Common core has nothing to do with what you've written. Common Core is simply a standard of what a student in a certain grade should be able to do or understand (eg, a graduating third grader should be able to identify basic shapes by categories and divide shapes into equal fractions). It doesn't say how teachers should teach the subject, and it doesn't say 'no play'. How students are taught varies between states, districts, schools, and individual teachers. If a district adopts a specific math curriculum from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and their third grade materials present the basic geometry one way and the district demands no deviation, then it gets taught HMH's way. If the state and district are more lax, and the school administration is fine as long as the kids get the material, and the teachers want to present the geometry their own way, Common Core doesn't stand in their way.
And if a district wants their elementary schools to have three recesses or two or none, that's up to the district and whatever state or federal guidelines apply. Not Common Core.
Not many posters seem to realize what this device is actually for, and what its competition is. It's not meant to replace your living room TV or your monitor. Surface Hub is meant to replace 4 major devices: a computer, a projector, a conference phone, and an interactive whiteboard. Its big competitors are SMART, Promethean, Mimio, Infocus, and Sharp Aquos. Depending on size and features, their interactive displays tend to start around $3000, and are usually only replace the projector and whiteboard. Sharp's 80 inch board is $11k on Newegg, and Promethean's 84" lists at $15k.
Sure, you can hack together a cheap solution--big $1000 TV, a cheap digitizer from China for $300, a used conference phone, and a computer, but I can definitely see the allure of an all-in-one system at a moderate price premium. It's too expensive for my classrooms, but we're already planning on replacing our SMART Boards and projectors with an interactive TV in the next year or two. If MS offered one designed (and priced) for classrooms, I'd definitely be considering it.
I hate driving around Seattle because those street signs aren't always above every intersection, and sometimes when they are, you can't see them until you're already at the intersection (or they're blocked by trees, other signs, or trucks), so you can't get into the appropriate lane.
I think they want to do a hop-to-shore once the technology is matured enough, but the balanced-pencil analogy isn't really applicable. The vast majority of the rocket's mass is in the engine cluster; the rest of it is mostly a thin, hollow tube with some empty tanks. IIRC, the original plan with the drone ships was that once the rocket landed, crew would arrive and weld brackets over the landing legs to hold the rocket down, then return to shore and offload with a normal crane. Then tip the rocket onto an appropriate truck, and take it to the refurb facility.
Lightspeed Tek, which makes classroom amplification systems and related products, has a new(er) model of microphone that uses just one rechargable NiMH AA instead of the two of the previous model. They say you have to use their $9 AA NiMH in them, and if you try another brand, it won't charge. Turns out they designed the new microphone to have a separate circuit for charging, and the contact is on the barrel of the battery, not the - cap, so their batteries are missing the bottom quarter-inch of the label. Cut that area of the label off a $2 eneloop, and it works just fine (assuming you remove all the glue).
The 'ideal' temperature of Earth is one where nearly-sea-level communities, where a vast portion of humanity live, aren't flooded, forcing enormous migrations. The breadbaskets of the world should still stay productive, and the deserts should stay roughly where they are. A warming planet might open up a lot of Siberia and Canada to farming, but how long would it take to get large farms going, and how much of the wilderness would be ruined?
The ideal temperature isn't about Earth--it can survive anything we can throw at it. The ideal temperature is about supporting 7+ billion humans without huge die-offs, and if we can avoid it, triggering mass extinctions.
Because the procedure is entirely untested, even in animals! He hasn't even shown he can partially heal a severed spinal cord in a rat using his technique, let alone performing a successful head transplant.
I'm all for experimental procedures in extreme cases, but there's a difference between "Ok, we're ready to try this in humans now after a decade of animal and human tissue tests, though you've got a 99% chance of dying anyway" and "What if we replace his burned skin with fruit leather? This propylene glycol will give it sensation and blood vessels, I'm sure of it!"
It might not have anything to do with MGS, but it sure as hell better be a publicity stunt, because anyone involved in an actual human head transplant surgery will need to lose their medical licenses and go to prison for a very long time.
