Golden Ages end. With Pohl it was his skills as an editor. Pick up any issue of Galaxy Magazine in the 60's and you'll be drawn into how well the thing is put together; and how good the writing is. If you like the Sci Fi genre there really is (current tense intended) no better way to read compelling and idea laden works from new and old writers. And like others from the era, his own novels became interesting rather late. "Gateway" is pretty good. The tropes are compelling. But again, Golden ages end.
I'm busy stuffing my bookshelves with anthologies, which I really love to go through. I've picked up a few old Sci-Fi magazines, like Galaxy, which are great reading, but slightly vexing when you come to the serials, which mean finding more of the issues. It can get spendy filling the gaps.
As a school library was cleaning out books I've been acquiring a lot of the works of Simak, Heinlein (early sci-fi), Bradbury, et al. There's something enjoyable about reading these things. Sometimes listening to old MP3s of Dimension-X or X-Minus-1 (which you can find on archive.org) is a lot of fun. It was a simpler age with the new sciences of atomic physics and morality to be explored.
I'm curious. What ghetto do you live in? I mean, you do live in an area where the public schools don't have the kind of funding they need, right? Otherwise, you might want to qualify your statement with something along the lines of "... so long as the school has adequate funding and a decent curriculum as well as dedicated teachers". Otherwise, you can be the most caring parent in the world and the only way they are going to get a decent education is if you send them to private school or home school them.
I've worked in education. I see it up front. I run the studies, the numbers, the stats.
I REALLY think we in the US should have a hard look at Finland's education system - #1 in the World.
And we need to get away from this "school is to educate workers" mentality that American business sneaked into our collective conscious.
Our education system was for having an educated electorate - not for free training for Wal-Mart and McDonald's.
That mentality has to change and we need to basically tell American business that if they want trained workers, THEY need to do it themselves and stop passing their costs onto the public.
They bitch and moan about taxes and then bitch and moan about the education of the populace - American business has the this horrible case of entitlement and have the nerve to put the blame on the average citizen when THEY have the power to change things.
American business has little loyalty to American people. Outsourcing, shipping manufacturing overseas, begging for increases in H1B visas, it's all there for people to see, yet so many "Tea Partiers" and "Libertarians" love to back the party that bends over for this stuff. In the 1970's a CEO of a large multinational collected a low-end 6 figure salary and sent his kids to public schools. Now they all get 7 or 8 figures, from pay and incentives (stock options, bonuses) and do you think they'd send their kids to a public school, even the best ones in the country?
Biggest contributing factor to student academic achievement is in the home. A good home, supportive parent and you can go far. Parents who fight all the time or are ambivalent about how much time you spend in chat-rooms or killing zombies in some virtual universe aren't helping.
As always, the problem is that people don't agree on what "success" means. I think that impersonal testing with static measures of success is best. Other people think that you need to factor in how this particular child got to this point.
The problem with Teaching To The Test is you aren't preparing these students for anything, but taking tests.
I took that class and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone having any interest in executing heroes. They teach you everything about constructing high tech execution machines, but when I asked the teacher why a bullet to the head wouldn't be more time and cost effective I got shouted at.
The worst bit is having to memorize your entire evil plot so you can soliloquize in front of the hero, while you think you have him/her utterly at your mercy, so they can then make an improbably escape and foil your plot.
But then, it can't be all milk and cookies at the hero academy, having to practice your improbable escapes and practice remembering entire evil plots, so you don't leave anything important out while foiling them. Nothing more embarrassing than finding that female reporter rotting away in a dungeon cell several weeks later, when all you had to do was rip the door off its hinges.
I say that sending your child to public school is akin to child abuse.
Not supporting Public Schools is Child Abuse on a Mass scale.
The worst thing that has happened to Public Schools in America is they have become a political weapon used by one party against another. Rather than improve the schools, we keep getting assholes who call themselves Education Candidates -- in a way, they are up front, they're going to teach you how not to run your schools.
