Nice puff piece. It doesn't mention what the resolution is or the surround formats it supports (or not). Who is going to want to watch crummy resolution on a 42" screen?
So how does this 'fair tax' work if you don't have a 16th amendment? It seems to me that if you are going to tax based on something other than head count you need the 16th.
If you could not sell a corporation there would be far less incentive for investors to put money into a startup - which would be a huge problem in terms of stimulation of economic growth. Nor could corporations sell themselves by issuing stock in order to raise money for expansion.
Corporations are assets with value to be bought and sold just like everything else. It is an essential part of modern capitalism.
I've been a researcher in applied science for some 30 years, and have never used a trig identity since graduating from high school, so I would certainly agree with the idea of flushing that from the math curriculum in favor of some combinatorial math.
BUT flushing the calculus path? I don't think so. That is still ultimately fundamental and critical to all of the sciences and engineering disciplines. I use it all the time, along with the discrete stuff I picked up in college that I had to learn to do some types of work - statistical mechanics. polymerization theory, etc.
Aside from the trig identities everything I learned in high school (and college) in math some 30-40 years ago is still absolutely relevant.
And the idea that calculators have changed the way math should be taught? Very little in my opinion. If anything they should alleviate some of the tedium in the lower grades, but that is it. By the time you are in middle school math should be about symbol manipulation, NOT crunching numbers.
As far as maths being useless unless you are a scientist or engineer ---- HAHAHAHA, ask anyone in marketing, business management, investing etc. about that. It is famous how many rich physics PhDs are working as analysts for Wall Street companies.
I wouldn't say that this is the case in the US universally. Like many things in the US there are good places for certain things, and not so good places.
Where I live I have some pretty good services available including 50 MB symmetrical metro ethernet, 35/7 MB cable with about 50 HDTV channels and VOIP if you want it, 20/20 symmetrical fiber from the telephone company, and a variety of *DSL services which vary depending on how close you live to a switching office.
I use the cable ethernet service for which I'm paying $39/mo. And that includes open inbound ports so I can run servers on it. No capping, no quotas either. And when I say no capping I mean it - my cable modem profile has no cap whatsoever on the downstream side.
You have to remember that the stories that you see on slashdot are the horrorshows.
US internet penetration is over 80% now, and broadband penetration is about 50%. The only other countries with penetration over 80% are Norway, the Netherlands and Iceland. Very much smaller. I think Europe as a whole is around 50%, which is MUCH lower than the US.
So it seems that the country that invented the internet is doing ok with it.
I think you have made the case for an applied math course in numerical analysis that contains about 2 hours of class lecture time in computer applications.
As far as requiring physics majors to take a programming course, I think that is ridiculous. I went through a PhD level applied physics program including writing a simulation of chemical reactions occurring on the surface of space shuttle heat shield tiles during re-entry and never found anything more than spending a few hours here and there reading language syntax. The applied maths literature is full of pidgin code for the algorithms that is easily translatable into the language of your choice. The courses in algorithm analysis and numerical methods are the rest if what you need. A formal course would have been both a terrible bore and a waste of time that should be spent on something more useful like quantum electrodynamics.
I was introduced to the Model M keyboard one fine afternoon when leaving from work a dumpster outside a large insurance company building was FILLED with hundreds of Model M keyboards; evidently they were doing a hardware upgrade. Seeing the keyboards I grabbed one from the dumpster (I have no pride) to try out.
Overjoyed that I finally found a clicky keyboard like those I remembered from the early IBM days I returned the next day and picked up half a dozen more.
If I had only known I would have taken more.
I can't use them at work though - my cube farm neighbors complained when I brought one in.
So when you are building your world view as to what a good career choice might be, and see the way some of the most dedicated and highly trained scientists and engineers are having to work at Fermilab, what are you going to take away from this?
At huge speeds, I'm not sure that the 20KB/sec needed for fdx VoIP is going to get noticed.
You are missing the point. QoS is needed due to congestion due to total traffic; it has noting to do with the bandwidth of the traffic being prioritized.
Everybody prefers the egalitarian approach, the problem is that for the egalitarian approach to work under all conditions you need an economically unsustainable level of capital investment in network infrastructure.
