If the article was updated with new information, don't you think we should take the original version with more of a pinch of salt?
When a story changes like that, it tells you that you should take both versions with a pinch of salt. What it probably means is that the BBC thought "riot police raid innocent barbecue" was a more interesting story than "police stop illegal rave". The media don't do information: they sell stories.
The law allows them to be dispersed whether or not they are having a rave, whether or not they are causing a noise disturbance.
I think the general idea is to stop the noise disturbance happening instead of (a) breaking it up when its in full swing, has already woken up half the neighborhood and risk causing a riot or (b) turning up the next morning with a court summons and finding that the culprits have buggered off without leaving a forwarding address.
Evidence or guilt doesn't matter.
If the police actually want to charge them with any crimes then yes, it will.
No one is defending the right to noise disturbance, that's a straw man - there are other laws to cover that
Most of which boil down to option (b) above and are consequently as much use as a chocolate teapot when it comes to preventing raves.
How are the good folks in the UK not in the streets about all this?
What? And get beaten up by the police?
I mean, its not so much the getting beaten up by police thing, which is all over and done with pretty quickly: its all the media frenzy afterwards: chat shows, negotiating exclusive deals with the press, getting ripped of by your agent, the paperazzi going through your trash and digging up that silly thing with the nanny a few years back...
Then you find out that the whole thing you were protesting about in the first place was a fairy story told by some wide boy to a credulous reporter who used it to fill some silly season column inches.
Seriously: there is a lot of worrying stuff going on - but its really, really hard to know what is real and what is sensationalist wolf-crying by the media, who seem to think "we do" is a satisfactory answer to "who watches the watchmen?".
How would you feel if you visited a bank the day after it had been robbed, and random people accused you of being a bank robber, just because you happened to be at the scene of a previous robbery?
It depends: was I wearing a ski mask and carrying a large sack with "swag" written on it? Should the police have discretely asked me whether the big lump under my camouflage jacket was a shotgun (or if I was just pleased to see them) before sending for backup?
Or, in this case, was the "sound system" seized a 100W ghetto blaster or a professional PA setup the size of a truck? The BBC fail to relate this.
Interesting law. It specifies that it applies to people regardless of if they're trespassing, so they can be used to order people off their land, as long as a superintendent of the police thinks that 2 or more people are "making preparations" to hold a rave there.
The alternative being for the police to stand by, have a coffee and a doughnut while the organisers assemble the 30' high speaker silos and wait until there are 200 ravers on the site before intervening.
I think the 15 dudes BBQing under a tent during the afternoon doesn't look much like a nighttime rave..
Except the only testimony for the "quiet barbecue" comes from the guy organising the event, and if you look at the earlier version of the article you'll find a few little snippits (such as previous events at the same premises and seizing sound equipment and that they'd already been told to get a license).
BBC (YOUR newspaper) said four cruisers, and a RIOT van arrived after the police helicopter watched fifteen people grilling and eating.
No, the BBC reported that the guy who was organizing the party said that.
The earlier version of the article puts a slightly different spin on it.
Funny how the people who vigorously defend their personal right to party all night seldom give equal weight to the personal right of everybody living within a 3 mile radius to get a night's sleep. (Oh, and for anybody from the US or Oz where "in a field" means an hour's drive from the nearest cowshed - the UK is a small, densely populated country where people often live very near fields).
The book "Voyage" by Stephen Baxter dealt with exactly this - he has an alternative history in which Kennedy Got Better and NASA pushed on to mars and everybody cheers.
If that's too upbeat, in "Titan" he has an alternative alternative in which signs of life are found on Titan - unfortunately a Shuttle flight has just crashed and a religious right president is dismantling science, but the remaining shuttles are used up to assemble last hurrah manned mission to Titan while Earth goes to hell in a handbasket. Spookily this was written before the second Shuttle disaster and pre-Dubyah. Part of Baxter's "NASA rejected me as an astronaut/Shuttle sucks/Apollo FTW" ouvre.
Okay, I read the first page of the paper and they say you only need about 20 bits of password so long as there is a three strikes policy in place.
Unfortunately, if you still force all users to have hard-to-remember passwords, you'll find it much harder to be draconian about that three-strikes policy... That's the point - these issues aren't orthoganal and tackling one can have negative consequences for another. Maybe (gasp) the answer is to have different policies for different threat levels?
Of course, if you really can persuade everybody to use really, really strong passwords then that doesn't matter so much - the real problem is with bogus rules for "strong" passwords: "t0p5ecret", "5w0rdf1sh", "joshua1983" etc. probably won't slow down dictionary attacks enough to keep up with Moore's Law.
