Not even close, its a time to market problem. Classic cathedral vs bazaar thing. The mfgr wants to ship something that technical barely legally works as fast as freaking possible, unless they're apple. As long as it doesn't get returned to the store as "broken", its good enough. Only the rockbox people and apple want to make the "perfect" device no matter how long it takes.
That brings up the marketing problem, that "noname mp3 player inc" markets to people who want the cheapest or are giving gifts or just simply don't care. The competition for the perfected rockbox device is the perfected apple device, not "noname mp3 player inc". You're going to totally confuse the management of "noname mp3 player inc" if you tell them their rockbox competes in the apple market space, when they think they're competing in the shovelware junk market space.
There is no end user support of consumer devices. The most you can dream of is a foreign script reader telling you to reinstall windows. Its not a control issue.
Weight. Never overlook the ability of fat rich people to spend $500 on a set of carbon fiber bicycle handlebars that are 1.3 ounces lighter than stock carbon steel. Oh, I can listen to my workout tunes using something that weighs 4 ounces less than my hefty iphone, and it only costs $50? I'm so there.
Size. At least for the gym bunny crowd (exhibitionist mostly young and good looking women who don't actually exercise, but like showing off the goods to the guys who like watching) on some of those more ridiculous tiny tight spandex outfits where do you put a giant iphone? Walk around with it in your hand the entire time? That was the strategy at the gym I used to go to, they'd spend the whole time walking around trying to look at the guys who were looking at them. Some tiny dedicated mp3 players are nearly small enough to be a barrett (no thats a M82A1 rifle).. barret (no thats for idiots who can't spell Barrett) Oh f it I mean that thing that you women clip in your hair. Even for an old guy like me who thinks "long distance" snow shoeing is hard core, less weight to carry always equals better.
(Rs. 15,000 is one week's wages for a programmer at a top IT company in India).
aka about 300 USD
Also the forex abbreviation for their currency is INR not Rs. Its not important, it's one of those sociological study moments where the abbreviation you select tells a lot about your culture and history etc. I don't think Rs is offensive, but I don't know one way or the other for sure, so I'd stick with the known inoffensive INR
Thanks for the much more recent data. Three interesting things about 50% growth rates 1) wall street is notoriously bad at fairly pricing on the upswing at that rate 2) that growth rate cannot go on forever 3) wall street is notoriously bad at fairly pricing on the downswing at that rate Its going to be a fun rollercoaster to watch.
That's be the best thing that could happen for Google+.
Yeah because the MBA types always move in lockstep herd-like mentality, so having to pay 0.1 bitcoin to make a post on G+ would act as a nice filter and make the Mighty GOOG even mightier.
You know what else would be hilarious? How about if your ISP/telco/cellphone provider peers directly with us so we pay no transit costs, then you get free service, if not, we post your telco's customer support hotline number and bill you $1/day for access to pay for bandwidth until your telco peers with us. This would be good for the net, more or less. Its not all bad news.
when I was stupid (ie, a youth) I didn't know any better.
Its not so much stupid as ignorant.
That TV police drama is actually pretty good. Once you've seen it, you don't have to watch it, or the endless remakes again. I certainly don't. I kind of liked the Stereotypical Sci Fi show, but it got a bit overdone in the late 90s what with about half a dozen simultaneous remake/copycat series.
Not unique to TV... Once you've absorbed all there is from the LOTR and related books, you... just stop reading them, and start reading something new. Same with any other book. If you really want to stir the pot then you ask why the bible / koran / torah doesn't get the same treatment. I read the bible, once, didn't much care for it, kind of repetitive, needs editing. Also read the Koran, even if it was an infidel english translation (apparently a translation is a major no-no) it had some interesting stories and poetry, I'd recommend it for a read. The books of mormon were... unusual, not really what I was expecting, to the point that its hard to evaluate. Scientologist scriptures, I read those too.
Kind of similar with movies. That movie, the one with the wisecracking detective partners in a kind of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy ends up with girl, theme but recast into a manly bro-mance with two straight dudes, combined with car chasing and catching the bad guy, yeah that was a good movie. No interest in seeing it again, or the thousandth remake/sequel/copycat, but it was a decent movie.
I wish there were more than 20 or so TV shows and 20 or so movies. I'd watch them.
Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.
You misquoted him. This is the actual poem:
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me because twitter was failwhale and anyway all they wanted to talk about was celebrity gossip and local weather conditions not philosophy and freedoms.
I bet you don't watch television and make sure everyone knows about it too.
