I think it's considered a competition in some respects because it is one: a competition for time. An NEA study that came out a few months ago showed reading for pleasure was decreasing substantially, especially among the youngest americans. There are more things to do than once there were, and books tend to lose out in the shuffle.
Don't get me wrong- I think that both can have their place, and have been both an avid reader and an avid gamer. But we are far from understanding what the balance between reading and gaming ought to be, and even farther from implementing it.
> Churchill Schmurchill, Schwartz is a technology mischief-maker not a technology statesmen.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Churchill would protest if he were not at times characterized as both. =)
He is the man "And you madame, are ugly," fame, after all, and the statesman who tried to get a ride across the channel with the first troops. (Before the king showed up and told him if Churchill went, he'd go too.)
Re:Was The Game Show Rigged To Get Ratings?
on
Adieu to Ken Jennings
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Buzzer system rigging is the only real way to do it, and while I doubt it, he was still dang good even if it was rigged. Also, he needn't be aware of it. But I rather suspect it wasn't rigged.
It's not just graduation rates; it's also tuition. Granted it's not the lifeblood of govenment, but it is pretty critical these days. Tuition has gone up tremendously in the last thirty years- not so long ago, the most expensive colleges cost a few thousand dollars a year. Now we're talking fifty thousand. It's grown well beyond the rate of inflation and is one of the major problems that faces the US.
The vast majority of this data is already available to the government anyway, because of the FAFSA. (Federal Application For Student Aid.)
The main practical differences? (a) The very rich aren't exempt from government tracking of this data, and (b) It might be possible for law enforcement to circumvent certain federal regulations involving a school's disclosure of personal financial information. However, I'd imagine they can already do this...
Which would you rather have... a society of hyperintelligent cockroaches... or a society of hyperintelligent cockroaches with a massive army of really really dumb cockroaches listening to their propoganda?
Actually, one of the reasons that nuclear plants have been slow to proliferate in the US is precisely because of not looking the other way for Mr. Burns. The incredible safety regulations that the US imposes makes them exceedingly expensive and very safe. It takes power companies decades to earn back the capital involved in building them, though. If I recall correctly, you get more radiation from smoking a few cigarettes than the average person who was evacuated from three mile island did.
They're both wrong six ways from sunday. It's which six ways that matter. In the debate, Bush admitted a mistake in some of his appointments. He also admitted to mistakes in his youth during the last election. He saw the last question of the town hall debate as an attack of his handling of the war, which it may or may not have been intended as. He'd have been better to fall back on his "it's going to be hard work" mantra, making it "it's been hard work, but we're working," but he didn't.
Both candidates make mistakes up there, and both candidates color what they say at least a little bit to curry favor with the electorate.
Ack. I suppose the bigger thing is, as one of the earlier posters on this topic said, there are far more important things in the election rubicon than copyright law, at least for most of us. The issue that's going to come up is dealing with either administration on it, not letting their stated platform on copyright have any more than a negligible influence on our vote. Health Care, Foreign Policy, ABM development, Social Security, take your pick.
Are you serious? Kerry said he's opening to examining an issue. The statement means very little. A clear statement of his receptiveness? He's courting voters, of course he's going to make clear statements of his receptiveness. That doesn't mean he's receptive, it means he wants votes.
If you extend an array of one million monkeys, each of which has only a hexidecimal pad to input machine code, eventually you can build up all of software, AND Hamlet. (Or at least the part of hamlet that only uses letters a-f.)
Was number one in the rankings a few years ago, and since has dropped below the top 25. Taking a quick look, though, it seems like the data that at least some of the Forbes Data is wrong.
"Wireless network" should probably not be checked, at least unless there were major upgrades over the summer (which, I'll admit, is possible. But a little bit in the science and computing buildings doesn't count.)
Students obviously can access email away from school, via webmail or ssh.
The school does provide web pages- both via WSO, and colrain (although the default directories no longer have public_html in them, I think,
so you have to know that.)
-
It also seems like the inclusion of usenet servers here is a bit antiquated. It's not quite as bad as saying "has a gopher server," it also doesn't really seem indicative of a wired campus, so to speak. More interesting would be IP's per student. Do they have direct connections, or is everything routed through a proxy server of some kind? Some schools are almost completely open, others barely let anything other than web traffic through their gateways.
I heard an anecdote about RPI's wireless coverage at some point. My understanding is that they were very pro-wireless for a while, making big news about being the first all-wireless network, etc...
Except for one prof who could never get wireless to work. They spent forever on it. They'd test the signal in the room, and it would be strong. They'd get it working, and then it would cut out, seemingly randomly. They couldn't figure it out at all, until one day someone noticed a huge metal chalkboard on wheels in the next room... it turns out it interfered with the signal when it was in certain positions...
