However, when we use our supposedly superior intelligence to destroy the land, alter the climate and intentionally destroy thousands of species, it's hardly business as usual. By your reasoning, engineered virusus and nuclear fallout are natural phenomena.
However, we may be outsmarting ourselves. We've reproduced ourselves into an effective mega-community. If you study "natural" population management, the usual outcome of this is the collapse of the whole population from the next little problem to come along.
For example, bioligists in the 60's found that Idaho and Western Montana had the forage to support much larger deer populations than were living on the land. A few changes to the hunting laws and BAM, populations doubled, then tripled. Then a brain parasite outbreak occured. These were fairly common, and occasionally decimated a small, isolated herd. However, this time the deer's behavior had altered, and instead of wintering in groups of 10-20, they had formed a mega-herd, which allowd the parasite to kill the majority of the population. Very few survived, and the repercussions on the entire ecosystem were felt for decades.
I suspect that someday either some little country will drop a genetically-engineered virus or something like ebola will adapt to be transmitted in aerosol. Our macro-community will facilitate transmission across the globe (we were amazingly lucky with ebola, twice!). The black plague took out better than 30% of the population of Europe, just think what a bigger, nastier, more virulent bug could do to our far-flung and interconnected society. Viva evolution -- we've far to short a history to count ourselves a succcess story yet.
re
Last Christmas I was toying with doing some cloud painting. I used to work at a planetarium, and have designed several laser shows. My thought was to buy the laser heads, then build the power supplies/controllers needed.
After a couple of hours on ebay, I was pretty shaken. Laser heads in the multi-hundred WATT (not MW) range are readily available to the public, no liscense no oversight. I asked a friend who does laser research about this, and he told me that while it was illegal to sell a high-powered laser to the public, the parts weren't restricted. So, a company can sell you a high power laser head, and next week the power supply, columnating lenses and whatever else you need, they just can't assemble it for you.
This is like saying that gun shops can sell all the parts for RPG's, but they can't actually load it for you!
Generally, I'm in favor of minimal govt. oversight, and I don't care for most gun-control laws etc. But NOBODY needs a 1500 watt UV laser for 'personal use' any more than I need tanks and howitzers for deer hunting! The add linked in previous responses showing a 200W laser-pointer shaped like a gun are just frightening. That's not a laser-pointer, it's a weapon, and I certainly don't want it pointed at me by some pimply-faced wanna-be geek trying to impress his friends!
Open formats should be required for anyone whose work has relevance beyond the current month or year. Scientists, authors, medical staff all have records that need to persist and be readable over a period of years or decades. To commit these resources to the ephemeral whim of a closed standard, controlled by the caprice of it's creator is lunacy.
I'm a database guy - and I've wrought near-miracles in extracting critical records from the clutches of any number of short-lived, bug-ridden, poorly conceived proprietary storage schemes, some of which go to great lengths to make the native data unreadable to anything but the parent application. When the parent goes bust, succumbs to obsolesence, or just fades away, businesses are left holding the bag -- and if I, or people like me, can recover the data, we darn sure don't do it cheap!
Office Suite Features:
Most of us don't need all the features built into even the simple office suites today. My wife is an author, and I've talked about her quest for the perfect word processor. She wanted something simple, like AbiWord, which stored documents in an open format (she got to retype an entire novel once!), with very basic tools.
Word is a behemoth, and on long (
Open Office has all the power most users will ever need -- and it's Macro support makes it pretty easy to add any special functions that may be needed. I'd like to see a few sets of customized menus built (I know, I know, what's stopping me!). One could easily build a menu for professional authors that hid most of the complexity while clearly showing the features they need, rather than burying them under five layers of sub-menues. I'm sure other professions could be similarly served.
In short, the problem is seldom that a critical feature is not found in Oo, but that the feature or the syntax may not be immediately apparent to the user. Complexity is a two-edged sword, which we cut ourselves upon too often.
keep it unlocked. They can't break in if it's already open.
Several months ago some idiot smashed the passenger window of my work car to steal the cheap CD player. The car is an ugly '86 Jetta and ALL FOUR DOORS WERE UNLOCKED! Bottom line - criminals aren't knows for their amazing IQ's!
Arrgh! My neighbor does this. I have a large back yard, which I prefer to leave unlit. We have excellent locks, a nice dog, and several firearms (properly secured!)
My neighbor is a security-freak, whose electric bill must be astronomical. His compound looks like the landing zone of a military base. Tall poles surround the perimiter, topped with floodlams which continually illuminate his property. His DOGHOUSE has a giant mercury-vapor lamp over the door. Alarms that go off every time the wind blows -- and heaven forbid my cat hop the fence, I think his alarms summon the National Guard.
Naturally he HATES my dark, sinister, scary yard, so he recently lined the fence (on his side) with motion-activated lights aimed at my back yard. Oh, and the motion-activation is attenuated to "paranoid". If I open my bedroom window (from inside the house) a half-dozen high intensity lights focused on the house come on and I can read in bed for the next half hour.
