The most amazingly stupid thing about Windows: when you close all documents, the application window insists on being opaque gray. What the heck good is that, other than making it impossible to click on the desktop or windows of any other running app? The app window, void of documents, should absolutely go transparent. Why it is that users worldwide put up with this horrible implementation is beyond me.
beg you to try and educate yourself to the difference between antibiotic drugs like erythromycin, penicillin, ciprofloxacin and common antibacterial hand soap. This is a truly dangerous meme, and it should be killed before it propagates and people abandon basic hygiene out of fear it will create Soap-Resistant Death Germs from Hell. This is totally wrong and quite irresponsible.
Well, maybe. There's some evidence that certain bugs are becoming mildly resistant to bleach, for example. IMHO it's like anything else: biodiversity rules. To maintain the efficacy of antibacterials, use different types on a rotating basis.
My understanding of the KS debate was whether to explicitly deny that no form of creation other than evolution was possible or not. Bad understanding. Evolution theories are NOT creation theories. Whether current scientific theories of the evolutionary processes are complete and/or 100% correct is one thing. Feeling the need to say that, because the science is incomplete, creation dogmas might be valid is quite another thing.
I'll look at ads when I have no way to avoid it. It's dopes like you that sit and stare at commercials thinking it will improve the quality of TV shows. Actually in most cases the ads are more creative, better produced, and more interesting than the shows they support. Of course, given how crappy the shows are, this isn't saying a whole lot about the ads.
Legally, at least, in MA there's a $25 or $40 charge to dispose of hazmat boxes such as computers. These PCs may be reaching throwaway cost points, but when you add the disposal cost back in (which IMHO should be built into the point-of-sale cost) the deal doesn't look quite as good.
I remain unconvinced that there's any reason to close deals within the next 5 minutes. If there really is money to be "made" there, there's money to be lost as well. Then again, I am absolutely opposed to any sort of margin purchases too so call me a conservative if you want.
Sorry, but I really don't give a rat's ass what happens to a bunch of trigger-happy day traders. And that's what you are if you plan your moneymaking schemes around closing or opening positions to a precision of minutes, let alone hours. I just want to be able to make some investments, in long-term positions, and not worry about a bunch of insiders gaming the system to their personal benefit.
And spare me the "you don't understand how the market works" lecture. The whole point is that us outsiders shouldn't have to know, and shouldn't have to worry about volatility on a time scale that we simply don't have the resources to react to.
One: family attitude is more important than the amount of homework assigned. Parents act like it's more important to get one's kids off to two different sports every day (and, yes, in my sports-obsessed county this happens all the time) than to do homework/studying. Bad. So why blame the teachers if the parents denigrate education?
Two: As others have written, it's absurd for teachers to grade based on effort, or even on worksheet-type homework. If a kid aces the tests and/or writes subperb essays, as far as I'm concerned he can dump the practicework and sleep through class. But when even decent high school math teachrs can't comprehend the rules of statstical analysis (they apply a rigid average to determine a final class grade with no adjustment for 3-sigma events), I don't expect sensible rules about homework.
I have a better idea
on
Blank Keyboard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Given that nobody is *forcing* you to look at the KB in the first place, here's what I'd like to see: A keyboard that looks up what language and layout you've selected (Dvorak, Kanji, Hebrew, etc), and has teeny LCD displays in every key that automatically display the current symbol said key produces. Now that would be really cool!
In a 2-player game, the optimal strategy is always independant of the opponent's strategy Can you elaborate on this? For example, chess masters will pick a defense based on their opponent's choice of offense. Is there a theoretical line of defense that works regardless of the attack sequence chosen? And if so, why do people select other defenses?
You know, I'm as atheistic and completely non-religious as the next slashdotter, but it's attitudes like this that help destroy any hope of rational discourse between the two sides of this argument.
