No. Computer Science != Computers required. The only reason why I would want to use a computer is because I can type so much faster than I can write. What happened to flowcharting? What happened to psuedocode? What about diagramming binary trees and writing explications about sample code. None of those things require a computer. Isn't computer science the logics of computers, not the programming itself? Sure, programming plays a big part; it's nice to be able to compile a java program and watch it in action, but it's not necessary.
For a moment, let me compare the AP Computer Science AB exam to my CS-162 class at Grand Valley State University. For my AP exam, I only used a computer once, and that was to peruse the college board web site. Everything else I did on paper, and I think that I leared twice as much last summer about computer science than all of my coding experience of having TI-Basic as a second language (you remember those cool TI-99/4As, right). On the other hand, my CS-162 class probably should have been JAVA-101, because we have yet to produce any kind of flowchart or psuedocode, and we're already on the fifth week! The only thing we've worked on is a java-specific "bag of tricks" as my professor calls it. The problem here is that I already have a humongeous Java bag of tricks; I want to know more about binary search trees, and cover things that weren't on the AP exam like multi-threading and networking for example. Well, at least I can see why GVSU won't articulate my AP credits except as general CS credit; it's because their computer dependant CS curriculum is a bag of tricks.
Ok, first let me establish that I'm not an old fogey man: I'm an eighteen year old girl. But I really have a problem with computers in the classroom. I can't seem to find any significant advantage to using computers over paper and pencil. In fact, I'm kind of pissed that I have to use a computer so much in my first year computer science class! (It should be pure logic, but it's java 101 -- I'm paying to learn science, not java.) When I was studying for the AP Computer Science (AB exam mind you, which I passed), I think I only used a computer once to download the source of the fish classes just to say "that's nice," and delete it from my computer. When I took the AP test, I didn't have a computer -- I had to write all my code by hand.
My point is that there is absolutely no use for computers in the classroom. You're right to be upset that students are abusing their computers, but, then again, they shouldn't even have the computers in the classroom. And another point is that if you're worried about computer usage outside of class, there's nothing you can do to stop students from collabrating. There this other girl CS major who lives down the hall who almost routienly gets answers off of me; if students share information, that's something you have to live with. Word of mouth worked just as good for me as AIM.
1: Hire studio rats to program the synth-pop music she sings over.
2: Hire a producer and recording engineer team able to make a child singer sound "sexy"
3: Produce expensive videos that wave Ms. Spears's two most obvious selling points in front of the camera.
4: Get it played on the radio (in this case, her records come from Disney, who is a top-5 player in almost every radio market)
You forgot the cost of the breast implants she got for he birthday. (I wish I could have gotten implants for my birthday;)
But seriously, all that needs to happen because her music is crap. I know a lot of people that composed better stuff in middle school. I've composed better stuff, and I'm a programmer! Pop singers are fads that a completely propagated by the recording industry. They contribute nothing significant to the big picture at all except something for thirteen year old boys to whack off to.
So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?
No, you've missed absolutely nothing at all. I like to listen to Vivaldi and various bands from the late seventies that had talent, and I'm only eighteen years old.
IANAL either (do there exist any net users who are lawyers that can help?), but the only things I know of that protect free speech in the United States are state Constitutions and the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech...." (State Constitutions generally likewise limit this to the legeslative body, and this is extended to the state legislatures by the Fourteenth Amendment.) Compare this to the Thirteenth Amendment:
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
"Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Here, a blanket rule is made, and permission is given to Congress to enforce it. So, it follows that, unfortunatly, Microsoft is allowed to do this.
I've got a couple Supreme Court precedents up at my webpage at http://velex.0catch.com/constitution/main.html, if anyone wants to check out my notes from Constitutional Law
Read it over and over again. It is not stating that 72 percent of people want their rights taken away. It just states that they think anti-crypto might of helped.
We all know what the poll says, but it's what it's being used for is what's important. imho, PMSNBC is a biased news source, not unlike WorldNetDaily. PMSNBC goes from a discussion on whether or not anti-crypto would be helpful to this:
In the United Kingdom, the Home Office is scheduled this winter to enforce the final stages of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which will grant law enforcement the power to demand decryption keys from the place where data is encrypted. Privacy groups are concerned that Britain?s enthusiasm for a unilateral global approach toward surveillance could re-energize the key escrow debate.
