It seems like almost anyone can register almost any TLD, so I doubt that this would cause the current situation to deteriorate. However, most of the people who are online have been online for over a decade. It is going to be very hard to change people's habits.
Besides, what is the merit of this? Even from a marketing perspective, most people identify "brand.com" as the address to a website so you can just plop that onto any piece of advertising. How would you identify an address in this new scheme? Add "http://" to the front? The people who don't have a clue would have to learn everything all over again. Or maybe "On the web at brand"? Do advertisers really want more verbiage to clutter their message?
As for those in the know, we may care but it won't make a huge difference for us. It will cause problems at first as we have to adjust our habits and networks to account for the new reality, but life will go on.
I'm guessing that it's a mix. I heard passers comment that they weren't fans, and they wanted to start a riot. There were also plenty of intoxicated fans who were more than ready to riot in defeat and probably would have caused as much destruction with a victory party.
As for the crowd sourcing, they're going to have an easy time identifying people but a terrible time proving guilt. I've seen videos of people posing in front of the mayhem, even though they probably didn't take part in it. When I went to down town Vancouver today, I found hoards of people posing for photos around the crime scenes. Brilliant.
There is no such thing as absolute freedom, yet the is the negotiating of rights. Done properly, you can maximize the freedom of people. You will also find that very few of those negotiated rights will be universal because every culture brings their own values to the table.
Take your example of the child. You, and perhaps the country to which you belong, probably have a strong sense of paternal authority. Yet other people would strongly disagree with your assertion, equating that paternal authority to a form of slavery that society must work to overcome. After all, to leave the child enslaved to the individual is fundamentally immoral.
Of course, there really are people who believe that children are the property of the father, but they are most definitely evil in my book.
NOTE: I don't agree with everything that I just said, though I do see them as acceptable viewpoints. And that's what public consultation processes are about, collecting those perspectives and trying to compile them into something coherent. Without that consultation, those negotiations, you are essentially ruling by fiat/ideology/whatever and denying the freedom of others. The fact that Iceland is using Facebook to do so is interesting, but it may work out in this case (regardless of your opinion on handing over control to a major, foreign, corporation) because Iceland is a tiny nation with a relatively homogenous population.
Then you're doing assembly all wrong. Assembly language is quite easy to write in if you structure it properly.
That said, it is an absolute bitch to read, which is why I prefer to deal with higher level languages any day. (Think about it: do you spend more time writing original code, or revising and debugging existing code? Even for a hobbiest such as myself, revising and debugging is a big part of what I do. I would imagine that the professionals spend much more time doing so since they're responsible for maintaining an existing codebase.)
This isn't the right thing for me, because I don't receive very much email. Yet I am tremendously pleased that they are looking for ways to prioritize email that puts the sender in the loop, because I've run into far too many situations where something gets lost because I'm not prepared to deal with it at the moment. (Example: I don't do personal email while at work and I don't deal with work email at home, so don't send ask for an appointment at 6 pm expecting a reply before you go to bed.)
Yes there are filters and there is communicating expectations to friends/colleagues. But the former doesn't allow for the sender to use their discretion and automated email systems have no way of knowing when is a good time of day to tell me that my library books are overdue or send the receipt for my latest purchase.
My biggest problem with this sort of scheme is that they are facilitating the very thing that they are claiming to combat.
Are they luring people into committing crimes that they would not have committed otherwise? I'm guessing that the answer is yes, even if it is unintentional. After all, a lot of wrong-doings wouldn't be done if there wasn't a social framework (e.g. forums) to reinforce the behaviour.
How is that hypocrisy? If you define hacking as an attack on military or civilian infrastructure, then you're playing with the big boys. And those big boys get to define it as anything from a teenaged prank to a full out declaration of war -- based upon who attacked and what the consequences of those actions are. In a lot of respects it's no different than launching an assault by good old fashioned physical means.
So if you're treating this as a joke, grow up. These are real actions with real consequences.
As an astrophysicist, I'm an observationalist and not an experimentalist...
I do a fair bit of work with children in the arts and the sciences. Even though there are some truly splendid geek-children out there, I've found that the ones who are engaged by the arts are better adjusted socially, emotionally, and intrapersonally. Of course, the ones who express enthusiasm on both sides are the most interesting and seem to have the most constructive behaviours.
At times like this I wish that I was a stupid, shallow person rather than a scientist -- just so that my children don't end up with the long list of psychoses that that child will end up with.
