They've thrown their clout around for a while. The new 4G networks that will be coming on will use the C block, which had network neutrality provisions put in because of Google's clout.
They could just talk to Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, or any other major network infra provider and get DWDM (read "extra colors") capability rolled into their switch. It would probably cost 5m Euro, but the tech already exists (and has since the mid 70's).
Here's the problem- can you tell me, straight up, the value of the governmental services that you use? You've got your simple direct ones ones- roads/public transit, local schools and whatnot. Then you've got the slightly harder to count ones- fire and police, though we can count these as insurance-type costs. Now we get to the ones that are impossible to enumerate. What's the price of having the armed forces protect our country? What's the value of providing student loans to people, thus giving us an educated workforce? What's the cost of having someone tell us what the weather is going to be like, or predicting the next hurricane or earthquake?
You say that governments should follow the same basic economic rules businesses do, but would this really help or hinder private business? By this token Google, Cisco, and just about every major company should be paying the US government obscene royalties for using the internet. DARPA did, after all, invent it, so it's only fair to license it for what it's worth. How about medical research, or the stuff that's come out of NASA? The government has given so much away, whereas any private corporation would have patented and licensed the crap out of it. Let's be honest- how many private companies are financing risky research nowadays?
There are many reasons to be against the taxation proposed here. I think that any money made overseas shouldn't be taxable in the US because, quite honestly, the money wasn't made here. I'd be fine with companies bringing cash back to the US tax-free because that'd be more money that can be spent in our borders. Your argument, however, is silly. You can't tabulate how much government you use because it's everywhere. Hell, I think throwing 30+% of your profits to taxes is a pretty fair deal considering we live in a pretty stable society. There's also an issue of fairness- if you get rich because of a underpaid populous that's denied basic benefits (and the government steps in to provide them), it's only fair that you actually pay for the benefits needed for the workers that are used. As broken as the system is, the gov't does provide a basic safety net that corporations don't, and this is something we indeed need.
This wouldn't help at all, and probably hurt in the long run. It may have worked 10 years ago when working in different theaters was difficult, but everything is so connected now that the company would probably just keep H1B guy in his home country in one of their satellite offices. I guarantee you that your Ciscos, IBMs, HPs and the like (you know, the major users of H1Bs) have offices in India, China, Japan, the EU and Australia. The company doesn't pay the ridiculous bribe, and the US don't get the associated state/income/sales tax this dude would have paid. Double loss.
It was an example of the Lotus, which is by all means a very light car. 100lbs is an 8% weight gain for that car, which is significant for a small 2 seater. In the end, every pound matters in a car- back in the day when I was on a hybrid electric vehicle team, we rebuilt an Explorer with an aluminum frame. That alone boosted fuel economy by 3-4 mpg.
Emissions stuff also cuts into your efficiency. While the cats thrown into our cars are fairly awesome, they restrict flow like crazy, making it harder for the engine to breathe easy. All the small things do add up in the end.
Part of it is that safety and emissions requirements are more stringent in the USA, so there are a lot of modifications that need to be made in order to sell the cars here. For example (if I recall correctly) the US version of the new Lotus Elise weighs something like 50-100lbs more than the Euro version because of the safety equipment they had to throw in.
That said, yes, it's stupid that a lot of the European cars aren't Stateside. In addition to being more efficient, they're so much better looking than the crap they try selling us here.
I can pay bills through the American Express credit card management site. I'm really not too worried, as I can always dispute charges on my credit cards- happened once and it was all sorted out in about half an hour. I also keep a low credit limit on my cards, so if there's any damage financially it's minimal.
What the deuce are you talking about? A lot of crap uses the x86 platform with commodity hardware, and we're not entitled to their OS's either. Apple is FAR from a monopoly- what market do they have cornered?
What lack of readability? All my Perl stuff is very readable, and it's easy to follow what's going on. If I use a crazy regex, then I leave a nice comment saying what it does.
