Really? I've never heard him say a word about immigration of high tech "workers"
You mean the guy who used to run a site called "Norman Matloff's Immigration Forum" and author of "A Critical Look at Immigration's Role in the U.S. Computer Industry"?
What specific differences should he correct for?... I think he can either give you a good answer or correct his studies. He's a stickler.
As a "former professor of statistics", you should know what one needs to correct for in such an analysis. And you should also know that you can't keep tinkering with retrospective cohort studies until you think they are right.
You've constructed a meaningless strawman. No low-income student is going to use voice over satellite, and there are almost no areas in the US that aren't served by terrestrial internet. So, this discussion is pointless.
Because I was responding to thread about a teacher creating their own course content, and I was telling them about a tool in which they could distribute their own content to students who worked offline.
and then based on your explanation, I'll explain how it's relevant.
Matloff has been on a crusade to stamp out immigration of high tech workers for many years, because he wants the supply of high tech workers to be low in order for salaries to go up. That's economic nonsense, because doing so simply would make the US tech industry less competitive and just cause more jobs to move overseas.
As for his study, he picks and chooses measures that superficially sound sensible, but without necessary statistical controls. One of his main conclusions is that prior foreign student status correlates negatively with salary, and he therefore concludes that foreign students aren't as bright as US students. But he fails to correct for differences in the populations. Mostly what this study proves conclusively is that Matloff is no statistician and doesn't really know what he is doing.
Of course, this kind of bad statistics is extremely common, used in areas from creationism to climate change, often by both sides. Each side gets their citeable scientific sources, and both sides can then go on hurling insults at each other.
Microsoft doesn't do personalized ads based on email contents.
No, but online ad personalization isn't the main problem people are complaining about. The main problem people are complaining about is that companies collect vast amounts of personal data, and Microsoft certainly does that. In fact, Microsoft routinely collects even more information about even operations on your computer that appear to be completely local.
There are almost no areas unserved by cable, DSL, or land-based wireless. There are also almost no areas where download speeds are http://www.broadbandmap.gov/summarize/nationwide
Well, it is "trivial" relative to just about anything else you can do on a computer. Meaning that if you decide to use computers at all, using offline video shouldn't be any more of an obstacle than viewing PDFs or using a word processor.
You've become disenchanted along the way because their focus hasn't been on your specific needs, I can understand that - but, you're not everyone - nor is the vocal minority.
Oh, it's clear Canonical has a pipe dream of becoming a mainstream OS, but that ain't going to happen. Yet, in the process, they are screwing their traditional user base. The result will be that they go under and they hurt Linux and FOSS big time in the process.
Even for mainstream users, Wayland, Unity, and Mir are exercises in futility: Wayland and Mir tinker with technical stuff under the covers that people don't care about, and Unity actually makes usability worse. Even for mainstream users, Canonical ought to have focused on predictability and usability.
You really have to be totally ignorant of the history and architecture of those systems to say that. NextStep, OS X, and "the Windows DirectX stack" are architectural nightmares and the results of decades of hacks upon hacks. And they are also resource hogs.
Google scrapped everything but the kernel and wrote all new code - you can tell by the Apache 2.0 license, no GPL userspace code,
That decision wasn't made by Google but by the Android developers, before Google bought them and open sourced their software. They probably had business reasons for it, and they were an odd bunch when it came to software anyway.
but because it is 'unreasonable' to expect students getting thousands of dollars worth of free education to spring for reasonable broadband service (estimated at $50/mo) we are considering this a problem?
Note that that $50/month also lets people replace many other subscriptions and services, like phone service. So there is really very little cost associated with using it for education.
They're an administrator's dream. More degrees generated at lower cost.
Heaven forbid that we should actually lower the cost of education! Do you prefer the cost of education to keep going through the roof and then raise taxes on everybody to pay for it? Or what?
Courses can still be taught under these conditions, but a teacher cannot use multimedia as a crutch
Unless your video format is really broken, you don't have to do anything special for video: tools like Miro will download video for offline playing. It's trivial to set up and use.
98.2% of the US have download speeds >3 Mbps available. That is more than enough for online video and just about anything else you might want to do on the Internet.
And for $30-50/month, you get a service that gives you free phone service, free university lectures, free access to millions of books , free or cheap movies and TV shows, business directories, and tons of other content. You basically don't need any other communication, education, or entertainment service these days. And yet, people keep complaining as if things are getting worse and worse.
