How is this different from any other kind of sabotage by employees or ex-employees? As long as there have been accountants, there has been embezzlement. A short-order cook could forget to wash his hands. A construction contractor can use sub-standard building materials.
You gotta trust somebody; just make sure it's somebody worthy of trust.
As for preventing this particular kind of sabotage, use the same principles as everywhere else: supervision, audits, bonds, insurance, and the threat of jail time if the rest fails. Oh--a good disaster recovery plan sure doesn't hurt, either.
One of the more surprising experiments I rememberd from high school where the teacher took two perfectly clear liquids--water, for all we know--an poured them together. They instantly turned a bright, fire-hydrant yellow. There were gasps all around the room.
I don't remember what the two substances were, but I seem to recall that one was lead-based and the lead combined with something else to form the precipitate (it later settled to the bottom, I think).
I'm sure any competent chemist, especially one in the paint industry, should be able to point you in the right direction for something like this.
My personal favorite experiments are those where I personally confirmed some fundamental property of nature. I've ``proven'' that absolute zero is about minues three-fifty Fahrenheit; distinguished lead shot from iron shot from tin shot by calculating their specific heat; and measured the speed of sound using a tuning fork.
Don't just tell the kids some fact. Give them the chance to prove it for themselves.
You say that they want you to sign something saying you won't sue them before they'll give you your severance pay. Well, turn it around: make it clear to them that, since you'll have nothing better to do with your time, you'll go sue-crazy if they don't give you your severence. You'll file separate suits for each percieved wrong they've ever done you, and you'll represent yourself. Their $500/hour lawyers will be wasting their time against your own out-of-work self. If necessary, you'll make a real stink about it, complete with media interviews, picketing, letters to their remaining clients, whatever.
If they're so freaked out by the possibility of you suing them, it's a perfect weapon to use against them.
Of course, you shouldn't necessarily expect a glowing recommendation from them, but they'll probably be to scared to actually write anything other than, ``He worked here.''
Remember, all they've got against you at this point is that severance package. You are under no obligation to sign anything new, and they're still obliged to give you that severance package (assuming it's in your contract or otherwise has already been promised to you). I really doubt they want to go to court over it, and you've got every reason to do so. The ball's in your...court.
Let's take a quick survey. All those of you who'd be happy with a 200 DPI priner, please raise your hand. Right--I thought so.
I'll say that displays have matured when they're at least 1,000 DPI--though most people can still tell the difference between 1,000 DPI and 2,000 DPI.
Yes, you can play games with AA. Yes, we need resolution-independent display mechanisms lest bitmapped graphics vanish. Folks, this has all been done before--with printers. When the display engineers catch up to the printer engineers (and, granted, their problems are much harder), those problems will also be solved.
Many of the people whose photos have been taken were stopped briefly for loitering and let go.
``Loitering'' basically means the cop thought you looked out of place. If that's all it takes to be branded as a suspect--and, don't forget, a suspect is somebody who's guilty of some terrible crime but just hasn't been caught yet--then you better not get caught staring at a cop's jackboots.
Speaking as somebody who does technical training for large companies (as detailed in my resume), your ``tenet that 'geeks should train geeks''' is less than ideal.
There are two things you want in any teacher:
someone who can teach;
and someone who knows the subject.
The actual teaching and delivery of a class is essentially a performance. A stand-up comic has to be constantly side-splittingly funny; a teacher has to be occasionally funny and educate the audience. Otherwise, there's not much difference.
A good teacher who doesn't know the subject is obviously (worse than) useless, but somebody who knows the subject but not how to teach is just as bad. You need the two together.
So what makes a good teacher? You've got to be on top of everything: you need to have absorbed the subject so thoroughly that you know it forwards and backwards, inside and out. You need to have that information extremely well organized so that you always know where you are in your own mental map.
When you've got that down, you'll probably also have the confidence that you need to bare your soul in front of a bunch of people. Humans grant authority to those with (percieved) confidence, and you need a great deal of authority to teach: you've got to control all those people.
Every teacher has had a number of different disruptive students. You need to know how to keep people focused on the subject at hand. Usually, this means letting people have their say, no matter how wacko, and using your normal conversational reply to ideally bring the thread back to earth--or, at least, steer it straight. Sometimes, you've got to be blunt: ``I'm sorry, Dave, but this is a class on the Internet, not on the dystopian perspective of the Romanovs. I wish we had the time to explore the Romanovs in more detail, but we've got to get through the dot-bomb in the next forty-five minutes, and we haven't even mentioned how the IPO hype brought in so many investors charged with what Alan Greenspan rightly called `irrational exuberance'....''
Every class has at least a couple students who close up into their shells. People don't learn when they're in their shells. Drawing them out is a challenge. How do you get somebody involved when they don't give you an opening? One very shy girl, I tossed her a real softball and she almost went into the foetal position....
There's a lot more I could go into--passion for the subject, honesty, knowing when to say, ``I don't know,'' and more. I haven't even touched on the preparation: how to make a lesson plan, design exercises and tests, grading, record-keeping, and a lot more. It's just like any other discipline: it takes a lot of time and hard work.
