I'm of the belief that modern schools fail for two reasons. 1) Uninvolved parents. You can't learn math in 3 - 45 minute sessions a week (or at least most people can't). You need homework, and it's not as much fun as the Xbox 360. Kids in home where parents encourage learning and demand a level of studying will learn almost regardless of the quality of the school they attend. 2) Schools are unable to get rid of disruptive students, and believe me as a guy who taught high school for awhile, one disruptive kid can distract 30 others who are happy to learn. When I was in high school we had one of those - he got punted to some remedial school somewhere, I don't even know where, but he was gone. Good luck managing that one today. Oh, and take a completely uninvolved parent and tell them that there kid is disruptive and being sent to a remedial class, and you'll very quickly see just how much that uninvolved parent will climb up your ass to protect their snowflake.
Oh, and schools/teachers/administrators/politicians can't/won't do anything to change either one.
I'm in rural nowhere NH, and Charter is my only option for TV or internet, unless I want to go with some kind of dish, which, with like 7 televisions in the house, is a little problematic. On the whole, I find charter television rediculously overpriced and very limited (only presently 8 or so HD channels, and to get those you have to rent and HD box (~$6/month) AND pay for HD service (another ~$8 a month) - so although I have a shiny new 61" HD plasma, I've got HD bupkis as far as TV service goes. Their internet OTOH I find to be pretty good - I surf, I torrent HD TV shows in vast quantities - all that seems to work out just fine. My friends in nearby areas who have Comcast seem to perpetually brag that they have better TV, and bitch that they have worse internet. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusions that of the two I'd rather have the better internet - I can download almost any show I'm interested in HD mere hours after it was broadcast (and no commercials!).
That's always been exactly my thinking. I take the soap because they're just going to throw it out anyway, right? Efficient use of resources, saving the landfill, and all that.
I walked back into my dorm after a math test and ran into a friend in the hallway. "Did you hear what happened to the space shuttle?" she asked. "What, did it explode?" I replied in jest. "Yes."
It had become so commonplace, so many launches going up without problem, that the immense technical complexity and enormous risk had been completely forgotten by me.
A little over a decade ago I was working on a program that used LIDAR to measure the shuttle exhaust plume constituents during liftoff. The trailer housing the lasers and telescope was positioned next to the block house for the Apollo 1 launch pad (launch complex 34). The block house has been completely emptied and sits as just a thick dome of concrete about a hundred feet in diameter. The bathrooms still work - I know, I used them - though you frequently find frogs in the toilets. Past the block house, through a rusted chain link fence and up a half mile of one-lane road surfaced in cracked seashell concrete (the concrete uses seashells for structure instead of gravel) sits the launchpad itself. It's a massive concrete table, several small outbuildings, and an enormous steel blast diverter now crumbling and rusted. There's a bronze plaque mounted on one leg of the tripod http://www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk/wp-content/images/Plaque%20to%20commorate%20the%20Apollo%201%20astronauts.JPG and that's it. I suspect I was the first person to have walked out there and looked at it in some time.
OK, smartypants, then why was the car covered in ice when it returned? Leaky A/C as well?
Re:Not to disagree with your conspiracy...
on
Gaming Netflix Ratings?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Back in college I somehow ended up screening a number of films before release (I think the process was something like a guy on campus asking if I'd like free tickets to a new movie). Before the movie there would be a quick spiel about the film not yet being released and that our feedback was very important, then they'd show the film, then they'd hand out a sheet of questions for us to answer. I recall that I saw Fletch 2 that way, and that the ending I saw in the screening was very different from the one I saw later in the theater. I also remember seeing a Judge Reinhold movie to wretched that everyone trashed it on the sheets, and I don't think it even came out in the theaters. It might have been released direct to video.
Actually, I have a "junker" (1994 Madza Protege), and it's not that I don't have money for a new one. 1) It runs like a watch, 2) it routinely gets 36mpg for my stop and go commute, 3)did I mention that it runs like a watch? Why get rid of a car that runs simply because it's old? Oh, and because it's 15 years old, it costs about $300 a year for insurance.
