I think Abort, Retry, Ignore summed up early MS-DOS frustrations beautifully. From what I remember, it never mattered which option you selected -- you were trapped in an endless cycle. Does anyone else remember the Abort, Retry, Ignore poem, in the meter of Poe's "The Raven"?
Sorry, gotta pick a nit here. SL-1 went prompt supercritical. With a chain reaction that is maintaining its power output, you want each fission to (on average) cause one new fission -- that's called critical. Going supercritical just means that the power output is going up -- each fission is (on average) causing > 1 new fission (subcritical == power output going down). Now, not all neutrons coming out of a fission come out at the same time -- some are "prompt", and some are "delayed" (nanoseconds vs. milliseconds, IIRC). You want your supercritical reaction to be relying on these delayed neutrons so that you can control the rate of power increase. If your reaction is supercritical based on the prompt neutrons, the rate of power increase is highly exponential (think nuclear weapon vs. nuclear reactor).
From what I've heard, the guy who got pinned to the ceiling was doing maintenance, pulled out a control rod, and pulled it out too far -- SL-1 went prompt supercritical, and it was all over.
So -- next time you watch some China Syndrome BS movie and you hear the alarms sounding and the people screaming "the reactor has gone critical", you know -- power's staying the same.
It's a wonder Americans have telephones, water, gas and electricity. The country is so big. I know you're being sarcastic, but perhaps you need to re-read your history of rural electrification and rural telephony here in the US. It took project and programs like the TVA to bring electricity to much of the rural US. The programs were successful, but took time -- it was 1953 before 90% of farms had electricity, and 1976 before 90% of farms had phone service (see reference here). Shoot -- when I was living about 20 miles north of Albany, NY (the state capital) in 1991, I had well water, a septic tank, and my gas stove and heat was fed by a big ol' tank of propane that a truck came by two months to fill.
Why invest if there is no competition? I've got no love for the phone company, but I think the question in their mind is "Why invest if we're not going to make our money back?" It seems like a lot of readers here want the telecos to pour out tons of money to dig up streets to provide fiber so that they could turn around and sell it to people for less money than they're paying for internet access now. Sorry, folks, that's just not the way capitalism works.
My 4-year-old son has leukemia, and has had a variety of hospital stays over the past two years. We've been lucky -- we haven't had too many hospital stays -- but we know other cancer kids that spend just weeks and weeks in the hospital. Most of these kids are sick enough to need hospitalization (many due to reduced immunity), but not so sick that they can't do stuff.
Hospital stays can be (among other things) extremely boring. There's only so much TV you can watch. Most pediatric wings will have some sort of a game room, but even that gets old. My 4-year-old obviously can't play really complicated video games, but we've had fun playing the games he can handle.
Please help this organization out. Also, as others have mentioned, give blood! Thanks!
I think probably the system is designed to work against heat-seeking missiles. Here the objective isn't to blow up the missile (a la GI Joe), but to just screw up the heat-seeking head.
(One would think that putting a mirror on the outside of the heat-seeking sensor of a missile would not only render the missile immune from laser attack, but also immune from doing any actual, you know, heat-seeking).
Disney made the decision in May 2003 (that's not a typo -- 2003) not to distribute Fahrenheit 911. Michael Moore has known this for a year (you've got to read all the way to the last paragraph -- c'mon, I know you can!). He's using this decision to hype the movie, allowing people to jump to the conclusion that Disney is trying to "stick it to the little man".
If this is such an important movie that everyone needs to see it, why doesn't Michael Moore either:
Distribute it online
Pony up his own money for distribution costs. What with all of the book sales and previous movies, he's a multimillionaire -- he could afford it
Of course, either of these options would cut into his bottom line...
I'm a CS instructor at a Community College in CA. For a number of semesters, I taught C++ programming, and got tired of trying to define the line between collaboration and cheating. Sometimes it was obvious (hold up two papers to the light, and the only difference is the name, or my favorite, the same misspelled words in the comments), but sometimes it was less obvious.
My solution: turn cheating into group work! (aka if you can't beat 'em...)
For about the last half of the assignments in the semester, I required students to work in groups of 2-4. They would turn in one paper, and would all receive the same grade. The kicker? Part of their grade (25%) on the assignment was based on a discussion I had with the group. During this discussion, I would ask each of the members of the group a question or two about the code. If a group member couldn't answer the question, they'd all lose points. The questions were moderate enough that if they had spent at least some time working on the concepts covered by the assignment, they could answer them (even if they hadn't done much/any of the original coding).
Some notes about this:
Students got to choose their own groups. I had a few in-class exercises before the first group assignment, so that people had a chance to get to know each other.
This took up a _lot_ of class time, but it was waaay worth it. I usually had them work on some sample exam problems while waiting for their group to be called.
