You have to remember that a test measures several levels of knowledge by having a range of easy to hard questions. A properly performed test on a random population should result in a normal distribution around a defined average. That average is solely based on the test so it has no bearing on the actual intelligence of the population. The test is more sorting the population then comparing it to a standard.
Actually, no: it should result in a normal distribution around an average, not a defined average. The range of the resulting distribution is then compared to a standard. In this case, the range failed to overlap the standard boundary, and so everyone flunked out.
If you futz with the standard based on the observed average every year, then you are effectively cheating the people in better performing years by causing the higher education to contain remedial elements that the higher performing students already know, and you move the sliding window of the top end of what can be learned at the institution downward.
This is effectively the same reason there are admissions tests in Japan as well, although in Japan, the majority pass, so it ends up being a numbers cut-off at the top end of the range instead, for the number of available slots.
If everyone in Liberia who took the tests had passed to the acceptance standard, they'd have to institute a similar numbers based cut-off to that of Japan, since there would not have been sufficient slots for all potential students.
It's much worse in countries where you have to pay to get an education, which means that there are young people who can't afford going to university (or college) even though they might be better suited for it than their dumb but rich neighbours,
Being rich doesn't mean you pass and get your degree, even if you can afford to be there. Beauty is skin deep; stupid goes to the bone.
Egalitarianism is a great social philosophy in theory, but it fails pretty quickly in the face of inequality of ability. You can guarantee equality of opportunity, and most modern societies try to do this - this is why there are scholarchips and BEOGs (Basic Educational Opportunity Grants), but there is no way, given inequality of ability, to guarantee equality of outcome.
Name an invention that was never based on a previous invention.
I'll wait right here.
-- BMO
The Archimedes screw, the earliest known water pump. Leonardo's helicopter, the first attempt at rotary lift flight. Written language. Tesla's invention of radio.
If you want to get more primitive: starting a fire via friction. The wheel. The spear. The stone axe. The scarping tools used by early man to cure hides. The idea of curing hides in the first place. Cheese. Beer. Domestication of animals. The fishing net.
Everything is derivative. The only difference is magnitude.
So your claim, if I have this straight, is that there is no such thing as revolutionary ideas, only evolutionary ones, and that there's always a route from the status quo to the most desirable future, and that route can always be travelled incrementally?
I call BS. I've known engineers who thought this way, and they, without exception, never had a revolutionary idea in their lives. Incrementalism is the refuge of the small mind.
You have to wonder how much that atmosphere was effected by debris still up there from Deep Impact, Chandrayaan-1's Moon Impact Probe, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's centaur upper stage impacts.
Too bad they didn't do a before-and-after of this particular mission.
So it seems my guess was correct and you're all bellyaching about a program taking advantage of an unstable API, with a feature not guaranteed to be there, and when the documentation recommends not distributing production apps yet.
I checked out the SDK link you provided. The iOS and Android sender examples were last updated July 30th. The breakage occurred post-July 30th, so the documentation should have been updated with working examples, or the references to using the SDK to create 3rd party senders should have been removed.
As I was in the Chrome OS group at Google, and not the Google TV group that is responsible for ChromeCast, I have no idea how frequently that group updates their developer documentation. However, if it's anything like the Chrome OS group, other than design documents, the documentation tends to stay rather out of date for Chrome OS, since there are no technical writers specifically tasked with updating documentation.
So it could be a bug or an intentional API change (for which the documentation is now out of date) that caused the breakage. However, since the breakage has been pretty localized as to where it occurred, it's unlikely to be supported via an alternate API, which implies intentionality, since releases are tested internally before going out to production systems.
Frankly I am surprised in this case. Being able to stream content is a selling point with broad appeal, unlike say Other OS on the PS3 which was only used by a tiny fraction of PS3 owners.
