Google has some fucking amazingly talented engineers with a love for software and physics and engineering working on this problem. They have people who consider it theirs life's goal to reduce traffic accidents.
They aren't working to stay ahead of the competition. They are working to build the best self-driving software possible. They are so far ahead of everyone else that it's just silly, and they're still working constantly to get to this goal faster.
Why would you want to invest in that, BMW? Just wait until it's done, and license the software. it'll be VASTLY cheaper and more efficient than what you're planning.
Can you design a scenario where there isn't a skill shortage? If there were a million people with the required skill set living in an apartment building across the street from your business, and they were all willing to work for $30,000 a year, you would immediately add more requirements to the skill set, or you would offer them a salary of $29,000 a year, or both. If that didn't reduce the pool of qualified applicants enough, you would drop the salary further and up the requirements further until you had a small pool of qualified applicants. Then you would complain about the lack of qualified applicants.
"good software developers"
I'd be willing to bet that you require proof of this through a successful project or two. You're not hiring people out of college, and you don't have projects that can ramp up their skills to be what you want. So the people that you want have to be currently employed by someone else doing exactly what you want them to do. Tell me again why they want to work for you?
I have a B.S. in math. I have years of programming experience. I've passed a few actuarial exams. I drive a taxi for a living.
In Colorado, the state legislature did away with tenure for elementary-middle-high school teachers. You don't get to argue for more pay, since it's just based on your level of education (B.S or M.S), and # of hours you've taken above your last degree, but you can never have true job security.
Why would anyone do a job where any idiot parent can raise a stink over something stupid, and you get fired for it? Seriously, in Office Space, the main character had 8 bosses, and that was considered ridiculous. For the average teacher, they have 150 bosses, and the bosses change every year. You wonder why all the teachers that stay never do anything for fear of doing something that someone will find offensive.
A judge in New Mexico can have your Jersey license suspended. They undoubtedly will, and you'll find out about it in a few years when you get pulled over for something really minor and end up going to jail for driving with a suspended license.
"Might be the case that the easy credit allowed colleges to push up their tuition knowing students could take out loans"
This is exactly the case. Would you extend a loan to someone for $40,000 to allow them to get a job making $28,000 a year (instead of $24,000?). If you could charge them 7% interest and have it be guaranteed by the government (which means you take NO risk) you sure would.
The housing bubble happened because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would buy any home loan no matter how bad it was. So, as a bank, even though you know someone will never be able to afford the payments, you make the loan knowing you can sell it off immediately and make a profit with no risk. In fact, you'd be shirking your fiduciary responsibility to NOT make the loan, since it makes money for your bank.
I've seen what happens when drivers are not selfish. Two lanes approach a stoplight. Most of the traffic wants to turn right, and can do so even if the light is red, but the "not selfish" driver who doesn't pay attention to the fact that there's another lane (with no cars in it) ends up sitting at the front of the overly-full lane, stopping traffic flow.
The school where I taught math had a strong department of math teachers.
Algebra II was required. But it didn't mean anything. If a student can't pass the class, they just talk to their counselor, and get moved into a computer-math class, which doesn't require anywhere close to the same level of understanding.
The fact that a student can't (or won't) pass a particular math class will not prevent them from graduating high school. There are too many alternate paths.
I think it would be a very good thing if everyone DID understand the material in an Algebra II class, but I don't see it happening. Locally, at least 10% of the adult population never passed Algebra I.
Algebra II == College Algebra, depending on how dumbed-down the college algebra course is. If you're taking it in high school, and it doesn't involve group theory, then it's Algebra II.
PLATO was a fantastic educational system, and still is.
I've seen it in use in computer-based classrooms for students that have failed in traditional settings. A student who struggles to learn can blame their failures on the teacher. Such a student will often behave in a manner counterproductive to their own success, just to have an affect on said teacher. You can't get a rise out of a computer, however. So you end up having to blame only yourself.
The original touch-screens ended up with a lot of lessons that accurately explained a large number of concepts. One of the problems with traditional textbooks is that they don't have a time axis. PLATO lessons can show you things as they happen, walking you through all the steps yourself. They can correct you along the way, so that you can learn to do the problems yourself. None of this is stuff that CAN'T be done with HTML and scripting, but PLATO came first, and did a really good job.
You can ask out a co-worker, or subordinate, as long as if they say "no", that's the end of it, and you don't pursue it. You're not creating a hostile work environment, or anything like that. It's just when there's a pattern of continued requests (even after rejections) that you expose yourself to winnable lawsuits.
The point of TRON:Legacy was the same as the original TRON: Wouldn't it be cool to actually BE inside the computer where you could interact in a meaningful and tactile way with computer programs (that weren't designed to have a 3D representation).
