Perhaps Pearson is full of blithering idiots. A course I took with Pearson content suggests they don't train people in writing quiz questions.
MY point is that Pearson didn't write common core, so Pearson's bad qquestions in no way reflect on common core. Common core may be bad because most things dictated from on high aren't great, but TFA's examples of Pearson questions tell us nothing about common core.
As for idiot mistakes, maybe Pearson is a bunch of idiots, but maybe not. I consistently score in the top 0.1% on any test, and I make idiot mistakes more often than I care to admit. I took a programming certification exam recently. When I gave the certification agency some feedback, they hired me to go through the entire test bank and improve it. When I was done, they paid me a bonus for doing a good job. So I'm a good programmer, right? Yesterday I completely screwed up the fire school by making a dumb programming mistake after my boss had already warned me about the problem. So even the best of us produce crap occasionally.
I believe the point is that the people near the top of the NSA, those managing major projects, do their work with a (sometimes misguided) sense that they are protecting their country.
Someone outsourced to cobble together a hundred archaic government systems for some other country is more likely to be simply punching the clock. They COULD do better work, and probably would if they believed their job was essential to protect their nation's freedom.
You know we're in trouble when the best that can be said about the sitting president is to compare him to a top 5 worst president and still Obama comes out worse. "He has less experience than Bush" isn't a compliment, my friend.
The top five worst presidents would include Filmore, Harrison, Bush, Obama, and another of your choosing. In many ways, including executive experience, Obama is the worst of the "worst five". Compare him to a good president like Kennedy, Reagan, Lincoln, Eisenhower...
"Billion+ dollar data center" Well it's certainly not suprising that government spent a lot of money. They may well have spent a billion and ended up with a DC worth $10 million. As far as we know, their DC capacity may be the same as what Amazon and Google build for 94% less money
Most likely, though, people with experience in similar signals intelligence speced out a project that would actually meet their expansion needs, probably part of a ten year plan to reach X capacity. That's a different beast than politicians saying "my next election depends on building a giant federal bureaucracy in no more than three years".
> "within 20 to solve word".. > DOE should have more say
The people who wrote that should have MORE control over elementary curriculum? No thanks.
Over the last 60 years, DOE has had more and more involvement. As their involvement has increased, US scores have fallen further and further compared to other countries.
On the other hand, if students and parents could choose between two or three nearby schools, the schools that suck wouldn't get any students. There would be an incentive for each school to improve.
For optimal results, those two or three schools would be able to try slightly different methods to find ways that work better. For teachers compensation, one might focus on seniority, another on subjective evaluation of teachers, and another on results of standardized testing. Parents could send their kid to the school that works the best. To have the flexibility that optimal results require, DOE's role would be limited to providing parents with guidance on choosing the best school, such as by reporting graduation rates, test averages, etc.
Someone at Pearson came up with a bad question. They meant for that question to coincide with the standards which say subtraction should be taught. How the heck do you leap from "Pearson has some bad questions" to "curriculum standards are bad"? Common Core may be bad, it may be good, TFA gives no reason to believe either. They only show that Pearson's implementation has some errors.
We teach firefighting, construction safety, and other topics that have specific codes and standards students need to learn. When we realize we have a bad question we don't say "construction codes are bad and students shouldn't be expected to learn them", we say "this question is bad and we should rewrite it so it better gauges the student's understanding".
There are a couple of statistical calculations test makers can use to find and fix bad questions. It doesn't appear that Pearson used those (yet). If they run the calculation, they'll see which questions are bad and can fix or remove them.
Obviously if fewer than half of students get a question correct, it's probably a bad question. There are other calculations which are similar but more advanced. Look at a properly designed quiz covering the same subject, one with well vetted questions, and I bet it looks a lot better. Questions like "Imagine you had four cookies and gave one to your sister. How many would you have left?" also meet the common core standards, and that's probably a good question for a certain grade level.
Every day millions of open source users violate patents, many of them legitimate patents. They don't get sued. That's been true for many years. Theoretically they COULD be sued, but it just doesn't happen.
Every few years, one suit will be filed against an open source company like Acacia and Novell sued Red Hat a few years ago. Red Hat won handily. If you researched enough, you might be able to find a dozen patent suits involving open source software. While you were digging up those few cases, another million people would be ignoring Microsoft's patents.
