Um, no. 3/4 cup of sugar is 540 calories. A 12oz can of coke (seems to be the most popular size) is 155 calories - about 10 teaspoons of sugar, not "3/4's of a cup".
Not sure if TI's can natively do RPN. If not, it's a shame. Once you get used to RPN, algebraic notion is quaint. I find it faster and easier to use.
All personal preference really. I perfectly understand RPN, and can use an HP calculator just fine, but I'm much faster on a TI-89. It's not something that's intrinsically better or worse - just different.
While i'm at it, i might as well ask. What is the most everyday use of a graphical calculator?
Outside of school? Not a lot for me. They were great for solving complex equations in school (and the graphing capabilities helped A LOT there), but out in the real world they haven't helped nearly as much.
That said, I think a lot of their utility has been diminished by smartphones and/or PDA's. A lot of what made such calculators attractive was their programmability. They were the original "There's an app for that" device for calculations, though of much more limited popularity. Example: I often use my phone for homebrew beer info tracking. A lot of that is database driven where the phones didn't excel, but a lot of it is also simply plugging in numbers to get a result (ie, starting and final specific gravity + temperature to find out ABV of a brew). Phones can do that now.
In a similar vein, when I was preparing for my pilot's license I used an electronic E6B Flight Calculator. Those aren't programmable graphing calculators, but they are also very purpose built devices. After passing my exam though I've never touched my E6B again though - I have an E6B app on my phone that's always with me.
What it comes down to at this point I think is testing. Students can't be allowed to have a fully internet capable smart phone on them while testing, so the more limited calculators allow them more restricted capabilities.
Amen. I have a TI-83 circa 1996 and a TI-89 circa 1999, and I don't feel at a disadvantage at all compared to newer models. There are a few MINOR tweaks here and there, but overall they're still about the same critters as the old models.
That said, the fact that they don't change does bode well for students on a budget who want one off the used market. I kept mine because it's a gadget and I like gadgets (though I haven't turned them on in years), but it seems there's always college students dumping their old calculators off on pawn shops after they finish up. If you need one you can usually pick one up pretty cheap from those sources.
I'm not a huge fan of Gamestop, but at least they as a company seem to be at least trying to recognize a coming trend and hopping on board rather than whining and complaining to legislators.
It just remains to be seen whether or not it's too little too late. I'll admit that for myself, I'm already pretty heavily invested in Steam and won't likely be using a different service unless it offers a specific advantage (namely, price - get some weekend sales on games that Steam ain't discounting and I'd look at it). Might be a case like Blockbuster, where they embraced the Netflix and Redbox models long after those companies had nearly run them into the ground.
That's not the way I've seen it though. In general, the $50 boards behave just fine for me, and aren't "flaky" at all. The only thing I've noticed on more expensive boards has typically been stuff that I might once would have used, but no longer. Better or dual ethernet, overclocking options, more slots and/or ports, etc. Overall, just not stuff I care about when I just want a process running at stock speeds. Sometime within the last 5 years or so computing just became more about what I do on my system, rather than the system/hardware itself. Prior to that I DID typically buy very high end boards, and I noticed pretty much the same upgrade game there. Nowdays when I buy a CPU I typically check first to see if my current mobo will support it and if not, I go to Newegg, find boards that do, sort by price ascending, and pick the first Foxconn or Biostar board I see:D.
I didn't always buy cheap boards, and noticed largely the same thing with more expensive ones. In the end if i'm going to have to replace it anyways I might as well not pay more than the minimum.
AMD's socket's might carry the same numbers, but the sockets don't always work all that readily. Often seems to be the fault of the motherboard maker, but I've had plenty instances where I bought a new chip only to find out that my mobo, though having a socket that is support by the chip, doesn't support chips of that power draw, or made at a certainly transistor size, or just past a certain point in manufacturing.
In the end, it's less hassle to just replace the board when you replace the chip either way. In my groggy old age (only 29, but I feel pretty old in computer terms:)) I just don't care about overclocking and whatnot anymore, and if you just want a barebones "plug it in and work at stock settings" board you can usually get one for under $50.
