I was in fifth grade (twenty years ago, wow!), and I was given a book about computers, which had in it an example BASIC program which was something like this (pseudocode, I never properly learned BASIC):
print "What is my name?"
read name
print "What color am I?"
read color
print "How tall am I?"
read height
print "Hello, I am " name "."
print "I am a " color " color."
print "I am " height " feet tall."
I brought this to my Dad and asked if I could get our computer to do this. He said that we could, but we would do it in a different language (we did not have BASIC on our Mac). He coded it up in a Pascal interpreter. One great feature that it had was auto pretty printing and error highlighting, so proper formatting was indeligably imprinted on my mind, and errors were easily found.
After playing with the program for a while and enjoying it thoroughly, I was told that I could do programming instead of math for school (I was home schooled at the time). I jumped at the chance. My Dad would simply give me new tools to play with (loops, arrays) and puzzles to solve (add n numbers where n is specified at runtime, print ASCII graphics, play shoot the wumpus).
Eventually, I got to the point where I had learned the basics, and he introduced me to the Mac drawing primitives. I then drew faces and such, with ears, ears, hair, etc. Then I switched to a real compiler and went on to create a whole application, with menus and options dialogs to choose how you wanted your face drawn, and all the basic stuff for an application. I remember one of the final things to do was to have an option for glasses, and an option for curly hair (a series of circles; my Dad told me about sine and cosine to do that nicely) -- this was to mimic my Dad, who had glasses and curly hair.
At this point, it was the end of the year, and I was then allowed to run loose and do whatever I wanted, and I learned to use the documentation to find out what I needed. I never looked back.
"That installation would have cost a bit more than $50K, but the price would have dropped to around $38K after the rebate."
so i saved a few hundred dollars a year but had to spend 38K ????? what the hell is the point. PV can't ever replace base load power sources.
The reason it won't replace base load power sources is that panels only work if sunlight makes it to the panels. The only way panels will end up working is in tandem with something else, say by charging batteries or reversing hydropower to store energy, or being secondary to something else.
And grid power might go up, but only so far. Because eventually the grid power hits the solar price, and the grid itself starts putting in solar sources at that price -- because it's cheaper.
Your logic doesn't work. When you own a PV system, you're part of "the grid itself." When I'm at work during the day, my PV panels are pumping energy into the grid, which is selling it to other customers. In my area, grid power has hit the solar price, for a south-facing roof with no shade; that's why I, a homeowner with a south-facing roof and no shade, have put in a PV system. You seem to be assuming that if rates go above a certain threshold, the entire state of California will suddenly magically cover itself with PV panels, because that will be the right thing to do according to the laws of supply and demand. That doesn't make sense, for a couple of reasons. First, there are huge variations in the price of land, the local cost of electricity, the amount of sunlight, which way people's roofs face, and how much shade they get. Second, there's a barrier to covering every house with PV panels, which is that most homeowners are short on capital. Your idea that the whole grid would suddenly go solar at some threshold is like imagining that everybody will suddenly drive a hydrogen-powered car if gas goes over $6 a gallon. We're talking about a massive infrastructure that doesn't change overnight.
Actually, you missed the fact that not all electricity in a given locale costs the same. The baseline power is created with cheap sources, and the variable amounts are created with more expensive sources. The costs for power during the day are higher because (in part) the power comes from more expensive sources. You are offsetting not the average cost of electricity, but the cost of more expensive electricity. By having panels, the utility simply avoids buying that amount of the more expensive electricity on the spot market.
Triple pane windows, extremely good insulation, lots of vegetation around the house, etc. However, you would need severe temperature drops at night to cool the house, and it would cost a small fortune to put together. Methinks that this is an exaggeration.
The upshot of all of this is that DNA is best used as EXCLUSIONARY evidence. If you don't match, it wasn't you period. If you do, it MAY have been you. It's a good way to narrow down a list of suspects or even come up with a list to examine closer (it may or may not be enough by itself to be probable cause).
The other funny thing is that while the summary cries "Usenet", TFA only mentions Usenet in passing, and the article to which it connects does not mention Usenet at all. That is basically a copy of the same article that was posted here a short while ago which didn't mention Usenet either.
From TFA:
All 18 cable companies have agreed to use NCMEC's list of active Web sites identified as containing child pornography, to ensure that no such site is hosted on servers owned or controlled by those companies.
(emphasis mine)
Why on earth are people screaming "They are turning of Usenet!"?
I must say, I have read your posts and I must commend you. Not many people understand what you are trying to do, least of all non-parents.
