The ribbon is what finally drove me to OpenOffice. Everyone I show OpenOffice to likes it better than Microsoft Office after about 10 minutes. I have even switched a few businesses and my dad's yacht club to it, which is not exactly a hotbeds of open source activity. Microsoft really is open sources best friend some times.
I use Windows XP, 7 and several flavors of Linux. I tend to use a lot of open source even on my Windows boxes, not only is it cheaper it is often better designed and has more features. The only reason I still use windows at home is for games on my main computer and blu-rays on my HTPC.
My solution was to sleep through school or read something interesting during class, read the chapter summaries to pass the tests, and study what I wanted when not in school. I was in all honors and AP classes in high school, so its not like I just took the easy classes. That was 20 years ago, so not supporting the kids who are ahead is hardly new.
As for what to do for your kids now, home school or private school. If you can't afford it put some time into getting your child learning opportunities outside of school. A lot of junior colleges now allow enrollment by high school students or have summer programs for high school students. Otherwise it is easy to get discouraged and become despondent or a trouble maker. I know, I did both before figuring out how to deal with the system and finding opportunities outside of public school. I was definitely in the could not afford home or private school category, but I still managed to find opportunities during high school. Because of those opportunities and self learning I paid my own way through college without accruing a bunch of debt. I would say I learned far more outside of school on my own than I ever did in school, but college was worth it for the people I met and the degrees of course.
My wife and I will probably be home schooling our daughter, since economically it is a better value for us than private school and my wife is crazy enough to do it. She has a liberal arts education and I have a masters of software engineering and we are both life long learners, so between the two of us we can provide a good balance. The area we live in has a ton of independent educational resources as well. We are in an area with top rated schools, but even so their primary purpose seems to be daycare not education.
Most of the studies I have seen on it suggest that cell phone conversation is more distracting for two reasons. The one I see in all the studies is the person on the phone does not react to what is going on in the car. So they keep talking even if something dangerous is going where someone in the car will stop and not expect an answer if you are in a situation that requires more attention on your driving. The second one I have seen suggested, but not as often is that your brain requires more "processing power" to talk on a cell phone due to quality of voice and lack of body language. And yes you would think that looking at the person you are talking to would be more dangerous, but your brain and visual system is designed to take in a wide field with only glances to build on. Most accidents are not caused by a vision problem but an attention problem.
See Inattentional Blindness.
And here is another study on cell phone vs passenger conversation (Sorry PDF).
There is a lot of hate so far, but I could see these being useful. I am definitely not a teenager anymore either, solidly middle-aged family man. I listen to a ridiculously large amount of news, audio books and music on my phone. I also regularly use it for looking things up or getting directions when I am out. I find myself using it more and more for chat (text, google talk, etc) and email, even though I am near a computer almost all the time.
I would hope there is a way to control it with eye movement or something so it could be used silently for most things. For example, pausing what I am listening to is one of the big annoyances with my current phone setup, it would be nice to just look up and blink twice or something to pause the book or music. A do not disturb mode for when I was working on something that required being in the zone would be helpful, but if I am just hanging out I would not mind popups about messages. Calendar popups would be helpful as I have my work calendar synced to my google calendar and am often running from meeting to meeting. I would also want it to be integrated into the glasses I already wear or available with prescription lenses. I am slightly cross-eyed, so I can't use contacts effectively.
There will always be people who are obnoxious with whatever technology they have available, from people with boom boxes in the 80's to the blue tooth yellers of today. So I can't really hold that against the technology.
I too have ridden a motorcycle for more than a decade. I am a pretty mellow motorcycle rider, started because of a long commute and I wanted to use the carpool lane. Given that I have had to dodge to the median, quick stop and accelerate through plenty of situations. Some of the drivers were looking right at me and actively tried to push me out of my lane. It definitely gives you a different view of other drivers. Now even when I drive a car I just assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me.
I run the standard Ubuntu releases (not the long term support, but not the betas either) on my media center box with an nVidia and I have not had to change a thing in the last several major upgrades. Movies and games both continue to work just fine. I am using the nVidia binaries.
