And when teacher A comes up with a 4.3 on his evaluation while B has a 4.4, then every parent of a kid in A's class who got anything less than an A+ will contact the principal and insist that the grade was due to teacher A being worse than teacher B.
They'll also contact teacher A and threaten to go to the school board or whatever other group they can think of to apply pressure unless teacher A changes the grade.
So, the principal and teacher A will waste a ton of time dealing with ridiculous people who don't have any sense, which certainly is a much better thing than spending the time trying to educate kids, right?
If you don't think that's exactly what would/will happen, then you obviously don't have kids or, if you do, have no interaction with parent/teacher groups. I've seen jihads waged against teachers who are strict in their grading and disciplinary practices because *gasp* they flunked a kid and had them put in detention for cheating on an exam.
Again, teachers need to be accountable for their performance, but making that data public will just result in a ton of time wasted on bullshit complaints and add more stress to teachers than there already is.
If you want to get fewer people to be interested in teaching, and have the ones who remain spend more time engaged in CYA rather than the ABCs, yeah, this is a great idea.
More to the point - what *possible* value could an untrained and unqualified public add that the supervisors and peers of teachers aren't already getting?
Especially since the public isn't actually observing the class and so has no idea what the hell would be going on to merit any particular bit of criticism. But of course that wouldn't stop people from pretending to be experts despite this ignorance.
Please explain to me exactly how putting performance evaluations of teachers in the hands of untrained, unqualified and certainly biased people is going to do anything but lead to crazy people targeting teachers who are trying to improve but - like anyone - can use some improvement? How is putting this stuff out there going to lead to valuable feedback being given to teachers that isn't already being given from people who have actually watched the instructor in action?
Do teachers need to be accountable for their performance? Hell yes, absolutely. But what possible benefit is there from putting those performance evaluations in the hands of people unqualified to evaluate them? None.
Now, if they de-identified the data, that might be acceptable. But having the data with the teachers' names on it would be awful. Imagine the amount of time wasted by parents rushing to schools to lodge complaints against any teacher with less than a perfect evaluation because their precious snowflake failed. "It couldn't be my child's fault - see - right here it says Mrs. Soandso only scored a 4.0 out of 5 on this one area!"
Avatar was a beautiful film with interesting technology behind it, but the story was trite, the dialogue was inane, and the acting was adequate to the task without anyone standing out.
2001 was a beautiful film with interesting technology behind it the story was novel, but much of it was plodding, the dialogue was serviceable and quotable but not particularly brilliant, and the acting was - well, pretty much anyone could handle that.
To be honest, if you wanted to talk about a sci-fi film getting snubbed, you would be be better off throwing out Moon - well crafted visually, interesting and well written story, very solid performances, realistic dialogue and by and large a superior film all around.
Hell, Wall-E was a superior sci-fi film to both Avatar and 2001 (at least the first part while on Earth).
Well, I can't say anything specific about Samsung off of the top of my head, but here's my general rule for determining if an organization is likely to engage in "evil" practices:
Are they "for profit"? Then the likelihood of them engaging in some evil practice is around 100%. Otherwise, probably slightly lower.
That may sound cynical and as if I am averse to capitalism, but by and large it's more that at least in the US corporations are required to maximize shareholder benefit, and often times the steps necessary to do that involve legal but ethically icky actions.
That said, I'm relatively OK with the idea of Google having information from when I would wear such a device, as long as I would also have complete access to the information they collect from me wearing such a thing.
First, because I would take it off if I were to do anything I wanted to keep private. And, even so, if there were even one other person present I would have to already assume that whatever was happening would have the potential to be made public anyway.
Second because I'm sure that really, if people want to violate my privacy there's pretty much no way I can 100% prevent it (just reduce the chance of a breech unless they're REALLY serious about it).
Third because I generally think that with the way things are going it's less about privacy and more about a level of anonymity. Only people who really care about me, personally, would have both the ability to look at my info AND cause me problems if they know it; people who just want to market to me don't care about me and I don't care about them - they just want my money. If someone were to use this information to stalk me or otherwise fuck with my life there are already ways to deal with that so I guess I just don't see it as that big a deal.
Fourth because I would be really interested in seeing the metrics of what I look at and do and just generally get more information about things in my surroundings. I find the whole idea fascinating, really - I zone out when in public a lot, in the sense that I'm usually living in my head and not paying much attention to things around me unless I'm actively engaged with them, so this would be neat to have just to see what I'm missing or whatever.
Fifth because I think that while Google would have a profit motive for this, they also have a lot of really bright folks working there and might come up with something really neat with that info. Though, that's probably the case also with open source projects, which I am also sure would pop up around this kind of hardware.
The claim has been made that breaking the chip in the passport shows that you disrespect the privilege of owning a passport, and that the airport was justified in denying this child from using the passport.
Well, that's a stupid fucking claim. Saying that one should respect an easily (relatively) replaceable inanimate object or lose a fundamental right is just the most pants-on-head stupid thing I've ever heard.
It's the kind of thing someone too stupid to understand abstract ideas views the world: "Oh, they want to burn the flag, that means they hate America" while being all the while unaware that prohibiting the exercise of free speech like flag burning is anathema to the founding principles of the US.
