Gas has gone up to about $3.80 per gallon for a short time, and it's hovering around $2.60 here now. Nobody has changed any habits at all. (Well, I lied. I got a Discover Gas Card so I get 5% off now.)
If both a short-term $2 hike and a long-term $1 hike doesn't affect behavior, what makes you think 50 cents will?
I don't know, are there any journalists left? Whenever I read a magazine and look at the staff, everyone's an editor. Great, who actually writes the words, if everyone else only edits them?
You're like me, you enjoy geek-friendly sports. Note that basketball is not on your list.
The main problem I see is that all through public school, every single sport they teach in gym is always a competitive or team sport. I'm simply not competetive when it comes to sports; I have zero interest in being better than anyone. Take with that the "being picked last" syndrome because you aren't as good at hitting a baseball as the other kids, and it's easy to quickly develop a negative association with all sports.
Gym teachers by far are the worst teachers in the world and care nothing about your personal development. This is not an exaggeration. In all years of public school, I had a mix good and bad teachers in most subjects, with the exception of gym; they were all terrible.
Every single one of them followed this policy: 1) pick random competitive sport 2) designate two jocks who both hate you to the be captains 3) start game 4) disappear to drink coffee for the rest of the period.
It wasn't until college until I discovered running, weight-lifting, skiing, etc. Much to my suprise, with the absence of a loser teacher, I could actually enjoy exercise. Competing against yourself is far more interesting than anything else, and avoids the "YOU SUCK!" aspect of team sports that I never found appealing.
If you're a geek, view your body as machine that needs the right inputs to get the desired effect. It's pretty damn simple when you get down to it, and the only thing you need is the motivation and interest.
most people usually get it right when there are multiple lanes turning in parallel.
Not around here! Every day there is the guy who decides to sit in the leftmost lane at the light, wander over to the right across 3 lanes in the middle of the turn, cutting you off, stop in the right most lane, stopping everyone else, and then pull off to the Dunkin' Donuts (this is MA after all) on the right side.
I'll throw in when turning at an intersection, turn into the CLOSEST lane. Eg, if you are turning right, turn into the RIGHTmost lane of the road you are turning into, and if you are turning left, turn into the LEFTmost lane of the road you are turning into (and then merge to the right, if you arent passing).
Not always. If there are two turning lanes that are parallel, then you stay in your lane regardless of the direction of turn. This allows two people to turn in parallel, and it's the reason many places now put dotted lines across the intersection. Otherwise you serialize the turn into one lane - some person decides to start the turn in the left lane, and cross mid-turn into the right. This halves the traffic flow.
I agree that 7 heated pools and 6 SUVs are wasteful, but let's look at it a bit.
First, that guy can't drive 6 vehicles at once, so the emissions is really split across all those vehicles.
Heating a 35000 square foot home is obviously going to take a lot of energy. If you assume an average "normal" house is 1500 square feet, then he is taking the resources of 23 houses. Sure, that's excessive, but how many people in the US are as rich as him? If there's only a handful, then trying to get him to turn off his pool or build a smaller house is pointless. Not only because of the Golden Rule, but much larger net gains are likely to be had by making broad but shallow changes to something that affects most people, like mpg standards.
A house can last a few hundred years. That guy's house is likely to be there, just as big, in a hundred years or so, eating up as much energy. Change code and regulate all you want, it's hard to undo that house.
Cars have much shorter lifespans. Yes, there are classic cars, but very few people drive even 50 year old cars as daily drivers.
So, yes, I suspect that a.25 mpg increase across the all cars in the new model year will have a MUCH larger impact, and is more likely to actually happen, than telling a few rich people they can't have a 35000 square foot house. ("Oh dear, I guess I'll have to buy two 17500 square foot houses now!") Rich people can find loopholes in anything.
Ever play a live gig? With a laptop, you have to worry about the battery running out in the middle of a 3-hour show, someone spilling beer on it, kicking it, stepping on it, and dropping a 50-pound monitor on it. I wouldn't expect a laptop to take this kind of abuse for very long at all.
