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And you'd be correct.

As far as Amazon is concerned. Do any of those countries have English as an official language?

And a trip to NCSU via google:
https://projects.ncsu.edu/grad...

Says those countries don't have a leg to stand on.

Possible quadruple win?

Clean drinking water.
Safe sewage disposal instead of pollution.
Biochar produced to improve soil.
Sanitation benefits.

https://projects.ncsu.edu/mcki...

If you're concerned about mischaracterisation then perhaps you should try and actually clarify what you're saying, instead of all these deflections?

Would you care to explain how pointing out the errors in your premises is deflection ? I encourage to take your own advice so you at least appear less ignorant

This is why you should read the study instead, where it explicitly states that turbines are "redistributing heat by mixing the boundary layer". Any warming in one layer of air is offset by cooling in another; there is no extra heat generated. If you believe otherwise, please cite where in the study it contradicts this. What physical method is supposed to produce "some level of warming", other than moving the heat from elsewhere?

As for moisture, it's well known that it is a far more powerful greenhouse gas - but this is irrelevant, because atmospheric water levels are not changing. The effect of water vapour is the same as it's always been - no more, no less. CO2 levels are most definitely changing, and the cumulative effect of this is already being felt.

How the structure of the atmosphere affects heat transfer.
https://climate.ncsu.edu/edu/S...

Simpler, turn on a ceiling fan in a house with a hot attic.

BTW my original statement was

It never ceases to amaze me how the climate doom people never understand the most basic concepts about heat transport.

Thanks for providing empirical evidence.

I did some looking around to try to find one, looks like most of the public-facing info has been replaced by the spring projects. The best way to get info was to have been there at Senior Design Day to see the unit in action and talked to the team, which I admit does little good now.
If you go to the photo gallery archive at https://research.ece.ncsu.edu/...
click on the Fall 2017 gallery, you can see a picture about 32 that has much of their poster, but not the demonstration unit.

You might be able to get more information by contacting the ECE department, they might still have project details. From my recollection, they trained Watson to do analysis of images captured by a phone that was placed on top of the sorter looking down, and a micro-controller to for the motor control side of things based on the classification that came back (to switch to the proper bin location then push the item in)

The control system allows the plant to accept step load increases of 10 percent and ramp load increases of 5 percent per minute over the load range of 15 to 100 percent of full power subject to xenon limitations. Equal step and ramp load reductions are possible over the range of 100 to 15 percent of full power. Losses of reactor load up to 100 percent of rated power without reactor trip can be accommodated by steam dump to the condenser conjunct with the control system.

Hmmm, 5 percent per minute, from 15 to 100 percent? That would mean 17 minutes to ramp up or down between full-throttle and idle. Quite flexible, and quite quick! Most peaker plants take between 10 to 30 minutes to ramp up to rated output, so the nuclear plant - with power equal or greater than most natural gas peakers - responds as fast as the natural gas peakers. Imagine that!

So a work experience program? This is nothing new.

There is a work experience program already - its called cooperative education - and one of the largest items employers out of RTP look for on a resume. Details of the program from a nearby university: https://careers.dasa.ncsu.edu/...

Coops - traditionally - have applied to engineering roles only. The one benefit I see from this new model is it looks to be open to additional roles outside of engineering.

Time to plant trees. Lots of trees.

You could cover the entire planet surface with trees and it still wouldn't be enough. It's time to start using technology to produce billions of machines that actively and permanently remove carbon from the air.

Okay. But until we have such machines, the most readily available carbon-sink, cost-effective and easily deployed with unskilled labour, is the tree.

OK, let's calculate. Here's a source talking about CO2 absorption by trees: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new... , and here's a source saying "A tree can absorb as much as 48 pounds of carbon dioxide per year and can sequester 1 ton of carbon dioxide by the time it reaches 40 years old.": https://projects.ncsu.edu/proj...

This one says that trees absorb 40% of the 28 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted per year: World's forests absorb almost 40 per cent of man made CO2

If we take just that last figure, it's easy: we need to increase the number of trees to 250% of the existing number: plant an additional 150% as many trees as already exist on Earth.

Google tells me that 30% of the Earth's land area is covered by trees ( ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/0... ), so the quick estimate is that we need to plant enough trees to change this to 75%.

