Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
Must every thread about using a Mac for anything not explicitly approved by Jobs include someone saying, "Why would you do that?"
(Also, "To see if I could" is actually a very good, valid, and accepted answer to nearly any such question. Alternative answers include, "Why wouldn't you?" and "Who gives a fuck why?")
Let's try this, then: Open a world atlas. Color all the large, drinkable water sources bright red. Now imagine those drinkable sources going away, as they have been for some time (including aquifers, which we're happily polluting when we're not emptying them). Then imagine all the people of the world moving right next to those sources. Hey look, the water's bright red in real life from everyone fighting over it!
You seem to equate the matter with death.
No shit. And you seem to think "exists" means "will always exist, even if we don't do anything to preserve it."
Even outside of programming, "conceptually" is where most of higher math matters. Being good at calculus means you've trained you brain to visualize and comprehend abstractions on top of abstractions.
(On a related note: This is why mathematicians (and smart people in general) are so bad at politics: The relatively small segment of the population who can think deeply and critically about a number of tangentially related variables don't generally buy into bumper-sticker slogans.)
I suspect that you saw the potential BECAUSE you're not a gamer. All I hear from gamers is how underpowered the Ouya is and how no one's going to want it because the games will suck (not unlike the Wii arguments, before everyone's grandma went out and bought one). To me, that lack of power is a VERY good thing because it means the developers will be forced to make their games fun rather than pretty.
Also, XBMC is great, and a ~$100 media center? Sign me up!
There's Netflix on Windows too, but thanks to Silverlight, XBMC can only open Netflix via IE, which severely limits the use of a remote control. (IOW, it's a lot of trouble because Netflix goes out of its way to make it troublesome.)
Don't forget that Palin left Wasilla massively in debt (for such a small place) and that her claim to fame as governor -- other than not finishing her term -- was raising taxes on oil corporations and redistributing that cash to Alaskan citizens as cash payouts.
My guess: Brian Sandoval of Nevada. They look a little too much alike, but Sandoval's a Catholic Hispanic, and can deliver a lot of votes from that population. He also pretends to be a conservative or centrist as the situation requires, and doesn't have enough track record to get intelligently taken to task for either stance.
The biggest problem is that, once Southern Republicans see them both side-by-side, they'll remember that Romney has Latin roots and ditch him as a border-crashing Mexican.
I just hope kids today are learning how to create line breaks in HTML instead of posting massive blocks of text and thinking someone somewhere might be able to slog through it.
I think part of the "we're less educated" argument stems from the fact that our grandparents and great-grandparents had a lot more practical knowledge that most people today. Read Popular Mechanics from the '40s and you'll see advanced electronics (for the time) and do-it-yourself projects that assumed a high level of engineering and mechanical skills -- something most of us sorely lack today.
A lot of this is a result of the wars and the economic woes at the early part of the 20th century. People learned to build things and fix things out of necessity. Today, even poor people just buy stuff and throw it away when it breaks (not least because there are "no user serviceable parts inside.")
the main problem in early education is that math, with its many abstractions of notation and convention, is brought in far too early.
I learned to program from books in 4th grade (and I'm no genius) well before I learned any actual algebra in school. As a result, when I finally did get to algebra in 7-9th grade it was ridiculously easy.
The idea that children can't handle these abstractions is ridiculous. It reminds me of the idiot education major in college who tried to explain to me that children can't begin learning a second language until around age 12, ignoring my friend sitting next to me who moved to the U.S. at 8 and spoke better English than either of us.
Obviously, money doesn't trickle down. Rich people are richer today compared to anyone else since the '20s. If 'trickle down' worked at all, we'd be living a utopia with lower unemployment and poverty than ever.
The obvious problem with 'trickle down' and pretty much all Randian 'economics' is that it ignores: a) the fact that most rich people don't get their money from producing, b) the U.S. isn't a closed system, so Mr. Rich Guy very likely keeps and spends a large amount of his $$ outside of the U.S. (and if he's just investing it or keeping it in a bank there, the money is actually trickling UP rather than down), and c) money hoarding. The idea that the rich are building new businesses with their cash ignores reality, where more money is being sat on right now than at any time in history.
You do realize that this is about federal agencies, right? You know that the reason the cops cannot just commandeer your house is because of a law passed by Congress.
No, that's in the Constitution. Congress has the power to GIVE cops that right, but have chosen not to do so yet.
I'm not sure if you're actually a conservative, or merely a Republican. So don't take any of this as a specific criticism of you -- it sounds like we agree on a number of things.
Please. As a conservative, methinks you're talking out your ass. We have no problem with public school teachers. What we have a problem with is unions that continue to protect teachers that are poor performers or don't adapt to new teaching techniques, which is exactly the reason why we're in the sad state we are, these days.
