paying kids for books read increased standardized test scores
It also instills the value that you shouldn't read unless you're being paid to. This is a well known downside, covered in most behavioral / developmental psychology degree programs.
The assigned readings in many school programs instill the value that reading sucks. Paying kids to actually do the reading won't make that any worse, except in as much as if they didn't do it, they might not learn to hate reading as much.
Explaining to 14yo that grades affect college choices and thus earning potential is simply not going to make sense to that 14yo till he's 30.
Especially when the second part of the connection is questionable. Does one's undergraduate institution really significantly affect future earning potential, and if so, in which fields? And if the financial situation means the kid's only going to State U at best anyway, maybe slacking off and taking the C is the rational choice.
However, there is no such thing as brilliant but unmaintainable code.
There is, but there's not much call for it nowadays. The kind of stuff Steve Wozniak could do in 256 bytes of 6502 assembler (e.g. stuff which behaved differently -- and usefully differently -- if you jumped into the middle of an instruction).
Last time I heard about such a technology, it was organic LEDs. They're finally available after many years, but still obscenely expensive. Why should I believe in this next breakthrough? I'm not holding my breath for this one.
I'll be up front and admit that I have no idea how much teachers and administrators should be paid. However, I know that if someone wrote the same thing about IT people, we'd be pointing out that if you don't offer a decent salary, you're guaranteed to get crap people.
That's because IT doesn't have unions assuring that performance and pay are orthogonal. Also I think GP is implying that the "counselor" positions he mentioned are entirely superfluous, not merely overpaid.
As long as the system works the way it does, throwing money at the schools won't work. As soon as more money might be available, the unions will smell it and go on strike until they get it. And everyone else with a pet project within the system will grab for a cut too. Net result: more money being spent for the same people resulting in the same results. And maybe a new library (but don't count on actual books) with some politically powerful person's name on it.
Nice troll. America lacks almost completely the equating of product defects with moral defects. It lacks a deep insecurity of its own culture (quite the opposite, Americans take American culture so much for granted that many are often surprised when it doesn't exist elsewhere, and we export it without even trying) Institutionalized misogyny is largely absent; the places it holds out are generally places considered either morally suspect or low class or both (car sales, and particularly used car sales, being one such holdout.). Hugely xenophobic attitudes towards other races are held by a minority of the population, again usually not well-thought-of by the rest. Hivemind-like business practices? Uh, no. Even in the bad old days of legal cartels, there was nothing resembling a hive mind. Pedophilia dressed up in cartoon outfits? Again, no. So that leaves widespread depression among males. Judging from the drug commercials, I'd say you've got that one. One out of seven.... you must be European.
Is it only in software we care about backwards compatiblity? This new name change will break thousands of studies which now references a fly does not exist. Journalists with only a fleeting aquantaince to biology will be confused about Drosophila melanogaster and its new name which leads to worse science reporting. This seems like gratitious breakage, where if an analysis was made the costs would be found much higher than the benefits.
You're modded funny, but I think this is more Insightful. The type species for a genus is more or less arbitrary. The member of Drosophila which is most studied and most written about is Drosophila melanogaster. It would make more sense to redesignate Drosophila melanogaster (or at least a near-relative) as the type species for Drosophila, and move Drosophila funebris to a new genus. Either change breaks "backwards compatibility", but moving Drosophila melanogaster breaks it worse.
(Interesting fact: The Mac OS X spell checker recognizes "Drosophila", though not "melanogaster")
Further space exploration is hingent on better orbital lifters than what we have today. The possibilies are still endless once we get cheaper ways to get up into space. The biggest hindrance today is cost versus benefit, not lack of applications once we are in space.
I noticed you didn't mention even one of these endless possibilities.
What exactly is it we can do with people in space? There's no useful place to live (aside from Earth) in the Solar System, and terraforming is presently well beyond our capacity (and would be stopped by environmentalists anyway, if based within a Western country). Any useful raw materials are too costly to move around to be practical. Microgravity manufacturing sounds great, but the costs would be enormous and the potential benefits aren't to that level.
I could help these guys out with the prefix issue. But after the whole kibi/mebi/gibbi nonsense, I'm not feeling inclined to. They'll have to suffer with what they've got.
A prime example of that is some of the charges that Admiral Donitz faced regarding the sinking of neutral and unarmed shipping even though both the British and the Americans waged a similar campaign tactic against both Germany and Japan.
But in a rare lack of hypocrisy, he was not punished for this, for precisely that reason. Admiral Nimitz (USN) famously testified on his behalf.
I agree. Once upon a time, the Slashdot readers argued against closed locked down platforms, and supported openness. But if in ten years' time, the majority of computing is all on completely closed locked down systems where you need permission from the company to do anything, it'll be places like Slashdot that supported and cheered this model on.
