I'd be interested to know which airlines allow you to get on an international flight without a passport. Certainly in the UK, the answer is "none of them".
Funny you should say that - I dropped out of A-level maths (a combined pure and applied course) because I was crap at it.
A few years later, I was doing a placement in a school and the head of physics - who believed that papers were getting easier - showed me a physics A-level paper. I didn't think it looked that challenging, even allowing for my dismal attempt at A-level maths.
(For those who don't know, A-level physics and applied maths in the UK were - at least at the time - very similar).
I've already alluded to it elsewhere in this topic, but I think the biggest problem with education is the number of conflicting requirements. "All children should leave with basic qualifications" clashes horribly with "Basic qualifications must mean something" unless you can dramatically up the standard of teaching and the ability of the pupils. IMV, it's easier to lower the standard of the qualification and quietly ignore the bit about qualifications having any meaning.
Or - better idea - apply the maths to situations you'll see in the real world. It'd make the classes much easier to understand, it'd make the immediate relevance more obvious and it'd equip pupils much better for applying and adapting a solution to a slightly different problem.
I don't mean "applied maths" in the traditional mechanics sense here, I mean questions less like "Calculate the area of this triangle" and more like "You want to tile this irregular shaped area. The tiles you want are 15cmx15cm and come in boxes of ten; the manufacturer recommends buying 10% extra to account for breakages. How many boxes do you need to buy? Show your working."
There were some questions like this when I was in school, but relatively few.
That's why our public education was originally created - to have an educated electorate. Then somehow over the years, our education became job training - even at the university level.
Whenever I hear a business leader complain that our schools aren't producing "educated workers" my blood boils - and I can understand the folks who rant about "corporatism".
Arguably they aren't. I'm in the UK and I was in school before all this AS-level stuff, and the gap between the exams we took at 16 (GCSEs) and 18 (A-levels) was vast. (Compulsory education in the UK ends at 16)
GSCEs were damn easy. For the most part, you could get good results simply by memorising a lot of information without really understanding much of it. A-levels, however, were vastly different. You couldn't bluff them in the same way - the entire syllabus and marking scheme was designed to ensure you actually had a reasonable understanding of the subject.
Anyone leaving school at 16 in the UK has just done these dead-easy exams that they can bluff and still get reasonable results - but employers will see through that very quickly. They're not necessarily demanding job training, but it'd be nice to get someone who can at least pick up training and get general ideas quickly.
People try to do really dumb stuff (at a national and global level) when they don't understand the maths of what they're going. Drill Drill Drill springs to mind. A little maths goes a long way.
Having said that, getting rid of the hard stuff from school would provide a larger underclass to exploit, which is quite handy from a corporate point of view.
Education, funnily enough isn't just about what's needed.
Employers don't necessarily want a large underclass. What they want is reasonably bright people who have come out of school with - at the very least - the ability read, write and do basic arithmetic who can be quickly trained for anything that's job specific. And if they're graduates, for them to show some evidence of having taken in at least some of the course content.
It really shouldn't be too much to ask. However, people aren't machines and our understanding of how to effectively teach appears to be stuck in the middle ages. (I rather suspect it isn't, rather that there are so many conflicting requirements of any education system that it's more-or-less impossible to meet them all without some serious compromises).
I have serious doubts that Al Qaeda - at least, as portrayed by the media - exists.
I believe there are fundamentalist factions that want nothing less than to return civilisation to the fourteenth century and will blow things up to achieve it. But I think they're rare and consist of independent groups of nutters - occasionally one of those groups succeeds in causing harm, usually it fails miserably. I mean really, what sort of moron ships a printer full of explosives from an arabic country to a synagogue in the US and then leaves a traceable phone number with the shipping company? You might as well print "Danger: Explosives!" in big letters all over the box.
This idea of an organised, worldwide, cell-based terror organisation for whom there are almost no limits to what they can achieve working to organise these attacks doesn't hold water on the very simple grounds that I don't believe such a group would have such a poor hit rate.
TBH, the only thing that surprised me was that the explosive was in shipped cargo rather than passenger-carried. Cargo can't complain about its treatment.
Which will almost certainly culminate in a ruling which essentially says "Airports are different to other parts of the world and the TSA can essentially invent their own law there, and if their law says they can gently fondle your bollocks with one hand while jacking off with the other, so be it".