To boil down everything that you have said, you (1) make your kids take responsibility for their actions, (2) teach them as much as you can to prevent danger on their own terms, and (3) do as much as you can to prevent what they can not themselves. You allow them to do whatever they want as long as it is not life-threatening or otherwise overly destructive, which then allows teaching by experience. You do not coddle them, which teaches them to pick themselves up when they fall and stand on their own two feet. You do monitor them, so that their environment is a healthy one.
A note on the monitoring: as others have mentioned, the monitoring is not going to be able to last forever (you can not watch adults, and to a lesser extent teenagers), and it looks like you are getting close to the time when it is going to happen. However, it looks like your goal is to have taught them enough so that they can correctly judge their own actions, so that when they are not monitored, they will be all right.
Of course, your style does seem a bit militaristic, but then that is personal style. Who says that one way is better than another?
More generally, I think that you are addressing in your personal way what I consider the "victim culture" that we now have in the US. People do not take responsibility for their own actions, and so we have lawsuits all over, liability disclaimers all over (don't drink the bleach! it's bad for you!), and an acquiescence to things that happen (OMG! someone help! or It's not my fault!). We need people that think of consequences before acting, that do not let things happen and say "Poor me", and do not blame other for their own mistakes.
To me, it sounds like the ISPs have agreed to turn off web sites that NCMEC complains about. They will "use NCMEC's list of active websites identified as containing child pornography, to ensure that no such site is hosted on servers owned or controlled by those companies." This is to "enforce their terms of service, all of which forbid the hosting of such illegal materials on their servers." In other words, sites are going to be turned off based on NCMEC's say so. Thus they look good for turning off sites that are illegal (think of the children!), and NCMEC gets the power they want.
From TFA:
Specifically, the cable companies have agreed to use NCMEC's list of active websites identified as containing child pornography, to ensure that no such site is hosted on servers owned or controlled by those companies. The companies will also report these instances to NCMEC's CyberTipline and where appropriate revise their policies around other potential sources of child pornography, such as, for example, newsgroups.
The agreement with NCMEC will provide cable broadband service providers with an invaluable source of information to help them enforce their terms of service, all of which forbid the hosting of such illegal materials on their servers. The information provided by NCMEC to cable service providers will also help them identify instances of child pornography, facilitating their reporting of such material to NCMEC as required by federal law. This in turn enables NCMEC to refer these cases to law enforcement for investigation and prosecution.
Oh, and the newsgroups bit seems like sensationalism to me.
Remember, the problem is that the hidden partition's existence is what is revealed, not the data on it. Full disk encryption does not hide the existence of the partition, and thus does not allow plausible deniability. This is expanded upon a lot more in other posts.
Yes it is. Wikipedia talks about catenary and parabola. Basically, when you have a cable-like object that has evenly distributed mass and support only at the ends, you get a catenary. When you get support over the entire object, you get the parabola. This is talked about in reference to a suspension bridge.
The solution is to see if more than 50% (say) of all outgoing emails from an account are considered spam, and if so, shut down the account. You would need some minimum threshold of outgoing messages (say, 20) before the shutdown occurs, and "spam" messages should not be blocked before the shutdown, in the case of false positives.
Unfortunately, after I wrote the above, I can already imagine a workaround -- spam accounts emailing to each other legitimate email. However, I think the idea could bear some thought.
As was part of the plotline of "Little Lost Robot". Part of Susan Calvin's method to find the robot was to try and trigger the "through inaction" part of the First Law, but the lost robot convinced the other robots that if following the First Law causes self-destruction before the harm is prevented, then the First Law is moot and won't trigger, which then only left the Second Law to trigger.
Actually, it refers to it obliquely, where it says that they pass matching tests or anything that does not require memory. "More" requires you match up opposing sides, and see which has leftovers.
It seems that the next step is how easy it would be to tell who had over stayed a meter and be able to start ticketing one second after the meter says expired. All you would need to do is combine with some way of identifying the car in the space, or simply use the info to direct a meter maid to identify the car.
My father teaches math and CSci, and does his part to try and alleviate the cost problem. When he teaches the same calculus course year after year, he builds up errata and maintains assignments for each edition, and then say, "If you have edition 5, here are the assigned problems and readings. If you have edition 4, here are the assignments. If you have edition 3, here are the assignments, and you need to borrow someone else's book when we get to chapter 12." Calculus books and courses really don't change all that much from year to year.
We want friendly customer service this is in direct conflect with security.
Do notice that the exploits talked about in TFA are not consistent with friendly customer service -- they involve such things as sneaking into unsecured offices or entering into the data center, places no customer would legitimately be. Good security would be keeping things locked away when not in use and checking ID before allowing access, which does not impact customer service at all.
