A few comments from the latest entry in my aunt's blog (http://www.travelwithhopi.blogspot.com)...
What did Obama mean when he said our children need to be better educated? Let us take a look at students around the world. In India, pupils in the elementary grades are learning advanced mathematics by the time they reach the age of nine. They are expected to know a minimum of two languages when the reach middle school, their own and English. Most pupils are able to speak two or three Indian languages as well as English before they reach middle school.
Pupils in China must memorize 5,000 characters before they can read their newspaper and 12,000 characters in order to enter the university. Their ability to memorize is unequaled. This doesn't stop them from studying mathematics at much higher levels in the high schools than we study here.
In Singapore, students will take eight A level exams before they graduate, while in England the populace is happy if their students learn and take two A levels.
When I state some of these figures, people brush it aside, saying that foreign students learn by rote and our children are learning to think critically and analyze.. Yes, that is true. In the early years Asian students do learn by rote. But when they begin analyzing and thinking critically they have a wealth of material to think about critically. They aren't playing catch-up in their teens and their twenties.
To the extent that any technical background has been discussed, about whether Apple could allow 3rd party development packages, it's that they question whether the "multi-tasking" in iPhone OS 4.0 could be made to work safely.
From what I've gathered, the "multi-tasking" (beyond the limited number of special server processes) in iPhone OS 4.0 is really more of a fast application switching system, where the os saves and restores data state when stopping and restarting processes. Apple thinks they can safely do this for apps compiled against the Apple 4.0 developers kit. They don't think they can safely do this for any arbitrary code.
If this is correct, Adobe could say "Tell us what information you need, and we'll tell you how to find it for apps compiled using our tool". Apple might then say "If we do this for you, we would have to do this for anybody who wanted to build a 3rd party development kit; that would not be practical".
My question to Apple, if I was Adobe, would be "If our tool built binaries that followed the exact rules of your developers kit, such that iPhone OS 4.0 could not tell the difference between a binary built by us, and a binary built by our software, what would happen?"
Once one government agency has some piece of information, you can never absolutely say that no other government agency will ever see it. Ignoring rule breaking, emergency orders, etc. a general "rule of thumb" about census data is that for a certain time period (roughly the average human lifetime) no individually identifiable information will ever be released. The government can and will release aggregate info about the country as a whole, and about individual regions. After the delay period (currently 72 years?) full census data can be released. These releases are where genealogy websites, such as ancestry.com, get their census data. Ancestry.com currently has the full 1930 census. I assume it will get the 1940 census sometime this decade.
There are roadblocks being ignored here; don't necessarily assume that this will go into effect. Everything below comes from newspaper articles last week.
The Democrat's did not use a normal procedure to "pass" the previous Senate bill. They created an entirely separate bill; put text in there to try to fix what they saw as problems in the Senate bill; and then added text saying that by passing this second bill they deemed the first bill as being passed. There were articles from constitutional law professors last week explicitly saying that this procedure is unconstitutional; listing Supreme court cases to back up their viewpoint. You can bet that opponents of that bill saw those articles, and that if there is a signing ceremony to "finally" enact the bill; lawsuits will be filed on this basis within days.
They're hoping to use what's called a reconciliation procedure to pass the second bill in the Senate. The problem is that this new house bill contains explicit points that violate restrictions on the reconciliation procedure. Articles last week said that Senate Democratic leaders expected those points to be brought up and didn't know whether they could be worked around.
And from articles last year. The Senate bill that narrowly passed last December contains language that some say "bought" a few votes; specifically that some states wouldn't have to contribute local taxes to health care. Multiple organizations back then said that they were preparing federal lawsuits saying that that language was unconstitutional; that all states had to be treated equally.
It's not just the many, many separate tax rates in this country. You also have to deal with different reporting systems (you can't just blindly send checks out); different monthly/quarterly/annual reporting systems, some localities may not be interested in checks that are "too small", etc. Amazon of course could do it. If you're an individual that wants to start a business, you have no hope. The only choice would be finding some service to do it for you; raising your prices so that you could pay the extra fees to that business on top of the taxes. What I would do is reverse the argument; e.g. say that a business in state X must pay taxes to that state even if the product is shipped out of state. Then you would know if the mail order company depended on not paying sales taxes; e.g. if the company then moved to a state with no sales tax like Oregon.
