But, really, are those relatively minor skills (minor in that they do not take long to learn if you already know basic math) really require classes? You could get the information anywhere. Someone you know, a book, or the internet. A class that lasts months wouldn't be required, as far as I see. Fractions are useful, but I'd suspect that someone in high school would already know them.
By that logic, we don't need schools at all--when I want to know geometry or grammar I can just look it up on the Internet, right? Wrong, because if they don't know it exists, they won't know what to google. You need to teach them enough that the remember the name of Pythagorean Theorem or Percentage Yield, not necessarily how to do it.
Furthermore, just teaching them the basics and hoping they'll figure out the rest (before they forget it all as meaningless) is a fool's errand. The extrapolation from fundamentals to applications is easy for some (especially those who have done lots of "useless" advanced academics to train their minds) but hard for most. It is that leap that is most important to teach, otherwise they will say "what good is a percent, why should i learn this" and "wtf is my interest payment so high" in the same breath and never know the irony.
Add to that the fact that a large portion of elementary students (in the US at least) are behind grade level in all subjects, and you see the need for a vocational math track in high school. Not to mention that there are some financial concepts that are extremely important, but so contorted by accounting practices that they are hard to figure out on your own. Everyone could benefit from a class like that (even if they pass by exam only).
To the best of my knowledge NASA is kind of a management consultant group... They contract EVERYTHING out.
No, you're confusing us with DoD. DoD contracts everything out, but NASA has a mix of contract and in-house services. We generally contract out pieces of satellites and assemble them ourselves (and fix everything the contractor f***ed up). In terms of IT, basic workstations are administered by contract suppliers, but other systems are owned by the government and administered by civil servants (engineering workstations, lab equipment computers, ground support operations, data processing supercomptuers, etc.). Many of these systems are connected to the Internet to get software updates and research problems when troubleshooting. But I do know that the ground support networks for satellites and large tests are definitely not connected to the Internet.
Once one misses one or two episodes of a show because of scheduling conflicts, it is much easier to miss the 3rd, 4th, and 5th episode and so on. If that happens enough, the show loses viability. That happens to enough shows on a given channel, the channel loses viability. The key here is what constitutes a scheduling conflict. In the day of Tivo, bit torrent, and other competitors who don't mind streaming their shows... the bar for conflict is dropping steadily.
Actually, this raises an interesting point. Back in the old days, if you missed a show you would never get to see it again (until re-runs next season), and so you would either make a big effort to see it, or get a summary from your friends and keep watching, or drop the series. Now, you can "pirate" the episode you missed and get back into it. Except once you pirate one episode, you're more likely to pirate the rest of them (since it's so much nicer), and that's the same as dropping it.
More likely, in 200 years when historians find an archive of the 2010 internet on an optical cube in someone's basement they will be glad that those words are still in the dictionary (perhaps listed as antiquated, but still there).
Well, they do say that English rap^H^H^H forcibly takes new words from foreign languages. Although this word probably liked it.
I think this is said about most living languages. Just look at all the English words making their way into spoken Japanese, for example. They start out being cute extra-cultural references, then they become popular and take on a life of their own in the new language. That's one of the wonders of living language. Oxford is just trying to keep up with it in their own, 30-year-delayed way.
You misunderstand. The capacitors will be in oil-drum-sized containers beneath the filling station, and they will provide the power to charge the car's chemical battery. The goal is to charge the car in a matter of minutes or seconds (dictated by the battery chemistry) without demanding huge load transients directly from the power grid. Capacitors were chosen because they can provide thousands or millions of charge/discharge cycles at very high currents with very little maintenance. The investment cost will be offset by the near-constant use in a public facility.
We worked all this out the last time a battery article came up. You can slow-charge at home, or fast charge at filling stations. Filling stations will install banks of capacitors that recharge in, say, 15-30 minutes from a dedicated high-power line. You drive in, dump a capacitor into your car, and go. It will take a good bit of work to get those power drops at every gas station, though, and capacitors are expensive. But then you don't have to worry about filling the fuel tanks or anything.
Hey, if I could trade a leg for a third hand, I'd give it some serious consideration. Sure, I'd have to recharge the wheel-chair every night and keep a crutch around, but boy would it make soldering easier!
I see why you posted Anonymous Coward, otherwise you might end up with hoards of vagrants opening all your mail before you get home in the evening. Some of us prefer to avoid that worry altogether.
This is equivalent to writing down an oral history. Sure, before modern science we could say there are 86,400 seconds in a day and a day is one revolution of the earth, but that is no longer good enough for the experiments we do. So the international scientific community decided to make a more precise definition of a second based on something else. They made measurements so that the new definition is as close to the old definition as it could possibly be, but now it is fixed and it is many times more precise than the old standard, so it is more useful for scientific experiments.