They want to have the standards bureau to define the kilogram this way. This is is only one possible redefinition. From what I have read, there is another strong contender which is based on electromagnetic force.
The new paper proposes that the next General Conference on Weights and Measures adopt either one of two definitions for the kilogram to effectively fix its value by selecting a specific value for either the Planck constant or the Avogadro constant. Two types of experiments are leading the effort to realize either of these definitions. The first one measures a kilogram against the amount of magnetic force required to balance a 1-kilogram mass against the pull of Earth's gravity. The experimental apparatus used to make the measurement is called a watt balance. A kilogram mass is placed on a balance plate that is surrounded by a coil of copper wire, which in turn is surrounded by a coil of superconducting wire. Magnetic fields produced by sending electricity through the coils push on the balance plate to offset the artifact's weight. The amount of electric current and its voltage then is used in defining a kilogram. Electrical power can be related to the Planck constant, defined as the ratio between the frequency of an electromagnetic particle such as a photon of light and its energy. This experimental method of defining the kilogram relies on selecting a fixed value for the Planck constant, which is currently determined experimentally based on the fixed value of the kilogram artifact.
This comes from here. Here is another article that talks about the same thing. TFA also links to an article that talks of this (I assume), but that article requires a subscription.
These articles also talk about why it is good to redefine the standard -- basically, by doing so, a bunch of other measurements/definitions immediately have less uncertainty.
Anyone who pays (way too much) for the privilege of _______________ (which is contrary to any living creature's survival instinct) cannot be described as "reasonable".
While the parent has "habitually inhaling toxic smoke and gases", this statement could have have any other dangerous activity in it, such as "skydiving", "parachuting", or "driving", and still be just as devoid of validity.
Kind of like smog control devices. You own them, so you can modify them -- except, your can't, legally (at least in California). If you are found to have intentionally disabled a smog control device on your car, you have some penalties coming your way.
Slashdot Mirror
And the reason you have £40 + £40 + £18.19 = £98.19 instead of £98.18 is because you put in you 2 cents worth (£0.01) in?
I was in fifth grade (twenty years ago, wow!), and I was given a book about computers, which had in it an example BASIC program which was something like this (pseudocode, I never properly learned BASIC):
print "What is my name?"
read name
print "What color am I?"
read color
print "How tall am I?"
read height
print "Hello, I am " name "."
print "I am a " color " color."
print "I am " height " feet tall."
I brought this to my Dad and asked if I could get our computer to do this. He said that we could, but we would do it in a different language (we did not have BASIC on our Mac). He coded it up in a Pascal interpreter. One great feature that it had was auto pretty printing and error highlighting, so proper formatting was indeligably imprinted on my mind, and errors were easily found.
After playing with the program for a while and enjoying it thoroughly, I was told that I could do programming instead of math for school (I was home schooled at the time). I jumped at the chance. My Dad would simply give me new tools to play with (loops, arrays) and puzzles to solve (add n numbers where n is specified at runtime, print ASCII graphics, play shoot the wumpus).
Eventually, I got to the point where I had learned the basics, and he introduced me to the Mac drawing primitives. I then drew faces and such, with ears, ears, hair, etc. Then I switched to a real compiler and went on to create a whole application, with menus and options dialogs to choose how you wanted your face drawn, and all the basic stuff for an application. I remember one of the final things to do was to have an option for glasses, and an option for curly hair (a series of circles; my Dad told me about sine and cosine to do that nicely) -- this was to mimic my Dad, who had glasses and curly hair.
At this point, it was the end of the year, and I was then allowed to run loose and do whatever I wanted, and I learned to use the documentation to find out what I needed. I never looked back.
"That installation would have cost a bit more than $50K, but the price would have dropped to around $38K after the rebate."
so i saved a few hundred dollars a year but had to spend 38K ????? what the hell is the point. PV can't ever replace base load power sources.
The reason it won't replace base load power sources is that panels only work if sunlight makes it to the panels. The only way panels will end up working is in tandem with something else, say by charging batteries or reversing hydropower to store energy, or being secondary to something else.
And grid power might go up, but only so far. Because eventually the grid power hits the solar price, and the grid itself starts putting in solar sources at that price -- because it's cheaper. Your logic doesn't work. When you own a PV system, you're part of "the grid itself." When I'm at work during the day, my PV panels are pumping energy into the grid, which is selling it to other customers. In my area, grid power has hit the solar price, for a south-facing roof with no shade; that's why I, a homeowner with a south-facing roof and no shade, have put in a PV system. You seem to be assuming that if rates go above a certain threshold, the entire state of California will suddenly magically cover itself with PV panels, because that will be the right thing to do according to the laws of supply and demand. That doesn't make sense, for a couple of reasons. First, there are huge variations in the price of land, the local cost of electricity, the amount of sunlight, which way people's roofs face, and how much shade they get. Second, there's a barrier to covering every house with PV panels, which is that most homeowners are short on capital. Your idea that the whole grid would suddenly go solar at some threshold is like imagining that everybody will suddenly drive a hydrogen-powered car if gas goes over $6 a gallon. We're talking about a massive infrastructure that doesn't change overnight.