Comparing religious Americans to the Afghan Taliban just doesn't fly. Get back to me when mainstream American christians applaud murder in their god's name. and then you gave examples of just this behavior. Like it or not, the fringe gains power from the pseudo-moderate religious. Name me one upper authority in any church or temple who went public to denounce them. For that matter, when was the last time you got a financial report specifying exactly where your contributions to your local parish (let alone the TV Minister duJour) went?
Organized religion, of any flavor, absolutely IS the problem. They form an organization to become powerful, not to help you. Think about it: will you suffer eternal damnation if you only pray at home and never at church? Or if you fail to read the Bible as assiduously as a bishop or cardinal? If you say "no," then the entire church structure is a useless sham. If you say "yes," then there are other problems.:-(
PS: I'm fully aware of the powerful need for social gathering and structure that a church meets. But we're talking about the validity of religion here, not sociology/antrhopology
I think we need to stop and notice that, in fact, it's not "religion" that has something against science, or even "Christianity," but "certain small, yet extremely vocal, Christian groups that happen to have a lot of money, bluster, and persecution complexes behind them The alleged size of these groups doesn't matter. What matters is that they have managed to sway some 10 or 15% of the US voters, thus giving them 100% control of our rather lame democratic political system. Even if you believe (I don't) that the majority of the population rejects the extremist religious views, it only takes a small swing to shift all power.
1 demential doesn't even have the right number of syllables; try one dimensional.
I dunno bout that. I thought 1-demential was a pretty good metric. Like, when you make it to 3-demential you need antipsychotics, at 7-demential you go to the rubber room, at 11 or higher you become a Republican.
Also add a $30 keyboard, $14 mouse, and $170 monitor, since Apple doesn't provide any of those in the $500 price they tout all over.
Go to macmall or maczones or just about any similar seller. You'll see they bundle KB and mouse for the $500 price. Monitor is extra only if you don't have one lying around. It costs me (or anyone in MA) $25 to $40 to dispose of a used monitor, so I'd save money by using a monitor off an old machine.
And some people will just ignore the Check Engine light. If they do that, they are taking the risk that a bigger problem will occur down the road. Those are the idiots. You are flat out wrong here. My car (96 Villager if you care) has flashed the CheckEngine light at least once a year. In all but one case the light gave up and went out within 8 weeks. The one time it did NOT go out and the garage checked it, turned out to be a checkvalve somewhere that had been stuck but wasn't any more. I'm very sensitive to performance, and knew in all cases that my acceleration, mileage, rpms, etc. were not changed in the least. The one time the light actually meant something it was obvious (to me): when I came to a stop the car kept straining to accelerate unless I tapped the accelerator to rev over 2500 and let it relax to resting idle. Turned out to be a blown idle set-back widget. And in this case the light went out even as the problem persisted.
So, I should be giving the service center $250 a year to find nothing?
That's funny, to me that's exactly what a low oil indicator is telling me, when it blinks on. I can carry on driving with the possbility of engine siezing, stop my car, or just ignore it and hope it goes away. At least one of my former cars had a "feature": the handbrake warning light, which should be off when the handbrake is released, would stay on if the brake fluid fell below some level. Being one of the 99% who didn't RTFM cover-to-cover, I thought either the handbrake was jammed or the sensor was fsckd.
Me too, that's why I've begun calling them Green Pigs, 'cause you can't make Green Eggs and Ham without them. IIRC the eggs are green but the ham is normal. It's been a while since I looked, what with the kids being all grown up now...
The TSA is a bureacratic mess, they can levee fines against anyone Excellent illiteracism! I can just visualize a huge levee of fines which have been levied for the sole purpose of creating a financial bulwark against those "anyone"s.
yet another thing your typical slashdotter doesn't get. The general public DOESN'T CARE!! Somehow the term "general public" immediately brings to my mind the term "general population," or "genpop," which referred to the really bad prisoners who didn't qualify for M-city status (which only contained drug dealers, cold-stone murderers, homosexual rapists, and one cellist). This is mostly OT, but if I carry the analogy, who among the "genpub" gets promoted to the social equivalent of M-city?
