The problem is that the beancounters can't "measure" this. In this day and age, "accountability" is the keyword. Standardized tests give numbers. You can compare those to other numbers. Letting students actually do shit and create things doesn't results in numbers you can compare to other numbers.
I taught HS science for 5 years. The only class I really liked teaching was Physics, because it lacked a hardcore, "test them to see if they learned the items on the list" metric. I could spend 2/3 of the time teaching, and 1/3 of the time letting my students "run wild", applying what they had learned, and generally just screwing around and LEARNING stuff. No, not the stuff on the checklist.
If this was a year before college where students could just play, use what they had learned, create things, and explore the world, then it would be FANTASTIC! We'd be producing some really amazing scientists and engineers. If it's just another year of HS, I agree with you. We'd just be grinding the smart and ambition out of them.
Seriously, I know that tilapia are "environmentally friendly". However, they taste like shit. Give me pretty much any other fish, and I'll be happy. Tilapia are the shittiest fish you can get.
This kills me, because I'd like to be environmentally friendly, but when given the choice of "tastes like water, and falls apart", and is fucking amazing I'm hard pressed to want to choose tilapia. I want to be good, but tilapia makes me hate fish, more than any other fish. It's so sad that the good-for-the-environment-fish taste like crap.
What I don't get is all the bitching about it being intrusive and hard to use. About once a day or so, I go to some non-everyday page, and run into issues with having to selectively enable things until it gives me content. Sometimes it never does before I stop trusting all the scripts it wants to run and close the tab.
From my standpoint, I'm more than happy to whitelist the pages I trust, and more than happy to give untrusted pages a couple of selected "temporarily allow"s. But beyond that, if it's too much work to get a page to load, I don't bother loading it. Because by and large, it's probably not worth me looking at, for the permissions it requires.
On my little netbook, with the short-but-wide screen, I did as somersault did and put the address bar next to the menu, but also went a step further:
Tree Style Tab
That takes your tabs, puts them on another side, (left, right, top or bottom, actually) and orders them as a tree, with the page you spawned tabs from as the main branch. Since I have widescreen monitors on everything, I set mine to be on the left. That gives me the maximum vertical space, and to be frank, I like the tree style, now that I've gotten used to it. I find it far more sensible than the default of putting them on top next to each other.
That and NoScript keep me stuck on Firefox. I won't choose another browser until I can get something as powerful and easy to use as NoScript for it. Every time I use a computer without it, it kills me. Life is so much better when you control what your browser does.
My Credit union had a "free checking with x number of our services", where x included a bunch of very good stuff. The next month, I got a $7 charge for "not enough services to qualify for the free checking". I wandered down there, asked, and the rep said, "Oh, Direct deposit is one of the x services you need to have to qualify for the free checking. Your direct deposit didn't happen until a week after the end of the month, so our system automatically changed you. I'm really, really sorry about that. Let me refund you account the money, and you should be all set from here on out."
The service and reasonableness I get from my credit union is amazing. If I run into the guy who opened my account, I say hi, tell him my acct number, and he takes care of everything for me. No deposit slips, no ID, no BS. Just a friendly couple of minutes chatting and doing business.
Get a credit union. They blow banks out of the water!
D) They are idiots, and are far overvaluing their business.
$100 mil? Seriously? That's a fucking huge amount of money! There aren't a ton of web-based businesses, not selling a physical product, which are worth this much. Dreaming that you're going to be the next Facebook or Ebay is not often a financially viable dream to have.
Secondly, I would argue that Foursquare is not well known. It's only got around a million users, which, as a percentage of those "really keen on the social networking scene" is relatively low. Plus it's a pretty creepy "big brother tracking your every movement" sort of deal. I agree with the grandparent - I bet the majority of the people on slashdot haven't heard of these guys. You may have. That doesn't translate to even those keen on social networking, and even if it does, this is an order of magnitude above the creepy factor of facebook knowing all your friends, likes, and dislikes.
The issue is that they once advertised that you could do "weird" things with your PS3, like "running other OSs". it was a SELLING POINT!!!
To not test an update against or to intentionally break something that you advertised to get sales is the issue. The updates should work as flawlessly for them as they do for you. Anything else is fraud.
