"...although I do agree that his show is comedy, for him to play it off as if he doesn't have an impact on how people think about politics was an artful dodge on his part."
He's never claimed to be anything but comedy. He delivers deadpan frequently, but he directly makes fun of news. The reason why there is irony here is that he, a self-proclaimed (and acknowledged) comedian goes on a supposedly serious news show, blasts them for their practices, and when they try to attack him for journalistic integrity they are left with nothing specifically because he isn't a journalist, but they have confused him for one. They can't make any logical retort at that point because his comedy is more accurate news than their journalism is.
"Stupidity has bipartisan support. The Daily Show can be enjoyed by both sides."
What makes you think that the Democrats are liberal? They seem pretty centrist to conservative to me most of the time, as they're frequently defending existing social/government programs against the onslaught of the reactionaries on the scary end of the Republican party...
From left to right politically:
radical
liberal
moderate/centrist
conservative
reactionary
assuming no differentiation between social and economic platforms. I myself typically am liberal socially and moderate to conservative economically. I like there being new possibilities in society, but I want to protect the economic system that keeps me well fed.
"I suppose it would be nice if kids could 'test out' of portions of general education allowing them the time to supplement their education on their own instead of having to waste time regurgitating what they already know and taking damage to their motivation and initiative on taxpayer dollars."
That'll never happen at the elementary school level, and here's why:
School systems are being held to ever-higher accountability standards. The theories behind this are good, but the implementations are not, so schools (like Arizona schools and the dysfunctional AIMS test, Arizona's way of fulfilling "no child left behind") find stresses because the daily classroom is barely functional for teaching what is required. They implemented AIMS top-down, first requiring tenth graders to pass to get a high school diploma. This has put stress on the top, because many students made it up that far with an education that is inadequate for the test.
They are now panicing to change guidelines so that more of the curriculum helps the students prepare for the three or four AIMS tests that are now being implemented (third grade, sixth grade, eighth, tenth, if memory serves, but I could be wrong). Since schools themselves are penalized if the students don't meet expectations, schools are going to teach every child that doesn't have a legally-mandated alternative education plan (tested, qualified, placed LD students) to the exact same standard so that they are sure that all of them pass the tests. This further reduces the effectiveness of gifted programs, because many gifted programs make assumptions about the student's ability to draw their own conclusions about the material that they would have learned in the regular classroom if they'd been there for it instead of being in the gifted program. If the student fails the test because the gifted program took too much time away from the basics then the school has a problem, and the solution is to attempt to teach the standard for the test to every student who can meet the minimum standard, ensuring that all students have had the same education made available to them. It prevents inequal education based on anything you can think of, excepting the LD students and their alternative education plans.
They will never, ever let kids test out of basics in elementary school. They will let kids take qualifying tests for junior high and high school placement, which is how kids end up in Honors, Advanced, or Advanced Placement classes, but at the elementary level they are going to provide every student with the same instruction, for the same opportunity to learn, and let the student's own natural abilities determine if they make it to the higher shelf in secondary school. If they don't, they're open to lawsuits, "failing school" labels, and all sorts of other problems that are even worse than turning all kids out the same.
Between MD5 and simply writing a function that looks at something like a hundred pre-picked bits within a file to see if they still match, coupled with writing in new "hidden" system calls that generate specific replies based on what makes the call in the first place I don't see how it's impossible to clean the system. Time consuming if things aren't all the same necessarily, annoying when Microsoft uses patching systems that aren't necessarily the most consistent, and frustrating that it is necessary at all, but this should be cleanable.
What you're missing that I've been trying to explain is that the gifted programs, as currently structured, teach ALL subjects to ALL students that are in the program. They don't teach "gifted spelling" but leave off "gifted math". This is why a student has to meet minimum standards in ALL subjects before being admitted to the program.
The program that I was in (1987-1991 or thereabouts) didn't really differentiate math, spelling, English, reading, science, social studies, and art. They were all integrated into one package, where students had to apply everything in order to complete the assigned tasks. Any student who was to be in the gifted program had to at least meet minimum standards of acceptability in every subject in order to have any clue what was going on. If a student sucked in reading they still weren't going to do well with the rest of the program, as reading, like math, science, social studies, and English, were all integral in how the program was designed. One flat out could not function if one lacked excellence in any single subject.
The point of these gifted programs wasn't to take kids that were way out of balance, with extremely high marks on only one subject and cater to that subject, the point was to take the top five to ten percent of students who were continually bored in the regular classroom and give them something to apply the material which they learned on the first goaround, without having to be babied through it like the majority of the students in school.
School is there to provide everyone with a general education, with excellence in math, reading, English, and to a lesser extent social studies and science. Some students are faster at absorbing all subjects than others, so they are placed in a gifted program. Most students learn at at about the same rate, so they're in the normal classroom as they're all within the same statistical average to each other. Some students are behind in one or two subjects, so they're in the regular classroom where they learn at the same pace as the vast majority of students, and are in an LD program to help them with subjects that they're struggling on. Some students are so poor as learners that they're in LD for all three primary subjects, or even in a special self contained class for students that need particular intervention.
