You don't call them that to their face because if you do, most bad teachers will throw you in the nearest detention cell and bring more of their wrath down upon you later. That's the kind of respect you have in the bad parts of schools: fear of power, nothing more.
I consider there to be two kinds of respect: there's "respect" as a synonym for "politeness", and there's deeper respect. Politeness is due everybody until they prove themselves unworthy (unless they have power over you, in which case you're in a tough spot), but deeper respect can only be earned. Simply being in a position of power isn't enough to earn respect, nor should it be.
I think we need to have more respectfulness (some students really do act like assholes, and I'm not apologizing for them), and more respectworthyness. Not just RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!!!
Yes, you do get a wide range in both students and teachers. I've had my share of bad teachers, and I've noticed that for some reason they tend to cluster around junior high. A bad teacher can't make a student unlearn things, and a bad teacher can't stop a truly determined student from learning, but sometimes the student has to learn in spite of the teacher. It doesn't happen very often, but it happened once to me.
My brother is going through the same evil torment I went through at her hands, and the effects are not pretty. Sure, it's hard to seperate variables---but AFAICT, everyone I know who went through the class of the bad teacher hated it, and suffered some mild depression at the mere thought of that class.
OTOH, you have some good teachers. In those classes the bad students are the ones you notice, because everybody else seems to be having a decent time and learning quite a bit.
So no, there's nothing wrong with calling a teacher a fucking retard if it happens to be true. I don't know how much damage bad teachers do, and I can only hope that the good teachers can offset that. To any good teachers out there: thank you!
Well said---but American Morality Policy will brook no interference from rational voices. This isn't a rational thing, it's a "close your eyes, ears and mind" thing, ingrained from early childhood. When this mixes with an overwillingness to force others to do your bidding, you get laws banning this sort of thing for no good reason that you or I can see. Fortunately, I can still get some uncensored stuff. The web is difficult to censor, and my Cowboy Bebop DVDs are pristine in all their occasionally breast-embellished glory.
Hey, YEAH! I can get my dirty original versions, and the intended audience for this can get their munged versions. That sounds a hell of a lot better than everybody having to see the bowdlerized version because a bunch of people got their undies in a knot.
Plaus, it isn't really hard for any ISP to read people's email. I saw one ISP that had a little window open on one computer showing all the emails being sent and recieved. It was striking how many of the emails had the same to and from addresses. Anyway, that just shows: you can't have any *real* email privacy without encryption.
I agree with you, but here's an idea: remember the article about gravitational "tunnels"---routes you can launch things along cheaply in such a way that they'll slowly go somewhere with some help from gravity? Perhaps the nuclear stuff could be launched on one of those relatively cheaply.
OTOH, it's probably cheaper just to have it out of sight and mind....
Are they still around? It's been so quiet lately that I just got the impression that they had all turned into zombies, lurching around and muttering incoherently about "intellectual property".
I would as well. The production stage doesn't really have much danger in it; about the worst you could do is get your hands on some uranium and strap it to explosives and detonate it in a city, creating what many people will think of as a dirty bomb, which won't kill many people (if any) but which will cause lots of property damage. The later stages are pretty well covered.
The crude petrol vehicle may have been crude and not all that useful, but it had some usefulness. It had a niche to occupy and keep development going. I can't see beaming power from the moon being useful enough off the bat to do the sort of large-scale construction and R&D necessary to make it anything more than a white elephant. If, however, you had other facilities on the moon that needed power, I'd say you have a chance, since you can get started and keep going at a small scale and slow but steady pace. That's the sort of thing that space often lacks, and it shows.
And can't vi (or at least vim) do smart indentation? Or do the emacs people in emacs vs. vi flamewars actually have a point? I think (and hope) it's the former.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I missed the bit about how the moon has a lot of silicon. In that case, two of my objections go down the toilet... but you're still going to have to figure out how to produce lots of solar panels on the moon. Good luck, honestly.
