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Submission + - Lingerie Company Recycles Bras into Insulation (ecouterre.com)

fangmcgee writes: Leave it to an Italian intimates company to trade one kind of stuffing for another: by recycling used bras into soundproof building insulation. To acquire a sizable stash of unmentionables, Intimissimi launched a six-week multimedia campaign to encourage women to drop off their used bras at its stores across Italy. Plus, every customer who brought in a bra received €3 ($4) towards the purchase of a new one—just in case Russian model Irina Shayk’s entreaties to “help save the planet” weren’t convincing enough.
The Internet

Submission + - What did people do on the internet before the Web? (quezi.com) 3

ribuck writes: "The web wasn't invented until 1989, and didn't really catch on until 1993 when the Mosaic browser was released. But the internet is much older than the web. So how did people use the internet in the good old pre-web days? There was email, of course, and FTP, and also a bunch of other interesting protocols. If HTTP and HTML hadn't come along, we might just have enhanced Gopher instead. Many of the pre-web protocols are still in active use, but sometimes it's only nostalgia that keeps them going. Try typing finger seth@swoolley.org at the command line to see how blogging works using steam technology."

Comment Re:The solution is easy (Score 2, Insightful) 446

So your point is skills can't be learned?

If we really need superstars to teach, then we're screwed. According to the BLS there are something like 3.5 million teachers in the US right now (kindergarten to high school). There are 660,000 physicians and surgeons. 1.3 million computer "engineers" and programmers. So it seems like if your strategy is to magically select exceptionally smart people, then we won't have good teachers.

I don't divide the world into "dim drones" and "brights". It doesn't have to be a "magic equation". The fact is there may be skills and techniques that make for better teachers, and those might be learnt to a certain degree. If that's true, we'll still have better and worse teachers, we'll still have to get rid of bad teachers, but we'll be in a better situation. More money would help, but it needs to be spent intelligently.

Comment Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score 1) 605

1) The recession is partly DUE to this practice.

How exactly is the recession due to this practice? In 2007, roughly 800,000 jobs were created (1.4M new, 600K destroyed). There were 65K new H1B visas - these last 6 years at the most so let's say that there was a TOTAL stock of 400K H1B visa immigrants. Unless you're saying that these immigrants created financial instruments that natives would not have, which is seriously doubtful.

Comment Re:H-1B is a Fraud (Score 0) 605

It's the kind of fraud that Indians have ingrained in to their culture and Americans seem to get better at every day.

I don't think it's any different from hiring illegal immigrants to work the harvest, or at a meatpacking plant. In that case, Indians have nothing to do with it. Some people may call it competition.

Comment Re:This doesn't prove ants can count (Score 1) 162

As I understand it, in Math being able to count does not involve numbers, it involves recognizing that two sets have the same cardinality. We do it through the construct of "numbers", but it's not necessary to resort to them. That's how we know that some sets with infinite cardinality have more elements than others.

That's also how we know kids learn to count gradually over time. When they first learn to speak, although they may know the words one, two, three, they only really recognize sets with one and two elements. Anything more is all the same. The number is not the key, the comparison is.

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