You'll also have to remember that because it is dependent on light, anything that hinders light will hinder its output. Go outside and look at a road, you'll find it covered in oils, rubber, gravel, sand, dead animals, etc. Every additional piece lowers the potential output of the system. In order to combat that, you'll need a very rigorous maintenance system, and more than likely, that sort of system would end up making the entire idea economically infeasible.
I picked up a pair of Sennheiser HD202 headphones a few years back. Mind you, they aren't earbuds, but headphones, but I found the noise canceling amazing on them. I can sit in the car with my iPod at about 50% volume and am unable to hear noise beyond the music. My family has developed a system to alert me when they try to talk to me, because I can't hear them. For 40 bucks, I'll say it's the best pair of headphones I've ever owned, and I couldn't tell the difference between them and a $100+ pair of BOSE headphones.
You'd also be surprised at what little tiny things many users enjoy about their PC that Linux does not currently offer them. I couldn't find my windows installation CD to reformat my sister's PC, but I had a Kubuntu disk on hand, so I put that on. I installed MP3 support for her, since my collection was in MP3 format, I taught her how to use Open Office, and showed her how to use the AIM chat software and things like that. She didn't have much of a problem figuring out how to get things done, but she did run into a lot of issues along the way. For example, my music collection isn't geared towards her tastes, so she likes to go onto websites like purevolume to listen to music. Flash, last time I checked, does not have a 64bit linux driver. Any website that was flash-based was off limits to her. Drivers were difficult to install for her, and anything that involved compiling or more than a double click setup file was too difficult to understand. She's got the capabilities to understand it, she's a very smart, tech savvy person, but she, like many other users, will not be too keen on the idea of having to spent hours researching a problem that pertains to a single bit of software. Until your average user can boot up, log in, and do everything without having to open a terminal or read a paragraph to determine which file is the right one in the suppository, you won't get the people who are middle-level users. The people who won't leave things alone, but won't spent hours figuring out how to play with it.
I'm currently using Vista on a Media Center I just built, and i've been ripping Movies for about 3 days straight now, it hasn't stopped me at all. Hell, the UAC is still on, since I haven't needed to do much besides rip and encode. I don't even consider the OS to be 'slow', but it's far from perfect. They did annoy the hell out of me with their change in WMP, it took me forever to figure out how to get the old style menus back, I was tired of trying to test a file, but having to monitor an entire folder to do it.
O thanks, I was about to ask the source. I recognized the lines, but was unsure of where it came from. I was reminded of it a few weeks ago, Anti-Flag song uses the concept as well. I knew it was from something else, but didn't know where to look.
I'm a student at Virginia Tech, so the source of this panic is still very much fresh for us. This situation is by far a severe reaction to something extremely mild. I remember in high school, we used to write about violence, sex, drugs, things like that all the time. Teachers didn't freak, they understood free expression. If there was something that required alarm, like a student talking about how they cut themselves, it would get reported.
Unfortunately, this is the perfect example of what mass media can do to a society. If any of you saw one of the newer episodes of House, they explored the idea of mass hysteria. This, while not a physical reaction, is still a great example. One person who wrote violent papers shoots his classmates. Therefore, all violent writers are going to shoot people. Jack Thompson tries to abuse this relationship as well, and it's sickening. Unfortunately, it's up to each individual person to not allow media to influence their thought process, and it more than likely won't change from a few people with common sense.
If you read what Seung-hui Cho wrote, compared to what this kid wrote, they are extremely different. Cho's writings were very violent, not just one mention of an act of violence. His control over his ideas and emotions seemed almost nonexistent, which was evident in how his media package was generally incoherent and mostly self-romanticized talk about his death. This kid in question, not only does his reference seem weak and spur of the moment, but his thought process is generally intact. His writing had a general idea behind each thought and he expressed interest in a future, even though he didn't like having to take a class to get it.