I fear this will collapse into a joke thread, but seriously: How would the shape of the well-known mushroom cloud change if the detonation occurred in a vaccuum? Would the characteristic double-shockwave be supported by the solids, or does it depend on the atmospheric pressure?
At the FE college I work at computers are a very useful tool. I've been teaching a module on statistics and computers have been a very useful tool. Perhaps the two leasons the students really undersood the best were workshop sesions where we did some stats using excel. Typeing =stdev(A1:A10) helped them understand the meaning of standard deviation much better than an hour long session on the subject with board work and exercises.
Really? How do you know this? What do you think you taught them? Certainly you didn't explain the difference between a standard deviation of a sample and the variance of the underlying RV. You didn't explain -- or even find out-- whether you were using a biased or unbiased estimator (divide by N or N-1 prior to taking sqrt). If you didn't graph the data, you sure as heck had no idea whether the population was even vaguely gaussian. So just what is it the kids learned?
First, let me say that I am a big fan of computing. I run a student linux user group, I am a computer science major, and computers will be an integral part of livelihood when I am working as a software engineer after I graduate in a few months. Still, I think computers are a big crutch. Consider finding the sum of the first 100 positive integers. It's extremely easy for me to grab a linux machine and type
rob:~$ python Python 2.3.4 (#2, Dec 3 2004, 13:53:17) [GCC 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-2)] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> sum(range(101)) 5050
Well, you've just proved something else interesting: you're so wound up in softwareland that you failed to learn how to solve this problem far faster by means of.... an ALGORITHM! Hint: 1+100 = 101, 2+99 = 101, 3+98 = 101... Get it? Try actually thinking, not turning a crank, be it software or tediously adding 1+2+3+4+5......
That's what education should be: learn some facts and learn how to *use* them to create new and wonderful stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
The most amazingly stupid thing about Windows: when you close all documents, the application window insists on being opaque gray. What the heck good is that, other than making it impossible to click on the desktop or windows of any other running app? The app window, void of documents, should absolutely go transparent.
Why it is that users worldwide put up with this horrible implementation is beyond me.
beg you to try and educate yourself to the difference between antibiotic drugs like erythromycin, penicillin, ciprofloxacin and common antibacterial hand soap. This is a truly dangerous meme, and it should be killed before it propagates and people abandon basic hygiene out of fear it will create Soap-Resistant Death Germs from Hell. This is totally wrong and quite irresponsible.
Well, maybe. There's some evidence that certain bugs are becoming mildly resistant to bleach, for example.
IMHO it's like anything else: biodiversity rules. To maintain the efficacy of antibacterials, use different types on a rotating basis.
My understanding of the KS debate was whether to explicitly deny that no form of creation other than evolution was possible or not.
Bad understanding.
Evolution theories are NOT creation theories. Whether current scientific theories of the evolutionary processes are complete and/or 100% correct is one thing. Feeling the need to say that, because the science is incomplete, creation dogmas might be valid is quite another thing.
I'll look at ads when I have no way to avoid it. It's dopes like you that sit and stare at commercials thinking it will improve the quality of TV shows.
Actually in most cases the ads are more creative, better produced, and more interesting than the shows they support. Of course, given how crappy the shows are, this isn't saying a whole lot about the ads.
Legally, at least, in MA there's a $25 or $40 charge to dispose of hazmat boxes such as computers. These PCs may be reaching throwaway cost points, but when you add the disposal cost back in (which IMHO should be built into the point-of-sale cost) the deal doesn't look quite as good.
I remain unconvinced that there's any reason to close deals within the next 5 minutes. If there really is money to be "made" there, there's money to be lost as well.
Then again, I am absolutely opposed to any sort of margin purchases too so call me a conservative if you want.
Sorry, but I really don't give a rat's ass what happens to a bunch of trigger-happy day traders. And that's what you are if you plan your moneymaking schemes around closing or opening positions to a precision of minutes, let alone hours.
I just want to be able to make some investments, in long-term positions, and not worry about a bunch of insiders gaming the system to their personal benefit.
