Thanks to a marketing mentality, our response to any realisation that we're not doing well is to "declare it ain't so" and toss out distractions until the challenger gives up in exasperation. Any studies to the contrary have enough mud slung at them that the common person won't trust either side and will allow their national pride or other predispositions to decide what they think is real.
We're not good at looking problems in the face, no matter what their nature.
That might be interesting, although the fiduciary duty would often compete with the value-based decisions - I would not claim that being a jerk is not profitable, even as I wish to impose enough costs on being a jerk that the more egrarious ways to be one are not done lightly or predictably. Also, this could be very expensive at times - if we wanted to buy enough stock in Amazon or Apple to penalise them for their stupid patent abuses, how expensive might that be? Could a company use predictable buyup of shares to its benefit somehow?
I would rather help reputation reliably work by imbuing the people with better memories and organisation.
We need a site to organise boycotts of companies that abuse the patent, trademark, or copyright system. Not everyone would need to sign on to all of them, but anyone should be able to post a call and explain their reasoning. If we got enough techies onto it who would use it at work, it could have some muscle.
Those of us who have switched generally have acquired an interest in the topic - a lot of geeks are thus keen to read anything they can about SSDs. I can't say whether that report was industry-sponsored or not, but it's not exactly astroturfing given the audience.
For me, the bootup speed is a very big deal because it changes how casually I use my laptop. If I'm out somewhere and can boot up very quickly, I'm more likely to do so than if it's going to be a minute or more. If I'm on the road and I just shut down my laptop and then realised there was one more thing to look up, nowadays I'll boot right back up because it's that fast while previously I wouldn't. It makes booting "no big deal", which is awesome. The added goodness that one sees in other aspects of computing is gravy.
I can understand the cost argument, and don't recommend that everyone I know switch yet (although several have been quite tempted after playing with one of the SSD-based systems).
After some UI tweaking, I got it looking and behaving like Firefox/Mozilla always has, and I'm left with a browser that's slightly faster and has better interfaces for some things. The drag-to-resize text fields in all websites is wonderful. The new extensions management interface is nicer but will take some getting used to.
About 5 months ago I bought a $700 250G SSD for my laptop and ditched the spinning disk. The system is overall faster, and for someone who's used HDs since the 286 days and floppies before then, the performance is oddly different (almost always better). The big bonus though is that my laptop takes about 10 seconds to boot (once past the BIOS) while it used to take about a minute. This has changed the way I use my computer, and is enough to justify the swap. I do have a few other systems I occasionally use, and apart from the OLPC XO-1 (which has its own performance characteristics that are different again from anything else I've seen), it's now kind of irritating to use spinning disks and feel those delays again. As the costs go down, I imagine anyone who's tasted SSDs will spread the technology very broadly among their friends.
Generally, if I have a physical copy of the game, I can expect to still run it 20 years later, long after their authentication servers have bit the dust. I still play Alpha Centauri and Civ3 fairly often, and occasionally dig out the old N16 games.
Many people in the US come from small towns or other sheltered environments. Most of the people I met at university, as well as me, found the increased variety to be shocking at first - in my case, a snobby wealthy town was most of what I had known, in some suitemates, they came from farming towns, from big cities, etc. The perspectives on things were very different, and by living with and arguing with them, we really had the first challenge to the worlds our parents lived in.
Being a good citizen involves things your parents can't easily teach you - having exposure to ideas different than theirs and the ability to independently weigh them, for example.
There are, not surprisingly, not a lot of options when it comes to actual micronations, nor could you really enforce the contract once you've handed over your money except by barrel of a gun (in which case why bother handing over the money in the first place?). Bigger nations easily could (and probably should) squash these micronations when they feel like it.
Having the broad body of knowledge that general studies at the university level provide is important to civics. It doesn't impugn your character or even make it impossible to get that on your own, but it is rare and difficult to do so.
Oh - maybe the original story wasn't clear enough about what these were - once one moves into the analysis stage, it's quite possible to make larger intermediary files, as you have. The best advice I could give would be to use VFAT in that case, unfortunately.
It would be a very good thing if we could get the funds to hire enough teachers to have smaller class sizes, and train/compensate those teachers well enough to get top-notch teaching. A commitment to never have more than 20 students in an academic class would be a wonderful thing (even if it's only one of the issues that needs to be addressed, it's a big one).
Regardless of actual positions (I'm a liberal socialist), some of us are more clear-thinking than others - we need a military, we probably always will need a military, we have national security interests that sometimes mean we'll be involved in foreign conflicts, and it's important that we have an effective military for such engagements. There are utopians who automatically think the military and police can just go away and everything will be roses and love - I consider the people who believe that to be fools (gets me into a surprising number of arguments with other radical liberals).
I expect that the military is actually very good at knocking most kinds of craziness out of people (or alternatively keeping most of them out of its ranks). It might not provide the comprehensive and broad type of education I prefer for everyone, but as far as I can tell it does provide some of it (from military surplus stores, I've picked up some of the materials on political theory and found them to be well-written and surprisingly deep), plus it's valuable as an alternative to civilian universities in that it helps us have an effective military.
