Here's an example of Common Core math. Someone tried to calculate their tip based on Common Core: https://twitter.com/BooyahSuckaFoo/status/435506648774230016/photo/1

And, yes, this is how my boys are learning to do math.

In our school district, we fell into the Common Core trap. We got some federal money but then the unfunded mandates meant we had to spend much, MUCH more. And we get told we can't back out without repaying that federal money... which is, of course, gone now.

So now we're making drastic cuts to pay for the Common Core stuff and our kids' education is taking a nose dive. But at least Pearson will get paid for their tests!

They've actually come up with standardized tests for PE now. I wish this were a joke. I really do.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/06/standardized_tests_for_the_arts_is_that_a_good_idea_.html === Just the first reference I was able to find.

As a parent of a kid who's doing "Common Core math", I can tell you that "Common Core math" is horrible. They're not being taught to work with numbers but to estimate answers (652 X 7? Well, that's kind of like 650 x 10 which is 6,500. Problem solved!) and to draw diagrams (1.8 - 0.5 => [OOOOO] OOOOOOOO => 13 O's => 1.3!). Working with numbers is now the "wrong way" and gets marked incorrect even if you get the answer right with that method.

This is purely politicians and corporations working together to "improve" education without any educators having input whatsoever. It would be like having a group of PHB's designing a program without any programmers having input and then having them claim it's so much better because programmers were the source of all of the previous versions' bugs.

The standardized tests are being used to rank teachers and can be used against them in job performance reviews. This means that teachers will do what they can to improve their kids' standardized test scores. This, in turn, means not teaching anything that isn't on the test. Teaching non-test materials means risking your job.

Right now, my son (5th grade) is doing a ton of test preparation materials because the teachers are told to do that to increase the test scores. (We're actually refusing the tests, but he still falls victim to "teach to the test.")

Not in New York State, they aren't. In New York, teachers are told to use the EngageNY materials and ONLY those. Though, when pressured, the Department of Education weasels out and claims it's up to the local school districts to decide. Then the local school districts say they were told by Department of Ed that they NEED to use these.

For those who don't know, EngageNY is literally a script. They tell the teacher what to say (exact words), when to say it, in what manner (excited, happy, etc) and how long to spend on each item, down to a 10-15 minute interval. Does one kid learn differently than another kid who learns differently than a third? Too bad. They all need to be taught the same materials in the same way and that's that.

Furthermore, EngageNY is horrible when it comes to math. They aren't teaching the kids to work with numbers anymore, but to draw pictures. For example, if you tell a kid to subtract 0.5 from 1.8, EngageNY says to draw a series of boxes like this: (Using O's to avoid /.'s "junk filter.")

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Now you circle 5 of these boxes and count the ones left. There are 13 left so your answer is 1.3.

If you actually do 1.8 - 0.5 = 1.3, then you've done the problem the wrong way and are counted as if you have the wrong answer. In addition, this method doesn't scale at all. Try doing it with 1,034.56 - 52.31. Your hands will cramp before you've drawn and circled all of the boxes!

My wife and I have been fighting this all year. My kids have gone from loving school to dreading it and everything has refocused onto the standardized tests instead of actually teaching the kids. We're refusing the tests. Every parent can, though sometimes the school will try to bully you out of it. Common Core wasn't designed with educators, it was designed by a group of politicians and big business folks the latter of which seem to get dollar signs in their eyes when they look at schools/students.

Another article on this, I agree with Dan's assessment - http://arstechnica.com/securit...

>and require zero power to use

Not quite. How does the noise get generated? Air gets pushed through the whistle as the car pushes through the air. And in doing so it increases the air resistance of the car, requiring the engine to put out slightly more power to maintain a constant speed. So those whistles are fairly directly engine-powered, and probably horribly inefficient - vortices which form around the around the whistles will increase drag, and well as disrupt the laminar flow of air over the car body, increasing the required power output of the engine by far more than the small amount of sonic energy generated. An electric sound machine under the hood could probably do the same jop far more efficiently

"Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity."

My guess, after years of working with Samsung's poor-quality platform software and multiple runins with their utterly piss-poor configuration management processes (as in, the Korean divisions at Samsung Mobile don't seem to have any, as evidenced by numerous situations during the Superbrick fiasco):

Samsung probably put this into the RIL library to facilitate modem debugging. e.g. the modem can read/write to /efs/root/ in order to make it easier for a developer to track state changes of the modem or whatever. (Why do this instead of using whatever debugging functions are built into the modem such as maybe JTAG? This is probably for late-stage development where they wanted to test finishing touches on the modem using final hardware and the modem's debugging functions weren't physically available.)

