So, how can Microsoft guarantee its Windows Phone 7 devices will enjoy broader adoption than the ill-fated Kin? By giving every Microsoft employee a free one, that's how
I'm sorry but this is a stupid statement and a stupid article.
No, you really missed the point. They seriously sold like 500 to 1000 kin phones, so handing out 90,000 of these phones is two orders of magnitude greater. Guaranteed greater marketshare. Of course MS used to be able to sell Windows phones before there were things that were much better and easier to use, but that's in significant doubt now. Sure, they'll be able to sell some, but I'd be extremely surprised if they crack significant market share. If they do it will be by one of two ways: actually creating one of the best products they ever have in order to compete, or the same old dirty business tricks that made dos, windows, exchange, etc successful.
I live about 40 miles from a nuclear plant and I'd be fine with another one closer, if it's of the more modern designs. If the environuts and scaremongering weren't so successful at misleading people, we'd be farther ahead at installing more advanced designs that produce less waste and even reuse other waste. And as long as the waste is stored safely after coming out of the more advanced designs that use it up more effectively, I would be fine with that too. I'm sure there are lots of other people that would feel the same way if they knew the facts about the situation and the relative merits vs coal, which is what we use most of currently. The part about the high paying jobs doesn't hurt either.
While wrongful death, etc, judgements can be very large, it's not automatic that they will take your house, make you claim bankruptcy, etc. The most they can take is your assets other than your house and some portion of your income. The gubbmint doesn't want you going bankrupt and homeless so they limit the amount that can be taken to reduce the likelihood of that. Your option is buy no insurance, pray that nothing happens and if it does, just give up everything they can take. Another option is to buy more liability insurance. It's not that expensive. Once you get up into the million dollar range, then the insurance company is majorly on the hook and then you have their shark lawyers working partly on your side to prevent the other party from recovering everything you have. Most likely the settlement will be something less than your policy limits. Of course they may try to get out of paying at all, but you can then sick other lawyers on them if need be, and/or apply pressure from the state insurance regulators, press, etc to get them to fall in line. Self insuring and hoping you can build up enough assets in MFs fast enough to cover a settlement is a really bad idea considering liability insurance is actually cheap, most people can't build up assets that fast, and who would want to have to pay out millions just in order to save a couple hundred a year on liability insurance? Not all insurance is that cheap, but liability insurance is a particularly stupid one to skip out on if you have any decent amount of assets or income.
So yeah, insurance is slightly a racket in that it is just as corrupt as most industries and has an added incentive not to pay out, it's nowhere near the racket you claim it to be. That incentive not to pay out is balanced by the desire to keep customers happy which requires paying out legitimate claims. If you buy from more reputable companies and follow the terms of the contract (such as not lying on the application to get cheaper rates), then you are in better shape.
What you describe is due to the reaction many/most educators have had to mathematics education research. Research showed that previous methods of mathematics education resulted in a few students that could do and understand math, a few more that could do some math and the rest that could neither do nor understand math. Understanding of math is generally considered what is needed to allow application of math to new domains, and in most careers being able to do much math isn't necessary. So the reaction has been to focus almost entirely on understanding of math and the result is some increases in math understanding using those methods. That's not the real problem, which is the fact that it's taken too far, and all skills of being able to actually do math have been de-emphasized or there isn't enough time for them after trying to teach the understanding. In the case you cite, that leads to many kids that have been taught this way to not be able to multiply, divide, do fractions, etc.
Probably the right answer is a better mix, but in general we're not their now. The pendulum has swung so far over into the understanding camp, that skills are practically looked down on. The answer is to find a way to teach skills and understanding, but for the most part the curricula aren't there yet and it takes skilled teachers, of which there are few. It really doesn't do that much good for any but the few that can pick up the understanding on their own to teach students to be able to do a lot of math. They can do what they are taught, but can't apply it to anything even slightly different, and can't recognize when to do what they know in anything approaching a real life situation. But understanding with no skills is just about as bad. It does actually allow students to reason with math, and since when they do have a calculator available, they can do things in many cases that a student with the skills but without the understanding can't. You may not recognize that because you are used to the type of math education you went through were everybody could perform calculations. You likely were also of the type that happened to pick up understanding along the way, perhaps without even being taught. Coming from that perspective it seems that math education is in shambles. It's probably not, it's just that it has partly shifted to a different purpose with some gains and losses along the way. One of those losses is that the best students don't learn the skills as well as they should or are able, but again that comes down to the teacher's ability and motivation to differentiate.
Another thing most people don't realize is that math is now taught to more students. More than just the able and motivated students take some of the higher levels of math now. That is part of the drive towards newer techniques that can allow teaching understanding and teaching students of different levels in one class. Again, the problem is most teachers can't teach well with the new methods. The results are what you have seen.
I built my house 2 years ago and used all closed-cell spray foam (isocyanate) making all walls, floor, and roof, water-tight and air-tight. 133 mm of foam gives me R-37 in the walls, and more gives me R-60 in the floor and ceiling. All ducting is in conditioned space. All external walls have thermal breaks (offset studs). I have an ultra-efficient water-jacketed earth-coupled geothermal heat pump. The solar gain in the summer still rapes my house with heat gain.
Plant some shade trees? I realize that decent size trees aren't that cheap, but if solar gain is your major problem, then perhaps it may have even saved money.
I actually wouldn't care a bit if they were allowed to also market a device that had no (or disabled) analog outputs as long as they weren't allowed to restrict sales of devices that did have analog outputs. Then they could choose to stream new releases just to their restricted devices. I wouldn't care a lick because I would never buy the restricted device.
The problem is they are already allowed to market a restricted single purpose device, but they choose not to and instead push to restrict the analog and other abilities of all devices even though it's really not the analog hole that is the source of pirate copies.
So I must ask why this over Operons, Xeons, or Arm?
