All those mid-uni transfers to English had to suffer through English 3000, which was a 300+ lecture with ten smaller breakout session classes led by TAs. You needed a C or higher in the class to declare your major as English. That was easier said than done, since they wanted an essay a week and the proper levels of kissing up to the TAs. I got into many frustrated arguments with my TA, who was a bigger ass than anyone I'd dealt with in the physics department, and barely scraped through with my C. A good third of the class got a D or F and either had to take it again or find another major.
The problem with that is when you give the students free reign to play with the modeling software during labs, they end up creating nifty vases using integrals instead of actually doing the math. *cough* (Didn't help that my math TA was blind as a bat and had to CTRL + my screen 200% to read anything I wrote.)
I agree, the illustrations of the concepts are important, but it needs to be incorporated into the structure of the class to work.
That was what hit me when I took my first AP classes in high school. AP Chemistry, AP Physics, and AP Calculus - for the first time in 12 years of education, I found myself unable to do my homework on the bus before school or during lunch because the concepts were difficult to grasp immediately. I didn't have the necessary study skills for the subjects because I'd never needed them before. My parents were flummoxed too, because I'd coasted along on the straight A gravy train for so long that to suddenly face a D in AP calculus was a big blow to my personal pride and their expectations of me.
I think I would have done better with an accelerated math program that challenged me much earlier and forced me to sit and work through problems for an hour at night, instead of breezing through them in fifteen minutes during homeroom for so long.
The Republicans voted against it because they don't want Obama to succeed at anything. Rush Limbaugh said "I hope he fails" in regards to Obama at the start of his first term, voicing the mindset of every Republican who was upset about McCain. Him winning a second term was just rubbing salt on the Obamacare wound.
The current House is the most obstructionist, obstinate, oligarchical gaggle of do-nothings the United States has ever seen. It's frankly embarrassing. However, they would rather sit around and do absolutely nothing - pass no bills, not even ones that would shrink government and save money like they say they want to do - because any bill that passes through both the House and the Senate to be signed by Obama is a success for Obama. And they can't have that, now can they?
In the case of the single and/or slutty women, they're now covering all oral contraceptives free of charge, because paying for the Pill is cheaper than paying for babies. Insurance companies will probably cover any treatments needed to help with smoking cessation, but continuing to smoke after all the proof we have regarding the health issues that it causes is just stupidity. It's the same stupidity that makes people not wear their seatbelts to prove a point.
I'm overweight. My last measured blood pressure was 118/72. My last measured lipid profile ratio was 1.5. I give platelets regularly, have no chronic illnesses, eat a pretty ridiculously healthy diet (home cook most of my meals and eat fast food only when traveling), and have good skin to boot. I go to the gym 3-4 times a week. I don't smoke either.
I do agree that we ought to penalize all unhealthy people who refused to follow medical advice via insurance costs, but there's a huge difference between someone who has a high BMI and wears a 1X despite doing everything right, and someone who continues to smoke a pack a day after being told by a doctor to quit it.
We only start whining when the C-levels do stuff like give away 2 million pizzas, and then pat themselves on the back with a five million dollar bonus for a marketing job well done. All while complaining that they'll have to raise pizza prizes 14 cents if they have to pay for healthcare. Personally, I'd pay a dollar more a pizza just to be assured that the kid who was making it had gotten his case of the flu treated two weeks ago.
This already how a lot of contract programmers work. They're hired and fired based on the needs of one program in development. Upsides: Paid a superstar expert salary (I've seen 100K for six months advertised before), no long-term commitment if the place is terrible, no need to sell your house if you have to leave town, etc. Downside: No benefits, no job security, and no employee camaraderie with your co-workers, some of whom are also probably temps.
Employers are afraid to commit and invest in their employees any more. I worked at a call center that was a "temp-to-hire" once - they had around 50 full time employees, including the 20-odd folks in management. Another 100 were temp workers who were brought in, worked to the bone until they burned out, then let go. The highest performers (read: the people who didn't screw up) were offered full time positions with the company, or promotions. The need for this could have been alleviated with better training, but training employees is expensive. Better to hire a lot of them short term through a temp agency, see which ones fit in, and just let the others go, in a constant pattern of churn.
I quit that place despite being one of the rare full timers, because I decided I'd much rather work on computers directly than just talk to people about them.
-- is ensuring that whatever we end up using for our 3D printed parts can, itself, be easily recycled. The problem with a lot of hard plastics is that they're difficult to recycle. Using softer polymers in 3D printing, and engineering their structures to create the strength (as the article discusses with the abalone shells) will allow us to create objects that can be used until they are no longer needed, then melted right back into the tank for new stuff. Having objects made from natural materials is all good and well, but the material has to be suitable for the purpose. I don't think I'd want a gear for my car made out of wood chips.
