Always tripple all estimates. That way you always look like a miracle worker.
Then any manager who is worth their pay will calculate the ROI, discover that there isn't any, and then cancel the project before spending a dollar. If you do that with every project you're competent to work on, they'll figure out you don't have any ROI either, and cancel you too.
I'm sure that will be really convenient for people in retirement... or people who hit on hard times...
You shouldn't store money in stocks unless you don't need it anytime soon. Also, you could take out a short-term loan using your stocks as collateral.
or people who have stock in companies that are suddenly shown to have acted immorally.
They can sell it just as they can right now - they just have to wait 1-30 days for the trade to execute. This actually helps the little guy, because they can issue the sell order that night when they get the news and get treated the same as the guy who has his HFT software following the AP twitter feed.
However, simply executing trades monthly would not be sufficient. You'd need to randomize the time that trades are executed and have them run without warning. So, at noon GMT+5 on the 15th of the month plus or minus a fudge factor with a standard deviation of n hours everything in the book executes. If you don't have your order in the book, you wait another month. If the time is known, then what will happen is the book will be empty until about 3 microseconds before the trades all execute, and then the book will have 35 billion entries in it. It would eliminate day-trading, but not the advantage of institutional investors.
If Strong AI comes to pass as predicted, we're going to see a re-alignment of these values in just a few decades as humans won't be required to be all-purpose cogs in the machines.
Correction - if strong AI comes to pass humans won't be ABLE to be all-purpose cogs in the machines. Who would hire a human to do a job that a robot could do? Humans would serve no productive purpose whatsoever. This is only a problem if your morals define the worth of people in terms of their productivity.
What you're talking about doesn't happen unless a government fails in its obligations and organized crime and/or political corruption takes over. Goon squads, by their nature, are organized crime. It doesn't even take a high school education to know that.
Ok, how about this picture instead, which is even worse:
And if this equilibrium is the masses living in miserable slums, with a tiny super-wealthy elite living on their own legally-owned property patrolled by their fully-paid-for above-minimum-wage security guards, like the "economic equilibrium" produced in many third-world countries with extreme wealth disparities?
I doubt that the elite would bother to provide police services to the slums - they'll just put walls around their property and keep the riff-raf out. Oh, and their property might amount to 90% of the land mass of the nation they're living in. But, they'll have deeds for all of it.
I doubt that those numbers account for how many hours are worked, either. I suspect that the number of hours worked per household is higher today than in 1975. I'd also question whether the buying power of those dollars is truly equivalent - inflation rates haven't really kept pace with inflation in the last decade from my observations.
You already receive the benefits of mechanization. How much do you think the carpet in your house would cost per square foot if it were handmade?
You receive SOME of the benefits of mechanization, and only if you have a job so that you can afford a carpet in the first place. The company wouldn't buy the machine in the first place if it didn't increase their profits, so the company also gets some of the benefits of mechanization. In practice it works out far better for the owners of capital than those who work for a living.
If the rule is 99.99%, then they don't need to spend any more. More viruses in, more viruses out.
I would hope they'd do a lot better than 99.99% though - these are asexually-reproducing organisms, not chemicals. It only takes one to cause a problem. (Yes, I realize that viruses don't reproduce on their own. No, it won't help you if you happen to swallow the glass of water with a single viable virus in it and it manages to attach to one of your cells.)
For all the time you spend messing with Linux setups and devices, a $100 Roku 3 will last you a decade and save you time and shelf space.
Uh, I don't think it will work sitting on my lap in my car, like my Nexus 10 will.
And unless I mess with a bunch of converters/etc it won't let me watch TV on my monitor on my desk while browsing the web at the same time on that monitor.
About the only thing the Roku will help with is plugging it into your living room TV. However, I'm sure it lacks half of the MythTV feature set, which makes it yet another box. I'd likely buy a Blu-ray player with Amazon support before I go that route...
Yeah - that thing would have just about anybody puking and screaming for their mothers from the look of it. Sure, it might be safe in theory, but so is the vomit comet.
In other words: what is this Director trying to pull ? Something like, when he looses the case, claiming that he as a person has no money to pay whatever punishment the court deems to impose on him ?
Well, if he doesn't live in the EU then the defendant can demand security of costs. That means the plaintiff has to put funds for her defense into escrow in the EU before the court will hear the case. If he loses, that money is forfeit. If he does live in the EU, then not paying any awards issued by the court will not turn out well for him.
