Um. That's what happens now -- you can homeschool, which just has various curriculum and testing requirements. But those requirements have to be implemented in some way. If nobody is managing your homeschooling, you are required to at least *be* somewhere that will manage your schooling. You simply have this mistaken belief that testing for competency is "easy" and would work fine. We have trouble even doing this properly in schools.

And what's with this "schools are paid by the class hour" crap. That kind of metric is commonly used for discussing school budgets, but it is by no means uniform enough to be even a useful standard let alone some kind of implied universal requirement.

You're not allowed to make napalm as a hobby because it's too dangerous to your neighbor, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to have unsecured assault rifles with high-capacity magazines in your house because it is too dangerous to your neighbor.

One role of law is to set accepted practice. Ownership and storage of military-grade weapons should be subject to licensing, required standard practice, and inspection for purposes of public safety. Otherwise its not the "militia" that's "well-regulated" it's the kids and the crazies.

My question is -- why not target touchscreen desktops? There's already a feature-restricted linux variant for tablets - it's called Android. It would be more efficient in terms of resources to build an open-only non-spyware Android variant than to build something open from scratch.

I think we should target 3 user experiences -- fixed-screen + keyboard + mouse/trackball (current desktops/laptops) -- (handheld) touchscreen only (current tablets) -- fixed-touchscreen + keyboard.

But as he said -- it may just be the influence that grows. Nominally someone could create a currency that works like bitcoin but has the same inflation properties as targeted by the central banks (3%/year). This may be possible to do on top of bitcoin's own proof-of-work stream. Bitcoin itself couldn't do this because the early adopter advantage (that makes it scam-like) was necessary to get it started. But now that the system has proved some of its worth, something else could build on it.

My impression from the previous discussion on this was that helium shortage is a fictional crisis. Medical usages don't do helium recovery, which is where most of the loss occurs. Also the main source of helium - as a by-product of natural gas extraction - just vents most of it because its not worth capturing it. So complaining about "misuse" is nonsense. If one is really worried about a helium shortage one should be pushing for recovery in its biggest usage context and stockpiling. Neither of these are being discussed, so apparently this isn't actually serious.

My question is why is this not just a demonstration that citation optimization works as expected? They say that resubmission is dominated by a flow from high-impact to low-impact journals. i.e. people submit their paper to the highest impact journal they think the "might" be able to get it into, and then resubmit to lower ones until it gets accepted. This means the scientists are using resubmissions to actively attempt to increase their citation count by getting their paper into the highest impact journal possible. So of course citation rates are higher for resubmitted papers, because resubmitted papers are the ones being subject to this optimization process.

While this is majorly labor-intensive on the reviewer side, it is a decently useful practice in a large field like biology, since it will help insure that "important" results receive a lot of visibility. High-impact journals are nominally high-impact because the community treats them that way. More people read & cite them, so people try to get their stuff in there first and then go to other journals.

I would also note that this study itself is an example of the distorting side-effects this process can have. These guys don't give the above very reasonable explanation for their results, and precisely because of their poor analysis, it is an "interesting puzzle" and gets into a high-impact journal (science in this case). Of course if they'd just done their analysis properly, it would be a completely uninteresting result, and not make it into the high-impact journal. Insane isn't it. That's scientific publication today. Science and nature tend to contain things that are speculative, inconclusive, or plain wrong because knowing the answer is boring.

By the way science and nature are run more like magazines than journals. Most journals don't have an "interesting" cut, just "useful to others, not done before, and done properly". Both science and nature will actually relax the "done properly" part if it is "interesting" enough. This isn't necessarily bad science, it just means that both the proposal of a hypothesis and its falsification are published separately. Nominally this is good for high-profile questions. The problem is that many people don't realize this and often the the proposal of the hypothesis is much "higher-impact" than its falsification!

