I remember a few years ago there was some catalog (wish I could remember which one) that sold mirrors that attached into the shower head (I think you unscrewed the shower head, attached the mirror to the pipe, then screwed the shower head to the mirror adaptor). Anyway the adaptor thing sent some of the water circulating through the mirror to warm it so it wouldn't fog up.
I'm guessing "trolley" is brittish-speak for "shopping cart". You just gave me a humorous mental image of people riding around in San Francisco style cable cars inside the grocery store.
I think the underperforming employees would try to get into the union, after-all 90% of all people believe they are above average (and 11-teen% of statistics are made up).
But anyway that shouldn't matter, the low performers will quit the union, and the union could then advertise "our members are x% more productive than non-member". They wouldn't even need "closed" shops then, anyone who is good will be in the union. Any employer who hires non-union knows they're getting what they pay for (i.e. crap salery/conditions for crap employees). After all, that is theoretically what unions are supposed to offer employers, higher quality employees.
Your second point is a good one, how do you democratize a union so the power stays with the employees themselves, rather that shifting to the full-time union officers who no longer do the work of the workers they represent?
Which makes the "proper" use of "begging the question" completely wrong. Granted the "improper" use of the phase is a bit grammer-challenged, but at least there is some "begging" (the listeners mind urgently pleas for something) about a "question".
The "proper" use makes no logical sense at all (which is very ironic considering that the "proper" use is defined in the field of logic). There is no begging going on in any modern sense of the word "beg", what is going on is assuming. And is being assumed isn't a question, but rather the answer to a question.
So why can't the logic folks (being logical and all) just say "you're assuming the answer"? That makes perfect sense and says exactly what you mean without having to explain anything. And it opens up the phase "begging the question" for uses where there is actual begging and questions involved.
All the current unions operate like that, but does it have to be so?
Why couldn't we form unions and put it in the union by-laws that we will allow, or even demand(!) that poorly performing employees be fired/paid lower?
If we controlled our unions, we could set whatever standard we wished right?
Maybe you're not old enough. I hear more and more people saying they took calculus in high school. It definately wasn't the norm back when I was in school (I graduated in 1991). So maybe they have improved some things since I was a kid.
Well, technically flight isn't neccessary like say food or water, but without airplanes I couldn't realistically do my job or ever visit my girlfriend, so I'd say its fairly important.
But why can't Linux be declared a generic term describing the family of software derived under GPL from Linus' kenel? Then no one can claim ownership of the word and try to sue others with it.
Knowledge of what order of magnitude and first digits to expect let you know if the calculation you just made is even in the right ballpark.
I agree, but they teach it over and over and over again way more than is neccessary if you're just going to use it for approximation. Besides, you'll get used to what the approximate right answer should be just by using math (both in class and in real life). There's no need to dedicate several years to only grinding out calculations.
The point is not that mental arithmetic is used to replace calculators as some sort of penis waving 'yay, look what I can do'
Ok, but I really feel that's what the schools are trying to teach. Why do they drill you to be able to do multiplication tables faster than a typical person could type it into a calculator? (And don't say for speed, if you spent that time practicing with a caculator you'd be even faster still!)
I assume by 'high school' you mean 15-18 year olds. Here, by 17, the basics of integration and differentiation is complete in maths courses.
Well then you're very lucky wherever 'here' is. At my High School, pre-calc was the highest class offered, and its not required to graduate or get addmitted to college. I didn't learn any differentiating or integrating until college
I think I overstated it in my post. I'm not saying they should skip teaching arithmetic at all, I just think spending several years doing nothing but grinding simple arithmetic problems to the exclussion of teaching any abstract concepts isn't really useful, and only serves to make kids hate math.
I agree that arithmatic is the neccessary first step, I just think they spend way too much time on it. From my personal school experience, you start with addition in first grade and reach fractions/decimals in sixth grade. Then in seventh grade you finally start learning some abstart concepts (in pre-algebra). I don't think 6 years is really neccessary to master basic arithmetic.
