It's not even always an issue of whether the parents have time to check on their kids work or not, but how do you propose they do it? If the kid is doing poorly he's going to do everything in his power to sabotage any effort to find out his progress. He's not going to answer questions about it, not going to show his parents tests that he did poorly on, not going to admit to having homework. So what do the parents do? Do they make 7 phone calls per day trying to get in touch with EACH of their kids teachers to find out what is going on and if the kid has any homework? At least with this system in place the parent has the option of a stop by the local library on the way home from work, or the way to work to check on it.
Oh, and don't go crying to me about all of the rigors of being a teacher. No one forced you into that profession any more than those parents were forced to have kids.
Oh, and for the record not only do I not have kids, I don't even particularly LIKE kids, or parents, or people in general.
The relevant factor that you are overlooking is that people in highschool are about 70% stupid, while people in law school are only about 5% stupid. In high school I would hear people complain about an 8 *PAGE* reading assignment, much less an 8 chapter one, or an entire book. Who the HELL doesn't have time to read 8 pages? Well, it takes a lot longer when you have to sound out every word that has more than 4 letters. My class had 3 people who literally COULD NOT read graduate. They had the graduation tests read to them and the person reading it to them helped them with the answers. It was sick. Oh, and any teacher "belittling" a student in class will probably get sued even if it's just for a sarcastic sounding "Wrong!" or something.
I don't force anybody to call me. I'm available at all times via e-mail. Those parents who don't have e-mail (I teach at a school where most students are in a low socio-economic bracket), can always reach me by phone or in person.
Sure, cause lord knows that everyone elses schedule coincides with yours. Do you have any objects to being called at 3 am when some parent is on lunchbreak from their 3rd shift factory job? Can they drop by your house at 6 am when they get off work before they crash? Do you mind getting calls during dinner around 8 when someone who has to work 50+ hours per week at their shitty job to pay rent finally gets off work? The fact of it is that a lot of parents in the "lower socio-economic bracket" as you put it work themselves near to death in order to pay the rent and feed their kids. Being able to go by a public terminal somewhere and see their kids progress might be incredibly helpful to them.
Also, how is the fact that Student A has turned in precisely 0 of 10 assigned homeworks over the course of the last 4 weeks going to change significantly at the end of the semester? Perhaps with some parental knowledge and intervention some of those homeworks could be made up or at least future ones could be turned in. Are you going to call that parent at home to discuss it? If the kid got a 12% on his last test it doesn't matter whether you plan on dropping that grade or not, the kid obviously had no idea WTF was going on. Shouldn't his parents be aware of that? Or do you just not want to be accountable for it? More knowledge is always a good thing.
So you think that someone who you don't view as responsible enough to choose whether they should be having a kid or not, is responsible enough to raise that kid not to be a psychotic howling maniac serial killer? No faulty logic there....
First of all, as I understand the nature of WAKE the designer doesn't have the power to remove files from the WAKE system as it is an index of files from other computers. In order for him to remove a file from the system he would have to commit some form of breaking and entering either into the system or into the physical location of the computer the infringing file was on in order to remove it. That would be illegal. I think he can quite easily show that a list of *ALL* files on a given network can never be infringing. If he was trimming the list in order to maximize the number of infringing files (MP3s) which appeared on it then he would certainly be contributing to the infringement, but a global index of all files on a given network is ignorant of its own contents to a degree which SHOULD provide protection to the implementor of the network and place the burden upon the actual people who posess the infringing material.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I hang out with a lot of them.
Why do you play? Where is the skill behind your game if you use an aimbot? What makes it fun for you to play? Is it just the design of the Aimbot that is fun for you?I can understand that, but then, why not just design it and play around with it a bit and not release it? What is the motivation for using an Aimbot in a game that has no prize beyond recognition of skill? If you are being recognized for skill you don't have doesn't that make the whole excersise pointless?
I wouldn't have a problem with it if it worked. But I've yet to run up against more than 1% at best of the students of public school that know fuckall about anything. Most of them are foul mouthed little morons barely capable of the most basic grunting communication outside of the profanity they spew. When every 17 year old knows who Descartes is (Just as a random example) maybe I'll change my mind...