Just because you can obfuscate Perl to the point where you can move a mountain with one line of code doesn't make it unreadable- I can do that in any language. If you're complaining about readability, the problem probably exists between the keyboard and the chair. A good dev puts out good code, and a bad dev will make unreadable stuff.
Over here we use the right language for the job. Perl, Python, C, Java- they're all tools with strengths and weaknesses. Use appropriately and you win.
It actually kind of annoys me that people expect their parents to pay for college. Yeah, it'd be nice, but you expect all of the freedom of being an adult without any of the responsibility...
I went to Cornell and managed to pay the entire bill myself. I've got a quite a bit of student debt, but I've also got a really good job that's allowing for me to pay off my bills very quickly. Go to a good school, you get good opportunities afterwards (contrary to popular belief, name recognition goes a long way). Fill out your FAFSA, use the power of Google to find scholarships and fight for 'em, and whatever the government and really nice people don't give you, pull out in private loans (Sallie Mae, etc...). Heck, interest rates are basically at rock bottom right now, so you won't get hosed. Having a loans also helps motivate you, trust me. You're less likely to goof off (still have fun, but not blow off work), plus you get fiscally responsible pretty quickly (a lot faster than most of your classmates).
Anyway, stepping off of my soapbox of "pay for yourself," as it looks like thats you're trying to do, I don't think many (if any) company will pay for your education right now this moment. After you're in college for a year or two, however, some of these opportunities crop up, but I've seen them more in the financial sector than in tech. Get an internship or two and it'll help you immensely financially and get a job after college. If you're as good as you say you are, you should be able to find one freshman year- go to the career fair with a good resume AFTER meeting with your career services center to get it brushed up, and practice some interview skills (some say it doesn't matter, and it may not, but it will most definitely help you stand out from the crowd). There is ONE program that I know of that is what you're looking for, but it ain't FOSS-- look up the "Stokes Educational Scholarship Program" for the NSA. They will pay tuition and books, and give you summer internships in return for 1.5x your stay in college (4 years undergrad, 6 years NSA).
I can see where you're trying to go with this. It's important to realize while analyzing Watership Down may not be the most important thing to you, some people may love it. Same thing goes about calculus. I loved it, most people hated it. That's why I'm an engineer now and they teach English. Reading a whole bunch of books, however, can't really hurt someone. While trying to find the true meaning of a wax figure in a Sherlock Holmes mystery may be going a bit far, books help people to get a feel for the world around them and how times have changed. But really, in the end, it never hurts to read.
History is also a pretty important thing for grade school kids to learn... I actually wish I paid more attention to it when I was in high school. I could always say "those who don't know their history are bound to repeat it," but really, I'd just like to have a better understanding of the world and how we got here. It's not terribly important to me, hell, it's just an idle curiosity, but to others who would go into politics, they'd better know that stuff cold. Local history is also a kind of cool thing to know, or at least I think so.
Look, I really think in high school a broad education is best. I learned in HS that I wanted to be an engineer because I was exposed to math and science. Others in my class decided they wanted to go study history because they were exposed to history classes. When you're in college, you can go ahead and specialize, but grade school isn't the place for a kid to decide what subjects are "useful" or not.
I second the Nikon scanner. I've used the smaller one for my film negatives, and it's produced some amazing stuff. The Nikon software also does a damn fine job of removing dust/scratches (if you want it to). With 35mm stuff, you can get a scan and postprocessing done in around a minute per slide, so you won't be spending all year doing this. This is what the parent is talking about. It's around $1700, but when you're done scanning those photos, you can just as easily scan in all 35mm negatives you've got. If you want, shoot me an e-mail (marcinjb [at] gmail) and I'll send you a few of the pictures I've scanned in so you can judge quality.
I just got my 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro, no problems whatsoever. The fans are quiet, but very efficient, I guess. I've watched a few movies while crunching some numbers in the background, giving the processor a run for its money, and the bottom has never reached the point where I had to move the computer off of my lap.
