Interminable dross
Colleges Adapt Online Courses to Ease Burden
Nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States arrive on campus needing remedial work before they can begin regular credit-bearing classes. That early detour can be costly, leading many to drop out, often in heavy debt and with diminished prospects of finding a job.
Scary to hear considering a college education is the safest and most reliable path to a secure, middle-class standard of living.
Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes, Compared To 2 Hours In 2012
I managed to get a ticket, but just barely. The system used in previous years where the sell date wasn’t announced beforehand was more fair. It favored the people who are crazy enough to set up alert systems, check the WWDC website every day when they wake up, have arrangements with friends to alert each other, and keep a constant eye on Twitter for weeks on end. Announcing the sale date a day in advance was bound to make tickets sell out as fast as it takes for a computer to process about 5,000 credit cards.
I’m now hearing people suggest systems like a lottery or some other alternative to a mad first-come, first-served rush. This seems even worse, because anyone with even a passive interest can sign up for a lottery, and some fraction of those who win will go. Those people will take the spots of people who want to go far more than they do.
Not every problem in life can be solved perfectly. Apple platforms are about as hot as it gets right now, and the conference is a fixed size. To make it bigger would risk ruining what makes it great, and probably impose an unreasonable burden on Apple, who already has hundreds of engineers on hand all week as it is (not to mention the weeks of prep for those that give sessions). It’s going to sell out fast. That sucks for people who really want to go but weren’t able to get a ticket, but such is life.
President Obama has watched the blood-dimmed tide drowning the ceremony of innocence, as Yeats wrote, and he has learned how to emotionally connect with Americans in searing moments, as he did from the White House late Friday night after the second bombing suspect was apprehended in Boston.
Unfortunately, he still has not learned how to govern.
How is it that the president won the argument on gun safety with the public and lost the vote in the Senate? It’s because he doesn’t know how to work the system. And it’s clear now that he doesn’t want to learn, or to even hire some clever people who can tell him how to do it or do it for him.
It’s unbelievable that with 90 percent of Americans on his side, he could get only 54 votes in the Senate. It was a glaring example of his weakness in using leverage to get what he wants. No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.
Say that again: “No one on Capitol Hill is scared of him.”
We’re only a few months into Obama’s second term, and so far he’s failed to avert sequestration, and failed to block a filibuster on establishing near-universal background checks for gun sales. He did manage to win an increase in the top marginal tax rate, but failed to simultaneously extend the payroll tax holiday.
It does seem inevitable that some form of immigration form will pass, but that’s because Congress wants it, not because of pressure from Obama. Indeed, Republican leaders view failure to pass an immigration reform bill this year as an existential threat to their party. Once immigration reform is done, that’ll be it for the Obama domestic record. Nothing else meaningful will get done for the next three and a half years.
Modern presidents are done about 18 months into their second term, but Obama will be done 6 months into his. And any suggestion that he’ll win back the House in 2014 and have a productive final two years is pure fantasy.
So great.
Who would design a system in which a President recently reëlected by a margin of almost five million votes could not move a piece of legislation supported by some ninety per cent of the country through even one chamber of the Congress—even when a majority of legislators in that chamber voted for it?
Everyone knows that key-value storage is the secret to achieving Web Scale. That’s just science.