(Don't get me wrong: it is important to raise creative and rational children. But treating them as a science experiment, even in good humour, is going to be damaging.)
My pa always used to say, "you can live to work or you can work to live." I suppose the former are more interested in doing a job that they enjoy and the latter are more interested in a job with good earnings. Neither philosophy is inherently better, as long as you choose the one that reflects what you're trying to get out of life.
Maybe the number is accurate, maybe it isn't. But the one thing that strikes me is that this is not an entirely random survey since there are too many factors that can affect the sampling. Examples: people who do not update their software (including but not limited to this scanner) are probably more likely to have an infected machine, making the number low. Yet institutional PCs that are professionally managed (and are likely to use third party solutions) are probably less likely less likely to be infected, making the number high. So that 5%, as good or as bad as it may sound to you, is actually just a number thrown around by the marketing department.
In some respects they are right: the Wikipedia is an amazing phenomena that is both a contribution to and a contribution of modern culture. Yet it isn't the only thing out there that is built upon similar premesises and contributes in similar ways. Most of all, you do you recognise a living part of culture? Let's face it, most UNESCO heritage items seek to preserve the past. Projects like Wikipedia are very much a part of the present.
I knew about this problem 15 years ago. Granted, it was from the perspective of online advertising. (I noticed that an abnormal amount of IBM ads were targetted towards me when I was running OS/2.) Yet it didn't take me long to figure out why Google's results were better than their competitor's when people started arguing over the quality of Microsoft's engine. Not only did Google have years to refine their results for my demographic, but they had years to refine their results for *me*.
My feelings on this are mixed, but mostly negative. In one respect, it allowed me to find what I needed quickly. And let's face it, that's what search engines are about. On the other hand, it also forced me to realize that it was reenforcing my preconceived notions of the world -- may that be from the perspective of myself as an information consumer or from my perspective as a member of the human race. But I largely ignored that until started making changes in my life, changes that meant that I could no longer fit into Google's pigeon hole.
And I think that realization is the biggest problem with the world of data mining. I couldn't give a shit about what businesses or even (God forbid, which I say in all sarcasm) government thinks about me. What I care about is what I think about me, and how that is influencing how I interact with other people. This use of user profiles to reaffirm (in most cases) and shape (in a few cases) one's conceptions of themselves is by far the greatest danger that this tracking presents us.
Based on the article, it is not an issue at all. They are dealing with a core Java application, OpenOffice, and Adobe Reader. The former presumably has been tested and operates properly under Linux. The latter applications are also available for Linux. It was also noted that they are using an older version of Windows, which means that some/all of the employees would have to learn how to use a "different OS" (presumably Windows 7) all over again. Yes, some would have been using that different OS on their personal machines, but those skills don't necessarily carry over very well to work environments.
It is worth considering that many corporate machines have highly customized configurations to start with, most of which are intended to improve security or the manageability of their systems. This ties into what I said about skills used on personal machines don't necessarily carry over to corporate machines. Many corporate machines lock out all but a subset of applications that the employees are permitted to use. This includes standard components of the operating system (e.g. the desktop shell).
Now I cannot comment fully on this company's situation, but it is highly probable that this decision was highly thought out from both a technical and employee level.
I usually recommend the opposite. There are cases where encryption is necessary because confidential data is being handled. The flip side is that full disk encryption makes it difficult, if not impossible, to recover data from corrupt file systems or failing hard drives.
Well increased solar activity it ought to add a little spunk to the aurora, which means that you can watch one of natures more beautiful light shows without tangoing with polar bears. So that's one less thing to worry about and one more thing to be happy about.
I've tracked the OLPC project and have worked in educational technology for years, and arguments over processors and power consumption are bullshit. The same goes for the philosophies of education behind educational technology. At the moment, the biggest issue is teacher training. Simply put, most teachers don't know how to use computers in the context of classroom teaching. That's even true when it comes down to the basics. Sticking an ARM processor into the case isn't going to solve that. Getting the computer to run on 2 Watts isn't going to solve that. Praying that the child is smarter than the teacher when it comes down to adopting new technologies for learning isn't going to solve that. Indeed, this emphasis upon technology over learning and these idle hopes that children are better at using technology for learning have left educational technology in the same cesspool that it was in 30 years ago: teachers, the people who are responsible for guiding children through the process of learning, are almost as ignorant about how to use it today as they were way back then.