He had some trouble in the early 1990s, AFTER he'd already made three and a half billion dollars. I'd trade places with him. He was extremely successful in the 1960s, 1979s, 1980s, had a downturn in the early 1990s, then more success.
Successful projects? His very first building was a grand success. Trump purchased a run down,half-empty building for $3.7 million with his father, a moderately successful real estate guy. Trump renovated it very nicely do it had a 100% occupancy rate and then sold it for several times what he bought it for.
He's a blow hard. He's annoying. He's consistently successful. I look at that and ask "what can I learn about how to be successful, and how not to be annoying?"
You make a good point about current standards assuming each controlled device is an intelligent endpoint. In stage lighting, where you may control over a hundred lights, it's typical to have a few intelligent end devices and several relay or dimmer packs that control many "dumb" lights. Typically, one smart pack control power to eight lights. Most lights are dumb and cheap - just bulbs in sockets. Only a few lights, the moving, color changing spot lights, have any electronics in the end device.
The war on poverty began over 50 years ago and we've spent trillions of dollars, your dollars. The poverty rate is higher today than it was when the federal government started spending money on it 50 years ago.
So the answer is "no". The government should leave your money with you. You'll spend it, and the stores where you spend it will hire people. More jobs = less poverty.
> "[He] doesn't know how to do that task nor understand the technical issues but doesn't think it should take or cost that much!"
So you just pay whatever someone asks for? We should talk. I have some wonderful solutions to sell you. I don't know exactly how to make toilet paper, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't cost $84 million per roll and I'm not going to pay $84 million per roll.
Beyond that, he was probably right - accomplishing the business goal should not cost that much, as you somewhat admitted...
> I wish I had told him that he needs to buy a copy of MS Word and his problem is solved.
If that would have solved the problem for 90% lower cost, you should have, and he was right to reject your proposal.
Then you say you think people who are successful are just lucky. Let's think this through. Did you successfully make breakfast this morning? Are you consistently successful when you attempt to pour cereal? Can a two-year-old say the same? Why are you successful at making breakfast and the two-year-old isn't? Because you're lucky, every single time? Or because YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING?
Trump keeps being successful at putting together $xxx million real estate deals because he knows what the heck he's doing. He's annoying as a TV personality, yes. That has almost nothing to do with the fact that he keeps building successful hotel / casinos because he knows how to build a friggin casino. He knows how, and he works 60+ hours a week doing it. That's why successful people keep on being successful while lottery winners are normally broke within a few years.
Successful people know how to do something that works and they keep doing it. Unsuccessful people keep doing things that don't work and keep being unsuccessful, EVEN IF YOU HAND THEM $50 MILLION.
For you, you can choose to be jealous and angry, or you can pick up any of many books in which Trump and others lay out exactly the principles they follow for success, then apply those principles to whatever you want to do. I'm a programmer. I have no interest in big real estate deals, my interest is in computer systems and business. I built and sold a web hosting company, then built a software company which sold over a million dollars of the software I wrote and I sold off that company. I'm now running my THIRD successful company. Do I get lucky every single time? No, I apply the principles that work, including the ones Trump laid out in Art of the Deal. That and I sometimes work until 2AM.
You're thinking of a different sale, confusing Nortel and Novell.
Also, even if Google could have signed on (they couldn't ), that wouldn't have protected them because Microsoft, Apple et al are suing anyone who makes Android devices (Samsung etc.). It's little use for Google to not be sued directly if nobody can build Android devices.
The report said the contestants did in fact spoof the caller ID. Though some people know it can be spoofed, most people trust it anyway. We're accustomed to fake links in e-mail, we look for that, but we generally assume caller ID is accurate.
This can be very useful for encouraging bad guys to reveal information.
On a societal level that makes sense. If a software bug crashes your car and you're paralyzed, it's little comfor to be told you might have crashed yourself.
If you're a good driver, a firmware bug that crashes your car is a BIG problem. The fact that other people avoided accidents because the software is better than a human isn't exactly relevant.