So, don't think that just because somebody is a geek like you and he knows his stuff that he'll make a good teacher. If he's got the archtypal geek personality, you want to avoid his class like the plague--he'll be the proverbial professor who talks in everybody else's sleep.
Time travel isn't possible, except for the everyday kind that your wristwatch measures.
If time travel were possible, somebody (human, alien, whatever) from the future (perhaps billions of years into the future, or maybe just next week) would have traveled into the past already.
So, let's consider what can happen. Somebody will travel back in time to before the initial discovery in order to beat the ``original'' researcher to the punch. Now, we've got a cascade of ``inventions'' of the time machine racing backwards through time. Life and time-travel technology reach the earliest time after the Big Bang that the two are sustainable and both are prolifically spread throughout the infant universe. Clearly, that hasn't happened.
Don't think that some sort of morality would prevent this from happening, either. Time travel is an incredibly powerful weapon; consider what a knife to the throat of the infant Hitler would have done to history, and how many people would leap at the chance, consequences be damned. All it would take is one person to do so...at any time in the next many billion years.
The instant time travel becomes possible, the only possible method for self-preservation is to race to the beginning. After all, how do you know that some far-distant alien race with souls of pure evil won't do the same just out of spite?
There's a wonderful quote, and I wish I could remember who said it. ``Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once.'' The obvious corollary is that, if you can break time, then everything will happen all at once.
Some people try to get around this in a few different ways. For one, there's the many-universes ilk: each act of time travel creates a whole new universe. In such a case, all of those universes would be on the same headlong rush to take time travel as early as possible. Besides, think of the incredible amount of energy and information needed to duplicate the universe--but I digress.
Others try to justify it by saying that it requires huge energy sources or otherwise make it hard. To this I say, ``so''? All you're talking about is a hard engineering project that'll take a lot of time. And--guess what? Even if it takes ten thousand years to build and the energy output of several stars, the payoff is worth it. Again, the alternative is to let somebody else do it...and invite certain disaster.
I take the mere fact that I'm typing this note as all the proof that I need that time travel is pure fantasy.
For all that the BSA would have you believe otherwise, the vast majority of computers running Microsoft operating systems are running paid-for licensed copies.
For all that Red Hat and others would hope, the vast majority of computers running Linux are running unpaid-for licensed copies.
Even if the same number of computers ran each operating system, the Microsoft operating system ``market'' would be much larger, as a result of simple math.
With this overwhelming inherent disadvantage, that Linux is even on the charts at all is impressive.
I'll stop calling it ``Line-icks'' when Americans stop calling the country, ``Finland,'' and start calling it, ``Suomi.'' That, of course, will be shortly after the evening news starts talking about Norge and Sverige.
Heck! the state that I am originally from (look it up on National Geographic - as "Kerala" was named as the one of the best 50 places to visit), the literacy rate is 100%. Can any other place in the world claim the same ?
Interestingly enough, Cuba can. According to the CIA, the total population literacy is 95.7%
Cuba is exactly the sort of place I'd expect the Simputer would do wonderfully. Many of its citizens have close ties with Americans--Americans with money. Education is one of the few things the Cuban government got right--very right. (Their medical system isn't that bad. What it lacks in sophistication and material supplies it make up with truly universal coverage with a strong emphasis on preventative measures, or true health maintenance.) Cubans have the skills to put computing to good use and the potential access to computers through those who escaped to America.
Now, all we need is to lift the embargo....
b&
P.S. Communisim is terrible. The Cuban people deserve a representative government and a leader other than Castro. Heck, even true Communisim would be a huge step up from what they have now. That the Cuban people have done as well as they have is a testament to their strength. Lifting the embargo would go a long ways towards destabilizing the Castro regime to the point where a replacement is practical. b&
The last time I heard about biodiesel, the people who were promoting it mentioned offhand that it's tough on the fuel system and might require some parts of a standard diesel engine to be reworked to avoid long term damage. Have you heard anything about that?
Biodiesel eats through some of the hoses and other plastic / rubber parts of the system quicker than does petroleum diesel. There are replacement parts that don't have the problem. They cost a bit more and aren't needed for petroleum diesel so they aren't included with stock diesel systems.
I can't speak from experience, but, if I owned a diesel car, I'd just pay closer-than-normal attention for leaky hoses and replace them with sturdier ones when they failed earlier than they otherwise would have. If you're more paranoid than me, you'd just replace them all up front.
First a disclaimer: I'm unemployed right now (please check out my resume and hire me!) and driving a '68 VW camper. I can't afford a new car, but that hasn't stopped me from looking.
The Honda Insight is a fascinating car. It's as if Honda took every neat new technology they've been working on and crammed it in. Unfortunately, it's small--just a two-seater--and expensive--in the low $20Ks.
For that much money or less, you can get a Volkswagen with the TDI engine. The two-door VW TDIs (the Bug and the Golf) get better mileage than any other car sold in America except for the Insight. You can drive non-stop from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles on one tank of fuel, and that's a trip I personally would take at elast two days to drive. They're also among the least-polluting cars available, though there are cleaner ones out there. The Bug has (one of?) the highest safety ratings you'll find.
