Windows XP has the option to restart automatically from a BSOD turned on by default. This means the Blue screen flashes for a second and the machine restarts. If you blink you wont even see it. This seems to be a better solution then going to a black screen, although a system to prevent potentially troublesome restart cycles (ie, system boots, BSOD on boot process does it all over again 1000 times or until things are so fucked up it cant even BSOD properly) would be nice. Most of the terminals and such you see BSOD in public are running win2k which if it has this option (I don't know for certain) it's turned off by default.
When you are a big company with lots of money buying good ideas is generally better business then trying to come up with them in house. Consider, I can spend my capital in two ways, one I can invest in R&D internally and hope something good comes out of it or two I can let smaller companies and startups invest in ideas, take all the risks, let the market sort out the good money-making ideas from the bad, then buy up the good ones. The ideas get the resources of a large company behind them, the inventors get a nice big check to go retire on an island somewhere with, and everybody wins. Theres a lot of small companies out there with a good idea but they lack the capital and resources to make it big. Companies dont buy a smaller company just because they can, they buy it because it has something they want. The owners (or shareholders) don't sell because they have to, but because they value the money they are recieving more then they value the company.
And thats the attitude that hands the Republicans the win. The red states voters must be ignorant and stupid because they didnt vote for your guy. Dont ask WHY they didnt vote for you, or even accept they think differently then you, just call them stupid and act like a snob and alienate them instead of try to persuade them. The Republicans (specifically the Neo-Cons) have carefully shaped the agenda into a place hard line Democrats can't win. A lot of Republicans are angry about Bush and the growing Neo-Con influence on the Republican party and all it would take is for the Democrats to put a moderate candidate traditional republicans could get behind (hint, John Kerry isn't it) but they won't do that cause compromising means dealing with the ignorant unwashed masses.
Notice the 18 credits. You overloaded and burnt out. I happens all the time. Some people cant handle 18 credit hours, and are better off with 15 or 12. Furthermore college is not a trade school for your specialization, it is intended to give you a general education first and a specialized education second. The general ed is there so "college grad" actually means something. The best programmer in the world who can't convey his ideas, write a decent memo, and is completely ignorant about everything not related to his field is not worth much.
You would have to be a Nielson household to actually affect the Nielson ratings. You can see how Nielson ratings are collected at http://www.nielsenmedia.com/, but according to their site the put a little box in 5,100 randomly selected homes. So unless you have that box, nothing you can do can affect a shows ratings, and thus ad revenue.
You want your insurer to pay for it right? Why wouldn't your health insurance have access to your medical records? They need it to be able to asses your case and what benefits you are entitled to. I suppose you plan on just calling them up and telling them how much they owe? You sign lots of stuff when you get insurance, one of them gives the insurer limited access to your medical records. When a procedure is done, that information needs to be sent in a secure manner to the insurance company so they can pay up. Unless you are trying to defraud the insurer (hide a preexisting condition etc.) I can't imagine why you wouldn't think it completely normal for your health insurance to see your medical records. I'd also garuntee you that YOUR insurance has a copy of your records or access to it in your country. Now if a company was given access without your permission it would be one thing, but giving that permission is part of getting insurance.
Blizzard is fighting this because A. It causes massive in-game inflation. As soon as there is a market, ebayers will begin farming money 24/7, often using bots and exploits. They will then sell this money to new players who suddenly have a massive amount of money out of proportion to their level. These new players are going to want the best equipment, of which there is a limited amount by design, and will be willing to pay for it. The end result is prices rapidly reach a point where your average player can not afford anything without buying money on eBay. This has already occured in many MMORPG's, particulary Star Wars Galaxies. B. If Blizzard accepts that in-game items have real world value, and there is a server crash causing you to lose items, you can now sue them over it. Blizzard does not want items to have value beyond their usefulness in game because no judge is gonna award damaged because it will take you an extra hour to get to level 60 cause Blizzard lost your fancy item. If you can sue Blizzard because you could have sold that item for $50 on eBay, thats a different matter.