PMSNBC's rhetoric says something completely different from the words alone: anti-crypto government policy is good, and 72% of sheopole in the United States support it.
Yeah, but the Russians were commies! They were evil! We're capatilists; we're the good guys! It doesn't matter whether or not the same thing is going on that was evil in Russia! We are good!
But at least they don't have slavery; if you value your life above your freedom, you're lost. What is life if it is not free (as in speech)? It is more terrible than death, because it is living death.
I am Sam.
Sam I Am.
Would you like Purple Potatoes and Ham?
Would you eat a purple potatoe with a fox in socks in a box?
No I will not eat a purple potatoe here nor there nor with a fox in socks in a box.
An interesting question of responsiblity arises. I should point out that, with a few egregious exceptions, Microsoft does proved patches for security holes. It's just that the network admins don't apply them. However, there wouldn't be any need for security if there weren't 31337 skr1p7 k1dd13z trying to bring wed sites down for kicks.
Three parties are involved in this mess. There's the dubious software vendor, Microsoft, who has written the programs with these gaping security holes. In addition, the end users that use the horrible products also bear responsiblity. Last, but not least, the 31337 d00dz that wrote the programs to exploit the holes in Microsoft's programs. First let us consider ourselves -- is there an element of responsiblity that we owe to the world to check whom we trust with our equipment? Yes, and I'm proud to say that I'm doing my part by using Mozilla and KMail and other GPLed whatnot. Everyone's favorite scapegoat, Microsoft, does not deserve as much blame as people like to place on their shoulders. Everyone should know better than to depend on something written by as sloppy a programming house as Microsoft. That doesn't excuse them from their part of the responsibility: if they had been more careful, worms like this couldn't exist. However, the brunt of the blame falls on the 31337 d00d that wrote the worm. If the 31337 d00d had never written the worm, we wouldn't have to worry about this. In fact, blame can only be assigned to the first two parties because of the inevitability of the existence of 31337 h4x0rz. Simply put, although we all share blame for worms like this, it is the direct fault of the d00d that put this worm into existance.
Exactly. Remember, although this is not government sponsored sensorship, this is the beginnings of it. Also remember, in the United States, and most of first world for that matter, the government is of the people, for the people, and by the people. Actions such as this indicate that the people believe in censorship. Therefore, why should a government of the people do anything different from what the people want?
What's with make examples out of people anyhow? Is there any reason for such an inconsistent thing other than vagrant emotions? This is very unfair to him, and it does nothing to contribute to justice. There should be a sentence for being an 31337 5kr1p7 k1dd13z, and it should be the same for everything. I don't know jack about Canadian law, but I do know about fairness, and this is not fair.
Even then, is his sentence proportional to the severity of his crime? Not at all. All he did was generate traffic to a bunch of sites. How is that a crime? If their servers can't handle it, it's their fault, not his. Serving time is for people that need to be out of society for a while -- murderers, rapists, theives, etc. -- but not for generating traffic. These companies' sites are public: if they can't handle getting DoSed, they need better software to handle the traffic.
Am I saying that DoS attacks are OK? Not exactly. At most what should have happened to him was fines for the attack. The action did have malicious intent and malicious effect, but nothing that deserves living with some of the most screwed up kids you can imagine for two thirds of a year. This is redicilous: he temporarly disabled capital for a day or so -- LIFE GOES ON.
Not for him, though. I suppose I should know better than to get in the way of people's emotions when mammon is in danger.
Re:Remain rational for months - no witchhunts
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 1
Unfortunatly, the American way IS witchhunts. Remember what happened at Salem? Remember slavery? Remember Japanese internment?
Objectivism won't work because people will never figure out the difference between a principled person acting in rational self-interest and a emotionless automaton with no ethics, principles or values.
But, is there really a difference? All it comes down to is collecting information and comparing the possibilities of action with a given goal. imho, humans have yet to show me any kind of adherence to ethics, principles, or values when Mammon calls.
But there is hope, for "...the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble" - RLE, 3:31.
(ach... I wanted to post this an hour ago, but my college's entire network got 0\/\//\/3d... oh well...)
