As someone who had his Identity stolen/used, I can attest that the person is a victim also. I was lucky, relatively speaking. The thieves opened a credit card in my name, using my name, address, DOB, and SSN. (Interestingly, they got Mother's Maiden Name wrong, but that didn't raise any red flags.) They paid for rush delivery of the card and THEN changed the address. (Second red flag missed: Immediately changing the address to a different state right after opening the card.) Due to a quirk in processing, the card got sent to me. Had it been sent to them, they would have charged up a storm and the collections agency would have banged down my door for me to pay the $5,000+ debt.
Identity theft victims - the people, not the companies - can find their credit rating shredded. They can spend years trying to repair the damage that an Identity thief ruins in a weekend of binge buying. And this doesn't even get into Criminal Identity Theft where an arrested criminal gives your name, SSN, DOB, etc to the police so that you wind up with a criminal record without ever having committed any crimes. And good luck getting all of the police systems corrected. They all feed into one another so fixing one means the bad data will just flow back into it.
Like I said, I was lucky. I still need to spend the rest of my life with my credit file frozen - my information is out there and could be used to open new accounts at any point if I left it unfrozen. It means that any time I need my credit file used (new car loan, credit check, opening a new credit card, etc), I need to pay to thaw my accounts for a limited period of time and hope that the transactions complete in that time frame.
NYS ELA Grade 6 Day 1 had a passage, written by a British author in the 1800s, with a readability/ text complexity range from Grade 9-College!
Note: That this blog can't provide the exact text because doing so could result in a lawsuit from Pearson. Teachers or students merely talking about the tests - even after the tests are given - isn't allowed either. Any teacher who says what was on the test - especially online somewhere - is risking their job.
The third-grade ELA test contained a passage from "Drag Racer," which had a grade level difficulty of 5.9 and an interest level of grades 9–12, as well as an allusion to the Aurora Borealis. Teachers anonymously reported one question appeared on both the third-grade test and fifth-grade test. Fourth-graders, generally 10 years old, were required to write about the architectural designs of roller coasters and why cables are used instead of chains.
These tests aren't meant to spot the brightest students. They are (supposedly) meant to evaluate how much a child has learned that year. If that's the case, what child will be learning college level materials in 6th grade? If it's not the case, then people have been misled as to the purpose behind the exam. At best, the tests are just badly designed. At worst, Pearson is rigging the test to get the results that they want. Namely, that students are failing so that they can sell solutions to this "problem" to school districts.
Not just producing horrible tests, but grading horribly. They employ near-minimum wage people to grade the exams and then tell them just how many of each grade they should get. Too many high scoring tests? You've just got to "see" that 5 out of 5 test as a 4 and that 4 out of 5 test as a 3.
I'm from NY too and agree with you on all of this. We've refused the tests for our oldest for three years now. Our youngest will have his first refusal next year. Meanwhile, Cuomo has come out saying that the tests mean nothing for the kids but will be used to evaluate teachers. Do you really think kids are going to try hard on difficult exams that "mean nothing" to them?!!! Just because their teachers' jobs might be at stake?
Just what is the education crisis? I just don't see it. As I said, I don't think we've advanced more than have a teacher in a classroom.
It's an invented crisis so that Pearson can sell more, Charter schools can push out more public schools, and politicians can get more power by blaming teachers and implementing "assessments" that don't really test anything.
There's also no transparency. Pearson makes the test, owns the test, and anyone releasing questions from the test can get in big trouble. The questions that were leaked show that 3rd grade tests had 6th grade reading materials and 6th grade tests had college level materials. This also means that the tests were likely designed to fail the students. (Pearson can sell more to students who fail than to students who pass.)
John Oliver's take was spot on. It was somehow funny and sad at the same time.
Not just rich and poor also, but special needs and no special needs. By us, Charter schools can pick and choose who they accept. So they reject anyone with special needs and only take students who perform well. This means they need to spend less per child. They also take money out of the public school fund so the public schools are left with a higher percentage of special needs kids with less money to help them. This helps the public schools fail which means the charter schools can push to turn more schools into charter schools.