For what it's worth, I believe that this was meant to be a feature in 10.3, but it got cut. As I recall, when Steve Jobs first announced the OS, there was a small blurb on the "Sneak Peek" page about a "Home on your iPod" feature. It was up for a month or so, then disappeared. Guess it's been in the pipeline for a while. Source.
Yes and no. Engineers already know what goes into building what they design. In college (at least in mine), engineers are required to take fabrication courses. MechEs need to know how to use a mill and a lathe. EEs need to know how to solder and how to make a circuit board. Since they know what goes into the building of their stuff, their time is much better spent honing their design than actually overseeing how their product is built. Yes, of course they should make prototypes and see how they work, where they fail, then go back to designing. An engineer should expect good work from his or her builders, as that's what he (or she) designs for. The people that "need to be out in the field checing that things are done right" are the inspectors, not the engineers.
I'm just curious-- who is this Daniel Wallace character, and what does he have to do with the GPL? What prompted the suit? I read the Wikipedia page and there wasn't much on him other than his two suits were thrown out.
Just about everybody here at my college is on the Facebook, while damn near nobody does the MySpace/LiveJournal/etc... thing. Mind you that my school was one of the first to be on the Facebook, so that may have something to do with it.
The Facebook is really nice compared to everything else in that it has a very clean and uniform layout. Also, it's a bit exclusive, and in general the signal to noise ratio is just a bit better than on MySpace. You're able to avoid the high school students (well, for the most part...)
To get your extreme point, you'll set f'(x) = 0, and we see that this can only happen at the point where ln(x) = 1, which is exactly at e^1 ~ 2.718. Problem solved.
On a side note, I liked this one. I haven't done this calc in a while, and it's good to brush up.
I can't comment on the status of eDonkey right now, but I need to say that many years ago (1999-2000ish, back before version 0.5), eDonkey was the best P2P application you could possibly use. It was one of the first (if not the first) to allow you to download from multiple sources. It was amazing, back when gnutella and the like sucked. The community of eDonkey was also second to none back then. If you ever had any problems, you'd just hop onto their forums and you could get some damn fine tech support in minutes. I'm pretty sure things started changing when eD2k started growing to be huge, but back in the beginning, it was the greatest P2P system by far. I'm very sad to see it go.
I always hate it when people say that NASA should be on its way out, and private industry should take over. NO! Failures! F-! Private industry is out looking for profit, finding a dollar in something. If there isn't a dollar to be earned, they won't be in business very long. Private industry isn't interested in furthering the field of science, they don't care too much about contributing to the knowledge of mankind. This is why we need NASA-- to make scientific breakthroughs that are available to ALL for (ideally) noble causes.
Quickly sidestepping too much politics, NASA embodies what the government should spend its money on (yes, improving infrastructure of the country is important, but I'm sure there's a lot that the government shouldn't spend money on *cough*war*cough*). NASA is set up to do wickedly expensive, yet groundbreaking research which can be useful 30+ years down the road-- very few companies would make such an investment. It's the department that's set up to be the exploratory fleet of our time. Who else would put a couple of rovers on Mars? Where's the profit in that? We got tons of scientific benefit from it, and I think we all can concur that it was a damn good thing that we landed on Mars and scouted the area. What motivation would private industry have to do the same?
I agree that currently NASA is kind of a broken department. Politicians are more interested in financing bridges named after themselves and whatnot than advancing science. Society today is more interested in what some celebrity ate for breakfast than science. It's a damn shame too! Look, what NASA needs is a bit of a reorganization, a shakedown if you will. They need to get back in gear, and instead of being a political lapdog, they need to get back into their R&D groove. You can't argue that they've done great things in the past. Currently, they've got some of the best damn brains in the country. They were able to hit a friggin comet with satellite! I say that we throw more money into NASA, and tell 'em to make something of it. Make a new shuttle! Find a way to setup a moon base, or mine the moon for materials. Push further into ramjet/scramjet research. There's so much that they can do, we just need to let them do it.