I like AMD processors, but have avoided the ATI cards due to previous driver issues. I am glad to hear they are releasing open source drivers and if they don't suck I will have more video cards to look at next time I upgrade.
You take a number which you don't know very well, so you estimate it. Then multiply it by a factor which you really don't know, so you just guess that. Next you multiply the result by another number which you may never know, so you just pull that one out of/dev/random, and multiply them all together.
And wow, you get a result that you like! That's amazing!
So its like project estimations. Probably about as accurate too.
I am not sure what everyone is talking about schools not being tracked already. At least when I went to high school in California there was at least 3 levels, regular classes, honors classes and advanced placement classes. Elementary school had the gate program. I was in the advanced classes all the way through, but there were a few classes that you had to take like Drivers Ed (I know that dates me), Physical Ed and Health, that were mixed. It was actually a rather disturbing experience. It was like being put in a room with wild monkeys. It did give me an appreciation of how the other half lived though.
So I think a tracked system is valuable as it lets people learn at there own pace. If we really wanted to improve our system though we would tailor education not only to level but also learning style. For example I can learn very quickly from a book or doing something, but am awful at auditory learning. I usually read the chapter and then slept through the rest of lecture classes. In college I just skipped the lecture classes and showed up for the tests. By focusing on how each student learns and catering to that they can learn far more quickly regardless of their general intelligence. That is one of the reasons why homeschooling is so much more effective.
I am afraid I am speaking with people who have already closed their minds to the possibility that what they do not/cannot understand with logic must inherently not exist or be explainable with something besides logic.
This is slashdot. What did you expect?
I am lucky enough to have a logical woman, but I still would not get in her way when it comes to our kid. Why are people so upset to think that our only purpose is to serve our genes? I have quite a good time doing it.
Are you implying that windows just works? I am having to search microsoft support on my linux box right now because the stupid Win XP 64 install fails with an unknown error and tells you to look at the log file which helpfully says "Unknown error". Microsoft can bit my shiny metal ass. I have always had more problems installing windows than any version of Linux I have tried.
Well Symantec needs the grant money so they can find bugs to exploit in Linux so they can write viruses for it and sell there antivirus solutions to linux users. I will just wait until the free better updated version comes out from AVG.
"Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler."
What is false about this? The first part of the sentence says that the two theories give the same results. If two theories give the same results, why would you choose the more complex one? That would be dumb.
The only people who do things like that are low level math teachers. That is because they like to make students suffer and don't understand math themselves.
Well you don't need a stargate. You could use a simple incinarator or other death device if your only goal is population elimination. Might be harder to keep the line moving though.:)
I guess you could just use good special effects to make it look like a star gate and vaporize the people. Remind me not to go through the stargate until I see someone I trust go in and come back.
Of course you could also limit birth rates to around 2 children per couple and you would have a steady or declining population also. Many parts of Europe and Japan have declining populations since people are choosing not to have kids or less than 2.
Actually money is usually more important than lives. If not, we would not have all these pesky wars. Its just how much money is a single life worth. Not as much as you would like to think. If corporations could make a profit killing people they would. Oh wait they already do.
On topic, as someone else said Dell will do what makes them the most money. We can just be happy that sometimes what makes a corporation money also makes us happy.
Where is the list of defenders of American liberties? All you listed was groups trying to take away different liberties. How's this for non-partisan? They are all out to screw you in one way or another get used to it. The best you can do is find politicians that vote closest to your main views. Of course, none of them qualify for me so I just vote against the most heinous.
Just so you know my bias, I am a slightly conservative anarchist (1.5,-5). You can find out your bias at politicalcompass.org. I think it should be a requirement when posting on politics.
If the end is truely nigh, then the best investment is lead or perferably copper on the end of a brass tube filled with explosive powder. I knew there was a reason I always keep a thousand rounds handy for each of my guns. I just got another thousand 9mm and.22 for christmas.:)
So you keep your little pieces of paper that say you own gold somewhere. I will keep my investment in my trunk and closet. We will see which is more useful in a full economic collapse.
