The main problem, I think (admittedly, among others), is that unless you're doing an all-out, money-is-no-object sort of thing like the 60s moon race, major projects take more time than changes in political leadership are willing to stand still for. So NASA ends up dithering back and forth every 3-6 years with a new project: manned mission to mars, shuttle replacement, low-cost capsule system, probe-focused unmanned space exploration, etc. I mean, Constellation was only proposed in 2005, with bids chosen by 2006--- then reviewed for cancellation in 2009.
There's a quote that's often attributed to him along those lines, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" (and variants), but I can't find any good documentation that he actually said it, or where it might be from (it's only mentioned, as far as I can find, in poorly sourced quote collections, both online and in books).
There is a fictional scientist in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle who says something similar: "Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."
I think "thru" is unlikely to become standard more because it's a cultural marker (seems commercial and low-class) than because of any inherent problem with shortening words. We have no trouble adopting "lazy" forms of words when they don't have negative class associations; for example, nobody will complain if you shorten periwig to the once-colloquial wig in your writing, nor will anyone be offended if you shorten electronic mail to the cutesy slang email.
There's been a fairly consistent shift in professional communication towards at least compromising with the conversational vernacular. Formal writing used to entirely eschew personal pronouns, for example, nowadays most fields prefer "we" or "I" to the old and stuffy "one". The dogmatic opposition to contractions is also slowly dying out.
So it's a bit of a cheap shot, but I can't help but quoting this sentence from your post, which later on complained about grammar:
They have kept really shitty teachers teaching and keeping standards testing to be implemented for hiring and continued employment of teachers.
As for the substantive point, I think the lack of good teachers is a bigger problem than a surplus of bad ones. It isn't like there's a long line of great teachers who are unable to find jobs, sitting impatiently behind this mass of horrible teachers that the union won't let us fire. Teaching is simply not a profession that attracts the best minds, for a mixture of reasons that mostly involve its relatively low status, relatively low pay, and poor working conditions (K-12 education is as much babysitting as teaching).
In a long-run sense that's true, but depending on the technology, there can be long lead-times in starting up a competitor. If China comes to dominate the market so much that for a period of years nobody else is producing anything in quantity, then to suddenly switch to a non-Chinese supplier would take some years to ramp up the designs/expertise/factories. So it's possible to get into a situation where you're beholden to China for a number of years with no easy escape.
(Easier than conjuring oil from thin air, yes, but not easy as in, "we'll just buy from someone else tomorrow".)
They had a PC subsidiary, yeah: Micron Computers, from 1995 to 2001. They spun it off in 2001, and it continued under the name MPC until it went out of business in 2008.
It was never a huge part of their business, though. Micron's a large semiconductor company, and been a dominant player in memory chips for decades. The other stuff they've dabbled in --- consumer PCs, motherboards, briefly video cards, etc. --- seems never to have taken off.
Yeah, oddly, "to bring something to the table" is the same in US English. But "to table" something is the opposite--- to take it off the table, so to speak.
In UK governmental English, "to table" apparently means something like "to propose" or "to bring up for consideration", almost exactly the opposite of the U.S. meaning, which is "to withdraw from further consideration".
I guess there's some international disagreement over whether this mythical table is where you put things to be considered, or where you put things to die. Perhaps to Britons, putting things on a table is officially proposing them, whereas to Americans, if it's on the table it's inert, and if you want it proposed, you had better have it in your hand waving it in someone's face.
Yeah, that's why it doesn't seem quite analogous to me. There's no real practical downside to a B&W->Color switch. There is some artistic interest in B&W over color, but it's fairly niche. But 3d TV requires glasses, which 2d TV doesn't, a big practical difference. And I think the number of people who find 3d annoying / motion-sickness-inducing / etc. to watch, and prefer 2d even just aesthetically, will be greater than the number who prefer b&w over color.
[A] broad range of fairly mature 3-D equipment is already on the market. The available systems, however, suffer from the drawback that users have to wear special devices to separate the left eye's and right eye's images. Such "aided viewing" systems have been firmly established in many professional applications. Yet further expansion to other fields will require "free viewing" systems with improved viewing comfort and closer adaptation to the mechanisms of binocular vision. The respective technologies are still under development.
...which is pretty much the state of technology in 2010 as well.
Even if it did, the supply would simply drop to the level of demand.
Indeed, and if that demand is less than the available terrestrial sources, space-mining would go out of business entirely, and therefore be a complete bust.
Sure it can: if people stop wanting it, the price can drop quite low, as gluts of the stuff languish unsold and people are unable to unload it. There is no guarantee prices would rise back up again if demand never recovers.
In gold's particular case, if the perception ever becomes that gold is not a rare, hard-to-acquire metal, its price will collapse and not recover, because it doesn't really have that much intrinsic value.