And spare me the "you don't understand how the market works" lecture. The whole point is that us outsiders shouldn't have to know, and shouldn't have to worry about volatility on a time scale that we simply don't have the resources to react to.
Forget *gate, PKD had tons of short stories involving self-replicating robots. IMHO scarier than the anti-Asgard kind.
One: family attitude is more important than the amount of homework assigned. Parents act like it's more important to get one's kids off to two different sports every day (and, yes, in my sports-obsessed county this happens all the time) than to do homework/studying. Bad. So why blame the teachers if the parents denigrate education?
Two: As others have written, it's absurd for teachers to grade based on effort, or even on worksheet-type homework. If a kid aces the tests and/or writes subperb essays, as far as I'm concerned he can dump the practicework and sleep through class. But when even decent high school math teachrs can't comprehend the rules of statstical analysis (they apply a rigid average to determine a final class grade with no adjustment for 3-sigma events), I don't expect sensible rules about homework.
Given that nobody is *forcing* you to look at the KB in the first place, here's what I'd like to see:
A keyboard that looks up what language and layout you've selected (Dvorak, Kanji, Hebrew, etc), and has teeny LCD displays in every key that automatically display the current symbol said key produces.
Now that would be really cool!
In a 2-player game, the optimal strategy is always independant of the opponent's strategy
Can you elaborate on this? For example, chess masters will pick a defense based on their opponent's choice of offense.
Is there a theoretical line of defense that works regardless of the attack sequence chosen? And if so, why do people select other defenses?
You know, I'm as atheistic and completely non-religious as the next slashdotter, but it's attitudes like this that help destroy any hope of rational discourse between the two sides of this argument.
:-(
Comparing religious Americans to the Afghan Taliban just doesn't fly. Get back to me when mainstream American christians applaud murder in their god's name.
and then you gave examples of just this behavior.
Like it or not, the fringe gains power from the pseudo-moderate religious. Name me one upper authority in any church or temple who went public to denounce them.
For that matter, when was the last time you got a financial report specifying exactly where your contributions to your local parish (let alone the TV Minister duJour) went?
Organized religion, of any flavor, absolutely IS the problem. They form an organization to become powerful, not to help you.
Think about it: will you suffer eternal damnation if you only pray at home and never at church? Or if you fail to read the Bible as assiduously as a bishop or cardinal? If you say "no," then the entire church structure is a useless sham. If you say "yes," then there are other problems.
PS: I'm fully aware of the powerful need for social gathering and structure that a church meets. But we're talking about the validity of religion here, not sociology/antrhopology
I think we need to stop and notice that, in fact, it's not "religion" that has something against science, or even "Christianity," but "certain small, yet extremely vocal, Christian groups that happen to have a lot of money, bluster, and persecution complexes behind them
The alleged size of these groups doesn't matter. What matters is that they have managed to sway some 10 or 15% of the US voters, thus giving them 100% control of our rather lame democratic political system.
Even if you believe (I don't) that the majority of the population rejects the extremist religious views, it only takes a small swing to shift all power.
"use the product of mass and acceleration, Luke."
Ummmm... that should be "Use the time-derivative of momentum, Luke."
1 demential doesn't even have the right number of syllables; try one dimensional.
I dunno bout that. I thought 1-demential was a pretty good metric. Like, when you make it to 3-demential you need antipsychotics, at 7-demential you go to the rubber room, at 11 or higher you become a Republican.
Also add a $30 keyboard, $14 mouse, and $170 monitor, since Apple doesn't provide any of those in the $500 price they tout all over.
Go to macmall or maczones or just about any similar seller. You'll see they bundle KB and mouse for the $500 price.
Monitor is extra only if you don't have one lying around. It costs me (or anyone in MA) $25 to $40 to dispose of a used monitor, so I'd save money by using a monitor off an old machine.
Next you'll claim he wants sharks with frickin' laser beams on their heads.
