"However, biographers have noted that Lovelace struggled with mathematics, and there is some debate as to whether Lovelace understood deeply the concepts behind programming Babbage's engine, or was more of a figurehead used by Babbage for public relations purposes. As an early woman in computing, Lovelace occupies a politically sensitive space in the canon of historical figures in computer science, and therefore the extent of her contribution versus Babbage's remains difficult to assess based on current sources."
You question whether computers are effective learning tools. Perhaps you should also question if they are cost effective.
A grade school, junior high, or senior high math textbook can be valid for decades. Grammar books can also be valid for decades. Chemistry and Physics books also tend to be good for many, many years. Even with scientific advances and new research, political science, geography, and biology books tend to be good for a decade and a half.
A cheap computer costs as much as several textbooks, not including additional manpower and resources needed to keep them maintained. Yet a cheap wintel computer only lasts a few years until its out of date.
Yes, there are a few skills that should be learned through hands-on use of a computer. Computerized document presentation and typing are probably the most useful to most students. As a preperation for some careers, an introduction to programming is also needed. Although, lets be honest -- a lot of good programming is more textbook related than computer related. Hell, a lot of computer basics is more textbook related than computer related: while a computer may aide in learning the applications of a technology, it won't easily aide in learning the basics of a technology. For even a high school level, most of the above can be done on outdated computers.
Funds are not an unlimited resource. There are schools out there spending money to needlessly upgrade their computers and networks with little benefit to our students because the public perception is that computers are needed in the classroom. Bullshit. For the most part, its not cost effective. A smaller, older computer department will work about as well, and will leave money for other causes.
Its officially mac bashing time for some, which is funny as this is a board known for its windows bashing, but bring up Macs and suddenly there's no shortage of "we love MS/Dell!" Suddenly, all the problems with windows and dell's build quality are tossed out the window.
Its revenge.:)
Quite honestly, many people are sick of hearing how Mac OS X will heal the sick and raise the dead.
We are tired of being patted on the head and condescending told how, yes, they too used a system like ours before seeing the light.
Don't be too upset -- replace "Mac OS X" with "Linux", "Windows", "Python", "Perl", "C", "Java", "Ruby", "Tivo" or whatnot, and its all the same.
"I, Robot" the movie had one main problem for non-Asimov fans -- the blatent advertisements at the beginning.
For Asimov fans, it an additional problems. There is a corruption of the Susan Calvin character -- in the books and the movie, she seems to be socially non-aware, but for different reasons. In the books, she appears to have rejected spending time to learning the nuances of human interaction, instead, focusing on robots. In the movie, she appears to be more clueless about human interaction.
That being said, its not a bad movie, and is probably the closest that Hollywood would get to spirit of Asimov's work.
It has an impossible murder in the beginning, which is very Asmovian ("Tales of the Black Widowers", anyone?). The solution to the murder requires an understanding of the SF setting (see "The Caves of Steel" and "The Naked Sun", amoung others). Robots can and have disregarded the three laws (such as Cutie (QT-1) in "Reason" and others) or have formulated rather harsh and drastic solutions when faced with protecting humanity (the Zeroth Law in "Robots and Empire"). It even has the main character who suffers from a "Frankenstein complex" and later learns to deal with it.
Sure, it isn't based on a specific story, and it doesn't seem to fit into the chronology of Asimov's universe, but it is the closest mainstream movie that we'll see of Asimov's work.
I think that a major problem with geeks' perception of the movie is that it was sold as an action adventure movie. Thus we go out and highlight the flaws in "I, Robot" while ignoring surfboarding elves and dwarf tossing in a certain other movie.
First is the interface. Much has been said about it, but it really is not intuitive at all. A UI overhaul would be very helpful, and could go a long way to get a lot of Adobe enthusiasts to check it out.
As a "regular" Joe-Blow user, I had the oppertunity to use Adobe Photoshop at work once or twice for some graphics. I found the interface very unintuitive.:)
For most people, "intuitive" tends to mean "like the program I'm most familiar with". I'm not much of an exception -- I started on the GIMP first, and had little complaints about its interface, but Photoshop's interface was PITA.
Just my $.02
Re:Why not some mainstream fallacies?
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Bad Science Awards
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem is, once we get to a point where it can be 100% proven, it's too fucking late. The evidence, whilst not totally conclusive, is pretty damn strong. We could stick our heads in the sand and sing "la la la", or we could do something about it and try to save ourselves and our descendents.
Fallacy. Let me illustrate:
The problem with not believing in God is once you get to the point where it can be proven, its too late. Therefore, the logical conclusion is to believe in God. - Pascal's Wager
The evidence for human caused global warming isn't as strong as I'd like. There are far too many unknowns. Quite frankly, we know squat about the environment, and we know squat about global warming. To add to the confusion, $bigcorp promotes one set of data, while $envirowackos promotes another set of data. (Hence my comparision to a belief in God -- some people (myself included) sees strong evidence for the
existance of God. Other people do not.)
