That's what tablets are made for. I hate doing graphics with a mouse.
Really, my favorite pointing device are the little keyboard nubs they used on old IBM thinkpads. I know some full-size keyboards use them as well. A few years back I saw some people selling buckling spring "clicky" keyboards with built-in pointer nub and programmable keycaps. It was like $100, and I didn't end up buying it, but I really wish I had.
Persecuted? Were you driven out of town by peasants with pitchforks and torches? Or did someone just find your statement uncouth? There are things it's just not polite to say in public.
For instance, there is a PhD candidate working at the library with me. I complained to some friends one day that someone at the carwash had managed to damage the fender on my car, and that I'd have to do talk to them. He said that it probably wouldn't be much use, because the illegal immigrants they employ don't pay attention and might even be gone by now. Several Mexican friends of mine there were extremely offended at this and have a very low opinion of him right now. Was the person who washed my car an illegal immigrant? Maybe. It's an unskilled job with a lot of Latinos who are likely recently immigrants. It's not far-fetched to imagine that they might hire some illegal workers. Even so it was -terribly- rude and socially awkward to say out loud.
A lot of the time, it's less about political correctness and more about plain common sense. Sometimes just because a fact is true doesn't mean it is appropriate.
Technically you can get your deposit back by bringing in the bottles and cans yourself. I used to take them back to the store as a kid and use the money I got to get more soda. I noticed that in Oakland (some parts at least) they have little bins on top of trashcans to put your bottles and cans in so homeless people can collect them. Now that's an efficient operation.
That would be a sociopath. Except that would mean that Anakin was lost from the start and analyzing what could have been done differently is pointless.
I have to say that your math class is the exception to the rule, and I wish I would have had that sort of rule in place. Working six 3-pt problems and a 2-pt problem is far better than getting thirty problems every night.
The problem is that not everyone learns by repetition, and even then assigning a pile of questions all at once is not the best way to apply it. Most schools just hand kids a pile of math work at once, review it again right before the chapter test, then never touch on it again.
Also keep in mind that it seems like you were an exceptional student. Most kids have a lot more trouble understanding and applying the concepts than it sounds like you did. It's not a question of bad mentality, they're just not mentally mature yet, and can't grasp a lot of what is obvious to adults. It's hard for many of them to see why learning math is so important.
On a personal note, I also take issue with the whole concept that extra work somehow fosters a child's development. What's the difference between giving a child ten problems to test whether he understands a particular use of algebra and, say, thirty problems? At some point there is no extra gain.
There's the same with social studies. Giving ten questions with two to three sentence answers and two paragraph-long answer questions is perhaps a little excessive to understand whether a sixth grader understands a two-page reading passage about American history.
English is one of the few classes where I do believe that homework can be relevant, since there's little use in spending entire class periods silently writing essays, but msot schools manage to counter that by forcing students to spend an hour a night reading terrible and mind-numbing class-assigned books which turn reading from a childhood pleasure into a terrible chore. I've talked to people who haven't read a book since high school because of that.
The main problem I see in this is that the schools are off-loading a lot of the actual teaching onto parents, in the form of homework. I remember when I was in school, the teachers would assign practically all of the actual classwork as homework, and would spend the teaching periods collectively correcting the previous night's homework.
I think what the article is saying is that in environments where parents have the time and resources to do the work with the children allow the kids to learn more easily. In lower-income single-parent homes or homes where the parents are uneducated, there isn't the time or ability to work with the children. They don't have anyone on-hand to help them if they don't understand or have a question.
Also, creating an environment conducive to learning is more than just giving the kids peace and quiet. I know of schools giving four hours of homework a night to thirteen-year-olds. Say school ends at 3:30. The student takes the bus home, walks a bit, gets there at 4:30. Maybe has a snack, rests a bit. Starts his work at 5:00. Stops at 7:00 to have dinner, maybe talk with family. Goes back to work. Finishes at 10:00pm then goes to bed. That's a lot of discipline to expect from a kid that age. The parents would need to give a lot of supervision to make sure the child completes the work. And then if he gets stuck on a problem and doesn't have anyone to help him with the answer, he's likely to just give up for the night.
