The purpose of an exam is to evaluate your abilities. Not just your abilities on one special day that you've prepared for, but your abilities overall, in general, on any given day. If you want to get a good picture of what your true skill set is, there is one thing that you absolutely need to not do: exam cram.
I find that with not cramming comes a great deal less stress and anxiety. I view the exam as just another test, and I know that whatever I score on that test will be an indicator of my skill level on any given random tuesday. When I'm out in the real world, I'm not going to cram before a meeting, I'm either going to be on the ball or I'm not, and if I'm not then perhaps I should consider a new line of work. So if I'm not going to do anything special to prepare in the real world, why do anything special to prepare for the exam? This doesn't mean that you shouldn't study, but rather that you shouldn't study any more than you intend to study regularly for the rest of your mortal life.
You can look at it this way though: if you put all your hopes and dreams into that one exam and you panic like a child when things don't go your way, how are you going to handle a rough business meeting? Maybe you'd be better-off as an artist...
The same is not true of univeristies. That is, we're very far from the situation where opening another univeristy will so crowd the market for higher education that the value of an education will decline due to the presence of more of them.
So you're saying that good, quality instructors and professors that can engage and entertain their students' minds, these kinds of people, they just grow on trees? There's like...a surplus of 'em? I ask you this, because without those people, any new schools built will be of a diminished quality. Perhaps some teachers will venture from an older university to the new ones, but then you've reduced the average quality of education for a group of institutions (both old and new) instead of just making the new ones worse-off than the existing ones. Additionally, if we are to believe that cheating is so rampant in China, imagine how many of the so-called "teachers" out there are actually frauds--unfit to teach even elementary school.
I think that you may want to reconsider your position.
I respectfully submit:
4. They purposefully grabbed more than they were entitled to because they were ordered to do so.
5. They purposefully grabbed more than they were entitled to, hoping for a backlash against Swedish Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström, because they think that enforcing copyright law at the same level as theft or rape is absolutely nuts.
The police follow orders, period. They may have their own opinions but at the end of the day, they just do what they're told. In this instance, doing what they were told may have been in line with furthering their own goals for making the current government look bad.
So no, your options are not the only options. I would like to belive that it's #5.
You don't have to sue "under" any law. You can sue for anything. You can sue the state seeking to make the official state song "Teenage Enema Nurses In Bondage" if you feel like it, and the case will get its time in court before a judge. Suing is a civil action, the grounds of which need not be governed by a specific law.
Guild Wars is totally sharded. All of the cities are broken into multiple "districts" (aka "shards") which physically separate groups of players from one another. Further, all non-city action is instanced which could be considered a form of "sharding" in and of itself.
EVE Online is the best Massively Multiplayer Online Game in existence. When I say "massively" what I mean is that there aren't "shards" or "realms" or other divisions between groups of players. Everyone plays on the same "realm" which had 26,000 players online concurrently last weekend, out of a playerbase of about 110,000. How is that for massive?
There's also the in-game universe, which consists of a network of more than 4,000 solar systems. How many zones are there in other MMOGs like WoW, Everquest, Everquest2, and so on? 200? 300? Again, massive.
Oh, and you wanna talk massive? Check out the ships you can fly. You do of course start the game in a tiny (by comparison) ship, but through the training of skills you will be able to fly bigger and badder ships over time.
Skills are another area where EVE takes the term massive to the limit. Any player can learn any skill, of which there are literally hundreds. You aren't limited by your "class" because there are no classes. The skills you have determine the activities you can perform, period. There are certain types of spacecraft which are designed to be used by members of a particular race (there are four: Caldari, Amarr, Gallente and Minmatar) but there is nothing preventing say, a Gallente pilot from learning the Amarr skills so that they can fly Amarr Battleships. One thing about skills that differs from other games is that you select a skill (one at a time) to train, and then it will train over a period of time, regardless of whether or not you're online. So if it will take you a few days to get the Caldari Cruiser skill from level 3 to 4, you can put the game down for a long weekend and come back to your new skill and the benefits it entails.