If we act in ways to prevent possible human-caused global warming, there are known and unknown economical costs to us all. "Economical costs" may sound dry and stuffy, but the net result is that acting to prevent possible human-caused global warming will impact each and every one of our lives in a negative way. That is certain. The cost effects and results of human caused global warming is uncertain.
There is evidence that we are coming out of another ice age. Personally, I believe that this evidence is stronger than the evidence for human caused global warming. Thus, we are probably facing a climate change regardless of what we do. If that is a case, even assuming a small additional climate change do to human causes, it might be more economically *and* environmentally efficient to devote our monies to other areas. What is "better" in the long run -- setting aside
one square mile as a wildlife preserve, or reducing human caused global warming by.0001 C? (Disclaimer: numbers pulled out of my ass.)
If you do feel strongly about global warming, I would suggest trying a vegan diet. Not eating meat tends to result in less pollution, less fossil fuels, and you don't get all those nasty greenhouse gasses from farting cows (don't laugh -- cow farts have been studied as a cause for climate change). While eggs and milk is more efficient, the pollution and antibiotic/hormone problems from factory farms may still be a problem.
Why not some mainstream fallacies?
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Bad Science Awards
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· Score: 0, Troll
I find that the evidence for human-caused global warming is lacking, yet consensus science tends to be used to support it.
Worse yet, when someone suggests that the current global warming may be due to non-human causes, that person tends to be rediculed, attacked, or
called a pawn of big industry.
Yet we don't know the natural global warming trends of the earth. We don't know how much sunlight earth received in the past, and how much it is receiving now. We don't know what the average amount of natural CO2 released is. We don't understand fluctuations in atmospheric composition. We can't even predict the weather a month down the road. In short, we don't understand what humans are doing to the environment, and how much is being effected.
Yet human caused global warming is popular because it can be used to support reform to protect the environment.
I'm all for less pollution, less waste, more recycling, and more efficiency, but lets be honest: We don't need to promote an unproven idea in order to support environmental reforms.
Quickbooks there is an alternative for, gnucash. Quicken, not so much.
Fundamentally, Gnucash is more sound than Quicken since it impliments the time-honored (but slightly confusing) tradition of double-entry book-keeping.
However, I find that it has stability issues under my distro (debian), and that its SQL database option is only partially supported, resulting in a single-user setup unless you are willing to go with less features to use the SQL backend.
In addition, I find that it does not take crashes well.
Finally, it does not work under Microsoft Windows.
With work, Gnucash would be a fine product, and it has some very nice features. I use it for my personal bookkeeping, but I'm careful to make frequent backups of my files (gnucash backups have given me problems before). If I was going to use a product for business, I would investigate SQL-Ledger, which is a web-based system.
The ACLU has a skewed perspective as to who is "oppressing" whom. They say that a person engaged in homosexuality has a "right" to join the Boy Scouts of America, an organization that requires belief in and respect for the God of the Bible. The ACLU thus attacks (oppresses?) the BSA in order to force an unqualified person into its organization. The ACLU acts to destroy the BSA and other organizations that have rules for membership. In cases like this, homosexuals and the ACLU are ones trying to take away rights - the rights of everyone else to make their own rules for private institutions.
Wrong. The Boy Scouts of America accepted government funds. Ergo, not entirely a
private organization. Thusly, the BSoA were
required to operate within certain requirements. They did not and were sued.
In addition, you are wrong about the Boy Scouts' requirements -- members are not required to believe in the God of the Christian bible. Belief in Allah or Vishnu works just as well.
PS: I'm a Christian. I also have socialist/communist tendencies[1] and try to live a vegan lifestyle.
[1] Other than the atheism ideology, communism seems *much* closer to the teachings of Jesus than capitalism.
Great idea. There's only one problem with public access Windows boxes: they cannot be trusted. Public access machines may have keyloggers, backdoors and stuff. I don't want anyone to see my password because I login from a windows box. Don't trust internet cafe's... So, personally, I was thinking more of using this when I'm visiting family and friends.
S/Key is your friend, and supported as a login mechanism for ssh.
So, configure ssh to use S/Key, generate some one time pass phrases, and carry this live CD with you. Login remotely to your system, be careful not to do anything which is security sensitive, and you are set.
Right, but in order for him to realize a profit, there would have to be at least one person in the world dumb enough to pay thirty grand for a virtual plot of land. Oh, wait...
There are already thousands upon thousands that are willing to pay more than a few dollars to just run around a virtual plot of land, killing virtual beings and collecting virtual items for a small period of time (usually a month).
If there is scarcity (a limited[1] amount of land in the game) and demand (people wanting in-game land) the land will have value, the same way that a slashdot subscriber account has value or that stocks have value.
