In the US, use a payphone. In Korea, you have to do a lot of looking to find a payphone that still works, since virtually everyone has a cell phone. And, you need to find a vending machine that still sells phone cards, because most of them don't take cash.
"Text-speak" and internet slang is almost impossible for most non-native English speakers to read, unless they have spent a huge chunk of their time playing games. Something to consider.
I have a BA in English and a minor in Physics, so I can see the logic in what you say. The simple truth is that for some fields, exams work very well. My math and physics classes graded almost entirely on exams. For some fields, they work very poorly. Exams for a literature class are pretty brutal, as they are long but only scratch the surface. It is the longer papers that require reading and research show if the student has actually learned anything, and requires them to develop the skills that are the real benefits of the fields. It's not just a book report; it is unfortunate that it is reduced to such by overworked faculty teaching freshman lit.
My major in college was creative writing. I took a class taught by the novelist David Shields, and he made the observation that most writers are most inspired by their periods of depression, but are only able to write about these periods when they were feeling better. Not all artists work this way, but generally a manic-depressive pattern tends to lead to a more fertile writing career.
The person you quoted, in the quotation, claims to have visited one US franchise and various Russian restaurants; I think you can give him a break on that.
As for the language, "learning a few words" doesn't cut it. My girlfriend is Korean, but speaks English quite well. She studied it for years in school (as is mandatory in Korea) and did fairly well on her TOEFL when she applied to a US university. The first time she ordered fast food here in the US, however, she was totally derailed by the question "For here or to go?" It just doesn't parse; its an idiom that we are accustomed to even though it is only a sentence fragment. Caught off guard, there were five minutes of confusion before the cashier made an arbitrary decision on her behalf.
So, give the guy a break, man. Sometimes you are in a hurry and you don't want to play the "I have limited understanding of your language but I am trying to fake it anyways" game.
Television drama is an art form. Television broadcasting is a business. Television production straddles these two sides.
There is always a little business in art, and there is often a little art in business. But the screenwriter can't forget that he is paid to be an artist, and the network executives can't forget that the commodity they deal in is art.
And you can't forget that Fox torpedoed Firefly from the beginning. The first episode aired was the second (or third, if you count the pilot as a two-parter) episode of the story. I had tuned in to see the series begin, but the second ep was a pretty shitty introduction to the series and I was turned off. It wasn't until long after it was pulled off of the air that I watched the rest of the series on a friend's recommendation, and now I am a pretty rabid fan of the show (Watched it back-to-front three times, own the DVDs). I am willing to bet they lost what could have been a big chunk of their base this way. I am sure they had reasons, but this turned out to be a poor business decision.
I don't know about people specifically in the accounting/publishing/powerpoint presentation industries, but all of the laypeople to whom I have introduced OOo or AbiWord, they never switched to MS Office unless they purchased computers with Office pre-installed. For most home or semi-professional users, the tranisition to OOo is transparent. And AbiWord is god's gift to college students; a free alternative to Word that works on old hand-me-down desktops and laptops with no learning curve.
I work for an insurance administrator that handles benefits for educators, including several junior colleges, and we use SSNs as an account identifier. One would assume its not difficult to find a program that the college offers (like an employee benefit program) and you can take your pick of profs to steal IDs.
And I am a college student, also. Supposedly my employer is one of the best in the industry, which if true does not reflect well on the industry. This would probably be an easy scam to run on a larger scale.
Robocode is a little game where you write a java applet to control a tank. Then you can run it against other automaton tanks and see who wins. I think it was designed as an educational tool.
As a former astronomy major who did a research project on a 30" scope, I know the feeling. : )
Didn't they make a sextant to navigate by on the Apollo 13? I seem to remember something like that from the movie. The principle, at least, seems useful for navigation by space probes.
Actually one of the indispensible tools in the observatory was the GPS. The time signal was used to calibrate the equatorial mounting.
