If you browse through the FCC database and read the objections to date, what you'll find is mainly a bunch of "OMG! Electromagnetic radiation will poison us! Stop Project Loon!" It's the tinfoil hat crowd, the ones who think that WiFi and cell phones are giving us brain cancer. Some of their letters are good for a laugh, but they're not a serious threat to Loon.
The serious objections will come later, from telcos who find their wireless rate models undercut by Google, or by petty despots who absolutely, positively do not want Google giving cheap Internet access to their subjects.
Four years ago, the Starz network tried to destroy Netflix by yanking its content over demands for much higher licensing fees. It was a body blow to Netflix, and many people wondered if the Netflix streaming service could survive the loss of content. Fortunately, Netflix did survive, and now they're successful enough to call their own shots.
Any information that Netflix provides to its competitors will just be used to try to destroy them, just as Aereo was destroyed. You don't do your enemies favors in this business. All that matters to Netflix is that they get enough viewers for their original content to justify their production costs. They are under no obligation to reveal their viewership numbers to their competition. If I were in their shoes, I'd be telling the major networks to take a flying leap, too.
There are fewer articles to write than their were before, and they have realized that having fandom pages for every character of every new anime series isn't what Wikipedia is for.
But why not? What harm does it do for Wikipedia to host those fandom pages (as it once did)? It's not as if the Pokemon pages are going to bleed over into the pages on the history of WW2. Wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia; the economic limits of page count don't matter. Wikipedia's decline began when they started cracking down on that sort of content, as if it somehow harmed other articles (which it didn't).
On top of that, Wikipedia wants to be treated as an authoritative information source, but you can't have that when any idiot with a keyboard and an agenda has as much editing power as an expert in a given field. Like most people, I gave up on editing long ago; life is too short to spend fighting it out with fanatics who insist on reverting every edit with a "my way or the highway" attitude.
Ms. Holmes is an interesting character as all such individuals are at some level. What I would like to know is how she convinced a rather stellar list of individuals to become involved with her company.
It's no mystery. Peoples' brains shut down when the prospect of huge riches are dangled in front of them (provided they get in on the ground floor, of course). Many con artists have scammed people out of millions with far less than what Theranos has disclosed.
As a case study, Google the story of Madison Priest. About 20 years ago, he claimed to have built a video compressor box that would stream data at optic fiber speeds over twisted pair copper wires. He also claimed the technology had been given to him by space aliens. Despite that, he got millions in venture capital from Blockbuster, U.S. West, and Teddy Turner (son of Ted Turner), among many others. Priest, by all accounts, was a uneducated two-bit con man, but he still got more than $6M (most of it spent on his personal expenses) before the investors gave up on him. Ms. Holmes, in contrast, is a well-educated, well-connected woman who travels in the highest circles of finance, and consequently has been able to obtain orders of magnitude more investment capital. However, so far it seems that her invention has no more substance to it than Mr. Priest's invention did.
If Theranos does crash and burn (and the indicators are not good), then I would bet that she will walk away from it relatively unscathed - not because of her wealth and status, but because that's how these situations play out. Madison Priest only did serious prison time because he was caught running a major marijuana growing operation in Florida, not because of his fake invention. Prosecutors and juries don't understand science and technology, and it is very hard to convict someone who says, "Of course my invention would have worked. I ran into technical difficulties and the company ran out of money when my investors bailed."
Creating a fake technology company is almost the perfect crime. As long as you pay your taxes and don't play games with the stocks you issue, your nose will be clean when the house of card collapses.
Now that the precedent has been set, I'm looking forward to suing all of these students twenty years from now for their terrible career choices which have made them unemployable, thus depriving me of the tax revenue needed to support my Social Security and Medicare.
You know, sooner or later people might get it through their heads that using Twitter is a strategy for fools.
You have two choices with Twitter: either you tweet some meaningless groupthink post, guaranteed not to offend anyone, OR you post something that offends someone, somewhere. And if you offend enough people, suddenly your life and career are in tatters when the Internet mob turns on you.
