chinese population has been expanding until recently. therefore the "pool" you talk about should also grow.
the other caveat is, especially in a student body as driven as chinaa, korea, that the quality of the faculty is not as important as the work ethic of the students. these people are self starters, and many of them would be able to manage their own education with just a written syllabus.
another point is school selection should not focus on performance; it creates a culture of irrelevancy in education, with the importance being pushed closer to jumping thuough the hoops just to get that piece of paper. but this is an old sophist complaint...you can teach rich offspring how to avoid paying debts, but not how to think. this holds true today across cultures, with true problem solving being a very rare ability in any field.
so the short answer is yes, create more universities, even with lower "pool" / calibre faculty. while you don't need to accomodate all of the 9.5 million from tfa, a significant portion above the 2.6 million spaces should be able to earn their keep/ be worth investing with a university education.
at that point you just let the market separate the wheat from the chaff, newer schools will have poorer faculty in the beginning, and poorer students, as the top will choose their schools. however it is the same as in med school, it does not matter who is at the top or bottom of the class, once they graduate, they are all doctors, and they will be evaluated on real life performance.
lastly, in an undergraduate setting, the argument of low calibre professors barely applies, as the "professor" will most often give a one hour lecture to a hall of 500 or so students. that is the only contact these students have with the professor, except that some of them do show up for exams. the course may be designed by the professor, but it is most often taught by several TA's (read MA student/slave earning sub welfare wages and studying at the same time). even the papers and exams are marked by hired temps.
sure this may be a north american outlook on university, but cutting edge faculty only really makes a difference in doctoral, or research settings, since the level of knowledge required to be at the top of the field is much too high for all but the most gifted of undergrads. students with such gifts blow by undergrad so quickly and easily that shitty faculty is only as important as the janitor who mops the floor at night.
not paying for shitty, artificailly inflated ipo shares that went down as soon as the underwriter pulled the rug from below is not taking a risk. it is taking an educated chance to prevent getting ripped off. pursuing payment is truly a chance for vonage, as they risk potential prison for allegations that will probably surface in numerous countersuits if they try and "persue payment". who does this pr shill think she is scaring/kidding?
these things are incredibly cheap to make, and are not sold at a loss. what perpetuates this myth is the fact that inkjet cartiges are sold at gouge level prices. A few major injet makers have lost in court over dmca issues when they encoded their printers to only use their brnd replacements. when there is a flourishing 3 party injet cartridge aftermarket that typically sells replacements for 10-25% of the original manufacturers price you know a scam is goin on. people like to think they got a deal on the printer. they didnt, just because the company is fucking you in the ass now, does not mean they did not fuck you in the ass before.
as far as things like stock buyback reserve, the cash to buy this back will have been long there from a huge tax free ipo. most companies underwrite their ipo, then pull the plug an let the stock crash. do a search on ipo and 1 and 2 year post ipo stock prices if you dont belive me. typically less than 5% of the cash raked in from ipo is needed for buyback.
all the stuff you mention exists as losses that are only found on the tax return, or annual reports when a company is fixing to buyback its own shares. why do you think insider trading is illegal? its not to protect the average investor from the ceo, it is to protect the real owners of a company from the ceo taking over stock. ok it might also be there to create the appearance of an honest system. however when you commonly have companies file two different financial statements in one year, one to the tax man, and one to the shareholders you know that there is a lot of room for interpretation.
you can bet you bottom dollar that M$, inkjet makers, etc are selling their wares at a loss out of the kindness of their heart, and they have the lawyers to beat down anyone that would say otherwise. this is why tax offices dont regualry fight big companies, but audit individuals/small business far more often. any large company knows that if the tax office gets out of line, sic your lawyers one em and teach em a lesson never to fuck with you again.
but in reality no such loss exists. M$, inkjet makers are getting richer than ever, literally printing money. one more thing that would perpetuate the rumor of M$ being willing to lose money is their unprecedented cash reserve of over 50 billion. many economists believe it is unhealthy for a company to have such a huge cash position. they are idiots. M$ also, i'm sure, does not find it to hard to have 50 bln USD lying around. but anyone who thinks that they are going to spend one red cent of that subsidizing gamers is in a fantasy world. M$ did not get where they are by giving anything away to anyone, ever.
this is how really rich business works.... attack what threatens you. may or may not succeed study what threatens you. steal. steal. innovate... chumbawumba will have little bearing in most legal decisions. RIAA doesnt need p2p to see whats popular. they can look at album sales. the bottom line here is controll. monopolist control over music. what most people dont undeartand is the members of the riaa are also a monopsony. this allows them total controll of music to push. to be able to realease your own record for a total cost of under 1000 bucks (pc bandwidth, studio etc) and release this to hundreds of millions of people scares the chit out of them. they do no give a fuck about the deadbeat that pirates cd's. he will never pay anyway, even in court, as no court can order a broke ass basement dweller to pay when he has nothing. but if a massive internet (non Riaa, so they could not say anything about it) hit was ever to happen, or a site that was famous delivering such hits it would be a cartel breaker.
