I can see how I did so awful in college, but am doing great in the real world.
You mean/.? That doesn't count.
OK, you're right: much of the real world doesn't require the ability to read above an 8th-grade level. But some of the most interesting and enriching parts do.
I don't know if this test in particular is a valid solution for it, but I've suggested that the art-and-design college where I work use something like this to change the handling of computers in their curriculum. Currently they assume incoming students know nothing and put an Intro to Computers class on their first-year class list. And a lot of them need it. But the ones who show up the first day of class with a scuffed-up PowerBook loaded with Lightwave, Final Cut, Macromedia Studio, and Adobe Creative Suite would be better off skipping the (IMHO) remedial education (a waste of their time, money, and enthusiasm) and go right into a studio class that teaches them what to do with Photoshop, not how to use it.
Do thee newer LCD monitors still have problems with non-native screen resolutions...
Yes, and they will for the foreseeable future; it's the nature of the technology. CRTs are inherently analog mechanisms, capable of (in theory) continuously variable scan frequencies. LCDs are inherently digital, with a fixed grid of pixels, and they mimic resolutions that don't match that grid by antialiasing/interpolating (i.e. faking it).
The only way LCDs can produce sharp displays at resolutions other than the physical grid they were manufactured for is when that grid is such high resolution that the lower resolutions are whole-number factors of it: e.g. a 2048x1536 LCD could do a good 1024x768 by using four physical pixels per data point... but it'll suck at 1280x1024 or 800x600. Build an LCD with resolution equal to the least common multiples of 1280/1024/800 x 1024/768/600 with the appropriate ratio, and it'll do all them without fuzziness.
And yet Apple, whose systems are dramatically preferred by chromatically-fascist graphic designers, sells CRTs only to their low-end eMac customers. I use a CRT and an Apple LCD side by side on my PowerMac, and I find the color reproduction on them roughly comparable, at least for my purposes. Having the appropriate color calibration profiles installed in the OS makes at least as much difference for accurate reproduction as the type of display/printing technology used.
I encourage people to look at a map of time zones. The Eastern Time zone stretches from the harbors of Maine to the wilds of Isle Royale within the U.S.; it's even wider in Canada. People from Spain to Poland are all in the same zone. The People's Republic of China: one time zone, 60 degress of longitude. And that's not even touching on the effect of latitude variations.
The point is that there is already no correspondence between sunrise/sunset and a given time of the clock, even within a given time zone. If you want it to be light out when the kiddies go to school at 7:00am, you either need to overcompensate by at least an hour to make sure you "fix" it for the whole time zone, or you have to go back to the old "noon = sun directly overhead" system.
Or you just accept that this variability is mostly a non-issue that human society has been coping with for about a century now, and get on with life.
Not in the United States*, it wasn't. I'm pretty sure the U.S. government stayed out of it until after 7 December 1941 (when that thing happened in Hawaii).
*Which is the country under discussion here, after all.
And what if the brother-in-law of the pilot of the rescue shuttle gets hit by a truck the night before, so he (the pilot) gets teary and misty-eyed at the wrong moment? And what if a loose screw from Skylab or one of the Apollo missions happens to intersect the orbit of the ISS a breaks a window? And what if just everything that could possibly go wrong goes wrong, all at once? What will the original poster find to worry about when it's all come true just the way he imagined it?
The copyright, patent and trademark laws etc. were created for specific purposes at different times.
So what? Cairo, Beijing, and Albuquerque were created by different people at different times in different places for different reasons, but they're all "cities". They have conceptual characteristics in common, and so do patents, trademarks, and copyrights (which can be owned/bought/sold, but exist only as expressions or implementations of ideas). You can try to deny that they have any commonality that warrants calling them all "intellectual property", but that's no more helpful to understanding them than ignoring their differences.
They are probably talking about the trademark law. But that's what you get when you use the term intellectual property, more confusion.
