Thing is, more powerful calculators actually do make it easier to advance in math quicker. The reason is you discover advanced math has a lot of repetitive bullshit. While it is important to learn how to do that stuff, once you know it, there is little point to repeating it over and over and over.
Also in the real world, you discover that you do not try to solve problems in an artificial vacuum where you have minimal access to tools, you have an enriched toolset.
So the questions shouldn't be written in a way that requires repeating things over and over, but rather involve subtle changes that require reviewing the underlying logic. On using the right tools, I agree but I was talking about high school level math, not college math. I studied pure math in college so I never used a calculator, but I accept that they would be appropriate for engineering courses, just like learning to use the appropriate software is essential.
It is harder on the teacher to design a good course without artificial restrictions, but it'll lead to better education for the students. When someone says "Oh that calculator is too powerful, " what they are really saying is "I can't think of a way to accurately teach and test your knowledge."
I find it even more funny because the only fields where you really do need advanced math, engineering mostly, the first thing you do is get introduced to things like Matlab because you haven't the time to fuck around with easier things. You really don't find cases where it is important to be able to do algebra or trig using nothing but a 4 function calculator.
The point of restricting the use of calculators is to reduce the cost burden on students. And I was referring to scientific calculators with no graphics or programming, not 4 function calculators. But I would add (as a poster below noted) that not only did I never use a calculator in college, but I also never used a programmable calculator in high school (in Australia). A graphing calculator might have been useful in some tests, and maybe some students used them, but I think that forcing students to make graphs without them is actually useful (of course this shouldn't be a big part of assessment).
The alternative is for school boards to set the limit of what can be used *lower*, i.e. only allow really basic calculators that are very cheap. There is no need to have a graphic/programmable calculator during a test, as long as other student's also don't have one.
By convincing school boards to set the allowable limit of how complex a calculator was allowed in a test, so that their calculators were the best allowable ones (I'm assuming GP poster was correct in stating this), TI have created a captive audience.
If all students were forced to use calculators with no programmability/graphing, then students would all get the best one of these, which would be significantly cheaper.
The other uses you gave are valid, but that's not what GP was talking about.
This measure is no less secure or private than other forms of absentee voting, and is necessary given the constitutional right to vote.
On privacy, email is no worse than regular mail or fax, from the point of view of the government knowing who you voted for.
On people voting for other people, there is no barrier to (A) voting for another registered voter in person or (B) registering to vote under fake name. (B) could be solved by voter ID laws but I've read many claims that this happens very rarely anyway.
Also, people criticizing this measure should say which alternative they propose. Only allowing absentee votes by mail/fax?
Well the less volume is traded/used, the less you can trust the price I think. So my argument relies on the volume being sufficient that a person who really wanted to arbitrage on bitcoins could actually do it.
Well said, but I would like to clarify some things you said.
Even though the exact nature of the price level (value of money) is still a bit murky to economists, it is generally agreed that the total value of money should have some relation to the total value of the economy. That is, the total value of money should be approximately equal to some fixed proportion of the total value of the economy. We can think of this as the equivalent of setting aside a percentage of the economy to use for barter.
Now since the economy is always growing in real terms, this means that the total value of money must also grow.
But if the number of bit coins is fixed, and it's value is growing in real terms (i.e. faster than interest rates), then it becomes a valuable investment. Or put another way, with rational investors the value of bit coin cannot grow over time. Fiat money doesn't suffer from this problem (gold may or may not) because central banks print money.
In fact, this is the reason central banks print money, beginning with monetarism (growing the money supply at a constant rate) and moving on to modern methods which target inflation to a constant amount. I really wish more people would read about this instead of blindly following charismatic non-experts. It seems like anti-reserve banking is the new creationism.