That was my first thought too. Considering some of the benchmarks that show ARM performance per watt that crushes the Atom. But according to the Wired article:
Though SeaMicro has used Atom processors for its chipset, the company says it has designed its architecture to be flexible and support any CPU. So any low-power chip included that from ARM, which runs on most smartphones today, can become a part of SeaMicro’s system. But Atom remains the best choice for now, says Feldman. ARM processors used in cellphones consume much lower power than an Atom chip but they also cannot deliver the same kind of computing performance, he claims.
So they say their system can handle it but they don't think ARM's have enough performance. I'd tend to doubt that and instead bet that they just haven't built their custom chip to handle the ARM yet. If they did, they could take advantage of ARM's extensive hardware power saving features. I would think it would be much cheaper too since you could have a SOC that would do what appears to take two Intel chips here, even after SeaMicro has bundled a lot of the rest of the board functions in their own custom ASIC. Less chips and cheaper licensing from ARM should make for a cheaper and lower power solution.
The submitter could have benefitted everyone and noted that this is the long awaited version of the original that was known as the Abramowitz_and_Stegun because it was so useful in certain areas. Because it was printed as a government publication it was automatically in the public domain. This new version was wholly created and printed through NIST so it is under copyright. That's an unfortunate side stepping of our rights as citizens. It was created with public money, it should be public domain.
The big offenders I've seen are breast cancer awareness and autism awareness. Why do we need to give money to make people more aware of these conditions? Everyone is already as aware as they need to be! Stop spending money on awareness and start spending it on research!
When discussing the context of finding cures then of course awareness sounds like wasted spending. But much of the focus of awareness efforts is on prevention. Growing evidence of autism, since you bring that up, is that the earlier it is identified by families and pediatricians and early treatment is sought, the better outcomes those children can have in terms of social integration and other areas in which people with autism tend to have difficulty. Most people still probably don't know that and there is still a stigma with autism so identification and treatment is delayed. Since there may be no cure for autism on the near horizon, awareness of the need for early identification and treatment amounts to prevention. An ounce of prevention can be worth a pound of cure.
Of course a true cure for cancer and autism would be a fully preventative one, but most people would consider those pretty cutting edge and risky research areas. In the meantime the best answer is probably a mix of awareness efforts focused on prevention and efforts towards cures.
Of course, once a charity reaches a certain size, its primary goal becomes self-preservation, and finding a cure for these things would threaten that goal.
Well yes, but hopefully these organizations would be smart enough to repurpose themselves into finding a cure for something else. The March of Dimes was pretty successful doing that.
Parent characterises the complete detachment from reality that characterises the modern "innovative" financial industry.
Actually the parent you refer to understands the difference between the equity market and the debt market. Imposing a restriction that stocks must be held for a day or other restrictions on equity trading would have costs that those proposing them don't understand. That is not directly connected to the consumer portion of debt markets you later refer to when you say you can't get a business loan at a rate you like or earn an interest rate you want. Actually since debt instruments can be bundled and sold like equities, imposing equity restrictions and extra costs would raise the cost of borrowing as well.
I operate a small business. I don't give a fsck about your claims that we need "liquidity" when I can't get a simple business loan for less than 8-9%, despite being well-capitalised, while my personal savings attract all of r pct, where 0.01 < r < 0.1. Quite the scam there. As a result, I use only retained earnings to pay for anything, which while a prudent thing to do given my situation, is hardly a recipe for large-scale economic growth. The financial industry does not fulfil its most basic imperative of funnelling capital to productive use, why should I care about whether some institutions can hold a stock for 1ms or 1 day?
Yes, so if you can make a return on investment greater than 8-9% net of costs, then you should still take that loan. Sorry it's not at the terms you wish it were at, but we all want more right? Or was greed bad? Perhaps you just meant other people's greed is bad.
I suppose things could be worse. Maybe in addition to being completely starved for capital, I may be subject to "protection" payments in the near future just to be able to stay in business at all! Financial innovation, 'Ndrangheta style! Wouldn't that be a boon for Wall Street and the City of London.
Wait, I thought you were well capitalized. I understand that the huge spread between loan and savings rates is frustrating. I'm not a fan either, but the answer isn't to impose restrictions on trading in the way naively suggested here. The current illiquidity in the debt markets won't be solved by adding illiquidity in the equity markets.
If you click to the sortbenchmark.org link, and click on the Ecosort link, it links to a paper by the people that put the system together. It gives much more details about their system including this about their hardware decisions:
The system is based on a Zotac IONITX-A board, equipped with an Atom 330. This processor consumes more than three times the power of an N270 (8 W TDP) but supports two cores and four hardware threads. The main advantage of this system is that its nVidia Ion chipset provides four SATA ports that can handle the SSD transfers at full speed. Moreover, it allows two DIMMs for a total of 4 GiB of RAM. The 64 bit logical address space is less prone to fragmentation, which we experienced on the 32-bit Atom N270.
Which really shows that they got a 3 times improvement by going with sub-optimal choices because that's all that was available. If there existed a two or 4 core N270 64 bit that had the necessary RAM and SATA interfaces the results would have been even better. Just think if there was an ARM chipset and motherboard that had the needed interfaces. So there is quite a ways to go with power efficient computing and that's a good thing. I'm still waiting for a low power desktop Cortex A8 or A9 system to be widely available with all the standard PC parts. It's just going to take someone putting all the pieces together right.
What you refer to is called tracking. Overwhelming evidence shows that tracking sounds good, but ends up resulting in poorer quality teachers getting assigned to the "less talented" kids, those kids getting more routinized and less creative lessons, and ending up with much poorer results than they would get from better teaching. Look at any educational psychology text for evidence. Growing consensus is that the best path is for teachers to have differentiated lessons that allow or force students of different abilities or with different background knowledge (those two things look much the same in many situations) to access the tasks and material at a level appropriate to their needs. That's the ultimate goal anyway: that every student is working just beyond their current abilities, but just within what they can reach for without getting too frustrated.