Please, realize that NASA is not a detriment to the country. It's done a lot of great stuff, and has the potential to do a lot more. If you privatize all of NASA, science will be set back many, many decades.
This just in: the center of a 12" record travels at a greater number of RPMs than the outer edge. Reactions from the Doobie Brothers were not reported
Uh... no. The tangential velocity at the edge is much greater than the tangential velocity in the center. Both points have the exact same angular velocity, otherwise the record would break into many pieces. Silly boy, don't you remember Physics I?
That's what everybody thinks, but I wouldn't get to cocky if I were them. A lot of other teams have a lot of potential, and with site visits wrapping up soon, we'll see who the real competitors are. Remember, they made 7 miles (not even 5% of the course) last year, so there's a LOT of room for improvement. Stanford, Cal Tech, Cornell and MIT are just four other colleges competing, and those guys aren't stupid, so watch out for them.
The way my teachers went about doing it was using nice, easy numbers when you did the calculating (eg, 30, 45, 60, 90 degrees for angles, natural log of 1, etc...). When we needed to solve a problem, for example integrating, we were dealing more with the technique of integrating instead of worrying about the final value. I know that if you've got a TI-83 you can plot a function and find its integral no problem, but that requires zero work on your part and does not show anyone that you know how to find an integral. To take this to an extreme, it's much better to teach someone how to multiply rather than saying 2*3 = 6. Only after you know the technique should you be allowed to use technology, because each more advanced concept is based on a multiple easier concepts, and if you don't know those, you're screwed.
I'm not saying that calculators should not be used at all for instruction. There is a time and place for them, and that is only after the students have a firm grasp on the concept at hand.
Slashdot Mirror
They've thrown their clout around for a while. The new 4G networks that will be coming on will use the C block, which had network neutrality provisions put in because of Google's clout.
They could just talk to Cisco, Juniper, Nortel, or any other major network infra provider and get DWDM (read "extra colors") capability rolled into their switch. It would probably cost 5m Euro, but the tech already exists (and has since the mid 70's).
Here's the problem- can you tell me, straight up, the value of the governmental services that you use? You've got your simple direct ones ones- roads/public transit, local schools and whatnot. Then you've got the slightly harder to count ones- fire and police, though we can count these as insurance-type costs. Now we get to the ones that are impossible to enumerate. What's the price of having the armed forces protect our country? What's the value of providing student loans to people, thus giving us an educated workforce? What's the cost of having someone tell us what the weather is going to be like, or predicting the next hurricane or earthquake?
You say that governments should follow the same basic economic rules businesses do, but would this really help or hinder private business? By this token Google, Cisco, and just about every major company should be paying the US government obscene royalties for using the internet. DARPA did, after all, invent it, so it's only fair to license it for what it's worth. How about medical research, or the stuff that's come out of NASA? The government has given so much away, whereas any private corporation would have patented and licensed the crap out of it. Let's be honest- how many private companies are financing risky research nowadays?
There are many reasons to be against the taxation proposed here. I think that any money made overseas shouldn't be taxable in the US because, quite honestly, the money wasn't made here. I'd be fine with companies bringing cash back to the US tax-free because that'd be more money that can be spent in our borders. Your argument, however, is silly. You can't tabulate how much government you use because it's everywhere. Hell, I think throwing 30+% of your profits to taxes is a pretty fair deal considering we live in a pretty stable society. There's also an issue of fairness- if you get rich because of a underpaid populous that's denied basic benefits (and the government steps in to provide them), it's only fair that you actually pay for the benefits needed for the workers that are used. As broken as the system is, the gov't does provide a basic safety net that corporations don't, and this is something we indeed need.
This wouldn't help at all, and probably hurt in the long run. It may have worked 10 years ago when working in different theaters was difficult, but everything is so connected now that the company would probably just keep H1B guy in his home country in one of their satellite offices. I guarantee you that your Ciscos, IBMs, HPs and the like (you know, the major users of H1Bs) have offices in India, China, Japan, the EU and Australia. The company doesn't pay the ridiculous bribe, and the US don't get the associated state/income/sales tax this dude would have paid. Double loss.
