Um, what chemistry and biology classesd did calculus help you out?
Take higher level classes. Intro classes typically don't assume calculus, unfortunatly. I think that a lot less time would be wasted if calculus was basic knowledge.
I know that there were some cal based economics classes,
An intro econ class can be done in about 2 weeks using calculus. If you couldn't see the derivitives (aka marginal value) screaming at from from the page, you were not paying very much attention in class, either that or paying attention and not thinking about what you had heard!
I guess that you had a poor Algebra teacher if it didn't make sense until after you'd taken cal.
Algebra is just a bunch of rules that everybody has agreed to follow. There are actually many systems of algebra, none of them have any "meaning" to them really.
I understood the reason for algebra after I took calculus (algebra by itself is almost useless...). I really understood algebra after I took abstract math classes and had to prove the various properties, suck as transitivity. For that matter, proving addition was rather fun!:) Once you have done that, everything makes a lot more sense. You get this sort of deep level understanding of how everything around you works.
I guess that I picked up the cynicism in junior high some where.
Well yah I had that "Government sux0rs!" cynicism, but I didn't really get cynical until I learned who funded our revolution!
Once again, understanding washed over my mind.;) (Hey look, rich corrupt white pricks funded a war using the word "freedom" when all they really wanted as a tax cut! The fact that some idealists survived and actually did create the promised freedoms is not something the original founders really cared about one way or the other.)
e tidy up history and teach our side was right and the other side was wrong/evil until you hit "higher" education.
This is mostly because the majority of our population does not have a college degree, and would be very upset if they learned that their child was being taught that a bunch of crooks and pirates funded the American Revolution.
The public, with its current level of education, is too unsophisticated to see the real beauty in what happened back then. It is not that a bunch of freedom loving guys got together and fought for what they believed in, but rather than a bunch of corrupt greedy men, a good number of them criminals, got together for reasons of greed, and yet despite all this, still managed to create something wonderful.
The truth is much more awe inspiring than the fiction that is taught in high schoool, but it also requires one to think it over for awhile, and come to terms with how they feel about this nation's history.
I viewed all the years of English classes as a waste of time.
Meh. For the most part. If I got really pissed I would write all my papers in the form of abab rhyming poems.
One time I turned in a 2 page long paper that consisted of one (valid!) English sentence.
Why don't they have a Reading or Lit class where you have 40-60 books a month to read over night and discuss topics or events during class.
You and I could pull it off, but it does take most people more than 3 or 4 hours to read a book!:) Also remember that there needs to be time for math. 2 weeks seems like a good amount of time for your average pocket book. Us two may get it done in 2 days, but some allowences do have to be made, not everybody is capable of reading fast, unfortuntly.
As an aside, I think that PHd Chemistry, Biology, Physic
When students are threatening teachers, disrupting class, and generally being jerks why can't anything be done? What happened to a good spanking to let them know that this is unacceptable?
I would disagree with this one out of family history. My grandmother used to get hit frequently in class because she was left handed. In the teacher's own words "I had one of you last year, and I am not going to have another one this year!"
Unfortunately it opens up too much room for abuse.
If the school just did something to make the teacher's threats not completely empty, that alone would be enough.
Heck, I like Math as much as the next guy, minored in it at college, but I think we teach too much math as it is. I'd rather have household accounting and 2-3 accounting/saving classes rather than any math classes over Alegbra I. I liked math, but other than a handful of things, I've not had to use it since college math classes. We really should work on trying to teach "tools" and "how they are used" more than "classes." Calculus is overkill. You only need Calculus for physics and most people don't really need it to get by in their life.
One problem with lack of education is lack of educated discourse afterwards. We can have reviws of math books posted on/. because most of us have had higher education in some form of mathematics.
The concepts of rate of change is a fundamental one to how everything works. Once someone has calculus, all of that algebra stuff makes sense.
Once you have taught people basic calculus, teaching many other fields becomes vastly easier. Economics, chemistry, aspects of biology.
Economics specifically, if the American public had a better grasp of economics, maybe it would be harder for politicians to swindle us so often.
I'd like to get rid of the concept of "higher" education and change things to where its all just "education" and we are expected just to attend a class day of "personal education" for the rest of our lives for various different reasons. 1/2 of college is general education requirements that folks seem to think will give you an expanded view point by showing up and passing all of them. What did it teach me?
What it taught you is what you put into it. I personally have gained much from my general education requirements, but that is because I spent time thinking over the implications of what my professors taught me.
Taking history gave me both pride and cynicism about my country. Learning the actual history about how our country was founded (and not just the "We fought the evil(tm) British then made up with them right after words cuz their jolly good chaps" version that is taught in high school) was immensely educational and interesting. Debunking the myths behind American heroes both stripped away their aura of heroism, yet made them much more accessible.
Reading some of the written works of our foundering fathers showed me that the problems we have today are often times the same ones they have back then, and that their solution, for citizens to remain vigilant watchers over their government, is as good of an idea now as it was back then.
History taught me that, despite what the media likes to infuse into our heads, most holy wars are not about religion. Religion is used as a one word cover for a variety of complex and interrelated topics. Of course by telling the public that "those Muslims and Jews have been fighting since before Christ was born", it is possible to make the public brush aside more news of fighting as yet more unsolvable religious problems.
Never mind that Islam has only been around for a bit less than 1,300 years. Throw away the rest of history while you are at it too. Just ensure that the American public doesn't pay any attention to what is happening in the world.
And all that just covers a set of 4 or so classes.
What to cover economics? How about Chemistry? Biology? Hell Genetics was a blast, I loved that class, and I would argue that it is VERY applicable to understanding the world around me.
As I sad, you get out of education what you put into it. If you think learning is a waste of time, odds are you won't be learning much, and indeed, you will be wasting your time.
For the record though, I do believe that high school is mostly a waste of time anyway, with a few exceptions thanks to exceptionally good teachers!
I think you are bit off on the book in 3 weeks though. It should be a book every other night
An excellent teacher can make great leaps beyond what a bad parent can do. An excellent parent can make great leaps beyond what a bad teacher lacks.
Yah well this country has a very low supply of both. Tell ya what, how about you get OK parents and OK teachers first, than we can work our way up. Right now we have a mix of excellent and cruddy teachers, and generally LOUSY parents. I say this as an American who has many friends born from different cultures, and who has seen the pressure that other cultures put on their children to graduate from school.