You do know that for each transaction you do you change your wallet-address and there is no easy way to trace this.

It will look something like if you do a single transaction to a company.
addr1(10btc) -> ( addr2(2btc), addr3(8btc) )
and you don't know if addr2 or addr3 would be the new wallet or destination address. All you know is that some BTC moved from one address to two other BTC addresses.
Most important part here would be to always use new keypairs for the destination-address(es) to make it harder to trace..

The destination address to the company will be generated on the fly by the recipient to allow for simple detection of when the transaction has been performed.
Try to trace something that has been going thru a couple of tumblers, and ending up in a few 100 different wallets.. On top of that do a couple of transfers in/out of a few exchanges located in a few different jurisdictions.. And then for withdrawing money using https://localbitcoins.com/ and getting cash...

Unless you are someone really sought after it will cost more to trace that than it's worth..
There have been quite a few articles about how bitcoins has been traced, but also different ways to obscure who's the actual owner of said coins...

I'm not saying it's completely secure and anonymous, but it can be anonymous enough depending on how it's used and how big of a target you have painted on yourself.

One of the latest anonymization techniques available you can find here:
https://news.ncsu.edu/2017/02/...

But if you want to stay fully anonymous:
- Use TOR when announcing transactions.
- Always generate new wallets at transaction-time.
- Don't pay for services that can be linked back to you..

There is another kind of Engineer.

You're missing all the death-by-a-thousand-cuts taxes, so the comparison really is useless, sorry.

80% of Americans have no savings and are living paycheck-to-paycheck. You won't have luck raising their taxes - that's why the Fed is holding down interest rates beyond all reasonable measures.

But the #1 hidden government cost ("taxes") is regulations which have an effective tax rate of 200% (see paper). This one factor is responsible for the vast majority of poverty in the US. And, frankly, reduced tax revenues, parallel to the Laffer Curve. All the other taxes pale in comparison.

I'm old, spent 40 years sweating over a hot computer. That said, this is worrying. As other commentators on this thread have said, this is predictable and useful in many ways. In the 1980s I worked with SYSTRAN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... which worked (works?) on pairs and the EU Commission, which has a huge translation burden was looking for pivots, even then.

However, consider this, a neural net that takes care of business in an oil refinery (or worse, nuclear installation) 'decides' that it can knock up a much more efficient control language. That's rational and perhaps beneficial, but, at that stage, there's also a creeping loss of control/comprehension in a system that controls actuators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Also from 1983, a much cited paper that is also is debated in the fly-by-wire community (pdf alert!): https://www.ise.ncsu.edu/nsf_i...

So, long story short, I'm not at all sure about surrendering control, somewhat unconsciously as a by-product of optimisation, itself (perhaps) a by-product of economics and 'cost effectiveness'. Also, when we deal with neural nets, we deal with the sub-symbolic, a system that is not going to 'explain', just say I did that because of 42. Don't mistake me, I'm not a Luddite, I love a good computer and have plenty at home, but this 'gives pause'.

Hey not all light switches are digital.

Let's crunch some numbers.

The largest tree planting project that I know of is the Civilian Conservation Core which planted about 3 billion trees in the US over about a decade (source).

Let's say that a 40-year-old tree is sequestering about 1 ton of CO2 (source, and yes, I realize this will vary a lot based on species and location, but we need to start somewhere).

So, let's say that we magically plant 3 billion trees tomorrow. That will sequester 3e9 trees*2e3 lbs/tree*4.54e-13 lbs/gigatonne / 40 years = 0.068 gigatonnes/year of CO2 sequestered. (Note that ton and tonne are different.) In comparison, the US produces about 1.4 gigatonnes a year (source).

I'm not saying that sequestering CO2 in rock is a better scheme, but planting a few *billion* trees won't solve our problem.

(PS. someone check my math. It's easy to screw these calculations up.)

Why the emo?

If something is bullshit, I'm going to call it bullshit. There's no emotion in it, it's just how I'm calling it. What term would you prefer I use instead? Bologna? I just like using the word bullshit.

