Depends on how much credit you want to give for predictions that correctly interpret the purpose and effect of the shift; but provide no technical detail whatsoever.
Would the grim ruminations of the marxists concerning the distribution of the means of production qualify? They tend to either be writing about smokestack industry or broad historical trends, specific implementation unspecified; but some of them would probably feel pretty well validated by the (substantial) shift from computers that provide programming tools by default, to computers that don't ship with any; but can run some if you obtain them elsewhere, to computers that explicitly and artificially forbid essentially all program production(on the device itself, if you SSH into a real computer Apple and friends don't much care what you type on their shiny tablets).
I don't think that the sort of techies who like techology enough to enthusiastically prognosticate about the future of it would have guessed "In the future, computers will be opaque closed boxes. And consumers will fucking love it with the same intensity and in far greater numbers than you did your obscurantist geek box. Where is your god now, nerd?"
I don't remember exactly when the move started; but 'mainstream' anti-vaxers switched to the "green our vaccines"/"reduce the toxins"/"too many too soon" line some years ago to help distinguish themselves from the fringe 'Vaccines sully the bodily purity and weaken the vital essences with Aborted Fetus cells and zionist NWO population control schemes!!!' anti-vaxers.
Shockingly, this move has not led them to embrace any of the vaccines that have been reformulated by popular demand to reduce or eliminate whatever originally had them worried, nor has it led to any apparent interest in working with the toxicology people to determine what level of 'greenness'/'reduced toxins' is acceptable. Nor has there been a rush of interest to vaccinate according to some sort of reduced-pace schedule(though some individual doctors have various ones that they prefer).
Obviously, it would be hugely unethical and pointlessly cruel to advocate the use of vaccines whose risks outweigh their benefits (and, since vaccination for a selection of potentially-serious childhood diseases, as well as less common but more serious diseases, if we have the vaccine available and you are in a suitable risk group, is so enormously common, this is an area of medicine where studying safety both before and after approval is money well spent); but, despite their rhetorical shift, there appears to be no evidence that the 'We don't hate vaccines, we just want safe ones!' groups are actually at all interested in even setting goalposts that vaccines would have to meet to be accepted, much less reviewing evidence as to whether or not existing vaccines do meet those standards.
Honestly, I liked them better before their shift. There is a certain intellectual honesty to embracing a position that others see as lunacy and then fighting like a rabid weasel against all evidence. Not a...healthy...kind of intellectual honesty; but a kind of intellectual honesty. Mealy-mouthed disingenuous bullshit, though, lacks that virtue, and aggressively so. Even more cynically, it uses the cause of actual epidemiology, toxicology, and medical monitoring, safety standards, approval protocols, and other (vital) elements of keeping medicine honest and more useful than it is harmful as camouflage for a load of anti-scientific nonsense.
If they were willing to actually come out with some some sort of target (even if it seems pointlessly low according to current data), they'd just be the cautious wing of an actually scientific exercise in epidemiology and toxicology. As it is, no goals are defined, no data accepted, no improvement is ever good enough. It's pure smokescreen.
I agree that it isn't a bigger issue in terms of expected ongoing pain/users affected, since the issue with trusting too many shady/incompetent CAs is showing no signs of real solution ('pinning' is an OK hack, so far as it goes; but it doesn't go very far on most users' systems and nobody seems to have an actual ready-for-prime-time solution that shows signs of making it out the door).
I was thinking 'bigger' in that only SSLed stuff accessed by excessively-trusting systems can be compromised by a rogue or incompetent CA, while anything can be compromised (and relatively silently, some atypically clueful person tends to notice the shady certs eventually, which is much less likely with a perfect copy of the actual private keys) if you have the same private key material as the legitimate host.
So, barring the possibility of some particularly nasty targeted exploit against some specific organizations, affected population is likely to be smaller; but the set of vulnerable systems is necessarily larger. I really didn't make what I meant by 'bigger' clear originally, did I...
I suspect that the okay-ness of this fact depends on whether you are a disinterested observer (in which case your points are valid and likely account for many silent users, along with some amount of abandoned accounts, squatters, etc.) or whether you are somebody at Twitter, who would probably prefer to keep their (laughable) early post-IPO value of something north of 30 billion dollars, rather than have further bad news after announcing in Febuary of this year that you'd lost half a billion dollars in the last year, and that your >P/E ratio is kind of tepid.
