"Students taking GCSE scienc[sic] have a choice of two tiers, or papers. The foundation tier assesses grades G to C and the higher tier assesses grades D to A*.
The Government claims that exams are structured in this way to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to show what they are capable of without being thrown off course by questions that are too hard or too easy. However, many experts believe that this approach to science leaves some students poorly prepared to pursue the subject at A level."
That's nonsense. Yes, people studying for the lower tier exam won't know the stuff they need to know for the A-level. That's not a problem, since people studying for lower tiers are people who are expected to get an E or lower (or at least, have a significant chance of getting that low). Such people aren't going to be carrying the subject on to A-level, are they?
There was no calculus on the syllabus when I did GCSE Maths about 5 years ago. To get the top grades on the coursework, however, you had to include something that wasn't on the syllabus, so I did learn a little calculus in a one-on-one session with my teacher after school (just what I needed for that particular problem... derivatives of trig functions and the quotient rule, if memory serves).
While doing simple calculus is pretty easy, if it was taught at GCSE it would have to be taught as formulae (eg. d/dx(ax^n)=anx^(n-1)) which you learn by rote with little to no understanding of where it comes from (while the teachers might go through a basic derivation, it would only be for the sake of the top pupils, no-one else would understand it). I really don't see the point of learning it like that.
I would imagine Microsoft Japan is a wholly (or at least majority) owned subsidiary of Microsoft (US), so Microsoft Japan's profits still end up in the US eventually.
I don't think the economic might is the issue, it's the political might. If the rest of the world wasn't so keen to be friends with the US, they would be able to counter any economic action taken by the US. With Tony Blair's resignation, that situation has improved marginally (Gordon Brown may not be particularly anti-US, but he's no Blair). With India and China growing quickly, and the EU expanding and becoming (slowing) more cohesive, the US is becoming less and less powerful both politically and economically.
Anarchy doesn't really work on any significant scale. The power vacuum gets filled pretty quickly, and usually with someone far worse than a politician.
Actually, I lie, it's 30 gig peak. And it explicitly says "unlimited" for the off-peak limit, although we all know better than the take that at face value. If I go over, I'll get throttled to 256kbps during peak hours only (which is 6pm to midnight), normal speed the rest of the time.
There is certainly no published off-peak limit for my (British) ISP. I pay £19 a month for "up to 8 meg" (used to connect at about 7.5, these days more like 5.5, I'm not quite sure what reduced it), with a 20 gig peak limit and no off-peak limit. I don't know if I've gone over that ever, but I wouldn't be surprised. They've never complained.
I would prefer 7 gig peak to 60 gig anytime (I think what I actually have is 20 gig peak, I don't remember exactly, I'll start worrying about it when they send me a warning). If you want to download 100 gig's worth of stuff, you can just do it in the morning and no-one minds (well, several mornings... I get about 5.5 meg). There is no reason to download large amounts of stuff at peak times.
"7gb on-peak bandwidth limits? Are you kidding me? That's ridiculously low."
I guess it depends on their definition of "peak", and I'm assuming you're talking about per month limits, but 7 gig doesn't sound too bad. You're not going to get anywhere near that with things like email and web browsing, and other things can be done off-peak. I like on-peak caps, since they generally allow pretty decent usage and you know what you're getting. Much better than "unlimited" service that cuts you off based on some secret definition of "fair usage".
There's no big difference between failing to predict growth and under-predicting it when that growth is (near) exponential. Your prediction is out by a factor of 20% in the first year, and by the fifth year, you are out by (according to the back of my envelope) 150%.
"Just because it's not common knowledge J. Random User, doesn't mean it's not common knowledge to a smaller more specialized community."
"Common" means "not some specialised group", so your point is nonsense. The rule of thumb on Wikipedia is that if someone disputes a statement, then it isn't common knowledge.
