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Oh? And WHICH army was first into Berlin, Capitalist lap dog?
Looks like the "Commies" did a HELL of a job with castoff weapons and better logistics.
Might do you some good to learn some history for once

The US went due to a stupid agreement with France ... the US had ridiculous nightmares about communists taking over the world.

I've read the stories of one of member of Deer Team of OSS sent to help Viet Minh, under Ho Chi Minh.
Why Vietnam?: Prelude to America's Albatross by Archimedes L.A. Patti

That said, he, Ho Chi Minh, love U.S.A (he was here, when he was finding 'way to liberate the country', he may like the 'freedom' breath he felt there). He considered U.S.A was the symbol of country against colonialism. He must be good friend with U.S.A.

But, U.S.A don't want 'good friend', they need some one they can control, like Dr. Hämsterviel in Lilo and Stich:

Your minions shouldn't like you. They only need to fear you!

No, it's not 'stupid', or 'ridiculous' decision, it's careful planned: to control the resources:
http://users.humboldt.edu/ogay...

Communist control of Southeast Asia would give Americans control over "strategically important commodities" like natural rubber, tin, coal, iron ore, and oil.
Communist control over Vietnam's rich rice fields and Japan's dependence upon rice would make it extremely difficult to prevent Japan's eventual capitulation to Communism.

Communism was just the bogeyman at that time. Just like 'terrorism', 'dictators' today.
But, what if Ho Chi Minh was puppet of U.S.A, the history must be different. He should be king of Saudi Arabia, instead of Assad/Syria, or Iran.

[quote]
The problem is, newspapers isn't being replaced by anything superior. I really don't see blogs and sites like digg and slashdot taking over journalism. They are great for commentary but don't produce original news, unless if there is an agenda.
[/quote]

I for one miss the dispassionate professionalism of our print media overlords, and am nostalgic for the Good Old Days:

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jcb10/spanwar.shtml

Try moodle. It works fine in every browser. Many schools are switching. http://www.humboldt.edu/~bboard/ and https://ilearn.sfsu.edu/login/ilearn_provost.htm

What is Blackboard?

        * Learning Management System (LMS) software partially owned by Microsoft

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_ by_Microsoft_Corporation

I second the question. Serious omission not listing Moodle. I've used it in classes, as well as WebCt. I know other profs who've used Moodle, Blackboard, and WebCT.

Blackboard was recently bought by WebCT. The license to use WebCt runs into the tens of thousands of dollars. Blackboard (not so much WebCT) had some very attractive ease-of-use features not found in Moodle (or WebCT at the time), but I can't say they were $60,000 per year better than Moodle.

Several comparisons of the main packages are available. Graf and List (2005) is an academic paper comparing nine different ones and is perhaps the most comprehensive. (2005 was a long time ago, in software time, so some of the comparisons might be different now.) They find that Moodle edges out the whole field.

At that point Sakai was just starting. Sakai is a well-funded effort at the Ivy League level to reinvent the wheel, which they're doing well, but at a licensing cost of thousands of dollars to universities. (Free to individuals, I believe.)

Munoz and Duzer (2005) at Cal State Univ. - Humboldt, compare Blackboard and Moodle, where Moodle also wins.

And for that matter, Ask Slashdot did a post on alternatives to Blackboard in 2005. Again, Moodle (and Blackboard) have come a long way since then, so comments may or may not be justified.

All the more recent, less formal evidence, suggests that Moodle has been pulling ahead, not falling behind.

http://moodle.org/ is a huge site with enough resources to drown a battleship. One of the interesting corners is a map showing where most of the thousands of moodle sites worldwide are located.

Babylonian. http://sorrel.humboldt.edu/~geog309i/ideas/dragons /t&m.html Most myths have thier similar elements. just like MS and Apple cultures also "innovate" from each other.

And being used at a number of US institutions (San Francisco State University, Humboldt State University, etc.) and worldwide, with large installations in New Zealand (NZVLE 45,000 students), a number of 10-20,000 student installations in Spain and France, the Open University of the UK is building out for 160,000 students next year, etc.

In fact the install base of Moodle rivals Blackboard/WebCT:
More http://www.moodle.org/stats

What people say about it

Re: "ideologue." Correction noted and acknowledged. Thank you.

I do in fact teach English and see language as a precise tool to communicate to avoid disappointing expectations.

