>Anyone can, at any time in the first 6 months of their enlistment, say "this isn't working for me" and get out with a simple Entry Level Separation.
I call bullshit on this. Maybe in peacetime. But not now.
>Furthermore, the real shortage in the military is in recruiting people for complex technical jobs rather than straight-up combat arms. So essentially they'd end up with a whole raft of uncooperative bedding-delousing specialists just to get a handfull of tactical intelligence analysts. The military doesn't want the draft. They want more volunteers.
1) Selective service was being regeared towards grabbing those in technical and intelligence fields first and foremost. Which is, oddly enough, not the problem. The problem is that we literally don't have enough feet on the grounds - grunts.
2) The military wants more volunteers, not a draft. But the military does not make decisions about the draft.
Okay, yes, the trailer implies that there are sounds in space in this version.
1) This is a trailer, not the final cut. There may be no sounds in space in the final version.
2) "No sounds in space" was more of a gimmick than anything else. Anyone who sees the reaver ship and Serenity passing each other extremely slowly - even though both ships would be moving extremely fast in order to get to a destination millions of miles away - knows that Firefly wasn't hard SF - I don't even think they established whether they had FTL tech or not. Ditching "no sounds in space" isn't a storybreaker. I mean, honestly, did you go and watch the original because it was silent?
3) Who is to say that the "space" scenes don't take place in some sort of atmosphere?
Could you name specifics? My guess is that you're probably watching television shows that have already been cancelled in the U.S. and are on BritTV in syndication.
Actually, I'm studying Journalism for a postgrad degree and let me tell you, local television news is nothing to be proud of. Yes, it's *actually* local, but mostly it's video news releases - commercials. When the local supermarket chain produces the video news release about where to find the best and cheapest items, and they don't tell you that the supermarket chain is doing it... (like a local station did here in Texas.)
Local television news isn't. I don't know what it is, but at the Journalism school, the students and professors I've seen treat it with exactly the same consideration as we do the National Enquirer.
I don't know what makes you say that the quality of television programming has gotten better. What do you typically watch in a day?
The reason that no one really gives a damn about switching over is that most people have cable or satellite, while those of us (including myself, still on rabbit ears) just don't think American television is damn good enough to pay for.
The Brits bitch about their TV licences, but at least they get kick-ass television and television news that is second to none. I would gladly pay it. But am I going to buy a converter box to watch American TV? No - I barely even watch the rabbit ears now - my TV is basically a device for watching VHS tapes on. It's a slightly bigger screen to invite friends over to look at (instead of the computer monitor) and to be frank, I don't know if it's worthwhile to lug to my new apartment when my lease is up.
And if you want me to subsidize this farce?
The only way you will get me to support subsidizing television is if either the companies that put television on the air start putting on some shows worth watching or we move to an "all stations are publically financed and owned by the government" BBC-like model.
I plan to solve the problem by living in another country by the time that New Years Even 2006 rolls around, but this has been a clusterf*ck at the FCC. The waste of HDTV bandwidth and the utter mismanagement of this FCC, spending more time looking for nipples than caring about technology. The corporations squatted the spectrum, didn't do anything with it... why hasn't the FCC responded with the only possible course of action and removed their licences!
On the one hand, there is the principle of Adam Smith that states that through pursuing your own personal gain you are benefiting society.
Actually, alot of people get Adam Smith wrong. While it is true that an invisible hand does move the economy along through a system of barter and the curve of supply and demand, on the aggragate, becomes important, Adam Smith lived in very, very different times.
When Smith says that the free market creates wealth and creates an efficient distribution system, he is talking about a free market in an era where monopoly control was hard to achieve and for the most part simply did not exist. Most goods and services had many small companies competing with each other - it is this competition which provides the best check on the supply/demand equation. It breaks down in a monopoly situation or a situation where there are large, indirect competitors.