I have stuff damaged by USPS all the time, thanks almost entirely to having a small delivery box. My neighborhood uses 25-year-old cluster boxes, and there are 9 houses to a cluster. Each house gets something about a foot deep and 6x4" across. The carrier will always try to cram something into the box rather than walking it to the door. Worse, the boxes each have a quarter-inch of rim around them, so something the carrier can insert easily from their side may be extremely difficult to remove from the other. I've had to tear apart boxes and padded envelopes to extract them.
I'd love to know if there's some sort of way to get the cluster boxes upgraded to the ones that have dedicated package boxes.
The 'USFS GIFFORD PINCHOT NAT'L FOREST' received over $1.4 million in items. It's a sizable place in southern Washington, but that still seems high. Turns out that $1.1 million of that was for FOUR rugged PDAs. Most everything they got were tools.
US DOJ ATF RENTON recieved 5 multimeters valued at over $60k apiece, and other things like weather stations and oscilloscopes.
PULLMAN POLICE DEPT got $22 of items: 6 pairs of sun/wind/dust goggles.
KING COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE took in over 2 million, including a million-dollar utility helicopter, some sort of spectroscopy detectors, and big trailer generators.
SPOKANE COUNTY SHERIFF OFFICE got a FLIR system and 3 'observation' helicopters which were valued at $276k.
Quite a few departments got an MRAP and guns, but the majority of items seem to be pretty useful, non-scary things.
I've cleaned this particular virus type off several machines in the past couple months.
They haven't caught on to.com files yet. They always hijack the exefile registry key, and sometimes specific executables like iexplore.exe. The worst ones hijack keys in Winlogon.
They usually use this bit or even a driver to prevent removal tools from running--malwarebytes, combofix, hijackthis, spybot, adaware...
The dumb ones just use filename checks, so you can rename mbam.exe to explorer.exe and run it or regedit.exe to regedit.com. The smart ones use some other method and will recognize the file you're trying to slip by them.
By that point, a LiveCD is basically required.
I'll add that if the device is like (b), the Remote will 'remember' what state the device is in. If the Watch TV and Watch DVD activities both have 'TV On' in their sequence, but the TV doesn't support discrete On/Off commands, the remote will remember that the TV was turned on for 'Watch DVD' when you push 'Watch TV' afterwards.
If one of my devices doesn't get the signal (like my TV), I'll go into the Devices menu to turn it off. The remote recognizes that something was changed outside of an Activity, and will ask me if everything's all right the next time I start another activity. If it's not, I can go through some troubleshooting steps so the remote knows what the setting situation actually is.
Nah, a 250-meter asteroid isn't extinction-level. It's a city-destroyer: 2-3 mile diameter crater, windows shattered at 100 kilometers from impact...and those are worst-case figures.
It also happens to be a "Well, we think we can deflect something this size on relatively short notice" asteroid. Scale that up to extinction-level impactors, and the story would still be "We might be able to do something if we had 20 years notice. Might."
Or you could, you know, also add the cost of an additional controller to the X360 price like you're doing to the Wii (I presume you meant to put "Nintendo Wii" and not "Nintendo DS"). Or perhaps two, since Wii controllers are wireless, and the X360 controller in the 300 euro package is wired. So that'd bump the price up to, what, 400 euros for a X360 with two wireless controllers? While a Wii with two wireless controllers is 310?
In response to the '500 scientists doubt evolution' thing, over 700 scientists named 'Steve' or of a similar/foreign variant have signed a statement supporting evolution.
Yes, the first two seasons are out on DVD. Both are on Amazon.
Re:You don't know what you are talking about
on
Are CRTs History?
·
· Score: 1
OLED's interesting, but they've got a major flaw right now. Lifetime. Blue OLEDs have a lifespan somewhere around 2000 hours. Green is somewhat more. Red has a much longer lifespan. That vibrant, competitively priced screen won't gain any market foothold when it takes on a permenant yellowish cast after 10 months' use.
Degaussing doesn't do much for genuine blur. Monitors that have a menu for focus seem pretty uncommon, and the external focus knob has essentially disappeared. What you want to do is (CAREFULLY! There are lethal demons running about inside a monitor, even unplugged) remove the monitor's case (and in the case of my Samsung 955df, the EMI shielding layer as well), and find a potentiometer knob somewhere towards the back labeled 'Focus' or something similar. My Samsung needs it done every few months, and it's like looking at a new monitor. There might even be another knob to fix color problems. You might have to break the glue they use to hold the knob in place, but that shouldn't pose a problem. Twist and watch to adjust. You might also mark a vent hole (or make your own) on the case to insert a long screwdriver directly into the potentiometer without having to remove the case, if possible.
