For instance, lately most of the questions have been over car and house payments, interest, and trying to basically handle finances. This is not simple four function math, and it's very relavant for what normal people need to know.
Dude, calculating the interest you pay on your loan is very simple math once you get passed all the legal wording and get the actual interest rate, there isn't any calculus involved. I suppose it is relevant to what normal people need to know, but lets not give them too much credit and say that it isn't simple math. Even my uncle that didn't pass grade 8 can figure out the interest on the loans he has.
There are so many tools out there for communication it is just a shame to see that the quality of the ideas communicated seems to be decreasing. How many times have we noticed with cell phones, and now blogs, that people are talking and communicating just to hear their own voice and don't contribute anything by their communication.
I found it was that way before cell phones also. I'd imagine that the quality of the average printed work decreased after the printing press too. It's bound to happen, because once you remove the cost of doing something, people won't put as much thought into doing it.
I once posed a question off that stupid "Are you smarter than a 5th grader?" show to some coworkers (at a small computer shop).
It was "If y=3x and 3x=12 what is y?". They both kept insisting y=4 no matter how many times I said no, would you like to try again. Finally I explained why y=12 and they both said "yeah, but that's math".
For background info: they were both female, one was in her early 50s and educated in Saskatchewan (finished High School), the other was in high school (age 14-17?) and had spent time in both the Nepal and Sask. education systems (I'm not sure where she spent more time, she was from Nepal originally).
Anyways, I guess my point is that people everywhere have a disdain for math and science. I think the problem lies in the fact that in too many schools (around here at least), they do things like having the phys-ed teacher teach math. My sister's class in grade 5 had a race instead of a test (this was in math not phys-ed).
Sometimes I think that I am the only one left on earth that doesn't have a blog. I often think about starting one but then I realized that all I do in a day is go to work then come home, smoke up, and read shit on the internet so I don't think many people would want to read about that. On the other hand, most blogs I've seen aren't much more exciting so...
I love how I can simply type "slashdot" then hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter to have it turned into "http://www.slashdot.org". Leave out the shift and you will be 33% more productive, and it works on IE too.
I hope this leads to better consumer solar technology. I was looking at those 12V solar panels at Canadian Tire the other day. The ones that produce about half a watt and have a cigarette lighter plug on a wire. Talk about junk. What am I going to do with that? It would not even run my 2m handheld on the low power setting let alone charge your car battery (which is what they were being advertised as doing). I suppose they didn't say how long it would take to charge it so they weren't lying exactly...
It's not a question of courage, it would just be a futile fight IMO.
I don't think it would ever happen, and if it did America would find that its allies from the gulf wars were all of the sudden on the other side. I really don't think Great Britain would be to pleased, Blair or not. Russia has also shown that they have no problem providing weapons and intelligence to the USA's enemies, so I think they would help us out. Anyways, the point is that the combined might of the above would be a threat to the US and would have to be considered.
There's also the fact that most american wars did not affect the general populace. A war with Canada would mean that the war is in your own backyard and you see all the details. There's a difference between knowing someone got blown to pieces and actually seeing it. Plus I would imagine it would be harder to convince a soldier to kill someone who looks and acts like him rather than some "raghead" in a desert.
It's a work machine that was assigned to me along with a copy of Vista for it. I needed to get familiar with vista to support our customers that are buying new machines with it preinstalled. I added 1gb of ram (had 512) and put in the radeon thinking that with all that extra hardware, Vista should run just as good as XP did even with the fancier gui (considering what a game can do with the same card aero shouldn't be that hard). I was mistaken.
I certainly don't. I'm testing it at work here on a 1.7 celeron with 1.5gb ram and a radeon 9550. Can't do anything without the cpu meter hitting 100 for a couple of seconds. Videos that played fine in XP stutter now and I had to turn off UAC cause it was driving me mad.
It taught me something, though: I have nothing whatsoever to do with children, and actively avoid being in a room with them unless their parents are there
That is a very smart idea, one I use daily in my job as a computer repair tech. We do Dell warranty repairs which often tasks me with going to people's houses. Housewives are way too trusting here, I even had one ask if I would mind if her 2 year old stay and watch me fix the computer while she stepped out cause he "was into taking things apart". Luckily when I looked at her funny and asked if she normally asked strange men to be alone with her children, she laughed and said she saw my point.
do you actually use all 24 or are most of them sitting and compiling custom kernels most of the time? Or do you have a large family? or are you counting your ti85 as a computer? Are any of them rack mounted? I'm genuinely curious as I've never met anyone that actually used that many computers.
