> Is it just me, or shouldn't we already have this by hiring competent, caring, understanding educators in the first place?

No, it's just you. The elite think that spending $5-6k per student per year is good enough for the masses. They however spend over $20k per year to educate their children at private schools with low, low student class sizes and lot of extras. The average good teacher makes it about 5-years before burnout. Anecdotally, I know a really good teacher that just left at the 5-year mark. He worked his ass off to start programs and teach kids. Unfortunately, it was no longer economically sustainable for he and his expanding family so he switched to another job at 2x the pay.

It's not what is best for teaching and learning, it is about how large can we push class sizes and how little resources can we provide. On the other hand, if you start a war, you can get a blank check. Definitely not what is best for kids.

Think about this. Take a city like Detroit. What if just accepted that it sucked and decided we were going to spend whatever it took to educate the kids. What if it student ratio was 3 kids to 1 teacher? How long would it take to fix the problem? 12-years? Seriously? This would be a permanent societal fix. It is just a matter of priorities and resource allocation.

I agree.. The new iPhone is really, really well done. Siri is so simple that my grandma can use the iPhone. This is clearly a time where profits were earned through innovation and delivery, not just accounting tricks. Exxon being the second closet company gets their product for nearly free, so this is definitely an accomplishment. The question is, without Steve is this sustainable.

Attention Slashdot green-lighters, pay close attention to the following words and their definitions.

Psychics: people who make stuff up.

Physicists: people who go to university for a long time get degrees, then make stuff up and sometime make stuff work (like rockets and lasers).

Because the descriptions are close, I will let it slide this time, but stop green-lighting when you are drunk. Thank you.

Thank you, I wish I had mod points... This clears up some questions I had about GPS. I have been trying to use a fixed point (known location) as a starting reference, but I could never come up with an %-error calculation for the Long/Lat as I moved away from that position. Additionally both the %-error and position and it would drift each day and even averaging the data over time never got close to plus/minus 10 feet. I have since switched to gyros, magnometers and accelerometers but they have their issues and they drift over time. It is such a maddening challenge to figure out your exact location to sub-inch accuracy.

Thanks for your post!

Fellow Slashdotters... this is a little off topic, but is there any way to get accuracy out of GPS? I can barely get plus/minus 12 feet of accuracy out of my GPS in the best conditions. How are they able to determine sub-inch accuracy? This sounds impossible, even with "25 extra-precise GPS receivers" as stated in the article. I just don't believe it is possible to measure to this level of accuracy with GPS. Someone please prove me wrong and school me how to build one with this accuracy for my autonomous lawn bot :)

This reminds me an X-files episode where you are left not knowing what to believe. Do you believe the convincing evidence or the "official denial" of the convincing evidence. Hmmmmm..... I guess I just won't carry around one of those personal tracking devices until I know the truth.

In order to understand security, you must first understand how to hack or abuse a website. I recommend spending at least a week as a hacker. Here are some things to get your started:
1. Install Firefox or Chrome, I like Firefox for webdev.
2. Install GreaseMonkey https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
3. Install TamperData https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tamper-data/
4. Learn about backend resource management and data validation, specifically SQL Injection. http://hackthissite.org/ is a great place to start
5. On your backend database ENCRYPT all sensitive data, names, account #s, social security, birth-dates. I like to encrypt all the fields then use an off-by-one Fibonacci encoding for numeric fields, so even if you are hacked/decrypted, this is still one more layer of encoding. So many fools do not encrypt their database field data and get owned by SQL-injection attacks or sever compromise. The list is long and distinguished.
6. Lastly, if you are running standard open-source packages test your site for cross-scripting vulnerabilities.
7. Web server lockdown depends on your server and platform Apache, IIS, Windows, Linux... but LOCK IT DOWN!

Also, don't do obvious things like put sql connect userid/passwords in your backend scripts especially if you are running a VM on a shared hosting server. Close down all unused ports/services on your server. Never trust the frontend firewall especially if it says CISCO on the front. Run tripwire. Run MRTG with Big Brother and monitor your traffic/activity and always keep an eye out for anomalies. Keep an eye on your logs and do daily backups.

There are hordes of hackers around the world looking to build backdoors into your site, especially if you have bandwidth and storage. Too many folks (including the new cloud guys like Amazon) have no baseline for activity on their system, get hacked, and are clueless.. maybe that is too harsh, I will say mostly clueless but getting better at responding.

If you need further help, I am available as an extremely expensive consultant, but I am slammed with work at the moment. Good Luck and remember the Internet is an extremely dangerous place.

Pna lbh ernq guvf? Vs fb, lbh pna rznvy zr hfvat ebg13 rapbqvat. rot13.com

In Soviet Russia, cloud does not destroy piracy, but instead destroys YOU (the desktop OS).

If we have cloud, tablets, and HTML 5 life is good :)