How are people able to concentrate on whatever they're doing at their laptop with all those people giving them the evil eye? My mind is boggled that people can be so self centered. But then, I guess that's why Washington D.C. has never appealed to me.
He has a point in that paying $50,000 yearly tuition to attend large lectures where the professor just reads his notes isn't a good deal for students. This is why one of the key measures of educational quality is the degree to which the classroom experience moves *away* from this model. If you're paying that much for tuition, you expect to have small classes and a lot of interaction among professors, TAs, and students.
So the fact that you can provide this inferior educational experience cheaply online isn't an argument for more online learning, so much as it is an illustration of how many universities need to improve teaching and stop giving students the shaft when it comes to their needs vs. the professors' research.
In Minnesota we've been hearing a lot of this from Gov. Pawlenty, and we'll probably hear more of it when he runs for president. The only thing I have to say to that is that I *guarantee* you, the Gates and Pawlenty children will not be getting their degrees online. Online learning is for other peoples' children, so they can fill their roles in the second tier society, beneath the places reserved for the children of the ruling class.
Lodi is a logical place for the train to go through on its way from the big cities of Northern California to the big cities of Southern California. I'm not aware of any commitment to extending the line to Barstow, although doing so might make sense as part of a LA to Las Vegas line. The cost isn't that astonishing for a state richer than many European countries that already have good passenger rail networks. What's astonishing is that it wasn't started 30 years ago.
...to run a domain name provider? Let's face it, they're not exactly curing cancer. People who spend half their lives playing WoW are probably well suited to sitting at computers for hour after hour, pushing buttons that are wired to produce reward or punishment at just the right intervals to keep people pushing buttons. Not that different from a lot of dead-end IT jobs, actually. But I wouldn't equate that with WoW being excellent training for anything else.
A robot does fine at packing uniform objects into uniform packages, but good luck finding one that can pack your shipment from Amazon.com, or do basic construction work, or pull the ingredients for 50,000 gallons of Coca Cola off of shelves in a warehouse and mix them all together for you. There is still a lot of dull, brain-killing, menial work for humans to do. If you work in an office and have never set foot in any kind of industrial operation, you'll probably be surprised at how much stuff still needs to be done by humans.
With all due respect, and I really don't mean this as a troll, but you aren't just paying $100 a month -- you simply cannot afford any medical system for that sum (even if you weren't screwed like the States into paying stupid large administrative costs) . In reality, a large fraction of the money for the health care system comes from taxes which you are ultimately going to pay.
Yes. And in the US, you are *also* paying for the health care system in taxes above the premium you or your employer pay. Per capita government expenditures on health care are higher in the US than in any other country. With a single-payer system we could reduce that inefficiency and save a great deal of money.
And also, with a government managed system it is easier to spread the burden around, so that people making $60,000 a year or less get health care subsidized by people who make more than that. An *average* expenditure of $650 per family per month doesn't mean that's what everybody pays. Rich families pay more, poor families pay less. This is what conservatives really hate. Well, to hell with them.
Er... no. The profits will be taxed as capital gains. The top capital gains rate is 15 percent I believe, and there's no social security or medicare tax on capital gains. So they'll pay tax at a considerably lower rate than someone who works at McDonald's.
if your grades are real good, then transfer to a state school. my brother got his bachelors and his masters, in mathematics, from university of texas at san antonio. he found grants and loans and worked. he got out only owing 20k
20k is actually quite a lot of debt. I know a lot of people graduate with more debt these days, but that's precisely the problem. 20k in debt and he went to community colleges and a second-tier state school?! Jesus H. Christ! How would it make you feel to know I went to a private university that is consistently ranked in the top 10 by US News and World Report and graduated in 1995 with $8,000 in debt? And my family was middle-income enough that I was eligible for work-study the entire time.
If he didn't find a job commnsurate with his education he'd have a tough time keeping up with those loan payments. Hopefully he had some solid internships in college to put that mathematical knowledge to use. At least he majored in math; if it was international relations, god help him.
Tough shit, yourself. Any system built on 18-year-olds taking out loans based on what they guess their income will be 4+ years into the future is an inherently risky system. The lenders walk into that risk with their eyes wide open--this is, after all, their area of expertise. The 18-year-olds don't even have the benefit of a college education. The lenders should bear their fair share of responsibility for that risk, and not put all of it on the borrower. It's completely unfair that student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, for instance. If you take out a loan to start a business, and the business fails, you file for bankruptcy, your credit is damaged, but you get a chance at a fresh start. There is no reason it should be different for an education loan.