What does that market say about the future of bit coin? If investors have correctly priced bit coins, then their value relative to USD should be "fair" (that is, it's expected future value should be the same as that of USD). However the total value of bit coin is $100 million USD, and 75% of all bit coins that will ever be produced have already been produced. Therefore the total value of all bit coin, in today's dollars, is $133 million USD. Compare this to MB (supply of hard currency and Federal reserve balances) which was about $900 billion before the financial crisis (MB is the equivalent of the total value of all bit coins, since if we were to create fractional reserve banking system based on bit coins, it would use bit coins as its money base). So the total present value of all bitcoins today is about 1/7000 of the total value of all US dollars today, and with time this can only go down, since more US dollars are produced every day.*
Note that this is under the assumption that bit coins are correctly priced. If you believed bit coins will eventually catch up and become 1/100 of the US economy, that means that bit coins are underpriced by a factor of 70, and you should probably be buying some!
*You might object that inflation cancels this out, but the combined effect of inflation and printing money is that the total value of the money supply grows with time, at about the same rate as the economy, which slightly outpaces interest rates, so that the present value of the total US money supply in year X, grows exponentially with X.
My understanding is that most migrant workers take busses because the trains are too expensive. I've ridden on these myself, they stack them full of bunk beds, probably not very safe, although I doubt what I rode in was the worst. However not all migrant workers earn exactly the same income, and I talked to some laborers on a (slow) train who were returning home by train.
However the article's point is still not a good one: it is unlikely any train system could compete in price with the cheapest buses, so as long as there are people who are poor enough that they prefer that tradeoff between price and safety/comfort, there is really no point trying to cater to them with the train system.
I agree this seems to be a fundamental part of patent law and not something that's been overlooked.
The problem is that the separation of function and method is a matter of judgement.
E.g. is slide to unlock a function, and some specific code the method of achieving it,
or is unlocking your phone in a way that is difficult to do unintentionally the function, and slide to unlock the method of achieving it.
Most software patents can be seen as methods for achieving some high level goal, so I don't think this argument helps. The real issue is novelty and non-obviousness.
While I don't deny that sometimes people are arrested who have broken no law, I still object to the summary's implication that protesting=getting arrested. Glamorizing getting arrested and even beaten by the police is a highly irresponsible tactic used by the left. If you exercise your constitutional rights, break now laws, and still get arrested, then I support you for standing up for you rights (although as far as I've seen this isn't that common).
If you commit trespass, disobey lawful orders from the police, or illegally block traffic or pedestrians, then even if your protest is otherwise "nonviolent" you are asking to get arrested because you are breaking the law.
Be fair, the author said "It's not the cleanest comparison" for precisely the reasons you stated. And the sentence is 100% correct, what clarification is needed? GDP is a measure of production, market cap is a measure of total worth.
The reason people use GDP is there is no equivalent of market cap for nations that is actually measured in practice. So comparing GDP is the only way to get a rough sense of how much Apple is worth.
How is using we searches (or whatever metric they use) to track words, and construct some unscientific "theory" about their rise and fall, not itself part of the current hype for this sort of thing. Who remembers Memetics?
Gartner uses the report to monitor the rise, maturity and decline of certain terms and concepts, the better for corporate strategists and planners to predict how things will trend over the next few months or years. As part of the report, Gartner's analysts have built a Hype Cycle which positions technologies on a graph tracing their rise, overexposure, inevitable fall, and eventual rehabilitation as quiet, productive, well-integrated, thoroughly un-buzz-worthy technologies. Right now, Gartner views hybrid cloud computing, Big Data, crowdsourcing, and the 'Internet of Things' as on the rise, while private cloud computing, social analytics and the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) phenomenon are coasting at the Peak of Inflated Expectations."
Everything you have said is true, except that I think you are grossly exaggerating the differences in government regulation between US and Europe.
The main difference between the US and Europe are (A) cultural - the US culture encourages innovation more, and people are more inclined to become entrepreneurs because they place more value on being very wealthy, or the lifestyle associated with it. (B) network/scale effects. The US has the largest GDP of any nation, this means a good idea has more chance of making a profit, and people will choose to start promising businesses in the US, or move their business to the US when it starts to see success. This is especially true in IT - there is no equivalent to Silicon Valley in the world (or in the US for that matter).
You don't understand the definition of "insolvent". US GDP is approx $15 Trillion. The total output of the US economy in 1 year would be sufficient to pay back all Federal debt. This is like having in income of $80,000 a year and owing $85,000 dollars. Insolvency would be more like if federal debt was 10x GDP.