[1] For an unusual definition of limited. The access to the item must be limited. For example, the amount of slashdot subscriber accounts are technically unlimited, but the access to a subscriber account is limited.
This may be a little off-topic, but can't you say the same thing about gold? What real does it have?
The supply of gold is more limited than the supply of dollars.
Since the value in a growing economy tends to increase, and as a whole, the world's economy is growing, we'd see much worse inflation with gold. (Note the inflation of an ounce of gold in respect to inflation of USD over the past 20 years.)
As for deflation, with a gold standard, its a lot harder for the government to create money, and when deflation hits, it encourages more deflation (why spend money $1 today if its worth $1.01 tomorrow and $1.30 a month from now?)
What about the oppressed, the persecuted, the abused? How about some priorities? There are a lot of people in the world who need your donations more than the lawyers at the ACLU and Stallman's cronies at the EFF.
I would consider donating to the ACLU because it helps the oppressed. It may not be popular to support Nazi speech (using one example), but it is necessary in order to support free speech.
In the same light, I would consider donating to the EFF because I believe that Stallman's "right to read" future is a possibility. Our civilization is built on knowledge, and the current trend is for corporations to limit our access to and control of knowledge.
While I haven't investigated either organization closely, both appear to do much work towards their stated goals.
Yes, there are hungry people in the world. There are starving people in the world. I'm not really sure how to help most of them out. How do I buy a meal for a starving Somalian without the money being diverted to some corrupt warlord?
If we limit it to the US, how am I sure that the money I donate goes to starving people, and not towards people scamming the system? I'm not sure.
EFF and ACLU I understand. World hunger, I do not.
Wouldn't D1 being on Mars and D2 being on Earth set things up nicely for a movie and its sequal?
Doom, the Movie: Bad-ass marine gets in a just dispute with a superior officer, and is exiled on a moon of Mars, where a corporation is performing experiments for the military in (what is rumored) teleportation.
Of course, bad things happen, and people end up dying, leaving only our hero left. (All of the above happens in the first ten or fifteen minutes of movie length.) Our hero then spends the next half hour to an hour killing the strange aliens that start to appear (heading to the other moon somewhere in the middle of this) until (mid-movie surprise twist) the hero and the audience comes to the revelation that these aren't aliens, they are demonic beings and there is some big demon somewhere in the base controlling all of this.
Rest of the movie is slaughtering more creatures until the big boss at the end. Roll credits. After the credits, we cut to a scene with our hero, voicing his relief at being able to head back to good ol' earth. Cut to the earth, showing a cute little bunny in a green field. Pan to the site, showing a burning city in the background, burnt forest, bigger and stranger demons, and a rabbit's decapited head on a spike. Fade to black. Text: Doom II: Hell on Earth, in theatres July 2nd, 2006.
No new monsters, no new creatures. Doom I has plenty of scary creatures to build on.
Then, the next year, we could have the sequal, Doom II. Our hero, arriving on earth, finds bad things, including the Doom II monsters and the odd elder sign. First part of the movie is brief backstory. Middle of the movie is our hero hunting down and killing the monsters on earth. The mid-movie twist is our hero finding that he has to enter hell itself to end the demonic plague. In the end, cue giant demonic head on wall generating demons, with a big finish. The end.
DVD Extras: (1) Our hero fighting nazis and pink demons. (2) The last scene from a different angle, showing John Romero controlling the end boss.
Like what should have been in an OS from the start?
I don't remember the pre win95 days, but from Windows 95 onward, MS had a search utility.
The Windows 95 version allowed the following searches:
Search by file name.
Search a specific directory without subfolders.
Search a specific directory with subfolders.
Created or modified between $date and $date.
Created or modified within $x day(s).
Created or modified within $x month(s).
Restricted to $application filetype.
Containing $string.
Size is at least $x kb.
Size is at most $x kb.
Its possible to search with several of the above restrictions, but not all combinations are possible.
While it may not have had all the features of unix's find command (and did not have the in-depth filetype understanding of google's desktop search, nor GDS's other capabilities), Microsoft's find command worked well, and worked relatively quickly, even on older machines. For the average Microsoft user, it was probably more than enough.
In addition, Microsoft Office came with a "Fast Find" utility which tended to grind the hard drive to a halt while it periodically indexed Office files. Most people turned it off since it slowed the machine and caused other problems. It may have been useful for searching documents if there was an insane number of them. I never had to search a large number of disorganized office documents, so I am unable to comment on its effectiveness.
We've got lots of hardware that won't EVER work in linux - network scanners, copiers and printers, raid controllers, CD-burners, network fax machines...etc
Er? I was under the impression that most IDE and SCSI CD burners were pretty generic in usage.
The whole technology upgrade the schools have been getting doesn't seem to be making learning more efficient. It seems like a big waste of money.
