I'd leave the version of Windows that you had on the laptop when you decided to send it off to Uganda (home of "Mountain-Glown Coffee"!).
A couple of other thoughts:
Put the latest version of (the free) IrfanView on it, because it reads pretty much any image format, remembering the install the plugins.
And then put John Walker's "Home Planet", a free planetarium/astronomy program.
I'm sure there are more, but....
The last bit of the original post reads,
"It gives you control of not only the current generation of spam, but also any future commercial spam -- why replace Viagra ads from a scam artist with Viagra ads from Pfizer?"
The ultimate irony woulda been if the ad JUST BELOW this post had been for Pfizer. It's just slightly less ironic that the ad was for....MICROSOFT!
You've turned down the position because you wouldn't ever get to write code and tinker with the nuts&bolts again. And maybe lurking in there is your own suspicion that you wouldn't be good at the job of supervising folks like yourself. But you need to know if the prospective candidate is any good at doing the tasks he/she will be supervising. If not, can he/she supervise you and your cohorts? The answer is maybe, if he/she at least understands and appreciates the process. But, if there's no real understanding of the process, or, worse, no appreciation of what it takes, then the candidate isn't right for the job. So, ask questions designed to uncover what the candidate knows about what you have to do to get your job done, and whether or not the candidate appreciates the type of people who do it well.
These things don't carry much. They don't fly very fast. They can't fly very high. They always seem to run into extreme weather and end up scattered in pieces across the landscape.
Why do I love Zeppelins so? Maybe because my family name was spelled "Schaeffer" in the "old country"?
And furthermore, "KC Masterpiece BBQ Sauce" hadn't been invented yet!
(And furthermore,)^2, consider that the slackers among the dinosaurs, the ones who were hanging around the hot tub on "der tag", were the only ones who survivied!
Even if those math courses aren't specifically used, they implicitly help the student learn how to think about solving problems. That's a lot more valuable than a lotta folks think it is.
I teach Astronomy at a community college here in the SW. I get a lot of students who haven't been forced to think much. They're not dumb. Far from it. But they haven't been forced to think critically very often, so they don't. That's why we need to stress science and math in our schools, not because the majority of students will do a lot of math and science throughout their lives, but because they'll really need to think critically throughout their lives!
Just clicked on down to see what folks were saying about HDTV when that sentence: "I thought hockey gmes were basically just contact figure skating...". Just the phrasing got a 6.49 on the open-ended GuffawScale! Thanks for that. On Monday AM, I needed that!
Whether or not it's legal isn't the question we should be asking. Here are three I think we should ask:
1. What do we think will happen if music is available so cheaply that pro musicians can't make a living recording their music?
2. If it's OK to buy music for next to nothing from a Russian website, is it also OK to pay for a ticket to a concert and then tape it and sell repros of the tape?
3. Say you go to work for a company making framuses. On payday, your boss comes up to you and says, "Hey, your check's pretty weak this time around. This is all we could get for what you made on "Boris' WebFramus". Would you regard this as a fair system?
I'd give a 5 for insight! Teachers are being held accountable for the success or failure of their students, but the students and their parents aren't being held accountable for the kids' educations. However, I have a couple of things to ad. I've taught for the last couple of years in charter schools in Central AZ, after a long career in aerospace. What I find is that we have a lot of teachers who can tell you a dozen different ways of doing a gradebook, or how to put together a lesson plan, etc., but THEY DON'T KNOW SQUAT about science or math! I've actually done talks at schools before I began teaching, and had teachers dispute the accuracy of what I was presenting. One teacher rebuked me during a presentation. I had explained why satellites can stay in orbit, instead of falling back to Earth. (It's because their orbital velocity allows them to "fall around" the Earth continually.) Her explanation was that "Everybody knows it's because there's no gravity in Space. That's why the astronauts are weightless."! I know there are some good science teachers out there, because I have one in the Astronomy class I teach at the local Community College. But, as her actual income shrinks due to gradual increase in her medical care contributions, she must take on other responsibilities just to stay even. Meanwhile, she's getting a second Master's degree because that's what school boards want to see. Sorry for the explosion of words. I have no particular scientific explanation for it. But, at least I know when I don't know something, unlike the majority of our science teachers, who couldn't tell you why the phases of the Moon happen, but will happily make something up! (And yeah, THAT happened to me, too!)
