the 4-year degree is more about improving yourself as a person and learning how to learn than it is about training for a specific career. An added bonus is that it looks significantly better on a resume than a "fake degree"
Go to college, have fun, major in what you find interesting (you may discover you dont really want to be a game programmer at all and instead love cell biology...who knows) and take classes that will allow you to branch out in different directions (learn how to code...take a microeconomics course...make sure you can write well...do all of those and you will be fine no matter what you want to do)
If you look at the university level, professors are certainly not paid the same (it varies a HUGE amount based on field unlike high school teachers).
Professors have to be paid based on the opportunity cost decisions they must make and as such people like phyiscs professors, economics professors, law professors, etc make a lot more money than english, classics, history type professors. This may not seem fair since they both do the same sort of work, teaching classes possibly consisting of the exact same students but you have to think about their other options. A physics professor could make good money in industry instead of teaching and similarily the opportunity cost of a law professor teaching is being a lawyer and the cost to an econ professor of teaching is the possibility of making a ton of money in business/consulting. If you are going get qualified professors in these fields, you are going to have to pay them a wage closer to what they could earn outside of acadamia.
The only reason I see this not being a valid case for high school teachers is that there is a bigger qualification gap. I feel fairly confident that given a curriculum (and I guess the education credits needed to qualify me to do so) I could teach science or algebra to a bunch of 16 year olds or show them how to construct a thesis but I am in no way qualified to be a college professor which would require me to possess a PhD in my field (which usually assumes a masters) and extensive time investment before being granted a real professorship. As a matter of fact, I remember being taught courses in high school by instructers who clearly had not studied the subject they were teaching...
Thus I see why the pay-gap is a legitimate idea but it probobly doesnt apply well enough to high school teachers (who dont necessarily have the qualifications to make the opportunity cost argument valid)
And that would probably be a better solution economically speaking than banning it. Banning normal light bulbs will just piss people off, the stores that have them in stock, the people who prefer to use them, the companies that make them. It just wouldnt work to say no. What would work and start to have an effect would be creating more incentives to purchase CCFL or LED bulbs over incandescant (maybe they should wait on this until LEDs are a little more advanced). If consumers can still buy incandescant but it slowly becomes more expensive to do so compared to energy saving alternatives then there might actually be a legitimate change rather than hordes of people simply breaking the law and using illegal light bulbs.
Re:And we know why they're there.
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· Score: 2, Funny
Yeah, the great depression and the end of prohibition really led to those 30's chicks being WAY hornier.
Same here, as soon as I dug out a usb cable I had my own mp3 ringtone on my cingular (FAR) razr. The picture was actually taken on the phone but my "screensaver" is one I sent to my phone via usb.
GP is thinking of the verizon way of doing things. Personally my favorite part of those $2.50 ringtones is that you dont get to keep them on your new phone...
I really like my cingular dealings. Other than some issues with a third-party rebate on the phone, it has worked great.
Cingular has great coverage in the two areas I care most about (Chicago and Minneapolis). In mpls. I experianced none of the nasty dropped calls and things that all of my verizon friends experianced with the terrible network coverage there (tmobile also worked fine though). In Chicago my coverage is great and it is in fact only Cingular customers who get who get usable coverage everywhere in my dorm building. Elsewhere in the city I always have great coverage (though I think if I went alltel or us cellular or something I would get service IN the subway tunnels but I am willing to accept that loss of service for great service everywhere else)
My biggest reason for going with the cingular (other than seeing all the verizon people experiancing bad service in my area and having to deal with Verizon's locked down phones) was that they use GSM phones. Stick in a new SIM and I am good to go. Travel to europe? grab an international SIM and I have a phone I can use. The selection of phones they offered me was great and if something happens to my phone its not hard to replace with any unlocked phone out there.
The plan itself was a pretty good deal. Ended up getting too many minutes on the 2-person family plan (personally, most of my calls are probobly covered in nights/weekends or the free calls to other cingular subscribers) and have accumulated a ton of rollover minutes in case I do go over. Its a handy feature to have and is still useful even if you get close to your limit every month.
