As an aside, I answered the census last week and I was shocked and appalled that it did not even ask whether the people living at my address are U.S. citizens. How the hell can they determine Congressional representation if they don't even ask who needs to be represented and who doesn't?
(And lest my sentiments be misconstrued, I'm not a nativist. I think anyone should be able to come to the U.S. and speak whatever languages they want and work for whoever will hire them. When it comes to determining the relative allocation of representation in the House of Representatives, I just think all non-citizens should be counted out.)
There are two forms of the census, the short form and the long form. Sounds like you got the short form. A random sample of addresses receive the long form instead of the short form. It asks a lot more detailed questions.
I did this, kind of, as a TA for a remedial (er, the PC term was "developmental") math pre-college summer program. The kids were older (17-18) than elementary school but here's how it worked in a nutshell.
Math is divided into topic categories or "units." There are about 20 of them from intermediate arithmetic (fractions, negative numbers, that sort of thing) through algebra up to integral calculus. Everyone takes a placement test right off the bat. Student's curriculum starts on the first unit he/she flunked on the placement test. You have to pass each unit with 90%.
The term was six weeks. If you pass six units you get an A. Five units gets a B, four gets a C, and if I remember right a D only required two. The point is that students got graded on how far they came, not where they started. Oh, and if you managed to pass the calculus unit then we (the instructors) had to make up new units for you to try next.
This worked great. The students who came in struggling with arithmetic and made it up to basic algebra walked out with A's and B's in math -- for the first time in their lives, in many cases. The students who came in knowing trigonometry walked out with a working knowledge of calculus. That was the goal: get everyone as far ahead as possible in six weeks.
For the instructors, it was hard work. Every student needed lots of help to get through a unit every week. What I found in fact was that the best students started teaching their classmates just to help their friends get an A. Grading took forever because practically every student was working on something different. And, of course, the instructors had to be ready to teach anything from adding and subtracting negative integers, through multivariable calculus, off the top of their heads. But man, was it worth the effort.:)
This is nothing new. I saw a concept video of something similar from GM in 1994.
From TFA:
General Motors has been fiddling around with head-up displays for 22 years now
and
GM has no immediate plans to offer the technology in production models, but Seder says some of features could appear in vehicles at some point.
Yeah, "could" appear "at some point." This is epic vaporware.
Maybe spending millions researching cool gadgets and never bringing them to market is part of the reason GM went bankrupt.
Actually, I've noticed that when my wife tries to substitute a low-fat ingredient into her baking, she insists it tastes the same and I can always tell. Guess which of us has a higher BMI?
Generally my approach is to eat fatty foods less often rather than to eat reduced-fat variants, which just don't satisfy. Except for Cheez-It crackers. For some reason the low-fat version of those tastes better.
Actually, yes, all organisms can alter how their genes are expressed during life. The study of this is called epigenetics and it is a fairly recent sub-field in biology.
When you get into a corporate environment, "cheating" is actually preferred. No reason to re-invent the wheel when there is existing code that gets the job done.
But that's not cheating. Academic cheating is a breach of ethics: you're told your work must be original but you re-use some else's anyway, without permission from your instructor.
The professional analogue of academic cheating is copyright and patent infringement: using third-party code without consulting your supervisor, the legal department, and so on. That is definitely not encouraged in any corporate setting I know of; the threat of an IP lawsuit is so great that it could drive a small or mid-sized company out of business.
Sharing code between two projects at the same company may or may not be allowed depending on the business use of the respective code bases. For example, the company may not want the latest fancy libraries from R&D being imported into their internal business apps. Again, if you went and did that without approval, I doubt your boss would be happy.
Section 1. After a Bill has become Law, if one-half of the Member States declare the U.S. Law to be "unconstitutional" it shall be null and void. It shall be as if the Law never existed.
That's already in the U.S. Constitution. It's called "passing a vote of the Senate." If one-half of the states, through their Senate representatives, object to a law for any reason, then it's as if the law never existed. Because it never did.
The senators represent the interests of the states, plain and simple. If you feel your senator is not adequately representing the interests of your state, then that's your and your state's problem and you can solve it at the ballot box.
Is it just me, or does the Windows 7 engineering blog post strike you as a bit... defensive?
As we have talked about many times, we have a relentless focus on the quality of Windows 7 and we take seriously any reports we receive that indicate a potential problem that could result in a significant failure of the OS.
Talked about many times? Maybe in meetings at Microsoft HQ, but not on that blog (whose previous update was August 2009). Which is a pity, because blogging about how to achieve quality in a product as complex as Windows 7 could be downright interesting. This really seems like a missed opportunity to improve Microsoft's image with the technically literate audience.
