Where did you go to college? My undergrad professors told me that as far as money was concerned, I should simply not go to a school that does not offer me some kind of fellowship or RA position. Perhaps that advice is confined to my field (computer science)?
Military spending, reduced progressive taxes
on
The Real Science Gap
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Two factors immediately come to my mind: military spending and the reduction of the progressive tax burden. The way I see it, there just is not as much money for the government to throw at science, with the exception of military science. Now, it is true that military science has produced a number of useful non-military results, but there are some fields that have not really been advanced by spending on military science -- the pentagon has little interest in funding research into coral reef development or studies on dung beetles (I write this wondering if someone is going to pull up a paper on one of those topics that happened to be funded by DARPA). It is also true that government spending is not the be-all and end-all of science funding, and that private sources can also fund science, but that is not a solution in and of itself -- corporate funded science suffers from a problem of biased results, and science-as-a-charity is not very sustainable (there really are not enough rich patrons willing to pay for research, especially for topics that are not "trendy").
"The ad supported model is a continual cycle of unwanted side effects."
It really does not have to be -- the whole reason ad blockers came about in the first place was that the advertisements were becoming far too annoying, far beyond what was necessary to actually convey an advertisement. Case in point, when I read a magazine, I certainly see advertisements...but those advertisements are not animated, they do not make it difficult to turn the page and read a new article, they do not cause a pile of advertisements to appear underneath the magazine, etc. Somehow, advertisements printed on paper generate quite a bit of revenue, enough to allow no-cost distribution of many publications -- so why are we forced to deal with horrendously annoying advertisements online?
If the advertisements were unintrusive, and if we did not have to worry about advertisers building dossiers on us, I doubt that ABP and similar plugins would have actually be produced. If online advertisements reflected on-paper advertisements, perhaps with the added feature of being able to click on an ad to find out more information (which is truly beneficial to the consumer), nobody would have problems with online advertising per se.
"Without copyright protection, all source will be treated like BSD licensed code more or less."
Or, perhaps the law will be rewritten to protect the available of source code to the general public? Stallman hinted at a model where code could only remain proprietary for a certain amount of time, and after that it was required to be released to the public, using an escrow system managed by the government. Copyright is not the only system that enables libre software.
"The web site owners have reason to be peeved - if the user uses reader extensively, for web sites that are ad-based, they have no revenue stream."
Perhaps they should be less intrusive with the advertising. I have no problem with relevant text ads, placed neatly on the side, that do no interfere with my ability to read an article. That is not what we have seen out of these sites. Instead, we see articles split up across multiple pages, so that more advertisements can be displayed, and we have seen advertisements that require inefficient plugins to render (with no opt out), and advertisements that float over the article, and advertisements that could give seizures, and so forth. People generally do not block ads because they have some malicious desire to deprive websites of revenue; people block ads because the ads are horribly annoying and increase page load times by an order of magnitude.
"they will intentionally sabotage reader mode or stop serving web pages to safari altogether"
More likely, they will find ways to create advertisements that can sneak into "reader mode" -- for example, advertisements that are indistinguishable from the relevant text or images in the article. This may not be a terrible thing, since it would realign online advertising with the sort of advertising that is already common in newspapers and magazines.
Except that Apple is also working to make it difficult for websites to compete with native applications on the iPhone/Pad. They simultaneously released an ad blocker for their web browser and an unblock advertisement system for their mobile devices. They advertise applications in the apps store, but have made it clear that they will not even attempt to create an index of web pages. They encourage users to turn to the apps store for content and programs, not to go searching the broader web.
It is like claiming that you can watch as much porno as you want on Sony TVs, but that you are not allowed to sell porno on their line of video cassettes. Oh, wait, that is exactly how it played out. Except that Apple's marketing machine is much stronger than Sony's, so the results will probably be different.
I heard about this research topic over a year ago when I took VLSI. The main problem, as I understand it, is not building circuits that operate below the threshold voltage, but actually reading the output of those circuits.
Or the school district could not put any requirements on the computers. You know, just saying, there is this whole concept of standards for exchanging information between computers running different operating systems, so there really should not be any problem.
Aid that is based on household income; so a household that has an income of $30k and only one child gets more "aid" than one with $60k income and 5 children.
My security engineering textbook actually has a chapter on nuclear launch codes and how that system was designed. You could, in the absence of all other security mechanisms, simply brute force the codes, since they are of deliberately limited length; the military did some research and discovered that when people are under stress (which is likely if they are being asked to arm a nuclear weapon), they can only accurately enter a certain number of digits even if those digits are being read to them.