1 it is legal to copy up to 10% of any printed material for educational purposes--or at least was when i was in school.
2 you can sort of copy much more; the limit does not really apply for the purposes of satire. lampoon, mockery.
3 crummy, cheap, professors (the kind that have leather elbow patches on wool blazers) write up what can be described as a "course kit" 3 bucks at kinkos, includin binding, sold to students for 30 an up. I have seen em for over 100 bucks. and you cant resell em, they are garbage when you are done. I have heard professors say that anyone in university should be smart enough to know that if they dont buy the kit they will get a nice bell curve. not to mention that exam material will be more likely to come from the kit. god help the student who tries to pirate one of these pieces of crap that could only be sold by a rapacious prof to a captive audience.
4 students in bookstores taking pictures of books? possibly, but most students are too busy gettin drunk and laid to care. those that arent are easily foiled by a simple thing called shrink wrap
5 what if you have a photographic memory? you dont need to buy any books, depending on how good your detail is. is that an infringement? if so how do you enforce it? if not, how can this be fair to those who do not have that type of brain? ok im done my drunken rant now...
i think you have the best outlook on statistics here. one thing the researchers failed to mention was that in the past immigrants often scored in the retarded range due to language barriers. This was largely hushed up in North America, because such a concept would severely undermine the credibility of IQ tests.
on a side note i'll counter your broad statistical comment with a single case. There was a television program about a man with the highest IQ in north america. This show aired a couple of years ago. The man had an IQ of over 200, with no post secondary education. He did not continue education because he missed the application deadline, and did not feel he had to conform to such things because they are assinine.
Whats more this person lived in a trailer on an annual income of 6 or 8 thousand (US) dollars per year. His occupation? He was a part time bouncer at a local bar. He kind of looks and behaves like Julian on the tv show Trailer Park Boys. Seriously im not makin this up. Google it if u need to, the show aired on the learning channel if that helps.
This begs the question, what does IQ really measure? Will this bouncer become some epoch defining genius? Conversely either Watson or Crick (you know the inventors of dna) had an IQ of only 115. Then you have people like Sylvester Stallone (inventor of Rocky, and the movie sequel) and Sharon Stone (inventor of Beaver) who reportedly have an IQ in the 160 range. Do they look, sound, or act like brainiacs?
When you think about it putting a complex faculty like intelligence, or even problem solving ability into a number, or even percentile seems to be dumbing down the very concept of intelligence to begin with (a simple example would be correlating the performace of a stereo system based on a Watt rating). The argument that there is no better way of measuing it is not justification for a faulty way of measurement.
As far as generalization being infalmmatory and serving no purpose, the purpose is to be infalmmatory, as for some researchers the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. But at what cost? These bozos lost their credibility as objective scientists, and can forget about ever being laid.
school is FREE babysitting. lets face it you could teach everything from grade 1 to end of highschool in a year or two. that would be some significant savings right there, but what would you do with the kids in the mean time?
so you want to use a computer to teach kids at home. well that is easy too. you could get some cheap content filmed in one classroom, by one teacher, and give a free pc to every child that is born.
sure pc's arent cheap, but this way you eliminate thousands of useless teacher salaries, pay no maintenance for school buildings, no bus fleets to keep up either.
But whats this i hear? children need human interaction to learn? not true, feral children learn soley from dogs. children need teachers to make them do boring shit that looks like a good cirriculum and keeps them employed, which in turn allows their 2 parents to work and be taxed.
the real question should be how can we educate children better, not cheaper. one on one tutoring has always achieved the best result, and historically a person with such an education was fluent in several languages by the time they became an adult. you can not say this about any public school in north america. even the performance in the bilingual sectors is dismal, with the indigenous people never learning english very well, and the english students while perhaps getting good grades in french or spanish, never being able to speak well without much additional study.
rio was not the first, just a cheap me too company
on
Rio Brand Closes Doors
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maybe it was the first flash player, but they are crap anyway. the first mp3 player witha harddrive was the pjb 100 from hango. it started in compaq labs, didnt get made for fear of being sued, was licensed to hango a pacific rim manufacturer that couldnt give a hoot about lawsuits or the riaa. it retailed for 3 grand at first, but was loaded with features. it cam out 2 or 3 years before the first ipod, had a 20 gig hard drive, 12 hour baterlife, usb (there was no firewire or usb 2 back then) and NO copyprotection of any kind. it came with a case and free lifetime koss headphones.
this was the first truly good mp3 player. and there should be no patents on it. what would the patent say? a box that plays mp3's? uses a hard disk? these are hardly inventions. I cant imagine what patents rio might have, since the box was invented long ago. good riddance to those bozos, one day you think you are hot shit in a tech company, the next you are just some shmuck working in a box factory.