I completely agree with RenHollen -- nicely said sir! Having some expertise in this field, I'd like to offer an opinion. My personal home-defense favorite is a Benelli semi-automatic assault shotgun with light loads. Here's why:
Semi-automatic is much easier to operate if you're tired/scared/panicked. No pump to cycle, no catch to flip. Point and shoot interface.
Great stopping power (even with reduced-recoil ammunition), with minimal overpenetration. Contrary to popular belief, a shotgun has virtually no spread under household distances. However, the individual pellets have very low mass, and dissipate energy more quickly than a solid slug - excellent kinetic transfer. This is good. Rather than punching a clean hole in the bad guy, you slam him across the room. If you miss, you'll destroy the wall, but probably won't kill the family member on the other side of it. Using light loads with small shot further protects the innocents in your home, and won't make a bit of difference to the bad guy.
The shotgun is short enough not to present a huge opportunity for the bad guy to grab the barrel. You've all seen it on TV. Good guy going through house with handgun in classic Weaver grip. Walks past corner, gun extended fully forward. Bad guy grabs gun. Game over.
Long enough to provide leverage if someone does grab it. Try this: grab a stick about the length of a shotgun. Have a friend grab the end of the barrel. Step back and pull back on the "gun" -- See the barrel pointed at his chest? How convenient!
Intimidating as heck. Don't want to kill a bad guy? Then intimidate them. I have a nice Walther PPK pistol. It's lethal, but looks like a toy. Chances are if you pull it (or anything like it), you're going to have to use it. Pull out an assault-style shotgun and the intimidation factor goes way up. Bottom line: bad guy gets arrested instead of shot, and you don't have to clean the living room and spend the next month in court hoping your self-defense story holds up.
For the record - most home insurnace programs don't replace the carpet, walls or furniture you blasted getting your bad guy, and taxidermists are generally unwilling to mount him for your trophy room, so you're better off not shooting him in the first place.
I am an Oracle DBA, working for a large military-industrial company. I maintain about 140 databases supporting all sorts of activities. The vast majority of these active, production databases are under 5 gigs. In fact, at a glance, I see only about ten that are larger than than 5 gigs. While it's true that some of the big ones are MUCH bigger than 5 gigs, that has no bearing on whether 5 gigs is enough for many useful applications.
Before this gets personel: 1) Yes, I've been doing this for a while, and generally know what I'm talking about. 2) I've done a fair bit of consulting, and have a reasonable basis to make these claims. 3) These database sizes are comparable to what I've seen at other places of employment.
A large percentage of major developments are the results of studying anomolous, odd, unexpected results in other studies. Cosmology, in particular, has made a number of important advances in recent years while trying to account for unexplained results.
Calling the press conference may have been premature (but in a publish or perish environment, with no points for second place, a certain urgency is certainly understandable). However, spectacular results are and SHOULD BE shared even if they aren't immediately reproducable. Think about it for a minute. If I find the lead shot in the bottom of my rotovap has suddenly turned to gold, I'll naturally try to reproduce the effect. If I can't, should I shrug my shoulders and move on, or solicit the assistance of my peers?
Cold fusion is a prize that would make merely transmuting base metals to gold a parlor trick in comparison. The published effect (which may or may not be cold fusion) has been reproduced numerous times, and NOW can be reproduced reliably. Nobody knows what it means -- but if turns out to be cold fusion we're all going to be VERY glad that they didn't just ignore it when they could't reliably reproduce the effect. And it's certainly worth investigating the effect -- the quest for knowledge is the province of science, after all.
LOL! In most respects I agree with you -- grammar checkers are hideously unreliable. However, for critical papers, I always run my final version through one. It usually catches about 100 false positives, but it frequently also flags one or two genuine errors. The signal to noise ratio is high, but occasionally worth the effort.
At a recent convention, I saw a unique means of protecting a laptop. A gentleman came to a session, and took out a garishly-painted vaio, done in a psychedellic hues reminiscent of the 70's, and EVERY piece was painted. Bezels, keys, even the wireless card. Painted in a hideous brain-frying cacophony of riotous color.
I asked him about it, and was told that he'd had an art-major friend do it using some sort of a thin enamel that wouldn't block small openings (like grills) but dried solid as a rock. The idea was to reduce the resale value to virtually nil while making it painfully easy to recognize, thus presenting a VERY unappealing target to thieves. So, do you know any art majors?
Sadly, the life a teacher is not all roses. Many years ago, before I became a nerd, I took a job as a school teacher. My parents were both teachers, and I thought it a nobel and proud profession, despite the long hours and low pay.
