I disagree. One thing that you seem to be missing is that the fingers are touching the surface the entire time. The cursors would show up on the screen to indicate the exact location that you will click when you apply pressure.
Also, the touchpad/keyboard layout would be very similar to the way it's done on laptops now, except with the much larger touchpad. We don't seem to have many problems with that layout now, and I would argue that it would be much more efficient than using a mouse. Playing an FPS would be similar to playing one on a laptop with a touchpad, except much easier because of the larger touch area and multi-touch. It might even be better than using a mouse.
The thing is, the new Star Trek movie didn't really feel like a movie at all, it was more like an extended large-scale pilot. It did a very good job of setting up the characters and there was a sizeable villain, but it didn't seem Trek enough. I came out of the movie feeling like I should tune in next week for the real story to start. It did a very good job of a reboot, but there really wasn't much besides just a reboot.
You are right, but if we're honest the teachers are almost as clueless as to how to use Windows. Actually, when I was in high school four years ago, even the IT guy (the librarian) didn't know how to use Windows as well as most of the students. I don't think Linux would have made much of a difference.
I read the book, and I'm pretty sure you didn't, or at least you didn't get past chapter two. The MIT team DID use card counting most of the time, and only used the super-hard tricky stuff when they just wanted to have a little fun.
This is harder to track than card counting, because you play normally most hands, just bet big (and somewhat out of character, which helped lead to their downfall) every once in a while and win big.
Again, completely wrong. That was exactly what the team was trying to avoid. A big bet after a bunch of small ones really stands out and makes you look suspicious. What they did was have one player bet small and count cards until the odds shifted to favor the player, then they signaled the "big player" to come in and bet big to take advantage of the better odds.
The one thing that struck me most in reading the book is that they really never understood human nature, specifically humans working for the casino. They kept on saying "well, we're not cheating" and expected there to be no problems.... They seemed totally unaware of the dangers they faced, physically.
I'm not sure which book you read, but it wasn't the right one. The MIT team understood human nature extremely well, and exploited it to make their scheme undetectable. They knew what kind of players bet big, so they imitated those characters. Their card counters were usually some hot blonde that no-one would ever suspect, and no-one did. They also knew the law, and they weren't "cheating". They knew the dangers, and always, always had a plan B. They were literally taught the people who discovered the dangers firsthand when they were interrogated forcefully by casino security (back in the 70's-80's). They had scouts and knew the quickest way out of the building, in case casino management decided they weren't welcome. The only reason they were ever caught is because someone ratted them out, and then everything changed because they were no longer allowed in any casino (by the casinos, not the law). Once they were forcefully retired, they did the smart thing and published their story, making even more money.
The article doesn't really get this one right. It wasn't the kernel itself that was so revolutionary, but the method of development. What the Linux project did was introduce the open source community (and the rest of the world) to a new, decentralized development strategy that actually worked. Absolutely no one expected Linux to take off like it did, and the result of this experiment in distributed development has changed the way we all think about open source. You may not remember, but open source software development before 1992 was very different than it is today, especially for GNU. Stallman had some great ideas, but it was Torvalds that really showed us how to put them to work. Look at it this way: Torvalds was the "accidental revolutionary" that simply tried to get something done and revolutionized the industry, and Stallman was the "purposeful revolutionary" that tried to revolutionize the world and only got something done (i.e. the GNU software). Stallman is the one that wants the credit, where Torvalds wants none, but they are almost equally responsible for the change. Torvalds just gets the spotlight because actions speak louder than words.
The US educational system has a hard enough time keeping *normal* kids *entertained*, much less educated. I don't know if I count as one of the "gifted" kids, but I know that my four years of high school (graduated last year) were a complete waste of time. I wasn't one of the kids that slept all day (about 25% did, though), but I never did my homework. It didn't matter: I graduated with a 4.0 and a diploma covered with shiny stickers for "achievements" (wow, they could tell I was smart). I buried that fancy sheet of paper in a pile of junk, because that's where it belongs. I home-schooled when I was younger, and I learned more in one year than I did in all of my public high school education. It wasn't until I met one of the "bell curve" grading teachers that I realized how messed up it really is. Quite obviously, most public high-school teachers were educated by the same system. How on earth you can force a pre-determined "average grade" on a group of students and claim it's a valid measure of "progress"? SOLs (I'm in Virginia, btw) ruined things even more. No longer to teachers educate. They "teach" the SOL. It boils down to memorizing a bunch of "facts" that have been "selected" by the government to provide a "standard" for measuring "progress". The problem is, the standard is set so low that everyone learns, um, absolutely nothing. The "facts" are completely useless and the most important part of education is completely missed: self-education! It's the "teach a man to fish" deal. The schools ask you to memorized different fish swimming patterns and scale-counts, but don't even give you a fishing pole!
