You haven't specified what is on the microfilm chip in the card.
If its largely text, I can't see why you'd want to lose the embedded text (searcheable etc. - TIFF would require OCR at some point..?) in PDF.
Err I guess my point would be that I'd pick one of these up with some kind of network server appropriate for your network instead of an all in one network capable one. They don't seem to build em like they used to.
I've had an HP LaserJet 5L since early 1996 and its still going strong (~2 toners a year). Not bad for a 10yr old printer. 9 moves later and I've dropped it, cracked the case, had kids jam sandwiches in it and it still works.
The auto power off / powersave is a little flaky sometimes (preventing it from going full poweroff) and sometimes halfway through the feed tray, the feeder will grab more than one page at a time leading to a jam, but other than that I love old reliable.
Re:Sugar coating. *Mini-spoiler*
on
A Beautiful Mind
·
· Score: 1
The only problem is that schizophrenics never *see* these imaginary characters (at least thats what modern research indicates) - they only hear and speak with them. Voices in their heads and stuff.
Definately. I am always nothing but impressed with the competancy of my Indian coworkers, and how fast they can get up to speed on new projects (certainly, a lot smarter than me..:)
Of course the only way to be truly self-reliant: farm.:) Leaving company X and becoming a freelance consultant for company X isn't really what you're looking for.
I too get emails like that. In fact, last week I got a non-list email from a person in India asking what it was like to work in Canada at my company, and if I knew any job openings (they were looking to immigrate.)
I have a few coworkers who came over from India a few years ago. My company also has a design centre over there (although I can't comment on their work... different division). But my coworkers are somewhat of the mind that they "got out at the good time" (i.e. before everyone over there got a CS degree, and before Nortel and half a dozen other hi-tech companies up here dumped thousands of software developers onto the Canadian job market.) They also say that their post-secondary education is somewhat compressed (covers more, in less time, more focused) than over here. i.e. turn out software geeks faster.
In spite of this, just think about it. Here you have to pay a (for lack of a better term) code monkey anywheres from $45,000-60,000 a year + benefits. They can pay far less over there (in relative $US or $CAN) and still keep their code monkeys above the poverty line. Not happy with your job? Too bad, thanks for coming out, there's only a BILLION others to replace you. So you have to sortof "code for your life."
While reading about this game (the first I've heard of it..) I was struck by the similarities to that movie "The Game" with Micheal Douglas in which his brother (Sean Penn) buys him a "game". The game company essentially spins a fantastic fantasy world and tosses him up to his eyeballs in it. It comes just short of ruining his life before he "wins".... An interesting concept.
While the $$$$$$$ price tag of smashed cars, coke strewn hotel rooms, fake hospitals and the actors required would put the price of such a thing beyond the range of your casual gamer, the premise is certainly interesting. Imagine having a fantasy life and being thrown (kicking and screaming) into the middle of it. Would be a thrill to say the least.
I don't suppose that such a thing actually exists. Does anyone know anything that comes close to this "real world immersive" game?
The only thing I know of that comes close is something called Dustrunners, but the immersive game is highly fantastic futuristic and is contained entirely within the website (and is somehow tied in with an animated cartoon). It didn't grab me soon enough after I signed up, but I admit it held promise.
In my final year of Comp. Eng., I hooked up with some Comp. Sci buds of mine in a senior thesis course. Ultimately I didn't take the course, but I still had a hand in the project, and laid the ground work for it (I had some summer jobs working with PLCs - programmable logic controllers).
[long background, but there is a point to this:]Anyways.... In traditional software development, the general process is design, code, then test, test and more test. In automation, the rule seemed to be (at least it was where I worked) spec --> code ladder logic --> install. Test? Not really.... testing [on the plant floor!] was limited to turn it on and cross your fingers. If it doesn't work, run around the floor resetting drives and e-stop buttons, hack the PLC code to cover unforseen scenarios that the original logic writer didn't think of (who would have thought that the guys on the line would have tried to do...?). Ugh. Wrong on so many levels. Expensive, time consuming.
But what if you could simulate the plant floor off-site? Test your ladder logic before hooking up the PLCs to the equipment? True, PLC ladder logic simulators exist, but these really only verify that your code is syntactically correct.. not that it does what the spec says it should. They just run the ladder logic you wrote outside of an actual PLC. But what happens when an e-stop is pressed, and THEN a drive faults? etc. Does your ladder logic consider this?
