I've had no problem with it, although it can be an issue with large purchases requiring other identification (for example buying a car with the intent of immediately paying it off in order to get air miles).
I also know plenty of Roberts with "Bob" on their credit cards, and other people whose short form of their name or alternate form bearls little resemblance (e.g. "Jack" for "John", "Kit" or "Kitty" for "Katherine", "Johnny" for "Giovanni", "Molly" for "Mary", "Dick" or "Rick" for "Richard", "Hank" for "Henry", "Peggy" for Margaret", "Ted" for "Edward" or "Theodore", "Sally" for "Sarah", etc.).
Worst case, if they won't let you have your nickname, you can get an FBN/DBA (Fictitious Business Name/Doing Business As) name. This will work for all the major card providers except Amex, which requires at least an LLC. Filing costs depend on where you are located, but $132 for everything including the 4 week publication, is a common fee from a broker like Signature Filing, or you can do it yourself for about 1/3 that and a bit of legwork. Incorporating an LLC is ~$49 in California, and again at about 3X that, ~$149 with the Federal EID and a paperwork kit through a broker like IncFile.
This takes going through a bit of a chain of events, but it's pretty clear that it was Intel's management of the people and the engineering constraints under which they operated, rather than the inability of the engineers themselves not being up to the task:
P.A. Semi team at Apple tasked with creation of fast, power efficient ARM processors: PP2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi#Acquisition_by_Apple...as I said: before, it's probably be a match made in hell for both companies. Intel demonstrably does not currently have the necessary management skills to deal with the problem of power consumption/performance ratio, and has little incentive to actually chase that market down, since it would cannibalize their high end performance market, given that electrical power costs continue to Enron upward.
It might be possible for Intel to incorporate a wholly owned subsidiary to try and keep things at arms length, but it's pretty clear that the tablet market and smart phone market are driving adoption of low power consumption/performance ratio processors pretty strongly, and things like the Motorola Atrix and ASUS Transformer are starting to target the desktop market, as well.
It's only a matter of time before Broadcom documents the GPU in the chip used in the Raspberry Pi, or someone else does something similar, and the desktop stranglehold on GPU accelerated graphics will be blown away to the point that Intel putting under-powered GPUs in their low end chips to avoid caniibalizing the market for their high end chips will completely blow them out of the low end of the market altogether.
The only reason Intel might be able to make some (short term) inroads into the smart phone market would be carrier subsidy of the handset price. This is something that's not happening in the tablet space, and so they won't get the same foothold there. As the tablet market continues to heat up with a slope much steeper than the smart phone adoption rate of anyone other than the earlier iPhone models, they aren't going to be able to rely on subsidy.
Intel could perhaps launch a "game changer" by cutting out the cellular service providers entirely, and killing the monthly billing that permits the handset subsidy in the first place (a quick way would be to deploy mesh networking with last-hop access to WiFi to undercut 3G/4G), but that is unlike Intel to be that forward thinking (e.g. you can still boot DOS 1.0 on their most recent processors, and that's limited their technology vector considerably). And doing so would vastly undercut the market for carrier subsidized handsets, which is precisely Nokia's market.
And then we are back to it being a match made in hell for both companies.
It's very similar to the early days of electrical distribution; when it became very clear that AC had won, you wouldn't go out and invest lots of money into companies producing DC generating equipment.
The article suggests that they step away from a Qualcomm Snapdragon based phone and move to Intel processors; but if they did so, they'd still need an ARM-based system to run the SDR on to get network connectivity, and they'd still pay the $35/device Qualcomm tax in any event to get CDMA connectivity for the U.S. Verizon/Sprint market. So a move to Intel does nothing but raise their price and their power consumption.
On the other side of the coin, Intel pretty much shot itself in the head when it comes to the mobile phone market when they sold StrongARM off to Marvell in 2006, before they had anything that could compete with it in terms of power consumption/performance ratio. Buying back into ARM now isn't going to help them in this regard.
All in all, it'd probably be a match made in hell for both companies.
So what he's really complaining about is the bad integration of his back end systems, since the user would have to be logged into the service in order to request help from the service in the first place.