It's obvious that this is a trademark question. It has nothing to do with copyright, and it's only confusing if you don't know anything about intellectual property law. Seriously, sometimes/.ers sound as silly as a non-tech person talking about a "56 megahertz" dial-up connection, calling a 3.5" diskette a "hard disk", or saying that Microsoft invented the web browser.
Listen people: if you want to be taken seriously about legal matters, stop jabbering like impassioned no-nothings and learn something about the topic first. Saying "copyright" when you're talking about trademarks is like putting an "I'm an id10t" sticker on your forehead.
That's clearly not the case here. Look at them: The Capitol Building, Congressional office buildings, and Supreme Court are artificially pixelated into obscurity very selectively, with trees on the sidewalk next to them at full resolution. And the flat brown and olive roofs of the White House and the flanking Executive office buildings were obviously done with the "paint bucket" tool. (Interestingly, the Pentagon is unobscured.)
You can get clearer views of the tops of these buildings from, say, the Washington Monument, or planes flying into or out of Reagan National Airport, or watching The West Wing on Wednesday nights. There's no question that either Google or their source is editing these images, for reasons that could only be security-related. I'm not outraged over it or anything; I'm just amused that anyone thinks it's worth the trouble to do. And frankly a little surprised that anyone would look at this and argue that it wasn't being done.
The respect I've received over the course of my career (two decades, counting college jobs) has varied more with place than with time. More to the point, it depends on the people.
I've generally received the least respect from the least intelligent people. They don't have intelligence, they don't recognise it, they don't respect it.
That's not to be confused with technical expertise. I've been respected by people who could whup my butt with their wizardly skills, and by people who didn't know a byte from a battery. But they recognised my qualifications and respected them, because they were qualified for their jobs, and knew that deserved respect.
Actually, I was going to suggest the same thing: use wires. There's no way to prevent other people from broadcasting on the same frequencies. Sure, you can probably do some kind of key-signing to authenticate the signal, but that doesn't solve the problem of someone else simply drowning out authenticated signals with sufficient noise.
Authenticating and "protecting" the signal are two separate problems. If you use the aether to carry your signal, only the former is soluble (unless you can invoke the government or armed thugs). If you use a shielded wire of some kind, you have a pretty good shot at solving both.
Does the University recognize the acediting body of the jr. college. If so - then the courses transfer.
Don't count on it. A university may accept them as just numerical credit hours to apply toward the final number needed to graduate. But they're under no obligation to count them for any other degree requirements, such as the particular classes required for a given major. The classes need to correspond to actual classes that the university teaches, or they won't be accepted. (When I applied to an art-and-design college, my previous bachelor's degree in CS - 127 credit hours worth - only counted for 30 credits of "liberal arts & sciences" credit.)
If you were to take a year off... what would you do? Get a high-school-grad job that you'll hate, to motivate yourself to do better at university? Backpack across Europe/America (whichever you don't live in), and deplete your bank account? Hang with your dawgs and get drunk a lot? Unless you have something specific that you really want to do, you're probably just trying to put off making some kind of decision about what you want to do with your life, and that's what college is for! College is where you should go when you don't know where you want to go.
If you're not entirely sure what you want to study, find a good liberal-arts college, and eat from the academic buffet for a year or two. Change majors a couple times if you feel a need to. It might mean you end up on the five-year (or six-year) program anyway, but it'll probably make you a better, more interesting, and even more marketable person than a year of telemarketing or traveling would. If you find yourself at a college that doesn't require you to take a bunch of classes in fields you think you have no interest in... take some anyway. They might surprise you. (Some of them certainly surprised me.)
There's never an easier time to go to college than the year you graduate from high school. You're still in data-acquisition mode, used to staying up late at night, and are comfortable changing "jobs" by the hour and by the semester. Just as importantly, you haven't yet been distracted by most of the annoying stuff that awaits those who join the "real world"... and which never leaves you once you've been there. I had a friend in college who was a few years older than the rest of us, and even though we tried to treat him like "one of the boys", he wasn't; he was "Gramps". The social experience of college is an important part of the education (yes, even for geeks), and when you're under 21, a year really does make a difference.
