Pfft. How many times have I ground (grinded?) a character from 0-70? Four times. A fifth won't be all that hard, and they're halving the XP requirements to get from 60-70, more or less. Outlands will blow by in about 20 hours of/played, and you'll be in northrend not too much after your friends.
I'm not saying you couldn't get to Northrend sooner if you took your already-epiced-out level 70 toon, sure you could. But getting 55-70 isn't all that hard, and in the long run, so what if it takes you an extra week or two to get to 80? We've got YEARS to enjoy the new character.
The article wasn't super informative, which is troubling. Even with a very complex physical layer providing a challenge-response tokening system, we're going to have to be able to validate the tokens. That means that there has to be a knowable pattern from challenge to response, stored in the central certifying authority (otherwise, how will you know that my RFID is actually authentic?)
If you've got access to the RFID for a fair amount of time (say, you're sitting at the next table over at a cafe with a laptop), you'll probably have enough time to keep poking the RFID with challenges in order to gauge its responses. Enough responses and you'll have enough data to reverse-engineer the mechanism, right? Even if it's a public-key system, you've got to be using some sort of standard crypto in there.
So, now you've got a lot of data, generated through some cryptosystem, but the system has to be able to run forwards on a very simple chip, while you've got a very complex and powerful computer to reverse it. I'm not particularly excited about those possibilities, even if you are deriving your private key from some truly random bit of noise at the edge of a silicon spray or something.
The shorter version, of course, would be to say, "uncloneable"? Bah. Maybe "difficult-to-clone". But if it runs on electronics and it's not quantum, I'd be VERY hesitant to say "uncloneable".
It's worth noting that the sidebear link to "idle.slashdot.org" actually points to "idke.slashdot.org", which (being in error) actually just redirects to the toplevel site.
The more important question is: how much spam does google block vs spamassassin? An anecdote about how much gets through isn't exactly as meaningful as saying, 'spamassassin lets through XX% of my incoming spam'. Of course, it may not be possible to tell how much spam gmail blocks quietly without even getting routed into your spam box.
Wait, so paper beats scissors now? Thank god! I got 3/4 of the way through the comments, just looking for this joke. I was worried nobody had made it yet, and I was going to have to.
I've never had to tell my spouse that she's an idiot who deserves to lose her data, despite the fact that a broken HDD wiped out her dissertation literally a weak before the filing deadline. I can't believe I just spelled "week" as "weak". Some kind of freudian thing going on there.
You're an idiot. So are all the people who modded you insightful. Backups are forever. Sure, you don't save every daily incremental, but you need to keep permanent copies of full backups on, say, a monthly basis.
Are you some kind of sociopath? Permanent archival with a proper logarithmic strategy is certainly something any COMPANY should do. But I'd like to see you tell your mother she's an "idiot" because she doesn't keep a bookshelf of DVDs of everything she's ever put on her laptop.
As far as "backups are forever," you're fucking crazy. Media wears out. Backups aren't forever even if you wanted it.
While it's true that media does wear out, it doesn't wear out all that quickly. And yes, I've told my parents and siblings that they're being foolish if they don't regularly back up their data and keep semi-permanent copies of those backups, including offsite backups somewhere (in case of fire). It's not that hard to take a set of DVDs and use them for archival elsewhere.
I've never had to tell my spouse that she's an idiot who deserves to lose her data, despite the fact that a broken HDD wiped out her dissertation literally a weak before the filing deadline. Why not? Because I'd been backing her up via a network client since we'd gotten engaged. Presto.
Seriously, if you value your data, you back it up, and you keep old copies at least for several years. The expected shelf-life of DVD-Rs is fairly long. Long enough that you probably (as a home user) won't have to worry about recovery from degraded media. So I'll back off on "forever" and stick to my guns on "a few years".
Maybe you can't archive your mp3 collection, but 75% of your important stuff is usually text anyway. The other 25% is usually pictures of family and such.
Given properly rolling backups, you don't just keep dailies for the past month. You keep dailies for a week, and weeklies for a month, and monthlies for however long you have space for.
And given that most people work in files which are essentially text or the moral equivalent (Word docs, etc), it's likely that you do, in fact, have enough space for a very, very large number of backups. Thank you for being insightful in your response. Yours is the post that should be modded up - people who don't know how to run backups don't deserve their data.
And how often do you roll through your backups? Will you notice the encrypted files in time, or will you end up backing up the worthless files instead?