Not quite...I'm not a smoker, but after a month of being cooped up with smokers, I started having withdrawal symptoms. I had inhaled enough second hand smoke that I started desiring cigarettes, despite hating the smell but a month prior.
It was truly weird - I was in the summer between my sophomore and junior years of a physics degree, doing hard manual labor for the summer because I wanted to have more cash in my pocket. I was pulling 12+ hour days, with 2-4hrs often in a truck with smokers, driving to and from job sites. I was smart enough to know not to smoke, but being forced to suck in second-hand smoke all the time caused cravings. I wonder how many people start smoking because of that?
You're coming at this from a pure programming perspective. From a more pure science perspective, the reality is far different. From my own experience:
Because it took that long (10 yrs) to figure out what I really wanted to do. I've had 3 jobs in 3 entirely different fields. The parts of each that I liked all pointed to one career. The problem? I had 0, and I mean zip, zero, no experience in that field. The quickest, most useful way to get chest deep in it was to jump into a PhD program. It's forced immersion the likes of which you can't get anywhere else easily.
I had to dust off my decade old calculus skills and dive headfirst into partial differential equations. The major issue was that despite a minor in math, I'd forgotten how to integrate, and differentiation required sticky notes to remind me how to do it. I sucked at life the first semester, but by the middle of the second semester I was doing alright. And I'm ok with that. I didn't expect to be the top of my class coming in with a decade of rust into a subject I knew nothing about, but which my classmates all had a BS in.
My recommendation would be to jump in headfirst. Expect to sink a bit before you can swim.
Wow...you're a bit late to the party. I had a bit of discussion about that twelve hours ago here.
My point was that Toyota's fleet average was almost 30mpg in 2007. They're being asked to improve about 5mpg in a DECADE. That's insane. If they can make every model year get 0.5mpg better, they meet these new requirements.
This is a very, very neutered bit of legislation. We have the technology to do far more than this. When a car a decade old will be beating the fleet average of new cars, and that's being touted as a milestone in fuel efficiency improvements, something is very wrong.
But in America, diesel is expensive and stinky. That's why we can't use it.
(The number on the sign is larger for diesel, which makes it undesirable for the 95% of the population here that can't do math. Also, we haven't gotten around to mandating really low-particulate diesel yet.)
Yeah, I know how that all went down. My frustration is that we have no technological barriers to improving gas mileage. We lack a political will to do so. Hell, if we just switched all vehicles over 2 tons to turbo-diesel, that would fix a lot of problems. A high-torque gearing to get it moving, and we'd be doing far better than we are doing today.
If you're spending under $20k, most American made cars are pretty shitty. Yet both Honda and Toyota make some pretty nice vehicles for that price. If you're spending $30k+, why not get a BMW or Audi?
Having friends and family members in the "Only Ford", "GMC for us", and "Fuck American made cars" camps, I can say that the "Fuck American made cars" folks come out ahead. Less money and better quality all the way.
That was my point. I'll be driving a car that beats the fleet average requirement in 2016 that was made 11 years prior. While it's one of the higher MPG cars, and thus pulling the fleet average up, it's still DECADE old technology, and non-hybrid to boot.
Toyota essentially has a decade to up their fleet average by 5mpg. (2007 CAFE for Toyota was just under 30 mpg.) That's not setting the bar very high. Sure, it might be high for GM or Ford, but from a technological standpoint, it's not really that hard to achieve.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the beancounters can't "measure" this. In this day and age, "accountability" is the keyword. Standardized tests give numbers. You can compare those to other numbers. Letting students actually do shit and create things doesn't results in numbers you can compare to other numbers.
That's the real issue.
This is a very valid point.
I taught HS science for 5 years. The only class I really liked teaching was Physics, because it lacked a hardcore, "test them to see if they learned the items on the list" metric. I could spend 2/3 of the time teaching, and 1/3 of the time letting my students "run wild", applying what they had learned, and generally just screwing around and LEARNING stuff. No, not the stuff on the checklist.
If this was a year before college where students could just play, use what they had learned, create things, and explore the world, then it would be FANTASTIC! We'd be producing some really amazing scientists and engineers. If it's just another year of HS, I agree with you. We'd just be grinding the smart and ambition out of them.
