Pencil. Paper. Calculator. The keyboard gets in the way of doing anything useful, especially if you're trying to do things involving symbols (like math).
This is why a tablet would be better in most STEM classes than a low cost PC. I tried using my laptop in a CS course for taking notes. But because it wasn't a simple coding class, but more of a mathematical/theoretical course, there was no way I could. Even now, it's hella hard to try typing up papers with any sort of mathematical representations(unless you type everything in LaTeX or try using a GUI equation editor).
Have you ever actually tried to take mathematical notes on an iPad? I have
It sucks. Utterly sucks. The touchscreen is nowhere near responsive and accurate enough even with a stylus.
The best thing I've ever found for mathematical/science notes is a Livescribe pen. Paper, pen, nothing else to learn- except that everything is stored and synced to audio.
doesn't have protection, it's that mayors, assistant Governors, and the like do. Seriously, it's not necessary for a mayor to bring a multi-person security detail with them everywhere, nor is it necessary for them to get high speed police escorts where ever they need to drive. We don't live in Afghanistan. It's simply not that dangerous- there are plenty of mayors, governors and the like who *don't* have protection layered around them and there hasn't been a wave of assassination attempts on them.
Perhaps not catastrophic in the sense of "Giant asteroid about to wipe out humanity" but it's still pretty bad.
You assume there is another phone out there that doesn't infringe- there simply isn't. All phones at this point infringe someone else's IP: it's Moto now, it will be Samsung, HTC and the rest later. Of course, Apple will then be countersued by Moto and Nokia and a dozen others.
Thus, good design gets litigated out of existence- you can't use anything, no matter how good if the other guy might hold some patent somewhere that will get you sued. Innovation slows to a crawl
Phones are made by people- a lot of people, most in useful trades like engineers. If it's standard to do the design work to make a new phone and then get it blocked, companies don't really need those engineers- better hire more lawyers instead.
Above point leads to bizarre activities like patent trolling, which benefits no one but a few sociopaths. After all, you don't need to actually make anything at all, you just need to sue people.
Meanwhile, we have two positions available here in small town PA and can't find anyone at all. (Peoplesoft expert and general programmer analyst ) Academia, so the pay isn't quite what you might expect in industry, but it's still good, the working conditions are excellent and we offer tuition benefits. The only decent candidate for the Peoplesoft job was going to interview today but called late last night to say she took a different position.
Leave the valley and be willing to look at random areas- chances are the lower pay you'll get will be more than cancelled by the lowered living costs
Given how many colleges are constantly strapped for cash and we don't exactly have people getting super wealthy being educators, I doubt this is a case of 'charge as much as you can'. The cost of running schools has increased significantly, all those extra students, all that extra capacity.. it isn't like a manufacturing plant where you just add another building or assembly line.
It is not a 'sacred ox', but it is part of the same mythology that has been bashing and devaluing education for decades in this country.. pulling otherwise reasonable people in to a larger culture war that wants to see 'liberal hotbeds' weakened, since education has been very bad for certain groups.
There are a couple of factors driving college costs, but the costs have increased significantly. Students today demand a lot more amenities than they used to- AC in dorms is now effectively required, back in my day only a few upperclass students had it. Mental and physical health care is far more in demand- we have students actually asking for inpatient care. We have a brand new $33M fitness facility on campus, because our old one didn't look very good when compared to the new ones our competitors had. The food is vastly better. Research costs are way up, even though the school I work at is bachelor's only, since US News' rankings require it. We wired all our classrooms/Library/dorms for Ethernet, and then turned right around and blanketed the entire campus with WiFi.
So how can they afford to pay for all of this? Student loans. Costs are secondary- indeed, colleges are Veblen goods, where lowering the price will cause the college to become less desirable. Since we can always find a financial aid package that allows you to come, costs get buried and simply aren't looked at as carefully as amenities.
Nukes in space has been possible for 50 years. We don't do it because there are treaties against it, treaties that have remarkably been followed by all involved. It's not a a boat that anyone involved really wants to start rocking.