I was trying to support a wife and three children on a teacher's salary, and had the sword of student debt suspended over my head. Some weeks after accepting the job, and moving to a new town, the principal called me in, and told me I would be teaching evolution and sex education. I was told that I was required to follow the district curriculum in these areas, and any deviatiation from the party line would be considered grounds for immediate dismissal. With a sinking feeling, I asked what the official curriculum would be. As expected it was a watered-down, "don't offend anyone, for any reason" curriculum with completely ignored all scientific evidence in favor of feel-good pablum and politically-correct platitudes.
I told the principal that this curriculum was laughable, I might as well teach Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. Not an eyelash blinked. Dead serious "Mr. Briggs, you are apparently under the impression that the science curriculum is as important as the socalization of our students. Your job is to assist the school is producing good citizens, subject area mastery is a secondary and far lesser consideration".
That was Pasco, WA 1994. I desperately needed the job. I swallowed my principles, and taught what I was told, knowing that the principal was using the classroom speaker system to monitor the content of my teaching. I left the teaching field that year, and have never gone back - there is no honor to be gained on that battlefield.
The teacher's can't fight, and have no hope of winning -- those who would fight are dismissed, those who remain offer up their intellecutal integrity upon the alter of polical correctness, in order to avoid legal entanglements for the administration.
Sure, it sounds great. Now let's see, I'm a pretty decent database admin, and I have a good friend who'se a security expert. So, if he can break into the central server, and I doctor up the database just a little bit, I should be on the receiving end of LOTS of little gifts and social services. . . sounds great!
I especially like the social services part - gorgeous girls dropping in from all over to improve my nonexistant love-live, because their pagers told them to.
Yeah, I see your future, and as long as I'm a nerd, I see distinct possibilities. Bring it on!!!
Sorry for replying to my own post, but this is kind of funny. This thread has nicely underscored my point. The words "Macho" and "Hembra", in Castillian Spanish, are usually used only in reference to animals. However, in Venezuela and Colombia, it is quite common to ask "Es macho o hembra?" when inquiring about the sex of a newborn baby. Often, "Varon" is used instead of "Macho", I don't pretend to know the difference (if any) between those.
As other posters mention, context plays a role. In English, "woman" isn't derogatory per se but if I say "Woman! get me a beer!", I may get a negative response. In some areas hembra is completely inoffensive, in others it has connotations more like "Wench" in English. For all I know, there may be regions where it's considered grossly offensive.
In similar fashion "pata" referes to the leg of an animal, and "pierna" to the leg of a human. However, in some parts of Latin America, it's common to compliment on woman for having cute patas, in others it'll get you a fat lip.
I thought it was funny that, within this thread, several posters have commented on the "correct" meaning of Hembra, and obviously don't agree. Viva le difference!
Oh, and thanks to the poster who corrected my spelling, the verb is "coger" as he stated. I speak pretty fluently, but my spelling is as bad in Spanish as it is in English! Sorry.
I hate to spoil the fun taking pot-shots at Microsoft, but the Spanish language error is hardly their fault. I speak fluent Spanish, and lived in South America for several years. Each time I moved to a different region (even within the same country!) the language would undergo substancial change. Most importantly, the words most likely to change were those with sexual connotation or profane impliction.
For example, cojer means "to pick up", but in mexico it means "to have sexual relations with". You can swing by to cojer your friends in most countries, but your Mexican buddies will probably object. (Acutally, I don't don't know if this is true for Northern Mexico, not having been there). There are literally thousands of similar examples -- be very careful asking shop keepers if they have eggs!
Since the language is extremely variable over even short geographic distances, it would be VERY difficult to provide Spanish-Language versions of your software that didn't offend someone.
For the record, I believe the word in question here is "hembra" - which means "female" most places, but can be derogatory in others.
Actually, 'coral' is similar to 'fish', in that the plural can be formed both ways, each with a specific meaning.
If you are speaking about groups (or, in the case of coral, colonies) of the same species (or possibly a few contemporaneous species), the plural is 'fish' or 'coral' as you stated.
If, however, you are referring to multiple species, the plural is 'fishes' or 'corals'.
"All those fish are swimming among the coral" or "This is an encyclopedia of the fishes and corals of the world."
I don't make the rules -- complain to somebody else! 8-)
I take exception to the snickering masses coyly speculating on how the poor can afford computers but not food. Ignoring the fact the article (for those who read it) didn't reference food-stamp recipients, I would like to direct my remarks to the insensive clods with the purile and acerbic sense of humor posting demeaning comments.
In case you haven't noticed, a large percentage of professional nerds are currently battling unemployment or underemployment. My company has cut staff dramatically over the past couple of years. I have the good fortune to be employed, but many of my friends do not. Many of these are senior staff, with families and mortgages to pay, and if they were lucky they landed jobs at Walmart or the local gas-station. These are folks who had been making 70k and up.