English libel law is a bit over the top, but for the most part the legal system is far better at deterring SLAPP suits and such than the US is.
That is definitely an issue. Israel only has two international airports, and spends quite a bit of money on security in general, with every citizen serving in the military.
That makes the entire society far more security conscious, and military training means that people know how to follow procedures and generally stay alert. The fact that everybody serves in the military also means that the guards are diverse and not just those who couldn't find a job or get a scholarship.
The result is that a security program that works in Israel will not necessarily work in the US, and certainly not with bottom-dollar security guards.
Also, Israel has a lot of defense in depth. Maybe the airport security isn't as tight, but they have far more border security at drive-in points, and even checkpoints at places like malls. All of this makes it a lot harder to get weapons to the airport in the first place. There is also a much higher state of vigilance - when bombs have been planted on buses in the past they've generally been noticed resulting in immediate evacuation before they go off.
Oh, and the last I heard El Al depressurizes every bag before putting it on a plane to set off altimeter-triggered bombs. So, some of the security is behind the scenes.
I wasn't talking about upgrades in the sense of replacing components, but outright replacement. My point was just that PCs have a lot more longevity.
A PC from 2002 is still pretty usable today, and can run XP with full security updates. I suspect it would run Win7 reasonably well, though it would be getting a bit outdated. However, we're talking about something 11 years old.
Contrast that with a 4-year-old Android phone or even iPhone. An iPhone from that era stopped getting security updates about a year ago most likely, and an Android phone from that time stopped getting updates several years ago, assuming it ever got them.
Unless you really check facebook from your lap on the sofa, the PC still offers a LOT of value - you can spend $300 and make it last a decade - not $400 every other year.
Stop and think about how Dell managed to do so well in business. They sold PCs that were desirable to the average consumer - they sold them by the trainload.
There is no way that some kind of FOSS community is going to be successful with that kind of model. The kickstarter would never end - any time you wanted a newer model you'd have to get the community to kick in to buy the parts to make 10 million of them so that each of the 2000 investors can get their 2 units and throw the rest in the landfill.
If you want FOSS hardware you need to find ways to make it work on a small scale.
I'm wondering if that will balance out though once everybody's first tablet becomes obsolete.
Right now you can buy a PC and get 5-10 years out of it if you don't play games and such. Tablets are largely designed to be obsolete in 2-3 years, and they aren't cheap (the cheap ones are practically obsolete while still on the shelves).
Honestly, I'm not sure if that is going to matter to the average consumer or not. However, when people decide to not upgrade their PC and get a tablet, and find that in 3 years they're still using that non-upgraded PC but the tablet doesn't run the stuff they need to run, they might think twice about upgrading the tablet.
They once had an appealing brand, which gave them an advantage over all the other people who were selling an indistinguishable product.
The reason Dell became big was because of really good just-in-time manufacturing control.
The biggest selling point for computers back when Dell became big was the CPU and its clock speed. It was also the fastest-depreciating component of the computer. In order to get good prices you needed to buy them in bulk, but if you stockpiled them and then took six months to sell them you'd be wiped out by the depreciation (you pay $1000 for a CPU that is worth $300 in six months).
Dell did build-to-order, mail-order, and just-in-time extremely well.
Build-to-order means that you don't end up with 47 models where you end up with 10 that don't sell well and have to be sold at firesale prices. It means that each customer gets exactly the computer they want, at the lowest price possible for that computer (well, assuming they want to buy a copy of Windows and MS Works). Their very-friendly website meant that people didn't have to walk down rows of PCs at the local retailer and try to compare the 47 different models their competitors were selling.
Mail-order means that they had little warehousing/distribution, which means less PCs stuck depreciating in the pipeline between consumers and the manufacturing plant. If they didn't sell as many model 3 video cards they just didn't order that many - they didn't have 30,000 PCs with those cards sitting in stores all over the country depreciating.
Just-in-time means that the part comes in from Intel/etc the day before it gets mailed out as part of a PC, or close to it. Again, inventory is rapidly depreciating, so you don't want to sit on anything. They were able to react to changes in the market - they didn't have a stake in one model or another selling better - they could just go where the customers were. If they offered a particular model and nobody bought it they didn't lose much, because they didn't build it until somebody ordered it.
Things like this are what made Dell big. Everybody else figured out what they were doing, and the MHz war wound down making the CPU less critical and slowing down depreciation.