This is just like calling up the phone company, and having them ask for your phone number "for verification", even though you've obviously called them from the number in question, and it should be on the monitor in front of them, if their ANI system and their billing system and their customer support systems had actually been designed to be integrated by anyone with half a clue.
One of the persons suspended by Google has an "unusual name". She didn't say what.... maybe Blossom or Flower or something. In any case she pointed-out the name on G+ is the same as the name on her credit card (which she registered to make paymentws), but that's not good enough for the Microsoft... Apple... ooops, I mean Google fuckup corporation. It deserves to be boycotted.
The name on the credit card is a vanity plate. The thing that matters is the credit card number + security code. The name is, if anything, decorative, although it's sometimes used by diligent companies to cross-check order name, delivery location, and so on. Most companies are not that diligent.
I'm going to guess there are a lot of people with common names who have the same name on their credit card, but that doesn't mean that they'd all get the same "John Smith" Google+ account; some of them would have to live with "John Smith in Ottumwa" or something like that to make the account identifier unique.
If I were other countries, I'd ask myself why any one country should be "in charge" of things like DNS.
If I were a computer scientist, I'd ask myself what kind of computer scientist doesn't know that the DNS system is a hierarchical database.
Next, I'd ask myself what kind of computer scientist doesn't understand that "hierarchical databases" are by their nature "hierarchical".
Then I'd ask myself what kind of computer scientist, who doesn't know the top level DNS server is actually named ".", not ".com", and has records for other servers named ".com", ".org", ".us", ".uk", and so on, is qualified to discuss necessary locking arbitration on creating new entries in the flat namespace of particular server for a node embedded in that hierarchy.
Then I'd ask myself how that computer scientist graduated university, since without at least a gross understanding of hierarchy, they would likely be unable to find the locations of books in the university library, which is also organized as a hierarchical database.
Get a [mydomainname].co.[ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code] domain instead.
Perhaps what you are bitching about is that when you type "foo" into some browsers, the search order ends up being "foo.", then "www." + foo." + "com"?
So use a browser where the address bar is actually an omnibar, and the search order is "foo.", then "[preferred search engine]?" + "foo".
The most common one I've seen mentioned is reverse pumping of water for hydroelectric systems, and store it as a gravity gradient.
There are also compressed air storage systems, such as the recent salt-dome one recently announced for Texas (not a real project until they break ground, IMO).
But you're right, you hit a wall at a pretty low capacity/usage ratio.
Sorry, but getting a fix into a stable source tree, and getting it installed on systems are two very different things. Chrome OS does a pretty decent job of this, but unless you are talking about a commercially backed Open Source OS distribution with automatic updates, most systems sit there with vulnerable software for years before they are updated/reinstalled/retired.
This is exactly the same as the situation in the closed source community.
It's because of badly written shaders. The article describes a contrived test case where everything is carefully and correctly written, unlike most code out there.
Specifically, when translating a shader from GL to DirectX to run GL on Windows through the compatibility layer, if the shader can't be demonstrated in a short time to be able to run in bounded time, it gets discarded.
Chrome does this same thing on Windows for WebGL code. Google hired a company to write the code, liked the result, and bought the company afterwards to acquire the talent.
When you send the GL pipeline directly to the hardware, as in Linux and Mac OS X, a badly written shader means you crash the OS at worst, crash the DirectX 10 capable video card at next best (DirectX 10 made it a requirement that the card be capable of being reset via software, which wasn't common until it was required), or it just takes unbounded time to run, which means it looks exactly the same as a hang.
I've suggested several times now that the DirectX check in Chrome be run on Lnon-Windows platforms as well, and that the shaders be discarded before being sent to the Linx/Mac OS X hardware if they can't be translated to run under the DirectX model. This would preemptively protect the hardware from bad GL code being pulled down from the net and/or from trying to run at all.
Until either the shader model changes in OpenGL, or there is universally applied software filtering to protect the hardware from the bad code that it should be capable of protecting itself from, OpenGL is not going to revolutionize gaming.
It's spelled "smart meters", which allow the payment of differential rates for electricity from the grid vs. electricity to the grid. In California, it's already the case that if you generate more electricity than you consume, you don't get paid for it.
