Re:So what am I paying them for exactly?
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Professors vs. WiFi
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So what exactly are they doing that I cant do better on my own? If they arent there to spoon feed me information,
You're paying for the privilege of being there. You're paying for the opportunity of being educated by people who are (theoretically) experts in their field. You're paying for the opportunity to have access to these experts. You are NOT paying to have said experts coddle you and give you an A.
But I shouldnt have to pay someone to waste MY time
If you are not paying attention when you should be, then it's YOU that is wasting YOUR time, not the professor.
Re:Maybe if teachers worked with technology instea
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Professors vs. WiFi
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a smart teacher would use WiFi and the fact that all the students have laptops
Um, and if all students *don't* have laptops....? Is the university going to provide one or are the students going to have to shell out another 2 grand (which I certainly didn't have)?
Re:You misunderstand completely
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E ~ mc^2
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Rather we look at the design in the universe,
How do you tell something that's designed from something that wasn't?
Now if the earth moved 0.8 inches or 1.0 inches instead, all life on earth would either freeze or incinerate.
Do they present any scientific evidence to back this up? Or are they making unsupportable assertions? Considering that the distance to the sun varies by over 3,000,000 miles over the course of the year, I'm rather doubtful of their claims.
And there's 1000's, if not millions, more facts like that out there.
Grand Theft Auto 3 - Example of how a game can suck based purely on the performance of the engine. Crashed repeatedly, incredibly slow performance when it did work, an example of an excellent console game ruined when ported over to the PC.
Wouldn't work under 98SE until I installed the 1.1 patch. Runs fine without the patch on XP. Ran flawlessly with smooth graphics after that. I think it's an example of a console game made a lot better when ported over to the PC.
Oh, and I think this is obligatory: Get a real computer!;)
Other changes can render a class' or items' abilities weaker, slower, or even drastically altered or removed from the game. Again, the players have no say in the matter officially, and rarely get these changes reversed through massive online signature petitions. It is quite common now for these sorts of changes to come completely unannounced and unexplained, leaving the players themselves to bug test, figure out what happened, what is wrong, and leaving them again to wander off to the Dev Board asking what the purpose of the change was.... The bottom line being, you can go to bed one night with a great character and items, and wake up in the morning to find all that has changed; leaving you holding your member and your opinions mattering less than a pig's squeals in a slaughterhouse.
[Note: I don't work for Sony, nor do I play Everquest]
In defense of Sony... I code on a MUD, and we have to deal with the same thing fairly often. The point that a lot of players don't realize or don't accept is that a lot of times, these kind of changes are necessary for long-term play balance. If your equipment gets "nerfed", or your numbers aren't as high after the change, well, sorry, but sux 2 B U. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. What usually happens is that someone introduces an item or a command that seems OK at the time, but due to not-enough playtesting, or as a consequence of other, later changes, it turns out the item is too "powerful" to the point that it unbalances the game. When that happens, problem has to be addressed. If that screws over 30% of the players in favor of the other 70%, so be it.
Now, to attack Sony... Players aren't paying $12.95 a month to play our MUD, so we can afford to be a little lax. If you're a professional company, you ought to be expected to playtest stuff extensively for the long-term before releasing it to the wild. Also, we try to post to the public bulletin boards before any major changes are made so that players can comment or suggest possible alternatives.
So yes, I can understand how and why it happens in Everquest, but I think it shouldn't, and it sounds like they handle it badly.
It's just as hard to prove that the universe came into existence by some random explosion as it is to prove that God exists... because both crowds can come up with lots of evidence but crowd A never believes crowd B.
Except that crowd A (the Big Bang people) have scientific, objective evidence, and crowd B (the God exists people) only have subjective, untestable evidence.
But why do you think they are mutually exclusive? There's no reason you can't accept the Big Bang *and* believe God exists at the same time. Many scientists do.
The fact is, in Software Engineering if you are over 30 you had better be in management or a legacy maintenance program like me with Clipper, or you're out.
I dunno. I'm going on 32 and still slinging code for new projects. Mind you, I work for a defense contractor. Hooray for war!