I understand your concern about the spirialing and somewhat devious advancement of technology. However, we are humans, and we have great curiosity and great greed. Acting like Tetsuo now, we will start to create technology that is indistinguishable from magic. But, with the pitfalls that this technology presents, and the tradgies that it will surely bring on us all, there is also a great potential for good.
Now, imagine, what if it were possibly, through our manipulation of genetic material, and with a bit of Spider-man technology, to create a device that can change how a person looks. Don't think in terms of plastic surgery, but think of the Stars-on-Stars-off machine from the Sneeches. In case you forget how that allegory goes, at first the people will become extremely vain, and try to make their society like an episode of the Twilight Zone. But, in the end, it would mean the end of racism, sexism, ageism, and whatever-else-ism exists now and is yet to be discovered.
The deal with artificial intelligence reminds me of Megaman X. It's too bad that such a rich subject matter was wasted on an arcade game written for a middle school audience. Just imagine, God created us in his own image, and now we can create a being in our own image. Will they become greater than their creators? Will they try to overthow us as inferior or worship us as gods? Will the three rules of robotics apply, or, in creation of intelligence, will those rules need to be thrown out? Personally, I think that Hawkings is a bit off of his rocker and talking about something that he really knows nothing about. However might our creations imitate their creators?
Responsibility, morality, and thoughtfullness need no apply to the masses, and I'm sure you remember the Puritans. I agree, humans are not quite ready to be exercising this kind of power. Our society reminds me of Tetsuo, who got so much power that he couldn't control it. Eventually, his power consumed him, revealing how undeveloped he was in comparison to his power. Technology has great benefits, but humans will be able to handle it one day. After all, it's already begun....
.Anybody up to writing an HTTP proxy or filter that strips out this info as it is being returned to the offending site? I guess it should then redirect the user to a site informing them of what has or was about to happened.
Actually, I think that most uses have no idea that this kind of privacy invasion is going on (except for the toptext and wannabes debacle). If users were redirected to a site that shows them exactly what infomation is being collected about them, maybe the user community will actually feel violated and do something about this crap.
Oh, come on. This is pure garbage. How much info could one possibly glean from whatever javascript the researchers were using to capture the mouse movements? For me, whom uses the keyboard excessively and only moves the mouse when I'm sure I want to click on a link, there isn't anything that they can possibly gather. Besides, if they want to monitor my mouse movements, maybe they can see how quickly my reflexes to close pop-up windows before I even know what's in them come into play.
Guess What. If we continue to pay the RIAA, they won't care what we think. btw, most of my music was found from free amiga mods -- those composers loved music, not money.
Didn't you know? This was all explained very clearly to me in school (although with the use of epithets). When you get a job, you're selling yourself. Not just are you selling your skills or talents, or are you being compensated for doing something useful. You are selling your soul to the company.
Don't worry, though, you'll get your soul back at the end of the day, but until then you had better work for the company you sold yourself to. It's almost a kind of self-imposed slavery -- don't expect it to make sense, just do as you're told and be a good cog.
It might seem a bit absurd at first, but it all makes sense when you add it up. We all want a new car, caviar, four-star daydream, and a football team, but only your money can give that to you. The machine gives money, but only in exchange for souls. Your choice.
CLIs have incredible power. Ever want to delete a bunch of files that match a pattern in a bunch of directories? I hate having to keep changing directories with GUIs, which is why I hit the terminal button on my toolbar and type in:
for i in `find -name "*.whatever"` ; do rm $i ; done
The thing I don't understand about all this hoopla about encrypting data is how the man (or whoever we were fighting against) expects it to stay encrypted. I mean, it's gotta be unencrypted some time. Software encryption is lame, as DeCSS and the victimized Dimitri Skylov shows, but now there's the possibility of hardware enforcement of the DMCA. To me, this is just more garbage. There is some point that the data becomes transformed into those musical compression waves we all call noise. So what if I can only decode *.lame by sending it to my sound card? I just plug in a recorder, and I have my music back in good old.wav.
What's that? Remove the ability to record? It's been hampered in mp3 encoders, I can tell you that. But to remove it totally or destroy it to acquiese to the perversion of copyright known as the DMCA would totally alienate the user base.