Of course! We should abolish local governments because state governments have such a track record of being SO competent. Local governments aren't prepared for this sort of thing because it's an emergency. An emergency, by definition is an unusal unexpected event. Keeping excessive capacity is expensive as are preventative measures that may or may not do any good. People get all excited about things when a major emergency happens, but a few years later the same people get upset because the government is "wasting" our money. You can only prepare so much, and then when a disaster does happen you do the best you can. local governments are important because they are much more reactive to the everyday local needs of the people then state or federal governments. The needs of people in a large metropolis and a remote urban area are very different, but almost all states have some of both. Should I have to travel to my state capital becasue I want a zoning change to let me build a tool shed on my property? Or because I want a stop light on my street? Right now, if my (theoretical) child has a problem at school, I can sit down with my school district member and get it fixed. If I disagree with an ordinance it is a simple matter to go before the city council or mayor and argue my case. Turning local government control over to the state just means all the current locally elected politician who pretty much have to listen to you (because at that level individual votes matter) with bureacrats chosen by someone half the state away.
In the time it would take you to apply this you could just paint it with traditonal paint. Its not like the car thieves will care if the paint job peels in a year cause they did not prep the car. It might be useful for a getaway car but itd be easier to just switch cars entirely. It would be useful for movie and advertizing use, or military use (imaging splash-on camo). I can't imagine criminals making much use of it, lots of trouble for little benefit, and given this stuff will probably not be very common, an easy way for criminals to draw attention to themselves when they buy it.
Re:And let's not forget who is funding a lot of th
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New and Improved SETI
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It would seem to me it would be a worthwhile ambition to have your name associated with important scientific research. There's plenty of easier ways to boost your ego. Also, that "true charity is anonymous" line is BS. Charity is about donating your time or money to a worthwhile cause, not some abstract ideal of giving without recieving any benefit. I suppose if I write charitable donations off on my taxes it wasn't "true charity" either. Noone is telling him he can't spend his millions on booze and hookers in proper pro-athlete/rapper style. What is wrong about wanting to leave a legacy as a supporter of science? What percentage of income do I have to give meet your ideal? Should I sell my home and live in a box to prove I'm giving more then I can easily afford? I agree their charitable donations do not outweigh their business decisions as part of Microsoft, but I still respect that they give to feilds I feel are important.
Speaking of disney cops, one time at Disney a Disney cop gave a friend of mine (who happens to have a rather large nose) a ticket for "impersonating Goofy".
In the situation, the cop was responding to a crime in progress. It was night, and suddenly he sees someone pointing something at him and the laser dot at him. He thought it was a laser sight and drew and shot him. In that situation he had reason to believe he was in danger. If you make a motion to draw a gun, a cop can and should shoot you. IIRC at the time laser pointers were like $50-$100, and weren't as common.
I agree, I was not being sarcastic, I think the cop had every right to shoot that kid. At night, in a potentially dangerous situation, the cop has to protect himself and has every reason to believe it is a laser sight.
There was a case here in Florida where a young teenager pointed a laser pointer at a cop at night and the cop shot and killed him. The cop was cleared of the killing, as the situation gave the cop reasonable belief he was in danger. I couldn't find the article with a quick search as it was many years ago, but I did find this http://www.thebackup.com/archives_newsdetail.asp?i d=-1141952145 which is about a similiar case where the officer wounded a teenager in the thigh. Pointing a laser pointer at a cop is a serious threat to that cop, and if the situation is already tense might get you shot.
Seriously, make them use.jp sites. Want to check your mail? mail.yahoo.com wont work, but mail.yahoo.co.jp will. The most important part of learning a new language is USING the language. Maybe even give them some age-appropriate japenese language games. The computers aren't going to teach them the language, thats the instructor's job, but maybe you can get them to use the language and give them some motivation to learn.
The most annyoing thing about public transportation today is people talking on cell phones. I take the bus to class everyday, and a nice peaceful bus ride is often ruined by people having the most idiotic and loud cell phone conversations. The last thing I want to listen to for 30 minutes is some women's vaginal infection (yes I did overhear that on a bus, with complete details). The engine noise on planes does tend to drown out noise, but that doesnt help you if they are right next to you. Until people learn the modern cell phones are generally sensitive enough you don't need to shout at them, it will be a problem.
