I'm quite sure you meant:
std::cout << "output" << endl;
You seriously think that's easier to explain than System.out.println("output"); ? The C++ version is concealing even more hairy details than the Java version, while using even more symbols that can't be fully explained until later!
If you think Java shouldn't be the intro language, that's fine (I think there's a case to be made for it, but I have mixed feelings). But C++ is definitely worse.
I'd say in the modern era he's part of the problem, i.e. CS programs producing students who know loads and loads of theory and can't write a damn line of actual code.
I'm curious where you are finding these students. In my experience, it is much more common to find people who think they know loads of theory, but can't write a line of code. In reality, these people usually can't write a line of proof either.
The best theoreticians aren't always the best coders, but they're usually able to code pretty well when they want to. I've much more frequently seen people who were great coders but couldn't handle more abstract algorithmic questions than vice versa. And I certainly think it's hard to say that great CS theorists who can't code is "the problem" in CS education right now...
It's the equivalent of a biology class detailing the possibilities of life, by examining chemical interactions, without actually examining any actual living organisms.
Eh? No, it's the equivalent of studying the simplest possible living organisms to prepare for the later work of understanding more complex ones. It's still the same subject matter, but it lets you focus on the most important concepts before getting caught up in the specific details that vary from case to case.
Teaching on a fake OS lets you write your own kernel while bypassing the tedium of bootstrapping and such. Teaching fake assembly lets you write your own compiler while avoiding some of the irrelevant gotchas or (initially) unneeded sophistication of real machine code. I've done both of these things, and my understanding of kernels and compilers is much better for it. The same result would not be possible if you gave students 6 weeks to write a real kernel from scratch that ran on real x86 system...
Yes, it's not like they taught such new-fangled subjects as MATH or HISTORY back then...
The way in which we teach is drastically different today, but the core subjects are not.
Just "HISTORY"? It must have been a survey course....
Seriously, what do you imagine is the "core subject" of "history" such that two people who studied "history" 60 years apart should perform similarly on identical exams? My wife is a PhD student in history, but would probably have trouble answering simple questions about people or periods she's never studied, even if she could give some broader context.
Or the "core subject" of "math"? I'm a PhD student in theoretical computer science, and do a lot of "math", but you could easily trip me up by asking for computations in areas I don't study (like, I suspect, some of the integrals that might appear on a 1950s chemistry exam)...
GP is right. Subjects change (you can claim "the same facts are still true", but the same facts are not still studied on the same timeline today, nor should they be). As another comment said, what we should really be concerned about isn't performance on some arbitrary historical standardized exam, but on how well education is preparing students. In many cases the answer is probably "not that well," and that's what we should be worrying about. If students are performing well after highschool and college, then who cares about a standardized exam from generations ago? Since when did we start thinking that doing well on specific tests is really an objective measure of a quality education?
I'm now thankful I didn't waste more time, given that there are corporate entries such as ATT to compete against (with all their resources and database staff to assist in the contest).
The ATT people are an extreme case, but even so there are multiple amateurs within close range of them -- as of a few days ago, at least one amateur team (PragmaticTheory) was beating them.
But part of what I was getting at is that it doesn't matter how farfetched it is, SVD has no preconceptions (or at least, only the minimum needed for accuracy), it just finds the correlations themselves. If a correlation isn't detectable in the data, then it doesn't matter how plausible or farfetched something is, it won't be useful. If it is detectable in the data, then again, farfetched or not doesn't matter. Time is better spent modeling different ways for functions to correlate and then applying SVD to that than it is in coming up with as many hard-coded correlations as possible...
I have not looked into it but can you be certain that the top teams are not using additional metadata on the movies?
Pretty sure. IAITTT = I Am In The Top Ten;)
The winning progress prize entry from 2007 had to publish the full details of their algorithm, and they don't use anything. I don't use anything. PragmaticTheory even wrote a blog post about how they don't use anything. Others have said the same thing. It's impossible to say that no one will ever come up with a useful way to use metadata, but so far the "metadata" produced by the algorithms themselves is far more accurate than that generated by human observers on the same data.
