We Canadians seem to like your space program more than you do... but then again, maybe that's cause we don't have to pay for it, just stick big arms on everything you build.
Mod parent "informative" - this one is hilarious - I didn't know about that. Now I think about all the VBScript apps I wrote for my last employer, and wonder.
Great - by extension, all the people who believed the claims of WMDs are untrained apes. Well, we knew that about one person at least - but we thought he was trained.
My opinion, in short: I believed Clinton when he said that Saddam had WMDs, because he wasn't deliberately ignoring evidence to the contrary. Plus, he used his intelligence to blow up the places they were likely to be, and exerted political pressure on Saddam. The evidence suggests it worked. Bush, on the other hand, ignored inspectors, documentation, and the world at large when he insisted they had WMDs. Instead, his buddies rigged the CIA to give him whatever flimsy justification they could find of WMDs, even trusting expat criminals with ties to enemies of the USA. He also didn't take the measured, careful approach that Clinton did (albeit even Clinton's Iraq conflict had its share of colossal fuck-ups, like the Chinese embassy bombing), instead, he seemed to be rushing more than a cold kid in a snowsuit who needed to pee.
Well, most of the Nintendo titles are literal remakes - not just continuations of a series like the new AC and Wipeout games are. Plus, there are six bazillion platformers out there, but Armored Core is actually unique.
Two launch titles I've seen so far are WipeOut and Armored Core. Those are easily two of the best console titles I've ever played. I've followed both series on the PS1 and PS2, and they haven't failed to impress - but never seem to pick up a massive following here for some reason.
Meanwhile, the best stuff I see on the GameBoy is just Nintendo being formulaic - timewasters and remakes. I really can't find titles that make my happy for my GBA. While the DS has real potential with its sexy hardware and stylus, the only game that's turned my crank on that thing is the new Metroid demo (finally a console FPS with a real aiming device).
My wife is studying to be a teacher here in Canada, and I have to agree - the problem is not a matter of wages. If anything is needed in terms of resources for teachers, its simply a matter of making sure they have enough prep time.
The real source of the problem is multidimensional. First, the fact is that teachers are totally unsupervised through their entire workday. Nobody watches the teacher do their daily thing. Even if you have class testing to check for results, that's only one performance review per year. Find me other jobs like that. Besides that, pop-culture of today has moved away from that brief burst in the tech-boom when technical knowledge was considered worthwhile. We've gone back to the '80s - the breakdown seems to be as follows: - left-wing hippy kids who go into liberal arts to do nothing - amoral right-wing assholes whose highest aspirations are to be coke-snorting business aristocrats - mentally fucked-up kids who might be geniuses, but will drop out anyways due to nihilism - girls who think a blowjob is the highest gesture of love, and anorexia is cool, and therefore have better things to do than school - keeners who care about nothing but good grades, which are increasingly disconnected from actual learning and intelligence. - jocks, rappers, and every other subcategory where they only have their eye on one goal, one they've a 1-in-10000 chance of acheiving.
None of those kids will succeed (except the asshole - and he'll only be successful on a personal level, but destructive to everyone around him).
Besides, standardised testing doesnt work - numerous studies have shown this. It dumbs down the kids, it gives kids with particular skills an unfair advantage, has bad biases in poor neighborhoods where kids weren't reared as well as in wealthy neighborhoods, and is generally unhealthy for a school system. There is no clear solution.
I find it funny how people always talk about hiring "coaches" in the States. You'll never hear those words together here in Canada. Coaches are volunteers, or teachers.
The fact is that the only subjects that are really quantifiable are math and science classes, and those aren't the ones that I see the biggest problems in. The only time that I see bad math/science teachers is cases where the Principal doesn't give a hoot about math and science and has simply retasked unqualified teachers into those departments - and in that case, they don't really seem to care about poor performance.
The problem seems to lie in ambiguous arts classes, which are really too unquantifiable for standardised testing. I see many people who breezed through school, through teachers college, and now through work teaching those classes. Nobody notices.
