In these times of economic concerns, do we really need to be paying people to go through George Bush's e-mail?
YES, dammit! This could be a whole new ballpark for the reconstituted WPA! Finally, a way to employ all those laid-off Razorfish and Netscape employees, all the DBA's and programmers and other disiecta membra who now clog our cities' streets selling apples and pencils!
Most of the posts under this article are rather one-sided -- the parent is the only one that really considers the student as a locus of responsibility for learning. Someone mentioned sarcastically a professor who taught his students the value of reading their textbooks and working cooperatively -- those are real values the students will need in the much-fabled "real world."
Imagine you hire two engineers, fresh from e-school. Both work on tasks beyond their immediate scope of knowledge; let's say each has to code in a new language he's never seen before. One actively searches for information, buys and reads books on the new language, and works together with his teammates to solve problems. The other emerges only from his cubicle to ask his immediate superior, who is working on other matters, how to write code. Worker number two never asks anyone else, never tries to figure out his problems on his own, never takes initiative but expects to be spoonfed.
Who gets the better performance evaluation?
I recognize that the analogy is not exact, but the student who actively seeks knowledge to solve problems on his own will learn more than one who wishes to be given the answers while remaining passive. Further, he who seeks to solve problems with his peers is also teaching his peers, and teaching is one of the best ways of learning. Cooperative study and teamwork is very much the trend in elementary and secondary education for precisely the reasons sketched above.
None of this absolves a professor from the responsibilty of being available to answer the occasional question, but the student who is dependent on the professor is also in breach of his responsibilities as an active learner.
My only regret, despite winning only 11 votes, is that I used a screencap from MSIE in Adobe Photoshop. Only now, in this late hour, do I realize my folly -- I should have used Konqueror and the GIMP. Perhaps three people reading the photoshop thread would have understood -- I could've been up to a whole 14 votes.
Guess he forgot to put the decimal point in the right place. Off to the federal "pound me in the ass" prision with you!
Umm... if you had read the article or remembered the guy's company, DEN, you'd note that he's awaiting extradition from Spain back to the US on charges of molesting a teenage male employee. Your choice of prison is ironic... and you know what happens to kiddie rapers in jail.
so they buy dvds, because every blockbuster pushes the dvd format. (blockbuster owns my town. four blockbusters, and no competition)
No competition? Your town doesn't have a bookstore or public library? How about public parks for playing football, courts for basketball, streets for stickball? If you just have to have scripted drama performed for you, try your local theater groups (and I don't mean the ones with projectors and screens), or join one yourself. Too old for stickball and too reserved for theater? Get involved in your community: become a volunteer, an activist, run for mayor, run for dogcatcher. Do something, don't just watch DVD's from Blockbuster and complain about watching DVD's from Blockbuster.
No one's managed to copyright reality, nature, or relations with your fellow human beings yet. Enjoy 'em while it lasts.
I graduated from my.edu three years ago and my account was terminated then. I enrolled again this summer as a visiting grad student to take a course and received the same e-mail address. I've used the e-mail address only to communicate with my professor.
And I'm getting spam.
Spammers are STILL using the mailing lists from 1999, I guess.
By the way, the crush spams were around back then too. And even in those days of ignorance, we still had sense enough not to reply.
There's a term for people who think like that - Luddites.
There's also a term for people who think they have to one-up the next guy by being the first kid on the block to have the latest technological trifle -- egotists.
Luddites oppose all modern technology. That's a silly point of view, however, because some technology presents man with a genuine benefit and augments his standard of living in meaningful ways. Genetic manipulation may lead to a cure for cancer, electricity brings light and heat in the midst of winter, and man rejoices that he has bettered his life by using technology for noble ends.
Running a Hello-Kitty first-person-shooter game while playing DivX videos and surfing for pr0n simultaneously on my hot pink cell phone does not, however, represent the noble usage of technology or a meaningful increase in man's standard of living. Rather, it demonstrates that man has been conditioned by vested commercial interests (the telcos and manufacturers of cell phones, in this case, not to mention the pornographers) to regard possession or use of this technology as "cool."