Kintanon
Re:Afghanistan Exit Realized
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
As for the "Why don't you just leave" argument, I doubt you could leave if you wanted to. At least not on a permanent basis. I've been looking into immigration for a while and almost all of the countries I would want to go to, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc... have some SERIOUS immigration policies. You have to have a rediculous amount of education, or already have a job lined up there to even think about moving there. It's not like you can just save up some cash, fly over, rent an apartment and then go job hunting. The world doesn't work that way, even if I think it should. I say down with barriers to trade! Down with barriers to immigration! Full globalization NOW! Not just corporate globalization that strips power from the citizens and gives it to the corporations, but complete globalization so that people can move at will around the planet just as they can within the US (for now).
Hell, my wife would beat the shit out of someone that had the bad manners to call her fat... I mean good lord, what kind of total asshole does someone have to be to say something like that and think no one will care? Possibly his problem is that he's never spoken to an actual female... Perhaps he should get out more?
How about we quit giving fucking tax breaks to people who have fucking kids? We already pay for their fucking schooling, their fucking daycare, and who knows what else! Then they hit us up at the super market to pay for every other fucking thing from little league to their fucking prom. If you can't afford kids don't fucking have any! And don't come whining to me after you do. I'm all for mandatory child restrictions. When you're born you get a "Reproduction" token, you can choose to use it yourself and have a kid, or sell it/give it away to someone else who wants to have more kids but doesn't have any more tokens. That way each couple has 2 tokens = 2 kids. Since I wouldn't need mine I could sell it to one of those fuckheads that has 6 kids because he's too fucking stupid to figure out how a condom works. I'm also in favor of mandatory sterilization after a couple has their 2 kids. Fucking breeders....
Kintanon PS. Yeah, I know I'm a ranty asshole. Fuck you too.
" But we don't even know how to produce food in space, much less build mass drivers and use native lunar/asteroidal material for any kind of useful construction."
We don't? I don't see what the problem with growing food in space is. You just start the system on earth and launch it as a payload. A small ecosystem that can be expanded and, if carefully managed, produces plenty of food. Yeah it requires that the initial system be configured on earth, but I don't see how that's a problem. Launch a bunch of curved pipes, build a doughnut, spin that thing up to get some gravity on the walls and then move your soil+plants+animals in. Have one side always sunfacing and fully plated with solar panels to power lamps that provide a normal day/night cycle. It's certainly feasible isn't it?
You are obviously a corporate tool! Everyone knows that if you forcefeed a rat 100 tons of aspartane it kills it rather nastily! Hence Aspartane must be a deadly, cancer causing poison!
What I really want is a Diesel Electric Hybrid... 150+mpg and it can run on bio-diesel. And if the US would remove the lower bound on street legal cars and put an UPPER bound on them that disallowed civillians with regular licenses from driving things like the H2 hummer or the Excursion we could have things like the Mini pr the Lupo that are so small and light they would get even MORE mpg. If anyone really cared we could have super efficient diesel/electric small vehicles, but americans don't WANT small vehicles they want gargantuan tanks that get 12 mpg on a good day, rolling down hill, in neutral. Bah I say!!
Technically everything you say is true of oil as well. If we were having to convert organic matter into oil, then process the oil before we could use it as fuel the energy cost to us would be enormous. The only reason Oil is a viable fuel is that 50% of the work has already been done for us by nature. But really, if you think about the energy that went into the production of the crude oil the efficiency is orders of magnitude worse than that of extracting hydrogen from water and burning the hydrogen. Perhaps one of the better methods of extracting hydrogen is to use microorganism designed to emit hydrogen as a waste product. I'm sure it could be done, then we're at the point of just feeding the things formless food glop. Dunno what the efficiency of that would be either...
I have a paper copy of Sony's financial report from last year around somewhere, I'll see if I can dig it up. The amounts listed as outlay for the production of the PS2 were slightly more than the profits from the PS1 from the 2 years before that I believe. So yes, Sony is putting out the money to build the facilities, but it's not borrowing money, it's not money that has to be paid back, or a loss to be recouped. It's the use of the money earned by the last console to fund expansion, ie the next console.
