So, just to make sure that I understand your points:
Well look at the source. Of course National Geographic will represent them as "on the way out".
You think that National Geographic just made up the reported fact that populations of this species of catfish have decreased by 80% in the past 13 or so years due to human destruction of their environment, and that this was done to fit some anti-human editorial stance that they've taken? Either that or the fact that they wouldn't have reported this had the species not been endangered? Right?
It's strange that they are in danger, but we are finding the biggest one ever seen.
So your claim is: We've just found the largest specimen of this species recorded so far (i.e., since 1981, when records were first kept), therefore the population of this species is not in danger.
To those of you in the "let 'em use calculators-- learning arithmetic is a waste of time" camp: I used to be ambivalent about the subject, but after doing a stint tutoring at a local high school I now say "no way".
Recently I was tutoring a 9th or 10th grader who had failed her pre-Algebra course and was having to take it again. IIRC, we were working on adding 3x3 matrices. *Adding*, fer crissakes...
First part, adding something like 3 and -7. She reaches for the calculator... "OK, she's not yet comfortable with negative numbers, I'll let that slide...", I think.
Next, adding 1/2 and 1/2. She punches *that* into the calculator. "You know how to add one half and one half, don't you?" I ask. She glances at the calculator. "22", she answers. "What?", I say. She shows me the calculator, and it says "2/2". We spend a few minutes going over why 1/2 + 1/2 is both 2/2 and 1.
Next, 5 + 0. Yup, you saw it coming. She reaches for the calculator. "Come on now, you can do that in your head!" I say, and she gives a sheepish grin and says "Oh, yeah... 5"
This fall I'll become a high school math teacher for the first time.
Engineering in Germany is known for its precision. Japan is recognized for continuous improvement of products (as American automakers have learned all too well). America's technological strength is based on innovation. Of these three, I'll take innovation for the most enduring competitive advantage.
Slight problem here. Germany and Japan are certainly not known for their lack of innovation, while in many areas the US is notorious for its lack of precision and continuous improvement of products (missiles and other ways of killing large numbers of people being obvious exceptions).
America's biggest strength is nothing so vague and ephemerous as "creativity" and "ethnic diversity" (unless by ethnic diversity what you really mean is the disproportionate number of advanced science and engineering degrees given to non-Americans), it's just size of the population and access to wealth (raw materials, energy sources, etc.)
As global economies and improving technologies make these strengths less important as compared to such things as precision and continuous improvement (not to mention a highly educated populace and a sane top leadership), I think that the future of the US will become a very different one than what happened there in the 20th century.
I go to school with the second place winner, and I can assure you that he's fscking brilliant. No need for parental help there (although both of his parents are math professors).
This is a 17-year old who's taking graduate level math courses, and doing better than (probably) most of the grad students. I hear that he's going to Harvard next year-- can't wait to see how he does on the Putnam exam.
I, too, have had no problem getting work visas in Japan over the 15 years that I've been coming and going. On the other hand, I was teaching English or working at game companies or starting up my own companies, and I'm from the US, so visas magically appear on demand.
But do you really think that the same thing would happen for a S.E. Asian or African or Middle Eastern applicant who wanted to support themselves in Japan as an aide to the elderly, or as a housekeeper, or as anything else that could be performed by robots? Because that's exactly the kind of applicant you would have for that kind of work-- unskilled labor migrating to rich countries where such work is paid premium prices for.
Currently almost all foreign nonskilled-labor (mainly construction and dockwork) workers in Japan are there illegally. Generally they come in on tourist visas, and "forget" to go home. The big exception to the rule is foreign girls working in hostess bars/legal sex industry. Clubs are generally able to sponsor them for visas, and it's not an uncommon sight at immigration in Tokyo to see a Japanese club owner standing in line with 5-6 passports from the Phillipines, Thailand, and Russia.
Please consider teaching, especially if you are in the U.S. There is a huge demand for teachers of science, math, foreign language, special education, and other fields.
Many states have special programs to attract new teachers from business and industry that, in effect, will give you not only teaching licensure but also a Master's degree-- for free (in the form of grants, forgiven loans, etc.)