The problem is a properly differentiated lesson takes a different style of teaching and more planning for teachers that aren't used to it. For teachers that don't know how to do it, which is most of todays teachers, it's, of course, basically impossible. I don't know how to do it for other subjects, but I do know how for math. It is possible to give tasks that have a wide variety of ways that students of different skill levels can access the task and get different levels of challenge out of it. When done properly, students of all ability and background levels progress at a higher rate. The lessons and tasks turn out to be much more fun and less boring anyway.
Yes, like many other fields of inquiry, the amount known has been exploding on an essentially exponential growth path (with a decent positive exponent--especially recently). We can account for all that was known before and all that was previously thought to be true but is now known not to be.
I'm not saying we know everything, but compared to what we know now, we knew very little then. The same will be said in 10 years and again in 10 more years. It's still a rapidly developing field with a lot to be discovered.
So an experiment done in 1929 when we knew almost nothing about math education applies how? There is too much different between now and then for the experiment to be meaningful. And further, the summary is poor. The article is a little better and refers to only arithmetic being taught in the early grades in 1929 and taking that out not having much impact on students ability to pick up the ability to reason with arithmetic later on. That should make sense. If the older curriculum doesn't focus on teaching students how to reason with the skills and concepts they know, they won't be able to reason well with them.
Fast forward to today and there is a huge volume of research and understanding about how students learn mathematics and successful ways to help students learn to reason and apply what they are learning to useful situations. It does not follow that eliminating Math from the early grades now is the way to go. Professor Grey should stick to subjects he knows, and apparently that's not Math education.
Where he is dead on is that, on the whole, elementary teachers know far too little about math or how to teach it. Very little is successfully making it from teacher education programs about how to properly teach mathematics. Basically those that choose to teach elementary school are the ones that hate math, are afraid of it, or can't do it. That's not true in all cases, but it's true in such a vast majority that it is a significant source of the problem for why our country isn't farther ahead in mathematics. That still doesn't mean take the math out of elementary school. It just means that the standards should be drastically raised for what elementary teachers should know and be able to do with mathematics. In short, the solution is to teach elementary teachers more math and more about how to teach math. The problem is that teacher education programs have a perverse incentive to make their programs easier to keep their numbers up to make more money, and math is the roadblock for many of their candidates. The result is no higher math requirements unless all teacher education programs are forced to have them. We should make sure the state requirements force them to have them.
Oh BS. Jeebus people. It's not a fricking conspiracy. Private health insurance does cost a fortune and you need to factor that into your decision to go as an independent. If you haven't done that, that's the stupid part. But that same fortune is being paid by your employer if you work for a company that provides it (Or by everyone through higher taxes in a public health care system). The OP has a few options. Find a group that you can join up with as others have mentioned, go with a Blues plan because they are required to accept everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions in return for the various benefits and overcharging they get to do, or by an individual private plan. You may as well factor the price of the Blues plan in your decision to go on your own. A family plan depending on options and your state will be $10-15,000 or more a year. You can pay substantially less and get substantially less coverage by going with something like an HSA type plan where you prefund a tax free account and then can spend from that for higher deductibles and copays. Depending on your family's health and situation that may make more sense. Bottom line is if you can't afford to pay for health insurance simply don't leave a situation where someone else is paying for it. If you have no choice, lower your cost of living until you can afford it. There are always choices.
I think a SAGE notebook is what you are looking for. It's basically multiple different open source mathematics software packages (such as Maxima) glued together with python. The notebook can typeset it automatically for you or you can output the LaTeX. Well you may like the custom system you have better, but SAGE is pretty slick since it goes into a wide range of math. I suppose any customizations you would like could be contributed to SAGE.
So you're taking people that smoked and quit, then take up a new bad habit-eating too much. That's not surprising, nor does it provide any evidence that smokers are cheaper for health care overall.
The diseases the smokers die of aren't all sudden ones and as another poster pointed out, cancer is extremely expensive to treat. A small increase in the incidence of cancer would pay for many many years of health care for non smokers. Over all I'm still betting smokers cost much much more.
As for my caffeine and nicotine addictions, I'll deal with them myself, in my own good time. I'll stop smoking some day. Probably the day the doctor pronounces me dead. And, it's none of YOUR business.
It wouldn't be any of my business if I didn't have to pay more for your health care because of your choices. If you paid enough more for your health care than the people that make better choices then it wouldn't be anyone's business. But you don't, so it is. That's the real problem with the just let the morons do all the blow they want to attitude. They end up in the ER (because they typically have no health insurance) or killing unrelated people in traffic accidents or whatever. Those both represent large costs to people that avoid the behavior. It doesn't matter if the drugs are cheaper from making them legal, they still cost something and people that are addicted will still do whatever they need to to get more including crime and murder. Your argument would have been stronger if you could make a cohesive case for there being less crime and costs on a total picture basis, but you didn't bother with that. Also, your darwinian argument would be better if people tended to die quickly on drugs, but the majority just get strung out and are a drag on society.
I'm not really sold either way on it. If someone presented a really convincing case that the costs really were lower and particularly lower for the people that avoid the crap, then I don't really care. But most of the arguments seem to be from people that just want easier access to more drugs.
That is why those who first warned of peak oil, and general limits to growth, also mentioned that it was necessary to start preparing for the peak BEFORE it happened, one or even two decades before if possible. The current salvation is the slowed down economy, but it won't last forever, and demand will soon hit the ceiling again... which will likely cause further economic hardships, which in turn will have a direct influence on the development and deployment of alternatives.