The school district that I am employed in is budgetted for $5,600 per student per year based on less than ten absent days for each enrolled student. If you want more than a typical "cookie-cutter" education for your children, you need to supplement it at home or be willing to be taxed much more heavily in order for the school to afford to teach your child the way you want. Otherwise, this is a damn effective way of teaching math, reading, English, science, and social studies to a large group of people for a very low price.
> > LD and the gifted program are by definition mutually exclusive.
> It's sad to see that almost a generation later many schools still feel this way.
Well, since the gifted programs aren't structured very well, one has to test at least average before being accepted. I think that it's something like high test scores on two of the three subjects.
I'd actually like to see elementary schools start to pull precocious children out like they pull LD children out, subject by subject. I was one of those kids who always tested in the 97th to 99th percentile, and it would have benefitted me greatly to have had a chance to have some kind of advanced Geography and advanced English beyond the regular stuff. The gifted program that I was in was also a one day per week program, and my scores in the regular classroom suffered because I was bored when I wasn't in the gifted environment. If I'd had a chance to be permanently in a gifted program at the elementary level I probably would have been there for English, Reading, Science, and Social Studies, and possibly even Math, but such a program didn't exist for fourth graders. I was stuck going over long division for the upteenth time after I'd already gotten it, when I'd probably have been into basic order-of-operation stuff if there had been a gifted permanent math class.
In the school system that I am employed in, elementary school children have one teacher for all basic subjects. If they are struggling with a subject to the point of needing intervention they have another teacher for that, who teaches all Learning Disabled primary subjects, so that if they struggle with math, reading, and English they go to the same person for all three subjects or any combination therein. Some precocious children will attend a gifted program once per week for the entire day. LD and the gifted program are by definition mutually exclusive. The student has two teachers, tops, for regular classes where they make an unsupervised trek across campus at regular intervals. Students also have music, PE, and in upper "intermediate" elementary grades band or strings, but transitions between these frequently happen at regular intervals when some form of supervision is present in the halls. If a student doesn't show up to LD or band/strings, the teacher calls the regular classroom to find out if something's amiss, usually to find that the student is absent for the day.
The only advantage to this RFID system that I can see is that the initial attendance is taken by computer rather than by hand. The alternate classroom teachers still have to find out why a student isn't present if that student isn't there, the first teacher in the morning still has to figure out who is absent and who isn't, and the school still has to patrol the halls to ensure that nothing mischevious or malevolent is occurring.
Most teachers develop a seating arrangement to tell at a glance who isn't there. They don't have to spend ten minutes per day taking attendance, they glance while the kids are getting situated, mark a scantron bubblesheet appropriately, and leave it in the bin for the campus runner to collect. The only time that lenthy attendance is required is if the teacher doesn't have a seating arrangement, or if there is a substitute teacher, in which case the system is likely broken anyway.
The only place that I'd think that RFID interrogators would make sense is at entrances to the building, if the school is set up for that, as it'd let administration know if a student left early or entered late, assuming the badge was being worn and not encased in aluminium foil. Most schools here are not set up where that could be done though, so that wouldn't have much chance of being successful here.
Worse yet, in an elementary school it should be pretty obvious when a student isn't there, since the student only has one teacher. The teacher takes attendance once and if a student disappears, reports it to the school administration. Anything else is a violation of privacy.
No one but the school and the student's guardians should have any knowledge of the student during the school day. Some students are involved as unwitting participants in custody battles, some are on special medications, some have medical problems that require special care. All of this should be confidential.
A failure to cite could be anything from "there was a police officer in the frame so the driver might have been directed to proceed through" to "we couldn't figure out who the driver was so we couldn't prosecute anyone".
Come look at the situation here in Arizona and you'll find that they're very much inclined to press anyone involved with the car about who was driving, trying to get them to tip them off, and it's very hard to defend against it when the system itself is slanted so heavily in the plaintiff's favor, not even requiring them to appear in court over it.
"The over-simplistic 'No victim, no crime' explanation that you're using to justify your dangerous driving also leads to the idea that a man with a truck full of explosives, a map of a local sport stadium showing supporting structures, and a note in his own handwriting which says 'Mom, everyone who loves sports more than God must die, I know you will understand' is undoubtedly innocent. No-one died yet, the officers ought to let him go on his way...."
Ah, but first, there's intent to cause harm that's stated, even indirectly by the defendant's own note. Second, he is going to go to trial and people are going to do the work of probing to find out what actually is going on. Thirdly, he is going to be held to trial by a jury, who decide his fate. He could be charged with conspiracy to XXXXXX, and I have little doubt that additional signs of his intent would be found.
What defines it as a crime when it hasn't yet been through due process?
