Be carefull. We all cheared when Microsoft was being sued. Now that lawyer is representing SCO.
I am and will stay a fan of the PowerPC processor. Motorola might as well tell the world they have given up on it. That leaves IBM and they are really pushing into new territory with it. I think IBM is a good company. This does not mean I trust them.
It is in IBM's best intrest at the moment to support Linux. For a company like IBM 1 billion dollars investment is actually petty change for a next generation OS that actually supports their processors. At the moment this is no longer true they will turn on Linux just like SCO (Caldera).
At least IBM has good engineers. Caldera had a couple and made bad descisions. No tech savey so how do we save our ass - buy a pib in apoke and litigate.
It is unfortunate but the short time span of a University class almost never allows for a project to be really fun. Especially if it involves a larger group of students. I have been a "team lead" on a number of projects all with small teams. This means from 4 to 8 people. Each project was seperate and independant from other projects in the company. As a team lead I expected my engineers to do their part and coordinate with each other. At project start I had an architecture in mind a somewhat mapped out and asked for input from each and every one of the team. This included the most inexperienced. I have often been taken by supprise at where a good idea came from. But you are right of group of more than 2 people needs a leader.
Group larger than 10 people need to have functionality broken up in a black box fashion. I have also worked as architect at this level. Fortunatly at the time I worked for a good company and this was very rewarding. Several of the sub groups had good leaders and I had to resolve a few things that came up. There is always something in a large project that architecture assumptions were just not correct about. There were other sub groups that were total caos and I often had to resolve issues from above. For about 4 weeks one of the team leads could not get along with any of the others and caused a lot of caos.
University is a very strange place. It is the instructors job to try and instill the abitlity to think on the students. At them same time they need to pump lots of just facts into the heads of the students. Many teachers fall flat on this. It is not the job of the administration to do any of this. Most of the administration's job is to process student information. In other words interface between the students and outside society.
This means two things. First they are either polititians or burocrats. And I do mean this in a bad way. In either case they mostly do not care about the students at all. At least in america it is a polititians job to represent his supporters and as a student you do not fall into that catagory. The administrations supporters are the outside government and other companies that either donate money or make them visable in some other way.
The second thing is that in most cases whether a software project has quality or not is often of little bearing in a case. Small companies with a good idea can always try to break through but if they fail then their expenses were their own. In this case I suspect the large company wined and dined people at the university and you obviously did not have the marketing budget to do that.
As for people not caring, probably most of the people you deal with in the adminstration just do their job because they have so many other worries in life and their job is basically uninstesting. They see no reason to put their own emotinal state on the line for anything at work. As a young software engineer I was passinate about doing quality and how my piece of the project worked. As I became more senior I battled for things to get better. This was often difficult with so many marginal engineers in a boom time. While I am still that way it has mellowed off a bit. I do pick and choose my battles these days.
This has happened for two reasons. First last year my daughter was born. With kids your priorities do change. When younger I have made comments about some people who never seemed to be at work because of their kids. I now know a lot more about how a single mother must run their lives. We are lucky enough that my wife can stay home while I go out and work. At the same time I am not at work as much as I used to be. This is negated somewhat by the fact that I take the lap top home at night when need be.
The second is that I recently found myself layed off becuase the company needed to save money by moving work off shore to China and Russia. My experience landed my a new job in less than 2 weeks but it still in today market I still needed to reasses a
I actually see one further problem. One person I worked with a few years ago was ranting at the quality of the Indian programmers he had worked with. I then asked him if the average white american programmer had been any better. The answer was "no".
I have been doing this for over 15 years now. I have very much come to believe a project with a few good engineers takes much less time and has better quality than gang banging it. It is more difficult for management to control the small group than the big. They also loose points for having fewer employees. It looks like their productivity is lower. I have been hearing the whole time that software will become cookie cutter and experienced engineers will not be needed. Managment with business degrees for the most part just plain do not understand the problem.
So most projects are late and over budget. How do you solve the issue? Find cheaper employees. I worked for a software company in Germany (lived near Frankfurt) for 3 years. In reality the software development environment in Europe and America are pretty much the same. A need for engineers have driven their salaries up. I think this is often because companies need to be located in large metropolitan setings close to airports. This drives up housing and other costs. It is much cheaper to go to a place where the people are just happy to have a job.
The real problem is just happy to have a job does not provide the creative environment needed to advance software. It will simply be rehashing the same crap over and over again. Linux does this but in a way that allows creativity and individuality to expands its bounds. Again management just does not get it. They will do this for a few years until they realize it is not working well.