Crime problem solved. Nobody can afford the bullets (at say $100 a piece), and when they do use them, they're 100% traceable to the buyer. If all bullets sold implement this feature, then in 10-20 years, nobody will have "old" untraceable bullets.
Sure. Now all you have to do is get every other country in the world to do the same thing. And inspect every single package on every plane, boat, and car coming into the country to make sure no one is smuggling in powder or ammunition. You haven't solved the crime problem. You've just opened up a vast new black market. But that's OK, the government can just pour millions into a "War on Gunpowder" and we can all feel safe.
The flag flutters because of the "sun wind", i.e. light pressure.
Um, no it doesn't. The solar wind is much too weak to make a flag flutter. The flag 'flutters' in all the movies because the astronaut is still holding the damn pole.:)
It would be nice to know when it hits heliopause, or the point in space where the sun's magnetic field ends.
It's not the magnetic field. As I understand it, it's the point where the solar wind stops. The sun emits a constant flood of particles that fly by at about 1 million miles per hour in our (the Earth's vicinity). This is what causes comet tails to point away from the sun, among other phenomena. As the particles get further and further from the sun, the density of the stream gets lower and lower. At some point the pressure of the particles coming from the sun is equal to the pressure of particles coming from the rest of the universe. That's the heliopause.
After all the hard work of the kernel folks, you seem to expect them to be perfectly happy with having to support binary modules that they can't debug, and that fall in a grey area of the GPL.
Citation?
I, for one, believe that mandatory athletic programs for ALL students is a good thing. [...] feeder program at most of these schools) but that everyone that wants to play a sport should, even if it is 3rd, 4th, or 5th string.
Mandatory does not mean you get to play if you want to. Mandatory means you play whether you want to or not. I, for one, did not.
Many of the problems in the schools are a result of lack of participation.
I'm not sure I agree with this or not, but *forcing* kids to participate (in anything) isn't going to accomplish anything either. The reason kids don't "participate" is generally not because of a lack of opportunity; it's because they don't want to.
Note: I also blame low standards, grade inflation, madatory teacher certification, absurd union rules, social promotion, backwards education philosophy, and other issues....
After all the hard work of the kernel folks, you seem to expect them to be perfectly happy with having to support binary modules that they can't debug, and that fall in a grey area of the GPL.
They don't have to be happy about it, but given how things work in the Real World, they damn well ought to learn to deal with it.
Ok, tell me how to falsify historical evolution--specifically, the "we evolved from something else" part.
Easy. I can think of two way right off the bat. 1. If human-like fossils suddenly appeared in the fossil record without any earlier, less human-like fossils before them. 2. If our DNA wasn't similar to other great apes.
Historical evolution--which is simply taking the percieved principles of breeding and stretching them backwards--is not.
You might as well say that just because gravity makes things fall today, you can't say that it made things fall in the distant past.
Especially when it contradicts things like Intelligent Design.
You can't contradict Intelligent Design because there's nothing to contradict. Coming full circle here, Intelligent Design is not a theory. Just for starters, how do you objectively distinguish something that was designed from something that wasn't?
each of the current ideas that explain where life came from and how it got here
There is ONLY one scientific idea of how life got here. There are a bunch of unsupported fantasies, but they have no place in science class. If you want to teach I.D., then we might as well teach the idea that the Earth is flat too, for they both have the same scientific footing.
But, when projected backwards and used as history, they're still neither falsifiable nor a good source for predictions.
Um, sure they are. Why wouldn't they be? I wonder if the problem is that you are confusing evolution with abiogenesis. Evolution doesn't care how life got started, it takes over from there.
I would suggests the answers in genesis [answersingenesis.org] website
There's nothing on answersingenesis except a bunch of stuff about them building a museum.
What happened? I seem to remember there being a lot more, even though it was all wrong.:)
Oh, and look at the tag line at the top of the page: "Upholding the authority of the Bible from the very first verse!" These are not the words of a group interested in doing real science. These are the words of people who think they already KNOW the answer and don't want to hear any argument.
Um, Henry Morris is widely regarded as a crackpot. I'd suggest finding someone else to use as an example.:)
Henry Morris is also a member of the ICR. The ICR is not a scientific organization. Read their Tenets. They assume the know what the truth is, then they go out and look for it; and they discard everything that doesn't agree with what they want to find. That's pretty much the opposite of how real science works.