If you're inclined to guided walking tours, I recommend the London Walks organization; http://www.walks.com./ In addition to walking tours of various parts of London, they also have excursion days to Oxford, Cambridge, etc.
I'd think you could go back much earlier. Syndicated radio, back in the 1930's, was done by individual radio stations subscribing to a show; e.g. a "podcast". "Downloads" were done by the syndicator making copies of records and mailing them to the subscribers. I see zero difference between that and current podcasts where the "syndicator" puts audio/video files on a computer network so that subscribers can download them.
Depends on the era. I was a high school student in Southern California in the early 1970's. At that time in that school district, PE was a mandantory class, one period a day, 5 days a week; graded like any other class.
The coaches (PE teachers) though just treated the class like a farm system for high school athletics. If you potentially any good athletically, you were recruited and got an A or B. If you weren't good at sports; etc. but didn't cause the coach problems, you got a C. The classes just switched every so often from one sport to the next. No special effort was given to monitoring extertion, etc.
The official reason they want GPS is that different states have different taxes. So they want to know the miles you drive in each state. There's of course also talk that if they get this, they can use it for toll roads; urban congestion charges, etc.
To my understanding, if any other organization wanted to spend the money to go through multiple big libraries; scanning every document, and then running those scans through an OCR system, there's nothing in this agreement that would prevent that. Google is just the only organization to have spent the money.
I would welcome easier access to "orphan", out of print books.
Depends on what area of the country you're in. Some of the old CompUSA stores in (iirc) the southeastern area of the US were purchased by Tiger Direct, along with the CompUSA web site. Unless Tiger Direct starts opening new CompUSA stores though, they're gone as far as the rest of the country is concerned.
I've seen reports elsewhere that implies this behavior is really the "best available" workaround cable companies have for a serious problem with the DOCSIS cable modem standards.
The way I understood those reports, currently all cable modems on a segment compete for a limited number of uplink slots (similar to a tdma architecture). If there's enough uplink traffic from some modems on the segment, other modems on the segment can effectively get locked out from sending any uplink traffic. There is nothing the cable company can do to control this, other than to try to force some connections to try to "go away" for a while. There is no point where they could add priorities, queueing, etc.
Does anyone know more details?
Using laptops in chairs
on
Lap Desks
·
· Score: 2, Informative
One I like is the "air desk" from www.airdesks.com
"Direct Recording Electoral" systems, touch screen recording, etc. doesn't apply in the state of Oregon. Oregon doesn't have (and hasn't had for years) traditional election days.
All voting in Oregon is done by mail. They send you a paper ballot; you mark the ballot and mail it back in. You can vote anytime after you receive the ballot (a couple of weeks before the election day); the ballot just has to reach the county office by election day. So unless the counties throw away the paper ballots, there is a paper trail.
At least in our county the ballot is a "fill in the bubble" paper that's first read electronically; or is looked at manually in recounts.
Some historical background...
The WTO wasn't formed by the United Nations. It came from the general "free trade" talks. US representatives were primary authors.
The WTO was "passed" during Bill Clinton's presidency (the lame duck congress session after the 94 elections, iirc). By "passed", I mean that it was not formally ratified in the constitutional sense. Clinton didn't have the necessary super-majority votes in the Senate. Instead, he used the workaround (that's been used in the past by other presidents from all parties) of calling it an international agreement; and asking the congress to agreeing to abide by the agreement. During that process, he needed some votes from republican members of congress; to get them he made a promise that he'd allow the agreement to be re-debated and possibly re-voted on if the WTO asked the US to change three or more laws (yes, this was an issue then, especially with the republicans).
Of course, that pledge was "forgotten" after that. The WTO has forced more than three US laws to be overturned. This includes (at least) the "dolphin safe tuna" laws (due to a complaint from Mexico), some clean air laws related to petroleum with heavy sulfur content (due to a complaint from Venezuala (sp?)), multiple rules about tax laws that were thought to be export subsidies in disguise, etc.
It's interesting how strongly the resistance is to this particular, arguably not that meaningful, ruling. To some extent it shows how the old Puritan views still hold sway; in others it shows the political influence of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, American Indian tribes, etc.