The problem is that there really is no simple, concise, and clear way to demonstrate to the average person that creationists are full of bunk.
Where a creationist can just say "My grandpappy ain't no monkey!" or "Duane Gish, Ph.D, says that the Grand Canyon could be carved out by the Flood" or "Junkyard + tornado = 747 same odds as creating life randomly" or "They eye doesn't work unless it's whole! Impossible to evolve!", to effectively rebutt such ridiculous statements, you have to go on for paragraphs or pages.
The people who buy these statements are the least likely to be interested in a long response, and, frankly, are unlikely to understand it well enough to see how it applies.
And public creationist debaters are good public debaters. They may fail miserably in a formal debate format, but in front of normal crowds, they rule the day. Short, sarcastic comments and pointed questions from a hundred different topics (a creationist has no problem jumping from the Flood Geology to Abiogenesis to Eye evolution to missing links) are winners in this format. The opponent, almost always a scientist in a specific discipline, can usually easily rebutt one of the creationist's topics, but by that point, the creationist will ignore that topic and harp on others the scientist doesn't have specific training in. How's a geologist going to counter points in evolutionary biochemistry?
The crowds are bussed in from local churches and they cheer at everything the creationist says.
In the world of science, the creationists lost big-time, and lost a long time ago. There's absolutely no question.
In the world of the public, the scientists are fighting a losing battle against the Word of God.
Short of a revolution in religion in this country, that won't change.
I just installed an oldish IntelliTools program on a Mac G4 at work today. There were 4 installers on one CD, and three installers on two other CDs. Every single installer wanted to reboot the system. 7 restarts just to get one extension and several related programs installed. Ugh.
Re:Image viewing and Gmail in FF/Opera
on
Opera 8 Released
·
· Score: 1
If Gmail works with this new version of Opera, I may have to switch back.
Gmail worked with Opera 7.54 as of Gmail's upgrade of a couple months ago.
Sometimes I manage to catch NBC airing Almost Live. It has not aged well, and you can really see why it didn't catch on nationally (when half of the show is dedicated to jokes about Ballard, Kent, and Renton...). I see now that their show was really hit-and-miss, and they seemed to have more misses than hits. Or maybe I'm just happening to catch the poor episodes, or I'm extrapolating The John Report (used to be my favorite, but since it was always topical stuff, 15-year-old local goings-on isn't as much fun) to the entire show. I haven't seen Uncle Fran and SpeedWalker in ages.
I find Baxter really hit-or-miss. The first thing I ever read from him was Time Ships, and rather liked it. I recently read all of the Manifold series (I do not recommend doing this straight through), and was ultimately disappointed. Each book takes you through a bunch of different story threads that...ultimately go nowhere. The lonely humanity in the year 1x10^100, the sentient squid, the blue children, the ET robots, the waves of colonization, the wandering moon...none of them really mesh together. And I don't think I'll ever read Manifold: Origin again. I hatedTitan. I didn't find one redeeming thing in that book. I can't think of any other books that have caused that sort of response from me. But, I loved Ring. I bought Vacuum Diagrams, and suspect I'll enjoy it, too.
Antimatter bombs? Are you joking? The world-wide production of antimatter can be measured in nanograms per year. We can't even light a 60w lightbulb with the amount of antimatter we make. The fact that it requires enormous particle accelerators pretty much precludes any mass production. Oh, and it costs roughly $25 billion per gram. Antimatter explosives would not be 'much worse' than nuclear weapons. You would simply need less material to create a similarly-sized reaction (a 64Mton nuclear device is quite large. A 64Mton antimatter device requires only 3 kilograms of reactant). And at our current production rates, we might get 1.5 kilograms of antimatter in, what, a trillion years?
Judging by what I see, Mogami is merely sanely priced. It's more expensive than lamp cord, yes, but it's nothing compared to expensive cabling. Mogami sells a 25-foot microphone cable for $50 or so. And this is their 'Gold' packaging. I saw on a bulk site that you could buy 328 feet of 19-channel snake cable for $1600. Monster sells a 3-meter 8-channel snake cable for $150. And that's nothing compared to actual 'audiophile' cables where cost is measured in thousands of dollars per foot.