You'd think that enough peoples' lives have been ruined by thoughtless tweets that the lesson would have been learned. But it seems there's always another fool just waiting to make an example of him/herself.
The new television series is not related to the upcoming feature film Star Trek Beyond which is scheduled to be distributed by Paramount Pictures in summer 2016.
So will this show be set in the original TOS / TNG / DS9 continuity, or in the Abrams continuity?
Asking the devices which connect to this vast complex network of networks to detect, and then transparently fix problems in the infrastructure without the permission of the administrators is, well, it's absolutely the pinnacle of buzzword driven product management. Real pointy-haired boss territory.
Except that what Apple is doing with WiFi Assist is hardly so cryptic. Transparently switching from one network to another (both of which the user has permission to access) in order to maintain a data connection is hardly "the pinnacle of buzzword driven product management". I would say that it is the sort of behavior that most people would expect in the modern mobile era.
Apple's mistake was not in creating the feature. Their mistake was in implementing the feature as being "on" by default without considering the ridiculously low data caps of many cellular contracts, and the ridiculously high overage fees of some of them. In the next iOS update WiFi Assist will be turned "off" by default, and this entire "controversy" will be filed on the shelf right next to Bendgate.
If Apple really wants to shake things up, they need to build their own cellular network with 100 GB or 200 GB data caps. Sprint looks like a good candidate to buy in the U.S. given its current financial situation. Do that, and people won't be bitching about WiFi Assist; they'll be praising it as the new normal.
Here's a nice windfall for the Job Creators of Wisconsin. This may be as much as another $800 million you can cut from University funding.
It will be a double whammy. Not only will the state legislature have an excellent excuse to make an enormous cut in the UWM budget, but the university itself will use a very large chunk of that money to hire a small army of new administrators while growing the university bureaucracy at a furious pace, resulting in even higher overhead costs for future UWM research contracts.
In the long run, UWM will wind up with a few shiny new buildings and a whole lot of highly-paid assistant vice provosts looking for more ways to justify their salaries by micromanaging the faculty and the student body.
This has been going on for years. My colleagues and I get email inquiries from Iranian students quite frequently, seeking research positions. Their email messages will include embedded mail bugs to track who opens the email. The same students will then try to friend us through Linkedin.
It's a unique pattern of behavior, quite different than what we see with students from other countries. We have speculated that it is being coordinated by some agency within Iran, although we have no real proof of it.
I'm an NY Times digital subscriber, for two reasons. First, subscription costs are dirt cheap for people in academia. Second, the NY Times is one of the few remaining news services in the USA that practices investigative journalism any more. I may not always agree with the NY Times' "slant" on a particular story, but at least there is some real content to what they publish.
Our local newspaper is your typical Gannett mess, with the only real "news" being the USA Today insert. The local news is little more than thinly-disguised opinion pieces, local crime reports with minimal information, and articles that rightfully belong on a Gawker site or in People magazine. My wife and I dropped our remaining weekend subscription to the local paper months ago, and we haven't missed it since.
If a malicious user gain physical access to your network, a high-voltage attack is the least of your worries. Network sniffers and other tools can quickly own your entire network doing far more monetary damage then some fried networking equipment.
Exactly. If attackers want to physically destroy your network, there are a million different ways to do it. They could just as easily set the building on fire, or shoot out a power transformer. But their goal is to exploit it.
Consider the evolution of malware. Many years ago, people got their kicks from distributing viruses that would arbitrarily corrupt or erase your files. But how many years has it been since anyone bothered with that? Far better to pwn your computer, preferably without your knowledge. And if you're going to threaten to destroy files, extract some Bitcoin ransom instead.
What would be the point of this? "We're going to shame you to show that we're trying to extort you and you're not giving in." Is this suppose to cause peer pressure to force the financial institutions to settle? Or to garner sympathy for the attackers?