Oh, great, I can see it all now. Well have andextra byte for High Address Area, then there will be Extended Addresses, which will require special drivers. These Extended Addresses will, of course, be mutually exclusive with Enhanced Addresses. Then, a wizard will write software which will unify all address bytes, and this will require a special address server. Then, when we finally get around to implementing continuous addresses, people will have to backwards support applications which are expecting a four byte barrier. (smacks forehead)
Re:For every action, there is an equal and opposit
on
Quicktime In Linux
·
· Score: 1
I agree totally. Might I add also that Linux also needs to get away from X and "su root." Don't get me wrong, both methods work fine, but X has some clear limitations, and always having to be the root user to install software is very annoying.
Nobody wants to compile his own software just to put it under his user's home directory instead of globally. There needs to be something like InstallShield or Wise Install for Windows -- I double click the executable on my desktop, answer a few simple questions, and, *poof*, my scripts are updated and the software is installed. Something else that the installer should do is put icons all over the place -- sometimes annoying, but generally helpful: I hate going into the menu editor ("kdesu" this time, but still from a cli) to set up a launcher.
That point also brings me to another thing: icon embedding. There's nothing more annoying than having to do "rpm -ql whatever | grep xpm" to find an icon!
X needs a color pointer. It's just as simple as that. Ok, so ub3r geeks find Onna-Ranma's head for a pointer cheesy, but I like my pointer in windows, and I wish I could use it in X. GTK for the Framebuffer seems to be on the right track. When X was written, video accelerator cards weren't very common. However, nowadays everyone has one. I really would like Quake III to run at more than three seconds per frame!
As for the plugin itself, I won't buy it because that's what I already have Windows for -- mass multimedia. I don't watch any kind of video in linux because X is too slow and there isn't an mpeg or divx decoder around that will do fullscreen under Linux. If you think that Linux is multimedia -- you're kidding yourself: my 750 MHz Thunderbird with 224 MB memory linux box doesn't even compare to my Packard H3ll 300 MHz with 64 MB of ram for multimedia.
<sarcasm>No, no, no, no. You've got it all wrong -- haven't you ever seen Les Misrables? Javer had it right! Once a criminal, always a criminal! Just like this football coach (who also happens to be just a tweak holier than Jesus) in my high school told me -- you stupid kids never change! We already had a precedent for sexual offenders -- they're once convicted indefinatly being punished --, why not just extend it to all types of offences?</sarcasm>
Slashdot Mirror
No. Computer Science != Computers required. The only reason why I would want to use a computer is because I can type so much faster than I can write. What happened to flowcharting? What happened to psuedocode? What about diagramming binary trees and writing explications about sample code. None of those things require a computer. Isn't computer science the logics of computers, not the programming itself? Sure, programming plays a big part; it's nice to be able to compile a java program and watch it in action, but it's not necessary.
For a moment, let me compare the AP Computer Science AB exam to my CS-162 class at Grand Valley State University. For my AP exam, I only used a computer once, and that was to peruse the college board web site. Everything else I did on paper, and I think that I leared twice as much last summer about computer science than all of my coding experience of having TI-Basic as a second language (you remember those cool TI-99/4As, right). On the other hand, my CS-162 class probably should have been JAVA-101, because we have yet to produce any kind of flowchart or psuedocode, and we're already on the fifth week! The only thing we've worked on is a java-specific "bag of tricks" as my professor calls it. The problem here is that I already have a humongeous Java bag of tricks; I want to know more about binary search trees, and cover things that weren't on the AP exam like multi-threading and networking for example. Well, at least I can see why GVSU won't articulate my AP credits except as general CS credit; it's because their computer dependant CS curriculum is a bag of tricks.
Ok, first let me establish that I'm not an old fogey man: I'm an eighteen year old girl. But I really have a problem with computers in the classroom. I can't seem to find any significant advantage to using computers over paper and pencil. In fact, I'm kind of pissed that I have to use a computer so much in my first year computer science class! (It should be pure logic, but it's java 101 -- I'm paying to learn science, not java.) When I was studying for the AP Computer Science (AB exam mind you, which I passed), I think I only used a computer once to download the source of the fish classes just to say "that's nice," and delete it from my computer. When I took the AP test, I didn't have a computer -- I had to write all my code by hand.