It's not so much that there has been any great restraint on the part of the nuclear armed space powers as that there is no point to having them in orbit. ICBMs get anywhere in the world in 30 minutes, SLBMs are even quicker since they are closer. Silos are very well hardened and subs are hard to find- orbiting satellites have limited maneuverability, so you always know where the warhead is. A good chunk of the time orbital dynamics is going to say you're out of position to even hit your desired target. Plus, stuff in space can't be maintained easily and warheads need occasional maintenance to do things like replace the tritium boosters and check the electronics.
The Muslim Brotherhood has no such compunctions. They are driven by ideology, not statecraft. Expect the slaughter of the Copts, and the destruction of Egyptian historical monuments (as "offenses to Allah", like Bhuddhist monuments in Afghanistan, Jewish temple relics in Palestine, and ancient Christian churches in Turkey) to follow. This is what happens EVERY TIME that truly committed Muslims gain control of a country politically. it's happened before, it will happen again.
I know- look at the hellhole Turkey has become. It went from an enlightened democracy with an excellent human rights record and a thriving, free market economy to an utter disaster under the Justice and Democracy (Islamic) party. And Indonesia, the most populous Islamic country in the world bans non-Islamic worship and has destroyed all the Buddhist temples in the country.
(Note to self: probably need to check statements later, but need to finish post ASAP)
The key to remembering why there were so many musicians was that recorded music didn't exist. This had two effects
1) If you wanted to hear music, you had to hear it live.
2) Most people never heard a truly amazing musician
Today it's a lot tougher- your competition isn't the guy in the next village who might be slightly less mediocre than you are, it's the entire collected work of the best musicians in the world, played flawlessly on demand. Tough to compete against that.
It's a *fucking* *screenshot* from Fox News. I realize that Media Matters is from the "other side" but please do us the favor of actually clicking on the link before engaging the mouth. It will make you look a lot less stupid in the future.
FOX News is involved with the Tea Party? As in giving funds and organizing the events? I'd like to see a citation of that, because it's the first I ever heard it.
Please tell me you're being sarcastic. If not, start here. The Tea Party was created by Republican strategist Dick Armey and promoted relentlessly by Fox News- it was never intended to be grass roots. Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.
Ah, yes, the next defense- "BMI is crap. I'm a heavy-framed bodybuilder with 4% body fat and a BMI of 30"
Once again, there are a few people out there like this- I've even known some. The *vast* majority of obese people do not fall under this category, and pretending that BMI is junk because of a few outliers is just a way to wish away the fact that we're fat. Folks with BMI over 30? They're almost certainly fat. Sorry, it's just the truth- as a population we're nowhere athletic enough to fall into the (very well understood) pool of folks with a lot of lean muscle mass, and I've never heard of a doctor telling a highly fit person to drop weight because their BMI was technically overweight. It's not even all that prevalent among athletes- I have relatives and coworkers who compete seriously in triathalons and while I don't know their BMI I'd be blown away if any of them was over 20. I have a lot of college student athletes in my classes and with the exception of a few wrestlers and a football player or two they aren't going to be over 25. As I mentioned, my BMI edged up over 30. I was a fat fuck. My BMI right now is 25.2, and frankly I'm still overweight. I come about as close as you can get to "normal" height and frame, and BMI works just fine for me, and most folks.
Yes, there are a few folks out there with serious health issues that make it very difficult to maintain a healthy weight.
But we're even more in denial thinking they are a significant number of the obese. They aren't- they're convenient excuses. I can think back to my wife's roommate in college who was morbidly obese, even though she ate healthy meals and exercised by biking around campus. She explained to everyone that she had glandular problems that caused the weight gain. Those same glandular problems also apparently caused her to eat cans of frosting late at night when she was depressed or stressed. (Yes, you read that correctly)
My metabolism has changed over the years- I was rail thin through college no matter what I ate. After 25 years of post-college life eating the same food, I was pushing the obese range- my body's burn rate has slowed even though I exercise quite a bit. So I stopped eating so much crap last year. Metabolism change or no, I'm down 35 pounds and a hair away from "healthy" BMI. It might be harder to lose weight with a crap metabolism, but it's hardly impossible.
In all seriousness, this (and other insurance fraud) won't be an issue. The cars are instrumented to the gills, and I'm sure in the case of any accident they can dump the data to show that what the person is claiming is impossible.