Exactly. My dad is a sailor/shipwright, and I remember an example he gave me when commercial GPS was still really new. His ship was docked when he happened to check the GPS (I think he was in either Sydney or Christchurch NZ). The GPS showed the boat was sitting on land in the middle of one of the big streets that ran beside the pier, a few hundred meters from the actual location. The GPS turned out to be far more accurate than the charts. This is getting to be less and less of a problem as cartographers use GPS to update their maps, and admittedly the error was still small enough that it wouldn't be a problem in most situations. But, again, your GPS is only as good as its maps, and cartographers are only human.
Also, my dad later ran a marine electronics shop in Seattle. That's a whole other can of beans. After helping my dad try to fix GPS/radar/other navigation systems and seeing just how screwed up they can get, I would highly recommend that all aspiring sailors learn how to use the sextants in their emergency kits.
PS - It has come to my attention that Jim Wales is harassing TOH Members with return phone calls if you call him. His phone number is the listed phone number as the contact number for his business. You have every right to call him at least once if you are offended by his libelous material about me and TOH. If you have been called and threatened by Jim Wales contact legal@templeofhayah.com
From the site in the parent post. Is he claiming that its harrassment when Mr. Wales returns the phone calls of TOH members?
There were already a million responses to this, but personally the first application I thought of was for construction sites, or landscaping. Road maintenance workers would probably find it useful too.
Its awful big, true, but thats a pretty sizeable mirror. And historical telescopes are very much worth preserving. For example, here at the UW is only a 6 inch Brashear, but the astronomy department would definitely object to the suggestion that it's useless.
I would hope that the buyer would take the same approach the UW astronomy department did and use it in an outreach program. Its much more powerful than the typical amateur would ever be able to use, and would be an excellent teaching tool. Its historical status would be an excellent excuse to educate the public on the recent history of astronomy. Hell, strap a camera on it and it would be a great tool for undergraduate research. Alot of professional research is still done on smaller backyard telescopes. Its not Mauna Kea, true, but its still very impressive.
Most japanese kids learn English in grade school - high school. Their conversational abilities and reading comprehension are often lacking, but reading phonetically is a cinch for them.
I can do a Win2k install in my sleep, from partitioning to installing all the extra apps. Very easy. Which was very useful, it was often easier to reinstall than FIX all the problems I was constantly running into.
The only time I have had to reinstall my Linux system was when I tried to screw with the filesystem without figuring out what I was doing. I have spent days fiddling with stuff on both systems, but I have never HAD to fix a Linux system unless I actually went out and broke it.
Then I switched to Mac OS X and everything is flowers and rainbows now, but thats another story.
Well, to nitpick, the first hard evidence of life (fossils) are dated at around 3.5-3.6 billion years ago. Massive surface activity (the meteorites and shtuff) ended around 3.8 billion years ago. So there are 2-3 Billion years where scientists are guessing simple chemical life originated. And the margin for error, even assuming life arose very proximate to the earth becoming semi-habitable is still a couple of million years.
I looked this up in my gf's Biology book last week after watching a related question on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire".
Still, I don't see where they got the gap of 10,000 years where life arose.
I had also been under the impression that women have better reflexes. My gf can take me on evenly at Soul Calibur despite the fact that I have logged in a lot more hours playing it, and while she dislikes FPS games (preferring strategy, she can be vicious) once she developed the right reflexes I am sure she could kick my ass their too.
The new generation of ground telescopes area amazing. But ground telescopes have weaknesses too. I had the good fortune to do a project with the 30 in telescope the Univ of Washington keeps at MRO.
Six nights were not as lucrative as we wished. One night of equipment failure and two nights of an almost full moon, as well as interference from patchy clouds, reduced our ability to take data pretty significantly.
Whats my point? Well, a space telescope sidesteps many of the engineering difficulties in adaptive optics. You still have the problem of weather (although the big observatories are usually in places where impact of weather is minimized), you still have maintenance problems. Maintaining a very large and precise mirror in an atmosphere is very difficult, and adaptive optics are very delicate. Also, to my knowledge, the telescope arrays have still not been used at their full capacity due to politics and technical problems.
AO is great. Using the ground based AO arrays are the coolest thing in astronomy right now. But the Hubble is also a great tool, and not necesarrily more expensive, and is flexible in many ways that ground based telescopes are not.