One of the reason smart meters are getting installed everywhere is that the power companies are running scared of owning a bunch of wires they have to maintain, and ending up with a net zero profit due to local generating capacity, like wind and solar.
Without the government subsidies, and as some posters have said, a willingness to consider it a long term investment by being able/happy to live in one spot for decades, it's a net loss.
I'd like to say that this would not have happened with an open source driver, but that's not necessarily true. It would almost definitely have been patched by now though.
Sure, it's be patched, and you could probably apply the patch locally, but it wouldn't be in the official repository yet. And then you get to wait for the review process, where someone tells you how they would have done it differently, if they only had the time or the interest, but since you didn't do it that way, you need to rewrite your patch. This is pretty much true of most Open Source communities, which tend not to take rough consensus and working code, and then clean up the cosmetic stuff later.
Then you get to wait for it to move from "development" to "beta" to "stable" before it actually makes it into an official release version. In most Open Source communities, this whole thing can take months.
In general, I'd have to say Open Source doesn't win over closed in this case, and I say that as a long time Open Source person.
Perhaps it was something along the lines of "That product is too similar because they are litigious assholes; they will go after anyone who manufactures anything that is vaguely parallelepiped shaped whose corners won't poke your eye out".
When you start using the machine 10 years ago, make sure all your personaly stuff is in a separate partition/directory so that it's easily detachable from the stuff owned by the company. Delete that directory before leaving, letting them keep everything they own because it's work product from a work for hire agreement (explicit or otherwise). Leave with them happy and with you happy.
The point of a dongle is physical separation. A push button would let someone left alone with the computer for a few seconds install malware that looks sufficiently like the default system that there is little likelihood of the user noticing.
So for example, you could have a nominally secure OS, like Chrome OS, where it's hard to get a key logger onto it because of the way the TPM is used, and you could install a fake version of the OS that has a built in keylogger which looks and acts sufficiently like the OS that's supposed to be there that the user can't tell the difference.
If you go the push button route, you need to combine it with a mandatory wait interval (on Chrome OS, it's 5 minutes, if you switch the developer switch), on the theory that someone who is not trusted won't be left alone with a machine for longer than 5 minutes, and then this is combined with a user safety screen which beeps and makes you explicitly use the keyboard to get around it and./or wait 30 seconds on each boot to notify you that the push button has been used.
This still isn't great, since if you are left for 5 minutes + 8 seconds with an already booted device, you can get it compromised and rebooted in about 5 minutes and 17 seconds. The binary option, using the dongle, closes that race window entirely.
It's the number one reason random people want Java on things. Their approach of compiling to native code, however, won't work with Minecraft without violating the Minecraft licensing agreement.
You ship the TPM with a per-TPM public key in it, and a USB dongle with a certificate on it signed with the per-TPM secret key for the per-TPM public key, and then you require the presence of the dongle to intermediate the installation of the OS of your choice onto the machine. You allow installation of other public keys signed with the private key, and you have another public key and separate private key to permit per-device self-signing of whatever code you want, but only on a per-device basis.
Then you have your BIOS/EFI/UEFI/Coreboot/u-boot refuse to do anything other than go into "install mode" if the dongle is inserted so that the dongle will be removed after installation for normal operation so that it can't be abused by malware.
After that, all vendors are responsible for securing their own OS past the point of it being loaded into memory.
First, learning is not an industrial process. In the papers cited, all students were expected to operate in economically impractical small peer groups, and all students were expected to master the subject at hand.
This presumption of equality of educability is simply wrong, except at the lowest levels of education, where it's reasonable to expect students to have a relatively equal lack of exposure and therefore be at the same relative point in a given curriculum. This speaks to my earlier point of non-divergence of educational level being of great benefit to the teacher, but not such great benefit to the advanced (or potentially advanced, but thwarted) student.
The small group assumption here is not statistically significant in the three major studies cited by the first paper you linked to; in reality, despite having one of the smallest class sizes in the U.S., California tests near the bottom of the nation. In SAT scores, California scores in around #40 (if we include DC and Puerto Rico separately), while Utah, with twice the number of students per class and half as much spending per student (indeed, it's 48th in the nation), scores in around #19.