It is possible to go "back" to college and get a lot out of it. After several years in the working world as a geek I decided to get an arts degree as well. There were some advantages to being a "non-traditional" student (e.g. I had functional time-management skills, and a clear understanding of what I was there for), but like my old classmate Gramps, I got few of the social benefits that time.
By the way, if you think you'd kinda like to take a year off the see the world, consider taking just the summer off for that. And maybe a summer or two during college, and a semester or two abroad if you can swing it. A friend and I took off (with our bicycles and a 1.5-person tent) for the UK after high school graduation, which was a fantastic experience. But we were still back for Freshling Orientation in September, and got the full advantage of that as well.
I have a little old TV that I wanted to use in my exercise room, but didn't want to run thick, ugly, large-turning-radius TV-grade coax to it. So I ran flimsy, unshielded speaker wire. You can tell it isn't running on the good stuff, but the signal still gets there in pretty good shape.
That's one advantage analog has over digital: it degrades gracefully.
Now all leading OSes have single-image, fixed-size icons.
If by "now" you mean "1995", you're absolutely right. But in 2005, the leading OSes (i.e. Windows, Mac OS, Linux) all support multiple-resolution icons. OS X will even scale them in real time for you.
It amazes me how otherwise-intelligent people can be so incapable of grokking a few basic legal principles. "Scrabble" is a trademark; only the holder of that trademark gets to use it. Sure there are some nuances to deal with, but at its heart it's a pretty simple and obvious rule. This Jared fella's an idiot to violate it, apparently not even trying to find an imaginative way around it. And the submitter of this article's an idiot for not understanding that.
I know it's cool to complain about how the law always sticks it to the little guy, but trademark law isn't just there to benefit corporations. It may not mean much in this case, but usually it benefits consumers too: it's how you know that "iPod" you bought is really going to live up to Apple's rep for good engineering. Be careful what you whine.
And that editorial comment about how Hasbro should pay this guy - for writing software and operating a site that's obviously designed to cut into the sales of their board sets! - is simply no-brain-engaged stupid. Yeah, maybe they should offer him a job. But maybe he should have had the sense to suggest that to them in the first place, and to take "no" for an answer and work around their legal rights, rather than instead painting a big "sue me" bulls-eye on his forehead.
how many iPod-touting Slashdotters are thinking of switching?
Error parsing question.
First, I already own a PowerMac G5 and an iBook G3, so I can't very well "switch" to Apple.
Second, I also own a Windows-running laptop, a Linux workstation, a Linux server, and an EPOC PDA (among other things), so the notion that I'd "switch" to any one platform is equally nonsensical.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean /.? That doesn't count.
OK, you're right: much of the real world doesn't require the ability to read above an 8th-grade level. But some of the most interesting and enriching parts do.
I don't know if this test in particular is a valid solution for it, but I've suggested that the art-and-design college where I work use something like this to change the handling of computers in their curriculum. Currently they assume incoming students know nothing and put an Intro to Computers class on their first-year class list. And a lot of them need it. But the ones who show up the first day of class with a scuffed-up PowerBook loaded with Lightwave, Final Cut, Macromedia Studio, and Adobe Creative Suite would be better off skipping the (IMHO) remedial education (a waste of their time, money, and enthusiasm) and go right into a studio class that teaches them what to do with Photoshop, not how to use it.
pot. kettle. black.
I hear they're more difficult about OS X refunds, though.
I'd guess that the number of car/wedding/beaver photos on the net has grown a lot more than that since 1996.
Yes, and they will for the foreseeable future; it's the nature of the technology. CRTs are inherently analog mechanisms, capable of (in theory) continuously variable scan frequencies. LCDs are inherently digital, with a fixed grid of pixels, and they mimic resolutions that don't match that grid by antialiasing/interpolating (i.e. faking it).