Good argument, except it's unlikely they are making money on the hardware, so the goal is not to sell Chromecast devices, the goal is to allow people to buy Chromecast devices at cost in order to be able to sell content, and to sell content in order to sell advertising. For a bare-bones devices, it's unlikely that additional economies of scale are going to increase their profit margin on the hardware any, and it may in fact be a loss-leader, like the PS/2 or original XBox.
No more hollywood fakes. Nothing this time will hide from high definition cameras. Will have proof and can trace every step from the start to the moon. No more lying, no more fake Apollo flights.
Add to your list: No more getting punched in the mouth by Buzz Aldrin for being an asshole.
America probably has more prison labour then China. Those private prison companies need to make money with their guaranteed prison population.
Correction: America has more prisoners. It does not have more prison labor.
You can't force American prisoners to work, you can just make it mind-numbingly dull to not work at some mind-numbingly dull prison job. If you work at the mind-numbingly dull prison job instead, you get machine shop, telemarking, or other skills to use on the outside, assuming you stop shanking people long enough that your sentence doesn't get extended past your release date again,
PS: If their non-numb minds got them into prison in the first place, a bit of mind-numbing can't hurt to fit them back into society with the rest of the mind-numbed cable TV subscribers out there.
Am I the only one wondering how water in California can be threatened by fire?
It's easier to push water than to pull it. So the pumping stations which are needed to push the water up hill are located at the bottom of the hill, and there is infrastructure in place along the rim (it's a rim fire) to supply power to those facilities. It's the same reason that electric power is currently at risk by the fire.
Unfortunately, people who do not understand land management have been making rules about fire roads,controlled burns, and removal of scrub for the last number of decades, which means when a fire like this happens, it tends to be a multi-hundred-thousand acre conflagration.
Well that is mainly because they never really invented something new, except Earth.
I filed 2 patents while I was at Google. One of my colleagues filed 5. On the floor where I worked in a single building, I believe the total was 106 over the period of time we had all been there. Other groups turned in smaller numbers, but some, such as the "Google Van" and "Self Driving car" and "Google X" groups turned in more. As long as you count employee inventions assigned to the company, I'd have to say Google invents quite a lot.
If you think it's because of the encryption, switch to using PPOE and see if the problem resolves itself.
Also, you can do TCP active probing to see which intermediate hop(s) actually have the slowdown; this is the same techniques used to detect black hole routes for when an ISP blocks ICMP packets, and you can use PMTU discovery.
"...saving students up to 50% of what a semester's worth of textbooks would cost"
The devil is in the details, isn't it?
(1) Compared to the price of new, rather than used, textbooks.
(2) Access to the books will be time limited, and books can not be loaned or resold.
Please "save" me from having a permanent, loanable, non time-limited paper copy of Halliday and Resnik, which I have occasionally referred back to from time to time, including when doing patent filings, over the last 30 years.
What is it they say these days? Was it "Do. Not. Want.", or was it "Get off my lawn!".
As a partial Briton, TV licences are a bad analogy. They subsidise state-funded production and broadcasts.
This is more like a public-speaking licence, or a printing-press licence.
Yes, but wouldn't an Internet license subsidize the state funded efforts of honest GCHQ employees attempting to protect you from terrorists? It sounds more like a TV license to me...
Household waste plastic other than clear plastic PET is not worth recycling. The plastic lobby has pulled the wool over your eyes. Plastic can be easily recycled when sorted, is like saying you can easily walk to work when someone gives you a piggyback ride.
According to this article, it's worth recycling, although if you dye it green or other colors, it goes down in value, but is still worth it from an economic perspective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling
We should probably just go back to glass bottles for most of he stuff we ship around in PET containers; for fruit and berriers, we should go back to raw cardboard, which was typically made from recycled paper anyway.
To address the larger issue, we should make sorting a lot easier by picking on or two classes of plastic which are easily distinguishable from one another, and only make plastic items out of those few plastics. If we could do away with paper labels, using container-printed labels instead, that'd also help.
Over a period of 10 years driving around, I think it's possible to chock up enough coincidental adjacency to criminal activity that we could selectively pick a non-random set of photos of your vehicle license plate, and establish a circumstantial case against you being involved in criminal activity.
