Almost anyone who works here knows that their education system is practically broken for the public schools. Children are legally entitled and cannot be denied their education; this precludes disciplinary measures such as in-school suspension and detention. There are no demerit systems -- after all, if you can't be given detention or suspension, how will you punish someone? The harshest punishment is usually a stern talking-to by the principal and homeroom teacher; a referral to a parent may or may not be as harsh.
From personal experience, many of the students who go to juku go because they don't pay attention in class. They sit around and draw pictures, stare out the window, or talk to their friends. There are students who simply sit and cross their arms, refusing to do anything in any class despite coming to school. And of course, there are students who just don't come to school, because there's nothing that can be done to them; they will move up through the grades and graduate from junior high regardless. There are also students who DON'T go to juku, or go once/twice a week. These students are the ones who actually do their homework and listen in class. Guess which of the two groups generally has better test scores in my school.
I don't really believe in the whole longer school hours argument, either. We have school from 8:50 AM to 3:35 PM; at my school, it was 8:10 AM to 3:10 PM, slightly longer. On top of that, they only have six periods in a day, with a lunch break after fourth period. And on top of THAT, Monday and Friday only have FIVE periods. I fail to see how Japanese children spend more time in school unless they count club activities (generally an hour before school and an hour or two after school). Or perhaps they're counting juku, which SHOULDN'T be counted; it's completely optional and you pay for it. Basically you're paying to go to a classroom with a cubby where you're forced to do what you should be doing in school to begin with.
For another rant, a lot of students who get good grades are simply memorizing and regurgitating facts, especially in liberal arts courses. They aren't learning how things fit together, or how to apply their knowledge, or even how to use their knowledge outside of regimented series of tests. If you think the SATs are bad in America, come here for a bit. This is a land where tests are God, so you learn to please God.
If that's what Obama wants America to aim for, I don't think I approve. At all.
You often hear people who have bought Kindles extolling the virtues of the unit; now I wonder how much of that comes from an attempt to squeeze value out of the machine and avoid buyer's regret by justifying the cost, even if through rose-tinted glasses. Despite all of the good press about the Kindle from a number of sources, celebrity and otherwise, you find cases like this where people have been GIVEN the Kindle and don't have much good to say about the experience.
I have a Japanese phone and pay (very little) for older games directly from the companies. For example, I play the NES and SNES Mega Man games on my phone, bought from Capcom. I also play the original Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior US) games on my phone and have the first Final Fantasy. If these third-party companies are making money off of their old, unused libraries, then I don't see why all of the first-party console makers should shut themselves out of the business.
I have the misfortune to have an HP TX, from the 2xxx series. They have massive overheating problems, some of them have cores that won't actually run at the advertised frequency, and worse still, the wacom layer will NOT work properly due to the overheating problems.
The way they're designed, the primary vent is on the rear right-hand side of the laptop. If you use the laptop for a while and it starts getting hot (and boy does it get hot), that vent will screw with the wacom layer, causing your cursor to jump to the lower-right corner of the screen and right- and left-click randomly in that area. Yeah, right there, where the system tray is. You can imagine the problems this causes.
The only way to prevent this from happening is to disable the wacom layer entirely, in which case you have an expensive, underpowered laptop with a bright screen and a single shoddy hinge assembly. No touch or wacom interface at all. It completely defeats the purpose of having a tablet PC.
I contacted HP about this several times and they refused to admit that it was their problem, despite the fact that numerous other people have complained about it as well. It's a crippling defect. This crappy product and their crappy service have completely turned me off of all HP products. Do not even consider the TX series.
So what happens to those astronauts after this? They've got training and a skillset that has essentially been forced into obsolescence. Will NASA sell the shuttles to other countries and then perhaps those countries will bring in astronauts as consultants? Will the astronauts continue to go up, affiliated with NASA, but guests in other countries' programs as we have had guests in ours? Or will they sign on with private programs to help/lend their experience (Are they even allowed, or is there a non-compete agreement with NASA or something of the like?)? Or will they simply retire and fade away?
