What math/physics degree allows you to graduate with only 120 credits, 72 of them things that can even be counted from AP exams?
My engineering degree took 200 credit hours, including about 45 that I entered college with. Taking 37 hours in a semester would save you... half a year over my normal course load.
I mean, so AP can cover your intro pretty much everything... meaning that few of his classes were actually something high level AKA possibly challenging? I had a year and a half worth of math courses beyond what you can get with all possible AP credits.
I mean, awesome for him... but what the heck is the university even teaching in a degree that short?
FIRST is a great competition. And even if you can't get directly involved, some of the teams sites have a wealth of robotics information. www.chiefdelphi.com, the home of one of the original teams, has some great resources.
The competitions are also a great gathering of engineers and recruiters from the big names in engineering - Delphi, NASA, GM, Ford... there are hundreds of sponsors.
But most importantly, by volunteering, you're helping high schoolers have something nerdy that they can feel proud of.
Although I still wish someone else would implement 16 bit color without making it look like crap. Unreal was beautiful on a Voodoo3, even in 16-bit. 16bit even on my new card looks grainy and nasty.
But 99% of my professors just posted their powerpoint slides on the web for you to download.
It was as nice as getting full complete notes for the lecture, but they were good enough most of the time and the professor had already made them, so it's no real extra work.
Don't see what the big deal is unless the professor just delivers everything off the cuff with no notes whatsoever. even if it's a scrap of paper five minutes with a scanner could makes things easier for the students in a "no assurances" sort of way.
I dunno, taping and selling the whole thing seems kind of lame.
Just kidding, but my fiancee complained about the management problem all the time through college. Any group assignment they put her with the other girls in the class to make her feel at home, or something. She started specifically writing "I work fine with boys" on all of the pre-group information slips.
It's been my experience that there will be as much of a gender issue as the specific group decides to make of it. If someone ignores the fact that she's the only girl and just works as though she's a member of a team there shouldn't be any problems. The important thing is to make that first step, so the guys aren't worried about not knowing who you are. And if some idiot guy decides tries to talk down to you kick his ass - the other guys will appreciate you more for it.
There are multiple techniques to "fix" hard shadows in a raytracer or a raster, although the "correct" way to do them involves pairing a raytracer with a global illumination model (something like photon mapping). They're just slow to compute. In general, you can make the raytraced ones look nicer, but they take longer the nicer you want them to look, of course.
2) You can fake it well enough for simple cases like water, or a single mirror. Although sometimes the lack of per-pixel accuracy in that can be unnoticeable or quite nasty, depending on how you're doing it. Raytracing can give some very nice reflections of reflections effects, though, and more generalized distortions. The reasons that the reflection stuff looks decent in today's games is because an artist tweaks it for a day or two and they don't put in any of the cases where it wouldn't look good:)
There's a reason that most of the hyper-realistic non-real-time renderers have a raytracing option. I'm not saying we're likely to see it happening in real time soon (30 fps on a modern computer... doesn't leave much room for an AI or physics calculations) but it could still look pretty sweet.
Yep. That's the theoretical beauty of the social game, though. I'm about as geared up as I care to be on both of my characters, but I still enjoy random instances with no loot for me left in them because I'm running it with guildmates.
I think most good games like that go in stages - there's the point where you are wowed by the newness of it, the part where you're racing to get all the best stuff and become really powerful, and then the part where it's mostly a place to hang out with all the friends you met while doing the other two.
Because of #3, you always end up playing a social game long after the play-worthiness of the actual video game wore off. It's happened to me in every online game I've played for more than a month.
If you never made those friends, then of course you're going to be saying "why the heck is anyone still playing that stupid old game":) Because I don't expect any game to still hold my attention, for the game itself, for that long.
WoW was good enough to make me enjoy my first few months of play for just the game, and it's good enough now that it's still enjoyable while I hang out with my friends. At some point, it will become enough of a grind that it isn't worth even that any more, but I think personally I've at least got until the Burning Crusade is released until that happens.
So the solution is... restrict population growth? Colonize other planets? The problems you list have little to do with farming and quite a bit to do with population pressures.
The catch-22 is that applying capitalism to a required resource (like farming) leads to corporate farms, which leads to less personal ownership of farms and more people either working a "factory" job at a farm or heading for the cities where they can hopefully get a factory job. But socializing it has in practice led to mass famine. Famine due to misguided government ownership of farming has killed more people this century than wars or disease - look at the history of Russia, or China, or the whole african continent. How do you suppose we solve it? People aren't leaving the farms because they want to, they're leaving because farming has NEVER been a lucrative job on a small scale. Ask my grandparents who had to go to school only every other day during the winter because they had to share their one pair of shoes with their sibling.
The only good news I think of about any of this is that history has shown that as income levels and standards of living increase (which generally comes some years AFTER the move to an urban society, as all those people who migrated to the city eventually get jobs in the new industries that spring up for the cheap labor) the birth rates decrease and level off, leading to a somewhat sustainable system. At least, that's the conservative stance, and from what I've read at least the basic premise seems to be true.
