hey hayyyyyy

When I was in grade school, calculators weren't allowed until 7th grade (strictly banned from elementary school). Even then, they had to be simple calculators that couldn't solve complex problems (graphing calculators were strictly disallowed until high school). Approaching it like this forced the students to learn to do new kinds of problems by hand. The expectation was that by the time tools were given, students should already know how to accomplish the same things their calculators do for them.

I don't know whether that's how calculators are still used in grade school or not, but it ought to be (in my opinion).

The same should apply for using spell check on exams. If they're at a level where they should be familiar enough with spelling to do so with a reasonable level of accuracy, then I think a spell checker should be okay.

What concerns me is that once spell checkers are introduced all of the time, the students may start to learn new words and not even attempt to learn to spell them properly (spell checker will do that for them, right?). For it to be equivalent to my logic on calculators above, the students would need to learn to spell the new words properly before being allowed to spell check them. Which isn't realistic to monitor or force upon students, unfortunately.

I bet you're a blast at parties.

The same Rampart division, yes. The show is loosely based on it. The characters in the show do have alliances/pay-offs with fictional rap moguls, were involved in a "money train heist" where the money was never found (similar to the bank robbery of Rampart's "David Mack"), and they used similar acronyms/symbols (instead of CRASH, it was STRIKE team and they had cards with symbols for their division).

So, no... it's not supposed to be a direct documentary on the Rampart division, but it's similar enough. The show was originally titled "Rampart", even, but was changed to not anger the LAPD.

That said, The Shield is one of the best television series ever produced and it's worth watching all 7 seasons. Each one is better than the last.

You're right, with the caveat that most people tend to try to speak differently when they know they're speaking to digital transcription. The Android voice input also requires that you actually say the punctuation, as well (i.e. Hello comma Mom period Yes comma a visit would be nice exclamation point). So, unfortunately, even with Google's web powered voice transcription, you're still not speaking naturally.

I'm assuming that Google Voice uses the same technology for their automated transcription. In this case, the person will definitely be speaking naturally. The transcriber is spotty at best in that setting. I can usually get the gist of what's being said without needing to actually listen to the message and I appreciate how it applies different style types for things it thinks it could have gotten wrong (guesses are in a lighter shade of gray)... but it's far from perfect.

Thanks for the link to that death threat thing and all, but can you please mark links that will plaster my screen with anime porn as "Not Safe For Work" in the future?

On that same note, we also just banned red light cameras in Bozeman. The city fought to keep them (a few months prior to them being activated), but the state stepped in and told the city that they would under no circumstances be allowed.

I'd actually submitted this article and I absolutely love Bozeman. It's a beautiful place to live. I think our city is a bit out of touch with what the citizens want and we sometimes need the state to intervene. With all of the coverage/press this issue is now getting, I'm sure the same thing will happen with this.

Everything you say is spot on, in my opinion, and I think most professors would agree.

Most of my math/physics profs in college would ONLY assign the even numbers because the answer was in the book. They weren't lazy, and actually checked whether you were arriving at the answer in the correct fashion. We'd get dinged if we omitted steps which weren't obvious, but likewise, we'd get partial credit if parts of our work was correct. This also gave the profs some gauge on which parts of the processes needed to be elaborated on in class, and if not frequently messed up enough, at least mentioned on the assignment so the student could get some insight as to where they went wrong.

The actual answer was usually worth very little compared to the process. If it were the opposite, I barely would have learned anything in those classes.

This idea already did the rounds in the form of an Internet rumor a couple of years back: http://www.snopes.com/business/bank/pinalert.asp

The Snopes page mentions why something like this hasn't been implemented:

Not entirely. I own a Popcorn Hour A110, and while I do love its ability to play basically any codec I toss at it, the UI leaves a LOT to be desired, which is what the parent mentioned about missing metadata from MKV. Any of the jukebox softwares for it need a ridiculously tedious weeding through of all media stored for them to appear well, and even then, the UI is slow and feels unresponsive. The built-in UI doesn't even have a "sort by date" functionality. This is all due to a very weak auxiliary processor for UI/background tasks.

The end all and be all solution is a video container with metadata information of its contents on a set top box that has a quick, responsive, and intuitive UI. Popcorn is definitely headed in the right direction, but I don't think they're there yet.

Small difference, relatively, but GTA III is actually almost 8 years old and not 6 (it was released October 2001).

Vintage is an ambiguous term, so he gets to play loosely with it. Regardless of whether you thought the game was fun or not, it WAS the first notably high selling game that did an open world sandbox well. There are countless games today that mimic the design (the new Red Faction game released yesterday, for one example).

Like it or not, GTA III was very influential for its design and the controversy that the game itself generated for its content.

Normally, I'd agree that this makes perfect sense... but video games are certainly a luxury sale that's very similar to music, and sales actually went UP a reported 18% as of last October (reference: http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/13/in-the-middle-of-economic-storm-us-video-game-sales-grew-18-percent-in-october/).

You'd think video game sales would suffer even more than music sales with the economic woes, since they cost $50 - $60 a purchase compared to an album's $12 - $20 sticker price.

Since this study points to last year, it's in the same time frame as the video game analysis.

My interest in the new Firefox betas is its official support of cross-site HTTP requests (documented at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/HTTP_access_control). It's following the new W3C spec (http://dev.w3.org/2006/waf/access-control/) for allowing the XmlHttpRequest to communicate with an external domain without the use of the filthy "script get" hacks. I've just spent some time implementing a proof-of-concept for this stuff, and am impressed with how well it works. It even allows POST requests so you're not limited by the usual GET length limits.

It does require server-side modifications, but they're mostly simple.

I see this as the best new feature of Firefox and plan on adding support for this method of XHR into my applications, with failover to the old "script get" stuff. I only hope that other browsers also embrace this new functionality in the near future.