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User: GlobalEcho

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  1. Expiration dates for laws on 18th Century Law Dredged Up To Force Decryption of Devices · · Score: 1

    My (probably harebrained) idea of the day:

    Some folks have long discussed putting more expiration dates on laws. Situations like this show why.

    All existing laws lacking expiration dates should be given one. Perhaps 50 years from now, since politicians like to kick the can down the road. New laws without expiration dates should then only be permitted when passed by a supermajority.

    Unfortunately, even if this works in theory, it would require a constitutional amendment to have any teeth. Good luck with that.

  2. Google hubris on Lessons Learned From Google's Green Energy Bust · · Score: 1

    What it means is that Google has a tendency to assume the set of intelligent people in the world (outside academia perhaps) is a subset of the set of Google employees.

  3. Re:Maybe a Mini on Apple Announces iPad Air 2, iPad mini 3, OS X Yosemite and More · · Score: 1

    They kept the Ethernet port on the back also, which keeps me happy. I don't want to buy another TB-to-Ethernet adaptor!

  4. Re:The Nobel Prize Committee blew it on No Nobel For Nick Holonyak Jr, Father of the LED · · Score: 2

    I happen to know someone who won the Economics prize, and even ended up going to Sweden for some of the award week. The economics medal is technically different, as you say, but is treated identically in a functional sense. That is to say, the winners all appear together at various ceremonies, are all given the same considerations and support, speak at the same events and so on. Press coverage also often fails to point out the distinction.

    (In contrast, the Peace prize is awarded differently, has different event and ceremonies, etc., etc.)

    Based on these observations, I've started thinking of economics medal as equivalent to the others in every objective sense that matters.

  5. Re:So, it has come to this. on Complain About Comcast, Get Fired From Your Job · · Score: 1

    Well, then, I guess it is time to show the cards: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10...

  6. Re:Just what any parent knows on Genes Don't Just Predict Intelligence, But Also How Well You Do In School · · Score: 1

    Well, I did just typo casual into causal, so I can hardly blame you.

  7. Re:Just what any parent knows on Genes Don't Just Predict Intelligence, But Also How Well You Do In School · · Score: 1

    This is a great post that I almost didn't read because you dropped an f-bomb in the first line, making it appear to the causal reader like a rant or troll.

  8. Re:I use cobol, you insensitive clod! on Unpopular Programming Languages That Are Still Lucrative · · Score: 1

    If you have not yet read Charles Stross' Laundry novels, now is the time.

  9. Re:Biden is talking coding?? on VP Biden Briefs US Governors On H-1B Visas, IT, and Coding · · Score: 1

    Al Gore, March 8, 1999, interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, "I took the initiative in creating the Internet."

    Al Gore, March 8, 1999, about 0.2 seconds later in the same interview "...I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth, environmental protection, improvements in our educational system." Wired magazine yanked that quote out of context and it has never been the same since.

    Absolutely right. I always thought that was a bit unfair, but I didn't mind too much, because I believe Gore has always been insufficiently lambasted for his active advocacy of the Clipper chip

  10. Re:Use TrueCrypt! on Dropbox Head Responds To Snowden Claims About Privacy · · Score: 1

    Mods: please mod this AC's post up!

  11. Listen in on New Toyota Helps You Yell At the Kids · · Score: 5, Informative

    Among the advantages of owning a minivan is that it becomes easy to carry your own children, plus a few of their friends. You get to know those friends, and listen to your kids' conversations with them. Often, the kids sort of forget you are there and converse "normally". You gain a window into their lives at school you otherwise would never have enjoyed.

    Sneaky trick: if you turn on the radio with the fader balanced toward the rear seats, the kids will speak louder without even realizing it.

  12. The next eruption on Mapping a Monster Volcano · · Score: 2

    My prediction:

    The next eruption, if it happens within the next couple of years, will be blamed on this experiment. This will happen regardless of any scientific support for such blame.

  13. Basically a toy on Shawn Raymond's Tandem Bike is Shorter Than Yours (Video) · · Score: 1

    As a "real" tandem person (see here), I must say this thing looks like a toy to me. Of course, it is also far less expensive than the bikes made by serious tandem bike companies, who often make bikes with derailer and brake systems that alone cost as much as this monstrosity.

    We've had our tandem going 60-70mph (down mountain roads). There's no way I would trust this thing for such riding. Maybe it is OK for some gentle cruises, but that's it. And furthermore, there's a far better design for front-stoker visibility.

    /snob mode off

  14. Table salt on Biodegradable Fibers As Strong As Steel Made From Wood Cellulose · · Score: 1

    replacement for many filament materials made today from imperishable substances such as fiberglass, plastic, and metal. And all this from a substance that requires only water, wood cellulose, and common table salt to create it

    I would hate to be the poor bastard in the factory whose job it is to stand there shaking the salt cellar all day.

  15. Entering students too young on Fixing the Humanities Ph.D. · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The median time to get a Ph.D. is nine years.

    I think students who enter are often doing so by default. Education has been their life unto that point, they have always been outstanding students, and they enjoy it. They are too young and inexperienced to realize how long 9 years is and what they'll be missing (or perhaps they are too optimistic about their personal chances of being an outlier).

  16. Re:Frequent auctions on High Frequency Trading and Finance's Race To Irrelevance · · Score: 1

    defeating the HFTs basically comes down to adding a delay to multi-exchange transactions such that the transaction reaches each exchange at the same time.