It was an example of the Lotus, which is by all means a very light car. 100lbs is an 8% weight gain for that car, which is significant for a small 2 seater. In the end, every pound matters in a car- back in the day when I was on a hybrid electric vehicle team, we rebuilt an Explorer with an aluminum frame. That alone boosted fuel economy by 3-4 mpg.
Emissions stuff also cuts into your efficiency. While the cats thrown into our cars are fairly awesome, they restrict flow like crazy, making it harder for the engine to breathe easy. All the small things do add up in the end.
Part of it is that safety and emissions requirements are more stringent in the USA, so there are a lot of modifications that need to be made in order to sell the cars here. For example (if I recall correctly) the US version of the new Lotus Elise weighs something like 50-100lbs more than the Euro version because of the safety equipment they had to throw in.
That said, yes, it's stupid that a lot of the European cars aren't Stateside. In addition to being more efficient, they're so much better looking than the crap they try selling us here.
I can pay bills through the American Express credit card management site. I'm really not too worried, as I can always dispute charges on my credit cards- happened once and it was all sorted out in about half an hour. I also keep a low credit limit on my cards, so if there's any damage financially it's minimal.
What the deuce are you talking about? A lot of crap uses the x86 platform with commodity hardware, and we're not entitled to their OS's either. Apple is FAR from a monopoly- what market do they have cornered?
What lack of readability? All my Perl stuff is very readable, and it's easy to follow what's going on. If I use a crazy regex, then I leave a nice comment saying what it does.
Just because you can obfuscate Perl to the point where you can move a mountain with one line of code doesn't make it unreadable- I can do that in any language. If you're complaining about readability, the problem probably exists between the keyboard and the chair. A good dev puts out good code, and a bad dev will make unreadable stuff.
Over here we use the right language for the job. Perl, Python, C, Java- they're all tools with strengths and weaknesses. Use appropriately and you win.
It actually kind of annoys me that people expect their parents to pay for college. Yeah, it'd be nice, but you expect all of the freedom of being an adult without any of the responsibility...
I went to Cornell and managed to pay the entire bill myself. I've got a quite a bit of student debt, but I've also got a really good job that's allowing for me to pay off my bills very quickly. Go to a good school, you get good opportunities afterwards (contrary to popular belief, name recognition goes a long way). Fill out your FAFSA, use the power of Google to find scholarships and fight for 'em, and whatever the government and really nice people don't give you, pull out in private loans (Sallie Mae, etc...). Heck, interest rates are basically at rock bottom right now, so you won't get hosed. Having a loans also helps motivate you, trust me. You're less likely to goof off (still have fun, but not blow off work), plus you get fiscally responsible pretty quickly (a lot faster than most of your classmates).
Anyway, stepping off of my soapbox of "pay for yourself," as it looks like thats you're trying to do, I don't think many (if any) company will pay for your education right now this moment. After you're in college for a year or two, however, some of these opportunities crop up, but I've seen them more in the financial sector than in tech. Get an internship or two and it'll help you immensely financially and get a job after college. If you're as good as you say you are, you should be able to find one freshman year- go to the career fair with a good resume AFTER meeting with your career services center to get it brushed up, and practice some interview skills (some say it doesn't matter, and it may not, but it will most definitely help you stand out from the crowd). There is ONE program that I know of that is what you're looking for, but it ain't FOSS-- look up the "Stokes Educational Scholarship Program" for the NSA. They will pay tuition and books, and give you summer internships in return for 1.5x your stay in college (4 years undergrad, 6 years NSA).
You should get that straight. Cornell's robot didn't screw up-- MIT's car ran into it. MIT also took out another competitor, CarOLO I think it was.