And yes the ipod owned them, and just about every other protable mp3 player by re-inventing (and patenting) the wheel. like it or not, welcome to america.
aye top of the line hd looks really sweet. saw a 45k ($) plasma a couple of years ago, an it was sportin a footbal game. you could see every blade of grass. the only problem was the satellite feed didnt have enough bandwidth, and every time the camera panned the frames started to slow down. 45 grand to see choppy frames, that gave me a big warning about the early adopters gettin burned worse than ever before. got a cheapo lcd projector at home, an had a boxin match come in hd, that was really nice too, even with native svga resolution.
Watchin burned out actors can be pretty depressing, and doesnt justify any extra outlay. the real cool things are going to be in animation and special effects. as far as paying for sunsets. the studio would love to find a way to charge anything, even the air we breathe. but a sunset will always be free.
Why are they making a hardware gap so that you will need the newest extra special display to veiw content? My gues is the fact that even the most decrepit crt can do xga resolution. Hd tv is a little higher in its top spec, but a 1600x1200 21 inch monitor would give a really nice picture, even if its only 21".--if hd tv could plug into pc monitors they wouldnt sell many tv's neh?
dvd's are crap now. if you look at all the old dvd ports from video tape, the are 2,3 maybe 4 gigs ona dvd. since dvd burners became popular, almost everything clocks in at over 4.35 gigs, even if the original signal was nowhere near that. they just stuff it with crap.
This is a very old, disturbing trend in how media is given to us. it started with floppy disks. I remember them being 720k per disk. but the manufacturers were too cheap to have 2 assembly lines for 720k and 1.44m disk. the 1.44 were quite a bit more than the 720k disks, way more than double, kinda like the dual layer dvd price point now. but the real spooky thing was you just had to punch a hole in the floppy on the other sire of the write protect button, and presto you doubled the capacity for free.
this is the same with dvd,s but greedy corporate learned their lesson with floppies, and now ther is no real easy way to do this. it will be harder with gettin blu ray to be double sided. otherwise it begs the question: when making a new format why bother with the crappy half capacity cripple ware in the first palce? They arent fooling anyone by calling the regular version double.
and as far as no paragraphs...i tried but it bunched them. up. never use caps unless i have to... ahh no html format and preview...happy now?
yes, but
one disc to burn them all
one disc to copy them
and in the darkeness pirate them
besides dvd-r is the defacto leader atm.
this blu ray/hddvd is gonna be a little bit more complicated.
and no the pissing contest won't stop, sony will always gample with shitty proprietary formats, even if it costs them millions. to a company that sells billions the risk doesn't matter
the main thing thats going to destroy these formats is the fact that players will need to phone home to work...
now for a dose of reality: sony, toshiba, etc. can get as greedy as they want with all kinds of copy protection schemes, but their format will never become popular until there are readily available, cheap Blank media. just look at vhs, it didnt take off until tapes were cheap. cdrom was the same, now dvd are cheap, but almost nobody is touchin the expensive dual layer crap.
in the end it's the conmsuers that can wait out a new format. they have one simple question, what's in it for me? dvd's work just fine, and hd does not justify a few grand to upgrade everything. mebbe if it was a 3d holo tv people might be interested, but a few more pixels?
with this attitude large companies quickly realize that they are in the money business, not the format business. they can try and add as much greed an copy protection to a new format, but the know if they arent careful, they can easily engineer themselves into the unemployment line.
while nobody can say that any background info is essential (ie once a work leaves the hands of its author it takes on a life of its own) there is relevance here.
why are details like this important? because they can help understand trends in research. Instead of reading that a mysterious dude may have solved an even more mysterious problem, but whether he solved it or not is still even a mystery is not very informative.
back ground information like this helps the reader indentify which instituions, nations are at the cutting edge of a given field. if enough reports are mentioning a specific country or institution of major breakthoughs, then that entity will(deservedly) gain a good reputation for solid work and advances.
sometimes the who did what, and how can be more important than the what was done and why. Mebbe you should google the princes of serendip for some interesting background. HTH.
when you live in a glass (or silicone) house don't throw bricks. is this news? it doesn't take much intelligence to see that hardware manufacturers really, really, drag their feet when it comes to r n d. in tfa it's mentioned that clock and bus speeds are slower than single chips. this is an example of how the industry rips people off. you can bet that in a few months the chipsets will come through with a "miraculous" new design that is really a fix to shitty engineering in the first place. there is so much spin on hardware it's unbelievable, and also hard to see. don't believe me? go pick up a pc mag from 1990, and look at "90 MHZ BREAKTHROUGH!" in bold letters and then try and read the tech drivel without laughing.
this has been going on for ages. Of course it's a really big scam, and never buy the latest thing out etc. etc. i don't think theinquirer.net and Charlie are fooling anyone with their 64 bit sponsored rant.
