Ridiculously Contrived Acronym of the Month Award
on
Set PHASRs On Stun
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Personnel Halting And Stimulation Response???
I can see why they made up that acronym though, because RBFTSOLLAF (Really Bright Flashlight That Sort of Looks Like a Fish) is way too long, hard to pronounce, and not as cool.
He was shot down by the "free minded" educators. No discussion, no alternative, "it's our way and that's it". Is this what teaching science has come to in this nation?
Our universe is filled with mysteries, but evolution isn't one of them, any more than the roundness of the Earth. It's a fact that can be observed directly at the bacterial level and in other ways. If somebody wants to believe the Earth is flat or that the universe sits on a stack of turtles, they're free to explore those ideas on their own time, just not in my classroom. That isn't a lack of free thinking, it's just a burning desire to teach students what we already know in what limited time there is to do it, so they can move on to solving the real mysteries.
The article doesn't say what kind of cells are in the ink. Are they stem cells or what? I think stem cells need some sort of environmental coaching to get them to turn into something specific. But since this tissue is being grown outside the body it seems like they would have to use cells that already know what they are -- liver cells to grow livers, etc. But then I would expect they would have to get the cells from the recipient or risk rejection. Wish there was more info about that.
For some reason the whole usatoday site comes up as a blank page for me so I can't read the article, but $117,500 such an odd amount I wonder how much of it is to cover the kid's legal fees. Maybe all of it?
Having read all the information, I disagree that this is Yet Another IDE. The target is a web app designed to run online or offline and specifically using AJAX. I think that's the unique thing about it. The XmlHttpRequest object has been around since IE5, but nobody has done anything to promote its use until somebody made up the name AJAX. Now that people are catching on to the off-channel request technique I think it will have a big impact on web programming. Morfik seems like a good effort to package that and make it easier to do.
The article explains that the "pull" is actually lift, as per an airplane wing. Lift is a real and well known effect that results from the airstream flowing faster over the top surface of the wing than the bottom, which lowers the air pressure above the wing.
The question is about educational value, not introductory training for tech careers. The goal of the project is to replace textbooks with laptops, which means ALL students (not just budding geeks) will have these INSTEAD OF books.
I question the wisdom of replacing $20/year textbooks with $100 laptops on a 5-year finance plan, as the article suggests. In the next sentence it mentions that if the publishers have to be paid for the content the cost will be higher. Well yeah, essentially you're replacing $100 worth of books with a $100 empty container for what's in the books. The content isn't going to come free. And although I have no idea what the rate of breakage and loss rate will be, it won't be anywhere near Zero. With content and replacement costs the breakeven point for this program is probably 6 to 8 years. How many careful, tech-savvy people with ample resources own functioning laptops right now that are that old?
Another aspect of this that I question is that it seems to view kids in developing nations as little knowledge-hungry angels. This isn't true any more than it is in America. Some kids love school, but many only tolerate it or outright hate it. If merely getting a kid to show up for school and do homework is a major victory, expecting that kid to learn to use and take care of some gadget on top of it is naively optimistic. I know there are many kids who are hungry for just such an opportunity, but I think a better use of the money would be to identify those kids and give them really useful tools, rather than carpet-bomb a country with cheap laptops.
any government that can make growing and consuming a plant in your house illegal can make analog recording illegal
Excellent analogy.
Personally I would prefer eliminating the content industry to criminalizing private uses of simple technology. DRM is leading the way to a society where people have no rights, only permissions.
This shows you the power of a website and a buzzword. I think xmlHttpRequest has been around as an ActiveX object since IE 5. More recently Mozilla added native support. Hopefully the IE7 team has done the same thing. At any rate I've been using this technique for 5 or 6 years. When I first learned about it I thought WOW, this is really going to revolutionize the web! A web page can be a little client/server app, just sitting there handling requests all day. No need for any crapola to maintain session state between refreshes. I always wondered why Microsoft never did anything to promote it. ASP.Net seemed to ignore the concept entirely, instead encouraging page refreshes whenever anything happened. Now its being promoted with a catchy name and it takes off like a rocket. Go figure.