Of course we should have started preparing long ago, but the basics of a political system are that politicians work to make themselves appear to be doing good and that usually means short term. Maybe you live in the US if you refer to the sudden flurry of green initiatives. Europe has been working on it much more steadily for years. But also you're missing the very basics of the economics here that may mitigate some of the worst effects of running out of petroleum. There are several moderators that make it unlikely that running out of oil will be a sudden and catastrophic shock. One is the demand influence that you mention. When costs of goods go up, people will indeed face some hardships, but that will reduce demand and act as one moderator on the catastrophic drop. The other is that oil is not likely to run out suddenly, it's just going to get more expensive, which acts as another moderator to a sudden and catastrophic decline. The cost goes up, the quantity demanded goes down, and it lasts a little longer. At the same time of each of these effects, alternative energy sources become more competitive. And the estimates for alternative fossil fuel sources, though they of course vary, are rather large which makes it unlikely there will be a major crash, just an expensive adjustment. How expensive and how much hardship there will be depends greatly on how fast cheap oil runs out and how fast cheaper processes for developing other fossil fuels and alternative energies are developed. On the other hand, expensive adjustment does mean opportunity to make profits, so your esteemed corporate overlords may just be able to exploit that profit opportunity if they can be the one that comes up with the competitive process. That's speaking charitably of course. They'd rather corner the market and create a monopoly, and our and our short sighted government's job is to avoid that.
It will always be playing catch up however. And last time I checked, The Sims is the best selling PC title of all time. It is also an old game that the Wine developers still haven't gotten to work. If they can't get the best selling game of all time to work, that seriously hurts your reputation as a true alternative to Windows for gaming.
Since they haven't claimed to he a true alternative for Windows gaming, it can't really hurt their reputation. And since WINE hasn't finished reimplementing the Windows API, it's not surprising that certain software or games don't work yet. It doesn't matter if the title is old or new if it depends on one or more components that haven't been finished yet.
I probably wouldn't bother with WINE for gaming either, even if I did play games, but that doesn't invalidate the OP's point. If WINE continues improving it will eventually finish the Windows API. The good news is that since MS has managed to lock everyone into Windows partly through that API, they can only change it so much, and not at all really for the vast catalog of software that already exists and many people would like to be able to run on Linux some day.
I won't claim the iPhone is the most perfect faultless device in existence because I'm not delusional, but if you don't realize that Apple changed the game and the rest of the industry has been playing catchup since, you're equally deluding yourself.
iPhone introduction put the smartphone front and center into the mainstream and turned a business device into a consumer one. Prior to the iPhone's introduction smartphones were used by enterprise and a tiny group of geeks.
Nonsense - Internet enabled phones that could run apps were around, and used by consumers, years before the Iphone appeared. The Iphone had, and still has relatively, small market share - there was no sudden jump. Even in the high end, people are buying far more from companies like Nokia than from Apple.
No, the smartphone really was almost entirely a business device before the iPhone and there was a sudden jump in market share for Apple in the smartphone market. Look at the market share graphs and they tell the story of very fast growth. I suppose you could call that not sudden, but it would be semantics. Nokia still does sell more smartphone according to Gartner's report, but their share is falling, while Apple's is rapidly growing. That's evidence Apple is changing the game, along with most of the other manufacturers copying much of what Apple is doing.
Oh please - "apps" were around long before Apple. Applications and stores already existed. Decent games already existed. Updates existed. "Twoo usability" is a no true scotsman fallacy.
Maybe, app stores existed before but I'd never heard of them, and neither did pretty much anybody else. I don't know if you could buy over the air and run it straight on your phone or not, but the fact that few have heard of them is evidence that they weren't really used and the usability probably wasn't very good. There probably weren't very many apps either. You poo poo the usability change, but the proof is that the web browsers on previous internet enabled phones pretty much didn't get used because they were horrible. Enter the iPhone and there was a huge spike in data usage per device. Since then there have been massive improvements in browsers from other devices such as Palm's and Android's.
Thats MS's desire. Its been shown that when people are overwhelmed with choices they go with what they know.
No, that's not really their desire, but they did acquiesce and that does happen to be a known phenomenon that will likely somewhat mitigate the effects that the browser ballot screen is intended to have on Internet Explorer's market share. MS's true desire is to keep the status quo and not let any consumer have an easy chance to choose anything else but their product. Evidence is that they have fought tooth and nail ever since the EU proposed the ballot screen and only gave up after spending oodles of cash fighting it and realizing they couldn't win.
The phenomenon you refer to is the paradox of choice. People either go with what they know, make no decision, or make an irrational one. Wikipedia redirects to a book about the subject, but the article on decision theory has a short section on the concept in general.
Yes, and you'd think that would apply since it's law and common sense, but common sense went out the window long ago when patents came into the picture. Rambushad patents on things that were being discussed in the JEDEC RAM standards body, but failed to disclose that, then later sued once those technologies became successful. How that didn't meet the standards for fraud or laches, or any other law that would have prevented them from profiting from what they did, I don't know.
It's even more evil than that. Only some publishers give out those digital texts to students (even those with registered disabilities), and many of those that do drag their feet and sometimes never supply the texts. I think it depends on the subject, but there's a very low hit rate with math or science books that have a lot of notation in them. Those books almost certainly exist in some text and LaTeX form at some point, which would be ideal for some of the experimental screen reader projects and those that can see if the text is blown up. But they'll never ever give out the LaTeX sources. Those same books are a near failure to run through OCR. None of the current commercial systems handle math notation well. Every book nowadays is stored at some point in an electronic format. Some take a little more work than others to get into an accessible form, but not existing in an electronic form is no longer an excuse.
I even had a professor that had written the text and had the LaTeX sources, but was prevented by the publisher from giving those out.
There are two different markets that are often reported (or a subsection of a market really). Mobile phones in general and smartphones particularly. Even the article you linked about the Western Europe market makes this distinction if you had read it. It gives Apple 4% overall but a growth from 16% in 2Q09 to 24% in 3Q09in the smartphone market. That's serious growth in the section of the market that's considered to have the most growth potential by most analysts. There's a lot of upside left that smartphones could do that they don't do yet. But the high growth rate in a high growth market is why Apple gets so much free publicity for the iPhone.