1 Buy crap at best buy
2 Mail in Rebate
3 Get $$$$
4 Return crap
5 Profit!
wonder if there are any people doing this on a large scale? or if the real reason is that legislation would eventually come out banning it anyway?
sing it on brutha!
i', sure this nasty idea will be hacked on principle alone. no personal data? but it tracks ip's? I call BOOOOO SHIT!
seems like evvery day there is another pair of eyes on what you are doing.
a device like this could eliminate the "his word against hers" scenario and easily prove who is telling the truth. the liar could then be prosecuted accordingly, without expensive, and uncleaar proceedings. With positive proof the state could confidently impose harsher sentences for false allegations, or violations of such orders.
this has already been done in Canada, with a court order requiring a felon to wear an ankle gps device or goto prison. this is definately a good idea to help control potentially dangerous felons. It can also be argued that a FPS (felon positioning system) could act as a significant deterrant to crime as the chance of success is dramatically lowered. This is the PRIMARY focus of the criminal justice system; the prevention of crime to protect the general public.
you got some points to you article, but you leave out a few things.
i'm not sticking up for roland, dont know him, or give a shit about him. it may very well be true that he does steal other's work. if so it will catch up with him. im replyin to your post for your benifit... you have some good arguments, and im gonna play a little devil's advocate.
if you look at things a in a slightly different light, roland is what one would call a low level research assistant.
the fact that you say he makes 600 some odd dollars a month would be a typical stipend for an RA of the post graduate level. While that may seem like a large amount of money, i hope he has a day job (welfare has for a long time been more profitable that being a (Teachers Assisstant --teachin undergrad classes of 500ish, and RA's)
why does slashdot post his stuff? well you have the answer in your post. He generates discussion. true only some of his stuff may, but that is worth the post that dont. discussion is one way of looking at a topic's popularity. next is laziness of/. eds. instead of findin out the current stories, they can rely on the rolands of the web to do it for them. when u ask what service roland provides, this would be the most valuable thing he does. the cut an paste, could be done by a well trained chimp. but roland, depending on his research skills and the availability of the data he comes up with, may actually spend a lot of time looking for and sorting out stuff for his posts.
the only benefit he can be to web writers is to give them exposure too. for a writer, the only worse thing than being talked about, is not being talked about. in fact, you talking about this raymoond character let me know he exists. dont worry, though, i will soon forget he exists.
however, if he steals the work of others, esp for profit, cannot be excused. here is whhere you can make a difference. if you feel strongly enough about him, then you should contact the author of each article he uses. you could say 1 ronald is using your article did you know? did he ask permission (not requierd for academia, but is known as a courtesy in learned circles). 2 we think he is an asshole because he a) steals others work b) derives an income from it. c) we recommend you a) ask not to be associated with him b) demand to see how mcuh he made from your article, and seek renumeration c) file the appropriate copyrigt / dcma &c notices
writing such a letter can be easy (you can draft the main body of each and paste it into emails (riddick is not the only one who can cut and paste). more than anything this will help speed up the process of him gettin busted if he is stealing work. you might also want to send a copy of his doings to his revenue provider, blogads, and his advertisers. hope this helps, and good luck on shutting him down, if he is indeed a plagiarist.
tech goodies in japan are lightyears ahead of the us and canada. im not gonna bother pointing out examples as anyone can come up with incidental data. the short of it is japanese manufacturers have to give the public better gadgets, or be unemployed. the japs really vote with their wallets.
in america everyone is patiently waiting for intel to raise their proc's by 0.01 g hz or some hokey threading tech or other marketing scam (these are not innovations, but fixed bugs and bottlenecks that intel touts as breakthroughs). there is not enough competition here so tech companies take their sweet time releasing products. just loot at how slowly pda ram is goin up. instead they pack em w crap like bluetooth/wifi. by now pdas should be full on video mp3 devices. and if you think pda's dont need memory, fine, look at how shitty AND expensive graphic cards are these days. before a 30 $ card was top of the line and could play any game. now that there are only 2 major card makers, each with products priced pennies apart, price fixing seems like the only option.
so the only things you should really buy thats canadian or american are socks and underwear.
long time ago i heard a rumor that aids/hiv was introduced into human beings (circa 1950's) by someone who was into bestiality, specifically apes.
chimeras always remind me of d 'n' d. a high level monster with many attacks. so when journalese uses this term, it make sme laugh.
seriously, this technology is no more dangerous than fire. we've had fire for quite some time, and still more people die every year from it than chimeras.
in the 80's there was a little girl who had a baboon heart transplant. it was the first of its kind. many thought that this was immoral. but it prolonged her life by a few weeks, and more importntly provided valuable research into what could be very useful organ replacement methods. put simple, u can harvest animals for whatever you need (pigs for insulin , etc...) but you cant really harvest humans, and maintain the spirit of medicine.
Proper lab technique, and quarantine methods easily solve the chimera of any possible risk in these types of experiments.
the chances of some badass virus compiling from one of these is about equal to veloci-raptors taking over an isolated island after they have been cloned back to life.