In my case, I moved to California from Canada when I was in fifth grade and never actually recovered. In Canada, we did all the work in class. The teacher would give a lesson then have us work a couple of pages of related problems or write an assignment in class. We'd occasionally get a page or two as homework if we didn't have time to finish it in class, but normally as we'd be working, the teacher would be there to help us.
When I moved here, I noticed that we practically did nothing in class. The teacher would talk at us for long periods of time, we might do a project or two that had little to do what we were supposed to be learning. A lot of arts and crafts and such. All the real work was assigned as homework.
And it was a lot. At least compared to what I was used to. Usually, I'd do about half before deciding I knew the work. By seventh and eighth grade, when the work doubled and tripled, I realized they were spending the entire class time reviewing the work we were doing the previous night anyway, so I stopped doing the work and just learned everything by listening to the teacher explain all the problems everyone had gotten wrong. I still got As on all the tests.
Anyway, the main point is that the teachers are supposed to be teaching these children. That is why we send kids to school all day. Parents ought to take an interest in their children's education and do what they can to help, but many are completely inequipped to act as secondary educators in english, math, and the social and physical sciences.
The issue is not that certain parents are unfairly boosting a child's performance through support and tutoring, it's that schools should not be depending on them as an educational resource, because it is not always available.
That simile is flawed. Handguns have many uses, such as easing server bandwidth requirements and doing a lot to spread open source software, while bittorrent was designed mainly for use in non-military situations to kill human beings. It's fairly obvious that for practical purposes, bittorrent should be carefully controlled.
Wait, I think I mixed things up a little there, didn't I.
If they did that here, piracy would go down a lot too. Not everyone earns $3000 a month, especially if you're talking net income. Most of the people that pirate software are teens or college students. There isn't a huge piracy epidemic among 40-something middle managers.
I used Photoshop as an example because I remember back in the mid-nineties when it was a lot less expensive. When Adobe started raising the price, they said it was because of piracy.
I was also talking about its popularity, not as a professional design tool, but as general image editing software. Most people I know that are interested in art have photoshop, and none of them make enough money to have purchased it. A lot of them are still students, some are still kids.
In fact, the whole reason many of those professionals know it well and don't want to switch is because a lot of them pirated it when they were younger. It's practically a benefit, since the pirates are individuals that wouldn't otherwise have been customers, and the more people use it, the more pressure they put on companies to buy that software for their use.
Personally, I'm not really one for piracy. After getting into Linux and using legitimately free software, it just makes me feel weird to illicitly install software that I'm supposed to be paying for. Of course, I also feel weird about paying for it, except for games, so that's about the only thing I use Windows for.
I thought that computer companies had already taken this into account with their pricing, anyway. The argument I always heard for why Photoshop is $700 was because of all the piracy. So then, of course, that means that more people are going to pirate it.
How else is Photoshop so popular? If there were no piracy, people would all be using Paint Shop Pro or something, which is 1/5 the price.
Anyway, as long want software for uses that don't match the price, there's going to be piracy. There's not much we can do about it.
Oh, c'mon. Everybody knows how we humans are going to evolve. Obviously, we're going to get paler skin, giant, bulbous skulls with pulsing veins and a penchant for long, shiny robes with pointy collars. At some point we'll even get telepathy so we can float everywhere and get small, atrophied muscles so that dashing space captains can easily overpower us in a physical confrontation.
I am so sick of seeing these reports of estimated corporate losses due to something or another. Star Wars will cost employers six hundred million? Those poor employers, having to deal with outside phenomena ruining their all-important productivity. They often talk about how many kajillion dollars chatting online or surfing the web costs employers annually, or people selfishly getting influenza or SARS.
Why stop there? Just think about how much money it's costing employers when people take a half hour for lunch every day, or all that lost work when they have to go to the bathroom. Then there's the financial burden companies have to deal with because employees waste time talking to each other. Jesus, what about that time they spend at home, sleeping? It's a terrible blight upon the face or corporate America.
I think the solution is obvious. All we need to do is get rid of all paid time off, any breaks, carefully monitor all computer access, drug them up with amphetamines, and implant a device that electrically shocks them any time they say something unnecessary or deviate from their appointed tasks in any way. Only then will we stop hemorrhaging money like this.
Let's see, it was in the February 2005 issue of Inside Kung-Fu. It looks like the quote is actually just attributed to a shaolin disciple (this is slashdot, research is for the weak).