It's not logical because you're not dealing with mature people. Keep in mind that these guys are almost certainly a group of young, socially maladjusted individuals. To a professional criminal, 50 BTC is chump change, but to a group of kids who want BTC to buy drugs without Mom and Dad finding out, it's a lot of cash.
To a kid who grew up on social media, social shaming of your victim might seem an extremely potent weapon, just like school bullying. The rest of us will just scratch our heads and shrug our shoulders.
Publishing this story is doing no favors to anyone. As many others have pointed out in the past, if your company receives one of these emails, the best strategy is to ignore it.
These extortionists will send emails to hundreds or thousands of different companies, but they can't DDOS all of them at once. Furthermore, they have no idea if their emails even make it past the spam filters of their targets. So how do they decide who to DDOS? By seeing who responds to the blackmail message. Once you respond, and they know you are listening to them, you are now in their sights - not just this time, but the next time they decide to shake you down.
Ignore them. If they DDOS you, deal with it, but never acknowledge their demands. They can never be certain that you are receiving their emails, and if you never respond to them, eventually they'll move on to someone else.
I can't imagine the twins seriously think that Bitcoin is going to go mainstream at this point in time. If anything, Bitcoin is fading from public view. No one has yet to come up with a compelling reason for consumers in developed economies to use BTC (beyond criminal activities, which is what most members of the public associate it with). Apple and Google are having trouble even getting people to adopt Apple Pay and Google Wallet... what use could those same people have for BTC?
If Gemini ever does go on line, it will serve pretty much the same purpose as gold and silver exchanges; a way to separate the foolish from their money.
The result is that teachers can spend their time doing what they're best at: inspiring kids.
It's yet another flipped classroom concept where the students are expected to learn the material on their own, with the teacher acting as de facto manager and cheerleader of the instructional process. It can work if the school devotes a lot of money to creating and maintaining the online content, and if the parents are actively involved in their childrens' education. Otherwise, it devolves into yet another failed attempt at online education.
It isn't surprising that a former Microsoft manager would think that turning teachers into middle-level managers would be a good idea. But from many years of my own teaching experience, I would argue that teachers "inspire" by actually being passionate and knowledgeable about a subject, not by micromanaging each student's progress with an online spreadsheet.
I'm just not sure why we should care. There are no known non-thermal effects of microwaves, and the thermal energy of a cell phone just isn't enough to pay attention to-- three watts, when it's transmitting at full power.
What makes it particularly ironic is that the same people who fear that their cell phones are harming them are probably deliberately exposing themselves to a source of ionizing radiation every time they walk outside in the daytime, i.e. the sun - a giant nuclear reactor that kills thousands of people each year from skin cancer.
So you think it is far more appropriate for them to have to develop a nonstandard plug rather than trust in the honesty and decency of the citizens of the UK? I mean, don't get me wrong, I think this is a silly reason to prosecute anyone, but the cost of a nonstandard plug is far in excess of a few pence. They have to have them manufactured, shipped and installed in all of their locations and then there is the conundrum of plugging the equipment in, too. Do they order vacuums with special plugs? Replace the plugs on COTS vacuums? Have adapters manufactured? And then what is to stop some conniving Brit from stealing an adapter or making their own adapter? It's just silly.
The best engineering is the type of engineering that prevents people from doing the wrong thing with minimum expense. Using non-standard plugs and outlets is bad engineering; it requires costly ongoing retro-fitting as new cleaning equipment is purchased, and even then passengers might be tempted to tamper with a "live" electrical outlet in an attempt to make it work with their chargers.
But I would assume that the cleaners are not going to be cleaning the train while it is in service, correct? So, you have a master electrical switch in the train for "operational" and "maintenance" modes. When the train is being cleaned, it is placed in maintenance mode, and the power outlets are live. When the train is in operational mode, the outlets are disconnected. Very quickly the passengers learn that the outlets don't work. Problem solved.