I'm not saying that farms shouldn't be concerned about the environment, but I don't see how any of the proposed organic solutions work in any situation other than one supported by the reasonable attempt at production made by society. It's like Thoreau advocating going back to the "natural" living of his friend's back yard:P The original settlers of that area fought their way up from log cabins to civilization for a reason. We need to proceed in some fashion that preserves the environment and the farms as well, but I haven't really seen any good solutions to that yet.
Yes, organic methods of farming work great as long as you have the traditional methods to handle the actual food needs of the general population.
Most of the methods used by agro-business are employed because they increase productivity. Because of this the US produces enough food to feed most of the world. Going back to methods a few hundred years old, on a large scale, would probably have some nasty consequences that most people don't think about.
Now, what we need to do is find something better to do with all the pig crap that is accumulated. I know that for cows there has been some pretty nice research into using the methane rising from pits of manure as an eletricity source.
The general problem is just that there is a ton of pigs, and no management system for dealing with their waste. Even when you reuse it for fertilizer, at the first rain a large portion of it will wash off into the local river system. Finding a nice way to manage and process that that doesn't completely bankrupt the farmers would be a good step for the environment, rather than saying they have to switch over their whole farming method to being half as productive and catering to the elite who can afford to care how their pigs were raised.
I don't know what MMO's you've been playing, but I've always been able to find a working Battlefield server (due to their lack of central organization/failure point) where every MMO I've played has had some really crappy downtime. Not all of them were WoW level downtime, but still pretty regular.
The point of any government's foreign policy is to advance its own countries aims, as filtered through the personal viewpoints of the people in charge.
At the time of Korea, our government had been watching government after government being taken over by communism, and and not the utopian communism that Marx or whoever originally wanted, Leninist vanguard elite, anti-intellectual, anti-law gangsterism. The realities of 20th century communism were that it lead in almost all cases to mass murder, destruction of economies that lead to mass starvation, a reduction in human rights, and hostility toward to the United States and our allies based on rhetorical and economic ties to the Soviet Union.
At the time of the Korean war, there was a very real fear of a soviet ground attack right through West Germany, or at any number of other places of key American interest, and soviet agents were actively working in many other democratic, or at least lawful nations, to bring about the constant revolution of communism. Korea was chosen to show the USSR that the united states would take a role as its opposing major power, creating a stable balance of power that did not erupt into a major world war. Up to that point, we had been dealing with the aftermath of WW2 and Eisenhower's fondness for Stalin that left us a country with no desire to return to war (despite the strategic implications of pulling our troops out of the European front) and a demilitarization that left us no power to wage on. Korea in many ways forced the USSR to change its tactics to more covert operations instead of direct takeovers, as we also started funding anti-communist groups in many countries, sometimes with good, sometimes with bad results.
The important thing to understand is that there WAS some justification for the anti-communist propaganda that the US has been spouting for years, for all that it was, of course, over-simplified and taken too far. Look at the history of the african continent, or southeast asia, to see the devastating results of leninist and stalinist communism in action. Hell, look at China and Russia. Russia was one of the biggest exporters of grain in the world under the tsars - it has been a net importer, despite some of the richest farmland in the world, since the revolution. hundreds of millions died in china, due to lack of law and starvation. In the cultural revolution, Mao basically encouraged farmboys with guns to kill every academic they could find, and burn the universities. I'm amazed at the degree to which chinese higher education has managed to recover. Countries across Africa were taken over by "communist" revolutions that resulted in a dictatorship of the party leader and mass atrocities. These were largely financed, encouraged, and in many cases controlled by the USSR. And no, I'm not just repeating american propaganda - this is straight from the mouth of Krushchev.
The end result of all this is that there was a strong legitimate protection of interest behind much of the US cold war effort, even if much of it was misguided. It wasn't just a desire to play world power (although I won't disagree that that didn't come into it, especially in vietnam. Johnson had an overly idealized view of what american power was capable of).
In Internation relations there is a strong theory that a balance of power will prevent large wars from erupting. Every major war, from the 30 year's war to napoleon to world war 1-2 were caused by a severe imbalance of power that made it too tempting for the aggressors to try to take what they could. The cold war was contained to relatively small skirmishes like korea and vietnam because of this.
What I'm actually most concerned about is what's happening, and what's going to happen now that there is no one to "balance" the US.
The thing about framing... is that there is always someone who makes a stupid mistake and puts a board where it shouldn't be.
This means you can either spend a lot of time, energy, and lumber ripping out everything that has been done since the mistake.. or you can take a saw and make a clean cut to remove it, and no one will know the difference.
There are also often certain parts of a building, especially involving the OSB on walls and roof, that are much easier, faster, and cleaner to do by cutting after they are in place. A portable, battery-powered saw is designed with this in mind and is easily used for it... except for the crazy buttons which are DESIGNED to be used one-handed, but on some models require some very strange hand contortions to keep you from accidentally enabling them.
