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User: byoon

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  1. Re:football coaches teaching history on Linux & Education - How To Get It For Your School · · Score: 1

    You need to be careful with blanket statements like this. I would rephrase it as most history teachers coach football, because the fact is, people go into teaching because they like it, not to make money. My girlfriend is a first year high school teacher and she makes around $21K. Coaching is a way to make a couple extra thousand over the course of a year. If you look at job posting for high school teachers they ask for a history or math teacher and throw in the fact that they'd really like the applicant to be certified to coach.

    My experience with high school CS is probably a bit different. My teacher was the science teacher and he spent more time on the computers than he did on anything else. He was a bachelor and pretty much lived in his classroom or the computer lab. That was back in the days when we thought we were hot shit because we got an Apple IIGS. He did quite alot of teaching in BASIC and also Pascal for the advanced students and he knew what he was talking about. That's why good teachers spend their summers in college. Also he was about 45 when I was in high school and that would put his college graduation in the mid 60's.

    You also gotta remember that alot of teachers are old. Some ridiculous percentage of them (like 1/3 or so) will be hitting retirement in the next few years and that's gonna have some impact on their desire to try something new. If you really want to make a difference, head over to the Teachers' College and sit through endless hours of Ed Psych and Curriculum and Methods classes and then get paid crap for it.

    One more thing. What does Linux have to do with pr0n or bombmaking? Last time I checked you could get all that stuff running Windows or MacOS.

  2. Re:Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! on Social Changes & Internet Access In The Third World · · Score: 1

    I didn't get angry at the point of your post. It was well said, in my opinion. I got angry because the first words in your reply were something to the effect of, "This is the biggest pile of shit I've read in a while." When I read something like that, I tend to go off.

    I probably should have used a different example in my first post but I was replying to the person who was implying that Eithopians were lazy because we give them a little grain. That really made me angry. My point was that people in LDC's all over the world have more important things to worry about than their band-width. Hopefully that will change in the future, but right now, even when people are able to get all they need to live, they are more intent on working to get ahead, trying to get a basic education (last time I checked the literacy rate in Eithopia was around 35%), just trying to live a better life.

  3. Re:Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! on Social Changes & Internet Access In The Third World · · Score: 1

    And I suppose you and your family lived out in western Eithopia on the border of Sudan where people are still trying to recover from the civil war that lasted from the late 80's until 1994. No, you were probably comfortably ensconced in a nice house in Addis Ababa and interacted with lots of nice people who work for the government and various industries. Let me know if I'm wrong. Did you know they are still repatriating people who fled during the drought and the civil war? Did you know only 12% of the land is suitable for agriculture and that 80% of the work force is in agriculture? Did you know life expectancy is still right around 40 years? And that they haven't had a port since Eritrea declared independence?

    Oh, yes, I'm sure there are plenty of people in Eithiopia that don't let all the poor people stop them from using the internet, and yes, there has been quite an improvement in the situation there since 1995 but let me know when the e-revolution hits. At last count there were something like 100,000 telephones in the country.

    Oh, and I do know that Eithiopians drink beer. I've drank it with them.

  4. Re:It is NOT luck. on Social Changes & Internet Access In The Third World · · Score: 1

    Do you really wanna know why China is still primarily agrarian? There are well over 1 billion people to feed, the amount of the arable land in the country is far below what is required to feed that many people, and modern machinery (the combine, the planter, the cultivator) are not built to run on the side of a mountain. Therefore, agriculture is very land and labor intensive in that country. And that huge dam they're building on the Yangtze that will supply untold megawatts of power will reduce that arable land even further. True, Mao took advantage of that agrarian ideal in the 50's and 60's but really, Maoism was more about a dictatorship of Mao than a dictatorship of the proletariat. Today there are actually stock markets in China and while the government keeps a close watch over everything, they like to see the Chinese people innovate.

    And really, there was quite a bit of luck involved and happenstance of geographic location, religious separatism, etc., did have a lot to do with it. The first settlers of the new world were religious separatists, and why did they come here? Because Columbus wound up here when he thought he was going to China. Sounds like geographic happenstance to me. Plus, the natural resources and climate were ideal for economic expansion if that was your goal. Plenty of good ports, coal and iron upstream from the ports, perfect growing conditions for cotton, lots of wide open land for livestock, etc.

  5. Re:Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! on Social Changes & Internet Access In The Third World · · Score: 1

    People in countries like Eithopia are apathetic about progress because they are more worried about when and where they are going to eat, where they are going to live, and which band of armed men are going to show up the next day. It's Maslow's hierarchy of needs perfectly illustrated. How much of that poisonous aid actually gets to the people who need it? Go out and live in the middle of Nevada in a shack for a few months and see how worried you are about your internet connection.

    I would agree that most significant inventors don't create their greatest works under complete subsidization, neither do writers or painters. However, they usually all had a place to live and something to eat.