One question though: Are you saying that calculus isn't taught in high schools, or that students get bored with maths and drop it before the subject comes up?
Both, I had lost all interest in math by 4th grade (when they were teaching multiplication), and started flunking math classes for not doing any homework (I could always ace the tests, but homework is often a big enough part of the grade to fail). So I progressed a lot slower though math then I could have. I didn't regain interest in math until Geometry class. But even if I had progressed at full speed, pre-calculus was the highest course offered at my high school.
How many times have you seen a store clerk struggle with counting change? How many times have you seen a person of average, or even better, intelligence struggle with a simple addition problem when presented with a few numbers and no access to a calculator.
That's just stupid. Being able to do arithmetic in your head isn't a math skill worth having. You're never far from a calculator of some sort, and even if you were (stuck on a desert island and needed to do a caculation to get home), everyone can do the math manually just not ultra-fast.
Grinding out arithmetic is something calculators do better, faster, and more conveniently then we do. The math skills we should spend time on are things like learning how to properly set up, say, a calculus problem so that you can feed the right equations into the calculator. But they don't even get as far as calculus in high school because they spend years making you grind out endless equations manually and boring you to death in the proccess so you'll hate math and stop caring.
When I was in the U.S Army (1991-1996) the army-issued underwear was brown. It probably still is today. I always assumed your reason was the real reason it was colored like that.
This goes to show what I've maintained all along. Most people don't care about ratings and don't think exposing kids to "evil" content is damaging.
The ones pushing for ratings on games and regulating T.V. broadcasts etc. are a tiny minority who aren't content to parent their own kids and want to parent everyone else, kids and adults alike.
Some patents are just for ideas rather than implementations.
But that's not right. The patent office itself maintains that you can't patent an idea, only an implimentation. I think that's the way it should be. It's pretty easy to come up with ideas, it doesn't cost anything to think so there's no cost of research and development to recoup. Patenting implimentations is supposed to reward the cost of actually making something work in the real world (which is a lot harder to do), working on the assumption that people won't do any development if they aren't likely to recoup the costs.
Lots of things are very clever but easy to program once someone came up with the idea
But that's the definition of obviousness! Your not supposed to be able to patent ideas (no matter how clever) only implimentations. And the implimentations have to be non-obvious. That's what ticks us off so much about patents on stuff like this, it's a back-door way of patenting ideas- by pantenting the obvious solution to them!
I work in the power generation industry, and I devide my time between new installations and maintenance/repair.
New unit installation is basically a construction job, and those almost always start at first light, usually to get the most work done possible during daylight. They rarely stick to 8-hour days, 10 or 12 hour days are more common, pretty much trying to get everything possible done in daylight (since outdoor lighting is expensive and not nearly as effective as sunlight)
In maintencance/repair situations, I deal with the permanant crews that cover the plant 24/7. Most either run three 8-hour shifts or two 12-hour ones. Either way 7:00am is the standard start of first shift.
Office jobs are the only ones I see or deal with that start at 9:00ish, unfortunately I discovered the hard way the cubicle/office work makes me practically suicidal within 6-months. The movie 'Office Space' isn't a comedy, it's a documentary!
I hate normal trackballs for this exact reason. But I used to have a big trackball, the ball was like the size of a baseball. That thing was great! I set the sesitivity so that one push of the ball from one side to the other moved the pointer from the one edge of the screen to the other.
Set up that way, it worked exactly like a mouse (being big, you move it with the palm of your hand) with the added advantage that it could never fall off the edge of the mouse pad.
they tend to pick that hour such that most people almost never need to get up before sunrise, even in the winter.
That would be fine, the problem I have is that employers always pick a start time that is a close to dawn as possible in the winter, meaning you have to wake up in the dark in winter. Then when the days start to get long enough that you can start waking up in the light - BAM! - DST comes along and you go back to waking up pre-dawn again.