Slashdot Mirror
not always true...
chinese population has been expanding until recently. therefore the "pool" you talk about should also grow.
the other caveat is, especially in a student body as driven as chinaa, korea, that the quality of the faculty is not as important as the work ethic of the students. these people are self starters, and many of them would be able to manage their own education with just a written syllabus.
another point is school selection should not focus on performance; it creates a culture of irrelevancy in education, with the importance being pushed closer to jumping thuough the hoops just to get that piece of paper. but this is an old sophist complaint...you can teach rich offspring how to avoid paying debts, but not how to think. this holds true today across cultures, with true problem solving being a very rare ability in any field.
so the short answer is yes, create more universities, even with lower "pool" / calibre faculty. while you don't need to accomodate all of the 9.5 million from tfa, a significant portion above the 2.6 million spaces should be able to earn their keep/ be worth investing with a university education.
at that point you just let the market separate the wheat from the chaff, newer schools will have poorer faculty in the beginning, and poorer students, as the top will choose their schools. however it is the same as in med school, it does not matter who is at the top or bottom of the class, once they graduate, they are all doctors, and they will be evaluated on real life performance.
lastly, in an undergraduate setting, the argument of low calibre professors barely applies, as the "professor" will most often give a one hour lecture to a hall of 500 or so students. that is the only contact these students have with the professor, except that some of them do show up for exams. the course may be designed by the professor, but it is most often taught by several TA's (read MA student/slave earning sub welfare wages and studying at the same time). even the papers and exams are marked by hired temps.
sure this may be a north american outlook on university, but cutting edge faculty only really makes a difference in doctoral, or research settings, since the level of knowledge required to be at the top of the field is much too high for all but the most gifted of undergrads. students with such gifts blow by undergrad so quickly and easily that shitty faculty is only as important as the janitor who mops the floor at night.
boohoohoo boohoohoo
not paying for shitty, artificailly inflated ipo shares that went down as soon as the underwriter pulled the rug from below is not taking a risk. it is taking an educated chance to prevent getting ripped off. pursuing payment is truly a chance for vonage, as they risk potential prison for allegations that will probably surface in numerous countersuits if they try and "persue payment". who does this pr shill think she is scaring/kidding?
these things are incredibly cheap to make, and are not sold at a loss. what perpetuates this myth is the fact that inkjet cartiges are sold at gouge level prices. A few major injet makers have lost in court over dmca issues when they encoded their printers to only use their brnd replacements. when there is a flourishing 3 party injet cartridge aftermarket that typically sells replacements for 10-25% of the original manufacturers price you know a scam is goin on. people like to think they got a deal on the printer. they didnt, just because the company is fucking you in the ass now, does not mean they did not fuck you in the ass before.
as far as things like stock buyback reserve, the cash to buy this back will have been long there from a huge tax free ipo. most companies underwrite their ipo, then pull the plug an let the stock crash. do a search on ipo and 1 and 2 year post ipo stock prices if you dont belive me. typically less than 5% of the cash raked in from ipo is needed for buyback.
all the stuff you mention exists as losses that are only found on the tax return, or annual reports when a company is fixing to buyback its own shares. why do you think insider trading is illegal? its not to protect the average investor from the ceo, it is to protect the real owners of a company from the ceo taking over stock. ok it might also be there to create the appearance of an honest system. however when you commonly have companies file two different financial statements in one year, one to the tax man, and one to the shareholders you know that there is a lot of room for interpretation.
you can bet you bottom dollar that M$, inkjet makers, etc are selling their wares at a loss out of the kindness of their heart, and they have the lawyers to beat down anyone that would say otherwise. this is why tax offices dont regualry fight big companies, but audit individuals/small business far more often. any large company knows that if the tax office gets out of line, sic your lawyers one em and teach em a lesson never to fuck with you again.
but in reality no such loss exists. M$, inkjet makers are getting richer than ever, literally printing money. one more thing that would perpetuate the rumor of M$ being willing to lose money is their unprecedented cash reserve of over 50 billion. many economists believe it is unhealthy for a company to have such a huge cash position. they are idiots. M$ also, i'm sure, does not find it to hard to have 50 bln USD lying around. but anyone who thinks that they are going to spend one red cent of that subsidizing gamers is in a fantasy world. M$ did not get where they are by giving anything away to anyone, ever.
stinkfist...
this is how really rich business works....
attack what threatens you. may or may not succeed
study what threatens you. steal. steal. innovate...
chumbawumba will have little bearing in most legal decisions. RIAA doesnt need p2p to see whats popular. they can look at album sales. the bottom line here is controll. monopolist control over music. what most people dont undeartand is the members of the riaa are also a monopsony. this allows them total controll of music to push. to be able to realease your own record for a total cost of under 1000 bucks (pc bandwidth, studio etc) and release this to hundreds of millions of people scares the chit out of them. they do no give a fuck about the deadbeat that pirates cd's. he will never pay anyway, even in court, as no court can order a broke ass basement dweller to pay when he has nothing.
but if a massive internet (non Riaa, so they could not say anything about it) hit was ever to happen, or a site that was famous delivering such hits it would be a cartel breaker.
some food for thought
1 it is legal to copy up to 10% of any printed material for educational purposes--or at least was when i was in school.