Everything (item-wise and ship-wise) in the game is produced in one of two ways: you take it as loot after killing an NPC pirate ("rat" in game terminology) or players make them. Most of the equipment and ships are player-produced. It is possible (although difficult) for a single player to mine her own ore, start her own production queue, and start producing her own ships, guns, ammunition, microwarp drives, armor plating, and so on. It's much easier to be part of a group.
That brings us to Corporations. Corporations of many types exist. Some corporations exist solely to mine the ores of the asteroid belts in the outer regions. Some corporations are pirates, who exist solely to kill other players and take their equipment. Some corporations are explorers, or escorts, or manufacturers. Corporations can be as small as 20 people or as large as 1,000 (or more). Multiple corporations can form Alliances, perhaps granting a Mining corporation the privelege of mining precious ore in an outer system controlled by a Pirate corporation in the alliance.
At the beginning I mentioned the 4,000 solar systems. These systems each have a sovereignity and a security level. The security level determines a player's safety in the system, ranging from 1.0 (secure) to 0.0 (insecure). At a security level less than 0.5, any player can attack any other player. At a security level less than 0.3, players can set up their own space stations (you read that right, you can deploy and operate your own space station) and claim sovereignity over that system, effectively making it "theirs." Alliances will claim sovereignity over vast networks of systems, as well. So of that massive 4,000 systems, perhaps half are at a security level of 0.5 or greater and are "protected" by The Federation. Outside of these systems though, anyone and anything is fair game, and the stakes can be quite high.
Outside of Federation Space, there is one thing that is more massive than any other game out there. If you have two alliances, each with 4,000 players or so, who both want to control a region of space because of, say, the extremely valuable minerals in the asteroid belts required to build a certain type of ship, th
On a 2/5 system, you can notice page tearing when you drag windows around, no matter how fast or slow you drag them. There is also a graphical delay on the redraw of menus. This is less-noticeable but still present at 3/5. The entire GUI uses 3D graphics, and much as you need a beefy system to run a 3D game at your monitor's native resolution (in my case, 1600x1200) you need a beefy system to run Vista at native res.
I'm currently testing software under Vista Beta 2 at MS.
I can say that 1GB is not enough. We have some Pentium 4 3.4GHz machines with 1GB of RAM and Radeon x600 graphics and they score 2 out of 5 on the system properties rating system. We have some identical machines with 2GB of RAM, and they score 3/5. I suspect that a 5/5 would involve a high-end $400+ video card and 4GB of RAM, but even though I work for one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they've refused to buy me such a machine for testing.:D So I really have no idea what it takes to score 5 out of 5, but the "recommended" specs will likely get you a 2/5 which does not provide an enjoyable user experience as far as I'm concerned.
How do humans learn to use names other than after repeated exposure to human conversation?
Further, if you isolated a group of humans from other humans ("in the wild") do you think they would come up with names for one another?
What I'm saying here is that I think a human separated from its herd/pack/society will be just as uninclined to name things as a bird would be. When integrated into society however, whether human or bird, the ability to learn enables higher-level functions like naming, understanding, counting, storytelling, and so on. That's probably the most amazing thing of all, that a bird can become "socialized" the same way a child can.
What does it matter if they do or don't have names that they speak in the wild? What if they don't? Wouldn't that make this all the more interesting?
I'm pretty sure Lynx doesn't download images. What about mobile browsers? Not downloading any images isn't the same as blocking ads. Blocking ads is the selective non-downloading of certain images. That is fairly trivial to detect, and if your site is largely dynamic, you could even restrict user access upon detection of their ad blocking software.
For example, a user downloads the main HTML page. They download the transparent spacer image and the website title banner, but they don't download the 468x60 advertisement banner. Upon clicking any link at that page, a check is performed to see if the user downloaded all the images or selectively downloaded only the non-advertisements. If the check comes up positive (downloaded all images) then they will get to navigate to another page. If the check comes up negative (downloaded only non-ad images) then they will get directed to a "YOU BLOCK ADS AND YOU SUCK" page. Granted, as others have pointed out, some ad blockers will download the images and not display them, which eliminates this detection scheme as viable. I wouldn't be surprised that, if in coming times, this becomes the de facto method of handling the "blocking" of advertisements: download, but do not display.
