Inkscape is an excellent FOSS vector graphics program. We use it all the time, and our 8th-grader also uses it.
Teaching some simple shell scripting might also be useful to complement the Python course.
You could also think about one of the FOSS mind-mapping programs, such as View-Your-Mind. Kids should be encouraged to break down concepts in this way at an early age.
Scribus might be something to introduce in a later class, after they have mastered the ideas of material creation and entry, and wish to focus more on presentation/formatting of publications.
If the idea is to support learning of other subjects, then there are also several FOSS chemical structure drawing tools available. Similarly, Scilab or Octave could be used with any subject requiring numerical analysis of plotting. And don't forget about a decent scientific/statistical calculator and a text editor (not necessarily vi or emacs, even mousepad would be OK).
Parents could just set their TVs to not show anything above, say, TV-PG.
The problem with this idea is that I would classify shows differently to those responsible for producing such ratings. Ratings such as PG are applied to material with repugnant violence, while material with healthy nudity or sexual behavior is likely to be rated as R.
Just as others have mentioned, we have no objection to our kids seeing nudity in most contexts (they've been to nude beaches, FWIW), and sexual behavior in many contexts. However, we do not want them seeing some of the kinds of violence which are considered suitable for kids by the rating agencies. Accordingly, the movies they watch range from G to R, but require parental approval - we must be familiar with the material to assess its suitability. Luckily, for TV they are mostly interested in science and nature type shows.
I was not a big fan of this movie first time I watched it but the second and third time I got bored with it.
Same for me, except I didn't watch it a third time. Twice was more than enough.
The movie feels like Cowboys and Indians with a sci-fi twist.
Actually, I thought it started OK and looked initially like it might be a decent sci-fi movie. Then came the long downward spiral into New Age mumbo jumbo and superficiality. Coupled with a plot which went utterly awry and developed inexplicable holes after the first 15-20 minutes, it was a over-hyped disappointment. Fine as a logically weak fantasy with 3D effects, but barely even 1D as sci-fi.
Plus the movie is way to long.
I don't mind long movies - provided the plot is good enough to justify the length. In Avatar, it was not.
Well, it's hard to say whether a hell-hole like Zimbabwe is better than a hell-hole like Burma ("There's no settling the order of precedence between a worm and a louse" - Johnson). However, few apart from the Dear Leader himself would consider North Korea to be as good as Canada, for instance.
Is your name Kim Jong-Il, by any chance?
Never guess the percentage of women in a building using the population of people in the men's restroom.
Or almost never. There are actually a few cases where it would be fairly accurate - gentlemen's club, Russian army barracks, Catholic monastery, and so forth. It would also have been spot-on for the engineering department where I studied, many years ago.
The patent office should do it like the insurance companies do it. Reject every single application on first submission. Find some detail that is just cause for rejecting it, and stamp a big red X through it.
They already do. It's termed a "non-final rejection" and occurs at least once for many applications. Sometimes the rejection is merely for non-compliance with some formality. However, it is often because the examiner found prior art which appears relevant. The applicant is thus required to provide a response, pointing out how it differs from the prior art, and possibly with amendments to the claims to delimit them appropriately.
Of my 15 granted US patents, I think only 3 or 4 went through without at least one non-final rejection. In a few cases, the examiner turned up quite relevant art and there was a significant revision needed for the claims. In a few others, the examiner had conflated different meanings of a particular word, and it was merely necessary to point out that my application used it in a very different sense to the art cited by the examiner (example: spectrum meaning a set of colors or wavelengths simultaneously present in a beam of radiance vs spectrum meaning frequency content over a finite time interval of a time series or signal). FWIW, my patents all involve hardware.
If your "up to" only applies to 5% of your customers, you're scamming them.
Try 2% getting close to the advertised speed, and 98% getting a lot less. According to OFCOM - the UK regulator - only a small fraction get anything close to the advertised maximum (unless they're on fiber). For example, regarding ADSL2 which was 'up to 20Mbps':
"65% were getting less than 8Mbps, 32% between 8 and 14Mbps, with just 2% getting 14-20Mbps." http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/07/ofcom_broadbands_broken_promis.html
From Wacom. I have one of these, and use it on a Windows system. I haven't plugged it into my Lucid system...yet
We have a Bamboo One and a Bamboo Fun on two of our Ubuntu systems, and they work fine. In fact, they worked straight out of the box in Jaunty, without any need for extra drivers etc.
To take advantage of stylus pressure etc., the application must be aware of the stylus, and the pressure/tilt features must be enabled inside the application. Both Gimp and Inkscape support various features, including assigning different tools to each end of the two-ended stylus.
...can't wait for these wall-wart 'freedom boxes' to get rooted on an astronomical scale.