Note - I'm not particularly close to the PC hardware market, so if there were other factors I'm all ears.
Precisely. Sounds like they need to go back and review their methodology. And probably put off the assessment until later on.
The issue here is that no matter where you draw the line, and how you draw the line, there are thousands of determinations that would change if you moved the line even the tiniest bit in either direction.
They were calculating to the month, and not to the day. Now they're calculating to the day, and not to the hour - I bet that affects quite a few determinations. Then we draw the line at 97%, and not 98%, or 96%, or 97.1%.
The label "gifted" in many states really just means "individualized" - some part of the whole is treated as exceptional, and thus they get instruction tailored to their actual performance and not just their physical age. For what we spend on education I don't really understand why this couldn't be extended to everybody. When you're testing for IQ/etc all you're really trying to do is test somebody in a way that can measure performance across a very wide range. If you just performed that testing at regular intervals for everybody, combined with testing on mastery of the material being taught in class (what we traditionally test), then you could get a sense for whether the student should be placed higher or lower than they are, and their class assignments can be adjusted accordingly.
When I was in Elementary school I had fairly mediocre performance, and before I was identified as gifted I had a lot of attention/discipline issues in class. Even identified as gifted the reality was that little was done to actually accelerate classwork for gifted students - they just got some special instruction once a week but stayed in regular classes. It wasn't until middle school and especially high school when classes were tracked to varying performance levels (especially in high school where the more college-like schedule meant that you could mix/match across grade levels and subjects). Once I hit those grades my performance was exceptional in areas.
If a kid is really gifted at some subject then even in 2nd-3rd grade they should be allowed to advance accordingly. If they've mastered 4th grade math when they're in 2nd grade, then they should be taking 5th grade math, and then 2nd grade english or whatever. If they're behind in math then they should be taking 2nd grade math when they're in 5th grade. The way we deliver instruction needs to be more flexible. This isn't about leaving children behind - it is about not tossing them into classes where they won't learn anything anyway, so that in the time they are in school they learn as much as possible and don't simply graduate with a meaningless diploma.
This is e-ink, that's the whole point. I believe e-ink is generally B&W and definitely has slow response time, which is why vendors haven't been investing as much in it. If you want a 7" HD color display, just get a Nexus 7.
The point of e-ink is that it is particularly well-suited to reading books. The refresh is no big deal since you only flip a page every 10 seconds or so (or less), and the fact that you can just plug it in about once a month to recharge makes it very much like a paper book. The displays are passive and rely on the fact that the e-ink has contrasting reflectivity when on vs off which means that it works just as well under a 60W or 375YW light source. The passive display also reduces contrast vs ambient lighting, which makes it much less annoying to stare at for hours at a time.
Bottom line is that if you like to read, chances are that you're doing it on an e-ink reader today. If you don't like to read, chances are you don't grok them. Just about anybody I've talked to who is a heavy reader has opted for the e-ink displays. I own one, and I don't even consider myself a heavy reader (I prefer unabridged audiobooks).
Makes sense. Plus, far more effective at the close ranges involved in home defense, shot loses effectiveness quickly and doesn't penetrate walls if you use the right shot. Aimed at a doorway or down a hallway it would basically take out anybody in the general direction, which gets rid of the need to aim (but NOT the need to identify your target - which is the key problem with defending yourself against a nutjob who doesn't have the same constraints).
Things like assault rifles really only make sense for hunting at range.
I know they make pistols with biometric locks on them. What I don't get is why they don't make shotguns equipped in the same way. A shotgun makes a lot more sense from a self-defense standpoint, and a biometric lock helps mitigate the stolen weapon problem (at least if the thief is in a hurry).
If this guy were running around in my backyard I wouldn't mind having a weapon for self-defense. I'd certainly be content to lock the doors and leave the apprehending to the professionals, but if the guy decides to break a window to take shelter in my home I'd prefer to not have to rely on the hostage negotiators. Sure, I might get surprised and then I would just have to surrender and hope for the best, but if I could take shelter in a defensible area and call the police a shotgun trained on the door would make me feel a whole lot better.
That said, rare situations like this are really the only ones where I'd really want to have a gun, and the reality is that this guy isn't going to be moving around the city freely as long as the police are out in force. I wouldn't want to rely on a gun except when I'm alert and awake and have some warning. While my emotions say that having a gun nearby when I hear bumps in the night might be comforting, I'm not sure I'd trust myself to apply good judgment in such a situation. Also, a gun is a liability in the present legal climate, where any use of a weapon even in your own home for defense is second-guessed. The odds are that the gun will cause you more trouble than it saves you.