Well Im a few years out of high school, but while I was there I did FIRST all four years, FIRST is the largest national robotics competition for high school students, and was some of the most fun I have had in my entire life. It does require a large commitment of time and resources, so it might not be for you. I went to several programming competitions run by varous state colleges and the like, and generally found them pretty boring. The most important thing is building a relationship with teachers that are interested in whatever it is you decide to do. You might want to check around to find out if there is a school where what you have to offer will be most appreciated. For example, I went to a Magnet program for "Emerging COmputer Technology" that drew students actually interested in the feild (and willing to make sacrifices of convenience) from across the county. Lots of school systems have similiar programs, and such concentrations of interested students will make your life easier. Some schools now offer Cisco Network Academy courses and such, they might be a good place to start, invite them to tour your workplace and see a full scale deployment in action (this only works if you have a network worth showing off, but you get the idea). This will get you started towards building a relationship with the school. If you decide to do some sort of competition, it will serve you well to make sure the students are self-selecting and want to be there for reasons beyond getting out of school for the day. Students will take any excuse for a feild trip, and once they arrive and are bored to tears they will not only learn anything but generally be disruptive. High school students will always, always act up when bored. Also, whatever task or challenge you set before them will take at least 3x longer then if you set a group of adults to do it, and that number goes up the larger the group.
If you are just interested in helping out however you can, almost all schools could benefit from professional IT help, and many programming classes are taught be reassigned math teachers who would probably welcome a guest instructor or such for the day. Some links to get you started: http://www.usfirst.org/ A very large and well respected robotics competition, all levels of contruction from screwed togethor wood bots to CNC precision engineered masterpieces sponsored by Fortune 500 companies. A 6 week intensive build period and my require considerable travel to competitions. http://www.bestinc.org/ Another robotics competition, lacks the budget and professionalism of FIRST. Robots are generally poorly contructed and must be made entirely of components provided. Much lower entry cost then FIRST. url:http://www.battlebotsiq.com/ A high-school off shoot of Battlebots, I have not competed in this and don't know much about it.
Spaceship One is to the Space Shuttle what a kite is to a jet fighter. While an impressive accomplishment, The X-prize took 1 person to 112 km, the Space Shuttle orbits at 185 to 643 km, with 28,800 kg of cargo and up to 10 people (although only 8 have ever gone up). SpaceshipOne was up for 24 minutes, the shuttle up to 17 days. The $25.4 billion for the Apollo was in 1960 dollars, approx. $100 billion today. The overall NASA budget at the time was twice what it is today. I don't doubt that NASA could be more effecient, but no comparison can be drawn from SpaceShipOne to NASA. Space is expensive because it's hard. It requires a massive amount of energy to reach orbital altitude and velocity. Thats the law of physics, you can't change it. Furthermore there is a limit to how much money can be made in space with current tech. We only need so many satelites. Only so many people will spend the massive amounts of money and take the large risks for space tourism. Some people have proposed asteroid mining and the like, but the costs for mounting such an expidition would be staggering. Businesses have little incentive for doing hard science like Nasa does. I have no doubt we will have commercial space flight someday, but the realties of today dont show any serious competitors to NASA, and noone is chomping at the bit to try.
There are plenty of people willing to take the risks, but the American people will not stand for killing astronauts. The Columbia disaster came dangerously close to shutting down the entire shuttle program. Despite being so risk averse, we have still had many deaths, and many close calls. If we throw caution to the wind, we can expect to lose many more. Public opinion is not gonna stand for a bunch of dead astronauts on TV every couple years. Then even if there is an overall cost savings, people are going to remember every failure and wonder why we should pay $10 million on a rocket that blows up. And remember, our Astronauts are extremely intelligent, well trained people. A huge amount of money goes into training them. They are ready to accept the current risks, but if you double or triple that risk, they may have doubts. There will only be so many first moon,mars, etc. missions that people are willing to risk it all for.