I wish there was some way to convince employers to start work 1 hour after dawn (about 8:00am instead of 7:00am). At my current job, they even went further and recently bumped start time to 6:00am, effectively doing double DST. (I can simpathize though, they did it because the manual laborers have had a lot of trouble with heat exhaustion, so they wanted more to get done in the morning before it got too hot. Then in the hottest part of the afternoon most worker go home except the few pulling overtime).
I play WoW regularly, but I must be missing something.
Left click selects a target, right click attacks a target.
When do you need to hit both buttons?
I was excited about this possibility myself, as my Windows XP started refusing to update about a week ago.
But according to the article, "they can still fill out a counterfeit report and receive a copy of Windows XP Home Edition for $99 or a copy of Windows XP Professional Edition for $149, Lazar said."
To me, this sound like I would have to sign some form saying I thought I was buying a legit copy and it turned out to be fake.
That would be dishonest!
(Seriously, I'm not joking! I'm ok with comitting copywrite infringement, but not with making false statements!)
This is exactly what I do. I pay $10/month for the cheapest possible local phone service (no long distance) and don't plug a phone into it. I just think of the $10 as part of my DSL bill.
Ok, I've seen this advice "get a lawyer" many, many times here on Slashdot. How exactly does one do this? I'm not a lawyer. I don't know any lawyers. I don't know anyone who knows any lawyers. None of my friends or coworkers have ever used a lawyer (that I know of) and I hear they are insanely expensive (and I am not rich).
Are you really suggesting that I pick a lawyer at random out of the yellow pages and dump a huge sum of cash on them next time I sign something? I'm not trying to be inflamitory here (sorry if I come off that way). Pretty much everyone I know is an electrical or mechancal engineer, or a computer science type. This problem comes up anytime I need help from someone from any other profession.
The huge number of beautiful, fenceless, privately owned front lawns around the world demonstrate that this is a common practice and that upon finding one and a suitable blanket, it's reasonable to assume you are allowed to use it to take a nap.
The problem with your analogy is that in the case of lawns the owners leave them unfenced because it makes the lawns more attractive, and its widely understood that the owners probably don't want you to sleep on them.
In the case of WAPs, the WAP owners are leaving them open precisely because they want the public to be able to use them (or else because they are stupid). The expectation when you find an open WAP is that it was intentionally left open for the public to enjoy (unless the network is still called "lynksys", in which case you assume the owner is too stupid to configure thier router).
Slashdot Mirror
I remember a few years ago there was some catalog (wish I could remember which one) that sold mirrors that attached into the shower head (I think you unscrewed the shower head, attached the mirror to the pipe, then screwed the shower head to the mirror adaptor). Anyway the adaptor thing sent some of the water circulating through the mirror to warm it so it wouldn't fog up.
I'm guessing "trolley" is brittish-speak for "shopping cart". You just gave me a humorous mental image of people riding around in San Francisco style cable cars inside the grocery store.
I think the underperforming employees would try to get into the union, after-all 90% of all people believe they are above average (and 11-teen% of statistics are made up).
But anyway that shouldn't matter, the low performers will quit the union, and the union could then advertise "our members are x% more productive than non-member". They wouldn't even need "closed" shops then, anyone who is good will be in the union. Any employer who hires non-union knows they're getting what they pay for (i.e. crap salery/conditions for crap employees). After all, that is theoretically what unions are supposed to offer employers, higher quality employees.
Your second point is a good one, how do you democratize a union so the power stays with the employees themselves, rather that shifting to the full-time union officers who no longer do the work of the workers they represent?
Which makes the "proper" use of "begging the question" completely wrong. Granted the "improper" use of the phase is a bit grammer-challenged, but at least there is some "begging" (the listeners mind urgently pleas for something) about a "question".
The "proper" use makes no logical sense at all (which is very ironic considering that the "proper" use is defined in the field of logic). There is no begging going on in any modern sense of the word "beg", what is going on is assuming. And is being assumed isn't a question, but rather the answer to a question.
So why can't the logic folks (being logical and all) just say "you're assuming the answer"? That makes perfect sense and says exactly what you mean without having to explain anything. And it opens up the phase "begging the question" for uses where there is actual begging and questions involved.
