Actually, you win wars by overwhelming the enemy. It doesn't matter if more of your own troops die if you have plenty more to start with. The Russians may have had a poor kill-to-die ratio, but they still slammed the Germans with sheer numbers.
My mom, born in 1945, had never used a computer before 1999. I bought her one on a whim that year and the first time she used the mouse she laughed like a little kid. She was completely mystified by the whole thing, though, and I wasn't hopeful that she'd actually use it much. But I gave her a couple days of instruction and set her loose. She did master email and web surfing in a few weeks, and I thought that was as far as she'd go.
What really triggered her learning was finding ebay. She got the bug and wanted to start selling off her old stuff. I would never have guessed it would happen, but a few months after buying her the computer I was teaching her the basics of HTML. She loved it and got pretty good at it for a casual user. Today she codes crypto functions in assembly. Okay, that last sentence is a lie, but the rest is true;)
I think the most important thing is having something enticing that they want to actually do with programming. For my mom this came about naturally from wanting to post fancy ads on ebay.
Programming as an abstract goal or with contrived toy projects isn't likely to stick or be very interesting. But trying to think of a real project with a real language for your mom would probably be difficult. Which is my point.
Another post mentioned HTML, which is a great idea. It's not a programming language, but it teaches people how to make something using a strict (heh) set of text instructions. This is a huge leap of understanding that will go a long way towards understanding the concept of programming. It's also great because it's easy to thing of an HTML project. Just about anyone would like to try their hand at making a web page.
Anyways, those are my somewhat disjoined thoughts. Gotta go!
I am at a loss for words trying to imagine in what way you think that Hollywood movies designed for entertainment can be validly compared to direct government alteration of history.
And I'm at a loss trying to imagine how you could find successful alteration of history different whether it's done by a government or a corporation. Corporations are the new government, my friend.
Right on. There is no such thing as Free Beer. The price of using GPL'd code is that you release your code. To me, this seems a fair price. But if you don't think so, go and drop a few grand to buy a commercial library.
Yeah -- that story definitely fits right in. The whole thing has made me wonder about the motivation for the hydrogen economy. When we can do it all so much simpler with biodiesel, why is everybody clamouring for hydrogen? I'm starting to think it's either 1) because people like the high-tech sound of it or 2) it's being promoted because it's not something we can do ourselves and is thus a better commercial opportunity.
Diesel/Electric Hybrid cars running off bio diesel that's generated by algae on the roof of my house (in Vegas this might actually work). Also powering my home would be nice.
Is the propsed hydrogen economy just another way to convince us we need complex high tech solutions that we can't possibly manage by ourselves? It's starting to sound to me like biodiesel is a much better storage medium: it works with existing infrastructure during the transition, is much easier to create, transport, store and handle, and is also clean burning (or so I've read).
Okay -- I'll admit you've piqued my interest in the topic. I will do some searching for the newer diesel info you mentioned.
In fact, with biodiesel out there (I've done some more reading on this since the thread started), I'm not sure why everyone is clamouring for a hydrogen economy. It seems like if we could switch to petro-diesel, then bio-diesel much more easily with existing infrastructure, and that bio-diesel is cheaper to produce and easier to transport and store than hydrogen.
If diesel is so much dirtier, why is it used for all of the "heavy lifting" (trucking, trains, construction equipment, etc) in this country?
Are you serious? It's because it's cheaper and no large company gives a rat's ass about pollution. I could just as easily say "if coal burning is so much dirtier than wind power, why do all the power plants still burn coal"?
If diesel is so much dirtier, why does 75% of airborne pollutants in the Denver metro area come from gasoline powered vehicles, and only 25% come from diesel powered vehicles
That's probably because about 98% of the vehicles on the road are gasoline powered. Besides, I'm not talking about your average crappy gasoline car, I'm talking about the cleanest gasoline you can get in the mainstream market vs. the cleanest diesel you can get in the mainstream market. Gasoline wins on pollutants hands down. I provided an actual link to an actual study to support this.
If diesel is so much dirtier, why do auto manufacturers in Europe bother with cars like the VW Lupo?
I don't know -- but I'm not sure why you think people give a damn about pollution. If they really did we'd be using natural gas, biodiesel, or clean source hydrogen.
