but i'm glad to see AMD dominating the top 10 spots. i've always had a, perhaps irrational, affinity for AMD as the consummate underdog. plus, they always seemed to have a lower cost-to-performance ratio than Intel chips.
that's an interesting question. since most modern supercomputers are just extremely larger clusters with very high I/O bandwidths running on a high-speed network. such systems allow for optimal large-scale parallel processing, which is a defining characteristic of supercomputers.
supercomputing clusters are still running separate instances of the OS on each node in the cluster. so aside from the geographic proximity of the cluster nodes and each node dedicating all of its processing power to the cluster, there's really not much of a difference between the BOINC platform and a "true" supercomputer.
i think once e-readers catch on (become cheaper, more widely used, etc.) we'll start seeing all-electronic book publishers. they would save cost by completely eliminating their manufacturing/printing infrastructure, as well as warehousing, shipping, etc. all an electronic publisher needs is to put their books on Amazon and perhaps their own website, and they're good to go. i imagine that would save them a ton of money in operational costs. there's no reason for them to publish fewer books just because they make less on each unit. as long as you're still making money on each book published, there is a financial incentive to publish new books.
the only thing that will change is that most publishers might no longer release new editions every single year, which isn't really a big loss for most fields. for fast-moving fields like certain programming/software references, there will still be an incentive for publishers to keep their titles up to date if they want schools to subscribe to their textbooks instead of their competitor's.
there's also no reason for the University to drop anything worthwhile just because they're brokering book purchases for students. tuition might go up a little, but it would still save students money. ordinarily, when a student goes to purchase a book, he does so by himself and has no leverage to bargain for a better deal, thus he has to pay the list price. however, if the school is purchasing the books for tens of thousands of students and staff all at the same time, they have much more leverage to negotiate with the publisher (in addition to cutting out the middleman). the students are still paying for their own books, but they're doing so collectively and are getting a better deal as a result.
this kind of collective bargaining is used in a lot of places by consumers to get a better deal from businesses. usually it's a win-win situation because the consumers get to buy at lower prices, and the business owner gets increased sales volume. likewise, if more people can afford to go to college, then the textbook publishing industry sells more books. not only that, they can sell tens or hundreds of thousands of e-books in a single deal rather than having to deal with hundreds of retailers.
i completely agree. however, i think there are several things that need to happen before we can take full advantage of electronic textbooks in colleges and perhaps even high schools. first off, like you and the GP have already mentioned, e-book readers need drop in price and employ higher resolution color displays (either e-ink or low power OLEDs), and WiFi capabilities should also come standard. secondly, there needs to be drastic reforms in the publishing industry, or at least in regards to attitudes towards IP enforcement and DRM. lastly, the business model currently employed by textbook publishers of forcing schools and students to buy new editions of books every other year needs to be dropped.
once these changes have occurred, Universities could simply purchase electronic subscriptions to certain texts, which would allow them to check these subscriptions out to students who need them for classes they're enrolled in. all a student would have to do is connect their e-reader to the school's WiFi network and they can check out the textbooks they need. the subscription would give the school permission to distribute "loaned" copies of the electronic textbooks to as many students as needed (rather than enforcing physical limitations on a virtual commodity) and also allow the school to receive updates from the publisher to keep their digital textbooks up to date. if a student finds a textbook particularly helpful they can pay the publisher for a modestly priced static copy, or they can purchase a single-user subscription that will receive automatic updates.
this model would save students a ton of money, and greatly lower the financial barrier to higher education. however, i imagine the textbook publishing industry would be strongly opposed to the necessary changes as it undermines their strategy of planned obsolescence, which is the basis of their current business model. and the true financial/economic advantages of using paperless textbooks won't be realized (at least not by anyone except for the publishers) until e-book publishers stop charging print prices for non-printed materials.
i don't really have that big of a problem with the outcome of this case. though i do think the fine is a little excessive, likewise with not being able to have video recording equipment outside of the home. but otherwise it's not really all that unreasonable compared to what Americans get fined for file sharing convictions.
my post was in response to the GGP's question "seriously why the fuck should a person get prison for something like that?" which i assume referred to this statement from the summary:
The Canadian Motion Picture Distributors Association was disappointed that jail time was not given.