Where were you yesterday? ---> slashdot
And some people will just ignore the Check Engine light. If they do that, they are taking the risk that a bigger problem will occur down the road. Those are the idiots.
You are flat out wrong here. My car (96 Villager if you care) has flashed the CheckEngine light at least once a year. In all but one case the light gave up and went out within 8 weeks. The one time it did NOT go out and the garage checked it, turned out to be a checkvalve somewhere that had been stuck but wasn't any more. I'm very sensitive to performance, and knew in all cases that my acceleration, mileage, rpms, etc. were not changed in the least.
The one time the light actually meant something it was obvious (to me): when I came to a stop the car kept straining to accelerate unless I tapped the accelerator to rev over 2500 and let it relax to resting idle. Turned out to be a blown idle set-back widget. And in this case the light went out even as the problem persisted.
So, I should be giving the service center $250 a year to find nothing?
That's funny, to me that's exactly what a low oil indicator is telling me, when it blinks on. I can carry on driving with the possbility of engine siezing, stop my car, or just ignore it and hope it goes away.
At least one of my former cars had a "feature": the handbrake warning light, which should be off when the handbrake is released, would stay on if the brake fluid fell below some level. Being one of the 99% who didn't RTFM cover-to-cover, I thought either the handbrake was jammed or the sensor was fsckd.
Me too, that's why I've begun calling them Green Pigs, 'cause you can't make Green Eggs and Ham without them.
IIRC the eggs are green but the ham is normal.
It's been a while since I looked, what with the kids being all grown up now...
The TSA is a bureacratic mess, they can levee fines against anyone
Excellent illiteracism! I can just visualize a huge levee of fines which have been levied for the sole purpose of creating a financial bulwark against those "anyone"s.
yet another thing your typical slashdotter doesn't get. The general public DOESN'T CARE!!
Somehow the term "general public" immediately brings to my mind the term "general population," or "genpop," which referred to the really bad prisoners who didn't qualify for M-city status (which only contained drug dealers, cold-stone murderers, homosexual rapists, and one cellist).
This is mostly OT, but if I carry the analogy, who among the "genpub" gets promoted to the social equivalent of M-city?
I fear this will collapse into a joke thread, but seriously:
How would the shape of the well-known mushroom cloud change if the detonation occurred in a vaccuum? Would the characteristic double-shockwave be supported by the solids, or does it depend on the atmospheric pressure?
At the FE college I work at computers are a very useful tool. I've been teaching a module on statistics and computers have been a very useful tool. Perhaps the two leasons the students really undersood the best were workshop sesions where we did some stats using excel. Typeing =stdev(A1:A10) helped them understand the meaning of standard deviation much better than an hour long session on the subject with board work and exercises.
Really? How do you know this? What do you think you taught them? Certainly you didn't explain the difference between a standard deviation of a sample and the variance of the underlying RV. You didn't explain -- or even find out-- whether you were using a biased or unbiased estimator (divide by N or N-1 prior to taking sqrt).
If you didn't graph the data, you sure as heck had no idea whether the population was even vaguely gaussian. So just what is it the kids learned?
First, let me say that I am a big fan of computing. I run a student linux user group, I am a computer science major, and computers will be an integral part of livelihood when I am working as a software engineer after I graduate in a few months. Still, I think computers are a big crutch. Consider finding the sum of the first 100 positive integers. It's extremely easy for me to grab a linux machine and type
.... an ALGORITHM!
rob:~$ python
Python 2.3.4 (#2, Dec 3 2004, 13:53:17)
[GCC 3.3.5 (Debian 1:3.3.5-2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> sum(range(101))
5050
Well, you've just proved something else interesting: you're so wound up in softwareland that you failed to learn how to solve this problem far faster by means of
Hint: 1+100 = 101, 2+99 = 101, 3+98 = 101...
Get it?
Try actually thinking, not turning a crank, be it software or tediously adding 1+2+3+4+5......
That's what education should be: learn some facts and learn how to *use* them to create new and wonderful stuff.