Slashdot Mirror
Common core has nothing to do with what you've written. Common Core is simply a standard of what a student in a certain grade should be able to do or understand (eg, a graduating third grader should be able to identify basic shapes by categories and divide shapes into equal fractions). It doesn't say how teachers should teach the subject, and it doesn't say 'no play'. How students are taught varies between states, districts, schools, and individual teachers. If a district adopts a specific math curriculum from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and their third grade materials present the basic geometry one way and the district demands no deviation, then it gets taught HMH's way. If the state and district are more lax, and the school administration is fine as long as the kids get the material, and the teachers want to present the geometry their own way, Common Core doesn't stand in their way. And if a district wants their elementary schools to have three recesses or two or none, that's up to the district and whatever state or federal guidelines apply. Not Common Core.
Not many posters seem to realize what this device is actually for, and what its competition is. It's not meant to replace your living room TV or your monitor. Surface Hub is meant to replace 4 major devices: a computer, a projector, a conference phone, and an interactive whiteboard. Its big competitors are SMART, Promethean, Mimio, Infocus, and Sharp Aquos. Depending on size and features, their interactive displays tend to start around $3000, and are usually only replace the projector and whiteboard. Sharp's 80 inch board is $11k on Newegg, and Promethean's 84" lists at $15k.
Sure, you can hack together a cheap solution--big $1000 TV, a cheap digitizer from China for $300, a used conference phone, and a computer, but I can definitely see the allure of an all-in-one system at a moderate price premium. It's too expensive for my classrooms, but we're already planning on replacing our SMART Boards and projectors with an interactive TV in the next year or two. If MS offered one designed (and priced) for classrooms, I'd definitely be considering it.
I hate driving around Seattle because those street signs aren't always above every intersection, and sometimes when they are, you can't see them until you're already at the intersection (or they're blocked by trees, other signs, or trucks), so you can't get into the appropriate lane.
I think they want to do a hop-to-shore once the technology is matured enough, but the balanced-pencil analogy isn't really applicable. The vast majority of the rocket's mass is in the engine cluster; the rest of it is mostly a thin, hollow tube with some empty tanks. IIRC, the original plan with the drone ships was that once the rocket landed, crew would arrive and weld brackets over the landing legs to hold the rocket down, then return to shore and offload with a normal crane. Then tip the rocket onto an appropriate truck, and take it to the refurb facility.
Lightspeed Tek, which makes classroom amplification systems and related products, has a new(er) model of microphone that uses just one rechargable NiMH AA instead of the two of the previous model. They say you have to use their $9 AA NiMH in them, and if you try another brand, it won't charge. Turns out they designed the new microphone to have a separate circuit for charging, and the contact is on the barrel of the battery, not the - cap, so their batteries are missing the bottom quarter-inch of the label. Cut that area of the label off a $2 eneloop, and it works just fine (assuming you remove all the glue).
The 'ideal' temperature of Earth is one where nearly-sea-level communities, where a vast portion of humanity live, aren't flooded, forcing enormous migrations. The breadbaskets of the world should still stay productive, and the deserts should stay roughly where they are. A warming planet might open up a lot of Siberia and Canada to farming, but how long would it take to get large farms going, and how much of the wilderness would be ruined? The ideal temperature isn't about Earth--it can survive anything we can throw at it. The ideal temperature is about supporting 7+ billion humans without huge die-offs, and if we can avoid it, triggering mass extinctions.
Because the procedure is entirely untested, even in animals! He hasn't even shown he can partially heal a severed spinal cord in a rat using his technique, let alone performing a successful head transplant. I'm all for experimental procedures in extreme cases, but there's a difference between "Ok, we're ready to try this in humans now after a decade of animal and human tissue tests, though you've got a 99% chance of dying anyway" and "What if we replace his burned skin with fruit leather? This propylene glycol will give it sensation and blood vessels, I'm sure of it!"
It might not have anything to do with MGS, but it sure as hell better be a publicity stunt, because anyone involved in an actual human head transplant surgery will need to lose their medical licenses and go to prison for a very long time.
