Dude, on standardized tests, 50% is the mean, by definition. The test result is them telling you where you fall in the 100 control group students.
I have a BS in math. The mean score of public school children on standardized tests is 50%.
Or do you seriously believe that the article was trying to say that public school students average a 50% score on their schoolwork, thus the average student fails?
First, it's an article defending Home Schooling, written by the Home School Legal Defense Association, so it's already suspect.
Then, it talks about what scores home-schooled children "average" in national tests. Those tests show percentiles: only the mean of the children is meaningful. Just because the mean score of public school children (by definition) is 50% doesn't mean the average is 50%. I don't think averaging the mean of a bunch of individual students would even be meaningful.
So, the average of the public school students might be 85%, too. Maybe they intend to talk about mean when they say average, but they have no business presenting statistical information if they don't know the difference.
I know lots of home schooled kids who are home-schooled because they had difficulty in school. I guarantee that they are not scoring higher than 50-60% on their standardized tests.
My kids are home schooled, so I'm not coming from an anti-HS bigotry. I just want to base my decisions on good, trustworthy studies, which I've not seen.
Google realizes that carriers want strict control over their devices.
No, carriers want strict control over *your* and *my* devices. You know, the ones we either paid up front for, or the ones we paid out subsidized by our contract.
I'm sure you're right, and I was crazy. I do wonder, however, about MS donating to schools. Every time that happens we hear someone going off here about how it's just a huge tax write-off for them. From what you're saying, there is no money made, but money lost on such deals.
Well, in the case of the company that paid you and then took a write-off, there is a loss on their part. They pay you your full salary, but the write-off only pays them back 30% (or whatever their highest bracket tax rate is) of the money they paid you.
If you charge for something, and have purchases, then isn't any copy of that thing that you give away a business loss?
How is this different than MS writing Vista, which they sell, then taking a tax write-off for the full value of Vista when they give 100,000 copies to schools?
You're not writing off your time; you're writing off the value of the goods you gave away.
I am not a lawyer or an accountant. I'm just asking the question:-)
We need term limits and campaign contributions should be anonymous or publicly financed.
Not just anonymous, but legally mandated to be anonymized: it should be illegal to present evidence to a candidate that you financed them. Otherwise people will just show their check stubs to the candidate.
Moreover, some body other than congress should be responsible for trying congressmen (duh), and congresspeople should be held to at least a stringent a legal standard as normal citizens. If I can't get off from a legal suit by blatantly lying about what I knew, what I remember, and what the definition of "is" is, neither should they. Respect and status is something that someone gets by deserving it, and when you start making ridiculous statements, respect and status should be lost, not used as an excuse for believing the unbelievable.
If Gates were to say, *in defense of installing CD presses at MS*, that the users won't be pressing illegal copies of CDs, and then they do, then absolutely Gates should be held responsible. If he says they won't do it, then he should institute policies that ensure that they don't do it. Saying that they won't do it puts a burden on the one saying it to make it so that it doesn't happen.
This is exactly the same as the "Iraq has WMD" statements. What they really meant was, "I'm pretty sure, based on no real evidence, that Iraq has WMD". Their statement was a statement of opinion given as a statement of fact.
Of course, even if they can correctly claim that spying will only be done on people for whom they have real evidence of criminal behavior, it is *still illegal*.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." -- the 6th amendment.
Without a warrant, it is illegal to snoop on people's private conversation. Period. This is not some legal puzzle put out there so that only people smart or charismatic enough to convince other people that they have a "really good reason" to spy without a warrant can do it. It is a legal principle to help protect you and I (presuming you're American) from an overreaching or oppressive government.
And, regarding Obama supporting a more controlling government than Bush: give me examples. If those examples are "he wants to regulate the health care industry", you're a nut. That's not the government controlling me, that's the government providing me a service. I'm willing do discuss that it might not be the best way to provide it, and even that it might be unconstitutional. But it is not a more controlling government.
Regarding Obama being more deceptive than Bush. Again, give examples. I don't think you have them. I can think of a few examples where Obama put forth mild deceptions to avoid innocent connections that could be made to look ugly by political opponents. I cannot think of examples where he lied about something that got tens of thousands of people killed and wasted *trillions* (multiple of the T-word) of dollars on a war that made the world despise the country.