Teaching is of course a challenging job, and you'll never get rich doing it, but then again you can say that about working in a cubicle farm. But there's this Warm Fuzzy Feeling that you get when your blood, sweat, and tears are for the betterment of mankind, not stockholder profit.
I finally broke down and returned to the Mac once OS X settled down and became usable for all of my work.
However, I am thinking of putting together a Windows box just to play games-- the only thing that I miss from Windows.
The thing that keeps me from using Linux daily is its lack of decent support for double-byte character sets. All *nixes that I have seen so far are about 15 years behind both the Mac and Windows in terms of gracefully handling Japanese and other double-byte character sets. Since I have to use these languages for most of my work, Linux sadly just isn't usable for me, and it won't be until it can handle those languages across most apps in the same way that the Mac OS (and to some extent Windows) does.
Wonder how many years will it be until most Linux productivity/communications apps are Unicode-friendly, and a graceful FEP is available?
Personally, I am sorry to see that Ga Tech has decided to back off on its no-collaboration policy for the classes in question. The policy was only in place for "Intro to Programming"-type classes, where learning basic programming techniques, not group-environment programming skills, is the purpose of the course.
Can you imagine the hell of being given a group assignment in a higher level class where half of the members can't remember how to create a for() loop or use pointers, because they "collaborated" that part of their work in the intro classes?
It looks like GaTech will now be offering different Intro-level courses for computer-related majors and non-computer-related majors, but it looks like they won't be enforcing the "no-collaboration" rules even for the comp-sci major classes. With a shift in emphasis to quizzes and tests, rather than actual coding, I can only see this as working to lower the quality level of students' programming skills.
Personally, I *never* want to go back to a "non-Washlet" toilet after having gotten used to these things.
They have been around in Japan for quite some time now, but seem to have really caught on over the past few years. Almost all new toilets seem come with them now (including many public toilets, though that is rarer than finding them in home units). The first few uses are a bit shocking, but once you get over that they become quite addictive.
The heated seat is of course very nice in the winter. So nice that there are simple heated toilet seats without the bidet functionality on the market here.
But it's the bidet features that are best. It's hard to explain how much... er... cleaner and more sanitary you feel after you have used water rather than just low-grade paper to clean your posterior.
The toilet in my office doesn't have a "washlet" on it, and I find myself "holding it" to extremes until I can get home to do my business-- in the rare emergency where I must use the toilets in the office, I tend to feel... soiled... until I get home.
I guess that if you've never used one then you won't feel a need for one. But I warn you, most people who use them for a short time can never go back to just wiping with dead tree slices.:-)
I must say that when this "Dance" first started, I was somewhat sympathentic to the corporate copyright holders. They have a legal copyright on works, their copyright is being completely ignored, causing them (I thought) a great deal of financial loss. At first glance, they seemed to have a valid case...
However, the more that I've read up on the background of this issue, the more the RIAA et. al. have pushed their bone-headed, intrusive, and greedy "solutions" to this "problem", the more I learn about the relationship between distribution corporations and artists, the less and less I care about their plight.
I've actually come to the point where I hope that in the near future I see some of these companys jump into the giant grave they've been digging for themselves and start pulling the dirt in. While I used to have moral qualms about.MP3s that I downloaded and ended up not buying the CD for, I no longer do. While I used to think that the giant Hollywood studios and uber-rich recording studios were a necessary evil to bring me quality entertainment, I now think that they are holding down the level of quality that we can expect from artists. While a few years ago a situation like that described in Bruce Sterling's Distraction (where China has destroyed the US economy by placing all English-language IP works in their public domain, available for free download), now I find myself perversely almost rooting for something like that happening.
Maybe it's time to cut Mickey Mouse and PrettyBoy bands out of our economic picture, and let art be done for art's sake?
I think that the point of keeping the corporation from holding the copyright is to keep the control of (and benefits from) creative works in the hands of the creator(s).
The creator holds the copyright, and the corporation can create a contract to license use of that creative work. Or, they can wait 14 years and use the creative work as they wish, as it has now fallen into the public domain.
It doesn't follow that just because a script-writer/novelist/songwriter/painter/whatever holds the copyright to what they have created that they will have to personally finance production/distribution of their work. If the work is good and a corporation (or individual investor) thinks that money can be made by investing in production in exchange for a cut of future profits, then they will do so.