One thing I will say about having a gun is that you shouldn't own one unless you're fully prepared to kill somebody with it. If you aren't then at best it is a waste of money, and at worst it will cause you a lot more harm than good.
Do you think a company that hires so many PhDs hasn't thought through the implications of their decisions?
I guess I missed the common sense class that apparently everybody else had to take when I was in grad school. A PhD does not guarantee that somebody thinks through the consequences of their decisions. In fact, most PhD research requires incredibly myopic thinking.
"Entitled to", how? What did you do to deserve this free service, and expectation to get more free service in the way of a written response?...Yes, I understand it's your local law, and they're free to not do business there. But, how would you handle a company that doesn't have a presence?
They certainly collect money from local advertisers even if they don't charge users for the service. That gives them quite a few ties to the community, and they're conducting business within Germany's jurisdiction.
As others have pointed out Google even has offices and data centers there, but I think that should be beside the point. If this were a US-centric operation that happens to let some people elsewhere use it for free I could see your point. However, when you start collecting revenue from within a jurisdiction you should certainly obey their laws.
I haven't seen the local laws, but I doubt they dictate the method of communication to be used. I think what they would take issue with is not providing any way to submit questions at all. The only thing Google provides is forums to post questions on, with no commitment that they will get a response, and no way to submit questions in privacy. That is something that probably would not be deemed sufficient if there were a law requiring some level of responsiveness to questions..
Yup, if it were up to me phone service and phone devices would be separate markets. As long as the phone was standards-compliant they should have to provide service. Phones and service sold at the same store would need to be separately advertised, and either would be purchasable in any quality without buying the other (so if they offer a $1 phone deal, then you can show up and buy 200 x $1 phones without buying anything else - that ensures the prices reflect actual costs for each component).
Oh, I agree. However, it seems like MS really wants to be a different company than what it is. They're the modern equivalent of the mainframe - stable ABIs are what it is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
Always tripple all estimates. That way you always look like a miracle worker.
Then any manager who is worth their pay will calculate the ROI, discover that there isn't any, and then cancel the project before spending a dollar. If you do that with every project you're competent to work on, they'll figure out you don't have any ROI either, and cancel you too.
I'm sure that will be really convenient for people in retirement... or people who hit on hard times...
You shouldn't store money in stocks unless you don't need it anytime soon. Also, you could take out a short-term loan using your stocks as collateral.
or people who have stock in companies that are suddenly shown to have acted immorally.
They can sell it just as they can right now - they just have to wait 1-30 days for the trade to execute. This actually helps the little guy, because they can issue the sell order that night when they get the news and get treated the same as the guy who has his HFT software following the AP twitter feed.
However, simply executing trades monthly would not be sufficient. You'd need to randomize the time that trades are executed and have them run without warning. So, at noon GMT+5 on the 15th of the month plus or minus a fudge factor with a standard deviation of n hours everything in the book executes. If you don't have your order in the book, you wait another month. If the time is known, then what will happen is the book will be empty until about 3 microseconds before the trades all execute, and then the book will have 35 billion entries in it. It would eliminate day-trading, but not the advantage of institutional investors.
If Strong AI comes to pass as predicted, we're going to see a re-alignment of these values in just a few decades as humans won't be required to be all-purpose cogs in the machines.
Correction - if strong AI comes to pass humans won't be ABLE to be all-purpose cogs in the machines. Who would hire a human to do a job that a robot could do? Humans would serve no productive purpose whatsoever. This is only a problem if your morals define the worth of people in terms of their productivity.
What you're talking about doesn't happen unless a government fails in its obligations and organized crime and/or political corruption takes over. Goon squads, by their nature, are organized crime. It doesn't even take a high school education to know that.
Ok, how about this picture instead, which is even worse:
And if this equilibrium is the masses living in miserable slums, with a tiny super-wealthy elite living on their own legally-owned property patrolled by their fully-paid-for above-minimum-wage security guards, like the "economic equilibrium" produced in many third-world countries with extreme wealth disparities?
I doubt that the elite would bother to provide police services to the slums - they'll just put walls around their property and keep the riff-raf out. Oh, and their property might amount to 90% of the land mass of the nation they're living in. But, they'll have deeds for all of it.