They are hurting, financially, make no mistake about it. Yet, by and large, they still live in nice homes (that they worked 30 years to pay for!), and drive decent cars, if they haven't sold them to buy food. Most of them are tapping their retirement accounts to keep the mortgage paid. And yes, most of them have computers at home.
If I were unemployed, my computer and my internet connection would be among my most highly protected possessions? Why? Because that's my life-line to employment and prosperity. I can apply to jobs all over the country, craft and modify a professional resume, and generally conduct an efficient job search from my computer. I'd sell the car, books, furniture and just about everything else before I got rid of the computer, because once that's gone, hope is pretty hard to hang on to.
So, spare me your infantile insight and feeble sense of humor. There are numerous good, well-educated folks taking food stamps, running a desperate race for employment, and using their home computers as the tool they were designed to be.
Mod parent up, and add some informative points to his funny ones. Anybody here ever study military strategy or martial arts? You can't win from a purely defensive posture. (Well, except maybe China, which is so big it simply swallows and assimilates the "conquerers", but that weakens my argument so we'll ignore it).
Every week hundreds of litte buggers splatter against my firewall. Most are probably zombies, or teenage script kiddies. Some are more serious. Those SCARE me -- I got to help rebuild every machine in the DMZ a while back when some idiot successfuly penetrated our systems. I'm primarily a DBA/programmer so I'm a bit out of my league when faced with the gritty underbelly of network security. If he got the DMZ, how do we know he didn't get further? Crud. What's to stop the same guy from coming back the week after we rebuilt everything?
Now I may be a security-lightweight, but I work for a very large company. A few cubes over from me lives a man I'll call Guido. Guido eats white papers and craps them out as textbooks. Guido says the intruder didn't make out of the DMZ, I believe him. Guido says he can track the intruder back to ip address he was hacking from, but he can't be sure that it's not a zombie. I believe him. Guido says he added that ip to a database he keeps on troublemakers, and if the same ip shows up more than twice, it's clobbering time. You know what? I believe him! So, if you're the pinhead that cost me several days work, please come back, and use the same host when you do. Guido's waiting, and he's very, very good at what he does!
Hey, I'm waiting for my boss to get of an (ugh) excell spreadsheet I'm supposed to be editing. Since he has it locked, there absolutely nothing I can do right now . . . Oh, look, it's almost lunch time!
I sure hope slashdot has some good articles this afternoon, 'cause when I'm done with them I've got a program to write. Maybe a need a workaholic monkey or ten to liven things up around here!
Yeah, life's like that. I used to preach "Size doesn't matter!" until I got this great enhancement product from a friendly spammer, now I prattle on and on about important size is . . .
"You have been found to be operating your world in violations of intergalatic patents 234,564.1, 569,870.2 and 1,345,264.2. Please cease and desist all techological manufacturing and research until appropriate licenses can be negotiated and secured.
Failure to comply will result in sterilization of your planet to prevent the theft of intellectual properties rightfully registered our clients.
Sincerly
Xanthpus and Ziphydol
Licensed Intergalactic Legal Counsel."
Tekgooroo:
(Nice name, by the way!) Your post is well-written, and I enjoyed your anecdotes. For the record, I did take a bit of time to peruse your website and catalog. In all fairness, I have neither visited your campus nor talked with a single member of your faculty. However, I did look through both your course catalog and curriculum, and I stand by my original assesment that you are more representative of a trade school than a university.
I don't intend that to be an insult. I work in a large government facility with several hundred nerds, most of which I would classify as excellent technicians. The computer profession NEEDS technicians, people who are able to code, debug, and develop software solutions, administer networks, build databases etc. This is the meat and potatoes of the IT industry. You seem well poised to deliver students, in a timely fashion, who are well equipped to meet those needs, and have secured the backing of some of the biggest players in the IT industry. Kudos!
All of this, however, is tangential to the point of my original post. Universities, like anything else, vary tremendously in quality. I'm sure there exist "party schools" which provide little more education than a two-year college, but the good ones do far more.
Aside from a vastly different focus on curriculm (theory vs. application), the university offers something that is almost impossible to get otherwise. Lots of time in a highly-creative academically-charged atmosphere. The formal curriculum is the tip of the iceburg, the opportunity to accociate with bright people from many different backgrounds and study broadly is priceless.
Many of my studies are not directly related to my work, and I'm sure any graduate from a top university would say the same. It doesn't matter, my teachers weren't trying to teach me MATERIAL (physics, chemistry, calculus, philosophy) they were teaching me how to think. The brain takes time to adapt to new ideas and challenges. Time and effort, it's an old recipe.
Have you ever studied the martial arts? There is a similar effect there. You can teach all the stances, strikes and blocks of most systems in a year, and learn the kata in another year or so. Poof, instant black-belt right? In some schools, yes. In better schools, not remotely. Mastery of the body and unlocking the secrets contained in the kata takes a very long time. Intensity helps, but time is essential. My current sensei has only had two students reach black belt in twenty years of teaching.