You take a culture in which everyone EXPECTS children to graduate from college, and holy crap, the children actually GRADUATE FROM COLLEGE.
Now you go to America.
Nobody really gives a crap if students graduate from high school.
Well look what happens. Kids drop out of high school.
You get what you expect.
Live with it, and stop sending kids to special ed who have 'behavioral problems' because you keep yelling to 'pay attention' to your dry ass LECTURE that's just regurgitated from the text they have to read anyways, until they snap back at your hypocritical statements. (Ok pardon, not truly directed at you, just bad teachers in general.)
On one hand, yah, I agree, on the other hand, no, I don't.
Lecture's shouldn't suck. Being able to speak is part of the job. My GF and I have worked hard at my uni to try and convince our profs to stop using power point, the ultimate way to give horrible presentations.
Bleck, I actually pay to attend those lectures. (That is another thing that helps gets students involved in education: When they are paying for it! Holy crap I care a lot more about my schooling now that I am working every summer to pay my tuition!)
On the flip side of things, students have to realize that education is NOT always fun. If learning was fun, we would all have multiple PhDs, and the entertainment industry would never have come into existence.
Learning math requires solving equations. For hours. Day after day. EVERY DAY.
Learning to write requires WRITING, day after day, every day. The Internet helps with this a bit, but only if people actually try, MySpace.com is not helping out here!
History actually is pretty cool if you have a good teacher.:) I have had a number of fun and entertaining history classes, but then again, there were still idiots in the class who insisted it was boring. People who don't think tend to be only entertained by loud brightly colored things.
Homework is work. Thus the inclusion of the word "work". If it was fun, they would send students to the playground to do it.
In public school, it always annoyed me that teachers have such low expecations of their students. "Oh here is a 200 page pocket book, we have only three months to go through it."
College took care of that crap really fast. "You all have your text book. We have a lot to cover and you will be going through about 40 pages of reading a day."
It is possible to compress all of high school into one year of college. Actually that one year would be better because students might actually remember something, public schools go at such a glacial rate that by the time it is all overwith, students have forgotten where they began! College tends to have the opposite problem, learning goes so fast it becomes hard to retain information unless the student purposefully goes the extra distance themself.
Of course in college one is expected to remember all that one has ever done, so you had damn better remember what was covered in some obscure class 2 years back! In the very least, make note of where the data can be looked up at.
My GF and I have worked somewhat successfully to reduce PP usage in school, but holy crap, is it hard.
Thankfully the math department at my uni uses chalk still.:-D
On the web I have seen math departments that use Power Point. I have an honest desire to beat the crud out of any math prof who uses PP to teach proofs and such. Part of mathematics is the following of a proof that the prof shows you, copying it down to your own paper. Indeed a fair number of studies have shown that the very act of taking notes drastically increases both retention and understanding.
All of this goes out the window when PP is used, as the slides have a tendency to fly by so quick that nobody has time to take notes.
Oh, and the CS profs who switched away from PP?
Students started attending their classes again. In classes that are PP based, attendance was typically 5 or 6 out of 30. Maybe 10 or so for the really hard classes.
The critics are absolutely right about the ineffective use of testing and such. My answer is shut up about the defects as an excuse not to test. Lets test the students and get better tests and better testing methods if you don't like the results. I whole heartedly support more efficient evaluation methods and any efforts that can direct teachers towards better results. The methods here are standard industrial and technological evaluation methods.
You are part of the problem.
Blame the teachers? They don't expect enough of the students, sure.
Who REALLY should be blamed?
The parents.
For not taking responsability for their children's actions and learning.
Require calculus from all students to get out of high school. Require REAL reading. A book in 2 months? Laughable. A book in 3 weeks.
Don't PUNISH teachers for FAILING the FAILURES. If a student fails, it should be the parents who are ashamed, not the schools.
You know far too little about the technology - Monitors and video cards could show far more detail than 256 colors to an 8 bit depth in 1993. Go lookup ATI's cards.... Then think about TIFF and JPEG - both in existance (along with GIF, PNG and dozens of others) - the image quality was just fine.
Yes they could, but they were not common on consumer level home x86 PCs.
Most of the other platforms had better display technology, but I have seen consumer computers made in 1996 (or even 1997) that could only do 256 colors. I had a 32bit video card in 96, but they were by no means common.
In the US you are correct... In the Scandinavian countries I think that you will find that the social order is quite just and people like Jon Johannsen can, and do fit in. Marriage has declined.
This is a bad thing?
One could say marriage has declined in America is well, but there are too many tax benefits for people to stay unmarried for too long!:) Not to mention that in order to maintain the standard of living that American's expect, it is almost a necessity now days to have dual incomes.
Indeed at work a week back, a single white male earning I would guess around 60k a year, was asking the rhetorical question "How is a man like me supposed to afford a house now days?"
To which I replied: "Get married."
You have avoided dealing with the ethics of harm to many weighed against harm to a few. By any ethical system the harm to the greatest number should bring the strongest response. You simply dropped the ball on that one.
Ah, but then we get into the more extremist and complicated matters. Check out my journal articles some time on economic justification for shooting everybody who drinks alchohal or does drugs.
Answer the question: shouldn't economic criminals who harm milions suffer a vastly greater penalty than the criminal who harms only a few others?
Yes, in general. But I think that intent also has to be looked at. If someone does not have the basic skills necessary to even KNOW how much money they are costing others, and is immature enough to not realize the consequences of online actions... I think often times this is the case. People do not really realize that their actions DO have an effect online.
Indeed, the RIAA continuously claims economic justification for their actions, but their math seems horribly messed up to everybody else! (As my math likely seems messed up to everybody else as well...)
Seattle is far, far from the nicest place I've lived. (And, you didn't mention I-5 - you must not attend UW or Pacific Lutheran - because you would be stuck in that traffic jam today.)
Yah, traffic sucks. We always start major road construction projects in the middle of budget slumps. The engineers come and tell us how many lanes we need, and we end up chopping the number way down. Like our ghetto express lane system. We couldn't afford to REALLY built a system express lanes, so instead we have half a system that goes south for part of the day and north for the other part of the day.
Or the West Seattle Freeway, that had to be built without time to gather proper funding because some drunken idiot ran into the old bridge. Doh.
The mayor right now is also an idiot. He wants to reduce the size of the viaduct and shove it underground. Everybody except for those who own property right where below where the viaduct sits, think this is the stupidest idea ever. We need a larger viaduct not a smaller one.