How they see it in non-important in the end though. They've already made their position clear on the matter. What matters is whether or not they can convince a court that they are being illegally harmed. That's often a whole different reality than how a party wants to "see" an issue.
Did you seriously not read the last sentence I wrote? I'm not writing it but the guys in the next 2 offices past me still are writing and maintaining a mountain of old COBOL code that our organization still uses (and has used since the early 80's) and that I have to interface with.
Also, having gone to various meetings with other counties around the state (I work in local government), I know that around half of them are also still running old COBOL code as well. Several others also still have systems written in RPG.
This particular area is in tax collection, but the financial industry as a whole still has a lot of very old code running it.
Where is that 6 number coming from? You could have literally pulled any number you wanted to make that statement true.
If it had been "only 10 million users" then you could have easily said "With an average of 46 accounts per player, that equals 450 million fake accounts. Sounds like the previous poster had a pretty good estimate.".
Come on people - random ass numbers aren't correct merely because you can adjust them to fit your desired result.
Cobol isn't just "around", Cobol is all over the place. It's not new or interesting, and IMHO is a decidedly outdated language (I'd slap anyone who proposed developing a NEW system in Cobol), but realistically, it works for what it's intended to in most of the places where it's deployed, otherwise it would have been long replaced.
Regardless of what's currently "in style", it's a tough business case to throw money at a problem that has already been solved. That rings even more true in a troubled economy.
NOTE: I say this as a person who knows absolutely zero Cobol. I program mostly in C# and Java, but I DO still have to interface with a lot of Cobol programs that likely won't be replaced any time soon.
And yet YOU are the one who created the association between "Chinese" and "strange and weird" in the minds of slashdotters everywhere where no such association had existed.
Not only that, but "Chinese" isn't really even a race - it's a nationality. If you want to get broad most Southeast Asians physically resemble each other to a degree that most could be considered racially the same. Same with most of Europe. It'd be akin to calling "English" or "Dutch" a race. No, they're nationalities, and most people from all the countries in that area looked racially pretty close. Taxing that issue even further is the fact that in modern times, people of just about any race can be found in any country you visit. You can find people of Southeast-Asian descent in England. You can find people of European descent in China. Trying to equate the naming of a country with "racism" is just plain silliness these days, and is far more indicative of someone either incredibly easily offended, or simply looking to pick a fight and make an issue where there is none.
Claiming that because it has an -ism suffix that it must be "ideological and institutionalised - formally or culturally" is just trying to skirt the issue. Racism is holding a grudge against another person or group due simply to their biological race. That's it. The appropriateness of other adjectives like hatred, bigotry, or prejudice do not mean that racism must be redefined to a more narrow context.
Heck if we went by your definition that all "-isms" must be "institutionalized - formally or culturally", I'd hate to see what you come up with for priapism.
Show us some data that most visitors are from USA.
Traffic statistics would only be available to the site owners, who don't publish them. HOWEVER, they do specifically address the issue in their FAQ (www.slashdot.org/faq) - emphasis mine:
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
It's cold in Canada. Hell it's cold in the upper part of the US that borders you, but past that it starts getting mightly cold to put up with, which is likely why 80% of the Canadian population lives with 150km/93miles of the US border.
Slashdot is an American site. Sure there are a large number of foreign visitors, but the site itself and the bulk of the readers are American. It only makes sense to assume we're talking about America unless a qualifier is given. If I went to the BBC's site and started posting in a discussion where location mattered I would immediately preface my statements with the fact that I'm talking about America, because though there are visitors from all over, the BBC is a British site with primarily British readers.
Like it or not, there will almost always be a "default" locale that is assumed when you're on a site.
True, but given that logic, if you were THAT set on using the Kindle store, chances are you would have never bought a Nook without this capability anyways.
