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Ah, the classic Ad Hominem fallacy -- nothing constructive to say so one resorts to childish insults.

Gee, even a Mathematician is saying that rote learning is a HORRIBLE way to "learn".

* A Mathematician's Lament aka Lockhart's Lament.

But go ahead and keep sticking your head in sand over how shitty the education system is.

* The Underground History Of American Education Book

--
Atheism, noun, a blind mad trying to tell the rest of the world that color doesn't exist.

Further in my experience, the kids that have trouble with high school math are frequently hobbled because they can't manipulate basic arithmetic efficiently

In my experience, it's because high school math is taught equally terribly. No... more terribly, because the subject matter is more complex. Useless busywork and rote memorization abound.

And either way 15 minutes of homework turns into 2 hour marathons

The assignments are just awful. Doing 10 "Find the missing side of the triangle" problems does not lead to understanding. It's just an exercise in rote memorization, and so are most word problems. 99% of these problems result because our education system is simply terrible all around, and the homework assignments are abysmal too.

Whatever.

Actually, rote memorization has its place

99.999% of the time, it simply doesn't.

especially in math.

I disagree.

There was a paper a while back

There's a random paper for everything, including for me. The fact that some papers exist that come to some conclusion means nothing, since they're likely just coming to arbitrary conclusions based on flawed tests. Our way of measuring proficiency is flawed to begin with, which is why I reject current tests.

that found that kids you memorized things like their multiplication tables performed better at higher level tasks.

Solving 40 multiplication problems that all ask you to do the same thing does nothing but waste your time on useless repetition. It won't magically make you understand the material any more than digging a giant hole in the ground with a spoon would; the information is simply not there.

By making low level steps reflexive, brain power was freed up to work on more complex parts of the problem.

Math is not about speed or memorizing facts, but about understanding. You're not just solving random, arbitrary problems, either. This is a poisonous mentality that is spread by awful educational systems all over the world.

Actually, you do learn math by rote memorization.

Using existing knowledge and forming conclusions about why it works is not the same as rote memorization, though you'll need to retain some information in order to do that. It seems you don't know what I'm talking about.

It's a shame. Most people can't even identify the problem with math education, let alone think of a solution to fix it.

How are the exam's existing compositional components samplings of rote memorization?

Really, it's just following rules you memorized and writing how they want you to write.

Beyond knowing formulas, how are the computational components of the SAT tests of rote memorization?

That's just an example of applying the procedures they memorized.

What is it of a high school student that you want tested, exactly?

Whether or not they have a deep, intuitive understanding of the material (how and why it works).

U.S. students who score highly on "IQ" tests also perform highly on the SAT

Which might just mean people with high IQs are good test takers, not that they're intelligent, or that the SAT is a good test.

IQ is mere pseudoscience, anyway.

It certainly measures how quickly all of this can be done, given that it is a time-limited exam together with punishing incorrect answers (guesses).

And it's still just a ridiculous multiple choice test, with a few other things (essays) thrown in. Also, math is not a game of speed or memorization, and that time limit crap is garbage.

Something tells me the people who make these tests do not comprehend what math is about. They only care about whether or not you can compute the correct answers and follow their precious procedures, and whether or not you can do so quickly enough. I doubt they have a better view of other subjects.

I agree. There are some who don't. Occasionally you see people posting here who think it's a from of brainwashing

I don't know about "brainwashing," but I sure think that rote memorization is inappropriate 99% of the time and that it ruins educations.

Math is not a speed or memorization game. Math is about understanding. I know that 9 x 9 = 81, but is that because I memorized nonsensical multiplication tables? I would never do anything that foolish. Instead, I happened to see the result pop up many times, and I memorized it naturally.

In school, I focused my time on understanding math, something that the other students never even thought to try to understand. I wouldn't bother doing repetitive homework assignments, and consequently got 'bad' grades (irrelevant in the real world), but I'm far more intelligent than any of them ever were, and I'm glad I didn't do their pointless busywork.

Multiplication tables and their ilk just give students a wrong idea of what mathematics is about and makes it repetitive and boring.