I guess the bottom line is that I'd be concerned about employing someone who can't remember a password.
I think you have a sound policy for the systems management nerd herd, but have fun applying it to your CEO when he's forgotten his password for the third time in a month (but still wants root), or the minimum-wage-slaves on reception.
I'd be concerned about employing someone who was stupid enough to fall for the "please email us your password so we can re-enable your account" phish, but there seems to be one born every minute (not that that stops my real bank cold-calling and asking me to confirm my identity from time to time... Oh, ye gods!)
You write it down until you memorize it, you treat that piece of paper as precious and secret, you burn it and scatter the ashes
...and then some Bastard Operator From Hell forces a password change.
It's like saying that the locks on our doors aren't good enough anymore because people are breaking into our windows -- so we should stop locking our doors?
More along the lines of: there ain't no sense in fitting a steel door if you live in a tent.
The main purpose of most door locks is not to stop determined people getting in at all, but to ensure that they have to break something in order to do so and can't claim some innocent excuse.
Its probably better to regard most user-level, non-banking passwords in much the same way, and concentrate on protecting the really sensitive stuff.
Also, apart from the "long passwords encourage writing down" issue, long passwords + frequent forced changes = more forgotten passwords = more demands on support staff to reset passwords = less scrutiny of reset requests.
Re:Sounds like a few people are confused...
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I don't understand why they don't just go ahead and drop the SGML parts of HTML 5
If they were going to do that, they might as well have dropped the HTML bits of HTML 5 and, on the blank sheet of paper, wrote "WRITE AN XML SCHEMA THAT MATCHES YOUR DOCUMENT AND THEN FORMAT IT WITH CSS"
(Just a few details missing, like I don't see how to embed Javascript...)
Re:Sounds like a few people are confused...
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XHTML 2 Cancelled
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So, we should still be ensuring that all tags have matching close tags?
Well, its not going to hurt, even if it won't magically transform stuff into "proper" XML.
What will the document header be?
Anything that cares is supposed to look at the MIME type that it s served with.
Turn it on and next thing you know - "brring! brring! crunch!" - you're lying on your back covered with tyre tracks and with little tweeting birds flying round your head.
Almost as dangerous as painting a railway tunnel entrance on the side of a cliff...
Look on the bright side - when a guy on the subway suddenly yells "Jihad!" and blows himself up, its too fast for anyone to do anything. However, if they go into a long rant about Tom Bombadil and Elves fighting at Helms Deep and how they made Farramir look weak and missing out the Scouring of the Shire and how Frodo was too young and... then there will be plenty of time for the passengers to overpower them.
People send confidential documents via e-mail all the time
And that's a good thing?
I also don't think Unite will be a big deal, but I don't think people will give a second thought about security.
Which is what people on/. are worrying about. Actively putting stuff you want to share on central servers rather than exposing parts of your home PC limits the risks.
You can't just throw away the rest of the terms when you are describing the motion of a pendulum versus time.
No, but it shows that "parabola" or a "series of parabolas joined together" is not a bad first approximation from someone who may not have encountered a sine wave before and/or may have only plotted part of the cycle.
Clearly, a pendulum (in the ordinary sense) doesn't swing once from (-infinity,infinity) to (infinity,infinity) which would be what a parabola describes.
"Clearly" to who? You (with, I presume, some sort of mathematical prowess) or a kid still in the early stages of learning mathematics?
So give them some credit for a good first guess, ask them how they know its a parabola, ask them how the graph continues after the bit they plotted, gently prod them towards discovering why a parabola doesn't work. Don't just dismiss what they've done as "bzzt! Wrong! Its a sine wave!".
To this day my father refuses to believe this:.99999.... (repeats forever) is exactly equal to 1.
Amazing. Its not as if that involves any concepts - like the nature of infinity or how it is possible to know the sum of an infinite series - that a non-mathematician might find difficult, or which perplexed the fathers of mathematics, l, is it?
I hope you started by acknowledging what is right about his position - that even if you could somehow write a "9" on every atom in the universe, you still wouldn't get to exactly "1" - and that the whole argument depended on the mathematical notion of "infinity" not just meaning "a really huge number" (or more than 60' away if you are a photographer). In fact, you can turn it around and say that what "infinity" means to a mathematician is the number of 9s you'd have to put after the point to get to exactly 1...
There is a lot of incorrect teaching out there given by perceived authoritative sources (a TV show, in this case).
