would this same judge let a case against a board game manufacturer go forward? I'm reading Work Freak right now about competitive Scrabble players, and it's a truly sad book in a lot of ways. The folks who make up the upper echelons of competitive Scrabble are basically completely dysfunctional and completely addicted in every way- most have quit their jobs in order to compete and many are about one step from homelessness, assuming they aren't still living with their parents in their 40s.
Can we hit up other vices as well? Booze and tobacco are obvious, but I can find pathologically addicted people for virtually any hobby.
How about just treating serious medical problems as serious medical problems and not trying to sweep them under the rug?
I have a severely ADHD child- he's not normal, he needs serious drugs to function in school, and he knows it. (He's extremely bright and is fully aware of what he's capable of when he's on them- you ever have to deal with child sobbing because he can't focus on simple tasks?) ADHD is one of the most misunderstood conditions out there- it is real, it can be severe, and we need to avoid knee-jerk "It's all made up" reactions
Yep, I remember quite well the actual dates- we got our first copies of Mosaic in December of 93 since it was almost exactly a year before I graduated. (And I wasn't impressed in the least- clunky, ugly, slow and with a fraction of the info I could get out of USENET and Archie.) One of the other grad students pointed us towards what would become Yahoo shortly after I got back from that break. If Webcrawler existed back then nobody I knew had ever heard of it.
It was even more than that. Search engines didn't suck back in the day. Search engines *didn't exist* when Yahoo started.
I was a couple of buildings over from Filo and Yang in (chemistry) grad school back when this weird little program called Mosaic appeared. But it was a toy- you couldn't find information on it. You ended up posting lists of your bookmarks so that other people could find the neat stuff you did. Then we heard about these two guys over in Engineering that were collecting links and indexing them (by hand). It was great- finally a place where you could find literally thousands of organized web links as opposed to our crappy lists of a few dozen.
Yahoo's kind of seen as a pathetic loser these days by the "digital elite" but they had a massive effect on the early web
Sorry, we won't. Amazon is killing B&N the same way it will kill M&P stores- selection and price. You can't compete on price with them for new books, and with affiliates Amazon can own the used book market too.
They're amazingly efficient for used stuff- for his birthday my son wanted an old LIFE book, now out of print. I found a used copy on Amazon, in perfect condition, in about 5 minutes. $8 + shipping. There's no way I could do that with used book stores in the area- I can't even enter half of them due to dust and mold issues.
and my answer is hell no. Use what improves your teaching, not what you think you "have" to use. When I teach, I use a blackboard for most everything- it's simple, it always works and it doesn't get in my way. I'll use a computer in class when it's actually useful, for things like
3-d models of molecules
Graphical simulations
Photos and movies
But simply moving your stack of notes to Powerpoint is beyond worthless- it wastes your time and adds nothing at all to the content of the course. Outside the classroom stuff like blogs and videoconferencing can be amazingly useful if you want to correspond with people around the world, but there's really not many good reasons to use stuff like discussion forums when you have a class of 10 people- why not just discuss face to face? We're spending a ton of time moving to a new course management system this year, but it's a plumbing application now- it makes doing routine chores easier and helps with distributing reserves and such, but there are very few serious pedagogy changes when using them. (We have a few exceptions, but 75% of the use is reserves, handouts and collecting papers)
Look at things that can improve the way you teach, to do something you *can't* do without tech. Don't just assume it's great because it looks shiny
I've been to a couple of talks by the guys running OCW. Their biggest problem? Copyright, especially for image-based courses. One architecture course had something like 750 images, the vast majority copyrighted. They had to clear every single image one at a time, since almost all of them were by different people. Converting the rest of the material was quite simple in comparison
PID was a weird FPS/RPG hybrid. Wolfenstein-3D like in that everything was on a flat plane, but you could pause time to read notes, do inventory control, operate magic devices, etc. It had a lot more story and strategy than the iD games- the game took place in an ancient pyramid infected with aliens which at least three separate groups had tried to infiltrate. (Nazis, Cubans, Americans) Crystals allowed you to read the thoughts of the dead people you found, and you could figure out what happened from that.
