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Comment Re:"education experiment" (Score 1) 254

I'm seeing how using computers to teach elementary math isn't working. It needs to be taught with paper and pencil. There needs to be a certain amount of simple rote memorization for the basics like multiplication and division but that doesn't seem to be the point of emphasis.

Comment Re:People shouldn't get a high school degree (Score 1) 254

Then fund education correctly.

To fund education correctly it would probably be around 70% of any given state's annual budget. It's expensive to fund education because to do it right takes a lot of qualified people. Most people don't want to pay so they push to lower the per-capita amount, which leads to education suffering accordingly.

Comment Re:College is not middle school (Score 1) 254

1. Colleges should screen applicants. If they aren't ready, don't take them.
2. Colleges should fail anyone who can't pass their courses. Fail too many courses, and you are done.

It isn't the college's job to teach anything other than college level courses.

In my experience, college was where instructors of all sorts (TAs, lecturers, professors) graded on a curve the most, and in my own personal case, was the only place I directly experienced grading on a curve. Having listened to my extended family of the prior generation, grading on a curve was already prevalent among colleges back in the sixties, and possibly well before that.

So what you propose in your second bullet point has not really ever been the standard, at least during the lifetime of the vast majority of Americans around today.

Comment Many reasons for many different people (Score 5, Insightful) 210

For those who learned the lesson to apply themselves to do the work in order to set themselves apart from lazy people, they see enabling lazy people as a slap in the face.

For those who are smart, they see faux-intelligence or faux-intellectualism out of people who are not capable of applying themselves but expect credit regardless.

For creative people who have and use skills to support themselves, they see enabling lackluster people who no actual interest in the artform trying to muscle-in.

For those who need information, they see substandard results that are of even further questionable veracity than what they could find before.

And for a whole lot of other people, they see something touted as labor-saving, ie, firing them.

Comment Re:Yawn (Score 1) 154

At least unsold cars might be moved to somewhere else if there's a perceived demand somewhere else. They might even be exported depending on the sorts of trade deals that the country has internationally.

Real estate by its very nature is fixed into place. If there's no value in it in-place, then the only real value is the proceeds from dismantling and carting-off whatever's there. If there are environmental regulations involved in that process, or if the materials have no reusable or recyclable value, then the real estate can have a negative value, ie, it's a liability exceeding its benefit.

China seems to be speed-running three centuries' worth of social and economic problems in under a hundred years, and without shaking-out or solving prior problems as thoroughly as other societies have done before the next set of problems come along. Prior unresolved problems may well contribute additional aggravation to new problems too. China's GDP per-capita is somewhere between 1/5 and 1/2 of American GDP per-capita, but I seriously doubt that it's proportionally less expensive to produce electric cars there versus anywhere else. Sure, it will be somewhat cheaper due to reduced wages, but not so much cheaper that the average Chinese could afford at the same rates as the average American could. That poses a real problem when there's the sort of overproduction that a centrally-managed economy enables.

Comment Re:Access does at least appear to be encrypted (Score 1) 43

I'd be much more concerned that if the buses are also tunneling back to the polity's network that there's now a vulnerable IoT device that allows using the method to do maintenance to then hop into another network.

This seems like something that doesn't need to be in a vendor cloud.

Comment Easy come, easy go (Score 2) 48

Be careful of the tax-incentives offered to big business to set up shop cheaply in small towns. If from a bottom-line perspective they have little invested, then they have little reason to abandon those investments, leading to a boom/bust cycle for the town next time the big tech vendors concoct some new 'best practices' scheme to try to cause the businesses dependent on them to buy more crap.

If the business has spent a lot of money out of their own coffers to build, they're more likely to treat that buildout so dismissively.

Comment Re:Offline Appliances (Score 1) 155

It's actually pretty funny, you mention WiFi only for the cameras, but I would love to have a good wifi-capable commercial-grade outdoor all-weather security camera that didn't basically rely on some other entity's wifi adapter, particularly if it could run off of power as varied as 120V to 277V.

Comment Re:Offline Appliances (Score 1) 155

I wonder how much benefit you are getting from your effort of managing this. It looks like you turn home management into your hobby. Not everyone is into this.

And that is a fundamental problem.

Even in a professional setting, it takes real time and effort to devise IoT policy that actually works. Some IoT only works with like-appliances from the same manufacturer. Some IoT has to work with like-appliances, and has to work with general purpose PCs or phones or tablets. Some IoT works with industry-standard protocols and has interoperability with devices from other manufacturers. Some IoT is cloud-only. Some is local-to-other-devices and cloud. some is local, local to general purpose devices, and cloud.

And that's just reachability rules. That's not including things like security vulnerabilities due to the device manufacturer having ceased software support for hardware rev 1.5 six months after hardware rev 2.0 debuted but the durable goods that the controllers are embedded into have another decade of expected service life.

For the average person who isn't an IT engineer or hobbyist, they're going to basically have to subscribe to yet another service in the form of a cloud-managed firewall that the manufacturer supports for whatever amount of time the hardware is considered good for. That's going to be expensive as hell.

Comment Having a dearth of sympathy here (Score 1) 11

I guess it's difficult to be particularly sympathetic when a publication or service that is rather important-to and dependent-upon the research that has brought us what they're currently calling AI is swamped with low-quality, low-effort garbage generated by the same sorts of systems that their service has enabled.

I'm still wondering how/why this happens if one presumes that the names of researchers are associated with any academic papers. It seems like the reputational harm that should be done to someone publishing hot garbage would be enough to get them blacklisted from publishing altogether if their abuses were too frequent.

Comment Re:I donno... (Score 2, Insightful) 186

A random number generator is a program.

You could connect a physical random number generator using quantum effects, but then you're basically just claiming that consciousness is a random number generator. To anyone who is conscious that's clearly nonsense.

Given the sheer number of people that will make choices or take actions that are clearly and obviously against their interests, I simply must disagree.

Unless my original comment that started this particular thread stands.

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