So what we did is propose that you could model things you'd find on a plant floor with C++ objects. For our demonstration, we modelled a really basic and trivial setup. We had a few lights, a few emergency stop and start push buttons and a cheap simulation of an AC drive. Each object lived in its little process... it wasn't truly *realtime* per se, but it was close enough for demonstration purposes. The point of the exercise was that we were able to send the simulator dozens of scripted test scenarios like:
[time] [object] [action]
00:10 start_pb PUSH ON
00:30 ac_drive SIMULATE CURRENT FAULT
00:45 ac_drive VERIFY SHUTDOWN
for example... check that your PLC logic to see that it monitors correctly for a fault... the last line would check the drive object to see that it got a shutdown signal (from the PLC)
The second part of the project (which we didn't get to) was to actually build an interface through a multi-channel I/O board so the simulated objects could talk directly to the I/O on a real PLC using +/-12V, 24V analog and 5V TTL digital signals.
But the idea was that equipment manufacturers could write simulation objects for their real devices. Installing a new AB drive on the line? Test out your PLC5 code before hand... go download the sim object from allenbradley.com, and throw your test plan into the simulator. Could find out that the new drive uses a different range for output speed, and you have to rework some conversion in your ladder logic. A new sensor has faster response time so you have to adjust a PID loop. Or whatever. All this before wasting time and money on the plant floor.
So.. ok, we never get very far with it (although my buds did get a good mark for the course) but the idea of having these objects was good. You could do something similar with procedural code of course, but you'd have to rewrite the code for every setup you wanted to test.
The only reason that it leaked fuel on the tarmac was because its skin was designed to expand. Flying at high alt cruising speed, its skin would heat up (a few hundred degrees..?), expand, sealing those leaks. It was usual practice for blackbird pilots to take off, fly to cruising altitude, do some high speed maneuvers to warm up the skin, then refuel in flight.
I don't see what the news here is. This has been ongoing for several years, and will probably keep on going for a while.
Too many people just cannot agree as to what the accepted Soft. Eng. body of knowledge should include. Not only that, but they're trying to cover this for everyone.... some states and provinces already have their own definitions, which drives university curriculum, but this is trying to be the body of knowledge used by EVERY soft. eng. program.
One of the aguments as to why this so hard to accomplish is because the field is still young, and keeps innovating. New languages, new algorithms, even newer applications. Other engineering disciplines benefit from the fact that they've been evolving for so much longer and that they've matured. Im sure that Civil engineering is still changing, but the fundamentals of city planning and road & bridge construction haven't changed since the Romans. Electrical engineering is younger, but the core fundamentals of electricity, magnetism, microwaves etc. have been around for a while (at least the turn of the century.) In Computer Engineering, integrated circuits (at least the theory) has been around for decades.
Software is still (comparatively) too young. Then you get academic groups fighting with commercial groups fighting with standards organisations (IEEE, ACM etc.), each with their own vested interest. There are best practices sure, but there are so many ways to write software........ comparatively, the "right" way to build a bridge should be obvious (i.e. not the way where it falls apart.)
I agree with you in that knee-jerk "oh wow things are screwed lets fix everything NOW" reactions are bad. (Not to mention how Hollywood beats you over the head with it)
In this case however, one would be hard pressed to dissprove the fact that our planet is getting 'worse'... quickly. Take a look at weather pattern maps, forest belts moving northwards, arid/desert zones expanding. Or right outside your window; when I was a kid, Southwestern Ontario could count on at least 2-3 ft of snow for Christmas. I can't remember when the last time we've had more than 6-10 inches on the ground at any one time - not for 5 years at least.
Yes, you're right; The Earth is a crazy everchanging planet. And yes, 100 years is but a blip in the history of this rock. But what a 100 hundred years it has been. There's usually thousands to millions of years between ice-ages; more than enough time for the planet's ecosphere, flora and fauna to adjust.
Not in this case. Like the meteor that could have wiped out the dinosaurs, humans learning to use their opposable digits (or whatever other marker of sentient presence you prefer) was the impact of the Human blight. The reprocussions have just taken a few thousand years to manifest themselves. But thats still pretty small on the Earth's timeframe.
Nope, we've started something that I don't think we can stop. Whether Manhatten will be submerged under 1000 ft of water, well thats up for speculation. But if we're going to start fixing things, we have to act now.
When I was still in university, our engineering department ran a summer Eng. camp for kids in both elementary and high school. While the primary focus was on engineering techniques & process in general (you know, building popscicle stick bridges etc.), there were some dedicated courses we ran on computing.