Here we have a mighty empire, ruling thousands of systems, with energy weapons, walking tanks and armoured soldiers - and they get their asses kicked by teddy bears with spears.
Come on, I'm sure if you met an Iraqi insurgent in person under normal circumstances, they'd be nice... but calling them a teddy bear?
What he calls 22 years of "IT" probably means managing a bunch of middle-managers at a defense contractor; a PHB squared. That's about as far away from any form of technology as you can get, without placing yourself in the middle of the Sahara.
Indeed. I once took a language theory class from a math bigot. He clearly hated computer science and (shudder) actual physical objects like computers.
Upon trying to describe a stack, he stumbled, paused and said: "Why do you computer people use such strange words like "push" and "pop"? Why not call it 'stick it on the end' and 'take it off the end?' It's so needlessly complicated".
Without a beat, he then writes a bunch of greek symbols on the board, epsilon prime-prime-underbar-hat, muttering on about nondeterministic finite automata and pumping lemmas.
Years ago, I learned never to take any computer science classes from anyone who held only degrees in math, but sadly I had no choice that semester.
Had a discussion with our secreta^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hadmin assistant. She was complaining how expensive eyeglass frames were, and having the same insurance plan, I said, "Huh, I got the highest-end frames there were at store X, and it was only about $100 after the insurance kicked in."
"But were they designer frames? You know, Armani?"
"No, uh, Jaguar." They're pretty cool frames, even as a fashion-challenged geek I think they're pretty impressive, but they're not hoity-toity designer ones.
To her, she'd rather forego all the free insurance money and pay an extra $400 to go to the store that carries the right frames, but doesn't take our insurance.
My class was in a private 2-year college. Though it was an evening class, it had a mix of traditional (2/3) and nontraditional (1/3) students.
But you have a good point, and maybe I did get lucky. After all, I'm not a really teacher, just a computer guy who taught a class once.
However, if I did see that most of the students weren't showing up and doing poorly, I'd have to rethink the policy. I'd probably do it on the sly by scheduling more smaller-sized tests, that I already said they'd have to take no matter what.
As it stood, only one kid really decided not to show up and wound up dropping the class. Of course, he might have never shown up anyway; so I'm not sure if my policy caused it. However I'd rather have a kid drop when he realizes he's in over his head, than stick around and get a 0.
I also made a guarantee that nobody would fail if they completed all the homeworks and tests, even if they were all late. Some students had to make a big stretch to understand programming at all, and most of them really did a good job. It was really a balancing act of setting the bar high vs. too low.
I kept on thinking about the bad teachers I had in school. Some teachers I'd be struggling along with a 37% average while studying many hours a day, -- only to realize the class average was 18%, and that the professor would curve up silently at the end of the semester. I hated that because I thought I was failing no matter what I did, until I got onto his game. But it was too late, I would invariably drop the class. Not worth my time.
Similary, I've bored out of my skull because classes were too easy, but the instructor was a pedant and graded on busy-work homework and attendance. I made a promise to myself never to run a class like either those.
The best teachers I ever had didn't require attendance.
I especially remember my college data structures class. As we ground through each topic at the pace of a one every few weeks, it was really pointless for me to be there.
The teacher was nice enough to say attendance is optional. You still have to do all the homeworks and all the tests, but you don't have to come to lecture. I 4.0'd that class, and only went once or twice a month. He was even kind enough to encourage me to do this - I'd show up at his office, and we'd plan when I would show up to coincide with new topics. How great is that?
In aural skills class (a music class where you listen to music and learn to write it out), one teacher took this even further. He told me to leave and not come back until finals. He said it was pointless for me to do the in-class assignments and 4.0'd me after a few weeks.
I remember this fondly - so when I had the chance to teach a Java class, I made the same policy. Some of the working adults elected to skip some classes, and one kid was a real ace. Most of the people who took advantage of it 4.0'd the class, and I'm happy I made their life a little bit easier by not being so pedantic.
The worst students would sit behind the computers with IM or Yahoo baseball turned on. I wish I had a big "internet off" button, or at least, could teach in a room with no computers.
