My one geeky disappointment is that the starfleet didn't take advantage of their superior maneuverability and the B5 heavy ships limitations (B5 big ships are japanese-like and have "BIG GUNS" that fire forward only.) It would have been nice for them to take advantage of that weakness.
Overall rating a 6 (8 if you are familiar with Startrek AND Babylon 5).
Technically the movie was very good. The sound quality was good and the special effects were solid. There were a few spots I think could use polish- for example with the ship takes off the first time it goes straight up- I think a little tilt would have been used in the real series. But the quality was pro level in my opinion- "B" movie, not "A" movie- but pro.
Costumes. The costumes were pretty solid but one of the lower parts of the movie. This makes sense and you have to spend -real- money to buy fabric. This is probably one of the limiting factors of non-big budget productions going forward. You can simulate the sets, you can get actors cheap, but you have to spend real money on things like costumes, chairs, etc.
Production Quality. It was decent but suffered from having a small cast. You would see scores of starships but then only 20-30 people. I think some crowd scenes could be digitally multiplied to make them more effect.
Tone. This is where the movie is uneven. It can't decide if it wants to be serious with humor or outright parody. Some parts are excellent, tense, serious and then it will veer sharply into stupid things that would not happen in real life. On the other hand- a lot of other scenes were much more like what WOULD happen in real life than you typically see in movies. The tone may be required to avoid lawsuits since parody is protected.
Acting. To be honest- there is a lot higher quality acting than you might expect. Some of it is that the actors already know the character they are playing so they don't have to make it up. I think some actors play multiple roles. There are at least a dozen major characters in the movie and ALL are distinct and stand out (which is quite a feat in a 2 hour film). None of it felt "wooden". A fair amount of it was a bit overblown.
Makeup. The costuming for Dwarf was a bit weak- and the costuming for a non alien was cheesy (a choice they made for a nose joke I think). Info was well done. General costumes are solid. The females looked pretty hot in some cases (but tall thin in a short black leather skirt is going to work in most cases).
Action Scenes. These were very weak. Probably the weakest part of the film. I guess hollywood stuntpersons deserve a lot more credit than they get. I can understand- actors just can't hit and be hit without hurting themselves or getting hurt. Stuntpeople mitigate injury through training and they still get hurt.
In Jokes. This is where SW rules. They really have a lot of fun poking jokes at the characters- even to the point of using them to advance the plot. Some are dead on, some are stupid, some misfire. But a lot more hits than misses.
Plot. The plot is very well thought out- much better than many "A" hollywood movies. It has plenty of twists and turns. You don't know what to expect at any given time. I won't give much away but it is NOT just about a bunch of CGI ships flying around fighting- they ADVANCE the plot with those battles, but the plot is about characters and character conflict.
Ending. The ending was solid- and well I won't say more but apparently there are some mistaken data assumptions.
--- There are MANY hollywood films out that I would not watch for free. This movie, I would have happily paid 6 bucks to see (maybe 7).
I was lucky. When I was still pretty young (28ish) I worked myself sick helping a company convert to a new system (70+ hour weeks for a couple months). After that they gave me a half day off as a reward. Five years later, the corporate parent dissolved that unit (sold it to a competitor who just wanted the customer list).
The combination of the two events changed my attitudes about business. I want the cash now. I won't do anything for future promises. And I realize I can be laid off without notice at any time- even if the company is doing well until the second that happens.
The only way you can trust the president of the company is if you ARE the president of the company- and even then I'm not sure.
This is the downside they don't talk about very often when comparing the risks of using closed source to open source. And they don't even consider all the patent violations that may be occuring in closed source (which I think will come to light within the next 2-3 years when some lawyer finds the right language to make closed source reveal source code).
The rough break down is 34 cents apple, 55 cents record industry leaving 10 cents for the artists.
WTF? 55 cents to sell records which have already been profitable since the early 80's? 55 cents of pure profit??? (It all goes into salaries- Apple is paying for the infrastructure out of their 34 cents).
Obviously a fair price would be "infrastructure" + 10 cents apple + 10 cents recording industry + 10 cents artist since they seem to think that the people who created the music in the first place are only due 10 cents.