Here is an excersise you may perform in order to determine just how much a meteor would affect the earth. First, get a cueball, now get a small round marble. Now, fire the marble at the cueball at varying velocities. Observe the motion of the cueball. Draw your own conclusions about how far the earth might have been adjusted by an approximately scaled object impacting it at an approximately scaled velocity.
We are agreeing. The deal is, the actual cost of production for each PS2 is lower than the cost it is being sold at. But at first that profit is eatten up by the initial outlay to build the facilities, except for one fact, the profit from the PREVIOUS consoles later years is used to establish a large portion of the production facilities for the next console. So Sony doesn't even lay out all that much money for the production facilities. So it usually only takes sony about 6 months of sales to be making nothing but profit from their consoles. No more recouping R&D or production costs, nothing but the cost to build the console and distribute it. Which is well under the cost charged to consumers.
You build consoles and sell them at a huge loss. It's a multi-billion dollar gamble only the largest players can attempt. If you win, you get a piece of the action for every product sold on your (dominant) platform, _and_ over time, your margin on the hardware comes back out of the red, and you make a profit selling that too. Sony has now been profitable on the PS2 hardware for some moderately short period of time.
Ok, this will be the fourth time I've done this, so PAY ATTENTION. The per unit cost of each PS2, is GREATER than the per unit cost to build the PS2. The same was true for the PS1. They are not "taking a loss" on the consoles. Sony never has done that and never will. You can view it as "taking a loss" only if you divide the R&D cost across the first year of consoles, but the fact is that Sony sells each console for more than it cost to make that console. They had recouped their R&D by the middle of the second year the PS2 was out, they have been making straight up profit for over a year and pushing that into the R&D for the nextgen. Currently Microsoft is the only player on the market taking a loss on their consoles.
The nextgen Sony console will most likely be released for Christmas of 2005, but if there doesn't seem to be a new console coming up from Nintendo or MSFT Sony will very likely hold the actual console release a bit. Their plan is usually to release just a few days or weeks before Nintendo does, but advertise for a year or so beforehand.
Kintanon
Re:sorry people had to bite on this one
on
Half Mast
·
· Score: 1
Guess I should have told the ENTIRE story then. First of all, I do study Martial Arts. Wrestling, Taekwondo, Aikido, Jujitsu, Judo, and Wushu. So yes, I study Martial Arts. As many of them as I can get instruction in. The incident I mentioned happened VERY VERY early in my studies, I was a green belt in Taekwondo and had been wrestling for about 6 months. I had damn near 0 control, but I knew the places to hit someone to hurt them. Of COURSE I wasn't trained well, I was new to it. Now, or even a year later I would NEVER have made the mistake I made in that confrontation, but when you're 15 and can finally stop the guy who is twice your size for turning you into hamburger you maybe don't think so clearly, eh?
And if you don't study "Martial Arts" as a whole then you're getting an incomplete education in self defense. Every art has something valuable to offer you.
You answered your own question. The movement of the elevator through the atmosphere can be used to harness energy and feed it to boosters used to keep the elevator stable.
You'd be hard pressed to get a cessna out into the middle of the pacific.... As for the rest, I imagine there would be plenty of anti-aircraft security around the thing and anything without a filed flight plan would probably be shot down on sight.
Kintanon
Re:Beware the viscious circle.
on
Half Mast
·
· Score: 1
The guys in your town were smarter than the ones in mine. A couple of years after I started taking Martial Arts the bullies were still fucking around with me and one of them finally elevated a level of physicality that I couldn't let go (I let him hit me twice before I fought back), he ended up in the hospital with a ruptured kidney.
Well, I'm in VERY GOOD condition physically, but that still doesn't mean I'm going to want to pedal home after my TKD class 3 nights a week, sometimes I can barely walk after those. I'll take note of your comments on the construction though. Maybe I could get a nicer bike and install a hybrid electric kit on it... The area I'll be riding most of the time isn't very hilly, but there are some places in town with HUGE hills which could be fun.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not even always an issue of whether the parents have time to check on their kids work or not, but how do you propose they do it? If the kid is doing poorly he's going to do everything in his power to sabotage any effort to find out his progress. He's not going to answer questions about it, not going to show his parents tests that he did poorly on, not going to admit to having homework. So what do the parents do? Do they make 7 phone calls per day trying to get in touch with EACH of their kids teachers to find out what is going on and if the kid has any homework? At least with this system in place the parent has the option of a stop by the local library on the way home from work, or the way to work to check on it.