The catch? They're both turbocharged diesel engines. Wait! Don't run away! A diesel engine doesn't have to be the awful, smelly, polluting nightmare you're all thinking of. When properly engineered, as is the TDI, it's superior to gasoline:
Proper fuel management, catalytic converters, filters, etc., can reduce emissions to well below the current average for the American fleet (the TDI makes use of every trick in the book in this regards).
Diesel takes less energy to produce. Even if you get the same miles per gallon on diesel and gasoline, fewer barrels of oil were refined to make the diesel.
Diesel fuel has more energy than gasoline. You can drive more miles on that gallon of diesel than on a gallon of gasoline.
Diesel engines have much more torque than gasoline engines. Americans buy horsepower but drive torque. The Bug with the high-power gasoline engine will do 0-60 MPH faster than the diesel (but not by much) and has a higher top speed, but the diesel will easily beat the gasoline in 0-40.
But the real thing to do with one of these cars is run it off of biodiesel instead of petroleum-based diesel. Biodiesel is a high-cetane (the diesel version of octane) fuel made from vegetable oil. It's non-toxic; you could drizzle it over your salad...though it'd likely taste awful. The maufacturing process is very similar to the soap-making process; if you've ever made soap in your kitchen, you can make biodiesel in your kitchen. Biodiesel and petroleum-based diesel can be blended in any ratio desired simply by pouring them together.
The real advantage to biodiesel, however, is that every pound of carbon put into the atmosphere via the tailpipe had been previously removed from the atmosphere by the plant. No increased CO2! (Petroleum-based diesel pumps carbon from the ground and puts it into the air.) And, because the plant pulls more carbon out of the air for itself (instead of just its seeds), each pound of biodiesel results in a net decrease of atmospheric CO2.
In essence, biodiesel is the solar storage mechanism everybody keeps looking for. Run all those trains, trucks, and power plants from solar power (by way of corn and soy) and reduce dependence on oil all at the same time! All the infrastructure is already in place....
So, buy a car with a TDI engine, and you get incredible mileage and have the option of using either fuel you can find anywhere or a very environmentally-friendly fuel.
Now, if only somebody would give me a job, I'd go out and buy one....
The new measures come on top of recently passed security laws, which state that journalists can be prosecuted for criticising Mr Mugabe and his government.
Robert Mugabe, dictator-in-chief of Zimbabwe, is a pusillanimous pipsqueak. His male member is dwarfed in comparison to his cockroach-sized brain. The stench of his breath makes granite crumble. His moral integrity is challenged only by that of a Microsoft lawyer. He rapes newborns with curling irons.
His government is composed entirely of weak-willed wusses, totally incapable of thinking for themselves. This, combined with Mr. Mugabe's stunning intellectual shortcomings, clearly explains the entire fiasco.
A written, computerless computer exam is like having somebody prove they're a chef by watching what they do in the bathroom. Even if you can meet some definition of success, it don't mean diddly.
The average number of cassettes per household -- this is fascinating -- Mrs. Schroeder, was 27.7, 28 cassettes. Now, if you are just time shifting, all you are doing is you are away from home and you are taping something and you come back and you watch the commercial, then you time shift, you don't need 28 cassettes. You need one cassette or at the most two. Why do you have 28? Why? Because of the next line. Seventy-five percent have a permanent collection. My own home, we do it in our on home. I know about that. Anybody that has a VCR, talk to them, and I ask you to use your own commonsense, Mr. Chairman, Mrs. Schroeder, Mr. Railsback, just think of you as human beings. If you had the power to sit on a playback of a recording and you could wipe out the commercials or not wipe out the commercials, what would you do? You would do exactly what you said, sir. That is terrific. Of course. We all do it.
But when you do it, you strip away the reason for free television. Now, let me --
Mr. KASTENMEIER. Jack, let me ask you. Do you consider yourself and your family infringers when you engage in that practice?
Mr. VALENTI. I consider myself and my family believing what the plaintiffs in this lawsuit said and they said publicly, they have said it to the press, they have said it to the lawyers, they have said it to the courts. They do not intend to file any actions against homeowners now or in the future. I mean, that is obvious and they have said that publicly, Mr. Chairman, so I believe them. As far as I am concerned, I am going to continue taping because the plaintiffs have said they aren't going to do anything to me. I am not committing any crime. They know that.
Mr. KASTENMEIER. That wasn't my question.
Mr. VALENTI. Do I consider myself an infringer?
Mr. KASTENMEIER. When you engage in such practice.
Mr. VALENTI. Yes, sir, I do. I am taking somebody else's copyrighted material without their consent and I know damn well I am infringing. But as far as court action or anything else, I am safe. First, it is not a criminal act. Again, the opposition would tell you video, police, and criminals. They show an astonishing lack of the copyright law. They know good and well that that is not a criminal infringement unless you do it for profit. But on the other hand the plaintiffs have said they are moving against anybody in the homes. There is no problem, but 1 know and everybody else knows they are infringing.