Get a sufficient amount of data on anyone, and you can paint them as a criminal by being selective about the data you choose to use in presenting your case.
"Assisted-suicide is legal in several jurisdictions, including Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland and four American states (Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana)."
Suicide itself, as an individual act is legal in most Western countries, including Australia, Canada, the United States, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, South Africa, England and Wales, and Scotland:
One of the impetus for allowing assisted suicide in Oregon's "Death With Dignity Act" was to permit a cryonicist with an untreatable brain cancer to check out without the ordinarily requisite autopsy that normally comes with any suicide, which would have destroyed his chances at being successfully frozen. He didn't want to continue to hang out while the cancer at his brain, resulting in so-called "identity death" or "personality death".
There really is nothing TO discuss because if they haven't come up with some magical potion that keeps 100% of the ice crystals from forming AND a way to unfreeze without damage all they are gonna end up with when they thaw it is mush anyway. The way it was explained to me its not the flash freezing that is the biggest problem, after all you dunk a head in liquid nitrogen and it'll flash freeze alright, the problem is in the thawing as THAT is where all the damage occurs.
Actually, it's typically done these days using organ vitrification, which prevents ice crystals from forming. For most crypoprotectants used in the process of vitrification, you are limited to one cell type one which it has best effect. The CI folks mostly try their best to preserve the brain without freezing damage, at the expense of some of the other cell types. This has been successfully used on laboratory animal organ transplants for mammalian livers, kidneys, and hearts; the first reference is a patent on the method of prepping the organ, which the second is a PubMed article case study dealing with a rabbit kidney vitrification and subsequent live transplant.
There has also been some interesting work in the last 5 years using in Japan using a 0.01 mT magnetic field. This prevents ice crystals from forming. The technique was originally developed by ABI, a Japanese company using a technique they call the "Calls Alive System", for storing sushi at cryogenic temperatures without permitting formation of ice crystals by triggerning through the glass phase change without normal expansion you would typically have with ice. The technique is currently being used for long term storage of live teeth, and has shown some merit for other larger organs:
Furthermore, for the 0.001% of people who truly need to be somewhere that fast, let them take their corporate jet to LA. Don't sink $70 billion to support a couple of hundred of sales people. Nobody else needs to get from LA to SF at 300 mph to see their relatives.
Dude, your virtual Disneyland still sucks; how long have you been working on it now? Even Euro Disney sucks less than your virtual Disneyland.
Fix that, and we don't even have to talk about how much your virtual Grand Canyon and Virtual Arches National Park and virtual Machu Picchu and virtual Angkor Watt and virtual Great Wall of China and virtual Tunguska site suck, because if you can make your virtual Disney unsuck, you can probably fix those other things. Eventually.
Until then, I'm throwing my sack of water in a tin can headed to the physical reality of those things.
No, that's state and local governments trying to coerce corporations into collecting sales tax for them, when there is already a use tax law, and it's the state and local governments job to do the collecting.
Actually it's the consumer's job to report it.
You're right... the state and local governments should make a law to that effect. And enforce it themselves, instead of asking corporations to enforce it for them.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to drop our standards and make everything in life easier so more people can pass through with out trying?
If you actually read the article, you'd know what they're going to do.
Time to reread 'Harrison Bergeron' by Kurt Vonnegut...
You have to remember that a test measures several levels of knowledge by having a range of easy to hard questions. A properly performed test on a random population should result in a normal distribution around a defined average. That average is solely based on the test so it has no bearing on the actual intelligence of the population. The test is more sorting the population then comparing it to a standard.
Actually, no: it should result in a normal distribution around an average, not a defined average. The range of the resulting distribution is then compared to a standard. In this case, the range failed to overlap the standard boundary, and so everyone flunked out.
If you futz with the standard based on the observed average every year, then you are effectively cheating the people in better performing years by causing the higher education to contain remedial elements that the higher performing students already know, and you move the sliding window of the top end of what can be learned at the institution downward.
