Pshaw! The only true reliable source of information is the guy who appears on late night television with that goofy suit with $ signs all over it who talks about getting free money from the government.
It must work, look at how many politicians we have.
Compared to that guy, Wikipedia is still in diapers.
Or there will be a new form of organized crime that specializes in skimming off virtual money. The one real challenge will be in how you catch and prosecute such criminals since no nation has jurisdiction.
If the robotic teaching of basic skills becomes commonplace it will be at the expense of human interaction.
We already have too many people who are dysfunctional in society and lacking in the basic human skills of communications, emotions and compassion. I do not see this as much of an advancement, it is just a means of reducing the "human" component of our educational system.
Rote Teaching, No Child Left Behind
on
The Creativity Crisis
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Education in America today is focused almost exclusively on memorizing the tests that will be used to determine school performance. Little emphasis is placed upon creative thinking, deductive logic or expression.
It is no surprise that we are turning out "trained rats" who can perform a specific set of tasks to pass a test but do not have adequate skills to function in a society where creativity is the driving force for progress.
This is just great. Now that AT&T is limiting the full capabilities of the iPhone/ iPad with data restrictions you get to "pay" for the bandwidth to download useless iAds.
It is funny how the article complains on how the PepsiCo blog detracts from "legitimate blogs". So now we are casting blogs as a legitimate source of information? Probably 98% of blogs are personal opinions with no factual, scientific basis.
It would be like holding Wikipedia up as the definitive source of accurate information on everything and ignoring the genuine work of researchers and scientists.
I do not put much credence in anything posted in a blog. Most are merely entertaining, scandalous or based upon urban legends, rumor or innuendo.
What was not mentioned in the article is that some of this may be caused by the hotel staff. The folks who work the night shift are frequently underpaid and have a bunch of spare time to browse through the credit card numbers and transactions of the folks who have checked in that evening.
Hotels frequently have a bank of converters, each tuned to a different digital channel. The outputs of all of the converter boxes are put onto separate analog channels, multiplexed and fed through a distribution amplifier.
You would need a box for each channel you wish to receive. While this may work with a hotel where they own all of the premise wiring to the rooms it would be impractical for a widespread system across a city.
That offends me on many levels. She created the song for the Girl Guides and it was sung around campfires in Australia, NZ, UK and the US for decades. She never thought of applying for a copyright so she could collect royalties from every Girl Guides group. She then donated the song to the Libraries Board who in turn, sold the rights.
I would have less of an issue with this if the money was going to the Girl Guides to build camps (the original intent). Instead it has been hijacked by a money grubbing corporation as a means of stealing money from another money grubbing corporation.
Remind me after I die to not leave anything to a group who will in turn sell it like used pottery at a flea market.
In Soviet Russia you do not find the class action law suit, it finds YOU!
I am bombarded on a regular basis with class action lawsuit notices for products and services.
AT&T long distance Volkswagen leaky sunroof Computer memory Vonage this or that
Unless I feel that I have been injured in some way I refuse to respond to these baits. As has been stated elsewhere the money goes into the ambulance chasing lawyers pockets and very little flows down to the "injured parties".
I wonder, can we file a class action lawsuit against lawyers who file class action lawsuits??
We did something similar in our teen years while working at a recreation center with a soccer ball.
Having found a spare soccer ball and with one of those desktop mounted air pumps we would put an increasing amount of pressure into the soccer ball and then the guys would bounce the thing around the gym. This went in stages, a little more pressure, the guys would go back to kicking the ball around the building, then back for more air pressure...
After seven or eight of these cycles of increasing pressure in the soccer ball it took on a distinct metallic sound when bouncing. The soccer ball had about 115 PSI in it and the guys decided to kick it around the hallway that connected several of the rooms in the recreation center. I was watching the fun and one of the guys kicked the ball and it hit the edge of a table and was bouncing up and down on top of the table. From 25 feet away I could hear brittle cracking sounds coming from the ball... At the last instant I have the picture of one of the guys running away from the ball with a look of fear on his face. Right at that moment the ball exploded like a bomb.
The sound of the explosion just left my ears with a buzzy, ringing sound as the guys are laughing their asses off. Quickly they grabbed all of the soccer ball shrapnel and hid it right as the senior citizens group was pouring out of their meeting room. There were retirees who must have served in WW II who were looking for the 250 pound bomb crater or airplane crash, asking furious questions about where the bomb went off.
