mathematics as a base for CS was great in the 50's and 60's, but the real problems in computer software are people problems, not algorithmic ones.
That may be true, but CS isn't short for "computer software", its short for "computer science". Lots of products are more bound by human factors and interface than limitations of knowledge of the fundamental science or engineering underlying the core functionality of the product.
Now, that may mean that fewer (proportionally) computer scientists need to be involved directly in the development of most software products, certainly, as most software products aren't blazing new ground in basic functionality or algorithms, but rather seek either to provide better interfaces to existing functionality or to provide new combinations of existing functionality, or some combination of the two.
But that doesn't mean that actual computer science needs less math.
But determining the optimal layout of a form to benefit the users of the system requires observing people and their needs. Understanding what parts of a program are going to be changed because of changing user needs is more important in program design than deciding whether you need a heap sort or insertion sort.
All this may be true, in the development of most software products, but has little to do with computer science.
Yes, you should know the difference, but you seldom need to program it, just choose the correct one from the system library.
System libraries and the like don't spring into existence magically, they are programmed by actual people, who need the skills not only to understand the difference between things that already exist, but to discover, develop, and implement new approaches to solving classes of problems for which there either are not existing solutions or the existing solutions are suboptimal.
And that's what computer science is about. And, yeah, it takes math.
Yes, we need those people to work the farms, the low-wage pay. But we need the ones who go through the paperwork and years of waiting and struggle just as much, if not more than those who just follow where the work is.
But do we need anyone to go through "years of waiting and struggle" to immigrate, especially in our current family-based preference categories? And do we need a system that sets quotas for particular countries rather than only globally, so that the countries with the most people qualified and motivated to immigrate (including one of the countries from which it is, for geographical reasons, easiest to immigrate illegally) under the existing law also have the longest waiting lists and greatest struggle to immigrate legally?
The cheapest, easiest, and most effective way to address the problems caused by illegal immigration is to fix legal immigration.
A majority of American's are against illegal immigration. A majority of American's are against profiling. So what alternative do you propose to identify legitimate citizens from illegal aliens?
Established national standards for proof of citizen, legal residency, authorization to work, and eligibility (as appropriate) to be used in employment, government benefits, border crossings, and ports of entry already exist. Real ID, while sold based on dubious claims of preventing terrorism or detecting illegal aliens would do little to do either, at considerable cost to state governments (or the federal government if it decides to subsidize the costs to try to woo balking states), and additional burden to US citizens.
The police would only be able to ask for it when there is clear evidence of crime.
Trying to board a domestic flight is "clear evidence of a crime"?
I for one would concentrate on protecting our Freedom of Speech rights (for which you are entitled to your opinion in this) and challenge to you suggest a feasible alternative that safeguards our borders, cuts down on illegal immigration, and possible terrorist activity.
Why? Real ID doesn't safeguard our borders, cut down on illegal immigration, or cut down on terrorist activity.
I don't live my life in fear of terrorism, but as the husband of Chinese national who has played by the rules and lived apart from my wife for TWO YEARS
"Immediate Relatives" (spouses and unmarried children under 21) of US citizens are admitted without any quotas (national or overall numerical limitations), waiting lists, etc. Now, there is a two-year requirement before permanent residency on the basis of marriage is granted, under the Marriage Fraud Act, but that's no barrier to living together legally in the United States. So, the question that comes to mind is...why?
To be honest, I doubt Microsoft really gives a damn, precisely because it's such a small market.
I bet they do, because the more access to source code becomes a recognized priority in the public sphere (and while e-Voting is the hot area right now in the US, policies with a much broader scope, and requiring more than disclosure, have been implemented elsewhere, so MS certainly sees the threat that this could be a wedge in the US) the less advantage Microsoft is going to have over open source alternatives, which in many areas are now its biggest competitors.
There's a difference. If microsoft funded people to write about microsoft products on wikipedia, it would be to help microsoft. Germany is funding people to write about things that would benefit the people of Germany.
