Well, then this must vary enormously by district, because I don't know any teachers who only have to teach for 5 hours a day and then get 2.5 hours a day to plan and grade.
You are fucking kidding. Teachers spend a signficant amount of time outside that 8-3.30 working: preparing lessons, marking, running extracurriculars.
That's their CHOICE.
If a teacher does not prepare lessons, grade homework, grade quizzes, grade tests, and attend mandatory courses, then that teacher is FIRED. I don't know quite how you define "choice" where you come from...
And how long until their regular check-in procedure for whether or not your computer is running legal copies of software morphs into a marketing opportunity by linking your ip address to your windows registration for tracking purposes? It would be the ultimate cookie, since it could essentially link every Windows user on the internet to the purchaser of the windows license, no matter where the computer moves to. Companies would leap all over this database in backroom deals, since it could allow advertisers or other companies to know the full identity of users the moment they bring up a page.
If the report said Linux has "20% more uptime" than Windows. I'm sure not one person here would be waving the FUD flag, just more slamming of Microsoft... hell I'd even put money on that bet.
I'll take your money, if you'd like. "20% more uptime" implies that one OS has an uptime of 83.3% or less. You have to have a pretty boneheaded admin on any OS to have an average downtime of 16.7%...
If on the other hand an article were to say that a study found "Windows has 3 times as much downtime", then I wouldn't be overly surprised with all the mandatory rebooting.
In many cases, it is actually in the record label's interest to post the "Tipper Tag" (Explicit lyrics label) because it will, quite frequently, boost sales.
The DRM warning, on the other hand, will most likely cut sales, ergo it is not in the label's interest.
It seems the solution is simple. Government should mandate that the DRM label contain profanity of the manufacturer's choice before the word "DRM".
Technically money is not "made" by trading stocks. Trading stocks just moves money from one hand to another in exchange for a certificate, with a piece of that money going to the exchange (like a portion of winnings going to the casino).
Money is occasionally distributed by dividends to the owner of some stocks, but this has little to do with the "market" itself, except that the price someone is willing to pay another owner is based on a guess of what future dividends might be.
The funiest part is that in WA we have tribal gambling, lotteries, and you can even have actual poker rooms off the reservation if you get the permits etc.
So gambling is apparently fine, it's the online part that is illegal.
Hand optimization or writing portions of code in assembler is the last thing 85% of these people want to do. They don't want to be computing experts to do their science/research.
When you're talking about reuseable modules like an FFT or matrix multiplication, then many scientists doing simulations would love to have a hand optimized FFT or matrix module to plug in as a simulation component. Even if they don't know a drop of assembly themselves, having the optimized module available can make a large difference in running time for big simulations.
Is not programming productivity just as important as performance?
When you're talking about scientific computations which can sometimes take a month or more to do one run, then suddenly it can become worth it to sacrifice a bit of programmer time if it can make a substantial increase in performance. If you can do a run in a week instead of a month, then that makes a huge difference in what you can investigate. Often it's not a question of just buying more machines because sometimes you need to know the answer to the last run before starting the next one.
However I got reprimanded by the school for allowing the kids to handle the engine. According to health and safety it can only be used behind a thick safety screen -- incase it explodes or whatever.
Would they accept signed notes from the parents?
"Will you allow your child to examine a model steam engine in science class, or should your child sit behind a safety-glass shield in the back of the room? Please check one box, and sign below."
"Safety" people are sometimes a little out of touch with reality, so if you can, it's better to find ways around them than to give up on scientific exposure.
Yeah - true - there are spoilt children everywhere. I often hear them shouting "it's not fair... but you PROMISED" when things don't go as planned & expected... all science can do is make predictions based on current knowledge, known facts, and best hypothesis. If "many people" can't accept that... well what can you do?
I have a random idea... How about, don't promise things as certain if you are only considering them best predictions based on current knowledge? People don't get so upset when someone says "It looks like this will happen", and then 70% of the time that person is right. They do justifiably get upset when someone says, "This is going to happen! Definitely! You're just being ignorant if you ignore me!" and then 70% of the time that person is right... Scientists who fall into this latter category when presenting their work to the public are being most unscientific with their presentation.
Scientists need to be honest about their conclusions and the axioms, assumptions, and models upon which those conclusions depend.
Otherwise, Joe Sixpack will always buy the product that does not tell him about the known bugs. "Gee, Mable, the Microsoft version has 1000 bugs listed, but the Happy Lucky Kitty version doesn't have any bug list at all. I guess we better buy the one with no bugs!" The first company that advertises its bugs probably goes out of business or has a stockholder revolt leading to new management.
