Y'know, I can almost respect them for torching SUVs - If the government won't tell people "No, you may not drive
a vehicle that presents a significant danger* to everyone else on the road, without special training for the appropriate
license class", then perhaps fear of having their car burn down one night kept at least a few people driving more
realistic vehicles.
So lemme get this straight. You almost respect them for:
- extreme vandalism,
- severely inconveniencing people who rely on their vehicles, which also inconveniences the people who rely on them,
- causing a metric fuckton of air pollution all in one go,
- risking catching something else or someone on fire,
- destroying an SUV that will likely be replaced with ANOTHER SUV, thus INCREASING the demand for them,
because you think the LICENSE BUREAU isn't doing a good job? Would you respect them more or less if you thought they were burning SUVs because the patent office isn't doing a good job?
Likely, the folks at google are turning this into some sort of biological warfare device - They want to figure out which species of mosquito we have to kill in order to remove all mouth-breathers from the planet, leaving all the hot women alive for the rest of us.
When a Sci-Fi corridor is mentioned I instantly think of old series Dr. Who. They were all flimsy and cheap, but they were interesting to look at and it always seemed like half the story involved the Doctor and/or an assistant running through them.
I hereby present without comment, the corridor scene from the parody/fanfic "The All-Singing, All-Dancing Five Doctors Pro-Am Cabaret Extravaganza" which I just happened to dig into my CD archive today to reread.
It was much later. The Doctor thrust his hands into his pockets, pursed his lips and peered into the dimly-it corridor.
The corridor.
Many people, the Time Lords included, thought of these ubiquitous quadrosurface
cubicoid two-dimensional tunnels with the name beginning with 'c' and rhyming
with 'snorridor' as, well, reasonably harmless. Just scenery, really, aren't
they? said Borusa once in a lecture, and the young Doctor (or Theta Sigma as
he was known to the faculty, or Spacko as he was known to the Master and his
gang of wannabe megalomaniacs) had had no cause to disagree.
He knew better now, of course. In all his battles against the Daleks, the
Cybermen, the Gods of Rrrragnarrrok et al, *they* had been there. Lurking.
Laughing behind his back. There would usually be a family of them in every
inhabited city on every planet in the known universe, and at Guild meetings
they would gather together, fomenting secret strategems, preparing for the
glorious day when they could be free of their shackles and rise up to control
the cosmos...ahahahahahaha.... Um. Evil, twisted creatures, they got special
pleasure from a range of illicit activities. Luring unwary space travellers
into their squalid interiors, where they would spend the rest of their days
wandering up and down in topological disarray and having strange disturbing
thoughts about artexed wallpaper. Saying the word 'wee', very quietly, when
no-one was around. Winning design awards at the annual 'Beings with No Nasal
Tract' festival. And - especially - messing the Doctor around. They really had
it in for him.
And the Doctor hated corridors. Almost as much as he hated half-hour info-
mercials extolling the dubious virtues of spending large quantities of coin
in the purchasing of small, white, serrated plastic culinary utensils such as
the Carrot Disney-Character-U-Sculpt, the Cabbage Home Topiary Kit, and the
Radish Friend! which, er, had been on a scrambled channel for some, um, reason.
There's quite a bit more of this, but I do think that's enough for the time being.
There is a right to free speech, but there is no right to an audience.
This is why I support "Free Speech Zones" for protesters 10 miles from any site relevant to the protest, and tossing the more annoying protesters in cells where they can free speech all they want at the serial rapist in the cell with them. Why should I provide someone with a view I disagree with an audience? They have no right to an audience.
(Sarcasm mode off.)
You can't force someone to listen because of free speech, this is true. But you can't force them to NOT listen either. Just as the individual has a right to say what he wants without government interference, all the other individuals nearby have a right to listen or not listen as they choose, without some nanny-state censor saying "This is good! Pay attention!" or "This is bad! Don't pay attention!"
The idea of free speech is that the individual says what he wants and the people, as individuals, decide whether or not they want to hear it.