Even at those prices anything before 1978 should be PD and sold in mass quantities on DVD. These prices are completely artificial. There is no reason for them to be so high. You can EASILY see they are high because of the wealth they are accumulating- if the prices were fair, they would be living upper-class but not wealthy- taking home a few hundred thousand a year but not 20 million a year. The system is broken and change is coming from competition outside of their monopoly locked in distribution channels.
What is the -cost- of putting every song from 1978 back on DVD?
By the original copyright law, all of those songs would be public domain now. Who exactly do you think we are paying? Many of the artists are dead. Many of the songs have been bought -multiple times- by people on 8-track, cassette, vinyl record, and CD.
How have they brainwashed people into thinking music is something you should rent forever?
That is pretty darned impressive. Most I ever managed (loooong ago in my youth) was 6 or 7 times. That must have been some come-hither look she was giving him!
Just like in EQ, "They'll always be buds with Jobs" until he isn't giving them something and then they will immediately move on to a new person who is.
I'm not sure where the lack of loyalty comes from - perhaps it's business that started it (It is pretty stupid to be loyal to a business as an employee these days). I'm not even sure the lack of loyalty is a bad thing- loyalty was basically mined for it's value by asshats during most of the 80's and 90's.
Jobs and Apple needs the revenue from iPod. Their stock will crash if it becomes apparent they have lost iPod sales.
Music companies- just like Disney- just like any business today- are pretty ruthless about yield management. Businesses learned- people lie. Metrics tell the truth. The look at the absolute sweet spot of price where they maximize profits. If that means 90% of the people can buy their product- great. If it means 90% of the people can NOT buy their product- great.
So if they make more profit on less sales at $1.39 per song then they want to charge that.
And by the way....99 a song is a JOKE. It is WAY to expensive. Your average person can easily want 10,000 songs. Your average DVD could easily accommodate 5,000 songs at a production cost of about $1.00. MOST of the songs you are paying money for are at least 30 years old. In many cases, the original artists are dead.
So anyone being distracted by the hand waving over a.99 to 1.39 has already missed the point that songs should probably be 19.99 for "Everything recorded in the 1950's" instead of the way they are selling them.
If jane is buying it to keep in touch with her grandchildren then why would she NEED to do research? What is the downside risk associated with keeping in touch with your grandchildren? Where is she exposed to financial loss? Why does security matter if she isn't putting any information that matters on the device?
So she buys a $149 "linspire" machine and sends emails back and forth.
If she decides to start doing online banking and running her craft business and putting all of her critical financial information on it, then I would suggest it doesn't match the case you are proposing any more.
The problem is that writing the kind of code proposed is 1) Very expensive (easily 100 times the cost of the code delivered now 2) Much slower (Easily 100 times longer to get the functionality 3) Still won't stop exposure to bugs. Even military grade code written at 100 times the cost and in 100 times as many man hours still has a bug or two per 10,000 lines. 4) May not function fast enough on available hardware. --- If something becomes an issue, then it will be addressed - but there will always be new issues in non-trivial code.
At a minimum, I'd prefer to have a choice between expensive safer code and risky but free/fast/gives me the functionality I need now instead of in 2 years code.
And that would be INFINITELY better than letting the UN have control of it.
There is no reason we have to rely on only 13 trusted DNS servers. You can easily and incrementally add DNS servers in every country that cares about this. And then change the software to reference those DNS servers first.
That way, instead of 13 DNS servers, subject to attack, we could have a little over a hundred DNS servers - each in a different country that really cares about this as an issue.
But for god's sake don't give it to the UN. It's just not an appropriate kind of organization for this kind of thing.
Just in case I wasn't clear- after their time of execution but you don't kill them then- they die in the course of the experiments. Since they are legally dead as of the execution time, you use them for other purposes. --- Seems equivalent to using living cells for experiments because they were already scheduled to be dead by then.
Wouldn't an even closer parallel be using criminals for experiments after their scheduled time of execution?
---
Tho personally, since i don't believe in souls in the first place, much less attached to small cell clusters, I don't see a problem with using them to heal cripples.
They are now using indian lawyers instead of paralegals.
Here is how it works.
The work sent overseas and performed there.
