G coverage. With a 2G phone, if one were continuously downloading content, one could expect to consume on the order of 10 GB of content. A lot buy most people are not going to do this. Most people will consume less than 1GB. With 3g the maximum content is on the order fo 100 GB. With 4G the problem increases. Larger pipes, faster downloads, more bandwidth used per customer, yet customers don't want to pay more. It is like candy. Can't charge more, so use less product.
However, as tends to happen, the insane compulsive designers came in and said they could not live in a world where they did not have 100% control of the look and feel of content. So hacks were made and kludges were put into allow these insane people to force their views on the innocent world. By the time a compromise was reached, in terms of cascading style sheets, the display independent ideal was long gone. Web pages were made to displayed on specific size screen with specific content. And we found ourselves in need of a book that differentiated the mobile device from the fixed device. What a joke.
Another reason has to be included. The game manufacturers themselves. It seems they are actively trying to kill the resale and rental market. Yet this is how kids get the games and get hooked. If the kids can't get the game, and therefore play the free or cheap online games, they will never buy a console.
A person who completes higher education should have basic abilities beyond the secondary education. Specificalluy such a person should be able to look at problems and with minimal supervision and prompting solve the problem. Think The Devil Wears Prada. A college educate person should be able to, when thrown into a pool, learn to swim before they drown. Everyone who can't should not have a college degree as they should have drowned, i.e. dropped out.
What is happening is an oversupply for colleges is driving a desire for more and more students, which is reducing the minimum standards. This results in mores students who are not qualified problem solvers or qualified creative persons to attend. This itself is not bad, but, at least in the US, such students are often recruited with the offering of federally guaranteed student loans which they can use to pay tuition, books, and living expenses. Since the student does not pay for school directly, there is no downward pressure on prices. Since the loans are guaranteed, there is no incentive of the loan companies to insure the school is preparing the student, that the student is a good risk, or to insure the student pay back the loan. OTOH, these loans can never be settle with bankruptcy or any normal debt removal procedure.
So what we have are local colleges like GVSU desperate for students and a seemingly free source of money to fund these students. The school does not care that 10% are going to default and even more are going to have their lives ruined because they did not receive the education needed to succeed to pay for the loans. The univeristy has the money and all risk is placed on the kids to pay or suffer. Weeding out the kids in the first year, before the debt is huge, is a favor to the kid, but costs the university huge sums of money. The alternative is to have a more selective admision proces, which I digree with since all kids should have an opportunity to gain an edcuation.
The big thing with energy is the externalization of costs to the general public, both real and opportunity. It is not really a conservative of liberal thing. When the BP oil well exploded in the Gulf or Mexico, conservatives all along the conservative Gulf Coast raised hell about the externalization of costs. Conservative Florida threw a fit even though conservative support approving drilling in the Gulf with minimal regulations. The coal industry is allowed to destroy public owned resources the could be better monetized by future generation with no recompense to future generations. And the nuclear industry is allowed to irradiate resources and create waste without a management plan. The Swiss reprocesses and stores the larger quantity, but less radioactive waste. Whether this faustian bargain will be acceptable in the long term is yet to be seen. What is true is that unlike out previous energy experiments in the industrial revolution will not be so easy to reverse. The benefit of nuclear energy is that most of the externalization is limited to the nation-state that benefits from the energy, unlike other sources in which the externalization is wolrd wide.
On a total cost basis other energy sources are viable. Switzerland has good solar irradiation potential. It also has mountains. During the day excess solar energy can be used to pump water up the mountain into a reservoir, and then run through a hydroelectric generator when needed. The same is true for wind. All without externalazing costs to future generations.
What would be cool if this summer the $199 promo include iPads. This way the college kids could play angry birds during the boring history class.
Early digital cameras were low resolution so speed did matter. I think they had like 1 MB of memory and worked through a serial cable, at least for the Dyson and Apple Quicktake. By 2000 we had cameras supassing 3 megapixels, with 4 megapixels storage in raw format. This did require speed, so the Nikon D1, For example, did use a firewire port. I recall using the USB 1.0 port for my first MP3 player. It took so long to transfer the music. For $300 I think they could have included firewire. As mentioned, devices that transfered more information, like hard drives and scanners, did move from SCSI to USB. I don't know that there were no still cameras that used SCSI, but probably not consumer ones.
What is interesting about this discussion is that though USB 3.0 is not widely implemented, no one says it is dead. The latest and greatest cameras do not seem to have USB 3.0. The base laptops sold by HP and Dell do not seem to have USB 3.0. This technology has been out for a year and I do not see it widely deployed, even though everyone says it is cheap and easy to do so. I can imagine a time when when medium format digital becomes affordable that there may be many digital backs that user Thunderbolt for tethered operation. Right now such backs seem to include USB 3.0 and firewire.