Ammo control was an absolute bitch- the first part of the game was amazingly stingy with ammo. You literally had to account for every round until you got the magic duplicator- after that it became a lot easier.
That's the whole point- this is *far* beyond lemonparty, or goatse, or other classic shock images. I've seen all of those- yeah, they're disgusting, but they don't bother me. The folks in them are there voluntarily, and if they are a bit messed up in the head so be it.
However, I seriously doubt you spend your time browsing photos of what this story is talking about. You really have browsed tons of photos of grown men raping 6-year-olds? Photos of mutilated bodies of kids? Videos of people being tortured, for real, or killed in brutally horrifying ways?
"Peer review" is independent reproduction of results, and validating assumptions made. This INCLUDES independent gathering of original source data.
This sentence alone indicates that you have no comprehension of how science is done at all. It is most certainly *not* independent reproduction of results- that's utterly absurd. When given something to review, you don't drop everything, set up the experiment and rerun it- nobody has the time, the funds, the lab space or anything else.
Peer review is a sanity check. The reviewer should be very familiar with the field the paper is in. What you do is look the paper over- are there theoretical mistakes? Has the experimenter accounted for known sources of error with the methods and equipment used? Does it agree with the sources that they are citing? Is the data strong enough to support the conclusions they are trying to draw? Is it clearly written and easily readable, at least for the intended audience? (Sadly, less common than you might expect) If so, go ahead and publish, or send back with suggestions for revisions.
It is not, and has never been, an attempt to reproduce the experiment done. Where you got this idea I have no idea.
Sadly, even that isn't a help these days. I built my current home machine from scratch, paying more for higher quality components. The ASUS motherboard blew in less than 2 years- at least the nice little LED display gave a code that a bit of Google showed to be "dead, no hope of recovery" so I didn't have to waste time troubleshooting. I paid a lot more for that since it was all solid state capacitor- didn't help.
The Gigabyte video card went nine months later- that one was a pain since it gradually got more and more unstable and I couldn't figure out the issue.
I was in the CA National Guard during the Rodney King riots and was stationed in Rampart district. I had a number of local citizens (non-gang-bangers) come up and thank me, not for protecting them from the rioters but from the police reprisals. At the time I wondered about it, having seen the corruption investigations later I began to understand.
There were a huge number of scumbags in Rampart- a lot were wearing gang colors, others police uniforms.
I'm watching the live feed, and at 2:10 PM EDT, they are, quite literally, beating on the casing with a big crescent wrench. The ROV has the wrench tied to it's arm with twine and it's hitting the casing.
I honestly wondered what they were doing with a big ass wrench down there. Now I know.
Depending on how you measure value, this is not correct. The original purpose of the market is to give companies a way to raise large sums of capital in order to grow their business- not to make the founders rich, not to give the traders a way to rent seek their way to riches, but to distribute the risk of large scale capital investment. There is certainly value in that- banks use a similar model.
However, these sorts of guys do nothing but game the system and generate no value, so fark 'em.
DSL works the same way. I wanted just a phone line from Sprint/Embarq/CenturyLink/WhateverTheHellTheyAreNow and was told that I'd need to pay a "line access charge" for a bare DSL line. The line access charge was $5/month less than having full blown home phone.
As you say, most scientists don't make a significant discovery in their lifetime. Still, it's quite possible for an amateur to discover something interesting just by looking around.
Case in point was a friend of mine in college- real geology buff, the sort of guy who was always digging around for rocks. Wandering through the college's woods one day he came across something very odd one day, marked the location and dug it up. It turned out to be a chunk of fossil walrus bone, from a species that wasn't thought to have lived anywhere nearby.
Was this "significant"? In the grand scheme of things, probably not- it merely indicated that this species of walrus was more widespread than thought. But the slow accumulation of this sort of knowledge is the real backbone of science.
Saw it coming? He's doing everything he can to make it happen.
