A long time ago in a bar far, far from here....a buddy of mine was acting like a jerk. Two bouncers picked him up, carried him outside, and told him to go home. Four cops can't pick up a college kid, carry him outside, and tell him to get lost? They gotta zap the guy? Did they think he had a knife or something? When did being a jerk become a felony? If it has, I'd better warn my friends.
....but the last used laptop I bought had a STOP sticker on it. I couldn't get the sticker off, so I called the number. Fortunately, my laptop wasn't stolen. The STOP people re-registered the laptop in my name for free. There is supposedly a permanent "tattoo" underneath the sticker. No, I have not pried it off to look. The sticker is very ugly, by the way.
It starts even earlier than this. If you want your little kid to be a good engineer, DO NOT buy him a virtual erector set for the PC, get him a real one. Little hands working with little tools to build real things, it matters to that young brain. It may make a mess around the house, with all those erector set pieces and Lego blocks scattered everywhere, but it'll produce a kid who can think about the real world and work in the real world.
This is old-school copyright infringement. Nothing to see here, move along. You cannot reproduce copyrighted material in its entirety and distribute it to hundreds of people. Charging for the copies doesn't matter. Way back around 1980, a professor of mine was doing something similar with articles from science magazines. He created a reader for one of his classes and distributed it to his students. We had to pick it up at the university's copy center. He got into trouble with the copyright holders. You have to get permission to reprint articles. This is only a little work, and, depending on the articles, only a little money (though a few copyright owners will try to screw you by jacking up the price - solution, leave that article out).
You are correct sir! (Phil Hartman SNL flashback - god I miss that guy). I remember a few of the preliminary designs made public back then (I knew my old age would come in handy someday). There were several piggyback models using a liquid-fueled lift vehicle that, if one of them had been adopted, would have prevented both shuttle crashes. There were also follow-on heat protection schemes that never saw the light of day, like replacing the tiles with a "carbon-carbon blanket." Just the snafus involved in developing the shuttle's main engines could fill a book, because they used a "hurry-up" approach that ignored decades of sound development practices.
This is no joke. A certain percentage of ADULTS will look into it. My old Astronomy professor used to invite his students to solar observations in the little observatory on top of the science building. He had to stop when, time after time, after numerous warnings not to cross or even approach the focal point of the projection (a variation of Galileo's projection of sunspots), one or two would always try. He'd pull them back. One time he didn't get there fast enough and a TWENTY-something student stuck his arm in it. Fortunately, it was cold outside, the guy was wearing a plastic windbreaker. The sleeve of the windbreaker went into the focal point. Pow! The guy pulled his arm back before he was burned. My professor gave up. He'd invite people he could trust to observe, but it was no longer open to the general student population or the public. We all think it's fun to make dangerous things. I've done it, and if you're honest, you've done it. We were the lucky ones, we didn't get blown up or scarred for life. I met one of the unlucky ones, who blew off his hand and put out an eye trying to make homemade fireworks. Always warn them! A few won't listen, but many others will. With this laser project, someone should have emulated the Mythbusters: "Don't try this at home....ever!"
Here's a little tale that will enlighten. A buddy and I were both teachers at a local community college. One night, after finals, we met for coffee at a restaurant just off campus. I drove an ordinary little compact car. When I parked the car, I rolled up the windows and locked the doors. My briefcase was on the front seat. A chimp with a rock could have been in my car in seconds. My buddy had an old MG convertible with the top down. He stuffed his briefcase behind the seat. Someone stole his briefcase. Mine was still in my car. A small but significant percentage of the population are only situationally honest. Given a chance, they'll be crooks. The cheap locks on my rusty old Datsun would keep a real crook out for about two seconds; but they are good enough to keep the lazy crook and the situational crook out. Locks are a filter. There are very few hard-core criminals, but lots of situational crooks. Locks keep the situational crooks away. To defeat the serious criminal, I'd recommend the human element: a rentacop with a cell phone.