I'd disagree with you if technology was taught properly in schools, but it isn't happening now, and its not likely to happen in the future for a variety of reasons.
If a kid doesn't spend time studying his books, why would he start studying his software?
For the most part, software fails as a learning tool. It works well for modeling complex problems with a bit of programming, and it works well for presentation.
For high school mathmatics, the modeling/programming aspect is not very useful. The most common use I can see at the HS level is graphing, and, as another poster pointed out, that can be done by hand for better results as a teaching tool.
For presentation, there is no time like the present for learning TeX/LaTeX. Not only does it excel for mathmatical equations, its pretty damn good for regular essays and papers.
Re:The word is 'burgle', you illiterate moron!
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Robbers Scared by GTA
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· Score: 1
This is just a case of Americans deciding that everything is "ized" because it sounds trendy. It is what my Grandma would refer to as "Estuary English". You won't find such abuses of the English language in the OED.
You do realize that parts of American English is closer to 17th century English than British English, right?
American English existed in a backwater where it didn't pick up some of the changes in British English. American English tended to be more conservative, and kept several archaic words and pronunciations that British English lost. The parts of the US that had the closest contact with Britain ended up picking some of the linguistic changes from Britain (New England/South) while the westernmost frontier tended to keep the more archaic usages.
I don't know how you can discredit American English. From what I can tell you are defining proper English as British English due to geography and history (in which case, I'll argue that proper English ist Deutsch).
Shouldn't you be comparing teachers' salaries against other
college-educated professionals ?
Okay.
Teacher's average salary was $42.5k.
Average salary for someone with a bachelor's degree is $36k - $45k,
depending on the study.
Quibble: Not all teachers have even a bachelor's degree. Perhaps,
before you argue with me, you should research what the education
requirements are for existing teachers as well as the education
requirements for new teachers.
Average teacher salary is about $45.5k/year in 2002-2003.
If that teacher was the only income for the household, that would be
considered a middle-class household. That would be just over median
household income.
Average beginning teacher salary is about $29.5/year in 2002-2003.
If that teacher was the only income for the household, that would be
considered upper-lower class or lower-middle class.
For a family of four, federal poverty level is about $20k/year.
I'd be shocked if Windows XP ran (acceptably) well on a P2. Don't run XP
you say? Problem is, depending on your licensing agreement with MS, you
might not have much of a choice. Linux might be an option of course, then
again, it might not be.
Ah, but linux isn't a viable option when price is a consideration, since
linux only runs on mainframes, thus leading to a much higher TCO than
a Microsoft Windows-based solution.
You must not have seen any of the recent informative Microsoft ads.:P
( FYI, I'm on vacation atm and am using a "throwaway" pentium 75 to type
this via w3m. Amazingly enough, with the right distribution, and the right
toolset, this machine is surprisingly productive. I have chat (irssi),
IM (centericq or bitlbee), text editing (vim) and document creation (latex).
)
It's not an issue of hard drives melting, it's an issue of thermal expansion of the platters. Hard drive platters go through a normal amount of expansion because solids expand when heated and contract when cooled.
A solution:
Get long enough cables so that the HDD can be in its own small case.
Excluding the hard drive, the only thing that will be hurt by cold temperatures are the fans. Hook up a thermostat to the CPU fan and the case fan. Good. Now the fans will shut off when its cold (protecting their bearings) and turn on when its warm (protecting the computer from overheating).
Stick the hard drive in its own container. Add a small wattage lightbulb for heat. Probably needs a thermostat for that, so you don't overheat it. Give the container some ventilation - making the ventilation not very productive to flow (consider a "U" shaped vent) and adding another thermostat controlled fan should work.
Test the temperatures in a warm and a cold environment, and then let it run.
PS: "Disc thermostat" is what you might want to google for. Mouser.com has a good selection, for about $5 each, but the spec sheet says 120/240V. If I understand *how* they are made, they should work with a 12V fan, but I'm not an electronic's engineer.
A nearly $500 million settlement was reached with the government of India to repair to extend possible. That's 1980's dollars, by the way. That's a lot of money in India.
I calculated that Union Carbide was fined over ten times their 1984 profits.
The stock price was halved as a result. Debt approached 80% of company revenue. It was the target of several hostile take-over attempts. UC did not easily walk away from Bhopal.
Due to numerous fiscal problems (including the above) they restructured themselves several times to avoid bankrupcy and were bought out by Dow Chemicals in the end.
Interestingly, Union Carbide of India (Limited) actually owned the plant. They had revenues of $170 million in 1984. Union Carbide Incorporated (USA) owned just over half of that plant. As far as I can figure, UC (India)'s profits were under two million for 1984. UC (USA)'s profit for 1984 was $41 million.
Of course, there are more than a few people who wanted to see Union Carbide's buildings razed, the ground salted, lawyers and accountants fighting over the corpse, and their employees out of work.