I'd be much happier if they just gave you a toggle safety like on a handgun.
You end up cutting wet lumber all the time in framing construction. Sure you try to cover it up when it rains, and you make sure that it's not wet when you close up the house (or you'll get mold) but you end up cutting slightly damp lumber all the time.
This is not even counting green lumber, which due to its treatment always seems to have a decently high amount of moisture in it.
You don't cut green or damp wood in a nice cabinetry shop, sure, but there's a lot of power-tool usage outside of that.
Of course, in my experience on the job many of the so-called "safety" features actually made things more dangerous - such as the arcane multi-button circular saws that made it very difficult to operate one handed from the top of a ladder, making you much more likely to fall and slice yourself.
I'm pretty sure almost every product of this type more or less ignores macs and PCs. The administrators have the option of blocking them entirely or letting them right on through, and that's about it. They're designed mostly for homogenous, large business infrastructure.
I know that Cisco sells a similar solution that does this at the router - I think the advantage of ours (supposedly) was a higher level of scanning on the computer itself, and the fact that you didn't need to upgrade all your network infrastructure to support it - you just had to plug our box in somewhere on it.
As for your son, I ran a windows box on that network for four years, and with a good firewall, virus protection, Firefox, and some common sense, he should be fine.
Yep, the company I used to work for made a product to stop just that.
One of the emerging areas in enterprise security is so-called "endpoint" security solutions, that will verify whether a user plugging into a corporate network has 1) approved virus software with updated definitions. 2) an approved firewall 3) Any software updates that the techies have deemed required.
If you don't, you get shunted off to a quarantined part of the network with instructions on how to obtain the software to make you compliant.
On the one hand, it sounds like a pain to set up and annoying for the users (and as it usually requires dhcp enforcement can be bypassed by someone who knows the network), and we didn't run in it at our own company, but on the other hand I bet that if they required it at the university I went to the virus problem there would have been much more controlled.
Every survey I've read from Consumer Reports and PCWorld puts apple close to the top in support, reliability, and customer satisfaction over Dell, HP, gateway, etc. IBM was the only manufacturer that ever seemed to beat them at anything, and they've now sold off their PC business.
People aren't just deluding themselves over this. Sure there's some bias, but there's bias specifically because they're nice machines.
Not that I would complain if their support record improved a bit... but I've done enough support on busted Dells and HP's to know that they have the problems, they just don't get publicized anywhere close to as much as apple's issues seem to.
They made one, called it the Cube. Was a nice silent little piece of work with an upgradeable video card and a normal sized hard drive. Completely fanless (unless you decided to stick a giant video card in there).
It tanked because it was too expensive:( Im still curious whether they just priced it too high or whether it was just that much more expensive to produce.
I expect that the problem was that no one wanted to pay more than an imac for a machine that didnt have the full expandability of a tower, and they didnt want to put the price down below an imac and cut into those sales.
I think the moral of this story is that there are as many home-schooling parents as there are teachers, and some are going to be good whereas others...
A good homeschool education requires external interaction through clubs, sports, or home-school organizations. Some parents know and provide this, others do not. It often depends upon the reasoning for the homeschooling in the first place, as well as how socially well-adapted the parents were to begin with.
Where I grew up, most parents homeschooled their children for religious reasons. They were generally some of the most strictly religious members of the community, and their children were not allowed televisions, video games, etc. Moreover, any social interactions their children had were through church. While I am sure they feel that their children benefitted from not being exposed to the "evils" of the modern world, their children of course had difficulty socializing with those outside of their church-centric world. The ones I knew who began attending the last years of high school at a public school had few friends and were generally unhappy because they were poorly socialized - they were nerds, but nerds in a way that made it hard for them to interact even with the other nerds (which included me) at school. One of them dropped out of college to smoke weed, I'm not sure what happened to the others - all in all, not the result his parents were going for.
This is compared to where I live now, where most people home-schooling are relatively secularist people in tech jobs who felt that public school was a waste of time/too violent/ too sports-centered, what have you. I know of several communities of home schooling parents that meet together to help give their kids social experience. Friends who have mentored with these groups say that the kids are nice, if a little different sometimes (it IS a robotics group, so of course they're going to be kind of nerdy). They also say that the parents tend to be a little overbearing and incredibly nerdy themselves, which I think possibly contributes to the stereotypes of home-schooled kids. But the kids still spend their time with activities that most kids do, so they are more "normal" than the home schooled kids that I grew up with.
And then you have my cousin, who was home schooled for several years between her divorced parents, and I'm not sure she was made to open a book the entire time.