My personal feeling is that insurance rates are going to drive the adoption of self driving cars. Once the insurance companies realize that they have a lower error rate than humans (never tired, drunk, distracted, etc) and that they can tell who was at fault in an accident (almost certainly the other guy) you'll see serious incentives to keep cars in auto-drive.
The *really* interesting bit? The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is pouring money into Open Textbook projects.
This makes sense in my opinion- the total cost for writing a series of 100 and 200 level texts to cover pretty much the entire curriculum is peanuts for something the size of the Gates Foundation, but it could really have a massive impact on the costs of education- check out how much books are vs. tuition at many community colleges.
Schmidt has dirty paws.
I would not be surprised if this behavior is why Sergey Brin had to oust him. Name any market Google has created? Search? Mail? Maps? Online Docs? It's all polished implementations of other peoples well proven ideas. Their finest and purest idea was their first one: search ranking by citation.
AdWords. I'm unaware of any prior system that did automatic auctions for specific search terms. As far as Google's success, AdWords was equally as important as search, since it's the financial basis for the entire company. If you read some of the early history of Google their original sales methods were human centric, slow and no better than anyone else. AdWords started the flood of cash.
In ten years? My guess is that the date was ~3 years ago- Obama's really ramped up the drone program and unless you restrict "bomb" to something free falling rather than a Maverick or Hellfire the number of drone strikes vastly outnumbers manned bomber runs.
Analog is "better" quality in this case. In the case of recording music using amplified instruments, you don't want perfect sound reproduction. You want the distortion from the amps, you want the reverb from the space, you want the oddities of the tape. Those things are critical to create the proper sound.
If you want to discuss sound reproduction later, yes, analog is a stupid idea compared to (good enough) digital, but there's a reason why guitarists still use tube amps.
"In all fairness, they aren't the IRS' rules. They are Congress', and the IRS has the thankless task every year of trying to figure them out."
The latter of the two sentences is true, but I don't see anything "fair" about it.
Regardless of who created the rules, the IRS is the agency in charge of implementing and enforcing those rules. If it cannot do so, then it should not even exist. And it has proven itself, year after year, incapable of doing so. Therefore...
Honestly, put yourself in their shoes. Have you ever had your boss give you a literally impossible assignment and told you to accomplish it? It's not so much that they are incapable- it's that *no one* is capable of doing it. Looking back to my situation, I had folks who had spent their entire lives studying the US tax code unable to figure out what to do.
Put the blame where it belongs- Congress. The tax code needs to be drastically simplified, but there are far too many well connected special interests who can game the current system to have it succeed.
Year after year, the IRS has proven in independent tests to be incompetent at understanding their own rules. Only a fool would allow the IRS to "help" them with their return.
In all fairness, they aren't the IRS' rules. They are Congress', and the IRS has the thankless task every year of trying to figure them out.
Back when I was a postdoc living in Canada I kicked a tax question about my return all the way up to the corporate HQ of H&R Block. (My mom has worked for them for ~30 years and called in some favors) The end result? They had no idea. It came down to exactly how you read one incredibly obscure clause in the thousands of pages of US tax code, and if you gave the wording to 100 people 50 of them probably would have picked one interpretation and 50 the other.
(I picked the one that zeroed out my taxes for the year. I didn't get audited.)
Why would the "well off" families fill the good schools up? Was there a bidding process so that the highest bidder got first pick?
Either way, in your district, they should increase the capacity of the "good" school (number of classrooms, not increase per class size) and start cutting classes from the poorer schools. First, this will increase the availability of the better school, allowing more students to attend. Next, Once enough of the teachers from the poorer school get fired, the remaining ones might start looking for ways to increase performance.
You have *got* to be joking. You honestly think that schools can be increased in size automatically? I invite you to come to reality, where building a new school or renovating an old one will takes years to decades of fighting over the tax revenues to pay for it.
And yes, the well off families fill up good schools. This is because in most of America school revenue is tied to local taxes, primarily property. Live in a rich area, your school gets more resources, so you are getting first pick based on where you live. Sadly, this is somewhat of a zero sum game- read The Darwin Economy to see why it doesn't work very well in the long run.