All the current unions operate like that, but does it have to be so?
Why couldn't we form unions and put it in the union by-laws that we will allow, or even demand(!) that poorly performing employees be fired/paid lower?
If we controlled our unions, we could set whatever standard we wished right?
Well my own company, GE, seems to be buying/building as much as it possibly can in China, so there's one example.
Maybe you're not old enough. I hear more and more people saying they took calculus in high school. It definately wasn't the norm back when I was in school (I graduated in 1991). So maybe they have improved some things since I was a kid.
Well, technically flight isn't neccessary like say food or water, but without airplanes I couldn't realistically do my job or ever visit my girlfriend, so I'd say its fairly important.
But why can't Linux be declared a generic term describing the family of software derived under GPL from Linus' kenel? Then no one can claim ownership of the word and try to sue others with it.
I agree, but they teach it over and over and over again way more than is neccessary if you're just going to use it for approximation. Besides, you'll get used to what the approximate right answer should be just by using math (both in class and in real life). There's no need to dedicate several years to only grinding out calculations.
The point is not that mental arithmetic is used to replace calculators as some sort of penis waving 'yay, look what I can do'Ok, but I really feel that's what the schools are trying to teach. Why do they drill you to be able to do multiplication tables faster than a typical person could type it into a calculator? (And don't say for speed, if you spent that time practicing with a caculator you'd be even faster still!)
I assume by 'high school' you mean 15-18 year olds. Here, by 17, the basics of integration and differentiation is complete in maths courses.
Well then you're very lucky wherever 'here' is. At my High School, pre-calc was the highest class offered, and its not required to graduate or get addmitted to college. I didn't learn any differentiating or integrating until college
I think I overstated it in my post. I'm not saying they should skip teaching arithmetic at all, I just think spending several years doing nothing but grinding simple arithmetic problems to the exclussion of teaching any abstract concepts isn't really useful, and only serves to make kids hate math.
I agree that arithmatic is the neccessary first step, I just think they spend way too much time on it. From my personal school experience, you start with addition in first grade and reach fractions/decimals in sixth grade. Then in seventh grade you finally start learning some abstart concepts (in pre-algebra). I don't think 6 years is really neccessary to master basic arithmetic.
One question though: Are you saying that calculus isn't taught in high schools, or that students get bored with maths and drop it before the subject comes up?
Both, I had lost all interest in math by 4th grade (when they were teaching multiplication), and started flunking math classes for not doing any homework (I could always ace the tests, but homework is often a big enough part of the grade to fail). So I progressed a lot slower though math then I could have. I didn't regain interest in math until Geometry class. But even if I had progressed at full speed, pre-calculus was the highest course offered at my high school.
That's just stupid. Being able to do arithmetic in your head isn't a math skill worth having. You're never far from a calculator of some sort, and even if you were (stuck on a desert island and needed to do a caculation to get home), everyone can do the math manually just not ultra-fast.
Grinding out arithmetic is something calculators do better, faster, and more conveniently then we do. The math skills we should spend time on are things like learning how to properly set up, say, a calculus problem so that you can feed the right equations into the calculator. But they don't even get as far as calculus in high school because they spend years making you grind out endless equations manually and boring you to death in the proccess so you'll hate math and stop caring.
When I was in the U.S Army (1991-1996) the army-issued underwear was brown. It probably still is today. I always assumed your reason was the real reason it was colored like that.
This goes to show what I've maintained all along. Most people don't care about ratings and don't think exposing kids to "evil" content is damaging.
The ones pushing for ratings on games and regulating T.V. broadcasts etc. are a tiny minority who aren't content to parent their own kids and want to parent everyone else, kids and adults alike.
But that's not right. The patent office itself maintains that you can't patent an idea, only an implimentation. I think that's the way it should be. It's pretty easy to come up with ideas, it doesn't cost anything to think so there's no cost of research and development to recoup. Patenting implimentations is supposed to reward the cost of actually making something work in the real world (which is a lot harder to do), working on the assumption that people won't do any development if they aren't likely to recoup the costs.