It's also stupid on its face - what possible benefit is gained from RFID other than convenience for immigration officials, and in what universe does that minor convenience outweigh the rights of citizens to travel or not?
Hi - I'm thesandtiger. Now you know me, and I use an iPad 2 + bluetooth keyboard and touchpad when I travel rather than carrying a laptop.
For "heavy" work when I travel I use the iPad and RDS to handle things on remote machines, which is pretty much how I do a lot of my heavier stuff when I'm not traveling anyway.
For the lighter work I can work on the iPad as it is - stuff like office docs (using quickoffice or goodreader), touchdraw, etc.
In both of those cases, I'm usually sitting down, and the iPad + keyboard/touchpad is basically a laptop replacement.
The reason the iPad is much better for me is that about half the time when I'm traveling for work I'm doing site visits where we're quite active, and I use the iPad without the keyboard/touchpad as I would use a pen & paper notepad or to fill out various forms we have etc. A laptop would be too clumsy for that - hard to actually type on a laptop while you're walking around from room to room, but it's rather easy to write on the iPad with one hand while walking around. Being able to have my notes already digitized is very, very helpful - I write pages and pages of quick notes during a visit and having them automatically converted to an electronic format is huge.
My use case probably isn't that common, but it's not completely uncommon, either.
You're assuming that the nature and meaning of "war" wouldn't undergo a fundamental shift if people weren't dying during it.
Lots of things are, essentially, "war" where people don't die. Apple and Samsung are engaged in a "war" against each other - they're both hoping to take something from the other by coercion, even if that isn't physical coercion.
Being able to "wage war" where stuff, rather than people, die would be huge. I'd much rather throw away stuff than people any day.
Also, I dispute entirely your belief that somehow we have a more profound appreciation for things that people have died for. In fact, I dare say that the fact that when people die in wars and other people use it for cheap political theater shows just how shallow the "appreciation" is.
Look, for example, at the whole "support our troops" thing as it happened with Iraq and Afghanistan: Some people used the deaths of troops to support a kind of "sunk cost" fallacy about dead soldiers, other people used it to say that their political opponents were politically bankrupt, other people used it as a club to beat up those they felt weren't appropriately patriotic, others used it to profit from selling shitty yellow ribbon magnets and Chinese-made American flags, and on and on.
Yet, when it comes to doing things that *actually* matter - taking care of injured veterans and helping their families - it's just *crickets* *crickets* when these men and women come home and need some help because of what they've left "over there." Veterans make up a disproportionate number of homeless - I dare say that if we had a "more profound appreciation" for the sacrifices made in war that wouldn't be the case because we wouldn't, as a society *let* it be the case.
I think they meant that the robot would be pre-programmed to automatically avoid falling rocks or deal with other anticipated emergency situations that require an immediate response not possible with the Earth-Moon time delay.
Think of it as a reflex for robots - the same way as when I touch something hot with my hand I don't have to think "move my hand away from that" because my nervous system can handle that for me.
The thing about exercise and diet as a way to lose weight is this:
The purpose of the exercise portion is to build muscle mass because muscle requires more calories than not-muscle does to maintain - so, by having more muscle you burn more calories all the time, at rest, when active, whatever.
The diet portion means to figure out what you actually need to take in and to do so with proper nutrition.
If you're right now obese and starting an exercise routine, the best thing would be lots and lots of weight lifting while simultaneously modifying your diet to eat as much as you do now, just healthier stuff that will also help muscle development.
Cardio and the like is good for fitness - indeed, add 2x IIT sessions per week just to improve your overall health and conditioning - but it's not really all that good for losing weight.
Blah, sorry, writing this from an iPad so numerous errors in the previous post.
Wrt the specific grading system I have a spreadsheet I use and I'm able to this add fields that are relevant for the meta grades, and also that allow me to run easy analyses on scores. Importing the letter grades to the primary system is easy - the meta info is entirely for me, it doesn't go in the permanent system. This is trivial to do.
For larger classes I will have 2 TAs, but I have handled courses with 200+ students by myself, and managed - again, their work is already being graded and since I won't just allow scantrons to decide their fate, it isn't much extra work to use my system over what I'm already doing.
For 100 level courses upwards of 200 students per class. It scales just fine; someone is grading their work and it's very little extra effort to add a meta grade while you're already on the work. For some classes I've been encouraged to use scantrons/teleforms but I don't like those since honestly anything that's merely multiple choice is not going to give an accurate measure of a students ability. It's very easy to eyeball work and see if they got the right answer and whether they showed their work/did work that makes sense for the problem.
I would actually say that having to add in a research component makes my method easier; there is more of a relationship developed wi th the student, more people are involved with the student, and thus when you have outliers you can more easily get information about them and whether their performance is anomalous.
Honestly, will be blunt and say "large classes" are an excuse for teachers to be lazy. I may not have every students record immediately in mind, but by having grade/meta grade pairs like c/incorrect or c/doesn't show work in my system I can do simple analyses to see which students are performing in unlikely to be legitimate ways. It honestly isn't that hard, though it did take some initial set up.
Absolutely there's a question that can't be answered that way:
"Minwee, on your previous exams you struggled to even articulate the most basic concepts involved in XYZ. Yet here on your final exam you managed to put forth an elegant solution. Please, from memory, walk me through your solution and how you came up with it step-by-step."