In my opinion, though, the most interested detail is the motivation for nuclear launch codes. As you pointed out, there should be (and there is) some physical security measure in place to ensure that some random guy does not launch a nuclear missile. The purpose of the arming codes is not to prevent Joe Schmoe from starting World War 3, but to prevent the soldiers themselves from doing so without authorization. Prior to the Kennedy administration, nuclear bombs were armed when they were deployed (dropped from an airplane), and the only measure in place to prevent a pilot from doing so without orders was a single soldier standing near the plane, who was supposed to shoot the pilot in such a situation -- but the commander might issue the order to strike without authorization.
As for the codes being leaked...that was considered as well. The codes change frequently, some change daily (i.e. the codes that the president carries -- there are other codes, like maintenance codes), so even a leak would have a low potential for causing a problem (a pair of rogue soldiers hell bent on launching a nuke would have to get the authorization codes on the same day they are leaked).
Really, people bring up nuclear secrets (and for some reason, launch codes) whenever they want you to abandon all logical thought and stop questioning the need for broad secrecy. A lot of things that people think are secret really are not secret, or are things that were once secret but are not anymore: it used to be the case that anything related to nuclear weapons, even chemical data about the fuel, was automatically classified, but that policy was relaxed somewhat. Sure, there are things that are secret and that are better kept secret, like the locations and planned movements of US military units in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the identities of spies in foreign countries, but there is a limit and things are supposed to be declassified after a certain amount of time, with certain rare exceptions.
Which any citizen could create a copy of, if he wanted to, without fearing legal attacks. Thankfully, in the USA, government documents are (at least in theory) automatically in the public domain, so we still have that right, although apparently the same company from TFA did put a copyright notice on the constitution...
"A user of a single desktop computer has many different needs, but users usually don't want to have to reboot the computer to switch to another need-specific operating system."
Although, considering that most desktops these days have hardware assistance for virtualization, perhaps it would be worthwhile to push virtualization instead of dual booting. Instead of rebooting to switch, just change between windows or switch to a different VT, and you have the environment you needed all along. It would take some work to ensure that the user interface was simple enough for common users though.
Maybe it is a regional thing. Sweden has yet to actually shut down TPB, Finland is changing the law to reflect technological changes...I even heard about citizens in Denmark using cryptographic protocols to maintain a fair market for small farms.
OK fine, the region does still have problems, and I am not exactly an expert on politics in those countries. Still, as an American, am I free to pretend that there are havens of sensibility.
There is also more money in the enterprise market; Red Hat is not an exception here. It is pretty hard to convince home users to pay yearly fees for software, yet somehow companies manage to get away with that tactic when it comes to enterprise contracts.
"Should a program require different binaries for Windows Starter vs. Home Basic vs. Home Premium vs. Professional vs. Ultimate vs. Server?"
No, but those are really the same operating system with different levels of user restriction, or at least that was the case last I checked. Now, should Fedora and TiVO be able to run the same unmodified binaries? What about Mac OS X and FreeBSD?
The fact that the operating systems happen to have the same kernel does not mean that they are the same operating system. Fedora and Ubuntu do not ship identical versions of libraries, nor do they have the same default access controls (sudo is not the default in Fedora, for example). They look similar because they both use GNOME by default, but "under the hood" there are substantial and relevant differences.
Sure, it would be nice if a single binary would run on many operating systems. Historically, there were attempts to do such things, but the attempts were not very successful, because the differences between operating systems wound up being too substantial. Different operating systems have different philosophies and target different user types -- different Linux distributions are not an exception to that statement. RHEL ships older (but more stable) libraries than Ubuntu does -- should Red Hat be forced to change its philosophy so that unmodified binaries can be run on both RHEL and Ubuntu? Should Canonical create a new policy of installing compatibility libraries by default? All for the sake of maintaining a common ABI between different operating systems that target different needs?
"So there is less of an incentive to produce easy to use and bug free software?"
Actually, there is, it is just not as clear as you might expect. If a large company has to choose between retraining costs for a system that is not easy to use but which carries a much lower up front cost, versus not retraining and sticking with their proprietary system, they are probably going to save a lot of money sticking with the proprietary system. If an open source company cannot produce software that requires minimal retraining -- basically, software that is easy to use -- then they will have a lot of trouble with their business.