The fact is that in general, parents are making a specific choice against the societal norm to homeschool their kids. That says something about the parents, which means the kids will probably be a little different anyway, for good or for ill. It also means that more of a concerted effort must be made to give the children social activities that in our culture are generally all lumped into school. Personally, while I went to a public school, it was a very small one, and I know that for a few things (such as dating, heh) the small circle of people to know and meet were limitting. I can only imagine what it would have been like if I spent a larger amount of time at home with my family and the few social groups we frequented. For others who adapt less readily to outside competition a smaller school or home school could have been beneficial. Finally, a public education will provide you with a wide range of teachers, some very good, some incredibly bad. A homeschooled child will spend most of his time with his parents - and just because they've volunteered to teach doesn't mean they're any good at it:) Being a good teacher takes a lot more than just knowledge of the subject - I'm not sure I would have wanted to have to study with my dad all day.
All in all, there is a wide variance in home schooling just as there is in public education. Anyone making cracks about home schooled children is likely only repeating their anecdotal experience, as is someone who defends it. Its very likely that the people who want to home school had a very unhappy education themselves, and those who don't knew some very strange homeschool kids.
Personally, I'll probably send my kids to school but tell them that if they want to learn anything they're going to have to study it on their own. I'll see how it works out:(
Of course, without the union lobby, my mother (a teacher) would have lost all health care options for her spouse and her pension plan would have been transfered out of their currently decent system into one that completely blows. While I agree that the unions are generally crap and don't care at all about education, they do at least work to some degree in favor of the teachers, which is more than can be said for the current state board of education, which cares about neither.
The ridiculous thing is that almost all their piracy concerns are happening abroad.
In most developing nations the only people who might buy legitimate copies of windows are the corporations that are outsourcing to them. Any software store in bombay has rows of pirated Windows CDs on sale.
Greater than 90% of all software piracy happens in places like India and China, but these are the number they quote whenever the BSA talks about how much money they are losing to piracy every year to make new laws or practices to make things difficult for their legitimate customers.
Of course, the real reason there's that much piracy in asia? An Indian programmer working for an American company who has outsourced their operations and pays very well makes about $200 a month, and on this lives as well as a programmer here in the US. Windows XP Pro in India costs more than a solidly middle class family's monthly income.
And we're calling this stuff waste? Anything that gives off enough energy to convert water into steam without us doing anything sounds like a potential source of electricity.
I'm thinking something along the lines of the language elective courses I have to take. For instance, I have to take a 1-hour course on the basics of a language of my choice - C, C++, pascal, cobol, java, etc. to graduate.
What not have a technical elective in applied databases - give an overview not of the commands of MySQL (they only recently added the concept of SQL at all to our database class, and the professor hates it) but of the standard ways one sets up a database in terms of user security, stored procedures, etc. Or have an introduction to.NET, or whatever. Bring in someone out of industry to teach it for a quarter as a seminar, and have a requirement that you take some of them in the areas that you are interested.
I guess, anyone coming out of a tech school gets that kind of education, and for a "we need someone who can be useful right now" type of job, that gives them an advantage over someone who just spent twice as long learning to prove their programs correct, when 99% of jobs don't require that proof. Or other fields - there are very important general skills that one learns getting a degree in computer graphics, but you're definitely going to KNOW Maya or 3D Studio when you graduate in it and standard production techniques.
Like I said, I agree with your point in general, and its one of the reasons that I hate the homogeneity of environments in most labs (all PCs, or all Macs, or all Solaris terminals, whatever). I think that I've gained a great deal of useful ability to learn by running multiple operating systems and multiple solutions. I think that college does a great job of preparing you for your lifetime of working... I just think it does a much shittier job than it could, if it tried, of prepping you for your first couple.
I've heard this argument a million times, and I agree with it... for the most part.
I still think that there should be one semester or so on C#/.net, or just how to use OpenGL, or SQL, or how to set up a server, or.... all of the tech school stuff that a college offering CS degrees thinks are below itself.
The ability to pick up new skills and work with any toolset using the core concepts of software engineering and programming is THE most important thing you get out of college, no doubt about it. But it would still be nice to have a quick "here's how to do what you're actually going to be doing when you graduate" class somewhere amidst that curriculum.
Computer Science programs produce great computer scientists... but unless you're going to grad school that's NOT what you're actually going to be doing all day. You also need to be a good computer programmer, and to actually do that you need to know the hardware and software tools that you will be using to do that job in addition to the software engineering background that will make you write better code than someone coming out of a tech school in the long wrong. I mean, electrical engineers get a course on Matlab in addition to their theoretical analysis courses. Mechanical engineers learn autocad, not just hand drafting.
I'm graduating this spring, and while I feel that I have a pretty good grasp of what technology can do that I've acquired outside of the classroom, I still have no idea on some key areas retaining to actual hard reality in computer science that my program has completely ignored. Things like how to actually write optimized C++ and C code - I know that early optimization is the root of all evil... but I also know you'll have to go back and optimize SOMETIME.
Just because we'll all be using a different language/toolset/platform etc in five years doesn't mean that colleges shouldn't give include an overview of what you will be using now in their curriculum. It just means that it shouldn't be the core of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, if you're going for a PhD it's not really a bad idea. Get the stuff out of the way.
What math/physics degree allows you to graduate with only 120 credits, 72 of them things that can even be counted from AP exams?