I'm not sure that would be justice.
Justice would have been the Indian government not playing politics with the case and going after the people responsible. My impression is that they have failed that objective.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikipedia states some problems with Ada Lovelace's claim as the first programmer:
You question whether computers are effective learning tools. Perhaps you should also question if they are cost effective.
A grade school, junior high, or senior high math textbook can be valid for decades. Grammar books can also be valid for decades. Chemistry and Physics books also tend to be good for many, many years. Even with scientific advances and new research, political science, geography, and biology books tend to be good for a decade and a half.
A cheap computer costs as much as several textbooks, not including additional manpower and resources needed to keep them maintained. Yet a cheap wintel computer only lasts a few years until its out of date.
Yes, there are a few skills that should be learned through hands-on use of a computer. Computerized document presentation and typing are probably the most useful to most students. As a preperation for some careers, an introduction to programming is also needed. Although, lets be honest -- a lot of good programming is more textbook related than computer related. Hell, a lot of computer basics is more textbook related than computer related: while a computer may aide in learning the applications of a technology, it won't easily aide in learning the basics of a technology. For even a high school level, most of the above can be done on outdated computers.
Funds are not an unlimited resource. There are schools out there spending money to needlessly upgrade their computers and networks with little benefit to our students because the public perception is that computers are needed in the classroom. Bullshit. For the most part, its not cost effective. A smaller, older computer department will work about as well, and will leave money for other causes.
Just my $.02.
It's much easier to cry "Our students are suffering because the computers are out of date", than it is to cry "Our teachers are under paid".
Last time I checked, the average teacher's pay was about the same as the average pay for a college graduate (which would be a middle-class income).
I think its easier to cry "Our teachers are under paid" than it is to cry "Blame the parents" and "blame the students".
Its officially mac bashing time for some, which is funny as this is a board known for its windows bashing, but bring up Macs and suddenly there's no shortage of "we love MS/Dell!" Suddenly, all the problems with windows and dell's build quality are tossed out the window.
Its revenge. :)
Quite honestly, many people are sick of hearing how Mac OS X will heal the sick and raise the dead.
We are tired of being patted on the head and condescending told how, yes, they too used a system like ours before seeing the light.
Don't be too upset -- replace "Mac OS X" with "Linux", "Windows", "Python", "Perl", "C", "Java", "Ruby", "Tivo" or whatnot, and its all the same.
Agreed.
"I, Robot" the movie had one main problem for non-Asimov fans -- the blatent advertisements at the beginning.
For Asimov fans, it an additional problems. There is a corruption of the Susan Calvin character -- in the books and the movie, she seems to be socially non-aware, but for different reasons. In the books, she appears to have rejected spending time to learning the nuances of human interaction, instead, focusing on robots. In the movie, she appears to be more clueless about human interaction.
That being said, its not a bad movie, and is probably the closest that Hollywood would get to spirit of Asimov's work.
It has an impossible murder in the beginning, which is very Asmovian ("Tales of the Black Widowers", anyone?). The solution to the murder requires an understanding of the SF setting (see "The Caves of Steel" and "The Naked Sun", amoung others). Robots can and have disregarded the three laws (such as Cutie (QT-1) in "Reason" and others) or have formulated rather harsh and drastic solutions when faced with protecting humanity (the Zeroth Law in "Robots and Empire"). It even has the main character who suffers from a "Frankenstein complex" and later learns to deal with it.
Sure, it isn't based on a specific story, and it doesn't seem to fit into the chronology of Asimov's universe, but it is the closest mainstream movie that we'll see of Asimov's work.
I think that a major problem with geeks' perception of the movie is that it was sold as an action adventure movie. Thus we go out and highlight the flaws in "I, Robot" while ignoring surfboarding elves and dwarf tossing in a certain other movie.
In short, we want to hate "I, Robot".
First is the interface. Much has been said about it, but it really is not intuitive at all. A UI overhaul would be very helpful, and could go a long way to get a lot of Adobe enthusiasts to check it out.
As a "regular" Joe-Blow user, I had the oppertunity to use Adobe Photoshop at work once or twice for some graphics. I found the interface very unintuitive. :)
For most people, "intuitive" tends to mean "like the program I'm most familiar with". I'm not much of an exception -- I started on the GIMP first, and had little complaints about its interface, but Photoshop's interface was PITA.
Just my $.02
The problem is, once we get to a point where it can be 100% proven, it's too fucking late. The evidence, whilst not totally conclusive, is pretty damn strong. We could stick our heads in the sand and sing "la la la", or we could do something about it and try to save ourselves and our descendents.