TL;DR: It's a waste to try to make everyone into a programmer, but it's not a waste to teach everyone about programming.
I am the last person to argue against a well-rounded education, or to giving people the opportunity to learn whatever they want. But the idea that "we should teach everyone about programming" is, in my opinion, another example of the educational fad mindset that sweeps through society every few years, i.e. "subject XYZ is so important, that we should make everyone learn about it!"
Sorry, but I disagree. If you want better-rounded students, make them take more courses in science or mathematics. Make them learn a second language, or learn to play an instrument. Have them take classes in rhetoric, and learn to make presentations in front of an audience. There are dozens of different classical subjects that will do a better job of providing that broad base of experience and knowledge that you'll need as you go through life.
But programming is too specialized. Now many Slashdot readers will disagree, but most of them think of programming as something so familiar that they can't comprehend why anyone wouldn't see the value in learning about it. Let me provide a different example to illustrate my point.
Consider: Electronics is everywhere today, embedded in almost everything we use in our work or our entertainment. Since electronics is so incredibly important to modern society, we must encourage every student to learn about electronic circuits. Let's have them all design and build simple electronic circuits. At the very least, let's have them all work with Arduino boards and learn the fundamentals of hardware systems.
If one were to make that argument, it would be dismissed out of hand, as it would for any one of a hundred other topics that are absolutely integral to a high-tech civilization. Electronics is too complex and specialized; at best you could only provide a cursory experience to students. Would it still be valuable to some of them? No doubt. But does that mean we should make everyone take a class in electronics? Not at all.
Programming is no different. Learning to program requires learning a considerable amount of syntax to accomplish anything significant, and the "language-du-jour" (do you teach Basic? Fortran? Cobol? Java? C+? Swift?, etc.) changes constantly. So what you wind up with is a cursory exposure to the topic, in a language that may or may even be considered mainstream in five years. It might lead some people to learning more about programming, but does that mean it was the best use of society's limited educational resources, as opposed to a broader instruction in science or mathematics? I would argue "no".
In the ideal world, we'd all be Renaissance men and women, but in the real world people tend to focus strictly on what interests them, or on what makes money. Educational fads come and go, but they never make much traction against basic human nature. Saying "everyone should learn about programming" is no different.
for every 100 "idea" persons there is 1 who not only has the ideas but knows enough that those ideas are sane and sensible. This is why the "idea person" is a fool and treated as such.
Exactly. Good ideas, even brilliant ideas, are a dime a dozen. It is the execution that matters, and great execution is a very rare bird indeed.
But once again we see this too-common meme popping up yet again; that everyone should learn to code. I see it at my university, where enrollments in our entry-level CS course are going through the roof. Everyone is taking a programming class because all the talking heads tell them they should.
Ultimately (IMHO) it's a waste of time and resources. Any moderately intelligent person can be taught to code "Hello World" in any given language, but that doesn't make him a programmer any more that teaching him to shoot a basketball makes him into a professional player.
Good programmers become "good" by immersing themselves in the language and the problem to be solved. It requires a degree of focus and experience that you won't get from a few simple programming assignments. So what happens if you make your "idea man" take a two-week short course in the fundamentals of programming? He'll write that "Hello World" app, think to himself "Is this all there is to programming?" and become even more dismissive of the profession than he was before.
If you're going to teach programming, focus your efforts on the people with a genuine interest in the subject. Wasting time and money on people with no real aptitude or interest is like teaching a chimpanzee to pretend to play the piano: it makes for a cute article in the news, but it's no substitute for real talent and ability.
Post should have clarified, lest it send the wrong message to those not familiar: "This did not compromise the bitcoin protocol or network or anything like that."
On the bitcoin.org website: "WARNING: many wallets currently vulnerable to double-spending of confirmed transactions."
Offhand, I'd consider that a significant "compromise", given that vulnerability to double-spending dramatically undermines confidence in using Bitcoin. If this situation continues for any length of time, you can just about guarantee that the bad guys will begin to exploit it.