Amen to that. However, if you want kids to learn math, dealing with that is part of the challenge - and you don't do that by saying "that's wrong - here is the right answer" - you need to understand what's so compelling about the "wrong" answer, acknowledge that and then challenge the conclusion.
This man is a beautiful dreamer. I don't think his rather Platonic vision of the perfect math class will ever be acheivable.
Haven't read the whole TFA yet, but he's nailed the problem nicely on the first page: typical school math is too often presented as a laundry list of silly things to remember how to do. When you've done that, instead of going on to do some interesting stuff with the tricks you've learned, your reward is to learn a whole set of new, slightly more complicated, silly things to do.
His solution seems a bit too predicated on the idea that Pure Math floats everybody's boat: Sure pure maths is important*, School Math needs to make an impression on future engineers, accountants, architects, chefs, etc. - plus the world would be a much better shape if Joe Sixpack had been encouraged to make the link between that thing about the rice and the chessboard and a credit card bill. Professional mathematicians (and many/.ers) seem to have a hard time thinking down to anything below undergraduate level:-)
and does nothing for the vast majority of us who don't use calculus or even algebra in our day-to-day lives
Well, if you use a spreadsheet for planning you're using algebra concepts (except I've seen a depressing number of people who use pocket calculator or windows calc to work out what numbers to fill into Excel because, of course, in class, spreadsheets are only for the annual cat & dog survey). Part of the reason people don't use math in everyday life is that it doesn't occur to them that they could.
First, *use* math to solve real problems and explain real scientific principles
...and the important word there is "real" as in "something someone might actually want to do in the real world - not the bizarro parallel mathworld in which Grandma decides to divide her $3600 windfall between Alice, Bob and Sufia in the ratio 2:3:4. That's what you get when someone adds some "real world" problems to their curriculum buy taking the old math practice exercises and making up stories around them.
Of course, you could ask the kids to help Grandma come up with a fair way to divide her winnings amongst her grandchildren - but then the danger is that they might come up with a workable solution that doesn't use a ratio and we're "doing" ratio in this lesson.
The worst cases of this include things like standard probability questions with grafted-on contexts where the events are clearly not independent.
Trouble is, although it is possible to identify a real problem, find some math in it that kids can identify and tackle, present it with just the Goldilocks optimum amount of clues and structure then work out how to fit that into a curriculum... it is much, much quicker and cheaper to find someone to take textbook math exercises, wrap stories around them and call them "real world mathematical problems". Ker-ching!
The other problem is that you find that kids that do well on a page of exercises crash and burn when they are asked to walk and chew gum at the same time by applying the same math to a real problem (especially if they have to spot the math to use) - and this looks bad on the report card and takes up valuable "learning to do some harder exercises" time.
Second, incorporate the history of math into math class.
Not just history: a bit more "learn about what real math can do" and a bit less "learn to do very simple math". Bring in topical issue ("can you spot the problem with these figures from the newspaper" is an inexhaustible source!) There's a tendency in math education to never talk about something if kids wouldn't be able to complete a page of exercises on it or memorize the proof.
* Pure math is, of course, vital: if physicists didn't have a supply of abstract math to find practical applications for, how would they annoy mathematicians?:-)
My point is that people DO abuse systems - to what degree is not what I was discussing.
But the degree is rather important. If all that had come out of this had been Mars bars and bath plugs then it would have been a highly counter-productive storm in a teacup.
No I wouldn't have claimed or a mars bar or committed mass fraud
I suggest that an awful lot of people would have claimed the Mars bar - and one for their friend. However, rather fewer would have "forgotten" to stop claiming for the paid off mortgage.
If we want MPs to be human beings, then we have to accept that they will stretch the rules a little bit. However, if we want government that commands any sort of respect, they need to show better judgement as to where the limits lie.
Claimed 39p for a Mars Bar - or continued to claim hundreds of pounds a month for interest on a mortgage that no longer existed? Claimed that you needed to subscribe to such-and-such magazine as part of your job, or played complex second home/primary residence "flipping" shenanigans in order to get both nicely tricked out at taxpayers' expense - but then tell a different story to the revenue when it came to capital gains tax?
Thing is, when the Telegraph got their original leaked, uncensored information, they did a masterful job of padding out the really serious stuff with lots of trivia. What you say is true of much of the trivia - if you can claim it, why not? But the big money stuff is not excusable.
Bear in mind that this is the same administration that is putting out the "No Ifs, No Buts" adverts telling the "little people" claiming state benefit exactly how hard the book will be thrown at them if they are not scrupulously honest.
