This same topic seems to get re-submitted to Slashdot about twice a year.
Short answer: If you need 100MB for a calculator, I salute you. If 320*240 pixels with 65,536 colours is too small and low-res for you for a calculator, you should save your money for a trip to the eye doctor.
Can a netbook do more different things than a calculator can? Yes, yes it can. That is why a calculator is not called something else... like, say, a netcalcubooklator.
My cell phone lets me make phone calls and also play Angry Birds. Why is Uniden still selling phones that don't have built-in synchronization to Google Contacts?
My 24" widescreen LCD monitor can display six pages of a book at once at full resolution. How do Amazon and Barnes & Noble get away with selling devices that can only display one page at a time, are not backlit, and can't run Photoshop?
The answer is obvious: There is plenty of room in the world for purpose-built devices. The reasons why people like to use those devices will vary. I, for one, like having a compact calculator that is programmable and has plenty of easy-to-stab dedicated calculator buttons on the front (as opposed to messing around with LaTek formula input, or whatever other input method you'd use on a device with a keyboard or touchscreen). My calculator of choice is an HP 50G. The HP 48 emulator on my Android phone can do most of what the 50G can do (and probably a lot faster), but as an emulated calculator on a touchscreen device, it ain't the same.
Do I use my programmable calculator every day? No, no I do not. Do I resent spending $120 on a calculator, compared to the cost of the chemistry textbook I bought for the same class? No, no I do not.
In the United States, where the hospital bills for a procedure of this kind are likely to run into thousands of dollars, "disposable" has a pretty broad definition.
Assuming, that is, that the aliens grow at the same rate we do. An alien with a 500 year lifespan would not have that problem.
But for an alien with a 500 year lifespan to spend that 500 years in a saucer-shaped vehicle that holds enough fuel to travel many light years' distance in a volume equivalent to a spacious city apartment, I'd say food would be an issue, to say nothing of insanity. That the aliens want to travel across the vastness of space at all implies that the aliens are compelled to move around. As for "some sort of stasis or hibernation," no animal we've ever encountered can hibernate for even one full year.
You're making way too many wrong assumptions, starting with the assumption that any aliens we meet will be in any way like life on Earth.
Which is yet another reason to discredit the article. Whomever perpetrated this fraud wasn't even far-sighted enough to postulate aliens that were significantly different from humans. Instead, they were three-foot-tall, humanoid bodies. I guess they could just coincidentally look like humans but actually have various super-powers that none of the life forms we've observed to date have -- such as muscles that never atrophy and cells that require no source of energy. But that sounds more like a '60s sci-fi story than science.
No, "it has to be" because the story is patently absurd.
Let's just start with: If the best way to build a craft that can travel through both outer space and all layers of a planetary atmosphere is to make it in the shape of a big disc, why have none of Earth's aerospace engineers ever built a craft using that shape? I guess it must have taken the Roswell incident to convince them it was a bad idea.
How about: How did aliens travel across countless light years of space to reach our planet in a craft that was just 50' in diameter? Presumably a couple generations of the crew would have grown old and died on the voyage. That's a pretty small space to raise a family in.
And how did these aliens plan to get back? Or if they weren't planning to get back, and they were just living on our planet in secret, wouldn't it be a lot easier to preserve the secret of their existence if they just drove cars, like regular people? If they look weird they could always have hired a guy to drive them around in the back of a delivery truck.
All kinds of things happen and the government covers up all kinds of things. But if you honestly think anybody should read into this story more than that some crackpot spread misinformation to someone else, who documented it and promptly stuck it in a file cabinet with all the other crackpot garbage -- then you're a credulous moron.
In fact what they got Twitter to agree to is to build new offices in a scummy slum part of town, which of course will now cost Twitter in extra security and such
Ohhhh, I think that's painting it on pretty thick. San Francisco is so gentrified now that there are very few "scummy slum parts of town" that aren't tucked away where nobody has to see them -- the Bayview and Hunter's Point neighborhoods in particular. If you want to avoid this particular scummy slum, all you'd have to do is walk about two blocks.
I heard a story once (apocryphal, probably) about some military guys who rigged a connection that ran Kermit over a length of barbed wire, when that was all they had.