From the study:
"In the heart, exposure to GSM or CDMA modulations of RFR in male rats resulted in a statistically significant, positive trend in the incidence of schwannomas. "

One of its conclusions:
"Under the conditions of these 2-year studies, the hyperplastic lesions and glial cell neoplasms of the heart and brain observed in male rats are considered likely the result of whole-body exposures to GSM- or CDMA-modulated RFR."

One of the three reviewers (all three of whom agreed with the study's conclusions):
https://cvm.ncsu.edu/directory... [ncsu.edu]

What they are saying could well be true.

I think you're not quite getting what the reviewers were agreeing with.

The female rats were exposed to the same thing, and yet they didn't have any of that happen to them. At the end of the day, what's fundamentally different from male and female? In the case of mammals in particular, it's fundamentally genetics. That is a very strong indicator that what is happening in these rats is likely only relevant to this strain of rat, and then only the males of this strain of rat. Remember, the females were exposed to the same thing, so ask yourself, why isn't this happening to them? And what makes you think this would happen to anything besides these particular male rats but not the female ones?

In other words, the message being put across by the media is like saying that if you feed avocado to your dog, and it kills your dog, it could very well be toxic to humans as well. Nope, wrong, try again. What persin does to affect dogs (and many other animals) isn't even relevant to humans. This is also similar to how Bt is highly toxic to invertebrates but harmless to anything else. Am I making sense to you?

Anyways back to the cell phone radiation study: If this also affected the females, then they might be on to something for any organism besides this strain of rat, and it would warrant more investigation. But basically, within their own study, they've already shown that what happened to these rats likely isn't relevant to anything else.

As for your three reviewers, I'm sure that their conclusion that this is relevant to these particular male rats is likely correct.

Why the emo?

From the study:
"In the heart, exposure to GSM or CDMA modulations of RFR in male rats resulted in a statistically significant, positive trend in the incidence of schwannomas. "

One of its conclusions:
"Under the conditions of these 2-year studies, the hyperplastic lesions and glial cell neoplasms of the heart and brain observed in male rats are considered likely the result of whole-body exposures to GSM- or CDMA-modulated RFR."

One of the three reviewers (all three of whom agreed with the study's conclusions):
https://cvm.ncsu.edu/directory...

What they are saying could well be true.

One of the cornerstones of mathematics is forgetting certain distinctions and identifying "different" stuff as one.

Without the human experience of forgetting, this is hardly imaginable.

If you haven't yet, read this story by J L Borges: Funes, the memorious. A mind that never loses memory is a dump bin.

Reverse-discrimination against men? Rejected, per the observation that there is evidence of discrimination against women when gender is identified.

unless of course that discrimination is made up and socjus has not simply evened the odds but actually biased selection in favor of women.

Women take fewer risks, and thus are more likely to provide solutions that are accepted? The authors cite a study that claims women are, on average, more risk-averse than men. However, this is inconsistent with the observation that women change more lines of code.

many smaller changes might be more appealing to risk adverse submitters. They're also less likely to move the project in new directions. Lines of code isn't a very good metric for this either.

Women in open-source are more competent than men? This is the hypothesis that the authors support the most. They suggest it somes about due to survivorship bias and/or self-selection and/or higher implicit performance-standards in the female population of open-source coders.

Of course they do. This is a socjus article where the premise is set first, and convenient factoids are carefully selected..you know, like a creationist 'analysis' of evolution.

also, from the link
This report has not yet been peer-reviewed, and thus the findings should be considered preliminary. Before citing this paper, please check for an updated version here: http://people.engr.ncsu.edu/er...

andrew kofink a "Universal rights activist". This guys' already got a predisposition..
https://twitter.com/akofink

Even the early academic studies (PDF warning) of the effectiveness of pair programming found that you didn't quite get as much out of a pair team as two individuals working independently. However the code quality is generally a lot better in terms of correctness or readability.

If you have a few individuals who are new to an organization or becoming acclimated to a new project they've not worked on previously, pairing can make some sense. On the other hand if you've got a rock-star developer that's head-and-shoulders above the rest, it's probably not worthwhile to pair them with another person.

Do they still teach assembly language?

The ABET accreditation for a computer science degree requires:
"Coverage of the fundamentals of algorithms, data structures, software design, concepts of programming languages and computer organization and architecture."
per: http://www.abet.org/accreditat...