For a site that requires sign-up to do all but the most crippled reading/following (do they do public RSS, such that you could 'follow' without an account? Barely matters since the public mostly doesn't and their design makes just-sign-up-with-us easier for most non-geeks than getting RSS up and running, especially across devices), 56% participation is actually higher than I'd expect, and certainly far from shockingly low. It's just that any pretense of being worth more than the scrap value of their office furniture is largely based on optimistic subscriber numbers, so I suspect that they are Not Happy about somebody talking about it. If some analyst comes out with "Percentage of twitter accounts that are actually bots" tomorrow, I imagine they'd be less happy still.
Did you notice how I said that the harping, not the rules, is an utter waste of time?
I have no problem with grammatical conventions. I try not to depart to egregiously from them myself. That doesn't oblige me to like the grammar police, or to refrain from criticizing the insufferable moralistic error-sniping that certain people engage in just to show how serious they are about grammar. The ones who treat comparatively new rules as though they'd been handed down from time immemorial or who are still rejecting as an undignified neologism some usage with the thick end of a century of documented history are particularly vexing.
If you skip that nonsense, you can have all the advantages of well-formed communication without any time wasted.
As for celebration of ignorance? I'd say that math takes substantially more flack, and that's a subject that virtually nobody picks up an idiosyncratic-but-workable knowledge of through basic cultural exposure, nor is it a subject where you can be substantially wrong and still get adequate results. (There is the separate, deeply vexed, issue of whether assorted nonstandard, but internally consistent, grammars associated with various regions and subcultures should be coddled or suppressed; but that's not an ignorance question; but a standardization one.)
Investments in lobbyists always suggest a belief (though they don't tell us whether it's true or false) that the ROI on regulatory meddling is greater than that of other purposes to which the money could be put. What could possibly go wrong?
I suspect that they don't emphasize this as much when teaching the not-dead ones; but when I took Latin it was overtly acknowledged that this was expected to improve my knowledge of English grammar and the (very large, if rather skewed toward jargon) chunk of English vocabulary that was pulled in from Latin with varying degrees of mangling.
Both because Latin grammar is substantially different, and because technical knowledge of English grammar couldn't be assumed, they didn't try to teach according to analogy with English grammar, or otherwise do something that required a formal knowledge of it.
Because of my...rather peculiar...profile on language acquisition, I ended up scraping through in large part by inferring Latin words I didn't know from the English words those Latin words were supposed to be helping me with, which was somewhat perverse; but so it goes.
There are some ongoing differences, aside from cost: With written material, you don't get the use of tone, gesture, expression, and the various other spoken-language tricks of expression that don't directly make it to paper. It is hardly impossible to write such that the reader will (mostly) correctly infer some of them; but that's exactly the sort of thing that you have to work at, or have sufficient practice to do nearly effortlessly, that you'd get for free when speaking.
There's also the difference that most spoken communication takes place in more or less real time, which allows the other person to interject, or you to elaborate on a point if the audience appears baffled, speed through a point if they appear bored, and otherwise tailor your speech to the demands of the occasion. It will lack formality; but customization counts for a lot.
Some text communication, IM and the like, is largely the same and admits of the same sort of near-real-time course corrections; but even at the level of message board posts you really start to see the effects of delay. If I fuck this up, I can post a (hopefully) clarifying reply; but I could easily end up being misunderstood by numerous people before one of them posts something that informs me and I refresh the page and see that, and get my correction in.
The 'purists' who spend their time harping on The True Rules, or replying purely to note that somebody has used 'there' instead of 'their' or the reverse, are an utter waste of time. Spending more time thinking about communication that will be stripped of spoken and nonverbal cues and sent out into the world with a nontrivial turnaround time, though, is something that I suspect we won't escape.
I agree that logistical issues for most text have declined over time (and some things that used to be text, like 'letter writing' as an actual social institution are now largely dominated by spoken word replacements); but I would argue that they aren't gone, and that additional issues that the writer needs to consider start to crop up with surprisingly small delays.