As a conservative also, I notice that there hasn't been a single proposal from the Republican party on how to hold teachers accountable, or how to fix the problem. We know that privatization hasn't produced the promised outcomes, so what now?
... incentivizing good, young teachers to excel and actually TEACH their students, rather than just read out of a book. ON the other hand, nothing the federal government ever does ONLY costs a billion dollars.
Smart, competent people are in demand. You incentivize those people to become teachers by paying them what they'd make elsewhere, plus a little more. A conservative would see good pay as a required first step for fixing the system. Republicans do not. From their perspective, government employees should be paid as little as possible, so that they'll go out and find real jobs in the private sector and shrink government even further. The well-being of the country takes a backseat to realizing some bizarre fantasy that a country can be strong without decent education as its cornerstone.
So as conservative, I like this Obama plan. It's not much, but it's something, which is more than we've seen in my lifetime on the education front.
Both are feel-good ways to make sure that our undereducated "educators" aren't held to any real standard.
Obama's plan, BTW, is a good one. The U.S. has a serious shortage of engineers* partially because people who want to be K-12 teachers (that is, people satisfied with living their lives as underpaid workhorses) generally have no scientific background at all.
Even our science teachers -- at least here in Vegas -- are often former English majors borrowed to teach directly from a textbook "temporarily."
(*I realize that some people -- particularly Republicans, for some reason -- deny this shortage exists. But having spent the better part of last year trying to hire some decent engineers, I know it's true.)
There are no liberals OR conservatives in the U.S. government. The "liberals" are just centrists, leaning more right then left by the rest of the world's standards.
The "conservatives" aren't conservative by any meaning of the word except the (very flexible) one they created.
We would do well to stop pretending any of our representatives have an overarching philosophy or belief system that isn't focused on lining the pockets of themselves and their friends, and simply call them "Republicans" and "Democrats."
Slashdot Mirror
You won't believe me so I won't even cite.
This is perhaps the most cowardly comment ever made on Slashdot.
High taxes? The U.S. has the lowest taxes in the industrialized world, and the shit services to show for it.
Why in the world would you even try to do it? What is the goal of this endeavour?
Must every thread about using a Mac for anything not explicitly approved by Jobs include someone saying, "Why would you do that?"
(Also, "To see if I could" is actually a very good, valid, and accepted answer to nearly any such question. Alternative answers include, "Why wouldn't you?" and "Who gives a fuck why?")
And as long as you always answer 42, or 416 what is the problem with that?
This is pretty much what I do. I have a password that changes based on the question, but isn't actually the answer to the question.
You seem to equate the matter with death.
No shit. And you seem to think "exists" means "will always exist, even if we don't do anything to preserve it."
Even outside of programming, "conceptually" is where most of higher math matters. Being good at calculus means you've trained you brain to visualize and comprehend abstractions on top of abstractions.
(On a related note: This is why mathematicians (and smart people in general) are so bad at politics: The relatively small segment of the population who can think deeply and critically about a number of tangentially related variables don't generally buy into bumper-sticker slogans.)
I suspect that you saw the potential BECAUSE you're not a gamer. All I hear from gamers is how underpowered the Ouya is and how no one's going to want it because the games will suck (not unlike the Wii arguments, before everyone's grandma went out and bought one). To me, that lack of power is a VERY good thing because it means the developers will be forced to make their games fun rather than pretty.
Also, XBMC is great, and a ~$100 media center? Sign me up!
There's Netflix on Windows too, but thanks to Silverlight, XBMC can only open Netflix via IE, which severely limits the use of a remote control. (IOW, it's a lot of trouble because Netflix goes out of its way to make it troublesome.)
Porn. Just turn on the subtitles.
Don't forget that Palin left Wasilla massively in debt (for such a small place) and that her claim to fame as governor -- other than not finishing her term -- was raising taxes on oil corporations and redistributing that cash to Alaskan citizens as cash payouts.
My guess: Brian Sandoval of Nevada. They look a little too much alike, but Sandoval's a Catholic Hispanic, and can deliver a lot of votes from that population. He also pretends to be a conservative or centrist as the situation requires, and doesn't have enough track record to get intelligently taken to task for either stance.
The biggest problem is that, once Southern Republicans see them both side-by-side, they'll remember that Romney has Latin roots and ditch him as a border-crashing Mexican.
I just hope kids today are learning how to create line breaks in HTML instead of posting massive blocks of text and thinking someone somewhere might be able to slog through it.
I think part of the "we're less educated" argument stems from the fact that our grandparents and great-grandparents had a lot more practical knowledge that most people today. Read Popular Mechanics from the '40s and you'll see advanced electronics (for the time) and do-it-yourself projects that assumed a high level of engineering and mechanical skills -- something most of us sorely lack today.