On a percentage basis, almost everyone watches TV, and almost no one uses twitter. But the twitter users only hang out with other twitter users, so they think the whole world is on twitter, because their whole world is on twitter. The TV watchers do use the same circular reasoning. However one group is a overwhelming majority, and the other a tiny minority.
On the other hand, the so called social media craze (I'm including in that the full spectrum, from twitter, to myspace) seems quite more widespread than the cb on the 70's.
The numbers are much smaller than CB. Here's an interesting article.
Depending on how you interpret the data, around 1 in 50 americans actually use twitter. At one point in the 70s, darn near 1 in 10 cars had a CB radio installed.
If you think about it, it makes sense. Most people have nothing to say, and are not interested in passively listening to others. Also its exceedingly circular, its not a surprise that most of the people you personally hang out with are into social media if you define the persons you hang out with as people who are into social media... This is the "everyone is a trekkie" effect where all the trekkies hang out together believing the entire world is trekkies because everyone they know is a trekkie.
You'd need to do something about districts and remove local budgeting and control of schools. Not saying I agree with you, but if you don't do that, then all you're doing is shuffling names around without actually changing anything. If you keep districts at "neighborhood" or "city" size, then you just end up replicating have/have-not based on real estate value. Which leads inevitably to lower property taxes and higher state or federal taxes, more bookkeeping, middlemen, and corruption, etc. Because taxes never reduce, that means the locals will have lots of extra money floating around, which leads to more corruption. So overall, you'd theoretically get standardized education, but probably at a lower level due to higher corruption, and the upper half would still have everything from simply caring about their kids school all the way up to private schools, so as a society I don't think we'd win because the rich would remain better off, but the median would drop. The absolute bottom of the barrel would do better, but they're just going into the prison industrial complex anyway, so I see little point in wasting educational resources on them, just what we need, smarter criminals. So in summary, I disagree with your method and your goals, each for different reasons.
There is a concerted effort by the conservative power elite in the USA to splinter and collapse universal schooling
No its a 1% vs 99% thing, and the 1% use anti-leftie PR when talking to the righties, and anti-rightie PR when talking to the lefties, to get both sides to do their bidding. Looks like you fell for it hook line and sinker.
the data collector is still justified in making the prediction that you can only know what you were formally taught because in 99% of the cases this will be true
I would disagree in that everything that is not compulsory is forbidden and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory and mistargeting of ads is too likely.
In my example, all kids in my suburban school are supposed to go to college, therefore standards were pretty high, and we were almost all unable to attend shop class or at least strongly discouraged. When I signed up for a CAD intro class you'd think I grew a second head, the way my advisor/counselor reacted. Yet we wrenched on our cars in our spare time; we had to if we wanted to be able to afford wheels. Using this educational data, you'd think no one graduated by my school system in at least the past 30 years knows anything about cars, you'd be very wrong. Similar for cooking; I was forbidden to take cooking classes, have to take geology instead. That does not mean no one in my entire district for more than a generation can cook.
That closely ties to the mistargeting problem. Auto shop and cooking class were where disciplinary problems were sent to keep the academic classes orderly until the problems either straighten out and fly right, or drop out. You're far more likely to sell brass knuckles and weed pee test passing substances to A+ automotive shop class kids than socket sets or breaker bars. I hope the people buying the sales lists understand this little problem. The percentage of students in shop class / cooking class accurately reflects soft drug addiction rates and other mental issues, nothing to do with the possible sales rates for car repair and gourmet cooking spices. For all practical purposes, the number of kids who took geology approaches 100%, but the number of people in the geological hammer market in my community approaches zero.
Imagine $76 million dollars to fund MORE / 'Better' teachers? Willing to bet it does more to help the overall economy & education (current AND future, in the same price tag) than buying some silly software that's going to show us that we don't truly care anymore.
I don't think it would have much effect.
Half your budget goes to overhead and management right off the top. Darn near a 1:2 administrator / teacher ratio where I live, and administrators get paid more for doing basically nothing productive, and physical plant overhead is quite expensive (imagine what it would cost to rent an office building the size of a school per year). Then lets assume the average teacher pulls down $50K. Yes I'm well aware that their salary model is different than, say, private sector IT, so a newbie teacher starts out at $20K and gets a 5K raise every year for the rest of their career, whereas a IT dude gets $50K the first year and then gets a pay raise a little smaller than inflation for the rest of his career. Back to topic. It does nothing to hire one teacher for one year if they just get downsized next year, so lets pay them for 20 years to have a real, generational effect.