And of course we have the problem of a city bordered on two sides by water. We also have rather large rivalries between the various metropolitan areas here. The suburbs outside of Seattle don't want to pay for anything improvements to Seattle's traffic infrastructure (even though
I pay 16c per kWh in Melbourne, and I figure on $1.4 for every watt continuous, so that makes a 200W system left on use $280 of electricity a year. That's a fair amount. As I said, that's about a third of our total electricity usage. My parents daily energy usage was 30kWh, then my brother moved out and it dropped to just over 10. Guess who had all the hardware?:)
Holy crud, your electric bill is cheap. My family pays around $150 per month for electricity, and that does not include heating!
Spending a grand on a new computer to save $100 a year is not economically logical, nor environmentally logical... and you can save more by spending 30 seconds in the BIOS: My year old athalon cost me $200 all up, and uses 40W continuous (underclocked from 2.2GHz to 1.6GHz, dropped the voltage and the disks are auto standby). My terrarium uses more energy:)
You really shouldn't work so hard to dismiss excuses that would allow you to buy a new computer.:)
You forgot gas DHW (DHW is the biggest user of energy anyway). Most of our energy is used running the fridge and chest freezer.
When I get a house I really want one of these. Damnit, the technology is excellent, but it seems like nobody in this country has HEARD of the damn things, all builders put standard electric water heaters (or sometimes gas water heaters) in houses, bleck! At least this is if you are talking about what I think you are talking about, inline aka tankless water heaters that head the water on demand. Given that I am graduating from college soon, I shall shortly be searching for a builder that knows what the hell these things are.
The article is a bit dated (100 watt PCs... heh), but you can always scale the numbers up.
A nice represenative quote:
But even if you were paying 50 cents per kilowatt-hour, a hundred left-on PCs each wasting a hundred watts would still only cost you five bucks an hour. Big deal.
5 cents per hour. Or around $36 total. a month.
Ok so that is a bit of money.:)
I used to have my PC go into hibernate mode after awhile, but now it just does everything short of that. By the time my CPU throttles down to nill, my hard drives spin down, and various other fans stop.
Hey, you have an excuse to buy a new MacBook, with the Intel Core Duo processor in it, it might just pay for itself compared to your G5!:) Remember, buying a new MacBook is the environmentally responsible thing to do!;)
There is no "ethics" system out there. There are laws. Sometimes the laws work!
This is an inane statement. If it were true, people would be incapable of action in regards to matters on which they had not had legal council.
Since I don't have to get legal counsel every time I fart outside, I am pretty damn sure I, and most people who are not psychopaths, have an internal system of ethics in place.
Indeed, do lawyers not have a code of ethics which they must abide to? Many professions have ethical codes of which members sign contracts agreeing to adhere to. These contracts are legal only in so far that any contract is legal, the 'law' doesn't care if the ethics contract requires someone to piss on a potted houseplant every day or pay a $1,000 fine to the group.
(in so far as someone does not go and urinate on a potted houseplant that belongs to another party without consent!:) )
Saying people do not have "ethics" is ridicules. That right there would lead to anarchy far faster than the downfall of the government!
Don't assume that I don't know about computing or networks.
Knowledge and culture are two different things. I know many people who can program a computer, but do not understand the community that surrounds technology.
As far as "different" in Seattle - you are wrong. Look around - there are many people who are quite poor - and they are NOT Bill's neighbors on Lake Washington.
People recycle more, there is a strong social urge towards being environmentally friendly. I am not saying it is something that is "absolute", indeed unlike the "law", no one with a gun goes around and forces people to throw paper into the recycle bin rather than into the trash can.
The glares from surrounding citizens and jabs in the side from friends sure help though.
Nope, they are shuttled into skid row around the Space Needle and out into the edges of town. By the way - I-5 sucks. Damn shame that you let the Mariner's stadium get imploded - at taxpayer's expense.
Yah the government here is corrupt. No illusions about that one. Actually they are both STUPID and corrupt, which is really a shame, since it means that even if they do try to do something good once in a while, they will in all likelihood mess it up anyway.
You seem to think that my client and I have some duty to rehabilitate a couple of young jerks. We don't.
Your right: you don't.
That is what separates ethics from law. Legally I can go drink, smoke, and have sex with as many women as I want.
Ethically I can't.
Do I have a responsibility NOT to partake of those actions?
Legally, nope.
Ethically, yah, I do. My own personal ethical standard requires that I do not behave in such a fashion. The fact that I am not drunk, smoking a cigarett, or involved in an orgy right now seems to refute your earlier point that systems of ethics do not exist.
Something that you simply haven't grasped yet is that the law is not like coding or science. The Law depends upon so many factors - tangible and intangible as well as real and imagined.
Have you kept up with modern software engineering practices? Coding is not an exact science. We have to take many factors into account, many of which cannot be measured. Factors such as a customer's request versus what a customer really expects, or what they will be requested tomorrow. The unpredictable changing arena of both hardware and the marketplace overall. Java was a language originally intended for a market that seemed like it was ready to explode at any point, but in reality did not even materialize until eight years after Java was created! (Various set top cable boxes, not even going to go into the fail
Beats me, but a single yellow 60watt incandescent bulb just kind of causes a room to "glow" yellow in my general experience. I haven't ever seen a 60 watt bulb that didn't let off some horrid yellow color. 100 is the minimum I want for anything decent.
Seriously, 60 watt bulbs are something you could have on while watching a movie, they are so unnoticeable.
Somebody want to enlighten us both on any differences in efficiency between Aussie and US light bulbs?
Do your incandescent cost more than 50 cents or so each and let off some horrid yellow glow? I have no doubt that whatever is sold here in the states is whatever is the cheapest crap that can possibly be shipped in from China.
CFs let off an icky blue-ish glow that looks like something from a horror movie. The "white-light" ones seem like they are from a slightly less tense scene in a bad horror movie!
and if you can actually max your 4GB of RAM to the gills by multitasking regular, every-day software, you deserve to be penalized with sluggish performance!
A few high resolution photos loaded up into an editor and that 4GB of RAM is gone rather fast.
I do wonder sometimes what my computers pull in because I subscribe to the 'I hate sleep mode' train of thought and my iMac G5 is on 24x7.
