Mod parent up, indeed, it is powered - while I was working on my grandparents' phone system, a family friend found it necessary to call them every 2 minutes for an hour because no one picked up the phone and she thought something had happened to them - SHOCKING.
Not just stupid, also wrong. Last time I checked Mexico was still part of the North American continent...next time drive down to Nicaragua and jump there.
We (Americans) also picked up the disease known as the Imperial measurement system:-) It's simply spectacular than 12 inches = 1 foot, 5280 feet = 1 mile, and 1 acre = 43560 square feet. This, clearly, is much more logical and obvious than that pesky metric system with it's 100 centimeters = 1 meter, 1000 meters = 1 km, and 1 square km = you guessed it, 1000000 square meters. I also love having to buy 2 sets of tools to work on my house/car, thanks again, UK.
Less than $300 is still a lot for a graphics card. Some higher end CPUs (Intel Core i7 920) go for around that price, and CPUs are much more important than a graphics card in terms of functionality (although GPUs have become more important recently). If you don't have a CPU, your computer doesn't work at all. If you don't have a discrete graphics card, you can still do a great many things aside from playing games/rendering graphics. I want to be able to run just about any game out there at max settings for about $150, not $300.
As is usually the case, if you want to buy bleeding edge, you're going to pay bleeding edge prices, even if there is only a 10-15% improvement over the older stuff.
Calculus is probably more similar to programming than chess or basket weaving. In programming, you have a well defined problem with discrete parameters (inputs/outputs). The same is true of calculus. It stresses your ability to problem solve rather than your ability to write code. If you're developing, say, algorithms, this could be an important skill.
I understand where you're coming from. I struggled with math when I was younger - long division didn't click for me right away, I got mediocre grades in algebra. Yet when I joined my junior high math team, I would consistently score the best on the team (even the kids that were getting better grades in algebra). Those problems, while algebra based, were word problems and not something like solve for y given x = 2y+3. I don't know why, but the math team event problems just made more sense to me. Eventually, something clicked and math in general started making more sense. By the time I got to multivariate calc in college, I was finishing exams early, breaking the bell curve, and earning the hatred of my classmates who were struggling.
The thing of it is, Calculus is a lot easier than programming. The approach to solving a problem is always the same, the procedure you use to solve that problem is always the same. Sure, you have to know some gotchas for fringe cases, but in general, you are just applying the same set of rules to get your solution.
A bunch of people have already replied to this, but I'll stick in my $0.02...Calculus is a construct in which you are given problems to solve. If you can't learn the construct and solve the problems, how can you be expected to learn other constructs (C, C++, Java, etc) and solve problems in those domains? Calculus, like programming languages, is just a tool. If you can't learn to use the tools, how can you be expected to do the work?
Indeed, and at least the footprints of some concentration camps still exist, where they will show you footage of what happened there and give you tours of the ovens and gas chambers. I happened to visit Dachau a few years ago. Repression is not the best way to prevent the past from repeating itself.
people were using the buy one Blackberry get one free promotion, canceling service, and selling that second Blackberry at a profit. What, are you feeling bad because you didn't think of it sooner? So am I:-)
Yeah, I also forgot to mention something like a pellet stove, which transfers a lot of heat to the interior of the structure through the sides of the stove, despite venting smoke and some heat out of the chimney. Also, if you have to make a choice between using the fireplace or stove and freezing to death, you probably don't care about its efficiency, as long as it keeps you warm.
You originally wrote: "Personally I carry everywhere that it's legal to do so. I hope and pray that I never have to use it. Should the day come though I won't be cowering under a desk waiting to be murdered by some mental case or Mumbai copy-cat."
Chances are, if you are American at least, you are much more likely to die from heart disease or cancer than from your supposed mental case or copy cat. Ergo, your effort of carrying around a gun is wasted, or at best not an efficient use of your resources. You are trying to protect yourself against a probabilistically unlikely event, when you could BETTER spend your efforts dealing with things like diet and exercise, for example.
This is not to say that the right to bear arms is unimportant, but let's face it - if there is a mental case, don't you think they'd rather blow up the building/bus/train/highway than try to individually shoot people? At least that is what has been mostly happening over in the sand box.
How about a fireplace? Of course it requires a bit of pre-planning to stockpile some dry wood, but otherwise seems like a much better alternative to a propane heater/car/just wear the right clothes.