Lest you complain about teaching to the test, the first, 3rd, and 4th article you linked specifically reference standardized testing results as justification for their educational theories.
If you're going to be ignorant, that's great, but don't group all learning and educators into one group because of your own bias. Do you know the real reason that "it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion"? Because the P.E. teacher is a trained professional, believe it or not. S/he understands the basics of education and the fundamentals of teaching. This means that if the History teacher makes good lesson plans, prepares well, and does what s/he is supposed to do, then YES, there can be cross-discipline teaching in the short term.
I have to call B.S. on this. While a trained educator, the P.E. teacher in my high school was neither sufficiently skilled to teach my A.P Math class, nor was he sufficiently skilled to teach my A.P. History class, both of which he was asked to substitute in, more as adult supervision than as someone with relevant knowledge of the subject matter which he could impart to the students. Nor would he have been able to teach my A.P. Chemistry class, my A.P. English class, nor my A.P. Art class. Nor A.P. Biology nor A.P. Physics.
Understanding teaching is not good enough for advanced students; neither is teaching to a lesson plan while being unable to answer questions on the subject matter. Otherwise we might as well just replace the entire teaching staff with SRA booklets as soon as we get a kid up to the 4th grade reading level.
Does it work that way all the time? Nope. But, can you tell me that you g
The problem was not the design by GE-Hitachi (foreigners are not allowed to own businesses in Japan), it was installation without appropriate siting. One of the reactors original designers, Yukiteru Naka, wanted to resite the diesel generators and batteries, but TEPCO would have none of it, See this Japan Times article from a little over a year ago:
The article also pretty clearly indicates that Toshiba, who manufactured the plants, also had misgivings, since all BWR's in the US were sited on rivers, rather than on the ocean.
I'd point out that due to the tech bubble, we have almost a decade worth of college drop-outs who took one or two years of courses before being hired to be a warm body in a cubicle at a startup that ended up failing because it turns out that you can't make up a negative cash flow through increased volume. So we have tons of people in the U.S. who have the title and not much education beyond high school, and never went back to get the remainder of their education.
I'd also say that the average Alok and Ananya with a high school degree in India are probably better educated than the average Jacob and Sophia in the United States, given that India never bought into the whole "new math" and "outcome based education" that's poisoned the well in the U.S..
If all teachers were paid more then more people would go into teaching. With more available labor to choose from, schools would be able to make better hires rather than just hire who's available.
Now who's spouting bumper-sticker logic?
The inevitable result of more people wanting to go into teaching is additional certification requirements for teachers so as to keep the labor pool the same size, otherwise the per-teacher salary would go down when the supply of teachers increased relative to the demand curve.
I personally know a PhD in physics who is a college professor, and a PhD in history who is an author, and they both found out that they were "unqualified" to teach middle school science and history, respectively.
Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
I think that happened about the same time as the career ladder for teachers was redefined so that "up the ladder" meant moving from teaching into administration, coupled with the huge amount of money that should be going to teachers, schools, and school supplies going to the administrators instead, while the whole system becomes more and more administration top-heavy.
A friend of mine is seriously considering starting a non-profit for the schools which "can not even afford minimal school supplies" in order to shame the state into getting rid of one administrator per school, which would be enough to keep every student supplied with pencils, paper, crayons, rulers, and so on for the entire year. I keep telling her that they have no shame, so it's probably not going to work.
I've had no problem with it, although it can be an issue with large purchases requiring other identification (for example buying a car with the intent of immediately paying it off in order to get air miles).
I also know plenty of Roberts with "Bob" on their credit cards, and other people whose short form of their name or alternate form bearls little resemblance (e.g. "Jack" for "John", "Kit" or "Kitty" for "Katherine", "Johnny" for "Giovanni", "Molly" for "Mary", "Dick" or "Rick" for "Richard", "Hank" for "Henry", "Peggy" for Margaret", "Ted" for "Edward" or "Theodore", "Sally" for "Sarah", etc.).
