Probably the same way that the US Navy got my contact information to harass me when I was in high school. The school just gets authority to collect it and to hell with your wishes. Compared with the years of harassment and insults from the jack asses at the Navy, this is of somewhat lesser concern.
But, it's still a concern, the last thing we need is to condition kids to think that it's normal for schools to spy on your behavior outside of school hours.
Because I'm familiar enough with the federal government to realize that they make a ton of mistakes due to the scope of their work. It's incredibly hard to predict what legislation is going to look like when passed and more likely the small government folks thought they could lower taxes for the rich by making the USPTO depend primarily on fees to conduct its affairs.
Do you dispute the fact that the USPTO is funded primarily by fees these days? Because it means nothing who controls the purse strings to the issue. They get their money through application fees and if they start turning down a lot of the fees there's a risk of having fewer people trying to get patents.
It's a conflict of interest for them to turn down patents when their funding is derived mainly from patent fees.
And the court is another level of concern, but a lot of these things wouldn't get to the court if they weren't granted in the first place.
That's the thing, if there's actual bullying going on, there's a paper trail of sorts. No need to actually spy, when a kid complains about things being posted to their page, they can just show the principal.
It's a bit of an odd question where exactly the line should be as the bullying these days is more likely to continue past the point of a student being at the same school or even in the same state.
No, the reason why this isn't being fixed is that a significant number of voters vote for politicians that run on a platform that includes deregulation and freeing the market of even modest restraints on bad behavior. And are quite vocal in shouting down anybody that suggests even modest reforms as being elitists and pushing for a totalitarian, nanny state.
The main problem with democracy is that it depends upon the voters actually being interested in voting for people that represent their best interests. As long as one party routinely votes against the self interests of their own voters, and hamstrings the other party, you get this sort of a mess.
The US is hardly unique in having problems that need fixing but can't be fixed because the politicians aren't interested in it. Most countries are like that. Assuming you even get to vote there.
You're missing the point. A lot of this was unintentional. They made the USPTO run on fees that were charged for patents which gave the USPTO and incentive to rubber stamp patents while not receiving sufficient funding to cover the cost of having patent examiners that could do the investigation that they used to do.
What needs to happen is that the USPTO needs to go back to being a government service the user fees need to be based upon the amount of time and energy it takes to deal with the application. And while we're at it, the duration of the patent period should go from the point where the first application is received to a reasonable period after that. For technology 7 years is likely more than adequate as a lot of that IP is no longer of value several years later.
And obviously, anybody filing for a patent on software gets to volunteer to test the prototype rectal exam bots.
If they wouldn't oversell their capacity to such a drastic degree that wouldn't be a problem. Bottom line here is that the ISPs aren't exactly writing the ToS in a neutral fashion, they're writing it in a way that disadvantages the subscriber and where the subscriber has basically no say other than to opt out completely.
Right now, I can sign with Comcast, that can't keep a stable connection; Centurylink that's OK, but slow; Hughes Net, which has satellite latency and Clear that has it's own bandwidth problems.
Now, if I had real choices and the contracts were more dissimilar it would be different. But, the ISPs oversell their capacity and fail to do anything to make things better. Meanwhile I have the choice of a 5mbps uncapped connection or one that's somewhat faster but has a cap below what I use some months.
The range of the estimate increased which means that it could be from 1.5 to 6. Or possibly outside of that range, but it's likely to be between those figures. Considering the state of the economy the last 5 years, a downward revision is to be expected.
The question is whether or not that downward revision remains as the economy heats up and people can afford to go back to wasting so much energy.
If the GOP had the Whitehouse it would need to be in the news regularly because they'd be looking for ways to make negative progress on the issue.
Obama has actually done some things to move things forward, it's just that he gets crap from the right for doing it, even as the GOP refuses to assist in any way. I take it you didn't notice a while back when the gas mileage requirements were raised.
The problem is that opting out of the ToS is a non-starter in many areas. Around here I get two viable choices for internet, I have to sign with one of them if I want to have an internet connection and I don't have the opportunity to negotiate the terms of the agreement.