Way the fsck off target, but I'm going to tell this story anyway. My dad has been a doctor in NY for the past 53 years. His record keeping consisted of a single 3x5 index card per patient. He wrote EVERYTHING on these cards in the tiniest print you could imagine, probably the equivalent of 2 pt type or less, in fountain pen. The cards had patient records for 40 years in some cases, and he never had to resort to a second card (though he did use both sides). He retired recently and we burned the cards (which I guess fulfills the privacy requirement). I could pull a card out of the box, read him the name, and he could, from memory, tell me all the high points of that patients medical history and care. Interesting comparison to modern medical care where my present physician doesn't even know my name. I kept my own card, BTW. I plan to frame it.
"The purpose of computing is not numbers, but insight" - Hamming
"Simulations are like political prisoners, either can be tortured to tell you what you want to hear." - Unknown
But beyond the clever idea that we shouldn't all become mindless drones to our simulations if we don't understand the underlying principles that went into them is the problem that, at least in the financial world, risk and reward became disconnected, mortgage brokers being the perfect example. Mortgage brokers don't get paid unless they sell a mortgage. Their income depended not on the soundness of the mortgages they sold, but merely on the number regardless of how small a chance there was of the mortgagee managing to support the payments. Every time this bad debt got sold someone made a commission, so it was repackaged and resold dozens and dozens of times.
Also, when people talk about all the money the banks lost on this bad debt, it's not like it went up in smoke. That money went somewhere. Some people made phenomenal killings in the bad debt market.
I've been working on a game review for GTA4 (shameless plug: game-over.net). My machine meets literally the minimum system requirements and I'm running it at a steady 50fps in 1024x768. Many, many people are reporting problems with GTA4, and there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to it. Smoking fast machines can't run it, my machine can. Rockstar really pushed this game to market well before it was ready.
I've got to agree with part of this. My nephew is given a laptop by his school for use in class which he takes home in the evenings. 1) He pays zero attention in class while he's got the computer in front of him so much so that he is flunking nearly every class and 2) he uses the computer at home for pretty much everything BUT schoolwork. Where I disagree is that I see this as the responsibility of his parents to monitor his computer use at home and to teach him that school is his job and he is expected to perform his work to the best of his abilities, not watch youtube and play games. In that sense I do not believe it is the job of the school to monitor or restrict his computer use, though his parents shoudl certainly be able to if they wish.
Since I have legal copies of XP on my present machines, I hereby feel completely OK with simply installing it on a new machine should any of them ever die. Microsoft plays its cards right, the two XP licenses I presently have may be the last commercial operating system licenses I ever buy.
If the software fails if the subject wears glasses, and I wear glasses just shy of 24/7, wouldn't a picture of me without glasses cause a failure in comparison? Or are they going to make me take my glasses off for the software, causing me to squint or otherwise alter my face and probably fail the test anyway? More importantly perhaps if I wear my glasses to drive, and I do, shouldn't the picture on the license reflect that?
Does on billion mice indicate that something on the order of one billion computers must have been sold (though admittedly not from any given vendor)? More than that even because there are other mice manufacturers out there, and not every computer comes with a mouse (laptops have the touch pad, for example).
Umm, how does this get you your laptop back? Or does it simply become a case of I don't have it and he can't use it? Useful perhaps if you want to keep the data on it from prying eyes, but wouldn't just encryption solve the same problem?
Between the transvestites and bondage fans Wonder Woman has something of a built-in audience (albeit sort of a fringey one). I'm surprised it has taken this long for a movie to be made.