And who can resist being labeled "cool?" Certainly no one who's been raised with the massive inferiority complex American manufacturers and service industries try to impose through advertising: "Your dick's too small, buy herbal Viagra; you're too fat to wear this bikini, join Jenny Craig (or go bulimic)." Spending a few bucks to look "cool" seems a good deal once it seems your sexual appeal depends on it -- hence why teenagers are such an easy market. The vested commercial interests use man's ego to compel him to consume, to buy these trifles or pay for use of them. It's not the same as curing cancer.
Someone who refuses to take advantage of the benefits conferred by electricity in the deep winter may indeed be a "Luddite." Someone who decides he doesn't need the latest cellphone equipped with 3-d gaming technology, on the other hand, is not necessarily a Luddite. It may be that his ego is satisfied, that he doesn't feel false material "needs." At one point, such people, who didn't feel the need to look "cool," were instead called "mature." Calling them "Luddites" instead merely serves the interests of advertisers.
No -- WalMart is trying to be good for once... remember, they've started selling OSless PC's, so you don't have the OEM Windows EULA forced on you at boot up. WalMart is the wrong place to storm for this reason (though I'm sure you can find other reasons to storm it if you look hard enough -- exploitation of foreign labor, etc).
Protest the right folks at the right time for the right reason.
I picked up a Sony Clie PEG-T415 early this year for around $150. It's just like a Palm, except it works right and has a legible screen -- something like twice the resolution of the Palms, which makes the fonts much more acceptable.
It also comes with a nifty remote-control emulator called "Clie RMC" that I use to turn off the TV's in bars. Haven't been caught yet.
You'll find a variation on the word used in "The Circus of Dr. Lao" by Charles Finney: Apollonius of Tyana is described as a "thaumaturge." Now *that*'s a classic of fantasy.
Programming classes at the high school level, epecially in conjunction with a concerted effort across disciplines to emphasize analysis and logic, could be enlightening. On the other hand, they can indeed by drivel. It depends on several factors, including the preparation of the students (have they been taught logic, or have they been taught that systematic thought stifles their creativity?) and the teacher's approach (teach with specific examples, step by step, or assign the whole book to be read and then start applying everything at once halfway through the year, like one teacher I know).
And the system is now too big for it to ever fix itself successfully. Shame.
No system ever fixes itself. People create systems, and people have the power also to destroy, subvert or fix systems. Yes, life often sucks -- so find a small corner of it, make it yours and make it better. Inspire others to do the same. That's the whole point behind becoming a teacher -- good teachers always work to improve their schools and the educational system.
Microsoft is a huge system. It's not immune to change. The Justice Department and the States are working on it through legal channels, and the Linux community is chipping away at it by providing an alternative and demonstrating to the masses that the alternative is viable. If these school systems can expose Microsoft's licensure scheme as the extortion racket it is, if they can demonstrate that alternatives to Office and Windows are feasible, and if they can teach those two points to children, the parents and the media, they too will have changed a system.
That subject line is, incidentally, as infuriatingly grammatically incorrect as the original quotation. ROFL. Early this year, I used a Flash version of the "All your base are belong to us" game intro to demonstrate why grammar is important to understanding a language.
Yes they do. It's easy, it requires little syntactic coherence or grammar, and it's got handy menus that let you add pointless clipart and obnoxious sounds. Trust me, kids love making PowerPoint presentations, just like middle managers, and for much the same reasons.
While I'm telling them what to teach in grade school. Teach English! Well!
Amen.
Enforce mastery and require that all your graduates can write a two page essay that could, say, get them a job or a raise or an A in college.
Writing beautifully polished prose is one thing. Writing *meaningful* prose is another. Writing the former and not the latter is called "BS." To get that job, raise or A requires that they have something to talk about. And for that, they need more than just the English and CS curriculum you suggested, unless you propose to convert the entire economic and academic structures of society into a technocracy. A generous smattering of the liberal arts would give the students enough background to have something meaningful to write about when applying to jobs or degree programs in fields beyond CS. English is important, but the other subjects should not be neglected.
I became a teacher because I saw in it, and still see, an opportunity to make a positive impact on the lives of others, and thus on the world, that will last far longer than my own mortal dust. I suspect that attracts most teachers. Certainly it's not the pay (I make $30K/year), it's not the hours (I was at school from 7:30 this morning until after 8:00 tonight, grading papers until 6:00 and then attending a varsity girls' softball game), and it's not the prestige (ha). Sure, I get two months off in the summer, but I'll be taking classes then at my own expense at a college three hours from my home. Honestly, the only reason to teach is to satisfy a desire to help others.