At this point, it's almost cheaper not to worry about no data. My wife's plan with Boost started at $50/month for unlimited(*) everything including voice/data/text, and that goes down $5 every six months. (It's about $40/mo now, will drop to $35 in a bit) She has a Samsung Prevail, which is a decent low end smartphone, although there is a selection of flip phones if you want. She's a lot like you but I couldn't find an unlimited talk plan any other place that wasn't absurdly expensive.
It's based on Sprint's network, so it's decent but you'll want to check coverage. (* Unlimited within throttled caps, but good enough for light-medium use. Don't expect to use it for Netflix)
Still, we had a visitor to our local Astronomy club explain the one oversight which may ultimately doom Opportunity - dust build up on the Solar Panels. Next probe will probably have a little robotic arm and brush to sweep itself off now and then.
This wasn't an oversight, it was well understood that this would happen. They've gotten lucky that dust devils have cleaned the panels a few times.
The next Mars rover is nuclear powered. There are no attempts at any kind of dust cleaning device- it would be far too heavy and fragile to be worth bothering with.
Slashdot Mirror
Pencil. Paper. Calculator. The keyboard gets in the way of doing anything useful, especially if you're trying to do things involving symbols (like math).
This is why a tablet would be better in most STEM classes than a low cost PC. I tried using my laptop in a CS course for taking notes. But because it wasn't a simple coding class, but more of a mathematical/theoretical course, there was no way I could. Even now, it's hella hard to try typing up papers with any sort of mathematical representations(unless you type everything in LaTeX or try using a GUI equation editor).
Have you ever actually tried to take mathematical notes on an iPad? I have
It sucks. Utterly sucks. The touchscreen is nowhere near responsive and accurate enough even with a stylus.
The best thing I've ever found for mathematical/science notes is a Livescribe pen. Paper, pen, nothing else to learn- except that everything is stored and synced to audio.
doesn't have protection, it's that mayors, assistant Governors, and the like do. Seriously, it's not necessary for a mayor to bring a multi-person security detail with them everywhere, nor is it necessary for them to get high speed police escorts where ever they need to drive. We don't live in Afghanistan. It's simply not that dangerous- there are plenty of mayors, governors and the like who *don't* have protection layered around them and there hasn't been a wave of assassination attempts on them.
Leave the valley and be willing to look at random areas- chances are the lower pay you'll get will be more than cancelled by the lowered living costs
.notporn
It will be interesting to see which gets more traffic.
Given how many colleges are constantly strapped for cash and we don't exactly have people getting super wealthy being educators, I doubt this is a case of 'charge as much as you can'. The cost of running schools has increased significantly, all those extra students, all that extra capacity.. it isn't like a manufacturing plant where you just add another building or assembly line. It is not a 'sacred ox', but it is part of the same mythology that has been bashing and devaluing education for decades in this country.. pulling otherwise reasonable people in to a larger culture war that wants to see 'liberal hotbeds' weakened, since education has been very bad for certain groups.
There are a couple of factors driving college costs, but the costs have increased significantly. Students today demand a lot more amenities than they used to- AC in dorms is now effectively required, back in my day only a few upperclass students had it. Mental and physical health care is far more in demand- we have students actually asking for inpatient care. We have a brand new $33M fitness facility on campus, because our old one didn't look very good when compared to the new ones our competitors had. The food is vastly better. Research costs are way up, even though the school I work at is bachelor's only, since US News' rankings require it. We wired all our classrooms/Library/dorms for Ethernet, and then turned right around and blanketed the entire campus with WiFi.
So how can they afford to pay for all of this? Student loans. Costs are secondary- indeed, colleges are Veblen goods, where lowering the price will cause the college to become less desirable. Since we can always find a financial aid package that allows you to come, costs get buried and simply aren't looked at as carefully as amenities.
Nukes in space has been possible for 50 years. We don't do it because there are treaties against it, treaties that have remarkably been followed by all involved. It's not a a boat that anyone involved really wants to start rocking.
