This is a *very* interesting discussion for me. I'm a high school senior, and am still trying to decide which school to go to. I *don't* want to program databases for the rest of my life, and so yet announcements like this make me question the wisdom of spending $160,000 on a "good" degree at a place like MIT. I love computer science, I've wanted to program for a living since I was five, and I'm not afraid of working hard to raise myself above the pack. Still, I'm disappointed to see jobs disappearing from the field I've set my heart on. I know what unemployment looks like, and it sucks.
Nope, MIT tuition is about $30K, plus $10K living expenses, and so on... giving a grand total of about $41K to go to school there for *one* *year*, as of this school year (03-04). They may be increasing it in the future. It's a sizable chunk of change -- more than my family makes annually.
I know because I've been reading their financial aid brochures a *lot*. This is not a heartening development. More info here.
- sparrow_hawk, who is currently rethinking going to MIT...
Understand that although I use Linux pretty exclusively, I have yet to be able to make my DVD drive work. *With* mplayer, libdvdcss, and so on. It's frustrating, and I feel for the guy.
The author's problem, however, wasn't that the DVD drive didn't work out of the box but that his wireless card didn't work. If his wireless card had worked, he could have downloaded mplayer and libdvdcss or whatever, and *then* he could complain if it didn't work.
Since he didn't even try to get the necessary files onto his machine, though, his problem isn't really with the DVD support but the wireless support, and making it into two issues is pointless for anything but trolling.
Hmm... I guess I never bought the idea of Neo as a messiah, or at least not as an allegory for Christ. The narrative arc of the Matrix movies actually reminds me in some senses more of the Lord of the Rings than the Bible. Perhaps it is because I saw Neo as dying at the end of Reloaded (in the physical world), and as *not* dying specifically when he was subsumed into Smith but remaining separate. I can see where it comes from, I guess, I just never assumed the right things that would make me draw those conclusions. If Neo remains separate from Smith even though his physical form has been changed, we don't have the death-and-resurrection theme *there*, and if Neo dies a physical death at the end, there is no resurrection either, which is essential to the Christian worldview.
Actually, I saw more parallels with Cowboy Bebop, both in the overall plot structure and specifically in "The Real Folk Blues." I know the Wachowskis were influenced by anime -- anybody got a definitive word on that? Or if it's a common anime theme?
I've heard of this but forgotten about it -- many thanks!
I was thinking, however, about keeping the stores closed on Christmas, plus the churches and the bars and the movie theaters. That is, I was moaning about how my dad and I (first and last, respectively) have to work on Christmas Eve and/or Day.:)
S'pose, though, you give *useful* consumer shit? Perhaps my dad would like another pair of socks this Christmas... Actually, that's not a bad idea!
I would dearly love it if *just for one day*, the entire nation could say "screw it" to capitalism and spend time with their families. Sadly, since my father is a pastor, he works both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, meaning we can't just spend one day at home together. How's *that* for backward?
The whole lying-about-her-age chat was probably a good thing, and it's also good you didn't step in immediately. I do hope you gave her a hearty high-five for turning the proposition down, though.:)
I dunno, giving me a 486 and a Sam's Teach Yourself Linux book with a Caldera disk (before Hades, Inc. bought a controlling share) taught me a heck of a lot about PCs I didn't know before.
I feel old sometimes -- I remember when the Internet *wasn't* graphical, and when you had to 'park' DOS, and I'm nowhere near drinking age.
- sparrow_hawk, proudly using Linux since 1999 or so
I'm typing this on the computer in my room now, which has been connected to the Internet for about a year.
Yes, when we first got the connection, I did look at porn (which my parents made very clear was A Bad Thing). Y'know what? I hated it -- it's frickin' *ugly*! Frankly, it turns me off -- and if I hadn't had the experience of trying it, I'd still think "ooh, porno, forbidden==cool." Not every kid is going to respond the same way, but most of us have to make mistakes before we truly learn something.