For the elementary school kids, we didn't try to overwhelm them with technical details - we found that starting with some webpage making, following up with some basic JavaScript was sufficient. We also started further back with an introduction to proper typing. The kids at this point didn't seem too interested in programming per se. Rather were more interested in how to *use* a computer - surf the web, use Windows, how to use Word to type a letter to Grandma etc., how to use PhotoShop to create cool graphics for their webpages.
The high school kids were a bit easier. All of them had had exposure to computers - they wanted to know C, C++ and Java. While game programming would have been nice, none of them had the necessary math background required for graphics (well, 3D graphics anyway.) Noone expressed much interest in knowing how to use Excel (whats the point, when do you use a spreadsheet in high school?) or MSAccess.
So we kept the programming exercises pretty simple. Essentially we asked each team what they wanted to do and helped them out as best as we could. One team came up with a pretty slick text based RPG a la Zork (You see a grue. Eat grue. The grue eats you. End.)
Also, don't forget the power of the Hello-World program. Nothing's cooler then seeing that first *anything*, that you programmed yourself... so it doesn't have to be fancy.
Yes, but since the average human mind can read at several hundred words/s, whats a few subtitles?
I have to say though that subtitles rather than redubbing is the way to go. Dubbing almost always ruins the film.
My $0.02
I just wish, that if they are going to go through the effort to do all that wonderful CGI and pretty explosions, that they would at least make them accurate.
*sigh*
Did anyone else notice that the Doolittle Radiers' B-25s were taking off from the deck of a Nimitz class nuclear aircraft carrier?
If those Warhawks had taken off cross field like that they *probably* would have ripped their landing gear off.
No one ever leads aircraft in movies anymore. Sigh.
I wish the movie would have done a bit more about the Japanese. From what I can remember from history class, the Japanese lost major face in regards to the attack:
-due to a transcription/time zone error, the Japanese embassy mixed up the hour of the attack. THey were supposed to deliver an official declaration of attack at the same time, Hawaii time, except in DC. But they were late by 1 hour. Many of the pilots who flew that morning were horribly disgraced and dishonoured, having attacked while not officially at war.... I believe some committed ritual suicide? Interesting.
Perhaps they watched Contact too many times. Wouldn't _you_ want to be the one who discovered a cell call from ET?
(Of course SETI would claim all the glory, but you could still try for your 15 nano seconds of fame --> I mean wouldn't it be just like Slashdot to report "The NYTimes has thisarticle up about the computer of the guy who discovered the message from Andromeda last week. When asked what his number crunching secret was, its owner, Joe Milkdud, said "My advantage? Well I think it was when I overlocked my Athalon to 800 MHz... that just put me over that computational edge. And the extra 256 MB RAM helped too.")
The article makes a point about there being a loss of critical thinking....
"My students can no longer tell the difference between reporting on something, and evaluating and interpreting it. That's critical thinking, and they're losing it.".... "Kids can spend hours clicking on icons and surfing the Web, but that doesn't mean they're learning anything;"
Well.... perhaps. But when tasked with a report about X in say, grade 8, how many of us were challenged to use critical judgement or develop conclusions then? At this time, the teacher would say "I want to see a 10 page report on X".... they didnt say "I want to see a 10 page report on X. Be sure to include a discussion on X's impact on the environment and an analysis of the political/socio-economic impact of increasing/decreasing X with reference to the collapse of the Soviet Union and why this might influence middle east peace negotiations."
Developing/using critical thinking skills is something that most of us don't get a chance to do until we hit post-secondary. Elementary and high-school curriculum does not ask much in the way of analytical problem solving or an individual's development of conclusions
So I would have to do a report on Belize (back to grade 8). I'd spend 30 seconds with the encyclopedia Brittanica. Hrmm. check index. "Belize"... [B] page 267. Wow, a 10 page report already made for me. Pictures too! I'd read it over, then flip through the volume looking for something cool to read about. How is doing a search in Google for X and compiling a report from that any better/worse then summarizing an encyclopedia?
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't specified what is on the microfilm chip in the card. If its largely text, I can't see why you'd want to lose the embedded text (searcheable etc. - TIFF would require OCR at some point..?) in PDF.
$2500? Dang yo, my wife's cost $6,000. But they don't get 40 mpg.