This is effectively the same reason there are admissions tests in Japan as well, although in Japan, the majority pass, so it ends up being a numbers cut-off at the top end of the range instead, for the number of available slots.
If everyone in Liberia who took the tests had passed to the acceptance standard, they'd have to institute a similar numbers based cut-off to that of Japan, since there would not have been sufficient slots for all potential students.
It's much worse in countries where you have to pay to get an education, which means that there are young people who can't afford going to university (or college) even though they might be better suited for it than their dumb but rich neighbours,
Being rich doesn't mean you pass and get your degree, even if you can afford to be there. Beauty is skin deep; stupid goes to the bone.
Egalitarianism is a great social philosophy in theory, but it fails pretty quickly in the face of inequality of ability. You can guarantee equality of opportunity, and most modern societies try to do this - this is why there are scholarchips and BEOGs (Basic Educational Opportunity Grants), but there is no way, given inequality of ability, to guarantee equality of outcome.
>never had a revolutionary idea in their lives
Name an invention that was never based on a previous invention.
I'll wait right here.
--
BMO
The Archimedes screw, the earliest known water pump. Leonardo's helicopter, the first attempt at rotary lift flight. Written language. Tesla's invention of radio.
If you want to get more primitive: starting a fire via friction. The wheel. The spear. The stone axe. The scarping tools used by early man to cure hides. The idea of curing hides in the first place. Cheese. Beer. Domestication of animals. The fishing net.
Everything is derivative. The only difference is magnitude.
So your claim, if I have this straight, is that there is no such thing as revolutionary ideas, only evolutionary ones, and that there's always a route from the status quo to the most desirable future, and that route can always be travelled incrementally?
I call BS. I've known engineers who thought this way, and they, without exception, never had a revolutionary idea in their lives. Incrementalism is the refuge of the small mind.
2025? Really ambitious, NASA... or maybe not...
Isn't 2024 about the time Planetary Resources plans to start platinum mining operations on a captured, much larger, asteroid?
You have to wonder how much that atmosphere was effected by debris still up there from Deep Impact, Chandrayaan-1's Moon Impact Probe, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's centaur upper stage impacts.
Too bad they didn't do a before-and-after of this particular mission.
>
So it seems my guess was correct and you're all bellyaching about a program taking advantage of an unstable API, with a feature not guaranteed to be there, and when the documentation recommends not distributing production apps yet.
I checked out the SDK link you provided. The iOS and Android sender examples were last updated July 30th. The breakage occurred post-July 30th, so the documentation should have been updated with working examples, or the references to using the SDK to create 3rd party senders should have been removed.
As I was in the Chrome OS group at Google, and not the Google TV group that is responsible for ChromeCast, I have no idea how frequently that group updates their developer documentation. However, if it's anything like the Chrome OS group, other than design documents, the documentation tends to stay rather out of date for Chrome OS, since there are no technical writers specifically tasked with updating documentation.
So it could be a bug or an intentional API change (for which the documentation is now out of date) that caused the breakage. However, since the breakage has been pretty localized as to where it occurred, it's unlikely to be supported via an alternate API, which implies intentionality, since releases are tested internally before going out to production systems.
Frankly I am surprised in this case. Being able to stream content is a selling point with broad appeal, unlike say Other OS on the PS3 which was only used by a tiny fraction of PS3 owners.
Good argument, except it's unlikely they are making money on the hardware, so the goal is not to sell Chromecast devices, the goal is to allow people to buy Chromecast devices at cost in order to be able to sell content, and to sell content in order to sell advertising. For a bare-bones devices, it's unlikely that additional economies of scale are going to increase their profit margin on the hardware any, and it may in fact be a loss-leader, like the PS/2 or original XBox.
Bart Sibrel, is that you? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_Sibrel
No more hollywood fakes. Nothing this time will hide from high definition cameras. Will have proof and can trace every step from the start to the moon. No more lying, no more fake Apollo flights.