Here's a recent report of overall and smartphone market share. Samsung barely makes the smartphone report, hence it's not that much of a stretch to say they are new to smartphones.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry but this is a stupid statement and a stupid article.
No, you really missed the point. They seriously sold like 500 to 1000 kin phones, so handing out 90,000 of these phones is two orders of magnitude greater. Guaranteed greater marketshare. Of course MS used to be able to sell Windows phones before there were things that were much better and easier to use, but that's in significant doubt now. Sure, they'll be able to sell some, but I'd be extremely surprised if they crack significant market share. If they do it will be by one of two ways: actually creating one of the best products they ever have in order to compete, or the same old dirty business tricks that made dos, windows, exchange, etc successful.
I live about 40 miles from a nuclear plant and I'd be fine with another one closer, if it's of the more modern designs. If the environuts and scaremongering weren't so successful at misleading people, we'd be farther ahead at installing more advanced designs that produce less waste and even reuse other waste. And as long as the waste is stored safely after coming out of the more advanced designs that use it up more effectively, I would be fine with that too. I'm sure there are lots of other people that would feel the same way if they knew the facts about the situation and the relative merits vs coal, which is what we use most of currently. The part about the high paying jobs doesn't hurt either.
While wrongful death, etc, judgements can be very large, it's not automatic that they will take your house, make you claim bankruptcy, etc. The most they can take is your assets other than your house and some portion of your income. The gubbmint doesn't want you going bankrupt and homeless so they limit the amount that can be taken to reduce the likelihood of that. Your option is buy no insurance, pray that nothing happens and if it does, just give up everything they can take. Another option is to buy more liability insurance. It's not that expensive. Once you get up into the million dollar range, then the insurance company is majorly on the hook and then you have their shark lawyers working partly on your side to prevent the other party from recovering everything you have. Most likely the settlement will be something less than your policy limits. Of course they may try to get out of paying at all, but you can then sick other lawyers on them if need be, and/or apply pressure from the state insurance regulators, press, etc to get them to fall in line. Self insuring and hoping you can build up enough assets in MFs fast enough to cover a settlement is a really bad idea considering liability insurance is actually cheap, most people can't build up assets that fast, and who would want to have to pay out millions just in order to save a couple hundred a year on liability insurance? Not all insurance is that cheap, but liability insurance is a particularly stupid one to skip out on if you have any decent amount of assets or income.
So yeah, insurance is slightly a racket in that it is just as corrupt as most industries and has an added incentive not to pay out, it's nowhere near the racket you claim it to be. That incentive not to pay out is balanced by the desire to keep customers happy which requires paying out legitimate claims. If you buy from more reputable companies and follow the terms of the contract (such as not lying on the application to get cheaper rates), then you are in better shape.
What you describe is due to the reaction many/most educators have had to mathematics education research. Research showed that previous methods of mathematics education resulted in a few students that could do and understand math, a few more that could do some math and the rest that could neither do nor understand math. Understanding of math is generally considered what is needed to allow application of math to new domains, and in most careers being able to do much math isn't necessary. So the reaction has been to focus almost entirely on understanding of math and the result is some increases in math understanding using those methods. That's not the real problem, which is the fact that it's taken too far, and all skills of being able to actually do math have been de-emphasized or there isn't enough time for them after trying to teach the understanding. In the case you cite, that leads to many kids that have been taught this way to not be able to multiply, divide, do fractions, etc.
Probably the right answer is a better mix, but in general we're not their now. The pendulum has swung so far over into the understanding camp, that skills are practically looked down on. The answer is to find a way to teach skills and understanding, but for the most part the curricula aren't there yet and it takes skilled teachers, of which there are few. It really doesn't do that much good for any but the few that can pick up the understanding on their own to teach students to be able to do a lot of math. They can do what they are taught, but can't apply it to anything even slightly different, and can't recognize when to do what they know in anything approaching a real life situation. But understanding with no skills is just about as bad. It does actually allow students to reason with math, and since when they do have a calculator available, they can do things in many cases that a student with the skills but without the understanding can't. You may not recognize that because you are used to the type of math education you went through were everybody could perform calculations. You likely were also of the type that happened to pick up understanding along the way, perhaps without even being taught. Coming from that perspective it seems that math education is in shambles. It's probably not, it's just that it has partly shifted to a different purpose with some gains and losses along the way. One of those losses is that the best students don't learn the skills as well as they should or are able, but again that comes down to the teacher's ability and motivation to differentiate.
Another thing most people don't realize is that math is now taught to more students. More than just the able and motivated students take some of the higher levels of math now. That is part of the drive towards newer techniques that can allow teaching understanding and teaching students of different levels in one class. Again, the problem is most teachers can't teach well with the new methods. The results are what you have seen.
I built my house 2 years ago and used all closed-cell spray foam (isocyanate) making all walls, floor, and roof, water-tight and air-tight. 133 mm of foam gives me R-37 in the walls, and more gives me R-60 in the floor and ceiling. All ducting is in conditioned space. All external walls have thermal breaks (offset studs). I have an ultra-efficient water-jacketed earth-coupled geothermal heat pump. The solar gain in the summer still rapes my house with heat gain.
Plant some shade trees? I realize that decent size trees aren't that cheap, but if solar gain is your major problem, then perhaps it may have even saved money.
I actually wouldn't care a bit if they were allowed to also market a device that had no (or disabled) analog outputs as long as they weren't allowed to restrict sales of devices that did have analog outputs. Then they could choose to stream new releases just to their restricted devices. I wouldn't care a lick because I would never buy the restricted device.
The problem is they are already allowed to market a restricted single purpose device, but they choose not to and instead push to restrict the analog and other abilities of all devices even though it's really not the analog hole that is the source of pirate copies.
