Why teach History? Few people need that in their daily life or jobs.
Yeah, until you start voting for TEA party candidates because you've never heard of the Know Nothings.
Science? Few people need Chemistry or Physics in their daily lives... etc.
Basic chemistry and physics could save you from mixing two common household items (or leaving them around for the kids to find) that don't react well together, or from not realizing what role momentum has to play when doing certain 'jackass' style stunts or driving. Those things can save your life.
Math? Up to a certain point, math is incredibly useful in everyday life. The trick is to find out what that certain point IS. Like others have said, probability and statistics are probably higher up there than most people would think, as far as being useful in your daily life. Having to do geometric proofs? No, let's not be silly. Calculus is useless for the vast majority of people (I've taken engineering-level calculus, so I'm not speaking from a position of ignorance here on that).
I think a much more practical program that helps people do what they will ALL need to do is better, and let them specialize as they wish. Everyone should be able to do their taxes, understand basic economic theory for when it comes time to vote, etc. The problem is not that people take too much math, because I believe most people only get as far as basic algebra in the U.S. by the time they're out of high school, but that people aren't learning how to apply it to the real world, and they aren't being taught anywhere NEAR enough of the other stuff with the real world applications, as they should be.
If we had a good public education system in this country, I doubt the TEA Party, whose candidates seem to evince a spectacular lack of understanding of the U.S. Constition, either wouldn't exist, or their preferred candidates would be very, very different. When you claim to be all about enforcing the Constitution, and one of your most highly-visible candidates doesn't know where the concept of 'Separation of Church and State' comes from, that's pretty telling.
Teaching economics and social theory and international trade, etc., would all be very valuable in trying to recover from our current mess, and preventing it from happening again.
But I think the most valuable lessons that could be taught would be in real world politics. Everything that's going wrong starts with a corrupt-by-design system we have, and until we fix that, we're not going to fix anything else without simply shifting the corruption into other forms.
Keeping the populace uneducated in useful things (rather than having everyone learn Calculus in high school) seems like a pretty good way to keep the status quo.
Take one quarter-pounder (with cheese), multiply by four, et voila, one pound. It's so simple, even Glenn Beck can do it! The reason he WON'T do it is because he thinks McDonald's is a Scottish Muslim liberal conspiracy. He'd prefer you eat gold after the whole socio-economic system is destroyed by Obama. Fortunately, after the fall of civilization, Christine O'Donnell will make sure you can't masturbate, and I'm sure that will turn things around very quickly.
I've got a mole in the Ubuntu organisation. The word is that mr. Shuttleworth has been in secret talks with Darth^WSteve Ballmer to negotiate the rights for Vista's Aero interface. It was available for pennies due to the number of unsold Vista licenses. The next version of Ubuntu will sport the familiar Aero interface, with features such as the nifty and user-friendly Deny/Allow-widget, grafted straight onto the Linux Kernel.
Open source community, what more do you want?
The WPS from OS/2, prettied up for the modern age. It's not like anyone is using THAT, right?
The Web is rapidly going the way of television: once it was about content, then ads came 'to pay for the content' and now it is all ads with the absolute minimum of content.
You were sounding good until this. You're being nostalgic for a time in tv that never existed.Even the inventor of TV was disgusted by what TV became very quickly.
WTF is this news? VW Polo 70 miles per US gallon highway. 60 MPUSG combined. 50 MPUSG City.
I'm not sure why you'd use 'US gallons' here, considering this car isn't available in the U.S. None of those ultra-efficent non-hybrid (generally diesels) cars are available in the U.S. It'll be BIG news when one of them DOES come here. Until then, I'm sticking with my 2001 VW Jetta TDI (diesel), which only gets around 35mpg city, and about 45+ highway. (No, it's not in great shape, and yes, I drive like a madman.:)
They can announce all the great things it's going to do, but if there's no release date, no hint of a release date, it's just another in a long line of vapor announcements. Do you remember when Diablo II came out? What year was that again?
I think this isn't news, but a news release by a company that has no idea when their product is going to ship, and wants to keep it in the public consciousness until they have some real news, like a release date or a beta or SOMETHING of substance.
And yes, I'm a big Diablo fan, which is why this is irritating. Here's a whole bunch of information about something you can't buy, and we won't even tell you what YEAR we expect it to ship.
>> Something the RIAA/MPAA will never learn. > They might... they just might.