When he was talking about pursuing personal gain benifiting society, he was not talking about "Greed is Good, Greed Works," the mantra of the 1980s. He was talking about the idea that through a specialization of labor, people can do things more efficiently than otherwise possible. The silversmith is likely a poor cook, and the innkeeper a poor smith. This division of labor means that everyone can do what he excells at, making sure that the best goods go to market, instead of everybody making everything and having the markets overflow with mediocre goods.
Today, we do not have that division of labor because for the most part, we do not create goods. There are some services that people provide, but goods are in the hands of large corporations which, by and large, make many different goods - Time Warner operates cable companies, books, movies, news operations, cartoons, magazines... Sony operates personal electronics, entertainment, and that is a major problem.
Before the advent of Linux, the choices people had to use for computer operating systems were a buggy, slow, memory hog of a system for the Macintosh and a really buggy, lousy system called Windows 3.1, which ran on DOS, another system. Two companies provided pretty much all the computer software for personal use. Now, we have Windows, Mac, 31 flavors of Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, we have ZetaOS... we have a whole bunch of different computer operating systems. Even us still using Windows XP and MacOSX can tell you that the competition motivated it's owners to create improvements for the two main products. Modern corporations do not operate competitively with a large market.
Look at the division of labor in your own community. How many people are actually *doing* something productive? There are no more shoemakers - they are assembly line workers in Vietnam. At best, you're a shoe salesman... Salesman! Such a modern invention - a person who has nothing to do with the design and creation of a product sells it.
No no, I don't think Adam Smith would appreciate modern capitalism or agree that pursuing corporate gain - which is only personal gain for a few, and then only indirectly - benifits societly.
Who cares if he can fire once every 10 seconds. I would imagine a Bradley tank can't fire more often than that.
Now, imagine this. An American tank, made with DU armor, up against a WWII era tank - the DU ammunition would tear through the WWII era tank like tinfoil, while the WWII era tank wouldn't be able to do more than scratch the surface of the modern tank.
Okay, now replace Depleted Uranium shells with a DEATH RAY, and replace DU armor with Dalekanium. Put it into a package that has hover capabilities, 360 degree view, 0" turning radius, and put a mad monster with a nazi-like fascination for genocide of the whole human race behind the wheel.
The only hope of defeating it is a device which requires you to get relatively close to it. It is paranoid and will destroy everything that gets in it's way. The only person that knows how to use the device is a person that the Dalek vows to kill on sight...
Salt shaker, my ass. Those things are scary as hell...
Just because there are a bunch of rotten apples in the position of power/leadership in the Christian community does not mean the entire community (or the faith) is bad.
When you have as many bad apples as Christianity does, it might be time to take a good hard look and wonder if maybe it's the barrel that's rotten, and it's the good apples that are the exception...
When the hell did God establish Marriage, and when did he say "between a man and a woman?"
You assert it, but you never talk about it. Closest I can see when I read the bible is a Prohibition in Leviticus buried along with stonings for working on the sabbath and touching menstruating women that prohibits male-male sex but not male-male marriage. In fact, I can't even find a prohibition for female-female sex in the bible...
----
Oh, also, that whole "Country was founded on biblical principals?" Not exactly. In fact, the country was founded by diests - enlightenment thinkers who used reason and science and regarded the bible as metaphor by a God who didn't meddle in daily affairs. If you're talking about the Puritans, I just want to point out that their idea of "biblical principals" were witch-burnings and scarlet letters.
----- "Anti-god types want to deconstruct current ways of life?" "Social deconstruction device?"
Mechagodzilla is a social deconstruction device.
Look, there are no anti-god types. This whole persecution complex? No one's persecuting you. No one's stopping you from worshipping as you please. We -- who don't believe in your backwards, backwoods, God who exists mainly to make life on earth a shithole if-He-was-really-like-most-Christians-who-oppose-G ay-marriage-say-he-is -- just want to be left in peace, left alone, live life according to the rule of law not the vagaries of a talking plant.
