SNAP! is a visual editor that can put together some simple-to-moderately-complex programs. I'm surprised no one has cited it as an example of the convenience / drawbacks of a visual editor. It can be hooked up to all kinds of things, including mindstorms, wiimotes, and Arduino. I've only seen it used standalone for intro-level CS instruction, but it does seem to have some interesting uses.
I don't think this is a real problem though -- the text of actual code isn't a barrier to actual coders...
Look, if you thought that workload was hard, you are not really preparing yourself well for a real education. When I shopped my Bachelor's from UofPxh around, I was quite pleased with the number of recruiting pitches I got for my MBA prospects, one of which I took. In almost any industry, college gives you the basic things you need to learn further, knowing that for the mast majority, "further" will be on the job.
In any case, my degree took me from $14.20 an hour to $28.00 / hr in about six months...not all by itself, of course, but with a pretty significant role.
"Soldiers can't be charged with conduct unbecoming for bad behavior unless they are in uniform, so why should it be different?"
Absolutely, 100% wrong. They can. The fact that the individual works for a public service and not a private corporation is actually worse for their case, not better for it.
The only thing you've proven is that your neighbors are idiots. A Windows machine is so ridiculously easy to run at the user level -- flawlessly -- that it's not even funny. Is it the cheapest option? No. Does it come in a shiny case and cost $400 more than the same hardware in a grey box? No. But to make it sound like Microsoft somehow puts all those viruses on your neighbor's computer is disingenious at best. It's like blaming Chevy for the damage caused to a car in a demolition derby.
I've run an MS box to game with for years. I've never once needed to go to the shop, remain virus free just using the basic Antivir client + Spybot S&D (both free), and reboot my computer exactly once a month on Patch Tuesday. Sure, all I do with it is write papers for school and play games, but the cost difference to the user on the desktop is pretty minute.
Any non-terrible biometric scanner will scan for a pulse while it is reading data points. While this is not so difficult to simulate with a finger, it's relatively difficult to simulate with an eye. For a bad guy, there are probably much easier ways of compromising security if they have the unlimited physical access they would need to chop up body parts and use those parts to bypass the scanner.
Really the OP just needs to take off his tinfoil hat - or leave it on, understanding that he won't be getting a lot of government work that way.
Really? You aren't aware of any for Linux/BSD? Not a single one? I sure hope you don't work in the security industry in any way, shape, or fashion...or if you do, you at least don't service my company or any of its clients.
No. The whole point of non-lethal force is not to act in place of lethal force. The point of non-lethal force is to act along the continuum of force, gradually responding to physical resistance until the subject de-escalates into cooperation.
By your reasoning, a police officer who chooses to use a wristlock to subdue an agitated subject during a domestic violence call is no different than a police officer who shoots said suspect with a firearm. That's just patently ridiculous, and a statement of absolutism I hope you would care to rethink.
Ignoring the parts of a post that are inconveniently and provably true...check.
Obvious lack of legal understanding...check.
Name-calling without the slightest shred of evidence (with bonus points for self-contradiction)...check.
You, sir, should run for Congress! You'd fit right in.
Your argument from the point of waste suffers from a number of fallacies in this case. If the government deduces that there is no possible conclusion reached through the bidding process than the one it has selected, then holding the bidding process will only add to government waste -- the very thing you are arguing to prevent.
When the U.S. military started the off-the-shelf program and allowed less bidding and more self-determination, the days of the $300 hammer ended. Sometimes removing the bidding process is a good and logical thing.
You obviously don't live in the area or drive on the 40th street overpass. I do. I don't work for Microsoft, and I would use that road several times per month just in the course of travelling to various entertainment venues.
What we have here is a non-story about a project that is useful, estimated to cost between 15-36M, and which Microsoft has already dropped $11M on. Show me how many Seattle businesses are willing to put extra cash of their own (in addition to tax base they already supply) on the line to dig their fancy tunnel.
Oh yeah, the only people in Seattle that regularly write checks for public works are retired Microsoft employees...weird.