The space shuttle is defense related. It's been used in about 10 classified missions, presumably having something to do with spy satellites.
Moreover I would speculate that the avionics systems, materials, high-pressure pumps, and other technology that went into the space shuttle would be both non-obvious and directly applicable to military aircraft and/or missiles.
Programming works fine for me, thanks. I had to move around a bit till I found a company where software is the main product (so developers are valued), and I have to keep my skills current and work well with others. When it's time to find a job, I've had to use networking instead of blindly e-mailing my resume into a black hole. I'd have had to do all these things in any other profession. Sometimes I think the people who bitch about how hostile the tech job market has become are just whiny losers who can't take ownership of their own careers.
'one player is denoted the Dungeon Master... [who] is tasked with giving directions to other players... [which] mimics the organization of a gang.'
In my workplace, one worker is denoted the Manager, who is tasked with giving directions to the other workers, which mimics the organization of a gang.
Or a software company. Or a labor union. Or a political party, family unit, social club, tribe, republic, grange, baseball team, or university department. Wow, just about every human institution mimics the structure of a gang!
In a related story, prison officials ban food because its hydrocarbon compounds mimic the chemical structure of explosives.
By the time the settlement or judgment is made -- assuming Microsoft doesn't go to trial and win -- the damages would probably amount to a few bucks per end-user anyway. It's the injunctive relief that matters IMHO. Microsoft should be forced to comply with anti-spyware laws. That can potentially happen whether the suit is class action or not.
What's the reason to assume that because a patent comes from a foreign company, it's less likely to be a troll? Patent trolling in the U.S. is clearly a proven means of making money so maybe the prevalence of foreign applications for U.S. patents simply means foreign trolls have figured out the U.S. is the best place to ply their trade.
The quality/quantity argument is specious IMO because there is no objective measurement of patent quality. In fact I wonder how bad a patent application has to be in order to get rejected.
Even if you happen to hang on to your AOL e-mail address because you don't want to change it, there's no need to put it on your resume.
The professional societies to which I belong -- IEEE and ACM -- as well as my alma mater, offer e-mail forwarding addresses. So I can set up a respectable-looking e-mail address, such as sirgarlon@alumni.almamater.edu, and have that redirect to the address I actually use. Who cares if that address is doofus123@aol.com? My business associates ain't gonna know.
I would be quite surprised if societies for other professions, such as law or medicine or even journalism, don't have similar services.
I only speak for myself here, but it seems like thinking about letters is actually harder than typing on a keyboard.
This is probably true for anyone who has use of at least one functional limb. Similarly, typing by dictation is easier for anyone who can speak. For people who have neither the use of a limb nor speech (total paralysis for example), typing with brain waves may be an attractive interface.
Though the article's recorded rate of "up to" 8 characters per minute means it will be quite a while before we see the next Great American Novel come out of a neurology ward.
Don't you think it is vaguely insulting to women to say they steer away from a career field is because they don't like the decorating? What was that you were saying about stereotypes?
Gosh, you know, I wanted to go into nursing, but I changed my mind once I saw how horribly those blue-green scrubs smocks clash with the beige walls.
Putting encryption in drones is bad. If they fail, the 'bad' people learn much.
Not necessarily. It's possible to use a different encryption key for every communication session. Both ends of the connection (ground station and drone) negotiate a one-time encryption key. That's how SSL works. If the enemy captured a drone, they still couldn't break the encryption of another drone. All they could do would be to send data from the drone they have, probably just once or twice (as the U.S. would realize the drone has been lost, and revoke its authorization to negotiate new session keys).
Putting badly-designed encryption on a drone would let the enemy learn much. But nothing they can't get now for $26.
They're flying missions halfway around the world and not even bothering to encrypt the video stream. I can understand that in the rush to get drones in the field they might have had to cut a few corners on the system design -- but for crying out loud they've had 8 years to patch this hole. *Sigh* Your tax dollars at work.
I am glad this controversy came up because I was not following GNOME development and had no idea how hard they were working to integrate with proprietary "cross-platform technologies" like Silverlight. To me the appeal of Linux is that it *doesn't* rely on the MS model of giving Web applications full access to the OS. The real "benefit" to end users from ActiveX, Silverlight,.NET, etc is they expose the users to all kinds of Trojan horses and malware. If GNOME has drunk the Microsoft kool-aid of doing away with any kind of application sandboxing, then to hell with it.
To be fair, doesn't that fundamentally have more to do with the Chinese government than it does Google?