Why do you find it so hard to believe that learning can occur at a faster pace that it has for the past x100 years? Because in addition to various science degrees, I also have a B.S. in education, now long unused and a bit dusty I'm afraid. Human's haven't really changed much in the past few hundred years. Education methods have been refined, but Bloom's taxonomy reamins a reasonable yardstick for measuring maturity of understanding. The classes and objectives put forth by Northface seem designed to promote master of the knowedge, comprehension and application levels. A better education lays the same foundation, but follows up with analysis,synthesis and evaluation. Humans haven't changed, the brain still requires time to adapt to and master new ways of thinking, and your program doesn't address the more abstract skills addressed in a four-year program. THAT's what leads me to categorize you as a trade school not a university, and why I don't believe you've suddenly stumbled upon a rosetta stone for unlocking intellectual potential, overlooked by every other teacher the past several hundred years.
I'm dismayed and a bit irritated at the growing number of people who don't understand the difference between a trade school and a university. I resent the dilution of credentials and standards that continues to be the hallmark of "innovation in education". The innovation can generally be summed up as "Teach Less, Charge More, Process sheep^H^H^H^H^H students more quickly." Baaa!
I went to a decent university, with a good reputation in science and engineering. Few students graduated in just four years, most took four and a half to five. I got multiple B.S. degrees. Later I did a thesis-based M.S. in biochemistry which took 2.5 years full-time. I've worked for a number of years, and changed to the computer field. I'm working on an M.S. in computer science from Washington State, who required me to take all the core C.S. classes from the undergrad classes PRIOR TO ADMISSION.
Now they're trying to say that a couple of years, most of which is spent training for certifications, is eqivalent? My ruddy arse!
Universities are about the pursuit of knowledge, not job-training. If you want job-training, go to DeVry or similar trade school.
Germany has a far better system. The university and trade schools are complely different things. There are computer users and computer scientists. We're blurring the bloody lines, and it does a huge disservice to those who have put in the blood, sweat, and effort to become educated rather than trained.
Remember, any dumb animal can be trained, but only a human can be educated. Which are you?
My current employer had the standard land-grab blanket contract "we own your soul", but allowed a list of exemptions as you mention.
I wrote that I had a diverse software package that could easily be identified by the "com.mb" prefix, which I continued to develop and debug in my spare time. When they asked what it did I kind of mumbled along about system libraries, graphic display routines, multi-threaded schedulers. . . and they glazed over almost instantly, and aquiesed.
So now "com.mb" is the sacred cow. Gee, I have a com.mb tree in perl, C, and Java. I've written a number of cool tools, including one or two on sourceforge. It's not really any hardship to nest all new development under that root tree!
Slashdot Mirror
However, we may be outsmarting ourselves. We've reproduced ourselves into an effective mega-community. If you study "natural" population management, the usual outcome of this is the collapse of the whole population from the next little problem to come along.
For example, bioligists in the 60's found that Idaho and Western Montana had the forage to support much larger deer populations than were living on the land. A few changes to the hunting laws and BAM, populations doubled, then tripled. Then a brain parasite outbreak occured. These were fairly common, and occasionally decimated a small, isolated herd. However, this time the deer's behavior had altered, and instead of wintering in groups of 10-20, they had formed a mega-herd, which allowd the parasite to kill the majority of the population. Very few survived, and the repercussions on the entire ecosystem were felt for decades.
I suspect that someday either some little country will drop a genetically-engineered virus or something like ebola will adapt to be transmitted in aerosol. Our macro-community will facilitate transmission across the globe (we were amazingly lucky with ebola, twice!). The black plague took out better than 30% of the population of Europe, just think what a bigger, nastier, more virulent bug could do to our far-flung and interconnected society. Viva evolution -- we've far to short a history to count ourselves a succcess story yet. re
Still, class IV lasers with very high colimation/low divergence are readily available to Joe Sixpack.
After a couple of hours on ebay, I was pretty shaken. Laser heads in the multi-hundred WATT (not MW) range are readily available to the public, no liscense no oversight. I asked a friend who does laser research about this, and he told me that while it was illegal to sell a high-powered laser to the public, the parts weren't restricted. So, a company can sell you a high power laser head, and next week the power supply, columnating lenses and whatever else you need, they just can't assemble it for you.
This is like saying that gun shops can sell all the parts for RPG's, but they can't actually load it for you!
Generally, I'm in favor of minimal govt. oversight, and I don't care for most gun-control laws etc. But NOBODY needs a 1500 watt UV laser for 'personal use' any more than I need tanks and howitzers for deer hunting! The add linked in previous responses showing a 200W laser-pointer shaped like a gun are just frightening. That's not a laser-pointer, it's a weapon, and I certainly don't want it pointed at me by some pimply-faced wanna-be geek trying to impress his friends!