Larry's been sending a bunch of emails to at least one mailing list I subscribe to (EDTECH) breathlessly discussing the legion of kiddie porn images on Wikipedia and how teachers need to ban all access to Wikipedia.
The actual teachers, on the other hand, are mostly telling him to go away- they're already used to handling porn and other "forbidden" stuff in the classroom and it's simply not a big deal.
I don't know if he's really, genuinely worried or if this is just a lever to hurt Wales, but frankly it's kind of annoying. (I'm not a big fan of Wales either, but Larry's so obviously grinding his axe here he's not converting me at least)
No, HTML 5 just isn't there yet- it's a evolving spec. Meanwhile, we have folks like Kaltura implementing full blown video production and distribution stuff in the cloud. Of course it's in Flash. Maybe, just maybe in a few years someone will manage to duplicate that in HTML5
it gets us out of this balkanized world of plugin nonsense and overlapping incompatible other track code bases And puts us into a Balkanized world of different levels of HTML 5 support. Whoopie- enjoy coding neat stuff when IE9 won't support Canvas.
t gets us away from the nightmare of licensing Forgive me while I laugh. H.264 and Firefox?
and security issues and performance hiccups and browsers crashing and unresponsive threads running at 100% cpu Ok, never mind, you're delusional. You really, honestly think you'll have no security issues in HTML 5? That HTML5 will magically be able to animate faster than Flash with low power consumption? That it will never crash a browser? Pro tip: we don't even know what HTML 5 is yet The spec's not even finished, and won't be until 2012. Different browsers have different ideas of what HTML 5 is right now, and will for quite some time. Since nobody's written an actual complex product in HTML5, we don't know how it will perform, or how hard it will be, or what sort of security holes it will open.
It provides some interesting things. Instead of the metadata hidden in a big binary blob it moves things to be loaded by the standard tools. This makes no sense- in what way is XML not standard? Flash has been storing metadata in XML files for ages.
Instead of another exe/dll/.o to load things you use your existing browser. Assuming your browser understands all of HTML 5. (Hint- look up Canvas and Microsoft) And that it has the proper codecs to understand video. I use Firefox- do I need to give up on Youtube?
It lets search engines search thru the metadata and help categorize your website (if you like that sort of thing). And this is different from Flash how?
It allows for changing the behavior by end users instead of being controlled by the producer (which may or may not be a good thing depending on your world view). This comment is nonsensical. Changing what behavior? If you mean that you can see all the HTML5 source, that might be useful for some but there are an awful lot of folks out there doing commercial work that won't be happy about that.
I am excited about the web again (it has been awhile). I cant wait to see what new things people will cook up. This tech demo is just the sort of thing that makes the web cool. The web's always been cool. Check out some Flash sites- they've been doing the same stuff you're so excited about for the past five years. (Hint- Flash is used for more than video, games and ads) When something like Kaltura ports itself to HTML 5 then I'll start to be impressed
Yes, this is a very nice start and working in academic tech I'm really interested in seeing this sort of stuff moving forwards.
But can we cool the HTML 5 hype engine, seriously? This is a very minimal demo, just like every other "Look at the amazing power of HTML 5!" site I see. There are Flash-based music sites out there with dynamic scrolling, multi-track MIDI playback and lots of other features, and nobody calls them incredible. I look at the moving dot demo and then go back to Prezi, or listen to all the stuff about video in HTML 5 and then go work in Kaltura for a while
HTML 5 has a lot of potential. But it's hardly some amazing thing that brings new capabilities to the web. All of this is possible now. You may not like how it's done, but all HTML 5 is going to do is change the underlying tech, not give us lightning.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we hit up other vices as well? Booze and tobacco are obvious, but I can find pathologically addicted people for virtually any hobby.