Almost every building on campus has underground passages. However, the 2nd floor of Norris Hall has double wide, wooden doors with handles that can be held with chains. I've never run across to the attached building to see how they are connected, but the ones I've used are easily 'locked' with chains. The door of Norris is also VERY big and heavy, made of solid wood about 10ft high, it actually requires a bit of strength just to open, so if that was chained from the inside, it would be almost impossible for a single person to open that door.
As a Virginia Tech student, I'll explain the rule for guns on campus. We are allowed to own a gun, however, it must be turned in to the Virginia Tech Police Department and cannot be concealed in vehicles or kept in dorms. When you have 26000+ students, if anyone is carrying a weapon, and that person gets into a fight, it takes one single moment of bad judgment for him to pull that weapon. Within minutes, he would be gunned down by police (if outside), or in this situation, surrounded.
At my school, it seems to be a general idea that Wikipedia cannot be used as a source of information due to it's possible inaccuracy. However, students including myself are smart enough to think for themselves and use the view the sources OF the wikipedia article and see what those have to offer us. We don't have to cite wiki, and we still get the same information. Eventually you could do this until you ended up at the original source anyway, just have to backtrack until you get a legitimate source.
As an engineering student, I have problem with others using my work. As long as im credited, that's perfectly fine by me. I think this article is basically stating that the students are being trained to protect their rights, not to cash in on them. Nothing about making the work cost money to read/use, just credit where credit is due.
I too am a Bank of America customer, and I remember pretty explicitly the instructions on what the SiteKey was, why it was there, and to ONLY log in if you see your key. It would be the customer's fault if they ignored missing information, and when it comes to banking, I don't leave anything to chance.
I needed to find a decently easy to use OS for my younger sister, so I downloaded both Ubuntu and Kubuntu from my school's OSS section. I had made 3 previous attempts at using Linux before, both with RedHat (before Fedora), Mandrake, and Fedora. All 3 attempts I found to be too difficult to get the normal things I wanted to do to easily work. So when I installed Ubuntu first, I was impressed at the ease of installation and how well it was designed for common users. I'm by no means a novice, but I am not a Linux user by far, having used almost primarily Mac and Windows based OSs my whole life.
I liked Ubuntu, and decided I wanted to test out Kubuntu to see the difference between KDE and GNOME. (I would have installed KDE, but I couldn't figure out HOW. I kept looking for information but it always pointed me to Kubuntu, so I just did that) So anyway, I installed Kubuntu and was hooked instantly. I wrote down how to compile LAME and install XMMS, shipped the instructions with a Kubuntu disk to my sister, and she's up and running like nothing ever changed. Not too shabby in my opinion.
Compared to the problems I had with my previous 3 attempts at Linux, then with my almost overnight switch with next to no problems (I had one, Ubuntu didn't have the C libraries, which prevented me from compiling LAME until I realized why.), The Linux community has done a damn awesome job at making the experience less painful. The Add/Remove Programs feature and package manager is amazing.
Virginia Tech (my current enrollment) requires all Mechanical Engineers complete a capstone project in their senior year. It takes two semesters with it's own credit slot, and you get to choose your project. It might not be professional experience, but it is as close to hands-on as you can get without a group project.
I am a lightweight web developer, mostly by hobby and not by trade. I have random brushes with PHP for news posting and database usage, but I found the work required to do even the simplest of things in PHP took forever to perfect because of my inexperience. I was pointed to Ruby on Rails as a 'cool language to check out' and I figured I'd give it a look. After about 12 hours of tinkering and playing around, I had a local test server, database and a small blog written in rails. Sure, it probably won't scale very well, but the simple fact that I was able to type a few things and had a majority of my database code written for me was a huge blessing. I would get annoyed by little errors I'd make while typing fast, rails helped me avoid that by reducing the amount of physical code I had to write. If I needed to get into the functions for the database calls, I could easily tell it to generate the files for what it was performing and it would give me the code that it was using so I could manually edit it.
I agree with some of the posters, the language does help novices branch into webapps easily. However, it does still requires knowledge of programming to get anything large accomplished, and I don't think anyone has to worry about some hobbyist sucking up jobs because he knows how to do little things here and there.