That's not strictly true: a lot of the value of precious metals, especially gold, is simply derived from the fact that they're rare, and thus seen as a store of value. If some major change happens that causes people to no longer perceive gold as rare (for example, we discover huge piles of the stuff elsewhere and a practical way of transporting it to earth), its price could fall precipitously as people stop considering it valuable, and all that's left are industrial uses.
I think there's a huge variance in culture of foreign-born folks, even if culturally-American is your main goal. I see a ton of foreign (mostly Asian) students in CS grad school, and they vary from barely able to communicate in English and no interest in American culture, to pretty comfortable and well-connected with their peers of all backgrounds. Time makes some difference: someone who came to the U.S. at 18 and went to an American university for 4 years is much more likely to be comfortable with the local culture than someone who moved to the U.S. after all their schooling was completed. What kind of family they came from matters also--- someone who grew up in a generally liberal, cosmopolitan environment will probably adapt better than someone from a more isolated, conservative background.
I do agree xenophobia is the biggest potential flashpoint. In particular, I have heard some... not very tactful... comments from immigrants about American blacks, the kinds of things that even racist rural white Mississippians would, in 2010, know you can't say in public. (This isn't specific to Asian immigrants--- I've also heard white European immigrants, especially from Russia or eastern Europe, say such things.)
Why would they need DNS modified for that? For users connecting to a Google service, which is what would be needed to measure the kind of stuff this patent talks about, they already have the IP address, because the user, well, connected to them.
By the phrasing "in built-in apps", it sounds like the tablet's hardware will support it, but the base Android apps, which currently don't support multitouch, won't be updated in time. That's basically the same situation as the Droid: hardware supports it, base Android apps don't, but some app-store apps do. Presumably some future revision of Android will update all the built-in apps to support multitouch (or at least those where it'd make sense).
Part of it is that CS theory tends to prove things that, while mathematically true, in practice often don't matter. For example, it's a running joke in AI that everything interesting is NP-complete. So we don't care about NP-completeness. What we want to avoid is AI-completeness: problems that, if you could solve them, would imply that you had Full Human-Level Intelligence. We want to solve bits of intelligence without having to solve all of it, but if it's NP-complete, who cares, because everything is. In fact, if you can reduce an AI problem to SAT, everyone's happen, because SAT is famously fast to solve (it's NP-complete, but almost always fast in practice).
Slashdot Mirror
The main problem, I think (admittedly, among others), is that unless you're doing an all-out, money-is-no-object sort of thing like the 60s moon race, major projects take more time than changes in political leadership are willing to stand still for. So NASA ends up dithering back and forth every 3-6 years with a new project: manned mission to mars, shuttle replacement, low-cost capsule system, probe-focused unmanned space exploration, etc. I mean, Constellation was only proposed in 2005, with bids chosen by 2006--- then reviewed for cancellation in 2009.
Are you sure that if it wasn't for NASA, we wouldn't ever have visited Earth?
There's a quote that's often attributed to him along those lines, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough" (and variants), but I can't find any good documentation that he actually said it, or where it might be from (it's only mentioned, as far as I can find, in poorly sourced quote collections, both online and in books).
There is a fictional scientist in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle who says something similar:
"Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan."
Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language echoes some similar sentiment.
I think "thru" is unlikely to become standard more because it's a cultural marker (seems commercial and low-class) than because of any inherent problem with shortening words. We have no trouble adopting "lazy" forms of words when they don't have negative class associations; for example, nobody will complain if you shorten periwig to the once-colloquial wig in your writing, nor will anyone be offended if you shorten electronic mail to the cutesy slang email.
There's been a fairly consistent shift in professional communication towards at least compromising with the conversational vernacular. Formal writing used to entirely eschew personal pronouns, for example, nowadays most fields prefer "we" or "I" to the old and stuffy "one". The dogmatic opposition to contractions is also slowly dying out.
As an academic, I would love to live in a world in which this were true!
So it's a bit of a cheap shot, but I can't help but quoting this sentence from your post, which later on complained about grammar:
As for the substantive point, I think the lack of good teachers is a bigger problem than a surplus of bad ones. It isn't like there's a long line of great teachers who are unable to find jobs, sitting impatiently behind this mass of horrible teachers that the union won't let us fire. Teaching is simply not a profession that attracts the best minds, for a mixture of reasons that mostly involve its relatively low status, relatively low pay, and poor working conditions (K-12 education is as much babysitting as teaching).
In a long-run sense that's true, but depending on the technology, there can be long lead-times in starting up a competitor. If China comes to dominate the market so much that for a period of years nobody else is producing anything in quantity, then to suddenly switch to a non-Chinese supplier would take some years to ramp up the designs/expertise/factories. So it's possible to get into a situation where you're beholden to China for a number of years with no easy escape.
(Easier than conjuring oil from thin air, yes, but not easy as in, "we'll just buy from someone else tomorrow".)