I doubt that those numbers account for how many hours are worked, either. I suspect that the number of hours worked per household is higher today than in 1975. I'd also question whether the buying power of those dollars is truly equivalent - inflation rates haven't really kept pace with inflation in the last decade from my observations.
You already receive the benefits of mechanization. How much do you think the carpet in your house would cost per square foot if it were handmade?
You receive SOME of the benefits of mechanization, and only if you have a job so that you can afford a carpet in the first place. The company wouldn't buy the machine in the first place if it didn't increase their profits, so the company also gets some of the benefits of mechanization. In practice it works out far better for the owners of capital than those who work for a living.
If the rule is 99.99%, then they don't need to spend any more. More viruses in, more viruses out.
I would hope they'd do a lot better than 99.99% though - these are asexually-reproducing organisms, not chemicals. It only takes one to cause a problem. (Yes, I realize that viruses don't reproduce on their own. No, it won't help you if you happen to swallow the glass of water with a single viable virus in it and it manages to attach to one of your cells.)
For all the time you spend messing with Linux setups and devices, a $100 Roku 3 will last you a decade and save you time and shelf space.
Uh, I don't think it will work sitting on my lap in my car, like my Nexus 10 will.
And unless I mess with a bunch of converters/etc it won't let me watch TV on my monitor on my desk while browsing the web at the same time on that monitor.
About the only thing the Roku will help with is plugging it into your living room TV. However, I'm sure it lacks half of the MythTV feature set, which makes it yet another box. I'd likely buy a Blu-ray player with Amazon support before I go that route...
Yeah - that thing would have just about anybody puking and screaming for their mothers from the look of it. Sure, it might be safe in theory, but so is the vomit comet.
Have you seen this or this? Those are actually fairly well-defined at least, but they read like something that was supposed to be punched into cards.
In other words: what is this Director trying to pull ? Something like, when he looses the case, claiming that he as a person has no money to pay whatever punishment the court deems to impose on him ?
Well, if he doesn't live in the EU then the defendant can demand security of costs. That means the plaintiff has to put funds for her defense into escrow in the EU before the court will hear the case. If he loses, that money is forfeit. If he does live in the EU, then not paying any awards issued by the court will not turn out well for him.
English libel law is a bit over the top, but for the most part the legal system is far better at deterring SLAPP suits and such than the US is.
That is definitely an issue. Israel only has two international airports, and spends quite a bit of money on security in general, with every citizen serving in the military.
That makes the entire society far more security conscious, and military training means that people know how to follow procedures and generally stay alert. The fact that everybody serves in the military also means that the guards are diverse and not just those who couldn't find a job or get a scholarship.
The result is that a security program that works in Israel will not necessarily work in the US, and certainly not with bottom-dollar security guards.
Also, Israel has a lot of defense in depth. Maybe the airport security isn't as tight, but they have far more border security at drive-in points, and even checkpoints at places like malls. All of this makes it a lot harder to get weapons to the airport in the first place. There is also a much higher state of vigilance - when bombs have been planted on buses in the past they've generally been noticed resulting in immediate evacuation before they go off.
Oh, and the last I heard El Al depressurizes every bag before putting it on a plane to set off altimeter-triggered bombs. So, some of the security is behind the scenes.
I wasn't talking about upgrades in the sense of replacing components, but outright replacement. My point was just that PCs have a lot more longevity.
A PC from 2002 is still pretty usable today, and can run XP with full security updates. I suspect it would run Win7 reasonably well, though it would be getting a bit outdated. However, we're talking about something 11 years old.
Contrast that with a 4-year-old Android phone or even iPhone. An iPhone from that era stopped getting security updates about a year ago most likely, and an Android phone from that time stopped getting updates several years ago, assuming it ever got them.
Unless you really check facebook from your lap on the sofa, the PC still offers a LOT of value - you can spend $300 and make it last a decade - not $400 every other year.
Stop and think about how Dell managed to do so well in business. They sold PCs that were desirable to the average consumer - they sold them by the trainload.
There is no way that some kind of FOSS community is going to be successful with that kind of model. The kickstarter would never end - any time you wanted a newer model you'd have to get the community to kick in to buy the parts to make 10 million of them so that each of the 2000 investors can get their 2 units and throw the rest in the landfill.
If you want FOSS hardware you need to find ways to make it work on a small scale.
