I was born in 1967. In the 1970s when I was in elementary school, even in our small rural school (the whole grade was ~50-60 kids), there was a gifted/talented program. It was informal, open to kids solely as recommended by teachers, and essentially took the 4-5 of us in the school who were wasting hours per day doing nothing (Kristi, Steve, Vincent, and later Bob...you might recognize yourselves) in class waiting for the others to catch up, and took us to learn more on pretty much whatever we as a group wanted to do - meteorology, dinosaurs, math, astronomy, etc. It was absolutely great and AFAIK there was no (apparent) resentment by those not in the program, nor did we make a big deal about it. When I hit 6th grade, we moved to Bloomington MN, and there was a 'high achiever' program for that much larger school district. In this (only for 6th grade) the ~50 kids that qualified after teacher recommendation, testing, and evaluation by (I'd guess?) developmental pschologists and the district were segregated into a totally separate school for the whole year. That was personally rather hard (I don't know that I was mature enough to be in this program in a totally new school, even if I was smart enough) but a second year would have been much, much better, I expect. The problem was, there WAS no second year...ever. After this 6th grade of extremely high-level classwork, we were all dropped into the mainstream. Maybe those who went back to their old friends had a better experience, but I found 7th grade extraordinarily hard, just going back to utter boredom - and both my grades and attitude reflected the problems. Tough time of life to be even more adrift, imo. Finally, in high school, there was nothing. I'd completed advanced Chemistry, AP Calc, and Engineering Physics as a junior and had literally nothing left to do as a senior. Fortunately, this was the first year of the Post-Secondary Educational Options (PSEO) program, so I went to a local junior college my whole senior year, but even that wasn't much educational advancement. (The program was also entirely new, and had some teething pains.)
Now, with my own kids 20-30 years later, I see the same thing happening - except there are no actual programs that support gifted/talented at all (while there are ample monies available for the 'mainstreaming' of kids who *might* eventually learn to eat without assistance). Constant boredom, programming that is deliberately designed to hobble advanced students and prevent them getting 'too far ahead'. Some teachers at the elementary level did try, at a personal, individual-class level to help support and address these kids' needs, but by junior high/high school, that level of personal attention absolutely vanished. PSEO is much better, but still, essentially this means that the taxpayers - who already are paying for the schools - are FURTHER subsidizing a school district's inability to sufficiently address educational needs by paying to send those students to local colleges.
I checked the temperature this morning at 8 am it was 18 degrees outside. At 10 it was 24. At 12 it was nearly 30. By noon tomorrow it will likely be 174 degrees outside!
..well, so pretty much have all the FUD-spreaders in the CDC, government, and NGOs who've been all telling us that "any moment" we could get a "deadly flu" since the (ha ha ha) Sars "epidemic".
All I've ever gotten is the "Cry Wolf" heebie jeebies.
- a slavish determination to mimic World of Warcraft's aesthetic. Unsurprising, since the dev team AFAIK largely came from Blizzard. IMO this is a little too slavish, coming off like "WoW sci fi with guns". To me it's jarring that you have nicely-detailed characters with hi-rez textures, but you're running around a world with a klunky geometry that screams "this is all computers can handle in 2004". TF2 showed that you could adhere to a non-representational, 'cartoony' theme without necessarily deliberately going so far as to mimic the design compromises of a decade ago.
- Obviously this is entirely subjective, but there's a very fine line between quirky/kitschy and cheesy. The "bad guys" n00b island story line in Wildstar is cheesy; the good guys story is cheesy AND sappy. WoW had a certain sort of self-referential humor to a lot of what it did (at its best), and that has seemed to dominate latter releases *cough* *cough* Pandas *cough*. Wildstar continues this unfortunate narrative/editorial choice, with everything from animations to storyline being so "over the top" that it has to be self-mocking (with the 'good guy' side adding a further drippy saccharine layer of narrative - the tutorial quest has you saving a guy's pregnant wife...)
- They've already very much adopted the modern-mmo paradigm of "go to quest hub, get a bunch of quests, complete those quests, move to next hub". There's almost never (at least in the first 12-15 levels) a point where you go backward, for any reason. Everything is very conveniently placed; when you hit a place where you level up, there's a new-skill trainer already waiting for you.
- Some clever design ideas in UI, communicating what enemies are doing and what you're doing (and the area effects) clearly and intuitively.
It's WoW40k, nothing more, nothing less. Personally, I don't find the modern design choices in MMOs for 'everything to be easy' to be interesting or engaging, but that's not Wildstar's fault at all. They're very solidly in the current mainstream.