You have stats for that or is it just cynicism?

It's not cynicism if you look at how math is taught in a grand majority of schools. There is no way that students are truly learning anything when most are just doing rote memorization exercises in various forms.

Nothing wrong with learning by rote.

That depends entirely on what you're talking about. If you're learning math equations by rote, you don't understand mathematics at all, which is an art form. There are very, very few things that need to be learned by rote. For most things, you should try to understand the 'why' and you will likely memorize it naturally, anyway. Sometimes it's necessary to memorize information, yes, but again, there are very few times you should be explicitly learning by rote.

Multiplication table is a good example.

*sigh* Actually, they're a terrible example. I never memorized multiplication tables, because I instead endeavored to actually understand the process of multiplication. Furthermore, if I see a result often, I will memorize it *naturally*. By forcing people to make a specific effort to memorize this useless garbage (and I would say that memorizing multiplication tables misses the point of mathematics and is quite useless), you give them the wrong idea of what mathematics is about and make it into something that is widely hated. Math is not about quickly performing random calculations or memorizing results; that's pure ignorance and is one of many things that shows that the school system is abysmal.

I can still recite the multiplication tables up to 12 with no real thought.

That might not have been a waste of time for you, but it was for me. Memorize such nonsense on your own time.

Rote has its place.

In mindless subjects. The example you gave was a poor one.

That is a bullshit phrase that has no proof at all.

That is a bullshit sentence with no proof at all.

I doubt anyone who actually understands math and other subjects even a little bit can honestly say that people are receiving good educations. There are vital things that are being left out, and one of those things is the 'why.'

The administration and the parents takes education seriously

Whether that's good or not depends on what their idea of education is. If it's more of the same sort of nonsense, I suspect it's only marginally superior.

80 percent of students go to some sort of higher education, graduation rates are above 98%

I see nothing truly impressive here. Quality over quantity. I wonder how much these kids are truly learning? Memorization doesn't really count in most cases.

Higher education has many of the same problems.

The idea that we need to suppress people's critical thinking skills early on because people might question authority figures is something I find positively absurd. People are going to question things either way, and again, if you're teaching by rote, chances are, you screwed up.

or example, that "being able to calculate random garbage in your head quickly" is *very* important to knowing whether you have enough money in your pocket to buy the things you have in your shopping basket when you get to the checkout

Nonsense. That has nothing to do with multiplication tables or anything of the sort. I think this is part of the reason math 'education' in this country is so abysmal; people treat it as nothing more than a tool they can use to complete mundane tasks. We have tools to do such boring, repetitive nonsense. In fact, you don't need multiplication tables or a rote memorization education to do such simple things. This is just garbage.

I think you really need to look up the term "Cultural Relativism"

I don't think I do.

not everyone wants to live in an apartment with cable TV, within walking distance of a Walmart, a McDonald's, and a Pizza Hut.

So don't. But if enough people don't want to be part of some culture, then I don't think we should force them to do so. Holding back education so people remain ignorant and obedient to keep certain cultures alive... I find that idea absolutely disgusting.

The amount of people who dismiss these tests who have absolutely no idea what they are testing, the methods etc really is quite incredible.

They're not testing for understanding; I know that much.

Countries that dismiss the tests (seemingly a more common response in America) can stick there heads in the sand but the problem won't go away.

I don't know what you mean. You can't just dismiss all criticism of the tests by saying that people who criticize the tests are just sticking their heads in the sand. The tests are garbage, and so are the education systems of a grand majority of countries in the world. This provides an explanation of part of the problem: Math education.

Clearly, there are 5 apples.

I don't know. The question could be asking how many apples there are in the entire universe; it doesn't specify where you're looking for apples.

And besides that, why does it say, "Bob gives 3 of his apples with Alice"? Are they giving apples to some mysterious third party? I guess it doesn't matter.

How many apples Bob has or Alice (or whether Alice is an idiot or not), has little to do with the problem at hand.

What?

Kids are seldom introduced to logic, theorems and proofs.