Actually, they said it was "like" a transplant, not "the same as" a transplant. "like" does not mean "the same as" and this is an important distinction.
I've often wondered about the actual heat impact of all our combustion engines expelling hot exhaust gases into the atmosphere. Nevermind the progressive warming caused by heat trapped under a layer of greenhouse gases, I'm talking about the mere fact that automobile exhaust, jet exhaust, and other internal-combustion engine exhausts are just plain hot. Does that make a difference? Also, we're changing the albedo of the earth every time we cut down a forest or build a new highway...how does that figure into global warming? Does the heat transfer between hot asphalt and the air amount to any measurable quantity which we could attribute at least partially to global warming? Would we be better off if we had white roads with black lines? Seriously, anyone have any idea about these questions?
If anybody can explain to me why so many folks seem to be terrified of homosexuality even though it has roughly zero impact on their lives I'd appreciate it.
This is because the reasoning that so many folks operate under is the Christian one. I give you now the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, cities destroyed by God for their sins, which allegedly include homosexuality. The conservative Christians are afraid that letting homosexuality run rampant is going to bring down the wrath of God upon them and their cities. It is, I believe, just that simple. The interesting irony here is that some Rabbinic texts say that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because their residents were greedy and selfish (ie, republican) and not actually due to homosexuality. Regardless, the governing belief among the hard-line Christians appears to be that allowing homosexuality to flourish will bring down upon us a torrent of fire and brimstone to punish us for our sins.
So, I think that Christianity is largely responsible for the mentality that homosexuality should not be tolerated. Good luck convincing those people to believe otherwise.
I, personally, don't care how people choose to gratify themselves. If having sex with cucumbers and watermelons floats somebody's boat, more power to them. I'd prefer that they not hold rallies praising the glory of cucumberfucking, but I suppose that's a free-speech-protected right. I actually think that homosexuality does us a favor by helping to stem the population explosion and by way of homosexual couples adopting children which would otherwise not have a safe and loving home to live in. Two birds, one stone.
Just because more people are familiar with the name Xena doesn't mean it's a better name. I'm sure many people are more familiar with the name Justin, but does that mean that the next planet should be named Justin? The people who name hurricanes have a system of A-Z with alternating male and female names which has persisted since the naming of hurricanes began. Why should the planets NOT be named after Roman gods, if that is historically exactly what has been done?
I do not understand why I have to pay a 911 fee on every phone if I don't want it. I have the option to have a phone, I have the option to call 911 if I want, but I do not have the option to pay for 911.
You have to pay because it's a universal system. Additionally, if somebody is dying and you choose not to call 911, you will probably be sued and/or charged with negligent manslaughter or something like that. So you don't really have the "option" to call 911 if you "want" to, the law and peoples' expectations more or less compels you to do so.
What would happen if you "chose" not to pay the 911 fee and therefore had no 911 service, and you are subsequently involved in a car accident which renders you unconscious. Your passenger, bleeding to death in the seat next to you, pulls your phone out of your pocket only to discover that you declined the 911 option, and you both proceed to, well, die. 911 is universally funded because although you may in some circumstances have the option of not calling, in the significant majority of circumstances (including those where you are unable to make the conscious decision whether or not to call), emergency services personnel should be dispatched in order to preserve either your life or the lives of those who are in your company. That is why you pay for 911 service on every single phone, whether you want to or not--if calling 911 is even a consideration, it's probably a damn good idea to just do it.
I got in at $4/share and I sold at $0.02/share after they tanked. I was pretty upset, because their tech demos really led me to believe that the technology had a future.
I'm a contractor at Microsoft and my fellow contractors and I use "google" as a verb--even my lead does it, and our homepages are all set to google (mine is google news, actually). Granted I'm not in the core Windows division, but I am at Microsoft and I am allowed an amount of freedom in which search engine I use.