How is that different? Microsoft pays people to write things that Microsoft's management judges serve the interests of Microsoft's stockholders, the German government pays people to write things that the German government bureaucrats judge to serve the interest of the German government's constituents.
Science isn't about giving answers that are some kind of Ultimate Absolute Truth.
And yet so many people assert exactly that about the theory of evolution as applied to humanity.
Some people may. Most people, even people who understand science and properly pragmatically apply it, have beliefs that extend beyond the scientific. That some people may have a quasi-religious belief in some of the things that are contained in evolutionary theory does not change the fact that those are scientific propositions that have withstood empirical scrutiny, while many other things (like creationism) that people may have religious or quasi-religious faith in are not.
The people may have a faith in the Invisible Hand of the Market that goes far beyond what is justifiable through the valid scientific results in economics does not make the real science done in economics any less real, even if the fervent proclamations often obscure the real science of economics. Similarly, if there are people that have an extra-rational faith in elements of evolutionary theory that goes beyond the science, that doesn't invalidate the science of evolution, nor does it make it make alternative religious explanations that are not empirically testable into scientific alternatives.
As much as I like it when people defend science from pseudoscience, please stop making crap up.
As much as I like it when people object to making crap up, please work on your reading comprehension skills.
Evolution is not a hypothesis
Yes, it is. It is not just a hypothesis, it is a scientific theory. But a scientific theory is simply a scientific hypothesis whose falsifiable predictions have been tested without falsifying the hypothesis.
A hypothesis(literally: less than a premise in an argument)
Er, no, a hypothesis is literally, from Greek, "a placing under", not "less than a premise in an argument".
is one minor true or false statement that defines a logical rule that can be disproven by experimentation or sufficiently careful observation.
A hypothesis need not be minor, but, yes, it is a statement that defines a rule that can be disproven (which is equivalent to what I said before: it must make empirically falsifiable predictions). Indeed, where the underlying process is complex, any more simple hypothesis standing alone will, with sufficient testing, be falsified, and only a complex hypothesis will withstand scrutiny.
A large number of reasonably demonstrated hypotheses on a related field of study is what creates a theory.
No, its not. A "theory" can be any set of one or more hypotheses that have all withstood scrutiny; equivalently, it can be seen as just any one hypothesis that has withstood scrutiny, since any set of hypotheses can be viewed as a single, more complex, hypothesis.
A theory is a mechanism that allows for sensible creation, control, and testing of new hypotheses in that area.
It is true that an existing theory provides a bases for new hypotheses that are refinements (if new tests show the theory's predictions prove false in some cases not previously explored) or extensions to areas that the theory doesn't cover. It is also true that that doesn't contradict anything I said.
Theories also tend to include points such as formal definitions, statistical correlations(which are themselves comprised of hypotheses), physical tools used in experimentations, and useful models for predicting things in the "real world" outside of experiments.
Any proposition, whether it is conjecture, hypothesis, theory, or otherwise can include "formal definitions" insofar as those are necessary to establish the meaning of the proposition. "Statistical correlations" are usually empirical results; physical tools are not part of a "theory" (as it defines a class of scientific propositions, at any rate); and all hypotheses (and, therefore, a fortiori, all theories) make predictions about the "real world", experiments are merely controlled tests of those predictions, and theories are, again, hypothesis that have withstood testing, and therefore, as I said, are predictive models that apply to the "real world". That's rather the whole point.
Evolutionary theory has every one of these things in abundance.
You are conflating two different concepts of "theory": evolution is a theory in the sense of the heirarchy of propositions conjecture->hypothesis->theory(->law); evolutionary theory is an area of study (similar to say, "music theory") which includes some of those other things you point to.
Intelligent design can muster pathetic excuses for few if any of these.
Intelligent design is a conjecture that makes no falsifiable predictions. It fails at that point, and all the rest is irrelevant.
There are a few areas of science that are lacking one of these qualities, but outright absence is a near certain sign of pseudoscience.