Yes. And it's a good thing for your ISP to know you are, for example, on VoIP to really *slowdown* the packets associated with the call so they can push through your throat their "premium service for VoIP" which is just de-capping again your VoIP calls.
Yeah, and the bad fairies might come in the night, steal your firstborn and replace it with a gollum.
Deep packet inspection is necessary to identify and provide QoS for many modern internet applications. For example it is quite common for services to tunnel video over HTTP (example - YouTube). Skype cannot be identified without DPI.
Of course it can be used for good or evil. But the fact of the matter is that DPI is in the mix as one approach to provide QoS for real time internet applications like streaming video and audio that don't play well with the 'best effort' delivery paradigm that packet switched networks are really designed to provide.
If you really want network neutrality for every packet, fine. But be aware that right now time sensitive traffic types like VOIP are being prioritized, and network neutrality will degrade performance for some applications.
Sometime traffic shaping can be a good thing. For example, on a VOIP call you really do want to give priority to the packets associated with the call so that the codecs will be able to reconstruct a reasonable facsimile of a voice.
If you are going to limit 'code' to something that runs on a stored program computer. I own an HP35 calculator built in 19687 who's firmware has never been updated and gets taken out and run once in a while. I have been told that the firmware was developed in 1966.
So not only is this pretty old code, but it is still running on the original hardware.
Is quite simple. When somebody comes up with an invention that has some potential use, you want that person to disclose that invention; how it was made and what it does so others can take that invention and make improvements, find other uses for it and all that.
But if patents didn't exist the inventor has absolutely no reason to do so. The longer and more darkly he can hide this information, or tie up that information in legal ribbons like contracts, EULAs, licenses, NDAs, the more money he will be able to make from his invention.
Patents address this issue - the basic deal is that the government gives you a limited term monopoly on your invention IF you fully disclose what the invention is and how it should be used.
Businesses make decisions all the time on whether or not to patent something. If they think that something won't be discovered by reverse engineering, or that they won't he able to enforce a patent that they received, they won't patent it. They will take their chances on keeping it secret. There are lot of areas that you will seldom see a patent because patent laws don't give value to the inventor.
So suppose we do abolish patents, What will happen? Lots more legal alternatives and barriers to disclosure of technology. Exactly the thing we don't want.
Sure, 20 years might seem like a long time. But before doing away with that be careful that we don't get something worse. Like the sort of trade secrecy practices that helped get patents adopted in the first place.
That means we'd get 5 times as much medical R&D if the insurance companies and government simply funded it outright and let the free market generics handle the production and marketing.
Assuming that the government could efficiently manage such a thing seems questionable. I wouldn't be too surprised if the cost turned out to be the same plus as the drug companies because of governmental inefficiencies (pork barrelling, set asides, ecess overheads, etc.) AND the time to market was much slower.
Nice but rather empty victory. Of course the MPAA is going to take little home from this except the realization that under current law there is little they can do that effectively enforces copyright. I imagine that any half-bright executive in the movie industry will quickly come to the conclusion that there are only two avenues open to improve copyright enforcement.
1. DRM 2. Congress
Expect to see both. Heavier use of elaborate schemes like those used for Blu-Ray recordings and downloadable media. Branding the owner's ID into the media so copies are traceable. Real use of certificates to manage keys, mandating only online playback.
More stringent use of legal remedies, and criminalization of copyright infringement. WIPO treaties allowing international cooperation in pursuing violators. Tying government aid to enforcement initiatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice puff piece. It doesn't mention what the resolution is or the surround formats it supports (or not). Who is going to want to watch crummy resolution on a 42" screen?
So how does this 'fair tax' work if you don't have a 16th amendment? It seems to me that if you are going to tax based on something other than head count you need the 16th.
If you could not sell a corporation there would be far less incentive for investors to put money into a startup - which would be a huge problem in terms of stimulation of economic growth. Nor could corporations sell themselves by issuing stock in order to raise money for expansion.
Corporations are assets with value to be bought and sold just like everything else. It is an essential part of modern capitalism.