Likewise with bugs -- if the software has so many bugs that a company is spending more time calling for support than actually get work done, the company is not really saving money. Thus, an open source company is forced to produce software with a certain level of quality, or else the company is going to die.
Finally, there is the big one: open source companies get a lot of code from "the community," who may be driven by completely different motivations than the company. Thus, even if an open source company on its own could not produce software that meets the demands of the business world, the community at large can. Red Hat actually maintains a pretty good relationship with the rest of the community, and commits bugfixes or new features upstream as a matter of policy.
"Of course as far as Free as in Speech software goes I feel the real battle and enemy is NOT closed source software."
What about devices like the iPad? The PS3? The Kindle? Proprietary software taken to those extremes is frightening -- imagine if PCs were like the iPad, and whatever company produced your computer had the power to decide how you used it, or perhaps if PCs were like the Kindle, and files could be removed without your consent. Software patents are a problem, yes, but they are just a fraction of the monster.
Except that Red Hat support also includes expertise that may be difficult to find within your own IT department, and goes beyond just bug fixes and workarounds. For example, the number of people in the world who can create useful and secure SELinux policies is not very large, but Red Hat does employ many such people, and if you pay for it, one of those people can literally come to your company's IT department and create or update those policies as needed. Granted, only large businesses or companies that process highly sensitive data (or the government) would actually require such a service, but they certainly do provide it. It is not just the quality of the software, or the completeness of the software, it is a matter of the skills to effectively use the software.
People need to stop saying "Linux" as if it were one operating system. A Linux distribution is an operating system; different distributions are similar, but not identical, and the problems you have with one distribution may not be reproduced with a different distribution. You say you cannot get Flash to work? Which distribution are you using? Which architecture? Adobe does not maintain a Flash plugin for every single distribution, and they only compile the plugin for x86. I know, it may seem pedantic to question whether or not you are using x86, but when dealing with operating systems other than Windows and (the current) Mac OS X, that is a relevant question -- I myself own an ARM desktop that runs Ubuntu.
I think that you might have been joking, at least judging by what you said about Windows installation. In all seriousness though, the sooner people stop treating "Linux" as if it were a single operating system, and the sooner they stop expecting everything they want to be installed by default (which is not the case with any other operating system -- so why should a Linux distribution be any different? Yes, you need to install the Flash plugin separately after installing Windows!), the sooner we can get back to having "productive" conversations about the relative merits of different operating systems.
There is more to it than that. A very carefully managed Windows system can certainly withstand a number of attacks, just like a carefully managed *nix system. The problem is that most Windows systems are not carefully managed, and a carelessly managed Windows system is much more vulnerable than a carelessly managed *nix system. Windows started out as a single user OS, and even though the NT kernel has everything necessary to support multiuser setups, it is very difficult for Microsoft to push better security as the default in Windows -- there are just too many people who have a habit of doing everything as "Administrator," and too much software the relies on that sort of behavior. Things have started to change, but Windows XP is still widely deployed.
Really, if Microsoft wanted to, they could start marketing an OS designed for security sensitive environments (perhaps with a compatibility mode that allows Windows software to run in some kind of VM), and leave Windows as a "home PC" operating system. The fact that they are not doing anything like that, despite the fact that MSR developed such an OS, speaks volumes about Microsoft's priorities.
Actually, there are millions of people who really do need a larger vehicle. There are plenty of workers who carry their equipment around in vans and pickup trucks, and who could not possibly fit that equipment in a smaller car. I do not just mean people who uproot trees -- anyone who needs to carry a ladder around, or a portable generator, or heavy supplies (pipes, large cable spools), and so forth. You can stand around a typical urban streetcorner and see dozens of vans go by, and a lot of them are owned by small businesses and independent contractors.
"Grade level" meant being able to correctly answer at least 55% of the questions on basic algebra (which just touches on quadratic equations) and geometry (no proofs, just a little bit of reasoning about the relationships between line segments, angles, and circles, with little to no trigonometry), for students in the 9th grade (14 and 15 year olds, unless for some reason a student had to repeat a grade, which itself was rare because of the "social promotion" policy at that time). A second exam, with slightly more difficult questions, was also required, and that was it. Calculus is not a requirement; in fact, it is considered outstanding for a high school student to take a calculus course, and there are some schools in the area where I grew up that did not even offer it.
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Where did you go to college? My undergrad professors told me that as far as money was concerned, I should simply not go to a school that does not offer me some kind of fellowship or RA position. Perhaps that advice is confined to my field (computer science)?