While I "choose" to work for this tutoring company I am not responsible for, nor inclined to justify their corporate philosophies based on another's line of reasoning. And since the presumption has been raised that my teaching methods are limited to the Socratic please allow me to correct the implication. My methods include and are not limited to Bloom's Taxonomyand Hunter's Methods.

With that said. I would like to congratulate Wiki on their outstanding achievement and hold them in high regard. My hope is that they will set a goal of making their database more approachable for educators.

Links:
http://www.crest.org/hydrogen/index.html
http://www.h2fuelcells.org/learn.php
http://www.humboldt.edu/~serc/related.html

Hey, it's a joke. Don't get bent out of shape if you went to Humbolt. I know not everyone who goes there smokes pot, and I know it's a good school.

For just running Moodle, you should be fine with the same hardware and number of sys admins/trainers/support folks you use for WebCT.

Custom development is optional, but a nice feature to improve the overall experience. I've an article on Moodle scalability with links to information about the NZVLE cluster and PHP scalability here

NZVLE

IMO, the main downside is retraining on a new system, however, I think you are going to have to do that anyway soon, I can't see it making good business sense for BB to keep supporting CE or Vista much longer.

http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm
http://edutech.ch/lms/ev3/
http://www.karinvandenberg.nl/Thesis.pdf

all taken from http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?f=485

Also the price factor is here
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=28182

And I don't believe the United States ever had wild horses: I think they were all brought here.

Belief is nice, but often facts smack it upside the ass. North America had mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed tigers, camels, and -- yes -- horses. In fact, horses evolved in North America and only later spread to Eurasia. The locals went extict 11,000 years ago.

As far as we know, native North American horses were never domesticated. The domesticable wild mustangs were just feral horses brought over by the conquistadors.

I mean Sudetenland. Neville Chamberlain made his "Peace in our Time" speech regarding the Munich Conference.

I mean Sudetenland. Neville Chamberlain made his "Peace in our Time" speech regarding the Munich Conference.

Last month I sat through a presentation of that same comparison you linked to at the local LUG. It looks like students tended to prefer Moodle slightly over Blackboard. IIRC, HSU (where the comparison was done) seems to want to ditch Blackboard because of high prices and lack of features in the basic version they're using.

Right now, I'm attending the community college down the road from HSU, which uses Blackboard. It's slow and clunky IMHO, and isn't used very much. Also, the two (?!?) pages leading up to the login page prominently and strongly recommend Internet Explorer (complete with big fancy IE logo), which leads me to believe that Blackboard doesn't really care about making web pages correctly. This is also a huge stumbling block to an effort I've heard about to ditch IE for Firefox at the college.

Last month I sat through a presentation of that same comparison you linked to at the local LUG. It looks like students tended to prefer Moodle slightly over Blackboard. IIRC, HSU (where the comparison was done) seems to want to ditch Blackboard because of high prices and lack of features in the basic version they're using.

Right now, I'm attending the community college down the road from HSU, which uses Blackboard. It's slow and clunky IMHO, and isn't used very much. Also, the two (?!?) pages leading up to the login page prominently and strongly recommend Internet Explorer (complete with big fancy IE logo), which leads me to believe that Blackboard doesn't really care about making web pages correctly. This is also a huge stumbling block to an effort I've heard about to ditch IE for Firefox at the college.

It has equivalent features, it scales, and students like it: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm

See the Comparisons and Advocacy: http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=2784 forum at Moodle.org (click the login as guest button to read) for discussions of folks who have or are making the switch.

It's being used at New Zealand Poly with >40,000 users on a 4 unit cluster, for instance.

Sakai largest installation is uMich with 27,000 students (reportedly on 27 servers) Sakai's release notes call for a new server for every 2000 students.

Moodle has a gradebook, a quiz system, and many other tools that haven't been written yet in Sakai.

Moodle is being used at more than 4000 registered sites world wide, including a number of 10,000-20,000+ student systems.

And Moodle is built with the same technology that Yahoo chose as the best for a (really) large site: PHP.

You can check out Sakai at collab.sakaiproject.org, join up and try the discussion tool out.

ALso see a comparison of Moodle vs. Blackboard: http://www.humboldt.edu/~jdv1/moodle/all.htm --note this is Moodle 1.3 vs. BB 6, Moodle 1.5 is due out in a few weeks with RSS, a wiki, a new gradebook, and extensive performance tuning by the NZVLE project.

No no no. Chico students are drunks. The stoners go upstate to CSU Humboldt.