This depends entirely on what you think the RIAA is doing. I don't believe, based on their activities, that they are interested in merely increasing profit. They seem to be about _control_ of the content. Their long-term goal is increasing profit, sure, but I'm pretty sure they want to entirely control the content, end-to-end, for their long-term benefit.
You listen to a song on the radio, the ratio station pays, and you probably pay for the ability to listen to it digitally, too. You hear Happy Birthday at a birthday party, somebody's gotta pay. You want to use a 5 second snippet of a song on your kid's soccer game video, you gotta pay. You play grandma's favorite song at her wake, gotta pay. Can't read the lyrics online unless you pay. Want to cover someone else's song in a free video online? Show us the money. Sample a song with your smartphone so you can go buy it online - gotta pay for that sample before you can go buy the song. Sorry, buy the right to play the song for your own individual self on that particular device you downloaded it to. Gotta pay, can't move it to another device, no stripping the DRM off it so you can even MOVE it to another device. Gotta pay.
as an Android developer (in the process of porting iphone apps) I can tell you that android sure makes it difficult to do the slick effects that on iPhone are practically free.
As an end user, I sure hope you make it really easy to turn off said 'slick effects.' That bullshit is the first thing I turn off when I get a new app.
Actually it is a year earlier than previously thought. December 12, 2011 is when my daughter can get her driver's license.
Is your daughter's name 'Sarah Connor' by any chance? Because if it is, I have a preprogrammed Austrian robot to send her for her birthday which may help us avoid or delay the Apocalypse. It speaks in a weird accent, but it IS a robot.
Yeah, right. iOS is about as fragmented as Android is. And the people I've talked to with iPhones older than version 4 are having real troubled with the latest version of iOS on their iPhone 3* phones - majorly slow is what I've heard.
While there is _some_ truth to Android not being as open as Google would lay claim to, it's certainly more open than iOS is, and when it comes t getting an app out, Android is the platform benchmark for letting anyone release an app. Apple's a joke in this area. I don't know how app distribution works on Blackberry/Windows Phone platforms, though.
You can not only release your own app on your own website, you can actually open your own Android app MARKETPLACE. Sorry, but that's a level of openness Apple can't and won't compete with.
I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion, but I tend to reboot my home and work Windows boxes on a multi-week basis, almost always because some update forces a reboot.
I mentioned 'boot drive only' as the best use of an SSD, not for regular use (like with torrents).
It's 1.5 years old and I admit I've been using it heavily with OS and all sorts of torrents and freenet and whatnot and pushed 90% full most of the time
How can that be possible? Wouldn't that conflict with the partition table or confuse the file system?
My knowledge on this is fuzzy, but I believe the SSD will report those blocks as unwritable. I don't know if it copies that data over to another block or what, but that's the end result - less available space over time, but no actual data loss. The newest generation of SSDs that were just announced have, at least from Intel, I think doubled the number of writes, so it's already got a much longer life than you're going to ever likely use in the field before upgrading the thing anyway.
The new generation of flash is being made on a die shrunk process, so they'll be able to get the price/GB down as well. They're already more than affordable enough for a sweet boot drive for most people.
Can I please flip a switch to turn that into 20GB of hard-to-corrupt data?
That would be an SSD, which fails on write, thus keeping any original data around. Over time, as an SSD fails, it simply has less and less available capacity, thus proving to be very reliable. As long as you don't fuck it up with a bad firmware update, of course.:)
What good does ever-increasing speed do if I just end up blowing through my data cap that much faster? I can live with lower speeds, I just want reasonable prices per GB.
Sure, data caps are a big concern, but that hardly negates the benefits of better throughput. If I have a 5GB/mo cap, I may never use more than 2GB, but why wouldn't I want a fast connection for when I *am* using data?
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Why teach History? Few people need that in their daily life or jobs.
Yeah, until you start voting for TEA party candidates because you've never heard of the Know Nothings.
Science? Few people need Chemistry or Physics in their daily lives... etc.
Basic chemistry and physics could save you from mixing two common household items (or leaving them around for the kids to find) that don't react well together, or from not realizing what role momentum has to play when doing certain 'jackass' style stunts or driving. Those things can save your life.
Math? Up to a certain point, math is incredibly useful in everyday life. The trick is to find out what that certain point IS. Like others have said, probability and statistics are probably higher up there than most people would think, as far as being useful in your daily life. Having to do geometric proofs? No, let's not be silly. Calculus is useless for the vast majority of people (I've taken engineering-level calculus, so I'm not speaking from a position of ignorance here on that).