Slashdot Mirror
The purpose of an exam is to evaluate your abilities. Not just your abilities on one special day that you've prepared for, but your abilities overall, in general, on any given day. If you want to get a good picture of what your true skill set is, there is one thing that you absolutely need to not do: exam cram.
I find that with not cramming comes a great deal less stress and anxiety. I view the exam as just another test, and I know that whatever I score on that test will be an indicator of my skill level on any given random tuesday. When I'm out in the real world, I'm not going to cram before a meeting, I'm either going to be on the ball or I'm not, and if I'm not then perhaps I should consider a new line of work. So if I'm not going to do anything special to prepare in the real world, why do anything special to prepare for the exam? This doesn't mean that you shouldn't study, but rather that you shouldn't study any more than you intend to study regularly for the rest of your mortal life.
You can look at it this way though: if you put all your hopes and dreams into that one exam and you panic like a child when things don't go your way, how are you going to handle a rough business meeting? Maybe you'd be better-off as an artist...
The same is not true of univeristies. That is, we're very far from the situation where opening another univeristy will so crowd the market for higher education that the value of an education will decline due to the presence of more of them.
So you're saying that good, quality instructors and professors that can engage and entertain their students' minds, these kinds of people, they just grow on trees? There's like...a surplus of 'em? I ask you this, because without those people, any new schools built will be of a diminished quality. Perhaps some teachers will venture from an older university to the new ones, but then you've reduced the average quality of education for a group of institutions (both old and new) instead of just making the new ones worse-off than the existing ones. Additionally, if we are to believe that cheating is so rampant in China, imagine how many of the so-called "teachers" out there are actually frauds--unfit to teach even elementary school.
I think that you may want to reconsider your position.
I respectfully submit:
4. They purposefully grabbed more than they were entitled to because they were ordered to do so.
5. They purposefully grabbed more than they were entitled to, hoping for a backlash against Swedish Minister of Justice Thomas Bodström, because they think that enforcing copyright law at the same level as theft or rape is absolutely nuts.
The police follow orders, period. They may have their own opinions but at the end of the day, they just do what they're told. In this instance, doing what they were told may have been in line with furthering their own goals for making the current government look bad.
So no, your options are not the only options. I would like to belive that it's #5.
I didn't say that it wouldn't get dismissed, I said that there need not be a violation of law in order to sue.
You don't have to sue "under" any law. You can sue for anything. You can sue the state seeking to make the official state song "Teenage Enema Nurses In Bondage" if you feel like it, and the case will get its time in court before a judge. Suing is a civil action, the grounds of which need not be governed by a specific law.
Legal prostitution, here we come!
Guild Wars is totally sharded. All of the cities are broken into multiple "districts" (aka "shards") which physically separate groups of players from one another. Further, all non-city action is instanced which could be considered a form of "sharding" in and of itself.
EVE Online is the best Massively Multiplayer Online Game in existence. When I say "massively" what I mean is that there aren't "shards" or "realms" or other divisions between groups of players. Everyone plays on the same "realm" which had 26,000 players online concurrently last weekend, out of a playerbase of about 110,000. How is that for massive?
There's also the in-game universe, which consists of a network of more than 4,000 solar systems. How many zones are there in other MMOGs like WoW, Everquest, Everquest2, and so on? 200? 300? Again, massive.
Oh, and you wanna talk massive? Check out the ships you can fly. You do of course start the game in a tiny (by comparison) ship, but through the training of skills you will be able to fly bigger and badder ships over time.
Skills are another area where EVE takes the term massive to the limit. Any player can learn any skill, of which there are literally hundreds. You aren't limited by your "class" because there are no classes. The skills you have determine the activities you can perform, period. There are certain types of spacecraft which are designed to be used by members of a particular race (there are four: Caldari, Amarr, Gallente and Minmatar) but there is nothing preventing say, a Gallente pilot from learning the Amarr skills so that they can fly Amarr Battleships. One thing about skills that differs from other games is that you select a skill (one at a time) to train, and then it will train over a period of time, regardless of whether or not you're online. So if it will take you a few days to get the Caldari Cruiser skill from level 3 to 4, you can put the game down for a long weekend and come back to your new skill and the benefits it entails.
