Lately, I'm seeing more and more "reign in" on Slashdot and I've got to say, I'm disappointed.

I need a new system on which to run asterisk, bonus points if I don't have to configure it from scratch. I'd like to spend less than $200 (ideally I'd pick up something used if necessary for $100) but I have storage devices available, whether CF, SD, USB, or what have you. It can have wireless, but it doesn't have to because I have a routerboard for that. I have found my pogoplugs to be unreliable at best.

If you are looking for the circle, it seems to have spontaneously reconfigured itself on reddit as of yesterday (the sub's been there a while, we all just rejoined).

Circular Refuge on Reddit

Click asking for permission (its a closed group) giving your /. id may help.

I've not been posting on Slashdot much this week, because I've been trying out Soylent News, which is using (and old version of) Slashcode (with some improvements) and lacks corporate overlords. It seems to have captured most of what I like about discussions in Slashdot, although is suffering slightly from not having nearly as many active users (50 or so comments is still the norm and it probably needs 100+ to be sustainable).
If you've not visited yet, I'd recommend giving it a go.

I'm TheRaven over there.

Ok, I need to expand a bit on my excessively long post on education some time back.

The first thing I am going to clarify is streaming. This is not merely distinction by speed, which is the normal (and therefore wrong) approach. You have to distinguish by the nature of the flows. In practice, this means distinguishing by creativity (since creative people learn differently than uncreative people).

It is also not sufficient to divide by fast/medium/slow. The idea is that differences in mind create turbulence (a very useful thing to have in contexts other than the classroom). For speed, this is easy - normal +/- 0.25 standard deviations for the central band (ie: everyone essentially average), plus two additional bands on either side, making five in total.

Classes should hold around 10 students, so you have lots of different classes for average, fewer for the band's either side, and perhaps only one for the outer bands. This solves a lot of timetabling issues, as classes in the same band are going to be interchangeable as far as subject matter is concerned. (This means you can weave in and out of the creative streams as needed.)

Creativity can be ranked, but not quantified. I'd simply create three pools of students, with the most creative in one pool and the least in a second. It's about the best you can do. The size of the pools? Well, you can't obtain zero gradient, and variations in thinking style can be very useful in the classroom. 50% in the middle group, 25% in each of the outliers.

So you've 15 different streams in total. Assume creativity and speed are normally distributed and that the outermost speed streams contain one class of 10 each. Start with speed for simplicity I'll forgo the calculations and guess that the upper/lower middle bands would then have nine classes of 10 each and that the central band will hold 180 classes of 10.

That means you've 2000 students, of whom the assumption is 1000 are averagely creative, 500 are exceptional and 500 are, well, not really. Ok, because creativity and speed are independent variables, we have to have more classes in the outermost band - in fact, we'd need four of them, which means we have to go to 8000 students.

These students get placed in one of 808 possible classes per subject per year. Yes, 808 distinct classes. Assuming 6 teaching hours per day x 5 days, making 30 available hours, which means you can have no fewer than 27 simultaneous classes per year. That's 513 classrooms in total, fully occupied in every timeslot, and we're looking at just one subject. Assuming 8 subjects per year on average, that goes up to 4104. Rooms need maintenance and you also need spares in case of problems. So, triple it, giving 12312 rooms required. We're now looking at serious real estate, but there are larger schools than that today. This isn't impossible.

The 8000 students is per year, as noted earlier. And since years won't align, you're going to need to go from first year of pre/playschool to final year of an undergraduate degree. That's a whole lotta years. 19 of them, including industrial placement. 152,000 students in total. About a quarter of the total student population in the Greater Manchester area.

The design would be a nightmare with a layout from hell to minimize conflict due to intellectual peers not always being age peers, and neither necessarily being perceptual peers, and yet the layout also has to minimize the distance walked. Due to the lack of wormholes and non-simply-connected topologies, this isn't trivial. A person at one extreme corner of the two dimensional spectrum in one subject might be at the other extreme corner in another. From each class, there will be 15 vectors to the next one.

But you can't minimize per journey. Because there will be multiple interchangeable classes, each of which will produce 15 further vectors, you have to minimize per day, per student. Certain changes impact other vectors, certain vector values will be impossible, and so on. Multivariable systems with permutation constraints. That is hellish optimization, but it is possible.

It might actually be necessary to make the university a full research/teaching university of the sort found a lot in England. There is no possible way such a school could finance itself off fees, but research/development, publishing and other long-term income might help. Ideally, the productivity would pay for the school. The bigger multinationals post profits in excess of 2 billion a year, which is how much this school would cost.

Pumping all the profits into a school in the hope that the 10 uber creative geniuses you produce each year, every year, can produce enough new products and enough new patents to guarantee the system can be sustained... It would be a huge gamble, it would probably fail, but what a wild ride it would be!

nvm

Not so well, huh? India is usually cited as one of the Green Revolution's successes, but it's easy to watch the ongoing failure.

I decided to try out nosupportlinuxhosting but they appear to have suspended hyperlogos.org without notice or explanation. I sure hope I don't have to issue a chargeback, that would be stupid. I'm already waiting for Amazon to process two returns that have been sitting around at their facilities for weeks.

I'm not talking about the content, that has always been shit
I'm talking about what happens when I try to modify my relationships.

OK

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, admin@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at slashdot.org Port 80

Of course I reported the error. Of course I never heard back. Now I'm seeing it again.
Slashdot is basically unusable without friends/foes lists.

Subject says it all. If I can't read your content without javascript, either you are an idiot, or you're evil, or you're an evil idiot.

Google will tell you that their collection of "anonymous" location statistics is opt-in. That is, technically, true. However, on Gingerbread it is not opt-out. Once turned on, there is no option to disable it, that was added later. That, or I have forgotten all I once knew about google-fu. I can find how to change your mind about this on ICS, but not on GB.

I became curious (about Slashdot achievements, silly) and searched to no avail. Anyone have any clue?

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3464373&cid=42911081
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3464373&cid=42911043
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3464373&cid=42910999
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3464373&cid=42910763
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3464373&cid=42910725

Slashdot, why for you no let me use Plain Text in my journal any more?

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3436185&cid=42803807
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3436175&cid=42803841
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3430839&cid=42803897
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3436185&cid=42804399

I can afford it.

Modtrolls troll mod. Film at eleven.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3428941&cid=42771455
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3428941&cid=42771437
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3426877&cid=42770781
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3427061&cid=42770777
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3427083&cid=42770769

Pretty sure this time I offended an iFanboi.

Too bad you can't tag things "slashdot"