Well, I can see it being better - the biggest failing of the Seg was mass. This thing is lightweight - I've always wanted a vehicle I could put in a backpack and stow on the bus when travelling. Its like a portable moped. Still, too damn slow for getting around. Need something more like a fold-up motorcycle.
Besides, we all know what this should be called: its a monobike.
You forget, the movies also have threepio and artoo. Really, the original trilogy is told as much from their perspective as anyone else's. Its sad that Lucas lost that somewhat in the prequels, turning them into bizarre sideplots more than the audience's eyes.
Wow, another movie, another villain. Notice how the first Star Wars movies actually had a consistent cast? Yes, Moff Tarkin buys the farm in the first movie, but the rest of the baddies are in it from the start - Vader, Palpatine, and Jabba.
Meanwhile, Palpatine swaps out a new flunky we've never heard of before each movie who is the villain for the flick.
As stupid as his name was (and as confusing as his role was), I was hoping Dooku would return as the villain in Ep3, just to avoid the "look, here's a new baddie! Buy his action figure" effect Lucas seems to adore.
Why ewoks are better than Jar-Jar. a) no pathetic slapstick. Jar-jar can't walk into a room without doing something stupid. b) no stupid speech. Ewoks make cute little noises, but don't actually sound like a Jamaican Elmer Fudd with down-syndrome. c) Ewoks who fought the storm troopers actually had casualties, like in a real battle. Gungans were mysteriously immortal in their fight against the battledroids.
Ewoks were obviously, pointlessly cute, and the battle was a little silly with the stone-age ewoks taking out imperial AT-ST's, but they weren't as massively annoying as Jar-Jar.
Solution: stop printing full bank account and credit card numbers on every piece of information. Honestly, since so many institutions treat their account numbers like passwords (including the US government) you'd think they'd at least put the basic, minimal amount of effort into not plastering it onto every page of every document that may pass by your eyes.
The fact is that Usenet has been almost completely replaced by web-based forums. Somehow, mashing F5 every 5 seconds is a better method than actually using a system intended for providing news and conversations to most people.
There's the old complaint that WWW != The Internet. Its beyond that. Nowadays, to the layman, WWW = their computer.
Actually, to me it sounds like a BattleGround will be a fully separate server, conventional online-game style. So it sounds like its more than just capping the players - its like switching from playing an WoW to playing UT2k4 with your WoW character. Which sounds cool.
Except two little problems: 1) never heard 'em say yes. 2) on places that allow port 25 (which is free from the start, not "with permission") you still have to deal with the RBL's bitchy little sister, the Dynamic IP Blackhole List.
That solves the spam problem, but it doens't fix all the other things that one can do with an insecure box - DDOS, dictionary, etc. Besides that, it punishes people who are perfectly capable of running a mailserver.
Maybe I'm missing something too... that people have actually been giving a flying fuck about that sport since the strike 10 years ago?
Plus, from the wording of the Slashdot blurb, it sounds like they're claiming all games related to baseball. Which is preposterous, since they only have control of the use of the teams of the Major League. I hardly think they could sue a game, like, say, Base Wars.
Agreed. I'll believe in SIP when I see a free client for it that's anywhere near as good as Skype. Skype is the only "just works" cross-platform voip solution I've ever seen. Hell, even MSN voicechat is unusable on older versions of Windows since only new versions of windows support the newer versinos of MSN that have NAT traversal.
Feasible, yes. Safe? Not so much - I'd rather drivers keep their eyes on the wheel, not looking at the buttons. Yes, with practice you do it by touch, but I'd rather not be crushed during the time it takes someone to learn a new stereo.
So wait - HP's shitty, shitty pavillion desktops are gonna get even worse? And their laptops? I recently discovered an HP laptop where the heatsink was haphazardly taped on. I can only imagine what corner cutting tricks they'll add on... like special "service fee" to enable the onboard 802.11, like the cellphone people do?
Slashdot Mirror
We Canadians seem to like your space program more than you do... but then again, maybe that's cause we don't have to pay for it, just stick big arms on everything you build.
Except that Webb is not a visible-light telescope. So no, a replacement for Hubble is not in the works.
Mod parent "informative" - this one is hilarious - I didn't know about that. Now I think about all the VBScript apps I wrote for my last employer, and wonder.