Even more surprising to me is that a new Circuit City opened near me just a few months ago. It's a ridiculous boutique store with like 75,000 square feet of nothing, with these areas set far apart from each other - the computer area, the TV area, the camera and videocamera area. The middle region is like a retail dead zone, unless they're selling the flooring, and that dead zone is filled with the red shirts intercepting you and pointing you to the area you want - like the 15' long sign reading "Flat Panel TVs" isn't going to point me the way. This is the new vision of the store that is somehow going to save the company?
McCain, at least initially running as the "independent maverick" was the closest thing the R's had to a moderate voice. Now that he's blown his wad, I fully expect the R's to be completely consumed by the nutjobs and moonbats. I voted independent in the last two elections and I voted independent in this one as well. So what that a total of about 110 votes in 4000 cast in my town went to the "other" column (which included Barr, Nader, and a couple of others) - I vote for the candidate that I believe in. The fact that they can't possibly win makes me feel worse about my country, not my vote.
Not to trivialize El Presidente at all, but none of the above extends to the ability to create funding for his ideas. He can stop the budget, but he can't make it. Congress controls the purse strings, and pretty much everything runs on money and nothing runs on empty. Bush wanted money to keep troops in Iraq, he needed Congress to approve it - all he can do is ask - short of some stopgap measures he probably could have accomplished by sloshing around the DoD budget (now that I think of it I recall that he actually did that for a little while). But given the burn rate, that would have been a very temporary solution at best.
I'm going to disagree for one very fundamental reason: the congress makes legislation, the president in the end can only sign it or not sign it, and the leadership of the House (Pelosi) gets to ultiimately decide what legislation comes to the floor for a vote. When the democrats in congress were making all kinds of noise about getting the soldiers out of Iraq they passed legislation to do exactly that, and Bush refused to sign it. The Republican talking heads howled about the Democrats not supporting the troops, and the Dems folded like a lawnchair. Pelosi should have gone on TV, called the Republicans disingenuous pricks, said that legislation giving the troops all the money they could possibly need to come home was sitting on Bush's desk any time he wanted to sign it, and moved on to the next piece of legislation. The same thing happened with the renewal of the Patriot Act, and the telecom immunity, etc, etc, etc. The Democrats don't want to be seen as weak on defense, when in fact by failing to stand up for any piece of legislation they believe in or blocking something they don't they appear just plain weak.
It's not just new businesses which need banks. I have a friend who runs an optics company. He gets a call from, say, Xerox for an order for 100,000 lenses for use in their next gen copiers. They don't pay him up front. They pay something like 90 days after the order has been delivered. He needs $500,000 to buy the materials and pay his people to make those lenses, and he gets a loan for that to float him until Xerox pays. Most industry works on a cycle of loans and paybacks - it's necessary for simple sustainment of business. Alternatively, he could keep half a million dollars in the bank from previous profits just waiting for the day when Xerox might come knocking on his door, and large companies do sock away some cash for rainy days, but for a small optics company (something like $5M USD sales last year) it would be almost impossible.
Beyond what they found, wouldn't there be a chain of custody issue? The landlord could have put the files on the computer. Sell could have put the files on the computer. Heck, Hipple could have put the files on the computer if he had a grudge of some sort against Crist. Like I dropped a jump drive in a taxi and three days later was arrested for what they found on it.
So, I go down to my voting location, cast my ballot, believe I got it right, but in the end how do I really know? How do I know my vote is counted? I can look county by county the next day online or in a newspaper, but in the grand tabulation of things there are just X votes for Candidate 1 and Y votes for Candidate 2 (oh, what I wouldn't give for a viable candidate 3), and my vote is inseparable among them. There was a case last year in NH (wish I could find a link) in which a woman reading the paper the next day noticed zero votes of Nader in her county, and yet she had voted for Nader. An investigation found something like 20 votes for Nader had never been tabulated, and in the end it made no material difference. But let's face it, the election could turn on a heck of a lot less, and in the end how do you know?
It's even worse than that, because if my cable company were actually honest about what my limits were and the costs for any given plan and I were unhappy about their offer, where exactly am I supposed to go? It's not like they have local competition or anything.