I can see where you're trying to go with this. It's important to realize while analyzing Watership Down may not be the most important thing to you, some people may love it. Same thing goes about calculus. I loved it, most people hated it. That's why I'm an engineer now and they teach English. Reading a whole bunch of books, however, can't really hurt someone. While trying to find the true meaning of a wax figure in a Sherlock Holmes mystery may be going a bit far, books help people to get a feel for the world around them and how times have changed. But really, in the end, it never hurts to read.
History is also a pretty important thing for grade school kids to learn... I actually wish I paid more attention to it when I was in high school. I could always say "those who don't know their history are bound to repeat it," but really, I'd just like to have a better understanding of the world and how we got here. It's not terribly important to me, hell, it's just an idle curiosity, but to others who would go into politics, they'd better know that stuff cold. Local history is also a kind of cool thing to know, or at least I think so.
Look, I really think in high school a broad education is best. I learned in HS that I wanted to be an engineer because I was exposed to math and science. Others in my class decided they wanted to go study history because they were exposed to history classes. When you're in college, you can go ahead and specialize, but grade school isn't the place for a kid to decide what subjects are "useful" or not.
I second the Nikon scanner. I've used the smaller one for my film negatives, and it's produced some amazing stuff. The Nikon software also does a damn fine job of removing dust/scratches (if you want it to). With 35mm stuff, you can get a scan and postprocessing done in around a minute per slide, so you won't be spending all year doing this. This is what the parent is talking about. It's around $1700, but when you're done scanning those photos, you can just as easily scan in all 35mm negatives you've got. If you want, shoot me an e-mail (marcinjb [at] gmail) and I'll send you a few of the pictures I've scanned in so you can judge quality.
I just got my 2.33 GHz MacBook Pro, no problems whatsoever. The fans are quiet, but very efficient, I guess. I've watched a few movies while crunching some numbers in the background, giving the processor a run for its money, and the bottom has never reached the point where I had to move the computer off of my lap.
For what it's worth, I believe that this was meant to be a feature in 10.3, but it got cut. As I recall, when Steve Jobs first announced the OS, there was a small blurb on the "Sneak Peek" page about a "Home on your iPod" feature. It was up for a month or so, then disappeared. Guess it's been in the pipeline for a while. Source.
Well, this is because women travel in packs, thus the singular "woman" doesn't really exist...
Yes and no. Engineers already know what goes into building what they design. In college (at least in mine), engineers are required to take fabrication courses. MechEs need to know how to use a mill and a lathe. EEs need to know how to solder and how to make a circuit board. Since they know what goes into the building of their stuff, their time is much better spent honing their design than actually overseeing how their product is built. Yes, of course they should make prototypes and see how they work, where they fail, then go back to designing. An engineer should expect good work from his or her builders, as that's what he (or she) designs for. The people that "need to be out in the field checing that things are done right" are the inspectors, not the engineers.
I'm just curious-- who is this Daniel Wallace character, and what does he have to do with the GPL? What prompted the suit? I read the Wikipedia page and there wasn't much on him other than his two suits were thrown out.
Just about everybody here at my college is on the Facebook, while damn near nobody does the MySpace/LiveJournal/etc... thing. Mind you that my school was one of the first to be on the Facebook, so that may have something to do with it.
The Facebook is really nice compared to everything else in that it has a very clean and uniform layout. Also, it's a bit exclusive, and in general the signal to noise ratio is just a bit better than on MySpace. You're able to avoid the high school students (well, for the most part...)
Here's what I did, you may be able to follow along (I think it's the same as what the guys above did)--
f(x) = x^(1/x) = e^ln(x^(1/x)) = e^[(1/x)ln(x)] (Log properties-- a = e^ln(a))
f'(x) = {[d/dx] (1/x) ln(x)} * f(x) = (1/x^2) (1-ln(x)) x^(1/x) = (1-ln(x)) x^(-x - 2)
To get your extreme point, you'll set f'(x) = 0, and we see that this can only happen at the point where ln(x) = 1, which is exactly at e^1 ~ 2.718. Problem solved.
On a side note, I liked this one. I haven't done this calc in a while, and it's good to brush up.