It is not correct that Kodak had to both recall and destroy their "infringing" cameras; there was just a recall. I had one of those Kodak cameras (as that was a much better camera than what Polaroid made at the time). All I had to do was remove the front nameplate and send it in for a refund. The only thing that "destroyed" what was left was that the film it used was no longer produced.
The standardization effort is the response of a group of state government to complaints by mail order businesses (not specifically internet businesses) that if they had to pay local taxes for every customer purchase...
there would be hundreds, if not thousands, of local tax rates to keep track of (state, county, city, special district, etc.)
you couldn't depend on customers to tell you the rate; they may not know; they may be wrong, etc.
each mail order business would have to register with potentially hundreds of different taxing authorities; could potentially be audited any any combination of those, etc.
would be spending lots of money to send very small checks (maybe just pennies) with accompanying tax return forms to those tax authorities
Etc. Maybe Amazon, etc. would be able to handle it. But a local small startup either couldn't handle it (and hopefully get away with ignoring it), or just give up on mail order sales.
The proposal from those states was to replace (for purposes of mail order sales) all the individual state/county/city/etc. tax rates with a single tax rate, and a single national tax authority, that would take in money from all mail order businesses, and distribute that money to the states, etc.
For most of my life, I think that general advertising of prescription drugs was also banned in the US. I think the current ridiculous advertising blitz started within the last 10-15 years. Does anybody else remember the exact details? Such as, did some court claim that "free speech" rights prevented any ban?
If I remember right, before that happened prescription drug advertising was specifically limited to trade magazines, etc. expressly directed at the medical profession.
There's never been any restriction that I know of on non-prescription drugs.
I wonder what the "exit polls" say about Oregon, since for about 10 years now Oregon hasn't had polling places where you can do exit polls at; all ballots are sent in by mail, during the few weeks after they send out the ballot and the official "election" day. The closest you can come to a traditional polling place is a few city or county offices that you can drive to on election day and drop off a ballot to be hand carried to the elections dept.
In other words, on election day there is no polling place in Oregon that pollsters can stand outside and ask how you voted as you leave.
I don't know of any other state that's gone as far as Oregon down this road; but there are many that substantially liberalized absentee ballot rules; in I think at least one other state the majority of people vote "absentee".
Voice lines use a defined set of frequencies on the copper. There is a limit on what you can send/receive just using those frequencies.
DSL, HomePNA, etc. use different (higher) set of frequencies. These frequencies do not overlap with the voice frequencies. There are some disadvantages of course; telephone wires are typically relatively electrically noisy, so if you're trying to push large amount of data around you have to be able to handle the noise. The extra frequencies can interfer with some voice equipment; so you might have to add filters to protect (e.g. remove the non-voice frequencies) the voice equipment.
What I'd like is for broadband ISP's to at least make it harder for zombie'd systems to cause troubles; harder for zombie'd systems to communicate, etc. This particulary includes Cox, Comcast, etc.
I really wonder sometimes whether in the long run it might be cheaper for broadband ISP's to install a small firewall box between the customers computer and the internet for EVERY connection; similar to what Verizon seems to be doing for all connections to their FIOS (fiber optics to the home) service.
There actually was a past effort at spelling reform in the US that "succeeded"; though it was quite a while ago. It's one source of the differences in American and British spelling; honor vs honour, etc.
My memories vague, but I think the first pushes for general literacy in the American colonies, with McGuffies (?) readers, etc. tried to "improve" British spelling. This was described in a cable tv show I once saw on the history and evolution of the English language.
The way I read the messages people are getting, containing threats, etc. is that they exactly match the legal definition of the crime of extortion. In the US, I think that comes under the jurisdiction of the FBI.
While each individual message is probably below the threshold the FBI usually investigates, if the whole block of threats could be reported to the FBI, maybe they could do something.
Just for background, here's a few areas where the US already has had to change laws to comply with WTO rules:
At one time, there was a push to regulate the tuna industry in the US to minimize or eliminate accidental dolphin and porpoise catches. The Mexican tuna industry protested to the WTO; the WTO ruled for them, and the US "safe tuna" laws disappeared.
