A dead-flat touchpad is no replacement for a proper keyboard. I know of no half-way decent typist that can come anywhere near their typing speed on a touch-screen. And mice have the advantage that they work in most applications requiring a pointer. I don't need an overlay to do this.
At best, this is a low-rent replacement for a Wacom, but not as precise; there's a reason Digitizers don't use simple pressure sensors. (And graphics tablets have had overlays since forever... I remember using an AutoCAD overlay a quarter-century ago.)
The standard doesn't have a name; it's not some useless crap in an ISO catalog, it's just a way truly mission-critical software is built.
I know that NASA has used it for the flight-control computers for the manned space-flight program, and IBM uses it for some of the more vital parts of their mainframe operating systems.
I didn't say it was applicable to everything, just that as a software-engineering technique, it's not at all new.
Given that they could have gotten a bigger drive for $40 from NewEgg (either out of petty cash, or just taking up a collection), shows how much they really think the data is needed.
Cops buy stuff out-of-pocket all the time to help out with their jobs; if they actually wanted more space for these logs, they would have gotten it, purchase-order or know.
I think that the whole "teh bureaucracy is teh worst" excuse was just an angle to make purchasing easier general, not because they are really upset about not keeping this gigantic mound of data, if not for a $50 part.
A study was run a couple of years ago that collected a group of low-income women, delivered comprehensive sex education, and gave them free access to the birth-control method of their choice.
In the fevered imagination of DittoHeads, the poor women would proceed to choose poor (or no) birth-control methods (or use them incorrectly), get knocked up (which is somehow supposed to be a money-maker... still haven't figured that one out), and become leeches on society.
What ACTUALLY happened? Exactly as you would expect rational people to do; the women had a tendency to choose the more-effective birth-control methods, and consequently birthrates dropped by (IIRC) 60-75% vs. the control group, which had no education nor access to free birth control.
Comprehensive Sex Education and widespread access to birth control WORKS. It's far more effective than abstinence-based sex "education", and leads to a reduction in birthrates (both teenage and otherwise.) If they were REALLY concerned with out-of-wedlock births, conservatives would be pushing for these polices, but really they are oddly fixated on the sex lives of American citizens and undesired babies end up being a side-effect that gives them something else to scold poor people about.
Is that the main reason the black community struggles much harder today (proportionally) than it did in the 1950s and 1960s is the total collapse of the nuclear family in many areas.
You know, we actually HAVE real statistics instead of wild imaginings culled from whatever websites you are glued to... your theory that the "black community" struggles today vs. the 50's and 60's because of the collapse of the nuclear family is directly contradicted by statistics (from the National Center for Health Statistics, a CDC arm), which show that the birthrate amongst unmarried black women is currently about half what it was at the end of the 60's, and this trend has continued despite a steep drop in black marriage rates over the last couple of decades.
... significantly less prone to the pathologies common in the black lower class (where out of wedlock birth is the norm, not exception).
Nor is "out of wedlock birth the norm"; the married birthrate is about 40% higher than the unmarried.
Ever deal with white trash (not rednecks, white trash; there is a major difference)? It's the same sociological situation and even the same set of behavior problems and stunted options despite "white privilege."
So, are they "pathologies common in the black lower class", or are they perhaps pathologies common amongst all low-income residents, and race has nothing to do with it? Making me wonder why you brought it up...
Yet those issues are precisely the personal choices, enabled by public policy and culture, that lead to the destruction of the stable nuclear family in much of the black community. Blaming external factors for everything, which is the politically correct solution,
Wait a minute... these personal choices are "enabled by public policy and culture" (which certainly appear to be external factors to me) but at the same time blaming said factors is the "politically correct" (and by implication, wrong) solution? Which is it? Is everything all the fault of those short-sighted black folk making bad decisions, or does public policy have something to do with it after all? I'm so confused...
For the end-user, these things are of marginal utility. (In fact, I'm surprised they want to charge for them at all; you'd think they'd just toss them in for free if you've bought one of the items they cover a couple times.)
The true customer for these is the brands they are surely charging to be featured on one of these buttons.