The problem I find, however, is that when we try to extrapolate what many would claim to be absolute truth based only on what we know how to observe so far, we can easily come to the wrong conclusion.
"Absolute truth" isn't what science is about, and "extrapolation" isn't as important as you would make it; inasmuch as it is relevant at all, it is just in coming up with hypotheses. Once you have a proper scientific hypothesis you then, by definition, have empirically falsifiable predictions you can test to validate the hypothesis. If those predictions fail, your hypothesis is wrong. If they do not, your hypothesis is a viable theory. That doesn't mean it is right: a more parsimonious or powerful theory may displace it because of the greater utility it provides, or additional predictions may be later derived from your hypothesis enabling new tests that may fail. No proper scientific theory (though some things popularly labelled theories are untested hypotheses) rests on extrapolation alone: if it is properly called a theory (as evolution is) it has testable predictions with have withstood testing.
Science isn't about giving answers that are some kind of Ultimate Absolute Truth. It is about refining models that have explanatory and, more importantly, predictive power.
I'm pretty sure the law of gravity is a law and not a theory.
A scientific "law" (in the sense it is used in "law of gravity", at any rate) is simply a theory that is subjectively fairly firmly established, and the label is less used now for new theories not because newer theories get less firmly established, but simply because the there is really nothing special about "laws" to warrant the new term, which tends to be misleading. (And also confusing with another sense of "law" used in some scientific areas, where "law" marks things which are logically true rather than tested empirical calims, such as the case with the "law of one price" in economics.)
The law of gravity is a theory. Indeed, Newtonian gravitation (what the phrase "law of gravity" usually refers to) is a theory that has since been falsified, but nevertheless remains a useful approximation in a wide range of common circumstances.
Isn't evolution *also* pretty much just a theory at this point, like Intelligent Design?
No. Evolution is a "theory" as the term is used in science, that is, it is a proper scientific hypothesis (an explanation which makes predictions which are empirically falsifiable) which has withstood attempts at falsification.
Intelligent Design is a "theory" only by one of the looser definitions in common conversation, a a conjecture that does not make predictions which are falsifiable even in principle. Its nothing more than "that looks really hard, so God musta did it."
It doesn't even ban RFID implants, it bans other people coercing, requiring, compelling, etc., you to get an RFID implant. Even if it did the same for tatoos, so what?
Funny how you could get mattel model of them for years before the public 'knew about them'. Same with the stealth fighter.
IIRC, the various toy models of the "Stealth Fighter" released prior to the public revelation of the F-117 bore no more similarity to the F-117 than one would expect from giving an artist access to the publicly available information on what it would take to make a stealth aircraft, and indeed were generally based on different stealth ideas than were used in the F-117 (the actual F-117 was very angular, the "stealth fighter" models I remember used smooth curves, like the B-2.)
Just say "Irregardless? That's not even a real word.
Merriam-Webster disagrees, but still recommends against using it:
usageIrregardless originated in dialectal American speech in the early 20th century. Its fairly widespread use in speech called it to the attention of usage commentators as early as 1927. The most frequently repeated remark about it is that "there is no such word." There is such a word, however. It is still used primarily in speech, although it can be found from time to time in edited prose. Its reputation has not risen over the years, and it is still a long way from general acceptance. Use regardless instead.
Except there was never any suggestion that Aurora was "crew optional". Nothing solid provided by the article, but no one should be surprised if it turns out to be true.
The other problem is of course office 2007 and the refusal of the bulk of the market to shift from 2003, a real problem, when combined, a lot of wasted investment for little or no additional return.
Is that really a problem? I've never seen the numbers, but my subjective impression was that Office 2000 and 2003 weren't products that forced people to run out and upgrade, either, and that adoption was fairly gradual on those. Has 2007 really been that much worse for MS?
I believe the point of his post, is that they, hybrid cars, are just as efficient with pollution because the electricity need probably comes from a Coal or Oil power plant, which does not solve the original problem.
