you summed it up, no matter what rules are made they still need to be enforced. The sad part is that every time I've had a crummy professor and tried to do something about it I have gotten nowhere because noone would touch them because they had tenure. They people in charge of that particular department almost admited that the particular teacher was worthless and wasn't doing their job. It's almost like a get out of jail free card from the department. I was literally told that short of one professor killing a student there was no way they could fire him.
The ability to speak freely is definitely a good thing though, in my experience tenure still does more harm then good.
I would agree absolutely. I can't remember how many times I have been told, ohh so and so is tenured in and there is nothing we can do about your complaint. Maybe 10? Maybe more.
A friend who's dad happens to be the dean of my particular college said that there was a movement a few years ago to start phasing out tenure but it was thought that if one school did it all the professors would flock to the schools that hadn't.
It's the biggest detriment to the university system today, hands down.
Has a Heavy Manufacturing plant Several Assembly plants A major division of Microsoft that does nothing but software design. More general services then you can count A huge grant, something like 50 million from the DOD for the college I go to, NDSU, to do R&D on nanotech.
What were you saying again? Ohh ya, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Ya, that is what I was going to say, we've been making these in North Dakota for as long as I can remember, my dad and his friends made them in the early 70's. PVC pipe, a flamable gas, a big fat hard potato, you are set!
Divx is a variant of MPEG 4 from what I understand, just like Xvid is. They are both based on a standard. They talk about it in the FAQ's on their site.
(from their site) Q: What video codecs are supported by KiSS DP-450 ?
A: All video codecs that comply with the specifications of ISO-MPEG4 - Advanced, Simple Profile, are supported by the DP-450. DivX 4.x and 5.x comply with this standard, exept DivX 5.02 features- GMC (Global Motion Compensation) and QP (Quarter Pexel) which are Advanced, Advanced Profile features.
What seems nice is that if someone comes out with a newer version of xvid and or divx all you need to do is update your fireware and they claim they will stay on top of that.
There is even a region free firmware someone wrote for this thing here. http://www.firmware-flash.com/~hijacker/kis s/
I went hog wild over this when I first heard about it but the price is a little too steep, $400. Just wait about 6 months to a year and every set top box will be shipping with an mpeg 4 decoder, just like MP3.
Cringely would be screaming "HomePlug HomePlug" He really seems to like that.
Kind of off topic but not really....Anyone else have their local power company doing trial runs with powerline broadband? I remember reading about this on/. a while back but it seems that some companies are actually getting their poop in a group. Which amazes me, have any of you actually been to a board meeting for a utility company? My grandparents went to one last month, they are in their 70's and they said they felt young! Most of those companies are really really conservative.
I met a woman once in college who had no interest in computers whatsoever. I asked her why she was taking CS classes then, she told me she wanted an SUV. That was it! She just wanted money.
I still see it today. I have a friend who is going to pay $25,000 to get a crappy 2 year degree from a crummy buisness school for CIS or MIS or CS or whatever they change it to that week. He could go to the University I am (NDSU) and get a bachelors for less money then that and make twice as much when he got out of school. I keep trying to convince him not to do it but he won't listen.
I think most of the posts on here are people bitching because they were dead wood and they got burned. Well shit happens, now move on with your life and get the job you should of had in the first place.
Leave the engineering work to those of us that have a pashion for it.
The general area of the trail is pretty much already laid out. In North Dakota there are two highways, 1804 and 1806, symbolizing the route they took in the respective years, their are several very nice places to stop in ND such as the Louis and Clark interpretive center in Washburn and Ft. Lincoln in Mandan. My grandfather helped design the interpretive center, some engineering work and although the latter wasn't constructed until 70 years later it gives you a glimpse into the frontier past of the upper midwest. General Custers rebuilt house, a wooden fort circa 1870 and Mandan Indian Earth Lodges you can go into.
The Missouri has been damed up in many spots and only 3 or so spots remain where one can see the river as they did, from Garrision Dam south to Bismarck (canoed it for 5 days last summer for the second time, very very beutiful) and two sections in Montana before and after FT. Peck Dam. South of Bismarck is Lake Oahe and further south then that going into SD and Nebraska it is kinda polluted.
