The parent video is shocking and painful to watch. On one hand, I like to think that the video shown takes place in England and that such a wanton abuse of power could never happen on this side of the pond, but in my heart I know that this wishful thinking is simply not true. Every time we hand some powers over to the police, they will find a way to abuse it. It is not that the police are especially terrible people, it is just the nature of our species.
What absolutely must be avoided at all cost is making the player feel like he has to consult a guidebook on how to play the game. When you have to think about how to play rather than simply play, all immersion is ruined.
That is certainly your preference when it comes to games. However, as a counterexample, I love the fiddly numbers in most games. In Starcraft, I had memorized the cooldown times, range, damage, etc. of every single unit. I could have run simulation battles on pen and paper... and I sometimes did. In Kingdom of Loathing (an MMORPG) I was part of a group that spent time working out the exact stats of every monster and the hit/miss percentages.
To me, numbers are fun, to you they are not. Yeah, you can make everything loot-based, but by having things being loot AND stats based, it makes more good numbers for me to crunch, which for me equals fun.
As a sidepoint, making everything loot-based would probably ruin the game due to twinking (giving new players super dooper loot)
You know what I just realized? That when someone starts a sentence with "I have never understood why..." it means they have understood why perfectly for a long time, and hate it.
'tis true. I have understood why perfectly for a long time, and I hate it.
I have never understood why news about kidnapped reporters is kept in the strictest confidence, whereas the media pretty much never offer the same to a member of the public who is not a part of the media fraternity.
There should be standards. Either kidnapping stories are reported widely, or they are not. I see no reason for journalists to have lives of more inherent value than anyone else. This would be like doctors giving preferential treatment to other doctors (eg. less waiting time in countries with socialized medicine) or teachers distributing textbooks only to the children of other teachers. This is not to say that it doesn't happen, but it is profoundly wrong.
Newspapers are filled to the brim with letters to the editor complaining that a certain "important" story was buried in the back pages by incompetent/evil editors. To some extent, these letters are correct: Often, important stories (in my view) are buried whereas the latest escapades of Paris Hilton make it to the front page. However, I do not have time to go through the entire paper, and I appreciate having a professional make a sort of triage estimate as to which stories are more important. Sure, mistakes are made, but I find that, in general, the important stories do appear on the front page, and it makes my reading experience that much better.
That said, I'm not sure why Kindle can't organize the stories like Google News, if I am interested in a story, it pretty much always appears in the top headlines. If necessary, they can license the technology from google, I'm sure they would embrace the partnership.
"We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there....
The problem is that we are overpaying our teachers.
(but, seriously, we give math and science teachers a starvation wage and provide them with little respect. Meanwhile, we pay football coaches 6 figure salaries and revere them as Gods. Are we really that surprised that we fail at math?)
Well it's quite simple really. Boeing doesn't expect anybody to be flying one of their big jets without years of experience. If you have a mechanical failure do you really want to have a machine, that may be getting fed bad data, trying to figure out what to do next.
The pilot would in all probability be getting fed the same bad data, and could easily come to the same wrong conclusions.
The only difference is that the pilot has extra ways to screw up... his input paths could be faulty. Sick, tired, drunk, distracted or just plain old with failing senses could result in the pilot taking good data and destroying it before it gets to the processing unit, I mean... brain. Then, even when the processing unit has the information, the clock speeds are so slow that a real computer could play an entire chess games before the pilot actually reacts. And the outputs can also be messed up, the pilot means to output "climb" but his hand hits "nose dive" instead. Unlikely? Of course it is, pilots are well trained, but computers are trained even better.
I would happily fly a plane without a pilot, especially if I could save a few bucks.
I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota.
That is almost spooky. We need this guy to be running the country.
An unfortunate result. The last 30 seconds of most songs are not usually as interesting as the first 30 seconds.
I wonder if he tried mangling the first 30 seconds at all. For example, keep the first 5 seconds, mess up the 6th and 7th seconds, and then continue on. Or perhaps adding in a base line that would be hard to hear. Or something at the high end of the audio frequency spectrum, to annoy all those teenagers while I listen to my free music in peace.
After some pervert principal gets his testicles crushed and his eyes gouged by a student he's trying to attack, perhaps we might see an end to this bullshit.
