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Comment Sick (Score 1) 321

You can't just put "[sic]" next to any random string of characters and expect the reader to understand. What the hell is "whiel boosting creativity" supposed to mean, anyway? Maybe I'm slow this morning, but it took me 5 minutes to see the "while". Brackets can help readers stay engaged [and] informed [while] improving understanding, but this time they failed us.

Comment Misleading Headline: Rates not Scores (Score 5, Informative) 622

The headline is misleading. The actual pass/fail line for each student is unchanged. The state is changing what it considers an acceptable aggregate rate of passing for groups of students, choosing race as the criterion for grouping. The stated rationale is that students of different races have different starting points, so it makes sense to seek different final achievement levels. But even if you accept that approach, it seems lazy to use race as a surrogate for academic starting point.

Comment Re:Function creep...? (Score 2) 216

I think you're close. You need a secondary access method that requires direct skin contact near the device in order to bypass the front-line wireless security. Same concept as how most people will protect wireless access to their home network, but rely on physical security to prevent someone replacing their router: if someone can get close enough to get physical access, you'll know it and know to stop it before it's too late.

Comment Sure (Score 1) 957

Sure, we can have international blasphemy laws... just as soon as someone figures out how to live in a way that never offends anyone anywhere in the world. Everyone that pushes for this sort of thing always seems to think it's perfectly natural for everyone to think they way they do and so criminalization would be easy to enforce. Nevermind that that their very way of life may be blasphemous to others in the international community. You want to criminalize blasphemy in your own nation? Have at it. Bash your own populace until they're a homogeneous mass. Don't expect the rest of the globe to fall in line so easily.

Comment Trusting Trust (Score 1) 67

Do RepRap machines, as open as they are, suffer from Ken Thompson's Trusting Trust problem? I suppose once the integration is sophisticated enough to incorporate the controller software in the replication process that it could, for example, recognize any tumbler-style lock device being printed and surreptitiously modify the design during printing to include support for a special master key. Is there a lower-level analog to the compiler problem that involves only subtle changes to the hardware elements?

Comment Sell? (Score 2) 106

Have we learned nothing from the evil corporate empires that feed us our culture in click-wrapped agreements? Don't sell your personal data... license it! And sue the bastards to death if they share it with anyone else!

Comment BI? Really? (Score 2) 339

I'm usually one to let this kind of thing slide (so to speak), but if this topic is meant to be at all serious, SlashBI is hardly a serious name. B.I. will only last so long before it withers under the ridicule. I strongly suggest something like "BusInt".

Comment Re:Privacy or Convenience? (Score 2) 128

Another factor that appears to be ignored in this report on the study is the perceived multiplier of the transaction delta from repeat business. If I'm going to save 65 cents on every book Amazon sells me in exchange for surrendering my (same) email address every time, that's very different from a one-time only discount or a unique purchase from a vendor I'm unlikely to revisit. As it happens, the full report does mention two models, one with and one without multiple transactions, but without reading all 76 pages, it's not clear how the 65 cent figure relates to those more complicated situations.

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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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