Civil, human rights may indeed be given by God, but his followers around the world and throughout history have sure as hell done their best to stomp out those civil rights whenever possible. Ever hear of the crusades?
I will never understand - not if I live forever - how people could think that God wants them to do what they know in their hearts is wrong.
I'm more worried. The paper I work for is a student daily, we also subscribe to the AP wire.
Now, here's the thing - our website (to my lament) is shovelware. If we run an AP story, can we now place that on the web, or does this only count for direct AP feeds?
The problem is that the ability to use computers *is* a skill that is required for employment and interaction in the modern world, but most schools do not teach the ability to use computers. They teach the ability to use Microsoft Office - at best.
The problem, of course, is that the teachers don't know how to operate computers - just Microsoft Office. If they were asked to operate in a workplace that used a different word processor - they'd be lost. Furthermore, put them on a Mac or Linux machine? Even though 99% of it's all the same (double clicking, find a file, right clicking) most of these kids don't know crap.
I remember when I went through high school, I found the "computer classes" -- required to graduate -- boring as hell. After having to correct the teacher on a number of occasions, I eventually went to the principal and asked if I could test out. Normally they wouldn't let you do that, but the teacher didn't want me in her class either, and it became a case of "Let's kick the guy upstairs."
The proficiency test, based on the final exam, was also laughable -- This was in 1996, the era of Windows 95, the Pentium 150mhz chip, and the graphical user interface.
The test was written in 1988. I checked the copyright notice... and it occured to me that the teachers were teaching to the test!
That course was a horrible waste of time. I don't know if computers in the classrooms are just flashy distractions, but unless you have proficient teachers, all computer courses are useless.
Did anyone else notice the line in the story about 10.4 being sold on DVD only?
This will be a pain. I started with 10.1. I bought 10.2 (academic) at retail, and that had a dud disc in it. I ended up shipping it to Apple to get a replacement, waiting a couple of weeks.
I then had 10.3 through my college's program. 10.3 also had a dud disc - this one, though, I figured out, could be fixed by making a disc image of the disc and copying to a CD-R.
Let's just say that Apple's OS upgrades haven't had a great history of being shipped on usable discs.
If Tiger gets shipped on a DVD disc, I'm worried about that "burn" trick working. I know it won't work at all if the DVD disc is larger than 4.5 Gb...
In high school, I made a 2.0 GPA due to emotional problems (manic-depression is tough on teens who are assumed to be naturally "moody.") In college, I had very bad years - going to a bad college at first where the professors didn't give a damn, and when I went to a good college, I pulled a boneheaded 1.8 GPA one semester because I SUCK at Calculus and algorithms.
I switched majors to History. I immediately pulled down a 3.6 GPA and stayed there till I graduated. I then got into graduate school at the University of Texas where I'm studying journalism. I got a 4.0 last semester, and am set to finish up my 60 page thesis - tonight actually, if I can wean myself away from Slashdot.
If I was in Russia, I'd be pumping gas.
Actually, more likely, if I was in Russia, a big sweaty guy *named* Gas would be pumping me...
I do agree that not everyone should go to college. Some guys should drop out of school - they simply don't want to be there and don't see the point. Let them - they'll stop bringing the other kids down. Some kids also shouldn't be forced to attend school - if they're smart enough, let them attend college at 14.
But I don't think we should EVER say to kids "You CANNOT go to school even if you want to" until they become adults. Poor grades often mean troubles at home or in life - low GPAs simply often denote that people don't know what they're good at yet.
Personally, I think that's what High School needs to be - a search for what you're good at in a wider range of curriculum. Determine GPA by forcing students to take 8 classes a semester, but allow students to put up to three of them - including gym - on a Pass/Fail basis. Stephen Hawking should not be penalized for not knowing how to slam-dunk, Shakespeare should not be criticized for not knowing how to calculate the quadratic equation, and Linus Torvalds work on Linux should not be graded on how well he knows 18th century British Literature.