I have stuff damaged by USPS all the time, thanks almost entirely to having a small delivery box. My neighborhood uses 25-year-old cluster boxes, and there are 9 houses to a cluster. Each house gets something about a foot deep and 6x4" across. The carrier will always try to cram something into the box rather than walking it to the door. Worse, the boxes each have a quarter-inch of rim around them, so something the carrier can insert easily from their side may be extremely difficult to remove from the other. I've had to tear apart boxes and padded envelopes to extract them. I'd love to know if there's some sort of way to get the cluster boxes upgraded to the ones that have dedicated package boxes.
The 'USFS GIFFORD PINCHOT NAT'L FOREST' received over $1.4 million in items. It's a sizable place in southern Washington, but that still seems high. Turns out that $1.1 million of that was for FOUR rugged PDAs. Most everything they got were tools. US DOJ ATF RENTON recieved 5 multimeters valued at over $60k apiece, and other things like weather stations and oscilloscopes. PULLMAN POLICE DEPT got $22 of items: 6 pairs of sun/wind/dust goggles. KING COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE took in over 2 million, including a million-dollar utility helicopter, some sort of spectroscopy detectors, and big trailer generators. SPOKANE COUNTY SHERIFF OFFICE got a FLIR system and 3 'observation' helicopters which were valued at $276k. Quite a few departments got an MRAP and guns, but the majority of items seem to be pretty useful, non-scary things.
I've cleaned this particular virus type off several machines in the past couple months. They haven't caught on to .com files yet. They always hijack the exefile registry key, and sometimes specific executables like iexplore.exe. The worst ones hijack keys in Winlogon.
They usually use this bit or even a driver to prevent removal tools from running--malwarebytes, combofix, hijackthis, spybot, adaware...
The dumb ones just use filename checks, so you can rename mbam.exe to explorer.exe and run it or regedit.exe to regedit.com. The smart ones use some other method and will recognize the file you're trying to slip by them.
By that point, a LiveCD is basically required.
I'll add that if the device is like (b), the Remote will 'remember' what state the device is in. If the Watch TV and Watch DVD activities both have 'TV On' in their sequence, but the TV doesn't support discrete On/Off commands, the remote will remember that the TV was turned on for 'Watch DVD' when you push 'Watch TV' afterwards. If one of my devices doesn't get the signal (like my TV), I'll go into the Devices menu to turn it off. The remote recognizes that something was changed outside of an Activity, and will ask me if everything's all right the next time I start another activity. If it's not, I can go through some troubleshooting steps so the remote knows what the setting situation actually is.
It also happens to be a "Well, we think we can deflect something this size on relatively short notice" asteroid. Scale that up to extinction-level impactors, and the story would still be "We might be able to do something if we had 20 years notice. Might."
Or you could, you know, also add the cost of an additional controller to the X360 price like you're doing to the Wii (I presume you meant to put "Nintendo Wii" and not "Nintendo DS"). Or perhaps two, since Wii controllers are wireless, and the X360 controller in the 300 euro package is wired. So that'd bump the price up to, what, 400 euros for a X360 with two wireless controllers? While a Wii with two wireless controllers is 310?
Only relevant to one part of your comment, but this is always amusing
In response to the '500 scientists doubt evolution' thing, over 700 scientists named 'Steve' or of a similar/foreign variant have signed a statement supporting evolution.
Yes, the first two seasons are out on DVD. Both are on Amazon.
OLED's interesting, but they've got a major flaw right now.
Lifetime.
Blue OLEDs have a lifespan somewhere around 2000 hours. Green is somewhat more. Red has a much longer lifespan. That vibrant, competitively priced screen won't gain any market foothold when it takes on a permenant yellowish cast after 10 months' use.
Degaussing doesn't do much for genuine blur. Monitors that have a menu for focus seem pretty uncommon, and the external focus knob has essentially disappeared.
What you want to do is (CAREFULLY! There are lethal demons running about inside a monitor, even unplugged) remove the monitor's case (and in the case of my Samsung 955df, the EMI shielding layer as well), and find a potentiometer knob somewhere towards the back labeled 'Focus' or something similar. My Samsung needs it done every few months, and it's like looking at a new monitor. There might even be another knob to fix color problems. You might have to break the glue they use to hold the knob in place, but that shouldn't pose a problem. Twist and watch to adjust.