> The suit is about maintaining a free market in labor. > Union membership is one way that individuals participate in that free market.
Lol. Did you just say that collusion, enforced by the government, is "free market"? Unions, organized, enforceable collusion, are exactly the opposite of free market.
A free market means I can hire your teenage son at $20 / hour to change lightbulbs, if you want to do that job at that price. Unions mean I better contract that job out, because I'm only allowed to hire electricians at $65 + $40 in benefits for anything related to anything electrical.
The illegal behavior these companies for busted for, the collusion, is PRECISELY what unions do. Anti-competive collusion is the PURPOSE of a union.
While we're at it, let's make it illegal to murder someone in_the_morning. Oh wait, California already did that I bet.
Half of the companies involved have already paid up. With the most recent ruling, the judge is saying the others will probably be held liable too. As the Palm CEO said, this is already illegal and has been for along time. We don't need more laws, a few million pages is enough.
Oddly, it's the opposite going the other way in some states. Employees are REQUIRED to collude and stick by that union collusion even if they don't want to.
Most captchas were cracked 17 months ago. It's time for something that's easier for humans and harder for computers. For example, these images have been tweaked such that the standard routines don't work:
Whether you make up a new "right" or not, you can't pay someone for paternity leave if the money is already spent on government mandated BS.
You seem to be confused about the definition of the word "right" is, though. When you talk about giving people new "rights", you've made the word virtually meaningless, turning it into a synonym for "entitlement" or "privilege". This is important, very important
The right to free speech means I can voice my opinion EVEN IF THE MAJORITY OR GOVERNMENT DOESN'TLIKE IT. You have the right to a fair trial even if the government would rather ramrod you. The Bill of Rights is a list of freedoms the government "shall not infringe". Note it doesn't say "should give you", it says "shall not infringe". Rights are not at the government's discretion. They can not take your rights away because your rights don't come from the government. Your right to think your own thoughts is intrinsic to your humaness; government can only infringe your rights or not. They can not take them because they did not give them.
Your natural rights as a person include your right to have your own thoughts, and your right to your own production - to eat what you grow in your own garden, to live in the house you built.
If you build your house for your family, I do not have the "right" to kick you out and take it for my family. I do not have any right to take your food you grew in your garden. My wife is pregnant at the moment. That has zero bearing on your rights to your own food. You may choose to share some tasty vegetables with me, but knocking up my wife doesn't give me the right to take your stuff.
You want to create a new government mandate? Fine. Do not lie and call it a "right", though, because as soon as you pretend that government creates rights, government is justified in taking away your rights that "they gave you".
> Amazon will abuse its power once it has attained monopoly status as a supplier.
So you predict that Amazon will have a monopoly , ignoring the fact it isn't possible (some customers prefer a bookstore, so they will always have customers). You then predict that after Amazon achieves this impossible feat, they could abuse their position. Based on those two predictions, you wish a horrible death on your fellow man.
They are using their accumulated wealth to start selling books at discount prices? How, pray tell, do you imagine Amazon got that wealth? They've been selling books at low prices since day one, that's their original business.
The most free market of all markets is the internet, where anyone can readily access any site, anywhere in the world. (Save a very few totalitarian countries with national firewalls.)
You claim free markets lead to monopoly. Therefore, the most free market system, the internet, has only one web page, correct?
Choice leads to differentiation, my friend. In a free market, I can choose Walmart pants and you can choose Abercrombie. Both serve a section of the market and both thrive. A government controlled market is the market for a driver's license. Government control is monopoly (and the DMV serves it's customers SO well).
In some areas of the US, the government enforces a monopoly on internet access, and you get 5-10 Mbps for $55. In Texas, it's mostly free market and we get Google's gigabit fiber, two cable providers, DSL, wireless, satellite, all kinds of choices.
Obama was right about one thing and the French missed it. "If you want people to stop doing something as much, make it more expensive."
More expensive books = fewer people can buy fewer books. I realize you liberals aren't that smart, but this isn't complicated principles that actually require thought, this is basic shit any third grader should understand.
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Perhaps Pearson is full of blithering idiots. A course I took with Pearson content suggests they don't train people in writing quiz questions.