I don't know about you, but I'd be much happier with a purchased product that had a bug list, perhaps with suggested workarounds, and an estimated timetable for fixes if a fix will be forthcoming. (And if none will be forthcoming, I know to look into the workarounds.)
I mean, people NOTICE bugs by the consequences, so it's not like you can hide them. People just don't know how to deal with the bugs they get, and sometimes aren't exactly sure what triggered them. Something as simple as the presence of a page that says "Pressing button C, B, and then A causes a crash. We're still trying to figure out why," would tell me to not press the buttons in that order until they fix it.
Molecular bonds are bound with an energy far greater than the energy supplied by electromagnetism, in the case we are considering.
This is precisely what permits resonance. Because the individual bonds are stronger than the applied force, they have a restoration force after being deformed. This is like a ball on a spring, or an old car with bad shocks. It would take a lot of energy to rip the shocks on an old car in two, but even a child can bottom out the car's shocks if they push at the resonance frequency.
In addition, the energy of room temperature heat causes continuous motion.
The contributions of thermal energy are randomized, while the coupling to an electromagnetic wave is periodic and not in thermodynamic equilibrium. The roar of the car's engine applies continuous vibration to a car's shocks, and the energy of this vibration likely even exceeds the energy a child can apply to the car, but still the child applying a periodic force is able to deform the shocks in ways that the more equilibrium vibration from the engine cannot.
I have not read the entire site. I started with the first article to catch my eye, titled, "Simple Math demonstrate that the Official 9/11 Account is a Fabrication".
The article uses the most boneheaded abuse of probability I've seen in at least a month. By equivalent reasoning, Slashdot doesn't exist, because the odds of a website name starting with "S" is one in 26, and the odds of the second letter being "l" is one in 26, so the odds of Slashdot existing is (1/26)^8, or less than 1 in 200 billion.
I hope the rest of the site is a little more "scholarly", but it certainly hasn't impressed me with that one...
The huge mismatch between the size of the wave and the size of a molecule means that the effect of the electromagnetic energy is generalized heating. There are apparently no resonance effects. The heating is caused by friction of the molecules against each other.
Not at all. The large size of the wave means that the interaction is essentially that of a rapidly varying electric field with a dipole. And every dipole in a region will have the resulting torque applied to it in the same direction (since the electric field will vary uniformly across a region), and therefore it cannot be considered a system in thermodynamic equilibrium. In addition, resonance effects will show up any time a molecular bond causes a dipole to return to its previous position with roughly the same periodicity as the applied fluctuation from the varying electric field (which can be fluctuation due to the frequency of that field, or due to a modulating frequency such as in the case of the field being turned on and off to transmit a digital signal). Remember that the applied torque will be in a periodic and consistent direction, and not in a random one.
It REALLY doesn't work to try to apply the photon view to this system, precisely because of the scale that you mentioned. First, one milliwatt contains over 10^20 photons per second, or over 37 million photons in the distance of one wavelength, so they are not being represented as quantized collisions. And second, you have to go back to Maxwell's equations and look at the effect for that wavelength which is relevant on the molecular distance scale, which is the treatment of the electromagnetic wave as a varying electric field.
And I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to look up the importance of the orientation of polar molecules to the functioning of various biological systems, many of which could lead to cancer and other effects when they malfunction.
Many years ago I used to think the same thing you do, then I learned a bit more about electromagnetism and about biological systems. I hope you'll spend some time thinking about this, and then you can start advocating the more accurate model in the future.:)
Prove that, and win a Nobel Prize. Get your name on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and never have to work again.
The interaction of electromagnetic radiation and matter is very well understood. Find some new interaction, and you will be as famous as Einstein.
In the sense that Maxwell's equations are known, yes, the interaction of electromagnetic radiation and matter is very well understood. However, they have not been solved for all biological systems, and the billiard-ball model of photon collisions does NOT tell the entire story. Ionizing radiation is NOT the entirety of interaction between radiation and matter.
For starters, the basic interaction of microwaves with matter is NOT IONIZATION, yet they still interact powerfully enough to turn a chicken into a clump of charcoal. Perhaps you should look at this page for an example of a different sort of interaction.
Now, do you really think you can tell me how the rotation of various polar molecules in a biological sample will affect an organism from first principles, while considering all possible resonance effects? If you could do that without running millions of experiments, then you'd win a Nobel prize.
Scaring Americans into giving up their privacy is really getting old.
The 502 people polled in this poll may have been more scared than average Americans are right now. Look at the details of the polling data. First, the people called were asked:
What do you think is more important right now - (for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy); or (for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats)?
THEN they were asked:
It's been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism?
