I agree with the point that you're making, however, the study does seem to strongly indicate a causation relationship. From the summary:
"Apparently, levels of NGF in the bloodstream were significantly higher in subjects who were in the early stages of romance than individuals not in a relationship."
If love was the result of the presence of this chemical, as you suggested, we would expect to see a high level of the chemical in at least a small percentage of the individuals who were not in a relationship at the time of the study. This small percentage would represent the people who were ready to fall in love/enter a relationship but had not yet done so. Since the higher levels were found only in people who had recently fallen in love and not in the other groups, including those in long term relationships, the data seems to indicate that it was falling in love/starting a relationship that triggered production of the chemical.
Of course, a larger study would be needed to more confidently state that there is such a causation relationship, but from what little I've read of this study, there IS some evidence leaning towards that conclusion.
Although I don't entirely like the concept of age discimination, such a product might be useful in at least covering the legal asses of adult entertainment companies.
Want to ensure that kids won't sneak into your XXX store/website/movie theater? Set up something like this and you'll have one more thing to bring up in court when the kids inevitably -do- get in and you get called on it.
Vancouver is extremely multicultural too -- in fact, I've read that it won't be too many more years before whites are in the minority here. Political pamphlets are all written in English and Chinese, store signs are commonly in Chinese, Korean or Japanese with English added more as an afterthought, and like in Toronto, English is sometimes hard to hear on the buses and trains.
It's neat, but I often do find myself wishing that I could speak Chinese:)
I think it depends on what part of the industry you're looking at. The games industry, for example, is very big here in Vancouver -- my boyfriend works for EA, and I'm going to be doing a co-op job (that's an internship, for you American types) in January at a small startup game company. To my knowledge, a lot of American companies, particularly those of the video game persuasion, are actually outsourcing to Canada because thanks to public healthcare and other perks, we're cheaper to employ.
Also, it probably doesn't mean much, but all of my friends who are recent computer science grads managed to find jobs very soon after graduation. I don't know how their wages were, but I haven't heard any complaints.
Even the most macho male football fan has got to be aware that having his kid play with NFL team colour bubbles during the game while he cheers wildly is going to make him look like a damn good fan. It might also help to get kids interested in sports -- I have a feeling that if I'd had colourful bubbles to play with when I was little, going to sports games would have been much more palatable.
Timeouts drive me nuts. I always stay logged in on my computer simply because if anyone figures out the password to get into my account on this machine, let alone my root password, I've got a lot more to worry about than a mere gmail account. Yeah, I know it's not a very secure system, but I have very little to hide (and even less to lose), so I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of security for the sake of convenience.
My university webmail times out after some rediculously short amount of time, and as I result I rarely use it -- I hate having to log in again just because I've alt-tabbed for 5-10 minutes to type something up or read up on something before sending an email.
To my knowledge, you can stop gmail from automagically logging you in simply by not clicking on the "Remember me on this computer" box on the login page -- I seem to have convinced it to stop logging me in that way anyway. I would be rather nice if gmail would give us the -option- of having a login timeout, however, for people (like you) who want that kind of thing.
I love my local gaming store because the people there are nice, the selection is insanely good (3 or 4 big bookshelves totally packed with new stuff, plus a bookshelf filled with used game books), and they have tables in the back where people can sit down and play for free. They also have a lot of boardgames for people who aren't into pure pen and paper stuff, including way more mainstream stuff like monopoly and chess, and people are encouraged to play those games in the back as well.
I went there for a game day organized by a local gaming club one time and had the opportunity to try out Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. At one point during the game, one of the cats living in the apartment building next door wandered in through the window above the gaming tables -- apparently it is a frequent visitor to the store. While furry paws, character sheets and miniatures don't exactly mix, I was cat-deprived, so getting both my gaming fix and cat fix in one day made me very happy.
While it might be cheaper to buy online, gaming is all about getting out and being social (it doesn't work very well without a group to play with), and a gaming store is a great place to meet fellow gamers, share stories, learn about upcoming game days, and just hang out and play games.