And we'll see diesel engines become much more popular, whether you or the general public likes it or not.
Look, drop the conspiracy theory act. If diesel took over and was cleaner, I'd be cheering. So would most people. Maybe diesel can be made cleaner, but my current gasoline car is cleaner and more practical than any (non bio) diesel that can be purchased.
Frankly, I wish it wasn't so. I wish there were more options. But as it is I'll buy the best thing I can get my hands on.
Your trash talking and instructions to go look it up myself aren't very convincing. I've done enough searching to know that studies indicate premium diesel technology is dirtier than premium gasoline technology. Unless you can provide something a little more concrete your unfounded claims and your attitude can go climb a tree.
That is actually a pretty cool possibility that I don't know much about. But I imagine biodiesel is pretty darn expensive and impractical these days, no?
Where are you getting your info? If I had ever heard that diesel engines ran more cleanly I would be all over it, but as far as I can tell you are making this claim up out of thin air.
So you're actually getting 30 MPG by US measure, not 40. That sounds a little more reasonable. There are plenty of cars sold in America that get 30 MPG -- mostly Japanese made.
The econo car you mention that gets 60 is probably not a real world number either. But assuming it is that's 48MPG US, which I've seen occasionally in my Prius on a good tank.
But you're right -- most Americans are driving huge tank-like vehicles that are lucky to get 15 MPG. Idiots.
you could probably get 70 MPG in a Prius, but good luck achieving that.
It depends on how small of a time slice you look at. I have averaged over 100 MPG (the highest the Prius meter goes) for ten minutes on occasion, and 10MPG on other occasions. My lifetime average (15K miles over 7 months) is 45MPG. The EPA highway test is, I believe, 10 minutes at 48 MPH on a dynomometer. Yeah -- that's going to be accurate.
I drive my Prius normally most all the time (meaning I accelerate faster than I really need to). When I drive to save, I can usually push my one tank average to 48MPG. The lowest tank average I've had was 42MPG.
Anyways, the EPA tests are lousy for all cars. If you're trying to get an idea of how useful hybrid engines are, don't compare real-world hybrid numbers to EPA gas numbers -- something a lot of people feel comfortable doing. And don't compare a comfy mid-size sedan like the 2004 Prius to some tiny econo box. If you compare the Prius to the Camry, similar interior space and comfort, the real world numbers show the Prius with a little more than double the milage.
Garbage. I've been driving my 2004 Prius for 15K miles (since last November) both highway and city, hills, using heat and AC and I average 45 MPG. Most online reports I've read indicate similar results -- mid 40's.
Yes, that is far lower than the 55/60 the EPA rating claims. But the only reason we're noticing is because the Prius has a built in milage gauge. The EPA tests are complete bullshit -- they take place on a dynamometer where aerodynamics doesn't factor at all and weight doesn't factor accurately. They test "highway" milage as 48 MPH... who the hell drives 48 MPH?!? And fuel efficiency drops dramatically as you go faster, especially over 60. The average highway speed in my neck of the woods is around 75 MPH.
That simply can't be true unless you're driving a diesel... in which case you're solving the wrong problem if we're discussing the environment and global warming. Diesel is dirty, dirty, dirty.
Even the best gas hybrids only get about 45 MPG in the real world.
And don't forget that the "ratings" on these cars is completely misleading. For example, the US EPA tests highway driving by running a car on a 48 MPH dynomometer for 10 minutes. No wind, no hills, no nothing. Aerodynamics and weight hardly factor in. Test a couple of tanks of fuel and average it out if you really want to know what your car gets.
I think it's funny that anyone would dismiss as "beating a dead horse" a war that is going on right now in which there is great human suffering wishing instead to gripe about a sensationalist filmmaker's credibility.
I hope IBM sues the hell out of the officers (not just the corperation) for libel or whatever they can. It's just not enough for these assholes to wave a gun around and then laugh it off when we find it's not loaded. They have caused a lot of people a lot of trouble and the _individuals_ who pushed this need to be appropriately punished. It should be made clear that it's not worth it to play these frivolous lawsuit games.
