Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment It is difficult... (Score 2, Insightful) 166

The article describes how scientists painstakingly gathered data on the quakes, and then tried to find ways to communicate the results--which are quite definitive--to politicians who often have financial reasons to disbelieve them.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair

Comment Re:If all you care about are numbers (Score 2) 201

Why is teaching to the test a bad thing? Is it because the test does not measure the skills students are expected to be learning? Or is it because teachers depend on repeated drills with old test questions to prepare students?

Neither one points to an insurmountable flaw with standardized testing.

Comment Re:Ummmm ... duh? (Score 1) 385

I think it's more likely that the male co-pilot could overpower the female flight attendant while the pilot is in the lavatory--no conspiracy necessary.

Putting guns in cockpits only makes the task easier.

Really what's needed is to have 3 people in the cockpit at all times to eliminate the near-guarantee that a single person could take over the plane.

It would also help to give airliners a "return to home" feature that could be triggered from outside the cockpit, similar to the emergency brake on passenger planes.

Comment Re:Not really needed (Score 1) 40

C assumes you will choose an integer size that won't overflow in your application. If you don't, that's a bug, even if C provided the run-time ability to detect overflows. So making a run-time error the default behavior when it causes a measurable performance hit on most platforms (excluding MIPS and Alpha) doesn't really make sense in a low-level language like C.

Slashdot Top Deals

Those who can, do; those who can't, write. Those who can't write work for the Bell Labs Record.

Working...