I generally use my phone for my alarm. One night I needed to charge it overnight, so I plugged it in and left it on a chest of drawers at the bottom of my bed (nearest socket). I woke up the next morning (about an hour after the alarm was set) to find my phone unplugged on my bedside table. Somehow I had got up, gone to the bottom of the bed, turned off the alarm, unplugged the phone, put it down on the bedside table and got back into bed all without remembering any of it the next morning.
If it's not solvable, it should at least be possible to prove that it isn't solvable. Or, more precisely, that it is independent of the standard axiomatic system. Proving a question is independent of your axioms still counts as an answer as far as mathematicians are concerned.
I think it's just a common mistake. As I understand it, organisations should always be treated as singular entities, although if you're referring to a group of people explicitly, then it's plural: "Microsoft if...", "Microsoft's staff are..."
He's assuming you need to actually visit a star to see if there is life orbiting it. It's far easier to look through a telescope, and then perhaps send out probes to a few specific stars that look hopeful. We could easily have a comprehensive list of potential habitable planets in 50 years time (at least within a few hundred light years, quite probably more). Sending a probe to each, travelling at 0.1c would have all the nearby potential planets checked out within 10,000 years, maybe. I haven't worked out how far away from Earth you need to go to cover 4% of the Milky Way, but I doubt it would take more than a million years to do such an exploration.
Of course, if SETI is right, we can find life without ever having to visit it, just by listening for it. In which case, the entire galaxy can be "explored" in 100,000 years (the galaxy is 100,000ly in diameter, so it would take that long for radio singles from the furthest stars to reach us), our neighbourhood can be "explored" in a few thousand years. It's important to note that almost all those years pass before you actually start looking, but if we're talking about why aliens haven't reached us, those are the numbers we're interested it.
Actually, all beer must be sold in metric quantities. The metric quantities just happen to be multiples of 0.284130742 litres (says Google). That's the EU for you... (I'm not actually against the EU, it's an unavoidable consequence of gradual change - until you reach the end, everything is a little confusing... changing everything at once would make us English very cross... we don't like change.)
Will this new steering wheel be able to tell the difference between someone who's drunk and someone who's washed their hands with cleaning alcohol? While it won't effect many people, it's an obvious example of a false positive.
As for false negatives - wear gloves and sunglasses, and as long as you don't swerve too much (which most drunk drivers don't - they drive perfectly fine until something goes wrong and can't react quick enough) you're absolutely fine.
Indeed - I'm doing a maths degree at the moment, most of it will never be particularly useful in any of the jobs I'm considering (unless I become a maths lecturer, of course). However, CS seems to be a very vocational degree - if my university is anything to go by, CS students seem to do it primarily to get a job, not because they're interested in it from a purely intellectual level. (My uni may not be anything to go by, though, as the CS dept is extremely bad. It's a good uni, so it gets lots of good CS students, but for some reason, it doesn't get any good CS lecturers...)
If you're interested in it intellectually, rather than to get a job, looking at the maths from a maths perspective, not a CS perspective will probably be more interesting, and learning programming is far more fun sitting at a computer than in a lecture theatre. (I'm not qualified to say much about the parts that aren't maths or programming, but I imagine they're similar).
I think the first question you need to answer is why you're doing a CS degree in the first place. Personally, I don't see any point in them. It's not the best way to learn to program (how can you really learn Java in a lecture theatre? It just doesn't work. Just get a good reference book, find some good code to copy the syntax from, and work it out as you go along.), if you want to know the maths side of it, do a maths degree (picking courses that are useful for the job you have in mind - you might have to pick a uni accordingly), you'll understand it far better (doing a few courses in maths is much harder than doing lots, because so many parts of maths interlink). If you want to be a Systems Administrator, or something, then I can't see why you would need a degree at all, it's experience that counts in those kinds of jobs.
Can anyone name a job for which a CS degree is the best qualification?
Slashdot Mirror
"Students taking GCSE scienc[sic] have a choice of two tiers, or papers. The foundation tier assesses grades G to C and the higher tier assesses grades D to A*.