Here's a good rule of thumb when you hear of a controversial speaker being silenced: In your mind, replace the controversial comments with other comments. Perhaps the polar opposite, or perhaps some other controversial or historically controversial comment. The catch? Make the replacement something that you agree with.
If you're horrified at the idea of someone saying "All races are equal." or "Gay marriage is OK." being shouted down, then you should be horrified when someone saying "Close the borders and install gun emplacements!" or "White power, baybeeee!" is shouted down because the same rules that protect their right to say what they think protect YOUR right to say what you think. Erosion for one is erosion for all, unless you truly believe that the current ruling party is the same as it always was and is the same as it always will be, and will never be voted out or corrupted or shift focus or compromise. And if you do, I got a nice bridge to sell ya.
I've seen similar birthday plans scheduled for October 29th (first hard link) or even December. It's one of those unknowable things, but an entertaining article nevertheless.
Are we sure it's not just an excuse to have multiple celebrations?
And considering that kids generally see 40 year old humans as "really old", that's saying something.
Everything done before you were born falls into your personal prehistory. While adults (hopefully) usually pick up a sense of scale, it takes a while for that to manifest in kids. Moses and George Washington might as well have been neighbors for how long ago it all was to them.
But the scary thing? For a kid in middle school, that "long ago" not only includes Washington and Lincoln and the World Wars, it also includes the invention of the computer and the ubiquity of the cell phone and the Internet. And if you want to feel decrepit: For a kid in elementary, the scale moves up past 9/11/01 - on their personal timescale, it's a more recent Pearl Harbor.
"Well, yes, there weren't even personal computers 40 years ago"
"There were no computers 40 years ago?!?!?!?!?!!"
yeesh
Don't try to explain that the computer keyboard is an extension of the typewriter. It'll just make things worse.
Not hard to parody, I admit. The previous poster was more subtle. I just took some of Gene's typical rants and made them on-topic. Er, relatively on-topic, of course.
Who said violent videogames weren't good for anything? This is in your face, Jack Thompson!
Violent video games make you murderous, evil and antisocial! But remembering ads and buying things means you're a good docile little consumerist with lots of friends, like the people in the ads!
But... but... but.... JOE SIXPACK LOGIC BREAKING MY BRAIN! GLAARGH!
They do something like this at my daughters school. I don't know if they have a name for it. In 1st grade she was encouraged to just write. It didn't matter what she wrote. It was more about penmanship than spelling.
So it was a penmanship class. I'm guessing that if she wrote a letter backwards or her writing was too far out of the lines, she was informed of same and encouraged to do better next time? Then she's being taught penmanship. (Impressive, it's a rare thing these days.)
However, what is the alternative? No child knows how to spell or knows proper punctuation/grammar in First grade. Are you saying that they shouldn't even attempt original composition?
Sure they should. And if they get the spelling wrong, it should be corrected. And they should be taught spelling outside of composition, as well.
I thought it worked out great. (Also...my daughter likes to IM me while I'm at work. She is FORCED to invent spelling. She also started writing notes to her mother in crayon. She also wrote chore lists and shopping lists. She invents spelling all the time. It's something they are going to do whether the teacher asks them to or not. I hardly think it's harming her.)
You're conflating improvisation and education. Of course she can guess at the spellings of words she doesn't know; everyone does it as soon as they hit a word they don't often use. But there's a difference between guessing something and being treated as if your guess was right even when it wasn't.
The school's job is to teach her to do it right, not to let her write "kat" and tell her she's not wrong. If it is indeed a penmanship class, then her spelling mistakes can be pointed out but not necessarily marked down to the extent that they would be in a spelling class.
Nothing turns a kid off to reading and writing like a bunch of teachers who red mark all your work. While the person next to you gets a gold star.
And that's good. It gives the ones who did it right the feeling of achievement, and the ones who did it wrong an incentive to do it right. If it turns him off doing it, then that's a damn shame, but I fail to see how having him learning wrong improves matters. Learning the rules of the road is a drag, but I'd much rather drivers know how to drive than tell me that their instructor was a fun guy while the paramedic wipes my kidneys off their headlights.
