Here's another basic fallacy of his analysis: it's true that on an "impossible" test, everybody would just be guessing and therefore equal. But it's equally true that a test which is too easy fails to discriminate between people because everybody gets near 100%. So obviously there is a sweet spot. The questions should all be in the range of what some (and only some) students will know, spanning the range from what most will know to what very few will know. A "hard" test (on which the average person only gets, say, 60%) can certainly be in that range.
I love this part: "The contents of a "typical" woman's handbag, including 14 bobby pins, lipstick and a bottle of tranquilizers..." My how times have changed...
Basically, we're looking at the results of at least one generation (more likely two or three) of neglect by the federal government, the corporate sector, and our own education system.
Another way to look at it is, why was the US so dominant for the last 60 years in the first place? Maybe it's simple: the other industrialized nations were devastated by war. We were protected by geography, and made amazing sums of money supplying those wars and the reconstruction, and hand-picking brilliant refugees from all sides to live here. That peculiar set of circumstances will not last forever. Perhaps this is a return to normalcy, or rather to the next unpredictable episode of history where somebody else will take center stage.
Tell that to the Amiga guys and to AMD when they chose IPC over clock while the P4 was around. Both are very important.
Not equally important. The original 8086 ran at 4 mhz and had an average CPI (in actual use) of 12. The Core 2 has a theoretical maximum of 4 IPC. That's only a difference of at most 48 times (actually less, but I couldn't find benchmark IPC data for Core 2). Meanwhile MHz over the same time period has increased by a factor of greater than 500! Thus 90% of the difference is from good old MHz, not IPC. IPC is simply not going to increase to 40.
While many countries (e.g. China, India) may agree that CO2 is a bad thing for us to produce in massive quantities, they're also not interested in stopping
I think the main party not interested in stopping is ourselves. We still produce 4x the CO2 China does on a per-capita basis.
I already feel that my digital rebels have remarkably low noise sensors and give me better results that shooting Velvia 50 and scanning. Still I usually carry a tripod and shoot at virtually never shoot at high ISO so it doesn't really affect me.
Digital is already better than film, but the fact is, DSLR owners continue to pay good money for big, heavy lenses precisely to obtain more sensitivity, and vibration reduction to cope with longer-than-ideal shutter speeds.
Cameras aren't "good enough" until I can shoot fast action at high magnification in near dark with a compact camera. Then I will be happy.
3ghz in less space than a dime! Cool, but why can't they just extend outwards?
Because the speed of light is too slow. No, seriously. You wanna run at 3 GHz? Light only travels about 4 inches in a clock cycle. Of course, you also need to allow time for switching - a processor is mostly a big bunch of switches, and they take a little time to respond to turn on and off.
The real performance issue isn't clockspeed, it's instructions per second.
Bull. The fact is, the MHz "myth" is mostly true. The vast majority of improvement in processor speed over the past 30 years is due to clock rate, not IPC. The performance gains from other areas over the last 5 years have not kept pace with the rate of progress for the preceeding 25 years, not even close.
Intel needs to develop new processor technologies to significantly increase native performance rather than just adding more cores.
Figure out how to do that and you will be a rich man. The move to multi-core is a white flag of surrender in the battle against the laws of physics to make a faster processor, no doubt about it. The industry did not bite the bullet of parallelism by choice.
Currently, a measurement accuracy of one part in 10^7 is possible
Only 10^-7? For comparison, "cesium clocks measure frequency with an accuracy of from 2 to 3 parts in 10 to the 14th," and length is also measurable to within 10^-14. Even for waterborn pollution, "chemists today routinely detect parts per trillion." I don't have any solid reason to think mass should be measurable to the same precision, but 10^-7 is only one part in 10 million, it just doesn't seem that great.
The global economy is a competitive sport. Right now the US eats up vastly disproportionate quantities of the world's natural resources, and (right or wrong) we like it that way. The efficiency of our economy has a whole lot to do with telecommunications, and that gives us buying power.
The way that mobile phone industry works is the network provider is the only innovator.
Roughly, "we own the tubes, therefore we should be the ones to derive all the profit." And just think, the landline and cable TV companies want to run the Internet the same way! Perish the thought.