If you were to ever get near this area I would recommend stoping in, I grew up in ND and still live in ND I don't think it gets the credit it deserves for it's beauty and history.
No I don't work for the ND Dept. of Tourism, hehe
If you have any questions about what to do or stay, email me, moszer AT moszer DOT net
Exactly. Just last week either/. or CNN had an article saying that the EU was going to take steps to stop the brain drain. Look at how many foreigners come to the US for grad school. Once they get here, most stay here. They have kids and they become one of us, not Indian-Americans or Chinese-Americans, but Americans.
Since most of this thread just degenerated into the typical gun control flamewar I thought I would actually repond to the question at hand.
I believe the most unbiased report on guns and crime rates has to be John Lott's "More guns less crime".
He didn't come up with the name until after he did the study. The name makes it sound like he was biased to start but he makes it very obvious why he wasn't. The forward is the best part of the book, since it is now on second edition, he talks about the reactions he got once he finished his book and then once it got media attention.
Gets pretty detailed in the statistical analysis but it is very good overall and the closest thing you are going to find to an unbiased source in my opinion, Good luck in your research!
That is good. You should question these things. Never just believe things you read. Just because someone posts is on/. doesn't mean it is true. I have come to realise that most of the stories that come out like this are pretty politically charged. Almost everyone just believes them without thinking about it. "Just more proof of global warming" they say.
So what if I told you that the town I live in set 3 record lows this year. That it snowed here already. That it was colder this year then on average. (these are all true by the way, Fargo, ND) I keep finding ways to push my agenda of global cooling, every story I can find that talks about a record low, early snow, blizzards, etc. I print in my paper or on my website and I never print any stories about warmer then usual events, after a while my readers start to believe it. Then I don't have to push my agenda anymore because every story you here of cold weather somewhere you think. Ohh it's just more proof of global cooling! Does this make sense to anyone else? I think this is what the media is doing, pushing global warming for a political agenda.
It's like the sensationalist new story that never went away. The kidnappings of little rich white girls went away (they wouldn't cover any others), the shark attacks went away. Gary Condit went away. School shootings went away. Mad cow disease went away, Little Ellian went away. Oj went away. Ohh, and we are all gonna die from global warming, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. That one always seems to come back to life.
I just got through with a murderous physics test, my brain is screaming for no more!
No That is a good point.. I Agree..Except the viscosity of water is even worse, I think it is 4 or 5 times that of air in this example That is what we are doing in class right now. There is a future in this though, didn't you ever watch Seaquest? Remember Lucas? He had that dolphin craft that went a couple hundred kph..
The Motion Picture Industry has alot of members in congress in their pocket. They make record profits every year and they still complain. They will blow 2 mil making some technique to prevent people from recording movies and then the movie theaters will have to buy new projectors to accomodate the tequinque and then the guys who were recording the movies in the theaters will just wait until the dvd comes out and make a divx rip.
This doesn't benefit anyone except Valenti and his clan of greedy hollywood cronies. Kind of a troll I know but it needed to be said..
You know the funny thing is that noone ever takes that into account during trials anymore. There is an old rule in the judicial system that says you can rule 3 ways in a case, Guilty, Not Guilty or Not Guilty because the law is unfair/unjust. I don't remember the name of the clause right of the top of my head, but noone is ever told about this anymore. Yet it is still a viable alternative. It would be nice to see a jury rule on a case regarding the DMCA and say the law is unjust.
Ohh man, tell me about it, I went to a junior college for a CIS degree, there were 50 people in that program, only 10 could format a harddrive and by the time it was all said and done only 3 of us knew what was going on. It was really sad.
I transfered to NDSU and I don't see that so much here, maybe a little in EE, there are designated weeder coursed in that major , like logic design and entry level programming. Most people decide they want to be accountants after taking Digital Systems and getting an F. Hehe
After running single cpu systems for 10 years I finally antied up and built a dual 1 gig P III box, I would never go back.
There are many many reasons for this, first off my computer hasn't locked up in probobly 4 months, I always have a free processor to kill the app! Even though faily few programs are multi-threaded, SETI@HOME, Photoshop, etc, I still use them both evenly by running 3 or 4 things at once...
