In my observation, the only way to really curb cheating is to make the punishment for cheating extremely severe AND to not simply give the same exam year after year. The risk of a very severe punishment like expulsion and basically black-balling you by putting "expelled due to cheating" on your transcript discourages the typical casual cheater from even seriously thinking about cheating. If your school costs a bunch of money, this is even more effective as being kicked out with a $50-100k+ debt and no diploma is a worse fate than simply being kicked out with no diploma. Many professional programs (such as the one I attended) have this system and cheating is practically unheard of as we are far too scared to even think about it.
The other part of the equation is the faculty needs to know that people can and will talk about the exams afterward (even if it's a general "here's the stuff that was emphasized on the exam" or "here's the kinds of questions they asked" rather than specific questions) and they cannot simply reuse the same stuff year after year. I know, asking test makers to make new tests or refresh their question pool frequently is akin to asking a geek to use Windows Me for a month, but it needs to be done in order to make a decent test. The worst offenders I've seen are in professional certification exams as they use a fairly small pool of questions and rarely update it, but charge $500, $1000, or more to take the test. Then they whine about how people are scoring too well and try to sue some for copyright infringement (the line "takers shall not discuss or reproduce any part of this test, including reconstruction of questions from memory" is the thing they like to put in the tests.)
The only problem is that certificate is what's needed to get a job in most cases. It's the equivalent of "pics or it didn't happen" in the business world.
The real #1 job of the professor is to write grant proposals and get research money. The #2 job is to run the lab and manage the grad students effectively enough that enough papers get written. Job #3, and it is usually waaaay down on the totem pole, is to give the occasional lecture. Grad students (as TAs) do much of the actual teaching.
Aspartame is a synthetic dipeptide comprised of aspartic acid and phenylalanine most frequently made through hydrolysis of methanol. The reason aspartame-containing products containing aspartame are labeled because the dipeptide is cleaved during digestion and phenylalanine is released, which is toxic in large amounts to people who have the congenital disease phenylketonuria (PKU). Some aspartame is made with bacterial enzymes performing the hydrolysis instead of strong acids or bases, but the labeling was in place well before the use of bacterial enzymes.
Oh, and natural drinks can also be harmful to people who have PKU. Infants with PKU are frequently fed synthetic formula without phenylalanine instead of breast milk or as a major supplement to small amounts of breast milk because breast milk contains phenylalanine (regardless of the mother's diet.) Other types of milks and bean-containing products are also high in phennylalanine regardless if they are "natural" or "organic" and must be avoided or eaten in small quantities.
The way that Monsanto prevents farmers from using the seed products of GM crops is due to lawsuits, not due to the lack of viability of the seeds themselves. You agree to a license saying you will not use the harvested grain as seed when you purchase and plant the seed. If you buy seed in bags, the license is on a tag on the bags and you are presumed to have agreed to the license if you have planted the seed, similar to EULAs on shrinkwrapped software.
He was referring to the cord that plugs into the wall receptacle and delivers AC power to the power brick, not the DC output from the brick to the laptop.
The Tea Party people use the term "Tea Partiers" to describe themselves. It was liberals in some media outlets that started to use the term "teabagger" as a snarky, derogatory comment. If you're going to try to sound smart, at least get your own facts straight first.
The "5000 applicants for 100 spots" bit is not the full story. A local medical school has about 100 spots and publishes their admission figures annually. They receive approximately 1000 applications for those spots. However, only about 200-300 of the applications meet their published minimum standards for consideration (minimum GPA, residency in state or in a contiguous state, minimum MCAT score) and are complete applications. That means that the other 800 or so applications are from people who either did not submit a complete application or still applied despite knowing their scores are below the minimum cutoff and they won't be considered for admission. They accept roughly 130-140 applicants, since 30-40% historically have been accepted by multiple schools and choose to go elsewhere. Thus the acceptance rate is really ~50% rather than ~10%.