By then it may be too late. Engineering will not pay in Europe and America so people will not study it. Three to four years of lacking new engineers will drop out too large a portion of the work force and it may not be able reestablish back here.
I agree also that Universities are more interested in making money than educating. Welcome to a capitalistic society with no rules. The american government has been bought out by the multi nationals or their own religous beliefs. They do not give a crap about fairness. I do not know what the political situation on Sweden is like but the German magazines I read indicate the same thing is happening to a lesser degree in Germany.
Actually I did take AP english. Then I spent 4 years in the Air Force filling out forms as quickly as possible. Since then I spent 5 years most speaking German and all the time working on Unix and Linux kernel and device driver code. Coding is not the best way to learn to write english. When I need to write I always do it 3 times. The first you have seen is a braid dump. The second organizes it a bit better and the third is english clean up.
However, I will admit you did get screwed. I did take a few classes that required attendance. I mean it is hard for a PE teacher to do something with a student that is not there (I took bowling, fishing and fencing for my 3 credits needed). I had several classes that I went to the first class the scheduled quiz dates and the final and got A's from. As I returned to school at the age of 24 and needed to work to get through I chose my school very carefully to find one that I could work within the rules. The teachers is CS were mostly so-so but there was a lot of computer access. At the time that was more important.
I do think it is incorrect to say the professors imposed rules arbitrarily of they were for ALL students.
I think your situation falls in the same catagory as a good friend of mine. He has a degree in geology. With this degree he is destined to make little more than squat his whole career. When he talked to a guidence counselor (in the geology department of course) he was encouraged to do this if it was what he wanted. They never mentioned the fact that if they could make money they would not be teaching and if they did not get a few students in the program they would not be teaching much longer. This resulted my friend making a bad choice. As for your professors, they all have reputations. I always tried to check out the intructor before to find out what is rep was. This is all part if life. A little more due diligence may have solved this problem for you.
Either I did not present myself clear or something. I intended to say the opposite. Whether is is correct or not, our high schools are mostly a memorization institute. Universities are not intended to be that but often are.
I am trully sorry about your history class in high school. I consider myself exteamly lucky because in the years I was there we had some very very good teachers. by the time my sister entered high school 2 years after I left they were most gone. I gradutated high school 25 years ago and at that time a lot of the teachers I saw were lazy imbittered old fools. I just got luck and did not have to deal with any of them except one math teacher. Good thing math was interesting to me at the time and I did the work on my own anyway.
As I said I took pretty much only advanced courses so I managed to avoid most of the really bad teachers. The one class I found teadious was physics. The teacher was excellent. The problem was there was 2 chearleaders in the class that needed a science credit to graduate and this was the only class and time that fit their schedule. Mr. Harvey actually threw me out of class one day when after two days of trying to get them to understand a concept I asked if he would go on because the bimbos would never understand it anyway.
I actually went back to school and started college at 24. I was motivated to get every CS class I could and graduate with enough knowlege to actually get a job that would pay and I could enjoy a bit. I took only the minimum of other classes to graduate. If I had it to do again I would have taken other things also. Since then I have come to beleive that everybody should speak at least a second language fluently. You tend to understand others a little better when you can listen in their native language.
I too was a bit lazy with papers and presentations. I also did not enjoy the english classes. As a child with an Air Force father we moved a lot and my dialect changed every year for a long time. I think I go buned out a big by that. I do not think it would be as big a problem today. The american language is being unified a lot around the country by the younger generation. I do wish now my english and writing skills were better and I think I should have had better basics in school. Probably actually predating high school.
I think you have also touched on the biggest problem with our schools. Teachers are underpaid, a bit (and only a bit) overworked and usually very little though goes into the makeup of a class. With the AP classes a lot of that fell away. They were generally atterned by students who wanted to be there. I do not think this is only the teachers fault. Most teachers are teachers because they originally wanted to help students grow in life. This gets burned out by students who are lazy, arrogant and bored; by parents who just want someplace to deposite their kids for a few hours on the governments money; and my a society in general that places no value on creativity.