My point is that there is absolutely no use for computers in the classroom. You're right to be upset that students are abusing their computers, but, then again, they shouldn't even have the computers in the classroom. And another point is that if you're worried about computer usage outside of class, there's nothing you can do to stop students from collabrating. There this other girl CS major who lives down the hall who almost routienly gets answers off of me; if students share information, that's something you have to live with. Word of mouth worked just as good for me as AIM.
2: Hire a producer and recording engineer team able to make a child singer sound "sexy"
3: Produce expensive videos that wave Ms. Spears's two most obvious selling points in front of the camera.
4: Get it played on the radio (in this case, her records come from Disney, who is a top-5 player in almost every radio market)
You forgot the cost of the breast implants she got for he birthday. (I wish I could have gotten implants for my birthday ;)
But seriously, all that needs to happen because her music is crap. I know a lot of people that composed better stuff in middle school. I've composed better stuff, and I'm a programmer! Pop singers are fads that a completely propagated by the recording industry. They contribute nothing significant to the big picture at all except something for thirteen year old boys to whack off to.
So tell me, fellow Slashbots, am I really missing anything by ignoring these teen divas and listening to Bethoven's 7th Symphony during my drive home?No, you've missed absolutely nothing at all. I like to listen to Vivaldi and various bands from the late seventies that had talent, and I'm only eighteen years old.
IANAL either (do there exist any net users who are lawyers that can help?), but the only things I know of that protect free speech in the United States are state Constitutions and the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech...." (State Constitutions generally likewise limit this to the legeslative body, and this is extended to the state legislatures by the Fourteenth Amendment.) Compare this to the Thirteenth Amendment:
"Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
"Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."
Here, a blanket rule is made, and permission is given to Congress to enforce it. So, it follows that, unfortunatly, Microsoft is allowed to do this.
I've got a couple Supreme Court precedents up at my webpage at http://velex.0catch.com/constitution/main.html, if anyone wants to check out my notes from Constitutional Law
We all know what the poll says, but it's what it's being used for is what's important. imho, PMSNBC is a biased news source, not unlike WorldNetDaily. PMSNBC goes from a discussion on whether or not anti-crypto would be helpful to this:
In the United Kingdom, the Home Office is scheduled this winter to enforce the final stages of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which will grant law enforcement the power to demand decryption keys from the place where data is encrypted. Privacy groups are concerned that Britain?s enthusiasm for a unilateral global approach toward surveillance could re-energize the key escrow debate.PMSNBC's rhetoric says something completely different from the words alone: anti-crypto government policy is good, and 72% of sheopole in the United States support it.
Yeah, but the Russians were commies! They were evil! We're capatilists; we're the good guys! It doesn't matter whether or not the same thing is going on that was evil in Russia! We are good!
But at least they don't have slavery; if you value your life above your freedom, you're lost. What is life if it is not free (as in speech)? It is more terrible than death, because it is living death.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin
I am Sam.
Sam I Am.
Would you like Purple Potatoes and Ham?
Would you eat a purple potatoe with a fox in socks in a box?
No I will not eat a purple potatoe here nor there nor with a fox in socks in a box.
An interesting question of responsiblity arises. I should point out that, with a few egregious exceptions, Microsoft does proved patches for security holes. It's just that the network admins don't apply them. However, there wouldn't be any need for security if there weren't 31337 skr1p7 k1dd13z trying to bring wed sites down for kicks.
Three parties are involved in this mess. There's the dubious software vendor, Microsoft, who has written the programs with these gaping security holes. In addition, the end users that use the horrible products also bear responsiblity. Last, but not least, the 31337 d00dz that wrote the programs to exploit the holes in Microsoft's programs. First let us consider ourselves -- is there an element of responsiblity that we owe to the world to check whom we trust with our equipment? Yes, and I'm proud to say that I'm doing my part by using Mozilla and KMail and other GPLed whatnot. Everyone's favorite scapegoat, Microsoft, does not deserve as much blame as people like to place on their shoulders. Everyone should know better than to depend on something written by as sloppy a programming house as Microsoft. That doesn't excuse them from their part of the responsibility: if they had been more careful, worms like this couldn't exist. However, the brunt of the blame falls on the 31337 d00d that wrote the worm. If the 31337 d00d had never written the worm, we wouldn't have to worry about this. In fact, blame can only be assigned to the first two parties because of the inevitability of the existence of 31337 h4x0rz. Simply put, although we all share blame for worms like this, it is the direct fault of the d00d that put this worm into existance.