Actually, you missed the fact that not all electricity in a given locale costs the same. The baseline power is created with cheap sources, and the variable amounts are created with more expensive sources. The costs for power during the day are higher because (in part) the power comes from more expensive sources. You are offsetting not the average cost of electricity, but the cost of more expensive electricity. By having panels, the utility simply avoids buying that amount of the more expensive electricity on the spot market.
Triple pane windows, extremely good insulation, lots of vegetation around the house, etc. However, you would need severe temperature drops at night to cool the house, and it would cost a small fortune to put together. Methinks that this is an exaggeration.
The upshot of all of this is that DNA is best used as EXCLUSIONARY evidence. If you don't match, it wasn't you period. If you do, it MAY have been you. It's a good way to narrow down a list of suspects or even come up with a list to examine closer (it may or may not be enough by itself to be probable cause).
Unless a chimera is involved, like Lydia Fairchild.
The other funny thing is that while the summary cries "Usenet", TFA only mentions Usenet in passing, and the article to which it connects does not mention Usenet at all. That is basically a copy of the same article that was posted here a short while ago which didn't mention Usenet either.
From TFA:
All 18 cable companies have agreed to use NCMEC's list of active Web sites identified as containing child pornography, to ensure that no such site is hosted on servers owned or controlled by those companies.
(emphasis mine)
Why on earth are people screaming "They are turning of Usenet!"?
there is no way they could get away with this with smtp or hhtp.
Ah, yes, the Hyper-Hoopla Transfer Protocol!
I must say, I have read your posts and I must commend you. Not many people understand what you are trying to do, least of all non-parents.
To boil down everything that you have said, you (1) make your kids take responsibility for their actions, (2) teach them as much as you can to prevent danger on their own terms, and (3) do as much as you can to prevent what they can not themselves. You allow them to do whatever they want as long as it is not life-threatening or otherwise overly destructive, which then allows teaching by experience. You do not coddle them, which teaches them to pick themselves up when they fall and stand on their own two feet. You do monitor them, so that their environment is a healthy one.
A note on the monitoring: as others have mentioned, the monitoring is not going to be able to last forever (you can not watch adults, and to a lesser extent teenagers), and it looks like you are getting close to the time when it is going to happen. However, it looks like your goal is to have taught them enough so that they can correctly judge their own actions, so that when they are not monitored, they will be all right.
Of course, your style does seem a bit militaristic, but then that is personal style. Who says that one way is better than another?
More generally, I think that you are addressing in your personal way what I consider the "victim culture" that we now have in the US. People do not take responsibility for their own actions, and so we have lawsuits all over, liability disclaimers all over (don't drink the bleach! it's bad for you!), and an acquiescence to things that happen (OMG! someone help! or It's not my fault!). We need people that think of consequences before acting, that do not let things happen and say "Poor me", and do not blame other for their own mistakes.
Finally, once again, great posts!
I hear from Google people that it gives you extra points if you do for a Google application.
To me, it sounds like the ISPs have agreed to turn off web sites that NCMEC complains about. They will "use NCMEC's list of active websites identified as containing child pornography, to ensure that no such site is hosted on servers owned or controlled by those companies." This is to "enforce their terms of service, all of which forbid the hosting of such illegal materials on their servers." In other words, sites are going to be turned off based on NCMEC's say so. Thus they look good for turning off sites that are illegal (think of the children!), and NCMEC gets the power they want.
From TFA:
Specifically, the cable companies have agreed to use NCMEC's list of active websites identified as containing child pornography, to ensure that no such site is hosted on servers owned or controlled by those companies. The companies will also report these instances to NCMEC's CyberTipline and where appropriate revise their policies around other potential sources of child pornography, such as, for example, newsgroups.
The agreement with NCMEC will provide cable broadband service providers with an invaluable source of information to help them enforce their terms of service, all of which forbid the hosting of such illegal materials on their servers. The information provided by NCMEC to cable service providers will also help them identify instances of child pornography, facilitating their reporting of such material to NCMEC as required by federal law. This in turn enables NCMEC to refer these cases to law enforcement for investigation and prosecution.
Oh, and the newsgroups bit seems like sensationalism to me.