IF the system asked "do you want us to save your cc# for later purchases?" and they affirmed, it's the parents' problem.
If, OTOH the cc# was saved without advising the user that it WOULD be saved, that's just economic opportunism, and SHOULD be illegal - saving cc# data in a format that it can be executed for a transaction without affirmative confirmation by the sole cardholder is pretty much the same as making a copy of their cc, no?
I could be that PERHAPS there IS a difference in some math skill between males and females?
I know it's heinously non-politically-correct to suggest that the sorts of hormonal variations that developmentally result in gross anatomical changes might actually have an impact on the subtle chemistry of brain development as well...we're perfectly willing to recognize that (speaking broadly) women are in fact better at multitasking or that men are better at 3d shape understanding. Is it impossible that there isn't actually some real difference in, say, instinctual math that vanishes in a focused, testing setting?
I'm 46; I've found over my life that often these sorts of 'common perceptions' commonly HAVE a kernel of truth in them. Often misapplied, misunderstood, or blown out of proportion, but nevertheless a root in fact.
I will say that I've far more often seen women spend 15 minutes trying to precisely divide a dinner tab more precisely than men, who'll tend instead to just throw down roughly their share plus some, even if that results in the wait staff getting a huge tip. I know that's not specifically a math skill, but it's one of those real-world anecdotes that feed this perception.
Simple: the feds need to stop subsidizing water redistribution.
If California needs water to have a bountiful strawberry industry, then California (or better still, strawberry farmers) can pay for it.
Yes, that means the price of strawberries go up. But who should pay for strawberries: - the person that buys and eats them, or - the person that buys and eats them PLUS the hundreds of millions of taxpayers dinged little tiny bits of money to go to make sure that strawberry is affordable?
Considering how ubiquitous they are, one would imagine that would be a great candidate for DNA mining, retrieval, reassembly, and ultimately, recreation.
"I'm at a boarding school, and I'm annoyed that I don't get to do anything I want. Here's a way that I can prove I'm clever, and try to gain sympathy by making it sound ("...school TRICKS people into installing...") like it's the perpetration of some sort of subterfuge or a liberty/civil rights issue."
Want freedom? Don't go to boarding school aka juvenile prison.
Don't like the idea of someone looking over your shoulder while you're surfing? Become an adult, pay for your own web connection, and wank, er, surf away.
I'm pretty certain that people haven't wanted their kids to look at porn for, well, nearly ever. So this isn't something "new" being invented, it's something very, very old being reformulated to recognize a new delivery technology.
You DID read that the OP said he was at a boarding school, right?
That means that the school's responsibility doesn't start when they get off the bus in the morning, and stop when they get on the bus to go home. This means that the kids are functionally wards of the school...meaning the school is responsible for them 24/7....ie, what they do in their spare time.
Considering that any possible harm that comes to the child - be it physical, emotional, psychological - ends up being the schools financial liability, then they are entirely within their remit to lock-down any computer systems used on their grounds. Don't like it? Don't browse the internet at their school.
"... which was deliberately designed to set speed records. It was not a fighter, and was never intended to be a fighter...." Which exactly ALSO describes THIS plane.
My point wasn't to suggest the 109 was the EXACT plane that won that race; instead it was to point out that the plane that was eventually the combat fighter Bf109 had its tech origins in the Bf209, or at least in the heads of the same design team, and probably was about as like the Bf209 as the (eventual combat-deployed successor) had to this one.
I'm 46. I've seen so many radical reversals as far as what's healthy to eat, what's not, that frankly NOTHING "the experts" say about diet today is credible.
I follow a pretty simple set of guidelines: - don't over eat - eat food as close to its natural form as you can: sugar, not 'sweetener'; eggs, not "egg product" - fewer names is better. "Coke" instead of "Caffeine Free Diet Vanilla Coke with Lemon".
"...should do is repurpose the stores to become... a hacker haven. Fill it with knowledgeable people..." Except that you have to PAY knowledgeable people a wage that compensates them for their knowledge, not the shit-wage that retail electronics stores pay their register-slaves.
"... who know how to make custom electronics..." You want BOTH of them to be working in a Radio Shack now?
Notice that the people still waving this old canard about "gender pay inequity are the ones that can derive personal/political power, or wealth from the assertion.
Let's remember that it's NOT only Bitcoin that's vulnerable to theft, cf Target, etc.
Real-world money can be scammed, stolen, etc particularly in its virtual form.
Bitcoin, not having the backing of governments, has fewer protections.
This is a 'value tradeoff'.
I'm not going to say Bitcoin is a stupid, shitty idea. It's a currency, just like Yap Island Stone Dollars are currency; over time, we'll see what it's TRUE value is and the market will likely reflect it.