Maybe in ten years time it will be. But I'll wager it won't be the same group of people. The most common view here still seems to be that closed locked-down systems are made to be jailbroken.
Form over function is ok for household gadgets but not for space exploration.
There's not even any exploration here. There's no "killer app" for putting people in space. As long as the only reason to do so is more or less national pride, there won't be any efforts to do so which are driven by practicality. Find a reason to do it which actually looks like it will pay off, and things will change. Problem is, there's nothing out there. The moon is a useless chunk of rock. Mars is little better. Asteroid mining and similar SF staples fail due to energy arguments. Satellites can be launched as well with unmanned rockets. So why put people in space? "Because it's really cool" won't run your space program for long.
You did a full throttle powerslide around a hairpin bend and it actually worked?
Nothing quite that crazy, as there weren't any hairpin bends on the way home. Also I wasn't actually all that good at Daytona. Powersliding around the highway cloverleaf ramps, though, yes.
A little calculation (hopefully correct) reveals that if you can get 1km of height, you can store the 32MWh needed (ignoring turbine efficiency) with a reservoir holding a mere 3.2 million gallons of water. In the Texas desert.
Probably a non-starter.
Also it's not clear what happens once the new transmission line is built. A hydro storage facility would be permanent. The battery, potentially, could be re-used somewhere else.
I suspect a flywheel would also be more reliable and environmentally friendly than most batteries.
Probably not feasible. That Wikipedia article suggests that flyweels have a typical capacity of up to 133kWh. This thing has a capacity of about 32MWh. You're either going to need a LOT of flywheels, or a really BIG flywheel... and flywheels don't scale up well.
you can kill yourself on 9 volts believe it or not, its not the voltage, but the amperage which does the damage.
Killing yourself with 9v would require you put the electrodes inside your body, though. You can hold onto both terminals of a 12V auto battery all day and not get anything but hand cramps.
If someone did "lick the connectors" on this baby when it was fully charged
Without doing the calculations, I think if the terminals were close enough together to be licked by even a pornstar-grade tongue, they'd probably arc over even without licking them.
As a rule, its a very bad idea to complete a circuit on batteries larger then D's. Your laptop battery will probably just shock you badly, or maybe just make you twitch and let go (I am just guessing because I wouldn't try it...)....the car battery...well we all know how that can kill people and how it does indeed kill a number of people every year.
Your laptop battery will do nothing to you. The car battery will do nothing to you (standard car battery; don't try this on a hybrid). Current matters, but it's current across you which matters. That's limited by both the effective internal resistance of the battery, the resistance of your skin, and the voltage. Even with a theoretical infinite-capacity 12V battery (0 effective internal resistance), nothing will happen if you grab both terminals.
A giant AC-DC inverter would work, but where are you going to find such a thing that can handle 4 MW?
I'd try GE or Siemens first, but that's just a guess. You'll need a really big line of credit...
Seriously, with a lot of high-voltage transmission now being done via DC, the problem of converting DC to clean phase-matched AC at high power must have been solved.
...there was a $10,000 bonus for patents at IBM in the month of April 2008, right? Alternatively, this was submitted internally at IBM on April 1, and someone missed the joke.
IBMs internal process must have slipped a lot since I was there. I was once on a team which applied for a patent which was useful and arguably non-obvious, the only problem being that IBM had actually done something similar some 20 years before (in a different language)... internal patent people shot it down.
I don't know about the view, but the handling of the car in the old Daytona arcade game is freakishly similar to that of a Miata at about half the speed. This led to an interesting drive home; bad enough that I started driving the Miata like the Daytona car, worse that it actually worked.
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The assigned readings in many school programs instill the value that reading sucks. Paying kids to actually do the reading won't make that any worse, except in as much as if they didn't do it, they might not learn to hate reading as much.
Especially when the second part of the connection is questionable. Does one's undergraduate institution really significantly affect future earning potential, and if so, in which fields? And if the financial situation means the kid's only going to State U at best anyway, maybe slacking off and taking the C is the rational choice.
There is, but there's not much call for it nowadays. The kind of stuff Steve Wozniak could do in 256 bytes of 6502 assembler (e.g. stuff which behaved differently -- and usefully differently -- if you jumped into the middle of an instruction).
Last time I heard about such a technology, it was organic LEDs. They're finally available after many years, but still obscenely expensive. Why should I believe in this next breakthrough? I'm not holding my breath for this one.
That's because IT doesn't have unions assuring that performance and pay are orthogonal. Also I think GP is implying that the "counselor" positions he mentioned are entirely superfluous, not merely overpaid.
As long as the system works the way it does, throwing money at the schools won't work. As soon as more money might be available, the unions will smell it and go on strike until they get it. And everyone else with a pet project within the system will grab for a cut too. Net result: more money being spent for the same people resulting in the same results. And maybe a new library (but don't count on actual books) with some politically powerful person's name on it.