I have plenty of important files which I don't look at very often. It might take months before I realize they are corrupted -- and by that time, I've overwritten the last valid backup with the encrypted stuff.
You're an idiot. So are all the people who modded you insightful. Backups are forever. Sure, you don't save every daily incremental, but you need to keep permanent copies of full backups on, say, a monthly basis. Permanent as in: you're not too cheap to overwrite them when you run out of room. Otherwise you're not really backing your stuff up.
It's true, and it's documented. Alan Schoenfeld's work in mathematics education is a good place to start for that. Students tend to think that if you cannot solve a math problem in 10 seconds (or is it 30? I forget, need to check the source) that it is impossible to solve. Students like that have no conception of the "hard problem" that takes hours or more to come to solution, and give up right away.
They think that because we teach them to think that way. It's not the teachers' faults, though. The teachers have to deal with enormous constraints, primarily due to standardized testing. All those problems CAN be solved in 10 seconds, and if the students aren't good at them, the teachers lose their jobs. It sucks, but it's true. The very tests that we implemented to "fix" our educational system have deformed the system horribly, because the tests were designed to detect basic competence but were given so much weight by legislation that they're the only thing [most] teachers pay attention to anymore. The actual high-level learning goals (learning to [think critically, solve problems, reason logically, argue, deconstruct a claim] in [science, mathematics, history, literature, art] etc) are so very difficult to test in an economically feasible manner that they aren't tested, and therefore aren't addressed.
So has anyone said anything about what kind of platform they're using for Game Table? I for one hope there's a mac/linux client. One of the reasons I play World of Warcraft (besides the addiction) is that I have a Macintosh, and I refuse to buy a PC just to play D&D via the internet.
First off, I'm glad to see people out there thinking hard about education and how their aspects of education tie in with other people as well. There was a lovely paper by Reed Stevens and others not too long ago that comes at your idea from a different direction. (link)
Not precisely my field, but there's lots and lots of work being done in all aspects of integrating science and math with reading and writing. Visit your local friendly PsycInfo database for starters. I find it more useful than google scholar, but if you're at a school and don't have access to PsycInfor through a university, google scholar can help too. Depending on how theoretically-minded you are, ERIC (run by the US government) is also a good repository to search through. It tends toward the less theoretical.
I suggest you look for "Writing across the curriculum", "content-area reading / literacy", hmmm... "Science (scientific) Discourse", the works of Jay Lemke, Ann Brown for a start. There's a ton of stuff out there. Actually, you may want to search the back issues of Review of Educational Research (RER) and Review of Research in Education (RRE)
You should also problematize your assumption: that science is all about lectures and (by connotation) cookbook labs. There's a ton of work out there saying that teaching school science shouldn't be like that, but it has a hard time penetrating the actual practice of everyday teachers. But for a good read on what we'd like science to actually be, I recommend Taking Science to School. It's targeted to grades k-8, and it's somewhat US-centric (and I've inferred from your request that you're not a USian), but it's still a great read, and you can read the whole thing for free online (one PDF page at a time, though, which was enough of an encouragement to me to actually buy it.)
My last warning - you're venturing into the zones of thought which usually drive teachers into graduate school. I started down similar roads, and now I'm a professor. The challenge is getting people to really think along these lines, but remain a practicing teacher.
Not only is 0.07 not significant, they used a 1-tailed test, rather than a 2-tailed test. If they had used the 2-tailed test, the p-value would have been 0.14, which is REALLY not significant. You're only ever justified in choosing the 1-tailed test over the 2-tailed one if you know for certain which way the influence is pushing. If, for example, one could make the case that the OOXML vote would have gone the other direction, with the more corrupt countries voting against it (a case we have no a priori reason to discard), then the use of a 1-tailed test is inappropriate here.
Actually, having read TFA, I'm pretty sure that correlation isn't appropriate at all here. The corruption scores are discrete, categorical values, rather than continuous values. This calls for nonparametric methods. Start with chi-square and move on from there. You can't do correlation with a straight face if your variables are discrete, since there's no guarantee that the "distance" in corruption between 2 and 3 is the same as the distance between 4 and 5.
So, I read the article. It seems more like a "kids these days" rant more than anything else. There's nothing about technology that prevents people from actually going to venues and meeting people and making music the old-fashioned way. It's just that technology allows people new ways to do it as well.
As a matter of fact, there are new websites and assorted technologies that allow aspiring singer-songwriters to hook up with session musicians from anywhere on the internet. It actually enables people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford to produce their single to see it through.