The Government claims that exams are structured in this way to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to show what they are capable of without being thrown off course by questions that are too hard or too easy. However, many experts believe that this approach to science leaves some students poorly prepared to pursue the subject at A level."
That's nonsense. Yes, people studying for the lower tier exam won't know the stuff they need to know for the A-level. That's not a problem, since people studying for lower tiers are people who are expected to get an E or lower (or at least, have a significant chance of getting that low). Such people aren't going to be carrying the subject on to A-level, are they?
There was no calculus on the syllabus when I did GCSE Maths about 5 years ago. To get the top grades on the coursework, however, you had to include something that wasn't on the syllabus, so I did learn a little calculus in a one-on-one session with my teacher after school (just what I needed for that particular problem... derivatives of trig functions and the quotient rule, if memory serves).
While doing simple calculus is pretty easy, if it was taught at GCSE it would have to be taught as formulae (eg. d/dx(ax^n)=anx^(n-1)) which you learn by rote with little to no understanding of where it comes from (while the teachers might go through a basic derivation, it would only be for the sake of the top pupils, no-one else would understand it). I really don't see the point of learning it like that.
I would imagine Microsoft Japan is a wholly (or at least majority) owned subsidiary of Microsoft (US), so Microsoft Japan's profits still end up in the US eventually.
I don't think the economic might is the issue, it's the political might. If the rest of the world wasn't so keen to be friends with the US, they would be able to counter any economic action taken by the US. With Tony Blair's resignation, that situation has improved marginally (Gordon Brown may not be particularly anti-US, but he's no Blair). With India and China growing quickly, and the EU expanding and becoming (slowing) more cohesive, the US is becoming less and less powerful both politically and economically.
And how to do you propose protecting our freedoms ourselves?
Anarchy doesn't really work on any significant scale. The power vacuum gets filled pretty quickly, and usually with someone far worse than a politician.
As would giving anyone else that amount of money. And raising taxes to pay for it would remove an equal amount from the economy.
Retroactive incentives couldn't work without some form of time travel...
Actually, I lie, it's 30 gig peak. And it explicitly says "unlimited" for the off-peak limit, although we all know better than the take that at face value. If I go over, I'll get throttled to 256kbps during peak hours only (which is 6pm to midnight), normal speed the rest of the time.
There is certainly no published off-peak limit for my (British) ISP. I pay £19 a month for "up to 8 meg" (used to connect at about 7.5, these days more like 5.5, I'm not quite sure what reduced it), with a 20 gig peak limit and no off-peak limit. I don't know if I've gone over that ever, but I wouldn't be surprised. They've never complained.
I would prefer 7 gig peak to 60 gig anytime (I think what I actually have is 20 gig peak, I don't remember exactly, I'll start worrying about it when they send me a warning). If you want to download 100 gig's worth of stuff, you can just do it in the morning and no-one minds (well, several mornings... I get about 5.5 meg). There is no reason to download large amounts of stuff at peak times.
"7gb on-peak bandwidth limits? Are you kidding me? That's ridiculously low."
I guess it depends on their definition of "peak", and I'm assuming you're talking about per month limits, but 7 gig doesn't sound too bad. You're not going to get anywhere near that with things like email and web browsing, and other things can be done off-peak. I like on-peak caps, since they generally allow pretty decent usage and you know what you're getting. Much better than "unlimited" service that cuts you off based on some secret definition of "fair usage".
There's no big difference between failing to predict growth and under-predicting it when that growth is (near) exponential. Your prediction is out by a factor of 20% in the first year, and by the fifth year, you are out by (according to the back of my envelope) 150%.
"Just because it's not common knowledge J. Random User, doesn't mean it's not common knowledge to a smaller more specialized community."
"Common" means "not some specialised group", so your point is nonsense. The rule of thumb on Wikipedia is that if someone disputes a statement, then it isn't common knowledge.