Add to your list: No more getting punched in the mouth by Buzz Aldrin for being an asshole.
America probably has more prison labour then China. Those private prison companies need to make money with their guaranteed prison population.
Correction: America has more prisoners. It does not have more prison labor.
You can't force American prisoners to work, you can just make it mind-numbingly dull to not work at some mind-numbingly dull prison job. If you work at the mind-numbingly dull prison job instead, you get machine shop, telemarking, or other skills to use on the outside, assuming you stop shanking people long enough that your sentence doesn't get extended past your release date again,
PS: If their non-numb minds got them into prison in the first place, a bit of mind-numbing can't hurt to fit them back into society with the rest of the mind-numbed cable TV subscribers out there.
Am I the only one wondering how water in California can be threatened by fire?
It's easier to push water than to pull it. So the pumping stations which are needed to push the water up hill are located at the bottom of the hill, and there is infrastructure in place along the rim (it's a rim fire) to supply power to those facilities. It's the same reason that electric power is currently at risk by the fire.
Unfortunately, people who do not understand land management have been making rules about fire roads,controlled burns, and removal of scrub for the last number of decades, which means when a fire like this happens, it tends to be a multi-hundred-thousand acre conflagration.
It's a search and rescue operation. Once we find Tony Bennett's heart, we're all moving some place safer.
Well that is mainly because they never really invented something new, except Earth.
I filed 2 patents while I was at Google. One of my colleagues filed 5. On the floor where I worked in a single building, I believe the total was 106 over the period of time we had all been there. Other groups turned in smaller numbers, but some, such as the "Google Van" and "Self Driving car" and "Google X" groups turned in more. As long as you count employee inventions assigned to the company, I'd have to say Google invents quite a lot.
Switching ISPs is one option.
SSRR (Source Routing) will also work.
If you think it's because of the encryption, switch to using PPOE and see if the problem resolves itself.
Also, you can do TCP active probing to see which intermediate hop(s) actually have the slowdown; this is the same techniques used to detect black hole routes for when an ISP blocks ICMP packets, and you can use PMTU discovery.
"...saving students up to 50% of what a semester's worth of textbooks would cost"
The devil is in the details, isn't it?
(1) Compared to the price of new, rather than used, textbooks.
(2) Access to the books will be time limited, and books can not be loaned or resold.
Please "save" me from having a permanent, loanable, non time-limited paper copy of Halliday and Resnik, which I have occasionally referred back to from time to time, including when doing patent filings, over the last 30 years.
What is it they say these days? Was it "Do. Not. Want.", or was it "Get off my lawn!".
why would we read it as that?
Because of past history, the government has been trying to force a national ID on everyone since at least the early 2000's. Remember the Real ID Act?
FWIW, This is precisely how I read the idea that you'd have a single ID card that would be used with all online services.
As a partial Briton, TV licences are a bad analogy. They subsidise state-funded production and broadcasts.
This is more like a public-speaking licence, or a printing-press licence.
Yes, but wouldn't an Internet license subsidize the state funded efforts of honest GCHQ employees attempting to protect you from terrorists? It sounds more like a TV license to me...
They just need to be more thoroughly sorted
Wrong.
Household waste plastic other than clear plastic PET is not worth recycling. The plastic lobby has pulled the wool over your eyes. Plastic can be easily recycled when sorted, is like saying you can easily walk to work when someone gives you a piggyback ride.
According to this article, it's worth recycling, although if you dye it green or other colors, it goes down in value, but is still worth it from an economic perspective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_bottle_recycling
We should probably just go back to glass bottles for most of he stuff we ship around in PET containers; for fruit and berriers, we should go back to raw cardboard, which was typically made from recycled paper anyway.
To address the larger issue, we should make sorting a lot easier by picking on or two classes of plastic which are easily distinguishable from one another, and only make plastic items out of those few plastics. If we could do away with paper labels, using container-printed labels instead, that'd also help.