The graphics were nice, especially if you paid for the IMAX 3D experience. I thought they provided the same role as in Avatar: stun the audience into not noticing the plot.
The plot wasn't the point of TRON. The graphics, while nice, weren't the point of TRON. The idea of physically interacting with arbitrary computer programs directly was the point. It's "cool" and "neat" almost because it's impossible and ludicrous.
The difference in the post 9/11 world is what kinds of hijacking get what kind of response.
If there's a terrorist who takes a passenger hostage to get the pilots to fly to an alternate destination, they'll probably get to their destination: preserving human life is worth a little inconvenience. If the terrorist wants to actually physically take control of the plane, then you (as a passenger) are going to die anyway, so it might be worth the sacrifice. As a parent who travels with a little one, I'd not-so-happily but enthusiastically sacrifice myself in the hope that my child won't die.
If, however, some people just direct (direct might be too gentle a word, perhaps "threaten the life of another passenger if demands are not met" would be better) the pilot to land at a different airport, then my doing something rash would not help protect my child.
"Pay your service fees if you wish to receive your service. It's a win-win."
Are you nuts? What if all of government did this? Want police? Pay up front. Want to call 911? That's $5 a minute. Want to drive on the road? Charged by the mile via GPS. Want your kids to go to school? All schools charge, public schools don't exist. Want to walk on the sidewalk? Toll sidewalks every 100 yards.
The situation here isn't a pay-as-you-go situation is a pay-for-access situation. I don't pay each time I need police service, I pay a flat fee (i.e. taxes) for access to as much police service as I need. Same goes for all the other stuff. I've never called 911, but I still happily pay for the service to exist.
To be honest, if you expect your house to catch fire more than once every 1000 years, then the $75/year fee is a win for you if your house is worth at least $75,000. The long and short of it is that the homeowner in this situation is a COMPLETE MORON with no sense of where the services that make up society come from and the fact that these services must be paid for.
In a country where drug lords rule, you want to spend how much money on this technology? How about using that cash to support basic infrastructure like roads and potable water?
It's not that someone could google to get the answer, it's that they could communicate with another thinking being that is willing and able to do the problem for them. The professor doesn't have a problem with a beefy calculator that can store an arbitrarily large amount of static information, he just wants to make certain that the student is the one to retrieve and process that information.
I'm a past math teacher, and the real cruelty is a student that gets a D in Algebra. They pass, so they can't take it again, but they don't know enough to pass any other math classes.
I did a lot of mastery-based stuff, so if a student couldn't show mastery of a particular subtopic, they would get a 0 on the quiz for it. If they could show mastery, they got a 9 or 10 (out of 10). An 8 meant they could try again with a different version of the quiz.
So a student that gets a D in my class has actually mastered a solid 60%-70% of the material, and they're not auto-screwed for later classes because they can pick up a couple of missed topics later.
There were other things that bifurcated the students into sub-D or C-or-better. I could do this mostly undetected because I'm very good with the numbers. TFA's school is just not hiding it.
I gave out a lot of F's. Those students get to try the whole thing over, and perhaps learn enough the second time around.
I'm still a fan of the "a D means you can't count it as a prerequisite, but you get credit for it."
A senior who gets a D in biology isn't going to be doing anything with it anyway, and preventing him from graduating isn't doing anybody any favors.
I haven't done any statistical research into this. It's just my personal observation based on anecdotal evidence.
I have a couple of friends (without degrees) who've had successful careers, but haven't seen projects through to conclusion. When the going gets rough, they jump ship at the company where they're working, and move on. It limits their success, but since they're still doing well, why change?
I have other friends with degrees who've stayed with companies that were floundering when maybe they should've moved on to find something better. I also have friends with degrees who stuck with companies that were going through a rough patch, and when they came out the other side, they were much better off for it.
I know a lot of people who consider themselves smart, but never finished college. It still bothers them, and it limits what kind of success they can enjoy.
Not having a 4-year degree doesn't say anything at all about your intelligence.
It does, however, often say a great deal about your ability to see a long-term project through to completion.
A great deal of getting a 4-year degree is simply managing time effectively, especially when there are so many distractions that are far more interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
And this goes to show you that Americans are afraid of crap they see on CNN and Fox News.
You are significantly more likely to get killed going to your mailbox than you are to get killed by any form of terrorism.
If you were really afraid of cyberterrorism, you'd be more cautious about what links you open.
Google has some fucking amazingly talented engineers with a love for software and physics and engineering working on this problem. They have people who consider it theirs life's goal to reduce traffic accidents.
They aren't working to stay ahead of the competition. They are working to build the best self-driving software possible. They are so far ahead of everyone else that it's just silly, and they're still working constantly to get to this goal faster.
