Thanks for your feedback hixie, how refreshing to see posts from someone actually knowledgeable on the subject at hand!
I agree with many of the posts, mainly on two points: 1) It's great that the browsers will show pretty much anything no matter how illegal the html, so who cares about a new spec? and 2) HTML5 looks like a great many changes and additions and deletions, to me anyway, and especially seems to strengthen form input fields and overall form usage. It appears to be a much larger creature than the html of the 90's. But I'm definitely behind the times, maybe all this is standard now.
This could have been a more fun topic, but one's first gaming experience is coincidental and not that interesting. Enough about pong. The interesting thing about pong was how you could spin the rebound, that was impressive.
A better question would have been: What was your first computer gaming experience that really hooked you in? When did you first look at a clock that showed it was early morning, and tell yourself, "better quit and go to bed... just a little more..."
I'm another old-timer, and this entire thread should be modded as insightful, for the way it shows the cluelessness of the american male driver, even in the elite world of slash-dotters.
I had an infuriating drive a few years back from Richmond, VA, to Newport News. A beautiful two-lane interstate through the pine woods, at first the drive was great, lots of traffic but a good flow. Then, brake lights everywhere, traffic slows to a stop, then a crawl, then starts up again. I'm looking for a wreck or a lane closing, but nothing seems unusual. Soon, we're back up to speed, and I notice the morons going 85, changing lanes all the time, then pretty soon again brake lights, stopped, etc. The entire drive is like this, no wrecks, no reason for traffic to slow, except: Just enough slight hills to lose sight of traffic, and coming over the hill the morons hit their brakes. Exactly like TFA describes.
But still it seems a large percentage of the comments ignore TFA, bring up pointless numbers galore, and shrug off sensible ideas like leaving a bigger gap, for example. Or driving slower.
One poster suggested that driving like an imbecile somehow serves his own self-interest so is perhaps a moral imperitave! Sad.
We just have to face it, most american male drivers drive like they have the brain of an eighth-grader. Unconscious of the potential danger of their behavior, pointlessly selfish and without courtesy, no awareness that the other vehicles contain people like them. It's too bad, it could be so easy.
Unsafe to drive at the posted limit? Impossible, and silly, much like something a teenager would say about old people driving too slow. Highway driving is so tedious because of this adolescent behavior, most drivers work so hard driving dangerously to gain a couple of car lengths.
Great response and right on the money! I say this even though I'm one of those wannabe hippies, grew up in the 60's, listened to my older sister's albums in junior high and high school, hit college in the 70's and hated the contemporary music of my time! Disco was the end of the world as I saw it.
Not in this country, anyway.
Yeah, we were completely wrong to think the USA had a future of peace and freedom and equality for every citizen. Turns out america really is a racist and imperialist country, this new century is much more true to our heritage.
"Judgefurious" I take my hat off to you. I read smallfurrycreature's post, felt the immediate need to praise it with a reply, and your post just says everything I would have said and more.
And I'd be glad to support a law forcing us to buy fresh bread from a neighborhood bakery.
Not just a reply to the parent, but more to this whole thread.
Whatever Churchill said or didn't say, it's comical to see all the posts as to the meaning of the word liberal. Who cares, and how sad that labels matter so much to us. But interesting to see the meaningful discussion that comes from a simple quote from some historical guy.
As for Gene Simmons, he is consistent and logical in his points. I never liked his music either, but only a moron would try to argue that he wasn't a phenomenal success due to his own talents and hard work. For whatever reason, plenty of people really liked the music. Who in the hell are slashdotters to claim some superior sense of aesthetics? Music is just sounds in your ears, and we're all just "some guy" or gal, so you like what you like and others do the same. Try to come up with a rational argument against why Kiss made a gazillion dollars. Music is "popular" culture, and you just come off sounding like an envious fool.
It's also ironic to have discussions about greed and taxes, etc., in conjunction with a guy who has been completely successful in all these avenues. Seems like a lot of the posters are in complete agreement with Gene!
As for making a living as a musician, yes, it's saturated, but overall I think if you really deserve to make it big, you do. Making really good music just happens to be a pretty common talent, there's plenty of great songs to play and plenty of people who can play well. Making music is, after all, something all humans were born to do. Really good music isn't that hard to find. Being unique, being original, having the drive and the ego to break out of the crowd, that will always "make it big." But making it big just means making big $$ and appealing to some lowest common denominator or matching some demographic, it doesn't mean it's the "best" music in some purist's mind.