The ability or lack thereof to implement databases doesn't really affect such a motive, unless your field of specialization is teaching computer science. I teach Latin, and frankly there are more effective ways to teach vocabulary or history than with Access or mysql.
Teaching children to value content over presentation, on the other hand, is a broader and more fundamental lesson, part of learning to filter signal from noise -- something each of us does every day, some more successfully than others. Personally, I have a problem with colleagues who don't teach children to sift the useful from the shiny, but I realize they do so from a lack of analysis of their own actions rather than from intent. They still *want* to help children learn, but they need to be shown the logical consequences of their implementations. And that, of course, is why we have inservice training.
As a teacher, I can say with great sadness that database use is not a priority among most middle or high school classes. I can't think of any colleague who has used Access all year -- in fact, even the training inservices had trouble developing situations in which it would be useful in the classroom (due to time constraints on lab use and a the greater efficiency in using simpler textbook-based strategies to teach the same material).
Word processing is by far the most common use of technology, followed by the web browsing (for those deluded into thinking that reading a book is a waste of time and that the interent, home of frauds and nuts a-plenty, is the best possible source for valid information on any subject).
Giving schools tools liks scilab or mysql (or the internet) is easy. Training teachers to teach useful ways to implement the technology -- to use the right tools in the right way for the right job -- is harder. I know some who struggle to save their gradebook spreadsheet files in the right place or keep their printers running; these will never figure out how to teach children to use sql queries to track data.
PowerPoint is used often in classrooms as a way to produce projects for presentation to classes -- things that once were called "oral reports" or "posters." Even worse, children are encouraged to use as many sounds, animations and transitions as possible to "arouse interest." The lesson taught: bells, whistles and shiny baubles are interesting, not content. Again, the more fundamental problem is not finding a replacement for PowerPoint (KPresenter would do nicely), but finding the right way to use it (to present content).
That having been said, isn't a parsec defined as the distance from the earth to a hypothetical star such that the hypothetical star would have a parallax of one arcsecond? The number 30.857x10^12 km corresponds to that distance if measuring parallax from earth. Parallax in turn depends in part on the length of the axis of the earth's orbit, or rather the distance of the earth from the center of its orbit... but what if, in "a galaxy far, far away" the standard for parsecs was based not on observations from Earth, but from a planet with a different orbit? Would that throw off the distance at which a star would appear to occupy a second of arc, and thus the length of a parsec?
On the other hand, who cares -- I'm going to see the movie not to see a treatise on astro-trigonometry or to see a fine piece of art cinema or even to view high-class science fiction -- Star Wars was never about any of that (hence the explosions in space, FTL drives, etc.). I'm going to be entertained, to see a space movie with big, flying ships and laser swords and little green men. Boo on anyone who's going just to pick faults and whine.
Step 1: Place legal control over basic components of everyday life in the hands of one organization, granting it a monopoly.
Step 2: Monopoly levies usage fees over basic components of everyday life.
Step 3: People complain to monopoly. Monopoly doesn't listen, because it doesn't have to: it alone has what people want.
Sound familiar? No, I'm not thinking of Microsoft, I'm thinking of the Stamp Tax and the acts leading to the American rebellion. When someone finally patents cloning or reproductive rights, that someone will have a stranglehold on a key industry thanks to the patent. At some point, no one's going to put up with it anymore -- Congress will be forced to act.
But the requisite surge of emotion won't develop until conditions become intolerable, and Americans are too self-centered not to tolerate the acts of coporations until those entities intrude on their everyday lives. Americans had been living without representation for some time; it wasn't until they were taxed, stinging their pockets and their pride, that they cared.
A prank pulled on the USPTO will raise media furor for a day or two, but it won't impact upon or intrude into anyone's life. Americans have grown used to being appalled -- jaded by spectacle. Only when a company actually gains a monopoly and openly exerts power though hubris (violent arrogance - think Microsoft here) will it be brought to account for its actions.