I'm glad we got rid of such an awful "service"
I can't comment on the status of eDonkey right now, but I need to say that many years ago (1999-2000ish, back before version 0.5), eDonkey was the best P2P application you could possibly use. It was one of the first (if not the first) to allow you to download from multiple sources. It was amazing, back when gnutella and the like sucked. The community of eDonkey was also second to none back then. If you ever had any problems, you'd just hop onto their forums and you could get some damn fine tech support in minutes. I'm pretty sure things started changing when eD2k started growing to be huge, but back in the beginning, it was the greatest P2P system by far. I'm very sad to see it go.
*bashes head on table*
I always hate it when people say that NASA should be on its way out, and private industry should take over. NO! Failures! F-! Private industry is out looking for profit, finding a dollar in something. If there isn't a dollar to be earned, they won't be in business very long. Private industry isn't interested in furthering the field of science, they don't care too much about contributing to the knowledge of mankind. This is why we need NASA-- to make scientific breakthroughs that are available to ALL for (ideally) noble causes.
Quickly sidestepping too much politics, NASA embodies what the government should spend its money on (yes, improving infrastructure of the country is important, but I'm sure there's a lot that the government shouldn't spend money on *cough*war*cough*). NASA is set up to do wickedly expensive, yet groundbreaking research which can be useful 30+ years down the road-- very few companies would make such an investment. It's the department that's set up to be the exploratory fleet of our time. Who else would put a couple of rovers on Mars? Where's the profit in that? We got tons of scientific benefit from it, and I think we all can concur that it was a damn good thing that we landed on Mars and scouted the area. What motivation would private industry have to do the same?
I agree that currently NASA is kind of a broken department. Politicians are more interested in financing bridges named after themselves and whatnot than advancing science. Society today is more interested in what some celebrity ate for breakfast than science. It's a damn shame too! Look, what NASA needs is a bit of a reorganization, a shakedown if you will. They need to get back in gear, and instead of being a political lapdog, they need to get back into their R&D groove. You can't argue that they've done great things in the past. Currently, they've got some of the best damn brains in the country. They were able to hit a friggin comet with satellite! I say that we throw more money into NASA, and tell 'em to make something of it. Make a new shuttle! Find a way to setup a moon base, or mine the moon for materials. Push further into ramjet/scramjet research. There's so much that they can do, we just need to let them do it.
Please, realize that NASA is not a detriment to the country. It's done a lot of great stuff, and has the potential to do a lot more. If you privatize all of NASA, science will be set back many, many decades.
This just in: the center of a 12" record travels at a greater number of RPMs than the outer edge. Reactions from the Doobie Brothers were not reported
Uh... no. The tangential velocity at the edge is much greater than the tangential velocity in the center. Both points have the exact same angular velocity, otherwise the record would break into many pieces. Silly boy, don't you remember Physics I?
That's what everybody thinks, but I wouldn't get to cocky if I were them. A lot of other teams have a lot of potential, and with site visits wrapping up soon, we'll see who the real competitors are. Remember, they made 7 miles (not even 5% of the course) last year, so there's a LOT of room for improvement. Stanford, Cal Tech, Cornell and MIT are just four other colleges competing, and those guys aren't stupid, so watch out for them.
The way my teachers went about doing it was using nice, easy numbers when you did the calculating (eg, 30, 45, 60, 90 degrees for angles, natural log of 1, etc...). When we needed to solve a problem, for example integrating, we were dealing more with the technique of integrating instead of worrying about the final value. I know that if you've got a TI-83 you can plot a function and find its integral no problem, but that requires zero work on your part and does not show anyone that you know how to find an integral. To take this to an extreme, it's much better to teach someone how to multiply rather than saying 2*3 = 6. Only after you know the technique should you be allowed to use technology, because each more advanced concept is based on a multiple easier concepts, and if you don't know those, you're screwed.
I'm not saying that calculators should not be used at all for instruction. There is a time and place for them, and that is only after the students have a firm grasp on the concept at hand.