While public school systems in many countries are great successes, the American public school has become a target of derision, blame and shame. Not quite lofty goals, not what they could be.
I do believe teachers should be held to account, but so should parents. I had good parents and I attended excellent public schools, which received the full support of the community. It should be that good everywhere, then private schools would be the joke.
Or they take away motivation. So Are teens who play video games more likely to get a job, more likely to not get a job even when its a detriment, no change.v
Perhaps leave teens mentally exhausted unable to dream up ways of getting in trouble. Won't last - the amoral behaviour so necessary in playing many violent video games is training these people, establishing thought patterns. Curious how they will rationalize things when they get into their 30's and 40's.
i need a red sports car for my mid-life crisis -- so I can run people over with it
Its called blowing off steam and it can be accomplished mush better by going outside and playing with other kids. Thats how i did it all i see are kids playing video games or watch cartoons which in my day was saturday mornings. But blowing off mental stress killing zombies is fun its just not enough in my book.
You, sir, are a veritable fossil, much as myself - get out on that bike, ski, run around in the woods, get into a boat and paddle like mad, swat at 12,507 mosquitoes at summer camp, catch a few 15 lb carp, go sledding, swipe pumpkins, chase girls, etc. Don't wake up at 40 to find half your hair gone along with most of your life in empty pursuit of points and levels.
Games are a good outlet for stress and frustration. I'd argue a game is a constructive activity as there are things you can learn from video games. Of course they make people less violent.
?
I found many games to increase my stress level to the point I can actually hear red corpuscles whistling through the capillaries in my cranium.
and once I finished getting them unpackaged, installed and running my stress level went even higher
the researchers were set upon and beaten with an inch of their lives by video game company executives, reviewers, players and given severe noogies and wedgies by Gabe and Tycho.
The Techdirt article you've cited to try to "prove me wrong" quotes the bill as follows:
"where the actual contribution of an invention lies solely in it being a computer program, it is ineligible for patent protection... it will not be possible to obtain a patent for an invention that involves or makes use of the computer program if the sole inventive feature is that it is a computer program".
In other words, exactly what I said.
Where this gets really fun is when the argument is presented that "the program" and "the computer" are analog, rather than digital. A hole you could pilot an aircraft carrier through.
Known shill = untrustworthy source of information. Even a broken clock is right twice a day - that doesn't mean it's ok to start believing it when you want to know what time it is. You ignore it and seek out an unbroken clock.
Unless it perpetually indicates 5:00 PM - time to check in at the Tiki Bar.
Some of the biggest liars I've ever known occasionally tell the truth, otherwise they'd function like some Bizarro World inhabitant.
He also came out with Windows 7, Office 2010, IE 9/10, and sharepoint 2010 which are the best versions to date and huge improvements over earlier versions under Balmer!
In the last year we saw Office 2013, Windows 8, Vs2012, which are big falls from their heights! Just frustrating as my anti ms views have softened until last year. Balmer did let great improvements.
IE 9 and 10 are such slow browsers, I can't stand using them. And to think they should do everything better than Firefox or Chrome because Microsoft could go directly into the OS rather than through APIs... really wonder what the IE team and budget look like.
On the technical reasons, I wrote before that "the big difference between plain D3D9 with XPDM and D3D9Ex with WDDM BTW is that WDDM allows multiple apps to use the GPU at the same time. With XPDM, if another app tried to use the GPU, the other app would receive a lost device error on the next DirectX call. The missing "hardware scheduler" in the i915 probably refers to the hardware needed for this."
+1 Informative!
You got it, it wasn't about the CPU, but the 915 chipsets which Intel was still trying to clear from inventory, or they'd eat them as they came back from OEMs
What rubbish is this? Apple's educational pricing set the standard for others to follow. The logic was get these into schools where students will learn on them and they will expect to use the same systems when out in the real world.
According to box office mojo, it has just regained its production budget. I guess it was a flop, but it was a flop that paid for itself.