i don't think any normal person would consider this man's crime worthy of incarceration. the reason why CMDPA actually thinks jail-time is called for in response to such a minor offense can be explained by the same reason the defendants in the McLibel case were ordered to pay McDonald's £60,000 in restitutions for distributing pamphlets critical of the McDonald's corporation.
hey, i didn't say it was particularly good culture. big macs, pop music, action movies, reality TV, etc. are culture too. it's not "high culture," but it's culture all the same.
just look at all the $country's Got Talent spin-offs that were launched after the success of American Idol. hip-hop culture also originated in the U.S. and then gradually spread to other countries, as did fast food and coronary heart disease.
naturally, we needed to create new IP laws to protect these valuable cultural exports. and these IP laws were similarly disseminated and foisted onto other nations through our global influence via international treaties and U.S.-dominated international organizations like the WTO.
wow, i think this is the first time i've watched an internet video stream where the sponsor ad was placed after the featured content.
it's kinda nice being given a choice rather than simply being forced to sit through an advertisement (or several) before being shown the featured content. this way you don't waste your time sitting through 5 minutes of commercials just to find out that the featured stream is something retarded.
hopefully, this kind of ad placement catches on. and i actually wouldn't mind if Google decides to insert ads after YouTube videos. after all, the more annoying an advertisement is, the more people will tune them out and despise the company/product it's for.
grades/report cards ought to be an indicator of general academic aptitude as well as specific aptitude in each of the various subjects, but because it's not standardized across all schools they can't be used for providing quantitative comparisons between students from different schools. that's why standardized tests like the SATs and ACTs were created. but naturally these standardized tests aren't as thorough as a student's grade transcript.
that's interesting. it doesn't look like it's a found art exhibit, but more like part of an industrial design installation.
i'm curious what our copyright laws say about applied art like industrial design. any object with a functional purpose that is also decorated or has aesthetic considerations can be considered applied art. i mean, almost any manufactured object that you can purchase these days has an industrial designer behind it. but is that enough to classify all manufactured products as "art" in the terms of eligibility for copyright protection? wouldn't that prevent people from taking photographs of practically everything?
it would mean that if i wanted to take a picture of a friend we'd have to first drive up to the mountains or somewhere else without any man-made objects, and then the person being photographed would have to take off all of their clothing before i could take a photo of them without encroaching on any artistic copyrights.
is it really the design of Mazda Miata taillight that is being exhibited as art? if it's not the actual design of the taillight that is being showcased (in other words, was the original designer from Mazda listed as the artist at that exhibit) then a regular "1st-gen Miata taillight" is still not considered art.
there's a huge difference between found art/readymades and applied art or other objects with intrinsic artist value. found art can include anything, including everyday objects that weren't designed or viewed as art. that doesn't mean that everything is art, or that anything that is appropriated into a found art piece is considered art by itself. found art turns ordinary objects into art only after the artist adds his/her input.
in other words, i can incorporate a car or car part into a found object installation, but that doesn't mean all such cars or car parts are now considered art. otherwise, just by taking a photo of the Grand Canyon and putting it up in an art exhibit i could prevent other people from also photographing the Grand Canyon
look past my ignorance? well, aside from the fact that i prefer to identify and remedy my own ignorance rather than looking past it, i don't think i'm the ignorant one here.
firstly, i never claimed the DMCA came out of nothing--few laws ever are. my argument was that, culture being our primary export, the U.S. has set many of legal precedents regarding IP enforcement. in the age of globalization, no country can exist inside a vacuum. and being the dominant superpower and cultural hegemon of the modern world, our actions ripple through other nations.
secondly, considering that the two WIPO treaties passed in 1996 were written and passed by the same industry lobbyists who pushed for the DMCA here in the U.S., i think it's fair to say that our domestic industries were the ultimate impetus for those public policy changes. do you really think that other countries are more worried about maintaining an IP monopoly than U.S., home of Hollywood and a $50 billion a year music industry?
i feel similarly about my PSP. it's a great PMP and gaming console, which is a real testament to the skill & ability of Sony's engineering and product design departments, but unfortunately all of this is being undermined by Sony's utterly incompetent corporate leadership.
at least Toyota's BS doesn't affect the use of your car. the PSP on the other hand, while technically impressive in terms of hardware, has from its inception suffered from gross mismanagement and crippling software as a result thereof. not only that, but Sony continuously insults their most loyal customers with outrageous anti-consumer policies and management decisions.