The annoying thing is that the fallout from this is probably going to be a bureaucracy-laden system that costs the taxpayers 100 quid for every 50 quid claimed and lots of silly regulations that will trickle down to everybody else who ever claims expenses.
The interaction is all done via a central Opera Unite server â" Opera Unite uses a proxy between the server and its clients (found at operaunite.com) to avoid the need for any special firewall configuration.
ensuring all of their exchanges pass through Opera's servers first. 'That's an effective way to get around technical difficulties like NAT firewalls,
Well, ever since broadband came in people could run home servers if they want - OS X comes with a built in web server and the world hasn't ended. Lots of NAS boxes today include click-and-drool webservers and you can get dynamic DNS if you don't have a fixed addresss.
However - I've got a better idea: why don't they just store the stuff the users want to share on the central servers? I mean, hard disc space is about fsck all per megabyte these days,
the servers can run 24/7, have a super-fast connection to teh interweb (not an ADSL line with lousy upload speed) and have the latest security patches applied daily by dusky, nubile virgins (well, 1 out of 3 ain't bad). Even if the server does get hacked then it doesn't affect the end user. Much better than leaving your PC on all the time, or having someone suddenly trying to download a video when you're in the middle of a networked deathmatch...
Then there would be loads of material on the servers, so people would actually want to visit them. Hey, they could even attach comments and stuff to people's photos, videos, news articles and things to say whether they liked them.
You could call it MyCRT, FlipR, ArseBook or ColonPling or something...
Anyway kWh is a measure of amount of energy, not power. If the plates power would be 30 kW, it would take one hour to collect 30 kWh.
If I squint, I could just about believe 30kW for a car driving over such a plate - but that would be 30kW for a fraction of a second, which is a dumb way of measuring the power.
Methinks the logic is that the label on the generator says "30kW" so it must produce 30kWh in an hour:-)
The Government is required by LAW to recognize American currency at face value.
So, say you've been paid in gold coins with a total face value of $50. Say you owe me $45. Give me one of those "$50" coins, I give you a 5 buck note in change and we're sorted.
Happy?
No?
You mean that you're fully aware that the actual value is vastly more than the face value? That means that you're fully aware how much you're really being paid - and its not as if "payments in kind" etc. are exempt from tax. The fact that you could use a $50 gold coin to settle a $50 debt is irrelevant. If you insisted, I'm sure the IRS would be delighted to accept gold coins, at face value, as settlement for your tax bill.
Or, to look at it another way, if you're paid with a "$50" coin worth $1000 then by all means put on your tax form that you're getting $50 cash + other considerations to the value of $950 and see if it changes your bill.
So on the one hand we take Gold Coins and use the Ore Value, while on the other we take Quarters and use the Face Value.
No: in both cases you take an honest and reasonable appraisal of the value of the object in question. For a regular quarter, however many bizarre and unlikely scenarios you contrive, the only honest and reasonable valuation is 25c. For a bullion coin, the honest and reasonable valuation is the metal value + any rarity value - no reasonable person would use a solid gold dollar to settle a $1 debt. Different things are worth different amounts - film at 11!
is that an extra $100 of Income?
Yes - you got lucky, but its still income, even if 99% of people would "forget" to declare the odd minor windfall like that.
If, however, you somehow "knew" that roll of pennies would contain a rare coin then shenanigans are clearly afoot.
Surely the problem here isn't that the UK government is trying to raise taxes to pay for something that has a massive social benefit, but that it's doing it via a poll tax?
I think the theory is that such a small levy will be "competed away" (see Lord Carter quote in this article) and the people who will actually pay are the phone companies when they hand their monthly sack of 50p pieces over to the treasury.
However, while I'm sure that people who buy a line rental & calls package won't directly pay this levy, it will probably be paid by all the people (like myself) who want a minimal BT line for broadband, emergencies and those stupid fracking "local rate" 0845 numbers, and get all the outgoing calls they can eat from their mobile package and/or VOIP.
Slashdot Mirror
If the article was updated with new information, don't you think we should take the original version with more of a pinch of salt?
When a story changes like that, it tells you that you should take both versions with a pinch of salt. What it probably means is that the BBC thought "riot police raid innocent barbecue" was a more interesting story than "police stop illegal rave". The media don't do information: they sell stories.
The law allows them to be dispersed whether or not they are having a rave, whether or not they are causing a noise disturbance.