That's true. Fortunately for all of us here in Redmond, we have a representative republic in which we vote on the people who make these decisions. If the majority of stakeholders felt the way you do and elected a city council that opposed growth, then you wouldn't get the highway.
Since D.C. residents got the vote, I think you would be hard pressed to find many places in the U.S. anymore that are without representation. Just because your representation doesn't win all of the time, or because your representation represents the majority of the area you live in and not your personal views, doesn't make it tyranny.
This game has enough layers of complexity to keep the recipient entertained for quite some time, and they can engineer magma and water systems while watching their dwarves stubbornly not do what they want them to.
http://www.bay12games.com/
While weight is one significant drawback of Ni-MH, another that you fail to mention is shelf life. While the performance is somewhat close when you use either one fresh off the charger, charge bleeds from Ni-MH much faster than Li-ion. I'm speaking from experience in an environment where I maintain a stock of 120+ Ni-MH and 50ish Li-ions that are used in the same systems, man-portable radios which transmit at 5W on max power. Ni-MH fresh off the charger are typically good for 8-12 hours, while Li-ion last 12-18 hours. The other effect we've noticed is that in cold (below 32F) or hot (above 125F) environments, Ni-MH lose their charge faster than Li-ion, though that is anecdotal evidence, while the bleed time is supplied with each shipment of batteries on a few pages of graphs from some lab. Our operators sleep with their spare batteries in their sleeping bags when it's cold to help them last longer.
As unpopular as any kind of ground strike other than laser-guided has become politically, I have to wonder why the UK or the US would continue to waste money on these machines. They are not as stealthy as the current F-117, which is apparently all that will be in use for some time to come. Close air support is no longer granted unless the target is in a location which can absolutely guarantee no collateral damage. This means that CAS is no longer granted. If you are lucky you might get a helo with a chaingun.
What a waste of money from the budget of both countries.
Currently, a bunch of poor, under-educated fighters are beating the U.S. military using propane tanks, styrofoam, gasoline, and an abudnant supply of military ordinance. Most of them are not residents of the country they are doing this in; they are operatives from foreign countries who have been trained on how to establish support from the locals.
One of their greatest weaknesses is that despite the fact that the country they operate in was, until recently, the 4th most heavily armed country in the world, they have difficulty in aquiring military-grade munitions. Thankfully, they are turning more and more to homemade explosives, indicating that the supply of military-grade is dwindling. I say thankfully because this is my second tour, and it indicates that my third will not be as violent as the first two.
If you think the U.S. military is invincible you are wrong. If you think that it would be very very hard to beat without munitions, you would be right. Simply choose between legal posession of firearms (which is a habit less dangerous than legal posession of cars, swimming pools, or alcohol) versus the ability of your government to oppress you at any time with no recourse of any kind.
But now what will all of the brick and mortar stores do? When you place an online order and they require you to create an "account" using your e-mail, where will all the spam go? Will it, having nowhere to go, return upon itself, imploding into a spamularity, sucking all nearby email inside forever? The humanity!
...nor do you receive a decade in the states just for smoking it, unless you get caught many, many, many times. While constantly getting hassled by police is pretty annoying, they don't set up task forces or collaborate with the DEA to bust your average pothead.
Yes, Yes, and no, they are not allowed to disinvite a student from class. Welcome to the modern American public school system: if you expel a student, expect a lawsuit. Since the cost of going to court is going to ruin your already ridiculously underfunded budget, as a school administrator you will not do ANYTHING that might put you in danger of that. And since most parents are completely unable to raise civil children, very little learning takes place in school.
Putting little Johnny's "self-esteem" at the top of the priority list and reinforcing that judgement with lawsuits is the disease of the public school system. Worse, it's a discredit to Johnny, who thinks respect should be automatic. No matter what the hippies tell you, respect is only gotten one way: by earning it.
I would have graduated from college in 2002 if I hadn't gotten bored and quit, opting for the military instead. I left with a good GPA and without financial duress; I just wanted to travel and escape the boredom of higher education. When my professors began calling roll in college, I realized American education was doomed.