What we really need is for the courts to start recognizing that these aren't contracts, these are demands placed on people with limited options and in some cases all of the options contain the same fine print.
That's not true. They don't collect the information coming down the pipe. They collect the information the same way on their network that they do on the network in general. The profit motive for them to provide the improved connections is more impressions per hour. As well as fewer people blocking ads because of slow connection speeds. And hopefully scare the other ISPs into improving the connection speeds so that it happens all over the place.
What else did you expect them to do? Other than not even try, they took the only other reasonably option other than fully complying.
It's not different from the US. See how long you can operate a server that provides child pornography and methods of taking down a plane before the server is shut down and confiscated.
The law is what the law is in the country and until and unless the policy isn't enforced you're options are to not go there, to leave or to fight. And fighting is often times not viable in countries like China where the party makes the laws and enforces them.
Most other ISPs do? I don't think any of the ISPs I've ever used have wasted their energy doing that. They stopped giving out static IPs for free a long time ago and they've never guaranteed the kind of uptime or bandwidth necessary to make a server useful. And many ISPs cap the connection anyways.
For people who care about those things, a residential plan is just not going to cut it. Now, a personal server for something that's only of interest to the extended family isn't likely to be something that's going to cause enough trouble to be worth worrying about.
Now, maybe in parts of the country where there's FiOS service or uncapped connections capable of more than 5mbps that's not the case.
Like the other poster said, vi is feature complete, they implemented all the features that it needed ages ago. The only patches going into it now are compatibility ones and the occasional bug fix. But even that is fairly rare because it's mature code. It also remains the default text editor in some *NIX variants because it's historically what's been used and works very effectively once you've gotten over the suicidal learning curve.
Vim has some nice features, but you're best not counting on them if you want to be able to log into any *NIX system out there without having functionality missing.
And your point is? Strong bases can burn tissue just as well as strong acids can.
It's alternative medicine so it's bunk, but dismissing it out of hand by drawing questionable conclusions makes you look just as foolish. It was the GP that said that these bacteria would raise the pH, not the article he was referring to.
But it's also worth realizing that people with cavities are also more likely to have a dentist spending a prolonged period of time examining their mouths. And probably more time during each visit. Consequently having the dentist notice something on the x-rays that hasn't yet gotten to the point of being cancerous. I know I've had a biopsy done just to make sure that it was just a benign cyst.
I also wonder what the data looks like if you normalize it for people that have cavities because they take poor care of their teeth and individuals that just go long periods of time between seeing the dentists. It would be interesting to know if there's a difference in the rates.
It's not the DVR's fault per se, it's a combination of the DVR and the broadcasters not using technology that permits the DVR to stop recording only when the program is finished. In some parts of the world the broadcaster embeds a signal that tells the DVR what program is on. That way if the game goes into overtime, the DVR knows that it's still going and you don't miss the extra action.
I believe in parts of Europe they have it figured out so that you don't have to worry about missing the end of the football match.
Right. Vi remains viable because it's still an incredibly useful text editor that has a fairly large user base. When a project gets to the point where it's just a small number of non-coders that want to see it continue, it's finished. The likelihood of attracting developers is slim, unless they're either using the software or being paid for it.
And being paid for it usually means a substantial number of users as I doubt that the software is worth hundreds of dollars to the submitter. And hundreds on a periodic basis.
Right, also don't forget that music wasn't paying musicians very well even before the latest wave of bedroom mixing was going on. I've been reading about this for at least a decade and it's been a problem for decades before that.
Right and the distinction there is important. For years people bought tracks that they didn't really want because they were on the same album as the tracks they did want. Even with singles, there was always the B side which was usually forgettable.
With the ability to just buy the tracks you want, I'm not surprised that people are skipping the ones they haven't heard. The studios don't pay enough attention to the other tracks to make it worthwhile. It's gotten so bad that it's not likely to be long before the album goes tits up, except in exceptional cases. It wasn't until I started to listen to music from the '70s where there was more focus on the album experience that I understood why it was so wrong to be asked to buy an album for 2 or 3 good tracks.