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/24/16 15232&tid=187&tid=4&tid=218

"Pushed" Into Management (Score:5 Bananas) by rafael_es_son (669255) on 2005.01.25 16:44 (#11472771)

You're a lieutenant in the Army now!

Re " Management Books" [amazon.com]: Unless you've been "pushed" into becoming an Accounting Manager, after re-reading "The Wealth of Nations [amazon.com]" by Adam Smith [wikipedia.org], you may substitute them with anything from the "Self-Help", "New Age" or equivalent sections [amazon.com] of your local Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.com. These type of reading material should prove to be more entertaining while providing an equivalent amount of substance.

Works on human-manipulation techniques [humboldt.edu] -to be applied to the management of your "normals"- tend to be quite popular among managers even when the results of its application to intelligent human beings tend result in somthing risible. If contact with clients is mandated you might want to pick up a book or two on the subject of Illusionism [amazon.com].

If your topmost priority in life -besides food and shelter- is the acquisition of better-than- normal-quantities of money, you will feel very confortable in your new position. Anything else (including technical excellence of your supervised normal's work) must be second-to-profit unless you work for Google or plan to be a considered a mediocre manager. Referring to other humans you work with as "normals" -dare I not ask "As opposed to what?"- reflects an excellent disposition for management work.

[ Reply to This ]

You're a lieutenant in the Army now!

Re "management books": Unless you've been "pushed" into becoming an Accounting Manager, after re-reading "The Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith, you may substitute them with anything from the "Self-Help", "New Age" or equivalent sections of your local Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.com. These type of reading material should prove to be more entertaining while providing an equivalent amount of substance.

Works on human-manipulation techniques -to be applied to the management of your "normals"- tend to be quite popular among managers even when the results of its application to intelligent human beings tend to be risible. If contact with clients is mandated you might want to pick up a book or two on the subject of Illusionism.

If your topmost priority in life -besides food and shelter- is the acquisition of better-than- normal-quantities of money, you will feel very confortable in your new position. Anything else (including technical excellence of your supervised normal's work) must be second-to-profit unless you work for Google or plan to be a considered a mediocre manager. Referring to other humans you work with as "normals" -dare I not ask "As opposed to what?"- reflects an excellent disposition for management work.

Actually, it was from the Yellow Kid.

The man had a limited interest in facts in Bowling for Columbine and an obvious agenda for which Columbine was exploited to promote, I hear that same accusation was made for a previous "documentary" that I didn't see nor do I remember its name, and it sounds like he used the same format in 911... clips of reality with interviews of people interspersed. That doesn't make it right or accurate and certainly doesn't mean it's fair. It presents Moore's political views, just like Bowling for Columbine did.

Moore is a yellow "journalist" that turns "the high drama of life into a cheap melodrama that leads to stories being twisted into the forms best suited for sales by the hollering newsboy." Moore looks for and exploits controversy and the hardships of others for personal gain and I, for one, do not plan on rewarding that kind of movie-making with my money. I'm sure millions of others will, though, so Moore's ego will grow even larger, his pompous attitude even more pronounced, and his general level of annoyance even higher. And I'm sure he'll get another Oscar next year and he'll probably have to make some political commentary there, too--either accusing the American public of being blind and reelecting Bush, or taking credit for Kerry being the new president. That's my prediction and come the Oscar's we'll see if I'm right.

I stand by all my points; though I'll only address the mathematical point:
The proof you indicated is a proof of triangulation. Triangulation only applies to closed 2D polygons. We're dealing with 3-space polygons who's cartesian projection does not always form a polygon or set of polygons. Subsequently the statement inquestion is indeed false.

On the subject of triangulation, there are many finite polygons who's triangulation requires an infinite number of triangles to construct. Subsequently, realtime 3D polygon based applications restrict what polygons can be presented and often incorporate failure cases.

The point is that treatments of mathematical subjects, including computer graphics and the article in question, should be presented with at least a minimal degree of rigor. I wouldn't expect proofs, but I do expect at least accurate and fairly precise statements.

Complex representations of three dimentional objects are not split into triangles for simpler rendering, they are split into triangles because it allowed for faster rendering.

There is no statement in mathematics that claims any polygon can be formed by multiple triangles. Furthmore, this claim is false.

"I, Robot" was one of the first games to use 3D polygonal representations. It was not one of the first games to use flat shading,

(given that it does not use cell shading).

Gouraud shading was first presented by Henri Gouraud in 1971 and has been common in games well before PlayStation.