Thus, if the movie/book/song "flops", it is still the corporation that loses money. The difference is that if the work is a success, it's the creator of the work, not the distributor of it who stands to profit the most (depending, of course, on the creator's contract with the financer).
Actually there *are* competitors to iMode-- the biggest are aU (offered by KDDI), J-Phone, and Tsuka (which I think may have merged with aU... but don't hold me to that). These companies' market shares are dwarfed by DoCoMo's, but they are not insignificant in the least. They keep a decent market share because they are usually cheaper than DoCoMo, and tend to have a lot of innovations before DoCoMo does (I got an aU phone because they had a waterproof/shockproof model. One of the three was also first to market with a digital camera built into the phone, letting you email photos immediately to friends).
Email for all of the manufacturers' phones are interoperable, because it's all just plain old email. All of them have color screens and let you browse the web. Only DoCoMo has specific i-Mode sites, but that just means that you go to different pay site to get your horoscope or check the weather or download tunes if you have a non-DoCoMo phone.
Actually, from what I've seen on the street from friends, the iMode sites aren't a big deal. All that everyone really wants is email service. The rest is just fluff and icing. The reason that DoCoMo is so big is that they have the biggest marketing budget, which makes it easier for them to set DoCoMo phones as the "coolest" and most "professional" in the minds of consumers.
I don't know that DoCoMo itself will be a huge hit in the States, but if they aren't then it will be due to marketing blunders like overpricing. The services that they offer (real email to your cell phone being the biggest) will definitely catch on, because it's just so damn convenient once you start using it. And it saves lots of cash, too, because it's always cheaper to send a cell-to-cell email than it is to talk when just a 1-line email will suffice.
Land-based lines are great when your butt is parked in front of a PC, but people who don't stay parked there makes for a pretty big market as well...:-)
The email address for the Docomo cell phone that my company issued me was apparently in use before, and got in the hands of spammers and was included in an email database. I have gotten 46 (!!) spam emails to that phone in the past 5 hours and 20 minutes, all for i-Mode sex sites and such.
At least in my case my company is picking up the bill-- i-Mode users in Japan pay for all received packets, so you are billed for all of the spam that you receive.
Docomo has tried to stop the flow by allowing you to block email from specified domains, but of course that doesn't help things at all. I know several people who end up having to change their cell phone email address every few months because the email features of their phone become unusable due to the amount of spam they start to get. (The spammers get their email address when they register on i-Mode capable web sites, or if they have an easy-to-guess email address like tanaka@docomo.ne.jp)
Up until last year or so you could usually send email to [cell phone #]@[cell phone provider].ne.jp, but the cell phone companies all had to discontinue that service because of the amount of spam that would be sent to all of their customers.
Compared to what I'm getting to my work phone, the amount of spam I get to my email accounts is nothing...:-P
Re:Guilt By Association, don't buy it
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I think that the point is not that GM foods are evil because Monsanto is making them, but rather the fact that Monsanto has a long history of covering up even known problems that would adversely affect profits, and therefore would perhaps not be forthcoming in admitting any health issues related to GM foods, and therefore must be watched closely.
You may be confusing Mandarin and Cantonese, which are both considered "Chinese". The two languages are verbally incompatible, but use (more or less) the same character set and written grammar, allowing both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers to read the same text.
While Japanese kanji were taken from the Chinese language, there are many differences in how they are written and used to form words. A Japanese person reading a Chinese newspaper would be something similar to an English speaker reading a French newspaper. Here and there s/he would spot familiar words, and with luck may be able to pick out enough words to figure out the topic of a given article, but what is being said about that topic would be completely incomprehensible.
Fervent Linux fan that I am, I've given up on being able to use it on my desktop for the time being. The main reason is lack of Japanese language capability.
Linux has come far enough to where Japanese can be viewed on the screen, and with some programs input, but it's currently at about the state that MacOS/Windows was about 10+ years ago.
My home server runs Redhat, but I've ended up even doing web development on it though a Win box, just because the internationalization (fonts, input method, speed of display, etc) is sooo much better.:-(
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone want to place bets on what year the first voluntary replacement of a limb with a prosthetic (as an upgrade) will take place?