Uh, OK. But I have a quibble about the number of points awarded to this post. Not how many, how FEW! I'd have awarded at least 5 points for "funny", but then have added another 5 for "really getting the point", and maybe another 5 for "best use of math humorously". Me, all I needed to know about the potential veracity of the site on which this latest "breakthrough" was posted was the sidebar for their PERSONALS. Just below his picture, a young Caucasian man had posted: "I think most asian girls are very hot, I would love to move to Japan. I like nice legs, nice smiles, nice eyes, cute hair, and nice butts for sure." All this, and MAGNETS, too?
A variation on this theme would be that the problem of disposing of worn-out paper AOL CDs will be worse than the problem of disposing of worn-out automobile tires! I can see it now: "Yet another paper-AOL-CD dump has erupted in flames. More at 11!"
I certainly can't think of a reason why it would be OK to pirate a movie or any other kind of work. But I think the LA Kops missed a charge they coulda made stick: "Being terminally stupid enough to try to pirate a really bad movie, to wit: 'The Alamo'."! Open-and-shut case!
I agree that we can certainly guarantee the condition of the cargo! But, can we gurantee that the cargo will actually hit the Moon? Well, we can if we know the location of the "Cosmic Bull's Eye" on the Moon, otherwise known as "Mare Orientale"! To see a great image of it, just go to: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960112.html
The writer makes some excellent points, and I certainly agree with the statement that the power grids are literally the World's biggest machines. And being such, they are among the World's most complex systems. Therefore, they are subject to the laws of Chaos Mathematics. In other words, no matter how well we test such as sytem, and no matter how many safequards we build into it, it will occasionally behave chaotically. This is true for Shuttle crashes, airplane crashes, train crashes, any really large system (crashing). Anytime something of this sort happens, and you read or hear that "a string of very improbable events all happened at one", and the investigator goes on to say that, "if one of these events hadn't happened, the plane wouldn't have crashed.", you just heard about "Chaos in Action". The long list of improbable events the writer mentioned just illustrate my point.
It's an example of "galloping irony" that the Russkies have chosen "Clipper" as the name or their proposed next generation spacecraft. Reason is that we already used that name for a 1/3-scale demo singe-stage-to-orbit vehicle in the 90s. It was called the DC-X or "Delta-Clipper", and it was made by McDonnell-Douglas under the direction of McD VP Pete Conrad, the former astronaut. You can read about it at:
http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/dc- xa.htm
There's also an interesting "first-person" account of the first publicly-viewed flight of this vehicle at:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/DCX/
A little later on, when NASA let a contract for a demo vehicle for a replacement for the Shuttle, the contract went to Lockheed-Martin in Marietta, GA. The fact that Bill Clinton needed to win GA in the 1996 election is said not to have anything to do with the fact that Lockheed got the contract, despite the fact that they had a paper vehicle, and McDonnell-Douglas had an already-flying vehicle! The Lockheed-Martin program never did anything but squander our money, and was later cancelled.
Rather than pay the Russians to build their vehicle, we ought to have a crash program to build the next generation version of the DC-X!
I agree that "electric cars are the way of the future." One electric car, the "CitiCar" was the way of my past. I bought one used in the '83 or '84, and drove it (when it was running) for about a year. Ironically, the problems with the car were the brakes, which were the same as those on a Cessna 172 light aircraft, and the method of switching the power from the batteries to the motor, which which was a set of relays that needed almost constant maintenance! I now know how to make the brakes work just fine, but I didn't know then. Also, the manufacturer had a semiconductor power transmission device (SCR pulsewidth modulator) that I could have bought for only $750, but, since I had that much in it at the time, I couldn't see it. I donated the thing to a local HS vo-tech program. My "20-20 hindsight" says I shouldn't have gotten rid of it!