I think a much more practical program that helps people do what they will ALL need to do is better, and let them specialize as they wish. Everyone should be able to do their taxes, understand basic economic theory for when it comes time to vote, etc. The problem is not that people take too much math, because I believe most people only get as far as basic algebra in the U.S. by the time they're out of high school, but that people aren't learning how to apply it to the real world, and they aren't being taught anywhere NEAR enough of the other stuff with the real world applications, as they should be.
If we had a good public education system in this country, I doubt the TEA Party, whose candidates seem to evince a spectacular lack of understanding of the U.S. Constition, either wouldn't exist, or their preferred candidates would be very, very different. When you claim to be all about enforcing the Constitution, and one of your most highly-visible candidates doesn't know where the concept of 'Separation of Church and State' comes from, that's pretty telling.
Teaching economics and social theory and international trade, etc., would all be very valuable in trying to recover from our current mess, and preventing it from happening again.
But I think the most valuable lessons that could be taught would be in real world politics. Everything that's going wrong starts with a corrupt-by-design system we have, and until we fix that, we're not going to fix anything else without simply shifting the corruption into other forms.
Keeping the populace uneducated in useful things (rather than having everyone learn Calculus in high school) seems like a pretty good way to keep the status quo.
60 would have the same divisors except 120 itself....
You sure about that? You might wanna check...
Yes, but 16 is easier to carve up into smaller pieces using fractions.
Base 120 FTW!
How does "America" define the pound...?
Take one quarter-pounder (with cheese), multiply by four, et voila, one pound. It's so simple, even Glenn Beck can do it! The reason he WON'T do it is because he thinks McDonald's is a Scottish Muslim liberal conspiracy. He'd prefer you eat gold after the whole socio-economic system is destroyed by Obama. Fortunately, after the fall of civilization, Christine O'Donnell will make sure you can't masturbate, and I'm sure that will turn things around very quickly.
Do you know anyone who can count individual carbon atoms?
Well, *I* can, but since *you* apparently can't, you can't *prove* I can't.
Well, you can try counting atoms. But apparently that turns out to be a royal pain.
Or at least an Imperial pain. :)
That sounds like it could be good for the rumoured PSP2, though the power requirements could be a deal-breaker.
I've got a mole in the Ubuntu organisation. The word is that mr. Shuttleworth has been in secret talks with Darth^WSteve Ballmer to negotiate the rights for Vista's Aero interface. It was available for pennies due to the number of unsold Vista licenses. The next version of Ubuntu will sport the familiar Aero interface, with features such as the nifty and user-friendly Deny/Allow-widget, grafted straight onto the Linux Kernel.
Open source community, what more do you want?
The WPS from OS/2, prettied up for the modern age. It's not like anyone is using THAT, right?
My guess is the submitter learned what the word infamous means from the movie "The Three Amigos"...
Oh, that movie has a veritable cornucopia of great words in it. A plethora, even!
The Web is rapidly going the way of television: once it was about content, then ads came 'to pay for the content' and now it is all ads with the absolute minimum of content.
You were sounding good until this. You're being nostalgic for a time in tv that never existed.Even the inventor of TV was disgusted by what TV became very quickly.
WTF is this news?
VW Polo
70 miles per US gallon highway.
60 MPUSG combined.
50 MPUSG City.
I'm not sure why you'd use 'US gallons' here, considering this car isn't available in the U.S. None of those ultra-efficent non-hybrid (generally diesels) cars are available in the U.S. It'll be BIG news when one of them DOES come here. Until then, I'm sticking with my 2001 VW Jetta TDI (diesel), which only gets around 35mpg city, and about 45+ highway. (No, it's not in great shape, and yes, I drive like a madman. :)
Seriously. I don't think I can tolerate slow trickle of news that leads up to the 2016 release date.
Anything that takes THIS long to come out has the potential to go all 'Phantom Menace' on us. :(
They can announce all the great things it's going to do, but if there's no release date, no hint of a release date, it's just another in a long line of vapor announcements. Do you remember when Diablo II came out? What year was that again?
I think this isn't news, but a news release by a company that has no idea when their product is going to ship, and wants to keep it in the public consciousness until they have some real news, like a release date or a beta or SOMETHING of substance.
