This actually was tested with a pilot project. They distributed the iPads to a few schools so they could collect data on how well the devices worked, before approving the deal.

Unfortunately, as you say, they made no attempt to be scientific or statistically rigorous about it. The feedback basically amounted to, "The teachers and students seemed to like it." No measurements to test if student comprehension or information retention improved, or if teachers were able to get through more material in a week. I'm still debating if that was due to incompetence (people who like Apple hardware tend to go ga-ga over the Apple logo, not what the device actually does), or if the whole pilot was just to rubber-stamp the deal. That's probably what the FBI is trying to figure out.

When someone says "open platform" they're usually referring to the software. The hardware specs for the IBM PC were open - anyone could make PC hardware without getting a license from IBM. Whoop dee doo. The software was locked down with the IBM BIOS, so nobody could sell a PC-compatible because they needed the IBM BIOS to run any software developed for that open hardware platform. And the BIOS had a great big "Copyright IBM" at the beginning without which DOS (and thus any PC software) wouldn't work. That is, if you wanted to sell a PC-compatible, you needed to get a license from IBM. And IBM wasn't selling licenses.

Compaq opened up the platform by reverse-engineering the IBM BIOS in a clean room (i.e. engineers who only had access to the IBM PC BIOS chip in a black box, and they deduced everything in the BIOS by sending in signals and seeing what came out). That's what allowed PC-compatibles and turned the PC into the open software platform it is today.

Apple locks down their Macs with the software license on OS X - you are (aside from OS X server in a VM) only allowed to run it on Apple-sold Mac hardware. The plethora of Hackintosh guides out there demonstrate that hardware compatibility is for the most part not a problem. Thus far the license agreement for OS X has been legally bulletproof. Unlike the copyright protection on the IBM BIOS.

The computer is a lot easier to audit. You can have it run a million drawings in a few seconds, burn the output to a blank CD (since you don't want to be inserting flash drives into it), then have another computer audit those million drawing results for similar randomness.

Auditing a physical random drawing machine means weighing and measuring each part to be sure its still within specs, and making sure there aren't other possible vectors for cheating, like smooth vs rough balls. In one lottery where the balls were drawn by blindfolded kids, they've even heated or chilled the balls which were supposed to be drawn. Which cannot be detected in an audit after the fact.

Theoretically, affirmative action can accelerate the speed at which you reach a new equilibrium. In terms of a harmonic oscillator, the regular behavior of the system in response to a change in base state (from 1 to 0 in the picture) is overdamped and it can take a long time for the system to reach the new base state. Affirmative action reduces the dampening to an underdamped state, causing the system to arrive at the new equilibrium state (0) much more quickly. i.e. It is sexism, but applied correctly it can speed up the transition to a new steady state equilibrium.

But an underdamped system will overshoot (drops past 0 in the picture). Since we're talking about law here and not a true harmonic oscillator, this can be avoided by putting in guidelines which trigger the end of affirmative action once the new equilibrium state is achieved. In terms of the picture, we raise the dampening back to normal the moment the system reaches 0. There will be a bit of overshoot, but it should quickly settle down.

Unfortunately, I have never seen any affirmative action laws actual specify at what point the affirmative action should cease. So the system will remain underdamped and will overshoot. If it were implemented fairly, at some point it would overshoot so far that affirmative action would call for more hiring of white males, and we'd end up with the oscillations you see in the picture. But I suspect the powers behind it would never allow that to happen, resulting in a permanent skew in hiring practices. Institutionalized sexism and racism - against white males.

This is like the other bad science assumption often tossed around by deniers: " Well if there is more water vapor then there will be more clouds and so the world will cool down!". No, it doesn't work like that.

Actually, it does work like that. Warmer temperatures increase cloud cover which increases albedo, helping mitigate the temperature change.

It doesn't offset the change entirely though (else the temperature would never change). Water vapor is on a negative (stabilizing) feedback loop with temperature. But just because you've got a negative feedback loop in place doesn't mean the system is immune to state changes. It'll slow down the rate of change, as well as dampen the degree of change before the system reaches a new equilibrium. But (with very rare exceptions) it cannot prevent the change.

We've got climate change deniers ignoring scientific data to substantiate their position. And we've got climate change proponents ignoring basic control systems engineering and Laplace transform math to substantiate their position.