Why would you want to invest in that, BMW? Just wait until it's done, and license the software. it'll be VASTLY cheaper and more efficient than what you're planning.
"skill shortage"
Can you design a scenario where there isn't a skill shortage? If there were a million people with the required skill set living in an apartment building across the street from your business, and they were all willing to work for $30,000 a year, you would immediately add more requirements to the skill set, or you would offer them a salary of $29,000 a year, or both. If that didn't reduce the pool of qualified applicants enough, you would drop the salary further and up the requirements further until you had a small pool of qualified applicants. Then you would complain about the lack of qualified applicants.
"good software developers"
I'd be willing to bet that you require proof of this through a successful project or two. You're not hiring people out of college, and you don't have projects that can ramp up their skills to be what you want. So the people that you want have to be currently employed by someone else doing exactly what you want them to do. Tell me again why they want to work for you?
I have a B.S. in math. I have years of programming experience. I've passed a few actuarial exams. I drive a taxi for a living.
In Colorado, the state legislature did away with tenure for elementary-middle-high school teachers. You don't get to argue for more pay, since it's just based on your level of education (B.S or M.S), and # of hours you've taken above your last degree, but you can never have true job security.
Why would anyone do a job where any idiot parent can raise a stink over something stupid, and you get fired for it? Seriously, in Office Space, the main character had 8 bosses, and that was considered ridiculous. For the average teacher, they have 150 bosses, and the bosses change every year. You wonder why all the teachers that stay never do anything for fear of doing something that someone will find offensive.
A judge in New Mexico can have your Jersey license suspended. They undoubtedly will, and you'll find out about it in a few years when you get pulled over for something really minor and end up going to jail for driving with a suspended license.
I have now officially read my first article by a squid geek. Your post is so full of information that it qualifies as an article.
Well done, sir, well done.
"Might be the case that the easy credit allowed colleges to push up their tuition knowing students could take out loans"
This is exactly the case. Would you extend a loan to someone for $40,000 to allow them to get a job making $28,000 a year (instead of $24,000?). If you could charge them 7% interest and have it be guaranteed by the government (which means you take NO risk) you sure would.
The housing bubble happened because Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would buy any home loan no matter how bad it was. So, as a bank, even though you know someone will never be able to afford the payments, you make the loan knowing you can sell it off immediately and make a profit with no risk. In fact, you'd be shirking your fiduciary responsibility to NOT make the loan, since it makes money for your bank.
I've seen what happens when drivers are not selfish. Two lanes approach a stoplight. Most of the traffic wants to turn right, and can do so even if the light is red, but the "not selfish" driver who doesn't pay attention to the fact that there's another lane (with no cars in it) ends up sitting at the front of the overly-full lane, stopping traffic flow.
The school where I taught math had a strong department of math teachers.
Algebra II was required. But it didn't mean anything. If a student can't pass the class, they just talk to their counselor, and get moved into a computer-math class, which doesn't require anywhere close to the same level of understanding.
The fact that a student can't (or won't) pass a particular math class will not prevent them from graduating high school. There are too many alternate paths.
I think it would be a very good thing if everyone DID understand the material in an Algebra II class, but I don't see it happening. Locally, at least 10% of the adult population never passed Algebra I.
Algebra II == College Algebra, depending on how dumbed-down the college algebra course is. If you're taking it in high school, and it doesn't involve group theory, then it's Algebra II.
PLATO was a fantastic educational system, and still is.
I've seen it in use in computer-based classrooms for students that have failed in traditional settings. A student who struggles to learn can blame their failures on the teacher. Such a student will often behave in a manner counterproductive to their own success, just to have an affect on said teacher. You can't get a rise out of a computer, however. So you end up having to blame only yourself.
The original touch-screens ended up with a lot of lessons that accurately explained a large number of concepts. One of the problems with traditional textbooks is that they don't have a time axis. PLATO lessons can show you things as they happen, walking you through all the steps yourself. They can correct you along the way, so that you can learn to do the problems yourself. None of this is stuff that CAN'T be done with HTML and scripting, but PLATO came first, and did a really good job.
You can ask out a co-worker, or subordinate, as long as if they say "no", that's the end of it, and you don't pursue it. You're not creating a hostile work environment, or anything like that. It's just when there's a pattern of continued requests (even after rejections) that you expose yourself to winnable lawsuits.
The point of TRON:Legacy was the same as the original TRON: Wouldn't it be cool to actually BE inside the computer where you could interact in a meaningful and tactile way with computer programs (that weren't designed to have a 3D representation).
The graphics were nice, especially if you paid for the IMAX 3D experience. I thought they provided the same role as in Avatar: stun the audience into not noticing the plot.