To their credit, the guys just looked quizzically at the senior citizens and said "what noise?".
Doing a post mortem on the soccer ball one of the sewn panels failed and ejected the air bladder from the ball. The soccer ball skin was turned inside out. There were tiny little shards of rubber ball liner everywhere.
Kids do stupid stuff. Outlaw CO2 (since it is a greenhouse gas and eeevil too). Adults will not stop the never-ending quest by kids for things that go BOOM!
Clearly the marketing department is the end-all, be-all decision makers in a product design at Apple. As an RF engineer (I am) I would not be jumping up and down to work for Apple. Antenna designs are always a compromise between aesthetics and performance.
I bet that the Apple phone worked just great in their corporate offices with an AT&T cell site right next door. The signal levels would be very high and you probably could have wrapped the phone in a 10 pound ham and the signal would have looked just great. I doubt that they did any real-world testing in a weak signal environment.
Much of the weak-signal specifications for any RF device are usually determined on a test bench or in an anechoic chamber where conditions are controlled. The ugly reality of someone's sweaty, meaty hand seldom makes it into the engineers lexicon.
The job titles for these folks should be "Fall Guy #1, Fall Guy #2 and Fall Guy #3.
To really rub China the wrong way Google should move all "Chinese" operations to Taiwan with a statement that google.cn will still be available in the one bastion of free Chinese, Taiwan.
Yes good old Stevie was claiming the problem was with the operators and demanded a modification of the UOS (user operating system).
Sorry dude but it will be a few years before you can implant all of that Apple hardware directly into our brains.
When I read his rather terse reply about "well, hold the phone differently" I was surprised. And this is from the company that made its riches by making hardware and software adapt to the users needs.
Now it's like "the hell with you, we are omnipresent and omnipotent, you will bow down and kiss my ass".
I had my sister on my T-Mobile account and she had purchased a new Android phone through the T-Mobile store. She died last year and it took me a few months to get around to calling T-Mobile to terminate the contract on her phone.
The T-Mobile customer service representative was very understanding and sympathetic and waived any disconnect penalties or outstanding balance on the phone purchase. She had even offered to see if she could backdate the service termination a few months. I told her that was not necessary as it was my own reticence to close the account (you know, the finality of death and wrapping up the details of someone's life).
Over the years little experiences like that with T-Mobile have made me a very loyal customer. It seems that someone still remembers how to treat their customers.
Using a cleaner burning fuel like natural gas would allow for generating facilities that capitalize on both the MHD effect and then the follow-on of traditionally 'boiling water to make steam" to drive a turbine.
By adding an MHD system to a conventional plant, energy efficiency can be increased by 50% over a conventional facility. As we do more work with near-room temperature superconductors the efficiency would increase.
Yep, right now you see natural gas electrical generation at peaking plants as they can come on-line very quickly.
For jump starting a conventional plant that would be called "black start capability" as most power plants do not have enough electrical generating capacity to bring the plant on-line. Natural gas powered plants and hydroelectric are also referred to as facilities that are "black start".
We will not burn up all of the natural gas deposits for centuries to come. There is much more methane (natural gas) in hydrates than in all of the possible traditional natural gas reservoirs worldwide.
If you have been watching the news regarding the oil well disaster down in the Gulf of Mexico they have problems with hydrates condense out of the expanding column of oil and gas that forms hydrate ice crystals and blocks up the stack. (remember basic physics about expansion and temperature).
Hydrate deposits could be exploited in a controlled manner with the modest introduction of heat into a deep deposit to liberate the gas. To stop a well from producing, remove the heat.
This is not even a very well veiled attempt to get any company that wants to do business in China to open up all of their source code and "hand the keys to the kingdom" to the Chinese government.
Ironically I bet there are companies that carry a big IP hammer to beat up the rest of the world with will be beating down the doors to become slavering lapdogs of China for a chance at the profits pie. Of course China will say "you companies just do not understand China so we need to repackage everything you do to fit our "culture"". What they are really meaning is that "Give us all of the stuff and we will let you play in our sandbox... until we can reverse engineer your application or system and stick a "Made in China" label on it. The we will give you the boot or make the conditions so impossible for you to do business you will run out with your tails between your legs".
Looking at the small sampling of fossils I find it hard to accept that they can draw so many conclusions.
Yes, you could definitely say that it is hominidae, most likely a Australopithecus but to infer that it is bipedal with a human-like gait is a stretch.