I dont think you realize that we are beyond the threshold of operating as country that is constitutional. Its really surprising that so many dont see the writing on the wall.
Oh, of course, the US has plenty of political problems, but we've always had those, and we deal with them. But whether some snooty European calls us "civilized" or not really doesn't matter to me.
Its time to wake up and realize you are living in a prison of your own making perpetuated by powerful people that want to suck the life out of you.
You need to read some US history. Presidents and Congress ignoring the Constitution at times is nothing new. "Powerful people" have always had a strong say, and crony capitalism used to be even more rampant than it is today. I don't see that we're "beyond any threshold", and by and large, things are still better today than they were a century ago. We need to be vigilant and participate in the political process. But succumbing to conspiracy theories isn't going to help anybody.
So I shall restate myself: What was the lie? What was the premise, why was the premise false or misleading
This is what you wrote:
More cost-effective compared to what? Letting poor people slowly starve to death on the streets until their rotting corpses choke our gutters? Oh certainly not! It's much cheaper to let the masses deal with the huge variety of public health and sanitation problems caused by creating a massive underclass who cannot even afford to eat or get treated for diseases and to refuse to pay to even haul the bodies off somewhere they don't regularly expose massive numbers of people to any number of contagious diseases! No, far cheaper to force everyone to deal with every problem ON THEIR OWN! and if they die? It was all THEIR FAULT for being stupid, the BEGGARS!
This is what I responded with:
Neither the retirement programs nor medical insurance have anything to with "public health and sanitation", or helping the indigent or extremely poor. You're engaging in the typical progressive lies, mixing up reasonable programs related to public health and welfare with individual retirement and health care.
I think my response was clear enough. Let me rephrase it, since you still don't seem to get it. Medical insurance is not a public health issue (and obviously not a sanitation issue). Whether you die of untreated cancer or heart disease or diabetes doesn't affect my health. The few aspects of public health related to individual medical care (vaccinations, STD treatment) are usually available free of charge to anybody already (and if they aren't, they could be provided as such). Likewise, mandatory retirement plans like social security is different from welfare; we could eliminate all mandatory retirement plans and still help people who have fallen on hard times and are unable to work.
One can have a debate about the degree to which such public services are a moral obligation or a question of compassion, but claims that abolishing Obamacare, Medicare, and social security would result in huge public health problems are wrong, and the people arguing for it know it. To avoid having people in the street or not get treatment, all we really would need is Medicaid, minimal, means-tested Medicare, and minimal, means-tested Social Security, along with a large reduction in contributions.
Either you can answer these questions and "describe" my lie, or you cannot, and you were just throwing mud at random to see what stuck. But please, enlighten me!;)
Consider yourself enlightened. Note that I didn't actually call you personally a liar; I said that you "engaged in the typical progressive lies". For all I know, you may simply be parroting what you have heard without understanding it.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the guy who used to run a site called "Norman Matloff's Immigration Forum" and author of "A Critical Look at Immigration's Role in the U.S. Computer Industry"?
As a "former professor of statistics", you should know what one needs to correct for in such an analysis. And you should also know that you can't keep tinkering with retrospective cohort studies until you think they are right.
Land-based wireless doesn't refer to mobile, it refers to microwave and WLAN.
Either show some better data or STFU.
You've constructed a meaningless strawman. No low-income student is going to use voice over satellite, and there are almost no areas in the US that aren't served by terrestrial internet. So, this discussion is pointless.
Because I was responding to thread about a teacher creating their own course content, and I was telling them about a tool in which they could distribute their own content to students who worked offline.
Don't bother, you're obviously totally confused.
Matloff has been on a crusade to stamp out immigration of high tech workers for many years, because he wants the supply of high tech workers to be low in order for salaries to go up. That's economic nonsense, because doing so simply would make the US tech industry less competitive and just cause more jobs to move overseas.
As for his study, he picks and chooses measures that superficially sound sensible, but without necessary statistical controls. One of his main conclusions is that prior foreign student status correlates negatively with salary, and he therefore concludes that foreign students aren't as bright as US students. But he fails to correct for differences in the populations. Mostly what this study proves conclusively is that Matloff is no statistician and doesn't really know what he is doing.
Of course, this kind of bad statistics is extremely common, used in areas from creationism to climate change, often by both sides. Each side gets their citeable scientific sources, and both sides can then go on hurling insults at each other.
No, but online ad personalization isn't the main problem people are complaining about. The main problem people are complaining about is that companies collect vast amounts of personal data, and Microsoft certainly does that. In fact, Microsoft routinely collects even more information about even operations on your computer that appear to be completely local.