I've been using The GIMP (probably one of the more recent versions) on Fedora Core 4, so I suspect that either it's a Linux driver issue or there's a setting in some obscure config file that I just haven't found yet. I've poked at it a few times in the past to try and fix it, but I'm still a Linux n00b in many respects.
The pressure sensitivity works just fine with both Photoshop and Painter (which came with my Wacom) on my Windows machine, so that's usually where I draw. I hate using smudge tools to blend colours, so I basically require pressure sensitivity (in conjunction with innumerable layers, of course) to colour and shade my drawings:)
I haven't used Photoshop much, but most of the commonly-used tools seem to be pretty easily accessible. I still wasn't very good with it, but that was due to my own lack of skill, not any problems with the UI or general program design.
If anything, I kind of wish that certain "things photographers do most" were MORE difficult to find: I'm one of the art moderators on Elfwood (a big sci-fi/fantasy art web site), and let's just say that the world would be a better place if budding young artists did not immediately pull out the lens flare filter every time they needed a fairy or extra magical sparkle in their work.
Personally, though, I prefer using Painter Classic for general digital art because I find it more comfortable to use. It's not exactly photo-oriented like Photoshop is, but it can still be used for photo manipulation. I use The GIMP occasionally as well, but I can't figure out how to make it recognize my tablet's pressure sensitivity, so I don't use it very often.
Unfortunately, judging by the blogs that I've seen, perhaps 75%-90% do.
I can't stand 'em. They make being female online harder because, in some circles at least, people expect me to be cute, slutty, and dumb. After all, that's how any girl past puberty is "supposed" to be. And she's supposed to talk about her wonderful boyfriend(s) at length in her public blog, complete with details on her sex life, her friends' sex lives, her sex life with her friends, etc. And there must be many shout outs to her friends. Bonus points for every animated gif and quiz result that can be crammed into a single page. Because, y'know, girls are dumb like that -_-
I think we just need more geek girls blogging to balance out the dumb ones... but I suppose that a new browser linked/advertised on/. that encourages blogging might be a way to make that happen:)
Bah, I have a hard enough time remembering the time difference between myself (in Vancouver) and my parents (in Ottawa) without the time difference changing due to some new kind of DST.
However, realistically, if Ontario is doing it, most other provinces (with the possible exceptions of ones which want to appear "distinct") will probably follow suit... no matter how silly they think the whole thing is. If something is annoying for me, it'll probably be even worse for someone running a business.
I've found that while Wikipedia can't be trusted on some issues, particularly popular/contraversial ones (if you can't be bothered to read the change history anyway), but it's great for finding some quick information, and ideally a few links to more reputable sources, when I'm working on an assignment.
Now, I don't think I would cite it in anything important (not directly -- if I used it as a resource I would still make a note of that in accordance with academic regulations), but I might take a look at the sources of a particularly good article and cite one of them. There are plenty of sites that I never would have found through Google alone.
It's also a lot easier to find things within a particular field on Wikipedia than it is via Google. There are all too many computer-related words that show up in the most interesting (and unrelated) places online. I'd rather type "mount", "zip", "unzip", or "fsck" into Wikipedia and have it helpfully point me towards the computer science section than brave the wilds of the internet through Google:)
Wait... aren't we talking about fungal spores? To my knowledge, they're a lot easier to get rid of than the bacterial spores that you're talking about:)
Fungi are pretty cool too, though. I like how they have many many different genders, and can reproduce in multiple different ways (including, of course, spores). It's also pretty neat thinking about how the things that we generally think of as fungi(ie. mushrooms, etc.) are just the fruiting bodies of truly enormous underground/otherwise hidden fungal colonies.
IANAEBGOA (I am not an evolutionary biologist, geologist or archeologist), but...
For Carbon dating, "the current maximum radiocarbon age limit lies in the range between 58,000 and 62,000 years" (from wikipedia). So... pretty recent, in the grand scheme of things.
Wikipedia also has an article on radiometric dating in general which outlines some types of radiometric dating that work for much older samples.