Thats 76M / 2 (half to overhead) / 50 (thousand bucks per teacher per year) / 20 years = no calculator necessary about 38 teachers for twenty years. So across a dozen states you just hired about one (big) elementary school, or perhaps an average sized middle school. Eh.
We did already have this. It was called report cards, and when I was in K-12 school, it got sent home on paper with me once every six weeks so my parents could look at it and see how I was doing and if necessary ground me for not paying attention in school.
With grade inflation its no longer meaningful. Also its a pretty good form of "stealth ageism". For example I'm old enough (get off my F-ing lawn) that I worked extremely hard to get a B+ in quantitative chemical analysis, lets just say it was long enough ago that we had an admittedly old even in that era apple II for a lab computer for potentiometric electrochemical analysis. Back in ye olden days, a B+ was a pretty strong effort and looks good on my transcript and believe it or not probably curved me up to around the top quartile of the class, I always was a superior chemist even in one of my weaker areas. Compared to a young whipper snapper where as long as you pay the registration office and show up, you're guaranteed an easy "A", that B+ makes me look like the class moron. And that is "stealth ageism" because my numbers make me appear dumber than your average young 4.0 student, but I actually did what would in modern terms be relatively high "A" level work not merely a B+. To figure out I'm a moron you should have to read/., not compare a decades old grades transcript with a modern hyper-inflated grade transcript.
I've seen this effect with my kids. I used to get the full spectrum of D in gym up to A+ in science, but they only get wishy washy word grades now in grade school, like a checkmark for one of these three "Have not begun this topic" "making progress on this topic" "mastered this topic". I'm told there was a slightly earlier era a decade ago where they exclusively gave out A grade, it was just curved to A- for the morons, plain A for the masses, and A+ for the elite.
The obvious assumption when you're dealing with a known criminal organization is that they'll put all this effort into gathering information in order to sell it. The problem is, who will the customers be?
So... you package up a spam list of all the students who flunked financial literacy 101 and sell it to the car dealers, Realtors(tm), and mortgage brokers, "come and get em!". But they don't need the leads, because its all cross fertilized. The customers at the rent-a-center are the customers at the payday loan store are the customers at the subprime mortgage dealer are the customers at McDonalds are the customers at Walmart. They already know who these guys are.
OK so see I never took any automotive classes, so you assume you can screw me over at the stealership. What you don't know is I spent a summer helping a great-uncle rebuild a 1930's diesel tractor, helped weld a homemade lake-pier together which is still standing a quarter century later, etc... The idea that a "college bound" student like myself would attend a votech class was unthinkable in that era, and probably today... in fact all of our suburban students are supposed to go to college to make the bankers who provider the loans rich, so I don't think shop class attendance is going to be relevant or useful data. In a way, this is great, because it encourages people to teach themselves, not attend a class. I certainly did not learn how to replace brake rotors and pads in a classroom, that's for sure.
And the rest of the data? Donno. Maybe I'm low on caffeine but I donno who can profit off the knowledge that I aced everything in 2nd year chem aka introductory o-chem or that I didn't do so well in 9th grade history because I was bored to tears (well not literally, but darn close).
...I'd like to know how much ad revenue have they generated in the past year, which would be a small fraction of it's valuation....
To extend on those remarks, two years ago the entire online advertising market was about $25B annually, with about half that going to GOOG for search placement. Old timers like myself will be surprised that only about a third of the online ad market is banner ads. I suppose adblocker-type technology will eventually completely kill off that market segment, or at least I hope it does. Anyway, FB can only be a small fraction of $10B ad revenue.
In normal market conditions companies used to sell for P.E. ratios in the single digit-ish range, but for a couple decades ultra high PE ratios have taken over. Once the baby boomers cash in their 401Ks that'll drop back to normal. Anyway it would not be all that out of line for a couple billion in revenue to account for a couple dozen billion in valuation.
Also the data they have is useful for spam services that are not online. Expect it to be mandatory to link your postal spam mail address and your social security number to your FB account, supposedly to cut down on griefers and spammers, but more likely to make the data they have on you more valuable.
how facebook makes money. The real foldy stuff, not stock prices that are based on hopes of increased stock prices at some nebulous date in the future.
Have you seen a facebook addict after being forcibly removed from the service for a day or two? Not a pretty sight. Apparently, amongst the addicts, it rates just below breathing, but above all other bodily functions.
They'd be doing a huge disservice to their stockholders by not charging at least a buck a day for the "heavy users". I could see something like your streamy-line-thing only updates once a day (or once per hour, etc) for free, but if you're a paid member then its realtime. Or paid members get realtime but free members live perpetually 30 minutes in the past...
