There's always a risk of zoning out since you know you can go listen again later

I guess everybody's different, but humans aren't as good at multitasking as they think they are. I want to have my full attention on what the lecturer is saying. Of course, you have to copy anything that's written on the blackboard (now whiteboard).

I know by allowing this half of the class will be tooling about on Facebook.

Well, if they're doing that, 40 years ago they would have been passing notes to each other and still missing the lecture. There are a lot more distractions these days, though.

Those instances are where I walk about the office, hand a test to colleagues, and have them hand the test back to me declaring that they, too, can't read the response.

Ah, ok, I was under the impression that penmanship was part of the grade, but if it isn't legible it's the same as if they turned in a blank piece of paper.

How is it a bad assumption that their lack of instruction was a disservice?

The assumption is that they lacked instruction rather than that their skills had deteriorated. Of course, if it's a high school class your assumption would probably be valid.

What it often misses is that there is more to being free and finding success than having a degree.

Very true. In my case, the actual knowledge is worth more than the degree; I've always loved learning. That was unfortunately a detriment before I went to college, after about the third grade it's all rote memorization and no learning. And I was always terrible at memorization.

Students who speak and write like people do where I'm from will, unfortunately, be looked down upon when they go out into the real world.

Well, that's grammar. It's also sad but true. Some even look down on certain accents.

"The tyrant fears the laugh more than the assassin's bullet."
HA HA!

No woosh there, it was a humorous story about police corruption and a sentient whirlwind.

Wow, some people have bad penmanship even with a keyboard!

I love people like you, I'm 60 and you make me think I should get off your lawn. I wish laptops had existed when I was in college; I can type faster than I could ever write longhand, but even then, rather than taking notes I'd just record the lecture with the laptop. Actually, that's what I did, only I used a cassette recorder.

That they did not receive instruction earlier in life on quick, efficient, and legible handwriting was a disservice to them.

That's an assumption on your part, and a bad one at that. When I was in school, computers were multimillion dollar building sized-pocket calculators, and they taught penmanship in grade school. But by the time I was in college my handwriting was terrible, mostly from taking notes in class during high school. The essays are timed and you expect good penmanship?? That's insane!

You're quite right that we're moving away from handwriting, but we're not there yet.

Thanks to people like you!

Incidentally, I think the batteries must be dead in your vibrating keyboard. I read your sig and the spelling is a mess.

Woosh to you, ma'am.

Where are the moderators? This is the third time I've seen this exact comment in this thread. It isn't exactly a unique nor profound thought.

Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.

Boy would e. e. cummings HATE that thing!

That guy was a good poet, but unfortunately 1) poetry is not prose, although good prose is poetic; 2) In art, the rules are guidelines rather than laws, but when one breaks a convention one should have a good artistic reason; 3) a lot of young folks don't realize that and think "If cummings can do it, so can I; 4) He only wrote POETRY like that -- his prose used caps and all the other normal writing conventions. Here is some of his prose:

A locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing â" dazed but erect â" beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head. One of her hands (the younger added) kept feeling her dress, as if trying to discover why it was wet. These men took my sixty-six year old mother by the arms and tried to lead her toward a nearby farmhouse; but she threw them off, strode straight to my father's body, and directed a group of scared spectators to cover him. When this had been done (and only then) she let them lead her away.

Just throwing paint on a canvas doesn't make you Jackson Pollack. Unless there's a valid reason, all lowercase is as ignorant as all caps.

I used to have good penmanship, but now? About the only time I use a pen is to write a check or sign a document. This tech is about twenty years too late.

Well, if you were to travel 500 years back you'd certainly sound as funny as Shakespeare sounds to us (Data: "I'm from France"), but if someone 400 years from the future went back to 1920 there would be plenty of sound recordings and books to study. Not that I actually believe it ever happened or will happen...

You are just making fun of bad sci-fi plots.

Well, I'm in the middle of writing a sci-fi book with a bad plot... :) It has time travel, FTL travel, terraforming planets that really can't be terraformed (Venus), man-made neutron stars as weapons of mass destruction, all sorts of impossibilities. But most sci-fi is really fantasy anyway. Chapter 2 ridicules Star Trek, even though I've been a fan since 1966. It's in my /. JEs.

The Butterfly Effect says that the most minor change in the distant past will cause huge changes in the future, so nobody can travel back and live in their own past.

I remember a short story with this theme, but it's been so long ago I can't remember its name or who wrote it. Despite Hawking's Daily Mail piece "how to build a time machine" (which I believe was tongue in cheek) I don't think anyone will ever travel backwards through time, and have serious doubts about FTL. It's fun to fantasize, though.

That is basically the result of massive advances in public health and disease prevention, and massive reduction in child mortality (which is partly the same thing, but also specific medical advances).

Exactly. That, and better pollution controls, and OSHA keeping so many young men dying on the job, and other things that have nothing to do with medicine. My grandfather probably would have made it to a hundred if Purina wasn't too cheap to put doors on the elevator.

When my grandmother was 95 she told me "I don't know why anybody wants to live to be a hundred, it ain't no fun bein' old!" Of course, she'd outlived 3 of her 4 kids, two husbands, and several doctors who all told her if she didn't cut her cholesterol down she'd die. She finally did, five years later when she fell and broke her hip. Outliving those you love is bad for your health!

However, I'm 60 and in better health than a lot of people I know who are half my age. I'm starting to get a touch of CRS, though.

Do you really think any time traveler will risk the possibility that something they do will cause them to have never existed? I know if I were a time traveler I'd be pretty careful about what I did.

Remember when they were building the LHC and screwed up the power supply? That was the doings of time traveler. Oh, and ghosts, bigfoots, Bermuda Triangle, Area 51... ;)

How would we know?

Log scale? Yep, that complicates it a little. However, didn't they test the time dilation with a couple of astronauts? I don't think they got anywhere near .8C. .8C is pretty damned fast.

Also, how's he going to read the rest of the Nobots book?

How did you know he didn't?

Thanks! I was about to post a similar JE with pretty much the same question; I want to control an XP box from a Linux box and a W7 notebook and get that monitor, mouse, and keyboard out of my living room (the TV is the Linux box's monitor, have an IR mouse and keyboard for that one).

It looks like it would probably work for d_r as well. I'd probably have found it on Google, but as it's closed source I wouldn't have trusted it without a trusted opinion.