A simple laser shining on the photosensor on top of the streetlight will take care of that. So will a pellet rifle, and you only have to fire it once to get the desired effect rather than continuously.
I wish THQ would bring out an updated version of Pax Imperia. I still play the occasional game of Pax Imperia: Emminent Domain when I need a break from WoW.
If I had any mod points right now, I'd mod the parent up, way up. Very reasonable suggestions. I particularly like the bits about avoiding power strips by having plenty of outlets and the description of the work bench, NICE!
I could. When I'm taking pictures with a long telephoto lens on my camera, I can manage to keep the aiming point within a ten-foot circle at three miles. Strap a laser to the camera, and that corresponds to a ten-inch circle at a quarter-mile. Ok, but could you point a laser at a 7 mm diameter circle (the diameter of the average human iris at full dilation) at a distance of 500 feet. Keep in mind that the laser pointer is not designed like a camera. Cameras have much more mass, they are designed to be held with two hands, braced against your face. A camera is a much steadier platform than a handheld laser pointer.
Now if the alleged offenders were using a tripod mounted laser that had more than 300 mw of power and were purposefully tracking the helicopter, maybe the cops would have a case. But if we're talking about a regular 300 mw pen style laser pointer being randomly waved around, the odds of a successful "hit" are supremely remote.
And part of the reason kids never get a chance to learn anything but "obedience" is because class sizes are way too big (sometimes as much as 35 kids to a teacher).
Try 50+ per class in Los Angeles Unified School District. 35 per class is more the average these days in most urban/suburban districts.
Worst nightmare? I can come close. I was on a flight from Boston to L.A. via Vegas. I boarded the plane at Logan, took my window seat and waited for the plane to fill. The two seats next to me were empty and I noticed a rather "large" couple working their way down the aisle, in matching nylon track suits. I thought, "Oh god, no" Yup, they took the two seats next to me. I was squished against the bulkhead and I'm not a small man. The plane took off and the man, who took the middle seat, proceeded to lean his head back and fall asleep. He then started to snore, like a freight train, for the next four hours until we landed at Las Vegas.
This was easily as annoying at 4 hours with someone on their cellphone.
But hey, that's what schools are for, right, teach kids what to do, rather than how to think. If that's what you think schools are for, you need to go back to school. Schools should be teaching kids to think. Unfortunately, most schools don't, but that's another rant for another day.
But what with the potential for high level mischief... When mischief graduates to "high level", I don't think it can really be called mischief anymore.
Teaching ID in schools would *not* mean teaching a specific idea, such as Christianity, with it. If ID were being pushed by more than fanatical Christians, I would agree. However that is not the case. I would be willing to bet that if you asked a hard-core ID advocate if they would allow the "creation theory" (aka Creation Story/Myth/Fable) of other religions to be taught right alongside their version of ID, they would change colors and sputter some pseudo babble about how that theory is wrong.
Some models have (e.g. Japan) a 5 kilometer range - this is 3 miles for the one country in the world not using metric. For the record there are three countries that have not officially adopted the metric system: USA, Liberia (founded by the US as a place to ship freed slaves), and Burma (aka Myanmar).
The thing that caught my attention was his idea to scale it up and stretch it across a canyon. Can you imagine the tension in that "belt" and the noise it would make. For large scale generation, I'd rather have a wind mill/turbine.
I wonder if someone would calculate the exact Lat/Lon of "the Most Remote Spot in the USA" for us? How about "the Most Remote Spot on Earth"? I would think that the criteria would be along the lines of lowest population density or farthest from any city/town.
And let's not bring up the pun of remotes (like for TV, VCR, DVR, etc.), because the most "remote" spot on Earth would surely be the entertainment room of a slashdotter.
Is there any good, technical reason that is keeping us from having truly UNIVERSAL serial communications?
Other that physical size of connector, I can't really see one. There are many times you want a very small connector. Sure you could make a myriad of connectors for a common bus architecture, but then you're back to the gripe of too many f-ing cables. However, I can see economic and marketing reasons to have multiple standards all over the place.
