Besides, is the university the right organization to police who's appropriate to get an education degree? An education degree signifies that she has successfully completed her course work in education, no more, no less. Not entirely correct. Educational institutions also have rules which dictate what constitutes acceptable behavior. Some are more strict than others, and some universities include in their degrees a reputation for high standards of character and behavior.
It's the difference between a degree from UoM and MIT. Both are universities of high caliber, but with student bodies of different reputation. (I, for one, never heard about a riot on MIT's campus following a football game.)
If the student in question violated their college's acceptable behavior policy, and was stupid enough to have that violation documented in a photo supported by anecdotal evidence, then the university may be in the right. However, if that cup contained anything other than alcohol, like, say, cider, then she's definitely on solid ground.
He doesn't even deserve that! Else we all deserve an evaluation for something. I'll agree with that statement. But my perspective was that if a school district is going to be pressured to address an "issue", they should address it with appropriate tools, not with nukes shot from the hip.
This royally pisses me off. I always wanted to build Quake levels for my high school, because it would have been the perfect multiplayer map. Two or more routes to any given place, wide halways, two floors, balconies, stairs at the end of every hallway...it would have been awesome.
But I never went through with it, because Columbine was still fresh in everyone's memory, and I was afraid that exactly this sort of thing would happen.
It's not a fear of terrorism that drives this sort of thing, or even a fear for our children. It's a fear of our children. We're so scared of the little guys that the instant they bring school into their video game hobby, we freak out.
This kid doesn't deserve to be arrested. He doesn't deserve to be thrust into "Alternative Education". He deserves to have someone ask him why he built the school in a video game. Let a psychologist evaluate him, and then either medicate the kid or let him go back to class.
(And someone should offer him constructive criticism on his level building techniques.)
Yesterday, I looked at the Firehose at a high level of filtration. Virtually every kdawson or Zonk article is a "story", meaning editor-written, rather than user-submitted.
I can sort of understand why; most submissions are blatantly biased, flagrant PR pieces, or just plain poorly written. The few that remain are generally uninteresting.
The problem is, we don't get to vote on stories. The first we hear about them is when they get queued to go live. Again, I can understand why. It's not worth the editor's time to write three or four stories in hopes that one will be voted up.
I have nothing against Linux but the fanboism is really starting to stink up the place. You should have been around here four or five years ago. I think the Linux fanboism started dying down with the addition of the Games section of Slashdot.
That said, I'm a hardcore Linux user of seven years, with no real temptation to use Windows, apart from the occasional LAN party I have to sit out on. Nobody plays enough Unreal or id games to keep me occupied. I miss the days when all anyone wanted to do was play Quake.
But since Google rankings are somewhat esoteric, it's hard for Whitehats to stay white. Perhaps, then, SEO is an inherently grey-hat or black-hat business?
Search engines retain users by showing users the results that they need. They develop and tune algorithms that determine what a user needs by the contents of the sites they index. If your site is important, search companies will eventually tune their algorithms to properly index it.
As for document.write() and other Web 2.0 problems, I predict the algorithms will be fixed as more and more important sites use these methods.
Yes, I'm giving Google et al the benefit of the doubt, but it's their business, their service. As a user, I expect nothing from them but the ability to find what I'm looking for. As a webmaster, a third of my hits are from Google, but two-thirds are direct or by referral. And I'm happy with that ratio; it means people are talking about my site.
As individuals, playing on their own time, kids will probably get better at it. If forced to compete with classmates who are much better at it than they are, they'll want to not even bother.
Take me, for example. I started playing DDR when it originally came out in the States. My younger brother was world's better than I was, and something of a show-off. A few years after he shipped off to the Navy, I started playing Stepmania on a hard pad at a local gaming center, in an effort to lose weight. It was slow going, but I was comfortable with it, not feeling pressured to do as well as those around me.
Now I've got my own hard pad, and play at home. I can double-ace four-foot and some five-foot songs, and get passing grades on a few six-foot songs. I'm still nowhere near my brother's skill level; Paranoia, an eight-foot song, makes me shudder.
Noncompetitive geeks like me will always be more comfortable when they don't feel pressured to catch up to someone of worlds better skills.
Stamina, perhaps. More so than you realize. When I first started playing Stepmania last summer, I had difficulty climbing more than one flight of stairs. It's a year later, and now I've got more energy than I know what to do with. I've walked the two miles to and from school, rather than take the bus. I almost always prefer the stairs over the elevator.
When I started, I'd get cramps in my legs for a couple days after each play. I haven't had that in seven, eight months now.
Microwaves aren't any more toxic than any other electronic device of similar size, but that isn't saying much.
The primary toxins you'd be worried about are in the circuit boards. But companies will pay you by the pound for those, as they're a great source of recycled precious metals.
I'm not a lawyer, but wouldn't ex post facto prevent this from being used to overturn patents already in place? Or does that only apply to congressional law?