The last part - "computer organization and architecture" - can be interpreted a number of different ways. For my alma mater, they met that requirement by creating a course titled "Computer Organization and Assembly Language": https://www.csc.ncsu.edu/acade....

So yes - but YMMV based on individual university.

Almonds are fascinating, using over a trillion gallons of water per year in California. I always thought eating nuts was lower impact on the environment than eating meat and so a better use of resources. Not sure why we can't grow almonds in water-wealthy states - almonds grow all over the Mediterranean. In fact, almonds are very genetically close to peaches, and I'm sure would make Georgia more money than peaches, with a little investment.

Pair programming isn't on the face bad and there are several aspects to it that are good, but it has to be implemented properly.

A lot of the early research on using it in an educational setting (see publications by Laurie Williams or Charlie McDowell ) found that it works best if you know the students who will be using it can already program individually. Otherwise you tend to get cases of severely mismatched abilities where one person does most of the work and the other just coasts by. So you also need a reasonable approximation of each student's ability so you can arrange pairs based on that. There's also other research that looked into pairing based on personality or other attributes that found some results to indicate some approaches are more preferable than others.

Using it right out of the gate when you don't have a good gauge of the different ability levels of the students could be detrimental in some cases. If used correctly, pair programming can be beneficial for students and teacher alike, but here it looks as though they're trying to use it as a solution to cut down on the amount of work they need to do. There are probably better ways of approaching that problem.

Most companies would not keep any developers over 50 on staff.

It's their loss. Most companies are horrendously bad at making software. The ones that are very good at it know better and have lots of older developers on staff.

And the research shows they're right:
Older Is Wiser: Study Shows Software Developers’ Skills Improve Over Time

My experience tells me the same. Most of the really good software engineers I know are at least 40, many are much older.

Go ahead, throw 'em out and get some newly-minted CS grads. Someone with some sense is going to get a great hire.

Furthermore, there was no requirement to stay in the union when the US was formed

You've never read the Articles of Confederation, have you?

Your argument is basically, "The South held slaves, the North were angels trying to swoop down and protect the helpless slaves from their Southern oppressors. Sherman's killing of civilians is perfectly OK in that context."

Nope. My argument is that it was a total war and Sherman destroyed targets of military value. He didn't directly kill civilians; he rendered some civilians homeless, which is a difference that is apparently lost on you. The wanton killing and aimless destruction that you're imagining is a figment of Southern imagination. Special Field Orders No. 120, emphasis mine:

IV. The army will forage liberally on the country during the march. To this end, each brigade commander will organize a good and sufficient foraging party, under the command of one or more discreet officers, who will gather, near the route traveled, corn or forage of any kind, meat of any kind, vegetables, corn-meal, or whatever is needed by the command, aiming at all times to keep in the wagons at least ten day's provisions for the command and three days' forage. Soldiers must not enter the dwellings of the inhabitants, or commit any trespass, but during a halt or a camp they may be permitted to gather turnips, apples, and other vegetables, and to drive in stock of their camp. To regular foraging parties must be instructed the gathering of provisions and forage at any distance from the road traveled.

V. To army corps commanders alone is entrusted the power to destroy mills, houses, cotton-gins, etc., and for them this general principle is laid down: In districts and neighborhoods where the army is unmolested no destruction of such property should be permitted; but should guerrillas or bushwhackers molest our march, or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads, or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility.

VI. As for horses, mules, wagons, etc, belonging to the inhabitants, the cavalry and artillery may appropriate freely and without limit, discriminating, however, between the rich, who are usually hostile, and the poor or industrious, usually neutral or friendly. Foraging parties may also take mules or horses to replace the jaded animals of their trains, or to serve as pack-mules for the regiments or brigades. In all foraging, of whatever kind, the parties engaged will refrain from abusive or threatening language, and may, where the officer in command thinks proper, give written certificates of the facts, but no receipts, and they will endeavor to leave with each family a reasonable portion for their maintenance....

5) One bad apple does not ruin the batch.

Follow up: yes it does - at least with apples. Ripening apples release ethylene gas that acts like a hormone to activate a specific gene in fruit that causes it to ripen. As it ripens further, the amount of ethylene gas soars and can cause an entire batch of apples stored together to ripen and rot.