There's also the intuitiveness and cleanness of the UI in Chrome. It's fast, and it does things I didn't even know I wanted it to do (like rendering my bookmarks toolbar within the browser window in new tabs when I've hidden it.) I was a big Firefox advocate several years ago, but they're going to have to do a lot more than being slightly faster at loading certain parts of a web page to get me off Chrome now.
Have little mini rental lockers, like safe deposit box size, with keys. Charge a quarter. Tell people to put their phones in them. Present the key for the rental locker for $1 off a 32 oz soda at the snack bar. Net cost to consumer: +75 cents, a drink, and diabetes. Net cost to theater: -75 cents on big gulps, but potential increased sales and happier customers all around.
We played a game with the photos of the booth babes from E3, which we called "staff or actress?" Female employees of the company wearing costumes were usually pretty easy to tell - they didn't have model perfect figures, although they were usually fit and attractive AND looked like they could hold their own in a conversation regarding the product in question. The actresses, too, were easy to tell. Did their thighs under the shorty shorts touch? Was their hair bleach blonde and down in loose waves? Did they have on twenty layers of makeup? Did they look bored out of their skulls beneath the costume? Yep, it's a booth babe.
I think the booth babe phenomenon isn't dying, I think it's evolving.
A while ago I made the decision to separate my solid technical stuff (which includes this Slashdot account) from the fuzzier edges of my online presence (political crap, fandom junk, Cheezburger.) And these are also separate from my public presence (which includes Facebook and my LinkedIn account.) Employers only get the technical handle and the public presence.
Nothing says you can't create an online presence from scratch, and make it a safe, clean one. Follow only cool people on Twitter and post only boring things and safe retweets. Start a blog and post nothing but links and discussions to boring tech articles. A one month old blog without any followers is less of a red flag to some employers than no blog at all.
My last office did "auditions." 2-3 hours a day for a few days, doing baby tickets and projects. If they seemed to fit in and didn't explode when asked to fix a printer, they'd have a shot at getting hired. If they freaked out at the boss's constant stream of profanity and came in five minutes late more than once, they would not be asked to come back after the agreed upon trial. They would be paid at least minimum wage for the hours they worked (since most of the folks coming in were unemployed or underemployed already) - with the check cut at the end of the audition so they were square.
Same for me. The games I want to play either won't run on Linux, or require a lot of jury-rigging with WINE to get to work. I'm really lazy and just use Windows as my primary OS for everything on my main desktop, and keep my Linux experiments on other systems.
Preventing fatalities is not the same as preventing a disaster from actually occurring. All nuclear accidents can be prevented with enough planning and prevention. We haven't quite figured out how to stop a tsunami from hitting shore.
Japan itself has been fixated on the nuclear aspects of the disaster. They're used to earthquakes and tsunamis and know that there isn't that much that can be done to prevent those disasters. They've focused on the nuclear aspect because 1. it's a newer type of disaster and 2. unlike earthquakes and tsunamis, it could have been prevented with a little more planning.
Interestingly, I knew exactly where this is and was able to generate the missing info from the context, only because I grew up about 60 miles from this plant. When I was a kid I'd climb on top of a giant hill in south Augusta, GA, and on a clear day you could see the cooling towers from the power plant off in the distance.
Richmond County kids were always jealous of the Burke County kids, because their high school was so much nicer. It was paid for with nuclear money and was nicknamed "The Mall." (The county later made us feel better by putting barbed wire fencing around Burke County High, I assume to keep nuclear mutated monsters out.)
You're not alone. I don't even really think about Win 8 now. There are still some occasional crashes, though, because the app makers haven't quite gotten everything to play nicely. (I had a BSOD last week which Win 8, after I ran a memory debugger, determined was caused by Google Chrome.)
And that is really why sales of Win8 on new hardware haven't taken off. The big medical app and ERP app companies haven't given the OK to the OS just yet. Hell, there are still some that require XP to run. Give it another year or so for them to get off their duffs and give patches to their software so that businesses are okay buying W8 machines, and the sales numbers will improve.
Yeah, right. Our government is so incompetent that even if your DNA is archived, it's going to sit in a database for 40 years untouched because none of the different records departments know how to talk to each other. That's the one good thing about data silos.