The tricky part (and it isn't that tricky) is how to know who's done suspiciously well and who is just a really good student.
For me, when I teach courses, I handle that by giving 2 grades for each assignment. One is the letter grade, the other is a meta-grade that explains why they got that letter. I also mix up assignment types and methods - some are open book, some are spontaneous and WAY too short (2-3 minutes at most) to get any real kind of response from an IRC enabled accomplice, etc.
The meta grade thing is simple: I might have 3 students who do an assignment and get a C. One might have gotten a C because they got an answer that was incorrect BUT they derived it through a process that is sensible and correct (usually just some kind of error they didn't catch); One might have gotten a C because they got a correct answer but their process made no sense; One might have gotten a C because they got the right answer but didn't show their work at all. Over time I develop a profile for each student based on those metas and so I can spot outliers not just in the actual letter grade they got but also in the reason for the grade.
When I have a student who routinely does very well but doesn't show their work, I'll sit with them and ask them to explain their work. If they can't do it adequately I'll remind them that cheating will get them an F for the course and possibly expelled, so I expect that in the future they'll be able to explain how they got those ever-so-correct answers the next time. It's shocking how many "correct but inarticulate" students suddenly become "frequently incorrect but extremely verbose" when they realize I'm on to them.
The other thing is that by and large, cheaters are not very consistent students when it comes to those meta grades, even if their letter grades might be. When I see a student with a very inconsistent pattern, that's another sign I need to have a talk with them.
I figure if a student can both figure out and slide past my system they deserve to get away with it.
Anyway, the thing is that it requires a faculty member who is actually invested in teaching their students rather than just herding them through a course.
Ask questions that require the student to demonstrate synthesis of the various things you've wanted them to learn. They might be able to google individual steps to solve the larger problem, but they wouldn't be able to google the end result - they'd have to know what they're doing. Put a time limit on it.
For example, in an introductory programming class (a CS 100 level course at my university), the final for the class consisted of this:
"Take a sound file (speech.wav) consisting of several dozen words with brief pauses between them and create a program that will output a new sound file with a name of the user's choice. The new sound file will consist of the words from the original file reorganized into a random sequence. The code must be commented to explain your thinking at each step. You have 3 hours for this task."
That task would require that the student understand how to analyze a problem, break it into smaller problems, design a process to address each of those problems individually, and then combine those solutions into the finished program.
Oh, sure - the student could google "how do I resize an array in java" (which might be necessary to know to accomplish several steps in the task), but they would need to know so much more in order to even realize they needed to know that, and that stuff wouldn't be something they could just look up.
The only downside would be the ability of the students to send the question to another student who is more advanced and who would spit back an answer; to guard against that you'd need to actually have an idea of what your students are capable of individually.
There's the rub - kids who are largely homeschooled usually (almost universally?) wind up missing out on a huge swath of humanity that traditionally schooled kids are exposed to from the get go. That's a byproduct of the largely controlled environment at home and parents who will screen people (consciously or not) who come into contact with their kids.
Some of the absolute worst people I've ever met in my life I met while I was a kid in school. Despite being awful people, they helped me develop a pretty thick skin and an ability to deal well with problem personalities. I am 99% sure I wouldn't have met most of those people had I been homeschooled because my parents simply wouldn't have allowed me to meet them, and also, if I did meet them it would have been under pretty controlled circumstances where I would have had people saying something like "don't be like them!" rather than how it did go down, which was more like, "deal with it."
I also learned how to work with people from very different backgrounds - going to public school in a big city I had classmates from all over the economic spectrum, every race, religion and creed, varying levels of natural ability, etc. I learned how to deal with the frustrations and frictions that can come up when working in such varied groups, which is something I think a lot of homeschool only kids don't get exposed to.
Enrolling kids in extra activities is part of the solution, but as the GP pointed out it still only really exposes them to more people like them. For my money, I think that a mix of public school and parental involvement is probably the best way to handle things so that their kids wind up being well rounded and capable human beings who don't fall apart when exposed to things outside their experience.
With the "bailing on the job" thing - I mean he made up his mind to leave; given the lack of details (which is a problem, more below) it seems fair to say he's mentally checked out of it.
I don't think it's a crime to ask for advice, but I do think it's really offensive to ask for advice in a way that minimizes the asker's effort and maximizes the effort of the people they're asking for help.
Look at the comments: Virtually all of them are asking the guy to clarify some very basic information that any thoughtful person would have included in their initial request. By being so incredibly vague he's wasted the time of people he is asking for help - he's saying "the 5 minutes it would have taken me to write a more detailed plea for help is vastly more important than the person-hours wasted asking me for clarification."
tl;dr: Young is one thing. Young and selfish is entirely another. Since his parents didn't teach him better, he's probably going to get smacked on the nose quite a bit until he learns better.
How do I know my obgyn isn't recording my exams? How do I know that my plumber didn't install a spycam in my shower? How do I know my lawyer isn't gossiping about my case? How do I know my therapist isn't having someone at Kinkos xerox her notes about me?