Yet most graphic artists I know don't use their tablets all the time. The tablets are good for specialized purposes -- drawing. Touch would be good for some specialized purposes, I'd imagine -- think about the possibilities with 3D modeling, being able to pinch and pull, rotate, whatever. I certainly wouldn't want it everywhere any more than I'd want to use a wacom pad all the time.
I was under the impression that with a linear spectrum ranging from low to high with middle in the, uh, middle, only high and low were "ends"... and the middle wasn't.
And how well do you understand those units? If someone says something weighs 150 grams, do you have a decent idea of how much it weighs? What about if someone has a temperature of 40 C?
My school career included both SI and Imperial, but since America never USES SI, I forgot them until I came to a country that does and had them pounded back in by experience.
I agree. It looks like they're making more of a multipurpose reader that's able to browse the internet, though.
I do like the idea of e-ink screens, especially in terms of battery life; I'd really like it if someone made an e-ink reader WITH a backlight that you could optionally turn on for reading in the dark.
If I found a new species of spider, I sure wouldn't be letting it crawl around on my bare hand. I wouldn't want to be the first known victim of a new species.
A scene where she DIDN'T pull the braid, you mean.
RJ actually wrote some stuff himself; it wasn't all just notes and scribbling. He wrote a fair bit of the book(s) himself in different sections, and Brandon Sanderson is filling in the gaps. So the chapter you're praising for being better than RJ's writing may actually, you know, be RJ's writing.
Sure, people complain about loss of privacy and possibly being sued for ads (gay man tired of seeing ads for jewelry for the wife [but if they knew he was gay, he'd sue because they judged he was gay by his walk or something anyway...]), but I, for one, welcome our new targeted advertising. I'm tired of awkwardly sitting through ads for feminine hygiene products.
We'll be losing water (slowly) if we ever start sending people to Mars and shipping them water/supplies every year as some posters suggested in the comments to the Mars article.
There's a difference between looking at someone's holiday photos online (perhaps with information on latitude/longitude, temperature, and weather conditions at the time of the photo) and looking at someone's photos while listening to them talk about what they saw, felt, and experienced.
Even if you didn't get to go personally, the latter is undoubtedly more viscerally satisfying, I think.
The way I read it is that the GP is not saying that the star CAUSED the retrograde orbit -- he's asking why everyone's asking how the PLANET's orbit changed rather than asking why the star's spin changed.
For a car analogy.. it's like asking why the car pissed off the dog that's chasing it rather than why the dog is chasing the car.
I think it would be orders of magnitude harder to reverse the spin of a large star than it would be to reverse the orbit of a planet, but I don't really know anything about celestial mechanics.
If the leaves don't hurt the tree in its current environment, there's nothing that would keep trees with that particular trait from proliferating, even if the moa is no longer around to weed out the ones without the trait.
Haven't other countries also poured a fair bit of money into it? I mean, it IS the International Space Station. What do they have to say to this unilateral "plan"?
I don't personally believe this, but from what I understand, a lot of people who oppose the use of human embryos for stem cell research oppose it because they see those embryos as having the human potential or BEING human. Again, I don't personally endorse it -- it's just how I understand the "other side's" beliefs.
If that's the case, then it's not so much like the GP's suggestion that we eat a cow that's already been killed; it's more like... "Well, this guy died in an accident, let's eat him so we don't waste his meat." Or, to put it in more of a medical perspective -- "This guy died in an accident. Nobody knows who he is and we don't have permission on file, but let's just harvest his organs anyway." The first is incredibly abhorrent to a lot of people, right? And a lot of people would probably be disgusted at the second as well -- it's pretty disrespectful. Well, using embryos is probably seen in much the same way by opponents of embryo usage in stem cell research.
Again, not my personal views, but I feel like someone had to speak up for the other side here on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost anyone who works here knows that their education system is practically broken for the public schools. Children are legally entitled and cannot be denied their education; this precludes disciplinary measures such as in-school suspension and detention. There are no demerit systems -- after all, if you can't be given detention or suspension, how will you punish someone? The harshest punishment is usually a stern talking-to by the principal and homeroom teacher; a referral to a parent may or may not be as harsh.