That being said, I work or have worked with many, many people. One of them is now 25. He works a blue collar job. He clears 110k a year.
For some reason, America doesn't like to tell people that changing collar color doesn't necessarily change wage brackets. For some reason, we try to force-feed to every kid in school that college is the only way. Then we wonder why all the labor is heading overseas...
If you are looking for something that upscales DVD to 1080p, the PS3 is a pretty bad choice, because it does not. This is one of the features being dogged quite a bit by reviewers. However, that still doesn't stop it from being the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there. And hey, last I heard they were at 74 titles and adding ~5 a week...
Actually, not much is, when it comes to an insurgency. By refusing to wear a uniform and trying to blend in with a civilian populace, the geneva convention actually explicitly states that they lose most of their protections under it.
For example, a POW under the convention must be paid for any labor they are compelled to do; be forced to work no longer hours than a standard work-week; be allowed to send out letters; be allowed one book in addition to one holy book such as the bible or koran; and a laundry list of other things.
A captured insurgent does not rate POW status, however. The only protection given is that they may not be treated in a "cruel and unusual" manner. Now, the methods being used are certainly open to debate as to whether or not they are cruel and unusual, but because this is an opinion and there is no actual list of what is permissable, the waters are muddied.
There's nothing "illegal" about this war. As someone who is on their second trip over, having actually seen how happy 95% of the populace is that we're here, I'm glad to be here as well. The media's assertion that Iraqis do not like us is about as true as saying that the Kuwaitis didn't like us back in DS/DS.
This is exactly what happened to me. I've installed Redhat, Slack, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Debian. 0 of these were able to install properly on all of my hardware, which was pretty straightforward: AMD Thunderbird 700, MSI mobo, PC3200 ram, Seagate IDE harddisk, Plextor DVD burner, ATI 9600 Pro. I literally messed around with that machine for over a month. Asking questions about hardware on linux forums usually resulted in a) being called a n00b or b) being completely ignored. I later tried to set up Debian on this machine again because debian had the easiest install of all the distros I tried, and couldn't get LAMP working; I had apache & php running, I had mySQL running, but I couldn't get the two to talk. Never got a single answer on forums or on IRC, not even someone who would take the time to listen to what was going on.
Experiences like that drive me back to windows. I've only had one install problems with windows xp; my latest system has a 4-disk SATA RAID array, and I didn't buy a floppy drive for it. After scratching my head (I had the raid drivers on a CD; why oh why would the installer demand a floppy), I googled my problem, slipstreamed a new install CD and had my system up, with a delay of maybe 30 minutes.
Linux seems like it could be a lot of fun and very powerful. After spending 3 years programming, 2 of which were spent on active server pages & SQL 7.0, I feel like I would be expanding my abilities as a programmer by quite a bit by learning how to do the same thing using free software on a linux server. But the response I've received several times from the community makes me not want to use it at all.:/
That post was a nice jaunt down fantasy road. Having actually read both judgements against microsoft (you can too at www.microsoft-antitrust.org), there's nothing in there that describes any of the activity you list above as mandatory. They don't have to share money with FF and they are certainly allowed to bundle IE and FF together. They don't have to be treated exactly the same at all; in fact, there's a whole page dedicated to how they DON'T have to be in the judgement. That is, of course, if you are considering the IE team as an OEM to the Windows team, which I assume you are; if you aren't, then NONE of the judgement applies to this situation even a little.
IE competes on the ground it was written to compete on: Microsoft's ground. FF competes on that ground, too. Noone is making them. They can certainly write their own "ground." Capitalism would then decide.
A more accurate portrayal of the problem is oligopoly the mainstream PC manufacturers create by force-installing windows on each and every PC they sell without giving users an option to take anything else. You really have to kick and scream to get an HP with no OS, for example...