XmlHttpRequest by itself is really easy to use. You submit a request asynchronously using the Send method, and you write an OnReadyStateChanged event handler which watches for readyState "Complete" and does whatever you want with the returned data, which can be either XML or just plain text. For example, plop it into the InnerHTML of a DIV, or in IE you can do a client-side XSL transformation. The Ajax implementations I've seen are just javascript object wrappers for this. Sajax adds browser compatibility, which is nice if you are working on the web, but if you want to use this technique for typical corporate intranet apps where you know IE is the only browser, you really don't need to bother learning about Ajax. Just look up the XmlHttpRequest object and you'll see how simple it is.
So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using.
There is. It's called a "phone bill," and I already pay it. What I do with the bandwidth is my own concern. I agree with him that if cable companies can carry phone traffic then phone companies should be able to carry television signals. But demanding a cut of Google's profits merely because they use phone lines is like demanding a share of all stock market transactions made over the phone.
The whole article is utter drivel, written by someone who not only views Xena and Buffy as science fiction, but apparently hasn't noticed how Xena and Lara Croft dress.
Side note: Nichelle Nichols was thinking about quitting Star Trek TOS because of conflicts with the studio, but Martin Luther King encouraged her to stay with the show because her role as an officer on a spaceship was setting a good example for young black Americans. Somehow I doubt that he would have felt so strongly if she had been playing a vampire slayer.
A woman I know used to do a lot of security jobs. When she was working for the City of Portland there were lots of rumors that the courthouse was haunted. The upper floors were spooky at night, and nobody particularly liked working the late shift there. One night one of their security guards was making his rounds when he saw someone in a sort of hooded robe standing at the far end of a hallway, apparently messing with a door as if trying to unlock it. The guard said something to challenge the person, when the figure suddenly rushed down the hall at him as if flying. He braced himself to get tackled, but whatever it was either went by him or through him, and when he turned to give chase there was nobody there. No sounds of fleeing footsteps, no doors opening and closing, nothing.
The other thing is that this guy was a real veteran security guard who had worked there for many years, very level-headed and dependable. But that night he left the building and went home without even clocking out, then called in to say that he was quitting and never going back. He wouldn't even report to the building during the daytime to turn in his keys and other stuff. His supervisor had to go to his house and pick them up.
A programmer I used to work with told me about a weird experience he had while working for an old bank in a small town in southern Oregon. One evening he was working late, when he noticed the sound of someone typing on a typewriter. It was muffled as if coming from in another room, and kind of slow, like someone who doesn't type very well and uses one finger.
After a while he got up for a stretch, and when he walked around the office he noticed everybody else had gone home. When he went back to his desk he heard the typing again, and realized that was coming from behind a door that he had never seen opened. He went over to the door and opened it, and found that it was a closet containing some boxes of files. On top of the pile of boxes sat an old black manual typewriter.
The frustrating thing is that there was no paper in the typewriter, and instead of rolling a piece of paper into it he just shut the door and went home. He never mentioned this to anybody at the bank because he was afraid they would think he was weird. I would love to have been there and put in a piece of paper to see what it would say. On the other hand I might have been to freaked to stick around.
Those people seem not to understand that the clichedness of bragging about not watching television outweighs any positive impression it makes.
Ok, how's this? I personally don't like TV because it consists almost entirely of attractive filler designed to keep you in place while someone tries to convince you to buy a whole lot of crap you don't need, and to borrow money to pay for it because you can't afford it. That's not bragging, it's just my opinion.
Without having read the book I can't criticize the author's logic, but any claim that popular culture makes people better critical thinkers seems about as plausible as a claim that fast food makes them better nutritionists. Critical thinking skills don't explain how more than half of Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, simply because their names were repeated together over and over. Or why the average American family has over $6000 in credit card debt and not enough savings to last 2 months without an income, yet they still buy 48-inch TVs and pay $200/month phone bills. Or why Americans keep voting for people who openly take bribes from big money interests.
I'll entertain the possibility that popular culture makes people better critical thinkers when they start showing signs that they're actually thinking at all.
Half the/. posts that will piss on this news have not ever used the product, let alone.NET.