Really, what Amazon should be doing is selling these "blank" at-cost to be used for the purchase of whatever item(s) you like.
The idea of evaluating each step of the program for "what happens if this fails" is standard software engineering technique for mission-critical software. (That't not to say it's always actually done, just that it is the standard.) This method is hardly revolutionary (or even evolutionary.)
While the A380 is a more modern and fuel-efficient aircraft vs. the 747, it's been a bit of a money-pit for Airbus. The demand for such large planes isn't nearly as high as projected, with only a few carriers (namely the long-haul Middle-Eastern ones) really having much use for more than a handful of the things.
Most carriers have shifted to the 777, 787, and the Airbus equivalents, as passengers prefer to avoid too-many connections, and the smaller planes let them service more routes, which reduced the need to travel through major "gateway" airports such as JFK or LHR to go between foreign locales. In addition, connections often mean passengers have to go out of the way, which costs both airlines and passengers money. One flight is usually cheaper (for the airline, anyways) than two.
For starters, while they are (until recently) of the same type, freight-specific 747's are (usually) sold that way from the factory; many of those freighter features are not present on the passenger versions. In any case, Boeing didn't make the 747 freight-friendly because they thought they wouldn't sell many passenger versions; they made it freight-friendly because they correctly divined that such a big aircraft would be useful for both passenger and freight service, so it would be folly to not make it easy to sell freight-specific versions if they were already making a big jet.
While many aircraft makers thought supersonic jets would become more common, I don't believe any of them thought they would largely replace sub-sonic jets for passenger service; there's no getting around the fuel penalty of high-speed jets.
The correct form of the saying is "There's no replacement for displacement" (which, as you might notice, rhymes); I have no idea how on earth TFA got THAT so mangled.
People live off of Ensure, Boost, Nutren, et al., as their sole source of calories for years on end and don't seem to develop nutritional deficiencies. Maybe Soylent is more "natural" (whatever that means), but the established alternatives (which, in addition to being sold by people that know what they are doing, are cheaper) have a proven track record. At best, Soylent meets basic requirements, but frankly I have my doubts, given how they (last time I checked) STILL didn't have an actual nutritionist checking on the micronutrients.
(Nutren, which although drinkable and flavored, is specifically advertised as being feeding-tube compatible... people have lived for decades off the stuff.)
And, as you point out, the Soylent people keep making major changes to the formula, demonstrating that they still don't really have any idea what they are doing. They should have started with an established nutritional drink and worked to develop an "open source" equivalent. Starting from scratch out of utter ignorance was the exact wrong approach.
Soylent (which unless things have changed a lot, still doesn't have somebody with actual training in nutrition looking over the formula... the best they claimed before was that they verified the macronutrient ratios with somebody with a clue) is amateurish, nasty, with a horrible texture.
You can get a can of Nestle Nutren 2.0 (500 kcal/can) for $1.75 a can, delivered, from Amazon. It is developed by an actual nutrition company, working with actual doctors who know what they are doing, and it (and related beverages) have been used for literally decades by people with digestive issues and, in many cases, as their sole source of calories for years and years (this is usually with people that have feeding tubes, but it is flavored and can be drunk.)
Forgive me if I do not trust the sources in the linked comment, both of which come from a Homeopathy Journal; the very idea of a scientific journal dedicated to something that is about the exact opposite of science is hilarious. You might as well have referenced Jenny McCarthy as an authority on vaccines.
(As a side-note, I do find it very fascinating that a Homeopathy journal is publishing an article stating that one of the primary "mechanisms of action" of homeopathy, that dilution makes a drug (or... errr... anti-drug) into a strong remedy, does not, in fact, actually happen in practice.)
Homeopathy has always been 100% bunk. Pure placebo effect. Nothing so prosaic as oil and water not mixing creating a useful result; it's simply pure, unadulterated, B.S.
Now, at the time it was developed, during what we call "pre-scientific medicine", there simply weren't any non-BS explanations available, so perhaps it was a forgivable error. But there's certainly no excuse for it now.