I had a graphics program I had written that inverted color channels every once in a while for no reason I could identify- specifically, red and blue would get swapped, green would stay the same. The problem eventually turned out to be with the following function call:
foreach(pixel) {
putpixel(x,y,arr[n++],arr[n++],arr[n++]);
}
arr was an array with r,g,b data for all of the pixels on the screen. As you may have guessed by now, for each iteration through the for statement, because the compiler pushed function parameters onto the stack in reverse order, the final arr[n++] was evaluated before the first one, so r,g,b were pushed on by the caller and r,g,b was popped in the callee, swapping r and b.
The bugs I love (and sometimes hate) are the ones that make you think a bit about what's actually happening. The other ones that come to mind are having a C++ function of a non-instantiated class work without complaint (it was a small method that turned out not to rely on any data in the class, so it didn't matter that the this pointer was filled with garbage), and a story I recall about someone having a problem in an old Fortran program where they had set 4 equal to 2 at some point in the program, and every 4 after that was interpreted as a 2...
In the beginning there was the fighter, and he was without wisdom and void of intellect. So he was named sponge. And there was evening and there was morning, the first character.
Sometimes it's about style, too. Clancy's not the best example, (not that he's not a fun read,) but If the New York Times really worked on their cadences, maybe churned it out in iambic pentameter... =)
> if the novels lacked such exaggerated drama, it would suffice to read the New York Times, and not Tom Clancy.
Throughout history, there have been divergences between that which is popular and that which is good. The Lord of the Rings is one of those truly rare works that has bridged that gap. Historically it has had many critics. Most of those seem to be people that respond to it as part of a genre they don't understand or believe in, as opposed to legitimate literary criticism. It also gets criticism to the effect of "I can't get through it." I still remember my AP English teacher, years ago, telling the class he couldn't get through the Hobbit. Ouch. It's a shame, really, that such a world is not truly accessible to all. There are the movies, of course, but they're not the same thing. There's an inherent beauty to the language that Tolkien understood and crafted. It's the kind of thing that makes the NEA report on decreasing reading for pleasure among Americans such a concern. There are whole worlds that begin to dissappear.
So, let me get this straight... with AT&T being one of the most frequent to violate the do-not-call list, they are no longer seeking to provide residential service? Isn't that sort of like biting the hand that you annoy the hell out of? I assume it was just no longer profitable, but the interesting thing is that not only will it save AT&T money, it will save everbody else money and time, until they figure out something new to call and bother us about.
Not necessarily that surprising when you think about it, for a variety of reasons. Macs dominate a much smaller sector of the market, and they are generally more expensive. So the people that buy them are more likely to be in higher income brackets, are more likely to have had more schooling, etc... Now this obviously isn't always true- just a correlation. Also, mac's are usually shinier.
It's not just a question of blockbusters, though- there's something to be said for trying to make good movies instead of popular movies. Not something the studios are so interested in, maybe, but worth the time nonetheless. Art and money are not the same thing- and that's doubly so for good art. They don't have to be disjoint, mind- but things like spellbound, or The Girl with the pearl earring, are never going to be blockbusters- but that doesn't mean they're not worth watching.
I was in the SQL database for the student facebook at college. It's basically just a student directory for student use, with additional info like dating status, personal hobbies or interests, copies of unix plans and projects, etc...
And I decided to update my interests while I was in there... without thinking, I left out the where clause... and suddenly all two thousand students have the same interests. My interests. Normally this would be a good thing, but sadly, I felt the need to find backups...
I was working at a camp one summer a few years ago and had my machine in the nature lodge I was running. One day the machine wouldn't boot up, so I tore her apart and watched two mice run out the expansion slots in the back. Cleaned it out and added duct tape to it, only to find them nesting *inside* the speakers a week later. I wonder what kind of music they liked, because they sure heard a lot of it.
Incidentally, the same summer, there was a leak in a roof hidden by a beam up there. The water ran down the inside of the beam to over the counter at the edge of the building, then rained onto my keyboard, which I found out one day when it didn't work. At this point I was in the middle of nowhere, with no usable keyboard and no way to get one for a few days. I pulled the keyboard apart, found a little control board with about thirty contacts on it, and started playing with a paperclip to figure out which combinations activated which letters. Before long I figured out how to enter my username and password, and just used the mouse for everything else, until I got a new keyboard. It wasn't connected to the net at the time, so this wasn't as much of a pain as it seems. That's all, folks.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's considered a competition in some respects because it is one: a competition for time. An NEA study that came out a few months ago showed reading for pleasure was decreasing substantially, especially among the youngest americans. There are more things to do than once there were, and books tend to lose out in the shuffle. Don't get me wrong- I think that both can have their place, and have been both an avid reader and an avid gamer. But we are far from understanding what the balance between reading and gaming ought to be, and even farther from implementing it.