Has it ever actually happened that a natural language has either achieved such unambiguity that reliable transmission of meaning can be expected, or such chaos as to descend into mutually unintelligible babble?
Obviously, we muddle through, so it's not as though meaning is totally impossible to convey; but even areas of (pseudo)natural language, like contract law, designed and implemented by trained experts in the hope of mutually unambiguous expression are constantly hitting the rocks. At the other end, languages can and do diverge over time if some sort of population separation occurs, and certain in-group jargons and slang can be used specifically to impede understanding by outsiders; but (as much as one or both parties might loath the encounter) languages just devolving into babble because we didn't nip slang in the bud doesn't seem to happen.
I realize that Slashdot Summaries are one of the important, protected, habitats of a mixture of questionable proofreading and overt editorializing; but isn't something important being left out here?
The scheme in question is known as 'write by reading'. This apparently boils down to 'write however you want', according to a blog post that barely touches on the matter aside from a link to a German newspaper. Is it possible that this 'write by reading' theory involves some 'reading' somewhere? Maybe the notion that children will pick up grammar by exposure to it, which would make spending the time previously allocated to Learning Your Grammar Rules Children on reading things that are both examples of good writing and also useful, interesting, or otherwise better than distilled essence of grammar a plausible alternative?
Now, I'd be the first to agree that the standards of pedagogical research are... notably tepid... and education is much ruled by fads, many with little or no basis in evidence beyond anecdotes; but can we really have a useful discussion if we are going to start from a position of such inspiring intellectual honesty?
The question: "Do children pick up grammar from exposure to well written, but not otherwise grammar focused, texts sufficiently efficiently that we are better off skipping the lessons in pure grammar in favor of receiving the grammar as a side effect of reading that will also have other uses?" is a perfectly reasonable one, and it isn't immediately obvious which side the facts would come down on, so some research would be nice; but I'm pretty sure that 'Writing by Reading' is not actually a polite expression for 'Thare iz no ruls in Sckool.'
The bigger issue is that even people who don't trust the (braindead; but too convenient to die) "Hey! Let's just trust about 150 zillion different 'secure' Certificate Authorities and if they signed the cert and it matches the domain everything must be OK!" are still pretty screwed if whatever specific certificate or certificates they are using are now also in the hands of some unknown and probably malicious 3rd party...
There's a pretty big difference between 'because the system is pretty stupid, you can generate a valid certificate for any domain by knocking over any one of an alarming number of shoddy and/or institutionally captured CAs' and 'your private key, yours specifically, can be remotely slurped out of your system and used to impersonate it exactly'.
I don't know if they care; but a uniquely serialized and network connected device running Google's software doesn't really change hands unless suitably disarmed. "Oh, software is licensed not sold, license agreement not transferable, remote wipe. Do enjoy the hardware you purchased."
I'm not sure if they are 'deaf' (and if they aren't, how much of their sensitivity-to-vibrations-in-fluid is actually 'hearing' and how much is 'touch' with their little sensory hairs) or if their range of stereotyped behaviors doesn't include predators that work by suction. There are some aquatic predators that are suction hunters, presumably becaues the fluid is denser; but nothing terrestrial comes to mind. If they evolved in absense of suction attacks, they presumably either are encountering something outside their experience, or running their protocols for high wind, when the vacuum cleaner attacks.
The little bastards are brutally well optimized; but don't seem to have much general-purpose-cognition grafted on so their utility in the face of novelty is likely very, very, low.
It would actually be interesting to see if, given suitable advances in the design and construction of biomimetic robots, low-speed-but-lightweight-and-crazy-maneuverable becomes a viable strategy (presumably as a complement to a very high speed arsenal). Something with the maneuverability of a fly(especially a fly that also has a few small jets for bursts of thrust on maneuvers that exceed what its wings can provide) might well be able to walk right past missiles designed to intercept high speed conventional aircraft unless those missiles were minimally dependent on accuracy because of large warheads with lots of shrapnel and AoE. Much less useful against more prosaic rapid-fire-guns and flack; but something designed to hunt fixed wing aircraft could be in for a real surprise.