That's criminal responsibility - and then only if it can be demonstrated that the child realised that what they were doing was wrong. IIRC you can neither sue nor be sued until you're 18 in the UK.
If real private industry, or science, wanted laser-powered helicopters we'd build them at a fraction of the cost that the taxpayers are paying for this shit.
You'd better tell Alan Turing that. He thought he was employed (and ultimately driven to suicide) by the government that paid him to do the early research that led to a lot of modern computing.
Thing is, I believe that some quarters (particularly those who deal with desktop software) within Microsoft honestly think that "cross platform" means "works with more than one version of Windows". Were you to walk into one of their meetings and suggest supporting a non-Windows based platform, you'd get everything from funny looks to comments along the lines of "But nobody's used DOS for years!". As far as they're concerned, you might just as well propose video streaming to a paper pad, it'd be equally absurd.
That's funny, my recollection is that Napster was sued into oblivion. A few years later the name was resurrected as a legit pay-per-download service.
WMA's DRM was floundering several years ago when it was fairly clear that Apple were basically eating up the portable music player market without even breaking a sweat. I can't remember the last time I saw someone using an MP3 player that wasn't an Apple product - even using their iPod while at the same time using a mobile phone that almost certainly has perfectly capable media player support builtin.
The final nail in the WMA DRM coffin was when the Zune didn't support it.
Yep, and I lost count of the number of PCs with USB I saw which ran Windows '95. For about three or four years it was the most pointless port in the whole of history. (I include the first year of Windows '98s life because even then there weren't a great deal of USB-only peripherals around).
Any product which tries to ape a Microsoft product - no more, no less - can't really start development properly until the equivalent Microsoft product has at least been released as a beta. And almost invariably has fewer resources.
Which means it'll inevitably be 2 years behind at best, more likely 5 years. And this is an industry where being 5 years behind the times is seldom a good idea.
An "accidental data charge" as they put it wouldn't necessarily need massive amounts of forensic accounting - you could just ask the customer service call centre what people were complaining about and see about putting the biggest individual sources of complaint right. Which they should be doing anyway from a customer service perspective and because it reduces the call volume (and hence the number of man-hours you have to pay for) at the call centre.
This is negligence bordering on the criminal. I guarantee you someone - probably fairly high up - got wind of this pretty quickly once it became clear it was happening - and took the executive decision to ignore it on the basis it wasn't affecting enough customers to attract regulatory attention and it helped the bottom line.
Oh and yes I believe you are correct - a contract is not binding if it has no been signed, or dollars changed hands (like when you buy Windows Seven NT 6.1).
Depending on the country you're in, that is not necessarily the case. All that needs to change hands is consideration - some sort of benefit. That benefit does not have to be financial in nature.
Microsoft has an incredibly great balance sheet and is making shitloads of money, and that's good news.
The bad news is that Redmond has developed a nasty habit of releasing incremental improvements and lackluster copies of what the competition is doing.
Microsoft have been doing that for the better part of thirty years. It's just that it's become much easier to spot these things since the web became mainstream.
but I understand the sentiment and I think it can equally apply to Microsoft business customers. Remember the old adage "Nobody got fired for buying IBM"?
For years, nervous CTOs ensured that something similar could be said about Microsoft. But articles like this start to chip away at the belief that you can buy Microsoft's product and you won't go too far wrong.
No single event will demolish that belief entirely, you understand. Instead, little articles here and there, the discovery that some well-known organisations aren't using very much in the way of Windows on the server (such as Google), the announcement from an organisation that they're looking to migrate off Windows. Small things, but they all have a similar effect. Sooner or later, "runs Windows" is taken off the list of absolute, non-negotiable requirements for new infrastructure. It may take a while to have any serious impact - after all, lots of commercial software vendors have been producing their products more-or-less exclusively for Windows for some years, partly because of the nervous CTOs.
I don't for one minute believe that Microsoft will die. They're far too entrenched. Hell, if it boils down to it, Ballmer will be ousted by angry shareholders and someone who understands technology will take his place. But I do believe that their days of being at the top of the tree are over in some areas, and numbered in many others.
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I somehow doubt the TSA employment procedures include the question "Does the candidate have the good sense to refuse to accept stupid orders?"
I think you may have just hit upon the legal definition of "unstoppable force meets immovable object".
I'd be interested to know which airlines allow you to get on an international flight without a passport. Certainly in the UK, the answer is "none of them".