Then why raise them? Unless you got good money for them....
Which is why they taste like water....
Seriously, I know that tilapia are "environmentally friendly". However, they taste like shit. Give me pretty much any other fish, and I'll be happy. Tilapia are the shittiest fish you can get.
This kills me, because I'd like to be environmentally friendly, but when given the choice of "tastes like water, and falls apart", and is fucking amazing I'm hard pressed to want to choose tilapia. I want to be good, but tilapia makes me hate fish, more than any other fish. It's so sad that the good-for-the-environment-fish taste like crap.
I'm betting your right
My right, damn straight MOTHERFUCKER. Don't you DARE FUCK WITH MY RIGHT!!!!!!
Oh, you meant "you're right"...not possessive... Carry on....
Eel tempura is the most amazing stuff ever. If I could get that cheep, every day, I'd eat a ton of it.
I'm hoping the landlocked midwest US saves me from that terrible fate....
What I don't get is all the bitching about it being intrusive and hard to use. About once a day or so, I go to some non-everyday page, and run into issues with having to selectively enable things until it gives me content. Sometimes it never does before I stop trusting all the scripts it wants to run and close the tab.
From my standpoint, I'm more than happy to whitelist the pages I trust, and more than happy to give untrusted pages a couple of selected "temporarily allow"s. But beyond that, if it's too much work to get a page to load, I don't bother loading it. Because by and large, it's probably not worth me looking at, for the permissions it requires.
On my little netbook, with the short-but-wide screen, I did as somersault did and put the address bar next to the menu, but also went a step further:
Tree Style Tab
That takes your tabs, puts them on another side, (left, right, top or bottom, actually) and orders them as a tree, with the page you spawned tabs from as the main branch. Since I have widescreen monitors on everything, I set mine to be on the left. That gives me the maximum vertical space, and to be frank, I like the tree style, now that I've gotten used to it. I find it far more sensible than the default of putting them on top next to each other.
That and NoScript keep me stuck on Firefox. I won't choose another browser until I can get something as powerful and easy to use as NoScript for it. Every time I use a computer without it, it kills me. Life is so much better when you control what your browser does.
My Credit union had a "free checking with x number of our services", where x included a bunch of very good stuff. The next month, I got a $7 charge for "not enough services to qualify for the free checking". I wandered down there, asked, and the rep said, "Oh, Direct deposit is one of the x services you need to have to qualify for the free checking. Your direct deposit didn't happen until a week after the end of the month, so our system automatically changed you. I'm really, really sorry about that. Let me refund you account the money, and you should be all set from here on out."
The service and reasonableness I get from my credit union is amazing. If I run into the guy who opened my account, I say hi, tell him my acct number, and he takes care of everything for me. No deposit slips, no ID, no BS. Just a friendly couple of minutes chatting and doing business.
Get a credit union. They blow banks out of the water!
Two points:
D) They are idiots, and are far overvaluing their business.
$100 mil? Seriously? That's a fucking huge amount of money! There aren't a ton of web-based businesses, not selling a physical product, which are worth this much. Dreaming that you're going to be the next Facebook or Ebay is not often a financially viable dream to have.
Secondly, I would argue that Foursquare is not well known. It's only got around a million users, which, as a percentage of those "really keen on the social networking scene" is relatively low. Plus it's a pretty creepy "big brother tracking your every movement" sort of deal. I agree with the grandparent - I bet the majority of the people on slashdot haven't heard of these guys. You may have. That doesn't translate to even those keen on social networking, and even if it does, this is an order of magnitude above the creepy factor of facebook knowing all your friends, likes, and dislikes.
Agreed. But if I could afford to do it, I totally would! That'd be fucking AWESOME!!!
Naaah, in Soviet Russia, you ride a red rocket....
There is one...right after you click "Preview"...
The issue is that they once advertised that you could do "weird" things with your PS3, like "running other OSs". it was a SELLING POINT!!!
To not test an update against or to intentionally break something that you advertised to get sales is the issue. The updates should work as flawlessly for them as they do for you. Anything else is fraud.
Heh, we always make pretty crazy house rules. Examples:
Names of fantasy novel characters allowed.