It's a cool idea, but does "cost effectiveness" ring a bell? There are much cheaper ways to get energy, and the materials for relatively inefficient photovoltaic cells aren't free---they cost money and it pollutes to produce them. It will cost more on top of that to get them to the moon (unless you can produce them on site, which would be really cool), and then you have the transmission losses. Finally, some trigger-happy country with more military power than it has a reasonable use for will probably try to shut you down because they don't trust anyone else with giant lasers pointed at the earth.
When I read up on Self, I thought it was kind of cool. However, IMO it suffers from the same issue as languages like Scheme: it's so stripped down, malleable and flexible that it ends up being too "slippery", and normal programmers can't really get a grip on it.
That's why Scheme needs to replace all those slippery parentheses with brackets that you can get a grip on. Which would be easier to hold: () or []?
Seriously, though, Scheme is worth learning for mind expansion purposes alone. It's fun to deal with such a flexible language.
Basically, I'm all up for viable commercial space projects, but let's try not to just trash a planet, or, should we encounter an intelligent life form, just wipe 'em out or take 'em down without second thought.
The days you're speaking of seem very far in the past. I can't imagine anybody doing something so horrible today. If nothing else, the news media would report it and the angry masses would be out for blood. I'm not worrying until I see something more concrete to worry about.
Actually, this does have some rather cool aspects. It could be thought of as a testbed for Python, at least. I sort of like the syntax for dealing with "self", I dislike the way it standardized on tabs rather than spaces. I generally prefer to just use whatever indentation emacs wants me to use, so I don't feel too strongly on this, but it strikes me as odd that "it saves typing" would be an argument for using tabs. Is anyone actually indenting python code by typing all those spaces manually?
What I would really like to see in Python is something like this:
with x = 1, y = 2, z = "wooglywooglywoo":<br> print z, x, y # Spaces don't come out right
Where the with statement would bind those variables locally, so you don't have to worry so much about polluting the global namespace.
Knoppix has Java on the disk? I would like to see that. I have Knoppix 3.3, and I haven't noticed Java anywhere. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.
While 500 soldiers dead is relatively minor, and while they did volunteer, looking at it from a different viewpoint: it's 500 people. Dead. How "minor" is that?
It's really funny to me that emacs was once considered a really big and bloated text editor. Compared with just about anything Microsoft makes these days (this isn't MS bashing, I just happen to have quite a bit of MS software handy to compare emacs with at the moment), emacs is extremely zippy and lightweight.
Slashdot Mirror
I consider there to be two kinds of respect: there's "respect" as a synonym for "politeness", and there's deeper respect. Politeness is due everybody until they prove themselves unworthy (unless they have power over you, in which case you're in a tough spot), but deeper respect can only be earned. Simply being in a position of power isn't enough to earn respect, nor should it be.
I think we need to have more respectfulness (some students really do act like assholes, and I'm not apologizing for them), and more respectworthyness. Not just RESPECT MAH AUTHORITAH!!!
My brother is going through the same evil torment I went through at her hands, and the effects are not pretty. Sure, it's hard to seperate variables---but AFAICT, everyone I know who went through the class of the bad teacher hated it, and suffered some mild depression at the mere thought of that class.
OTOH, you have some good teachers. In those classes the bad students are the ones you notice, because everybody else seems to be having a decent time and learning quite a bit.
So no, there's nothing wrong with calling a teacher a fucking retard if it happens to be true. I don't know how much damage bad teachers do, and I can only hope that the good teachers can offset that. To any good teachers out there: thank you!
You're not the only one to try to force me to be joyous today, but you are the first one to do it in jest.
Well said---but American Morality Policy will brook no interference from rational voices. This isn't a rational thing, it's a "close your eyes, ears and mind" thing, ingrained from early childhood. When this mixes with an overwillingness to force others to do your bidding, you get laws banning this sort of thing for no good reason that you or I can see. Fortunately, I can still get some uncensored stuff. The web is difficult to censor, and my Cowboy Bebop DVDs are pristine in all their occasionally breast-embellished glory.