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I'm of the belief that modern schools fail for two reasons. 1) Uninvolved parents. You can't learn math in 3 - 45 minute sessions a week (or at least most people can't). You need homework, and it's not as much fun as the Xbox 360. Kids in home where parents encourage learning and demand a level of studying will learn almost regardless of the quality of the school they attend. 2) Schools are unable to get rid of disruptive students, and believe me as a guy who taught high school for awhile, one disruptive kid can distract 30 others who are happy to learn. When I was in high school we had one of those - he got punted to some remedial school somewhere, I don't even know where, but he was gone. Good luck managing that one today. Oh, and take a completely uninvolved parent and tell them that there kid is disruptive and being sent to a remedial class, and you'll very quickly see just how much that uninvolved parent will climb up your ass to protect their snowflake.
Oh, and schools/teachers/administrators/politicians can't/won't do anything to change either one.
I'm in rural nowhere NH, and Charter is my only option for TV or internet, unless I want to go with some kind of dish, which, with like 7 televisions in the house, is a little problematic. On the whole, I find charter television rediculously overpriced and very limited (only presently 8 or so HD channels, and to get those you have to rent and HD box (~$6/month) AND pay for HD service (another ~$8 a month) - so although I have a shiny new 61" HD plasma, I've got HD bupkis as far as TV service goes. Their internet OTOH I find to be pretty good - I surf, I torrent HD TV shows in vast quantities - all that seems to work out just fine. My friends in nearby areas who have Comcast seem to perpetually brag that they have better TV, and bitch that they have worse internet. I'm rapidly coming to the conclusions that of the two I'd rather have the better internet - I can download almost any show I'm interested in HD mere hours after it was broadcast (and no commercials!).
That's always been exactly my thinking. I take the soap because they're just going to throw it out anyway, right? Efficient use of resources, saving the landfill, and all that.
I walked back into my dorm after a math test and ran into a friend in the hallway. "Did you hear what happened to the space shuttle?" she asked. "What, did it explode?" I replied in jest. "Yes."
It had become so commonplace, so many launches going up without problem, that the immense technical complexity and enormous risk had been completely forgotten by me.
A little over a decade ago I was working on a program that used LIDAR to measure the shuttle exhaust plume constituents during liftoff. The trailer housing the lasers and telescope was positioned next to the block house for the Apollo 1 launch pad (launch complex 34). The block house has been completely emptied and sits as just a thick dome of concrete about a hundred feet in diameter. The bathrooms still work - I know, I used them - though you frequently find frogs in the toilets. Past the block house, through a rusted chain link fence and up a half mile of one-lane road surfaced in cracked seashell concrete (the concrete uses seashells for structure instead of gravel) sits the launchpad itself. It's a massive concrete table, several small outbuildings, and an enormous steel blast diverter now crumbling and rusted. There's a bronze plaque mounted on one leg of the tripod http://www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk/wp-content/images/Plaque%20to%20commorate%20the%20Apollo%201%20astronauts.JPG and that's it. I suspect I was the first person to have walked out there and looked at it in some time.
OK, smartypants, then why was the car covered in ice when it returned? Leaky A/C as well?
Back in college I somehow ended up screening a number of films before release (I think the process was something like a guy on campus asking if I'd like free tickets to a new movie). Before the movie there would be a quick spiel about the film not yet being released and that our feedback was very important, then they'd show the film, then they'd hand out a sheet of questions for us to answer. I recall that I saw Fletch 2 that way, and that the ending I saw in the screening was very different from the one I saw later in the theater. I also remember seeing a Judge Reinhold movie to wretched that everyone trashed it on the sheets, and I don't think it even came out in the theaters. It might have been released direct to video.
Actually, I have a "junker" (1994 Madza Protege), and it's not that I don't have money for a new one. 1) It runs like a watch, 2) it routinely gets 36mpg for my stop and go commute, 3)did I mention that it runs like a watch? Why get rid of a car that runs simply because it's old? Oh, and because it's 15 years old, it costs about $300 a year for insurance.