The real problem is that they never focus on trying to get people to understand why or how things work, not that there's a lack of theorems and proofs. This is a pretty good summary of the problem.

Get a clue, dude.

Wow... I think you need to read this, because it sounds like you don't know what it means to have people truly understanding something (it applies to every subject, but what I linked to talks mainly about math education). I may not be that old, but I am old enough to know that the public school system has never been good; it has always been about producing obedient factory workers. Sure, a few intelligent people do well, but they're a minority, and such people have always existed. By and large, most people have always been unintelligent.

Wrong, lack of basic information between the ears, not being on readily "on tap", means a person can't form a proper mental model to understanding any issue where geographical configuration is key. They won't understand why Russia, for example, would be much more interested in not having external forces involved in a civil war in the nearby trading partner. They wouldn't understand why a hurricane making landfall from state A to state D would also involve states B and C.

What you speak of is understanding an issue. Being able to point out random countries on a map has nothing to do with this. You cannot justify such unimaginative, useless processes.

Now, no one is saying that memorization is always useful, but most of the time, when a school asks you to memorize something, doing so is just a waste of time. If something is important, you will memorize it naturally as you try to understand it, which should be the focus of education. What we don't need is unimaginative rote memorization being the focus of education, which has been going on for a very long time indeed.

Rote is extremely useful; it's how humans learn to do basic things.

Sure, if you call that 'learning.' Shouldn't you actually understand the material? That's something that our current education doesn't strive for at all. This explains the problem quite well. Oftentimes, rote isn't even necessary, and indeed, is harmful. If someone finds something useful and fun, they'll naturally remember various things about it on their own even if they don't explicitly try to.

You do know the suicide rate is high in Finland (in particular, above the Arctic circle) mainly due to the long periods darkness 6 months out of every year, right?

The Finland rate is 17.6 per 100k people. 10 points higher for men.
The US rate is 11.8 per 100k, and again 8 points higher for men.
Canada 11.3. Canada has a significant population above the Arctic Circle.
Figures from Here

Alaska Suicide rate is the highest in the nation, at over 27. Per here.

However, One study found that the average annual suicide rate among Alaska Natives was 40.4 per 100,000 people, compared with 17.7 per 100,000 people in the non-Native population. But if you subtract out 20-something Alaskan Native Males, (155.3 per 100,000) even the native rate is not that much higher than the rest of the population's rate.
Rates in Canadian Aboriginal populations are much similarly higher, at 56.3 per 100,000 for males, and 11.8 per 100,000 for females (of all ages)

That 17.7 percent for non-native Alaskans looks surprisingly like the Finnish number.

But on the other hand the this seems as likely to be a Racial/Cultural issue when you take everything into account, Alaska, Canada, and even Finland because northern finland has some related population groups.

Hit it hard and hit it fast, it's the same epidemiological solution to a zombie uprising.

Pac-Man meets Tic-Tac-Toe: "Though the GE/McKinsey Matrix is more sophisticated than the BCG matrix and can provide higher value information for the executive management, it has several flaws and limitations..."

That strongly depends on the parameters of the zombie outbreak. Check this for a full mathematical treatise of zombie epidemiology. Under certain boundary conditions, no hunting skill will save you. Besides, as someone else already stated, hunting does not particularly give you the close quarter skills you gonna need...

by http://www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~rsmith/Zombies.pdf

You want scientific? Ok, here you go: http://www.mathstat.uottawa.ca/~rsmith/Zombies.pdf It is a mathematical model of how the zombies will spread.

It is not as optimistic as cracked.com I am afraid.

I agree (my first paper was a negative-results paper), but I think there are some kinds of negative results that are relatively hard to get published. Papers along the lines of: "here's an approach you might have thought would work, but it turned out that it didn't, and in retrospect we can see why, which this paper will explain". If you try to submit a paper like that, you often get push-back of, "oh well, yeah it's obvious why that wouldn't work, dunno why you didn't see it earlier". And of course it often is obvious once you've read why it doesn't work.