Keep in mind that, based on the reverse engineering effort, Samsung *intended* this feature to only access files within /efs/root/ - the EFS partition is specifically reserved for device-specific state and calibration data (most notably the phone's IMEI is stored in the EFS partition, and with the exception of some miscellaneous other config data such as MAC addresses for wifi and BT, it's almost entirely for modem-related items. I may be wrong about the MAC data, I'm a bit rusty and haven't poked around at my EFS partitions in a long time.) It's only due to a screwup (lack of sanitization of escape sequences such as ../../ ) that someone can in theory access files outside of /efs/root

So at some point, Samsung probably removed the corresponding components on the baseband firmware side (no one has yet to confirm anything on the modem side that sends these commands, nor has anyone caught any of these commands being issued - the behavior of the library was verified by injecting extra commands with a kernel patch in the driver between the modem and the library), but someone forgot to remove them from the RIL library on the applications processor side. Forgetting to remove dead code and/or leaving epic security holes in place (remember that in late 2012, someone realized that Samsung left a world readable/writable device node that effectively mapped all system memory to that device file - allowing anyone to read or write any part of memory. For more, do a Google search for "exynos-abuse" ) is pretty typical for Samsung.

As to my experience here - I was one of the Cyanogenmod maintainers for the Exynos 4210 (I9100, I777, N7000) handset family, and also did some work on 4412 devices (primarily the Note 10.1 - GT-N8013) throughout 2012 and the first half of 2013. I'm 90% retired from working with Haxxinos these days and was (along with the majority of the rest of the Exynos maintainers) one of the people who left the project to start Omni after the Focal relicensing attempt fiasco.

An interesting question is - what architecture is the XMM626x's baseband processor? Is it custom or an ARM variant making it easier to analyze the baseband firmware itself? More than two years of working with that family of devices and I never personally looked in detail at what was running on the baseband side.

Why would you have a field of broken turbines? The point of having a field is so that some of them can break without problems. And looking at the photo in the article it seems quite possible the whole tower could be laid down for servicing. And what does a sea-bound wind turbine have to do with anything? It's constantly subjected to corrosive saltwater and swaying of the base. Meanwhile the south pole is one of the drier deserts on the planet - humidity is near zero, and precipitation is miniscule - it just never melts.

Back when my grandmother was alive, every time I spoke with her, she would ask if I got a promotion. In my company, being "promoted" would have meant working as a manager. However, being a manager would mean having to handle - well, managing people. I'd need to deal with company politics and firing people and lots of other things that I have no interest in. Coding (specifically, web development), though, is something I love doing. Why should I stop coding just because I'm 38? I should stop doing what I love doing and do something I don't like simply because of my age?

Of course, for every Rob Ford, there's a dozen other politicians whose scandals destroy their political career. If you're a politician and know you have something that's best not divulged (a partner on the side, drug use, visiting prostitutes, etc), you aren't going to want to take the chance that you can survive the scandal. Especially if the scandal involves something you've declared evil in the past. (Insert any of the very conservative Republicans who railed about how "the gays" were destroying America only to be found cheating on their spouses with someone of the same-sex.) If you were able to know exactly what shady things each of these politicians was up to (even if it wasn't illegal, but just embarrassing given past political stances), you might be able to control how they vote on some issues.

True, but what Rob Ford only admitted to it because a video was obtained of him doing it. Before that, he denied everything. I'm not an expert on Canadian politics, but depending on the political climate, he might weather the storm and keep his job. Or not. Still, I'm sure he'd much rather this all stayed quiet. An NSA that listens to everyone all the time (even if not actively but storing data for future possible analysis) can - either for the purposes of the NSA retaining their power or for other political purposes - look up information on anyone and leak or threaten to leak information on people who don't sit down and keep quiet. The mere threat of doing this will be enough to silence some critics who would have something to lose (wives, children, family, jobs, etc.).

Dough!

I mean...

Do'h!

You may want to familiarize yourself with the concept of rubber hose cryptography.

Granted, the United States Federal Government won't literally beat you with a hose, but they will take away your freedom until you comply with the lawful orders of the courts. The Government will go over your finances with a fine toothed comb, accounting for any and all assets you currently or previously owned, including bitcoin. If you obtained any of those assets via fraud you're going to be on the hook for repayment, plus criminal and civil penalties on top of the fraudulent earnings.

Want to play the "I lost them" card? You can try, but you're still going to be on the hook for the full amount Uncle Sam thinks you owe your victims, plus the aforementioned penalties, and you're not wiping any of that away with a bankruptcy. It will follow you until the day you die.

Bitcoin doesn't spend at the prison commissary, nor am I aware of any reputable criminal defense attorneys that accept payment in bitcoin.