How well does AbiWord support funky character sets? I end up doing most of my work in a language with macrons over the vowels. Unicode fonts support this, and I've got unicode fonts on my linux box, but using them is a pain. Does AbiWord have any nice, handy way of mapping keystrokes like MS Word can with its shortcuts? (In MSWord I can hit alt+"\" and hen type a vowel to get a macron over that vowel). I've tried xmodmap with no positive results to date.
The troller (yes, you were trolled) who started the thread seemed to have been inspired by the adequacy.org article. Specifically, question #3 of the adequacy article deals with AMD processors being used exclusively by hackers.
The article was funny back when it first came out back in December. It's old now, and I'm surprised the idea of AMD as a transnational corporation exploiting native populations for cheap labor made its way into a troll five months later. I don't know if the rest of Adequacy's articles are written in the same style, but this one, with its links-a-plenty, reminds me vaguely of a low-brow Suck (the Wired spin-off that was worth reading once upon a time).
It's rather irksome that so many people actually thought AMD used Asian sweatshops to manufacture chips. Almost as annoying as the number of people who can't spell Malaysia.
Remember also that oftentimes that people want to replace their computer, and damn well know how to do it, but simply lack the funds.
Amen, brother. That about sums up the whole deal. Yes, I could buy a Lian Li case, the top of the line SMP quad mobo, four processors, and enough fans to cool a small stadium, but I'd also like to buy a sandwich and a pack of smokes once in a while too.
If you read the article, the camera is pointing north. The camera is not actually located at the pole, but a few miles south of it on a drifting ice floe. Therefore, the camera is pointing towards the north pole, which should be somewhere in view between the equipment visible and the ridge at the horizon. That ridge marks the north end of the floe.
Re:The name of the sequel has been leaked out!
on
Tron 2.0 Game
·
· Score: 1
I remember seeing the movie TRON and suddenly realizing what "TRON" and "TROFF" in BASICA must mean. And then I went back to playing DONKEY.BAS and the rest of SAMPLES.BAS:)
I suppose I should've looked it up in the manual, given that DOS 3.0 and "Advanced Basic" had honest-to-god, binder-style manuals.
Slashdot Mirror
YES, dammit! This could be a whole new ballpark for the reconstituted WPA! Finally, a way to employ all those laid-off Razorfish and Netscape employees, all the DBA's and programmers and other disiecta membra who now clog our cities' streets selling apples and pencils!
Most of the posts under this article are rather one-sided -- the parent is the only one that really considers the student as a locus of responsibility for learning. Someone mentioned sarcastically a professor who taught his students the value of reading their textbooks and working cooperatively -- those are real values the students will need in the much-fabled "real world."
Imagine you hire two engineers, fresh from e-school. Both work on tasks beyond their immediate scope of knowledge; let's say each has to code in a new language he's never seen before. One actively searches for information, buys and reads books on the new language, and works together with his teammates to solve problems. The other emerges only from his cubicle to ask his immediate superior, who is working on other matters, how to write code. Worker number two never asks anyone else, never tries to figure out his problems on his own, never takes initiative but expects to be spoonfed. Who gets the better performance evaluation?
I recognize that the analogy is not exact, but the student who actively seeks knowledge to solve problems on his own will learn more than one who wishes to be given the answers while remaining passive. Further, he who seeks to solve problems with his peers is also teaching his peers, and teaching is one of the best ways of learning. Cooperative study and teamwork is very much the trend in elementary and secondary education for precisely the reasons sketched above.
None of this absolves a professor from the responsibilty of being available to answer the occasional question, but the student who is dependent on the professor is also in breach of his responsibilities as an active learner.
My only regret, despite winning only 11 votes, is that I used a screencap from MSIE in Adobe Photoshop. Only now, in this late hour, do I realize my folly -- I should have used Konqueror and the GIMP. Perhaps three people reading the photoshop thread would have understood -- I could've been up to a whole 14 votes.
Wow. The part about the ponies was precious. I think I may have found a new hobby...
Yeah... it's CmdrTaco -- but it's not a joke, it's the OSDN business plan :)
one awaiting a prison sentence
Guess he forgot to put the decimal point in the right place. Off to the federal "pound me in the ass" prision with you!
Umm... if you had read the article or remembered the guy's company, DEN, you'd note that he's awaiting extradition from Spain back to the US on charges of molesting a teenage male employee. Your choice of prison is ironic... and you know what happens to kiddie rapers in jail.