Oh, and believe me, if my mom walks into my room while I'm ordering her birthday gift off the 'Net, I'm minimizing that browser window real fast. Same with keeping the door open -- in the winter, the basement is *cold*, and my computer raises the temperature by several degrees. I get quite peeved if a family member leaves my room and forgets to shut the door behind them.
Also understand that your kids will only lie to you if you teach them to. If you ask your kid what they were doing on the computer, and they tell you the truth -- say, they were looking at porn -- punishing them for looking at porn is counter-productive. You aren't teaching them not to look at porn, you're teaching them *not* *to* *tell* *you* *the* *truth*. Next time you walk in the room and ask them that, you think they're going to tell you, "oh, yeah, I was looking at porn" and wait for the inevitable punishment? Unless they're *really* messed up, they'll lie to you, because that's the way to avoid punishment.
If you want to teach your kids to tell the truth, you have to provide them with some incentive. If the options are a) tell truth and get punished, or b) lie and maybe get away with it, *or* get punished if parents find out, any sensible kid is going to choose b), unless the lie-punishment is a *lot* worse than the truth-punishment. A truth-punishment should be a token ("we don't like this"), not as bad as a lie-punishment. Better yet, ask your child what they *thought* of what they saw, use it as an opportunity to talk with them about the issue; but don't preach -- listen to your kids! Preaching is only seen as a punishment.
For my family, however, letting each person have their own more-or-less private computer has been a blessing, because each of us has schoolwork or e-mail that needs to get done, and competing for one system would never work. To some extent you need to resist the knee-jerk parenting impulse ("Shame!"), but properly managed, private PCs and a shared Internet connection can be a godsend.
Hey, I agree with you, and I'm a teen. I've had an Internet-connected computer in my room for about a year now, and it hasn't turned me into a porno addict.
Depends on the theater -- the one I work at makes pretty much *all* its money off of concessions. Each contract is different, but by in large if we didn't sell concessions we couldn't show movies, nor could we pay someone to sell tickets (and we're making federal minimum, remember).
I would guess it has something to do with how each chain runs.
Mr. Mathews is correct in that the ticket price determines how soon we get movies, and is also somewhat dependent on where the theater is. A standard adult ticket at the fiveplex I work at is $6.50, whereas in some places it can run as high as $10.
As a first-run movie theater, we cannot contractually sell tickets for less than $4, which is why $1 tickets won't fly. Again, it's not the theaters that are doing this, it's the movie studios.
I'm a theater employee, and I can sympathize with you on the bladder-capacity issue. If I have even the smallest amount of soda, I will inevitably have to run the the bathroom. I got lucky in LotR:FotR -- even though I didn't buy any concessions, I still had to dash, and got back just in time to watch Gandalf's fight with the Balrog. (The upside is that concessions can make certain movies more bearable, however.)
if they want to make money on me, they have one of two options, charge less for concessions, or charge more for the ticket.
Sadly, the second option isn't available to us -- the studio wants its cut of the ticket, whether we charge $4 or $10, because in that case we're making money off "their" movie. This is why groups can't passes for a fundraiser (ie. they buy $4 passes and sell for $5), because the studio wants that money. We make nothing off the tickets regardless of how much we sell them for -- every theater is a popcorn-and-pop shop that happens to show movies, which is why we can't charge much less for concessions either.
I know the situation sucks, but there's not really a whole lot the theaters can do about it. Blame the studios, not us.
Dude, Win98 leaked at least a year before it was released. It's a nice conspiracy theory, but do you really think people who are downloading the supposedly private build of Longhorn, *cracking* it, and installing it, are going to be very liable to report bugs they find to MS?
It's mostly PR, I'd say. Sure, Linux is great and it's here now, but wouldn't you rather have the Next New Thing, which will come with 10% MORE FEATURES than Linux?