Here's something else to keep in mind that goes hand-in-hand with this. This is supposedly exactly what many Slashdotters have been claiming they've wanted for years and years -- a la carte TV channels. However, I can assure you that when they come, everyone around here will start bitching about how they're getting ripped off, nevermind that they're being offered exactly what they claimed they wanted. For some reason, Slashdotters feel that they're entitled to the bulk-discount pricing instead of the individual-purchaser pricing.
Why is that so bad? If buying the 8 channels you actually want costs more than buying 292 channels that you want along with those 8 channels, then it's of no use.
A la carte pricing is only viable when there is some semblance of parity with the overall package.
As to "bulk discount", that's a model that is completely outdated in related to things like TV channels. If you're buying physical goods, then bulk discounts make sense. You're taking a larger quantity of merchandise off of the owner's hands at once, meaning they recoup their investment on those items faster, and they no longer have to store the items. In the case of perishable items like food this becomes particularly important as there is an ever present danger that if they don't move enough product quickly enough it will spoil and need to be thrown out.
Digital goods suffer no such issues. There is no need to store any instance of the information beyond the first. It doesn't go stale, and they haven't paid for a set amount of copies ahead of time that they need to recoup the investment on. The whole notion that "it should be cheaper in bulk" is just an illogical holdover from the trade of physical goods.
In my area, I actually work for the local county government (which is tied to and is the main source of funds for the county sheriff's office). You see that for the sheriff's deputies, they are usually much more lenient on things like traffic violations, because in reality the bulk of their funding is coming from property taxes and state funds - NOT traffic violations. As such, they are usually only out to enforce things that they truly believe are safety violations. When I was 17-18 in high school, if a county sheriff's deputy caught us drinking down an old dirt road, they generally didn't care - as long as we weren't throwing trash everywhere, and were in an area where there was unlikely to be any actual traffic (middle of the woods at midnight nobody else is typically on the roads), then they'd usually just let us go with a "Be careful, and stay out of trouble.".
Now, shift to town police instead. The smaller the town (and hence the less state funding they receive), the worse the officers are. They will ticket you for the smallest infraction. One small town around here has literally written tickets for as little as *3* mph over the speed limit. A news story was recently done on that down related to their draconian enforcement and it was exposed that 66% of their budget comes from the fines related to traffic violations. That "town" literally is an intersection with a mayor, judge, and 1-2 police officers (and a population of less than 100 people).
As such I wouldn't say that ALL law enforcement officers are out to be dicks, but realistically, when you tie their paycheck to the numbers of tickets they write, you're going to get draconian enforcement.
If they're "watching" the "obvious bypass points" of the published checkpoints, then that in essence becomes another defacto unpublished checkpoint, which completely negates the whole premise that the checkpoints are published in the first place.
The only people who don't want this app out there are as stupid as the drunks they are trying to catch. If you want to catch a drunk driver, park outside a bar, watch people leave stumbling and get into their car and pull them over right there.
The problem there is that the current legal limit in most states (0.08%) is WAY above the level at which one would be stumbling. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion, but for most people there is a huge zone between when they're legally "under the influence" and displaying obvious signs of intoxication. In order for your example to work they'd literally need to start pulling over every car leaving the bar, which is considered profiling (ie illegal).
When was the last time that worked and didn't just take you to a fake web server index page that was just a bunch of links through to dodgy malware sites?
That's becoming a problem with search engines in general lately, not just looking for mp3's. I swear it seems like regardless of what I happen to be hoping to search for, half the pages popping up on Google's front page now are random gibberish spam pages that were setup just to pop up on a Google search.
I browse in Ubuntu so no malware is likely to affect my system, but just navigation through the trash on the net is becoming more and more of a headache.
Then again, since PS3's are sold at a loss, they really don't have much power to complain.
Yes they do. Just because a manufacturer's business practices are akin to gambling (selling systems in the hopes of making it up later) in no way affects a consumer's rights under law.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, no. 3/4 cup of sugar is 540 calories. A 12oz can of coke (seems to be the most popular size) is 155 calories - about 10 teaspoons of sugar, not "3/4's of a cup".