Now, a thought about how little the use of an electric car will pollute the atmosphere. The answer is "a lot less than other types of cars". But, if engergy is generated, there's usually some kind of pollution, be it hydrocarbon emmissions, spent nuclear fuel we must somehow deal with, thermal pollution, etc. I'm trained in Physics, so I know a bit about nuclear power. I don't think that it's the answer, because there's no guarantee that our society will be stable enough over the time needed to properly store nuclear waste until it's no longer dangerous. The only long-term solution that makes sense to me is to really get serious about generating large amounts of electricity from the Sun. The technology already exists; it's our will as a society that's lacking.
Finally, I'm enthusiastic about electric cars for local transportation. However, battery weight is still a problem for long distance travel. I suspect that Hydrogen-powered vehicles (maybe not dirigibles!) will be the way to go for long distance travel by car. But, we can make Hydrogen and Oxygen by dissociating water with electricity, so that shouldn't be much of a problem. It appears that fuel cells will be used to generate electricity, so it might be that an electric car normally intended for local travel would be powered by an auxilliary trailer which would be carrying the Hydrogen, Oxygen, and the fuel cell itself.
Sorry this turned into "War&Peace"....
I agree that registration isn't a rip-off. What is a rip-off is the tendency of various online "services" to begin charging a subscription fee, but fail to upgrade the features and reliability of their "service".
Also, I have a lot of trouble with electronic publishing sites that seem to misunderstand that it's gotta be less expensive for me to buy thier online offering than it would cost me to buy the same or an equivalent publication in a bookstore. If they charge more online, what incentive are they offering me to buy their product?
This is a really good presentation of the current employment situation as I see it. I only have a bit to ad:
1. I worked for NASA/JPL and a Navy contractor for a lotta years as an electronics engineer/tech manager/astronomer. I found that graduates of the "for profit" tech schools such as DeVry were usually very well trained, and, so long as their job responsibilities were a good fit to their tech school training, they worked out very well. They also usually benefitted by in-service training, which was often modeled on how schools like DeVry do it.
2. Folks who had college or university degrees, on the other had, were not nearly so well trained as their tech school counterparts, in that they hadn't been exposed to as much material, but they were generally better educated, and also much more capable of training themselves when they needed to.
3. Finally, the military remains a great source of tech training, and costs the student a LOT less. Furthermore, if the student is willing to work really hard, he or she can get out of the military with the equivalent of a tech school cert AND an AS in a tech or science discipline. The catch, of course, is that the student is also a soldier, and has to get it straight in his or her head that there's the potential for killing and dying in the job. If you're a person who's contemplating this option, remember that you'll have to live with killing another human being a lot longer than you'll have to live with being killed! This may seem obvious, but a lot of young people don't consider it. I'm a veteran of the US Army, and I know I didn't pay much attention to this!
I certainly agree that the folks at the RIAA aren't much evolved from bags of dirt, but I also know folks who were making their living playing in a touring band, and almost lost everything because their CD-sales sagged due to the ease with which their fans could download their music for free from the various file-sharing sites. My closest friend "in the business" once remarked to me that "We have a lot of fans. They love our music and pack our concerts, but too many of those same fans don't see the need to buy our music...." We have to find some middle ground. Meanwhile, the folks from the RIAA should be told that the only thing they can carry in a violin case is a violin!
Nice job of searching. But you missed the one from the Food Network announcing the long series of shows on "Emeril Live!" on how to cook the "Musroom That Ate Oregon"! I thought the last episode, "Grilled Chicken Heart (that ate New Jersey) with Mushroom (that ate Oregon)" with special guest star Bill Cosby, was a bit over the top! Cosby's had that chicken heart in the freezer since - what? - 1965?
Well, the alternative is that, instead of "killing two birds with one stone", we can all flood NASA HQ with letters, say, oh, 125,000 of them. O''Keefe will be forced to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope. But, in a fit of pique, he moves it to Friday night....
Slashdot Mirror
See what happens when those biologists fail to follow directions?
"the very same buggy software"....
Actually, in 1997, Microsoft patented "horse & buggy software"! You'll likely be getting a call from Bill's lawyers....