Just to add to that, many small businesses want part-time/remote/on-call support, not a full time employee.
Full time work at home = hire someone in India for 1/20th the wage
"fifth-time, tenth-time" work mostly at home generating human readable presentation quality PBX reports or doing basic accounting and such, with the occasional visit into the office to run monthly PBX backups or backups in general and/or a MAC run (moves, adds, changes of phone extensions), and the awareness that you're available 24x7 for emergencies onsite if they're willing to pay triple overtime, that's going to a local.
"fifth time" = work one day per week, etc. Like squirting out weekly reports.
I'm not a EE, but wouldn't finding a stronger permanent magnet increase the energy efficiency of any electric motor or generator, thus leading to energy conservation across the board?
Relatively few watts worldwide are dropped into permanent magnet motors. Its "unusual" for a motor bigger than fractional HP to be a permanent mag design, although they do exist. Shunt wound, or series wound, that's your field coil choice, more or less, or you get into induction, synchronous, slip-pole, and probably a bunch of others I've forgotten... Its a race, kind of, will permag motors improve faster than AC VFDs get cheaper? Then there's brushless, and the people who do things that on the surface are weird like run machine tool spindles off servomotors because they want huge controllable torque at low RPMs (like for semi-rigid tapping)
Although in greenwashing tradition, if my tropical fishtank water filter pump was improved from 5 watts to 4.9 watts I'm sure I'd be gettin' hippie chicks by savin' the planet... after purchasing a new $50 filter, of course.
There's a new kit car announced. It has a 100cc engine and a small frame attached to four wheels. This "car" gets 100mpg and costs $500. It has no seats, no steering wheel, no roof, no doors, no airbags, no windshield, etc.
Is it fair to compare this "car" in terms of fuel economy and price to a brand new Corolla or F150?
If someone starts going on about "It's a fraction of the cost and gets 4x the economy! That's the real story here!" Wouldn't you think they were a little nuts?
No I'd think they're freaking geniuses.
You screwed up the standard/. car analogy. Cross out the bit about the 4 wheels and no seat, and you've basically described a moped or motorcycle. Pretty exciting news, if that whole giant and exciting market had never existed until right now. This is like living in day 1 of the Harley Davidson corporation, or day 1 of Vespa. Thaaaats why they're geniuses, not because they invented yet another car model, but they're inventing entire new vehicular industry categories.
Peasants, do not revolt. You can select from one 1%er corporate purchased candidate or the other 1%er corporate purchased candidate. They do have slightly different marketing messages/lies and you get to select which identical candidate hired the better PR agency and/or you get to select which lies you prefer to hear.
I'm guessing konsole will get a lot more use with this crowd, that, say, Marble. I'm not sure this feature list is worth the effort of upgrading, but here it is:
Before any window is opened, make sure pty device has right size before starting the terminal process.
Allow an image to be set as the background in the terminal window.
Close session reliably when the session process doesn't die with SIGHUP.
Don't show the default profile in menu New Tab list when no others are listed.
Add "Select All" action for selecting the whole history of this session.
Add popup menu for drag-n-drop operations using KonqOperations::doDrop.
Bidirectional text support is on by default.
Left-To-Right direction will always be used in the terminal area even when the language is Right-To-Left.
Add support for Unicode decomposed characters and in general better unicode displaying.
The one liner/. summary is when you mix up and bake a magnet in a pan, it'll stick in the pan and warp unless you use a carbon based non-stick coating, you know, like "special" brownies.
Please no followups complaining that is a gross simplification; that is the whole point. Its better than "contributes to energy conservation" which is pretty tenuous grasp (well, cheaper magnets mean cheaper windmills means more windmills means less coal burned, or some extreme greenwashing like that)
They gave their last award to DMR who promptly died, I do hope Masato has better luck. Seriously, they both were/are good guys so best of luck dude.
Or rephrased, can't have a free market when the two big players, the govt and megacorps have all of the money, power, and force of law, and everyone else is tiny and has none.
You're much more likely to have a truly libertarian free market in the.eu than.us
Also there is no such thing as a "free market" without contract law and WRT privacy we are not allowed legally to have that in.us, as chattel property of the megacorps.
Slashdot Mirror
Not even close, its a time to market problem. Classic cathedral vs bazaar thing. The mfgr wants to ship something that technical barely legally works as fast as freaking possible, unless they're apple. As long as it doesn't get returned to the store as "broken", its good enough. Only the rockbox people and apple want to make the "perfect" device no matter how long it takes.