Don't just pull random numbers out of thin air.
Not sure if TI's can natively do RPN. If not, it's a shame. Once you get used to RPN, algebraic notion is quaint. I find it faster and easier to use.
All personal preference really. I perfectly understand RPN, and can use an HP calculator just fine, but I'm much faster on a TI-89. It's not something that's intrinsically better or worse - just different.
While i'm at it, i might as well ask. What is the most everyday use of a graphical calculator?
Outside of school? Not a lot for me. They were great for solving complex equations in school (and the graphing capabilities helped A LOT there), but out in the real world they haven't helped nearly as much.
That said, I think a lot of their utility has been diminished by smartphones and/or PDA's. A lot of what made such calculators attractive was their programmability. They were the original "There's an app for that" device for calculations, though of much more limited popularity. Example: I often use my phone for homebrew beer info tracking. A lot of that is database driven where the phones didn't excel, but a lot of it is also simply plugging in numbers to get a result (ie, starting and final specific gravity + temperature to find out ABV of a brew). Phones can do that now.
In a similar vein, when I was preparing for my pilot's license I used an electronic E6B Flight Calculator. Those aren't programmable graphing calculators, but they are also very purpose built devices. After passing my exam though I've never touched my E6B again though - I have an E6B app on my phone that's always with me.
What it comes down to at this point I think is testing. Students can't be allowed to have a fully internet capable smart phone on them while testing, so the more limited calculators allow them more restricted capabilities.
Amen. I have a TI-83 circa 1996 and a TI-89 circa 1999, and I don't feel at a disadvantage at all compared to newer models. There are a few MINOR tweaks here and there, but overall they're still about the same critters as the old models.
That said, the fact that they don't change does bode well for students on a budget who want one off the used market. I kept mine because it's a gadget and I like gadgets (though I haven't turned them on in years), but it seems there's always college students dumping their old calculators off on pawn shops after they finish up. If you need one you can usually pick one up pretty cheap from those sources.
I'm not a huge fan of Gamestop, but at least they as a company seem to be at least trying to recognize a coming trend and hopping on board rather than whining and complaining to legislators.
It just remains to be seen whether or not it's too little too late. I'll admit that for myself, I'm already pretty heavily invested in Steam and won't likely be using a different service unless it offers a specific advantage (namely, price - get some weekend sales on games that Steam ain't discounting and I'd look at it). Might be a case like Blockbuster, where they embraced the Netflix and Redbox models long after those companies had nearly run them into the ground.
That's not the way I've seen it though. In general, the $50 boards behave just fine for me, and aren't "flaky" at all. The only thing I've noticed on more expensive boards has typically been stuff that I might once would have used, but no longer. Better or dual ethernet, overclocking options, more slots and/or ports, etc. Overall, just not stuff I care about when I just want a process running at stock speeds. Sometime within the last 5 years or so computing just became more about what I do on my system, rather than the system/hardware itself. Prior to that I DID typically buy very high end boards, and I noticed pretty much the same upgrade game there. Nowdays when I buy a CPU I typically check first to see if my current mobo will support it and if not, I go to Newegg, find boards that do, sort by price ascending, and pick the first Foxconn or Biostar board I see :D.
I didn't always buy cheap boards, and noticed largely the same thing with more expensive ones. In the end if i'm going to have to replace it anyways I might as well not pay more than the minimum.
AMD's socket's might carry the same numbers, but the sockets don't always work all that readily. Often seems to be the fault of the motherboard maker, but I've had plenty instances where I bought a new chip only to find out that my mobo, though having a socket that is support by the chip, doesn't support chips of that power draw, or made at a certainly transistor size, or just past a certain point in manufacturing.
In the end, it's less hassle to just replace the board when you replace the chip either way. In my groggy old age (only 29, but I feel pretty old in computer terms :)) I just don't care about overclocking and whatnot anymore, and if you just want a barebones "plug it in and work at stock settings" board you can usually get one for under $50.