I'd leave the version of Windows that you had on the laptop when you decided to send it off to Uganda (home of "Mountain-Glown Coffee"!). A couple of other thoughts: Put the latest version of (the free) IrfanView on it, because it reads pretty much any image format, remembering the install the plugins. And then put John Walker's "Home Planet", a free planetarium/astronomy program. I'm sure there are more, but....
The last bit of the original post reads, "It gives you control of not only the current generation of spam, but also any future commercial spam -- why replace Viagra ads from a scam artist with Viagra ads from Pfizer?" The ultimate irony woulda been if the ad JUST BELOW this post had been for Pfizer. It's just slightly less ironic that the ad was for....MICROSOFT!
You've turned down the position because you wouldn't ever get to write code and tinker with the nuts&bolts again. And maybe lurking in there is your own suspicion that you wouldn't be good at the job of supervising folks like yourself. But you need to know if the prospective candidate is any good at doing the tasks he/she will be supervising. If not, can he/she supervise you and your cohorts? The answer is maybe, if he/she at least understands and appreciates the process. But, if there's no real understanding of the process, or, worse, no appreciation of what it takes, then the candidate isn't right for the job. So, ask questions designed to uncover what the candidate knows about what you have to do to get your job done, and whether or not the candidate appreciates the type of people who do it well.
If a subatomic particle lives such a short time that it can't be observed, does it exist at all? What if it dresses in a "bear suit"?
These things don't carry much. They don't fly very fast. They can't fly very high. They always seem to run into extreme weather and end up scattered in pieces across the landscape. Why do I love Zeppelins so? Maybe because my family name was spelled "Schaeffer" in the "old country"?
And furthermore, "KC Masterpiece BBQ Sauce" hadn't been invented yet! (And furthermore,)^2, consider that the slackers among the dinosaurs, the ones who were hanging around the hot tub on "der tag", were the only ones who survivied!
Even if those math courses aren't specifically used, they implicitly help the student learn how to think about solving problems. That's a lot more valuable than a lotta folks think it is. I teach Astronomy at a community college here in the SW. I get a lot of students who haven't been forced to think much. They're not dumb. Far from it. But they haven't been forced to think critically very often, so they don't. That's why we need to stress science and math in our schools, not because the majority of students will do a lot of math and science throughout their lives, but because they'll really need to think critically throughout their lives!
Just clicked on down to see what folks were saying about HDTV when that sentence: "I thought hockey gmes were basically just contact figure skating...". Just the phrasing got a 6.49 on the open-ended GuffawScale! Thanks for that. On Monday AM, I needed that!
Whether or not it's legal isn't the question we should be asking. Here are three I think we should ask: 1. What do we think will happen if music is available so cheaply that pro musicians can't make a living recording their music? 2. If it's OK to buy music for next to nothing from a Russian website, is it also OK to pay for a ticket to a concert and then tape it and sell repros of the tape? 3. Say you go to work for a company making framuses. On payday, your boss comes up to you and says, "Hey, your check's pretty weak this time around. This is all we could get for what you made on "Boris' WebFramus". Would you regard this as a fair system?
I'd give a 5 for insight! Teachers are being held accountable for the success or failure of their students, but the students and their parents aren't being held accountable for the kids' educations. However, I have a couple of things to ad. I've taught for the last couple of years in charter schools in Central AZ, after a long career in aerospace. What I find is that we have a lot of teachers who can tell you a dozen different ways of doing a gradebook, or how to put together a lesson plan, etc., but THEY DON'T KNOW SQUAT about science or math! I've actually done talks at schools before I began teaching, and had teachers dispute the accuracy of what I was presenting. One teacher rebuked me during a presentation. I had explained why satellites can stay in orbit, instead of falling back to Earth. (It's because their orbital velocity allows them to "fall around" the Earth continually.) Her explanation was that "Everybody knows it's because there's no gravity in Space. That's why the astronauts are weightless."! I know there are some good science teachers out there, because I have one in the Astronomy class I teach at the local Community College. But, as her actual income shrinks due to gradual increase in her medical care contributions, she must take on other responsibilities just to stay even. Meanwhile, she's getting a second Master's degree because that's what school boards want to see. Sorry for the explosion of words. I have no particular scientific explanation for it. But, at least I know when I don't know something, unlike the majority of our science teachers, who couldn't tell you why the phases of the Moon happen, but will happily make something up! (And yeah, THAT happened to me, too!)