Fallacy. Let me illustrate:
The problem with not believing in God is once you get to the point where it can be proven, its too late. Therefore, the logical conclusion is to believe in God. - Pascal's Wager
The evidence for human caused global warming isn't as strong as I'd like. There are far too many unknowns. Quite frankly, we know squat about the environment, and we know squat about global warming. To add to the confusion, $bigcorp promotes one set of data, while $envirowackos promotes another set of data. (Hence my comparision to a belief in God -- some people (myself included) sees strong evidence for the existance of God. Other people do not.)
If we act in ways to prevent possible human-caused global warming, there are known and unknown economical costs to us all. "Economical costs" may sound dry and stuffy, but the net result is that acting to prevent possible human-caused global warming will impact each and every one of our lives in a negative way. That is certain. The cost effects and results of human caused global warming is uncertain.
There is evidence that we are coming out of another ice age. Personally, I believe that this evidence is stronger than the evidence for human caused global warming. Thus, we are probably facing a climate change regardless of what we do. If that is a case, even assuming a small additional climate change do to human causes, it might be more economically *and* environmentally efficient to devote our monies to other areas. What is "better" in the long run -- setting aside one square mile as a wildlife preserve, or reducing human caused global warming by .0001 C? (Disclaimer: numbers pulled out of my ass.)
If you do feel strongly about global warming, I would suggest trying a vegan diet. Not eating meat tends to result in less pollution, less fossil fuels, and you don't get all those nasty greenhouse gasses from farting cows (don't laugh -- cow farts have been studied as a cause for climate change). While eggs and milk is more efficient, the pollution and antibiotic/hormone problems from factory farms may still be a problem.
I find that the evidence for human-caused global warming is lacking, yet consensus science tends to be used to support it.
Worse yet, when someone suggests that the current global warming may be due to non-human causes, that person tends to be rediculed, attacked, or called a pawn of big industry.
Yet we don't know the natural global warming trends of the earth. We don't know how much sunlight earth received in the past, and how much it is receiving now. We don't know what the average amount of natural CO2 released is. We don't understand fluctuations in atmospheric composition. We can't even predict the weather a month down the road. In short, we don't understand what humans are doing to the environment, and how much is being effected.
Yet human caused global warming is popular because it can be used to support reform to protect the environment.
I'm all for less pollution, less waste, more recycling, and more efficiency, but lets be honest: We don't need to promote an unproven idea in order to support environmental reforms.
Just my $.02
Quickbooks there is an alternative for, gnucash. Quicken, not so much.
Fundamentally, Gnucash is more sound than Quicken since it impliments the time-honored (but slightly confusing) tradition of double-entry book-keeping.
However, I find that it has stability issues under my distro (debian), and that its SQL database option is only partially supported, resulting in a single-user setup unless you are willing to go with less features to use the SQL backend.
In addition, I find that it does not take crashes well.
Finally, it does not work under Microsoft Windows.
With work, Gnucash would be a fine product, and it has some very nice features. I use it for my personal bookkeeping, but I'm careful to make frequent backups of my files (gnucash backups have given me problems before). If I was going to use a product for business, I would investigate SQL-Ledger, which is a web-based system.
The ACLU has a skewed perspective as to who is "oppressing" whom. They say that a person engaged in homosexuality has a "right" to join the Boy Scouts of America, an organization that requires belief in and respect for the God of the Bible. The ACLU thus attacks (oppresses?) the BSA in order to force an unqualified person into its organization. The ACLU acts to destroy the BSA and other organizations that have rules for membership. In cases like this, homosexuals and the ACLU are ones trying to take away rights - the rights of everyone else to make their own rules for private institutions.
Wrong. The Boy Scouts of America accepted government funds. Ergo, not entirely a private organization. Thusly, the BSoA were required to operate within certain requirements. They did not and were sued.
In addition, you are wrong about the Boy Scouts' requirements -- members are not required to believe in the God of the Christian bible. Belief in Allah or Vishnu works just as well.
PS: I'm a Christian. I also have socialist/communist tendencies[1] and try to live a vegan lifestyle.
[1] Other than the atheism ideology, communism seems *much* closer to the teachings of Jesus than capitalism.
Great idea. There's only one problem with public access Windows boxes: they cannot be trusted. Public access machines may have keyloggers, backdoors and stuff. I don't want anyone to see my password because I login from a windows box. Don't trust internet cafe's... So, personally, I was thinking more of using this when I'm visiting family and friends.
S/Key is your friend, and supported as a login mechanism for ssh.
So, configure ssh to use S/Key, generate some one time pass phrases, and carry this live CD with you. Login remotely to your system, be careful not to do anything which is security sensitive, and you are set.
Right, but in order for him to realize a profit, there would have to be at least one person in the world dumb enough to pay thirty grand for a virtual plot of land. Oh, wait...
There are already thousands upon thousands that are willing to pay more than a few dollars to just run around a virtual plot of land, killing virtual beings and collecting virtual items for a small period of time (usually a month).