I have a severely ADHD child- he's not normal, he needs serious drugs to function in school, and he knows it. (He's extremely bright and is fully aware of what he's capable of when he's on them- you ever have to deal with child sobbing because he can't focus on simple tasks?) ADHD is one of the most misunderstood conditions out there- it is real, it can be severe, and we need to avoid knee-jerk "It's all made up" reactions
Yep, I remember quite well the actual dates- we got our first copies of Mosaic in December of 93 since it was almost exactly a year before I graduated. (And I wasn't impressed in the least- clunky, ugly, slow and with a fraction of the info I could get out of USENET and Archie.) One of the other grad students pointed us towards what would become Yahoo shortly after I got back from that break. If Webcrawler existed back then nobody I knew had ever heard of it.
This is why I'm still working for the man and Filo and Yang can take Scrooge McDuck baths in hundred dollar bills.
I was a couple of buildings over from Filo and Yang in (chemistry) grad school back when this weird little program called Mosaic appeared. But it was a toy- you couldn't find information on it. You ended up posting lists of your bookmarks so that other people could find the neat stuff you did. Then we heard about these two guys over in Engineering that were collecting links and indexing them (by hand). It was great- finally a place where you could find literally thousands of organized web links as opposed to our crappy lists of a few dozen.
Yahoo's kind of seen as a pathetic loser these days by the "digital elite" but they had a massive effect on the early web
They're amazingly efficient for used stuff- for his birthday my son wanted an old LIFE book, now out of print. I found a used copy on Amazon, in perfect condition, in about 5 minutes. $8 + shipping. There's no way I could do that with used book stores in the area- I can't even enter half of them due to dust and mold issues.
But simply moving your stack of notes to Powerpoint is beyond worthless- it wastes your time and adds nothing at all to the content of the course. Outside the classroom stuff like blogs and videoconferencing can be amazingly useful if you want to correspond with people around the world, but there's really not many good reasons to use stuff like discussion forums when you have a class of 10 people- why not just discuss face to face? We're spending a ton of time moving to a new course management system this year, but it's a plumbing application now- it makes doing routine chores easier and helps with distributing reserves and such, but there are very few serious pedagogy changes when using them. (We have a few exceptions, but 75% of the use is reserves, handouts and collecting papers)
Look at things that can improve the way you teach, to do something you *can't* do without tech. Don't just assume it's great because it looks shiny
I've been to a couple of talks by the guys running OCW. Their biggest problem? Copyright, especially for image-based courses. One architecture course had something like 750 images, the vast majority copyrighted. They had to clear every single image one at a time, since almost all of them were by different people. Converting the rest of the material was quite simple in comparison
If I descended from my great grandmother, why do I still have cousins?
Ammo control was an absolute bitch- the first part of the game was amazingly stingy with ammo. You literally had to account for every round until you got the magic duplicator- after that it became a lot easier.
However, I seriously doubt you spend your time browsing photos of what this story is talking about. You really have browsed tons of photos of grown men raping 6-year-olds? Photos of mutilated bodies of kids? Videos of people being tortured, for real, or killed in brutally horrifying ways?
Thanks, but no. Not for any amount of money.
This sentence alone indicates that you have no comprehension of how science is done at all. It is most certainly *not* independent reproduction of results- that's utterly absurd. When given something to review, you don't drop everything, set up the experiment and rerun it- nobody has the time, the funds, the lab space or anything else.
Peer review is a sanity check. The reviewer should be very familiar with the field the paper is in. What you do is look the paper over- are there theoretical mistakes? Has the experimenter accounted for known sources of error with the methods and equipment used? Does it agree with the sources that they are citing? Is the data strong enough to support the conclusions they are trying to draw? Is it clearly written and easily readable, at least for the intended audience? (Sadly, less common than you might expect) If so, go ahead and publish, or send back with suggestions for revisions.
It is not, and has never been, an attempt to reproduce the experiment done. Where you got this idea I have no idea.
The Gigabyte video card went nine months later- that one was a pain since it gradually got more and more unstable and I couldn't figure out the issue.
Everything is crap today
if it told you when to work. I rarely have problems taking a break.
There were a huge number of scumbags in Rampart- a lot were wearing gang colors, others police uniforms.
I honestly wondered what they were doing with a big ass wrench down there. Now I know.