I wonder what it is about Korean culture that lends itself so well to social videogame obsession. My wife is Korean and she had an addiction to Tribes that seriously interfered with her real life. She eventually had to quit gaming completely.
I remember some story about a Korean guy playing until he actually died (of dehydration or malnutrition or something). And although data is not the plural of anecdote as they say, there seems to me to be evidence that gaming as a culture is sweeping Korea faster than almost anywhere else. When I visited there two years ago you couldn't walk 20 yards in Seoul without passing a PC Bahng (internet cafe/gaming room). People were there 24/7.
I've talked about it with my wife but she doesn't have a particular theory. Though she grew up there she's not very traditional so she doesn't seem to have any insight to it beyond her own obsession.
A friend and I went to one of the first ever screenings of the back-to-back Star Wars trilogy that was used to open a new ten theater complex in Braintree Massachusetts in the early 90's. This was years before the terrible "Special Editions" and before the rehyping of the sequels. The crowd was actually quite cool, though a few were dressed up. It was truly great to see the original films in all their glory.
The theaters were all THX, which was still a big deal at the time, and they had a guy from Lucasfilm there telling us about the impressive sound systems. He claimed that one of the reasons it was called THX sound was because it was invented by Thomas Holman... it was dubbed "Thomas Holman's Experiment" when they were developing it, and Lucas really liked that it lined up with the "THX" from his first feature his movie.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when all the ISPs filtering spam are sent threating legal letters telling them to stop filtering?
The ISP coughs up the money, McAffee rakes in the dough, there is a small rate hike for ISP service and the consumers are none the wiser.
Cheers.
Actually, you win wars by overwhelming the enemy. It doesn't matter if more of your own troops die if you have plenty more to start with. The Russians may have had a poor kill-to-die ratio, but they still slammed the Germans with sheer numbers.
Cheers.
From the article -- in a bullet list of "benefits":
Operating lifetime exceed 1000 hours
Um, I hope it's a lot longer than 1000 hours. That's just over 41 days for the mathematically impaired.
CHeers.
My mom, born in 1945, had never used a computer before 1999. I bought her one on a whim that year and the first time she used the mouse she laughed like a little kid. She was completely mystified by the whole thing, though, and I wasn't hopeful that she'd actually use it much. But I gave her a couple days of instruction and set her loose. She did master email and web surfing in a few weeks, and I thought that was as far as she'd go.
;)
What really triggered her learning was finding ebay. She got the bug and wanted to start selling off her old stuff. I would never have guessed it would happen, but a few months after buying her the computer I was teaching her the basics of HTML. She loved it and got pretty good at it for a casual user. Today she codes crypto functions in assembly. Okay, that last sentence is a lie, but the rest is true
I think the most important thing is having something enticing that they want to actually do with programming. For my mom this came about naturally from wanting to post fancy ads on ebay.
Programming as an abstract goal or with contrived toy projects isn't likely to stick or be very interesting. But trying to think of a real project with a real language for your mom would probably be difficult. Which is my point.
Another post mentioned HTML, which is a great idea. It's not a programming language, but it teaches people how to make something using a strict (heh) set of text instructions. This is a huge leap of understanding that will go a long way towards understanding the concept of programming. It's also great because it's easy to thing of an HTML project. Just about anyone would like to try their hand at making a web page.
Anyways, those are my somewhat disjoined thoughts. Gotta go!
Good luck!
I am at a loss for words trying to imagine in what way you think that Hollywood movies designed for entertainment can be validly compared to direct government alteration of history.
And I'm at a loss trying to imagine how you could find successful alteration of history different whether it's done by a government or a corporation. Corporations are the new government, my friend.
Many of your other points are valid, though.
Cheers.
I stand corrected. That makes the price seem even more fair :)
Right on. There is no such thing as Free Beer. The price of using GPL'd code is that you release your code. To me, this seems a fair price. But if you don't think so, go and drop a few grand to buy a commercial library.
Cheers.
Thanks I will read through these and change my position if appropriate.
Cheers.
Yeah -- that story definitely fits right in. The whole thing has made me wonder about the motivation for the hydrogen economy. When we can do it all so much simpler with biodiesel, why is everybody clamouring for hydrogen? I'm starting to think it's either 1) because people like the high-tech sound of it or 2) it's being promoted because it's not something we can do ourselves and is thus a better commercial opportunity.