So I must ask why this over Operons, Xeons, or Arm?
That was my first thought too. Considering some of the benchmarks that show ARM performance per watt that crushes the Atom. But according to the Wired article:
Though SeaMicro has used Atom processors for its chipset, the company says it has designed its architecture to be flexible and support any CPU. So any low-power chip included that from ARM, which runs on most smartphones today, can become a part of SeaMicro’s system. But Atom remains the best choice for now, says Feldman. ARM processors used in cellphones consume much lower power than an Atom chip but they also cannot deliver the same kind of computing performance, he claims.
So they say their system can handle it but they don't think ARM's have enough performance. I'd tend to doubt that and instead bet that they just haven't built their custom chip to handle the ARM yet. If they did, they could take advantage of ARM's extensive hardware power saving features. I would think it would be much cheaper too since you could have a SOC that would do what appears to take two Intel chips here, even after SeaMicro has bundled a lot of the rest of the board functions in their own custom ASIC. Less chips and cheaper licensing from ARM should make for a cheaper and lower power solution.
The submitter could have benefitted everyone and noted that this is the long awaited version of the original that was known as the Abramowitz_and_Stegun because it was so useful in certain areas. Because it was printed as a government publication it was automatically in the public domain. This new version was wholly created and printed through NIST so it is under copyright. That's an unfortunate side stepping of our rights as citizens. It was created with public money, it should be public domain.
The big offenders I've seen are breast cancer awareness and autism awareness. Why do we need to give money to make people more aware of these conditions? Everyone is already as aware as they need to be! Stop spending money on awareness and start spending it on research!
When discussing the context of finding cures then of course awareness sounds like wasted spending. But much of the focus of awareness efforts is on prevention. Growing evidence of autism, since you bring that up, is that the earlier it is identified by families and pediatricians and early treatment is sought, the better outcomes those children can have in terms of social integration and other areas in which people with autism tend to have difficulty. Most people still probably don't know that and there is still a stigma with autism so identification and treatment is delayed. Since there may be no cure for autism on the near horizon, awareness of the need for early identification and treatment amounts to prevention. An ounce of prevention can be worth a pound of cure.
Of course a true cure for cancer and autism would be a fully preventative one, but most people would consider those pretty cutting edge and risky research areas. In the meantime the best answer is probably a mix of awareness efforts focused on prevention and efforts towards cures.
Of course, once a charity reaches a certain size, its primary goal becomes self-preservation, and finding a cure for these things would threaten that goal.
Well yes, but hopefully these organizations would be smart enough to repurpose themselves into finding a cure for something else. The March of Dimes was pretty successful doing that.
Parent characterises the complete detachment from reality that characterises the modern "innovative" financial industry.
Actually the parent you refer to understands the difference between the equity market and the debt market. Imposing a restriction that stocks must be held for a day or other restrictions on equity trading would have costs that those proposing them don't understand. That is not directly connected to the consumer portion of debt markets you later refer to when you say you can't get a business loan at a rate you like or earn an interest rate you want. Actually since debt instruments can be bundled and sold like equities, imposing equity restrictions and extra costs would raise the cost of borrowing as well.
I operate a small business. I don't give a fsck about your claims that we need "liquidity" when I can't get a simple business loan for less than 8-9%, despite being well-capitalised, while my personal savings attract all of r pct, where 0.01 < r < 0.1. Quite the scam there. As a result, I use only retained earnings to pay for anything, which while a prudent thing to do given my situation, is hardly a recipe for large-scale economic growth. The financial industry does not fulfil its most basic imperative of funnelling capital to productive use, why should I care about whether some institutions can hold a stock for 1ms or 1 day?
Yes, so if you can make a return on investment greater than 8-9% net of costs, then you should still take that loan. Sorry it's not at the terms you wish it were at, but we all want more right? Or was greed bad? Perhaps you just meant other people's greed is bad.
I suppose things could be worse. Maybe in addition to being completely starved for capital, I may be subject to "protection" payments in the near future just to be able to stay in business at all! Financial innovation, 'Ndrangheta style! Wouldn't that be a boon for Wall Street and the City of London.
Wait, I thought you were well capitalized. I understand that the huge spread between loan and savings rates is frustrating. I'm not a fan either, but the answer isn't to impose restrictions on trading in the way naively suggested here. The current illiquidity in the debt markets won't be solved by adding illiquidity in the equity markets.
The system is based on a Zotac IONITX-A board, equipped with an Atom 330. This processor consumes more than three times the power of an N270 (8 W TDP) but supports two cores and four hardware threads. The main advantage of this system is that its nVidia Ion chipset provides four SATA ports that can handle the SSD transfers at full speed. Moreover, it allows two DIMMs for a total of 4 GiB of RAM. The 64 bit logical address space is less prone to fragmentation, which we experienced on the 32-bit Atom N270.
Which really shows that they got a 3 times improvement by going with sub-optimal choices because that's all that was available. If there existed a two or 4 core N270 64 bit that had the necessary RAM and SATA interfaces the results would have been even better. Just think if there was an ARM chipset and motherboard that had the needed interfaces. So there is quite a ways to go with power efficient computing and that's a good thing. I'm still waiting for a low power desktop Cortex A8 or A9 system to be widely available with all the standard PC parts. It's just going to take someone putting all the pieces together right.
What you refer to is called tracking. Overwhelming evidence shows that tracking sounds good, but ends up resulting in poorer quality teachers getting assigned to the "less talented" kids, those kids getting more routinized and less creative lessons, and ending up with much poorer results than they would get from better teaching. Look at any educational psychology text for evidence. Growing consensus is that the best path is for teachers to have differentiated lessons that allow or force students of different abilities or with different background knowledge (those two things look much the same in many situations) to access the tasks and material at a level appropriate to their needs. That's the ultimate goal anyway: that every student is working just beyond their current abilities, but just within what they can reach for without getting too frustrated.