Two factors immediately come to my mind: military spending and the reduction of the progressive tax burden. The way I see it, there just is not as much money for the government to throw at science, with the exception of military science. Now, it is true that military science has produced a number of useful non-military results, but there are some fields that have not really been advanced by spending on military science -- the pentagon has little interest in funding research into coral reef development or studies on dung beetles (I write this wondering if someone is going to pull up a paper on one of those topics that happened to be funded by DARPA). It is also true that government spending is not the be-all and end-all of science funding, and that private sources can also fund science, but that is not a solution in and of itself -- corporate funded science suffers from a problem of biased results, and science-as-a-charity is not very sustainable (there really are not enough rich patrons willing to pay for research, especially for topics that are not "trendy").
"The ad supported model is a continual cycle of unwanted side effects."
It really does not have to be -- the whole reason ad blockers came about in the first place was that the advertisements were becoming far too annoying, far beyond what was necessary to actually convey an advertisement. Case in point, when I read a magazine, I certainly see advertisements...but those advertisements are not animated, they do not make it difficult to turn the page and read a new article, they do not cause a pile of advertisements to appear underneath the magazine, etc. Somehow, advertisements printed on paper generate quite a bit of revenue, enough to allow no-cost distribution of many publications -- so why are we forced to deal with horrendously annoying advertisements online?
If the advertisements were unintrusive, and if we did not have to worry about advertisers building dossiers on us, I doubt that ABP and similar plugins would have actually be produced. If online advertisements reflected on-paper advertisements, perhaps with the added feature of being able to click on an ad to find out more information (which is truly beneficial to the consumer), nobody would have problems with online advertising per se.
"Without copyright protection, all source will be treated like BSD licensed code more or less."
Or, perhaps the law will be rewritten to protect the available of source code to the general public? Stallman hinted at a model where code could only remain proprietary for a certain amount of time, and after that it was required to be released to the public, using an escrow system managed by the government. Copyright is not the only system that enables libre software.
"The web site owners have reason to be peeved - if the user uses reader extensively, for web sites that are ad-based, they have no revenue stream."
Perhaps they should be less intrusive with the advertising. I have no problem with relevant text ads, placed neatly on the side, that do no interfere with my ability to read an article. That is not what we have seen out of these sites. Instead, we see articles split up across multiple pages, so that more advertisements can be displayed, and we have seen advertisements that require inefficient plugins to render (with no opt out), and advertisements that float over the article, and advertisements that could give seizures, and so forth. People generally do not block ads because they have some malicious desire to deprive websites of revenue; people block ads because the ads are horribly annoying and increase page load times by an order of magnitude.
"they will intentionally sabotage reader mode or stop serving web pages to safari altogether"
More likely, they will find ways to create advertisements that can sneak into "reader mode" -- for example, advertisements that are indistinguishable from the relevant text or images in the article. This may not be a terrible thing, since it would realign online advertising with the sort of advertising that is already common in newspapers and magazines.
I am with you on that one, and for a second I thought that we were going to be reading about some kind of technological revolution.
Except that Apple is also working to make it difficult for websites to compete with native applications on the iPhone/Pad. They simultaneously released an ad blocker for their web browser and an unblock advertisement system for their mobile devices. They advertise applications in the apps store, but have made it clear that they will not even attempt to create an index of web pages. They encourage users to turn to the apps store for content and programs, not to go searching the broader web.
It is like claiming that you can watch as much porno as you want on Sony TVs, but that you are not allowed to sell porno on their line of video cassettes. Oh, wait, that is exactly how it played out. Except that Apple's marketing machine is much stronger than Sony's, so the results will probably be different.
I heard about this research topic over a year ago when I took VLSI. The main problem, as I understand it, is not building circuits that operate below the threshold voltage, but actually reading the output of those circuits.
Or the school district could not put any requirements on the computers. You know, just saying, there is this whole concept of standards for exchanging information between computers running different operating systems, so there really should not be any problem.
Aid that is based on household income; so a household that has an income of $30k and only one child gets more "aid" than one with $60k income and 5 children.
My security engineering textbook actually has a chapter on nuclear launch codes and how that system was designed. You could, in the absence of all other security mechanisms, simply brute force the codes, since they are of deliberately limited length; the military did some research and discovered that when people are under stress (which is likely if they are being asked to arm a nuclear weapon), they can only accurately enter a certain number of digits even if those digits are being read to them.