Funny you should say that - I dropped out of A-level maths (a combined pure and applied course) because I was crap at it.
A few years later, I was doing a placement in a school and the head of physics - who believed that papers were getting easier - showed me a physics A-level paper. I didn't think it looked that challenging, even allowing for my dismal attempt at A-level maths.
(For those who don't know, A-level physics and applied maths in the UK were - at least at the time - very similar).
I've already alluded to it elsewhere in this topic, but I think the biggest problem with education is the number of conflicting requirements. "All children should leave with basic qualifications" clashes horribly with "Basic qualifications must mean something" unless you can dramatically up the standard of teaching and the ability of the pupils. IMV, it's easier to lower the standard of the qualification and quietly ignore the bit about qualifications having any meaning.
Or - better idea - apply the maths to situations you'll see in the real world. It'd make the classes much easier to understand, it'd make the immediate relevance more obvious and it'd equip pupils much better for applying and adapting a solution to a slightly different problem.
I don't mean "applied maths" in the traditional mechanics sense here, I mean questions less like "Calculate the area of this triangle" and more like "You want to tile this irregular shaped area. The tiles you want are 15cmx15cm and come in boxes of ten; the manufacturer recommends buying 10% extra to account for breakages. How many boxes do you need to buy? Show your working."
There were some questions like this when I was in school, but relatively few.
That's why our public education was originally created - to have an educated electorate. Then somehow over the years, our education became job training - even at the university level.
Whenever I hear a business leader complain that our schools aren't producing "educated workers" my blood boils - and I can understand the folks who rant about "corporatism".
Arguably they aren't. I'm in the UK and I was in school before all this AS-level stuff, and the gap between the exams we took at 16 (GCSEs) and 18 (A-levels) was vast. (Compulsory education in the UK ends at 16)
GSCEs were damn easy. For the most part, you could get good results simply by memorising a lot of information without really understanding much of it. A-levels, however, were vastly different. You couldn't bluff them in the same way - the entire syllabus and marking scheme was designed to ensure you actually had a reasonable understanding of the subject.
Anyone leaving school at 16 in the UK has just done these dead-easy exams that they can bluff and still get reasonable results - but employers will see through that very quickly. They're not necessarily demanding job training, but it'd be nice to get someone who can at least pick up training and get general ideas quickly.
People try to do really dumb stuff (at a national and global level) when they don't understand the maths of what they're going. Drill Drill Drill springs to mind. A little maths goes a long way.
Having said that, getting rid of the hard stuff from school would provide a larger underclass to exploit, which is quite handy from a corporate point of view.
Education, funnily enough isn't just about what's needed.
Employers don't necessarily want a large underclass. What they want is reasonably bright people who have come out of school with - at the very least - the ability read, write and do basic arithmetic who can be quickly trained for anything that's job specific. And if they're graduates, for them to show some evidence of having taken in at least some of the course content.
It really shouldn't be too much to ask. However, people aren't machines and our understanding of how to effectively teach appears to be stuck in the middle ages. (I rather suspect it isn't, rather that there are so many conflicting requirements of any education system that it's more-or-less impossible to meet them all without some serious compromises).
I have serious doubts that Al Qaeda - at least, as portrayed by the media - exists.
I believe there are fundamentalist factions that want nothing less than to return civilisation to the fourteenth century and will blow things up to achieve it. But I think they're rare and consist of independent groups of nutters - occasionally one of those groups succeeds in causing harm, usually it fails miserably. I mean really, what sort of moron ships a printer full of explosives from an arabic country to a synagogue in the US and then leaves a traceable phone number with the shipping company? You might as well print "Danger: Explosives!" in big letters all over the box.
This idea of an organised, worldwide, cell-based terror organisation for whom there are almost no limits to what they can achieve working to organise these attacks doesn't hold water on the very simple grounds that I don't believe such a group would have such a poor hit rate.
TBH, the only thing that surprised me was that the explosive was in shipped cargo rather than passenger-carried. Cargo can't complain about its treatment.
Which will almost certainly culminate in a ruling which essentially says "Airports are different to other parts of the world and the TSA can essentially invent their own law there, and if their law says they can gently fondle your bollocks with one hand while jacking off with the other, so be it".
That's criminal responsibility - and then only if it can be demonstrated that the child realised that what they were doing was wrong. IIRC you can neither sue nor be sued until you're 18 in the UK.