Same here - I'm using the library more and more as a near-total replacement for book, CD, and DVD purchases. This started mostly for kid's books, as they go through them at an alarming clip, but now we've gotten into the habit for ourselves.
With online catalogs accessible from the internet that searches the entire state, plus free delivery to the local library that's so close I can walk to it, why buy anything? It's really amazing how useful libraries are once you get the hang of searching and reserving online.
I now only buy the stuff I really love, or want to keep.
I know you were joking, but the irony is the lawyers beat you to it.
There already is such a thing as an ephemeral license fee. You see (paraphrasing jwz) someone decided that the transitory copying of music necessary for a webcast is more like printing new copies, than broadcasting over radio waves.
Back in 4th grade I believe it was an Atari 400 with it's monstrous 16K of memory. But that was only the first one I owned, not used.
By then I had been playing with other computers for a year or so that friends/schools/stores had: a VIC-20, TI99/4A, Timex Sinclair, Commodore PET, Odyssey 2 (more of a game machine) and some unnamed mainframe/teletype system that I still don't know what it was -- "Login/attach" anyone?
I was one of those geek kids used to program computers on displays in stores before I owned one. Even after, I remember writing graphics & music demos at home, bringing them in on floppy, loading them up, and leaving them run. I stitched together a bunch of ones that I wrote, plus others I had traded, into a one big program -- sort of like a screen saver with lots of changing modes does today.
Now that I think of it, I imagine it must have been kind of funny working at one of those stores like Sears. You have a computer on display that shows nothing but "READY"... and when you come back from your break, an animated keyboard is playing "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" in 4-part harmony. Not faked, either - a musician could tell the right keys were lit up. With all of David Lee Roth's improvisations and the sax solo transcribed note for note.
Ha! While I'm in old fart mode, I remember the day when I discovered I could get the Atari to control the tape drive for playing audio. (IIRC, they had a little program that was a foreign language tutor that would take advantage of this.) So hacked up a program and brought it in to my summer computer class, along with a program that would print out the song's lyrics in time.
Since it wasn't obvious the tape was running, it gave the impression that I wrote a program that was actually playing it. Wow, that punk fit 3 minutes of encoded music into an 8K address space!
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Gas has gone up to about $3.80 per gallon for a short time, and it's hovering around $2.60 here now. Nobody has changed any habits at all. (Well, I lied. I got a Discover Gas Card so I get 5% off now.)
If both a short-term $2 hike and a long-term $1 hike doesn't affect behavior, what makes you think 50 cents will?
I don't know, are there any journalists left? Whenever I read a magazine and look at the staff, everyone's an editor. Great, who actually writes the words, if everyone else only edits them?
The main problem I see is that all through public school, every single sport they teach in gym is always a competitive or team sport. I'm simply not competetive when it comes to sports; I have zero interest in being better than anyone. Take with that the "being picked last" syndrome because you aren't as good at hitting a baseball as the other kids, and it's easy to quickly develop a negative association with all sports.
Gym teachers by far are the worst teachers in the world and care nothing about your personal development. This is not an exaggeration. In all years of public school, I had a mix good and bad teachers in most subjects, with the exception of gym; they were all terrible.
Every single one of them followed this policy: 1) pick random competitive sport 2) designate two jocks who both hate you to the be captains 3) start game 4) disappear to drink coffee for the rest of the period.
It wasn't until college until I discovered running, weight-lifting, skiing, etc. Much to my suprise, with the absence of a loser teacher, I could actually enjoy exercise. Competing against yourself is far more interesting than anything else, and avoids the "YOU SUCK!" aspect of team sports that I never found appealing.
If you're a geek, view your body as machine that needs the right inputs to get the desired effect. It's pretty damn simple when you get down to it, and the only thing you need is the motivation and interest.
Not around here! Every day there is the guy who decides to sit in the leftmost lane at the light, wander over to the right across 3 lanes in the middle of the turn, cutting you off, stop in the right most lane, stopping everyone else, and then pull off to the Dunkin' Donuts (this is MA after all) on the right side.