Oh, and don't go crying to me about all of the rigors of being a teacher. No one forced you into that profession any more than those parents were forced to have kids.
Oh, and for the record not only do I not have kids, I don't even particularly LIKE kids, or parents, or people in general.
Kintanon
The relevant factor that you are overlooking is that people in highschool are about 70% stupid, while people in law school are only about 5% stupid.
In high school I would hear people complain about an 8 *PAGE* reading assignment, much less an 8 chapter one, or an entire book. Who the HELL doesn't have time to read 8 pages? Well, it takes a lot longer when you have to sound out every word that has more than 4 letters.
My class had 3 people who literally COULD NOT read graduate. They had the graduation tests read to them and the person reading it to them helped them with the answers. It was sick.
Oh, and any teacher "belittling" a student in class will probably get sued even if it's just for a sarcastic sounding "Wrong!" or something.
Kintanon
I don't force anybody to call me. I'm available at all times via e-mail. Those parents who don't have e-mail (I teach at a school where most students are in a low socio-economic bracket), can always reach me by phone or in person.
Sure, cause lord knows that everyone elses schedule coincides with yours. Do you have any objects to being called at 3 am when some parent is on lunchbreak from their 3rd shift factory job? Can they drop by your house at 6 am when they get off work before they crash? Do you mind getting calls during dinner around 8 when someone who has to work 50+ hours per week at their shitty job to pay rent finally gets off work?
The fact of it is that a lot of parents in the "lower socio-economic bracket" as you put it work themselves near to death in order to pay the rent and feed their kids. Being able to go by a public terminal somewhere and see their kids progress might be incredibly helpful to them.
Also, how is the fact that Student A has turned in precisely 0 of 10 assigned homeworks over the course of the last 4 weeks going to change significantly at the end of the semester? Perhaps with some parental knowledge and intervention some of those homeworks could be made up or at least future ones could be turned in. Are you going to call that parent at home to discuss it? If the kid got a 12% on his last test it doesn't matter whether you plan on dropping that grade or not, the kid obviously had no idea WTF was going on. Shouldn't his parents be aware of that? Or do you just not want to be accountable for it?
More knowledge is always a good thing.
Kintanon
So you think that someone who you don't view as responsible enough to choose whether they should be having a kid or not, is responsible enough to raise that kid not to be a psychotic howling maniac serial killer? No faulty logic there....
Kintanon
OR IF they do receive a proper takedown notice, they have to expeditiously remove access to that material.
Does anyone know if this guy did receive a takedown notice of any kind, or did the RIAA just skip straight to the lawsuite part?
Kintanon
First of all, as I understand the nature of WAKE the designer doesn't have the power to remove files from the WAKE system as it is an index of files from other computers. In order for him to remove a file from the system he would have to commit some form of breaking and entering either into the system or into the physical location of the computer the infringing file was on in order to remove it. That would be illegal.
I think he can quite easily show that a list of *ALL* files on a given network can never be infringing. If he was trimming the list in order to maximize the number of infringing files (MP3s) which appeared on it then he would certainly be contributing to the infringement, but a global index of all files on a given network is ignorant of its own contents to a degree which SHOULD provide protection to the implementor of the network and place the burden upon the actual people who posess the infringing material.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I hang out with a lot of them.
Kintanon
Why do you play?
Where is the skill behind your game if you use an aimbot? What makes it fun for you to play? Is it just the design of the Aimbot that is fun for you?I can understand that, but then, why not just design it and play around with it a bit and not release it?
What is the motivation for using an Aimbot in a game that has no prize beyond recognition of skill? If you are being recognized for skill you don't have doesn't that make the whole excersise pointless?
Kintanon
I wouldn't have a problem with it if it worked. But I've yet to run up against more than 1% at best of the students of public school that know fuckall about anything. Most of them are foul mouthed little morons barely capable of the most basic grunting communication outside of the profanity they spew.