Great - by extension, all the people who believed the claims of WMDs are untrained apes. Well, we knew that about one person at least - but we thought he was trained.
My opinion, in short: I believed Clinton when he said that Saddam had WMDs, because he wasn't deliberately ignoring evidence to the contrary. Plus, he used his intelligence to blow up the places they were likely to be, and exerted political pressure on Saddam. The evidence suggests it worked. Bush, on the other hand, ignored inspectors, documentation, and the world at large when he insisted they had WMDs. Instead, his buddies rigged the CIA to give him whatever flimsy justification they could find of WMDs, even trusting expat criminals with ties to enemies of the USA. He also didn't take the measured, careful approach that Clinton did (albeit even Clinton's Iraq conflict had its share of colossal fuck-ups, like the Chinese embassy bombing), instead, he seemed to be rushing more than a cold kid in a snowsuit who needed to pee.
Competition is no better than monopoly if all the options suck.
Well, most of the Nintendo titles are literal remakes - not just continuations of a series like the new AC and Wipeout games are. Plus, there are six bazillion platformers out there, but Armored Core is actually unique.
Two launch titles I've seen so far are WipeOut and Armored Core. Those are easily two of the best console titles I've ever played. I've followed both series on the PS1 and PS2, and they haven't failed to impress - but never seem to pick up a massive following here for some reason.
Meanwhile, the best stuff I see on the GameBoy is just Nintendo being formulaic - timewasters and remakes. I really can't find titles that make my happy for my GBA. While the DS has real potential with its sexy hardware and stylus, the only game that's turned my crank on that thing is the new Metroid demo (finally a console FPS with a real aiming device).
My wife is studying to be a teacher here in Canada, and I have to agree - the problem is not a matter of wages. If anything is needed in terms of resources for teachers, its simply a matter of making sure they have enough prep time.
The real source of the problem is multidimensional. First, the fact is that teachers are totally unsupervised through their entire workday. Nobody watches the teacher do their daily thing. Even if you have class testing to check for results, that's only one performance review per year. Find me other jobs like that. Besides that, pop-culture of today has moved away from that brief burst in the tech-boom when technical knowledge was considered worthwhile. We've gone back to the '80s - the breakdown seems to be as follows:
- left-wing hippy kids who go into liberal arts to do nothing
- amoral right-wing assholes whose highest aspirations are to be coke-snorting business aristocrats
- mentally fucked-up kids who might be geniuses, but will drop out anyways due to nihilism
- girls who think a blowjob is the highest gesture of love, and anorexia is cool, and therefore have better things to do than school
- keeners who care about nothing but good grades, which are increasingly disconnected from actual learning and intelligence.
- jocks, rappers, and every other subcategory where they only have their eye on one goal, one they've a 1-in-10000 chance of acheiving.
None of those kids will succeed (except the asshole - and he'll only be successful on a personal level, but destructive to everyone around him).
Besides, standardised testing doesnt work - numerous studies have shown this. It dumbs down the kids, it gives kids with particular skills an unfair advantage, has bad biases in poor neighborhoods where kids weren't reared as well as in wealthy neighborhoods, and is generally unhealthy for a school system. There is no clear solution.
I find it funny how people always talk about hiring "coaches" in the States. You'll never hear those words together here in Canada. Coaches are volunteers, or teachers.
The fact is that the only subjects that are really quantifiable are math and science classes, and those aren't the ones that I see the biggest problems in. The only time that I see bad math/science teachers is cases where the Principal doesn't give a hoot about math and science and has simply retasked unqualified teachers into those departments - and in that case, they don't really seem to care about poor performance.
The problem seems to lie in ambiguous arts classes, which are really too unquantifiable for standardised testing. I see many people who breezed through school, through teachers college, and now through work teaching those classes. Nobody notices.
Well, just remember: you might not see much sympathy when China uses that line on you 30 years from now.
Well, I can see it being better - the biggest failing of the Seg was mass. This thing is lightweight - I've always wanted a vehicle I could put in a backpack and stow on the bus when travelling. Its like a portable moped. Still, too damn slow for getting around. Need something more like a fold-up motorcycle.