I'd be happy being able to watch something while recording two other things. Or for the recordings to start and stop at the appropriate time. I regularly miss the end of things because the DVR doesn't know what to stop.
I'd also be happy if there wasn't so much lag and the box that came with my TV service was easily replaceable with something that wasn't from DirecTV. I'm not sure who makes them, but they're ridiculously sluggish and don't perform as well as the one we had when we got the service.
In the 1950s the spread of income was much smaller than it is today. Most people didn't need to go to college in order to make a decent wage and those that did go to college found that the government was picking up most of the tab. As recently as the 1980s the government was subsidizing the tuition to the tune of about 90%. Which meant that you could afford to work an entry level job at McDonalds during the summer and not have to work during the school year.
Bottom line here is that if you exclude the top 10% earning households, the average drops substantially. They earned 45% of the money, but only made up 10% of the population. If you exclude the top 10%, that figure for average drops substantially making that house cost nearly 7 years worth of income. I don't have access to quality numbers, but you can't pretend like income distribution doesn't make a difference, because it makes a huge difference.
It disturbs me a great deal when people like you trot out statistics that you don't understand to try and claim that the poverty that exists in America doesn't exist. Because it clearly does exist.
Stress and pressure do horrible things to the brain. Not to mention that the choices these kids are pressured into making so they don't waste their gift tend not to be particularly good for the hypothalamus either.
I don't personally care, by the time I was 8 I was already smarter than most of the adults I came into contact with. And at 32 I'm smarter than I've ever been. Mostly because I wasn't identified and single out. Sure, I haven't been able to make the most of what I have because I lack access to the things I'd need to do so, but it's allowed me time to mature and gain meaningful understanding of most areas of inquiry that I've come into contact with. Truth be told, most people are too stupid to grasp even the basics of economic theory, what do I care if they respect my intelligence?
Specialism is great, but it's not a viable long term strategy if you want to maximize the impact you have. You do marginally better in a few areas, while giving up a huge amount you could have contributed in many others. Not a tradeoff that I'd like to make.
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Probably the same way that the US Navy got my contact information to harass me when I was in high school. The school just gets authority to collect it and to hell with your wishes. Compared with the years of harassment and insults from the jack asses at the Navy, this is of somewhat lesser concern.
But, it's still a concern, the last thing we need is to condition kids to think that it's normal for schools to spy on your behavior outside of school hours.
Because I'm familiar enough with the federal government to realize that they make a ton of mistakes due to the scope of their work. It's incredibly hard to predict what legislation is going to look like when passed and more likely the small government folks thought they could lower taxes for the rich by making the USPTO depend primarily on fees to conduct its affairs.
Do you dispute the fact that the USPTO is funded primarily by fees these days? Because it means nothing who controls the purse strings to the issue. They get their money through application fees and if they start turning down a lot of the fees there's a risk of having fewer people trying to get patents.
It's a conflict of interest for them to turn down patents when their funding is derived mainly from patent fees.
And the court is another level of concern, but a lot of these things wouldn't get to the court if they weren't granted in the first place.
That's the thing, if there's actual bullying going on, there's a paper trail of sorts. No need to actually spy, when a kid complains about things being posted to their page, they can just show the principal.
It's a bit of an odd question where exactly the line should be as the bullying these days is more likely to continue past the point of a student being at the same school or even in the same state.
No, the reason why this isn't being fixed is that a significant number of voters vote for politicians that run on a platform that includes deregulation and freeing the market of even modest restraints on bad behavior. And are quite vocal in shouting down anybody that suggests even modest reforms as being elitists and pushing for a totalitarian, nanny state.
The main problem with democracy is that it depends upon the voters actually being interested in voting for people that represent their best interests. As long as one party routinely votes against the self interests of their own voters, and hamstrings the other party, you get this sort of a mess.
The US is hardly unique in having problems that need fixing but can't be fixed because the politicians aren't interested in it. Most countries are like that. Assuming you even get to vote there.
You're missing the point. A lot of this was unintentional. They made the USPTO run on fees that were charged for patents which gave the USPTO and incentive to rubber stamp patents while not receiving sufficient funding to cover the cost of having patent examiners that could do the investigation that they used to do.