While there are many comments referring to a good righteous assaulting of the genitalia of the evil male authorities involved, keep in mind that the actual search was carried out by the female school nurse and a female secretary.
This is no way condones the action, but I don't think that this case involved some guys getting their child pr0n fix.
Also, there seems to be a large jump here
1) You may have stronger-than-normal advil 2).... 3) Strip Search!
Something happened in step 2 that we are not aware of, I can't imagine a jump from step 1 straight to step 3.
Anyone who would aspire to a career in politics should find this very chilling I would imagine. Nobody cares that I wore a KKK costume to my last Halloween party, but I'm sure that the picture I posted of it would be worth a lot more when I am running for senate.
There are many important subjects: Math, Science, Physical Education, English, a second language, a third language, international awareness, etc. etc.
But, there are a finite number of hours in a school day, and a finite amount of material that parents are willing to let their children learn before they complain that it interferes with the dozen after-school activities that the parents have scheduled.
So, the while the original question was worded correctly (eg. is CS equal to science), it will be important in this thread to remember that any comment that says that CS is useful in isolation is of little value. It is a given that having knowledge set "X" is better than not having it. The question boils down, consequently, to, "is knowledge set X worth losing knowledge set Y?".
My opinion: Basic CS is useful, but only if we start streaming aggressively at a younger age. No point is wasting massive resources provided computers for many students who will never amount to anything.
I am a teacher in Canada (where teachers are paid fairly well). In particular, I am a math/physics teacher, and a pretty good one at that, if anonymous student ratings can be believed.
I left a relatively high paying job (in a nuclear reactor as it turns out!) to go teach, and I was able to do so because the cut in salary was not too severe. In the states, I would have certainly NOT left my original job, since the gain in job satisfaction would not have been worth the crippling change in lifestyle.
Frankly, I am amazed that any competent individual would choose to teach in the states. Anyone in math/science should be able to find a much better job.
When you go to the theater, you will meet an obnoxious minimum wage drone who will charge you $15 for a movie and take 25 minutes to enter the transaction while you miss the opening scene.
You can...
(1) Harvest the clerk, and get into the movie for free along with unlimited popcorn.
or
(2) Save the clerk, teaching him how to operate a register. You'll still have to pay a bit to get in, but at least you helped the world a bit and the clerk might hook you up with some presents later.
If it stops inconsiderate bastards leaving their dog's shit on the pavement, I'm all for it.
I guess it depends on where you feel public resources should be allocated. Dog poop certainly annoys me, but I do not want millions of taxpayers dollars to be used dealing with that problem. I'd rather they spend it on free breakfasts for schoolchildren or going after drunk drivers.
The point is, there are finite dollars to throw at a relatively large number of potential issues, and every dollar spent enforcing dog poop laws is one less dollar that will be spent on some other public good.
Oh, and using terrorism to justify spending any large amount of money is also annoying. But that is another issue.
Believe it or not, when I first read the article, I thought it was a joke. I thought that somebody was implying that blackboard style teaching has killed off any desire to learn in the part of the students. Read the article summary from that perspective, it could really work as an onion article.
That said, I'll admit, whoever invented that whooshing sound was thinking of me.
When has a commercial airliner been shot down by a missile? In 2002, an attempt was made to nail an Israeli airline. It was unsuccessful, or we would have heard more about it. Just pointing out that the concept is not completely far-fetched.
That said, I don't really care what they spend to save the rich flying-folk, as long as the taxpayers don't have to pay for such lunacy. If we are going to hemorrhage money saving people, I'd rather spend it in other, potentially more beneficial ways.
Does a teacher in a classroom have an expectation of privacy? Is it reasonable for students to tape the teacher with their cellphones? Do the students have the right to post said recording on youtube or other public arena? Who controls the rights to the recording?
Conversely, is it reasonable for a teacher to tape students without them knowing?
Slashdot Mirror
The parent video is shocking and painful to watch. On one hand, I like to think that the video shown takes place in England and that such a wanton abuse of power could never happen on this side of the pond, but in my heart I know that this wishful thinking is simply not true. Every time we hand some powers over to the police, they will find a way to abuse it. It is not that the police are especially terrible people, it is just the nature of our species.
What absolutely must be avoided at all cost is making the player feel like he has to consult a guidebook on how to play the game. When you have to think about how to play rather than simply play, all immersion is ruined.