Also, when we're dealing with dinosaur remains, even IF we're off by hundreds or even thousands of years, it's not going to affect our data very much. We're dealing with such a large time scale that determining roughly when a creature died is often good enough -- usually we just want to know when some species existed compared to some other species, and species are usually pretty good about lasting for at least a few thousand years.
In any case, if we determine that something is... say... roughly 60-65 million years old, that huge error range doesn't change the fact that the evidence blatantly contradicts Young Earth theory;)
*shrug* I know I'm not unique. Well, I don't consciously try to be like other people, but I know that I -am- like people in certain subcultures (eg./. geeks), so I see no reason why I shouldn't label myself as that kind of person. Labels just make it easier for me to find other people who share my interests and, to some extent, personality... and, by extension, said labels also help me find suitable boyfriends.
Besides, nobody would ever read my postings if I repeatedly described myself as "A somewhat childish, easily-amused person who has trouble interacting with girls and is happiest in front of a computer, ideally coding, reading Slashdot, watching anime or sci-fi, chatting with like-minded guys, and/or gaming." The term "geek" summarizes it all so neatly:)
Guys who are "hot" in the generic mainstream way that you are probably referring to are pretty boring as far as I'm concerned. Maybe I'm a closeted bisexual or something, but I definitely DO like (and have dated) guys whose femininity and masculinity are relatively balanced.
Then again, this may just be because I'm a geek. I like to stick to my own kind -- ie. nonthreatening intelligent tall skinny geek guys. Dating a "hot guy with money or power and charisma" would be like dating a whole different species, and beastiality really isn't my thing. Besides... I'm only moderately pretty myself, so I would hate to be with a guy who was way more attractive than I was.
I would like to see more actual scientific studies about what makes people attracted to each other, though... and more research into what love actually is would be interesting too. People keep telling me that I'll just "know" when I fall in love, but in my very very limited experience, that really isn't the case.
On one hand, I agree with you: an aquaruium does seem like an odd place to keep robots.
But then again, few other museums/etc. are going to have the facilities to display robot fish swimming around with real ones. I know that the science and tech museum in Ottawa certainly doesn't have any big tanks lying around, let alone the staff required to clean tanks/feed real fish/do other such tasks. An aquarium already has all of those things and more.
Besides, this is less weird than the Vancouver aquarium having a whole rainforest exhibit filled with an awful lot of creatures that look a lot less fishy than this robot:)
I agree that it was probably a problem with his highschool. I was in the gifted program at a highschool in Ottawa (Lisgar Collegiate Institute, in case anyone cares) and was also part of the last group of students to do grade 13 before it was phased out. My marks in highschool were good in some classes (mainly English), abysmal in others (mainly math -- I'm really weak in that area).
Perhaps because of the aforementioned highschool-related reasons, I found that I was FAR better prepared for university than most of my non-gifted, non-grade 13-graduate classmates. The transition for me was easy: much of the material was review, nothing was particularly unexpected, and I actually knew how to study. Admittedly I was a biology major rather than an engineering major, but I still had to deal with titrations in chemistry (which aren't so bad if you're willing to be patient), various maths (which are, indeed, evil... but profs usually bell the final marks, so you're rewarded for being above average), and other such courses. Since then, I've switched to computer science, and it still isn't that bad as long as I do the work.
Based on the article, I got the impression that the guy just wanted a free ride like he had in highschool. Yeah, maybe some TAs and profs were partially at fault (though I've seen similar whining about some GREAT profs that I've had in the past), but it was still his responsibility to find a tutor, online resource, study group, or whatever in order to get through the course.
As the girlfriend of an EA worker...
on
Pay vs. Happiness
·
· Score: 1
My boyfriend is a build engineer on Need for Speed at EAX in downtown Vancouver. When he took the job, we knew all about EA spouse, but pretty much everything we'd heard about EA up in Canada had been positive. Apparently they'd had problems in the past, but had been markedly improving, and I have since heard rumours to back that up... but only about EAC, the main studio.
Unfortunately, as we discovered, these improvements did not extend to EAX.
