Quickly on the '@sshole' thing: I completely agree. I don't have any taboos about cursing, and I hate the idea that seeing the 'u' in 'f*ck' in a magazine is somehow be harmful; I just didn't know if there was a text filter on posts. To be clear: yes, people are assholes.
As for the rest, I appreciate your response. I don't completely agree, but it was a coherent, intelligent comment that made me consider my point a bit before responding, and I would much rather spend my time on that than on some flippant response to the "die in a fire" guy.
So I think it's worth trying to be clearer about my point. I'll readily admit that my own writing isn't perfect, but at minimum I do try to re-read what I write before posting to make sure that it's as clear and correct as possible, because I think that what we say and how we say it matters. I'm not so OCD that I'll ignore someone over a minor grammar error, and here on/. there are plenty of non-native speakers and engineers with imperfect English skills that I've enjoyed reading. When I browse here, I look for posts that are insightful, logical, and well-written; if something has at least 2 of those 3 qualities, I'll generally read it. Insight and logic carry more relative weight most of the time, but writing is still important to me: I think it's a shame that we've spent 100,000 years developing the ability to convey our thoughts to one another, only take language for granted out of sheer laziness. Saying "your" instead of "you're" is a minor error that doesn't prevent a post from adding value, but I think those lapses are cumulative. What worries me isn't the person (myself included) who makes the occasional error, it's the person down the road who never initially learns which is correct. Melodramatic maybe, but I think it's plausible that in time we'll be left with only 1 of those 2 words and our ability to clearly express ourselves will be reduced, however slightly. Language is rife with examples of words that once had a distinct, nuanced meaning that's now lost. Not perfectly related, but one of my favorite examples. Anyways, I agree that the point of language is to make text comprehensible. What it sounds like is that you and I each have some unspoken metric to determine whether something is well written 'enough' to be easily understood and worth reading; fair enough. I suspect that in your time you've come across at least one mangling-of-the-language bad enough for you not to continue, so are we different in anything but degree? I use grammar as (part of) a content filter for a reason: in my experience there's a clear (if not perfect) correlation between how well someone can write and how well they can reason, and at some point on that sliding scale a person's point is lost if they can't express it understandably. That's a shame. I can't really get angry at the person whose voice is lost out of ignorance, but I do get irritated at his predecessor who contributed to that gradual degradation out of nothing more than laziness.
I suppose my broader point is that all 3 metrics of logic, insight, and clarity seem to be getting harder and harder to meet, or at least harder to find in an increasing sea of poorly-considered and unclear irrelevance. The volume of chaff increases, and we seem inclined to use these trillions of dollars of communication technology the same way a dog would, barking just to hear himself howl.
You say to remain silent, which reminds me of the adage "don't feed the trolls". Maybe that saying is right, and ignoring trolls is the only realistic path to take. But I disagree with you on staying silent, because again, I think it matters, and I won't just sit back and accept that the current state of discourse is inevitable. I'm here to find out what other people think; personally I really enjoy finding those off-topic gems where someone is clearly passionate about something and puts some thought into their respon
Let me guess. Like every other tedious online atheist, liberal, conservative, and angry-opponent-of-copyright-law, you're a 14 year old who is bitter at mom and dad for making you go to school, or church, or anywhere that requires a modicum of effort. You're either a stereotype or a human spam-bot.
The question is, will you look back in 10 years and shudder to think how loud-mouthed windbags have contributed to the decline of civility, or will humanity have already been crushed by this intellectual suicide, leaving us all too busy slathering butter on our McDinners to consider how incredibly stupid and brutish we've become?
Here's the real crime in the life of the lowest common denominator: you. are. boring.
Even idiots have their place in the ecosystem; who else is going to keep our bathrooms sparkly clean? But when language dies we revert back to animals, so for God's sake at least try to be a dancing bear or something that keeps us entertained. I love my stupid dog, but at least he doesn't try to convince anyone he has something worthwhile to say.
So the parent should spend their time coming up with a thoughtful response to an AC poster who posits the genius theory of "you're wrong"?