I'm in Engineering school now, and it's ridiculous what professors have to go through to deal with "high school graduates", a.k.a. complete morons. Sometimes half of calculus class is spent explaining a simple algebra concept to someone who obviously was never taught how to work with numbers or logic. When you get out in the real world, all those "rules" you learned (and later forgot) in high school are completely worthless. The only thing I've gained from high school is the insight to know that people who can learn things on their own (and did during the time they could have been doing busy-work in high school) are at a HUGE advantage when time comes either continue education in college or get a job that pays well. I'm living proof: I landed my dream job (computer-related) two months after I graduated from high school.
Was I somehow the best "educated" candidate? Not even close. Everything I use on the job every day comes from education and experience from outside of school. I didn't even have to apply for my job, because of the volunteer work I had done during school for non-profits and churches (they are very forgiving clients, good place to learn stuff in the real world [don't tell them I said that]) spread by word of mouth, and there is a huge demand for young people who know what they're talking about and doing it well (or at least decently).
It's a real shame that the US public education system simply cannot produce that kind of people! I don't blame the drop-outs, to tell you the truth. It's BORING! If anyone educated before about 1960 were forced to learn something the way we were required to, they would walk out just from sheer frustration. Heck, I had a math teacher that couldn't explain a mathematical constant! We learned to scan a textbook for specific answers, and regurgitate exacting, precise answers to worthless, and equally precise, questions. I took MANY tests where points were taken off for using grammar different from what was used in the textbook!
If you doubt me, watch a selection of high-school teachers either grade a "short answer" test or create a "multiple guess" test. The "short answers" are just associative keywords! In other words, it doesn't matter what you understand, but instead whether you can give the proper keyword in response to another set of keywords. Not only do students end up not understanding anything, they can't remember e
I'm willing to bet that 5% of MySpace users are exactly "99" years old. I know from experience that almost every MySpace user under the age of 16 lies about their age on their myspace profile. I don't think this study can accurately measure a statistic that's guaranteed to be skewed by underage liars.
There's a very good reason for them to use a copy of the DVD instead of the original. They needed to degrade the video quality slightly in order to make the difference in the comparison immediately obvious. Thus, their copy is not actually the original DVD version of the movie, but instead, their own "for comparison" re-render.
seemingly all of their arguments are witheringly obsolete.
There's something that needs to be cleared up about this whole issue. The vast majority of these "arguments" are in fact not used at all by supporters of Intelligent Design, but are created by their opponents to make everyone think they look stupid. Sure, they may stem from some comment made by some un-educated supporter, buy why in the world is anyone taking the word of some anonymous idiot as the viewpoint of the entire group? The real supporters of intelligent design have PHDs and know what they're talking about, but never get posted on slashdot because they're not "controversial" enough.
It doesn't really matter, though; the only non-idiotic argument I've ever heard against Intelligent Design is that "It can't be disproven." (seriously) Everything else I've seen is either BS or is based on a misunderstanding of ID (like this one about bees). If you want to attack it, come back when you actually have heard the real thing, instead of laughing at idiots who claim bees can't fly.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. One thing that you seem to be missing is that the fingers are touching the surface the entire time. The cursors would show up on the screen to indicate the exact location that you will click when you apply pressure.
Also, the touchpad/keyboard layout would be very similar to the way it's done on laptops now, except with the much larger touchpad. We don't seem to have many problems with that layout now, and I would argue that it would be much more efficient than using a mouse. Playing an FPS would be similar to playing one on a laptop with a touchpad, except much easier because of the larger touch area and multi-touch. It might even be better than using a mouse.
I think the more appropriate way to do it would have been this: http:80,tech.slashdot.org/story/09/10/14/1219215/Tim-Berners-Lee-Is-Sorry-About-the-Slashes There, problems gone.
The thing is, the new Star Trek movie didn't really feel like a movie at all, it was more like an extended large-scale pilot. It did a very good job of setting up the characters and there was a sizeable villain, but it didn't seem Trek enough. I came out of the movie feeling like I should tune in next week for the real story to start. It did a very good job of a reboot, but there really wasn't much besides just a reboot.
Ever heard of patents?
You are right, but if we're honest the teachers are almost as clueless as to how to use Windows. Actually, when I was in high school four years ago, even the IT guy (the librarian) didn't know how to use Windows as well as most of the students. I don't think Linux would have made much of a difference.
strange, that is the same DVD drive that I use with my linux box. Didnt I already pay for the codec then?
I'll second that question. Anyone got a spare lawyer to answer it for us?
It's podometer, not pedometer !
as in iPodometer?