That is certainly your preference when it comes to games. However, as a counterexample, I love the fiddly numbers in most games. In Starcraft, I had memorized the cooldown times, range, damage, etc. of every single unit. I could have run simulation battles on pen and paper... and I sometimes did. In Kingdom of Loathing (an MMORPG) I was part of a group that spent time working out the exact stats of every monster and the hit/miss percentages.
To me, numbers are fun, to you they are not. Yeah, you can make everything loot-based, but by having things being loot AND stats based, it makes more good numbers for me to crunch, which for me equals fun.
As a sidepoint, making everything loot-based would probably ruin the game due to twinking (giving new players super dooper loot)
You know what I just realized? That when someone starts a sentence with "I have never understood why..." it means they have understood why perfectly for a long time, and hate it.
'tis true. I have understood why perfectly for a long time, and I hate it.
I have never understood why news about kidnapped reporters is kept in the strictest confidence, whereas the media pretty much never offer the same to a member of the public who is not a part of the media fraternity.
There should be standards. Either kidnapping stories are reported widely, or they are not. I see no reason for journalists to have lives of more inherent value than anyone else. This would be like doctors giving preferential treatment to other doctors (eg. less waiting time in countries with socialized medicine) or teachers distributing textbooks only to the children of other teachers. This is not to say that it doesn't happen, but it is profoundly wrong.
Sweet, more room for p0rn. I mean, more room to store my philosophical musings about the world we live in...
Newspapers are filled to the brim with letters to the editor complaining that a certain "important" story was buried in the back pages by incompetent/evil editors. To some extent, these letters are correct: Often, important stories (in my view) are buried whereas the latest escapades of Paris Hilton make it to the front page. However, I do not have time to go through the entire paper, and I appreciate having a professional make a sort of triage estimate as to which stories are more important. Sure, mistakes are made, but I find that, in general, the important stories do appear on the front page, and it makes my reading experience that much better.
That said, I'm not sure why Kindle can't organize the stories like Google News, if I am interested in a story, it pretty much always appears in the top headlines. If necessary, they can license the technology from google, I'm sure they would embrace the partnership.
($50/paying user)(5000 users) = $250,000
Clearly it should read:
($50/paying user)(5000 paying users) = $250,000
if the average user gives an average of 1-2 dollars per month, how can 5000 users generate 230,000 dollars?
I believe that the average per user is $1-2 per month.
However, the average per paying user was something along the lines of $50. So the math would go something like:
($50/paying user)(5000 users) = $250,000
or
($1.50/user)(160,000 users) = $240,000
"We do the same thing with athletics here that they do with mathematics and science there....
The problem is that we are overpaying our teachers.
(but, seriously, we give math and science teachers a starvation wage and provide them with little respect. Meanwhile, we pay football coaches 6 figure salaries and revere them as Gods. Are we really that surprised that we fail at math?)
Well it's quite simple really. Boeing doesn't expect anybody to be flying one of their big jets without years of experience. If you have a mechanical failure do you really want to have a machine, that may be getting fed bad data, trying to figure out what to do next.
The pilot would in all probability be getting fed the same bad data, and could easily come to the same wrong conclusions. The only difference is that the pilot has extra ways to screw up... his input paths could be faulty. Sick, tired, drunk, distracted or just plain old with failing senses could result in the pilot taking good data and destroying it before it gets to the processing unit, I mean... brain. Then, even when the processing unit has the information, the clock speeds are so slow that a real computer could play an entire chess games before the pilot actually reacts. And the outputs can also be messed up, the pilot means to output "climb" but his hand hits "nose dive" instead. Unlikely? Of course it is, pilots are well trained, but computers are trained even better. I would happily fly a plane without a pilot, especially if I could save a few bucks.
I think we will look back in 10 years' time and say we should not have done this but we did because we forgot the lessons of the past, and that that which is true in the 1930's is true in 2010,'' said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota.
That is almost spooky. We need this guy to be running the country.
An unfortunate result. The last 30 seconds of most songs are not usually as interesting as the first 30 seconds.
I wonder if he tried mangling the first 30 seconds at all. For example, keep the first 5 seconds, mess up the 6th and 7th seconds, and then continue on. Or perhaps adding in a base line that would be hard to hear. Or something at the high end of the audio frequency spectrum, to annoy all those teenagers while I listen to my free music in peace.