It's not so much that there has been any great restraint on the part of the nuclear armed space powers as that there is no point to having them in orbit. ICBMs get anywhere in the world in 30 minutes, SLBMs are even quicker since they are closer. Silos are very well hardened and subs are hard to find- orbiting satellites have limited maneuverability, so you always know where the warhead is. A good chunk of the time orbital dynamics is going to say you're out of position to even hit your desired target. Plus, stuff in space can't be maintained easily and warheads need occasional maintenance to do things like replace the tritium boosters and check the electronics.
It's basically just not necessary
I know- look at the hellhole Turkey has become. It went from an enlightened democracy with an excellent human rights record and a thriving, free market economy to an utter disaster under the Justice and Democracy (Islamic) party. And Indonesia, the most populous Islamic country in the world bans non-Islamic worship and has destroyed all the Buddhist temples in the country.
(Note to self: probably need to check statements later, but need to finish post ASAP)
Has nature? Yes. There are quite a few meteorites that originated on Mars.
1) If you wanted to hear music, you had to hear it live.
2) Most people never heard a truly amazing musician
Today it's a lot tougher- your competition isn't the guy in the next village who might be slightly less mediocre than you are, it's the entire collected work of the best musicians in the world, played flawlessly on demand. Tough to compete against that.
It's a *fucking* *screenshot* from Fox News. I realize that Media Matters is from the "other side" but please do us the favor of actually clicking on the link before engaging the mouth. It will make you look a lot less stupid in the future.
>>>no thanks to Fox News and their involvement.
FOX News is involved with the Tea Party? As in giving funds and organizing the events? I'd like to see a citation of that, because it's the first I ever heard it.
Please tell me you're being sarcastic. If not, start here. The Tea Party was created by Republican strategist Dick Armey and promoted relentlessly by Fox News- it was never intended to be grass roots. Amusingly, it's actually grown some legitimate roots since and has proved more difficult to control than the establishment would like.
Once again, there are a few people out there like this- I've even known some. The *vast* majority of obese people do not fall under this category, and pretending that BMI is junk because of a few outliers is just a way to wish away the fact that we're fat. Folks with BMI over 30? They're almost certainly fat. Sorry, it's just the truth- as a population we're nowhere athletic enough to fall into the (very well understood) pool of folks with a lot of lean muscle mass, and I've never heard of a doctor telling a highly fit person to drop weight because their BMI was technically overweight. It's not even all that prevalent among athletes- I have relatives and coworkers who compete seriously in triathalons and while I don't know their BMI I'd be blown away if any of them was over 20. I have a lot of college student athletes in my classes and with the exception of a few wrestlers and a football player or two they aren't going to be over 25. As I mentioned, my BMI edged up over 30. I was a fat fuck. My BMI right now is 25.2, and frankly I'm still overweight. I come about as close as you can get to "normal" height and frame, and BMI works just fine for me, and most folks.
But we're even more in denial thinking they are a significant number of the obese. They aren't- they're convenient excuses. I can think back to my wife's roommate in college who was morbidly obese, even though she ate healthy meals and exercised by biking around campus. She explained to everyone that she had glandular problems that caused the weight gain. Those same glandular problems also apparently caused her to eat cans of frosting late at night when she was depressed or stressed. (Yes, you read that correctly)
My metabolism has changed over the years- I was rail thin through college no matter what I ate. After 25 years of post-college life eating the same food, I was pushing the obese range- my body's burn rate has slowed even though I exercise quite a bit. So I stopped eating so much crap last year. Metabolism change or no, I'm down 35 pounds and a hair away from "healthy" BMI. It might be harder to lose weight with a crap metabolism, but it's hardly impossible.
My personal feeling is that insurance rates are going to drive the adoption of self driving cars. Once the insurance companies realize that they have a lower error rate than humans (never tired, drunk, distracted, etc) and that they can tell who was at fault in an accident (almost certainly the other guy) you'll see serious incentives to keep cars in auto-drive.
This makes sense in my opinion- the total cost for writing a series of 100 and 200 level texts to cover pretty much the entire curriculum is peanuts for something the size of the Gates Foundation, but it could really have a massive impact on the costs of education- check out how much books are vs. tuition at many community colleges.