From the www.usajobs.gov site:
ASTRONAUT CANDIDATE (NON-PILOTING BACKGROUND):
1. Bachelor's degree from an accredited institution in engineering, biological science, physical science, or mathematics. Quality of academic preparation is important. Degree must be followed by at least 3 years of related, progressively responsible, professional experience. An advanced degree is desirable and may be substituted for experience as follows: master's degree = 1 year of experience, doctoral degree = 3 years of experience. Teaching experience, including experience at the K - 12 levels, is considered to be qualifying experience for the Astronaut Candidate position; therefore, educators are encouraged to apply.
I'm really glad to see that teaching experience is being considered "real" job experience for once. Looking at all the minimum qualifications, with 7 years of K-12 teaching, I qualify. I'm going to apply. Who knows, I might get lucky. Wish me luck!
I agree! As a part time college professor (geology/oceanography) and recovering High School teacher (chemistry/physics/earth science), I have found both from my own experience as a student and my experience on the other side of the desk that handwritten notes are the best way to go for the student. As many have pointed out most people can draw a diagram or an equation by hand faster than they can on a computer. However, the physical act of forming the letters and words in your head then making your hand make those same letters and words imprints the information in the brain much more firmly than typing does. I'm sure that some psychologist has done a thesis on this very topic (or at least I hope one has, if they haven't it would be a great research project).
I do use PowerPoint (ok, I use Keynote, I'm a MacLover) for my lectures, more because it's less labor intensive for me versus hand writing my notes on the whiteboard (I do miss chalkboards, there's just something about the feel of the chalk in your hand as you drag it across the board that is just not there when working with dry erase). I also have better diagrams and images in my PowerPoints than I could ever draw freehand (and I don't get blinded by looking into the bright light of an overhead projector). Once you bring in embedded video in PowerPoint, it really brings new visuals to the learning experience.
One drawback that I do see about using PowerPoint is that the professor doesn't have multiple pages of notes up on the board at one time, as my professors did. In a larger lecture hall, my professors would have 6 blackboards to work with. As a student, I found being able to refer to exactly what the professor wrote 10 minutes ago very useful. If I could set up a lecture hall to be perfect, there would be two projectors for the PowerPoint showing two slides, another projector for a document camera that could also be used for close ups of samples, demonstrations, etc., and stadium seating so that no one has to look through someone else's head to see me or the info.
I refuse to print out my presentations as slides for my students. I've done it in the past and one semester I had the students ask me to stop, they preferred to write their own notes. One problem that I have noticed is that very few students really know how to take notes. The vast majority just copy exactly what's on the slide and call it note-taking. I repeatedly say, "Feel free to paraphrase what is on the slide, you don't need to write it down word for word." To help my students I have been going through my presentations and streamlining them, reducing the amount of text on each slide, in essence paraphrasing for them.
None of them will help ME anymore, I got out of the K-12 system.
In any case, helping the teachers will help the students but allowing the teacher to focus more on the education and not on the behavior, figuring out how to teach the content without proper equipment, etc.
As for increased pay, I doubt very much that many people think that teachers are overpaid.
It's all well and good to offer free tuition but from my own experience, most people who excel at science, math, and engineering do not have the right personality, mindset, whatever you want to call it, to be teachers.
As a science teacher (7 years of teaching high school chemistry, physics, and earth science, now I'm trying to get into community college teaching), I have experienced the problem first hand.
IMHO, a few major changes would help out the whole education system, not just science/math.
1) Increase teachers' pay to more closely match that of similarly educated workers. Teaching (k-12) has historically been a "woman's job" and as we all know, historically women have been paid less for doing the same job as a man. I'm not condoning it, in fact, I think it's awful! I have a B.A. in Chem and an M.S. in Geosciences and I was making $65k my last year of teaching. A decent wage but compared to someone with my same level of experience and education it's about $20k too low. And don't give me that horseshit about "but teachers get so much vacation time", most every teacher I know used their "summer vacation" to do required professional development, take more classes, or many had a job just to make ends meet.