Facebook didn't screw up when they opened themselves to everybody. The site is extremely segregated by schools. I sign on and I only see my friends and same-school users. I cannot go and look at a person from Cal Tech, or Loyola, or any other school besides my own. The privacy settings are so strict that you can even filter who can search for you.
Below is a copy and paste of the available filter options for JUST searching a user.
Who Can Find Me in Search
You can allow everyone on Facebook to find you in search results, or you can select restricted to allow only certain people from inside and outside your networks to find you in search results.
Everyone (This includes people inside and outside your networks)
Restricted (Some people will not be able to search for you and add you as a friend)
Select people from inside your networks who can find you in search results:
Virginia Tech
Everyone from Virginia Tech
Friends of your friends from Virginia Tech
Only your friends
Select people from outside your networks who can find you in search results:
People in college networks
People in high school networks
People in company networks
People in regional networks
People with no networks
On top of that, you can even define what those users can do once they've found you in a search. So if you don't want to be harassed with thousands of 'pokes', you can disable the poke ability from searches. Myspace can't touch that sort of privacy and flexibility. The only time I ever even see a person from outside of my own school is in groups, and those groups have to be defined as Global before a user outside of the creators school can even join it. Facebook did the right thing when they opened it the site to everyone, because everyone is kept in their own little world. The change only bothered people on a moral standpoint, but nobody was actually a victim of this change. If they had a problem with a newer, non-school user, they have complete control over stopping repeat offenses. If you have a repeating problem, it's your own fault, not Facebook's.
And as for a common interest that all users can enjoy. The site uses it's divisions very well, advertising can be limited to a single school. If I have a store outside of a school I want to advertise, I can easily register an ad for only that school. The same will probably be done for facebook group specific interests. Want to create a Sex Education group for college only students? It would be a simple filter. It might not be implemented yet, but I bet if the idea was presented to the staff, it would be easily added to the site. The staff members DO actually listen to the users, and a lot of flexibility on the site is because of this.
OK! Let's humor you for a moment.
Orleans Parish, not New Orleans which all this discussion seems to be around, is the important thing.
Now, Orleans Parish is 467.9 sq km of land. Converting that to English units, that's 1535100 sq ft. Now, let's pretend we are going to fill it with 10 feet of earth. That equals a total of 15,351,000 cubic feet of dirt. Now I personally have never bought earth for a project, but that's a lot of dirt to buy. Plus, it's a hell of a lot of dirt to move.
Additionally, building Orleans Parish above ground creates several flooding problems. Now, instead of water flowing into the city, it will flow out of the city. This means that the levees will have had to be destroyed around the city, or otherwise your trapping water in again. This will take any water leaving the city and pour it against the levee systems protecting Jefferson and St Charles Parish, or it will flow into the lake, which eventually will rise into the Bonnet Carre spillway and then work it's way from the rear into St Charles and St John parish without any levee to stop it.
You have to remember all these plans do affect other places besides New Orleans, and being a person living in one of those areas, I wouldn't take kindly to them.
Last time I checked, New Orleans didn't sink because they built levees. The levees were built to hold back the water because it was built below sea level.
Additionally, the whole area is built on swamp land, which naturally causes roads to shift and sink, which explains why roads such as Airline Highway (I-16 I think) slowly gets worse and worse for flooding.
New Orleans HAD to be built along the river to be a productive city, and it has always been one of the most important cities in the country because of it's economy. You saw what happened with gas prices, and it forced the president to drawdown from the SPR. Last time I checked, all the big SPR sites were in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The area is important, despite its slight ability to be destroyed by weather. Also, one of the SPR salt domes built on Avery Island was abandoned due to the land sinking, so this isn't something we are unaware of, it's just something we can't control.
I've been in airports all over the place, I would think 26 miles of track underground wouldn't speed up the process, especially if it is unmanned. I trust eyes on my luggage more than nobody knowing if it is really being moved or not. I've had luggage take forever in JFK airport, and the fastest was in another country!