Not even close to paying for itself. The marketing was in the tens of millions, various costs of distribution and so on meant Disney needed it to be a smash, on the order of 7-800 million. So they're going to be taking a big loss on it.
Disney can't (re-) do classics. Lone Ranger was one example, John Carter another.
Planes was Cars was CGI Thomas the Tank Engine. Disney is about as original as Microsoft, with similar results.
I can't wait to see what they do with Star Wars.
Biggest problem with Lone Ranger - the series road out of the west, more specifically WXYZ Detroit, as a Juvenile Western ( so juvenile in fact, the creators of Gunsmoke hated it so much they vowed to create a series with shades of grey, give the view of good or bad some perspective, etc.) and Disney tried to turn it into entertainment for the masses. Harry Potter it ain't.
I might be part of the few people in the world who are able to implement attacks on cryptography or busting advanced malware in random hardware firmwares in a breeze. Still there might always be someone who knows some trick I'm not aware of, who is cleverer and more prepared, thus i don't feel safe.
The Guardian's staff is in my opinion well aware of how to use Tor and such countermeasures. They just don't want to try their luck, because if they happen to fail this is ultimate failure.
The Guardian is right and The Register is a usual a bundle of same sized wooden sticks.
Also possible they fear relying upon any "safe" technology because they won't know when it is no longer "safe". Not like the NSA is going to send them a card saying "We are now watching you".
Wasn't so long ago all the British press were under scrutiny in the wake News Of The World Phone Hacking Scandal. I think it's still fresh on the minds of many editors in the British press and more scrutiny is not something they would welcome. In this light it was probably intentional not to go out of their way to protect him.
Slashdot Mirror
Golden Ages end. With Pohl it was his skills as an editor. Pick up any issue of Galaxy Magazine in the 60's and you'll be drawn into how well the thing is put together; and how good the writing is. If you like the Sci Fi genre there really is (current tense intended) no better way to read compelling and idea laden works from new and old writers. And like others from the era, his own novels became interesting rather late. "Gateway" is pretty good. The tropes are compelling. But again, Golden ages end.
I'm busy stuffing my bookshelves with anthologies, which I really love to go through. I've picked up a few old Sci-Fi magazines, like Galaxy, which are great reading, but slightly vexing when you come to the serials, which mean finding more of the issues. It can get spendy filling the gaps.
To be replaced by Vampire fiction :_(
As a school library was cleaning out books I've been acquiring a lot of the works of Simak, Heinlein (early sci-fi), Bradbury, et al. There's something enjoyable about reading these things. Sometimes listening to old MP3s of Dimension-X or X-Minus-1 (which you can find on archive.org) is a lot of fun. It was a simpler age with the new sciences of atomic physics and morality to be explored.
I'm curious. What ghetto do you live in? I mean, you do live in an area where the public schools don't have the kind of funding they need, right? Otherwise, you might want to qualify your statement with something along the lines of "... so long as the school has adequate funding and a decent curriculum as well as dedicated teachers". Otherwise, you can be the most caring parent in the world and the only way they are going to get a decent education is if you send them to private school or home school them.
I've worked in education. I see it up front. I run the studies, the numbers, the stats.
I REALLY think we in the US should have a hard look at Finland's education system - #1 in the World.
And we need to get away from this "school is to educate workers" mentality that American business sneaked into our collective conscious.
Our education system was for having an educated electorate - not for free training for Wal-Mart and McDonald's.
That mentality has to change and we need to basically tell American business that if they want trained workers, THEY need to do it themselves and stop passing their costs onto the public.
They bitch and moan about taxes and then bitch and moan about the education of the populace - American business has the this horrible case of entitlement and have the nerve to put the blame on the average citizen when THEY have the power to change things.
