Money alone isn't the issue. I live in DC, home of the highest per student spending in the public schools - and also with some very serious problems with the school system. Part of the problem in DC is a history of viewing the school system as a source of political patronage jobs.
Lack of resources, however, can be a problem. In DC the lack of resources is caused by money being poorly spent. In other places it could be poor funding.
ALL education is the responsibility of the parents. Just because you send your kid to a school doesn't mean you're free of your responsibility to be properly educated. That's why parents worry about what school districts to live in, what schools to go to, etc. Knowledge of human sexuality is important and relevant, and it's a good idea for a school to provide that resource. Because it's a sensitive subject, and a parent is ultimately responsible for teaching it, most programs I know of allow a parent to opt out of having their child in a sex ed class.
I send my kid to a religious school. I like it on many levels - not least of all the way they emphasis being decent to other people in a way my public school never did. However, many viewpoints are presented, and I certainly step in and discuss those points that I think need clarification. For example, we just had a long discussion on whether the Noah story "really happened". But all of her education is my job - which is why I take picking her school so seriously.
We lose power where I work, on occasion. It always astounds me how little I can get done without it. We usually hang around and chat for an hour, then go home - after all, how long can you chat with your coworkers with no coffee?
Yes, it's exactly like switch/case in C (including a default option). What C did is to encapsulate all of the code in one set of brackets, thus keeping it confined.
The odds are 1 in 10^24 if their assumptions are true... The odds of the assumptions being true is a different story.
When I was in grad school our group was trying to make a particular type of superconducting circuit. After many attempts we got one that worked, wrote it up, and presented it at a conference.
During the Q&A, someone asked my advisor what our yields were. "On a good day, 100%". The followup question was, "what's your yield on good days?"
Someone once told me that if you short the stock of a company that goes bankrupt, you can indefinitly postpone "closing the deal" and hence indefinitely delay paying taxes. I have no idea if this is true...
No - the lesson is that it's worth not taking your grade so seriously that you muzzle yourself. As it often is in real life, sometimes you pay a price for being a smartass, but it's often worth it anyway.
anymore than most men should be around a daycare job
I took a year off between my sophomore and junior years of college and taught three to five year olds at a preschool. I was very good at it, and had a terrific time. I was the only male teacher there, and there's always a general feeling that there's not enough male care.
Which to some extent supports your point - as a man, I approached daycare differently. I did a lot of running and roughhousing. Don't get me wrong- I did my share of skinned knees, conflict resolution, quiet activities, and all the other things childcare involves. 85% of what I did was the same as the women who worked there. But there was a difference, and it was appreciated.
If you spent time with the families I spent time with, you'd conclude that most of the fathers would make very good daycare teachers. They're mostly a very involved bunch. Now, this isn't necessarily typical. But the point is not to deny that there are differences between groups of people. The point is to be open to the possibility that the person in front of you may or may not reflect your expectations.
The women you met at college are not necessarily more representative of women than the ones around you. The women I met in college were predominantly the "intelligent, strong, independent" types. Was that typical? I don't know. Does it matter?
I'm an engineer, not a programmer, but I'm very familiar with the generalist/specialist phenomena. My degree is in Physics, not engineering, and every job I've had has been in a very different field then the previous one. This has made my job searches somewhat slow and frustrating, but I've found that once I get to a job, I'm well appreciated because I do all sorts of useful things.
I've hit the downside too. Our company's in a financially tight period, so we've reduced are headcount. As a result, I'm back in the production area building and testing product. (Somewhat high end, we're talking $30K a piece). I'm back there, despite being the number two technical guy who actually designed the stuff, because I'm the only one who can do it at this point. Yes, if our volume was a bit higher we could higher technicians to do it, whom I could train, but we're not there now.
However, despite being a fairly unpleasant time to be working here, the last few months have been very educational. I had the epiphany that employees assume management knows a lot more about what's going on then is actually the case. I'm not talking about internal politics. Do you think you know where your company's revenue is going to come from in the next three months? In most tech businesses, nobody has a clue. We all groan about PHBs, but most of us assume someone is watching the store. It ain't necessarily so.
So I'm doing things I think are unpleasant because they need to get done, and I'm doing them well enough. I'm keeping it up because there's a possible payout, and they continue to pay me on time. I don't think I can stand it past the end of the year, but as I grit my teeth through it, and watch other people grit their teeth, I'm getting a terrific lesson in what an organization needs to do to survive, and how to make sure those things get done.
The question of useful work is no different when considering the Casimir effect or the simple attraction of two charged particles. Bring them together, and work is performed. Put work into the system, and you can move them further apart. Different configurations of the consitiuents have different amounts of potential energy. This is true whether the force is due to the Casimir force or the electrostatic force, or any other force, for that matter.
As for levitation, all it requires is a repulsive force in some stable configuration. Putting a magnet over a superconducting sheet will give you levitation.