A lot of this is a result of the wars and the economic woes at the early part of the 20th century. People learned to build things and fix things out of necessity. Today, even poor people just buy stuff and throw it away when it breaks (not least because there are "no user serviceable parts inside.")
the main problem in early education is that math, with its many abstractions of notation and convention, is brought in far too early.
I learned to program from books in 4th grade (and I'm no genius) well before I learned any actual algebra in school. As a result, when I finally did get to algebra in 7-9th grade it was ridiculously easy.
The idea that children can't handle these abstractions is ridiculous. It reminds me of the idiot education major in college who tried to explain to me that children can't begin learning a second language until around age 12, ignoring my friend sitting next to me who moved to the U.S. at 8 and spoke better English than either of us.
census data has been public all along
before now you had to go to washington and look it up yourself
now it's easier to get at
No, it's been online for years. There just hasn't been a good, uniform way to query it and write apps against it.
So you consider it "ruined," yet here you are. Either it's not really all that ruined, or you're perfectly happy with ruined things.
Obviously, money doesn't trickle down. Rich people are richer today compared to anyone else since the '20s. If 'trickle down' worked at all, we'd be living a utopia with lower unemployment and poverty than ever.
The obvious problem with 'trickle down' and pretty much all Randian 'economics' is that it ignores:
a) the fact that most rich people don't get their money from producing,
b) the U.S. isn't a closed system, so Mr. Rich Guy very likely keeps and spends a large amount of his $$ outside of the U.S. (and if he's just investing it or keeping it in a bank there, the money is actually trickling UP rather than down), and
c) money hoarding. The idea that the rich are building new businesses with their cash ignores reality, where more money is being sat on right now than at any time in history.
I like big phones. I buy big phones.
The whole debate is dumb: There's no shortage of choice at the small end; there's just more choice at the bigger end.
How is more choice a bad thing?
You do realize that this is about federal agencies, right? You know that the reason the cops cannot just commandeer your house is because of a law passed by Congress.
No, that's in the Constitution. Congress has the power to GIVE cops that right, but have chosen not to do so yet.
Please. As a conservative, methinks you're talking out your ass. We have no problem with public school teachers. What we have a problem with is unions that continue to protect teachers that are poor performers or don't adapt to new teaching techniques, which is exactly the reason why we're in the sad state we are, these days.
As a conservative also, I notice that there hasn't been a single proposal from the Republican party on how to hold teachers accountable, or how to fix the problem. We know that privatization hasn't produced the promised outcomes, so what now?
... incentivizing good, young teachers to excel and actually TEACH their students, rather than just read out of a book. ON the other hand, nothing the federal government ever does ONLY costs a billion dollars.
Smart, competent people are in demand. You incentivize those people to become teachers by paying them what they'd make elsewhere, plus a little more. A conservative would see good pay as a required first step for fixing the system. Republicans do not. From their perspective, government employees should be paid as little as possible, so that they'll go out and find real jobs in the private sector and shrink government even further. The well-being of the country takes a backseat to realizing some bizarre fantasy that a country can be strong without decent education as its cornerstone.
So as conservative, I like this Obama plan. It's not much, but it's something, which is more than we've seen in my lifetime on the education front.
If public schools cared at all for the students the first thing children would be taught would be how to learn. How to study.
The term for this in higher ed is "information literacy." It's absolutely vital, but something few are ever taught, even at the college level.
HOTS and OBE.
Both are feel-good ways to make sure that our undereducated "educators" aren't held to any real standard.
Obama's plan, BTW, is a good one. The U.S. has a serious shortage of engineers* partially because people who want to be K-12 teachers (that is, people satisfied with living their lives as underpaid workhorses) generally have no scientific background at all.
Even our science teachers -- at least here in Vegas -- are often former English majors borrowed to teach directly from a textbook "temporarily."
(*I realize that some people -- particularly Republicans, for some reason -- deny this shortage exists. But having spent the better part of last year trying to hire some decent engineers, I know it's true.)
There are no liberals OR conservatives in the U.S. government. The "liberals" are just centrists, leaning more right then left by the rest of the world's standards.
The "conservatives" aren't conservative by any meaning of the word except the (very flexible) one they created.
We would do well to stop pretending any of our representatives have an overarching philosophy or belief system that isn't focused on lining the pockets of themselves and their friends, and simply call them "Republicans" and "Democrats."
Linux runs my server.
A different Linux runs my desktop.
A different Linux runs my Android phone.
A different Linux runs my router.
FRAGMENTATION!!!!
Link to forums... (Thanks for making me add more than just the link, /.)