As a side-note, one of the first homeopathic "cures" was for malaria. At the time, there actually WAS, a well-known and useful cure for malaria, cinchona bark extract (a.k.a. Quinine.) However it tastes nasty and has side-effects, so people took the homeopathic remedy for it instead. Those people were untreated for the illness and many of them died from it where quinine would have saved them.
Look up how they do the "dilutions", the concentration of the original ingredients asymptotes. It does not go to zero. Fools (including critics) don't actually check what is in there, preferring to misapply equations.
Concentrations are usually expressed as percentages because we usually deal in numbers of molecules so large, there's no point in expressing quantities like that. (A single drop of water contains approx. 100 quintillion molecules.)
But, homeopathy dilutes substances SO MUCH, that using math and Avogadro's Number we can calculate that a vial of said "remedy" containing all the water on planet earth is more likely to have zero vs. a single molecule of the substance.
While technically this probability is expressed as an asymptote, for practical purposes it's zero.
Your argument might make sense before we understood things like solutions being actual combinations of substances and not some kind of magic that changes the properties of ordinary water. But we DO understand how things work, so your argument makes no sense at all.
"The instructor reports that she provides these readings as the students have already seen the other side in previous courses."
"The other side"? When one side is the best modern science has to offer, and the other "side" is unadulterated bull$hit, further study is not necessary, except to the extent that it would be helpful for students to be familiar with said BS so they can swiftly disabuse patients of the idea that any of it is actually going to work.
When, in a course of scientific study, one side discards the precepts of science entirely, you cannot have a two-party discussion; you'll simply be talking past each other. When said non-scientific side co-opts the language of science to come up with nonsensical word salad purporting to explain their theories, well, a students grade in the course better not be dependent on accepting the bizzaro-land explanations for any of it.
I get those "Microsoft" support calls a couple times a month... I usually cuss them out and hang up the phone, like I imagine most computer-literate people do. (That job has gotta have a high turnover rate...)
Well, a few months ago, one called me, identified himself as being from "SpeedyPC" (points for not pretending to work for Microsoft, I guess...), and I did my usual string of expletives and slammed down the phone. The *bleep!*-er called back! I let it go to machine. He does it again. I let it go to machine. He does it a third time, and I pick up because I need the line open for business purposes. He begins to scold me for being rude to him! WTH? He knows he's a scammer, I know it, he knows I know it, so why on earth is he wasting his time letting me know how mean I was to him? He tries to argue with me about how he's going to "prove" my machine is infected or something...
Don't these people have call stats to meet like any other telemarketer? Why did he take time to call me back? How was that ever going to work?
I'm not sure what Fractional Reserve banking has to do with it... Yes, I'm sure that the banks lending the money use fractional-reserve lending, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. A margin loan works the same no matter what the source of the funds is.
And what do you mean "the rest of the margin disappears"? What "rest"? When the loan is called due to the drop, the stocks are force-sold, the principal is paid off, and yes, the investor loses his cash.
The US stock market is by-and-large is held by retirement funds, pension funds, Really Rich People, banks, insurance companies, etc. When the stock market crashes, pensions can't be paid, banks fail, insurance companies collapse, etc., sending repercussions throughout the entire market.
The Chinese stock market is held largely by individuals (and highly leveraged). They are totally taking it in the shorts right now; the only systemic effect will be a reduction in consumption by said individuals, but the Chinese economy as a whole is still not particularly driven by these individuals, which are mostly in China's older middle class. (The poor have nothing, the rich own companies directly, the young middle class weren't spending these funds yet)
Unlike, say, the US housing collapse, there's not much risk to the banks that are extending margin. As long as they aren't afraid to make the Margin Call promptly, they'll be able to recover nearly 100% of the principal without a problem. (Of course the investor will be left with a big, fat, nothing, at best...)
I had a former co-worker who, when my company switched over from a defined-benefit to a cash-balance pension actually selected the cash-balance (he had enough tenure to have a choice.) He then immediately retired so he could invest it in an IRA account.
I remember when the.com crash started he was in my office talking to my officemate about how the 'Q's (a reference to the NASDAQ composite... which is a measure designed to capture frothiness; it ain't built like the Dow or S&P) just had to come back up after falling (this is after they had only fallen 10-20%). I remember thinking at the time: They don't have to do 'nuthin. (Fifteen years later, it still isn't back at that level.)