You are living in some weird cynical fantasyland. Plug in hybrid cars are expensive because they are new technology. The factories to build them have to be built, we haven't spent enough time figuring out ways to keep individual unit costs down, and R&D costs haven't been amortized over long periods of selling millions of units as with standard ICE.
The first electric cars will be expensive. Probably the only ones that will sell well will be expensive luxury cars, because the people who can afford to spend $38,000 on a plug-in hybrid car that looks like crap & has no features probably prefer to spend $50,000 on a plug-in hybrid car that looks nice and is fun to be in.
Then we'll get better at making individual units cheaply, the manufacturing infrastructure will become more established, and car companies will get more comfortable about how many PIH cars will sell. And then they'll get cheap.
Car companies would gladly sell us cars that never required fuel if they could figure out how to make them at prices people would pay. If 90% of car companies elected not to sell cars that don't use petroleum (or use less petroleum) which everyone could afford simply because the people making decisions have a stake in petroleum sales, the other 10% of car companies would put them out of business.
the information about which way a polarized filter is oriented appears to travel faster than light
I should make it more clear that this doesn't make it possible to transmit information faster than light. The instrument on one end can't determine the orientation of the instrument on the other end, but the measurement results are guaranteed to be consistent with the measurement results at the other end. Even though the measurement results are dependent on orientation.
This is most interesting when the filters are orthogonal to one another, because then you're guaranteed that if you see the photon, the other guy doesn't, and vice versa.
Likewise, any other effect that we know of, all of which are limited to lightspeed.
This is offtopic, but I thought you might be interested. In fact, some effects which do not carry information appear to travel faster than light. See the EPR (Einstein-Podolski-Rosen) paradox.
I personally believe in the Everett Relative State (aka Many Worlds) interpretation of QM, in which those "paradoxes" don't involve information traveling faster than light. But from a classical point of view, the information about which way a polarized filter is oriented appears to travel faster than light.
(Of course, that's just one of many cases which EPR applies to, but it's the standard one.)
I'm happy now, at least the correct information is modded up so people will see it and not just the incorrect info. Overrated mods don't affect karma anyway, I don't think.
Is someone following me around modding my stuff overrated? I wouldn't have minded if they had actually modded the factual parent post to which I referred up, or the incorrect ancestor +5 post down. As it is, they're just hiding the truth.
CrimsonAvenger, modded at 2 (the parent in my MOD PARENT UP comment), has it completely right. Warrax, modded at 5 Informative, has it completely wrong.
"Information can't travel faster than the speed of light" means just what it says. The impossibility of detecting changes outside your light cone is transitive - you can't detect changes outside your light cone, not even in the form of detecting changes to an object inside your light cone caused by an object outside your light cone.
At least, per relativity, you can't. If you can, then relativity is wrong.
He is right: my light cone, per special relativity, is the boundary beyond which things can have *no effect on me whatsoever*. Any effect coming from the other side of the light cone would allow communication back in time from some frames of reference, and all the fucked-up things that come with that.
If information is traversing the light cone, relativity is wrong.
I do have a BS in Physics and strong interest in relativity, but I am not a physicist.
You had a snide answer. Oh, and it's "your understanding", not "you're understanding".
He didn't say anything about little boxes.
By the way, AC, in answer to your question, and to actually illuminate rather than just tell you that you misunderstand:
Most software is written to serve the in-house needs of large-ish corporations. They need to manage their business, and to be competitive their business has to differ from other businesses serving similar needs. So they have large quantities of software to manage their inventory, coordinate their workers, manage their books, determine if payment they've been given is fraudulent, etc. The little details of all of these things are specific to the business rules of any large business.
Often those needs could be fulfilled by some commercial software, if it weren't for the hundred little things that the company needs done differently. If some open software can do basically the same thing as the commercial software, it's in the company's interest to add the features needed to support their business needs. This typically has to be done without exposing their business specific rules (i.e. without making those rules open source), but you can just make the software configurable and put the rules in some configuration file outside the OSS app.
Frankly, the only times I make changes to OSS software for pay are for basic infrastructure software (e.g. apache, ant, etc) when there is a bug or an obvious feature missing. The actual software that fulfills whatever business need is fully proprietary, except for some of the infrastructure.