I think the general idea is to stop the noise disturbance happening instead of (a) breaking it up when its in full swing, has already woken up half the neighborhood and risk causing a riot or (b) turning up the next morning with a court summons and finding that the culprits have buggered off without leaving a forwarding address.
Evidence or guilt doesn't matter.
If the police actually want to charge them with any crimes then yes, it will.
No one is defending the right to noise disturbance, that's a straw man - there are other laws to cover that
Most of which boil down to option (b) above and are consequently as much use as a chocolate teapot when it comes to preventing raves.
How are the good folks in the UK not in the streets about all this?
What? And get beaten up by the police?
I mean, its not so much the getting beaten up by police thing, which is all over and done with pretty quickly: its all the media frenzy afterwards: chat shows, negotiating exclusive deals with the press, getting ripped of by your agent, the paperazzi going through your trash and digging up that silly thing with the nanny a few years back...
Then you find out that the whole thing you were protesting about in the first place was a fairy story told by some wide boy to a credulous reporter who used it to fill some silly season column inches.
Seriously: there is a lot of worrying stuff going on - but its really, really hard to know what is real and what is sensationalist wolf-crying by the media, who seem to think "we do" is a satisfactory answer to "who watches the watchmen?".
How would you feel if you visited a bank the day after it had been robbed, and random people accused you of being a bank robber, just because you happened to be at the scene of a previous robbery?
It depends: was I wearing a ski mask and carrying a large sack with "swag" written on it? Should the police have discretely asked me whether the big lump under my camouflage jacket was a shotgun (or if I was just pleased to see them) before sending for backup?
Or, in this case, was the "sound system" seized a 100W ghetto blaster or a professional PA setup the size of a truck? The BBC fail to relate this.
Interesting law. It specifies that it applies to people regardless of if they're trespassing, so they can be used to order people off their land, as long as a superintendent of the police thinks that 2 or more people are "making preparations" to hold a rave there.
The alternative being for the police to stand by, have a coffee and a doughnut while the organisers assemble the 30' high speaker silos and wait until there are 200 ravers on the site before intervening.
I think the 15 dudes BBQing under a tent during the afternoon doesn't look much like a nighttime rave. .
Except the only testimony for the "quiet barbecue" comes from the guy organising the event, and if you look at the earlier version of the article you'll find a few little snippits (such as previous events at the same premises and seizing sound equipment and that they'd already been told to get a license).
BBC (YOUR newspaper) said four cruisers, and a RIOT van arrived after the police helicopter watched fifteen people grilling and eating.
No, the BBC reported that the guy who was organizing the party said that.
The earlier version of the article puts a slightly different spin on it.
Funny how the people who vigorously defend their personal right to party all night seldom give equal weight to the personal right of everybody living within a 3 mile radius to get a night's sleep. (Oh, and for anybody from the US or Oz where "in a field" means an hour's drive from the nearest cowshed - the UK is a small, densely populated country where people often live very near fields).
The book "Voyage" by Stephen Baxter dealt with exactly this - he has an alternative history in which Kennedy Got Better and NASA pushed on to mars and everybody cheers.
If that's too upbeat, in "Titan" he has an alternative alternative in which signs of life are found on Titan - unfortunately a Shuttle flight has just crashed and a religious right president is dismantling science, but the remaining shuttles are used up to assemble last hurrah manned mission to Titan while Earth goes to hell in a handbasket. Spookily this was written before the second Shuttle disaster and pre-Dubyah. Part of Baxter's "NASA rejected me as an astronaut/Shuttle sucks/Apollo FTW" ouvre.
Okay, I read the first page of the paper and they say you only need about 20 bits of password so long as there is a three strikes policy in place.
Unfortunately, if you still force all users to have hard-to-remember passwords, you'll find it much harder to be draconian about that three-strikes policy... That's the point - these issues aren't orthoganal and tackling one can have negative consequences for another. Maybe (gasp) the answer is to have different policies for different threat levels?
Of course, if you really can persuade everybody to use really, really strong passwords then that doesn't matter so much - the real problem is with bogus rules for "strong" passwords: "t0p5ecret", "5w0rdf1sh", "joshua1983" etc. probably won't slow down dictionary attacks enough to keep up with Moore's Law.
I guess the bottom line is that I'd be concerned about employing someone who can't remember a password.
I think you have a sound policy for the systems management nerd herd, but have fun applying it to your CEO when he's forgotten his password for the third time in a month (but still wants root), or the minimum-wage-slaves on reception.