The problem is a properly differentiated lesson takes a different style of teaching and more planning for teachers that aren't used to it. For teachers that don't know how to do it, which is most of todays teachers, it's, of course, basically impossible. I don't know how to do it for other subjects, but I do know how for math. It is possible to give tasks that have a wide variety of ways that students of different skill levels can access the task and get different levels of challenge out of it. When done properly, students of all ability and background levels progress at a higher rate. The lessons and tasks turn out to be much more fun and less boring anyway.
Yes, like many other fields of inquiry, the amount known has been exploding on an essentially exponential growth path (with a decent positive exponent--especially recently). We can account for all that was known before and all that was previously thought to be true but is now known not to be.
I'm not saying we know everything, but compared to what we know now, we knew very little then. The same will be said in 10 years and again in 10 more years. It's still a rapidly developing field with a lot to be discovered.
So an experiment done in 1929 when we knew almost nothing about math education applies how? There is too much different between now and then for the experiment to be meaningful. And further, the summary is poor. The article is a little better and refers to only arithmetic being taught in the early grades in 1929 and taking that out not having much impact on students ability to pick up the ability to reason with arithmetic later on. That should make sense. If the older curriculum doesn't focus on teaching students how to reason with the skills and concepts they know, they won't be able to reason well with them.
Fast forward to today and there is a huge volume of research and understanding about how students learn mathematics and successful ways to help students learn to reason and apply what they are learning to useful situations. It does not follow that eliminating Math from the early grades now is the way to go. Professor Grey should stick to subjects he knows, and apparently that's not Math education.
Where he is dead on is that, on the whole, elementary teachers know far too little about math or how to teach it. Very little is successfully making it from teacher education programs about how to properly teach mathematics. Basically those that choose to teach elementary school are the ones that hate math, are afraid of it, or can't do it. That's not true in all cases, but it's true in such a vast majority that it is a significant source of the problem for why our country isn't farther ahead in mathematics. That still doesn't mean take the math out of elementary school. It just means that the standards should be drastically raised for what elementary teachers should know and be able to do with mathematics. In short, the solution is to teach elementary teachers more math and more about how to teach math. The problem is that teacher education programs have a perverse incentive to make their programs easier to keep their numbers up to make more money, and math is the roadblock for many of their candidates. The result is no higher math requirements unless all teacher education programs are forced to have them. We should make sure the state requirements force them to have them.
Oh BS. Jeebus people. It's not a fricking conspiracy. Private health insurance does cost a fortune and you need to factor that into your decision to go as an independent. If you haven't done that, that's the stupid part. But that same fortune is being paid by your employer if you work for a company that provides it (Or by everyone through higher taxes in a public health care system). The OP has a few options. Find a group that you can join up with as others have mentioned, go with a Blues plan because they are required to accept everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions in return for the various benefits and overcharging they get to do, or by an individual private plan. You may as well factor the price of the Blues plan in your decision to go on your own. A family plan depending on options and your state will be $10-15,000 or more a year. You can pay substantially less and get substantially less coverage by going with something like an HSA type plan where you prefund a tax free account and then can spend from that for higher deductibles and copays. Depending on your family's health and situation that may make more sense. Bottom line is if you can't afford to pay for health insurance simply don't leave a situation where someone else is paying for it. If you have no choice, lower your cost of living until you can afford it. There are always choices.
I think a SAGE notebook is what you are looking for. It's basically multiple different open source mathematics software packages (such as Maxima) glued together with python. The notebook can typeset it automatically for you or you can output the LaTeX. Well you may like the custom system you have better, but SAGE is pretty slick since it goes into a wide range of math. I suppose any customizations you would like could be contributed to SAGE.
So you're taking people that smoked and quit, then take up a new bad habit-eating too much. That's not surprising, nor does it provide any evidence that smokers are cheaper for health care overall.
The diseases the smokers die of aren't all sudden ones and as another poster pointed out, cancer is extremely expensive to treat. A small increase in the incidence of cancer would pay for many many years of health care for non smokers. Over all I'm still betting smokers cost much much more.
As for my caffeine and nicotine addictions, I'll deal with them myself, in my own good time. I'll stop smoking some day. Probably the day the doctor pronounces me dead. And, it's none of YOUR business.
It wouldn't be any of my business if I didn't have to pay more for your health care because of your choices. If you paid enough more for your health care than the people that make better choices then it wouldn't be anyone's business. But you don't, so it is. That's the real problem with the just let the morons do all the blow they want to attitude. They end up in the ER (because they typically have no health insurance) or killing unrelated people in traffic accidents or whatever. Those both represent large costs to people that avoid the behavior. It doesn't matter if the drugs are cheaper from making them legal, they still cost something and people that are addicted will still do whatever they need to to get more including crime and murder. Your argument would have been stronger if you could make a cohesive case for there being less crime and costs on a total picture basis, but you didn't bother with that. Also, your darwinian argument would be better if people tended to die quickly on drugs, but the majority just get strung out and are a drag on society.
I'm not really sold either way on it. If someone presented a really convincing case that the costs really were lower and particularly lower for the people that avoid the crap, then I don't really care. But most of the arguments seem to be from people that just want easier access to more drugs.
That is why those who first warned of peak oil, and general limits to growth, also mentioned that it was necessary to start preparing for the peak BEFORE it happened, one or even two decades before if possible. The current salvation is the slowed down economy, but it won't last forever, and demand will soon hit the ceiling again... which will likely cause further economic hardships, which in turn will have a direct influence on the development and deployment of alternatives.