As to their service, their customer service is known for long waits but I havnt had any issues that had trouble getting corrected. The other part of customer service is the part you dont see, the work they do on the infrastructure when it has issues affecting bigger groups of people. A tower went down in a storm here once and the cingular customers were all having trouble...issue was fixed in a day...a new one was up before the fallen trees were even cleared from most of the streets around here.
now that you mention that, I have probobly noticed that too among university students (with the exception of laptops where often some kids parents will buy them the greatest and most expensive laptop they can find and they will end up with a fancy card to play freecell with). Its probably due to the fact that to get those high end cards you really have to build it yourself or know what you want because otherwise the price tag is going to scare you off. Even a lower end card these days can play most games so its only the people who want to play some top-end games on high settings who have a need for the cards. Those people are likely to be knowledgeable enough to avoid issues and solve problems themselves (that or they spend so much time playing WoW that they dont pick up viruses and dont have time to leave the game to get someone to fix any problems they do have...)
I also dont see how it is violating the warranty. Nintendo almost immediately began offering to replace the straps. I can see sueing them if they knew there was a problem and did nothing but doesnt the warranty state that they guarantee it to be free of manufacturing defects and will replace it if that is not so? Wouldnt this mean that they were perefctly fin as long as they replace the straps (Or simply claim that the straps are within spec, you are throwing to hard...kind of like sueing ford because your engine blew up when you drove it only in 1st gear)
I've been switching to 64-bit processors since the month the clawhammer core was released. The box I am typing this on is an A64-3200+ (commemoratively named hammertime). Its a socket 768 with AGP which has severely hurt my upgrade options (although it was fine at the time of purchase). At that time even in 32bit mode they provided better preformance for the price than the intel chips and they had the ability to go 64 when needed. Everything I have built for people since has been 64...it just makes sense.
XP-64 doesnt matter. It kinda sucks and I dont use it on this box. If I wanted a 64bit, I would boot linux and be confidant in the fact that it would run just as well as it does on my 32bit linux box (unlike XP where there are huge differances)
and a 4:1 ratio for developers isnt so bad. It's far better than what the RIAA pays.
Also, with software there are a LOT of costs in QA and support that simply don't exist for music. I'm sure there is someone somewhere that you can call that will tell you which side of the CD goes down in the CD player but for the most part once a disk is sold, the RIAA is done with it (unless you try to copy it...).
I would venture to say that software companies have significantly higher costs than the RIAA, at least in those regions where they havnt forced themselves to have higher costs (such as paying people to play your music, paying lawyers to sue your fans, etc).
right now every time I have renewed my drivers licesne, I was given a vision test (and this is the E XG AIEDF type, no passing that without sight or cheating). If a car comes along that can see in order to steer and navigate itself clear of all obstacles (this may not even be that far off) then sure, a blind person should be allowed to operate one of these. (I should probobly clarify based on what other repliers have said, it is really the operation that I take issue with. If a blind person wants to collect guns or restore a car then sure, he can own one but that still doesnt mean he meets the requirments to operate one). Of course these operation rules (drivers license requirment) only apply on public roads and there are plenty of instances where you see unlicensed drivers driving cars perfectly legally (usually underadged people on private land for various purposes)
In the same vein, if they come out with a gun that aims itself and accurately identifies targets as friend or foe then I guess a blind person could use it but right now I fail to see how a blind person could meet any sensible requirments to be able to cary and use a firearm in public. It's certainly hard to make the self defense call when you cant tell if its a stupid 10 year old boy trying to steal from the poor blind man or a serious armed mugger. In one case there is no clear and present danger and you would most certainly be in a SHITLOAD of trouble if you shot the kid (based on my states conceal and carry laws) and in the other case, use of a firearm might be warranted--the blind person couldnt make a positive identification in this situation...
When I say blind in this context I mean fully non-functioning or missing eyes as in cannot see. A legally blind person has some amount of visual stimulation and often with enough corrective contacts/lenses they can see well enough to do most things normally. If these people have good enough sight to drive or pass shooting tests, then let them go (does the blind hunting law even apply to legally blind people with corrective lenses?)