When a stock market triples over the span of not-very-long, for no reason connected to projected growth, revenue, or profit, it should not come as a surprise that things are going to come back down. And they still have a ways to go.
In China's case it doesn't help that the government was actively preaching investing in the stock market... (just like our government pushed home ownership so hard.) Perhaps governments should take this as a lesson that pushing particular asset classes doesn't end well for anybody if you can actually get people to believe you.
I would not expect a standard CS curriculum to have a class on the TCP/IP stack. A networking class, maybe, but more theoretical than on IP implementation details.
If you need somebody that knows the ins and outs of IP, then I suggest your organization look for such things during the hiring process, instead of going through the incredibly expensive process of hiring somebody only to let them go months later.
It sounds like you are a bunch of morons there that have managed to (consistently!) confuse CS and IT.
Why not Java? They have to pick some language, and Java has a wide array of IDE's, many of which will run just great on whatever ancient Windows boxen a school can scrape up, an extensive textbook infrastructure, a decent number of people that know it, and the ability to implement (in a straightforward manner) most of the concepts you need to teach in a high-school CS class. It has it's quirks, but I'd prefer it to C++.
Yes, a full CS curriculum uses several languages in order to teach different concepts, but that's just not possible within the confines of a couple High School courses.
When I did AP CS in the early 90's, it was Pascal all the way... it had a very easy to learn syntax, but didn't have enough modern language features (like OOP) that the folks in my college's CS program that had passed the AP test were really hurt when their follow-on classes assumed they both knew C++ already and that they had some familiarity with OOP. (I didn't pass the AP CS test due to my brain being fried from a brutal AP US History test that morning.)
Outside of the Northeast Corridor, passenger rail in the US makes no sense whatsoever. The distance between viable markets, even with high-speed trains, is simply far too large to make the extensive capital costs worth it.
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A dead-flat touchpad is no replacement for a proper keyboard. I know of no half-way decent typist that can come anywhere near their typing speed on a touch-screen. And mice have the advantage that they work in most applications requiring a pointer. I don't need an overlay to do this.
At best, this is a low-rent replacement for a Wacom, but not as precise; there's a reason Digitizers don't use simple pressure sensors. (And graphics tablets have had overlays since forever... I remember using an AutoCAD overlay a quarter-century ago.)
The standard doesn't have a name; it's not some useless crap in an ISO catalog, it's just a way truly mission-critical software is built.
I know that NASA has used it for the flight-control computers for the manned space-flight program, and IBM uses it for some of the more vital parts of their mainframe operating systems.
I didn't say it was applicable to everything, just that as a software-engineering technique, it's not at all new.
Given that they could have gotten a bigger drive for $40 from NewEgg (either out of petty cash, or just taking up a collection), shows how much they really think the data is needed.
Cops buy stuff out-of-pocket all the time to help out with their jobs; if they actually wanted more space for these logs, they would have gotten it, purchase-order or know.
I think that the whole "teh bureaucracy is teh worst" excuse was just an angle to make purchasing easier general, not because they are really upset about not keeping this gigantic mound of data, if not for a $50 part.
A study was run a couple of years ago that collected a group of low-income women, delivered comprehensive sex education, and gave them free access to the birth-control method of their choice.
In the fevered imagination of DittoHeads, the poor women would proceed to choose poor (or no) birth-control methods (or use them incorrectly), get knocked up (which is somehow supposed to be a money-maker... still haven't figured that one out), and become leeches on society.
What ACTUALLY happened? Exactly as you would expect rational people to do; the women had a tendency to choose the more-effective birth-control methods, and consequently birthrates dropped by (IIRC) 60-75% vs. the control group, which had no education nor access to free birth control.
Comprehensive Sex Education and widespread access to birth control WORKS. It's far more effective than abstinence-based sex "education", and leads to a reduction in birthrates (both teenage and otherwise.) If they were REALLY concerned with out-of-wedlock births, conservatives would be pushing for these polices, but really they are oddly fixated on the sex lives of American citizens and undesired babies end up being a side-effect that gives them something else to scold poor people about.