PS I think a economic collapse is unlikely, but a correction is comming, so gold is probably not a bad investment, but there are a lot of other investments that are good in a bear market.
PSS Firearms are great stress relief in any economic climate.
You obviously bought a big name DVD player. The $20 one I got at Radio Shack doesn't pay any attention to region encoding or anything else. You can skip the FBI warning, previews and anything else you want. The picture and sound quality are fine on it too. I was a little worried about that when I got it. I can barely use the expensive one I bought several years ago simply because it is so annoying. My patients with electronics goes down every year. Now I just watch TV and Movies on my Linux box where I can do whatever the hell I feel like.
The US has a large prison population to experiment on. If you are opposed to that we can always experiment on terrorists. At least in the US we have handy prisons where they have no rights anyway. If we run out of them we can move on to open source developers since they are obviously communists. Oh, and file sharers.
I just find I get places slower when I am on the phone, since I have to take attention away from constantly scanning for cops. So really I am not paying any less attention to driving, just replacing one task with another. I don't use the phone much in the car though because I feel like I am crawling if I drive the speed limit. See you on the highway (briefly).:)
Much scarier than talking on the cell phone is when I get to work or home and do not remember the drive at all, total autopilot. When I had a two hour commute it was pretty much every day.
I do not know if video games make me a better driver, but I do know video games have made me a much more aggressive driver. I never used to powerslide into oncoming traffic or shoot at cops before playing GTA.
If you want good no frills science reporting I recommend Science News. Its a small weekly (about 20 pages) with quick summaries of all the interesting science journals and usually one or two in depth articles.
The Hydrogen would most likely evaporate or burn very quickly. It would probably be less dangerous than gas since it evaporates very quickly and requires a decent concentration to burn at all. It does burn hotter, but gas burns hot enough to kill you so after that point it really doesn't matter. Maybe more damage to infrastructure?
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The ribbon is what finally drove me to OpenOffice. Everyone I show OpenOffice to likes it better than Microsoft Office after about 10 minutes. I have even switched a few businesses and my dad's yacht club to it, which is not exactly a hotbeds of open source activity. Microsoft really is open sources best friend some times. I use Windows XP, 7 and several flavors of Linux. I tend to use a lot of open source even on my Windows boxes, not only is it cheaper it is often better designed and has more features. The only reason I still use windows at home is for games on my main computer and blu-rays on my HTPC.
I'm demanding a missile launcher and a flame thrower attachment.
I am handicapable, of killing you all! (Read in Arnold accent.)
My solution was to sleep through school or read something interesting during class, read the chapter summaries to pass the tests, and study what I wanted when not in school. I was in all honors and AP classes in high school, so its not like I just took the easy classes. That was 20 years ago, so not supporting the kids who are ahead is hardly new.
As for what to do for your kids now, home school or private school. If you can't afford it put some time into getting your child learning opportunities outside of school. A lot of junior colleges now allow enrollment by high school students or have summer programs for high school students. Otherwise it is easy to get discouraged and become despondent or a trouble maker. I know, I did both before figuring out how to deal with the system and finding opportunities outside of public school. I was definitely in the could not afford home or private school category, but I still managed to find opportunities during high school. Because of those opportunities and self learning I paid my own way through college without accruing a bunch of debt. I would say I learned far more outside of school on my own than I ever did in school, but college was worth it for the people I met and the degrees of course.
My wife and I will probably be home schooling our daughter, since economically it is a better value for us than private school and my wife is crazy enough to do it. She has a liberal arts education and I have a masters of software engineering and we are both life long learners, so between the two of us we can provide a good balance. The area we live in has a ton of independent educational resources as well. We are in an area with top rated schools, but even so their primary purpose seems to be daycare not education.