An american lawyer reviews the output of many indian lawyers and does the actual presentation. There are no legal restrictions on who performs the legal work- only on who acts as a lawyer in the courts.
So-- reduced demand for lawyers and greatly reduced demand for paralegals.
Schools that graduate too many students lose their accreditation.
At my school, they got a bit lax and were passing too many people in my major (C.S.). The professor of a frikkin -junior- class (when you should be past weedout) walked in class and stated, "I must fail 35% of you this semester. Study hard." In another class, they failed 76 of 81 students. It was a case of the bell curve gone bad.
There were two approaches. 1) Help no one. The logic was if you help someone, they mess up your spot on the curve. 2) Get in a group of people. The logic was- help each other to move up the curve.
I was in group 2. But regardless of how much material you mastered, some of you were going to fail.
--- But the point is, there is no purpose served to dumping 1500 mediocre engineers on the senior year classes and then dumping them on the market. So 1500 must turn in to 300 somehow and the time-honored way is weed out courses. Organic Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, Assembly Language, and Discrete Math are typical examples.
If you want an easy degree get a business degree. Personally, I regret getting C.S. and not just going MIS. While I was writing entire database programs in 3 months (Basically MySQL 0.8), they were writing 60 line basic. While I was writing compilers, they were writing 80 line cobol programs and spreadsheet programs.
Would have saved me a couple years of my life and a lot of grief and I probably would have still ended up a java/web/business programmer.
People are not compensated for how "hard" their degree is to get.
--- P.S. don't get me started on doctors. IMHO they have a cartel going where they turn away qualified people if it will mean too many doctors.
The reason that your logic doesn't work out is the unfair restrictions to to trade and the fact that the upper class currently have an unreasonable hold on running companies.
Just as there is no valid reason why they should make $100k instead of $60k, there is no valid reason why our executive class makes $15 million while in other countries they make under a $1 million.
There is no valid reason why we pay $20 for DVD's that the chinese pay $2.45 for.
There is no valid reason we pay $80 for medicine which costs $4 (unsubsidised) in other countries.
It wouldn't matter so much if my pay got cut by $10k per year if I also got to buy DVD's for $4 and so on.
This is a temporary dislocation- it can't go on for long. At some point the executive class pay will be the reason companies fail and at that point they will need to take pay cuts as well. But it's going to be painful until that happens. The rich are going to seem "super-rich" for a while before things even out again. I am concerned about getting priced out of america, like the locals get priced out of Vail and other ski resorts. (You can see it happening in California).
We can't address the problems until we identify them. We can't identify them if we are lying about them or avoiding talking about them.
Short term, politics and lying can stave off the truth, but in the end the truth prevails. I'm really bloody frakking annoyed at our "leaders" who are ruining our future to push reality out past their tenure in office.
Of course, liberal arts people used to be mature and capable of reasoned thought as well.
What I (and my friends) often wondered was... if we were required to take 2 real philosophy and 2 real english classes, why are lib arts students not required to take 2 real math courses and 2 real science classes.
The broader point is -- in a casual conversation do we really have to carefully qualify and specify every clause and vocabulary point in each sentence?
For what it's worth... --- Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sound pretty different to me. The slavic languages sound pretty similar. --- I agree with your basic point but you could mistake a north american for a european based on accent (french). And I agree that we are better educated on european accents tho that is changing with more movies like Hero, Crouching Tiger...for chinese and Anime for japanese.
A large part of undergraduate and even masters degree just serves to show business that you actually will finish the project that they budgeted a half a million dollars for. It's about your persperation more than your inspiration.
Not so true for doctorates- there you are talking more about wanting someone who can think up new ideas.
A lot of the time the professors just don't understand how LITTLE you know. It is like you are in 1st grade and they are reaching down to 7th grade to try to introduce 12th grade concepts.
I had a very smart college professor (Dr. Verma) who was notorius for being a very hard class (even weedout levels- 50% drop/fail rates). Here is the tip that gave us close to an 85% pass rate that semester.
I figured out to ask him for a "trivial" example. When he gave a "trivial" example, at least half the class would understand what he had been trying to explain for 15 minutes. And often, the understanding was like "Oh my god- that's so easy, why was he saying it so complicated?"