I'm a database guy - and I've wrought near-miracles in extracting critical records from the clutches of any number of short-lived, bug-ridden, poorly conceived proprietary storage schemes, some of which go to great lengths to make the native data unreadable to anything but the parent application. When the parent goes bust, succumbs to obsolesence, or just fades away, businesses are left holding the bag -- and if I, or people like me, can recover the data, we darn sure don't do it cheap!
Office Suite Features:
Most of us don't need all the features built into even the simple office suites today. My wife is an author, and I've talked about her quest for the perfect word processor. She wanted something simple, like AbiWord, which stored documents in an open format (she got to retype an entire novel once!), with very basic tools.
Word is a behemoth, and on long ( Open Office has all the power most users will ever need -- and it's Macro support makes it pretty easy to add any special functions that may be needed. I'd like to see a few sets of customized menus built (I know, I know, what's stopping me!). One could easily build a menu for professional authors that hid most of the complexity while clearly showing the features they need, rather than burying them under five layers of sub-menues. I'm sure other professions could be similarly served.
In short, the problem is seldom that a critical feature is not found in Oo, but that the feature or the syntax may not be immediately apparent to the user. Complexity is a two-edged sword, which we cut ourselves upon too often.
Freedom in America
1776 - 2004
R.I.P.
You'll be Missed
Several months ago some idiot smashed the passenger window of my work car to steal the cheap CD player. The car is an ugly '86 Jetta and ALL FOUR DOORS WERE UNLOCKED! Bottom line - criminals aren't knows for their amazing IQ's!
My neighbor is a security-freak, whose electric bill must be astronomical. His compound looks like the landing zone of a military base. Tall poles surround the perimiter, topped with floodlams which continually illuminate his property. His DOGHOUSE has a giant mercury-vapor lamp over the door. Alarms that go off every time the wind blows -- and heaven forbid my cat hop the fence, I think his alarms summon the National Guard.
Naturally he HATES my dark, sinister, scary yard, so he recently lined the fence (on his side) with motion-activated lights aimed at my back yard. Oh, and the motion-activation is attenuated to "paranoid". If I open my bedroom window (from inside the house) a half-dozen high intensity lights focused on the house come on and I can read in bed for the next half hour.
Actually. . .Are you my neighbor??? ;-)
For the record - most home insurnace programs don't replace the carpet, walls or furniture you blasted getting your bad guy, and taxidermists are generally unwilling to mount him for your trophy room, so you're better off not shooting him in the first place.
Before this gets personel: 1) Yes, I've been doing this for a while, and generally know what I'm talking about. 2) I've done a fair bit of consulting, and have a reasonable basis to make these claims. 3) These database sizes are comparable to what I've seen at other places of employment.
Calling the press conference may have been premature (but in a publish or perish environment, with no points for second place, a certain urgency is certainly understandable). However, spectacular results are and SHOULD BE shared even if they aren't immediately reproducable. Think about it for a minute. If I find the lead shot in the bottom of my rotovap has suddenly turned to gold, I'll naturally try to reproduce the effect. If I can't, should I shrug my shoulders and move on, or solicit the assistance of my peers?
Cold fusion is a prize that would make merely transmuting base metals to gold a parlor trick in comparison. The published effect (which may or may not be cold fusion) has been reproduced numerous times, and NOW can be reproduced reliably. Nobody knows what it means -- but if turns out to be cold fusion we're all going to be VERY glad that they didn't just ignore it when they could't reliably reproduce the effect. And it's certainly worth investigating the effect -- the quest for knowledge is the province of science, after all.
LOL! In most respects I agree with you -- grammar checkers are hideously unreliable. However, for critical papers, I always run my final version through one. It usually catches about 100 false positives, but it frequently also flags one or two genuine errors. The signal to noise ratio is high, but occasionally worth the effort.
I asked him about it, and was told that he'd had an art-major friend do it using some sort of a thin enamel that wouldn't block small openings (like grills) but dried solid as a rock. The idea was to reduce the resale value to virtually nil while making it painfully easy to recognize, thus presenting a VERY unappealing target to thieves. So, do you know any art majors?
I was trying to support a wife and three children on a teacher's salary, and had the sword of student debt suspended over my head. Some weeks after accepting the job, and moving to a new town, the principal called me in, and told me I would be teaching evolution and sex education. I was told that I was required to follow the district curriculum in these areas, and any deviatiation from the party line would be considered grounds for immediate dismissal. With a sinking feeling, I asked what the official curriculum would be. As expected it was a watered-down, "don't offend anyone, for any reason" curriculum with completely ignored all scientific evidence in favor of feel-good pablum and politically-correct platitudes.
I told the principal that this curriculum was laughable, I might as well teach Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. Not an eyelash blinked. Dead serious "Mr. Briggs, you are apparently under the impression that the science curriculum is as important as the socalization of our students. Your job is to assist the school is producing good citizens, subject area mastery is a secondary and far lesser consideration".