The problem comes in that this test isn't boolean.
Allow me to explain.
One of the real important parts of computer literacy is realizing that there are many, many different ways of doing something. If you want to open a file called "test.doc" in Microsoft Word, you can search for it in Spotlight/Find/Sherlock/whatever, you can go through the Finder and browse, you can open up the application and open the file from THERE - there are tons of different ways to do the problem. This test seems to determine that there's only ONE best way to solve the problem. The best way to solve the problem is the one that works best for you - When I was moving from PC to Mac, I *knew* that Apple-z was faster than edit-undo, but I kept hitting Ctrl-z, so I used edit-undo until I could get used to the Mac way (about a week.) If you put me in front of a program, I may make wrong assumptions about where something is, but I'm likely to eventually find it because I know how to use Mac/Windows interfaces.
Yes, this test could be very useful in determining whether or not someone knows how to do something. But that's a boolean operator - true/false - at best. It starts breaking down with those who are really computer literate. Such a test could only test the most basic of computer skills, not well-rounded computer literacy.
Now, you CAN test general computer literacy, but that'd likely take subjective graders, like the essay portion of the GRE.
At the same time, boolean search can sometimes be overrated.
"Earthquakes in 1996" AND "California" NOT "San Francisco" will often leave out documents that list ALL the earthquakes in California in 1996 because San Francisco is on a list of them. That's a poor search and one of the reasons that I avoid using the NOT boolean when I do searches EXCEPT if I get a preponderance of information about the irrelevant topic on the second try. Results garnered from unhelpful searches can also help find the search terms that WILL get me to the right search eventually... I'm loathe to think about a computer grading what is essentially something utterly subjective.
You're absolutely right. It should be the job of every citizen to do so. But as a citizen, I have less lobbying power than the National Rifle Association.
Specifically, since the NRA justifies their gun ownership stance mostly through the prevention of tyranny, you would expect them to speak up (not shoot up -- at first) when things like right to trial by jury come up.
If Charlton Heston and Wayne La Pierre would come out and say: "Although the NRA respects the work the Republican party has done in the past towards preserving gun rights, we grow increasingly concerned about the abridgements of speech and due process occuring since 9/11. Starting in 2006, we will have to take a long hard look if we want to continue our relationship with the Republican party and consider alternatives," you'd bet your ass the orange-jumpsuited prisoners in Gitmo would get their asses in front of a judge and pronto. The NRA wields enormous influence within the Republican party, and therefore the government, and while I like the idea that there's a large, armed populace protecting our freedom by acting as a deterrent to tyranny, the point is that most NRA members think the Patriot act is a good idea, thinks a "Diebold Machine" is a type of tractor, and supports the war in Iraq.
And while the Democrats aren't exactly superheroes, the difference between the two parties is one that blithely ignores the fire in the kitchen and the other one pours on kerosene. The American people voted for kerosene.
New Zealand has a very liberal WHV program: meet some financial, medical, police reqs, and you can move in anytime, work a job for up to 12 months... oh, and while you're there you can apply for a Working Visa which allows you to work your same job up to another two years.
They have wonderfully low unemployment and are looking for educated, bright people to come into the workforce. It's actually pretty damn easy.
Re:Call me old fashioned...
on
VoIP Wiretapping
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They don't need to take away 2nd amendment rights. The average gun-owner sides with those taking away rights. This is why the "2nd Amendment" violent uprising scenario won't occur - to the average red-state gun nutter, these are good times.
Slashdot Mirror
Cable -used- to be an entertainment service. But you'll never get me to say that internet access is anything but a utility.
> "Preying"? You make it sound like the recruiters are kidnapping these kids and pressing them into service.
Uh... I don't know if you haven't been paying attention, but at least two recruiters in Seattle have been doing exactly that.
