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Comment Re:A whole bunch of questions (Score 1) 52

"do you really think the grades are that important?"

If I'm asking somebody's opinion of John Stuart Mills, probably not. But if I need them to design a bridge, the yes, I want to know they were graded. And, to one point expressed in the article, I want to know the institution is concerned about maintaining a reputation for producing capable graduates.

If we think a bachelors degree has low utility now, imagine what value employers place on it if grading stops being a gatekeeper. It might be slightly more favorable than nothing... but barely.

Comment Re:A whole bunch of questions (Score 1) 52

Are smart people more prone to psychological issues?

As my father (a heavy duty mechanic) told me often, "The more complicated you make something, the more likely it is to break down." I think that's true of brains. But I doubt that would account for quarter or more of the student body being "disabled".

Rather, considering how the number of self-diagnosing jackasses I've met has skyrocketed in the 2000s, I can totally see victimhood being part of the problem.

"There are no more stupid people anymore. Everybody has a learning disorder." - George Carlin

Comment Re:More testing Better Medicine (Score 2) 46

As a patient with metastatic cancer, my story is on the other side. I was going around to Dr's for a year or more trying to figure out why I was feeling more and more exhausted. (I say Dr's but don't remember if I ever got seen by more than a nurse practitioner). I kept saying I felt like it was something physical, but got sidetracked into psychiatry. I had visible lumps under my skin and everybody said, well it's probably just lipomas. In the end I got undeniable symptoms and was finally given a chest xray, which (unlike an MRI) costs like $99. By then it had spread everywhere. So far I have lived almost a year, which at one point was deemed highly unlikely, but it has cost my insurers well over $1M and counting.

Comment Re:Good for her! (Score 1) 125

>Break the fucking cameras.

The problem with that is, it's legal to film i public in the US. I don't know about other countries, but you can use these smart glasses to film people in public in the US legally.

What you are advocating is just assault. Congratulations. You have not evolved past "violent criminal".

Comment Goes further -- edtech obsoletes schools (Score 1) 43

as suggested by me from 2007: "Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
        https://patapata.sourceforge.n...
        "... Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case"
based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
          But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. ...
          That is not all technology has been asked to do in schools. It has been invited into the classroom in other ways, including educational simulations, Lego/Logo, web browsing, robotics, and computer-linked data collection from sensors. But assessment is mostly what technology does in schools that *matters*, where the other uses of it have been marginalized for various reasons. These "learning on demand" or "hands on learning" activities have been kept in their boxes so to speak (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally). Or to recall from my own pre-computer elementary school experiences in the 1960s, there was a big fancy expensive "science kit" in the classroom closet -- but there was little time to use it or explore it -- we were too busy sitting at our desks. ...
        Essentially, the conventional notion is that the compulsory schooling approach is working, it just needs more money and effort. Thus a push for higher standards and pay and promotion related to performance to those standards. Most of the technology then should be used to ensure those standards. That "work harder" and "test harder" approach has been tried now for more than twenty years in various ways, and not much has changed. Why is that? Could it be that schools were designed to produce exactly the results they do? [as John Taylor Gatto has suggested] And that more of the same by more hard work will only produce more of the same results? Perhaps schools are not failing to do what they were designed; perhaps in producing people fit only to work in highly structured environments doing repetitive work, they are actually succeeding at doing what they were designed for? Perhaps digging harder and faster and longer just makes a deeper pit? ...
        However, over the past 150 years or so the world has changed, and we have entered a post-industrial information age, with cheaply copied songs and perhaps soon cheaply copied material goods in nanotech replicators. ...
        Industry still matters of course, but only now in the sense that agricultural still matters, where an ever smaller part of the population is concerned directly with it, as innovation after innovation makes people in those fields ever more productive. If only a small percent of the people in the economy produce food, and now only an ever shrinking part of the population produces material goods, what is left for the rest to do? ...
        So, [as Dr. David Goodstein, Vice Provost of Caltech pointed out] employment in conventional research is closed for most people [even with PhDs, due to funding issues]. Still, if you look at, say, the field of biology, there are endless opportunities for people to research millions of species of organisms and their biochemistry, ecology, and history. If you look at astrophysics, there are endless stars and solar systems to study. If you look at medicine, there is a vast amount we do not know, especially for chronic diseases of poor people. If you look at music, there are endless opportunities for people to make songs about their specific lives and families. If you look at writing, endless novels yet to be written. And if you look at programming, there is even a vast enjoyment to be had reinventing the wheel -- another programming language, another operating system, another application -- just for the fun of doing it for its own sake. The world wide web -- from blogs to you tube to garage bands -- is full of content people made and published just because they wanted to. It is an infinite universe we live in, and would take an infinite time to fill it up. However, there is practically no one willing to pay for those activities, so they are for the most part hobbies, or at best, "loss leaders" or "training" in business. And, as always, there is the endless demands of essentially volunteer parenting to invest in a future generation. And there are huge demands for community service to help less fortunate neighbors. So there are plenty of things that need doing -- even if they do not mesh well with our current economic system based around "work" performed within a bureaucracy, carefully reduced to measurable numbers (parts produced, lines of code generated, number of words written) producing rewards based on ration units (dollars).
        But then, with so much produced for so little effort, perhaps the very notion of work itself needs to change? Maybe most people don't need to "work" in any conventional way (outside of home or community activities)? ...
        But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in India are self-motivated to learn a lot just from a computer kiosk -- or a "hole in the wall"...
        Granted if people want to send kids to a prison-like facility each day for security or babysitting, then the "free school" model makes a lot of sense for that ... and is much more compatible with democratic traditions than compulsory schools (and is even cheaper to run). And the kids and teachers are generally happier in "free schools" where they have to show up but can otherwise then spend their time as they like; and such schools also do well with "discipline problem" type kids. Just ask any teacher how much happier they would be if only the kids in their classes were the ones who wanted to be there. However, there are alternatives to "free schools" as well, but requiring more parental involvement [like unschooling]...
        So, there is more to the story of technology than it failing in schools. Modern information and manufacturing technology itself is giving compulsory schools a failing grade. Compulsory schools do not pass in the information age. They are no longer needed. What remains is just to watch this all play out, and hopefully guide the collapse of compulsory schooling so that the fewest people get hurt in the process. ...