That was Pasco, WA 1994. I desperately needed the job. I swallowed my principles, and taught what I was told, knowing that the principal was using the classroom speaker system to monitor the content of my teaching. I left the teaching field that year, and have never gone back - there is no honor to be gained on that battlefield.
The teacher's can't fight, and have no hope of winning -- those who would fight are dismissed, those who remain offer up their intellecutal integrity upon the alter of polical correctness, in order to avoid legal entanglements for the administration.
I especially like the social services part - gorgeous girls dropping in from all over to improve my nonexistant love-live, because their pagers told them to.
Yeah, I see your future, and as long as I'm a nerd, I see distinct possibilities. Bring it on!!!
As other posters mention, context plays a role. In English, "woman" isn't derogatory per se but if I say "Woman! get me a beer!", I may get a negative response. In some areas hembra is completely inoffensive, in others it has connotations more like "Wench" in English. For all I know, there may be regions where it's considered grossly offensive.
In similar fashion "pata" referes to the leg of an animal, and "pierna" to the leg of a human. However, in some parts of Latin America, it's common to compliment on woman for having cute patas, in others it'll get you a fat lip.
I thought it was funny that, within this thread, several posters have commented on the "correct" meaning of Hembra, and obviously don't agree. Viva le difference!
Oh, and thanks to the poster who corrected my spelling, the verb is "coger" as he stated. I speak pretty fluently, but my spelling is as bad in Spanish as it is in English! Sorry.
For example, cojer means "to pick up", but in mexico it means "to have sexual relations with". You can swing by to cojer your friends in most countries, but your Mexican buddies will probably object. (Acutally, I don't don't know if this is true for Northern Mexico, not having been there). There are literally thousands of similar examples -- be very careful asking shop keepers if they have eggs!
Since the language is extremely variable over even short geographic distances, it would be VERY difficult to provide Spanish-Language versions of your software that didn't offend someone.
For the record, I believe the word in question here is "hembra" - which means "female" most places, but can be derogatory in others.
If you are speaking about groups (or, in the case of coral, colonies) of the same species (or possibly a few contemporaneous species), the plural is 'fish' or 'coral' as you stated.
If, however, you are referring to multiple species, the plural is 'fishes' or 'corals'.
"All those fish are swimming among the coral" or "This is an encyclopedia of the fishes and corals of the world."
I don't make the rules -- complain to somebody else! 8-)
I take exception to the snickering masses coyly speculating on how the poor can afford computers but not food. Ignoring the fact the article (for those who read it) didn't reference food-stamp recipients, I would like to direct my remarks to the insensive clods with the purile and acerbic sense of humor posting demeaning comments.
In case you haven't noticed, a large percentage of professional nerds are currently battling unemployment or underemployment. My company has cut staff dramatically over the past couple of years. I have the good fortune to be employed, but many of my friends do not. Many of these are senior staff, with families and mortgages to pay, and if they were lucky they landed jobs at Walmart or the local gas-station. These are folks who had been making 70k and up.
They are hurting, financially, make no mistake about it. Yet, by and large, they still live in nice homes (that they worked 30 years to pay for!), and drive decent cars, if they haven't sold them to buy food. Most of them are tapping their retirement accounts to keep the mortgage paid. And yes, most of them have computers at home.
If I were unemployed, my computer and my internet connection would be among my most highly protected possessions? Why? Because that's my life-line to employment and prosperity. I can apply to jobs all over the country, craft and modify a professional resume, and generally conduct an efficient job search from my computer. I'd sell the car, books, furniture and just about everything else before I got rid of the computer, because once that's gone, hope is pretty hard to hang on to.
So, spare me your infantile insight and feeble sense of humor. There are numerous good, well-educated folks taking food stamps, running a desperate race for employment, and using their home computers as the tool they were designed to be.
Every week hundreds of litte buggers splatter against my firewall. Most are probably zombies, or teenage script kiddies. Some are more serious. Those SCARE me -- I got to help rebuild every machine in the DMZ a while back when some idiot successfuly penetrated our systems. I'm primarily a DBA/programmer so I'm a bit out of my league when faced with the gritty underbelly of network security. If he got the DMZ, how do we know he didn't get further? Crud. What's to stop the same guy from coming back the week after we rebuilt everything?
Now I may be a security-lightweight, but I work for a very large company. A few cubes over from me lives a man I'll call Guido. Guido eats white papers and craps them out as textbooks. Guido says the intruder didn't make out of the DMZ, I believe him. Guido says he can track the intruder back to ip address he was hacking from, but he can't be sure that it's not a zombie. I believe him. Guido says he added that ip to a database he keeps on troublemakers, and if the same ip shows up more than twice, it's clobbering time. You know what? I believe him! So, if you're the pinhead that cost me several days work, please come back, and use the same host when you do. Guido's waiting, and he's very, very good at what he does!