At one time, there were rules prohibiting the importation of some high-sulfur oil. Venezuala (iirc) protested to the WTO. Those rules disappeared.
The US congress has tried multiple times to give special tax protection to some export industries. Other countries protested to the WTO. The WTO ruled for the other countries.
I think there are a few more examples.
An anecdote back from when the WTO treaty was passed in the US... The same comments about the WTO treaty possibly impinging on US sovereignity were being said then. The Clinton administration used the typical constitutional end-run for a controversial treaty; instead of following treaty ratification rules in the constitution, they called it an agreement. Then they pushed a bill through a lame duck session of congress saying that the US would follow the agreement. (This circumvents an otherwise required super-majority vote in the US Senate).
To get at least minimal Republican support for the bill, Clinton promised Dole that the WTO agreement could be brought up again if the WTO ever overruled 3 US laws. That point was reached years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
A few comments from the latest entry in my aunt's blog (http://www.travelwithhopi.blogspot.com)...
What did Obama mean when he said our children need to be better educated? Let us take a look at students around the world. In India, pupils in the elementary grades are learning advanced mathematics by the time they reach the age of nine. They are expected to know a minimum of two languages when the reach middle school, their own and English. Most pupils are able to speak two or three Indian languages as well as English before they reach middle school.
Pupils in China must memorize 5,000 characters before they can read their newspaper and 12,000 characters in order to enter the university. Their ability to memorize is unequaled. This doesn't stop them from studying mathematics at much higher levels in the high schools than we study here.
In Singapore, students will take eight A level exams before they graduate, while in England the populace is happy if their students learn and take two A levels.
When I state some of these figures, people brush it aside, saying that foreign students learn by rote and our children are learning to think critically and analyze.. Yes, that is true. In the early years Asian students do learn by rote. But when they begin analyzing and thinking critically they have a wealth of material to think about critically. They aren't playing catch-up in their teens and their twenties.
To the extent that any technical background has been discussed, about whether Apple could allow 3rd party development packages, it's that they question whether the "multi-tasking" in iPhone OS 4.0 could be made to work safely.
From what I've gathered, the "multi-tasking" (beyond the limited number of special server processes) in iPhone OS 4.0 is really more of a fast application switching system, where the os saves and restores data state when stopping and restarting processes. Apple thinks they can safely do this for apps compiled against the Apple 4.0 developers kit. They don't think they can safely do this for any arbitrary code.
If this is correct, Adobe could say "Tell us what information you need, and we'll tell you how to find it for apps compiled using our tool". Apple might then say "If we do this for you, we would have to do this for anybody who wanted to build a 3rd party development kit; that would not be practical".
My question to Apple, if I was Adobe, would be "If our tool built binaries that followed the exact rules of your developers kit, such that iPhone OS 4.0 could not tell the difference between a binary built by us, and a binary built by our software, what would happen?"
Once one government agency has some piece of information, you can never absolutely say that no other government agency will ever see it. Ignoring rule breaking, emergency orders, etc. a general "rule of thumb" about census data is that for a certain time period (roughly the average human lifetime) no individually identifiable information will ever be released. The government can and will release aggregate info about the country as a whole, and about individual regions. After the delay period (currently 72 years?) full census data can be released. These releases are where genealogy websites, such as ancestry.com, get their census data. Ancestry.com currently has the full 1930 census. I assume it will get the 1940 census sometime this decade.
The Democrat's did not use a normal procedure to "pass" the previous Senate bill. They created an entirely separate bill; put text in there to try to fix what they saw as problems in the Senate bill; and then added text saying that by passing this second bill they deemed the first bill as being passed. There were articles from constitutional law professors last week explicitly saying that this procedure is unconstitutional; listing Supreme court cases to back up their viewpoint. You can bet that opponents of that bill saw those articles, and that if there is a signing ceremony to "finally" enact the bill; lawsuits will be filed on this basis within days.
They're hoping to use what's called a reconciliation procedure to pass the second bill in the Senate. The problem is that this new house bill contains explicit points that violate restrictions on the reconciliation procedure. Articles last week said that Senate Democratic leaders expected those points to be brought up and didn't know whether they could be worked around.