With prices generally ranging from $400 to $3,000 for typical desktop 3D printers, they are not cheap, and with budgets within many school districts running dry, both in the United States and overseas, the unfortunate fact is that many schools simply canâ(TM)t afford them

That's a myth. The U.S. spends more than a quarter of a million dollars per K-12 classroom every year (average 20-23.4 students per class). We could easily afford one 3D printer per school. Heck, we could afford one per classroom.

The problem is schools are top-heavy and administrators suck up most of that money, then create an artificial financial crisis every time a budget cut is threatened. This gets teachers and the teachers' union to claim we aren't spending enough on education, when we're already spending way more than we should be.

Yes I'm aware that first link I gave says administration is only $843 per student per year. That's because the administrators have gamed the stats to hide how much money they're sucking up. If you drill down into the numbers (p.56), you find that "In 2008-09, salary and employee benefits for school staff amounted to $8,797 per student." Subtract $843 for administration and that leaves $7954 per student supposedly going to instructional teachers.

For 2010, the average student to teacher ratio was 16.0 (this includes substitutes and assistants). Ask yourself, is the average teacher making ($7954 * 16) = $127,264 per year in salary and benefits? Of course not. The figure is inflated because the administrators have misclassified most of their salary and benefits as "instructional" instead of "administration" to hide how much money their draining from our educational system.

I always been a proponent of Libraries of Congress as a unit of volume. But the bibliophiles have thwarted me at every turn.

That's socialism!! I signed my pledge not to raise taxes etc

The problem isn't socialism nor capitalism. The problem is industry collusion with the politicians calling the shots. The agricultural industry in California has deep political ties stemming back nearly two centuries. Consequently, we've got the opposite of socialism (government regulation for the betterment of society). We've got corruption.

Water is sold to agriculture for a bit over $100 per acre-foot. Looking at my latest residential water bill, the lowest price tier (enough for a family of 4 at 55 gal/person-day) is $3.41 per 100 cubic feet. Which is $1488.47 per acre-foot.

All of California's water problems would disappear if agriculture had to pay the market rate for water. Instead you've got this corrupt pricing scheme where the group using 80% of the water has pushed the vast majority of the water cost onto the other 20%. That regulatory price distortion is what leads to ridiculous situations like alfalfa farmers flooding their fields with water while residential homeowners are told to let their lawns die in order to conserve water.

Ivanpah is CSP - concentrated solar power. Basically big mirrors which track the sun and focus it on a heating element (usually a salt bath), which turns water to steam, which drives a turbine to generate power. CSP usually has a capacity factor around 30%, and is a viable (efficient) power source albeit roughly double the cost of coal/nuclear/wind per kWh.

OP was referring to photovoltaic solar. PV solar panels have a capacity factor around 14% (18% in the desert southwest). And their unsubsidized cost per kWh is still about 3-5x that of coal/nuclear/wind.

CSP would actually work for desalination. Reverse osmosis is the most energy efficient method of desalination. The problem with RO is that nearly all of that energy needed is electrical. And with CSP you're converting sunlight to thermal energy, which is converted into mechanical energy to drive a generator, which converts it to electrical energy, which is sent to the RO plant, where it's converted back to mechanical energy in motors used to drive pumps, whose pressure forces the water through the RO filters. All those energy conversions are murder on your overall efficiency.

Thermal energy is usually abundant as a byproduct of other energy production or consumption, so can be obtained much more cheaply than electrical energy. So in terms of cost, thermal desalination can actually be competitive with RO even though its overall energy use is higher. If that thermal energy was just going to be vented into the environment anyway as waste heat, then it's essentially free. CSP solar would be much better than PV solar in that respect since it can produce thermal energy directly. The problem being the best source for water to be desalinated is the ocean, while the best location for CSP is the desert. Moving the CSP plant to the ocean shore is probably not the best idea since the shoreline tends to be clouded over every morning til almost noon. And piping corrosive seawater to the desert would make the Keystone pipeline seem like child's play.

Why wouldn't we use the single most abundant energy source on the planet to power something that is energy intensive? Oh and said energy source has no fuel costs?

Because it's stupid to collect solar energy with PV cells, which convert it to electricity, which gets stored chemically in a battery, which gets converted back to electricity, which gets converted to rotational mechanical energy in a motor, which gets converted to linear mechanical energy in pumps which, which gets converted to pressure mechanical energy for the desalination reverse osmosis filters to operate. All those energy conversions absolutely kill your efficiency. Why bother with all those conversions if you can come up with a way for sunlight to directly drive your desalination?