I sure hope slashdot has some good articles this afternoon, 'cause when I'm done with them I've got a program to write. Maybe a need a workaholic monkey or ten to liven things up around here!
Mods: I'm trying for funny, not insightful!
"You have been found to be operating your world in violations of intergalatic patents 234,564.1, 569,870.2 and 1,345,264.2. Please cease and desist all techological manufacturing and research until appropriate licenses can be negotiated and secured.
Failure to comply will result in sterilization of your planet to prevent the theft of intellectual properties rightfully registered our clients.
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Xanthpus and Ziphydol Licensed Intergalactic Legal Counsel."
(Nice name, by the way!) Your post is well-written, and I enjoyed your anecdotes. For the record, I did take a bit of time to peruse your website and catalog. In all fairness, I have neither visited your campus nor talked with a single member of your faculty. However, I did look through both your course catalog and curriculum, and I stand by my original assesment that you are more representative of a trade school than a university.
I don't intend that to be an insult. I work in a large government facility with several hundred nerds, most of which I would classify as excellent technicians. The computer profession NEEDS technicians, people who are able to code, debug, and develop software solutions, administer networks, build databases etc. This is the meat and potatoes of the IT industry. You seem well poised to deliver students, in a timely fashion, who are well equipped to meet those needs, and have secured the backing of some of the biggest players in the IT industry. Kudos!
All of this, however, is tangential to the point of my original post. Universities, like anything else, vary tremendously in quality. I'm sure there exist "party schools" which provide little more education than a two-year college, but the good ones do far more.
Aside from a vastly different focus on curriculm (theory vs. application), the university offers something that is almost impossible to get otherwise. Lots of time in a highly-creative academically-charged atmosphere. The formal curriculum is the tip of the iceburg, the opportunity to accociate with bright people from many different backgrounds and study broadly is priceless.
Many of my studies are not directly related to my work, and I'm sure any graduate from a top university would say the same. It doesn't matter, my teachers weren't trying to teach me MATERIAL (physics, chemistry, calculus, philosophy) they were teaching me how to think. The brain takes time to adapt to new ideas and challenges. Time and effort, it's an old recipe.
Have you ever studied the martial arts? There is a similar effect there. You can teach all the stances, strikes and blocks of most systems in a year, and learn the kata in another year or so. Poof, instant black-belt right? In some schools, yes. In better schools, not remotely. Mastery of the body and unlocking the secrets contained in the kata takes a very long time. Intensity helps, but time is essential. My current sensei has only had two students reach black belt in twenty years of teaching.
Why do you find it so hard to believe that learning can occur at a faster pace that it has for the past x100 years? Because in addition to various science degrees, I also have a B.S. in education, now long unused and a bit dusty I'm afraid. Human's haven't really changed much in the past few hundred years. Education methods have been refined, but Bloom's taxonomy reamins a reasonable yardstick for measuring maturity of understanding. The classes and objectives put forth by Northface seem designed to promote master of the knowedge, comprehension and application levels. A better education lays the same foundation, but follows up with analysis,synthesis and evaluation. Humans haven't changed, the brain still requires time to adapt to and master new ways of thinking, and your program doesn't address the more abstract skills addressed in a four-year program. THAT's what leads me to categorize you as a trade school not a university, and why I don't believe you've suddenly stumbled upon a rosetta stone for unlocking intellectual potential, overlooked by every other teacher the past several hundred years.
I went to a decent university, with a good reputation in science and engineering. Few students graduated in just four years, most took four and a half to five. I got multiple B.S. degrees. Later I did a thesis-based M.S. in biochemistry which took 2.5 years full-time. I've worked for a number of years, and changed to the computer field. I'm working on an M.S. in computer science from Washington State, who required me to take all the core C.S. classes from the undergrad classes PRIOR TO ADMISSION.
Now they're trying to say that a couple of years, most of which is spent training for certifications, is eqivalent? My ruddy arse!
Universities are about the pursuit of knowledge, not job-training. If you want job-training, go to DeVry or similar trade school.
Germany has a far better system. The university and trade schools are complely different things. There are computer users and computer scientists. We're blurring the bloody lines, and it does a huge disservice to those who have put in the blood, sweat, and effort to become educated rather than trained.
Remember, any dumb animal can be trained, but only a human can be educated. Which are you?
I wrote that I had a diverse software package that could easily be identified by the "com.mb" prefix, which I continued to develop and debug in my spare time. When they asked what it did I kind of mumbled along about system libraries, graphic display routines, multi-threaded schedulers. . . and they glazed over almost instantly, and aquiesed.
So now "com.mb" is the sacred cow. Gee, I have a com.mb tree in perl, C, and Java. I've written a number of cool tools, including one or two on sourceforge. It's not really any hardship to nest all new development under that root tree!