Sometimes, all you need is just to comprehend a little edge or corner of the problem and suddenly the entire problem just peels open for you. The professors are speaking in jargon that you barely comprehend- if you can get them to drop the jargon and give an easy example in english, it may help.
1) He was basically taking the 5th year of high school physics. The professors have absolutely no interest in wasting another year of their life treating trivial material to anyone (even a brain).
2) Grades are a joke. They use a bell curve. You hope you don't get in a class with the next Hawking- because he will get the "A". The main point is to reduce the number of people in the senior classes to a managable level.
3) If that engineering wasn't easy for him, then he would have never cut it as a real engineer. So he was properly filtered out by a system designed to do just that.
Where I do agree with him... College used to teach- now grad students do the work- and in many cases they cannot teach.
What is not mentioned in the article... These days, you go through all that hell, and in many cases you can't get a job at ANY pay level because a foreign national is willing to do it for a fraction of the pay. That's niether right nor wrong- it's just a fact. There is no point in smart but sub-genius level american's going into these fields right now. There may be in 20 years when out economies even out or we have a war and see the stupidity of relying on foreign nationals who are not U.S. citizens for our critical programs.
A smart but not genius person will reasonably pick the highest compensated field with good employment prospects that they enjoy or at least do not actively despise.
Geniuses are different tho- they will fight the material easy with or without help- usually will get to bypass the trivial courses and skip straight to the good stuff by the time they are 20 (if not earlier). And they will always find employment at decent wages + benefits.
Outside of geniuses- there are about 3 billion people smarter than average who are increasingly competing for the same jobs.
Slashdot Mirror
First- yes solid B5 in the movie.
My one geeky disappointment is that the starfleet didn't take advantage of their superior maneuverability and the B5 heavy ships limitations (B5 big ships are japanese-like and have "BIG GUNS" that fire forward only.) It would have been nice for them to take advantage of that weakness.
Overall rating a 6 (8 if you are familiar with Startrek AND Babylon 5).
Technically the movie was very good. The sound quality was good and the special effects were solid. There were a few spots I think could use polish- for example with the ship takes off the first time it goes straight up- I think a little tilt would have been used in the real series. But the quality was pro level in my opinion- "B" movie, not "A" movie- but pro.
Costumes. The costumes were pretty solid but one of the lower parts of the movie. This makes sense and you have to spend -real- money to buy fabric. This is probably one of the limiting factors of non-big budget productions going forward. You can simulate the sets, you can get actors cheap, but you have to spend real money on things like costumes, chairs, etc.
Production Quality. It was decent but suffered from having a small cast. You would see scores of starships but then only 20-30 people. I think some crowd scenes could be digitally multiplied to make them more effect.
Tone. This is where the movie is uneven. It can't decide if it wants to be serious with humor or outright parody. Some parts are excellent, tense, serious and then it will veer sharply into stupid things that would not happen in real life. On the other hand- a lot of other scenes were much more like what WOULD happen in real life than you typically see in movies. The tone may be required to avoid lawsuits since parody is protected.
Acting. To be honest- there is a lot higher quality acting than you might expect. Some of it is that the actors already know the character they are playing so they don't have to make it up. I think some actors play multiple roles. There are at least a dozen major characters in the movie and ALL are distinct and stand out (which is quite a feat in a 2 hour film). None of it felt "wooden". A fair amount of it was a bit overblown.
Makeup. The costuming for Dwarf was a bit weak- and the costuming for a non alien was cheesy (a choice they made for a nose joke I think). Info was well done. General costumes are solid. The females looked pretty hot in some cases (but tall thin in a short black leather skirt is going to work in most cases).
Action Scenes. These were very weak. Probably the weakest part of the film. I guess hollywood stuntpersons deserve a lot more credit than they get. I can understand- actors just can't hit and be hit without hurting themselves or getting hurt. Stuntpeople mitigate injury through training and they still get hurt.
In Jokes. This is where SW rules. They really have a lot of fun poking jokes at the characters- even to the point of using them to advance the plot. Some are dead on, some are stupid, some misfire. But a lot more hits than misses.