That brings up the marketing problem, that "noname mp3 player inc" markets to people who want the cheapest or are giving gifts or just simply don't care. The competition for the perfected rockbox device is the perfected apple device, not "noname mp3 player inc". You're going to totally confuse the management of "noname mp3 player inc" if you tell them their rockbox competes in the apple market space, when they think they're competing in the shovelware junk market space.
There is no end user support of consumer devices. The most you can dream of is a foreign script reader telling you to reinstall windows. Its not a control issue.
Weight. Never overlook the ability of fat rich people to spend $500 on a set of carbon fiber bicycle handlebars that are 1.3 ounces lighter than stock carbon steel. Oh, I can listen to my workout tunes using something that weighs 4 ounces less than my hefty iphone, and it only costs $50? I'm so there.
Size. At least for the gym bunny crowd (exhibitionist mostly young and good looking women who don't actually exercise, but like showing off the goods to the guys who like watching) on some of those more ridiculous tiny tight spandex outfits where do you put a giant iphone? Walk around with it in your hand the entire time? That was the strategy at the gym I used to go to, they'd spend the whole time walking around trying to look at the guys who were looking at them. Some tiny dedicated mp3 players are nearly small enough to be a barrett (no thats a M82A1 rifle) .. barret (no thats for idiots who can't spell Barrett) Oh f it I mean that thing that you women clip in your hair. Even for an old guy like me who thinks "long distance" snow shoeing is hard core, less weight to carry always equals better.
(Rs. 15,000 is one week's wages for a programmer at a top IT company in India).
aka about 300 USD
Also the forex abbreviation for their currency is INR not Rs. Its not important, it's one of those sociological study moments where the abbreviation you select tells a lot about your culture and history etc. I don't think Rs is offensive, but I don't know one way or the other for sure, so I'd stick with the known inoffensive INR
Thanks for the much more recent data.
Three interesting things about 50% growth rates
1) wall street is notoriously bad at fairly pricing on the upswing at that rate
2) that growth rate cannot go on forever
3) wall street is notoriously bad at fairly pricing on the downswing at that rate
Its going to be a fun rollercoaster to watch.
That's be the best thing that could happen for Google+.
Yeah because the MBA types always move in lockstep herd-like mentality, so having to pay 0.1 bitcoin to make a post on G+ would act as a nice filter and make the Mighty GOOG even mightier.
You know what else would be hilarious? How about if your ISP/telco/cellphone provider peers directly with us so we pay no transit costs, then you get free service, if not, we post your telco's customer support hotline number and bill you $1/day for access to pay for bandwidth until your telco peers with us. This would be good for the net, more or less. Its not all bad news.
when I was stupid (ie, a youth) I didn't know any better.
Its not so much stupid as ignorant.
That TV police drama is actually pretty good. Once you've seen it, you don't have to watch it, or the endless remakes again. I certainly don't. I kind of liked the Stereotypical Sci Fi show, but it got a bit overdone in the late 90s what with about half a dozen simultaneous remake/copycat series.
Not unique to TV... Once you've absorbed all there is from the LOTR and related books, you ... just stop reading them, and start reading something new. Same with any other book. If you really want to stir the pot then you ask why the bible / koran / torah doesn't get the same treatment. I read the bible, once, didn't much care for it, kind of repetitive, needs editing. Also read the Koran, even if it was an infidel english translation (apparently a translation is a major no-no) it had some interesting stories and poetry, I'd recommend it for a read. The books of mormon were ... unusual, not really what I was expecting, to the point that its hard to evaluate. Scientologist scriptures, I read those too.
Kind of similar with movies. That movie, the one with the wisecracking detective partners in a kind of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy ends up with girl, theme but recast into a manly bro-mance with two straight dudes, combined with car chasing and catching the bad guy, yeah that was a good movie. No interest in seeing it again, or the thousandth remake/sequel/copycat, but it was a decent movie.
I wish there were more than 20 or so TV shows and 20 or so movies. I'd watch them.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
You misquoted him. This is the actual poem:
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me because twitter was failwhale and anyway all they wanted to talk about was celebrity gossip and local weather conditions not philosophy and freedoms.
I bet you don't watch television and make sure everyone knows about it too.
On a percentage basis, almost everyone watches TV, and almost no one uses twitter. But the twitter users only hang out with other twitter users, so they think the whole world is on twitter, because their whole world is on twitter. The TV watchers do use the same circular reasoning. However one group is a overwhelming majority, and the other a tiny minority.