From personal experience, many of the students who go to juku go because they don't pay attention in class. They sit around and draw pictures, stare out the window, or talk to their friends. There are students who simply sit and cross their arms, refusing to do anything in any class despite coming to school. And of course, there are students who just don't come to school, because there's nothing that can be done to them; they will move up through the grades and graduate from junior high regardless. There are also students who DON'T go to juku, or go once/twice a week. These students are the ones who actually do their homework and listen in class. Guess which of the two groups generally has better test scores in my school.
I don't really believe in the whole longer school hours argument, either. We have school from 8:50 AM to 3:35 PM; at my school, it was 8:10 AM to 3:10 PM, slightly longer. On top of that, they only have six periods in a day, with a lunch break after fourth period. And on top of THAT, Monday and Friday only have FIVE periods. I fail to see how Japanese children spend more time in school unless they count club activities (generally an hour before school and an hour or two after school). Or perhaps they're counting juku, which SHOULDN'T be counted; it's completely optional and you pay for it. Basically you're paying to go to a classroom with a cubby where you're forced to do what you should be doing in school to begin with.
For another rant, a lot of students who get good grades are simply memorizing and regurgitating facts, especially in liberal arts courses. They aren't learning how things fit together, or how to apply their knowledge, or even how to use their knowledge outside of regimented series of tests. If you think the SATs are bad in America, come here for a bit. This is a land where tests are God, so you learn to please God.
If that's what Obama wants America to aim for, I don't think I approve. At all.
You often hear people who have bought Kindles extolling the virtues of the unit; now I wonder how much of that comes from an attempt to squeeze value out of the machine and avoid buyer's regret by justifying the cost, even if through rose-tinted glasses. Despite all of the good press about the Kindle from a number of sources, celebrity and otherwise, you find cases like this where people have been GIVEN the Kindle and don't have much good to say about the experience.
I have a Japanese phone and pay (very little) for older games directly from the companies. For example, I play the NES and SNES Mega Man games on my phone, bought from Capcom. I also play the original Dragon Quest (Dragon Warrior US) games on my phone and have the first Final Fantasy. If these third-party companies are making money off of their old, unused libraries, then I don't see why all of the first-party console makers should shut themselves out of the business.
As a side note, there are a bunch of posts like this about the TX series in this thread alone, yet they've all been modded down. I wonder why.
I have the misfortune to have an HP TX, from the 2xxx series. They have massive overheating problems, some of them have cores that won't actually run at the advertised frequency, and worse still, the wacom layer will NOT work properly due to the overheating problems.
The way they're designed, the primary vent is on the rear right-hand side of the laptop. If you use the laptop for a while and it starts getting hot (and boy does it get hot), that vent will screw with the wacom layer, causing your cursor to jump to the lower-right corner of the screen and right- and left-click randomly in that area. Yeah, right there, where the system tray is. You can imagine the problems this causes.
The only way to prevent this from happening is to disable the wacom layer entirely, in which case you have an expensive, underpowered laptop with a bright screen and a single shoddy hinge assembly. No touch or wacom interface at all. It completely defeats the purpose of having a tablet PC.
I contacted HP about this several times and they refused to admit that it was their problem, despite the fact that numerous other people have complained about it as well. It's a crippling defect. This crappy product and their crappy service have completely turned me off of all HP products. Do not even consider the TX series.
So what happens to those astronauts after this? They've got training and a skillset that has essentially been forced into obsolescence. Will NASA sell the shuttles to other countries and then perhaps those countries will bring in astronauts as consultants? Will the astronauts continue to go up, affiliated with NASA, but guests in other countries' programs as we have had guests in ours? Or will they sign on with private programs to help/lend their experience (Are they even allowed, or is there a non-compete agreement with NASA or something of the like?)? Or will they simply retire and fade away?
Yet most graphic artists I know don't use their tablets all the time. The tablets are good for specialized purposes -- drawing. Touch would be good for some specialized purposes, I'd imagine -- think about the possibilities with 3D modeling, being able to pinch and pull, rotate, whatever. I certainly wouldn't want it everywhere any more than I'd want to use a wacom pad all the time.