>Anyone can, at any time in the first 6 months of their enlistment, say "this isn't working for me" and get out with a simple Entry Level Separation. I call bullshit on this. Maybe in peacetime. But not now. >Furthermore, the real shortage in the military is in recruiting people for complex technical jobs rather than straight-up combat arms. So essentially they'd end up with a whole raft of uncooperative bedding-delousing specialists just to get a handfull of tactical intelligence analysts. The military doesn't want the draft. They want more volunteers. 1) Selective service was being regeared towards grabbing those in technical and intelligence fields first and foremost. Which is, oddly enough, not the problem. The problem is that we literally don't have enough feet on the grounds - grunts. 2) The military wants more volunteers, not a draft. But the military does not make decisions about the draft.
> And if you think Bush is a dictator, it really shows how ignorant and coddled you are in this country, protected by the troops which you disdain.
I'm sorry, I'm going to need you to provide supporting evidence for this assertion.
Ah, see, that would be the Blinovitch Limitation Effect...
Okay, yes, the trailer implies that there are sounds in space in this version. 1) This is a trailer, not the final cut. There may be no sounds in space in the final version. 2) "No sounds in space" was more of a gimmick than anything else. Anyone who sees the reaver ship and Serenity passing each other extremely slowly - even though both ships would be moving extremely fast in order to get to a destination millions of miles away - knows that Firefly wasn't hard SF - I don't even think they established whether they had FTL tech or not. Ditching "no sounds in space" isn't a storybreaker. I mean, honestly, did you go and watch the original because it was silent? 3) Who is to say that the "space" scenes don't take place in some sort of atmosphere?
Could you name specifics? My guess is that you're probably watching television shows that have already been cancelled in the U.S. and are on BritTV in syndication.
Actually, I'm studying Journalism for a postgrad degree and let me tell you, local television news is nothing to be proud of. Yes, it's *actually* local, but mostly it's video news releases - commercials. When the local supermarket chain produces the video news release about where to find the best and cheapest items, and they don't tell you that the supermarket chain is doing it... (like a local station did here in Texas.)
Local television news isn't. I don't know what it is, but at the Journalism school, the students and professors I've seen treat it with exactly the same consideration as we do the National Enquirer.
I don't know what makes you say that the quality of television programming has gotten better. What do you typically watch in a day?
The reason that no one really gives a damn about switching over is that most people have cable or satellite, while those of us (including myself, still on rabbit ears) just don't think American television is damn good enough to pay for. The Brits bitch about their TV licences, but at least they get kick-ass television and television news that is second to none. I would gladly pay it. But am I going to buy a converter box to watch American TV? No - I barely even watch the rabbit ears now - my TV is basically a device for watching VHS tapes on. It's a slightly bigger screen to invite friends over to look at (instead of the computer monitor) and to be frank, I don't know if it's worthwhile to lug to my new apartment when my lease is up. And if you want me to subsidize this farce? The only way you will get me to support subsidizing television is if either the companies that put television on the air start putting on some shows worth watching or we move to an "all stations are publically financed and owned by the government" BBC-like model. I plan to solve the problem by living in another country by the time that New Years Even 2006 rolls around, but this has been a clusterf*ck at the FCC. The waste of HDTV bandwidth and the utter mismanagement of this FCC, spending more time looking for nipples than caring about technology. The corporations squatted the spectrum, didn't do anything with it... why hasn't the FCC responded with the only possible course of action and removed their licences!
On the one hand, there is the principle of Adam Smith that states that through pursuing your own personal gain you are benefiting society.
Actually, alot of people get Adam Smith wrong. While it is true that an invisible hand does move the economy along through a system of barter and the curve of supply and demand, on the aggragate, becomes important, Adam Smith lived in very, very different times.
When Smith says that the free market creates wealth and creates an efficient distribution system, he is talking about a free market in an era where monopoly control was hard to achieve and for the most part simply did not exist. Most goods and services had many small companies competing with each other - it is this competition which provides the best check on the supply/demand equation. It breaks down in a monopoly situation or a situation where there are large, indirect competitors.