And yes, I'm a big Diablo fan, which is why this is irritating. Here's a whole bunch of information about something you can't buy, and we won't even tell you what YEAR we expect it to ship.
You don't know? Then fuck off with the Diablo 3 'news' until you do.
Is that you?
Get off of my damned lawn, or I'll sic my Boy and His Dog on you!
>> Something the RIAA/MPAA will never learn.
> They might... they just might.
This depends entirely on what you think the RIAA is doing. I don't believe, based on their activities, that they are interested in merely increasing profit. They seem to be about _control_ of the content. Their long-term goal is increasing profit, sure, but I'm pretty sure they want to entirely control the content, end-to-end, for their long-term benefit.
You listen to a song on the radio, the ratio station pays, and you probably pay for the ability to listen to it digitally, too. You hear Happy Birthday at a birthday party, somebody's gotta pay. You want to use a 5 second snippet of a song on your kid's soccer game video, you gotta pay. You play grandma's favorite song at her wake, gotta pay. Can't read the lyrics online unless you pay. Want to cover someone else's song in a free video online? Show us the money. Sample a song with your smartphone so you can go buy it online - gotta pay for that sample before you can go buy the song. Sorry, buy the right to play the song for your own individual self on that particular device you downloaded it to. Gotta pay, can't move it to another device, no stripping the DRM off it so you can even MOVE it to another device. Gotta pay.
BITCH BETTER HAVE MY MONEY!
as an Android developer (in the process of porting iphone apps) I can tell you that android sure makes it difficult to do the slick effects that on iPhone are practically free.
As an end user, I sure hope you make it really easy to turn off said 'slick effects.' That bullshit is the first thing I turn off when I get a new app.
Actually it is a year earlier than previously thought. December 12, 2011 is when my daughter can get her driver's license.
Is your daughter's name 'Sarah Connor' by any chance? Because if it is, I have a preprogrammed Austrian robot to send her for her birthday which may help us avoid or delay the Apocalypse. It speaks in a weird accent, but it IS a robot.
Yeah, right. iOS is about as fragmented as Android is. And the people I've talked to with iPhones older than version 4 are having real troubled with the latest version of iOS on their iPhone 3* phones - majorly slow is what I've heard.
While there is _some_ truth to Android not being as open as Google would lay claim to, it's certainly more open than iOS is, and when it comes t getting an app out, Android is the platform benchmark for letting anyone release an app. Apple's a joke in this area. I don't know how app distribution works on Blackberry/Windows Phone platforms, though.
You can not only release your own app on your own website, you can actually open your own Android app MARKETPLACE. Sorry, but that's a level of openness Apple can't and won't compete with.
Do you Windows users really reboot that often?
I'm not sure what that has to do with the discussion, but I tend to reboot my home and work Windows boxes on a multi-week basis, almost always because some update forces a reboot.
I mentioned 'boot drive only' as the best use of an SSD, not for regular use (like with torrents).
It's 1.5 years old and I admit I've been using it heavily with OS and all sorts of torrents and freenet and whatnot and pushed 90% full most of the time
Torrents?! Yo. Boot drive only!
How can that be possible? Wouldn't that conflict with the partition table or confuse the file system?
My knowledge on this is fuzzy, but I believe the SSD will report those blocks as unwritable. I don't know if it copies that data over to another block or what, but that's the end result - less available space over time, but no actual data loss. The newest generation of SSDs that were just announced have, at least from Intel, I think doubled the number of writes, so it's already got a much longer life than you're going to ever likely use in the field before upgrading the thing anyway.
The new generation of flash is being made on a die shrunk process, so they'll be able to get the price/GB down as well. They're already more than affordable enough for a sweet boot drive for most people.
Can I please flip a switch to turn that into 20GB of hard-to-corrupt data?
That would be an SSD, which fails on write, thus keeping any original data around. Over time, as an SSD fails, it simply has less and less available capacity, thus proving to be very reliable. As long as you don't fuck it up with a bad firmware update, of course. :)
These people will soon be in charge of health care.
This statement brought to you by the people who brought you the quote, "The government better keep its hands off my Medicare!"
What good does ever-increasing speed do if I just end up blowing through my data cap that much faster? I can live with lower speeds, I just want reasonable prices per GB.
Sure, data caps are a big concern, but that hardly negates the benefits of better throughput. If I have a 5GB/mo cap, I may never use more than 2GB, but why wouldn't I want a fast connection for when I *am* using data?