I still love to be able to burn a cd, listen to music and play counter-stike all at the same time.
I heard of a Higher-UP at Transmetta saying that SMP was crap one time, what a moron, no wonder they aren't doing that well.
Now maybe when we start seeing Asyncronous processor systems come down to the desktop level is when things will really start to cook..
Mars is the future. I was reading on NASA's webpage about two missions in the next two years that will send rovers to the surface again to explore around. I think something like that is needed, gets everyone interested and excited.
Pick any console you like, anyone, I don't care. I can show you hundreds if not thousands of games that you can't play on it, there is nothing you can do to make them work, nothing! Wether it is the media the game is on or just the code the game is written it. They won't work
Now show me one game, just one, that I can't play on my PC, I know there are some games that aren't out yet like Halo and the such, but they will be, count on it, if not them some guy will write an emulator and we will all be able to play them. They did it for the PS1, they did it for the Nintendo 64, I even remember rumors of an X-box emulator on/. It will happen. Plus I can do 10,000 other things with my computer that you can't do with your console.
Whats that guys? want to play an old Atari game? Sorry you have an X-box can't do it, you need an Atari. What's that? ol' el_nofx has a computer with an Atari emulator that works perfect? Damn! Hey, when your done lets play some Quake 3, or maybe some Counter Stike, after that I want to play PONG!
Slashdot Mirror
you summed it up, no matter what rules are made they still need to be enforced. The sad part is that every time I've had a crummy professor and tried to do something about it I have gotten nowhere because noone would touch them because they had tenure. They people in charge of that particular department almost admited that the particular teacher was worthless and wasn't doing their job. It's almost like a get out of jail free card from the department. I was literally told that short of one professor killing a student there was no way they could fire him.
The ability to speak freely is definitely a good thing though, in my experience tenure still does more harm then good.
I would agree absolutely. I can't remember how many times I have been told, ohh so and so is tenured in and there is nothing we can do about your complaint. Maybe 10? Maybe more.
A friend who's dad happens to be the dean of my particular college said that there was a movement a few years ago to start phasing out tenure but it was thought that if one school did it all the professors would flock to the schools that hadn't.
It's the biggest detriment to the university system today, hands down.
Me either. I would say I'm a reletively informed geek too. That is probobly why it went under, noone I know has ever even mentioned this mag.
Sign me up please!
Fargo North Dakota (population 150,000)
Has a Heavy Manufacturing plant
Several Assembly plants
A major division of Microsoft that does nothing but software design.
More general services then you can count
A huge grant, something like 50 million from the DOD for the college I go to, NDSU, to do R&D on nanotech.
What were you saying again? Ohh ya, you have no idea what you are talking about.
Ya, that is what I was going to say, we've been making these in North Dakota for as long as I can remember, my dad and his friends made them in the early 70's. PVC pipe, a flamable gas, a big fat hard potato, you are set!
Divx is a variant of MPEG 4 from what I understand, just like Xvid is. They are both based on a standard. They talk about it in the FAQ's on their site.
s s/
(from their site)
Q: What video codecs are supported by KiSS DP-450 ?
A: All video codecs that comply with the specifications of ISO-MPEG4 - Advanced, Simple Profile, are supported by the DP-450. DivX 4.x and 5.x comply with this standard, exept DivX 5.02 features- GMC (Global Motion Compensation) and QP (Quarter Pexel) which are Advanced, Advanced Profile features.
What seems nice is that if someone comes out with a newer version of xvid and or divx all you need to do is update your fireware and they claim they will stay on top of that.
There is even a region free firmware someone wrote for this thing here.
http://www.firmware-flash.com/~hijacker/ki
I went hog wild over this when I first heard about it but the price is a little too steep, $400. Just wait about 6 months to a year and every set top box will be shipping with an mpeg 4 decoder, just like MP3.
Cringely would be screaming "HomePlug HomePlug"
/. a while back but it seems that some companies are actually getting their poop in a group. Which amazes me, have any of you actually been to a board meeting for a utility company? My grandparents went to one last month, they are in their 70's and they said they felt young! Most of those companies are really really conservative.
He really seems to like that.