  6. Re:The US is not "Silicon Valley". Most *not* wire on Social Changes & Internet Access In The Third World · · Score: 1

    I think you're right for the most part but you might be surprised. I live in Lincoln, NE, which I think compares with Topeka and Grand Forks in a lot of ways, and our telco started offering DSL over a year ago. They even gave away routers if you signed up within the first month. I suppose we'll have cable internet access soon too since AOL now owns our cable company.

    Lincoln probably got this before other cities its size because it has a large university and a big-ass internet hub sits in the engineering building on UNL's campus. I wouldn't be surprised to find the same situation in Lubbock and maybe Topeka.

    My parents live about 50 miles south of here and they just got access to a local dialup a few months ago. Still even with their 56K modem, they're lucky to get 1.5 K/sec over those lines out there in the country that are probably decades old. Maybe that's why I don't visit them more often. Wireless wide-band is probably their only hope because the town they live in is too small to even have cable service.

  7. Re:less than 12 Hours on Please Patiently Ponder Purported Poe Puzzle · · Score: 1

    You seem awfully confident. Remember, this has sat around for 150 years unsolved and I doubt it's just some simple substitution or even a Vignere cipher.

    For instance, Poe/Tyler could have used any piece of writing as a key so unless you have a perl script that does a word by word analysis of every bit of published writing from Poe's time, you could be in for a long haul.

    Check out The Code Book by Simon Singh. He talks
    about a piece of code that supposedly leads to several million dollars worth of gold buried in the hills of western Virginia that has never been solved despite the efforts of 1000's of people.
    A human being who wants to keep something secret from computer analysis probably can, as long as they don't want anyone else to read it either. You can use several different keys, each being a very obscure text, for instance.

    Of course, I could be wrong. This could be a very simple cipher, but something tells me it probably isn't.

  8. Re:Following Slashdot "tradition"... on Busted for (L0pht)Crack Possession · · Score: 1

    Just what I'm talking about. You're so hyped up on guns, guns, guns that you can't even spell, plus you have to start calling me "idiot."

    And guns don't unexpectedly shoot people? Try telling that to a friend of mine who lost one of his best friend's as a child when he was playing with a gun and it went off. That's not the point though, nor was the unexpected discharge of a Dr. Pepper bottle the point. It was an example for all the arguments that anti-gun control people use to try and advance their position.

    L0phtcrack actually doesn't do any damage on its own. Point a gun at my head, pull the trigger, I'm dead. Point L0phtcrack at a box, "pull the trigger", oooh, you've got some passwords. Which does more damage?

  9. Re:Following Slashdot "tradition"... on Busted for (L0pht)Crack Possession · · Score: 1

    There's a big difference between guns and cracking tools. For one, a six-year old can't take L0phtCrack to school and "crack" another six-year old.

    It seems like the anti gun control people are always looking for some parallel to draw so they can say, "Well, if we ban guns, we'll have to ban Dr. Pepper because those lids can fly off unexpectedly and do someone harm."

    C'mon, people. Try to keep your hot-button political views out of discussions where they don't belong.

  10. cancelling your amazon account on Yet Another Amazon Patent · · Score: 1

    Here's what you need to do if you have an account at amazon and wish to cancel. I searched their site for 30 minutes before I finally gave up and e-mailed them. Thanks for writing to us at Amazon.com. If you would like us to close your Amazon.com account, please write back with some information about your last order (a title or two would suffice) so we can verify that it's your account. Once your account is closed, it is no longer accessible by you or anyone else. Please note that if you have an Auctions account, Member Page, Wish List, or you are an associate you will no longer have access to your account for these purposes either. You would need to start a new account if you wish to order more titles from us, participate in auctions, or to take advantage of any other features on our web site which require a password. If you simply want a credit card removed from the list of payment options on the order form, you may write back to us with the last five digits of the card. This way, you will not have to open a new account to continue ordering from us. Please don't hesitate to contact us should you have any further questions, and thanks for shopping at Amazon.com.

  11. omega point theory on Putting Your Brain into A Computer · · Score: 1

    This is just a rehashing, slightly modified, of the Omega Point Theory of Frank Tipler. Also, I think Ross was expounding on this same thing a couple months ago on Friends. Here's the link to Tipler's book at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0385467990/ o/qid=948941194/sr=8-1/102-9354975-73792 51
    I never made it all the way through. It gets kind of Goddy and weird halfway through. There's about 200 pages of math at the end that purport to be a proof of the existence of God although I think it's kind of a Deus sum machina deal more than a Cartesian proof of God.

  12. Re:Sounds like a neat piece of marketing on The Matrix Movie Now in a College Course · · Score: 1

    The philosophy courses I took in college were some of the most interesting and useful classes I had and if this helps bring more people into philosophy more power to him. The early parts of the movie do have a pretty strong basis in Descartes' Meditations, especially the first two or three. You can also draw parallels to early Christian (esp. Gnostic) philosophy so I don't think it's off-base at all, especially for the beginning philosophy student who may need more than just a boring little white book to get them interested.

  13. Open Source on First LPI Certification Exam · · Score: 1

    Are the exams going to be open source?