Google has the choice not to do business in China. Instead they chose to collaborate with the Communist Party and help the Party identify and track "subversives". I would say it fundamentally has a lot to do with Google.
Solution... Just outside the jurisdictional boundaries of the ports (usually very safe places) weapons are offloaded to "locker ships" (for a fee of course) and are loaded back aboard as the commercial/merchant vessel passes back through.
And why, pray tell, would the "locker ship" give your weapons back to you, instead of stealing them and selling them on the black market? After all, once you hand over your weapons, they're armed and you're not.
Better solution: don't dock in ports where the weapons aren't allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish you could express outrage without resorting to the F-bomb, but yeah.
--SirGarlon, a Polish-English-Dutch-American born in New York
As an aside, I answered the census last week and I was shocked and appalled that it did not even ask whether the people living at my address are U.S. citizens. How the hell can they determine Congressional representation if they don't even ask who needs to be represented and who doesn't? (And lest my sentiments be misconstrued, I'm not a nativist. I think anyone should be able to come to the U.S. and speak whatever languages they want and work for whoever will hire them. When it comes to determining the relative allocation of representation in the House of Representatives, I just think all non-citizens should be counted out.)
There are two forms of the census, the short form and the long form. Sounds like you got the short form. A random sample of addresses receive the long form instead of the short form. It asks a lot more detailed questions.
I did this, kind of, as a TA for a remedial (er, the PC term was "developmental") math pre-college summer program. The kids were older (17-18) than elementary school but here's how it worked in a nutshell.
Math is divided into topic categories or "units." There are about 20 of them from intermediate arithmetic (fractions, negative numbers, that sort of thing) through algebra up to integral calculus. Everyone takes a placement test right off the bat. Student's curriculum starts on the first unit he/she flunked on the placement test. You have to pass each unit with 90%.
The term was six weeks. If you pass six units you get an A. Five units gets a B, four gets a C, and if I remember right a D only required two. The point is that students got graded on how far they came, not where they started. Oh, and if you managed to pass the calculus unit then we (the instructors) had to make up new units for you to try next.
This worked great. The students who came in struggling with arithmetic and made it up to basic algebra walked out with A's and B's in math -- for the first time in their lives, in many cases. The students who came in knowing trigonometry walked out with a working knowledge of calculus. That was the goal: get everyone as far ahead as possible in six weeks.
For the instructors, it was hard work. Every student needed lots of help to get through a unit every week. What I found in fact was that the best students started teaching their classmates just to help their friends get an A. Grading took forever because practically every student was working on something different. And, of course, the instructors had to be ready to teach anything from adding and subtracting negative integers, through multivariable calculus, off the top of their heads. But man, was it worth the effort. :)
and
Yeah, "could" appear "at some point." This is epic vaporware. Maybe spending millions researching cool gadgets and never bringing them to market is part of the reason GM went bankrupt.
Actually, I've noticed that when my wife tries to substitute a low-fat ingredient into her baking, she insists it tastes the same and I can always tell. Guess which of us has a higher BMI? Generally my approach is to eat fatty foods less often rather than to eat reduced-fat variants, which just don't satisfy. Except for Cheez-It crackers. For some reason the low-fat version of those tastes better.
Actually, yes, all organisms can alter how their genes are expressed during life. The study of this is called epigenetics and it is a fairly recent sub-field in biology.
But that's not cheating. Academic cheating is a breach of ethics: you're told your work must be original but you re-use some else's anyway, without permission from your instructor.
The professional analogue of academic cheating is copyright and patent infringement: using third-party code without consulting your supervisor, the legal department, and so on. That is definitely not encouraged in any corporate setting I know of; the threat of an IP lawsuit is so great that it could drive a small or mid-sized company out of business.
Sharing code between two projects at the same company may or may not be allowed depending on the business use of the respective code bases. For example, the company may not want the latest fancy libraries from R&D being imported into their internal business apps. Again, if you went and did that without approval, I doubt your boss would be happy.
That's already in the U.S. Constitution. It's called "passing a vote of the Senate." If one-half of the states, through their Senate representatives, object to a law for any reason, then it's as if the law never existed. Because it never did.
The senators represent the interests of the states, plain and simple. If you feel your senator is not adequately representing the interests of your state, then that's your and your state's problem and you can solve it at the ballot box.
Talked about many times? Maybe in meetings at Microsoft HQ, but not on that blog (whose previous update was August 2009). Which is a pity, because blogging about how to achieve quality in a product as complex as Windows 7 could be downright interesting. This really seems like a missed opportunity to improve Microsoft's image with the technically literate audience.