He started work in May of this year, right after he graduated from university with a computer science degree. As the new guy on a pretty senior team, he knew it was going to be rough, but he's a smart and dedicated worker, so we both thought he could handle it.
Within the first couple of months, they had him working until 2am and coming in almost every weekend. By the end of summer, he had slept at the office once (on a Sunday, I might add) and rarely got a weekend off. And now we're getting into crunch time.
He's gaining weight, he feels sick all the time, he doesn't get enough sleep, he's more miserable than I've ever seen him... and they still expect him to work 80 hour weeks. On salary. With maybe a week or two off at the end of the project as his only compensation.
The money at EA may be good, but it's worthless if you don't even have time to spend it.
Well, given that the ESA headquarters are in Paris, if they do accidentally (or intentionally) hit France, we won't have to worry about them making any more mistakes...
I didn't know much about the Google print project, so I looked at the about section of their website.
Click a book title and you'll see the page of the book that has your search terms, along with other information about the book and "Buy this Book" links to online bookstores (you can view the entirety of public domain books or, for books under copyright, just a few pages or in some cases, only the title's bibliographic data and brief snippets).
Looks to me like they're respecting copyright laws. Copying a few pages of a copyrighted work has always been fine -- there's a reason why every university library is equipped with an enormous number of monstrous photocopy machines. The Dalhousie library even has signs up reminding people of how much they can copy under the law.
So I'm really not sure what all the commotion is about... but if Google -is- successfully sued and the copyright laws are changed, what will happen to the rest of us who (legally, under current laws) reproduce sections of books for academic reasons?
It looks like an interesting toy, but I don't know how useful it would be to make actual works of art. From what I can see in the pictures, it looks too big and awkward to do any detail work. It's too bad, really, because a much smaller, stylus-sized version of this would be a lot of fun for image manipulation and digital art. It would be a lot easier to get colours right when painting from life anyway:)
Well, my impression is that the guy quoted views this "bad behavior" as justice rather than any kind of sin.
That's the lovely thing about moral issues... nobody can fully agree on what's "right" and what's "wrong", but most still hold the view that everyone is born with the innate ability (or conscience, if you will) to correctly identify what's right/wrong according to their particular belief system.
On this particular topic, I think that what the kid did was wrong, but I'm not going to deny that I'm happy to see it happen to Hilton instead of a less deserving victim. However, his deeds were so minor that a mere 11 month sentence in a juvenile facility is probably appropriate, so all in all, I'm happy with this ruling.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the point that you're making, however, the study does seem to strongly indicate a causation relationship. From the summary:
"Apparently, levels of NGF in the bloodstream were significantly higher in subjects who were in the early stages of romance than individuals not in a relationship."
If love was the result of the presence of this chemical, as you suggested, we would expect to see a high level of the chemical in at least a small percentage of the individuals who were not in a relationship at the time of the study. This small percentage would represent the people who were ready to fall in love/enter a relationship but had not yet done so. Since the higher levels were found only in people who had recently fallen in love and not in the other groups, including those in long term relationships, the data seems to indicate that it was falling in love/starting a relationship that triggered production of the chemical.
Of course, a larger study would be needed to more confidently state that there is such a causation relationship, but from what little I've read of this study, there IS some evidence leaning towards that conclusion.
Although I don't entirely like the concept of age discimination, such a product might be useful in at least covering the legal asses of adult entertainment companies.
Want to ensure that kids won't sneak into your XXX store/website/movie theater? Set up something like this and you'll have one more thing to bring up in court when the kids inevitably -do- get in and you get called on it.
Vancouver is extremely multicultural too -- in fact, I've read that it won't be too many more years before whites are in the minority here. Political pamphlets are all written in English and Chinese, store signs are commonly in Chinese, Korean or Japanese with English added more as an afterthought, and like in Toronto, English is sometimes hard to hear on the buses and trains.