It was 32nd generation disciple Shi Xing Long, who said, "Like monkey style, bat'leth is inspired by a mythical tale. (Its practitioners) have boldly gone where myth meets reality. However, we of the martial world have actually been here many times before. It is encouraging to see that this honored tradition is now being passed down to the next generation."
The Bat'leH is the semicircular blade, and the article says that the style combines the fluidity of the Chinese staff with blade techniques, along with grabbing techniques like those in the hooked sword and Okinawan sai.
See I always saw it as the end conseqences of nationalism and imperialism. Then again, there's the aspect of the Borg as the dehumanization of society by technology.
Of course, they were really just created as a big scary bad guy, and developed so a writer that was going to quit at the end of season three could write the show into the worst situation he could think of before he left. (But then he ended up staying on after all and had to write them out of it himself.)
But I guess that the major alien races ended up being a lot more abstract than in TOS, and could be used as parallels for a lot of things in modern society. Except the Ferengi. They were pretty much a one-trick capitalist pony.
Oh my god! They posted a story that you don't care about. I guess timothy forgot to run it by you before approving it this time. What were they thinking? I mean, it even says on the front page: "News For jmcmunn. Stuff that matters (to jmcmunn)."
Only how do I see how terrible slashdot is. All those people that complain about every single article are so right. I guess the only thing to do now is make empty threats about leaving then reloading every five minutes to see if anyone responded.
Actually, I figure the cops will find him in a pool of blood with a Bat'leH sticking out of his chest. His article is an insult to the Klingon Empire.
Speaking of, I read an article in Inside Kung Fu about people desgining weapons forms for the Bat'leH. The senior monk at the Shaolin Temple even commented on it as an interesting example of a modern martial arts weapon. The only thing is most people create hard-style kata when the creator of the weapon envisioned it used in a more flowing style, like Tai Chi sword. Since I'm partial to kung fu anyway, I have to agree.
Originally, the Klingons were the Russians and the Romulans were the Chinese, I believe. They changed it around in later series. The different races represented concepts more than countries.
Cue irresponsible speculation: one of the things the dream cut-off switch (of the motor cortex) might do is allow us a way to rehearse or practice complex motions and interactions while sleeping, as a way of cementing our development of those habits.
Yeah, that has a lot to do with it. Research is currently showing that the whole purpose of sleep is to process and sort information gained during the day. Without sleep we wouldn't be able to learn things.
Cliché characters, no plot whatsoever, banal tagline dialogues and total lack of ideas, meaning and conflict. There are some visually stunning, stylish, yet intelligent and thought-provocative movies out there. Why settle for this teenage-dream kind of stuff?
Because I like to see more than two movies a year, maybe? Even then, I'd still watch comic book movies. I'm a big fan of martial arts movies, and as much as I love Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, they don't stand anywhere near Jackie Chan in Drunken Master II. Some movies don't try to be works of art, just entertaining, fun stories, and by keeping their pretensions low they often end up connecting to the viewer on a more fundamental level. Anyway, Batman is a wonderful character archetype, especially among geeks, and I love to see how he is portrayed in different media.
It reminds me, I have some friends who spend all their time going over the deep meanings and messages of different musicians. They're go on and on about so-and-so evocatively portraying society through the eyes of whatever, and how this song is about that aspect of the human condition. Personally, I just like stuff that sounds good. Hell, half the music I listen to is in languages I don't even understand. No idea what any of it means, but it's just good music.
Of course, this might be more like my friend who won't listen to any band that gets played on the radio and brings up bands only he's ever heard of to show how hip and cultured he is. The funny thing is that he doesn't actually appreciate music so much as the feeling that he's superior to your regular bourgeoisie. There are a lot of independent film people that seem to think the same way.
Anyway, the point is that I like movies that I like. They might be visually stunning, they might address deep philosophical questions, or they might have a bunch of explosions and people kicking each other in the head. They go for different things, and as long as I approach them on the level that they're presented, there's no reason I can't enjoy both.
Slashdot Mirror
Awesome. Thank you. My last semi-decent keyboard just died this week.
That's what tablets are made for. I hate doing graphics with a mouse.