I'm wondering if that will balance out though once everybody's first tablet becomes obsolete.
Right now you can buy a PC and get 5-10 years out of it if you don't play games and such. Tablets are largely designed to be obsolete in 2-3 years, and they aren't cheap (the cheap ones are practically obsolete while still on the shelves).
Honestly, I'm not sure if that is going to matter to the average consumer or not. However, when people decide to not upgrade their PC and get a tablet, and find that in 3 years they're still using that non-upgraded PC but the tablet doesn't run the stuff they need to run, they might think twice about upgrading the tablet.
They once had an appealing brand, which gave them an advantage over all the other people who were selling an indistinguishable product.
The reason Dell became big was because of really good just-in-time manufacturing control.
The biggest selling point for computers back when Dell became big was the CPU and its clock speed. It was also the fastest-depreciating component of the computer. In order to get good prices you needed to buy them in bulk, but if you stockpiled them and then took six months to sell them you'd be wiped out by the depreciation (you pay $1000 for a CPU that is worth $300 in six months).
Dell did build-to-order, mail-order, and just-in-time extremely well.
Build-to-order means that you don't end up with 47 models where you end up with 10 that don't sell well and have to be sold at firesale prices. It means that each customer gets exactly the computer they want, at the lowest price possible for that computer (well, assuming they want to buy a copy of Windows and MS Works). Their very-friendly website meant that people didn't have to walk down rows of PCs at the local retailer and try to compare the 47 different models their competitors were selling.
Mail-order means that they had little warehousing/distribution, which means less PCs stuck depreciating in the pipeline between consumers and the manufacturing plant. If they didn't sell as many model 3 video cards they just didn't order that many - they didn't have 30,000 PCs with those cards sitting in stores all over the country depreciating.
Just-in-time means that the part comes in from Intel/etc the day before it gets mailed out as part of a PC, or close to it. Again, inventory is rapidly depreciating, so you don't want to sit on anything. They were able to react to changes in the market - they didn't have a stake in one model or another selling better - they could just go where the customers were. If they offered a particular model and nobody bought it they didn't lose much, because they didn't build it until somebody ordered it.
Things like this are what made Dell big. Everybody else figured out what they were doing, and the MHz war wound down making the CPU less critical and slowing down depreciation.
Note - I'm not particularly close to the PC hardware market, so if there were other factors I'm all ears.
Precisely. Sounds like they need to go back and review their methodology. And probably put off the assessment until later on.
The issue here is that no matter where you draw the line, and how you draw the line, there are thousands of determinations that would change if you moved the line even the tiniest bit in either direction.
They were calculating to the month, and not to the day. Now they're calculating to the day, and not to the hour - I bet that affects quite a few determinations. Then we draw the line at 97%, and not 98%, or 96%, or 97.1%.
The label "gifted" in many states really just means "individualized" - some part of the whole is treated as exceptional, and thus they get instruction tailored to their actual performance and not just their physical age. For what we spend on education I don't really understand why this couldn't be extended to everybody. When you're testing for IQ/etc all you're really trying to do is test somebody in a way that can measure performance across a very wide range. If you just performed that testing at regular intervals for everybody, combined with testing on mastery of the material being taught in class (what we traditionally test), then you could get a sense for whether the student should be placed higher or lower than they are, and their class assignments can be adjusted accordingly.
When I was in Elementary school I had fairly mediocre performance, and before I was identified as gifted I had a lot of attention/discipline issues in class. Even identified as gifted the reality was that little was done to actually accelerate classwork for gifted students - they just got some special instruction once a week but stayed in regular classes. It wasn't until middle school and especially high school when classes were tracked to varying performance levels (especially in high school where the more college-like schedule meant that you could mix/match across grade levels and subjects). Once I hit those grades my performance was exceptional in areas.
If a kid is really gifted at some subject then even in 2nd-3rd grade they should be allowed to advance accordingly. If they've mastered 4th grade math when they're in 2nd grade, then they should be taking 5th grade math, and then 2nd grade english or whatever. If they're behind in math then they should be taking 2nd grade math when they're in 5th grade. The way we deliver instruction needs to be more flexible. This isn't about leaving children behind - it is about not tossing them into classes where they won't learn anything anyway, so that in the time they are in school they learn as much as possible and don't simply graduate with a meaningless diploma.