On the other hand, the so called social media craze (I'm including in that the full spectrum, from twitter, to myspace) seems quite more widespread than the cb on the 70's.
The numbers are much smaller than CB. Here's an interesting article.
http://billcrosby.com/socialmedia/how-many-twitter-users-are-there-really-graph/
Depending on how you interpret the data, around 1 in 50 americans actually use twitter. At one point in the 70s, darn near 1 in 10 cars had a CB radio installed.
If you think about it, it makes sense. Most people have nothing to say, and are not interested in passively listening to others. Also its exceedingly circular, its not a surprise that most of the people you personally hang out with are into social media if you define the persons you hang out with as people who are into social media... This is the "everyone is a trekkie" effect where all the trekkies hang out together believing the entire world is trekkies because everyone they know is a trekkie.
You'd need to do something about districts and remove local budgeting and control of schools. Not saying I agree with you, but if you don't do that, then all you're doing is shuffling names around without actually changing anything. If you keep districts at "neighborhood" or "city" size, then you just end up replicating have/have-not based on real estate value. Which leads inevitably to lower property taxes and higher state or federal taxes, more bookkeeping, middlemen, and corruption, etc. Because taxes never reduce, that means the locals will have lots of extra money floating around, which leads to more corruption. So overall, you'd theoretically get standardized education, but probably at a lower level due to higher corruption, and the upper half would still have everything from simply caring about their kids school all the way up to private schools, so as a society I don't think we'd win because the rich would remain better off, but the median would drop. The absolute bottom of the barrel would do better, but they're just going into the prison industrial complex anyway, so I see little point in wasting educational resources on them, just what we need, smarter criminals. So in summary, I disagree with your method and your goals, each for different reasons.
There is a concerted effort by the conservative power elite in the USA to splinter and collapse universal schooling
No its a 1% vs 99% thing, and the 1% use anti-leftie PR when talking to the righties, and anti-rightie PR when talking to the lefties, to get both sides to do their bidding. Looks like you fell for it hook line and sinker.
the data collector is still justified in making the prediction that you can only know what you were formally taught because in 99% of the cases this will be true
I would disagree in that everything that is not compulsory is forbidden and everything that is not forbidden is compulsory and mistargeting of ads is too likely.
In my example, all kids in my suburban school are supposed to go to college, therefore standards were pretty high, and we were almost all unable to attend shop class or at least strongly discouraged. When I signed up for a CAD intro class you'd think I grew a second head, the way my advisor/counselor reacted. Yet we wrenched on our cars in our spare time; we had to if we wanted to be able to afford wheels. Using this educational data, you'd think no one graduated by my school system in at least the past 30 years knows anything about cars, you'd be very wrong. Similar for cooking; I was forbidden to take cooking classes, have to take geology instead. That does not mean no one in my entire district for more than a generation can cook.
That closely ties to the mistargeting problem. Auto shop and cooking class were where disciplinary problems were sent to keep the academic classes orderly until the problems either straighten out and fly right, or drop out. You're far more likely to sell brass knuckles and weed pee test passing substances to A+ automotive shop class kids than socket sets or breaker bars. I hope the people buying the sales lists understand this little problem. The percentage of students in shop class / cooking class accurately reflects soft drug addiction rates and other mental issues, nothing to do with the possible sales rates for car repair and gourmet cooking spices. For all practical purposes, the number of kids who took geology approaches 100%, but the number of people in the geological hammer market in my community approaches zero.
Imagine $76 million dollars to fund MORE / 'Better' teachers? Willing to bet it does more to help the overall economy & education (current AND future, in the same price tag) than buying some silly software that's going to show us that we don't truly care anymore.
I don't think it would have much effect.
Half your budget goes to overhead and management right off the top. Darn near a 1:2 administrator / teacher ratio where I live, and administrators get paid more for doing basically nothing productive, and physical plant overhead is quite expensive (imagine what it would cost to rent an office building the size of a school per year). Then lets assume the average teacher pulls down $50K. Yes I'm well aware that their salary model is different than, say, private sector IT, so a newbie teacher starts out at $20K and gets a 5K raise every year for the rest of their career, whereas a IT dude gets $50K the first year and then gets a pay raise a little smaller than inflation for the rest of his career. Back to topic. It does nothing to hire one teacher for one year if they just get downsized next year, so lets pay them for 20 years to have a real, generational effect.
Thats 76M / 2 (half to overhead) / 50 (thousand bucks per teacher per year) / 20 years = no calculator necessary about 38 teachers for twenty years. So across a dozen states you just hired about one (big) elementary school, or perhaps an average sized middle school. Eh.