I suspect the network you had these problems on was not very well configured. Most likely, you were trying to use simple autodetecting workgroups on a complicated network. To find other stations in this manner, it has to send broadcasts (similiar to DHCP broadcasts). Most routers do not send these broadcasts past the originating router, so you cannot see machines on other parts of the network. This can be fixed by implementing a WINS server for older versions of Windows or more properly by implementing a domain controller. Trying to use the auto-detect on anything other then a 1 hub home network is going beyond it's scope. Of course if it's such a hassle for you, the ip address of the machine can be used in just about every instance instead of the computer name. As for Plug'n'Play, Windows currently vastly outperforms Linux in the hardware that is automatically detected. Mac OS may be considered to have an edge in percentage of hardware automatically detected, but the actual number of devices available for Mac is much much smaller. The Plug'n'Pray moniker came from a time when it was new technology, and you were lucky to have it work for obscure hardware on any platform. Rants like these (calling it Losedows does not grant you credibility) calls attention from the real problems with Windows (of which there are many).
This bill would stop municipalties from getting into the wireless internet access business with tax dollars. It does not mean only Verizon can step in to provide the services. If the community wants it, nothing is stopping them from starting a business and doing it. Lots of cities give out small business loans and so forth, if they believe the city needs such a business, nothing is stopping them. Wireless equipment is not that expensive, and there are lots of small isps across the country, so with a cooperative government it should not be difficult. They could then collect fees from people who actually use the service, instead of charging everyone whether they like it or not. Verizon is in the right when they say a private company (who can only charge their users) can not compete with a tax supported utility that charges everyone through taxes. If verizon can not manage it, someone else will.
Just because it can be part of an ad hominem attack doesn't make it worthless. In the lack of the knowledge of statistics neccesary to directly critique their work, Berkeley's famous liberal leanings can provide context for the work. Fox News is known for it's conservative bias. Do you automatically trust everything they report? Or do you wait until it is confirmed by their peers. This is the same situation. There is a logical reason to distrust the accuracy of their work, and 99% of people lack the statistics background neccesary to check it. If Stephen Hawking cam forward with a paper proving Albert Einstein was the second coming of Jesus, using advanced theoretical physics, I would not believe it. Although the known liberal bearing is not evidence in itself, it is cause for suspicion. To point out that known liberal bias is not offtopic. Bias in academia is very real, the system of peer review is to help weed it out, but this paper was produced by students and sent straight to the media, without any review.
If you had the slightest grasp of engineering, you'd realize how full of shit your claims are. 80% effecient? Can you provide plans for such an engine? If such a thing were easy, or even possible at reasonable tempuratures don't you think the car manufacturers would be after it like it could turn lead into gold? First manufacturer to make a working car capable of such a thing would make a fortune. Every commercial fleet, and every broke ass college kid, would be banging at their door. There is a huge market for a massive leap in fuel effeciency. If you could make a leap large enough to overcome the conversion costs you would sell them as fast as you could make them. People have fuel inefficient cars because cost of the extra gas is overcome by the convenience of the larger more powerful car. And yes engines are designed for the maximum possible load, not the minimum. This is why cars have transmissions, to help (although not fully) alleviate the ineffeciency brought about. Only a fool builds something to meet the bare minimum. A car normally never needs to exceed MPH, but in an emergency you might need to go past that. Overcapacity is feature of cars, not a detriment. You also say we shouldn't be in the business of "sledgehammer social engineering", but then propose Congress set an arbitrary minimum fuel effeciency. Sounds kind of sledgehammer to me, you are dictating what kind of vehicles people can produce and buy. Isn't a car that uses more gas but produces less hazardous pollutants preferable? yet we can't have that car, we need to be 75% (hah!) effecient. Economics already favors fuel effeciency, why not legislate things that affect everyone like pollution, and let economics sort out fuel effeciency.
