FTFY. Everything else you said was so good, I couldn't stand to see egregious spelling errors. Oh, and, no, you can't skip the commas in your final parenthetical sentence ("...set off by an exclamation point, or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong" -- "Interjection", Grammar Rock).
Wait: If the nice person is always wrong, why not enjoy working with them while doing the opposite of whatever they do? If someone is occasionally wrong, you have to look carefully at everything they do to find the wrong stuff.
It's the developer, not the end user, that applies the creator code that's being ignored (I can't remember the last time I manually changed a creator code--it was long before OS X, anyway). The end user can always do a "Get Info" to change the default app for any individual document.
That said, I agree that it's a pain to have to do that for every specific document you want opened with a particular app; I just saw a nit that needed picking.
I have TiVo. I bought the lifetime service plan when I first got it. I've got NetFlix on-demand through it. I love it.
My brother had TiVo, but then Comcast gave away their DVR with his cable. He knows the Comcast software is inferior and the keypress lag is huge, but he can't justify the extra cost for TiVo's software, which he was paying monthly. It's hard to compete with free, especially when I'm actually paying an additional $8 a month to Verizon for the two cable cards in my TiVo.
That's TiVo's big problem: the cablecos deliberately undercut them on price. Why? Is it because Verizon gets more money from people who use their box? I have no idea. But they are the ones trying to put TiVo out of business.
Michael Phelps, although physically advantaged to swimming, still has normal body proportions. If his arms or feet were grossly and abnormally long, would it still be considered fair?
What do you consider "grossly" long? His arm span is 3" longer than his height (6'7" vs. 6'4"), about 4% greater than his height (definitely higher than normal). That's pretty far out the bell curve, I guess (a Google search doesn't seem to reveal the standard deviation for that ratio but a paper in "Annals of Human Biology" says a change from 2% to 4% between groups of different ages is "significant"). But I had a birth defect that disturbed the growth plates in my lower back and legs, resulting in a 9% deviation (6' vs. 5'6"), much farther out, so far out as to truly be considered abnormal. Does that make it not "fair" to other swimmers? Very few swimmers are competitive in Individual Medley (I was the only boy at our club, a lifetime ago in junior high--although to call me "competitive" was quite a stretch) like Phelps, because of the odd physique that lends itself to success in all four strokes. No one ever asked to have me disqualified because of that.
I'm not sure what to make of Ms. Semenya, but if she's been female all her life, who are we to argue? When she fathers a child, go ahead and strip her of her titles and records. But until then, remember it's all about the bell curve.
Last I heard, there were about 3.785 l/g (Google "convert gallons to liters"), 3.8 if you want to round to one decimal place, giving 45 mpg. Otherwise, informative post.
And as long as you're in Canada, why not head east to the Musée de la Civilisation in Québec? They have a temporary exhibit (until Sep 27) on extraterrestrials, which starts with movie aliens & robots, then on to odd terran life forms, and finally to a couple of speculative "planets" whose biota has been worked on by sf writers & exobiologists. There's another one (until Apr 4) on mummies that really goes into both the science and the anthropology. Then there are the historical exhibits on the Seven-years War (1756-1763; we in the states were taught a bit of it as the French and Indian War), First Nations, and general history of Quebec.
Plus there's a freakin' huge fort (la Citadelle) just around the corner and up (and up, and up) the hill.
Another place in town has that "Bodies" exhibit, but I don't know until when.
You raise a valid point. I do use the term "effectively" because that's how university lawyers want to treat them (primarily, I believe, as protection for both parties, such as a student who is graded on some basis not described in the syllabus) and have used them that way successfully in both arbitration and in court.
I was responding to an AC who described a paper submitted "without your consent," not to the general problem of turnitin and other such services. I understand, however, that the report from turnitin consists of a percentage matching other sources along with citations of those other papers, rather than a wholesale distribution of those previously submitted papers. I have a hard time considering the listing of matching portions to be a derivative work.
The university legal eagle is a shyster and a con artist.
FTFY. Save the personal attacks for someone you know personally. That clause is in the syllabus because the university legal staff says to put it in, and the university legal staff believes it will hold up in court.