I'm always amassed by the number of computers people have room for. I am currently running 2 (an athlon64 3500 pc that I built and a sun blade 100) and I'm debating whether or not to sell the pc when I buy a macbook this year.
The government has no interest in prosecuting child porn offenders. They have found the perfect way to get rid of someone without anyone protesting. Simply accuse them of child porn possession and you've pretty much got an open and shut case. Judges are in on the system and juries have been trained to see anyone accused of such a crime as guilty until proven innocent.
I bet in 15 years there will be mpaa goons in your living room and you're tied up with your eyelids propped open ala Clockwork Orange. This will be considered normal by everyone and the mpaa will be trying to make even more draconian laws.
and Americans will still be telling me about how the terrorists "hate their freedom";)
Back in the days, when the Japanese where trying to break into the American automotive market, they used to send groups over to measure the rust on the rail tracks.
Why?
Because it would then be simple to know how often the trains where running, how much wear on the tracks (thus how big and heavy the trains are), and a whole host of other tidbits which would be useful in competition.
I must be missing something here. How does knowing when and where trains traveled somehow give insights into the American automotive market? I suppose doing it near a factory would maybe help you discover how much weight the trains were carrying and work out how many cars were sold but there are many easier ways of obtaining that info.
I'm so sick of renting a movie from BlockBuster and wasting time Windex-ing the DVD etc. to try and get it to play all the way through etc. They're busted policy on this is they will only give you another copy of the same movie, so as long as it was good enough to fight through it and finish it I just paid $4 to watch a shite quality movie.
For rentals, I'd actually rather go back to VHS tapes and have to deal with rewidning them... or some alternative method like download it, watch it, delete it.
Dude, VHS tapes sucked worse than DVDs. It wasn't just rewinding them, you had shitty quality, tapes that physically wore out, tapes that your VCR ate and the store wants to charge you for, tapes that sort of play that don't get replaced cause they're good enough, etc etc.
I'm not an idiot I know what a microcontroller is. But I don't know of any microcontroller that has say 1gb ram, a semi decent gpu, and a couple of cpu cores. I wouldn't be surprised if someone goes for the easy mod points and googles up something that's close but not quite what I'm talking about.
I'm just waiting till they come out with a complete single chip PC (I know there are examples but they aren't spectacularly performing). Just enough PCB for some external connectors and some voltage regulation.
This will be great for porn. Nothing worse than downloading 45 seconds of the last 3 minute video you downloaded. Now, I'll be able to tell which are just clips and which are the whole thing.
Unlike with audio, where most people will listen to the same track on their iPod and through their home stereo (which makes me think that a lot of people must be near-deaf
I think it also has to do with how most teenagers/2Xs just listen to bass anyways. Seriously, all the young people I know are buying subs like you wouldn't believe and ignoring mids and tweeters. I know you loose some bass with mp3s, but they're good enough to make the plastic parts of your dashboard rattle and your head hurt when you have 3 15 inch subs in the trunk of your cavalier.
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Dude, calculating the interest you pay on your loan is very simple math once you get passed all the legal wording and get the actual interest rate, there isn't any calculus involved. I suppose it is relevant to what normal people need to know, but lets not give them too much credit and say that it isn't simple math. Even my uncle that didn't pass grade 8 can figure out the interest on the loans he has.
I found it was that way before cell phones also. I'd imagine that the quality of the average printed work decreased after the printing press too. It's bound to happen, because once you remove the cost of doing something, people won't put as much thought into doing it.
It was "If y=3x and 3x=12 what is y?". They both kept insisting y=4 no matter how many times I said no, would you like to try again. Finally I explained why y=12 and they both said "yeah, but that's math".
For background info: they were both female, one was in her early 50s and educated in Saskatchewan (finished High School), the other was in high school (age 14-17?) and had spent time in both the Nepal and Sask. education systems (I'm not sure where she spent more time, she was from Nepal originally).
Anyways, I guess my point is that people everywhere have a disdain for math and science. I think the problem lies in the fact that in too many schools (around here at least), they do things like having the phys-ed teacher teach math. My sister's class in grade 5 had a race instead of a test (this was in math not phys-ed).
Sometimes I think that I am the only one left on earth that doesn't have a blog. I often think about starting one but then I realized that all I do in a day is go to work then come home, smoke up, and read shit on the internet so I don't think many people would want to read about that. On the other hand, most blogs I've seen aren't much more exciting so...