I was under the impression that with a linear spectrum ranging from low to high with middle in the, uh, middle, only high and low were "ends"... and the middle wasn't.
And how well do you understand those units? If someone says something weighs 150 grams, do you have a decent idea of how much it weighs? What about if someone has a temperature of 40 C?
My school career included both SI and Imperial, but since America never USES SI, I forgot them until I came to a country that does and had them pounded back in by experience.
I agree. It looks like they're making more of a multipurpose reader that's able to browse the internet, though.
I do like the idea of e-ink screens, especially in terms of battery life; I'd really like it if someone made an e-ink reader WITH a backlight that you could optionally turn on for reading in the dark.
We couldn't introduce the metric system in schools -- I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell that we'll introduce a new keyboard layout.
If I found a new species of spider, I sure wouldn't be letting it crawl around on my bare hand. I wouldn't want to be the first known victim of a new species.
A scene where she DIDN'T pull the braid, you mean.
RJ actually wrote some stuff himself; it wasn't all just notes and scribbling. He wrote a fair bit of the book(s) himself in different sections, and Brandon Sanderson is filling in the gaps. So the chapter you're praising for being better than RJ's writing may actually, you know, be RJ's writing.
Sure, people complain about loss of privacy and possibly being sued for ads (gay man tired of seeing ads for jewelry for the wife [but if they knew he was gay, he'd sue because they judged he was gay by his walk or something anyway...]), but I, for one, welcome our new targeted advertising. I'm tired of awkwardly sitting through ads for feminine hygiene products.
We'll be losing water (slowly) if we ever start sending people to Mars and shipping them water/supplies every year as some posters suggested in the comments to the Mars article.
There's a difference between looking at someone's holiday photos online (perhaps with information on latitude/longitude, temperature, and weather conditions at the time of the photo) and looking at someone's photos while listening to them talk about what they saw, felt, and experienced. Even if you didn't get to go personally, the latter is undoubtedly more viscerally satisfying, I think.
Vista may have been fine "when heavily reconfigured", but Windows 7 also works from the start. Big difference.
The way I read it is that the GP is not saying that the star CAUSED the retrograde orbit -- he's asking why everyone's asking how the PLANET's orbit changed rather than asking why the star's spin changed. For a car analogy.. it's like asking why the car pissed off the dog that's chasing it rather than why the dog is chasing the car.
I think it would be orders of magnitude harder to reverse the spin of a large star than it would be to reverse the orbit of a planet, but I don't really know anything about celestial mechanics.
Only if you cross your eyes and slowly move the book forward from your nose.
If the leaves don't hurt the tree in its current environment, there's nothing that would keep trees with that particular trait from proliferating, even if the moa is no longer around to weed out the ones without the trait.
Haven't other countries also poured a fair bit of money into it? I mean, it IS the International Space Station. What do they have to say to this unilateral "plan"?
Is your name Moreau? Do you have a PhD or MD? If so, I may have just the island for you!
I don't personally believe this, but from what I understand, a lot of people who oppose the use of human embryos for stem cell research oppose it because they see those embryos as having the human potential or BEING human. Again, I don't personally endorse it -- it's just how I understand the "other side's" beliefs.
If that's the case, then it's not so much like the GP's suggestion that we eat a cow that's already been killed; it's more like... "Well, this guy died in an accident, let's eat him so we don't waste his meat." Or, to put it in more of a medical perspective -- "This guy died in an accident. Nobody knows who he is and we don't have permission on file, but let's just harvest his organs anyway." The first is incredibly abhorrent to a lot of people, right? And a lot of people would probably be disgusted at the second as well -- it's pretty disrespectful. Well, using embryos is probably seen in much the same way by opponents of embryo usage in stem cell research.
Again, not my personal views, but I feel like someone had to speak up for the other side here on Slashdot.
I hope it doesn't malfunction and get stuck or something. All you need in that situation is a nice mechanical clot...