Don't kid yourself -- they're not looking to build a bullet train, they're looking for another handout.
"Handout"? Last I checked, Californians pay federal taxes too. It's really not so much to ask that some of those federal dollars be spent in California on a project that would benefit millions of people. You can only build so many interstate highways connecting the dirt farms of North Dakota.
Jesus Christ, *how old are you* person who wrote these questions? I'm 37, and state abbreviations for postage haven't had punctuation in them for most of my lifetime either. I can remember because we had to be able to address an envelope as part of a 5th-grade competency test. And card catalogs were about 75 percent computerized at my high school by the time I graduated.
The right to privacy is pretty much limited to things you do inside your own home. Once you put something in a public space, it's not longer private. There has never been any right to publish anonymously, or be quoted anonymously. Think of all those investigative reporters who spent years trying to uncover Deep Throat. (Yes this is a US example, but law in the US and the UK are based on the same common law principles.)
Just build the damn thing. Throw in one from SF to LA, DC to New York, and Chicago to the dozen or so cities that are within 600 miles. By the time they're finished, our children will finally be able to utilize the kind of transportation infrastructure Japan and France have had since the 1980s.
I still miss Kozmo.com. With a few clicks you could have a sandwich, a pint of Ben & Jerry's, a Razor scooter, and some porn delivered to you in 30 minutes. Everything you need for the perfect evening! And no delivery charge.
I kind of knew at the time that they'd never turn a profit, but it was nice while it lasted.
Oil companies do not calude with each other, they compete.
I guess you've never heard of OPEC? Yes the members of OPEC have competing interests and don't always get along, but they are a cartel and they most definitely collude.
people already subsidize shoplifters through higher prices at the store
Not really. That's just what Best Buy tells you so you'll feel a little better about being cavity-searched at the exit. Really, the cost of shoplifting comes mostly out of their profits. Why would they even bother with the cavity search if they could pass the entire cost on to their customers?
I've noticed that seagulls landing on a pier seem to want to land at the same place the bird in front of them landed. The bird in front obliges them by jumping off, into the water. Then the process repeats. It doesn't seem to make sense. There is plenty of space all along the pier; they could simply land in one of the many spaces where no other birds are. It probably keeps them organized, though, since they never have to fly off in complex patterns to find a parking spot, so to speak.
The Facebook angle is beside the point. A university president summarily dismissing a student by slipping a note under his door is extremely bizarre. Ordinarily you'd expect lower-level administrators to be involved, for there to be meetings and hearings and counseling offered. The president wouldn't be involved at all, except to sign off on the decision (if that.) It sounds like the president is making a very rinky-dink attempt to intimidate the student while bypassing the official channels.
Sometimes you see this sort of petty thuggery by corrupt small-town public officials (or College Republicans), but they usually don't ascend much higher than that. Their careers are self-limiting because once they rise to the level where their behavior is subjected to the slightest scrutiny, they scurry like cockroaches from the light.
San Francisco was nearly completely leveled a couple of times in the 20th century alone by earthquakes.
Wha? The '89 Loma Prieta earthquake caused some serious damage but "nearly completely leveled" is a bit of a stretch. And the 1906 disaster was caused by lack of modern building codes and fire protection as much as anything else. Other cities of that era suffered similar disasters without an earthquake as the root cause (Chicago, for instance.)
There is no reason a data center built from the ground up to survive an earthquake would be less safe on the ground in SF than it would be on a ship in the Bay. You'd be more worried about damage to external things the center relies upon, such as the power grid.
The obvious reason to build on a ship is that the cost of the real estate needed to build a data center the size of a cargo ship in downtown SF would be astronomical.
Here's a short primer. You take some data samples over a period of time (say, for example, percent of GDP spent on the military). You plot those points on a graph and connect them with lines. Really advanced people then apply some sort of smoothing function called a moving average to eliminate local peaks and valleys. Then you do this really tricky operation where you fit a function to the points. The slope of the function allows you to predict future data points even before they happen!
Then if I extrapolate the trend for the Pets.com stock I purchased in 1997, my shares are now worth... Holy shit! I'm rich!
Slashdot Mirror
How are people able to concentrate on whatever they're doing at their laptop with all those people giving them the evil eye? My mind is boggled that people can be so self centered. But then, I guess that's why Washington D.C. has never appealed to me.