Kind of off topic but not really....Anyone else have their local power company doing trial runs with powerline broadband? I remember reading about this on
You are completely right
I met a woman once in college who had no interest in computers whatsoever. I asked her why she was taking CS classes then, she told me she wanted an SUV. That was it! She just wanted money.
I still see it today. I have a friend who is going to pay $25,000 to get a crappy 2 year degree from a crummy buisness school for CIS or MIS or CS or whatever they change it to that week. He could go to the University I am (NDSU) and get a bachelors for less money then that and make twice as much when he got out of school. I keep trying to convince him not to do it but he won't listen.
I think most of the posts on here are people bitching because they were dead wood and they got burned. Well shit happens, now move on with your life and get the job you should of had in the first place.
Leave the engineering work to those of us that have a pashion for it.
Absolutely, my Grandfather is still a practicing Structural Engineer (68 years old) and the new guys he hires think he is a god for knowledge.
You definitely get better with age in that field
The general area of the trail is pretty much already laid out. In North Dakota there are two highways, 1804 and 1806, symbolizing the route they took in the respective years, their are several very nice places to stop in ND such as the Louis and Clark interpretive center in Washburn and Ft. Lincoln in Mandan. My grandfather helped design the interpretive center, some engineering work and although the latter wasn't constructed until 70 years later it gives you a glimpse into the frontier past of the upper midwest. General Custers rebuilt house, a wooden fort circa 1870 and Mandan Indian Earth Lodges you can go into.
/.ers!
The Missouri has been damed up in many spots and only 3 or so spots remain where one can see the river as they did, from Garrision Dam south to Bismarck (canoed it for 5 days last summer for the second time, very very beutiful) and two sections in Montana before and after FT. Peck Dam. South of Bismarck is Lake Oahe and further south then that going into SD and Nebraska it is kinda polluted.
If you were to ever get near this area I would recommend stoping in, I grew up in ND and still live in ND I don't think it gets the credit it deserves for it's beauty and history.
No I don't work for the ND Dept. of Tourism, hehe
If you have any questions about what to do or stay, email me, moszer AT moszer DOT net
Merry Christmas
Exactly. Just last week either /. or CNN had an article saying that the EU was going to take steps to stop the brain drain. Look at how many foreigners come to the US for grad school. Once they get here, most stay here. They have kids and they become one of us, not Indian-Americans or Chinese-Americans, but Americans.
Since most of this thread just degenerated into the typical gun control flamewar I thought I would actually repond to the question at hand.
I believe the most unbiased report on guns and crime rates has to be
John Lott's "More guns less crime".
He didn't come up with the name until after he did the study. The name makes it sound like he was biased to start but he makes it very obvious why he wasn't. The forward is the best part of the book, since it is now on second edition, he talks about the reactions he got once he finished his book and then once it got media attention.
Gets pretty detailed in the statistical analysis but it is very good overall and the closest thing you are going to find to an unbiased source in my opinion, Good luck in your research!
His first post everybody! Give him a round of applause for nailing a 5.
That is good. You should question these things. Never just believe things you read. Just because someone posts is on /. doesn't mean it is true. I have come to realise that most of the stories that come out like this are pretty politically charged. Almost everyone just believes them without thinking about it. "Just more proof of global warming" they say.
So what if I told you that the town I live in set 3 record lows this year. That it snowed here already. That it was colder this year then on average. (these are all true by the way, Fargo, ND) I keep finding ways to push my agenda of global cooling, every story I can find that talks about a record low, early snow, blizzards, etc. I print in my paper or on my website and I never print any stories about warmer then usual events, after a while my readers start to believe it. Then I don't have to push my agenda anymore because every story you here of cold weather somewhere you think. Ohh it's just more proof of global cooling! Does this make sense to anyone else? I think this is what the media is doing, pushing global warming for a political agenda.
It's like the sensationalist new story that never went away. The kidnappings of little rich white girls went away (they wouldn't cover any others), the shark attacks went away. Gary Condit went away. School shootings went away. Mad cow disease went away, Little Ellian went away. Oj went away. Ohh, and we are all gonna die from global warming, the sky is falling, the sky is falling. That one always seems to come back to life.