There is many ways the school system could be changed to work much better. I do not think this will happen for several reasons. First, despite what is stated on job adds most employers just want somebody who will show up, do the little thing they are highered for and take the blame if it fails. One of the exceptions to this has been the high tech market but now that engineers have become somewhat well paid this work is being shipped more and more offshore to sweat shops. The old if a project needs five $150,000 engineers to complete in 6 months then surely 25 $10,000 engineers can do it in the same amount of time. This brings up the second reason. For 25 years you needed at least a high school education to get any kind of good job. Now you need at least a college education to get (in reality) the same job. Do the students learn more today? I little but not much, a college education costs a great deal more today for a student and actually has less value. Going to college no longer makes you s
There are a number of reasons why attendence rules are different in high school and university. Most of them have to do with age and the average responsibility of people at that age. I took moslty AP classes in high school and was very board in those that were not at that level.
Like some of the other posts stated, high school is not just a "facts" learning enviroment and college is intended to be that. By the time you are in college you are expected to know how to act in society. In high school you are just learning who to do that.
Technically you are not a citizen until you are 18 years old. Until that point your parents and society are expected to make life decissions for you. In high school if you do not attend it should also be considered your parents fault as they are probably failing in there task to help you integrate into society. In college you are now a citizen and are expected to think for yourself.
It's a big transition from 17 to 18 and becoming a citizen. Go out and vote.
It took me a minute to figure out who Vauxhall is. I think you will find what you read is misleading to an american. You need to realize first that the Vauxhall line in England is like the Opal line in Germany. They are GM affiliates and often carry a lot of baggage from that affiliation.
Second is that in Europe most of the prices you see also include the sales tax which is alot more all over Europe than it is here.
Diesel is popular in Europe for several reasons. It turns out a motor can be built to get better milage than a standard gasoline more. Couple that with the fact that diesel, with a properly designed more, generates less polution and is generally cheaper.
In Germany I drove a German Ford Fiesta for 3 years. It performed better that the american version and got somewhat better gas milage. That is until I got in the habit of driveing to work on the Autobahn at over 100 mph.
I am currently shopping in California for a new care and I believe I am going to buy a VW Jetta or Passat with the TDI diesel motor. They are supposed to get over 35 mpg. A friend says he gets better than 41 mpg with his mostly long distance driving on the free ways (90 miles each way to work).
If and when I find another job in Germany I suspect will buy a VW Passat wagon and a Smart convertible for the family.
You are anonymous and you are a coward but you are not intellegent.
"We" did not conquer France, we helped the French liberate it. "We" did not single handedly conquer Italy. "We" did not single handedly conquer Germany. The reality is the harsh Russian winter had more to do with it than any thing else.
Why is it that cars from all other countries than ours get better gas milage? Why is it that american cars do NOT sell in other countries. Because they do not have their governemnt and military subsidizing oil.
If sunny countries could provide energy for the rest of the world, Bush would direct the military to take them over and string up sun nets across the country so his friends could continue to sell thier oil to suckers like you.
What can you expect fromt he "ass-clown" in office now.
1. Higher national debt
2. Loss of American lives
3. Loss of American jobs
4. More corperate greed
but O.K. theres a bright side he has eliminated major terrorist leaders. Oh yea, he hasn't done that either. And man has his team found a butt load of WMDs. Get off the republican bull shit line. The only reason he will win again is because the Demos are even more corrupt and screwed up.
Actually the NSA should assume software developers in China are working with the government. If the Chinese government tells them to do something they will do it for fear of their own lives.
This is not to say the chinese is going to do this willy nilly. They are more sophisticated than that. They are, however, by definition a hostil nation.
I think there are bigger issues to this. The US government should also be ensuring the systems they need at least can be produced in the US. If we keep sending critical projects out of the country at some time this will not be true.
Don't give me the crap about that will never happen. At this moment with our economy what is the encentive for students to major in EE or CS? Will they have jobs? Will the industry miss a critical set of knowlege it will not be able to recover. Before you say anything, can we at this moment effectively design a better space shuttle before retraining engineers to do so?
I've slowed down on buying CDs in the last few years. I have most of the old stuff I want and don't care for most of the new stuff out. I still know of a couple of CD stores that let you sample a CD in the store before you buy it.
In the past my freinds and I would also share the responsibility of new records (this dates me). We would take turns buying. If that person did not like it, but one of the others did then it would swap hands. If all parties liked it then changes were it would be purchased by all of us. If it was really terrible we could usually get at least half the money back at a used record / CD store.
Botton line is this was all legal. What you are doing is not legal. Wether you like it or not the record companies have the right to set the rules on how their copyrighted materials are sold. In the end you are doing the right thing. Don't buy their CDs. In fact if nobody bought their CDs the problem would solve itself pretty fast. As the consumer you always have the final say.
As cheap as it is to produce a CD these days I have no idea why a group would sign with a record label. I do not believe the amount of marketing the group recieves is even close to the amount of many the record companies hold.