There is the question of when we run out of work to be done that humans are capable of. I would be most surprised indeed to see the crystallization of a lovely fundamental theory of everything that ties up all the loose ends; but considerably less surprised to see the supply of "With a dash of brilliance and some exploited grad students, you can have this problem beaten and written up before you die." scale problems dwindle considerably. Depending on what team physics does, they also might end up spending a long time writing neat equations predicting what a particle collider of roughly the same diameter as the kuiper belt would find if it were funded; but not looking at particularly good odds of getting one. In something like math, it seems quite likely that the number of concise, elegant, proofs is overwhelmingly tinier than the number of inhumanly large ones. I'm not even sure we'd have any reason to suspect that the supply of possible proofs is bounded; but I imagine that people will still be disappointed when the discovery of a new proof short enough to grasp within one mathematician's lifetime is a major event and the mathematical journals are cluttered with 50,000 page machine generated results.
I work at the FCC (as an Engineer) I want some of that trickle down . . . .:(
Have you tried discovering that the merger would cause *some sort of treknobabble apocalyptic issue involving scary RF terms and America losing its god-given right to TV*; but expressing a willingness to 'review your preliminary results in collaboration with industry experts' for a modest consulting fee?
It's not bribery, it's just a corporate person engaging in free speech. Indeed, our own dear supreme court asserts the view that this sort of activity does not even create the impression of impropriety...
Fuck them. They're stupid. Who cares if morons do or do not have noncompetes. It's not like it matters since the people there are so stupid.
It's worth noting that the Mitt Romney who was elected in Massachusetts was a politician who the Mitt Romney that ran for president was bitterly opposed to on the majority of issues, and spent a fair amount of time overtly attacking, along with the filthy liberals who had elected him.
The fact that these were the same man suggests that Mitt Romney is some sort of mendacious fuckweasel whose relationship with the truth is so complicated at this point that he probably can't even lie properly anymore; but they were practically different candidates for all operational purposes.
I imagine that they only enforce as many as it takes to discourage the moderately discontent from leaving or shopping around. If they have you on theft of some specific trade secret, copyrighted implementation, patent, whatever, the noncompete would just be gravy on top of the raft of actual charges.
Effectively, the non-compete provides them with something similar to an 'option' in finance. They are under no obligation to sue you into the ground if you leave; but the fact that they could, weighted by the odds that they will, imposes an additional cost to you leaving, which lowers the cost of retaining you.
Don't they stop employees from taking any kind of IP and running away with it, which would basically kill the industry?
I'm pretty sure that theft of trade secrets, violation of copyrights and patents, etc. are already covered by their own bodies of regulation. It's already illegal to run away with anything approaching the implementation of anything, so non-competes are either redundant or are deliberately intended to extend the 'any kind of IP' to basically include any and all relevant job skills (including the ones they hired you for, which you obviously didn't even acquire through experience at that job), experience, vague musings during lunch, and most of the rest of the employee's brain-meats as company property.
How many if I throw in enough electric-eel style current generators that you can just interface directly with low-speed logic circuits or do unbelievably crazy analog synth work by touch alone?
They are hardly a dangerous player in Cold War intrigue anymore; but I wouldn't necessarily underestimate the supply of nostalgic B-list and below feds just itching to go fight the last war, now set to 'casual' difficulty level.
Unless they truly fuck something up, people just keep accruing seniority until they die or finally become too senile to disguise their senility. We still have some years left before we've aged out all the cold warriors.
This is pretty serious business. At a potential maximum of 140 octects/message, that's (just)Over 40 Megabytes delivered in the course of 5 hours.
Just think. To deliver an attack like that, the US government must have had some sort of time machine, with Ronald Reagan shouting "Now witness the destructive power of this fully armed and operational ARPANET!" before turning on, um, maybe a couple dozen modems at once.
The major nuisance with those odds (even if the nonkilled are all aymptomatic, rather than variously sickened) is that it means the organism can remain in the population basically forever, with an ample supply of carriers, barring develpment of some persistent eradication mechanism so effective and safe that it can ethically be mass-applied as a largely preventative measure(as, for instance, with the polio vaccine, where the safety and efficacy are good enough, and the duration of effect long enough, that you can just blanket entire areas with vaccination campaigns until the organism disappears from the population).
