Sure. But having it integrated like that takes the hassles out of connecting to it, and eliminates the worry of hax0rz hax0ring your stuff. Last time I tried to deal with bluetooth was a huge pain, although I understand it's a lot easier in these, our modern times. Of course, it introduces whole new hassles of having to have the laptop nearby. But yeah, it seems like in general, if it doesn't add more than, say, $2-300 to the price of a laptop and if works well, I'd spring for it.
> One, SAT tests are normally taken as early as 9th grade. P(ractice)SATs can be taken as early as the 5th grade.
Weird. Back when I was in school, it was PSATs in 9th or 10th (can't remember) and SATs in 12th, sometime early. Now apparently there's 7th grade SATs and lord knows what.
> Two, how do you write a decent essay when whatever you say will ultimately boil down to "because I said so"?
You're just not getting it. The essay is to demonstrate that you can make your point clearly, not to give the 'right' answer to a question, because the questions have no 'right' answers. No one cares what your position is, they care that you elucidate it well.
I'm done with this conversation. If you don't get it, you're just not going to. If you still have your SATs coming up, get help from someone else.
> Jesus, thats the same argument going on over the use of torture today, you expect a grade school student to answer that
First of all, no, I expect a graduting high school student to answer that.
Second of all, what I expect you to do is simply write a decent essay. What is so fucking difficult about the idea that your ANSWER doesn't matter, it's your EXPOSITION that matters. Shit. If the responses I got to my top post are any indication of the general state of writing talent on the internet, it's no goddamn wonder so many bloggers failed the goddamn test. No one seems to understand that simple fact. No one grading that test actually thinks you're going to solve a dilemma that has plagued mankind for millenia. They just expect you to take a position and communicate your ideas clearly and concisely. They don't care what the actual ideas are.
> 25 years ago, my parents didn't have monitoring tools to record phone calls.
Neither did mine, but when my sister started having problems, they took away the phone in her room and made her talk to her friends downstairs in the living room. And yeah, they checked up on her. When she said she was going to Debbie's house for a sleepover, they called Debbie's parents to verify that she was, in fact, at Debbie's house. Just because they couldn't tape a keylogger to her forehead doesn't mean that they weren't monitoring her.
I'm not saying that monitoring your child 24/7 is a good idea - or even possible, even with these internets they have nowadays. I'm just reacting to what I percieve as a naive attitude commonly espoused in this thread: that you can simply talk to and trust children all the time and that if you 'just' maintain an open and honest relationship with your child that everything will be sunshine and flowers. The other guy responding to my post seems to think that I'm misreading this attitude, and it's possible that I am. But I don't think so.
> So you want people to write an essay with no right answer while staying on topic? Thats like asking which religion is the correct religion.
Yeah. So? All they're asking for is a clear assertion of whatever opinion you happen to hold. They're grading how you say it, not what you say. The essay tests not your knowledge but your ability to communicate that knowledge. That's why the essay topics are always something incredibly broad, like "Take a position and justify it on the statement 'the ends justify the means.'" There is no right answer, but anyone ought to be able to rouse up enough gumption to think of decent arguments on either side - certainly enough to round out a dinky SAT essay.
> Oh and again, this test was done with a 20 minute time limit. No research. No Google.
Just how do you expect Google to help you out on the subject of "your opinion on the idea that struggle is a more important measure of success than accomplishment?"
> No warning beforehand on the topic.
Well, duh. Do most tests you take tell you what the questions will be the week before?
> No proofreading afterwards. No spell check. And this is originally a test for grade school students.
Right. And those grade school students (actually, graduating from high school, but whatever) seemed to do just fine.
Of course it has no right answer. That's why they were asked to give their opinion on it.
I fail to see why it's so wrong to ask someone to write a simple goddamn essay on a simple goddamn topic and expect them to... you know, stay on the goddamn topic. If I ask you about Subject A, I don't care to hear about Subject R. It's a pretty simple idea.
yep. It's a really good name - relatively descriptive (consumers aren't going to make a big fuss over whether a DOF actually technically constitutes an axis or not), it's got the marketing-friendly 'x's, and it's got symmetry. As a name goes, it's a damn fine one. Doesn't make the platform any more attractive, but it's a good name.
> It doesn't delight them to have a new, insightful, or personal spin on things.
The same can be said for TAs, as you will no doubt soon find out. The sad fact is that until you get farther along, and then only if you're in a field that rewards creative writing, you will do far, far better by sticking to formulaic "intro, 3 points of proof, conclusion"-type papers that state your position so clearly you can read it 40 feet away than you will by putting your 'personal spin' on things, because no one is interested in your personal spin on things - they're interested in seeing whether you can make yourself understood. After that's accomplished, then you get to put your personal spin on things, and people will pay attention.
the point, which you apparently missed, was that as a whole the bloggers either elected not to or were unable to stay on-topic. If you can't answer a simple, direct question on a test then you really deserve to fail.