There are also those working on Linux for hardware vendors and those doing some product on top to Linux that either needs some functionality in the kernel or some particular bug fixed.
And a few very lucky people who are actually getting paid to create GPLed software.
Osama, is he still out there? Well Bush thinks it doesn't matter. By now he probably also thinks it doesn't matter if we have Sadam or not. Next stop Iran, everybody exit.
Been a while since I've been called a nitwit. Not even the nitwits on slashdot have had this effect on me before.
I do not believe in my post I said anything about a stinger. That is more than a bit far fetched. Yes the engineers know the process produces a protein and yes produces unforeseen results. That was my point after all. How this new gene reacts with some natural fish is not yet tested.
These days our software gets beat up by customers if it has problems yet software almost always has some unforeseen problem. It is bad enough then we loose business. If a genetic "bug" gets out and has bad unforeseen problems the result will be much worse. It does not have to grow a stinger. It simply has to cause a glitch in the ecology of an area.
Whatever, humans are the biggest glitch ever prodcued. We might as well keep our record up.
American, Canadian or whatever the ability to patent a "living" organism is just plain wrong. It is far too easy to for the changes to get free. After all these products will sold outside the labratory.
There have been a few references to Jurasic Park on this list. While I liked the movie, as often stated here, its premiss was a bit far fetched. But, as the movie brought out with the reptilian DNA, the full consequences of gene manipulation are far from understood.
The fish are supposedly 90% sterial. When at over 40 my wife and I decided to have a child we were told we had a 5% chance of it occuring at all. A month later we were really suprised. 10% this playing with some pretty bad juju for nature.
My point was you cannot know and control this. Large corps playing god are going to cause harm. The question to be mulled over by society is "will the little improvements have been worth it when the big disaster occurs".
I see two distinct problems with this "product". And it is a product to be sold and controled by its patent holder.
Genetically modifed creatures such as this fish are not likely to get any real quaranteen time. The real impact on the customer, nature and society in general will not be know. Remember ther falitiimide (Phalitdamide? damned if I know how it is spelled) problems of the 60s. They also thought they had a good idea. These things need to be tested, tested and then quaranteened for a long period of time.
The second problem is the ownership problem. In the past plants and animals have been cross bred to produce new versions that show particular combinations of traits. Whether animal or plant this has usually occured from the effort of groups of people to improve their lives. No one person / organization owned a "patent" on an imported type of organism.
Behold Monsantos gene modifications (I have forgotten if it is corn or wheat or whatever). A believe the news article said some plans from the Monsanto seed were found in a ditch outside his fields. Monsanto has sucessfully stoped home from planting his own seed because it may now contain some of their patented genes. This farmer had spent decades breeding the crop he wanted and boom he lost all rights to it because another farmer did not control his planting well enough.
Until we have government (politicians) that is no longer by the multinationals, of the multinationals and for the multinationals this problem cannot be solved. Regulation for the protection of the public is one of the real responsibilites of the government.
In either of the two cases outlined above, the financial concerns of the corperations doing the gene modifications will always try to get them out to the public before the consiquences on society and nature are understood even at miniumal level.
I do not believe for a second that the bio engineer that is splicing in the gene "well understands" the effect it will have. The scientist in the article was, after all, suprised that the whole fish glowed.
Compared to what these guys are doing the complexity of an operating computer is but a drop in the bucket. These guys are literally doing things to see what will happend.
What about the recent story of the Canadian farmer. He had modified seeds of some kind blow into his field and mix genetically with his seeds for the next year. Mansanto has sucessfully sued him to stop hime from using their patented genes and he how has no farm left.
This same kind of thing could happen with fish or whatever. Some fish that is not as steril as thought breeds with another unmodified fish and a kid gives one of the offsping to a friend. If this goes a bit further then the owner of the patent will be forced to defend it and sue all the kids. Or maybe their parents because they should have known better.
It should not be posible to patent anything related to life and its genetic makeup. I think the farmer should have sued Monsanto for providing a substance that corrupted the years of plant breeding he had done to get the crop just as he wanted it.
Silly me. The farmer could not afford enought lawyers to darken the skies. American justice at its best.
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Be carefull. We all cheared when Microsoft was being sued. Now that lawyer is representing SCO.
I am and will stay a fan of the PowerPC processor. Motorola might as well tell the world they have given up on it. That leaves IBM and they are really pushing into new territory with it. I think IBM is a good company. This does not mean I trust them.