In my opinion, though, the most interested detail is the motivation for nuclear launch codes. As you pointed out, there should be (and there is) some physical security measure in place to ensure that some random guy does not launch a nuclear missile. The purpose of the arming codes is not to prevent Joe Schmoe from starting World War 3, but to prevent the soldiers themselves from doing so without authorization. Prior to the Kennedy administration, nuclear bombs were armed when they were deployed (dropped from an airplane), and the only measure in place to prevent a pilot from doing so without orders was a single soldier standing near the plane, who was supposed to shoot the pilot in such a situation -- but the commander might issue the order to strike without authorization.
As for the codes being leaked...that was considered as well. The codes change frequently, some change daily (i.e. the codes that the president carries -- there are other codes, like maintenance codes), so even a leak would have a low potential for causing a problem (a pair of rogue soldiers hell bent on launching a nuke would have to get the authorization codes on the same day they are leaked).
Really, people bring up nuclear secrets (and for some reason, launch codes) whenever they want you to abandon all logical thought and stop questioning the need for broad secrecy. A lot of things that people think are secret really are not secret, or are things that were once secret but are not anymore: it used to be the case that anything related to nuclear weapons, even chemical data about the fuel, was automatically classified, but that policy was relaxed somewhat. Sure, there are things that are secret and that are better kept secret, like the locations and planned movements of US military units in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the identities of spies in foreign countries, but there is a limit and things are supposed to be declassified after a certain amount of time, with certain rare exceptions.
It could be worse -- the law could have stated that failing to secure a wifi network is a crime.
Which any citizen could create a copy of, if he wanted to, without fearing legal attacks. Thankfully, in the USA, government documents are (at least in theory) automatically in the public domain, so we still have that right, although apparently the same company from TFA did put a copyright notice on the constitution...
"A user of a single desktop computer has many different needs, but users usually don't want to have to reboot the computer to switch to another need-specific operating system."
Although, considering that most desktops these days have hardware assistance for virtualization, perhaps it would be worthwhile to push virtualization instead of dual booting. Instead of rebooting to switch, just change between windows or switch to a different VT, and you have the environment you needed all along. It would take some work to ensure that the user interface was simple enough for common users though.
Maybe it is a regional thing. Sweden has yet to actually shut down TPB, Finland is changing the law to reflect technological changes...I even heard about citizens in Denmark using cryptographic protocols to maintain a fair market for small farms.
OK fine, the region does still have problems, and I am not exactly an expert on politics in those countries. Still, as an American, am I free to pretend that there are havens of sensibility.
Google produces a lot of proprietary software: an email program, an office suite, an instant messenger...
There is also more money in the enterprise market; Red Hat is not an exception here. It is pretty hard to convince home users to pay yearly fees for software, yet somehow companies manage to get away with that tactic when it comes to enterprise contracts.
"Should a program require different binaries for Windows Starter vs. Home Basic vs. Home Premium vs. Professional vs. Ultimate vs. Server?"
No, but those are really the same operating system with different levels of user restriction, or at least that was the case last I checked. Now, should Fedora and TiVO be able to run the same unmodified binaries? What about Mac OS X and FreeBSD?
The fact that the operating systems happen to have the same kernel does not mean that they are the same operating system. Fedora and Ubuntu do not ship identical versions of libraries, nor do they have the same default access controls (sudo is not the default in Fedora, for example). They look similar because they both use GNOME by default, but "under the hood" there are substantial and relevant differences.
Sure, it would be nice if a single binary would run on many operating systems. Historically, there were attempts to do such things, but the attempts were not very successful, because the differences between operating systems wound up being too substantial. Different operating systems have different philosophies and target different user types -- different Linux distributions are not an exception to that statement. RHEL ships older (but more stable) libraries than Ubuntu does -- should Red Hat be forced to change its philosophy so that unmodified binaries can be run on both RHEL and Ubuntu? Should Canonical create a new policy of installing compatibility libraries by default? All for the sake of maintaining a common ABI between different operating systems that target different needs?
"So there is less of an incentive to produce easy to use and bug free software?"
Actually, there is, it is just not as clear as you might expect. If a large company has to choose between retraining costs for a system that is not easy to use but which carries a much lower up front cost, versus not retraining and sticking with their proprietary system, they are probably going to save a lot of money sticking with the proprietary system. If an open source company cannot produce software that requires minimal retraining -- basically, software that is easy to use -- then they will have a lot of trouble with their business.