I could care less what Gene says, too, though he amuses me much like Ted Nugent. I think, good for them, I'm glad they made a bunch of money and are nutcases! I'm not interested in accumulating wealth so don't consider his point of view important. But those of you talking about too high taxes, blah blah blah, probably should check him out, he's one of you.
I was done, but just have to speak to the posts about how hard you've worked all your life, with two jobs or whatever. You're just incredibly lucky, and have done NOTHING to earn your easy life, but just the dumb luck to have been a human born in the US. There's a guy smarter than you, and has worked harder every day of his life, given more to his fellow man, but just happened to have been born in Darfur or some other place where he never had a chance. We (in the US and other places) live like kings, to pretend that our labor has earned us the lifestyle we enjoy is to look at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. It's small, selfish, petty, and greedy.
Or Midnight Commander, good old mc, as it appears on linux and unix systems. I wonder how old this program is and who wrote it originally? This is and always has been one of the greatest utilities ever. Such a pleasure to see directories appear immediately on a keystroke, while windows explorer gets slower and slower since win95.
But there are extensive writings about Herod, Pilate, the whole region. And later Josephus and the revolt was also written about by a number of historians, so the region wasn't ignored at all.
It was the Roman Empire that created the Christian church. Until Constantine made it the state religion it made up only a small minority outside of the middle east.
Just an anecdotal low-tech example, a friend and I used headphones for a microphone back in the late 80's because the headphones worked better than a cheap microphone we had. The plug fit in my Optonica cassette recorder, and damned if they didn't work just fine. So, speakers = microphone, QED.
Go is just like chess, a game with finite pieces and a finite board with fixed rules, of course computers will bust it someday. It's funny to see statements like "Go has many many more states than chess..." on slashdot, surely this is one place folks realize that what seems like a powerful computer now will be nothing in 10 years. So what if go has more states, they're still finite, it's just a question of computing power. Yesterday's story on finding the code for the original adventure game should have reminded us of what used to be possible compared to now.
I'm an avid chess-player and I never understood the big deal about a computer beating Kasparov in chess, it seems like no bigger a deal than the fact that any car (or bicycle, for that matter) can go faster than the fastest human. BFD. John Henry was just foolish.
Absolutely wrong, schools spend much more of their own money complying with NCLB than they receive, so your snide comment makes no sense.
It is both bizarre and comical to hear people imply anyone anywhere in public education does anything for the money. (This does exclude textbook and testing companies. They do make big bucks.)
It's hard for those of us who teach in the public schools to read this sort of thread, people just don't know the reality. For me, the biggest impact of NCLB is like you said, it takes a week out of the school year.
To the tutor above, you bet, most high school students can't do arithmetic with fractions and decimals. This had been a steadily declining skill since the advent of calculator use in the late 80's.
"I have heard reports of colleges who complain that students are increasingly ill-prepared in terms of reasoning, thinking, researching, and persuasive writing,"
No kidding. But tell me slashdotters, did any of you learn to reason or think in school? I'm an old guy, went to school in the 60-70's, crushed the sat's, bfd, but I don't recall any teachers I had that did anything other than just work us hard on old-time school, do 1-90 odd. Teaching reasoning and thinking is just a really hard thing to do.
Bottom line for me is, forcing a teenager to try to do mathematics that is a complete foggy mystery to them is cruel and unnecessary. Everybody has their own level, I thought calculus was easy but fourier series was kind of tough. I couldn't follow the Principia, so does that make me bad at math? Neither does it mean a kid who can't do algebra is bad at math. Give them a break and let them take "Practical Math for the Real World III" and get their math credits.
Whaa--t? I'm afraid your category of "left" probably includes 2/3 of the American public. "Openly liberal?" Hunh? True, higher education often creates increased concerns with the rights of all people, and less of an inclination to hold biased or racist points of view, so of course college graduates of journalism would be what you call "liberal."
Very amusing post, especially the weird tangent about socialized medicine. So, you don't think the government should handle defense of the borders, interstate commerce, or the military either, right?
Am I the only one who thinks the title is flawed? Are pirated programs described as "leaked to Zip files?" BitTorrent is of course nothing more than a method or protocol, the title makes it sound like it's some actual entity. Sure, there's no ambiguity in what the title means, but it is inexact, and it bugged me.