Worst case, if they won't let you have your nickname, you can get an FBN/DBA (Fictitious Business Name/Doing Business As) name. This will work for all the major card providers except Amex, which requires at least an LLC. Filing costs depend on where you are located, but $132 for everything including the 4 week publication, is a common fee from a broker like Signature Filing, or you can do it yourself for about 1/3 that and a bit of legwork. Incorporating an LLC is ~$49 in California, and again at about 3X that, ~$149 with the Federal EID and a paperwork kit through a broker like IncFile.
Our population just topped 7 billion; if you ask me, there is already too much meat.
This takes going through a bit of a chain of events, but it's pretty clear that it was Intel's management of the people and the engineering constraints under which they operated, rather than the inability of the engineers themselves not being up to the task:
StrongARM was sold by DEC to Intel:
PP3: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM#History
Former StrongARM engineers quit Intel for SiByte:
PP4: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM#History
Broadcom acquires SiByte December 2000:
Row 17: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcom#Acquisitions
Founder of SiByte leaves Broadcomm to found P.A. Semi:
PP6: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_W._Dobberpuhl
P.A. Semi makes fast, power efficient Power Architecture processors (PWRficient):
PP1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi#History
P.A. Semi acquired by Apple in April 2008:
PP1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi#Acquisition_by_Apple
P.A. Semi team at Apple tasked with creation of fast, power efficient ARM processors: ...as I said: before, it's probably be a match made in hell for both companies. Intel demonstrably does not currently have the necessary management skills to deal with the problem of power consumption/performance ratio, and has little incentive to actually chase that market down, since it would cannibalize their high end performance market, given that electrical power costs continue to Enron upward.
PP2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi#Acquisition_by_Apple
It might be possible for Intel to incorporate a wholly owned subsidiary to try and keep things at arms length, but it's pretty clear that the tablet market and smart phone market are driving adoption of low power consumption/performance ratio processors pretty strongly, and things like the Motorola Atrix and ASUS Transformer are starting to target the desktop market, as well.
It's only a matter of time before Broadcom documents the GPU in the chip used in the Raspberry Pi, or someone else does something similar, and the desktop stranglehold on GPU accelerated graphics will be blown away to the point that Intel putting under-powered GPUs in their low end chips to avoid caniibalizing the market for their high end chips will completely blow them out of the low end of the market altogether.
The only reason Intel might be able to make some (short term) inroads into the smart phone market would be carrier subsidy of the handset price. This is something that's not happening in the tablet space, and so they won't get the same foothold there. As the tablet market continues to heat up with a slope much steeper than the smart phone adoption rate of anyone other than the earlier iPhone models, they aren't going to be able to rely on subsidy.
Intel could perhaps launch a "game changer" by cutting out the cellular service providers entirely, and killing the monthly billing that permits the handset subsidy in the first place (a quick way would be to deploy mesh networking with last-hop access to WiFi to undercut 3G/4G), but that is unlike Intel to be that forward thinking (e.g. you can still boot DOS 1.0 on their most recent processors, and that's limited their technology vector considerably). And doing so would vastly undercut the market for carrier subsidized handsets, which is precisely Nokia's market.
And then we are back to it being a match made in hell for both companies.
It's very similar to the early days of electrical distribution; when it became very clear that AC had won, you wouldn't go out and invest lots of money into companies producing DC generating equipment.
The article suggests that they step away from a Qualcomm Snapdragon based phone and move to Intel processors; but if they did so, they'd still need an ARM-based system to run the SDR on to get network connectivity, and they'd still pay the $35/device Qualcomm tax in any event to get CDMA connectivity for the U.S. Verizon/Sprint market. So a move to Intel does nothing but raise their price and their power consumption.
On the other side of the coin, Intel pretty much shot itself in the head when it comes to the mobile phone market when they sold StrongARM off to Marvell in 2006, before they had anything that could compete with it in terms of power consumption/performance ratio. Buying back into ARM now isn't going to help them in this regard.
All in all, it'd probably be a match made in hell for both companies.
So what he's really complaining about is the bad integration of his back end systems, since the user would have to be logged into the service in order to request help from the service in the first place.
This is just like calling up the phone company, and having them ask for your phone number "for verification", even though you've obviously called them from the number in question, and it should be on the monitor in front of them, if their ANI system and their billing system and their customer support systems had actually been designed to be integrated by anyone with half a clue.