They had a PC subsidiary, yeah: Micron Computers, from 1995 to 2001. They spun it off in 2001, and it continued under the name MPC until it went out of business in 2008.
It was never a huge part of their business, though. Micron's a large semiconductor company, and been a dominant player in memory chips for decades. The other stuff they've dabbled in --- consumer PCs, motherboards, briefly video cards, etc. --- seems never to have taken off.
In addition to the comments here, you might find useful suggestions in this 2005 and this 2003 Slashdot discussion.
But it's part of the HTTP spec that you should be able to POST form data to any port.
Yeah, oddly, "to bring something to the table" is the same in US English. But "to table" something is the opposite--- to take it off the table, so to speak.
In UK governmental English, "to table" apparently means something like "to propose" or "to bring up for consideration", almost exactly the opposite of the U.S. meaning, which is "to withdraw from further consideration".
I guess there's some international disagreement over whether this mythical table is where you put things to be considered, or where you put things to die. Perhaps to Britons, putting things on a table is officially proposing them, whereas to Americans, if it's on the table it's inert, and if you want it proposed, you had better have it in your hand waving it in someone's face.
Yeah, that's why it doesn't seem quite analogous to me. There's no real practical downside to a B&W->Color switch. There is some artistic interest in B&W over color, but it's fairly niche. But 3d TV requires glasses, which 2d TV doesn't, a big practical difference. And I think the number of people who find 3d annoying / motion-sickness-inducing / etc. to watch, and prefer 2d even just aesthetically, will be greater than the number who prefer b&w over color.
Here's what a 1997 review article (from Displays 17(2):100-110) concluded:
Indeed, and if that demand is less than the available terrestrial sources, space-mining would go out of business entirely, and therefore be a complete bust.
Sure it can: if people stop wanting it, the price can drop quite low, as gluts of the stuff languish unsold and people are unable to unload it. There is no guarantee prices would rise back up again if demand never recovers.
In gold's particular case, if the perception ever becomes that gold is not a rare, hard-to-acquire metal, its price will collapse and not recover, because it doesn't really have that much intrinsic value.
That's not strictly true: a lot of the value of precious metals, especially gold, is simply derived from the fact that they're rare, and thus seen as a store of value. If some major change happens that causes people to no longer perceive gold as rare (for example, we discover huge piles of the stuff elsewhere and a practical way of transporting it to earth), its price could fall precipitously as people stop considering it valuable, and all that's left are industrial uses.
I lived in Atlanta for several years, and people like that at least wouldn't say things like that to me, even if they might've amongst themselves.
I think there's a huge variance in culture of foreign-born folks, even if culturally-American is your main goal. I see a ton of foreign (mostly Asian) students in CS grad school, and they vary from barely able to communicate in English and no interest in American culture, to pretty comfortable and well-connected with their peers of all backgrounds. Time makes some difference: someone who came to the U.S. at 18 and went to an American university for 4 years is much more likely to be comfortable with the local culture than someone who moved to the U.S. after all their schooling was completed. What kind of family they came from matters also--- someone who grew up in a generally liberal, cosmopolitan environment will probably adapt better than someone from a more isolated, conservative background.
I do agree xenophobia is the biggest potential flashpoint. In particular, I have heard some... not very tactful... comments from immigrants about American blacks, the kinds of things that even racist rural white Mississippians would, in 2010, know you can't say in public. (This isn't specific to Asian immigrants--- I've also heard white European immigrants, especially from Russia or eastern Europe, say such things.)
The XUL stuff might also run afoul of Apple's refusal to allow any apps that include scripting languages.
Why would they need DNS modified for that? For users connecting to a Google service, which is what would be needed to measure the kind of stuff this patent talks about, they already have the IP address, because the user, well, connected to them.
By the phrasing "in built-in apps", it sounds like the tablet's hardware will support it, but the base Android apps, which currently don't support multitouch, won't be updated in time. That's basically the same situation as the Droid: hardware supports it, base Android apps don't, but some app-store apps do. Presumably some future revision of Android will update all the built-in apps to support multitouch (or at least those where it'd make sense).
I see ads above the post and all down the left sidebar, as well.
Hah, that's "everyone's happy", of course.
Incidentally, this was the work that started the "reduce to SAT, because it's NP-complete and, btw, fast" trend.
Part of it is that CS theory tends to prove things that, while mathematically true, in practice often don't matter. For example, it's a running joke in AI that everything interesting is NP-complete. So we don't care about NP-completeness. What we want to avoid is AI-completeness: problems that, if you could solve them, would imply that you had Full Human-Level Intelligence. We want to solve bits of intelligence without having to solve all of it, but if it's NP-complete, who cares, because everything is. In fact, if you can reduce an AI problem to SAT, everyone's happen, because SAT is famously fast to solve (it's NP-complete, but almost always fast in practice).