Anyways... I'll check back later.
Diesel/Electric Hybrid cars running off bio diesel that's generated by algae on the roof of my house (in Vegas this might actually work). Also powering my home would be nice.
Is the propsed hydrogen economy just another way to convince us we need complex high tech solutions that we can't possibly manage by ourselves? It's starting to sound to me like biodiesel is a much better storage medium: it works with existing infrastructure during the transition, is much easier to create, transport, store and handle, and is also clean burning (or so I've read).
Cheers.
Okay -- I'll admit you've piqued my interest in the topic. I will do some searching for the newer diesel info you mentioned.
In fact, with biodiesel out there (I've done some more reading on this since the thread started), I'm not sure why everyone is clamouring for a hydrogen economy. It seems like if we could switch to petro-diesel, then bio-diesel much more easily with existing infrastructure, and that bio-diesel is cheaper to produce and easier to transport and store than hydrogen.
Hmmm. You have set me to thinking. Thanks.
Cheers.
If diesel is so much dirtier, why is it used for all of the "heavy lifting" (trucking, trains, construction equipment, etc) in this country?
Are you serious? It's because it's cheaper and no large company gives a rat's ass about pollution. I could just as easily say "if coal burning is so much dirtier than wind power, why do all the power plants still burn coal"?
If diesel is so much dirtier, why does 75% of airborne pollutants in the Denver metro area come from gasoline powered vehicles, and only 25% come from diesel powered vehicles
That's probably because about 98% of the vehicles on the road are gasoline powered. Besides, I'm not talking about your average crappy gasoline car, I'm talking about the cleanest gasoline you can get in the mainstream market vs. the cleanest diesel you can get in the mainstream market. Gasoline wins on pollutants hands down. I provided an actual link to an actual study to support this.
If diesel is so much dirtier, why do auto manufacturers in Europe bother with cars like the VW Lupo?
I don't know -- but I'm not sure why you think people give a damn about pollution. If they really did we'd be using natural gas, biodiesel, or clean source hydrogen.
And we'll see diesel engines become much more popular, whether you or the general public likes it or not.
Look, drop the conspiracy theory act. If diesel took over and was cleaner, I'd be cheering. So would most people. Maybe diesel can be made cleaner, but my current gasoline car is cleaner and more practical than any (non bio) diesel that can be purchased.
Frankly, I wish it wasn't so. I wish there were more options. But as it is I'll buy the best thing I can get my hands on.
Cheers.
Your trash talking and instructions to go look it up myself aren't very convincing. I've done enough searching to know that studies indicate premium diesel technology is dirtier than premium gasoline technology. Unless you can provide something a little more concrete your unfounded claims and your attitude can go climb a tree.
Cheers.
That is actually a pretty cool possibility that I don't know much about. But I imagine biodiesel is pretty darn expensive and impractical these days, no?
Cheers.
Really? That's funny, because all the research I've read over the years and up to today has indicated that diesel engines are dirtier than gasoline.
Where are you getting your info? If I had ever heard that diesel engines ran more cleanly I would be all over it, but as far as I can tell you are making this claim up out of thin air.
Cheers.
So you're actually getting 30 MPG by US measure, not 40. That sounds a little more reasonable. There are plenty of cars sold in America that get 30 MPG -- mostly Japanese made.
The econo car you mention that gets 60 is probably not a real world number either. But assuming it is that's 48MPG US, which I've seen occasionally in my Prius on a good tank.
But you're right -- most Americans are driving huge tank-like vehicles that are lucky to get 15 MPG. Idiots.
Thanks for the update.
Cheers.
you could probably get 70 MPG in a Prius, but good luck achieving that.
It depends on how small of a time slice you look at. I have averaged over 100 MPG (the highest the Prius meter goes) for ten minutes on occasion, and 10MPG on other occasions. My lifetime average (15K miles over 7 months) is 45MPG. The EPA highway test is, I believe, 10 minutes at 48 MPH on a dynomometer. Yeah -- that's going to be accurate.