If you're concerned about the relationship between the experience of a president and how history sees him, plug what Obama's numbers will be at the time he's sworn in into this convenient chart: http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Info/experience.html
Those numbers would be about 3 years in the US Senate and 6 years in the state Senate. In particular, pay attention to Abraham Lincoln's numbers on that chart.
By the way, look at the details of your straight shooter's plan to fix the market crash. Oh, wait, there isn't one, unless you count his longstanding position of not regulating the market.
Well, then, let's look at the details of his plan to provide tax relief. Oh, wait, it provides about half as much relief to the middle class worker as Obama's plan. And, by the way, trickle-down economics clearly don't work.
OK, let's look at his plan to solve America's energy problems. Every expert I've heard on the topic says offshore drilling will have insignificant effects on the price of oil. Of course, I'm sure it will be great for American oil companies...
Although the time in between is liable to be somewhat scary. When data is available on lots of people (but not all) and we're not used to accepting the fact that everyone knows if you pick your nose in public, or forget to close the blinds before you change clothes, there's liable to be a lot of unnecessary shame and heartache.
By 2018 or so everyone will be filming the vicinity of their car and/or home at all times anyway. (How better to provide evidence that an accident isn't your fault, or see who broke into your car, etc.) Once quality vidcams and computing power drop to almost $0, and cheap or free software makes it trivial to set up, why not?
Once that data is processed and correlated, everyone, including people who don't have the system, will be tracked everywhere and the information will be available to anyone. Even if only 1% of the cars on the road did this, in a metropolitan area everyone would essentially be tracked everywhere.
We're going to have to redefine our notions of privacy once everything that is detectable from a public space is recorded and distributed.
Of course, that's not quite the same thing as the government recording and correlating the data recorded in the public space and putting it in private databases.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, on standardized tests, 50% is the mean, by definition. The test result is them telling you where you fall in the 100 control group students.
I have a BS in math. The mean score of public school children on standardized tests is 50%.
Or do you seriously believe that the article was trying to say that public school students average a 50% score on their schoolwork, thus the average student fails?
So why haven't you bought an Openmoko Freerunner? I have debian in my pocket right now.
First, it's an article defending Home Schooling, written by the Home School Legal Defense Association, so it's already suspect.
Then, it talks about what scores home-schooled children "average" in national tests. Those tests show percentiles: only the mean of the children is meaningful. Just because the mean score of public school children (by definition) is 50% doesn't mean the average is 50%. I don't think averaging the mean of a bunch of individual students would even be meaningful.
So, the average of the public school students might be 85%, too. Maybe they intend to talk about mean when they say average, but they have no business presenting statistical information if they don't know the difference.
I know lots of home schooled kids who are home-schooled because they had difficulty in school. I guarantee that they are not scoring higher than 50-60% on their standardized tests.
My kids are home schooled, so I'm not coming from an anti-HS bigotry. I just want to base my decisions on good, trustworthy studies, which I've not seen.
You just did challenge it, and you didn't get legally punished.
The analogy would be, did this guy employ women contrary to national law, or did he distribute written materials advocating employing women?
It's a big difference. If you can't advocate change, change will never happen. If you can follow whatever rules you deem fit, you have anarchy.
Well, my phone is a Neo1973. I hate contracts, too, so I'm on AT&T GoPhone.
I do think it's silly of us to let carriers dictate what happens with the phone we buy from them, though.
No, carriers want strict control over *your* and *my* devices. You know, the ones we either paid up front for, or the ones we paid out subsidized by our contract.
This bothers me quite a bit.
Yep, chaotoroboto pointed that out.
I'm sure you're right, and I was crazy. I do wonder, however, about MS donating to schools. Every time that happens we hear someone going off here about how it's just a huge tax write-off for them. From what you're saying, there is no money made, but money lost on such deals.
I did think about it. Do software publishers pay tax? Do you have evidence one way or another?
'cause I couldn't find any.
Well, in the case of the company that paid you and then took a write-off, there is a loss on their part. They pay you your full salary, but the write-off only pays them back 30% (or whatever their highest bracket tax rate is) of the money they paid you.
If you charge for something, and have purchases, then isn't any copy of that thing that you give away a business loss?