Frankly, if you are worried about 1 second every 1700 years then I think you should already give more weight to the scientific definition rather than the colloquial definition. Otherwise, it doesn't matter one bit which way you choose to express the value of one second. But if you ask a scientist, he will say the only correct *definition* is the Cesium atom, because in science there is only one right answer (no matter how hard that is for some people to understand).
I should clarify what I mean: The "right" to set terms of sale of a creative work is *not fundamental* and is *conferred* by copyright law, pursuant to the purpose laid out in the Constitution. It is important not to put the cart before the horse and assume that copy rights are as important as the "unalienable rights" to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" because they most certainly are not. If anything, copy rights should be considered *privileges*, granted for limited time as a reward for adding to the sum of human knowledge, not something you are automatically entitled to because it came out of your head.
A creator has the right to, as part of the terms of selling his work, require that the receiver not make copies for anyone else. ... I'm merely giving an answer to the question of why we should have copyright law.
The only problem is that the reason why we have copyright law is codified in the U.S. Constitution, and is completely different from what you suggest:
Ah, but you see, this is the beauty of the U.S. Senate. Power is held not by the majority, but by the 51st person to declare whose side he is on. Everything can be sacrificed to the whim of the swing votes. And recently, that 51st has been Republican, or at least more Republican than we would have liked.
And secondly, the democrats are in bed with the IP lobby just as much if not more than republicans. It's hard to tell which is the lesser of two evils if they're both falling down a bottomless pit of evilness. I guess we just have to pick whichever one is falling more slowly...
So we get the mildly upgradeable laptops, most do away with a processor socket and go with a bga soldered to the board to save $0.32 per unit made eliminating processor upgrades.
High-speed sockets are expensive, and a mobile CPU socket would probably be at least a few dollars in quantity nowadays. The bigger problem is it would add thickness, weight and failure points.
Slashdot Mirror
But, really, are those relatively minor skills (minor in that they do not take long to learn if you already know basic math) really require classes? You could get the information anywhere. Someone you know, a book, or the internet. A class that lasts months wouldn't be required, as far as I see. Fractions are useful, but I'd suspect that someone in high school would already know them.
By that logic, we don't need schools at all--when I want to know geometry or grammar I can just look it up on the Internet, right? Wrong, because if they don't know it exists, they won't know what to google. You need to teach them enough that the remember the name of Pythagorean Theorem or Percentage Yield, not necessarily how to do it.
Furthermore, just teaching them the basics and hoping they'll figure out the rest (before they forget it all as meaningless) is a fool's errand. The extrapolation from fundamentals to applications is easy for some (especially those who have done lots of "useless" advanced academics to train their minds) but hard for most. It is that leap that is most important to teach, otherwise they will say "what good is a percent, why should i learn this" and "wtf is my interest payment so high" in the same breath and never know the irony.
Add to that the fact that a large portion of elementary students (in the US at least) are behind grade level in all subjects, and you see the need for a vocational math track in high school. Not to mention that there are some financial concepts that are extremely important, but so contorted by accounting practices that they are hard to figure out on your own. Everyone could benefit from a class like that (even if they pass by exam only).
To the best of my knowledge NASA is kind of a management consultant group... They contract EVERYTHING out.
No, you're confusing us with DoD. DoD contracts everything out, but NASA has a mix of contract and in-house services. We generally contract out pieces of satellites and assemble them ourselves (and fix everything the contractor f***ed up). In terms of IT, basic workstations are administered by contract suppliers, but other systems are owned by the government and administered by civil servants (engineering workstations, lab equipment computers, ground support operations, data processing supercomptuers, etc.). Many of these systems are connected to the Internet to get software updates and research problems when troubleshooting. But I do know that the ground support networks for satellites and large tests are definitely not connected to the Internet.
Once one misses one or two episodes of a show because of scheduling conflicts, it is much easier to miss the 3rd, 4th, and 5th episode and so on. If that happens enough, the show loses viability. That happens to enough shows on a given channel, the channel loses viability. The key here is what constitutes a scheduling conflict. In the day of Tivo, bit torrent, and other competitors who don't mind streaming their shows... the bar for conflict is dropping steadily.
Actually, this raises an interesting point. Back in the old days, if you missed a show you would never get to see it again (until re-runs next season), and so you would either make a big effort to see it, or get a summary from your friends and keep watching, or drop the series. Now, you can "pirate" the episode you missed and get back into it. Except once you pirate one episode, you're more likely to pirate the rest of them (since it's so much nicer), and that's the same as dropping it.
More likely, in 200 years when historians find an archive of the 2010 internet on an optical cube in someone's basement they will be glad that those words are still in the dictionary (perhaps listed as antiquated, but still there).