It's the job of the constabulary to enforce laws in person to protect the public, and to investigate real crime that has already occurred. Photo Radar for speed enforcement is a stupid idea, and just leads to people finding out where the cameras are that day, speeding everywhere except by the cameras. Traffic used to even require an officer to serve one with a court notice (the traffic citation), same as an officer picking up a wanted criminal to force a court appearance. Many cities don't even use the police departments to run photo radar, they contract it out to companies, who give the city a portion of the money collected. One such company is American Traffic Systems, who has operated in Scottsdale AZ and San Diego CA if memory serves.
By not receiving instant citation, the accused has no opportunity to place any importance on the memories that might help them form a defense. The prosecution/plaintiff is rarely forced to appear in court either, let alone testify to remembering the vehicle as it sped by, or any of that, like a real officer is required to do. A real officer is required to take an oath that he or she isn't committing perjury when they testify. A picture sent to the court isn't, and should be thrown out if the prosecution/plaintiff does not appear to press their side.
Photo Radar is treating people as guilty by default, without requiring individual explanation, or without an arraignment, pre-trial conference, and trial. It's a travesty to justice and a continual erosion of the rights of citizens by the government.
I'd like them to stop accepting photo radar data. The cities in my area have switched to digital photography. Currently one's only out is to request the Plaintiff to produce the calibration records for the system for the day of the ticket and hope that they don't have that data.
I'd be okay with photo radar and with red light cameras if they were used to bolster the Prosecution/Plaintiff, like if there were a car accident and the red light camera data were used to show that the cited person (by the officer on the scene) had indeed run the light, and that the officer was correct. The current system of using photography with near-automatic conviction deprives people of privacy. If the police want to cite people for speeding or for any other traffic violation then they need to get out there with people who will be required to testify as to what they saw; people who actively claim the count in the charge, not some computer or desk-jockey who analyses data after the fact.
Of course, I also have the opinion that if there's no victim then there's no crime. Take this as you will.
Some day look up Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Tent City Jail. It's an outdoors jail in a fenced-in plot of land using black tents, in Arizona. They provide evaporative cooling.
The problem here is that it does not house convicts, it houses people awaiting trial. Admittedly many of them are convicted, but it's appauling that people who can't make bail are likely to end up in these conditions rather than in an indoor jail.
They should include "time served" as part of one's stay in Arpaio's jail.
Dammit, I hate it when slashdot gets mad when using a public terminal and screws up to post me AC...
I agree with you. The point of this use of the technology isn't to victimize otherwise innocent people or people entitled to privacy, it is to manage a person who has been convicted of a crime. It specifically allows that person some more freedom (as well as less expense to the State) by using an inexpensive technical means to track them. Remember, these people would otherwise be in full custody of the State (read: in prison), so the freedoms being granted to them are not rights, as their rights were forefit by felony conviction.
I obviously think that this technology needs to be applied selectively, so that convicts that have restrictions on movement or location are the main candidates, but if it helps to properly enforce the conditions of probation or parole, gives specific victims peace of mind, or protects the public in instances when it is important to do so then I am in favor of it.
My only major conern is that such technology will be required of ex-cons even after their sentences are concluded, or that simple location will be used as evidence of a crime being committed by the individual, when it is possible for someone to happen to be in an area that has had a recent (and as-yet-undiscovered) crime take place. This might lead authorities to consider the convict a suspect, but it should not lead to an automatic assumption of guilt.
If the authorities are smart then this could work very well.
It may not be a "special" stream, but a specific way of implementing a generator that looks to be totally random. I'd like to see several years' worth of data, so that I can compare it with historical events beyond the scope that they've so far mentioned.
The point of science is to attempt to understand the universe that we inhabit. If there's some correlation between otherwise random events and specific events that can be reliably demonstrated then we'll have some piece of the universe newly discovered, and we can begin to explore it and its full implications. That doesn't mean that it's likely, or that even if it's true that everyone would immediately accept it, but it's still progress as long as the proper methods are used.
I'd say that with Intel's various errors over the last fifteen years, like the fourth and ninth digit floating point division errors in the Pentium 60, and the heat throttleback due to normal operating conditions on their newer processors, Intel had done a wonderful job of embracing this new unpredictability technology.
Keep in mind too that most UN*X type OSes have everything plus the kitchen sink thrown in, which are a lot of individual projects to keep secure and up to date. If the vendor picks a patching model where every individual package is individually patched then this means that a lot of small things over a given time could be updated, while Microsoft's "Let's make one BIG patch that fixes things once everyone's been in the crapper for months" method only puts out huge omnibus type patches from time to time.
Additionally, the nature of the exploits (often down to the specific function or set of functions at fault) are much more widely published, so the user or sysop can decide whether or not to install the patch based on what they're using the utility or daemon for. Sometimes the exploit is so specific and obscure that only a few people are vulnerable, but everyone is encouraged anyway.