Personal insults are uncalled for. You've never met her and have never taken a class from her. You do not appear to have a complete understanding of what a professor actually does.
She has never used turnitin; on legal advice from the university, she includes that clause in the syllabus. Again, it is the university legal staff (and that of most universities) that considers syllabi as contracts. Also, her syllabi are available before the first day of class; no one has to show up to find out what's in one. Finally, tuition is often due after the start of classes.
She has caught many plagiarists, all using her own research without, as I said, resorting to any of these comparison services (unless you include Google among the "search engine[s]" she does not need). Laziness? Once plagiarism is suspected (usually because of her face-to-face interactions with students), it can require hours of tracking down the student's sources and documenting them to build a case that will stand up to a review board. All that is time that is taken away from her primary mission of helping the honest students. Trust me: she wants to do her job. Plagiarists are the very, very worst part of it.
You're a customer. You retain all your consumer rights per U.S. law.
A student may be a "customer" of the university, but most faculty are fighting (their own administration, generally, which is being/has been taken over by business types rather than academics; the secretaries have taken over the law firm) to keep that relationship from taking over the classroom. The professor (or instructor) is a teacher, a guide, not a "knowledge provider." Your putative professor who shows CN instead of leading the course is such an extreme example that I doubt that nonsense would last very long (tenure is revocable).
When I take my car to the shop, I don't expect to do any work; but if I want to get anything out of college classes, I have a responsibility (to myself, and by extension, to my classmates and the professor) to be an active learner. The usual ratio quoted is two to three hours outside of class for every hour in class. This doesn't resemble the usual consumer paradigm. Consumer law shouldn't apply. And when the university's lawyers are confident that a particular clause will hold up in court, chances are it already has.
My wife is an English professor at a large research university. Her syllabus, which is effectively the contract between her and the student, states that she reserves the right to upload it as she sees fit. The student agrees to the contract by remaining in the class (this is the view of the university's lawyers).
So if there's anything like that in your syllabus, you're probably out of luck. "I didn't read the syllabus" is not going to be a successful legal argument. "I had to take the course to graduate" might get you farther, but it can usually be shown that there were other classes that would have fulfilled that requirement.
It doesn't assume short trips. It specifies them ("8 miles"). I also never said 75 was the speed limit. There are plenty of drivers trying to go 75 through the city of Tampa while most of us are just trying to do 60-65 in a 55MPH zone.
Argh. Of course 15% of a long journey is nothing to be sneezed at. That's doing the math. But most trips are much shorter than--oh, pick a reasonable cut-off of how long a trip would have to be for the savings to be significant (thirty minutes to save five?). Passing someone (especially on a two-lane) can put you in a position where the risk far outweighs the reward. My entire point is to know what that reward is before you undertake the risk.
I'm starting to get really tired of explaining my sig, but I still think it's a really good point: Think before you act.
"The last moment" is obviously defined by the speed of traffic. Higher speed = earlier merge. Duh. But if everyone in the persistent lane is leaving a sufficient following distance, it's trivial for the vanishing lane to merge. "Punishers" in the persistent lane who refuse to allow alternate merge ("reissverschlussverfahren," I love it) by following too closely are the real trouble-makers and rule-breakers.
Highway capacities are usually measured in vehicles per hour (or day), not per mile (dynamic vs. static capacity). If every driver's following distance increases by a factor of three, but the average speed increases by a factor of four (i.e., from 15MPH to 60MPH), that's a win.
If your following distance is under two car lengths, you effectively prevent anyone from changing lanes in front of you except at very slow speeds. If no one can change lanes, no one can enter or exit except from the right lane (barring left-hand exits, but you get my point) without slowing the next lane to the speed at which he or she can safely move to the right lane. This closes up following distances in that lane, and that compression eventually moves across all the lanes, no matter how many there are, until following distances open up in the right lane (usually by more people leaving the highway than entering).
Not to mention that these small spaces for lane changes vastly increase the chance of a collision at any speed.