Sure "some" people do. The point is that if someone will do it for 60k plus props, then there are plenty of others that can do it for nefarious purposes. Also I'm not just being cynical, there is a practical component. Looking at it from the practical security standpoint this indicates a market value of a given type of crack, and therefore the approximate cost of such an attack to the hypothetical adversary in your security evaluation. Everything is vulnerable to a "motivated enough" attacker. Security is keeping the expected cost of the crack below the benefit (motivation). My cynicism comes in when I say that $60k+props seems like a pretty darn low cost for a hole (escape from sandbox) in a high-profile browser touted for its security. More cynicism comes in by the assumption that this crack is just the product. The critical issues are in the way the crack was found, which is not mentioned. I would have more confidence if this Pinkie Pie person were well-known for all the bugs they have fixed in chromium, and they just held onto one for the contest. A cause of concern is that the exploit sounds awfully similar to the previous one (using a render bug to access the IPC), indicating that there is a whole family of possible exploits of which these may just be two examples.

I think this demonstration of crack-on-demand is not really a good thing for chrome. This means that cracks for chrome are not worth too much more than 60k on the black market. That doesn't seem like a very high price.

Interesting... this makes me wonder if it is possible that the evaluation given was indirectly gender-biased. i.e. there was something in the evaluation that could be interpreted differently based on the gender of the candidate. For example if the applicant is mid-30's and had an uncharacteristic gap in their employment a few years ago, a woman might be assumed to have a kid, but a man may not be subjected to that assumption. This is still bias, but it might get closer to a more specific understanding what factors are leading to the bias. There could be even more subtle things in an "evaluation" like traits that are seen as positive/negative for one gender but not the other.

But it is always possible to sufficiently disguise paid speech as free. The Citizen's United case was about a propaganda film disguised as a for-profit movie. The promoters just exhibited it at a loss, but it was structured as a for-profit show. So how does one go about "proving" speech is paid in these corner cases? I think paid speech is what is fundamentally wrong with the US democracy, but there is an argument to be made that it is simply not workable to restrict it. The electorate just has to figure it out. As the grandparent post points out, Fox news can just pretend to be legitimate news and get away with extremely biased and manipulative crap. To some degree Citizens United just acknowledges this as a fact of life.

or to say it another way: Never believe what you see on TV. (i.e. what someone else paid money for you to see -- even if its not an ad, it is advertiser-supported).

This is a great correlation is (possibly) not causation. They are saying that it is possible that the same metabolic differences that lead to obesity might also cause people to have more bpa in their urine. So the causality might be the other way entirely. Somehow that seems like a more reasonable explanation to me since it might even have a reasonable mechanism in terms of the individual's uptake of both sugar and an additive of sugared beverages.

What I think he is trying to say is that often these comparisons don't make sense because education is structured differently in the US. This results in a much more fair sample of the US population going into calculating the "average" for the US compared to other countries. "Developed" countries in Europe select out people for limited education very early compared to the US. The same is often true in Asia. Then only the students that are left take the tests used to make comparisons. So, in countries other than the US, often the students tested are pre-selected to be the good students, so obviously they do better. In the US we are often careful about things like graduation rates and minimum achievement levels for ALL citizens, even those who drop out for socioeconomic reasons.

In the case of countries like China and India, which are still mostly rural populations, this is all pretty clearly a trick. The US as a whole is being compared to the relatively small fraction of China/India that is included in the test population. In the US we could similarly rig our numbers by just leaving out the least-educated 80% of our population.

It seems reasonable to me that the guy's blog should be the source, not his user account on wikipedia. otherwise Wikipedia would have to verify user identities, which is insane.

One word -- Office. A "desktop" O/S without Microsoft Office is not viable. OS X is the only unix desktop that MS has blessed with a port of Office, so it is the dominant unix desktop. Nothing else matters until Office's monopoly is diluted.

Seems like it will hinge on exactly how he answered questions during the jury selection. As you say, his bias is pretty clear in hindsight due to the nature of his patent. The problem will be if he skirted this issue in jury selection questioning in order to give himself a better chance to get on the jury. I would assume Samsung's lawyers are looking at his answers very carefully. He also pretty clearly overstepped his bounds as jury foreman, and that itself may be enough for a mistrial.