You might also mark a vent hole (or make your own) on the case to insert a long screwdriver directly into the potentiometer without having to remove the case, if possible.
The problem is that there really is no simple, concise, and clear way to demonstrate to the average person that creationists are full of bunk. Where a creationist can just say "My grandpappy ain't no monkey!" or "Duane Gish, Ph.D, says that the Grand Canyon could be carved out by the Flood" or "Junkyard + tornado = 747 same odds as creating life randomly" or "They eye doesn't work unless it's whole! Impossible to evolve!", to effectively rebutt such ridiculous statements, you have to go on for paragraphs or pages. The people who buy these statements are the least likely to be interested in a long response, and, frankly, are unlikely to understand it well enough to see how it applies.
And public creationist debaters are good public debaters. They may fail miserably in a formal debate format, but in front of normal crowds, they rule the day. Short, sarcastic comments and pointed questions from a hundred different topics (a creationist has no problem jumping from the Flood Geology to Abiogenesis to Eye evolution to missing links) are winners in this format. The opponent, almost always a scientist in a specific discipline, can usually easily rebutt one of the creationist's topics, but by that point, the creationist will ignore that topic and harp on others the scientist doesn't have specific training in. How's a geologist going to counter points in evolutionary biochemistry?
The crowds are bussed in from local churches and they cheer at everything the creationist says.
In the world of science, the creationists lost big-time, and lost a long time ago. There's absolutely no question.
In the world of the public, the scientists are fighting a losing battle against the Word of God. Short of a revolution in religion in this country, that won't change.
I just installed an oldish IntelliTools program on a Mac G4 at work today. There were 4 installers on one CD, and three installers on two other CDs.
Every single installer wanted to reboot the system. 7 restarts just to get one extension and several related programs installed. Ugh.
If Gmail works with this new version of Opera, I may have to switch back.
Gmail worked with Opera 7.54 as of Gmail's upgrade of a couple months ago.
Sometimes I manage to catch NBC airing Almost Live.
It has not aged well, and you can really see why it didn't catch on nationally (when half of the show is dedicated to jokes about Ballard, Kent, and Renton...). I see now that their show was really hit-and-miss, and they seemed to have more misses than hits.
Or maybe I'm just happening to catch the poor episodes, or I'm extrapolating The John Report (used to be my favorite, but since it was always topical stuff, 15-year-old local goings-on isn't as much fun) to the entire show. I haven't seen Uncle Fran and SpeedWalker in ages.
I find Baxter really hit-or-miss.
The first thing I ever read from him was Time Ships, and rather liked it. I recently read all of the Manifold series (I do not recommend doing this straight through), and was ultimately disappointed. Each book takes you through a bunch of different story threads that...ultimately go nowhere. The lonely humanity in the year 1x10^100, the sentient squid, the blue children, the ET robots, the waves of colonization, the wandering moon...none of them really mesh together. And I don't think I'll ever read Manifold: Origin again.
I hated Titan. I didn't find one redeeming thing in that book. I can't think of any other books that have caused that sort of response from me.
But, I loved Ring. I bought Vacuum Diagrams, and suspect I'll enjoy it, too.
Antimatter bombs? Are you joking?
The world-wide production of antimatter can be measured in nanograms per year. We can't even light a 60w lightbulb with the amount of antimatter we make. The fact that it requires enormous particle accelerators pretty much precludes any mass production.
Oh, and it costs roughly $25 billion per gram.
Antimatter explosives would not be 'much worse' than nuclear weapons. You would simply need less material to create a similarly-sized reaction (a 64Mton nuclear device is quite large. A 64Mton antimatter device requires only 3 kilograms of reactant). And at our current production rates, we might get 1.5 kilograms of antimatter in, what, a trillion years?
Judging by what I see, Mogami is merely sanely priced. It's more expensive than lamp cord, yes, but it's nothing compared to expensive cabling.
Mogami sells a 25-foot microphone cable for $50 or so. And this is their 'Gold' packaging. I saw on a bulk site that you could buy 328 feet of 19-channel snake cable for $1600. Monster sells a 3-meter 8-channel snake cable for $150.
And that's nothing compared to actual 'audiophile' cables where cost is measured in thousands of dollars per foot.