In 1988 an author (whose name I forgot) wrote a novel called HARD DRIVE in which the heroes stopped an evil computer virus by creating a counter virus . . .
Really bad novel, actually. But it came back to mind reading this article. . .
Slashdot Mirror
In the US, use a payphone. In Korea, you have to do a lot of looking to find a payphone that still works, since virtually everyone has a cell phone. And, you need to find a vending machine that still sells phone cards, because most of them don't take cash.
"Text-speak" and internet slang is almost impossible for most non-native English speakers to read, unless they have spent a huge chunk of their time playing games. Something to consider.
I have a BA in English and a minor in Physics, so I can see the logic in what you say. The simple truth is that for some fields, exams work very well. My math and physics classes graded almost entirely on exams. For some fields, they work very poorly. Exams for a literature class are pretty brutal, as they are long but only scratch the surface. It is the longer papers that require reading and research show if the student has actually learned anything, and requires them to develop the skills that are the real benefits of the fields. It's not just a book report; it is unfortunate that it is reduced to such by overworked faculty teaching freshman lit.
My major in college was creative writing. I took a class taught by the novelist David Shields, and he made the observation that most writers are most inspired by their periods of depression, but are only able to write about these periods when they were feeling better. Not all artists work this way, but generally a manic-depressive pattern tends to lead to a more fertile writing career.
Oh, god, no. The only thing worse than crappy covers is when the band decides to pull out their originals.
The person you quoted, in the quotation, claims to have visited one US franchise and various Russian restaurants; I think you can give him a break on that. As for the language, "learning a few words" doesn't cut it. My girlfriend is Korean, but speaks English quite well. She studied it for years in school (as is mandatory in Korea) and did fairly well on her TOEFL when she applied to a US university. The first time she ordered fast food here in the US, however, she was totally derailed by the question "For here or to go?" It just doesn't parse; its an idiom that we are accustomed to even though it is only a sentence fragment. Caught off guard, there were five minutes of confusion before the cashier made an arbitrary decision on her behalf. So, give the guy a break, man. Sometimes you are in a hurry and you don't want to play the "I have limited understanding of your language but I am trying to fake it anyways" game.
Television drama is an art form. Television broadcasting is a business. Television production straddles these two sides. There is always a little business in art, and there is often a little art in business. But the screenwriter can't forget that he is paid to be an artist, and the network executives can't forget that the commodity they deal in is art. And you can't forget that Fox torpedoed Firefly from the beginning. The first episode aired was the second (or third, if you count the pilot as a two-parter) episode of the story. I had tuned in to see the series begin, but the second ep was a pretty shitty introduction to the series and I was turned off. It wasn't until long after it was pulled off of the air that I watched the rest of the series on a friend's recommendation, and now I am a pretty rabid fan of the show (Watched it back-to-front three times, own the DVDs). I am willing to bet they lost what could have been a big chunk of their base this way. I am sure they had reasons, but this turned out to be a poor business decision.
I don't know about people specifically in the accounting/publishing/powerpoint presentation industries, but all of the laypeople to whom I have introduced OOo or AbiWord, they never switched to MS Office unless they purchased computers with Office pre-installed. For most home or semi-professional users, the tranisition to OOo is transparent. And AbiWord is god's gift to college students; a free alternative to Word that works on old hand-me-down desktops and laptops with no learning curve.
I work for an insurance administrator that handles benefits for educators, including several junior colleges, and we use SSNs as an account identifier. One would assume its not difficult to find a program that the college offers (like an employee benefit program) and you can take your pick of profs to steal IDs. And I am a college student, also. Supposedly my employer is one of the best in the industry, which if true does not reflect well on the industry. This would probably be an easy scam to run on a larger scale.
Robocode is a little game where you write a java applet to control a tank. Then you can run it against other automaton tanks and see who wins. I think it was designed as an educational tool.