Remember, the problem is that the hidden partition's existence is what is revealed, not the data on it. Full disk encryption does not hide the existence of the partition, and thus does not allow plausible deniability. This is expanded upon a lot more in other posts.
Vs lbh nfxrq Oehpr Fpuarvre gb qrpelcg guvf, ur'q pehfu lbhe fxhyy jvgu uvf ynhtu.
If you asked Bruce Schneier to decrypt this, he'd crush your skull with his laugh.
For you lazy people out there.
Yes it is. Wikipedia talks about catenary and parabola. Basically, when you have a cable-like object that has evenly distributed mass and support only at the ends, you get a catenary. When you get support over the entire object, you get the parabola. This is talked about in reference to a suspension bridge.
Mercury cannot be used, however, because it is too dense and changing its shape requires impractically powerful fields.
The solution is to see if more than 50% (say) of all outgoing emails from an account are considered spam, and if so, shut down the account. You would need some minimum threshold of outgoing messages (say, 20) before the shutdown occurs, and "spam" messages should not be blocked before the shutdown, in the case of false positives.
Unfortunately, after I wrote the above, I can already imagine a workaround -- spam accounts emailing to each other legitimate email. However, I think the idea could bear some thought.
And the theory goes that views are proportional to clicks. I can't imagine that twice as many views (say) wouldn't generate at least one more click.
As was part of the plotline of "Little Lost Robot". Part of Susan Calvin's method to find the robot was to try and trigger the "through inaction" part of the First Law, but the lost robot convinced the other robots that if following the First Law causes self-destruction before the harm is prevented, then the First Law is moot and won't trigger, which then only left the Second Law to trigger.
Actually, it refers to it obliquely, where it says that they pass matching tests or anything that does not require memory. "More" requires you match up opposing sides, and see which has leftovers.
It seems that the next step is how easy it would be to tell who had over stayed a meter and be able to start ticketing one second after the meter says expired. All you would need to do is combine with some way of identifying the car in the space, or simply use the info to direct a meter maid to identify the car.
My father teaches math and CSci, and does his part to try and alleviate the cost problem. When he teaches the same calculus course year after year, he builds up errata and maintains assignments for each edition, and then say, "If you have edition 5, here are the assigned problems and readings. If you have edition 4, here are the assignments. If you have edition 3, here are the assignments, and you need to borrow someone else's book when we get to chapter 12." Calculus books and courses really don't change all that much from year to year.
We want friendly customer service this is in direct conflect with security.
Do notice that the exploits talked about in TFA are not consistent with friendly customer service -- they involve such things as sneaking into unsecured offices or entering into the data center, places no customer would legitimately be. Good security would be keeping things locked away when not in use and checking ID before allowing access, which does not impact customer service at all.
They want to have the standards bureau to define the kilogram this way. This is is only one possible redefinition. From what I have read, there is another strong contender which is based on electromagnetic force.
The new paper proposes that the next General Conference on Weights and Measures adopt either one of two definitions for the kilogram to effectively fix its value by selecting a specific value for either the Planck constant or the Avogadro constant. Two types of experiments are leading the effort to realize either of these definitions. The first one measures a kilogram against the amount of magnetic force required to balance a 1-kilogram mass against the pull of Earth's gravity. The experimental apparatus used to make the measurement is called a watt balance. A kilogram mass is placed on a balance plate that is surrounded by a coil of copper wire, which in turn is surrounded by a coil of superconducting wire. Magnetic fields produced by sending electricity through the coils push on the balance plate to offset the artifact's weight. The amount of electric current and its voltage then is used in defining a kilogram. Electrical power can be related to the Planck constant, defined as the ratio between the frequency of an electromagnetic particle such as a photon of light and its energy. This experimental method of defining the kilogram relies on selecting a fixed value for the Planck constant, which is currently determined experimentally based on the fixed value of the kilogram artifact.
This comes from here. Here is another article that talks about the same thing. TFA also links to an article that talks of this (I assume), but that article requires a subscription.
These articles also talk about why it is good to redefine the standard -- basically, by doing so, a bunch of other measurements/definitions immediately have less uncertainty.
Anyone who pays (way too much) for the privilege of _______________ (which is contrary to any living creature's survival instinct) cannot be described as "reasonable".
While the parent has "habitually inhaling toxic smoke and gases", this statement could have have any other dangerous activity in it, such as "skydiving", "parachuting", or "driving", and still be just as devoid of validity.
Kind of like smog control devices. You own them, so you can modify them -- except, your can't, legally (at least in California). If you are found to have intentionally disabled a smog control device on your car, you have some penalties coming your way.