School isn't about self-esteem and having fun and treating everyone like an identical fragile ball of emotions that we can't dare contradict or even disturb, it's about learning the stuff the kid will need in his/her later school years and, in turn, in the adult world. It it can be fun at the same time, great! Ideally it should be. But first and foremost kids are there to learn.
To do well, kids need guidance. They need limits. Some form of judgment. And if adults don't provide it, they'll make one of their own, standard playground pecking order. And theirs tend to be more sadistic.
In kindergarden they usually just cover the alphabet and writing letters. The Invented Spelling at least gets them in the mind set that writing is a fun activity.
What if they don't want to write at all? The journal gimmick only makes it fun if writing is at least somewhat fun to begin with. If the kid doesn't want to set pencil to paper and mark down words, then it's ALL not fun. What then? Let the kid doodle so he can establish the mindset that making lines on paper is a fun activity, and try work up from there?
Later on you can more quietly work on the issues and teach them the rules for spelling.
So you build the house on a mud foundation, then dig and pour the concrete under it? Dude, it's better to do it right the first time. Unlearning bad habits is a bitch, and having the year two authority figure try explain why the year one authority figure deliberately did things wrong never goes over well with kids. They don't see why yesterday's "That's right!" is today's "That's wrong!" Hell, I work for a living and I often don't see why yesterday's "That's right!" is today's "That's wrong!", either.
When my youngest was in kindergarten, the stupid school district came up with having the pre-readers write diaries, with what they called "invented spelling".
She still can't spell. Thanks, "educators".
Oh, goodness, they had that when I was a kid. The idea was the kid wrote what they wanted, enjoyed writing, etc. and the teacher's responses used correct grammar and spelling so the student could compare and contrast the two.
In reality, it didn't work like that. The less ethical teachers used it to collect gossip (small town), the less clever teachers made mistakes of their own*, and because no one told the students WHY "I ain't got none" is wrong and "I don't have any" is right, the kids never learned.
(* I've seen a teacher's journal notes asking if a student had a Valentine's "sweatheart", and another, after showing a video about Paul Bunyan, asking what "the blue oxen name" was. Yes, the teacher couldn't tell the difference between the plural and the possessive of "ox".)
Simply trying to passively sneak learning in doesn't work. If the kid is clever enough to absorb proper grammar through seeing it used ONCE, then the kid wants to learn enough that he/she will gain from normal lessons.
Found out when I was in high school that journals and invented spelling had been seen as the useless crap they were and abandoned. And replaced with the NEW crap-of-the-year "simplified spelling". I have a little cousin who, when shown a crate with "APPLES" written on it, couldn't guess what was inside. When told, she insisted it was spelled WRONG, that "apples" was "apls", because that's what she was taught. (A sound + P sound + L sound + S sound.) It's like someone realized phonics used to work and then fucked the implementation up HARD.
All in all, I'm glad my mom instilled in me a love of reading AND a resistance to blindly obeying authority before I got to school. I needed both for my trips through schools in backwater districts, or run by "we gotta be cutting edge" school boards, or, Heaven forbid, both.
Yup... Ever since them young-us started building that tower at Babel, I can't understand a word those hoodlums are saying.
What? I can't understand you.
For those of you who don't know the story of Babel, it goes like this: Everyone spoke one language, which made people get along far too well for their own good. In this great harmony, they decided to build a tower to Heaven. God, disliking the idea of having new neighbors lowering His property values but apparently short on lightning bolts and plagues that day, made everyone working on the tower speak a different language, so they couldn't understand each other.
And in the end, it turns out the murderer was an orangutan.
Honestly, it never ceases to amaze me how slashdot geeks don't allow having no practical experience with something (e.g. pouring concrete) stop them from drawing extrapolated conclusions therefrom.
You must be amazed every time an Ask Slashdot hits the front page.
And, thanks to a misreading on my part, I had a mental image of Archon,
You rang?
where your Sorceress had the ability to go back in time to before your dragon got his ass kicked by a fucking unicorn.