I worked for a small company that had one IT guy (I was in QA) that handled our thirty or so PCs, three or four network servers, the phone/data cabling, programming the PBX, and assisted in building the systems that customers ordered to handle pager traffic. One guy did all this. Admittedly the bulk of the staff was computer literate and we probably could have done it even without the one IT guy, but it didn't require cell phones. He had a cell, but he had a work pager and he'd be reimbursed if he had to use it to call in for something. Workstations ran until they were wholly inadquate for their tasks, and then were reallocated to other tasks (frequently to Quality Assurance for use as test generator machines), while servers were replaced or added frequently, probably more frequently than necessary. Labor was the vast majority of our internal IT expenses, with probably about a third of our internal expenses being equipment. So, probably about $90,000, if that high, and could have been reduced if we'd been more thrifty with our purchases.
Hmmm. So they're saying that it's very dim? I guess that I'm not used to the way various ANSI Lumen standards are recorded besides the obvious. I have a Philips ProScreen 4100 that's 800x600 resolution, 300 ANSI Lumens, with a 4,000 hour lamp (400 hours used) and it still looks pretty good, but requires a darkened room to be used with a picture 50" across diagonal or larger.
If 15lm means 15 ANSI Lumens then this thing is going to be very, very dim under any normally lit room, and one would be better off going for one of the cheap LCD projectors with 1000 Lumens brightness and better controls.
I'm so glad that my ProScreen has an optical keystone adjust, even if it means no throw/zoom control. I'd rather have to move the projector a few feet forward or back to get the image size where I want it than to have the artifacting and antialiasing problems that digital keystone correction creates.
"Having recently repaired a 5 year old computer -- a K6-2/350 running windows 98, there's no damned way you could get any productive work done with that thing. Just browsing the web is horribly slow. God help you if you have to run any real office applications (word, outlook, access, etc.) 2-3 year old (1GHz+ processor speeds) machines might be passable if your company is flat broke, but those machines are costing the company some employee productivity."
Okay, then go get a machine off a two year or three year lease. These can run Windows 2000 *gasp* Windows XP if it's your fancy.
By the way, running a business-normal 350MHz machine puts you squarely into Intel land. I loved the K6/2 line, but that was because for the same money I could buy a 550MHz processor when I could only buy the 350MHz or 400MHz Intel P-II. MHz for MHz the Intels were ahead. My employer has 25,000 PCs on the desktops of users and only around fifteen people to do field work on them across a hundred sites in a metro area. We have machines still out there as slow as 75MHz that are officially off the supported list, but we still support machines down to 300MHz. Take that 300MHz Intel P-II and put 512MB RAM in it and it's capable of doing all required tasks in a reasonable time. I know this because our accounting department is still using them because they're the last PCs we bought in desktop form factor cases, and they don't want towers.
What task using say, Microsoft Office 98 can not be done that can be done using Microsoft Office XP? Don't go to marketing literature to answer it, answer it off of the top of your head. Cop-out answers like "file versions are too new for it" don't count either. I want to know what actual features that real people use didn't yet exist in MS Office 98 that people depend on now in Office XP. If you can't think of any then running that computer from 1998 or 1999 with an OS dating back to when the hardware was reasonably new (NT, 98, 2000, hell even Millennium) properly security patched, updated, or secured behind proper firewalling, and a proper replacement web browser could do everything that the user needs as fast or faster than the user needs it.
I'm writing this on my 700MHz Celeron based laptop with 192MB RAM. I surf the web, check my email, write papers with a word processor, play DVDs with no hardware accelerator, work with spreadsheets, and work with a graphics editor. Yes, I have to be a bit careful with that last one, but it does just work to the point that I haven't really considered a need to buy the newest/latest/greatest other than because 192MB RAM is maxing out what this machine can handle.
My work computer was a 400MHz Celeron for a long time and it still let me use the workorder system (written with Access), use a word processor, a spreadsheet program, email, web browsing, and the like. The only reason that I got a better computer was that they offered us upgrades because we had some parts left over after a project.
Most of the people that I know who work on somewhat substantial OSS projects are paid to work on those projects too. The only real difference is that the companies paying them for the work also release that work to the world-at-large, and take things one step further by building their own distributions that are designed to bundle well together.
Take SuSE for example. They built on work from RedHat, who built on work from Slackware and "roll your own" distributions, who built on the straight GNU toolset and the raw kernel. SuSE has evolved things to where they have a nice installer and maintenance system on top of the GPL stuff. YaST wasn't too bad back when I ran SuSE, and since YaST wasn't yet GPL (and it didn't depend on anything that was, it just allowed for configuration changes to GPL programs to be made easily) it was all to SuSE's advantage because they worked to help the cause of OSS. They did write most of those fancy video drivers that we had in the very late nineties and early noughties, after all.