There are problems with some universities and professors in what they teach, although I think exposure to such a broad variety of ideas, even radical and possibly harmful ones, is important. In one political philosophy class, for example, we read and critiqued the writings of the Unibomber, and in theory someone might've decided to champion those ideas and build their lives out of that. The academic mindset suggests that we tolerate odd ideas (in students and professors, at least outside of fields that have definite right answers), teach as broadly as we can, and hope that this broad exposure is in the public interest. That easily produces a few bad eggs, and it's the other side of a broad education.
Were I to be given the chance to define how education works for an entire society, it'd involve an expectation that people would take, at some slower rate after main education, classes at local universities (and other institutes like the local film schools) over their entire lives.
It's interesting how in some countries it's reasonably common to have students spend a year between primary schooling and university-level education, wandering the world, working, or similar. That might be a good idea as a general cultural practice.
Nothing is to say they would succeed or change. A number of them would.
There's also a last process of maturing that happens in the 2-3 years after university, as they need to apply the ideas they learned there to specific situations. That's an important step.
I would not want to compare military training on CS with university classes - I don't know enough about the military's instruction to make an apt comparison. I also don't want to compare community colleges because they vary significantly in content on the topic. My comparison was primarily meant to be between university graduates and high school graduates. For all I know, you may have received a top-notch education from the USMC.
University-level CS is theory-heavy by intention - one may learn to write code, but that's not the main point of the instruction.
I'd rather say slim than none - some rare people really are able to pick up the theoretical foundations on their own. Instruction helps a lot though, and for some types of programming, the theory is not quite as necessary (although it's still very helpful over a career). If someone could read Knuth's works and intelligently discuss them despite a lack of degree, I'd consider them to be part of that small group of people who actually did self-teach themselves enough. (Still leaves the general learning issue out though)
Some people manage to make up some or all of the loss on their own. Many people do not. Knowing people in many smaller towns, the ones who didn't get a college degree almost all ended up staying in their home towns, believing almost the same as their parents did, and failing to really understand the world. Among those who went to university, far more (but not all) journeyed in mind and/or body and had a lot more personal growth. Sure, it's possible to waste one's time in university, but many people do not, and those people are not the sort you'll see drawing attention to themselves with alcohol and misbehaviour.
Slashdot Mirror
Would be amusing to have people worrying that the Chinese even own positions in our government now :P
Thanks to a marketing mentality, our response to any realisation that we're not doing well is to "declare it ain't so" and toss out distractions until the challenger gives up in exasperation. Any studies to the contrary have enough mud slung at them that the common person won't trust either side and will allow their national pride or other predispositions to decide what they think is real.
We're not good at looking problems in the face, no matter what their nature.
That might be interesting, although the fiduciary duty would often compete with the value-based decisions - I would not claim that being a jerk is not profitable, even as I wish to impose enough costs on being a jerk that the more egrarious ways to be one are not done lightly or predictably. Also, this could be very expensive at times - if we wanted to buy enough stock in Amazon or Apple to penalise them for their stupid patent abuses, how expensive might that be? Could a company use predictable buyup of shares to its benefit somehow?
I would rather help reputation reliably work by imbuing the people with better memories and organisation.
We need a site to organise boycotts of companies that abuse the patent, trademark, or copyright system. Not everyone would need to sign on to all of them, but anyone should be able to post a call and explain their reasoning. If we got enough techies onto it who would use it at work, it could have some muscle.
Why would it matter who came up with any given feature first? In software, all ideas are recycled.
Those of us who have switched generally have acquired an interest in the topic - a lot of geeks are thus keen to read anything they can about SSDs. I can't say whether that report was industry-sponsored or not, but it's not exactly astroturfing given the audience.
For me, the bootup speed is a very big deal because it changes how casually I use my laptop. If I'm out somewhere and can boot up very quickly, I'm more likely to do so than if it's going to be a minute or more. If I'm on the road and I just shut down my laptop and then realised there was one more thing to look up, nowadays I'll boot right back up because it's that fast while previously I wouldn't. It makes booting "no big deal", which is awesome. The added goodness that one sees in other aspects of computing is gravy.
I can understand the cost argument, and don't recommend that everyone I know switch yet (although several have been quite tempted after playing with one of the SSD-based systems).
After some UI tweaking, I got it looking and behaving like Firefox/Mozilla always has, and I'm left with a browser that's slightly faster and has better interfaces for some things. The drag-to-resize text fields in all websites is wonderful. The new extensions management interface is nicer but will take some getting used to.
About 5 months ago I bought a $700 250G SSD for my laptop and ditched the spinning disk. The system is overall faster, and for someone who's used HDs since the 286 days and floppies before then, the performance is oddly different (almost always better). The big bonus though is that my laptop takes about 10 seconds to boot (once past the BIOS) while it used to take about a minute. This has changed the way I use my computer, and is enough to justify the swap. I do have a few other systems I occasionally use, and apart from the OLPC XO-1 (which has its own performance characteristics that are different again from anything else I've seen), it's now kind of irritating to use spinning disks and feel those delays again. As the costs go down, I imagine anyone who's tasted SSDs will spread the technology very broadly among their friends.