Over a period of 10 years driving around, I think it's possible to chock up enough coincidental adjacency to criminal activity that we could selectively pick a non-random set of photos of your vehicle license plate, and establish a circumstantial case against you being involved in criminal activity.
Get a sufficient amount of data on anyone, and you can paint them as a criminal by being selective about the data you choose to use in presenting your case.
You already do, but you're too ignorant to realize it. There are only a couple countries where suicide is legal.
I believe you are confusing "suicide" with "assisted suicide"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assisted_suicide
"Assisted-suicide is legal in several jurisdictions, including Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland and four American states (Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana)."
Suicide itself, as an individual act is legal in most Western countries, including Australia, Canada, the United States, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Romania, South Africa, England and Wales, and Scotland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_legislation
One of the impetus for allowing assisted suicide in Oregon's "Death With Dignity Act" was to permit a cryonicist with an untreatable brain cancer to check out without the ordinarily requisite autopsy that normally comes with any suicide, which would have destroyed his chances at being successfully frozen. He didn't want to continue to hang out while the cancer at his brain, resulting in so-called "identity death" or "personality death".
The motherboards to either size are MacBook Pros; here's a picture showing the same board in a MacBook Pro teardown.
http://9to5mac.com/2012/06/13/ifixit-tears-down-the-new-retina-macbook-pro-calls-it-least-repairable-laptop-ever/macbook-pro-teardown/
The U-shaped divot is a cutout for one of the two fan assemblies.
The green board isn't an Apple board. The red one is only an Apple board if someone stole a prototype, which is unlikley.
BTW: The article makes it pretty clear that the tech doing the destruction was a guardian employee, and that the act was done as a symbolic gesture.
There really is nothing TO discuss because if they haven't come up with some magical potion that keeps 100% of the ice crystals from forming AND a way to unfreeze without damage all they are gonna end up with when they thaw it is mush anyway. The way it was explained to me its not the flash freezing that is the biggest problem, after all you dunk a head in liquid nitrogen and it'll flash freeze alright, the problem is in the thawing as THAT is where all the damage occurs.
Actually, it's typically done these days using organ vitrification, which prevents ice crystals from forming. For most crypoprotectants used in the process of vitrification, you are limited to one cell type one which it has best effect. The CI folks mostly try their best to preserve the brain without freezing damage, at the expense of some of the other cell types. This has been successfully used on laboratory animal organ transplants for mammalian livers, kidneys, and hearts; the first reference is a patent on the method of prepping the organ, which the second is a PubMed article case study dealing with a rabbit kidney vitrification and subsequent live transplant.
https://www.google.com/patents/US5723282
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781097/
There has also been some interesting work in the last 5 years using in Japan using a 0.01 mT magnetic field. This prevents ice crystals from forming. The technique was originally developed by ABI, a Japanese company using a technique they call the "Calls Alive System", for storing sushi at cryogenic temperatures without permitting formation of ice crystals by triggerning through the glass phase change without normal expansion you would typically have with ice. The technique is currently being used for long term storage of live teeth, and has shown some merit for other larger organs:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20478291
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0011224010000854
Furthermore, for the 0.001% of people who truly need to be somewhere that fast, let them take their corporate jet to LA. Don't sink $70 billion to support a couple of hundred of sales people. Nobody else needs to get from LA to SF at 300 mph to see their relatives.
Dude, your virtual Disneyland still sucks; how long have you been working on it now? Even Euro Disney sucks less than your virtual Disneyland.
Fix that, and we don't even have to talk about how much your virtual Grand Canyon and Virtual Arches National Park and virtual Machu Picchu and virtual Angkor Watt and virtual Great Wall of China and virtual Tunguska site suck, because if you can make your virtual Disney unsuck, you can probably fix those other things. Eventually.
Until then, I'm throwing my sack of water in a tin can headed to the physical reality of those things.
Actually it's the consumer's job to report it.
You're right... the state and local governments should make a law to that effect. And enforce it themselves, instead of asking corporations to enforce it for them.