Ah, you must live in Ottawa. Well at least the Sens are in the finals, so thats something. :/
Err I guess my point would be that I'd pick one of these up with some kind of network server appropriate for your network instead of an all in one network capable one. They don't seem to build em like they used to.
I've had an HP LaserJet 5L since early 1996 and its still going strong (~2 toners a year). Not bad for a 10yr old printer. 9 moves later and I've dropped it, cracked the case, had kids jam sandwiches in it and it still works. The auto power off / powersave is a little flaky sometimes (preventing it from going full poweroff) and sometimes halfway through the feed tray, the feeder will grab more than one page at a time leading to a jam, but other than that I love old reliable.
The only problem is that schizophrenics never *see* these imaginary characters (at least thats what modern research indicates) - they only hear and speak with them. Voices in their heads and stuff.
It looks too much like a lamp to me. That little neck for the screen would be a good handle to beat someone over the head with the base.
I can see it now:
girlfriend: cmon, lets go out
me: just... one... more... frag...
girlfriend: you've been playing q3 all day
me: camper!
girlfriend: arrrggggggg!
Except for the fact that it only comes with a GeForce 2 MX....
Yeah, except you'd have to be careful and be ready to make a quick catch when you eject the CD/DVD. :)
Definately. I am always nothing but impressed with the competancy of my Indian coworkers, and how fast they can get up to speed on new projects (certainly, a lot smarter than me.. :)
Of course the only way to be truly self-reliant: farm. :) Leaving company X and becoming a freelance consultant for company X isn't really what you're looking for.
I too get emails like that. In fact, last week I got a non-list email from a person in India asking what it was like to work in Canada at my company, and if I knew any job openings (they were looking to immigrate.)
I have a few coworkers who came over from India a few years ago. My company also has a design centre over there (although I can't comment on their work... different division). But my coworkers are somewhat of the mind that they "got out at the good time" (i.e. before everyone over there got a CS degree, and before Nortel and half a dozen other hi-tech companies up here dumped thousands of software developers onto the Canadian job market.) They also say that their post-secondary education is somewhat compressed (covers more, in less time, more focused) than over here. i.e. turn out software geeks faster.
In spite of this, just think about it. Here you have to pay a (for lack of a better term) code monkey anywheres from $45,000-60,000 a year + benefits. They can pay far less over there (in relative $US or $CAN) and still keep their code monkeys above the poverty line. Not happy with your job? Too bad, thanks for coming out, there's only a BILLION others to replace you. So you have to sortof "code for your life."
While reading about this game (the first I've heard of it..) I was struck by the similarities to that movie "The Game" with Micheal Douglas in which his brother (Sean Penn) buys him a "game". The game company essentially spins a fantastic fantasy world and tosses him up to his eyeballs in it. It comes just short of ruining his life before he "wins".... An interesting concept.
While the $$$$$$$ price tag of smashed cars, coke strewn hotel rooms, fake hospitals and the actors required would put the price of such a thing beyond the range of your casual gamer, the premise is certainly interesting. Imagine having a fantasy life and being thrown (kicking and screaming) into the middle of it. Would be a thrill to say the least.
I don't suppose that such a thing actually exists. Does anyone know anything that comes close to this "real world immersive" game?
The only thing I know of that comes close is something called Dustrunners, but the immersive game is highly fantastic futuristic and is contained entirely within the website (and is somehow tied in with an animated cartoon). It didn't grab me soon enough after I signed up, but I admit it held promise.
In my final year of Comp. Eng., I hooked up with some Comp. Sci buds of mine in a senior thesis course. Ultimately I didn't take the course, but I still had a hand in the project, and laid the ground work for it (I had some summer jobs working with PLCs - programmable logic controllers).
[long background, but there is a point to this:]Anyways.... In traditional software development, the general process is design, code, then test, test and more test. In automation, the rule seemed to be (at least it was where I worked) spec --> code ladder logic --> install. Test? Not really.... testing [on the plant floor!] was limited to turn it on and cross your fingers. If it doesn't work, run around the floor resetting drives and e-stop buttons, hack the PLC code to cover unforseen scenarios that the original logic writer didn't think of (who would have thought that the guys on the line would have tried to do...?). Ugh. Wrong on so many levels. Expensive, time consuming.
But what if you could simulate the plant floor off-site? Test your ladder logic before hooking up the PLCs to the equipment? True, PLC ladder logic simulators exist, but these really only verify that your code is syntactically correct.. not that it does what the spec says it should. They just run the ladder logic you wrote outside of an actual PLC. But what happens when an e-stop is pressed, and THEN a drive faults? etc. Does your ladder logic consider this?