Your dead wrong. Steam does not verify the files (although it should). I know because some of my CS:Source files did not download correctly, and I had to redownload the whole thing to get them. CS:Source (which you've been able to play for months if you bought hl2) already has wallhacks, speed hacks, and aimbots widely available. CS:Source seems to be the easiest to hack game yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Windows XP has the option to restart automatically from a BSOD turned on by default. This means the Blue screen flashes for a second and the machine restarts. If you blink you wont even see it. This seems to be a better solution then going to a black screen, although a system to prevent potentially troublesome restart cycles (ie, system boots, BSOD on boot process does it all over again 1000 times or until things are so fucked up it cant even BSOD properly) would be nice. Most of the terminals and such you see BSOD in public are running win2k which if it has this option (I don't know for certain) it's turned off by default.
When you are a big company with lots of money buying good ideas is generally better business then trying to come up with them in house. Consider, I can spend my capital in two ways, one I can invest in R&D internally and hope something good comes out of it or two I can let smaller companies and startups invest in ideas, take all the risks, let the market sort out the good money-making ideas from the bad, then buy up the good ones. The ideas get the resources of a large company behind them, the inventors get a nice big check to go retire on an island somewhere with, and everybody wins. Theres a lot of small companies out there with a good idea but they lack the capital and resources to make it big. Companies dont buy a smaller company just because they can, they buy it because it has something they want. The owners (or shareholders) don't sell because they have to, but because they value the money they are recieving more then they value the company.
And thats the attitude that hands the Republicans the win. The red states voters must be ignorant and stupid because they didnt vote for your guy. Dont ask WHY they didnt vote for you, or even accept they think differently then you, just call them stupid and act like a snob and alienate them instead of try to persuade them. The Republicans (specifically the Neo-Cons) have carefully shaped the agenda into a place hard line Democrats can't win. A lot of Republicans are angry about Bush and the growing Neo-Con influence on the Republican party and all it would take is for the Democrats to put a moderate candidate traditional republicans could get behind (hint, John Kerry isn't it) but they won't do that cause compromising means dealing with the ignorant unwashed masses.
Notice the 18 credits. You overloaded and burnt out. I happens all the time. Some people cant handle 18 credit hours, and are better off with 15 or 12. Furthermore college is not a trade school for your specialization, it is intended to give you a general education first and a specialized education second. The general ed is there so "college grad" actually means something. The best programmer in the world who can't convey his ideas, write a decent memo, and is completely ignorant about everything not related to his field is not worth much.
You would have to be a Nielson household to actually affect the Nielson ratings. You can see how Nielson ratings are collected at http://www.nielsenmedia.com/, but according to their site the put a little box in 5,100 randomly selected homes. So unless you have that box, nothing you can do can affect a shows ratings, and thus ad revenue.
You want your insurer to pay for it right? Why wouldn't your health insurance have access to your medical records? They need it to be able to asses your case and what benefits you are entitled to. I suppose you plan on just calling them up and telling them how much they owe? You sign lots of stuff when you get insurance, one of them gives the insurer limited access to your medical records. When a procedure is done, that information needs to be sent in a secure manner to the insurance company so they can pay up. Unless you are trying to defraud the insurer (hide a preexisting condition etc.) I can't imagine why you wouldn't think it completely normal for your health insurance to see your medical records. I'd also garuntee you that YOUR insurance has a copy of your records or access to it in your country. Now if a company was given access without your permission it would be one thing, but giving that permission is part of getting insurance.
Blizzard is fighting this because A. It causes massive in-game inflation. As soon as there is a market, ebayers will begin farming money 24/7, often using bots and exploits. They will then sell this money to new players who suddenly have a massive amount of money out of proportion to their level. These new players are going to want the best equipment, of which there is a limited amount by design, and will be willing to pay for it. The end result is prices rapidly reach a point where your average player can not afford anything without buying money on eBay. This has already occured in many MMORPG's, particulary Star Wars Galaxies. B. If Blizzard accepts that in-game items have real world value, and there is a server crash causing you to lose items, you can now sue them over it. Blizzard does not want items to have value beyond their usefulness in game because no judge is gonna award damaged because it will take you an extra hour to get to level 60 cause Blizzard lost your fancy item. If you can sue Blizzard because you could have sold that item for $50 on eBay, thats a different matter.