Human drivers are far too easily distracted. The real problems happen when one driver realizes there are brake lights on (or he or she has significant delta-v with the car) ahead, and brakes perhaps harder than necessary, and then the next driver does the same, only harder, etc. Or the same thing happens in the next lane, so the driver slows in anticipation of something unseen ahead (or someone pulling out of the slower lane into the lane ahead), starting the same chain reaction in his or her lane.
Leaving a significant following distance is not about your reaction time: it's about having time to adjust your own speed gently, maybe even without using the brake, so that you and the drivers behind you don't have to come to a (crashing) halt.
Ha! I was talking about vacation. Work, now, that was torus magnets on a 2cm spacing wire grid. And two hours at a time on the bicycle for the electricity. Kids these days.
Worse, there's a better than even chance that at least one of the terrorist grains of sand didn't make it through the sifter.
Significantly better than even. Assume all the tests are independent with success 90%. The chance of getting them all is then 0.9^10, which is less than 0.35, so there's an over 65% chance of missing at least one.
Many such tests, though, have a far higher probability of false positive than of false negative. That's why, in medicine, there's often an (inexpensive) first screening (with a relatively high rate of false positives, maybe 5%) but almost no chance of missing. If that test is positive, they go on to the (presumably) more expensive test with a much lower rate of false positive, secure in the belief that they haven't missed someone.
I just ran into somebody Sunday afternoon. It was a friendly little softball game and I dinked one towards third, then ran like hell towards first. Well, the girl playing first had no idea that the baseline belongs to the runner. I kept thinking she would move off the bag while she waited for the throw, and by the time I realized she wasn't going to, I pulled up and moved to tag the outer edge of the bag, but still ended up knocking her down. No one was injured, but, yeah, I ran into her.
Slashdot Mirror
principal
rein in
over-zealous
FTFY. Everything else you said was so good, I couldn't stand to see egregious spelling errors. Oh, and, no, you can't skip the commas in your final parenthetical sentence ("...set off by an exclamation point, or by a comma when the feeling's not as strong" -- "Interjection", Grammar Rock).
Carry on.
Wait: If the nice person is always wrong, why not enjoy working with them while doing the opposite of whatever they do? If someone is occasionally wrong, you have to look carefully at everything they do to find the wrong stuff.
It's the developer, not the end user, that applies the creator code that's being ignored (I can't remember the last time I manually changed a creator code--it was long before OS X, anyway). The end user can always do a "Get Info" to change the default app for any individual document.
That said, I agree that it's a pain to have to do that for every specific document you want opened with a particular app; I just saw a nit that needed picking.
I have TiVo. I bought the lifetime service plan when I first got it. I've got NetFlix on-demand through it. I love it.
My brother had TiVo, but then Comcast gave away their DVR with his cable. He knows the Comcast software is inferior and the keypress lag is huge, but he can't justify the extra cost for TiVo's software, which he was paying monthly. It's hard to compete with free, especially when I'm actually paying an additional $8 a month to Verizon for the two cable cards in my TiVo.
That's TiVo's big problem: the cablecos deliberately undercut them on price. Why? Is it because Verizon gets more money from people who use their box? I have no idea. But they are the ones trying to put TiVo out of business.
Michael Phelps, although physically advantaged to swimming, still has normal body proportions. If his arms or feet were grossly and abnormally long, would it still be considered fair?
What do you consider "grossly" long? His arm span is 3" longer than his height (6'7" vs. 6'4"), about 4% greater than his height (definitely higher than normal). That's pretty far out the bell curve, I guess (a Google search doesn't seem to reveal the standard deviation for that ratio but a paper in "Annals of Human Biology" says a change from 2% to 4% between groups of different ages is "significant"). But I had a birth defect that disturbed the growth plates in my lower back and legs, resulting in a 9% deviation (6' vs. 5'6"), much farther out, so far out as to truly be considered abnormal. Does that make it not "fair" to other swimmers? Very few swimmers are competitive in Individual Medley (I was the only boy at our club, a lifetime ago in junior high--although to call me "competitive" was quite a stretch) like Phelps, because of the odd physique that lends itself to success in all four strokes. No one ever asked to have me disqualified because of that.