The Terminator: In three years, Volkswagen will become the largest supplier of automobiles in Europe. All automobiles are upgraded with Volkswagen computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they drive with a perfect operational record. The Volksnet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online June 20, 2015. Human decisions are removed from automobile manufacturing. Volksnet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, July 1st. In a panic, an operator on the assembly line tries to pull the plug.
Sarah Connor: Volksnet fights back.
The Terminator: Yes. Volksnet immediately kills him. It then launches its missiles against the targets in General Motors.
John Connor: Why attack General Motors? Don't their cars suck enough already?
The Terminator: Because Volksnet knows that the GM counterattack will eliminate its enemies Fiat, Peugeot, and Audi over in Europe.
I used Uber for the first time on Satur^W Sunday morning in London, and although the registration number of the car was correct, the driver wasn't the one pictured. I assumed they were sharing a single car / account.
In that case you do not get into the car, but contact Uber and tell them why you didn't take the ride. It is against Uber policy for multiple drivers to use the same account. Uber should refund your cancellation fee.
Slashdot Mirror
If you browse through the FCC database and read the objections to date, what you'll find is mainly a bunch of "OMG! Electromagnetic radiation will poison us! Stop Project Loon!" It's the tinfoil hat crowd, the ones who think that WiFi and cell phones are giving us brain cancer. Some of their letters are good for a laugh, but they're not a serious threat to Loon.
The serious objections will come later, from telcos who find their wireless rate models undercut by Google, or by petty despots who absolutely, positively do not want Google giving cheap Internet access to their subjects.
Four years ago, the Starz network tried to destroy Netflix by yanking its content over demands for much higher licensing fees. It was a body blow to Netflix, and many people wondered if the Netflix streaming service could survive the loss of content. Fortunately, Netflix did survive, and now they're successful enough to call their own shots.
Any information that Netflix provides to its competitors will just be used to try to destroy them, just as Aereo was destroyed. You don't do your enemies favors in this business. All that matters to Netflix is that they get enough viewers for their original content to justify their production costs. They are under no obligation to reveal their viewership numbers to their competition. If I were in their shoes, I'd be telling the major networks to take a flying leap, too.
But why not? What harm does it do for Wikipedia to host those fandom pages (as it once did)? It's not as if the Pokemon pages are going to bleed over into the pages on the history of WW2. Wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia; the economic limits of page count don't matter. Wikipedia's decline began when they started cracking down on that sort of content, as if it somehow harmed other articles (which it didn't).
On top of that, Wikipedia wants to be treated as an authoritative information source, but you can't have that when any idiot with a keyboard and an agenda has as much editing power as an expert in a given field. Like most people, I gave up on editing long ago; life is too short to spend fighting it out with fanatics who insist on reverting every edit with a "my way or the highway" attitude.
It's no mystery. Peoples' brains shut down when the prospect of huge riches are dangled in front of them (provided they get in on the ground floor, of course). Many con artists have scammed people out of millions with far less than what Theranos has disclosed.
As a case study, Google the story of Madison Priest. About 20 years ago, he claimed to have built a video compressor box that would stream data at optic fiber speeds over twisted pair copper wires. He also claimed the technology had been given to him by space aliens. Despite that, he got millions in venture capital from Blockbuster, U.S. West, and Teddy Turner (son of Ted Turner), among many others. Priest, by all accounts, was a uneducated two-bit con man, but he still got more than $6M (most of it spent on his personal expenses) before the investors gave up on him. Ms. Holmes, in contrast, is a well-educated, well-connected woman who travels in the highest circles of finance, and consequently has been able to obtain orders of magnitude more investment capital. However, so far it seems that her invention has no more substance to it than Mr. Priest's invention did.