Probably an understandable move for SciAm, assuming Mims is like most born-again Christians. There is *no* scientific theory of "creationism" that a) accounts for a literal interpretation of Genesis, or b) necessitates a creator. Get over it, people. There are a substantial number of scientifically-inclined Christians that deal with it just fine.
Forest Mims *is* a great writer for electronics stuff, so it's a shame SciAm couldn't give him a column that wouldn't deal with biology -- cool electronic project of the month, or somesuch. His Engineer's Notebooks are great, understandable references, and it's good to see that they're being used to teach kids basic electrical principles. Goodness knows we need more technically-savvy people, and it's best to hook them young.:)
See, I really hope they stay close to this in the final form because it isn't a terrible eyesore (blue is nice; blue, green, and orange are painful). It's obviously not polished yet, but the Longhorn screenies I've seen blow Luna all to heck.
Thank you for buying concessions -- you're paying the salaries of the $5.15/h employees who're working their butts off trying to pay for college (eg. me). You might be interested to know that the theater's food license is *exactly* like that of any restaurant, which is why you can't bring in outside food or drink -- it's a common misconception that we're trying to force you to buy our product. The only places that allow you to bring outside stuff in are BYOB after-hours parties and the like, and there's a *lot* of risk for contamination.
See, there you're only really hurting the theater, not the movie studios, and believe me, it isn't the theater's fault that the movie sucks. The theater owner isn't the one putting the red marks in the movie either, and he gets screwed just as much as you do by the studios. Margins are *slim* in the theater industry -- we couldn't afford to show you movies if you didn't buy our concessions, because we get pennies on the dollar from your ticket price. If the movie is bad, fine, walk out -- but walking out just out of spite means you were taking up a seat the theater could have sold to someone else. (Unless you buy popcorn, in which case we'll forgive you.:)
If you want to boycott the MPAA, don't come to MPAA-funded movies at all, don't buy or rent the DVDs, and don't download them off the Internet -- patronize small theaters that show independent films, buy those DVDs, attend film festivals, whatever instead. Walking out, on its own, isn't going to change much, however.
Actually (I *am* a projectionist), the reel-change marks are a holdover from the days when projectionists *did* have to queue up the next reel; nowadays, except in really small screening theaters, the film gets spliced together into one big reel and run all at once. The marks are still handy for figuring out where a bad splice or other problem is, though.
As a (not-so) pimply-faced kid who does work the box office at the theater occasionally, I must say that the exchange you mentioned is a perfect example of how we are attempting to save consumers from wasting their $4-10 on a ridiculously bad movie. The kid knew what you meant all along (btw, it's "gee-lee," as in "rhymes with 'really'... bad"), he just chose to purposely misunderstand you to encourage you to go see something that wouldn't make you homicidal. Weren't you so much happier seeing Seabiscuit, which was actually a reasonably decent movie?
See, I'm weird, as anyone who knows me personally will be more than willin to tell you, but even though I learned to type before I learned to write (I used WordPerfect for DOS back in the day), I actually have fairly legible handwriting.
In fact, I had teachers that drilled us in cursive, so I can not only print with reasonable legibility, I default to readable *longhand*. I'm actually quite pissed at one of my teachers who seems to feel that all notes for his class (and our signatures on our papers, no less) need to be printed. If I'm in a hurry, yes, my writing turns into primitive heiroglyphics, but I have yet to fail a test because the grader couldn't read my handwriting, so I'm assuming I'm doing something right.
I suppose once you leave school it's very easy to lose something like handwriting if you don't make a point to use it -- we'll see, twenty years from now, if I can still make the same claims about my handwriting.
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This is a *very* interesting discussion for me. I'm a high school senior, and am still trying to decide which school to go to. I *don't* want to program databases for the rest of my life, and so yet announcements like this make me question the wisdom of spending $160,000 on a "good" degree at a place like MIT. I love computer science, I've wanted to program for a living since I was five, and I'm not afraid of working hard to raise myself above the pack. Still, I'm disappointed to see jobs disappearing from the field I've set my heart on. I know what unemployment looks like, and it sucks.