As you point out, it's quite a bit easier to get negative results published if someone else had already claimed them as positive results. In that case, you're not both proposing and shooting down the idea simultaneously, but shooting down (or failing to confirm) someone else's idea, which has the advantages that: 1) you have evidence that at least one presumably smart person really didn't think it was obviously a bad idea (in fact, they thought it was a good one, and even that it worked); and 2) you're positioned as correcting an error in the literature, rather than as introducing a correction for a hypothetical error nobody has yet made.

It's a bit tricky to fix, because some negative results really are obvious: it does nobody in the field any good to publish "we tried X on Y, and it didn't work", if genuinely nobody who was competent in the field would've thought X would work on Y, and the reason was exactly the reason you discovered.

Incidentally, here's one previous attempt to start such a journal that didn't really get off the ground. Their one published article, which is quite good, is of the form I mention: the authors of a system called Swordfish recounted an idea they had to produce an improvement, Swordfish2, that in the end turned out to do be better than the original Swordfish. It was hard to get published elsewhere, because it wasn't correcting an existing result---nobody had previously proposed that doing what they tried to Swordfish2 was actually a good idea---but it's interesting (to me, at least) because it really does seem like a plausible idea, and I feel I learned something in reading why it didn't work.

Yes, but what exactly does one do a with a masters in political science. Other than proving that you can work hard, and that you are probably pretty smart, it doesn't give you any special abilities to do a specific job. There are some jobs which it would really help with, but not enough jobs to warrant the number of people getting degrees in things like political science. Just take a look at some statistics from the university I attended. Social sciences and arts are the two largest faculties even though there's probably the least number of jobs out there for people with degrees. Even science schools like Waterloo have a staggering number of students registered in the arts. You'd be much better off learning to be an industrial truck mechanical, or even just standard car mechanic than getting a degree in social science.

complaining about the potential for abuse is like complaining your search could pull up a porn site. its retarted.

Are you posting by SMS? I hope so, because otherwise, there are these nifty little symbols called punctuation that would make reading your blather so much more readable!

It's spelled like this: retarded, although you did manage to spell "douche" correctly. Go figure...

You can still write good code without having a CS background. Sure, if you designing an operating system, designing a compiler, or delving into some low-level code, more engineering know-how is required. However, I've found my Math/CS background only to be mildly useful when writing database apps...

Here are some things you can do to become a better programmer...

Mentorship
Find someone (preferable a group of people) you can talk shop with. Nobody loves solving someone elses problems, but most programmers like to discuss best practices. Pick apart other people's code. It could be an open source project or maybe just the source code to some guy's game you found online. Maintaining code allows you to see other people's mistakes. Writing good code is hard, writing maintainable code is even harder. You can learn a lot about design by being on the other end of the development process (i.e. maintanance). Sometimes mentorship is just reading good code.

Read, read, read...
All the coding in the world will get you only so far. You need to consult the wisdom of experts. Some other good books are:
Object-Oriented Software Engineering: Practical Software Development using UML and Java by Timothy Lethbridge and Robert Laganiere
2nd edition
website for book
They even have a DVD with an entire semester's worth of lectures (based on the book) available for $50 online.

Applying UML and Patterns
by Craig Larman
3rd edition
sample chapters here
There's a series of videos (about 3 hours in length) that describe many of the details in the book.

Anything by Martin Fowler
Martin Fowler's website

You may wish to also check out:
A seminar on the Object Oriented Design with a focus on the Unified Process (or something close to it)

Methodology, methodology, methodology

The above books will introduce you to many of the existing methodologies in software engineering. It's not so important what methodology you choose; what is important is how you implement it. While many people may disagree with me on this. Engineering methods can be taught, problem solving skills can be acquired, and math skills can be learned. You might not be the next Edsger Dijkstra, but you can learn to write very good code on schedule and under budget. It may be hard to write code at home when you've been writing code at work all day, but try working through a project from beginning to end with perfect documentation (yes, make use cases...) utilizing all the right tools (i.e. version control, bug tracking, make tools). Doing this will make you a better programmer. Learn to take a few minutes each day and write out what your going to do. I often start writing code for the day by opening up notepad and figuring out what I'm going to do in psuedo-code. After, I just flesh out the notes and spend the rest of my time testing. Some guys like to do this on paper. Many professional organizations start out a days worth of coding drawing UML (or some close approximation to it) on a white board. The key is to plan before you code. Don't just jump in front of your IDE.