If there is scarcity (a limited[1] amount of land in the game) and demand (people wanting in-game land) the land will have value, the same way that a slashdot subscriber account has value or that stocks have value.
[1] For an unusual definition of limited. The access to the item must be limited. For example, the amount of slashdot subscriber accounts are technically unlimited, but the access to a subscriber account is limited.
This may be a little off-topic, but can't you say the same thing about gold? What real does it have?
The supply of gold is more limited than the supply of dollars.
Since the value in a growing economy tends to increase, and as a whole, the world's economy is growing, we'd see much worse inflation with gold. (Note the inflation of an ounce of gold in respect to inflation of USD over the past 20 years.)
As for deflation, with a gold standard, its a lot harder for the government to create money, and when deflation hits, it encourages more deflation (why spend money $1 today if its worth $1.01 tomorrow and $1.30 a month from now?)
Oh, wait, do you mean benefits? :)
What about the oppressed, the persecuted, the abused? How about some priorities? There are a lot of people in the world who need your donations more than the lawyers at the ACLU and Stallman's cronies at the EFF.
I would consider donating to the ACLU because it helps the oppressed. It may not be popular to support Nazi speech (using one example), but it is necessary in order to support free speech.
In the same light, I would consider donating to the EFF because I believe that Stallman's "right to read" future is a possibility. Our civilization is built on knowledge, and the current trend is for corporations to limit our access to and control of knowledge.
While I haven't investigated either organization closely, both appear to do much work towards their stated goals.
Yes, there are hungry people in the world. There are starving people in the world. I'm not really sure how to help most of them out. How do I buy a meal for a starving Somalian without the money being diverted to some corrupt warlord?
If we limit it to the US, how am I sure that the money I donate goes to starving people, and not towards people scamming the system? I'm not sure.
EFF and ACLU I understand. World hunger, I do not.
Wouldn't D1 being on Mars and D2 being on Earth set things up nicely for a movie and its sequal?
Doom, the Movie: Bad-ass marine gets in a just dispute with a superior officer, and is exiled on a moon of Mars, where a corporation is performing experiments for the military in (what is rumored) teleportation.
Of course, bad things happen, and people end up dying, leaving only our hero left. (All of the above happens in the first ten or fifteen minutes of movie length.) Our hero then spends the next half hour to an hour killing the strange aliens that start to appear (heading to the other moon somewhere in the middle of this) until (mid-movie surprise twist) the hero and the audience comes to the revelation that these aren't aliens, they are demonic beings and there is some big demon somewhere in the base controlling all of this.
Rest of the movie is slaughtering more creatures until the big boss at the end. Roll credits. After the credits, we cut to a scene with our hero, voicing his relief at being able to head back to good ol' earth. Cut to the earth, showing a cute little bunny in a green field. Pan to the site, showing a burning city in the background, burnt forest, bigger and stranger demons, and a rabbit's decapited head on a spike. Fade to black. Text: Doom II: Hell on Earth, in theatres July 2nd, 2006.
No new monsters, no new creatures. Doom I has plenty of scary creatures to build on.
Then, the next year, we could have the sequal, Doom II. Our hero, arriving on earth, finds bad things, including the Doom II monsters and the odd elder sign. First part of the movie is brief backstory. Middle of the movie is our hero hunting down and killing the monsters on earth. The mid-movie twist is our hero finding that he has to enter hell itself to end the demonic plague. In the end, cue giant demonic head on wall generating demons, with a big finish. The end.
DVD Extras: (1) Our hero fighting nazis and pink demons. (2) The last scene from a different angle, showing John Romero controlling the end boss.
Now that's how you make a few good Doom movies.
Like what should have been in an OS from the start?
I don't remember the pre win95 days, but from Windows 95 onward, MS had a search utility.
The Windows 95 version allowed the following searches:
Its possible to search with several of the above restrictions, but not all combinations are possible.
While it may not have had all the features of unix's find command (and did not have the in-depth filetype understanding of google's desktop search, nor GDS's other capabilities), Microsoft's find command worked well, and worked relatively quickly, even on older machines. For the average Microsoft user, it was probably more than enough.
In addition, Microsoft Office came with a "Fast Find" utility which tended to grind the hard drive to a halt while it periodically indexed Office files. Most people turned it off since it slowed the machine and caused other problems. It may have been useful for searching documents if there was an insane number of them. I never had to search a large number of disorganized office documents, so I am unable to comment on its effectiveness.
We've got lots of hardware that won't EVER work in linux - network scanners, copiers and printers, raid controllers, CD-burners, network fax machines...etc
Er? I was under the impression that most IDE and SCSI CD burners were pretty generic in usage.
The whole technology upgrade the schools have been getting doesn't seem to be making learning more efficient. It seems like a big waste of money.
I'd disagree with you if technology was taught properly in schools, but it isn't happening now, and its not likely to happen in the future for a variety of reasons.