that's because stupid is contagious. it's no big secret that other countries emulate the U.S. culture is our greatest export, and so what happens in the U.S. becomes a precedent for other nations. unfortunately, this also includes our political/legal culture.
the U.S. passed the DMCA in 1998, and soon other countries started getting their own DMCA-analogs. so it shouldn't be surprising the RIAA's legal shenanigans are being copied by their foreign counterparts. that's globalization for you.
that proves nothing except that the documents they've put up (which are probably made in SoftMaker) are incompatible with OO.o.
and i have tried creating similar documents (either AutoShapes, Word Art, graphs & charts, etc.) in OO.o and then opening them with Excel, or creating them in Excel and then opening them in OO.o, and they look exactly the same. there's no such discrepancy when porting documents between Excel and Calc.
so then a jaywalking ticket should come with a prison sentence because 99.9% of jaywalkers are never caught? it's not just copyright laws that have overly severe penalties, so do corporate libel convictions like the McLibel case in the UK a while back. and copyright breaches against smaller companies with less legal muscle do not come with the same disproportionate fines/restitution.
what does "elementary education" have to do with math or science degrees?
in any case, if the ACTs are anything like the SATs then they're more of an indicator of general academic aptitude (including test-taking skills) rather than a measure of math ability, writing ability, etc. that's not to say that getting a perfect SAT/ACT score isn't impressive, and there's certainly a correlation between good students and good SAT/ACT scores. but they're not an indicator of intelligence--though they might be an indicator of college-preparedness. for instance, i have several friends who scored lower than me on the SATs who i know for a fact are much smarter than i am.
also, in my experience maths and sciences don't become very challenging until you get to about college undergraduate level material. and i don't think the SATs/ACTs really test for scholastic aptitude beyond 9th or 10th grade high school course material. a better indicator of whether a student excels at math/science would be the AP exams, which do cover things like calculus and college-level physics.
it's quite easy to excel in high school algebra & geometry, but the learning curve really shoots up once you get to multi-variable calculus/linear algebra or discrete mathematics. so you really shouldn't push a student into a math/science field that they're not interested in just because they find the high school material very easy. because once you get to college level courses, it quickly becomes a completely different story. and at that point it's vital that the student be interested in what he/she is studying, otherwise they won't have the drive to push ahead and will quickly get burnt out.
that said, the reason a student might not be interest in math/science in high school could be due to their high school math & science curricula not being challenging enough to hold their interest. if she isn't in AP classes then perhaps she should try to take some math/science courses at a local community college. that will help to expose her to what college-level maths & sciences are really like, which she might find more interesting. also, i think it's a bad idea to treat college as a trade school or vocational training. students should be free to take classes that pique their interest and follow academic pursuits that they enjoy. once you've found your niche and finish college, you can then decide where best to apply your acquired skills. otherwise you might as well go to a technical school.
because corporations are the new aristocracy. in the olden days committing a crime against an aristocrat was a far worse offense than the same crime committed against a commoner. ridiculously harsh sentences were there to reinforce the difference in status. if you stole from or committed any other offense against an aristocrat/noble they could pretty much do whatever they wanted with you. that was their aristocratic privilege.
as caste systems began to fall out of favor with educated societies people began to seek a more egalitarian justice system. therefore punishments for crimes were the same regardless of the socioeconomic status of either the perpetrator or victim. but like the concept of democracy this egalitarian idealism didn't last for very long in practice. a corporate plutocracy was quickly created to replace the nobles and ruling elite of the past.
and with corporate interests dominating the government & political system in most capitalist societies, the same double standards are again resurfacing. that is why the RIAA is allowed to bully regular citizens using the threat of costly court battles to extort money from innocent individuals, and individuals convicted to pirating music are ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for "stealing" $20-30 worth of music. similarly, non-malicious hackers accused of causing financial damages to large corporations are often punished more severely than violent offenders.
also, the SoftMaker feature comparison (MS Excel 2003, PlanMaker 2008, and Calc from OO.o 2) page is rather deceptive. their screen shots seem to suggest that PlanMaker and Excel support AutoShapes whereas Calc does not, which is patently false. there are also intentionally manufactured discrepancies between the documents displayed in Calc versus those displayed in PlanMaker/Excel--such as using different gradient colors, font sizes, chart & graph styles, etc. to make Calc appear to render documents differently from PlanMaker/Excel.