(For what it's worth, I think that there is some value in the 'student is smarter than the teacher' mentality when it comes down to educational technology. Yet that only works for a subset of children, since it involves a lot of self-motivation.)
I don't care if the models are good or if they're bad. This is because I was brought up to believe that every action we take has consequences. Some of those consequences may be bad. Some of those consequences may be good. But something happens as the result of our actions.
Now if the models are good and they're predicting nasty consequences, then clearly we must act otherwise people will die and there will be mass migrations of displaced populations that will come knocking at our doors.
But some argue that the models are wrong, or that they are inconclusive, or that they are inconsistent with each other. Clearly the scientists don't know what they are talking about, so we can safely ignore them. WRONG. Just because we don't understand the consequences doesn't mean that those consequences don't exist. And if you have the choice between unknown consequences (bad *or* good) and the status-quo, then you should seriously consider the status-quo. After all, our world may be imperfect but at least we know that we can survive in it. Usually.
The Wired article doesn't even suggest that the backlog in missing persons cases is due to prioritizing copyright over people. Indeed, it suggests that the backlog is due to information management and civil rights issues. What it does state is that the FBI is giving priority to "case completion" which (the last I heard) is notoriously low for missing persons. So the question is, would you rather the FBI prioritize cases that can never be solved over those that can be solved?
Don't get me wrong: I don't like the notion of prioritizing non-violent crime over violent crime. On the other hand, it is absurd to allow several criminals escape the justice system because the FBI is neutered by prioritizing crimes with low case completion rates.
I cannot speak for the UK, but you don't need to add postage to letters addressed to your MPs in Canada. Even if such a rule does not exist in the UK, I would imagine that the postal service would have an unwritten commitment to deliver mail addressed to MPs regardless of affixed postage.
So if you can't spend the pennies on a sheet of paper and envelope, and can't invest the five minutes to walk to a postal box, I really must ask if that essential comment to your MP is really essential or just another example of UBE.
The one thing that I've noticed about technology is that people get excited about it when there is a lot of optimism surrounding it. You could see that with the introduction of the personal computer, with the coming of the Internet, in the early days of FLOSS, and with the Makers/Hacklabs of today. Once it becomes a product, there is a lot less excitement because people learn the inevitable: technology is just a tool that solves technical problems, it will not solve the human issues that surround us. Even though the lesson has been learnt repeatedly, it is one that every generation must come to terms to. This is just one example, of many, of our generation coming to terms with it.
Calculators are useful as handheld devices, but you may as well use an interpreted programming language if you're on a computer. That is particularly true if you consider yourself a Unix user. So my favourites are:
bc: fast to use, arbitrary precision, and it seems to be universally available awk: faster to use when you are performing the same calculation many times over python: has a richer library of mathematics functions
Isn't it odd how one of the easiest thing to convert to bits will be the last thing to be sold as bits? Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if books are still printed long after every human brain has been uploaded into the memory banks of Google's massive servers.
Seriously though, electronic textbooks won't fly for a good long time to come. The people who select these books tend to be hardened and cynical after dealing with publishers for years. These people know that publishers are trying to turn their books into disposable tomes of consumption. Education boards and school principals are more than aware that publishers are trying to drain them of every last cent with disposable workbooks, never mind expiring electronic books. University professors and college instructors have been around long enough to see new revisions of textbooks come out on regular intervals, with insignificant changes outside of section ordering and problem numbers.
These people will resist, and will resist as long as there aren't any intrinsic benefits for them. Institutional buyers will stick to traditional media where the costs are known until they see a way that it may save them money. Fancy technology won't do that, but integrated assessment tools may. Even post-secondary instructors, from my experience, are timid about playing into the publisher's hands. Most will account for differing editions. Usually they do so by treating the book as a supplementary resource and suggesting that the student to follow along in it, but not specifying section numbers or problems from it. Others will go as far as specifying alternate page and question numbers while making critical remarks about the publishers themselves.
Even though I'm far more aligned with the nurture camp and don't go for this genetics crap, it is fairly obvious that there are differences between toys for boys and girls.
The nature of dolls and tea sets is very different from that of cars and guns. Dolls and tea sets are designed to facilitate social fantasies, while cars and guns are designed to facilitate agressive fantasize. Even action figures tend to be designed for agression rather than socialization. Just consider the difference between Ken and GI Joe. So I'm guessing that this study uses boys and girls toys and a stand-in for male and female behaviours.
That being said, is the feminization of boys all that bad?