I'm not one who participates in copyright infringment, even with the strict standards imposed by recent changes to the law. Mr. Valenti's testimony, however, has completely changed my opinion on whether or not it is right for me (y'all are welcome to do as you wish, I'm talking about me) to engage in such practices. What's good for the goose, and all.
I'd also like to point out that a lot of computer users use their keyboards for 8hrs+. Im not sure how that compares to a practicing pianist, but I somewhat doubt that they dont use the pianno for as long (no offence intended). Also, its a matter of 8hrs+ per day, 5 days+ per week etc
Hmpf. You've never been to a conservatory or other serious music school. Pianists who practice eight hours a day are commonly called ``slackers.''
I've known pianists who've complained of injury, but the worst case I personally know is a wonderful violinist from South America who needed multiple surgeries and had to stop playing for weeks at a time.
And injuries from playing too much aren't related to pianists and string players. I know three other trumpeters who've torn the muscle that suurrounds the mouth, under the lip. They tore them not by getting punched in the mouth, but simply by playing too long and too hard. Two of them had to stop playing for months and practically had to learn to play all over again. The third...it was a factor in the end of his career.
In contrast to pianists who play several hours a day, few brass players will practice more than three or four--five at the absolute most. Not many have the stamina to accomplish anything by practicing longer, and many of those who think they do wind up unable to play much at all after a week or so. And, heaven forbid, you should get called at the last minute for a gig....
This, of course, assumes that you practice smartly. Nobody's going to pull off four hours of practicing Strauss, Mahler, and Wagner. Damn few trumpeters could play Bach for two hours straight, certainly not if they expected to do anything the next day. Those of us who like to improve our playing when we practice will do a little of this, a little of that, push this here, take that easy there--just like any athlete.
What many people seem to be overlooking is that few of these things are ``natural'' acts. That is, humans have spent the past tens of thousands of years walking, running, picking apart nuts, grasping rocks and bones and spears and branches. It's only the past few hundred years that any sizable number of people have spent the majority of their time doing things that require as much manual dexterity as playing a piano or working a high-speed garment machine or typing. It's a testament to our bodies' versatility that these things are possible at all, and hardly surprising that we're having some troubles along the way.
Why SF and fantasy are lumped together is beyond me. What Tolkein and Vernor Vinge have in common besides great creativity and command of the English language escapes my attention.
Obviously, what the two authors have in common is a prodigious imagination coupled with a patient intellect capable of exploring an entirely mentally constucted world through many levels and editing it for self-consistency.
In that case, we should see Sherlock Holmes next to Isaac Asimov and Ian Fleming next to Ben Bova. Stranger in a Strange Land could be placed in the comparative theology section with Dune, and, while we're at it, we might as well put Moby Dick and Call of the Wild in the biology section.
When it comes down to it, great writing is great writing, regardless of genre. Genre is a classification system, not a qualification system.
There's a clear distinction between SF and fantasy: SF explores the possible (or, at least, the plausible); fantasy explores the impossible. SF has its roots in reality; fantasy, unreality. Both deserve exploration.
But lumping them together makes as even less sense than combining horror stories with detective fiction.
The Moon would make an excellent staging area for interplanetary trips.
We should go to the Moon, but not for any of the reasons you listed.
1) The low gravity offers tons of advantages, including a way to simulate, say, the gravity on a moon of Jupiter.
We know enough about low-gravity environments that there's not much need to simulate them. If you're worried about training people, underwater on Earth or, better, a centrifuge in orbit would make much more sense.
2) The low gravity also allows boosters to be much smaller since they don't need to escape earth's atmosphere/gravity, and thus cheaper.
...but you still have to fight the Moon's gravity, and you still have to get there in the first place. Terrestrial orbit is much, much better than the Moon in this regards.
3) You can build much bigger things in 1/6 G since you've got 1/6th of the forces to deal with.
You can build even bigger things in microgravity than you can on the Moon. Much, much bigger.
4) more volatile and thus more powerful fuels can be used because in the lack of an atmosphere, the threat of explosion is much, much lower.
Er...this is completely irrelevant. Volatile chemical fuels aren't a problem, now. You still wouldn't want them leaking on the Moon, so you've got the same engineering problems to deal with. You'll also need a reactant and reagent that you don't want to mix until you're ready...none of this is affected in the least by the lack of an atmosphere. Besides, we won't be using chemical propulsion for much longer--it's just waaay too expensive and inefficient. Ion drives and solar sails will probably drive intrastellar travel in coming decades. Eventually, I suspect we'll have some sort of fusion-powered photon drive like Niven's torchships--a very bright flashlight that uses the high velocity of light as exhaust instead of the puny velocity of hydrogen-oxygen reactions.
The moon may be a good source of raw materials; it deserves extensive scientific research for the sake of the research; and the far side would make the ultimate near-Earth astronomical observation platform. Once we're (back) there, we'll undoubtedly discover lots more to make it a great place for humanity to have a permanent presence.
I haven't read the book, so I won't comment on its merits. pinkunicorn, however, does seem to be a bit mistraken about what makes good science fiction.
True science fiction--at least good SF--has nothing to do with technobable. Rather, science and technology are important characters in the story.