More likely they forgot what happens when you don't listen to Homer... "IN THIS HOUSE WE OBEY THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!"
so they buy dvds, because every blockbuster pushes the dvd format. (blockbuster owns my town. four blockbusters, and no competition)
No competition? Your town doesn't have a bookstore or public library? How about public parks for playing football, courts for basketball, streets for stickball? If you just have to have scripted drama performed for you, try your local theater groups (and I don't mean the ones with projectors and screens), or join one yourself. Too old for stickball and too reserved for theater? Get involved in your community: become a volunteer, an activist, run for mayor, run for dogcatcher. Do something, don't just watch DVD's from Blockbuster and complain about watching DVD's from Blockbuster.
No one's managed to copyright reality, nature, or relations with your fellow human beings yet. Enjoy 'em while it lasts.
I graduated from my .edu three years ago and my account was terminated then. I enrolled again this summer as a visiting grad student to take a course and received the same e-mail address. I've used the e-mail address only to communicate with my professor.
And I'm getting spam.
Spammers are STILL using the mailing lists from 1999, I guess.
By the way, the crush spams were around back then too. And even in those days of ignorance, we still had sense enough not to reply.
There's a term for people who think like that - Luddites.
There's also a term for people who think they have to one-up the next guy by being the first kid on the block to have the latest technological trifle -- egotists.
Luddites oppose all modern technology. That's a silly point of view, however, because some technology presents man with a genuine benefit and augments his standard of living in meaningful ways. Genetic manipulation may lead to a cure for cancer, electricity brings light and heat in the midst of winter, and man rejoices that he has bettered his life by using technology for noble ends.
Running a Hello-Kitty first-person-shooter game while playing DivX videos and surfing for pr0n simultaneously on my hot pink cell phone does not, however, represent the noble usage of technology or a meaningful increase in man's standard of living. Rather, it demonstrates that man has been conditioned by vested commercial interests (the telcos and manufacturers of cell phones, in this case, not to mention the pornographers) to regard possession or use of this technology as "cool."
And who can resist being labeled "cool?" Certainly no one who's been raised with the massive inferiority complex American manufacturers and service industries try to impose through advertising: "Your dick's too small, buy herbal Viagra; you're too fat to wear this bikini, join Jenny Craig (or go bulimic)." Spending a few bucks to look "cool" seems a good deal once it seems your sexual appeal depends on it -- hence why teenagers are such an easy market. The vested commercial interests use man's ego to compel him to consume, to buy these trifles or pay for use of them. It's not the same as curing cancer.
Someone who refuses to take advantage of the benefits conferred by electricity in the deep winter may indeed be a "Luddite." Someone who decides he doesn't need the latest cellphone equipped with 3-d gaming technology, on the other hand, is not necessarily a Luddite. It may be that his ego is satisfied, that he doesn't feel false material "needs." At one point, such people, who didn't feel the need to look "cool," were instead called "mature." Calling them "Luddites" instead merely serves the interests of advertisers.
No -- WalMart is trying to be good for once... remember, they've started selling OSless PC's, so you don't have the OEM Windows EULA forced on you at boot up. WalMart is the wrong place to storm for this reason (though I'm sure you can find other reasons to storm it if you look hard enough -- exploitation of foreign labor, etc).
Protest the right folks at the right time for the right reason.
I picked up a Sony Clie PEG-T415 early this year for around $150. It's just like a Palm, except it works right and has a legible screen -- something like twice the resolution of the Palms, which makes the fonts much more acceptable.
It also comes with a nifty remote-control emulator called "Clie RMC" that I use to turn off the TV's in bars. Haven't been caught yet.
You'll find a variation on the word used in "The Circus of Dr. Lao" by Charles Finney: Apollonius of Tyana is described as a "thaumaturge." Now *that*'s a classic of fantasy.
Programming classes at the high school level, epecially in conjunction with a concerted effort across disciplines to emphasize analysis and logic, could be enlightening. On the other hand, they can indeed by drivel. It depends on several factors, including the preparation of the students (have they been taught logic, or have they been taught that systematic thought stifles their creativity?) and the teacher's approach (teach with specific examples, step by step, or assign the whole book to be read and then start applying everything at once halfway through the year, like one teacher I know).
And the system is now too big for it to ever fix itself successfully. Shame.