The answer is that I don't, but I can be pretty sure that if they did do this and it ever came to light, in every single case they would be ruined beyond imagining financially, professionally, personally and likely judicially.
Psychiatrists and psychologists and licensed clinical social workers see patients who are in extremely vulnerable situations all the time; vulnerable to the point where it could be potentially life-endangering if the patient in question were simply found out to be seeking counseling, even if the actual information conveyed during counseling sessions isn't disclosed.
A friend of mine had a patient beaten nearly to death by their spouse when the spouse found out the patient was seeking help. Another friend of mine had clients they couldn't meet at their usual office because the office in question was inside a health center serving the LGBTQ community, and the clients were not out and could have faced serious issues (including violence) were they found out by people in their lives (usually parents who would have had extremely negative reactions to finding out their kids are queer).
Sometimes people who need help aren't able to get help face-to-face or in a traditional setting, and rather than just deny them help entirely, it's preferable to get them help that may come with more risk than typical. The people who are worth being licensed, however, will take every step they can to minimize the risks, inform the patient of the risks, and be as aware as possible of the ways they themselves can reduce the risk.
Is it ideal? No. But please, dispense with the hyperbole.
It's pretty obvious the OP isn't experienced, isn't mature and isn't resourceful - in that light, the knee-jerk reaction makes perfect sense.
Inexperienced: Anyone with more than entry-level experience in their work would at least have some idea of competing companies in their industry and would also have some notions about how to contact those companies to ask about jobs whether advertised or not. They would also know that, when asking for help from complete strangers, being as clear and detailed as possible would help them get the answers they're seeking.
Immature: He bailed on a job in this economy with only the vaguest of handwaves about "FUD." Further, it's clear from the fact that he didn't bother explaining *anything* in his OP about this "FUD" that so vexed him that it never occurred to him that other people might not agree with him. Further, it's clear from the lack of information in his posting that he expects other people to do the work for him in helping him find a new job; he wasn't willing to spend time thinking of good things to google, but he values other people's time so little that he's willing to ask here. All huge signs of immaturity.
Not resourceful: A resourceful person would have taken more steps to find things on their own before resorting to asking here. A resourceful person would have come up with quite a few different things to search for (hint: I spent 5 minutes on the job sites mentioned and was able to find quite a few "open source" jobs because I'm not an idiot and didn't just type "open source" into the search field). A resourceful person would, if they had to give up hope finding the answer they seek on their own, give a detailed description of what they were looking for, where they looked, and the problems they ran into so that the people they were enlisting to help them wouldn't waste time going over things that had already been covered.
So, inexperienced, immature and not resourceful. Rather than looking for an "open source" job, I'd suggest the OP look for one where the questions he asks are easier - like "Would you like fries with that?"
None of those things are surprising or unexpected. None of those things, or even just the combination of those things, are unique or special to Jobs, or uncommon among humanity at all, let alone people of his generation and initial environment. Hell, the fact that he had an FBI file isn't even surprising or unexpected - I'm sure quite a few/.ers have FBI files just by virtue of where they've worked etc.
This is "news" in the same way that saying Mr. Jobs was a carbon based life form would been news.
Jobs was who most people expected he was, even when they had vastly differing opinions as to his worth as a human being.
I'm not trying to say that/, shouldn't report this stuff, but rather that I'm just surprised the guy's file was so mundane - you'd hope for *something* juicy.
So what are you hiding? You use a fake name and protected your account with a password - by your own admission, trying to hide things like that implies guilt.
If I have some apples, were I to count them, the base I use would be meaningless - saying 15 or 0F or 00001111 or 17 depending on the base I use wouldn't change the number of them that I have.
Similarly, a prime number in any whole-number base is a prime number when translated to any other whole number base. 2 (or 10 in binary) is still only divisible by 1 and itself, regardless of being in decimal or base 2 or base 12, 16, 8, 3, whatever.
I'm adding the caveat of "whole number" to the bases because I really don't know if it's possible to construct some kind of strange fraction-base math (which just seems like it would still essentially be an offshoot of a whole-number base, but I dunno if that's absolutely correct)
Anyway, because primes are primes are primes, the reason for using them would be because receiving a long sequence of them would almost certainly have to be an artificial source, and it would definitely get the attention of any species with math and an interest in meeting other species.
You are very angry about things that you don't seem particularly up on or interested in. There are many decaffinated brands that taste just as good as the real thing, you know.
Well, since you're complaining about someone being imprecise in their speech, I want to call you on the carpet yourself. You said:
"I don't know what's worse, his grasp of statistics, or... no, wait, that's about as bad as it gets."
In fact, if you look at the entire scope of human activity and behaviors, I'm pretty sure you would find "says 'must' when in reality he should have said 'almost certainly'" to be WAY down there on the list of "bad things" to the point where it's essentially irrelevant in the whole good/bad scheme of things.
In fact, I daresay your hyperbolic complaint and dismissal of the man for saying something that was only slightly off and basically comparing him to Hitler (you did, after all, say "that's about as bad as it gets" and most people would say the Nazi regime was pretty much about as bad as it gets also!) is, in actuality, much, much worse than Vogt's trivial offense.