It would make fusion power look like crawling with one arm. Back of the napkin calculation:
A deuteron has 3.34x10^-27 kg of mass, while an alpha particle (He2+) has mass 6.64x10-27kg. (Particle Masses).

The mass of two deuterons is hence 0.04x10-27 kg more than the mass of an alpha particle. Equivalently, less than 0.6% of the mass of input Hydrogen mass is converted to energy. Pure matter-to-energy would be 167x better than H->He fusion.

Conservation laws would prevent a simple direct conversion (and also spontaneous "evaporation" of matter, thankfully). But, one might dream of more clever ways to do this...

Parts of Speech.
br> HTH.

that has been explored in previous research covering similar ideas (they used a stylus input and pressure to hide input): http://www.discover.uottawa.ca/publications/EH2006.pdf

I think the principle of this CMU system is sound. Obfuscating the output and the input for an authentication system is a good approach to limit vulnerabilities to observation. The key is to be able to do it without annoying the user. This scheme seems to be able to make some headway in this regard. However, one aspect I don't like is that it requires a separate hardware solution (i.e. all ATMs would have to have this trackball). If such an investment is going to be made by banks, I figure they would be more inclined to try something else like biometrics. I personally believe this type of input obfuscation can be accomplished with the devices we already have (keypads) and software (I am currently researching this), and thus there would be no added costs (at least additional hardware costs) to implement such a system.

if he got a Software Engineering degree from an accredited engineering university offering an accredited software engineering degree, then he could call himself a software engineer. University of Ottawa has offered software engineering for ~8 years now, with the first graduating class ~4 years ago.

http://www.site.uottawa.ca/eng/school/ugrad/softwareengineering.html

I almost took soft.eng, but opted for comp.eng instead since it is more recognized and the soft.eng program was so new.... now all I do is software.

* Astronomy Knowledge Base
* Astronomy resources on the web

Also, this post will push down the presence of my post on artificial meats on the profile page, and I think it somewhat important to keep the link available.

"operate a motor vehicle"

The motor vehicle is not doing the operating. It is not 'a subject' at all. In fact, it's a direct object. http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/o bjcompl.html

People around here use that term ad hominem a lot. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Well it does literally, but not in the context of logic and rhetoric. In order to have been making an ad hominem argument I would first have to be making an argument. The argument you inferred did not exist in my comment. I just wanted to know what the hell constituted a "former scientist."

If anything I was criticizing the author of the article for making a vague and ridiculous characterization. My point was, in order to literally be a "former" scientist you would have to have done something ridiculously extreme. I do want to know how he got into civil engineering. He teaches it at Ottowa, which is a very reputable school.

We can't prove that cracks that these haven't happened before, I agree, but we can prove with some pretty good evidence that the north pole hasn't gone through this amount of change recently (within a couple of hundred thousand years)

The very references you point to suggest otherwise. There is evidence from Greenland ice cores that the Earth went through periods considerably warmer than recent history in the past 10,000 years. There is also pollen data (google "paleolimnology" for references). These events occured within the past few hundred thousand years.

The claim that there is anything particularly "unprecedented" about current climate variability, including it's rapidity and it's affect on the Arctic, is simply marketing. The Earth's climate has always been highly variable, responding to a variety of external influences and internal changes, such as the current spike in atmospheric CO2 levels due to human industrial activity.

The consequences of climate variability, such as species extinction (but not apparently polar bears, thankfully, as they have survived through the warmer periods of the past) and the destruction of human societies--such as the Viking settlements in Greenland and North America--are also quite well known.