Did you know that, when pencils came into widespread use in schools, teachers and pundits (if they had pundits at the time) were concerned that people would use their pencils to write things down, thus making them less able to practice their memory skills?
It is buried in the FAQ, but yeah. DirectX? Come on, people, lrn2OpenGL! The real reason I play WoW: it's pretty much the only game I'm interested in that runs on a Mac.
There are a number of good ways to make coffee. I use a melitta filter, which is just a plastic cone on top of a coffeepot. It cost me about eight dollars. You heat water in a teakettle and pour it through the filter. I also, on occasion, make "Toddy" coffee, which is a cold-process brew. You let coffee grounds sit with water for about 24h, and filter out the result, which goes into the 'fridge. Then you mix about a 2:1 ratio of boiling water with the cold Toddy. It's very good, and can make delicious stuff out of subpar beans.
The most important thing to do is keep the heatplate off. Coffee burns very quickly on a hotplate. If you need to keep your coffee warm for a while, use a thermos.
As far as beans go, other people have mentioned that there is a lot of overrated crap out there. Two places I strongly recommend are Peets www.peets.com and Blue Bottle Coffee Co http://www.bluebottlecoffee.net/ Peets is bigger and better-known. Blue Bottle, on the other hand is simply, hands down, undeniably, the best dang coffee I've ever had, period. It's that much better than everyone else. As a bonus, Blue Bottle has good instructions for brewing your coffee.
That's started happening to me all of a sudden. I think I've moved beyond typing letters to typing whole words instead. I never used to make your/you're mistakes, but now I catch myself doing it more and more often. Perhaps I'm just getting dumber.
Too bad it's not OpenGL, then you could play it on whatever platform you wanted, like, say, a mac. I play WoW, becuase it's one of the only MMOs I can play on my fancypants mac.
I can restore one or two things from the backup, just not everything all at once. The problem (I imagine) is, Backup by default only ever does one full backup, and never updates that. So I've got one full backup and 280+ incrementals. I never really noticed that, since it's a Mac app. I just assumed everything would Just Work.
So when I go to restore 20,000+ files from across 280+ backup files, it dies with a malloc error. Somewhere, it's leaking memory. There are other people on the dotMac support board who've made similar complaints as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks fine to me. But then again, I guess I know how to change the view preferences. By, you know, clicking the preferences link.
Double moron on you, moron.
Pfft. How many times have I ground (grinded?) a character from 0-70? Four times. A fifth won't be all that hard, and they're halving the XP requirements to get from 60-70, more or less. Outlands will blow by in about 20 hours of /played, and you'll be in northrend not too much after your friends.
I'm not saying you couldn't get to Northrend sooner if you took your already-epiced-out level 70 toon, sure you could. But getting 55-70 isn't all that hard, and in the long run, so what if it takes you an extra week or two to get to 80? We've got YEARS to enjoy the new character.
The article wasn't super informative, which is troubling. Even with a very complex physical layer providing a challenge-response tokening system, we're going to have to be able to validate the tokens. That means that there has to be a knowable pattern from challenge to response, stored in the central certifying authority (otherwise, how will you know that my RFID is actually authentic?)
If you've got access to the RFID for a fair amount of time (say, you're sitting at the next table over at a cafe with a laptop), you'll probably have enough time to keep poking the RFID with challenges in order to gauge its responses. Enough responses and you'll have enough data to reverse-engineer the mechanism, right? Even if it's a public-key system, you've got to be using some sort of standard crypto in there.
So, now you've got a lot of data, generated through some cryptosystem, but the system has to be able to run forwards on a very simple chip, while you've got a very complex and powerful computer to reverse it. I'm not particularly excited about those possibilities, even if you are deriving your private key from some truly random bit of noise at the edge of a silicon spray or something.
The shorter version, of course, would be to say, "uncloneable"? Bah. Maybe "difficult-to-clone". But if it runs on electronics and it's not quantum, I'd be VERY hesitant to say "uncloneable".
It's worth noting that the sidebear link to "idle.slashdot.org" actually points to "idke.slashdot.org", which (being in error) actually just redirects to the toplevel site.
... but I will point out in closing that hair brained schemes ...
It's hare brained. Actually, it's harebrained. No space. Put this on the list next to "Wala!" and "for all intensive purposes", please.
I'm going to name my kid 'lastname' instead.
The more important question is: how much spam does google block vs spamassassin? An anecdote about how much gets through isn't exactly as meaningful as saying, 'spamassassin lets through XX% of my incoming spam'. Of course, it may not be possible to tell how much spam gmail blocks quietly without even getting routed into your spam box.