Well here's one up from the other half. I've been a Visual Studio user since 1998 and have been working with.Net and C# for 3 years. Yesterday I tried to install the.Net Framework 2.0 Beta and fire up the QuickStart tutorials, since they were so helpful when I was learning Framework v1.
The Quickstart said I had to install a new version of the SQL Server Desktop Engine, which is now called SQL Server Express. The install failed. I ran that installer and it failed, saying it had found incompatible components. The fix, according to Microsoft, is to use a Cleanup tool found in the installer package. I extracted and ran the cleanup tool, and tried the SQL Server Express install again. Now it says it can't be installed without Framework 2.0. So I install the Framework again and try the SQL Server Express install again. Now we're back to the original error.
Shaking my head sadly and wondering WHO THE F*CK TESTED THIS CRAP, I uninstall Framework 2.0, reinstall 1.1, and go back to my work.
Maybe they fixed these ridiculous problems in the release version. I don't know and I don't care. I already wasted a couple hours on this damn thing and I'm not touching it again for a while.
Although there were a billion PCs, that was still very different to having six billion in the world and that they was still more to be done to make them much smarter.
Remember the good old days when the King owned all the land and parceled it out to the Barons, who allowed the peasants to live on it and farm it as long as they handed over a share? Guess what! We're still living in that system. Mining companies get mineral rights for next to nothing, wood products companies get logging rights for next to nothing. The public will end up paying for this, because whatever the spectrum bidders pay at auction they'll recoup in tax breaks, low interest loans and other corporate welfare. The public ALWAYS pays, because it's always been the peasants who do the paying.
Maybe a better place to begin a discussion would be the question of which governments have the most control over their citizens. When someone's in position to take away your "freedom" whenever they want, then it isn't freedom anymore, it's permission.
Slashdot Mirror
Personnel Halting And Stimulation Response???
I can see why they made up that acronym though, because RBFTSOLLAF (Really Bright Flashlight That Sort of Looks Like a Fish) is way too long, hard to pronounce, and not as cool.
He was shot down by the "free minded" educators. No discussion, no alternative, "it's our way and that's it". Is this what teaching science has come to in this nation?
Our universe is filled with mysteries, but evolution isn't one of them, any more than the roundness of the Earth. It's a fact that can be observed directly at the bacterial level and in other ways. If somebody wants to believe the Earth is flat or that the universe sits on a stack of turtles, they're free to explore those ideas on their own time, just not in my classroom. That isn't a lack of free thinking, it's just a burning desire to teach students what we already know in what limited time there is to do it, so they can move on to solving the real mysteries.
The article doesn't say what kind of cells are in the ink. Are they stem cells or what? I think stem cells need some sort of environmental coaching to get them to turn into something specific. But since this tissue is being grown outside the body it seems like they would have to use cells that already know what they are -- liver cells to grow livers, etc. But then I would expect they would have to get the cells from the recipient or risk rejection. Wish there was more info about that.
For some reason the whole usatoday site comes up as a blank page for me so I can't read the article, but $117,500 such an odd amount I wonder how much of it is to cover the kid's legal fees. Maybe all of it?
Having read all the information, I disagree that this is Yet Another IDE. The target is a web app designed to run online or offline and specifically using AJAX. I think that's the unique thing about it. The XmlHttpRequest object has been around since IE5, but nobody has done anything to promote its use until somebody made up the name AJAX. Now that people are catching on to the off-channel request technique I think it will have a big impact on web programming. Morfik seems like a good effort to package that and make it easier to do.
Best first-post comment I've ever seen. /golf clap
The article explains that the "pull" is actually lift, as per an airplane wing. Lift is a real and well known effect that results from the airstream flowing faster over the top surface of the wing than the bottom, which lowers the air pressure above the wing.
I really think this century will be to China what the 1800s were to the United States. Have your children learn Chinese.
The question is about educational value, not introductory training for tech careers. The goal of the project is to replace textbooks with laptops, which means ALL students (not just budding geeks) will have these INSTEAD OF books.