The problem with "news" is that it has to appear "new". Humans are attracted by novelty and most humans are cowards, so we are particulary attracted by novel threats. Ergo, even scientists (and certainly universities and research institutes that have an eye on public funding) put the most novel spin possible on every result.

Some people argue that we must lie this way to get attention paid to global climate change and our contribution to it. This is a mistake. A society that needs to believe falsehoods on the order of "nothing like this has ever happened before OMG it's new and scary" before it is willing to change does not deserve to survive.

In the same way that hostility from irrational, truth-hating creationists stifled healthy debate within the evolutionary community for many years, it is possible that irrational, truth-hating climate-change-deniers will cripple debate within the climatological community. That would be a shame, because it is only science that is going to get us out of this mess. And interestingly, creationists and climate-change-deniers have some remarkable similarities in their beliefs: they both believe that the Earth is far more stable than it actually is, and they both have blind faith in humanity's special place in it, as if we are immune to the forces of nature that we have helped unleash around us.

WTF?

Now I know I'm dealing with a retard and/or a troll - and its not even Tuesday!

Percent is NOT the noun in that sentence.

The people are the subject noun; the number is an adjective that quantifies the number of people.

http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/n ouns.html "A noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing, and abstract idea."

http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/a djectve.html#adjective

"An adjective modifies a noun or a pronoun by describing, identifying, or quantifying words. An adjective usually precedes the noun or the pronoun which it modifies."

The whatever percent is a quanifier, not the subject noun you pretend it to be.

WTF?

Now I know I'm dealing with a retard and/or a troll - and its not even Tuesday!

Percent is NOT the noun in that sentence.

The people are the subject noun; the number is an adjective that quantifies the number of people.

http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/n ouns.html "A noun is a word used to name a person, animal, place, thing, and abstract idea."

http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/a djectve.html#adjective

"An adjective modifies a noun or a pronoun by describing, identifying, or quantifying words. An adjective usually precedes the noun or the pronoun which it modifies."

The whatever percent is a quanifier, not the subject noun you pretend it to be.

Whoops, forgot to post the link - http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/q marks.html

  "BusinessWeek has a piece looking at if it makes sense for companies such as Sony to delay the release of products to ensure that when they do come out they are absolutely top of the line..."

I hope this isn't lost at the end of the thread but if anyone wants to leave an imprint on these boobs who think it's that easy to "prove evolution". I have some email addresses you might enjoy.

Links that have emails for the SSHRC members who rejected Alters application:
http://www.english.ucalgary.ca/faculty/s_bennett.h tm
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~lfelt/oldindex.html
http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/history/prof_h eap.html
http://www.uqac.ca/aemeir/articles.php?lng=fr&pg=6 5
http://www.economie.uqam.ca/fich_profs_html/prof_r _ruth.html

I was tempted to paste the emails directly but I didn't want to get in trouble for that. If you care about this, send them an email and tell them how you feel and if you're Canadian cc your MP, you never know if your MP might get involved. I cc'ed mine, I hope he does something because this just hurts. I'm without words to convey how pissed I am.

"Articles about the UK are always introduced with adjectives: "The Prime Minister of the UK"."

Save your complaints for slashdot.org.uk

Or would Oxford spelling demand slashedotte.org.uk?

"The Union of South Africa is never refered to as the USA."

That's because on May 31, 1961, they kicked out Her Majesty and are now known as the Republic of South Africa. You'd be less out-of-date if you were complaining about outsourcing stories not specifying West Pakistan.

"You have an international audience, quit staring in the bleeding mirror all day FCS!"

Hypocrite. Slashdot is not specifically seeking an international audience and, to my knowledge, has never claimed to be. You are here of your own volition and should yourself adjust yourself to the site and the community instead of "staring the bleeding mirror all day FCS!" Why should this established group suddenly change to suit your whims simply because you decide to be here?

"PS: Because I know you forgot what an adjective is:
http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/a djectve.html"

Ah, no wonder you're still stuck on "Union of South Africa," you're still in a Commonwealth Realm.