Since the code is open, a company can either buy their package from a vendor to obtain support, or they can download the source, hire someone to make the modifications that they need, and use that. The thing that people seem to continually miss is that changes made to GPL code only have to be distributed if the binaries compiled off of those changes are distributed. If you rewrite a significant portion of "df", you can keep it all to yourself so long as you don't go sending around the binary executable without the source. Companies can use OSS internally and never reveal what they've done to it if they play by the rules.
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"...although I do agree that his show is comedy, for him to play it off as if he doesn't have an impact on how people think about politics was an artful dodge on his part."
He's never claimed to be anything but comedy. He delivers deadpan frequently, but he directly makes fun of news. The reason why there is irony here is that he, a self-proclaimed (and acknowledged) comedian goes on a supposedly serious news show, blasts them for their practices, and when they try to attack him for journalistic integrity they are left with nothing specifically because he isn't a journalist, but they have confused him for one. They can't make any logical retort at that point because his comedy is more accurate news than their journalism is.
"Stupidity has bipartisan support. The Daily Show can be enjoyed by both sides."
What makes you think that the Democrats are liberal? They seem pretty centrist to conservative to me most of the time, as they're frequently defending existing social/government programs against the onslaught of the reactionaries on the scary end of the Republican party...
From left to right politically:
radical
liberal
moderate/centrist
conservative
reactionary
assuming no differentiation between social and economic platforms. I myself typically am liberal socially and moderate to conservative economically. I like there being new possibilities in society, but I want to protect the economic system that keeps me well fed.
"And the Secret Service giving a press pass to a gay prostitute using an assumed name would be...what?"
Your Government in action?
"I suppose it would be nice if kids could 'test out' of portions of general education allowing them the time to supplement their education on their own instead of having to waste time regurgitating what they already know and taking damage to their motivation and initiative on taxpayer dollars."
That'll never happen at the elementary school level, and here's why:
School systems are being held to ever-higher accountability standards. The theories behind this are good, but the implementations are not, so schools (like Arizona schools and the dysfunctional AIMS test, Arizona's way of fulfilling "no child left behind") find stresses because the daily classroom is barely functional for teaching what is required. They implemented AIMS top-down, first requiring tenth graders to pass to get a high school diploma. This has put stress on the top, because many students made it up that far with an education that is inadequate for the test.
They are now panicing to change guidelines so that more of the curriculum helps the students prepare for the three or four AIMS tests that are now being implemented (third grade, sixth grade, eighth, tenth, if memory serves, but I could be wrong). Since schools themselves are penalized if the students don't meet expectations, schools are going to teach every child that doesn't have a legally-mandated alternative education plan (tested, qualified, placed LD students) to the exact same standard so that they are sure that all of them pass the tests. This further reduces the effectiveness of gifted programs, because many gifted programs make assumptions about the student's ability to draw their own conclusions about the material that they would have learned in the regular classroom if they'd been there for it instead of being in the gifted program. If the student fails the test because the gifted program took too much time away from the basics then the school has a problem, and the solution is to attempt to teach the standard for the test to every student who can meet the minimum standard, ensuring that all students have had the same education made available to them. It prevents inequal education based on anything you can think of, excepting the LD students and their alternative education plans.
They will never, ever let kids test out of basics in elementary school. They will let kids take qualifying tests for junior high and high school placement, which is how kids end up in Honors, Advanced, or Advanced Placement classes, but at the elementary level they are going to provide every student with the same instruction, for the same opportunity to learn, and let the student's own natural abilities determine if they make it to the higher shelf in secondary school. If they don't, they're open to lawsuits, "failing school" labels, and all sorts of other problems that are even worse than turning all kids out the same.
Between MD5 and simply writing a function that looks at something like a hundred pre-picked bits within a file to see if they still match, coupled with writing in new "hidden" system calls that generate specific replies based on what makes the call in the first place I don't see how it's impossible to clean the system. Time consuming if things aren't all the same necessarily, annoying when Microsoft uses patching systems that aren't necessarily the most consistent, and frustrating that it is necessary at all, but this should be cleanable.
What you're missing that I've been trying to explain is that the gifted programs, as currently structured, teach ALL subjects to ALL students that are in the program. They don't teach "gifted spelling" but leave off "gifted math". This is why a student has to meet minimum standards in ALL subjects before being admitted to the program.
The program that I was in (1987-1991 or thereabouts) didn't really differentiate math, spelling, English, reading, science, social studies, and art. They were all integrated into one package, where students had to apply everything in order to complete the assigned tasks. Any student who was to be in the gifted program had to at least meet minimum standards of acceptability in every subject in order to have any clue what was going on. If a student sucked in reading they still weren't going to do well with the rest of the program, as reading, like math, science, social studies, and English, were all integral in how the program was designed. One flat out could not function if one lacked excellence in any single subject.
The point of these gifted programs wasn't to take kids that were way out of balance, with extremely high marks on only one subject and cater to that subject, the point was to take the top five to ten percent of students who were continually bored in the regular classroom and give them something to apply the material which they learned on the first goaround, without having to be babied through it like the majority of the students in school.
