71 undergrads and 43 grads, one university, nothing normalized for anything except hours on facebook and self-reported GPA.
It's hard to even pull that much since it appears that this is only a poster presentation.
I'd love to see a real study of 1000's of students from colleges and universities around the world. Even better, to also consider tools other than Facebook, but I'd settle for just the one tool.
I don't doubt that there is some potential for the results to be accurate but there's way too little information and way too many variables that haven't been taken into consideration. And the story is being picked up by the wire services as "proof" that social tools are harmful.
I'm curious how this affects the sort of safe harbour-ish thinking that says you're legally safe if you don't know what's happening and if anyone can use you for good purposes. But hanging out a kill-switch means you expect to review and approve (or, potentially, remove) apps which means Google would suddenly be liable for anything written with Android???
Card hasn't spent much time thinking about Rowling's case or he'd realize it isn't simply congruent ideas or similar fundamental storylines. This is someone who is publishing a fan board and augmenting the publication with wholesale copying of Rowling's work.
I seriously doubt anyone, including Card, would approve of someone taking their work, scanning it into a computer and then submitting it for publication under their own name. Rowling's situation is somewhere on the slippery slope between Card's example and this one.
Of course, it would be even better if the "fix" could check for the infection and offer a few alternatives for repairing the damage - one of which could be "fix it for me". Of course, anyone who selects "fix it for me" should get the bug fixed and then get a 2x4 upside the head for letting a random Internet executable from an unknown source run on their computer!
A couple of summers ago, the Northeast was blacked out. I was sitting in a rented apartment, waiting for my condo to be finished and trying to work when the ADSL line dropped and things went black. I finally figured out that it was more than my unit.
So, I went outside to the apartment pool and told my wife and kids to hang out there for a while. Then I went back in to see if I could find a radio (actually found one - with batteries and everything). Couldn't make out much more than that there was a bigger blackout in progress. I thought it was a local transformer - one of those times when a squirrel or raccoon goes kamikaze and takes out power to 20,000 people.
And then... the telephone rang. My father, from Hamilton (50mi away) checking that we were OK. No lights (ended up without power for 3 days) but the darned phone worked. Flawlessly.
Wow, it's pedant day on slashdot! The point, Captain Obvious, is to provide the most daylight during waking hours for the average diurnal person.
I think that Mr. Underbridge has found a way to create more daylight hours - if he can continue such shining, bright commentary - a new sun is born.
What difference does my battery-operated clock make for a diurnal person? Wouldn't they continue to wake and sleep at the same time?
By the way, today was the first that I heard about this move. Did Congress just wake up and go, "let's jerk around the rest of the world and prove we're the biggest bully around?" Shouldn't something like this be discussed and synchronized with trading partners or something?
Actually, Canadian teams competed in regionals against American teams for 8 of the seats at the finals and Canadians took 6 of those 8 seats.
That's not a big surprise, it is usually 5 or 6. It may only be one test, but U.S. teams have done remarkably poorly in the past decade as the calibre of international teams keeps increasing.
The reason you don't see "Right, let's stop pissing about and actually make something..." is two-fold.
First, there's the highly public nature of this beast - it has to be perfect and yet all forces combine to try and force it out at the earliest opportunity. And missing the earliest date is treated as a sign of systemic failure. In this case from Ireland, nobody says there are problems, just that there isn't enough evidence to convince the reviewers to a suitable degree of confidence that there won't be problems.
Second, the liabilities in this sort of product probably exceed anything you might imagine. I doubt that the profitability comes anywhere near the liability.
You'd be better off trying to come up with an e-voting system that is secure, unspoofable and that allows people to select their "Idol" or to vote someone "off the island".
There are a few things that make this something more than a change in the language of instruction.
First, as I understand, teaching in C# is a contractual obligation and thus has been removed as a pedagogical decision.
Second, as I understand, this obligation lasts for 5 years (all the Microsoft PR material refers to a 5 year program). This binds UW E&CE to a specific language regardless of future developments. Since C# only runs on Windows, it further binds the university and thus drives a number of other decisions.
The enforced change in languages is not the only apparent requirement. UW students will now be required to work with.NET in spite of other, technically different (and, in my opinion, superior) alternatives.
None of this would count as a sign of the coming Apocalypse but I view it as a serious encroachment on academic rights including the freedom for a department to make changes to equipment, tooling, etc.