Comment Hey, don't fuck with the system. (Score 1) 43

When the thinky works is handled by some necessary few and a whole lot of technology, we still need people to do the shitty, unskilled work. I don't want to do it, so I'm glad people fail out of the bottom. If your skillset is knowing how to ask an AI to do it, the clock is ticking.

* Ingredients: 65% sarcasm, 30% wary sincerity, 5% other

Comment Re:Just shows he does not really understand hardwa (Score 1) 74

One major difference, assuming you've got full platform support(should be the case on any server or workstation that isn't an utter joke; but can be a problem with some desktop boards that 'support' ECC in the sense that AMD didn't laser it off the way Intel does; but don't really care); is that ECC RAM can (and should) report even correctable errors; so you get considerably more warning than you do with non-ECC RAM.

If you pay no attention to error reports ECC or non-ECC are both rolling the dice; though ECC has better odds; but 'proper' ECC and Linux-EDAC support will allow you to keep an eye on worrisome events(normally with something like rasdaemon, not sure what other options and preferences there are in terms of aggregating the kernel-provided data) and, unless the RAM fails particularly dramatically and thoroughly, will give you much better odds of knowing that you have a hardware problem while that problem is still at correctable levels; so you can take appropriate action(either replacement, or on the really fancy server systems, some 'chipkill'-like arrangement where the specific piece of DRAM that is failing gets cut out of use when deeemed unreliable without having to bring the system down.

Comment Re:BSoD was an indicator (Score 1) 74

Sometimes you'd get a BSOD that was a fairly clear call to action; when the error called out something recognizable as the name of part of a driver; but that is mostly just a special case of the "did you change any hardware or update any drivers recently?" troubleshooting steps that people have been doing more or less blind since forever; admittedly slightly more helpful in cases where as far as you know the answer to those questions is 'no'; but windows update did slip you a driver update; or a change in OS behavior means that a driver that used to work is now troublesome.

Realistically, as long as the OS provides suitable support for being configured to collect actual crash dump material if you want it; it's hard to object too strongly to the idea that just rebooting fairly quickly is probably the better choice vs. trying to make the BSOD a genuinely useful debugging resource; especially given how rare it is for the person with useful debugging ability to happen to be at the console at the time of crash(rather than just an end user who is ill equipped to make sense of it; or a system that mostly does server stuff, quite likely not on actual physical hardware, where nobody has even touched the physical console in months or years; and it's more or less entirely useless to display a message there; rather than rebooting and hoping that things come up enough that management software can grab the dump files; or giving up and leaving the system in EMS so that someone can attach to that console.

Comment Spooky (Score 1) 77

Not to anthropomorphize... but yes, to do that just that... this set of behaviour sure looks like the logic of a well spoken toddler, being clever and finding the loopholes that mess with the spirit of the ask. To me, it's more concretely a demonstration of progress towards general AI than any amount of code completion or shitty album cover generation has been.

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