No system ever fixes itself. People create systems, and people have the power also to destroy, subvert or fix systems. Yes, life often sucks -- so find a small corner of it, make it yours and make it better. Inspire others to do the same. That's the whole point behind becoming a teacher -- good teachers always work to improve their schools and the educational system.
Microsoft is a huge system. It's not immune to change. The Justice Department and the States are working on it through legal channels, and the Linux community is chipping away at it by providing an alternative and demonstrating to the masses that the alternative is viable. If these school systems can expose Microsoft's licensure scheme as the extortion racket it is, if they can demonstrate that alternatives to Office and Windows are feasible, and if they can teach those two points to children, the parents and the media, they too will have changed a system.
That subject line is, incidentally, as infuriatingly grammatically incorrect as the original quotation. ROFL. Early this year, I used a Flash version of the "All your base are belong to us" game intro to demonstrate why grammar is important to understanding a language.
Kids don't want to make powerpoint presentations.
Yes they do. It's easy, it requires little syntactic coherence or grammar, and it's got handy menus that let you add pointless clipart and obnoxious sounds. Trust me, kids love making PowerPoint presentations, just like middle managers, and for much the same reasons.
While I'm telling them what to teach in grade school. Teach English! Well!
Amen.
Enforce mastery and require that all your graduates can write a two page essay that could, say, get them a job or a raise or an A in college.
Writing beautifully polished prose is one thing. Writing *meaningful* prose is another. Writing the former and not the latter is called "BS." To get that job, raise or A requires that they have something to talk about. And for that, they need more than just the English and CS curriculum you suggested, unless you propose to convert the entire economic and academic structures of society into a technocracy. A generous smattering of the liberal arts would give the students enough background to have something meaningful to write about when applying to jobs or degree programs in fields beyond CS. English is important, but the other subjects should not be neglected.
I became a teacher because I saw in it, and still see, an opportunity to make a positive impact on the lives of others, and thus on the world, that will last far longer than my own mortal dust. I suspect that attracts most teachers. Certainly it's not the pay (I make $30K/year), it's not the hours (I was at school from 7:30 this morning until after 8:00 tonight, grading papers until 6:00 and then attending a varsity girls' softball game), and it's not the prestige (ha). Sure, I get two months off in the summer, but I'll be taking classes then at my own expense at a college three hours from my home. Honestly, the only reason to teach is to satisfy a desire to help others.
The ability or lack thereof to implement databases doesn't really affect such a motive, unless your field of specialization is teaching computer science. I teach Latin, and frankly there are more effective ways to teach vocabulary or history than with Access or mysql.
Teaching children to value content over presentation, on the other hand, is a broader and more fundamental lesson, part of learning to filter signal from noise -- something each of us does every day, some more successfully than others. Personally, I have a problem with colleagues who don't teach children to sift the useful from the shiny, but I realize they do so from a lack of analysis of their own actions rather than from intent. They still *want* to help children learn, but they need to be shown the logical consequences of their implementations. And that, of course, is why we have inservice training.
As a teacher, I can say with great sadness that database use is not a priority among most middle or high school classes. I can't think of any colleague who has used Access all year -- in fact, even the training inservices had trouble developing situations in which it would be useful in the classroom (due to time constraints on lab use and a the greater efficiency in using simpler textbook-based strategies to teach the same material).
Word processing is by far the most common use of technology, followed by the web browsing (for those deluded into thinking that reading a book is a waste of time and that the interent, home of frauds and nuts a-plenty, is the best possible source for valid information on any subject).
Giving schools tools liks scilab or mysql (or the internet) is easy. Training teachers to teach useful ways to implement the technology -- to use the right tools in the right way for the right job -- is harder. I know some who struggle to save their gradebook spreadsheet files in the right place or keep their printers running; these will never figure out how to teach children to use sql queries to track data.
PowerPoint is used often in classrooms as a way to produce projects for presentation to classes -- things that once were called "oral reports" or "posters." Even worse, children are encouraged to use as many sounds, animations and transitions as possible to "arouse interest." The lesson taught: bells, whistles and shiny baubles are interesting, not content. Again, the more fundamental problem is not finding a replacement for PowerPoint (KPresenter would do nicely), but finding the right way to use it (to present content).
