Is it PowerPoint's fault, or the fault of the Powerpoint creator?
Totally agreed. I had a math instructor during my last degree who was a Power Point master. His formulas flowed, his animations were understated and tasteful, and everything focused your attention on what he wanted you to understand. This was in 2001, when hardly anyone was using Power Point in the classroom.
Today, I have lecturers who fill every slide with long 10-pt bullet points, and simply read from the slides--that's their "lecture". Handouts consist of what is on the screen, without even changing colored slides that turn into uniform gray blobs on paper.
But probably the worst offender was my Technical Presentations instructor, whose presentations consisted of bright yellow and green text on saturated blue backgrounds, rife with the most tacky, irrelevant, distracting clip-art you can imagine. He seemed to think one of the fundamental goals of a presentation was to use as many different animations and bullets as possible on a single slide.
The worst part: He showed us a presentation he had bought (well, the school had) after paying $2000 to attend. It turns out he based his presentation style on this "professional" presentation on how to give effective presentations. One of the most hilarious slides was intended to show how to focus your viewers' attention where you want. Under the usual bullet points (with multiple bullet styles), there was a globe with a big red dot on South America. Fine so far. There was also a big red arrow pointing to the big red dot. A bit overstated, but it does the job. Then there was a clip-art image of two women who were apparently supposed to be looking along the line of the arrow.
But when that slide appeared, my classmate beside me leaned over and said "Hey, I think those two chicks are checking each other out." Sure enough, if you looked at their eye lines, these two clip-art women were definitely not focused on South America, but were gazing fondly into each other's eyes, with telling Mona-Lisa smiles. We missed most of what our instructor said about that slide, perfectly illustrating how it completely failed to achieve what it was trying to teach you how to do.
The presentation was called "1,2,3..." something or other. It's supposedly a famous how-to seminar. Don't waste your money. Go to Presentation Zen instead. You'll learn a lot more.
I use a very old technology 1300cc car... It has sufficient guts for my purposes, even when carrying 4 people + a load.
You obviously don't live in a mountainous area. My 2.4L Stratus has a lot of power for general driving, but when I'm going up the Coquihalla with a full car, I wouldn't want anything less.
However, I agree totally with your sentiment regarding Hummers. They're little more than an environmental disgrace that can't do anything a smaller, more sensible SUV can't do better... except look goofy with enormous spinning rims.
But Star Wars is not sci-fi. It's space fantasy. Look at Serenity: No magic FTL travel or fanciful rubber-suit aliens, silent space scenes; almost everything was a fairly sensible extrapolation of modern technology (the exceptions being the floating vehicles and ground-effect spaceship maneuvering, and River Tam's telepathy). It's sci-fi.
Compare that to Star Wars: no attempt to reconcile any of the logistics or special human abilities with existing science or technology. It's fantasy.
On the other hand, Star Wars will always have a bigger, more obsessive fan base. But Serenity was a very good sci-fi movie.
I...wonder just how much methane is just escaping into the atmosphere. Methane which could be captured fairly easily, and used anywhere natural gas or propane are currently used.
If it's a well-managed facility, the methane is probably already being reclaimed. They do that at the Vancouver landfill. Surprisingly though, sewage treatment doesn't release that much methane, unless you have an anaerobic tank for biological phosphorus removal. Most of the carbon-based gas released is CO2 from the aerobic reactor.
And before you point out the smell, methane is actually odorless. The smell most people associate with methane is hydrogen sulfide, which is often produced at the same time by anaerobic biological processes.
Excellent point. However, TFA (the second one) states that the commerce commission did their own testing after the kids reported their findings, and found no detectable levels. So even if the kids' analysis was imperfect (which it probably was), their results were verified by a more reliable lab (who probably took things like shelf life and sample size into account).
...if you honestly believe Google will forever let you use gmail without looking at their ads...
Um... Gmail does "make you look at their ads". They're over to the right. Subtle, text-only, context-focused ads. And with the context focus, I've actually followed a couple of them when they were relevant to the conversation.
Re:Which is why India's looking at thorium...
on
The Coming Uranium Crisis
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Coulda fooled me. The amount of uranium coming out of Saskatchewan is going to increase considerably this year. And before you scoff at some sparsely populated Canadian province, and wonder how much of the world's uranium it can possibly produce: try 50%.
What I want to know is, what Tory paid this Liberal to bring up this political-suicide bill so soon before an election? Or maybe Dion is trying to get her thrown out of the party so he can put a hand-picked candidate in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Lachine.
Has anyone actually bought one of these yet? If not, it's not really worth a million dollars. It may be priced at a million dollars, but it's only worth what someone will pay for it.