School is there to provide everyone with a general education, with excellence in math, reading, English, and to a lesser extent social studies and science. Some students are faster at absorbing all subjects than others, so they are placed in a gifted program. Most students learn at at about the same rate, so they're in the normal classroom as they're all within the same statistical average to each other. Some students are behind in one or two subjects, so they're in the regular classroom where they learn at the same pace as the vast majority of students, and are in an LD program to help them with subjects that they're struggling on. Some students are so poor as learners that they're in LD for all three primary subjects, or even in a special self contained class for students that need particular intervention.
The school district that I am employed in is budgetted for $5,600 per student per year based on less than ten absent days for each enrolled student. If you want more than a typical "cookie-cutter" education for your children, you need to supplement it at home or be willing to be taxed much more heavily in order for the school to afford to teach your child the way you want. Otherwise, this is a damn effective way of teaching math, reading, English, science, and social studies to a large group of people for a very low price.
> > LD and the gifted program are by definition mutually exclusive.
> It's sad to see that almost a generation later many schools still feel this way.
Well, since the gifted programs aren't structured very well, one has to test at least average before being accepted. I think that it's something like high test scores on two of the three subjects.
I'd actually like to see elementary schools start to pull precocious children out like they pull LD children out, subject by subject. I was one of those kids who always tested in the 97th to 99th percentile, and it would have benefitted me greatly to have had a chance to have some kind of advanced Geography and advanced English beyond the regular stuff. The gifted program that I was in was also a one day per week program, and my scores in the regular classroom suffered because I was bored when I wasn't in the gifted environment. If I'd had a chance to be permanently in a gifted program at the elementary level I probably would have been there for English, Reading, Science, and Social Studies, and possibly even Math, but such a program didn't exist for fourth graders. I was stuck going over long division for the upteenth time after I'd already gotten it, when I'd probably have been into basic order-of-operation stuff if there had been a gifted permanent math class.
In the school system that I am employed in, elementary school children have one teacher for all basic subjects. If they are struggling with a subject to the point of needing intervention they have another teacher for that, who teaches all Learning Disabled primary subjects, so that if they struggle with math, reading, and English they go to the same person for all three subjects or any combination therein. Some precocious children will attend a gifted program once per week for the entire day. LD and the gifted program are by definition mutually exclusive. The student has two teachers, tops, for regular classes where they make an unsupervised trek across campus at regular intervals. Students also have music, PE, and in upper "intermediate" elementary grades band or strings, but transitions between these frequently happen at regular intervals when some form of supervision is present in the halls. If a student doesn't show up to LD or band/strings, the teacher calls the regular classroom to find out if something's amiss, usually to find that the student is absent for the day.
The only advantage to this RFID system that I can see is that the initial attendance is taken by computer rather than by hand. The alternate classroom teachers still have to find out why a student isn't present if that student isn't there, the first teacher in the morning still has to figure out who is absent and who isn't, and the school still has to patrol the halls to ensure that nothing mischevious or malevolent is occurring.
Most teachers develop a seating arrangement to tell at a glance who isn't there. They don't have to spend ten minutes per day taking attendance, they glance while the kids are getting situated, mark a scantron bubblesheet appropriately, and leave it in the bin for the campus runner to collect. The only time that lenthy attendance is required is if the teacher doesn't have a seating arrangement, or if there is a substitute teacher, in which case the system is likely broken anyway.
The only place that I'd think that RFID interrogators would make sense is at entrances to the building, if the school is set up for that, as it'd let administration know if a student left early or entered late, assuming the badge was being worn and not encased in aluminium foil. Most schools here are not set up where that could be done though, so that wouldn't have much chance of being successful here.
Worse yet, in an elementary school it should be pretty obvious when a student isn't there, since the student only has one teacher. The teacher takes attendance once and if a student disappears, reports it to the school administration. Anything else is a violation of privacy.
No one but the school and the student's guardians should have any knowledge of the student during the school day. Some students are involved as unwitting participants in custody battles, some are on special medications, some have medical problems that require special care. All of this should be confidential.
A failure to cite could be anything from "there was a police officer in the frame so the driver might have been directed to proceed through" to "we couldn't figure out who the driver was so we couldn't prosecute anyone".
Come look at the situation here in Arizona and you'll find that they're very much inclined to press anyone involved with the car about who was driving, trying to get them to tip them off, and it's very hard to defend against it when the system itself is slanted so heavily in the plaintiff's favor, not even requiring them to appear in court over it.
"The over-simplistic 'No victim, no crime' explanation that you're using to justify your dangerous driving also leads to the idea that a man with a truck full of explosives, a map of a local sport stadium showing supporting structures, and a note in his own handwriting which says 'Mom, everyone who loves sports more than God must die, I know you will understand' is undoubtedly innocent. No-one died yet, the officers ought to let him go on his way...."