Where's the money in that for Daley?
There are, however, such things as schools that will not do a better job educating kids if given more money.
Nice troll. America lacks almost completely the equating of product defects with moral defects. It lacks a deep insecurity of its own culture (quite the opposite, Americans take American culture so much for granted that many are often surprised when it doesn't exist elsewhere, and we export it without even trying) Institutionalized misogyny is largely absent; the places it holds out are generally places considered either morally suspect or low class or both (car sales, and particularly used car sales, being one such holdout.). Hugely xenophobic attitudes towards other races are held by a minority of the population, again usually not well-thought-of by the rest. Hivemind-like business practices? Uh, no. Even in the bad old days of legal cartels, there was nothing resembling a hive mind. Pedophilia dressed up in cartoon outfits? Again, no. So that leaves widespread depression among males. Judging from the drug commercials, I'd say you've got that one. One out of seven.... you must be European.
I noticed you didn't mention even one of these endless possibilities.
What exactly is it we can do with people in space? There's no useful place to live (aside from Earth) in the Solar System, and terraforming is presently well beyond our capacity (and would be stopped by environmentalists anyway, if based within a Western country). Any useful raw materials are too costly to move around to be practical. Microgravity manufacturing sounds great, but the costs would be enormous and the potential benefits aren't to that level.
I could help these guys out with the prefix issue. But after the whole kibi/mebi/gibbi nonsense, I'm not feeling inclined to. They'll have to suffer with what they've got.
But in a rare lack of hypocrisy, he was not punished for this, for precisely that reason. Admiral Nimitz (USN) famously testified on his behalf.
It probably didn't help that the East German government left much of the town as rubble until reunification.
Maybe in ten years time it will be. But I'll wager it won't be the same group of people. The most common view here still seems to be that closed locked-down systems are made to be jailbroken.
Yes, but the lactase gene is in the human genome; this is different because it's in the genomes of symbiotic bacteria.
The Russians tried that once. They ended up paying NASA about $2 million per astronaut. It turns out NASA hired Hollywood accountants.
There's not even any exploration here. There's no "killer app" for putting people in space. As long as the only reason to do so is more or less national pride, there won't be any efforts to do so which are driven by practicality. Find a reason to do it which actually looks like it will pay off, and things will change. Problem is, there's nothing out there. The moon is a useless chunk of rock. Mars is little better. Asteroid mining and similar SF staples fail due to energy arguments. Satellites can be launched as well with unmanned rockets. So why put people in space? "Because it's really cool" won't run your space program for long.
Just because you share your name with an Alaska city doesn't mean you have to be as dumb as Sarah Palin.
Nothing quite that crazy, as there weren't any hairpin bends on the way home. Also I wasn't actually all that good at Daytona. Powersliding around the highway cloverleaf ramps, though, yes.
A little calculation (hopefully correct) reveals that if you can get 1km of height, you can store the 32MWh needed (ignoring turbine efficiency) with a reservoir holding a mere 3.2 million gallons of water. In the Texas desert.
Probably a non-starter.
Also it's not clear what happens once the new transmission line is built. A hydro storage facility would be permanent. The battery, potentially, could be re-used somewhere else.
Probably not feasible. That Wikipedia article suggests that flyweels have a typical capacity of up to 133kWh. This thing has a capacity of about 32MWh. You're either going to need a LOT of flywheels, or a really BIG flywheel... and flywheels don't scale up well.
Killing yourself with 9v would require you put the electrodes inside your body, though. You can hold onto both terminals of a 12V auto battery all day and not get anything but hand cramps.
Without doing the calculations, I think if the terminals were close enough together to be licked by even a pornstar-grade tongue, they'd probably arc over even without licking them.
Your laptop battery will do nothing to you. The car battery will do nothing to you (standard car battery; don't try this on a hybrid). Current matters, but it's current across you which matters. That's limited by both the effective internal resistance of the battery, the resistance of your skin, and the voltage. Even with a theoretical infinite-capacity 12V battery (0 effective internal resistance), nothing will happen if you grab both terminals.
I'd try GE or Siemens first, but that's just a guess. You'll need a really big line of credit...
Seriously, with a lot of high-voltage transmission now being done via DC, the problem of converting DC to clean phase-matched AC at high power must have been solved.
...there was a $10,000 bonus for patents at IBM in the month of April 2008, right? Alternatively, this was submitted internally at IBM on April 1, and someone missed the joke.
IBMs internal process must have slipped a lot since I was there. I was once on a team which applied for a patent which was useful and arguably non-obvious, the only problem being that IBM had actually done something similar some 20 years before (in a different language)... internal patent people shot it down.
I don't know about the view, but the handling of the car in the old Daytona arcade game is freakishly similar to that of a Miata at about half the speed. This led to an interesting drive home; bad enough that I started driving the Miata like the Daytona car, worse that it actually worked.