How is this different than MS writing Vista, which they sell, then taking a tax write-off for the full value of Vista when they give 100,000 copies to schools?
You're not writing off your time; you're writing off the value of the goods you gave away.
I am not a lawyer or an accountant. I'm just asking the question :-)
Not just anonymous, but legally mandated to be anonymized: it should be illegal to present evidence to a candidate that you financed them. Otherwise people will just show their check stubs to the candidate.
Moreover, some body other than congress should be responsible for trying congressmen (duh), and congresspeople should be held to at least a stringent a legal standard as normal citizens. If I can't get off from a legal suit by blatantly lying about what I knew, what I remember, and what the definition of "is" is, neither should they. Respect and status is something that someone gets by deserving it, and when you start making ridiculous statements, respect and status should be lost, not used as an excuse for believing the unbelievable.
I wish I hadn't run out of mod points yesterday.
Clear thinking, well expressed.
If Gates were to say, *in defense of installing CD presses at MS*, that the users won't be pressing illegal copies of CDs, and then they do, then absolutely Gates should be held responsible. If he says they won't do it, then he should institute policies that ensure that they don't do it. Saying that they won't do it puts a burden on the one saying it to make it so that it doesn't happen.
This is exactly the same as the "Iraq has WMD" statements. What they really meant was, "I'm pretty sure, based on no real evidence, that Iraq has WMD". Their statement was a statement of opinion given as a statement of fact.
Of course, even if they can correctly claim that spying will only be done on people for whom they have real evidence of criminal behavior, it is *still illegal*.
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." -- the 6th amendment.
Without a warrant, it is illegal to snoop on people's private conversation. Period. This is not some legal puzzle put out there so that only people smart or charismatic enough to convince other people that they have a "really good reason" to spy without a warrant can do it. It is a legal principle to help protect you and I (presuming you're American) from an overreaching or oppressive government.
And, regarding Obama supporting a more controlling government than Bush: give me examples. If those examples are "he wants to regulate the health care industry", you're a nut. That's not the government controlling me, that's the government providing me a service. I'm willing do discuss that it might not be the best way to provide it, and even that it might be unconstitutional. But it is not a more controlling government.
Regarding Obama being more deceptive than Bush. Again, give examples. I don't think you have them. I can think of a few examples where Obama put forth mild deceptions to avoid innocent connections that could be made to look ugly by political opponents. I cannot think of examples where he lied about something that got tens of thousands of people killed and wasted *trillions* (multiple of the T-word) of dollars on a war that made the world despise the country.
I hate that the "No karma bonus" flag is persistent now.
You are living in some weird cynical fantasyland. Plug in hybrid cars are expensive because they are new technology. The factories to build them have to be built, we haven't spent enough time figuring out ways to keep individual unit costs down, and R&D costs haven't been amortized over long periods of selling millions of units as with standard ICE.
The first electric cars will be expensive. Probably the only ones that will sell well will be expensive luxury cars, because the people who can afford to spend $38,000 on a plug-in hybrid car that looks like crap & has no features probably prefer to spend $50,000 on a plug-in hybrid car that looks nice and is fun to be in.
Then we'll get better at making individual units cheaply, the manufacturing infrastructure will become more established, and car companies will get more comfortable about how many PIH cars will sell. And then they'll get cheap.
Car companies would gladly sell us cars that never required fuel if they could figure out how to make them at prices people would pay. If 90% of car companies elected not to sell cars that don't use petroleum (or use less petroleum) which everyone could afford simply because the people making decisions have a stake in petroleum sales, the other 10% of car companies would put them out of business.
I should make it more clear that this doesn't make it possible to transmit information faster than light. The instrument on one end can't determine the orientation of the instrument on the other end, but the measurement results are guaranteed to be consistent with the measurement results at the other end. Even though the measurement results are dependent on orientation.
This is most interesting when the filters are orthogonal to one another, because then you're guaranteed that if you see the photon, the other guy doesn't, and vice versa.
This is offtopic, but I thought you might be interested. In fact, some effects which do not carry information appear to travel faster than light. See the EPR (Einstein-Podolski-Rosen) paradox.
I personally believe in the Everett Relative State (aka Many Worlds) interpretation of QM, in which those "paradoxes" don't involve information traveling faster than light. But from a classical point of view, the information about which way a polarized filter is oriented appears to travel faster than light.