One of the persons suspended by Google has an "unusual name". She didn't say what.... maybe Blossom or Flower or something. In any case she pointed-out the name on G+ is the same as the name on her credit card (which she registered to make paymentws), but that's not good enough for the Microsoft... Apple... ooops, I mean Google fuckup corporation. It deserves to be boycotted.
The name on the credit card is a vanity plate. The thing that matters is the credit card number + security code. The name is, if anything, decorative, although it's sometimes used by diligent companies to cross-check order name, delivery location, and so on. Most companies are not that diligent.
I'm going to guess there are a lot of people with common names who have the same name on their credit card, but that doesn't mean that they'd all get the same "John Smith" Google+ account; some of them would have to live with "John Smith in Ottumwa" or something like that to make the account identifier unique.
If I were other countries, I'd ask myself why any one country should be "in charge" of things like DNS.
If I were a computer scientist, I'd ask myself what kind of computer scientist doesn't know that the DNS system is a hierarchical database.
Next, I'd ask myself what kind of computer scientist doesn't understand that "hierarchical databases" are by their nature "hierarchical".
Then I'd ask myself what kind of computer scientist, who doesn't know the top level DNS server is actually named ".", not ".com", and has records for other servers named ".com", ".org", ".us", ".uk", and so on, is qualified to discuss necessary locking arbitration on creating new entries in the flat namespace of particular server for a node embedded in that hierarchy.
Then I'd ask myself how that computer scientist graduated university, since without at least a gross understanding of hierarchy, they would likely be unable to find the locations of books in the university library, which is also organized as a hierarchical database.
Oh wait, I am a computer scientist.
How much does the US owe the UN?
It depends... how much did the US borrow from the UN in the first place?
Get a [mydomainname].co.[ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code] domain instead.
Perhaps what you are bitching about is that when you type "foo" into some browsers, the search order ends up being "foo.", then "www." + foo." + "com"?
So use a browser where the address bar is actually an omnibar, and the search order is "foo.", then "[preferred search engine]?" + "foo".
I suggest Chrome.
Half the country has been unable to recharge their Blackberries for two days in a row anyway.
The most common one I've seen mentioned is reverse pumping of water for hydroelectric systems, and store it as a gravity gradient.
There are also compressed air storage systems, such as the recent salt-dome one recently announced for Texas (not a real project until they break ground, IMO).
But you're right, you hit a wall at a pretty low capacity/usage ratio.
Sorry, but getting a fix into a stable source tree, and getting it installed on systems are two very different things. Chrome OS does a pretty decent job of this, but unless you are talking about a commercially backed Open Source OS distribution with automatic updates, most systems sit there with vulnerable software for years before they are updated/reinstalled/retired.
This is exactly the same as the situation in the closed source community.
It's because of badly written shaders. The article describes a contrived test case where everything is carefully and correctly written, unlike most code out there.
Specifically, when translating a shader from GL to DirectX to run GL on Windows through the compatibility layer, if the shader can't be demonstrated in a short time to be able to run in bounded time, it gets discarded.
Chrome does this same thing on Windows for WebGL code. Google hired a company to write the code, liked the result, and bought the company afterwards to acquire the talent.
When you send the GL pipeline directly to the hardware, as in Linux and Mac OS X, a badly written shader means you crash the OS at worst, crash the DirectX 10 capable video card at next best (DirectX 10 made it a requirement that the card be capable of being reset via software, which wasn't common until it was required), or it just takes unbounded time to run, which means it looks exactly the same as a hang.
I've suggested several times now that the DirectX check in Chrome be run on Lnon-Windows platforms as well, and that the shaders be discarded before being sent to the Linx/Mac OS X hardware if they can't be translated to run under the DirectX model. This would preemptively protect the hardware from bad GL code being pulled down from the net and/or from trying to run at all.
Until either the shader model changes in OpenGL, or there is universally applied software filtering to protect the hardware from the bad code that it should be capable of protecting itself from, OpenGL is not going to revolutionize gaming.