We did already have this. It was called report cards, and when I was in K-12 school, it got sent home on paper with me once every six weeks so my parents could look at it and see how I was doing and if necessary ground me for not paying attention in school.
With grade inflation its no longer meaningful. Also its a pretty good form of "stealth ageism". For example I'm old enough (get off my F-ing lawn) that I worked extremely hard to get a B+ in quantitative chemical analysis, lets just say it was long enough ago that we had an admittedly old even in that era apple II for a lab computer for potentiometric electrochemical analysis. Back in ye olden days, a B+ was a pretty strong effort and looks good on my transcript and believe it or not probably curved me up to around the top quartile of the class, I always was a superior chemist even in one of my weaker areas. Compared to a young whipper snapper where as long as you pay the registration office and show up, you're guaranteed an easy "A", that B+ makes me look like the class moron. And that is "stealth ageism" because my numbers make me appear dumber than your average young 4.0 student, but I actually did what would in modern terms be relatively high "A" level work not merely a B+. To figure out I'm a moron you should have to read /., not compare a decades old grades transcript with a modern hyper-inflated grade transcript.
I've seen this effect with my kids. I used to get the full spectrum of D in gym up to A+ in science, but they only get wishy washy word grades now in grade school, like a checkmark for one of these three "Have not begun this topic" "making progress on this topic" "mastered this topic". I'm told there was a slightly earlier era a decade ago where they exclusively gave out A grade, it was just curved to A- for the morons, plain A for the masses, and A+ for the elite.
The obvious assumption when you're dealing with a known criminal organization is that they'll put all this effort into gathering information in order to sell it. The problem is, who will the customers be?
So... you package up a spam list of all the students who flunked financial literacy 101 and sell it to the car dealers, Realtors(tm), and mortgage brokers, "come and get em!". But they don't need the leads, because its all cross fertilized. The customers at the rent-a-center are the customers at the payday loan store are the customers at the subprime mortgage dealer are the customers at McDonalds are the customers at Walmart. They already know who these guys are.
OK so see I never took any automotive classes, so you assume you can screw me over at the stealership. What you don't know is I spent a summer helping a great-uncle rebuild a 1930's diesel tractor, helped weld a homemade lake-pier together which is still standing a quarter century later, etc ... The idea that a "college bound" student like myself would attend a votech class was unthinkable in that era, and probably today... in fact all of our suburban students are supposed to go to college to make the bankers who provider the loans rich, so I don't think shop class attendance is going to be relevant or useful data. In a way, this is great, because it encourages people to teach themselves, not attend a class. I certainly did not learn how to replace brake rotors and pads in a classroom, that's for sure.
And the rest of the data? Donno. Maybe I'm low on caffeine but I donno who can profit off the knowledge that I aced everything in 2nd year chem aka introductory o-chem or that I didn't do so well in 9th grade history because I was bored to tears (well not literally, but darn close).
...I'd like to know how much ad revenue have they generated in the past year, which would be a small fraction of it's valuation....
To extend on those remarks, two years ago the entire online advertising market was about $25B annually, with about half that going to GOOG for search placement. Old timers like myself will be surprised that only about a third of the online ad market is banner ads. I suppose adblocker-type technology will eventually completely kill off that market segment, or at least I hope it does. Anyway, FB can only be a small fraction of $10B ad revenue.
In normal market conditions companies used to sell for P.E. ratios in the single digit-ish range, but for a couple decades ultra high PE ratios have taken over. Once the baby boomers cash in their 401Ks that'll drop back to normal. Anyway it would not be all that out of line for a couple billion in revenue to account for a couple dozen billion in valuation.
Also the data they have is useful for spam services that are not online. Expect it to be mandatory to link your postal spam mail address and your social security number to your FB account, supposedly to cut down on griefers and spammers, but more likely to make the data they have on you more valuable.
how facebook makes money. The real foldy stuff, not stock prices that are based on hopes of increased stock prices at some nebulous date in the future.
Have you seen a facebook addict after being forcibly removed from the service for a day or two? Not a pretty sight. Apparently, amongst the addicts, it rates just below breathing, but above all other bodily functions.
They'd be doing a huge disservice to their stockholders by not charging at least a buck a day for the "heavy users". I could see something like your streamy-line-thing only updates once a day (or once per hour, etc) for free, but if you're a paid member then its realtime. Or paid members get realtime but free members live perpetually 30 minutes in the past...
Yes, exactly like unemployment figures, which are manipulated to meet political goals, not to report facts.