i think this kind of intentionally deceptive marketing says a lot about the developers. i wouldn't be surprised if this "Peter Troi" mentioned in the Summary is an astroturfer working for SoftMaker, or that he intentionally lied about its being open source to mislead the editors and get free publicity for their proprietary office suite.
you didn't RTFA did y... oh what am i saying? of course you didn't.
the article isn't saying that success is purely arbitrary. it is arguing that what we commonly perceive as inborn talent is actually a convergence of luck, expedient circumstances, and good ol' elbow grease.
the author makes the distinction early on between traditional meritocracies like sports/IT versus the world of business/politics, which the author describes as "old-boy networks." pop music would be more akin to the world of business & politics since actual personal ability plays very little role in an industry of pretentious superficiality.
the true grit of the article really is just revisiting the nature vs. nurture debate and summarizing the recent findings of developmental psychologists and other intelligence researchers. the first educational experiment to provide strong evidence that genius could be cultivated was conducted by Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian schoolteacher and father of the world-renowned "Polgar Sisters" who are amongst the top-ranking chess players in world.
while Laszlo Polgar was an avid chess player, he never rose beyond the level of an amateur, and when he first began his experiment with his eldest daughter, Susan, female chess players were pretty much unheard of and the world of competitive chess was strictly dominated by males. but through diligent mentoring and a rigorous regimen of practice and study, Laszlo proved his theory that genius could be deliberately cultivated, shattering the precept that talent/genius were genetic or inborn traits.
the correlation between professional level athletes and birth dates was also established long ago (and was even published in a New Scientist article submitted to/., i believe). all of this helps to demonstrate that genetics are only significant to the extent that they might determine what interests & activities we are predisposed towards, which affect what skills we practice and cultivate in our childhood.
huh? who said that they were hacked, much less from the internet? they are still trying to determine where the information was leaked from, including the possibility that this was an inside job.
as i said, no one knows how the records were stolen or who was even involved. so pulling facts out of your ass without even bothering to RTFA to understand the situation is more idiotic than anything that can be pinned on Express Scripts at this point.
We're in the process of notifying our members and clients to enable them to take steps to protect themselves from possible identity theft.
We have notified the members whose information appeared in the extortion letter. We notified the FBI immediately after we received the letter and they continue to investigate. Additionally, we launched our own investigation with the assistance of outside experts in data security and computer forensics. [...] How do I know if my company received an extortion letter? We are notifying all our clients and the members whose data was listed in the extortion letters. [...] How will you notify me if you find out if my records have been accessed? Express Scripts will notify in compliance with state regulations. The best way for you to receive personal notification, if needed, is to log into our secure member website to update your email address. If you are not currently registered, please visit our member website to activate your account.
they're now part of JPMorgan Chase, so technically they're still in business, but they're under new management.
i was hoping the change in ownership would be a good thing, but so far my experience with their customer service regarding banking fraud has been rather underwhelming. there's no dedicated support line for identity-theft/banking fraud/mischarges, and it's practically impossible to get a hold of a human operator even on weekdays during their regular business hours.
i'm wondering if i should contact PayPal instead, and perhaps they would be willing to reverse the fraudulent charges.
what they should have done is kept the original specs or design goals, which really catered well to the casual computing market which most consumers fall into, but also add higher end netbooks that are purposed for specific market niches. that way you keep the baseline netbook for the average non-technical user, but also provide higher-end netbooks that aren't just low-end laptops.
for instance, a purpose-driven netbook for college students might be a netbook-based tablet for note-taking, or perhaps incorporate an e-ink display for displaying e-books. instead of having to lug around 50 lbs of books all over campus you could have all your textbooks stored on your low-power, extended battery-life netbook.
a netbook model for graphic design students/professionals might also include a tablet interface in addition to a GPU specialized for graphic design applications (higher display resolution, image transsizing, sub-pixel antialiasing, NURBS, motion blurs, etc.). the idea of a netbook for graphic designers might seem counterintuitive since most 2D graphic design applications simply rely on ever-increasing clock speeds to improve performance, but with Photoshop CS4 Adobe has begun to experiment with GPU-accelerated graphic design. since GPUs can be highly specialized for a particular application, powerful multi-core CPUs with ridiculous clock speeds are no longer a necessity.
by using specialized hardware and purpose-driven design, it should be possible to create relatively cheap & low power netbooks that provide good performance in specific applications. IMO it's better to have a specialized system that performs well in one or two applications rather than a mediocre general-purpose system.