OS in ROM - no Virus worries or update hell. All the machines are the same. BASIC (replaced with something modern) in ROM - make it easy and attractive to program.
Sounds like it's got that. It can boot to a C64 emulator "within seconds." It's just not "replaced with something modern."
It's a little bit more, they do apparently have some sort of proprietary Commodore OS that you can use.
I don't see anything on the manufacturer's site that necessarily indicates it's a proprietary OS. For one thing, they say "Commodore OS 1.0" isn't available yet, but they'll mail it to people who buy the computer when it's ready. In the meantime, it says the machines will ship with Ubuntu LTS. That suggests to me that Commodore OS 1.0 is likely to be yet another Linux distro, maybe with some sort of nostalgic Commodore-like skin.
I've seldom used the graphing capabilities of graphing calculators, even in school. I do like to use some of the minor features of fancy calculators, though, even for everyday use. I like RPN input. I like having a multi-line screen that preserves the last few results, if I want to compare a few calculations. I like being able to enter a series of numbers, then perform a sequence of operations on the entire series at once, again to compare results. If I have to repeat a more complex operation a number of times, I might hack out a quick program and assign it to a function key, so all I have to do is enter the input, press the function key, enter the input, press the function key. Obviously, though, for most people there are far more uses for them in school; I still have a library on mine that allows me to type in any chemical formula, hit a button, and the calculator will return its atomic mass.
"Nuts, for example, are pretty high in fat -- but are good for you" hahahaha.
You laugh? Go look it up. Prevailing opinion is that despite their high fat content, nuts actually lower the risk of heart disease.
" Every few more years, new consensus among nutritionists shifts the "food pyramid" around,"
A) no, not nearly that often.
The "food pyramid" was formally adopted by the U.S. government in 1992, changed in 1994, then again in 2005. If you were a first grader in 1992, by the time you graduated high school the USDA's advice would have changed twice.
B) Changing how we behave and what we know based on new facts is a good thing.
Only until we start passing laws about it. Then we better be damn sure the laws can change as fast as the "new facts."
I've been thin all my life, except for when I was on Paxil, and I eat like a hobbit. I'll have eggs, bacon, and toast for breakfast, then a second breakfast of biscuts and gravy at the cafeteria at work. Big lunch, snack on cookies, big dinner.
Be careful, man. My grandfather used to eat like you. Think old-school British food: beans, potatoes, meat, maybe peas if he felt like having a vegetable. His favorite meal was pork chops, and when everybody at the table was done with theirs, he'd scoop up the fat they'd trimmed off their own chops, cut it up and eat that, too. He was more or less skinny his whole life -- right up until the day he died of complications due to atherosclerosis.
Are you saying that there are almost as many unhealthily underweight individuals as unhealthily overweight ones? Are you talking about Arizona, USA
He's most certainly not talking about Arizona, I can tell you that much. TFA claims Arizona has a 25.5 percent obesity rate. All I can say is, the census takers must have skipped the whole Phoenix area.
Also, the human energy it takes to cook your own food will probably lead most people to make simpler meals. Instead of stir fried chicken and vegetables, a pile of fried rice, two potstickers and an egg roll, you'll probably decide you can only be bothered to make the stir fry and put some plain white rice in a rice cooker, and that will be it. Voila!
Besides, making something illegal doesn't make it go away.
This is probably the best argument for keeping cigarettes legal. Fireworks (the Fourth of July kind) have been illegal in California for many years now. Along with drugs, fireworks have become one of the biggest commodities in Asian black markets. You know what else they have a plentiful supply of in China and Hong Kong, besides fireworks? Cigarettes.
On the other hand, if you tax them -- and tax, and tax, and tax, slowly increasing it all the time -- first you'll price them out of the range of teenagers (the "new recruits," as it were, so the rate of new smokers slows) and eventually you'll price them out of the range of the elderly on fixed income (the last holdouts).
Foods containing significant quantities of nutrients that the human body only needs in small amounts are "junk food."
You mean like Vitamin C pills.
The major elements to watch out for are salt, sugars, and fats.