Here in NY, Governor Cuomo has been drooling over the prospect of turning ALL public schools into Charters. My oldest's school might be forced to become a charter school in a year or two. If they do, I'm not sure what we'll do as he's special needs (Autism - high functioning and very smart, but needs assistance with some things) and the charter will likely decide he's not "cost effective." (Charter schools are businesses, after all.)
There were no federal mandates on common core. This is an outright lie by conspiricy theorists.
It doesn't help when state officials claim the Feds are mandating certain tests and when Federal officials say that they might need to take "action" if there are too many test refusals in a state.
As for innnercity schools that seems to be more of an issue with lack of parental ovesight than with school administrators.
That and poverty. When a child is poor - to the degree that he/she is worried about whether they'll be able to eat dinner, whether mom/dad will still have a job tomorrow, whether they'll lose their home next week, etc, that impacts learning. Obviously, there's no easy cure to poverty, but we'd be better off spending money helping the poor kids than giving it to Pearson to implement yet more testing.
The Common Core opposition isn't just coming from Republicans. My wife and I have been fighting over New York's horrible implementation of Common Core which includes scripts for teachers that they aren't allowed to deviate from, high stakes testing, and most recently tying said testing to teacher jobs. We're definitely not Republicans. Around 300,000 students refused the tests in NY. (Before someone says "well, they're just hard tests", the 6th grade tests had college level reading material on them.) Bill Gates, Pearson, and others are pushing this to make money off students - not to help students succeed.
Bobby: Do religions hate each other where you come from? Noranti: Oh, good heavens no. Religions are grand lofty ideals. Religious followers, now that's another story.
If more people pirate music, they can blame bad sales (where bad is defined as "We sold X and we think we should have sold 10,000*X") on piracy. Then, they can use the piracy claim to get some music industry-friendly, consumer-unfriendly laws passed. (E.g. "You need to pay a $5 a month piracy tax whether or not you pirate." or "Three copyright infringement accusations and your ISP must disconnect you.") Best case: An executive blames piracy on a bad album sale instead of on the fact that he signed a band with no talent.
Even if piracy went away tomorrow, I'm convinced that the music industry would still claim that piracy was increasing more and more.
I think labels might still have a place, but not with the kind of power that they traditionally had. They still employ people who are good at publicizing albums whereas the bands might not be good at it themselves. (Yes, social media and other tools makes it easier, but it doesn't mean everyone becomes a marketing expert.) I envision the future label to be a glorified ad agency. A singer/band would sign a contract for the label to promote their album for a certain period of time. The label wouldn't own the copyrights and would merely get a cut of the profits. (As opposed to the current "gobble all the profits and generously give a crumb to the artists" model.) If the artist didn't like how the label was doing, they could fire them or wait until the contract expired. Then, they could pack up their albums and go to another label. (No more: "Artist X can't play popular Song Y because they left Label Z who now owns the rights to it.")
Of course, these new labels will need to trim a lot of fat out so many music executives will lose their jobs. Here's an actual size tear that I will shed over their lost jobs: .
Very interesting. We have Catan but rarely play it due to lack of space. (Small house combined with long playing times for Catan and needing to reuse the "playing area" for other reasons before the game is up.) The portable version might let us play part of a game, move it aside when the playing area needs to be reused, and then pick up our game later on. Thanks.
I would love to see this in a self-driving car for long family road-trips. Three hour car ride? Set your destination, turn your seats around, grab a tabletop game (Pandemic, Munchkin, Catan, etc) and play a few games while the car drives you to your destination. Of course, some games might need travel versions to keep the pieces on the playing board. For example, Catan might be difficult if every bump the car hit caused your pieces to go flying. Still, this could make long road trips more fun for the entire family.
It seems kind of dumb to on the one hand think you'll get everyone to help populate your data for free, and on the other hand that you'll get perfectly valid data in all cases.