You have an international audience, quit staring in the bleeding mirror all day FCS!
PS: Because I know you forgot what an adjective is:
http://www.arts.uottawa.ca/writcent/hypergrammar/a djectve.html

Okay, there are a whack-load of new issues there. Let me see if I can say something useful.

Most courts that have addressed the validity of the shrinkwrap license have found them to be invalid, characterizing them as contracts of adhesion, unconscionable, and/or unacceptable pursuant to the U.C.C.

Shrink-wrap licenses are displayed outside software and execute on completion of purchase. A shrink-wrap license that requires agreement to unseen terms disclosed inside the box and after the sale is probably not enforceable due to lack of consideration.

Distinguish this from a click-wrap license where the terms are typically presented on the screen and scrollable (analogous to turning a page), and require a positive act. That act probably constitutes consideration, and American jurisprudence goes to this effect. I forget the New Jersey case, but there's a prototypical case in Canada called Rudder v. Microsoft where the MSN click-wrap agreement had a term requiring disputes to be resolved in Washington courts. The Canadian courts upheld the agreement, threw out the case. They would have done so only if they suspected, ironically, that Microsoft's rights under the EULA would be upheld in Washington. The Rudder case followed the New Jersey case (which has slipped my mind) in that a click-wrap EULA is not fine print.

However, addressing to the Step-Saver case - in that particular case, the object of the EULA was to undermine the warranty. Warranty occupies a funny bit of sales law; the law against disclaiming warranties is much, much stronger than any presumption against contract. The EULA may be either struck down or the warranty's exculpatory clause read out of the contract.

I just read the Step-Saver case and I think the Wikipedia editors have misinterpreted the ruling; it is not about whether the EULA is valid, but whether the buyer and seller made a contract before the product arrived and the buyer could read the on-the-box license, and whether it is enforceable in spite of the seller's acquiescence to the buyer's repeated acts in denial of the purported license.

The on-box license said there was express or implied no warranty, whereas on the telephone (a) the seller had made certain guarantees (i.e. compatible with 90% of MS-DOS software) that (b) the buyer relied upon. The warranty held out by the seller was part of the SALE contract, not the EULA license (look at the case: the "consent by opening" language is not sufficient to render TSL's acceptance conditional, and the offeree/counterofferor may be relying on the purchaser's investment in time and energy in reaching this point in the transaction and TSL was willing to proceed with the transaction despite the fact that one of the terms of the box-top license was not included in the contract).

Justice Wisdom of the circuit court is saying that the EULA was not part of the original contract for sale, and hence had no force and effect. This is not whether a generic EULA is enforceable, but whether in the above fact-specific situation the EULA, which materially alters the sale contract, should be part of that original sale contract. (Answer: no) A EULA on the box in a store might not be given the same treatment, since you can read it prior to the sale transaction.

So, according to the Step-Saver case (in my humble and possibly even correct interpretation) the warranty disclaimer portion of a EULA is unenforceable if:
1. that EULA has been sent only after the completion of the sale transaction,
2. the seller has made guarantees as to merchantability as part of that sale,
3. the buyer has never consented to the EULA, and
4. the seller has acquiesced to the buyer's non-consent.

This is NOT the same as saying EULA's are unenforceable. To rely on the Step-Saver case, you would require all of the elements 1-4. You may be able to argue for a lesser s

First of all, lets link to the research on how hashes are reversed:

Fingerprint Readers: http://chris.fornax.net/biometrics.html

Face Recognizers
http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~adler/publications/200 3/adler-2003-fr-templates.pdf

Both attacks are based on the idea that the algorithms are necessarily fuzzy, and as such emit not just an oracular "match/not match" but a weighting regarding how accurate the matching is. As such, you basically can perturb the underlying data slightly, run it through the algorithm, and then see if you got closer or farther from the source biometric.

Fingerprint reversal already creates viable (if not completely accurate) candidates. Faces? Well, see the PDF, but they can be made recognizable. (You just, widen the brow, shrink the nose, widen the mouth, whatever incrementally until you achieve match.)