My engineering degree took 200 credit hours, including about 45 that I entered college with. Taking 37 hours in a semester would save you... half a year over my normal course load.
I mean, so AP can cover your intro pretty much everything... meaning that few of his classes were actually something high level AKA possibly challenging? I had a year and a half worth of math courses beyond what you can get with all possible AP credits.
I mean, awesome for him... but what the heck is the university even teaching in a degree that short?
No mod points, or I'd put you higher.
FIRST is a great competition. And even if you can't get directly involved, some of the teams sites have a wealth of robotics information. www.chiefdelphi.com, the home of one of the original teams, has some great resources.
The competitions are also a great gathering of engineers and recruiters from the big names in engineering - Delphi, NASA, GM, Ford... there are hundreds of sponsors.
But most importantly, by volunteering, you're helping high schoolers have something nerdy that they can feel proud of.
Although I still wish someone else would implement 16 bit color without making it look like crap. Unreal was beautiful on a Voodoo3, even in 16-bit. 16bit even on my new card looks grainy and nasty.
:(
It really kind of sucks for old games
But 99% of my professors just posted their powerpoint slides on the web for you to download.
It was as nice as getting full complete notes for the lecture, but they were good enough most of the time and the professor had already made them, so it's no real extra work.
Don't see what the big deal is unless the professor just delivers everything off the cuff with no notes whatsoever. even if it's a scrap of paper five minutes with a scanner could makes things easier for the students in a "no assurances" sort of way.
I dunno, taping and selling the whole thing seems kind of lame.
Honey, is that you?
Just kidding, but my fiancee complained about the management problem all the time through college. Any group assignment they put her with the other girls in the class to make her feel at home, or something. She started specifically writing "I work fine with boys" on all of the pre-group information slips.
It's been my experience that there will be as much of a gender issue as the specific group decides to make of it. If someone ignores the fact that she's the only girl and just works as though she's a member of a team there shouldn't be any problems. The important thing is to make that first step, so the guys aren't worried about not knowing who you are. And if some idiot guy decides tries to talk down to you kick his ass - the other guys will appreciate you more for it.
1) You don't know what you're talking about.
:)
There are multiple techniques to "fix" hard shadows in a raytracer or a raster, although the "correct" way to do them involves pairing a raytracer with a global illumination model (something like photon mapping). They're just slow to compute. In general, you can make the raytraced ones look nicer, but they take longer the nicer you want them to look, of course.
2) You can fake it well enough for simple cases like water, or a single mirror. Although sometimes the lack of per-pixel accuracy in that can be unnoticeable or quite nasty, depending on how you're doing it. Raytracing can give some very nice reflections of reflections effects, though, and more generalized distortions. The reasons that the reflection stuff looks decent in today's games is because an artist tweaks it for a day or two and they don't put in any of the cases where it wouldn't look good
There's a reason that most of the hyper-realistic non-real-time renderers have a raytracing option. I'm not saying we're likely to see it happening in real time soon (30 fps on a modern computer... doesn't leave much room for an AI or physics calculations) but it could still look pretty sweet.
Yep. That's the theoretical beauty of the social game, though. I'm about as geared up as I care to be on both of my characters, but I still enjoy random instances with no loot for me left in them because I'm running it with guildmates.
:) Because I don't expect any game to still hold my attention, for the game itself, for that long.
I think most good games like that go in stages - there's the point where you are wowed by the newness of it, the part where you're racing to get all the best stuff and become really powerful, and then the part where it's mostly a place to hang out with all the friends you met while doing the other two.
Because of #3, you always end up playing a social game long after the play-worthiness of the actual video game wore off. It's happened to me in every online game I've played for more than a month.
If you never made those friends, then of course you're going to be saying "why the heck is anyone still playing that stupid old game"
WoW was good enough to make me enjoy my first few months of play for just the game, and it's good enough now that it's still enjoyable while I hang out with my friends. At some point, it will become enough of a grind that it isn't worth even that any more, but I think personally I've at least got until the Burning Crusade is released until that happens.
So the solution is... restrict population growth? Colonize other planets? The problems you list have little to do with farming and quite a bit to do with population pressures.
:P The original settlers of that area fought their way up from log cabins to civilization for a reason. We need to proceed in some fashion that preserves the environment and the farms as well, but I haven't really seen any good solutions to that yet.
The catch-22 is that applying capitalism to a required resource (like farming) leads to corporate farms, which leads to less personal ownership of farms and more people either working a "factory" job at a farm or heading for the cities where they can hopefully get a factory job. But socializing it has in practice led to mass famine. Famine due to misguided government ownership of farming has killed more people this century than wars or disease - look at the history of Russia, or China, or the whole african continent. How do you suppose we solve it? People aren't leaving the farms because they want to, they're leaving because farming has NEVER been a lucrative job on a small scale. Ask my grandparents who had to go to school only every other day during the winter because they had to share their one pair of shoes with their sibling.
