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Comment Re:This doesn't prove anything (Score 1) 437

Likeliness calculated off of some random model -- now that there's "science". Yee-haw!

It's idiocy to compare test anomalies as a deviance from a *random* model. Intelligence itself is a deviance from a random model.

Understanding, and even mis-understanding of subject matter or test wording in a classroom by students can be highly correlated or somewhat clustered or not. Even those poor student that choose some answers randomly may subconsciously use the same patterns to do so. Small clusters outside a large "baseline" correlation are conclusive proof of cheating only to an ignoramus, or to someone who's selling you something.

So all it takes is two like-minded thinkers to coincide in their understanding and mis-understanding on some number of answers and they're branded cheaters?

Comment Solution perhaps to SPAM, but not piracy. (Score 1) 421

Applying this to pirate content is kind of lame, since payments aren't what drives that. BUT I've always thought the Visa+Mastercard collectively have always had the power to end 90% of all spam, and could do it in a matter of weeks.

All it would take is:

  1) terms of service forbidding UCE for products.

  2) a few effectively placed honeypot/canary accounts

  3) a couple tiger teams to place orders for the products that get spammed, and

  4) kick the plug on the commercial accounts that deposit the money.

I would venture to guess that the financial services sector spends more overall on anti-spam/excess bandwidth/malware removal for their own infrastructure than they make from those few stinking transactions.

Comment N.H.S. Pinafore (Score 3, Interesting) 572

I've seen that N.H.S. Pinafore show before. I can even still hum some of the snappy lyrics.

I hold when diagnosing a disease,
The expression, "if you please",
A particularly gentlemanly tone implants.
And so do my sisters, and my cousins, and my aunts!

Stick close to your desk
And never check a pulse
and you may all be rulers
of our hospitals.

or something like that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-ZZRXBEcM with "please" goodness at 4:00 and 5:40

Just who does this Doctor Dick Deadeye think he is? Doesn't he know that a British lab technician is any man's equal, (excepting, of course, mine).

Comment My Trifecta. (Score 1) 716

Sorry to hear that. I'd like to chime in on this one.

I have 3 lovely, well adjusted, funny, principled, intelligent daughters. I do not deserve them.

All 3 were valedictorians of their HS, without pushing by us.

Anecdotal? Perhaps, but harder to argue with results * 3.

I've never before shared this much info about what we did. FWIW, YMMV, etc.

1) Give them the gift of self esteem. Demonstrate your believe in their intrinsic worth, and act out of love only. This does not mean giving them every toy they want, but it does mean make sacrifices when you can for the best aspirations of your kids, and constantly showing them how much you appreciate them. Be sentimental and approachable. I think my kids knew I would have been no less their fan if they were D students.

2) They need you, give them all of you. Don't hold back and don't ever fake it with them. They know you; no double standards! If that movie is bad for your kids, parents can do without watching it. Schedule regular whole-family time and 1:1 time. Family dinners together are important.

3) Humor and curiosity are some of the best tools. Demonstrate them. Memorize funny poems, make music together, show how to take things apart, and keep it all upbeat, even crazy.

4) Don't let anyone else raise your kids. That includes daycare and school systems. I lean toward public school system over homeschooling, and it worked out for us, but that depended on what the system had to work with. Social development and problem solving is important. So are friends. Be involved parents, room mothers, etc. Know the kids in their K-6 classes; they end up on your doorstep asking for dates. Here's the tough part, but it proved extremely important: I barely made a living wage and my wife made more than me when we decided one would stay home. It was her call who would. I don't know if I would be able to look my kids in the eyes if we hadn't sacrificed.

5) Money incentives? Oh ya. Make cash match effort was my philosophy. They got a pittance for base allowances but kept job-journals as they learned to write and were richly rewarded for finding new ways to help. In school, the first A is the easiest, even hard not to get. That last A is a bear, it's the subject they don't like. My kids got $1 for the first A, and the pay doubled for each additional A. They nearly bankrupted me. Long term, the investment works out. The youngest just took her MCAT.