Way the fsck off target, but I'm going to tell this story anyway. My dad has been a doctor in NY for the past 53 years. His record keeping consisted of a single 3x5 index card per patient. He wrote EVERYTHING on these cards in the tiniest print you could imagine, probably the equivalent of 2 pt type or less, in fountain pen. The cards had patient records for 40 years in some cases, and he never had to resort to a second card (though he did use both sides). He retired recently and we burned the cards (which I guess fulfills the privacy requirement). I could pull a card out of the box, read him the name, and he could, from memory, tell me all the high points of that patients medical history and care. Interesting comparison to modern medical care where my present physician doesn't even know my name. I kept my own card, BTW. I plan to frame it.
"The purpose of computing is not numbers, but insight" - Hamming
"Simulations are like political prisoners, either can be tortured to tell you what you want to hear." - Unknown
But beyond the clever idea that we shouldn't all become mindless drones to our simulations if we don't understand the underlying principles that went into them is the problem that, at least in the financial world, risk and reward became disconnected, mortgage brokers being the perfect example. Mortgage brokers don't get paid unless they sell a mortgage. Their income depended not on the soundness of the mortgages they sold, but merely on the number regardless of how small a chance there was of the mortgagee managing to support the payments. Every time this bad debt got sold someone made a commission, so it was repackaged and resold dozens and dozens of times.
Also, when people talk about all the money the banks lost on this bad debt, it's not like it went up in smoke. That money went somewhere. Some people made phenomenal killings in the bad debt market.
I've been working on a game review for GTA4 (shameless plug: game-over.net). My machine meets literally the minimum system requirements and I'm running it at a steady 50fps in 1024x768. Many, many people are reporting problems with GTA4, and there seems to be no rhyme nor reason to it. Smoking fast machines can't run it, my machine can. Rockstar really pushed this game to market well before it was ready.
I've got to agree with part of this. My nephew is given a laptop by his school for use in class which he takes home in the evenings. 1) He pays zero attention in class while he's got the computer in front of him so much so that he is flunking nearly every class and 2) he uses the computer at home for pretty much everything BUT schoolwork. Where I disagree is that I see this as the responsibility of his parents to monitor his computer use at home and to teach him that school is his job and he is expected to perform his work to the best of his abilities, not watch youtube and play games. In that sense I do not believe it is the job of the school to monitor or restrict his computer use, though his parents shoudl certainly be able to if they wish.
Since I have legal copies of XP on my present machines, I hereby feel completely OK with simply installing it on a new machine should any of them ever die. Microsoft plays its cards right, the two XP licenses I presently have may be the last commercial operating system licenses I ever buy.
If the software fails if the subject wears glasses, and I wear glasses just shy of 24/7, wouldn't a picture of me without glasses cause a failure in comparison? Or are they going to make me take my glasses off for the software, causing me to squint or otherwise alter my face and probably fail the test anyway? More importantly perhaps if I wear my glasses to drive, and I do, shouldn't the picture on the license reflect that?
Does on billion mice indicate that something on the order of one billion computers must have been sold (though admittedly not from any given vendor)? More than that even because there are other mice manufacturers out there, and not every computer comes with a mouse (laptops have the touch pad, for example).
Umm, how does this get you your laptop back? Or does it simply become a case of I don't have it and he can't use it? Useful perhaps if you want to keep the data on it from prying eyes, but wouldn't just encryption solve the same problem?
Between the transvestites and bondage fans Wonder Woman has something of a built-in audience (albeit sort of a fringey one). I'm surprised it has taken this long for a movie to be made.