Of course! We should abolish local governments because state governments have such a track record of being SO competent. Local governments aren't prepared for this sort of thing because it's an emergency. An emergency, by definition is an unusal unexpected event. Keeping excessive capacity is expensive as are preventative measures that may or may not do any good. People get all excited about things when a major emergency happens, but a few years later the same people get upset because the government is "wasting" our money. You can only prepare so much, and then when a disaster does happen you do the best you can. local governments are important because they are much more reactive to the everyday local needs of the people then state or federal governments. The needs of people in a large metropolis and a remote urban area are very different, but almost all states have some of both. Should I have to travel to my state capital becasue I want a zoning change to let me build a tool shed on my property? Or because I want a stop light on my street? Right now, if my (theoretical) child has a problem at school, I can sit down with my school district member and get it fixed. If I disagree with an ordinance it is a simple matter to go before the city council or mayor and argue my case. Turning local government control over to the state just means all the current locally elected politician who pretty much have to listen to you (because at that level individual votes matter) with bureacrats chosen by someone half the state away.
In the time it would take you to apply this you could just paint it with traditonal paint. Its not like the car thieves will care if the paint job peels in a year cause they did not prep the car. It might be useful for a getaway car but itd be easier to just switch cars entirely. It would be useful for movie and advertizing use, or military use (imaging splash-on camo). I can't imagine criminals making much use of it, lots of trouble for little benefit, and given this stuff will probably not be very common, an easy way for criminals to draw attention to themselves when they buy it.
It would seem to me it would be a worthwhile ambition to have your name associated with important scientific research. There's plenty of easier ways to boost your ego. Also, that "true charity is anonymous" line is BS. Charity is about donating your time or money to a worthwhile cause, not some abstract ideal of giving without recieving any benefit. I suppose if I write charitable donations off on my taxes it wasn't "true charity" either. Noone is telling him he can't spend his millions on booze and hookers in proper pro-athlete/rapper style. What is wrong about wanting to leave a legacy as a supporter of science? What percentage of income do I have to give meet your ideal? Should I sell my home and live in a box to prove I'm giving more then I can easily afford? I agree their charitable donations do not outweigh their business decisions as part of Microsoft, but I still respect that they give to feilds I feel are important.
Speaking of disney cops, one time at Disney a Disney cop gave a friend of mine (who happens to have a rather large nose) a ticket for "impersonating Goofy".
In the situation, the cop was responding to a crime in progress. It was night, and suddenly he sees someone pointing something at him and the laser dot at him. He thought it was a laser sight and drew and shot him. In that situation he had reason to believe he was in danger. If you make a motion to draw a gun, a cop can and should shoot you. IIRC at the time laser pointers were like $50-$100, and weren't as common.
I agree, I was not being sarcastic, I think the cop had every right to shoot that kid. At night, in a potentially dangerous situation, the cop has to protect himself and has every reason to believe it is a laser sight.
There was a case here in Florida where a young teenager pointed a laser pointer at a cop at night and the cop shot and killed him. The cop was cleared of the killing, as the situation gave the cop reasonable belief he was in danger. I couldn't find the article with a quick search as it was many years ago, but I did find this http://www.thebackup.com/archives_newsdetail.asp?i d=-1141952145 which is about a similiar case where the officer wounded a teenager in the thigh. Pointing a laser pointer at a cop is a serious threat to that cop, and if the situation is already tense might get you shot.
Seriously, make them use .jp sites. Want to check your mail? mail.yahoo.com wont work, but mail.yahoo.co.jp will. The most important part of learning a new language is USING the language. Maybe even give them some age-appropriate japenese language games. The computers aren't going to teach them the language, thats the instructor's job, but maybe you can get them to use the language and give them some motivation to learn.
The most annyoing thing about public transportation today is people talking on cell phones. I take the bus to class everyday, and a nice peaceful bus ride is often ruined by people having the most idiotic and loud cell phone conversations. The last thing I want to listen to for 30 minutes is some women's vaginal infection (yes I did overhear that on a bus, with complete details). The engine noise on planes does tend to drown out noise, but that doesnt help you if they are right next to you. Until people learn the modern cell phones are generally sensitive enough you don't need to shout at them, it will be a problem.