Slashdot Mirror
SNAP! is a visual editor that can put together some simple-to-moderately-complex programs. I'm surprised no one has cited it as an example of the convenience / drawbacks of a visual editor. It can be hooked up to all kinds of things, including mindstorms, wiimotes, and Arduino. I've only seen it used standalone for intro-level CS instruction, but it does seem to have some interesting uses. I don't think this is a real problem though -- the text of actual code isn't a barrier to actual coders...
Look, if you thought that workload was hard, you are not really preparing yourself well for a real education. When I shopped my Bachelor's from UofPxh around, I was quite pleased with the number of recruiting pitches I got for my MBA prospects, one of which I took. In almost any industry, college gives you the basic things you need to learn further, knowing that for the mast majority, "further" will be on the job. In any case, my degree took me from $14.20 an hour to $28.00 / hr in about six months...not all by itself, of course, but with a pretty significant role.
"Soldiers can't be charged with conduct unbecoming for bad behavior unless they are in uniform, so why should it be different?"
Absolutely, 100% wrong. They can. The fact that the individual works for a public service and not a private corporation is actually worse for their case, not better for it.
The only thing you've proven is that your neighbors are idiots. A Windows machine is so ridiculously easy to run at the user level -- flawlessly -- that it's not even funny. Is it the cheapest option? No. Does it come in a shiny case and cost $400 more than the same hardware in a grey box? No. But to make it sound like Microsoft somehow puts all those viruses on your neighbor's computer is disingenious at best. It's like blaming Chevy for the damage caused to a car in a demolition derby. I've run an MS box to game with for years. I've never once needed to go to the shop, remain virus free just using the basic Antivir client + Spybot S&D (both free), and reboot my computer exactly once a month on Patch Tuesday. Sure, all I do with it is write papers for school and play games, but the cost difference to the user on the desktop is pretty minute.
Any non-terrible biometric scanner will scan for a pulse while it is reading data points. While this is not so difficult to simulate with a finger, it's relatively difficult to simulate with an eye. For a bad guy, there are probably much easier ways of compromising security if they have the unlimited physical access they would need to chop up body parts and use those parts to bypass the scanner. Really the OP just needs to take off his tinfoil hat - or leave it on, understanding that he won't be getting a lot of government work that way.
Really? You aren't aware of any for Linux/BSD? Not a single one? I sure hope you don't work in the security industry in any way, shape, or fashion...or if you do, you at least don't service my company or any of its clients.
You mean Yahoo, powered by Bing? You're right, that does come to mind.
By the time Apple finished creating a search engine from scratch, the dirt on their search grave wouldn't even be fresh anymore.
No. The whole point of non-lethal force is not to act in place of lethal force. The point of non-lethal force is to act along the continuum of force, gradually responding to physical resistance until the subject de-escalates into cooperation.
By your reasoning, a police officer who chooses to use a wristlock to subdue an agitated subject during a domestic violence call is no different than a police officer who shoots said suspect with a firearm. That's just patently ridiculous, and a statement of absolutism I hope you would care to rethink.
Ignoring the parts of a post that are inconveniently and provably true...check.
Obvious lack of legal understanding...check.
Name-calling without the slightest shred of evidence (with bonus points for self-contradiction)...check.
You, sir, should run for Congress! You'd fit right in.
Your argument from the point of waste suffers from a number of fallacies in this case. If the government deduces that there is no possible conclusion reached through the bidding process than the one it has selected, then holding the bidding process will only add to government waste -- the very thing you are arguing to prevent.
When the U.S. military started the off-the-shelf program and allowed less bidding and more self-determination, the days of the $300 hammer ended. Sometimes removing the bidding process is a good and logical thing.
You obviously don't live in the area or drive on the 40th street overpass. I do. I don't work for Microsoft, and I would use that road several times per month just in the course of travelling to various entertainment venues. What we have here is a non-story about a project that is useful, estimated to cost between 15-36M, and which Microsoft has already dropped $11M on. Show me how many Seattle businesses are willing to put extra cash of their own (in addition to tax base they already supply) on the line to dig their fancy tunnel. Oh yeah, the only people in Seattle that regularly write checks for public works are retired Microsoft employees...weird.