The only good news I think of about any of this is that history has shown that as income levels and standards of living increase (which generally comes some years AFTER the move to an urban society, as all those people who migrated to the city eventually get jobs in the new industries that spring up for the cheap labor) the birth rates decrease and level off, leading to a somewhat sustainable system. At least, that's the conservative stance, and from what I've read at least the basic premise seems to be true.
I'm not saying that farms shouldn't be concerned about the environment, but I don't see how any of the proposed organic solutions work in any situation other than one supported by the reasonable attempt at production made by society. It's like Thoreau advocating going back to the "natural" living of his friend's back yard
Yes, organic methods of farming work great as long as you have the traditional methods to handle the actual food needs of the general population.
Most of the methods used by agro-business are employed because they increase productivity. Because of this the US produces enough food to feed most of the world. Going back to methods a few hundred years old, on a large scale, would probably have some nasty consequences that most people don't think about.
Now, what we need to do is find something better to do with all the pig crap that is accumulated. I know that for cows there has been some pretty nice research into using the methane rising from pits of manure as an eletricity source.
The general problem is just that there is a ton of pigs, and no management system for dealing with their waste. Even when you reuse it for fertilizer, at the first rain a large portion of it will wash off into the local river system. Finding a nice way to manage and process that that doesn't completely bankrupt the farmers would be a good step for the environment, rather than saying they have to switch over their whole farming method to being half as productive and catering to the elite who can afford to care how their pigs were raised.
I don't know what MMO's you've been playing, but I've always been able to find a working Battlefield server (due to their lack of central organization/failure point) where every MMO I've played has had some really crappy downtime. Not all of them were WoW level downtime, but still pretty regular.
The point of any government's foreign policy is to advance its own countries aims, as filtered through the personal viewpoints of the people in charge.
At the time of Korea, our government had been watching government after government being taken over by communism, and and not the utopian communism that Marx or whoever originally wanted, Leninist vanguard elite, anti-intellectual, anti-law gangsterism. The realities of 20th century communism were that it lead in almost all cases to mass murder, destruction of economies that lead to mass starvation, a reduction in human rights, and hostility toward to the United States and our allies based on rhetorical and economic ties to the Soviet Union.
At the time of the Korean war, there was a very real fear of a soviet ground attack right through West Germany, or at any number of other places of key American interest, and soviet agents were actively working in many other democratic, or at least lawful nations, to bring about the constant revolution of communism. Korea was chosen to show the USSR that the united states would take a role as its opposing major power, creating a stable balance of power that did not erupt into a major world war. Up to that point, we had been dealing with the aftermath of WW2 and Eisenhower's fondness for Stalin that left us a country with no desire to return to war (despite the strategic implications of pulling our troops out of the European front) and a demilitarization that left us no power to wage on. Korea in many ways forced the USSR to change its tactics to more covert operations instead of direct takeovers, as we also started funding anti-communist groups in many countries, sometimes with good, sometimes with bad results.
The important thing to understand is that there WAS some justification for the anti-communist propaganda that the US has been spouting for years, for all that it was, of course, over-simplified and taken too far. Look at the history of the african continent, or southeast asia, to see the devastating results of leninist and stalinist communism in action. Hell, look at China and Russia. Russia was one of the biggest exporters of grain in the world under the tsars - it has been a net importer, despite some of the richest farmland in the world, since the revolution. hundreds of millions died in china, due to lack of law and starvation. In the cultural revolution, Mao basically encouraged farmboys with guns to kill every academic they could find, and burn the universities. I'm amazed at the degree to which chinese higher education has managed to recover. Countries across Africa were taken over by "communist" revolutions that resulted in a dictatorship of the party leader and mass atrocities. These were largely financed, encouraged, and in many cases controlled by the USSR. And no, I'm not just repeating american propaganda - this is straight from the mouth of Krushchev.
The end result of all this is that there was a strong legitimate protection of interest behind much of the US cold war effort, even if much of it was misguided. It wasn't just a desire to play world power (although I won't disagree that that didn't come into it, especially in vietnam. Johnson had an overly idealized view of what american power was capable of).
In Internation relations there is a strong theory that a balance of power will prevent large wars from erupting. Every major war, from the 30 year's war to napoleon to world war 1-2 were caused by a severe imbalance of power that made it too tempting for the aggressors to try to take what they could. The cold war was contained to relatively small skirmishes like korea and vietnam because of this.
What I'm actually most concerned about is what's happening, and what's going to happen now that there is no one to "balance" the US.
The thing about framing... is that there is always someone who makes a stupid mistake and puts a board where it shouldn't be.
This means you can either spend a lot of time, energy, and lumber ripping out everything that has been done since the mistake.. or you can take a saw and make a clean cut to remove it, and no one will know the difference.
There are also often certain parts of a building, especially involving the OSB on walls and roof, that are much easier, faster, and cleaner to do by cutting after they are in place. A portable, battery-powered saw is designed with this in mind and is easily used for it... except for the crazy buttons which are DESIGNED to be used one-handed, but on some models require some very strange hand contortions to keep you from accidentally enabling them.