I consider this Rule #1 in any kind of development project: Never trust the user's input.
It doesn't matter if you told the user to select 1 to 10 and gave them a drop down box to choose the appropriate number. Don't trust that only numbers from 1 to 10 will be coming to your application. Check to make sure that the input is indeed a number and not "1; Delete from Users". Make sure that the number is within your 1 - 10 integer boundaries and not -1, 13, or 3.14159265. Only once the input has been fully vetted/sanitized should it be used.
Obviously, things get more complicated when you get up to Map Maker levels of complexity. You can't simply run IsNewDataValid(x). However, this is where you should have someone review the data for any obvious issues. It won't remove all abuses (people might sneak in graffiti using many small, innocuous-looking updates instead of one big one), but it can help stop major abuses. It also can slow down approvals of user data, but sometimes slow posting of data is preferable to letting everything through and then looking foolish when someone posts something inappropriate.
I believe the summary said that that humans were in control of the cars during at least 2 of the 4 incidents. You can't blame the self-driving car if the self-driving feature is disabled and the human takes over. That would be like blaming Google Maps for bad directions if you turn it off, take a left turn when Google had said to turn right, and wind up lost.
With a 2 out of 48 accident rate, that's 4%. Of course, that's a very small sample size. It would be interesting to see how the accident rate changes with many more autonomous cars on the road.
Except, as delt0r pointed out, there's a difference between liability for "Office crashed and destroyed my resume" and "My car's air bags deployed when we weren't involved in a crash." The former is an inconvenience so a click-wrap agreement absolving the company from any damages due to their software might be annoying but isn't life threatening. The latter involves actual lives. Car manufacturers have already been held accountable for faulty automotive systems. Self-driving will be another feature of the car like ABS and air bags. If the self-driving mechanism decides that the two lane road actually has three lanes, the car manufacturer will face a recall at best and lawsuits at worst. I don't see the courts treating a car feature like software instead of like other car features. To quote delt0r: If car makers could have had "click-wrap agreement" equivalents, they definitely would have and you'd never see any recalls. ("Thousands of our cars' ABS doesn't work when it is raining? Must be a faulty system. Oh well, they all agreed not to sue us. Those folks better pay to get that fixed.")
I'm all for reducing the penalties for copyright infringement when there's no profit motive involved. For example, someone downloads a movie via BitTorrent and shares that movie out. Mind you, I still think there should be penalties, but the $750 - $150,000 per infringement seems too high.
This case, however, is one where people are intentionally selling books that they don't own the rights to sell and not paying the legitimate author. This is piracy purely for profit and can snag people who think these are legitimate listings. THESE kinds of pirates are the ones that the original copyright infringement fees were designed for and I will feel no sorrow for them if they are fined exorbitant amounts of money.
If an ISP wants to throttle video, as long as they do it equally among all providers, that seems fair. Or to give preference to online gaming, that's fair too. As long as the ISP isn't picking and choosing, or asking for money to give a higher preference.
Network Neutrality doesn't mean that an ISP can't provide QoS and say "All video streaming packets get bumped ahead of e-mail packets." What it means is that an ISP can't say "Video packet A gets bumped ahead of video packet B because provider A paid us for 'fast lane access.'" Even more, it says that ISPs can't say "All video packets get slowed down so that our service's video packets can seem faster and so we can use our local Internet access monopoly to get people to sign up for our video services." (Look at the Comcast-Netflix speed graphs for an example of this. Netflix's speed tanked until right when Netflix decided to pay Comcast for faster access.)
You're not the person that the government is targeting in their "War on Terror." They're targeting the majority of folks who see "cool news device in TSA line... it must be keeping us safe by buzzing if a terrorist passes through" and not "invasion of privacy combined with company-government kickbacks for selecting this device."
I've found that listening to music can help. If my brain needs to switch focus for a second, it can listen to the music for a few seconds and then go right back to the task at hand. What kind of music works best varies from person to person and even day to day. Some days, I need slow songs to help calm me down. Other days, I need a more "active" song to boost my adrenaline.