When the shit hits the "inventor's" 40-Kfans they'll be a LOT noisier!
Uh, OK. But I have a quibble about the number of points awarded to this post. Not how many, how FEW! I'd have awarded at least 5 points for "funny", but then have added another 5 for "really getting the point", and maybe another 5 for "best use of math humorously". Me, all I needed to know about the potential veracity of the site on which this latest "breakthrough" was posted was the sidebar for their PERSONALS. Just below his picture, a young Caucasian man had posted: "I think most asian girls are very hot, I would love to move to Japan. I like nice legs, nice smiles, nice eyes, cute hair, and nice butts for sure." All this, and MAGNETS, too?
A variation on this theme would be that the problem of disposing of worn-out paper AOL CDs will be worse than the problem of disposing of worn-out automobile tires! I can see it now: "Yet another paper-AOL-CD dump has erupted in flames. More at 11!"
I certainly can't think of a reason why it would be OK to pirate a movie or any other kind of work. But I think the LA Kops missed a charge they coulda made stick: "Being terminally stupid enough to try to pirate a really bad movie, to wit: 'The Alamo'."! Open-and-shut case!
I agree that we can certainly guarantee the condition of the cargo! But, can we gurantee that the cargo will actually hit the Moon? Well, we can if we know the location of the "Cosmic Bull's Eye" on the Moon, otherwise known as "Mare Orientale"! To see a great image of it, just go to: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap960112.html
The writer makes some excellent points, and I certainly agree with the statement that the power grids are literally the World's biggest machines. And being such, they are among the World's most complex systems. Therefore, they are subject to the laws of Chaos Mathematics. In other words, no matter how well we test such as sytem, and no matter how many safequards we build into it, it will occasionally behave chaotically. This is true for Shuttle crashes, airplane crashes, train crashes, any really large system (crashing). Anytime something of this sort happens, and you read or hear that "a string of very improbable events all happened at one", and the investigator goes on to say that, "if one of these events hadn't happened, the plane wouldn't have crashed.", you just heard about "Chaos in Action". The long list of improbable events the writer mentioned just illustrate my point.
It's an example of "galloping irony" that the Russkies have chosen "Clipper" as the name or their proposed next generation spacecraft. Reason is that we already used that name for a 1/3-scale demo singe-stage-to-orbit vehicle in the 90s. It was called the DC-X or "Delta-Clipper", and it was made by McDonnell-Douglas under the direction of McD VP Pete Conrad, the former astronaut. You can read about it at: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History/x-33/dc- xa.htm
There's also an interesting "first-person" account of the first publicly-viewed flight of this vehicle at:
http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/DCX/
A little later on, when NASA let a contract for a demo vehicle for a replacement for the Shuttle, the contract went to Lockheed-Martin in Marietta, GA. The fact that Bill Clinton needed to win GA in the 1996 election is said not to have anything to do with the fact that Lockheed got the contract, despite the fact that they had a paper vehicle, and McDonnell-Douglas had an already-flying vehicle! The Lockheed-Martin program never did anything but squander our money, and was later cancelled.
Rather than pay the Russians to build their vehicle, we ought to have a crash program to build the next generation version of the DC-X!