Standard (non-plugin) hybrids generate all of their energy from burning fuel in the car, just like non-hybrids, but they burn fuel more efficiently, and therefore are better than non-hybrids both in terms of fuel economy and environmental impact.
Plugin hybrids do get some power from the grid. Some of the power on the grid comes from coal and oil (some comes from hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, or other green sources, or nuclear or other not-that-green but low-carbon-impact sources), but even the coal or oil large scale generation is more efficient, in terms of carbon impact, than burning fuel in a non-hybrid, or even hybrid, automobile.
So, in short, the idea that hybrids, whether standard or plugin, are "no better" because some or all of their energy is still supplied by fossil fuels is mistaken.
Technically in a perfect world, even gas combusts into water vapor.
Even with complete combustion, gasoline (or any hydrocarbon) combusts to CO2 plus water vapor, not only water vapor, which was what the GP was asking. The only way something can combust to just water vapor, even assuming complete combustion, is if it doesn't start out with any elements other than hydrogen and oxygen in the reactants.
(The wikipedia article you quote makes this clear, too, but your statement here seems to have overlooked that rather basic fact.)
I would think that 90 would be enough, no? With a forward and a reverse...or am I missing something?
To be able to move in any direction with a forward and reverse gear available, you need 180 degree rotation on the wheels. If the wheels lined up straight forward and back is your baseline, you need to be able to rotate them 90 degrees in either direction, which may be the source of your error.
If it isn't intuitively clear, it may help to draw a diagram. If you have a 90 degree forward arc (45 degrees right and 45 degrees left), and then reflect that around a line perpendicular to your forward axis to represent the area available with reverse, you'll have a 90 degree forward arc and a 90 degree reverse arc representing the directions you can go, and two 90 degree side arcs representing directions you cannot go.
Expand the forward arc to 180 degrees, and when you reflect it you can go anywhere.
California doesn't allow school districts to impose them.
Such taxes could be imposed or raised in CC county.
Contra Costa County isn't involved in this. The West Contra Costa Unified School District is a separate legal entity that represents a small (compared to the whole county), politically weak section of the county.
Or they could cut expenses by firing administrators and special ed teachers.
Special ed teachers are required to meet outside mandates; they've already had cost controls, management cutbacks, and faculty wage reductions initially and subseqent freezes imposed as part of the terms of the state emergency loan.
I live in Contra Costa and given the tax base here, the whole idea that the school district needs charity instead of a state or federal supervisor and some honest auditing is just ludicrous.
West Contra Costa Unified (Richmond, largely) doesn't have the same tax base as Contra Costa County more generally. Richmond isn't Walnut Creek. And WCCUSD has a state supervisor, and will continue to until at least 2018.
What I don't get is how Loni Hancock and Don Perata come into play. The last time I checked, both Berkeley and Oakland are part of Alameda County, not Contra Costa. Now if anyone wants to argue that downtown Oakland and Richmond schools are ripe for charitable donations, I'd be all for it.
"Richmond schools" are WCCUSD, which was formed from the consolidation of the Richmond Unified School District and other neighboring school districts (similarly troubled, IIRC). SoI think your argument against WCCUSD getting charity and for "Richmond schools" getting charity is a bit confused.
That being said, I imagine that Alameda County representatives in the legislature are at least somewhat interested in going to bat to get seek voluntary forgiveness of loans by troubled districts like WCCUSD in part because Oakland Unified is in a similar overall position to WCCUSD, also operating under state supervision as it repays an emergency loan and establishes state mandate fiscal controls to prevent recurrence of the problems that put it into crisis in the first place.
the school district has such lousy financial controls that they can't account for the systems, and they can't pay for them. Typically, the socialist argument is to not hold them accountable. I say bankrupt the district and put some people in who won't let $5M get STOLEN.
The district already went bankrupt after the time the computers were purchased, and has since that time (as part of the state bailout that allowed it to operate at all) had new management and management controls imposed on it.