Why does he care? Easy. He's a programmer, he's thought about the problem, it matters. I don't think he thinks of himself as "Linus, creator of Linux."
A better question is, why is the above post modded up to 5, funny? Was a paragraph deleted or something? Where's the funny part?
Can these guys really be that good and sure of their measurements? Spectrum from that far away can be measured to one part in 50,000 with exactitude? If so, that is amazing stuff, and of course I'm all for multiple realities! It is a little bit of a letdown, though, to read "fundamental constant changes!" and then find the chance is.002% over 12 billion years. "Oh no! A proton isn't 1836 times as heavy as an electron, it's really 1836.03672 times as heavy! Aaaiieeeee! God help us all!"
Who is it that needs a solution? I have no problem with junkies or the obese, but I'll be damned if I'll pay for their problems. Go ahead and shoot up or overeat, just don't tell me it's not all up to you to do it or not.
While it may be an unpleasant thing to consider, the concentration camps of WWII demonstrated quite clearly that it's all about calories. There were no inmates whose metabolism prevented them from becoming walking skeletons. While it's sad that people can't regulate their food intake and exercise level, and remain obese, like a previous post suggested, there are people with real problems. I could easily be obese, but I deny myself the pleasures of over-eating pretty much daily in order to remain thin.
As a teacher with 25+ years experience, I agree with all of the above, except for "standards of competency" and "get rid of MTV."
MTV is probably meant to be a generalized thing, but exactly how is the institution of public schools at all involved with MTV and its ilk? Maybe parental influence should be a little more involved here, eh?
Hopefully all slashdotters know that the number one statistically accurate measure that correlates with standardized test scores is the level of education of the parents? Not economic level, or race, or urban-suburban location? Not the level of education of the teachers in the district, nor any supposed standards of competency? Surely this is known to all of you?
Tenure by unions, what a joke of a comment. As if there's some long line of competent and exemplary people just yearning to be public school teachers, but can't get a job because they're closed out by the "unions." Tenure (which isn't really a word that appears in teacher contracts any more, for about 20 years now) just meant you couldn't lose your job without due process. They had to tell you what the problem was with your performance before your contract wasn't renewed. Tenure never kept any one in their job if the community voted down the latest tax increase.
But the rest is all good, grade inflation is easy, less phone calls from the parents, but a bad thing. Calculators have crippled the minds of millions, it's almost too late to repair the damage they've done. Grammar and literate writing are what make communication possible, as opposed to just sayin' what ya thank, dudes.
Aaaaaaaaaaahh, tiresome discussion. Send us some kids who were read to when they were growing up, whose parents read books, and think education has some value at all. Then there's nothing to this education thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for your feedback hixie, how refreshing to see posts from someone actually knowledgeable on the subject at hand!
I agree with many of the posts, mainly on two points: 1) It's great that the browsers will show pretty much anything no matter how illegal the html, so who cares about a new spec? and 2) HTML5 looks like a great many changes and additions and deletions, to me anyway, and especially seems to strengthen form input fields and overall form usage. It appears to be a much larger creature than the html of the 90's. But I'm definitely behind the times, maybe all this is standard now.
Seems like a real job to me, fwiw.
A better question would have been: What was your first computer gaming experience that really hooked you in? When did you first look at a clock that showed it was early morning, and tell yourself, "better quit and go to bed... just a little more..."
I'm another old-timer, and this entire thread should be modded as insightful, for the way it shows the cluelessness of the american male driver, even in the elite world of slash-dotters.
I had an infuriating drive a few years back from Richmond, VA, to Newport News. A beautiful two-lane interstate through the pine woods, at first the drive was great, lots of traffic but a good flow. Then, brake lights everywhere, traffic slows to a stop, then a crawl, then starts up again. I'm looking for a wreck or a lane closing, but nothing seems unusual. Soon, we're back up to speed, and I notice the morons going 85, changing lanes all the time, then pretty soon again brake lights, stopped, etc. The entire drive is like this, no wrecks, no reason for traffic to slow, except: Just enough slight hills to lose sight of traffic, and coming over the hill the morons hit their brakes. Exactly like TFA describes.
But still it seems a large percentage of the comments ignore TFA, bring up pointless numbers galore, and shrug off sensible ideas like leaving a bigger gap, for example. Or driving slower.
One poster suggested that driving like an imbecile somehow serves his own self-interest so is perhaps a moral imperitave! Sad.