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on how much credit you want to give for predictions that correctly interpret the purpose and effect of the shift; but provide no technical detail whatsoever.
Would the grim ruminations of the marxists concerning the distribution of the means of production qualify? They tend to either be writing about smokestack industry or broad historical trends, specific implementation unspecified; but some of them would probably feel pretty well validated by the (substantial) shift from computers that provide programming tools by default, to computers that don't ship with any; but can run some if you obtain them elsewhere, to computers that explicitly and artificially forbid essentially all program production(on the device itself, if you SSH into a real computer Apple and friends don't much care what you type on their shiny tablets).
I don't think that the sort of techies who like techology enough to enthusiastically prognosticate about the future of it would have guessed "In the future, computers will be opaque closed boxes. And consumers will fucking love it with the same intensity and in far greater numbers than you did your obscurantist geek box. Where is your god now, nerd?"
I don't remember exactly when the move started; but 'mainstream' anti-vaxers switched to the "green our vaccines"/"reduce the toxins"/"too many too soon" line some years ago to help distinguish themselves from the fringe 'Vaccines sully the bodily purity and weaken the vital essences with Aborted Fetus cells and zionist NWO population control schemes!!!' anti-vaxers.
Shockingly, this move has not led them to embrace any of the vaccines that have been reformulated by popular demand to reduce or eliminate whatever originally had them worried, nor has it led to any apparent interest in working with the toxicology people to determine what level of 'greenness'/'reduced toxins' is acceptable. Nor has there been a rush of interest to vaccinate according to some sort of reduced-pace schedule(though some individual doctors have various ones that they prefer).
Obviously, it would be hugely unethical and pointlessly cruel to advocate the use of vaccines whose risks outweigh their benefits (and, since vaccination for a selection of potentially-serious childhood diseases, as well as less common but more serious diseases, if we have the vaccine available and you are in a suitable risk group, is so enormously common, this is an area of medicine where studying safety both before and after approval is money well spent); but, despite their rhetorical shift, there appears to be no evidence that the 'We don't hate vaccines, we just want safe ones!' groups are actually at all interested in even setting goalposts that vaccines would have to meet to be accepted, much less reviewing evidence as to whether or not existing vaccines do meet those standards.
Honestly, I liked them better before their shift. There is a certain intellectual honesty to embracing a position that others see as lunacy and then fighting like a rabid weasel against all evidence. Not a...healthy...kind of intellectual honesty; but a kind of intellectual honesty. Mealy-mouthed disingenuous bullshit, though, lacks that virtue, and aggressively so. Even more cynically, it uses the cause of actual epidemiology, toxicology, and medical monitoring, safety standards, approval protocols, and other (vital) elements of keeping medicine honest and more useful than it is harmful as camouflage for a load of anti-scientific nonsense.
If they were willing to actually come out with some some sort of target (even if it seems pointlessly low according to current data), they'd just be the cautious wing of an actually scientific exercise in epidemiology and toxicology. As it is, no goals are defined, no data accepted, no improvement is ever good enough. It's pure smokescreen.
I agree that it isn't a bigger issue in terms of expected ongoing pain/users affected, since the issue with trusting too many shady/incompetent CAs is showing no signs of real solution ('pinning' is an OK hack, so far as it goes; but it doesn't go very far on most users' systems and nobody seems to have an actual ready-for-prime-time solution that shows signs of making it out the door).
I was thinking 'bigger' in that only SSLed stuff accessed by excessively-trusting systems can be compromised by a rogue or incompetent CA, while anything can be compromised (and relatively silently, some atypically clueful person tends to notice the shady certs eventually, which is much less likely with a perfect copy of the actual private keys) if you have the same private key material as the legitimate host.
So, barring the possibility of some particularly nasty targeted exploit against some specific organizations, affected population is likely to be smaller; but the set of vulnerable systems is necessarily larger. I really didn't make what I meant by 'bigger' clear originally, did I...
I suspect that the okay-ness of this fact depends on whether you are a disinterested observer (in which case your points are valid and likely account for many silent users, along with some amount of abandoned accounts, squatters, etc.) or whether you are somebody at Twitter, who would probably prefer to keep their (laughable) early post-IPO value of something north of 30 billion dollars, rather than have further bad news after announcing in Febuary of this year that you'd lost half a billion dollars in the last year, and that your >P/E ratio is kind of tepid.