When he was talking about pursuing personal gain benifiting society, he was not talking about "Greed is Good, Greed Works," the mantra of the 1980s. He was talking about the idea that through a specialization of labor, people can do things more efficiently than otherwise possible. The silversmith is likely a poor cook, and the innkeeper a poor smith. This division of labor means that everyone can do what he excells at, making sure that the best goods go to market, instead of everybody making everything and having the markets overflow with mediocre goods.
Today, we do not have that division of labor because for the most part, we do not create goods. There are some services that people provide, but goods are in the hands of large corporations which, by and large, make many different goods - Time Warner operates cable companies, books, movies, news operations, cartoons, magazines... Sony operates personal electronics, entertainment, and that is a major problem. Before the advent of Linux, the choices people had to use for computer operating systems were a buggy, slow, memory hog of a system for the Macintosh and a really buggy, lousy system called Windows 3.1, which ran on DOS, another system. Two companies provided pretty much all the computer software for personal use. Now, we have Windows, Mac, 31 flavors of Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, we have ZetaOS... we have a whole bunch of different computer operating systems. Even us still using Windows XP and MacOSX can tell you that the competition motivated it's owners to create improvements for the two main products. Modern corporations do not operate competitively with a large market.
Look at the division of labor in your own community. How many people are actually *doing* something productive? There are no more shoemakers - they are assembly line workers in Vietnam. At best, you're a shoe salesman... Salesman! Such a modern invention - a person who has nothing to do with the design and creation of a product sells it.
No no, I don't think Adam Smith would appreciate modern capitalism or agree that pursuing corporate gain - which is only personal gain for a few, and then only indirectly - benifits societly.
You're forgetting something important.
The Dalek is a f*cking tank.
Who cares if he can fire once every 10 seconds. I would imagine a Bradley tank can't fire more often than that.
Now, imagine this. An American tank, made with DU armor, up against a WWII era tank - the DU ammunition would tear through the WWII era tank like tinfoil, while the WWII era tank wouldn't be able to do more than scratch the surface of the modern tank.
Okay, now replace Depleted Uranium shells with a DEATH RAY, and replace DU armor with Dalekanium. Put it into a package that has hover capabilities, 360 degree view, 0" turning radius, and put a mad monster with a nazi-like fascination for genocide of the whole human race behind the wheel.
The only hope of defeating it is a device which requires you to get relatively close to it. It is paranoid and will destroy everything that gets in it's way. The only person that knows how to use the device is a person that the Dalek vows to kill on sight...
Salt shaker, my ass. Those things are scary as hell...
Just because there are a bunch of rotten apples in the position of power/leadership in the Christian community does not mean the entire community (or the faith) is bad.
When you have as many bad apples as Christianity does, it might be time to take a good hard look and wonder if maybe it's the barrel that's rotten, and it's the good apples that are the exception...
When the hell did God establish Marriage, and when did he say "between a man and a woman?"
G ay-marriage-say-he-is -- just want to be left in peace, left alone, live life according to the rule of law not the vagaries of a talking plant.
You assert it, but you never talk about it. Closest I can see when I read the bible is a Prohibition in Leviticus buried along with stonings for working on the sabbath and touching menstruating women that prohibits male-male sex but not male-male marriage. In fact, I can't even find a prohibition for female-female sex in the bible...
----
Oh, also, that whole "Country was founded on biblical principals?" Not exactly. In fact, the country was founded by diests - enlightenment thinkers who used reason and science and regarded the bible as metaphor by a God who didn't meddle in daily affairs. If you're talking about the Puritans, I just want to point out that their idea of "biblical principals" were witch-burnings and scarlet letters.
-----
"Anti-god types want to deconstruct current ways of life?" "Social deconstruction device?"
Mechagodzilla is a social deconstruction device.