So what we did is propose that you could model things you'd find on a plant floor with C++ objects. For our demonstration, we modelled a really basic and trivial setup. We had a few lights, a few emergency stop and start push buttons and a cheap simulation of an AC drive. Each object lived in its little process... it wasn't truly *realtime* per se, but it was close enough for demonstration purposes. The point of the exercise was that we were able to send the simulator dozens of scripted test scenarios like:
[time] [object] [action]
00:10 start_pb PUSH ON
00:30 ac_drive SIMULATE CURRENT FAULT
00:45 ac_drive VERIFY SHUTDOWN
for example... check that your PLC logic to see that it monitors correctly for a fault... the last line would check the drive object to see that it got a shutdown signal (from the PLC)
The second part of the project (which we didn't get to) was to actually build an interface through a multi-channel I/O board so the simulated objects could talk directly to the I/O on a real PLC using +/-12V, 24V analog and 5V TTL digital signals.
But the idea was that equipment manufacturers could write simulation objects for their real devices. Installing a new AB drive on the line? Test out your PLC5 code before hand... go download the sim object from allenbradley.com, and throw your test plan into the simulator. Could find out that the new drive uses a different range for output speed, and you have to rework some conversion in your ladder logic. A new sensor has faster response time so you have to adjust a PID loop. Or whatever. All this before wasting time and money on the plant floor.
So.. ok, we never get very far with it (although my buds did get a good mark for the course) but the idea of having these objects was good. You could do something similar with procedural code of course, but you'd have to rewrite the code for every setup you wanted to test.
Just got the Sopranos, seasons 1 & 2 on DVD for Christmas.... :)
Got Cowboy Bebop (all 26 episodes) too. Decisions, decisions..
that not only does this guy respond (well) to our Slashdot questions, but he responds to our responses to his responses. Gets my vote. :)
The only reason that it leaked fuel on the tarmac was because its skin was designed to expand. Flying at high alt cruising speed, its skin would heat up (a few hundred degrees..?), expand, sealing those leaks. It was usual practice for blackbird pilots to take off, fly to cruising altitude, do some high speed maneuvers to warm up the skin, then refuel in flight.
the space shuttle code and "Hello World". And the later is arguable.
I don't see what the news here is. This has been ongoing for several years, and will probably keep on going for a while.
Too many people just cannot agree as to what the accepted Soft. Eng. body of knowledge should include. Not only that, but they're trying to cover this for everyone.... some states and provinces already have their own definitions, which drives university curriculum, but this is trying to be the body of knowledge used by EVERY soft. eng. program.
One of the aguments as to why this so hard to accomplish is because the field is still young, and keeps innovating. New languages, new algorithms, even newer applications. Other engineering disciplines benefit from the fact that they've been evolving for so much longer and that they've matured. Im sure that Civil engineering is still changing, but the fundamentals of city planning and road & bridge construction haven't changed since the Romans. Electrical engineering is younger, but the core fundamentals of electricity, magnetism, microwaves etc. have been around for a while (at least the turn of the century.) In Computer Engineering, integrated circuits (at least the theory) has been around for decades.
Software is still (comparatively) too young. Then you get academic groups fighting with commercial groups fighting with standards organisations (IEEE, ACM etc.), each with their own vested interest. There are best practices sure, but there are so many ways to write software........ comparatively, the "right" way to build a bridge should be obvious (i.e. not the way where it falls apart.)
I agree with you in that knee-jerk "oh wow things are screwed lets fix everything NOW" reactions are bad. (Not to mention how Hollywood beats you over the head with it)
In this case however, one would be hard pressed to dissprove the fact that our planet is getting 'worse'... quickly. Take a look at weather pattern maps, forest belts moving northwards, arid/desert zones expanding. Or right outside your window; when I was a kid, Southwestern Ontario could count on at least 2-3 ft of snow for Christmas. I can't remember when the last time we've had more than 6-10 inches on the ground at any one time - not for 5 years at least.
Yes, you're right; The Earth is a crazy everchanging planet. And yes, 100 years is but a blip in the history of this rock. But what a 100 hundred years it has been. There's usually thousands to millions of years between ice-ages; more than enough time for the planet's ecosphere, flora and fauna to adjust.