We just have to face it, most american male drivers drive like they have the brain of an eighth-grader. Unconscious of the potential danger of their behavior, pointlessly selfish and without courtesy, no awareness that the other vehicles contain people like them. It's too bad, it could be so easy.
Unsafe to drive at the posted limit? Impossible, and silly, much like something a teenager would say about old people driving too slow. Highway driving is so tedious because of this adolescent behavior, most drivers work so hard driving dangerously to gain a couple of car lengths.
Your revolution is never coming.
Great response and right on the money! I say this even though I'm one of those wannabe hippies, grew up in the 60's, listened to my older sister's albums in junior high and high school, hit college in the 70's and hated the contemporary music of my time! Disco was the end of the world as I saw it.
Not in this country, anyway.
Yeah, we were completely wrong to think the USA had a future of peace and freedom and equality for every citizen. Turns out america really is a racist and imperialist country, this new century is much more true to our heritage.
Darn that different world.
And I'd be glad to support a law forcing us to buy fresh bread from a neighborhood bakery.
Whatever Churchill said or didn't say, it's comical to see all the posts as to the meaning of the word liberal. Who cares, and how sad that labels matter so much to us. But interesting to see the meaningful discussion that comes from a simple quote from some historical guy.
As for Gene Simmons, he is consistent and logical in his points. I never liked his music either, but only a moron would try to argue that he wasn't a phenomenal success due to his own talents and hard work. For whatever reason, plenty of people really liked the music. Who in the hell are slashdotters to claim some superior sense of aesthetics? Music is just sounds in your ears, and we're all just "some guy" or gal, so you like what you like and others do the same. Try to come up with a rational argument against why Kiss made a gazillion dollars. Music is "popular" culture, and you just come off sounding like an envious fool.
It's also ironic to have discussions about greed and taxes, etc., in conjunction with a guy who has been completely successful in all these avenues. Seems like a lot of the posters are in complete agreement with Gene!
As for making a living as a musician, yes, it's saturated, but overall I think if you really deserve to make it big, you do. Making really good music just happens to be a pretty common talent, there's plenty of great songs to play and plenty of people who can play well. Making music is, after all, something all humans were born to do. Really good music isn't that hard to find. Being unique, being original, having the drive and the ego to break out of the crowd, that will always "make it big." But making it big just means making big $$ and appealing to some lowest common denominator or matching some demographic, it doesn't mean it's the "best" music in some purist's mind.
I could care less what Gene says, too, though he amuses me much like Ted Nugent. I think, good for them, I'm glad they made a bunch of money and are nutcases! I'm not interested in accumulating wealth so don't consider his point of view important. But those of you talking about too high taxes, blah blah blah, probably should check him out, he's one of you.
I was done, but just have to speak to the posts about how hard you've worked all your life, with two jobs or whatever. You're just incredibly lucky, and have done NOTHING to earn your easy life, but just the dumb luck to have been a human born in the US. There's a guy smarter than you, and has worked harder every day of his life, given more to his fellow man, but just happened to have been born in Darfur or some other place where he never had a chance. We (in the US and other places) live like kings, to pretend that our labor has earned us the lifestyle we enjoy is to look at the world through the wrong end of a telescope. It's small, selfish, petty, and greedy.
Best sig in quite a while, it'd be even funnier if Stephen Wright said it!
Or Midnight Commander, good old mc, as it appears on linux and unix systems. I wonder how old this program is and who wrote it originally? This is and always has been one of the greatest utilities ever. Such a pleasure to see directories appear immediately on a keystroke, while windows explorer gets slower and slower since win95.
It was the Roman Empire that created the Christian church. Until Constantine made it the state religion it made up only a small minority outside of the middle east.
Just an anecdotal low-tech example, a friend and I used headphones for a microphone back in the late 80's because the headphones worked better than a cheap microphone we had. The plug fit in my Optonica cassette recorder, and damned if they didn't work just fine. So, speakers = microphone, QED.
I'm an avid chess-player and I never understood the big deal about a computer beating Kasparov in chess, it seems like no bigger a deal than the fact that any car (or bicycle, for that matter) can go faster than the fastest human. BFD. John Henry was just foolish.
It is both bizarre and comical to hear people imply anyone anywhere in public education does anything for the money. (This does exclude textbook and testing companies. They do make big bucks.)
It's hard for those of us who teach in the public schools to read this sort of thread, people just don't know the reality. For me, the biggest impact of NCLB is like you said, it takes a week out of the school year.