Apples can be stored for an extended period if stored in a cold, oxygen-deprived location. Historically, before refrigeration, apples picked were stored for winter in barrels sunk in lakes. Even then, however, one rotten apple could prematurely ripen and rot an entire barrel.

More information here: Postharvest Cooling and Handling of Apples

Most of the studies on pair programming that I've read have suggested that this is a bad idea. The person who knows what they're doing might not have the patience for someone who doesn't and the person who doesn't know what they're doing might just go along for the ride. A lot of the early studies (Laurie Williams and Charlie McDowell) found that it's better to pair people of similar ability levels, the idea being that two individuals who are less skillful will be able to struggle and grow together rather than having one person dominate everything.

Unless you can match up people who have the patience to work with a novice with those who want to learn rather than just get a grade, it's a bit of a recipe for disaster.

That is not consistent with the current policy:
http://policies.ncsu.edu/policy/pol-10-00-01/

Get bad results.

Agriculture has been advancing as fast as any other technology field.

Here are some recent developments: http://www.popularmechanics.co...
and GPS is becoming important to farm competitiveness: https://www.bae.ncsu.edu/topic...

None of this depending on massive fixed installations, so it can be used cost effectively over thousands of acres of fields.

No, it doesn't.

[listeria bacteria's] presence on a food does not change the taste or smell of the food.

Seattle's already doing this. The water treatment plants compost solid waste and turn it back into, well, usable compost.

Are the human medicines removed from the compost?

Also, how about the persistant herbicides.? This isn't granola-speak, if your composting facility is accepting grass clippings, you're almost certainly getting herbicides.

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/fletch...

And our over-medicated society? Here's a post for King County

http://www.lhwmp.org/home/hhw/...

Even when we don't dump old medicine down the toilet, we whizz out a lot of it.

I have BS in CS & Math. Still have no clue what is Data analytics. Is it statistical analysis of big data sets ?

Short answer: Yes. Curriculum for the program is available here
http://analytics.ncsu.edu/?pag...

I have a BS in Computer Science and a BS in Statistics - both from NC State. CSC students are terrible when it comes to analyzing data sets, but great when it comes to designing software. Statistics students are great at analyzing data sets, but terrible when it comes to designing software. You need a combination of both to handle large data sets. There are PhD students in either field that tackle data mining but employers don't want to hire PhDs every time to fill in that gap. Hence the Master's program which is coursework only.

Still have no clue what is Data analytics.

Or google, it would seem.

http://analytics.ncsu.edu/?pag...

Looks like mostly stuff I'd expect a maths grad to already know[1]. Maybe not the specific applications, but it isn't that true of anything?

[1] ANOVA? I did that as a non-maths undergrad. With a slide rule, uphill in the snow.

Again, do you read your own statements? These are your words: " That is, he may have deliberately manipulated the data, even if his results turned out to be correct later."

Yes, prefixed by "Mann's data can be fraudulent without being wrong.". That was in response to someone who claimed that because Mann's conclusions were correct, he cannot have committed fraud. So, if Mann committed fraud, arriving at a correct conclusion wouldn't get him off. I'm sorry you have trouble with hypotheticals.

I said the evidence goes back more than a century. Some of it goes back millions of years. None of which has anything to do with "feedback mechanisms."

You can say that the moon is made of green cheese; that doesn't make it true. You simply don't know what you're talking about.

"I would note that our '98 article was reviewed by the US National Academy of Sciences, the highest scientific authority in the United States, and given a clean bill of health," he said. "In fact, the statistician on the panel, Peter Bloomfield, a member of the Royal Statistical Society, came to the opposite conclusion of Prof Hand."

How nice. But a lot of statisticians disagree. So do I. And Steyn will have no trouble finding reputable statisticians attesting to the fact that Mann did "torture" the data, statisticians with a lot more impressive publication records and credentials than Bloomfield's.

That model isn't a climate model at all, it's an energy economy model, as are the models it replaces. This has nothing at all to do with the availability (or otherwise) of climate models ...

The quote comes from: New Energy Model Offers Transparency to Let Others Replicate Findings

The model

Hexadecimal nothing! And you can can leave aside these tables as well. The Ancient Chinese were able to solve linear systems using Guass Elimination. Most undergraduate still aren't able to do that.