His point was probably that you are much more likely to be shot/stabbed/deleted by your significant other or someone you know than a "mental case or Mumbai copy-cat".
I'll agree with you on the shady practices of Intel when the Athlon line was launched - but I don't think a one hit wonder like that should magically position AMD as the top chip maker. There are probably other reasons why AMD didn't enjoy a greater deal of success even though it had, for a limited time, a superior product. Brand recognition is one reason. Reluctance of professionals trusting AMD processors in server grade machines could be another. The P4 may have sucked but keep in mind that previously AMDs chips sucked as well, and for a long time the only thing AMD was good for was reverse engineering Intel designs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD#IBM_PC_and_the_x86_architecture)
I don't want to sound condescending or anything - but do you know your electrical well? If I put a 0.25 Amp fuse in an outlet that I normally use for a lamp and then decide to plug in an 8.0 Amp Vacuum cleaner the next week, then what? I either have to constantly fuck around with the fuse size in the outlet or remember never to use a high draw device there. This idea just seems stupid to me. And you don't put a GFCI at EVERY socket (outlet), you put it at the first outlet in the run, and the rest of the outlets downstream from there are all protected by the 1 GFCI outlet. Here's a crude diagram:
A----B----C----D----E
A = fuse box/circuit breaker box
B = GFCI outlet
C through E = normal outlets wired in parallel via the GFCI outlet B
everything from the panel to the wall plates got changed out. Bedrooms now require AFCI protection at the panel or in the first outlet of a run, GFCIs protect any outlets near water (kitchen & bathroom, and 1 GFCI can protect a number of other connected outlets downstream), the non-GFCI outlets have "shutters" on them and 3 prongs. I don't quite understand why anyone would think a fuse (what year are we in anyway) is better than a GFCI/AFCI breaker. Furthermore, those thicker UK prongs are probably a bitch to plug in/out and have to almost guarantee that tripping/yanking on a wire will result in the entire flippin outlet getting ripped out of the wall with it. Thanks but I'll stick to what we got here in the USA. Oh yeah and whoever mentioned that appliances don't have grounds was kinda sorta right. My 240 volt central A/C has two hots (120 + 120) and a neutral, no ground, it was just installed a few months ago.
I appreciate your point. The view I hit upon also happens to be my own, so we have that in common. Think about it though - we are both clearly well evolved and intelligent people - at the end of the day, wouldn't you want the criminal to be reformed and become a functional and positively contributing member of society? Politicians may bill prison as a deterrent, but clearly it isn't working, or jails would be empty. Victims of crime see prison as revenge, but we can't consider them to act or think rationally under whatever stress they have been put through by the criminal. I don't think prisons are working well to reform criminals, but I do think that should be their end goal. If you haven't read about Kohlberg's stages of moral development, here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development
Spend a couple of minutes there, it's worth your time.
So, the situation that has been described with the Toyota/Lexus cars has happened to me at least a handful of times with my A4. When I notice the car continuing to accelerate, which usually takes about a second or so, I immediately depress the clutch, let the engine "redline", which really means it hits the fuel cutoff, and yank the floor mat back. I think driving a manual does make you more aware of what's going on. At the very least it requires more attention and physical coordination/finesse. Maybe if I drove an automatic, I wouldn't realize I had to pull the lever into Neutral, or at least not as quickly.
That throttle valve is located in most cases close to the top of your engine - as is the cable or the electronic throttle positioning device. If those things are getting inundated with water, you have bigger problems than electrical shorting...
So, instead of improving their 3G service areas, they spent time and money on suing Verizon for pointing out their obviously inferior high speed network. "Wah mommy, Verizon is making fun of me." Half the time my coworkers with iPhones can't even make a voice call in my building, let alone get high speed data. Thanks, but I think I'll stick with my lousy Verizon phone, at least I can make calls pretty much anywhere.
Finding a consensus on the purpose of imprisonment is pretty much impossible.
No, it really isn't. In the US at least, the prison system is officially called the Department of Corrections (DoC), and prisons are also commonly referred to as correctional facilities. Clearly, the "purpose" of imprisonment is to correct or reform the individual so they are no longer a threat to themselves and/or others. Now, whether or not the DoC is successful in achieving that purpose is quite debatable. What is also debatable is whether or not anyone actually cares if they get reformed, so long as they are segregated from the rest of society and as the GP posted, kept off the street.