One wonders, why not start off in the right lane?
Not always. If there are two turning lanes that are parallel, then you stay in your lane regardless of the direction of turn. This allows two people to turn in parallel, and it's the reason many places now put dotted lines across the intersection. Otherwise you serialize the turn into one lane - some person decides to start the turn in the left lane, and cross mid-turn into the right. This halves the traffic flow.
I agree that 7 heated pools and 6 SUVs are wasteful, but let's look at it a bit.
.25 mpg increase across the all cars in the new model year will have a MUCH larger impact, and is more likely to actually happen, than telling a few rich people they can't have a 35000 square foot house. ("Oh dear, I guess I'll have to buy two 17500 square foot houses now!") Rich people can find loopholes in anything.
First, that guy can't drive 6 vehicles at once, so the emissions is really split across all those vehicles.
Heating a 35000 square foot home is obviously going to take a lot of energy. If you assume an average "normal" house is 1500 square feet, then he is taking the resources of 23 houses. Sure, that's excessive, but how many people in the US are as rich as him? If there's only a handful, then trying to get him to turn off his pool or build a smaller house is pointless. Not only because of the Golden Rule, but much larger net gains are likely to be had by making broad but shallow changes to something that affects most people, like mpg standards.
A house can last a few hundred years. That guy's house is likely to be there, just as big, in a hundred years or so, eating up as much energy. Change code and regulate all you want, it's hard to undo that house.
Cars have much shorter lifespans. Yes, there are classic cars, but very few people drive even 50 year old cars as daily drivers.
So, yes, I suspect that a
Ever play a live gig? With a laptop, you have to worry about the battery running out in the middle of a 3-hour show, someone spilling beer on it, kicking it, stepping on it, and dropping a 50-pound monitor on it. I wouldn't expect a laptop to take this kind of abuse for very long at all.
Come on, I'm sure if you met an Iraqi insurgent in person under normal circumstances, they'd be nice... but calling them a teddy bear?
There is porn for women, with pictures. It's called Gilmore Girls.
Right, go for a 20" ViewSonic for 1600x1200. I have a 19" Samsung and the pixels felt a little big for my taste. Buy pixels, not inches.
The boobies? Um, they sure do!
(Fagtart, I like that one. Very creative!)
I agree, but that's how you get to be President!
Indeed. I once took a language theory class from a math bigot. He clearly hated computer science and (shudder) actual physical objects like computers.
Upon trying to describe a stack, he stumbled, paused and said: "Why do you computer people use such strange words like "push" and "pop"? Why not call it 'stick it on the end' and 'take it off the end?' It's so needlessly complicated".
Without a beat, he then writes a bunch of greek symbols on the board, epsilon prime-prime-underbar-hat, muttering on about nondeterministic finite automata and pumping lemmas.
Years ago, I learned never to take any computer science classes from anyone who held only degrees in math, but sadly I had no choice that semester.
True, but there's a whole lot more porn than museums! How about we trade .xxx for .museum?
"But were they designer frames? You know, Armani?"
"No, uh, Jaguar." They're pretty cool frames, even as a fashion-challenged geek I think they're pretty impressive, but they're not hoity-toity designer ones.
To her, she'd rather forego all the free insurance money and pay an extra $400 to go to the store that carries the right frames, but doesn't take our insurance.
To some people, there is no function, only form.
My class was in a private 2-year college. Though it was an evening class, it had a mix of traditional (2/3) and nontraditional (1/3) students.
But you have a good point, and maybe I did get lucky. After all, I'm not a really teacher, just a computer guy who taught a class once.
However, if I did see that most of the students weren't showing up and doing poorly, I'd have to rethink the policy. I'd probably do it on the sly by scheduling more smaller-sized tests, that I already said they'd have to take no matter what.
As it stood, only one kid really decided not to show up and wound up dropping the class. Of course, he might have never shown up anyway; so I'm not sure if my policy caused it. However I'd rather have a kid drop when he realizes he's in over his head, than stick around and get a 0.