He has a point in that paying $50,000 yearly tuition to attend large lectures where the professor just reads his notes isn't a good deal for students. This is why one of the key measures of educational quality is the degree to which the classroom experience moves *away* from this model. If you're paying that much for tuition, you expect to have small classes and a lot of interaction among professors, TAs, and students.
So the fact that you can provide this inferior educational experience cheaply online isn't an argument for more online learning, so much as it is an illustration of how many universities need to improve teaching and stop giving students the shaft when it comes to their needs vs. the professors' research.
In Minnesota we've been hearing a lot of this from Gov. Pawlenty, and we'll probably hear more of it when he runs for president. The only thing I have to say to that is that I *guarantee* you, the Gates and Pawlenty children will not be getting their degrees online. Online learning is for other peoples' children, so they can fill their roles in the second tier society, beneath the places reserved for the children of the ruling class.
Lodi is a logical place for the train to go through on its way from the big cities of Northern California to the big cities of Southern California. I'm not aware of any commitment to extending the line to Barstow, although doing so might make sense as part of a LA to Las Vegas line. The cost isn't that astonishing for a state richer than many European countries that already have good passenger rail networks. What's astonishing is that it wasn't started 30 years ago.
...to run a domain name provider? Let's face it, they're not exactly curing cancer. People who spend half their lives playing WoW are probably well suited to sitting at computers for hour after hour, pushing buttons that are wired to produce reward or punishment at just the right intervals to keep people pushing buttons. Not that different from a lot of dead-end IT jobs, actually. But I wouldn't equate that with WoW being excellent training for anything else.
A robot does fine at packing uniform objects into uniform packages, but good luck finding one that can pack your shipment from Amazon.com, or do basic construction work, or pull the ingredients for 50,000 gallons of Coca Cola off of shelves in a warehouse and mix them all together for you. There is still a lot of dull, brain-killing, menial work for humans to do. If you work in an office and have never set foot in any kind of industrial operation, you'll probably be surprised at how much stuff still needs to be done by humans.
With all due respect, and I really don't mean this as a troll, but you aren't just paying $100 a month -- you simply cannot afford any medical system for that sum (even if you weren't screwed like the States into paying stupid large administrative costs) . In reality, a large fraction of the money for the health care system comes from taxes which you are ultimately going to pay.
Yes. And in the US, you are *also* paying for the health care system in taxes above the premium you or your employer pay. Per capita government expenditures on health care are higher in the US than in any other country. With a single-payer system we could reduce that inefficiency and save a great deal of money.
And also, with a government managed system it is easier to spread the burden around, so that people making $60,000 a year or less get health care subsidized by people who make more than that. An *average* expenditure of $650 per family per month doesn't mean that's what everybody pays. Rich families pay more, poor families pay less. This is what conservatives really hate. Well, to hell with them.
Don't you wish they worked at McDonalds?
No. I just wish they paid more taxes.
Er... no. The profits will be taxed as capital gains. The top capital gains rate is 15 percent I believe, and there's no social security or medicare tax on capital gains. So they'll pay tax at a considerably lower rate than someone who works at McDonald's.
if your grades are real good, then transfer to a state school. my brother got his bachelors and his masters, in mathematics, from university of texas at san antonio. he found grants and loans and worked. he got out only owing 20k
20k is actually quite a lot of debt. I know a lot of people graduate with more debt these days, but that's precisely the problem. 20k in debt and he went to community colleges and a second-tier state school?! Jesus H. Christ! How would it make you feel to know I went to a private university that is consistently ranked in the top 10 by US News and World Report and graduated in 1995 with $8,000 in debt? And my family was middle-income enough that I was eligible for work-study the entire time.
If he didn't find a job commnsurate with his education he'd have a tough time keeping up with those loan payments. Hopefully he had some solid internships in college to put that mathematical knowledge to use. At least he majored in math; if it was international relations, god help him.
Tough shit, yourself. Any system built on 18-year-olds taking out loans based on what they guess their income will be 4+ years into the future is an inherently risky system. The lenders walk into that risk with their eyes wide open--this is, after all, their area of expertise. The 18-year-olds don't even have the benefit of a college education. The lenders should bear their fair share of responsibility for that risk, and not put all of it on the borrower. It's completely unfair that student loans can't be discharged in bankruptcy, for instance. If you take out a loan to start a business, and the business fails, you file for bankruptcy, your credit is damaged, but you get a chance at a fresh start. There is no reason it should be different for an education loan.