Right now it's IMO grossly overvalued because of trendy-chic and an underestimation of the vulnerabilities it faces.
All of your "assertions of fact" smell strongly like you pulled them from your butt.
"...Treatment pretty bad and opportunities pretty limited" - according to most of the people I've talked to in tech fields, frankly, this experience is the same whether you have a Y chromosome or not.
Got ANY sources for any of these 'facts' or is it just what you believe?
First, thanks for linking a page with autoplaying video, LOVE THAT.
Second: combat aircraft are about much, much more than speed. Note this line: "...The reigning air speed record of the time was 469mph, set by a German Messerschmitt plane in 1939...." That was the plane that LOST the Battle of Britain, by the way.
The Bf109 was 10% faster than the Spitfire during the Battle of Britain anyway, an even faster plane - assuming it would remain so, after the addition of reasonable fuel tanks, armor, guns, ammunition, and a fighting canopy - would have helped how?
Note, the power/weight ratio for this racing plane, 3.44 lbs/hp, is precisely the same (curious?) as the unloaded combat Spitfire. Wing loading is much less, but if we presume the addition of 1000+ lbs of combat-necessary weight, that would be rather worse.
No, this is a clever design, a very pretty bird, and will be interesting to see fly. I would be a little nervous, without seeing the wind-tunnel results, of flat spins and yaw control generally, not to mention forward-swept wings being notoriously twitchy in practice.
"...We're starting to find out that what happens at one trench doesn't necessarily represent what happens in all the trenches..."
When speciation is happening in adjacent subway tunnels in the London Underground over as short a span as 100 years, I think it's pretty certain that deep-sea trenches separated by hundreds if not thousands of miles will evolve rather dramatically differently?
Slashdot Mirror
At least we can count on the fact that there aren't any lobbyists in Washington anymore!
I was born in 1967.
In the 1970s when I was in elementary school, even in our small rural school (the whole grade was ~50-60 kids), there was a gifted/talented program. It was informal, open to kids solely as recommended by teachers, and essentially took the 4-5 of us in the school who were wasting hours per day doing nothing (Kristi, Steve, Vincent, and later Bob...you might recognize yourselves) in class waiting for the others to catch up, and took us to learn more on pretty much whatever we as a group wanted to do - meteorology, dinosaurs, math, astronomy, etc. It was absolutely great and AFAIK there was no (apparent) resentment by those not in the program, nor did we make a big deal about it.
When I hit 6th grade, we moved to Bloomington MN, and there was a 'high achiever' program for that much larger school district. In this (only for 6th grade) the ~50 kids that qualified after teacher recommendation, testing, and evaluation by (I'd guess?) developmental pschologists and the district were segregated into a totally separate school for the whole year. That was personally rather hard (I don't know that I was mature enough to be in this program in a totally new school, even if I was smart enough) but a second year would have been much, much better, I expect.
The problem was, there WAS no second year...ever. After this 6th grade of extremely high-level classwork, we were all dropped into the mainstream. Maybe those who went back to their old friends had a better experience, but I found 7th grade extraordinarily hard, just going back to utter boredom - and both my grades and attitude reflected the problems. Tough time of life to be even more adrift, imo.
Finally, in high school, there was nothing. I'd completed advanced Chemistry, AP Calc, and Engineering Physics as a junior and had literally nothing left to do as a senior. Fortunately, this was the first year of the Post-Secondary Educational Options (PSEO) program, so I went to a local junior college my whole senior year, but even that wasn't much educational advancement. (The program was also entirely new, and had some teething pains.)
Now, with my own kids 20-30 years later, I see the same thing happening - except there are no actual programs that support gifted/talented at all (while there are ample monies available for the 'mainstreaming' of kids who *might* eventually learn to eat without assistance). Constant boredom, programming that is deliberately designed to hobble advanced students and prevent them getting 'too far ahead'. Some teachers at the elementary level did try, at a personal, individual-class level to help support and address these kids' needs, but by junior high/high school, that level of personal attention absolutely vanished. PSEO is much better, but still, essentially this means that the taxpayers - who already are paying for the schools - are FURTHER subsidizing a school district's inability to sufficiently address educational needs by paying to send those students to local colleges.
I checked the temperature this morning at 8 am it was 18 degrees outside.
At 10 it was 24.
At 12 it was nearly 30.
By noon tomorrow it will likely be 174 degrees outside!
..well, so pretty much have all the FUD-spreaders in the CDC, government, and NGOs who've been all telling us that "any moment" we could get a "deadly flu" since the (ha ha ha) Sars "epidemic".