Exactly. Gross public debt is approx. 100% of GDP. That means the US govt owes about the same amount as the US economy produces in 1 year. While this level of debt is generally considered harmful by economists, it's also not something to panic over.
This isn't that different from Ardusat, just different branding. Neither is actually useful, but one is branded as "art" while the other is branded as "educational".
Half correct.
There are really two issues. First, do you believe that a single company could really suffer $50,000 of losses from cybercrime?
If no, then certainly remove that data as an outlier.
if maybe, go with the "yes" case below but qualify your result with a comment about reporting error.
If yes, then you can't just remove the data because then you will underestimate the true cost. However, since we only have one observation of $50,000 losses (and assume all the other losses are much smaller) and the rest are much smaller, then the distribution is non-gaussian and we need to use the bootstrap to get standard errors. This will give a correct (but huge) confidence interval.
Something like, $1 trillion with a 90% confidence interval of [$1000, $2 trillion] would have been completely honest:-)
(this is the kind of confidence interval you would get using the bootstrap method on the kind of data they describe, i.e. data with one huge outlier).
The following statements are not equivalent
1) The probability of being a mass murderer conditional on not having a Facebook account, is higher than the probability of being a mass murderer conditional on having a Facebook account. In the language of statistics, not having a Facebook account 'predicts' being a mass murderer.
2) A person who does not have a Facebook account will definitely become a mass murderer.
3) The only reason a person would choose not to use Facebook is because they are planning mass murder, or because they are anti-social.
4) Employers should be able to ask potential employees for their access to their Facebook page.
If you disagree with (1) because you disagree with (2), (3), or (4) then you are engaging in a logical fallacy.
They really should teach how the stock market works in school. In real life, the market imposes very little discipline on a company, at least until the stock price gets low enough that a buyout is feasible.
While no one has a controlling stake in a company, there isn't that much discipline imposed on the company. Generally the CEO and board of directors get along well, and the CEO can do whatever they like.
If the price gets so low that another company or individual might be able to purchase a controlling take, then that company/person could then fire the CEO.
Facebook is a huge company, and in the current climate no one would consider a takeover of Facebook. So Zuckerberg can do pretty much what he likes (obviously if he acts too crazy or does something too stupid the board of directors will get rid of him, but we are nowhere near that territory now).
Slashdot Mirror
Thing is, more powerful calculators actually do make it easier to advance in math quicker. The reason is you discover advanced math has a lot of repetitive bullshit. While it is important to learn how to do that stuff, once you know it, there is little point to repeating it over and over and over.
Also in the real world, you discover that you do not try to solve problems in an artificial vacuum where you have minimal access to tools, you have an enriched toolset.
So the questions shouldn't be written in a way that requires repeating things over and over, but rather involve subtle changes that require reviewing the underlying logic. On using the right tools, I agree but I was talking about high school level math, not college math. I studied pure math in college so I never used a calculator, but I accept that they would be appropriate for engineering courses, just like learning to use the appropriate software is essential.
It is harder on the teacher to design a good course without artificial restrictions, but it'll lead to better education for the students. When someone says "Oh that calculator is too powerful, " what they are really saying is "I can't think of a way to accurately teach and test your knowledge."
I find it even more funny because the only fields where you really do need advanced math, engineering mostly, the first thing you do is get introduced to things like Matlab because you haven't the time to fuck around with easier things. You really don't find cases where it is important to be able to do algebra or trig using nothing but a 4 function calculator.
The point of restricting the use of calculators is to reduce the cost burden on students. And I was referring to scientific calculators with no graphics or programming, not 4 function calculators. But I would add (as a poster below noted) that not only did I never use a calculator in college, but I also never used a programmable calculator in high school (in Australia). A graphing calculator might have been useful in some tests, and maybe some students used them, but I think that forcing students to make graphs without them is actually useful (of course this shouldn't be a big part of assessment).
I hear racist attitudes to Obama are also very common in Israel
By convincing school boards to set the allowable limit of how complex a calculator was allowed in a test, so that their calculators were the best allowable ones (I'm assuming GP poster was correct in stating this), TI have created a captive audience.