You're an idiot. So are all the people who modded you insightful. Backups are forever. Sure, you don't save every daily incremental, but you need to keep permanent copies of full backups on, say, a monthly basis.
Are you some kind of sociopath? Permanent archival with a proper logarithmic strategy is certainly something any COMPANY should do. But I'd like to see you tell your mother she's an "idiot" because she doesn't keep a bookshelf of DVDs of everything she's ever put on her laptop.
As far as "backups are forever," you're fucking crazy. Media wears out. Backups aren't forever even if you wanted it.
While it's true that media does wear out, it doesn't wear out all that quickly. And yes, I've told my parents and siblings that they're being foolish if they don't regularly back up their data and keep semi-permanent copies of those backups, including offsite backups somewhere (in case of fire). It's not that hard to take a set of DVDs and use them for archival elsewhere.I've never had to tell my spouse that she's an idiot who deserves to lose her data, despite the fact that a broken HDD wiped out her dissertation literally a weak before the filing deadline. Why not? Because I'd been backing her up via a network client since we'd gotten engaged. Presto.
Seriously, if you value your data, you back it up, and you keep old copies at least for several years. The expected shelf-life of DVD-Rs is fairly long. Long enough that you probably (as a home user) won't have to worry about recovery from degraded media. So I'll back off on "forever" and stick to my guns on "a few years".
Maybe you can't archive your mp3 collection, but 75% of your important stuff is usually text anyway. The other 25% is usually pictures of family and such.
And given that most people work in files which are essentially text or the moral equivalent (Word docs, etc), it's likely that you do, in fact, have enough space for a very, very large number of backups. Thank you for being insightful in your response. Yours is the post that should be modded up - people who don't know how to run backups don't deserve their data.
Does it matter? I have backups.
And how often do you roll through your backups? Will you notice the encrypted files in time, or will you end up backing up the worthless files instead?
I have plenty of important files which I don't look at very often. It might take months before I realize they are corrupted -- and by that time, I've overwritten the last valid backup with the encrypted stuff.
You're an idiot. So are all the people who modded you insightful. Backups are forever. Sure, you don't save every daily incremental, but you need to keep permanent copies of full backups on, say, a monthly basis. Permanent as in: you're not too cheap to overwrite them when you run out of room. Otherwise you're not really backing your stuff up.This is a really good idea.
A better question would be what aspect of my life hasn't been influenced by Gygax. Safe travels, Gary.
It's true, and it's documented. Alan Schoenfeld's work in mathematics education is a good place to start for that. Students tend to think that if you cannot solve a math problem in 10 seconds (or is it 30? I forget, need to check the source) that it is impossible to solve. Students like that have no conception of the "hard problem" that takes hours or more to come to solution, and give up right away.
They think that because we teach them to think that way. It's not the teachers' faults, though. The teachers have to deal with enormous constraints, primarily due to standardized testing. All those problems CAN be solved in 10 seconds, and if the students aren't good at them, the teachers lose their jobs. It sucks, but it's true. The very tests that we implemented to "fix" our educational system have deformed the system horribly, because the tests were designed to detect basic competence but were given so much weight by legislation that they're the only thing [most] teachers pay attention to anymore. The actual high-level learning goals (learning to [think critically, solve problems, reason logically, argue, deconstruct a claim] in [science, mathematics, history, literature, art] etc) are so very difficult to test in an economically feasible manner that they aren't tested, and therefore aren't addressed.
Bah, oh well. At least I have a good excuse to not get a subscription to D&DI then. I can just have my friends print out stuff for me.
So has anyone said anything about what kind of platform they're using for Game Table? I for one hope there's a mac/linux client. One of the reasons I play World of Warcraft (besides the addiction) is that I have a Macintosh, and I refuse to buy a PC just to play D&D via the internet.
First off, I'm glad to see people out there thinking hard about education and how their aspects of education tie in with other people as well. There was a lovely paper by Reed Stevens and others not too long ago that comes at your idea from a different direction. (link)
Not precisely my field, but there's lots and lots of work being done in all aspects of integrating science and math with reading and writing. Visit your local friendly PsycInfo database for starters. I find it more useful than google scholar, but if you're at a school and don't have access to PsycInfor through a university, google scholar can help too. Depending on how theoretically-minded you are, ERIC (run by the US government) is also a good repository to search through. It tends toward the less theoretical.