It is in IBM's best intrest at the moment to support Linux. For a company like IBM 1 billion dollars investment is actually petty change for a next generation OS that actually supports their processors. At the moment this is no longer true they will turn on Linux just like SCO (Caldera).
At least IBM has good engineers. Caldera had a couple and made bad descisions. No tech savey so how do we save our ass - buy a pib in apoke and litigate.
As far as I can see money always wins. In some cases the supplier of money has morals. We can only hope the techies supplying money have the morals.
It is unfortunate but the short time span of a University class almost never allows for a project to be really fun. Especially if it involves a larger group of students. I have been a "team lead" on a number of projects all with small teams. This means from 4 to 8 people. Each project was seperate and independant from other projects in the company. As a team lead I expected my engineers to do their part and coordinate with each other. At project start I had an architecture in mind a somewhat mapped out and asked for input from each and every one of the team. This included the most inexperienced. I have often been taken by supprise at where a good idea came from. But you are right of group of more than 2 people needs a leader.
Group larger than 10 people need to have functionality broken up in a black box fashion. I have also worked as architect at this level. Fortunatly at the time I worked for a good company and this was very rewarding. Several of the sub groups had good leaders and I had to resolve a few things that came up. There is always something in a large project that architecture assumptions were just not correct about. There were other sub groups that were total caos and I often had to resolve issues from above. For about 4 weeks one of the team leads could not get along with any of the others and caused a lot of caos.
University is a very strange place. It is the instructors job to try and instill the abitlity to think on the students. At them same time they need to pump lots of just facts into the heads of the students. Many teachers fall flat on this. It is not the job of the administration to do any of this. Most of the administration's job is to process student information. In other words interface between the students and outside society.
This means two things. First they are either polititians or burocrats. And I do mean this in a bad way. In either case they mostly do not care about the students at all. At least in america it is a polititians job to represent his supporters and as a student you do not fall into that catagory. The administrations supporters are the outside government and other companies that either donate money or make them visable in some other way.
The second thing is that in most cases whether a software project has quality or not is often of little bearing in a case. Small companies with a good idea can always try to break through but if they fail then their expenses were their own. In this case I suspect the large company wined and dined people at the university and you obviously did not have the marketing budget to do that.
As for people not caring, probably most of the people you deal with in the adminstration just do their job because they have so many other worries in life and their job is basically uninstesting. They see no reason to put their own emotinal state on the line for anything at work. As a young software engineer I was passinate about doing quality and how my piece of the project worked. As I became more senior I battled for things to get better. This was often difficult with so many marginal engineers in a boom time. While I am still that way it has mellowed off a bit. I do pick and choose my battles these days.
This has happened for two reasons. First last year my daughter was born. With kids your priorities do change. When younger I have made comments about some people who never seemed to be at work because of their kids. I now know a lot more about how a single mother must run their lives. We are lucky enough that my wife can stay home while I go out and work. At the same time I am not at work as much as I used to be. This is negated somewhat by the fact that I take the lap top home at night when need be.
The second is that I recently found myself layed off becuase the company needed to save money by moving work off shore to China and Russia. My experience landed my a new job in less than 2 weeks but it still in today market I still needed to reasses a
I actually see one further problem. One person I worked with a few years ago was ranting at the quality of the Indian programmers he had worked with. I then asked him if the average white american programmer had been any better. The answer was "no".
I have been doing this for over 15 years now. I have very much come to believe a project with a few good engineers takes much less time and has better quality than gang banging it. It is more difficult for management to control the small group than the big. They also loose points for having fewer employees. It looks like their productivity is lower. I have been hearing the whole time that software will become cookie cutter and experienced engineers will not be needed. Managment with business degrees for the most part just plain do not understand the problem.
So most projects are late and over budget. How do you solve the issue? Find cheaper employees. I worked for a software company in Germany (lived near Frankfurt) for 3 years. In reality the software development environment in Europe and America are pretty much the same. A need for engineers have driven their salaries up. I think this is often because companies need to be located in large metropolitan setings close to airports. This drives up housing and other costs. It is much cheaper to go to a place where the people are just happy to have a job.
The real problem is just happy to have a job does not provide the creative environment needed to advance software. It will simply be rehashing the same crap over and over again. Linux does this but in a way that allows creativity and individuality to expands its bounds. Again management just does not get it. They will do this for a few years until they realize it is not working well.
By then it may be too late. Engineering will not pay in Europe and America so people will not study it. Three to four years of lacking new engineers will drop out too large a portion of the work force and it may not be able reestablish back here.