:) Yay!
> Churchill Schmurchill, Schwartz is a technology mischief-maker not a technology statesmen.
I have a sneaking suspicion that Churchill would protest if he were not at times characterized as both. =)
He is the man "And you madame, are ugly," fame, after all, and the statesman who tried to get a ride across the channel with the first troops. (Before the king showed up and told him if Churchill went, he'd go too.)
This is having a negative impact on the reading habits of a generation.
'nuff said.
Buzzer system rigging is the only real way to do it, and while I doubt it, he was still dang good even if it was rigged. Also, he needn't be aware of it. But I rather suspect it wasn't rigged.
It's not just graduation rates; it's also tuition. Granted it's not the lifeblood of govenment, but it is pretty critical these days. Tuition has gone up tremendously in the last thirty years- not so long ago, the most expensive colleges cost a few thousand dollars a year. Now we're talking fifty thousand. It's grown well beyond the rate of inflation and is one of the major problems that faces the US. The vast majority of this data is already available to the government anyway, because of the FAFSA. (Federal Application For Student Aid.) The main practical differences? (a) The very rich aren't exempt from government tracking of this data, and (b) It might be possible for law enforcement to circumvent certain federal regulations involving a school's disclosure of personal financial information. However, I'd imagine they can already do this...
Which would you rather have... a society of hyperintelligent cockroaches... or a society of hyperintelligent cockroaches with a massive army of really really dumb cockroaches listening to their propoganda?
Actually, one of the reasons that nuclear plants have been slow to proliferate in the US is precisely because of not looking the other way for Mr. Burns. The incredible safety regulations that the US imposes makes them exceedingly expensive and very safe. It takes power companies decades to earn back the capital involved in building them, though. If I recall correctly, you get more radiation from smoking a few cigarettes than the average person who was evacuated from three mile island did.
They're both wrong six ways from sunday. It's which six ways that matter. In the debate, Bush admitted a mistake in some of his appointments. He also admitted to mistakes in his youth during the last election. He saw the last question of the town hall debate as an attack of his handling of the war, which it may or may not have been intended as. He'd have been better to fall back on his "it's going to be hard work" mantra, making it "it's been hard work, but we're working," but he didn't. Both candidates make mistakes up there, and both candidates color what they say at least a little bit to curry favor with the electorate. Ack. I suppose the bigger thing is, as one of the earlier posters on this topic said, there are far more important things in the election rubicon than copyright law, at least for most of us. The issue that's going to come up is dealing with either administration on it, not letting their stated platform on copyright have any more than a negligible influence on our vote. Health Care, Foreign Policy, ABM development, Social Security, take your pick.
Are you serious? Kerry said he's opening to examining an issue. The statement means very little. A clear statement of his receptiveness? He's courting voters, of course he's going to make clear statements of his receptiveness. That doesn't mean he's receptive, it means he wants votes.
If you extend an array of one million monkeys, each of which has only a hexidecimal pad to input machine code, eventually you can build up all of software, AND Hamlet. (Or at least the part of hamlet that only uses letters a-f.)
Was number one in the rankings a few years ago, and since has dropped below the top 25. Taking a quick look, though, it seems like the data that at least some of the Forbes Data is wrong. "Wireless network" should probably not be checked, at least unless there were major upgrades over the summer (which, I'll admit, is possible. But a little bit in the science and computing buildings doesn't count.) Students obviously can access email away from school, via webmail or ssh. The school does provide web pages- both via WSO, and colrain (although the default directories no longer have public_html in them, I think, so you have to know that.) - It also seems like the inclusion of usenet servers here is a bit antiquated. It's not quite as bad as saying "has a gopher server," it also doesn't really seem indicative of a wired campus, so to speak. More interesting would be IP's per student. Do they have direct connections, or is everything routed through a proxy server of some kind? Some schools are almost completely open, others barely let anything other than web traffic through their gateways.
I heard an anecdote about RPI's wireless coverage at some point. My understanding is that they were very pro-wireless for a while, making big news about being the first all-wireless network, etc... Except for one prof who could never get wireless to work. They spent forever on it. They'd test the signal in the room, and it would be strong. They'd get it working, and then it would cut out, seemingly randomly. They couldn't figure it out at all, until one day someone noticed a huge metal chalkboard on wheels in the next room... it turns out it interfered with the signal when it was in certain positions...