I'd be concerned about employing someone who was stupid enough to fall for the "please email us your password so we can re-enable your account" phish, but there seems to be one born every minute (not that that stops my real bank cold-calling and asking me to confirm my identity from time to time... Oh, ye gods!)
You write it down until you memorize it, you treat that piece of paper as precious and secret, you burn it and scatter the ashes
...and then some Bastard Operator From Hell forces a password change.
(or eat it, or whatever)
Mmmm... cH3353Bur93r... :-)
It's like saying that the locks on our doors aren't good enough anymore because people are breaking into our windows -- so we should stop locking our doors?
More along the lines of: there ain't no sense in fitting a steel door if you live in a tent.
The main purpose of most door locks is not to stop determined people getting in at all, but to ensure that they have to break something in order to do so and can't claim some innocent excuse.
Its probably better to regard most user-level, non-banking passwords in much the same way, and concentrate on protecting the really sensitive stuff.
Also, apart from the "long passwords encourage writing down" issue, long passwords + frequent forced changes = more forgotten passwords = more demands on support staff to reset passwords = less scrutiny of reset requests.
I don't understand why they don't just go ahead and drop the SGML parts of HTML 5
If they were going to do that, they might as well have dropped the HTML bits of HTML 5 and, on the blank sheet of paper, wrote "WRITE AN XML SCHEMA THAT MATCHES YOUR DOCUMENT AND THEN FORMAT IT WITH CSS"
(Just a few details missing, like I don't see how to embed Javascript...)
So, we should still be ensuring that all tags have matching close tags?
Well, its not going to hurt, even if it won't magically transform stuff into "proper" XML.
What will the document header be?
Anything that cares is supposed to look at the MIME type that it s served with.
Turn it on and next thing you know - "brring! brring! crunch!" - you're lying on your back covered with tyre tracks and with little tweeting birds flying round your head.
Almost as dangerous as painting a railway tunnel entrance on the side of a cliff...
It's probably in pan-n-scan too.
Look on the bright side - when a guy on the subway suddenly yells "Jihad!" and blows himself up, its too fast for anyone to do anything. However, if they go into a long rant about Tom Bombadil and Elves fighting at Helms Deep and how they made Farramir look weak and missing out the Scouring of the Shire and how Frodo was too young and... then there will be plenty of time for the passengers to overpower them.
People send confidential documents via e-mail all the time
And that's a good thing?
I also don't think Unite will be a big deal, but I don't think people will give a second thought about security.
Which is what people on /. are worrying about. Actively putting stuff you want to share on central servers rather than exposing parts of your home PC limits the risks.
You can't just throw away the rest of the terms when you are describing the motion of a pendulum versus time.
No, but it shows that "parabola" or a "series of parabolas joined together" is not a bad first approximation from someone who may not have encountered a sine wave before and/or may have only plotted part of the cycle.
Clearly, a pendulum (in the ordinary sense) doesn't swing once from (-infinity,infinity) to (infinity,infinity) which would be what a parabola describes.
"Clearly" to who? You (with, I presume, some sort of mathematical prowess) or a kid still in the early stages of learning mathematics?
So give them some credit for a good first guess, ask them how they know its a parabola, ask them how the graph continues after the bit they plotted, gently prod them towards discovering why a parabola doesn't work. Don't just dismiss what they've done as "bzzt! Wrong! Its a sine wave!".
To this day my father refuses to believe this: .99999.... (repeats forever) is exactly equal to 1.
Amazing. Its not as if that involves any concepts - like the nature of infinity or how it is possible to know the sum of an infinite series - that a non-mathematician might find difficult, or which perplexed the fathers of mathematics, l, is it?
I hope you started by acknowledging what is right about his position - that even if you could somehow write a "9" on every atom in the universe, you still wouldn't get to exactly "1" - and that the whole argument depended on the mathematical notion of "infinity" not just meaning "a really huge number" (or more than 60' away if you are a photographer). In fact, you can turn it around and say that what "infinity" means to a mathematician is the number of 9s you'd have to put after the point to get to exactly 1...
There is a lot of incorrect teaching out there given by perceived authoritative sources (a TV show, in this case).
Amen to that. However, if you want kids to learn math, dealing with that is part of the challenge - and you don't do that by saying "that's wrong - here is the right answer" - you need to understand what's so compelling about the "wrong" answer, acknowledge that and then challenge the conclusion.
The graph of a pendulum's motion with respect to time is a sine wave
Which is the same basic shape as a cosine wave, for which the first two terms of the series expansion are 1-0.5x^2 which is a....?