This is e-ink, that's the whole point. I believe e-ink is generally B&W and definitely has slow response time, which is why vendors haven't been investing as much in it. If you want a 7" HD color display, just get a Nexus 7.
The point of e-ink is that it is particularly well-suited to reading books. The refresh is no big deal since you only flip a page every 10 seconds or so (or less), and the fact that you can just plug it in about once a month to recharge makes it very much like a paper book. The displays are passive and rely on the fact that the e-ink has contrasting reflectivity when on vs off which means that it works just as well under a 60W or 375YW light source. The passive display also reduces contrast vs ambient lighting, which makes it much less annoying to stare at for hours at a time.
Bottom line is that if you like to read, chances are that you're doing it on an e-ink reader today. If you don't like to read, chances are you don't grok them. Just about anybody I've talked to who is a heavy reader has opted for the e-ink displays. I own one, and I don't even consider myself a heavy reader (I prefer unabridged audiobooks).
Makes sense. Plus, far more effective at the close ranges involved in home defense, shot loses effectiveness quickly and doesn't penetrate walls if you use the right shot. Aimed at a doorway or down a hallway it would basically take out anybody in the general direction, which gets rid of the need to aim (but NOT the need to identify your target - which is the key problem with defending yourself against a nutjob who doesn't have the same constraints).
Things like assault rifles really only make sense for hunting at range.
I know they make pistols with biometric locks on them. What I don't get is why they don't make shotguns equipped in the same way. A shotgun makes a lot more sense from a self-defense standpoint, and a biometric lock helps mitigate the stolen weapon problem (at least if the thief is in a hurry).
If this guy were running around in my backyard I wouldn't mind having a weapon for self-defense. I'd certainly be content to lock the doors and leave the apprehending to the professionals, but if the guy decides to break a window to take shelter in my home I'd prefer to not have to rely on the hostage negotiators. Sure, I might get surprised and then I would just have to surrender and hope for the best, but if I could take shelter in a defensible area and call the police a shotgun trained on the door would make me feel a whole lot better.
That said, rare situations like this are really the only ones where I'd really want to have a gun, and the reality is that this guy isn't going to be moving around the city freely as long as the police are out in force. I wouldn't want to rely on a gun except when I'm alert and awake and have some warning. While my emotions say that having a gun nearby when I hear bumps in the night might be comforting, I'm not sure I'd trust myself to apply good judgment in such a situation. Also, a gun is a liability in the present legal climate, where any use of a weapon even in your own home for defense is second-guessed. The odds are that the gun will cause you more trouble than it saves you.
One thing I will say about having a gun is that you shouldn't own one unless you're fully prepared to kill somebody with it. If you aren't then at best it is a waste of money, and at worst it will cause you a lot more harm than good.
Do you think a company that hires so many PhDs hasn't thought through the implications of their decisions?
I guess I missed the common sense class that apparently everybody else had to take when I was in grad school. A PhD does not guarantee that somebody thinks through the consequences of their decisions. In fact, most PhD research requires incredibly myopic thinking.
"Entitled to", how? What did you do to deserve this free service, and expectation to get more free service in the way of a written response?...Yes, I understand it's your local law, and they're free to not do business there. But, how would you handle a company that doesn't have a presence?
They certainly collect money from local advertisers even if they don't charge users for the service. That gives them quite a few ties to the community, and they're conducting business within Germany's jurisdiction.
As others have pointed out Google even has offices and data centers there, but I think that should be beside the point. If this were a US-centric operation that happens to let some people elsewhere use it for free I could see your point. However, when you start collecting revenue from within a jurisdiction you should certainly obey their laws.
I haven't seen the local laws, but I doubt they dictate the method of communication to be used. I think what they would take issue with is not providing any way to submit questions at all. The only thing Google provides is forums to post questions on, with no commitment that they will get a response, and no way to submit questions in privacy. That is something that probably would not be deemed sufficient if there were a law requiring some level of responsiveness to questions..
Yup, if it were up to me phone service and phone devices would be separate markets. As long as the phone was standards-compliant they should have to provide service. Phones and service sold at the same store would need to be separately advertised, and either would be purchasable in any quality without buying the other (so if they offer a $1 phone deal, then you can show up and buy 200 x $1 phones without buying anything else - that ensures the prices reflect actual costs for each component).
Oh, I agree. However, it seems like MS really wants to be a different company than what it is. They're the modern equivalent of the mainframe - stable ABIs are what it is all about.