See http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Straw_man
How is that in any way relevant to a teacher creating their own online courses and videos?
People adapt to that, just like they adapt to not seeing the other person or having all the high frequencies cut out.
There are almost no areas unserved by cable, DSL, or land-based wireless. There are also almost no areas where download speeds are http://www.broadbandmap.gov/summarize/nationwide
Well, it is "trivial" relative to just about anything else you can do on a computer. Meaning that if you decide to use computers at all, using offline video shouldn't be any more of an obstacle than viewing PDFs or using a word processor.
Oh, it's clear Canonical has a pipe dream of becoming a mainstream OS, but that ain't going to happen. Yet, in the process, they are screwing their traditional user base. The result will be that they go under and they hurt Linux and FOSS big time in the process.
Even for mainstream users, Wayland, Unity, and Mir are exercises in futility: Wayland and Mir tinker with technical stuff under the covers that people don't care about, and Unity actually makes usability worse. Even for mainstream users, Canonical ought to have focused on predictability and usability.
You really have to be totally ignorant of the history and architecture of those systems to say that. NextStep, OS X, and "the Windows DirectX stack" are architectural nightmares and the results of decades of hacks upon hacks. And they are also resource hogs.
Yeah, that's the problem: they are pushing towards their goals, rather than towards solving their users' needs.
That decision wasn't made by Google but by the Android developers, before Google bought them and open sourced their software. They probably had business reasons for it, and they were an odd bunch when it came to software anyway.
I'd rather glue things together than wait for years for someone to ship a "proper integrated solution" and charge me and arm and a leg for it.
Note that that $50/month also lets people replace many other subscriptions and services, like phone service. So there is really very little cost associated with using it for education.
Heaven forbid that we should actually lower the cost of education! Do you prefer the cost of education to keep going through the roof and then raise taxes on everybody to pay for it? Or what?
Unless your video format is really broken, you don't have to do anything special for video: tools like Miro will download video for offline playing. It's trivial to set up and use.
Here is the source of the 98.2% figure, Obama's very own boondoggle:
http://www.broadbandmap.gov/summarize/nationwide
98.2% of the US have download speeds >3 Mbps available. That is more than enough for online video and just about anything else you might want to do on the Internet.
And for $30-50/month, you get a service that gives you free phone service, free university lectures, free access to millions of books , free or cheap movies and TV shows, business directories, and tons of other content. You basically don't need any other communication, education, or entertainment service these days. And yet, people keep complaining as if things are getting worse and worse.
The traffic--or the country--may simply be cut off at the border.
Canonical seems out of control: they create one new, half-baked technology after another. Shame, because for a while, Ubuntu was doing quite well.
Oh, of course, the US has plenty of political problems, but we've always had those, and we deal with them. But whether some snooty European calls us "civilized" or not really doesn't matter to me.
You need to read some US history. Presidents and Congress ignoring the Constitution at times is nothing new. "Powerful people" have always had a strong say, and crony capitalism used to be even more rampant than it is today. I don't see that we're "beyond any threshold", and by and large, things are still better today than they were a century ago. We need to be vigilant and participate in the political process. But succumbing to conspiracy theories isn't going to help anybody.
This is what you wrote:
This is what I responded with:
I think my response was clear enough. Let me rephrase it, since you still don't seem to get it. Medical insurance is not a public health issue (and obviously not a sanitation issue). Whether you die of untreated cancer or heart disease or diabetes doesn't affect my health. The few aspects of public health related to individual medical care (vaccinations, STD treatment) are usually available free of charge to anybody already (and if they aren't, they could be provided as such). Likewise, mandatory retirement plans like social security is different from welfare; we could eliminate all mandatory retirement plans and still help people who have fallen on hard times and are unable to work.
One can have a debate about the degree to which such public services are a moral obligation or a question of compassion, but claims that abolishing Obamacare, Medicare, and social security would result in huge public health problems are wrong, and the people arguing for it know it. To avoid having people in the street or not get treatment, all we really would need is Medicaid, minimal, means-tested Medicare, and minimal, means-tested Social Security, along with a large reduction in contributions.
Consider yourself enlightened. Note that I didn't actually call you personally a liar; I said that you "engaged in the typical progressive lies". For all I know, you may simply be parroting what you have heard without understanding it.
I use the term "liar" descriptively: either you make statements that you know are wrong, or that misrepresent assumptions as facts.