An example of someone who can hit the target is here http://www.careymcwilliams.com/ and I mention him a few posts down. Still a statistical anomoly and clear that he loves guns enough to have the patience to be accurate to a fixed point without looking but it would scare me if I saw him out in the open aiming at moving animals (with the aid of a friend even...stil scary)
If that friend is one of hte drunken hillbilly hunters, thats even scarier but hopefully the blind hunter would be with one of the many many responsible hunters that are out there and hopefully not in a busy place.
He has passed enough of those tests that he even has a conceal and carry permit. He is obviously a very good shot but I bet if he didnt have a booth or something to guide him and he spun around a few times and has a moving target, he would have a VERY difficult time shooting anywhere near the target as long as there werent other clues as to where to shoot. What if there was a target with an innocent target (bound and gagged of course) right in front of it. He would have no idea there was a hostage/bystander and would be capable of taking the shot. This guy seems smart enough that he wouldnt do something like that (and he was at one time actually trying to get ND to make their gun laws stricter).
I honestly wouldnt care if blind people drove at safe speeds on a closed course. They would probobly end up crashing but there would be nobody there to hit. If they want to shoot maybe thats the same way they can do it, on a closed course with no chance of shooting someone unintentionally. You could argue that hunting on private land is similar but you never know if someone is there and that would require a blind person operating a firearm out in the open which kind of scares me.
I hardly see how the blind should be allowed to own and operate a firearm. They are 100% incapable of safely using it on their own. They arent allowed to drive for the same reason. Sure they could operate the pedals and even steer if they have someone telling them exactly where to aim the car and when to push but that doesnt make any sense--it just sounds idiotic.
I know there are blind people who have gone so far as to pass a marksmanship test but that still doesnt give me much of a sense of security (with enough practice, anyone can hit a stationary target with thier eyes closed). I would like to see more of a real world shooting test...two targets, one friendly one enemy, moving back and forth with random motion. It doesnt have to be difficult or high speed, just moving and random with both good and bad targets. Firearms should only be allowed to those who can distinguish between foes and friends and can hit something that has the ability to move. I'm sorry but blind people just cant do this reliably enough that they should be trusted with using deadly force.
There are plenty of activities that they can participate in that dont involve deadly weapons and really, how much fun is hunting going to be if someone else is essentially aiming for you and telling you when to pull the trigger. You might as well let them pull the trigger and just come along for the ride.
you need to get some better laptops (at least in the linux support category).
my Thinkpad T23 has had no issues sleeping (never use hibernate, the time it takes to write and the fact that it can runforever on suspend make it useless compared to restarting) and waking up every single time. The display is a little wonky when I first open the lid, instead of a loading bar or a nice fade in like on osx I just get funny colors and then my desktop but it works just fine. This is on ubuntu (6.06 now but previous versions as well). It also worked fine on mandrake (but before it became mandriva you needed the multimedia kernel for it to wake up right 100% of the time).
The key is to make sure the hardware works according to the specs.
But the irony of the CSS hacks is that you dont have to use browser detection or some silly IE "feature". It is valid CSS that doesnt show on other browsers and only shows because of broken CSS in IE. If microsoft was to fix the CSS, it would eliminate advertising for their competition in addition to better supporting to the standards which would make some people happy.
Of course if the CSS hack wasnt widespread, there wouldnt be much gain from eliminating the advertising...
There is definately a page on my university's site (dont remember where though, sorry) that exploits an IE CSS bug to display a firefox download link only to IE users. No fancy browser-checking code here, just some valid CSS that is improperly displayed on IE.
It is possible that it is some spammer who is lacking actual products to spam you with at the moment so they are trying to screw with as many bayesian filters as they can. Remember, most of these kinds of filters (any learning filter will use some implementation of this...thunderbird...gmail) base the legitimacy of the email on its content. This is why you will often see paragraphs of random text at the end of spams, the filter sees things like viagra, buy, sell, get rich, and the types of formatting usually used in spam but then it also sees this somewhat intellectual sounding section at the end so it doesnt mark it spam. You read it and instantly mark it as spam and when you do that you are training the filter that the stuff written on the bottom qualifies as spam.