:)
It's neat, but I often do find myself wishing that I could speak Chinese
I think it depends on what part of the industry you're looking at. The games industry, for example, is very big here in Vancouver -- my boyfriend works for EA, and I'm going to be doing a co-op job (that's an internship, for you American types) in January at a small startup game company. To my knowledge, a lot of American companies, particularly those of the video game persuasion, are actually outsourcing to Canada because thanks to public healthcare and other perks, we're cheaper to employ.
Also, it probably doesn't mean much, but all of my friends who are recent computer science grads managed to find jobs very soon after graduation. I don't know how their wages were, but I haven't heard any complaints.
But what if you're that 1?
Maybe the fans themselves... but their kids?
Even the most macho male football fan has got to be aware that having his kid play with NFL team colour bubbles during the game while he cheers wildly is going to make him look like a damn good fan. It might also help to get kids interested in sports -- I have a feeling that if I'd had colourful bubbles to play with when I was little, going to sports games would have been much more palatable.
Timeouts drive me nuts. I always stay logged in on my computer simply because if anyone figures out the password to get into my account on this machine, let alone my root password, I've got a lot more to worry about than a mere gmail account. Yeah, I know it's not a very secure system, but I have very little to hide (and even less to lose), so I'm willing to sacrifice a bit of security for the sake of convenience.
My university webmail times out after some rediculously short amount of time, and as I result I rarely use it -- I hate having to log in again just because I've alt-tabbed for 5-10 minutes to type something up or read up on something before sending an email.
To my knowledge, you can stop gmail from automagically logging you in simply by not clicking on the "Remember me on this computer" box on the login page -- I seem to have convinced it to stop logging me in that way anyway. I would be rather nice if gmail would give us the -option- of having a login timeout, however, for people (like you) who want that kind of thing.
I love my local gaming store because the people there are nice, the selection is insanely good (3 or 4 big bookshelves totally packed with new stuff, plus a bookshelf filled with used game books), and they have tables in the back where people can sit down and play for free. They also have a lot of boardgames for people who aren't into pure pen and paper stuff, including way more mainstream stuff like monopoly and chess, and people are encouraged to play those games in the back as well.
I went there for a game day organized by a local gaming club one time and had the opportunity to try out Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. At one point during the game, one of the cats living in the apartment building next door wandered in through the window above the gaming tables -- apparently it is a frequent visitor to the store. While furry paws, character sheets and miniatures don't exactly mix, I was cat-deprived, so getting both my gaming fix and cat fix in one day made me very happy.
While it might be cheaper to buy online, gaming is all about getting out and being social (it doesn't work very well without a group to play with), and a gaming store is a great place to meet fellow gamers, share stories, learn about upcoming game days, and just hang out and play games.
The pressure sensitivity works just fine with both Photoshop and Painter (which came with my Wacom) on my Windows machine, so that's usually where I draw. I hate using smudge tools to blend colours, so I basically require pressure sensitivity (in conjunction with innumerable layers, of course) to colour and shade my drawings :)
If anything, I kind of wish that certain "things photographers do most" were MORE difficult to find: I'm one of the art moderators on Elfwood (a big sci-fi/fantasy art web site), and let's just say that the world would be a better place if budding young artists did not immediately pull out the lens flare filter every time they needed a fairy or extra magical sparkle in their work.
Personally, though, I prefer using Painter Classic for general digital art because I find it more comfortable to use. It's not exactly photo-oriented like Photoshop is, but it can still be used for photo manipulation. I use The GIMP occasionally as well, but I can't figure out how to make it recognize my tablet's pressure sensitivity, so I don't use it very often.
Unfortunately, judging by the blogs that I've seen, perhaps 75%-90% do.
/. that encourages blogging might be a way to make that happen :)
I can't stand 'em. They make being female online harder because, in some circles at least, people expect me to be cute, slutty, and dumb. After all, that's how any girl past puberty is "supposed" to be. And she's supposed to talk about her wonderful boyfriend(s) at length in her public blog, complete with details on her sex life, her friends' sex lives, her sex life with her friends, etc. And there must be many shout outs to her friends. Bonus points for every animated gif and quiz result that can be crammed into a single page. Because, y'know, girls are dumb like that -_-
I think we just need more geek girls blogging to balance out the dumb ones... but I suppose that a new browser linked/advertised on
Bah, I have a hard enough time remembering the time difference between myself (in Vancouver) and my parents (in Ottawa) without the time difference changing due to some new kind of DST. However, realistically, if Ontario is doing it, most other provinces (with the possible exceptions of ones which want to appear "distinct") will probably follow suit... no matter how silly they think the whole thing is. If something is annoying for me, it'll probably be even worse for someone running a business.