And from articles last year. The Senate bill that narrowly passed last December contains language that some say "bought" a few votes; specifically that some states wouldn't have to contribute local taxes to health care. Multiple organizations back then said that they were preparing federal lawsuits saying that that language was unconstitutional; that all states had to be treated equally.
It's not just the many, many separate tax rates in this country. You also have to deal with different reporting systems (you can't just blindly send checks out); different monthly/quarterly/annual reporting systems, some localities may not be interested in checks that are "too small", etc. Amazon of course could do it. If you're an individual that wants to start a business, you have no hope. The only choice would be finding some service to do it for you; raising your prices so that you could pay the extra fees to that business on top of the taxes. What I would do is reverse the argument; e.g. say that a business in state X must pay taxes to that state even if the product is shipped out of state. Then you would know if the mail order company depended on not paying sales taxes; e.g. if the company then moved to a state with no sales tax like Oregon.
If you're inclined to guided walking tours, I recommend the London Walks organization; http://www.walks.com./ In addition to walking tours of various parts of London, they also have excursion days to Oxford, Cambridge, etc.
I'd think you could go back much earlier. Syndicated radio, back in the 1930's, was done by individual radio stations subscribing to a show; e.g. a "podcast". "Downloads" were done by the syndicator making copies of records and mailing them to the subscribers. I see zero difference between that and current podcasts where the "syndicator" puts audio/video files on a computer network so that subscribers can download them.
Depends on the era. I was a high school student in Southern California in the early 1970's. At that time in that school district, PE was a mandantory class, one period a day, 5 days a week; graded like any other class. The coaches (PE teachers) though just treated the class like a farm system for high school athletics. If you potentially any good athletically, you were recruited and got an A or B. If you weren't good at sports; etc. but didn't cause the coach problems, you got a C. The classes just switched every so often from one sport to the next. No special effort was given to monitoring extertion, etc.
The official reason they want GPS is that different states have different taxes. So they want to know the miles you drive in each state. There's of course also talk that if they get this, they can use it for toll roads; urban congestion charges, etc.
To my understanding, if any other organization wanted to spend the money to go through multiple big libraries; scanning every document, and then running those scans through an OCR system, there's nothing in this agreement that would prevent that. Google is just the only organization to have spent the money. I would welcome easier access to "orphan", out of print books.
Depends on what area of the country you're in. Some of the old CompUSA stores in (iirc) the southeastern area of the US were purchased by Tiger Direct, along with the CompUSA web site. Unless Tiger Direct starts opening new CompUSA stores though, they're gone as far as the rest of the country is concerned.
I'm an xps m1330 owner in the US; it's adaptor came with a three pin grounded plug.
The way I understood those reports, currently all cable modems on a segment compete for a limited number of uplink slots (similar to a tdma architecture). If there's enough uplink traffic from some modems on the segment, other modems on the segment can effectively get locked out from sending any uplink traffic. There is nothing the cable company can do to control this, other than to try to force some connections to try to "go away" for a while. There is no point where they could add priorities, queueing, etc.
Does anyone know more details?
One I like is the "air desk" from www.airdesks.com
"Direct Recording Electoral" systems, touch screen recording, etc. doesn't apply in the state of Oregon. Oregon doesn't have (and hasn't had for years) traditional election days. All voting in Oregon is done by mail. They send you a paper ballot; you mark the ballot and mail it back in. You can vote anytime after you receive the ballot (a couple of weeks before the election day); the ballot just has to reach the county office by election day. So unless the counties throw away the paper ballots, there is a paper trail. At least in our county the ballot is a "fill in the bubble" paper that's first read electronically; or is looked at manually in recounts.