The value of facebook, like the value of typicalTV, is that it targets kids and young adults whose future buying patterns can be more easily influenced, or, as you say, soccer moms who are necessarily spending significant money on a daily basis. The most valuable advertising is still used to build brand loyalty, to a product, to a retailers, to a manufacturer. Linked in is not doing that. It may be a way to get gigs, and may be a way to advertise for free, but I wonder if it will a way to make a profit for shareholders.
Normal, at least in the free market, is a compromise between what retailers are willing to sell and users are willing to pay for. People complain about high gas prices, but it is only recently that, again, users are actually responding to the prices. Likewise, it may seem that $2 for a coke is high, but largely retailers sell quite a bit of product in that way.
In this case, bandwidth retailers are largely setting caps based on price points that are attractive to consumers and still provide them a profitable situation. We can argue whether the profits are excessive, but the situation is what it is. Netflix is a new business model, and some costs may be externalized to third parties that do not directly benefit from the service. I think the point of the report is to illustrate this point, and question Netflix as a viable model. OTOH, 'the internet' like 'the roads' s becoming a public resource in which continuously increasing trafic capacity is considered in the public interest, and the telcos clearly benefit from more consumers buying product in part driven by the desire for high bandwidth streaming media.
To date, none of my Mac computers has had a debilitating infection. Back in the day, we could expect a PC to be dead every few months due to infection. So Apple is going to validate a threat that does not exist in quantity so that users can be conned by "your computer is infected" scam and the legitimate anti-virus maker scare tactics.
I am not saying that Apple is not playing security by obscurity, just that it may not yet be time to panic the users. It may be time, I don't know. We will have to wait and see what develops.
Over the years Apple has developed these bad habits as well. Apple sends email as HTML with active content, so it sets the Mac to show these dangerous emails by default. From Apple it is probably safe, but there are thousands of other emails that can contain a malware payload in the HTML. Likewise, Apple let Flash and PDF entities run free, which exposed the computer to any number of active contents.
Here are three ways the OS protects the user. First, frequent incremental backups will insure that if the compter is infected it is easy to roll back to a known good state with minimal data loss. Second, anytime the user tries to run content downloaded from an untrusted source, the user will be told that a program is attempting to load as the user has to validate. The novice user can be told to never validate without asking someone knowledgable. This wil not protect kids who would run a program that blew up the house if it meant they could play a game or run a proxy, or older persons who will do the same to see naked people, but those are extreme cases. The third thing, that will combat the fake virus malware, is to simply run all user accounts without admin privileges. These are not necessary for normal work, so do not grant them.
Of course at this point not everyone had connections at home, and certainly not while traveling. I would also note that while AIM was actually used for communication, Facebook is more of a vanity website, much more related to the old BBS, rather than AIM.
My concern is that these big government proposals are being put forth by alleged conservatives when there are alternatives that conservatives should be considered before giving the governement power to interfere with day to day operations of businesses.
FIrst, most states have use taxes, that is the end user is obligated to pay for products. Obviously, most end users do not pay and the state does not enforce this law. The conservatives have been making a lot of noise about enforcing laws, yet do not seem to want to enforce this one. In fact, this law would be simple to enforce and a few high profile prosecutions would encourage people to pay the use fees without significant expansion of the size or power of government
The second option is to get rid of the sales tax. The sales tax provide a hug burden to business, especially the small firms that many credit with creating jobs. It creates regulatory burdens, competitive disadvatages, and simple honest erros can escalate to huge tax burdens that destroy an otherwise thriving business. The sales tax, by any measure, in anti-free market and really no conservative has any justification to be in favor of it. Rather, a small flat tax with a significant deduction, say anyone at the poverty level pays no tax, could generate income equal or greater to the sales tax. A family making $50K might pay 1-2K in taxes. The top earners inwill pay at least 10K, and there would be no deductions. Simple, fair, minimum government intrusion and no bigger government. Sales tax office that harasses small business is instead responsible to insure that private citizens pay their fair share for services received. What is more, it is very clear to everyone how much those services costs, unlike the hidden sales tax, so they can make a more informed decision about the size of government.
What people are not realizing is that Google Docs and the upcoming Android tables and Chrome laptop computer is the first real threat to the MS domination. In the past MS has maintained dominance on the theory that any PC had to be licensed with MS software because it was assumed that any naked PC was bought for the intention of pirating MS Windows. This meant that even if one wanted to run *nix, one still had to have the MS license, so where was the cost savings? Even if one built one's own machine, if one has a single MS Windows machine running, one was open to being attacked by the BSA and MS for piracy, even if everything was licensed. An disgruntled employee could easily set something up for the reward money.
With thins MS is defending itself against the upcoming machines that run the office application over the network and cannot run Windows. This is the $20/month machines that are allegedly soon to be offered by Google. Yes, these machines are going to be a disappoint to some. Yes they will not be as great as advertised. I think they will end up costing more. But they will be machines that will potentially never generate any income for MS. And they will be mass market. This is new a potentially scary territory for people would depend on MS, not to mention MS.