It may wind up being something not intuitive (like release month/year, production company, gap score of economic state during release year vs current, or something like that)
Well, that's beyond just counterintuitive to actually demonstrably unhelpful -- it seems a priori unlikely that someone's rating would depend on the production company, for example, but even if it was, that would be much more easily detected by the actual movie average (i.e. if a particular production company gets good ratings, then we will know that just because the movie has a lot of good ratings, and the company becomes superfluous). On the other hand, if you're suggesting that specific people have varying opinions of particular companies, well that again seems odd, but again it's irrelevant -- if such a correlation exists, SVD will find it, and so some of the dimensions of user-movie vectors will correlate to production company.
Similar with the other properties you mention: since SVD is already finding *all* of the (linear) correlations in the data, it's not very helpful to try to come up with a huge list of farfetched ones yourself hoping one of them will work out...
You recall incorrectly. None of the top teams currently use external data sources (some have tried, but it doesn't help that much once you get up towards the top 10). The last team that (probably, not official yet) won a milestone used the combined predictions of the first and second place teams, interpolated to improve the final score, but nothing external. Same thing in the previous year, the winning team used only computations on the data given.
The "OMFG BOOBS! Let's go talk to them" effect creates a really hostile environment, which causes many of us to change majors/jobs...
Ugh. I can't believe how many responses you're getting to this that are basically "You moron, don't you know that not every time a guy talks to you is not about your boobs?"
To those responses, which are too numerous to deal with one by one: Of course she realizes this. Are you really so confident that you know the life experience of a female in a tech field that you're prepared to discount every single one of these interactions, because she obviously misread all of them? You're making this absurd leap from "Maybe some of the time you misread the situation" to "therefore this is not a legitimate point and there is no social issue at all."
Is it really so hard to believe that there are enough actual negative interactions to make a school or workplace unpleasant? You really think every single one of them was just her overreacting?
Given the general tenor of the 800-and-growing comments, maybe this is spitting into the wind, but geez, you want to see the hostile environment that makes a lot of female CS people uncomfortable? Just find a slashdot post about women in CS, and read the resulting comments...
Not irony. Doing something even though it may or may not benefit you is called having ideals and principles. You should try it sometime. Now go on continuing to vote for the person who will line your trough.
GP's whole point was that Republicans say they object to this, but then they elect people who bring them a disproportionate amount of federal "pork" spending. Which means, by implication, that the Democrats are electing people who bring them proportionately less of that funding, that is, people who are less likely to "line their trough", at least in the sense of federal grants.
Now, if Republicans whined about income redistribution, and they elected officials who refused to redistribute income to their constituents, that would be an instance of these "ideals and principles" you speak of. So far, there's no sign of this happening, because they instead elect officials who promise to stop redistributing income to other people, while conveniently overlooking their own.
Or, to make a more specific point along the same lines -- towards the end of the campaign, McCain went for several weeks at a time without speaking to any national press at all. Remember the "no-talk express" crack? That wasn't because the reporters were by nature anti-McCain, although some of them may have been, but when both the presidential and vice-presidential candidates are being completely hidden from the media, it's hardly an instance of media bias when they receive less coverage.
While I wouldn't call it slavery, I think it should be pointed out that studying English, math, etc. benefits only the student.
You realize, don't you, that students are being taught English, math, etc., so that when they finish school they can go out and use those skills? Outside of school, and even -- though only inadvertently, I'm sure! -- in a way that benefits someone besides themself?
People who lack the basic intelligence and wherewithal to make sure that their information matches aren't likely to be good voters
Screw you. When I registered to vote in my current state, the person who copied my name off the form left an 'r' out of my last name. I've tried to correct this through two primary and election cycles now, and I believe they still have it wrong. I've still been able to vote, because the name is almost the same and I can show them that I correctly received my polling information under the not-quite-right name. But according to you I lack the basic intelligence to vote?
Citizens get to vote, that's how democracy works, and you don't get to decide who is qualified based on, for example, how likely some data entry temp was to mistype their crazy islamist-ferner-sounding name with all the consonants. Screw you.
Child care was NEVER free. Child care carries an opportunity cost that results in one potential income earner to stay at home.