(ICBW, IANAL, etc etc)
If real private industry, or science, wanted laser-powered helicopters we'd build them at a fraction of the cost that the taxpayers are paying for this shit.
You'd better tell Alan Turing that. He thought he was employed (and ultimately driven to suicide) by the government that paid him to do the early research that led to a lot of modern computing.
Thing is, I believe that some quarters (particularly those who deal with desktop software) within Microsoft honestly think that "cross platform" means "works with more than one version of Windows". Were you to walk into one of their meetings and suggest supporting a non-Windows based platform, you'd get everything from funny looks to comments along the lines of "But nobody's used DOS for years!". As far as they're concerned, you might just as well propose video streaming to a paper pad, it'd be equally absurd.
That's funny, my recollection is that Napster was sued into oblivion. A few years later the name was resurrected as a legit pay-per-download service.
WMA's DRM was floundering several years ago when it was fairly clear that Apple were basically eating up the portable music player market without even breaking a sweat. I can't remember the last time I saw someone using an MP3 player that wasn't an Apple product - even using their iPod while at the same time using a mobile phone that almost certainly has perfectly capable media player support builtin.
The final nail in the WMA DRM coffin was when the Zune didn't support it.
Yep, and I lost count of the number of PCs with USB I saw which ran Windows '95. For about three or four years it was the most pointless port in the whole of history. (I include the first year of Windows '98s life because even then there weren't a great deal of USB-only peripherals around).
Actually, I can see some logic in that.
Any product which tries to ape a Microsoft product - no more, no less - can't really start development properly until the equivalent Microsoft product has at least been released as a beta. And almost invariably has fewer resources.
Which means it'll inevitably be 2 years behind at best, more likely 5 years. And this is an industry where being 5 years behind the times is seldom a good idea.
This way, some other bugger does the washing up.
IIRC there's some evidence to suggest that they're just as able to plant a software backdoor as a hardware one.
Which is precisely what anyone means when they talk about "cost to the planet" anyhow. Since when did big lumps of damp rock care about anything?
Absolutely right.
An "accidental data charge" as they put it wouldn't necessarily need massive amounts of forensic accounting - you could just ask the customer service call centre what people were complaining about and see about putting the biggest individual sources of complaint right. Which they should be doing anyway from a customer service perspective and because it reduces the call volume (and hence the number of man-hours you have to pay for) at the call centre.
This is negligence bordering on the criminal. I guarantee you someone - probably fairly high up - got wind of this pretty quickly once it became clear it was happening - and took the executive decision to ignore it on the basis it wasn't affecting enough customers to attract regulatory attention and it helped the bottom line.
But this uses Technology! It must be better!
Oh and yes I believe you are correct - a contract is not binding if it has no been signed, or dollars changed hands (like when you buy Windows Seven NT 6.1).
Depending on the country you're in, that is not necessarily the case. All that needs to change hands is consideration - some sort of benefit. That benefit does not have to be financial in nature.
If the security checker had the remotest clue what they were looking at, they probably wouldn't be a security checker.
Microsoft has an incredibly great balance sheet and is making shitloads of money, and that's good news.
The bad news is that Redmond has developed a nasty habit of releasing incremental improvements and lackluster copies of what the competition is doing.
Microsoft have been doing that for the better part of thirty years. It's just that it's become much easier to spot these things since the web became mainstream.
but I understand the sentiment and I think it can equally apply to Microsoft business customers. Remember the old adage "Nobody got fired for buying IBM"?
For years, nervous CTOs ensured that something similar could be said about Microsoft. But articles like this start to chip away at the belief that you can buy Microsoft's product and you won't go too far wrong.
No single event will demolish that belief entirely, you understand. Instead, little articles here and there, the discovery that some well-known organisations aren't using very much in the way of Windows on the server (such as Google), the announcement from an organisation that they're looking to migrate off Windows. Small things, but they all have a similar effect. Sooner or later, "runs Windows" is taken off the list of absolute, non-negotiable requirements for new infrastructure. It may take a while to have any serious impact - after all, lots of commercial software vendors have been producing their products more-or-less exclusively for Windows for some years, partly because of the nervous CTOs.
I don't for one minute believe that Microsoft will die. They're far too entrenched. Hell, if it boils down to it, Ballmer will be ousted by angry shareholders and someone who understands technology will take his place. But I do believe that their days of being at the top of the tree are over in some areas, and numbered in many others.