Schmidt has dirty paws. I would not be surprised if this behavior is why Sergey Brin had to oust him. Name any market Google has created? Search? Mail? Maps? Online Docs? It's all polished implementations of other peoples well proven ideas. Their finest and purest idea was their first one: search ranking by citation.
AdWords. I'm unaware of any prior system that did automatic auctions for specific search terms. As far as Google's success, AdWords was equally as important as search, since it's the financial basis for the entire company. If you read some of the early history of Google their original sales methods were human centric, slow and no better than anyone else. AdWords started the flood of cash.
In ten years? My guess is that the date was ~3 years ago- Obama's really ramped up the drone program and unless you restrict "bomb" to something free falling rather than a Maverick or Hellfire the number of drone strikes vastly outnumbers manned bomber runs.
If you want to discuss sound reproduction later, yes, analog is a stupid idea compared to (good enough) digital, but there's a reason why guitarists still use tube amps.
Disclaimer: I triple-boot, with more VMs. I can make fun of everybody.
Bah- neophyte. I ran Doom the other day in a DOS emulator under Linux running in VirtualBox under Windows which was running on my Mac in Parallels.
Yes, it ran- it was even playable. Next up I'm going to run VICE on the DOS machine and see if I can play Bard's Tale on a C64. I loved that game...
"In all fairness, they aren't the IRS' rules. They are Congress', and the IRS has the thankless task every year of trying to figure them out."
The latter of the two sentences is true, but I don't see anything "fair" about it. Regardless of who created the rules, the IRS is the agency in charge of implementing and enforcing those rules. If it cannot do so, then it should not even exist. And it has proven itself, year after year, incapable of doing so. Therefore...
Honestly, put yourself in their shoes. Have you ever had your boss give you a literally impossible assignment and told you to accomplish it? It's not so much that they are incapable- it's that *no one* is capable of doing it. Looking back to my situation, I had folks who had spent their entire lives studying the US tax code unable to figure out what to do.
Put the blame where it belongs- Congress. The tax code needs to be drastically simplified, but there are far too many well connected special interests who can game the current system to have it succeed.
Year after year, the IRS has proven in independent tests to be incompetent at understanding their own rules. Only a fool would allow the IRS to "help" them with their return.
In all fairness, they aren't the IRS' rules. They are Congress', and the IRS has the thankless task every year of trying to figure them out.
Back when I was a postdoc living in Canada I kicked a tax question about my return all the way up to the corporate HQ of H&R Block. (My mom has worked for them for ~30 years and called in some favors) The end result? They had no idea. It came down to exactly how you read one incredibly obscure clause in the thousands of pages of US tax code, and if you gave the wording to 100 people 50 of them probably would have picked one interpretation and 50 the other.
(I picked the one that zeroed out my taxes for the year. I didn't get audited.)
Why would the "well off" families fill the good schools up? Was there a bidding process so that the highest bidder got first pick?
Either way, in your district, they should increase the capacity of the "good" school (number of classrooms, not increase per class size) and start cutting classes from the poorer schools. First, this will increase the availability of the better school, allowing more students to attend. Next, Once enough of the teachers from the poorer school get fired, the remaining ones might start looking for ways to increase performance.
You have *got* to be joking. You honestly think that schools can be increased in size automatically? I invite you to come to reality, where building a new school or renovating an old one will takes years to decades of fighting over the tax revenues to pay for it.
And yes, the well off families fill up good schools. This is because in most of America school revenue is tied to local taxes, primarily property. Live in a rich area, your school gets more resources, so you are getting first pick based on where you live. Sadly, this is somewhat of a zero sum game- read The Darwin Economy to see why it doesn't work very well in the long run.
It's based on Sprint's network, so it's decent but you'll want to check coverage. (* Unlimited within throttled caps, but good enough for light-medium use. Don't expect to use it for Netflix)
Still, we had a visitor to our local Astronomy club explain the one oversight which may ultimately doom Opportunity - dust build up on the Solar Panels. Next probe will probably have a little robotic arm and brush to sweep itself off now and then.
This wasn't an oversight, it was well understood that this would happen. They've gotten lucky that dust devils have cleaned the panels a few times.
The next Mars rover is nuclear powered. There are no attempts at any kind of dust cleaning device- it would be far too heavy and fragile to be worth bothering with.