2 you can sort of copy much more; the limit does not really apply for the purposes of satire. lampoon, mockery.
3 crummy, cheap, professors (the kind that have leather elbow patches on wool blazers) write up what can be described as a "course kit" 3 bucks at kinkos, includin binding, sold to students for 30 an up. I have seen em for over 100 bucks. and you cant resell em, they are garbage when you are done. I have heard professors say that anyone in university should be smart enough to know that if they dont buy the kit they will get a nice bell curve. not to mention that exam material will be more likely to come from the kit. god help the student who tries to pirate one of these pieces of crap that could only be sold by a rapacious prof to a captive audience.
4 students in bookstores taking pictures of books? possibly, but most students are too busy gettin drunk and laid to care. those that arent are easily foiled by a simple thing called shrink wrap
5 what if you have a photographic memory? you dont need to buy any books, depending on how good your detail is. is that an infringement? if so how do you enforce it? if not, how can this be fair to those who do not have that type of brain? ok im done my drunken rant now...
i think you have the best outlook on statistics here. one thing the researchers failed to mention was that in the past immigrants often scored in the retarded range due to language barriers. This was largely hushed up in North America, because such a concept would severely undermine the credibility of IQ tests.
on a side note i'll counter your broad statistical comment with a single case. There was a television program about a man with the highest IQ in north america. This show aired a couple of years ago. The man had an IQ of over 200, with no post secondary education. He did not continue education because he missed the application deadline, and did not feel he had to conform to such things because they are assinine.
Whats more this person lived in a trailer on an annual income of 6 or 8 thousand (US) dollars per year. His occupation? He was a part time bouncer at a local bar. He kind of looks and behaves like Julian on the tv show Trailer Park Boys. Seriously im not makin this up. Google it if u need to, the show aired on the learning channel if that helps.
This begs the question, what does IQ really measure? Will this bouncer become some epoch defining genius? Conversely either Watson or Crick (you know the inventors of dna) had an IQ of only 115. Then you have people like Sylvester Stallone (inventor of Rocky, and the movie sequel) and Sharon Stone (inventor of Beaver) who reportedly have an IQ in the 160 range. Do they look, sound, or act like brainiacs?
When you think about it putting a complex faculty like intelligence, or even problem solving ability into a number, or even percentile seems to be dumbing down the very concept of intelligence to begin with (a simple example would be correlating the performace of a stereo system based on a Watt rating). The argument that there is no better way of measuing it is not justification for a faulty way of measurement.
As far as generalization being infalmmatory and serving no purpose, the purpose is to be infalmmatory, as for some researchers the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. But at what cost? These bozos lost their credibility as objective scientists, and can forget about ever being laid.
school is FREE babysitting. lets face it you could teach everything from grade 1 to end of highschool in a year or two. that would be some significant savings right there, but what would you do with the kids in the mean time? so you want to use a computer to teach kids at home. well that is easy too. you could get some cheap content filmed in one classroom, by one teacher, and give a free pc to every child that is born. sure pc's arent cheap, but this way you eliminate thousands of useless teacher salaries, pay no maintenance for school buildings, no bus fleets to keep up either. But whats this i hear? children need human interaction to learn? not true, feral children learn soley from dogs. children need teachers to make them do boring shit that looks like a good cirriculum and keeps them employed, which in turn allows their 2 parents to work and be taxed. the real question should be how can we educate children better, not cheaper. one on one tutoring has always achieved the best result, and historically a person with such an education was fluent in several languages by the time they became an adult. you can not say this about any public school in north america. even the performance in the bilingual sectors is dismal, with the indigenous people never learning english very well, and the english students while perhaps getting good grades in french or spanish, never being able to speak well without much additional study.
maybe it was the first flash player, but they are crap anyway. the first mp3 player witha harddrive was the pjb 100 from hango. it started in compaq labs, didnt get made for fear of being sued, was licensed to hango a pacific rim manufacturer that couldnt give a hoot about lawsuits or the riaa.
it retailed for 3 grand at first, but was loaded with features. it cam out 2 or 3 years before the first ipod, had a 20 gig hard drive, 12 hour baterlife, usb (there was no firewire or usb 2 back then) and NO copyprotection of any kind.
it came with a case and free lifetime koss headphones.
this was the first truly good mp3 player. and there should be no patents on it. what would the patent say? a box that plays mp3's? uses a hard disk? these are hardly inventions. I cant imagine what patents rio might have, since the box was invented long ago. good riddance to those bozos, one day you think you are hot shit in a tech company, the next you are just some shmuck working in a box factory.