For a site that requires sign-up to do all but the most crippled reading/following (do they do public RSS, such that you could 'follow' without an account? Barely matters since the public mostly doesn't and their design makes just-sign-up-with-us easier for most non-geeks than getting RSS up and running, especially across devices), 56% participation is actually higher than I'd expect, and certainly far from shockingly low. It's just that any pretense of being worth more than the scrap value of their office furniture is largely based on optimistic subscriber numbers, so I suspect that they are Not Happy about somebody talking about it. If some analyst comes out with "Percentage of twitter accounts that are actually bots" tomorrow, I imagine they'd be less happy still.
Not (all) twits gonna tweet. It's actually something of a heartwarming discovery.
Did you notice how I said that the harping, not the rules, is an utter waste of time?
I have no problem with grammatical conventions. I try not to depart to egregiously from them myself. That doesn't oblige me to like the grammar police, or to refrain from criticizing the insufferable moralistic error-sniping that certain people engage in just to show how serious they are about grammar. The ones who treat comparatively new rules as though they'd been handed down from time immemorial or who are still rejecting as an undignified neologism some usage with the thick end of a century of documented history are particularly vexing.
If you skip that nonsense, you can have all the advantages of well-formed communication without any time wasted. As for celebration of ignorance? I'd say that math takes substantially more flack, and that's a subject that virtually nobody picks up an idiosyncratic-but-workable knowledge of through basic cultural exposure, nor is it a subject where you can be substantially wrong and still get adequate results. (There is the separate, deeply vexed, issue of whether assorted nonstandard, but internally consistent, grammars associated with various regions and subcultures should be coddled or suppressed; but that's not an ignorance question; but a standardization one.)
Investments in lobbyists always suggest a belief (though they don't tell us whether it's true or false) that the ROI on regulatory meddling is greater than that of other purposes to which the money could be put. What could possibly go wrong?
I suspect that they don't emphasize this as much when teaching the not-dead ones; but when I took Latin it was overtly acknowledged that this was expected to improve my knowledge of English grammar and the (very large, if rather skewed toward jargon) chunk of English vocabulary that was pulled in from Latin with varying degrees of mangling.
Both because Latin grammar is substantially different, and because technical knowledge of English grammar couldn't be assumed, they didn't try to teach according to analogy with English grammar, or otherwise do something that required a formal knowledge of it.
Because of my...rather peculiar...profile on language acquisition, I ended up scraping through in large part by inferring Latin words I didn't know from the English words those Latin words were supposed to be helping me with, which was somewhat perverse; but so it goes.
There are some ongoing differences, aside from cost: With written material, you don't get the use of tone, gesture, expression, and the various other spoken-language tricks of expression that don't directly make it to paper. It is hardly impossible to write such that the reader will (mostly) correctly infer some of them; but that's exactly the sort of thing that you have to work at, or have sufficient practice to do nearly effortlessly, that you'd get for free when speaking.
There's also the difference that most spoken communication takes place in more or less real time, which allows the other person to interject, or you to elaborate on a point if the audience appears baffled, speed through a point if they appear bored, and otherwise tailor your speech to the demands of the occasion. It will lack formality; but customization counts for a lot.
Some text communication, IM and the like, is largely the same and admits of the same sort of near-real-time course corrections; but even at the level of message board posts you really start to see the effects of delay. If I fuck this up, I can post a (hopefully) clarifying reply; but I could easily end up being misunderstood by numerous people before one of them posts something that informs me and I refresh the page and see that, and get my correction in.
The 'purists' who spend their time harping on The True Rules, or replying purely to note that somebody has used 'there' instead of 'their' or the reverse, are an utter waste of time. Spending more time thinking about communication that will be stripped of spoken and nonverbal cues and sent out into the world with a nontrivial turnaround time, though, is something that I suspect we won't escape.
I agree that logistical issues for most text have declined over time (and some things that used to be text, like 'letter writing' as an actual social institution are now largely dominated by spoken word replacements); but I would argue that they aren't gone, and that additional issues that the writer needs to consider start to crop up with surprisingly small delays.
