What is it with people and that "overthrow the government" thing. If your government has the intelligence capabilities (I'm obviously not talking IQ here) to stop isolated terrorist cells, then it has the capability to stop a revolution in it's tracks. Just because you have a bunch of assult rifles in your basement doesn't mean you can overthrow your government.
Even if it came to an actual fight, your military has a lot more than just guns at its disposal. Considering what they can do against an actual army, I'd speculate they could dismantle even a sizable uprising without taking many casualties.
I really think your best bet is keeping your government from ever being in the position to get out of control.
As for criminals, well, we have police here. Keeping us safe is what they do, and I'm happier with them holding the weapons and not just any idiot on the street. Shooting a gun is easy. Knowing when to shoot is the key...
I'm not an expert, but isn't the solar radiation that falls on the desert mostly reflected back? I don't know how big an effect it would have, but it seems that if you covered large portions of a desert area with energy absorbing panels it could alter the local climate significantly. If solar panels store and radiate heat (I don't know if they do or don't) then the night time temperature would go up. Alternatively, if they don't, it could be very cold at night.
Math is definitely important for a generic computer science course, but I think the real problem lies in the fact you CAN NOT train just anyone to be a good programmer. They have to have a genuine interest in the field, have a good logical mind, and preferably not have much interest in doing anything else with their life for the next 10 years...
I started in computer science in 1995, but because I was working full time I only did a few courses a year. This allowed me to see multiple generations of people going through the first and second year "programming" courses. To be polite, the quality of individuals did not improve as the profession became known as a good way to make money. And, in true university fashion, the difficulty of the courses progressively declined. In my third year software engineering course (probably 2001-2002) we didn't have to complete the final project because someone (I can only assume they were well connected) complained that it was too hard to get it done and study for final exams at the same time.
"Except and unless those laws are wrong, then we and they have an obligation to change or violate them. You won't see a change though unless someone is willing to violate them."
Not that I support the parent post 100%, but if you are talking about laws that are wrong, you don't have to look all the way to China to find some.
I wrote a letter to the people responsible for the recordable media tax (I am Canadian) and their response was that the tax was NOT to cover pirated media, but to cover our right to make a legal backup copy of the music.
Either way, some of the money I pay for the blank CDs I purchase and deliver my products on goes to the RIAA, and I take serious offense to that.
I use it in online training courses. It is very useful to be able to tie the media (audio/video) and interactivity together on a single page. It is also (IMO) a requirement to keep the course content and engine logic as two interchangeable components. The eLearning industry has some standards, but they aren't widespread enough that I can afford to tie a particular course to a particular technology.
A lot of the stuff I do could be replicated in an AJAX type environment, but that would be more work for me and ultimately give me less control over the final product (I've seen courseware delivery engines built on AJAX, and they generally look terrible).
Note that I currently develop to Flash Player 6, and stay behind the current version to maintain cross-platform compatibility.
I can understand why some people dislike flash, but it has many legitimate uses.
I use flash extensively in my work, and it has to be fully 508 compliant for some of my clients. It supports keyboard navigation, screen readers, etc. The difference is you have to explicitly build that support in, or the files will (in my experience) behave rather poorly (worse than HTML that is).
Flash can also be very fast because you can control individual elements. You can choose download order, intelligently pre-load components, and automatically gauge bandwidth (and thus choose appropriate media without user intervention). It supports OO style programming (I don't know if I'd call it full OO yet, but I haven't looked at version 9 much...) and is fairly easy to work with (there are some quirks...)
It has compatibility issues, in that not everyone can see it. On the plus side, you know that it will behave the same way for everyone who can see it. A trade off I'm personally willing to live with.
There are many places where it is NOT useful but it is used anyway, but you really can't blame that on Flash. I don't require it on anything directly exposed to the public, but once a user logs in to one of my sites it is almost always a requirement.
And then the smart become the stupid. I fail to see how this would help. The one good thing about bullying is that it allows the people who will eventually end up with the power to know what it feels like.
I know a lot of smart people with very little empathy, and we all know where that leads.
I think this is one of the reasons the home schooled children I know are better socialized than the ones who go to school. The home schooled kids spend a lot more time with their parents, their parent's friends, etc. Most of the kids I know I meet through the community theatre group. The home schooled kids are consistantly more mature, better behaved, and appear outwardly to be more intelligent and intependent. I blame it on them being exposed to the real world, and working with and as adults at real tasks. You can hardly compare some makework group exercise in school to volunteer work with good quality adult role models.
If someone knows their stuff I don't care what their education is. I've had high school co-op students outperform college graduates many times over. As a programmer, problem solving skills are more important than rote memorization, and I want self-motivated people who can take a task and do it without my holding their hand. A piece of paper says very little about these qualities.
I'm a high school dropout. I rarely went to class and never did homework or studied; I mostly smoked pot, drank, and got in trouble a lot. That had nothing to do with my ability, just the wrong person in the wrong situation. I can guarantee I would have done better in an online environment, and looked for one at the time. Of course I was the only high school student I knew with internet access, and the only courses I could find were university level...
I did go to University after a year off, and did much better than a lot of the high scoring high school students. I have a degree, but never did finish high school. My story may be a little unusual, but I'm far from alone. I got a break because I found a job that I could excel at, many people I know were never that lucky, and their talent wastes away in dead end jobs to this day.
Slashdot Mirror
High resolution porn? No wait, I take it back!
Fair enough.
Good logic. Buy much from China lately?