Most of the studies I have seen on it suggest that cell phone conversation is more distracting for two reasons. The one I see in all the studies is the person on the phone does not react to what is going on in the car. So they keep talking even if something dangerous is going where someone in the car will stop and not expect an answer if you are in a situation that requires more attention on your driving. The second one I have seen suggested, but not as often is that your brain requires more "processing power" to talk on a cell phone due to quality of voice and lack of body language. And yes you would think that looking at the person you are talking to would be more dangerous, but your brain and visual system is designed to take in a wide field with only glances to build on. Most accidents are not caused by a vision problem but an attention problem. See Inattentional Blindness. And here is another study on cell phone vs passenger conversation (Sorry PDF).
There is a lot of hate so far, but I could see these being useful. I am definitely not a teenager anymore either, solidly middle-aged family man. I listen to a ridiculously large amount of news, audio books and music on my phone. I also regularly use it for looking things up or getting directions when I am out. I find myself using it more and more for chat (text, google talk, etc) and email, even though I am near a computer almost all the time.
I would hope there is a way to control it with eye movement or something so it could be used silently for most things. For example, pausing what I am listening to is one of the big annoyances with my current phone setup, it would be nice to just look up and blink twice or something to pause the book or music. A do not disturb mode for when I was working on something that required being in the zone would be helpful, but if I am just hanging out I would not mind popups about messages. Calendar popups would be helpful as I have my work calendar synced to my google calendar and am often running from meeting to meeting. I would also want it to be integrated into the glasses I already wear or available with prescription lenses. I am slightly cross-eyed, so I can't use contacts effectively.
There will always be people who are obnoxious with whatever technology they have available, from people with boom boxes in the 80's to the blue tooth yellers of today. So I can't really hold that against the technology.
I too have ridden a motorcycle for more than a decade. I am a pretty mellow motorcycle rider, started because of a long commute and I wanted to use the carpool lane. Given that I have had to dodge to the median, quick stop and accelerate through plenty of situations. Some of the drivers were looking right at me and actively tried to push me out of my lane. It definitely gives you a different view of other drivers. Now even when I drive a car I just assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me.
Mmmm...long pig. Or were you thinking of labeling humans for some other purpose?
I run the standard Ubuntu releases (not the long term support, but not the betas either) on my media center box with an nVidia and I have not had to change a thing in the last several major upgrades. Movies and games both continue to work just fine. I am using the nVidia binaries. I like AMD processors, but have avoided the ATI cards due to previous driver issues. I am glad to hear they are releasing open source drivers and if they don't suck I will have more video cards to look at next time I upgrade.
You take a number which you don't know very well, so you estimate it. Then multiply it by a factor which you really don't know, so you just guess that. Next you multiply the result by another number which you may never know, so you just pull that one out of /dev/random, and multiply them all together.
And wow, you get a result that you like! That's amazing!
So its like project estimations. Probably about as accurate too.
I am not sure what everyone is talking about schools not being tracked already. At least when I went to high school in California there was at least 3 levels, regular classes, honors classes and advanced placement classes. Elementary school had the gate program. I was in the advanced classes all the way through, but there were a few classes that you had to take like Drivers Ed (I know that dates me), Physical Ed and Health, that were mixed. It was actually a rather disturbing experience. It was like being put in a room with wild monkeys. It did give me an appreciation of how the other half lived though.
So I think a tracked system is valuable as it lets people learn at there own pace. If we really wanted to improve our system though we would tailor education not only to level but also learning style. For example I can learn very quickly from a book or doing something, but am awful at auditory learning. I usually read the chapter and then slept through the rest of lecture classes. In college I just skipped the lecture classes and showed up for the tests. By focusing on how each student learns and catering to that they can learn far more quickly regardless of their general intelligence. That is one of the reasons why homeschooling is so much more effective.
This is slashdot. What did you expect? I am lucky enough to have a logical woman, but I still would not get in her way when it comes to our kid. Why are people so upset to think that our only purpose is to serve our genes? I have quite a good time doing it.
Are you implying that windows just works? I am having to search microsoft support on my linux box right now because the stupid Win XP 64 install fails with an unknown error and tells you to look at the log file which helpfully says "Unknown error". Microsoft can bit my shiny metal ass. I have always had more problems installing windows than any version of Linux I have tried.