MY point is that Pearson didn't write common core, so Pearson's bad qquestions in no way reflect on common core. Common core may be bad because most things dictated from on high aren't great, but TFA's examples of Pearson questions tell us nothing about common core.
As for idiot mistakes, maybe Pearson is a bunch of idiots, but maybe not. I consistently score in the top 0.1% on any test, and I make idiot mistakes more often than I care to admit. I took a programming certification exam recently. When I gave the certification agency some feedback, they hired me to go through the entire test bank and improve it. When I was done, they paid me a bonus for doing a good job. So I'm a good programmer, right? Yesterday I completely screwed up the fire school by making a dumb programming mistake after my boss had already warned me about the problem. So even the best of us produce crap occasionally.
I believe the point is that the people near the top of the NSA, those managing major projects, do their work with a (sometimes misguided) sense that they are protecting their country.
Someone outsourced to cobble together a hundred archaic government systems for some other country is more likely to be simply punching the clock. They COULD do better work, and probably would if they believed their job was essential to protect their nation's freedom.
You know we're in trouble when the best that can be said about the sitting president is to compare
him to a top 5 worst president and still Obama comes out worse. "He has less experience than Bush" isn't a compliment, my friend.
The top five worst presidents would include Filmore, Harrison, Bush, Obama, and another of your choosing. In many ways, including executive experience, Obama is the worst of the "worst five". Compare him to a good president like Kennedy, Reagan, Lincoln, Eisenhower ...
"Billion+ dollar data center"
Well it's certainly not suprising that government spent a lot of money. They may well have spent a billion and ended up with a DC worth $10 million. As far as we know, their DC capacity may be the same as what Amazon and Google build for 94% less money
Most likely, though, people with experience in similar signals intelligence speced out a project that would actually meet their expansion needs, probably part of a ten year plan to reach X capacity. That's a different beast than politicians saying "my next election depends on building a giant federal bureaucracy in no more than three years".
> "within 20 to solve word" ..
> DOE should have more say
The people who wrote that should have MORE control over elementary curriculum? No thanks.
Over the last 60 years, DOE has had more and more involvement. As their involvement has increased, US scores have fallen further and further compared to other countries.
On the other hand, if students and parents could choose between two or three nearby schools, the schools that suck wouldn't get any students. There would be an incentive for each school to improve.
For optimal results, those two or three schools would be able to try slightly different methods to find ways that work better. For teachers compensation, one might focus on seniority, another on subjective evaluation of teachers, and another on results of standardized testing. Parents could send their kid to the school that works the best. To have the flexibility that optimal results require, DOE's role would be limited to providing parents with guidance on choosing the best school, such as by reporting graduation rates, test averages, etc.
Someone at Pearson came up with a bad question.
They meant for that question to coincide with the standards which say subtraction should be taught. How the heck do you leap from "Pearson has some bad questions" to "curriculum standards are bad"? Common Core may be bad, it may be good, TFA gives no reason to believe either. They only show that Pearson's implementation has some errors.
We teach firefighting, construction safety, and other topics that have specific codes and standards students need to learn. When we realize we have a bad question we don't say "construction codes are bad and students shouldn't be expected to learn them", we say "this question is bad and we should rewrite it so it better gauges the student's understanding".
There are a couple of statistical calculations test makers can use to find and fix bad questions. It doesn't appear that Pearson used those (yet). If they run the calculation, they'll see which questions are bad and can fix or remove them.
Obviously if fewer than half of students get a question correct, it's probably a bad question. There are other calculations which are similar but more advanced. Look at a properly designed quiz covering the same subject, one with well vetted questions, and I bet it looks a lot better. Questions like "Imagine you had four cookies and gave one to your sister. How many would you have left?" also meet the common core standards, and that's probably a good question for a certain grade level.
Bundling it where it can't be removed, preventing OEMs from installing other browsers, a patch to prevent downloading Netscape ...
Okay so I'm not THAT Morris, but I am an information systems security professional.
Every day millions of open source users violate patents, many of them legitimate patents. They don't get sued. That's been true for many years. Theoretically they COULD be sued, but it just doesn't happen.