Hey, YEAH! I can get my dirty original versions, and the intended audience for this can get their munged versions. That sounds a hell of a lot better than everybody having to see the bowdlerized version because a bunch of people got their undies in a knot.
Plaus, it isn't really hard for any ISP to read people's email. I saw one ISP that had a little window open on one computer showing all the emails being sent and recieved. It was striking how many of the emails had the same to and from addresses. Anyway, that just shows: you can't have any *real* email privacy without encryption.
Perhaps because they were hoping to do some gradual revisions and eventually reach Windows 3.14?
Don't tell him that! You may ruin the placebo effect!
Slow down, cowboy! I never said I was against "out of sight, out of mind". You're confusing me with another poster.
The sun keeps you alive, which gives you the time to excersise your stupidity on your car, making its radiator boil over. Happy?
OTOH, it's probably cheaper just to have it out of sight and mind....
Are they still around? It's been so quiet lately that I just got the impression that they had all turned into zombies, lurching around and muttering incoherently about "intellectual property".
Yes. And it had very little to do with this. There's a big difference between "evil proteins made for military reasons" and "buckyballs".
It would be especially easy to say that if you already had a lot of money from your dead husband. Unfortunately....
I would as well. The production stage doesn't really have much danger in it; about the worst you could do is get your hands on some uranium and strap it to explosives and detonate it in a city, creating what many people will think of as a dirty bomb, which won't kill many people (if any) but which will cause lots of property damage. The later stages are pretty well covered.
The crude petrol vehicle may have been crude and not all that useful, but it had some usefulness. It had a niche to occupy and keep development going. I can't see beaming power from the moon being useful enough off the bat to do the sort of large-scale construction and R&D necessary to make it anything more than a white elephant. If, however, you had other facilities on the moon that needed power, I'd say you have a chance, since you can get started and keep going at a small scale and slow but steady pace. That's the sort of thing that space often lacks, and it shows.
And can't vi (or at least vim) do smart indentation? Or do the emacs people in emacs vs. vi flamewars actually have a point? I think (and hope) it's the former.
Sorry to reply to my own comment, but I missed the bit about how the moon has a lot of silicon. In that case, two of my objections go down the toilet... but you're still going to have to figure out how to produce lots of solar panels on the moon. Good luck, honestly.
It's a cool idea, but does "cost effectiveness" ring a bell? There are much cheaper ways to get energy, and the materials for relatively inefficient photovoltaic cells aren't free---they cost money and it pollutes to produce them. It will cost more on top of that to get them to the moon (unless you can produce them on site, which would be really cool), and then you have the transmission losses. Finally, some trigger-happy country with more military power than it has a reasonable use for will probably try to shut you down because they don't trust anyone else with giant lasers pointed at the earth.
That's why Scheme needs to replace all those slippery parentheses with brackets that you can get a grip on. Which would be easier to hold: () or []?
Seriously, though, Scheme is worth learning for mind expansion purposes alone. It's fun to deal with such a flexible language.
The days you're speaking of seem very far in the past. I can't imagine anybody doing something so horrible today. If nothing else, the news media would report it and the angry masses would be out for blood. I'm not worrying until I see something more concrete to worry about.
What I would really like to see in Python is something like this:
Where the with statement would bind those variables locally, so you don't have to worry so much about polluting the global namespace.Knoppix has Java on the disk? I would like to see that. I have Knoppix 3.3, and I haven't noticed Java anywhere. Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough.
While 500 soldiers dead is relatively minor, and while they did volunteer, looking at it from a different viewpoint: it's 500 people. Dead. How "minor" is that?
It's really funny to me that emacs was once considered a really big and bloated text editor. Compared with just about anything Microsoft makes these days (this isn't MS bashing, I just happen to have quite a bit of MS software handy to compare emacs with at the moment), emacs is extremely zippy and lightweight.