Or for laws requiring all such devices to be pre-rooted according to government specifications in various countries. Also making all non-rooted devices illegal to own or operate without a special license. Of course, this would probably lead to astronomically large security holes for others to exploit, and which you are not allowed to patch.
I cynically expect that whatever drinks/snacks are approaching their "best by" dates will be grossly over-represented in the vending machine's recommendations.
Does this tell anyone about how soon this laser will have real world applications?
Especially since the terrahertz waves still won't show what's hidden in folds of flesh, beneath pendulous breasts, or in body cavities. If the objective is real security through scanning people (as opposed to costly and annoying theatrics), it would have to be a lot more intrusive.
I'm thinking the motive is to prevent damage to morale, but I can't see how the order is any less destructive on morale than the contents of these documents.
Well, perhaps it is just a first attempt along the lines of "the beatings will continue until morale improves". Morale will only improve when they stop this sort of nonsense.
I also use Thunderbird 3 for 2 pop mailboxes and 1 imap mailbox (with about 8 email addresses in aggregate). No slowdown or resource-hogging has been observed. It appears just as snappy as Thunderbird 2 was, but with a few new features.
FYI, this is not on a multi-core speed-demon PC. We run Thunderbird on a 7-year-old Pentium-M laptop (Ubuntu 10.04).
If a tab is 2 spaces, and we're supposed to put 2 spaces after the end of a sentence than we can all save a keystroke by putting a tab at the end of a sentence instead. It's obviously the optimum solution.
Then, when the "Girls Gone Wild JFK Airport Style" video comes out, they'll say that all those people signed release forms. Then, when someone sues because she didn't, they'll arrest her as a terrorist.
FTFY.
The slippery slope will prove longer and steeper than we expect...
Slashdot Mirror
Inkscape is an excellent FOSS vector graphics program. We use it all the time, and our 8th-grader also uses it.
Teaching some simple shell scripting might also be useful to complement the Python course.
You could also think about one of the FOSS mind-mapping programs, such as View-Your-Mind. Kids should be encouraged to break down concepts in this way at an early age.
Scribus might be something to introduce in a later class, after they have mastered the ideas of material creation and entry, and wish to focus more on presentation/formatting of publications.
If the idea is to support learning of other subjects, then there are also several FOSS chemical structure drawing tools available. Similarly, Scilab or Octave could be used with any subject requiring numerical analysis of plotting. And don't forget about a decent scientific/statistical calculator and a text editor (not necessarily vi or emacs, even mousepad would be OK).
Studying sea floor mining is not new.
Or is it "studying" instead of studying? Or whose sunken submarines are they planning to recover?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glomar_Explorer
What - no xkcd references yet???
http://xkcd.com/779/
Gotta look your "best" for the backscatter scan!
Parents could just set their TVs to not show anything above, say, TV-PG.
The problem with this idea is that I would classify shows differently to those responsible for producing such ratings. Ratings such as PG are applied to material with repugnant violence, while material with healthy nudity or sexual behavior is likely to be rated as R.
Just as others have mentioned, we have no objection to our kids seeing nudity in most contexts (they've been to nude beaches, FWIW), and sexual behavior in many contexts. However, we do not want them seeing some of the kinds of violence which are considered suitable for kids by the rating agencies. Accordingly, the movies they watch range from G to R, but require parental approval - we must be familiar with the material to assess its suitability. Luckily, for TV they are mostly interested in science and nature type shows.
If this site was run by Baskin Robbins I have no doubt there would be people here posting:
"...Fucking ice cream is awesome!"
FTFY
Any "Fixed that for you" insights will be modded up to the skies.
FTFY also.
I was not a big fan of this movie first time I watched it but the second and third time I got bored with it.
Same for me, except I didn't watch it a third time. Twice was more than enough.
The movie feels like Cowboys and Indians with a sci-fi twist.
Actually, I thought it started OK and looked initially like it might be a decent sci-fi movie. Then came the long downward spiral into New Age mumbo jumbo and superficiality. Coupled with a plot which went utterly awry and developed inexplicable holes after the first 15-20 minutes, it was a over-hyped disappointment. Fine as a logically weak fantasy with 3D effects, but barely even 1D as sci-fi.
Plus the movie is way to long.
I don't mind long movies - provided the plot is good enough to justify the length. In Avatar, it was not.
One country can not be "better" than another.
Well, it's hard to say whether a hell-hole like Zimbabwe is better than a hell-hole like Burma ("There's no settling the order of precedence between a worm and a louse" - Johnson). However, few apart from the Dear Leader himself would consider North Korea to be as good as Canada, for instance.
Is your name Kim Jong-Il, by any chance?
I prefer 62 miles, 241 yards, 11.872512 inches.