Depending on how you measure value, this is not correct. The original purpose of the market is to give companies a way to raise large sums of capital in order to grow their business- not to make the founders rich, not to give the traders a way to rent seek their way to riches, but to distribute the risk of large scale capital investment. There is certainly value in that- banks use a similar model.
However, these sorts of guys do nothing but game the system and generate no value, so fark 'em.
Slap an automated transaction tax on the entire system- this would fix the problem instantly.
DSL works the same way. I wanted just a phone line from Sprint/Embarq/CenturyLink/WhateverTheHellTheyAreNow and was told that I'd need to pay a "line access charge" for a bare DSL line. The line access charge was $5/month less than having full blown home phone.
Case in point was a friend of mine in college- real geology buff, the sort of guy who was always digging around for rocks. Wandering through the college's woods one day he came across something very odd one day, marked the location and dug it up. It turned out to be a chunk of fossil walrus bone, from a species that wasn't thought to have lived anywhere nearby.
Was this "significant"? In the grand scheme of things, probably not- it merely indicated that this species of walrus was more widespread than thought. But the slow accumulation of this sort of knowledge is the real backbone of science.
And you could have a front row seat, if you weren't getting crushed back into an infinitesimal ball of energy
Larry's been sending a bunch of emails to at least one mailing list I subscribe to (EDTECH) breathlessly discussing the legion of kiddie porn images on Wikipedia and how teachers need to ban all access to Wikipedia.
The actual teachers, on the other hand, are mostly telling him to go away- they're already used to handling porn and other "forbidden" stuff in the classroom and it's simply not a big deal.
I don't know if he's really, genuinely worried or if this is just a lever to hurt Wales, but frankly it's kind of annoying. (I'm not a big fan of Wales either, but Larry's so obviously grinding his axe here he's not converting me at least)
The rest of us will wonder what took you so long
t gets us away from the nightmare of licensing Forgive me while I laugh. H.264 and Firefox?
and security issues and performance hiccups and browsers crashing and unresponsive threads running at 100% cpu Ok, never mind, you're delusional. You really, honestly think you'll have no security issues in HTML 5? That HTML5 will magically be able to animate faster than Flash with low power consumption? That it will never crash a browser? Pro tip: we don't even know what HTML 5 is yet The spec's not even finished, and won't be until 2012. Different browsers have different ideas of what HTML 5 is right now, and will for quite some time. Since nobody's written an actual complex product in HTML5, we don't know how it will perform, or how hard it will be, or what sort of security holes it will open.
Instead of another exe/dll/.o to load things you use your existing browser. Assuming your browser understands all of HTML 5. (Hint- look up Canvas and Microsoft) And that it has the proper codecs to understand video. I use Firefox- do I need to give up on Youtube?
It lets search engines search thru the metadata and help categorize your website (if you like that sort of thing). And this is different from Flash how?
It allows for changing the behavior by end users instead of being controlled by the producer (which may or may not be a good thing depending on your world view). This comment is nonsensical. Changing what behavior? If you mean that you can see all the HTML5 source, that might be useful for some but there are an awful lot of folks out there doing commercial work that won't be happy about that.
I am excited about the web again (it has been awhile). I cant wait to see what new things people will cook up. This tech demo is just the sort of thing that makes the web cool. The web's always been cool. Check out some Flash sites- they've been doing the same stuff you're so excited about for the past five years. (Hint- Flash is used for more than video, games and ads) When something like Kaltura ports itself to HTML 5 then I'll start to be impressed
But can we cool the HTML 5 hype engine, seriously? This is a very minimal demo, just like every other "Look at the amazing power of HTML 5!" site I see. There are Flash-based music sites out there with dynamic scrolling, multi-track MIDI playback and lots of other features, and nobody calls them incredible. I look at the moving dot demo and then go back to Prezi, or listen to all the stuff about video in HTML 5 and then go work in Kaltura for a while
HTML 5 has a lot of potential. But it's hardly some amazing thing that brings new capabilities to the web. All of this is possible now. You may not like how it's done, but all HTML 5 is going to do is change the underlying tech, not give us lightning.