It seems like you aren't interpreting GP's quote correctly. The claim isn't that there were no implicit costs involved. The claim is that today, identical work is being done (children are still cared for, food is still prepared), but because it is done for cash exchange, it adds to the GDP, and factors into economic calculations, tax revenue, etc. -- there is increased cash circulation without necessarily a corresponding increase in real work / production. It's just that economically we now categorize a larger portion of activities as contributing to the economy / GDP / incomes / whatever.
That's what the "no activities left to monetize" claim is getting at. I think personally that the quote is overstating the situation, but it raises a legitimate point -- at least some of the "economic growth" our current system depends on is really just shuffling around the same set of activities and exchanging money for them where before they were done "for free" (i.e. at opportunity cost, not explicit dollar cost). There is a theoretical limit to how much growth can be wrangled out of this shuffling alone (and it's also legitimate to question whether it's even desirable to have a system that encourages or requires this sort of shuffling in the first place)...
But the same objections could be raised to physical safety laws, or due diligence laws of any kind. With safety regulations, you don't just increase the penalties for accidents, and you don't avoid making explicit requirements because "what if there's a better way?" -- if the technology improves, so can the regulations, but it shouldn't just be a matter of whatever the company thinks is good enough.
Now the thief just needs 1 more step, instead.
Anything any company might conceivably do, with or without legislative requirements, would just add "one more step". That is not in itself an objection to taking this specific step.
The password/key. Even without it, it's not impossible to crack encryption. It's just very hard, if done right. (And next to useless if done wrong.)
False. If encryption is done right, it is impossible to crack. The point of failure is not the encryption itself, it's the key, as you mention. If you disagree on this point, and can provide evidence, the entire computer security industry would be very interested. Any effective way to break standard encryption schemes, even if it was "just very hard", would be a Very Big Deal in the field (I Am A Theoretical Computer Scientist).
You are partially right about badly done encryption being much less effective (though not necessarily "next to useless" unless you know that most people who might obtain the data have enough proficiency and resources to extract the data because of it). But that's beside the point -- you might as well object to a law requiring top secret documents to be locked up, because there exist locks that are easy to pick.
Okay, why is this already tagged "nanny state"? Is it somehow a fascist imposition on the free market to make companies protect the personal data of their customers? Aren't slashdot articles run all the time criticizing how lax many corporations (including financial companies that should know better) are with their customers' data?
If you're a great mathematician, and someone needs a great mathematician, it doesn't matter if they hate your fucking guts, they still need to treat you with respect and deal with you. That's one of the perks of the field.
Are you actually in the field?
...because if so, I'd like to apply for transfer to your department / employer:-P
The biggest problem is actually not the false positives - that would just mean extra wasted effort to screen the individuals, which "only" costs time and money.
No. False positives "only" cost the government time and money. For the individuals falsely suspected, it could cost them their career, their relationships, their home, and their freedom, depending on how much "time and money" the government spends on them before realizing they are innocent. (If they ever do, since -- as shocking as it sounds -- there have been a few cases reported where individuals were detained indefinitely without charges, or even evidence.)
I suppose I should clarify my one claim that "no political powers were abused" in Missouri -- in fact that's only true up to the point when the Governor used his office to broadcast a bunch of false anti-Obama smears. While it's fine for a public prosecutor to work for a political campaign in the evenings as a private citizen -- that is not an abuse of political power -- I don't really think it's okay for a governor to use his office to tell his entire state lies about a presidential candidate.
The bigger point is that BOTH parties do this. There's a tendency to think Obama's people are pure in this but I doubt McCain stole his own campaign's laptop. Not to mention Obama supporters going to the police to have dissenting voices intimidated in Missouri. This is politics. It's dirty.
Your post sounds like you're trying to advocate the "reasonable middle ground" or something, but since it contains at least one explicit lie, I suspect you may have a particular agenda. Though you may have just been misled by others with the same agenda.
