" Learning a language is compulsory for at least one year of high school."
Same is true in the USA. I had to take a semester of beginning langauges (an intro to french, spanish, and german), a year of Latin, plus 3 years of an elective langauge.
"The vast majority of Americans that we encountered were amazed that a variety of languages could be learnt by high school students (Greek, French, German, Italian, Farsi, Mandarin, Japanese at my high school 10 years ago)."
When I was in Australia, Japan was a popular country to visit. Not sure of the distances, but it felt like flying to Japan wasn't too big of deal. Just a few hours (5ish? I'd love a correction on tihs if I'm wrong) and you're there. Man I'd love to go there, but it's like half a globe away from me here. Then again, the USA is very large and packed with diverse settings to go visit. Trips to Greece etc seem exotic. I'm not all that surprised that we don't have that wide of variety of langauges to study. Again, I think geography plays a huge role in this, something that's difficult for outsiders to see right away.
"That said, almost all younger Americans we met did make the effort to pick up small amounts of foreign languages when abroad -- especially Spanish which I understand is an option at US high schools?"
Oh yes, one of the more popular ones. Languages are not as diverse here. As I mentioned before, it's not easy to get out there. (Though I am some surprised that japanese isn't an option...) I cannot offer you a reason, but I can tell you it's easy to get into these classes in community colleges.
Yep, you're right. However, spanning that many CDs is dangerous. I tried to install Redhat 7 or 8 (I forget which, but I can tell you it was only 3 CDs, not 5.) and on the third disc, I discovered the media was bad. Redhat's installer wasn't smart enough to deal with an error like that, and never gave me the opportunity to 'retry'. Instead it just stopped. So I had a partly installed Linux that'd only work in CLI mode, and root had a blank password. Heh. I had to start the entire install over with a fresh set of discs. (Fortunately, this problem, if not solved already, is fairly easy to fix.)
In any event, I wasn't faulting RedHat for it in my original comment. I'm not mad at Redhat for that other than with the problem mentioned above, thought it was nice to not have to go download a bunch of stuff. What makes it interesting, though, is there are people out there who try to measure 'bloat' by how much space the install of an app takes up, and sometimes times change and work against you, as with the case of that poor AC.
"Liquid Nitrogen? Compressors? Huge heatsinks? Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to beowulf cluster a few systems together?"
Will Quake run effectively on a beowulf cluster? Will Maya?
Even if the answer is yes, you've still completely missed the point of the article. It's not a "wee we got 5 ghz of processing going" story, it's a "Ho ho ho more power!"/Tim_Allen_Voice story. Lighten up.
"IMHO Americans not learning Spanish is damn insular and imperialistic, they are your neighbour, not your slave, so why not put in some effort and try rather than assuming they are accomodating?"
It has nothing to do with being insular or imperialistic. To assume so is a bit ignorant. It has to do with how useful it is. I do, more or less, speak Spanish. I so rarely need it. Seriously, the most mileage I've gotten out of knowing any Spanish (outside of a trip to Brazil, where it was only a minor help as they speak Portuguese there) was the understanding a skit I saw on Mad TV.
Let's put this another way: Could you go an entire year without wearing shoes? You could, but you'd never dream of it. Why bother? You always have shoes, they always protect you. You have no dying need to have your feet harden from walking over gravel. How would you feel if I grouped you in with people who couldn't live without their precious shoes? You'd feel like I was a moron for making that distinction, and an even bigger one for not considering that you haven't run into a situation where you never have shoes.
" It's what, somewhere around 50,000 people that are killed by cars annually in the US - we are still using cars, aren't we?"
The implication here is that the number of deaths is acceptable. That is not the case at all. Every year cars are being made safer. Compare a car today to a car 15-20 years ago, and you'll see what I mean.
Yes, with a phrase like that, I see it as cynical.
"What do you call someone who speaks one language? An American."
I know it's a joke, but it's a common complaint aboout Americans. Unfortunately, nobody seems to think about the United States' geography and why most of us are uni-lingual. To the North, we have Canada, which is mostly english speaking. To the south, we have Mexico, which is Spanish speaking, but there's not all that much travelling back and forth like there is with Canada. Worse, they're very accomodating down there, so there isn't a big huge need to speak Spanish. Go much further south than that, and you're spending a great deal of money to get on a flight to do this. (I should know, I've traveled to Brazil twice.)