I used this in college, albeit not while I was attending a lecture. Still, you should be able to click the various special formula buttons at least as fast as some prof is either talking through slides or writing them on a board. By the way, it is also a good tool for checking whether or not you solved an equation correctly. I've used it up to and including multivariate calculus, so it should take you quite a ways. My memory of matrix algebra is kind of fuzzy so don't remember how good it was there, but overall it should work for you.
From the article: "The gene variant isn't always bad, though. Studies have found that people with it maintain their usual mental sharpness longer than those without it when neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and multiple sclerosis are present."
My take: "usual mental sharpness" - a dull knife is still dull after you run it over concrete. Maybe the people with the gene variant just aren't as "sharp" to begin with, which is why they appear not to change for a longer period of time.
Alright so here's my contribution to the whole driving/traffic laws discussion - I was driving home from work during rush hour one day and coming up to an automated toll plaza (the booth accepted either exact change or EZPass, here's a link for those who don't know what EZPass is - http://www.ezpass.com/). So this car in front of me decided to go through the clearly marked EZPass only lane of the toll booth, only, she didn't have an EZPass. So, she stopped her car at the booth. And I stopped behind her, and traffic started piling up behind me rather quickly since it was rush hour and she was blocking the only EZPass lane at the toll plaza. I gave her 2 minutes to figure out what she should do, and then proceeded to get out of my car and walk up to hers. I asked her what the (expletive) she thought she was doing there. She told me she was driving a rental car and forgot she didn't have EZPass. So I replied, "What the (expletive) do you think is going to happen here? This is an automated plaza, no human being works here, and no one is going to magically show up and fix this. There's at least half a mile of cars backed up here because you've stopped. Just continue to drive through and you'll get a ticket in the mail, the camera (I pointed out the security camera that was aimed at her license plate) already took a picture of your plate because you have no EZPass, so the damage is done. You can't do anything about it now."
Moral: If you have no common sense, do not operate a motor vehicle. You will definitely injure, kill, or piss people off. Do everyone a favor and use mass transit, or just shop on the Internet.
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Mod parent up, indeed, it is powered - while I was working on my grandparents' phone system, a family friend found it necessary to call them every 2 minutes for an hour because no one picked up the phone and she thought something had happened to them - SHOCKING.
But labeling it as such is just stupid.
Not just stupid, also wrong. Last time I checked Mexico was still part of the North American continent...next time drive down to Nicaragua and jump there.
We (Americans) also picked up the disease known as the Imperial measurement system :-) It's simply spectacular than 12 inches = 1 foot, 5280 feet = 1 mile, and 1 acre = 43560 square feet. This, clearly, is much more logical and obvious than that pesky metric system with it's 100 centimeters = 1 meter, 1000 meters = 1 km, and 1 square km = you guessed it, 1000000 square meters. I also love having to buy 2 sets of tools to work on my house/car, thanks again, UK.
Less than $300 is still a lot for a graphics card. Some higher end CPUs (Intel Core i7 920) go for around that price, and CPUs are much more important than a graphics card in terms of functionality (although GPUs have become more important recently). If you don't have a CPU, your computer doesn't work at all. If you don't have a discrete graphics card, you can still do a great many things aside from playing games/rendering graphics. I want to be able to run just about any game out there at max settings for about $150, not $300.
As is usually the case, if you want to buy bleeding edge, you're going to pay bleeding edge prices, even if there is only a 10-15% improvement over the older stuff.
sell the customer data to some health insurance company.
Calculus is probably more similar to programming than chess or basket weaving. In programming, you have a well defined problem with discrete parameters (inputs/outputs). The same is true of calculus. It stresses your ability to problem solve rather than your ability to write code. If you're developing, say, algorithms, this could be an important skill.
I understand where you're coming from. I struggled with math when I was younger - long division didn't click for me right away, I got mediocre grades in algebra. Yet when I joined my junior high math team, I would consistently score the best on the team (even the kids that were getting better grades in algebra). Those problems, while algebra based, were word problems and not something like solve for y given x = 2y+3. I don't know why, but the math team event problems just made more sense to me. Eventually, something clicked and math in general started making more sense. By the time I got to multivariate calc in college, I was finishing exams early, breaking the bell curve, and earning the hatred of my classmates who were struggling.