What everybody is forgetting is that there are opportunity costs in going into medicine. Salary of physicians is somewhat raised by the fact that med school enrollment is small and the debt load is stunningly high, but if you remove much of that, salaries will still remain relatively high due to opportunity costs. People who go into medicine are among the very best and brightest and the road from graduating high school to becoming an attending physician is long and very difficult. It takes quite a bit of reward at the end of the day to persuade the best and brightest who are interested in the sciences to go into the practice of medicine rather than in some related field like biomedical engineering, drug design, and such. People in healthcare-related and other scientific industries make pretty decent money with a lot less time and difficulty in school, so that's really what puts a floor on physician salaries since that's what they're really competing with. Not to mention there are a fair number of white-collar jobs that aren't in the sciences that somebody who is actually intelligent and has some interpersonal relationship skills (like many physicians have) can advance very well in and earn six figures.
You don't even need $400-500 worth of parts to do an HTPC if you're willing to have a micro-ATX system rather than a mini-ITX type of system. Just about any old desktop made in the past half-dozen years or so will be plenty powerful enough, and you can often get them for free or close to it. Put in a 1-1.5 TB HDD for about a hundred bucks, an ATSC tuner card for about $50, slap MythTV on it, and there you go.
For the second point, isn't that what a serial cable or IR blaster are for? Your DVR just tells the cable box to change channels immediately at the start of the recording time by firing up the IR blaster or sending a signal over the serial cable. You can omit a serial port, but there's no way anybody can prevent somebody from using an IR blaster to automatically have a DVR change the cable box channel. It's impossible to determine if it's a human pressing on a remote control or a computer hitting an IR blaster changing the channel.
You are correct in the fact that you don't need a big case for good airflow due to ducting. However, you need a larger case to fit large enough fans to get good airflow quietly. A 1U server case generally has good enough airflow to passively cool several hundred watts' worth of CPUs, but those little fans have to spin so quickly to provide that airflow that they're almost deafening.
These mini-ITX units are more or less laptops in a slightly larger case and without an integrated monitor and keyboard. They generally have to use low-TDP processors (45-65 watts or less) because you can't fit a high-capacity ATX PSU in a mini-ITX case and the small fans required by the small cases can't dissipate the heat from high-TDP parts. They are popular for HTPCs and business desktops since you generally want a small, unobtrusive machine that can be easily connected to a separate monitor, has standard, replaceable parts, and does not need to be particularly powerful. But you certainly won't see anybody who does much for heavy work using one of these machines. They'll continue to use larger desktop boards and cases that fit high-TDP, high-performance parts and multiple disks.
Using a larger case to fit a smaller board is not necessarily a bad idea. Larger cases can accommodate more disks, a larger number of larger fans for better cooling, and give more room to work in while building and maintaining the computer. Mini-ITX cases are seriously small and a real PITA to work with, but putting one of those boards in a micro-ATX case solves that problem very well. I learned my lesson trying to shoehorn parts into cases that were technically large enough but a very tight fit with everything installed and now almost always buy a case that fits a board one size larger than what I'm intending to install. A good desktop setup with an ATX motherboard, a decent GPU (which is generally about 9-10" long) and a few disks is a tight fit in an ATX mid-tower case but has plenty of room in an Extended ATX-capable full-tower case.
Basically, it won't do much beyond making the config menus look prettier and be able to detect larger disks more easily. Since UEFI can actually contain a BIOS payload, most OSes don't even know or care that there is UEFI underneath somewhere. But that being said, most newer OSes support UEFI natively. Most Unixes have supported it since the early 2000s when EFI first showed up on Itanics and then MS followed suit much later for x86/amd64 Windows with Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1.
I doubt this has much if anything to do with the *AAs since UEFI is basically a BIOS replacement and apparently doesn't require any DRM schemes to be in place. If the *AAs were behind this, bet your bottom dollar that multiple layers of DRM would be absolutely mandatory. I bet it has to deal with larger disk support and making a "friendlier-looking" pre-boot environment.
Linux doesn't really need "fat" binaries if all you want to target is the amd64/x86 arches. Almost all amd64 distros have the ia32-emul-libs installed and can execute x86 binaries. Also, the vast majority of Linux programs are distributed as C/C++ source and generally very little in that source is arch-dependent.
Now if you wanted to make a hybrid x86/armel binary for netbooks or MIDs...then you might want a "fat" binary as there is no compatibility between the two. But just distributing source is so much easier.