Here's my own theory for you to carefully de-construct: people who can't write are either stupid, or @ssholes. Language is important, especially online where you lose any physical context, and we're steadily losing our ability to communicate anything deeper than our thoughts on how clever the latest I Can't Believe It's Not Butter commercial is. Every day the amount of trite, inane garbage that a person has to wade through to find any useful information increases exponentially; if your thoughts aren't important enough to proofread, why on Earth would they be important enough for anyone else to ponder the content? By all means, butcher the language. There's no better way for me to tell at a glance that I shouldn't bother reading any further.
How about Everything (assuming the server is Windows & NTFS)?
Works well for me (quickest desktop search I've found yet), and can either run locally or connect to an ETP server. The site seems to be down right now, but here's the original Lifehacker article where I found it.
Incidentally, I never heard of ETP til I started using it. Anyone know if it's an Everything-specific protocol?
Seconded. I switched from doing hundreds of crunches a day to doing planks instead, which are totally static, and my back feels much better.
For overall workouts, I've recently switched up my routine because of the same lack of time. Instead of spending 45 minutes with weights doing muscle-isolation exercises I'm down to about 15 minutes of full-body and balance-focused exercises, and I'm seeing a lot more improvement in a lot less time. Everything that's been said about changing up your diet and eating smaller, more frequent meals is great advice too.
For weights, search youtube for things like:
one-leg deadlifts, overhead dumbbell snatch, renegade rows, startups, hindu squats, one-leg squats
For cardio, look into HIIT and Tabata, both of which can give good cardio results in minimal time. Right now I spend 15-20 minutes a day doing interval training, either with jump rope, boxing, or stationary bike.
With the combination of better diet, full-body exercises, and burst interval cardio, I've dropped about 40lbs in the last 3 months.
Does......does 'sakdoctor' mean what I think it means? Because I think it means that you changed it from sac to sak and now all I can picture is some kind of Gestapo testicular surgeon, which is awesome.
That's a good point, and I don't have a ready answer. Maybe this could be addressed with customs regulations? Hard to administer probably (and like someone mentions below, would you end up with a black market?), but any harder than income tax? I'm not so sure.
I would think you'd get into more trouble with fixed exemptions. Cost of living varies widely across states and you incentivize having additional children to earn rebates.
Personally I think the basics-of-life are pretty much what everyone covers in junior high science: food, water, shelter. Of course I remove clothing from that list, as I'm hoping a 90% tax on women's clothing will incentivize rampant nudity.
Just can't bring myself to let this one go. I'm so petty.
I don't claim that lower classes only pay for food and rent, only that food and rent, along with a few other items and services, are the basic necessities of life, sufficient for a human being to live.
As far as I'm concerned, a fair tax system has to follow 2 criteria:
1) It needs to be simple enough to give people an honest understanding of what they're paying. No punishment (cigarettes, alcohol) taxes. No loopholes, no wide ranging variety of taxes. The only other taxes I would want to see are ones based strictly on usage, which directly fund the services they claim to (like national park entrance fees). Which leads into:
2) To some degree they should be based on my admittedly vague concept of 'participation in society'. Ie, if a mountain man chooses to isolate himself and not draw on the benefits of civilization, and his only interaction with society at large is to purchase the untaxed essentials of life, then I don't think he should be required to fund those benefits for others. Conversely, you don't get rich without being well-integrated into society, and you should be taxed accordingly for your consumption of those benefits. I won't say a sales tax is perfect, but I do think that consumption has at least a loose correlation to 'participation'.
Personally I'm a big fan of eliminating all but the sales tax and making the rate high enough to be revenue-neutral, which I imagine would be something astronomical like 40-60%.
The driver for me is that I don't think people (myself included) have a valid concept of how much they really pay in tax. I can't imagine anything driving down government spending as effectively as seeing a 40% sales tax on your goods.
Continuing the totally off-topic thread...
It always bugs me when people hold up income tax as the only plausible form of progressive tax.