I had a graphics program I had written that inverted color channels every once in a while for no reason I could identify- specifically, red and blue would get swapped, green would stay the same. The problem eventually turned out to be with the following function call: foreach(pixel) { putpixel(x,y,arr[n++],arr[n++],arr[n++]); } arr was an array with r,g,b data for all of the pixels on the screen. As you may have guessed by now, for each iteration through the for statement, because the compiler pushed function parameters onto the stack in reverse order, the final arr[n++] was evaluated before the first one, so r,g,b were pushed on by the caller and r,g,b was popped in the callee, swapping r and b. The bugs I love (and sometimes hate) are the ones that make you think a bit about what's actually happening. The other ones that come to mind are having a C++ function of a non-instantiated class work without complaint (it was a small method that turned out not to rely on any data in the class, so it didn't matter that the this pointer was filled with garbage), and a story I recall about someone having a problem in an old Fortran program where they had set 4 equal to 2 at some point in the program, and every 4 after that was interpreted as a 2...
In the beginning there was the fighter, and he was without wisdom and void of intellect. So he was named sponge. And there was evening and there was morning, the first character.
>Is this really a problem or just a natural > progression?" The two things aren't mutually exclusive.
Sometimes it's about style, too. Clancy's not the best example, (not that he's not a fun read,) but If the New York Times really worked on their cadences, maybe churned it out in iambic pentameter... =) > if the novels lacked such exaggerated drama, it would suffice to read the New York Times, and not Tom Clancy.
Throughout history, there have been divergences between that which is popular and that which is good. The Lord of the Rings is one of those truly rare works that has bridged that gap. Historically it has had many critics. Most of those seem to be people that respond to it as part of a genre they don't understand or believe in, as opposed to legitimate literary criticism. It also gets criticism to the effect of "I can't get through it." I still remember my AP English teacher, years ago, telling the class he couldn't get through the Hobbit. Ouch. It's a shame, really, that such a world is not truly accessible to all. There are the movies, of course, but they're not the same thing. There's an inherent beauty to the language that Tolkien understood and crafted. It's the kind of thing that makes the NEA report on decreasing reading for pleasure among Americans such a concern. There are whole worlds that begin to dissappear.
So, let me get this straight... with AT&T being one of the most frequent to violate the do-not-call list, they are no longer seeking to provide residential service? Isn't that sort of like biting the hand that you annoy the hell out of? I assume it was just no longer profitable, but the interesting thing is that not only will it save AT&T money, it will save everbody else money and time, until they figure out something new to call and bother us about.
Not necessarily that surprising when you think about it, for a variety of reasons. Macs dominate a much smaller sector of the market, and they are generally more expensive. So the people that buy them are more likely to be in higher income brackets, are more likely to have had more schooling, etc... Now this obviously isn't always true- just a correlation. Also, mac's are usually shinier.
It's not just a question of blockbusters, though- there's something to be said for trying to make good movies instead of popular movies. Not something the studios are so interested in, maybe, but worth the time nonetheless. Art and money are not the same thing- and that's doubly so for good art. They don't have to be disjoint, mind- but things like spellbound, or The Girl with the pearl earring, are never going to be blockbusters- but that doesn't mean they're not worth watching.
I was in the SQL database for the student facebook at college. It's basically just a student directory for student use, with additional info like dating status, personal hobbies or interests, copies of unix plans and projects, etc...
And I decided to update my interests while I was in there... without thinking, I left out the where clause... and suddenly all two thousand students have the same interests. My interests. Normally this would be a good thing, but sadly, I felt the need to find backups...
I was working at a camp one summer a few years ago and had my machine in the nature lodge I was running. One day the machine wouldn't boot up, so I tore her apart and watched two mice run out the expansion slots in the back. Cleaned it out and added duct tape to it, only to find them nesting *inside* the speakers a week later. I wonder what kind of music they liked, because they sure heard a lot of it.
Incidentally, the same summer, there was a leak in a roof hidden by a beam up there. The water ran down the inside of the beam to over the counter at the edge of the building, then rained onto my keyboard, which I found out one day when it didn't work. At this point I was in the middle of nowhere, with no usable keyboard and no way to get one for a few days. I pulled the keyboard apart, found a little control board with about thirty contacts on it, and started playing with a paperclip to figure out which combinations activated which letters. Before long I figured out how to enter my username and password, and just used the mouse for everything else, until I got a new keyboard. It wasn't connected to the net at the time, so this wasn't as much of a pain as it seems. That's all, folks.
also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions
Wait, no! Is it a subtle difference? How come nobody's noticed it before? Why did we all always think that they were the same...
Ever start your car with a cat sitting on the manifold? - Michael Garibaldi