That's true. For the purposes of my comment, I was assuming that the FBI were "good guys" because they keep saying they are the good guys and need a "good guys only" backdoor. Even if we make the huge assumption that they are good guys and would never abuse it, a "good guys only" backdoor would still be used by "bad guys" as well.
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As someone who had his Identity stolen/used, I can attest that the person is a victim also. I was lucky, relatively speaking. The thieves opened a credit card in my name, using my name, address, DOB, and SSN. (Interestingly, they got Mother's Maiden Name wrong, but that didn't raise any red flags.) They paid for rush delivery of the card and THEN changed the address. (Second red flag missed: Immediately changing the address to a different state right after opening the card.) Due to a quirk in processing, the card got sent to me. Had it been sent to them, they would have charged up a storm and the collections agency would have banged down my door for me to pay the $5,000+ debt.
Identity theft victims - the people, not the companies - can find their credit rating shredded. They can spend years trying to repair the damage that an Identity thief ruins in a weekend of binge buying. And this doesn't even get into Criminal Identity Theft where an arrested criminal gives your name, SSN, DOB, etc to the police so that you wind up with a criminal record without ever having committed any crimes. And good luck getting all of the police systems corrected. They all feed into one another so fixing one means the bad data will just flow back into it.
Like I said, I was lucky. I still need to spend the rest of my life with my credit file frozen - my information is out there and could be used to open new accounts at any point if I left it unfrozen. It means that any time I need my credit file used (new car loan, credit check, opening a new credit card, etc), I need to pay to thaw my accounts for a limited period of time and hope that the transactions complete in that time frame.
Coincidentally, they are showing Expendables 3 in movie jail, though some have said that this is inhumane.
From http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2015/04/ny-testing-horror-stories-ela-tests-day.html:
Note: That this blog can't provide the exact text because doing so could result in a lawsuit from Pearson. Teachers or students merely talking about the tests - even after the tests are given - isn't allowed either. Any teacher who says what was on the test - especially online somewhere - is risking their job.
There's also this post:
Well, nothing except "My e-mail address is USERNAME.... .... .... .... Oh, I need to add the @aol.com?"
Luckily, there seem to be fewer and fewer of those folks around.
These tests aren't meant to spot the brightest students. They are (supposedly) meant to evaluate how much a child has learned that year. If that's the case, what child will be learning college level materials in 6th grade? If it's not the case, then people have been misled as to the purpose behind the exam. At best, the tests are just badly designed. At worst, Pearson is rigging the test to get the results that they want. Namely, that students are failing so that they can sell solutions to this "problem" to school districts.
Not just producing horrible tests, but grading horribly. They employ near-minimum wage people to grade the exams and then tell them just how many of each grade they should get. Too many high scoring tests? You've just got to "see" that 5 out of 5 test as a 4 and that 4 out of 5 test as a 3.
I'm from NY too and agree with you on all of this. We've refused the tests for our oldest for three years now. Our youngest will have his first refusal next year. Meanwhile, Cuomo has come out saying that the tests mean nothing for the kids but will be used to evaluate teachers. Do you really think kids are going to try hard on difficult exams that "mean nothing" to them?!!! Just because their teachers' jobs might be at stake?
It's an invented crisis so that Pearson can sell more, Charter schools can push out more public schools, and politicians can get more power by blaming teachers and implementing "assessments" that don't really test anything.
There's also no transparency. Pearson makes the test, owns the test, and anyone releasing questions from the test can get in big trouble. The questions that were leaked show that 3rd grade tests had 6th grade reading materials and 6th grade tests had college level materials. This also means that the tests were likely designed to fail the students. (Pearson can sell more to students who fail than to students who pass.)
John Oliver's take was spot on. It was somehow funny and sad at the same time.