What about national sales tax? It seems like it would be simple enough to set up sales tax exemptions for bare necessities (food, housing, maybe energy), so that only non-essentials get taxed. Rich people buy more stuff = they pay higher tax. It seems like a much more efficient, naturally balanced method than fiddling around with the system to determine who counts as rich, and what rate they should pay at.
These are all just random 1st finds in each category so I have no idea if they're compatible, but assuming compatible variants of each part work, it seems feasible:
- Server is to whatever specs you want
- Assuming the A/C technology is decent (never heard of the company before) it should be enough for at least a single server & UPS
- Might need some kind of de-humidifier?
- Reasonably portable. By vehicle at least, since I'm assuming you're not lugging this thing by hand through the jungle
I'm sure this is a stupid question, but I'll be the 1st to admit that I don't really have any idea what ISPs actually do or how internet infrastructure works.
I'm with Time Warner. I don't use their email servers and they don't provide usenet anymore, so it doesn't seem like I'm getting any use from any data they're actually hosting, just the connection.
Could someone explain what purpose ISPs serve and why there's no option (or maybe just really, really expensive options?) that allows people to connect directly to...whatever they have to connect to to get online. I mean, so I can connect to a friend on a shared LAN and through him to an ISP and from there to the wider world. What component of the infrastructure design prevents people from bypassing the ISP in one big ad-hoc network?
Browsing through the other comments, it looks like everyone's assuming you're going to be teaching 20 year old kids who are expected to delve deeper into programming. Is that the case? To me, intro to programming at a community college could just as easily mean teaching someone who's taking this class alone without anything further.
The first question I'd ask is who you're teaching. If you're trying to teach my grandma to add some sparkle to her webpage or write some Excel macros, go with an IDE or you'll make her cry. If it's someone who's going to take a class or two & wants to know a little bit for improvements at a non-programming centered job (like me), go with an IDE. If it's someone you expect to spend a lifetime programming, start with the basics.
Slashdot Mirror
Quickly on the '@sshole' thing: I completely agree. I don't have any taboos about cursing, and I hate the idea that seeing the 'u' in 'f*ck' in a magazine is somehow be harmful; I just didn't know if there was a text filter on posts. To be clear: yes, people are assholes.
/. there are plenty of non-native speakers and engineers with imperfect English skills that I've enjoyed reading. When I browse here, I look for posts that are insightful, logical, and well-written; if something has at least 2 of those 3 qualities, I'll generally read it. Insight and logic carry more relative weight most of the time, but writing is still important to me: I think it's a shame that we've spent 100,000 years developing the ability to convey our thoughts to one another, only take language for granted out of sheer laziness. Saying "your" instead of "you're" is a minor error that doesn't prevent a post from adding value, but I think those lapses are cumulative. What worries me isn't the person (myself included) who makes the occasional error, it's the person down the road who never initially learns which is correct. Melodramatic maybe, but I think it's plausible that in time we'll be left with only 1 of those 2 words and our ability to clearly express ourselves will be reduced, however slightly. Language is rife with examples of words that once had a distinct, nuanced meaning that's now lost. Not perfectly related, but one of my favorite examples. Anyways, I agree that the point of language is to make text comprehensible. What it sounds like is that you and I each have some unspoken metric to determine whether something is well written 'enough' to be easily understood and worth reading; fair enough. I suspect that in your time you've come across at least one mangling-of-the-language bad enough for you not to continue, so are we different in anything but degree? I use grammar as (part of) a content filter for a reason: in my experience there's a clear (if not perfect) correlation between how well someone can write and how well they can reason, and at some point on that sliding scale a person's point is lost if they can't express it understandably. That's a shame. I can't really get angry at the person whose voice is lost out of ignorance, but I do get irritated at his predecessor who contributed to that gradual degradation out of nothing more than laziness.
As for the rest, I appreciate your response. I don't completely agree, but it was a coherent, intelligent comment that made me consider my point a bit before responding, and I would much rather spend my time on that than on some flippant response to the "die in a fire" guy.
