Orson Scott Card is a mediocre writer with an ego that is completely out of
proportion to his talent.
Like most, the first book of his I read was Ender's Game. It isn't a bad
book. But it isn't great, either. Everything in it has been done before,
by better writers. Its popularity is due mostly to the "heroic geeky kid
beats the adults and saves the world" theme, much like Harry Potter. The
other couple books of his I've read seem pretty much the same.
Like I said, it's not really bad. I've got dozens of science fiction books
on my shelves churned out by various writers that may not be great literature,
but are still a fun afternoon read. Ender's Game should be one of them.
However, in the introduction to Ender's Game, he pretty much claimed to have
invented the idea of wargames in the future. This "review" is pretty much
just an excuse to talk about how great his book could be if made into a
movie. This kind of nonsense leaves me with something of a bad taste in my
mouth.
It's certainly possible, as can be heard in Disney's Ghilbi dubs. Although weak points can be found in Mononoke Hime, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Porco Rosso, they are all basically decent (and, I can't recall any shortcomings in Spirited Away).
You missed Castle in the Sky, which has a terrible dub. (Which is really too bad, as it's among my favorite movies.) I don't know how they managed to do such a good job on the other movies, but screwed up that one royally.
Yes, but RMS doesn't, and it was his supposed inconsistancy that the person responded to was talking about.
However, my understanding is that RMS would like to not only get rid of copyright law, but create new laws that would essentially enforce releasing source code along with binaries. If that's the case, then his support of the GPL and opposition to copyright laws is not neccessarily inconsistant.
But the reality of the situation is that you'd have to give out clickers to every student, then train the professors how to use them.
Close. The real reality of the situation is that you sell clickers to every student (making a tidy profit), and then the professors don't use them because they don't know how.
You missed "4. The people who take their education seriously and will raise their hands." You know, the kind of people that we should be encouraging to attend universities.
The only place that I've seen these clickers marketed to is huge freshman classes where everyone still acts like they're in high school anyway. The students either grow up or get out after the first couple semesters anyway.
Clickers are a solution looking for a problem.
Re:Yay! another Zonk review...
on
Review: Darkwatch
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Somehow, I thought that they would never find somebody who could match michael's stupidity, but I think that Zonk even has him beaten.
I've finally removed the "Games" topic from my home page. He's managed to completely kill it.
As long as the prices are reasonable (say $8-10 or less for N64 games and $3 or 4 for SNES) it'll be a good service and will let people buy games that are FUN and CHEAP.
Right now, there's a fair number of old NES and SNES games being sold for the game boy and gamecube. It looks like they tend to start out with a retail of $30+, dropping to around $20 after they've been out for awhile. I rather doubt that they're going to drop prices that much (if at all) for these games on their new platform.
Tabs opening blank is the *CORRECT WAY* to do it - as another poster pointed out. "I'm opening a new tab, I'm not cloning an existing one." New means *NEW*, not "clone of what I'm vewing now." When I open a *NEW* tab, it's because I want to go somewhere else, not see the exact same thing I'm already looking at.
Your argument really just boils down to "new tabs should open blank because new tabs should open blank." It doesn't actually address his complaint, which is a usability issue.
NASA has long been considered a waste of money by the conservatives, HST is just another scientific boondoggle as far as these guys are concerned.
Count on them finding some fancy excuse to de-orbit HST within the next 6 months.
The only people I've heard who want to get rid of Hubble are the ones that want to put the money into replacing it with another telescope. Of course, don't let that stop your anti-Bush dick waving.
Are you saying that it isn't obvious that they tried to make the story look serious instead of humorous?
No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that it's obvious that they posted a humorous story as if it was real for comic purposes. Nobody with intelligence should have been taken in after reading the summary. If you were, it's your own fault -- don't try to blame the slashdot editors for it.
I don't think I've ever seen a joke go whizzing past so many heads.
I assume that you never saw adequacy.org in action, then. I don't know why it is, but it seems that a disproportionate number of geeks are completely lacking their humor gene.
Is it too much to ask that we at least try to raise the bar a little - say, to the level of semi-intelligent discourse on noteworthy topics?
You say that readers should be assumed to be so slow-witted that they can't pick up on an obviously humorous story, and then claim you want semi-intelligent discourse? Yeah, I do agree -- you're on the wrong site.
This article doesn't say that alternative browsers impede investigators, or that use of these browsers is a bad thing, regardless of what the Slashdot headline says. It's just a (rather pointless) snippet about how police need to learn different techniques in order to use the data left behind by Firefox instead of IE.