I'm not sure what to make of Ms. Semenya, but if she's been female all her life, who are we to argue? When she fathers a child, go ahead and strip her of her titles and records. But until then, remember it's all about the bell curve.
Last I heard, there were about 3.785 l/g (Google "convert gallons to liters"), 3.8 if you want to round to one decimal place, giving 45 mpg. Otherwise, informative post.
And as long as you're in Canada, why not head east to the Musée de la Civilisation in Québec? They have a temporary exhibit (until Sep 27) on extraterrestrials, which starts with movie aliens & robots, then on to odd terran life forms, and finally to a couple of speculative "planets" whose biota has been worked on by sf writers & exobiologists. There's another one (until Apr 4) on mummies that really goes into both the science and the anthropology. Then there are the historical exhibits on the Seven-years War (1756-1763; we in the states were taught a bit of it as the French and Indian War), First Nations, and general history of Quebec.
Plus there's a freakin' huge fort (la Citadelle) just around the corner and up (and up, and up) the hill.
Another place in town has that "Bodies" exhibit, but I don't know until when.
You raise a valid point. I do use the term "effectively" because that's how university lawyers want to treat them (primarily, I believe, as protection for both parties, such as a student who is graded on some basis not described in the syllabus) and have used them that way successfully in both arbitration and in court.
I was responding to an AC who described a paper submitted "without your consent," not to the general problem of turnitin and other such services. I understand, however, that the report from turnitin consists of a percentage matching other sources along with citations of those other papers, rather than a wholesale distribution of those previously submitted papers. I have a hard time considering the listing of matching portions to be a derivative work.
The university legal eagle is a shyster and a con artist.
FTFY. Save the personal attacks for someone you know personally. That clause is in the syllabus because the university legal staff says to put it in, and the university legal staff believes it will hold up in court.
Personal insults are uncalled for. You've never met her and have never taken a class from her. You do not appear to have a complete understanding of what a professor actually does.
She has never used turnitin; on legal advice from the university, she includes that clause in the syllabus. Again, it is the university legal staff (and that of most universities) that considers syllabi as contracts. Also, her syllabi are available before the first day of class; no one has to show up to find out what's in one. Finally, tuition is often due after the start of classes.
She has caught many plagiarists, all using her own research without, as I said, resorting to any of these comparison services (unless you include Google among the "search engine[s]" she does not need). Laziness? Once plagiarism is suspected (usually because of her face-to-face interactions with students), it can require hours of tracking down the student's sources and documenting them to build a case that will stand up to a review board. All that is time that is taken away from her primary mission of helping the honest students. Trust me: she wants to do her job. Plagiarists are the very, very worst part of it.
You're a customer. You retain all your consumer rights per U.S. law.
A student may be a "customer" of the university, but most faculty are fighting (their own administration, generally, which is being/has been taken over by business types rather than academics; the secretaries have taken over the law firm) to keep that relationship from taking over the classroom. The professor (or instructor) is a teacher, a guide, not a "knowledge provider." Your putative professor who shows CN instead of leading the course is such an extreme example that I doubt that nonsense would last very long (tenure is revocable).
When I take my car to the shop, I don't expect to do any work; but if I want to get anything out of college classes, I have a responsibility (to myself, and by extension, to my classmates and the professor) to be an active learner. The usual ratio quoted is two to three hours outside of class for every hour in class. This doesn't resemble the usual consumer paradigm. Consumer law shouldn't apply. And when the university's lawyers are confident that a particular clause will hold up in court, chances are it already has.
My wife is an English professor at a large research university. Her syllabus, which is effectively the contract between her and the student, states that she reserves the right to upload it as she sees fit. The student agrees to the contract by remaining in the class (this is the view of the university's lawyers).
So if there's anything like that in your syllabus, you're probably out of luck. "I didn't read the syllabus" is not going to be a successful legal argument. "I had to take the course to graduate" might get you farther, but it can usually be shown that there were other classes that would have fulfilled that requirement.
It doesn't assume short trips. It specifies them ("8 miles"). I also never said 75 was the speed limit. There are plenty of drivers trying to go 75 through the city of Tampa while most of us are just trying to do 60-65 in a 55MPH zone.