I agree that "electric cars are the way of the future." One electric car, the "CitiCar" was the way of my past. I bought one used in the '83 or '84, and drove it (when it was running) for about a year. Ironically, the problems with the car were the brakes, which were the same as those on a Cessna 172 light aircraft, and the method of switching the power from the batteries to the motor, which which was a set of relays that needed almost constant maintenance! I now know how to make the brakes work just fine, but I didn't know then. Also, the manufacturer had a semiconductor power transmission device (SCR pulsewidth modulator) that I could have bought for only $750, but, since I had that much in it at the time, I couldn't see it. I donated the thing to a local HS vo-tech program. My "20-20 hindsight" says I shouldn't have gotten rid of it! Now, a thought about how little the use of an electric car will pollute the atmosphere. The answer is "a lot less than other types of cars". But, if engergy is generated, there's usually some kind of pollution, be it hydrocarbon emmissions, spent nuclear fuel we must somehow deal with, thermal pollution, etc. I'm trained in Physics, so I know a bit about nuclear power. I don't think that it's the answer, because there's no guarantee that our society will be stable enough over the time needed to properly store nuclear waste until it's no longer dangerous. The only long-term solution that makes sense to me is to really get serious about generating large amounts of electricity from the Sun. The technology already exists; it's our will as a society that's lacking. Finally, I'm enthusiastic about electric cars for local transportation. However, battery weight is still a problem for long distance travel. I suspect that Hydrogen-powered vehicles (maybe not dirigibles!) will be the way to go for long distance travel by car. But, we can make Hydrogen and Oxygen by dissociating water with electricity, so that shouldn't be much of a problem. It appears that fuel cells will be used to generate electricity, so it might be that an electric car normally intended for local travel would be powered by an auxilliary trailer which would be carrying the Hydrogen, Oxygen, and the fuel cell itself. Sorry this turned into "War&Peace"....
I agree that registration isn't a rip-off. What is a rip-off is the tendency of various online "services" to begin charging a subscription fee, but fail to upgrade the features and reliability of their "service". Also, I have a lot of trouble with electronic publishing sites that seem to misunderstand that it's gotta be less expensive for me to buy thier online offering than it would cost me to buy the same or an equivalent publication in a bookstore. If they charge more online, what incentive are they offering me to buy their product?
This is a really good presentation of the current employment situation as I see it. I only have a bit to ad: 1. I worked for NASA/JPL and a Navy contractor for a lotta years as an electronics engineer/tech manager/astronomer. I found that graduates of the "for profit" tech schools such as DeVry were usually very well trained, and, so long as their job responsibilities were a good fit to their tech school training, they worked out very well. They also usually benefitted by in-service training, which was often modeled on how schools like DeVry do it. 2. Folks who had college or university degrees, on the other had, were not nearly so well trained as their tech school counterparts, in that they hadn't been exposed to as much material, but they were generally better educated, and also much more capable of training themselves when they needed to. 3. Finally, the military remains a great source of tech training, and costs the student a LOT less. Furthermore, if the student is willing to work really hard, he or she can get out of the military with the equivalent of a tech school cert AND an AS in a tech or science discipline. The catch, of course, is that the student is also a soldier, and has to get it straight in his or her head that there's the potential for killing and dying in the job. If you're a person who's contemplating this option, remember that you'll have to live with killing another human being a lot longer than you'll have to live with being killed! This may seem obvious, but a lot of young people don't consider it. I'm a veteran of the US Army, and I know I didn't pay much attention to this!
I certainly agree that the folks at the RIAA aren't much evolved from bags of dirt, but I also know folks who were making their living playing in a touring band, and almost lost everything because their CD-sales sagged due to the ease with which their fans could download their music for free from the various file-sharing sites. My closest friend "in the business" once remarked to me that "We have a lot of fans. They love our music and pack our concerts, but too many of those same fans don't see the need to buy our music...." We have to find some middle ground. Meanwhile, the folks from the RIAA should be told that the only thing they can carry in a violin case is a violin!
Nice job of searching. But you missed the one from the Food Network announcing the long series of shows on "Emeril Live!" on how to cook the "Musroom That Ate Oregon"! I thought the last episode, "Grilled Chicken Heart (that ate New Jersey) with Mushroom (that ate Oregon)" with special guest star Bill Cosby, was a bit over the top! Cosby's had that chicken heart in the freezer since - what? - 1965?
Well, the alternative is that, instead of "killing two birds with one stone", we can all flood NASA HQ with letters, say, oh, 125,000 of them. O''Keefe will be forced to extend the life of the Hubble Space Telescope. But, in a fit of pique, he moves it to Friday night....