    Budish shows in his paper how that is not true. Basically, it works only if very little of the total volume is on a delayed exchange.

    The stock exchanges are engaged in the same sort of crap with the HFTs, selling them special access and trade types that other investors do not have.

    I don't see a problem with that. Back in the old days of floor trading, the floor traders had special access everyone else lacked. And they behaved very badly compared to what we now see with HFTs.

    If our regulatory agencies were more competent, this would have been dealt with years ago instead of letting it fester as long as it has.

    They are careful, not incompetent. The gut reaction of lots of people is that any middleman is a parasite. The reaction in the American West to the rise of hardware and lumber specialists during the late 19th century (fueled by general stores) is an excellent example with similar popular political outrage behind it. I'm glad the regulators did nothing about it.

  17. Frequent auctions on High Frequency Trading and Finance's Race To Irrelevance · · Score: 1

    For those of you not frothing at the mount, Eric Budish has an interesting critique and proposal to replace continuous-time markets with auctions every second or so. The idea is that being forced to wait for the next auction mitigates the advantages of low-latency trading.

    I think he makes a very good argument.

  18. Nanoseconds on Grace Hopper, UNIVAC, and the First Programming Language · · Score: 5, Interesting

    My mother was one of the first female programmers at Honeywell back in the `70s. Back then, IT companies recruited their programmers from the ranks of mathematicians (like mom).

    Grace Hopper was a big hero to her, and one of the things I remember best is mom coming home with a short length of wire given out by Adm. Hopper at a speech -- sized to represent the distance electricity would travel in a nanosecond.

    Mom is still coding, by the way, writing custom software for my dad's business in Python/Django/PostgreSQL. Dad complains that she's obsessed with the programming and won't do anything else. Sounds like me...thanks for the genes, mom!

  19. Re:Easiest for the instructor on Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too, Study Finds · · Score: 1

    Interestingnow that I reflect on it, my experiences are similar.

    Perhaps it is because humans dislike change?

  20. Easiest for the instructor on Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too, Study Finds · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One reason lectures are so popular is that they are far, far easier for the instructor. Putting together a useful interactive activity is much harder than simply planning what to say. Even incorporating someone else's pre-designed activity is difficult to synchronize with one's own lesson plan. At the grade school level, I believe there is considerable room for improvement through teachers learning how to share and use activity plans.

    At the college and graduate school level, it gets much harder on the professor as potential sources of planned activities thin out and specialization increases. Increasing interactivity demands much more time of these professors since most such improvements will have to be custom-designed for the class. Given the social structure of university compensation (research counts, teaching doesn't), I find it hard to see interactivity at the college or grad school level increasing very quickly.

    That said, college and grad school courses are perhaps more interactive than they are given credit for. They often meet just a few times a week, reducing the boring lecture hours, and assign a lot of homework, increasing interactivity in a way that fails to appear in the studies cited.

    For context, I am an adjunct professor (at the graduate school level). Based on this daily of studies I try to include some interactivity but it's really hard, so that mainly degenerates into a few intra-class status quizzes. My classes tend to meet for 2.5-3 hours per week, and have 5-20 hours of homework on top of that.

  21. Flawed reasoning on A Look at Smart Gun Technology · · Score: 5, Insightful

    the last thing you want is another avenue for failure

    That's not a very bright statement. What you should wish to avoid is for something bad to happen. One way that can happen is indeed for a gun to fail when it needs to work, but there are others, for example having an unseen companion assailant seize the gun and shoot you with it.

    It's all about the probabilities of various scenarios, and anyone failing to incorporate that that in their evaluation is not worth listening to. (For the record, I have no opinion about what those probabilities are, but live in such a safe place that I don't consider bothering with a gun.)

  22. Many polite people on Traffic Optimization: Cyclists Should Roll Past Stop Signs, Pause At Red Lights · · Score: 4, Interesting

    As a cyclist who commutes year-round in Chicago, I just want to give a little shout out to the motorists, who are almost all incredibly polite. It's human nature for us to notice and remember the jerks (and I recall a few) but the incredibly vast majority of motorists are accommodating, friendly, and (when paying attention) cautious.

    If I have one request of motorists, it's to get off the cell phones, something I am sure every road user -- pedestrian, cyclist and motorist agrees with.

  23. Re:"there's not much to indicate difficulty" on The Ways Programming Is Hard · · Score: 2

    I wouldn't simply assume that it's easy because it looks that way.

    Agree!....I despair of ever managing to lay a good caulk bead.

  24. Re:Wisest quote I saw from the pundit class on Supreme Court Upholds Michigan's Ban On Affirmative Action In College Admissions · · Score: 1

    The dirty little secret that neither Haycock nor Sotommayor (sic) want to acknowledge is that "racially sensitive admissions policies" only get the student through the door -- they do nothing to address the significant gap in minority student retention and graduation

    You misread the quote...Haycock is agreeing with you.

  25. Wisest quote I saw from the pundit class on Supreme Court Upholds Michigan's Ban On Affirmative Action In College Admissions · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Wisest quote I saw from the pundit class:

    “I just keep wishing that the people who spend so much time trying to end racial preferences in higher ed would work to end the racial differences in the education we provide K-12”

          --Kati Haycock, Education Trust