Every few years, one suit will be filed against an open source company like Acacia and Novell sued Red Hat a few years ago. Red Hat won handily. If you researched enough, you might be able to find a dozen patent suits involving open source software. While you were digging up those few cases, another million people would be ignoring Microsoft's patents.
He had some trouble in the early 1990s, AFTER he'd already made three and a half billion dollars. I'd trade places with him. He was extremely successful in the 1960s, 1979s, 1980s, had a downturn in the early 1990s, then more success.
Successful projects? His very first building was a grand success. Trump purchased a run down,half-empty building for $3.7 million with his father, a moderately successful real estate guy. Trump renovated it very nicely do it had a 100% occupancy rate and then sold it for several times what he bought it for.
He's a blow hard. He's annoying. He's consistently successful. I look at that and ask "what can I learn about how to be successful, and how not to be annoying?"
You make a good point about current standards assuming each controlled device is an intelligent endpoint. In stage lighting, where you may control over a hundred lights, it's typical to have a few intelligent end devices and several relay or dimmer packs that control many "dumb" lights. Typically, one smart pack control power to eight lights. Most lights are dumb and cheap - just bulbs in sockets. Only a few lights, the moving, color changing spot lights, have any electronics in the end device.
The war on poverty began over 50 years ago and we've spent trillions of dollars, your dollars. The poverty rate is higher today than it was when the federal government started spending money on it 50 years ago.
So the answer is "no". The government should leave your money with you. You'll spend it, and the stores where you spend it will hire people. More jobs = less poverty.
> "[He] doesn't know how to do that task nor understand the technical issues but doesn't think it should take or cost that much!"
So you just pay whatever someone asks for? We should talk. I have some wonderful solutions to sell you. I don't know exactly how to make toilet paper, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't cost $84 million per roll and I'm not going to pay $84 million per roll.
Beyond that, he was probably right - accomplishing the business goal should not cost that much, as you somewhat admitted ...
> I wish I had told him that he needs to buy a copy of MS Word and his problem is solved.
If that would have solved the problem for 90% lower cost, you should have, and he was right to reject your proposal.
Then you say you think people who are successful are just lucky. Let's think this through. Did you successfully make breakfast this morning? Are you consistently successful when you attempt to pour cereal? Can a two-year-old say the same? Why are you successful at making breakfast and the two-year-old isn't? Because you're lucky, every single time? Or because YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING?
Trump keeps being successful at putting together $xxx million real estate deals because he knows what the heck he's doing. He's annoying as a TV personality, yes. That has almost nothing to do with the fact that he keeps building successful hotel / casinos because he knows how to build a friggin casino. He knows how, and he works 60+ hours a week doing it. That's why successful people keep on being successful while lottery winners are normally broke within a few years.
Successful people know how to do something that works and they keep doing it. Unsuccessful people keep doing things that don't work and keep being unsuccessful, EVEN IF YOU HAND THEM $50 MILLION.
For you, you can choose to be jealous and angry, or you can pick up any of many books in which Trump and others lay out exactly the principles they follow for success, then apply those principles to whatever you want to do. I'm a programmer. I have no interest in big real estate deals, my interest is in computer systems and business. I built and sold a web hosting company, then built a software company which sold over a million dollars of the software I wrote and I sold off that company. I'm now running my THIRD successful company. Do I get lucky every single time? No, I apply the principles that work, including the ones Trump laid out in Art of the Deal. That and I sometimes work until 2AM.
You're thinking of a different sale, confusing Nortel and Novell.
Also, even if Google could have signed on (they couldn't ), that wouldn't have protected them because Microsoft, Apple et al are suing anyone who makes Android devices (Samsung etc.). It's little use for Google to not be sued directly if nobody can build Android devices.
The report said the contestants did in fact spoof the caller ID. Though some people know it can be spoofed, most people trust it anyway. We're accustomed to fake links in e-mail, we look for that, but we generally assume caller ID is accurate.
This can be very useful for encouraging bad guys to reveal information.
On a societal level that makes sense. If a software bug crashes your car and you're paralyzed, it's little comfor to be told you might have crashed yourself.
If you're a good driver, a firmware bug that crashes your car is a BIG problem. The fact that other people avoided accidents because the software is better than a human isn't exactly relevant.
> The suit is about maintaining a free market in labor.