I agree also that Universities are more interested in making money than educating. Welcome to a capitalistic society with no rules. The american government has been bought out by the multi nationals or their own religous beliefs. They do not give a crap about fairness. I do not know what the political situation on Sweden is like but the German magazines I read indicate the same thing is happening to a lesser degree in Germany.
Actually I did take AP english. Then I spent 4 years in the Air Force filling out forms as quickly as possible. Since then I spent 5 years most speaking German and all the time working on Unix and Linux kernel and device driver code. Coding is not the best way to learn to write english. When I need to write I always do it 3 times. The first you have seen is a braid dump. The second organizes it a bit better and the third is english clean up.
However, I will admit you did get screwed. I did take a few classes that required attendance. I mean it is hard for a PE teacher to do something with a student that is not there (I took bowling, fishing and fencing for my 3 credits needed). I had several classes that I went to the first class the scheduled quiz dates and the final and got A's from. As I returned to school at the age of 24 and needed to work to get through I chose my school very carefully to find one that I could work within the rules. The teachers is CS were mostly so-so but there was a lot of computer access. At the time that was more important.
I do think it is incorrect to say the professors imposed rules arbitrarily of they were for ALL students.
I think your situation falls in the same catagory as a good friend of mine. He has a degree in geology. With this degree he is destined to make little more than squat his whole career. When he talked to a guidence counselor (in the geology department of course) he was encouraged to do this if it was what he wanted. They never mentioned the fact that if they could make money they would not be teaching and if they did not get a few students in the program they would not be teaching much longer. This resulted my friend making a bad choice. As for your professors, they all have reputations. I always tried to check out the intructor before to find out what is rep was. This is all part if life. A little more due diligence may have solved this problem for you.
Either I did not present myself clear or something. I intended to say the opposite. Whether is is correct or not, our high schools are mostly a memorization institute. Universities are not intended to be that but often are.
I am trully sorry about your history class in high school. I consider myself exteamly lucky because in the years I was there we had some very very good teachers. by the time my sister entered high school 2 years after I left they were most gone. I gradutated high school 25 years ago and at that time a lot of the teachers I saw were lazy imbittered old fools. I just got luck and did not have to deal with any of them except one math teacher. Good thing math was interesting to me at the time and I did the work on my own anyway.
As I said I took pretty much only advanced courses so I managed to avoid most of the really bad teachers. The one class I found teadious was physics. The teacher was excellent. The problem was there was 2 chearleaders in the class that needed a science credit to graduate and this was the only class and time that fit their schedule. Mr. Harvey actually threw me out of class one day when after two days of trying to get them to understand a concept I asked if he would go on because the bimbos would never understand it anyway.
I actually went back to school and started college at 24. I was motivated to get every CS class I could and graduate with enough knowlege to actually get a job that would pay and I could enjoy a bit. I took only the minimum of other classes to graduate. If I had it to do again I would have taken other things also. Since then I have come to beleive that everybody should speak at least a second language fluently. You tend to understand others a little better when you can listen in their native language.
I too was a bit lazy with papers and presentations. I also did not enjoy the english classes. As a child with an Air Force father we moved a lot and my dialect changed every year for a long time. I think I go buned out a big by that. I do not think it would be as big a problem today. The american language is being unified a lot around the country by the younger generation. I do wish now my english and writing skills were better and I think I should have had better basics in school. Probably actually predating high school.
I think you have also touched on the biggest problem with our schools. Teachers are underpaid, a bit (and only a bit) overworked and usually very little though goes into the makeup of a class. With the AP classes a lot of that fell away. They were generally atterned by students who wanted to be there. I do not think this is only the teachers fault. Most teachers are teachers because they originally wanted to help students grow in life. This gets burned out by students who are lazy, arrogant and bored; by parents who just want someplace to deposite their kids for a few hours on the governments money; and my a society in general that places no value on creativity.
There is many ways the school system could be changed to work much better. I do not think this will happen for several reasons. First, despite what is stated on job adds most employers just want somebody who will show up, do the little thing they are highered for and take the blame if it fails. One of the exceptions to this has been the high tech market but now that engineers have become somewhat well paid this work is being shipped more and more offshore to sweat shops. The old if a project needs five $150,000 engineers to complete in 6 months then surely 25 $10,000 engineers can do it in the same amount of time. This brings up the second reason. For 25 years you needed at least a high school education to get any kind of good job. Now you need at least a college education to get (in reality) the same job. Do the students learn more today? I little but not much, a college education costs a great deal more today for a student and actually has less value. Going to college no longer makes you s
There are a number of reasons why attendence rules are different in high school and university. Most of them have to do with age and the average responsibility of people at that age. I took moslty AP classes in high school and was very board in those that were not at that level.
