It is strictly a parental issue in believing in education and starting it at home, where it must start by example.

I have to believe part of it is cultural. Black culture was forcibly put through slavery, where literacy and formal education was prohibited. Consequently their new culture came to value spoken language rather than written. I think that's why a disproportionate number of successful musicians are black (not currently true, but was true in recent decades). It's similar for Latinos (people of Central American descent, as opposed to Hispanics who are of Spanish descent). For centuries they were second-class citizens in Spanish-controlled territories and thus weren't given the opportunity to incorporate standardized education into their culture.

This is probably a good argument for not respecting all aspects of someone's "culture." If part of your "cultural heritage" is handicapping your kids in school, the solution isn't to change educational standards so that it's no longer a handicap. It's to alter your culture. (I'm first gen Asian immigrant, and I actually think Asians go too far in the opposite direction with too much emphasis on academic achievement. I'm actually glad to see current gen Asian kids prioritizing social integration over academic achievement.)

English is a whole different matter, the English phonetics changed drastically from their Germanic roots during/ due to 'The Great Vowel Shift'. Strange enough the spelling remained basically Germanic but the pronunciation is nothing like it used to be.
This vowel shift is even more pronounced in American, the (a?) reason they have great difficulty in comprehensively speaking European languages, including Church-Latin.

English is a mish-mash of other languages, which also gives it more words than other languages. Its spelling and pronunciation are non-standard because most of those borrowed words retain part or all of their spelling or pronunciation from their native language. You even get words which retain spelling from their original language, but whose pronunciation gets shifted to a phonetic reading using rules from another language (e.g. niche = nitch instead of neesh).

English spelling and pronunciation will become standardized when all the world's languages decide to conform their languages to a universal spelling and pronunciation standard.

and they've done their best at tax avoidance depriving each country where they trade of valuable tax revenue

If you really want to to tax Apple (or any company for that matter) in the country where the transaction is made, it's really simple. All you have to do is raise your sales tax rate.

The reason governments try to do it by taxing corporations is because they don't want their citizens to see how much they're being taxed. Charge a 20% sales tax, or charge a tax on corporations which they can only pay by raising their prices 20%. The end result is the same (the government gets 20% of the transaction amount), but in the first case the people (correctly) blame the government, in the second case the people (incorrectly) blame the corporations.

(Actually, raising the income tax rate is even better. You can implement progressive tax rates, and citizens cannot skirt the tax by purchasing in other states or countries. The drawback of course being that each citizen knows exactly how much of their income is going to taxes. The current systems where everything and anything under the sun is taxed is horribly inefficient.)

That was my thought too. For example, if you grab n people off the street and ask them to make a total guess at 10 coin flips, just by pure chance alone 1.1% of them are going to get 8, 9, or all 10 correct (80% or better "correct" rate). A cumulative binomial distribution of 8 correct of 10 trials with 50% success rate is 98.9%. Likewise the bottom 1.1% will guess correctly 20% or worse. This is the the usual "cause" of some research investigating psychic phenomenon. If the researchers aren't very well versed in statistics, they end up thinking that a percentage of the population is psychic (guesses better than average), and a percentage is anti-psychic (guesses worse than average). When in reality it's just luck.

The deviation shrinks as you increase the number of coin flips (i.e. the "correct" rate of the luckiest 1% of the population gets closer to 50%). Unfortunately the article lacks any info to really judge if this is what's going on. I wasn't able to find in TFA how many events they've had their "crowd" predict. From the project's blog, they've been at it for 3 years so I have to think they've had more than 10 predictions. But you also need to know the long-term rate of correct guesses, as that will skew the correct rate up as well. (It's also unclear what's meant by "30% better" - does that mean the experts were correct 60% and their top 1% were correct 90%? Or does it mean the experts were correct 60% and their top 1% were correct 78%?)

To break up a rape, you you need to conduct assault and battery on the rapist. Things that are normally considered criminal, but not in the context of self-defense or defense of another.

That's what's missing in the security front. If you're exposing the flaw in self-defense (your info is at risk) or defense of another (other people's info is at risk), you should be immunized against prosecution if you reveal the info in a reasonable manner. "Reasonable" can be defined in many ways, but probably something like notifying government regulators and the company fielding the security hole and giving them a month to do something about it, before going public with it.

See, the problem with your example is that understanding a particular tech (i.e. Java, C#) != logical thinking. A lot of people are great at understanding how to integrate Spring and Hibernate and muck around with configurations, but suck at logical thinking. A lot of people are great at logical thinking and problem solving, but for the life of them can't (or won't) bother themselves with APIs and the like.

Hire someone who's studying "real" CS (i.e. lots of discrete math, graph theory, data structures etc), engineering, or the hard sciences (math, physics, chemistry etc) and you'll see that unless they studied at no-name college, they can easily solve logical problems.

On some level, I can't help but think that the article you linked to is full of shit. Or at the very least, a hyperbole.

Computer Science grads and PhDs cannot do basic loops and recursion? Yeah right. Unless they studied at University of Phoenix or DeVry, any school worth its salt will teach you math and computational logic for comp sci degrees.

Is it true for someone who's studied, say, literature, and wants to program? I can see that happening. But the legitimacy of the whole piece is affected when they make blanket statements that the majority of the comp sci grads can't or that people with master's and PhDs in comp sci cannot solve simple problems.

There's no data there other than anecdotes, and I'll dismiss it for the hyperblow that it probably is.

I chose $10 - $20 in apps, because it really depends on whether or not a new app captures my attention.