Well, they do say that English rap^H^H^H forcibly takes new words from foreign languages. Although this word probably liked it.
I think this is said about most living languages. Just look at all the English words making their way into spoken Japanese, for example. They start out being cute extra-cultural references, then they become popular and take on a life of their own in the new language. That's one of the wonders of living language. Oxford is just trying to keep up with it in their own, 30-year-delayed way.
No, they want you to believe that they want you to believe that, but couldn't care less if you actually believe it.
Funny that you're all 6-digit UIDs but the OP is the lowest.
I second this. My EVGA GTS450 is so quiet I can hardly tell the machine is on, even when playing games.
You misunderstand. The capacitors will be in oil-drum-sized containers beneath the filling station, and they will provide the power to charge the car's chemical battery. The goal is to charge the car in a matter of minutes or seconds (dictated by the battery chemistry) without demanding huge load transients directly from the power grid. Capacitors were chosen because they can provide thousands or millions of charge/discharge cycles at very high currents with very little maintenance. The investment cost will be offset by the near-constant use in a public facility.
We worked all this out the last time a battery article came up. You can slow-charge at home, or fast charge at filling stations. Filling stations will install banks of capacitors that recharge in, say, 15-30 minutes from a dedicated high-power line. You drive in, dump a capacitor into your car, and go. It will take a good bit of work to get those power drops at every gas station, though, and capacitors are expensive. But then you don't have to worry about filling the fuel tanks or anything.
Hey, if I could trade a leg for a third hand, I'd give it some serious consideration. Sure, I'd have to recharge the wheel-chair every night and keep a crutch around, but boy would it make soldering easier!
How can you possibly be overqualified for a tenure-track research position?
I see why you posted Anonymous Coward, otherwise you might end up with hoards of vagrants opening all your mail before you get home in the evening. Some of us prefer to avoid that worry altogether.
Frankly, if you are worried about 1 second every 1700 years then I think you should already give more weight to the scientific definition rather than the colloquial definition. Otherwise, it doesn't matter one bit which way you choose to express the value of one second. But if you ask a scientist, he will say the only correct *definition* is the Cesium atom, because in science there is only one right answer (no matter how hard that is for some people to understand).
I should clarify what I mean: The "right" to set terms of sale of a creative work is *not fundamental* and is *conferred* by copyright law, pursuant to the purpose laid out in the Constitution. It is important not to put the cart before the horse and assume that copy rights are as important as the "unalienable rights" to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" because they most certainly are not. If anything, copy rights should be considered *privileges*, granted for limited time as a reward for adding to the sum of human knowledge, not something you are automatically entitled to because it came out of your head.
A creator has the right to, as part of the terms of selling his work, require that the receiver not make copies for anyone else.
...
I'm merely giving an answer to the question of why we should have copyright law.
The only problem is that the reason why we have copyright law is codified in the U.S. Constitution, and is completely different from what you suggest:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
To suggest otherwise would imply the need for a constitutional amendment, and I haven't heard anybody mention that recently.
I take it the first insult went right over your head, then? Not surprising.
So when do we create a Wikipedia article about the OMM deletion controversy? I can't wait to see the THAT article's deletion controversy!
Ah, but you see, this is the beauty of the U.S. Senate. Power is held not by the majority, but by the 51st person to declare whose side he is on. Everything can be sacrificed to the whim of the swing votes. And recently, that 51st has been Republican, or at least more Republican than we would have liked.
And secondly, the democrats are in bed with the IP lobby just as much if not more than republicans. It's hard to tell which is the lesser of two evils if they're both falling down a bottomless pit of evilness. I guess we just have to pick whichever one is falling more slowly...
I was gonna say, there should be some big celebration on Pi day 2016, but then remembered nobody else writes their dates that way...
We have an entire industry built around this box-checking requirement. Does anyone else think that's a huge waste to time and money?
There are more. How about the tax law industry? They're the ones lobbying against simplifying the tax code because it would put them out of a job.
Don't forget the NSA. They are a major center of Math/CS/Crypto research.
Well, for most Slashdotters, but in many other cases, her dad is the ....
Wait, what?!?!?!
So we get the mildly upgradeable laptops, most do away with a processor socket and go with a bga soldered to the board to save $0.32 per unit made eliminating processor upgrades.
High-speed sockets are expensive, and a mobile CPU socket would probably be at least a few dollars in quantity nowadays. The bigger problem is it would add thickness, weight and failure points.
it had gotten a huge following, with a movie aswell... this plainly shows there is a HUGE demand for it,
If you ignore the fact that the movie bombed...
Well duh. Not even Firefly could make us come out of our moms' basements. Put it on TV or the Internet and there won't be a problem.