Like some of the other posts stated, high school is not just a "facts" learning enviroment and college is intended to be that. By the time you are in college you are expected to know how to act in society. In high school you are just learning who to do that.
Technically you are not a citizen until you are 18 years old. Until that point your parents and society are expected to make life decissions for you. In high school if you do not attend it should also be considered your parents fault as they are probably failing in there task to help you integrate into society. In college you are now a citizen and are expected to think for yourself.
It's a big transition from 17 to 18 and becoming a citizen. Go out and vote.
I do not know if I actually typed it wrong or if something got eaten but substitute more with motor in several locations above.
It took me a minute to figure out who Vauxhall is. I think you will find what you read is misleading to an american. You need to realize first that the Vauxhall line in England is like the Opal line in Germany. They are GM affiliates and often carry a lot of baggage from that affiliation.
Second is that in Europe most of the prices you see also include the sales tax which is alot more all over Europe than it is here.
Diesel is popular in Europe for several reasons. It turns out a motor can be built to get better milage than a standard gasoline more. Couple that with the fact that diesel, with a properly designed more, generates less polution and is generally cheaper.
In Germany I drove a German Ford Fiesta for 3 years. It performed better that the american version and got somewhat better gas milage. That is until I got in the habit of driveing to work on the Autobahn at over 100 mph.
I am currently shopping in California for a new care and I believe I am going to buy a VW Jetta or Passat with the TDI diesel motor. They are supposed to get over 35 mpg. A friend says he gets better than 41 mpg with his mostly long distance driving on the free ways (90 miles each way to work).
If and when I find another job in Germany I suspect will buy a VW Passat wagon and a Smart convertible for the family.
You are anonymous and you are a coward but you are not intellegent.
"We" did not conquer France, we helped the French liberate it. "We" did not single handedly conquer Italy. "We" did not single handedly conquer Germany. The reality is the harsh Russian winter had more to do with it than any thing else.
Why is it that cars from all other countries than ours get better gas milage? Why is it that american cars do NOT sell in other countries. Because they do not have their governemnt and military subsidizing oil.
If sunny countries could provide energy for the rest of the world, Bush would direct the military to take them over and string up sun nets across the country so his friends could continue to sell thier oil to suckers like you.
What can you expect fromt he "ass-clown" in office now.
1. Higher national debt
2. Loss of American lives
3. Loss of American jobs
4. More corperate greed
but O.K. theres a bright side he has eliminated major terrorist leaders. Oh yea, he hasn't done that either. And man has his team found a butt load of WMDs. Get off the republican bull shit line. The only reason he will win again is because the Demos are even more corrupt and screwed up.
Let's face it out government is selling us out.
Actually the NSA should assume software developers in China are working with the government. If the Chinese government tells them to do something they will do it for fear of their own lives.
This is not to say the chinese is going to do this willy nilly. They are more sophisticated than that. They are, however, by definition a hostil nation.
I think there are bigger issues to this. The US government should also be ensuring the systems they need at least can be produced in the US. If we keep sending critical projects out of the country at some time this will not be true.
Don't give me the crap about that will never happen. At this moment with our economy what is the encentive for students to major in EE or CS? Will they have jobs? Will the industry miss a critical set of knowlege it will not be able to recover. Before you say anything, can we at this moment effectively design a better space shuttle before retraining engineers to do so?
I've slowed down on buying CDs in the last few years. I have most of the old stuff I want and don't care for most of the new stuff out. I still know of a couple of CD stores that let you sample a CD in the store before you buy it.
In the past my freinds and I would also share the responsibility of new records (this dates me). We would take turns buying. If that person did not like it, but one of the others did then it would swap hands. If all parties liked it then changes were it would be purchased by all of us. If it was really terrible we could usually get at least half the money back at a used record / CD store.
Botton line is this was all legal. What you are doing is not legal. Wether you like it or not the record companies have the right to set the rules on how their copyrighted materials are sold. In the end you are doing the right thing. Don't buy their CDs. In fact if nobody bought their CDs the problem would solve itself pretty fast. As the consumer you always have the final say.
As cheap as it is to produce a CD these days I have no idea why a group would sign with a record label. I do not believe the amount of marketing the group recieves is even close to the amount of many the record companies hold.