The article doesn't really get this one right. It wasn't the kernel itself that was so revolutionary, but the method of development. What the Linux project did was introduce the open source community (and the rest of the world) to a new, decentralized development strategy that actually worked. Absolutely no one expected Linux to take off like it did, and the result of this experiment in distributed development has changed the way we all think about open source. You may not remember, but open source software development before 1992 was very different than it is today, especially for GNU. Stallman had some great ideas, but it was Torvalds that really showed us how to put them to work. Look at it this way: Torvalds was the "accidental revolutionary" that simply tried to get something done and revolutionized the industry, and Stallman was the "purposeful revolutionary" that tried to revolutionize the world and only got something done (i.e. the GNU software). Stallman is the one that wants the credit, where Torvalds wants none, but they are almost equally responsible for the change. Torvalds just gets the spotlight because actions speak louder than words.
/home/*/.mozilla r,It's looking for the Skype Firefox plugin.
The US educational system has a hard enough time keeping *normal* kids *entertained*, much less educated. I don't know if I count as one of the "gifted" kids, but I know that my four years of high school (graduated last year) were a complete waste of time. I wasn't one of the kids that slept all day (about 25% did, though), but I never did my homework. It didn't matter: I graduated with a 4.0 and a diploma covered with shiny stickers for "achievements" (wow, they could tell I was smart). I buried that fancy sheet of paper in a pile of junk, because that's where it belongs. I home-schooled when I was younger, and I learned more in one year than I did in all of my public high school education. It wasn't until I met one of the "bell curve" grading teachers that I realized how messed up it really is. Quite obviously, most public high-school teachers were educated by the same system. How on earth you can force a pre-determined "average grade" on a group of students and claim it's a valid measure of "progress"? SOLs (I'm in Virginia, btw) ruined things even more. No longer to teachers educate. They "teach" the SOL. It boils down to memorizing a bunch of "facts" that have been "selected" by the government to provide a "standard" for measuring "progress". The problem is, the standard is set so low that everyone learns, um, absolutely nothing. The "facts" are completely useless and the most important part of education is completely missed: self-education! It's the "teach a man to fish" deal. The schools ask you to memorized different fish swimming patterns and scale-counts, but don't even give you a fishing pole!
I'm in Engineering school now, and it's ridiculous what professors have to go through to deal with "high school graduates", a.k.a. complete morons. Sometimes half of calculus class is spent explaining a simple algebra concept to someone who obviously was never taught how to work with numbers or logic. When you get out in the real world, all those "rules" you learned (and later forgot) in high school are completely worthless. The only thing I've gained from high school is the insight to know that people who can learn things on their own (and did during the time they could have been doing busy-work in high school) are at a HUGE advantage when time comes either continue education in college or get a job that pays well. I'm living proof: I landed my dream job (computer-related) two months after I graduated from high school.
Was I somehow the best "educated" candidate? Not even close. Everything I use on the job every day comes from education and experience from outside of school. I didn't even have to apply for my job, because of the volunteer work I had done during school for non-profits and churches (they are very forgiving clients, good place to learn stuff in the real world [don't tell them I said that]) spread by word of mouth, and there is a huge demand for young people who know what they're talking about and doing it well (or at least decently).
It's a real shame that the US public education system simply cannot produce that kind of people! I don't blame the drop-outs, to tell you the truth. It's BORING! If anyone educated before about 1960 were forced to learn something the way we were required to, they would walk out just from sheer frustration. Heck, I had a math teacher that couldn't explain a mathematical constant! We learned to scan a textbook for specific answers, and regurgitate exacting, precise answers to worthless, and equally precise, questions. I took MANY tests where points were taken off for using grammar different from what was used in the textbook!
If you doubt me, watch a selection of high-school teachers either grade a "short answer" test or create a "multiple guess" test. The "short answers" are just associative keywords! In other words, it doesn't matter what you understand, but instead whether you can give the proper keyword in response to another set of keywords. Not only do students end up not understanding anything, they can't remember e
I'm willing to bet that 5% of MySpace users are exactly "99" years old. I know from experience that almost every MySpace user under the age of 16 lies about their age on their myspace profile. I don't think this study can accurately measure a statistic that's guaranteed to be skewed by underage liars.
There's a very good reason for them to use a copy of the DVD instead of the original. They needed to degrade the video quality slightly in order to make the difference in the comparison immediately obvious. Thus, their copy is not actually the original DVD version of the movie, but instead, their own "for comparison" re-render.
seemingly all of their arguments are witheringly obsolete.
There's something that needs to be cleared up about this whole issue. The vast majority of these "arguments" are in fact not used at all by supporters of Intelligent Design, but are created by their opponents to make everyone think they look stupid. Sure, they may stem from some comment made by some un-educated supporter, buy why in the world is anyone taking the word of some anonymous idiot as the viewpoint of the entire group? The real supporters of intelligent design have PHDs and know what they're talking about, but never get posted on slashdot because they're not "controversial" enough.
It doesn't really matter, though; the only non-idiotic argument I've ever heard against Intelligent Design is that "It can't be disproven." (seriously) Everything else I've seen is either BS or is based on a misunderstanding of ID (like this one about bees). If you want to attack it, come back when you actually have heard the real thing, instead of laughing at idiots who claim bees can't fly.