Look, there are no anti-god types. This whole persecution complex? No one's persecuting you. No one's stopping you from worshipping as you please. We -- who don't believe in your backwards, backwoods, God who exists mainly to make life on earth a shithole if-He-was-really-like-most-Christians-who-oppose-
Civil, human rights may indeed be given by God, but his followers around the world and throughout history have sure as hell done their best to stomp out those civil rights whenever possible. Ever hear of the crusades?
I will never understand - not if I live forever - how people could think that God wants them to do what they know in their hearts is wrong.
I thought the London subway system was the Underground.
It's British English. Sometimes they call a truck a "lorry," sometimes they call a television "the tube," other times they call elevators a "lift."
My god. This is just about the most culturally blind, obviously offensive, most idiotic thing I have ever seen on the Internets.
I'm more worried. The paper I work for is a student daily, we also subscribe to the AP wire. Now, here's the thing - our website (to my lament) is shovelware. If we run an AP story, can we now place that on the web, or does this only count for direct AP feeds?
The problem is that the ability to use computers *is* a skill that is required for employment and interaction in the modern world, but most schools do not teach the ability to use computers. They teach the ability to use Microsoft Office - at best.
The problem, of course, is that the teachers don't know how to operate computers - just Microsoft Office. If they were asked to operate in a workplace that used a different word processor - they'd be lost. Furthermore, put them on a Mac or Linux machine? Even though 99% of it's all the same (double clicking, find a file, right clicking) most of these kids don't know crap.
I remember when I went through high school, I found the "computer classes" -- required to graduate -- boring as hell. After having to correct the teacher on a number of occasions, I eventually went to the principal and asked if I could test out. Normally they wouldn't let you do that, but the teacher didn't want me in her class either, and it became a case of "Let's kick the guy upstairs."
The proficiency test, based on the final exam, was also laughable -- This was in 1996, the era of Windows 95, the Pentium 150mhz chip, and the graphical user interface.
The test was written in 1988. I checked the copyright notice... and it occured to me that the teachers were teaching to the test!
That course was a horrible waste of time. I don't know if computers in the classrooms are just flashy distractions, but unless you have proficient teachers, all computer courses are useless.
Did anyone else notice the line in the story about 10.4 being sold on DVD only?
This will be a pain. I started with 10.1. I bought 10.2 (academic) at retail, and that had a dud disc in it. I ended up shipping it to Apple to get a replacement, waiting a couple of weeks.
I then had 10.3 through my college's program. 10.3 also had a dud disc - this one, though, I figured out, could be fixed by making a disc image of the disc and copying to a CD-R.
Let's just say that Apple's OS upgrades haven't had a great history of being shipped on usable discs.
If Tiger gets shipped on a DVD disc, I'm worried about that "burn" trick working. I know it won't work at all if the DVD disc is larger than 4.5 Gb...
In high school, I made a 2.0 GPA due to emotional problems (manic-depression is tough on teens who are assumed to be naturally "moody.") In college, I had very bad years - going to a bad college at first where the professors didn't give a damn, and when I went to a good college, I pulled a boneheaded 1.8 GPA one semester because I SUCK at Calculus and algorithms. I switched majors to History. I immediately pulled down a 3.6 GPA and stayed there till I graduated. I then got into graduate school at the University of Texas where I'm studying journalism. I got a 4.0 last semester, and am set to finish up my 60 page thesis - tonight actually, if I can wean myself away from Slashdot. If I was in Russia, I'd be pumping gas. Actually, more likely, if I was in Russia, a big sweaty guy *named* Gas would be pumping me... I do agree that not everyone should go to college. Some guys should drop out of school - they simply don't want to be there and don't see the point. Let them - they'll stop bringing the other kids down. Some kids also shouldn't be forced to attend school - if they're smart enough, let them attend college at 14. But I don't think we should EVER say to kids "You CANNOT go to school even if you want to" until they become adults. Poor grades often mean troubles at home or in life - low GPAs simply often denote that people don't know what they're good at yet. Personally, I think that's what High School needs to be - a search for what you're good at in a wider range of curriculum. Determine GPA by forcing students to take 8 classes a semester, but allow students to put up to three of them - including gym - on a Pass/Fail basis. Stephen Hawking should not be penalized for not knowing how to slam-dunk, Shakespeare should not be criticized for not knowing how to calculate the quadratic equation, and Linus Torvalds work on Linux should not be graded on how well he knows 18th century British Literature.