So I think it's worth trying to be clearer about my point. I'll readily admit that my own writing isn't perfect, but at minimum I do try to re-read what I write before posting to make sure that it's as clear and correct as possible, because I think that what we say and how we say it matters. I'm not so OCD that I'll ignore someone over a minor grammar error, and here on
I suppose my broader point is that all 3 metrics of logic, insight, and clarity seem to be getting harder and harder to meet, or at least harder to find in an increasing sea of poorly-considered and unclear irrelevance. The volume of chaff increases, and we seem inclined to use these trillions of dollars of communication technology the same way a dog would, barking just to hear himself howl.
You say to remain silent, which reminds me of the adage "don't feed the trolls". Maybe that saying is right, and ignoring trolls is the only realistic path to take. But I disagree with you on staying silent, because again, I think it matters, and I won't just sit back and accept that the current state of discourse is inevitable. I'm here to find out what other people think; personally I really enjoy finding those off-topic gems where someone is clearly passionate about something and puts some thought into their respon
Let me guess. Like every other tedious online atheist, liberal, conservative, and angry-opponent-of-copyright-law, you're a 14 year old who is bitter at mom and dad for making you go to school, or church, or anywhere that requires a modicum of effort. You're either a stereotype or a human spam-bot. The question is, will you look back in 10 years and shudder to think how loud-mouthed windbags have contributed to the decline of civility, or will humanity have already been crushed by this intellectual suicide, leaving us all too busy slathering butter on our McDinners to consider how incredibly stupid and brutish we've become? Here's the real crime in the life of the lowest common denominator: you. are. boring. Even idiots have their place in the ecosystem; who else is going to keep our bathrooms sparkly clean? But when language dies we revert back to animals, so for God's sake at least try to be a dancing bear or something that keeps us entertained. I love my stupid dog, but at least he doesn't try to convince anyone he has something worthwhile to say.
So the parent should spend their time coming up with a thoughtful response to an AC poster who posits the genius theory of "you're wrong"? Here's my own theory for you to carefully de-construct: people who can't write are either stupid, or @ssholes. Language is important, especially online where you lose any physical context, and we're steadily losing our ability to communicate anything deeper than our thoughts on how clever the latest I Can't Believe It's Not Butter commercial is. Every day the amount of trite, inane garbage that a person has to wade through to find any useful information increases exponentially; if your thoughts aren't important enough to proofread, why on Earth would they be important enough for anyone else to ponder the content? By all means, butcher the language. There's no better way for me to tell at a glance that I shouldn't bother reading any further.
How about Everything (assuming the server is Windows & NTFS)? Works well for me (quickest desktop search I've found yet), and can either run locally or connect to an ETP server. The site seems to be down right now, but here's the original Lifehacker article where I found it. Incidentally, I never heard of ETP til I started using it. Anyone know if it's an Everything-specific protocol?
Seconded. I switched from doing hundreds of crunches a day to doing planks instead, which are totally static, and my back feels much better. For overall workouts, I've recently switched up my routine because of the same lack of time. Instead of spending 45 minutes with weights doing muscle-isolation exercises I'm down to about 15 minutes of full-body and balance-focused exercises, and I'm seeing a lot more improvement in a lot less time. Everything that's been said about changing up your diet and eating smaller, more frequent meals is great advice too. For weights, search youtube for things like: one-leg deadlifts, overhead dumbbell snatch, renegade rows, startups, hindu squats, one-leg squats For cardio, look into HIIT and Tabata, both of which can give good cardio results in minimal time. Right now I spend 15-20 minutes a day doing interval training, either with jump rope, boxing, or stationary bike. With the combination of better diet, full-body exercises, and burst interval cardio, I've dropped about 40lbs in the last 3 months.
Does......does 'sakdoctor' mean what I think it means? Because I think it means that you changed it from sac to sak and now all I can picture is some kind of Gestapo testicular surgeon, which is awesome.