Or, as in my worst loss ever, a damn goblin suddenly wires himself up like he's on crack, hits a couple lucky scenery changes that ALL bump him closer to his target and out of the way of my last shot, and is bloody impossible to hit until he's so close he's busy turning the wizard into a fine paste. A GOBLIN!
Most memorable game? Ended in a tie. Not a draw, but a tie. The sorceress and wizard (the last pieces for their respective sides) took each other out with their last shot. Empty board, tied game.
Aw, no new Archon game.:(
More's the pity, huh? I'd even take an Adept-based game now.
If you're concerned, stick a printout of the spec in there. FAT is simple enough to pick apart with a hex editor given some time, and it doesn't take very long to write a read-only implementation of it.
Have I wandered into another thread by accident, or are we still talking about something targeted at a seventeen year old girl? Because most seventeen year olds of either gender would sooner set themselves on fire than throw themselves into coding a filesystem implementation based off of careful studying of a spec sheet. Hell, I'm a 30 year old geek and I'd rather set myself on fire. And let's face it, if the stars align and she turns into enough of a die-hard tech head to do that, then any format of any age will work - she'll take decoding it as a challenge.
I suppose the person who's giving it could do the decoding and whatnot, if they're still around in 16 years. But if that's the case, just write on a note "Ask me for the stuff I was going to put in here.", then stash your time capsule data (JPGs, basic HTML, ASCII, etc.) in an obvious place with the other files you normally back up (you do backups, right)? And then it'll get naturally elevated to the newest file system format as you upgrade your systems.
I didn't see Dances with Wolves (DwW) and I probably won't see this.
First (and only) member of the didn't see DwW society. (DSWwWS)
Can I join? Had no interest, and I've only since seen the occasional snippet while channel-surfing.
An old pal of mine's mother may also be a member. Due to some confusion on her part, she thought it was called "Dances With Foxes". So she saw that in the TV listing, turned it on, and got quite the surprise. Don't know if she ever overcame her shock enough to watch the real movie.
I only have two problems with drivers: First, if you lose the CD you're hosed.
If you're dealing with an older or a no-name device, quite possible. But a lot of the major manufacturers provide drivers (often newer than the ones on disk) on their websites.
New things will be done with the dog and the bread-crumb-trails mechanic....
Okay, this is a hoax, right? Haha, we were all fooled. You had me except for that line about new things being done with the dog, as if it was a good idea that merely need to be tweaked to make it great, as if it could somehow be slotted into a game that's apparently going to be a king RPG. Really, that line was a bit too Onion-y for it to come off as being a real announcement.
But it was a respectable shot. You got us good, Pete.
TAFKAP.com, if we go by what my local newspaper's entertainment page used to use. Got so bad that they wouldn't expand out the acronym the first time, and I was starting to think he'd re-changed his name to TAFKAP.
But if I had to render that as a URL? my-harpoon-caught-a-horn.com
I'm sorry, that's what it always looked like to me. Like a bunch of musical whalers saw the hammer and sickle and said "Hey, we need something like that!"
Slashdot Mirror
Y'know, I can almost respect them for torching SUVs - If the government won't tell people "No, you may not drive a vehicle that presents a significant danger* to everyone else on the road, without special training for the appropriate license class", then perhaps fear of having their car burn down one night kept at least a few people driving more realistic vehicles.
So lemme get this straight. You almost respect them for:
- extreme vandalism,
- severely inconveniencing people who rely on their vehicles, which also inconveniences the people who rely on them,
- causing a metric fuckton of air pollution all in one go,
- risking catching something else or someone on fire,
- destroying an SUV that will likely be replaced with ANOTHER SUV, thus INCREASING the demand for them,
because you think the LICENSE BUREAU isn't doing a good job? Would you respect them more or less if you thought they were burning SUVs because the patent office isn't doing a good job?
Likely, the folks at google are turning this into some sort of biological warfare device - They want to figure out which species of mosquito we have to kill in order to remove all mouth-breathers from the planet, leaving all the hot women alive for the rest of us.
Hey, hey, what's with all this "us" stuff?