Exactly. Remember, although this is not government sponsored sensorship, this is the beginnings of it. Also remember, in the United States, and most of first world for that matter, the government is of the people, for the people, and by the people. Actions such as this indicate that the people believe in censorship. Therefore, why should a government of the people do anything different from what the people want?
What's with make examples out of people anyhow? Is there any reason for such an inconsistent thing other than vagrant emotions? This is very unfair to him, and it does nothing to contribute to justice. There should be a sentence for being an 31337 5kr1p7 k1dd13z, and it should be the same for everything. I don't know jack about Canadian law, but I do know about fairness, and this is not fair.
Even then, is his sentence proportional to the severity of his crime? Not at all. All he did was generate traffic to a bunch of sites. How is that a crime? If their servers can't handle it, it's their fault, not his. Serving time is for people that need to be out of society for a while -- murderers, rapists, theives, etc. -- but not for generating traffic. These companies' sites are public: if they can't handle getting DoSed, they need better software to handle the traffic.
Am I saying that DoS attacks are OK? Not exactly. At most what should have happened to him was fines for the attack. The action did have malicious intent and malicious effect, but nothing that deserves living with some of the most screwed up kids you can imagine for two thirds of a year. This is redicilous: he temporarly disabled capital for a day or so -- LIFE GOES ON.
Not for him, though. I suppose I should know better than to get in the way of people's emotions when mammon is in danger.
Unfortunatly, the American way IS witchhunts. Remember what happened at Salem? Remember slavery? Remember Japanese internment?
Objectivism won't work because people will never figure out the difference between a principled person acting in rational self-interest and a emotionless automaton with no ethics, principles or values.
But, is there really a difference? All it comes down to is collecting information and comparing the possibilities of action with a given goal. imho, humans have yet to show me any kind of adherence to ethics, principles, or values when Mammon calls.
But there is hope, for "...the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble" - RLE, 3:31.
(ach... I wanted to post this an hour ago, but my college's entire network got 0\/\//\/3d... oh well...)
I understand your concern about the spirialing and somewhat devious advancement of technology. However, we are humans, and we have great curiosity and great greed. Acting like Tetsuo now, we will start to create technology that is indistinguishable from magic. But, with the pitfalls that this technology presents, and the tradgies that it will surely bring on us all, there is also a great potential for good.
Now, imagine, what if it were possibly, through our manipulation of genetic material, and with a bit of Spider-man technology, to create a device that can change how a person looks. Don't think in terms of plastic surgery, but think of the Stars-on-Stars-off machine from the Sneeches. In case you forget how that allegory goes, at first the people will become extremely vain, and try to make their society like an episode of the Twilight Zone. But, in the end, it would mean the end of racism, sexism, ageism, and whatever-else-ism exists now and is yet to be discovered.
The deal with artificial intelligence reminds me of Megaman X. It's too bad that such a rich subject matter was wasted on an arcade game written for a middle school audience. Just imagine, God created us in his own image, and now we can create a being in our own image. Will they become greater than their creators? Will they try to overthow us as inferior or worship us as gods? Will the three rules of robotics apply, or, in creation of intelligence, will those rules need to be thrown out? Personally, I think that Hawkings is a bit off of his rocker and talking about something that he really knows nothing about. However might our creations imitate their creators?
Responsibility, morality, and thoughtfullness need no apply to the masses, and I'm sure you remember the Puritans. I agree, humans are not quite ready to be exercising this kind of power. Our society reminds me of Tetsuo, who got so much power that he couldn't control it. Eventually, his power consumed him, revealing how undeveloped he was in comparison to his power. Technology has great benefits, but humans will be able to handle it one day. After all, it's already begun....
Actually, I think that most uses have no idea that this kind of privacy invasion is going on (except for the toptext and wannabes debacle). If users were redirected to a site that shows them exactly what infomation is being collected about them, maybe the user community will actually feel violated and do something about this crap.
What, you've got something against 1995?
Oh, come on. This is pure garbage. How much info could one possibly glean from whatever javascript the researchers were using to capture the mouse movements? For me, whom uses the keyboard excessively and only moves the mouse when I'm sure I want to click on a link, there isn't anything that they can possibly gather. Besides, if they want to monitor my mouse movements, maybe they can see how quickly my reflexes to close pop-up windows before I even know what's in them come into play.