For example, Larry Niven takes the idea of a Star Trek style transporter, and examines what it would do to society. Perfect murders go unsolved, protests and riots spontaneously appear and disappear, pickpockets run rampant.
Timothy Zahn creates a super-soldier with implanted weapons and sends the soldiers home. They're feared and hated, develop terrible wasting diseases, and eventually flee to create their own society.
James Hogan explores virtual reality and the effects of total immersion in an unreal world. Alan Dean Foster creats a society of fanciful aliens with a specialized socialst structure and then throws humans into the mix. Frank Herbert creates a self-aware computer that becomes God--or is it the Devil?
There are related genres. Good space opera, like David Weber's works, is classic adventure storytelling set in a detailed and internally consistent technologically-advanced future.
Star Wars and friends is perhaps best classified as science fantasy. The story may be entertaining, but it makes no attempt at basing itself in reality. What psuedo-technology there is serves as colorful background. If Star Wars were truce science fiction, it would have spent more time on the Endor Holocaust than the (admitedly entertaining) final swordfight between Luke and Vader.
So don't expect me to get excited about a story just because it has intelligent cleaning robots and mechanical computers, especially if the plot isn't too complex. If I want intelligent cleaning robots, I'll read Doug Adams and get a great plot and good laughs. If I want mechanical computers, I'll read William Gibson and get a great plot, social commentary, and a fascinating exploration of human nature.
Why SF and fantasy are lumped together is beyond me. What Tolkein and Vernor Vinge have in common besides great creativity and command of the English language escapes my attention.
Slashdot Mirror
CChheecckk yyoouurr dduupplleexx sseettttiinngg!!
CChheerrss,,
bb&&
How is this different from any other kind of sabotage by employees or ex-employees? As long as there have been accountants, there has been embezzlement. A short-order cook could forget to wash his hands. A construction contractor can use sub-standard building materials.
You gotta trust somebody; just make sure it's somebody worthy of trust.
As for preventing this particular kind of sabotage, use the same principles as everywhere else: supervision, audits, bonds, insurance, and the threat of jail time if the rest fails. Oh--a good disaster recovery plan sure doesn't hurt, either.
Cheers,
b&
Whoah...Taco's Zarus has a digital screen? That's like, waaaay too much information.
Cheers,
b&
One of the more surprising experiments I rememberd from high school where the teacher took two perfectly clear liquids--water, for all we know--an poured them together. They instantly turned a bright, fire-hydrant yellow. There were gasps all around the room.
I don't remember what the two substances were, but I seem to recall that one was lead-based and the lead combined with something else to form the precipitate (it later settled to the bottom, I think).
I'm sure any competent chemist, especially one in the paint industry, should be able to point you in the right direction for something like this.
My personal favorite experiments are those where I personally confirmed some fundamental property of nature. I've ``proven'' that absolute zero is about minues three-fifty Fahrenheit; distinguished lead shot from iron shot from tin shot by calculating their specific heat; and measured the speed of sound using a tuning fork.
Don't just tell the kids some fact. Give them the chance to prove it for themselves.
Cheers,
b&
You say that they want you to sign something saying you won't sue them before they'll give you your severance pay. Well, turn it around: make it clear to them that, since you'll have nothing better to do with your time, you'll go sue-crazy if they don't give you your severence. You'll file separate suits for each percieved wrong they've ever done you, and you'll represent yourself. Their $500/hour lawyers will be wasting their time against your own out-of-work self. If necessary, you'll make a real stink about it, complete with media interviews, picketing, letters to their remaining clients, whatever.
If they're so freaked out by the possibility of you suing them, it's a perfect weapon to use against them.
Of course, you shouldn't necessarily expect a glowing recommendation from them, but they'll probably be to scared to actually write anything other than, ``He worked here.''
Remember, all they've got against you at this point is that severance package. You are under no obligation to sign anything new, and they're still obliged to give you that severance package (assuming it's in your contract or otherwise has already been promised to you). I really doubt they want to go to court over it, and you've got every reason to do so. The ball's in your...court.
Good luck,
b&
Seriously. 200 DPI is still not enough.
Let's take a quick survey. All those of you who'd be happy with a 200 DPI priner, please raise your hand. Right--I thought so.
I'll say that displays have matured when they're at least 1,000 DPI--though most people can still tell the difference between 1,000 DPI and 2,000 DPI.
Yes, you can play games with AA. Yes, we need resolution-independent display mechanisms lest bitmapped graphics vanish. Folks, this has all been done before--with printers. When the display engineers catch up to the printer engineers (and, granted, their problems are much harder), those problems will also be solved.
Cheers,
b&
``Loitering'' basically means the cop thought you looked out of place. If that's all it takes to be branded as a suspect--and, don't forget, a suspect is somebody who's guilty of some terrible crime but just hasn't been caught yet--then you better not get caught staring at a cop's jackboots.
Cheers,
b&
What's your favorite Perl poem?
Cheers,
b&
P.S. Thanks for creating something as wonderful as Perl! b&
Speaking as somebody who does technical training for large companies (as detailed in my resume), your ``tenet that 'geeks should train geeks''' is less than ideal.