Except as any nutritionist will tell you, not all fats are equal, nor are all sugars. Nuts, for example, are pretty high in fat -- but are good for you. Trans-fats, on the other hand, are worse than anything you'd get out of a fatty steak. There's been lots of debate over the difference between high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose. And so on.
Consider fruits and vegetables. Eat as much as you like of these, and I don't think you will have health problems.
In most cases that's true -- unless, of course, you eat them to the exclusion of other things that would give you a more balanced diet. There are plenty of strict vegetarians in India, true -- but there are also lots and lots of severely malnourished people.
The problem here is that a law is being proposed that seeks to codify as fact knowledge that seems to be shifting every day. Every couple of years, someone else comes up with "the perfect diet." Every few more years, new consensus among nutritionists shifts the "food pyramid" around, so that what we were taught was appropriate as children is no longer considered healthy.
Given that nutrition is such a complex area, how can we keep such a law from being one that arbitrarily discriminates against food businesses?
Employee salaries and benefits only make up about 10% of the state budget [ca.gov] ($7B salaries + $3.4B benefits)
That's only counting the payroll expenditures that come out of the General Fund. Total state expenditure on payroll is about $23.6 billion, or just less than a third of the total resources available for 2010-2011. The percentage of General Fund is also closer to 12 percent.
Worth noting, though, that if you reduced state employee compensation to zero it still wouldn't make up for the budget shortfall.
If you have an Android phone, and you prefer HP calculators to TI, you have the option of Droid48. It's a port of the X48 project, and it works pretty well for me!
Many women report the same from contraceptive pills. They can't get pregnant; the irony is that once they start the pills, they have no interest in sex. There are many different types of pills, and it's possible that women who find their libido affected by one kind can find another that doesn't affect it, but working your way through the options can be a laborious process -- and since you don't have any real desire for sex anyway, it doesn't seem like much of a priority (at least, not until you look back on the last year and think, "wait a minute...").
I think it's legitimate to have a high school diploma be a certificate of basic competency for the workforce. If you have a diploma, a prospective employer can assume you can read at an adult level, spell decently well, and do enough math to handle a cash register. Hopefully you also know enough about science, history, and civics to get along in society. But does an auto mechanic really need to know how to compute the number of moles of exhaust that comes out of an engine when each piston fires? I don't think so.
The problem is, modern high schools don't seem to even fulfill this role. "Social promotion" means kids are rarely ever held back a grade in K-12 these days, and once you turn 18, they basically have to turn you loose, ready or not. All a diploma means is that you played the game.
Actually, that's not true. According to this data, women on the contraceptive pill experienced less than half the number of unplanned pregnancies than women who used condoms alone. Combining the two is pretty darn effective. Contraceptive pills also do nothing to limit the spread of disease.
As I've said elsewhere, at my school there was sort of an unspoken division between college-bound students and those who were not college-bound. For college-bound students, you didn't really need to make specific class requirements for graduation, because you don't get to be an engineer without studying math, you don't become a doctor without taking biology, etc. You won't get into upper-division college courses without fulfilling the prerequisites, so the kids who want to get out of college in four years start taking those classes in high school. It's the colleges -- and to a large degree, their parents -- who "require" it of them, not the high schools.
Geometry definitely came before Algebra II at my school, and I think that's the way they should do it, too. The important thing wasn't the Pythagorean theorem, it was doing proofs and the logical thinking habits you picked up along the way.
The Algebra II courses I've seen typically start by examining linear equations, finding the slope of a line and stuff like that, then move on into topics like factoring polynomials, polynomial arithmetic, solving systems of equations and inequalities, matrices, and so on, and I think a lot of classes end with conic sections. Maybe the most important parts of Algebra II, though, are that this is the level of math where they really start having you graph a lot of stuff (which becomes even more important for Trigonometry and beyond) and that Algebra II introduces the concept of functions. In my experience functions are not really given a ton of emphasis at this stage, but by the time you start Calculus you're supposed to have one of those "ah-haaaaa" moments where all the earlier topics start to come together.
Slashdot Mirror
This same topic seems to get re-submitted to Slashdot about twice a year.