No one is losing their life over filtering. No, just their freedoms. But some would argue that that's more important. "Give me liberty, or give me death!"
I'm going to email them. I hope it leaves them in the clear, but I doubt it. While they don't allow you to choose songs, they do allow you significant control over the factors that power the song selection algorithm.
Computers have become appliances you just replace when they break or no longer do some job you wish to use them for. Because I can't afford it? I make $6k a year as a college student. I spend more on classes, food and housing than I actually earn. Buying a new computer haid to wait until after I bought a washer that stopped adding water to the tub when it's full.
Also, it was much cheaper to add a SATA controller card and hard drive to my desktop than to buy a computer with a larger hard drive.
The computer-as-appliance model won't be worthwhile until computers are standardized like game console systems. If people really wanted a computer that they could replace on a whim, don't you think you'd have been able to get an office software suite for the PS2? It worked for the Tandy Coco, Commodore and Amiga, and the PS2 had USB ports.
I should clarify, that those upgrades were with my current laptop, a Compaq Presario 2100. My previous laptop, a Thinkpad 760XL, was flexible enough that I was able to upgrade the hard drive, though I never did use the CD-ROM drive.
As for getting a Mac, well, I'd like to. I love the hardware and the software. But you don't come across decent iBooks and MacBooks used. The Thinkpad was a gift from my parents when it was already a five-year-old computer. The Compaq was a gift from my brother on the promise that I lose weight.
Hell, even my desktop PCs were obtained cheaply. My first desktop, a Packard Bell Pentium 75, was a Christmas present. My second, a home-built AMD K6-200, was sold to me for $200. My third, a Compaq Presario 750MHz Duron, was another Christmas present. My current desktop, a P4 2.4GHz, was bought for $50.
Each of my desktops underwent substantial subsequent tinkering and upgrading. My laptops, not so much.
Yes, they are hard to repair, but so what? So I've had to pay a guy $150 for different repairs, where if I'd been using a desktop, I would have done it myself.
So it's difficult to upgrade the CPU when something better comes along. (Socket? We don't need no stinkin' socket.)
So it's difficult replace the optical media drive if it breaks, or if I just want to be able to burn dual-layer DVDs instead of just CD-Rs. And forget about getting the right faceplate...
About the only upgrades I've been able to perform on my laptop without assistance are replacing the battery, adding RAM, and adding a miniPCI wireless A/B/G card. And the laptop didn't have an antenna in it, so I'm going to need to get in touch with a friend who knows how to add one.
Laptops are a PITA for anyone who's tasted the power of self-service.
There's one caveat...how do you repair the software when the user breaks it?
I run a free PC Clinic that fixes between 20 and 30 computers, once a month. The Win98 machines are a pain to work with because it's harder to fix things broken by the likes of AOL and malware. (Not to mention the original system discs are probably fifty miles away at the bottom of a landfill.)
If you have solutions for that, I could really use them.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the difference between a degree from UoM and MIT. Both are universities of high caliber, but with student bodies of different reputation. (I, for one, never heard about a riot on MIT's campus following a football game.)
If the student in question violated their college's acceptable behavior policy, and was stupid enough to have that violation documented in a photo supported by anecdotal evidence, then the university may be in the right. However, if that cup contained anything other than alcohol, like, say, cider, then she's definitely on solid ground.
This royally pisses me off. I always wanted to build Quake levels for my high school, because it would have been the perfect multiplayer map. Two or more routes to any given place, wide halways, two floors, balconies, stairs at the end of every hallway...it would have been awesome.
But I never went through with it, because Columbine was still fresh in everyone's memory, and I was afraid that exactly this sort of thing would happen.
It's not a fear of terrorism that drives this sort of thing, or even a fear for our children. It's a fear of our children. We're so scared of the little guys that the instant they bring school into their video game hobby, we freak out.
This kid doesn't deserve to be arrested. He doesn't deserve to be thrust into "Alternative Education". He deserves to have someone ask him why he built the school in a video game. Let a psychologist evaluate him, and then either medicate the kid or let him go back to class.
(And someone should offer him constructive criticism on his level building techniques.)
Yesterday, I looked at the Firehose at a high level of filtration. Virtually every kdawson or Zonk article is a "story", meaning editor-written, rather than user-submitted.
I can sort of understand why; most submissions are blatantly biased, flagrant PR pieces, or just plain poorly written. The few that remain are generally uninteresting.
The problem is, we don't get to vote on stories. The first we hear about them is when they get queued to go live. Again, I can understand why. It's not worth the editor's time to write three or four stories in hopes that one will be voted up.
That said, I'm a hardcore Linux user of seven years, with no real temptation to use Windows, apart from the occasional LAN party I have to sit out on. Nobody plays enough Unreal or id games to keep me occupied. I miss the days when all anyone wanted to do was play Quake.