That's a good point, and I don't have a ready answer. Maybe this could be addressed with customs regulations? Hard to administer probably (and like someone mentions below, would you end up with a black market?), but any harder than income tax? I'm not so sure.
I would think you'd get into more trouble with fixed exemptions. Cost of living varies widely across states and you incentivize having additional children to earn rebates. Personally I think the basics-of-life are pretty much what everyone covers in junior high science: food, water, shelter. Of course I remove clothing from that list, as I'm hoping a 90% tax on women's clothing will incentivize rampant nudity.
Just can't bring myself to let this one go. I'm so petty.
I don't claim that lower classes only pay for food and rent, only that food and rent, along with a few other items and services, are the basic necessities of life, sufficient for a human being to live.
As far as I'm concerned, a fair tax system has to follow 2 criteria:
1) It needs to be simple enough to give people an honest understanding of what they're paying. No punishment (cigarettes, alcohol) taxes. No loopholes, no wide ranging variety of taxes. The only other taxes I would want to see are ones based strictly on usage, which directly fund the services they claim to (like national park entrance fees). Which leads into:
2) To some degree they should be based on my admittedly vague concept of 'participation in society'. Ie, if a mountain man chooses to isolate himself and not draw on the benefits of civilization, and his only interaction with society at large is to purchase the untaxed essentials of life, then I don't think he should be required to fund those benefits for others. Conversely, you don't get rich without being well-integrated into society, and you should be taxed accordingly for your consumption of those benefits. I won't say a sales tax is perfect, but I do think that consumption has at least a loose correlation to 'participation'.
Personally I'm a big fan of eliminating all but the sales tax and making the rate high enough to be revenue-neutral, which I imagine would be something astronomical like 40-60%.
The driver for me is that I don't think people (myself included) have a valid concept of how much they really pay in tax. I can't imagine anything driving down government spending as effectively as seeing a 40% sales tax on your goods.
Continuing the totally off-topic thread... It always bugs me when people hold up income tax as the only plausible form of progressive tax. What about national sales tax? It seems like it would be simple enough to set up sales tax exemptions for bare necessities (food, housing, maybe energy), so that only non-essentials get taxed. Rich people buy more stuff = they pay higher tax. It seems like a much more efficient, naturally balanced method than fiddling around with the system to determine who counts as rich, and what rate they should pay at.
Build one:
Rackmount UPS
Shallow musician-style rack case
Shallow rackmount server case
Rackmount AC
Plus server components.
These are all just random 1st finds in each category so I have no idea if they're compatible, but assuming compatible variants of each part work, it seems feasible:
- Server is to whatever specs you want
- Assuming the A/C technology is decent (never heard of the company before) it should be enough for at least a single server & UPS
- Might need some kind of de-humidifier?
- Reasonably portable. By vehicle at least, since I'm assuming you're not lugging this thing by hand through the jungle
I'm sure this is a stupid question, but I'll be the 1st to admit that I don't really have any idea what ISPs actually do or how internet infrastructure works. I'm with Time Warner. I don't use their email servers and they don't provide usenet anymore, so it doesn't seem like I'm getting any use from any data they're actually hosting, just the connection. Could someone explain what purpose ISPs serve and why there's no option (or maybe just really, really expensive options?) that allows people to connect directly to...whatever they have to connect to to get online. I mean, so I can connect to a friend on a shared LAN and through him to an ISP and from there to the wider world. What component of the infrastructure design prevents people from bypassing the ISP in one big ad-hoc network?
Browsing through the other comments, it looks like everyone's assuming you're going to be teaching 20 year old kids who are expected to delve deeper into programming. Is that the case? To me, intro to programming at a community college could just as easily mean teaching someone who's taking this class alone without anything further. The first question I'd ask is who you're teaching. If you're trying to teach my grandma to add some sparkle to her webpage or write some Excel macros, go with an IDE or you'll make her cry. If it's someone who's going to take a class or two & wants to know a little bit for improvements at a non-programming centered job (like me), go with an IDE. If it's someone you expect to spend a lifetime programming, start with the basics.