Sorting the reviews by "most helpful" helps a lot. In fact that seems to be the default sort of the review samples which show up on the right side at Amazon. Often you'll find a product with 4+ stars, but a significant fraction of the "helpful" reviews give it 1-2 stars. The helpful reviews also usually contain a lot of details about the product which are of interest to the prospective buyer (e.g. speed benchmarks for USB flash drives).

If Ocean water is moves from alkaline to neutral to below 7 on the scale, which is what tehy are saying is/will happen, then it is becoming acidic. It is currently at an 8.1 out of a 14 point scale.

It's usually not referred to that way because the chemistry works differently at pH below 7 than it does above. It's not like a meter stick where you've arbitrarily chosen a center point, and any upward movement regardless of location on that scale is "becoming higher".

It's more like a bowl, with the center (base of the bowl) at 7. As you move away from the center (towards 1 or 14), the environment becomes more extreme, albeit for chemically different reasons. "Becoming acidic" specifically refers to drops below a pH of 7. The correct term for being at pH 8.1 and moving towards 7 is "becoming neutral" (or becoming less alkaline). Which obviously doesn't sound as threatening, which is probably why TFS chose to use the incorrect term.

OTOH, the term "ocean acidification" refers to the process which lowers the ocean's pH. Iif I remember my chemistry right the process should still function below pH 7, so "acidification" is the correct term. That is, "becoming acidic" or "becoming neutral" refers to a change in the state. "Acidification" refers to the process causing the state change.

Any âoestandard-essential patentsâ should be public domain (or as close as possible, as Elon Musk did with the Tesla battery circuitry), or they should not be included in the standards. Period.

and from TFS:

If Apple wins, the understanding of what fees are RAND may decrease by at least an order of magnitude.

Are both the wishful thinking version of how things will play out.

If RAND fees drop by an order of magnitude or are eliminated, the outcome is simple: Nobody will submit patents of any value for approval under RAND anymore.

Those patents will be more valuable if kept proprietary and licensed out in a case-by-case basis. Remember, Apple wanted Samsung to pay them roughly $40 per device for 5 of Apple's proprietary patents, while refusing to pay Google (Motorola) and Samsung more than $1 per device for their portfolio 16 and 103 standards-essential patents respectively. If you go by those numbers, then on a per-patent basis a proprietary patent is worth roughly 300x more than a RAND patent. In other words, for it to make economic sense to submit a patent under RAND, you have to feel RAND will increase the number of devices using your patent by at least 300x.

So any company with more than 0.3% market share will have no economic incentive to submit any of their patents worth a damn to RAND under that pricing structure. All the good patented ideas will not be submitted under RAND, and we will end up with every product using proprietary implementations. The RAND "official" standards will suck compared to the proprietary versions (unless they were created via government research). And wasteful "standards wars" like HD-DVD vs Blu-ray will become the norm instead of the exception.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair

The irony is that we've accidentally stumbled onto probably our best chance at mitigating disastrous earthquakes. But one side is desperate to prove we aren't causing earthquakes, and the other side is desperate to prove this is an evil thing which must be stopped.

In avalanche-prone regions, we don't wait for the snow to build up until it comes down in a humungous avalanche. We deliberately cause smaller avalanches before the snow builds up to levels which could cause a devastating avalanche. Either by firing cannon shells or dropping dynamite from helicopters into the snowpack. With fracking, we've stumbled upon the exact same technique. We could intentionally trigger smaller earthquakes before seismic stresses build up enough to cause a devastating earthquake. But one side insists there's no connection, while the other side is desperate to portray it as an activity from which no good can come.

It's also worth pointing out that stereotypes aren't in and of themselves bad. They're a mental shortcut our brains take to deal with the massive influx of information it receives while moving around in the real world. You're driving and see something that looks like a tree, and you assume it's a tree and will exhibit tree-like properties - stays in one spot, branches may sway a bit, a few leaves might fall. Your brain can then automatically eliminate the multitude of other possibilities for things beside the road (e.g. could run into the road), and ignore the tree as a potential threat to your driving.

What's important is to recognize when a stereotypes isn't true. If a big branch from the tree breaks and falls onto the road in front of you, that breaks the stereotype about trees being static objects which don't interfere with your driving. If you understand that "Oh, this tree broke my stereotype of trees" and react appropriately, you're fine. But if you persist in your (incorrect) stereotype and insist that branch in the middle of the road cannot exist because trees can't get in the way of your driving as long as you stay on the road, you're going to have an accident.