"Taxation without representation is tyranny."
That's true. Fortunately for all of us here in Redmond, we have a representative republic in which we vote on the people who make these decisions. If the majority of stakeholders felt the way you do and elected a city council that opposed growth, then you wouldn't get the highway.
Since D.C. residents got the vote, I think you would be hard pressed to find many places in the U.S. anymore that are without representation. Just because your representation doesn't win all of the time, or because your representation represents the majority of the area you live in and not your personal views, doesn't make it tyranny.
This game has enough layers of complexity to keep the recipient entertained for quite some time, and they can engineer magma and water systems while watching their dwarves stubbornly not do what they want them to. http://www.bay12games.com/
While weight is one significant drawback of Ni-MH, another that you fail to mention is shelf life. While the performance is somewhat close when you use either one fresh off the charger, charge bleeds from Ni-MH much faster than Li-ion. I'm speaking from experience in an environment where I maintain a stock of 120+ Ni-MH and 50ish Li-ions that are used in the same systems, man-portable radios which transmit at 5W on max power. Ni-MH fresh off the charger are typically good for 8-12 hours, while Li-ion last 12-18 hours. The other effect we've noticed is that in cold (below 32F) or hot (above 125F) environments, Ni-MH lose their charge faster than Li-ion, though that is anecdotal evidence, while the bleed time is supplied with each shipment of batteries on a few pages of graphs from some lab. Our operators sleep with their spare batteries in their sleeping bags when it's cold to help them last longer.
As unpopular as any kind of ground strike other than laser-guided has become politically, I have to wonder why the UK or the US would continue to waste money on these machines. They are not as stealthy as the current F-117, which is apparently all that will be in use for some time to come. Close air support is no longer granted unless the target is in a location which can absolutely guarantee no collateral damage. This means that CAS is no longer granted. If you are lucky you might get a helo with a chaingun. What a waste of money from the budget of both countries.
Dear poster,
Currently, a bunch of poor, under-educated fighters are beating the U.S. military using propane tanks, styrofoam, gasoline, and an abudnant supply of military ordinance. Most of them are not residents of the country they are doing this in; they are operatives from foreign countries who have been trained on how to establish support from the locals.
One of their greatest weaknesses is that despite the fact that the country they operate in was, until recently, the 4th most heavily armed country in the world, they have difficulty in aquiring military-grade munitions. Thankfully, they are turning more and more to homemade explosives, indicating that the supply of military-grade is dwindling. I say thankfully because this is my second tour, and it indicates that my third will not be as violent as the first two.
If you think the U.S. military is invincible you are wrong. If you think that it would be very very hard to beat without munitions, you would be right. Simply choose between legal posession of firearms (which is a habit less dangerous than legal posession of cars, swimming pools, or alcohol) versus the ability of your government to oppress you at any time with no recourse of any kind.
Thanks,
A US Servicemember
But now what will all of the brick and mortar stores do? When you place an online order and they require you to create an "account" using your e-mail, where will all the spam go? Will it, having nowhere to go, return upon itself, imploding into a spamularity, sucking all nearby email inside forever? The humanity!
...nor do you receive a decade in the states just for smoking it, unless you get caught many, many, many times. While constantly getting hassled by police is pretty annoying, they don't set up task forces or collaborate with the DEA to bust your average pothead.
Yes, Yes, and no, they are not allowed to disinvite a student from class. Welcome to the modern American public school system: if you expel a student, expect a lawsuit. Since the cost of going to court is going to ruin your already ridiculously underfunded budget, as a school administrator you will not do ANYTHING that might put you in danger of that. And since most parents are completely unable to raise civil children, very little learning takes place in school. Putting little Johnny's "self-esteem" at the top of the priority list and reinforcing that judgement with lawsuits is the disease of the public school system. Worse, it's a discredit to Johnny, who thinks respect should be automatic. No matter what the hippies tell you, respect is only gotten one way: by earning it.