I personally suspect that many of our basic and even advanced mathematical methods are much older than we assumme. Much, much older.

That seems highly unlikely, if you actually look at the map. California's entire coastline, except for the San Diego area, skews heavily blue (and even San Diego is lightly blue), so the opposite would probably be true - only California 4 (on his map) would likely elect Republican senators. Keep in mind the coasts are also far more heavily populated. So it'd probably be 8-2 the other way.

http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/healey/US_election/figs/CA.png

My link got Lucased: http://www4.ncsu.edu/~mtmorris/index3.htm

George Lucas (Verb) Lucasing, Lucased (a) The act of committing graphics overkill.

Better update it. Lucas Electrical

http://www4.ncsu.edu/~tenshi/Killer_000.htm

http://peachfront.diaryland.com/enderhitlte.html

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/5/28/22428/7034


And a few other article insunuating that actually the book was a group/commityn produce, which explain the disparity of quality, and style with the follow up book.


My opinion is that Orson scott card was always an asshat, and the whole book was *very* itnentionally a disguised nazi apologia.

Really? I don't see the answers in that article. With controlled logging you can remove the smaller stuff and keep the bigger stuff. And you have far better control than "controlled burns" which don't always go as planned.

Anyway the real answer is in different articles and it's "Yes something like that is already being done" and it is called Forest fuel reduction/Mechanical Fuels Treatment:
http://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/stelprdb5393869.pdf
http://cnr.ncsu.edu/blogs/southeast-fire-update/2013/07/24/ga-forestry-commission-offers-new-service-mechanical-fuel-treatment/

But burning stuff is faster and cheaper (assuming the burn doesn't go out of control).

Because they are terribly inefficient? According to http://www.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.htm, 1 tree process around 24kg of CO2 per year. Refrigerator (which I'm not giving away to be 'green'), according to http://www.botany.org/planttalkingpoints/co2andtrees.php, produce almost 900kg of CO2 because of energy used per year. This means, I need almost 40 full-grown trees just to cover my refrigerator. If you add some other things, like PC I'm writing it on, water heating, house warming, washing machine, etc etc, we are probably talking about acre of forest just to cover my family needs. Don't know about you, but I live in area where space is a bit of premium and people are sometimes failing to secure 50m^2 apartment in multi-store building (which translates to probably like 20m^2 of real ground space, even with pavements etc) - they can hardly affort paying for extra 5000m^2 of ground to plant forest there.

Generally, plants are very bad at anything they do, if you look from pure efficiency point of view. Same way as solar panels are order (or even few) of magnitude better at converting solar to energy than plants, there might be a non-plant solution for getting rid of CO2 in hundred times more efficient manner than trees are doing that now.

I'm a lot more worried about all these ideas with 'lets change the albedo', 'lets spray air with nanoparticles of HaArP molecules' etc. We don't know a lot about our planet and I'm afraid that any manual steering of single variables will cause catastrophic results.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I do still feel there is something highly 'accidental' to the genius of Card's Ender's series, but I have read some criticisms that damn the books for being highly manipulative in the way they persuade the audience to forgive Ender's actions:

"Card has spoken in interviews about his tropism for the story of the person who sacrifices himself for the community. This is the story, he tells us, that he has been drawn to tell again and again. For example, in justification of the scenes of violence in his fiction, Card told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990 that, “In every single case, cruelty was a voluntary sacrifice. The person being subjected to the torture was suffering for the sake of the community.” I find this statement astonishingly revealing. By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.” Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. No, in these situations, according to Card the person being tortured is Ender, and even though he walks away from every battle, the sacrifice is his. In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence. It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game."

One might equate the effects on Ender to exactly the same mental effects on our own armed forces in Afghanistan, who come home with PTSD, have a huge suicide rate, etc. Whether you agree with us being at "war" over there (I don't), it is quite easy to see in real life in this country the "price paid by the destroyer" on our veterans.

... and by exactly the same forces, the military commanders who wanted to "win at all costs" regardless of the human consequences either on the ground to the population (the buggers), or the military they are "using" to fight (Ender and his jeesh). Yes, one can argue that the military forces are somewhat responsible as the "destroyers", as is Ender (and thus his "tortured soul"), but the role of servicemen (and Ender/his jeesh) is to "follow orders", the order being to "win".