There are two things you want in any teacher:
The actual teaching and delivery of a class is essentially a performance. A stand-up comic has to be constantly side-splittingly funny; a teacher has to be occasionally funny and educate the audience. Otherwise, there's not much difference.
A good teacher who doesn't know the subject is obviously (worse than) useless, but somebody who knows the subject but not how to teach is just as bad. You need the two together.
So what makes a good teacher? You've got to be on top of everything: you need to have absorbed the subject so thoroughly that you know it forwards and backwards, inside and out. You need to have that information extremely well organized so that you always know where you are in your own mental map.
When you've got that down, you'll probably also have the confidence that you need to bare your soul in front of a bunch of people. Humans grant authority to those with (percieved) confidence, and you need a great deal of authority to teach: you've got to control all those people.
Every teacher has had a number of different disruptive students. You need to know how to keep people focused on the subject at hand. Usually, this means letting people have their say, no matter how wacko, and using your normal conversational reply to ideally bring the thread back to earth--or, at least, steer it straight. Sometimes, you've got to be blunt: ``I'm sorry, Dave, but this is a class on the Internet, not on the dystopian perspective of the Romanovs. I wish we had the time to explore the Romanovs in more detail, but we've got to get through the dot-bomb in the next forty-five minutes, and we haven't even mentioned how the IPO hype brought in so many investors charged with what Alan Greenspan rightly called `irrational exuberance'....''
Every class has at least a couple students who close up into their shells. People don't learn when they're in their shells. Drawing them out is a challenge. How do you get somebody involved when they don't give you an opening? One very shy girl, I tossed her a real softball and she almost went into the foetal position....
There's a lot more I could go into--passion for the subject, honesty, knowing when to say, ``I don't know,'' and more. I haven't even touched on the preparation: how to make a lesson plan, design exercises and tests, grading, record-keeping, and a lot more. It's just like any other discipline: it takes a lot of time and hard work.
So, don't think that just because somebody is a geek like you and he knows his stuff that he'll make a good teacher. If he's got the archtypal geek personality, you want to avoid his class like the plague--he'll be the proverbial professor who talks in everybody else's sleep.
Cheers,
b&
Time travel isn't possible, except for the everyday kind that your wristwatch measures.
If time travel were possible, somebody (human, alien, whatever) from the future (perhaps billions of years into the future, or maybe just next week) would have traveled into the past already.
So, let's consider what can happen. Somebody will travel back in time to before the initial discovery in order to beat the ``original'' researcher to the punch. Now, we've got a cascade of ``inventions'' of the time machine racing backwards through time. Life and time-travel technology reach the earliest time after the Big Bang that the two are sustainable and both are prolifically spread throughout the infant universe. Clearly, that hasn't happened.
Don't think that some sort of morality would prevent this from happening, either. Time travel is an incredibly powerful weapon; consider what a knife to the throat of the infant Hitler would have done to history, and how many people would leap at the chance, consequences be damned. All it would take is one person to do so...at any time in the next many billion years.
The instant time travel becomes possible, the only possible method for self-preservation is to race to the beginning. After all, how do you know that some far-distant alien race with souls of pure evil won't do the same just out of spite?
There's a wonderful quote, and I wish I could remember who said it. ``Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once.'' The obvious corollary is that, if you can break time, then everything will happen all at once.
Some people try to get around this in a few different ways. For one, there's the many-universes ilk: each act of time travel creates a whole new universe. In such a case, all of those universes would be on the same headlong rush to take time travel as early as possible. Besides, think of the incredible amount of energy and information needed to duplicate the universe--but I digress.
Others try to justify it by saying that it requires huge energy sources or otherwise make it hard. To this I say, ``so''? All you're talking about is a hard engineering project that'll take a lot of time. And--guess what? Even if it takes ten thousand years to build and the energy output of several stars, the payoff is worth it. Again, the alternative is to let somebody else do it...and invite certain disaster.
I take the mere fact that I'm typing this note as all the proof that I need that time travel is pure fantasy.
Cheers,
b&
Blockquoth cDarwin:
Not if you've got $25K buried in the couch....
b&
For all that the BSA would have you believe otherwise, the vast majority of computers running Microsoft operating systems are running paid-for licensed copies.
For all that Red Hat and others would hope, the vast majority of computers running Linux are running unpaid-for licensed copies.
Even if the same number of computers ran each operating system, the Microsoft operating system ``market'' would be much larger, as a result of simple math.
With this overwhelming inherent disadvantage, that Linux is even on the charts at all is impressive.
Cheers,
b&
Blockquote DasBub:
I'll stop calling it ``Line-icks'' when Americans stop calling the country, ``Finland,'' and start calling it, ``Suomi.'' That, of course, will be shortly after the evening news starts talking about Norge and Sverige.