How they see it in non-important in the end though. They've already made their position clear on the matter. What matters is whether or not they can convince a court that they are being illegally harmed. That's often a whole different reality than how a party wants to "see" an issue.
Did you seriously not read the last sentence I wrote? I'm not writing it but the guys in the next 2 offices past me still are writing and maintaining a mountain of old COBOL code that our organization still uses (and has used since the early 80's) and that I have to interface with.
Also, having gone to various meetings with other counties around the state (I work in local government), I know that around half of them are also still running old COBOL code as well. Several others also still have systems written in RPG.
This particular area is in tax collection, but the financial industry as a whole still has a lot of very old code running it.
Where is that 6 number coming from? You could have literally pulled any number you wanted to make that statement true.
If it had been "only 10 million users" then you could have easily said "With an average of 46 accounts per player, that equals 450 million fake accounts. Sounds like the previous poster had a pretty good estimate.".
Come on people - random ass numbers aren't correct merely because you can adjust them to fit your desired result.
Cobol isn't just "around", Cobol is all over the place. It's not new or interesting, and IMHO is a decidedly outdated language (I'd slap anyone who proposed developing a NEW system in Cobol), but realistically, it works for what it's intended to in most of the places where it's deployed, otherwise it would have been long replaced.
Regardless of what's currently "in style", it's a tough business case to throw money at a problem that has already been solved. That rings even more true in a troubled economy.
NOTE: I say this as a person who knows absolutely zero Cobol. I program mostly in C# and Java, but I DO still have to interface with a lot of Cobol programs that likely won't be replaced any time soon.
And yet YOU are the one who created the association between "Chinese" and "strange and weird" in the minds of slashdotters everywhere where no such association had existed.
Not only that, but "Chinese" isn't really even a race - it's a nationality. If you want to get broad most Southeast Asians physically resemble each other to a degree that most could be considered racially the same. Same with most of Europe. It'd be akin to calling "English" or "Dutch" a race. No, they're nationalities, and most people from all the countries in that area looked racially pretty close. Taxing that issue even further is the fact that in modern times, people of just about any race can be found in any country you visit. You can find people of Southeast-Asian descent in England. You can find people of European descent in China. Trying to equate the naming of a country with "racism" is just plain silliness these days, and is far more indicative of someone either incredibly easily offended, or simply looking to pick a fight and make an issue where there is none.
Claiming that because it has an -ism suffix that it must be "ideological and institutionalised - formally or culturally" is just trying to skirt the issue. Racism is holding a grudge against another person or group due simply to their biological race. That's it. The appropriateness of other adjectives like hatred, bigotry, or prejudice do not mean that racism must be redefined to a more narrow context.
Heck if we went by your definition that all "-isms" must be "institutionalized - formally or culturally", I'd hate to see what you come up with for priapism.
Show us some data that most visitors are from USA.
Traffic statistics would only be available to the site owners, who don't publish them. HOWEVER, they do specifically address the issue in their FAQ (www.slashdot.org/faq) - emphasis mine:
Slashdot is U.S.-centric. We readily admit this, and really don't see it as a problem. Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
It's cold in Canada. Hell it's cold in the upper part of the US that borders you, but past that it starts getting mightly cold to put up with, which is likely why 80% of the Canadian population lives with 150km/93miles of the US border.
Slashdot is an American site. Sure there are a large number of foreign visitors, but the site itself and the bulk of the readers are American. It only makes sense to assume we're talking about America unless a qualifier is given. If I went to the BBC's site and started posting in a discussion where location mattered I would immediately preface my statements with the fact that I'm talking about America, because though there are visitors from all over, the BBC is a British site with primarily British readers.
Like it or not, there will almost always be a "default" locale that is assumed when you're on a site.
True, but given that logic, if you were THAT set on using the Kindle store, chances are you would have never bought a Nook without this capability anyways.