Slashdot Mirror
And when teacher A comes up with a 4.3 on his evaluation while B has a 4.4, then every parent of a kid in A's class who got anything less than an A+ will contact the principal and insist that the grade was due to teacher A being worse than teacher B.
They'll also contact teacher A and threaten to go to the school board or whatever other group they can think of to apply pressure unless teacher A changes the grade.
So, the principal and teacher A will waste a ton of time dealing with ridiculous people who don't have any sense, which certainly is a much better thing than spending the time trying to educate kids, right?
If you don't think that's exactly what would/will happen, then you obviously don't have kids or, if you do, have no interaction with parent/teacher groups. I've seen jihads waged against teachers who are strict in their grading and disciplinary practices because *gasp* they flunked a kid and had them put in detention for cheating on an exam.
Again, teachers need to be accountable for their performance, but making that data public will just result in a ton of time wasted on bullshit complaints and add more stress to teachers than there already is.
If you want to get fewer people to be interested in teaching, and have the ones who remain spend more time engaged in CYA rather than the ABCs, yeah, this is a great idea.
More to the point - what *possible* value could an untrained and unqualified public add that the supervisors and peers of teachers aren't already getting?
Especially since the public isn't actually observing the class and so has no idea what the hell would be going on to merit any particular bit of criticism. But of course that wouldn't stop people from pretending to be experts despite this ignorance.
How ridiculous.
Please explain to me exactly how putting performance evaluations of teachers in the hands of untrained, unqualified and certainly biased people is going to do anything but lead to crazy people targeting teachers who are trying to improve but - like anyone - can use some improvement? How is putting this stuff out there going to lead to valuable feedback being given to teachers that isn't already being given from people who have actually watched the instructor in action?
Do teachers need to be accountable for their performance? Hell yes, absolutely. But what possible benefit is there from putting those performance evaluations in the hands of people unqualified to evaluate them? None.
Now, if they de-identified the data, that might be acceptable. But having the data with the teachers' names on it would be awful. Imagine the amount of time wasted by parents rushing to schools to lodge complaints against any teacher with less than a perfect evaluation because their precious snowflake failed. "It couldn't be my child's fault - see - right here it says Mrs. Soandso only scored a 4.0 out of 5 on this one area!"
Avatar was a beautiful film with interesting technology behind it, but the story was trite, the dialogue was inane, and the acting was adequate to the task without anyone standing out.
2001 was a beautiful film with interesting technology behind it the story was novel, but much of it was plodding, the dialogue was serviceable and quotable but not particularly brilliant, and the acting was - well, pretty much anyone could handle that.
To be honest, if you wanted to talk about a sci-fi film getting snubbed, you would be be better off throwing out Moon - well crafted visually, interesting and well written story, very solid performances, realistic dialogue and by and large a superior film all around.
Hell, Wall-E was a superior sci-fi film to both Avatar and 2001 (at least the first part while on Earth).
Well, I can't say anything specific about Samsung off of the top of my head, but here's my general rule for determining if an organization is likely to engage in "evil" practices:
Are they "for profit"? Then the likelihood of them engaging in some evil practice is around 100%. Otherwise, probably slightly lower.
That may sound cynical and as if I am averse to capitalism, but by and large it's more that at least in the US corporations are required to maximize shareholder benefit, and often times the steps necessary to do that involve legal but ethically icky actions.
That said, I'm relatively OK with the idea of Google having information from when I would wear such a device, as long as I would also have complete access to the information they collect from me wearing such a thing.
First, because I would take it off if I were to do anything I wanted to keep private. And, even so, if there were even one other person present I would have to already assume that whatever was happening would have the potential to be made public anyway.
Second because I'm sure that really, if people want to violate my privacy there's pretty much no way I can 100% prevent it (just reduce the chance of a breech unless they're REALLY serious about it).
Third because I generally think that with the way things are going it's less about privacy and more about a level of anonymity. Only people who really care about me, personally, would have both the ability to look at my info AND cause me problems if they know it; people who just want to market to me don't care about me and I don't care about them - they just want my money. If someone were to use this information to stalk me or otherwise fuck with my life there are already ways to deal with that so I guess I just don't see it as that big a deal.
Fourth because I would be really interested in seeing the metrics of what I look at and do and just generally get more information about things in my surroundings. I find the whole idea fascinating, really - I zone out when in public a lot, in the sense that I'm usually living in my head and not paying much attention to things around me unless I'm actively engaged with them, so this would be neat to have just to see what I'm missing or whatever.
Fifth because I think that while Google would have a profit motive for this, they also have a lot of really bright folks working there and might come up with something really neat with that info. Though, that's probably the case also with open source projects, which I am also sure would pop up around this kind of hardware.
The claim has been made that breaking the chip in the passport shows that you disrespect the privilege of owning a passport, and that the airport was justified in denying this child from using the passport.
Well, that's a stupid fucking claim. Saying that one should respect an easily (relatively) replaceable inanimate object or lose a fundamental right is just the most pants-on-head stupid thing I've ever heard.
It's the kind of thing someone too stupid to understand abstract ideas views the world: "Oh, they want to burn the flag, that means they hate America" while being all the while unaware that prohibiting the exercise of free speech like flag burning is anathema to the founding principles of the US.