Not in this case. Like the meteor that could have wiped out the dinosaurs, humans learning to use their opposable digits (or whatever other marker of sentient presence you prefer) was the impact of the Human blight. The reprocussions have just taken a few thousand years to manifest themselves. But thats still pretty small on the Earth's timeframe.
Nope, we've started something that I don't think we can stop. Whether Manhatten will be submerged under 1000 ft of water, well thats up for speculation. But if we're going to start fixing things, we have to act now.
When I was still in university, our engineering department ran a summer Eng. camp for kids in both elementary and high school. While the primary focus was on engineering techniques & process in general (you know, building popscicle stick bridges etc.), there were some dedicated courses we ran on computing.
For the elementary school kids, we didn't try to overwhelm them with technical details - we found that starting with some webpage making, following up with some basic JavaScript was sufficient. We also started further back with an introduction to proper typing. The kids at this point didn't seem too interested in programming per se. Rather were more interested in how to *use* a computer - surf the web, use Windows, how to use Word to type a letter to Grandma etc., how to use PhotoShop to create cool graphics for their webpages.
The high school kids were a bit easier. All of them had had exposure to computers - they wanted to know C, C++ and Java. While game programming would have been nice, none of them had the necessary math background required for graphics (well, 3D graphics anyway.) Noone expressed much interest in knowing how to use Excel (whats the point, when do you use a spreadsheet in high school?) or MSAccess.
So we kept the programming exercises pretty simple. Essentially we asked each team what they wanted to do and helped them out as best as we could. One team came up with a pretty slick text based RPG a la Zork (You see a grue. Eat grue. The grue eats you. End.)
Also, don't forget the power of the Hello-World program. Nothing's cooler then seeing that first *anything*, that you programmed yourself... so it doesn't have to be fancy.
Yes, but since the average human mind can read at several hundred words/s, whats a few subtitles? I have to say though that subtitles rather than redubbing is the way to go. Dubbing almost always ruins the film. My $0.02
*sigh*
Did anyone else notice that the Doolittle Radiers' B-25s were taking off from the deck of a Nimitz class nuclear aircraft carrier?
If those Warhawks had taken off cross field like that they *probably* would have ripped their landing gear off.
No one ever leads aircraft in movies anymore. Sigh.
I wish the movie would have done a bit more about the Japanese. From what I can remember from history class, the Japanese lost major face in regards to the attack: -due to a transcription/time zone error, the Japanese embassy mixed up the hour of the attack. THey were supposed to deliver an official declaration of attack at the same time, Hawaii time, except in DC. But they were late by 1 hour. Many of the pilots who flew that morning were horribly disgraced and dishonoured, having attacked while not officially at war.... I believe some committed ritual suicide? Interesting.
Perhaps they watched Contact too many times. Wouldn't _you_ want to be the one who discovered a cell call from ET? (Of course SETI would claim all the glory, but you could still try for your 15 nano seconds of fame --> I mean wouldn't it be just like Slashdot to report "The NYTimes has thisarticle up about the computer of the guy who discovered the message from Andromeda last week. When asked what his number crunching secret was, its owner, Joe Milkdud, said "My advantage? Well I think it was when I overlocked my Athalon to 800 MHz... that just put me over that computational edge. And the extra 256 MB RAM helped too.")
"My students can no longer tell the difference between reporting on something, and evaluating and interpreting it. That's critical thinking, and they're losing it.".... "Kids can spend hours clicking on icons and surfing the Web, but that doesn't mean they're learning anything;"
Well.... perhaps. But when tasked with a report about X in say, grade 8, how many of us were challenged to use critical judgement or develop conclusions then? At this time, the teacher would say "I want to see a 10 page report on X".... they didnt say "I want to see a 10 page report on X. Be sure to include a discussion on X's impact on the environment and an analysis of the political/socio-economic impact of increasing/decreasing X with reference to the collapse of the Soviet Union and why this might influence middle east peace negotiations."
Developing/using critical thinking skills is something that most of us don't get a chance to do until we hit post-secondary. Elementary and high-school curriculum does not ask much in the way of analytical problem solving or an individual's development of conclusions
So I would have to do a report on Belize (back to grade 8). I'd spend 30 seconds with the encyclopedia Brittanica. Hrmm. check index. "Belize"... [B] page 267. Wow, a 10 page report already made for me. Pictures too! I'd read it over, then flip through the volume looking for something cool to read about. How is doing a search in Google for X and compiling a report from that any better/worse then summarizing an encyclopedia?