What is it with people and that "overthrow the government" thing. If your government has the intelligence capabilities (I'm obviously not talking IQ here) to stop isolated terrorist cells, then it has the capability to stop a revolution in it's tracks. Just because you have a bunch of assult rifles in your basement doesn't mean you can overthrow your government.
Even if it came to an actual fight, your military has a lot more than just guns at its disposal. Considering what they can do against an actual army, I'd speculate they could dismantle even a sizable uprising without taking many casualties.
I really think your best bet is keeping your government from ever being in the position to get out of control.
As for criminals, well, we have police here. Keeping us safe is what they do, and I'm happier with them holding the weapons and not just any idiot on the street. Shooting a gun is easy. Knowing when to shoot is the key...
I'm not an expert, but isn't the solar radiation that falls on the desert mostly reflected back? I don't know how big an effect it would have, but it seems that if you covered large portions of a desert area with energy absorbing panels it could alter the local climate significantly. If solar panels store and radiate heat (I don't know if they do or don't) then the night time temperature would go up. Alternatively, if they don't, it could be very cold at night.
Math is definitely important for a generic computer science course, but I think the real problem lies in the fact you CAN NOT train just anyone to be a good programmer. They have to have a genuine interest in the field, have a good logical mind, and preferably not have much interest in doing anything else with their life for the next 10 years...
I started in computer science in 1995, but because I was working full time I only did a few courses a year. This allowed me to see multiple generations of people going through the first and second year "programming" courses. To be polite, the quality of individuals did not improve as the profession became known as a good way to make money. And, in true university fashion, the difficulty of the courses progressively declined. In my third year software engineering course (probably 2001-2002) we didn't have to complete the final project because someone (I can only assume they were well connected) complained that it was too hard to get it done and study for final exams at the same time.
"Except and unless those laws are wrong, then we and they have an obligation to change or violate them. You won't see a change though unless someone is willing to violate them."
Not that I support the parent post 100%, but if you are talking about laws that are wrong, you don't have to look all the way to China to find some.
I wrote a letter to the people responsible for the recordable media tax (I am Canadian) and their response was that the tax was NOT to cover pirated media, but to cover our right to make a legal backup copy of the music.
Either way, some of the money I pay for the blank CDs I purchase and deliver my products on goes to the RIAA, and I take serious offense to that.
I use it in online training courses. It is very useful to be able to tie the media (audio/video) and interactivity together on a single page. It is also (IMO) a requirement to keep the course content and engine logic as two interchangeable components. The eLearning industry has some standards, but they aren't widespread enough that I can afford to tie a particular course to a particular technology. A lot of the stuff I do could be replicated in an AJAX type environment, but that would be more work for me and ultimately give me less control over the final product (I've seen courseware delivery engines built on AJAX, and they generally look terrible). Note that I currently develop to Flash Player 6, and stay behind the current version to maintain cross-platform compatibility.
I can understand why some people dislike flash, but it has many legitimate uses.
I use flash extensively in my work, and it has to be fully 508 compliant for some of my clients. It supports keyboard navigation, screen readers, etc. The difference is you have to explicitly build that support in, or the files will (in my experience) behave rather poorly (worse than HTML that is).
Flash can also be very fast because you can control individual elements. You can choose download order, intelligently pre-load components, and automatically gauge bandwidth (and thus choose appropriate media without user intervention). It supports OO style programming (I don't know if I'd call it full OO yet, but I haven't looked at version 9 much...) and is fairly easy to work with (there are some quirks...)
It has compatibility issues, in that not everyone can see it. On the plus side, you know that it will behave the same way for everyone who can see it. A trade off I'm personally willing to live with.
There are many places where it is NOT useful but it is used anyway, but you really can't blame that on Flash. I don't require it on anything directly exposed to the public, but once a user logs in to one of my sites it is almost always a requirement.
And then the smart become the stupid. I fail to see how this would help. The one good thing about bullying is that it allows the people who will eventually end up with the power to know what it feels like.
I know a lot of smart people with very little empathy, and we all know where that leads.
I think this is one of the reasons the home schooled children I know are better socialized than the ones who go to school. The home schooled kids spend a lot more time with their parents, their parent's friends, etc. Most of the kids I know I meet through the community theatre group. The home schooled kids are consistantly more mature, better behaved, and appear outwardly to be more intelligent and intependent. I blame it on them being exposed to the real world, and working with and as adults at real tasks. You can hardly compare some makework group exercise in school to volunteer work with good quality adult role models.
I can't claim to have experienced this exactly, but I can tell you right now, my parents had to pull me away from educational games when I was a kid.
Now maybe these classes aren't as interesting as Robot Odyssey, but that isn't a fault of the medium.
If someone knows their stuff I don't care what their education is. I've had high school co-op students outperform college graduates many times over. As a programmer, problem solving skills are more important than rote memorization, and I want self-motivated people who can take a task and do it without my holding their hand. A piece of paper says very little about these qualities.
I'm a high school dropout. I rarely went to class and never did homework or studied; I mostly smoked pot, drank, and got in trouble a lot. That had nothing to do with my ability, just the wrong person in the wrong situation. I can guarantee I would have done better in an online environment, and looked for one at the time. Of course I was the only high school student I knew with internet access, and the only courses I could find were university level...
I did go to University after a year off, and did much better than a lot of the high scoring high school students. I have a degree, but never did finish high school. My story may be a little unusual, but I'm far from alone. I got a break because I found a job that I could excel at, many people I know were never that lucky, and their talent wastes away in dead end jobs to this day.