And exactly the same number of people said that this was "acceptable" as chose the first option in the first question. In other words, the pollsters framed the NSA question around the government's sequence of rhetoric by leading with an "or would you rather be killed by terrorists?" question.
Responses to poll questions change enormously among the middle 30% based on how you ask the question. I think it might be prudent to wait for a more careful poll.
Why did you change your name from Bret McDanel to Eric McCarty in the first place? That seems a bit extreme and fishy to me.
If you read the article carefully, you'll note that they switch names from McCarty to McDanel and then back to McCarty, and then compare the two cases.
See, but that's the rub... the PS2 controller didn't work well. The analog sticks are placed at right angles to your thumb's natural orientation. This is stressful and unnatural.
That's because you're holding it wrong. Slide the controller forward farther in your hands so that the base only comes down to your pinky, the tips of your pointer fingers touch the L1/R1 buttons, and the analog sticks are at 45 degree angles (the natural orientation for the thumb in this position).
Growing, transporting, and distilling corn to make a gallon of ethanol uses almost as much energy as is contained in the ethanol itself.
I've heard of many people calculating this... But has anyone ever tried to prove it? Use farm equipment running on ethanol, convert the corn to ethanol using ethanol powered facilities, distribute the ethanol with an ethanol-powered supply chain, and fuel all of these things from the ethanol produced in this manner. The proponents of ethanol from corn could easily demonstrate the validity of the approach with a working example of this sort.
What's original about the PlayStation 3? Controller?
Better yet, what SHOULD be original about it? Would a Christmas-tree shaped controller be preferable? Or how about a one-button controller for simpler learning curves? If something works well, you don't have to muck with it just to be "original". Sometimes originality can get in the way of making a good product.
That's fine and all, but there's NO excuse for it not being in OpenOffice's help file with a nice little explanation like the one you just typed.
Do you mean like how when you click on "Help", and type in "headers", right there on the first page it says:
To use different headers or footers in your document, you must add them to different Page Styles, and then apply the styles to the pages where you want the headers or footer to appear.
And how when you click on "Page Styles" in that sentence it gives you explicit instructions about how to do what I described? I don't know what version of OpenOffice you tried this on, but I see it in clear English in the help files.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, then this must vary enormously by district, because I don't know any teachers who only have to teach for 5 hours a day and then get 2.5 hours a day to plan and grade.
You are fucking kidding. Teachers spend a signficant amount of time outside that 8-3.30 working: preparing lessons, marking, running extracurriculars.
That's their CHOICE.
If a teacher does not prepare lessons, grade homework, grade quizzes, grade tests, and attend mandatory courses, then that teacher is FIRED. I don't know quite how you define "choice" where you come from...
And how long until their regular check-in procedure for whether or not your computer is running legal copies of software morphs into a marketing opportunity by linking your ip address to your windows registration for tracking purposes? It would be the ultimate cookie, since it could essentially link every Windows user on the internet to the purchaser of the windows license, no matter where the computer moves to. Companies would leap all over this database in backroom deals, since it could allow advertisers or other companies to know the full identity of users the moment they bring up a page.
If the report said Linux has "20% more uptime" than Windows. I'm sure not one person here would be waving the FUD flag, just more slamming of Microsoft... hell I'd even put money on that bet.
I'll take your money, if you'd like. "20% more uptime" implies that one OS has an uptime of 83.3% or less. You have to have a pretty boneheaded admin on any OS to have an average downtime of 16.7%...
If on the other hand an article were to say that a study found "Windows has 3 times as much downtime", then I wouldn't be overly surprised with all the mandatory rebooting.
In many cases, it is actually in the record label's interest to post the "Tipper Tag" (Explicit lyrics label) because it will, quite frequently, boost sales.
The DRM warning, on the other hand, will most likely cut sales, ergo it is not in the label's interest.
It seems the solution is simple. Government should mandate that the DRM label contain profanity of the manufacturer's choice before the word "DRM".
In the market, on average, everyone makes money.
Technically money is not "made" by trading stocks. Trading stocks just moves money from one hand to another in exchange for a certificate, with a piece of that money going to the exchange (like a portion of winnings going to the casino).
Money is occasionally distributed by dividends to the owner of some stocks, but this has little to do with the "market" itself, except that the price someone is willing to pay another owner is based on a guess of what future dividends might be.
The funiest part is that in WA we have tribal gambling, lotteries, and you can even have actual poker rooms off the reservation if you get the permits etc.
So gambling is apparently fine, it's the online part that is illegal.
Now you know who paid for the law...
Hand optimization or writing portions of code in assembler is
the last thing 85% of these people want to do. They don't want
to be computing experts to do their science/research.