Nope, MIT tuition is about $30K, plus $10K living expenses, and so on... giving a grand total of about $41K to go to school there for *one* *year*, as of this school year (03-04). They may be increasing it in the future. It's a sizable chunk of change -- more than my family makes annually.
I know because I've been reading their financial aid brochures a *lot*. This is not a heartening development. More info here.
- sparrow_hawk, who is currently rethinking going to MIT...
Actually, this is only *one* problem.
Understand that although I use Linux pretty exclusively, I have yet to be able to make my DVD drive work. *With* mplayer, libdvdcss, and so on. It's frustrating, and I feel for the guy.
The author's problem, however, wasn't that the DVD drive didn't work out of the box but that his wireless card didn't work. If his wireless card had worked, he could have downloaded mplayer and libdvdcss or whatever, and *then* he could complain if it didn't work.
Since he didn't even try to get the necessary files onto his machine, though, his problem isn't really with the DVD support but the wireless support, and making it into two issues is pointless for anything but trolling.
(Entering lit-crit mode, SPOILERS AHEAD :)
Hmm... I guess I never bought the idea of Neo as a messiah, or at least not as an allegory for Christ. The narrative arc of the Matrix movies actually reminds me in some senses more of the Lord of the Rings than the Bible. Perhaps it is because I saw Neo as dying at the end of Reloaded (in the physical world), and as *not* dying specifically when he was subsumed into Smith but remaining separate. I can see where it comes from, I guess, I just never assumed the right things that would make me draw those conclusions. If Neo remains separate from Smith even though his physical form has been changed, we don't have the death-and-resurrection theme *there*, and if Neo dies a physical death at the end, there is no resurrection either, which is essential to the Christian worldview.
Actually, I saw more parallels with Cowboy Bebop, both in the overall plot structure and specifically in "The Real Folk Blues." I know the Wachowskis were influenced by anime -- anybody got a definitive word on that? Or if it's a common anime theme?
I've heard of this but forgotten about it -- many thanks!
:)
I was thinking, however, about keeping the stores closed on Christmas, plus the churches and the bars and the movie theaters. That is, I was moaning about how my dad and I (first and last, respectively) have to work on Christmas Eve and/or Day.
S'pose, though, you give *useful* consumer shit? Perhaps my dad would like another pair of socks this Christmas... Actually, that's not a bad idea!
I would dearly love it if *just for one day*, the entire nation could say "screw it" to capitalism and spend time with their families. Sadly, since my father is a pastor, he works both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, meaning we can't just spend one day at home together. How's *that* for backward?
The whole lying-about-her-age chat was probably a good thing, and it's also good you didn't step in immediately. I do hope you gave her a hearty high-five for turning the proposition down, though. :)
Question -- when your daughter was propositioned, did you step in right away, or did you wait to see if she would say, "fuck off, pervert!"
I dunno, giving me a 486 and a Sam's Teach Yourself Linux book with a Caldera disk (before Hades, Inc. bought a controlling share) taught me a heck of a lot about PCs I didn't know before.
I feel old sometimes -- I remember when the Internet *wasn't* graphical, and when you had to 'park' DOS, and I'm nowhere near drinking age.
- sparrow_hawk, proudly using Linux since 1999 or so
I'm typing this on the computer in my room now, which has been connected to the Internet for about a year.
Yes, when we first got the connection, I did look at porn (which my parents made very clear was A Bad Thing). Y'know what? I hated it -- it's frickin' *ugly*! Frankly, it turns me off -- and if I hadn't had the experience of trying it, I'd still think "ooh, porno, forbidden==cool." Not every kid is going to respond the same way, but most of us have to make mistakes before we truly learn something.