Really, my favorite pointing device are the little keyboard nubs they used on old IBM thinkpads. I know some full-size keyboards use them as well. A few years back I saw some people selling buckling spring "clicky" keyboards with built-in pointer nub and programmable keycaps. It was like $100, and I didn't end up buying it, but I really wish I had.
Persecuted? Were you driven out of town by peasants with pitchforks and torches? Or did someone just find your statement uncouth? There are things it's just not polite to say in public.
For instance, there is a PhD candidate working at the library with me. I complained to some friends one day that someone at the carwash had managed to damage the fender on my car, and that I'd have to do talk to them. He said that it probably wouldn't be much use, because the illegal immigrants they employ don't pay attention and might even be gone by now. Several Mexican friends of mine there were extremely offended at this and have a very low opinion of him right now. Was the person who washed my car an illegal immigrant? Maybe. It's an unskilled job with a lot of Latinos who are likely recently immigrants. It's not far-fetched to imagine that they might hire some illegal workers. Even so it was -terribly- rude and socially awkward to say out loud.
A lot of the time, it's less about political correctness and more about plain common sense. Sometimes just because a fact is true doesn't mean it is appropriate.
Technically you can get your deposit back by bringing in the bottles and cans yourself. I used to take them back to the store as a kid and use the money I got to get more soda. I noticed that in Oakland (some parts at least) they have little bins on top of trashcans to put your bottles and cans in so homeless people can collect them. Now that's an efficient operation.
Damn, less than two hours of homework a night isn't bad. If that's all I had, I might have actually done it back then.
Sorry, less than three hours. Maybe if I had done my homework as a kid I might have learned to proofread.
That would be a sociopath. Except that would mean that Anakin was lost from the start and analyzing what could have been done differently is pointless.
I have to say that your math class is the exception to the rule, and I wish I would have had that sort of rule in place. Working six 3-pt problems and a 2-pt problem is far better than getting thirty problems every night.
The problem is that not everyone learns by repetition, and even then assigning a pile of questions all at once is not the best way to apply it. Most schools just hand kids a pile of math work at once, review it again right before the chapter test, then never touch on it again.
Also keep in mind that it seems like you were an exceptional student. Most kids have a lot more trouble understanding and applying the concepts than it sounds like you did. It's not a question of bad mentality, they're just not mentally mature yet, and can't grasp a lot of what is obvious to adults. It's hard for many of them to see why learning math is so important.
On a personal note, I also take issue with the whole concept that extra work somehow fosters a child's development. What's the difference between giving a child ten problems to test whether he understands a particular use of algebra and, say, thirty problems? At some point there is no extra gain.
There's the same with social studies. Giving ten questions with two to three sentence answers and two paragraph-long answer questions is perhaps a little excessive to understand whether a sixth grader understands a two-page reading passage about American history.
English is one of the few classes where I do believe that homework can be relevant, since there's little use in spending entire class periods silently writing essays, but msot schools manage to counter that by forcing students to spend an hour a night reading terrible and mind-numbing class-assigned books which turn reading from a childhood pleasure into a terrible chore. I've talked to people who haven't read a book since high school because of that.
The main problem I see in this is that the schools are off-loading a lot of the actual teaching onto parents, in the form of homework. I remember when I was in school, the teachers would assign practically all of the actual classwork as homework, and would spend the teaching periods collectively correcting the previous night's homework.
I think what the article is saying is that in environments where parents have the time and resources to do the work with the children allow the kids to learn more easily. In lower-income single-parent homes or homes where the parents are uneducated, there isn't the time or ability to work with the children. They don't have anyone on-hand to help them if they don't understand or have a question.
Also, creating an environment conducive to learning is more than just giving the kids peace and quiet. I know of schools giving four hours of homework a night to thirteen-year-olds. Say school ends at 3:30. The student takes the bus home, walks a bit, gets there at 4:30. Maybe has a snack, rests a bit. Starts his work at 5:00. Stops at 7:00 to have dinner, maybe talk with family. Goes back to work. Finishes at 10:00pm then goes to bed. That's a lot of discipline to expect from a kid that age. The parents would need to give a lot of supervision to make sure the child completes the work. And then if he gets stuck on a problem and doesn't have anyone to help him with the answer, he's likely to just give up for the night.