Besides, we all know what this should be called: its a monobike.
You forget, the movies also have threepio and artoo. Really, the original trilogy is told as much from their perspective as anyone else's. Its sad that Lucas lost that somewhat in the prequels, turning them into bizarre sideplots more than the audience's eyes.
Neither. This is one place where Pascal and its bretherine win - A := B or A = B. Assignment is not equality, and the notation should not be such.
Still, I prefer C's brackets or Python's colons and bracing to Pascal-style "begin" and "end" statements.
Then just embed banners into the articles at evenly spaced intervals.
Wow, another movie, another villain. Notice how the first Star Wars movies actually had a consistent cast? Yes, Moff Tarkin buys the farm in the first movie, but the rest of the baddies are in it from the start - Vader, Palpatine, and Jabba.
Meanwhile, Palpatine swaps out a new flunky we've never heard of before each movie who is the villain for the flick.
As stupid as his name was (and as confusing as his role was), I was hoping Dooku would return as the villain in Ep3, just to avoid the "look, here's a new baddie! Buy his action figure" effect Lucas seems to adore.
Why ewoks are better than Jar-Jar.
a) no pathetic slapstick. Jar-jar can't walk into a room without doing something stupid.
b) no stupid speech. Ewoks make cute little noises, but don't actually sound like a Jamaican Elmer Fudd with down-syndrome.
c) Ewoks who fought the storm troopers actually had casualties, like in a real battle. Gungans were mysteriously immortal in their fight against the battledroids.
Ewoks were obviously, pointlessly cute, and the battle was a little silly with the stone-age ewoks taking out imperial AT-ST's, but they weren't as massively annoying as Jar-Jar.
Solution: stop printing full bank account and credit card numbers on every piece of information. Honestly, since so many institutions treat their account numbers like passwords (including the US government) you'd think they'd at least put the basic, minimal amount of effort into not plastering it onto every page of every document that may pass by your eyes.
Irony: Red Orchestra, a WWII FPS-themed independant mod, just won US$1000000 in the MSU contest.
The fact is that Usenet has been almost completely replaced by web-based forums. Somehow, mashing F5 every 5 seconds is a better method than actually using a system intended for providing news and conversations to most people.
There's the old complaint that WWW != The Internet. Its beyond that. Nowadays, to the layman, WWW = their computer.
Actually, to me it sounds like a BattleGround will be a fully separate server, conventional online-game style. So it sounds like its more than just capping the players - its like switching from playing an WoW to playing UT2k4 with your WoW character. Which sounds cool.
Except two little problems:
1) never heard 'em say yes.
2) on places that allow port 25 (which is free from the start, not "with permission") you still have to deal with the RBL's bitchy little sister, the Dynamic IP Blackhole List.
That solves the spam problem, but it doens't fix all the other things that one can do with an insecure box - DDOS, dictionary, etc. Besides that, it punishes people who are perfectly capable of running a mailserver.
Maybe I'm missing something too... that people have actually been giving a flying fuck about that sport since the strike 10 years ago?
Plus, from the wording of the Slashdot blurb, it sounds like they're claiming all games related to baseball. Which is preposterous, since they only have control of the use of the teams of the Major League. I hardly think they could sue a game, like, say, Base Wars.
Agreed. I'll believe in SIP when I see a free client for it that's anywhere near as good as Skype. Skype is the only "just works" cross-platform voip solution I've ever seen. Hell, even MSN voicechat is unusable on older versions of Windows since only new versions of windows support the newer versinos of MSN that have NAT traversal.
Feasible, yes. Safe? Not so much - I'd rather drivers keep their eyes on the wheel, not looking at the buttons. Yes, with practice you do it by touch, but I'd rather not be crushed during the time it takes someone to learn a new stereo.
So wait - HP's shitty, shitty pavillion desktops are gonna get even worse? And their laptops? I recently discovered an HP laptop where the heatsink was haphazardly taped on. I can only imagine what corner cutting tricks they'll add on... like special "service fee" to enable the onboard 802.11, like the cellphone people do?