Everything (item-wise and ship-wise) in the game is produced in one of two ways: you take it as loot after killing an NPC pirate ("rat" in game terminology) or players make them. Most of the equipment and ships are player-produced. It is possible (although difficult) for a single player to mine her own ore, start her own production queue, and start producing her own ships, guns, ammunition, microwarp drives, armor plating, and so on. It's much easier to be part of a group.
That brings us to Corporations. Corporations of many types exist. Some corporations exist solely to mine the ores of the asteroid belts in the outer regions. Some corporations are pirates, who exist solely to kill other players and take their equipment. Some corporations are explorers, or escorts, or manufacturers. Corporations can be as small as 20 people or as large as 1,000 (or more). Multiple corporations can form Alliances, perhaps granting a Mining corporation the privelege of mining precious ore in an outer system controlled by a Pirate corporation in the alliance.
At the beginning I mentioned the 4,000 solar systems. These systems each have a sovereignity and a security level. The security level determines a player's safety in the system, ranging from 1.0 (secure) to 0.0 (insecure). At a security level less than 0.5, any player can attack any other player. At a security level less than 0.3, players can set up their own space stations (you read that right, you can deploy and operate your own space station) and claim sovereignity over that system, effectively making it "theirs." Alliances will claim sovereignity over vast networks of systems, as well. So of that massive 4,000 systems, perhaps half are at a security level of 0.5 or greater and are "protected" by The Federation. Outside of these systems though, anyone and anything is fair game, and the stakes can be quite high.
Outside of Federation Space, there is one thing that is more massive than any other game out there. If you have two alliances, each with 4,000 players or so, who both want to control a region of space because of, say, the extremely valuable minerals in the asteroid belts required to build a certain type of ship, th
On a 2/5 system, you can notice page tearing when you drag windows around, no matter how fast or slow you drag them. There is also a graphical delay on the redraw of menus. This is less-noticeable but still present at 3/5. The entire GUI uses 3D graphics, and much as you need a beefy system to run a 3D game at your monitor's native resolution (in my case, 1600x1200) you need a beefy system to run Vista at native res.
I'm currently testing software under Vista Beta 2 at MS.
:D So I really have no idea what it takes to score 5 out of 5, but the "recommended" specs will likely get you a 2/5 which does not provide an enjoyable user experience as far as I'm concerned.
I can say that 1GB is not enough. We have some Pentium 4 3.4GHz machines with 1GB of RAM and Radeon x600 graphics and they score 2 out of 5 on the system properties rating system. We have some identical machines with 2GB of RAM, and they score 3/5. I suspect that a 5/5 would involve a high-end $400+ video card and 4GB of RAM, but even though I work for one of the most powerful corporations in the world, they've refused to buy me such a machine for testing.
I can explain it too: the grizzly raped the polar bear.
I think it's like the difference between writing down the title of a book and writing a summary of its contents.
How do humans learn to use names other than after repeated exposure to human conversation?
Further, if you isolated a group of humans from other humans ("in the wild") do you think they would come up with names for one another?
What I'm saying here is that I think a human separated from its herd/pack/society will be just as uninclined to name things as a bird would be. When integrated into society however, whether human or bird, the ability to learn enables higher-level functions like naming, understanding, counting, storytelling, and so on. That's probably the most amazing thing of all, that a bird can become "socialized" the same way a child can.
What does it matter if they do or don't have names that they speak in the wild? What if they don't? Wouldn't that make this all the more interesting?
I'm pretty sure Lynx doesn't download images. What about mobile browsers? Not downloading any images isn't the same as blocking ads. Blocking ads is the selective non-downloading of certain images. That is fairly trivial to detect, and if your site is largely dynamic, you could even restrict user access upon detection of their ad blocking software.