Here's something else to keep in mind that goes hand-in-hand with this. This is supposedly exactly what many Slashdotters have been claiming they've wanted for years and years -- a la carte TV channels. However, I can assure you that when they come, everyone around here will start bitching about how they're getting ripped off, nevermind that they're being offered exactly what they claimed they wanted. For some reason, Slashdotters feel that they're entitled to the bulk-discount pricing instead of the individual-purchaser pricing.
Why is that so bad? If buying the 8 channels you actually want costs more than buying 292 channels that you want along with those 8 channels, then it's of no use.
A la carte pricing is only viable when there is some semblance of parity with the overall package.
As to "bulk discount", that's a model that is completely outdated in related to things like TV channels. If you're buying physical goods, then bulk discounts make sense. You're taking a larger quantity of merchandise off of the owner's hands at once, meaning they recoup their investment on those items faster, and they no longer have to store the items. In the case of perishable items like food this becomes particularly important as there is an ever present danger that if they don't move enough product quickly enough it will spoil and need to be thrown out.
Digital goods suffer no such issues. There is no need to store any instance of the information beyond the first. It doesn't go stale, and they haven't paid for a set amount of copies ahead of time that they need to recoup the investment on. The whole notion that "it should be cheaper in bulk" is just an illogical holdover from the trade of physical goods.
Really depends on the neighborhood/jurisdiction.
In my area, I actually work for the local county government (which is tied to and is the main source of funds for the county sheriff's office). You see that for the sheriff's deputies, they are usually much more lenient on things like traffic violations, because in reality the bulk of their funding is coming from property taxes and state funds - NOT traffic violations. As such, they are usually only out to enforce things that they truly believe are safety violations. When I was 17-18 in high school, if a county sheriff's deputy caught us drinking down an old dirt road, they generally didn't care - as long as we weren't throwing trash everywhere, and were in an area where there was unlikely to be any actual traffic (middle of the woods at midnight nobody else is typically on the roads), then they'd usually just let us go with a "Be careful, and stay out of trouble.".
Now, shift to town police instead. The smaller the town (and hence the less state funding they receive), the worse the officers are. They will ticket you for the smallest infraction. One small town around here has literally written tickets for as little as *3* mph over the speed limit. A news story was recently done on that down related to their draconian enforcement and it was exposed that 66% of their budget comes from the fines related to traffic violations. That "town" literally is an intersection with a mayor, judge, and 1-2 police officers (and a population of less than 100 people).
As such I wouldn't say that ALL law enforcement officers are out to be dicks, but realistically, when you tie their paycheck to the numbers of tickets they write, you're going to get draconian enforcement.
If they're "watching" the "obvious bypass points" of the published checkpoints, then that in essence becomes another defacto unpublished checkpoint, which completely negates the whole premise that the checkpoints are published in the first place.
The only people who don't want this app out there are as stupid as the drunks they are trying to catch. If you want to catch a drunk driver, park outside a bar, watch people leave stumbling and get into their car and pull them over right there.
The problem there is that the current legal limit in most states (0.08%) is WAY above the level at which one would be stumbling. Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion, but for most people there is a huge zone between when they're legally "under the influence" and displaying obvious signs of intoxication. In order for your example to work they'd literally need to start pulling over every car leaving the bar, which is considered profiling (ie illegal).
When was the last time that worked and didn't just take you to a fake web server index page that was just a bunch of links through to dodgy malware sites?
That's becoming a problem with search engines in general lately, not just looking for mp3's. I swear it seems like regardless of what I happen to be hoping to search for, half the pages popping up on Google's front page now are random gibberish spam pages that were setup just to pop up on a Google search.
I browse in Ubuntu so no malware is likely to affect my system, but just navigation through the trash on the net is becoming more and more of a headache.
Then again, since PS3's are sold at a loss, they really don't have much power to complain.
Yes they do. Just because a manufacturer's business practices are akin to gambling (selling systems in the hopes of making it up later) in no way affects a consumer's rights under law.
You know why it's bad to start your post's text in the subject?