Don't kid yourself -- they're not looking to build a bullet train, they're looking for another handout.
"Handout"? Last I checked, Californians pay federal taxes too. It's really not so much to ask that some of those federal dollars be spent in California on a project that would benefit millions of people. You can only build so many interstate highways connecting the dirt farms of North Dakota.
Jesus Christ, *how old are you* person who wrote these questions? I'm 37, and state abbreviations for postage haven't had punctuation in them for most of my lifetime either. I can remember because we had to be able to address an envelope as part of a 5th-grade competency test. And card catalogs were about 75 percent computerized at my high school by the time I graduated.
The right to privacy is pretty much limited to things you do inside your own home. Once you put something in a public space, it's not longer private. There has never been any right to publish anonymously, or be quoted anonymously. Think of all those investigative reporters who spent years trying to uncover Deep Throat. (Yes this is a US example, but law in the US and the UK are based on the same common law principles.)
The human body is darn close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit. What could be more practical if you are measuring how comfortable a temperature is for humans?
Just build the damn thing. Throw in one from SF to LA, DC to New York, and Chicago to the dozen or so cities that are within 600 miles. By the time they're finished, our children will finally be able to utilize the kind of transportation infrastructure Japan and France have had since the 1980s.
I still miss Kozmo.com. With a few clicks you could have a sandwich, a pint of Ben & Jerry's, a Razor scooter, and some porn delivered to you in 30 minutes. Everything you need for the perfect evening! And no delivery charge.
I kind of knew at the time that they'd never turn a profit, but it was nice while it lasted.
Maybe they should have called it PlaysForNow?
What a stupid move. How much would it cost to keep the servers running vs. damaging their brand this way.
Oil companies do not calude with each other, they compete.
I guess you've never heard of OPEC? Yes the members of OPEC have competing interests and don't always get along, but they are a cartel and they most definitely collude.
people already subsidize shoplifters through higher prices at the store
Not really. That's just what Best Buy tells you so you'll feel a little better about being cavity-searched at the exit. Really, the cost of shoplifting comes mostly out of their profits. Why would they even bother with the cavity search if they could pass the entire cost on to their customers?
I've noticed that seagulls landing on a pier seem to want to land at the same place the bird in front of them landed. The bird in front obliges them by jumping off, into the water. Then the process repeats. It doesn't seem to make sense. There is plenty of space all along the pier; they could simply land in one of the many spaces where no other birds are. It probably keeps them organized, though, since they never have to fly off in complex patterns to find a parking spot, so to speak.
The Facebook angle is beside the point. A university president summarily dismissing a student by slipping a note under his door is extremely bizarre. Ordinarily you'd expect lower-level administrators to be involved, for there to be meetings and hearings and counseling offered. The president wouldn't be involved at all, except to sign off on the decision (if that.) It sounds like the president is making a very rinky-dink attempt to intimidate the student while bypassing the official channels.
Sometimes you see this sort of petty thuggery by corrupt small-town public officials (or College Republicans), but they usually don't ascend much higher than that. Their careers are self-limiting because once they rise to the level where their behavior is subjected to the slightest scrutiny, they scurry like cockroaches from the light.
I'm going to propose we store our offsite backups in Tahiti. It's the best place, obviously. An island in the Pacific. Who's going to nuke Tahiti?
San Francisco was nearly completely leveled a couple of times in the 20th century alone by earthquakes.
Wha? The '89 Loma Prieta earthquake caused some serious damage but "nearly completely leveled" is a bit of a stretch. And the 1906 disaster was caused by lack of modern building codes and fire protection as much as anything else. Other cities of that era suffered similar disasters without an earthquake as the root cause (Chicago, for instance.)
There is no reason a data center built from the ground up to survive an earthquake would be less safe on the ground in SF than it would be on a ship in the Bay. You'd be more worried about damage to external things the center relies upon, such as the power grid.
The obvious reason to build on a ship is that the cost of the real estate needed to build a data center the size of a cargo ship in downtown SF would be astronomical.
Here's a short primer. You take some data samples over a period of time (say, for example, percent of GDP spent on the military). You plot those points on a graph and connect them with lines. Really advanced people then apply some sort of smoothing function called a moving average to eliminate local peaks and valleys. Then you do this really tricky operation where you fit a function to the points. The slope of the function allows you to predict future data points even before they happen!
Then if I extrapolate the trend for the Pets.com stock I purchased in 1997, my shares are now worth... Holy shit! I'm rich!