I don't see it as any different as what is going on, in real life, right now.

That is true, but I thought that part of the reason this is being discussed is because the message people are trying to boycott isn't in 'Ender's Game'. So you aren't disagreeing with a work's message, you are disagreeing with the politics of the IP owner of the work.

Well, actually, I'm not all that fond of the messages in Ender's Game either.

But even if I thought Ender's Game was an important movie with positive moral lessons in it, I would, in fact, be boycotting it because I "disagree[] with the politics of the IP owner of the work".

Card isn't just a random bigot. He actually joined the board of directors of the main lobbying organization against same-sex marriage, and publicly advocated the overthrow of the government if same-sex marriage were made legal. (Of course, now it's "moot".)

Some works can be separated from their authors, or excused as having flaws endemic to the time they were created. But there's a continuum between that and profiting a leader of a movement you disagree with deeply. I don't know where the line is - there probably isn't a bright sharp line anyway - but Card is way past that line.

Thank you for the thoughtful response. I do still feel there is something highly 'accidental' to the genius of Card's Ender's series, but I have read some criticisms that damn the books for being highly manipulative in the way they persuade the audience to forgive Ender's actions:

"Card has spoken in interviews about his tropism for the story of the person who sacrifices himself for the community. This is the story, he tells us, that he has been drawn to tell again and again. For example, in justification of the scenes of violence in his fiction, Card told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990 that, “In every single case, cruelty was a voluntary sacrifice. The person being subjected to the torture was suffering for the sake of the community.” I find this statement astonishingly revealing. By “The person being subjected to the torture,” Card is not referring here to Stilson, Bonzo, or the buggers, who may well be sacrificed, but whose sacrifices are certainly not “voluntary.” Their deaths are not the voluntary sacrifices that draw Card’s concern. No, in these situations, according to Card the person being tortured is Ender, and even though he walks away from every battle, the sacrifice is his. In every situation where Ender wields violence against someone, the focus of the narrative’s sympathy is always and invariably on Ender, not on the objects of Ender’s violence. It is Ender who is offering up the voluntary sacrifice, and that sacrifice is the emotional price he must pay for physically destroying someone else. All the force of such passages is on the price paid by the destroyer, not on the price paid by the destroyed. “This hurts me more than it hurts you,” might well be the slogan of Ender’s Game."

Sometimes I hear this criticism, and I don't get it. That's the point of art. If it doesn't have a message, what's the point?

Beauty? Seriously, though, not all art has a deeper meaning. More to the point, art that has a deeper meaning is repugnant is not something I want to, you know, spend money on.

Your objection is that it has a message you disagree with. In that sense, I agree with Card. It is intolerance. And closed-mindedness. If you refuse to listen to any argument against what you believe in, you must believe in a lot of things that aren't true.

You'd have a valid point if the movie were free. But your argument degenerates into the KKK holding a rally and demanding $1 million per person who shows up (except clan members) with the claim that those who don't attend are intolerant. That's simply absurd. No, we all can hear Card's morality for free from critiques. We hear him quite clearly. We even have nice critique[s] of Ender's Game that leave plenty of reason to not bother watching the movie. Your argument would make a lot more sense if you were arguing, of course, that it's intolerant to specifically not shop at a store because the owner was a KKK clan member. To that, I'd tend to more agree.

Now, I'm completely against him on the gay marriage issue (and on most issues, really), but why the hell would I have a problem with him voicing his opinions? That's how we get rid of bad ideas. We listen to the arguments, and we refute them.

Which is precisely what's happening. In the mean time, I personally don't think Ender's Game is worth the money to watch.

The best way of making a point against racism, for example, is letting the KKK talk and make asses of themselves. We only stop them when they move beyond talking.

That doesn't mean we dedicate, for free, 2 solid hours a day to the KKK on TV. It doesn't mean we go out of our way to fund KKK rallies. It means the KKK, if it can manage to find the funds, can hold a rally. That we choose to not give them money is in part because and in part to show how irrelevant they are. You're too much conflating the negative actions upon another's free speech vs the lack of a positive action to support every stupid fucker's ability to spout off beyond to their limited means and people's willingness to search out for their message.