Kallahar wrote: "every time my boss walks by with his cell phone, my monitors fuzz out and my speakers make strange noises from whatever signals the cell phone is emitting..."
That's just the RF interference due to the pointy-hair acting as a transmission tower. That's the magical Law of Similarity in action.
What makes you think that these robots are going to be made out of iron? They'll more likely be carbon-based life-forms.
The crude, early versions will be built using something like the NanoManipulator already on the market for less than some fools pay for an SUV (see http://www.3rdtech.com/NanoManipulator.htm). The next generation will probably use a very simplistic RNA/DNA programming structure, we're pretty close to that already.
If you are interested in reading about genomics and you want a high level view that has enough science to be interesting without being too specialized, I strongly recommend Matt Ridley's book "Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters". Here's a link.
The book has one chapter for each of the 23 chromosomes and it has some general discussion as well as some facts that are known or suspected about the sequences in that chromosome.
The biggest problem with retaliation is that it doesn't work. The Israeli's have been trying that policy for years and they can't retaliate enough to make a difference. And nobody would want them to retaliate that much!
Keep in mind that there are people who think nothing of strapping pounds of explosive to their bodies and detonating themselves.
And keep in mind that a highly trained, assumedly intelligent person took over the controls of a very fussy piece of machinery and hit a relatively small target with great accuracy, committing certain suicide.
I think that something needs to be done, but I am very skeptical that the answer lies in carpet bombing.
Why on earth would I want a 300 page novel where one page could contain the whole book. I supposed that I can imagine a magazine where pages contain video, not just words and photos but I already have a couple of versions of that - my computer and my television. The TV picture is still a bit better but the laptop with wireless modem is closer to truly asynchronous.
I didn't see anything about size restrictions. I could see using this to wallpaper my room -- a 10 square meter screen might come close to what I want, once they get the resolution up there.
What are the real applications? Live video display on id- and credit-cards? Blueprints that can display and calculate? Smart x-rays (once resolution jumps 3 orders of magnitude or more)?
I find it difficult to understand how someone can justify a violent reponse to the appearance of a McDonald's restaurant. Especially when there are many, effective, non-violent approaches.
M. Bove could have chosen to organize a protest, perhaps blocking the site entrance with a legal protest. These things take a large number of people to organize and thus can be taken as a representative view of local opinion (in lieu of other, established democratic forms).
He could have organized to block food shipments after the fact or to inform patrons as they approached the completed McD's or to undertake any number of other, legal and non-violent approaches. But they wouldn't have been such a good vehicle for rallying forces...
Violence might be justified if there is an imminent threat and it is certainly a good choice of response to prior violence. That hardly seems to be the case here. McDonald's hasn't chosen to wear red coats and to march in with rifles and bayonets to enforce the eating of greasy, over-processed foods laden with hormones. If the majority of M. Bove's countrymen choose to follow the American hegemonization process, then why shouldn't M. Bove respect their choice.
What right allows any individual to force their own point of view of their community?
Stephen
P.S. I wonder how Jon Katz would feel if someone trashed his computers because they felt that his writing was a threat to their interpretation of what topics should be consumed by other readers?
One way that the judgement could go that would help lead us into a post-Microsoft world is for the judge to order Microsoft to endow $1B to an independent organization that would partially fund the development of competing products. The rational behind the decision is laid out in the parent article and the intention would be to smooth the startup phase for competitors in order to offset Microsoft's current illegal domination.
It's sad to see postings that can be summed up as "the old way worked for me so any changes are inherently evil".
Clearly, a large number of people felt that Microsoft was abusing a position of power to influence them into accepting employment without relatively fair compensation. The result was that a court (and an appeals court) have agreed with those people.
Notice two facts. People may not have been forced into accepting Microsoft's terms of employment but the judges clearly felt that Microsoft was not dealing on a fair basis and that the resulting contract was thereby unduly influenced.
Also, the ruling is based on the relative fairness of full-time versus contract/temp employment compensation from Microsoft.
So, while SerpentMage, his wife and others are happy, this doesn't (and shouldn't) change anything pertaining to the ruling.
The fact that some people "agree to the contractor principle" and should therefor "stick to it" is overridden by the higher fact that our society has risen above the feudal system and has created a system of law that can judge when "agree" may have an undue degree of "coerce". Society's law then allows for the contract to be overridden for all.