It is true that Google docs are to suck. But so were MS office products. It was years before MS had anything as good even as MacWrite, which was free on the Mac. It was years before MS Excel for MS Windows was nearly as good as MS Excel for Macintosh. This was so apparent that MS really did at one point degrade the user experience on Mac, and stopped developing on any number of products to keep people on Windows. But even without such intervention, $1000 for a PC versus $3000 for a Mac kept most people on the MS Windows side, even though the products on MS Windows were vastly inferior
I can use Google Docs for production work. It is not great, but it is not horrible. There are things it cannot do, but per $20 per seat including computer I can work around the issues. Some of the problems, like the spread sheet, are real. Other problems, like the word processor, are due to people thinking that everything should run like word. The presentation software is no worse than MS Powerpoint, and I can't believe that so many think Powerpoint is still legitimate software. Again, it has to do low expectations.
I think that people who license MS software wil continue to do so for some time. I would wonder about the profitability of new company that choose to spend that king of money on legacy products. It would be like basing your business on IBM Selectric in the mid 80's.
I don't know what we could do if we could not call the president a monkey without the opposing view that he is not in fact a simian. I do like the fact that liberal radio can call the current speak Boner without allowing corrections to his name, and talk about how Bonercare will solve everything. Fact based reporting is for the bygone era, and the fairness doctrine is not going to bring it back.
In fact i have any number of issues with bad memory and tend to use one supplier until it starts shipping bad memory. If I were looking at a machine and saw dodgy memory, I would suggest to the user to replace the memory. How many would think I were ripping them off? Likewise the real problem might be a failing hard disk, and how many people would think I were ripping them off it I suggested replacing a 2 year old hard disk? The thing is that a technical firm cannot survive by billing $40/hour. So cheap firms must come up with creative ways to extort money while still appearing to be cheap.
For instance, when nooses were left in the schoolyard and nothing was done until the kids who left the nooses were beat to a pulp, the natural reaction was to say the white kids were just funnin' and did not deserve to beat up. OTOH for many who understand the rules of high school, and understand that some things between boys require a level of physical interaction, the outcomes were unfortunate but predicatable. The school chose not to stop the bullying, so the kids took the issue into their own hands. A kangaroo court was prevented due to publicity.
Likewise when an a 11 year old girl was repeatedly gang raped over some time, The community was willing to brand her a slut. Many saida1 she wanted to be raped, and the alleged rapist, one a star athlete, should not be held responsible. After all, what would it do to the scholarship opportunities? Again, easy publicity fo the internet and a video means that the community will have a hard time blaming the victim.
We see this publicity everywhere. Conservative radio wants to call women sluts and black men stupid and liars. How much father would Trump's birther thing have gotten, and his accusation a black man could never have been the best a Harvard without cheating gotten without the easy access provided by the internet for contradictory facts. The powerful have always had the bully pulpit. In school these are the agressive boys, sometimes girls, and star athletes. But the internet is the real world, and the real world does not operate by adolescent rules. Humiliating another person has never been the right thing to do. It is just that it used to be easier to get away with so we ignored it. Now a bully has the world as his or her judge.
At the basis is an attempt to minimize third party profit on movie products. The studios though blockbuster was bad, and now they have netflix, and probably have no idea where it will end. As most of this is caused by physical DVD sales, they would be good to stop making DVDs and just stream everything.
All I want is a button that will set flash content to load only with approval. This is already done third party, but if Adobe did it one might think Flash was more than just a method to push near pornographic advertising onto innocent users. As it is, the infrastructure to approve cookies is horribly unreliable.
The Google response reminds me of when MS was in the habit of using PR to quash security reports instead of writing code good. Someone would come up with an exploit and MS would say it was not a well configured updated system so the fixing the code that fell to the exploit was not the responsibility of MS. The security people would then run the exploit again with an fresh out of the box installation with all updates, and the machine would again be compromised. MS would then respond by saying that user could easily configure the machine to not fall to the exploit, so it was a user issue and not a MS issue. The thing is that is the out of the box configuration is not secure, then the machine is not secure. If an Android phone comes with flash out of the box, and Flash is not secure, then the machine is not secure. It does not matter how fancy and pretty and secure the rest of the code may be.
The problem will be managing the computers. The 3G network will be totally unfiltered, so many kids are going to choose to play games rather than read or write or run assigned simulations. While the assignments can be more interesting, the fact is that school can compete against games and music and fight videos about as well as labels can compete against free. It is a conflict. There are valid reasons to have a filtered network at school but increasingly kids do need connectivity at home. Though many kids have cable, 3g will be the best option for some. In the end, though, 3g will keep these computers out of many schools.