'pithecus was around for a few million years and a great deal of evolutionary changes were occurring over that span of time. In the late Pleistocene look at how much 'homo changed with the extinction of habilis, neanderthalensis, floresiensis and denisova. We only have the ability to look at a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the evolutionary diversity of the hominid family.
Quote: "Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation's homeland security chief said Friday."
She goes on to say that the TSA procedure to not retain copies of the pictures taken by airport scanners is "protecting our rights". If the argument is going to be made that not making copies is "good enough" let's ask Rolando Negrin, the TSA employee who was arrested and fired after beating the snot out of one of his co-workers for their cracks about the size of his genitals.
So, if someone only "publicly" derides your appearance, reading habits or porn preferences then your rights are violated. If the government gives unfettered access to the fine details of your private life to a select group it is a good thing?
The process is supposed to be based upon reasonable cause and suspicion. Evidence is to be presented to a judge who would issue a search warrant to give the government the temporary permission to snoop into the details of your private life to collect evidence of a crime. Homeland Security is quick to jump onto any opportunity to treat every American as a criminal "who just hasn't been caught yet".
I work in the AMI/ Smart Grid field and I am just finishing up a study on HAN devices for a municipality. This is the way to go, with a ZigBee enabled device to communicate with power monitoring adapters that all of your electrical loads plug into. If it also supported an internet LAN connection back up to the utility AMI MMS (meter management system) it could incorporate the latest billing rate information and any data collected from the AMI meter outside the house.
There are some solutions out there that are closed-proprietary but I believe that a standards-based solution is the right way to go. HAN needs to get to the point where you can go into your local home improvement store and buy devices that can associate to a central device. Right now the price-point is too high at around $100 a device and it can cost $300-$400 to equip a home with a IHD (in home dislay), programmable thermostat and a communications gateway.
I hope that Intel can apply pressure to the marketplace so this technology can become ubiquitous.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcom... Backed by the Greek treasury.
Pshaw! The only true reliable source of information is the guy who appears on late night television with that goofy suit with $ signs all over it who talks about getting free money from the government.
It must work, look at how many politicians we have.
Compared to that guy, Wikipedia is still in diapers.
Or there will be a new form of organized crime that specializes in skimming off virtual money. The one real challenge will be in how you catch and prosecute such criminals since no nation has jurisdiction.
I would like to see what sort of guarantees are in place for virtual currency
What a deal, the creators of Farmville and Mafia Wars, two games that would be a better fit for the early 90's.
There are some funny YouTube videos on both of those games.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odBDAcOEKuI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6kNjC50BzB0&feature=channel
If the robotic teaching of basic skills becomes commonplace it will be at the expense of human interaction.
We already have too many people who are dysfunctional in society and lacking in the basic human skills of communications, emotions and compassion. I do not see this as much of an advancement, it is just a means of reducing the "human" component of our educational system.
Education in America today is focused almost exclusively on memorizing the tests that will be used to determine school performance. Little emphasis is placed upon creative thinking, deductive logic or expression.
It is no surprise that we are turning out "trained rats" who can perform a specific set of tasks to pass a test but do not have adequate skills to function in a society where creativity is the driving force for progress.
This is just great. Now that AT&T is limiting the full capabilities of the iPhone/ iPad with data restrictions you get to "pay" for the bandwidth to download useless iAds.
They get you coming and going.
It is funny how the article complains on how the PepsiCo blog detracts from "legitimate blogs". So now we are casting blogs as a legitimate source of information? Probably 98% of blogs are personal opinions with no factual, scientific basis.
It would be like holding Wikipedia up as the definitive source of accurate information on everything and ignoring the genuine work of researchers and scientists.
I do not put much credence in anything posted in a blog. Most are merely entertaining, scandalous or based upon urban legends, rumor or innuendo.
What was not mentioned in the article is that some of this may be caused by the hotel staff. The folks who work the night shift are frequently underpaid and have a bunch of spare time to browse through the credit card numbers and transactions of the folks who have checked in that evening.
Hotels frequently have a bank of converters, each tuned to a different digital channel. The outputs of all of the converter boxes are put onto separate analog channels, multiplexed and fed through a distribution amplifier.
You would need a box for each channel you wish to receive. While this may work with a hotel where they own all of the premise wiring to the rooms it would be impractical for a widespread system across a city.