You'd probably find the free data at
http://shadowstats.com/
to be very informative.
Just to add to that, many small businesses want part-time/remote/on-call support, not a full time employee.
Full time work at home = hire someone in India for 1/20th the wage
"fifth-time, tenth-time" work mostly at home generating human readable presentation quality PBX reports or doing basic accounting and such, with the occasional visit into the office to run monthly PBX backups or backups in general and/or a MAC run (moves, adds, changes of phone extensions), and the awareness that you're available 24x7 for emergencies onsite if they're willing to pay triple overtime, that's going to a local.
"fifth time" = work one day per week, etc. Like squirting out weekly reports.
I'm not a EE, but wouldn't finding a stronger permanent magnet increase the energy efficiency of any electric motor or generator, thus leading to energy conservation across the board?
Relatively few watts worldwide are dropped into permanent magnet motors. Its "unusual" for a motor bigger than fractional HP to be a permanent mag design, although they do exist. Shunt wound, or series wound, that's your field coil choice, more or less, or you get into induction, synchronous, slip-pole, and probably a bunch of others I've forgotten... Its a race, kind of, will permag motors improve faster than AC VFDs get cheaper? Then there's brushless, and the people who do things that on the surface are weird like run machine tool spindles off servomotors because they want huge controllable torque at low RPMs (like for semi-rigid tapping)
Although in greenwashing tradition, if my tropical fishtank water filter pump was improved from 5 watts to 4.9 watts I'm sure I'd be gettin' hippie chicks by savin' the planet... after purchasing a new $50 filter, of course.
Let's put this another way:
There's a new kit car announced. It has a 100cc engine and a small frame attached to four wheels. This "car" gets 100mpg and costs $500. It has no seats, no steering wheel, no roof, no doors, no airbags, no windshield, etc.
Is it fair to compare this "car" in terms of fuel economy and price to a brand new Corolla or F150?
If someone starts going on about "It's a fraction of the cost and gets 4x the economy! That's the real story here!" Wouldn't you think they were a little nuts?
No I'd think they're freaking geniuses.
You screwed up the standard /. car analogy. Cross out the bit about the 4 wheels and no seat, and you've basically described a moped or motorcycle. Pretty exciting news, if that whole giant and exciting market had never existed until right now. This is like living in day 1 of the Harley Davidson corporation, or day 1 of Vespa. Thaaaats why they're geniuses, not because they invented yet another car model, but they're inventing entire new vehicular industry categories.
Peasants, do not revolt. You can select from one 1%er corporate purchased candidate or the other 1%er corporate purchased candidate. They do have slightly different marketing messages/lies and you get to select which identical candidate hired the better PR agency and/or you get to select which lies you prefer to hear.
I'm guessing konsole will get a lot more use with this crowd, that, say, Marble. I'm not sure this feature list is worth the effort of upgrading, but here it is:
http://konsole.kde.org/changelog.php
Noteworthy:
Before any window is opened, make sure pty device has right size before starting the terminal process.
Allow an image to be set as the background in the terminal window.
Close session reliably when the session process doesn't die with SIGHUP.
Don't show the default profile in menu New Tab list when no others are listed.
Add "Select All" action for selecting the whole history of this session.
Add popup menu for drag-n-drop operations using KonqOperations::doDrop.
Bidirectional text support is on by default.
Left-To-Right direction will always be used in the terminal area even when the language is Right-To-Left.
Add support for Unicode decomposed characters and in general better unicode displaying.
I think this is a link to Masato Sagawa's magnet patent:
http://www.freshpatents.com/-dt20110324ptan20110070118.php
The one liner /. summary is when you mix up and bake a magnet in a pan, it'll stick in the pan and warp unless you use a carbon based non-stick coating, you know, like "special" brownies.
Please no followups complaining that is a gross simplification; that is the whole point. Its better than "contributes to energy conservation" which is pretty tenuous grasp (well, cheaper magnets mean cheaper windmills means more windmills means less coal burned, or some extreme greenwashing like that)
They gave their last award to DMR who promptly died, I do hope Masato has better luck. Seriously, they both were/are good guys so best of luck dude.
Or rephrased, can't have a free market when the two big players, the govt and megacorps have all of the money, power, and force of law, and everyone else is tiny and has none.
You're much more likely to have a truly libertarian free market in the .eu than .us
Also there is no such thing as a "free market" without contract law and WRT privacy we are not allowed legally to have that in .us, as chattel property of the megacorps.
Marry an EU resident :)
How many EU states are cool with polygamy? That would be a complication...