There are also those working on Linux for hardware vendors and those doing some product on top to Linux that either needs some functionality in the kernel or some particular bug fixed.
And a few very lucky people who are actually getting paid to create GPLed software.
Osama, is he still out there? Well Bush thinks it doesn't matter. By now he probably also thinks it doesn't matter if we have Sadam or not. Next stop Iran, everybody exit.
Canadian, American it does not matter. Monsanto is an american corperation and the stupid NAFTA kicks in.
Read some of my other posts here. I do not post as anonymous coward.
Been a while since I've been called a nitwit. Not even the nitwits on slashdot have had this effect on me before.
I do not believe in my post I said anything about a stinger. That is more than a bit far fetched. Yes the engineers know the process produces a protein and yes produces unforeseen results. That was my point after all. How this new gene reacts with some natural fish is not yet tested.
These days our software gets beat up by customers if it has problems yet software almost always has some unforeseen problem. It is bad enough then we loose business. If a genetic "bug" gets out and has bad unforeseen problems the result will be much worse. It does not have to grow a stinger. It simply has to cause a glitch in the ecology of an area.
Whatever, humans are the biggest glitch ever prodcued. We might as well keep our record up.
American, Canadian or whatever the ability to patent a "living" organism is just plain wrong. It is far too easy to for the changes to get free. After all these products will sold outside the labratory.
There have been a few references to Jurasic Park on this list. While I liked the movie, as often stated here, its premiss was a bit far fetched. But, as the movie brought out with the reptilian DNA, the full consequences of gene manipulation are far from understood.
The fish are supposedly 90% sterial. When at over 40 my wife and I decided to have a child we were told we had a 5% chance of it occuring at all. A month later we were really suprised. 10% this playing with some pretty bad juju for nature.
My point was you cannot know and control this. Large corps playing god are going to cause harm. The question to be mulled over by society is "will the little improvements have been worth it when the big disaster occurs".
No!
I see two distinct problems with this "product". And it is a product to be sold and controled by its patent holder.
Genetically modifed creatures such as this fish are not likely to get any real quaranteen time. The real impact on the customer, nature and society in general will not be know. Remember ther falitiimide (Phalitdamide? damned if I know how it is spelled) problems of the 60s. They also thought they had a good idea. These things need to be tested, tested and then quaranteened for a long period of time.
The second problem is the ownership problem. In the past plants and animals have been cross bred to produce new versions that show particular combinations of traits. Whether animal or plant this has usually occured from the effort of groups of people to improve their lives. No one person / organization owned a "patent" on an imported type of organism.
Behold Monsantos gene modifications (I have forgotten if it is corn or wheat or whatever). A believe the news article said some plans from the Monsanto seed were found in a ditch outside his fields. Monsanto has sucessfully stoped home from planting his own seed because it may now contain some of their patented genes. This farmer had spent decades breeding the crop he wanted and boom he lost all rights to it because another farmer did not control his planting well enough.
Until we have government (politicians) that is no longer by the multinationals, of the multinationals and for the multinationals this problem cannot be solved. Regulation for the protection of the public is one of the real responsibilites of the government.
In either of the two cases outlined above, the financial concerns of the corperations doing the gene modifications will always try to get them out to the public before the consiquences on society and nature are understood even at miniumal level.
Grass? Did you say grass? Hope the feds aren't listening. What about some of the properties of the other "grass".
Kind of like "the other white meat" commercials.
I do not believe for a second that the bio engineer that is splicing in the gene "well understands" the effect it will have. The scientist in the article was, after all, suprised that the whole fish glowed.
Compared to what these guys are doing the complexity of an operating computer is but a drop in the bucket. These guys are literally doing things to see what will happend.
What about the recent story of the Canadian farmer. He had modified seeds of some kind blow into his field and mix genetically with his seeds for the next year. Mansanto has sucessfully sued him to stop hime from using their patented genes and he how has no farm left.
This same kind of thing could happen with fish or whatever. Some fish that is not as steril as thought breeds with another unmodified fish and a kid gives one of the offsping to a friend. If this goes a bit further then the owner of the patent will be forced to defend it and sue all the kids. Or maybe their parents because they should have known better.
It should not be posible to patent anything related to life and its genetic makeup. I think the farmer should have sued Monsanto for providing a substance that corrupted the years of plant breeding he had done to get the crop just as he wanted it.
Silly me. The farmer could not afford enought lawyers to darken the skies. American justice at its best.
Get everybody in Utah to vote him out of office.