Benefits? The number of students who finished the class went up, I found that I didn't have to re-explain things as often in class, and that in general students' understanding of the concepts went up. Students didn't just get the program to work and say "phew! it works! print it out!", they said "phew! it works! how???"
Students were initially very reluctant to do group work, but gave me lots of positive feedback after the class was done (and after doing well in follow-on classes).
Anyhow, as far as cheating is concerned, make sure you know the school's policy about cheating and grade review (your College Catalog is a good first place to look).
If you're going to start giving zero's to all involved, make sure you (or your prof) has the details of this in whatever handout the students get on the first day. I've got something like this:
Cheating is prohibited. If a student is found to be cheating on an assignment, all students involved will be given a grade of zero for that assignment. Cheating includes, but is not limited to: turning in identical files, etc.
(whatever you want)
Slashdot Mirror
I think Abort, Retry, Ignore summed up early MS-DOS frustrations beautifully. From what I remember, it never mattered which option you selected -- you were trapped in an endless cycle. Does anyone else remember the Abort, Retry, Ignore poem, in the meter of Poe's "The Raven"?
Be sure to include the Avoid Death warning label on the manual.
Sorry, gotta pick a nit here. SL-1 went prompt supercritical. With a chain reaction that is maintaining its power output, you want each fission to (on average) cause one new fission -- that's called critical. Going supercritical just means that the power output is going up -- each fission is (on average) causing > 1 new fission (subcritical == power output going down). Now, not all neutrons coming out of a fission come out at the same time -- some are "prompt", and some are "delayed" (nanoseconds vs. milliseconds, IIRC). You want your supercritical reaction to be relying on these delayed neutrons so that you can control the rate of power increase. If your reaction is supercritical based on the prompt neutrons, the rate of power increase is highly exponential (think nuclear weapon vs. nuclear reactor).
From what I've heard, the guy who got pinned to the ceiling was doing maintenance, pulled out a control rod, and pulled it out too far -- SL-1 went prompt supercritical, and it was all over.
So -- next time you watch some China Syndrome BS movie and you hear the alarms sounding and the people screaming "the reactor has gone critical", you know -- power's staying the same.
(former Navy nuke)
Am I the only one who sees "RMS" and thinks "Root mean square"?
My 4-year-old son has leukemia, and has had a variety of hospital stays over the past two years. We've been lucky -- we haven't had too many hospital stays -- but we know other cancer kids that spend just weeks and weeks in the hospital. Most of these kids are sick enough to need hospitalization (many due to reduced immunity), but not so sick that they can't do stuff.
Hospital stays can be (among other things) extremely boring. There's only so much TV you can watch. Most pediatric wings will have some sort of a game room, but even that gets old. My 4-year-old obviously can't play really complicated video games, but we've had fun playing the games he can handle.
Please help this organization out. Also, as others have mentioned, give blood! Thanks!
I think probably the system is designed to work against heat-seeking missiles. Here the objective isn't to blow up the missile (a la GI Joe), but to just screw up the heat-seeking head. (One would think that putting a mirror on the outside of the heat-seeking sensor of a missile would not only render the missile immune from laser attack, but also immune from doing any actual, you know, heat-seeking).
- Distribute it online
- Pony up his own money for distribution costs. What with all of the book sales and previous movies, he's a multimillionaire -- he could afford it
Of course, either of these options would cut into his bottom line...My solution: turn cheating into group work! (aka if you can't beat 'em...)
For about the last half of the assignments in the semester, I required students to work in groups of 2-4. They would turn in one paper, and would all receive the same grade. The kicker? Part of their grade (25%) on the assignment was based on a discussion I had with the group. During this discussion, I would ask each of the members of the group a question or two about the code. If a group member couldn't answer the question, they'd all lose points. The questions were moderate enough that if they had spent at least some time working on the concepts covered by the assignment, they could answer them (even if they hadn't done much/any of the original coding).
Some notes about this:
- Students got to choose their own groups. I had a few in-class exercises before the first group assignment, so that people had a chance to get to know each other.
- This took up a _lot_ of class time, but it was waaay worth it. I usually had them work on some sample exam problems while waiting for their group to be called.
- Benefits? The number of students who finished the class went up, I found that I didn't have to re-explain things as often in class, and that in general students' understanding of the concepts went up. Students didn't just get the program to work and say "phew! it works! print it out!", they said "phew! it works! how???"
- Students were initially very reluctant to do group work, but gave me lots of positive feedback after the class was done (and after doing well in follow-on classes).
Anyhow, as far as cheating is concerned, make sure you know the school's policy about cheating and grade review (your College Catalog is a good first place to look).If you're going to start giving zero's to all involved, make sure you (or your prof) has the details of this in whatever handout the students get on the first day. I've got something like this:
Good luck!