I've been a researcher in applied science for some 30 years, and have never used a trig identity since graduating from high school, so I would certainly agree with the idea of flushing that from the math curriculum in favor of some combinatorial math.
BUT flushing the calculus path? I don't think so. That is still ultimately fundamental and critical to all of the sciences and engineering disciplines. I use it all the time, along with the discrete stuff I picked up in college that I had to learn to do some types of work - statistical mechanics. polymerization theory, etc.
Aside from the trig identities everything I learned in high school (and college) in math some 30-40 years ago is still absolutely relevant.
And the idea that calculators have changed the way math should be taught? Very little in my opinion. If anything they should alleviate some of the tedium in the lower grades, but that is it. By the time you are in middle school math should be about symbol manipulation, NOT crunching numbers.
As far as maths being useless unless you are a scientist or engineer ---- HAHAHAHA, ask anyone in marketing, business management, investing etc. about that. It is famous how many rich physics PhDs are working as analysts for Wall Street companies.
I wouldn't say that this is the case in the US universally. Like many things in the US there are good places for certain things, and not so good places.
Where I live I have some pretty good services available including 50 MB symmetrical metro ethernet, 35/7 MB cable with about 50 HDTV channels and VOIP if you want it, 20/20 symmetrical fiber from the telephone company, and a variety of *DSL services which vary depending on how close you live to a switching office.
I use the cable ethernet service for which I'm paying $39/mo. And that includes open inbound ports so I can run servers on it. No capping, no quotas either. And when I say no capping I mean it - my cable modem profile has no cap whatsoever on the downstream side.
You have to remember that the stories that you see on slashdot are the horrorshows.
US internet penetration is over 80% now, and broadband penetration is about 50%. The only other countries with penetration over 80% are Norway, the Netherlands and Iceland. Very much smaller. I think Europe as a whole is around 50%, which is MUCH lower than the US.
So it seems that the country that invented the internet is doing ok with it.
Absolutely correct. Excel does not follow accepted standards when performing decimal arithmetic.
Here are a couple of good links relevant to this issue:
http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/
http://mesa.ece.wisc.edu/publications/cp_2005-14.pdf?PHPSESSID=643d8caaab9a8736654674ed089aa4aa
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ARITH_17.pdf
Excel is unacceptable for numerical analysis. It is WAY too slow, and doesn't teach use of algorithms.
I think you have made the case for an applied math course in numerical analysis that contains about 2 hours of class lecture time in computer applications.
As far as requiring physics majors to take a programming course, I think that is ridiculous. I went through a PhD level applied physics program including writing a simulation of chemical reactions occurring on the surface of space shuttle heat shield tiles during re-entry and never found anything more than spending a few hours here and there reading language syntax. The applied maths literature is full of pidgin code for the algorithms that is easily translatable into the language of your choice. The courses in algorithm analysis and numerical methods are the rest if what you need. A formal course would have been both a terrible bore and a waste of time that should be spent on something more useful like quantum electrodynamics.
The desire to be able to use a Model M at work has me working for a promotion so I can have my own office.
Model M keyboards turn up quite frequently on EBay.
Just use the search term 'clicky'.
I was introduced to the Model M keyboard one fine afternoon when leaving from work a dumpster outside a large insurance company building was FILLED with hundreds of Model M keyboards; evidently they were doing a hardware upgrade. Seeing the keyboards I grabbed one from the dumpster (I have no pride) to try out.
Overjoyed that I finally found a clicky keyboard like those I remembered from the early IBM days I returned the next day and picked up half a dozen more.
If I had only known I would have taken more.
I can't use them at work though - my cube farm neighbors complained when I brought one in.
But I do love the bucking spring design.
So when you are building your world view as to what a good career choice might be, and see the way some of the most dedicated and highly trained scientists and engineers are having to work at Fermilab, what are you going to take away from this?
Capitalization of "internet" is not at all agreed on. See the Wikipedia article on the topic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_capitalization_conventions
Another option is to consider working for a company that develops and sells bioinformatic software to pharma/biotec companies.
I usually don't comment on English usage on the internet, but 'short-sided' in two consecutive posts from two different user ID's is a bit much.
Try short-sighted.
I don't know about that - there sure good competition for my broadband dollar here in NJ.