If they can get you to start qualifying what looks like a legitimate email (just from a fake person and not at all pertaining to you) as spam, your filter might start giving you false positives which would make you more inclined (they hope) to turn off your filter or check your junk folder more often in case you missed something.
I have a set of these myself (in blue) and I take them to concerts. They are great because they make a smooth reduction in sound, there are earplugs out there that decrease it more but not that do it so evenly (unless you spend a ton on the etymotic custom ones or something) The one thing that bothers me though is that when its a band that I want to sing (yell) along to it sounds really weird because the earplugs only serve to make your own voice sound louder. Washable and I have no comfort issue with them and at only $12, saving your hearing could never be so easy.
you forgot about the part where paypal was trying to replace that window with something more ornamental anyways. Might as well have insurance pay for it.
I think the reference of tactile feeling has more to do with the click wheel than the scrolling part of it (thats what this is all about after all). Ipods had a scroll wheel long before the click wheel (like the 3g ipod with the row of 4 buttons above the wheel)...the click wheel came from the mini and the 4g ipod and specifies the wheel that scrolls when you move your finger but actually "clicks" when you press it left/right/up/down. The play/pause/etc buttons are all controlled with these clicks.
On a touch screen you could still scroll with it just fine (although it probobly wouldnt feel as smooth as the texture on the ipod wheel) but you wouldnt be able to press the buttons. You would have to lift up and tap which feels way different than a nice firm button push.
Slashdot Mirror
the 4-year degree is more about improving yourself as a person and learning how to learn than it is about training for a specific career. An added bonus is that it looks significantly better on a resume than a "fake degree"
Go to college, have fun, major in what you find interesting (you may discover you dont really want to be a game programmer at all and instead love cell biology...who knows) and take classes that will allow you to branch out in different directions (learn how to code...take a microeconomics course...make sure you can write well...do all of those and you will be fine no matter what you want to do)
Professors have to be paid based on the opportunity cost decisions they must make and as such people like phyiscs professors, economics professors, law professors, etc make a lot more money than english, classics, history type professors. This may not seem fair since they both do the same sort of work, teaching classes possibly consisting of the exact same students but you have to think about their other options. A physics professor could make good money in industry instead of teaching and similarily the opportunity cost of a law professor teaching is being a lawyer and the cost to an econ professor of teaching is the possibility of making a ton of money in business/consulting. If you are going get qualified professors in these fields, you are going to have to pay them a wage closer to what they could earn outside of acadamia.
The only reason I see this not being a valid case for high school teachers is that there is a bigger qualification gap. I feel fairly confident that given a curriculum (and I guess the education credits needed to qualify me to do so) I could teach science or algebra to a bunch of 16 year olds or show them how to construct a thesis but I am in no way qualified to be a college professor which would require me to possess a PhD in my field (which usually assumes a masters) and extensive time investment before being granted a real professorship. As a matter of fact, I remember being taught courses in high school by instructers who clearly had not studied the subject they were teaching...
Thus I see why the pay-gap is a legitimate idea but it probobly doesnt apply well enough to high school teachers (who dont necessarily have the qualifications to make the opportunity cost argument valid)
depends on whether or not you passed it the -l option
And that would probably be a better solution economically speaking than banning it. Banning normal light bulbs will just piss people off, the stores that have them in stock, the people who prefer to use them, the companies that make them. It just wouldnt work to say no. What would work and start to have an effect would be creating more incentives to purchase CCFL or LED bulbs over incandescant (maybe they should wait on this until LEDs are a little more advanced). If consumers can still buy incandescant but it slowly becomes more expensive to do so compared to energy saving alternatives then there might actually be a legitimate change rather than hordes of people simply breaking the law and using illegal light bulbs.
Yeah, the great depression and the end of prohibition really led to those 30's chicks being WAY hornier.
Lets all take an economics class first.
GP is thinking of the verizon way of doing things. Personally my favorite part of those $2.50 ringtones is that you dont get to keep them on your new phone...