The only way LCDs can produce sharp displays at resolutions other than the physical grid they were manufactured for is when that grid is such high resolution that the lower resolutions are whole-number factors of it: e.g. a 2048x1536 LCD could do a good 1024x768 by using four physical pixels per data point... but it'll suck at 1280x1024 or 800x600. Build an LCD with resolution equal to the least common multiples of 1280/1024/800 x 1024/768/600 with the appropriate ratio, and it'll do all them without fuzziness.
And yet Apple, whose systems are dramatically preferred by chromatically-fascist graphic designers, sells CRTs only to their low-end eMac customers. I use a CRT and an Apple LCD side by side on my PowerMac, and I find the color reproduction on them roughly comparable, at least for my purposes. Having the appropriate color calibration profiles installed in the OS makes at least as much difference for accurate reproduction as the type of display/printing technology used.
The point is that there is already no correspondence between sunrise/sunset and a given time of the clock, even within a given time zone. If you want it to be light out when the kiddies go to school at 7:00am, you either need to overcompensate by at least an hour to make sure you "fix" it for the whole time zone, or you have to go back to the old "noon = sun directly overhead" system.
Or you just accept that this variability is mostly a non-issue that human society has been coping with for about a century now, and get on with life.
Not in the United States*, it wasn't. I'm pretty sure the U.S. government stayed out of it until after 7 December 1941 (when that thing happened in Hawaii).
*Which is the country under discussion here, after all.
And what if the brother-in-law of the pilot of the rescue shuttle gets hit by a truck the night before, so he (the pilot) gets teary and misty-eyed at the wrong moment? And what if a loose screw from Skylab or one of the Apollo missions happens to intersect the orbit of the ISS a breaks a window? And what if just everything that could possibly go wrong goes wrong, all at once? What will the original poster find to worry about when it's all come true just the way he imagined it?
So what? Cairo, Beijing, and Albuquerque were created by different people at different times in different places for different reasons, but they're all "cities". They have conceptual characteristics in common, and so do patents, trademarks, and copyrights (which can be owned/bought/sold, but exist only as expressions or implementations of ideas). You can try to deny that they have any commonality that warrants calling them all "intellectual property", but that's no more helpful to understanding them than ignoring their differences.
It's obvious that this is a trademark question. It has nothing to do with copyright, and it's only confusing if you don't know anything about intellectual property law. Seriously, sometimes /.ers sound as silly as a non-tech person talking about a "56 megahertz" dial-up connection, calling a 3.5" diskette a "hard disk", or saying that Microsoft invented the web browser.
Listen people: if you want to be taken seriously about legal matters, stop jabbering like impassioned no-nothings and learn something about the topic first. Saying "copyright" when you're talking about trademarks is like putting an "I'm an id10t" sticker on your forehead.
That's clearly not the case here. Look at them: The Capitol Building, Congressional office buildings, and Supreme Court are artificially pixelated into obscurity very selectively, with trees on the sidewalk next to them at full resolution. And the flat brown and olive roofs of the White House and the flanking Executive office buildings were obviously done with the "paint bucket" tool. (Interestingly, the Pentagon is unobscured.)
You can get clearer views of the tops of these buildings from, say, the Washington Monument, or planes flying into or out of Reagan National Airport, or watching The West Wing on Wednesday nights. There's no question that either Google or their source is editing these images, for reasons that could only be security-related. I'm not outraged over it or anything; I'm just amused that anyone thinks it's worth the trouble to do. And frankly a little surprised that anyone would look at this and argue that it wasn't being done.
My first guess would be hysterical paranoia about "national security".
I've generally received the least respect from the least intelligent people. They don't have intelligence, they don't recognise it, they don't respect it.
That's not to be confused with technical expertise. I've been respected by people who could whup my butt with their wizardly skills, and by people who didn't know a byte from a battery. But they recognised my qualifications and respected them, because they were qualified for their jobs, and knew that deserved respect.
Authenticating and "protecting" the signal are two separate problems. If you use the aether to carry your signal, only the former is soluble (unless you can invoke the government or armed thugs). If you use a shielded wire of some kind, you have a pretty good shot at solving both.