The thing of it is, Calculus is a lot easier than programming. The approach to solving a problem is always the same, the procedure you use to solve that problem is always the same. Sure, you have to know some gotchas for fringe cases, but in general, you are just applying the same set of rules to get your solution.
A bunch of people have already replied to this, but I'll stick in my $0.02...Calculus is a construct in which you are given problems to solve. If you can't learn the construct and solve the problems, how can you be expected to learn other constructs (C, C++, Java, etc) and solve problems in those domains? Calculus, like programming languages, is just a tool. If you can't learn to use the tools, how can you be expected to do the work?
Indeed, and at least the footprints of some concentration camps still exist, where they will show you footage of what happened there and give you tours of the ovens and gas chambers. I happened to visit Dachau a few years ago. Repression is not the best way to prevent the past from repeating itself.
I'm guessing you got a full refund for whatever you paid for them? The people that were "beating" the system kept theirs and just paid the ETF.
people were using the buy one Blackberry get one free promotion, canceling service, and selling that second Blackberry at a profit. What, are you feeling bad because you didn't think of it sooner? So am I :-)
Yeah, I also forgot to mention something like a pellet stove, which transfers a lot of heat to the interior of the structure through the sides of the stove, despite venting smoke and some heat out of the chimney. Also, if you have to make a choice between using the fireplace or stove and freezing to death, you probably don't care about its efficiency, as long as it keeps you warm.
You originally wrote:
"Personally I carry everywhere that it's legal to do so. I hope and pray that I never have to use it. Should the day come though I won't be cowering under a desk waiting to be murdered by some mental case or Mumbai copy-cat."
Chances are, if you are American at least, you are much more likely to die from heart disease or cancer than from your supposed mental case or copy cat. Ergo, your effort of carrying around a gun is wasted, or at best not an efficient use of your resources. You are trying to protect yourself against a probabilistically unlikely event, when you could BETTER spend your efforts dealing with things like diet and exercise, for example.
This is not to say that the right to bear arms is unimportant, but let's face it - if there is a mental case, don't you think they'd rather blow up the building/bus/train/highway than try to individually shoot people? At least that is what has been mostly happening over in the sand box.
Because carrying your gun around all day is not going to protect you from your wife/husband pwning you while you are asleep in bed...
How about a fireplace? Of course it requires a bit of pre-planning to stockpile some dry wood, but otherwise seems like a much better alternative to a propane heater/car/just wear the right clothes.
His point was probably that you are much more likely to be shot/stabbed/deleted by your significant other or someone you know than a "mental case or Mumbai copy-cat".
I'll agree with you on the shady practices of Intel when the Athlon line was launched - but I don't think a one hit wonder like that should magically position AMD as the top chip maker. There are probably other reasons why AMD didn't enjoy a greater deal of success even though it had, for a limited time, a superior product. Brand recognition is one reason. Reluctance of professionals trusting AMD processors in server grade machines could be another. The P4 may have sucked but keep in mind that previously AMDs chips sucked as well, and for a long time the only thing AMD was good for was reverse engineering Intel designs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD#IBM_PC_and_the_x86_architecture)
I don't want to sound condescending or anything - but do you know your electrical well? If I put a 0.25 Amp fuse in an outlet that I normally use for a lamp and then decide to plug in an 8.0 Amp Vacuum cleaner the next week, then what? I either have to constantly fuck around with the fuse size in the outlet or remember never to use a high draw device there. This idea just seems stupid to me. And you don't put a GFCI at EVERY socket (outlet), you put it at the first outlet in the run, and the rest of the outlets downstream from there are all protected by the 1 GFCI outlet. Here's a crude diagram:
A----B----C----D----E
A = fuse box/circuit breaker box
B = GFCI outlet
C through E = normal outlets wired in parallel via the GFCI outlet B
everything from the panel to the wall plates got changed out. Bedrooms now require AFCI protection at the panel or in the first outlet of a run, GFCIs protect any outlets near water (kitchen & bathroom, and 1 GFCI can protect a number of other connected outlets downstream), the non-GFCI outlets have "shutters" on them and 3 prongs. I don't quite understand why anyone would think a fuse (what year are we in anyway) is better than a GFCI/AFCI breaker. Furthermore, those thicker UK prongs are probably a bitch to plug in/out and have to almost guarantee that tripping/yanking on a wire will result in the entire flippin outlet getting ripped out of the wall with it. Thanks but I'll stick to what we got here in the USA. Oh yeah and whoever mentioned that appliances don't have grounds was kinda sorta right. My 240 volt central A/C has two hots (120 + 120) and a neutral, no ground, it was just installed a few months ago.