I've found that while Wikipedia can't be trusted on some issues, particularly popular/contraversial ones (if you can't be bothered to read the change history anyway), but it's great for finding some quick information, and ideally a few links to more reputable sources, when I'm working on an assignment.
:)
Now, I don't think I would cite it in anything important (not directly -- if I used it as a resource I would still make a note of that in accordance with academic regulations), but I might take a look at the sources of a particularly good article and cite one of them. There are plenty of sites that I never would have found through Google alone.
It's also a lot easier to find things within a particular field on Wikipedia than it is via Google. There are all too many computer-related words that show up in the most interesting (and unrelated) places online. I'd rather type "mount", "zip", "unzip", or "fsck" into Wikipedia and have it helpfully point me towards the computer science section than brave the wilds of the internet through Google
Wait... aren't we talking about fungal spores? To my knowledge, they're a lot easier to get rid of than the bacterial spores that you're talking about :)
Fungi are pretty cool too, though. I like how they have many many different genders, and can reproduce in multiple different ways (including, of course, spores). It's also pretty neat thinking about how the things that we generally think of as fungi(ie. mushrooms, etc.) are just the fruiting bodies of truly enormous underground/otherwise hidden fungal colonies.
IANAEBGOA (I am not an evolutionary biologist, geologist or archeologist), but...
;)
For Carbon dating, "the current maximum radiocarbon age limit lies in the range between 58,000 and 62,000 years" (from wikipedia). So... pretty recent, in the grand scheme of things.
Wikipedia also has an article on radiometric dating in general which outlines some types of radiometric dating that work for much older samples.
Also, when we're dealing with dinosaur remains, even IF we're off by hundreds or even thousands of years, it's not going to affect our data very much. We're dealing with such a large time scale that determining roughly when a creature died is often good enough -- usually we just want to know when some species existed compared to some other species, and species are usually pretty good about lasting for at least a few thousand years.
In any case, if we determine that something is... say... roughly 60-65 million years old, that huge error range doesn't change the fact that the evidence blatantly contradicts Young Earth theory
*shrug* I know I'm not unique. Well, I don't consciously try to be like other people, but I know that I -am- like people in certain subcultures (eg. /. geeks), so I see no reason why I shouldn't label myself as that kind of person. Labels just make it easier for me to find other people who share my interests and, to some extent, personality... and, by extension, said labels also help me find suitable boyfriends.
:)
Besides, nobody would ever read my postings if I repeatedly described myself as "A somewhat childish, easily-amused person who has trouble interacting with girls and is happiest in front of a computer, ideally coding, reading Slashdot, watching anime or sci-fi, chatting with like-minded guys, and/or gaming." The term "geek" summarizes it all so neatly
Some of us find sensitive feminine guys hot.
Guys who are "hot" in the generic mainstream way that you are probably referring to are pretty boring as far as I'm concerned. Maybe I'm a closeted bisexual or something, but I definitely DO like (and have dated) guys whose femininity and masculinity are relatively balanced.
Then again, this may just be because I'm a geek. I like to stick to my own kind -- ie. nonthreatening intelligent tall skinny geek guys. Dating a "hot guy with money or power and charisma" would be like dating a whole different species, and beastiality really isn't my thing. Besides... I'm only moderately pretty myself, so I would hate to be with a guy who was way more attractive than I was.
I would like to see more actual scientific studies about what makes people attracted to each other, though... and more research into what love actually is would be interesting too. People keep telling me that I'll just "know" when I fall in love, but in my very very limited experience, that really isn't the case.
On one hand, I agree with you: an aquaruium does seem like an odd place to keep robots.