Even more surprising to me is that a new Circuit City opened near me just a few months ago. It's a ridiculous boutique store with like 75,000 square feet of nothing, with these areas set far apart from each other - the computer area, the TV area, the camera and videocamera area. The middle region is like a retail dead zone, unless they're selling the flooring, and that dead zone is filled with the red shirts intercepting you and pointing you to the area you want - like the 15' long sign reading "Flat Panel TVs" isn't going to point me the way. This is the new vision of the store that is somehow going to save the company?
McCain, at least initially running as the "independent maverick" was the closest thing the R's had to a moderate voice. Now that he's blown his wad, I fully expect the R's to be completely consumed by the nutjobs and moonbats. I voted independent in the last two elections and I voted independent in this one as well. So what that a total of about 110 votes in 4000 cast in my town went to the "other" column (which included Barr, Nader, and a couple of others) - I vote for the candidate that I believe in. The fact that they can't possibly win makes me feel worse about my country, not my vote.
Not to trivialize El Presidente at all, but none of the above extends to the ability to create funding for his ideas. He can stop the budget, but he can't make it. Congress controls the purse strings, and pretty much everything runs on money and nothing runs on empty. Bush wanted money to keep troops in Iraq, he needed Congress to approve it - all he can do is ask - short of some stopgap measures he probably could have accomplished by sloshing around the DoD budget (now that I think of it I recall that he actually did that for a little while). But given the burn rate, that would have been a very temporary solution at best.
I'm going to disagree for one very fundamental reason: the congress makes legislation, the president in the end can only sign it or not sign it, and the leadership of the House (Pelosi) gets to ultiimately decide what legislation comes to the floor for a vote. When the democrats in congress were making all kinds of noise about getting the soldiers out of Iraq they passed legislation to do exactly that, and Bush refused to sign it. The Republican talking heads howled about the Democrats not supporting the troops, and the Dems folded like a lawnchair. Pelosi should have gone on TV, called the Republicans disingenuous pricks, said that legislation giving the troops all the money they could possibly need to come home was sitting on Bush's desk any time he wanted to sign it, and moved on to the next piece of legislation. The same thing happened with the renewal of the Patriot Act, and the telecom immunity, etc, etc, etc. The Democrats don't want to be seen as weak on defense, when in fact by failing to stand up for any piece of legislation they believe in or blocking something they don't they appear just plain weak.
It's not just new businesses which need banks. I have a friend who runs an optics company. He gets a call from, say, Xerox for an order for 100,000 lenses for use in their next gen copiers. They don't pay him up front. They pay something like 90 days after the order has been delivered. He needs $500,000 to buy the materials and pay his people to make those lenses, and he gets a loan for that to float him until Xerox pays. Most industry works on a cycle of loans and paybacks - it's necessary for simple sustainment of business. Alternatively, he could keep half a million dollars in the bank from previous profits just waiting for the day when Xerox might come knocking on his door, and large companies do sock away some cash for rainy days, but for a small optics company (something like $5M USD sales last year) it would be almost impossible.
Beyond what they found, wouldn't there be a chain of custody issue? The landlord could have put the files on the computer. Sell could have put the files on the computer. Heck, Hipple could have put the files on the computer if he had a grudge of some sort against Crist. Like I dropped a jump drive in a taxi and three days later was arrested for what they found on it.
So, I go down to my voting location, cast my ballot, believe I got it right, but in the end how do I really know? How do I know my vote is counted? I can look county by county the next day online or in a newspaper, but in the grand tabulation of things there are just X votes for Candidate 1 and Y votes for Candidate 2 (oh, what I wouldn't give for a viable candidate 3), and my vote is inseparable among them. There was a case last year in NH (wish I could find a link) in which a woman reading the paper the next day noticed zero votes of Nader in her county, and yet she had voted for Nader. An investigation found something like 20 votes for Nader had never been tabulated, and in the end it made no material difference. But let's face it, the election could turn on a heck of a lot less, and in the end how do you know?
It's even worse than that, because if my cable company were actually honest about what my limits were and the costs for any given plan and I were unhappy about their offer, where exactly am I supposed to go? It's not like they have local competition or anything.