Well I thought it was Civil... At least he didn't mail him "rock candy" which was really mislabeled rat poison. That would be uncivil... or at least oddly amusing.
A local Internet Cafe in my area used to have wifi available, and they worked on the honors system, that if you bought something, you could use it, but they didn't enforce usernames and passwords. The wifi was too abused though, so they just removed it.
The center has 30PCs all designed for gaming, and you need a username and password to get on them. I have no clue if they plan to bring back the wifi access.
I'm a webmaster for 16 schools in my area, and me and some co-workers went onto the Wayback Machine and looked up the schools OLD websites. We found it pretty amazing to see what we once had online, compared to what we have now. It helped to show us how differently are job is compared to the original site launch. Before it was simply highly important information, such as addresses and contact numbers. Now it's anything and everything the schools would like to have online.
We were also amused to see what people once found impressive. Back the sites were designed with html editors and paint, instead of Dreamweaver and Photoshop.
I had Alcohol 120% installed, and nothing else in the Emulation department. I got the error, and after uninstalling it, it worked fine. Seeing as how I only used Alcohol 120% for a few things, it didn't bother me much, since BF2 takes up all those games time slots, but I have found myself starting to go to use Alcohol 120% and wondering where it was, only to remember I uninstalled it to play BF2.
Slashdot Mirror
You'll also have to remember that because it is dependent on light, anything that hinders light will hinder its output. Go outside and look at a road, you'll find it covered in oils, rubber, gravel, sand, dead animals, etc. Every additional piece lowers the potential output of the system. In order to combat that, you'll need a very rigorous maintenance system, and more than likely, that sort of system would end up making the entire idea economically infeasible.
I picked up a pair of Sennheiser HD202 headphones a few years back. Mind you, they aren't earbuds, but headphones, but I found the noise canceling amazing on them. I can sit in the car with my iPod at about 50% volume and am unable to hear noise beyond the music. My family has developed a system to alert me when they try to talk to me, because I can't hear them. For 40 bucks, I'll say it's the best pair of headphones I've ever owned, and I couldn't tell the difference between them and a $100+ pair of BOSE headphones.
You'd also be surprised at what little tiny things many users enjoy about their PC that Linux does not currently offer them. I couldn't find my windows installation CD to reformat my sister's PC, but I had a Kubuntu disk on hand, so I put that on. I installed MP3 support for her, since my collection was in MP3 format, I taught her how to use Open Office, and showed her how to use the AIM chat software and things like that. She didn't have much of a problem figuring out how to get things done, but she did run into a lot of issues along the way. For example, my music collection isn't geared towards her tastes, so she likes to go onto websites like purevolume to listen to music. Flash, last time I checked, does not have a 64bit linux driver. Any website that was flash-based was off limits to her. Drivers were difficult to install for her, and anything that involved compiling or more than a double click setup file was too difficult to understand. She's got the capabilities to understand it, she's a very smart, tech savvy person, but she, like many other users, will not be too keen on the idea of having to spent hours researching a problem that pertains to a single bit of software. Until your average user can boot up, log in, and do everything without having to open a terminal or read a paragraph to determine which file is the right one in the suppository, you won't get the people who are middle-level users. The people who won't leave things alone, but won't spent hours figuring out how to play with it.
I'm currently using Vista on a Media Center I just built, and i've been ripping Movies for about 3 days straight now, it hasn't stopped me at all. Hell, the UAC is still on, since I haven't needed to do much besides rip and encode. I don't even consider the OS to be 'slow', but it's far from perfect. They did annoy the hell out of me with their change in WMP, it took me forever to figure out how to get the old style menus back, I was tired of trying to test a file, but having to monitor an entire folder to do it.
O thanks, I was about to ask the source. I recognized the lines, but was unsure of where it came from. I was reminded of it a few weeks ago, Anti-Flag song uses the concept as well. I knew it was from something else, but didn't know where to look.