Making the Casimir force repel instead of attract will not give you perpetual motion. It'll keep small things from sticking together.
I set up a server on my DSL line. I'm not in IT (although I am an engineer), so as an Admin I'm pretty much a n00b. I got Apache up and running on a Sunday. This included installing the OS.
Yes, amber letters on a black background are better. I remember seeing an amber monitor for the first time after using the old green on black ones... it was lovely.
We know a family that had a little girl a few years older than ours who refused to wear anything with buttons. If you suggested it, she'd say "got buttons!" with a frown.
We got a lot of her clothes as hand-me-downs, and every time we saw a pristine piece (often with the tags still on it) and buttons, we'd say "got buttons!"
There are, I'm sure, a lot of problems and abuses in the system, and I have not been through it. There have traditionally a lot of presumptions that are bad for men (e.g, the woman is the best custodian of the child.) And these tick me off, too.
However... I don't think spousal support is always uncalled for. My wife has been home taking care of the children for eight years now - an economic (not to mention emotional) arrangement which has worked out well for us. If I were to take off, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect me to support her for at least some length of time - say, for her to finish her graduate work.
But yes, the system is awful, and has been traditionally heavily biased against men, and fairness is often hard to come by. Good luck on your new life.
Training engineers and computer scientists to consider privacy issues would be a good start. The natural instinct of an engineer is to collect as much information as possible, and to make it as accessible as possible. Mostly this has nothing to with human privacy (I don't think my PCB minds having thermistors all over it...). But it's a fundemental approach to gather as much information as you can, even if you don't know what it's going to be used for.
There have been two main technological obstacles to ubiquitous surveilance. The first is getting the data from the sensor to some central location. Universal wireless networks have taken care of that. The second is the storage and filtering of all that data. That problem's been solved with cheap storage and better computers and software. So, in building other things people want (cell phone systems, computers with enough storage and power to handle video, etc.) we've put all the tools in place of a low cost, universal surveilance system.
Even the last minor hurdle - powering the sensors - is being overcome with "energy harvesting" technology. It's not enough to power video cameras yet, but the market forces will certainly push it in that direction.
The days are over when we could safeguard our privacy by technological limitations (the "who's going to bother looking at what I'm doing" defense). So perhaps it is time for the engineers and the computer scientists to start considering the privacy issues from the beginning, as a technology issue.
We work hard to build devices that don't electrocute or maim us. It's time we started considering social harm as well, and not leave it all to the politicians.
Yes, it's line of sight... I thought we were talking about linking a house to the internet. Line of sight is fine for that.
Gigabeam is trying to make higher bandwidth links that can be used with high density. They're also bleeding money like nobody's business. The problem's not the technological difficulty so much as the lack of a market. There's commercial products at 12.5 GHz (DirecTV). Granted, it's not 73 GHz, but it's in the arena where similar manufacturing and design techniques are used. There are amplifiers and mixers available for these frequencies.
Slashdot Mirror
1) People see your message as a scam or a trap, like the rest of the crap they receive, or
2) People see your message as legit, and it raises the reputation of spam to the point where more people will be taken in by scams.
I had forgotten about the CHR$(4) trick. I remember how excited I was when I found out about it....
You young whippersnappers - I was excited to get an 80 column card! (Anyone remember pr#3 to get into 80 column mode.?)
Appleworks in the pre-GUI era on the Apple //e was great - it got me through college as well. >sigh
Lack of resources, however, can be a problem. In DC the lack of resources is caused by money being poorly spent. In other places it could be poor funding.
ALL education is the responsibility of the parents. Just because you send your kid to a school doesn't mean you're free of your responsibility to be properly educated. That's why parents worry about what school districts to live in, what schools to go to, etc. Knowledge of human sexuality is important and relevant, and it's a good idea for a school to provide that resource. Because it's a sensitive subject, and a parent is ultimately responsible for teaching it, most programs I know of allow a parent to opt out of having their child in a sex ed class.
I send my kid to a religious school. I like it on many levels - not least of all the way they emphasis being decent to other people in a way my public school never did. However, many viewpoints are presented, and I certainly step in and discuss those points that I think need clarification. For example, we just had a long discussion on whether the Noah story "really happened". But all of her education is my job - which is why I take picking her school so seriously.
We lose power where I work, on occasion. It always astounds me how little I can get done without it. We usually hang around and chat for an hour, then go home - after all, how long can you chat with your coworkers with no coffee?
Yes, it's exactly like switch/case in C (including a default option). What C did is to encapsulate all of the code in one set of brackets, thus keeping it confined.
When I was in grad school our group was trying to make a particular type of superconducting circuit. After many attempts we got one that worked, wrote it up, and presented it at a conference.
During the Q&A, someone asked my advisor what our yields were. "On a good day, 100%". The followup question was, "what's your yield on good days?"
Someone once told me that if you short the stock of a company that goes bankrupt, you can indefinitly postpone "closing the deal" and hence indefinitely delay paying taxes. I have no idea if this is true...