When a Sci-Fi corridor is mentioned I instantly think of old series Dr. Who. They were all flimsy and cheap, but they were interesting to look at and it always seemed like half the story involved the Doctor and/or an assistant running through them.
I hereby present without comment, the corridor scene from the parody/fanfic "The All-Singing, All-Dancing Five Doctors Pro-Am Cabaret Extravaganza" which I just happened to dig into my CD archive today to reread.
It was much later. The Doctor thrust his hands into his pockets, pursed his lips and peered into the dimly-it corridor.
The corridor.
Many people, the Time Lords included, thought of these ubiquitous quadrosurface cubicoid two-dimensional tunnels with the name beginning with 'c' and rhyming with 'snorridor' as, well, reasonably harmless. Just scenery, really, aren't they? said Borusa once in a lecture, and the young Doctor (or Theta Sigma as he was known to the faculty, or Spacko as he was known to the Master and his gang of wannabe megalomaniacs) had had no cause to disagree.
He knew better now, of course. In all his battles against the Daleks, the Cybermen, the Gods of Rrrragnarrrok et al, *they* had been there. Lurking. Laughing behind his back. There would usually be a family of them in every inhabited city on every planet in the known universe, and at Guild meetings they would gather together, fomenting secret strategems, preparing for the glorious day when they could be free of their shackles and rise up to control the cosmos...ahahahahahaha.... Um. Evil, twisted creatures, they got special pleasure from a range of illicit activities. Luring unwary space travellers into their squalid interiors, where they would spend the rest of their days wandering up and down in topological disarray and having strange disturbing thoughts about artexed wallpaper. Saying the word 'wee', very quietly, when no-one was around. Winning design awards at the annual 'Beings with No Nasal Tract' festival. And - especially - messing the Doctor around. They really had it in for him.
And the Doctor hated corridors. Almost as much as he hated half-hour info- mercials extolling the dubious virtues of spending large quantities of coin in the purchasing of small, white, serrated plastic culinary utensils such as the Carrot Disney-Character-U-Sculpt, the Cabbage Home Topiary Kit, and the Radish Friend! which, er, had been on a scrambled channel for some, um, reason.
There's quite a bit more of this, but I do think that's enough for the time being.
There is a right to free speech, but there is no right to an audience.
This is why I support "Free Speech Zones" for protesters 10 miles from any site relevant to the protest, and tossing the more annoying protesters in cells where they can free speech all they want at the serial rapist in the cell with them. Why should I provide someone with a view I disagree with an audience? They have no right to an audience.
(Sarcasm mode off.)
You can't force someone to listen because of free speech, this is true. But you can't force them to NOT listen either. Just as the individual has a right to say what he wants without government interference, all the other individuals nearby have a right to listen or not listen as they choose, without some nanny-state censor saying "This is good! Pay attention!" or "This is bad! Don't pay attention!"
The idea of free speech is that the individual says what he wants and the people, as individuals, decide whether or not they want to hear it.
Here's a good rule of thumb when you hear of a controversial speaker being silenced: In your mind, replace the controversial comments with other comments. Perhaps the polar opposite, or perhaps some other controversial or historically controversial comment. The catch? Make the replacement something that you agree with.
If you're horrified at the idea of someone saying "All races are equal." or "Gay marriage is OK." being shouted down, then you should be horrified when someone saying "Close the borders and install gun emplacements!" or "White power, baybeeee!" is shouted down because the same rules that protect their right to say what they think protect YOUR right to say what you think. Erosion for one is erosion for all, unless you truly believe that the current ruling party is the same as it always was and is the same as it always will be, and will never be voted out or corrupted or shift focus or compromise. And if you do, I got a nice bridge to sell ya.
I've seen similar birthday plans scheduled for October 29th (first hard link) or even December. It's one of those unknowable things, but an entertaining article nevertheless.
Are we sure it's not just an excuse to have multiple celebrations?
I told my kid the Internet turned 40.
"The internet is only 40 years old??!?!?!"
And considering that kids generally see 40 year old humans as "really old", that's saying something.