Slashdot Mirror
more impressive, yes. more profitable? no.
but i'm glad to see AMD dominating the top 10 spots. i've always had a, perhaps irrational, affinity for AMD as the consummate underdog. plus, they always seemed to have a lower cost-to-performance ratio than Intel chips.
that's an interesting question. since most modern supercomputers are just extremely larger clusters with very high I/O bandwidths running on a high-speed network. such systems allow for optimal large-scale parallel processing, which is a defining characteristic of supercomputers.
supercomputing clusters are still running separate instances of the OS on each node in the cluster. so aside from the geographic proximity of the cluster nodes and each node dedicating all of its processing power to the cluster, there's really not much of a difference between the BOINC platform and a "true" supercomputer.
has the Top 500 Supercomputer List been slashdotted already?
i think once e-readers catch on (become cheaper, more widely used, etc.) we'll start seeing all-electronic book publishers. they would save cost by completely eliminating their manufacturing/printing infrastructure, as well as warehousing, shipping, etc. all an electronic publisher needs is to put their books on Amazon and perhaps their own website, and they're good to go. i imagine that would save them a ton of money in operational costs. there's no reason for them to publish fewer books just because they make less on each unit. as long as you're still making money on each book published, there is a financial incentive to publish new books.
the only thing that will change is that most publishers might no longer release new editions every single year, which isn't really a big loss for most fields. for fast-moving fields like certain programming/software references, there will still be an incentive for publishers to keep their titles up to date if they want schools to subscribe to their textbooks instead of their competitor's.
there's also no reason for the University to drop anything worthwhile just because they're brokering book purchases for students. tuition might go up a little, but it would still save students money. ordinarily, when a student goes to purchase a book, he does so by himself and has no leverage to bargain for a better deal, thus he has to pay the list price. however, if the school is purchasing the books for tens of thousands of students and staff all at the same time, they have much more leverage to negotiate with the publisher (in addition to cutting out the middleman). the students are still paying for their own books, but they're doing so collectively and are getting a better deal as a result.
this kind of collective bargaining is used in a lot of places by consumers to get a better deal from businesses. usually it's a win-win situation because the consumers get to buy at lower prices, and the business owner gets increased sales volume. likewise, if more people can afford to go to college, then the textbook publishing industry sells more books. not only that, they can sell tens or hundreds of thousands of e-books in a single deal rather than having to deal with hundreds of retailers.
i completely agree. however, i think there are several things that need to happen before we can take full advantage of electronic textbooks in colleges and perhaps even high schools. first off, like you and the GP have already mentioned, e-book readers need drop in price and employ higher resolution color displays (either e-ink or low power OLEDs), and WiFi capabilities should also come standard. secondly, there needs to be drastic reforms in the publishing industry, or at least in regards to attitudes towards IP enforcement and DRM. lastly, the business model currently employed by textbook publishers of forcing schools and students to buy new editions of books every other year needs to be dropped.
once these changes have occurred, Universities could simply purchase electronic subscriptions to certain texts, which would allow them to check these subscriptions out to students who need them for classes they're enrolled in. all a student would have to do is connect their e-reader to the school's WiFi network and they can check out the textbooks they need. the subscription would give the school permission to distribute "loaned" copies of the electronic textbooks to as many students as needed (rather than enforcing physical limitations on a virtual commodity) and also allow the school to receive updates from the publisher to keep their digital textbooks up to date. if a student finds a textbook particularly helpful they can pay the publisher for a modestly priced static copy, or they can purchase a single-user subscription that will receive automatic updates.
this model would save students a ton of money, and greatly lower the financial barrier to higher education. however, i imagine the textbook publishing industry would be strongly opposed to the necessary changes as it undermines their strategy of planned obsolescence, which is the basis of their current business model. and the true financial/economic advantages of using paperless textbooks won't be realized (at least not by anyone except for the publishers) until e-book publishers stop charging print prices for non-printed materials.
i don't really have that big of a problem with the outcome of this case. though i do think the fine is a little excessive, likewise with not being able to have video recording equipment outside of the home. but otherwise it's not really all that unreasonable compared to what Americans get fined for file sharing convictions.