Not just rich and poor also, but special needs and no special needs. By us, Charter schools can pick and choose who they accept. So they reject anyone with special needs and only take students who perform well. This means they need to spend less per child. They also take money out of the public school fund so the public schools are left with a higher percentage of special needs kids with less money to help them. This helps the public schools fail which means the charter schools can push to turn more schools into charter schools.
Here in NY, Governor Cuomo has been drooling over the prospect of turning ALL public schools into Charters. My oldest's school might be forced to become a charter school in a year or two. If they do, I'm not sure what we'll do as he's special needs (Autism - high functioning and very smart, but needs assistance with some things) and the charter will likely decide he's not "cost effective." (Charter schools are businesses, after all.)
It doesn't help when state officials claim the Feds are mandating certain tests and when Federal officials say that they might need to take "action" if there are too many test refusals in a state.
That and poverty. When a child is poor - to the degree that he/she is worried about whether they'll be able to eat dinner, whether mom/dad will still have a job tomorrow, whether they'll lose their home next week, etc, that impacts learning. Obviously, there's no easy cure to poverty, but we'd be better off spending money helping the poor kids than giving it to Pearson to implement yet more testing.
The Common Core opposition isn't just coming from Republicans. My wife and I have been fighting over New York's horrible implementation of Common Core which includes scripts for teachers that they aren't allowed to deviate from, high stakes testing, and most recently tying said testing to teacher jobs. We're definitely not Republicans. Around 300,000 students refused the tests in NY. (Before someone says "well, they're just hard tests", the 6th grade tests had college level reading material on them.) Bill Gates, Pearson, and others are pushing this to make money off students - not to help students succeed.
Bobby: Do religions hate each other where you come from?
Noranti: Oh, good heavens no. Religions are grand lofty ideals. Religious followers, now that's another story.
(Farscape)
If more people pirate music, they can blame bad sales (where bad is defined as "We sold X and we think we should have sold 10,000*X") on piracy. Then, they can use the piracy claim to get some music industry-friendly, consumer-unfriendly laws passed. (E.g. "You need to pay a $5 a month piracy tax whether or not you pirate." or "Three copyright infringement accusations and your ISP must disconnect you.") Best case: An executive blames piracy on a bad album sale instead of on the fact that he signed a band with no talent.
Even if piracy went away tomorrow, I'm convinced that the music industry would still claim that piracy was increasing more and more.
I think labels might still have a place, but not with the kind of power that they traditionally had. They still employ people who are good at publicizing albums whereas the bands might not be good at it themselves. (Yes, social media and other tools makes it easier, but it doesn't mean everyone becomes a marketing expert.) I envision the future label to be a glorified ad agency. A singer/band would sign a contract for the label to promote their album for a certain period of time. The label wouldn't own the copyrights and would merely get a cut of the profits. (As opposed to the current "gobble all the profits and generously give a crumb to the artists" model.) If the artist didn't like how the label was doing, they could fire them or wait until the contract expired. Then, they could pack up their albums and go to another label. (No more: "Artist X can't play popular Song Y because they left Label Z who now owns the rights to it.")
Of course, these new labels will need to trim a lot of fat out so many music executives will lose their jobs. Here's an actual size tear that I will shed over their lost jobs: .
Very interesting. We have Catan but rarely play it due to lack of space. (Small house combined with long playing times for Catan and needing to reuse the "playing area" for other reasons before the game is up.) The portable version might let us play part of a game, move it aside when the playing area needs to be reused, and then pick up our game later on. Thanks.
I would love to see this in a self-driving car for long family road-trips. Three hour car ride? Set your destination, turn your seats around, grab a tabletop game (Pandemic, Munchkin, Catan, etc) and play a few games while the car drives you to your destination. Of course, some games might need travel versions to keep the pieces on the playing board. For example, Catan might be difficult if every bump the car hit caused your pieces to go flying. Still, this could make long road trips more fun for the entire family.
I consider this Rule #1 in any kind of development project: Never trust the user's input.