It's also stupid on its face - what possible benefit is gained from RFID other than convenience for immigration officials, and in what universe does that minor convenience outweigh the rights of citizens to travel or not?
Hi - I'm thesandtiger. Now you know me, and I use an iPad 2 + bluetooth keyboard and touchpad when I travel rather than carrying a laptop.
For "heavy" work when I travel I use the iPad and RDS to handle things on remote machines, which is pretty much how I do a lot of my heavier stuff when I'm not traveling anyway.
For the lighter work I can work on the iPad as it is - stuff like office docs (using quickoffice or goodreader), touchdraw, etc.
In both of those cases, I'm usually sitting down, and the iPad + keyboard/touchpad is basically a laptop replacement.
The reason the iPad is much better for me is that about half the time when I'm traveling for work I'm doing site visits where we're quite active, and I use the iPad without the keyboard/touchpad as I would use a pen & paper notepad or to fill out various forms we have etc. A laptop would be too clumsy for that - hard to actually type on a laptop while you're walking around from room to room, but it's rather easy to write on the iPad with one hand while walking around. Being able to have my notes already digitized is very, very helpful - I write pages and pages of quick notes during a visit and having them automatically converted to an electronic format is huge.
My use case probably isn't that common, but it's not completely uncommon, either.
You're assuming that the nature and meaning of "war" wouldn't undergo a fundamental shift if people weren't dying during it.
Lots of things are, essentially, "war" where people don't die. Apple and Samsung are engaged in a "war" against each other - they're both hoping to take something from the other by coercion, even if that isn't physical coercion.
Being able to "wage war" where stuff, rather than people, die would be huge. I'd much rather throw away stuff than people any day.
Also, I dispute entirely your belief that somehow we have a more profound appreciation for things that people have died for. In fact, I dare say that the fact that when people die in wars and other people use it for cheap political theater shows just how shallow the "appreciation" is.
Look, for example, at the whole "support our troops" thing as it happened with Iraq and Afghanistan: Some people used the deaths of troops to support a kind of "sunk cost" fallacy about dead soldiers, other people used it to say that their political opponents were politically bankrupt, other people used it as a club to beat up those they felt weren't appropriately patriotic, others used it to profit from selling shitty yellow ribbon magnets and Chinese-made American flags, and on and on.
Yet, when it comes to doing things that *actually* matter - taking care of injured veterans and helping their families - it's just *crickets* *crickets* when these men and women come home and need some help because of what they've left "over there." Veterans make up a disproportionate number of homeless - I dare say that if we had a "more profound appreciation" for the sacrifices made in war that wouldn't be the case because we wouldn't, as a society *let* it be the case.
I think they meant that the robot would be pre-programmed to automatically avoid falling rocks or deal with other anticipated emergency situations that require an immediate response not possible with the Earth-Moon time delay.
Think of it as a reflex for robots - the same way as when I touch something hot with my hand I don't have to think "move my hand away from that" because my nervous system can handle that for me.
Also, good on ya for starting to exercise!
The thing about exercise and diet as a way to lose weight is this:
The purpose of the exercise portion is to build muscle mass because muscle requires more calories than not-muscle does to maintain - so, by having more muscle you burn more calories all the time, at rest, when active, whatever.
The diet portion means to figure out what you actually need to take in and to do so with proper nutrition.
If you're right now obese and starting an exercise routine, the best thing would be lots and lots of weight lifting while simultaneously modifying your diet to eat as much as you do now, just healthier stuff that will also help muscle development.
Cardio and the like is good for fitness - indeed, add 2x IIT sessions per week just to improve your overall health and conditioning - but it's not really all that good for losing weight.
Blah, sorry, writing this from an iPad so numerous errors in the previous post.
Wrt the specific grading system I have a spreadsheet I use and I'm able to this add fields that are relevant for the meta grades, and also that allow me to run easy analyses on scores. Importing the letter grades to the primary system is easy - the meta info is entirely for me, it doesn't go in the permanent system. This is trivial to do.
For larger classes I will have 2 TAs, but I have handled courses with 200+ students by myself, and managed - again, their work is already being graded and since I won't just allow scantrons to decide their fate, it isn't much extra work to use my system over what I'm already doing.
For 100 level courses upwards of 200 students per class. It scales just fine; someone is grading their work and it's very little extra effort to add a meta grade while you're already on the work. For some classes I've been encouraged to use scantrons/teleforms but I don't like those since honestly anything that's merely multiple choice is not going to give an accurate measure of a students ability. It's very easy to eyeball work and see if they got the right answer and whether they showed their work/did work that makes sense for the problem.
I would actually say that having to add in a research component makes my method easier; there is more of a relationship developed wi th the student, more people are involved with the student, and thus when you have outliers you can more easily get information about them and whether their performance is anomalous.
Honestly, will be blunt and say "large classes" are an excuse for teachers to be lazy. I may not have every students record immediately in mind, but by having grade/meta grade pairs like c/incorrect or c/doesn't show work in my system I can do simple analyses to see which students are performing in unlikely to be legitimate ways. It honestly isn't that hard, though it did take some initial set up.
Absolutely there's a question that can't be answered that way:
"Minwee, on your previous exams you struggled to even articulate the most basic concepts involved in XYZ. Yet here on your final exam you managed to put forth an elegant solution. Please, from memory, walk me through your solution and how you came up with it step-by-step."