Oh, and believe me, if my mom walks into my room while I'm ordering her birthday gift off the 'Net, I'm minimizing that browser window real fast. Same with keeping the door open -- in the winter, the basement is *cold*, and my computer raises the temperature by several degrees. I get quite peeved if a family member leaves my room and forgets to shut the door behind them.
Also understand that your kids will only lie to you if you teach them to. If you ask your kid what they were doing on the computer, and they tell you the truth -- say, they were looking at porn -- punishing them for looking at porn is counter-productive. You aren't teaching them not to look at porn, you're teaching them *not* *to* *tell* *you* *the* *truth*. Next time you walk in the room and ask them that, you think they're going to tell you, "oh, yeah, I was looking at porn" and wait for the inevitable punishment? Unless they're *really* messed up, they'll lie to you, because that's the way to avoid punishment.
If you want to teach your kids to tell the truth, you have to provide them with some incentive. If the options are a) tell truth and get punished, or b) lie and maybe get away with it, *or* get punished if parents find out, any sensible kid is going to choose b), unless the lie-punishment is a *lot* worse than the truth-punishment. A truth-punishment should be a token ("we don't like this"), not as bad as a lie-punishment. Better yet, ask your child what they *thought* of what they saw, use it as an opportunity to talk with them about the issue; but don't preach -- listen to your kids! Preaching is only seen as a punishment.
For my family, however, letting each person have their own more-or-less private computer has been a blessing, because each of us has schoolwork or e-mail that needs to get done, and competing for one system would never work. To some extent you need to resist the knee-jerk parenting impulse ("Shame!"), but properly managed, private PCs and a shared Internet connection can be a godsend.
Hey, I agree with you, and I'm a teen. I've had an Internet-connected computer in my room for about a year now, and it hasn't turned me into a porno addict.
Depends on the theater -- the one I work at makes pretty much *all* its money off of concessions. Each contract is different, but by in large if we didn't sell concessions we couldn't show movies, nor could we pay someone to sell tickets (and we're making federal minimum, remember).
I would guess it has something to do with how each chain runs.
Mr. Mathews is correct in that the ticket price determines how soon we get movies, and is also somewhat dependent on where the theater is. A standard adult ticket at the fiveplex I work at is $6.50, whereas in some places it can run as high as $10.
As a first-run movie theater, we cannot contractually sell tickets for less than $4, which is why $1 tickets won't fly. Again, it's not the theaters that are doing this, it's the movie studios.
I'm a theater employee, and I can sympathize with you on the bladder-capacity issue. If I have even the smallest amount of soda, I will inevitably have to run the the bathroom. I got lucky in LotR:FotR -- even though I didn't buy any concessions, I still had to dash, and got back just in time to watch Gandalf's fight with the Balrog. (The upside is that concessions can make certain movies more bearable, however.)
if they want to make money on me, they have one of two options, charge less for concessions, or charge more for the ticket.
Sadly, the second option isn't available to us -- the studio wants its cut of the ticket, whether we charge $4 or $10, because in that case we're making money off "their" movie. This is why groups can't passes for a fundraiser (ie. they buy $4 passes and sell for $5), because the studio wants that money. We make nothing off the tickets regardless of how much we sell them for -- every theater is a popcorn-and-pop shop that happens to show movies, which is why we can't charge much less for concessions either.
I know the situation sucks, but there's not really a whole lot the theaters can do about it. Blame the studios, not us.
I come up with a couple, all on -- you guessed it -- Kazaa. Brilliant, people, brilliant.
Dude, Win98 leaked at least a year before it was released. It's a nice conspiracy theory, but do you really think people who are downloading the supposedly private build of Longhorn, *cracking* it, and installing it, are going to be very liable to report bugs they find to MS?
It's mostly PR, I'd say. Sure, Linux is great and it's here now, but wouldn't you rather have the Next New Thing, which will come with 10% MORE FEATURES than Linux?