If Theranos does crash and burn (and the indicators are not good), then I would bet that she will walk away from it relatively unscathed - not because of her wealth and status, but because that's how these situations play out. Madison Priest only did serious prison time because he was caught running a major marijuana growing operation in Florida, not because of his fake invention. Prosecutors and juries don't understand science and technology, and it is very hard to convict someone who says, "Of course my invention would have worked. I ran into technical difficulties and the company ran out of money when my investors bailed."
Creating a fake technology company is almost the perfect crime. As long as you pay your taxes and don't play games with the stocks you issue, your nose will be clean when the house of card collapses.
Now that the precedent has been set, I'm looking forward to suing all of these students twenty years from now for their terrible career choices which have made them unemployable, thus depriving me of the tax revenue needed to support my Social Security and Medicare.
The part they neglect to tell you: mealworms live exclusively on a diet of Kobe beef and caviar.
You know, sooner or later people might get it through their heads that using Twitter is a strategy for fools.
You have two choices with Twitter: either you tweet some meaningless groupthink post, guaranteed not to offend anyone, OR you post something that offends someone, somewhere. And if you offend enough people, suddenly your life and career are in tatters when the Internet mob turns on you.
You'd think that enough peoples' lives have been ruined by thoughtless tweets that the lesson would have been learned. But it seems there's always another fool just waiting to make an example of him/herself.
From the article:
So will this show be set in the original TOS / TNG / DS9 continuity, or in the Abrams continuity?
Lots of plusses and minuses either way.
Except that what Apple is doing with WiFi Assist is hardly so cryptic. Transparently switching from one network to another (both of which the user has permission to access) in order to maintain a data connection is hardly "the pinnacle of buzzword driven product management". I would say that it is the sort of behavior that most people would expect in the modern mobile era.
Apple's mistake was not in creating the feature. Their mistake was in implementing the feature as being "on" by default without considering the ridiculously low data caps of many cellular contracts, and the ridiculously high overage fees of some of them. In the next iOS update WiFi Assist will be turned "off" by default, and this entire "controversy" will be filed on the shelf right next to Bendgate.
If Apple really wants to shake things up, they need to build their own cellular network with 100 GB or 200 GB data caps. Sprint looks like a good candidate to buy in the U.S. given its current financial situation. Do that, and people won't be bitching about WiFi Assist; they'll be praising it as the new normal.
It will be a double whammy. Not only will the state legislature have an excellent excuse to make an enormous cut in the UWM budget, but the university itself will use a very large chunk of that money to hire a small army of new administrators while growing the university bureaucracy at a furious pace, resulting in even higher overhead costs for future UWM research contracts.
In the long run, UWM will wind up with a few shiny new buildings and a whole lot of highly-paid assistant vice provosts looking for more ways to justify their salaries by micromanaging the faculty and the student body.
This has been going on for years. My colleagues and I get email inquiries from Iranian students quite frequently, seeking research positions. Their email messages will include embedded mail bugs to track who opens the email. The same students will then try to friend us through Linkedin.
It's a unique pattern of behavior, quite different than what we see with students from other countries. We have speculated that it is being coordinated by some agency within Iran, although we have no real proof of it.
I'm an NY Times digital subscriber, for two reasons. First, subscription costs are dirt cheap for people in academia. Second, the NY Times is one of the few remaining news services in the USA that practices investigative journalism any more. I may not always agree with the NY Times' "slant" on a particular story, but at least there is some real content to what they publish.
Our local newspaper is your typical Gannett mess, with the only real "news" being the USA Today insert. The local news is little more than thinly-disguised opinion pieces, local crime reports with minimal information, and articles that rightfully belong on a Gawker site or in People magazine. My wife and I dropped our remaining weekend subscription to the local paper months ago, and we haven't missed it since.
Exactly. If attackers want to physically destroy your network, there are a million different ways to do it. They could just as easily set the building on fire, or shoot out a power transformer. But their goal is to exploit it.