Everything done before you were born falls into your personal prehistory. While adults (hopefully) usually pick up a sense of scale, it takes a while for that to manifest in kids. Moses and George Washington might as well have been neighbors for how long ago it all was to them.
But the scary thing? For a kid in middle school, that "long ago" not only includes Washington and Lincoln and the World Wars, it also includes the invention of the computer and the ubiquity of the cell phone and the Internet. And if you want to feel decrepit: For a kid in elementary, the scale moves up past 9/11/01 - on their personal timescale, it's a more recent Pearl Harbor.
"Well, yes, there weren't even personal computers 40 years ago"
"There were no computers 40 years ago?!?!?!?!?!!"
yeesh
Don't try to explain that the computer keyboard is an extension of the typewriter. It'll just make things worse.
Brilliant. and for those of you who have no idea what he's (she's?)
"He", but the equality's appreciated nonetheless.
parodying, http://www.timecube.com/
Not hard to parody, I admit. The previous poster was more subtle. I just took some of Gene's typical rants and made them on-topic. Er, relatively on-topic, of course.
If you weren't so educated stupid by evil educators, you would realize the power of the four-corner diagonal tab.
Browser has simultaneous four corner TAB CUBE in only 24 minute browsing session. 4 CORNER TAB, CUBE BROWSER.
BROWSER'S HARMONIC SIMULTANEOUS 4 CORNER TAB CUBE IS THE ONLY WAY!
Who said violent videogames weren't good for anything? This is in your face, Jack Thompson!
Violent video games make you murderous, evil and antisocial! But remembering ads and buying things means you're a good docile little consumerist with lots of friends, like the people in the ads!
But... but... but.... JOE SIXPACK LOGIC BREAKING MY BRAIN! GLAARGH!
I'm watching: CBS
2 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: ABC
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I'm watching: NBC
2 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: ETWN
2 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: Playboy Channel
5 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: ETWN
5 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: Playboy Channel
5 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: CNN
5minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: ABC (Mountain Time affiliate)
6 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: NBC (Central Time affiliate)
7 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: CBS (Mountain Time affiliate)
7 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: Bravo!
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I'm watching: CBS
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I'm watching: ABC
8 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
I'm watching: NBC
8 minutes ago from IBM TwitteRemote
They do something like this at my daughters school. I don't know if they have a name for it. In 1st grade she was encouraged to just write. It didn't matter what she wrote. It was more about penmanship than spelling.
So it was a penmanship class. I'm guessing that if she wrote a letter backwards or her writing was too far out of the lines, she was informed of same and encouraged to do better next time? Then she's being taught penmanship. (Impressive, it's a rare thing these days.)
However, what is the alternative? No child knows how to spell or knows proper punctuation/grammar in First grade. Are you saying that they shouldn't even attempt original composition?
Sure they should. And if they get the spelling wrong, it should be corrected. And they should be taught spelling outside of composition, as well.
I thought it worked out great. (Also...my daughter likes to IM me while I'm at work. She is FORCED to invent spelling. She also started writing notes to her mother in crayon. She also wrote chore lists and shopping lists. She invents spelling all the time. It's something they are going to do whether the teacher asks them to or not. I hardly think it's harming her.)
You're conflating improvisation and education. Of course she can guess at the spellings of words she doesn't know; everyone does it as soon as they hit a word they don't often use. But there's a difference between guessing something and being treated as if your guess was right even when it wasn't.
The school's job is to teach her to do it right, not to let her write "kat" and tell her she's not wrong. If it is indeed a penmanship class, then her spelling mistakes can be pointed out but not necessarily marked down to the extent that they would be in a spelling class.
Nothing turns a kid off to reading and writing like a bunch of teachers who red mark all your work. While the person next to you gets a gold star.
And that's good. It gives the ones who did it right the feeling of achievement, and the ones who did it wrong an incentive to do it right. If it turns him off doing it, then that's a damn shame, but I fail to see how having him learning wrong improves matters. Learning the rules of the road is a drag, but I'd much rather drivers know how to drive than tell me that their instructor was a fun guy while the paramedic wipes my kidneys off their headlights.