As a former astronomy major who did a research project on a 30" scope, I know the feeling. : ) Didn't they make a sextant to navigate by on the Apollo 13? I seem to remember something like that from the movie. The principle, at least, seems useful for navigation by space probes. Actually one of the indispensible tools in the observatory was the GPS. The time signal was used to calibrate the equatorial mounting.
Exactly. My dad is a sailor/shipwright, and I remember an example he gave me when commercial GPS was still really new. His ship was docked when he happened to check the GPS (I think he was in either Sydney or Christchurch NZ). The GPS showed the boat was sitting on land in the middle of one of the big streets that ran beside the pier, a few hundred meters from the actual location. The GPS turned out to be far more accurate than the charts. This is getting to be less and less of a problem as cartographers use GPS to update their maps, and admittedly the error was still small enough that it wouldn't be a problem in most situations. But, again, your GPS is only as good as its maps, and cartographers are only human. Also, my dad later ran a marine electronics shop in Seattle. That's a whole other can of beans. After helping my dad try to fix GPS/radar/other navigation systems and seeing just how screwed up they can get, I would highly recommend that all aspiring sailors learn how to use the sextants in their emergency kits.
There were already a million responses to this, but personally the first application I thought of was for construction sites, or landscaping. Road maintenance workers would probably find it useful too.
I would hope that the buyer would take the same approach the UW astronomy department did and use it in an outreach program. Its much more powerful than the typical amateur would ever be able to use, and would be an excellent teaching tool. Its historical status would be an excellent excuse to educate the public on the recent history of astronomy. Hell, strap a camera on it and it would be a great tool for undergraduate research. Alot of professional research is still done on smaller backyard telescopes. Its not Mauna Kea, true, but its still very impressive.
Most japanese kids learn English in grade school - high school. Their conversational abilities and reading comprehension are often lacking, but reading phonetically is a cinch for them.
I can do a Win2k install in my sleep, from partitioning to installing all the extra apps. Very easy. Which was very useful, it was often easier to reinstall than FIX all the problems I was constantly running into. The only time I have had to reinstall my Linux system was when I tried to screw with the filesystem without figuring out what I was doing. I have spent days fiddling with stuff on both systems, but I have never HAD to fix a Linux system unless I actually went out and broke it. Then I switched to Mac OS X and everything is flowers and rainbows now, but thats another story.
Well, to nitpick, the first hard evidence of life (fossils) are dated at around 3.5-3.6 billion years ago. Massive surface activity (the meteorites and shtuff) ended around 3.8 billion years ago. So there are 2-3 Billion years where scientists are guessing simple chemical life originated. And the margin for error, even assuming life arose very proximate to the earth becoming semi-habitable is still a couple of million years.
I looked this up in my gf's Biology book last week after watching a related question on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire".
Still, I don't see where they got the gap of 10,000 years where life arose.
I had also been under the impression that women have better reflexes. My gf can take me on evenly at Soul Calibur despite the fact that I have logged in a lot more hours playing it, and while she dislikes FPS games (preferring strategy, she can be vicious) once she developed the right reflexes I am sure she could kick my ass their too.
. . . from a nonprogrammer, but does this vulnerability occur in the mac version of IE5 as well?
Six nights were not as lucrative as we wished. One night of equipment failure and two nights of an almost full moon, as well as interference from patchy clouds, reduced our ability to take data pretty significantly.
Whats my point? Well, a space telescope sidesteps many of the engineering difficulties in adaptive optics. You still have the problem of weather (although the big observatories are usually in places where impact of weather is minimized), you still have maintenance problems. Maintaining a very large and precise mirror in an atmosphere is very difficult, and adaptive optics are very delicate. Also, to my knowledge, the telescope arrays have still not been used at their full capacity due to politics and technical problems.
AO is great. Using the ground based AO arrays are the coolest thing in astronomy right now. But the Hubble is also a great tool, and not necesarrily more expensive, and is flexible in many ways that ground based telescopes are not.
In 1988 an author (whose name I forgot) wrote a novel called HARD DRIVE in which the heroes stopped an evil computer virus by creating a counter virus . . . Really bad novel, actually. But it came back to mind reading this article. . .