After some pervert principal gets his testicles crushed and his eyes gouged by a student he's trying to attack, perhaps we might see an end to this bullshit.
While there are many comments referring to a good righteous assaulting of the genitalia of the evil male authorities involved, keep in mind that the actual search was carried out by the female school nurse and a female secretary.
This is no way condones the action, but I don't think that this case involved some guys getting their child pr0n fix.
Also, there seems to be a large jump here
1) You may have stronger-than-normal advil
2)....
3) Strip Search!
Something happened in step 2 that we are not aware of, I can't imagine a jump from step 1 straight to step 3.
Anyone who would aspire to a career in politics should find this very chilling I would imagine. Nobody cares that I wore a KKK costume to my last Halloween party, but I'm sure that the picture I posted of it would be worth a lot more when I am running for senate.
(note: I didn't actually wear a KKK costume)
There are many important subjects: Math, Science, Physical Education, English, a second language, a third language, international awareness, etc. etc.
But, there are a finite number of hours in a school day, and a finite amount of material that parents are willing to let their children learn before they complain that it interferes with the dozen after-school activities that the parents have scheduled.
So, the while the original question was worded correctly (eg. is CS equal to science), it will be important in this thread to remember that any comment that says that CS is useful in isolation is of little value. It is a given that having knowledge set "X" is better than not having it. The question boils down, consequently, to, "is knowledge set X worth losing knowledge set Y?".
My opinion: Basic CS is useful, but only if we start streaming aggressively at a younger age. No point is wasting massive resources provided computers for many students who will never amount to anything.
Never fear, scientists have almost perfected the synthesis of "unobtainium"
My guess is that the holes are caused by violent video games.
Quick Anecdote:
I am a teacher in Canada (where teachers are paid fairly well). In particular, I am a math/physics teacher, and a pretty good one at that, if anonymous student ratings can be believed.
I left a relatively high paying job (in a nuclear reactor as it turns out!) to go teach, and I was able to do so because the cut in salary was not too severe. In the states, I would have certainly NOT left my original job, since the gain in job satisfaction would not have been worth the crippling change in lifestyle.
Frankly, I am amazed that any competent individual would choose to teach in the states. Anyone in math/science should be able to find a much better job.
When you go to the theater, you will meet an obnoxious minimum wage drone who will charge you $15 for a movie and take 25 minutes to enter the transaction while you miss the opening scene.
You can...
(1) Harvest the clerk, and get into the movie for free along with unlimited popcorn.
or
(2) Save the clerk, teaching him how to operate a register. You'll still have to pay a bit to get in, but at least you helped the world a bit and the clerk might hook you up with some presents later.
I guess it depends on where you feel public resources should be allocated. Dog poop certainly annoys me, but I do not want millions of taxpayers dollars to be used dealing with that problem. I'd rather they spend it on free breakfasts for schoolchildren or going after drunk drivers.
The point is, there are finite dollars to throw at a relatively large number of potential issues, and every dollar spent enforcing dog poop laws is one less dollar that will be spent on some other public good.
Oh, and using terrorism to justify spending any large amount of money is also annoying. But that is another issue.
Believe it or not, when I first read the article, I thought it was a joke. I thought that somebody was implying that blackboard style teaching has killed off any desire to learn in the part of the students. Read the article summary from that perspective, it could really work as an onion article.
That said, I'll admit, whoever invented that whooshing sound was thinking of me.
Doesn't religious persecution tend to kill the moderates and breed more radicals?
It is true, I used to be a moderate secularist, but now I'm a rabid and radical anti-religion zealot.
User: Please connect me with Hugh Jass
Gadget: Sorry, I could not find a Hugh Jass
User: *snicker*
That said, I don't really care what they spend to save the rich flying-folk, as long as the taxpayers don't have to pay for such lunacy. If we are going to hemorrhage money saving people, I'd rather spend it in other, potentially more beneficial ways.
Some possible gray...
Does a teacher in a classroom have an expectation of privacy? Is it reasonable for students to tape the teacher with their cellphones? Do the students have the right to post said recording on youtube or other public arena? Who controls the rights to the recording?
Conversely, is it reasonable for a teacher to tape students without them knowing?