The evidence for intelegent design is overwhelming, as is the evidence of Jesus being God.
OK, let's hear it.
Evolutionists/Atheists have been and are still trying to disprove God's existence and have failed to do so.
Evolutionists don't care if God exists or not, and the only atheists who try to disprove God's existence are very silly atheists, since it's an impossible task.
The theory that (a) God exists is just as sound as the theory that existance is older than the sum of human memory & created through random chance.
Nope. A theory must explain the evidence, make testable predictions, and be falsifiable. "God exists" fails on the last two. Therefore, it is not a theory.
You wouldn't. Feet aren't divided into 16ths, feet are divided into 12ths, called "inches".:)
And that is not all, apart from shear memorization, how do you realte units of volume and lebght in ENglish system?
You don't, because you don't need to. A farmer (or anyone else for that matter) isn't interested in how many cubic inches of apples they have. They're interested in how many bushels.
A good system, like the metric, addresses those small problems and the big ones in an elegant scalable manner easy for anybody toi understand.
You missed the point. The point isn't that the metric system is hard to understand. It's dead easy to understand. The point is that the units are inconvenient on a human scale. The reason feet and inches and miles and pounds and bushels and gallons survived is that they were nice to use for everyday purposes. In metric, a meter is somewhat too long, a centimeter is a bit too short. A kilogram is too heavy, a gram is too light.
The old English system tried to fit the units to the people. With metric, we are forcing people to fit the units. But I'm sure we'll get used to it eventually.:)
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So what exactly are they doing that I cant do better on my own? If they arent there to spoon feed me information,
You're paying for the privilege of being there. You're paying for the opportunity of being educated by people who are (theoretically) experts in their field. You're paying for the opportunity to have access to these experts. You are NOT paying to have said experts coddle you and give you an A.
But I shouldnt have to pay someone to waste MY time
If you are not paying attention when you should be, then it's YOU that is wasting YOUR time, not the professor.
a smart teacher would use WiFi and the fact that all the students have laptops
Um, and if all students *don't* have laptops....? Is the university going to provide one or are the students going to have to shell out another 2 grand (which I certainly didn't have)?
Rather we look at the design in the universe,
How do you tell something that's designed from something that wasn't?
Now if the earth moved 0.8 inches or 1.0 inches instead, all life on earth would either freeze or incinerate.
Do they present any scientific evidence to back this up? Or are they making unsupportable assertions? Considering that the distance to the sun varies by over 3,000,000 miles over the course of the year, I'm rather doubtful of their claims.
And there's 1000's, if not millions, more facts like that out there.
Facts? I don't think so.
Time spent in the car is time that I cannot do something else: I must be exclusively driving
You obviously don't live in the Washington, DC area.
I would much rather have played an impossible to win Impossible Mission than the hours I suffered trying to make sense of ET.
I have a confession to make. Many of you will be shocked by this, but it's time to come out of the closet. I actually *enjoyed* the 2600 E.T. game.
There, I said it! Ahh, I feel like a great burden has been lifted from my shoulders.
Grand Theft Auto 3 - Example of how a game can suck based purely on the performance of the engine. Crashed repeatedly, incredibly slow performance when it did work, an example of an excellent console game ruined when ported over to the PC.
;)
Wouldn't work under 98SE until I installed the 1.1 patch. Runs fine without the patch on XP. Ran flawlessly with smooth graphics after that. I think it's an example of a console game made a lot better when ported over to the PC.
Oh, and I think this is obligatory: Get a real computer!
Other changes can render a class' or items' abilities weaker, slower, or even drastically altered or removed from the game. Again, the players have no say in the matter officially, and rarely get these changes reversed through massive online signature petitions. It is quite common now for these sorts of changes to come completely unannounced and unexplained, leaving the players themselves to bug test, figure out what happened, what is wrong, and leaving them again to wander off to the Dev Board asking what the purpose of the change was. ...
The bottom line being, you can go to bed one night with a great character and items, and wake up in the morning to find all that has changed; leaving you holding your member and your opinions mattering less than a pig's squeals in a slaughterhouse.
[Note: I don't work for Sony, nor do I play Everquest]
In defense of Sony...