Penguins do not live in the wild in any location in the Northern Hemisphere. This includes the continents of North America, Europe, and Asia. There are no penguins living in the wild in the Arctic regions of the North Pole. The only penguins living in the Northern Hemisphere are living in zoos or in wildlife displays. There are no penguins living in the wild in the Northern Hemisphere.
So, do penguins live in the wild in the northern hemisphere?
For fun, I tried plugging five questions from your page into google. Of the five, three were answered directly by google, and one had the answer in the summary for the first result. Creating a parser to determine the right answer from the google results would take some work, but I would bet that a 50% accuracy rate is not unreasonable. A first, fairly obvious method, would be to take the summary of the first google result, remove all of the words that appeared in the original question, and pick from the remaining words.
Of course, as long as your system isn't widely used, nobody will bother to create tools to defeat it.
Cute. Very cute. All the cameras were "off". If true, that makes me suspicious if they were either deliberately turned off to avoid having to deal with pesky evidence, or the data simply erased.
Or maybe, just maybe, that Anonymous Coward is making things up.
I remember when I was in high school, we were required by most math classes to "show work", so that we weren't cheating or using calculators to excess.
My problem? I used my brain as my scratchpad - so until I got used to writing things down (and taking 2-3x longer to complete a given problem) I got worse grades than my fellow classmates.
Whether or not you believe it, your teachers were trying to help you learn valuable skills by making you write out your work rather than just doing it in your head. Lots of people can do basic arithmetic in their heads, and with some work do the same in early algebra classes. Many of them do it because they find it faster, although in my experience it's usually done at least partly because they think it gives them some kind of gloating rights. Then, when they reach the tougher math courses, they suddenly find that they haven't developed the necessary skills to organize and solve a problem on paper.
When I was teaching, I often ran into students who would spend long periods of time staring at a problem, trying to figure out the correct order to plug their numbers into the calculator. They had never learned how to take a problem one step at a time, and choked when presented with something that required intermediate work.
I had a math teacher in high school who said (paraphrasing; it's been a long time) that nobody will notice that you can do arithmetic in your head, but that everyone will notice when you add two and two and get two. People may find the mental arithmetic easy, or fun, but they are setting themselves up for a lot of grief in the long run.
I don't necessarily agree with the common policy that problems without work aren't acceptable -- actually, I rather liked the policy of that same teacher, which was that if you got the question right, you got the credit -- but if you got it wrong, and didn't include your work, then no partial credit. We all learned pretty quick that it was worth our while to show our work. However, I can certainly see why some teachers choose to take a tougher stance on this.
A lot of the people using Bittorrent to distribute media are coming from Usenet, where it does make sense to split very large files into managable chunks. The fact that they still do it when using P2P software just demonstrates that they don't actually have any understanding of why it can be useful in some circumstances.
I just finished getting a copy. For those who are interested, here is how their argument goes:
Over the last decade, they say that computer hardware has seen an eightfold reduction in price, while the price of Microsoft software has doubled, and that Microsoft's margins on Windows and Office are much higher than margins on desktop computer hardware. They handwave that they can directly compare both markets, and come up with a figure of $200 million that Microsoft has "overcharged" their customers.
They then say that Australia makes up 2% of the "global marketplace." (Whatever that means -- they don't define it or cite it, though maybe it means something to the economists here.) They assume that therefore Australia makes up 2% of Microsoft's sales, and come up with a total figure of $10 billion.
Although the paper is thorougly slashdotted, and I can't seem to find a mirror, the implication of their executive summary is that they took the amount Australians spend on Windows licenses, made a guess as to how many of those were bought by people who would have chosen Linux instead if they had been offered it, and then called the amount of money spent on those licenses the "cost."
So in other words, they might as well have been throwing darts. But that's not going to stop the slashdrones from citing this as proof of Microsoft's evilness in every discussion for the next year.
Unless you've got really braindead friends it should be possible to get the idea across to them that the main idea is freedom, as in the oposite of slavery, the oposite of imprisonment, the oposite of being restrained.
Of course, then you have to explain how somebody can enslave or imprison a bunch of 1's and 0's.
Umm 4 hours a day? Now I don't know about you but that seems a little low.
My figures were for home use (as most people aren't buying a monitor, or paying electric bills, for their office.) In fact, I kind of figured that was on the high side for my use. Of course the figure varies dramatically based on your usage.
Now cheep LCD's cost 50$ more than cheep CRT's so you save 20-$ over 4 years.
For a 17-inch monitor -- the ones that I priced out, and were mentioned in your previous comment -- the cheapest LCD's seem to run around $200, while a CRT can be had for $100. (I actually did my price comparison figuring $350 for a halfway decent LCD, but prices have dropped since then.) Taking your $20/year figure, that puts you even after about five years.
When I did the numbers last time it saved 50$ over 4 years but I was comparing specific models, which made things easer.