When every 17 year old knows who Descartes is (Just as a random example) maybe I'll change my mind...
Kintanon
As for the "Why don't you just leave" argument, I doubt you could leave if you wanted to. At least not on a permanent basis. I've been looking into immigration for a while and almost all of the countries I would want to go to, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc... have some SERIOUS immigration policies. You have to have a rediculous amount of education, or already have a job lined up there to even think about moving there. It's not like you can just save up some cash, fly over, rent an apartment and then go job hunting. The world doesn't work that way, even if I think it should. I say down with barriers to trade! Down with barriers to immigration! Full globalization NOW! Not just corporate globalization that strips power from the citizens and gives it to the corporations, but complete globalization so that people can move at will around the planet just as they can within the US (for now).
Kintanon
Hell, my wife would beat the shit out of someone that had the bad manners to call her fat... I mean good lord, what kind of total asshole does someone have to be to say something like that and think no one will care?
Possibly his problem is that he's never spoken to an actual female... Perhaps he should get out more?
Kintanon
How about we quit giving fucking tax breaks to people who have fucking kids? We already pay for their fucking schooling, their fucking daycare, and who knows what else! Then they hit us up at the super market to pay for every other fucking thing from little league to their fucking prom. If you can't afford kids don't fucking have any! And don't come whining to me after you do. I'm all for mandatory child restrictions. When you're born you get a "Reproduction" token, you can choose to use it yourself and have a kid, or sell it/give it away to someone else who wants to have more kids but doesn't have any more tokens. That way each couple has 2 tokens = 2 kids. Since I wouldn't need mine I could sell it to one of those fuckheads that has 6 kids because he's too fucking stupid to figure out how a condom works.
I'm also in favor of mandatory sterilization after a couple has their 2 kids.
Fucking breeders....
Kintanon
PS. Yeah, I know I'm a ranty asshole. Fuck you too.
" But we don't even know how to produce food in space, much less build mass drivers and use native lunar/asteroidal material for any kind of useful construction."
We don't? I don't see what the problem with growing food in space is. You just start the system on earth and launch it as a payload. A small ecosystem that can be expanded and, if carefully managed, produces plenty of food. Yeah it requires that the initial system be configured on earth, but I don't see how that's a problem. Launch a bunch of curved pipes, build a doughnut, spin that thing up to get some gravity on the walls and then move your soil+plants+animals in. Have one side always sunfacing and fully plated with solar panels to power lamps that provide a normal day/night cycle. It's certainly feasible isn't it?
Kintanon
Uhh, because he wanted to fire it. Who cares about the money? It was the experience he wanted.
Kintanon
You are obviously a corporate tool! Everyone knows that if you forcefeed a rat 100 tons of aspartane it kills it rather nastily! Hence Aspartane must be a deadly, cancer causing poison!
>;)
Kintanon
What I really want is a Diesel Electric Hybrid... 150+mpg and it can run on bio-diesel.
And if the US would remove the lower bound on street legal cars and put an UPPER bound on them that disallowed civillians with regular licenses from driving things like the H2 hummer or the Excursion we could have things like the Mini pr the Lupo that are so small and light they would get even MORE mpg.
If anyone really cared we could have super efficient diesel/electric small vehicles, but americans don't WANT small vehicles they want gargantuan tanks that get 12 mpg on a good day, rolling down hill, in neutral.
Bah I say!!
Kintanon
Technically everything you say is true of oil as well. If we were having to convert organic matter into oil, then process the oil before we could use it as fuel the energy cost to us would be enormous. The only reason Oil is a viable fuel is that 50% of the work has already been done for us by nature. But really, if you think about the energy that went into the production of the crude oil the efficiency is orders of magnitude worse than that of extracting hydrogen from water and burning the hydrogen.
Perhaps one of the better methods of extracting hydrogen is to use microorganism designed to emit hydrogen as a waste product. I'm sure it could be done, then we're at the point of just feeding the things formless food glop. Dunno what the efficiency of that would be either...
Kintanon
I have a paper copy of Sony's financial report from last year around somewhere, I'll see if I can dig it up. The amounts listed as outlay for the production of the PS2 were slightly more than the profits from the PS1 from the 2 years before that I believe.