What needs to happen is that the USPTO needs to go back to being a government service the user fees need to be based upon the amount of time and energy it takes to deal with the application. And while we're at it, the duration of the patent period should go from the point where the first application is received to a reasonable period after that. For technology 7 years is likely more than adequate as a lot of that IP is no longer of value several years later.
And obviously, anybody filing for a patent on software gets to volunteer to test the prototype rectal exam bots.
If they wouldn't oversell their capacity to such a drastic degree that wouldn't be a problem. Bottom line here is that the ISPs aren't exactly writing the ToS in a neutral fashion, they're writing it in a way that disadvantages the subscriber and where the subscriber has basically no say other than to opt out completely.
Right now, I can sign with Comcast, that can't keep a stable connection; Centurylink that's OK, but slow; Hughes Net, which has satellite latency and Clear that has it's own bandwidth problems.
Now, if I had real choices and the contracts were more dissimilar it would be different. But, the ISPs oversell their capacity and fail to do anything to make things better. Meanwhile I have the choice of a 5mbps uncapped connection or one that's somewhat faster but has a cap below what I use some months.
The range of the estimate increased which means that it could be from 1.5 to 6. Or possibly outside of that range, but it's likely to be between those figures. Considering the state of the economy the last 5 years, a downward revision is to be expected.
The question is whether or not that downward revision remains as the economy heats up and people can afford to go back to wasting so much energy.
If the GOP had the Whitehouse it would need to be in the news regularly because they'd be looking for ways to make negative progress on the issue.
Obama has actually done some things to move things forward, it's just that he gets crap from the right for doing it, even as the GOP refuses to assist in any way. I take it you didn't notice a while back when the gas mileage requirements were raised.
The problem is that opting out of the ToS is a non-starter in many areas. Around here I get two viable choices for internet, I have to sign with one of them if I want to have an internet connection and I don't have the opportunity to negotiate the terms of the agreement.
What we really need is for the courts to start recognizing that these aren't contracts, these are demands placed on people with limited options and in some cases all of the options contain the same fine print.
That's not true. They don't collect the information coming down the pipe. They collect the information the same way on their network that they do on the network in general. The profit motive for them to provide the improved connections is more impressions per hour. As well as fewer people blocking ads because of slow connection speeds. And hopefully scare the other ISPs into improving the connection speeds so that it happens all over the place.
What else did you expect them to do? Other than not even try, they took the only other reasonably option other than fully complying.
It's not different from the US. See how long you can operate a server that provides child pornography and methods of taking down a plane before the server is shut down and confiscated.
The law is what the law is in the country and until and unless the policy isn't enforced you're options are to not go there, to leave or to fight. And fighting is often times not viable in countries like China where the party makes the laws and enforces them.
Most other ISPs do? I don't think any of the ISPs I've ever used have wasted their energy doing that. They stopped giving out static IPs for free a long time ago and they've never guaranteed the kind of uptime or bandwidth necessary to make a server useful. And many ISPs cap the connection anyways.
For people who care about those things, a residential plan is just not going to cut it. Now, a personal server for something that's only of interest to the extended family isn't likely to be something that's going to cause enough trouble to be worth worrying about.
Now, maybe in parts of the country where there's FiOS service or uncapped connections capable of more than 5mbps that's not the case.
Like the other poster said, vi is feature complete, they implemented all the features that it needed ages ago. The only patches going into it now are compatibility ones and the occasional bug fix. But even that is fairly rare because it's mature code. It also remains the default text editor in some *NIX variants because it's historically what's been used and works very effectively once you've gotten over the suicidal learning curve.
Vim has some nice features, but you're best not counting on them if you want to be able to log into any *NIX system out there without having functionality missing.
And your point is? Strong bases can burn tissue just as well as strong acids can.
It's alternative medicine so it's bunk, but dismissing it out of hand by drawing questionable conclusions makes you look just as foolish. It was the GP that said that these bacteria would raise the pH, not the article he was referring to.
They may be onto something with this.