I would have graduated from college in 2002 if I hadn't gotten bored and quit, opting for the military instead. I left with a good GPA and without financial duress; I just wanted to travel and escape the boredom of higher education. When my professors began calling roll in college, I realized American education was doomed.
That being said, I work or have worked with many, many people. One of them is now 25. He works a blue collar job. He clears 110k a year.
For some reason, America doesn't like to tell people that changing collar color doesn't necessarily change wage brackets. For some reason, we try to force-feed to every kid in school that college is the only way. Then we wonder why all the labor is heading overseas...
If you are looking for something that upscales DVD to 1080p, the PS3 is a pretty bad choice, because it does not. This is one of the features being dogged quite a bit by reviewers. However, that still doesn't stop it from being the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there. And hey, last I heard they were at 74 titles and adding ~5 a week...
Give me just one more hit...I'm so...cold...
Actually, not much is, when it comes to an insurgency. By refusing to wear a uniform and trying to blend in with a civilian populace, the geneva convention actually explicitly states that they lose most of their protections under it.
For example, a POW under the convention must be paid for any labor they are compelled to do; be forced to work no longer hours than a standard work-week; be allowed to send out letters; be allowed one book in addition to one holy book such as the bible or koran; and a laundry list of other things.
A captured insurgent does not rate POW status, however. The only protection given is that they may not be treated in a "cruel and unusual" manner. Now, the methods being used are certainly open to debate as to whether or not they are cruel and unusual, but because this is an opinion and there is no actual list of what is permissable, the waters are muddied.
There's nothing "illegal" about this war. As someone who is on their second trip over, having actually seen how happy 95% of the populace is that we're here, I'm glad to be here as well. The media's assertion that Iraqis do not like us is about as true as saying that the Kuwaitis didn't like us back in DS/DS.
This is exactly what happened to me. I've installed Redhat, Slack, Fedora Core, Ubuntu, Debian. 0 of these were able to install properly on all of my hardware, which was pretty straightforward: AMD Thunderbird 700, MSI mobo, PC3200 ram, Seagate IDE harddisk, Plextor DVD burner, ATI 9600 Pro. I literally messed around with that machine for over a month. Asking questions about hardware on linux forums usually resulted in a) being called a n00b or b) being completely ignored. I later tried to set up Debian on this machine again because debian had the easiest install of all the distros I tried, and couldn't get LAMP working; I had apache & php running, I had mySQL running, but I couldn't get the two to talk. Never got a single answer on forums or on IRC, not even someone who would take the time to listen to what was going on.
:/
Experiences like that drive me back to windows. I've only had one install problems with windows xp; my latest system has a 4-disk SATA RAID array, and I didn't buy a floppy drive for it. After scratching my head (I had the raid drivers on a CD; why oh why would the installer demand a floppy), I googled my problem, slipstreamed a new install CD and had my system up, with a delay of maybe 30 minutes.
Linux seems like it could be a lot of fun and very powerful. After spending 3 years programming, 2 of which were spent on active server pages & SQL 7.0, I feel like I would be expanding my abilities as a programmer by quite a bit by learning how to do the same thing using free software on a linux server. But the response I've received several times from the community makes me not want to use it at all.
DS
That post was a nice jaunt down fantasy road. Having actually read both judgements against microsoft (you can too at www.microsoft-antitrust.org), there's nothing in there that describes any of the activity you list above as mandatory. They don't have to share money with FF and they are certainly allowed to bundle IE and FF together. They don't have to be treated exactly the same at all; in fact, there's a whole page dedicated to how they DON'T have to be in the judgement. That is, of course, if you are considering the IE team as an OEM to the Windows team, which I assume you are; if you aren't, then NONE of the judgement applies to this situation even a little. IE competes on the ground it was written to compete on: Microsoft's ground. FF competes on that ground, too. Noone is making them. They can certainly write their own "ground." Capitalism would then decide. A more accurate portrayal of the problem is oligopoly the mainstream PC manufacturers create by force-installing windows on each and every PC they sell without giving users an option to take anything else. You really have to kick and scream to get an HP with no OS, for example...