You were warned. On at least one occasion, somebody swiped The Doctor's sonic screwdriver and couldn't get it to work. When asked, the good doctor called his screwdriver "an isomorphic device." It could only be used by The Doctor. Whether or not this is an abuse of the word "isomorphic," I don't know. What relevance this has to the current discussion, I don't know. Another existing "isomorphic device": a handgun mod that allows only someone wearing a specific ring to use it. I think the ring contains an RFID chip. Then there are all those cute biometric devices, including that nifty fingerprint scanner in a laptop. You know the one, the Mythbusters defeated it in a show last season.
To paraphrase SNL: "You ignorant slut!" Communism is an historically well-defined political philosophy. It involves the wholesale confiscation of the "means of production" and destruction of the ruling classes. They are to be replaced by a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Communism is a complex and dense belief system, some historians have called it a secular religion. A Communist would consider healthcare reform to be puny stuff. In fact, many Communists in the early part of the Twentieth Century opposed reformists, considering them lackeys of capitalists. They considered Progressives to be the enemies of Communism. If Progressives could succeed in their reforms, the Communists felt this would strengthen capitalism. This is the last thing Communists wanted. They wanted capitalism to be destroyed by its own excesses. Judging by the results of the reforms of TR, Wilson, and FDR, they were right. Progressivism strengthens capitalism. Universal healthcare would strengthen our society and our economy. Thus endeth the lesson.
Reminds me of an incident in trig class way back when. The instructor caught me trying to memorize all the different trig formulas. "Why are you doing that?" he said, and then proceeded to teach me how to derive all of them from the three basic formulas. A good memory is often overvalued.
because consumer tastes increasingly send us conflicting messages on this subject. People seem to like integrated functions on their cell phones, at least a few of them. Yet they obviously like single-function products. People who own multifunction cell phones also own and use digital cameras and mp3 players. Do they want to REPLACE their other devices, or do they want added functionality in their phones? Those are different questions. I'm guessing the second. Multi-function cell phones are another way for consumers to interact with their music, not the only way they want to interact with their music. They want to take images and video with their phones, but they don't want the phone to be their only device for doing so. In the end, only air, food, and water are necessary for existence. Everything else is a matter of desire. That's the cage of modern life. "But it's such a pretty cage!"
Let's not forget The Prestige, the other movie about magicians from a few months ago. Once you watch it, you'll realize it's science fiction. To my knowledge, neither the book it's based on or the movie were ever marketed as SF. Tesla and quantum mechanics play pivotal roles in the plot.
But only if you're the Exile. Remember, Outcasts don't wear robes, only Exiles.
Re:First use will be military, second law enforcem
on
Purdue Unveils a Tricorder
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Nope, not unless the Supreme Court is overthrown. They ruled several years ago in a case involving the police use of FLIR to spy on the houses of suspected pot growers, that the use of remote sensing equipment without a warrant is a violation of the "Unwarranted Search" clause of the Bill of Rights. The cops tried to use the "plain sight" exception, but since we don't see in infrared, the court wasn't having any of it. I think the tricorder would fall under this ruling. Using a tricorder without the express permission of the suspect would be a similar violation.
Though this does bring up an inconsistency. As you pointed out, US law does allow for the use of dogs to detect drugs. Or does the officer have to get permission to use the dog? Not having smuggled drugs, this is an area I'm woefully ignorant in.
Have you heard of democracy and the court system? Local communities get fed up with their high-handed police all the time. They sue the city, they campaign against the police chief (if it's an elected position), they put up opposition candidates to local elected officials. Local government elections aren't as sexy as national elections, but they have more real impact on your life. Take my little town, for instance. There's always someone upset at the sheriff or the mayor or a county commissioner or the school superintendent. There are always recall elections, new candidates for sheriff, lawsuits against the school, lawsuits against the city, reform candidates for mayor (our new mayor is the reform candidate, he won the last election), and write-in campaigns aimed against the county commission. This in a rural Kansas town of 1500, in a county of 5000 people. Got a problem with government? Fix it yourself, with a little help from your friends. That's the essence of democracy.
Let's go someplace else in the solar system first
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm probably not the first one to point this out. There's room in the solar system for several thousand years of unchecked human growth. Let's fix up the house first before visiting the neighbors.