So, I'd have to say in that way it is a show of intolerance towards Orson Scott Card and those like him. Just like people are intolerant of and speak out against heavy metal heads, fornication, etc.

You and the story poster really really really need to go back to school and beef up on your reading comprehension. Card's personal views are evident all over the place. Empire was painfully filled with them. Everything in the Bean series. All of his non-SF is littered with it.

If you want to read a very well written and thought out argument as to why Ender's Game is one of the worst books for adolescents to read, check out John Kessel's thesis. He's not like one of those that says Card didn:t even write Ender's Game

You do realize that the article you cited refers to an in-vitro test of isolated cells exposed to a wetting agent (common terminology: soap) used in conjunction with Round-Up. right? And that almost ANY soap would show similar toxicity?

These chemicals purpose is to make it easier for roundup shit to be abosrbed into cells causing damage. See the safety datasheet for their own stinkin product.

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/fletcher/programs/xmas/pesticides/labels/Roundup-orig-max-msds.pdf

North Carolina State University's new Hunt Library has a similar system. It is scheduled to open on January 2nd 2013. The bookBot will eventually mange 2 million books. It currently manges 1.3 million books, and you can watch as more books are added via the library's site.

No, it's still a hub because everyone still uses the same channel.

No, you've missed the point. Nutria had it right.

  It is almost exactly like converting the AP from a hub to a switch, because the AP gets to tell all the stations to STFU, and then handles traffic of each station one at a time, giving each at full upstream bandwidth, while the other stations wait until are allowed to speak. Switch.

Read carefully the Abstract at the bottom of this page: http://news.ncsu.edu/releases/wms-gupta-wifi/

Lookup E115 at NC State University for Engineering Students:
http://www.eos.ncsu.edu/e115/

1 credit hour course with pass / fail option. Students who have the knowledge can take the exam at the beginning of their first semester and skip the course entirely. Other groups (Physical and Mathematical Sciences, Agricultural and Life Sciences, etc.) offer a similar course tailored for their students. Textbook was custom-made and cost less than $20.

In short, you won't win the argument to have an "introduction to computing" class any less generalized. You can, however, recommend significant improvements in course material based on what peer colleges/universities are doing. AND, further, if you want to DESIGN said courses tailored to a diverse student population and each populations unique requirements, I don't see a Dean turning down the opportunity to at least listen to somebody who is passionate about their coursework and can offer constructive feedback.

Best of luck if you decide to pursue it that far.

"If only there were a way to make that happen..."

See Michael Kay's work: http://www.ise.ncsu.edu/kay/pln/index.htm
"A public logistics network is proposed as an alternative to private logistics networks for the ground transport of parcels. Using the analogy between the packages transported in the network and the packets transmitted through the Internet, a package in a public logistics network could, for example, be sent from a retail store and then routed through a sequence of public distribution centers (DCs) located throughout the metropolitan area and then delivered to a customer's home in a matter of hours, making a car trip to the store to get the package unnecessary. The DCs in the network, functioning like the routers in the Internet, could also be located at major highway interchanges for longer distance transport.
    Currently, it is common for a single logistics firm like UPS and FedEx to handle a package throughout its transport. The such a private logistics network, much of the technology used to coordinate the operation of the network is proprietary. As a result, the principal competitive advantage that a private logistics company has is the barrier to entry due to the very large scale of operation (national or international) required in order to be able to underwrite the development of private facilities and propriety technologies. Nevertheless, a single firm, unless it becomes a monopoly, is ultimately limited in the scale of its operation, resulting in the use of a limited number of large-scale hub transshipment points that can result in packages making many circuitous hops before reaching their destinations. In a public logistics network, the different functions of the network would be separated so that a single firm is not required for coordination. This would enable scale economies to be realized in performing each logistics function since each element of the network has access to potentially all of the network's demand. The increase in scale would make it economical to have many more transshipment points. Each transshipment point, or distribution center (DC), could be an independently operated facility that serves as both a freight terminal and a public warehouse, and could be established in small cities and towns that would never have such facilities if they were served as part of a proprietary, private logistics network."

I liked your point in general. Presumably these front-door codes (or a home delivery box with a code) coud be integrated in with a Public Logistics Network? I elaborated on that idea here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html#Princeton_University_Freecycle_Transportation_Network_--_an_internet_of_physical_packages