Idle: not that much. Especially if your HDs are set to spin down (and if they aren't, don't plan on having hard drives for very much longer!) and your CPU has a power friendly idle mode (I do not know the specifics of the G5)
Wow, those G5s DO run hot. A standard PC now days can get by with around 300 watts, unless you have some crazy super video card and mega raid array in there.
So what happened in the US to make them fail so miserably at their introduction? The only bad press we've gotten over here is that they're a bit trickier to dispose of since they (used to?) contain a small amount of quicksilver.
In short: They flicker and they are this ugly depressing blue color that makes people want to commit suicide.
I don't understand why governments don't just ban the sale of old fashioned incandescent style bulbs, or at the very least whack a huge 1000% tax on the damn things. Does anyone know why they won't do this? I bet a few lightbulb companies are worried about declining sales when people realise the efficient ones last way longer. Unless your worried about electricity company shares or work in an ancandescent bulb factory, its insane not to want the old style bulbs phased out immediately. Why isnt this done?
Oh I know I know!
BECAUSE CF BULBS SUCK!
My house uses them (against my better wishes).
CF bulbs let off about one TENTH the light of a normal bulb. Indeed, with two CF bulb lamps on, the (very tiny 1940s) living room in my house is way to dark to read in still.
Oh they also flicker like heck, and are UGLY.
The thing is, a few years ago there was a big push towards CF bulbs, a lot of people tried them out, and found that they suck horribly.
The flickering noise alone from them is irritating enough.
Also passing laws like that is stupid. You give people a technology that saves them money, and isn't so repulsive, and people will go and buy it on their own. CF is not that technology.
You are anti-government. You are a self admitted thief - your MP3 collection.
Read again: My MP3 collection is legal. I have PAID for all my songs.
You are the one who started spouting off about how evil the government is. I have a tendency to agree, that is aside the point here. Our founding fathers warned us about the evils of politicians, I just happened to listen.
Where I stand - you have exactly "ZERO" ethical standing and your arguments are grossly self-serving - you want a way out of being held liable for your acts.
You mean like my helping people for free, or assisting people in learning when ever possible?
If I had a client that had a problem with you I'd drag you into court and through "discovery" expose your strange and unethical view of the law and how it applies to you.
Like how I years ago deleted all my illegal software and replaced it with legal copies?
Wow, some discovery there!
"Your honor, I am afraid that this young man, at sometime in his life, acquired a moral conscience. This is a horrible thing, we must have him jailed immediatly. We cannot let him continue to pay for products he uses."
That'd go over great I'm sure...
You should step back from the Regan world where Governments are viewed as bad and start thinking for yourself. Look around - this very medium exists because of Government. If Governments are all bad - go off line and join the people living off the grid and on the land. I reccomend Alaska. That state tolerates all sorts of people who want to rugged individualists. Good luck.
I live in America, a country where the government is ALWAYS considered suspect. I am not saying that they don't do good things. Letting a bunch of college students define half the protocols that run the internet was one good thing they did. This medium exists because of smart teenagers and young adults who got together to build something great. The government provided the funding, and was smart enough to step aside for the most part after that.
For the rest of us - the Government is US. We decide what laws get passed and who is elected. If you and your ilk support criminals because they are just kids experimenting - well, that is the road to anarchy.
The government is run by a bunch of idiots up on capitol hill who claim to fear God while somehow bringing blasphomy to His name with almost every action that they take.
I think that what you DID was overreact to economic damage and cause far GREATER economic damage to this country by not nuturing intelligence, which is a valuable comodity that this country (and all countries) are in dire need of.
Not recognizing misguided intelligence is the road to a bunch of stupid mindless sheep walking around doing exactly what they are told to do.
I am not saying that they were RIGHT, indeed they did screw up. But to put it bluntly, you where a major dickhead to not at least TRY and see if maybe the teenagers could have the basics of ethics explained the them. Your "sue now, worry never" approach is great for your clients, and crappy for society. It creates a nice happy "Gee we sure screwed those guys over!!" feeling for your clients, but doesn't really help improve the situation on a social scale any.
Anarchy didn't create the Internet.
No, an open to discussion Request For Comments process created the internet, which originally consisted of a group of researches typing up some papers and asking for comments on them, and eventually evolved into a bunch of college students typing up papers, passing them around, discussin them, and coming to a consensus on how things should be done.
Was in anarchy? Well that depends on who you ask. If you ask the gover
Tell me where those "ethics training" courses are held?
Accredited Computer Science curriculums for one...
Aside from that, you have to realize, at that young of an age, telling someone "Hey do this and you get paid money!!!" is really a hard lure. How ethical where YOU back when you were 13? Would you have thought that typing commands into a computer to copy electronic signals from point a to point b would constitute theft?
Hell, the qustion STILL comes up here at/. all the time, and is constantly debated by (for the most part) grown adults. Indeed, just a few days ago/. posted survey results showing that the majority of teenagers thought there was nothing wrong with copying a music CD they had bought and giving it to a friend, and this is after years of RIAA advertising telling us how wrong pirating is. You expected teenagers back in 1993 to have come to conclusions that both teenagers and adults still cannot all agree on today?
The President and FEMA - nearly a year ago to the day - let thousands of people die when they had five (5) days notice that Katrina was headed into the Gulf. We have Tom Delay and Duke Cunningham as sterling examples of thieves in government (with Duke in the Stir and The Hammer soon to follow).......
Notice those are all called lapses in ethics. Or when not being so politically correct about it unethical f*ckups.
You can't teach what you don't know.
I didn't ask you to turn them over to the government, I have no doubt that in such cases they would continue to follow right on down the path they were already on.
Heck, I wouldn't trust turning my DOG over to the government.
Now, you talk about training prodigies - in the traditions and ethics of the technology professions???! What are you talking about?
THOSE kinds of traditions. Honoring others work and truthfullness in ones actions.
The pursuit of perfection in what one does, taking pride in one's work.
Old fashion things like that.
How about Marie Curie who literally died from her contributions to science? Who donated the metal her nobel prizes to the war effort of the Allies?
How about Richard Stallman, who forgave the "work until 35, retire a millionaire" life that geniuses of his caliber so often obtain, and instead has chosen to devote his entire life to a cause that he believes will help the world?
How about the tradition of countless technicians who, unpaid, off company time, explain computers and technology to people all around them, solely so that others can gain a better understanding of computers? Heck if I (or almost any other technically minded person!) was paid the same as motivational speakers for the work we do trying to get people over their fear of technology, I could go out and buy a new sports car right now.