I also made a guarantee that nobody would fail if they completed all the homeworks and tests, even if they were all late. Some students had to make a big stretch to understand programming at all, and most of them really did a good job. It was really a balancing act of setting the bar high vs. too low.
I kept on thinking about the bad teachers I had in school. Some teachers I'd be struggling along with a 37% average while studying many hours a day, -- only to realize the class average was 18%, and that the professor would curve up silently at the end of the semester. I hated that because I thought I was failing no matter what I did, until I got onto his game. But it was too late, I would invariably drop the class. Not worth my time.
Similary, I've bored out of my skull because classes were too easy, but the instructor was a pedant and graded on busy-work homework and attendance. I made a promise to myself never to run a class like either those.
The best teachers I ever had didn't require attendance.
I especially remember my college data structures class. As we ground through each topic at the pace of a one every few weeks, it was really pointless for me to be there.
The teacher was nice enough to say attendance is optional. You still have to do all the homeworks and all the tests, but you don't have to come to lecture. I 4.0'd that class, and only went once or twice a month. He was even kind enough to encourage me to do this - I'd show up at his office, and we'd plan when I would show up to coincide with new topics. How great is that?
In aural skills class (a music class where you listen to music and learn to write it out), one teacher took this even further. He told me to leave and not come back until finals. He said it was pointless for me to do the in-class assignments and 4.0'd me after a few weeks.
I remember this fondly - so when I had the chance to teach a Java class, I made the same policy. Some of the working adults elected to skip some classes, and one kid was a real ace. Most of the people who took advantage of it 4.0'd the class, and I'm happy I made their life a little bit easier by not being so pedantic.
The worst students would sit behind the computers with IM or Yahoo baseball turned on. I wish I had a big "internet off" button, or at least, could teach in a room with no computers.
Adblock religiously.
In the old days you had to configure Junkbuster and edit text files, but it's much easier these days with firefox extensions.
I was going to nitpick you on the gratuitous apostophe, but then I realized that it actually is quite appropriate here!
Same here - I'm using the library more and more as a near-total replacement for book, CD, and DVD purchases. This started mostly for kid's books, as they go through them at an alarming clip, but now we've gotten into the habit for ourselves.
With online catalogs accessible from the internet that searches the entire state, plus free delivery to the local library that's so close I can walk to it, why buy anything? It's really amazing how useful libraries are once you get the hang of searching and reserving online.
I now only buy the stuff I really love, or want to keep.
Except MA plates only have six letters.
My vanity license plate is "NONE". I never get any parking tickets.
There already is such a thing as an ephemeral license fee. You see (paraphrasing jwz) someone decided that the transitory copying of music necessary for a webcast is more like printing new copies, than broadcasting over radio waves.
By then I had been playing with other computers for a year or so that friends/schools/stores had: a VIC-20, TI99/4A, Timex Sinclair, Commodore PET, Odyssey 2 (more of a game machine) and some unnamed mainframe/teletype system that I still don't know what it was -- "Login/attach" anyone?
I was one of those geek kids used to program computers on displays in stores before I owned one. Even after, I remember writing graphics & music demos at home, bringing them in on floppy, loading them up, and leaving them run. I stitched together a bunch of ones that I wrote, plus others I had traded, into a one big program -- sort of like a screen saver with lots of changing modes does today.
Now that I think of it, I imagine it must have been kind of funny working at one of those stores like Sears. You have a computer on display that shows nothing but "READY"... and when you come back from your break, an animated keyboard is playing "Just a Gigolo/I Ain't Got Nobody" in 4-part harmony. Not faked, either - a musician could tell the right keys were lit up. With all of David Lee Roth's improvisations and the sax solo transcribed note for note.
Ha! While I'm in old fart mode, I remember the day when I discovered I could get the Atari to control the tape drive for playing audio. (IIRC, they had a little program that was a foreign language tutor that would take advantage of this.) So hacked up a program and brought it in to my summer computer class, along with a program that would print out the song's lyrics in time.
Since it wasn't obvious the tape was running, it gave the impression that I wrote a program that was actually playing it. Wow, that punk fit 3 minutes of encoded music into an 8K address space!