Is that the main reason the black community struggles much harder today (proportionally) than it did in the 1950s and 1960s is the total collapse of the nuclear family in many areas.
You know, we actually HAVE real statistics instead of wild imaginings culled from whatever websites you are glued to... your theory that the "black community" struggles today vs. the 50's and 60's because of the collapse of the nuclear family is directly contradicted by statistics (from the National Center for Health Statistics, a CDC arm), which show that the birthrate amongst unmarried black women is currently about half what it was at the end of the 60's, and this trend has continued despite a steep drop in black marriage rates over the last couple of decades.
... significantly less prone to the pathologies common in the black lower class (where out of wedlock birth is the norm, not exception).
Nor is "out of wedlock birth the norm"; the married birthrate is about 40% higher than the unmarried.
Ever deal with white trash (not rednecks, white trash; there is a major difference)? It's the same sociological situation and even the same set of behavior problems and stunted options despite "white privilege."
So, are they "pathologies common in the black lower class", or are they perhaps pathologies common amongst all low-income residents, and race has nothing to do with it? Making me wonder why you brought it up...
Yet those issues are precisely the personal choices, enabled by public policy and culture, that lead to the destruction of the stable nuclear family in much of the black community. Blaming external factors for everything, which is the politically correct solution,
Wait a minute... these personal choices are "enabled by public policy and culture" (which certainly appear to be external factors to me) but at the same time blaming said factors is the "politically correct" (and by implication, wrong) solution? Which is it? Is everything all the fault of those short-sighted black folk making bad decisions, or does public policy have something to do with it after all? I'm so confused...
For the end-user, these things are of marginal utility. (In fact, I'm surprised they want to charge for them at all; you'd think they'd just toss them in for free if you've bought one of the items they cover a couple times.)
The true customer for these is the brands they are surely charging to be featured on one of these buttons.
Really, what Amazon should be doing is selling these "blank" at-cost to be used for the purchase of whatever item(s) you like.
The idea of evaluating each step of the program for "what happens if this fails" is standard software engineering technique for mission-critical software. (That't not to say it's always actually done, just that it is the standard.) This method is hardly revolutionary (or even evolutionary.)
While the A380 is a more modern and fuel-efficient aircraft vs. the 747, it's been a bit of a money-pit for Airbus. The demand for such large planes isn't nearly as high as projected, with only a few carriers (namely the long-haul Middle-Eastern ones) really having much use for more than a handful of the things.
Most carriers have shifted to the 777, 787, and the Airbus equivalents, as passengers prefer to avoid too-many connections, and the smaller planes let them service more routes, which reduced the need to travel through major "gateway" airports such as JFK or LHR to go between foreign locales. In addition, connections often mean passengers have to go out of the way, which costs both airlines and passengers money. One flight is usually cheaper (for the airline, anyways) than two.
For starters, while they are (until recently) of the same type, freight-specific 747's are (usually) sold that way from the factory; many of those freighter features are not present on the passenger versions. In any case, Boeing didn't make the 747 freight-friendly because they thought they wouldn't sell many passenger versions; they made it freight-friendly because they correctly divined that such a big aircraft would be useful for both passenger and freight service, so it would be folly to not make it easy to sell freight-specific versions if they were already making a big jet.
While many aircraft makers thought supersonic jets would become more common, I don't believe any of them thought they would largely replace sub-sonic jets for passenger service; there's no getting around the fuel penalty of high-speed jets.
The correct form of the saying is "There's no replacement for displacement" (which, as you might notice, rhymes); I have no idea how on earth TFA got THAT so mangled.
"I'd totally buy an electric car tomorrow if not for the herculean task of lifting a cord and plugging it in all by myself." - Said Nobody Ever.
People live off of Ensure, Boost, Nutren, et al., as their sole source of calories for years on end and don't seem to develop nutritional deficiencies. Maybe Soylent is more "natural" (whatever that means), but the established alternatives (which, in addition to being sold by people that know what they are doing, are cheaper) have a proven track record. At best, Soylent meets basic requirements, but frankly I have my doubts, given how they (last time I checked) STILL didn't have an actual nutritionist checking on the micronutrients.