Of course we should have started preparing long ago, but the basics of a political system are that politicians work to make themselves appear to be doing good and that usually means short term. Maybe you live in the US if you refer to the sudden flurry of green initiatives. Europe has been working on it much more steadily for years. But also you're missing the very basics of the economics here that may mitigate some of the worst effects of running out of petroleum. There are several moderators that make it unlikely that running out of oil will be a sudden and catastrophic shock. One is the demand influence that you mention. When costs of goods go up, people will indeed face some hardships, but that will reduce demand and act as one moderator on the catastrophic drop. The other is that oil is not likely to run out suddenly, it's just going to get more expensive, which acts as another moderator to a sudden and catastrophic decline. The cost goes up, the quantity demanded goes down, and it lasts a little longer. At the same time of each of these effects, alternative energy sources become more competitive. And the estimates for alternative fossil fuel sources, though they of course vary, are rather large which makes it unlikely there will be a major crash, just an expensive adjustment. How expensive and how much hardship there will be depends greatly on how fast cheap oil runs out and how fast cheaper processes for developing other fossil fuels and alternative energies are developed. On the other hand, expensive adjustment does mean opportunity to make profits, so your esteemed corporate overlords may just be able to exploit that profit opportunity if they can be the one that comes up with the competitive process. That's speaking charitably of course. They'd rather corner the market and create a monopoly, and our and our short sighted government's job is to avoid that.
It will always be playing catch up however. And last time I checked, The Sims is the best selling PC title of all time. It is also an old game that the Wine developers still haven't gotten to work. If they can't get the best selling game of all time to work, that seriously hurts your reputation as a true alternative to Windows for gaming.
Since they haven't claimed to he a true alternative for Windows gaming, it can't really hurt their reputation. And since WINE hasn't finished reimplementing the Windows API, it's not surprising that certain software or games don't work yet. It doesn't matter if the title is old or new if it depends on one or more components that haven't been finished yet.
I probably wouldn't bother with WINE for gaming either, even if I did play games, but that doesn't invalidate the OP's point. If WINE continues improving it will eventually finish the Windows API. The good news is that since MS has managed to lock everyone into Windows partly through that API, they can only change it so much, and not at all really for the vast catalog of software that already exists and many people would like to be able to run on Linux some day.
iPhone introduction put the smartphone front and center into the mainstream and turned a business device into a consumer one. Prior to the iPhone's introduction smartphones were used by enterprise and a tiny group of geeks.
Nonsense - Internet enabled phones that could run apps were around, and used by consumers, years before the Iphone appeared. The Iphone had, and still has relatively, small market share - there was no sudden jump. Even in the high end, people are buying far more from companies like Nokia than from Apple.
No, the smartphone really was almost entirely a business device before the iPhone and there was a sudden jump in market share for Apple in the smartphone market. Look at the market share graphs and they tell the story of very fast growth. I suppose you could call that not sudden, but it would be semantics. Nokia still does sell more smartphone according to Gartner's report, but their share is falling, while Apple's is rapidly growing. That's evidence Apple is changing the game, along with most of the other manufacturers copying much of what Apple is doing.
Oh please - "apps" were around long before Apple. Applications and stores already existed. Decent games already existed. Updates existed. "Twoo usability" is a no true scotsman fallacy.
Maybe, app stores existed before but I'd never heard of them, and neither did pretty much anybody else. I don't know if you could buy over the air and run it straight on your phone or not, but the fact that few have heard of them is evidence that they weren't really used and the usability probably wasn't very good. There probably weren't very many apps either. You poo poo the usability change, but the proof is that the web browsers on previous internet enabled phones pretty much didn't get used because they were horrible. Enter the iPhone and there was a huge spike in data usage per device. Since then there have been massive improvements in browsers from other devices such as Palm's and Android's.
Thats MS's desire. Its been shown that when people are overwhelmed with choices they go with what they know.
No, that's not really their desire, but they did acquiesce and that does happen to be a known phenomenon that will likely somewhat mitigate the effects that the browser ballot screen is intended to have on Internet Explorer's market share. MS's true desire is to keep the status quo and not let any consumer have an easy chance to choose anything else but their product. Evidence is that they have fought tooth and nail ever since the EU proposed the ballot screen and only gave up after spending oodles of cash fighting it and realizing they couldn't win.
The phenomenon you refer to is the paradox of choice. People either go with what they know, make no decision, or make an irrational one. Wikipedia redirects to a book about the subject, but the article on decision theory has a short section on the concept in general.
Yes, and you'd think that would apply since it's law and common sense, but common sense went out the window long ago when patents came into the picture. Rambushad patents on things that were being discussed in the JEDEC RAM standards body, but failed to disclose that, then later sued once those technologies became successful. How that didn't meet the standards for fraud or laches, or any other law that would have prevented them from profiting from what they did, I don't know.
It's even more evil than that. Only some publishers give out those digital texts to students (even those with registered disabilities), and many of those that do drag their feet and sometimes never supply the texts. I think it depends on the subject, but there's a very low hit rate with math or science books that have a lot of notation in them. Those books almost certainly exist in some text and LaTeX form at some point, which would be ideal for some of the experimental screen reader projects and those that can see if the text is blown up. But they'll never ever give out the LaTeX sources. Those same books are a near failure to run through OCR. None of the current commercial systems handle math notation well. Every book nowadays is stored at some point in an electronic format. Some take a little more work than others to get into an accessible form, but not existing in an electronic form is no longer an excuse.
I even had a professor that had written the text and had the LaTeX sources, but was prevented by the publisher from giving those out.
There are two different markets that are often reported (or a subsection of a market really). Mobile phones in general and smartphones particularly. Even the article you linked about the Western Europe market makes this distinction if you had read it. It gives Apple 4% overall but a growth from 16% in 2Q09 to 24% in 3Q09in the smartphone market. That's serious growth in the section of the market that's considered to have the most growth potential by most analysts. There's a lot of upside left that smartphones could do that they don't do yet. But the high growth rate in a high growth market is why Apple gets so much free publicity for the iPhone.
Here's a recent report of overall and smartphone market share. Samsung barely makes the smartphone report, hence it's not that much of a stretch to say they are new to smartphones.