Cingular has great coverage in the two areas I care most about (Chicago and Minneapolis). In mpls. I experianced none of the nasty dropped calls and things that all of my verizon friends experianced with the terrible network coverage there (tmobile also worked fine though). In Chicago my coverage is great and it is in fact only Cingular customers who get who get usable coverage everywhere in my dorm building. Elsewhere in the city I always have great coverage (though I think if I went alltel or us cellular or something I would get service IN the subway tunnels but I am willing to accept that loss of service for great service everywhere else)
My biggest reason for going with the cingular (other than seeing all the verizon people experiancing bad service in my area and having to deal with Verizon's locked down phones) was that they use GSM phones. Stick in a new SIM and I am good to go. Travel to europe? grab an international SIM and I have a phone I can use. The selection of phones they offered me was great and if something happens to my phone its not hard to replace with any unlocked phone out there. The plan itself was a pretty good deal. Ended up getting too many minutes on the 2-person family plan (personally, most of my calls are probobly covered in nights/weekends or the free calls to other cingular subscribers) and have accumulated a ton of rollover minutes in case I do go over. Its a handy feature to have and is still useful even if you get close to your limit every month. As to their service, their customer service is known for long waits but I havnt had any issues that had trouble getting corrected. The other part of customer service is the part you dont see, the work they do on the infrastructure when it has issues affecting bigger groups of people. A tower went down in a storm here once and the cingular customers were all having trouble...issue was fixed in a day...a new one was up before the fallen trees were even cleared from most of the streets around here.
now that you mention that, I have probobly noticed that too among university students (with the exception of laptops where often some kids parents will buy them the greatest and most expensive laptop they can find and they will end up with a fancy card to play freecell with). Its probably due to the fact that to get those high end cards you really have to build it yourself or know what you want because otherwise the price tag is going to scare you off. Even a lower end card these days can play most games so its only the people who want to play some top-end games on high settings who have a need for the cards. Those people are likely to be knowledgeable enough to avoid issues and solve problems themselves (that or they spend so much time playing WoW that they dont pick up viruses and dont have time to leave the game to get someone to fix any problems they do have...)
I also dont see how it is violating the warranty. Nintendo almost immediately began offering to replace the straps. I can see sueing them if they knew there was a problem and did nothing but doesnt the warranty state that they guarantee it to be free of manufacturing defects and will replace it if that is not so? Wouldnt this mean that they were perefctly fin as long as they replace the straps (Or simply claim that the straps are within spec, you are throwing to hard...kind of like sueing ford because your engine blew up when you drove it only in 1st gear)
XP-64 doesnt matter. It kinda sucks and I dont use it on this box. If I wanted a 64bit, I would boot linux and be confidant in the fact that it would run just as well as it does on my 32bit linux box (unlike XP where there are huge differances)
Also, with software there are a LOT of costs in QA and support that simply don't exist for music. I'm sure there is someone somewhere that you can call that will tell you which side of the CD goes down in the CD player but for the most part once a disk is sold, the RIAA is done with it (unless you try to copy it...).
I would venture to say that software companies have significantly higher costs than the RIAA, at least in those regions where they havnt forced themselves to have higher costs (such as paying people to play your music, paying lawyers to sue your fans, etc).
right now every time I have renewed my drivers licesne, I was given a vision test (and this is the E XG AIEDF type, no passing that without sight or cheating). If a car comes along that can see in order to steer and navigate itself clear of all obstacles (this may not even be that far off) then sure, a blind person should be allowed to operate one of these. (I should probobly clarify based on what other repliers have said, it is really the operation that I take issue with. If a blind person wants to collect guns or restore a car then sure, he can own one but that still doesnt mean he meets the requirments to operate one). Of course these operation rules (drivers license requirment) only apply on public roads and there are plenty of instances where you see unlicensed drivers driving cars perfectly legally (usually underadged people on private land for various purposes)
In the same vein, if they come out with a gun that aims itself and accurately identifies targets as friend or foe then I guess a blind person could use it but right now I fail to see how a blind person could meet any sensible requirments to be able to cary and use a firearm in public. It's certainly hard to make the self defense call when you cant tell if its a stupid 10 year old boy trying to steal from the poor blind man or a serious armed mugger. In one case there is no clear and present danger and you would most certainly be in a SHITLOAD of trouble if you shot the kid (based on my states conceal and carry laws) and in the other case, use of a firearm might be warranted--the blind person couldnt make a positive identification in this situation...