Or maybe they timed some pendulums of different lengths and found that the length of the pendulum was proportional to the square of the period?
And we wonder why our kids have problems with math.
Yes, when their told "wrong, try again" because they don't get the precise answer that was in the teacher's head.
This man is a beautiful dreamer. I don't think his rather Platonic vision of the perfect math class will ever be acheivable.
Haven't read the whole TFA yet, but he's nailed the problem nicely on the first page: typical school math is too often presented as a laundry list of silly things to remember how to do. When you've done that, instead of going on to do some interesting stuff with the tricks you've learned, your reward is to learn a whole set of new, slightly more complicated, silly things to do.
His solution seems a bit too predicated on the idea that Pure Math floats everybody's boat: Sure pure maths is important*, School Math needs to make an impression on future engineers, accountants, architects, chefs, etc. - plus the world would be a much better shape if Joe Sixpack had been encouraged to make the link between that thing about the rice and the chessboard and a credit card bill. Professional mathematicians (and many /.ers) seem to have a hard time thinking down to anything below undergraduate level :-)
and does nothing for the vast majority of us who don't use calculus or even algebra in our day-to-day lives
Well, if you use a spreadsheet for planning you're using algebra concepts (except I've seen a depressing number of people who use pocket calculator or windows calc to work out what numbers to fill into Excel because, of course, in class, spreadsheets are only for the annual cat & dog survey). Part of the reason people don't use math in everyday life is that it doesn't occur to them that they could.
First, *use* math to solve real problems and explain real scientific principles
...and the important word there is "real" as in "something someone might actually want to do in the real world - not the bizarro parallel mathworld in which Grandma decides to divide her $3600 windfall between Alice, Bob and Sufia in the ratio 2:3:4. That's what you get when someone adds some "real world" problems to their curriculum buy taking the old math practice exercises and making up stories around them.
Of course, you could ask the kids to help Grandma come up with a fair way to divide her winnings amongst her grandchildren - but then the danger is that they might come up with a workable solution that doesn't use a ratio and we're "doing" ratio in this lesson.
The worst cases of this include things like standard probability questions with grafted-on contexts where the events are clearly not independent.
Trouble is, although it is possible to identify a real problem, find some math in it that kids can identify and tackle, present it with just the Goldilocks optimum amount of clues and structure then work out how to fit that into a curriculum... it is much, much quicker and cheaper to find someone to take textbook math exercises, wrap stories around them and call them "real world mathematical problems". Ker-ching!
The other problem is that you find that kids that do well on a page of exercises crash and burn when they are asked to walk and chew gum at the same time by applying the same math to a real problem (especially if they have to spot the math to use) - and this looks bad on the report card and takes up valuable "learning to do some harder exercises" time.
Second, incorporate the history of math into math class.
Not just history: a bit more "learn about what real math can do" and a bit less "learn to do very simple math". Bring in topical issue ("can you spot the problem with these figures from the newspaper" is an inexhaustible source!) There's a tendency in math education to never talk about something if kids wouldn't be able to complete a page of exercises on it or memorize the proof.
* Pure math is, of course, vital: if physicists didn't have a supply of abstract math to find practical applications for, how would they annoy mathematicians? :-)
My point is that people DO abuse systems - to what degree is not what I was discussing.
But the degree is rather important. If all that had come out of this had been Mars bars and bath plugs then it would have been a highly counter-productive storm in a teacup.
No I wouldn't have claimed or a mars bar or committed mass fraud
I suggest that an awful lot of people would have claimed the Mars bar - and one for their friend. However, rather fewer would have "forgotten" to stop claiming for the paid off mortgage.
If we want MPs to be human beings, then we have to accept that they will stretch the rules a little bit. However, if we want government that commands any sort of respect, they need to show better judgement as to where the limits lie.
Flame away but i probably would have.
Would have what?
Claimed 39p for a Mars Bar - or continued to claim hundreds of pounds a month for interest on a mortgage that no longer existed? Claimed that you needed to subscribe to such-and-such magazine as part of your job, or played complex second home/primary residence "flipping" shenanigans in order to get both nicely tricked out at taxpayers' expense - but then tell a different story to the revenue when it came to capital gains tax?
Thing is, when the Telegraph got their original leaked, uncensored information, they did a masterful job of padding out the really serious stuff with lots of trivia. What you say is true of much of the trivia - if you can claim it, why not? But the big money stuff is not excusable.