2) Reduce class size. The reason that so many kids slip through the cracks is that they are in a room with 35+ other students. One teacher can only help so many students at one time. Once you throw in all the time a teacher spends in a period just "riding herd" on the students, a student is lucky if they get one minute of time from the teacher. Get class size down to about 20-24 students per teacher and then you'll see some improvements.
3) Allocate more money for the classroom/allocate more money per student. California allocates about $6000/student/year. Out of that comes all the administration costs, teacher's salaries, maintenance of facilities, books, electricity, water, etc. Not a whole lot makes it to the classroom. I was lucky if I had $300/year to spend on supplies for the classroom. I had to replace broken lab equipment, buy videos, etc out of that every year. I was doing much the same labs that I had done when I was in high school 20 years ago.
4) Finally, give the teachers back some of the power that has been taken away. At every school I taught at, if there was a dispute between a teacher and student, all a parent had to do was threaten to sue and the administration would bend over and grab their ankles. Never once did anyone ask the question, "Who's the professional in this dispute?" "Who has the most to gain from filing this complaint?" Teachers should have to option to PERMANENTLY boot a disruptive student from their classroom. What do we do with the chronic miscreants you ask? FINE THE PARENTS! I've found that if you inconvenience the parent, the parent will crack down on their kid.
Now before you all start to cry about "teacher-tenure" and that it's so hard to get rid of a bad teacher, true tenure (you can't be fired, except in the MOST extreme cases) for k-12 teachers does not exist. As a teacher I had "permanent status", this is the same level of protection as any other contract employee. To fire a teacher you need to document the problem, attempt to help the employee(teacher) correct the problem through counseling, education, whatever. Then if the problem persists you can fire then with cause. The problem is that most administrators are not willing to follow the procedure to get rid of a bad teacher. I admit that the process does take a bit longer in education, on the scale of a year to two, but it's not impossible to fire a teacher because they have some special protections that other workers don't have. The only real protection a teacher has anymore is the union, and that's not saying much.
Isn't the definition of a "smart teen", one that DOES have sex? You gotta admit; the teens that have sex must be doing something smart. Or maybe they have lower standards...
"In today's news, soldiers across the United States have demanded to have their MRI's analyzed to determine if the United States Government is secretly lacing said MRI's with hallucinogens."
Funny but it would have been funnier if the poster had called them MREs not MRIs. MRE = Meal Ready to Eat MRI = Magnetic Resonance Imaging, big difference.
I second this choice. The are written for teens using characters, situations, themes, language, and sentence structure that they will understand and identify with. They are also fairly quick reads (350 pages each).
I would also recommend Arthur C Clarke, in particular "Fountains of Paradise" which is an excellent story about building a Sky Tower/Orbital Tether.
Larry Niven, Issac Asimov, and David Brin are also all excellent writers but may be too advanced for most high school students.
If you read the entire article you would know that they are only doing this at the corporate headquarters not at store level, yet. It will be interesting to see how this works at the store level where the Sales Associate's job is to be available. This could be partially adapted to retail by allowing the employees to write the work schedule, within certain guidelines of course.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish THQ would bring out an updated version of Pax Imperia. I still play the occasional game of Pax Imperia: Emminent Domain when I need a break from WoW.
No, GOD, the guy/gal/it that started the whole universe, not Jesus. Don't be so Christian-centric.
If I had any mod points right now, I'd mod the parent up, way up. Very reasonable suggestions. I particularly like the bits about avoiding power strips by having plenty of outlets and the description of the work bench, NICE!
Now if the alleged offenders were using a tripod mounted laser that had more than 300 mw of power and were purposefully tracking the helicopter, maybe the cops would have a case. But if we're talking about a regular 300 mw pen style laser pointer being randomly waved around, the odds of a successful "hit" are supremely remote.
And part of the reason kids never get a chance to learn anything but "obedience" is because class sizes are way too big (sometimes as much as 35 kids to a teacher).