I use compact fluorescent bulbs everywhere, so I'm familiar with this problem. The low-watt bulbs are dim when they are first turned on, but they get brighter the longer they are on. I have one in a lamp next to my computer desk and it behaves just as I've said. It's incredibly dim when it first comes on, but after about fifteen or twenty minutes it becomes much brighter. I don't notice this so much with the bigger, higher watt flourescents.
After years of fighting with students, I gave up on the term paper. Since I was teaching history and geography, not English 101, it wasn't my job to instruct them in the niceties of doing research papers. I issued threats, I gave flunking grades, I made people rewrite their papers; none of it worked. Every semester I found students in my classes copying stuff directly off Wikipedia, Britannica Online, and just about everywhere else. Even when they didn't plagiarize, they cited online sources to excess, to extreme lengths. I wanted them to dig a little, find out the vagaries of history, get below the surface, get beyond reference works and textbooks. It wasn't going to happen.
I realized the freshman term paper was dead. It had no place outside of English 101. No other 100 level class should have them. But what should I do? Writing is an essential component to a college education. It has to be in as many classes as it can. However, writing assignments do no good if the words either aren't written by the students in the first place, or they depend too much on reference works. You don't take swimming lessons to walk around in the toddler's wading pool. The term paper was already in the trash. The multiple-choice test went with it. All my tests would now contain only short-answer (under fifty words) or essay questions. For the replacement of the term paper, I took a page from my old statistics professor. Back in the day, we could fill a note card with any equations or formulas we wanted and bring it to a test. I put this in action. There was an extra essay test at the end of the semester, with one question, which I gave to the students a month beforehand. They could fill up two sheets of paper with notes and citations - whatever they wanted. They had to cite at least two primary sources and five secondary sources, no encyclopedia citations. And especially no citations from the textbook. I called it an essay test. I was really making them write a term paper in front of me.
Most of the students liked the idea. I was happy with the results, though it was much more work for me (no graduate assistants for lowly instructors - "Grad students, I don't need no stinking grad students!"). I wouldn't recommend the technique for more advanced courses. Being able to make a coherent argument supported by evidence is an essential skill, so term papers have their place in a college education. Still, they don't have to be everywhere. Maybe we could do without them in the first year of college.
You'll need it or a desktop for many things, but not for taking notes. A paper notebook and a pen or pencil are all you'll need for taking notes. Why? Note-taking isn't outlining, which is what most people think. Note-taking is a mnemonic system. It is not transcription. Someone good at note-taking will make small sketches, use arrows, circle items, use abbreviations, and skip items of little relevance. Properly used, note-taking can act like a filter, preserving the things you think you'll need to remember from the lecture, while skipping those irrelevancies every lecture has. There is one final, absolute advantage to note-taking over laptop transcription (or taping the lecture, another rookie mistake): your focus will be on what's said in class, not on fiddling with your laptop.
That would be nice, except they've been talking about electronic paper and other similar schemes for at least ten years and nothing's come of it. I can buy used paperbacks online for a fraction of their original cost. You wanna bet on how illegal they'll make selling old ebooks? Hell, it's probably already illegal.
A US F-117 was downed by the Serbs right around the time of the attack on the Chinese embassy. Since the Serbs were the least likely to down a stealth aircraft, there was speculation in some quarters as to who helped them do it. Then the Chinese embassy was hit. Was that a little payback for the loss of our Nighthawk? "You help someone shoot down one of our planes? That's all right. We'll just blow the frak out of one of your embassies. Fair trade, huh?" It could all be an internet myth, but you have to wonder....
Has anyone considered that there were millions of R2 units and protocol droids in the galaxy, and he had last seen R2D2 and C3P0 almost twenty years before, in another part of the galaxy? To his mind, not knowing the Tantive IV had been in orbit over Tatooine, they could have been any two droids. I specialize in Monday-morning quarterbacking, armchair generaling, and 20/20 hindsight operations.
