The Wheel of Time is ending soon. Robert Jordan passed recently, and his wife and editors have nodded to an author (I forget his name) to use Jordan's very meticulous notes to finish the finale. It should be done by the time any teen could possibly read through all of Jordan's monstrosities.
There is no hard drive to melt (Google Apps is all online). If the server was down, it'd be out for pretty much everyone and for that day, you'd revert to writing stuff down. No big loss. Supermarkets don't train their employees well for downtimes because it isn't necessarily that large of a loss (they rarely happen and when they do happen its usually in the event of a storm and the majority of their customers have decided to stay home anyway) and because retail has a huge employee turn-over ratio.
A tool cannot convey knowledge. Books cannot convey knowledge. Neither can a computer. So, your argument is mostly irrelevant. Nothing can ever be a substitute for experience.
There are trade-offs between computers and books which should be considered, however. A computer can convey information real-time (bonus) and in almost infinite qualities which will cause filtering issues (bonus + negative). A book must be constantly updated and re-purchased (negative) but it does have the benefit of being narrowly focused on a subject (bonus + negative) and a published book/article almost always goes through some approval process to weed out the errors (bonus).
One can actually set up a monitor for the teacher to display what's on the monitors of all the students. We use this at work in our classroom settings. The teacher can even select one of the displayed monitors and take control of the mouse to show the student something remotely, rather than having to walk desk to desk. I think this would pretty much end the misuse of the computers most of the time.
A computer can't teach you to think critically, but neither can a pad of paper and a pencil. Both are just tools. Computers do not decrease the quality of learning.
Finally, kids don't learn Latin anymore because it is a dead language. However, they should still be learning Latin roots which will help them decipher the meanings of many scientific words.
It is an inconvenience. Imagine every game requiring an Internet phone home. Tomorrow, a storm blows through and your internet provider gets knocked out of service. One week without games? Two? Three? Sorry. My single-player experience should be available in every instance except a complete power failure. Thank goodness for Stardock because as long as they keep pumping out games like Sins and Galactic Civs then I'll keep I won't have to support DRM.
Stupid argument.
Requiring an internet connection for an on-line game is rudimentary. You can't play "on-line" without the connection.
Requiring an internet connection for a single-player game is draconian. I like to play games traveling down the road, in the air, etc. Internet connection is not always viable. I'm not going to purchase a single-player game that isn't available just because my Internet provider decides to crash.
Steam requires authentication once. I can play all of my Steam games off-line. This type of copy protection scheme requires me to be online continuously. This is not always possible. Sorry, this type of DRM is not quite as bad as putting a rootkit on my computer, but it is still completely unacceptable.
...or do both lists look like it's going to be a slow year of console gaming.
So far, I'm only interested in Halo 3, Winning Eleven, Lost Odyssey, the Rockstar game, and Jade Empire 2 (which is only rumored). I'll be playing Elder Scrolls IV on my PC (who wants to pass up all that fan-made goodness?). What happened to Playstation RPGs? There doesn't seem to be a single one on the list, which is highly disappointing.
I wish Nintendo would get with publishing info about upcoming games on their system. The controller just isn't enough... in fact, I don't really care much about it. Give me some games!
One needs to experience programming while in class. So, this is what one of my instructors did: at the end of every major coding project, we had to meet with the professor (or assistant) and defend our project much like a thesis (although less intensive). Unfortunately, this is time consuming and can't be done for every entry-level CS course (many of my freshman/sophmore classes had 200+ students).
Of course, K-State instituted a programming test before our Senior Projects. If you don't pass it, you don't get into the class -- to many people were graduating without knowing basic programming. This was reflecting terribly on K-State.
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You under estimate. I was reading Dune when I was a pre-teen, and now, I read the series about once every other year or so. Don't pass on Dune.
The Wheel of Time is ending soon. Robert Jordan passed recently, and his wife and editors have nodded to an author (I forget his name) to use Jordan's very meticulous notes to finish the finale. It should be done by the time any teen could possibly read through all of Jordan's monstrosities.
There is no hard drive to melt (Google Apps is all online). If the server was down, it'd be out for pretty much everyone and for that day, you'd revert to writing stuff down. No big loss. Supermarkets don't train their employees well for downtimes because it isn't necessarily that large of a loss (they rarely happen and when they do happen its usually in the event of a storm and the majority of their customers have decided to stay home anyway) and because retail has a huge employee turn-over ratio.
A tool cannot convey knowledge. Books cannot convey knowledge. Neither can a computer. So, your argument is mostly irrelevant. Nothing can ever be a substitute for experience. There are trade-offs between computers and books which should be considered, however. A computer can convey information real-time (bonus) and in almost infinite qualities which will cause filtering issues (bonus + negative). A book must be constantly updated and re-purchased (negative) but it does have the benefit of being narrowly focused on a subject (bonus + negative) and a published book/article almost always goes through some approval process to weed out the errors (bonus).
One can actually set up a monitor for the teacher to display what's on the monitors of all the students. We use this at work in our classroom settings. The teacher can even select one of the displayed monitors and take control of the mouse to show the student something remotely, rather than having to walk desk to desk. I think this would pretty much end the misuse of the computers most of the time.
A computer can't teach you to think critically, but neither can a pad of paper and a pencil. Both are just tools. Computers do not decrease the quality of learning. Finally, kids don't learn Latin anymore because it is a dead language. However, they should still be learning Latin roots which will help them decipher the meanings of many scientific words.
It is an inconvenience. Imagine every game requiring an Internet phone home. Tomorrow, a storm blows through and your internet provider gets knocked out of service. One week without games? Two? Three? Sorry. My single-player experience should be available in every instance except a complete power failure. Thank goodness for Stardock because as long as they keep pumping out games like Sins and Galactic Civs then I'll keep I won't have to support DRM.
Stupid argument. Requiring an internet connection for an on-line game is rudimentary. You can't play "on-line" without the connection. Requiring an internet connection for a single-player game is draconian. I like to play games traveling down the road, in the air, etc. Internet connection is not always viable. I'm not going to purchase a single-player game that isn't available just because my Internet provider decides to crash.
Steam requires authentication once. I can play all of my Steam games off-line. This type of copy protection scheme requires me to be online continuously. This is not always possible. Sorry, this type of DRM is not quite as bad as putting a rootkit on my computer, but it is still completely unacceptable.
...or do both lists look like it's going to be a slow year of console gaming.
So far, I'm only interested in Halo 3, Winning Eleven, Lost Odyssey, the Rockstar game, and Jade Empire 2 (which is only rumored). I'll be playing Elder Scrolls IV on my PC (who wants to pass up all that fan-made goodness?). What happened to Playstation RPGs? There doesn't seem to be a single one on the list, which is highly disappointing.
I wish Nintendo would get with publishing info about upcoming games on their system. The controller just isn't enough... in fact, I don't really care much about it. Give me some games!
One needs to experience programming while in class. So, this is what one of my instructors did: at the end of every major coding project, we had to meet with the professor (or assistant) and defend our project much like a thesis (although less intensive). Unfortunately, this is time consuming and can't be done for every entry-level CS course (many of my freshman/sophmore classes had 200+ students).
Of course, K-State instituted a programming test before our Senior Projects. If you don't pass it, you don't get into the class -- to many people were graduating without knowing basic programming. This was reflecting terribly on K-State.
Actually, according to a few MIT students, the foil hat crowd may be the ones most easily controlled by the gov't.
See: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/