For example, a user downloads the main HTML page. They download the transparent spacer image and the website title banner, but they don't download the 468x60 advertisement banner. Upon clicking any link at that page, a check is performed to see if the user downloaded all the images or selectively downloaded only the non-advertisements. If the check comes up positive (downloaded all images) then they will get to navigate to another page. If the check comes up negative (downloaded only non-ad images) then they will get directed to a "YOU BLOCK ADS AND YOU SUCK" page. Granted, as others have pointed out, some ad blockers will download the images and not display them, which eliminates this detection scheme as viable. I wouldn't be surprised that, if in coming times, this becomes the de facto method of handling the "blocking" of advertisements: download, but do not display.
Actually, they said it was "like" a transplant, not "the same as" a transplant. "like" does not mean "the same as" and this is an important distinction.
Just my little nit pick with your comment.
...anybody not running Vista.
I've often wondered about the actual heat impact of all our combustion engines expelling hot exhaust gases into the atmosphere. Nevermind the progressive warming caused by heat trapped under a layer of greenhouse gases, I'm talking about the mere fact that automobile exhaust, jet exhaust, and other internal-combustion engine exhausts are just plain hot. Does that make a difference? Also, we're changing the albedo of the earth every time we cut down a forest or build a new highway...how does that figure into global warming? Does the heat transfer between hot asphalt and the air amount to any measurable quantity which we could attribute at least partially to global warming? Would we be better off if we had white roads with black lines? Seriously, anyone have any idea about these questions?
And what, exactly, would make this a foolish consistency?
If anybody can explain to me why so many folks seem to be terrified of homosexuality even though it has roughly zero impact on their lives I'd appreciate it.
This is because the reasoning that so many folks operate under is the Christian one. I give you now the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, cities destroyed by God for their sins, which allegedly include homosexuality. The conservative Christians are afraid that letting homosexuality run rampant is going to bring down the wrath of God upon them and their cities. It is, I believe, just that simple. The interesting irony here is that some Rabbinic texts say that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed because their residents were greedy and selfish (ie, republican) and not actually due to homosexuality. Regardless, the governing belief among the hard-line Christians appears to be that allowing homosexuality to flourish will bring down upon us a torrent of fire and brimstone to punish us for our sins.
So, I think that Christianity is largely responsible for the mentality that homosexuality should not be tolerated. Good luck convincing those people to believe otherwise.
I, personally, don't care how people choose to gratify themselves. If having sex with cucumbers and watermelons floats somebody's boat, more power to them. I'd prefer that they not hold rallies praising the glory of cucumberfucking, but I suppose that's a free-speech-protected right. I actually think that homosexuality does us a favor by helping to stem the population explosion and by way of homosexual couples adopting children which would otherwise not have a safe and loving home to live in. Two birds, one stone.
Just because more people are familiar with the name Xena doesn't mean it's a better name. I'm sure many people are more familiar with the name Justin, but does that mean that the next planet should be named Justin? The people who name hurricanes have a system of A-Z with alternating male and female names which has persisted since the naming of hurricanes began. Why should the planets NOT be named after Roman gods, if that is historically exactly what has been done?
What would happen if you "chose" not to pay the 911 fee and therefore had no 911 service, and you are subsequently involved in a car accident which renders you unconscious. Your passenger, bleeding to death in the seat next to you, pulls your phone out of your pocket only to discover that you declined the 911 option, and you both proceed to, well, die. 911 is universally funded because although you may in some circumstances have the option of not calling, in the significant majority of circumstances (including those where you are unable to make the conscious decision whether or not to call), emergency services personnel should be dispatched in order to preserve either your life or the lives of those who are in your company. That is why you pay for 911 service on every single phone, whether you want to or not--if calling 911 is even a consideration, it's probably a damn good idea to just do it.
Story comments aren't skinned in the same fashion as the left-hand sidebar.
Taco, if you're going to try to appeal to a new demographic, at least do it right eh?
One that doesn't require a telescope: http://www.lavarnd.org/
I got in at $4/share and I sold at $0.02/share after they tanked. I was pretty upset, because their tech demos really led me to believe that the technology had a future.
I'm a contractor at Microsoft and my fellow contractors and I use "google" as a verb--even my lead does it, and our homepages are all set to google (mine is google news, actually). Granted I'm not in the core Windows division, but I am at Microsoft and I am allowed an amount of freedom in which search engine I use.