The space shuttle is defense related. It's been used in about 10 classified missions, presumably having something to do with spy satellites.
Moreover I would speculate that the avionics systems, materials, high-pressure pumps, and other technology that went into the space shuttle would be both non-obvious and directly applicable to military aircraft and/or missiles.
That explains the need to populate the cyber test range with virtual people... maybe I should reconsider and join the Air Force after all.
Programming works fine for me, thanks. I had to move around a bit till I found a company where software is the main product (so developers are valued), and I have to keep my skills current and work well with others. When it's time to find a job, I've had to use networking instead of blindly e-mailing my resume into a black hole. I'd have had to do all these things in any other profession. Sometimes I think the people who bitch about how hostile the tech job market has become are just whiny losers who can't take ownership of their own careers.
In my workplace, one worker is denoted the Manager, who is tasked with giving directions to the other workers, which mimics the organization of a gang.
Or a software company. Or a labor union. Or a political party, family unit, social club, tribe, republic, grange, baseball team, or university department. Wow, just about every human institution mimics the structure of a gang!
In a related story, prison officials ban food because its hydrocarbon compounds mimic the chemical structure of explosives.
By the time the settlement or judgment is made -- assuming Microsoft doesn't go to trial and win -- the damages would probably amount to a few bucks per end-user anyway. It's the injunctive relief that matters IMHO. Microsoft should be forced to comply with anti-spyware laws. That can potentially happen whether the suit is class action or not.
What's the reason to assume that because a patent comes from a foreign company, it's less likely to be a troll? Patent trolling in the U.S. is clearly a proven means of making money so maybe the prevalence of foreign applications for U.S. patents simply means foreign trolls have figured out the U.S. is the best place to ply their trade.
The quality/quantity argument is specious IMO because there is no objective measurement of patent quality. In fact I wonder how bad a patent application has to be in order to get rejected.
Even if you happen to hang on to your AOL e-mail address because you don't want to change it, there's no need to put it on your resume.
The professional societies to which I belong -- IEEE and ACM -- as well as my alma mater, offer e-mail forwarding addresses. So I can set up a respectable-looking e-mail address, such as sirgarlon@alumni.almamater.edu, and have that redirect to the address I actually use. Who cares if that address is doofus123@aol.com? My business associates ain't gonna know.
I would be quite surprised if societies for other professions, such as law or medicine or even journalism, don't have similar services.
This is probably true for anyone who has use of at least one functional limb. Similarly, typing by dictation is easier for anyone who can speak. For people who have neither the use of a limb nor speech (total paralysis for example), typing with brain waves may be an attractive interface.
Though the article's recorded rate of "up to" 8 characters per minute means it will be quite a while before we see the next Great American Novel come out of a neurology ward.
Don't you think it is vaguely insulting to women to say they steer away from a career field is because they don't like the decorating? What was that you were saying about stereotypes?
Gosh, you know, I wanted to go into nursing, but I changed my mind once I saw how horribly those blue-green scrubs smocks clash with the beige walls.
And what makes you think I don't do communications security for a living?
Not necessarily. It's possible to use a different encryption key for every communication session. Both ends of the connection (ground station and drone) negotiate a one-time encryption key. That's how SSL works. If the enemy captured a drone, they still couldn't break the encryption of another drone. All they could do would be to send data from the drone they have, probably just once or twice (as the U.S. would realize the drone has been lost, and revoke its authorization to negotiate new session keys).
Putting badly-designed encryption on a drone would let the enemy learn much. But nothing they can't get now for $26.
They're flying missions halfway around the world and not even bothering to encrypt the video stream. I can understand that in the rush to get drones in the field they might have had to cut a few corners on the system design -- but for crying out loud they've had 8 years to patch this hole. *Sigh* Your tax dollars at work.
I am glad this controversy came up because I was not following GNOME development and had no idea how hard they were working to integrate with proprietary "cross-platform technologies" like Silverlight. To me the appeal of Linux is that it *doesn't* rely on the MS model of giving Web applications full access to the OS. The real "benefit" to end users from ActiveX, Silverlight, .NET, etc is they expose the users to all kinds of Trojan horses and malware. If GNOME has drunk the Microsoft kool-aid of doing away with any kind of application sandboxing, then to hell with it.
Google has the choice not to do business in China. Instead they chose to collaborate with the Communist Party and help the Party identify and track "subversives". I would say it fundamentally has a lot to do with Google.
And why, pray tell, would the "locker ship" give your weapons back to you, instead of stealing them and selling them on the black market? After all, once you hand over your weapons, they're armed and you're not.
Better solution: don't dock in ports where the weapons aren't allowed.