I'd be much happier if they just gave you a toggle safety like on a handgun.
Bullshit.
You end up cutting wet lumber all the time in framing construction. Sure you try to cover it up when it rains, and you make sure that it's not wet when you close up the house (or you'll get mold) but you end up cutting slightly damp lumber all the time.
This is not even counting green lumber, which due to its treatment always seems to have a decently high amount of moisture in it.
You don't cut green or damp wood in a nice cabinetry shop, sure, but there's a lot of power-tool usage outside of that.
Of course, in my experience on the job many of the so-called "safety" features actually made things more dangerous - such as the arcane multi-button circular saws that made it very difficult to operate one handed from the top of a ladder, making you much more likely to fall and slice yourself.
I'm pretty sure almost every product of this type more or less ignores macs and PCs. The administrators have the option of blocking them entirely or letting them right on through, and that's about it. They're designed mostly for homogenous, large business infrastructure.
I know that Cisco sells a similar solution that does this at the router - I think the advantage of ours (supposedly) was a higher level of scanning on the computer itself, and the fact that you didn't need to upgrade all your network infrastructure to support it - you just had to plug our box in somewhere on it.
As for your son, I ran a windows box on that network for four years, and with a good firewall, virus protection, Firefox, and some common sense, he should be fine.
Yep, the company I used to work for made a product to stop just that.
One of the emerging areas in enterprise security is so-called "endpoint" security solutions, that will verify whether a user plugging into a corporate network has
1) approved virus software with updated definitions.
2) an approved firewall
3) Any software updates that the techies have deemed required.
If you don't, you get shunted off to a quarantined part of the network with instructions on how to obtain the software to make you compliant.
On the one hand, it sounds like a pain to set up and annoying for the users (and as it usually requires dhcp enforcement can be bypassed by someone who knows the network), and we didn't run in it at our own company, but on the other hand I bet that if they required it at the university I went to the virus problem there would have been much more controlled.
Every survey I've read from Consumer Reports and PCWorld puts apple close to the top in support, reliability, and customer satisfaction over Dell, HP, gateway, etc. IBM was the only manufacturer that ever seemed to beat them at anything, and they've now sold off their PC business.
People aren't just deluding themselves over this. Sure there's some bias, but there's bias specifically because they're nice machines.
Not that I would complain if their support record improved a bit... but I've done enough support on busted Dells and HP's to know that they have the problems, they just don't get publicized anywhere close to as much as apple's issues seem to.
They made one, called it the Cube. Was a nice silent little piece of work with an upgradeable video card and a normal sized hard drive. Completely fanless (unless you decided to stick a giant video card in there).
:( Im still curious whether they just priced it too high or whether it was just that much more expensive to produce.
It tanked because it was too expensive
I expect that the problem was that no one wanted to pay more than an imac for a machine that didnt have the full expandability of a tower, and they didnt want to put the price down below an imac and cut into those sales.
(and yes, my apostrophe key is broken.)
Now I'm just waiting for everyone to start collapsing into this primordial sea...
I think the moral of this story is that there are as many home-schooling parents as there are teachers, and some are going to be good whereas others...
:) Being a good teacher takes a lot more than just knowledge of the subject - I'm not sure I would have wanted to have to study with my dad all day.
:(
A good homeschool education requires external interaction through clubs, sports, or home-school organizations. Some parents know and provide this, others do not. It often depends upon the reasoning for the homeschooling in the first place, as well as how socially well-adapted the parents were to begin with.
Where I grew up, most parents homeschooled their children for religious reasons. They were generally some of the most strictly religious members of the community, and their children were not allowed televisions, video games, etc. Moreover, any social interactions their children had were through church. While I am sure they feel that their children benefitted from not being exposed to the "evils" of the modern world, their children of course had difficulty socializing with those outside of their church-centric world. The ones I knew who began attending the last years of high school at a public school had few friends and were generally unhappy because they were poorly socialized - they were nerds, but nerds in a way that made it hard for them to interact even with the other nerds (which included me) at school. One of them dropped out of college to smoke weed, I'm not sure what happened to the others - all in all, not the result his parents were going for.
This is compared to where I live now, where most people home-schooling are relatively secularist people in tech jobs who felt that public school was a waste of time/too violent/ too sports-centered, what have you. I know of several communities of home schooling parents that meet together to help give their kids social experience. Friends who have mentored with these groups say that the kids are nice, if a little different sometimes (it IS a robotics group, so of course they're going to be kind of nerdy). They also say that the parents tend to be a little overbearing and incredibly nerdy themselves, which I think possibly contributes to the stereotypes of home-schooled kids. But the kids still spend their time with activities that most kids do, so they are more "normal" than the home schooled kids that I grew up with.
And then you have my cousin, who was home schooled for several years between her divorced parents, and I'm not sure she was made to open a book the entire time.