It's spelled "smart meters", which allow the payment of differential rates for electricity from the grid vs. electricity to the grid. In California, it's already the case that if you generate more electricity than you consume, you don't get paid for it.
One of the reason smart meters are getting installed everywhere is that the power companies are running scared of owning a bunch of wires they have to maintain, and ending up with a net zero profit due to local generating capacity, like wind and solar.
Without the government subsidies, and as some posters have said, a willingness to consider it a long term investment by being able/happy to live in one spot for decades, it's a net loss.
I'd like to say that this would not have happened with an open source driver, but that's not necessarily true. It would almost definitely have been patched by now though.
Sure, it's be patched, and you could probably apply the patch locally, but it wouldn't be in the official repository yet. And then you get to wait for the review process, where someone tells you how they would have done it differently, if they only had the time or the interest, but since you didn't do it that way, you need to rewrite your patch. This is pretty much true of most Open Source communities, which tend not to take rough consensus and working code, and then clean up the cosmetic stuff later.
Then you get to wait for it to move from "development" to "beta" to "stable" before it actually makes it into an official release version. In most Open Source communities, this whole thing can take months.
In general, I'd have to say Open Source doesn't win over closed in this case, and I say that as a long time Open Source person.
Perhaps it was something along the lines of "That product is too similar because they are litigious assholes; they will go after anyone who manufactures anything that is vaguely parallelepiped shaped whose corners won't poke your eye out".
When you start using the machine 10 years ago, make sure all your personaly stuff is in a separate partition/directory so that it's easily detachable from the stuff owned by the company. Delete that directory before leaving, letting them keep everything they own because it's work product from a work for hire agreement (explicit or otherwise). Leave with them happy and with you happy.
The point of a dongle is physical separation. A push button would let someone left alone with the computer for a few seconds install malware that looks sufficiently like the default system that there is little likelihood of the user noticing.
So for example, you could have a nominally secure OS, like Chrome OS, where it's hard to get a key logger onto it because of the way the TPM is used, and you could install a fake version of the OS that has a built in keylogger which looks and acts sufficiently like the OS that's supposed to be there that the user can't tell the difference.
If you go the push button route, you need to combine it with a mandatory wait interval (on Chrome OS, it's 5 minutes, if you switch the developer switch), on the theory that someone who is not trusted won't be left alone with a machine for longer than 5 minutes, and then this is combined with a user safety screen which beeps and makes you explicitly use the keyboard to get around it and./or wait 30 seconds on each boot to notify you that the push button has been used.
This still isn't great, since if you are left for 5 minutes + 8 seconds with an already booted device, you can get it compromised and rebooted in about 5 minutes and 17 seconds. The binary option, using the dongle, closes that race window entirely.
It's the number one reason random people want Java on things. Their approach of compiling to native code, however, won't work with Minecraft without violating the Minecraft licensing agreement.
You ship the TPM with a per-TPM public key in it, and a USB dongle with a certificate on it signed with the per-TPM secret key for the per-TPM public key, and then you require the presence of the dongle to intermediate the installation of the OS of your choice onto the machine. You allow installation of other public keys signed with the private key, and you have another public key and separate private key to permit per-device self-signing of whatever code you want, but only on a per-device basis.
Then you have your BIOS/EFI/UEFI/Coreboot/u-boot refuse to do anything other than go into "install mode" if the dongle is inserted so that the dongle will be removed after installation for normal operation so that it can't be abused by malware.
After that, all vendors are responsible for securing their own OS past the point of it being loaded into memory.
In my experience in education, that's a horrible spin on peer-learning. Methinks you had a poor experience.
Used correctly, peer learning is not only beneficial, but can improve grades in math for all students, can improve self-esteem and self-efficacy in young girls in math and science, and is considered one of the better cost-to-benefit options available.
Again, though, that's done correctly.
First, learning is not an industrial process. In the papers cited, all students were expected to operate in economically impractical small peer groups, and all students were expected to master the subject at hand.
This presumption of equality of educability is simply wrong, except at the lowest levels of education, where it's reasonable to expect students to have a relatively equal lack of exposure and therefore be at the same relative point in a given curriculum. This speaks to my earlier point of non-divergence of educational level being of great benefit to the teacher, but not such great benefit to the advanced (or potentially advanced, but thwarted) student.