In my case, I moved to California from Canada when I was in fifth grade and never actually recovered. In Canada, we did all the work in class. The teacher would give a lesson then have us work a couple of pages of related problems or write an assignment in class. We'd occasionally get a page or two as homework if we didn't have time to finish it in class, but normally as we'd be working, the teacher would be there to help us.
When I moved here, I noticed that we practically did nothing in class. The teacher would talk at us for long periods of time, we might do a project or two that had little to do what we were supposed to be learning. A lot of arts and crafts and such. All the real work was assigned as homework.
And it was a lot. At least compared to what I was used to. Usually, I'd do about half before deciding I knew the work. By seventh and eighth grade, when the work doubled and tripled, I realized they were spending the entire class time reviewing the work we were doing the previous night anyway, so I stopped doing the work and just learned everything by listening to the teacher explain all the problems everyone had gotten wrong. I still got As on all the tests.
Anyway, the main point is that the teachers are supposed to be teaching these children. That is why we send kids to school all day. Parents ought to take an interest in their children's education and do what they can to help, but many are completely inequipped to act as secondary educators in english, math, and the social and physical sciences.
The issue is not that certain parents are unfairly boosting a child's performance through support and tutoring, it's that schools should not be depending on them as an educational resource, because it is not always available.
I know what I want next Christmas. Screw these new gaming consoles.
That simile is flawed. Handguns have many uses, such as easing server bandwidth requirements and doing a lot to spread open source software, while bittorrent was designed mainly for use in non-military situations to kill human beings. It's fairly obvious that for practical purposes, bittorrent should be carefully controlled.
Wait, I think I mixed things up a little there, didn't I.
If they did that here, piracy would go down a lot too. Not everyone earns $3000 a month, especially if you're talking net income. Most of the people that pirate software are teens or college students. There isn't a huge piracy epidemic among 40-something middle managers.
I used Photoshop as an example because I remember back in the mid-nineties when it was a lot less expensive. When Adobe started raising the price, they said it was because of piracy.
I was also talking about its popularity, not as a professional design tool, but as general image editing software. Most people I know that are interested in art have photoshop, and none of them make enough money to have purchased it. A lot of them are still students, some are still kids.
In fact, the whole reason many of those professionals know it well and don't want to switch is because a lot of them pirated it when they were younger. It's practically a benefit, since the pirates are individuals that wouldn't otherwise have been customers, and the more people use it, the more pressure they put on companies to buy that software for their use.
Personally, I'm not really one for piracy. After getting into Linux and using legitimately free software, it just makes me feel weird to illicitly install software that I'm supposed to be paying for. Of course, I also feel weird about paying for it, except for games, so that's about the only thing I use Windows for.
I thought that computer companies had already taken this into account with their pricing, anyway. The argument I always heard for why Photoshop is $700 was because of all the piracy. So then, of course, that means that more people are going to pirate it.
How else is Photoshop so popular? If there were no piracy, people would all be using Paint Shop Pro or something, which is 1/5 the price.
Anyway, as long want software for uses that don't match the price, there's going to be piracy. There's not much we can do about it.
I believe the technical term for that is "backwards compatible, kinda."
Oh, c'mon. Everybody knows how we humans are going to evolve. Obviously, we're going to get paler skin, giant, bulbous skulls with pulsing veins and a penchant for long, shiny robes with pointy collars. At some point we'll even get telepathy so we can float everywhere and get small, atrophied muscles so that dashing space captains can easily overpower us in a physical confrontation.
Personally, I can't wait.
I am so sick of seeing these reports of estimated corporate losses due to something or another. Star Wars will cost employers six hundred million? Those poor employers, having to deal with outside phenomena ruining their all-important productivity. They often talk about how many kajillion dollars chatting online or surfing the web costs employers annually, or people selfishly getting influenza or SARS.
Why stop there? Just think about how much money it's costing employers when people take a half hour for lunch every day, or all that lost work when they have to go to the bathroom. Then there's the financial burden companies have to deal with because employees waste time talking to each other. Jesus, what about that time they spend at home, sleeping? It's a terrible blight upon the face or corporate America.
I think the solution is obvious. All we need to do is get rid of all paid time off, any breaks, carefully monitor all computer access, drug them up with amphetamines, and implant a device that electrically shocks them any time they say something unnecessary or deviate from their appointed tasks in any way. Only then will we stop hemorrhaging money like this.