It doesn't matter if you told the user to select 1 to 10 and gave them a drop down box to choose the appropriate number. Don't trust that only numbers from 1 to 10 will be coming to your application. Check to make sure that the input is indeed a number and not "1; Delete from Users". Make sure that the number is within your 1 - 10 integer boundaries and not -1, 13, or 3.14159265. Only once the input has been fully vetted/sanitized should it be used.
Obviously, things get more complicated when you get up to Map Maker levels of complexity. You can't simply run IsNewDataValid(x). However, this is where you should have someone review the data for any obvious issues. It won't remove all abuses (people might sneak in graffiti using many small, innocuous-looking updates instead of one big one), but it can help stop major abuses. It also can slow down approvals of user data, but sometimes slow posting of data is preferable to letting everything through and then looking foolish when someone posts something inappropriate.
I believe the summary said that that humans were in control of the cars during at least 2 of the 4 incidents. You can't blame the self-driving car if the self-driving feature is disabled and the human takes over. That would be like blaming Google Maps for bad directions if you turn it off, take a left turn when Google had said to turn right, and wind up lost.
With a 2 out of 48 accident rate, that's 4%. Of course, that's a very small sample size. It would be interesting to see how the accident rate changes with many more autonomous cars on the road.
Except, as delt0r pointed out, there's a difference between liability for "Office crashed and destroyed my resume" and "My car's air bags deployed when we weren't involved in a crash." The former is an inconvenience so a click-wrap agreement absolving the company from any damages due to their software might be annoying but isn't life threatening. The latter involves actual lives. Car manufacturers have already been held accountable for faulty automotive systems. Self-driving will be another feature of the car like ABS and air bags. If the self-driving mechanism decides that the two lane road actually has three lanes, the car manufacturer will face a recall at best and lawsuits at worst. I don't see the courts treating a car feature like software instead of like other car features. To quote delt0r: If car makers could have had "click-wrap agreement" equivalents, they definitely would have and you'd never see any recalls. ("Thousands of our cars' ABS doesn't work when it is raining? Must be a faulty system. Oh well, they all agreed not to sue us. Those folks better pay to get that fixed.")
I'm all for reducing the penalties for copyright infringement when there's no profit motive involved. For example, someone downloads a movie via BitTorrent and shares that movie out. Mind you, I still think there should be penalties, but the $750 - $150,000 per infringement seems too high.
This case, however, is one where people are intentionally selling books that they don't own the rights to sell and not paying the legitimate author. This is piracy purely for profit and can snag people who think these are legitimate listings. THESE kinds of pirates are the ones that the original copyright infringement fees were designed for and I will feel no sorrow for them if they are fined exorbitant amounts of money.
Network Neutrality doesn't mean that an ISP can't provide QoS and say "All video streaming packets get bumped ahead of e-mail packets." What it means is that an ISP can't say "Video packet A gets bumped ahead of video packet B because provider A paid us for 'fast lane access.'" Even more, it says that ISPs can't say "All video packets get slowed down so that our service's video packets can seem faster and so we can use our local Internet access monopoly to get people to sign up for our video services." (Look at the Comcast-Netflix speed graphs for an example of this. Netflix's speed tanked until right when Netflix decided to pay Comcast for faster access.)
You're not the person that the government is targeting in their "War on Terror." They're targeting the majority of folks who see "cool news device in TSA line... it must be keeping us safe by buzzing if a terrorist passes through" and not "invasion of privacy combined with company-government kickbacks for selecting this device."
I've found that listening to music can help. If my brain needs to switch focus for a second, it can listen to the music for a few seconds and then go right back to the task at hand. What kind of music works best varies from person to person and even day to day. Some days, I need slow songs to help calm me down. Other days, I need a more "active" song to boost my adrenaline.
That's true. For the purposes of my comment, I was assuming that the FBI were "good guys" because they keep saying they are the good guys and need a "good guys only" backdoor. Even if we make the huge assumption that they are good guys and would never abuse it, a "good guys only" backdoor would still be used by "bad guys" as well.