You know he's smart - he decided to spend more time with his family AFTER his son left for college.
lox is smoked salmon. Whitefish is something different.
No - the lesson is that it's worth not taking your grade so seriously that you muzzle yourself. As it often is in real life, sometimes you pay a price for being a smartass, but it's often worth it anyway.
Because when your old, it'll be our kids taking care of your sorry ass.
I took a year off between my sophomore and junior years of college and taught three to five year olds at a preschool. I was very good at it, and had a terrific time. I was the only male teacher there, and there's always a general feeling that there's not enough male care.
Which to some extent supports your point - as a man, I approached daycare differently. I did a lot of running and roughhousing. Don't get me wrong- I did my share of skinned knees, conflict resolution, quiet activities, and all the other things childcare involves. 85% of what I did was the same as the women who worked there. But there was a difference, and it was appreciated.
If you spent time with the families I spent time with, you'd conclude that most of the fathers would make very good daycare teachers. They're mostly a very involved bunch. Now, this isn't necessarily typical. But the point is not to deny that there are differences between groups of people. The point is to be open to the possibility that the person in front of you may or may not reflect your expectations.
The women you met at college are not necessarily more representative of women than the ones around you. The women I met in college were predominantly the "intelligent, strong, independent" types. Was that typical? I don't know. Does it matter?
I've hit the downside too. Our company's in a financially tight period, so we've reduced are headcount. As a result, I'm back in the production area building and testing product. (Somewhat high end, we're talking $30K a piece). I'm back there, despite being the number two technical guy who actually designed the stuff, because I'm the only one who can do it at this point. Yes, if our volume was a bit higher we could higher technicians to do it, whom I could train, but we're not there now.
However, despite being a fairly unpleasant time to be working here, the last few months have been very educational. I had the epiphany that employees assume management knows a lot more about what's going on then is actually the case. I'm not talking about internal politics. Do you think you know where your company's revenue is going to come from in the next three months? In most tech businesses, nobody has a clue. We all groan about PHBs, but most of us assume someone is watching the store. It ain't necessarily so.
So I'm doing things I think are unpleasant because they need to get done, and I'm doing them well enough. I'm keeping it up because there's a possible payout, and they continue to pay me on time. I don't think I can stand it past the end of the year, but as I grit my teeth through it, and watch other people grit their teeth, I'm getting a terrific lesson in what an organization needs to do to survive, and how to make sure those things get done.
As for levitation, all it requires is a repulsive force in some stable configuration. Putting a magnet over a superconducting sheet will give you levitation.
Making the Casimir force repel instead of attract will not give you perpetual motion. It'll keep small things from sticking together.
I set up a server on my DSL line. I'm not in IT (although I am an engineer), so as an Admin I'm pretty much a n00b. I got Apache up and running on a Sunday. This included installing the OS.
Some hint in the article of how they've reversed it would be nice. Maybe a sentence or two. Anyone have a link?
Ah, the good old days.
We got a lot of her clothes as hand-me-downs, and every time we saw a pristine piece (often with the tags still on it) and buttons, we'd say "got buttons!"
The technology to make GM crops sterile exists, but is not used.
It's like the ultimate DRM, except instead of not being able to listen to music you starve to death. Smart, eh?
However... I don't think spousal support is always uncalled for. My wife has been home taking care of the children for eight years now - an economic (not to mention emotional) arrangement which has worked out well for us. If I were to take off, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect me to support her for at least some length of time - say, for her to finish her graduate work.
But yes, the system is awful, and has been traditionally heavily biased against men, and fairness is often hard to come by. Good luck on your new life.
Sorry your divorce didn't work out so well for you.
There have been two main technological obstacles to ubiquitous surveilance. The first is getting the data from the sensor to some central location. Universal wireless networks have taken care of that. The second is the storage and filtering of all that data. That problem's been solved with cheap storage and better computers and software. So, in building other things people want (cell phone systems, computers with enough storage and power to handle video, etc.) we've put all the tools in place of a low cost, universal surveilance system.
Even the last minor hurdle - powering the sensors - is being overcome with "energy harvesting" technology. It's not enough to power video cameras yet, but the market forces will certainly push it in that direction.
The days are over when we could safeguard our privacy by technological limitations (the "who's going to bother looking at what I'm doing" defense). So perhaps it is time for the engineers and the computer scientists to start considering the privacy issues from the beginning, as a technology issue.
We work hard to build devices that don't electrocute or maim us. It's time we started considering social harm as well, and not leave it all to the politicians.
Gigabeam is trying to make higher bandwidth links that can be used with high density. They're also bleeding money like nobody's business. The problem's not the technological difficulty so much as the lack of a market. There's commercial products at 12.5 GHz (DirecTV). Granted, it's not 73 GHz, but it's in the arena where similar manufacturing and design techniques are used. There are amplifiers and mixers available for these frequencies.