Ya, and someone should remind us all on the 19th of November when they actually do start letting us comment, most /.ers have a memory like a fruit fly.
AHHHH! STOP THE MADDNESS!
I just got through with a murderous physics test, my brain is screaming for no more!
No That is a good point.. I Agree..Except the viscosity of water is even worse, I think it is 4 or 5 times that of air in this example That is what we are doing in class right now. There is a future in this though, didn't you ever watch Seaquest? Remember Lucas? He had that dolphin craft that went a couple hundred kph..
It doesn't.
It's complete crap.
The Motion Picture Industry has alot of members in congress in their pocket. They make record profits every year and they still complain. They will blow 2 mil making some technique to prevent people from recording movies and then the movie theaters will have to buy new projectors to accomodate the tequinque and then the guys who were recording the movies in the theaters will just wait until the dvd comes out and make a divx rip.
This doesn't benefit anyone except Valenti and his clan of greedy hollywood cronies.
Kind of a troll I know but it needed to be said..
It's called "Jury Nullification" that jarred the memory. Found some proof here
http://www.mindspring.com/~frdmftr/juryveto.htm
You know the funny thing is that noone ever takes that into account during trials anymore. There is an old rule in the judicial system that says you can rule 3 ways in a case, Guilty, Not Guilty or Not Guilty because the law is unfair/unjust. I don't remember the name of the clause right of the top of my head, but noone is ever told about this anymore. Yet it is still a viable alternative. It would be nice to see a jury rule on a case regarding the DMCA and say the law is unjust.
Ohh man, tell me about it, I went to a junior college for a CIS degree, there were 50 people in that program, only 10 could format a harddrive and by the time it was all said and done only 3 of us knew what was going on. It was really sad.
I transfered to NDSU and I don't see that so much here, maybe a little in EE, there are designated weeder coursed in that major , like logic design and entry level programming. Most people decide they want to be accountants after taking Digital Systems and getting an F. Hehe
This is awesome, because SMP is the future baby.
After running single cpu systems for 10 years I finally antied up and built a dual 1 gig P III box, I would never go back.
There are many many reasons for this, first off my computer hasn't locked up in probobly 4 months, I always have a free processor to kill the app! Even though faily few programs are multi-threaded, SETI@HOME, Photoshop, etc, I still use them both evenly by running 3 or 4 things at once...
I still love to be able to burn a cd, listen to music and play counter-stike all at the same time.
I heard of a Higher-UP at Transmetta saying that SMP was crap one time, what a moron, no wonder they aren't doing that well.
Now maybe when we start seeing Asyncronous processor systems come down to the desktop level is when things will really start to cook..
Mars is the future. I was reading on NASA's webpage about two missions in the next two years that will send rovers to the surface again to explore around. I think something like that is needed, gets everyone interested and excited.
To pass my physics test tomorrow, to maybe get laid this month, and to find enough money to buy beer this weekend.
Is anyone doing math by hand any longer, I wonder?
Ya, I am an undergrad in EE, that is all I do all day.
Do they miss the cerebral nourishment of solving equations?
Not around here anyway, i saw a guy tell a professor to shove an equation the other day.
Engineering today feels like that window seat on the airplane.
Well come down from the trip and help me solve this integral.
Ok noone else has said it, so I will..
/. It will happen. Plus I can do 10,000 other things with my computer that you can't do with your console.
Here is my argument..
Pick any console you like, anyone, I don't care. I can show you hundreds if not thousands of games that you can't play on it, there is nothing you can do to make them work, nothing! Wether it is the media the game is on or just the code the game is written it. They won't work
Now show me one game, just one, that I can't play on my PC, I know there are some games that aren't out yet like Halo and the such, but they will be, count on it, if not them some guy will write an emulator and we will all be able to play them. They did it for the PS1, they did it for the Nintendo 64, I even remember rumors of an X-box emulator on
Whats that guys? want to play an old Atari game? Sorry you have an X-box can't do it, you need an Atari. What's that? ol' el_nofx has a computer with an Atari emulator that works perfect? Damn!
Hey, when your done lets play some Quake 3, or maybe some Counter Stike, after that I want to play PONG!