First, for the true but misleading part of your post: it's true that both parties do this. All political parties always have and always will play dirty tricks to some degree. But that's hardly the "bigger point" if it's always true of everyone, because it ignores the matter of degree: not all political parties have always pulled the same amount of dirty tricks at all times in all locations. For the last few US elections, either the Republicans have pulled dirty tricks on a much larger and more systematic scale than the Democrats, or the Democrats are much better at hiding it. But the typical republican "voice of reason" response is to find some minor incidences of Democratic corruption and treat those as if they're equivalent -- or to give up on specific data and just repeat "Chicago!" over and over.
Now, for the explicit lie, which is actually an instance of Republican intimidation and corruption: Obama supporters did not go to the police to have dissenting voices intimidated in Missouri. Some state employees volunteered to work for the Obama campaign in their private capacity, that is, as citizens. They did not use their state powers to help Obama. State employees have been doing identical volunteer work for the McCain campaign. This is as it should be. No police or prosecutorial powers were abused, or even used, in this process. These were just citizens participating in the political campaign. That the governor could make this into an issue of Democrats hiring police squads to track down and suppress their opponents, and not be torn to shreds by his constituients for the obvious falsehood, is a travesty. Nonetheless, it's become a Republican talking point even though it has no basis in reality.
So, no, the bigger point is not that both parties do this. I wish the Democrats did it even less than they do, but that doesn't mean that both parties are somehow on the same ethical level right now.
Technically, you can use the keyboard to make notes. I don't find that very useful. Searching for text in a book is much more important. But the biggest use for the keyboard is because the device has free wireless Internet, so the keyboard can be used in the browser (and particularly, as far as amazon is concerned, in the Kindle store -- you can hear about a book and immediately find and purchase it straight from the device).
I'm wondering if your question was rhetorical or what, since saying "It's still not clear to you" why there's a keyboard makes it seem like you've been wondering for a while, but it's hard to read more than a paragraph about the Kindle without seeing what I said above... so maybe you already know about those and just don't think they're significant. In which case I'd have to disagree:)
Well, the post I was responding to was explicitly implying that net neutrality was just a bunch of greedy computer geeks wanting to download a bunch of torrents without paying for the bandwidth. TFA itself is another matter.
I still disagree, though: ISPs are looking into charging content providers because they are greedy and see a way to exploit their monopoly on users. If it was really a matter of covering costs, then they would just do the sensible thing and charge the current price for "as much bandwidth as any normal human would need" and then a second tier higher price for "truly unlimited" bandwidth (add additional tiers as necessary). If they want to avoid customer complaints, (1) they can offer a slight price decrease to users who don't use tons of bandwidth, (2) the people who will be bothered most are the same people they're claiming are running them out of business with their crazy downloading, so losing them should improve profits anyway.
They don't do this, though, because they are covering costs quite comfortably, and in many places they have effective monopolies anyway and only the fear of litigation keeps them from pushing the price up even further. Charging content providers is thus a back door to exploit their monopoly that, depending on how legislation favors them, would be less vulnerable to lawsuits or monopoly-related charges than simple price-gouging would be.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm quite sure you meant: std::cout << "output" << endl;
You seriously think that's easier to explain than System.out.println("output"); ? The C++ version is concealing even more hairy details than the Java version, while using even more symbols that can't be fully explained until later!
If you think Java shouldn't be the intro language, that's fine (I think there's a case to be made for it, but I have mixed feelings). But C++ is definitely worse.
I'm curious where you are finding these students. In my experience, it is much more common to find people who think they know loads of theory, but can't write a line of code. In reality, these people usually can't write a line of proof either.
The best theoreticians aren't always the best coders, but they're usually able to code pretty well when they want to. I've much more frequently seen people who were great coders but couldn't handle more abstract algorithmic questions than vice versa. And I certainly think it's hard to say that great CS theorists who can't code is "the problem" in CS education right now...
Eh? No, it's the equivalent of studying the simplest possible living organisms to prepare for the later work of understanding more complex ones. It's still the same subject matter, but it lets you focus on the most important concepts before getting caught up in the specific details that vary from case to case.
Teaching on a fake OS lets you write your own kernel while bypassing the tedium of bootstrapping and such. Teaching fake assembly lets you write your own compiler while avoiding some of the irrelevant gotchas or (initially) unneeded sophistication of real machine code. I've done both of these things, and my understanding of kernels and compilers is much better for it. The same result would not be possible if you gave students 6 weeks to write a real kernel from scratch that ran on real x86 system...