An example of someone who can hit the target is here http://www.careymcwilliams.com/ and I mention him a few posts down. Still a statistical anomoly and clear that he loves guns enough to have the patience to be accurate to a fixed point without looking but it would scare me if I saw him out in the open aiming at moving animals (with the aid of a friend even...stil scary)
If that friend is one of hte drunken hillbilly hunters, thats even scarier but hopefully the blind hunter would be with one of the many many responsible hunters that are out there and hopefully not in a busy place.
He has passed enough of those tests that he even has a conceal and carry permit. He is obviously a very good shot but I bet if he didnt have a booth or something to guide him and he spun around a few times and has a moving target, he would have a VERY difficult time shooting anywhere near the target as long as there werent other clues as to where to shoot. What if there was a target with an innocent target (bound and gagged of course) right in front of it. He would have no idea there was a hostage/bystander and would be capable of taking the shot. This guy seems smart enough that he wouldnt do something like that (and he was at one time actually trying to get ND to make their gun laws stricter).
I honestly wouldnt care if blind people drove at safe speeds on a closed course. They would probobly end up crashing but there would be nobody there to hit. If they want to shoot maybe thats the same way they can do it, on a closed course with no chance of shooting someone unintentionally. You could argue that hunting on private land is similar but you never know if someone is there and that would require a blind person operating a firearm out in the open which kind of scares me.
I know there are blind people who have gone so far as to pass a marksmanship test but that still doesnt give me much of a sense of security (with enough practice, anyone can hit a stationary target with thier eyes closed). I would like to see more of a real world shooting test...two targets, one friendly one enemy, moving back and forth with random motion. It doesnt have to be difficult or high speed, just moving and random with both good and bad targets. Firearms should only be allowed to those who can distinguish between foes and friends and can hit something that has the ability to move. I'm sorry but blind people just cant do this reliably enough that they should be trusted with using deadly force. There are plenty of activities that they can participate in that dont involve deadly weapons and really, how much fun is hunting going to be if someone else is essentially aiming for you and telling you when to pull the trigger. You might as well let them pull the trigger and just come along for the ride.
my Thinkpad T23 has had no issues sleeping (never use hibernate, the time it takes to write and the fact that it can runforever on suspend make it useless compared to restarting) and waking up every single time. The display is a little wonky when I first open the lid, instead of a loading bar or a nice fade in like on osx I just get funny colors and then my desktop but it works just fine. This is on ubuntu (6.06 now but previous versions as well). It also worked fine on mandrake (but before it became mandriva you needed the multimedia kernel for it to wake up right 100% of the time).
The key is to make sure the hardware works according to the specs.
Of course if the CSS hack wasnt widespread, there wouldnt be much gain from eliminating the advertising...
There is definately a page on my university's site (dont remember where though, sorry) that exploits an IE CSS bug to display a firefox download link only to IE users. No fancy browser-checking code here, just some valid CSS that is improperly displayed on IE.
2Prong is great (except it crashes my firefox 1.5 on ubuntu but who knows...probobly not their fault)
If they can get you to start qualifying what looks like a legitimate email (just from a fake person and not at all pertaining to you) as spam, your filter might start giving you false positives which would make you more inclined (they hope) to turn off your filter or check your junk folder more often in case you missed something.
I have a set of these myself (in blue) and I take them to concerts. They are great because they make a smooth reduction in sound, there are earplugs out there that decrease it more but not that do it so evenly (unless you spend a ton on the etymotic custom ones or something) The one thing that bothers me though is that when its a band that I want to sing (yell) along to it sounds really weird because the earplugs only serve to make your own voice sound louder. Washable and I have no comfort issue with them and at only $12, saving your hearing could never be so easy.
Picasa?
you forgot about the part where paypal was trying to replace that window with something more ornamental anyways. Might as well have insurance pay for it.
On a touch screen you could still scroll with it just fine (although it probobly wouldnt feel as smooth as the texture on the ipod wheel) but you wouldnt be able to press the buttons. You would have to lift up and tap which feels way different than a nice firm button push.