Cheers,
b&
Blockquoth the cOdEgUru:
Interestingly enough, Cuba can. According to the CIA, the total population literacy is 95.7%
Cuba is exactly the sort of place I'd expect the Simputer would do wonderfully. Many of its citizens have close ties with Americans--Americans with money. Education is one of the few things the Cuban government got right--very right. (Their medical system isn't that bad. What it lacks in sophistication and material supplies it make up with truly universal coverage with a strong emphasis on preventative measures, or true health maintenance.) Cubans have the skills to put computing to good use and the potential access to computers through those who escaped to America.
Now, all we need is to lift the embargo....
b&
P.S. Communisim is terrible. The Cuban people deserve a representative government and a leader other than Castro. Heck, even true Communisim would be a huge step up from what they have now. That the Cuban people have done as well as they have is a testament to their strength. Lifting the embargo would go a long ways towards destabilizing the Castro regime to the point where a replacement is practical. b&
Blockquoth the Crow:
Biodiesel eats through some of the hoses and other plastic / rubber parts of the system quicker than does petroleum diesel. There are replacement parts that don't have the problem. They cost a bit more and aren't needed for petroleum diesel so they aren't included with stock diesel systems.
I can't speak from experience, but, if I owned a diesel car, I'd just pay closer-than-normal attention for leaky hoses and replace them with sturdier ones when they failed earlier than they otherwise would have. If you're more paranoid than me, you'd just replace them all up front.
b&
First a disclaimer: I'm unemployed right now (please check out my resume and hire me!) and driving a '68 VW camper. I can't afford a new car, but that hasn't stopped me from looking.
The Honda Insight is a fascinating car. It's as if Honda took every neat new technology they've been working on and crammed it in. Unfortunately, it's small--just a two-seater--and expensive--in the low $20Ks.
For that much money or less, you can get a Volkswagen with the TDI engine. The two-door VW TDIs (the Bug and the Golf) get better mileage than any other car sold in America except for the Insight. You can drive non-stop from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles on one tank of fuel, and that's a trip I personally would take at elast two days to drive. They're also among the least-polluting cars available, though there are cleaner ones out there. The Bug has (one of?) the highest safety ratings you'll find.
The catch? They're both turbocharged diesel engines. Wait! Don't run away! A diesel engine doesn't have to be the awful, smelly, polluting nightmare you're all thinking of. When properly engineered, as is the TDI, it's superior to gasoline:
But the real thing to do with one of these cars is run it off of biodiesel instead of petroleum-based diesel. Biodiesel is a high-cetane (the diesel version of octane) fuel made from vegetable oil. It's non-toxic; you could drizzle it over your salad...though it'd likely taste awful. The maufacturing process is very similar to the soap-making process; if you've ever made soap in your kitchen, you can make biodiesel in your kitchen. Biodiesel and petroleum-based diesel can be blended in any ratio desired simply by pouring them together.
The real advantage to biodiesel, however, is that every pound of carbon put into the atmosphere via the tailpipe had been previously removed from the atmosphere by the plant. No increased CO2! (Petroleum-based diesel pumps carbon from the ground and puts it into the air.) And, because the plant pulls more carbon out of the air for itself (instead of just its seeds), each pound of biodiesel results in a net decrease of atmospheric CO2.
In essence, biodiesel is the solar storage mechanism everybody keeps looking for. Run all those trains, trucks, and power plants from solar power (by way of corn and soy) and reduce dependence on oil all at the same time! All the infrastructure is already in place....
So, buy a car with a TDI engine, and you get incredible mileage and have the option of using either fuel you can find anywhere or a very environmentally-friendly fuel.
Now, if only somebody would give me a job, I'd go out and buy one....
b&
That's what, 1200 mm^27? I don't know about you, but I have problems with just four spatial dimensions, and they expect us to do this with 27?
I'll wait for this Euclidian version, thankyouverymuch.
b&
Robert Mugabe, dictator-in-chief of Zimbabwe, is a pusillanimous pipsqueak. His male member is dwarfed in comparison to his cockroach-sized brain. The stench of his breath makes granite crumble. His moral integrity is challenged only by that of a Microsoft lawyer. He rapes newborns with curling irons.
His government is composed entirely of weak-willed wusses, totally incapable of thinking for themselves. This, combined with Mr. Mugabe's stunning intellectual shortcomings, clearly explains the entire fiasco.
Need I continue?
b&
A written, computerless computer exam is like having somebody prove they're a chef by watching what they do in the bathroom. Even if you can meet some definition of success, it don't mean diddly.
b&
I found this exchange fascinating:
I'm not one who participates in copyright infringment, even with the strict standards imposed by recent changes to the law. Mr. Valenti's testimony, however, has completely changed my opinion on whether or not it is right for me (y'all are welcome to do as you wish, I'm talking about me) to engage in such practices. What's good for the goose, and all.
I think I'll go download something right now....
b&
Quoth MoogMan:
Hmpf. You've never been to a conservatory or other serious music school. Pianists who practice eight hours a day are commonly called ``slackers.''
I've known pianists who've complained of injury, but the worst case I personally know is a wonderful violinist from South America who needed multiple surgeries and had to stop playing for weeks at a time.
And injuries from playing too much aren't related to pianists and string players. I know three other trumpeters who've torn the muscle that suurrounds the mouth, under the lip. They tore them not by getting punched in the mouth, but simply by playing too long and too hard. Two of them had to stop playing for months and practically had to learn to play all over again. The third...it was a factor in the end of his career.