Having said that, I'm sure some rich bastard with money to burn will buy one for his spoiled teenage daughter so she can play Grand Theft Poniez: Malibu.
The manufacturer obviously knows far more about their product than the customer, so they are the only ones in a position to make a sensible decision about what other people should use.
Your post may be modded "Funny", but I wouldn't be surprised if this was exactly the attitude of a lot of corporate execs.
They went about it the wrong way, though. They should have produced TV ads claiming that Diebold machines combat global warming, help little old ladies across the street, and promote cosmic harmony, while the AutoMARK's machines run on coal-fired generators, kill babies, and force you to listen to Kenny G. Legislators would be flooded with mail insisting they use Diebold machines. Then, if they didn't, they could be sued (in a grassroots class-action suit sponsored by freedom-loving Diebold) for not representing the views of their residents!
...not only do these sites ask for your email account password, but people actually let them have them.
...thereby violating the terms of service of their e-mail provider, and affecting others who didn't make the asinine decision to do so.
I was having an argument with someone the other day about the fact that laws that prevent people from doing stupid things are a good thing. If the only victim were the primary idiot, I'd say go ahead, Darwin away. But, unfortunately, stupidity usually has a wide splash zone.
(note: actual pissing not recommended outdoors in -55C weather.)
Been there, done that, got the rather painful frostbite. When your sanitary plumbing consists of an outhouse, you have little choice. Just remember to think warm thoughts to avoid freezing your butt to the seat.
-25C in Toronto? That must have been a pretty extreme year. The couple of Christmases I was there, it was above freezing, and my grandparents never usually saw more than a sprinkling of snow. Where I'm from (northern Manitoba), -30C is a normal daytime temperature in January, and +30C is normal in July. The extremes are -55C and +40C. That's 95C difference (over 200F). That's extreme. That's why advances in energy efficient housing come from the prairies (and the American great plains).
How can you put those two thoughts in the same sentence?! Does this strike anyone else from the north, the prairies, or the great plains as just a bit ridiculous?
...that the protection of copyright in this case seeks to keep rights with the creators and away from the distributors? I mean, considering that the rights to most of what is broadcast belong almost exclusively to another level of distributor, and not to the original creators?
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agreed. I had a math instructor during my last degree who was a Power Point master. His formulas flowed, his animations were understated and tasteful, and everything focused your attention on what he wanted you to understand. This was in 2001, when hardly anyone was using Power Point in the classroom.
Today, I have lecturers who fill every slide with long 10-pt bullet points, and simply read from the slides--that's their "lecture". Handouts consist of what is on the screen, without even changing colored slides that turn into uniform gray blobs on paper.
But probably the worst offender was my Technical Presentations instructor, whose presentations consisted of bright yellow and green text on saturated blue backgrounds, rife with the most tacky, irrelevant, distracting clip-art you can imagine. He seemed to think one of the fundamental goals of a presentation was to use as many different animations and bullets as possible on a single slide.
The worst part: He showed us a presentation he had bought (well, the school had) after paying $2000 to attend. It turns out he based his presentation style on this "professional" presentation on how to give effective presentations. One of the most hilarious slides was intended to show how to focus your viewers' attention where you want. Under the usual bullet points (with multiple bullet styles), there was a globe with a big red dot on South America. Fine so far. There was also a big red arrow pointing to the big red dot. A bit overstated, but it does the job. Then there was a clip-art image of two women who were apparently supposed to be looking along the line of the arrow.
But when that slide appeared, my classmate beside me leaned over and said "Hey, I think those two chicks are checking each other out." Sure enough, if you looked at their eye lines, these two clip-art women were definitely not focused on South America, but were gazing fondly into each other's eyes, with telling Mona-Lisa smiles. We missed most of what our instructor said about that slide, perfectly illustrating how it completely failed to achieve what it was trying to teach you how to do.
The presentation was called "1,2,3..." something or other. It's supposedly a famous how-to seminar. Don't waste your money. Go to Presentation Zen instead. You'll learn a lot more.
But the Japanese cars you see in the USA are not the same as those you see in Japan. The cars you see were manufactured for the American market.
You obviously don't live in a mountainous area. My 2.4L Stratus has a lot of power for general driving, but when I'm going up the Coquihalla with a full car, I wouldn't want anything less.
However, I agree totally with your sentiment regarding Hummers. They're little more than an environmental disgrace that can't do anything a smaller, more sensible SUV can't do better... except look goofy with enormous spinning rims.
But Star Wars is not sci-fi. It's space fantasy. Look at Serenity: No magic FTL travel or fanciful rubber-suit aliens, silent space scenes; almost everything was a fairly sensible extrapolation of modern technology (the exceptions being the floating vehicles and ground-effect spaceship maneuvering, and River Tam's telepathy). It's sci-fi.