School isn't about self-esteem and having fun and treating everyone like an identical fragile ball of emotions that we can't dare contradict or even disturb, it's about learning the stuff the kid will need in his/her later school years and, in turn, in the adult world. It it can be fun at the same time, great! Ideally it should be. But first and foremost kids are there to learn.
To do well, kids need guidance. They need limits. Some form of judgment. And if adults don't provide it, they'll make one of their own, standard playground pecking order. And theirs tend to be more sadistic.
In kindergarden they usually just cover the alphabet and writing letters. The Invented Spelling at least gets them in the mind set that writing is a fun activity.
What if they don't want to write at all? The journal gimmick only makes it fun if writing is at least somewhat fun to begin with. If the kid doesn't want to set pencil to paper and mark down words, then it's ALL not fun. What then? Let the kid doodle so he can establish the mindset that making lines on paper is a fun activity, and try work up from there?
Later on you can more quietly work on the issues and teach them the rules for spelling.
So you build the house on a mud foundation, then dig and pour the concrete under it? Dude, it's better to do it right the first time. Unlearning bad habits is a bitch, and having the year two authority figure try explain why the year one authority figure deliberately did things wrong never goes over well with kids. They don't see why yesterday's "That's right!" is today's "That's wrong!" Hell, I work for a living and I often don't see why yesterday's "That's right!" is today's "That's wrong!", either.
When my youngest was in kindergarten, the stupid school district came up with having the pre-readers write diaries, with what they called "invented spelling".
She still can't spell. Thanks, "educators".
Oh, goodness, they had that when I was a kid. The idea was the kid wrote what they wanted, enjoyed writing, etc. and the teacher's responses used correct grammar and spelling so the student could compare and contrast the two.
In reality, it didn't work like that. The less ethical teachers used it to collect gossip (small town), the less clever teachers made mistakes of their own*, and because no one told the students WHY "I ain't got none" is wrong and "I don't have any" is right, the kids never learned.
(* I've seen a teacher's journal notes asking if a student had a Valentine's "sweatheart", and another, after showing a video about Paul Bunyan, asking what "the blue oxen name" was. Yes, the teacher couldn't tell the difference between the plural and the possessive of "ox".)
Simply trying to passively sneak learning in doesn't work. If the kid is clever enough to absorb proper grammar through seeing it used ONCE, then the kid wants to learn enough that he/she will gain from normal lessons.
Found out when I was in high school that journals and invented spelling had been seen as the useless crap they were and abandoned. And replaced with the NEW crap-of-the-year "simplified spelling". I have a little cousin who, when shown a crate with "APPLES" written on it, couldn't guess what was inside. When told, she insisted it was spelled WRONG, that "apples" was "apls", because that's what she was taught. (A sound + P sound + L sound + S sound.) It's like someone realized phonics used to work and then fucked the implementation up HARD.
All in all, I'm glad my mom instilled in me a love of reading AND a resistance to blindly obeying authority before I got to school. I needed both for my trips through schools in backwater districts, or run by "we gotta be cutting edge" school boards, or, Heaven forbid, both.
Yup... Ever since them young-us started building that tower at Babel, I can't understand a word those hoodlums are saying.
What? I can't understand you.
For those of you who don't know the story of Babel, it goes like this: Everyone spoke one language, which made people get along far too well for their own good. In this great harmony, they decided to build a tower to Heaven. God, disliking the idea of having new neighbors lowering His property values but apparently short on lightning bolts and plagues that day, made everyone working on the tower speak a different language, so they couldn't understand each other.
And in the end, it turns out the murderer was an orangutan.
The little C's are there, but they are in 0.000000001 font. I think it's Arial.
Parent the first:
Guh. I hate Arial.
Well, at least it's not Comic Sans.
Parent the second:
Nope, Comic Sans. So much for intelligent design.
Parent the third:
Thank god! I was afraid it was going to be Comic Sans.
And this has proven that even when people disagree on everything else, they still agree that Comic Sans sucks.