Just "HISTORY"? It must have been a survey course....
Seriously, what do you imagine is the "core subject" of "history" such that two people who studied "history" 60 years apart should perform similarly on identical exams? My wife is a PhD student in history, but would probably have trouble answering simple questions about people or periods she's never studied, even if she could give some broader context.
Or the "core subject" of "math"? I'm a PhD student in theoretical computer science, and do a lot of "math", but you could easily trip me up by asking for computations in areas I don't study (like, I suspect, some of the integrals that might appear on a 1950s chemistry exam)...
GP is right. Subjects change (you can claim "the same facts are still true", but the same facts are not still studied on the same timeline today, nor should they be). As another comment said, what we should really be concerned about isn't performance on some arbitrary historical standardized exam, but on how well education is preparing students. In many cases the answer is probably "not that well," and that's what we should be worrying about. If students are performing well after highschool and college, then who cares about a standardized exam from generations ago? Since when did we start thinking that doing well on specific tests is really an objective measure of a quality education?
The ATT people are an extreme case, but even so there are multiple amateurs within close range of them -- as of a few days ago, at least one amateur team (PragmaticTheory) was beating them.
Well, no, "accurate" is what you're looking for ;)
But part of what I was getting at is that it doesn't matter how farfetched it is, SVD has no preconceptions (or at least, only the minimum needed for accuracy), it just finds the correlations themselves. If a correlation isn't detectable in the data, then it doesn't matter how plausible or farfetched something is, it won't be useful. If it is detectable in the data, then again, farfetched or not doesn't matter. Time is better spent modeling different ways for functions to correlate and then applying SVD to that than it is in coming up with as many hard-coded correlations as possible...
Pretty sure. IAITTT = I Am In The Top Ten ;)
The winning progress prize entry from 2007 had to publish the full details of their algorithm, and they don't use anything. I don't use anything. PragmaticTheory even wrote a blog post about how they don't use anything. Others have said the same thing. It's impossible to say that no one will ever come up with a useful way to use metadata, but so far the "metadata" produced by the algorithms themselves is far more accurate than that generated by human observers on the same data.
Well, that's beyond just counterintuitive to actually demonstrably unhelpful -- it seems a priori unlikely that someone's rating would depend on the production company, for example, but even if it was, that would be much more easily detected by the actual movie average (i.e. if a particular production company gets good ratings, then we will know that just because the movie has a lot of good ratings, and the company becomes superfluous). On the other hand, if you're suggesting that specific people have varying opinions of particular companies, well that again seems odd, but again it's irrelevant -- if such a correlation exists, SVD will find it, and so some of the dimensions of user-movie vectors will correlate to production company.
Similar with the other properties you mention: since SVD is already finding *all* of the (linear) correlations in the data, it's not very helpful to try to come up with a huge list of farfetched ones yourself hoping one of them will work out...
You recall incorrectly. None of the top teams currently use external data sources (some have tried, but it doesn't help that much once you get up towards the top 10). The last team that (probably, not official yet) won a milestone used the combined predictions of the first and second place teams, interpolated to improve the final score, but nothing external. Same thing in the previous year, the winning team used only computations on the data given.
IAITTT ;)
Women in CS in the 80s was explained by the dot-com boom?
Learn something new every day.
Ugh. I can't believe how many responses you're getting to this that are basically "You moron, don't you know that not every time a guy talks to you is not about your boobs?"
To those responses, which are too numerous to deal with one by one: Of course she realizes this. Are you really so confident that you know the life experience of a female in a tech field that you're prepared to discount every single one of these interactions, because she obviously misread all of them? You're making this absurd leap from "Maybe some of the time you misread the situation" to "therefore this is not a legitimate point and there is no social issue at all."
Is it really so hard to believe that there are enough actual negative interactions to make a school or workplace unpleasant? You really think every single one of them was just her overreacting?
Given the general tenor of the 800-and-growing comments, maybe this is spitting into the wind, but geez, you want to see the hostile environment that makes a lot of female CS people uncomfortable? Just find a slashdot post about women in CS, and read the resulting comments...