Compare that to Star Wars: no attempt to reconcile any of the logistics or special human abilities with existing science or technology. It's fantasy.
On the other hand, Star Wars will always have a bigger, more obsessive fan base. But Serenity was a very good sci-fi movie.
If it's a well-managed facility, the methane is probably already being reclaimed. They do that at the Vancouver landfill. Surprisingly though, sewage treatment doesn't release that much methane, unless you have an anaerobic tank for biological phosphorus removal. Most of the carbon-based gas released is CO2 from the aerobic reactor.
And before you point out the smell, methane is actually odorless. The smell most people associate with methane is hydrogen sulfide, which is often produced at the same time by anaerobic biological processes.
Not from the USA, are you?
This was insightful until you used the 'F' word. Fusion is the Godot of the energy industry. Might as well wait for dilithium crystals.
Speak for yourself, boy. Those of us who didn't watch the first season of The X Files from a crib think she's still pretty hot.
Excellent point. However, TFA (the second one) states that the commerce commission did their own testing after the kids reported their findings, and found no detectable levels. So even if the kids' analysis was imperfect (which it probably was), their results were verified by a more reliable lab (who probably took things like shelf life and sample size into account).
Conveniently enough, that will also take care of much of the noise and venting of hot gases.
:
Um... Gmail does "make you look at their ads". They're over to the right. Subtle, text-only, context-focused ads. And with the context focus, I've actually followed a couple of them when they were relevant to the conversation.
Coulda fooled me. The amount of uranium coming out of Saskatchewan is going to increase considerably this year. And before you scoff at some sparsely populated Canadian province, and wonder how much of the world's uranium it can possibly produce: try 50%.
What I want to know is, what Tory paid this Liberal to bring up this political-suicide bill so soon before an election? Or maybe Dion is trying to get her thrown out of the party so he can put a hand-picked candidate in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce-Lachine.
Has anyone actually bought one of these yet? If not, it's not really worth a million dollars. It may be priced at a million dollars, but it's only worth what someone will pay for it.
Having said that, I'm sure some rich bastard with money to burn will buy one for his spoiled teenage daughter so she can play Grand Theft Poniez: Malibu.
Your post may be modded "Funny", but I wouldn't be surprised if this was exactly the attitude of a lot of corporate execs.
They went about it the wrong way, though. They should have produced TV ads claiming that Diebold machines combat global warming, help little old ladies across the street, and promote cosmic harmony, while the AutoMARK's machines run on coal-fired generators, kill babies, and force you to listen to Kenny G. Legislators would be flooded with mail insisting they use Diebold machines. Then, if they didn't, they could be sued (in a grassroots class-action suit sponsored by freedom-loving Diebold) for not representing the views of their residents!
...thereby violating the terms of service of their e-mail provider, and affecting others who didn't make the asinine decision to do so.
I was having an argument with someone the other day about the fact that laws that prevent people from doing stupid things are a good thing. If the only victim were the primary idiot, I'd say go ahead, Darwin away. But, unfortunately, stupidity usually has a wide splash zone.
"...your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
So... that's the motto of the RIAA legal department, is it?
Maybe it's just early in the morning, but I read that phrase as "creating any new precedent or coleslaw."
Then I thought WTF? You mean the judge wanted to make salad out of KinderStart? Why not just give them their just desserts?
I read the summary, and this song immediately came to mind. Especially "Aww, do I even need a reason?"
This reminds me of a poem that is quoted more and more frequently these days, but deserves to be quoted again:
A Wikipedia article gives a number of variations.
And of course, a sig line I had for a while:
Been there, done that, got the rather painful frostbite. When your sanitary plumbing consists of an outhouse, you have little choice. Just remember to think warm thoughts to avoid freezing your butt to the seat.
Oops. Used the converter without subtracting 32.
-25C in Toronto? That must have been a pretty extreme year. The couple of Christmases I was there, it was above freezing, and my grandparents never usually saw more than a sprinkling of snow. Where I'm from (northern Manitoba), -30C is a normal daytime temperature in January, and +30C is normal in July. The extremes are -55C and +40C. That's 95C difference (over 200F). That's extreme. That's why advances in energy efficient housing come from the prairies (and the American great plains).
How can you put those two thoughts in the same sentence?! Does this strike anyone else from the north, the prairies, or the great plains as just a bit ridiculous?
...that the protection of copyright in this case seeks to keep rights with the creators and away from the distributors? I mean, considering that the rights to most of what is broadcast belong almost exclusively to another level of distributor, and not to the original creators?