That offends me on many levels. She created the song for the Girl Guides and it was sung around campfires in Australia, NZ, UK and the US for decades. She never thought of applying for a copyright so she could collect royalties from every Girl Guides group. She then donated the song to the Libraries Board who in turn, sold the rights.
I would have less of an issue with this if the money was going to the Girl Guides to build camps (the original intent). Instead it has been hijacked by a money grubbing corporation as a means of stealing money from another money grubbing corporation.
Remind me after I die to not leave anything to a group who will in turn sell it like used pottery at a flea market.
In Soviet Russia you do not find the class action law suit, it finds YOU!
I am bombarded on a regular basis with class action lawsuit notices for products and services.
AT&T long distance
Volkswagen leaky sunroof
Computer memory
Vonage this or that
Unless I feel that I have been injured in some way I refuse to respond to these baits. As has been stated elsewhere the money goes into the ambulance chasing lawyers pockets and very little flows down to the "injured parties".
I wonder, can we file a class action lawsuit against lawyers who file class action lawsuits??
We did something similar in our teen years while working at a recreation center with a soccer ball.
Having found a spare soccer ball and with one of those desktop mounted air pumps we would put an increasing amount of pressure into the soccer ball and then the guys would bounce the thing around the gym. This went in stages, a little more pressure, the guys would go back to kicking the ball around the building, then back for more air pressure...
After seven or eight of these cycles of increasing pressure in the soccer ball it took on a distinct metallic sound when bouncing. The soccer ball had about 115 PSI in it and the guys decided to kick it around the hallway that connected several of the rooms in the recreation center. I was watching the fun and one of the guys kicked the ball and it hit the edge of a table and was bouncing up and down on top of the table. From 25 feet away I could hear brittle cracking sounds coming from the ball... At the last instant I have the picture of one of the guys running away from the ball with a look of fear on his face. Right at that moment the ball exploded like a bomb.
The sound of the explosion just left my ears with a buzzy, ringing sound as the guys are laughing their asses off. Quickly they grabbed all of the soccer ball shrapnel and hid it right as the senior citizens group was pouring out of their meeting room. There were retirees who must have served in WW II who were looking for the 250 pound bomb crater or airplane crash, asking furious questions about where the bomb went off.
To their credit, the guys just looked quizzically at the senior citizens and said "what noise?".
Doing a post mortem on the soccer ball one of the sewn panels failed and ejected the air bladder from the ball. The soccer ball skin was turned inside out. There were tiny little shards of rubber ball liner everywhere.
Kids do stupid stuff. Outlaw CO2 (since it is a greenhouse gas and eeevil too). Adults will not stop the never-ending quest by kids for things that go BOOM!
Clearly the marketing department is the end-all, be-all decision makers in a product design at Apple. As an RF engineer (I am) I would not be jumping up and down to work for Apple. Antenna designs are always a compromise between aesthetics and performance.
I bet that the Apple phone worked just great in their corporate offices with an AT&T cell site right next door. The signal levels would be very high and you probably could have wrapped the phone in a 10 pound ham and the signal would have looked just great. I doubt that they did any real-world testing in a weak signal environment.
Much of the weak-signal specifications for any RF device are usually determined on a test bench or in an anechoic chamber where conditions are controlled. The ugly reality of someone's sweaty, meaty hand seldom makes it into the engineers lexicon.
The job titles for these folks should be "Fall Guy #1, Fall Guy #2 and Fall Guy #3.
To really rub China the wrong way Google should move all "Chinese" operations to Taiwan with a statement that google.cn will still be available in the one bastion of free Chinese, Taiwan.
Yes good old Stevie was claiming the problem was with the operators and demanded a modification of the UOS (user operating system).
Sorry dude but it will be a few years before you can implant all of that Apple hardware directly into our brains.
When I read his rather terse reply about "well, hold the phone differently" I was surprised. And this is from the company that made its riches by making hardware and software adapt to the users needs.
Now it's like "the hell with you, we are omnipresent and omnipotent, you will bow down and kiss my ass".
I had my sister on my T-Mobile account and she had purchased a new Android phone through the T-Mobile store. She died last year and it took me a few months to get around to calling T-Mobile to terminate the contract on her phone.
The T-Mobile customer service representative was very understanding and sympathetic and waived any disconnect penalties or outstanding balance on the phone purchase. She had even offered to see if she could backdate the service termination a few months. I told her that was not necessary as it was my own reticence to close the account (you know, the finality of death and wrapping up the details of someone's life).