If all students were forced to use calculators with no programmability/graphing, then students would all get the best one of these, which would be significantly cheaper.
The other uses you gave are valid, but that's not what GP was talking about.
According to the courts, everything is interstate commerce. Even your post could have caused me to buy (or not buy) something from another state.
This measure is no less secure or private than other forms of absentee voting, and is necessary given the constitutional right to vote. On privacy, email is no worse than regular mail or fax, from the point of view of the government knowing who you voted for. On people voting for other people, there is no barrier to (A) voting for another registered voter in person or (B) registering to vote under fake name. (B) could be solved by voter ID laws but I've read many claims that this happens very rarely anyway. Also, people criticizing this measure should say which alternative they propose. Only allowing absentee votes by mail/fax?
Well the less volume is traded/used, the less you can trust the price I think. So my argument relies on the volume being sufficient that a person who really wanted to arbitrage on bitcoins could actually do it.
Well said, but I would like to clarify some things you said.
Even though the exact nature of the price level (value of money) is still a bit murky to economists, it is generally agreed that the total value of money should have some relation to the total value of the economy. That is, the total value of money should be approximately equal to some fixed proportion of the total value of the economy. We can think of this as the equivalent of setting aside a percentage of the economy to use for barter.
Now since the economy is always growing in real terms, this means that the total value of money must also grow.
But if the number of bit coins is fixed, and it's value is growing in real terms (i.e. faster than interest rates), then it becomes a valuable investment. Or put another way, with rational investors the value of bit coin cannot grow over time. Fiat money doesn't suffer from this problem (gold may or may not) because central banks print money.
In fact, this is the reason central banks print money, beginning with monetarism (growing the money supply at a constant rate) and moving on to modern methods which target inflation to a constant amount. I really wish more people would read about this instead of blindly following charismatic non-experts. It seems like anti-reserve banking is the new creationism.
What does that market say about the future of bit coin? If investors have correctly priced bit coins, then their value relative to USD should be "fair" (that is, it's expected future value should be the same as that of USD). However the total value of bit coin is $100 million USD, and 75% of all bit coins that will ever be produced have already been produced. Therefore the total value of all bit coin, in today's dollars, is $133 million USD. Compare this to MB (supply of hard currency and Federal reserve balances) which was about $900 billion before the financial crisis (MB is the equivalent of the total value of all bit coins, since if we were to create fractional reserve banking system based on bit coins, it would use bit coins as its money base). So the total present value of all bitcoins today is about 1/7000 of the total value of all US dollars today, and with time this can only go down, since more US dollars are produced every day.*
Note that this is under the assumption that bit coins are correctly priced. If you believed bit coins will eventually catch up and become 1/100 of the US economy, that means that bit coins are underpriced by a factor of 70, and you should probably be buying some!
*You might object that inflation cancels this out, but the combined effect of inflation and printing money is that the total value of the money supply grows with time, at about the same rate as the economy, which slightly outpaces interest rates, so that the present value of the total US money supply in year X, grows exponentially with X.
Turn them into some kind of art project.
Run linux on them.
Connect them to an arduino or raspberry pi.
Send them into space using cubesat, as a kickstarter project.
Write a slashdot article about them (oh wait, you already did that).
Or my personal favorite: Sell them.
However the article's point is still not a good one: it is unlikely any train system could compete in price with the cheapest buses, so as long as there are people who are poor enough that they prefer that tradeoff between price and safety/comfort, there is really no point trying to cater to them with the train system.
A PC or portable device wouldn't possibly work, it must be the cloud. Not because cloud is a buzzword.
I agree this seems to be a fundamental part of patent law and not something that's been overlooked. The problem is that the separation of function and method is a matter of judgement. E.g. is slide to unlock a function, and some specific code the method of achieving it, or is unlocking your phone in a way that is difficult to do unintentionally the function, and slide to unlock the method of achieving it. Most software patents can be seen as methods for achieving some high level goal, so I don't think this argument helps. The real issue is novelty and non-obviousness.