And yes the ipod owned them, and just about every other protable mp3 player by re-inventing (and patenting) the wheel. like it or not, welcome to america.
aye top of the line hd looks really sweet. saw a 45k ($) plasma a couple of years ago, an it was sportin a footbal game. you could see every blade of grass. the only problem was the satellite feed didnt have enough bandwidth, and every time the camera panned the frames started to slow down. 45 grand to see choppy frames, that gave me a big warning about the early adopters gettin burned worse than ever before. got a cheapo lcd projector at home, an had a boxin match come in hd, that was really nice too, even with native svga resolution.
Watchin burned out actors can be pretty depressing, and doesnt justify any extra outlay. the real cool things are going to be in animation and special effects. as far as paying for sunsets. the studio would love to find a way to charge anything, even the air we breathe. but a sunset will always be free.
Why are they making a hardware gap so that you will need the newest extra special display to veiw content? My gues is the fact that even the most decrepit crt can do xga resolution. Hd tv is a little higher in its top spec, but a 1600x1200 21 inch monitor would give a really nice picture, even if its only 21".--if hd tv could plug into pc monitors they wouldnt sell many tv's neh?
dvd's are crap now. if you look at all the old dvd ports from video tape, the are 2,3 maybe 4 gigs ona dvd. since dvd burners became popular, almost everything clocks in at over 4.35 gigs, even if the original signal was nowhere near that. they just stuff it with crap.
This is a very old, disturbing trend in how media is given to us. it started with floppy disks. I remember them being 720k per disk. but the manufacturers were too cheap to have 2 assembly lines for 720k and 1.44m disk. the 1.44 were quite a bit more than the 720k disks, way more than double, kinda like the dual layer dvd price point now. but the real spooky thing was you just had to punch a hole in the floppy on the other sire of the write protect button, and presto you doubled the capacity for free.
this is the same with dvd,s but greedy corporate learned their lesson with floppies, and now ther is no real easy way to do this. it will be harder with gettin blu ray to be double sided. otherwise it begs the question: when making a new format why bother with the crappy half capacity cripple ware in the first palce? They arent fooling anyone by calling the regular version double.
and as far as no paragraphs...i tried but it bunched them. up. never use caps unless i have to... ahh no html format and preview...happy now?
yes, but one disc to burn them all one disc to copy them and in the darkeness pirate them besides dvd-r is the defacto leader atm. this blu ray/hddvd is gonna be a little bit more complicated. and no the pissing contest won't stop, sony will always gample with shitty proprietary formats, even if it costs them millions. to a company that sells billions the risk doesn't matter the main thing thats going to destroy these formats is the fact that players will need to phone home to work... now for a dose of reality: sony, toshiba, etc. can get as greedy as they want with all kinds of copy protection schemes, but their format will never become popular until there are readily available, cheap Blank media. just look at vhs, it didnt take off until tapes were cheap. cdrom was the same, now dvd are cheap, but almost nobody is touchin the expensive dual layer crap. in the end it's the conmsuers that can wait out a new format. they have one simple question, what's in it for me? dvd's work just fine, and hd does not justify a few grand to upgrade everything. mebbe if it was a 3d holo tv people might be interested, but a few more pixels? with this attitude large companies quickly realize that they are in the money business, not the format business. they can try and add as much greed an copy protection to a new format, but the know if they arent careful, they can easily engineer themselves into the unemployment line.
while nobody can say that any background info is essential (ie once a work leaves the hands of its author it takes on a life of its own) there is relevance here. why are details like this important? because they can help understand trends in research. Instead of reading that a mysterious dude may have solved an even more mysterious problem, but whether he solved it or not is still even a mystery is not very informative. back ground information like this helps the reader indentify which instituions, nations are at the cutting edge of a given field. if enough reports are mentioning a specific country or institution of major breakthoughs, then that entity will(deservedly) gain a good reputation for solid work and advances. sometimes the who did what, and how can be more important than the what was done and why. Mebbe you should google the princes of serendip for some interesting background. HTH.
when you live in a glass (or silicone) house don't throw bricks. is this news? it doesn't take much intelligence to see that hardware manufacturers really, really, drag their feet when it comes to r n d. in tfa it's mentioned that clock and bus speeds are slower than single chips. this is an example of how the industry rips people off. you can bet that in a few months the chipsets will come through with a "miraculous" new design that is really a fix to shitty engineering in the first place. there is so much spin on hardware it's unbelievable, and also hard to see. don't believe me? go pick up a pc mag from 1990, and look at "90 MHZ BREAKTHROUGH!" in bold letters and then try and read the tech drivel without laughing. this has been going on for ages. Of course it's a really big scam, and never buy the latest thing out etc. etc. i don't think theinquirer.net and Charlie are fooling anyone with their 64 bit sponsored rant.