Short answer: If you need 100MB for a calculator, I salute you. If 320*240 pixels with 65,536 colours is too small and low-res for you for a calculator, you should save your money for a trip to the eye doctor.
Can a netbook do more different things than a calculator can? Yes, yes it can. That is why a calculator is not called something else... like, say, a netcalcubooklator.
My cell phone lets me make phone calls and also play Angry Birds. Why is Uniden still selling phones that don't have built-in synchronization to Google Contacts?
My 24" widescreen LCD monitor can display six pages of a book at once at full resolution. How do Amazon and Barnes & Noble get away with selling devices that can only display one page at a time, are not backlit, and can't run Photoshop?
The answer is obvious: There is plenty of room in the world for purpose-built devices. The reasons why people like to use those devices will vary. I, for one, like having a compact calculator that is programmable and has plenty of easy-to-stab dedicated calculator buttons on the front (as opposed to messing around with LaTek formula input, or whatever other input method you'd use on a device with a keyboard or touchscreen). My calculator of choice is an HP 50G. The HP 48 emulator on my Android phone can do most of what the 50G can do (and probably a lot faster), but as an emulated calculator on a touchscreen device, it ain't the same.
Do I use my programmable calculator every day? No, no I do not. Do I resent spending $120 on a calculator, compared to the cost of the chemistry textbook I bought for the same class? No, no I do not.
In the United States, where the hospital bills for a procedure of this kind are likely to run into thousands of dollars, "disposable" has a pretty broad definition.
Assuming, that is, that the aliens grow at the same rate we do. An alien with a 500 year lifespan would not have that problem.
But for an alien with a 500 year lifespan to spend that 500 years in a saucer-shaped vehicle that holds enough fuel to travel many light years' distance in a volume equivalent to a spacious city apartment, I'd say food would be an issue, to say nothing of insanity. That the aliens want to travel across the vastness of space at all implies that the aliens are compelled to move around. As for "some sort of stasis or hibernation," no animal we've ever encountered can hibernate for even one full year.
You're making way too many wrong assumptions, starting with the assumption that any aliens we meet will be in any way like life on Earth.
Which is yet another reason to discredit the article. Whomever perpetrated this fraud wasn't even far-sighted enough to postulate aliens that were significantly different from humans. Instead, they were three-foot-tall, humanoid bodies. I guess they could just coincidentally look like humans but actually have various super-powers that none of the life forms we've observed to date have -- such as muscles that never atrophy and cells that require no source of energy. But that sounds more like a '60s sci-fi story than science.
No, "it has to be" because the story is patently absurd.
Let's just start with: If the best way to build a craft that can travel through both outer space and all layers of a planetary atmosphere is to make it in the shape of a big disc, why have none of Earth's aerospace engineers ever built a craft using that shape? I guess it must have taken the Roswell incident to convince them it was a bad idea.
How about: How did aliens travel across countless light years of space to reach our planet in a craft that was just 50' in diameter? Presumably a couple generations of the crew would have grown old and died on the voyage. That's a pretty small space to raise a family in.
And how did these aliens plan to get back? Or if they weren't planning to get back, and they were just living on our planet in secret, wouldn't it be a lot easier to preserve the secret of their existence if they just drove cars, like regular people? If they look weird they could always have hired a guy to drive them around in the back of a delivery truck.
All kinds of things happen and the government covers up all kinds of things. But if you honestly think anybody should read into this story more than that some crackpot spread misinformation to someone else, who documented it and promptly stuck it in a file cabinet with all the other crackpot garbage -- then you're a credulous moron.
In fact what they got Twitter to agree to is to build new offices in a scummy slum part of town, which of course will now cost Twitter in extra security and such
Ohhhh, I think that's painting it on pretty thick. San Francisco is so gentrified now that there are very few "scummy slum parts of town" that aren't tucked away where nobody has to see them -- the Bayview and Hunter's Point neighborhoods in particular. If you want to avoid this particular scummy slum, all you'd have to do is walk about two blocks.
I heard a story once (apocryphal, probably) about some military guys who rigged a connection that ran Kermit over a length of barbed wire, when that was all they had.
I would venture to add the Anglicans to that.