Try 50+ per class in Los Angeles Unified School District. 35 per class is more the average these days in most urban/suburban districts.Worst nightmare? I can come close. I was on a flight from Boston to L.A. via Vegas. I boarded the plane at Logan, took my window seat and waited for the plane to fill. The two seats next to me were empty and I noticed a rather "large" couple working their way down the aisle, in matching nylon track suits. I thought, "Oh god, no" Yup, they took the two seats next to me. I was squished against the bulkhead and I'm not a small man. The plane took off and the man, who took the middle seat, proceeded to lean his head back and fall asleep. He then started to snore, like a freight train, for the next four hours until we landed at Las Vegas.
This was easily as annoying at 4 hours with someone on their cellphone.
Source:
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/internat.htm
The thing that caught my attention was his idea to scale it up and stretch it across a canyon. Can you imagine the tension in that "belt" and the noise it would make. For large scale generation, I'd rather have a wind mill/turbine.
I wonder if someone would calculate the exact Lat/Lon of "the Most Remote Spot in the USA" for us? How about "the Most Remote Spot on Earth"? I would think that the criteria would be along the lines of lowest population density or farthest from any city/town.
And let's not bring up the pun of remotes (like for TV, VCR, DVR, etc.), because the most "remote" spot on Earth would surely be the entertainment room of a slashdotter.
Is there any good, technical reason that is keeping us from having truly UNIVERSAL serial communications?
Other that physical size of connector, I can't really see one. There are many times you want a very small connector. Sure you could make a myriad of connectors for a common bus architecture, but then you're back to the gripe of too many f-ing cables. However, I can see economic and marketing reasons to have multiple standards all over the place.I'm really glad to see that teaching experience is being considered "real" job experience for once. Looking at all the minimum qualifications, with 7 years of K-12 teaching, I qualify. I'm going to apply. Who knows, I might get lucky. Wish me luck!
I agree! As a part time college professor (geology/oceanography) and recovering High School teacher (chemistry/physics/earth science), I have found both from my own experience as a student and my experience on the other side of the desk that handwritten notes are the best way to go for the student. As many have pointed out most people can draw a diagram or an equation by hand faster than they can on a computer. However, the physical act of forming the letters and words in your head then making your hand make those same letters and words imprints the information in the brain much more firmly than typing does. I'm sure that some psychologist has done a thesis on this very topic (or at least I hope one has, if they haven't it would be a great research project).
I do use PowerPoint (ok, I use Keynote, I'm a MacLover) for my lectures, more because it's less labor intensive for me versus hand writing my notes on the whiteboard (I do miss chalkboards, there's just something about the feel of the chalk in your hand as you drag it across the board that is just not there when working with dry erase). I also have better diagrams and images in my PowerPoints than I could ever draw freehand (and I don't get blinded by looking into the bright light of an overhead projector). Once you bring in embedded video in PowerPoint, it really brings new visuals to the learning experience.
One drawback that I do see about using PowerPoint is that the professor doesn't have multiple pages of notes up on the board at one time, as my professors did. In a larger lecture hall, my professors would have 6 blackboards to work with. As a student, I found being able to refer to exactly what the professor wrote 10 minutes ago very useful. If I could set up a lecture hall to be perfect, there would be two projectors for the PowerPoint showing two slides, another projector for a document camera that could also be used for close ups of samples, demonstrations, etc., and stadium seating so that no one has to look through someone else's head to see me or the info.
I refuse to print out my presentations as slides for my students. I've done it in the past and one semester I had the students ask me to stop, they preferred to write their own notes. One problem that I have noticed is that very few students really know how to take notes. The vast majority just copy exactly what's on the slide and call it note-taking. I repeatedly say, "Feel free to paraphrase what is on the slide, you don't need to write it down word for word." To help my students I have been going through my presentations and streamlining them, reducing the amount of text on each slide, in essence paraphrasing for them.
Isn't that the cover art for a David Brin book? I know I've seen that shot somewhere as a book cover.
None of them will help ME anymore, I got out of the K-12 system.
In any case, helping the teachers will help the students but allowing the teacher to focus more on the education and not on the behavior, figuring out how to teach the content without proper equipment, etc.
As for increased pay, I doubt very much that many people think that teachers are overpaid.
