Good grief - how far have we come?

"The middle school years are critical for students in reaching conclusions regarding their own skills and aptitudes,"

Yes educators should make things understandable, yes we should make learning fun but there is a whole big nasty world of hungry people who would kill for the chance to "reach conclusions about their own skills...".

Where are the parents or schools telling students that engineering, maths and science can make the difference between having a job and not? Because at the end of the day those students need to get the cold hard fact: Do something useful and get paid, or hope somebody else will just give you a living. Presumably they don't expect to be hungry no matter what happens.

N.B. please reread the "Yes educators should make things understandable, yes we should make learning fun" line before replying.

I can see a lot of people talking about error bars on graphs and the traditional 95% confidence intervals but typically they don't write as if they have understood them. So to help /.'s general understanding:

A 95% error bound merely means that the author thinks, based off several (possibly) sound assumptions, that what we are saying could arise by chance in 5% of cases.

If the graph has datapoints that fit within a 95% bounded line then all you can say is "this data didn't arise by chance in 19 out of 20 cases if the datapoints lie within this bounded path". Typically this 95% probability isn't per point, i.e. when you look at the graph you can't take the fact that each point lies within the bound as repeated 95% probabilities correctly turning out which would combine to a much higher confidence.

In the hopes that this helps,

Richard Feynmann has a lot to say about this, and is well worth listening to.

Obvious limitations from the demo:

1) Objects must be sitting on a consistent(ish) surface with a low rate of change compared to the object. Desk, Chair, Bathroom, Wall, Hubcap, etc.

2) It doesn't handle strong shadows (or they are not showing us it doing so).

3) It makes the greatest amount of mistakes with the shadows anyway.

Please add anything I missed to future posts.

I would like to see it erase a boat from a choppy sea where there are 5-7 waves for the length of the boat as I expect that to be a pathological case. I would also like to see it erase a discolouration rather than a very different object to see its behaviour. Cool technology though!

Fair points, all of them. Now explicit in the article itself.

This is what Intel and Microsoft most fear - a perfectly usable ecosystem of increasingly powerful web connected devices that don't need them. At all. At last! M (Note they didn't bother to do a Windows Mobile version - kinda a dead os there)

Well the word "rocket" is both an engine and a vehicle in common English usage scenarios. Hence it could be completely accurate to say that it is the largest rocket (i.e. engine, source of thrust) while it isn't the largest rocket (vehicle, reliant robin).

M

Amateur rocket people don't have a stock of chemical, biological and possible a few nuclear weapons, a historical grudge against a southern neighbor and totalitarian government (although their welfare state does have very good coverage).

...and 40% faster in parts. FACTS - give me some context to judge if this is good or bad.

Looking at Amdahl's law (golden oldie here) how much time does a PC spend on kernel tasks these days?

So the "Do No Evil" actually lasted about 5 seconds into Google becoming a listed company. Oh well, that was quite long.

From p32: Recommendation Our board of directors recommends a vote AGAINST the stockholder proposal.

Capitalism == Situational Ethics....