To the tutor above, you bet, most high school students can't do arithmetic with fractions and decimals. This had been a steadily declining skill since the advent of calculator use in the late 80's.
"I have heard reports of colleges who complain that students are increasingly ill-prepared in terms of reasoning, thinking, researching, and persuasive writing,"
No kidding. But tell me slashdotters, did any of you learn to reason or think in school? I'm an old guy, went to school in the 60-70's, crushed the sat's, bfd, but I don't recall any teachers I had that did anything other than just work us hard on old-time school, do 1-90 odd. Teaching reasoning and thinking is just a really hard thing to do.
Bottom line for me is, forcing a teenager to try to do mathematics that is a complete foggy mystery to them is cruel and unnecessary. Everybody has their own level, I thought calculus was easy but fourier series was kind of tough. I couldn't follow the Principia, so does that make me bad at math? Neither does it mean a kid who can't do algebra is bad at math. Give them a break and let them take "Practical Math for the Real World III" and get their math credits.
Whaa--t? I'm afraid your category of "left" probably includes 2/3 of the American public. "Openly liberal?" Hunh? True, higher education often creates increased concerns with the rights of all people, and less of an inclination to hold biased or racist points of view, so of course college graduates of journalism would be what you call "liberal."
Very amusing post, especially the weird tangent about socialized medicine. So, you don't think the government should handle defense of the borders, interstate commerce, or the military either, right?
Am I the only one who thinks the title is flawed? Are pirated programs described as "leaked to Zip files?" BitTorrent is of course nothing more than a method or protocol, the title makes it sound like it's some actual entity. Sure, there's no ambiguity in what the title means, but it is inexact, and it bugged me.
-Aldous Huxley
He's dead, so pirate away!
Sorry to waste a post, but I just have to say the parent really deserves a 6.
A better question is, why is the above post modded up to 5, funny? Was a paragraph deleted or something? Where's the funny part?
Can these guys really be that good and sure of their measurements? Spectrum from that far away can be measured to one part in 50,000 with exactitude? If so, that is amazing stuff, and of course I'm all for multiple realities! It is a little bit of a letdown, though, to read "fundamental constant changes!" and then find the chance is .002% over 12 billion years. "Oh no! A proton isn't 1836 times as heavy as an electron, it's really 1836.03672 times as heavy! Aaaiieeeee! God help us all!"
Who is it that needs a solution? I have no problem with junkies or the obese, but I'll be damned if I'll pay for their problems. Go ahead and shoot up or overeat, just don't tell me it's not all up to you to do it or not.
While it may be an unpleasant thing to consider, the concentration camps of WWII demonstrated quite clearly that it's all about calories. There were no inmates whose metabolism prevented them from becoming walking skeletons. While it's sad that people can't regulate their food intake and exercise level, and remain obese, like a previous post suggested, there are people with real problems. I could easily be obese, but I deny myself the pleasures of over-eating pretty much daily in order to remain thin.
And I'm curious, how do your Christ and his disciples survive in your capitalist anarchy?
Probably not a neccessary attribution for slashdotters, but it's not just an old saying, it's an Isaac Newton quote.
MTV is probably meant to be a generalized thing, but exactly how is the institution of public schools at all involved with MTV and its ilk? Maybe parental influence should be a little more involved here, eh?
Hopefully all slashdotters know that the number one statistically accurate measure that correlates with standardized test scores is the level of education of the parents? Not economic level, or race, or urban-suburban location? Not the level of education of the teachers in the district, nor any supposed standards of competency? Surely this is known to all of you?
Tenure by unions, what a joke of a comment. As if there's some long line of competent and exemplary people just yearning to be public school teachers, but can't get a job because they're closed out by the "unions." Tenure (which isn't really a word that appears in teacher contracts any more, for about 20 years now) just meant you couldn't lose your job without due process. They had to tell you what the problem was with your performance before your contract wasn't renewed. Tenure never kept any one in their job if the community voted down the latest tax increase.
But the rest is all good, grade inflation is easy, less phone calls from the parents, but a bad thing. Calculators have crippled the minds of millions, it's almost too late to repair the damage they've done. Grammar and literate writing are what make communication possible, as opposed to just sayin' what ya thank, dudes.
Aaaaaaaaaaahh, tiresome discussion. Send us some kids who were read to when they were growing up, whose parents read books, and think education has some value at all. Then there's nothing to this education thing.