Slashdot Mirror
All those mid-uni transfers to English had to suffer through English 3000, which was a 300+ lecture with ten smaller breakout session classes led by TAs. You needed a C or higher in the class to declare your major as English. That was easier said than done, since they wanted an essay a week and the proper levels of kissing up to the TAs. I got into many frustrated arguments with my TA, who was a bigger ass than anyone I'd dealt with in the physics department, and barely scraped through with my C. A good third of the class got a D or F and either had to take it again or find another major.
The problem with that is when you give the students free reign to play with the modeling software during labs, they end up creating nifty vases using integrals instead of actually doing the math. *cough* (Didn't help that my math TA was blind as a bat and had to CTRL + my screen 200% to read anything I wrote.)
I agree, the illustrations of the concepts are important, but it needs to be incorporated into the structure of the class to work.
That was what hit me when I took my first AP classes in high school. AP Chemistry, AP Physics, and AP Calculus - for the first time in 12 years of education, I found myself unable to do my homework on the bus before school or during lunch because the concepts were difficult to grasp immediately. I didn't have the necessary study skills for the subjects because I'd never needed them before. My parents were flummoxed too, because I'd coasted along on the straight A gravy train for so long that to suddenly face a D in AP calculus was a big blow to my personal pride and their expectations of me.
I think I would have done better with an accelerated math program that challenged me much earlier and forced me to sit and work through problems for an hour at night, instead of breezing through them in fifteen minutes during homeroom for so long.
The Republicans voted against it because they don't want Obama to succeed at anything. Rush Limbaugh said "I hope he fails" in regards to Obama at the start of his first term, voicing the mindset of every Republican who was upset about McCain. Him winning a second term was just rubbing salt on the Obamacare wound.
The current House is the most obstructionist, obstinate, oligarchical gaggle of do-nothings the United States has ever seen. It's frankly embarrassing. However, they would rather sit around and do absolutely nothing - pass no bills, not even ones that would shrink government and save money like they say they want to do - because any bill that passes through both the House and the Senate to be signed by Obama is a success for Obama. And they can't have that, now can they?
In the case of the single and/or slutty women, they're now covering all oral contraceptives free of charge, because paying for the Pill is cheaper than paying for babies. Insurance companies will probably cover any treatments needed to help with smoking cessation, but continuing to smoke after all the proof we have regarding the health issues that it causes is just stupidity. It's the same stupidity that makes people not wear their seatbelts to prove a point.
You sound like my cranky 75 year old father-in-law.
I'm overweight. My last measured blood pressure was 118/72. My last measured lipid profile ratio was 1.5. I give platelets regularly, have no chronic illnesses, eat a pretty ridiculously healthy diet (home cook most of my meals and eat fast food only when traveling), and have good skin to boot. I go to the gym 3-4 times a week. I don't smoke either.
I do agree that we ought to penalize all unhealthy people who refused to follow medical advice via insurance costs, but there's a huge difference between someone who has a high BMI and wears a 1X despite doing everything right, and someone who continues to smoke a pack a day after being told by a doctor to quit it.
We only start whining when the C-levels do stuff like give away 2 million pizzas, and then pat themselves on the back with a five million dollar bonus for a marketing job well done. All while complaining that they'll have to raise pizza prizes 14 cents if they have to pay for healthcare. Personally, I'd pay a dollar more a pizza just to be assured that the kid who was making it had gotten his case of the flu treated two weeks ago.
This already how a lot of contract programmers work. They're hired and fired based on the needs of one program in development. Upsides: Paid a superstar expert salary (I've seen 100K for six months advertised before), no long-term commitment if the place is terrible, no need to sell your house if you have to leave town, etc. Downside: No benefits, no job security, and no employee camaraderie with your co-workers, some of whom are also probably temps.
Employers are afraid to commit and invest in their employees any more. I worked at a call center that was a "temp-to-hire" once - they had around 50 full time employees, including the 20-odd folks in management. Another 100 were temp workers who were brought in, worked to the bone until they burned out, then let go. The highest performers (read: the people who didn't screw up) were offered full time positions with the company, or promotions. The need for this could have been alleviated with better training, but training employees is expensive. Better to hire a lot of them short term through a temp agency, see which ones fit in, and just let the others go, in a constant pattern of churn.
I quit that place despite being one of the rare full timers, because I decided I'd much rather work on computers directly than just talk to people about them.
-- is ensuring that whatever we end up using for our 3D printed parts can, itself, be easily recycled. The problem with a lot of hard plastics is that they're difficult to recycle. Using softer polymers in 3D printing, and engineering their structures to create the strength (as the article discusses with the abalone shells) will allow us to create objects that can be used until they are no longer needed, then melted right back into the tank for new stuff. Having objects made from natural materials is all good and well, but the material has to be suitable for the purpose. I don't think I'd want a gear for my car made out of wood chips.