Search engines retain users by showing users the results that they need. They develop and tune algorithms that determine what a user needs by the contents of the sites they index. If your site is important, search companies will eventually tune their algorithms to properly index it.
As for document.write() and other Web 2.0 problems, I predict the algorithms will be fixed as more and more important sites use these methods.
Yes, I'm giving Google et al the benefit of the doubt, but it's their business, their service. As a user, I expect nothing from them but the ability to find what I'm looking for. As a webmaster, a third of my hits are from Google, but two-thirds are direct or by referral. And I'm happy with that ratio; it means people are talking about my site.
So when are Google, the Library of Congress and the CIA going to combine and be simply known as the CIC?
(Literary reference. Hope I didn't get first post.)
Already figured that one out when a friend needed someone to set up spam filtering. Fun game, that.
I remember those days.
You wouldn't happen to know of anything recent like that, would you? Preferably something that'll run on Linux?
Seconded. (And, someone, mod parent up.)
Nice try. In my area, it's about 25 cents a pound. They extract gold from these things, too, ya'know.
As individuals, playing on their own time, kids will probably get better at it. If forced to compete with classmates who are much better at it than they are, they'll want to not even bother.
Take me, for example. I started playing DDR when it originally came out in the States. My younger brother was world's better than I was, and something of a show-off. A few years after he shipped off to the Navy, I started playing Stepmania on a hard pad at a local gaming center, in an effort to lose weight. It was slow going, but I was comfortable with it, not feeling pressured to do as well as those around me.
Now I've got my own hard pad, and play at home. I can double-ace four-foot and some five-foot songs, and get passing grades on a few six-foot songs. I'm still nowhere near my brother's skill level; Paranoia, an eight-foot song, makes me shudder.
Noncompetitive geeks like me will always be more comfortable when they don't feel pressured to catch up to someone of worlds better skills.
When I started, I'd get cramps in my legs for a couple days after each play. I haven't had that in seven, eight months now.
Whatever. I'll take Stepmania, where I can play DDR, ITG and PumpItUp songs.
I bought a custom-built hard pad for $250. It looks great, works great, and I've lost weight as a result.
Microwaves aren't any more toxic than any other electronic device of similar size, but that isn't saying much.
The primary toxins you'd be worried about are in the circuit boards. But companies will pay you by the pound for those, as they're a great source of recycled precious metals.
I'm not a lawyer, but wouldn't ex post facto prevent this from being used to overturn patents already in place? Or does that only apply to congressional law?
I'm going to email them. I hope it leaves them in the clear, but I doubt it. While they don't allow you to choose songs, they do allow you significant control over the factors that power the song selection algorithm.
The SATA controller only cost $30, and I've been unable to find a 500GB IDE drive.
Also, it was much cheaper to add a SATA controller card and hard drive to my desktop than to buy a computer with a larger hard drive.
The computer-as-appliance model won't be worthwhile until computers are standardized like game console systems. If people really wanted a computer that they could replace on a whim, don't you think you'd have been able to get an office software suite for the PS2? It worked for the Tandy Coco, Commodore and Amiga, and the PS2 had USB ports.
I should clarify, that those upgrades were with my current laptop, a Compaq Presario 2100. My previous laptop, a Thinkpad 760XL, was flexible enough that I was able to upgrade the hard drive, though I never did use the CD-ROM drive.
As for getting a Mac, well, I'd like to. I love the hardware and the software. But you don't come across decent iBooks and MacBooks used. The Thinkpad was a gift from my parents when it was already a five-year-old computer. The Compaq was a gift from my brother on the promise that I lose weight.
Hell, even my desktop PCs were obtained cheaply. My first desktop, a Packard Bell Pentium 75, was a Christmas present. My second, a home-built AMD K6-200, was sold to me for $200. My third, a Compaq Presario 750MHz Duron, was another Christmas present. My current desktop, a P4 2.4GHz, was bought for $50.
Each of my desktops underwent substantial subsequent tinkering and upgrading. My laptops, not so much.
So it's difficult to upgrade the CPU when something better comes along. (Socket? We don't need no stinkin' socket.)
So it's difficult replace the optical media drive if it breaks, or if I just want to be able to burn dual-layer DVDs instead of just CD-Rs. And forget about getting the right faceplate...
About the only upgrades I've been able to perform on my laptop without assistance are replacing the battery, adding RAM, and adding a miniPCI wireless A/B/G card. And the laptop didn't have an antenna in it, so I'm going to need to get in touch with a friend who knows how to add one.
Laptops are a PITA for anyone who's tasted the power of self-service.
There's one caveat...how do you repair the software when the user breaks it?
I run a free PC Clinic that fixes between 20 and 30 computers, once a month. The Win98 machines are a pain to work with because it's harder to fix things broken by the likes of AOL and malware. (Not to mention the original system discs are probably fifty miles away at the bottom of a landfill.)
If you have solutions for that, I could really use them.