10 - watching her install Ubuntu... naked!
(Peels lacquer layer off disk.) Okay, Ubuntu's naked, where do I get the girl?
Yeah, I know, but "nothing more attractive"? Really?
Maybe he's into blue skin and underbites...?
Honestly, it never ceases to amaze me how slashdot geeks don't allow having no practical experience with something (e.g. pouring concrete) stop them from drawing extrapolated conclusions therefrom.
You must be amazed every time an Ask Slashdot hits the front page.
And, thanks to a misreading on my part, I had a mental image of Archon,
You rang?
where your Sorceress had the ability to go back in time to before your dragon got his ass kicked by a fucking unicorn.
Or, as in my worst loss ever, a damn goblin suddenly wires himself up like he's on crack, hits a couple lucky scenery changes that ALL bump him closer to his target and out of the way of my last shot, and is bloody impossible to hit until he's so close he's busy turning the wizard into a fine paste. A GOBLIN!
Most memorable game? Ended in a tie. Not a draw, but a tie. The sorceress and wizard (the last pieces for their respective sides) took each other out with their last shot. Empty board, tied game.
Aw, no new Archon game. :(
More's the pity, huh? I'd even take an Adept-based game now.
If you're concerned, stick a printout of the spec in there. FAT is simple enough to pick apart with a hex editor given some time, and it doesn't take very long to write a read-only implementation of it.
Have I wandered into another thread by accident, or are we still talking about something targeted at a seventeen year old girl? Because most seventeen year olds of either gender would sooner set themselves on fire than throw themselves into coding a filesystem implementation based off of careful studying of a spec sheet. Hell, I'm a 30 year old geek and I'd rather set myself on fire. And let's face it, if the stars align and she turns into enough of a die-hard tech head to do that, then any format of any age will work - she'll take decoding it as a challenge.
I suppose the person who's giving it could do the decoding and whatnot, if they're still around in 16 years. But if that's the case, just write on a note "Ask me for the stuff I was going to put in here.", then stash your time capsule data (JPGs, basic HTML, ASCII, etc.) in an obvious place with the other files you normally back up (you do backups, right)? And then it'll get naturally elevated to the newest file system format as you upgrade your systems.
I didn't see Dances with Wolves (DwW) and I probably won't see this. First (and only) member of the didn't see DwW society. (DSWwWS)
Can I join? Had no interest, and I've only since seen the occasional snippet while channel-surfing.
An old pal of mine's mother may also be a member. Due to some confusion on her part, she thought it was called "Dances With Foxes". So she saw that in the TV listing, turned it on, and got quite the surprise. Don't know if she ever overcame her shock enough to watch the real movie.
I only have two problems with drivers: First, if you lose the CD you're hosed.
If you're dealing with an older or a no-name device, quite possible. But a lot of the major manufacturers provide drivers (often newer than the ones on disk) on their websites.
Hard drives? Dude, we're talking USENETs. About 0.3 USENETs, but hey, it's coming from the moon.
USENETs? Sorry, I'm American and don't know how to convert that from metric to Libraries of Congress.
New things will be done with the dog and the bread-crumb-trails mechanic....
Okay, this is a hoax, right? Haha, we were all fooled. You had me except for that line about new things being done with the dog, as if it was a good idea that merely need to be tweaked to make it great, as if it could somehow be slotted into a game that's apparently going to be a king RPG. Really, that line was a bit too Onion-y for it to come off as being a real announcement.
But it was a respectable shot. You got us good, Pete.
What? You're serious? Oh, God, you're serious.
But exactly how do you make a url out of this?
TAFKAP.com, if we go by what my local newspaper's entertainment page used to use. Got so bad that they wouldn't expand out the acronym the first time, and I was starting to think he'd re-changed his name to TAFKAP.
But if I had to render that as a URL? my-harpoon-caught-a-horn.com
I'm sorry, that's what it always looked like to me. Like a bunch of musical whalers saw the hammer and sickle and said "Hey, we need something like that!"
Hmmm. Is themusicalwhalers.com taken?