While I don't deny that sometimes people are arrested who have broken no law, I still object to the summary's implication that protesting=getting arrested. Glamorizing getting arrested and even beaten by the police is a highly irresponsible tactic used by the left. If you exercise your constitutional rights, break now laws, and still get arrested, then I support you for standing up for you rights (although as far as I've seen this isn't that common). If you commit trespass, disobey lawful orders from the police, or illegally block traffic or pedestrians, then even if your protest is otherwise "nonviolent" you are asking to get arrested because you are breaking the law.
Be fair, the author said "It's not the cleanest comparison" for precisely the reasons you stated. And the sentence is 100% correct, what clarification is needed? GDP is a measure of production, market cap is a measure of total worth. The reason people use GDP is there is no equivalent of market cap for nations that is actually measured in practice. So comparing GDP is the only way to get a rough sense of how much Apple is worth.
Greece in 2011 had debt/gdp ratio of 165%, US had 103% in 2012.
Obviously the govt couldn't tax 100% of GDP, in fact people would starve since GDP includes all food consumed. Did I actually claim otherwise?
Everything you have said is true, except that I think you are grossly exaggerating the differences in government regulation between US and Europe. The main difference between the US and Europe are (A) cultural - the US culture encourages innovation more, and people are more inclined to become entrepreneurs because they place more value on being very wealthy, or the lifestyle associated with it. (B) network/scale effects. The US has the largest GDP of any nation, this means a good idea has more chance of making a profit, and people will choose to start promising businesses in the US, or move their business to the US when it starts to see success. This is especially true in IT - there is no equivalent to Silicon Valley in the world (or in the US for that matter).
You don't understand the definition of "insolvent". US GDP is approx $15 Trillion. The total output of the US economy in 1 year would be sufficient to pay back all Federal debt. This is like having in income of $80,000 a year and owing $85,000 dollars. Insolvency would be more like if federal debt was 10x GDP.
Exactly. Gross public debt is approx. 100% of GDP. That means the US govt owes about the same amount as the US economy produces in 1 year. While this level of debt is generally considered harmful by economists, it's also not something to panic over.
This isn't that different from Ardusat, just different branding. Neither is actually useful, but one is branded as "art" while the other is branded as "educational".
Half correct. There are really two issues. First, do you believe that a single company could really suffer $50,000 of losses from cybercrime? If no, then certainly remove that data as an outlier. if maybe, go with the "yes" case below but qualify your result with a comment about reporting error. If yes, then you can't just remove the data because then you will underestimate the true cost. However, since we only have one observation of $50,000 losses (and assume all the other losses are much smaller) and the rest are much smaller, then the distribution is non-gaussian and we need to use the bootstrap to get standard errors. This will give a correct (but huge) confidence interval.
Something like, $1 trillion with a 90% confidence interval of [$1000, $2 trillion] would have been completely honest :-)
(this is the kind of confidence interval you would get using the bootstrap method on the kind of data they describe, i.e. data with one huge outlier).
The following statements are not equivalent 1) The probability of being a mass murderer conditional on not having a Facebook account, is higher than the probability of being a mass murderer conditional on having a Facebook account. In the language of statistics, not having a Facebook account 'predicts' being a mass murderer. 2) A person who does not have a Facebook account will definitely become a mass murderer. 3) The only reason a person would choose not to use Facebook is because they are planning mass murder, or because they are anti-social. 4) Employers should be able to ask potential employees for their access to their Facebook page. If you disagree with (1) because you disagree with (2), (3), or (4) then you are engaging in a logical fallacy.
I feel sorry for you
They really should teach how the stock market works in school. In real life, the market imposes very little discipline on a company, at least until the stock price gets low enough that a buyout is feasible. While no one has a controlling stake in a company, there isn't that much discipline imposed on the company. Generally the CEO and board of directors get along well, and the CEO can do whatever they like. If the price gets so low that another company or individual might be able to purchase a controlling take, then that company/person could then fire the CEO. Facebook is a huge company, and in the current climate no one would consider a takeover of Facebook. So Zuckerberg can do pretty much what he likes (obviously if he acts too crazy or does something too stupid the board of directors will get rid of him, but we are nowhere near that territory now).