Slashdot Mirror
It seems like almost anyone can register almost any TLD, so I doubt that this would cause the current situation to deteriorate. However, most of the people who are online have been online for over a decade. It is going to be very hard to change people's habits.
Besides, what is the merit of this? Even from a marketing perspective, most people identify "brand.com" as the address to a website so you can just plop that onto any piece of advertising. How would you identify an address in this new scheme? Add "http://" to the front? The people who don't have a clue would have to learn everything all over again. Or maybe "On the web at brand"? Do advertisers really want more verbiage to clutter their message?
As for those in the know, we may care but it won't make a huge difference for us. It will cause problems at first as we have to adjust our habits and networks to account for the new reality, but life will go on.
I'm guessing that it's a mix. I heard passers comment that they weren't fans, and they wanted to start a riot. There were also plenty of intoxicated fans who were more than ready to riot in defeat and probably would have caused as much destruction with a victory party.
As for the crowd sourcing, they're going to have an easy time identifying people but a terrible time proving guilt. I've seen videos of people posing in front of the mayhem, even though they probably didn't take part in it. When I went to down town Vancouver today, I found hoards of people posing for photos around the crime scenes. Brilliant.
There is no such thing as absolute freedom, yet the is the negotiating of rights. Done properly, you can maximize the freedom of people. You will also find that very few of those negotiated rights will be universal because every culture brings their own values to the table.
Take your example of the child. You, and perhaps the country to which you belong, probably have a strong sense of paternal authority. Yet other people would strongly disagree with your assertion, equating that paternal authority to a form of slavery that society must work to overcome. After all, to leave the child enslaved to the individual is fundamentally immoral.
Of course, there really are people who believe that children are the property of the father, but they are most definitely evil in my book.
NOTE: I don't agree with everything that I just said, though I do see them as acceptable viewpoints. And that's what public consultation processes are about, collecting those perspectives and trying to compile them into something coherent. Without that consultation, those negotiations, you are essentially ruling by fiat/ideology/whatever and denying the freedom of others. The fact that Iceland is using Facebook to do so is interesting, but it may work out in this case (regardless of your opinion on handing over control to a major, foreign, corporation) because Iceland is a tiny nation with a relatively homogenous population.
Then you're doing assembly all wrong. Assembly language is quite easy to write in if you structure it properly.
That said, it is an absolute bitch to read, which is why I prefer to deal with higher level languages any day. (Think about it: do you spend more time writing original code, or revising and debugging existing code? Even for a hobbiest such as myself, revising and debugging is a big part of what I do. I would imagine that the professionals spend much more time doing so since they're responsible for maintaining an existing codebase.)
This isn't the right thing for me, because I don't receive very much email. Yet I am tremendously pleased that they are looking for ways to prioritize email that puts the sender in the loop, because I've run into far too many situations where something gets lost because I'm not prepared to deal with it at the moment. (Example: I don't do personal email while at work and I don't deal with work email at home, so don't send ask for an appointment at 6 pm expecting a reply before you go to bed.)
Yes there are filters and there is communicating expectations to friends/colleagues. But the former doesn't allow for the sender to use their discretion and automated email systems have no way of knowing when is a good time of day to tell me that my library books are overdue or send the receipt for my latest purchase.
My biggest problem with this sort of scheme is that they are facilitating the very thing that they are claiming to combat.
Are they luring people into committing crimes that they would not have committed otherwise? I'm guessing that the answer is yes, even if it is unintentional. After all, a lot of wrong-doings wouldn't be done if there wasn't a social framework (e.g. forums) to reinforce the behaviour.
How is that hypocrisy? If you define hacking as an attack on military or civilian infrastructure, then you're playing with the big boys. And those big boys get to define it as anything from a teenaged prank to a full out declaration of war -- based upon who attacked and what the consequences of those actions are. In a lot of respects it's no different than launching an assault by good old fashioned physical means.
So if you're treating this as a joke, grow up. These are real actions with real consequences.
As an astrophysicist, I'm an observationalist and not an experimentalist ...
I do a fair bit of work with children in the arts and the sciences. Even though there are some truly splendid geek-children out there, I've found that the ones who are engaged by the arts are better adjusted socially, emotionally, and intrapersonally. Of course, the ones who express enthusiasm on both sides are the most interesting and seem to have the most constructive behaviours.
At times like this I wish that I was a stupid, shallow person rather than a scientist -- just so that my children don't end up with the long list of psychoses that that child will end up with.