(Of course, that's just one of many cases which EPR applies to, but it's the standard one.)
Thanks :-)
I'm happy now, at least the correct information is modded up so people will see it and not just the incorrect info. Overrated mods don't affect karma anyway, I don't think.
Is someone following me around modding my stuff overrated? I wouldn't have minded if they had actually modded the factual parent post to which I referred up, or the incorrect ancestor +5 post down. As it is, they're just hiding the truth.
CrimsonAvenger, modded at 2 (the parent in my MOD PARENT UP comment), has it completely right. Warrax, modded at 5 Informative, has it completely wrong.
"Information can't travel faster than the speed of light" means just what it says. The impossibility of detecting changes outside your light cone is transitive - you can't detect changes outside your light cone, not even in the form of detecting changes to an object inside your light cone caused by an object outside your light cone.
At least, per relativity, you can't. If you can, then relativity is wrong.
He is right: my light cone, per special relativity, is the boundary beyond which things can have *no effect on me whatsoever*. Any effect coming from the other side of the light cone would allow communication back in time from some frames of reference, and all the fucked-up things that come with that.
If information is traversing the light cone, relativity is wrong.
I do have a BS in Physics and strong interest in relativity, but I am not a physicist.
You had a snide answer. Oh, and it's "your understanding", not "you're understanding".
He didn't say anything about little boxes.
By the way, AC, in answer to your question, and to actually illuminate rather than just tell you that you misunderstand:
Most software is written to serve the in-house needs of large-ish corporations. They need to manage their business, and to be competitive their business has to differ from other businesses serving similar needs. So they have large quantities of software to manage their inventory, coordinate their workers, manage their books, determine if payment they've been given is fraudulent, etc. The little details of all of these things are specific to the business rules of any large business.
Often those needs could be fulfilled by some commercial software, if it weren't for the hundred little things that the company needs done differently. If some open software can do basically the same thing as the commercial software, it's in the company's interest to add the features needed to support their business needs. This typically has to be done without exposing their business specific rules (i.e. without making those rules open source), but you can just make the software configurable and put the rules in some configuration file outside the OSS app.
Frankly, the only times I make changes to OSS software for pay are for basic infrastructure software (e.g. apache, ant, etc) when there is a bug or an obvious feature missing. The actual software that fulfills whatever business need is fully proprietary, except for some of the infrastructure.
It's a good thing someone thought of the space fountain, then.
If you're concerned about the relationship between the experience of a president and how history sees him, plug what Obama's numbers will be at the time he's sworn in into this convenient chart: http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2008/Info/experience.html
Those numbers would be about 3 years in the US Senate and 6 years in the state Senate. In particular, pay attention to Abraham Lincoln's numbers on that chart.
By the way, look at the details of your straight shooter's plan to fix the market crash. Oh, wait, there isn't one, unless you count his longstanding position of not regulating the market.
Well, then, let's look at the details of his plan to provide tax relief. Oh, wait, it provides about half as much relief to the middle class worker as Obama's plan. And, by the way, trickle-down economics clearly don't work.
OK, let's look at his plan to solve America's energy problems. Every expert I've heard on the topic says offshore drilling will have insignificant effects on the price of oil. Of course, I'm sure it will be great for American oil companies...
Agreed.
Although the time in between is liable to be somewhat scary. When data is available on lots of people (but not all) and we're not used to accepting the fact that everyone knows if you pick your nose in public, or forget to close the blinds before you change clothes, there's liable to be a lot of unnecessary shame and heartache.
By 2018 or so everyone will be filming the vicinity of their car and/or home at all times anyway. (How better to provide evidence that an accident isn't your fault, or see who broke into your car, etc.) Once quality vidcams and computing power drop to almost $0, and cheap or free software makes it trivial to set up, why not?
Once that data is processed and correlated, everyone, including people who don't have the system, will be tracked everywhere and the information will be available to anyone. Even if only 1% of the cars on the road did this, in a metropolitan area everyone would essentially be tracked everywhere.
We're going to have to redefine our notions of privacy once everything that is detectable from a public space is recorded and distributed.
Of course, that's not quite the same thing as the government recording and correlating the data recorded in the public space and putting it in private databases.