You'll just have sports practice in the morning. That would frequently happen with certain sports when I was in high school as one group would use the gym after school and another would use it before school. It wasn't a big deal for the morning group to show up at 6:30 (school started at 8:00), so it should be even less of a problem if school started at 10:00. Shoot, summer workouts when there was no school in session generally started at 7:00-8:00 because it gets so bloody hot outside in the summer here.
Those two are completely different situations, and for absolutely obvious reasons. There's no "bias" to it.
A person throwing a beer bottle at the cops at a protest will at best get a very, very brief mention if it is mentioned at all. Things like that are common and dare I say almost expected out of an angry mob, so the fact that somebody threw a beer bottle at armored riot police is a real non-issue. Racial insults said by whites against non-whites are something that society deems absolutely 100% unacceptable and as such, there is a very strong negative reaction to the group the slur hurler supposedly is affiliated with. Thus, there's little to gain in a conservative guy sneaking into a liberal protest and chucking a bottle of Bud at a cop, but a liberal guy sneaking into a Tea Party protest and saying "Obama's a $RACIAL_SLUR" can cause a lot of damage to the Tea Party because it will be all over the morning news the next day. This probability of causing more damage to the opposition makes it much more likely that a "plant" is responsible. I'm not saying that the person/people were actually from the opposition, only that it's more likely.
I'm not convinced the person/people who yelled that stuff and spat were actually real Tea Party members/protesters against health care. It seems *awfully* convenient that one of the people in with the protesters did probably the one thing that would most discredit the protest in the eyes of the nation and would be guaranteed to get a lot of news coverage. It would be an awfully effective tactic for somebody who actually supports the bill to go out there, pretend to be a protester, and then spit and yell racial slurs to discredit the protesters. It's not like that sort of thing hasn't happened before...
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In my observation, the only way to really curb cheating is to make the punishment for cheating extremely severe AND to not simply give the same exam year after year. The risk of a very severe punishment like expulsion and basically black-balling you by putting "expelled due to cheating" on your transcript discourages the typical casual cheater from even seriously thinking about cheating. If your school costs a bunch of money, this is even more effective as being kicked out with a $50-100k+ debt and no diploma is a worse fate than simply being kicked out with no diploma. Many professional programs (such as the one I attended) have this system and cheating is practically unheard of as we are far too scared to even think about it.
The other part of the equation is the faculty needs to know that people can and will talk about the exams afterward (even if it's a general "here's the stuff that was emphasized on the exam" or "here's the kinds of questions they asked" rather than specific questions) and they cannot simply reuse the same stuff year after year. I know, asking test makers to make new tests or refresh their question pool frequently is akin to asking a geek to use Windows Me for a month, but it needs to be done in order to make a decent test. The worst offenders I've seen are in professional certification exams as they use a fairly small pool of questions and rarely update it, but charge $500, $1000, or more to take the test. Then they whine about how people are scoring too well and try to sue some for copyright infringement (the line "takers shall not discuss or reproduce any part of this test, including reconstruction of questions from memory" is the thing they like to put in the tests.)
The only problem is that certificate is what's needed to get a job in most cases. It's the equivalent of "pics or it didn't happen" in the business world.
.
The real #1 job of the professor is to write grant proposals and get research money. The #2 job is to run the lab and manage the grad students effectively enough that enough papers get written. Job #3, and it is usually waaaay down on the totem pole, is to give the occasional lecture. Grad students (as TAs) do much of the actual teaching.
Aspartame is a synthetic dipeptide comprised of aspartic acid and phenylalanine most frequently made through hydrolysis of methanol. The reason aspartame-containing products containing aspartame are labeled because the dipeptide is cleaved during digestion and phenylalanine is released, which is toxic in large amounts to people who have the congenital disease phenylketonuria (PKU). Some aspartame is made with bacterial enzymes performing the hydrolysis instead of strong acids or bases, but the labeling was in place well before the use of bacterial enzymes.