You think that National Geographic just made up the reported fact that populations of this species of catfish have decreased by 80% in the past 13 or so years due to human destruction of their environment, and that this was done to fit some anti-human editorial stance that they've taken? Either that or the fact that they wouldn't have reported this had the species not been endangered? Right?
So your claim is:
We've just found the largest specimen of this species recorded so far (i.e., since 1981, when records were first kept), therefore the population of this species is not in danger.
Right?
To those of you in the "let 'em use calculators-- learning arithmetic is a waste of time" camp: I used to be ambivalent about the subject, but after doing a stint tutoring at a local high school I now say "no way".
Recently I was tutoring a 9th or 10th grader who had failed her pre-Algebra course and was having to take it again. IIRC, we were working on adding 3x3 matrices. *Adding*, fer crissakes...
First part, adding something like 3 and -7. She reaches for the calculator... "OK, she's not yet comfortable with negative numbers, I'll let that slide...", I think.
Next, adding 1/2 and 1/2. She punches *that* into the calculator. "You know how to add one half and one half, don't you?" I ask. She glances at the calculator. "22", she answers. "What?", I say. She shows me the calculator, and it says "2/2". We spend a few minutes going over why 1/2 + 1/2 is both 2/2 and 1.
Next, 5 + 0. Yup, you saw it coming. She reaches for the calculator. "Come on now, you can do that in your head!" I say, and she gives a sheepish grin and says "Oh, yeah... 5"
This fall I'll become a high school math teacher for the first time.
Rule #1: No fscking calculators.
Slight problem here. Germany and Japan are certainly not known for their lack of innovation, while in many areas the US is notorious for its lack of precision and continuous improvement of products (missiles and other ways of killing large numbers of people being obvious exceptions).
America's biggest strength is nothing so vague and ephemerous as "creativity" and "ethnic diversity" (unless by ethnic diversity what you really mean is the disproportionate number of advanced science and engineering degrees given to non-Americans), it's just size of the population and access to wealth (raw materials, energy sources, etc.)
As global economies and improving technologies make these strengths less important as compared to such things as precision and continuous improvement (not to mention a highly educated populace and a sane top leadership), I think that the future of the US will become a very different one than what happened there in the 20th century.
I go to school with the second place winner, and I can assure you that he's fscking brilliant. No need for parental help there (although both of his parents are math professors).
This is a 17-year old who's taking graduate level math courses, and doing better than (probably) most of the grad students. I hear that he's going to Harvard next year-- can't wait to see how he does on the Putnam exam.
I, too, have had no problem getting work visas in Japan over the 15 years that I've been coming and going. On the other hand, I was teaching English or working at game companies or starting up my own companies, and I'm from the US, so visas magically appear on demand.
But do you really think that the same thing would happen for a S.E. Asian or African or Middle Eastern applicant who wanted to support themselves in Japan as an aide to the elderly, or as a housekeeper, or as anything else that could be performed by robots? Because that's exactly the kind of applicant you would have for that kind of work-- unskilled labor migrating to rich countries where such work is paid premium prices for.
Currently almost all foreign nonskilled-labor (mainly construction and dockwork) workers in Japan are there illegally. Generally they come in on tourist visas, and "forget" to go home. The big exception to the rule is foreign girls working in hostess bars/legal sex industry. Clubs are generally able to sponsor them for visas, and it's not an uncommon sight at immigration in Tokyo to see a Japanese club owner standing in line with 5-6 passports from the Phillipines, Thailand, and Russia.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
It's almost scary how appropriate that quote is today...
Please consider teaching, especially if you are in the U.S. There is a huge demand for teachers of science, math, foreign language, special education, and other fields.
Many states have special programs to attract new teachers from business and industry that, in effect, will give you not only teaching licensure but also a Master's degree-- for free (in the form of grants, forgiven loans, etc.)
Teaching is of course a challenging job, and you'll never get rich doing it, but then again you can say that about working in a cubicle farm. But there's this Warm Fuzzy Feeling that you get when your blood, sweat, and tears are for the betterment of mankind, not stockholder profit.
Having just woken up, my sleep-addled brain parsed the headline for this story as being about robots that make homebrew-as-in-beer...
:-)
Now that would be cool, eh?