At huge speeds, I'm not sure that the 20KB/sec needed for fdx VoIP is going to get noticed.
You are missing the point. QoS is needed due to congestion due to total traffic; it has noting to do with the bandwidth of the traffic being prioritized.
Everybody prefers the egalitarian approach, the problem is that for the egalitarian approach to work under all conditions you need an economically unsustainable level of capital investment in network infrastructure.
Yes. And it's a good thing for your ISP to know you are, for example, on VoIP to really *slowdown* the packets associated with the call so they can push through your throat their "premium service for VoIP" which is just de-capping again your VoIP calls.
Yeah, and the bad fairies might come in the night, steal your firstborn and replace it with a gollum.
Your scenario is a paranoid fantasy.
Deep packet inspection is necessary to identify and provide QoS for many modern internet applications. For example it is quite common for services to tunnel video over HTTP (example - YouTube). Skype cannot be identified without DPI.
Of course it can be used for good or evil. But the fact of the matter is that DPI is in the mix as one approach to provide QoS for real time internet applications like streaming video and audio that don't play well with the 'best effort' delivery paradigm that packet switched networks are really designed to provide.
If you really want network neutrality for every packet, fine. But be aware that right now time sensitive traffic types like VOIP are being prioritized, and network neutrality will degrade performance for some applications.
Sometime traffic shaping can be a good thing. For example, on a VOIP call you really do want to give priority to the packets associated with the call so that the codecs will be able to reconstruct a reasonable facsimile of a voice.
But that means patents should only be issued on things which
* * you'd likely manage to keep secret for at least the period of the patent protection
* * would be unlikely to be rediscovered during that time
Thus the unobvious clause in the patent statute.
If you are going to limit 'code' to something that runs on a stored program computer. I own an HP35 calculator built in 19687 who's firmware has never been updated and gets taken out and run once in a while. I have been told that the firmware was developed in 1966.
So not only is this pretty old code, but it is still running on the original hardware.
Is quite simple. When somebody comes up with an invention that has some potential use, you want that person to disclose that invention; how it was made and what it does so others can take that invention and make improvements, find other uses for it and all that.
But if patents didn't exist the inventor has absolutely no reason to do so. The longer and more darkly he can hide this information, or tie up that information in legal ribbons like contracts, EULAs, licenses, NDAs, the more money he will be able to make from his invention.
Patents address this issue - the basic deal is that the government gives you a limited term monopoly on your invention IF you fully disclose what the invention is and how it should be used.
Businesses make decisions all the time on whether or not to patent something. If they think that something won't be discovered by reverse engineering, or that they won't he able to enforce a patent that they received, they won't patent it. They will take their chances on keeping it secret. There are lot of areas that you will seldom see a patent because patent laws don't give value to the inventor.
So suppose we do abolish patents, What will happen? Lots more legal alternatives and barriers to disclosure of technology. Exactly the thing we don't want.
Sure, 20 years might seem like a long time. But before doing away with that be careful that we don't get something worse. Like the sort of trade secrecy practices that helped get patents adopted in the first place.
That means we'd get 5 times as much medical R&D if the insurance companies and government simply funded it outright and let the free market generics handle the production and marketing.
Assuming that the government could efficiently manage such a thing seems questionable. I wouldn't be too surprised if the cost turned out to be the same plus as the drug companies because of governmental inefficiencies (pork barrelling, set asides, ecess overheads, etc.) AND the time to market was much slower.
Nice but rather empty victory. Of course the MPAA is going to take little home from this except the realization that under current law there is little they can do that effectively enforces copyright. I imagine that any half-bright executive in the movie industry will quickly come to the conclusion that there are only two avenues open to improve copyright enforcement.
1. DRM
2. Congress
Expect to see both. Heavier use of elaborate schemes like those used for Blu-Ray recordings and downloadable media. Branding the owner's ID into the media so copies are traceable. Real use of certificates to manage keys, mandating only online playback.
More stringent use of legal remedies, and criminalization of copyright infringement. WIPO treaties allowing international cooperation in pursuing violators. Tying government aid to enforcement initiatives.
Enjoy it while the fun lasts.