What's an investiment bank?! I don't trust any large institution that can't spell worth beans.
We'd more expect this kind of thing from Adams, Washington, or others on the Federalist side of the first party system.
Generally, if I have a physical copy of the game, I can expect to still run it 20 years later, long after their authentication servers have bit the dust. I still play Alpha Centauri and Civ3 fairly often, and occasionally dig out the old N16 games.
Many people in the US come from small towns or other sheltered environments. Most of the people I met at university, as well as me, found the increased variety to be shocking at first - in my case, a snobby wealthy town was most of what I had known, in some suitemates, they came from farming towns, from big cities, etc. The perspectives on things were very different, and by living with and arguing with them, we really had the first challenge to the worlds our parents lived in.
Being a good citizen involves things your parents can't easily teach you - having exposure to ideas different than theirs and the ability to independently weigh them, for example.
There are, not surprisingly, not a lot of options when it comes to actual micronations, nor could you really enforce the contract once you've handed over your money except by barrel of a gun (in which case why bother handing over the money in the first place?). Bigger nations easily could (and probably should) squash these micronations when they feel like it.
P.S. Configure your browser to tunnel DNS queries over that socks proxy while using it. Firefox doesn't do it by default but can be told to.
$ cat ~/bin/socksproxy_to
#!/bin/sh
ssh -D 8080 -Nf $* && \
echo "Configure your browser to use a socks proxy on localhost port 8080"
Having the broad body of knowledge that general studies at the university level provide is important to civics. It doesn't impugn your character or even make it impossible to get that on your own, but it is rare and difficult to do so.
Oh - maybe the original story wasn't clear enough about what these were - once one moves into the analysis stage, it's quite possible to make larger intermediary files, as you have. The best advice I could give would be to use VFAT in that case, unfortunately.
It would be a very good thing if we could get the funds to hire enough teachers to have smaller class sizes, and train/compensate those teachers well enough to get top-notch teaching. A commitment to never have more than 20 students in an academic class would be a wonderful thing (even if it's only one of the issues that needs to be addressed, it's a big one).
Regardless of actual positions (I'm a liberal socialist), some of us are more clear-thinking than others - we need a military, we probably always will need a military, we have national security interests that sometimes mean we'll be involved in foreign conflicts, and it's important that we have an effective military for such engagements. There are utopians who automatically think the military and police can just go away and everything will be roses and love - I consider the people who believe that to be fools (gets me into a surprising number of arguments with other radical liberals).
I expect that the military is actually very good at knocking most kinds of craziness out of people (or alternatively keeping most of them out of its ranks). It might not provide the comprehensive and broad type of education I prefer for everyone, but as far as I can tell it does provide some of it (from military surplus stores, I've picked up some of the materials on political theory and found them to be well-written and surprisingly deep), plus it's valuable as an alternative to civilian universities in that it helps us have an effective military.
There are problems with some universities and professors in what they teach, although I think exposure to such a broad variety of ideas, even radical and possibly harmful ones, is important. In one political philosophy class, for example, we read and critiqued the writings of the Unibomber, and in theory someone might've decided to champion those ideas and build their lives out of that. The academic mindset suggests that we tolerate odd ideas (in students and professors, at least outside of fields that have definite right answers), teach as broadly as we can, and hope that this broad exposure is in the public interest. That easily produces a few bad eggs, and it's the other side of a broad education.
Were I to be given the chance to define how education works for an entire society, it'd involve an expectation that people would take, at some slower rate after main education, classes at local universities (and other institutes like the local film schools) over their entire lives.
It's interesting how in some countries it's reasonably common to have students spend a year between primary schooling and university-level education, wandering the world, working, or similar. That might be a good idea as a general cultural practice.
Nothing is to say they would succeed or change. A number of them would.
There's also a last process of maturing that happens in the 2-3 years after university, as they need to apply the ideas they learned there to specific situations. That's an important step.
I would not want to compare military training on CS with university classes - I don't know enough about the military's instruction to make an apt comparison. I also don't want to compare community colleges because they vary significantly in content on the topic. My comparison was primarily meant to be between university graduates and high school graduates. For all I know, you may have received a top-notch education from the USMC.
University-level CS is theory-heavy by intention - one may learn to write code, but that's not the main point of the instruction.
I'd rather say slim than none - some rare people really are able to pick up the theoretical foundations on their own. Instruction helps a lot though, and for some types of programming, the theory is not quite as necessary (although it's still very helpful over a career). If someone could read Knuth's works and intelligently discuss them despite a lack of degree, I'd consider them to be part of that small group of people who actually did self-teach themselves enough. (Still leaves the general learning issue out though)
Some people manage to make up some or all of the loss on their own. Many people do not. Knowing people in many smaller towns, the ones who didn't get a college degree almost all ended up staying in their home towns, believing almost the same as their parents did, and failing to really understand the world. Among those who went to university, far more (but not all) journeyed in mind and/or body and had a lot more personal growth. Sure, it's possible to waste one's time in university, but many people do not, and those people are not the sort you'll see drawing attention to themselves with alcohol and misbehaviour.