The plot wasn't the point of TRON. The graphics, while nice, weren't the point of TRON. The idea of physically interacting with arbitrary computer programs directly was the point. It's "cool" and "neat" almost because it's impossible and ludicrous.
If terrorism follows the power law, then that actually just confirms that terrorism is as random as sunspots and global earthquakes.
It's random. Nothing to see here.
The difference in the post 9/11 world is what kinds of hijacking get what kind of response.
If there's a terrorist who takes a passenger hostage to get the pilots to fly to an alternate destination, they'll probably get to their destination: preserving human life is worth a little inconvenience. If the terrorist wants to actually physically take control of the plane, then you (as a passenger) are going to die anyway, so it might be worth the sacrifice. As a parent who travels with a little one, I'd not-so-happily but enthusiastically sacrifice myself in the hope that my child won't die.
If, however, some people just direct (direct might be too gentle a word, perhaps "threaten the life of another passenger if demands are not met" would be better) the pilot to land at a different airport, then my doing something rash would not help protect my child.
"...it would be so onerous that it might finally provoke some kind of sizeable backlash against the whole pointless process."
Which is exactly what the virtual strip search is doing now.
"Pay your service fees if you wish to receive your service. It's a win-win."
Are you nuts? What if all of government did this? Want police? Pay up front. Want to call 911? That's $5 a minute. Want to drive on the road? Charged by the mile via GPS. Want your kids to go to school? All schools charge, public schools don't exist. Want to walk on the sidewalk? Toll sidewalks every 100 yards.
The situation here isn't a pay-as-you-go situation is a pay-for-access situation. I don't pay each time I need police service, I pay a flat fee (i.e. taxes) for access to as much police service as I need. Same goes for all the other stuff. I've never called 911, but I still happily pay for the service to exist.
To be honest, if you expect your house to catch fire more than once every 1000 years, then the $75/year fee is a win for you if your house is worth at least $75,000. The long and short of it is that the homeowner in this situation is a COMPLETE MORON with no sense of where the services that make up society come from and the fact that these services must be paid for.
In a country where drug lords rule, you want to spend how much money on this technology? How about using that cash to support basic infrastructure like roads and potable water?
It's not that someone could google to get the answer, it's that they could communicate with another thinking being that is willing and able to do the problem for them. The professor doesn't have a problem with a beefy calculator that can store an arbitrarily large amount of static information, he just wants to make certain that the student is the one to retrieve and process that information.
I'm a past math teacher, and the real cruelty is a student that gets a D in Algebra. They pass, so they can't take it again, but they don't know enough to pass any other math classes.
I did a lot of mastery-based stuff, so if a student couldn't show mastery of a particular subtopic, they would get a 0 on the quiz for it. If they could show mastery, they got a 9 or 10 (out of 10). An 8 meant they could try again with a different version of the quiz.
So a student that gets a D in my class has actually mastered a solid 60%-70% of the material, and they're not auto-screwed for later classes because they can pick up a couple of missed topics later.
There were other things that bifurcated the students into sub-D or C-or-better. I could do this mostly undetected because I'm very good with the numbers. TFA's school is just not hiding it.
I gave out a lot of F's. Those students get to try the whole thing over, and perhaps learn enough the second time around.
I'm still a fan of the "a D means you can't count it as a prerequisite, but you get credit for it."
A senior who gets a D in biology isn't going to be doing anything with it anyway, and preventing him from graduating isn't doing anybody any favors.
On the SAT, the range of scores is from 200 to 800, so 500 is 50%, not 62.5%
"Although it was a project that would take a complete amateur no more than 5 minutes to perfect in MS Word..."
If that was the case, don't you think the woman with the lost cat would have done this?
Microsoft was walking across the street in a hurry and accidentally dropped $200,000,000.00 on the ground.
It didn't notice.
I haven't done any statistical research into this. It's just my personal observation based on anecdotal evidence.
I have a couple of friends (without degrees) who've had successful careers, but haven't seen projects through to conclusion. When the going gets rough, they jump ship at the company where they're working, and move on. It limits their success, but since they're still doing well, why change?
I have other friends with degrees who've stayed with companies that were floundering when maybe they should've moved on to find something better. I also have friends with degrees who stuck with companies that were going through a rough patch, and when they came out the other side, they were much better off for it.
I know a lot of people who consider themselves smart, but never finished college. It still bothers them, and it limits what kind of success they can enjoy.
Not having a 4-year degree doesn't say anything at all about your intelligence.
It does, however, often say a great deal about your ability to see a long-term project through to completion.
A great deal of getting a 4-year degree is simply managing time effectively, especially when there are so many distractions that are far more interesting.