All I've ever gotten is the "Cry Wolf" heebie jeebies.
If I have a $7.6 billion cushion, I frankly don't care if you knock me from my perch.
Granted this was beta, but here's what I found:
- a slavish determination to mimic World of Warcraft's aesthetic. Unsurprising, since the dev team AFAIK largely came from Blizzard. IMO this is a little too slavish, coming off like "WoW sci fi with guns". To me it's jarring that you have nicely-detailed characters with hi-rez textures, but you're running around a world with a klunky geometry that screams "this is all computers can handle in 2004". TF2 showed that you could adhere to a non-representational, 'cartoony' theme without necessarily deliberately going so far as to mimic the design compromises of a decade ago.
- Obviously this is entirely subjective, but there's a very fine line between quirky/kitschy and cheesy. The "bad guys" n00b island story line in Wildstar is cheesy; the good guys story is cheesy AND sappy. WoW had a certain sort of self-referential humor to a lot of what it did (at its best), and that has seemed to dominate latter releases *cough* *cough* Pandas *cough*. Wildstar continues this unfortunate narrative/editorial choice, with everything from animations to storyline being so "over the top" that it has to be self-mocking (with the 'good guy' side adding a further drippy saccharine layer of narrative - the tutorial quest has you saving a guy's pregnant wife...)
- They've already very much adopted the modern-mmo paradigm of "go to quest hub, get a bunch of quests, complete those quests, move to next hub". There's almost never (at least in the first 12-15 levels) a point where you go backward, for any reason. Everything is very conveniently placed; when you hit a place where you level up, there's a new-skill trainer already waiting for you.
- Some clever design ideas in UI, communicating what enemies are doing and what you're doing (and the area effects) clearly and intuitively.
It's WoW40k, nothing more, nothing less. Personally, I don't find the modern design choices in MMOs for 'everything to be easy' to be interesting or engaging, but that's not Wildstar's fault at all. They're very solidly in the current mainstream.
IF the system asked "do you want us to save your cc# for later purchases?" and they affirmed, it's the parents' problem.
If, OTOH the cc# was saved without advising the user that it WOULD be saved, that's just economic opportunism, and SHOULD be illegal - saving cc# data in a format that it can be executed for a transaction without affirmative confirmation by the sole cardholder is pretty much the same as making a copy of their cc, no?
"...what else is the government supposed to do with the money?..."
Maybe not take it in the first place?
I know, you're a democrat, that's inconceivable.
Sure, that's a lot of applicants, but really the most important thing is DO ENOUGH OF THEM HAVE VAGINAS?
I mean, really, otherwise it's obviously sexism at work.
My daughter is in AP Calc in high school, has a 4.0 GPA, and scored 34 on the math portion of the ACT.
Yet we were in a store with a 10% discount, she held up a $50 item and said "so how much would this be?". /facepalm.
Sometimes, if you're pretty, it's easier just to not think.
I could be that PERHAPS there IS a difference in some math skill between males and females?
I know it's heinously non-politically-correct to suggest that the sorts of hormonal variations that developmentally result in gross anatomical changes might actually have an impact on the subtle chemistry of brain development as well...we're perfectly willing to recognize that (speaking broadly) women are in fact better at multitasking or that men are better at 3d shape understanding. Is it impossible that there isn't actually some real difference in, say, instinctual math that vanishes in a focused, testing setting?
I'm 46; I've found over my life that often these sorts of 'common perceptions' commonly HAVE a kernel of truth in them. Often misapplied, misunderstood, or blown out of proportion, but nevertheless a root in fact.
I will say that I've far more often seen women spend 15 minutes trying to precisely divide a dinner tab more precisely than men, who'll tend instead to just throw down roughly their share plus some, even if that results in the wait staff getting a huge tip. I know that's not specifically a math skill, but it's one of those real-world anecdotes that feed this perception.
Simple: the feds need to stop subsidizing water redistribution.
If California needs water to have a bountiful strawberry industry, then California (or better still, strawberry farmers) can pay for it.
Yes, that means the price of strawberries go up.
But who should pay for strawberries:
- the person that buys and eats them, or
- the person that buys and eats them PLUS the hundreds of millions of taxpayers dinged little tiny bits of money to go to make sure that strawberry is affordable?
Considering how ubiquitous they are, one would imagine that would be a great candidate for DNA mining, retrieval, reassembly, and ultimately, recreation.
"I'm at a boarding school, and I'm annoyed that I don't get to do anything I want. Here's a way that I can prove I'm clever, and try to gain sympathy by making it sound ("...school TRICKS people into installing...") like it's the perpetration of some sort of subterfuge or a liberty/civil rights issue."