Argh. Of course 15% of a long journey is nothing to be sneezed at. That's doing the math. But most trips are much shorter than--oh, pick a reasonable cut-off of how long a trip would have to be for the savings to be significant (thirty minutes to save five?). Passing someone (especially on a two-lane) can put you in a position where the risk far outweighs the reward. My entire point is to know what that reward is before you undertake the risk.
I'm starting to get really tired of explaining my sig, but I still think it's a really good point: Think before you act.
"The last moment" is obviously defined by the speed of traffic. Higher speed = earlier merge. Duh. But if everyone in the persistent lane is leaving a sufficient following distance, it's trivial for the vanishing lane to merge. "Punishers" in the persistent lane who refuse to allow alternate merge ("reissverschlussverfahren," I love it) by following too closely are the real trouble-makers and rule-breakers.
Highway capacities are usually measured in vehicles per hour (or day), not per mile (dynamic vs. static capacity). If every driver's following distance increases by a factor of three, but the average speed increases by a factor of four (i.e., from 15MPH to 60MPH), that's a win.
If your following distance is under two car lengths, you effectively prevent anyone from changing lanes in front of you except at very slow speeds. If no one can change lanes, no one can enter or exit except from the right lane (barring left-hand exits, but you get my point) without slowing the next lane to the speed at which he or she can safely move to the right lane. This closes up following distances in that lane, and that compression eventually moves across all the lanes, no matter how many there are, until following distances open up in the right lane (usually by more people leaving the highway than entering).
Not to mention that these small spaces for lane changes vastly increase the chance of a collision at any speed.
non-distracted
Human drivers are far too easily distracted. The real problems happen when one driver realizes there are brake lights on (or he or she has significant delta-v with the car) ahead, and brakes perhaps harder than necessary, and then the next driver does the same, only harder, etc. Or the same thing happens in the next lane, so the driver slows in anticipation of something unseen ahead (or someone pulling out of the slower lane into the lane ahead), starting the same chain reaction in his or her lane.
Leaving a significant following distance is not about your reaction time: it's about having time to adjust your own speed gently, maybe even without using the brake, so that you and the drivers behind you don't have to come to a (crashing) halt.
Ha! I was talking about vacation. Work, now, that was torus magnets on a 2cm spacing wire grid. And two hours at a time on the bicycle for the electricity. Kids these days.
Assembly? Ha! In my day, we had a memory-level debugger. We programmed in machine code. And we liked it.
Worse, there's a better than even chance that at least one of the terrorist grains of sand didn't make it through the sifter.
Significantly better than even. Assume all the tests are independent with success 90%. The chance of getting them all is then 0.9^10, which is less than 0.35, so there's an over 65% chance of missing at least one.
Many such tests, though, have a far higher probability of false positive than of false negative. That's why, in medicine, there's often an (inexpensive) first screening (with a relatively high rate of false positives, maybe 5%) but almost no chance of missing. If that test is positive, they go on to the (presumably) more expensive test with a much lower rate of false positive, secure in the belief that they haven't missed someone.
I know! Let C = A, then we're sure to get all the B that are also A!
If I patent this, can I make money?
TFA says it's 90% of embryos, not eggs. That makes a difference!
Did anyone else read that as taking "half a million cows ... off the road"? No? Just me, then.
I got a call a couple of days ago from "Visa and MasterCard" offering to help lower my rates. I said, "Which card?"
They said, "Either VISA or MasterCard."
"Which issuing bank? CitiBank? Chase?"
"Either, as long as it's a VISA or MasterCard."
"This phone number is on the Do Not Call registry."
*click*
Has anyone else heard of this yet? Is it a new scam, or did I piss off a legitimate phonesalesthug?
I just ran into somebody Sunday afternoon. It was a friendly little softball game and I dinked one towards third, then ran like hell towards first. Well, the girl playing first had no idea that the baseline belongs to the runner. I kept thinking she would move off the bag while she waited for the throw, and by the time I realized she wasn't going to, I pulled up and moved to tag the outer edge of the bag, but still ended up knocking her down. No one was injured, but, yeah, I ran into her.