Has it ever actually happened that a natural language has either achieved such unambiguity that reliable transmission of meaning can be expected, or such chaos as to descend into mutually unintelligible babble?
Obviously, we muddle through, so it's not as though meaning is totally impossible to convey; but even areas of (pseudo)natural language, like contract law, designed and implemented by trained experts in the hope of mutually unambiguous expression are constantly hitting the rocks. At the other end, languages can and do diverge over time if some sort of population separation occurs, and certain in-group jargons and slang can be used specifically to impede understanding by outsiders; but (as much as one or both parties might loath the encounter) languages just devolving into babble because we didn't nip slang in the bud doesn't seem to happen.
I realize that Slashdot Summaries are one of the important, protected, habitats of a mixture of questionable proofreading and overt editorializing; but isn't something important being left out here?
The scheme in question is known as 'write by reading'. This apparently boils down to 'write however you want', according to a blog post that barely touches on the matter aside from a link to a German newspaper. Is it possible that this 'write by reading' theory involves some 'reading' somewhere? Maybe the notion that children will pick up grammar by exposure to it, which would make spending the time previously allocated to Learning Your Grammar Rules Children on reading things that are both examples of good writing and also useful, interesting, or otherwise better than distilled essence of grammar a plausible alternative?
Now, I'd be the first to agree that the standards of pedagogical research are... notably tepid... and education is much ruled by fads, many with little or no basis in evidence beyond anecdotes; but can we really have a useful discussion if we are going to start from a position of such inspiring intellectual honesty?
The question: "Do children pick up grammar from exposure to well written, but not otherwise grammar focused, texts sufficiently efficiently that we are better off skipping the lessons in pure grammar in favor of receiving the grammar as a side effect of reading that will also have other uses?" is a perfectly reasonable one, and it isn't immediately obvious which side the facts would come down on, so some research would be nice; but I'm pretty sure that 'Writing by Reading' is not actually a polite expression for 'Thare iz no ruls in Sckool.'
The bigger issue is that even people who don't trust the (braindead; but too convenient to die) "Hey! Let's just trust about 150 zillion different 'secure' Certificate Authorities and if they signed the cert and it matches the domain everything must be OK!" are still pretty screwed if whatever specific certificate or certificates they are using are now also in the hands of some unknown and probably malicious 3rd party...
There's a pretty big difference between 'because the system is pretty stupid, you can generate a valid certificate for any domain by knocking over any one of an alarming number of shoddy and/or institutionally captured CAs' and 'your private key, yours specifically, can be remotely slurped out of your system and used to impersonate it exactly'.
I don't know if they care; but a uniquely serialized and network connected device running Google's software doesn't really change hands unless suitably disarmed. "Oh, software is licensed not sold, license agreement not transferable, remote wipe. Do enjoy the hardware you purchased."
I'm not sure if they are 'deaf' (and if they aren't, how much of their sensitivity-to-vibrations-in-fluid is actually 'hearing' and how much is 'touch' with their little sensory hairs) or if their range of stereotyped behaviors doesn't include predators that work by suction. There are some aquatic predators that are suction hunters, presumably becaues the fluid is denser; but nothing terrestrial comes to mind. If they evolved in absense of suction attacks, they presumably either are encountering something outside their experience, or running their protocols for high wind, when the vacuum cleaner attacks.
The little bastards are brutally well optimized; but don't seem to have much general-purpose-cognition grafted on so their utility in the face of novelty is likely very, very, low.
It would actually be interesting to see if, given suitable advances in the design and construction of biomimetic robots, low-speed-but-lightweight-and-crazy-maneuverable becomes a viable strategy (presumably as a complement to a very high speed arsenal). Something with the maneuverability of a fly(especially a fly that also has a few small jets for bursts of thrust on maneuvers that exceed what its wings can provide) might well be able to walk right past missiles designed to intercept high speed conventional aircraft unless those missiles were minimally dependent on accuracy because of large warheads with lots of shrapnel and AoE. Much less useful against more prosaic rapid-fire-guns and flack; but something designed to hunt fixed wing aircraft could be in for a real surprise.