Guess What. If we continue to pay the RIAA, they won't care what we think. btw, most of my music was found from free amiga mods -- those composers loved music, not money.
Didn't you know? This was all explained very clearly to me in school (although with the use of epithets). When you get a job, you're selling yourself. Not just are you selling your skills or talents, or are you being compensated for doing something useful. You are selling your soul to the company.
Don't worry, though, you'll get your soul back at the end of the day, but until then you had better work for the company you sold yourself to. It's almost a kind of self-imposed slavery -- don't expect it to make sense, just do as you're told and be a good cog.
It might seem a bit absurd at first, but it all makes sense when you add it up. We all want a new car, caviar, four-star daydream, and a football team, but only your money can give that to you. The machine gives money, but only in exchange for souls. Your choice.
CLIs have incredible power. Ever want to delete a bunch of files that match a pattern in a bunch of directories? I hate having to keep changing directories with GUIs, which is why I hit the terminal button on my toolbar and type in:
And, as the done indicates. I'm done.The thing I don't understand about all this hoopla about encrypting data is how the man (or whoever we were fighting against) expects it to stay encrypted. I mean, it's gotta be unencrypted some time. Software encryption is lame, as DeCSS and the victimized Dimitri Skylov shows, but now there's the possibility of hardware enforcement of the DMCA. To me, this is just more garbage. There is some point that the data becomes transformed into those musical compression waves we all call noise. So what if I can only decode *.lame by sending it to my sound card? I just plug in a recorder, and I have my music back in good old .wav.
What's that? Remove the ability to record? It's been hampered in mp3 encoders, I can tell you that. But to remove it totally or destroy it to acquiese to the perversion of copyright known as the DMCA would totally alienate the user base.
> "640 kB should be enough for everybody"
Oh, great, I can see it all now. Well have andextra byte for High Address Area, then there will be Extended Addresses, which will require special drivers. These Extended Addresses will, of course, be mutually exclusive with Enhanced Addresses. Then, a wizard will write software which will unify all address bytes, and this will require a special address server. Then, when we finally get around to implementing continuous addresses, people will have to backwards support applications which are expecting a four byte barrier. (smacks forehead)
I agree totally. Might I add also that Linux also needs to get away from X and "su root." Don't get me wrong, both methods work fine, but X has some clear limitations, and always having to be the root user to install software is very annoying.
Nobody wants to compile his own software just to put it under his user's home directory instead of globally. There needs to be something like InstallShield or Wise Install for Windows -- I double click the executable on my desktop, answer a few simple questions, and, *poof*, my scripts are updated and the software is installed. Something else that the installer should do is put icons all over the place -- sometimes annoying, but generally helpful: I hate going into the menu editor ("kdesu" this time, but still from a cli) to set up a launcher.
That point also brings me to another thing: icon embedding. There's nothing more annoying than having to do "rpm -ql whatever | grep xpm" to find an icon!
X needs a color pointer. It's just as simple as that. Ok, so ub3r geeks find Onna-Ranma's head for a pointer cheesy, but I like my pointer in windows, and I wish I could use it in X. GTK for the Framebuffer seems to be on the right track. When X was written, video accelerator cards weren't very common. However, nowadays everyone has one. I really would like Quake III to run at more than three seconds per frame!
As for the plugin itself, I won't buy it because that's what I already have Windows for -- mass multimedia. I don't watch any kind of video in linux because X is too slow and there isn't an mpeg or divx decoder around that will do fullscreen under Linux. If you think that Linux is multimedia -- you're kidding yourself: my 750 MHz Thunderbird with 224 MB memory linux box doesn't even compare to my Packard H3ll 300 MHz with 64 MB of ram for multimedia.
<sarcasm>No, no, no, no. You've got it all wrong -- haven't you ever seen Les Misrables? Javer had it right! Once a criminal, always a criminal! Just like this football coach (who also happens to be just a tweak holier than Jesus) in my high school told me -- you stupid kids never change! We already had a precedent for sexual offenders -- they're once convicted indefinatly being punished --, why not just extend it to all types of offences?</sarcasm>