I question the wisdom of replacing $20/year textbooks with $100 laptops on a 5-year finance plan, as the article suggests. In the next sentence it mentions that if the publishers have to be paid for the content the cost will be higher. Well yeah, essentially you're replacing $100 worth of books with a $100 empty container for what's in the books. The content isn't going to come free. And although I have no idea what the rate of breakage and loss rate will be, it won't be anywhere near Zero.
With content and replacement costs the breakeven point for this program is probably 6 to 8 years. How many careful, tech-savvy people with ample resources own functioning laptops right now that are that old?
Another aspect of this that I question is that it seems to view kids in developing nations as little knowledge-hungry angels. This isn't true any more than it is in America. Some kids love school, but many only tolerate it or outright hate it. If merely getting a kid to show up for school and do homework is a major victory, expecting that kid to learn to use and take care of some gadget on top of it is naively optimistic. I know there are many kids who are hungry for just such an opportunity, but I think a better use of the money would be to identify those kids and give them really useful tools, rather than carpet-bomb a country with cheap laptops.
any government that can make growing and consuming a plant in your house illegal can make analog recording illegal
Excellent analogy.
Personally I would prefer eliminating the content industry to criminalizing private uses of simple technology. DRM is leading the way to a society where people have no rights, only permissions.
This shows you the power of a website and a buzzword. I think xmlHttpRequest has been around as an ActiveX object since IE 5. More recently Mozilla added native support. Hopefully the IE7 team has done the same thing. At any rate I've been using this technique for 5 or 6 years. When I first learned about it I thought WOW, this is really going to revolutionize the web! A web page can be a little client/server app, just sitting there handling requests all day. No need for any crapola to maintain session state between refreshes. I always wondered why Microsoft never did anything to promote it. ASP.Net seemed to ignore the concept entirely, instead encouraging page refreshes whenever anything happened. Now its being promoted with a catchy name and it takes off like a rocket. Go figure.
XmlHttpRequest by itself is really easy to use. You submit a request asynchronously using the Send method, and you write an OnReadyStateChanged event handler which watches for readyState "Complete" and does whatever you want with the returned data, which can be either XML or just plain text. For example, plop it into the InnerHTML of a DIV, or in IE you can do a client-side XSL transformation. The Ajax implementations I've seen are just javascript object wrappers for this. Sajax adds browser compatibility, which is nice if you are working on the web, but if you want to use this technique for typical corporate intranet apps where you know IE is the only browser, you really don't need to bother learning about Ajax. Just look up the XmlHttpRequest object and you'll see how simple it is.
The salesman at the computer store said my new cup holder has photons instead of electrodes. So if I spill my coffee I won't get a shock.
So there's going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they're using.
There is. It's called a "phone bill," and I already pay it. What I do with the bandwidth is my own concern. I agree with him that if cable companies can carry phone traffic then phone companies should be able to carry television signals. But demanding a cut of Google's profits merely because they use phone lines is like demanding a share of all stock market transactions made over the phone.
The whole article is utter drivel, written by someone who not only views Xena and Buffy as science fiction, but apparently hasn't noticed how Xena and Lara Croft dress.
Side note: Nichelle Nichols was thinking about quitting Star Trek TOS because of conflicts with the studio, but Martin Luther King encouraged her to stay with the show because her role as an officer on a spaceship was setting a good example for young black Americans. Somehow I doubt that he would have felt so strongly if she had been playing a vampire slayer.
A woman I know used to do a lot of security jobs. When she was working for the City of Portland there were lots of rumors that the courthouse was haunted. The upper floors were spooky at night, and nobody particularly liked working the late shift there. One night one of their security guards was making his rounds when he saw someone in a sort of hooded robe standing at the far end of a hallway, apparently messing with a door as if trying to unlock it. The guard said something to challenge the person, when the figure suddenly rushed down the hall at him as if flying. He braced himself to get tackled, but whatever it was either went by him or through him, and when he turned to give chase there was nobody there. No sounds of fleeing footsteps, no doors opening and closing, nothing.
The other thing is that this guy was a real veteran security guard who had worked there for many years, very level-headed and dependable. But that night he left the building and went home without even clocking out, then called in to say that he was quitting and never going back. He wouldn't even report to the building during the daytime to turn in his keys and other stuff. His supervisor had to go to his house and pick them up.