I generally use my phone for my alarm. One night I needed to charge it overnight, so I plugged it in and left it on a chest of drawers at the bottom of my bed (nearest socket). I woke up the next morning (about an hour after the alarm was set) to find my phone unplugged on my bedside table. Somehow I had got up, gone to the bottom of the bed, turned off the alarm, unplugged the phone, put it down on the bedside table and got back into bed all without remembering any of it the next morning.
Something parallel to it, at least.
You could probably sue the USAF for any smoking related illnesses you get. ;)
I haven't really been following the whole RIAA suing people thing - have they won any court cases, yet?
If it's not solvable, it should at least be possible to prove that it isn't solvable. Or, more precisely, that it is independent of the standard axiomatic system. Proving a question is independent of your axioms still counts as an answer as far as mathematicians are concerned.
Indeed. The best way to stop people marking your emails as spam is to stop sending out spam.
I think it's just a common mistake. As I understand it, organisations should always be treated as singular entities, although if you're referring to a group of people explicitly, then it's plural: "Microsoft if...", "Microsoft's staff are..."
He's assuming you need to actually visit a star to see if there is life orbiting it. It's far easier to look through a telescope, and then perhaps send out probes to a few specific stars that look hopeful. We could easily have a comprehensive list of potential habitable planets in 50 years time (at least within a few hundred light years, quite probably more). Sending a probe to each, travelling at 0.1c would have all the nearby potential planets checked out within 10,000 years, maybe. I haven't worked out how far away from Earth you need to go to cover 4% of the Milky Way, but I doubt it would take more than a million years to do such an exploration.
Of course, if SETI is right, we can find life without ever having to visit it, just by listening for it. In which case, the entire galaxy can be "explored" in 100,000 years (the galaxy is 100,000ly in diameter, so it would take that long for radio singles from the furthest stars to reach us), our neighbourhood can be "explored" in a few thousand years. It's important to note that almost all those years pass before you actually start looking, but if we're talking about why aliens haven't reached us, those are the numbers we're interested it.
Actually, all beer must be sold in metric quantities. The metric quantities just happen to be multiples of 0.284130742 litres (says Google). That's the EU for you... (I'm not actually against the EU, it's an unavoidable consequence of gradual change - until you reach the end, everything is a little confusing... changing everything at once would make us English very cross... we don't like change.)
Will this new steering wheel be able to tell the difference between someone who's drunk and someone who's washed their hands with cleaning alcohol? While it won't effect many people, it's an obvious example of a false positive.
As for false negatives - wear gloves and sunglasses, and as long as you don't swerve too much (which most drunk drivers don't - they drive perfectly fine until something goes wrong and can't react quick enough) you're absolutely fine.
Indeed - I'm doing a maths degree at the moment, most of it will never be particularly useful in any of the jobs I'm considering (unless I become a maths lecturer, of course). However, CS seems to be a very vocational degree - if my university is anything to go by, CS students seem to do it primarily to get a job, not because they're interested in it from a purely intellectual level. (My uni may not be anything to go by, though, as the CS dept is extremely bad. It's a good uni, so it gets lots of good CS students, but for some reason, it doesn't get any good CS lecturers...)
If you're interested in it intellectually, rather than to get a job, looking at the maths from a maths perspective, not a CS perspective will probably be more interesting, and learning programming is far more fun sitting at a computer than in a lecture theatre. (I'm not qualified to say much about the parts that aren't maths or programming, but I imagine they're similar).
I think the first question you need to answer is why you're doing a CS degree in the first place. Personally, I don't see any point in them. It's not the best way to learn to program (how can you really learn Java in a lecture theatre? It just doesn't work. Just get a good reference book, find some good code to copy the syntax from, and work it out as you go along.), if you want to know the maths side of it, do a maths degree (picking courses that are useful for the job you have in mind - you might have to pick a uni accordingly), you'll understand it far better (doing a few courses in maths is much harder than doing lots, because so many parts of maths interlink). If you want to be a Systems Administrator, or something, then I can't see why you would need a degree at all, it's experience that counts in those kinds of jobs.
Can anyone name a job for which a CS degree is the best qualification?