I hope this leads to better consumer solar technology. I was looking at those 12V solar panels at Canadian Tire the other day. The ones that produce about half a watt and have a cigarette lighter plug on a wire. Talk about junk. What am I going to do with that? It would not even run my 2m handheld on the low power setting let alone charge your car battery (which is what they were being advertised as doing). I suppose they didn't say how long it would take to charge it so they weren't lying exactly...
I don't think it would ever happen, and if it did America would find that its allies from the gulf wars were all of the sudden on the other side. I really don't think Great Britain would be to pleased, Blair or not. Russia has also shown that they have no problem providing weapons and intelligence to the USA's enemies, so I think they would help us out. Anyways, the point is that the combined might of the above would be a threat to the US and would have to be considered.
There's also the fact that most american wars did not affect the general populace. A war with Canada would mean that the war is in your own backyard and you see all the details. There's a difference between knowing someone got blown to pieces and actually seeing it. Plus I would imagine it would be harder to convince a soldier to kill someone who looks and acts like him rather than some "raghead" in a desert.
I love eating animal products, especially vegan environmentalists, the best meat is always from those fed with no animal byproducts ;)
It's a work machine that was assigned to me along with a copy of Vista for it. I needed to get familiar with vista to support our customers that are buying new machines with it preinstalled. I added 1gb of ram (had 512) and put in the radeon thinking that with all that extra hardware, Vista should run just as good as XP did even with the fancier gui (considering what a game can do with the same card aero shouldn't be that hard). I was mistaken.
I certainly don't. I'm testing it at work here on a 1.7 celeron with 1.5gb ram and a radeon 9550. Can't do anything without the cpu meter hitting 100 for a couple of seconds. Videos that played fine in XP stutter now and I had to turn off UAC cause it was driving me mad.
mod parent up. I don't trust anything done by the Chinese government. Beware the red dragon.
That is a very smart idea, one I use daily in my job as a computer repair tech. We do Dell warranty repairs which often tasks me with going to people's houses. Housewives are way too trusting here, I even had one ask if I would mind if her 2 year old stay and watch me fix the computer while she stepped out cause he "was into taking things apart". Luckily when I looked at her funny and asked if she normally asked strange men to be alone with her children, she laughed and said she saw my point.
Someone uses something like that as a sig, seemed appropriate here
I'm always amassed by the number of computers people have room for. I am currently running 2 (an athlon64 3500 pc that I built and a sun blade 100) and I'm debating whether or not to sell the pc when I buy a macbook this year.
The government has no interest in prosecuting child porn offenders. They have found the perfect way to get rid of someone without anyone protesting. Simply accuse them of child porn possession and you've pretty much got an open and shut case. Judges are in on the system and juries have been trained to see anyone accused of such a crime as guilty until proven innocent.
how big were the large pizzas diameter wise?
and Americans will still be telling me about how the terrorists "hate their freedom" ;)
I must be missing something here. How does knowing when and where trains traveled somehow give insights into the American automotive market? I suppose doing it near a factory would maybe help you discover how much weight the trains were carrying and work out how many cars were sold but there are many easier ways of obtaining that info.
Dude, VHS tapes sucked worse than DVDs. It wasn't just rewinding them, you had shitty quality, tapes that physically wore out, tapes that your VCR ate and the store wants to charge you for, tapes that sort of play that don't get replaced cause they're good enough, etc etc.
I'm not an idiot I know what a microcontroller is. But I don't know of any microcontroller that has say 1gb ram, a semi decent gpu, and a couple of cpu cores. I wouldn't be surprised if someone goes for the easy mod points and googles up something that's close but not quite what I'm talking about.
I'm just waiting till they come out with a complete single chip PC (I know there are examples but they aren't spectacularly performing). Just enough PCB for some external connectors and some voltage regulation.
This will be great for porn. Nothing worse than downloading 45 seconds of the last 3 minute video you downloaded. Now, I'll be able to tell which are just clips and which are the whole thing.
I think it also has to do with how most teenagers/2Xs just listen to bass anyways. Seriously, all the young people I know are buying subs like you wouldn't believe and ignoring mids and tweeters. I know you loose some bass with mp3s, but they're good enough to make the plastic parts of your dashboard rattle and your head hurt when you have 3 15 inch subs in the trunk of your cavalier.
Did you even read my post? Or did you just decide to be a dick?
Seems one offish and anecdotal to me. An example doesn't prove it to be the norm.