Slashdot Mirror
A long time ago in a bar far, far from here....a buddy of mine was acting like a jerk. Two bouncers picked him up, carried him outside, and told him to go home. Four cops can't pick up a college kid, carry him outside, and tell him to get lost? They gotta zap the guy? Did they think he had a knife or something? When did being a jerk become a felony? If it has, I'd better warn my friends.
....but the last used laptop I bought had a STOP sticker on it. I couldn't get the sticker off, so I called the number. Fortunately, my laptop wasn't stolen. The STOP people re-registered the laptop in my name for free. There is supposedly a permanent "tattoo" underneath the sticker. No, I have not pried it off to look. The sticker is very ugly, by the way.
Battle Angel Alita. There, I've said it.
Yep. The power of the Force has been confirmed once again.
It starts even earlier than this. If you want your little kid to be a good engineer, DO NOT buy him a virtual erector set for the PC, get him a real one. Little hands working with little tools to build real things, it matters to that young brain. It may make a mess around the house, with all those erector set pieces and Lego blocks scattered everywhere, but it'll produce a kid who can think about the real world and work in the real world.
This is old-school copyright infringement. Nothing to see here, move along. You cannot reproduce copyrighted material in its entirety and distribute it to hundreds of people. Charging for the copies doesn't matter. Way back around 1980, a professor of mine was doing something similar with articles from science magazines. He created a reader for one of his classes and distributed it to his students. We had to pick it up at the university's copy center. He got into trouble with the copyright holders. You have to get permission to reprint articles. This is only a little work, and, depending on the articles, only a little money (though a few copyright owners will try to screw you by jacking up the price - solution, leave that article out).
You are correct sir! (Phil Hartman SNL flashback - god I miss that guy). I remember a few of the preliminary designs made public back then (I knew my old age would come in handy someday). There were several piggyback models using a liquid-fueled lift vehicle that, if one of them had been adopted, would have prevented both shuttle crashes. There were also follow-on heat protection schemes that never saw the light of day, like replacing the tiles with a "carbon-carbon blanket." Just the snafus involved in developing the shuttle's main engines could fill a book, because they used a "hurry-up" approach that ignored decades of sound development practices.
This is no joke. A certain percentage of ADULTS will look into it. My old Astronomy professor used to invite his students to solar observations in the little observatory on top of the science building. He had to stop when, time after time, after numerous warnings not to cross or even approach the focal point of the projection (a variation of Galileo's projection of sunspots), one or two would always try. He'd pull them back. One time he didn't get there fast enough and a TWENTY-something student stuck his arm in it. Fortunately, it was cold outside, the guy was wearing a plastic windbreaker. The sleeve of the windbreaker went into the focal point. Pow! The guy pulled his arm back before he was burned. My professor gave up. He'd invite people he could trust to observe, but it was no longer open to the general student population or the public. We all think it's fun to make dangerous things. I've done it, and if you're honest, you've done it. We were the lucky ones, we didn't get blown up or scarred for life. I met one of the unlucky ones, who blew off his hand and put out an eye trying to make homemade fireworks. Always warn them! A few won't listen, but many others will. With this laser project, someone should have emulated the Mythbusters: "Don't try this at home....ever!"
Here's a little tale that will enlighten. A buddy and I were both teachers at a local community college. One night, after finals, we met for coffee at a restaurant just off campus. I drove an ordinary little compact car. When I parked the car, I rolled up the windows and locked the doors. My briefcase was on the front seat. A chimp with a rock could have been in my car in seconds. My buddy had an old MG convertible with the top down. He stuffed his briefcase behind the seat. Someone stole his briefcase. Mine was still in my car. A small but significant percentage of the population are only situationally honest. Given a chance, they'll be crooks. The cheap locks on my rusty old Datsun would keep a real crook out for about two seconds; but they are good enough to keep the lazy crook and the situational crook out. Locks are a filter. There are very few hard-core criminals, but lots of situational crooks. Locks keep the situational crooks away. To defeat the serious criminal, I'd recommend the human element: a rentacop with a cell phone.