OS in ROM - no Virus worries or update hell. All the machines are the same.
BASIC (replaced with something modern) in ROM - make it easy and attractive to program.
Sounds like it's got that. It can boot to a C64 emulator "within seconds." It's just not "replaced with something modern."
An HDMI port
It's got that.
It's a little bit more, they do apparently have some sort of proprietary Commodore OS that you can use.
I don't see anything on the manufacturer's site that necessarily indicates it's a proprietary OS. For one thing, they say "Commodore OS 1.0" isn't available yet, but they'll mail it to people who buy the computer when it's ready. In the meantime, it says the machines will ship with Ubuntu LTS. That suggests to me that Commodore OS 1.0 is likely to be yet another Linux distro, maybe with some sort of nostalgic Commodore-like skin.
I've seldom used the graphing capabilities of graphing calculators, even in school. I do like to use some of the minor features of fancy calculators, though, even for everyday use. I like RPN input. I like having a multi-line screen that preserves the last few results, if I want to compare a few calculations. I like being able to enter a series of numbers, then perform a sequence of operations on the entire series at once, again to compare results. If I have to repeat a more complex operation a number of times, I might hack out a quick program and assign it to a function key, so all I have to do is enter the input, press the function key, enter the input, press the function key. Obviously, though, for most people there are far more uses for them in school; I still have a library on mine that allows me to type in any chemical formula, hit a button, and the calculator will return its atomic mass.
Carobhydrates, fat, and salt, mostly. Don't forget to count the butter and baked bean sauce.
"Nuts, for example, are pretty high in fat -- but are good for you"
hahahaha.
You laugh? Go look it up. Prevailing opinion is that despite their high fat content, nuts actually lower the risk of heart disease.
" Every few more years, new consensus among nutritionists shifts the "food pyramid" around,"
A) no, not nearly that often.
The "food pyramid" was formally adopted by the U.S. government in 1992, changed in 1994, then again in 2005. If you were a first grader in 1992, by the time you graduated high school the USDA's advice would have changed twice.
B) Changing how we behave and what we know based on new facts is a good thing.
Only until we start passing laws about it. Then we better be damn sure the laws can change as fast as the "new facts."
I've been thin all my life, except for when I was on Paxil, and I eat like a hobbit. I'll have eggs, bacon, and toast for breakfast, then a second breakfast of biscuts and gravy at the cafeteria at work. Big lunch, snack on cookies, big dinner.
Be careful, man. My grandfather used to eat like you. Think old-school British food: beans, potatoes, meat, maybe peas if he felt like having a vegetable. His favorite meal was pork chops, and when everybody at the table was done with theirs, he'd scoop up the fat they'd trimmed off their own chops, cut it up and eat that, too. He was more or less skinny his whole life -- right up until the day he died of complications due to atherosclerosis.
Are you saying that there are almost as many unhealthily underweight individuals as unhealthily overweight ones? Are you talking about Arizona, USA
He's most certainly not talking about Arizona, I can tell you that much. TFA claims Arizona has a 25.5 percent obesity rate. All I can say is, the census takers must have skipped the whole Phoenix area.
Also, the human energy it takes to cook your own food will probably lead most people to make simpler meals. Instead of stir fried chicken and vegetables, a pile of fried rice, two potstickers and an egg roll, you'll probably decide you can only be bothered to make the stir fry and put some plain white rice in a rice cooker, and that will be it. Voila!
Besides, making something illegal doesn't make it go away.
This is probably the best argument for keeping cigarettes legal. Fireworks (the Fourth of July kind) have been illegal in California for many years now. Along with drugs, fireworks have become one of the biggest commodities in Asian black markets. You know what else they have a plentiful supply of in China and Hong Kong, besides fireworks? Cigarettes.
On the other hand, if you tax them -- and tax, and tax, and tax, slowly increasing it all the time -- first you'll price them out of the range of teenagers (the "new recruits," as it were, so the rate of new smokers slows) and eventually you'll price them out of the range of the elderly on fixed income (the last holdouts).
Foods containing significant quantities of nutrients that the human body only needs in small amounts are "junk food."
You mean like Vitamin C pills.