IANAA (I am not an astronomer.)
That having been said, isn't a parsec defined as the distance from the earth to a hypothetical star such that the hypothetical star would have a parallax of one arcsecond? The number 30.857x10^12 km corresponds to that distance if measuring parallax from earth. Parallax in turn depends in part on the length of the axis of the earth's orbit, or rather the distance of the earth from the center of its orbit... but what if, in "a galaxy far, far away" the standard for parsecs was based not on observations from Earth, but from a planet with a different orbit? Would that throw off the distance at which a star would appear to occupy a second of arc, and thus the length of a parsec?
On the other hand, who cares -- I'm going to see the movie not to see a treatise on astro-trigonometry or to see a fine piece of art cinema or even to view high-class science fiction -- Star Wars was never about any of that (hence the explosions in space, FTL drives, etc.). I'm going to be entertained, to see a space movie with big, flying ships and laser swords and little green men. Boo on anyone who's going just to pick faults and whine.
Step 1: Place legal control over basic components of everyday life in the hands of one organization, granting it a monopoly.
Step 2: Monopoly levies usage fees over basic components of everyday life.
Step 3: People complain to monopoly. Monopoly doesn't listen, because it doesn't have to: it alone has what people want.
Sound familiar? No, I'm not thinking of Microsoft, I'm thinking of the Stamp Tax and the acts leading to the American rebellion. When someone finally patents cloning or reproductive rights, that someone will have a stranglehold on a key industry thanks to the patent. At some point, no one's going to put up with it anymore -- Congress will be forced to act.
But the requisite surge of emotion won't develop until conditions become intolerable, and Americans are too self-centered not to tolerate the acts of coporations until those entities intrude on their everyday lives. Americans had been living without representation for some time; it wasn't until they were taxed, stinging their pockets and their pride, that they cared.
A prank pulled on the USPTO will raise media furor for a day or two, but it won't impact upon or intrude into anyone's life. Americans have grown used to being appalled -- jaded by spectacle. Only when a company actually gains a monopoly and openly exerts power though hubris (violent arrogance - think Microsoft here) will it be brought to account for its actions.
How well does AbiWord support funky character sets? I end up doing most of my work in a language with macrons over the vowels. Unicode fonts support this, and I've got unicode fonts on my linux box, but using them is a pain. Does AbiWord have any nice, handy way of mapping keystrokes like MS Word can with its shortcuts? (In MSWord I can hit alt+"\" and hen type a vowel to get a macron over that vowel). I've tried xmodmap with no positive results to date.
The troller (yes, you were trolled) who started the thread seemed to have been inspired by the adequacy.org article. Specifically, question #3 of the adequacy article deals with AMD processors being used exclusively by hackers.
The article was funny back when it first came out back in December. It's old now, and I'm surprised the idea of AMD as a transnational corporation exploiting native populations for cheap labor made its way into a troll five months later. I don't know if the rest of Adequacy's articles are written in the same style, but this one, with its links-a-plenty, reminds me vaguely of a low-brow Suck (the Wired spin-off that was worth reading once upon a time).
It's rather irksome that so many people actually thought AMD used Asian sweatshops to manufacture chips. Almost as annoying as the number of people who can't spell Malaysia.
Remember also that oftentimes that people want to replace their computer, and damn well know how to do it, but simply lack the funds.
Amen, brother. That about sums up the whole deal. Yes, I could buy a Lian Li case, the top of the line SMP quad mobo, four processors, and enough fans to cool a small stadium, but I'd also like to buy a sandwich and a pack of smokes once in a while too.
Yes, of course AMD has long been known for using child labor in Asian sweatshops to manufacture unAmerican chips that promote piracy.
If you read the article, the camera is pointing north. The camera is not actually located at the pole, but a few miles south of it on a drifting ice floe. Therefore, the camera is pointing towards the north pole, which should be somewhere in view between the equipment visible and the ridge at the horizon. That ridge marks the north end of the floe.
I remember seeing the movie TRON and suddenly realizing what "TRON" and "TROFF" in BASICA must mean. And then I went back to playing DONKEY.BAS and the rest of SAMPLES.BAS :)
I suppose I should've looked it up in the manual, given that DOS 3.0 and "Advanced Basic" had honest-to-god, binder-style manuals.