Want freedom? Don't go to boarding school aka juvenile prison.
Don't like the idea of someone looking over your shoulder while you're surfing? Become an adult, pay for your own web connection, and wank, er, surf away.
I'm pretty certain that people haven't wanted their kids to look at porn for, well, nearly ever. So this isn't something "new" being invented, it's something very, very old being reformulated to recognize a new delivery technology.
You DID read that the OP said he was at a boarding school, right?
That means that the school's responsibility doesn't start when they get off the bus in the morning, and stop when they get on the bus to go home. This means that the kids are functionally wards of the school...meaning the school is responsible for them 24/7....ie, what they do in their spare time.
Considering that any possible harm that comes to the child - be it physical, emotional, psychological - ends up being the schools financial liability, then they are entirely within their remit to lock-down any computer systems used on their grounds. Don't like it? Don't browse the internet at their school.
"... which was deliberately designed to set speed records. It was not a fighter, and was never intended to be a fighter...."
Which exactly ALSO describes THIS plane.
My point wasn't to suggest the 109 was the EXACT plane that won that race; instead it was to point out that the plane that was eventually the combat fighter Bf109 had its tech origins in the Bf209, or at least in the heads of the same design team, and probably was about as like the Bf209 as the (eventual combat-deployed successor) had to this one.
I'm 46.
I've seen so many radical reversals as far as what's healthy to eat, what's not, that frankly NOTHING "the experts" say about diet today is credible.
I follow a pretty simple set of guidelines:
- don't over eat
- eat food as close to its natural form as you can: sugar, not 'sweetener'; eggs, not "egg product"
- fewer names is better. "Coke" instead of "Caffeine Free Diet Vanilla Coke with Lemon".
"...should do is repurpose the stores to become ... a hacker haven. Fill it with knowledgeable people..."
Except that you have to PAY knowledgeable people a wage that compensates them for their knowledge, not the shit-wage that retail electronics stores pay their register-slaves.
"... who know how to make custom electronics..."
You want BOTH of them to be working in a Radio Shack now?
Notice that the people still waving this old canard about "gender pay inequity are the ones that can derive personal/political power, or wealth from the assertion.
Let's remember that it's NOT only Bitcoin that's vulnerable to theft, cf Target, etc.
Real-world money can be scammed, stolen, etc particularly in its virtual form.
Bitcoin, not having the backing of governments, has fewer protections.
This is a 'value tradeoff'.
I'm not going to say Bitcoin is a stupid, shitty idea. It's a currency, just like Yap Island Stone Dollars are currency; over time, we'll see what it's TRUE value is and the market will likely reflect it.
Right now it's IMO grossly overvalued because of trendy-chic and an underestimation of the vulnerabilities it faces.
All of your "assertions of fact" smell strongly like you pulled them from your butt.
"...Treatment pretty bad and opportunities pretty limited" - according to most of the people I've talked to in tech fields, frankly, this experience is the same whether you have a Y chromosome or not.
Got ANY sources for any of these 'facts' or is it just what you believe?
That is what I was thinking of when I made the comment, cf http://www.nature.com/hdy/jour...
http://ncse.com/files/pub/evol...
I thought the science was reasonably settled on this, apparently /. commenters beg to differ. :)
First, thanks for linking a page with autoplaying video, LOVE THAT.
Second: combat aircraft are about much, much more than speed. Note this line: "...The reigning air speed record of the time was 469mph, set by a German Messerschmitt plane in 1939...." That was the plane that LOST the Battle of Britain, by the way.
The Bf109 was 10% faster than the Spitfire during the Battle of Britain anyway, an even faster plane - assuming it would remain so, after the addition of reasonable fuel tanks, armor, guns, ammunition, and a fighting canopy - would have helped how?
Note, the power/weight ratio for this racing plane, 3.44 lbs/hp, is precisely the same (curious?) as the unloaded combat Spitfire. Wing loading is much less, but if we presume the addition of 1000+ lbs of combat-necessary weight, that would be rather worse.
No, this is a clever design, a very pretty bird, and will be interesting to see fly. I would be a little nervous, without seeing the wind-tunnel results, of flat spins and yaw control generally, not to mention forward-swept wings being notoriously twitchy in practice.
"...We're starting to find out that what happens at one trench doesn't necessarily represent what happens in all the trenches..."
When speciation is happening in adjacent subway tunnels in the London Underground over as short a span as 100 years, I think it's pretty certain that deep-sea trenches separated by hundreds if not thousands of miles will evolve rather dramatically differently?
I have to admit, It's kinda cool that Putin posts on slashdot.