The major elements to watch out for are salt, sugars, and fats.
Except as any nutritionist will tell you, not all fats are equal, nor are all sugars. Nuts, for example, are pretty high in fat -- but are good for you. Trans-fats, on the other hand, are worse than anything you'd get out of a fatty steak. There's been lots of debate over the difference between high-fructose corn syrup and sucrose. And so on.
Consider fruits and vegetables. Eat as much as you like of these, and I don't think you will have health problems.
In most cases that's true -- unless, of course, you eat them to the exclusion of other things that would give you a more balanced diet. There are plenty of strict vegetarians in India, true -- but there are also lots and lots of severely malnourished people.
The problem here is that a law is being proposed that seeks to codify as fact knowledge that seems to be shifting every day. Every couple of years, someone else comes up with "the perfect diet." Every few more years, new consensus among nutritionists shifts the "food pyramid" around, so that what we were taught was appropriate as children is no longer considered healthy.
Given that nutrition is such a complex area, how can we keep such a law from being one that arbitrarily discriminates against food businesses?
Employee salaries and benefits only make up about 10% of the state budget [ca.gov] ($7B salaries + $3.4B benefits)
That's only counting the payroll expenditures that come out of the General Fund. Total state expenditure on payroll is about $23.6 billion, or just less than a third of the total resources available for 2010-2011. The percentage of General Fund is also closer to 12 percent.
Worth noting, though, that if you reduced state employee compensation to zero it still wouldn't make up for the budget shortfall.
If you have an Android phone, and you prefer HP calculators to TI, you have the option of Droid48. It's a port of the X48 project, and it works pretty well for me!
Many women report the same from contraceptive pills. They can't get pregnant; the irony is that once they start the pills, they have no interest in sex. There are many different types of pills, and it's possible that women who find their libido affected by one kind can find another that doesn't affect it, but working your way through the options can be a laborious process -- and since you don't have any real desire for sex anyway, it doesn't seem like much of a priority (at least, not until you look back on the last year and think, "wait a minute...").
I think it's legitimate to have a high school diploma be a certificate of basic competency for the workforce. If you have a diploma, a prospective employer can assume you can read at an adult level, spell decently well, and do enough math to handle a cash register. Hopefully you also know enough about science, history, and civics to get along in society. But does an auto mechanic really need to know how to compute the number of moles of exhaust that comes out of an engine when each piston fires? I don't think so.
The problem is, modern high schools don't seem to even fulfill this role. "Social promotion" means kids are rarely ever held back a grade in K-12 these days, and once you turn 18, they basically have to turn you loose, ready or not. All a diploma means is that you played the game.
Condoms, lower failure rate.
Actually, that's not true. According to this data, women on the contraceptive pill experienced less than half the number of unplanned pregnancies than women who used condoms alone. Combining the two is pretty darn effective. Contraceptive pills also do nothing to limit the spread of disease.
As I've said elsewhere, at my school there was sort of an unspoken division between college-bound students and those who were not college-bound. For college-bound students, you didn't really need to make specific class requirements for graduation, because you don't get to be an engineer without studying math, you don't become a doctor without taking biology, etc. You won't get into upper-division college courses without fulfilling the prerequisites, so the kids who want to get out of college in four years start taking those classes in high school. It's the colleges -- and to a large degree, their parents -- who "require" it of them, not the high schools.
Geometry definitely came before Algebra II at my school, and I think that's the way they should do it, too. The important thing wasn't the Pythagorean theorem, it was doing proofs and the logical thinking habits you picked up along the way.
The Algebra II courses I've seen typically start by examining linear equations, finding the slope of a line and stuff like that, then move on into topics like factoring polynomials, polynomial arithmetic, solving systems of equations and inequalities, matrices, and so on, and I think a lot of classes end with conic sections. Maybe the most important parts of Algebra II, though, are that this is the level of math where they really start having you graph a lot of stuff (which becomes even more important for Trigonometry and beyond) and that Algebra II introduces the concept of functions. In my experience functions are not really given a ton of emphasis at this stage, but by the time you start Calculus you're supposed to have one of those "ah-haaaaa" moments where all the earlier topics start to come together.