But you know what? We don't demand that kind of payment. For the same reason we troll newsgroups, discussion groups, and other forums. Because there is an innate feeling, and innate need, telling us that we have been given this "gift" as it where of understanding technology (never mind that it involved hard work and hours of screwing things up then having to fix them!), and that we have a responsibility to help others achieve at least some part of that understanding.
That is either religion, or a set of ethics. And with the decline of the
Back in 1993, before most people even KNEW what the internet was, some kids hacked an ISP (which were rare enough themselves back in 1993), had porn of (presumably) others their own age (the horror! Most people don't want to look at naked pictures of someone twice their age....), and were smart enough to do that much damage in that little time.
Their parents did not believe their children could have done that much damage, so few people even KNEW about the internet back then, and you call up the parents and tell them that their children have porn (most parents are not going to believe you right there!), and are hacking ("hey isn't that something you do with a axe?") in to machines and got root ("Why is he now talking about trees??") access and used it to steal credit card numbers ("Credit card numbers? What is he talking about, little Johnny plays games and writes book reports on the computer...")
Ethics training might have been a more appropriate course of action. You know, take some young prodigies and TRAIN them in the traditions and ethics of the technology professions, and about using one's skills for the betterment of all?
Oh, and why did your system have such crappy security that a bunch of kids managed to break into it?
What is it with you people that think you should be able to tell grown adults what they can and cannot ingest?
Economic and intellectual efficiency. I am an efficiency freak.
If everybody who drank alcohol instead meditated, or practiced some other relaxation technique, there would be a lot more money to go around for useful purposes, and people would be more relaxed, and less likely to run over another person while drunk.
See, I am a cost->effect person. The purpose of alcohol is to relax. Alcohol is a inefficient method of doing such. It should thusly be optimized.
Oh, also the idiots who get drunk then hoot and holler all night light complete morons are an embarrassment to the species.
Lately though, I have been more in favor of legalizing everything, and putting such high taxes on it that nobody can actually afford it.:)
I can only imagine what the response would be if Microsoft did this for any of its software.
Oddly enough, the MSDN Search Team did exactly this in their blog.
After the unanimous "it sucks!" comments came through though, I haven't seen anything else out of them!
Microsoft has been eliciting a lot of user feedback on products as of late. That is the entire point of all these open betas they are holding. Microsoft also holds a ton of focus group tests, and many of their programmers do have actively maintained blogs and popular requests made on those blogs are taken seriously.
I think one major issue is that Microsoft's release cycle is so slow compared to what most of the rest of the software market is going at now days, that any improvements they do make take a long time to materialize on desktops. There are a load of Office 2007 features I want to take advantage of right now! MS is generally hesitant to release massive new features in service packs, with a few (rather major!) exceptions. The idea behind this is not too horrific though: Better halfway working crufty software than completely broken pretty flashy software!
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Take higher level classes. Intro classes typically don't assume calculus, unfortunatly. I think that a lot less time would be wasted if calculus was basic knowledge.
An intro econ class can be done in about 2 weeks using calculus. If you couldn't see the derivitives (aka marginal value) screaming at from from the page, you were not paying very much attention in class, either that or paying attention and not thinking about what you had heard!
Algebra is just a bunch of rules that everybody has agreed to follow. There are actually many systems of algebra, none of them have any "meaning" to them really.
:) Once you have done that, everything makes a lot more sense. You get this sort of deep level understanding of how everything around you works.
I understood the reason for algebra after I took calculus (algebra by itself is almost useless...). I really understood algebra after I took abstract math classes and had to prove the various properties, suck as transitivity. For that matter, proving addition was rather fun!
Well yah I had that "Government sux0rs!" cynicism, but I didn't really get cynical until I learned who funded our revolution!
;) (Hey look, rich corrupt white pricks funded a war using the word "freedom" when all they really wanted as a tax cut! The fact that some idealists survived and actually did create the promised freedoms is not something the original founders really cared about one way or the other.)
Once again, understanding washed over my mind.
This is mostly because the majority of our population does not have a college degree, and would be very upset if they learned that their child was being taught that a bunch of crooks and pirates funded the American Revolution.
The public, with its current level of education, is too unsophisticated to see the real beauty in what happened back then. It is not that a bunch of freedom loving guys got together and fought for what they believed in, but rather than a bunch of corrupt greedy men, a good number of them criminals, got together for reasons of greed, and yet despite all this, still managed to create something wonderful.
The truth is much more awe inspiring than the fiction that is taught in high schoool, but it also requires one to think it over for awhile, and come to terms with how they feel about this nation's history.
Meh. For the most part. If I got really pissed I would write all my papers in the form of abab rhyming poems.
One time I turned in a 2 page long paper that consisted of one (valid!) English sentence.
You and I could pull it off, but it does take most people more than 3 or 4 hours to read a book! :) Also remember that there needs to be time for math. 2 weeks seems like a good amount of time for your average pocket book. Us two may get it done in 2 days, but some allowences do have to be made, not everybody is capable of reading fast, unfortuntly.
I'll go with that one.
I would disagree with this one out of family history. My grandmother used to get hit frequently in class because she was left handed. In the teacher's own words "I had one of you last year, and I am not going to have another one this year!"
Unfortunately it opens up too much room for abuse.
If the school just did something to make the teacher's threats not completely empty, that alone would be enough.
One problem with lack of education is lack of educated discourse afterwards. We can have reviws of math books posted on /. because most of us have had higher education in some form of mathematics.
The concepts of rate of change is a fundamental one to how everything works. Once someone has calculus, all of that algebra stuff makes sense.
Once you have taught people basic calculus, teaching many other fields becomes vastly easier. Economics, chemistry, aspects of biology.
Economics specifically, if the American public had a better grasp of economics, maybe it would be harder for politicians to swindle us so often.
What it taught you is what you put into it. I personally have gained much from my general education requirements, but that is because I spent time thinking over the implications of what my professors taught me.
Taking history gave me both pride and cynicism about my country. Learning the actual history about how our country was founded (and not just the "We fought the evil(tm) British then made up with them right after words cuz their jolly good chaps" version that is taught in high school) was immensely educational and interesting. Debunking the myths behind American heroes both stripped away their aura of heroism, yet made them much more accessible.
Reading some of the written works of our foundering fathers showed me that the problems we have today are often times the same ones they have back then, and that their solution, for citizens to remain vigilant watchers over their government, is as good of an idea now as it was back then.