American business has little loyalty to American people. Outsourcing, shipping manufacturing overseas, begging for increases in H1B visas, it's all there for people to see, yet so many "Tea Partiers" and "Libertarians" love to back the party that bends over for this stuff. In the 1970's a CEO of a large multinational collected a low-end 6 figure salary and sent his kids to public schools. Now they all get 7 or 8 figures, from pay and incentives (stock options, bonuses) and do you think they'd send their kids to a public school, even the best ones in the country?
Biggest contributing factor to student academic achievement is in the home. A good home, supportive parent and you can go far. Parents who fight all the time or are ambivalent about how much time you spend in chat-rooms or killing zombies in some virtual universe aren't helping.
As always, the problem is that people don't agree on what "success" means. I think that impersonal testing with static measures of success is best. Other people think that you need to factor in how this particular child got to this point.
The problem with Teaching To The Test is you aren't preparing these students for anything, but taking tests.
Hero Killing 112
I took that class and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone having any interest in executing heroes. They teach you everything about constructing high tech execution machines, but when I asked the teacher why a bullet to the head wouldn't be more time and cost effective I got shouted at.
The worst bit is having to memorize your entire evil plot so you can soliloquize in front of the hero, while you think you have him/her utterly at your mercy, so they can then make an improbably escape and foil your plot.
But then, it can't be all milk and cookies at the hero academy, having to practice your improbable escapes and practice remembering entire evil plots, so you don't leave anything important out while foiling them. Nothing more embarrassing than finding that female reporter rotting away in a dungeon cell several weeks later, when all you had to do was rip the door off its hinges.
I say that sending your child to public school is akin to child abuse.
Not supporting Public Schools is Child Abuse on a Mass scale.
The worst thing that has happened to Public Schools in America is they have become a political weapon used by one party against another. Rather than improve the schools, we keep getting assholes who call themselves Education Candidates -- in a way, they are up front, they're going to teach you how not to run your schools.
While public school systems in many countries are great successes, the American public school has become a target of derision, blame and shame. Not quite lofty goals, not what they could be.
I do believe teachers should be held to account, but so should parents. I had good parents and I attended excellent public schools, which received the full support of the community. It should be that good everywhere, then private schools would be the joke.
requested the ability to treat Windows security bug reporters as being in league with terrorists by invoking the Patriot Act.
My head is spinning.
Does Apple already have a claim on the name? If Japan continues with this trend of cute robots, it'll be the next big thing.
Is Microsoft paying any attention to this?
Or they take away motivation.
So Are teens who play video games more likely to get a job, more likely to not get a job even when its a detriment, no change.v
Perhaps leave teens mentally exhausted unable to dream up ways of getting in trouble. Won't last - the amoral behaviour so necessary in playing many violent video games is training these people, establishing thought patterns. Curious how they will rationalize things when they get into their 30's and 40's.
i need a red sports car for my mid-life crisis -- so I can run people over with it
"A team of researchers claims to have created the world's fastest spinning man-made object."
A politician?
--
BMO
A marketer or political consultant - if they had quantum numbers, well, they'd be quantum!
Its called blowing off steam and it can be accomplished mush better by going outside and playing with other kids. Thats how i did it all i see are kids playing video games or watch cartoons which in my day was saturday mornings. But blowing off mental stress killing zombies is fun its just not enough in my book.
You, sir, are a veritable fossil, much as myself - get out on that bike, ski, run around in the woods, get into a boat and paddle like mad, swat at 12,507 mosquitoes at summer camp, catch a few 15 lb carp, go sledding, swipe pumpkins, chase girls, etc. Don't wake up at 40 to find half your hair gone along with most of your life in empty pursuit of points and levels.
Games are a good outlet for stress and frustration. I'd argue a game is a constructive activity as there are things you can learn from video games.
Of course they make people less violent.
?
I found many games to increase my stress level to the point I can actually hear red corpuscles whistling through the capillaries in my cranium.
and once I finished getting them unpackaged, installed and running my stress level went even higher
the researchers were set upon and beaten with an inch of their lives by video game company executives, reviewers, players and given severe noogies and wedgies by Gabe and Tycho.