Ob. geek question:
QWERTY or Dvorak?
Probably an understandable move for SciAm, assuming Mims is like most born-again Christians. There is *no* scientific theory of "creationism" that a) accounts for a literal interpretation of Genesis, or b) necessitates a creator. Get over it, people. There are a substantial number of scientifically-inclined Christians that deal with it just fine.
:)
Forest Mims *is* a great writer for electronics stuff, so it's a shame SciAm couldn't give him a column that wouldn't deal with biology -- cool electronic project of the month, or somesuch. His Engineer's Notebooks are great, understandable references, and it's good to see that they're being used to teach kids basic electrical principles. Goodness knows we need more technically-savvy people, and it's best to hook them young.
Whaddaya mean it's coming out in 2006? I've got the disk sitting on my desk right in front of me!
(grin)
See, I really hope they stay close to this in the final form because it isn't a terrible eyesore (blue is nice; blue, green, and orange are painful). It's obviously not polished yet, but the Longhorn screenies I've seen blow Luna all to heck.
Me two bits.
Thank you for buying concessions -- you're paying the salaries of the $5.15/h employees who're working their butts off trying to pay for college (eg. me). You might be interested to know that the theater's food license is *exactly* like that of any restaurant, which is why you can't bring in outside food or drink -- it's a common misconception that we're trying to force you to buy our product. The only places that allow you to bring outside stuff in are BYOB after-hours parties and the like, and there's a *lot* of risk for contamination.
We're not trying to be anal -- it's the law.
See, there you're only really hurting the theater, not the movie studios, and believe me, it isn't the theater's fault that the movie sucks. The theater owner isn't the one putting the red marks in the movie either, and he gets screwed just as much as you do by the studios. Margins are *slim* in the theater industry -- we couldn't afford to show you movies if you didn't buy our concessions, because we get pennies on the dollar from your ticket price. If the movie is bad, fine, walk out -- but walking out just out of spite means you were taking up a seat the theater could have sold to someone else. (Unless you buy popcorn, in which case we'll forgive you. :)
If you want to boycott the MPAA, don't come to MPAA-funded movies at all, don't buy or rent the DVDs, and don't download them off the Internet -- patronize small theaters that show independent films, buy those DVDs, attend film festivals, whatever instead. Walking out, on its own, isn't going to change much, however.
Actually (I *am* a projectionist), the reel-change marks are a holdover from the days when projectionists *did* have to queue up the next reel; nowadays, except in really small screening theaters, the film gets spliced together into one big reel and run all at once. The marks are still handy for figuring out where a bad splice or other problem is, though.
As a (not-so) pimply-faced kid who does work the box office at the theater occasionally, I must say that the exchange you mentioned is a perfect example of how we are attempting to save consumers from wasting their $4-10 on a ridiculously bad movie. The kid knew what you meant all along (btw, it's "gee-lee," as in "rhymes with 'really'... bad"), he just chose to purposely misunderstand you to encourage you to go see something that wouldn't make you homicidal. Weren't you so much happier seeing Seabiscuit, which was actually a reasonably decent movie?
That's right... no need to thank me. (wink)
See, I'm weird, as anyone who knows me personally will be more than willin to tell you, but even though I learned to type before I learned to write (I used WordPerfect for DOS back in the day), I actually have fairly legible handwriting.
In fact, I had teachers that drilled us in cursive, so I can not only print with reasonable legibility, I default to readable *longhand*. I'm actually quite pissed at one of my teachers who seems to feel that all notes for his class (and our signatures on our papers, no less) need to be printed. If I'm in a hurry, yes, my writing turns into primitive heiroglyphics, but I have yet to fail a test because the grader couldn't read my handwriting, so I'm assuming I'm doing something right.
I suppose once you leave school it's very easy to lose something like handwriting if you don't make a point to use it -- we'll see, twenty years from now, if I can still make the same claims about my handwriting.