History taught me that, despite what the media likes to infuse into our heads, most holy wars are not about religion. Religion is used as a one word cover for a variety of complex and interrelated topics. Of course by telling the public that "those Muslims and Jews have been fighting since before Christ was born", it is possible to make the public brush aside more news of fighting as yet more unsolvable religious problems.
Never mind that Islam has only been around for a bit less than 1,300 years. Throw away the rest of history while you are at it too. Just ensure that the American public doesn't pay any attention to what is happening in the world.
And all that just covers a set of 4 or so classes.
What to cover economics? How about Chemistry? Biology? Hell Genetics was a blast, I loved that class, and I would argue that it is VERY applicable to understanding the world around me.
As I sad, you get out of education what you put into it. If you think learning is a waste of time, odds are you won't be learning much, and indeed, you will be wasting your time.
For the record though, I do believe that high school is mostly a waste of time anyway, with a few exceptions thanks to exceptionally good teachers!
I am a computer science student. Nice try.
Yah well this country has a very low supply of both. Tell ya what, how about you get OK parents and OK teachers first, than we can work our way up. Right now we have a mix of excellent and cruddy teachers, and generally LOUSY parents. I say this as an American who has many friends born from different cultures, and who has seen the pressure that other cultures put on their children to graduate from school.
You take a culture in which everyone EXPECTS children to graduate from college, and holy crap, the children actually GRADUATE FROM COLLEGE.
Now you go to America.
Nobody really gives a crap if students graduate from high school.
Well look what happens. Kids drop out of high school.
You get what you expect.
On one hand, yah, I agree, on the other hand, no, I don't.
:) I have had a number of fun and entertaining history classes, but then again, there were still idiots in the class who insisted it was boring. People who don't think tend to be only entertained by loud brightly colored things.
Lecture's shouldn't suck. Being able to speak is part of the job. My GF and I have worked hard at my uni to try and convince our profs to stop using power point, the ultimate way to give horrible presentations.
Bleck, I actually pay to attend those lectures. (That is another thing that helps gets students involved in education: When they are paying for it! Holy crap I care a lot more about my schooling now that I am working every summer to pay my tuition!)
On the flip side of things, students have to realize that education is NOT always fun. If learning was fun, we would all have multiple PhDs, and the entertainment industry would never have come into existence.
Learning math requires solving equations. For hours. Day after day. EVERY DAY.
Learning to write requires WRITING, day after day, every day. The Internet helps with this a bit, but only if people actually try, MySpace.com is not helping out here!
History actually is pretty cool if you have a good teacher.
Homework is work. Thus the inclusion of the word "work". If it was fun, they would send students to the playground to do it.
In public school, it always annoyed me that teachers have such low expecations of their students. "Oh here is a 200 page pocket book, we have only three months to go through it."
College took care of that crap really fast. "You all have your text book. We have a lot to cover and you will be going through about 40 pages of reading a day."
It is possible to compress all of high school into one year of college. Actually that one year would be better because students might actually remember something, public schools go at such a glacial rate that by the time it is all overwith, students have forgotten where they began! College tends to have the opposite problem, learning goes so fast it becomes hard to retain information unless the student purposefully goes the extra distance themself.
Of course in college one is expected to remember all that one has ever done, so you had damn better remember what was covered in some obscure class 2 years back! In the very least, make note of where the data can be looked up at.
High school by comparison is a joke. Nobody expec
You want to know what is REALLY crappy?
:-D
Almost ALL my CS profs use PowerPoint.
My GF and I have worked somewhat successfully to reduce PP usage in school, but holy crap, is it hard.
Thankfully the math department at my uni uses chalk still.
On the web I have seen math departments that use Power Point. I have an honest desire to beat the crud out of any math prof who uses PP to teach proofs and such. Part of mathematics is the following of a proof that the prof shows you, copying it down to your own paper. Indeed a fair number of studies have shown that the very act of taking notes drastically increases both retention and understanding.
All of this goes out the window when PP is used, as the slides have a tendency to fly by so quick that nobody has time to take notes.
Oh, and the CS profs who switched away from PP?
Students started attending their classes again. In classes that are PP based, attendance was typically 5 or 6 out of 30. Maybe 10 or so for the really hard classes.
Without PP? Well over 20.
You are part of the problem.
Blame the teachers? They don't expect enough of the students, sure.
Who REALLY should be blamed?
The parents.
For not taking responsability for their children's actions and learning.
Require calculus from all students to get out of high school. Require REAL reading. A book in 2 months? Laughable. A book in 3 weeks.
Don't PUNISH teachers for FAILING the FAILURES. If a student fails, it should be the parents who are ashamed, not the schools.
Yes they could, but they were not common on consumer level home x86 PCs.
Most of the other platforms had better display technology, but I have seen consumer computers made in 1996 (or even 1997) that could only do 256 colors. I had a 32bit video card in 96, but they were by no means common.
This is a bad thing?
:) Not to mention that in order to maintain the standard of living that American's expect, it is almost a necessity now days to have dual incomes.
One could say marriage has declined in America is well, but there are too many tax benefits for people to stay unmarried for too long!
Indeed at work a week back, a single white male earning I would guess around 60k a year, was asking the rhetorical question "How is a man like me supposed to afford a house now days?"
To which I replied: "Get married."
Ah, but then we get into the more extremist and complicated matters. Check out my journal articles some time on economic justification for shooting everybody who drinks alchohal or does drugs.
Yes, in general. But I think that intent also has to be looked at. If someone does not have the basic skills necessary to even KNOW how much money they are costing others, and is immature enough to not realize the consequences of online actions... I think often times this is the case. People do not really realize that their actions DO have an effect online.
Indeed, the RIAA continuously claims economic justification for their actions, but their math seems horribly messed up to everybody else! (As my math likely seems messed up to everybody else as well...)
Yah, traffic sucks. We always start major road construction projects in the middle of budget slumps. The engineers come and tell us how many lanes we need, and we end up chopping the number way down. Like our ghetto express lane system. We couldn't afford to REALLY built a system express lanes, so instead we have half a system that goes south for part of the day and north for the other part of the day.
Or the West Seattle Freeway, that had to be built without time to gather proper funding because some drunken idiot ran into the old bridge. Doh.