> Therefore, it's insane to make serious literary criticisms on these writers [...]
By taking the test (which was voluntary) it seems to me that it would indicate an acceptance that they were being graded. If they can't write a simple essay that will please the graders, I'm sorry but I don't think much of their writing skills. Creativity is wonderful, but if you're only capable of writing something inspiring, or incapable of following simple rules, you're just not much of a writer.
> If you ask someone their opinion on something, of course people are going to not going to follow directions and write 'whatever they actually felt like'.
No. If you ask someone their opionion on Subject X, it's not unreasonable to expect them to tell you their position on Subject X, whatever that may be. What is unreasonable is for people to turn in a paper detailing their opionons on Subject Y, why they think asking their opionon of Subject D would have been a more interesting question, and what they had for breakfast. And that's apparently what a large contingent of them did.
For instance:
Good: Q: What's your opinion on the best text editor? A: vi, duh.
Bad: Q: What's your opinion on the best text editor? A: Who cares? You know what I really like? Bavarian Chocolate cake.
did you even read the article? The submitted essays tended to drift and not answer the question directly or at all. Whatever your opinion is about a topic is, if you can't follow simple directions, you get graded down.
Slashdot Mirror
all the GoddamnWords you PossiblyCan!
I don't think they're available. I mean, they're USMC training aids. Generally they don't share that stuff.
it's easy to tell people to 'just live with it' when you're not the guy who has to actually, you know, live with it.
Or audible. Most windmills get pretty noisy. I'd kick up a fuss if someone put one too close to me.
Sure. But having it integrated like that takes the hassles out of connecting to it, and eliminates the worry of hax0rz hax0ring your stuff. Last time I tried to deal with bluetooth was a huge pain, although I understand it's a lot easier in these, our modern times. Of course, it introduces whole new hassles of having to have the laptop nearby. But yeah, it seems like in general, if it doesn't add more than, say, $2-300 to the price of a laptop and if works well, I'd spring for it.
> Even if they wanted to tie it directly to the PCI bus, it would be a trivial mod.
I guess your idea of 'trivial' and mine are pretty different.
I stand by my opinion - a little built-in device that can access a sleeping laptops hardware is nifty.
> It's a PDA.
f
Well, no, because it can access the laptops hardware, at least when the laptop isn't actually powered down.
http://www.portalplayer.com/preface/whitepaper.pd
Reading is FUN-damental!
I wouldn't mind having a decent interface to my mp3player that's easy to use while the laptop is closed.
Also being able to scan for wifi coverage without walking around with the laptop open like an idiot would be a nice change.
Overall, seems like a good idea.
> One, SAT tests are normally taken as early as 9th grade. P(ractice)SATs can be taken as early as the 5th grade.
Weird. Back when I was in school, it was PSATs in 9th or 10th (can't remember) and SATs in 12th, sometime early. Now apparently there's 7th grade SATs and lord knows what.
> Two, how do you write a decent essay when whatever you say will ultimately boil down to "because I said so"?
You're just not getting it. The essay is to demonstrate that you can make your point clearly, not to give the 'right' answer to a question, because the questions have no 'right' answers. No one cares what your position is, they care that you elucidate it well.
I'm done with this conversation. If you don't get it, you're just not going to. If you still have your SATs coming up, get help from someone else.
> Jesus, thats the same argument going on over the use of torture today, you expect a grade school student to answer that
First of all, no, I expect a graduting high school student to answer that.
Second of all, what I expect you to do is simply write a decent essay. What is so fucking difficult about the idea that your ANSWER doesn't matter, it's your EXPOSITION that matters. Shit. If the responses I got to my top post are any indication of the general state of writing talent on the internet, it's no goddamn wonder so many bloggers failed the goddamn test. No one seems to understand that simple fact. No one grading that test actually thinks you're going to solve a dilemma that has plagued mankind for millenia. They just expect you to take a position and communicate your ideas clearly and concisely. They don't care what the actual ideas are.
> 25 years ago, my parents didn't have monitoring tools to record phone calls.
Neither did mine, but when my sister started having problems, they took away the phone in her room and made her talk to her friends downstairs in the living room. And yeah, they checked up on her. When she said she was going to Debbie's house for a sleepover, they called Debbie's parents to verify that she was, in fact, at Debbie's house. Just because they couldn't tape a keylogger to her forehead doesn't mean that they weren't monitoring her.