Plot. The plot is very well thought out- much better than many "A" hollywood movies. It has plenty of twists and turns. You don't know what to expect at any given time. I won't give much away but it is NOT just about a bunch of CGI ships flying around fighting- they ADVANCE the plot with those battles, but the plot is about characters and character conflict.
Ending. The ending was solid- and well I won't say more but apparently there are some mistaken data assumptions.
---
There are MANY hollywood films out that I would not watch for free. This movie, I would have happily paid 6 bucks to see (maybe 7).
I was lucky. When I was still pretty young (28ish) I worked myself sick helping a company convert to a new system (70+ hour weeks for a couple months). After that they gave me a half day off as a reward. Five years later, the corporate parent dissolved that unit (sold it to a competitor who just wanted the customer list).
The combination of the two events changed my attitudes about business. I want the cash now. I won't do anything for future promises. And I realize I can be laid off without notice at any time- even if the company is doing well until the second that happens.
The only way you can trust the president of the company is if you ARE the president of the company- and even then I'm not sure.
This is the downside they don't talk about very often when comparing the risks of using closed source to open source. And they don't even consider all the patent violations that may be occuring in closed source (which I think will come to light within the next 2-3 years when some lawyer finds the right language to make closed source reveal source code).
I agree with you on apple.
The rough break down is 34 cents apple, 55 cents record industry leaving 10 cents for the artists.
WTF? 55 cents to sell records which have already been profitable since the early 80's? 55 cents of pure profit??? (It all goes into salaries- Apple is paying for the infrastructure out of their 34 cents).
Obviously a fair price would be "infrastructure" + 10 cents apple + 10 cents recording industry + 10 cents artist since they seem to think that the people who created the music in the first place are only due 10 cents.
Even at those prices anything before 1978 should be PD and sold in mass quantities on DVD. These prices are completely artificial. There is no reason for them to be so high. You can EASILY see they are high because of the wealth they are accumulating- if the prices were fair, they would be living upper-class but not wealthy- taking home a few hundred thousand a year but not 20 million a year. The system is broken and change is coming from competition outside of their monopoly locked in distribution channels.
What is the -cost- of putting every song from 1978 back on DVD?
By the original copyright law, all of those songs would be public domain now. Who exactly do you think we are paying? Many of the artists are dead. Many of the songs have been bought -multiple times- by people on 8-track, cassette, vinyl record, and CD.
How have they brainwashed people into thinking music is something you should rent forever?
It's truly crazy.
That is pretty darned impressive. Most I ever managed (loooong ago in my youth) was 6 or 7 times. That must have been some come-hither look she was giving him!
The modern generation has no loyalty to give.
.99 a song is a JOKE. It is WAY to expensive. Your average person can easily want 10,000 songs. Your average DVD could easily accommodate 5,000 songs at a production cost of about $1.00. MOST of the songs you are paying money for are at least 30 years old. In many cases, the original artists are dead.
.99 to 1.39 has already missed the point that songs should probably be 19.99 for "Everything recorded in the 1950's" instead of the way they are selling them.
Just like in EQ, "They'll always be buds with Jobs" until he isn't giving them something and then they will immediately move on to a new person who is.
I'm not sure where the lack of loyalty comes from - perhaps it's business that started it (It is pretty stupid to be loyal to a business as an employee these days). I'm not even sure the lack of loyalty is a bad thing- loyalty was basically mined for it's value by asshats during most of the 80's and 90's.
Jobs and Apple needs the revenue from iPod. Their stock will crash if it becomes apparent they have lost iPod sales.
Music companies- just like Disney- just like any business today- are pretty ruthless about yield management. Businesses learned- people lie. Metrics tell the truth. The look at the absolute sweet spot of price where they maximize profits. If that means 90% of the people can buy their product- great. If it means 90% of the people can NOT buy their product- great.
So if they make more profit on less sales at $1.39 per song then they want to charge that.
And by the way...
So anyone being distracted by the hand waving over a
If jane is buying it to keep in touch with her grandchildren then why would she NEED to do research? What is the downside risk associated with keeping in touch with your grandchildren? Where is she exposed to financial loss? Why does security matter if she isn't putting any information that matters on the device?