So, um, great idea, except that that was already done 16 years ago. The deferment to 2008 was a result of negotiations on how to address its pre-collapse debt that occurred after the bankruptcy, during the bailout and imposition of the state trustee.
Slashdot Mirror
That may be true, but CS isn't short for "computer software", its short for "computer science". Lots of products are more bound by human factors and interface than limitations of knowledge of the fundamental science or engineering underlying the core functionality of the product.
Now, that may mean that fewer (proportionally) computer scientists need to be involved directly in the development of most software products, certainly, as most software products aren't blazing new ground in basic functionality or algorithms, but rather seek either to provide better interfaces to existing functionality or to provide new combinations of existing functionality, or some combination of the two.
But that doesn't mean that actual computer science needs less math.
All this may be true, in the development of most software products, but has little to do with computer science.
System libraries and the like don't spring into existence magically, they are programmed by actual people, who need the skills not only to understand the difference between things that already exist, but to discover, develop, and implement new approaches to solving classes of problems for which there either are not existing solutions or the existing solutions are suboptimal.
And that's what computer science is about. And, yeah, it takes math.
But do we need anyone to go through "years of waiting and struggle" to immigrate, especially in our current family-based preference categories? And do we need a system that sets quotas for particular countries rather than only globally, so that the countries with the most people qualified and motivated to immigrate (including one of the countries from which it is, for geographical reasons, easiest to immigrate illegally) under the existing law also have the longest waiting lists and greatest struggle to immigrate legally?
The cheapest, easiest, and most effective way to address the problems caused by illegal immigration is to fix legal immigration.
Established national standards for proof of citizen, legal residency, authorization to work, and eligibility (as appropriate) to be used in employment, government benefits, border crossings, and ports of entry already exist. Real ID, while sold based on dubious claims of preventing terrorism or detecting illegal aliens would do little to do either, at considerable cost to state governments (or the federal government if it decides to subsidize the costs to try to woo balking states), and additional burden to US citizens.
Trying to board a domestic flight is "clear evidence of a crime"?
Why? Real ID doesn't safeguard our borders, cut down on illegal immigration, or cut down on terrorist activity.
"Immediate Relatives" (spouses and unmarried children under 21) of US citizens are admitted without any quotas (national or overall numerical limitations), waiting lists, etc. Now, there is a two-year requirement before permanent residency on the basis of marriage is granted, under the Marriage Fraud Act, but that's no barrier to living together legally in the United States. So, the question that comes to mind is...why?
I bet they do, because the more access to source code becomes a recognized priority in the public sphere (and while e-Voting is the hot area right now in the US, policies with a much broader scope, and requiring more than disclosure, have been implemented elsewhere, so MS certainly sees the threat that this could be a wedge in the US) the less advantage Microsoft is going to have over open source alternatives, which in many areas are now its biggest competitors.
Some people may. Most people, even people who understand science and properly pragmatically apply it, have beliefs that extend beyond the scientific. That some people may have a quasi-religious belief in some of the things that are contained in evolutionary theory does not change the fact that those are scientific propositions that have withstood empirical scrutiny, while many other things (like creationism) that people may have religious or quasi-religious faith in are not.
The people may have a faith in the Invisible Hand of the Market that goes far beyond what is justifiable through the valid scientific results in economics does not make the real science done in economics any less real, even if the fervent proclamations often obscure the real science of economics. Similarly, if there are people that have an extra-rational faith in elements of evolutionary theory that goes beyond the science, that doesn't invalidate the science of evolution, nor does it make it make alternative religious explanations that are not empirically testable into scientific alternatives.
As much as I like it when people object to making crap up, please work on your reading comprehension skills.
Yes, it is. It is not just a hypothesis, it is a scientific theory. But a scientific theory is simply a scientific hypothesis whose falsifiable predictions have been tested without falsifying the hypothesis.
Er, no, a hypothesis is literally, from Greek, "a placing under", not "less than a premise in an argument".