Oh, and natural drinks can also be harmful to people who have PKU. Infants with PKU are frequently fed synthetic formula without phenylalanine instead of breast milk or as a major supplement to small amounts of breast milk because breast milk contains phenylalanine (regardless of the mother's diet.) Other types of milks and bean-containing products are also high in phennylalanine regardless if they are "natural" or "organic" and must be avoided or eaten in small quantities.
The way that Monsanto prevents farmers from using the seed products of GM crops is due to lawsuits, not due to the lack of viability of the seeds themselves. You agree to a license saying you will not use the harvested grain as seed when you purchase and plant the seed. If you buy seed in bags, the license is on a tag on the bags and you are presumed to have agreed to the license if you have planted the seed, similar to EULAs on shrinkwrapped software.
Most mobile phones made in the last couple years have moved away from proprietary connectors and toward using micro USB as a charging interface.
He was referring to the cord that plugs into the wall receptacle and delivers AC power to the power brick, not the DC output from the brick to the laptop.
They do, it's called "residency."
The Tea Party people use the term "Tea Partiers" to describe themselves. It was liberals in some media outlets that started to use the term "teabagger" as a snarky, derogatory comment. If you're going to try to sound smart, at least get your own facts straight first.
The "5000 applicants for 100 spots" bit is not the full story. A local medical school has about 100 spots and publishes their admission figures annually. They receive approximately 1000 applications for those spots. However, only about 200-300 of the applications meet their published minimum standards for consideration (minimum GPA, residency in state or in a contiguous state, minimum MCAT score) and are complete applications. That means that the other 800 or so applications are from people who either did not submit a complete application or still applied despite knowing their scores are below the minimum cutoff and they won't be considered for admission. They accept roughly 130-140 applicants, since 30-40% historically have been accepted by multiple schools and choose to go elsewhere. Thus the acceptance rate is really ~50% rather than ~10%.
What everybody is forgetting is that there are opportunity costs in going into medicine. Salary of physicians is somewhat raised by the fact that med school enrollment is small and the debt load is stunningly high, but if you remove much of that, salaries will still remain relatively high due to opportunity costs. People who go into medicine are among the very best and brightest and the road from graduating high school to becoming an attending physician is long and very difficult. It takes quite a bit of reward at the end of the day to persuade the best and brightest who are interested in the sciences to go into the practice of medicine rather than in some related field like biomedical engineering, drug design, and such. People in healthcare-related and other scientific industries make pretty decent money with a lot less time and difficulty in school, so that's really what puts a floor on physician salaries since that's what they're really competing with. Not to mention there are a fair number of white-collar jobs that aren't in the sciences that somebody who is actually intelligent and has some interpersonal relationship skills (like many physicians have) can advance very well in and earn six figures.
You don't even need $400-500 worth of parts to do an HTPC if you're willing to have a micro-ATX system rather than a mini-ITX type of system. Just about any old desktop made in the past half-dozen years or so will be plenty powerful enough, and you can often get them for free or close to it. Put in a 1-1.5 TB HDD for about a hundred bucks, an ATSC tuner card for about $50, slap MythTV on it, and there you go.
For the second point, isn't that what a serial cable or IR blaster are for? Your DVR just tells the cable box to change channels immediately at the start of the recording time by firing up the IR blaster or sending a signal over the serial cable. You can omit a serial port, but there's no way anybody can prevent somebody from using an IR blaster to automatically have a DVR change the cable box channel. It's impossible to determine if it's a human pressing on a remote control or a computer hitting an IR blaster changing the channel.
You are correct in the fact that you don't need a big case for good airflow due to ducting. However, you need a larger case to fit large enough fans to get good airflow quietly. A 1U server case generally has good enough airflow to passively cool several hundred watts' worth of CPUs, but those little fans have to spin so quickly to provide that airflow that they're almost deafening.
These mini-ITX units are more or less laptops in a slightly larger case and without an integrated monitor and keyboard. They generally have to use low-TDP processors (45-65 watts or less) because you can't fit a high-capacity ATX PSU in a mini-ITX case and the small fans required by the small cases can't dissipate the heat from high-TDP parts. They are popular for HTPCs and business desktops since you generally want a small, unobtrusive machine that can be easily connected to a separate monitor, has standard, replaceable parts, and does not need to be particularly powerful. But you certainly won't see anybody who does much for heavy work using one of these machines. They'll continue to use larger desktop boards and cases that fit high-TDP, high-performance parts and multiple disks.