Gouraud shading takes the averaged surface normals at each vertex and performs a lighting computation (originally a Lambertian diffuse calculation) upon them. The resulting vertex colours are then interpolated along the edges of triangle, then the triangle is filled by interpolating between each set of edge pixels per a scanline.

The production of shadows has nothing to do with Gouraud shading, or shading at all.

The problem with Gouraud shading
[snip]
Another issue is the Gouraud shading is not perspective correct.

Furthermore, the comment that "light tends not to spread slowly across the triangles" is non-sensical at best.

It has nothing to do with how smooth the shading is.

What this chart shows is that gas prices are very high, even taking inflation into account! Not the highest they've ever been, but higher than in the "gas crisis" late 70s, higher in fact than every other period except the early 80s.

What's really stupid is saying, "don't worry, inflation-adjusted gas prices have been higher - just look at the early 80s" when you consider the miserable unemployment and staggering inflation of the US economy in the early 80s! Is that what we have to look forward to?

Some links (click the 1's). Some are for dylexics but still relevent for all since pretty much all of us are capable of visual thought...:

Perhaps newspapers should also be banned?

but if you have an everyday shape, chances are its not created by a known mathematical formula. how do you work out the area using calculus?

Hmmm. Hydrogen bonds are an order of magnitude stronger than van der Waals IM bonds. One practical effect of the strength of H-bonds is that water is liquid instead of gas at room temperature.

I wonder if anyone is working on an H-bond version of this stuff. Presumably, you could use 1/30th the material. Makes me wonder if you could space it out more and make it easier to peel off.

Anyone know if there are critters that use H-bonds for the same function a Gecko uses dipole-dipole stickies? If not, any ideas why? Do H-bonds just not work for this purpose, or are they selected against for some reason?

The Kinetic Sculpture race was started by artist Hobart Brown. He has an art gallery showcasing his metal sculptures on Main street Ferndale. The gallery features paintings by friends of his and a museum of the Race.

at Chico State, you're learning what some might call crappy, inefficient programming. No offense to (most of) the professors at CSUC , but after suffering through two SHITTY teachers (whose names will remain anonymous unless you really wanna know..), and then listening to one of the better ones (Dr. Juliano) rant about how little the administration cares about the CS department, I decided to hightail it outta there. Not to mention I couldn't stand most of the people who go to Chico state (again, no offense intended toward the good people I did meet), and I wasn't too impressed with the course curriculum (java -> C++ -> 68k ASM -> C++ w/ STL...wtf?). After moving back to my hometown and attending the local college, I am finding that I enjoy CS (which is a brand new major here) much more than at Chico.

P.S. I also heard from Dr. J that ~10 professors were retiring or quitting, and were to be replaced with lecturers, is this true?

P.Sx2 also, two professors I really, really recommend: Clarke Steinback for any CS class, and Dr. Buchholtz for Physics (E&M). Both excellent people and excellent teachers.

Excuse my previous typo. Here's an index to the museum's instruments

UC Berkeley is clueless. They are selling a treasure!

In contract, check out this university's Scientific Instrument Museum.

OK, it's really just a few display cases, but the online exhibit is extensive.

Well, it is not. It is called a protection of domestic industries. And though it may not seem fair from the RAM consumer point of view there are quite a bit of good reasons to justify such actions. Whether all of those are applicable to this particular case is a matter of a debate. And taking into account govenment actions, someone somewhere probably jumped over the head trying to protect them.

The Schatz Energy Research Center has a lot of information online about current fuel cell research. Most notable is their full time automated solar hydrogen installation.

The Schatz Energy Research Center has a lot of information online about current fuel cell research. Most notable is their full time automated solar hydrogen installation.

Take taxes from you?

Like the Microsoft Tax?

Start wars?

You mean like Hearst, and the Spanish-American War?

Engage in gross acts of waste?

You mean like logging the Amazon rainforests?

And these aren't the only examples, by any means. You sound awfully naive about corporate power.

-Isaac

Here is a fun little trick. Just find all the male portions of grammar in a document, replace them with the female counterpart (another good trick is using "black" instead of "woman", or virtually any minority group), touch up a little here and there and see if the original document its still offensive.

This test has worked for me a lot in the past to try to determine is what is being said is bigoted. I grew up in a "traditional" (that is to say rasist and sexist) household so its tough for me sometimes to see "others" points of view.

If you wanna check it out go to this page.