(Nutren, which although drinkable and flavored, is specifically advertised as being feeding-tube compatible... people have lived for decades off the stuff.)
And, as you point out, the Soylent people keep making major changes to the formula, demonstrating that they still don't really have any idea what they are doing. They should have started with an established nutritional drink and worked to develop an "open source" equivalent. Starting from scratch out of utter ignorance was the exact wrong approach.
Soylent (which unless things have changed a lot, still doesn't have somebody with actual training in nutrition looking over the formula... the best they claimed before was that they verified the macronutrient ratios with somebody with a clue) is amateurish, nasty, with a horrible texture.
You can get a can of Nestle Nutren 2.0 (500 kcal/can) for $1.75 a can, delivered, from Amazon. It is developed by an actual nutrition company, working with actual doctors who know what they are doing, and it (and related beverages) have been used for literally decades by people with digestive issues and, in many cases, as their sole source of calories for years and years (this is usually with people that have feeding tubes, but it is flavored and can be drunk.)
Or, I suppose you can take this crap...
Forgive me if I do not trust the sources in the linked comment, both of which come from a Homeopathy Journal; the very idea of a scientific journal dedicated to something that is about the exact opposite of science is hilarious. You might as well have referenced Jenny McCarthy as an authority on vaccines.
(As a side-note, I do find it very fascinating that a Homeopathy journal is publishing an article stating that one of the primary "mechanisms of action" of homeopathy, that dilution makes a drug (or... errr... anti-drug) into a strong remedy, does not, in fact, actually happen in practice.)
Homeopathy has always been 100% bunk. Pure placebo effect. Nothing so prosaic as oil and water not mixing creating a useful result; it's simply pure, unadulterated, B.S.
Now, at the time it was developed, during what we call "pre-scientific medicine", there simply weren't any non-BS explanations available, so perhaps it was a forgivable error. But there's certainly no excuse for it now.
As a side-note, one of the first homeopathic "cures" was for malaria. At the time, there actually WAS, a well-known and useful cure for malaria, cinchona bark extract (a.k.a. Quinine.) However it tastes nasty and has side-effects, so people took the homeopathic remedy for it instead. Those people were untreated for the illness and many of them died from it where quinine would have saved them.
Homeopathy: Proudly killing patients since Day 1.
Look up how they do the "dilutions", the concentration of the original ingredients asymptotes. It does not go to zero. Fools (including critics) don't actually check what is in there, preferring to misapply equations.
Concentrations are usually expressed as percentages because we usually deal in numbers of molecules so large, there's no point in expressing quantities like that. (A single drop of water contains approx. 100 quintillion molecules.)
But, homeopathy dilutes substances SO MUCH, that using math and Avogadro's Number we can calculate that a vial of said "remedy" containing all the water on planet earth is more likely to have zero vs. a single molecule of the substance.
While technically this probability is expressed as an asymptote, for practical purposes it's zero.
Your argument might make sense before we understood things like solutions being actual combinations of substances and not some kind of magic that changes the properties of ordinary water. But we DO understand how things work, so your argument makes no sense at all.
"The instructor reports that she provides these readings as the students have already seen the other side in previous courses."
"The other side"? When one side is the best modern science has to offer, and the other "side" is unadulterated bull$hit, further study is not necessary, except to the extent that it would be helpful for students to be familiar with said BS so they can swiftly disabuse patients of the idea that any of it is actually going to work.
When, in a course of scientific study, one side discards the precepts of science entirely, you cannot have a two-party discussion; you'll simply be talking past each other. When said non-scientific side co-opts the language of science to come up with nonsensical word salad purporting to explain their theories, well, a students grade in the course better not be dependent on accepting the bizzaro-land explanations for any of it.
I get those "Microsoft" support calls a couple times a month... I usually cuss them out and hang up the phone, like I imagine most computer-literate people do. (That job has gotta have a high turnover rate...)