No words shorter than 4 letters.
Words spelled as per a specific accent.(caah, for the Boston run...)
But our favorite: Backwards scrabble, with a 1 minute timer. All words must be spelled backwards, correctly.
Fuck the official rules - we're not out to win the national championship - we're out to have fun!
Not quite...I'm not a smoker, but after a month of being cooped up with smokers, I started having withdrawal symptoms. I had inhaled enough second hand smoke that I started desiring cigarettes, despite hating the smell but a month prior.
It was truly weird - I was in the summer between my sophomore and junior years of a physics degree, doing hard manual labor for the summer because I wanted to have more cash in my pocket. I was pulling 12+ hour days, with 2-4hrs often in a truck with smokers, driving to and from job sites. I was smart enough to know not to smoke, but being forced to suck in second-hand smoke all the time caused cravings. I wonder how many people start smoking because of that?
You're coming at this from a pure programming perspective. From a more pure science perspective, the reality is far different. From my own experience:
Because it took that long (10 yrs) to figure out what I really wanted to do. I've had 3 jobs in 3 entirely different fields. The parts of each that I liked all pointed to one career. The problem? I had 0, and I mean zip, zero, no experience in that field. The quickest, most useful way to get chest deep in it was to jump into a PhD program. It's forced immersion the likes of which you can't get anywhere else easily.
I had to dust off my decade old calculus skills and dive headfirst into partial differential equations. The major issue was that despite a minor in math, I'd forgotten how to integrate, and differentiation required sticky notes to remind me how to do it. I sucked at life the first semester, but by the middle of the second semester I was doing alright. And I'm ok with that. I didn't expect to be the top of my class coming in with a decade of rust into a subject I knew nothing about, but which my classmates all had a BS in.
My recommendation would be to jump in headfirst. Expect to sink a bit before you can swim.
Damn man, you fucking rock! I started reading that, and could hear JC's voice. My most favorite game ever. I may have to reinstall that tonight....
If I had the $5-$10 million needed to donate to campaigns to make that happen, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Wow...you're a bit late to the party. I had a bit of discussion about that twelve hours ago here.
My point was that Toyota's fleet average was almost 30mpg in 2007. They're being asked to improve about 5mpg in a DECADE. That's insane. If they can make every model year get 0.5mpg better, they meet these new requirements.
This is a very, very neutered bit of legislation. We have the technology to do far more than this. When a car a decade old will be beating the fleet average of new cars, and that's being touted as a milestone in fuel efficiency improvements, something is very wrong.
But in America, diesel is expensive and stinky. That's why we can't use it.
(The number on the sign is larger for diesel, which makes it undesirable for the 95% of the population here that can't do math. Also, we haven't gotten around to mandating really low-particulate diesel yet.)
only works well if you are securely fastened down with a 5 or 6 point harness and are wearing a helmet
And the helmet is attached to the seat.
Securely attach the helmet to he head and nothing else, and you do some major damage to the neck in a wreck.
Yeah, I know how that all went down. My frustration is that we have no technological barriers to improving gas mileage. We lack a political will to do so. Hell, if we just switched all vehicles over 2 tons to turbo-diesel, that would fix a lot of problems. A high-torque gearing to get it moving, and we'd be doing far better than we are doing today.
Aaah. I see. Why would anyone want to do that?
If you're spending under $20k, most American made cars are pretty shitty. Yet both Honda and Toyota make some pretty nice vehicles for that price. If you're spending $30k+, why not get a BMW or Audi?
Having friends and family members in the "Only Ford", "GMC for us", and "Fuck American made cars" camps, I can say that the "Fuck American made cars" folks come out ahead. Less money and better quality all the way.
That was my point. I'll be driving a car that beats the fleet average requirement in 2016 that was made 11 years prior. While it's one of the higher MPG cars, and thus pulling the fleet average up, it's still DECADE old technology, and non-hybrid to boot.
Toyota essentially has a decade to up their fleet average by 5mpg. (2007 CAFE for Toyota was just under 30 mpg.) That's not setting the bar very high. Sure, it might be high for GM or Ford, but from a technological standpoint, it's not really that hard to achieve.