Your neighbor's car kills over 1000 people per year? Man, your neighbor needs some serious driving lessons...
I'd likely be glad I had a job, let alone overtime... ;-)
Yeah, and apparently data transfer rates are now measured in books/sec. :-)
At $30 per blade, the text message should probably read "Steal Me". :-)
I finally broke down and returned to the Mac once OS X settled down and became usable for all of my work.
However, I am thinking of putting together a Windows box just to play games-- the only thing that I miss from Windows.
The thing that keeps me from using Linux daily is its lack of decent support for double-byte character sets. All *nixes that I have seen so far are about 15 years behind both the Mac and Windows in terms of gracefully handling Japanese and other double-byte character sets. Since I have to use these languages for most of my work, Linux sadly just isn't usable for me, and it won't be until it can handle those languages across most apps in the same way that the Mac OS (and to some extent Windows) does.
Wonder how many years will it be until most Linux productivity/communications apps are Unicode-friendly, and a graceful FEP is available?
Personally, I am sorry to see that Ga Tech has decided to back off on its no-collaboration policy for the classes in question. The policy was only in place for "Intro to Programming"-type classes, where learning basic programming techniques, not group-environment programming skills, is the purpose of the course.
Can you imagine the hell of being given a group assignment in a higher level class where half of the members can't remember how to create a for() loop or use pointers, because they "collaborated" that part of their work in the intro classes?
It looks like GaTech will now be offering different Intro-level courses for computer-related majors and non-computer-related majors, but it looks like they won't be enforcing the "no-collaboration" rules even for the comp-sci major classes. With a shift in emphasis to quizzes and tests, rather than actual coding, I can only see this as working to lower the quality level of students' programming skills.
Personally, I *never* want to go back to a "non-Washlet" toilet after having gotten used to these things.
:-)
They have been around in Japan for quite some time now, but seem to have really caught on over the past few years. Almost all new toilets seem come with them now (including many public toilets, though that is rarer than finding them in home units). The first few uses are a bit shocking, but once you get over that they become quite addictive.
The heated seat is of course very nice in the winter. So nice that there are simple heated toilet seats without the bidet functionality on the market here.
But it's the bidet features that are best. It's hard to explain how much... er... cleaner and more sanitary you feel after you have used water rather than just low-grade paper to clean your posterior.
The toilet in my office doesn't have a "washlet" on it, and I find myself "holding it" to extremes until I can get home to do my business-- in the rare emergency where I must use the toilets in the office, I tend to feel... soiled... until I get home.
I guess that if you've never used one then you won't feel a need for one. But I warn you, most people who use them for a short time can never go back to just wiping with dead tree slices.
I must say that when this "Dance" first started, I was somewhat sympathentic to the corporate copyright holders. They have a legal copyright on works, their copyright is being completely ignored, causing them (I thought) a great deal of financial loss. At first glance, they seemed to have a valid case...
.MP3s that I downloaded and ended up not buying the CD for, I no longer do. While I used to think that the giant Hollywood studios and uber-rich recording studios were a necessary evil to bring me quality entertainment, I now think that they are holding down the level of quality that we can expect from artists. While a few years ago a situation like that described in Bruce Sterling's Distraction (where China has destroyed the US economy by placing all English-language IP works in their public domain, available for free download), now I find myself perversely almost rooting for something like that happening.
However, the more that I've read up on the background of this issue, the more the RIAA et. al. have pushed their bone-headed, intrusive, and greedy "solutions" to this "problem", the more I learn about the relationship between distribution corporations and artists, the less and less I care about their plight.
I've actually come to the point where I hope that in the near future I see some of these companys jump into the giant grave they've been digging for themselves and start pulling the dirt in. While I used to have moral qualms about
Maybe it's time to cut Mickey Mouse and PrettyBoy bands out of our economic picture, and let art be done for art's sake?
I think that the point of keeping the corporation from holding the copyright is to keep the control of (and benefits from) creative works in the hands of the creator(s).
r holds the copyright to what they have created that they will have to personally finance production/distribution of their work. If the work is good and a corporation (or individual investor) thinks that money can be made by investing in production in exchange for a cut of future profits, then they will do so.