The mayor right now is also an idiot. He wants to reduce the size of the viaduct and shove it underground. Everybody except for those who own property right where below where the viaduct sits, think this is the stupidest idea ever. We need a larger viaduct not a smaller one.
And of course we have the problem of a city bordered on two sides by water. We also have rather large rivalries between the various metropolitan areas here. The suburbs outside of Seattle don't want to pay for anything improvements to Seattle's traffic infrastructure (even though
Holy crud, your electric bill is cheap. My family pays around $150 per month for electricity, and that does not include heating!
You really shouldn't work so hard to dismiss excuses that would allow you to buy a new computer.
When I get a house I really want one of these. Damnit, the technology is excellent, but it seems like nobody in this country has HEARD of the damn things, all builders put standard electric water heaters (or sometimes gas water heaters) in houses, bleck! At least this is if you are talking about what I think you are talking about, inline aka tankless water heaters that head the water on demand. Given that I am graduating from college soon, I shall shortly be searching for a builder that knows what the hell these things are.
Try loading said image up into Photoshop.
Run any kind of filter over it.
Enjoy running out of memory!
You must not have a large TV with any sort of surround sound system, have a gas heater, dryer, and stove, and not leave your front porch light on!
Article on the cost of your computer's power usage
The article is a bit dated (100 watt PCs... heh), but you can always scale the numbers up.
A nice represenative quote:
5 cents per hour. Or around $36 total. a month.
Ok so that is a bit of money.
I used to have my PC go into hibernate mode after awhile, but now it just does everything short of that. By the time my CPU throttles down to nill, my hard drives spin down, and various other fans stop.
Hey, you have an excuse to buy a new MacBook, with the Intel Core Duo processor in it, it might just pay for itself compared to your G5!
This is an inane statement. If it were true, people would be incapable of action in regards to matters on which they had not had legal council.
:) )
Since I don't have to get legal counsel every time I fart outside, I am pretty damn sure I, and most people who are not psychopaths, have an internal system of ethics in place.
Indeed, do lawyers not have a code of ethics which they must abide to? Many professions have ethical codes of which members sign contracts agreeing to adhere to. These contracts are legal only in so far that any contract is legal, the 'law' doesn't care if the ethics contract requires someone to piss on a potted houseplant every day or pay a $1,000 fine to the group.
(in so far as someone does not go and urinate on a potted houseplant that belongs to another party without consent!
Saying people do not have "ethics" is ridicules. That right there would lead to anarchy far faster than the downfall of the government!
Knowledge and culture are two different things. I know many people who can program a computer, but do not understand the community that surrounds technology.
People recycle more, there is a strong social urge towards being environmentally friendly. I am not saying it is something that is "absolute", indeed unlike the "law", no one with a gun goes around and forces people to throw paper into the recycle bin rather than into the trash can.
The glares from surrounding citizens and jabs in the side from friends sure help though.
Yah the government here is corrupt. No illusions about that one. Actually they are both STUPID and corrupt, which is really a shame, since it means that even if they do try to do something good once in a while, they will in all likelihood mess it up anyway.
Your right: you don't.
That is what separates ethics from law. Legally I can go drink, smoke, and have sex with as many women as I want.
Ethically I can't.
Do I have a responsibility NOT to partake of those actions?
Legally, nope.
Ethically, yah, I do. My own personal ethical standard requires that I do not behave in such a fashion. The fact that I am not drunk, smoking a cigarett, or involved in an orgy right now seems to refute your earlier point that systems of ethics do not exist.
Have you kept up with modern software engineering practices? Coding is not an exact science. We have to take many factors into account, many of which cannot be measured. Factors such as a customer's request versus what a customer really expects, or what they will be requested tomorrow. The unpredictable changing arena of both hardware and the marketplace overall. Java was a language originally intended for a market that seemed like it was ready to explode at any point, but in reality did not even materialize until eight years after Java was created! (Various set top cable boxes, not even going to go into the fail
Beats me, but a single yellow 60watt incandescent bulb just kind of causes a room to "glow" yellow in my general experience. I haven't ever seen a 60 watt bulb that didn't let off some horrid yellow color. 100 is the minimum I want for anything decent.
Seriously, 60 watt bulbs are something you could have on while watching a movie, they are so unnoticeable.
Somebody want to enlighten us both on any differences in efficiency between Aussie and US light bulbs?
Do your incandescent cost more than 50 cents or so each and let off some horrid yellow glow? I have no doubt that whatever is sold here in the states is whatever is the cheapest crap that can possibly be shipped in from China.
CFs let off an icky blue-ish glow that looks like something from a horror movie. The "white-light" ones seem like they are from a slightly less tense scene in a bad horror movie!
A few high resolution photos loaded up into an editor and that 4GB of RAM is gone rather fast.
Umm, that seems about right to me.
60*3, if you want to be able to SEE in the room.
A 60 watt bulb by itself is rather useless, unless you are into the entire "depressed goth" thing.
Idle: not that much. Especially if your HDs are set to spin down (and if they aren't, don't plan on having hard drives for very much longer!) and your CPU has a power friendly idle mode (I do not know the specifics of the G5)
120-200 watts maximum. while idle.
Apple's information on the topic.
Wow, those G5s DO run hot. A standard PC now days can get by with around 300 watts, unless you have some crazy super video card and mega raid array in there.
Actually electric heat is perfectly efficient, in terms of how much heat you get out given how much electricity you put in.
The inefficiency comes from how the electricity is generated, if it is generated through gas or coal, then yah, you have some waste.
In short: They flicker and they are this ugly depressing blue color that makes people want to commit suicide.
Oh I know I know!
BECAUSE CF BULBS SUCK!
My house uses them (against my better wishes).
CF bulbs let off about one TENTH the light of a normal bulb. Indeed, with two CF bulb lamps on, the (very tiny 1940s) living room in my house is way to dark to read in still.
Oh they also flicker like heck, and are UGLY.
The thing is, a few years ago there was a big push towards CF bulbs, a lot of people tried them out, and found that they suck horribly.
The flickering noise alone from them is irritating enough.
Also passing laws like that is stupid. You give people a technology that saves them money, and isn't so repulsive, and people will go and buy it on their own. CF is not that technology.
Your clothes would last a lot longer....
My family actually does use clothing lines in the summer. The wrinkles suck though.
Read again: My MP3 collection is legal. I have PAID for all my songs.
You are the one who started spouting off about how evil the government is. I have a tendency to agree, that is aside the point here. Our founding fathers warned us about the evils of politicians, I just happened to listen.