And, as a last word, I wonder if the plaintiffs would agree with SerpentMage's comment that "sueing... is a bit easy"?
Slashdot Mirror
71 undergrads and 43 grads, one university, nothing normalized for anything except hours on facebook and self-reported GPA.
It's hard to even pull that much since it appears that this is only a poster presentation.
I'd love to see a real study of 1000's of students from colleges and universities around the world. Even better, to also consider tools other than Facebook, but I'd settle for just the one tool.
I don't doubt that there is some potential for the results to be accurate but there's way too little information and way too many variables that haven't been taken into consideration. And the story is being picked up by the wire services as "proof" that social tools are harmful.
I'm curious how this affects the sort of safe harbour-ish thinking that says you're legally safe if you don't know what's happening and if anyone can use you for good purposes. But hanging out a kill-switch means you expect to review and approve (or, potentially, remove) apps which means Google would suddenly be liable for anything written with Android???
Card hasn't spent much time thinking about Rowling's case or he'd realize it isn't simply congruent ideas or similar fundamental storylines. This is someone who is publishing a fan board and augmenting the publication with wholesale copying of Rowling's work.
I seriously doubt anyone, including Card, would approve of someone taking their work, scanning it into a computer and then submitting it for publication under their own name. Rowling's situation is somewhere on the slippery slope between Card's example and this one.
Of course, it would be even better if the "fix" could check for the infection and offer a few alternatives for repairing the damage - one of which could be "fix it for me". Of course, anyone who selects "fix it for me" should get the bug fixed and then get a 2x4 upside the head for letting a random Internet executable from an unknown source run on their computer!
A couple of summers ago, the Northeast was blacked out. I was sitting in a rented apartment, waiting for my condo to be finished and trying to work when the ADSL line dropped and things went black. I finally figured out that it was more than my unit.
So, I went outside to the apartment pool and told my wife and kids to hang out there for a while. Then I went back in to see if I could find a radio (actually found one - with batteries and everything). Couldn't make out much more than that there was a bigger blackout in progress. I thought it was a local transformer - one of those times when a squirrel or raccoon goes kamikaze and takes out power to 20,000 people.
And then... the telephone rang. My father, from Hamilton (50mi away) checking that we were OK. No lights (ended up without power for 3 days) but the darned phone worked. Flawlessly.
Don't knock those landlines!
I think that Mr. Underbridge has found a way to create more daylight hours - if he can continue such shining, bright commentary - a new sun is born.
What difference does my battery-operated clock make for a diurnal person? Wouldn't they continue to wake and sleep at the same time?
By the way, today was the first that I heard about this move. Did Congress just wake up and go, "let's jerk around the rest of the world and prove we're the biggest bully around?" Shouldn't something like this be discussed and synchronized with trading partners or something?
Actually, Canadian teams competed in regionals against American teams for 8 of the seats at the finals and Canadians took 6 of those 8 seats.
That's not a big surprise, it is usually 5 or 6. It may only be one test, but U.S. teams have done remarkably poorly in the past decade as the calibre of international teams keeps increasing.
Stephen
The reason you don't see "Right, let's stop pissing about and actually make something..." is two-fold.
First, there's the highly public nature of this beast - it has to be perfect and yet all forces combine to try and force it out at the earliest opportunity. And missing the earliest date is treated as a sign of systemic failure. In this case from Ireland, nobody says there are problems, just that there isn't enough evidence to convince the reviewers to a suitable degree of confidence that there won't be problems.
Second, the liabilities in this sort of product probably exceed anything you might imagine. I doubt that the profitability comes anywhere near the liability.
You'd be better off trying to come up with an e-voting system that is secure, unspoofable and that allows people to select their "Idol" or to vote someone "off the island".
There are a few things that make this something more than a change in the language of instruction.
.NET in spite of other, technically different (and, in my opinion, superior) alternatives.
First, as I understand, teaching in C# is a contractual obligation and thus has been removed as a pedagogical decision.
Second, as I understand, this obligation lasts for 5 years (all the Microsoft PR material refers to a 5 year program). This binds UW E&CE to a specific language regardless of future developments. Since C# only runs on Windows, it further binds the university and thus drives a number of other decisions.