Well Im a few years out of high school, but while I was there I did FIRST all four years, FIRST is the largest national robotics competition for high school students, and was some of the most fun I have had in my entire life. It does require a large commitment of time and resources, so it might not be for you. I went to several programming competitions run by varous state colleges and the like, and generally found them pretty boring.
The most important thing is building a relationship with teachers that are interested in whatever it is you decide to do. You might want to check around to find out if there is a school where what you have to offer will be most appreciated. For example, I went to a Magnet program for "Emerging COmputer Technology" that drew students actually interested in the feild (and willing to make sacrifices of convenience) from across the county. Lots of school systems have similiar programs, and such concentrations of interested students will make your life easier. Some schools now offer Cisco Network Academy courses and such, they might be a good place to start, invite them to tour your workplace and see a full scale deployment in action (this only works if you have a network worth showing off, but you get the idea). This will get you started towards building a relationship with the school.
If you decide to do some sort of competition, it will serve you well to make sure the students are self-selecting and want to be there for reasons beyond getting out of school for the day. Students will take any excuse for a feild trip, and once they arrive and are bored to tears they will not only learn anything but generally be disruptive. High school students will always, always act up when bored. Also, whatever task or challenge you set before them will take at least 3x longer then if you set a group of adults to do it, and that number goes up the larger the group.
If you are just interested in helping out however you can, almost all schools could benefit from professional IT help, and many programming classes are taught be reassigned math teachers who would probably welcome a guest instructor or such for the day.
Some links to get you started:
http://www.usfirst.org/
A very large and well respected robotics competition, all levels of contruction from screwed togethor wood bots to CNC precision engineered masterpieces sponsored by Fortune 500 companies. A 6 week intensive build period and my require considerable travel to competitions.
http://www.bestinc.org/
Another robotics competition, lacks the budget and professionalism of FIRST. Robots are generally poorly contructed and must be made entirely of components provided. Much lower entry cost then FIRST.
url:http://www.battlebotsiq.com/
A high-school off shoot of Battlebots, I have not competed in this and don't know much about it.
Spaceship One is to the Space Shuttle what a kite is to a jet fighter. While an impressive accomplishment, The X-prize took 1 person to 112 km, the Space Shuttle orbits at 185 to 643 km, with 28,800 kg of cargo and up to 10 people (although only 8 have ever gone up). SpaceshipOne was up for 24 minutes, the shuttle up to 17 days. The $25.4 billion for the Apollo was in 1960 dollars, approx. $100 billion today. The overall NASA budget at the time was twice what it is today. I don't doubt that NASA could be more effecient, but no comparison can be drawn from SpaceShipOne to NASA. Space is expensive because it's hard. It requires a massive amount of energy to reach orbital altitude and velocity. Thats the law of physics, you can't change it. Furthermore there is a limit to how much money can be made in space with current tech. We only need so many satelites. Only so many people will spend the massive amounts of money and take the large risks for space tourism. Some people have proposed asteroid mining and the like, but the costs for mounting such an expidition would be staggering. Businesses have little incentive for doing hard science like Nasa does. I have no doubt we will have commercial space flight someday, but the realties of today dont show any serious competitors to NASA, and noone is chomping at the bit to try.
There are plenty of people willing to take the risks, but the American people will not stand for killing astronauts. The Columbia disaster came dangerously close to shutting down the entire shuttle program. Despite being so risk averse, we have still had many deaths, and many close calls. If we throw caution to the wind, we can expect to lose many more. Public opinion is not gonna stand for a bunch of dead astronauts on TV every couple years. Then even if there is an overall cost savings, people are going to remember every failure and wonder why we should pay $10 million on a rocket that blows up. And remember, our Astronauts are extremely intelligent, well trained people. A huge amount of money goes into training them. They are ready to accept the current risks, but if you double or triple that risk, they may have doubts. There will only be so many first moon,mars, etc. missions that people are willing to risk it all for.