The creator holds the copyright, and the corporation can create a contract to license use of that creative work. Or, they can wait 14 years and use the creative work as they wish, as it has now fallen into the public domain.
It doesn't follow that just because a script-writer/novelist/songwriter/painter/whateve
Thus, if the movie/book/song "flops", it is still the corporation that loses money. The difference is that if the work is a success, it's the creator of the work, not the distributor of it who stands to profit the most (depending, of course, on the creator's contract with the financer).
Actually there *are* competitors to iMode-- the biggest are aU (offered by KDDI), J-Phone, and Tsuka (which I think may have merged with aU... but don't hold me to that). These companies' market shares are dwarfed by DoCoMo's, but they are not insignificant in the least. They keep a decent market share because they are usually cheaper than DoCoMo, and tend to have a lot of innovations before DoCoMo does (I got an aU phone because they had a waterproof/shockproof model. One of the three was also first to market with a digital camera built into the phone, letting you email photos immediately to friends).
:-)
Email for all of the manufacturers' phones are interoperable, because it's all just plain old email. All of them have color screens and let you browse the web. Only DoCoMo has specific i-Mode sites, but that just means that you go to different pay site to get your horoscope or check the weather or download tunes if you have a non-DoCoMo phone.
Actually, from what I've seen on the street from friends, the iMode sites aren't a big deal. All that everyone really wants is email service. The rest is just fluff and icing. The reason that DoCoMo is so big is that they have the biggest marketing budget, which makes it easier for them to set DoCoMo phones as the "coolest" and most "professional" in the minds of consumers.
I don't know that DoCoMo itself will be a huge hit in the States, but if they aren't then it will be due to marketing blunders like overpricing. The services that they offer (real email to your cell phone being the biggest) will definitely catch on, because it's just so damn convenient once you start using it. And it saves lots of cash, too, because it's always cheaper to send a cell-to-cell email than it is to talk when just a 1-line email will suffice.
Land-based lines are great when your butt is parked in front of a PC, but people who don't stay parked there makes for a pretty big market as well...
The email address for the Docomo cell phone that my company issued me was apparently in use before, and got in the hands of spammers and was included in an email database. I have gotten 46 (!!) spam emails to that phone in the past 5 hours and 20 minutes, all for i-Mode sex sites and such.
:-P
At least in my case my company is picking up the bill-- i-Mode users in Japan pay for all received packets, so you are billed for all of the spam that you receive.
Docomo has tried to stop the flow by allowing you to block email from specified domains, but of course that doesn't help things at all. I know several people who end up having to change their cell phone email address every few months because the email features of their phone become unusable due to the amount of spam they start to get. (The spammers get their email address when they register on i-Mode capable web sites, or if they have an easy-to-guess email address like tanaka@docomo.ne.jp)
Up until last year or so you could usually send email to [cell phone #]@[cell phone provider].ne.jp, but the cell phone companies all had to discontinue that service because of the amount of spam that would be sent to all of their customers.
Compared to what I'm getting to my work phone, the amount of spam I get to my email accounts is nothing...
I think that the point is not that GM foods are evil because Monsanto is making them, but rather the fact that Monsanto has a long history of covering up even known problems that would adversely affect profits, and therefore would perhaps not be forthcoming in admitting any health issues related to GM foods, and therefore must be watched closely.
You may be confusing Mandarin and Cantonese, which are both considered "Chinese". The two languages are verbally incompatible, but use (more or less) the same character set and written grammar, allowing both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers to read the same text.
While Japanese kanji were taken from the Chinese language, there are many differences in how they are written and used to form words. A Japanese person reading a Chinese newspaper would be something similar to an English speaker reading a French newspaper. Here and there s/he would spot familiar words, and with luck may be able to pick out enough words to figure out the topic of a given article, but what is being said about that topic would be completely incomprehensible.
Fervent Linux fan that I am, I've given up on being able to use it on my desktop for the time being. The main reason is lack of Japanese language capability.
:-(
Linux has come far enough to where Japanese can be viewed on the screen, and with some programs input, but it's currently at about the state that MacOS/Windows was about 10+ years ago.
My home server runs Redhat, but I've ended up even doing web development on it though a Win box, just because the internationalization (fonts, input method, speed of display, etc) is sooo much better.