You were warned. On at least one occasion, somebody swiped The Doctor's sonic screwdriver and couldn't get it to work. When asked, the good doctor called his screwdriver "an isomorphic device." It could only be used by The Doctor. Whether or not this is an abuse of the word "isomorphic," I don't know. What relevance this has to the current discussion, I don't know. Another existing "isomorphic device": a handgun mod that allows only someone wearing a specific ring to use it. I think the ring contains an RFID chip. Then there are all those cute biometric devices, including that nifty fingerprint scanner in a laptop. You know the one, the Mythbusters defeated it in a show last season.
The nerd has left the building.
Bugging pets? Wasn't that a plot point in a Bond movie? Or am I thinking of Austin Powers?
To paraphrase SNL: "You ignorant slut!" Communism is an historically well-defined political philosophy. It involves the wholesale confiscation of the "means of production" and destruction of the ruling classes. They are to be replaced by a "dictatorship of the proletariat." Communism is a complex and dense belief system, some historians have called it a secular religion. A Communist would consider healthcare reform to be puny stuff. In fact, many Communists in the early part of the Twentieth Century opposed reformists, considering them lackeys of capitalists. They considered Progressives to be the enemies of Communism. If Progressives could succeed in their reforms, the Communists felt this would strengthen capitalism. This is the last thing Communists wanted. They wanted capitalism to be destroyed by its own excesses. Judging by the results of the reforms of TR, Wilson, and FDR, they were right. Progressivism strengthens capitalism. Universal healthcare would strengthen our society and our economy. Thus endeth the lesson.
Reminds me of an incident in trig class way back when. The instructor caught me trying to memorize all the different trig formulas. "Why are you doing that?" he said, and then proceeded to teach me how to derive all of them from the three basic formulas. A good memory is often overvalued.
because consumer tastes increasingly send us conflicting messages on this subject. People seem to like integrated functions on their cell phones, at least a few of them. Yet they obviously like single-function products. People who own multifunction cell phones also own and use digital cameras and mp3 players. Do they want to REPLACE their other devices, or do they want added functionality in their phones? Those are different questions. I'm guessing the second. Multi-function cell phones are another way for consumers to interact with their music, not the only way they want to interact with their music. They want to take images and video with their phones, but they don't want the phone to be their only device for doing so. In the end, only air, food, and water are necessary for existence. Everything else is a matter of desire. That's the cage of modern life. "But it's such a pretty cage!"
Let's not forget The Prestige, the other movie about magicians from a few months ago. Once you watch it, you'll realize it's science fiction. To my knowledge, neither the book it's based on or the movie were ever marketed as SF. Tesla and quantum mechanics play pivotal roles in the plot.
But only if you're the Exile. Remember, Outcasts don't wear robes, only Exiles.
Nope, not unless the Supreme Court is overthrown. They ruled several years ago in a case involving the police use of FLIR to spy on the houses of suspected pot growers, that the use of remote sensing equipment without a warrant is a violation of the "Unwarranted Search" clause of the Bill of Rights. The cops tried to use the "plain sight" exception, but since we don't see in infrared, the court wasn't having any of it. I think the tricorder would fall under this ruling. Using a tricorder without the express permission of the suspect would be a similar violation.
Though this does bring up an inconsistency. As you pointed out, US law does allow for the use of dogs to detect drugs. Or does the officer have to get permission to use the dog? Not having smuggled drugs, this is an area I'm woefully ignorant in.
I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.
Have you heard of democracy and the court system? Local communities get fed up with their high-handed police all the time. They sue the city, they campaign against the police chief (if it's an elected position), they put up opposition candidates to local elected officials. Local government elections aren't as sexy as national elections, but they have more real impact on your life. Take my little town, for instance. There's always someone upset at the sheriff or the mayor or a county commissioner or the school superintendent. There are always recall elections, new candidates for sheriff, lawsuits against the school, lawsuits against the city, reform candidates for mayor (our new mayor is the reform candidate, he won the last election), and write-in campaigns aimed against the county commission. This in a rural Kansas town of 1500, in a county of 5000 people. Got a problem with government? Fix it yourself, with a little help from your friends. That's the essence of democracy.