A programmer I used to work with told me about a weird experience he had while working for an old bank in a small town in southern Oregon. One evening he was working late, when he noticed the sound of someone typing on a typewriter. It was muffled as if coming from in another room, and kind of slow, like someone who doesn't type very well and uses one finger.
After a while he got up for a stretch, and when he walked around the office he noticed everybody else had gone home. When he went back to his desk he heard the typing again, and realized that was coming from behind a door that he had never seen opened. He went over to the door and opened it, and found that it was a closet containing some boxes of files. On top of the pile of boxes sat an old black manual typewriter.
The frustrating thing is that there was no paper in the typewriter, and instead of rolling a piece of paper into it he just shut the door and went home. He never mentioned this to anybody at the bank because he was afraid they would think he was weird. I would love to have been there and put in a piece of paper to see what it would say. On the other hand I might have been to freaked to stick around.
For extraterrestrials reading this, what is it in Martian Standard Time?
Microsoft Threatens to Stimulate Bootleg Windows Market in South Korea.
Those people seem not to understand that the clichedness of bragging about not watching television outweighs any positive impression it makes.
Ok, how's this? I personally don't like TV because it consists almost entirely of attractive filler designed to keep you in place while someone tries to convince you to buy a whole lot of crap you don't need, and to borrow money to pay for it because you can't afford it. That's not bragging, it's just my opinion.
Without having read the book I can't criticize the author's logic, but any claim that popular culture makes people better critical thinkers seems about as plausible as a claim that fast food makes them better nutritionists. Critical thinking skills don't explain how more than half of Americans came to believe that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with Osama bin Laden, simply because their names were repeated together over and over. Or why the average American family has over $6000 in credit card debt and not enough savings to last 2 months without an income, yet they still buy 48-inch TVs and pay $200/month phone bills. Or why Americans keep voting for people who openly take bribes from big money interests.
I'll entertain the possibility that popular culture makes people better critical thinkers when they start showing signs that they're actually thinking at all.
Half the /. posts that will piss on this news have not ever used the product, let alone .NET.
.Net and C# for 3 years. Yesterday I tried to install the .Net Framework 2.0 Beta and fire up the QuickStart tutorials, since they were so helpful when I was learning Framework v1.
Well here's one up from the other half. I've been a Visual Studio user since 1998 and have been working with
The Quickstart said I had to install a new version of the SQL Server Desktop Engine, which is now called SQL Server Express. The install failed. I ran that installer and it failed, saying it had found incompatible components. The fix, according to Microsoft, is to use a Cleanup tool found in the installer package. I extracted and ran the cleanup tool, and tried the SQL Server Express install again. Now it says it can't be installed without Framework 2.0. So I install the Framework again and try the SQL Server Express install again. Now we're back to the original error.
Shaking my head sadly and wondering WHO THE F*CK TESTED THIS CRAP, I uninstall Framework 2.0, reinstall 1.1, and go back to my work.
Maybe they fixed these ridiculous problems in the release version. I don't know and I don't care. I already wasted a couple hours on this damn thing and I'm not touching it again for a while.
Although there were a billion PCs, that was still very different to having six billion in the world and that they was still more to be done to make them much smarter.
Dang, them article done make me smarter!
""Hotmail, you know, the world's biggest e-mail system, is hosted by us [said Gates]."
Oh yeah, Hotmail. That's that big system they host on UNIX machines, isn't it?
Nowadays just about everything is "on steroids."
In my day all we had was "Turbo."
My parents had to settle for "o-matic".
Remember the good old days when the King owned all the land and parceled it out to the Barons, who allowed the peasants to live on it and farm it as long as they handed over a share? Guess what! We're still living in that system. Mining companies get mineral rights for next to nothing, wood products companies get logging rights for next to nothing. The public will end up paying for this, because whatever the spectrum bidders pay at auction they'll recoup in tax breaks, low interest loans and other corporate welfare. The public ALWAYS pays, because it's always been the peasants who do the paying.
Maybe a better place to begin a discussion would be the question of which governments have the most control over their citizens. When someone's in position to take away your "freedom" whenever they want, then it isn't freedom anymore, it's permission.