I code on a MUD, and we have to deal with the same thing fairly often. The point that a lot of players don't realize or don't accept is that a lot of times, these kind of changes are necessary for long-term play balance. If your equipment gets "nerfed", or your numbers aren't as high after the change, well, sorry, but sux 2 B U. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. What usually happens is that someone introduces an item or a command that seems OK at the time, but due to not-enough playtesting, or as a consequence of other, later changes, it turns out the item is too "powerful" to the point that it unbalances the game. When that happens, problem has to be addressed. If that screws over 30% of the players in favor of the other 70%, so be it.
Now, to attack Sony...
Players aren't paying $12.95 a month to play our MUD, so we can afford to be a little lax. If you're a professional company, you ought to be expected to playtest stuff extensively for the long-term before releasing it to the wild. Also, we try to post to the public bulletin boards before any major changes are made so that players can comment or suggest possible alternatives.
So yes, I can understand how and why it happens in Everquest, but I think it shouldn't, and it sounds like they handle it badly.
It's just as hard to prove that the universe came into existence by some random explosion as it is to prove that God exists... because both crowds can come up with lots of evidence but crowd A never believes crowd B.
Except that crowd A (the Big Bang people) have scientific, objective evidence, and crowd B (the God exists people) only have subjective, untestable evidence.
But why do you think they are mutually exclusive? There's no reason you can't accept the Big Bang *and* believe God exists at the same time. Many scientists do.
The fact is, in Software Engineering if you are over 30 you had better be in management or a legacy maintenance program like me with Clipper, or you're out.
I dunno. I'm going on 32 and still slinging code for new projects. Mind you, I work for a defense contractor. Hooray for war!
Crime problem solved. Nobody can afford the bullets (at say $100 a piece), and when they do use them, they're 100% traceable to the buyer. If all bullets sold implement this feature, then in 10-20 years, nobody will have "old" untraceable bullets.
Sure. Now all you have to do is get every other country in the world to do the same thing. And inspect every single package on every plane, boat, and car coming into the country to make sure no one is smuggling in powder or ammunition. You haven't solved the crime problem. You've just opened up a vast new black market. But that's OK, the government can just pour millions into a "War on Gunpowder" and we can all feel safe.
Sheesh.
The flag flutters because of the "sun wind", i.e. light pressure.
:)
Um, no it doesn't. The solar wind is much too weak to make a flag flutter. The flag 'flutters' in all the movies because the astronaut is still holding the damn pole.
Check the bad astronomy site.
It would be nice to know when it hits heliopause, or the point in space where the sun's magnetic field ends.
:)
It's not the magnetic field. As I understand it, it's the point where the solar wind stops. The sun emits a constant flood of particles that fly by at about 1 million miles per hour in our (the Earth's vicinity). This is what causes comet tails to point away from the sun, among other phenomena. As the particles get further and further from the sun, the density of the stream gets lower and lower. At some point the pressure of the particles coming from the sun is equal to the pressure of particles coming from the rest of the universe. That's the heliopause.
I think.
After all the hard work of the kernel folks, you seem to expect them to be perfectly happy with having to support binary modules that they can't debug, and that fall in a grey area of the GPL.
:)
Citation?
I, for one, believe that mandatory athletic programs for ALL students is a good thing.
[...]
feeder program at most of these schools) but that everyone that wants to play a sport should, even if it is 3rd, 4th, or 5th string.
Mandatory does not mean you get to play if you want to. Mandatory means you play whether you want to or not. I, for one, did not.
Many of the problems in the schools are a result of lack of participation.
I'm not sure I agree with this or not, but *forcing* kids to participate (in anything) isn't going to accomplish anything either. The reason kids don't "participate" is generally not because of a lack of opportunity; it's because they don't want to.
Note: I also blame low standards, grade inflation, madatory teacher certification, absurd union rules, social promotion, backwards education philosophy, and other issues....
I'll agree with you there!
After all the hard work of the kernel folks, you seem to expect them to be perfectly happy with having to support binary modules that they can't debug, and that fall in a grey area of the GPL.
They don't have to be happy about it, but given how things work in the Real World, they damn well ought to learn to deal with it.