I'm a student at Virginia Tech, so the source of this panic is still very much fresh for us. This situation is by far a severe reaction to something extremely mild. I remember in high school, we used to write about violence, sex, drugs, things like that all the time. Teachers didn't freak, they understood free expression. If there was something that required alarm, like a student talking about how they cut themselves, it would get reported.
Unfortunately, this is the perfect example of what mass media can do to a society. If any of you saw one of the newer episodes of House, they explored the idea of mass hysteria. This, while not a physical reaction, is still a great example. One person who wrote violent papers shoots his classmates. Therefore, all violent writers are going to shoot people. Jack Thompson tries to abuse this relationship as well, and it's sickening. Unfortunately, it's up to each individual person to not allow media to influence their thought process, and it more than likely won't change from a few people with common sense.
If you read what Seung-hui Cho wrote, compared to what this kid wrote, they are extremely different. Cho's writings were very violent, not just one mention of an act of violence. His control over his ideas and emotions seemed almost nonexistent, which was evident in how his media package was generally incoherent and mostly self-romanticized talk about his death. This kid in question, not only does his reference seem weak and spur of the moment, but his thought process is generally intact. His writing had a general idea behind each thought and he expressed interest in a future, even though he didn't like having to take a class to get it.
He didn't say how BIG the napkin was, just that it was a napkin. We can't assume these sort of things, ya know?
I never thought I'd see secular arguments on /. That made my day!
Almost every building on campus has underground passages. However, the 2nd floor of Norris Hall has double wide, wooden doors with handles that can be held with chains. I've never run across to the attached building to see how they are connected, but the ones I've used are easily 'locked' with chains. The door of Norris is also VERY big and heavy, made of solid wood about 10ft high, it actually requires a bit of strength just to open, so if that was chained from the inside, it would be almost impossible for a single person to open that door.
As a Virginia Tech student, I'll explain the rule for guns on campus. We are allowed to own a gun, however, it must be turned in to the Virginia Tech Police Department and cannot be concealed in vehicles or kept in dorms. When you have 26000+ students, if anyone is carrying a weapon, and that person gets into a fight, it takes one single moment of bad judgment for him to pull that weapon. Within minutes, he would be gunned down by police (if outside), or in this situation, surrounded.
At my school, it seems to be a general idea that Wikipedia cannot be used as a source of information due to it's possible inaccuracy. However, students including myself are smart enough to think for themselves and use the view the sources OF the wikipedia article and see what those have to offer us. We don't have to cite wiki, and we still get the same information. Eventually you could do this until you ended up at the original source anyway, just have to backtrack until you get a legitimate source.
As an engineering student, I have problem with others using my work. As long as im credited, that's perfectly fine by me. I think this article is basically stating that the students are being trained to protect their rights, not to cash in on them. Nothing about making the work cost money to read/use, just credit where credit is due.
I too am a Bank of America customer, and I remember pretty explicitly the instructions on what the SiteKey was, why it was there, and to ONLY log in if you see your key. It would be the customer's fault if they ignored missing information, and when it comes to banking, I don't leave anything to chance.
I liked Ubuntu, and decided I wanted to test out Kubuntu to see the difference between KDE and GNOME. (I would have installed KDE, but I couldn't figure out HOW. I kept looking for information but it always pointed me to Kubuntu, so I just did that) So anyway, I installed Kubuntu and was hooked instantly. I wrote down how to compile LAME and install XMMS, shipped the instructions with a Kubuntu disk to my sister, and she's up and running like nothing ever changed. Not too shabby in my opinion.
Compared to the problems I had with my previous 3 attempts at Linux, then with my almost overnight switch with next to no problems (I had one, Ubuntu didn't have the C libraries, which prevented me from compiling LAME until I realized why.), The Linux community has done a damn awesome job at making the experience less painful. The Add/Remove Programs feature and package manager is amazing.
Virginia Tech (my current enrollment) requires all Mechanical Engineers complete a capstone project in their senior year. It takes two semesters with it's own credit slot, and you get to choose your project. It might not be professional experience, but it is as close to hands-on as you can get without a group project.