The tricky part (and it isn't that tricky) is how to know who's done suspiciously well and who is just a really good student.
For me, when I teach courses, I handle that by giving 2 grades for each assignment. One is the letter grade, the other is a meta-grade that explains why they got that letter. I also mix up assignment types and methods - some are open book, some are spontaneous and WAY too short (2-3 minutes at most) to get any real kind of response from an IRC enabled accomplice, etc.
The meta grade thing is simple: I might have 3 students who do an assignment and get a C. One might have gotten a C because they got an answer that was incorrect BUT they derived it through a process that is sensible and correct (usually just some kind of error they didn't catch); One might have gotten a C because they got a correct answer but their process made no sense; One might have gotten a C because they got the right answer but didn't show their work at all. Over time I develop a profile for each student based on those metas and so I can spot outliers not just in the actual letter grade they got but also in the reason for the grade.
When I have a student who routinely does very well but doesn't show their work, I'll sit with them and ask them to explain their work. If they can't do it adequately I'll remind them that cheating will get them an F for the course and possibly expelled, so I expect that in the future they'll be able to explain how they got those ever-so-correct answers the next time. It's shocking how many "correct but inarticulate" students suddenly become "frequently incorrect but extremely verbose" when they realize I'm on to them.
The other thing is that by and large, cheaters are not very consistent students when it comes to those meta grades, even if their letter grades might be. When I see a student with a very inconsistent pattern, that's another sign I need to have a talk with them.
I figure if a student can both figure out and slide past my system they deserve to get away with it.
Anyway, the thing is that it requires a faculty member who is actually invested in teaching their students rather than just herding them through a course.
Ask questions that require the student to demonstrate synthesis of the various things you've wanted them to learn. They might be able to google individual steps to solve the larger problem, but they wouldn't be able to google the end result - they'd have to know what they're doing. Put a time limit on it.
For example, in an introductory programming class (a CS 100 level course at my university), the final for the class consisted of this:
"Take a sound file (speech.wav) consisting of several dozen words with brief pauses between them and create a program that will output a new sound file with a name of the user's choice. The new sound file will consist of the words from the original file reorganized into a random sequence. The code must be commented to explain your thinking at each step. You have 3 hours for this task."
That task would require that the student understand how to analyze a problem, break it into smaller problems, design a process to address each of those problems individually, and then combine those solutions into the finished program.
Oh, sure - the student could google "how do I resize an array in java" (which might be necessary to know to accomplish several steps in the task), but they would need to know so much more in order to even realize they needed to know that, and that stuff wouldn't be something they could just look up.
The only downside would be the ability of the students to send the question to another student who is more advanced and who would spit back an answer; to guard against that you'd need to actually have an idea of what your students are capable of individually.
There's the rub - kids who are largely homeschooled usually (almost universally?) wind up missing out on a huge swath of humanity that traditionally schooled kids are exposed to from the get go. That's a byproduct of the largely controlled environment at home and parents who will screen people (consciously or not) who come into contact with their kids.
Some of the absolute worst people I've ever met in my life I met while I was a kid in school. Despite being awful people, they helped me develop a pretty thick skin and an ability to deal well with problem personalities. I am 99% sure I wouldn't have met most of those people had I been homeschooled because my parents simply wouldn't have allowed me to meet them, and also, if I did meet them it would have been under pretty controlled circumstances where I would have had people saying something like "don't be like them!" rather than how it did go down, which was more like, "deal with it."
I also learned how to work with people from very different backgrounds - going to public school in a big city I had classmates from all over the economic spectrum, every race, religion and creed, varying levels of natural ability, etc. I learned how to deal with the frustrations and frictions that can come up when working in such varied groups, which is something I think a lot of homeschool only kids don't get exposed to.
Enrolling kids in extra activities is part of the solution, but as the GP pointed out it still only really exposes them to more people like them. For my money, I think that a mix of public school and parental involvement is probably the best way to handle things so that their kids wind up being well rounded and capable human beings who don't fall apart when exposed to things outside their experience.
With the "bailing on the job" thing - I mean he made up his mind to leave; given the lack of details (which is a problem, more below) it seems fair to say he's mentally checked out of it.
I don't think it's a crime to ask for advice, but I do think it's really offensive to ask for advice in a way that minimizes the asker's effort and maximizes the effort of the people they're asking for help.
Look at the comments: Virtually all of them are asking the guy to clarify some very basic information that any thoughtful person would have included in their initial request. By being so incredibly vague he's wasted the time of people he is asking for help - he's saying "the 5 minutes it would have taken me to write a more detailed plea for help is vastly more important than the person-hours wasted asking me for clarification."
tl;dr: Young is one thing. Young and selfish is entirely another. Since his parents didn't teach him better, he's probably going to get smacked on the nose quite a bit until he learns better.
Don't be absurd.
How do I know my obgyn isn't recording my exams?
How do I know that my plumber didn't install a spycam in my shower?
How do I know my lawyer isn't gossiping about my case?
How do I know my therapist isn't having someone at Kinkos xerox her notes about me?