So she buys a $149 "linspire" machine and sends emails back and forth.
If she decides to start doing online banking and running her craft business and putting all of her critical financial information on it, then I would suggest it doesn't match the case you are proposing any more.
The problem is that writing the kind of code proposed is
1) Very expensive (easily 100 times the cost of the code delivered now
2) Much slower (Easily 100 times longer to get the functionality
3) Still won't stop exposure to bugs. Even military grade code written at 100 times the cost and in 100 times as many man hours still has a bug or two per 10,000 lines.
4) May not function fast enough on available hardware.
---
If something becomes an issue, then it will be addressed - but there will always be new issues in non-trivial code.
At a minimum, I'd prefer to have a choice between expensive safer code and risky but free/fast/gives me the functionality I need now instead of in 2 years code.
And that would be INFINITELY better than letting the UN have control of it.
There is no reason we have to rely on only 13 trusted DNS servers. You can easily and incrementally add DNS servers in every country that cares about this. And then change the software to reference those DNS servers first.
That way, instead of 13 DNS servers, subject to attack, we could have a little over a hundred DNS servers - each in a different country that really cares about this as an issue.
But for god's sake don't give it to the UN. It's just not an appropriate kind of organization for this kind of thing.
Just in case I wasn't clear- after their time of execution but you don't kill them then- they die in the course of the experiments. Since they are legally dead as of the execution time, you use them for other purposes.
---
Seems equivalent to using living cells for experiments because they were already scheduled to be dead by then.
Wouldn't an even closer parallel be using criminals for experiments after their scheduled time of execution?
---
Tho personally, since i don't believe in souls in the first place, much less attached to small cell clusters, I don't see a problem with using them to heal cripples.
I have no need for the DVD. I never intend to see that piece of crap again in my life.
That was one of my realizations too.
1) Regardless of how hard I worked at certain things- I would never find them easy like some people around me clearly did.
2) I was smart, but there were -many- people smarter than me.
It was a tough realization to come to. We don't all get to be astronauts when we grow up.
They are now using indian lawyers instead of paralegals.
Here is how it works.
The work sent overseas and performed there.
An american lawyer reviews the output of many indian lawyers and does the actual presentation. There are no legal restrictions on who performs the legal work- only on who acts as a lawyer in the courts.
So-- reduced demand for lawyers and greatly reduced demand for paralegals.
Schools that graduate too many students lose their accreditation.
At my school, they got a bit lax and were passing too many people in my major (C.S.). The professor of a frikkin -junior- class (when you should be past weedout) walked in class and stated, "I must fail 35% of you this semester. Study hard." In another class, they failed 76 of 81 students. It was a case of the bell curve gone bad.
There were two approaches.
1) Help no one. The logic was if you help someone, they mess up your spot on the curve.
2) Get in a group of people. The logic was- help each other to move up the curve.
I was in group 2. But regardless of how much material you mastered, some of you were going to fail.
---
But the point is, there is no purpose served to dumping 1500 mediocre engineers on the senior year classes and then dumping them on the market. So 1500 must turn in to 300 somehow and the time-honored way is weed out courses. Organic Chemistry, Electrical Engineering, Assembly Language, and Discrete Math are typical examples.
If you want an easy degree get a business degree. Personally, I regret getting C.S. and not just going MIS. While I was writing entire database programs in 3 months (Basically MySQL 0.8), they were writing 60 line basic. While I was writing compilers, they were writing 80 line cobol programs and spreadsheet programs.
Would have saved me a couple years of my life and a lot of grief and I probably would have still ended up a java/web/business programmer.
People are not compensated for how "hard" their degree is to get.
---
P.S. don't get me started on doctors. IMHO they have a cartel going where they turn away qualified people if it will mean too many doctors.
The reason that your logic doesn't work out is the unfair restrictions to to trade and the fact that the upper class currently have an unreasonable hold on running companies.
Just as there is no valid reason why they should make $100k instead of $60k, there is no valid reason why our executive class makes $15 million while in other countries they make under a $1 million.
There is no valid reason why we pay $20 for DVD's that the chinese pay $2.45 for.
There is no valid reason we pay $80 for medicine which costs $4 (unsubsidised) in other countries.