But that's the definition of obviousness! Your not supposed to be able to patent ideas (no matter how clever) only implimentations. And the implimentations have to be non-obvious. That's what ticks us off so much about patents on stuff like this, it's a back-door way of patenting ideas- by pantenting the obvious solution to them!
I work in the power generation industry, and I devide my time between new installations and maintenance/repair.
New unit installation is basically a construction job, and those almost always start at first light, usually to get the most work done possible during daylight. They rarely stick to 8-hour days, 10 or 12 hour days are more common, pretty much trying to get everything possible done in daylight (since outdoor lighting is expensive and not nearly as effective as sunlight)
In maintencance/repair situations, I deal with the permanant crews that cover the plant 24/7. Most either run three 8-hour shifts or two 12-hour ones. Either way 7:00am is the standard start of first shift.
Office jobs are the only ones I see or deal with that start at 9:00ish, unfortunately I discovered the hard way the cubicle/office work makes me practically suicidal within 6-months. The movie 'Office Space' isn't a comedy, it's a documentary!
I hate normal trackballs for this exact reason. But I used to have a big trackball, the ball was like the size of a baseball. That thing was great! I set the sesitivity so that one push of the ball from one side to the other moved the pointer from the one edge of the screen to the other.
Set up that way, it worked exactly like a mouse (being big, you move it with the palm of your hand) with the added advantage that it could never fall off the edge of the mouse pad.
That would be fine, the problem I have is that employers always pick a start time that is a close to dawn as possible in the winter, meaning you have to wake up in the dark in winter. Then when the days start to get long enough that you can start waking up in the light - BAM! - DST comes along and you go back to waking up pre-dawn again.
I wish there was some way to convince employers to start work 1 hour after dawn (about 8:00am instead of 7:00am). At my current job, they even went further and recently bumped start time to 6:00am, effectively doing double DST. (I can simpathize though, they did it because the manual laborers have had a lot of trouble with heat exhaustion, so they wanted more to get done in the morning before it got too hot. Then in the hottest part of the afternoon most worker go home except the few pulling overtime).
I play WoW regularly, but I must be missing something.
Left click selects a target, right click attacks a target.
When do you need to hit both buttons?
I was excited about this possibility myself, as my Windows XP started refusing to update about a week ago.
But according to the article, "they can still fill out a counterfeit report and receive a copy of Windows XP Home Edition for $99 or a copy of Windows XP Professional Edition for $149, Lazar said."
To me, this sound like I would have to sign some form saying I thought I was buying a legit copy and it turned out to be fake.
That would be dishonest!
(Seriously, I'm not joking! I'm ok with comitting copywrite infringement, but not with making false statements!)
This is exactly what I do. I pay $10/month for the cheapest possible local phone service (no long distance) and don't plug a phone into it. I just think of the $10 as part of my DSL bill.
Ok, I've seen this advice "get a lawyer" many, many times here on Slashdot. How exactly does one do this? I'm not a lawyer. I don't know any lawyers. I don't know anyone who knows any lawyers. None of my friends or coworkers have ever used a lawyer (that I know of) and I hear they are insanely expensive (and I am not rich).
Are you really suggesting that I pick a lawyer at random out of the yellow pages and dump a huge sum of cash on them next time I sign something? I'm not trying to be inflamitory here (sorry if I come off that way). Pretty much everyone I know is an electrical or mechancal engineer, or a computer science type. This problem comes up anytime I need help from someone from any other profession.
The problem with your analogy is that in the case of lawns the owners leave them unfenced because it makes the lawns more attractive, and its widely understood that the owners probably don't want you to sleep on them.
In the case of WAPs, the WAP owners are leaving them open precisely because they want the public to be able to use them (or else because they are stupid). The expectation when you find an open WAP is that it was intentionally left open for the public to enjoy (unless the network is still called "lynksys", in which case you assume the owner is too stupid to configure thier router).