It's all well and good to offer free tuition but from my own experience, most people who excel at science, math, and engineering do not have the right personality, mindset, whatever you want to call it, to be teachers.
As a science teacher (7 years of teaching high school chemistry, physics, and earth science, now I'm trying to get into community college teaching), I have experienced the problem first hand.
IMHO, a few major changes would help out the whole education system, not just science/math.
1) Increase teachers' pay to more closely match that of similarly educated workers. Teaching (k-12) has historically been a "woman's job" and as we all know, historically women have been paid less for doing the same job as a man. I'm not condoning it, in fact, I think it's awful! I have a B.A. in Chem and an M.S. in Geosciences and I was making $65k my last year of teaching. A decent wage but compared to someone with my same level of experience and education it's about $20k too low. And don't give me that horseshit about "but teachers get so much vacation time", most every teacher I know used their "summer vacation" to do required professional development, take more classes, or many had a job just to make ends meet.
2) Reduce class size. The reason that so many kids slip through the cracks is that they are in a room with 35+ other students. One teacher can only help so many students at one time. Once you throw in all the time a teacher spends in a period just "riding herd" on the students, a student is lucky if they get one minute of time from the teacher. Get class size down to about 20-24 students per teacher and then you'll see some improvements.
3) Allocate more money for the classroom/allocate more money per student. California allocates about $6000/student/year. Out of that comes all the administration costs, teacher's salaries, maintenance of facilities, books, electricity, water, etc. Not a whole lot makes it to the classroom. I was lucky if I had $300/year to spend on supplies for the classroom. I had to replace broken lab equipment, buy videos, etc out of that every year. I was doing much the same labs that I had done when I was in high school 20 years ago.
4) Finally, give the teachers back some of the power that has been taken away. At every school I taught at, if there was a dispute between a teacher and student, all a parent had to do was threaten to sue and the administration would bend over and grab their ankles. Never once did anyone ask the question, "Who's the professional in this dispute?" "Who has the most to gain from filing this complaint?" Teachers should have to option to PERMANENTLY boot a disruptive student from their classroom. What do we do with the chronic miscreants you ask? FINE THE PARENTS! I've found that if you inconvenience the parent, the parent will crack down on their kid.
Now before you all start to cry about "teacher-tenure" and that it's so hard to get rid of a bad teacher, true tenure (you can't be fired, except in the MOST extreme cases) for k-12 teachers does not exist. As a teacher I had "permanent status", this is the same level of protection as any other contract employee. To fire a teacher you need to document the problem, attempt to help the employee(teacher) correct the problem through counseling, education, whatever. Then if the problem persists you can fire then with cause. The problem is that most administrators are not willing to follow the procedure to get rid of a bad teacher. I admit that the process does take a bit longer in education, on the scale of a year to two, but it's not impossible to fire a teacher because they have some special protections that other workers don't have. The only real protection a teacher has anymore is the union, and that's not saying much.
"In today's news, soldiers across the United States have demanded to have their MRI's analyzed to determine if the United States Government is secretly lacing said MRI's with hallucinogens."
Funny but it would have been funnier if the poster had called them MREs not MRIs. MRE = Meal Ready to Eat MRI = Magnetic Resonance Imaging, big difference.
A Nautical Mile is equal to 6000 feet or 1828.8 meters.
A Statute Mile ("normal mile") is 5280 feet or 1609.344 meters.
Why there are two miles? I have no idea.
I second this choice. The are written for teens using characters, situations, themes, language, and sentence structure that they will understand and identify with. They are also fairly quick reads (350 pages each).
I would also recommend Arthur C Clarke, in particular "Fountains of Paradise" which is an excellent story about building a Sky Tower/Orbital Tether.
Larry Niven, Issac Asimov, and David Brin are also all excellent writers but may be too advanced for most high school students.
If you read the entire article you would know that they are only doing this at the corporate headquarters not at store level, yet. It will be interesting to see how this works at the store level where the Sales Associate's job is to be available. This could be partially adapted to retail by allowing the employees to write the work schedule, within certain guidelines of course.
I think the first post had it right with point one but said too much;
"1- Never connect a Windows PC to the internet"