:)
But then again, few other museums/etc. are going to have the facilities to display robot fish swimming around with real ones. I know that the science and tech museum in Ottawa certainly doesn't have any big tanks lying around, let alone the staff required to clean tanks/feed real fish/do other such tasks. An aquarium already has all of those things and more.
Besides, this is less weird than the Vancouver aquarium having a whole rainforest exhibit filled with an awful lot of creatures that look a lot less fishy than this robot
I agree that it was probably a problem with his highschool. I was in the gifted program at a highschool in Ottawa (Lisgar Collegiate Institute, in case anyone cares) and was also part of the last group of students to do grade 13 before it was phased out. My marks in highschool were good in some classes (mainly English), abysmal in others (mainly math -- I'm really weak in that area).
Perhaps because of the aforementioned highschool-related reasons, I found that I was FAR better prepared for university than most of my non-gifted, non-grade 13-graduate classmates. The transition for me was easy: much of the material was review, nothing was particularly unexpected, and I actually knew how to study. Admittedly I was a biology major rather than an engineering major, but I still had to deal with titrations in chemistry (which aren't so bad if you're willing to be patient), various maths (which are, indeed, evil... but profs usually bell the final marks, so you're rewarded for being above average), and other such courses. Since then, I've switched to computer science, and it still isn't that bad as long as I do the work.
Based on the article, I got the impression that the guy just wanted a free ride like he had in highschool. Yeah, maybe some TAs and profs were partially at fault (though I've seen similar whining about some GREAT profs that I've had in the past), but it was still his responsibility to find a tutor, online resource, study group, or whatever in order to get through the course.
My boyfriend is a build engineer on Need for Speed at EAX in downtown Vancouver. When he took the job, we knew all about EA spouse, but pretty much everything we'd heard about EA up in Canada had been positive. Apparently they'd had problems in the past, but had been markedly improving, and I have since heard rumours to back that up... but only about EAC, the main studio.
Unfortunately, as we discovered, these improvements did not extend to EAX.
He started work in May of this year, right after he graduated from university with a computer science degree. As the new guy on a pretty senior team, he knew it was going to be rough, but he's a smart and dedicated worker, so we both thought he could handle it.
Within the first couple of months, they had him working until 2am and coming in almost every weekend. By the end of summer, he had slept at the office once (on a Sunday, I might add) and rarely got a weekend off. And now we're getting into crunch time.
He's gaining weight, he feels sick all the time, he doesn't get enough sleep, he's more miserable than I've ever seen him... and they still expect him to work 80 hour weeks. On salary. With maybe a week or two off at the end of the project as his only compensation.
The money at EA may be good, but it's worthless if you don't even have time to spend it.
Well, given that the ESA headquarters are in Paris, if they do accidentally (or intentionally) hit France, we won't have to worry about them making any more mistakes...
So I'm really not sure what all the commotion is about... but if Google -is- successfully sued and the copyright laws are changed, what will happen to the rest of us who (legally, under current laws) reproduce sections of books for academic reasons?
It looks like an interesting toy, but I don't know how useful it would be to make actual works of art. From what I can see in the pictures, it looks too big and awkward to do any detail work. It's too bad, really, because a much smaller, stylus-sized version of this would be a lot of fun for image manipulation and digital art. It would be a lot easier to get colours right when painting from life anyway :)
Well, my impression is that the guy quoted views this "bad behavior" as justice rather than any kind of sin.
That's the lovely thing about moral issues... nobody can fully agree on what's "right" and what's "wrong", but most still hold the view that everyone is born with the innate ability (or conscience, if you will) to correctly identify what's right/wrong according to their particular belief system.
On this particular topic, I think that what the kid did was wrong, but I'm not going to deny that I'm happy to see it happen to Hilton instead of a less deserving victim. However, his deeds were so minor that a mere 11 month sentence in a juvenile facility is probably appropriate, so all in all, I'm happy with this ruling.
I hate interfaces that force me to middle click because I only have two mouse buttons on my laptop, and they're a pain to use at the best of times.
:)
But to each his own