I think you meant 62 miles, 1 furlong, 3 rods, 4 yards, 2 feet, 5 inches, 2 barleycorns, 2 lines, 8 mickeys.
Helium is the second most abundant element at 25%.
No, you should know that the second most common element is stupidity.
Indeed. And the most common element is ignorance.
All the others are just a rounding error.
And anyway, they should have said "over 62.13712 miles (approximately)" for even more impressive false precision.
Never guess the percentage of women in a building using the population of people in the men's restroom.
Or almost never. There are actually a few cases where it would be fairly accurate - gentlemen's club, Russian army barracks, Catholic monastery, and so forth. It would also have been spot-on for the engineering department where I studied, many years ago.
The patent office should do it like the insurance companies do it. Reject every single application on first submission. Find some detail that is just cause for rejecting it, and stamp a big red X through it.
They already do. It's termed a "non-final rejection" and occurs at least once for many applications. Sometimes the rejection is merely for non-compliance with some formality. However, it is often because the examiner found prior art which appears relevant. The applicant is thus required to provide a response, pointing out how it differs from the prior art, and possibly with amendments to the claims to delimit them appropriately.
Of my 15 granted US patents, I think only 3 or 4 went through without at least one non-final rejection. In a few cases, the examiner turned up quite relevant art and there was a significant revision needed for the claims. In a few others, the examiner had conflated different meanings of a particular word, and it was merely necessary to point out that my application used it in a very different sense to the art cited by the examiner (example: spectrum meaning a set of colors or wavelengths simultaneously present in a beam of radiance vs spectrum meaning frequency content over a finite time interval of a time series or signal). FWIW, my patents all involve hardware.
I wonder if "THEY" already have one of these quantum computers
Pardon my lack of paranoia. It's because "they" are out to get you, not me.
If your "up to" only applies to 5% of your customers, you're scamming them.
Try 2% getting close to the advertised speed, and 98% getting a lot less. According to OFCOM - the UK regulator - only a small fraction get anything close to the advertised maximum (unless they're on fiber). For example, regarding ADSL2 which was 'up to 20Mbps':
"65% were getting less than 8Mbps, 32% between 8 and 14Mbps, with just 2% getting 14-20Mbps."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/07/ofcom_broadbands_broken_promis.html
From Wacom. I have one of these, and use it on a Windows system. I haven't plugged it into my Lucid system...yet
We have a Bamboo One and a Bamboo Fun on two of our Ubuntu systems, and they work fine. In fact, they worked straight out of the box in Jaunty, without any need for extra drivers etc.
To take advantage of stylus pressure etc., the application must be aware of the stylus, and the pressure/tilt features must be enabled inside the application. Both Gimp and Inkscape support various features, including assigning different tools to each end of the two-ended stylus.
It's just that next year, Debian will be legal. :)
Hey, I can't wait that long! Gotta fsck it fairly regularly...
...can't wait for these wall-wart 'freedom boxes' to get rooted on an astronomical scale.
Or for laws requiring all such devices to be pre-rooted according to government specifications in various countries. Also making all non-rooted devices illegal to own or operate without a special license. Of course, this would probably lead to astronomically large security holes for others to exploit, and which you are not allowed to patch.
I cynically expect that whatever drinks/snacks are approaching their "best by" dates will be grossly over-represented in the vending machine's recommendations.
FYI, NutraSweet is called NutraSuc in French, which should be adopted as the English name also.
Does this tell anyone about how soon this laser will have real world applications?
Especially since the terrahertz waves still won't show what's hidden in folds of flesh, beneath pendulous breasts, or in body cavities. If the objective is real security through scanning people (as opposed to costly and annoying theatrics), it would have to be a lot more intrusive.
I'm thinking the motive is to prevent damage to morale, but I can't see how the order is any less destructive on morale than the contents of these documents.
Well, perhaps it is just a first attempt along the lines of "the beatings will continue until morale improves". Morale will only improve when they stop this sort of nonsense.
I also use Thunderbird 3 for 2 pop mailboxes and 1 imap mailbox (with about 8 email addresses in aggregate). No slowdown or resource-hogging has been observed. It appears just as snappy as Thunderbird 2 was, but with a few new features.
FYI, this is not on a multi-core speed-demon PC. We run Thunderbird on a 7-year-old Pentium-M laptop (Ubuntu 10.04).
Liberté, égalité, fraternité, sodomisé!
FTFY
If a tab is 2 spaces, and we're supposed to put 2 spaces after the end of a sentence than we can all save a keystroke by putting a tab at the end of a sentence instead. It's obviously the optimum solution.
Then, when the "Girls Gone Wild JFK Airport Style" video comes out, they'll say that all those people signed release forms. Then, when someone sues because she didn't, they'll arrest her as a terrorist.
FTFY.
The slippery slope will prove longer and steeper than we expect...