I suspect the network you had these problems on was not very well configured. Most likely, you were trying to use simple autodetecting workgroups on a complicated network. To find other stations in this manner, it has to send broadcasts (similiar to DHCP broadcasts). Most routers do not send these broadcasts past the originating router, so you cannot see machines on other parts of the network. This can be fixed by implementing a WINS server for older versions of Windows or more properly by implementing a domain controller. Trying to use the auto-detect on anything other then a 1 hub home network is going beyond it's scope. Of course if it's such a hassle for you, the ip address of the machine can be used in just about every instance instead of the computer name. As for Plug'n'Play, Windows currently vastly outperforms Linux in the hardware that is automatically detected. Mac OS may be considered to have an edge in percentage of hardware automatically detected, but the actual number of devices available for Mac is much much smaller. The Plug'n'Pray moniker came from a time when it was new technology, and you were lucky to have it work for obscure hardware on any platform. Rants like these (calling it Losedows does not grant you credibility) calls attention from the real problems with Windows (of which there are many).
This bill would stop municipalties from getting into the wireless internet access business with tax dollars. It does not mean only Verizon can step in to provide the services. If the community wants it, nothing is stopping them from starting a business and doing it. Lots of cities give out small business loans and so forth, if they believe the city needs such a business, nothing is stopping them. Wireless equipment is not that expensive, and there are lots of small isps across the country, so with a cooperative government it should not be difficult. They could then collect fees from people who actually use the service, instead of charging everyone whether they like it or not. Verizon is in the right when they say a private company (who can only charge their users) can not compete with a tax supported utility that charges everyone through taxes. If verizon can not manage it, someone else will.
What chairs are you talking about? I looked through the article, the paper, and the website, and didn't see any chairs.
Just because it can be part of an ad hominem attack doesn't make it worthless. In the lack of the knowledge of statistics neccesary to directly critique their work, Berkeley's famous liberal leanings can provide context for the work. Fox News is known for it's conservative bias. Do you automatically trust everything they report? Or do you wait until it is confirmed by their peers. This is the same situation. There is a logical reason to distrust the accuracy of their work, and 99% of people lack the statistics background neccesary to check it. If Stephen Hawking cam forward with a paper proving Albert Einstein was the second coming of Jesus, using advanced theoretical physics, I would not believe it. Although the known liberal bearing is not evidence in itself, it is cause for suspicion. To point out that known liberal bias is not offtopic. Bias in academia is very real, the system of peer review is to help weed it out, but this paper was produced by students and sent straight to the media, without any review.
If you had the slightest grasp of engineering, you'd realize how full of shit your claims are. 80% effecient? Can you provide plans for such an engine? If such a thing were easy, or even possible at reasonable tempuratures don't you think the car manufacturers would be after it like it could turn lead into gold? First manufacturer to make a working car capable of such a thing would make a fortune. Every commercial fleet, and every broke ass college kid, would be banging at their door. There is a huge market for a massive leap in fuel effeciency. If you could make a leap large enough to overcome the conversion costs you would sell them as fast as you could make them. People have fuel inefficient cars because cost of the extra gas is overcome by the convenience of the larger more powerful car. And yes engines are designed for the maximum possible load, not the minimum. This is why cars have transmissions, to help (although not fully) alleviate the ineffeciency brought about. Only a fool builds something to meet the bare minimum. A car normally never needs to exceed MPH, but in an emergency you might need to go past that. Overcapacity is feature of cars, not a detriment. You also say we shouldn't be in the business of "sledgehammer social engineering", but then propose Congress set an arbitrary minimum fuel effeciency. Sounds kind of sledgehammer to me, you are dictating what kind of vehicles people can produce and buy. Isn't a car that uses more gas but produces less hazardous pollutants preferable? yet we can't have that car, we need to be 75% (hah!) effecient. Economics already favors fuel effeciency, why not legislate things that affect everyone like pollution, and let economics sort out fuel effeciency.
Your dead wrong. Steam does not verify the files (although it should). I know because some of my CS:Source files did not download correctly, and I had to redownload the whole thing to get them. CS:Source (which you've been able to play for months if you bought hl2) already has wallhacks, speed hacks, and aimbots widely available. CS:Source seems to be the easiest to hack game yet.