1 Buy crap at best buy 2 Mail in Rebate 3 Get $$$$ 4 Return crap 5 Profit! wonder if there are any people doing this on a large scale? or if the real reason is that legislation would eventually come out banning it anyway?
sing it on brutha! i', sure this nasty idea will be hacked on principle alone. no personal data? but it tracks ip's? I call BOOOOO SHIT! seems like evvery day there is another pair of eyes on what you are doing.
a device like this could eliminate the "his word against hers" scenario and easily prove who is telling the truth. the liar could then be prosecuted accordingly, without expensive, and uncleaar proceedings. With positive proof the state could confidently impose harsher sentences for false allegations, or violations of such orders. this has already been done in Canada, with a court order requiring a felon to wear an ankle gps device or goto prison. this is definately a good idea to help control potentially dangerous felons. It can also be argued that a FPS (felon positioning system) could act as a significant deterrant to crime as the chance of success is dramatically lowered. This is the PRIMARY focus of the criminal justice system; the prevention of crime to protect the general public.
you got some points to you article, but you leave out a few things. i'm not sticking up for roland, dont know him, or give a shit about him. it may very well be true that he does steal other's work. if so it will catch up with him. im replyin to your post for your benifit... you have some good arguments, and im gonna play a little devil's advocate. if you look at things a in a slightly different light, roland is what one would call a low level research assistant. the fact that you say he makes 600 some odd dollars a month would be a typical stipend for an RA of the post graduate level. While that may seem like a large amount of money, i hope he has a day job (welfare has for a long time been more profitable that being a (Teachers Assisstant --teachin undergrad classes of 500ish, and RA's) why does slashdot post his stuff? well you have the answer in your post. He generates discussion. true only some of his stuff may, but that is worth the post that dont. discussion is one way of looking at a topic's popularity. next is laziness of /. eds. instead of findin out the current stories, they can rely on the rolands of the web to do it for them. when u ask what service roland provides, this would be the most valuable thing he does. the cut an paste, could be done by a well trained chimp. but roland, depending on his research skills and the availability of the data he comes up with, may actually spend a lot of time looking for and sorting out stuff for his posts.
the only benefit he can be to web writers is to give them exposure too. for a writer, the only worse thing than being talked about, is not being talked about. in fact, you talking about this raymoond character let me know he exists. dont worry, though, i will soon forget he exists.
however, if he steals the work of others, esp for profit, cannot be excused. here is whhere you can make a difference. if you feel strongly enough about him, then you should contact the author of each article he uses. you could say 1 ronald is using your article did you know? did he ask permission (not requierd for academia, but is known as a courtesy in learned circles). 2 we think he is an asshole because he a) steals others work b) derives an income from it. c) we recommend you a) ask not to be associated with him b) demand to see how mcuh he made from your article, and seek renumeration c) file the appropriate copyrigt / dcma &c notices
writing such a letter can be easy (you can draft the main body of each and paste it into emails (riddick is not the only one who can cut and paste). more than anything this will help speed up the process of him gettin busted if he is stealing work. you might also want to send a copy of his doings to his revenue provider, blogads, and his advertisers. hope this helps, and good luck on shutting him down, if he is indeed a plagiarist.
tech goodies in japan are lightyears ahead of the us and canada. im not gonna bother pointing out examples as anyone can come up with incidental data. the short of it is japanese manufacturers have to give the public better gadgets, or be unemployed. the japs really vote with their wallets. in america everyone is patiently waiting for intel to raise their proc's by 0.01 g hz or some hokey threading tech or other marketing scam (these are not innovations, but fixed bugs and bottlenecks that intel touts as breakthroughs). there is not enough competition here so tech companies take their sweet time releasing products. just loot at how slowly pda ram is goin up. instead they pack em w crap like bluetooth/wifi. by now pdas should be full on video mp3 devices. and if you think pda's dont need memory, fine, look at how shitty AND expensive graphic cards are these days. before a 30 $ card was top of the line and could play any game. now that there are only 2 major card makers, each with products priced pennies apart, price fixing seems like the only option. so the only things you should really buy thats canadian or american are socks and underwear.
long time ago i heard a rumor that aids/hiv was introduced into human beings (circa 1950's) by someone who was into bestiality, specifically apes. chimeras always remind me of d 'n' d. a high level monster with many attacks. so when journalese uses this term, it make sme laugh. seriously, this technology is no more dangerous than fire. we've had fire for quite some time, and still more people die every year from it than chimeras. in the 80's there was a little girl who had a baboon heart transplant. it was the first of its kind. many thought that this was immoral. but it prolonged her life by a few weeks, and more importntly provided valuable research into what could be very useful organ replacement methods. put simple, u can harvest animals for whatever you need (pigs for insulin , etc...) but you cant really harvest humans, and maintain the spirit of medicine. Proper lab technique, and quarantine methods easily solve the chimera of any possible risk in these types of experiments. the chances of some badass virus compiling from one of these is about equal to veloci-raptors taking over an isolated island after they have been cloned back to life.
Does a lawsuit count as an "established business relationship" ?