I certainly won't argue the point that for some people, an LCD is cheaper due to energy savings. I mainly did the analysis because I kept hearing blanket statements like "an LCD pays for itself in a year," which seemed pretty farfetched to me. It seems to turn out that even if an LCD is cheaper, it's not to the extent that many people make it out to be. (Take your example -- $50 over four years. It's nice to have, but it's not exactly big money when making a purchase of several hundred dollars.)
When desiding between buying a 17" flat screan and a 17" CRT the cost of electrisity makes the CRT significantly cheeper over 4 years.
Did you mean "LCD" instead of CRT there? In either case, the energy savings isn't nearly as much as it's made out to be. I ran the numbers and came up with a energy savings of about $12 - $15 per year, assuming that I ran the monitor 4 hours a day. Monitor prices for CRTs and LCDs are still seperated by a hundred dollars or more, so unless you use it nonstop you're not likely to make up the price difference in energy costs alone.
Of course, there are other good reasons to buy an LCD. I'll probably get one to replace my current CRT monitor if it ever dies.
Slashdot Mirror
Like most, the first book of his I read was Ender's Game. It isn't a bad book. But it isn't great, either. Everything in it has been done before, by better writers. Its popularity is due mostly to the "heroic geeky kid beats the adults and saves the world" theme, much like Harry Potter. The other couple books of his I've read seem pretty much the same.
Like I said, it's not really bad. I've got dozens of science fiction books on my shelves churned out by various writers that may not be great literature, but are still a fun afternoon read. Ender's Game should be one of them.
However, in the introduction to Ender's Game, he pretty much claimed to have invented the idea of wargames in the future. This "review" is pretty much just an excuse to talk about how great his book could be if made into a movie. This kind of nonsense leaves me with something of a bad taste in my mouth.
However, my understanding is that RMS would like to not only get rid of copyright law, but create new laws that would essentially enforce releasing source code along with binaries. If that's the case, then his support of the GPL and opposition to copyright laws is not neccessarily inconsistant.
The only place that I've seen these clickers marketed to is huge freshman classes where everyone still acts like they're in high school anyway. The students either grow up or get out after the first couple semesters anyway.
Clickers are a solution looking for a problem.
Somehow, I thought that they would never find somebody who could match michael's stupidity, but I think that Zonk even has him beaten. I've finally removed the "Games" topic from my home page. He's managed to completely kill it.
Oh, crap.
Did you even bother read the page you linked to? The use of 'he' as a generic pronoun is definition 2.
This article doesn't say that alternative browsers impede investigators, or that use of these browsers is a bad thing, regardless of what the Slashdot headline says. It's just a (rather pointless) snippet about how police need to learn different techniques in order to use the data left behind by Firefox instead of IE.
Of course, as long as your system isn't widely used, nobody will bother to create tools to defeat it.
When I was teaching, I often ran into students who would spend long periods of time staring at a problem, trying to figure out the correct order to plug their numbers into the calculator. They had never learned how to take a problem one step at a time, and choked when presented with something that required intermediate work.
I had a math teacher in high school who said (paraphrasing; it's been a long time) that nobody will notice that you can do arithmetic in your head, but that everyone will notice when you add two and two and get two. People may find the mental arithmetic easy, or fun, but they are setting themselves up for a lot of grief in the long run.
I don't necessarily agree with the common policy that problems without work aren't acceptable -- actually, I rather liked the policy of that same teacher, which was that if you got the question right, you got the credit -- but if you got it wrong, and didn't include your work, then no partial credit. We all learned pretty quick that it was worth our while to show our work. However, I can certainly see why some teachers choose to take a tougher stance on this.
A lot of the people using Bittorrent to distribute media are coming from Usenet, where it does make sense to split very large files into managable chunks. The fact that they still do it when using P2P software just demonstrates that they don't actually have any understanding of why it can be useful in some circumstances.
Over the last decade, they say that computer hardware has seen an eightfold reduction in price, while the price of Microsoft software has doubled, and that Microsoft's margins on Windows and Office are much higher than margins on desktop computer hardware. They handwave that they can directly compare both markets, and come up with a figure of $200 million that Microsoft has "overcharged" their customers.
They then say that Australia makes up 2% of the "global marketplace." (Whatever that means -- they don't define it or cite it, though maybe it means something to the economists here.) They assume that therefore Australia makes up 2% of Microsoft's sales, and come up with a total figure of $10 billion.
So in other words, they might as well have been throwing darts. But that's not going to stop the slashdrones from citing this as proof of Microsoft's evilness in every discussion for the next year.
Of course, there are other good reasons to buy an LCD. I'll probably get one to replace my current CRT monitor if it ever dies.