The answer is that I don't, but I can be pretty sure that if they did do this and it ever came to light, in every single case they would be ruined beyond imagining financially, professionally, personally and likely judicially.
Psychiatrists and psychologists and licensed clinical social workers see patients who are in extremely vulnerable situations all the time; vulnerable to the point where it could be potentially life-endangering if the patient in question were simply found out to be seeking counseling, even if the actual information conveyed during counseling sessions isn't disclosed.
A friend of mine had a patient beaten nearly to death by their spouse when the spouse found out the patient was seeking help. Another friend of mine had clients they couldn't meet at their usual office because the office in question was inside a health center serving the LGBTQ community, and the clients were not out and could have faced serious issues (including violence) were they found out by people in their lives (usually parents who would have had extremely negative reactions to finding out their kids are queer).
Sometimes people who need help aren't able to get help face-to-face or in a traditional setting, and rather than just deny them help entirely, it's preferable to get them help that may come with more risk than typical. The people who are worth being licensed, however, will take every step they can to minimize the risks, inform the patient of the risks, and be as aware as possible of the ways they themselves can reduce the risk.
Is it ideal? No. But please, dispense with the hyperbole.
It's pretty obvious the OP isn't experienced, isn't mature and isn't resourceful - in that light, the knee-jerk reaction makes perfect sense.
Inexperienced: Anyone with more than entry-level experience in their work would at least have some idea of competing companies in their industry and would also have some notions about how to contact those companies to ask about jobs whether advertised or not. They would also know that, when asking for help from complete strangers, being as clear and detailed as possible would help them get the answers they're seeking.
Immature: He bailed on a job in this economy with only the vaguest of handwaves about "FUD." Further, it's clear from the fact that he didn't bother explaining *anything* in his OP about this "FUD" that so vexed him that it never occurred to him that other people might not agree with him. Further, it's clear from the lack of information in his posting that he expects other people to do the work for him in helping him find a new job; he wasn't willing to spend time thinking of good things to google, but he values other people's time so little that he's willing to ask here. All huge signs of immaturity.
Not resourceful: A resourceful person would have taken more steps to find things on their own before resorting to asking here. A resourceful person would have come up with quite a few different things to search for (hint: I spent 5 minutes on the job sites mentioned and was able to find quite a few "open source" jobs because I'm not an idiot and didn't just type "open source" into the search field). A resourceful person would, if they had to give up hope finding the answer they seek on their own, give a detailed description of what they were looking for, where they looked, and the problems they ran into so that the people they were enlisting to help them wouldn't waste time going over things that had already been covered.
So, inexperienced, immature and not resourceful. Rather than looking for an "open source" job, I'd suggest the OP look for one where the questions he asks are easier - like "Would you like fries with that?"
None of those things are surprising or unexpected. None of those things, or even just the combination of those things, are unique or special to Jobs, or uncommon among humanity at all, let alone people of his generation and initial environment. Hell, the fact that he had an FBI file isn't even surprising or unexpected - I'm sure quite a few /.ers have FBI files just by virtue of where they've worked etc.
This is "news" in the same way that saying Mr. Jobs was a carbon based life form would been news.
Jobs was who most people expected he was, even when they had vastly differing opinions as to his worth as a human being.
I'm not trying to say that /, shouldn't report this stuff, but rather that I'm just surprised the guy's file was so mundane - you'd hope for *something* juicy.
So what are you hiding? You use a fake name and protected your account with a password - by your own admission, trying to hide things like that implies guilt.
Fucking basic science, such a waste of taxpayer money!
Nah, the base they use doesn't matter:
If I have some apples, were I to count them, the base I use would be meaningless - saying 15 or 0F or 00001111 or 17 depending on the base I use wouldn't change the number of them that I have.
Similarly, a prime number in any whole-number base is a prime number when translated to any other whole number base. 2 (or 10 in binary) is still only divisible by 1 and itself, regardless of being in decimal or base 2 or base 12, 16, 8, 3, whatever.
I'm adding the caveat of "whole number" to the bases because I really don't know if it's possible to construct some kind of strange fraction-base math (which just seems like it would still essentially be an offshoot of a whole-number base, but I dunno if that's absolutely correct)
Anyway, because primes are primes are primes, the reason for using them would be because receiving a long sequence of them would almost certainly have to be an artificial source, and it would definitely get the attention of any species with math and an interest in meeting other species.
You are very angry about things that you don't seem particularly up on or interested in. There are many decaffinated brands that taste just as good as the real thing, you know.
Well, since you're complaining about someone being imprecise in their speech, I want to call you on the carpet yourself. You said:
"I don't know what's worse, his grasp of statistics, or... no, wait, that's about as bad as it gets."
In fact, if you look at the entire scope of human activity and behaviors, I'm pretty sure you would find "says 'must' when in reality he should have said 'almost certainly'" to be WAY down there on the list of "bad things" to the point where it's essentially irrelevant in the whole good/bad scheme of things.
In fact, I daresay your hyperbolic complaint and dismissal of the man for saying something that was only slightly off and basically comparing him to Hitler (you did, after all, say "that's about as bad as it gets" and most people would say the Nazi regime was pretty much about as bad as it gets also!) is, in actuality, much, much worse than Vogt's trivial offense.