When you're talking about reuseable modules like an FFT or matrix multiplication, then many scientists doing simulations would love to have a hand optimized FFT or matrix module to plug in as a simulation component. Even if they don't know a drop of assembly themselves, having the optimized module available can make a large difference in running time for big simulations.
Is not programming productivity just as important as performance?
When you're talking about scientific computations which can sometimes take a month or more to do one run, then suddenly it can become worth it to sacrifice a bit of programmer time if it can make a substantial increase in performance. If you can do a run in a week instead of a month, then that makes a huge difference in what you can investigate. Often it's not a question of just buying more machines because sometimes you need to know the answer to the last run before starting the next one.
I was surprised to see the Powered by Sun, too. Especially since Netcraft reports all ebay machines running MS Windows Server.
You misunderstand. They were solar-powered windows servers.
However I got reprimanded by the school for allowing the kids to handle the engine. According to health and safety it can only be used behind a thick safety screen -- incase it explodes or whatever.
Would they accept signed notes from the parents?
"Will you allow your child to examine a model steam engine in science class, or should your child sit behind a safety-glass shield in the back of the room? Please check one box, and sign below."
"Safety" people are sometimes a little out of touch with reality, so if you can, it's better to find ways around them than to give up on scientific exposure.
Yeah - true - there are spoilt children everywhere. I often hear them shouting "it's not fair ... but you PROMISED" when things don't go as planned & expected ... all science can do is make predictions based on current knowledge, known facts, and best hypothesis. If "many people" can't accept that ... well what can you do?
I have a random idea... How about, don't promise things as certain if you are only considering them best predictions based on current knowledge? People don't get so upset when someone says "It looks like this will happen", and then 70% of the time that person is right. They do justifiably get upset when someone says, "This is going to happen! Definitely! You're just being ignorant if you ignore me!" and then 70% of the time that person is right... Scientists who fall into this latter category when presenting their work to the public are being most unscientific with their presentation.
Scientists need to be honest about their conclusions and the axioms, assumptions, and models upon which those conclusions depend.
Otherwise, Joe Sixpack will always buy the product that does not tell him about the known bugs. "Gee, Mable, the Microsoft version has 1000 bugs listed, but the Happy Lucky Kitty version doesn't have any bug list at all. I guess we better buy the one with no bugs!" The first company that advertises its bugs probably goes out of business or has a stockholder revolt leading to new management.
I don't know about you, but I'd be much happier with a purchased product that had a bug list, perhaps with suggested workarounds, and an estimated timetable for fixes if a fix will be forthcoming. (And if none will be forthcoming, I know to look into the workarounds.)
I mean, people NOTICE bugs by the consequences, so it's not like you can hide them. People just don't know how to deal with the bugs they get, and sometimes aren't exactly sure what triggered them. Something as simple as the presence of a page that says "Pressing button C, B, and then A causes a crash. We're still trying to figure out why," would tell me to not press the buttons in that order until they fix it.
What if the fuel tank always was full of paladium pellets?
1. Setup fake gas station.
2. Substitute hydrogen gas pump for vacuum cleaner.
3. Profit!
Molecular bonds are bound with an energy far greater than the energy supplied by electromagnetism, in the case we are considering.
This is precisely what permits resonance. Because the individual bonds are stronger than the applied force, they have a restoration force after being deformed. This is like a ball on a spring, or an old car with bad shocks. It would take a lot of energy to rip the shocks on an old car in two, but even a child can bottom out the car's shocks if they push at the resonance frequency.
In addition, the energy of room temperature heat causes continuous motion.
The contributions of thermal energy are randomized, while the coupling to an electromagnetic wave is periodic and not in thermodynamic equilibrium. The roar of the car's engine applies continuous vibration to a car's shocks, and the energy of this vibration likely even exceeds the energy a child can apply to the car, but still the child applying a periodic force is able to deform the shocks in ways that the more equilibrium vibration from the engine cannot.
That's a dumb thing to rely on. ASSUME the user is going to do unwise things, and design around that assumption.
"I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that..."
Start here, at this excellent site: http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/index.html
I have not read the entire site. I started with the first article to catch my eye, titled, "Simple Math demonstrate that the Official 9/11 Account is a Fabrication".
The article uses the most boneheaded abuse of probability I've seen in at least a month. By equivalent reasoning, Slashdot doesn't exist, because the odds of a website name starting with "S" is one in 26, and the odds of the second letter being "l" is one in 26, so the odds of Slashdot existing is (1/26)^8, or less than 1 in 200 billion.