It wouldn't matter so much if my pay got cut by $10k per year if I also got to buy DVD's for $4 and so on.
This is a temporary dislocation- it can't go on for long. At some point the executive class pay will be the reason companies fail and at that point they will need to take pay cuts as well. But it's going to be painful until that happens. The rich are going to seem "super-rich" for a while before things even out again. I am concerned about getting priced out of america, like the locals get priced out of Vail and other ski resorts. (You can see it happening in California).
As you agree, many of the things I say are true.
We can't address the problems until we identify them. We can't identify them if we are lying about them or avoiding talking about them.
Short term, politics and lying can stave off the truth, but in the end the truth prevails. I'm really bloody frakking annoyed at our "leaders" who are ruining our future to push reality out past their tenure in office.
Allyson Hannigan.
She married Wesley (Alexis Duchanov?)
Firefly is not EQ/WoW/Buffy/Angel.
They are drifting into it at the end of the series a tiny bit- apparently Joss likes supergirls.
No idea about Serenity except that I am going to see it.
Of course, liberal arts people used to be mature and capable of reasoned thought as well.
... if we were required to take 2 real philosophy and 2 real english classes, why are lib arts students not required to take 2 real math courses and 2 real science classes.
What I (and my friends) often wondered was
The broader point is -- in a casual conversation do we really have to carefully qualify and specify every clause and vocabulary point in each sentence?
For what it's worth...
---
Chinese, Japanese, and Korean sound pretty different to me. The slavic languages sound pretty similar.
---
I agree with your basic point but you could mistake a north american for a european based on accent (french). And I agree that we are better educated on european accents tho that is changing with more movies like Hero, Crouching Tiger...for chinese and Anime for japanese.
A large part of undergraduate and even masters degree just serves to show business that you actually will finish the project that they budgeted a half a million dollars for. It's about your persperation more than your inspiration.
Not so true for doctorates- there you are talking more about wanting someone who can think up new ideas.
A lot of the time the professors just don't understand how LITTLE you know. It is like you are in 1st grade and they are reaching down to 7th grade to try to introduce 12th grade concepts.
I had a very smart college professor (Dr. Verma) who was notorius for being a very hard class (even weedout levels- 50% drop/fail rates). Here is the tip that gave us close to an 85% pass rate that semester.
I figured out to ask him for a "trivial" example. When he gave a "trivial" example, at least half the class would understand what he had been trying to explain for 15 minutes. And often, the understanding was like "Oh my god- that's so easy, why was he saying it so complicated?"
Sometimes, all you need is just to comprehend a little edge or corner of the problem and suddenly the entire problem just peels open for you. The professors are speaking in jargon that you barely comprehend- if you can get them to drop the jargon and give an easy example in english, it may help.
Good luck!
Agree on several points.
1) He was basically taking the 5th year of high school physics. The professors have absolutely no interest in wasting another year of their life treating trivial material to anyone (even a brain).
2) Grades are a joke. They use a bell curve. You hope you don't get in a class with the next Hawking- because he will get the "A". The main point is to reduce the number of people in the senior classes to a managable level.
3) If that engineering wasn't easy for him, then he would have never cut it as a real engineer. So he was properly filtered out by a system designed to do just that.
Where I do agree with him...
College used to teach- now grad students do the work- and in many cases they cannot teach.
What is not mentioned in the article...
These days, you go through all that hell, and in many cases you can't get a job at ANY pay level because a foreign national is willing to do it for a fraction of the pay. That's niether right nor wrong- it's just a fact. There is no point in smart but sub-genius level american's going into these fields right now. There may be in 20 years when out economies even out or we have a war and see the stupidity of relying on foreign nationals who are not U.S. citizens for our critical programs.
A smart but not genius person will reasonably pick the highest compensated field with good employment prospects that they enjoy or at least do not actively despise.
Geniuses are different tho- they will fight the material easy with or without help- usually will get to bypass the trivial courses and skip straight to the good stuff by the time they are 20 (if not earlier). And they will always find employment at decent wages + benefits.
Outside of geniuses- there are about 3 billion people smarter than average who are increasingly competing for the same jobs.