There is the question of when we run out of work to be done that humans are capable of. I would be most surprised indeed to see the crystallization of a lovely fundamental theory of everything that ties up all the loose ends; but considerably less surprised to see the supply of "With a dash of brilliance and some exploited grad students, you can have this problem beaten and written up before you die." scale problems dwindle considerably. Depending on what team physics does, they also might end up spending a long time writing neat equations predicting what a particle collider of roughly the same diameter as the kuiper belt would find if it were funded; but not looking at particularly good odds of getting one. In something like math, it seems quite likely that the number of concise, elegant, proofs is overwhelmingly tinier than the number of inhumanly large ones. I'm not even sure we'd have any reason to suspect that the supply of possible proofs is bounded; but I imagine that people will still be disappointed when the discovery of a new proof short enough to grasp within one mathematician's lifetime is a major event and the mathematical journals are cluttered with 50,000 page machine generated results.
I work at the FCC (as an Engineer) I want some of that trickle down . . . . :(
Have you tried discovering that the merger would cause *some sort of treknobabble apocalyptic issue involving scary RF terms and America losing its god-given right to TV*; but expressing a willingness to 'review your preliminary results in collaboration with industry experts' for a modest consulting fee?
It's not bribery, it's just a corporate person engaging in free speech. Indeed, our own dear supreme court asserts the view that this sort of activity does not even create the impression of impropriety...
Fuck them. They're stupid. Who cares if morons do or do not have noncompetes. It's not like it matters since the people there are so stupid.
It's worth noting that the Mitt Romney who was elected in Massachusetts was a politician who the Mitt Romney that ran for president was bitterly opposed to on the majority of issues, and spent a fair amount of time overtly attacking, along with the filthy liberals who had elected him.
The fact that these were the same man suggests that Mitt Romney is some sort of mendacious fuckweasel whose relationship with the truth is so complicated at this point that he probably can't even lie properly anymore; but they were practically different candidates for all operational purposes.
I imagine that they only enforce as many as it takes to discourage the moderately discontent from leaving or shopping around. If they have you on theft of some specific trade secret, copyrighted implementation, patent, whatever, the noncompete would just be gravy on top of the raft of actual charges.
Effectively, the non-compete provides them with something similar to an 'option' in finance. They are under no obligation to sue you into the ground if you leave; but the fact that they could, weighted by the odds that they will, imposes an additional cost to you leaving, which lowers the cost of retaining you.
Don't they stop employees from taking any kind of IP and running away with it, which would basically kill the industry?
I'm pretty sure that theft of trade secrets, violation of copyrights and patents, etc. are already covered by their own bodies of regulation. It's already illegal to run away with anything approaching the implementation of anything, so non-competes are either redundant or are deliberately intended to extend the 'any kind of IP' to basically include any and all relevant job skills (including the ones they hired you for, which you obviously didn't even acquire through experience at that job), experience, vague musings during lunch, and most of the rest of the employee's brain-meats as company property.
How many if I throw in enough electric-eel style current generators that you can just interface directly with low-speed logic circuits or do unbelievably crazy analog synth work by touch alone?
They are hardly a dangerous player in Cold War intrigue anymore; but I wouldn't necessarily underestimate the supply of nostalgic B-list and below feds just itching to go fight the last war, now set to 'casual' difficulty level.
Unless they truly fuck something up, people just keep accruing seniority until they die or finally become too senile to disguise their senility. We still have some years left before we've aged out all the cold warriors.
This is pretty serious business. At a potential maximum of 140 octects/message, that's (just)Over 40 Megabytes delivered in the course of 5 hours.
Just think. To deliver an attack like that, the US government must have had some sort of time machine, with Ronald Reagan shouting "Now witness the destructive power of this fully armed and operational ARPANET!" before turning on, um, maybe a couple dozen modems at once.
The major nuisance with those odds (even if the nonkilled are all aymptomatic, rather than variously sickened) is that it means the organism can remain in the population basically forever, with an ample supply of carriers, barring develpment of some persistent eradication mechanism so effective and safe that it can ethically be mass-applied as a largely preventative measure(as, for instance, with the polio vaccine, where the safety and efficacy are good enough, and the duration of effect long enough, that you can just blanket entire areas with vaccination campaigns until the organism disappears from the population).