my post was in response to the GGP's question "seriously why the fuck should a person get prison for something like that?" which i assume referred to this statement from the summary:
i don't think any normal person would consider this man's crime worthy of incarceration. the reason why CMDPA actually thinks jail-time is called for in response to such a minor offense can be explained by the same reason the defendants in the McLibel case were ordered to pay McDonald's £60,000 in restitutions for distributing pamphlets critical of the McDonald's corporation.
hey, i didn't say it was particularly good culture. big macs, pop music, action movies, reality TV, etc. are culture too. it's not "high culture," but it's culture all the same.
just look at all the $country's Got Talent spin-offs that were launched after the success of American Idol. hip-hop culture also originated in the U.S. and then gradually spread to other countries, as did fast food and coronary heart disease.
naturally, we needed to create new IP laws to protect these valuable cultural exports. and these IP laws were similarly disseminated and foisted onto other nations through our global influence via international treaties and U.S.-dominated international organizations like the WTO.
wow, i think this is the first time i've watched an internet video stream where the sponsor ad was placed after the featured content.
it's kinda nice being given a choice rather than simply being forced to sit through an advertisement (or several) before being shown the featured content. this way you don't waste your time sitting through 5 minutes of commercials just to find out that the featured stream is something retarded.
hopefully, this kind of ad placement catches on. and i actually wouldn't mind if Google decides to insert ads after YouTube videos. after all, the more annoying an advertisement is, the more people will tune them out and despise the company/product it's for.
grades/report cards ought to be an indicator of general academic aptitude as well as specific aptitude in each of the various subjects, but because it's not standardized across all schools they can't be used for providing quantitative comparisons between students from different schools. that's why standardized tests like the SATs and ACTs were created. but naturally these standardized tests aren't as thorough as a student's grade transcript.
that's interesting. it doesn't look like it's a found art exhibit, but more like part of an industrial design installation.
i'm curious what our copyright laws say about applied art like industrial design. any object with a functional purpose that is also decorated or has aesthetic considerations can be considered applied art. i mean, almost any manufactured object that you can purchase these days has an industrial designer behind it. but is that enough to classify all manufactured products as "art" in the terms of eligibility for copyright protection? wouldn't that prevent people from taking photographs of practically everything?
it would mean that if i wanted to take a picture of a friend we'd have to first drive up to the mountains or somewhere else without any man-made objects, and then the person being photographed would have to take off all of their clothing before i could take a photo of them without encroaching on any artistic copyrights.
is it really the design of Mazda Miata taillight that is being exhibited as art? if it's not the actual design of the taillight that is being showcased (in other words, was the original designer from Mazda listed as the artist at that exhibit) then a regular "1st-gen Miata taillight" is still not considered art.
there's a huge difference between found art/readymades and applied art or other objects with intrinsic artist value. found art can include anything, including everyday objects that weren't designed or viewed as art. that doesn't mean that everything is art, or that anything that is appropriated into a found art piece is considered art by itself. found art turns ordinary objects into art only after the artist adds his/her input.
in other words, i can incorporate a car or car part into a found object installation, but that doesn't mean all such cars or car parts are now considered art. otherwise, just by taking a photo of the Grand Canyon and putting it up in an art exhibit i could prevent other people from also photographing the Grand Canyon
look past my ignorance? well, aside from the fact that i prefer to identify and remedy my own ignorance rather than looking past it, i don't think i'm the ignorant one here.
firstly, i never claimed the DMCA came out of nothing--few laws ever are. my argument was that, culture being our primary export, the U.S. has set many of legal precedents regarding IP enforcement. in the age of globalization, no country can exist inside a vacuum. and being the dominant superpower and cultural hegemon of the modern world, our actions ripple through other nations.
secondly, considering that the two WIPO treaties passed in 1996 were written and passed by the same industry lobbyists who pushed for the DMCA here in the U.S., i think it's fair to say that our domestic industries were the ultimate impetus for those public policy changes. do you really think that other countries are more worried about maintaining an IP monopoly than U.S., home of Hollywood and a $50 billion a year music industry?
i feel similarly about my PSP. it's a great PMP and gaming console, which is a real testament to the skill & ability of Sony's engineering and product design departments, but unfortunately all of this is being undermined by Sony's utterly incompetent corporate leadership.