Ah, but first, there's intent to cause harm that's stated, even indirectly by the defendant's own note. Second, he is going to go to trial and people are going to do the work of probing to find out what actually is going on. Thirdly, he is going to be held to trial by a jury, who decide his fate. He could be charged with conspiracy to XXXXXX, and I have little doubt that additional signs of his intent would be found.
Who's the victim?
Do you exceed the posted speed limit?
What defines it as a crime when it hasn't yet been through due process?
It's the job of the constabulary to enforce laws in person to protect the public, and to investigate real crime that has already occurred. Photo Radar for speed enforcement is a stupid idea, and just leads to people finding out where the cameras are that day, speeding everywhere except by the cameras. Traffic used to even require an officer to serve one with a court notice (the traffic citation), same as an officer picking up a wanted criminal to force a court appearance. Many cities don't even use the police departments to run photo radar, they contract it out to companies, who give the city a portion of the money collected. One such company is American Traffic Systems, who has operated in Scottsdale AZ and San Diego CA if memory serves.
By not receiving instant citation, the accused has no opportunity to place any importance on the memories that might help them form a defense. The prosecution/plaintiff is rarely forced to appear in court either, let alone testify to remembering the vehicle as it sped by, or any of that, like a real officer is required to do. A real officer is required to take an oath that he or she isn't committing perjury when they testify. A picture sent to the court isn't, and should be thrown out if the prosecution/plaintiff does not appear to press their side.
Photo Radar is treating people as guilty by default, without requiring individual explanation, or without an arraignment, pre-trial conference, and trial. It's a travesty to justice and a continual erosion of the rights of citizens by the government.
I'd like them to stop accepting photo radar data. The cities in my area have switched to digital photography. Currently one's only out is to request the Plaintiff to produce the calibration records for the system for the day of the ticket and hope that they don't have that data.
I'd be okay with photo radar and with red light cameras if they were used to bolster the Prosecution/Plaintiff, like if there were a car accident and the red light camera data were used to show that the cited person (by the officer on the scene) had indeed run the light, and that the officer was correct. The current system of using photography with near-automatic conviction deprives people of privacy. If the police want to cite people for speeding or for any other traffic violation then they need to get out there with people who will be required to testify as to what they saw; people who actively claim the count in the charge, not some computer or desk-jockey who analyses data after the fact.
Of course, I also have the opinion that if there's no victim then there's no crime. Take this as you will.
Some day look up Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the Tent City Jail. It's an outdoors jail in a fenced-in plot of land using black tents, in Arizona. They provide evaporative cooling.
The problem here is that it does not house convicts, it houses people awaiting trial. Admittedly many of them are convicted, but it's appauling that people who can't make bail are likely to end up in these conditions rather than in an indoor jail.
They should include "time served" as part of one's stay in Arpaio's jail.
> > The president is a ... heavy drinker
> Let me guess, you were so much happier back when the president was a pot smoker?
Well, he probably was...
It may not be a "special" stream, but a specific way of implementing a generator that looks to be totally random. I'd like to see several years' worth of data, so that I can compare it with historical events beyond the scope that they've so far mentioned.
The point of science is to attempt to understand the universe that we inhabit. If there's some correlation between otherwise random events and specific events that can be reliably demonstrated then we'll have some piece of the universe newly discovered, and we can begin to explore it and its full implications. That doesn't mean that it's likely, or that even if it's true that everyone would immediately accept it, but it's still progress as long as the proper methods are used.
I'd say that with Intel's various errors over the last fifteen years, like the fourth and ninth digit floating point division errors in the Pentium 60, and the heat throttleback due to normal operating conditions on their newer processors, Intel had done a wonderful job of embracing this new unpredictability technology.
Keep in mind too that most UN*X type OSes have everything plus the kitchen sink thrown in, which are a lot of individual projects to keep secure and up to date. If the vendor picks a patching model where every individual package is individually patched then this means that a lot of small things over a given time could be updated, while Microsoft's "Let's make one BIG patch that fixes things once everyone's been in the crapper for months" method only puts out huge omnibus type patches from time to time.
Additionally, the nature of the exploits (often down to the specific function or set of functions at fault) are much more widely published, so the user or sysop can decide whether or not to install the patch based on what they're using the utility or daemon for. Sometimes the exploit is so specific and obscure that only a few people are vulnerable, but everyone is encouraged anyway.
I worked for a small company that had one IT guy (I was in QA) that handled our thirty or so PCs, three or four network servers, the phone/data cabling, programming the PBX, and assisted in building the systems that customers ordered to handle pager traffic. One guy did all this. Admittedly the bulk of the staff was computer literate and we probably could have done it even without the one IT guy, but it didn't require cell phones. He had a cell, but he had a work pager and he'd be reimbursed if he had to use it to call in for something. Workstations ran until they were wholly inadquate for their tasks, and then were reallocated to other tasks (frequently to Quality Assurance for use as test generator machines), while servers were replaced or added frequently, probably more frequently than necessary. Labor was the vast majority of our internal IT expenses, with probably about a third of our internal expenses being equipment. So, probably about $90,000, if that high, and could have been reduced if we'd been more thrifty with our purchases.