The small group assumption here is not statistically significant in the three major studies cited by the first paper you linked to; in reality, despite having one of the smallest class sizes in the U.S., California tests near the bottom of the nation. In SAT scores, California scores in around #40 (if we include DC and Puerto Rico separately), while Utah, with twice the number of students per class and half as much spending per student (indeed, it's 48th in the nation), scores in around #19.
Lest you complain about teaching to the test, the first, 3rd, and 4th article you linked specifically reference standardized testing results as justification for their educational theories.
If you're going to be ignorant, that's great, but don't group all learning and educators into one group because of your own bias. Do you know the real reason that "it's possible for the P.E. teacher to substitute for the History teacher on occasion"? Because the P.E. teacher is a trained professional, believe it or not. S/he understands the basics of education and the fundamentals of teaching. This means that if the History teacher makes good lesson plans, prepares well, and does what s/he is supposed to do, then YES, there can be cross-discipline teaching in the short term.
I have to call B.S. on this. While a trained educator, the P.E. teacher in my high school was neither sufficiently skilled to teach my A.P Math class, nor was he sufficiently skilled to teach my A.P. History class, both of which he was asked to substitute in, more as adult supervision than as someone with relevant knowledge of the subject matter which he could impart to the students. Nor would he have been able to teach my A.P. Chemistry class, my A.P. English class, nor my A.P. Art class. Nor A.P. Biology nor A.P. Physics.
Understanding teaching is not good enough for advanced students; neither is teaching to a lesson plan while being unable to answer questions on the subject matter. Otherwise we might as well just replace the entire teaching staff with SRA booklets as soon as we get a kid up to the 4th grade reading level.
Does it work that way all the time? Nope. But, can you tell me that you g
See:
http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/book/chapter9.html ...specifically the sections on "Regulatory Ratcheting" and "Regulatory Turbulence".
The problem was not the design by GE-Hitachi (foreigners are not allowed to own businesses in Japan), it was installation without appropriate siting. One of the reactors original designers, Yukiteru Naka, wanted to resite the diesel generators and batteries, but TEPCO would have none of it, See this Japan Times article from a little over a year ago:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn20110714a2.html
The article also pretty clearly indicates that Toshiba, who manufactured the plants, also had misgivings, since all BWR's in the US were sited on rivers, rather than on the ocean.
I'd point out that due to the tech bubble, we have almost a decade worth of college drop-outs who took one or two years of courses before being hired to be a warm body in a cubicle at a startup that ended up failing because it turns out that you can't make up a negative cash flow through increased volume. So we have tons of people in the U.S. who have the title and not much education beyond high school, and never went back to get the remainder of their education.
I'd also say that the average Alok and Ananya with a high school degree in India are probably better educated than the average Jacob and Sophia in the United States, given that India never bought into the whole "new math" and "outcome based education" that's poisoned the well in the U.S..
If all teachers were paid more then more people would go into teaching. With more available labor to choose from, schools would be able to make better hires rather than just hire who's available.
Now who's spouting bumper-sticker logic?
The inevitable result of more people wanting to go into teaching is additional certification requirements for teachers so as to keep the labor pool the same size, otherwise the per-teacher salary would go down when the supply of teachers increased relative to the demand curve.
I personally know a PhD in physics who is a college professor, and a PhD in history who is an author, and they both found out that they were "unqualified" to teach middle school science and history, respectively.
Yeah, because holy shit that teacher pay rate is out of control.
Seriously, since when did the abysmally low rate of pay teachers receive become a point of contention?
I think that happened about the same time as the career ladder for teachers was redefined so that "up the ladder" meant moving from teaching into administration, coupled with the huge amount of money that should be going to teachers, schools, and school supplies going to the administrators instead, while the whole system becomes more and more administration top-heavy.
A friend of mine is seriously considering starting a non-profit for the schools which "can not even afford minimal school supplies" in order to shame the state into getting rid of one administrator per school, which would be enough to keep every student supplied with pencils, paper, crayons, rulers, and so on for the entire year. I keep telling her that they have no shame, so it's probably not going to work.