Likewise with bugs -- if the software has so many bugs that a company is spending more time calling for support than actually get work done, the company is not really saving money. Thus, an open source company is forced to produce software with a certain level of quality, or else the company is going to die.
Finally, there is the big one: open source companies get a lot of code from "the community," who may be driven by completely different motivations than the company. Thus, even if an open source company on its own could not produce software that meets the demands of the business world, the community at large can. Red Hat actually maintains a pretty good relationship with the rest of the community, and commits bugfixes or new features upstream as a matter of policy.
"Of course as far as Free as in Speech software goes I feel the real battle and enemy is NOT closed source software."
What about devices like the iPad? The PS3? The Kindle? Proprietary software taken to those extremes is frightening -- imagine if PCs were like the iPad, and whatever company produced your computer had the power to decide how you used it, or perhaps if PCs were like the Kindle, and files could be removed without your consent. Software patents are a problem, yes, but they are just a fraction of the monster.
Except that Red Hat support also includes expertise that may be difficult to find within your own IT department, and goes beyond just bug fixes and workarounds. For example, the number of people in the world who can create useful and secure SELinux policies is not very large, but Red Hat does employ many such people, and if you pay for it, one of those people can literally come to your company's IT department and create or update those policies as needed. Granted, only large businesses or companies that process highly sensitive data (or the government) would actually require such a service, but they certainly do provide it. It is not just the quality of the software, or the completeness of the software, it is a matter of the skills to effectively use the software.
People need to stop saying "Linux" as if it were one operating system. A Linux distribution is an operating system; different distributions are similar, but not identical, and the problems you have with one distribution may not be reproduced with a different distribution. You say you cannot get Flash to work? Which distribution are you using? Which architecture? Adobe does not maintain a Flash plugin for every single distribution, and they only compile the plugin for x86. I know, it may seem pedantic to question whether or not you are using x86, but when dealing with operating systems other than Windows and (the current) Mac OS X, that is a relevant question -- I myself own an ARM desktop that runs Ubuntu.
I think that you might have been joking, at least judging by what you said about Windows installation. In all seriousness though, the sooner people stop treating "Linux" as if it were a single operating system, and the sooner they stop expecting everything they want to be installed by default (which is not the case with any other operating system -- so why should a Linux distribution be any different? Yes, you need to install the Flash plugin separately after installing Windows!), the sooner we can get back to having "productive" conversations about the relative merits of different operating systems.
There is more to it than that. A very carefully managed Windows system can certainly withstand a number of attacks, just like a carefully managed *nix system. The problem is that most Windows systems are not carefully managed, and a carelessly managed Windows system is much more vulnerable than a carelessly managed *nix system. Windows started out as a single user OS, and even though the NT kernel has everything necessary to support multiuser setups, it is very difficult for Microsoft to push better security as the default in Windows -- there are just too many people who have a habit of doing everything as "Administrator," and too much software the relies on that sort of behavior. Things have started to change, but Windows XP is still widely deployed.
Really, if Microsoft wanted to, they could start marketing an OS designed for security sensitive environments (perhaps with a compatibility mode that allows Windows software to run in some kind of VM), and leave Windows as a "home PC" operating system. The fact that they are not doing anything like that, despite the fact that MSR developed such an OS, speaks volumes about Microsoft's priorities.
Perhaps their profit margins are not high enough right now?
Actually, there are millions of people who really do need a larger vehicle. There are plenty of workers who carry their equipment around in vans and pickup trucks, and who could not possibly fit that equipment in a smaller car. I do not just mean people who uproot trees -- anyone who needs to carry a ladder around, or a portable generator, or heavy supplies (pipes, large cable spools), and so forth. You can stand around a typical urban streetcorner and see dozens of vans go by, and a lot of them are owned by small businesses and independent contractors.
"Grade level" meant being able to correctly answer at least 55% of the questions on basic algebra (which just touches on quadratic equations) and geometry (no proofs, just a little bit of reasoning about the relationships between line segments, angles, and circles, with little to no trigonometry), for students in the 9th grade (14 and 15 year olds, unless for some reason a student had to repeat a grade, which itself was rare because of the "social promotion" policy at that time). A second exam, with slightly more difficult questions, was also required, and that was it. Calculus is not a requirement; in fact, it is considered outstanding for a high school student to take a calculus course, and there are some schools in the area where I grew up that did not even offer it.