Forgot your password?

Comment: Re:This doesn't prove anything (Score 1) 437

by IronClad (#34701578) Attached to: Cheaters Exposed Analyzing Statistical Anomalies

Likeliness calculated off of some random model -- now that there's "science". Yee-haw!

It's idiocy to compare test anomalies as a deviance from a *random* model. Intelligence itself is a deviance from a random model.

Understanding, and even mis-understanding of subject matter or test wording in a classroom by students can be highly correlated or somewhat clustered or not. Even those poor student that choose some answers randomly may subconsciously use the same patterns to do so. Small clusters outside a large "baseline" correlation are conclusive proof of cheating only to an ignoramus, or to someone who's selling you something.

So all it takes is two like-minded thinkers to coincide in their understanding and mis-understanding on some number of answers and they're branded cheaters?

Comment: Solution perhaps to SPAM, but not piracy. (Score 1) 421

by IronClad (#34646738) Attached to: RIAA, MPAA Recruit MasterCard As Internet Police

Applying this to pirate content is kind of lame, since payments aren't what drives that. BUT I've always thought the Visa+Mastercard collectively have always had the power to end 90% of all spam, and could do it in a matter of weeks.

All it would take is:

  1) terms of service forbidding UCE for products.

  2) a few effectively placed honeypot/canary accounts

  3) a couple tiger teams to place orders for the products that get spammed, and

  4) kick the plug on the commercial accounts that deposit the money.

I would venture to guess that the financial services sector spends more overall on anti-spam/excess bandwidth/malware removal for their own infrastructure than they make from those few stinking transactions.

Comment: N.H.S. Pinafore (Score 3, Interesting) 572

by IronClad (#32441126) Attached to: Doctor Slams Hospital's "Please" Policy

I've seen that N.H.S. Pinafore show before. I can even still hum some of the snappy lyrics.

I hold when diagnosing a disease,
The expression, "if you please",
A particularly gentlemanly tone implants.
And so do my sisters, and my cousins, and my aunts!

Stick close to your desk
And never check a pulse
and you may all be rulers
of our hospitals.

or something like that.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-ZZRXBEcM with "please" goodness at 4:00 and 5:40

Just who does this Doctor Dick Deadeye think he is? Doesn't he know that a British lab technician is any man's equal, (excepting, of course, mine).

Comment: My Trifecta. (Score 1) 716

by IronClad (#28262371) Attached to: Kids Score 40 Percent Higher When They Get Paid For Grades

Sorry to hear that. I'd like to chime in on this one.

I have 3 lovely, well adjusted, funny, principled, intelligent daughters. I do not deserve them.

All 3 were valedictorians of their HS, without pushing by us.

Anecdotal? Perhaps, but harder to argue with results * 3.

I've never before shared this much info about what we did. FWIW, YMMV, etc.

1) Give them the gift of self esteem. Demonstrate your believe in their intrinsic worth, and act out of love only. This does not mean giving them every toy they want, but it does mean make sacrifices when you can for the best aspirations of your kids, and constantly showing them how much you appreciate them. Be sentimental and approachable. I think my kids knew I would have been no less their fan if they were D students.

2) They need you, give them all of you. Don't hold back and don't ever fake it with them. They know you; no double standards! If that movie is bad for your kids, parents can do without watching it. Schedule regular whole-family time and 1:1 time. Family dinners together are important.

3) Humor and curiosity are some of the best tools. Demonstrate them. Memorize funny poems, make music together, show how to take things apart, and keep it all upbeat, even crazy.

4) Don't let anyone else raise your kids. That includes daycare and school systems. I lean toward public school system over homeschooling, and it worked out for us, but that depended on what the system had to work with. Social development and problem solving is important. So are friends. Be involved parents, room mothers, etc. Know the kids in their K-6 classes; they end up on your doorstep asking for dates. Here's the tough part, but it proved extremely important: I barely made a living wage and my wife made more than me when we decided one would stay home. It was her call who would. I don't know if I would be able to look my kids in the eyes if we hadn't sacrificed.

5) Money incentives? Oh ya. Make cash match effort was my philosophy. They got a pittance for base allowances but kept job-journals as they learned to write and were richly rewarded for finding new ways to help. In school, the first A is the easiest, even hard not to get. That last A is a bear, it's the subject they don't like. My kids got $1 for the first A, and the pay doubled for each additional A. They nearly bankrupted me. Long term, the investment works out. The youngest just took her MCAT.

Comment: My Summary of the Article (Score 1) 626

by IronClad (#27294025) Attached to: Windows and Linux Not Well Prepared For Multicore Chips

Since I see little evidence that timothy or Mr. Chapman read the article, I'll do them a favor so they don't have to click:

< article paycheck="undeserved" >

Hi I'm Agam Shah and I'm writing an article about multicore processors, but these concepts are so new to me that I'm putting quotees around "race conditions" like it's frickin' sharks with lasers.

So then I did a Google search on "parallel programming tools" and it help me get another paragraph out of the way.

Oh, and I quote some lamer analyst who has never heard of NUMA or libhoard, so I'll try to fabricate some crisis that the problems they address might never be solved.

Parallel programming is hard, WAH! WAH!

Oh, except when it's not, as in that trivial application named Photoshop. I'll write one of those next weekend.

Comment: Better Criteria (Score 1) 347

by IronClad (#26500549) Attached to: GAO Reports Bailout and Tech Firms Love Tax Havens

It seems the article and the report casts the net too wide.

Some mega-corps (like Coca-Cola and Cisco) actually do business everywhere, and even though they show considerable numbers of businesses in tax havens, those are a small fraction (10%) of the total number of countries in which they have offices. For companies like that, I'd be surprised to find a country where they are *not* operating.

Others, like Chevron and Goldman Sachs, show over half of their foreign operations in tax-haven locales. To me, that sounds very slimy.

Others are somewhere in between, probably representing a somewhat disproportionate presence in tax havens.

What else would you expect? Corporations do behave like psychopaths.


Solving the Knight's Tour Puzzle In 60 Lines of Python 311

Posted by Soulskill
from the snakes-and-horsies dept.

Blogger.com Banned In Turkey 262

Posted by timothy
from the no-longer-young-turks dept.

Comment: Re:Record label dude is kinda asking for it (Score 3, Informative) 282

by IronClad (#25437421) Attached to: Record Label Infringes Own Copyright, Site Pulled

>Fair enough




>why record label dude doesn't simply register




MLB Fans Who Bought DRM Videos Get Hosed 299

Posted by ScuttleMonkey
from the digital-restrictions-management dept.
Billosaur writes "Major League Baseball has just strengthened the case against DRM. If you downloaded videos of baseball games from MLB.com before 2006, apparently they no longer work and you are out of luck. MLB.com, sometime during 2006, changed their DRM system. Result: game videos purchased before that time will now no longer work, as the previous DRM system is no longer supported. When the video is played, apparently the MLB.com servers are contacted and a license obtained to verify the authenticity of the video; this is done by a web link. That link no longer exists, and so now the videos will no longer play, even though the MLB FAQ says that a license is only obtained once and will not need to be re-obtained. The blogger who is reporting this contacted MLB technical support, only to be told there are no refunds due to this problem."