I hope the rest of the site is a little more "scholarly", but it certainly hasn't impressed me with that one...
The huge mismatch between the size of the wave and the size of a molecule means that the effect of the electromagnetic energy is generalized heating. There are apparently no resonance effects. The heating is caused by friction of the molecules against each other.
:)
Not at all. The large size of the wave means that the interaction is essentially that of a rapidly varying electric field with a dipole. And every dipole in a region will have the resulting torque applied to it in the same direction (since the electric field will vary uniformly across a region), and therefore it cannot be considered a system in thermodynamic equilibrium. In addition, resonance effects will show up any time a molecular bond causes a dipole to return to its previous position with roughly the same periodicity as the applied fluctuation from the varying electric field (which can be fluctuation due to the frequency of that field, or due to a modulating frequency such as in the case of the field being turned on and off to transmit a digital signal). Remember that the applied torque will be in a periodic and consistent direction, and not in a random one.
It REALLY doesn't work to try to apply the photon view to this system, precisely because of the scale that you mentioned. First, one milliwatt contains over 10^20 photons per second, or over 37 million photons in the distance of one wavelength, so they are not being represented as quantized collisions. And second, you have to go back to Maxwell's equations and look at the effect for that wavelength which is relevant on the molecular distance scale, which is the treatment of the electromagnetic wave as a varying electric field.
And I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to look up the importance of the orientation of polar molecules to the functioning of various biological systems, many of which could lead to cancer and other effects when they malfunction.
Many years ago I used to think the same thing you do, then I learned a bit more about electromagnetism and about biological systems. I hope you'll spend some time thinking about this, and then you can start advocating the more accurate model in the future.
Prove that, and win a Nobel Prize. Get your name on the front page of every newspaper in the world, and never have to work again.
The interaction of electromagnetic radiation and matter is very well understood. Find some new interaction, and you will be as famous as Einstein.
In the sense that Maxwell's equations are known, yes, the interaction of electromagnetic radiation and matter is very well understood. However, they have not been solved for all biological systems, and the billiard-ball model of photon collisions does NOT tell the entire story. Ionizing radiation is NOT the entirety of interaction between radiation and matter.
For starters, the basic interaction of microwaves with matter is NOT IONIZATION, yet they still interact powerfully enough to turn a chicken into a clump of charcoal. Perhaps you should look at this page for an example of a different sort of interaction.
Now, do you really think you can tell me how the rotation of various polar molecules in a biological sample will affect an organism from first principles, while considering all possible resonance effects? If you could do that without running millions of experiments, then you'd win a Nobel prize.
The 502 people polled in this poll may have been more scared than average Americans are right now. Look at the details of the polling data. First, the people called were asked:
THEN they were asked:
And exactly the same number of people said that this was "acceptable" as chose the first option in the first question. In other words, the pollsters framed the NSA question around the government's sequence of rhetoric by leading with an "or would you rather be killed by terrorists?" question.
Responses to poll questions change enormously among the middle 30% based on how you ask the question. I think it might be prudent to wait for a more careful poll.
Why did you change your name from Bret McDanel to Eric McCarty in the first place? That seems a bit extreme and fishy to me.
If you read the article carefully, you'll note that they switch names from McCarty to McDanel and then back to McCarty, and then compare the two cases.
See, but that's the rub... the PS2 controller didn't work well. The analog sticks are placed at right angles to your thumb's natural orientation. This is stressful and unnatural.
That's because you're holding it wrong. Slide the controller forward farther in your hands so that the base only comes down to your pinky, the tips of your pointer fingers touch the L1/R1 buttons, and the analog sticks are at 45 degree angles (the natural orientation for the thumb in this position).
Growing, transporting, and distilling corn to make a gallon of ethanol uses almost as much energy as is contained in the ethanol itself.
I've heard of many people calculating this... But has anyone ever tried to prove it? Use farm equipment running on ethanol, convert the corn to ethanol using ethanol powered facilities, distribute the ethanol with an ethanol-powered supply chain, and fuel all of these things from the ethanol produced in this manner. The proponents of ethanol from corn could easily demonstrate the validity of the approach with a working example of this sort.
What's original about the PlayStation 3? Controller?
Better yet, what SHOULD be original about it? Would a Christmas-tree shaped controller be preferable? Or how about a one-button controller for simpler learning curves? If something works well, you don't have to muck with it just to be "original". Sometimes originality can get in the way of making a good product.
Do you mean like how when you click on "Help", and type in "headers", right there on the first page it says:
And how when you click on "Page Styles" in that sentence it gives you explicit instructions about how to do what I described? I don't know what version of OpenOffice you tried this on, but I see it in clear English in the help files.