The problem comes in that this test isn't boolean. Allow me to explain. One of the real important parts of computer literacy is realizing that there are many, many different ways of doing something. If you want to open a file called "test.doc" in Microsoft Word, you can search for it in Spotlight/Find/Sherlock/whatever, you can go through the Finder and browse, you can open up the application and open the file from THERE - there are tons of different ways to do the problem. This test seems to determine that there's only ONE best way to solve the problem. The best way to solve the problem is the one that works best for you - When I was moving from PC to Mac, I *knew* that Apple-z was faster than edit-undo, but I kept hitting Ctrl-z, so I used edit-undo until I could get used to the Mac way (about a week.) If you put me in front of a program, I may make wrong assumptions about where something is, but I'm likely to eventually find it because I know how to use Mac/Windows interfaces. Yes, this test could be very useful in determining whether or not someone knows how to do something. But that's a boolean operator - true/false - at best. It starts breaking down with those who are really computer literate. Such a test could only test the most basic of computer skills, not well-rounded computer literacy. Now, you CAN test general computer literacy, but that'd likely take subjective graders, like the essay portion of the GRE.
At the same time, boolean search can sometimes be overrated. "Earthquakes in 1996" AND "California" NOT "San Francisco" will often leave out documents that list ALL the earthquakes in California in 1996 because San Francisco is on a list of them. That's a poor search and one of the reasons that I avoid using the NOT boolean when I do searches EXCEPT if I get a preponderance of information about the irrelevant topic on the second try. Results garnered from unhelpful searches can also help find the search terms that WILL get me to the right search eventually... I'm loathe to think about a computer grading what is essentially something utterly subjective.
Do you know how I can tell which DVD players are Divx/xvid ready?
You're absolutely right. It should be the job of every citizen to do so. But as a citizen, I have less lobbying power than the National Rifle Association.
Specifically, since the NRA justifies their gun ownership stance mostly through the prevention of tyranny, you would expect them to speak up (not shoot up -- at first) when things like right to trial by jury come up.
If Charlton Heston and Wayne La Pierre would come out and say: "Although the NRA respects the work the Republican party has done in the past towards preserving gun rights, we grow increasingly concerned about the abridgements of speech and due process occuring since 9/11. Starting in 2006, we will have to take a long hard look if we want to continue our relationship with the Republican party and consider alternatives," you'd bet your ass the orange-jumpsuited prisoners in Gitmo would get their asses in front of a judge and pronto. The NRA wields enormous influence within the Republican party, and therefore the government, and while I like the idea that there's a large, armed populace protecting our freedom by acting as a deterrent to tyranny, the point is that most NRA members think the Patriot act is a good idea, thinks a "Diebold Machine" is a type of tractor, and supports the war in Iraq.
And while the Democrats aren't exactly superheroes, the difference between the two parties is one that blithely ignores the fire in the kitchen and the other one pours on kerosene. The American people voted for kerosene.
New Zealand has a very liberal WHV program: meet some financial, medical, police reqs, and you can move in anytime, work a job for up to 12 months... oh, and while you're there you can apply for a Working Visa which allows you to work your same job up to another two years. They have wonderfully low unemployment and are looking for educated, bright people to come into the workforce. It's actually pretty damn easy.
They don't need to take away 2nd amendment rights. The average gun-owner sides with those taking away rights. This is why the "2nd Amendment" violent uprising scenario won't occur - to the average red-state gun nutter, these are good times.