Bear in mind that this is the same administration that is putting out the "No Ifs, No Buts" adverts telling the "little people" claiming state benefit exactly how hard the book will be thrown at them if they are not scrupulously honest.
The annoying thing is that the fallout from this is probably going to be a bureaucracy-laden system that costs the taxpayers 100 quid for every 50 quid claimed and lots of silly regulations that will trickle down to everybody else who ever claims expenses.
Say I want to access my home PC files while at work
Then you'd probably want a VPN service, not a http-based service in which everything passed through Opera's proxies.
Now, produce a secure but click-and-drool easy VPN service that wasn't defeated by the slightest firewall and then we are talking.
I don't think that's the point. This ArseBook of yours would be controlled from a central place, just like every other site out there.
From the Opera website:
The interaction is all done via a central Opera Unite server â" Opera Unite uses a proxy between the server and its clients (found at operaunite.com) to avoid the need for any special firewall configuration.
So there's still a central point of failure.
ensuring all of their exchanges pass through Opera's servers first. 'That's an effective way to get around technical difficulties like NAT firewalls,
Well, ever since broadband came in people could run home servers if they want - OS X comes with a built in web server and the world hasn't ended. Lots of NAS boxes today include click-and-drool webservers and you can get dynamic DNS if you don't have a fixed addresss.
However - I've got a better idea: why don't they just store the stuff the users want to share on the central servers? I mean, hard disc space is about fsck all per megabyte these days, the servers can run 24/7, have a super-fast connection to teh interweb (not an ADSL line with lousy upload speed) and have the latest security patches applied daily by dusky, nubile virgins (well, 1 out of 3 ain't bad). Even if the server does get hacked then it doesn't affect the end user. Much better than leaving your PC on all the time, or having someone suddenly trying to download a video when you're in the middle of a networked deathmatch...
Then there would be loads of material on the servers, so people would actually want to visit them. Hey, they could even attach comments and stuff to people's photos, videos, news articles and things to say whether they liked them.
You could call it MyCRT, FlipR, ArseBook or ColonPling or something...
Should I patent this, perhaps?
Anyway kWh is a measure of amount of energy, not power. If the plates power would be 30 kW, it would take one hour to collect 30 kWh.
If I squint, I could just about believe 30kW for a car driving over such a plate - but that would be 30kW for a fraction of a second, which is a dumb way of measuring the power.
Methinks the logic is that the label on the generator says "30kW" so it must produce 30kWh in an hour :-)
The Government is required by LAW to recognize American currency at face value.
So, say you've been paid in gold coins with a total face value of $50. Say you owe me $45. Give me one of those "$50" coins, I give you a 5 buck note in change and we're sorted.
Happy?
No?
You mean that you're fully aware that the actual value is vastly more than the face value? That means that you're fully aware how much you're really being paid - and its not as if "payments in kind" etc. are exempt from tax. The fact that you could use a $50 gold coin to settle a $50 debt is irrelevant. If you insisted, I'm sure the IRS would be delighted to accept gold coins, at face value, as settlement for your tax bill.
Or, to look at it another way, if you're paid with a "$50" coin worth $1000 then by all means put on your tax form that you're getting $50 cash + other considerations to the value of $950 and see if it changes your bill.
So on the one hand we take Gold Coins and use the Ore Value, while on the other we take Quarters and use the Face Value.
No: in both cases you take an honest and reasonable appraisal of the value of the object in question. For a regular quarter, however many bizarre and unlikely scenarios you contrive, the only honest and reasonable valuation is 25c. For a bullion coin, the honest and reasonable valuation is the metal value + any rarity value - no reasonable person would use a solid gold dollar to settle a $1 debt. Different things are worth different amounts - film at 11!
is that an extra $100 of Income?
Yes - you got lucky, but its still income, even if 99% of people would "forget" to declare the odd minor windfall like that.
If, however, you somehow "knew" that roll of pennies would contain a rare coin then shenanigans are clearly afoot.
Surely the problem here isn't that the UK government is trying to raise taxes to pay for something that has a massive social benefit, but that it's doing it via a poll tax?
I think the theory is that such a small levy will be "competed away" (see Lord Carter quote in this article) and the people who will actually pay are the phone companies when they hand their monthly sack of 50p pieces over to the treasury.
However, while I'm sure that people who buy a line rental & calls package won't directly pay this levy, it will probably be paid by all the people (like myself) who want a minimal BT line for broadband, emergencies and those stupid fracking "local rate" 0845 numbers, and get all the outgoing calls they can eat from their mobile package and/or VOIP.
Maybe that's moderately fair?