> Union membership is one way that individuals participate in that free market.
Lol. Did you just say that collusion, enforced by the government, is "free market"? Unions, organized, enforceable collusion, are exactly the opposite of free market.
A free market means I can hire your teenage son at $20 / hour to change lightbulbs, if you want to do that job at that price. Unions mean I better contract that job out, because I'm only allowed to hire electricians at $65 + $40 in benefits for anything related to anything electrical.
The illegal behavior these companies for busted for, the collusion, is PRECISELY what unions do. Anti-competive collusion is the PURPOSE of a union.
While we're at it, let's make it illegal to murder someone in_the_morning. Oh wait, California already did that I bet.
Half of the companies involved have already paid up. With the most recent ruling, the judge is saying the others will probably be held liable too. As the Palm CEO said, this is already illegal and has been for along time. We don't need more laws, a few million pages is enough.
Oddly, it's the opposite going the other way in some states. Employees are REQUIRED to collude and stick by that union collusion even if they don't want to.
Most captchas were cracked 17 months ago.
It's time for something that's easier for humans and harder for computers. For example, these images have been tweaked such that the standard routines don't work:
https://bettercgi.com/sb5/
Whether you make up a new "right" or not, you can't pay someone for paternity leave if the money is already spent on government mandated BS.
You seem to be confused about the definition of the word "right" is, though. When you talk about giving people new "rights", you've made the word virtually meaningless, turning it into a synonym for "entitlement" or "privilege". This is important, very important
The right to free speech means I can voice my opinion EVEN IF THE MAJORITY OR GOVERNMENT DOESN'TLIKE IT. You have the right to a fair trial even if the government would rather ramrod you. The Bill of Rights is a list of freedoms the government "shall not infringe". Note it doesn't say "should give you", it says "shall not infringe". Rights are not at the government's discretion. They can not take your rights away because your rights don't come from the government. Your right to think your own thoughts is intrinsic to your humaness; government can only infringe your rights or not. They can not take them because they did not give them.
Your natural rights as a person include your right to have your own thoughts, and your right to your own production - to eat what you grow in your own garden, to live in the house you built.
If you build your house for your family, I do not have the "right" to kick you out and take it for my family. I do not have any right to take your food you grew in your garden. My wife is pregnant at the moment. That has zero bearing on your rights to your own food. You may choose to share some tasty vegetables with me, but knocking up my wife doesn't give me the right to take your stuff.
You want to create a new government mandate? Fine. Do not lie and call it a "right", though, because as soon as you pretend that government creates rights, government is justified in taking away your rights that "they gave you".
> Amazon will abuse its power once it has attained monopoly status as
a supplier.
So you predict that Amazon will have a monopoly , ignoring the fact it isn't possible (some customers prefer a bookstore, so they will always have customers).
You then predict that after Amazon achieves this impossible feat, they could abuse their position.
Based on those two predictions, you wish a horrible death on your fellow man.
You're a vile, twisted person aren't you.
They are using their accumulated wealth to start selling books at discount prices? How, pray tell, do you imagine Amazon got that wealth? They've been selling books at low prices since day one, that's their original business.
That's funny. Obama's the lead editor on the new Constitution, I understand.
The most free market of all markets is the internet, where anyone can readily access any site, anywhere in the world. (Save a very few totalitarian countries with national firewalls.)
You claim free markets lead to monopoly. Therefore, the most free market system, the internet, has only one web page, correct?
Choice leads to differentiation, my friend. In a free market, I can choose Walmart pants and you can choose Abercrombie. Both serve a section of the market and both thrive. A government controlled market is the market for a driver's license. Government control is monopoly (and the DMV serves it's customers SO well).
In some areas of the US, the government enforces a monopoly on internet access, and you get 5-10 Mbps for $55. In Texas, it's mostly free market and we get Google's gigabit fiber, two cable providers, DSL, wireless, satellite, all kinds of choices.
Obama was right about one thing and the French missed it. "If you want people to stop doing something as much, make it more expensive."
More expensive books = fewer people can buy fewer books.
I realize you liberals aren't that smart, but this isn't complicated principles that actually require thought, this is basic shit any third grader should understand.