So in the future, you should expect Notepad to expand to require 1GB of RAM.
:)
But it still won't be able to open files larger than 32K.
Ok, tell me how to falsify historical evolution--specifically, the "we evolved from something else" part.
Easy. I can think of two way right off the bat. 1. If human-like fossils suddenly appeared in the fossil record without any earlier, less human-like fossils before them. 2. If our DNA wasn't similar to other great apes.
Historical evolution--which is simply taking the percieved principles of breeding and stretching them backwards--is not.
You might as well say that just because gravity makes things fall today, you can't say that it made things fall in the distant past.
Especially when it contradicts things like Intelligent Design.
You can't contradict Intelligent Design because there's nothing to contradict. Coming full circle here, Intelligent Design is not a theory. Just for starters, how do you objectively distinguish something that was designed from something that wasn't?
each of the current ideas that explain where life came from and how it got here
There is ONLY one scientific idea of how life got here. There are a bunch of unsupported fantasies, but they have no place in science class. If you want to teach I.D., then we might as well teach the idea that the Earth is flat too, for they both have the same scientific footing.
But, when projected backwards and used as history, they're still neither falsifiable nor a good source for predictions.
Um, sure they are. Why wouldn't they be? I wonder if the problem is that you are confusing evolution with abiogenesis. Evolution doesn't care how life got started, it takes over from there.
"existance is older than the sum of human memory & was created through random chance" fails on the last two as well.
True. Fortunately, the various theories of evolution are a lot more detailed than that.
It would not falsify the "no god" theory.
"No god" is also not a theory.
Common language lets "theory" stand for any idea that can explain observed facts.
Who cares about common language? We are talking about science here.
I would suggests the answers in genesis [answersingenesis.org] website
:)
There's nothing on answersingenesis except a bunch of stuff about them building a museum.
What happened? I seem to remember there being a lot more, even though it was all wrong.
Oh, and look at the tag line at the top of the page: "Upholding the authority of the Bible from the very first verse!" These are not the words of a group interested in doing real science. These are the words of people who think they already KNOW the answer and don't want to hear any argument.
Um, Henry Morris is widely regarded as a crackpot. I'd suggest finding someone else to use as an example. :)
Henry Morris is also a member of the ICR. The ICR is not a scientific organization. Read their Tenets. They assume the know what the truth is, then they go out and look for it; and they discard everything that doesn't agree with what they want to find. That's pretty much the opposite of how real science works.
The evidence for intelegent design is overwhelming, as is the evidence of Jesus being God.
OK, let's hear it.
Evolutionists/Atheists have been and are still trying to disprove God's existence and have failed to do so.
Evolutionists don't care if God exists or not, and the only atheists who try to disprove God's existence are very silly atheists, since it's an impossible task.
The theory that (a) God exists is just as sound as the theory that existance is older than the sum of human memory & created through random chance.
Nope. A theory must explain the evidence, make testable predictions, and be falsifiable. "God exists" fails on the last two. Therefore, it is not a theory.
Actually, feathers are measured in avoirdupois (ie, normal) pounds; lead would be measured in troy pounds, which are lighter. :)
How easy it is to comprehend 3 and 13/16 feet.
:)
:)
You wouldn't. Feet aren't divided into 16ths, feet are divided into 12ths, called "inches".
And that is not all, apart from shear memorization, how do you realte units of volume and lebght in ENglish system?
You don't, because you don't need to. A farmer (or anyone else for that matter) isn't interested in how many cubic inches of apples they have. They're interested in how many bushels.
A good system, like the metric, addresses those small problems and the big ones in an elegant scalable manner easy for anybody toi understand.
You missed the point. The point isn't that the metric system is hard to understand. It's dead easy to understand. The point is that the units are inconvenient on a human scale. The reason feet and inches and miles and pounds and bushels and gallons survived is that they were nice to use for everyday purposes. In metric, a meter is somewhat too long, a centimeter is a bit too short. A kilogram is too heavy, a gram is too light.
The old English system tried to fit the units to the people. With metric, we are forcing people to fit the units. But I'm sure we'll get used to it eventually.
1 cubic centimeter of water = 1 millileter of water = 1 gram.
:)
At what temperature and pressure?