(Don't get me wrong: it is important to raise creative and rational children. But treating them as a science experiment, even in good humour, is going to be damaging.)
My pa always used to say, "you can live to work or you can work to live." I suppose the former are more interested in doing a job that they enjoy and the latter are more interested in a job with good earnings. Neither philosophy is inherently better, as long as you choose the one that reflects what you're trying to get out of life.
Maybe the number is accurate, maybe it isn't. But the one thing that strikes me is that this is not an entirely random survey since there are too many factors that can affect the sampling. Examples: people who do not update their software (including but not limited to this scanner) are probably more likely to have an infected machine, making the number low. Yet institutional PCs that are professionally managed (and are likely to use third party solutions) are probably less likely less likely to be infected, making the number high. So that 5%, as good or as bad as it may sound to you, is actually just a number thrown around by the marketing department.
In some respects they are right: the Wikipedia is an amazing phenomena that is both a contribution to and a contribution of modern culture. Yet it isn't the only thing out there that is built upon similar premesises and contributes in similar ways. Most of all, you do you recognise a living part of culture? Let's face it, most UNESCO heritage items seek to preserve the past. Projects like Wikipedia are very much a part of the present.
I knew about this problem 15 years ago. Granted, it was from the perspective of online advertising. (I noticed that an abnormal amount of IBM ads were targetted towards me when I was running OS/2.) Yet it didn't take me long to figure out why Google's results were better than their competitor's when people started arguing over the quality of Microsoft's engine. Not only did Google have years to refine their results for my demographic, but they had years to refine their results for *me*.
My feelings on this are mixed, but mostly negative. In one respect, it allowed me to find what I needed quickly. And let's face it, that's what search engines are about. On the other hand, it also forced me to realize that it was reenforcing my preconceived notions of the world -- may that be from the perspective of myself as an information consumer or from my perspective as a member of the human race. But I largely ignored that until started making changes in my life, changes that meant that I could no longer fit into Google's pigeon hole.
And I think that realization is the biggest problem with the world of data mining. I couldn't give a shit about what businesses or even (God forbid, which I say in all sarcasm) government thinks about me. What I care about is what I think about me, and how that is influencing how I interact with other people. This use of user profiles to reaffirm (in most cases) and shape (in a few cases) one's conceptions of themselves is by far the greatest danger that this tracking presents us.
Based on the article, it is not an issue at all. They are dealing with a core Java application, OpenOffice, and Adobe Reader. The former presumably has been tested and operates properly under Linux. The latter applications are also available for Linux. It was also noted that they are using an older version of Windows, which means that some/all of the employees would have to learn how to use a "different OS" (presumably Windows 7) all over again. Yes, some would have been using that different OS on their personal machines, but those skills don't necessarily carry over very well to work environments.
It is worth considering that many corporate machines have highly customized configurations to start with, most of which are intended to improve security or the manageability of their systems. This ties into what I said about skills used on personal machines don't necessarily carry over to corporate machines. Many corporate machines lock out all but a subset of applications that the employees are permitted to use. This includes standard components of the operating system (e.g. the desktop shell).
Now I cannot comment fully on this company's situation, but it is highly probable that this decision was highly thought out from both a technical and employee level.
I usually recommend the opposite. There are cases where encryption is necessary because confidential data is being handled. The flip side is that full disk encryption makes it difficult, if not impossible, to recover data from corrupt file systems or failing hard drives.
Well increased solar activity it ought to add a little spunk to the aurora, which means that you can watch one of natures more beautiful light shows without tangoing with polar bears. So that's one less thing to worry about and one more thing to be happy about.
I've tracked the OLPC project and have worked in educational technology for years, and arguments over processors and power consumption are bullshit. The same goes for the philosophies of education behind educational technology. At the moment, the biggest issue is teacher training. Simply put, most teachers don't know how to use computers in the context of classroom teaching. That's even true when it comes down to the basics. Sticking an ARM processor into the case isn't going to solve that. Getting the computer to run on 2 Watts isn't going to solve that. Praying that the child is smarter than the teacher when it comes down to adopting new technologies for learning isn't going to solve that. Indeed, this emphasis upon technology over learning and these idle hopes that children are better at using technology for learning have left educational technology in the same cesspool that it was in 30 years ago: teachers, the people who are responsible for guiding children through the process of learning, are almost as ignorant about how to use it today as they were way back then.