A hypothesis need not be minor, but, yes, it is a statement that defines a rule that can be disproven (which is equivalent to what I said before: it must make empirically falsifiable predictions). Indeed, where the underlying process is complex, any more simple hypothesis standing alone will, with sufficient testing, be falsified, and only a complex hypothesis will withstand scrutiny.
No, its not. A "theory" can be any set of one or more hypotheses that have all withstood scrutiny; equivalently, it can be seen as just any one hypothesis that has withstood scrutiny, since any set of hypotheses can be viewed as a single, more complex, hypothesis.
It is true that an existing theory provides a bases for new hypotheses that are refinements (if new tests show the theory's predictions prove false in some cases not previously explored) or extensions to areas that the theory doesn't cover. It is also true that that doesn't contradict anything I said.
Any proposition, whether it is conjecture, hypothesis, theory, or otherwise can include "formal definitions" insofar as those are necessary to establish the meaning of the proposition. "Statistical correlations" are usually empirical results; physical tools are not part of a "theory" (as it defines a class of scientific propositions, at any rate); and all hypotheses (and, therefore, a fortiori, all theories) make predictions about the "real world", experiments are merely controlled tests of those predictions, and theories are, again, hypothesis that have withstood testing, and therefore, as I said, are predictive models that apply to the "real world". That's rather the whole point.
You are conflating two different concepts of "theory": evolution is a theory in the sense of the heirarchy of propositions conjecture->hypothesis->theory(->law); evolutionary theory is an area of study (similar to say, "music theory") which includes some of those other things you point to.
Intelligent design is a conjecture that makes no falsifiable predictions. It fails at that point, and all the rest is irrelevant.
"Absolute truth" isn't what science is about, and "extrapolation" isn't as important as you would make it; inasmuch as it is relevant at all, it is just in coming up with hypotheses. Once you have a proper scientific hypothesis you then, by definition, have empirically falsifiable predictions you can test to validate the hypothesis. If those predictions fail, your hypothesis is wrong. If they do not, your hypothesis is a viable theory. That doesn't mean it is right: a more parsimonious or powerful theory may displace it because of the greater utility it provides, or additional predictions may be later derived from your hypothesis enabling new tests that may fail. No proper scientific theory (though some things popularly labelled theories are untested hypotheses) rests on extrapolation alone: if it is properly called a theory (as evolution is) it has testable predictions with have withstood testing.
Science isn't about giving answers that are some kind of Ultimate Absolute Truth. It is about refining models that have explanatory and, more importantly, predictive power.
A scientific "law" (in the sense it is used in "law of gravity", at any rate) is simply a theory that is subjectively fairly firmly established, and the label is less used now for new theories not because newer theories get less firmly established, but simply because the there is really nothing special about "laws" to warrant the new term, which tends to be misleading. (And also confusing with another sense of "law" used in some scientific areas, where "law" marks things which are logically true rather than tested empirical calims, such as the case with the "law of one price" in economics.)
The law of gravity is a theory. Indeed, Newtonian gravitation (what the phrase "law of gravity" usually refers to) is a theory that has since been falsified, but nevertheless remains a useful approximation in a wide range of common circumstances.
No. Evolution is a "theory" as the term is used in science, that is, it is a proper scientific hypothesis (an explanation which makes predictions which are empirically falsifiable) which has withstood attempts at falsification.
Intelligent Design is a "theory" only by one of the looser definitions in common conversation, a a conjecture that does not make predictions which are falsifiable even in principle. Its nothing more than "that looks really hard, so God musta did it."
Attempts to equate the two are equivocation.
It doesn't even ban RFID implants, it bans other people coercing, requiring, compelling, etc., you to get an RFID implant. Even if it did the same for tatoos, so what?
IIRC, the various toy models of the "Stealth Fighter" released prior to the public revelation of the F-117 bore no more similarity to the F-117 than one would expect from giving an artist access to the publicly available information on what it would take to make a stealth aircraft, and indeed were generally based on different stealth ideas than were used in the F-117 (the actual F-117 was very angular, the "stealth fighter" models I remember used smooth curves, like the B-2.)