There's also the intuitiveness and cleanness of the UI in Chrome. It's fast, and it does things I didn't even know I wanted it to do (like rendering my bookmarks toolbar within the browser window in new tabs when I've hidden it.) I was a big Firefox advocate several years ago, but they're going to have to do a lot more than being slightly faster at loading certain parts of a web page to get me off Chrome now.
Have little mini rental lockers, like safe deposit box size, with keys. Charge a quarter. Tell people to put their phones in them. Present the key for the rental locker for $1 off a 32 oz soda at the snack bar. Net cost to consumer: +75 cents, a drink, and diabetes. Net cost to theater: -75 cents on big gulps, but potential increased sales and happier customers all around.
We played a game with the photos of the booth babes from E3, which we called "staff or actress?" Female employees of the company wearing costumes were usually pretty easy to tell - they didn't have model perfect figures, although they were usually fit and attractive AND looked like they could hold their own in a conversation regarding the product in question. The actresses, too, were easy to tell. Did their thighs under the shorty shorts touch? Was their hair bleach blonde and down in loose waves? Did they have on twenty layers of makeup? Did they look bored out of their skulls beneath the costume? Yep, it's a booth babe.
I think the booth babe phenomenon isn't dying, I think it's evolving.
A while ago I made the decision to separate my solid technical stuff (which includes this Slashdot account) from the fuzzier edges of my online presence (political crap, fandom junk, Cheezburger.) And these are also separate from my public presence (which includes Facebook and my LinkedIn account.) Employers only get the technical handle and the public presence.
Nothing says you can't create an online presence from scratch, and make it a safe, clean one. Follow only cool people on Twitter and post only boring things and safe retweets. Start a blog and post nothing but links and discussions to boring tech articles. A one month old blog without any followers is less of a red flag to some employers than no blog at all.
My last office did "auditions." 2-3 hours a day for a few days, doing baby tickets and projects. If they seemed to fit in and didn't explode when asked to fix a printer, they'd have a shot at getting hired. If they freaked out at the boss's constant stream of profanity and came in five minutes late more than once, they would not be asked to come back after the agreed upon trial. They would be paid at least minimum wage for the hours they worked (since most of the folks coming in were unemployed or underemployed already) - with the check cut at the end of the audition so they were square.
As long as they use the VII system and not the super fail original XIV system.
Same for me. The games I want to play either won't run on Linux, or require a lot of jury-rigging with WINE to get to work. I'm really lazy and just use Windows as my primary OS for everything on my main desktop, and keep my Linux experiments on other systems.
You think your sea wall is big enough until Mother Nature comes up with a bigger storm just to prove you wrong. Ask Galveston TX about that.
Preventing fatalities is not the same as preventing a disaster from actually occurring. All nuclear accidents can be prevented with enough planning and prevention. We haven't quite figured out how to stop a tsunami from hitting shore.
Japan itself has been fixated on the nuclear aspects of the disaster. They're used to earthquakes and tsunamis and know that there isn't that much that can be done to prevent those disasters. They've focused on the nuclear aspect because 1. it's a newer type of disaster and 2. unlike earthquakes and tsunamis, it could have been prevented with a little more planning.
Interestingly, I knew exactly where this is and was able to generate the missing info from the context, only because I grew up about 60 miles from this plant. When I was a kid I'd climb on top of a giant hill in south Augusta, GA, and on a clear day you could see the cooling towers from the power plant off in the distance.
Richmond County kids were always jealous of the Burke County kids, because their high school was so much nicer. It was paid for with nuclear money and was nicknamed "The Mall." (The county later made us feel better by putting barbed wire fencing around Burke County High, I assume to keep nuclear mutated monsters out.)
Oh right, the nerds who know actually never left IRC to begin with.
You're not alone. I don't even really think about Win 8 now. There are still some occasional crashes, though, because the app makers haven't quite gotten everything to play nicely. (I had a BSOD last week which Win 8, after I ran a memory debugger, determined was caused by Google Chrome.)
And that is really why sales of Win8 on new hardware haven't taken off. The big medical app and ERP app companies haven't given the OK to the OS just yet. Hell, there are still some that require XP to run. Give it another year or so for them to get off their duffs and give patches to their software so that businesses are okay buying W8 machines, and the sales numbers will improve.
Yeah, right. Our government is so incompetent that even if your DNA is archived, it's going to sit in a database for 40 years untouched because none of the different records departments know how to talk to each other. That's the one good thing about data silos.