(For what it's worth, I think that there is some value in the 'student is smarter than the teacher' mentality when it comes down to educational technology. Yet that only works for a subset of children, since it involves a lot of self-motivation.)
After all, we're talking 3-D and not 2-D!
I don't care if the models are good or if they're bad. This is because I was brought up to believe that every action we take has consequences. Some of those consequences may be bad. Some of those consequences may be good. But something happens as the result of our actions. Now if the models are good and they're predicting nasty consequences, then clearly we must act otherwise people will die and there will be mass migrations of displaced populations that will come knocking at our doors. But some argue that the models are wrong, or that they are inconclusive, or that they are inconsistent with each other. Clearly the scientists don't know what they are talking about, so we can safely ignore them. WRONG. Just because we don't understand the consequences doesn't mean that those consequences don't exist. And if you have the choice between unknown consequences (bad *or* good) and the status-quo, then you should seriously consider the status-quo. After all, our world may be imperfect but at least we know that we can survive in it. Usually.
The Wired article doesn't even suggest that the backlog in missing persons cases is due to prioritizing copyright over people. Indeed, it suggests that the backlog is due to information management and civil rights issues. What it does state is that the FBI is giving priority to "case completion" which (the last I heard) is notoriously low for missing persons. So the question is, would you rather the FBI prioritize cases that can never be solved over those that can be solved?
Don't get me wrong: I don't like the notion of prioritizing non-violent crime over violent crime. On the other hand, it is absurd to allow several criminals escape the justice system because the FBI is neutered by prioritizing crimes with low case completion rates.
I cannot speak for the UK, but you don't need to add postage to letters addressed to your MPs in Canada. Even if such a rule does not exist in the UK, I would imagine that the postal service would have an unwritten commitment to deliver mail addressed to MPs regardless of affixed postage.
So if you can't spend the pennies on a sheet of paper and envelope, and can't invest the five minutes to walk to a postal box, I really must ask if that essential comment to your MP is really essential or just another example of UBE.
The one thing that I've noticed about technology is that people get excited about it when there is a lot of optimism surrounding it. You could see that with the introduction of the personal computer, with the coming of the Internet, in the early days of FLOSS, and with the Makers/Hacklabs of today. Once it becomes a product, there is a lot less excitement because people learn the inevitable: technology is just a tool that solves technical problems, it will not solve the human issues that surround us. Even though the lesson has been learnt repeatedly, it is one that every generation must come to terms to. This is just one example, of many, of our generation coming to terms with it.
Calculators are useful as handheld devices, but you may as well use an interpreted programming language if you're on a computer. That is particularly true if you consider yourself a Unix user. So my favourites are:
bc: fast to use, arbitrary precision, and it seems to be universally available
awk: faster to use when you are performing the same calculation many times over
python: has a richer library of mathematics functions
Isn't it odd how one of the easiest thing to convert to bits will be the last thing to be sold as bits? Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if books are still printed long after every human brain has been uploaded into the memory banks of Google's massive servers.
Seriously though, electronic textbooks won't fly for a good long time to come. The people who select these books tend to be hardened and cynical after dealing with publishers for years. These people know that publishers are trying to turn their books into disposable tomes of consumption. Education boards and school principals are more than aware that publishers are trying to drain them of every last cent with disposable workbooks, never mind expiring electronic books. University professors and college instructors have been around long enough to see new revisions of textbooks come out on regular intervals, with insignificant changes outside of section ordering and problem numbers.
These people will resist, and will resist as long as there aren't any intrinsic benefits for them. Institutional buyers will stick to traditional media where the costs are known until they see a way that it may save them money. Fancy technology won't do that, but integrated assessment tools may. Even post-secondary instructors, from my experience, are timid about playing into the publisher's hands. Most will account for differing editions. Usually they do so by treating the book as a supplementary resource and suggesting that the student to follow along in it, but not specifying section numbers or problems from it. Others will go as far as specifying alternate page and question numbers while making critical remarks about the publishers themselves.
Even though I'm far more aligned with the nurture camp and don't go for this genetics crap, it is fairly obvious that there are differences between toys for boys and girls.
The nature of dolls and tea sets is very different from that of cars and guns. Dolls and tea sets are designed to facilitate social fantasies, while cars and guns are designed to facilitate agressive fantasize. Even action figures tend to be designed for agression rather than socialization. Just consider the difference between Ken and GI Joe. So I'm guessing that this study uses boys and girls toys and a stand-in for male and female behaviours.
That being said, is the feminization of boys all that bad?