The enforced change in languages is not the only apparent requirement. UW students will now be required to work with
None of this would count as a sign of the coming Apocalypse but I view it as a serious encroachment on academic rights including the freedom for a department to make changes to equipment, tooling, etc.
... all opinions are my own
Kallahar wrote: "every time my boss walks by with his cell phone, my monitors fuzz out and my speakers make strange noises from whatever signals the cell phone is emitting..."
That's just the RF interference due to the pointy-hair acting as a transmission tower. That's the magical Law of Similarity in action.
The crude, early versions will be built using something like the NanoManipulator already on the market for less than some fools pay for an SUV (see http://www.3rdtech.com/NanoManipulator.htm). The next generation will probably use a very simplistic RNA/DNA programming structure, we're pretty close to that already.
The book has one chapter for each of the 23 chromosomes and it has some general discussion as well as some facts that are known or suspected about the sequences in that chromosome.
I think that something needs to be done, but I am very skeptical that the answer lies in carpet bombing.
Why on earth would I want a 300 page novel where one page could contain the whole book. I supposed that I can imagine a magazine where pages contain video, not just words and photos but I already have a couple of versions of that - my computer and my television. The TV picture is still a bit better but the laptop with wireless modem is closer to truly asynchronous.
I didn't see anything about size restrictions. I could see using this to wallpaper my room -- a 10 square meter screen might come close to what I want, once they get the resolution up there.
What are the real applications? Live video display on id- and credit-cards? Blueprints that can display and calculate? Smart x-rays (once resolution jumps 3 orders of magnitude or more)?
Almost anything makes sense except books!
>It takes about 30 seconds in Office 2000:
>1.Click on paperclip to bring up a dialog balloon
>....etc....
Actually, you're both right. It takes 30sec. to uncheck the box but only after you've spent 15min. booting Windows, starting MS-Office, etc.
I find it difficult to understand how someone can justify a violent reponse to the appearance of a McDonald's restaurant. Especially when there are many, effective, non-violent approaches.
M. Bove could have chosen to organize a protest, perhaps blocking the site entrance with a legal protest. These things take a large number of people to organize and thus can be taken as a representative view of local opinion (in lieu of other, established democratic forms).
He could have organized to block food shipments after the fact or to inform patrons as they approached the completed McD's or to undertake any number of other, legal and non-violent approaches. But they wouldn't have been such a good vehicle for rallying forces...
Violence might be justified if there is an imminent threat and it is certainly a good choice of response to prior violence. That hardly seems to be the case here. McDonald's hasn't chosen to wear red coats and to march in with rifles and bayonets to enforce the eating of greasy, over-processed foods laden with hormones. If the majority of M. Bove's countrymen choose to follow the American hegemonization process, then why shouldn't M. Bove respect their choice.
What right allows any individual to force their own point of view of their community?
Stephen
P.S. I wonder how Jon Katz would feel if someone trashed his computers because they felt that his writing was a threat to their interpretation of what topics should be consumed by other readers?
One way that the judgement could go that would help lead us into a post-Microsoft world is for the judge to order Microsoft to endow $1B to an independent organization that would partially fund the development of competing products. The rational behind the decision is laid out in the parent article and the intention would be to smooth the startup phase for competitors in order to offset Microsoft's current illegal domination.
It's sad to see postings that can be summed up as "the old way worked for me so any changes are inherently evil".
... is a bit easy"?
Clearly, a large number of people felt that Microsoft was abusing a position of power to influence them into accepting employment without relatively fair compensation. The result was that a court (and an appeals court) have agreed with those people.
Notice two facts. People may not have been forced into accepting Microsoft's terms of employment but the judges clearly felt that Microsoft was not dealing on a fair basis and that the resulting contract was thereby unduly influenced.
Also, the ruling is based on the relative fairness of full-time versus contract/temp employment compensation from Microsoft.
So, while SerpentMage, his wife and others are happy, this doesn't (and shouldn't) change anything pertaining to the ruling.
The fact that some people "agree to the contractor principle" and should therefor "stick to it" is overridden by the higher fact that our society has risen above the feudal system and has created a system of law that can judge when "agree" may have an undue degree of "coerce". Society's law then allows for the contract to be overridden for all.
And, as a last word, I wonder if the plaintiffs would agree with SerpentMage's comment that "sueing