The fact is that in general, parents are making a specific choice against the societal norm to homeschool their kids. That says something about the parents, which means the kids will probably be a little different anyway, for good or for ill. It also means that more of a concerted effort must be made to give the children social activities that in our culture are generally all lumped into school. Personally, while I went to a public school, it was a very small one, and I know that for a few things (such as dating, heh) the small circle of people to know and meet were limitting. I can only imagine what it would have been like if I spent a larger amount of time at home with my family and the few social groups we frequented. For others who adapt less readily to outside competition a smaller school or home school could have been beneficial. Finally, a public education will provide you with a wide range of teachers, some very good, some incredibly bad. A homeschooled child will spend most of his time with his parents - and just because they've volunteered to teach doesn't mean they're any good at it
All in all, there is a wide variance in home schooling just as there is in public education. Anyone making cracks about home schooled children is likely only repeating their anecdotal experience, as is someone who defends it. Its very likely that the people who want to home school had a very unhappy education themselves, and those who don't knew some very strange homeschool kids.
Personally, I'll probably send my kids to school but tell them that if they want to learn anything they're going to have to study it on their own. I'll see how it works out
Of course, without the union lobby, my mother (a teacher) would have lost all health care options for her spouse and her pension plan would have been transfered out of their currently decent system into one that completely blows. While I agree that the unions are generally crap and don't care at all about education, they do at least work to some degree in favor of the teachers, which is more than can be said for the current state board of education, which cares about neither.
The ridiculous thing is that almost all their piracy concerns are happening abroad.
:P
In most developing nations the only people who might buy legitimate copies of windows are the corporations that are outsourcing to them. Any software store in bombay has rows of pirated Windows CDs on sale.
Greater than 90% of all software piracy happens in places like India and China, but these are the number they quote whenever the BSA talks about how much money they are losing to piracy every year to make new laws or practices to make things difficult for their legitimate customers.
Of course, the real reason there's that much piracy in asia? An Indian programmer working for an American company who has outsourced their operations and pays very well makes about $200 a month, and on this lives as well as a programmer here in the US. Windows XP Pro in India costs more than a solidly middle class family's monthly income.
I'd sure as hell pirate it, too
And we're calling this stuff waste? Anything that gives off enough energy to convert water into steam without us doing anything sounds like a potential source of electricity.
I'm thinking something along the lines of the language elective courses I have to take. For instance, I have to take a 1-hour course on the basics of a language of my choice - C, C++, pascal, cobol, java, etc. to graduate.
.NET, or whatever. Bring in someone out of industry to teach it for a quarter as a seminar, and have a requirement that you take some of them in the areas that you are interested.
What not have a technical elective in applied databases - give an overview not of the commands of MySQL (they only recently added the concept of SQL at all to our database class, and the professor hates it) but of the standard ways one sets up a database in terms of user security, stored procedures, etc. Or have an introduction to
I guess, anyone coming out of a tech school gets that kind of education, and for a "we need someone who can be useful right now" type of job, that gives them an advantage over someone who just spent twice as long learning to prove their programs correct, when 99% of jobs don't require that proof. Or other fields - there are very important general skills that one learns getting a degree in computer graphics, but you're definitely going to KNOW Maya or 3D Studio when you graduate in it and standard production techniques.
Like I said, I agree with your point in general, and its one of the reasons that I hate the homogeneity of environments in most labs (all PCs, or all Macs, or all Solaris terminals, whatever). I think that I've gained a great deal of useful ability to learn by running multiple operating systems and multiple solutions. I think that college does a great job of preparing you for your lifetime of working... I just think it does a much shittier job than it could, if it tried, of prepping you for your first couple.
I've heard this argument a million times, and I agree with it... for the most part.
I still think that there should be one semester or so on C#/.net, or just how to use OpenGL, or SQL, or how to set up a server, or.... all of the tech school stuff that a college offering CS degrees thinks are below itself.
The ability to pick up new skills and work with any toolset using the core concepts of software engineering and programming is THE most important thing you get out of college, no doubt about it. But it would still be nice to have a quick "here's how to do what you're actually going to be doing when you graduate" class somewhere amidst that curriculum.
Computer Science programs produce great computer scientists... but unless you're going to grad school that's NOT what you're actually going to be doing all day. You also need to be a good computer programmer, and to actually do that you need to know the hardware and software tools that you will be using to do that job in addition to the software engineering background that will make you write better code than someone coming out of a tech school in the long wrong. I mean, electrical engineers get a course on Matlab in addition to their theoretical analysis courses. Mechanical engineers learn autocad, not just hand drafting.
I'm graduating this spring, and while I feel that I have a pretty good grasp of what technology can do that I've acquired outside of the classroom, I still have no idea on some key areas retaining to actual hard reality in computer science that my program has completely ignored. Things like how to actually write optimized C++ and C code - I know that early optimization is the root of all evil... but I also know you'll have to go back and optimize SOMETIME.
Just because we'll all be using a different language/toolset/platform etc in five years doesn't mean that colleges shouldn't give include an overview of what you will be using now in their curriculum. It just means that it shouldn't be the core of it.