Let's see, it was in the February 2005 issue of Inside Kung-Fu. It looks like the quote is actually just attributed to a shaolin disciple (this is slashdot, research is for the weak).
It was 32nd generation disciple Shi Xing Long, who said, "Like monkey style, bat'leth is inspired by a mythical tale. (Its practitioners) have boldly gone where myth meets reality. However, we of the martial world have actually been here many times before. It is encouraging to see that this honored tradition is now being passed down to the next generation."
The Bat'leH is the semicircular blade, and the article says that the style combines the fluidity of the Chinese staff with blade techniques, along with grabbing techniques like those in the hooked sword and Okinawan sai.
See I always saw it as the end conseqences of nationalism and imperialism. Then again, there's the aspect of the Borg as the dehumanization of society by technology.
Of course, they were really just created as a big scary bad guy, and developed so a writer that was going to quit at the end of season three could write the show into the worst situation he could think of before he left. (But then he ended up staying on after all and had to write them out of it himself.)
But I guess that the major alien races ended up being a lot more abstract than in TOS, and could be used as parallels for a lot of things in modern society. Except the Ferengi. They were pretty much a one-trick capitalist pony.
Oh my god! They posted a story that you don't care about. I guess timothy forgot to run it by you before approving it this time. What were they thinking? I mean, it even says on the front page: "News For jmcmunn. Stuff that matters (to jmcmunn)."
Only how do I see how terrible slashdot is. All those people that complain about every single article are so right. I guess the only thing to do now is make empty threats about leaving then reloading every five minutes to see if anyone responded.
Actually, I figure the cops will find him in a pool of blood with a Bat'leH sticking out of his chest. His article is an insult to the Klingon Empire.
Speaking of, I read an article in Inside Kung Fu about people desgining weapons forms for the Bat'leH. The senior monk at the Shaolin Temple even commented on it as an interesting example of a modern martial arts weapon. The only thing is most people create hard-style kata when the creator of the weapon envisioned it used in a more flowing style, like Tai Chi sword. Since I'm partial to kung fu anyway, I have to agree.
Originally, the Klingons were the Russians and the Romulans were the Chinese, I believe. They changed it around in later series. The different races represented concepts more than countries.
Cue irresponsible speculation: one of the things the dream cut-off switch (of the motor cortex) might do is allow us a way to rehearse or practice complex motions and interactions while sleeping, as a way of cementing our development of those habits.
Yeah, that has a lot to do with it. Research is currently showing that the whole purpose of sleep is to process and sort information gained during the day. Without sleep we wouldn't be able to learn things.
Cliché characters, no plot whatsoever, banal tagline dialogues and total lack of ideas, meaning and conflict. There are some visually stunning, stylish, yet intelligent and thought-provocative movies out there. Why settle for this teenage-dream kind of stuff?
Because I like to see more than two movies a year, maybe? Even then, I'd still watch comic book movies. I'm a big fan of martial arts movies, and as much as I love Hero and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, they don't stand anywhere near Jackie Chan in Drunken Master II. Some movies don't try to be works of art, just entertaining, fun stories, and by keeping their pretensions low they often end up connecting to the viewer on a more fundamental level. Anyway, Batman is a wonderful character archetype, especially among geeks, and I love to see how he is portrayed in different media.
It reminds me, I have some friends who spend all their time going over the deep meanings and messages of different musicians. They're go on and on about so-and-so evocatively portraying society through the eyes of whatever, and how this song is about that aspect of the human condition. Personally, I just like stuff that sounds good. Hell, half the music I listen to is in languages I don't even understand. No idea what any of it means, but it's just good music.
Of course, this might be more like my friend who won't listen to any band that gets played on the radio and brings up bands only he's ever heard of to show how hip and cultured he is. The funny thing is that he doesn't actually appreciate music so much as the feeling that he's superior to your regular bourgeoisie. There are a lot of independent film people that seem to think the same way.
Anyway, the point is that I like movies that I like. They might be visually stunning, they might address deep philosophical questions, or they might have a bunch of explosions and people kicking each other in the head. They go for different things, and as long as I approach them on the level that they're presented, there's no reason I can't enjoy both.