This is very different from Europe where you can drive across countries like we can drive across states here. Even if we were bilingual, there wouldn't be a huge screaming need to speak in other languages. It's hard to feel the need to speak other languages when you have to travel overseas to encounter somebody speaking that language.
Sadly, this factor is never considered. Nope, it's assumed we're just stupid.
"If the turbines killed three people a day......well, we'd probably accept that, too, just as we do for cars."
Um, a cynical view of human values is worth '+5 Insightful'? Never mind that there are always new things being put into place to make everyday life safer, no no no, we 'allow' people to die in car accidents.
Sorry, I just don't see a +5 here. Corrections welcome.
"If my math works right, with sales exceeding 25,000,000 copies, he would prefer if there were 25 million fewer GTA players and 250 billion more child molestors."
You know what I find funny? A couple of kids try to blamed their bad behaviour on a game they played, and the media ran with it. When I was in first grade, my school had a chocolate sale. They sent me home with some chocolate bars to sell. I ate one of them. When I realized that somebody would notice a bar was missing, I went to my mom and said "Luke Skywalker ate a candy bar." Why is their story so believable? Why's it so easy to accept the idea that they didn't know right and wrong, so they picked it up from a video game?
So, another guy goes and shoots at cars. They suspect GTA is the cause of it. Eh why? He shot at cars! This isn't a new idea! Don't remember potato guns? (It didn't start with those, either.) If you shoot a car in Vice City, you kill the driver. So those kids KNEW they were commiting murder. Where's the media coverage of this point of view?
I've been using 'irresponsible' and 'media' in the same sentence a lot lately. The game's popularity has already passed its peak, yet the media acts as though we're all going to have to wear vests in fear of game playing children. In some respects, this is a self fulfilling prophecy. If I took a shot at a moving car, I'd just blame GTA3 and get public opinion on my side. Easy enough.
"Is anyone else worried that this article elevates the acceptability of having sex with a child just so they can express their distaste towards a video game?"
The author's email address is 'cbyron@nypost.com', tell him what you think. I am.
Well subject says it all. I can already get wireless internet to my PocketPC via bluetooth. Take that another step and add GPS as well, and I could have a handy dandy direction finder. I've run into cases where that'd be useful.
Brother HL-1440, and a $20'ish memory upgrade from crucial.com. I can personally vouch for the printer, even bought one as a present for my dad, no complaints from him either.
I do a lot of graphics printing on them, not as much text. Not sure how that translates to pages per month, but I can tell ya I'm well beyond several ink cartridges from my old inkjet.
" Or worse yet, have onstar send my ticket in the mail becasue they detected my speeding. So yeah, as long as the information is not used against me I really don't catre."
Hmm mixed feelings on that one too. I *don't* want YOU speeding. I don't want to drive in fear that some maniac is going to come plowing around the corner. I want you to fear speeding, as opposed to fearing being caught by a random patrol.
At the same time, GPS won't tell the cops the context. It won't tell them that a hostile man with a gun was in the car behind you. It won't tell them that your wife is having a baby. It won't tell them that your spedometer's busted.
I'm not really sure where I stand there. Like I said, due process plays a huge part in this. For example, if tickets are automatically doled out for speeding, do you have a strong method for appeal? Does it only go off if you're going ridiculously fast? Does it only happen in certain areas such as school crossings? I think there's middle ground, especially when the cost of that freedom is the saving of human life.
"If you're that paranoid, don't install anything trackable in your car."
Heh. Oregon recently considered using GPS devices to track how many miles a car was driven within the state, in order to fairly tax those who use the roads more or don't use them much at all. Didn't happen, but it could have.
Slashdot Mirror
"But tell me one other deadly weapon that you can hit and kill someone with and not necessarily go to jail."
A car is not a weapon unless it is inentionally used to injure a person. You cannot use a car as a weapon and not go to jail.
" Learning a language is compulsory for at least one year of high school."
Same is true in the USA. I had to take a semester of beginning langauges (an intro to french, spanish, and german), a year of Latin, plus 3 years of an elective langauge.
"The vast majority of Americans that we encountered were amazed that a variety of languages could be learnt by high school students (Greek, French, German, Italian, Farsi, Mandarin, Japanese at my high school 10 years ago)."