I appreciate your point. The view I hit upon also happens to be my own, so we have that in common. Think about it though - we are both clearly well evolved and intelligent people - at the end of the day, wouldn't you want the criminal to be reformed and become a functional and positively contributing member of society? Politicians may bill prison as a deterrent, but clearly it isn't working, or jails would be empty. Victims of crime see prison as revenge, but we can't consider them to act or think rationally under whatever stress they have been put through by the criminal. I don't think prisons are working well to reform criminals, but I do think that should be their end goal. If you haven't read about Kohlberg's stages of moral development, here's a link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development Spend a couple of minutes there, it's worth your time.
So, the situation that has been described with the Toyota/Lexus cars has happened to me at least a handful of times with my A4. When I notice the car continuing to accelerate, which usually takes about a second or so, I immediately depress the clutch, let the engine "redline", which really means it hits the fuel cutoff, and yank the floor mat back. I think driving a manual does make you more aware of what's going on. At the very least it requires more attention and physical coordination/finesse. Maybe if I drove an automatic, I wouldn't realize I had to pull the lever into Neutral, or at least not as quickly.
That throttle valve is located in most cases close to the top of your engine - as is the cable or the electronic throttle positioning device. If those things are getting inundated with water, you have bigger problems than electrical shorting...
So, instead of improving their 3G service areas, they spent time and money on suing Verizon for pointing out their obviously inferior high speed network. "Wah mommy, Verizon is making fun of me." Half the time my coworkers with iPhones can't even make a voice call in my building, let alone get high speed data. Thanks, but I think I'll stick with my lousy Verizon phone, at least I can make calls pretty much anywhere.
Finding a consensus on the purpose of imprisonment is pretty much impossible.
No, it really isn't. In the US at least, the prison system is officially called the Department of Corrections (DoC), and prisons are also commonly referred to as correctional facilities. Clearly, the "purpose" of imprisonment is to correct or reform the individual so they are no longer a threat to themselves and/or others. Now, whether or not the DoC is successful in achieving that purpose is quite debatable. What is also debatable is whether or not anyone actually cares if they get reformed, so long as they are segregated from the rest of society and as the GP posted, kept off the street.
I used this in college, albeit not while I was attending a lecture. Still, you should be able to click the various special formula buttons at least as fast as some prof is either talking through slides or writing them on a board. By the way, it is also a good tool for checking whether or not you solved an equation correctly. I've used it up to and including multivariate calculus, so it should take you quite a ways. My memory of matrix algebra is kind of fuzzy so don't remember how good it was there, but overall it should work for you.
From the article: "The gene variant isn't always bad, though. Studies have found that people with it maintain their usual mental sharpness longer than those without it when neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and multiple sclerosis are present."
My take: "usual mental sharpness" - a dull knife is still dull after you run it over concrete. Maybe the people with the gene variant just aren't as "sharp" to begin with, which is why they appear not to change for a longer period of time.
Alright so here's my contribution to the whole driving/traffic laws discussion - I was driving home from work during rush hour one day and coming up to an automated toll plaza (the booth accepted either exact change or EZPass, here's a link for those who don't know what EZPass is - http://www.ezpass.com/). So this car in front of me decided to go through the clearly marked EZPass only lane of the toll booth, only, she didn't have an EZPass. So, she stopped her car at the booth. And I stopped behind her, and traffic started piling up behind me rather quickly since it was rush hour and she was blocking the only EZPass lane at the toll plaza. I gave her 2 minutes to figure out what she should do, and then proceeded to get out of my car and walk up to hers. I asked her what the (expletive) she thought she was doing there. She told me she was driving a rental car and forgot she didn't have EZPass. So I replied, "What the (expletive) do you think is going to happen here? This is an automated plaza, no human being works here, and no one is going to magically show up and fix this. There's at least half a mile of cars backed up here because you've stopped. Just continue to drive through and you'll get a ticket in the mail, the camera (I pointed out the security camera that was aimed at her license plate) already took a picture of your plate because you have no EZPass, so the damage is done. You can't do anything about it now."
Moral: If you have no common sense, do not operate a motor vehicle. You will definitely injure, kill, or piss people off. Do everyone a favor and use mass transit, or just shop on the Internet.