I agree with some of the posters, the language does help novices branch into webapps easily. However, it does still requires knowledge of programming to get anything large accomplished, and I don't think anyone has to worry about some hobbyist sucking up jobs because he knows how to do little things here and there.
Below is a copy and paste of the available filter options for JUST searching a user.
Who Can Find Me in Search
You can allow everyone on Facebook to find you in search results, or you can select restricted to allow only certain people from inside and outside your networks to find you in search results.
Select people from inside your networks who can find you in search results:
Virginia Tech
Select people from outside your networks who can find you in search results:
On top of that, you can even define what those users can do once they've found you in a search. So if you don't want to be harassed with thousands of 'pokes', you can disable the poke ability from searches. Myspace can't touch that sort of privacy and flexibility. The only time I ever even see a person from outside of my own school is in groups, and those groups have to be defined as Global before a user outside of the creators school can even join it. Facebook did the right thing when they opened it the site to everyone, because everyone is kept in their own little world. The change only bothered people on a moral standpoint, but nobody was actually a victim of this change. If they had a problem with a newer, non-school user, they have complete control over stopping repeat offenses. If you have a repeating problem, it's your own fault, not Facebook's.
And as for a common interest that all users can enjoy. The site uses it's divisions very well, advertising can be limited to a single school. If I have a store outside of a school I want to advertise, I can easily register an ad for only that school. The same will probably be done for facebook group specific interests. Want to create a Sex Education group for college only students? It would be a simple filter. It might not be implemented yet, but I bet if the idea was presented to the staff, it would be easily added to the site. The staff members DO actually listen to the users, and a lot of flexibility on the site is because of this.
Additionally, building Orleans Parish above ground creates several flooding problems. Now, instead of water flowing into the city, it will flow out of the city. This means that the levees will have had to be destroyed around the city, or otherwise your trapping water in again. This will take any water leaving the city and pour it against the levee systems protecting Jefferson and St Charles Parish, or it will flow into the lake, which eventually will rise into the Bonnet Carre spillway and then work it's way from the rear into St Charles and St John parish without any levee to stop it.
You have to remember all these plans do affect other places besides New Orleans, and being a person living in one of those areas, I wouldn't take kindly to them.
Additionally, the whole area is built on swamp land, which naturally causes roads to shift and sink, which explains why roads such as Airline Highway (I-16 I think) slowly gets worse and worse for flooding.
New Orleans HAD to be built along the river to be a productive city, and it has always been one of the most important cities in the country because of it's economy. You saw what happened with gas prices, and it forced the president to drawdown from the SPR. Last time I checked, all the big SPR sites were in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. The area is important, despite its slight ability to be destroyed by weather. Also, one of the SPR salt domes built on Avery Island was abandoned due to the land sinking, so this isn't something we are unaware of, it's just something we can't control.
I've been in airports all over the place, I would think 26 miles of track underground wouldn't speed up the process, especially if it is unmanned. I trust eyes on my luggage more than nobody knowing if it is really being moved or not. I've had luggage take forever in JFK airport, and the fastest was in another country!
Well I thought it was Civil... At least he didn't mail him "rock candy" which was really mislabeled rat poison. That would be uncivil... or at least oddly amusing.
The center has 30PCs all designed for gaming, and you need a username and password to get on them. I have no clue if they plan to bring back the wifi access.
We were also amused to see what people once found impressive. Back the sites were designed with html editors and paint, instead of Dreamweaver and Photoshop.
I had Alcohol 120% installed, and nothing else in the Emulation department. I got the error, and after uninstalling it, it worked fine. Seeing as how I only used Alcohol 120% for a few things, it didn't bother me much, since BF2 takes up all those games time slots, but I have found myself starting to go to use Alcohol 120% and wondering where it was, only to remember I uninstalled it to play BF2.
Friends hasn't worked in ages, it worked decently in the steam beta, but I haven't seen it working in the past 6 months ever.