Hmmm. So they're saying that it's very dim? I guess that I'm not used to the way various ANSI Lumen standards are recorded besides the obvious. I have a Philips ProScreen 4100 that's 800x600 resolution, 300 ANSI Lumens, with a 4,000 hour lamp (400 hours used) and it still looks pretty good, but requires a darkened room to be used with a picture 50" across diagonal or larger.
If 15lm means 15 ANSI Lumens then this thing is going to be very, very dim under any normally lit room, and one would be better off going for one of the cheap LCD projectors with 1000 Lumens brightness and better controls.
I'm so glad that my ProScreen has an optical keystone adjust, even if it means no throw/zoom control. I'd rather have to move the projector a few feet forward or back to get the image size where I want it than to have the artifacting and antialiasing problems that digital keystone correction creates.
"Having recently repaired a 5 year old computer -- a K6-2/350 running windows 98, there's no damned way you could get any productive work done with that thing. Just browsing the web is horribly slow. God help you if you have to run any real office applications (word, outlook, access, etc.) 2-3 year old (1GHz+ processor speeds) machines might be passable if your company is flat broke, but those machines are costing the company some employee productivity."
Okay, then go get a machine off a two year or three year lease. These can run Windows 2000 *gasp* Windows XP if it's your fancy.
By the way, running a business-normal 350MHz machine puts you squarely into Intel land. I loved the K6/2 line, but that was because for the same money I could buy a 550MHz processor when I could only buy the 350MHz or 400MHz Intel P-II. MHz for MHz the Intels were ahead. My employer has 25,000 PCs on the desktops of users and only around fifteen people to do field work on them across a hundred sites in a metro area. We have machines still out there as slow as 75MHz that are officially off the supported list, but we still support machines down to 300MHz. Take that 300MHz Intel P-II and put 512MB RAM in it and it's capable of doing all required tasks in a reasonable time. I know this because our accounting department is still using them because they're the last PCs we bought in desktop form factor cases, and they don't want towers.
What task using say, Microsoft Office 98 can not be done that can be done using Microsoft Office XP? Don't go to marketing literature to answer it, answer it off of the top of your head. Cop-out answers like "file versions are too new for it" don't count either. I want to know what actual features that real people use didn't yet exist in MS Office 98 that people depend on now in Office XP. If you can't think of any then running that computer from 1998 or 1999 with an OS dating back to when the hardware was reasonably new (NT, 98, 2000, hell even Millennium) properly security patched, updated, or secured behind proper firewalling, and a proper replacement web browser could do everything that the user needs as fast or faster than the user needs it.
I'm writing this on my 700MHz Celeron based laptop with 192MB RAM. I surf the web, check my email, write papers with a word processor, play DVDs with no hardware accelerator, work with spreadsheets, and work with a graphics editor. Yes, I have to be a bit careful with that last one, but it does just work to the point that I haven't really considered a need to buy the newest/latest/greatest other than because 192MB RAM is maxing out what this machine can handle.
My work computer was a 400MHz Celeron for a long time and it still let me use the workorder system (written with Access), use a word processor, a spreadsheet program, email, web browsing, and the like. The only reason that I got a better computer was that they offered us upgrades because we had some parts left over after a project.
Most of the people that I know who work on somewhat substantial OSS projects are paid to work on those projects too. The only real difference is that the companies paying them for the work also release that work to the world-at-large, and take things one step further by building their own distributions that are designed to bundle well together.
Take SuSE for example. They built on work from RedHat, who built on work from Slackware and "roll your own" distributions, who built on the straight GNU toolset and the raw kernel. SuSE has evolved things to where they have a nice installer and maintenance system on top of the GPL stuff. YaST wasn't too bad back when I ran SuSE, and since YaST wasn't yet GPL (and it didn't depend on anything that was, it just allowed for configuration changes to GPL programs to be made easily) it was all to SuSE's advantage because they worked to help the cause of OSS. They did write most of those fancy video drivers that we had in the very late nineties and early noughties, after all.
Since the code is open, a company can either buy their package from a vendor to obtain support, or they can download the source, hire someone to make the modifications that they need, and use that. The thing that people seem to continually miss is that changes made to GPL code only have to be distributed if the binaries compiled off of those changes are distributed. If you rewrite a significant portion of "df", you can keep it all to yourself so long as you don't go sending around the binary executable without the source. Companies can use OSS internally and never reveal what they've done to it if they play by the rules.
That make OSS valuable.
"Windows 95 = Apple 1984"
yeah, I've had too much to drink tonight. I actually enjoyed watching the Schwarzenegger/Belushi movie Red Heat...