I'm probably not the first one to point this out. There's room in the solar system for several thousand years of unchecked human growth. Let's fix up the house first before visiting the neighbors.
I use compact fluorescent bulbs everywhere, so I'm familiar with this problem. The low-watt bulbs are dim when they are first turned on, but they get brighter the longer they are on. I have one in a lamp next to my computer desk and it behaves just as I've said. It's incredibly dim when it first comes on, but after about fifteen or twenty minutes it becomes much brighter. I don't notice this so much with the bigger, higher watt flourescents.
After years of fighting with students, I gave up on the term paper. Since I was teaching history and geography, not English 101, it wasn't my job to instruct them in the niceties of doing research papers. I issued threats, I gave flunking grades, I made people rewrite their papers; none of it worked. Every semester I found students in my classes copying stuff directly off Wikipedia, Britannica Online, and just about everywhere else. Even when they didn't plagiarize, they cited online sources to excess, to extreme lengths. I wanted them to dig a little, find out the vagaries of history, get below the surface, get beyond reference works and textbooks. It wasn't going to happen.
I realized the freshman term paper was dead. It had no place outside of English 101. No other 100 level class should have them. But what should I do? Writing is an essential component to a college education. It has to be in as many classes as it can. However, writing assignments do no good if the words either aren't written by the students in the first place, or they depend too much on reference works. You don't take swimming lessons to walk around in the toddler's wading pool. The term paper was already in the trash. The multiple-choice test went with it. All my tests would now contain only short-answer (under fifty words) or essay questions. For the replacement of the term paper, I took a page from my old statistics professor. Back in the day, we could fill a note card with any equations or formulas we wanted and bring it to a test. I put this in action. There was an extra essay test at the end of the semester, with one question, which I gave to the students a month beforehand. They could fill up two sheets of paper with notes and citations - whatever they wanted. They had to cite at least two primary sources and five secondary sources, no encyclopedia citations. And especially no citations from the textbook. I called it an essay test. I was really making them write a term paper in front of me.
Most of the students liked the idea. I was happy with the results, though it was much more work for me (no graduate assistants for lowly instructors - "Grad students, I don't need no stinking grad students!"). I wouldn't recommend the technique for more advanced courses. Being able to make a coherent argument supported by evidence is an essential skill, so term papers have their place in a college education. Still, they don't have to be everywhere. Maybe we could do without them in the first year of college.
You'll need it or a desktop for many things, but not for taking notes. A paper notebook and a pen or pencil are all you'll need for taking notes. Why? Note-taking isn't outlining, which is what most people think. Note-taking is a mnemonic system. It is not transcription. Someone good at note-taking will make small sketches, use arrows, circle items, use abbreviations, and skip items of little relevance. Properly used, note-taking can act like a filter, preserving the things you think you'll need to remember from the lecture, while skipping those irrelevancies every lecture has. There is one final, absolute advantage to note-taking over laptop transcription (or taping the lecture, another rookie mistake): your focus will be on what's said in class, not on fiddling with your laptop.
That would be nice, except they've been talking about electronic paper and other similar schemes for at least ten years and nothing's come of it. I can buy used paperbacks online for a fraction of their original cost. You wanna bet on how illegal they'll make selling old ebooks? Hell, it's probably already illegal.
A US F-117 was downed by the Serbs right around the time of the attack on the Chinese embassy. Since the Serbs were the least likely to down a stealth aircraft, there was speculation in some quarters as to who helped them do it. Then the Chinese embassy was hit. Was that a little payback for the loss of our Nighthawk? "You help someone shoot down one of our planes? That's all right. We'll just blow the frak out of one of your embassies. Fair trade, huh?" It could all be an internet myth, but you have to wonder....
Has anyone considered that there were millions of R2 units and protocol droids in the galaxy, and he had last seen R2D2 and C3P0 almost twenty years before, in another part of the galaxy? To his mind, not knowing the Tantive IV had been in orbit over Tatooine, they could have been any two droids. I specialize in Monday-morning quarterbacking, armchair generaling, and 20/20 hindsight operations.