Or 99%. Or 90%. Or any other number; the margin of error doesn't tell you anything if you don't know at what confidence interval it is stated at.
Merriam-Webster disagrees, but still recommends against using it:
That's strange. NASA itself seems to think it is the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Because if the black hole was big enough to suck in the CERN campus with its gravity, the matter from which it was formed would have the same effect.
Except there was never any suggestion that Aurora was "crew optional". Nothing solid provided by the article, but no one should be surprised if it turns out to be true.
Standard (non-plugin) hybrids generate all of their energy from burning fuel in the car, just like non-hybrids, but they burn fuel more efficiently, and therefore are better than non-hybrids both in terms of fuel economy and environmental impact.
Plugin hybrids do get some power from the grid. Some of the power on the grid comes from coal and oil (some comes from hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, tidal, or other green sources, or nuclear or other not-that-green but low-carbon-impact sources), but even the coal or oil large scale generation is more efficient, in terms of carbon impact, than burning fuel in a non-hybrid, or even hybrid, automobile.
So, in short, the idea that hybrids, whether standard or plugin, are "no better" because some or all of their energy is still supplied by fossil fuels is mistaken.
Even with complete combustion, gasoline (or any hydrocarbon) combusts to CO2 plus water vapor, not only water vapor, which was what the GP was asking. The only way something can combust to just water vapor, even assuming complete combustion, is if it doesn't start out with any elements other than hydrogen and oxygen in the reactants.
(The wikipedia article you quote makes this clear, too, but your statement here seems to have overlooked that rather basic fact.)
To be able to move in any direction with a forward and reverse gear available, you need 180 degree rotation on the wheels. If the wheels lined up straight forward and back is your baseline, you need to be able to rotate them 90 degrees in either direction, which may be the source of your error.
If it isn't intuitively clear, it may help to draw a diagram. If you have a 90 degree forward arc (45 degrees right and 45 degrees left), and then reflect that around a line perpendicular to your forward axis to represent the area available with reverse, you'll have a 90 degree forward arc and a 90 degree reverse arc representing the directions you can go, and two 90 degree side arcs representing directions you cannot go.
Expand the forward arc to 180 degrees, and when you reflect it you can go anywhere.
California doesn't allow school districts to impose them.
Contra Costa County isn't involved in this. The West Contra Costa Unified School District is a separate legal entity that represents a small (compared to the whole county), politically weak section of the county.
Special ed teachers are required to meet outside mandates; they've already had cost controls, management cutbacks, and faculty wage reductions initially and subseqent freezes imposed as part of the terms of the state emergency loan.
West Contra Costa Unified (Richmond, largely) doesn't have the same tax base as Contra Costa County more generally. Richmond isn't Walnut Creek. And WCCUSD has a state supervisor, and will continue to until at least 2018.
"Richmond schools" are WCCUSD, which was formed from the consolidation of the Richmond Unified School District and other neighboring school districts (similarly troubled, IIRC). SoI think your argument against WCCUSD getting charity and for "Richmond schools" getting charity is a bit confused.
That being said, I imagine that Alameda County representatives in the legislature are at least somewhat interested in going to bat to get seek voluntary forgiveness of loans by troubled districts like WCCUSD in part because Oakland Unified is in a similar overall position to WCCUSD, also operating under state supervision as it repays an emergency loan and establishes state mandate fiscal controls to prevent recurrence of the problems that put it into crisis in the first place.
The district already went bankrupt after the time the computers were purchased, and has since that time (as part of the state bailout that allowed it to operate at all) had new management and management controls imposed on it.
So, um, great idea, except that that was already done 16 years ago. The deferment to 2008 was a result of negotiations on how to address its pre-collapse debt that occurred after the bankruptcy, during the bailout and imposition of the state trustee.
Considering that the district declared bankruptcy not long after these orders occurred, I think that's exactly what happened.