When I was in Australia, Japan was a popular country to visit. Not sure of the distances, but it felt like flying to Japan wasn't too big of deal. Just a few hours (5ish? I'd love a correction on tihs if I'm wrong) and you're there. Man I'd love to go there, but it's like half a globe away from me here. Then again, the USA is very large and packed with diverse settings to go visit. Trips to Greece etc seem exotic. I'm not all that surprised that we don't have that wide of variety of langauges to study. Again, I think geography plays a huge role in this, something that's difficult for outsiders to see right away.
"That said, almost all younger Americans we met did make the effort to pick up small amounts of foreign languages when abroad -- especially Spanish which I understand is an option at US high schools?"
Oh yes, one of the more popular ones. Languages are not as diverse here. As I mentioned before, it's not easy to get out there. (Though I am some surprised that japanese isn't an option...) I cannot offer you a reason, but I can tell you it's easy to get into these classes in community colleges.
Must... resist... yo mama... joke....
Yep, you're right. However, spanning that many CDs is dangerous. I tried to install Redhat 7 or 8 (I forget which, but I can tell you it was only 3 CDs, not 5.) and on the third disc, I discovered the media was bad. Redhat's installer wasn't smart enough to deal with an error like that, and never gave me the opportunity to 'retry'. Instead it just stopped. So I had a partly installed Linux that'd only work in CLI mode, and root had a blank password. Heh. I had to start the entire install over with a fresh set of discs. (Fortunately, this problem, if not solved already, is fairly easy to fix.)
In any event, I wasn't faulting RedHat for it in my original comment. I'm not mad at Redhat for that other than with the problem mentioned above, thought it was nice to not have to go download a bunch of stuff. What makes it interesting, though, is there are people out there who try to measure 'bloat' by how much space the install of an app takes up, and sometimes times change and work against you, as with the case of that poor AC.
"Nasty artifacts, much more effecient to span the render of MULTIPLE proccessors"
Yep, you're right. We're talking about benchmarks here, not production tho.
On the "Fit 32 megs on a floppy" link to an old Slashdot story, I ran across this 'first post' comment:
"The next version of Windows should fit on 5000 of these..."
Just thought it was amusing that Windows XP is distributed on one CD, RedHat is distributed with 5.
(Sorry, NFI how to answer this guy's question...)
"Liquid Nitrogen? Compressors? Huge heatsinks? Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to beowulf cluster a few systems together?"
/Tim_Allen_Voice story. Lighten up.
Will Quake run effectively on a beowulf cluster? Will Maya?
Even if the answer is yes, you've still completely missed the point of the article. It's not a "wee we got 5 ghz of processing going" story, it's a "Ho ho ho more power!"
"IMHO Americans not learning Spanish is damn insular and imperialistic, they are your neighbour, not your slave, so why not put in some effort and try rather than assuming they are accomodating?"
It has nothing to do with being insular or imperialistic. To assume so is a bit ignorant. It has to do with how useful it is. I do, more or less, speak Spanish. I so rarely need it. Seriously, the most mileage I've gotten out of knowing any Spanish (outside of a trip to Brazil, where it was only a minor help as they speak Portuguese there) was the understanding a skit I saw on Mad TV.
Let's put this another way: Could you go an entire year without wearing shoes? You could, but you'd never dream of it. Why bother? You always have shoes, they always protect you. You have no dying need to have your feet harden from walking over gravel. How would you feel if I grouped you in with people who couldn't live without their precious shoes? You'd feel like I was a moron for making that distinction, and an even bigger one for not considering that you haven't run into a situation where you never have shoes.
Think about it.
" It's what, somewhere around 50,000 people that are killed by cars annually in the US - we are still using cars, aren't we?"
The implication here is that the number of deaths is acceptable. That is not the case at all. Every year cars are being made safer. Compare a car today to a car 15-20 years ago, and you'll see what I mean.
Yes, with a phrase like that, I see it as cynical.
"What do you call someone who speaks one language? An American."
I know it's a joke, but it's a common complaint aboout Americans. Unfortunately, nobody seems to think about the United States' geography and why most of us are uni-lingual. To the North, we have Canada, which is mostly english speaking. To the south, we have Mexico, which is Spanish speaking, but there's not all that much travelling back and forth like there is with Canada. Worse, they're very accomodating down there, so there isn't a big huge need to speak Spanish. Go much further south than that, and you're spending a great deal of money to get on a flight to do this. (I should know, I've traveled to Brazil twice.)