Now, suppose you add a warping factor to faces. Does this help? The stored biometric must contain the warping parameters (since the incoming image must be similarly modified), so we're left with two possibilities:

1) The warping is severe -- not only does the resulting image bear no resemblance to a human face, but so much pixel intermixing has occurred that it'd be near meaningless to invert the warp vectors to try to get back to a meaningful face.

2) The warping isn't so severe, and you can just invert the stored vectors.

Case 1 is what they're implying, but Case 1 doesn't allow for significant features above and beyond what's created by the vector field itself. In other words, almost any face would match, if the warp vectors were irreversable. Put another way -- if the face detection algorithm is able to find a feature, we're able to reverse back to what the feature looks like, and if we're not able to reverse back, we almost certainly can't have a face detector find the feature.

My assumption, then -- and again, this is without seeing detailed research (I happily discount the examples CNN provided...it can't be _that_ bad) -- is that this technique doesn't work against hot/cold style attacks against the biometric algorithm. If the researchers care to clarify -- please mail me, or respond!

--Dan

I'm sorry. I can't pass this up.

What are they teaching in schools these days!
vs.
What are they teaching in schools these days?

http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/writcent/hyper grammar/endpunct.html

Also, without wasting too much more time, I found this page that explains:

It is important to note that the pronoun "they" is in the processing of becoming singular as well as plural. For example, one might say:

A person called and they did not leave their name.

This construction allows the speaker to avoid identifying the gender of a person, and it has been common in speech for decades, if not for centuries. Be aware, however, that some people still consider it unacceptable for formal writing.

I suppose some people consider Slashdot to be a formal venue, but I personally think "his/her" is a little clumsy.

(sorry for the completey off-topic post)

Though not implementing this law would mean violating the WIPOs rulings; which state that circumvention of TPM (...DRMs) are illegal.

Unfortunately, the heritage minister in charge of this debacle has seen little evidence to support our cause. The one event that was supposed to make her see the light failed miserably due to a lack of foresight from the organisers and poor arguments from the attendees.

In essence: we're screwed. Though we do have the advantage of our lawmakers not being bribed $179,000 by the RIAA/MPAA.

*What* fundamental advances? Name them!

Firm semantical foundations, the Pi-Calculus, Game Semantics, Full Abstraction results for various languages, Zero Knowledge Proofs, Breakthroughs in Program Logics (Separation Logic, Honda-Logics), Proof-Carrying Code, Model-Checking.

Here is the professors university home page , from where i guess the email id was harvested. Looks like the spammers should have read his biography and field of speciallization before having sent that mail :-) He even hosts this site regarding privacy issues

I could have seen much further had it not been for the giants standing on my shoulders

I'm not certain about the US but here in canada, we already have this biotechnology engineering at least at Ottawa University, many of my co-workers are in this field. Apparently it takes 6 years to complete and you need to do a bio degree and an engineering degree, and its very difficult to get into. Here At Waterloo University you can already do BioInformatics, I think its like Bio Engineering. Is this something different?

I am an astrophysicist.

What I was trying to point out, but evidently with little success, was that the article was hyping the discovery. It is certainly important (as you might gather from the fact that it is being published in Nature). The article, however, summarizes the physicists' findings but allows the reader to think that the "dark matter" that the article refers to is that really mysterious stuff that science fiction writers like to write about, not the less mysterious stuff that the physicists were actually talking about.

And, by the way, dark energy (which indeed is horribly named) is a huge mystery. Ask a particle physicist to calculate the vacuum energy density and he will give you an answer that is incorrect by many, many, MANY orders of magnitude. See http://www.site.uottawa.ca:4321/astronomy/index.ht ml#cosmologicalconstantproblem/.

One way to measure theories is by how many axioms, or things they take for granted, they need to prove everything else in their theory. Euclid needed five, and he spent a long time getting that list as short as he could.

But without taking anything for granted, you can't prove anything, as you've said. And taking geometry as an example, it has worked, because it's allowed us to make great things like pyramids, space shuttles, buildings, etc.