However, I spend much more than that on music and media. Like a song I heard on the radio? Shazam it and buy it. Does someone just remind you of a favorite album from your childhood? Buy it.

Our first baby was born just a few weeks ago, and lately, I've been buying lullabies, nursery rhymes, and similar music/apps.

Given how inexpensive apps are, I am boggled at how many people refuse to spend any money on them.

As an open-source dev myself, I often wonder why the fuck I do anything useful for others when they'll just turn on me the moment their toys don't work exactly as desired because -- gorsh -- I'm not perfect, though I work very hard to be.

Welcome to Engineering. Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) best summarized this disconnect between commendation and blame in the Engineers Explained chapter of his book:

Engineers hate risk. They try to eliminate it whenever they can. This is understandable, given that when an engineer makes one little mistake, the media will treat it like it's a big deal or something.

Examples of Bad Press for Engineers

• Hindenberg.
• Space Shuttle Challenger.
• SPANet(tm)
• Hubble space telescope.
• Apollo 13.
• Titanic.
• Ford Pinto.
• Corvair.

The risk/reward calculation for engineers looks something like this:

RISK: Public humiliation and the death of thousands of innocent people. REWARD: A certificate of appreciation in a handsome plastic frame.

Hydrodynamically, they are completely different. A catamaran's hulls displace water at the surface (and below). Its drag consists of both friction and waves generated by that displacement. A SWATH gets buoyancy from completely submerged hulls and minimal distortion of the surface. In the ideal case (hulls are sufficiently submerged), its drag consists entirely of friction.

Normally a SWATH design is used on slow-moving ships where stability is paramount (having the buoyancy underwater means your ship does not rock in waves). At low speeds, it takes more power to move a SWATH than a same-size catamaran because it has greater friction drag - a semicircle can enclose the same area as a circle but using less circumference. But because of the near-elimination of wave drag, it should perform better at intermediate speeds. e.g. Submarines are not able to travel as fast on the surface as they can underwater due to wave drag. (At extremely high speed, wave drag tends to decrease because the frequency of your disturbance no longer matches the frequency of waves, so the hull becomes "less efficient" at generating waves.)

Whoops, left out the 0.5 in the KE calcs. Divide the times by 2.

23 lbs = 10.5 kg
Mach 7 = 5300 mph = 2382 m/s
KE = 0.5mv^2 = 59.6 MJ

The ship in question has four 9100 kW diesel engines (12,200 hp).

Assuming you have a big enough capacitor, the output from just one diesel engine should be enough to power a round every 6.5 seconds. There are conversion and efficiency losses, so probably every 15-20 seconds is more realistic.

Also note that 59.6 MJ is about equivalent to 14 kilos of TNT. So the energy yield of this will be on the order of a high explosive round from a 5 inch shell (which weighs about 30 kg), assuming the projectile doesn't pass entirely through the target.

It is possible people are vandalizing the cars

Sure, but... "new rules were put in place requiring officers to document that both antennas were in place at the beginning and end of each shift. To guard against officers removing the antennas during their shifts, Tingirides said he requires patrol supervisors to make unannounced checks on cars."

"Since the new protocols went into place, only one antenna has been found missing,"

As soon as it became likely that the vandalism be caught, the vandalism suddenly dropped to almost zero despite the fact that only the officers knew of the change.

I wouldn't read too much into that. The article doesn't mention specific timeframes. Only that:

• - The cars have been equipped with the cameras and antennas since 2010.
• - Some time after July 2013, a check revealed 72 of 160 antennas had been removed.
• - Only one antenna has been removed since new protocols were put into place.

If you figure they first installed the antennas in mid-2010, then they were disappearing at a rate of 24 per year, or about two per month.

So whether the new protocols really improved the situation depends on when they were implemented. If they were implemented in (say) September and only one antenna has gone missing in 6 months, then yes it's improved. If they were implemented last month, then one antenna going missing in a month is not statistically different from 2 per month. Given the information in the article, it's impossible to say which is correct.

(It's a bit more complicated than this because the rate at which the antennas were being removed, whether by officers or vandals, would be proportional to the number of antennas in place. More antennas = more opportunity to remove them. So this favors the interpretation that the new policies are really helping out the situation, since presumably they replaced all the missing antennas. But without a specific timeframe it's hard to draw any conclusions about their efficacy.)

While working in the shop in undergrad (all engineering majors were required to take a metalworking shop course so we wouldn't come up with stupid designs which were impossible to manufacture), the professor told us to be especially careful with the lathe. Because it's spinning and parts of it appear semi-transparent, it apparently doesn't register in some people's brains as really being there. I thought that was silly, then discovered that I was one of those people and nearly stuck my hand into the spinning lathe clamp. I've taken note of this deficiency in my visual system and am especially careful around things like fan blades and aircraft propellers (I have accidentally stuck my fingers into rotating CPU fans, which fortunately don't have enough mass to do much damage).

I suspect if you made a semi-transparent virtual view through the hood, people like me might "forget" there's a hood there in the first place thereby increasing the danger rather than reducing it. A view of only critical areas like directly in front of the tires would probably be safer, rather than making the entire hood semi-transparent for the gee whiz factor.

Politicians. Just about every law passed by Congress has a clause at the end stating that Congress is exempt from it. That's always struck me as a perverse loophole which could be horribly exploited. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Speaking of which, if there's one group of public employees who should be video recorded in all their daily activities and meetings, it's politicians. If all their meetings with lobbyists were required by law to be recorded and streamed to the public, things might actually start improving.