In contrast to pianists who play several hours a day, few brass players will practice more than three or four--five at the absolute most. Not many have the stamina to accomplish anything by practicing longer, and many of those who think they do wind up unable to play much at all after a week or so. And, heaven forbid, you should get called at the last minute for a gig....
This, of course, assumes that you practice smartly. Nobody's going to pull off four hours of practicing Strauss, Mahler, and Wagner. Damn few trumpeters could play Bach for two hours straight, certainly not if they expected to do anything the next day. Those of us who like to improve our playing when we practice will do a little of this, a little of that, push this here, take that easy there--just like any athlete.
What many people seem to be overlooking is that few of these things are ``natural'' acts. That is, humans have spent the past tens of thousands of years walking, running, picking apart nuts, grasping rocks and bones and spears and branches. It's only the past few hundred years that any sizable number of people have spent the majority of their time doing things that require as much manual dexterity as playing a piano or working a high-speed garment machine or typing. It's a testament to our bodies' versatility that these things are possible at all, and hardly surprising that we're having some troubles along the way.
b&
Quoth mike_the_kid:
I think Monty Python said it best: ``Every sperm is sacred.''
b&
In that case, we should see Sherlock Holmes next to Isaac Asimov and Ian Fleming next to Ben Bova. Stranger in a Strange Land could be placed in the comparative theology section with Dune, and, while we're at it, we might as well put Moby Dick and Call of the Wild in the biology section.
When it comes down to it, great writing is great writing, regardless of genre. Genre is a classification system, not a qualification system.
There's a clear distinction between SF and fantasy: SF explores the possible (or, at least, the plausible); fantasy explores the impossible. SF has its roots in reality; fantasy, unreality. Both deserve exploration.
But lumping them together makes as even less sense than combining horror stories with detective fiction.
b&
We should go to the Moon, but not for any of the reasons you listed.
We know enough about low-gravity environments that there's not much need to simulate them. If you're worried about training people, underwater on Earth or, better, a centrifuge in orbit would make much more sense.
...but you still have to fight the Moon's gravity, and you still have to get there in the first place. Terrestrial orbit is much, much better than the Moon in this regards.
You can build even bigger things in microgravity than you can on the Moon. Much, much bigger.
Er...this is completely irrelevant. Volatile chemical fuels aren't a problem, now. You still wouldn't want them leaking on the Moon, so you've got the same engineering problems to deal with. You'll also need a reactant and reagent that you don't want to mix until you're ready...none of this is affected in the least by the lack of an atmosphere. Besides, we won't be using chemical propulsion for much longer--it's just waaay too expensive and inefficient. Ion drives and solar sails will probably drive intrastellar travel in coming decades. Eventually, I suspect we'll have some sort of fusion-powered photon drive like Niven's torchships--a very bright flashlight that uses the high velocity of light as exhaust instead of the puny velocity of hydrogen-oxygen reactions.
The moon may be a good source of raw materials; it deserves extensive scientific research for the sake of the research; and the far side would make the ultimate near-Earth astronomical observation platform. Once we're (back) there, we'll undoubtedly discover lots more to make it a great place for humanity to have a permanent presence.
But it'd make a damn poor staging area.
b&
I haven't read the book, so I won't comment on its merits. pinkunicorn, however, does seem to be a bit mistraken about what makes good science fiction.
True science fiction--at least good SF--has nothing to do with technobable. Rather, science and technology are important characters in the story.
For example, Larry Niven takes the idea of a Star Trek style transporter, and examines what it would do to society. Perfect murders go unsolved, protests and riots spontaneously appear and disappear, pickpockets run rampant.
Timothy Zahn creates a super-soldier with implanted weapons and sends the soldiers home. They're feared and hated, develop terrible wasting diseases, and eventually flee to create their own society.
James Hogan explores virtual reality and the effects of total immersion in an unreal world. Alan Dean Foster creats a society of fanciful aliens with a specialized socialst structure and then throws humans into the mix. Frank Herbert creates a self-aware computer that becomes God--or is it the Devil?
There are related genres. Good space opera, like David Weber's works, is classic adventure storytelling set in a detailed and internally consistent technologically-advanced future.
Star Wars and friends is perhaps best classified as science fantasy. The story may be entertaining, but it makes no attempt at basing itself in reality. What psuedo-technology there is serves as colorful background. If Star Wars were truce science fiction, it would have spent more time on the Endor Holocaust than the (admitedly entertaining) final swordfight between Luke and Vader.
So don't expect me to get excited about a story just because it has intelligent cleaning robots and mechanical computers, especially if the plot isn't too complex. If I want intelligent cleaning robots, I'll read Doug Adams and get a great plot and good laughs. If I want mechanical computers, I'll read William Gibson and get a great plot, social commentary, and a fascinating exploration of human nature.
Why SF and fantasy are lumped together is beyond me. What Tolkein and Vernor Vinge have in common besides great creativity and command of the English language escapes my attention.
</rant>
b&