If a kid doesn't spend time studying his books, why would he start studying his software?
For the most part, software fails as a learning tool. It works well for modeling complex problems with a bit of programming, and it works well for presentation.
For high school mathmatics, the modeling/programming aspect is not very useful. The most common use I can see at the HS level is graphing, and, as another poster pointed out, that can be done by hand for better results as a teaching tool.
For presentation, there is no time like the present for learning TeX/LaTeX. Not only does it excel for mathmatical equations, its pretty damn good for regular essays and papers.
This is just a case of Americans deciding that everything is "ized" because it sounds trendy. It is what my Grandma would refer to as "Estuary English". You won't find such abuses of the English language in the OED.
You do realize that parts of American English is closer to 17th century English than British English, right?
American English existed in a backwater where it didn't pick up some of the changes in British English. American English tended to be more conservative, and kept several archaic words and pronunciations that British English lost. The parts of the US that had the closest contact with Britain ended up picking some of the linguistic changes from Britain (New England/South) while the westernmost frontier tended to keep the more archaic usages.
I don't know how you can discredit American English. From what I can tell you are defining proper English as British English due to geography and history (in which case, I'll argue that proper English ist Deutsch).
Shouldn't you be comparing teachers' salaries against other college-educated professionals ?
Okay.
Teacher's average salary was $42.5k.
Average salary for someone with a bachelor's degree is $36k - $45k, depending on the study.
Quibble: Not all teachers have even a bachelor's degree. Perhaps, before you argue with me, you should research what the education requirements are for existing teachers as well as the education requirements for new teachers.
Average teacher salary is about $45.5k/year in 2002-2003. If that teacher was the only income for the household, that would be considered a middle-class household. That would be just over median household income.
Average beginning teacher salary is about $29.5/year in 2002-2003. If that teacher was the only income for the household, that would be considered upper-lower class or lower-middle class.
For a family of four, federal poverty level is about $20k/year.
Teacher salaries do not seem to be the issue.
I'd be shocked if Windows XP ran (acceptably) well on a P2. Don't run XP you say? Problem is, depending on your licensing agreement with MS, you might not have much of a choice. Linux might be an option of course, then again, it might not be.
Ah, but linux isn't a viable option when price is a consideration, since linux only runs on mainframes, thus leading to a much higher TCO than a Microsoft Windows-based solution.
You must not have seen any of the recent informative Microsoft ads. :P
( FYI, I'm on vacation atm and am using a "throwaway" pentium 75 to type this via w3m. Amazingly enough, with the right distribution, and the right toolset, this machine is surprisingly productive. I have chat (irssi), IM (centericq or bitlbee), text editing (vim) and document creation (latex). )
The gimp is only 8 bit color
It is?
It's not an issue of hard drives melting, it's an issue of thermal expansion of the platters. Hard drive platters go through a normal amount of expansion because solids expand when heated and contract when cooled.
A solution:
Get long enough cables so that the HDD can be in its own small case.
Excluding the hard drive, the only thing that will be hurt by cold temperatures are the fans. Hook up a thermostat to the CPU fan and the case fan. Good. Now the fans will shut off when its cold (protecting their bearings) and turn on when its warm (protecting the computer from overheating).
Stick the hard drive in its own container. Add a small wattage lightbulb for heat. Probably needs a thermostat for that, so you don't overheat it. Give the container some ventilation - making the ventilation not very productive to flow (consider a "U" shaped vent) and adding another thermostat controlled fan should work.
Test the temperatures in a warm and a cold environment, and then let it run.
PS: "Disc thermostat" is what you might want to google for. Mouser.com has a good selection, for about $5 each, but the spec sheet says 120/240V. If I understand *how* they are made, they should work with a 12V fan, but I'm not an electronic's engineer.
A nearly $500 million settlement was reached with the government of India to repair to extend possible. That's 1980's dollars, by the way. That's a lot of money in India.
I calculated that Union Carbide was fined over ten times their 1984 profits.
The stock price was halved as a result. Debt approached 80% of company revenue. It was the target of several hostile take-over attempts. UC did not easily walk away from Bhopal.
Due to numerous fiscal problems (including the above) they restructured themselves several times to avoid bankrupcy and were bought out by Dow Chemicals in the end.
Interestingly, Union Carbide of India (Limited) actually owned the plant. They had revenues of $170 million in 1984. Union Carbide Incorporated (USA) owned just over half of that plant. As far as I can figure, UC (India)'s profits were under two million for 1984. UC (USA)'s profit for 1984 was $41 million.
Of course, there are more than a few people who wanted to see Union Carbide's buildings razed, the ground salted, lawyers and accountants fighting over the corpse, and their employees out of work.
I'm not sure that would be justice.
Justice would have been the Indian government not playing politics with the case and going after the people responsible. My impression is that they have failed that objective.