I'm not saying that monitoring your child 24/7 is a good idea - or even possible, even with these internets they have nowadays. I'm just reacting to what I percieve as a naive attitude commonly espoused in this thread: that you can simply talk to and trust children all the time and that if you 'just' maintain an open and honest relationship with your child that everything will be sunshine and flowers. The other guy responding to my post seems to think that I'm misreading this attitude, and it's possible that I am. But I don't think so.
Seems like that would be the case. Plus, we're storing it for future generations that might have some use for highly processed radioactive material.
> would this be causing massive tumors or something?
If it did, MRI machines would probably not be used quite so much.
> the satellites would be engineered to withstand the g-forces encountered (2,000 g)
That'sa lotta g, my friend.
> So you want people to write an essay with no right answer while staying on topic? Thats like asking which religion is the correct religion.
Yeah. So? All they're asking for is a clear assertion of whatever opinion you happen to hold. They're grading how you say it, not what you say. The essay tests not your knowledge but your ability to communicate that knowledge. That's why the essay topics are always something incredibly broad, like "Take a position and justify it on the statement 'the ends justify the means.'" There is no right answer, but anyone ought to be able to rouse up enough gumption to think of decent arguments on either side - certainly enough to round out a dinky SAT essay.
> Oh and again, this test was done with a 20 minute time limit. No research. No Google.
Just how do you expect Google to help you out on the subject of "your opinion on the idea that struggle is a more important measure of success than accomplishment?"
> No warning beforehand on the topic.
Well, duh. Do most tests you take tell you what the questions will be the week before?
> No proofreading afterwards. No spell check. And this is originally a test for grade school students.
Right. And those grade school students (actually, graduating from high school, but whatever) seemed to do just fine.
> Who are these people?
Mom, dad, meet BadAnalogyGuy. BadAnalogyGuy, this is Marty and Doris.
Of course it has no right answer. That's why they were asked to give their opinion on it.
... you know, stay on the goddamn topic. If I ask you about Subject A, I don't care to hear about Subject R. It's a pretty simple idea.
I fail to see why it's so wrong to ask someone to write a simple goddamn essay on a simple goddamn topic and expect them to
any of them. COTS = Commercial Off The Shelf.
yep. It's a really good name - relatively descriptive (consumers aren't going to make a big fuss over whether a DOF actually technically constitutes an axis or not), it's got the marketing-friendly 'x's, and it's got symmetry. As a name goes, it's a damn fine one. Doesn't make the platform any more attractive, but it's a good name.
Also:
> It doesn't delight them to have a new, insightful, or personal spin on things.
The same can be said for TAs, as you will no doubt soon find out. The sad fact is that until you get farther along, and then only if you're in a field that rewards creative writing, you will do far, far better by sticking to formulaic "intro, 3 points of proof, conclusion"-type papers that state your position so clearly you can read it 40 feet away than you will by putting your 'personal spin' on things, because no one is interested in your personal spin on things - they're interested in seeing whether you can make yourself understood. After that's accomplished, then you get to put your personal spin on things, and people will pay attention.
the point, which you apparently missed, was that as a whole the bloggers either elected not to or were unable to stay on-topic. If you can't answer a simple, direct question on a test then you really deserve to fail.
> It's only about writing to the test.
Agreed. This is kind of obvious.
> Therefore, it's insane to make serious literary criticisms on these writers [...]
By taking the test (which was voluntary) it seems to me that it would indicate an acceptance that they were being graded. If they can't write a simple essay that will please the graders, I'm sorry but I don't think much of their writing skills. Creativity is wonderful, but if you're only capable of writing something inspiring, or incapable of following simple rules, you're just not much of a writer.
let me restate that.
> If you ask someone their opinion on something, of course people are going to not going to follow directions and write 'whatever they actually felt like'.
No. If you ask someone their opionion on Subject X, it's not unreasonable to expect them to tell you their position on Subject X, whatever that may be. What is unreasonable is for people to turn in a paper detailing their opionons on Subject Y, why they think asking their opionon of Subject D would have been a more interesting question, and what they had for breakfast. And that's apparently what a large contingent of them did.
For instance:
Good:
Q: What's your opinion on the best text editor?
A: vi, duh.
Bad:
Q: What's your opinion on the best text editor?
A: Who cares? You know what I really like? Bavarian Chocolate cake.
did you even read the article? The submitted essays tended to drift and not answer the question directly or at all. Whatever your opinion is about a topic is, if you can't follow simple directions, you get graded down.
I'm surprised you're that confident in assessing the hidden motivations of an AC.