2GB will still be a fine size for camera memory cards 5 years from now. The mexapixel race has really slowed down, having achieved ample resolution for normal-sized viewing and also approaching physical limits for both sensors and lenses. And once you can store several hundred photos (even approximately 200 RAW files), that's plenty for most people most of the time.
I think there are bigger threats to this product: first, built-in wireless (be it WiFi, bluetooth, or wireless usb) will become standard and practically free; and second, a fixed-size built-in memory might become the norm as the price of the memory falls below what justifies modularity.
Considering that someone could easily have 1600 portfolios and make use of the law of averages in real life (if they've got the cash for it), I wouldn't think of it as cheating.
Uh, no. In real life you can't just run a bunch of high-risk portfolios and welch on all but the best one; when you lose you have to pay. Kraber's tactic does nothing to increase returns on average.
Or, more likely, your net losses + net gains would likely track a similar pattern to the index of the stock markets you invested in.
But that's true for the overall portfolio of Jim Kraber (MSNBC's accuser) as well. I'm not accusing him of cheating, I'm just saying it is a stupid game, essentially a lottery where you can have as many tickets as you wish - for free. In other words, nothing like the stock market. So even the guy complaining about others exploiting the game is exploiting the game. Apparently Kraber's tactic was within the rules -- but what about the winning strategy of placing orders early, then executing them only if the stock goes up? I doubt there was anything in the rules explicitly prohibiting people from awarding themselves stock options, because it wasn't anticipated.
On that level, maybe it's a pretty realistic game after all. Whoever's lawyers find the best loopholes, wins.
Manual tagging is useless, mainly because most people won't bother at all but also due to spamming, trolling, incompleteness, etc. That's one reason the "semantic web" will never happen.
Automated tagging, on the other hand, is coming along nicely. Time and location stamping are pretty obvious (and very helpful), but I think within just a few years the software to automatically, accurately retrieve photos of specific people and places will be common as well. Leaving all your photos in a big directory with names like IMG00427.JPG might not be such a problem after all.
Credit scores (which is what the above lines reference) are calculated by an algorithm, and they can be wrong. If they are, you can get the company to adjust them, provided that you can provide evidence that their input is faulty.
If, on the other hand, the credit rating company has all its facts right, but you don't like their algorithm and think you're still credit-worthy even though they don't? Well you're screwed. How to combine numbers is their prerogative. Think about how that applies to this case.
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Wow, is your new price for the 12 months of service?
Those are upgrades every user will appreciate. Battery life is obviously good, and remember all the furor over iPod Nano scratches?
Here's another basic fallacy of his analysis: it's true that on an "impossible" test, everybody would just be guessing and therefore equal. But it's equally true that a test which is too easy fails to discriminate between people because everybody gets near 100%. So obviously there is a sweet spot. The questions should all be in the range of what some (and only some) students will know, spanning the range from what most will know to what very few will know. A "hard" test (on which the average person only gets, say, 60%) can certainly be in that range.
It was the 50's, they should've used a big tupperware.
Cameras aren't "good enough" until I can shoot fast action at high magnification in near dark with a compact camera. Then I will be happy.
Of course it's not just natural resources. According to the head of the US Patent Office, intellectual property is the single largest sector of the U.S. economy. I have no doubt the Internet will be the #1 medium for intellectual property in the next century.
Instead, you first get 3 pages of "good press," like "Joe Brown is not serving time for beating his wife any more!"
I think there are bigger threats to this product: first, built-in wireless (be it WiFi, bluetooth, or wireless usb) will become standard and practically free; and second, a fixed-size built-in memory might become the norm as the price of the memory falls below what justifies modularity.
On that level, maybe it's a pretty realistic game after all. Whoever's lawyers find the best loopholes, wins.
Automated tagging, on the other hand, is coming along nicely. Time and location stamping are pretty obvious (and very helpful), but I think within just a few years the software to automatically, accurately retrieve photos of specific people and places will be common as well. Leaving all your photos in a big directory with names like IMG00427.JPG might not be such a problem after all.