at least Toyota's BS doesn't affect the use of your car. the PSP on the other hand, while technically impressive in terms of hardware, has from its inception suffered from gross mismanagement and crippling software as a result thereof. not only that, but Sony continuously insults their most loyal customers with outrageous anti-consumer policies and management decisions.
that's because stupid is contagious. it's no big secret that other countries emulate the U.S. culture is our greatest export, and so what happens in the U.S. becomes a precedent for other nations. unfortunately, this also includes our political/legal culture.
the U.S. passed the DMCA in 1998, and soon other countries started getting their own DMCA-analogs. so it shouldn't be surprising the RIAA's legal shenanigans are being copied by their foreign counterparts. that's globalization for you.
that proves nothing except that the documents they've put up (which are probably made in SoftMaker) are incompatible with OO.o.
and i have tried creating similar documents (either AutoShapes, Word Art, graphs & charts, etc.) in OO.o and then opening them with Excel, or creating them in Excel and then opening them in OO.o, and they look exactly the same. there's no such discrepancy when porting documents between Excel and Calc.
so then a jaywalking ticket should come with a prison sentence because 99.9% of jaywalkers are never caught? it's not just copyright laws that have overly severe penalties, so do corporate libel convictions like the McLibel case in the UK a while back. and copyright breaches against smaller companies with less legal muscle do not come with the same disproportionate fines/restitution.
what does "elementary education" have to do with math or science degrees?
in any case, if the ACTs are anything like the SATs then they're more of an indicator of general academic aptitude (including test-taking skills) rather than a measure of math ability, writing ability, etc. that's not to say that getting a perfect SAT/ACT score isn't impressive, and there's certainly a correlation between good students and good SAT/ACT scores. but they're not an indicator of intelligence--though they might be an indicator of college-preparedness. for instance, i have several friends who scored lower than me on the SATs who i know for a fact are much smarter than i am.
also, in my experience maths and sciences don't become very challenging until you get to about college undergraduate level material. and i don't think the SATs/ACTs really test for scholastic aptitude beyond 9th or 10th grade high school course material. a better indicator of whether a student excels at math/science would be the AP exams, which do cover things like calculus and college-level physics.
it's quite easy to excel in high school algebra & geometry, but the learning curve really shoots up once you get to multi-variable calculus/linear algebra or discrete mathematics. so you really shouldn't push a student into a math/science field that they're not interested in just because they find the high school material very easy. because once you get to college level courses, it quickly becomes a completely different story. and at that point it's vital that the student be interested in what he/she is studying, otherwise they won't have the drive to push ahead and will quickly get burnt out.
that said, the reason a student might not be interest in math/science in high school could be due to their high school math & science curricula not being challenging enough to hold their interest. if she isn't in AP classes then perhaps she should try to take some math/science courses at a local community college. that will help to expose her to what college-level maths & sciences are really like, which she might find more interesting. also, i think it's a bad idea to treat college as a trade school or vocational training. students should be free to take classes that pique their interest and follow academic pursuits that they enjoy. once you've found your niche and finish college, you can then decide where best to apply your acquired skills. otherwise you might as well go to a technical school.
because corporations are the new aristocracy. in the olden days committing a crime against an aristocrat was a far worse offense than the same crime committed against a commoner. ridiculously harsh sentences were there to reinforce the difference in status. if you stole from or committed any other offense against an aristocrat/noble they could pretty much do whatever they wanted with you. that was their aristocratic privilege.
as caste systems began to fall out of favor with educated societies people began to seek a more egalitarian justice system. therefore punishments for crimes were the same regardless of the socioeconomic status of either the perpetrator or victim. but like the concept of democracy this egalitarian idealism didn't last for very long in practice. a corporate plutocracy was quickly created to replace the nobles and ruling elite of the past.
and with corporate interests dominating the government & political system in most capitalist societies, the same double standards are again resurfacing. that is why the RIAA is allowed to bully regular citizens using the threat of costly court battles to extort money from innocent individuals, and individuals convicted to pirating music are ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for "stealing" $20-30 worth of music. similarly, non-malicious hackers accused of causing financial damages to large corporations are often punished more severely than violent offenders.