Don't count on it. A university may accept them as just numerical credit hours to apply toward the final number needed to graduate. But they're under no obligation to count them for any other degree requirements, such as the particular classes required for a given major. The classes need to correspond to actual classes that the university teaches, or they won't be accepted. (When I applied to an art-and-design college, my previous bachelor's degree in CS - 127 credit hours worth - only counted for 30 credits of "liberal arts & sciences" credit.)
Sounds like a speech-to-COBOL processor.
If you're not entirely sure what you want to study, find a good liberal-arts college, and eat from the academic buffet for a year or two. Change majors a couple times if you feel a need to. It might mean you end up on the five-year (or six-year) program anyway, but it'll probably make you a better, more interesting, and even more marketable person than a year of telemarketing or traveling would. If you find yourself at a college that doesn't require you to take a bunch of classes in fields you think you have no interest in... take some anyway. They might surprise you. (Some of them certainly surprised me.)
There's never an easier time to go to college than the year you graduate from high school. You're still in data-acquisition mode, used to staying up late at night, and are comfortable changing "jobs" by the hour and by the semester. Just as importantly, you haven't yet been distracted by most of the annoying stuff that awaits those who join the "real world"... and which never leaves you once you've been there. I had a friend in college who was a few years older than the rest of us, and even though we tried to treat him like "one of the boys", he wasn't; he was "Gramps". The social experience of college is an important part of the education (yes, even for geeks), and when you're under 21, a year really does make a difference.
It is possible to go "back" to college and get a lot out of it. After several years in the working world as a geek I decided to get an arts degree as well. There were some advantages to being a "non-traditional" student (e.g. I had functional time-management skills, and a clear understanding of what I was there for), but like my old classmate Gramps, I got few of the social benefits that time.
By the way, if you think you'd kinda like to take a year off the see the world, consider taking just the summer off for that. And maybe a summer or two during college, and a semester or two abroad if you can swing it. A friend and I took off (with our bicycles and a 1.5-person tent) for the UK after high school graduation, which was a fantastic experience. But we were still back for Freshling Orientation in September, and got the full advantage of that as well.
So much for the dark-matter factory I spent so much money building. I just hope I can get my current inventory liquidated on eBay.
That's one advantage analog has over digital: it degrades gracefully.
If by "now" you mean "1995", you're absolutely right. But in 2005, the leading OSes (i.e. Windows, Mac OS, Linux) all support multiple-resolution icons. OS X will even scale them in real time for you.
It amazes me how otherwise-intelligent people can be so incapable of grokking a few basic legal principles. "Scrabble" is a trademark; only the holder of that trademark gets to use it. Sure there are some nuances to deal with, but at its heart it's a pretty simple and obvious rule. This Jared fella's an idiot to violate it, apparently not even trying to find an imaginative way around it. And the submitter of this article's an idiot for not understanding that.
I know it's cool to complain about how the law always sticks it to the little guy, but trademark law isn't just there to benefit corporations. It may not mean much in this case, but usually it benefits consumers too: it's how you know that "iPod" you bought is really going to live up to Apple's rep for good engineering. Be careful what you whine.
And that editorial comment about how Hasbro should pay this guy - for writing software and operating a site that's obviously designed to cut into the sales of their board sets! - is simply no-brain-engaged stupid. Yeah, maybe they should offer him a job. But maybe he should have had the sense to suggest that to them in the first place, and to take "no" for an answer and work around their legal rights, rather than instead painting a big "sue me" bulls-eye on his forehead.
"No one is innocent!" --Agent Rogersz, Repo Man
Error parsing question.
First, I already own a PowerMac G5 and an iBook G3, so I can't very well "switch" to Apple.
Second, I also own a Windows-running laptop, a Linux workstation, a Linux server, and an EPOC PDA (among other things), so the notion that I'd "switch" to any one platform is equally nonsensical.