GP's whole point was that Republicans say they object to this, but then they elect people who bring them a disproportionate amount of federal "pork" spending. Which means, by implication, that the Democrats are electing people who bring them proportionately less of that funding, that is, people who are less likely to "line their trough", at least in the sense of federal grants.
Now, if Republicans whined about income redistribution, and they elected officials who refused to redistribute income to their constituents, that would be an instance of these "ideals and principles" you speak of. So far, there's no sign of this happening, because they instead elect officials who promise to stop redistributing income to other people, while conveniently overlooking their own.
Godwin nazi :-P
Or, to make a more specific point along the same lines -- towards the end of the campaign, McCain went for several weeks at a time without speaking to any national press at all. Remember the "no-talk express" crack? That wasn't because the reporters were by nature anti-McCain, although some of them may have been, but when both the presidential and vice-presidential candidates are being completely hidden from the media, it's hardly an instance of media bias when they receive less coverage.
You realize, don't you, that students are being taught English, math, etc., so that when they finish school they can go out and use those skills? Outside of school, and even -- though only inadvertently, I'm sure! -- in a way that benefits someone besides themself?
Screw you. When I registered to vote in my current state, the person who copied my name off the form left an 'r' out of my last name. I've tried to correct this through two primary and election cycles now, and I believe they still have it wrong. I've still been able to vote, because the name is almost the same and I can show them that I correctly received my polling information under the not-quite-right name. But according to you I lack the basic intelligence to vote?
Citizens get to vote, that's how democracy works, and you don't get to decide who is qualified based on, for example, how likely some data entry temp was to mistype their crazy islamist-ferner-sounding name with all the consonants. Screw you.
It seems like you aren't interpreting GP's quote correctly. The claim isn't that there were no implicit costs involved. The claim is that today, identical work is being done (children are still cared for, food is still prepared), but because it is done for cash exchange, it adds to the GDP, and factors into economic calculations, tax revenue, etc. -- there is increased cash circulation without necessarily a corresponding increase in real work / production. It's just that economically we now categorize a larger portion of activities as contributing to the economy / GDP / incomes / whatever.
That's what the "no activities left to monetize" claim is getting at. I think personally that the quote is overstating the situation, but it raises a legitimate point -- at least some of the "economic growth" our current system depends on is really just shuffling around the same set of activities and exchanging money for them where before they were done "for free" (i.e. at opportunity cost, not explicit dollar cost). There is a theoretical limit to how much growth can be wrangled out of this shuffling alone (and it's also legitimate to question whether it's even desirable to have a system that encourages or requires this sort of shuffling in the first place)...
Of course, another possible reason that the liquor industry may have boomed in the 1930s is that there was no liquor industry for more than ten years before that...
Or rather, there was, and it was certainly booming throughout the twenties, but for some reason specific dollar numbers were hard to come by...
But the same objections could be raised to physical safety laws, or due diligence laws of any kind. With safety regulations, you don't just increase the penalties for accidents, and you don't avoid making explicit requirements because "what if there's a better way?" -- if the technology improves, so can the regulations, but it shouldn't just be a matter of whatever the company thinks is good enough.
Anything any company might conceivably do, with or without legislative requirements, would just add "one more step". That is not in itself an objection to taking this specific step.
False. If encryption is done right, it is impossible to crack. The point of failure is not the encryption itself, it's the key, as you mention. If you disagree on this point, and can provide evidence, the entire computer security industry would be very interested. Any effective way to break standard encryption schemes, even if it was "just very hard", would be a Very Big Deal in the field (I Am A Theoretical Computer Scientist).
You are partially right about badly done encryption being much less effective (though not necessarily "next to useless" unless you know that most people who might obtain the data have enough proficiency and resources to extract the data because of it). But that's beside the point -- you might as well object to a law requiring top secret documents to be locked up, because there exist locks that are easy to pick.
Okay, why is this already tagged "nanny state"? Is it somehow a fascist imposition on the free market to make companies protect the personal data of their customers? Aren't slashdot articles run all the time criticizing how lax many corporations (including financial companies that should know better) are with their customers' data?