Over the years little experiences like that with T-Mobile have made me a very loyal customer. It seems that someone still remembers how to treat their customers.
Using a cleaner burning fuel like natural gas would allow for generating facilities that capitalize on both the MHD effect and then the follow-on of traditionally 'boiling water to make steam" to drive a turbine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator
By adding an MHD system to a conventional plant, energy efficiency can be increased by 50% over a conventional facility. As we do more work with near-room temperature superconductors the efficiency would increase.
Yep, right now you see natural gas electrical generation at peaking plants as they can come on-line very quickly.
For jump starting a conventional plant that would be called "black start capability" as most power plants do not have enough electrical generating capacity to bring the plant on-line. Natural gas powered plants and hydroelectric are also referred to as facilities that are "black start".
We will not burn up all of the natural gas deposits for centuries to come. There is much more methane (natural gas) in hydrates than in all of the possible traditional natural gas reservoirs worldwide.
If you have been watching the news regarding the oil well disaster down in the Gulf of Mexico they have problems with hydrates condense out of the expanding column of oil and gas that forms hydrate ice crystals and blocks up the stack. (remember basic physics about expansion and temperature).
Hydrate deposits could be exploited in a controlled manner with the modest introduction of heat into a deep deposit to liberate the gas. To stop a well from producing, remove the heat.
This is not even a very well veiled attempt to get any company that wants to do business in China to open up all of their source code and "hand the keys to the kingdom" to the Chinese government.
Ironically I bet there are companies that carry a big IP hammer to beat up the rest of the world with will be beating down the doors to become slavering lapdogs of China for a chance at the profits pie. Of course China will say "you companies just do not understand China so we need to repackage everything you do to fit our "culture"". What they are really meaning is that "Give us all of the stuff and we will let you play in our sandbox... until we can reverse engineer your application or system and stick a "Made in China" label on it. The we will give you the boot or make the conditions so impossible for you to do business you will run out with your tails between your legs".
Looking at the small sampling of fossils I find it hard to accept that they can draw so many conclusions.
Yes, you could definitely say that it is hominidae, most likely a Australopithecus but to infer that it is bipedal with a human-like gait is a stretch.
'pithecus was around for a few million years and a great deal of evolutionary changes were occurring over that span of time. In the late Pleistocene look at how much 'homo changed with the extinction of habilis, neanderthalensis, floresiensis and denisova. We only have the ability to look at a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the evolutionary diversity of the hominid family.
Quote:
"Fighting homegrown terrorism by monitoring Internet communications is a civil liberties trade-off the U.S. government must make to beef up national security, the nation's homeland security chief said Friday."
She goes on to say that the TSA procedure to not retain copies of the pictures taken by airport scanners is "protecting our rights". If the argument is going to be made that not making copies is "good enough" let's ask Rolando Negrin, the TSA employee who was arrested and fired after beating the snot out of one of his co-workers for their cracks about the size of his genitals.
http://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local-beat/TSA-Fracas-After-Body-Scanner-Reveals-TMI-92971929.html
So, if someone only "publicly" derides your appearance, reading habits or porn preferences then your rights are violated. If the government gives unfettered access to the fine details of your private life to a select group it is a good thing?
The process is supposed to be based upon reasonable cause and suspicion. Evidence is to be presented to a judge who would issue a search warrant to give the government the temporary permission to snoop into the details of your private life to collect evidence of a crime. Homeland Security is quick to jump onto any opportunity to treat every American as a criminal "who just hasn't been caught yet".
I work in the AMI/ Smart Grid field and I am just finishing up a study on HAN devices for a municipality. This is the way to go, with a ZigBee enabled device to communicate with power monitoring adapters that all of your electrical loads plug into. If it also supported an internet LAN connection back up to the utility AMI MMS (meter management system) it could incorporate the latest billing rate information and any data collected from the AMI meter outside the house.
There are some solutions out there that are closed-proprietary but I believe that a standards-based solution is the right way to go. HAN needs to get to the point where you can go into your local home improvement store and buy devices that can associate to a central device. Right now the price-point is too high at around $100 a device and it can cost $300-$400 to equip a home with a IHD (in home dislay), programmable thermostat and a communications gateway.
I hope that Intel can apply pressure to the marketplace so this technology can become ubiquitous.