I suggest you look for "Writing across the curriculum", "content-area reading / literacy", hmmm... "Science (scientific) Discourse", the works of Jay Lemke, Ann Brown for a start. There's a ton of stuff out there. Actually, you may want to search the back issues of Review of Educational Research (RER) and Review of Research in Education (RRE)
You should also problematize your assumption: that science is all about lectures and (by connotation) cookbook labs. There's a ton of work out there saying that teaching school science shouldn't be like that, but it has a hard time penetrating the actual practice of everyday teachers. But for a good read on what we'd like science to actually be, I recommend Taking Science to School. It's targeted to grades k-8, and it's somewhat US-centric (and I've inferred from your request that you're not a USian), but it's still a great read, and you can read the whole thing for free online (one PDF page at a time, though, which was enough of an encouragement to me to actually buy it.)
My last warning - you're venturing into the zones of thought which usually drive teachers into graduate school. I started down similar roads, and now I'm a professor. The challenge is getting people to really think along these lines, but remain a practicing teacher.
Not only is 0.07 not significant, they used a 1-tailed test, rather than a 2-tailed test. If they had used the 2-tailed test, the p-value would have been 0.14, which is REALLY not significant. You're only ever justified in choosing the 1-tailed test over the 2-tailed one if you know for certain which way the influence is pushing. If, for example, one could make the case that the OOXML vote would have gone the other direction, with the more corrupt countries voting against it (a case we have no a priori reason to discard), then the use of a 1-tailed test is inappropriate here.
Actually, having read TFA, I'm pretty sure that correlation isn't appropriate at all here. The corruption scores are discrete, categorical values, rather than continuous values. This calls for nonparametric methods. Start with chi-square and move on from there. You can't do correlation with a straight face if your variables are discrete, since there's no guarantee that the "distance" in corruption between 2 and 3 is the same as the distance between 4 and 5.
So, I read the article. It seems more like a "kids these days" rant more than anything else. There's nothing about technology that prevents people from actually going to venues and meeting people and making music the old-fashioned way. It's just that technology allows people new ways to do it as well.
As a matter of fact, there are new websites and assorted technologies that allow aspiring singer-songwriters to hook up with session musicians from anywhere on the internet. It actually enables people who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford to produce their single to see it through.
Did you know that, when pencils came into widespread use in schools, teachers and pundits (if they had pundits at the time) were concerned that people would use their pencils to write things down, thus making them less able to practice their memory skills?
It is buried in the FAQ, but yeah. DirectX? Come on, people, lrn2OpenGL! The real reason I play WoW: it's pretty much the only game I'm interested in that runs on a Mac.
There are a number of good ways to make coffee. I use a melitta filter, which is just a plastic cone on top of a coffeepot. It cost me about eight dollars. You heat water in a teakettle and pour it through the filter. I also, on occasion, make "Toddy" coffee, which is a cold-process brew. You let coffee grounds sit with water for about 24h, and filter out the result, which goes into the 'fridge. Then you mix about a 2:1 ratio of boiling water with the cold Toddy. It's very good, and can make delicious stuff out of subpar beans.
The most important thing to do is keep the heatplate off. Coffee burns very quickly on a hotplate. If you need to keep your coffee warm for a while, use a thermos.
As far as beans go, other people have mentioned that there is a lot of overrated crap out there. Two places I strongly recommend are Peets www.peets.com and Blue Bottle Coffee Co http://www.bluebottlecoffee.net/ Peets is bigger and better-known. Blue Bottle, on the other hand is simply, hands down, undeniably, the best dang coffee I've ever had, period. It's that much better than everyone else. As a bonus, Blue Bottle has good instructions for brewing your coffee.
That's started happening to me all of a sudden. I think I've moved beyond typing letters to typing whole words instead. I never used to make your/you're mistakes, but now I catch myself doing it more and more often. Perhaps I'm just getting dumber.
Too bad it's not OpenGL, then you could play it on whatever platform you wanted, like, say, a mac. I play WoW, becuase it's one of the only MMOs I can play on my fancypants mac.
I can restore one or two things from the backup, just not everything all at once. The problem (I imagine) is, Backup by default only ever does one full backup, and never updates that. So I've got one full backup and 280+ incrementals. I never really noticed that, since it's a Mac app. I just assumed everything would Just Work.
So when I go to restore 20,000+ files from across 280+ backup files, it dies with a malloc error. Somewhere, it's leaking memory. There are other people on the dotMac support board who've made similar complaints as well.