So yes, Sony is putting out the money to build the facilities, but it's not borrowing money, it's not money that has to be paid back, or a loss to be recouped. It's the use of the money earned by the last console to fund expansion, ie the next console.
Kintanon
Kintanon
Here is an excersise you may perform in order to determine just how much a meteor would affect the earth. First, get a cueball, now get a small round marble. Now, fire the marble at the cueball at varying velocities. Observe the motion of the cueball.
Draw your own conclusions about how far the earth might have been adjusted by an approximately scaled object impacting it at an approximately scaled velocity.
Kintanon
We are agreeing.
The deal is, the actual cost of production for each PS2 is lower than the cost it is being sold at. But at first that profit is eatten up by the initial outlay to build the facilities, except for one fact, the profit from the PREVIOUS consoles later years is used to establish a large portion of the production facilities for the next console. So Sony doesn't even lay out all that much money for the production facilities. So it usually only takes sony about 6 months of sales to be making nothing but profit from their consoles. No more recouping R&D or production costs, nothing but the cost to build the console and distribute it. Which is well under the cost charged to consumers.
Kintanon
You build consoles and sell them at a huge loss. It's a multi-billion dollar gamble only the largest players can attempt. If you win, you get a piece of the action for every product sold on your (dominant) platform, _and_ over time, your margin on the hardware comes back out of the red, and you make a profit selling that too. Sony has now been profitable on the PS2 hardware for some moderately short period of time.
Ok, this will be the fourth time I've done this, so PAY ATTENTION. The per unit cost of each PS2, is GREATER than the per unit cost to build the PS2. The same was true for the PS1. They are not "taking a loss" on the consoles. Sony never has done that and never will. You can view it as "taking a loss" only if you divide the R&D cost across the first year of consoles, but the fact is that Sony sells each console for more than it cost to make that console. They had recouped their R&D by the middle of the second year the PS2 was out, they have been making straight up profit for over a year and pushing that into the R&D for the nextgen. Currently Microsoft is the only player on the market taking a loss on their consoles.
The nextgen Sony console will most likely be released for Christmas of 2005, but if there doesn't seem to be a new console coming up from Nintendo or MSFT Sony will very likely hold the actual console release a bit. Their plan is usually to release just a few days or weeks before Nintendo does, but advertise for a year or so beforehand.
Kintanon
Guess I should have told the ENTIRE story then. First of all, I do study Martial Arts. Wrestling, Taekwondo, Aikido, Jujitsu, Judo, and Wushu. So yes, I study Martial Arts. As many of them as I can get instruction in.
The incident I mentioned happened VERY VERY early in my studies, I was a green belt in Taekwondo and had been wrestling for about 6 months. I had damn near 0 control, but I knew the places to hit someone to hurt them. Of COURSE I wasn't trained well, I was new to it. Now, or even a year later I would NEVER have made the mistake I made in that confrontation, but when you're 15 and can finally stop the guy who is twice your size for turning you into hamburger you maybe don't think so clearly, eh?
And if you don't study "Martial Arts" as a whole then you're getting an incomplete education in self defense. Every art has something valuable to offer you.
Kintanon
You answered your own question. The movement of the elevator through the atmosphere can be used to harness energy and feed it to boosters used to keep the elevator stable.
Kintanon
You'd be hard pressed to get a cessna out into the middle of the pacific.... As for the rest, I imagine there would be plenty of anti-aircraft security around the thing and anything without a filed flight plan would probably be shot down on sight.
Kintanon
The guys in your town were smarter than the ones in mine. A couple of years after I started taking Martial Arts the bullies were still fucking around with me and one of them finally elevated a level of physicality that I couldn't let go (I let him hit me twice before I fought back), he ended up in the hospital with a ruptured kidney.
Kintanon
Well, I'm in VERY GOOD condition physically, but that still doesn't mean I'm going to want to pedal home after my TKD class 3 nights a week, sometimes I can barely walk after those. I'll take note of your comments on the construction though. Maybe I could get a nicer bike and install a hybrid electric kit on it... The area I'll be riding most of the time isn't very hilly, but there are some places in town with HUGE hills which could be fun.
Thanks again!
Kintanon