Well Symantec needs the grant money so they can find bugs to exploit in Linux so they can write viruses for it and sell there antivirus solutions to linux users. I will just wait until the free better updated version comes out from AVG.
"Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler."
What is false about this? The first part of the sentence says that the two theories give the same results. If two theories give the same results, why would you choose the more complex one? That would be dumb.
The only people who do things like that are low level math teachers. That is because they like to make students suffer and don't understand math themselves.
Well you don't need a stargate. You could use a simple incinarator or other death device if your only goal is population elimination. Might be harder to keep the line moving though. :)
I guess you could just use good special effects to make it look like a star gate and vaporize the people. Remind me not to go through the stargate until I see someone I trust go in and come back.
Of course you could also limit birth rates to around 2 children per couple and you would have a steady or declining population also. Many parts of Europe and Japan have declining populations since people are choosing not to have kids or less than 2.
Actually money is usually more important than lives. If not, we would not have all these pesky wars. Its just how much money is a single life worth. Not as much as you would like to think. If corporations could make a profit killing people they would. Oh wait they already do.
On topic, as someone else said Dell will do what makes them the most money. We can just be happy that sometimes what makes a corporation money also makes us happy.
Just to be obstinate they should use Opera.
Where is the list of defenders of American liberties? All you listed was groups trying to take away different liberties. How's this for non-partisan? They are all out to screw you in one way or another get used to it. The best you can do is find politicians that vote closest to your main views. Of course, none of them qualify for me so I just vote against the most heinous.
Just so you know my bias, I am a slightly conservative anarchist (1.5,-5). You can find out your bias at politicalcompass.org. I think it should be a requirement when posting on politics.
If the end is truely nigh, then the best investment is lead or perferably copper on the end of a brass tube filled with explosive powder. I knew there was a reason I always keep a thousand rounds handy for each of my guns. I just got another thousand 9mm and .22 for christmas. :)
So you keep your little pieces of paper that say you own gold somewhere. I will keep my investment in my trunk and closet. We will see which is more useful in a full economic collapse.
PS I think a economic collapse is unlikely, but a correction is comming, so gold is probably not a bad investment, but there are a lot of other investments that are good in a bear market.
PSS Firearms are great stress relief in any economic climate.
You obviously bought a big name DVD player. The $20 one I got at Radio Shack doesn't pay any attention to region encoding or anything else. You can skip the FBI warning, previews and anything else you want. The picture and sound quality are fine on it too. I was a little worried about that when I got it. I can barely use the expensive one I bought several years ago simply because it is so annoying. My patients with electronics goes down every year. Now I just watch TV and Movies on my Linux box where I can do whatever the hell I feel like.
The US has a large prison population to experiment on. If you are opposed to that we can always experiment on terrorists. At least in the US we have handy prisons where they have no rights anyway. If we run out of them we can move on to open source developers since they are obviously communists. Oh, and file sharers.
I just find I get places slower when I am on the phone, since I have to take attention away from constantly scanning for cops. So really I am not paying any less attention to driving, just replacing one task with another. I don't use the phone much in the car though because I feel like I am crawling if I drive the speed limit. See you on the highway (briefly). :)
Much scarier than talking on the cell phone is when I get to work or home and do not remember the drive at all, total autopilot. When I had a two hour commute it was pretty much every day.
I do not know if video games make me a better driver, but I do know video games have made me a much more aggressive driver. I never used to powerslide into oncoming traffic or shoot at cops before playing GTA.
Yeah, but pet cell phones is apparently a hot button issue. We are doomed.
Socialism is so passe. Once I am God Emperor of Earth things will be just peachy.
If you want good no frills science reporting I recommend Science News. Its a small weekly (about 20 pages) with quick summaries of all the interesting science journals and usually one or two in depth articles.
The Hydrogen would most likely evaporate or burn very quickly. It would probably be less dangerous than gas since it evaporates very quickly and requires a decent concentration to burn at all. It does burn hotter, but gas burns hot enough to kill you so after that point it really doesn't matter. Maybe more damage to infrastructure?