Some historical background... The WTO wasn't formed by the United Nations. It came from the general "free trade" talks. US representatives were primary authors. The WTO was "passed" during Bill Clinton's presidency (the lame duck congress session after the 94 elections, iirc). By "passed", I mean that it was not formally ratified in the constitutional sense. Clinton didn't have the necessary super-majority votes in the Senate. Instead, he used the workaround (that's been used in the past by other presidents from all parties) of calling it an international agreement; and asking the congress to agreeing to abide by the agreement. During that process, he needed some votes from republican members of congress; to get them he made a promise that he'd allow the agreement to be re-debated and possibly re-voted on if the WTO asked the US to change three or more laws (yes, this was an issue then, especially with the republicans). Of course, that pledge was "forgotten" after that. The WTO has forced more than three US laws to be overturned. This includes (at least) the "dolphin safe tuna" laws (due to a complaint from Mexico), some clean air laws related to petroleum with heavy sulfur content (due to a complaint from Venezuala (sp?)), multiple rules about tax laws that were thought to be export subsidies in disguise, etc. It's interesting how strongly the resistance is to this particular, arguably not that meaningful, ruling. To some extent it shows how the old Puritan views still hold sway; in others it shows the political influence of Las Vegas, Atlantic City, American Indian tribes, etc.
It is not correct that Kodak had to both recall and destroy their "infringing" cameras; there was just a recall. I had one of those Kodak cameras (as that was a much better camera than what Polaroid made at the time). All I had to do was remove the front nameplate and send it in for a refund. The only thing that "destroyed" what was left was that the film it used was no longer produced.
Etc. Maybe Amazon, etc. would be able to handle it. But a local small startup either couldn't handle it (and hopefully get away with ignoring it), or just give up on mail order sales.
The proposal from those states was to replace (for purposes of mail order sales) all the individual state/county/city/etc. tax rates with a single tax rate, and a single national tax authority, that would take in money from all mail order businesses, and distribute that money to the states, etc.
If I remember right, before that happened prescription drug advertising was specifically limited to trade magazines, etc. expressly directed at the medical profession.
There's never been any restriction that I know of on non-prescription drugs.
In other words, on election day there is no polling place in Oregon that pollsters can stand outside and ask how you voted as you leave.
I don't know of any other state that's gone as far as Oregon down this road; but there are many that substantially liberalized absentee ballot rules; in I think at least one other state the majority of people vote "absentee".
Voice lines use a defined set of frequencies on the copper. There is a limit on what you can send/receive just using those frequencies.
DSL, HomePNA, etc. use different (higher) set of frequencies. These frequencies do not overlap with the voice frequencies. There are some disadvantages of course; telephone wires are typically relatively electrically noisy, so if you're trying to push large amount of data around you have to be able to handle the noise. The extra frequencies can interfer with some voice equipment; so you might have to add filters to protect (e.g. remove the non-voice frequencies) the voice equipment.
What I'd like is for broadband ISP's to at least make it harder for zombie'd systems to cause troubles; harder for zombie'd systems to communicate, etc. This particulary includes Cox, Comcast, etc.
I really wonder sometimes whether in the long run it might be cheaper for broadband ISP's to install a small firewall box between the customers computer and the internet for EVERY connection; similar to what Verizon seems to be doing for all connections to their FIOS (fiber optics to the home) service.
My memories vague, but I think the first pushes for general literacy in the American colonies, with McGuffies (?) readers, etc. tried to "improve" British spelling. This was described in a cable tv show I once saw on the history and evolution of the English language.
While each individual message is probably below the threshold the FBI usually investigates, if the whole block of threats could be reported to the FBI, maybe they could do something.
At one time, there was a push to regulate the tuna industry in the US to minimize or eliminate accidental dolphin and porpoise catches. The Mexican tuna industry protested to the WTO; the WTO ruled for them, and the US "safe tuna" laws disappeared.
At one time, there were rules prohibiting the importation of some high-sulfur oil. Venezuala (iirc) protested to the WTO. Those rules disappeared.
The US congress has tried multiple times to give special tax protection to some export industries. Other countries protested to the WTO. The WTO ruled for the other countries.
I think there are a few more examples.
An anecdote back from when the WTO treaty was passed in the US... The same comments about the WTO treaty possibly impinging on US sovereignity were being said then. The Clinton administration used the typical constitutional end-run for a controversial treaty; instead of following treaty ratification rules in the constitution, they called it an agreement. Then they pushed a bill through a lame duck session of congress saying that the US would follow the agreement. (This circumvents an otherwise required super-majority vote in the US Senate).
To get at least minimal Republican support for the bill, Clinton promised Dole that the WTO agreement could be brought up again if the WTO ever overruled 3 US laws. That point was reached years ago.