Comment My Summary of the Article (Score 1) 626

Since I see little evidence that timothy or Mr. Chapman read the article, I'll do them a favor so they don't have to click:

< article paycheck="undeserved" >

Hi I'm Agam Shah and I'm writing an article about multicore processors, but these concepts are so new to me that I'm putting quotees around "race conditions" like it's frickin' sharks with lasers.

So then I did a Google search on "parallel programming tools" and it help me get another paragraph out of the way.

Oh, and I quote some lamer analyst who has never heard of NUMA or libhoard, so I'll try to fabricate some crisis that the problems they address might never be solved.

Parallel programming is hard, WAH! WAH!

Oh, except when it's not, as in that trivial application named Photoshop. I'll write one of those next weekend.

Comment Better Criteria (Score 1) 347

It seems the article and the report casts the net too wide.

Some mega-corps (like Coca-Cola and Cisco) actually do business everywhere, and even though they show considerable numbers of businesses in tax havens, those are a small fraction (10%) of the total number of countries in which they have offices. For companies like that, I'd be surprised to find a country where they are *not* operating.

Others, like Chevron and Goldman Sachs, show over half of their foreign operations in tax-haven locales. To me, that sounds very slimy.

Others are somewhere in between, probably representing a somewhat disproportionate presence in tax havens.

What else would you expect? Corporations do behave like psychopaths.

Programming

Solving the Knight's Tour Puzzle In 60 Lines of Python 311

ttsiod writes "When I was a kid, I used to play the Knight's Tour puzzle with pen and paper: you simply had to pass once from every square of a chess board, moving like a Knight. Nowadays, I no longer play chess; but somehow I remembered this nice little puzzle and coded a 60-line Python solver that can tackle even 100x100 boards in less than a second. Try beating this, fellow coders!"
Censorship

Blogger.com Banned In Turkey 262

petermp writes "A Turkish court has blocked access to the popular blog hosting service Blogger (Blogger.com and Blogspot.com, owned by Google), since Friday, October 24th, 2008. According to BasBasBas.com, a Dutch blogger based in Istanbul, who alerted readers about the issue: 'It is suspected that the reason for this has something to do with Adnan Oktar, by some considered the leading Muslim advocate for creationism, who has in the past managed to get Wordpress, Google Groups, as well as Richard Dawkins' website [banned].'"

Comment Re:Record label dude is kinda asking for it (Score 3, Informative) 282

>Fair enough

Not fair at all. First of all, if the blog and myspace post are accurate, then the ISP is citing their TOS as the agreement that requires this. The TOS here dated June 16:

http://www.ixwebhosting.com/index.php/v2/pages.tos#q21

says *nothing* about copyright registrations being required or any other provenance for hosted content. If they don't have some other reason for the service outage, I'd speculate that they're making up the "terms" as they go.

>why record label dude doesn't simply register

I see no indication of how many files we're talking about. Depending on how it's structured, $35/file could add up to cash that a struggling artist does not have. They probably would not be needed later either, as I think most folks are inclined to respect CC license provisions.

Still, it's hardly a problem going forward. If the label's report bears scrutiny, then the IX brand is toxic.

Media

MLB Fans Who Bought DRM Videos Get Hosed 299

Billosaur writes "Major League Baseball has just strengthened the case against DRM. If you downloaded videos of baseball games from MLB.com before 2006, apparently they no longer work and you are out of luck. MLB.com, sometime during 2006, changed their DRM system. Result: game videos purchased before that time will now no longer work, as the previous DRM system is no longer supported. When the video is played, apparently the MLB.com servers are contacted and a license obtained to verify the authenticity of the video; this is done by a web link. That link no longer exists, and so now the videos will no longer play, even though the MLB FAQ says that a license is only obtained once and will not need to be re-obtained. The blogger who is reporting this contacted MLB technical support, only to be told there are no refunds due to this problem."
United States

Submission + - Font Freedom Day (trumpetpower.com)

TrumpetPower! writes: "On September 29, 1988, the Library of Congress Copyright Office issued a notice of policy decision (4 Mbyte coralized PDF) in the Federal Register “to inform the public that the Copyright Office has decided that digitized representations of typeface designs are not registrable under the Copyright Act because they do not constitute original works of authorship.” In observance of Font Freedom day, go ahead and share some of your favorite fonts with your friends — and do so entirely guilt-free!"

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