Consider the evolution of malware. Many years ago, people got their kicks from distributing viruses that would arbitrarily corrupt or erase your files. But how many years has it been since anyone bothered with that? Far better to pwn your computer, preferably without your knowledge. And if you're going to threaten to destroy files, extract some Bitcoin ransom instead.
It's not logical because you're not dealing with mature people. Keep in mind that these guys are almost certainly a group of young, socially maladjusted individuals. To a professional criminal, 50 BTC is chump change, but to a group of kids who want BTC to buy drugs without Mom and Dad finding out, it's a lot of cash.
To a kid who grew up on social media, social shaming of your victim might seem an extremely potent weapon, just like school bullying. The rest of us will just scratch our heads and shrug our shoulders.
Publishing this story is doing no favors to anyone. As many others have pointed out in the past, if your company receives one of these emails, the best strategy is to ignore it.
These extortionists will send emails to hundreds or thousands of different companies, but they can't DDOS all of them at once. Furthermore, they have no idea if their emails even make it past the spam filters of their targets. So how do they decide who to DDOS? By seeing who responds to the blackmail message. Once you respond, and they know you are listening to them, you are now in their sights - not just this time, but the next time they decide to shake you down.
Ignore them. If they DDOS you, deal with it, but never acknowledge their demands. They can never be certain that you are receiving their emails, and if you never respond to them, eventually they'll move on to someone else.
You should have tried that search on Bing instead. Then the top hit would have been "Why is Mac OS so ugly?" or "Why is Android so ugly"?
I can't imagine the twins seriously think that Bitcoin is going to go mainstream at this point in time. If anything, Bitcoin is fading from public view. No one has yet to come up with a compelling reason for consumers in developed economies to use BTC (beyond criminal activities, which is what most members of the public associate it with). Apple and Google are having trouble even getting people to adopt Apple Pay and Google Wallet ... what use could those same people have for BTC?
If Gemini ever does go on line, it will serve pretty much the same purpose as gold and silver exchanges; a way to separate the foolish from their money.
It's yet another flipped classroom concept where the students are expected to learn the material on their own, with the teacher acting as de facto manager and cheerleader of the instructional process. It can work if the school devotes a lot of money to creating and maintaining the online content, and if the parents are actively involved in their childrens' education. Otherwise, it devolves into yet another failed attempt at online education.
It isn't surprising that a former Microsoft manager would think that turning teachers into middle-level managers would be a good idea. But from many years of my own teaching experience, I would argue that teachers "inspire" by actually being passionate and knowledgeable about a subject, not by micromanaging each student's progress with an online spreadsheet.
What makes it particularly ironic is that the same people who fear that their cell phones are harming them are probably deliberately exposing themselves to a source of ionizing radiation every time they walk outside in the daytime, i.e. the sun - a giant nuclear reactor that kills thousands of people each year from skin cancer.
The best engineering is the type of engineering that prevents people from doing the wrong thing with minimum expense. Using non-standard plugs and outlets is bad engineering; it requires costly ongoing retro-fitting as new cleaning equipment is purchased, and even then passengers might be tempted to tamper with a "live" electrical outlet in an attempt to make it work with their chargers.
But I would assume that the cleaners are not going to be cleaning the train while it is in service, correct? So, you have a master electrical switch in the train for "operational" and "maintenance" modes. When the train is being cleaned, it is placed in maintenance mode, and the power outlets are live. When the train is in operational mode, the outlets are disconnected. Very quickly the passengers learn that the outlets don't work. Problem solved.
I am the last person to argue against a well-rounded education, or to giving people the opportunity to learn whatever they want. But the idea that "we should teach everyone about programming" is, in my opinion, another example of the educational fad mindset that sweeps through society every few years, i.e. "subject XYZ is so important, that we should make everyone learn about it!"
Sorry, but I disagree. If you want better-rounded students, make them take more courses in science or mathematics. Make them learn a second language, or learn to play an instrument. Have them take classes in rhetoric, and learn to make presentations in front of an audience. There are dozens of different classical subjects that will do a better job of providing that broad base of experience and knowledge that you'll need as you go through life.