also, the SoftMaker feature comparison (MS Excel 2003, PlanMaker 2008, and Calc from OO.o 2) page is rather deceptive. their screen shots seem to suggest that PlanMaker and Excel support AutoShapes whereas Calc does not, which is patently false. there are also intentionally manufactured discrepancies between the documents displayed in Calc versus those displayed in PlanMaker/Excel--such as using different gradient colors, font sizes, chart & graph styles, etc. to make Calc appear to render documents differently from PlanMaker/Excel.
i think this kind of intentionally deceptive marketing says a lot about the developers. i wouldn't be surprised if this "Peter Troi" mentioned in the Summary is an astroturfer working for SoftMaker, or that he intentionally lied about its being open source to mislead the editors and get free publicity for their proprietary office suite.
you didn't RTFA did y... oh what am i saying? of course you didn't.
the article isn't saying that success is purely arbitrary. it is arguing that what we commonly perceive as inborn talent is actually a convergence of luck, expedient circumstances, and good ol' elbow grease.
the author makes the distinction early on between traditional meritocracies like sports/IT versus the world of business/politics, which the author describes as "old-boy networks." pop music would be more akin to the world of business & politics since actual personal ability plays very little role in an industry of pretentious superficiality.
the true grit of the article really is just revisiting the nature vs. nurture debate and summarizing the recent findings of developmental psychologists and other intelligence researchers. the first educational experiment to provide strong evidence that genius could be cultivated was conducted by Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian schoolteacher and father of the world-renowned "Polgar Sisters" who are amongst the top-ranking chess players in world.
while Laszlo Polgar was an avid chess player, he never rose beyond the level of an amateur, and when he first began his experiment with his eldest daughter, Susan, female chess players were pretty much unheard of and the world of competitive chess was strictly dominated by males. but through diligent mentoring and a rigorous regimen of practice and study, Laszlo proved his theory that genius could be deliberately cultivated, shattering the precept that talent/genius were genetic or inborn traits.
the correlation between professional level athletes and birth dates was also established long ago (and was even published in a New Scientist article submitted to /., i believe). all of this helps to demonstrate that genetics are only significant to the extent that they might determine what interests & activities we are predisposed towards, which affect what skills we practice and cultivate in our childhood.
huh? who said that they were hacked, much less from the internet? they are still trying to determine where the information was leaked from, including the possibility that this was an inside job.
as i said, no one knows how the records were stolen or who was even involved. so pulling facts out of your ass without even bothering to RTFA to understand the situation is more idiotic than anything that can be pinned on Express Scripts at this point.
again, RTFA:
and then convert Google Earth into an online RTS game that lets you pit these ancient armies against one another!
as a side note, i wonder if it'd be possible to create an MMO RTS game given the huge server farms Google has at their disposal.
they're now part of JPMorgan Chase, so technically they're still in business, but they're under new management.
i was hoping the change in ownership would be a good thing, but so far my experience with their customer service regarding banking fraud has been rather underwhelming. there's no dedicated support line for identity-theft/banking fraud/mischarges, and it's practically impossible to get a hold of a human operator even on weekdays during their regular business hours.
i'm wondering if i should contact PayPal instead, and perhaps they would be willing to reverse the fraudulent charges.
what they should have done is kept the original specs or design goals, which really catered well to the casual computing market which most consumers fall into, but also add higher end netbooks that are purposed for specific market niches. that way you keep the baseline netbook for the average non-technical user, but also provide higher-end netbooks that aren't just low-end laptops.
for instance, a purpose-driven netbook for college students might be a netbook-based tablet for note-taking, or perhaps incorporate an e-ink display for displaying e-books. instead of having to lug around 50 lbs of books all over campus you could have all your textbooks stored on your low-power, extended battery-life netbook.
a netbook model for graphic design students/professionals might also include a tablet interface in addition to a GPU specialized for graphic design applications (higher display resolution, image transsizing, sub-pixel antialiasing, NURBS, motion blurs, etc.). the idea of a netbook for graphic designers might seem counterintuitive since most 2D graphic design applications simply rely on ever-increasing clock speeds to improve performance, but with Photoshop CS4 Adobe has begun to experiment with GPU-accelerated graphic design. since GPUs can be highly specialized for a particular application, powerful multi-core CPUs with ridiculous clock speeds are no longer a necessity.
by using specialized hardware and purpose-driven design, it should be possible to create relatively cheap & low power netbooks that provide good performance in specific applications. IMO it's better to have a specialized system that performs well in one or two applications rather than a mediocre general-purpose system.