This is very different from Europe where you can drive across countries like we can drive across states here. Even if we were bilingual, there wouldn't be a huge screaming need to speak in other languages. It's hard to feel the need to speak other languages when you have to travel overseas to encounter somebody speaking that language.
Sadly, this factor is never considered. Nope, it's assumed we're just stupid.
"If the turbines killed three people a day... ...well, we'd probably accept that, too, just as we do for cars."
Um, a cynical view of human values is worth '+5 Insightful'? Never mind that there are always new things being put into place to make everyday life safer, no no no, we 'allow' people to die in car accidents.
Sorry, I just don't see a +5 here. Corrections welcome.
"It takes toxic products to create a solar energy collector -> it kills too."
Survival of the fittest. Ooo Paris Hilton is on TV tonight!
How'd they get a picture of me with my pants down? =D
(Damn being anonymous on the internet is cool.)
Oh boy. Thermian Idol promises to be a hoot!
"complete with the why-didn't-they-include-it-in-the-first-place backlight and rechargable battery."
Price. Duh.
"If my math works right, with sales exceeding 25,000,000 copies, he would prefer if there were 25 million fewer GTA players and 250 billion more child molestors."
You know what I find funny? A couple of kids try to blamed their bad behaviour on a game they played, and the media ran with it. When I was in first grade, my school had a chocolate sale. They sent me home with some chocolate bars to sell. I ate one of them. When I realized that somebody would notice a bar was missing, I went to my mom and said "Luke Skywalker ate a candy bar." Why is their story so believable? Why's it so easy to accept the idea that they didn't know right and wrong, so they picked it up from a video game?
So, another guy goes and shoots at cars. They suspect GTA is the cause of it. Eh why? He shot at cars! This isn't a new idea! Don't remember potato guns? (It didn't start with those, either.) If you shoot a car in Vice City, you kill the driver. So those kids KNEW they were commiting murder. Where's the media coverage of this point of view?
I've been using 'irresponsible' and 'media' in the same sentence a lot lately. The game's popularity has already passed its peak, yet the media acts as though we're all going to have to wear vests in fear of game playing children. In some respects, this is a self fulfilling prophecy. If I took a shot at a moving car, I'd just blame GTA3 and get public opinion on my side. Easy enough.
"Is anyone else worried that this article elevates the acceptability of having sex with a child just so they can express their distaste towards a video game?"
The author's email address is 'cbyron@nypost.com', tell him what you think. I am.
"I'm wearin ya down, baby!
Well subject says it all. I can already get wireless internet to my PocketPC via bluetooth. Take that another step and add GPS as well, and I could have a handy dandy direction finder. I've run into cases where that'd be useful.
"You're the one abusing the system by blindly metamoderating."
Why are you so afraid to log in and post? Worried you'll be modded down? Hmmmm....
Funny, the one guy that's annoyed with my irrational actions stand is the guy who should understand my point of view the most.
Greetings Hal.
Brother HL-1440, and a $20'ish memory upgrade from crucial.com. I can personally vouch for the printer, even bought one as a present for my dad, no complaints from him either.
I do a lot of graphics printing on them, not as much text. Not sure how that translates to pages per month, but I can tell ya I'm well beyond several ink cartridges from my old inkjet.
Hello Hal the Computer.
" Or worse yet, have onstar send my ticket in the mail becasue they detected my speeding. So yeah, as long as the information is not used against me I really don't catre."
Hmm mixed feelings on that one too. I *don't* want YOU speeding. I don't want to drive in fear that some maniac is going to come plowing around the corner. I want you to fear speeding, as opposed to fearing being caught by a random patrol.
At the same time, GPS won't tell the cops the context. It won't tell them that a hostile man with a gun was in the car behind you. It won't tell them that your wife is having a baby. It won't tell them that your spedometer's busted.
I'm not really sure where I stand there. Like I said, due process plays a huge part in this. For example, if tickets are automatically doled out for speeding, do you have a strong method for appeal? Does it only go off if you're going ridiculously fast? Does it only happen in certain areas such as school crossings? I think there's middle ground, especially when the cost of that freedom is the saving of human life.
It wouldn't be a waste.
"If you're that paranoid, don't install anything trackable in your car."
Heh. Oregon recently considered using GPS devices to track how many miles a car was driven within the state, in order to fairly tax those who use the roads more or don't use them much at all. Didn't happen, but it could have.
Incidently, cell phones are trackable too.