The Techdirt article you've cited to try to "prove me wrong" quotes the bill as follows:
"where the actual contribution of an invention lies solely in it being a computer program, it is ineligible for patent protection... it will not be possible to obtain a patent for an invention that involves or makes use of the computer program if the sole inventive feature is that it is a computer program".
In other words, exactly what I said.
Where this gets really fun is when the argument is presented that "the program" and "the computer" are analog, rather than digital. A hole you could pilot an aircraft carrier through.
Known shill = untrustworthy source of information. Even a broken clock is right twice a day - that doesn't mean it's ok to start believing it when you want to know what time it is. You ignore it and seek out an unbroken clock.
Unless it perpetually indicates 5:00 PM - time to check in at the Tiki Bar.
Some of the biggest liars I've ever known occasionally tell the truth, otherwise they'd function like some Bizarro World inhabitant.
He also came out with Windows 7, Office 2010, IE 9/10, and sharepoint 2010 which are the best versions to date and huge improvements over earlier versions under Balmer!
In the last year we saw Office 2013, Windows 8, Vs2012, which are big falls from their heights! Just frustrating as my anti ms views have softened until last year. Balmer did let great improvements.
IE 9 and 10 are such slow browsers, I can't stand using them. And to think they should do everything better than Firefox or Chrome because Microsoft could go directly into the OS rather than through APIs... really wonder what the IE team and budget look like.
The great irony is Marketing is Ballmer's background. Not very good at it, was he?
On the technical reasons, I wrote before that "the big difference between plain D3D9 with XPDM and D3D9Ex with WDDM BTW is that WDDM allows multiple apps to use the GPU at the same time. With XPDM, if another app tried to use the GPU, the other app would receive a lost device error on the next DirectX call. The missing "hardware scheduler" in the i915 probably refers to the hardware needed for this."
+1 Informative!
You got it, it wasn't about the CPU, but the 915 chipsets which Intel was still trying to clear from inventory, or they'd eat them as they came back from OEMs
A lot of those were donated
What rubbish is this? Apple's educational pricing set the standard for others to follow. The logic was get these into schools where students will learn on them and they will expect to use the same systems when out in the real world.
According to box office mojo, it has just regained its production budget. I guess it was a flop, but it was a flop that paid for itself.
Not even close to paying for itself. The marketing was in the tens of millions, various costs of distribution and so on meant Disney needed it to be a smash, on the order of 7-800 million. So they're going to be taking a big loss on it.
Disney can't (re-) do classics. Lone Ranger was one example, John Carter another.
Planes was Cars was CGI Thomas the Tank Engine. Disney is about as original as Microsoft, with similar results.
I can't wait to see what they do with Star Wars.
Biggest problem with Lone Ranger - the series road out of the west, more specifically WXYZ Detroit, as a Juvenile Western ( so juvenile in fact, the creators of Gunsmoke hated it so much they vowed to create a series with shades of grey, give the view of good or bad some perspective, etc.) and Disney tried to turn it into entertainment for the masses. Harry Potter it ain't.
I might be part of the few people in the world who are able to implement attacks on cryptography or busting advanced malware in random hardware firmwares in a breeze.
Still there might always be someone who knows some trick I'm not aware of, who is cleverer and more prepared, thus i don't feel safe.
The Guardian's staff is in my opinion well aware of how to use Tor and such countermeasures. They just don't want to try their luck, because if they happen to fail this is ultimate failure.
The Guardian is right and The Register is a usual a bundle of same sized wooden sticks.
Also possible they fear relying upon any "safe" technology because they won't know when it is no longer "safe". Not like the NSA is going to send them a card saying "We are now watching you".
Wasn't so long ago all the British press were under scrutiny in the wake News Of The World Phone Hacking Scandal. I think it's still fresh on the minds of many editors in the British press and more scrutiny is not something they would welcome. In this light it was probably intentional not to go out of their way to protect him.