Are you actually in the field?
...because if so, I'd like to apply for transfer to your department / employer :-P
No. False positives "only" cost the government time and money. For the individuals falsely suspected, it could cost them their career, their relationships, their home, and their freedom, depending on how much "time and money" the government spends on them before realizing they are innocent. (If they ever do, since -- as shocking as it sounds -- there have been a few cases reported where individuals were detained indefinitely without charges, or even evidence.)
I suppose I should clarify my one claim that "no political powers were abused" in Missouri -- in fact that's only true up to the point when the Governor used his office to broadcast a bunch of false anti-Obama smears. While it's fine for a public prosecutor to work for a political campaign in the evenings as a private citizen -- that is not an abuse of political power -- I don't really think it's okay for a governor to use his office to tell his entire state lies about a presidential candidate.
Ah well.
Your post sounds like you're trying to advocate the "reasonable middle ground" or something, but since it contains at least one explicit lie, I suspect you may have a particular agenda. Though you may have just been misled by others with the same agenda.
First, for the true but misleading part of your post: it's true that both parties do this. All political parties always have and always will play dirty tricks to some degree. But that's hardly the "bigger point" if it's always true of everyone, because it ignores the matter of degree: not all political parties have always pulled the same amount of dirty tricks at all times in all locations. For the last few US elections, either the Republicans have pulled dirty tricks on a much larger and more systematic scale than the Democrats, or the Democrats are much better at hiding it. But the typical republican "voice of reason" response is to find some minor incidences of Democratic corruption and treat those as if they're equivalent -- or to give up on specific data and just repeat "Chicago!" over and over.
Now, for the explicit lie, which is actually an instance of Republican intimidation and corruption: Obama supporters did not go to the police to have dissenting voices intimidated in Missouri. Some state employees volunteered to work for the Obama campaign in their private capacity, that is, as citizens. They did not use their state powers to help Obama. State employees have been doing identical volunteer work for the McCain campaign. This is as it should be. No police or prosecutorial powers were abused, or even used, in this process. These were just citizens participating in the political campaign. That the governor could make this into an issue of Democrats hiring police squads to track down and suppress their opponents, and not be torn to shreds by his constituients for the obvious falsehood, is a travesty. Nonetheless, it's become a Republican talking point even though it has no basis in reality.
So, no, the bigger point is not that both parties do this. I wish the Democrats did it even less than they do, but that doesn't mean that both parties are somehow on the same ethical level right now.
Technically, you can use the keyboard to make notes. I don't find that very useful. Searching for text in a book is much more important. But the biggest use for the keyboard is because the device has free wireless Internet, so the keyboard can be used in the browser (and particularly, as far as amazon is concerned, in the Kindle store -- you can hear about a book and immediately find and purchase it straight from the device).
I'm wondering if your question was rhetorical or what, since saying "It's still not clear to you" why there's a keyboard makes it seem like you've been wondering for a while, but it's hard to read more than a paragraph about the Kindle without seeing what I said above... so maybe you already know about those and just don't think they're significant. In which case I'd have to disagree :)
Well, the post I was responding to was explicitly implying that net neutrality was just a bunch of greedy computer geeks wanting to download a bunch of torrents without paying for the bandwidth. TFA itself is another matter.
I still disagree, though: ISPs are looking into charging content providers because they are greedy and see a way to exploit their monopoly on users. If it was really a matter of covering costs, then they would just do the sensible thing and charge the current price for "as much bandwidth as any normal human would need" and then a second tier higher price for "truly unlimited" bandwidth (add additional tiers as necessary). If they want to avoid customer complaints, (1) they can offer a slight price decrease to users who don't use tons of bandwidth, (2) the people who will be bothered most are the same people they're claiming are running them out of business with their crazy downloading, so losing them should improve profits anyway.
They don't do this, though, because they are covering costs quite comfortably, and in many places they have effective monopolies anyway and only the fear of litigation keeps them from pushing the price up even further. Charging content providers is thus a back door to exploit their monopoly that, depending on how legislation favors them, would be less vulnerable to lawsuits or monopoly-related charges than simple price-gouging would be.