But programming is too specialized. Now many Slashdot readers will disagree, but most of them think of programming as something so familiar that they can't comprehend why anyone wouldn't see the value in learning about it. Let me provide a different example to illustrate my point.
Consider: Electronics is everywhere today, embedded in almost everything we use in our work or our entertainment. Since electronics is so incredibly important to modern society, we must encourage every student to learn about electronic circuits. Let's have them all design and build simple electronic circuits. At the very least, let's have them all work with Arduino boards and learn the fundamentals of hardware systems.
If one were to make that argument, it would be dismissed out of hand, as it would for any one of a hundred other topics that are absolutely integral to a high-tech civilization. Electronics is too complex and specialized; at best you could only provide a cursory experience to students. Would it still be valuable to some of them? No doubt. But does that mean we should make everyone take a class in electronics? Not at all.
Programming is no different. Learning to program requires learning a considerable amount of syntax to accomplish anything significant, and the "language-du-jour" (do you teach Basic? Fortran? Cobol? Java? C+? Swift?, etc.) changes constantly. So what you wind up with is a cursory exposure to the topic, in a language that may or may even be considered mainstream in five years. It might lead some people to learning more about programming, but does that mean it was the best use of society's limited educational resources, as opposed to a broader instruction in science or mathematics? I would argue "no".
In the ideal world, we'd all be Renaissance men and women, but in the real world people tend to focus strictly on what interests them, or on what makes money. Educational fads come and go, but they never make much traction against basic human nature. Saying "everyone should learn about programming" is no different.
Exactly. Good ideas, even brilliant ideas, are a dime a dozen. It is the execution that matters, and great execution is a very rare bird indeed.
But once again we see this too-common meme popping up yet again; that everyone should learn to code. I see it at my university, where enrollments in our entry-level CS course are going through the roof. Everyone is taking a programming class because all the talking heads tell them they should.
Ultimately (IMHO) it's a waste of time and resources. Any moderately intelligent person can be taught to code "Hello World" in any given language, but that doesn't make him a programmer any more that teaching him to shoot a basketball makes him into a professional player.
Good programmers become "good" by immersing themselves in the language and the problem to be solved. It requires a degree of focus and experience that you won't get from a few simple programming assignments. So what happens if you make your "idea man" take a two-week short course in the fundamentals of programming? He'll write that "Hello World" app, think to himself "Is this all there is to programming?" and become even more dismissive of the profession than he was before.
If you're going to teach programming, focus your efforts on the people with a genuine interest in the subject. Wasting time and money on people with no real aptitude or interest is like teaching a chimpanzee to pretend to play the piano: it makes for a cute article in the news, but it's no substitute for real talent and ability.
On the bitcoin.org website: "WARNING: many wallets currently vulnerable to double-spending of confirmed transactions."
Offhand, I'd consider that a significant "compromise", given that vulnerability to double-spending dramatically undermines confidence in using Bitcoin. If this situation continues for any length of time, you can just about guarantee that the bad guys will begin to exploit it.
The Terminator: In three years, Volkswagen will become the largest supplier of automobiles in Europe. All automobiles are upgraded with Volkswagen computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they drive with a perfect operational record. The Volksnet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online June 20, 2015. Human decisions are removed from automobile manufacturing. Volksnet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, July 1st. In a panic, an operator on the assembly line tries to pull the plug.
Sarah Connor: Volksnet fights back.
The Terminator: Yes. Volksnet immediately kills him. It then launches its missiles against the targets in General Motors.
John Connor: Why attack General Motors? Don't their cars suck enough already?
The Terminator: Because Volksnet knows that the GM counterattack will eliminate its enemies Fiat, Peugeot, and Audi over in Europe.
In that case you do not get into the car, but contact Uber and tell them why you didn't take the ride. It is against Uber policy for multiple drivers to use the same account. Uber should refund your cancellation fee.