You mean like my helping people for free, or assisting people in learning when ever possible?
Like how I years ago deleted all my illegal software and replaced it with legal copies?
Wow, some discovery there!
"Your honor, I am afraid that this young man, at sometime in his life, acquired a moral conscience. This is a horrible thing, we must have him jailed immediatly. We cannot let him continue to pay for products he uses."
That'd go over great I'm sure...
I live in America, a country where the government is ALWAYS considered suspect. I am not saying that they don't do good things. Letting a bunch of college students define half the protocols that run the internet was one good thing they did. This medium exists because of smart teenagers and young adults who got together to build something great. The government provided the funding, and was smart enough to step aside for the most part after that.
The government is run by a bunch of idiots up on capitol hill who claim to fear God while somehow bringing blasphomy to His name with almost every action that they take.
I think that what you DID was overreact to economic damage and cause far GREATER economic damage to this country by not nuturing intelligence, which is a valuable comodity that this country (and all countries) are in dire need of.
Not recognizing misguided intelligence is the road to a bunch of stupid mindless sheep walking around doing exactly what they are told to do.
I am not saying that they were RIGHT, indeed they did screw up. But to put it bluntly, you where a major dickhead to not at least TRY and see if maybe the teenagers could have the basics of ethics explained the them. Your "sue now, worry never" approach is great for your clients, and crappy for society. It creates a nice happy "Gee we sure screwed those guys over!!" feeling for your clients, but doesn't really help improve the situation on a social scale any.
No, an open to discussion Request For Comments process created the internet, which originally consisted of a group of researches typing up some papers and asking for comments on them, and eventually evolved into a bunch of college students typing up papers, passing them around, discussin them, and coming to a consensus on how things should be done.
Was in anarchy? Well that depends on who you ask. If you ask the gover
Accredited Computer Science curriculums for one...
/. all the time, and is constantly debated by (for the most part) grown adults. Indeed, just a few days ago /. posted survey results showing that the majority of teenagers thought there was nothing wrong with copying a music CD they had bought and giving it to a friend, and this is after years of RIAA advertising telling us how wrong pirating is. You expected teenagers back in 1993 to have come to conclusions that both teenagers and adults still cannot all agree on today?
Aside from that, you have to realize, at that young of an age, telling someone "Hey do this and you get paid money!!!" is really a hard lure. How ethical where YOU back when you were 13? Would you have thought that typing commands into a computer to copy electronic signals from point a to point b would constitute theft?
Hell, the qustion STILL comes up here at
Notice those are all called lapses in ethics. Or when not being so politically correct about it unethical f*ckups.
I didn't ask you to turn them over to the government, I have no doubt that in such cases they would continue to follow right on down the path they were already on.
Heck, I wouldn't trust turning my DOG over to the government.
I linketh to the jargon file: The Story of Mel.
THOSE kinds of traditions. Honoring others work and truthfullness in ones actions.
The pursuit of perfection in what one does, taking pride in one's work.
Old fashion things like that.
How about Marie Curie who literally died from her contributions to science? Who donated the metal her nobel prizes to the war effort of the Allies?
How about Richard Stallman, who forgave the "work until 35, retire a millionaire" life that geniuses of his caliber so often obtain, and instead has chosen to devote his entire life to a cause that he believes will help the world?
How about the tradition of countless technicians who, unpaid, off company time, explain computers and technology to people all around them, solely so that others can gain a better understanding of computers? Heck if I (or almost any other technically minded person!) was paid the same as motivational speakers for the work we do trying to get people over their fear of technology, I could go out and buy a new sports car right now.
But you know what? We don't demand that kind of payment. For the same reason we troll newsgroups, discussion groups, and other forums. Because there is an innate feeling, and innate need, telling us that we have been given this "gift" as it where of understanding technology (never mind that it involved hard work and hours of screwing things up then having to fix them!), and that we have a responsibility to help others achieve at least some part of that understanding.
That is either religion, or a set of ethics. And with the decline of the
So wait here now,
Back in 1993, before most people even KNEW what the internet was, some kids hacked an ISP (which were rare enough themselves back in 1993), had porn of (presumably) others their own age (the horror! Most people don't want to look at naked pictures of someone twice their age....), and were smart enough to do that much damage in that little time.
Their parents did not believe their children could have done that much damage, so few people even KNEW about the internet back then, and you call up the parents and tell them that their children have porn (most parents are not going to believe you right there!), and are hacking ("hey isn't that something you do with a axe?") in to machines and got root ("Why is he now talking about trees??") access and used it to steal credit card numbers ("Credit card numbers? What is he talking about, little Johnny plays games and writes book reports on the computer...")
Ethics training might have been a more appropriate course of action. You know, take some young prodigies and TRAIN them in the traditions and ethics of the technology professions, and about using one's skills for the betterment of all?
Oh, and why did your system have such crappy security that a bunch of kids managed to break into it?
Economic and intellectual efficiency. I am an efficiency freak.
If everybody who drank alcohol instead meditated, or practiced some other relaxation technique, there would be a lot more money to go around for useful purposes, and people would be more relaxed, and less likely to run over another person while drunk.
See, I am a cost->effect person. The purpose of alcohol is to relax. Alcohol is a inefficient method of doing such. It should thusly be optimized.
Oh, also the idiots who get drunk then hoot and holler all night light complete morons are an embarrassment to the species.
Lately though, I have been more in favor of legalizing everything, and putting such high taxes on it that nobody can actually afford it.
Now if he had just assigned alcohol and cigarettes to the same category, I wouldn't have any problems.
Oddly enough, the MSDN Search Team did exactly this in their blog.
After the unanimous "it sucks!" comments came through though, I haven't seen anything else out of them!
Microsoft has been eliciting a lot of user feedback on products as of late. That is the entire point of all these open betas they are holding. Microsoft also holds a ton of focus group tests, and many of their programmers do have actively maintained blogs and popular requests made on those blogs are taken seriously.
I think one major issue is that Microsoft's release cycle is so slow compared to what most of the rest of the software market is going at now days, that any improvements they do make take a long time to materialize on desktops. There are a load of Office 2007 features I want to take advantage of right now! MS is generally hesitant to release massive new features in service packs, with a few (rather major!) exceptions. The idea behind this is not too horrific though: Better halfway working crufty software than completely broken pretty flashy software!