Using a larger case to fit a smaller board is not necessarily a bad idea. Larger cases can accommodate more disks, a larger number of larger fans for better cooling, and give more room to work in while building and maintaining the computer. Mini-ITX cases are seriously small and a real PITA to work with, but putting one of those boards in a micro-ATX case solves that problem very well. I learned my lesson trying to shoehorn parts into cases that were technically large enough but a very tight fit with everything installed and now almost always buy a case that fits a board one size larger than what I'm intending to install. A good desktop setup with an ATX motherboard, a decent GPU (which is generally about 9-10" long) and a few disks is a tight fit in an ATX mid-tower case but has plenty of room in an Extended ATX-capable full-tower case.
Basically, it won't do much beyond making the config menus look prettier and be able to detect larger disks more easily. Since UEFI can actually contain a BIOS payload, most OSes don't even know or care that there is UEFI underneath somewhere. But that being said, most newer OSes support UEFI natively. Most Unixes have supported it since the early 2000s when EFI first showed up on Itanics and then MS followed suit much later for x86/amd64 Windows with Windows Server 2008 and Vista SP1.
I doubt this has much if anything to do with the *AAs since UEFI is basically a BIOS replacement and apparently doesn't require any DRM schemes to be in place. If the *AAs were behind this, bet your bottom dollar that multiple layers of DRM would be absolutely mandatory. I bet it has to deal with larger disk support and making a "friendlier-looking" pre-boot environment.
...as a future SEC employee!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Linux doesn't really need "fat" binaries if all you want to target is the amd64/x86 arches. Almost all amd64 distros have the ia32-emul-libs installed and can execute x86 binaries. Also, the vast majority of Linux programs are distributed as C/C++ source and generally very little in that source is arch-dependent.
Now if you wanted to make a hybrid x86/armel binary for netbooks or MIDs...then you might want a "fat" binary as there is no compatibility between the two. But just distributing source is so much easier.
Actually, I bet that they are being overtaxed right now...
If you think beer is gross, you're drinking the wrong beer!
You'll just have sports practice in the morning. That would frequently happen with certain sports when I was in high school as one group would use the gym after school and another would use it before school. It wasn't a big deal for the morning group to show up at 6:30 (school started at 8:00), so it should be even less of a problem if school started at 10:00. Shoot, summer workouts when there was no school in session generally started at 7:00-8:00 because it gets so bloody hot outside in the summer here.
And then they'll become an emo singer to let out all of that teenage angst. More emo singers is the last thing we need!
Those two are completely different situations, and for absolutely obvious reasons. There's no "bias" to it.
A person throwing a beer bottle at the cops at a protest will at best get a very, very brief mention if it is mentioned at all. Things like that are common and dare I say almost expected out of an angry mob, so the fact that somebody threw a beer bottle at armored riot police is a real non-issue. Racial insults said by whites against non-whites are something that society deems absolutely 100% unacceptable and as such, there is a very strong negative reaction to the group the slur hurler supposedly is affiliated with. Thus, there's little to gain in a conservative guy sneaking into a liberal protest and chucking a bottle of Bud at a cop, but a liberal guy sneaking into a Tea Party protest and saying "Obama's a $RACIAL_SLUR" can cause a lot of damage to the Tea Party because it will be all over the morning news the next day. This probability of causing more damage to the opposition makes it much more likely that a "plant" is responsible. I'm not saying that the person/people were actually from the opposition, only that it's more likely.
And how is that different from Democrats blaming everything on G.W. Bush?
I'm not convinced the person/people who yelled that stuff and spat were actually real Tea Party members/protesters against health care. It seems *awfully* convenient that one of the people in with the protesters did probably the one thing that would most discredit the protest in the eyes of the nation and would be guaranteed to get a lot of news coverage. It would be an awfully effective tactic for somebody who actually supports the bill to go out there, pretend to be a protester, and then spit and yell racial slurs to discredit the protesters. It's not like that sort of thing hasn't happened before...