At Georgia Tech, the core classes of Calculus, Physics, Chemistry, and some others were taught in auditoriums with over 200 people in them. There was no opportunity to ask questions during lecture - it just would not be practical or fair. Consequently lectures were about as useful as watching the MIT free course ware you can now watch online for free. You went to lecture 3 days a week, and then went to a session 2 days a week with a teacher assistant, who was a graduate student doing this as a requirement for their own course work. They might be interested in doing it, or they might not. They might speak English well, or they might not. This is where the bulk of actual teaching went on though.

After about 2 years as a traditional student at GT, I failed out, and spent the rest of my time as a non-traditional student at 6 other colleges and universities while working and completing my degree.

I rent web space from ipower.com, and route all my email through it.

>After 9 years of hunting Bin Laden.. Assange is safe from the US for a while!

No useful purpose would be solved in capturing Bin Laden. It would probably cause calls for the "war on terror" to be over, and that would make lots of military spending go away. Can't have that. No, it is far far better to have that boogey man out there as an excuse to carry on.

Assange, on the other hand, is nothing but a loose cannon bringing public embarrassment to people in power.

His ass is toast.

Here is a kid with developing engineering an entrepreneurial spirit, and you are poo-pooing it.

I'm not a big fan of the "OK government secrets" thing.

I'm pretty convinced that just about every thing that the government tries to keep secret is because it is a morally bad thing that they would be ashamed of if it was made public.

Sure, there are technological secrets, but most of the secrets that they are up in arms about are behavioral secrets.

Personally, think that every government secret that can be outed should be outed, and the people doing the outing should be held harmless. Allow the government to keep its secrets as best it may, but there should be no retribution when they drop the ball and the secret gets out.

For years we have heard "If you have nothing to hide, you should have nothing to worry about" aimed at private citizens. Well what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

What I want to know about these tablets is: Can I write on them with a stylus and get results like writing in a notebook?

If the damn thing was just a computer, who would care about a fucking "app store"???

I don't go buy my PC based on writes software for it. Is this like 1975 when the hardware was thrown in for free to get you locked into their software?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system

But you don't obtain a velocity without having accelerated.

Physics 101 indeed.

Do you only engage in communications that are "well supported arguments"?

You must be a blast at parties.

Simply make all cell phones stop functioning if they detect that they are moving faster than a certain speed. Many phones already contain accelerometers that could be used for this. If not, GPS or cellular triangulation could work, also.

I support the idea of disabling cell phones from working once they detect they are moving at, say, greater than 5 MPH. Certain SIM cards could be provided for people who had a demonstrated need to be exempt from this.

It's really not a big hardship if you need to use the phone or send a text to simply pull over.

But this will never happen, and here is why: Lobbyists for the cellular companies will kill it. I would wager that a huge number of cell phone minutes are consumed while people use their phone while driving. Cut that off and suddenly you take a huge bite out of cell phone profits.

I was very excited about the Chevy Volt, but at $40K that's too expensive for me.

The Nisan Leaf sounds nice, too, but I'm scared to buy a car that can only go 100 miles on a charge.

When I saw the picture the first thing it looked like to me were those giant gets you sometimes see shooting away from black holes. I assumed that this was from the black hole in the center of our galaxy. The article says it might be, but might also be from star formation.

Unless it's raining. Or it's cold out. Or it's hot out.