Well, a few months ago, one called me, identified himself as being from "SpeedyPC" (points for not pretending to work for Microsoft, I guess...), and I did my usual string of expletives and slammed down the phone. The *bleep!*-er called back! I let it go to machine. He does it again. I let it go to machine. He does it a third time, and I pick up because I need the line open for business purposes. He begins to scold me for being rude to him! WTH? He knows he's a scammer, I know it, he knows I know it, so why on earth is he wasting his time letting me know how mean I was to him? He tries to argue with me about how he's going to "prove" my machine is infected or something...
Don't these people have call stats to meet like any other telemarketer? Why did he take time to call me back? How was that ever going to work?
I'm not sure what Fractional Reserve banking has to do with it... Yes, I'm sure that the banks lending the money use fractional-reserve lending, but I don't see what that has to do with anything. A margin loan works the same no matter what the source of the funds is.
And what do you mean "the rest of the margin disappears"? What "rest"? When the loan is called due to the drop, the stocks are force-sold, the principal is paid off, and yes, the investor loses his cash.
Yes, China owns a lot of the US debt... and???
The US stock market is by-and-large is held by retirement funds, pension funds, Really Rich People, banks, insurance companies, etc. When the stock market crashes, pensions can't be paid, banks fail, insurance companies collapse, etc., sending repercussions throughout the entire market.
The Chinese stock market is held largely by individuals (and highly leveraged). They are totally taking it in the shorts right now; the only systemic effect will be a reduction in consumption by said individuals, but the Chinese economy as a whole is still not particularly driven by these individuals, which are mostly in China's older middle class. (The poor have nothing, the rich own companies directly, the young middle class weren't spending these funds yet)
Unlike, say, the US housing collapse, there's not much risk to the banks that are extending margin. As long as they aren't afraid to make the Margin Call promptly, they'll be able to recover nearly 100% of the principal without a problem. (Of course the investor will be left with a big, fat, nothing, at best...)
... The more they stay the same.
I had a former co-worker who, when my company switched over from a defined-benefit to a cash-balance pension actually selected the cash-balance (he had enough tenure to have a choice.) He then immediately retired so he could invest it in an IRA account.
I remember when the .com crash started he was in my office talking to my officemate about how the 'Q's (a reference to the NASDAQ composite... which is a measure designed to capture frothiness; it ain't built like the Dow or S&P) just had to come back up after falling (this is after they had only fallen 10-20%). I remember thinking at the time: They don't have to do 'nuthin. (Fifteen years later, it still isn't back at that level.)
When a stock market triples over the span of not-very-long, for no reason connected to projected growth, revenue, or profit, it should not come as a surprise that things are going to come back down. And they still have a ways to go.
In China's case it doesn't help that the government was actively preaching investing in the stock market... (just like our government pushed home ownership so hard.) Perhaps governments should take this as a lesson that pushing particular asset classes doesn't end well for anybody if you can actually get people to believe you.
I would not expect a standard CS curriculum to have a class on the TCP/IP stack. A networking class, maybe, but more theoretical than on IP implementation details.
If you need somebody that knows the ins and outs of IP, then I suggest your organization look for such things during the hiring process, instead of going through the incredibly expensive process of hiring somebody only to let them go months later.
It sounds like you are a bunch of morons there that have managed to (consistently!) confuse CS and IT.
Why not Java? They have to pick some language, and Java has a wide array of IDE's, many of which will run just great on whatever ancient Windows boxen a school can scrape up, an extensive textbook infrastructure, a decent number of people that know it, and the ability to implement (in a straightforward manner) most of the concepts you need to teach in a high-school CS class. It has it's quirks, but I'd prefer it to C++.
Yes, a full CS curriculum uses several languages in order to teach different concepts, but that's just not possible within the confines of a couple High School courses.
When I did AP CS in the early 90's, it was Pascal all the way... it had a very easy to learn syntax, but didn't have enough modern language features (like OOP) that the folks in my college's CS program that had passed the AP test were really hurt when their follow-on classes assumed they both knew C++ already and that they had some familiarity with OOP. (I didn't pass the AP CS test due to my brain being fried from a brutal AP US History test that morning.)
Outside of the Northeast Corridor, passenger rail in the US makes no sense whatsoever. The distance between viable markets, even with high-speed trains, is simply far too large to make the extensive capital costs worth it.