But it's also worth realizing that people with cavities are also more likely to have a dentist spending a prolonged period of time examining their mouths. And probably more time during each visit. Consequently having the dentist notice something on the x-rays that hasn't yet gotten to the point of being cancerous. I know I've had a biopsy done just to make sure that it was just a benign cyst.
I also wonder what the data looks like if you normalize it for people that have cavities because they take poor care of their teeth and individuals that just go long periods of time between seeing the dentists. It would be interesting to know if there's a difference in the rates.
It's not the DVR's fault per se, it's a combination of the DVR and the broadcasters not using technology that permits the DVR to stop recording only when the program is finished. In some parts of the world the broadcaster embeds a signal that tells the DVR what program is on. That way if the game goes into overtime, the DVR knows that it's still going and you don't miss the extra action.
I believe in parts of Europe they have it figured out so that you don't have to worry about missing the end of the football match.
Yes, but it's free market crap that we pay for.
Right. Vi remains viable because it's still an incredibly useful text editor that has a fairly large user base. When a project gets to the point where it's just a small number of non-coders that want to see it continue, it's finished. The likelihood of attracting developers is slim, unless they're either using the software or being paid for it.
And being paid for it usually means a substantial number of users as I doubt that the software is worth hundreds of dollars to the submitter. And hundreds on a periodic basis.
Right, also don't forget that music wasn't paying musicians very well even before the latest wave of bedroom mixing was going on. I've been reading about this for at least a decade and it's been a problem for decades before that.
Wrong. Budweiser bottles the best horse piss and Microsoft makes the best migraines.
Right and the distinction there is important. For years people bought tracks that they didn't really want because they were on the same album as the tracks they did want. Even with singles, there was always the B side which was usually forgettable.
With the ability to just buy the tracks you want, I'm not surprised that people are skipping the ones they haven't heard. The studios don't pay enough attention to the other tracks to make it worthwhile. It's gotten so bad that it's not likely to be long before the album goes tits up, except in exceptional cases. It wasn't until I started to listen to music from the '70s where there was more focus on the album experience that I understood why it was so wrong to be asked to buy an album for 2 or 3 good tracks.
I'd be happy being able to watch something while recording two other things. Or for the recordings to start and stop at the appropriate time. I regularly miss the end of things because the DVR doesn't know what to stop.
I'd also be happy if there wasn't so much lag and the box that came with my TV service was easily replaceable with something that wasn't from DirecTV. I'm not sure who makes them, but they're ridiculously sluggish and don't perform as well as the one we had when we got the service.
In the 1950s the spread of income was much smaller than it is today. Most people didn't need to go to college in order to make a decent wage and those that did go to college found that the government was picking up most of the tab. As recently as the 1980s the government was subsidizing the tuition to the tune of about 90%. Which meant that you could afford to work an entry level job at McDonalds during the summer and not have to work during the school year.
Bottom line here is that if you exclude the top 10% earning households, the average drops substantially. They earned 45% of the money, but only made up 10% of the population. If you exclude the top 10%, that figure for average drops substantially making that house cost nearly 7 years worth of income. I don't have access to quality numbers, but you can't pretend like income distribution doesn't make a difference, because it makes a huge difference.
It disturbs me a great deal when people like you trot out statistics that you don't understand to try and claim that the poverty that exists in America doesn't exist. Because it clearly does exist.
Stress and pressure do horrible things to the brain. Not to mention that the choices these kids are pressured into making so they don't waste their gift tend not to be particularly good for the hypothalamus either.
I don't personally care, by the time I was 8 I was already smarter than most of the adults I came into contact with. And at 32 I'm smarter than I've ever been. Mostly because I wasn't identified and single out. Sure, I haven't been able to make the most of what I have because I lack access to the things I'd need to do so, but it's allowed me time to mature and gain meaningful understanding of most areas of inquiry that I've come into contact with. Truth be told, most people are too stupid to grasp even the basics of economic theory, what do I care if they respect my intelligence?
Specialism is great, but it's not a viable long term strategy if you want to maximize the impact you have. You do marginally better in a few areas, while giving up a huge amount you could have contributed in many others. Not a tradeoff that I'd like to make.