I drive my Prius normally most all the time (meaning I accelerate faster than I really need to). When I drive to save, I can usually push my one tank average to 48MPG. The lowest tank average I've had was 42MPG.
Anyways, the EPA tests are lousy for all cars. If you're trying to get an idea of how useful hybrid engines are, don't compare real-world hybrid numbers to EPA gas numbers -- something a lot of people feel comfortable doing. And don't compare a comfy mid-size sedan like the 2004 Prius to some tiny econo box. If you compare the Prius to the Camry, similar interior space and comfort, the real world numbers show the Prius with a little more than double the milage.
Garbage. I've been driving my 2004 Prius for 15K miles (since last November) both highway and city, hills, using heat and AC and I average 45 MPG. Most online reports I've read indicate similar results -- mid 40's.
Yes, that is far lower than the 55/60 the EPA rating claims. But the only reason we're noticing is because the Prius has a built in milage gauge. The EPA tests are complete bullshit -- they take place on a dynamometer where aerodynamics doesn't factor at all and weight doesn't factor accurately. They test "highway" milage as 48 MPH... who the hell drives 48 MPH?!? And fuel efficiency drops dramatically as you go faster, especially over 60. The average highway speed in my neck of the woods is around 75 MPH.
Cheers.
That simply can't be true unless you're driving a diesel... in which case you're solving the wrong problem if we're discussing the environment and global warming. Diesel is dirty, dirty, dirty.
Even the best gas hybrids only get about 45 MPG in the real world.
And don't forget that the "ratings" on these cars is completely misleading. For example, the US EPA tests highway driving by running a car on a 48 MPH dynomometer for 10 minutes. No wind, no hills, no nothing. Aerodynamics and weight hardly factor in. Test a couple of tanks of fuel and average it out if you really want to know what your car gets.
Cheers.
I think it's funny that anyone would dismiss as "beating a dead horse" a war that is going on right now in which there is great human suffering wishing instead to gripe about a sensationalist filmmaker's credibility.
Cheers.
Any examples? Or are you just making stuff up to support your prejudices?
I've heard people say this, but haven't done any research myself. Enlighten me as to what items he presented as facts that had not basis in reality.
Cheers.
I think Moore himself has called BfC a "mockumentary" on many occasions.
Besides, if you think that there is _any_ documentary that doesn't have a bias you're naiive.
Cheers.
I hope IBM sues the hell out of the officers (not just the corperation) for libel or whatever they can. It's just not enough for these assholes to wave a gun around and then laugh it off when we find it's not loaded. They have caused a lot of people a lot of trouble and the _individuals_ who pushed this need to be appropriately punished. It should be made clear that it's not worth it to play these frivolous lawsuit games.
Cheers.
I wonder what it is about Korean culture that lends itself so well to social videogame obsession. My wife is Korean and she had an addiction to Tribes that seriously interfered with her real life. She eventually had to quit gaming completely.
I remember some story about a Korean guy playing until he actually died (of dehydration or malnutrition or something). And although data is not the plural of anecdote as they say, there seems to me to be evidence that gaming as a culture is sweeping Korea faster than almost anywhere else. When I visited there two years ago you couldn't walk 20 yards in Seoul without passing a PC Bahng (internet cafe/gaming room). People were there 24/7.
I've talked about it with my wife but she doesn't have a particular theory. Though she grew up there she's not very traditional so she doesn't seem to have any insight to it beyond her own obsession.
Any Koreans out there who have thoughts on this?
Cheers.
A friend and I went to one of the first ever screenings of the back-to-back Star Wars trilogy that was used to open a new ten theater complex in Braintree Massachusetts in the early 90's. This was years before the terrible "Special Editions" and before the rehyping of the sequels. The crowd was actually quite cool, though a few were dressed up. It was truly great to see the original films in all their glory.
The theaters were all THX, which was still a big deal at the time, and they had a guy from Lucasfilm there telling us about the impressive sound systems. He claimed that one of the reasons it was called THX sound was because it was invented by Thomas Holman... it was dubbed "Thomas Holman's Experiment" when they were developing it, and Lucas really liked that it lined up with the "THX" from his first feature his movie.
Anyways, a bit of trivia.
Cheers.